Divinity Matters: Religion and Labor in South Asia

This paper examines the entanglement of labour, class, and religion among migrant workers in Gurgaon, North India. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it invokes the Hindi term majboori (compulsion or necessity) as a key idiom through which workers interpret their precarious conditions. Migrants locate their hardships in the worldly order rather than divine will. This moral landscape is inseparable from Gurgaon's religious and class geography, where an ostensibly secular urbanism naturalises Hindu middle-class religiosity while rendering other working-class identities suspect. Engaging Shankar Ramaswami's Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Contemporary India, the paper argues that majboori provides a framework through which migrants interpret labour precarity while sustaining dignity. It does so within a city that simultaneously depends on their labour yet excludes them from its moral community.

Addressing the unit’s special emphasis on religion and labor in South Asia, this paper will analyze an important, though implicit, connection between two main threads of Shankar Ramaswami’s Souls in the Kalyug: on the one hand, the close relationships between Delhi metal polishers and their machines, and on the other, divine presences in the factory and even within the machines themselves. As this paper will show, the resulting “god–man–machine” imbrication bears important implications not only for how the workers see themselves, their machines, and their gods, but also more broadly as a corrective to posthumanist frameworks which ignore or deny the crucial roles of the divine. This paper will thus contend that Ramaswami’s analysis, through its attention to the dynamic interactions among metal workers, their machines, and deities, pushes posthumanists to consider how the divine works alongside and in concert with technology in humans’ quest to be “more-than-human.” 

This paper presentation will examine ritual practice as a form of labor by tracing Kamala's claim, an oracle of Kodungallur Bhagavathy in the southern Indian state of Kerala, that ritual possession is a toḻil (an occupation). Using a recurring weekly ritual at her personal shrine as an analytic thread, the paper studies how ritual possession, livelihood, and ethical life are co-constitutive. By situating her claim within the social and political histories of Izhava caste assertions of dignity, the presentation examines how work becomes an operative category for oracles both through its assertion and refusal. It analyzes the choreography and improvisation of this ritual across shrines, foregrounding ritual possession as a form of embodied labor co-authored with the Goddess.