Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration: Leaving and Living (Migrations in South Asia) [1 ed.] 1032047364, 9781032047362

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Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration

This volume explores ideas of home, belonging, and memory in migration through the social realities of leaving and living. It discusses themes and issues such as locating migrant subjectivities and belonging; sociability and wellbeing; the making of a village; bondage and seasonality; dislocation and domestic labour; women and work; gender and religion; Bhojpuri folksongs; folk music; experience; and the city to analyse the social and cultural dynamics of internal migration in India in historical perspectives. Departing from the dominant understanding of migration as an aberration impelled by economic factors, the book focuses on the centrality of migration in the making of society. Based on case studies from an array of geo-cultural regions from across India, the volume views migrants as active agents with their own determinations of selfhood and location. Part of the series Migrations in South Asia, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of migration studies, refugee studies, gender studies, development studies, social work, political economy, social history, political studies, social and cultural anthropology, exclusion studies, sociology, and South Asian Studies. Sadan is Associate Professor at the Centre for Social Studies, Surat, Gujarat, India. Pushpendra is Professor and Chairperson at the Patna Centre of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bihar, India.

Migrations in South Asia Series Editors: Pushpendra and Manish K Jha Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India

This series interrogates contemporary forms of migrations in the region shaped by colonial pasts of several South Asian countries and present global economic and political forces. The volumes in the series intersect with various dimensions of migration such as gender, economic disparity, cross-border movements, citizenship, nativism, conflicts, identity, and religion. They engage with labour processes, urbanisation, agrarian relations, climate change, displacement, neoliberal developmentalism, and state policies. Using transdisciplinary perspectives, the series intervenes in the socio-economic and cultural aspects of migration, histories, networks, linkages, disruptions, social movements, mutations in social relations, new technologies of migrants’ enumeration and surveillance, and changing paradigm of government and politics in the countries of South Asia. The series also aims to study the dynamics of international migration in and out of the region. The series will provide a platform for scholars in the South Asia region working on Migration Studies to share their work and create a vibrant research collective, thereby enriching and diversifying the field. The books in the series will be of interest to those in migration and refugee studies, development studies, social work, political economy, political studies, sociology, and social anthropology, gender studies, contemporary history, South Asian Studies, and Global South studies. Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration Leaving and Living Edited by Sadan and Pushpendra For more information about this series, please visit: ww.routledge.com/ Migrations-in-South-Asia/book-series/MIGSA

Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration Leaving and Living Edited by Sadan and Pushpendra

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Sadan Jha and Pushpendra Kumar Singh; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sadan Jha and Pushpendra Kumar Singh to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-04736-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05783-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19912-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

To those migrants who suffered and died while returning home during the COVID-19 pandemic

Contents

List of figures ix List of tables x Acknowledgementsxi List of contributors xii 1 Introduction: locating subjectivities and belonging in migration

1

SADAN AND PUSHPENDRA

Part I

Labouring to freedom

27

2 The aspiration of a “civilised”, “human”, and “dignified” life: an enquiry into sociability, sociality and wellbeing of migrants in an Indian coalfield

29

DHIRAJ KUMAR NITE

3 Migration and the making of a village

59

PUSHPENDRA

4 “Freedom talk of ploughmen”: bondage and seasonal migration in East-Central India

82

SOHINI SENGUPTA

Part II Engendering migration

101

5 Gender and migration: a contemporary view

103

SAMITA SEN

6 Home away from home? Belonging and dislocation among migrant domestic workers ANINDITA CHATTERJEE

121

viii  Contents 7 Migration, gender, and religion: a study of Malabar migration and gendered Christian identity in Girideepam (1961–71)

137

SHARON ROSE

PART III

Migration, memory and longing

151

8 Making sense of migration: reflections on the contexts and contents of Bhojpuri women’s folksongs

153

ASHA SINGH

9 The idea of home in a world of circulation: steam, women, and migration through Bhojpuri folksongs

172

NITIN SINHA

10 Jaun-Yeun: simultaneous engagement of Konkani migrants

194

AMITA BHIDE AND KALYANI VARTAK

11 Migration and music: incarnations of Birahā

213

PRAVEEN KUMAR JHA

PART IV

Negotiating the city space

231

12 The Purusharthi refugee: Sindhi migrants in Jaipur’s walled city

233

GARIMA DHABHAI

13 “Once a migrant, always a migrant”? Negotiating home and belongingness in the city of Kolkata

248

SWATI MANTRI

14 The figure of the migrant as other: experiences, memory, and the politics of belonging

268

SADAN

Index290

Figures

10.1 12.1 12.2 12.3 13.1

Pandurang Sawant’s family genealogy An ode to the purushartha in Jaipur’s Indira Bazar Marble plaque narrating the history of the sculpture Acts of labour Inscription outside Shri Vishudanand Saraswati Vidyalaya, a school in Kolkata, mentioning the name of the Marwari donor and indicating he is “of Ratangarh” (the donor’s place of origin in Rajasthan) 13.2 Inscriptions mentioning monetary donations outside Marwari Relief Society, a hospital in Barabazaar, Kolkata 13.3 Inscription outside Mangal Matri Sadan, a hospital in Barabazaar, Kolkata 14.1 Specimen of a letter written by migrant husband Durmil Jha to Shree Champawati, published with a translation by George A. Grierson in 1882 as first specimen of Maithili prose writing

200 236 237 237

253 254 255

272

Tables

2.1 Social origin of coalminers in the selected years 10.1 Biographical information of members of Pandurang Sawant’s family

32 201

Acknowledgements

While the core idea behind this volume emerged out of conversations between its editors, the seed took its current form through a collective effort by a large group of researchers focused on the subject of migration in India. We wanted to be ambitious and inclusive in our approach; hence an open call for chapter proposals was circulated along with approaching and contacting potential contributors personally. A large number of good quality proposals came in. Owing to page limitations of a volume, we had to disappoint many. We are deeply indebted to those researchers/scholars who remain absent in this volume’s pages but whose enthusiasm and response remain a motivational force for us editors in this venture. We place on record our sincere appreciation of the immeasurable support provided by our publisher, Routledge: Shashank Shekhar Sinha, Antara Ray Chaudhury, and Rimina Mohapatra. We are grateful to Shaili Thakur and Rimli Barooah for excellent copyediting. We sincerely acknowledge the support of Neeraj Kumar, Programme Manager, and Mukesh Kumar Srivastava, Administrative Officer, both at TISS Patna Centre, India. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Shri Sanjiv Kumar, S­ ecretary, Takshila Educational Society, New Delhi for generously providing a ­multi-year grant to the TISS Patna Centre to research on migration. The financial support received from the Society enabled us to undertake this venture and to meet various costs involved in the pre-production stages. And last but not least, our special thanks to our respective institutions – Centre for Social Studies, Surat and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Patna Centre.

Contributors

Amita Bhide is Professor and Dean at the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She is an action-researcher engaged with alternate urbanisms and critical theory for cities in the global south. Her recent publications include ‘Informal settlement, the  emerging response to COVID and the imperative of transforming the narrative’ in Journal of Social and Economic Development and ‘The Political Possibilities of an Administrative Boundary: How the Transforming M-Ward Project ‘Constructed’ The Ward’ in Urbanisation. Anindita Chatterjee is Visiting Professor at the Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts (SSLA), Pune, India, and a postdoctoral research consultant, employed for a project by Brandeis University, USA. She completed her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2019 and joined as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber Stiftung (IBO). Dr. Chatterjee’s research/ teaching areas include globalisation, migration, and gender studies. Her co-authored article entitled ‘“Maid to maiden”: The false promise of English for the daughters of domestic workers in post-colonial Kolkata’ was published in International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Garima Dhabhai is Assistant Professor, Political Science, Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. She received her PhD from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is interested in questions related to urban heritage, spatial politics, representations of power, and the political economy of non-metropolitan urban centres. Her recent publications include: ‘Paramount State and the ‘Princely Subject’: Privy Purses Abolition and its Aftermath’ in Anupama Roy and Michael Becker (eds.), Dimensions of Constitutional Democracy (2020); and ‘The Purusharthi Refugee: Sindhi Migrants in Jaipur’s Walled City’ in Economic and Political Weekly. Praveen Kumar Jha is Chief Radiologist at Helsehuset Kongsberg, Norway. Apart from his medical profession, his research interests include music and migration. He has authored the books Coolie Lines based on indentured migration and Wah Ustad on schools of Indian classical music.

Contributors  xiii His other publications are ‘Knowledge tradition in the music of Mithila’ and ‘History of classical music in Mithila’ presented at the Madhubani Literature Festival. Swati Mantri is an independent social researcher, ethnographer, and consultant. She obtained her PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, India. She has taught courses on digital social research, anthropology of social media, consumer culture, sociology of gender and sociology theories to undergraduate students at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, Sharda University, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, and IIT, Delhi. Her research interests are spread across urban sociology, migration studies, precariat livelihoods, digital anthropology, visual anthropology, identity studies, sociology of space and food. Dhiraj Kumar Nite is (Senior) Assistant Professor, School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi, India. A historian by training, he has worked as Senior Research Associate, University of Johannesburg, South African Research Chair in Social Change. His research interests are the history of labour relations and entrepreneurship; the socioeconomic history of the labour processes and the condition of wellbeing in the mining communities in India and South Africa; methodology of oral history; memory study; and historical anthropology. Pushpendra is Professor and Chairperson at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Patna Centre, Bihar, India. Earlier, he served as Professor at TISS, Mumbai, and Dean of TISS, Tuljapur. He has also served as Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Director, Centre for Social Studies, Surat. His publications include Public Report on Basic Education (co-authored, 1999), Land Reforms in India: An Unfinished Agenda, Vol. V (co-edited, 2001), Traversing Bihar: The Politics of Development and Social Justice (co-edited, 2014), and Migration, Workers, and Fundamental Freedoms: Pandemic Vulnerabilities and States of Exception in India (co-edited, 2021). He is the editor of Journal of Migration Affairs. Sharon Rose is Assistant Professor of English at Mary Matha Arts and Science College, Mananthavady, Kerala, India. She completed her M Phil from the University of Hyderabad (2017) and MA from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (2014). Her areas of academic interest include cultural studies, gender studies, and Indian writing in English. Sadan is Associate Professor at the Centre for Social Studies, Surat, Gujarat, India. His research interests are visuality, history of symbols (Indian national flag, spinning wheel and Bharat mata), history of colours and

xiv  Contributors contemporary urban experiences. His publications include Reverence, Resistance and the Politics of Seeing the Indian National Flag (2016), Neighbourhoods in Urban India (edited with Dev Nath Pathak and Amiya Kumar Das, 2021), Devnagari Jagat ki Drishya Sanskriti (2018), Half Set Chai (2018) and a number of academic as well as non-academic articles in Indian Economic and Social History Review, History and Sociology of South Asia, Indian Express, Manushi, The Conversation and Huffingtonpost. Samita Sen is Vere Harmsworth Professor in Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge, UK. Her monograph on women’s employment in the jute industry in colonial Bengal was published in 1999 and won the Trevor Reese Prize in Commonwealth History. Her current research is on women’s migration and the history of marriage. Her recent publications include a co-written book on women domestic workers, Domestic Days (2016) and an edited volume on Assam tea plantations, Passage to Bondage (2016). Sohini Sengupta is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at SOAS (London). Her research interests are indigeneity, land and colonial history, social media and gender, poverty and social policy. She has worked in development policy-making and as a research fellow with the World Commission on Dams. Her most recent research project is on drought, migration and the pandemic in Western India. Asha Singh is Assistant Professor in Gender Studies with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), India. Previously she taught at Ambedkar University Delhi and Amity University, Noida. Also, she has worked as a journalist in Hindi newspapers Nai Dunia, Bhopal and Lokmat Samachar, Maharashtra. Her PhD is from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her doctoral work focused on the intersections of gender, caste and migration in Bhojpuri folksongs. Her current research focuses on the sociology of the Bhojpuri language, its institutional history and implications on social transformation. Nitin Sinha is a social historian working on the histories of eighteenthand nineteenth-century South Asia. He has researched and published on the histories of transport and communication, labour, agro-ecology, and migration. He has recently concluded a project on the history of domestic servants and service in India. His most recent publications include two co-edited volumes, Servants’ Pasts (2019). Kalyani Vartak is an independent researcher and translator based in Montreal, Canada. Her academic interests include migration, urban studies,

Contributors  xv caste and gender studies and research methods. She completed her PhD from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her publications include ‘Migration and Caste’ in Handbook of Internal Migration in India edited by I. Rajan, & S. Maruthur (co-authored, 2020), ‘Migration and Education in Regions with a Culture of Migration: Observations from Kunkeri Village, Konkan, Maharashtra’ in Journal of Migration Affairs (2020), and Mass Migration from Rural India: A Restudy of Kunkeri Village in Konkan, Maharashtra, 1961–1987–2017’ in Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics (co-authored, 2019).

1 Introduction Locating subjectivities and belonging in migration Sadan and Pushpendra

In between leaving and living A migrant leaves his or her home to live somewhere else. This movement, the shift from home to locations elsewhere, is foundational to the migrant experience. In this shift, the journey entails a certain distantiation. While in the phenomenon of leaving, the act is necessarily attached to the home (i.e., leaving home), in the case of living, the suffix is a nondescript “somewhere else”. The living remains ambiguous, to say the least. Somewhere else implies a place other than home, a non-home. While the home has a definite location, living lacks the audacity and the depth. It is as though by living somewhere else, a migrant is condemned to a foundational lack – the lack of dwelling. You might live somewhere else, in fact, anywhere, but you cannot dwell anywhere – as if “somewhere else” necessarily comes before us as a concept emptied of its own dwelling, a concept hanging loose in the void. If correct and not fallacious, this is a dangerous proposition. How can a concept be devoid of its own location? How can a social reality exist bereft of its belonging? Such a line of inquiry then makes it imperative to contemplate the journey, the shift, the movement, or the processes between leaving and living. How can one make sense of this movement from home to somewhere else, a going away from the supposedly well-defined dwelling invariably associated with the word “home”? At one level, the move appears fundamentally spatial. Unless there is a shift in location, there cannot be migration. However, what may seem to be so obvious turns out to have by and large escaped scholarly attention. In fact, the concept of migration has been primarily studied in temporal and not in spatial terms (we will return to attend to this apathy to spatial dynamics shortly). Following the question of belonging (or the lack of it), and the movement that is inherent in the leaving of home and living somewhere else, another question confronts us: is the journey from home to somewhere else so unidirectional, conceptually uncomplicated, and emotionally well-sorted that we pay attention merely to the reasons behind leaving and the consequences of living somewhere else? Are the grids and scaffoldings already in place, and is the filling in sociological and historical details all we need to do? The DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-1

2  Sadan and Pushpendra answer would be an obvious no. Among other things, the social realities of the journey, the process of leaving, changes not only the vantage points but the very idea of home and of living as well. This process, its temporal entanglements, and socio-spatial embedding lead to the emergence of multiple coordinates between leaving and living. One realises that not only do home and somewhere else switch their positions, but each of them also has crucial bearings upon the other. Home and somewhere else no longer remain binaries locked in oppositional traits. At times, they become indistinguishable from each other. A migrant finds a home somewhere else. The ideas and imageries of home and belonging never leave a migrant even though s/he leaves his or her dwelling. The essays presented in this volume touch upon some of these coordinates to unpack the social reality between leaving and living. More than excavating the objective reality and the defined dynamics between leaving and living, the essays privilege subjectivities and the perceptive contours that go into making this social reality called migration. Gazing at this vast and open field, where one enters through two tiny dots of leaving and living, one identifies a broad thematic rubric of belonging, which is what connects, the essays of this volume though loosely, with the same precarious bonding that connects migrants as a community among themselves. The idea of belonging encompasses home, memory, place, intersectionalities with identities, becoming, and heterogeneity. The focus of all of these, however, is on unravelling the social dynamics of migration in India. Before moving on to deliberate upon the overarching rubric of belonging – its constituents, their interconnections, and their significance in unravelling the complexities of migration – it may be prudent to locate our intervention in the existing discourse on the subject by delineating a genealogy that will help identify the key epistemic shifts in this discourse and the proposed point of departure of this volume.

Revisiting the discourse on migration Migration has been the foundation of human civilisation and its social formations across time periods. Palaeo-archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists have convincingly delineated the various phases of migration whereby human groups branched out of Africa and populated the globe. However, the scholarly discourse on migration predominantly conceives human migration as brought on by exceptional moments in a society’s life, caused by one or the other factor. These factors are then further traced to the economic dynamics of societies. Broadly, a scenario emerges where staying in the vicinity of a home is considered normal and routine, but leaving it becomes extraordinary, abnormal, and a rupture in the rhythm of the social life. The binaries of living and leaving as well as staying and mobility, thus, envision home as a privileged epistemic location. To borrow Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 23) criticism, “history is always written from a sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary state apparatus”. They call for

Introduction  3 replacing such history with nomadology. A call for nomadology must not be seen as an attempt to erase the specificities that have gone into making the figure of a migrant and conceptually treat migrants as nomads without paying attention to their distinctiveness in history. The allegory of criticism comes from an altogether different context: The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory. Nomads and migrants can mix in many ways, or form a common aggregate; their causes and conditions are no less distinct for that (for example, those who joined Mohammed at Medina had a choice between a nomadic or Bedouin pledge, and a pledge of hegira or emigration). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 380) The relevance of such a criticism of history lies in its potential to open new perspectives and fresh questions to return to aspects like belongingness and home. Far from diluting the significance of migration, a call for nomadology makes migration central to the idea of society and history. Emphasising the centrality of migration in social formations, historians, and social scientists from other disciplines, have started looking at human movement as an ordinary rather than exceptional dimension of human life, as a ubiquitous characteristic feature of human experience itself. Following Peter Manning (2004) and other recent interventions in history writing, Donna Gabaccia calls this approach as “integrating migration into world history”, where humans are recast as a “migratory species” rather than a sedentary one (Gabaccia and Hoerder 2011: 3). However, this recent integrationist scholarship also points out that while we ought not to see human mobility as extraordinary, “Migration and mobile persons came to be problematised conceptually only during the formation of a modern international system of nation-states in the centuries after the 1648 treaty of Westphalia”, a period also identified as “foundational for the concept of sovereignty, and thus border controls over mobility” (Gabaccia 2015: 40). At another level, this scholarship gets closely interwoven with the history of industrialisation and later with globalisation. Increasingly, the modern state’s concerns, economics, and law gave rise to a public climate filled with insecurity towards the immigrants and a sense of what is termed as “moral panic” (Lucassen et al. 2010: 4).1 In recent times, the influx of Syrian immigrants to European countries, Mexican immigrants to the US, or Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar to India have raised such moral panic. The attribution of such banality to migration will have serious implications for the discourse of migration itself. While dealing with “moral panic” as unethical, migrations scholars are also faced with the risk of “normalising” migration. It could be argued that conceptualising migration as

4  Sadan and Pushpendra “ordinary” runs the risk of undermining and trivialising the exploitative, traumatic, and agonising aspects of the suffering caused by displacement and dislocation. Normalising mobility might also potentially entail normalising the forces responsible for such suffering and letting them off the hook. While acknowledging these ethical concerns, it is paramount for migration scholars to refrain from the kind of moral panic referred to earlier and not treat migrants as mere objects devoid of sociality and subjectivities. To overcome the moral panic and “to surpass the exceptionalism of migration and the figure of the migrant”, scholars have suggested “demigrantization of migration research” and that this “should be paralleled and connected with the migrantization of research on society and culture initiating a process of ‘normalisation’” (Dogramaci and Mersmann 2019: 12). Effectively, this necessitates approaching migration from different perspectives as migration is indeed multifaceted and, therefore, demands interdisciplinarity in its study – something that is often ignored or at best attended to in passing. While recognising that migration has always been a critical constitutive factor of human history, the subject formation of the migrant has taken a particular historical trajectory. The modern migrant (and immigrant in the international context) is different from that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century under the colonial conditions. Samaddar (2016) refers to [t]he hidden histories of conflicts, desperate survivals, and new networks growing as well as old networks being transplanted across great expanse and zones. Studies of hunger in the nineteenth century, of itinerant movements, transportations of coolies, spread of famines, shipping of children, adult girls, trafficking in sex, labour, and human organs, and welfare legislations to cope with this great infamy tell us how actually we have arrived at our own time of subject formation under the conditions of empire. Modern migration is caused not just by the reasons referred to above, but a host of new factors which we will discuss at appropriate places. However, extending this argument, one might safely claim that while migration has been an ongoing historical process, the figure of the migrant is a modern conception. The modernity of the figure of migrant gets accentuated when we attempt to unpack the linguistic lineages going into making the figure of a migrant in the Indian context. There is still no specific word for “migrant” and “migration” in India’s various vernacular traditions. For example, in Hindi and other North Indian languages, the word used for a migrant is pravaasi. This is a generic term for someone who stays away from home. There is no doubt that pravaasi has a definite spatial connotation and is different from yaatri (traveller) or yaayaawar (wanderer). The term vaasi is used to refer to one’s roots, whereas pravaas refers to living at another place (destination). Vaasi and pravaasi are twin identities of a person denoting two spatial

Introduction  5 points of leaving and living. In recent times, pravaasi has entered the state lexicon as a term for the Indian diaspora community and Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) for whom the common term so far had been Bhartiya mool ke (Persons of Indian origin or PIO) and apravaasi, respectively. However, in the strict sense of the term, pravaasi neither means emigrant nor necessarily involves border-making. The right term would have been apravaasi. There are other related terms in Hindi. Pravajjan and pravajjani, for instance, can be linked with emigration. This term closely aligns with another frequently used word: pardesi (lit. foreigner, outsider). Both pravaasi and pardesi have acquired extraordinary fluidity and do not necessarily adhere to political nation-state boundaries. Fluidity is the strength of a word. In English, for example, “foreign” is one such word that is used not only to denote someone or something from across the border but also the unknown, alien. Here, we must differentiate between videsh and pardes. Desh is a common word that refers not just to a country but also a “territory”. It stands for a perceived or real territory linked with territorialisation, whereas pardes points to de-territorialisation in the migratory process. Thus, a native from Bihar living and working in Delhi frequently gets identified as a pravaasi Bihari in his or her native state. Similarly, a lover coming from outside the village is marked as pardesi in poetic and cinematic registers. Here, it may be worth mentioning that the term exodus also does not have any commonly used linguistic sibling in the vernacular. For exodus, the closest Hindi word is niskraman or nirgaman. Using the phrase “bhari sankhya mein palaayan” (migration in heavy numbers) is the other way to refer to it. Moreover, languages expand, particularly living languages. We do have specific terms like coolie or girmitiya emerging out of a specific historical context of overseas indentured migration.2 Thus, on the one hand, while the vernacular lacks a robust vocabulary and words with certain definitional finitude, on the other hand, we have these linguistic markers coming from specific contexts that have not been able to transcend their specific historical contextual meanings. Does this mean that we do not have practices and empirical evidence on the varied and differentiated dimensions of migration at social levels? Certainly not! Historians have pointed out that the exodus was quite frequent in pre-colonial periods, in fact, a routine phenomenon, to escape exploitation from the local landlords or ruling class in villages. In this context, we come across Palaayan, another generic term for the migration process, which literally means “escaping” and perhaps, for this reason, has prevailed over the use of another term, bahirgaman. Gradually, palaayan has become a popular term among migrating communities and vernacular literature referring to all sorts of migrations – voluntary and involuntary, those of labourers and students, and internal and across the border. Even a cursory glance at the vernacular vocabulary is enough to suggest a kind of disjuncture between the social reality of migration and its conceptualisation in vernacular languages. The volume aims to intervene at this level. A flip side of this disjuncture lies in the manner migration has been addressed by scholars of social sciences in India. It is at this level that

