Paper short abstract:

We spend much our lives at home. Primary emotional connections are shaped in home. Home is a place of longing. The home is the social organisation of space. Family relations, gender, class identities are negotiated, contested and transformed. I demonstrate how home is unnecessarily idealised.

Paper long abstract:

Away From Home: Nazma, the waste picking woman narrates their tales of dispossession

We spend much our lives at home. Our primary emotional connections are shaped in the domestic arena of the home. Home is a place/space of longing. The home is a key site in the social organisation of space. Here family relations, gender, and class identities are negotiated, contested and transformed. I demonstrate how home is unnecessarily idealised while depicting how a community of waste pickers in Calcutta lose their serene homes in continuum.

Short (1999; x) says, 'Home is a source of work, abuse, and exploitation.' Fetcher (1999; x) wrote, 'Charity and beating begin at home…' as for example domestic violence and child abuse. I question notion of harmony and fairness at home. Due to the absence of livelihood, heavy debts due to daughter's marriage and medical treatment, natural disasters like floods or cyclones, family conflicts, severe hunger including disputes over property, for example being driven out of the house by in-laws after becoming a widow the waste pickers are forced to relocate to the city.

Woman waste picker Nazma, from Topsia related waste pickers know that they run the constant risk of being dispossessed of the other space at any point of time. When a fire gutted their 450 shelters within an hour on 5 April 2014, this devastating event placed the entire existence of the community in perilous jeopardy, underlining the need to set the other space within wider relations of unequal power, resources and representations including gender.