The Season of Migration to the City
Courtsey of Ekta Patel
Namita Dharia
10 The City and South Asia
Twenty-year-old Veer strode across the construction pit to start his day.1 A yellow helmet topped his striped shirt and dusty-brown pants. Picking up his cement scraper, he teased a woman worker: “You, you—I saw you eating that mango yesterday, hun. Don’t lie, hun.” He sauntered up to the concrete footing he was building and cajoled his supervisor: “Today we will all leave early, hun. Go see a movie.” Everyone around laughed at his antics. Veer is a twenty-year-old mason, one of over two million migrant construction workers in India’s National Capital Region (NCR).2 His life narratives question the ways in which we plan and perceive the urban. I meet Veer on a hot summer’s day at the bottom of a thirty-foot construction pit. The walls of the basement-to-be were scarred with mechanical tooth marks of excavators. Bands of golden-brown earth radiated heat upon us. “We are blacksmiths (lohars),” Veer explains to me. “That does not mean you beat on metal the whole day. It means working with any metal tool—a cement scraper, a hammer, and . . . furniture work too.” Veer comes from a large family of carpenters from Bihar. His father is a formwork carpenter in NCR and his uncle runs a furniture workshop. Veer’s father has seven brothers. Each brother has five to six kids of his own. Together the family totals over a hundred. Communities and areas in India are historically identified with specific building skills. The past three decades saw building methods shift from craft to industry. Veer responds to this changing employment pattern by moving out of carpentry work and into layout masonry—a move that discounts craftsmanship but improves his job prospects. Migrant workers transform their skill sets in order to make ends meet as industries and economics in NCR change. Harvard South Asia Institute 11