Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Contemporary India, By Shankar Ramaswami, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025. pp. 304. $64.95 (hb) / $64.95 (e-book). ISBN: 9781512826647; ISBN: 9781512826654

Abstract

The book under review discusses the work and life of migrant labourers who are confronted at home with a shortage of waged employment to make ends meet for themselves and the other members of their household. In the rural habitat, they belong to the landpoor and landless segments stuck at the bottom of the pile. Deprived of viable livelihood in agriculture, which used to be the mainstay for former generations, these proletarianized classes of peasant stock have found no substitute for their labour power in other sectors of the village economy. They are forced to leave their domicile in search of earnings enough to take care of their own cost of living and to provide for the subsistence of dependent members in their household who are left behind.

Labour migration is not a one-way trek of departure and settlement elsewhere. Wherever they manage to go, usually and preferably to towns and cities nearby or far away, the large majority of them do not succeed in staying on in the destinations reached. Not only because they are hired and fired according to the need of the moment on casualized conditions but also driven in their quest for wages in the thoroughly informalized economy. Migrant labourers are also often unable to find the dwelling space required for establishing themselves more permanently. Their migration remains cyclical in nature, moving out and coming back every now and then, if they can spare or borrow the money for travel. It is a mobility that tends to last throughout the length of working life. Such a peripatetic existence starts at young adolescence and already frequently ends in the late forties or early fifties, due to failing health and loss of vitality to keep working.

The demand for outside labour is not necessarily caused by a lack of local supply. Capital and government in combination insist on keeping huge crowds of wage hunters and gatherers without proper jobs and shelter instead of ending their nomadism. Capital, because footlooseness drives down the labour price to the lowest level possible; the government, because it aims to keep this off-and-on employed swarm firmly embedded in the countryside, fragmented and scattered over a sprawl of rural slums. Rather than allowing this proletariat at drift to settle down in aggregated habitat on the city outskirts, which could incite large-scale public disorder, it shows that both operate in tandem to privilege capital and victimize labour, a collusion that contributes to widening the distance between them.

Migrants constitute a major part of the urban workforce recruited for their cheap cost and pliability. Both recruitment and dismissal are not sealed with a legally binding work contract stipulating terms of fair treatment and wage payment. The labour power extracted to a maximal extent from them when commanded is dismally rewarded. Exploitation and repression are the driving forces for their erratic engagement in all sectors of the economy, not seldom in occupational multiplicity. Adding up to a huge magnitude, the labour migrants are kept adrift, vainly vying for better work and life than the mode of predatory capitalism under which they are forced to toil is willing to grant to this footloose army of labour.

Ramaswami took a factory in an industrial neighbourhood of New Delhi for the polishing of metal artware as the site of his fieldwork and stayed close to this anchorage point for data collection from the end of 2001–2004. The management of this manufacturing enterprise gave him permission to observe the process of production, which is in operation for 24 h. This enabled him to follow the interaction of the workforce, consisting of craftsmen assisted by helpers and split up in day and night shifts. His daily presence on the shop floor allowed him to watch the surveillance exercised by supervisors selected from among the old hands both for their occupational proficiency and loyalty to managerial demands. Being around all the time, he succeeded in building up his profile as a curious outsider and bystander who wanted to know what he asked but kept mum on what he saw and heard. The discrete handling of the information gathered seems to have secured him acceptance of his role as investigator by the workforce. But we do not learn whether his show of affinity with the problems of labour in the end might have caused the company's directors and managers to probe and question the imbued prejudice of his investigations.

In order to track and trace the route migrants passed through to their current work site and to widen the scope of research to life beyond the work hours and factory, a sample of sixty-five of the labourers was interviewed once or twice on their identity, past mobility, expertise, work experiences and thoughts and feelings about their present employment.

In this last batch, two were singled out for closer scrutiny of their background from childhood onwards in the village milieu and the social networks in which they were involved in urban life across boundaries of caste, creed and region. Most of these interviews were held and audiotaped in a room Ramaswami had rented as a day halt close to the quarters where the workers had their lodgings. In the aftermath of his fieldwork carried out within the factory compounds, he resorted to another line of inquiry in order to contextualize his findings in a wider frame by adding to his data sets the information gained in a wide range of encounters outside the factory gate. This follow-up took shape in a variety of meetings arranged with the management and staff of the enterprise investigated, officials of the state labour department, police officers, politicians, trade union leaders, doctors and healers, landlords, shopkeepers, workers in the same factories also located in the industrial enclave as well as wives and other close relatives who came from the village to join their breadwinners on short visits.

