How Easily Things May Be Conducted in Those Cities in Which the Multitude Is Not Corrupt; and That Where There Is Equality, a Principality Cannot Be Made, and Where There Is Not, a Republic Cannot Be Made
~Title of chapter fifty-five in Nicolo Machiavelli’s Discourses of Livy)
On an early morning in October in Paris last year, I was on my way to Amsterdam. I had to get to Gare du Nord to catch my long-distance train when one of the female officers at Versailles Chantiers rail station interrupted me after I had crossed the barriers using my Navigo Pass (valid on buses and trains in Paris). She checked my pass and asked me to pay a fine of 35 euros for not pasting my photograph on the pass. She said she would have let me go on compassionate grounds had I not known the rule or if I was not told about it, but that was not the case. I paid and moved on.
Despite the limited years that I have spent in Europe, I was sure this was not a place to haggle. I was also (mostly) sure that this officer may not have paid a bribe to get her job, or seen a tantrik for her economic success, nor would she have paid a dowry to the partner she was married to. So, bribing or negotiating for a lesser fine would make neither moral nor legal sense to her. Her universe was divided between compassion and legal laws – there was no middle way.
This also reminded me of the Rs 2,000 I had paid to a cop to get my passport verification cleared before my travel to Paris. The cop (a Maratha) had asked for bakshis and while I paid, he also enquired if I could find some work for his young cousins who were unemployed after studying engineering. I found this experience better than my previous passport renewal around a decade back. Then, the police constable (an OBC) came home and, out of courtesy, we offered tea. After enquiring about some basic whereabouts and my partner’s religion, he left. As we walked out, he congratulated me for ‘marrying a Muslim’. He told me it is mostly “our girls” who marry “their” men and you have done better.
Both the cops were acting as intermediaries carrying out link work; the one who took bakshis recently was linking me to a most efficient police machinery. The OBC cop on the other hand was attempting to link me to the Hindu world that imagines and hates ‘love jihad’. To his dismay, I did not pay a penny to him and he used his temporal power to delink me from an efficient police machinery – for not paying up and for not accepting his misplaced admiration for my marriage. My passport renewal application was stuck for months. It was released only after my liberal professor friend with contacts in the police mediated and got my file cleared through his police friend.
These episodes may not seem new for Indians – it is part of our daily lives to bank on brokers or to be brokers ourselves. Brokering, however, is not limited to our public life. It governs our private lives too – even arranged marriages almost always happen through brokers or relatives who perform that role.
Bombay Brokers
Ed Lisa Björkman
Duke University Press (May 2021)
Bombay Brokers, edited by Lisa Björkman, casts an innovative gaze on such intermediaries and brokers. It is an important exploration and defence of brokers and their labour. It talks back to those who disparage them. It is also not a typical edited book where all contributors engage with theory and field. Much of the theoretical review and weightlifting is done by Björkman in the introduction, whereas the rest of the book carries qualitative descriptions of brokers drawing on the ethnographic labour of other contributors. There are 36 profiles of brokers, which constitute the main body of the book. These profiles are organised under six themes with a short introduction by other scholars.
The introduction locates Bombay Brokers’ ethnographic point of departure in the paradox of the necessary-yet-suspect character of such [brokers’] “local expertise” (p.10). The polarised narratives of urban hope and urban crisis undermine the real workings of the city as it is, ‘neither in a state of imminent crisis not overrun by monsters, rather, the myriad everyday crises and contradictions of city life are managed, mitigated, and metabolized by a myriad of brokers’(p. 13).
A certain contemporariness is assigned to the proliferation of brokers and brokerage and its changing form and content. This, in turn, is also an opportunity at this historical juncture and particular place to explore the domains of activity that do not fit neatly into privileged and empowered categories through which power and authority are theorised and institutionalised. Probing the interregnum ethnographically – dwelling in the gaps that brokers are said to bridge, following the faults and failings that fixers are said to fix – compels rethinking some of the key canonical formulations and conceptual distinctions by means of which contemporary scholarship has tended to explain and explore contemporary social, economic, and political life: categories such as states and markets, citizens and sovereigns, cities and hinterlands, nations and territories, rights and wrong (p. 13).
This book draws on Michel Callon’s call for understanding mediation as a “theory of action”. This “theory of action” is called brokerage, and the virtuoso performers of such actions are called brokers in this book (p. 17). Corruption is indeed central to the process of brokering and the conventional understanding of corruption as boundary transgression is seen as a hurdle therefore. Studies on corruption either reproduce or unsettle the institutionalised structure of authority. The ethnographies in this book are said to reveal instead how discourses of corruption, illegality, and informality often have recursive relations with the very processes and practices that they profess to describe (p. 20). Thus the fundamental rights may be recognised in the constitution but the ways of accessing them may involve illegal mechanisms – including corruption – and the brokers may have the expertise needed for the long-drawn legwork involved in articulating law-legible claims. Those disparaging brokers are denying and misrecognising the value of brokers’ expertise (p. 29).
The ethnographies thus reveal the Janus-faced character of money, which appears to both democratise access to social services while also commercialising that access, thereby obviating entrenched hierarchies (caste, community, gender) while threatening to push services out of the reach of those who can’t pay (p. 30).
The rest of the book carries substantial ethnographic material on brokers. The six themes that hold the 36 cases of brokers are development, property, business, difference, publics and truth. All the chapters carry insightful cases under these themes but the limited space allocated to each sometimes dampens the ethnographic spirit of description and a few cases seem incomplete or do not necessarily fit the sweeping broker bracket.
