Introduction

In the India of the 1950s, Mahatma Gandhi’s aversion against industrial modernity had given way to its opposite. Large dams and steel mills were praised as the temples of modern India. The first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his advisors were convinced that the newly independent republic requires a strong industrial base that would grant it economic independence from advanced industrial nations. Otherwise India’s political independence might be short-lived (Khilnani 2003: 61–106; Nayar 2001: 50–85). In addition to these economic and political benefits, large industries would also have an effect on the integration of the country’s various regions, castes and religions. The state would establish these industries in the country’s backward regions far away from the metropolises Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai (then Bombay) and Chennai (then Madras) to better integrate these into the nation-state. These internal peripheries were sparsely populated by a peasantry that so far lacked industrial skills. It was envisioned nevertheless that they would be absorbed as unskilled labour into the workforce that was to construct and to run the steel plants. But the industrial megaprojects would necessarily recruit skilled and unskilled workers from other parts of India, too. Indeed, the construction sites very quickly turned into “mini-Indias” where workers and engineers from all corners of the country mingled. They spoke different languages, had different dietary preferences and customs, and even if they came from the same region, they often belonged to different castes or adhered to different faiths. Thus, the steel plants were necessary to integrate various categories of ‘others’—strangers mostly—into an emergent industrial society. It must be emphasised that this was part of Nehru’s vision too, equal in importance to India’s economic autarchy and the balancing of her regional inequalities. The gigantic steel plants were supposed to produce a social model for a new nation-state that was to transcend its various ‘primordial’ loyalties of caste, region and religion and to turn its people into a pan-Indian citizenry. The expectation was that work in a modern factory and life in a modern township, both owned and operated by a benevolent state-employer, would inevitably and irrevocably transcend such ‘traditional’ social identities. And this was considered necessary indeed since these identities were regarded as divisive obstacles to the project of nation building. Thus, the various strangers on the construction sites and on the shop floors of India’s ‘temples of industrial modernity’ would be integrated by the state and be transformed into members of a modern, secular and socialistic industrial workforce (Parry 1999).

One of the first such industrial undertakings was constructed in Rourkela. Until the 1950s, Rourkela was a small settlement in a remote region of the eastern Indian state Odisha (former Orissa). This site had been selected for several reasons. Rich deposits of iron ore, dolomite, manganese and lime stone—major resources for the production of steel—were found in the vicinity. Two nearby rivers guaranteed a sufficient water supply for the steel plant and the township, and a hydro-project and coalfields in the wider region offered the energy required. Moreover, Rourkela was already connected by rail with India’s major industrial centres in Kolkata and Mumbai. And finally, the region lacked major industries and towns and was primarily inhabited by various so-called scheduled tribes (Adivasi) who both the former colonial and present-day postcolonial governments considered particularly ‘backward’ and hence in special need of ‘development’.Footnote 1

Between 2004 and 2014, I spent intermittently around 30 months in Rourkela to conduct ethnographic field research on how people experienced, participated in and shaped the ‘great transformation’ (Polanyi 1957) that is unfolding there. Let me describe how I came to Rourkela, how I settled down in one particular neighbourhood, and how this formed the trajectory of my research, the places I came to visit and the people I came to meet. As I will show, this process was initially influenced by personal contacts I had established during my prior research in eastern India. After some time, I developed social relationships that reached beyond my first local network. My new contacts had backgrounds of caste and class that were different from those of my old network. They also differed in the way they socialised and integrated others. During my stay in Rourkela I frequently switched between these social categories. In some instances this proved problematic, but by and large people accepted my doing so. One effect of my moving between the categories was that I came to be integrated in individual families, rather than in the neighbourhood in which I lived and the ones in which I worked. In the type of urban-industrial society that Rourkela represents, this was not considered problematic.

Rourkela in the 2000s

At the time of my first visit in 2004, Rourkela was still a centre of heavy industry as every first-time visitor was bound to note soon after arrival. Stepping outside the Rourkela railway station one could already see the blast furnaces of the Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP); the town’s highway was lined by massive trucks carrying huge steel pipes or coils of steel sheets waiting for dispatch; the skies were often coloured by grey or yellowish fumes from the steel plant’s chimneys; and besides the usual statues of freedom fighters of the independence movement, Rourkela’s main squares were watched over by sculptures of workers at work or of their products.

