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ABSTRACT
Global North's Second-hand Clothing (SHC) is disposed to third world nations, giving birth to massive import-based informal markets. In India, these SHCs are illegally imported and often cater to only an urban middle-class customer base. What caters to India’s poor customers is the informal SHC trade called ChindhiFootnote1 trade (chindhi in Hindi means rags), practiced by a nomadic community named Waghri.Footnote2 Chindhiwallis,Footnote3 as they call themselves, practice an itinerant trade of exchanging old clothes for new utensils from urban Indian households to further sell to their rural/urban poor customers, thus operating a traditional and unique SHC recycling industry. This paper presents the informal work conditions of the Waghris, echoing the concerns of India’s informal street vendors. Challenging working conditions, low-income earnings, informal markets, and limited access to wider trade opportunities marginalises the community. The author argues that what perpetuates it further is the stigma associated with their social identity as ‘Denotified’ and formerly criminalised nomadic community in the colonial era. While these communities are recognised in independent India, their traditional livelihoods and community-based trade networks have remained largely undocumented. This paper attempts to draw attention to one such community-based trade practice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. ciṃdhī.
2. vāghrī.
3. ciṃdhīvālī.
4. Service nomads are a separate category of nomadic community from the pastoral nomads. Often termed as ‘itinerant’, ‘peripatetic’, or ‘gypsies’, these are artisans and performers offering specialised forms of goods and services to the settled communities. Hayden, “The Cultural Ecology of Service Nomads,” 297–309.
5. Government of India repealed The Criminal Tribes Act of 1861 in 1949, and former ‘criminal tribes’ were Denotified.
6. Each DNT community is an endogamous group. Though they are termed as tribes, for all practical purposes they were treated as castes in the traditional rural society. Restrictions on inter-dining and inter-marriages prevailed. They were not considered untouchables but occupied lower-most positions in social hierarchy. At present, administratively, in many cases the same caste/community has been included in the list of Scheduled Castes (SCs), in one or more States, and the same caste/community has been included in the lists of Scheduled Tribes (STs), or OBCs in some other States. Bokil, ‘De-notified and Nomadic Tribes- A Perspective’,148.
7. Norris, Recycling Indian Clothing- Global Contexts of Reuse and Value, 2010 explores the Indian SHC industry with the lens of examining the materiality of clothes usage in India. Apart from her work, there exists limited or no research documenting the working lives of the Waghri community as traders of Indian SHC industry.
8. Self-employed is an ambiguous category of employment within the informal sector of India, owing to lack of proper employer–employee relationship. Sengupta, Report on the Conditions of work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector, 49.
The report indicates that the self-employed comprise of three categories – own-account operator, unpaid family member, and informal employers. The own-account operators include family-based traders, urban street vendors, cart-pullers, coolies, rickshaw drivers, and others operating on their own.
9. Bhattacharya, Predicaments of Mobility:Peddlars and Itinerants in Nineteenth Century Northwestern India, 163–214.
10. Bokil, De-notified and Nomadic Tribes- A Perspective, 148–154.
11. Jajmānī and balūtedārī systems are the service relations that defined India’s caste-based rural economy.
12. Harriss-White, India Working – Essays on Society and Economy, 178.
13. Though nomadic communities carried out diversified economic activities, at present their livelihoods are seriously threatened by modern processes of mechanisation, urbanisation, commercialisation. Bokil, De-notified and Nomadic Tribes- A Perspective, 151.
14. Rajyagor, Gujarat State Gazetteers.
15. pherī.
16. vāgaḍ.
17. vāgh.
18. K.S Singh’s volumes of books, People of India, give extensive details of Indian communities and castes. The first volume (1992) briefly describes the Waghri community, and it cites the work of a British administrator, R.E. Enthoven, who published volumes on the Tribes and Castes of Bombay (1920).
19. Kennedy, Notes on Criminal Classes in the Bombay Presidency, 156–165.
20. cunariyā, datāniyā, vedū, cunvāliyā, kaṅkoḍiyā, talāpadā, patānī, godhaḍiyā, dhaṅḍāriyā.
21. Laxmibai, June 17th, 2015.
22. Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India.
23. Hayden,The cultural ecology of service nomads; Berland, Servicing the Ordinary Folk: Peripatetic Peoples and their Niche in South Asia; Bhattacharya, Predicaments of Mobility:Peddlars and Itinerants in Nineteenth Century Northwestern India.
24. Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by History, 9–10.
25. See note 19 above.
26. Bhattacharya, Predicaments of Mobility:Peddlars and Itinerants in Nineteenth Century Northwestern India, 193.
27. Hayden, Conflicts and Relations of Power between Peripatetics and Villagers in South Asia, 451.
28. See note 24 above.
29. See note 27 above.
30. Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by History, 196.
31. At one of the lectures, I delivered in Vadodara University’s School of Architecture and Planning, a senior professor involved in designing the city’s master plan mentioned how Waghris are mere thieves and conducting a research study on their work and identifying them as street vendors and discussing about their access to a market place is an irrational endeavour. Such prejudiced attitudes have an adverse impact on dignity at work and ease of access to newer markets for the workers.
32. Norris, Recycling Indian Clothing- Global Contexts of Reuse and Value, 128.
33. Meenuben, January 28th, 2013.
34. bāzār.
35. sārī.
36. Janaki and Seema, 25th July 2015. Vicks Action 500 is a medicine that functions as a temporary pain reliever.
37. Sangeeta, November 2nd, 2015.
38. Sheelaben, December 18th, 2012.
39. Anjaria, The Politics of Illegality : Mumbai Hawkers, Public Space and the Everyday Life of Law, 69–86; Indorewala, Behind Our Prejudice Against Street Vendors Lies a Flawed Idea of Public Space.
40. Indorewala, Behind Our Prejudice Against Street Vendors Lies a Flawed Idea of Public Space.
41. Anjaria, Street Hawkers and Public Space in Mumbai, 2140.
42. cāl: slum-like settlements.
43. See note 39 above.
44. See note 41 above.
45. Deepa, March 12th, 2016.
46. Gangaben, September 13th, 2015.
47. Pinky, November 29th, 2015.
48. dupaṭṭā: a length of material worn in two folds, arranged over the chest and thrown back around the shoulders.
49. jāt paṅcāyat.
50. Deepa, March 12th 2016.
51. Norris, Recycling Indian Clothing- Global Contexts of Reuse and Value, 162.
52. oṃ.
53. bāṭik.
54. bāṃdhanī: a Rajasthani tie-dye art form.
55. Norris, Recycling Indian Clothing- Global Contexts of Reuse and Value, 161–167.
56. Zarī.
57. Only 10–30% of the old clothes collection is retailed in the UK, similar to Canada and USA. Rest is shipped to countries to the African continent, Indonesia, Pakistan etc. Brooks, Clothing Poverty- The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes, 87.
58. Norris, The limits of ethicality in international markets: Imported second-hand clothing in India, 186.
59. Ibid.,188.
60. Norris, Recycling Indian Clothing- Global Contexts of Reuse and Value, 146.
61. Vinod, November 23rd, 2023.