As months passed at the bazaar my claims of conducting research without seeming to do much were for many of the jhupri labourers really a distraction from a more obvious reality: I was unemployed. The group were then impressed by my swift change in status in subsequent years evidenced by a business card, jumping from a hanger on who drank too much tea to a ‘professor’, as they generously framed various post-doctoral positions. This admiration was accompanied by requests to detail my income and expenditure in minutia, starting of course with salary, tax and housing costs and later, at my own insistence, the much-dreaded nursery fees. Jobs are hard to come by in Dhaka and anything vaguely formal a distant dream for the jhupri labourers. Government positions in particular are rare and much coveted, often requiring extortionate bribes to acquire, similar to how jobbers once mediated work in industry. Many municipal sweepers in Dhaka, for example, are known to have paid up to 10 lakh taka to gain a job, bringing debts but conferring stability of income and other opportunities. A younger labourer in the jhupri group, clearly exaggerating, once claimed to me while looking at the road being cleaned that ‘even the sweepers on this lane are government people, but only us labourers don't have papers.’

The jhupri group have few avenues for getting salaried jobs. Being the sons of labourers, fishermen, small-scale farmers or faded one-time santrashis and having spent years apart from them, means family is rarely a source of strength. Few here can rely on family capital, security, contacts or opportunities. Whatever the jhupri labourers have, they have it despite this background. As children they learned to fend for themselves. The friendships formed here were not only their fictive bhais and schoolmates to play and joke with, but something even closer, brothers to survive with. Viewed from the side of the jhupri lane, their world then is much smaller, framed by the corners of the bazaar. It is here that they can earn, and here that they seek opportunities.

Parvez's samiti had seemed for much of my time with the jhupri group little more than a harmless side act to his role as a boro bhai. I knew that at least ostensibly the samiti was a savings group, where each of the seventy labourers deposited 10 taka daily, which he in principle would keep safe for them. I was aware, however, that Rubel, who had similarly run a samiti in the past, had been known to have in fact kept most of the capital. It was also clear that Parvez, unlike Rubel, did not own rickshaw vans apart from his own and did not hence receive income from renting them, nor did he work during the night, instead monitoring activities by the side and fielding questions from the labourers. I sensed then that Parvez was perhaps living on the samiti funds day to day. At times the money given to him was portrayed by the labourers less as a savings system and more as a tribute. When asked why they gave to the samiti, younger labourers in particular would often reply along the lines of: ‘He is our boro bhai, that's why we give it.’ The way it was spoken of was as chanda, with the complexity this word entails. The samiti then seemed to stand alongside the other ways Parvez earned: money from rounding up the boys to attend rallies, some from more dangerous acts of political violence, some from a short-lived syndicate, some from the thieving of vegetable sacks and some from the labourers themselves.

What then also appeared clear was that while larger bodies such as the Van Workers’ Union were intertwined with party politics, whatever this samiti was, it appeared far less meaningful politically than the rallies the group attended or the bombings they orchestrated. A common portrayal of similar societies in academic literature1 is furthermore as mutual aid associations understood within a ‘development’ paradigm, seen as a way of overcoming short-term horizons or mobilising groups in a ‘civic’ manner to better negotiate with the state.

Rubel was only eight or nine when he came to Dhaka. He took a train alone from the north, arrived at a station in the centre of the city and walked to a nearby bazaar where he has worked ever since. Memories of his family and village have blurred over the years, and today he is married with two children and stays in a basti (slum) elsewhere in the city. For people who have grown up on the streets of Dhaka, such stories are common. Some recall odd details of their home but have forgotten the name of their village and even family. Some ran away from poverty and cruelty, and described a widowed mother, a resentful stepparent, a neglectful father, mental illness, abuse at school or the madrasah. For some, the story of their arrival is bound up with a precise moment of fear, such as losing a prized asset and not daring to return home or a particularly brutal argument. For others, the streets have always been their home, growing up in makeshift shacks formed from tarpaulin sheets that dot stretches of pavement, and where even today some babies are born.

