Access to the city has always been a contentious issue for migrants from rural areas. While, within the context of urban India being wealthier than rural India, this question of access has taken on economic connotations, the nature of symbolic access to the city and access to the meanings of the city have not been studied enough, despite these being important in how they shape the migrant’s sense of belonging to the city. This paper outlines certain relevant findings of an ongoing study of the everyday lives of paid domestic workers in Kolkata, West Bengal. Many of these domestic workers are migrant women from rural areas and marginalized economic backgrounds. Firstly, I shall note how paid domestic work, by allowing these women to access spaces of the city like middle-class and high-end residential neighbourhoods, enables these women to access, not only physically, but also at the level of symbols and meanings the city and its spatial contours. Further, I shall emphasize not only the facilitating role of paid domestic work for migrant women accessing the city but also its precarities like entrenching the subordinate position they even otherwise are subject to.
Within the ambit of anthropology, this paper contributes to discussions around social relations, predominantly those that focus on negotiations between senses of the self and the other. Further, this paper reinforces the need to look at the order of symbols and meanings in how social lives are led at the level of the everyday. By emphasizing how relations built around paid domestic work allow migrant women to access Kolkata, as a city, better, this paper contributes to anthropological debates around relationality and its making and manifestations in the everyday.
