Tanima Sharma, PhD student, Anthroplogy
In this talk I examine how ‘worker’ and ‘farmer’ identities blur amongst labouring subjects who are part of Haryana’s Gurgaon-Bawal automobile industry. In contrast to traditional leftist and trade union vocabularies of a self-evident, productive, exploited-by-capital, industrial working class, I posit some public, political worker self-articulations that make visible gendered caste regimes of labour which exist both in service to and in tension with capital. Paying attention to these worker self-articulations not only shows how Jat lifeworlds overdetermine labour and labouring subjects in the region, it also gives urgency to questions of how class and caste, and thereby the politics of the productive and reproductive, intersect today, under neoliberal Hindutva.