Slum Tourism and Affective Economy in Delhi, India - Transcript

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Welcome to the New Books Network.

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This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

Dosol Nissi Lee [00:00:13]

Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration, sharing expertise in Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Dosol Nissi Lee. I'm a master fellow at the Nordic Institute of Asia Studies and a master student at the Center for Advanced Migration Studies at the University of Copenhagen. In this episode, we discuss slum tourism and affective economies in Delhi, India. In Delhi, former street children guide visiting tourists around the streets that they used to inhabit and show how the NGO they work for tries to re-socialize the current street children. Here we focus on emotional labor of the street children and the ethical positions of the tourists, which are increasingly important given the growing presence of the tourism and hospitality industry in primarily but not limited to the economy of India. Today I'm joined by Dr. Tore Holst, who is a lecturer at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen and the Institute for the Communication of Humanistisk Videnskab at Roskilde University. Tore has conducted research and has been teaching on a wide range of humanities and social sciences and is specialized in post humanitarianism, tourism and human migration. He's the author of multiple publications, including the latest article, The Emotional Labour of Former Street Children Working as tour Guides in Delhi, which was published in 2019. Tore, welcome to the podcast.

Tore Holst [00:01:48]

Thank you so much.

Dosol Nissi Lee [00:01:49]

Great. So first of all, your recent article, as well as your other intellectual works, discuss interesting connections between slum tourism and affective economies in the regional context of Delhi. Could you briefly tell us what motivated you to research this particular geographic area and research topics?

Tore Holst [00:02:10]

So slum tourism is in a sense what it says it is. It is a tour that you as tourists go on takes between half an hour to a couple of hours in disenfranchised urban neighborhoods, usually in the global South, usually marked by kind of geographical, cultural and economic informal structures. And you basically take a tour and look at what's happening there and usually have a chat with the kind of NGO that is facilitating this tour. And then you pay the guide "slash" donate some money to the NGO, then you go on your way, whatever it is that tourists do. I was interested in this partly because I, like most other people, have tried being a tourist, sometimes involuntarily, because you're situated as one and sometimes quite voluntarily when traveling in what you could call loosely the Global South and also all over the Indian subcontinent. I had experienced that there was a lot of what you might call encounters between me as a representative from the Global North and representatives of the Global South, which is to say the poorest segments of the Indian population. But usually it wasn't framed that way. It could be servers at a restaurant. It could be the pool guy, it could be, you know, people I bought stuff from, had a chat [with], people in the street and so on and so forth. But whenever this was facilitated through a tourism infrastructure, it wasn't seemed as a meeting between rich or poor or something like that. That's part of it was basically invisible as it usually is. And so I thought that maybe slum tourism as a practice, a worldwide practice, I would actually say, is perhaps one of the largest facilitators of meetings between the global North and South, where the gap between those participants is actually the seam. And when I started looking into it, it turned out that, yes, that is actually true. If you want, as a citizen somewhere in the global North to get a face to face meeting with somebody who is living in other circumstances in the global South, these kinds of touristic frameworks is is one of the best bets. It's a quick and dirty way of doing that. On the other hand, it is also a what you might call an ethically contentious space to do so in right off the bat because it is so obviously a part of a capitalist, post-colonial kind of social, cultural and economic structure that it might seem at least to be located within the same kind of exploitation as the colonial times, but also the new colonial times, and the Neoliberal times is a part of that ethical contention and of course also the potential good this practice might do fascinated me. That is why I started doing research in it.

Dosol Nissi Lee [00:05:02]

All right. So in your research, slum tourism is based on emotional engagement by the tourists, emotional management by the NGO, and emotional. Negotiation by the tour guides. And this chain of emotions is often mediated through personal stories of the tour guides who are the former street children living in slums. Could you elaborate more on what these emotions and personal stories are and how the three actors interact with one another in slum tours?

Tore Holst [00:05:32]

