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Eating Akhuni In India
Working in the digital platform economies has typically been characterised by a corporatised and media fuelled narrative of independence—as a route to financial independence, freedom to determine work schedules, and the positioning of workers as ‘independent contractors’. This terminology suggests a sense of novelty in the nature of jobs and the upending of hierarchies by technological processes. This panel aims at excavating the pre-existing power dynamics between customers, workers and intermediaries. Taxi driving, delivering food and providing domestic care services have long been informal forms of work segregated along lines of caste, religion, class and gender in urban India. What has the platformisation of this work meant for workers, their experiences of work and the opening up of this work? Has the involvement of technological intermediaries led to an opening up and the opening up of this work outside of its parochial considerations of class, caste, gender, religion? The panel is based on qualitative, ethnographic and participatory fieldwork across ride hailing, food delivery and domestic work platforms in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. Through 4 presentations, we bring forth the promise of working in the absence of a boss, the restrictions on independence and the functions of interdependence.
The modernist conception of urban order is predicated on state regulation of city spaces and social practices. Street food vending disrupts this idealized order and is therefore denounced by state officials and the bourgeois public. Hamstrung by this hostile discursive field and their own lack of symbolic capital, how do food vendors manage to maneuver their way through an inhospitable city? In this paper, I use ethnographic vignettes from two neighborhoods in Delhi to argue that street vendors and city spaces should not be treated as homogeneous categories; differences among vendors and between urban settings are crucial for explaining heterogeneous survival strategies. These differences relate to ethnic identities derived from diverse histories of migration, as well as to the variegated layout, land use and legal geographies of spaces in the city. I conclude by showing that negotiations over food vending now occur not only on the street, but also through the virtual world of food blogs and videos. By representing street food as a valued part of city culture, the internet has emerged as a new space where the claims of street vendors acquire greater legitimacy in the public sphere.
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