Appendix

By the early 2010s, when I started my research with an ethnographic study of money lending practices in Banaras, extra-legal finance there was flourishing or, it could be said, it was continuing to flourish. It had lost a major share of its predominance in financing trade and petty industry to ‘organized’ banking, and in doing so had shed its links to elaborate forms of mercantile ethics. It had lost its position in the lives of the city's elites (as lenders), and of the city's upper-middle classes (as debtors and lenders). It had lost its importance in financing high-level investments – especially real estate and education. It even had lost ground to regulated forms of banking in financing various other consumption purposes. As one debtor I interviewed put it:

Within the spectrum of this ‘anything else’, extra-legal finance continued to be a ubiquitous occurrence: not everyone went to a moneylender for loans, but everyone beyond the upper-middle class knew people who had experience with moneylenders, and had an idea of who could be approached in the neighbourhood. Everyone knew that money lending was flourishing. Within this spectrum of ‘anything else’, as it turned out, two things really had changed. First, all forms of extra-legal finance had become significantly more exploitative since the late colonial period. And second, the operational modes of extra-legal finance had changed, in some respects subtly, yet – taken altogether – in quite dramatic ways. For Indian public opinion, though, it seemed as if extra-legal finance had ceased to exist, as if it was visible only in Munshi Premchand's stories.

The designation of financial markets as M–M’ markets implicitly highlights the central role of trust in monetary transactions. Devoid of the commodity element in exchange of goods for money that accordingly expresses valuation differentials rather than assessments of uncertainty, financial markets engage in the transfer of money across time and space, extracting a commission for the necessary infrastructure, but especially for the uncertainty involved. Interest and collaterals, seen in this way, are functions of the level of trust employed. Regardless of its embeddedness in institutionalized or socio-cultural forms, assessment of uncertainty remains an individual process in that the party to a transaction needs to employ a variety of methods selected from the means available. Efforts to institutionalize the assessment of uncertainty as risk have taken a variety of forms, and typically several of these forms coexist, so that a historical analysis cannot describe successions of uncertainty assessing structures but merely point out prominently available methods and the gradual decline into obscurity of others. Yet, at all times, the individual needs to fall back on a variety of registers for handling uncertainty.

A significant part of the literature describing ‘modernization’ processes and the emergence of capitalist socio-economic orders deviates from this interpretation by describing a supersession of ‘traditional’ modes of assessing risks by ‘scientific’ or ‘rational’ ones, rather than changes in the patterns of coexisting registers. In accordance with the predominant strands of liberal thought at the time, the late colonial Indian state typically fell back on a ‘disenchantment’ or ‘rationalization’ trope when thinking in developmental terms, even though the literature on the ‘ethnographic’ colonial state provides ample evidence that its governing practices were informed by a much more pessimistic understanding of the unknowable qualities (for the British Indian administration) of the subjected population (see, for instance, Cohn 1996). The optimistic evaluation of the potentials of rationalization vied with more pessimistic perceptions of the possibilities of reform: optimism remained preeminent in guiding assumptions on the desirable outcomes, at the same time as the more pessimistic opinions framed responses that eventually marked the boundaries of where ‘progress’ was at all possible.

2008: Global and Local Significance

The year 2008: A benchmark globally and, as it turned out, for distinctly local reasons, for Sri Lanka too. Months after I received news of success with my grant application to enable me to explore how Sri Lankan apparels are at the vanguard of ethical code governance, the world went into a global economic meltdown. This put pressure on apparel producers worldwide, including those in Sri Lanka. Local issues also had an impact on Sri Lanka's apparel sector. The Rajapaksa government had started its steady onslaught to end a protracted ethnic conflict and, by May 2009, through a bloody and gory military war, three decades of violence in the country ostensibly ended. What might these shifts mean for the Sri Lankan apparel sector's trademark Garments without Guilt (GWG)? Anu's poem, which I collected during my fieldwork in 2009, is also a reminder to ask: What about labour?

