Citation:
Date Presented:
February 3Abstract:
How was the begging, vagrant body a subject and object of anxiety, aspiration, and exclusion in the city of Bombay from 1898 to 1959? Relentless migration during this time period created a city powered by not just the dream of urban life—employment and excitement—but its co-constitutive nightmare—criminality and destitution. This thesis argues that the deviant beggar and normative urban order constructed each other as the colonial hub emerged into an independent metropolis. The thesis grounds this analysis in 1) a genealogical treatment of vagrancy law 2) a history of the punitive regime erected to eliminate beggary and 3) a study of Raj Kapoor’s landmark film Awaara. This sequence maps onto cycles of the beggar’s historical form of life—from interpellation to rehabilitation to exhibition, and from freedom to seizure to indeterminacy. The history of striving and exclusion in Bombay breathes, flutters ambiguously, in the figure of the beggar. I hope that this work will illuminate the ways in which the vagrant was a feared, denigrated, and celebrated figure haunting the streets and screens of Bombay.