Beyond remittances: A rare insight into the everyday lives of migrant workers
Social anthropologist Shankar Ramaswami’s ‘Souls in the Kalyug’ is a rich, multi-layered text that provides a window into workers’ lives in India, including some hopeful strands within the destructive churnings of global capitalism.
Sapan Bookshelf
Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Contemporary India
By Shankar Ramaswami
University of Pennsylvania Press 2025
By Nida Kirmani / Sapan News
I first met Shankar Ramaswami more than two decades ago when we were both conducting our Ph.D. fieldwork in the interstices of South Delhi. While my fieldwork in the Muslim locality of Zakir Nagar was completed in a year, Shankar’s fieldwork, just a few miles away in the Okhla Industrial Estate, carried on for several years (2002-2006), a considerable length of time even for an ethnographic study.
The depth of this research is apparent in his recently published book, Souls in the Kalyug, which meticulously documents the multi-layered struggles of men employed in a metal-polishing factory, which supplied home décor and artware largely for the American market.
This ethnography captures the everyday struggles of migrant male workers largely from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkand, and Uttarkhand who like millions of others, moved to Delhi as a result of agrarian displacement in search of a better life for themselves and their families back in their villages.
Unique view
The book provides a unique, in-depth view of the lives of these men who occupy the bottom-most rungs of global capitalism. An economic system that has pushed them to the city by decimating their opportunities for decent livelihoods in their villages, and which continues to exploit their labour while also gradually decimating their bodies.
However, Ramaswami takes great care not to present his interlocutors as hapless victims. Rather, he draws attention to the various ways these men are both entangled in and resist their ongoing exploitation as they try to make cosmic sense of their lives.
Each chapter draws the reader into a different layer of these men’s lives. Beginning with the factory itself, to the networks of labour organizing that connect their factory to the wider city and the globe, to the cramped rooms they occupy with other workers, The reader moves with these workers as they navigate through these complex webs of power in search of secure livelihoods. These navigations come with considerable costs particularly to their health, as their bodies are gradually hollowed out by the grueling conditions of the factory.
The first two chapters immerse the reader into the dark, hazy world of the B156 factory where workers must contend with the ‘forces of life and death’ amidst the dust, grime, and sweat that permeate the factory floor. Ramaswami paints a gloomy picture of factory life, describing how these men alternate between day and night shifts as their bodies are constantly squeezed by increasing expectations of productivity from the management.
Ramaswami shows the workers not solely as victims of exploitation, but as thoughtful actors who alternate between speeding up and slowing down the pace of their work. This is reminiscent of the foot dragging described by anthropologist James Scott in his discussion of ‘everyday forms of resistance’ and who struggle to maintain a public image of respectability despite the ‘dirty’ nature of their jobs.
One of the richest and most thought-provoking chapters in the book, sheds light on the role of humour (mazak) in making factory life bearable for his interlocutors. As with the case with most male humour, much of this mazak too was sexual and degrading in nature while other jokes centred on ethnic/religious stereotypes of Biharis and Muslims in particular. Ramaswami describes the role of humour as a lubricating force that helped the workers resist becoming lifeless cogs in the machine of production.
Collective resistance
Ramaswami’s book also focuses on noncooperation and collective resistance through unionization. Chapter 3, “Collectivity” documents how workers’ frustrations about their low wages and grueling working conditions gradually coalesced into unified action. Through Ramaswami’s thick description of workers’ shift from compliance to auto-regulation and finally outright refusal and resistance, this chapter provides rich insights into the micro-politics of protest.
Chapter 4, “Warp and Weft,” continues the discussion of resistance as work in the factory was disrupted due to the company’s legal disputes, and workers were forced to once again shift strategies to preserve their livelihoods. This chapter describes the expansion of protests beyond the factory itself. Workers took to the streets with placards in a demonstration of non-violent resistance along with forging alliances with labor rights activists in the U.S. where the corporation itself was based.
It provides an intimate portrait of the lives of two workers as they move between their neighbourhoods in Delhi and their villages in Jharkhand. Ramaswami draws an analogy between the workers’ movements within the city and between the city and the village to the warp and weft of the handloom. As workers struggle to weave together their social lives and preserve the health of their kin and themselves from the disintegrating forces of capitalism.
While the overall picture is depressing, Ramaswami also describes hopeful strands within the social fabric of workers’ lives such as the mutual support and bhaichara (fellowship) between men across ethnic, religious and caste boundaries—that become more fluid within the city. The inter-religious and inter-caste ties forged between workers can be seen as small glimmers of hope in the context of the rising tide of Hindutva politics over the past decades.
The concluding chapter delves more deeply into the cosmic understandings of Ramaswami’s interlocutors. The concept of the Kalyug (or Qayamat for the Muslims) — the end-times in which souls were caught in a self-destructive battle characterized by violence, oppression and injustice — is a thread running through the entire book.
Cosmic interplay
Ramaswami carefully unpacks this concept with regards to the workers’ self-understandings of truth, justice, and agency amidst the forces of disintegration that constantly threaten to envelop them in their folds. This discussion of the cosmic interplay of spirituality and politics within workers’ self-understandings is one of the most valuable contributions offered by the book.
Despite the incredible richness in detail provided by Ramaswami’s account, I did feel that the book missed some opportunities particularly with regards to the discussion of gender and sexuality. While the author certainly highlights the role that patriarchy plays in structuring workers’ lives and their relationships with their wives, more could be said about the pressure exerted by the ‘breadwinner model’ on working men and the role this plays in self-destructive patterns such as the abuse of alcohol. Similarly, while the chapter on mazak vividly describes the central role of sexuality in workers’ social interactions, the analysis of the role of gender and sexuality in the formation of working-class masculinities could have been deeper.
Overall, Souls in the Kalyug is a rich, multi-layered text, which provides a rare insight into the everyday lives of migrant workers caught within the destructive ‘churnings’ of global capitalism. In the Postscript of the book, Ramaswami provides a broad overview of how life has unfolded for his interlocutors in the two decades since he completed his fieldwork with only nine of the original workers remaining in the B156 factory.
While the workers’ strivings for a ‘good life’ seem to be largely in vain in the face of increasing capitalist exploitation, environmental degradation, and the expansion of right-wing Hindutva politics, some events do indicate the ongoing struggles of workers and marginalized groups in India to resist the destructive forces of capitalism and fascism that characterize our current epoch. These pockets include the Maruti auto workers’ protests in 2011-2012, the Shaheen Bagh protests of 2019-2020, and the farmers’ movement of 2020-2021, to name some.
The struggle for justice in the age of the Kalyug continues.
Nida Kirmani is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. She has published on issues related to gender, Islam, women’s movements, development, and urban studies.
+++++++++++++++++++
Domination and Chaos: India’s radical conservatism
‘A little unhinged, or totally fearless’ : the chronicler of China’s 170 million migrant workers
The People First: Rohini Hensman on Democracy, Resistance, and the Global Left
Democracy and workers’ movements – stories from Jamshedpur
1938: the year Indian workers fought for themselves
Too ill to work, too poor to get better: how debt traps families working at India’s kilns
In a Delhi heat ward, two workers fight a lonely battle for life
Unworkable: Swapping Palestinian workers with Indians
After the truth-shower 