In 2004, the RSP was still a public-sector undertaking and with a regular workforce of a little over 20,000 it was the major local employer in a town of 500,000 inhabitants. RSP had also attracted dozens of smaller and usually private downstream and ancillary industries that in total employed roughly the same number of workers. In addition, there was an even larger workforce informally or otherwise precariously employed by the same industries or on local construction sites, scrap yards and so on. Of course, Rourkela hosted also the usual middle class of administrators, traders, lawyers, bank employees, doctors and teachers as well as the urban poor such as washer men, rickshaw pullers, rag pickers and shoe-shiners. Hence, though the erstwhile vision centred on the public-sector RSP and its workforce the local economy had quickly developed into an agglomeration of different industries and service sectors. Along with it pronounced class inequalities had emerged. There were the owners of the private-sector factories whose wealth is difficult to estimate, but who afforded posh mansions at the outskirts of Rourkela, drove imported limousines and frequently travelled abroad where their children often studied, worked or had married as well. Not surprisingly, the high-ranking RSP executives displayed a similar lifestyle. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that the regularly employed RSP workers considered themselves—and were so by all others—as middle class, too. They earned relatively munificent wages and enjoyed several substantial fringe benefits such as heavily subsidised housing, electricity and water in company quarters and life-long free medical treatment in the company hospital for the worker and his spouse. They would enjoy in all likelihood these benefits until their age of retirement at 60. Furthermore, their legal status as regular employees almost fully protected them against arbitrary dismissals. By comparison, a regular worker in one of the larger and well-established private-sector factories could expect to earn half of what a regular RSP worker earns, and he enjoyed none of the fringe benefits of an RSP worker. Even worse off were the informally employed so-called contract workers working in RSP and all other industries, but only indirectly employed through a chain of contractors. They earned around 20 per cent of what an RSP worker earns and they regularly faced lay-offs.

As Nehru had envisioned, Rourkela’s 500,000 inhabitants indeed had come from all corners of India. The majority originated in various districts of the state Odisha, to which Rourkela belongs. But there was a sizeable population from Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal—the union states surrounding Odisha—and also from farther away, from Punjab or Kerala or from surrounding countries such as Nepal or Bangladesh. There were also some dozen foreign engineers and workers living with their families in Rourkela. They came from Russia and other former Soviet republics and were in Rourkela to handle the Russian machinery, part of which had been installed when RSP was undergoing a technical modernisation in the 1990s.

As most industrial towns in the world, Rourkela could boast neither historical monuments nor a ‘pristine beauty’. It is decidedly not a tourist location. In contrast to Indian towns with famous temples such as Puri on Odisha’s coast, in Rourkela foreign visitors are intuitively associated with the steel plant but never considered as tourists. And so, whenever I stepped out of the Rourkela railway station most auto rickshaw drivers took it for granted that I was living in Sector 9 of the RSP township where a special block housed foreign technical personnel. The block had a swimming pool and its company flats here were provided with air conditioning. The bungalows of RSP’s Indian senior executive staff in Sector 19 were even more luxuriously furnished. The company’s workers, by contrast, lived in detached or semi-detached houses or in two- or three-storied housing complexes according to their rank in RSP and their ability to influence—through acquaintances in management or the unions or (allegedly) through bribes—the allotment procedure of RSP’s town administration department.

Given Nehru’s vision of the township as transcending the conventional socio-religious boundaries I was surprised to learn soon after my arrival in Rourkela that some of the township’s sectors had a distinct social identity. There was a neighbourhood of Muslim employees; others were primarily inhabited by Santal—one of the ‘scheduled tribes’ of the region. But the vast majority of the township’s inhabitants were identified as Odia, that is, as speakers of the mother tongue Odia and natives of Odisha. By contrast, the Punjabi, Bihari and Bengali had settled mostly in the unplanned parts of the town, in the boroughs around the railway station known as “old Rourkela” or simply “Rourkela”. Various ‘scheduled tribe’ communities other than Santal often lived in the unplanned quarters called bastis that the state treated as illegal encroachments. In other words, the townscape displayed a tendency of ethnic segregation. Furthermore, this segregation significantly overlapped with class differences. The affluent working class of regularly employed RSP workers consisted predominantly of Odia who inhabited the company township. Likewise, the members of the ‘scheduled tribe’ living in the unplanned quarters primarily worked as precarious contract workers (Strümpell 2014, 2018).

