Hustle in the Sidewalk: Triangular Contestations Between Hawkers,Walkers,and Coppers in the Kathmandu Valley

Introduction

In a video that went viral in the social media in February 2022 shows the city police kicking a vendor in a Kathmandu street. ¹ In the mobile video shot by a bystander from the back of a yellow van, the young vendor is heard requesting the police not to take away his pushcart, his body imposed by the seven policemen, and his tangerines spilled all over on the street. The video garnered sympathies to the vendor and helped raise voice against the “inhumane” treatment by the city police in the social media. This was not an isolated incident, but part and parcel of an everyday street vendor’s life. After facing the brunt of pandemic restrictions, one Saraswoti Mainali was misbehaved, and her pushcart was thrown by the police just for selling vegetables and greens. ² Naya Patrika Daily zoomed in on her life story as a pushcart puller that gave a slice of an insight into lives which street vendors like her are living in Kathmandu. These, among others, are only a few of the visualized and widely circulated incidents in which vendors are seen in “altercation” with the police, but the incidents are mundane and every day in Kathmandu that deems “illegal” to open a microenterprise in the pavement, or the push carts that create “nuisance” in the roads from the standpoint of urban aestheticians giving away to a symbolic class war.

Street commerce has been a structured part of urban life for a very long time (Swanson, 2019). Preceding the advent of city planning that aimed at modernizing and regulating the public spaces, and the corresponding rise of permanent shops and malls, urban consumers used to buy most of the perishable and petty goods from the street vendors and public markets (Swanson, 2019). Street vendors can be differentiated from the other merchants and entrepreneurs by not having a fixed place to carry out their business (Bhowmik, 2010a). In Kathmandu, like in the cities of other developing countries, street vendors sell their merchandise on carts, on bicycles, on pavements, or carry their wares on heads. Carrying of perishable goods on the two baskets joined by a bamboo over the shoulders is an old custom of Newar Jyapu sellers in the Kathmandu Valley which is usually conducted in the early mornings. As seen by observation, vendors can be divided into mobile, who roam around to sell, and stationary, who occupy the pavements or the corner spaces without having “legal” claims to do so, and the cities in which street vendors operate can be punitive or inclusive to them (Swanson, 2019). Though accommodating the large population of street vendors in Kathmandu, the city administration seems to be punitive and exerts symbolic to physical violence on a day-to-day basis. ³ In a process of rulemaking and rule breaking (Piven and Cloward, 2003), rulemaking aligns with the middle-class pedestrians that aspires for the “gentrification,” and smooth walking and driving, and rule breaking as a strategy for livelihood choice. ⁴

According to the Nepal Street Vendors Trade Union (NSVTU), there are over 10,000 street vendors in Kathmandu (Ojha, 2020). A conservative estimate of street vendors in Nepal is 30,000 to 40,000 (Bhowmik, 2010b). The number of street vendors in Kathmandu is ever increasing due to historical inequality and marginalization, lower employment rate, and lack of infrastructures and manufacturing industries in the country. The income shocks due to including the 10-year Maoist insurgency, the earthquake of 2015, and possibly the coronavirus pandemic have increased the numbers or will increase in the near future. ⁵ This increment in numbers can be assumed as paradoxical to the increasing rhetorical shift, if not actual, toward “smart cities” since 2017 local elections. ⁶ Endeavoring toward the smart cities, which resembles the Actor Network Theory’s (ANT) focus on creation of socio-technical networks, underscores the certain actors and technologies as key to the urban management (Callon, 1986 quoted in Söderström et al., 2020) while further relegating and obliterating other actors, including vendors, to the margins which are seen as problems rather than solutions. The increasing rhetoric and practice of “smart cities” adds and highlights the digitalization of shopping through mobile phone apps that negate the experience of perfunctory street shopping, if not physical shopping altogether. Infatuation and habitation to digital shopping entail further disregard or disdain for the street more than the earlier hassles created when entering the malls or stores as the online consumers remain more unattached than their offline counterparts.

