Bazaars and Backstories in Delhi’s Electronic Trade
I have often wondered about the lives of street vendors. Not just about how much they make or what they sell, but about the makeup of their everyday lives – displaying a kind of toughness or resilience, when much around them seems fluid or precarious. For instance, will they be permitted to operate from the same spot in the next year or month or even day? Will those goods still be needed? Will consumers keep visiting their place, in the face of so many changes: e-commerce, Amazon, digital wares, shifts in transport systems, glitzy malls, new supermarkets? So it was enthralling to read Traders and Tinkers, a deep ethnography that delves into the lives of street vendors, small traders and tinkers (folks involved in physical tasks like carrying loads, or repairing phones and watches and circuit boards).
The Research Framework
The book itself is an outgrowth of Maitrayee Deka’s doctoral study, that she first embarked on in 2012. For her research, she spent about a year visiting three bazaars in Delhi – in Lajpat Rai, Palika Bazaar and Nehru – situated across North, Central and Southern Delhi. These were largely electronic marketplaces and most of her interviewees were men, aged 16 to 65, who mostly sold video games. Even those who owned shops earned less than 1 lakh rupees a month, so these spaces were largely filled with folks from the working class. Most of the younger folks were uneducated or school dropouts.
Adapting to The Bazaar and Vice Versa
Spending at least four or five hours over three or four days a week, Deka absorbed changes in the way vendors interacted with her. At first, they were wary and reluctant to engage with a woman who wasn’t a fleeting consumer. Since their own lives were filled with frenetic activity, they were too busy or exhausted to relish long conversations. Over time, after they had shed their own inhibitions and curiosity – “Are you married?” “Do you have a boyfriend?” – there was more variation in the way they related to her.
Maitrayee does acknowledge that she was compelled to play a more “gendered” role in these spaces. For instance, in the way she dressed, or the tone of voice she used. After all, she didn’t want to raise their hackles or dispel stereotypes about single women: “After a while, it was like talking to acquaintances.” Deka returned to the places in 2022, so she has a decade-long perspective on their lives.
Bazaars Across History
Bazaars have existed in medieval Europe and in Rome. There have been Victorian and colonial bazaars. They were also spread across Asia. “They created among other things a consumerist spirit.”
Shopping also became a means of liberation for women, who were otherwise constrained by rigid Victorian ideals. In cities like London, bazaars were seen as corrupt places that brought in the exotic and degraded practices of the “East”: “Chinese opium and gaming dens in London raised concerns about racial intermixing in cities.”
Beyond Orientalist Myths
In The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999), Eric Raymond reinforces that bazaars have been typically conceived in Orientalist constructs, “home to goblins and sorcerers from the ‘East’”. He typifies them as being non-hierarchical, informal and non-corporatized – like the buildout of Linux software outside institutional settings.
Deka points out that bazaars are open, but not necessarily in the way that Raymond saw them. Social barriers to entry are not steep, and they sell a mix of old, new and stolen goods. But they’re not strange and exotic. They try to make the cheapest alternatives available to those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. They have generally involved a loosely organized gathering of people, who engage in face-to-face transactions.
Contemporary Makeup of Bazaars
These involve sellers who inhabit the margins; they can be easily evicted; their goods might or might not be illegal. Their sites of sale are “rudimentary” – a plastic sheet, a stool or chair if lucky, a simple wooden platform, a cart. They obtain their wares from ships or from suitcase-ferrying airborne entrepreneurs – who bring back cheap goods from Dubai or Guangzhou.
Deka observes that these spaces are not wholly capitalistic, or as calculative as one might presume. They fall into a fuzzy middle space – of not being an entirely economic space, or simply a social one. Dense commercial transactions are offset by a high degree of sociality, of collaboration, of neighborly chats and sharing and assistance. Of course, there is also competition and comparison and the necessary connivance to ensure one’s getting by or ahead.
Fitting Into the City
Many bazaars are located inside dilapidated structures, fitting, as the author puts it, into the “cracks and fissures of urban cities.” Naturally, there are hierarchies inside the space. The traders and dealers – the folks who own small shops or more permanent establishments – tend to occupy a higher status than those on the pavement or with carts. Laborers – the ones who pull carts or do the soldering occupy an even lower position.
Working With Each Other
Unlike workers in a factory, or some other establishment, they possess a fair degree of autonomy. They can change their wares, or expand their services, or access informal money-lending networks to slide up or down the system. In general though, as Deka observes, they are aware of their overall marginalization inside the nation. These small sellers are not accorded the kudos awarded to startup founders or other cultural entrepreneurs. They are not the “poster children of neoliberal India” – and she senses that they carry a certain diminishment of self-worth as a result.
They leverage mutual networks and exchange favors while operating inside an informal ethical framework. Functioning under severe constraints, they collaborate. New entrants train by watching older workers, by borrowing resources, by imitation. Scavenging among discards for spare parts, or material that can be reused, they engage in what Deka calls “backyard style innovation” – displaying an ingenuity that is rarely applauded in mainstream channels.
Reading Customers: Bazaar Tactics
Attuned to the theatrics of sale – of possessing a front-stage (with the customer) and a back-stage (where the product is procured or repaired) – they also engage in what Maitrayee terms “psychological warfare.” They assess rather quickly if the visitor is a regular or a newbie, and if the price can be hiked or not. They dismiss those who are mere flaneurs – or passersby engaged in “timepass.”
Navigating Digital Challenges
While earlier fearful about digital competition, Deka notices that they have adapted rather well to e-commerce competitors. Some have started making their own businesses hybrid – and haven’t yet been financially bankrupted by new models. But clearly, as the author puts it, policy makers would do well to track shifts when charting plans. In the meanwhile, diving into this insightful book would be a laudable beginning.
References
Maitrayee Deka, Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy, Stanford University Press, 2023