6  Sadan and Pushpendra history writings on migration become insightful for two reasons. First, a growing volume of literature directly or indirectly engage with the subjects in historically grounded ways. Second, migration has not merely influenced the discourse of history in crucial ways, but this history continues to shape the key questions of identity politics in twentieth-century India. In sum, one can safely argue that migration is central to the making of modern Indian selfhood. Let us briefly substantiate this claim. Recent scholarship convincingly argues that South Asian society has its civilisational roots in three waves of migration (Joseph 2018; Thapar et al. 2019). These happened in pre-historic and proto-historic periods. Subsequently, the subcontinent witnessed several episodes of human mobility that cumulatively formed the fabric of the social life of South Asia (Ramaswamy 2020). The earliest historically recorded evidence (epigraphic/written) of migration in India comes from Kumargupta II’s Mandasor Prasashti located in ancient Malwa. This inscription of 473 AD mentions the migration of a guild of silk weavers from the region of Lata to Dashpur (Malwa), who made a donation to a sun temple there. Migration played an important role in the spread of Buddhism to the countries of Southeast Asia in the ancient period. However, it is important to clarify that this volume does not deal with pre-colonial migration. Although it does invoke history or specific episodes of history at certain places, the purpose is not to excavate the historical context but to mobilise historical perspectives as a critique of the dominant understanding of migration. Distinguishing between genealogy and history and simultaneously recognising the relevance of both, the essays in the volume draw from the scholarship in history to inform and sharpen their questions. It is noteworthy that a concerted effort to study migration systematically had to wait for the colonial state’s arrival. In the nineteenth century, in the context of the migration of indentured labour to overseas plantation economies, efforts were made to consider different aspects of migration. George Grierson’s Report on the Colonial Emigration from the Bengal Presidency (1883) is one example from the colonial context of governance. The records of a public discussion in the 1830s, in the context of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, are also noteworthy. Grierson’s 1883 report gives a detailed ground assessment of statistics and popular perceptions on indentured migration in the districts of Bihar and considers the empirical evidence in quite a comprehensive manner. In the initial decades of the twentieth century, after Mahatma Gandhi’s stay in South Africa, migration caught public mood and attention. This was manifest in the large-scale emigration from Punjab to Canada (interspersed with episodes like the formation of Ghadar Party at San Francisco and the Komagata Maru incident in 1914), as well as in the protests against the indenture system. The Arya Samaj and the Marwari community from Kolkata (then Calcutta) came up with the “Indentured Cooly Protection Society or anti-Indentured emigration League”. A variety of pamphlets and tracts came up, making people aware of the indentured system. This included autobiographical literature from

Introduction  7 indentured labourers themselves, Totaram Sanadhya’s Fiji Dwip Me Mere Ikkish Varsh (Sanadhya 1914 [Samvat 1972]), and Munshi Rahman Khan’s Jeevan Prakash (Kerkhoff Sinha 2006), for example. At another level, during the colonial period in India, migration formed the ground for building some key civilisational theories related to historical periodisation and identity politics. The Aryan question and the tripartite division of Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British periods emerged from these fierce and long-lasting debates that had resonances in both academic and public discourses. These are only two examples suggesting the discursive power of the discourse on migration shaping the contours of identity politics in the sub-continent. A comprehensive discussion on these themes or the relationship between the migration discourse and identity politics in India is beyond the scope of our current exercise. Therefore, these are mentioned here merely as pointers, as key threads on how we deal with the migration question. In the twentieth century, migration attracted considerable rigorous disciplinary attention and diversified its thematic focus in South Asia. While demographers focused on the mobility of the population (Davis 1951), scholarship in the initial decades of the post-Independence period remained glued primarily to economic questions. Rural-urban migration, regional dynamics, urbanisation, and the impact of mobility on the social structure remained some of the key determinants of this discourse. Scholars working on labour and the working class soon became aware of the overlap between migrants and the working-class population. From the mid-1980s, labour historians and anthropologists began to emphasise the complexity of seasonal migration as well as specificities like the cultural ties of migrants shaping their sociality as workers (Breman 1974, 1996; Chakrabarty 1989/2000; Chandavarkar 1994, 1998, 2009).3 Even though these studies have opened up new vistas for examining the migrants’ experiences, the figure of migrants continues to be studied primarily as an economic figure, as a worker: landless and footloose. In the 1980s and increasingly in the 1990s, scholars began to notice the absence of women in the discourse of migration, and a process of engendering migration studies started taking shape in India (Pandey 1993; Karlekar 1995; Patel 2001). The late eighties extending into the nineties was also the period when a hitherto untouched and forgotten self of migrants surfaced. This was the figure of migrants as victims of the partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan (Butalia 1998; Pandey 2001). Scholars working on the Partition took us deeper into questions of subjectivities, victimhood, and narratives of mass violence and dislocations. This ushered a new and hitherto unexplored dimension in migration studies. Such deep forays into the trauma of dislocation also brought into consideration a whole range of issues, registers,4 disciplinary boundaries, methods, identities, and displacement experiences. Scholars had earlier looked at the Partition from the vantage points of high politics, focusing on conspiracy theories, its inevitability in history, and the transfer of power from Britain

8  Sadan and Pushpendra to India and Pakistan. It is only recently that social scientists have showed inquisitiveness to the event, processes, and the pathos associated with a long unfinished journey called the Partition. We have a few interesting forays into studying the migration due to the Partition, for example, the study of demography and migration in newborn India and Pakistan (Davis 1951: 93–123). However, it was only from the mid-1980s; we witnessed scholarly inroads understanding the Partition as a key signpost in the subcontinental history of migration. This new Partition scholarship not only shifted the discourse away from high politics but realised the necessity of engaging with the subjectivities of people who suffered the violence and trauma associated with it (Butalia 1998; Pandey 2001). The question of displacement acquired fresh impetus in the study of migration. Need to attend subjective dimensions led to some serious critical reflections on various disciplines and creative engagement at the levels of sources and methodology. The significance of studying memory as an alternative or distinctive route for accessing the past, as an interface between the past and the present, and as a critique of the disciplinary boundary of history which has taken roots by the 1980s among scholars working on India, continued to grow deeper in subsequent decades opening new registers and innovative ways for studying migrant, displaced and uprooted subjectivities. Though this volume does not have any chapter on the Partition, the new scholarship on it has direct bearings upon how the volume at hand was conceived – in our selection of essays and our desire to move into newer areas, particularly the social and cultural aspects of labour migration. While the Partition introduced refugee studies in a significant manner, it gained further prominence due to a host of factors such as the largescale refugee influx into India before and after the formation of Bangladesh following the 1971 Indo-Pak War, conflicts in North-East India, persecution of minorities in India’s neighbours, wars, large-scale violence in the South and South-East Asia, development-induced displacement, growing climate refugeehood, and very recently due to the contestations around the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 and its implementation. Hundreds of thousands have been forced to migrate and/or rendered stateless. Though the central themes of “forced migration” literature have been mostly citizenship, humanitarian crisis, care, and rehabilitation, of late, some ethnographic accounts have considered individual and collective sufferings of the victims of forced migration. On the other hand, scholars focusing upon women emphasised the gendered nature of the discourse and made it “clear that the impact of migration cannot be assessed only in economic terms but needs to be socially contextualized” too (Karlekar 1995: 71). The engendering of migration discourse in India had a longish pedigree going back to feminist struggles and a direct consequence of women social scientists shifting the discourse’s male centricism (Schenk-Sandbergen 1995). Yet, it is intriguing that we

Introduction  9 find little methodological insights and creativity among scholars engaged in women’s social and economic aspects and migration in India until the early 1980s. In fact, the second crucial scholarly intervention came in the 1980s and 1990s, which sought to engender migration perspectives. Initially, it focused on the effect of male migration on different aspects of women’s lives, but gradually it seriously began to engage with women’s migration. Thus, while on the one hand, scholars like Urvashi Butalia, Gyan Pandey, and Veena Das were making significant epistemic contributions, the engendering of migrant studies stayed within the positivist conventions of doing social sciences, concentrated on regionally situated case studies and policy-­ oriented research. Although engendering the migration largely remained un-attentive to questions of subjectivities of women migrants or those who stayed behind/ left behind and their desires and sufferings, the discourse questioned numerous settled stereotypes and frames of understanding migration. For example, when the debate on the nature of modernity in India acquired momentum in Indian social sciences, migration came to be acknowledged as an important vehicle for the ideas and commodities linking different geographies and shaping gender and other social relations. In the words of Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, to critique Modernity through the lens of movement and migration is to ‘question a pre-given world of separate and discrete “peoples and cultures” and see instead a difference-producing set of relations…. (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2004: 346) Migration and rural cosmopolitanism, Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2004) argue, decisively influence self-making, consumption culture, ­women’s “self-conception of goods and values that are modern” (p. 353), a preference for women workers in informal and “underground” sectors like that of information technology and garments leading to a scenario when “it is now men who are being sidelined” (p. 352). The decade of 1990s, when migration studies was undergoing the process of engendering and moving its focus from the collective to individual narratives of pain and suffering, also witnessed a renewed scholastic vigour in the conceptualisation of diasporic/overseas migration and the problematisation of identity connected with it. Building upon the works on post-structuralism, in the fin de siècle, postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha provocatively questioned the very location of culture and its sedentariness to make a case for the hybridity of emigrant identity and a conceptualisation of the contemporary conditions of living “beyond” the borders (Bhabha 1994 : 1).5 Ironical as this may sound, while Bhabha and the postcolonial theory have made deep inroads in the fields of literature, contemporary culture, and socio-political theory, we find little resonance of such post-structuralist

10  Sadan and Pushpendra and postcolonial theorisations, or the discourse of pain and sufferings coming from the scholarship on the Partition, on aspects pertaining to labour migration in India. Instead, summarising this genealogy of migration studies, we argue that in India’s social science discourse, the figure of the migrant comes before us predominantly in two forms – as a displaced economic unit of labour and/or as a victim, political or otherwise. One serious implication of this trend is the lack of consideration of experiential and subjective aspects of migration linked to social structures and community relations. There is a dearth of literature dealing with specific migration experiences of marginalised castes, tribes, or social groups such as the homeless, transgender, sex workers, and disabled. From the above genealogy of migration studies in India, we have tried to identify key epistemic shifts in the discourse. This discourse suggests that both in terms of methodology as well as content, there is a neat compartmentalisation in the scholarly investment on migration in India. In these disciplinary frameworks, the figuration of the migrant in a particular way (as a unit bereft of subjectivities) owes a great deal to the manner in which Census and other data sets (chiefly those provided by the National Sample Survey Office) conceptualise this figure for the purpose of enumeration. When a person is enumerated at a place other than his/ her birthplace, he/she is registered as a migrant in the Census (there are two criteria to achieve such enumeration: by place of birth and by place of last residence). This viewing of migrants as a population with a certain identity and set of socio-economic characteristics serves to help the state know its subjects in order to govern. Such an approach owes a great deal to the manner in which Census has been conceptualised by the colonial state. In this manner, at broader levels, the nation-state, through its enumeration mechanism and through its own history, remains the overarching guiding force determining the contours of the conceptualisation of migration and migrants. The state does so by reducing the subjectivities of migrants into quantified population statistics. Without ignoring the presence of the state, the volume makes an attempt to move out of the state-centric approach to migration and invest in the societal aspects of it. It is in this domain of social reality that, by moving away from exceptionalisation (when migration is conceived as a moment of crisis in the everyday sedentary life of the society that is triggered either by push or pull factors), it reclaims the personhood of migrants and their experiential dynamics. Questioning such hegemonic scholarly trajectories, the task at hand is how to move beyond and how to expand our migrant lenses while looking at the sites and processes that are directly connected to migrants and migration in general but are often ignored or barely mentioned in passing. Instead of trying to fit in any specific disciplinary mould, we have intended to gather insights and perspectives from different directions and achieve a theorisation of human mobility as ordinary and inherent dimensions of human social life.6

Introduction  11

Belongingness in migrant’s subjectivity Migrants are not mute and passive subjects. As human beings, migrants have agency – their own cognitive ways of perceiving their selfhood and their location in the wider social world. The issue of subjectivity obviously emanates from the conceptualisation of the migrants’ agency. As Donald Hall puts it, the question of agency remains at the heart of discussions on subjectivity (Hall 2004: 124). However, the task is not merely to recover this agency. Such a recovery, though inevitable, remains primarily an ethical commitment. An equally pertinent question is how to access this agency and if there is any specificity attached to migrants’ subjectivity. While the former leads to epistemic investments, the latter requires delving deep into social structures, as it becomes imperative to demonstrate the distinctness of the migrants’ selfhood from those of non-migrants. However, this is certainly not to treat agency in isolation from the societal forces and structures or romanticise individuals as figures who are bestowed with the power to control and dictate their lives in whichever manner they like, in one and all contexts. Scholars working with insights from Michel Foucault’s notion of all-pervasive power have questioned such a romantic idea of agency. For example, Judith Butler is insightful when she claims that “the subject as a self-identical entity is no more” (Butler 1993: 230). Thus, to make a case for migrants’ agency and subjectivity is not to treat the figure of a migrant in isolation from the processes, institutions, practices, and forces that go into the making of a migrant. The challenge is to explore and engage with the intertwining of social realities and the subjectivity of the self. The viewing of subjectivity through the agency’s lens has direct implications for understanding identity, in our case, migrant identity: how the migrant conceives her/his own self. Another way, not unconnected though, would be to address how a migrant articulates and conceptualises her/his own migrant status through her/his understanding of the linkages with the social realm. Here, subjectivity may or may not get directly framed in terms of agency or identity. It is here that the rubrics of home, memory, and belonging become critical constituents in the social life of a migrant. Compared to identity and its politics, the field created by an interaction of these rubrics, as the essays in the volume show, is far more ambiguous and amorphous. Belonging, in its bareness, is about connection, attachment, linkages, and relatedness. At one level, one might argue that in the Indian context, where seasonal and circular migration remains quite a frequent phenomenon, it is the ties with the land that play a crucial role in migrant belongingness. Scholars have hardly paid any heed to the question of belonging in the context of labour migration. In fact, it may not be an exaggeration to say that belongingness has remained a largely ignored dimension of migration studies in particular and social sciences in general in India. This apathy can be partly explained by the over-deterministic methodological frames of causal

12  Sadan and Pushpendra analysis that have dominated migration studies so far. It is a messy, incoherent, fractured, partial, and fragmented experience (Lähdesmäki Saresma and Hiltumen 2016: 233–247). These properties of belonging call for affective frames of sociality and cannot be addressed in the causal frameworks so prevalent in India’s social sciences. The strength of the concept of belonging lies in its openness and fluidity, thereby allowing new ways of addressing sociality, social and cultural practices with enough room to engage with politics of access, spatial complexities in the making of the social, emotional, and affective understanding of how a social process unfolds its complexities. The concept “enables the inclusion of subjective, social, and societal dimensions in the study” (Lähdesmäki Saresma and Hiltumen 2016: 241). Scholars are increasingly addressing the complicated relationship between belonging and identity. Pointing to a growing recognition of the multiplicity and fragmentation of identity, some scholars argue, there is a complete abandonment of the residual elements of essentialisation in the conceptualisation of identity (Lähdesmäki Saresma and Hiltumen 2016: 233–247). In this conceptualisation, belongingness enables a researcher to see an individual in relational terms, without the burden of any fixity or pre-givenness. “People may feel that they belong to something without necessarily describing this feeling as an identification or identity” (ibid.). However, that belonging and identity are distinct does not mean that these two concepts form exclusionary zones of understanding social reality, or one of them should be privileged over the other. Identity constitutes a stark social reality that cannot be wished away. In fact, the two quite often intersect each other. Scholars, for example, have looked at belonging as a form of access where the identity of a specific migrant group, or an individual identified as a migrant, functions as the key determinant of her/his entry and assimilation in that society. At this level, belonging or non-belonging overlaps with the politics of othering of migrants. The challenge is to parallelise belongingness and identity in migration. Some of the chapters in the volume have addressed the complicated relationship between belonging and identity. Subjectivities, belongingness, and the affective dimensions of the migrants’ social realities are better narrativised and analysed than measured. Such a methodological shift then also affords us a vantage point where one can reflect upon some key threads of the migration discourse. Privileging a migrant’s perspective also allows transcending the disciplinary boundaries. The volume contests a dominant scholarly perspective where migrant workers get configured as meek commodities. It tries to situate the migrants’ belongingness in their specific spatio-temporal contextual frames and approach the complexities of their subjectivity in empirical depth. In this exercise, while belonging is the key axis, it is through its relation to memory and the home that we intend to understand the migrant subjectivities and not by looking at belonging in isolation. Thus, instead of focusing upon any of these key coordinates separately, we place

Introduction  13 migrant experiences as a concept approached through their linkages and interactions. The circuit of the relationship between migrant, memory, and belonging has multiple coordinates. It is impossible and unwarranted to identify, count, and bring them into analysis in this modest attempt. Yet, without naming two such coordinates, no discussion on migration can be meaningful. These are work and home. Both require different treatments, and both are highly ignored themes in the migration discourse. How do migrants perceive work? What is the meaning and status of home in the life of a migrant worker? These are challenging questions for a researcher working on migration. Home is often conceptualised as the opposite to work. However, recent scholarship on domestic work and housewife’s activities recognises households as production units alongside the factory mode of production. This has seriously undermined the binary and exclusivity between home and work. The recent experience of prolonged lockdown in the wake of COVID19 pandemic’s outbreak has also allowed us to see home as the site of work for a considerably larger section of society. Yet, thinking from the perspective of migration, home comes with a different set of questions. For a migrant, home is both a place of living (a residence to take rest and indulge in non-production activities; where her/his body is not merely a commodified form of labour; where she/he becomes human once again, no matter how routined and how fleeting that would be) and as an object of longing. Both these meanings of home are crucial for understanding migration and migrant lives. Yet, to analytically move more in-depth, this volume narrows down to the latter (i.e., home as a site of longing). This choice is arbitrary and may be seen as a limitation of this volume, something we hope other migration researchers would take up in the future. Firstly, we wanted to pay more attention to the non-material dimensions of migrant lives. Secondly, home as an object of longing is closely tied to our two other threads – memories and belonging. Whether it is a site of residence or an object of longing, home surfaces at an interface between interiority (of individual life) and the external social world. As an object of longing, home is in the realm of the affective. It is deeply intimate, cannot be measured, and has the potential to escape homogenisation and generalisations. Yet, it is simultaneously social and collective as emotions do not take roots in the void. In this volume, the essays focus on this social side of home in shaping the realm of migrant-memory. To us, this focus is relevant for numerous reasons. To mention a few, firstly, we find that the existing scholarship on home and belonging is primarily confined to the context of transnational migration and the rubric of exile. In the discourse on internal migration, this relationship between home, memory and belonging has not been adequately studied. Secondly, in the discourse of migration (and here we include the scholarship on diaspora and transnational migration), the home is predominantly seen from

14  Sadan and Pushpendra the prism of loss. The loss is both cellular as well as monumental. It is cellular as it is profoundly present in the emotional registers of migrants at the day-to-day level. Its monumental dimension is reflected in different forms of cultural representations (ranging from the folk to the classical). We are confident that the readers will come across these aspects in the essays presented here. While the chapters by Anindita and Sohini address the first; Nitin, Asha, and Sadan engage with the latter. Yet, these essays do not treat the loss of home as a unidimensional aspect of migrant lives. On the contrary, essays in this volume aim to foreground multi-dimensions (i.e., the social, cultural, and spatial moorings) attached to migrant longing for home. This is an important point of departure that we wish to emphasise as we often come across a tendency in which this loss gets translated into the romantic idea of migrant’s love for their homes. During the pandemic lockdown, such an idea of love for home ironically acquired mythic proportion, and the State treated it as unwarranted and dangerous. For example, echoing this trend, columnist Sanjoy Hazarika wrote, “Ultimately this desperate longing for home killed a number of them, one group of 14 most violently and tragically on a railway track” (Hazarika 2020). Although the essay by Hazarika is primarily concerned about policy dimensions, it may be pertinent to ponder about migrant workers’ “desperate longing for home”. The question is, what choice these migrant workers had? They had to leave their homes in the cities because they lost their job, ran out of liquid cash, were thrown out of their rented homes, and had hardly had access to cooked food or dry ration, their worksites were closed, and their wages and salaries were not paid. This compulsion to leave cities was conveniently and sometimes unconsciously switched for a phrase “love for the home”. Only those who had some means to stay deferred their journey. To say that migrant workers were leaving cities for their love for home/ natives is to absolve the primary duty bearers from looking at harsh conditions which led to the migrant exodus out of city boundaries and left them walking in extreme conditions or undertaking arduous train journeys. It is pertinent to ask, then, do we know what migrants’ love for home means? At another level, the pandemic-led migrant exodus and the public responses over the issue compel us to revisit some of the deep-rooted prejudices and dominant strands on the idea of home in migrants’ lives.