The cultural turn to the city-as-a-mosaic can still be pernicious to the venders in terms of the responses to their rural and underclass colorations in that mosaic. As voluntary migration is overwhelmingly practiced from the rural hinterlands to the urban spaces due to opportunity differentials (Adepoju, 2000), the concept of the realities of urban poverty started to find currency in the 1990s (Bhowmik, 2006) with an increasingly parallel intention of city officials and planners to incriminate the very means of survival to assuage those recently conceptualized harsh economic realities. In addition to the increasing number of vendors, the spontaneously sprawling slums as “outplaces” (Toffin, 2010) at the margins or peripheries of the city are the stark characteristic of urban poverty that provides insight on different, particularistic livelihood strategies (Tacoli, 2002), and the corresponding state policies.

With increasing urban migration and urban poverty, vending has emerged as a critical means of livelihood in the Kathmandu Valley. From the standpoint of officials, this demography has been seen as a “nuisance” as they “poach” riverbanks and open spaces, and brings irritation to the bureaucratic and commercial administrators (Cross, 1998). On the contrary, approximately 80% of new employment opportunities are provided by the informal sector, and 60% of those in urban locations. As there are less opportunities in small towns and villages beyond sustainable farming and animal husbandry, people tend to migrate to the urban cities which have an ever-increasing population and a monetized, consumerist society (Carr, 1997) that adds to the aspiration of the vendors. The rural population entering the cities generally don’t have apt skills, education, and capital to conduct gentrified work, and quickly get absorbed in the informal sector, including low-paid jobs in restaurants, construction, transportation, and brick kilns, and the independent business of vending that has high risk of domination, exploitation, and harassment (Hossain, 2005). From a perspective of a generally low-paid population living in rents, the cheap and mainly Chinese made goods are boon, and it creates vending as a class activity of both the vendors and their consumers.

Into the field

Both of us hail from the rural hinterlands in west Nepal and came to Kathmandu for higher education. In Kathmandu, street vendors and open markets like Khulla Bazar (open market) at Bhrikutimandap became the primary sites where we bought clothes and petty goods. We frequently drank tea at the street stalls. As students who come from rural backgrounds, we bought cheap goods from the streets and had some class affinity with the vendors. Gradually, we were fascinated by the oral and kinetic mode of entrepreneurship that intersected with the tough reactions from the city mandarins. In 2018, for the partial fulfillment of the graduate course at the Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, I (Roshan) decided to submit a dissertation on street vendors, for which we both did our first field visits.

During the time of this research first conducted in 2018, we had personally talked to 20 vendors, of which 13 were women. The vendors were between 24 and 69 years of age. The reason behind the over-representation of females was not intended, but as one female vendor explained,

Men don’t primarily like to do this work, so women are left to take care of it.

This is reminiscent of the strategy of livelihood diversification among the lower-class and lower-middle-class families. As many men work as assistants at the gentrified spheres like offices, women work for extra income, for example, to pay for the children’s tuition or for the additional costs that come occasionally. “We are the better sellers, and are more likely to be suited for a job,” a woman had said to us just below the walkway in Jamal. The respondents were explicit on their education that ranged from the lack of formal education to attending or passing high school.

In a way to find what process and capital leads a person to sell merchandise in the street, we asked our respondents how “street vending” struck in their minds to generate income to survive. It is the “social capital” and “social network” or kasailai chinnu (knowing somebody who knows the tricks of the trade) that inspires anyone to run the street commerce, and that consolidates and enhances the contact. Jay Kishan, from Dolakha, started selling newspapers, tabloids, and popular novels in Jamal when his friend who was doing the same left that place for him for a job in the Gulf. He started selling the books under the sun and started to communicate to neighboring hawkers. “In this Jamal stretch, we [the vendors] know each other,” he said. The young men occasionally came to buy a book of horoscopes and stuff. We asked him about the business, the whole operation, cost, and profits. Our chat with him, too, started with the purchase of a book of chutkila (jokes). Either a person has known somebody in business or has to talk to somebody who has already done it to start the business in the first place. Being initiated into vending by another vendor is advantageous but not necessary. The pedagogy of hawking is taught in a way that answers where to buy the merchandise, where and whom to sell, and how to keep the profit in the context of bargaining. A fruit or vegetable hawker generally buys the merchandise at Kalimati and Kuleshwor, where there are large wholesale markets, and carries the merchandise to the place of his expertise, choice, or hood.