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is one of the most densely populated cities on earth. People here live in a sprawling mix of apartment blocks, a few upmarket neighbourhoods and large bastis. Others skirt the edges of these in bazaars, transport terminals and pavements. Despite being one of the most populous cities on earth, it is little known in the so-called Global North, so much so that foreigners often pronounce it ‘Dakar’ after the Senegalese capital. As a city it is rarely deemed beautiful by outside eyes, unlike its iconic cousin Kolkata, nor does it boast obvious distinctions to draw tourists or wider interest. When Dhaka does appear in the world's media, it is sometimes in reference to its violent politics, the garment factories which sit at its edges or its frequent designation as one of the least liveable cities in the world. The only Western film to feature Dhaka – a recent Netflix production concerning the abduction of an Indian drug lord's son and a white mercenary hero – was filmed in India and Thailand, and its earlier title of ‘Dhaka’ scrapped for the more marketable Extraction.

Before meeting the jhupri labourers, I had heard of Kawran Bazaar's reputation through old colleagues and friends. On the few occasions I had visited over the years, I had seen that by day it was a chaotic bazaar. By night, I was warned, it was one of the most dangerous places in Dhaka. I was unclear where this reputation came from and had heard only vague descriptions of badmash (criminals), mastan (gangster, thugs) or that ‘there's lots of politics there’. I was thus surprised after getting to know the jhupri labourers to see little sign of violence other than the scuffles between labourers trying to reach trucks, and was told there were plain-clothes police stationed nearby, keeping a watchful eye over the market. I hence began to formulate questions about some of the terms my colleagues had used or that I had seen opaque references to in academic literature. Are there mastan here? What do mastan do? These questions largely fell flat. Some pointed my attention to the young thieves who stole mobile phones from passengers at the nearby Tejgaon railway station, some of whom I knew.

It was when I began to ask what the bazaar used to be like that replies became animated. Over subsequent years of research, labourers and political leaders here have conveyed consistent and evocative descriptions of the 1980s to 2000s: this ‘was a time of chaos’, an ‘underworld’ (aparadh jagat), an era ‘of terror’, a time when ‘the whole bazaar was held hostage by gangsters’ and ‘guns were like toys’. A Jubo League activist well established in the area put it like this:

I first met the jhupri labourers behind a row of parked buses. They were sprawled out on the backs of their rickshaw vans after a night of work: some were asleep, some smoking, some playing ludo. Rubel was seated on a van with others huddled around him. He wore a white panjabi (kurta) and a sparse beard, giving the impression he was both pious and not in fact a labourer. Unlike the rest of the group who were lean from carrying heavy sacks of vegetables, he was large, or ‘short and fat’ as others would later describe him. Foreigners were not an unfamiliar sight at the bazaar. Nearby offices and a five-star hotel meant visitors passed by on their way elsewhere. Some took photos of the colours and chaos. Foreign sisters from the Missionaries of Charity occasionally shopped here. An Italian priest had for decades visited weekly to help children with small ailments and injuries. Some of the group later claimed that ‘bad foreigners’ used the cheap hotels to meet sex workers, with Australians for some reason singled out as particularly guilty.

As the first foreigner to speak to the group there, Rubel saw it as an opportunity to preach. He gave a speech about Islam that I barely understood and the group found amusing. He then stated provocatively, ‘We are all BNP here. Do you have a problem with that?’ The claim of affiliation to the opposition BNP was an odd one. The election a few months previously in early 2014 had been highly controversial: the opposition had boycotted, the nation had seen widespread violence, and with the Awami League re-elected, public claims of loyalty to their rivals were risky. Whatever Rubel's motivations, the encounter was precisely the opportunity I had been looking for. For the past couple months I had been walking around the city, getting to know it better, looking for a route in to study local politics, somewhere to embed myself and normalise my presence on the pavements, in the bastis and bazaars of the city. Scattered across Dhaka at the time were shelters run by local NGOs to support people living on the streets.

As the remnants of Picchi Hannan's gang failed to retake control at Kawran Bazaar, the more egregious aspects of his reign calmed. Kidnappings no longer plagued the business community and threatening demands for payment became less frequent. The severity of crossfire and widespread arrests made it clear that the ruling party and state would no longer patronise and tolerate the likes of Hannan. Those who wished to emulate him would face the same fate. The decline in such santrashis brought about a power vacuum, which for local leaders and cadres of the then ruling BNP represented an opportunity. As long as Hannan had been dominant, the various official wings of the ruling party had been largely sidelined locally, weak by comparison. Yet the condition of the party at the bazaar was still too fragile and politics too uncertain to take advantage. The years of fights and killings had taken their toll on the likes of Siddiq, and the resources of local leaders were depleted from violence and competition.

