“We Too Have Blackened Our Hands”: Work, Harm, and Legitimacy in a Delhi Scrap Market

Abstract

The phrase “we too have blackened our hands” was often repeated to me in conversations with shop owners in what I call “Leela Market,” one of India’s largest metal scrap and parts markets, located in Delhi. I consider the refrain of “having blackened one’s hands” in order to highlight the place-making power of repeated embodied practice and expressive forms and to explore how those who pursue their livelihood in the market invoked a particular quality and world of work to claim rightful presence and legitimacy in the city. This essay ethnographically renders two activities—“breaking a car” and “cleaning gently”—as forms of work that compose the refrain and resound through the landscape of Leela Market. These forms of work hold together various material practices and transactions, heterogeneous communities and experiences, and contested events and histories that are entangled with the transformation of metal discards into scrap and parts. As regulatory interventions challenge the relevance of the market and threaten its place in the city, these forms of work also constitute a basis for engagements with various forms and discourses of harm, pollution, and toxicity.