Ramaswami's bibliography demonstrates that he is well versed in the literature on labour migration. But he consistently refrains from entering into discussion with the argumentation of schools of thought expressing different assessments and opinions on the subject, apart from briefly listing a multitude of authors in footnotes. It is a choice that has allowed him to produce a neatly streamlined presentation of his findings, which are, however, at odds with opposing views elaborated on in other studies, as, for instance, by Aman Sethi in his haunting story A Free Man, A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi (2011). The result is nevertheless an impressive narrative that spells out in detail the many brutalities of the employment regime to which the migrants find themselves exposed.

The chapter scheme synchronizes with how the fieldwork was broken up in phases, site of inspection and change of focus. The first two chapters elaborate on the labour process, the rhythm of the workday and night, the handling of top-down discipline in a chain of control, and the compliance of the workforce at this initial stage. Abiding by the managerial machinations meant to exert themselves and attune to the strenuous workload to the best of their ability. The interplay of these proletarianized migrants when at work as well as in their dwelling space generates a camaraderie among them that transcended their diverse primordial identity brought along from home to their city domicile. The next two chapters describe the emergence of a joint stance of the migrant labourers in reaction to their employer's confrontational strategy to intensify productivity and lower wage payment.

In these politics of protest, workers made attempts to protect their jobs by going on strike in open contestation against intimidation and injustice. The abusive treatment meted out to them provoked a mood of commonality, which solidified into a momentaneous rise of collectivity. Resistance to their commodified employment took shape in refuting loyalty to managerial demands and seeking the support of a radical trade union. In negotiations with the company's owners and officials of the state labour department, the union's leadership failed to solve the dispute. Still activated in jointness, the workers bypassed the union's habitual aim to reach a settlement behind closed doors in order to charge a hefty commission on the spoils. They set up picketing lines in front of the factory and held demonstrations with placards of their grievance in nearby streets and even in the city centre. Having brought their loud cry of exploitation and repression to the public space motivated the company to concede to a compromise sealed in the presence of the author. But as he granted in his postscript, it turned out to be only a short reprieve. The cutting down of job conditions and of wages earlier gained was resumed already soon after his fieldwork in the factory had ended. Tightened control from above sparked fresh rounds of agitation in the years that followed.

The migrants come to the city to avoid immiseration in the rural economy. Their search for a better existence is recorded as a long tale of ups and downs. Good luck is experienced once in a while. It amounts in this study to finding a factory job that may last with the prospect of getting skilled to craftsman, which enables them to save up a sizable part of earnings for the family at home. Such windfalls fuel dreams to stay put and set up their rural-based household unit in a nearby neighbourhood. Or if this is a bridge too far, to go back to the village to start a small business with the cash their many years of absence have yielded. It is the script of a hopeful scenario that, for most migrants, does not materialize. Good luck happens to be of short duration, interrupted by spells of nightmarish adversity, which increases precarity. Occupational vulnerability causes health problems—spells of sickness, chronic ailments and injuries not properly diagnosed and treated—which debilitates their labour power. Steady decline is shaped as an ultimate downfall that ends their ability to cope with setbacks and misfortune. It is the immanent apparition of kalyug, which refers to the final age in Hindu cosmology, a gestalt featured by catastrophe and moral decay. Gloom and doom are around the corner, with the factory operating as the microcosm of that indomitable spectre.

My first dissenting comment is to point out that the large majority of the migrants forced to leave their village domicile are not assembled en masse in waged work elsewhere. Although the industrial batch on which Ramaswami has concentrated his research adds up to a substantial minority, my own long-lasting fieldwork in India zoomed in on the diversity of labour migrants on offer for daily hire in urban nakas, domestic service, transport or construction or dependent on self-employed petty business. Among them, many females abound in not much lower numbers, and their glaring absence in the investigated workforce roaming around in the informal economy glosses over their greater vulnerability, not only because of lower wage levels but also being prone to sexual abuse. By and large, this gendered multitude adrift does not and cannot team up to unity at the site of their casual employment. Instead of a mood of togetherness, it is carefully dominated heterogeneity and social segmentation that has struck me as the main character of the way in which labour power is extracted from them. Their cohesive strength lacks, to a large extent, the capability to get and remain engaged in collective action. Acknowledgement of each other in shared commonality as companions in the tyrannic work process marks this proletariat as a class in itself but not for itself.