Contributions The contributions are divided into four thematic sections. In the first section, “Labouring to Freedom”, the essays deal with workers’ subjectivities in their struggle against unfreedoms. The second section, “Engendering Migration”, looks at prevailing gendered norms in social institutions and brings in the centrality of women’s agency. In the third section, “Memory and Longing”, by mobilising folk registers and contemporary ethnography,

Introduction  15 the essays broaden the meaning of home and belonging. In the last section, “Negotiating the City Space”, the essays locate migrants’ agency in the city space. In the following pages, our purpose is to introduce the chapters and show how they relate to and communicate with each others. Hence, we have not strictly followed the order in which the essays appear in the volume. The volume opens with a set of three essays by Dhiraj, Pushpendra, and Sohini. They build upon the recent scholarship on labour and migration and problematise the dominant frames and methods of addressing migration in India. A certain contemporaneity goes into these interventions allowing us to venture into new ways of conceiving the migration question in the subcontinent. Dhiraj Kumar Nite’s essay, drawing from historical anthropology, opens new ways of conceptualising the linkages between migration, experience, and wellbeing as historically constituted and subjectively articulated categories. He elaborates on the socio-cultural roots of accumulation and wellbeing. Questioning the exaggerated scholarly emphasis on the issue of identity, Dhiraj asks, does this focus on identities, whether rigid or fluid, allow us to map the transformations of workers’ worldviews, sociability and wellbeing, and their effect on the migration pattern? Dhiraj’s essay, based on migrant mineworkers in the coalfields of Jharia during 1895–1970, demonstrates that the socio-cultural proclivities of migrant mineworkers were entwined with their work relations and influenced their code of sociability and respectability. Dhiraj argues that in the aftermath of World War I, a period that coincided with private commercial mining, a new ethics of human, civilised, and dignified life gradually took roots amongst mineworkers. It represented the objection of mineworkers to sociability ridden with caste, ethnic and racial inequities. Workers, who secured regular-wage work, sought to consolidate their economic mobility by removing socio-cultural disability and deprivation. This movement/change occurred in twin contexts – the interplay between the workforce’s migration pattern and social composition and the intersection between their economic relations and social composition. Mineworkers were not merely following the universal language of wellbeing but were quite consciously structuring their own language and issues that they considered crucial for the betterment of their life. In a similar exploration of contextual meanings (and moving away from the universal language of categories), Sohini Sen Gupta’s anthropological study unsettles the binary of freedom and unfreedom that crops up in debates around labour. From patron-client relations of pre-capitalist agriculture to neo-bondage among contemporary migrants in the informal economy, the labouring poor are viewed as victims of exploitative working conditions and backward economies. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and mobilising insights from Paul Ricoeur’s moral anthropology, she examines debt-bondage and seasonal migration through narratives of ex-ploughmen from an East-Central Indian village. In these recollections, the ex-ploughmen evaluate past labouring as exploitative, reject hierarchies that legitimise bondage and view seasonal migration as a last resort, an

16  Sadan and Pushpendra escape route for redundant workers. Besides putting their past experiences in order and constructing identities relevant to the present, the ploughmen’s stories describe the varied “freedoms” of the labouring poor that depart from the understanding of liberal freedom in capitalist wage contracts. In his essay, Pushpendra contests the myth that only cities are made by migrants. Citing from his fieldwork in a village in Bihar, he establishes how the historical conditions and processes that went into making the village influenced, and continue to influence, the sense of home and belonging. For an estate under the Permanent Settlement System, the making of a village was an exercise in adding a revenue unit, i.e., creating a new source of ground rent. For the people, however, it was an exercise in mobilising themselves into a social formation that had a codified relation with land and other natural resources, on the one hand, and social relations based on a complex mix of caste and class that kept challenging the boundaries of prevailing customs, norms, and power dynamics while continuing to operate within them, on the other. The essay mobilises people’s memories to create historical evidence and, in this way, takes anthropological accounts beyond an objectified history that privileges archival and other documentary material over people’s subjectivities. These land-centric ethnographic accounts make forays into an anthropological exercise in which people make sense of their abrasions with history in a timeframe with which they can easily relate. Leaving and living are not linear. The contribution by Pushpendra confirms this lack of linearity, offering a reverse perspective that emboldens the case that leaving and living cannot be treated as binaries. Leaving comes after living invariably, leads to a new living, but as it happens, there is back and forth movement towards old places of living. However, this should not be equated with circularity, a term much in use in economic migration literature. What complicates the apparent cycle of living-leaving-living is the element of change that accompanies leaving one point for another or even returning to it. In the last three to four decades, gender has emerged as an insightful category and also an analytical strategy to study migration. While almost all the essays of this volume mobilise these insights, Samita Sen, Anindita Chatterjee, Sharon Rose, Asha Singh, and Nitin Sinha have looked at women and migration in a more focused manner. Samita Sen offers a stock-taking and a fresh perspective on women’s migration in India in a historical context. She delves into the patterns of mobility in the colonial period as a context to identify contemporary patterns of women’s migration. According to her, the migration discourse in India identifies three kinds of migration in the colonial period: (a) family migration, (b) single male migration, and (c) single female migration. Even though family migration has generally been considered the typical form of migration, the literature is dominated by the specificities of single male migration, which is most characteristic of rural-urban migration and the urban and industrial workforce.

Introduction  17 Writing about women migrating singly, Samita Sen emphasises that the pattern of single female migration noted in the colonial period was quite different from that in the present. These women were not only migrating singly but were also mostly “single women”. They were dis-embedded from the rural family in the process of migration. In her earlier work, Samita has argued that these single women were more truly proletarianised, in the sense that they had lost access to rural resources since access was contingent upon familial role fulfilment. Building upon that corpus of her work and revisiting the migration discourse, Samita describes in this essay the new and contemporary patterns of women’s migration, and according to her, the real surprise in this process has been the discovery of a form of single women’s migration that is analogous to the single male migration of the colonial period. Anindita Chatterjee examines the narratives of migrant women as they describe the displacement from their daily living practices and the formation of new relationships in a different place. In her case studies, young women recount their viewpoints regarding dislocation from their natal kin while building attachments with the families they work for. She addresses the difficult yet ethically quite relevant question of choice and further adds nuances to it by peeling the entanglements of choice with memory. These two, Anindita argues, crucially constitute migrant experiences among women domestic workers belonging to minority religious communities, as well as the trans-regional and transnational aspects of identity formation among them. Anindita’s essay is also a reminder that home memory might not necessarily be an innocent, soothing one. Structures of gender, regional inequalities, and ethnicity all play their parts in shaping the contours of memory. Therefore, it would be fallacious to assume that home memory would inevitably give rise to a longing for the homeland and a desire to return. In her essay, memory is a violated terrain. Sometimes, the violence is physical; in other instances, this may be in the form of the pain and agony of separation and come before us in myriad registers of longing. Nitin Sinha and Asha Singh’s essays bring about an epistemic shift in our engagement with memory and imageries of home. Theirs is a move from the individual to the collective/shared repertoires of migrant memories. They take us to the domain of folk registers. Our intention in calling these registers collective is not to romanticise the folk and treat the collective as an uncontested territory. In fact, both these essays lead us towards a deeply gendered field, revealing the shifting characteristics of migrant culture, its “money order” economy, and the historically shifting materiality of longing. Here, women and their linkages with migration are not merely about the women who move but also about those who stay back or are left behind in the process of migration. These essays are also about the idiom, the language, and the social entanglements of such longings that go in the making of not merely the migrant folk culture but the folk’s domain in totality. These essays powerfully depict the overlapping of sites, processes,

18  Sadan and Pushpendra and imageries of migrant and non-migrant elements of social life. One cannot segregate the two. Asha Singh suggests that in a context marked by a strong dependence on orality due to low female literacy, analysing folk songs becomes a crucial tool for understanding women’s articulation of their own social context. Her reading implies that Bhojpuri folk songs “record” multiple regimes of perceptions and dilemmas regarding male outmigration. She claims that a sound reiteration and contextualisation of this argument in Bhojpuri folklore can be a powerful and historically salient tool through which women “make sense” of their shared socio-cultural realities. Interestingly, in Asha’s treatment, one finds a yearning to go beyond mobilising folk registers merely as sources for grounding research questions on migration. She twists her methodological investment in the folk and argues that these songs help the women in that society “make sense” of migration. Nitin Sinha pays close attention to the socio-historical context, going as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. The historical period from the 1840s to 1860s witnessed the introduction of new means of communication (steamships and railways), the coming up of new industrial and plantation investments in and outside of India (which thereby created a demand for labour), and the expansion of a print culture that went beyond the urban elite domain to reflect the world of small towns and villages. In this constellation of social, economic, and technological changes, Nitin scrutinises the idea of home, the construction of womanhood, and the interlaced life cycles of migrant men and non-migrant women. By moving away from the predominant focus on migrant men, the essay attempts to recreate the social world of the non-migrant women left behind in the villages of northern and eastern India. While engaging with the framework of circulation, Nitin calls for it to be redesigned to allow histories of mobility and immobility, male and female, and villages and cities to appear in the same analytical field. While marriage is recognised as one of the most important social institutions that lead to women’s dislocation, and there is a near-universal cultural normalisation of such a dislocation of women in South Asia, it is inadequately addressed in South Asian migration studies. “Separated conjugality” is one aspect of this. Through Bhojpuri folk songs, the essay brings together migration and marriage as two important social events that help us understand the different but interlaced life cycles of gendered (im) mobilities. Nitin and Asha’s essays may not obfuscate the category of migrants and non-migrants but, by investing their analytical gaze into the figure of non-migrant women, they make this binary irrelevant. In other words, one cannot ignore the immobile, the one who stayed back. Such a move expands the field of migration studies enormously and, hypothetically, nothing remains excluded from its purview. At a conceptual level, this implies a collapse of the subject-object binary. In the methodological terrain, such a breakdown would necessitate a certain critical reflexivity, a realisation that you are no

Introduction  19 longer studying the “other”. You are yourself the “other” and, at the same time, the object of your own study. However, such a conflation of the self with the “other” does not imply evaporation of the power dynamics that go into making this “other”. The exclusionary politics and social agencies that make a migrant the “other” need different analytical and narrative strategies to simultaneously excavate this politics and subvert its conservativeness and exploitative nature. In this context, relying upon an auto-ethnography, Sadan brings together the field of the folk, the discursive constructs of the figure of the migrant, and his own experiences of being a migrant, to engage with the figuration of the migrant as the “other”. For him, the core issue is people’s movement, their dislocation, and relocation. His underlying assumption is that there is an absence of spatial embeddings in migration discourse in the South Asian milieu. Spatial embeddedness calls for a framework that includes the richness of social and cultural particularities that make such spaces and their dynamics. The individual remains an economic unit, a population that requires governance technologies, and a social being relevant merely for society’s health. However, in all these three spheres (i.e., economy, polity, and society), a migrant is engaged only when the individual is a commensurate figure. Experiences and subjectivities, which are incommensurable, are irrelevant and largely ignored in this discourse. Such apathy is ironic, particularly in South Asia where Dalit studies, gender studies, the discourse on the Partition violence, and the overarching frame of postcolonial scholarships have all emphasised the centrality of experiences and subjectivities in different manners. Sadan further explores some facets and circuits of subjectivities by grounding them in the fragments that constitute the journey for a migrant. In this engagement with the journey, the analytical landscape gets conflated with physical geography to narrate the tale. Riding upon the cultural memory of migration, the journey here commences in Mithila (a geo-cultural region in the north-eastern Bihar) and culminates in the city of Surat (Gujarat), criss-crossing, in between, a wide range of geo-cultural coordinates and metaphors that may bring up some fresh provocations. In all these three essays that engage with folk registers, the issue of longing is quite pervasive. Over the centuries, this longing has taken different cultural forms. The birahā is one such form in music. However, beyond the psychological frames of longing, scholars of migration studies in India have largely ignored the birahā. Even at a broader level, aesthetic experiences remain a neglected topic in this scholarship. As a core aesthetic experience, music becomes particularly relevant in people’s transcontinental mass movement and their passage through a dynamic colonial and postcolonial history. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian labourers migrated to the Caribbean under the indenture system. These migrants carried folk music from colonial India; perhaps inevitably, some contemporary musical forms are an outcome of the fusion of Indian folk music with local Afro-Caribbean music.

20  Sadan and Pushpendra Praveen Jha’s essay in this volume claims that the study of the parent Indian folk music pathways and the transplant Indo-Caribbean music gives us an insight into the temporal and spatial factors influencing the aesthetic experiences of migration. Focusing on a particular Indian folk music genre, the birahā, and its transformation in the Indo-Caribbean landscape as also in India, Praveen investigates the relation between music and migration. With a singular focus on birahā, he analyses how migration across geographical and social coordinates influences the journey of a folk-musical form. Transcontinental migration is one aspect of the analysis; the other aspects are rural to urban migration within India and the associated survival strategies. Sadan’s and Praveen’s essays point towards the importance of the routes leading to the destination while dealing with the migrant experience. These spatial dynamics, which find openings in Sadan’s forays into interpretative folk registers and are expanded upon in the history of birahā, also receive a rich and focused analysis in some other essays. In the chapter by Sharon Rose, one comes across the linkages between space and migration at the intersection of migration history, gender, and religious institutions. This essay also shows that belonging is not sui generis, and both religious institutions and print culture shape its contours. This is also where migrants belonging to a region’s landscape get embroiled in identity politics dynamics. This study’s larger historical frame is the Malabar migration, which refers to peasants’ mass movement from Travancore to Malabar that began in the early 1920s and lasted till the late 1970s. The movement coincided with many historical events like the Nationalist Movement, the Great Depression, and the World Wars and, more importantly, the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church’s spread to the northern part of Kerala. Today, the power of the Church is spread across many continents. Sharon also brings into focus another ignored field in migration studies, i.e., migration and religion. She argues that the Church, being a gendered institution, could exercise and spread its power over the migrants through gendered discourses. Girideepam, a magazine (recognised as the “voice of migrants”) published by the Telicherry diocese between 1961 and 1971, is taken as the primary source for understanding the notion of religious identity in Malabar migration. The regional moorings of migration and belonging acquire another layer in the essay by Amita Bhide and Kalyani Vartak on the movement of Konkani migrants, where they contest the paradigmatic frame of looking at migrants in terms of lack of belongingness, “uprootedness”, or fractured belonging. Instead, they make a case for “simultaneous” belonging among migrants, which then constructs regional ties among Konkani migrants. This essay, therefore, opens new ways of conceptualising the relation between migrants and time. Bhide and Vartak explore how “simultaneity” is practised and how migrants perceive and shape the place of origin and destination at various points in their migrant life. They challenge the dominant perspective of migration as a disruptive force in both sending and receiving societies. They contend that in the popular imagination, migration has a tone of finality

Introduction  21 attached to it. But, for migrants themselves, boundaries blur – the place of origin and the destination are not separated in neat containers but are woven together by innumerable threads of “simultaneous” engagement in both places. They look at the characteristics of the movement of Konkani migrants and invite readers to think of the possibilities brought up by such a conceptualisation. The migrants’ understanding of their lives as “juanyeun” (come and go) best describes the place of migration in their lives – an inextricable part of their milieu, influencing their notion of identity, home, and belonging. Such a conceptualisation of migration has implications for how categories of the rural, the urban, the ownership of assets and migration itself come to be perceived. While for Bhide and Vartak “simultaneity” characterises migrant belonging, for Swati Mantri, belonging acquires graded characteristics. To broaden the concept of belonging as outlined in most of the theoretical and analytical work done on this theme, Swati locates it as a sentiment churned out through the Marwaris’ social and material practices in Kolkata. Mantri’s ethnography emphasises that neither the idea of belonging nor the home’s imageries remain static among migrant communities. Migrants keep renewing their orientation and attachments towards the space of the home. In these re-articulations, a certain gradation appears in their attachment to the spaces they inhabit – neighbourhoods within the city they have left in the recent past and the region they identify as their native land. She suggests that for a migrant community, a constant effort to reproduce and revitalise its culture and identity away from its “home” – the des (the native land) – necessitates emotional as well as material investment in desavar (the foreign land). Swati Mantri inquires about the nature of this investment by migrant communities that embeds them in the city’s collective space and informs their idea of belonging in desavar. Using binaries of “roots” and “routes” with that of “home” and “belonging”, the chapter elucidates the notion of attachment for the community that had moved out of India’s north-western region towards the East. The varied understanding of the concept of belonging and the figure of migrants by the “self”, locates it as both emancipatory as well as limiting for the new generation which perhaps envisions home in a renewed way. In the case of the Sindhi community of Jaipur that had come from the other side of the border at the time of the Partition, Garima Dhabai’s study shows how this perception of self itself became the ground for laying claims to and asserting a renewed identity, by discarding old nomenclature and adopting new markers. This is a story of the transformation of the sharanarthi (refugee) into the purusharthi (one who defines and embodies an achiever’s characteristic features). In many ways, this transformation is also about defying the politics of otherness that Sadan talks about in his essay on Surat. The chapter also seeks to understand the spatial arrangement of refugee groups within the walled city of Jaipur through an ethnographic exploration of Indira Bazar, one of the market spaces created in the 1970s for rehabilitating Sindhi refugees. These migrants mostly came from the

22  Sadan and Pushpendra urban areas of West Pakistan and were involved in the trade, and inhabited the new neighbourhoods and markets that emerged and formed part of the city’s burgeoning labour force. However, this did not ensure their absolute inclusion in the city’s representational matrix, which is dominated by the image of Rajput royalty and is inhabited by Jain and Baniya traders. This makes the Sindhi purusharthi a specific category for governance purposes but not legitimate enough as an identity within the burgeoning discourse of heritage in Jaipur. On the one hand, the “walled city” absorbed them in the retail economy and benefited from their enterprise; on the other, the recent re-signification of the wall as “heritage” by the state authorities has made the position of Sindhi retailers rather precarious in this new regime of valuation of urban infrastructure. To conclude, this volume is built around empirically grounded narratives of migrants’ subjectivities that deal with the concepts of belonging, home, and memory. It draws narratives broadly from five themes: labour, gender, folk, self, and religiosity. The volume marks a departure from the routine research on migration insofar as it adopts an interdisciplinary approach, traversing from history to anthropology, from gender studies to cultural studies, and from the literature of movement to folk genre, and, at the same time, engages with contentious ideas of identity, agency, structure, and fluidity in a mix of historical as well as contemporary contexts. The essays cross over state and national boundaries, communities, and time spans. Conceptually they move away from the received wisdom of creating binaries – binaries between the assigned identity and self-identity, agency and identity, agency and structure, static and fluid, temporal and spatial, sedentary and nomadic – without necessarily trying to create harmony between these concepts with apparently opposite meanings. In fact, these are used as tropes to peep into the migrants’ subjective world and envisage how the migrants’ subjectivities perceived and encountered the “objective” world outside. The essays do not portray migrants as victims of circumstances and devoid of agency. On the contrary, the essays make attempts to capture how migrants, whether living in the condition of utter banality or extraordinary success, have continuously strived to create, with varying degrees of success, what they valued in life materially as well as culturally.

Notes 1 The term ‘moral panic’ has been used by Lucassen et al. (2010) in the context of international migration leading to identity anxieties. To refer to such a panic in the context of internal migration might entail some empirical problems. Yet, such borrowings are done, keeping in mind the conceptual parallels and resonances observed when migrants coming from one region to another or coming from rural to urban landscapes are perceived as ‘other’. 2 G. Balachandran writes, The term “coolie” itself can boast several etymologies. In one coolie collapses into the payment for menial work (kuli in Tamil), the person performing it (kuli-al – “al” here describing the person performing the work and receiving

Introduction  23 payment). Even in this narrow definition, one senses a thicker history of the coolie in which an indigenous term is mobilized and charged with meanings depersonalizing the subject and rendering it constitutive of un-free wage labour relations. By the late-19th century in many parts of the world, the term coolie had also acquired an almost formless malleability. Used to describe nearly anyone performing labour for a wage or monetary payment, the term lost all contextually shaped meanings other than the most pejorative, even this very plasticity speaking perhaps to the presumed malleability of the (non-)person it described, and justifying coercive relations and institutions to stabilize her. The coolie was no mere discursive construct. S/he was also a product of colonial policies and practices entrenching political, legal, social, and cultural apparatuses to command and immobilize wage-seeking labour…. (Balachandran 2011: 267–268) 3 A growing acknowledgement of cultural dynamics at this stage can also be seen in the observations of M.S.A. Rao that, a cultural interpretation is important in gaining a deeper understanding of the process of migration… Staying out and moving about are related to people’s conceptions of space and time. People invest meaning to a place or territory in which they live and they also attach meaning to their movements. (Rao 1986: 32) 4 This relates to questions of representation which led to the problematisation of literature and cinema, on the one hand, and of the ethical dimensions of how language itself bears the pain of dislocation, on the other. 5 Among other provocations, Bhabha (1994: 47) argues for ‘a splitting of the postcolonial or the migrant subject’ in the contemporary which ‘insists that the phrase of identity cannot be spoken, except by putting the eye/I in the impossible position of enunciation’. 6 Here, it might be useful to remember the scholarship strand that emphasises circulation instead of migration to capture the complexities of the movement of people, ideas, and goods in history (Markovits et al. 2003). Deploying circulation differently, Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2003) have drawn our attention to how circular labour migrants create spaces for cultural and political assertion within the context of regional modernities and the role cultural politics play in the subjective experiences of migration.