The case of Kaushal – the NRI who Llerena Guiu Searle profiles and frames as a land aggregator – presents the impossibility of entering land markets without mediators. However, this essay is based on limited interactions with Kaushal and is neither dense nor complete. As opposed to this, Uday Chandra narrates a very detailed and insightful case of Janu, a woman from the Ho tribe who is a sirdar (boss) who simultaneously forms a fictive kinship with tribal workers who migrate to Mumbai for work. She helps them find work, patiently listens to new migrants, and warns the drunkards like a big sisterly figure. Similarly, Lalita Kamath’s chapter on Bunty Singh is a fascinating one. Singh organises land in Vasai-Virar and meets the housing needs of those displaced by demolition, reinforces kinship networks while maintaining good relations with politicians, officials, the media and gundas. He is a social worker-cum-gunda himself who builds temples too. One would have liked to know more about engaged political parties, communal trajectories and caste loyalties here.
The second part of the book on property has chapters that problematise the dichotomy of legal and illegal forms of mediation to expose the overlap. Yaffa Truelove’s case of Dr K, the middle-class social worker, is also insightful. Dr K is a former officer of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and a direct descendant of Bombay’s early freedom fighters – social work is in his blood. He distinguishes his social work from paid agents and uses his networks with politicians and bureaucrats, thus mobilising fragments of state that could orchestrate needed effects. This case is a good contrast to Sangeeta Banerjee’s profile of Shazia the proof maker. Shazia is thickly connected to local politicians and helps the poor residents secure documents that make them eligible for resettlement. One of the residents she helped shared, ‘I don’t know how I would have been able to get any of the documents without her help. When we go to any government officer, they take one look at us and turn us away or keep making us run around in circles.’ (p. 143) Shazia, on the other hand, shares, ‘You really have to know who to approach in these office [..] whenever I am unable to get something done, I directly call the party office, and they sort out things. And of course,’ she shrugs, ‘Gandhij (money/brine) is always helpful.’ Shazia is framed in this book as a broker but she also seems to play the role of an organic intellectual.
Representative image of Indian currency notes. Photo: Syed Hussaini/Unsplash
Lisa Björkman’s chapter on Ramji, the tantrik business energiser, gives us nuanced insight into the ritual foundations of Indian businesses but the framework of broker also limits theoretical possibilities. The chapters in part four unravel the work of brokering difference. I particularly found David Strohl’s chapter on Sultan the image maker thought-provoking. Sultan manages the image of Ismailis for the outsiders – making them appear progressive for Hindus while simultaneously reproducing Muslims (non-Ismaili) as regressive and backward subjects. Similarly, Amita Bhide’s chapter in the section on truth focuses on Prakash the data entrepreneur, who did not have much access to formal education, moved on from being a home cleaner to an NGO worker (Pratham) and is now a data entrepreneur. He made inroads into the emerging business of Indian academia without a doctorate and has his own system of practical ethics. Atreyee Sen’s profile of Pawan the prison master is very disturbing and one is not sure if the essay is meant to be an ironic take on this volume as it does not really fit in the broker story. Pawan takes up the role of dummy prisoner for powerful players who would not want to be jailed. This job involves facing violence, even rape, and for me, he seemed more like a prison slave than master.
The introduction by Björkman is intellectually stimulating. However, the divide between theory and field is glaring in this book and this has to do with the way the book is organised. If the contributing authors would have theorised ethnography on their own terms, we would have had a more exciting volume. I particularly found engagement with the question of power in the introduction very limited, and the simultaneous suspicion of the big polarising canons like that of state, society, market and citizenship affects the possibilities of universals. There are no universal claims therefore to be made and it is in the work of individual brokers that much of the politics is located.
Jeffrey Witsoe’s critical work on power and corruption finds a passing mention and engagement. Despite the exhaustive and engaging nature of the literature, I can think of at least three key readings on this subject that needed a mention. Ian Cook’s research on land brokers in Mangaluru carries similar traits to the argument developed by Björkman, Qudsiya Contractor’s special article in EPW on water brokers in Mumbai that highlights state prejudice against poor Muslims in water distribution and the role of intermediaries who are simultaneously accused of being ‘water mafia’ and Ward Berenschots’ work on mediation in Gujarat and Indonesia.
Bombay Brokers is indeed an important addition to several other volumes on the actual workings of democracy in India. However, the celebratory tone towards brokering and its simultaneous and almost universal usage to think on difference, development, truth, property and publics leaves much to be desired. It recognises only in passing that broker and brokering ‘obviates entrenched hierarchies (caste, community, gender) while threatening to push services out of the reach of those who can’t pay.’ This book is mostly about the how of brokerage and ignores the why. For Machiavelli, where there is equality, a principality cannot be made and where there is inequality, a republic cannot be made. India is an ideal case of a deeply unequal society where individual freedom and equality are alien ideas. Following Machiavelli, India cannot produce a republic; what we seem to have therefore is a procedural democracy that functions through brokers. While cities in the West have social housing, Mumbai only has slums for the poor.
Are the morals and ethics of our society more accommodative towards informality, brokers, mediators along with corruption and sustained exploitation? Why does the constitutional promise of equality, fraternity and justice remain abstract? Why is realising these abstract ideas possible mostly through intermediaries? Democracy as a majoritarian project in India seems to draw less on humanism and more on the exclusionary ethos of our society. While this volume mostly attempts to theorise the positive side of brokers, we may need another one perhaps to look at the ills of our broker-conducive democracy and the persistent graded inequality and informality it (re)produces.
Suryakant Waghmore is a professor of sociology at IIT Bombay.