I drew this conclusion in my early explorations of the informal economy. Based on fieldwork in West India carried out in 1971–1972, I split up the workforce researched into four sub-classes, which differed from each other in their relationship to capital. Regular versus casual employment, conditioned by varying terms of engagement in the labour process combined with lesser or greater vulnerability, culminated in multiple segments stamped by uneven life chances and lifestyles. In follow-up essays, I refuted the idea of a clear dividing line between the formal and informal economy and held on to a fourfold though slightly modified fragmentation of the workforce under the globalized neoliberal regime (Breman 1976, 1999). For an overview of the classes of labour debate, see Bernstein 2025.

The ambulant existence also of the factory flock under Ramaswami's gaze is subject to the managerial ploy, which aims to diversify the hired workforce on the basis of different primeval identities. Breaking up production into various components and setting them up in separate locales further splits up workers' ongoing interaction at the shop floor. The constant shift of spatial fission and fusion at the company's behest is meant to weaken resistance. But it is a strategy matched by the migrants when they refuse to stick to the employment found. To escape from terms and conditions that become unbearable, they opt out from a broiling conflict on the spur of the moment, or in preplanned action when they hear about better prospects in this branch of industry and also to show themselves open to more attractive job offers in any other sector of the economy. The information in the postscript that twenty years after the factory-based fieldwork only nine out of the interviewed sample were still hanging on to the same work site comes therefore as no surprise.

Documentation on the sustained flow of migrants passing through a wide range of jobs would have required more on-the-spot observation in the quarters where they have their lodgings. To put on record the further livelihood of just two of them while simultaneously processing and writing up the data sets collected with regard to their interaction in the factory should have induced him to articulate the agency of labour beyond the intense work site surveillance in more depth. The space in which they can move around before and after work hours opens up latitude for a modicum of privacy and intimacy, bolstering their autonomy. This is why and how the most successful trade unions, such as the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) and a wide range of local-level activists, mobilize labour in the habitat where they dwell rather than where they toil and sweat.

But also in their residential niches, social relationships are bound to remain fragile, torn up again by their never-ending ordeal of footlooseness, as recorded in Katherine Boo's portrait Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2011). As I pointed out in my review of her fascinating account of work and life in a Mumbai slum:

Although many labour migrants move around incessantly for work and shelter in the urban milieu, Ramaswami emphasizes that ties with their village of origin are firmly kept intact. This empathy finds expression first and for all in close touch with the members of the household left behind. By either making trips home to recuperate from their grating drudgery and to take part in family life or to receive close relatives who occasionally visit them.

The muted presence and voice of rural labour migrants in the urban growth poles became starkly visible to a shocked public eye at the start of the COVID epidemic in 2019. Barred by the lockdown the government had imposed overnight, the lion's share of them lost their employment and were often also forced to vacate their lodgings. With no income to spend on their daily needs—food and other costs of living—and fear from the mushrooming virus, they were eager to find solace and retreat to their places of origin. It was a homecoming spoilt by anxiety. This time the termination of their services came out of the blue and they arrived without the usual savings from their wages, which their families needed to keep themselves afloat.

Home had abruptly become a sparse and poverty-stricken waiting room at the village margins, a halt to pass the quarantine in misery (Breman 2020). But was this dramatic event really so exceptional? The lockdown on this mass in excess of regular demand was already imposed before COVID-19 exploded and until it had worn itself out. The pandemic actually highlighted features of the footloose existence I had monitored in my preceding rounds of fieldwork. One of the conclusions that I drew from my findings was to challenge the notion of labour migrants adrift when away from their village abode in frantic search of enough wherewithal to share and spend with all members of their household. The fictitious imagery of solid and harmonious bonds with the family left behind affirms the connectivity between breadwinners and dependents as joint shareholders in the household budget.