You are completely right. When I was doing my fieldwork back in 2013 and onwards, because I followed the NGO, I was looking at an organisation called Salam Baloch Trusts who is who is at home in Delhi and where they sort of re-socialise street kids - and a very small number of them have the opportunity to be trained as tour guides. And when they turn 18 and they can no longer be a part of this organization as quote unquote orphans. A former street kids, they have the chance to be tour guides for tourists for three years, showing people around an informal urban neighbourhood called Paragon and speaking about their lives as street children and what kind of work the organisation does and of course, also tell their personal story. Now the reason why I was interested primarily in the emotional side of that was that if you think of yourself, you are a former street kid who had joined this organisation, perhaps at the age of six, ten, 12 or so on and so forth, and you have received primarily informal kinds of education that has equipped you to speak to tourists. But if you as a tourist are looking for, let's say, statistical information or sort of what we would think of as reporting on issues of homelessness or, you know, how many street kids are there, what do they do, where do they live, and so on and so forth. The register that these tour guides can speak within, I would say, is primarily within a discourse that points to themselves as what I call prisms of authenticity, is the fact that they have lived it. They know what it is like. It's not a large knowledge about, let's say, what other kinds of lives for street kids are there, What are the systemic reasons for the problem? What is a slum in a more systemic way? And so on and so forth. So what they can do is that they can tell their story. They can give information about certain aspects of street life that tourists wouldn't necessarily know, but which is only available to a local. And they can, in a sense, perform emotionally as prisms of authenticity. What I saw, in a sense, was what I call an effective economy, not only in the sense that affect was exchanged between tour guides and tourists, but also that what came the other way, of course, was money. It was contributions, funds, charity, wages, whatever you want to call it. Right. So what money was coming from the tourist to the tour guides and from the tour guides were coming information. But most of all, a space where the tourist could emotionally engage with the kind of homelessness that they were being told about. And that brings me to the role of the organization itself. What I found was that there was a discourse within the organization, which I have found prevalent in quite a few NGOs, namely a discourse of sensitization that what you do when you make informative work, when you tell the world about what you do in an organization, is you are sensitizing the public to the problem that you are working with. And so I was interested in, well, what does this sensitization actually mean? And what I found in relation to the tours was that if the city work was a space of sensitization, perhaps it was a space of re-sensitization. Because when I interviewed the tourists and what I also found was that as a tourist in India, you are in a sense desensitized to the suffering that you are presented with because usually you can't do very much about it. Even if you donated all your money, there would be absolutely no certainty that it would actually do any kind of good. It means that what the majority of especially long term tourists in India experience is a desensitization to the suffering that they encounter in poor urban neighborhoods in, for instance, Delhi or in other large cities in India. And what you then had on the tour was, in a sense, first of all, a promise that if you donated money, they would do some good. It was a promise that by not just giving out money randomly, you were actually also doing good as a tourist. And it was a space where it was then safe to emotionally engage with the tour guides former identity as street kids, because you were, well, in a sense, retrospectively alleviating their suffering by donating money to an organization that was doing something about this problem. So what you then had was, in a sense, if we think that the tourists were buying a product, maybe the product they were buying was a certainty that donation would do some good and thereby an opportunity to emotionally engaged with the people they were helping. I call this facilitation that is done by the tour guides, emotional labor, which is a term I have borrowed from Arlie Hochschild and the people who have subsequently worked on this. The reason why I call it emotional labor is because I see the tour guides as managing the emotions of the tourists who are all of a sudden given a space to feel something in relation to the suffering and poverty that they see in India when they travel there. And so what I actually trap is this interplay between organization tourists and tour guides and to also see, well, what does this emotional labor actually consist of? And you asking me about their personal stories. What I found was that all these city walks have, in a sense, the same kind of format, which is to say each instance or the city walk, no matter what guide you encounter, have sort of a set format. They have a route, they have a script and so on and so forth. And then they have a part which is called the "Personal Story", which of course differs depending on what guide you get. What I found was that these guides very much learned to speak English by practicing their own story, and that actually went before practicing it for tourists. Because what you see with disenfranchised groups often and this is not just in India, but I would say with a lot of disenfranchised groups and NGOs working with them. What happens is that if a given NGO has the mandate to work with a certain group, then people who want to be helped by that NGO has a tendency to formulate their identity as fitting within the group that the NGO has a mandate to help. And this was exactly what I found here, that kids who weren't necessarily orphans because they knew their parents, but their parents were not well off, maybe they were abusive and so on and so forth. These kids had a tendency to formulate their identity as orphans, even though this, strictly speaking, wasn't actually the case. And they also had a tendency to think of themselves as street kids, even though their time on the streets was usually quite limited because there was a tendency for them to be encountered by social workers not very long after they actually left their homes. They had, in a sense, sort of a set format for the personal story that they thought of as being a part of their identity within the organization, but which they also, in a sense, reiterated when they were doing the performance on the City walk. It was a kind of self narration that they were engaging in also as a way of pointing to themselves as these prisms of authenticity, as the authentic form of street kids, even that could actually, in the last instance, be questioned sometimes.Iin terms of emotions, what I then also found was that these personal stories always had a few constituent sort of elements. Narratologically speaking. So there was always the time. It started with time at home, them usually running away, sometimes being left somewhere and so on, and then a sort of a point where they are met by social workers, where they find their future saviors, their work and their life at the organization, which is the time of telling in a sense, and then a happy end to the story which is situated sort of in the near future is of course, within the logic of the story, sort of contingent on the tourists donating money, which of course is fair enough, because they are also customers and it's for good cause. And so you have a set story with some constituent elements that can vary a bit between the tour guides and which serve the purpose of letting the tour guides claim an identity as a former street child and of course also as a present day authorized guide that can lead these tourists. Emotionally speaking, what I found that this story was guides sometimes saw the job of managing the tourists emotions exactly as a job. What they wanted was to give a performance rather than to create some sort of personal connection with the tourists. They wanted to create a space where the tourists could feel, but not so much that the tour guides themselves became sad by retelling their own sad story. So they distance themselves from a past that could be thought of as sad by, in a sense, staging it as a kind of play and thereby distancing them their mechanism to protect themselves in this kind of emotional labor.

