Cheri Histories: Working Lives and the Production of the Neighbourhood in Madras City, c. 1870-1950

本研究项目确定了19世纪晚期一种独特类型的社区的出现，这种社区是由马德拉斯市不同部门的劳动力的城市工作生活构成的。该研究将“城市工作生活”定义为与土地、劳动力和社会政治文化有关的相互关联的社会关系的不断衔接，这些社会关系不断地产生和复制工人社区的空间。与关注单一职业群体（通常是工厂劳动力）的传统劳动史不同，对城市工作生活的考察抓住了各种各样的新旧劳动形式，表明了社会空间关系的历史转变。被吸引到马德拉斯寻找工作的移民主要居住在棚户区或cheris，这些棚户区随着城市的发展而激增。“Cheri”是泰米尔语，意思是居住着贱民种姓群体的农村定居点，与村里其他种姓在空间上隔离。除去种姓的特殊性，“cheri”在殖民记录中也是一个通用术语，用来描述城市中工人的社区。这些被称为贫穷、拥挤和寄生的社区代表了殖民地“现代性”的意外空间。Cheris不能被简化为殖民社会工程的对象，也不能被简化为农村景观的永恒的、惰性的延伸。相反，它们构成了一个动态的力量场，在这里，正式和非正式的城市劳动力的不同回路彼此相遇并结合在一起。每一次相遇都产生了新的工作和生活空间，改变了城市与农村腹地之间的关系，重新定义了种姓和宗教等社群主义身份，制造了城市空间中相互冲突的社会文化和政治想象，并在cheris上铭刻了几种含义。此外，19世纪末和20世纪初的社区历史与旧的定居点、劳动形式和文化联系在一起，它们被改造或淹没，导致了复杂的日常工作节奏和城市建筑景观中的分层时间性。通过五个相互关联的案例研究，该项目有以下主要目标：(a)从历史上揭示日常工作生活的生产和生殖社会实践，这些实践在马德拉斯城市景观中产生了作为独特空间形态的cheri；(b)了解这些空间是如何被不同的劳动群体感知、体验、争夺和占用的；(c)这些社会和象征性的实践如何影响精英政治，有时会偏离官方城镇规划的轨迹。

This research project identifies the emergence of a distinct type of neighbourhood in the late nineteenth century, constituted through the urban working lives of a diverse section of the workforce in the city of Madras. The study defines 'urban working lives' as an incessant articulation of interconnected social relations pertaining to land, labour and socio-political cultures, which constantly produced and reproduced the spaces of the workers' neighbourhoods. Unlike conventional histories of labour, which focus on a single occupational group (usually factory labour), the examination of urban working lives captures a large variety of old and new labour forms, indicating a historical transformation of socio-spatial relations. Migrants drawn to Madras in search of work primarily inhabited squatter settlements or cheris, which proliferated with the growth of the city. 'Cheri' is a Tamil word, which denotes rural settlements housing untouchable caste groups in spatial segregation from the other castes of the village. Stripped of its caste specificity, the 'cheri' was also a generalized term used in colonial records to describe workers' neighbourhoods in the city. Dubbed as poor, overcrowded and parasitic, these neighbourhoods represent unintended spaces of colonial 'modernity'. Cheris cannot be reduced to objects of colonial social engineering or to a presumably timeless, inert extension of the rural landscape. Rather, they constitute a dynamic field of forces where different circuits of formal and informal urban labour encountered each other and combined. Each of these encounters produced new spaces of work and living, transformed relations between the city and the rural hinterland, redefined communitarian identities like caste and religion, manufactured conflicting socio-cultural and political imaginaries of the city space and inscribed several meanings on the cheris. Moreover, the histories of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century neighbourhoods were tied to older settlements, forms and cultures of labour, which were transformed or submerged, resulting in complex quotidian work rhythms and a layered temporality within the built landscape of the city. By way of five interconnected case studies the project has the following main objectives: (a) to historically unravel the productive as well as reproductive social practices of everyday working lives, which generated the cheri as a distinct spatial formation in the urban landscape of Madras City; (b) to understand how these spaces were perceived, experienced, contested and appropriated by diverse labouring groups and (c) how these social and symbolic practices impacted on elite politics and sometimes deflected the trajectories of official town planning.