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In the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, the Dhar Khanda ridge looks down upon the forested slopes and terraced fields of the Chamba valley. Rising to an altitude of 3000 meters above sea level, the ridge is relatively level with two large alpine meadows-Bari Dhar to the East and Lamba Got to the West-divided by a wooded stretch of rough ground. 1 Though snowbound for much of the year, from late March through to November, the meadows and forests of Dhar Khanda reveal themselves as a grazing space for buffaloes, cows, sheep and goats. These forests and alpine meadows are not only physical domains, but also contested social spaces to which different groups of people compete for access.'Who Has the Stick Has the Buffalo': Processes of Inclusion and Exclusion on ...

This article examines the circumstances, in which the tasks performed by professional labour contractors may be passed on to worker-agents. It does so by critically engaging with the experience of migrant workers from the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand as they travel to work in the Peermade tea belt in the south Indian state of Kerala. Specifically, we identify shifts in economic and political contexts that have permitted these functions to pass from labour contractors to workers-agents and from a sardari (topdown) to a ristedari (kinship based) system. Outlining the functions of the labour contractor-as bridge, broker and buffer-the article details the complex processes and the series of negotiations that occur during the transition from labour contractor to worker-agent-led recruitment and the implications of this shift for labour relations in the production setting. We conclude by calling for further consideration of the 'workeragent' as a key emerging figure in understanding the contemporary transformations in the reproduction of footloose migrant labour, which may have larger ramifications for other contexts in South Asia and beyond.