The pheriwali is a unique presence on our city streets, a stack of utensils on her head and a gathri (bundle) of clothes slung on her arm as she does periodic rounds (pheri) of colonies and homes, as we detailed in the first part of this series. Women like Sona ben once used to be familiar figures at the doorstep of urban households,negotiating a barter – old clothes for new utensils. These clothes are then recycled with the help of tailors and embroiderers, and sold once they are made attractive and reusable. In Delhi, the homes and markets of pheriwalis lie in Raghubir Nagar in west Delhi.
But as Sona ben’s experience shows, it is a hard life, vulnerable to violence from both the State and those they encounter on the streets which they inhabit as residents, buyers and sellers. The one law that could have shielded them from this brutality, the Street Vending Act of 2014, is ineffective, as we show later.
The pheriwali’s identity is gradually disappearing from Delhi’s urban landscape as their work dwindles in the face of changing socio-economic factors. Typically, a significant portion of a street vendor’s day is spent outside their homes, navigating the public realm and servicing networks of supply chains and diverse consumer base at affordable rates. Safe workspaces for them mean safe streets.
Our work documenting the life of Raghubir Nagar’s pheriwalis shows us that the act of street vending in Indian cities is a daily act of turning public spaces into places of work. We call this placemaking and it is a familiar sight across our cities. From a banta wala quenching your summer thirst with a soda to a samosa wala adding joy to monsoon teatime, these encounters are permanent fixtures of our city life and cityscape.
A street vendor setting up a shop on streets, pavements, roadside curbs, or under a metro station is a deliberate act of reclaiming public spaces. For decades, street vendors have contributed to the urban informal economy without legitimacy, brought vibrancy to the streets, acted as eyes on the streets to make cities safer, and negotiated for space to earn a livelihood every day.
But violence makes the life of hawkers arduous and renders their place of work undignified. Then there are other obstacles — restrictions on vending in certain areas, unexpected disasters like the pandemic that led to a ban on weekly markets during lockdowns, the lack of legitimacy and uncertainty associated with their work, and poor access to public transport and basic infrastructure like toilets and safe drinking water. All these have eroded the place of pheriwalis and many other vendors in the city.
The everyday act of place-making then becomes a brave retort to the threats posed to their livelihoods. It offers a way to reclaim their position in the city through a complex ecosystem within which various players coexist and perform an unrelenting contest for space.
Just as a woman walking at night through a dimly lit street needs basic street lighting to feel comfortable and secure, disabled people have multi-sensorial infrastructural needs to access streets, children and the elderly need more play and recreational spaces and trans people need more inclusive, visiblised spaces to belong, pheriwalis needs dignified places to work to earn a livelihood.