Another important aspect of street vending is the repertoire of equipment, both physical and symbolic, from a simple basket with ground nuts and gooseberries, and a voice with a desired pitch to a complicated setting of stove, cooking utensils, and serving plates. For example, in Ratnapark, men and women serve masu chiura (meat and beaten rice) in which they have a setting consisting of stools, stove, cooking and serving materials, utensils, water jars, and mugs. Like food stalls in Ratnapark, many have fixed spots to sell their goods while others are itinerants roaming here and there. The fixed spots cater largely to the fixed and regular customers. The street vendors have to have physical swiftness and rhetorical prowess to a certain degree. In Kathmandu streets, one can perennially listen to the calls of the vendors highlighting the cheap price of their goods. They have the communication capacities to deal with their customers in the intent of luring them into buying and bargaining the price. Yet, their rhetorical capabilities need not match those who run the permanent cloth store inside the malls. Inside the permanent stores, owners can buy more time to deal with the customers as opposed to the streets. In the streets, it is the temporal and spatial contraction that puts an impediment to protracted bargaining.

In a day, street vendors work for up to 10 hours. The food stalls open in the afternoons; vegetable hawkers come in the mornings, and tea sellers throughout the days. The vendors from outside Kathmandu work for 8–9 months, and in the remaining months, they work at their farms back in the village.

Street vending is a desired occupation only for three of 20 who think they chose it because of the benefits it offered which means that a majority of the vendors opt for their vocation and trade not because of choice but are rather coerced into it. They would discount the “police brutality” and highlight the freedom it offers as they can set their own schedules, take leave at any time, and don’t have to pay rent or taxes. The profit can be counted on a daily basis. All the street vendors are not from rural and improvised backgrounds. One woman from Patan, originally from the far west of the country, who owns and rents some flats of her five-story building used to sell Chinese clothes in Thapathali. Her husband, a lawyer, lived with her and commuted in a private car. Group of vendors like her and traditional petty Newar merchants sell goods in more secure pavements. While others come from the villages, with no collateral to secure debts and can’t go abroad, especially Gulf and East Asia, and their family members set their enterprises in risky pavements, or move here and there. They have minimal education and can’t properly navigate the meager job opportunities in the city. The income shocks, including the earthquake of 2015, and local hazards push them into the margin, and if it occurs to them about this opportunity, they sit or walk on the pavement to sell the desired merchandise:

There is no work in Sindhupalchok. Oh! I came to Kathmandu before the earthquake. I followed vending as the only viable alternative. As an only son, I wanted to help my family. After the SLC board, I came here to find a job. As I loitered in the city, it occurred to me that I could do my own business. Peanuts were my choice. I bring peanuts from a wholesale store in Kalimati. I have this small hearth in this pushcart, and in this ghaito (a medium sized earthen pot), I fry peanuts, and sell them. It is enough for me, and I can save a little money.

It is also learnt that the most of the street vendors come from nearby districts who specialize in selling goods like clothes, and many from Madhes, or the southern plains, specialize in selling vegetables and fruits, and procuring papers, scrap metals, batteries, and metal dust among others.

On the other side, there are differently abled people struggling to sell their products. Many of them sit by the sidewalk with a weighing machine, and ask Rs. 10 (US$0.08) per weight measurement. Generally, these people are not pushed, given the conditions, by the city police. But, others whose bodily impairment is not explicitly seen are pushed along with other able vendors:

I have a problem with my leg. I can’t walk fast, one leg is shorter and also, I have to wear special shoes—to hide my toeless leg. I am stationed in Jamal with other sisters who sell greens and fruits. I have a husband who works in a book shop in Thamel. If I don’t work, if only my husband works, it is enough to eat, live and send my daughter to a cheap school. But, that is not enough-there are so many expenses which have to be covered like the interests of my daughter, sometimes she may want to paint or sometimes she may want to watch a movie. Or, anyone can get sick. I can even give credit to someone who is in urgent need of cash, my family and in-laws. I feel worthy, having cash. So, this stall is helping us a lot. Working here and talking with fellow sisters don’t also make me bored.

We have chosen spaces like Jamal, Sundhara, Ratnapark, Gongabu, Baneshwor, and Lagankhel areas which are repeatedly mentioned in this article. These places have more concentration of vendors and consumers, and the corresponding responses of the city office as these many places in these locations are seeing ban on vending since 2008. In this research, we have incorporated our everyday experiences of walking in those areas, observation, and conversational interviewing in which the talk is widely meandered.