Around 2006, Sri Lanka's Joint Apparel Association Forum (JAAF) members envisioned GWG as a labelling strategy by which garments produced in the country were to carry a brand label and tag. Although the labelling objective was eventually recognized as unrealistic, GWG offered an effective platform to promote the Sri Lankan apparel sector as a safe place for retailers wanting to conduct their business ethically. Under the aegis of the JAAF, the Sri Lankan apparel sector was branded, packaged and promoted as a niche and ethical producer, which also created added value (Gunawardana 2007; Kelegama 2009; Athukorala and Ekanayake 2018).

Introduction

When travelling out of Katunayake Airport, visitors to Sri Lanka meet a large billboard – greeting tourists, retailers, buyers and investors with ‘Welcome to the world's first ethical apparel sourcing destination’ (Image 4.1). The sign incorporates a logo with a shopping cart – located above the slogan ‘Made in Sri Lanka’ and topped by a halo, no doubt a subliminal message of sanctified sourcing. This bold, confident sign reflects the success of the Sri Lankan apparel sector in recent decades. The advent of free market policies led to the establishment of the first FTZ in the late 1970s and initially attracted FDI. Alongside these rudimentary beginnings was the birth of nascent local capital within the sector. The industry now claims to produce GWG and sees itself in the vanguard of the global value chain. For instance, Sri Lanka was one of the initial countries in the region and the world to go into partnership with Marks and Spencer's Plan A and set up eco-friendly production sites. It also envisages becoming a regional hub and has already set itself up as a centre of fashion design.

This sign raises an obvious question: How has the Sri Lankan apparel industry gone so successfully from strength to strength in the past four decades that its apparel association can make such claims without appearing hubristic or attracting condemnation? In this chapter, I attempt to answer this question with an outline of Sri Lanka's apparel landscape and its evolution over the past 40 years. Taking 1977 as the beginning of the burgeoning of a local apparel sector, I provide the foundation from which to understand the post-2008 years. Drawing on and interweaving my fieldwork, I also examine the impact of the onset of a global recession and the ending of 30 years of ethnic war and violence. Alongside this, I briefly sketch the industry through a combination of management perspectives and secondary data. The chapter provides some historical context to enable an appreciation of how the Sri Lankan apparel industry has successfully navigated various challenges, a success that stands in stark contrast to the death of the industry in neighbouring Nepal (Shakya 2018).

The production of a monetary outside in Banaras rested on two interlinked developments – the establishment of credit markets suitable for the expansion of capitalism and the responses by market participants in the segments that could not be served by capitalist credit. The former delineated the inside of the larger market by excluding from its outside the crucial principle that allowed for the aggregation of substantial credit flows necessary for mature capitalist accumulation, a conglomeration of regulatory practices establishing the common capitalist intelligibility of the credit contract as an instrument that fixed the enhanced uncertainty of credit relations in favour of the creditor. Faced with its incapacity to extend these regulatory mechanisms to credit practices serving the needs of vast segments of the Indian population – and with its unwillingness to provide the capital that would have sufficiently improved socio-economic conditions for them to participate in it – the Indian state eventually tolerated the prevalence of extra-legality by largely ignoring its existence.

The responses of market participants, in turn, shaped what had been delineated as a monetary outside. The delineation process of improper transactions never considered how credit markets were operating beyond the state's reach – apart from caricaturist portrayals of greed, violence, and the supposedly insurmountable informational advantage of ‘the moneylender’. Market participants did not need to shape only a market that necessarily operated extra-legally but one that needed to operate in the absence of what had been the predominant forms of making extra-legality work. The reputational credit contract in India in the nineteenth century rested on the employment of social ties and/or elaborate systems of mercantile ethics rooted in the ability of the market's apex to incentivize emulation. The collapse of these mechanisms was facilitated, even if indirectly, by the project to delineate the monetary inside, although its roots also related to larger socio-economic developments.

