The development process in India, along with its alleged achievements, has induced multiple difficulties and hardships for poor and working people. In villages, farming families confront an agrarian crisis, with rising costs of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, inadequate irrigation facilities, low prices for their crops, grave indebtedness, and ecological damage to the soil, water, and forests. Due to a paucity of jobs in the countryside, many are compelled to migrate to cities for work.

Once in the city, migrants confront many difficulties. In workplaces, they contend with low-paid, insecure, exhausting, and hazardous work. In neighborhoods, they deal with congested living conditions, poor qualities of air, water, and sanitation, vulnerabilities to illnesses, and separation from their families in the village.

This book pursues the following inquiry. How are migrant workers confronting these myriad difficulties and hardships, in ways which are less injurious and more life-promoting? The book proposes an answer in three parts. In a metal factory in Delhi, the anchoring ethnographic site of this book, migrant workers engage in resistances and collective struggles against perceived oppression and injustice. In the city and village, they weave integrative filaments to one another, in empathetic closeness and fellowship. In the cosmological domain, they attempt to resist soul-distorting processes in present, decivilizing times. Through these activities, migrant workers strive towards, and at times realize, elements of a good life.

Shankar Ramaswami is a Professor of Sociology at O. P. Jindal Global University, India. He works on the anthropologies of globalization, migration, urban workers, and religion in South Asia. He completed an A.B. in Economics at Harvard College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Prior to coming to Jindal University, he was Lecturer on South Asian Studies in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard, where he taught courses on anthropology, literature, cinema, and religion. At Jindal, he teaches courses on global capitalism, autonomous politics, urban ethnography, religion and justice, the Mahabharata, and Indian cinema.