Tools of resistance

A city sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction. (Jacobs, 1961)

Although relentless resistance occurs in the streets in a rather triangular fashion with pedestrians and city officials or police, the vendors have to first and foremost resist the pernicious air. As the city is continuously being rebuilt after the earthquake, the emission of vehicles, wildfires, cross-border industrial pollution, emission from brick kilns, and so on adulterate the air in the Kathmandu Valley. According to reports, people in the Kathmandu Valley breathe “some of the dirtiest air in the world” with the air quality index in February 2022 climbed as high as 430. ⁷ As the vendors have to talk to the possible buyers all the time, they are reluctant to wear respirators or surgical masks. Even after the deadly pandemic, the street vendors find it difficult to wear masks all the time and wear it on the chin if they find the censuring buyers. One can conjecture for the long-term risks of respiratory diseases among the street vendors, but there has not been any research ascertaining that hypothesis. ⁸ On the contrary, vendors themselves don’t seem to prioritize health consequences at the face of instant need for survival and existence.

Besides the conspicuous and unsolved problem of air pollution, there is an equally important problem of solid waste in the Kathmandu Valley. The haphazard throwing of plastic and other dry solid wastes in the pavement is not much of a nuisance as people are habituated, yet there are recurring problems of garbage collection and management that go for months. ⁹ In these periods, solid wastes are thrown around the sidewalks, the stench of which mars the air and threatens the health of pedestrians and the denizens alike. The locations called “garbage collection centers” where garbage is collected and thereafter transported to dumping or landfill sites outside the Valley suffer the most. As there is no segregation of degradable and non-biodegradable wastes, the foul smell of garbage makes the street vendors suffer the most as they have to be anchored to the sidewalks more permanently than others. This seems to be a temporary problem, but the vendors who sit on the bridges like in Gongabu have to smell perennially the nauseous smells of Bishnumati and other rivers. If the problem of garbage collection arises in a monsoon season, the degradable waste like food mixes with rainwater and overflows in the narrow roads themselves or in puddles, and the vehicles splash that water to the sidewalks.

Even if there are thousands of street vendors in the Kathmandu Valley, the scale and form of resistance generally don’t take as a collective action. The resistance is small-scale and individualized. When I asked Sita, a vegetable vendor, if she liked to resist the daytime ban on her space in Jamal with a leader, and in a collective way, she preferred the status quo. Her and her colleagues’ resistance takes place in a rather covert way, primarily taking place outside the observational scheme of the city officials. Furthermore, the actions taken by the vendors could be understood as “everyday resistance” (Scott, 1985), meaning that it is carried out through the use of everyday actions, yet the romantic elucidation of ubiquitous, Scottian resistance to the dominant institutions and actors needed to be gradually debunked and rejected (Scheper-Hughes, 1992; Wacquant, 1999). The mature vendors in Jamal are connected to city officials through one or many interlocutors. During daytime patrols, one or many of city police secretly call one of the vendors about the forthcoming inspection. It is unsure of how the vendors made the contacts with the city officials, both vendors and police may be from the same village, are friends or relatives or the latter sympathizes with the former being hailed from the same social, rural background. On one of the days of our observation, such a contact was broken down; police came with a truck and swiftly took the merchandise which consists of fruits, vegetables, and toys. According to the vendors, these goods are returned by making a certain payment of up to Rs 15,000 (US$120) depending upon the valuation of the confiscated goods. ¹⁰

Meanwhile in Lagankhel Bus Park, where many from Lalitpur countryside come to the market, we saw the vendors escaping the officials in a hide-and-seek pattern. As the officials are spotted, vendors would communicate with big eyes and signaled with heads to other vendors regarding the presence of city police. As the police came, vendors escaped outside the bus park area and hid behind two big trees at the center. As the police called them, the vendors would pretend that they have not heard or seen them, and they are going their own way, minding their own business, or they are the shoppers themselves who bought the commodities in bulk. Cross (2000) has observed similar patterns of reiterate vendors of Hanoi being constantly in run, the street itself becoming a tool of resistance. In the Sundhara stretch, where buses and microbuses stand for a short time to pick up and drop passengers, the presence of police is conspicuous. In such a crowd in a relatively small place, one can’t even notice when the city police have arrived. The motley of vendors has to be constantly aware of the police as they can come at any time. If the police had just raided, they might come to the same place again.

