Muslim artisans in the city of Saharanpur, during migration across India, and the Middle East.

What is it about?

Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans provides an ethnography of life, work and migration in a North Indian Muslim-dominated woodworking industry. It traces artisanal connections within the local context, during migration within India, and to the Gulf, examining how woodworkers utilise local and transnational networks, based on identity, religiosity, and affective circulations, to access resources, support and forms of mutuality. However, the book also illustrates how liberalisation, intensifying forms of marginalisation and incorporation into global production networks have led to spatial pressures, fragmentation of artisanal labour, and forms of enclavement that persist despite geographical mobility and connectedness.

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Photo by Bruce Hong on Unsplash

Photo by Bruce Hong on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This monograph builds on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in India which is combined with broader historical and theoretical research. It focuses on the everyday lives of Muslim craftworkers in the city of Saharanpur, during migration across India, and to the Middle East. The monograph makes substantive empirical contributions to studies of labour, migration, Islam, craftwork, apprenticeship, marginalisation and Indian Muslims. At a theoretical level, the book works across a dialectic of marginalisation and connectedness to develop contributions to discussions within anthropology and beyond concerning subjectivities, the imagination, materiality, gender, urban space, informality, class and neoliberalism.

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