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Labor in South Asia
1.. I would like to thank the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies and Yale University for their support of this project, as well as Thomas Blom Hansen, Bernard Bate, Enrique Mayer, Devika Bordia, Kushanava Choudhury, Shahana Chattaraj, Sudipta Kaviraj, Shaila Seshia-Galvin, Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Sankha Guha, Paromita Guha, Christine Murray, Valerie Ross, Amit Basole, Deepankar Basu, Jun Zhang, Shankar Ramaswami, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Angelique Haugerud, Shail Mayaram, Janet Roitman, Rajeev Bhargava, Smita Jassal, Ravikant, Ravi Sundaram, Ravi Vasudevan, Andrea Estepa and the anonymous reviewers at American Ethnologist and International Labor and Working-Class History for their contributions to this article. I am profoundly grateful to the people of Kulpi and the South 24 Parganas who gave generously of their time. Names have been changed in this article to protect identities.
Introduction
I own a gray nylon sari,2hand-embroidered with swirling threadwork and raised gray beads, and decorated along its border with silver sequins. I bought it from Rabiul Sheikh, an entrepreneur in the sari embroidery industry, from the riverside village of Kulpi.3Kulpi is located in the South 24 Parganas district, about fifty miles from Kolkata. It is a central location from which sari embroidery is spreading across large parts of rural Bengal. The Bengali term for the embroidery industry is zarir kaaj (metallic threadwork). Zarir kaaj refers to the work of hand-embroidering saris with metallic thread, as well as beads, stones, and sequins.4
After buying the sari, I watched as Bani, a middle-aged woman from Pathor Protima island, handed Rabiul a large bundle of embroidered saris.5She was returning the saris that she had collected from him a month earlier to be embroidered by family and friends in her village. She had taken two buses and a boat to reach Kulpi, a seven-hour journey. Like Bani, thousands of men, women, and children across South 24 Parganas work in sari embroidery. These saris rarely sell in the villages where they are hand-embroidered. Rather, they are consumed in urban centers, where such embroidery is in demand. [Figure Omitted; See PDF]
South 24 Parganas stretches from...