When one of us (Nirmal) was changing the cheap screen cover of the mobile phone, the seller who was doing so was looking to the other side of the road. He couldn’t notice the arriving police. He had just changed the cover, I had paid, and he had to return the changes. As the police came, he hurriedly wore the bag and walked into the premises of Nepal Airlines building. He would look like any other college student. These minimalist mobile screen changers have their own strategy; their merchandise is light with some cleaners, earphones, screens, and so on. I followed him inside the premises and chatted for a while. He said he had learnt the knack of changing screens while working as an assistant in a mobile repair shop in New Road. The salary was meager, and he knew about the profits earned by the shopkeeper who bought those cheap Chinese stuff from the Maha Boudha wholesale market. As told by this vendor of mobile phone accessories, salary or income is one the clear motivation that sets a person into street business from the lowly and often exploitative paid works in legal businesses. The process of selling screens and earphones is itself a counter strategy to the criminalization of street vending in Kathmandu. He would at once become a seller, and at the other moment he changes himself as a college student or any other loiterer, or just a passenger waiting for the bus.

Resistance of street vendors is diverse. At times, it is understood as a process with different stages, consisting of a series of decisions, and structured by several tools. Many of the vendors are cognizant of the future tactics of resistance when they start the street enterprise, and this is the reason for the anticipated risks and challenges that keep the street vendors going. It is a rare case when a seasoned street vendor is humiliated, pushed, or looted by the city officials, or when censured by the pedestrians, he or she retaliates in a way not to gather even a large crowd. Several vendors we talked to in Gongabu, where many people come from outside the Valley, said that they had first observed the selling procedures of the vendors. One of the vendors noted that he had come to Kathmandu for a different purpose, looking for an opportunity as a migrant laborer in Qatar, and as the documentation was postponed, he bought some dresses for his daughter before he returned to his village:

At first, he would say the price of a skirt as Rs. 1000, and I bargained for a while, and he gave that at Rs. 200. I saw the margin for bargaining. I was lured by the fact that if I had bought that dress at Rs. 1000 or 800 without bargaining, how much he would have earned as profit. As I went to my village, I started thinking about my own shop, selling clothes for babies. After I came to Kathmandu, I was less interested in going abroad and more interested in street vending. I would go to the person who was selling earphones, buy one, and would talk about the profit margin. As I stayed more on the street, dust would settle in my head and body. Clothes were my choice.

In the Gongabu, a bustling stretch where many from outside the Kathmandu come first as there is a big buspark and a sprawling cheap market, there is less of the state policing but more of the heat and the pernicious air. It is like constantly inhaling cigarettes. ¹¹ In the stretch, one can see the sitting line of vendors whose faces and bodies are covered with dust. As we talked to the aforementioned vendor, he said that initially he used to bathe everyday at night after going to his room, which he has a two-one kitchen and another to sleep in. As he bathed, the blackish mud as dust mixed with soap water would collect around his feet on the bathroom floor. He would feel fresh afterwards. After months, he frequently started to sneeze, and his throat filled with phlegm. Then, he quitted daily baths as he thought it had weakened his respiratory system. Afterwards, he started wearing a mask. “The mask would blacken in a few hours.” His psychological conjecture was that if he wore the mask, the customers would go to the ones who is not wearing as doing so would make him feel disinterested; it would hinder the communication as many vendors and shopkeepers alike wear mask when there are no customers, and whenever the customers come, they pull their masks to the chin as this would make the hearing and communication perfect. In the case of immaterial challenges like air and puddles, when drivers occasionally splash mud water on the vendors, it is to be susceptible to harm or taking imperfect measures than the outright resistance.

In areas where there is heavy police presence, and in the same way, the crowd, bottom-up surveillance (Mann et al., 2003) is carried out by the street vendors. In areas like the now-defunct buspark near Ratnapark, and Sundhara where public vehicles stop for brief periods, there is quite a concentration of transportation workers, passersby, customers, vendors, ride-sharing drivers of apps like Pathao and inDriver, and the occasional and heavy handed police. In the dry season, there is dusty air. While in the wet season, the dilapidated pavement and the corners with potholes make walking slippery. One has to carefully take steps on stones or bricks to cross the stretch. In this contextual setting, one can see about a 100 men and women selling cigarettes, water bottles, herbs, spices, and perishable fruits to cheap clothes and utensils. Even in a disorientated space like this, vendors maintain their own place.