Dosol Nissi Lee [00:14:40]

In your research, you also highlighted re-socialization of the street children through slum tourism. How does this socialization take place and what would be the consequences of such re-socialization?

Tore Holst [00:14:55]

I would say in a sense, there is two sides to that question. That is, how does re-socialization function as such for these kids and why is it important to these kids? But there's also how does the re-socialization function in the performing of the tour guides as tour guides? And I'll begin with the first question. So Salaam Balak Trust, which was the organization that I was doing my field work with at any one time, have about 500 former street children living in orphanages, two for girls and three for boys, where two of them are sort of permanent places where they live. And one is like an arrival home in a sense. The socialization of these kids, to use their own terminology, refer to themselves as kids in English at least, is unlearn the kind of shortsightedness that lives on the street, teaches these kids. So if you imagine that you're living on the street, perhaps you're sleeping at a railway station, maybe you're running with a gang and so on and so forth. Having even a bit of money valuables is something that is likely to make you a target because you're completely unprotected. And that means that whatever you have, you spend. And this actually came as a surprise to me when I first learned this getting food for these children was usually not a problem because religious institutions such as the Sikh temples or sometimes the Hindu temples, Christian missions were usually serving food. And that meant that whatever kind of money they could gather, they would use for fun, clothes, to go to the cinema, sometimes in the daytime to sleep because it was hard to sleep at night because it was unsafe. Could also be cold. They could use them for drugs and other kinds of things. Teaching kids who had been self-reliant but had also been conditioned to not think about the future, teaching them to think a long term plan, getting them interested in some sort of education that was, in a sense, the kind of re-socializing that was most important, if you thought about the relationship between the organization and the street children. I was interested not only in that, but also in re socialization as a trope within the city walk. I mean, you have to imagine that you have a tour guide who is somewhere between 18 and 19, and most of them have been living with the organization for the last ten years. And that means that their lives as street children is ten years back. For the last ten years, they had been living an organization as kids at an orphanage where the organization, in a sense, is their family. And now they are sort of on their way out, If you think about it, the reason why they are there as tour guides explaining about this life is because they have to claim this authentic identity as former street kids and of course also representatives of kids that the organization has helped. And that means that they, in order to claim that identity, they couldn't really protect an identity that was completely re-socialized. They had to be in a space of what I call "perpetual re-socialization", sort of a liminal space where they were always on the verge of becoming completely re-socialized because on the one hand they had to be representatives of street life and the organization and on the other hand they also had to be trustworthy enough to be thought of as competent tour guides who wouldn't leave the tourists stray or anything like that. And so being in a sense in a liminal space of perpetual re-socialization, not quite re-socialized, but always sort of telling the story of how they are on the verge of becoming completely re-socialized, embodying the typical street children in need of help, which the tourists can then help by leaving the suffering by donating.

Dosol Nissi Lee [00:18:41]

You also emphasized on representation and self-representation as an analytical tool to understand the extended meanings of slum tourism and effective economies that are not static at the regional level, but In fact, circulating at multiple levels you explain to us how slum tourism in Delhi is connected to broader political economic structures?

Tore Holst [00:19:04]

One of the things I learned through my work pretty quickly was that the largest opponents worldwide of slum tourism usually isn't the people in the slums that you interact with, nor is it the NGOs or tourist operators that facilitate it. It is usually the city officials. It could also be the middle class or the upper class of the countries where this takes place, because these kinds of tours reflect badly on these countries. And in India, especially from what is now called - I don't know vaguely - the West or the global North, or you could also call it the formerly colonizing nations. There has always been a preoccupation with the filth of India, partly as something that the civilizing mission of the colonizing powers should, in a sense, try to get rid of, Alleviate, to help poor Indians to get rid of, which is, of course, enormously patronizing. While are the other hand also in a sense, just being fascinated by it. Right? So it's this exaggeration of the colonial order that is being read into these slum tours and the fascination with slum in the West by the part of what you could call the Indian middle and upper classes, which is why there is a widespread opposition towards this kind of practice. Secondly, what you have in Indian cities and in Delhi, especially from the 2000 to 2010, was a drive towards removing visible poverty and informalism from especially the city center. But I would say actually from the whole of Delhi and to make zones where this informalism wasn't a trait to be recognized, you have people like Amitabh Batishka having written extensively about this, but also quite a few other scholars. What I experienced was that the city government on the one hand was -seemed to be proud of the organization's Salaam Balak Trust because it had quite prominent guests. I mean, from the British Royal House, the British Prime minister at the time, and so on and so forth, many prominent guests showing sort of model NGO work. But on the other hand, the city officials were also against the highlighting of slum and filth, poverty and vulnerability and all the rest of it that the city does want to highlight. There was this double approach to urban development of trying to get rid of Delhi or and India by extension as a place of poverty. That instilled sort of a hostility towards this kind of representations of the problem that was actually present at the time.