This power vacuum was prolonged by national politics, with an extended caretaker government in the period 2006–2008. It was widely alleged that during their term in office the BNP were attempting to have a favourable caretaker official in place for the 2006 election, prompting widespread protest. It furthermore seemed obvious to some that the democracy this system held together was one of the most corrupt on earth. In response, the military backed a new caretaker government in early 2007. Rather than calling a general election within ninety days as mandated, it extended its rule to almost two years in a failed attempt to bring radical reform and rid the country of political corruption. At Kawran Bazaar this was portrayed as a period of comparative calm, where businesses ran largely unimpeded and flagrant criminality and violence were minimised by the significant presence of security agencies in everyday life, which continued to arrest, imprison and allegedly ‘crossfire’ santrashi figures. Yet neither Hannan's death nor two years of a caretaker government cleaned Kawran Bazaar of crime and violence.

Syndicates in Bangladesh are felt in many ways. They are felt in the higher prices when the supply of goods is manipulated. They are seen in the shoddy quality of public infrastructure when contractors skim contracts and skip on inputs. They are felt in the hefty sums demanded for jobs in the public sector. They are felt in the violence and conflicts between rival political leaders and their followers when they compete for dominance. But perhaps most pressingly, they also felt in the relationships that people sustain to get by in everyday life. The core argument developed here has been that behind many of the diverse dependencies that people rely upon to get work, seek security, find opportunities and other resources, lie syndicates. Syndicates are the coercive control that a particular group or network exercises over a resource to their advantage. Many syndicates are embodied by individuals sustaining that coercive hold on a resource and mediating access to it. Many intermediaries are thus racketeers.

For some, the syndicates that carve up the lanes of Kawran Bazaar could be seen as somehow peripheral to life in the city, distant from where the real capital or authority lies. These dirty streets feel much like the city's other creases and crevices such as the bastis, transport terminals, parks or footpaths where the lower classes live and work. Similarly, when syndicates come to public light, we could easily get the impression that these are a scattered phenomenon, examples of particularly egregious politicians or officials. In drawing together odd combinations of actors such as the leader of an Awami League affiliate body and opaque lineman, as well as a very wide range of sectors, they seem idiosyncratic. Others might also characterise the politics we find here as that at the ‘margins’ of the state. Yet the story told here is that syndicates should be seen as fundamental to Bangladeshi politics. Though the labourers may be poor, and the streets may be dirty, there is nothing marginal about the politics we find here. This is the lifeblood of the nation's politics in microcosm. This is the core, the unstable bedrock on which politicians build and parties rest. Syndicates are not merely the whims of greedy people in power but serve to sustain the authority of political leaders.

‘If you want to know what it is really like here you must come at night,’ I was often told when first getting to know the jhupri labourers. They spoke of the mess (jhamela) and the fighting (ganjam). The image they draw upon most to convey life here is the sight of labourers competing for work. By day the bazaar and adjacent avenue are clogged with imported Japanese cars, dilapidated buses, CNGs and rickshaws, all slowly inching forward in the shadows of the new metro rail, protesting each metre gained with a cacophony of horns. By late evening the traffic around Kawran Bazaar calms but is replaced with a different jostling for space. As labourers catch sight of arriving trucks, they speed their flat-backed rickshaw vans towards them. Rather than face forward, they often reverse, running while swivelling the handlebars so as to arrive ready to receive sacks. With neither brakes nor chains, the labourers are masters of weaving and dodging obstacles at high speed, forcing each other off course and lobbing insults at rivals. Those who arrive first wait the least, are likely to get more of the goods to deliver and hence higher payment at the end of the night. Fights and injuries are common. Liton described the scene as: ‘The van drivers barricade the truck[s] like an army.’ The image then suggests chaos, a ruthlessness and precarity for people relying on their health and needing to work here day to day to survive and support families. In reality, however, the majority of the trucks are not unloaded in this manner and the jhupri labourers rarely race for work. Instead, most labourers wait in a queue (serial) or follow instructions from a labour leader. Work, in other words, is highly ordered. Yet the claims of precarity that the jhupri labourers evoke with these images are still very real, only materialised in a different way. Risks stem not so much from the need to race and jostle for work, but rather from the dependencies which give order to work.