In our observation, we saw vendors sitting or standing in the exact same spot everyday like an old man of 70 sits in the middle of the huge entrance of the Kathmandu Mall, one of the first shopping centers opened after 2006. He sells toothpicks, ear picks, nail cutters, scissors, cigarettes, napkins, and stuff. If one walks the pavement regularly, one can spot him sitting at the same exact spot, and remaining reticent until a customer arrives to buy his goods, a demeanor quite opposite to young vendors who cry to the probable customers about the discounted price of their goods. Notwithstanding that it is a compulsion to work as a street vendor in such an old age, yet it serves as a comparative advantage that police can’t go heavy on such senior citizens, while other vendors in the same sprawl have to be on a constant watch of the authorities and relay the message to other vendors when they see them first in the crowd. Bottom-up surveillance creates the “inverse panopticon” (Mann et al., 2003) that is usually to confront and tackle police violence as opposed to Foucauldian sense of its meaning (Foucault, 1995) which refers to the top-heavy approach of the authorities. In the long term, vendors collect the data regarding the arrival and the practice of the city police which they appropriate for their own benefits. According to the respondents, the vendors know the approximate arrival time, that is, mostly after lunch time. They analyze how to move out of the locations swiftly; for the preparation of it, the vendors tend to keep the quantity of the merchandise small so that they can escape easily like any other pedestrians. It is easy, for example, for a vendor who sells mobile phone accessories like screen or earphones. But, for a person selling clothes, he or she has to have a stall or a collection from which a customer chooses his or her favorite color, shape, and size. The cloth seller has to be too swift. If he or she sees police from a distance, he or she has to close the deal abruptly, and run away.

When I (Roshan) was loitering in a congested alley from Basantapur Durbar Square to Asan, one of the oldest markets in the Valley, I wanted to buy a dress for my niece. Vendors were selling fancy dresses for the women and children. As I was searching for a dress from her impressive collection, she had got a sudden notice that police were coming for a raid. “Police are coming, make it fast!” she said to her customers. I couldn’t see her physically talking to anyone or on the phone. The message ran too fast, and every vendor emptied their spaces in minutes. It is difficult in these situations if one has already sold the merchandise but has not received the payment or the vendor has to return the change. In the latter situation, the customer has to walk behind or follow the vendor as one of us had followed the screen seller to the premises of an official building. In the former situations, sometimes the vendor snatches the goods from the hand of the customer, and runs away, and at other times, the customer remains standstill in the sidewalk unaware, and the goods clutched in his or her hand. Depending on the gender of the vendor, the customer cries didi (sister) or dai (brother) to ask what to do with the goods. The vendor gives a cue like a short message—pakhnus (wait, I will come) or with a sign to wait by pushing one palm pushed onwards like a traffic police signaling the vehicles.

There are two options for the vendors—one is to avoid the police altogether, and to risk the losses, in case, one is caught. Ram Charan described his constant watching:

I am not afraid of the police catching me-but, I watch out for them, and move if I see them. I know what their vans look like, and I can move fast so I usually don’t get caught. It’s the vendors that are slow to notice and run and get caught.

There are many ways that slow the speed of the vendors when the police come. A neophyte is always nonplussed; he or she gets confused about what to do when the policemen come near to her. One has to be enmeshed with the street trade to take the swift move. It is more difficult whenever she is in the middle of bargaining or transaction. The sartorial choices, too, slow down the process. The seasoned vendor wears swift attires like sport shoes to become freely mobile. Ladies wear swift dresses like T-shirts and pants or salwar-kurta as opposed to sari which slows the running and walking process, and shoes instead of sandals or slippers. Shoes are very important to take a grip on the muddy road in the monsoon season. Many sidewalks in Kathmandu are in the need of serious renovation. The concrete of the narrow pavements is weathered away, and there are several potholes where rainwater is collected. One has to carefully take her steps over the bricks or stones in a space that is overcrowded, and there is always a fear of falling into the potholes. The vendors, who have to carry their merchandise, have to struggle to additionally balance their bodies.