Entering the Field

One of my first important decisions to take was where to set up my living quarters. This is of course never to the anthropologist’s own discretion only but depends on the willingness of others to accept him or her as a guest or tenant. On my first arrival in Rourkela I initially stayed in a hotel nearby the main station, but I already had a local contact whom I approached soon afterwards. She was an acquaintance of my research assistant who had helped me in conducting and translating interviews and informal talks during my previous research in Odisha. Between 2000 and 2003, I had undertaken research in a settlement connected to a hydroelectric power project located some 600 kilometres south of Rourkela. That project and its settlement of around 500 households had been established in the same spirit as Rourkela’s but the region had remained isolated and hardly accessible. My assistant had been particularly important during my research because I had started learning the Odia language only after my arrival there. And since he had finished his teacher training he was perfectly able to explain the basics and intricacies of that language to me. And as he had grown up in the settlement he knew all its inhabitants personally. He could therefore introduce me to people of interest to my research. When I was about to begin my follow-up research in Rourkela he told me that a sister of one of his father’s colleagues in fact had been married in Rourkela. Thereupon that colleague asked his sister and her husband whether I might contact them, and they kindly agreed. A few days after I arrived in Rourkela they generously invited me to stay with them until I would have found a place to stay on my own. The Sahoos, as I shall call them, lived in a three-room concrete house in an unplanned quarter located behind one of the sectors of the RSP township. This quarter consisted of two rows of houses built alongside a concrete road winding up to an elongated hill. Halfway towards the hill stands a temple of the Hindu Goddess Tara Tarini; her most famous abode is near the town Brahmapur in the southern Odishan District of Ganjam. As mentioned earlier, most quarters were considered the dwelling sites of particular tribes whose names they carried, such as Orampada or Khariapada. Many of these quarters are in fact former villages that predate RSP and that are now engulfed by factories or urban sprawl. However, there were also several quarters built by migrants who had come to Rourkela in the 1950s in search of jobs on the vast construction site. The quarter in which the Sahoos lived was one of those. Almost all of its inhabitants originated from Ganjam District in southern Odisha, like the many other labourers that had come to Rourkela in those days. After they had settled there, they had begun to build the temple. Over the decades, and with donations from RSP engineers and workers from Ganjam, the temple grew continuously; it is now among the largest temple complexes in Rourkela. After some time, Brahmin priests were recruited from Ganjam to serve in it.

Since I had socialised extensively with people from Ganjam during my previous research I was already familiar with their particular dietary restrictions; I also knew well how to interact appropriately with men and women, the young and the elderly. It therefore came as no surprise that the Sahoos treated me as ‘fictive kin’. Let me explain what this entailed.

My former assistant in Ganjam had considered me his “brother” (bhāi). He and Mrs. Sahoo had been brought up together, so that she considered him as her “brother”, too. Therefore, Mrs. Sahoo thought it proper that I call her nāni, the Odia term for “elder sister”. Properly speaking, Mrs. Sahoo’s husband, Mr. Sahoo, would have to call me—whom his wife called “brother”—salā, meaning “wife’s brother”, and I would have to refer to him as jhuāi, “sister’s husband”. Yet they asked me to address him as “elder brother” (bhāinā). This did not surprise me because I knew by then that in Odia (but also in Hindi, cp. Vatuk 1975) the term “brother” and also “elder brother” can be applied to any male person of roughly the same generation with whom one maintains a closely knit and amicable relationship. By contrast, calling someone who is not really one’s wife’s brother as such—salā—can be considered a serious insult. For calling that man “wife’s brother” would imply that the man’s sister is one’s “wife”—suggesting that one maintains a sexual relationship with that woman.

The choice of kin terms that the Sahoos applied to me therefore was a quite delicate affair. This also became clear, when their three adolescent children—two sons followed by one daughter—called me by the English term “uncle” but never by the Odia term māmu, “brother of our mother”, even though their mother called me her “brother”. The reason that the children avoided using the term māmu was that the relationship between a ‘real’ mother’s brother (māmu) and his sister’s son or daughter (called bhanjā/bhānji) is a particularly important ritual bond in Odia families—as in many other North Indian societies (op. cit.). The term māmu therefore is rarely if ever applied to people who are not ‘true’ maternal uncles. By contrast, by the English term “uncle” can be addressed all males of one’s parents’ generation with whom one maintains a familial relationship.

