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ABSTRACT
Indian men who migrated circularly from their village homes to Delhi to pedal cycle rickshaws for work practiced intimate relationships with their wives, sex workers, and middle-class female customers. While the intimacy practiced by South Asian men who migrate is, in popular discourse, often framed as deviancy or assumed to be only about physical gratification, this article’s ethnography demonstrates that rickshaw men’s heterosexual/erotic intimacies took multiple forms which were variously characterized by sexual exchange, physical closeness, emotional connections, and/or the denial of gender and sexuality. The intimate practices were informed by intersecting identities and systems of social hierarchy, and it is argued that they had considerable bearing on the men’s migration decisions and labor performance. Although neither intimacy studies nor South Asian labor migration studies are in the habit of analyzing industries like the cycle rickshaw industry through the same lens as, for example, sex work or surrogacy and fertility work, a case is made that such industries that rely on South Asian male migrants’ manual labor and migration may, too, be profitably understood as intimate industries.
Acknowledgements
This research was only possible with generous assistance from the cycle rickshaw men and their families. I am also very thankful to Contemporary South Asia’s editors, the anonymous peer reviewers, and others who made this article possible with their feedback and/or support including Charlie Abriel, Joseph Alter, María Lis Baiocchi, Ryan Baugess, Amar BK, Ryan Coffee, Nicole Constable, Gitika De, Jayanti Garg, Gaurav Jain, Alice Keyes, Ognjen Kojanić, Gabriella Lukacs, Xi Jie Ng, Rachel Nunes, Aanmona Priyadarshini, Lizette Muñoz Rojas, Stephanie Rulias, Marcus Santiago, Caitlin Schroering, Susan Shulman, and Baby Zonunpuii. I assume sole responsibility for all errors in the text and weaknesses in its arguments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This article’s focus on intimacies that were heterosexual/erotic has to do with the quality of data relevant to my arguments that I, as a straight male researcher, was able to collect, and the inattention to heterosexual intimacy in the literature on male migrants’ intimacy (Ang Citation2019).
2 By ‘industry’ I refer to any group of workers or businesses that manufacture or produce a specific type of goods and/or services.
3 Migrants’ relationships with their spouses, as well as the romances and cheating that they practice when they migrate, are recurring themes in studies on migrant laborers in India (e.g. Shah Citation2006; Jain and Jayaram Citation2023) and elsewhere (e.g. Ehrenreich, Hochschild, and Citation2004).
4 Half my key informants were Sunni Muslims of the Sabzi caste. Traditionally vegetable mongers, these men were ranked intermediately by Muslims in their region of origin, but at the bottom of the caste hierarchy by every Hindu with whom I spoke, and by every middle-class person in Delhi with whom I spoke. The other half of my key informants were a mix of lower-middle-caste, low-caste, and Dalit Hindus.
5 All names are pseudonyms.
6 Rickshaw men might also be called home by other family members and people in their village. Here I focus on their wives because if a man said ‘I’m being called home’ it was implied he meant by his wife unless he specified otherwise. Being called home by their wives had bearing on their migration decisions far more often than requests from any other type of person in their village, and it was infused with intimate meaning that I was able to learn about from my interlocutors.
7 Additional reasons for returning to the village included religious holidays, harvests, planting, weddings, deaths, illnesses, settling disputes, repairing/building houses, relaxing/recovering from work in Delhi, doing contract/seasonal labor in the village, and seeing children, parents, relatives, and friends.
8 There were, perhaps, a minority of rickshaw men for whom migrating and working in Delhi was basically a means to the gratification of sex with sex workers. However, the men I interviewed knew there were cheap brothels in their home districts and it was possible to visit them anonymously, which meant that if they just wanted to buy sex, they did not need to come to Delhi to do it. For the men I studied, economic and extra-economic motivations intertwined to influence their migration decisions.
9 Of the rickshaw men who paid for sex, not all of them hired sex workers who shared their ethnic backgrounds. I knew a rickshaw man from Rajasthan who only bought sex from Afghani sex workers, and for him there was no meaning in it besides sexual pleasure which was heightened for him by what he judged to be their superior physical beauty.
10 The men’s devotion in this regard overrode other religious differences, and both Hindus and Muslims bought sex at the same brothels.
11 They did their best to keep their comments and jokes inaudible to the women rather than blatantly eve-teasing/catcalling. They sometimes shushed their workmates because they knew it could be dangerous if a middle-class woman accused them of improper behavior. They were less tactful in their staring, but that was probably because it would have been easier to deny wrongdoing. Women surely sometimes heard or inferred what the rickshaw men were up to, but I never saw a woman confront a rickshaw man for staring or laughing. The reason for this probably had as much to do with the women’s weaker gender position in the male-dominated society and public space as with any discretion that rickshaw men exercised in their weaker class and caste positions.
12 Homosocial bonding between rickshaw men was a vital activity, and its practice was, among other things, further evidence that the men practiced multiple kinds of intimacy and intimate relationships.
13 The desexualizing implication of ‘non-joking’ fictive kinship terms such as brother-sister can be more fully appreciated by examining Parry’s (Citation2001, 807–808) case where ‘joking’ fictive kinship terms of brother-in-law and sister-in-law were applied in order to legitimize flirting. On fictive kinship and flirting in India, also see Abraham (Citation2002).
14 Although this style of providing service was most consistently noticeable when the rickshaw men were interacting with Delhi girls, some of it also appeared in interactions with other types of customers, and in these cases there may have been different motivation behind it.
15 Another exception might be the performances of a small number of rickshaw men (particularly in the Paharganj, Jama Masjid, and Red Ford areas) who specialized in hustling foreign tourists by building confidence through affective strategies.
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Patrick Beckhorn
Patrick Beckhorn earned a Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh where he is currently a Research Associate. His research focuses on labor, masculinity, and gender in contemporary North India.