The surveillance is carried out collectively, yet there are instances that many vendors seem to be more independent. Another way to circumvent the police patrol is the strategy of shifting the schedule and space. Babu Lal says some vendors sell before 9:00 a.m. or after 6:00 p.m. Before 9:00 a.m., there are not many customers strolling on the sidewalks. After 6:00 p.m., there are large crowds in some places like the public transport stations, but many might not want to transact in the dark as many of public spaces in Kathmandu are dimly lit. However, in locations like Kalanki, where buses from outside Kathmandu enter all night and spots like the ones in front of the hospitals, there are vendors busy selling cigarettes and tea, snacks, and so on. In these cases, family members take charge of the shop on a rotation basis. As the vendors can take account of the schedule of police, they can do the business accordingly. Policemen and policewomen wearing gray khaki dress are seen generally after lunchtime in Jamal and Sundhara stretch.

In other tactics, similar to a vendor acting as a chameleon to become a college student or a bystander, some female vendors in Bagbazar area look as if they are the normal walkers as they keep the minimalist approach. They carry a few goods for which they can be seen as people who have just bought some goods. In doing so, they don’t come under the radar of police vigilance. In hard, emergency cases, these goods can be easily concealed. If some vendors put the remaining merchandise in a place like a shop and carry a lighter load, others, during the raids, have to throw their goods to a designated place. In Jamal, we saw women throwing the goods from a wall, and in case the goods are perishable, and can’t be thrown as they are kept in open-mouthed chhituwas (a kind of bamboo basket), they carry them behind the wall.

Bribe is another tool to resist the raids, yet it is less explicated in the interviews and the observations. In our night-time observation, we had seen police, not the city police who has a separate jurisdiction, receive packs of cigarettes and other merchandise from the shops. In some locations where vending is illegal yet there are few customers and few vendors, the vending doesn’t become such a nuisance. In these locations, bribes are exchanged in the form of gifts. When some police need something for him or for his family, he tends to buy it at a heavy discount or the vendor gives him for free for future help.

If the police and vendors play cat-and-mouse games, some bystanders or pedestrians feel that their paths are encroached. In a symbolic way of class struggle on the sidewalk, it depends on how close a pedestrian is to the vendors in terms of class position. In some stretches like that of Sundhara, the sidewalk is dilapidated. It is narrow. There are potholes everywhere, and it is thronged as it serves as a temporary buspark. On the side stands an imposing Kathmandu Mall and the New Road gate. People get pushed from all sides, and vendors have to protect their merchandise. On the side are the ride-sharing two wheelers, food stalls, tempos, micros, and buses. People curse to anonymous people whenever they are pushed as they have to stop and move constantly. The vendors sit on the side or corner, and their more than two customers encircle the vendors making the pedestrians hard to pass through. In the Baneshwor stretch, in the evening, it is hard to pass through, and one can feel anxious to catch the public transport as most of the transport is closed after 8:00 p.m. In Kathmandu, there are narrow walking lanes, even if there are no vendors; it is difficult to walk through. Vendors slow the speed. In many sidewalks, people haphazardly put the construction materials. The middle-class pedestrians who have to walk rather than drive look down upon the vendors. It is the want of an aesthetically smart city which the vendors try to encroach. From the perspective of pedestrians, the city is cluttered by the rural invaders. As Bieri (2018) elaborates how walking as a “human invariant” has generated an aestheticized form, and this aestheticized form poses a threat, or street vending poses a threat to that form of walking in a city that aspires to become smart. In a vein to stress this form of walking, or cycling as a new fetish, on the wide and gentrified pavements across the high rises and hoarding boards in the Scandinavian countries is recurrently posted in social media by the proponents of the “walkable cities.” This yearning for suave walking and cycling has created a psychological distance from the living impediments in the streets.

