| Sumario: | In the winter of 2013-14, I undertook a series of internships with multiple NGOs in Kolkata, India. Back then I was pursuing undergraduate studies in English at a city college, and belonged to a small group of "well-educated but underemployed individuals" privileged with formal education, male body, confidence, street-smarts and the ability to navigate the contours of Kolkata. Given these characteristics, I worked as a fieldworker and translator for a documentary shoot on street children, while volunteering for an international NGO based in Kolkata. I was tasked with accompanying the filmmakers, journalists and researchers to different locations in the city where the children transacted their daily trade and formed their precarious livelihood. This article is a critical, reflexive exercise of analysing the embodied racialisation of working as a Brown fieldworker for White bodies in a postcolonial setting of Kolkata. It builds on the lived experiences of a Brown man, acting as a fieldworker or fixer or translator, rubbing shoulders with the White Man, while at the same time, the fieldworker is being hawk-eyed or very closely and critically looked at by the Brown Men around him, albeit with periodic interventions (seldom violent), engendering the precarity and price of such association.
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