References Balachandran, G. 2011. “Making Coolies, (Un)making Workers: ‘Globalizing’ Labour in the Late-19th and Early-20th Centuries”. Journal of Historical Sociology 24 (3) (September): 266–296. Bhabha, H. 1994. Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Breman, J. 1974. Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Breman, J. 1996. Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butalia, Urvashi. 1998. The Other side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Viking Penguin Books. Butler, J. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge. Chakrabarty, D. 1989/2000. Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal: 1890– 1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

24  Sadan and Pushpendra Chandavarkar, R. 1994. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chandavarkar, R. 1998. Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and State in India, 1850–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chandavarkar, R. 2009. History, Culture and the Indian City: Essays by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, Kingsley. 1951. The Population of India and Pakistan. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dogramaci, Burcu, and Brigit Mersmann. 2019. “Editorial Introduction: Art and Global Migration: Theories, Practices, and Challenges”. In Handbook of Art and Global Migration: Theories, Practices, and Challenges, edited by Burcu Dogramaci and Brigit Mersmann, 9–13. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Gabaccia, D.R. 2015. “Time and Temporality in Migration Studies”. In Migration Theories: Talking across Disciplines, edited by Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield, 37–66. New York and London: Routledge. Gabaccia, D.R., and D. Hoerder. 2011. “Editors’ Introduction”. In Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migration from the 1830s to the 1930s, edited by D.R. Gabaccia and D. Hoerder, 1–11. Leiden and Boston: Brill. George, G. 1883. Report on the Colonial Emigration from Bengal Presidency. Calcutta: Government of India. Gidwani, V., and K. Sivaramakrishnan. 2003. “Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion”. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93 (1): 186–213. Gidwani, V., and K. Sivaramakrishnan 2004. “Circular Migration and Rural Cosmopolitanism in India”. In Migration, Modernity and Social Transformation in South Asia, edited by Filippo Osella and Katy Gardner, 339–367. London: Sage. Hall, D.E. 2004. Subjectivity. New York: Routledge. Hazarika, Sanjay. 2020. “The Echo of Migrant Footfalls and the Silence on Policy”. The Hindu, 28 May. https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/theecho-of-migrant-footfalls-and-the-silence-on-policy/article31689921.ece. Accessed 25 January 2021. Joseph, T. 2018. Early Indians. New Delhi: Juggernaut. Karlekar, M. 1995. “Gender Dimensions in Labour Migration: An Overview”. In Women and Seasonal Labour Migration, edited by Loes Schenk-Sandbergen. New Delhi and London: Sage. Kerkhoff Sinha, Kathinka, ed. and trans. 2006. Jeevan Prakash, Autobiography of an Indian Indentured Labourer: Munshi Rahman Khan, 1874–1972. New Delhi: Shipra Publication. Lähdesmäki Saresma, T.T., and K. Hiltumen. 2016. “Fluidity and Flexibility of ‘Belonging’: Uses of the Concept in Contemporary Research”. Acta Sociologica 59 (3) (August): 233–247. Lucassen, J., L. Lucassen, and Peter Manning. 2010. “Migration History: Multidisciplinary Approaches”. In Migration History in World History: Multidisciplinary Approaches, edited by J. Lucassen, L. Lucassen and Peter Manning, 3–38. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Introduction  25 Manning, Peter. 2004. Migration in World History. London: Routledge. Markovits, C., J. Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds. 2003. Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia 1750–1950. New Delhi and Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Pandey, D. 1993. Migrant Labour and Gender Dimension. Bombay: Research Centre for Women’s Studies. Pandey, Gyanendra. 2001. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Patel, Tulsi. 2001. “Women and Migration”. In Structure and Transformation: Theory and Society in India, edited by Susan Visvanathan, 131–151. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ramaswamy, Vijaya, ed. 2020. Migrations in Medieval and Early Colonial India. London and New York: Routledge. Rao, M.S.A. 1986. “Some Aspects of Sociology of Migration in India”. In Studies in Migration: Internal and International Migration in India, edited by M.S.A. Rao, 19–38. New Delhi: Manohar. Samaddar, Ranabir. 2016. “Histories of the Late Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century Immigration and Our Time”. Public Arguments – 1, p. 6. Patna: Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Patna Centre. Sanadhya, T. 1914 [Samvat 1972]. Fiji Dwip Me Mere Ikkish Varsh. Firozabad: Bharati Bhawan. Schenk-Sandbergen, Loes, ed. 1995. Women and Seasonal Labour Migration. London: Sage. Thapar, R, M. Witchael, and Jaya Menon, et al. 2019. Which of Us Are Aryans? New Delhi: Aleph.

Part I

Labouring to freedom

2 The aspiration of a “civilised”, “human”, and “dignified” life An enquiry into sociability, sociality, and wellbeing of migrants in an Indian coalfield Dhiraj Kumar Nite Economic development and the quest for wellbeing are crucial to the history of migration (Lucassen and Lucassen, 2014; Manning 2005; Fisher 2014). Recent studies on migration have now noted the participation of a large number of Indians in the “great migration wave” from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Indians moved to new economic destinations overseas as well as within South Asia. One of the observations made in these studies is that most of these migrations were voluntary and channelled through networks of kith-and-kin as well as patronising headmen (Amrith 2011; Kumar 2016; Bates and Carter 2017; Roy 2017: 288; Tumbe 2018).1 Another observation suggests that migration was a definite instrument of improving economic wellbeing and an escape from poverty, while it was also a good teacher of self-respect among the labouring poor belonging to the depressed castes (Amrith 2011, 2013; Roy 2017: 297; Tumbe 2018: 112).2 These studies also note that labour migrancy, that is, circulating migrants between different centres and their native villages, emerged as a defining feature of the life-world of a large number of workers in Indian industrial and urban centres. The factors responsible for the persistent circulation of working Indians included the inadequacy of supports for sustained reproduction for migrants and the existence of prohibitive state regulations in the destination economies (Chandavarkar 1994/2002; Amrith 2011: 195–197; Breman 2014; Tumbe 2018: 19–20).3 It has also been noted that the ties of kinship, caste, ethnicity, and race marked the social structure of migrants and South Asian urban centres (Chandavarkar 1994/2002; Chakrabarty 1989/2000; Gooptu 2003; Harriss-White 2003; Joshi 2003; Chari 2004; de Neve 2005; Parry 2009, 2020; Sanchez and Strumpell 2014; Knotter 2015). The efforts of peoples at coming to terms with such a social structure generated varied experiences. In a few instances, caste/ethnic consanguinity shared by a group of persons served the mobilisation of capital, skill, and fostering of loyalty in favour of the master in the enterprise (Chari 2004; de Neve 2005; Roy 2010). In some cases, it proved conducive to solidarity in a vulnerable, disadvantaged community and facilitated horizontal mobilisation between them for agitation against their foes (Nair 1998; Gooptu 2003; Blecking 2015; Parthasarathi 2016; Rai 2016; Slenes 2016). In most situations, however, DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-3

30  Dhiraj Kumar Nite fissures along the lines of caste, ethnicity, and race amongst peoples were the source of woes for these peoples. It symbolised estrangement, integration pessimism, and the relation of domination, subordination, and exclusion. It set the limit on their solidarity and capacity of collective bargaining (Gooptu 2003; Amrith 2011; Arents and Tsuneishi 2015; Slaby 2015; Speranza 2015; Trotter Jr 2015). But does this focus on identities, whether rigid/ fluid or ranked/unranked, allow us to map the transformations of workers’ worldviews, sociability, wellbeing, and the effect on the migration pattern? Some studies have noted the array of transformations in the consciousness of working peoples, without any teleology of class consciousness, leading to their collective assertion against both caste-based inequities and subordination to capital (Joshi 2003; Bhattacharya 2014; Karuna 2016). This chapter contributes to the understanding of the transformation of worldviews and sociability amongst working peoples and its function for their pursuit of wellbeing. An understanding of this dimension of wellbeing, this study maintains, broadens the discussion and our grasp of social underpinning of the quality of life. Such a discussion has often placed at the centre the economic dimension (van Zanden et al. 2014). It has treated unseemly sociability and hierarchical sociality as a source of inequality and drag on wellness. My study treats the transformation in sociality and sociability as a cause of wellbeing as well as its constituent indicator. The chapter demonstrates that socio-cultural proclivities of migrant workers were entwined with the work relations, and influenced the code of sociability and respectability amongst mineworkers, comprising a large number of migrants in the coalfield of Jharia during 1895–1970. Located in the north of Damodar River in the district of Dhanbad, previously ­Manbhum, from 1895 to 1906, the Jharia coalfield became the largest coal-­ producing zone in the Indian subcontinent. The period covered the era of private commercial mining. A new ethics of human, civilised, and dignified life took root over time amongst mineworkers from the aftermath of World War I (WW  I). It represented the objection of mineworkers to sociability ridden with caste, ethnic and racial inequities. Workers who secured regular wage work sought to consolidate economic mobility by removing socio-cultural disability and deprivation. The factors responsible for this phenomenon included the emphases of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on a human, civilised life for workers, the struggle of organised labour for industrial democracy, and caste upliftment campaigns for dignified and advancing life. This phenomenon contributed to forging solidarity over time amongst the socially disadvantaged groups in their campaigns for social security and assertion for respectability in an ethnically hierarchised sociality. It means that in terms of explanation, economic mobility led to the claim for freedom from socio-cultural disability and, in turn, the latter propelled the urge for economic improvement. These new ethics had a substantive bearing on the striving of workers for improvement; additionally, they also bore the imprint of ethnic estrangement and discordance. A substantial block of migrants sought privileged recognition for

The aspiration of a “civilised” life  31 themselves at the cost of the locals. The hierarchical sociality received a blow, however, without undermining the notion about the purity/dignity of castes/ethnicity being pre-eminently protected by the purity/dignity of their women.4 This movement/change occurred in twin contexts: the interplay between the migration patterns and social composition of the workforce, and the intersection between economic relations and social composition of the workforce. Notably, shifts in the social composition and socio-cultural patterns of migrants were equally wedded to the dynamics of economic structure and political processes in both the place of origin and the destination economy. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first section traces the social origin of the workforce and shifts within it. The second delves into the entwinement of the social structure of the workforce with work relations, and the third section examines what can be understood as the code of sociability. The emergence of a new worldview amongst workers forms the final section.

Migrants and their social composition The coal mining industry recruited persons from various social groups, and places covering distances up to nearly 460 km in the west (Mirzapur and Gazipur) and 650 km from its centre in the south (Bilaspur). From the early years of the coal industry in Jharia, since 1895, mineworkers hailed from multiple ethnic, caste, religious, gender, age, and spatial groups. Their social composition altered as time wore on. The early mineworker, usually, belonged to what census enumerators described as the “Aboriginal” and “semi-aboriginal” (semi-Hinduised) populations: they are now known as the Adivasis and Dalit. The Santhals, Bauris, and Bhuinyas together formed nearly two-thirds of the total workforce in the first one-and-half decades. They maintained their numbers until the mid-1920s but began to lose their share, accounting for close to two-fifths of the total. The Ghatwals, Kurmi-Mahtos, and Turis were the other earliest communities who took up mining (see Table 2.1).5 The Bhuinyas, Chamars, Musahars, Dusadhs, Goalas, and others were, increasingly, recruited since 1905–6, when mining expanded and employers looked for a newer stream of migrants from relatively distant areas. The Chamars, pre-eminently, included the Satnamis from Bilaspur (the Central Province or CP) who had already established themselves as railway construction workers. The social origin of workers drastically altered following the removal of women from belowground mining during the mid-1920s and 1946.6 Traditional mineworkers, such as the Santhals, Bauris, and Chamars were, usually, family-oriented labourers. Their numbers fell when the Mines (Amendment) Act 1929, related to the prohibition on employment of women, was fully enforced. The Bhuinyas were the only group of traditional mineworkers who held on to their share. In their case, women successfully competed for works on the pit surface and the quarry and worked

32  Dhiraj Kumar Nite Table 2.1  Social origin of coalminers in the selected years Social groups Census (1921) percentage Manjhis/ Santhals Bhuinyas Bauris Dusadhs Chamars Rajwars Musahars Turis Muslims Ghatwals Kurmis Rest others

Census (1931) percentage

12.5

12

13.2 11.5 4 10 – 3 4 5.5 4 3.6 32

13 11 4.0 10 – – 4 5.5 4.0 3.5 33

Bose’s (1934) percentage

Prasad committee (1938) percentage

Census (1971) percentage

7.3

5.4

5.7

8 7 4.6 8 – – 5.4 11 2.7 1.2 44.3

15.16 4.4 4.05 2.5 NA NA 5 14.67 2.3 1.6 44.2

29

15

50

Source: Census, 1921, Vol. VII, Part I, pp. 298–304; Report of the Bihar Labour Enquiry Committee or Prasad Report, 1938, Vol. II, p. 311; Ghosh, 1992, pp. 43–61; Dhanbad District Census, 1971, Vol. X, pp. 211, 251, 572, 574.

separately from their male members. New Bhuinya men were also available to do loading work, which others regarded as a feminine job. Their share in employment diminished in the 1950s, when another spate of replacement of women by men occurred in the aftermath of the Mines Act, 1952 prohibiting the employment of women from night works between 7 pm and 5 am. Men from the unprivileged and underprivileged caste-Hindus, including the Goala, Rajwar, Jolaha, Lohar, Dom, Dusadh, Pasi, Kahar, Nuniya, Beldar, and the Muslims came from the distant areas to take the place of women and men who vacated their positions in their search for an opportunity of family-oriented labour. The social composition of workers shifted little in the decades following the early 1950s. The Santhal mineworkers, described as Scheduled Tribes (Adivasis), included 6,332 males and 1,727 females, accounting for just 5.7 percent of the total workforce in 1971.7 Among them, 4,025 men and 1,029 women, that is, two-thirds were local rural persons and others urban, who migrated from the neighbouring district of Hazaribagh. Among the Bauris, Chamars, Bhuinyas, Rajwars, Dusadhas, and Musahars, now called Scheduled Castes (Dalit), 34,580 males and 5,903 females were employed in the mines, accounting for approximately 29 percent of the total in 1971.8 Among them, 18,649 men and 2,788 women, that is, one-half were urban

The aspiration of a “civilised” life  33 [immigrants]. The proportion of the rest, consisting of Muslims and underprivileged and privileged caste-Hindus increased by 1971; they accounted for about half of the total. The early workers, mostly, came from the neighbouring districts and moved in, pre-eminently, as family-oriented labourers.9 The first flush of immigrants from the relatively distant areas, from 1905 to 1906, arrived to meet a spurt in the labour demand and dramatic expansion of mining. It did not, however, significantly alter the balance between units of family-­ oriented labour, and those single men who maintained their family back home in the village.10 The number of single male migrants from the distant areas grew from the 1920s.11 Single female mineworkers, chiefly widows and separated, also constituted a small proportion of the total workforce (Seth 1940: 176). The share of local workers fell from two-thirds of the total in 1911 to one-third in 1921 and about one-fifth by 1971.12 Labour migrancy was tenacious. This was coeval with the trend that workers increasingly became career miners and were gradually becoming stable in the mining areas. As small as 15 percent workers were settled while about one-third were regular commuters in 1921. In the next decade, the settled workers accounted for one-fourth of the total.13 The former increased to two-fifth of the total alongside about one-tenth as commuters by World War II (WW II).14 Their rate of stabilisation halted and was estimated at just 46–50 percent after three-quarters of its advancement in 1970.15 As compared to this, the phenomenon of seasonal rural visits of workers for participation in agriculture seemed to have eclipsed by the mid1960s. Such breaks away from the mines involved as many as one-half of the workforce until the mid-1940s. Similarly, labour absenteeism fell from about 25 percent in the mid-1940s to eight to nine percent in the mid1960s. G.S. Jabbi, the Chief Inspector of Mines, considered the latter figure as a standard industrial situation.16 The co-existence of two types of mineworkers – career miners and target workers – as noted by Ranajit Dasgupta (1994) thus declined. The social composition of workers largely coincided with the division of labour and influenced the labour process. The British and the natives of privileged castes, such as the Brahmin, Rajput, and Kayastha, being the literati, occupied the managerial, upper-rung supervisory, and clerical positions. They formed about five to six percent of the total workforce. The natives of privileged castes, underprivileged castes, and the Muslims occupied the positions of skilled and artisanal jobs, such as the surveyor, mining sirdars (foreman or shift bosses), firemen, safetymen, blasting-men, explosive-carriers, pumpmen, banksmen, onsetter (liftmen), engine-men, boiler-men, machine-men, carpenters, prop-men and timbermen, masons, electricians, and the labour recruiter. They constituted another nine to ten percent of the total workforce. The coal cutters, loaders, trolley men, earth-removers, and coal cleaners, more than four-fifth of the workforce till the early 1950s when mechanisation remained limited, were men, women, and children mostly belonging to the Adivasis and depressed castes, both

34  Dhiraj Kumar Nite locals and migrants. The traditional mining communities lost the positions of safetymen, mining sirdars, and blasting-men, when the Mines Act, 1923– 24 and 1937–38 imposed the criteria of literacy and certified training as prerequisites for performing such jobs. Initially, the traditional gang sirdar (headman or team leader) multitasked, doing jobs of supervision of his gang-men in the gallery and faces of mines, a preliminary inspection of the mining faces, blasting or coal cutting, and recruitment. As the efforts at mechanisation and scientific management advanced and the legislative mandate encouraged it, their illiteracy weakened their claim on such occupations. Henceforth, they were mostly limited to coal cutting, hauling, loading, and recruitment.17 Little evidence is available to indicate the role played by any other exclusionary component, barring those of literacy and training scheme, of the employment policy for the overlap between occupational division and social composition. Similar to the social composition of workers, their spatial origins also, to an extent, overlapped with the division of labour. The local workers from the district of erstwhile Manbhum and other neighbouring districts were, pre-eminently, concentrated in coal cutting, hauling, and loading jobs. The Musahars and Bhuinyas from Gaya and Hazaribagh districts were, primarily, loaders. The middle-caste workers from Munger district occupied the position of trolley-men. The Oriyas, Nuniyas, and Beldars were concentrated in surface works, such as earthmoving and railway-wagon loading. The Bilaspuris mostly performed blasting, coal cutting, and loading. Workers who hailed from UP and Punjab were preferred for mechanical and other better-paid skilled jobs.18 The concentration of the locals in sweat labour, while the mechanical and supervisory occupations mostly allocated to the migrants, was akin to the situation on the Turkish and Brazilian coalmines and contrary to most other cases (Kahveci 2015; Speranza 2015). So far, we have seen the shift in migration pattern – from locals to the distant migrants and noted the change in the social composition of the workforce from family-oriented labourers to single men. There was the reduction in the number of Adivasi, while an increase in that of unprivileged and underprivileged castes. The overlap between the division of labour and social differentiation in the workforce was also evident. Its connection with sociability is the focus of our subsequent discussion.

Abusive work relations Ethnic, caste, racial, and territorial dimensions of the division of labour seem to have as much shaped the experiences of workers of the work relations (relations in production) and social transaction among workers; as the economic relations and political processes did to the socio-cultural dimensions.19 The choices made by different workers and their skills involving literacy and work experience determined the allocation of jobs partly. No evidence comes forth to support any idea, whatsoever, that the management directly planned ethnic or caste aspect of job allocation. The management,

The aspiration of a “civilised” life  35 however, considered the social groups traditionally known for sweat labour as desirable for strenuous jobs of coal-cutting, loading, trolleying, and earth-moving.20 The method of labour recruitment maintained by the labour contractor, called the sirdars (headmen), played the most crucial role in the concentration of some social groups on one or other collieries rather than occupations. The recruiter selected members mostly of his caste, ethnicity, community, and village/region in the gang and supplied them to a colliery in return of commission on per unit of output performed and per recruit supplied. Nevertheless, there was no comparable pattern to what existed in South African mines: the employment of the Basotho workers for sinking a shaft (Guy and Thabane 1988). Bachu Ghosh, an owner of the coalmines, preferred creating a mixed team of mineworkers and encouraged monetary incentive in order to get maximum output (Ghosh 1992: 387). This was similar to the managerial practice on South African mines (Moodie 1994; Alexander 2003). Gender division of work – women performing mostly loading and hauling works belowground and loading, coal sifting on the surface – was categorical. Employers maintained that the relatively weak physique and lower intelligence of women made them suitable for such works. Social identity mattered in the workplace in several ways. Workers and staff interacted with each other within the existing division of labour and graded social, what Ambedkar called, of labourers. The power of managerial and supervisory personnel over production workers rested on their technical position in the labour process, better economic standing, and a superior status in social hierarchy. Production workers gave their thumb impression on an attendance register maintained by the attendance clerk and reported their output to another clerk, called Munshi babu. They initially collected their payment from the gang-headmen. From the 1920s, they queued up on the weekends in front of the payment office and collected their pay envelop from the payment clerk. Over there, the usurers, mainly recruiters and company security personnel themselves grabbed their dues from workers. No evidence supports a presumption, whatsoever, of any practice of social distancing between workers along the line of identities in the workplace. This notwithstanding, the clerical and supervisory staff, it could be said as per other pieces of information to come below, would have liked to maintain a reasonable spatial distance from many a production worker in the real workplace, whom they regarded as the lower caste, the source of ritual pollution (also see Gooptu 2003; Joshi 2003). Production workers would have received a message in the early days of their professional life that the modern industrial sector was only in a limited sense distant from the ambit of purity and pollution, which defined the caste-ridden Indian society. This is what Dashrath Manjhi conveyed to his interlocutor in 1949–50. Manjhi had run away as a teenager from his village in Gaya district to the coalmines in Dhanbad. He worked for some years and returned Gaya, onwards to his village. For the first time, he learnt from his interlocutor and the newspaper that the new Indian government prohibited untouchability; now, he

36  Dhiraj Kumar Nite could touch any other fellow without retributive contempt. In other words, his past on the mines had not witnessed any scope of touchable fraternity and unrestrained inclusivity. However, his own reading of his experience on the mines was as follows: Dhanbad mines offered an opportunity of cash wage, paid labour, and respectable recognition to an industrious worker.21 Manjhi’s self-assessment of life in the mines allows to modulate our understanding of untouchability/caste-discrimination on the mines. The European managers and overman (mine captain) entertained autonomy of mineworkers in mine galleries and working faces, but they frequently expressed their command and disapproval of some activities of workers by hurling of foul language and a racial slur on the Indian worker. This was one of the issues included in the list of grievances of workers, who went on a work stoppage in 1920. This was the moment of nationalist agitation of the non-cooperation movement. The strikers reported to the leaders with a sense of humiliation how they were not paid wages for Dewali and were called “damned fools” by Sahibs (managers and overman) and abused.22 In another episode, Shiv Kali Bose, an Indian clerk on the TISCO mines of Jamadoba, slapped back a European manger, who racially abused him. In his enquiry report E.S. Hoernle, the Additional District Collector, advised the European officers on the mines to show restraint in their favour, for the educated Indian staff imbued with a new nationalist fervour may not tolerate the old kind of behaviour of the superordinate.23 Physical violence of the superordinate against the Indian staff disappeared over time, but the foul language and subtle racial discrimination in the selection of staff, work allocation, and provisioning of employee benefits remained widespread. The Indian staff complained against it to the Whitely (Royal) Commission on Labour in 1929–30 and the Mahindra Committee in 1945–46.24 The rapid Indianisation of upper echelon of mining personnel in the Republic of India resolved this issue. The European, as well as Indian superordinate personnel, maintained the habit of exercising extra-economic coercion, violence, and of hurling abuses on production workers. They closely followed the message of Hoernle, which was silent on production workers. The company maintained muscle men, called pehalwan and latthaith, who frequently beat up those workers who did not go on work and stayed back in the workers’ tenements for one or other reasons.25 The Badda Sahib, a British manager, of the Industry colliery, reported Amulya Mali, had kept a big dog, which he would direct to attack a worker who declined to follow his command.26 All these outraged workers from the late 1930s. The late 1930s and the later 1940s, barring the interruption of World War II, was the period of the heightened assertion of the productive masses in general. Now, production workers resisted physical assaults and verbal abuses of the superordinate. In retaliation, they began to assault some infamous European officers in the last decade of colonial rule.27 Their target further expanded to include other notorious Indian personnel in the late 1940s.28 The associations of owners and managers found the situation slipped out of their hands, their company

