A Free Man By Aman Sethi: The Life Of The Poor

India is a land of many landless labourers. They are not only landless but also homeless and jobless. India has 21.9% of the population living below the poverty line. This lack of concern is a disappointment not simply of scholarly interest, but rather of moral instinct. In this landmark work of reportage, Aman Sethi throws light on the life of migrant workers in Sadar Bazar in Delhi. He wants to understand the mazdoor ki zindagi – the life of the labourer. The plot revolves around Mohammed Ashraf who works as a safediwala (painter) that is as a mazdoor in Delhi’s Bara Tooti Chowk.

This chowk is one of Delhi’s largest labour markets. It is here where thousands of labourers like Ashraf live, work and sleep. A mazdoor is a general term used to describe any labourer, but mazdoori describes a much broader collection of professions. In mazdoori lines like rickshaw pullers, porters (palledars), or even helpers (who consider themselves partly of the ‘helpery’ line) at a roadside stall, the worker is expected to simply follow orders as efficiently and honestly as possible.

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Ashraf has made a living by selling newspapers and lottery tickets. His story is a reflection of the underlying truth of this country that is poverty. Despite being poor Ashraf believes in living free. “The maalik owns our work. He does not own us.” This is what Ashraf says to the author. Like M.N. Srinivas Aman Sethi also points out the concept of patron-client relationship. Ashraf was a bonded labourer in the butcher shop in which he had worked.

This gave his maalik to humiliate him in front of everyone. In rural areas it was ownership of land that conferred power and prestige to people, on the other hand in urban areas it was ownership of work that provided the people with power.Aman Sethi has, with utmost elegance, brought out the brutal realities of life. He has a very lucid style of writing. With the help of Ashraf, the author has brought to the forefront the stories of people we would have otherwise not read. Hence, I chose this book to understand the life of the urban poor. I wanted to understand their life from a different perspective.

The author looks at the poor from a very different perspective. Ashraf is not a poor man, he happens to be poor. Ashraf is an educated man. He has done biology till college level but unfortunately is not able to complete his education. He drops college in his second year because he needed a job to run his family. Aman’s conversations reflect what the poor are when they are not subject to judgements of pity, subordination, embarrassment and disgust. This book shows a very different understanding of the urban poor. This book aims at two important underlying and tragic truth of poverty and social inequality that forms an integral part of our society. The rich are becoming richer and the poor are getting poorer. The gap between the rich and poor has widened. For the urban poor, employment is uncertain; money is hard to earn and even harder to save; there is a constant fear of the criminal conspiracies that involve organ-selling and bonded labour in many parts of the city; and the more immediate danger of police and municipal watchdogs.

Aman Sethi has brought to the forefront the push and pull factors of migration. Migration refers to the movement of people from one place to the other. This movement can be from rural to urban or from urban to rural. Generally, the movement from rural to urban is more than urban to rural. People migrate to urban areas for better jobs, better education, to gain recognition and to financially help their families whom they have left behind in the villages. Ashraf had migrated to Delhi. Despite being educated he roamed around the city in search of work and had to quit a well running floor polishing business. Similar to M.N. Srinivas, Aman Sethi has also described the quality of social relations. Ashraf has many friends as well is surrounded by many enemies. Gossips form an important part of Indian rural villages, likewise mazdoors in Bara Tooti chowk also gossip about their surroundings. M.N. Srinivas states that sense of humour was an integral part of Indian villages and A Free Man is a humorous text.

M.N. Srinivas noted that women of higher castes remained confined to their homes while women of lower castes came out to help their male counterparts. This broadly shows invisible gender inequality. Similarly, Aman Sethi talks about a woman Kalyani who runs her own business of an illegal bar, which later turns about to be the most interesting place as the story moves forward. Though Aman Sethi does not tell that the ideal place for a woman is the ‘kitchen’, his work tells us very little about the lifestyles of women of Bara Tooti chowk of New Delhi. His work, in a very meagre sense, is gender biased. Hierarchy was in practice in Bara Tooti, but the hierarchical differentiation was not based on caste, as M.N. Srinivas had stated. It can be assumed from what Ashraf had said that the concept of purity and pollution was absent in the cities. In the hierarchical ladder, mazdoors were at the bottom while raj Mistry headed the ladder. The position of the people in the hierarchy is not always fixed, unlike the caste system in villages, as noted by M.N. Srinivas. There is also specialisation of work as can be seen in the villages. Andre Beteille noted that the ideal-typical village in India was a system of gradation (caste based) and was accompanied by division of labour. It was a system where different hierarchical values among the members of the village, were accepted. Aman Sethi refers to a similar system in his book, where hierarchy among the workers is practiced, there is division of labour with mazdoors (lowest in the hierarchy table) having to do the maximum labour and there is gradation though not based on cate.

An important relation of that between politics and poverty has been highlighted in ‘A Free Man’. According to Ashraf, many demolition drives are conducted every year in order to win elections. If a party feels that a particular basti (a slum area) will vote for a particular party, they might as well demolish the entire area. As a result, people like Ashraf who live in these areas lose their livelihood. Aman Sethi feels that these demolition drives rarely gain media attention. The entire process is described as necessary for urban development. Before the demolition Ashraf was working in a factory in Sanjay Amar Colony. A big company in Dubai had outsourced it’s stitching work. Ashraf had lost his only source of income in Delhi because of the demolition drive. Since the masterji with whom he was working had no title for his land, he did not get any compensation. After the demolition masterji went to Bengal and Ashraf came to Bara Tooti. Thus, the lives of slum dwellers is not easy. They have to work very hard to earn a living and make both their ends meet.