Abstract: Democracy in Motion: Livelihoods, Politics, and Small Transport Operators in Delhi, India

This dissertation analyzes how legalism and the changing tides of urban life, labor, property, state, and political forms adapt to each other in South Asia across a 100-year period. This dissertation uses the ethnographic case study of the small transport sector in Delhi to explore a central question: how does the political action of the migrant working poor shape democracy in the postcolonial megacity? In Delhi, small transport operators – the auto-rickshaw drivers, cycle-rickshaw pullers, electric rickshaw drivers, and erstwhile horse carriage drivers – have always been critical to the city’s economy. Across the world, and particularly in the global South, the informal economy remains a defining feature of cities, yet it remains understudied. While less understood, vulnerable migrant informal workers are a powerful political force. The small transport sector in Delhi is one of the city’s prime informal employers, comprising over 1.5 million operators. Observing the efforts of these small transport operators as they file court cases, send bureaucratic petitions, and negotiate with electoral parties and their leaders, I analyze citizen-state relationships and closely study the disaggregated State. This research offers insight into the workings of democracy as institutions intertwined with politics across different agencies, actors, and venues through the struggles of small transport operators in India’s capital city from the late nineteenth century to the present. In this way, it ethnographically shows how the sphere of politics and law has created opportunities for the working poor, who comprise most of India’s urban population. Ultimately, I focus on democracy in South Asia as a daily lived experience from the perspective of the urban working classes, who constitute over 60% of the urban population in the global South.

This study is based on twenty-four months of fieldwork in Delhi across the fields of street, bureaucracy, court, and electoral politics, with union leaders and operators, activist lawyers, bureaucrats, party strategists, and various middle-class actors. The study also develops several months of archival research across collections in the UK, US, and India to show the development of city laws. The dissertation is divided into two parts. Part I lays out the anxieties of small transporting livelihoods in the context of the broader architecture of laws and the planning arrangements around Delhi. Here, I illustrate how planning arrangements and urban anxiety feed into each other. Alongside, Part I takes a long historical view of the development of colonial town planning and the slow legalization of urban life. It shows how contemporary urban issues and state-society dynamics have long historical roots, beginning with the accretive changes in city laws.

In Part II, I systematically investigate the domains where citizen action and institutional processes interact. Part II first studies the regulatory process in the bureaucratic domain. Next, it turns to the domain of street politics and broadly analyses the various modes of activism across time and class. Finally, Part II brings the different threads of state, street, and society together and turns to the domain of the courtroom, where in a wide-ranging public interest litigation, the constitutional right to work is measured and balanced against infrastructural possibilities in the constitutional courtroom as it reworks physical infrastructures and rights to allow the actualization of small transporting livelihoods in the city. That process brings together several stakeholders, including the government, the middle class, and small transport operators, and facilitates deliberative democracy.

Bio, Souvanik Mullick:

Souvanik Mullick is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities at Princeton University. His research, drawing upon historical archives and ethnographic fieldwork, centers on democracy, law, state, cities, labor, and politics. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his doctoral dissertation that explores how legalism and the changing tides of urban life, labor, property, state, and political forms adapt to each other in South Asia across a 100-year period. Dr Mullick received his PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Yale University in December 2023 and law degrees from the University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor (LL.M, Grotius Fellow, 2013) and West Bengal University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata (BA. LL. B (Hons), 2010). His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, USA (2019), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, New York (2019), and the Yale Macmillan Center (2018), among others.

Statement of the 2024 Sardar Patel Award Committee:

Dr Mullick’s dissertation draws on rigorous ethnographic research in Delhi with rickshaw drivers of various kinds to ask how democracy actually operates in what is frequently touted as the world's largest democracy. Through multiple years of on-the-ground fieldwork, Mullick examines how political action by those with the least resources--the migrant, working poor--gives shape to the forms of democratic governance that structure everyday life in India's capital city. Both a lawyer and anthropologist by training, Mullick uses his multidisciplinary expertise to challenge theories of democracy and urban politics built from on high, seeking instead a more granular view of what it means to live democracy from below, evidenced with richly illustrative ethnographic accounts. In addition, he draws on extensive archival research to better understand the evolution of urban law. The dissertation significantly advances ongoing efforts in the social sciences to better appreciate the everyday functioning of law, statecraft, and democracy in postcolonial contexts. In sum, this is a work that will make important contributions to scholarship in anthropology, law, urban studies, and South Asian studies--but it will also help us to better understand how democracy is given form by those who ply the streets of the postcolonial state, within and beyond India.