Abstract
This chapter discusses the hawkers and their modes in the South Asian city of Kolkata. When read through subalternity optics and the broader postcolonial literature, the hidden and explicit nuances are ruptured open. It takes Oren Yiftachel’s work on gray space to understand how things work to suspend hawkers between the legal white and the non-legal black. It is through this that the hawkers sustain. However, the resistance to such gray spacing is materialized through quiet encroachment, which has metamorphosed into bold encroachment in the last couple of decades. Emulating Asef Bayat’s work on this, the study charts three ways in which the encroachment is visible and comprehensible upon Kolkata’s urban geography. The chapter ends at a margin that discusses the hawker union’s politics of inclusion and ways in which their politics animate different urban subjectivity.
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