In the light of my previous research experiences, it was my familiarity with Odia norms, conventions and cuisine, and the contacts that I had established earlier that greatly facilitated my access to my research field in Rourkela. As I mentioned, I knew the terms by which people addressed their relatives, so that when they addressed me as such, I knew how to respond properly. And as I had accompanied some workers in the hydro-project to their native villages in Ganjam District, I knew the native village of the Sahoos and of some of their neighbours as well. From my acquaintance with Ganjam culture I was also familiar with the Hindu Goddess Tara Tarini so that I was allowed to worship at her temple in the Ganjam quarter in Rourkela.

Equally important, however, was the fact that I already spoke the Odia language. Because Rourkela was supposed to become a community in which all language groups would mingle I initially expected that its inhabitants would speak primarily Hindi—India’s national language. But although in the vicinity of the railway station people indeed usually speak Hindi among themselves, the RSP township is primarily inhabited by Odia people, as mentioned above. This results from the pressure that the federal state of Odisha had exerted upon the RSP management to give preferential employment to the state’s native inhabitants at the expense of labourers from Bengal, Bihar and other federal states. This persistent feeling among Odia inhabitants, that Rourkela might be ‘colonised’ by Bengali, Bihari and other ‘non-native’ people who would be privileged on the Rourkela job market, is rooted in India’s twentieth-century history. Under British colonial rule Odisha was part of the Bengal Presidency. Bengali had staffed the lower echelons of the colonial administration and many had used that position to acquire property in Odisha—allegedly by dubious means. Adding insult to injury, Bengali had assumed superior manners, ridiculing the indigenous language and culture of the Odia inhabitants. The latter therefore demanded an own state within the colonial administration that would unite all territories where Odia was spoken. In 1936, when the demise of British rule in India was in sight, they were granted this state, yet it still excluded several areas that the Odia had initially claimed as theirs. Odia in Rourkela and elsewhere in Odisha never tired of saying that this exclusion had to be blamed on Bengali and Bihari administrators, who cunningly registered more native speakers of Bengali or Hindi than Odia in these areas. Since in Odia perspective, ‘strangers’ had become a majority in ‘their’ land, one now should prevent the ‘colonisation’ of Rourkela by Bengali, Bihari and other Indians. Therefore the Odisha government endeavoured to reserve jobs in the steel plant for Odia people. Migrants from other states should learn to speak the Odia language or leave the region (cf. Strümpell 2017).

This rejection of people from elsewhere impacted on the way that my presence was perceived as well. Odia in Rourkela were excited that as a result of my previous research, I could speak Odia language rather than Hindi; in that respect I had become ‘one of them’. They invited me to give brief speeches in Odia at various cultural events and wrote elated stories in local newspapers about my love for Odia culture. I had become an asset in the competition between ‘native’ Odia and ‘strange’ Indians from elsewhere. And yet, the ‘Nehruvian’ spirit of pan-Indian unity in which Rourkela had been founded was also decisive for my integration in Rourkela and in the quarter where the Sahoos lived. The Sahoos—as did many others later on—offered me a place to sleep in their house and shared their food with me, defying the rules of social intercourse between different castes. Indeed, this was how they defined themselves: as ‘modern’ and different from their ‘uneducated’ and ‘rustic’ relatives in the villages in Ganjam District. For example, when on one occasion relatives from their native village visited the Sahoos they questioned them, not why I stayed at their place, but why my dishes were rinsed together with all other ones in the kitchen. They should have been cleaned outside the house so as to avoid the stark impurity that comes from the leftovers of a meal consumed by someone whose ‘caste’ or ‘community’ allows him to eat beef and pork. My “elder sister” nāni and “brother” bhāinā, however, did not mind at all, provided I would not eat such food in their house or in their presence.