The aspiration of a “civilised” life  37 security guards helpless. They sought the stringent intervention of the state police in order to curb the growing “indiscipline” and assaults of workers to protect the morale of company staff. Many more police posts were set up in 1949–50, which to an extent succeeded in restraining both parties.29 The new equilibrium of low violence also meant that the superordinate staff came to prevail on production workers especially on the small and medium-size mines, accounting for about one-third of total employees, where the unionisation of workers remained fragile. A new spate of militant resistance and counter-assaults occurred on this part of the coalfields in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when productive masses, in general, expressed their new sense of self-respect and fighting consciousness.30 The superordinate staff sought to impose a dress code, which marked the identity of dominant and subordinate as well as that of graded social positions. A dress code established social distance between them. Production workers usually wore dhoti, a loincloth. The latter slowly gave way to a new garment, including full-pant and half-pant in the 1950s on. Superordinate staffs reserved full-pant for themselves and asked production workers to put on half-pant on the mines. Similarly, production workers were prevented from putting on a wristwatch, which superordinate personnel saw a cardinal sign of their privilege in the workplace. Persons like Md. Yakub, Amulya Mali and Sathrughan Rajwar, who initially expressed their desire for parity by transgressing this dress and behaviour code, faced the charge of insubordination and disciplinary violence at the hands pehalwan of the company. This practise was in vogue in the context when the employer neither provided mining overall nor any other dress.31 The overlap between social division and labour division fostered the relation of domination, hierarchisation and marginalisation and cast an adverse spell on the opportunity available to the disadvantaged groups for a superior, fruitful profession. A well-known case of this situation was the removal of women from belowground works. Another better-archived episode relates to the removal of Tunu Chamar (Ram), a 36-year-old Dalit man, from the position of labour contractor (Sirdar).32 He was a substantial Sirdar along with his brother and uncle. The management favoured him because of, first, the supply of nearly 100 workers and, second, his anti-­ union stance. Following the long-standing strike of 26 days in the Jealgora colliery of the East Indian Coal Company in early 1947, the union leaders asked for the removal of Tunu Sirdar and Nilmohan Mishra, a timekeeper. The enquiry held into the matter on 29 May 1947 in the Jealgora office concluded that the complainants, Ramadhar Singh and Baijnath Goala (the union activists) did not like a Chamar as well off as Tunu Sirdar and were against him. They had verbally complained of Tunu Sirdar committing dishonour to the union flag. He was also assaulted and was accused as the strike-breaking sirdar. The enquiry of the Labour Commissioner recommended that Mr. Mishra be transferred to other works, and Tunu Sirdar should join the union and pledge not to oppose its activity. He met both conditions. Yet, the union

38  Dhiraj Kumar Nite refused membership to Tunu Sirdar, and consequently, the company was reluctant to continue with his Sirdarship. His men were, however, working in the mines. Tunu Sardar wrote a letter to Binodananda Jha, Labour Minister of Bihar government, Srikrishna Singh, Chief Minister of the Bihar government, and subsequently to Jagjivan Ram, Labour Minister of the GOI, in this regard for seeking their intervention. He described himself as, I belong to such a poor and humble trodden scheduled caste (Chamar) community, who has no hope of justice and protection except govt. As it is clear fact that so called high caste people never want to see this community in a financially good position and always try to dominate and crush us by fair or foul means, which cannot be denied… The Union is taking so serious action against me only because I belong to such a community which one cannot be heard by anyone, that is why the union is violating over your decision. I request your honour to reconsider my case most sympathetically and instruct the labour union to enroll me as the member of the union and thus save the life of a poor Harijan family, who will of (sic) nowhere if dismissed from the colliery. 33 (3 November 1947, signed in Hindi) He got signatures of all his men on the above petition. This included the names of workers belonging to Chamar, Pasi, Dusadh, and Mahto. He informed Jagjivan Ram on 9 February 1948 that: There are about 40 sardars in the colliery, who have direct concern with their labour only and he is only the Harijan sardar having 90 labourers who have all along been supporting him. But, the so-called high caste members of the union have jealously [sic] with this community by nature and are deadly against him.34 In defence of union’s stand, S.B. Sen, a former Forward Blockist and later affiliated to the INTUC, stated that “Tunu Chamar is a notorious man and it can be proved from the police record about his character. His financial position is sound. He gets a royalty from the Bhulabararee Coal Co. Ltd., he got the land property in the colliery and earns about Rs. 200/per week from the workers as interests on the loan. The goondaism of this group is still going on. An old sirdar was assaulted brutally at night by one of his gangs on the last week of October 1948”. Sen’s argument on this matter prevailed at last. Thus, Tunu Chamar could not regain his labour contract.

Unseemly sociability and sociality among the migrants Social differentiation intruded on the colliery settlements in a full-blown way. During the early two-decades, mining companies worked on the principle of continuous renewal of the workforce through the supply of fresh

The aspiration of a “civilised” life  39 migrants. They hired the labour recruiter, called sirdars, on a commission to recruit, train and control mineworkers.35 Migrants were, initially, housed in thatched huts. They constructed these huts themselves with materials provided by employers on the employer’s property. The local commuters preferred to live in their nearby villages. Employers slowly and unevenly took certain interest in a temporary stay of migrants in order to secure a section of the stable workforce and obviate the disruption in production caused by the sudden flight of workers in the wake of outbreaks of diseases, like cholera, smallpox, and plague (Nite 2019). From the mid-1910s, mineworkers slowly moved into the colliery tenements, known as arched dhowrahs, allotted by employers. A colliery tenement, typically, consisted of around 60–70 back-to-back and side-by-side houses. Each of them had one room of 1000 cubic feet (twelve by twelve by seven sizes) and one tiny courtyard. The latter functioned as a kitchen.36 The number of tenements remained far short of the needs of workers. The tenements were “overcrowded”: between two to three mineworkers’ families, that is, six to twelve persons lived in each of them.37 The average size of a coalminer’s family was about five to six individuals – comprising husband, wife, and three to four offspring.38 Many of them also included two or three kin and old parents. Most of them did various jobs on the mines. Mineworkers shared a tenement as well as a neighbourhood or coolly line with fellow workers of the same family, tribe, caste, or territory (district or village). Over time, a neighbourhood (para) of such workers tenements came about and symbolised as an ethnicised, differentiated space. We hear, for instance, of the Bhuiyan dhowrah, Bauri dhowrah, Dushadh dhowrah, Mahato dhowrah, Beldar dhowrah, Gaya dhowrah, Munger dhowrah, Paschima dhowrah and the Muhammedan dhowrah.39 The migrants belonging to the caste Hindus from the Gangetic Bihar and the United Provinces were called Paschimas, while those of from the local villages popularly known as Dehatis. The spatial concentrations of mining communities sharing a specific kinship and spatial network were, partly, a consequence of “the segment and control” policy of employers. The latter encouraged, indeed planned, this kind of housing arrangements to obviate any prospects of potential class solidarity or threats of coalworkers’ collective assertion or strike.40 The labour recruiter distributed tenements between his gang members consisting of persons from his caste, ethnicity, village, and religion. The policy maintained by the mining companies was similar to what others have noticed with relation to the Korean migrants in Japan, Polish migrants in France, African Americans in the US, Africans in Rhodesia and South Africa, and blacks in Brazil (Moodie 1994; Alexander 2003; Arents and Tsuneishi 2015; Slaby 2015; Speranza 2015; Trotter Jr 2015). Notably, ethnicisation of colliery settlements was conducive to endogamous fraternisation among migrants. Over time, Indian employers deployed security guards, called pehalwan and latthait, to compel workers to come out of the tenements and start work as per the schedule and conform to the managerial scheme of things.41

40  Dhiraj Kumar Nite The endogamous, ethnic fraternisation formed along the lines of territorial affinity as well. A noticeable split emerged between the group of long-distance migrants on one side and the locals on the other. The stable migrants, initially, formed labour unions. They voiced their concern for access to mining jobs even at the cost of the locals. The context of retrenchment and cutthroat competition for mining jobs, which was itself shrinking amid the Great Depression, roughened the social exchange between the unionised migrants and the non-unionised locals. The former asked for the allocation of existing jobs primarily to settled mineworkers. In case of retrenchment, the locals could be the first and the settled migrants the last.42 The Indian Colliery Labour Union (ICLU) expressed such demands, thus: A minimum wage sufficient to maintain the workers and his family in reasonable comfort and to meet his other expenses necessary to maintain his position according to the standard of a civilised society.43 … if colliery owners needed to get rid of the workforce of his colliery, he should get rid of the Dehatis (the local peasant-miners) first and only after that the retrenchment of the Paschima workers should take place.44 This fissure between the migrants and the locals became a sore point in social exchange on a score of issues. It retreated on the coalmines when the labour leader undertook concerted initiatives to organise and unite both the migrants and the locals in struggles for social security, dignity, and job security. Such leaders laid down the political process as opposed to chauvinist attitude. They championed broader, secular fraternisation. One remarkable case of this kind occurred under the banner of Hindustan Khan Mazdoor Sangh (HKMS), led by Sadan Gupta, in the frontier collieries on the bank of Damodar river in 1946–49. On this zone of the coalfield, the locals worked in a significant number. The administration of life imprisonment to Sadan Gupta thwarted his unusual project. It revived once more in the late 1960s under the leadership of A.K. Roy and Sadan Gupta, who came out of the jail after serving twenty years-long imprisonment. This impetus was wedded to the sense of contempt shared by migrants against the existing unions functioning in a zamindary style. The leadership of Roy and Gupta introduced social movement unionism that combined the causes of industrial workers and peasantry, and the question of dignity and autonomy of the productive classes as a whole.45 Social differentiation and hierarchisation cast a tumultuous spell on sociality among workers over the sexual economy. Mineworkers passed through a moment of intense emotional and social turbulence in the wake of the substitution of women mineworkers with the single men miners and the removal of women from belowground work. Women increasingly competed to secure surface jobs. The clerical staff exploited his power of allocating employment to seek sexual favour from vulnerable women. In some instances, women sought to establish sexual liaison as well as cohabitation

The aspiration of a “civilised” life  41 with the regularly employed men. Amid shifting social composition of the migrant workforce, the caste/ethnic affinity of men and vulnerable women often differed. Many members in the mining communities faced with these activities, felt disturbed, violated, anxious, and robbed of respectability. They saw with contempt sexual assaults on women members, the defiant sexual behaviour of women and the aggression on their privileged control on women within each community (Nite 2014b). They realised that the need of the hour was to place individuals and households within a stable normative order. The community, therefore, encouraged couples to invest heavily in the sanctity of stable relationships. “It went to the extent of tying, at times by force, a widow or a separated woman, who preferred to be on her own, with a man”, reported Moteshwar Mondal.46 “Apart from such community-induced couplings, there were cases when a Dabang Neta (an awful leader) type man and a Beneta (a degenerate lathaith) seduced single women to stay with them. A woman went into such “liaisons” under compulsion, since she had to secure proper care of herself and her child. “Rarely, if ever”, continued Mondal, “would a woman indulge herself to the extent of deserting her children to pursue such dangerous liaison”.47 The family and community of a single woman swore by the template of the “monogamous” conjugal home. For the community, therefore, the “vulnerable” status of a single woman, whether unmarried or widowed, with or without children, was a cause of serious concern. The same code of conduct presumably did not apply to single men. The community did, of course, continue to observe the sexual behaviour of a man closely once he entered a liaison with a particular woman, but it would not overtly pressurise the man to get married to the woman. This was a gender bias in-built in the sexual contract as understood by the men. Such community vigilance reflected much more than a pure communal desire to discipline a sexually transgressing woman into a staid and sedate one. Some anthropological studies conducted in the 1960s–70s focused on such community vigilance adopted by the Santhals and the Bauris offer some interesting leads in this regard.48 The traditional colliery communities concerned themselves with the vulnerability of women against the broader background of what they considered an overall moral “degeneration”. This “degeneration” was manifest in the form of sexually predatory acts by hostile individuals. Given the unequal power relation in the mining area, the community could not always subject these aggressive individuals to retribution. The community could not penalise, for instance, a high official for leading its women astray. However, it perceived such dalliances as a collective embarrassment. A woman ensnared in an abhorrent affair was understood to have brought disgrace to the entire community. The community to which the woman in question belonged would be taunted by the so-called respectable immigrants as violable and inferior. The only way left for the community in such instances to reclaim an “honourable” existence was to try to prevent the recurrence of such shameful events. The community raided houses of the individuals who resorted to prostitution. It took

42  Dhiraj Kumar Nite all precautions to guard against the vulnerability of its women to sexual exploitation by the loading and time-keeping babus and other Paschimas. A group of Santhal youth, associated with the newly formed Adibasi Parishad and Sanot Santhal Samaj (Cleaner Santhal Society), wrote letters in 1963 to the manager and contractor requesting them to “cease the employment of illiterate young ladies with immediate effect. In special cases, she may be employed only on written permission obtained from the Association”.49 The illiteracy of a young woman, they believed, made her too gullible to resist sexual advances on her own. The Adibasi Parishad, formed in 1960 under the leadership of an educated miner employed at the Bhowra colliery, exhorted workers to abandon drinking, to educate himself or herself in order to lead a contented and dignified life and to keep a close watch on the up-country labourer denying them any more chances to dishonour their women workers. One Santhal man employed at the Bhowra colliery (Karam Chandra & Thapar (KCT) Co. Ltd.) received a serious injury, which he later succumbed to, when he defended, in 1962, his wife from the unwelcome advances of a lathaith employed by the K.C.T. Company. The man was a member of the Adibasi Parishad. This incident gave a spurt to the movement among the Santhals in the Chota Nagpur region that culminated in the formation of the Sanot Santhal Samaj.50 The Santhals altogether boycotted any individual, who entered a “liaison” with any non-Santhal mining personnel. Unlike them, when a Bauri woman entered in a pairing family, the Bauris wanted her to hold on to decent home life. These responses of the communities were predicated on a palpable feeling of being disadvantaged in hierarchical power relations, and a collective will to overcome the feeling of helplessness. The history of the Bauris’ self-assertion began with a momentous event: The Bauri youth formed the association, called Harijan Sevak Sangh, and initiated the first reform efforts in 1945, following Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s visit to Dhanbad district. A vision of integration of different castes within a just and equitable social order inspired them. They organised an inter-caste marriage between a Bauri girl and a Rajwar boy intending to remove the caste barrier.51 They had no problem approving sexual alliances with the Paschimas provided these conformed to the ethics of mutual respect.

Untoward experiences in schools Coalminers found in modern education an avenue to help their children escape the drudgery of mining and to bring some measure of prestige to the family, which they lost every other day to the babus and Sarkar. Increasingly, they enrolled their sons in colliery schools. A girl’s education remained less critical than the boy’s, although. Three points are discernible in this regard. The families took great pains, wilfully suffering financial difficulties and absolving the school-going elder son from all responsibilities otherwise incumbent on him. The increased share of education in household budgets and the fact that workers provided regular subscriptions to the labour

The aspiration of a “civilised” life  43 organisation, unanimously evinced a favourable view most of them took on the question of schooling.52 The third point is about unique debility that haunted the children of only the “unprivileged” production workers. They faced discrimination and even persecution, because of their caste identity, at the hands of teachers and babus responsible for the management of colliery schools. These problems drew the attention of investigators, like B.R. Seth and S.R. Deshpande in 1938–45. Again, the schools, which have been provided by the employers at their cost in big collieries, are looked upon by the working classes as institutions for the education of children of the Babus, i.e., clerks and higher-paid employees. This inferiority complex from which the workers suffer together with the discouraging and unsympathetic treatment that the teachers meet out to the workers’ children, is greatly responsible for keeping away their children from schools. In not a few schools that were visited, it was found that benches were provided for the Babus’ children while the children of the workers were made to squat on the bare floor. In three or four schools, miners’ children were found to be sitting in the corners of the classrooms like untouchables. When some workers were questioned as to why they were not sending their children to schools, they not only complained about the big demand of the masters or their discriminatory and unsympathetic treatment towards their children, but also went so far as to say that the teachers do not pay so much attention to their children as they pay to the children of the Babus of high-class skilled workers. There may have been some objections on the part of the caste Hindus to have their children educated in the same school with the children of the depressed classes, and who can say that some moral pressure is not brought to bear upon the depressed class workers not to send their children to schools.53 This scenario reminds us of the situation that existed in the British mining centres in particular and the experiences of the children of the working families in general until the nineteenth century.54 The “Babus” whom Seth referred to were only too ready to undermine these institutions designed to usher in “civilised life” and for “humanisation of working and living conditions”. The babus who led the Swaraj campaign in the aftermath of WW I were beneficiaries of an earlier phase of improvement in the labour-management relationship.55 Many of them chose to confine their energies to ensuring proper implementation of the benefits concerning work hours, leaves, and other facilities laid down by the Indian Mines Act, 1923 (Amendment) and those managed by the Jharia Mines Health Board and Jharia Mines Water Board. Other section of mining peoples and publicists had proceeded to launch an independent initiative during the Great Depression when the class conflict between employers and workers as well as between supervisors and production workers assumed a sharper edge on the issue of supervisory exaction.56 Ideological and political struggles that

44  Dhiraj Kumar Nite animated the working-classes as a whole, as well as those between its different strata and within the class of babus, mediated social relations between different sections of the working masses. The scenario in colliery schools represented the struggle as also the agreement reached between the liberal babus and others against the reactionary (Brahmanical) babus. Many in the former camp perceived the new agreement as advancement whereby children of the “depressed” castes entered colliery schools. The reactionary (Brahmanical) babus believed, noted Deshpande with disgust in 1945, that “education would make the children of coal-cutters and loaders refuse to enter into the colliery”.57 This conservative worldview was the most definite hurdle that squarely confronted the children of production workers. Chapal Bhattacharya, General Secretary of the All India Mine Workers’ Federation, strongly disapproved of such myths in preference for the necessity of a better citizen and an educated, efficient mineworker. He complained about caste-based discriminatory practices found in colliery schools to the Indian Coalfields Committee on the eve of the formation of the Republic of India.58 This progressive worldview rationalised the relevance of universal schooling and slowly pulled down the cultural blockage.59 The engagement of mining children with schooling produced mixed results. Some, like Ramjash Rawani, were fortunate enough to acquire a matriculation degree; many others were forced, after a few years in primary school, to give up and start wage work.60 Syamnarain Rawani, a son of trolley man Kesho Rawani, and Shatrughan Rajwar, a son of a mining sirdar, had altogether different lessons to learn. Their fathers sent them to colliery schools. They were socially not privileged enough to receive engaging treatment at the hands of the teachers and other schoolmates. The teacher at the primary level in Bhowra colliery frequently beat Syamnarain, and hence he opted out of school. He also felt that his father was not able to provide him with any pocket money besides regular meals at home. He, therefore, took up a construction job with a contractor at the young age of 12 or 13.61 The death of Shatrughan Rajwar’s father put an end to his schooling, for he had to take care of his other siblings.62 Notwithstanding such instances of dropouts, the modern ideas of emplacement of children in school, away from the “dark” colliery, defined the new ethico-politics of employee benefits. It opened the possibility of development of a new socio-political force, of recognition of labour variations, and of the intellectual fitness of a person for different kinds of labour including those of fitter, clerk, surveyor, mining sirdar, overman, engineer, and political advocate. Not surprisingly, many of the militants in the movement seen in collieries in 1968–75, for a variety of concerns including universal parenthood, were youngsters who had been to schools, who re-lived, as it were, the spirit of Pavel Korchagin.63

For advancing life Sociability and sociality of workers bore the imprint of a shift in their worldviews. Amid the shifts in migration pattern and social composition

The aspiration of a “civilised” life  45 of workers, a slow but dramatic transformation in the worldviews of mineworkers unfolded in the aftermath of WW I. The working-class public increasingly set out the question of employee benefits, labour relations, improvement, and reform in new terms, which was much contrary to what Chakrabarty (1989/2000) has described as the pre-bourgeois, hierarchical, community consciousness of the Indian workers in early twentieth-century Bengal. The labour publicists denounced the “sub-human” treatment meted out to workers and their miserable conditions of living. They highlighted the instances of high mortality rates, infant and maternal mortality, despotic labour-management relations, and lack of opportunity for education and cultural growth in the working-classes. In 1919–22, the Workers Welfare League of India (WWLI, London), a participant body in the ILO convention, propagated in India the calls for measures to develop welfare facilities for childcare and schooling and provisions for housing.64 Associations like the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) and its associates, the Indian Colliery Employees Association (ICEA), and Indian Colliery Labour Union (ICLU), too, pressed for reforms. Political activists, like N.M. Joshi, Chaman Lal and Pd. Krishna Kant Malviya65 pressed for ratification of the ILO conventions and legislative interventions to provide workers with the right to unionisation and collective bargaining, maternity care, crèches, insurance schemes related to sickness, work hazards, old age, and unemployment benefits, together with measures to improve wage rates, equal wages for women, housing, and schooling.66 The very second congress of All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) held in Jharia coalfield called for agitation on a wide range of issues: the ratification of the ILO conventions; recognition of the trade union and right to strike; improvement in the wage rates and an equal wage for the women workers; reduction in working hours, provisions for weekly holiday; housing, crèche, education, medical facilities; maternity benefits and leaves for the women workers; the representation of working masses in the legislative assembly; the prohibition on employment of the women in night works and of children below the age of fourteen. The emphasis on the need of removing coal control and a supply of sufficient number of wagons to all Indian colliery proprietors, and a prohibition on the sale of spirits accompanied the aforesaid agenda.67 This campaign recurred in another congress of AITUC held in Jharia and taken up by the local labour organisations.68 In this context, particularly significant were the public debates and movements concerning the question of “civilising” and “humanising” the worker’s life. The new idea was that a well-managed and stable life of workers was integral to the emergence of “advancing and a healthy humanity”. The broader philosophy underlying this approach was that children as such should be free to participate in schooling and other creative exercises. “Humanised” life, in other words, was defined by this approach as the ability of a person to freely participate in various cultural, intellectual, and political activities. To meet such an end, went the argument, it was necessary to make reproduction independent of wage-centred everyday labour.

