A Visual-Ethnographic Exploration of Home under a Flyover in Kolkata: Rethinking “Homelessness” and Limited Social Reproduction

Indian cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata have been facing an acute crisis of housing. Massive informalization of the workforce on one hand and rising rent on the other, as landlords continue to profiteer from the lack of subsidized housing, has resulted in a manifold rise in the population of pavement dwellers and unhoused people who are more likely to settle informally. The centralized policies to house the unhoused have so far proven inadequate, often criminalizing the latter. This visual-ethnographic essay emphasizes the need to denaturalize and problematize “homelessness.” Aided with in-depth interviews conducted with unhoused dwellers residing under a flyover in Kolkata, I particularly depend on my interlocutors’ conceptualization of home and on photographs taken in the field to theorize how home as a site of social reproduction becomes crucial in the lives of the unhoused. Engaging with scholarship on embeddedness and placemaking, I explore the reconfigured meanings of housing as a ground for limited social reproduction, placed amid contested spheres of economic production and social reproduction.