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This article analyses the lived experiences of migrant workers in India under different regimes of coal mining and engages with their contemporary precarious labouring conditions and resilience. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in the Talcher coalfields of Odisha, I argue that the labouring lives of migrant workers from marginalised communities have been invisiblised in a ‘shadow economy’ of coal extraction through subcontracting and labour recruitment by local contractors working with state-owned coal companies. The process of invisiblisation has taken place at three levels: first, at the workplace which includes recruitment patterns, contracting systems and precarious labouring conditions inflicted by the employer; second, through the exclusion of migrant workers in the land and labour politics of local dispossessed communities for coal mining jobs; and finally, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent lockdowns, observed as ‘invisible’ essential workers under the Essential Services Maintenance Act of 1981.

Book ReviewJonathan Parry (in collaboration with Ajay T.G.) (2020) 1 Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town. Oxon and New York: Routledge. ISBN 9781138095595 (hardback) 9780367510329 (paperback) 9780203712467 (e-book). 732 pages. £112 (hardback); £29.59 (paperback); £29.59 (e-book). Reviewed by Suravee Nayak, Centre for Development Studies, IndiaClasses of Labour by Jonathan Parry is based on thirty-four months of ethnography in one of Nehru's projects of modernity -the Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP) and its township in central India. This meticulously written monograph of 732 pages covers sixty years of work and social life of industrial labour in Bhilai, between 1955 and 2014, and focuses on the workforces of a public-sector steel plant, a variety of private-sector factories and informal-sector labour.The book under review explores class differentiation in the manual labour force by analysing both shop floors and neighbourhoods in Bhilai. Parry argues that the working class in Bhilai is divided into two distinct classes of labour -naukri (regular BSP workers as labour elites) and kam (contract, temporary and informal-sector workers as the labour class). The labour elites sometimes share a relationship of exploitation against the labour class. The author further argues that the shop floor of the Bhilai Steel Plant, its township and middle-class housing colonies are the "melting pots" of old hierarchies or primordial relations of caste in India. Parry shows us that "class now trumps caste as the dominant axis of inequality" which shapes the contemporary social classes of labour (p. 4). He identifies the weakening not only of the hierarchy of castes, division of labour and interdependence, but also separation between upper and lower castes of the Hindu religion that characterised the "traditional" caste relations in India.The class divide between labour elites and the labour class is analysed and observed not only on the basis of wages, lifestyles and life chances, "but also in kinship and marriage practices, the premium placed on ties with one's village of origin, the significance of caste in daily life and the texture of relations between neighbours, and even in the propensity to suicide" (p. 4). The book is organised into thirteen chapters, including the introduction and conclusion, across four parts -Context, Work, Life and Concluding.The first part of the book (Chapters 1 to 4) sets out the key arguments and provides us with the conceptual basis on which the arguments are framed. It also gives the reader a sense of the wider political economy and the historical processes behind the making of Bhilai township. The author asserts that Bhilai is not among the examples representing a "tragedy of development" but rather a symbol of national integration and modernity. As an industrial monoculture, BSP has a heterogeneous and culturally diverse workforce dominated by migrant workers from different parts

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