Introduction

I return to the poem by Anu with which I started this book. I use the lines with which she ends her poem to reconsider the Sri Lankan apparel sector and its successes. Anu reminds us that factories run on the courage of labouring workers, emphasizing another dimension to labour agency: courage. The end of her composition, however, takes us from the factory to a different level, that of the nation; she praises the workers’ contribution to the land. In her subtle way, she promotes the value creation that toiling labourers bring to two different levels, accentuating how their courage helps both the firm and the country earn hard currency. Unstated is the point that this appreciation of sweating workers does not take material form; in other words, they are not adequately remunerated and yet they are recognized. How did labourers come to be in this place? The two ends of my research trajectory may make some sense of this.

I started my research at the onset of a global recession; ironically, my writing of this concluding chapter coincides with the CoVID-19 global pandemic. Although at the time of writing it is early days in the pandemic (March–April 2020), the prognosis for the world economy is dire, with ripples in livelihoods in places far away from the current epicentres of the plague (Europe and the USA). I draw attention to the effects on theglobal garment industry, where reports of leading retailers cancelling orders from countries, such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, abound (Hossain 2020; Kelly 2020a, 2020b; Hoskins 2020, 2021). These accounts alert us to the large-scale cutbacks and the struggles of local activists to ensure some degree of protection and severance for redundant workers. With retail therapy adrift, many major brands have walked away from their contractual obligations. This has meant the closure of local factories or employers’ inability or unwillingness to pay workers, potentially creating the prospect of mass unemployment. While labourers seek justice, retailers blame the markets and local manufacturers highlight their exposure to the vagaries of global markets.

Introduction

This line from Anu's poem to me captures the essence of labour geography. It was a poem pinned against one of the walls in the canteen of a production site where I was doing fieldwork. The creative wall, as it was called, was vividly colour-washed in orange and was a strip that everyone encountered upon entering the canteen. It was an initiative introduced by a recently recruited HR manager, where workers were invited to post their artwork, poems, verses, short stories and such. One day, the poem caught my eye. I learnt that these creative works were rotated on a monthly basis to make way for others. Later, I approached the worker who penned these verses and inquired if I might have them to use for my research. I let her know that, if I were ever to use her poem in my writings, she would be acknowledged. She was bemused by my request: She was ambivalent about her work's poetic value and so wondered if I was in earnest. I had to assure her that I did find the poem powerful and effective. This is how I came to obtain a copy of the poem, while I encouraged her to retain the original.

I had not used this poem before in my writings. Yet, as I returned to my field diaries and collections, I was reminded that it remained a poignant and powerful effort to capture the essence of labour geographies; without the worker, firms would not exist. Even as her entire poem entitled Lovingly, To You, tenderly captures the challenges and hardships of working in the apparel sector, she also reminds her co-workers that without them or us, the factories simply would not exist. They, the workers, make an important contribution to the nation's wealth. Her poem then is a tender call for recognizing their agency.

Through the entirety of the poem, Anu invokes the importance of workers to the country and the firm. Her verses are a stimulating way of combining two important theoretical strands – feminist interventions and labour geographies literature – which are pertinent for thinking about labour geographies within the context of the Sri Lankan apparel sector.

Introduction

Commentators often portray the Sri Lankan apparel industry as visionary, giving industrialists credit for pursuing an ethical and niche-market production strategy. In Chapter Five, I attempted to puncture this storyline to reveal its partiality – since the rendering ignores how labourers have held the state culpable for violating their rights. Early collective struggles led to general legislative frameworks that continue to offer workers some recourse, and resistance by apparel sector workers in particular helped shape work conditions within that sector from the late 1980s (Kearney 1971; Jayawardena 1972; Women's Centre 2006; Biyanwila 2011; Saxena 2014). When a senior officer at the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) regional office shared the above sentiments, she was capturing another dimension to Sri Lankan apparel's successful ethical trajectory: that of the voice and place of labour, enabled by social and human development factors, as well as by labour legislation.

