'Ke bhai ... tui ke? Dalal naki?': locating the racialised fieldworker in a postcolonial setting.
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,...
| Publicado en: | Postcolonial Studies Vol. 28; no. 3; pp. 225 - 243 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Sep2025
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=196513576&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 196513576 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 13688790 56Z jtl: Postcolonial Studies issn: 13688790 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Sep2025 vid: 28 iid: 3 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 196513576 10.1080/13688790.2026.2673615 ppf: 225 ppct: 18 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 901KB tig: atl: 'Ke bhai ... tui ke? Dalal naki?': locating the racialised fieldworker in a postcolonial setting. aug: au: Chakraborty, Tirthankar affil: Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany sug: keyword: field assistants Fieldwork Global South mediation racialisation ab: 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. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Postcolonial Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Postcolonial Studies holder: Taylor & Francis Ltd dt: @attributes: year: 2025 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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