46  Dhiraj Kumar Nite This objective was to be achieved by setting up institutional supports to the reproduction needs of workers, known otherwise as social security programmes. Such institutions could come into being either through general protective legislation or be funded by the state or the industry in specific cases. This ideology was a movement away from the pre-modern presumption that the weak, the sick and other dependent were the sole liability of the family.69 The agenda of labour activists based in Jharia in the early twenties, such as Swami Bishwanand, was often more sensitive to a few other [local] needs than national publicists. Bishwanand emphasised the needs for small schools and a prohibition on the sale of spirits, and a better wage rate for workers employed in the dangerous work.70 He exhorted mineworkers to assert their civilised status and worthy position through temperance in order to check wastage, a reform in the mode of life and ending to untouchability.71 Unlike national leaders like N.M. Joshi, he believed that taking care of the sick and the elderly was the sole responsibility of the family and its breadwinner and regarded facilities, such as maternity benefits or crèche schemes as an alien imposition. Therefore, movements around such demands did not pick up any momentum until the late 1930s. The campaign for industrial democracy grew strident in the wake of threats of retrenchment and wage cut amidst the Great Depression (1929–35), the promise of redressal expected from autonomous provincial government (1937–40) and that of the national government since 1946. The Jharia Colliery Labour Union, with J.C. Gupta as its President, repeated many of these demands in the same breath as seeking a privileged recognition of job opportunities for migrant workers (Paschimas) over the locals (Dehatis), thus: …a minimum wage sufficient to maintain the worker and his family in reasonable comfort and to meet his other expenses necessary to maintain his position according to the standard of a civilised society. Graded increment according to experience and skill. Short hours of work to avoid fatigue and leave a margin of leisure on the basis of international decision. Sanitary dwelling, proper foodstuffs and water supply. Arrangement for unemployment and old age provisions and maternity benefits and other social insurance … facility for education of the children of the workers.72 The Indian Colliery Labour Union, S.K. Bose as its President, emphasised in its campaign: The standard of living of our workmen, at present, is unworthy of human beings. To raise the standard of living and give our workmen human conditions and ordinary comforts and amenities of civilised life, the minimum wage must be raised from its present level. …only a few irregular schools for the clerical staff. The charitable dispensary and hospital at Dhanbad admits only serious cases of accident of colliery

The aspiration of a “civilised” life  47 employees. The shops are owned by raising contractors or patronized by a member of the superior staff. The difference between cash and credit prices varies from 25 to 50 percent. Need of cooperative shops… Indebtedness since the time of recruitment. Need of prohibition of entry of kabuli money lenders into the industrial areas, and restriction on the money lending business by chaprasis and other employees. Employers belittle the accidents with a view to evade or minimize the payment of compensation and illiterate workmen are misled by employers.73 These proposals culminated in a number of short and long strikes in the 1930s and in the aftermath of WW II (Nite 2014a, 2019). The worker’s pursuit of advancing humanity and self-respect, alongside growing “civilising” and “humanising” concerns, appears to have equally defined their approach to workers’ wellness, sociality, and employee benefits. They were all but a destitute and starving lot. They sought to consolidate the gains from the opportunity of regular wage work and, at the same time, to earn status. They observed the campaigns for “social upliftment”. The churning of the social (caste) upliftment campaigns gradually took roots in more than a dozen caste-solidarities belonging to the unprivileged and underprivileged social conditions from the second decade of the twentieth century. They claimed for the higher social status of Kshatriya, Viskarma-Brahmin, and Vaishya. Some of their characteristic pursuits included the adoption of janeo (sacred thread); the prevention of beggary and services of female labour in others’ fields and in the distant market; the prevention of widow remarriage and child marriage; and the exhortation of the members for the education of children (both boys and girls). They sought access to educational and training institutions; the prohibition on drinking; and adherence to pious food habits and clean accommodation. The All India Chandravanshiya Kshatriya Mahasabha, together with similar associations having a prefix of Yadav, Kurmi, Koeri, Dosadh and Kahar-Rawani campaigned along this line since 1912, after the Census Enumerators declined their claim for Kshatriya status in the two successive censuses in 1901 and 1911. Their campaigns turned regular and reverberated in larger sections when they conducted annual provincial and national gatherings over the concerned subject. The All India Kurmi Kshatriya Association extended its activity into Chota Nagpur region since 1923 onwards.74 The Satnami Mahasabha was formed amongst the Bilaspuri (Chhattisgarh) Chamars in the early 1920s and campaigned against caste distinction and for an improved living and dignified life.75 “Social upliftment” campaigns brought about the new ethics amongst workers of social groups like the Goala, Kurmi-mahto, Koeri, KaharRawani, and Dosadh. The members of these caste-upliftment and social reform campaigns wanted to educate their children, have a culturally initiated and varied life and dignified social standing. Therefore, they exerted themselves under the piece-rate payment system and liked to have female earning members than comforting homemakers.

48  Dhiraj Kumar Nite Other groups, like the Bhuiyan, Chamar, and Rajwar in the 1930s and 1940s, the Bauri in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Santhal in the 1960s pursued a similar family wage-work and code of respectability. The Coalfield Dalit Mazdoor Sangh, Backward Class Federation, and Harijan Kalyan Samiti were set up and promoted the conceptions of self-respect and improved working and living conditions.76 The Bauri youth formed the Harijan Sevak Sangh, and initiated the first reform efforts since 1945, following Dr, B.R.  Ambedkar’s visit in Dhanbad subdivision of erstwhile Manbhum district.77 Similarly, a group of the Santhal youth, associated with the newly formed Adibasi Parishad (1960) and Sanot Santhal Samaj (Cleaner Santhal Society 1962–63) exhorted the Santhal workers to abandon drinking, to educate themselves so as to lead a contented and dignified life. They also urged their member to keep a close watch on the up-country labourer, denying him any more chance to dishonour their women workers.78 These campaigns benefitted from the old Kharwar movement, a purification campaign in the 1910s–30s79 and now, the Jharkhand movement. The latter had been organising anti-usury agitations, campaigns for the restoration of tribals’ claim on land and forest and the demand for statehood since 1955–56, under the banner of the Jharkhand Party and Karantikari Morcha.80 A restriction upon womenfolk’s work outside their house, land, and village was seen as essential for strong claims to respectable status in the brahminical caste order. The practice of family-oriented labour on the mines did not violate the “reformist” [patriarchal] attitude to women’s wage-work, for the family headmen exercised control over recruitment and supervision of women in the collieries. Their insistence on the continuation of family-oriented labour decidedly confronted the “civilising” concerns of protecting women from dangerous occupations and reposing in their caregiving and house-making responsibilities. This cultural confrontation, it could be said, embodied the working-class subculture, their autonomous manner of adaptation to the contending pulls and pressures. The caste-upliftment and self-respect campaigns were an aspect of the caste, ethnic and gender propensities of migrant workers. Indeed, these campaigns brought about a fruitful dimension in the labour movement organised on the question of employee benefits and respectability. This feature of the labour politics was as significant as, observed in many studies, the segmentary effect of such social identities as well as the function of social capital played by these identities in the mobilisation of economic resources and political strength.81

Upshot This chapter has outlined the role of cosmological propensities of workers and their lived experiences in their pursuit of wellbeing. The worldview of workers transformed towards the emergence of a new ethics of human, civilised, and dignified life from the aftermath of the WW I and onwards. In this worldview, the non-material component of wellbeing in the form

The aspiration of a “civilised” life  49 of fraternisation in social connection and dignification in social exchanges was emphasised. This development was an outcome of the advocacy of ILO in favour of human, civilised life for the working-classes, the struggles of organised workers for industrial democracy and the campaigns of caste upliftment amongst the socially disadvantaged groups. All these took place amid the interplay between the migration pattern and social composition of workers on one side and, on the other, intersection between economic relations and socio-cultural proclivities of working peoples. The persistent labour migrancy and slow, partial stabilisation of migrants in the coalfields were pronounced. Social composition of migrants altered especially in the wake of the removal of women coal workers from belowground mining during the late 1920s- and mid-1940s. The local Adivasi and unprivileged castes slowly gave way to the migrants belonging to the groups of unprivileged, underprivileged, and other caste Hindus, Muslims, and single men. The division in labour largely overlapped with the social gradation amongst workers in which the disadvantaged castes and ethnicity constituted the class of production workers. They suffered from caste-specific social disability, denigration, and marginalisation on the mines. This unseemly sociality and sociability intruded even on the neighbourhood, sexual economy as well as schools. In opposition to this, the new ethics emerged. As the desire for dignity, civility, and humanness in social exchanges slowly took roots amongst working peoples; they sought to rework sociability and sociality. It informed the struggles of social security and a sign of respectability. Working peoples began to retaliate against abusive supervisors and take on the denigration in the work relations. They sought to ensure decency of conjugality between men and women. They looked for educational opportunities for children. The new ethics at the end harbingered broader solidarity between the locals and the migrants and across caste/ethnic affinities in the late 1960s. Endogamous ethnicisation remained enduring, however, which had definite constraining ramification particularly for women. It was not any vestige of the tradition. Indeed, it was very much a product of the conflict between commodified labour and denigrated life of production workers on one side and efforts at dignification and mutuality in social exchanges on the other. Women suffered at the altar of a sectarian code of respectability and sexually predatory behaviour amidst labour migrancy involving single men. This was despite improved socio-cultural wellbeing, as measured in terms of fraternisation and dignification in social exchanges amongst men and endogamous ethnicised communities. These conflicting experiences equally played a role, besides the factor of social security measures (Nite 2019), in the tenaciousness of oscillating labourers and a slow, partial stabilisation of working peoples in the destination economy.

Notes 1 It is a critique of another existing viewpoint suggesting coerced, unfree nature of labour migration (Tinker 1974; Mohapatra 2005, 2009; Breman 2012, 2014; Behal 2014).

50  Dhiraj Kumar Nite 2 It differs from another observation highlighting the use of cheap, coerced migrant labour (ibid.). 3 It disputes the argument referring to the migratory nature of working Indians and that of their preference for building up homestead economy in the village (de Haan 1997, 1999). 4 Parry (2020: 621) has fully developed the argument in his study of the working peoples in Bhilai. 5 Census, 1911, Vol. V, Pt. 1, p. 587. Census, 1921, Vol. VII, Pt. 1, pp. 298–304. 6 The causes included the availability of cheap male labourers from the mid-1920s, the impact of reformist pressure on the homemaking role of women, mechanisation, and ‘protective’ legislation. 7 Census of Dhanbad District, 1971, Series 4, A & B – Bihar, Part X, B.L. Das, pp. 211, 251, 572, 574. 8 Ibid., pp. 158–159, 171, 202, 556, 558. 9 From the districts of Manbhum, Hazaribagh, Santhal Pargana, Bankura, and Burdwan. 10 From the districts of Hazaribagh, Gaya, Monghyr, and Bilashpur and Nagpur (Central Province). 11 From Sahabad and Gaya (western region) districts, the United Province (contemporary Uttar Pradesh) and the Punjab. Foley Report (1920: 57–132). Whitely Report (1931, Vol. I). 12 Census of Dhanbad District, 1971, pp. 572–574. 13 Whitely Report, Vol. II, p. 269. 14 Deshpande Report, pp. 26–27. 15 Census Report, 1970, Vol. X, Pt C, p. 436. The Report of the National Commission on Labour in 1969 (BSA: ‘Labour department’, Labour Branch, September 1970, File No. VI/57 – 1011/69, Proceeding No. 54). 16 CIMAR, 1966, p. 13. 17 The literacy rate among the mining persons was merely six percent in 1921. Only one-third of mining persons were literate in 1971 (Census of Dhanbad District, 1971, Vol. X. Pt. C., p. 70). 18 M.D. Singh, Bhuli Bishri Kariya, p. 27. Ghosh (1992: 62–66). 19 This study tries to advance an understanding that the factors involving labour and production relations, the dynamics of community identity and elite politics together shaped the articulation of interests among workers. The argument of Nair (1998) and Gooptu (2003) that both the experiences of labour relations and community identity influence the politics of working-classes partly helps elucidate the case of Jharia mineworkers. 20 The millowners in Bombay sought to recruit the Mahar persons in the weaving and spinning departments in order to throttle the militancy of weavers and spinners who traditionally belonged to the Maratha and the Julaha Muslim communities (Chandavarkar 1994/2002: 326, 427). 21 Manjhi: The Mountain Man, a movie directed by Ketan Mehta (2015). This film is inspired by a real-life character of Dashrath Manjhi. The Bihar Harijan (Removal of Civil Disabilities) Act 1949 made beggar (unpaid labour) and similar forced labour an offence to compel a Harijan to work against his will or without adequate wages. Similarly, the Constitution of India, promulgated on 26 November 1949, declared untouchability a punishable offence. 22 BSA: Political Special 1920, File No. 353. 23 BSA: Political Special 1920, File No. 353, ‘Hoernle’s Report’. 24 Whitely Report, Vol. IV, Pt. II, Oral Submission of S.K. Bose, pp. 193–194. 25 (The Report of the Bihar Labour Enquiry Committee or Prasad Report), p. 342. The raising contractor, like H.P. Raichaudhary formed a gang of henchmen, known as Sidapanthi, with a view towards disciplining defiant workers. It was a major source of resentment on the part of workers in the Kustore and Bhargarh collieries in 1939–47.

The aspiration of a “civilised” life  51 26 Amulya Mali, Interviews at his residence on the Industry Colliery in 2004–5. A. Mali joined Industry Colliery during World War II. He worked as a pumpman and settled in the Industry Colliery bastees. He hailed from a nearby village at Chandankiyari block in Dhanbad district. I shared his residence during my oral historical survey. 27 CIMAR, 1939–40, p. 28. 28 CIMAR and IMA Reports. For the Years of 1946–51. 29 IMF Reports and IMA Reports, 1949–51. 30 Bhaduri Rajwar, Interview with Ranjan Ghosh (1992: 273–276) at Amlabad colliery on 21 November 1991. Interveiw of Shashi Chetri with Ghosh (1992: 409) at Dharmaband colliery on 9 December 1990. 31 Md. Yakub, Interviews at the Bera Colliery in 14 and 29 January 2004. Shatrudhan Rajwar, Interviews, 12 and 29 December 2003, Dubaree Colliery Bastee. Amulya Mali, Interviews. 32 BSA: ‘Labour Department’, Labour Branch, File No. III/D – 30/49, 1950. 33 Ibid., p. 44. 34 Ibid. 35 The labour contractor, normally, received about 10 percent commission on the coal cut and loaded by his gang of recruits. 36 Agabeg (1913: 37–40) and Evans (1918: 79–89). 37 Whitely Report (RCL), Vol. IV, Part II, p. 122. 38 NAI: ‘Department of Industries and Labour’, 1923: L-919 (8). 39 Foley Report, pp. 62, 82 and Seth, pp. 167–168. 40 Foley Report, pp. 68, 82. 41 Prasad Report, p. 342. 42 BSA: ‘Political Special File’, 8(III)/1933. 43 Ibid. 44 BSA: ‘Political Special File’, 8(IV)/1933. 45 Mohi Mahto, Interview with Ghosh (1992: 423–428), at the Barora colliery, on 19 November 1990. Shashi Chetri, Interview with Ghosh (1992: 391–403), at his residence in Dharmaband colliery, on 9 December 1990. Khetu Bauri, Interveiw with Ghosh (1992: 377–380), at Madhuban colliery, on 10 November 1990. 46 Moteshwar Mondal: Interviews, at Dubaree Colliery, in January 2004. 47 Ibid. 48 Their sources included newspapers, popular literatures, and ethnographic accounts. 49 Banerjee (1981: 157). 50 Ibid., p. 127. 51 Sengupta (1979: 91–118). 52 BSA: ‘Labour Department’, Labour Branch, September 1970: Proceeding No. 54, File No. VI/57-1011/69. 53 Prasad Report, Vol. II, A, p. 325. 54 Llewellyn (1939), Stedman Jones (1987), and Rahikainen (2011: 105). 55 BSA: ‘Political Special File’, 1920: 248/1920, 372/1920; 1928: 102/1928. 56 BSA: ‘Political Special File’, 1933: 8(III)/1933, 8(IV)/1933 and Nite (2014a). 57 Deshpande Report, p. 98. 58 ‘Memorandum to the Indian Coalfields Committee on behalf of the All India Mine Workers’ Federation (affiliating to All Mines Mine Workers’ Unions under AITUC, and claims membership of around 25,000 miners out of the total 3.5 lacks in British India);’ ‘Oral Evidence of Mr. C. Bhattacharya, representing the All India Mine-Workers’ Federation recorded at Calcutta on 6 July 1946’. K.C. Mahindra, Report of the Indian Coalfields Committee (Mahindra Report), Delhi: Secretariat Press, 1946, Vol. II. 59 BSA: ’Labour Department’, Labour Branch, ‘The report of the National Commission on Labour in Bihar’, File No. VI/57 – 1011/69, Proceeding No. 54. September 1970.

52  Dhiraj Kumar Nite 60 Ramjash Rawani: Interviews, 29 January 2004; nearby Twelve-number-incline bastee in Bhowra colliery. He joined Bhowra colliery as a clerk in 1946–47, retired in the mid-1990s, and was now permanently settled there. His grandparent immigrated to the field from Arrah area in Bihar. 61 Syamnaryan. Rawani: Interviews, Bhowra Twelve-number incline bastes, 30 March 2008. 62 Shatrudhan. Rajwar: Interviews, 12 and 29 December 2003, Dubaree Colliery Bastee. 63 Pavel Korchagin was the central protagonist of Nicolai Istrovasky’s novel, How the Steel was Tempered (1936). He emerged as a revolutionary from a similar social background in Ukraine during and after WW I. 64 Shapurji Saklatwala, ‘India in the Labour World’, Workers Welfare League of India, London, 1920. 65 N.M. Joshi was a member of the Servants of India Society and a nominated Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA). Chaman Lal was the General Secretary of AITUC and a nominated MLA. Krishna Kant was an MLA. 66 NAI: ‘Department of Industry and Labour’, File Nos. (1924: L-1162 (1); 1925: L-1150 (9), L-1174 (4)). 67 NAI: ‘Department of Industries’, Labour Branch, L-1028/1923 and BSA: ‘Political Special Files’, 115/1923. 68 BSA: ‘Political Special Files’, 244/1928, 102/1928. They included the agenda of nationalisation of the means of production in the session held in the year of 1928, when the AITUC congress was held again in Jharia, in their quest for a genuine social emancipation of humankind. 69 BSA: ‘Political Special Files’, 372/1920, 246/1921, 4/1921, 244/1928; NAI: ‘Department of Industries’, Labour branch file, June 1923: L-1028 (1), B Part, Proceedings – pp. 17–24. 70 NAI: ‘Department of Industries’, 1923: L-1028. 71 BSA: ‘Political Special File’, 372/1920. 72 BSA: ‘Political Special File’, 8(III)/1933. 73 Prasad Report, Vol. III, Pt. C, pp. 191–193. 74 BSA: ‘Political Special File’, 397/1922; 60/1924; 171/1925; 7/1926; 102/1931. Census of Bihar and Orissa for 1921 (Vol. VII, Part I, 234–245) and for 1931 (Vol. VII, Part I, 246–297). 75 Dube (2014: 340–380) and Parry (2020: 452–458). 76 Census of B&O, 1931, Vol. VII, Pt. I, pp. 248, 285. BSA: ‘Political Special File’, 54/1937. ‘Labour Department’, Labour Branch, August 1957, Proceeding No. 121, File No. 1008/52. RoyChoudhury (1964: 97–133). Sengupta (1979), Maharaj and Iyer (1982: 165–200), and Kumar (1982: 203–210). 77 Sengupta (1979: 91–118). 78 Banerjee (1981: 127–157). 79 BSA: ‘Political Special File’, 57/1931. Census of B&O, 1921, Vol. VII, Pt 1, p. 131. 80 Maharaj and Iyer (1982) and Kumar (1982). 81 See Sanchez and Strumpell (2014), Parry (2009), De Neve (2005), and HarrissWhite (2003).

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58  Dhiraj Kumar Nite Trotter, Jr, Joe William. 2015. “The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in the US Coal Industry”. IRSH 60 (SI): 145–164. Tumbe, Chinmay. 2018. India Moving: A History of Migration. New Delhi: Penguin. Whitely, J.H. 1931. Report of the Royal Commission on Labour (Whitely Report). Vol. I. New Delhi: Secretariat Press. Zanden, Jan Luiten van, Joerg Baten, Marco Mira d’Ercole, Auke Rijpma, Canal Smith, and Marcel Timmer, eds. 2014. How Was Life? Global Well-Being since 1820. IISH: OECD.

3 Migration and the making of a village Pushpendra1

The chapter tries to bust the myth that only cities are made by migrants. Based on the author’s fieldwork in a village in Bihar, it shows how migration has also been crucial to the making of the village, and how the historical conditions and processes of the making of the village influenced, and continue to influence even today, the sense of home and belonging. A great deal of focus is on land, the most important resource from the point of view of both the living and the leaving, for early residents as well as late ‘settlers’. Hence, administrative processes such as survey and settlement operations, chakbandi,2 land distribution, adjudication of land conflicts, etc., have been vital reference points in the life history of local communities. The cross-sectionality of migration with land and caste as crucial socioeconomic factors has been creating the “othering” within the village. The fieldwork, conducted in Jitwarpur village in the Araria district of Bihar in early 2010,3 combined a household survey using a Census approach with ethnography. This chapter mainly uses oral narratives to understand the making of the village and to further explore subjectivities in migration and inter-community relationships by studying historical and material entanglements in the village. The opening section of the chapter introduces the village, with particular emphasis on its spatial geography, land-ownership pattern, and the occupations of different social groups. In the next section, the chapter traces the spatial movement of different communities that contributed to the making of the village. This includes their subjectivities about their spatial movement. The chapter explores the long history of the village spanning over a century while taking note of events that people perceived as life-changing. In the process, it specifically records narratives centred around land, labour, and culture. Finally, it records people’s reflections on their present outmigration that has proven to be equally crucial to the making of the village.

The village and its social ecology The village Jitwarpur is located in the Kismat-Khawaspur Panchayat of Araria Sadar block in Araria district, 22 km to the north from the district headquarters. Surprisingly, when I was in the field in 2010, there was DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-4

60  Pushpendra no single habitation by the name of Jitwarpur. In Araria, people knew the village by the name of its prominent hamlets – Palasi or Tegachhia – or the local market Patengana which was a kilometre away from Palasi. The village was spread over 2 km from north to south and no less from east to west. Our household survey enumerated 950 households in Jitwarpur revenue village, with a population of 5,600. Of these, 847 households belonged to Hindus and 103 to Muslims. Out of the 103 Muslim households, 101 belonged to the Dhuniya (Momin) community, and two belonged to the Ansari community. The Hindu households belonged to the following twelve castes, with the number of households given in parentheses – Brahmin (284), Noniya (186), Kewat (9129), Godhi (125), Musahar (37), Yadav (31), Baniya (14), Chamar (7), Barhai (7), Halwai (2), Sudhi (1), and Nai (1). Besides, there were twenty-three Santhal households in the village.4 The village was spread over ten tolas (hamlets); the following are their names, with the number of households they comprise mentioned alongside in parentheses – Tegachhia (323), Palasi (194), Godhi (115), Mansoori (103), Puraini (84), Musahari (37), Yadav (31), Jhaua (20), Paschim (19), and Santhal (24) which was also known as Panchavati. There was another small tola known as Gilahbari that was adjacent, almost contiguous to the Musahari tola. Administratively, a few households of Gilahbari were part of the Musahari tola and the rest were part of Khwaspur village which was more than a kilometre from the tola. I followed the administrative division for the household survey, but for this chapter, I have also included some narratives from Gilahbari. A river stream called Bhalua – a branch of the river Kosi – flowed through the northern part of the village from the east to the west between Puraini and Musahari tolas. Bhalua usually almost dried up between January and May but was in full flow during the rainy season. Palasi was basically a Brahmin tola but there also were a considerable number of Kewat households, and some Barhai, Chamar, Nai, Sudhi, and Baniya households as well. The Jhaua tola was inhabited by Kewats. Tegachhia was practically divided into two separate tolas – Tegachhia Brahmin tola and Tegachhia Noniya tola. The Brahmin tola, located near the Tarabari market, had ninety-eight Brahmin households. The Noniya tola had 185 households. Other castes in Tegachhia were Barhai, Halwai, Nai, and Baniya. Puraini tola was inhabited by Kewats, Brahmins and Chamars, and Paschim tola by Brahmins. Other tolas were almost single-caste habitations and known by their caste name. There were three local markets – one each at Patengana, Palasi, and Tarabari. The one at Patengana, a kilometre away from Palasi, was the biggest amongst them: a weekly hatia (market) was also held here every Friday. The Tarabari market had an oil mill. People from Tegachhia, Musahari, Paschim, and Jhaua tolas used this market. Every tola had at least one small grocery shop run from someone’s home, and some tolas also had a flour mill.