Looking for My Own Abode

As so many others I met over the years in Odisha, my “elder sister” and her family were very generous hosts. They had invited me to stay with them as a guest and offered me food and shelter for free. They never gave me the feeling to be a burden but I certainly was one. Furthermore, they made it clear that they were uncomfortable with me leaving the house on my own. They feared I might get into trouble with local toughs and cheats, and as their guest they felt responsible for my security. They did so probably for good reasons. In case anything would have happened, they would very likely have run into problems with the local police. For these reasons, I had to find an accommodation to rent. Mr. Sahoo asked his relatives and friends for vacancies. Some came forward with rooms in the RSP township that some workers against company instructions sublet for a substantial rent. But as a foreigner I would have easily been identified as an illicit sub-leaser and therefore was advised not to accept such an offer. After one month of searching I found a flat in the Chhend housing colony, with approximately 45,000 inhabitants the largest one in Rourkela. That outcome was not entirely fortuitous, since my “brother” Mr. Sahoo worked in Chhend as an inspector of the Health Department of the Rourkela municipality that comprises all quarters of Rourkela that do not belong to the RSP township. Sahoo supervised the sweeping of roads and cleaning of drainages in the Chhend housing colony. Therefore, he knew the inhabitants well and they considered him a trustworthy spokesman. When he heard about a vacancy in the house of Mr. Bishnu Mohanty, a well-known and respected lawyer, he proposed me as tenant. The flat had three rooms plus kitchen and bathroom and was certainly larger than what I as a single person required. However, the landlord was not only a lawyer but also a high-ranking trade unionist, and so we both were interested in each other’s work.

Mr. Mohanty accepted me as his tenant, which I remained from March 2004 until August 2009. During these years, I spent intermittently around 30 months in Rourkela, and I very soon developed close ties with Mr. Mohanty. He was a high-caste Odia who had come to Rourkela from coastal Odisha in the 1970s as a law student. At that time he had become involved in student politics and joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist). A little later he met his wife and founded a family. He settled in Rourkela as a lawyer, became involved in the party’s trade union work and built a house. Instead of preferring the terms “uncle” and “aunty” as the Sahoos had done, he told me to address him as mausā (literally “mother’s sister’s husband”) and his wife as mausī (“mother’s sister”). This is an even more usual way to address men and women in one’s parental generation with whom one maintains a familial relationship. It seems to me that by instructing me to address them as such, they let me interact with them in an informal and non-obligatory manner. For these relations with one’s mother’s relatives contrast sharply with those with one’s paternal uncles. The latter relations are formal and authoritative and subject to strict exchange obligations, whereas in relating to people addressed as mausā and mausī I was largely freed from these restrictions.

Becoming Mr. Mohanty’s tenant turned out to be of essential importance for my research. I became well acquainted with the local trade union scene and much benefitted from his knowledge of India’s complicated system of industrial relations—of focal concern in a research of industrial workers. Almost all trade unions in India are affiliated with umbrella organisations that act as the labour wings of political parties. The union that my landlord presided over as general secretary was affiliated to the trade union wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which had often fiercely competed with the unions of rival parties. Representatives from such rival unions freely discussed delicate issues in local trade union politics with me despite my close association with Mr. Mohanty. Yet I often wondered whether it was this very association that made RSP managers forbade me to enter RSP’s shop floors, despite the support of influential spokesmen. But when it came to my standing with the police, Mr. Mohanty was a great help. He had political clout but compared to many other unionists and politicians he also enjoyed a high reputation. As a result, the police authorities swiftly registered me as his tenant and accepted me as a bonafide person without much ado. This was important because, as I had quickly learned, the police closely watched me during the years of my research.

Moving Across Boundaries

Being a tenant of Mr. Mohanty’s house in the Chhend colony gave my research a particular twist for other reasons, too. Chhend is a middle-class residential area. Public-sector steel workers, who had earned wages that placed them solidly in the middle class, had settled with their families after retirement there. By far the most of them were Odia from the coastal districts of Odisha, but there were also individual families from federal states surrounding Odisha, such as Bihar and West Bengal. Many others had migrated here for reasons other than industrial employment; they were engaged in services ranging from laundry to shop keeping and petty trade.

