atención al cliente en servicios de hotelería

196 All my respondents have initially migrated to the cities through village and kinship networks. One of the first persons to initiate the migration to Jeevakpur, Delhi from Ghagrapur had now over a span of 15 years become a local labour contractor for the shop- keepers in Delhi: leading one of the labour “gangs” (as they are called). Now many have followed him to the city. As Rajesh, a male aged 30 years, and belonging to an intermediate caste noted:

“we do not go to anjaan [unknown] city. For example, if I go to Mumbai and do not know anyone then I will starve of hunger. Or else I will have to take money from home. I will get work only if I know somebody, and not otherwise. And why will anybody give me work if they don‟t know me; who am I; where am I from and why I have come?” (Rajesh November 2010).

Thus my respondents had gone for the first time to the city along with a village or a kinship contact person. This role of kinship and fellow villagers by the first time migrants, have been noted by other studies such as by de Haan (2004).

All migrants across the castes confessed that life in Jeevakpur, Delhi, was harsh and full of hardship. Jeevakpur is a low-income settlement with rooms and houses primarily owned by a “jamadaar”: (a sweeper community; a scheduled caste) who worked as municipal workers in the city, and were themselves a marginalised group in the city. The migrants said that their room owners, the jamadaars were notorious in the area for liquor drinking and the playing of Jua (or betting on cards), or picking a fight. Due to this bad reputation, police or other communities did not enter in their location. The migrants showed an anger against the elite Delhites – the shop owners and the customers for whom they worked – who, they complained, were indifferent to their plight and were constantly trying to undercut their wages. The main problems of living in the city were: access to water, labour wages, sanitation, vulnerability to accidents at work, and having to sleep on a pavement as the rented room was too small to accommodate all persons staying there. Living was hard as earnings had to be made every-day. One of the young male migrants Mohit, aged 22 from an intermediate caste shared with me the reasons why he preferred his village to this work in Delhi:

“In village, whether you work or not you get roti [bread] in the evening in your house. Here if you don‟t work, you won‟t have money. In a city, no person is your own or a stranger ... There without money you can‟t do anything. If you have money, you are ok. If not, you are nobody. That is why I prefer my village” (Mohit, December 2008).

197 The migrants complained that the language used by the city dwellers were „kadvi‟ (harsh) with no feeling of love for them; their attitude indifferent to their needs. When I first met Dildar, a male from intermediate caste, aged 32, it was in his village Ghagrapur, when he had just returned from Delhi. Then, he was angrily narrating to me his experience in Delhi about how the employers were not even sensitive to the labourer‟s needs of water. Many of them worked as coolies or casual labourers, and at times, were employed for a whole day‟s work without the basic facility of drinking water. If they had money, they could buy water, but if not, they had to just go without. They were angry about the buildings in Delhi where the housing colonies would hire chowkidar (security guards) with instructions not to allow them to enter the compound of the buildings to drink water, even when there were water taps available. Such behaviour was called asabhya (uncivilised). Later I met Dildar again in Delhi where he showed me his tiny room in Jeevakpur which he shared with others from his village. The indifference of the Delhities to the migrants basic human needs and their sole commoditized relation with those in Delhi was difficult for them to digest as they said that even a stranger is cared for and greeted in their village: such as myself who had lived and visited their village as a researcher. They reminded me that nobody had insisted on my „proof‟ of identity before sharing information with me, but in Delhi, they said, without proof of an identity, they had no rights. Treated as nameless and faceless persons by elite Delhites whose only interest in them was economic: that of extraction of their labour, they said that they had no relation with the city, except the necessary one of labour. In Delhi, all they cared for was earning enough to send money home.

Jeevakpur and the lane in which they stayed called as “saat number galli” (seven number lane) was their world. As Akash, a male aged 30 years from the thakur caste, told me in Delhi:

“We have not seen or known any other part of the city. I go for labour work, and if there is none, then I sit with others in this 7 number galli. What do I have to do with rest of the others in the city? If I don‟t have roti [bread], these dilliwala will not give me one. It is him [pointing to a fellow labourer who incidentally belonged to the gudiya caste from his village and was sitting along with him in the 7 number galli awaiting message for work on the mobile phones of their labour contractor] who will feed me. No Dilliwala will give us anything ... Here, we have no lena- dena [interactive relation] with anyone. We only have a lena-dena with each other [other migrants from their village]” (Akash, December 2008).

198 The city‟s indifference to these migrant workers made them highly dependent on each other for their daily survival and communal living. The daily survival is hard in the city due to casualness of work and therefore a living with uncertainty of not getting work and wages. This wage uncertainty and risks of falling ill and incurring expenses; meant borrowing of money from fellow migrant villagers or their kinship relations in the city. Thus the relation of „bhav-vyavhar‟ was now lived in the city and seemed to be their final refuge for coping with any adversity.

Living as they were in the city through circular migration, they felt their needs and their rights would never be heard by the city‟s government. Akash asked me “when I don‟t get my rights in my village, how can I expect to get them here in another city? .... I need a ration card, an identity proof. When I don‟t have one, to whom can I go?”

The predicament of the migrants from my researched villages, who had come to Delhi in search of jagaya kamaya, was that of exclusion from the city‟s civic, social and political life. They were entitled only to a „bare living‟ a „bare life‟ without any other rights. Although metro cities such as Delhi and Mumbai are celebrated for their cosmopolitanism, the experience of these migrants shows that far from being a cosmopolitian city, Delhi excluded from its civic community certain classes of people, one of which was the migrant labouring class, which was devoid of any real and substantive citizenship rights. The community of these migrants lived as unequal citizens and felt acutely their distance from the elite Delhi city-dwellers. Living in Jeevakpur, the migrant‟s identity was demarked by their communal address the „saat number galli‟, where they began and ended their day, while toiling through the day as nameless labourers. Little wonder, then, that their dreams and aspirations of good living were tied to the life of the villages, which all of them sought, irrespective of castes. It seemed as though village politics with all its complexities was preferred to the city‟s indifference by these migrants. However, the fact of circular migration suggests that the good living aspired to in the village could only be enabled through migrant labour work in the city: thus the enmeshment of city and a village life was an inevitable fact for several flood and erosion-affected families in the researched villages. The social change dynamics in village power relations through a contested caste matrix, as discussed in the earlier section, were now accompanied by a new set of them: that is, one in which the identity of “migrants” (irrespective of their castes) and the “city‟s elite” whom they served existed within a social field of mutually antagonistic social relation. As a voiceless community in a city, the migrants are currently rightless but it may not be too