The history of mass political formation in post-colonial metropolitan India has generally been narrated through the optic of ‘competitive electoral mobilization’ of the ‘poor’. How then are we to explain cases of successful mobilization in the terrain of ‘political society’ when some population groups are yet to, or just beginning to, constitute themselves as ‘vote bank’ communities? This article invites us to look into the organizational dimensions of subaltern politics in contemporary urban India. It also prompts us to re-examine the relation between law and subaltern politics. In this light, the article presents some of the major findings of a larger historical anthropology project on the organized mobilization of footpath hawkers in Calcutta since the 1970s. It examines the ways in which the hawkers have acquired and aggregated crucial resources to sustain prolonged anti-eviction movements. In this connection, this article makes a critique of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014.

I am grateful to the activists of the Hawker Sangram Committee and the National Hawker Federation for access to their College Street archive; to Jadavpur University-SYLFF Programme; University of California, Berkeley; El Colegio de Mexico; the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; the United States-India Educational Foundation; and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta for employing me and hosting me at various stages of this research. I am thankful to all the participants of a workshop on the National Policy on Urban Street Vendors at the Urban Research and Policy Programme of the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore held on 13 August 2012. I presented an earlier draft of this article in a workshop titled ‘Extrapolitics: Indian Democracy and the Political “Outside”’ held between 5 December and 7 December 2012 at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. I am thankful to Nathaniel Roberts for initiating an important discussion following my presentation. Many scholars offered invaluable insight during the writing of this article: Ravi Ahuja, Debarati Bagchi, Kishor Bhat, Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, Sharit K. Bhowmik, Devika Bordia, Uday Chandra, Partha Chatterjee, Neha Chatterji, Sumandro Chattopadhyay, Priyankar Dey, Anwesha Ghosh, Saktiman Ghosh, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Murad Hussain, Bodhisattva Kar, Koyel Lahiri, Iman Mitra, Janaki Nair, Rajan Pande, T. V. H Prathamesh, Srirupa Roy, S. Soundarya, Aditya Sarkar, Sebastian Schwecke, Samita Sen, Joyashree Roy, Rupsa Roy, Anwesha Sengupta, Jayanta Sengupta, Kaustubh Sengupta, Ritam Sengupta, Sanjay Srivastava, Lakshmi Subramanian, Carol Upadhya, Lalit Vachani, Rupa Viswanath, and my students at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. I am grateful to all of them. Surit Das has provided several helpful suggestions while copy-editing the manuscript. I am thankful to the three anonymous reviewers from Modern Asian Studies for their thoughtful suggestions on two earlier drafts of the article.