Dr. Biju Mathew: An Interview

By Shreya Krishnan 19 November 2008 904 views 2 Comments

Co Written with Mrinalini Ranjan

On October 30th, Nazar hosted its first event in the form of a talk on immigrant labor in global cities, presented by Dr. Biju Mathew. An Associate Professor at Rider University and one of the founders of the New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance (NYTWA), Dr. Mathew is a controversial and very interesting figure in the sphere of social justice work. Just before his highly successful lecture that evening, writers Shreya Krishnan and Mrinalini Ranjan spoke to Dr. Mathew about his ideas and experiences.

Nazar: A management professor at Rider University and NYTWA organizer tend to occupy separate spheres and the two rarely collide. How did you get involved in this cause? Was there a particular incident that put you onto the path of writing Taxi!¹ ?

Dr. Mathew: I come from a background of being involved with social justice work back in Hyderabad, India. I then went to Pittsburgh to do my Ph.D., and wanted to continue my work with social justice. I lived in the old working class neighbourhood. Like such neighbourhoods in other cities in America, it had fallen apart and was a product of urban decay. It was a way of introducing myself to the U.S. I realized that fastest growing set of workers in the U.S. were immigrants. And so I decided I had to live in a big city.

And about why taxi drivers in particular: Taxis are serendipitous. There was one incident which happened during the first few meetings, when I had just started to get involved with this cause. It was late evening and I got into a taxi at Penn Station. The driver started driving and I could tell he was Pakistani. I asked him the standard question: where are you from? He replied: Tobaa Dekh Singh. I was taken aback. This was the title of a short story written in Urdu by Sadat Hassan Mantu. He generally writes tragicomic tales about Partition, and this was the name of a village that was the subject of a story about Partition. I asked him if he knew about the short story. He not only knew about it, he proceeded to give me a fifteen minute lecture comparing Mantu and his existentialism to that of John Paul Sartre. It was a completely unreal moment. That very same evening, after the meeting that I had been driven to by this driver, I got into another taxi with another Pakistani driver. He too was coincidentally from Tobaa Dekh Singh. I was blown away. When I asked him if he knew Mantu, however, he said “No, who’s that?” Instead, he gave me the origin story of the village. Apparently Tobaa Dekh Singh was the name of the man who brought water to the village. He was a well-digger.

So for me, working with drivers has been very fascinating and a very rich experience because of the sheer diversity and depth of people that you meet.

The remarkable solidarity between cab drivers of different ethnic backgrounds and nationalities in your book struck me, especially the description of the India-Pakistan test match. You have also pointed out that this is in marked contrast to the immigrant bourgeoisie population from the same countries who still carry nationalistic and ethnocentric and often racist prejudices with them from their home countries to America. Why is this so?

There is nationalism amongst cab drivers. Nationalism appears to be a European disease that we as South Asians have inherited. However, the question is, how many other identities do you have? The more fractured your identity, the more open you are to other sorts of identities and other people. The lives of so many of the taxi drivers encapsulate precisely that kind of openness. They know that what they stand for is just one more in a vast diaspora. It’s because of life experiences. The Indian Muslim and Indian Hindu middle classes in the U.S. never interact. They find their own enclaves. In a space like India, you can’t avoid it. You’re in each other’s spaces all the time, and this is a similar situation to being a taxi driver in New York City.

Punjab especially has had a very interesting relationship with Pakistan and the question of the other. Specific case: there is no distance once a barrier is broken. The ease with which Indian and Pakistani Punjabi taxi drivers get along is fascinating, once they get beyond the narrow identities imposed on them by nationalism. Here is a fascinating detail: Immediately after independence, the entire debate in Punjab about whether the state language should be Punjabi or Hindi was carried out in Urdu. If you really take the Punjabi case, it’s a fascinating example. There are experiences of horror, but also simultaneously a loss.

What are your thoughts on the phenomenon of middle-class Indian Hindu immigrants in the suburbs of America being more likely to support Hindu right-wing organizations ?

