Sorting things
When I first arrived in Chittagong, almost two months ago, I walked everywhere trying to get the measure of the place. Perhaps I felt a bit like one of the cockroaches I occasionally trap under a drinking glass before putting it off the balcony. I am past that frantic stage now but there’s a remarkable feature of this city that I encounter repeatedly when I go out for a wander: the clustering of vendors by their wares. In Kathmandu, this happens to a limited degree: coppersmiths cluster, woodcarvers cluster, but in Kathmandu I know a little bit about the underlying social and economic processes that both allow and drive that clustering.
As someone seeing Chittagong for the first time, the bunching up is so dense as to be visually quite striking. I want to know how the economic and social factors are different.
Here, for example, is the place at the foot of Ice Factory Road where one may find loudspeakers. These electronic shops sell other things too, but political rallies, mosques and various advertising vans all need these big horn speakers and these are the particular shops that you visit if you need to buy such a speaker for your bus, van, mosque, advertising campaign or political rally.
This, on the other hand, is a row of about ten shops near Sholoshohor railway station that all sell many brands of gas cooker and also sell cooking gas canisters. Again, you could visit one of the small appliance shops near GEC Mol, for example, and you’d find a gas cooker among the other things they sell— but there’s a whole row of shops here that sell nothing but gas cookers, with lots of different kinds to choose from. More importantly, they sell and refill the canisters. I would guess that, if you have worked out a good relationship around gas canisters—something a customer need every few weeks—then it’s a pretty good place from which to sell gas cookers too. The loyalty developed through frequent purchases of canisters creates a pool of customers always looking for that better cooker.
The main old market area, Reyaz Uddin Bajār, is full of these specialised clusters. Here are some turkeys for sale in the Pakkhī Bajār, the bird market — along with (1) budgerigars (2) cockatiels (3) racing pigeons and (4) fancy pigeons. They are all birds, so they all go in the bird market, even though some are for eating, some to be kept as pets, and some to be raced. There were neither chickens nor ducks here, so I presume ‘farm birds’ are someplace else, and when turkeys become less of an exotic commodity item and more of a routine farm bird, perhaps they will be sold elsewhere. How does the loyalty work here?
What strikes me about this, and I must stress I have not done anything more that cursory fieldwork through speaking with vendors in some of these specialised clusters (the marketplace full of light bulb shops was good), is that this kind of clustering could only be economically viable if there are long-term factors that connect the customers to the shops which are much stronger than the disadvantage of having all your potential competitors visibly nearby. The sociability of transactions at such shops must involve cups of tea, long-term repeat business over generations, kin networks, small financial flexibilities (credit relations) and so forth—all behaviours that Bhavana and I found to be crucial for the Baniyā. They compete very successfully with businesses that don’t put so much effort into developing long-term social and economic relationships, and indeed, that don’t have that crucial distinguishing factor for the Baniyās, intergenerational reputation. Each kind of cluster, though, must have slightly different dynamics. The social and economic relations around gas canisters are very different to those around jaḍibuṭī, the natural medical and ritual substances that the Baniyā sell.
But back to Chittagong. This process of sorting things has its visual complement on the other side of the product lifecycle, in the recycling of discarded things. Close to the Pakkhī Bajār on that particular Friday, workers were cleaning the market. Perhaps because it was Friday mid-day, many of the shops were closed and it was easy for me to get into the market but also easy for workers who collect, sort and remove discarded things for sale to buyers. The specificity of what gets sorted is, again, very striking.
It is a little hard to see, and I had to grab the photo quickly, but in the foreground, behind the pile of brown glass bottles, is a large sack of clear plastic bottles and in the background, just being covered, is a sack of miscellaneous coloured plastic objects, consisting of one red bucket and, so far as I could tell, an enormous number of brightly coloured children’s toys. Presumably the mixed plastic composition of these items means they require a different recycling stream. The sheer quantity of children’s toys gathered up as rubbish says so much about what really happens in a big noisy market as thousands of families forage for objects to buy.
Just as with the wholesalers, the retailers, and the local shops, so too spent goods find their way up a collection chain. Near AUW, along OR Nizam Road, there’s a line of mid-level buyers for recyclables. Here is a cycle-cart worth of brown cardboard being readied for transport to the next buyer up the recycling chain from them.
Down near Reyaz Uddin Bajār, there is a whole section of shops that sell tools and construction supplies. Not too surprisingly, there is a thriving business in reconditioned power tools—I’m not sure how many of these tools are being rebuilt from new tools originally sold here in Bangladesh, and how many of them are built up from industrial scrap that arrives on the ships in the ship-breaking yard or via other international waste streams. But that, too, generates some striking images of neatly sorted objects. Here, to finish, is a pile of brightly coloured power tool casings that was stacked by the side of the road that Friday afternoon, the leftovers from a successful week of cobbling together working tools to sell from a stream of broken tools.