Dosol Nissi Lee [00:21:37]

It is also interesting that you described tourist performances and appeals for aid as two pillars of slum tourism, and you translated them into commodities and altruistic discourse of charity. Could you explain what relationship is there between these two and why they are important in understanding slum tourism? Certainly what I did when I was trying to figure out what is slum tourism actually in terms of the money, emotions and other commodities or whatever things being exchanged was that I went back to sort of classic texts on, let's say, the gift or the exchange of goods and so on and so forth, and tracked my way up to modern day what you could call theorization of humanitarianism and what that is. And I arrived especially at this Lily Kulia Rakhis idea of post-humanitarianism, where she says that two spheres of, you know, modern day humanitarianism, which was in a sense business versus charity business, a place you had the exchange of commodities and you are the sink or swim and then charity for those who couldn't deal with business, that would be modern day humanitarianism in post humanitarianism. What you had in a sense was a blurring of these two spheres so that the market, in a sense was making its way into charity and especially development increasingly became a business. What I find interesting is that if we think about slum tourism, on the one hand it's tourism and that means business to many, I think, the tourism signifies the excess of capitalism in a sense, and also perhaps even a democratization of excess, because it is a way of taking what was once a privileged lifestyle of the upper class and extending it to, well, ordinary working class people in the West. I would say that's tourism for you. So on the one hand, tourism and capitalism is inextricably linked and tourism is business. But the fact of the matter is that slum tourism is usually managed by NGOs, and I haven't come across a slum tourism outfit. Whether or not they call themselves that, that isn't somehow as a central part of their business model giving and I quote something back to the community. And that means that they all, in a sense, think of themselves as a crossover between business and charity or business and development studies as a way for NGOs to make extra cash, basically.

Tore Holst [00:24:12]

And so the question is, what is it that they're actually selling and are they selling it? An interesting point here was that for the tour guides at the city walk, who thought of themselves as emotional labourers, Thinking of what they did as a commodity was actually part of what helped them shield themselves from an excess of emotional exchange that was uncomfortable to them. So they are telling their personal stories perhaps two or 3 or 4 times a week, and it's very hard stories. So naturally they can't deliver that with an equal amount of emotion each time, and they don't want to engage with the hardship of the past such a lot. So what they do is they want to make it into a performance. And thinking of this tourism performance as a commodity, as a service, that these sell, help them to create these boundaries between themselves and the wish of the tourists to basically bond with them at an emotional level.

Dosol Nissi Lee [00:25:10]

Thank you Tore. Your research also provides insights on the ethical positions of tourists, as well as the researchers who are required to negotiate their positionality in the field. What would be the practical lessons from your research for those participating in swamp tours as tourists and as researchers.

Tore Holst [00:25:30]

As a tourist engaging in a kind of slum tourism? I think, first of all, one should make itself clear that you will interact with poverty no matter what you do, and choosing to interact with poverty in a way where it is consciously being mediated isn't in itself ethically contentious. I don't think it is because poverty is going to be there whether or not you engage with it. On the other hand, as an ordinary tourist, unless you do a lot of research, you can never quite be sure where your money is going. I mean, the same way that you don't quite know how the products that you otherwise buy are being produced. You can never be quite sure of what it is that you're actually buying, right? And so it is the same kind of dynamic. What you can be pretty certain of is that the people that you are engaging with see very little problem in the discrepancy between rich and poor in itself. And even though you might think that, you know, there's a problem between you having so much and them having too little, and that is in a sense, an ethical and ideological standpoint that I completely sympathize with. But you should probably be aware that poor people around the world are used to this being the case. That doesn't mean that you necessarily have to buy that premise as tourist engaging with poor people, but it means whether or not you feel, in a sense culpable or responsible for the kind of poverty that you see is probably a result of a larger ideological engagement, rather than just confronting yourself with the injustice of some people having lost and other people not having so much. I would say that being aware of that and being aware of the fact that people that you engage with and the lives that you have given access to are usually people who are quite happy about where they live and what they do, even though they face problems, is something that is quite important to remember, I would say.

Dosol Nissi Lee [00:27:36]

All right. Thank you so much, Tore, for sharing your fascinating research with us.

Tore Holst [00:27:42]

You're very welcome.

Dosol Nissi Lee [00:27:42]

Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast, showcasing Nordic collaboration and studying Asia