By the time ethical trade practices were promoted via global governance initiatives, the apparel sector in Sri Lanka was poised for success due to reasons beyond that of management vision. From the 1980s, workers had compelled the Sri Lankan state to respond to their concerns regarding working conditions and rights, often endangering their lives in doing so. The global move to implement voluntary codes of conduct barely caused a squeak, because Sri Lanka was already ahead of the game (Ruwanpura and Wrigley 2011). In a country and sector that had achieved this lead, and where workers had greater voice, what were work conditions like within production sites?

I now turn to an examination of ethical codes at production sites. I return to my located ethnography and long-term field research to tease out the nuances in the media narratives that often describe Sri Lankan factories in terms of extremes – either as idyllic spaces or as exploitative ones.

Arjan was not the first moneylender I met in Banaras but in some ways the most important. I started contacting him through other people known to both of us as part of a brief feasibility study on ethnographic research in Banaras. He managed to avoid me for several weeks, giving polite excuses that demonstrated how little he wanted to meet me. In the end, he was unlucky. He suffered an accident and became bedridden for sufficient time to run out of excuses. Meeting Arjan was a lucky turn for me, though, since our conversations undermined many of my initial assumptions on money lending. I had expected to find a highly exploitative system of credit depending on debt traps extending into an economy of displacement, an economy of favours (or debt-enforced labour), and significant levels of organization.

What Arjan's self-depiction demonstrated, however, was an almost comprehensively ‘amateurish’ economy that primarily worked on simple interest aggregation by a highly diverse assortment of lenders following complex operational logics. And it was much more exploitative than anticipated. A particularly frustrating element of Arjan's self-depiction – for me – was the absence of any shred of a Schumpeterian ‘entrepreneurial spirit’: Arjan had taken over money lending from his father. His clients either had been his father's clients, or their descendants, or they were living in the houses of his father's clients in cases where entire families had moved out. Before passing away, his father had raised the typical interest rate for his loans to 20 per cent per month, and Arjan had not bothered to raise it further, though by 2011 it was a fairly cheap rate for petty loans. He almost never took on new clients and had only ever done this when his existing clients asked him to give loans to friends of theirs. His clients had various social backgrounds, but were only from within the neighbourhood, and the diversity was mostly the outcome of changes in family fortunes over the decades.

Introduction

Towards the latter part of 2008, when I travelled to Sri Lanka to start this research, I did not envisage that I would be continuing this work for almost a decade. My initial approach was to a large degree dictated by the methods I had outlined for an Economic and Social Research Council–funded research project. Hence, like many others before me, I too followed the well-trodden track of carrying out interviews and located ethnography in a way that fell well within the project timeline. However, for a variety of factors recounted later, I also returned to do further research on the topic, maintaining connections with a number of workers, labour rights activists and managers. In this chapter, I try to capture the unbounded nature of field research and provide a sense of the processual nature of my research over the past decade.

I also aim to discuss the various methods that I deployed, especially as the fieldwork was not conducted during a singular research trip but, in the end, was a prolonged process carried out over several visits and years. This extended timeline was not one that I had anticipated at the start of my three-year project but one that ensued nonetheless. Partly, my motivation for continuing to have an association with a select number of workers had some connection with my feminist and solidarity politics and an upbringing infused with Buddhist empathy. Recurrent visits also involved using and deploying multiple methods at various stages, as the extended field research necessitated an evolving research design schema. In this chapter, therefore, I will detail the progress of my research methods over time. An extended field-research schedule meant that I was able to gather and reflect upon unanticipated changes and different embodied tempos, methods and processes.

Multiple Belongings: Doing Fieldwork Back ‘Home’

The year 2008 was the starting point of my fieldwork and, like the experiences of countless others, my initial time in Sri Lanka had its ups and downs. The cyclical process of doing research back ‘home’ was undoubtedly linked to my shifting subject position as an insider (Sri Lankan born and bred) and outsider (residing and working in the United Kingdom).