Migration and the making of a village  61 As per government records, the total land area of the village was 1484.8 acres,5 a little less than half of which was under cultivation. Landlessness, smallholdings, and highly uneven distribution of land were the chief characteristics of the landholding pattern in Jitwarpur. Overall, 42 per cent of households did not own land for cultivation. About 8 per cent (seventy-four households) were without homestead land. Landlessness was very high among Musahars (78 per cent), Godhis (71 per cent), Muslims (71 per cent), Chamars (57 per cent), and Kewats (54 per cent). In contrast, only 19 per cent of the Brahmin households were landless; 35 per cent of them owned less than one acre and 15 per cent had holdings up to 2.5 acres. Only ten families, all Brahmins, owned more than 10 acres of land, and the largest landholder family, an extended joint family, owned 39 acres. Overall, the Brahmins, with 30 per cent households, owned 57 per cent of the total land. All orchards and ponds were owned by the Brahmins. Since orchards were the main source of dry leaves and wood for cooking, the non-Brahmins were heavily dependent on them. Caste-wise landholding was expectedly on the lines of the traditional socioeconomic hierarchy. The average landholding size was the largest for Brahmins, followed by OBC-II, OBC-I, STs, Muslims, and SCs. The Brahmins had diverse occupations – self-cultivation, leasing out of the land, government and private jobs, small trade and business activities in the locality (grocery and chemist shops, private school, grain trading, etc.), business in Araria and Purnia towns, and also migration in the capacity of professionals or skilled/semi-skilled workers. Some worked as quacks, brokers in government offices, money lenders, rentiers, priests, and local agents; some operated or rented out thresher machines/pumpsets/tractors, ran NGOs, gave tuitions, and even indulged in smuggling. Some very poor Brahmin families worked in their own field, and some in the fields of other Brahmin landholders as wage labourers. Brahmin women did not work outside their homes except in jobs like teaching and running Anganwadi Centres. Clearly, the Brahmins as a community enjoyed the highest social status, were largest in number, possessed more than half of the land in the village, had more money, education, jobs, and external connections, and continued to influence local politics. The Noniyas and Kewats were mostly lessees, agricultural wage labourers, and cultivators. Some of them also reared cattle. Besides, a few had jobs, ran PDS outlets and ICDS centres, and did moneylending. Some Kewats were engaged in fishing, their traditional caste occupation. A couple of Noniya migrants had become petty contractors and purchased small plots of land in the village. Two Kewat families had become well-to-do and had started businesses in Araria town. The Yadavs were into cultivation, animal husbandry, and selling milk and milk products. The Godhis were lessee and agricultural wage workers. Fishing, their traditional occupation, was taken up as principal activity only by 4–5 families. The Baniyas were mostly into local petty businesses. The lone Sudhi family was into micro-business activities – mostly making rice from paddy and other processed agricultural products to sell in the local market. The Barhai (carpenter) families

62  Pushpendra were into traditional work but also worked as agricultural labourers and lessee. The Halwai families had eateries and sweets shops in the market but their main income came from contracts as cooks during marriage and other social ceremonies. The lone Nai family still worked under the jajmani system.6 The Santhals, Chamars, and Musahars worked as agricultural labourers. The Santhals and Muslims were largely into non-agricultural wage work. Muslim migrants were mainly working in cities. Non-Brahmin women worked in agriculture. While Sudhi women were engaged in the processing of agricultural produce, such as the making of white (arva) rice, boiled (usna) rice, and flattened rice (Chura), Godhi women (and some Kewat women too) supplemented their family incomes by making murhi (dry rice roasted over a sand base), roasted gram, puffed rice and roasted maize (a kind of popcorn, called lawa and thuri in the local language). Some women from Noniya, Kewat, and Musahar communities prepared mud walls for kutcha houses and plastered grain kothis (storage) with mud. A few women worked as maidservants in Brahmin families. Chamar women worked as traditional birth attendants. Some Santhal women worked in tractor trolleys at a brick kiln.

Facets of in-migration During the British Raj, the area was part of the Banaili estate and was gradually brought under cultivation after the clearing of jungles around the late nineteenth century. Lands in the surrounding areas were settled with several petty estates such as the Khamgarha, Batwari, and Gilahbari estates. The initial cultivators in the village were Brahmins. The conversion of wasteland into cultivable land picked up during the last decade of the nineteenth century and continued into the early decades of the twentieth century. In the 1905 settlement, a large number of Brahmins were recorded as raiyat (a tenant under a landlord). Chandreshwar Jha, a Brahmin from Palasi, was recorded as the biggest landholder in the village, owning approximately 900 acres of land. Following their caste practices, the Brahmins did not work in the field. They, therefore, required labourers to cultivate their land and rear their cattle, and a service class to do other odd jobs. Early agricultural labourers came from neighbouring areas. Gradually, seasonal migrants started coming. The Musahars were the first migrant labouring community to settle in the village, probably a hundred years back. They came from the other side of the river Kosi in the west. Their original habitations had been destroyed by changes in the river’s course. They settled on gair majarua malik7 land. During land Survey and Settlement in 1952–54, they were issued pattas (a deed of lease specifying the conditions on which the lands are held) of 5–6 decimals of homestead land but the landholders forcibly took away those pattas. They could never access old records and continued to live on the Brahmins’ land without any record of rights; repeated attempts were made to evict them.

Migration and the making of a village  63 Ramji Singh, eighty-one years old and a Noniya by caste, claimed that the Noniyas came from two different, distant places to this village. His family had come from a place called Baltharwa which was on the other side of the river Kosi in Darbhanga district. His sister was married in the village and he used to come here to work as a wage labourer in the post-harvesting operations of the patua (jute) crop. Later, when Kosi changed its course and eventually swallowed his village, three Noniya families, including his, decided to settle in this village. Thus, around 1949–50, his part of the Noniya tola came into existence. At the time of the Survey and Settlement in 1952–54, there were 80–85 Noniya families in the tola including the three families in his side of the tola. Gradually, as more families settled in, their numbers grew. He recalled: That was the time of abject poverty. We could barely manage a onetime meal. The land belonged to Brahmins. Any family willing to settle here had to agree to work on their field. We had to beg them to allow us to take residual dry plants from their field to thatch our hut. Then wages were low – just two annas8 a day, but money had value as one could buy 16 kg of rice for one taka.9 The land on which my family had settled belonged to a Brahmin lawyer, Makam Jha. He was a largehearted person. He owned large tracts of land and allowed Noniyas to settle on his land and work as his sharecropper. In those days, Noniyas were dependent on Brahmins’ land even for answering nature’s call. In the 1954 Survey and Settlement, some of the Noniyas got sikmi10 rights and some kayami11 rights on his land. Thus, several Noniya families, including mine, became landed. Anil Singh, the husband of the village sarpanch, lived in the same tola. He was an educated person and claimed that he had passed the Bihar Public Service Commission entrance examination but could not join the service due to a delay in the declaration of graduation results. According to him, Noniyas first came to the village in 1905. At that time, like the Musahars, we too used to eat rats, consumed liquor, and did all odd works in the field. We are descendants of Prithvi Raj Chauhan.12 When Muhammad Ghori defeated Prithvi Raj, the Chauhans fled to distant places to save themselves. One of the groups reached Azamgarh. My clan migrated to this village from the Azamgarh-Jaunpur region. He cited the influence of Azamgarhy accent in the Noniyas’ Maithili, the local spoken language of the region. He also cited the design of their women’s blouses, with the sleeves extending little below the elbow. He said, In Azamgarh, we had to hide our identity. We did not use our Chauhan title. We were well-built, hence preferred as labourers. Gradually we got accommodated in the local caste structure at a lower level. Our

64  Pushpendra fate had ordained that from a warrior Rajput we became a lower caste Noniya. Resisting subordination is in our blood, that’s why we have always been in conflict with the local Brahmin landowners. The phenomenon of lower castes claiming higher-caste status by linking their genealogy to a higher caste clan is well-known. My interest was not in ascertaining the authenticity of the Noniyas’ claim or that of the several other stories that I was told in the village. I was interested in knowing what memories had been produced and sustained, how they were expressed and how they continued to influence, if at all, the subconscious of the communities. I have tried to construct the story of the making of the village based on what people residing in different tolas told me. The Godhis and Kewats came from Champanagar and Srinagar – part of the Banaili estate in Purnea district. They were fishing communities living on the riverside and bore the brunt of the frequently changing course of the various small branches of Kosi. The Kewats of the Jhaua tola were the last of the Kewats to settle in this village. The lone Nai family, and the Halwai and Barhai families, had come from the neighbouring Madanpur village which seemed to have come into existence before Jitwarpur. They claimed to have originally come from Champanagar. The Yadavs claimed that their forefathers were originally from Banaili but when the area was ravaged by floods some 150 years back, they migrated to Basgaraa along with the Banaili estate’s raja (proprietor of a large estate). The raja further moved to a new place, but they remained in Basgaraa for decades. However, that area increasingly became uninhabitable because of frequent outbreaks of diseases. When they heard about this new village under the same estate, they decided to move in. Gradually their tola came into existence. The Momins claimed to have been living in the neighbouring areas in the radius of 15–20 km before moving here; they gradually came to settle near Patengana when the lands were cleared for cultivation. The Ansaris were late entrants and came from Araria. That the making of the village was a dynamic process and was yet to be over was illustrated by two rather recent incidents, one of out-migration of a group of Musahars and another of in-migration of a group of Santhals. In the making of this village, both “in- and out-migration” exhibited strong intersectionality with land, caste, and class. Together, they largely worked in favour of the Brahmins and gave them the power to decide whether or not the “others” were desirable. At times, these “others” internalised subjugation but at other times they demonstrated a will to withstand their “othering”. Sometimes they eventually succumbed too. I prefer to call these settling and unsettling processes. The first instance was of a habitation of Musahars which until sometime back was situated by the side of the river Bhalua. Some thirty Musahar families had been living there for several decades. They had settled on a plot that had originally belonged to Brahmins and were therefore subject to harassment from them (Brahmins). Finally, the Musahar families decided to leave the plot and shifted to a village called

Migration and the making of a village  65 Rangdaha, some 8 km away towards Forbesganj. After the Musahars left, the plot, measuring 58 decimals, was captured by a Brahmin, Baikunth Jha. One of the Musahar families had been conferred sikmi rights over eight bighas13 of land; that land too was taken into possession by family members of the original landowner. The motive behind the evicting of Musahars was to usurp the land under their possession. There was another case of land grab some ten years ago. Ram Sadai, belonging to the Musahar community, had 28 decimals of land. After his death, his wife along with their small children went to visit her mother’s village. Meanwhile, Jesu Jha of the neighbouring village of Madanpur captured that land. He demolished Ram’s house. The family never returned. The second instance was related to a clan of Santhals who had migrated into the village as recently as 4–5 years before my fieldwork. Earlier they were living in Golabari village in the Khwaspur Panchayat in Forbesganj as part of a large community of Santhals. There was a dispute between two Brahmins over a gair majarua plot of land in Jitwarpur. One of them, Baliram Jha from the Rahatmeena Panchayat, having failed to capture the land himself, enticed the Santhals to do so. One night, twenty-four families put up their huts on the plot and started living there. They could not be evicted as it was known that a section of Brahmins was behind them, and because the Santhals were known to be a militant community. Except for the other sulking party, Brahmins, in general, welcomed the entry of the Santhals as this increased the availability of labourers in the village. The Santhal habitation, which was surrounded by a green cover of trees, was given the name Panchvati by Brahmins. Such a Sanskritised name was otherwise highly unusual for a Santhal habitation. Land and migrants Satish Singh lived in the Noniya tola of Tegachhia. When I met him, he was rather busy planning for an auspicious bath in the river Ganga to be taken by his extended family the next day, on the occasion of Poornima (full moon). But he readily agreed to discuss the issue of land and even called a few knowledgeable persons from the tola. He had a peculiar habit of making some sort of concluding remarks even before starting his narration. Thus went his conclusion, “Except for Brahmin zamindars and kashtkaars (cultivator-cum-landowners) from their caste, the story of all others is that of landlessness and land conflicts for generations and this story will not end soon. It may continue for hundreds of years”. And then came his punch line, “Without land solkans14 have no future”. In 1904–5, the British Government conducted a Cadastral Survey15 in this area and a khesra16 was prepared. Lands were settled in the name of the Brahmins. Besides the fact that the Banaili estate’s raja was a Brahmin, was there any other reason why land pattas were issued only to the Brahmins and not to the lower castes in the village? People cited the traditional relation between land and caste and how the lower castes were never imagined

66  Pushpendra as kashtkaars. In the upper castes’ view, they said, lower castes were created for labour (serving others) and living with abuses and humiliation. They did not even have homestead land in their name. Soon after Independence, zamindari was abolished. A new land survey, called Revisional Survey, became imperative to identify the erstwhile tenants and tillers of zamindars’ lands to settle the lands in their name. In this area, the Revisional Survey was carried out during 1952–54. This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for the landless to get land in their name. The process was highly contested and strife stricken. Satish Singh pointed out, Brahmin landlords and other landowners did not want to part with even an inch of their land but for us, this was our first chance to get hold of some land. We were not sure if we would ever in our lifetime or the next fifty years get another opportunity. Our first attempt was to secure our homestead land. Many of us were indeed able to secure at least right of possession on our homestead land. Some of us got sikmi rights and some kayami (ownership) rights over our tenanted land. He continued, We got khatiyan17 in 1959. Since then, we have been paying land rent according to the new khatiyan. Overall, the Noniyas gained a considerable amount of land, up to 10–15 acres, from the Survey & Settlement operation – either as kayami or sikmi. Some lands belonged to landlords from other villages. Radha Jha’s family succeeded in saving their land completely. Nobody could lay claim over his land because of his firepower. In 1972, the Chakbandi survey started. By the late 1980s, a new khatiyan was ready. But Lalu Prasad Yadav, soon after becoming the Chief Minister of Bihar in 1990, declared it invalid otherwise we would have got some more land. According to the villagers, Lalu Prasad Yadav feared that the new land records would cause great unrest in the rural areas, thereby creating a big governance challenge at the very beginning of his tenure. All migrant labouring families had been landless when they settled down in the village and many of them continued to be landless. As mentioned earlier, several of them were without a single decimal of homestead land of their own. They resided on the land of landowners (originally gair majarua malik). A considerable number of land-poor households had only the right of possession over their homestead. They continued to live in a situation of perpetual conflict with the landowners. Besides homestead land, 15–20 per cent of cultivable land was sikmi. Barring the land used for homestead and another 2–3 per cent of cultivable land, all other sikmi lands had been forcibly reoccupied by the landowners. The 1952–54 Survey and Settlement gave importance to the khewat,18 and those mentioned in the khewat as lessee were, after verification,

Migration and the making of a village  67 conferred sikmi right wherein they could not be evicted from the land, even though they were not conferred the ownership right. However, landlords kept harassing the lessees and tried to evict them. In Gilahbari, a tola of about sixty Musahars, the erstwhile landowners had been trying to recapture the land that the government had redistributed. Several inhabitants of the tola reported that landowners had implicated them in false cases – accusing them of cutting their trees, theft of crops, etc. Baikunth Jha had laid claim over a banswari (bamboo orchard) belonging to Suresh Sadai and had implicated him (Suresh) in false cases. Lakhandeo Sadai was a sharecropper of Sheogovind Jha on 10 bighas of land but 5–6 years back, after the conflict and false cases, Sheogovind Jha changed his lessee. But how did several non-Brahmin households, who had settled in the village as landless migrants, come to own land, howsoever small those holdings were? In the course of my fieldwork, I could enumerate at least ten ways in which several landless migrants came to acquire some land: i) entry of tenants in the khewat which gave security of tenure of the leased-in land; ii) Survey and Settlement operation that conferred either complete ownership or occupancy rights over leased-in land, land under possession, and land plots that were received by attached labour for tilling as long as he continued as attached labour; iii) land redistribution (ceiling surplus land, bhoodan land, gair majarua khas land, kaiser-i-hind19 land, and other types of government land); iv) encroachment of either government or private land; v) distribution or occupation of land reclaimed from the river; vi) purchase of land through the land market; vii) court intervention giving the verdict in favour of the landless; viii) land auction when a borrower failed to repay loan amount; ix) forcible capture of land; and x) long-term mortgage of land in lieu of borrowing. Some of the Godhi families living on gair majarua malik land had purchased the land from the original owner. The original owners were mostly absentees who had realised that they could never be able to evict them and had therefore chosen to sell the land, though at a much cheaper rate than prevailing market rates. A prominent example of access to land through adjudication by the court was related to a case, well-known in this area, that also highlighted the relationship between land and caste violence. Satish Singh narrated the case as follows, It was sometime in 1926. My grandfather’s cousin was a charwaha (cattle grazer) for a Brahmin landlord. One day, while grazing, a cow stepped in Chandreshwar Jha’s land. Someone reported this to him (Jha). His men came to threaten my grandfather’s cousin. They had a quarrel. This flared up. Chandreshwar Jha decided to teach the Noniyas (then called Chauhans) a lesson. One night, he led his men to attack the Noniya tola. They encircled the tola, set houses on fire, looted property, and fatally attacked people. Three Noniyas were killed and several injured in the incident. My maternal uncle, Kanhai ji, was among the deceased.

68  Pushpendra Anil Singh added, The case went up to the High Court. Chandreshwar Jha and several other Brahmins were made accused. The Chief Justice himself came to the village. However, no Brahmin was given any physical punishment. The High Court identified ten affected Noniya families and, as compensation, ordered distribution of Chandreshwar Jha’s 110 acres of land among them. One Durganandan Jha became intervener in the case, claiming that he was an equal portioner in Chandreshwar Jha’s land. The court upheld his claim and awarded him half of ­Chandreshwar Jha’s land. To fight the case, Chandreshwar Jha borrowed heavily from a local Marwadi trader, Hari Charan Sancheti.20 The same was the case of the other accused. When Chandreshwar Jha and others failed to repay their loans, Sancheti went to court and got a considerable amount of their land auctioned to recover his loan with interest. Durganandan Jha saved most of his land from the ceiling act by transferring his land to fictitious names (called benami transaction) and his close relatives. This was told to Sancheti in good faith. Later Sancheti filed a case in the district court for settlement of Durganandan Jha’s benami lands with their actual tillers. The court conferred sikmi rights on the tillers of the land. Sancheti himself succeeded in getting 5–6 bighas of land. However, during Lalu Prasad Yadav’s rule, when abductions were at their peak, the Sancheti family decided to permanently migrate out of Bihar and moved to their ancestral place in Rajasthan. His was a complex case of the unsettling process that was involved in the making of this village. Though Sancheti was not an inhabitant of Jitwarpur, his presence had influenced the village in many ways. As a moneylender he had helped Chandreshwar Jha, the biggest landlord of Jitwarpur, fight against the Noniyas in local courts and the High Court but that had also proved to be a decisive factor in the decline of Chandreshwar Jha and several other local Brahmins. He also weakened Durganandan Jha by continuously giving him loans on high interests to meet his political ambitions and fund his lavish lifestyle, and by exposing his fraudulent ways of saving his lands from ceiling laws. As a moneylender and monopolist over grain trade in the area, he ruined several families and local producers. Migration and labour relations The migrant labour families, by settling in the village, had entered into a feudal agrarian relationship with the Brahmin landowners who were their employers and whom they would call zimdar (zamindar) irrespective of their holding size (the term zimdar was still in use at the time of my fieldwork). On the one hand, their social relationship was governed by Brahminical notions of purity and pollution, and on the other, their economic relationship was based on the exploitation of labour by the landowners. Political

Migration and the making of a village  69 power too was vested in the zamindars. Hence, labouring families had no option but to give free service (called begaar) to the zamindars, work for meagre wages, and tolerate all sorts of humiliation in the form of beating, verbal abuses, and sexual exploitation of women. There was no question of saying no to the zamindar, howsoever unreasonable his demands were. Gradually, a local form of labour employment called lagoria developed in the area. Remnants of the system still existed at the time of my fieldwork. Lagwas (agricultural workers) belonged to poor Musahar, Mandal (Kewat) and Yadav families. They had taken loans from their landowner and, in return, had to give priority to the work of the landowner. They repaid the loan in the form of their labour. No interest was charged from them on the loan amount. Lagwas were also expected to do begaar (unpaid labour). However, regular seasonal outmigration helped the lagwas to escape begaar to a great extent. Bachcha Singh, a Godhi by caste, narrated his own experience of begaar in the past: As soon as a landowner sighted us, he would immediately ask to do some work. Purely as begaary! He would say – bhains kholkar ghas khila de; bhains ko khunta par bandh de; peene ka pani bhar de kuan se (ya) chaapaakal se; bojha dho de; bora utha ke machaan pe rakh de; pinjwa lagane mein madad kar de; darwaje par jhadu lage de; bari mein kamthauni kar de; patta chun de; bari-jhari mein do balti pani dal de; lakadi chir de; aata piswa ke la de21 – how many of them one can recall? Their demands were endless. Some 25–30 years back, we were required to share fruits – banana, mango, jackfruit – from our trees, and bamboo. Those days there worked a system of dafadari.22 We feared [them]. There was no question of saying no. We were living on their land and were dependent on them. Had we said no, they would have retaliated by stopping the entry of our cattle in their field for grazing, fuelwood, and even giving a loan to us. Until 15–16 years back, all Godhi families were required to offer free service for a few days in a year. At least fifty of our hundred and a quarter family resided on their land. Now, we avoid going to them. Now we use santhi23 as our fuel. This is one of the reasons we cultivate patua. Even today Brahmins use swear words for those taking fuelwood from their orchards, they humiliate us even when we take bhanti or karchi24 from their land. But we cannot avoid them fully. We are their sharecroppers, hence, have to give some free labour and accept less wages. The Musahars were paid lesser wages because the land of their homestead was gair majarua malik or sikmi and had originally belonged to Brahmins. While other labourers got 50–60 rupees, sometimes even 70 rupees, as cash and one and a half kg of grain, the Musahars got 20–30 rupees less than others. The Musahars too were dependent on the Brahmins for their daily existence. Only those few Musahar households who owned land and were