Mr. Mohanty’s house was situated almost at the end of the road. The residents living there used a narrow footpath as a short-cut to a small market. This consisted of four parallel rows of one-room shops, which the municipality had built and rented out to various businesses. The footpath ran some 20 metres through a plot of land strewn with clumps of grass, rubbish and broken bricks that passers-by had dumped there. On the left hand, beyond the rubbish lay another quarter named Nag Nadi. This consisted of four clusters of some 250 households, 90 per cent of which belonged to the ‘scheduled tribe’ Mundari. Here, most houses had loam walls and tiled roofs, so that the quarter had a more rural appearance. Some households partly lived of farming and kept bullocks for ploughing. There were more distinctions between the Mundari people of the Nag Nadi quarter and the Odia inhabitants of the Ganjam quarter and the Chhend colony. In the Ganjam quarter and the Chhend colony, people usually spoke Odia and—in case their interlocutor did not command that language—Hindi. But in Nag Nadi people spoke Mundari when addressing adults and Sadri (the lingua franca spoken from north-western Odisha to Jharkhand) when speaking to other people with a different ‘scheduled tribe’ background. They only spoke Odia when addressing the few visitors from Chhend and other colonies or when talking to their children. The latter, according to their parents, should accustom themselves as soon as possible to speaking Odia instead of Mundari or Sadri, because Odia would be the language of instruction in school. Lacking a proper grasp of it would hamper their chances to compete with the Odia children from Chhend.

The Mundari and Odia people also had a very different attitude regarding the consumption of alcohol. Among the migrants from Ganjam living in the Ganjam quarter or Chhend, drunkenness was frowned upon. Of course, men sometimes did drink but only among their age peers behind closed doors, and they were careful not to appear drunk in public. By contrast, in Nag Nadi the consumption of alcohol was at the centre of various social activities. In all major rituals, a distilled rice drink was offered to deities and ancestors and afterwards shared by the worshippers. In everyday life, people used to drink a light rice beer at day-time during breaks from work and in the evenings; they also drank a stronger liquor distilled from the fruits of the mahua tree. Women beyond child-rearing age also drank alcoholic beverages, although they usually sat apart from men, drinking considerably less. Inebriated elderly women one could see only during festivals. However, drunken men staggering through the quarter’s lanes were not an unusual sight. Some of them in fact were notorious drunkards from Chhend or other colonies of Rourkela who visited one of the dozen houses in Nag Nadi that sold liquor commercially. These drunkards, or “gone cases” as they were also called, were from all walks of life. Some were described locally as “labour class people”, a reference to construction workers, truck drivers or sweepers. But there were also people with a middle-class background such as college teachers, government servants, RSP workers and “sons by profession” (Odia mā bāpānkara bekāra santāna, literally “mother’s and father’s idle son”). In fact, the drunkards visited the Nag Nadi quarter because of the cheap liquor available there. Because of this repute of alcohol abuse and other illicit activities ‘respectable’ people in Chhend and elsewhere in Rourkela advised me against visiting this quarter. Nevertheless, after some weeks I decided to focus my research also on the Nag Nadi and other ‘scheduled tribes’ quarters. For it was there that I might obtain an understanding of how the low status that the higher castes ascribe to these ‘scheduled tribes’ impinges on the latter’s condition as industrial workers.

From March 2004 onwards, I spent ever more hours of the day in Nag Nadi and—through the connections established there—later in similar places elsewhere in and around Rourkela. But I returned to the Chhend for having lunch and dinner at a small food stall, and for sleeping in my flat at night. This meant that I socialised for several times a day at both sides of the divide between Mundari and Odia people. Given the considerable cultural differences between them, it is not very surprising that my Odia neighbours in Chhend did not wholeheartedly approve my socialising with people in Nag Nadi. Right-wing Hindu nationalists publicly condemned it; they accused me of being a missionary in disguise aiming to lure away the innocent ‘tribals’ from the Hindu fold. But most people did not mind my actions, accepting that other people had other ways of life and that my research brought me into contact with people of very different backgrounds of class, caste and ethnicity.

