‘We work together, we eat together’

Abstract

Among themselves and within their families, workers of a public sector power project in Orissa, constantly and intentionally, violate the restrictions on inter-caste contact that they perceive as prevailing in their various villages of origin. Subscribing to the teleology of modernisation, the workers dichotomise the industrial settlement and the village as ‘modern’ and ‘backward’ sites, respectively. Their withdrawal into these ‘backward’ villages for weddings and other rituals is explained with reference to the ‘outside’, peripheral character of the settlement. I argue that this conceptualisation hints at a spatial limitation of the institution of caste, and has, at the very least, facilitated the creation of a ‘modern’, caste-negating working class.

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