Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021. xii, 452 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$31.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1149-1.
Bombay Brokers is a book that defies easy categorization into any given genre. Prima facie, it pitches itself as a collection of 36 ethnographic profiles of “brokers” found in different walks of life in contemporary Bombay (Mumbai). In and of themselves, each of the bite-sized ethnographic portraits do not purport to delve into stand-alone academic debates—footnotes are used sparingly and the primary commitment is to reconstruct and represent the lives of the brokers. To this end, one may engage with Bombay Brokers in the spirit of a literary non-fiction. At the same time, this edited volume is no analytical lightweight. The ethnographies are clubbed under six thematic sections—development, property, business, difference, publics, and truth—and each section is prefaced by an introductory overview by an academic who draws out the common and disparate strands contained in the ethnographies therein. The entire collection is bookended by an editorial introduction by Lisa Björkman and brief concluding remarks by Lisa Mitchell, both of whom invite scholars to rethink the certitudes about brokers and brokerage. While the book’s unique format and refusal of easy taxonomy is in many ways its strength, it also poses difficulties for a reviewer: Against what benchmark might the book’s coherence be evaluated?
In a thought-provoking introduction, Björkman centres the focus of the book as being on those “people [who] perform the morally fraught but socially necessary work of transgression, translation, and transborder navigation” (16) that is necessary for survival in a labyrinthine city like Bombay. Taking everyday encounters as its point of departure, the book challenges the all-too-easy conflation of brokerage with instances of petty “corruption” or “vote-buying” (an understanding that remains regretfully rampant in the political science literature). At the heart of Björkman’s editorial intervention (and the subsequent ethnographies) is an attempt to rethink the content of brokerage through three legitimizing principles: expert knowledge, value, and morality. First, the brokers in this volume appear as the gatekeepers of intimate and local knowledge systems—from how to procure gas cylinders to assembling crowds for political rallies. But, far from merely being passive repositories of facts, the ethnographies reveal brokers as creatively deploying this expert knowledge through considerable guile and discerning judgement. While this creativity certainly indexes their agential capacity, Björkman is careful to highlight that this is a “dispersed, nonhierarchical, materialized” form of agency (15), and not one that can be valourized within the tradition of Enlightenment humanism. Second, seeing brokers as purveyors of expert knowledge allows us to map how they facilitate the accretion of value in different forms (material profit, political support, social networks) and at different scales (global, national, local, and so on). Finally, by acknowledging their role as value-generating actors, the book questions the moral castigations placed on them as parasitical rent-seekers. Without lapsing into moral relativism, the ethnographies question whether there can ever be a clean a priori boundary in binaries such as “legal/illegal,” “public/private,” “formal/informal,” “newsmaking/filmmaking,” “fact/fiction,” and “the everyday/the spectacular,” for brokers are not merely the mediators between these realms, they enable the creation of these domains in the first place.
One of the questions that remains unsatisfactorily addressed is the extent to which the circuits of brokerage described in this book are unique to Bombay, as opposed to other cities in the Indian subcontinent. While Björkman disavows the temptation to compare Bombay with other cities early on (5), this question nonetheless subsequently reappears. Ethnographies pertaining to dabbawalas (by Ken Kuroda) or that of a Bollywood production manager (by Rohan Shivkumar) are some of the obvious instances where the distinctive character of Bombay comes to the fore, but this is less clear in most of the other chapters, notwithstanding their individual merit. What then is distinctively Bombay about Bombay’s brokers? Is it the case that “[i]n all of India, only Mumbai is like that” (163) and that these brokers are “emplaced in particular locations of the city” (168)? Or does the book’s analysis point towards “longer histories of urban development,” writ large (234)?
The ethnographies in Bombay Brokers are at their best when they manage to shine a light on instances of brokerage in those spaces that are usually assumed to be free of the presence of brokers. The figure of the muscleman in the local neighbourhood, the party karyakarta in the slums, or the scrivener lurking outside government offices—such are the caricatured portrayals of brokers. One may note here the class-inflected nature of the representation of brokerage. The present volume tries to break free of this stereotype by showing the pervasive presence of brokers even when ethnographers are “studying up.” Take for example Lubaina Rangwala’s delightful auto-ethnography where, as an employee of a non-governmental organization, the author brokers a series of “exchanges” and “community engagement workshops” between an American multinational company and the residents of a slum settlement facing water shortages.
However, taking a capacious view of brokerage also risks stretching the analytical category of the broker to its breaking point. This problem appears clearly in the fourth section entitled “difference,” which seeks to emphasize the importance of marginalized social identities and conflicting subject-positions in the lives of brokers. To my mind, there is little validity in characterizing the subjects of the entries by Shailaja Paik and Maura Finkelstein—Bhimsen Gaikwad, an Ambedkarite poet/singer, and Raj, a millworker turned vada pav vendor, respectively—as brokers. Yes, they are actors who command expertise in their respective domains, and they liaise with multiple individuals in their professional lives. But surely brokerage is more than a signifier of the irreducibly social character of nearly all forms of labour in the modern world? If all of us can be designated as brokers, what analytical value does the term retain? The introductory overview written by Anjali Arondekar for this section remains unsatisfactory for being unable to address this tension. Instead, Arondekar argues that “vada pav, that tasty morsel of Bombay’s soul, is the true protagonist” of Finkelstein’s ethnography (236). An imaginative suggestion, but it comes at the cost of analytical coherence.
For all its useful provocations, Bombay Brokers deserves to be read and engaged with by scholars across anthropology, political science, history, and critical area studies. I personally look forward to using the text in classroom teaching, for it vividly captures the art of ethnographic writing and the ends to which it can be mobilized.
Amogh Dhar Sharma
University of Oxford, Oxford