Vendors are mentally segregated from the perspective of color and ethnicity; those from the southern part of the country are insulted the most. The pedestrians generally don’t vocally curse the other ethnicities but the Madhesis. It is not just from the general public in Kathmandu but even scholars who stereotype Madhesis who have racial and cultural affinity with the north Indians. ¹² Calling them Bihari refers to the denizens of Bihar, India, is one of the ways of othering the vendors from the Southern belt of Nepal, even if a considerable fraction of vendors from northern India work in Nepal as vendors and the purchaser of recyclable wastes like papers, glass, and plastic. In our observation, customers tend to throw explicit racist remarks like bhaia (condescendingly calling someone as younger brother), Madhesi, Bihari, and so on, or implicitly showing better bargaining power than with the other ethnicities. One of the questions we posed to many of the vendors who originally come from the southern districts was why they chose the particular profession. Their answers among other similar reasons to that from other ethnicities are that they generally don’t do work like carrying loads, and they are more into hairdressing, clothing, and cosmetics. Many men from other hilly ethnic communities are seen carrying loads in and around the Maha Boudha area, where wholesale dealers of assorted items are located.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the government imposed the complete ban on street vending while the big malls were allowed to open and the home delivery apps too. Even when the local groceries and green groceries started opening as the pandemic slowed down, the street vendors weren’t allowed to open. As we strolled in the Kirtipur area, we saw locals cursing the vendors, and scolding them to close, and go home. They were seen as the possible carriers of the virus. Like many of the street vendors, many of the female street vendors don’t have savings to sustain their livelihood for some months. As the vendors generally come from outside the Kathmandu Valley, they are considered to be outsiders and have starkly different coloration, ethnicity, and linguistic tools that the usual or permanent city dwellers who are thought to be spreading the disease or any other shortcomings in the city as the disease is considered to come from outside. The endeavor to make the city disease-free by showing the vendors out is parallel to the general blame put toward the vendors as a group that spoil the beauty and cause the accidents in the city. As a high-level police official said, “The street vendors are free loaders (sic). They buy the goods on credit, make profit, escape (sic) tax, cause accidents in the streets, and spoil the beauty of our city,” accuses Bishnu Prasad Joshi, Division Chief of Kathmandu Metro Police. “They want to escape the physical labor of farming in villages and are lured by the luxury of the city” (Ghimire, 2018), as there is a sudden rise in the narration of smart cities by the elected officials who constantly stress on digitized bill paying systems, and incorporation of the cities with informational technology. In the vein, many places are recently attached with CCTV cameras to surveillance the street vendors among other tasks. On the contrary, the sort of health awareness that encourages tapping the potential benefits of walking has urged the pedestrians to criticize the vendors of congesting the very space where one could realize such potentials. The narrow and dilapidated pavements of Kathmandu are in no way meant to be walking from the discourse of walking as a health benefit for its pernicious air. The drive to aestheticization of the cities has created the individuals with pseudo-individualities (Bieri, 2018) that opine the vendors have obstructed gentrification without any incorporation of structural inequalities that have forced the people to hawk in a hostile environment. As aptly put, vending can be understood as a dialectics of exclusion and resistance in the public place (Piazzoni and Jamme, 2021); exclusion is understood as both contemporary and historical, and resistance as in the sense of “weapons of the weak” (Scott, 1985) even though weapons of the weak are always the weak weapons. The everyday life anchored in the hostile street itself serves as a dual site of marginalization and resistance. If we assume the sex workers as street vendors by the logic of them selling their bodies in Ratnapark, Gongabu, and Thamel areas, we can get insights on how permanently they feel anxious in the city. After around 2:00 p.m., sex workers of assorted genders start to queue around the rundown railings that enclose Ratnapark, a city park named after the former queen, with socially imposed agoraphobia (Bourdieu, 2001). The workers are seen to be looking for the customers as much as they seem to hide from the scene. It is from this insight that street vendors from Kathmandu streets are treated as outsiders which in-turn becomes socially imposed anxiety for the vendors.

As the “relations of power and discipline are inscribed into apparently innocent spatial social life” (Soja, 1989: 6), the enterprises and upper class have always tried to deny the mobile vendors to use the sidewalks for economic purposes (Bromley, 2000). The street vendors driven by the serious want of livelihood opportunities have challenged or resisted the city regulations. As sidewalks are assumed for an order of walking in urban areas, vendors, on the other hand, contest it as a counterpublic who treat it as a venue of different economic and social activities (Coombe, 1995; Fraser, 1992 quoted in Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht, 2009).

Conclusion

The sidewalk vending provides the thriving economic opportunities to the subproletariats, who come from the rural quarters of the country, and in turn caters to the low-income population of the Kathmandu Valley. This activity and class symbiosis is taken as an urban nuisance, and is accused of slowing down the passerby flow, littering, and a conspicuous impediment to aestheticization of the cities. The city mandarins and police frequently crack down on the vendors, confiscate their goods, and aim to displace them. The middle urban class holds disdain for the hawking as it throngs the sidewalk and hinders the gentrification and the path to aestheticized form of walking. In this context, vendors have to relentlessly resist the city apparatuses on one hand, and the walkers on the other through a motley of layered and micro-strategies keeping the sidewalk as both a structure and strategy for economic survival.