ABSTRACT
The chapter provides an ethnographic examination of the intersecting modes of precariousness encountered by small manufacturing producers in Mumbai. Following industrial deregulation under neoliberalism, small enterprises have largely operated “informally” without the structural support to grow and become competitive. The producers, who are mostly Muslims from Uttar Pradesh, are also stigmatised as performing polluting and dirty work and denied basic civic amenities. They are neither able to relocate to larger industrial areas, nor grow their marginal businesses within the neighbourhood. In this context, we foreground their use of the term pehchaan – as the set of business strategies, that they deploy with their vendors to guarantee a minimum level of work orders. Pehchaan can be understood as an everyday credibility-building exercise through which migrant producers invest a certain amount of certainty in business transactions and expectations. While pehchaan is central to carving out survival in urban small manufacturing, we show how maintaining pehchaan over time is not able to counter the precariousness that surrounds it and gets mired within it. Making the small producers too dependent on tenuous relationships, pehchaan often gives way and forces them continue to live with precariousness.
