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Abstract
This dissertation ethnographically studies how labouring subjects and politics are being constituted under neoliberal Hindutva in peri-urban communist movement spaces in north India. Based on long-term fieldwork conducted between 2015-2024 amongst automobile industry workers and agrarian farm labourers, I follow struggles for better wages and working conditions in industrial Gurgaon-Manesar-Bawal, Haryana, as well as a sustained campaign for collective land ownership in agrarian Sangrur, Punjab. In the process, I lay out where these movements encounter or overlap with hegemonic Hindu nationalist visions of the past and the future, and interrogate how the boundaries between class and caste come to be drawn. I attend to the public forms such industrial-agrarian organizing takes–political speeches, marches, strikes, protests at factory gates and demonstrations at panchayat auctions for land. I also pay attention to the quieter intellectual, relational, and aesthetic dimensions that undergird such organizing–everyday socialities; jokes and recollections of militant actions; debates over tactics and strategies; cultural programs in the streets, neighbourhoods and in villages; making pamphlets and planning meetings; domestic lives and chores; and finding time for leisure in the midst of it all. I argue that resonant encounters between dominant agrarian caste Jat and oppressed caste Dalit lifeworlds are formative to the idioms and orientations that working-class politics has been taking in both movement spaces since the early 2010s. What does it mean for leftist politics in this historical conjuncture if industrial workers are identifying as farmers, and agrarian labourers as landless farmers? What kinds of caste-class aspirations does this index, and how do Hindutva infrastructures of cow protection that model attachments through love, injury and agrarian rationality within peri-urban spaces clarify the stakes of such subject-formation? What are the implications of unsettling any stable categories of ‘worker,’ and ‘farmer,’ and of understanding politics beyond the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of a movement in industrial Haryana and agrarian Punjab? I situate non-economically deterministic industrial-agrarian forms of leftist activism within what I call class ambivalence–a paradoxical both/and formulation of being, becoming and doing as a class, within the political of caste capitalism. Politics in the both/and of class ambivalence happens precisely because tensions are held, and not because one node of the ambivalence trumps or overcomes the other. Class ambivalence is thereby a way of paying attention to how gendered caste lifeworlds come to bear on struggles happening at the point of production in the factory and the field alike, at a time when neither industrial nor agrarian futures are guaranteed.