Living on the Edge: Interrogating Migrant Labourer Lives of Bengaluru/Bangalore

This paper proposes to create a discourse of migrant labourers in the city of Bengaluru/Bangalore, especially during the current period of crisis ensued by COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being an essential part of the informal sector economy these workers are often rendered invisible from the urban social, cultural and political spaces of this global city. The United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Development (Habitat III), held in Quito, Ecuador in October 2016 declared the New Urban Agenda (NUA) — that was adopted as the guideline for urban development for the next twenty years — with the vision of ‘cities for all’. But in reality, for their regional, linguistic, cultural, class and caste differences, the migrant labourers in the city are marginalized from the mainstream urban scene. The paper investigates the historiography of the migrant labourers in the city to interrogate the space they occupy in Bengaluru/Bangalore. Some of the important questions the paper attempts to grapple with are also about their fight for survival amidst the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and the relief measure responses from the state. Evidences show, the immigrant labourers are perceived as the city’s necessary ‘Other’ who are needed to build the city but barely finds any representation in the planning grids of urban architects. Their direct experiences and negotiations with ‘the lived city’, available from news archives and other secondary sources, will be interrogated through the lens of ‘the Right to the City’, a concept introduced by Henri Lefebvre. The paper attempts to explore if they have any agency to assert their rights to the city and become a meaningful stakeholder in the democratic control over Bengaluru/Bangalore.

Forms of Unfree Labour in Brazil: Dealing with Racism and Racialisation in Amazonian Agriculture

Unlike many other countries, the Brazilian state has created institutions and actions against unfree labour. In addition, unfree labour is a topic that appears in popular media as well as in scientific research. Poverty is generally attributed as the only factor making people vulnerable to the promises of labour recruiters, while the intersection between class and race is denied. In this article, which takes the Brazilian example, racism is seen as a structural element of unfree labour. Two factors play a big role in this intersection: first, structural racism and, second, racism as a theory of legitimation. As regards the first, imagined races influence one’s chances of having a good education as well as lead to segregation in the job and housing markets, etc. Black people in Brazil are more likely to be poor and have lower chances of upward mobility. As these structures are also mirrored in unfree labour formation, most of unfree labourers in Brazil are black, even though skin colour does not constitute a factor for labour recruiters or estate owners in choosing labourers. As regards the second, when poor people are racialised, they are ascribed specific characteristics. These mostly legitimise their subordinated position as well as their poverty. In Brazil, it could be argued that the category of the peão de trecho (migrant labourer) has been racialised. This group of subaltern labourers are seen as totally irrational people who do not possess the ability to plan their future, but who could be, with the correct guidance, potentially good labourers. Therefore, the exploitation of the peões de trecho is attributed to their characteristic traits and not to labour relations. Additionally, structural factors – as, for example, the lack of access to basic resources – are negated, making poverty a problem of merit and not of chances. Using the example of unfree labour in Brazilian agriculture, this article presents racism and racialisation as factors structuring the labour market as a whole.

Breath on the windowpane: Precarious aesthetics and diegetic noise in Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts

This article explores the various ways in which noise acts as an aesthetic marker of precarity in Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts, a documentary account of the death of 23 undocumented Chinese nationals in the United Kingdom in 2004. Taking its cue from recent work on aesthetics and the temporalities of precarity, it considers the ways in which the different forms of noise ‐ medial and informational ‐ index the ways in which the figure of the undocumented migrant labourer disturbs dominant western accounts of the aesthetic predicated on a division between production and consumption. Noise, in the form of Michel Serres’ conceptual figure of the parasite, it argues, registers the ways in which precarious labour has revealed the dependence of aesthetic categories on models of production rendered incoherent by the representation of undocumented migrant labour.

Jodh Singh, The Ghadar Movement and the Anti-Colonial Deviant in the Anglo-American Imagination*

This article is a study of an early Indian anti-colonial revolutionary movement (the Ghadar Movement) through the life and testimonies of Jodh Singh. Jodh Singh straddled the worlds of official imaginaries and revolutionary realities. He was a Punjabi Sikh and had been a migrant labourer, revolutionary, turncoat and approver before being imprisoned for refusing to give evidence in a courtroom in San Francisco in 1917 and suffering a psychotic breakdown in the early weeks of 1918. The detailed interviews and analyses of Jodh Singh’s madness offer some measure of intimacy with the rank and file of the Ghadar Movement about whom very little was ever recorded or preserved. It also becomes a prism through which an understanding can be reached of the neuroses that plagued both the United Kingdom and the United States. The desire to prosecute a trans-national and trans-Pacific conspiracy about which they knew very little, resulted in Ghadar assuming a fictive, nightmarish quality in the Anglo-American imagination. And Jodh Singh, diagnosed as possessing all the degenerative qualities of the ‘homosexual type’was one such victim.

Tuberculosis and Human Immunodeficiency Virus Co-Infection: Clinico-Demographic Determinants at an Anti-Retroviral Therapy Center in Northern India

Background: In India, Tuberculosis (TB) is endemic and Human immunodefi ciency virus (HIV) infection is epidemic in few states. The risk of developing TB in people living with HIV (PLHIV) is about 19 (27-22) times greater than those without it. TB is major cause of death in HIV-TB co-infected patients. Globally 0.4 million deaths occur annually due to HIV-TB disease.Material & Methods:The present observational study was conducted at Darbhanga Medical College and Hospital ART (Antiretroviral therapy) center during period from January to June 2017. Data of HIV-TB co-infected patients was collected from HIV-TB register and entered into Microsoft Excel sheet for analysis using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences.Results:Young persons mostly from the labouring class working in other states were most affected. Pulmonary tuberculosis (sputum smear positive) was most common co-infection. Baseline CD4 cell count at the time of presentation was observed to be low (less than 200 cells/μL) in 46.64℅ HIV-TB co-infected patients.Conclusion: Rural young people working as migrant labourer need focus of health interventions. They should be educated and screened for HIV and TB. Baseline CD4 cell count should be done in all PLHIV cases to assess their immune status.SAARC Journal of Tuberculosis, Lung Diseases and HIV/AIDS, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2017, Page: 12-17