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Victimhood, Agency, and Vulnerability: Portraits of Delhi Manual Workers in Aman Sethi’s A Free Man (2011) and Mridula Koshy’s Bicycle Dreaming (2016)
ABSTRACT This chapter examines the representation of Delhi manual workers in Aman Sethi’s literary reportage A Free Man (2011), about homeless daily construction workers in an Old Delhi labour market, and Mridula Koshy’s novel Bicycle Dreaming (2016), which portrays the children of an itinerant buyer of waste and a scavenger in South Delhi. The two books feature disenfranchized people or characters from the Indian working class, who may be seen as the victims of a social and economic system which feeds on the vulnerability of manual workers in deprived areas. However, I will show that Koshy’s novel and Sethi’s reportage blur the lines between victimhood and agency, refusing to make their books narratives of either abjectivity or aspiration. I will also question whether empathy is the appropriate response to such books and explore the distribution of vulnerability which may pertain not only to the manual workers but also, partly, to authors and readers.
KEYWORDS agency, contemporary Indian literature, victimhood, vulnerability, working class
