Over a dinner in Mumbai in the winter of 2017, ethnographer Lisa Björkman and a colleague got talking about the many skilled people they had encountered during their research in the city, in particular, a “plumber” named Sunny. His expertise in procuring official water connections for households without residential documents had been at the heart of a high-profile hydraulic debacle in the eastern suburbs. Björkman wondered if she could get other ethnographers with research projects in Mumbai to draw up profiles of similar people, “someone who is not the main protagonist of our research in Bombay [the official “water engineer” or the “film director”], but rather that person who always seems to be hanging about; the person who, even if we can’t quite make out what they actually do for a living, nonetheless, appears to be indispensable to whatever it is that our research is trying to understand: how movies get made; how buildings get built; how political rallies assemble their publics,” she says, in an email conversation with mid-day.

These profiles now form a part of Bombay Brokers (Duke University Press), which took over four years to put together. An India edition has been delayed due to the pandemic, but Björkman hopes that it will be out soon, along with a planned Marathi edition.