Work in the Bazaar - The Organisation of Work in a Social Milieu beyond State Regulation: India, 1930s to 2000s.

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The research project studies the evolution of work conditions and labour relations in a specific segment of the informal sector of the Indian economy marked by the dominance of commercial professions and low-value services, frequently described as the bazaar, from the 1930s to the 2000s that constitutes one of the largest spheres of employment in the urban Indian economy. Special emphasis is placed on developments between 1964 and the early 1990s. Based on a set of locally acquired archival sources providing information on informal sector labour previously largely neglected by scholarly discourse, supplemented by oral sources, the project questions the emphasis on legal histories within the debate on the evolution of informality in Indian labour relations. Instead, based on a case approach focusing on the north Indian city of Banaras (Varanasi), the project highlights the way in which patterns of spatial and social organisation in local milieus, frequently misconceived in the discourse as anachronistic, continued to shape work in this social segment throughout twentieth century history. By providing alternative modes of organisation, the bazaar shaped reactions to liberal and socialist state-led modernisation projects marked both by regulatory approaches to the labour market as well as de-regulation. It also affected union-led endeavours to mobilise labour. The focus on the bazaar thus contributes to an emerging debate on the mutual reinforcement of political and social dimensions of informalisation.