My integration among the Mundari inhabitants of the Nag Nadi quarter remained a partial one. Initially, in March 2004, I spent much time with adult men, lounging around and drinking along a dirt road. I also played football with boys and young men on the pitch they had constructed at the edge of the quarter. A month later the marriage season began, and I was invited to several marriages. On these occasions, relatives from elsewhere came to Nag Nadi, which gave me the opportunity to meet them. People introduced me as a “brother” (bhāi in Odia) from Germany. On my next visit to Rourkela in December 2004, some of the young football players invited me to join the annual meeting of the Mundari ‘tribe’ that was taking place in that year in a village some hundred kilometres from Rourkela near the RSP mines. Each year the Great Council of the Mundari (Mundari Mahasabha) organised one such gathering of the whole ‘tribe’ in a different location of the region. The Great Council of the Mundari had been established in the 1990s by some Mundari RSP workers and engineers with the aim of reforming Mundari culture. One particular concern of the Council’s founders was to eradicate alcoholism and to urge the members of the ‘tribe’ to pursue a formal education so as to escape from ignorance and poverty. To that end, they had divided the Rourkela region in 12 zones, each with a President, General Secretary and a Treasurer. They were to look after local affairs, calling the Central Committee in case they were unable to solve conflicts. They also collected donations for the annual meetings. The main attractions of the two-day annual gathering was a football tournament for which each zone fielded one team and the cultural programme in which the zones competed with teams of male and female dancers. The players from Nag Nadi who had invited me were all young men in their late teens and early 20s who thought the German goalkeeper would be an asset to their team. On our arrival at the site of the gathering, however, the organisers told them that only Mundari players are allowed to partake. The organisers were men in their 40s and 50s, and they were RSP workers, engineers or railwaymen, that is to say, all public-sector employees. Nevertheless, they also invited me to stay, and called me kupul, a Mundari word for both “guest” and “affine”. This term not only contrasts with that of haga—the Mundari word for “brother”—but also with that of diku, “stranger”, “outsider” and “exploiter”. This was of course quite significant. By calling me kupul “guest”/“affine” instead of diku “stranger” they deprived me of my strangeness and placed me in that category of people who by marrying into a Mundari community become their affine.

However, a couple of hours later, one of these Mundari RSP workers in their 50s asked me to call him koka, “father’s younger brother” and he addressed me as putura, “brother’s son” in turn. But for my closest friend in Nag Nadi, a 30-year-old truck driver who had been the first to invite me to his marriage the previous year, I remained an elder (see below) “brother” and so I did for his sister and his cousin. Consequently, my relationship to his wife was marked by a high degree of avoidance. She was my kimentani (a Mundari term) and that meant she should not sit in my presence and under no circumstances should we ever touch. Thus, when she served me tea or a meal, she either placed the cup or plate at some distance in front of me or, preferably, she handed it over to someone else—usually to my friend’s, and thus my, sister—to pass them on to me. Over the years I became closely integrated in my friend’s family. His mother started calling me “son” (honkuda in Mundari) and for his son I was the “elder brother of the father” (bodu in Mundari). In 2009, I was also invited to celebrate with his sister the annual ritual called rakhi bandhan in which the special bond that unites brothers and sisters in most Indian cultures is reconfirmed. Thus, while I became integrated into the Mundari ‘tribe’ as a whole as a kupul, that is, an affine, several individual members in their 50s and 30s took me in as a consanguineal relative.

Concluding Remarks

In Rourkela, a modern industrial society was supposed to materialise in which the ‘traditional’ boundaries between religions, regional ethnic communities, castes and non-Hindu ‘tribals’ would be transcended and perhaps even eradicated. Although in several regards, these boundaries lost much of their earlier tenacity, in others they were exacerbated. Such an exacerbation marked the relations between Odia and the Mundari people. Whereas they frequently met on local markets, in the streets and on the work floors, they constituted two very different socio-linguistic communities and regarded each other as ‘others’ if not as ‘strangers’.

To be integrated in Rourkela therefore meant to become part of different communities, each with its own kinship system and its particular procedures of integrating others. But rather than being integrated in these Odia and Mundari communities as wholes I was taken into some of their individual families. In both cases this involved the invitation to address the family members as relatives, and to be addressed as such myself, but the ideas of kinship and family at issue differed significantly. My Odia hosts were cautious to integrate me as a relative by blood but not by marriage. By contrast, during their annual gathering when Mundari celebrate their proverbial ‘brotherhood’, as a non-Mundari I could not be a part as a “brother”. Hence, it was as a “guest” or “affine” that I was offered a respectful place on this occasion. But being a “guest” or “affine” of the Mundari ‘tribe’ as a whole during an annual ceremonial gathering was one thing, interacting with individual Mundari people in the Nag Nadi community in Rourkela another. In such contexts, in which the Mundari ‘tribe’ as a whole is a distant abstraction, they were perfectly content to address me as a relative by blood instead of by marriage.