We turn more inward-looking,or fundamentalist when we are away from home. There is an insecurity around your culture. Like a museum, even destroyed objects have a certain kind of perfections. And this is the case with the Indian Hindus in America. The vision of India put forth by the RSS and the BJP seems much more appealing when further removed from the reality on the ground.

The dynamic between the traditional blue collar workers and the newer immigrant workforces is interesting. Could you give us some examples of discussions between the two groups and also what end these discussions served?

We see each of these crises as an opportunity. For us, one of our analyses for a long time was that the relationship between migrant communities and African American communities has been in a bad place. But African Americans have always strongly supported immigration. The neo-liberal city has fundamentally altered all of that. The immigrant influx in the 1960s from the South Asian subcontinent as well as other Third World countries did not use the strategic opening within the African American community to build that relationship.

Migrant populations carry their racism with them. There has also been a rise in xenophobia amongst the African American community, although traditionally it was one of the few communities that was free of xenophobia. This has meant worse and worse relationships between the immigrant workers and African Americans. This is an important moment to start education. Crisis is really important. I would say that the NYTWA is the only immigrant organization that has attempted to build a relationship with the African American community. 9/11 was very important in this respect. The entire state infrastructure came hammering down on South Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants. Who could have led that fight [against the anti-South Asian and Middle Eastern reaction]? The African American community. But they did not come out for that fight. Even as the Patriot Act was about to be enacted, if there was an African American community agitating for the rights of South Asian taxi drivers and blue collar workers, it would not have been passed. The fact that they did not is a crushing testimony to the strategic blunder in not building a relationship with the African American community early on.

How do you feel about India’s direction?

I wasn’t particularly happy with what existed before 1991. It was at best, state monopolized capitalism. Post 1991, anyone who looks at India now and tries to understand it critically has to begin by acknowledging that the last 15 years have unleashed a really interesting set of energies among a certain class of people. There is an educated middle class and the elite. We focus on the so called middle class. The economic liberalization of 1991 has unleashed the energies of this hundred million people. But this leaves another 900 million people. These people’s experiences are nothing to write home about. I spent this summer going around special economic zones (SEZ) in India. There’s nothing that’s really happening in these places. There is basically a very primitive landgrab sanctioned by the government, under the guise of economic reform. Ranjan Khar SEZ south of new Bombay is literally 30 km from Colaba and essentially, these two areas are prime real estate. The attempt is to just push the farmers out of Ranjan Khar. A large part of it is prime farmland. There’s a clause in the SEZ act which has gone through some modification that says that 70% of land acquired can be used for non SEZ work. What this will translate to is real estate.

In Orissa, Abhay Sahu was an activist in the anti-SEZ struggle and was arrested along with several other activists. With the whole neo-liberal drive, with absolutely brazen communal ideology, India is on the brink of fascism. The middle class doesn’t believe that. All notions of a liberal state have collapsed. Go state by state in India, look at the number of people who have fought the government and industrialists in one way or the other and who are now in jail on false cases and it’s mindboggling. A lot of Indians believed that the judicial structure is something they can depend on. But more and more the entire judiciary has turned against them. At the local level, the law has turned into a weapon against the weak. For someone with a middle class vision, it is not visible.

At the other end, of course, is a continuous series of bomb blasts. Either the Indian intelligence set-up is a joke or there’s something wrong. Read the newspaper after every bomb blast in the last seven years. The people claimed to be responsible have consistently changed. There was a brilliant series of five articles on Tehelka that destroyed the Indian State’s case and exposed how there was a whole bunch of young Muslim kids in jail in spite of having zero evidence against them.

Although I do not know enough accuse to any group of anything, I do know there are too many loose ends in these stories. The State is the single institution with the most amount of unchecked power. But at least 80% of the middle class doesn’t seem to put the story together. I don’t need to do anything more than to read the newspaper thoroughly to put inconsistencies together.

Footnotes:
1. Dr. Mathew’s book, Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City

Photo Courtesy: Cobrapost