Shah and Lerche (2020) have quite rightly pointed out that the research on labour migration in India mainly deals with the predicament of this footloose workforce at the sites of the destination reached. Their analysis zooms in on the kinship and family support networks which keep the migrants, even during their absence, intertwined with their home base in a production–social reproduction binary. Their assessment addresses the relationship between waged work and the informal economies of care and is also relevant in recording the impact of the pandemic on the labouring poor who fled from the cities when employers and landlords turned hostile to them. But I have reservations about their argument of ‘safety nets at home’ as a fallback option, a support frame of the last resort for the footloose army of labour when in dire need. Indeed, intra- and extra-household dynamics of care are being reconfigured because of migration, but not necessarily so in a win–win relationship for all stakeholders concerned.

At the bottom of the urban and rural heap, households reliant for bare livelihood on the cash yield earned elsewhere are split up in lasting multilocality. The ceaseless coming and going of the main breadwinners in short or long intervals demonstrates the fragility of this primary unit of cohabitation and tends to hollow out social cohesion and solidarity within it. Commuting between their places of work and residence, footloose labourers are on both sides of their mobility at risk of progressive marginality and declining resilience. The stereotypical opinion is that migrants save and transmit a third to a half of their incomes for the maintenance of dependent members of their household. Yet, I frequently encountered exceptions and other anomalies to this obligation to support family relatives during my local-level investigations. Male providers, in particular, tend to put their own needs before those of dependent members of the family. Their appetite for flashy clothes, fast food, novel gadgets, gambling and above all addiction to drink and drugs means that the flow of money sent or brought home gets reduced. Indulging in wants beyond their means, they seek advances on their wages, which ends in debt dependency to workmates or loan sharks.

Although Ramaswami corroborates in his narrative such giving way to a priori needs practiced by the migrants, he fails to notice the consequences as a looming threat to social rupture and dissolution instead of coexistence in mutuality and reciprocity with the family at home. A difficult-to-gratify relish for consumerism is driven by surrender to a capitalist mode of spending income that pervades even the milieu of the last and the least, craving for wants which have turned into needs. In the case of prolonged absence for years on end, the bonds keeping the common household together tend to weaken. Optimizing on both sides not their joint but separated interests, long-term migrants have to face erosion of their social weight in village affairs but no less so in household matters when they come back from their working life sojourn to resettle. However, hybridity at home is the price paid for not being there, as Sethi has clarified in great detail in his evocative portrait of a hobo who passed his vagrant life in progressive solitude ending in forlorn loneliness.

My concluding remarks concern the wider perspective of accelerated distortion in the balance between capital and labour. The informalization of the economy in flexible employment and wages is pushed through to privileged accumulation and concentration of wealth increasingly in fewer hands. The flipside of the achieved boost in production is jobless growth, which turns the swelling workforce into a permanent reserve army of labour obligated to shift from pillar to post in the worried and endless quest for meagre livelihood. The unauthorized news that India has climbed up to the world's fourth largest economy obscures that the per capita income hovers around a mere $2500 annually, nearly five times less than, for instance, China's tally. Moreover, the country's social welfare indicators rank this densely populated nation 111th out of 125 on the Global Hunger Index, and the score on education, nutrition, health and housing is equally abysmal. The top 1% billionaires, tycoons of big corporate business, command a staggering 40% of the total wealth, followed by a still 4% mega-rich bunch of profiteers. It means that the peak 5% lay claim to 62% of the GDP, leaving for half of the 1.4 billion people just 15% of the national income. The proletarian classes at the bottom of the heap—with the footloose workforce among them on which this essay has focused as a major segment—are fobbed off with a little over $100 per month. It is a lopsided model of development, with hills of obscene affluence occupied by a spread of luxury condominiums. Out of sight below them, a landscape of precarity is filled with slums inhabited by the poor who stand no chance of upward mobility. They suffer bouts of unemployment and are dependent for survival on informal safety nets and debt bondage. The ingrained inequality, which is the bane of India's civilizational heritage, has unleashed in the last quarter of a century, under the spell of an autocratic regime, a polarized trajectory that has created in the political economy a steep contrast between inclusion and exclusion of rights to citizenship.

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.