70  Pushpendra not dependent on Brahmins got full wages and could resist demands for free labour. Md. Alzan of Mansoori tola was doing sharecropping on seven bighas of a Brahmin’s land. He narrated his experience: Free labour has reduced due to migration as we are not always present in the village. But even today I must give 5–6 days of free labour in a year. I am asked to do odd works like puaal ka taal lagana; dhan ke bakhaar ke liye taat bana dena; taat chha dena; khet mein apna hal-bail leke jotayi kar dena; chana ke khet mein spray kar dena.25 At least one day for each of the three crops. During such work, the landlord gives one meal only. Being a tenant, I am paid just Rs. 50 a day whereas non-tenants are paid more, up to Rs. 70 during peak period. Now that grazing land has shrunk due to growing wheat cultivation, we are forced to reduce the number of cattle. Landlords do not allow grass-cutting even on aar-dhur (edge of a field). The terms and conditions of sharecropping are lopsided and favour the landlord. One day, when I was interviewing a Brahmin landowner, a Musahar labourer, along with his 10-12-year-old daughter, was waiting to collect his wages. He sat on the chowki (a wooden cot). Meanwhile, the landowner asked him to serve fodder to his two cows. The girl was asked to do some minor household work. Later I met the labourer in his tola. He mused: Taking begaar is ingrained in the psyche of the Brahmins. We cannot completely avoid visiting their house. We have seen how our parents and grandparents were humiliated, even beaten up. Now they cannot do it to us, particularly to the younger generation. I sit on his chowki. He may not like it but would say nothing. Mukhiya and sarpanch, both are from backward castes. Our MLA is from a gadedia (shepherd) community.26 Even a few Musahars have land. Sometimes Brahmins borrow money from them. Sab kuchh ek dam pehle jaisa nahi chal sakta hai (the past cannot be repeated in the same manner). Lakhandeo Sadai pointed to one big change that, according to him, would not have been possible without migration: “Earlier the labourers would flock around the landlords for work. Now the landlords come to our door when they require labour in agriculture or otherwise”. He told me that among Musahars, he and one Balak Lal Rishidev did moneylending. Some 5–6 years back, he had mortgaged-in five bighas of a Brahmin’s land for 40,000 rupees. In the case of a mortgage, the moneylender did not charge any interest but retained the right to till the land. The landowner repaid the loan after three years. Earlier, many Brahmins used to sell their land to meet daily expenses as their men and women did not work in the field. Balak Lal had in the past purchased their land for 700–1100 rupees for a bigha while working as attached labour, along with his brother. According to him,

Migration and the making of a village  71 purchasing land had now become almost impossible for a labourer due to sky-rocketing land prices. The general opinion among the labouring community in the village was that the Brahmins’ hold had weakened but would weaken further if work opportunities expanded outside agriculture in the area, or if wages increased, or earnings from migration went up. This was also expressed by almost all the Brahmins I met, of course sometimes as a complaint, sometimes with a sense of loss and at other times in the tone of reconciliation. Ramakant Jha, whom everybody considered the most systematic and efficient farmer in the village, complained that despite his strong personal preference for self-cultivation, he had to lease out some land to keep a hold over labourers and ensure labour supply to his field. He brought his diary, in which he had meticulously noted down cultivation-related expenditure, production and income, and explained that self-cultivation was more rewarding than leasing out. Earlier you call five labourers, ten of them would come rushing to your door. Now nobody comes unless called four-five times. Rather we go to their door and request repeatedly. Even when they say they would come; you can never be sure. Delhi-Punjab bhi bigada hai aur yahan bhi kheti ke bahar kaam badh gaya hai (migration to Delhi and Punjab has spoiled them and also more non-agricultural work is available locally). From 2008 onwards, I stopped the cultivation of patua because it was labour intensive. Instead, I cultivate moong and chana. Moreover, I must keep giving cash loans to my tenants on which I do not charge any interest. I also allow them to collect jalawan (fuelwood) from my orchard. Yet, I also came across some extreme cases of labour practices embedded in poverty. Two minor children, around 12–13 years, worked as charwaha (cattle grazers). They stayed at their employers’ house. Each child tended to 4–5 cattle. There were conflicting claims about their wages. While the children reported that they were paid three meals every day and Rs. 3000 a year, their employers claimed that they paid 14000 rupees a year as salary and took care of their meals and other requirements such as clothes, soap, and oil. The children belonged to completely landless families from the Momin community in Mansoori tola. Another example was of an old Brahmin in Puraini tola – Tej Narayan Jha, a widower. He worked as a charwaha for Brahmins. When I asked him the reason, he broke down and narrated his story of landlessness, and how his sons had left him unattended. Unable to migrate at his age (he looked around 60–65 years old), he took up this job.

Dignity and cultural capital27 In Jitwarpur, migrants carried a huge burden of indignity, particularly because they were perceived as lacking “cultural” capital. Only the

72  Pushpendra Brahmins were considered to be practising “knowledge” as a social class. Gaining cultural capital through material possessions was also ruled out in the case of “lower” castes. Their clothing, taste, manners, ornaments, songs, dances, pastime favourites, rituals, etc. were viewed as inferior, with “nanh jat” (low caste) characteristics. They “lacked” exhibitionist values for establishing class positionality. These laid a solid foundation for “othering”, which continuously nurtured the social practices of distancing, untouchability, discrimination, and humiliation. Migrants’ memories were replete with stories of “othering”. At the same time, as it would have been anywhere else, the “others” strived to create their roots and proof of belongingness. They created stories that voiced their deep quest for dignity and redefined their collective identity and their relationship with their “others”. It would be wrong to attribute the awakening entirely to the recent rise of backward politics or earlier socialist politics. It seemed inherent and expressed itself in myriad ways, even before the country became independent. One strategy for claiming social equity was Sanskritisation; it emphasised on adopting symbols that would grant them the credentials to build cultural capital. The case of the Godhis was an example. Earlier the Godhis used “Bahardar” as their surname. But a teacher in the Patengana middle school, Shyamlal Pandit (“Pandit” was not a caste surname, teachers at that time used to be called “Pandit”) influenced the Bahardars to change their surname to “Singh” which was considered a Kshatriya surname. This happened some 70–80 years back. During my fieldwork, I could list twenty-seven villages in the vicinity where the Bahardars changed their surname to Singh, including the village Dooba to which Shyamlal Pandit belonged. The Bahardars of Jitwarpur village belonged to the Kurin sub-caste among Godhis. Kurins widely adopted the new surname to raise their social status. They went on to adopt the “sacred” thread (yajyopavit, called janeu in local language), though they hardly used it, reserving its use for special occasions like marriage or religious functions. For them, maintaining the sacredness of the thread in their day-to-day life as per the norms laid in the scripture was difficult. In the post-Mandal era, for the first time, there were signs of reversal of Sanskritisation. In many villages in the vicinity, the Godhis had started reverting to their original surname, Bahardar. By using “Singh”, some of them said, they stood the risk of losing their distinct OBC identity and a sense of larger solidarity. Ganesh Bahardar questioned why the community should feel ashamed of their surname when they had seen people outside the state having weird and amusing surnames that they did not try to hide. Godhi, Chaudhary, Bahardar, Mukhia, Mallah, Kewat, and Kewot Mandal belonged to the same caste. Within Godhis there were nine sub-castes: Khunot, Kurin, Banpar, Tiar, Sahni, Bind, Kol, Chabhi, and Chaudhari. I heard several sayings about this caste. One oft-quoted saying was, “Kewot kuti mahaapradhi, bhel-bhat mein gare kathi”, roughly meaning that one cannot trust the words of this caste: they speak different things at different

Migration and the making of a village  73 times. This saying shed light on the strategies that the community had to adopt to negotiate their living in the village. The entire community was settled on maliks’ land (here the reference is to gair majarua malik land) and their male folk had no specific occupation. Even for selling murhi and kachari in the local hatia, they had to please the malik (landowner) on whose land the hatia was held. The male workers did not want to get attached to one malik; they had to keep all of them (the landowners) in good humour as their dependence on maliks, for both land and labour, was critical. Communities had to be adaptable to survive and shrewdness was one such adaptation. Bare truth did not work. People participating in the discussion agreed that this applied to other castes too. No caste was spared in these sayings. For example, about the Yadavs the saying was, “Ganwarak Dosti, puvarak chhavani saale bhar”, meaning a Yadav’s friendship was short-lived. The choicest sayings, however, were about the Brahmins – “Brahman bhookha, Brahman haath sookha” or this slayer “Brahman ke chahuo mein chhal”, meaning that deception is so ingrained in the Brahmins that they even carry it in their teeth. Though such sayings are generic and part of the day-to-day lingo in the entire Hindi belt, I was interested in knowing how communities interpreted them. In people’s opinion, the sayings were less about the real attributes of the communities and more about their social relations. Brahmins and other oppressors had contempt for lower-caste people and their sayings demeaned them. But the lower castes too had contempt for their oppressors. Hence, in scriptural Hinduism, a Brahmin might be the epitome of knowledge, created by Brahma from his top upper limb, but in sayings he was a mean, greedy, and cunning creature. Satish Singh recalled how the Brahmins used to treat them badly in the past: We did not have any respect. Even a small boy from the Brahmin community would talk in derogatory language with our elders. We had to sit on the floor in their presence; we were not allowed to sit on a cot. We were forbidden to use slippers even when entering their bakhaar (grain store), leave aside their home. Untouchability was practised and the Brahmins would not take water from us. They would call us and other lower castes solkans. Now the situation has changed for the better. The Brahmins accept food and water from us. They do not dare to assault us. Earlier we used to call them Malik (master), now we call them bhaiji (brother) and chacha (uncle). Several Brahmin families have money and land, but many borrow money from us in case of need. Our women work and earn. Their women do not work. This is an important reason why we are progressing and they are declining. Gradually, the Brahmins are forced to work in the field. They plough, milk their cows, participate in the harvesting, and engage in wage labour. However, the Brahmins work only in other Brahmins’ fields. Still, they do not work in the sowing of paddy, though they participate in removing the seedlings.

74  Pushpendra One important milestone in the struggle for dignity was the offer of rapprochement that came the Noniyas’ way after years of animosity between them and the Brahmins, following the pogrom mentioned earlier. The story narrated by Anil Singh and some others, in a nutshell, was as follows: in an effort to end caste hostility in the area, in 1952 the former rajas of Champanagar and Banaili organised a big yajna,28 called Shrikunj.29 Thousands of people from the area attended it. The Noniyas were specifically invited to the yajna. On this occasion, a 72-hour non-stop kirtan (singing devotional songs) was held. One kirtan mandali (singing group) of the Noniyas was allowed to participate. The Brahmin priests who had come from Madanpur, Balua and Banaili, were pleased with the way the Shrikunj was organised. The Brahmins agreed to end untouchability against the Noniyas. They performed ­Upnayan30 for the Noniyas, conferring on Noniya men the right to wear the sacred threat, Janeu. Practically, the Noniyas seldom performed ­Upnayan ceremony because of the cost involved and the difficulty in maintaining the thread’s purity. They clubbed Upnayan with the marriage ceremony of their boys. They wore Janeu only on certain occasions. The Brahmins never refused to perform rituals for them, though there were instances where they (the Brahmins) were unwilling to visit very poor families. While the Shrikunj did help the Noniyas by reducing untouchability, discrimination, and social isolation, it did not end the hostility between the two communities. People recalled how, within ten years of the Shrikunj – at the behest of Mahesh Jha, one of the descendants of Chandreshwar Jha – several Noniya men were implicated in a criminal case following a dacoity in a trader’s house in Tegachhiya and were sent to jail. The case went on for more than a decade. It was in 1972 that the court finally disposed the case and exonerated all accused Noniya men. Lakhandeo Sadai from Gilahbari narrated one incident which played an important role in arousing the self-esteem of Musahars. Lalu Prasad Yadav, the then chief minister of Bihar, during one of his visits to the area, addressed a gathering of Musahars. He said, Punjab, Haryana ya jahan kahin kaam mile jao aur jab lauto to jeet se raho (if you do not find sufficient work locally, migrate to Punjab, Haryana or wherever you can find work. Earn well and when you return then live in style, not in tattered clothes). He exhorted them, pothi, puranas, jala do aur chandan-tika mita do (burn Brahmanical scriptures and wipe off the sandalwood paste worn on the forehead, which are symbols of Brahmanism). Lakhandeo believed that the Musahars discovered their own voice in the words of Lalu Prasad Yadav. The word jeet was particularly remarkable and caught their imagination. Before their return journey from Punjab and other places, migrants would buy heaps of clothes that were sold on the footpath by weight. These clothes would be resized by the local tailors to fit the family members. The usual scene of mud-slathered naked children running around changed, women started wearing blouse and houses looked neat and clean. Cheap plastic chairs found their way into Musahar houses. The Musahar and Yadav tolas were indeed the cleanest habitations in the village.

Migration and the making of a village  75

Reflections on outmigration Wheat was the main crop in the rabi31 season; garma paddy (paddy grown during rabi season) was cultivated on a very limited scale. The kharif32 crops comprised paddy and patua (jute). Paddy was sown in the month of Asadh33 and Sawan and harvested in Agahan. In between, weeding was done in the month of Bhado. One round of irrigation was done in the month of Bhado, particularly if there were less or no rains. Wheat was sown in the month of Poos and harvested in the month of Chait. In between, after about a month of sowing one round of irrigation was done. Weeding was usually not done in wheat fields. The same field was used for the cultivation of patua which was sown in the month of Vaishakh and harvested in Sawan. Patua required complete weeding which was done during the entire month of Jeth. After the harvesting of patua, the field was used for the sowing of paddy. The harvesting of Patua slightly delayed the paddy-sowing. My household survey found that the average number of days of employment per labouring household per year was 134 days, clearly establishing that the number of days of employment (wage as well as self-employment) in a year was less than the number of days of unemployment. In fact, employment days were much less in the case of irregular wage earners. In particular, there was no work during Asin, Kartik, Magh, and Phagun. Migration in itself was evidence of surplus labour. Low mechanisation in agriculture was another evidence of the presence of surplus labour as a considerable area was being tilled using bullocks. However, some labour scarcity was experienced during the sowing of paddy and, to some extent, also during wheat harvesting. Labourers would leave for Punjab before wheat harvesting was completely over in the village. Use of the mobile thresher (fitted in a tractor in such a way that it ran on the tractor engine) was a relatively new development but had rapidly replaced manual labour. Low wages were also contributing to the scarcity of labour. For example, attached labour was paid only Rs. 1000 per month and food. The same labour, had he migrated, would have saved Rs. 2000 in a month. The magnitude and importance of outmigration from the village could be understood by considering the following four facts. First, out of the total 950 HHs, 67 per cent (636 HHs) reported having at least one member who was a migrant, in the last one year. Second, male migrant workers accounted for 52 per cent of the total male labour force. Third, migrant workers constituted 40 per cent of the labour force in the case of Scheduled Caste workers and 30 per cent of the relatively poorer OBC I. And fourth, 62 per cent male migrant workers belonged to landless HHs and another 52 per cent to HHs owning less than 1 acre of agricultural land. Migration was by and large circular. All local works – agricultural and non-agricultural combined – were not sufficient to sustain them in the village, whereas at the destinations low wages and inaccessible family housing

76  Pushpendra did not allow permanent or long-term migration with family. People did not see any alternative to this situation. In 1972, the Forbesganj rail line, which linked this area with Punjab, became operational, and with that, the route to the Green Revolution hotbeds of Punjab and Haryana opened. For non-agricultural works, Karnal, Kurukshetra, and Khoda (a place between Ghaziabad and Noida) were the destinations of choice. People recalled how, even in the distant past, they were occasionally forced to migrate when local landlords had no work for them or when they faced extreme scarcity due to failure of rains or severe floods. Lali Sharma, a carpenter living in the Noniya tola, recollected how, in earlier times, people used to migrate to Nepal and Bengal, In Nepal, we used to work in dhankuti (dehusking of paddy) and take up soil cutting, ghar-gharghatti (building or repairing kutcha house) and other works that came our way. In Bengal, we used to go to Dinajpur to work in the agricultural field of tori, paddy, patua. Earlier we also used to travel up to 10–15 km for work. According to Lali Sharma, the introduction of wheat cultivation to this area led to more work being available locally. There was also a demand for labour in the neighbouring Panchayats during the sowing of paddy and harvesting of patua. Big landowners from Jamua and Phulwari used to come in their tractors and take away labourers from Jitwarpur. Wages were negotiated beforehand. Lali Sharma said There is definitely a slight improvement in our economic conditions. But migration is still required. A small episode of illness, floods, drought, crop failure – and we become indebted. Peak period in crops is declining. In recent years, cultivators have started using weedicide, which is affecting labour use, particularly of women. Namdhari Jha, who owned 52 decimals of land, used to cultivate Durganandan Jha’s land on lease. But the landlord ensured that his name was not recorded in the khewat. He did not benefit from the Survey and Settlement. After his death, for a few years, his son worked as a lessee as well as a wage labourer in the landlord’s land before deciding to migrate out of Bihar for work. He was just nineteen years old at that time. He recalled, “I did not want to work in the field of the local landlords as they would always seek begaar”. He along with his brother worked in a flour and oil mill in Karnal (Haryana) while their family members lived in the village. He proudly said that he earned Rs. 2250 for ten days of work in the mill, whereas he would make just Rs. 900 in a month if he worked in the village. They saved money to purchase one acre and 10 decimals of land in the village. In 2005, they mortgaged 84 decimals and sold 60 decimals of land to meet the cost of their sister’s marriage. Though they were almost landless again, he declared, “Whatever we have today, even the hut with a tin shed, is all because of our

Migration and the making of a village  77 own efforts from migration. We do not work under the local landlord even for a day”. In the Noniya tola, I came across several households where women had also migrated to Delhi or Haryana along with their male counterparts and worked as maidservants. I met Kamali Devi whose story defies any simple understanding of migration. She recounted, In 1993, I migrated to Delhi with my family. We used to stay in Malviya Nagar. Then my son Arbind Singh was twelve years old. My husband (Pukar Singh) used to do beldari (carrying headload of bricks) at construction sites. He earned Rs. 100 a day though on some days he would not get work. I worked as a domestic maid in kothis [it might have been bungalows or flats in housing societies]. Sometimes my daughter, Meena, accompanied me. I used to work in five houses. At that time the payment was Rs. 150 for jharu, pochha aur bartan (floor and utensil cleaning) and Rs. 500 for washing clothes. Overall, I used to earn about 2000 rupees in a month. Arbind was admitted to a school. But on 14 August 1994, he fell from the roof while flying a kite. Both his hands were fractured, and it took them about a year to heal. Thus, his education was disrupted. After recovery, he started to learn painting in construction work. During his apprenticeship, he used to earn Rs. 30 a day. After his apprenticeship, he started working. He was supposed to get at least Rs. 50–55 a day but the employer cheated and paid at the rate of Rs. 35 only. Then, Arbind left for Himachal Pradesh along with a relative. It was in the year 2000. He used to work on daily wages of Rs. 80. Then he got a job in a furniture shop where he learnt to polish wood. When the owner of the shop constructed his house, he gave the contract of painting and polishing to Arbind. As this was his first contract, he had no idea of the contract market. Hence, he had taken the job on below-market rates. He worked for six months and saved Rs. 5000 to send back home. Arbind stayed in Himachal for 5–6 years. Once he shifted to Himachal, we decided to return to the village. My husband resumed agriculture on our 15 kattha34 family land and 15 kattha of mortgaged land. In 2005, Arbind was married. However, after three-four years, Arbind developed mental illness. He had got addicted to the smell of paints. He returned to the village. To meet the cost of his treatment, my husband, our younger son, and I again shifted to Delhi. My younger son was in Class IX, but he had to leave his studies. He worked in a shop where starting from Rs. 1500 gradually his salary increased to 3000 rupees a month. My husband became a security guard. Later, he returned to his previous job of the head loader in construction work in Sonipat. Our elder son, Balchand, also joined him. They work through a contractor who ensures that they get a job every day. However, the contractor pays them less than market wages; still, they prefer the contractor as there is

78  Pushpendra no guarantee of getting work in the open job market. I too returned to working as a maidservant. Sometime back, when I heard about my son’s deteriorating condition, I came back to the village to be with him. My husband and sons send money every month. My husband is also planning to come back but both sons will continue working there. Of all the stories I heard about out-migration, the common conclusion was that the destinations were inhospitable, and life was tough for working-class people. Yet they continued to leave their village. Whosoever I  spoke to seemed convinced of its benefits – remittances had helped to bring about improvements in their food, clothing, etc.; their debt-burden had reduced; cash income had increased; the dominance of the Brahmins had reduced; the unemployment period had come down; more work was available locally as excess labour was migrating out; and begaary had reduced. Then why did they not migrate permanently, with family? “Not possible”, “earnings are not sufficient for a family to survive” (“khayenge kya aur khilayenge kya”), “how can you leave your ancestral place” were common answers. Yogi Mandal, a Kewat who survived on fishing, said, There is no belongingness at the destination town (shahar apna nahi hai). Permanent migration is a luxury. A few Brahmin families have migrated, but they are doctors, engineers. They may have land in the village, but that is property for them. Their sense of belongingness ends with the death of their parents whom they leave behind.

Conclusion The cases cited in the essay demonstrate the dynamic nature of the spatial movement of people that contributed to the making of a village. Almost all communities now settled in the village came from somewhere else, during a period extending from the last five years to almost a hundred years. The village came into existence through a process of settling and unsettling which was mediated through land, labour, power, violence, oppression, resistance, subversion, social mobility, physical movement, and certain events that deeply influenced the lives of settlers. Evidently, the socio-economic conditions of the people were still crucially embedded in their migration history. The prevailing social relations, agrarian relations, and power dynamics in the village were outcomes of a complex interplay of caste, class, migration, and the modern institutions of democracy. Gradually, particularly in the last two decades, outmigration is being used by the historically subjugated communities to challenge, resist, and subvert the dominance and oppression practised by upper castes. In my ethnography, the village lived in its memories. The past seldom appeared as a collection of happy memories in the narratives of the labouring poor, the in-migrants to the village. Their narratives frequently exuded their memories of struggle, their indomitable will to survive and to change.

Migration and the making of a village  79 The past is a long history of the struggle to create belongingness. Their ancestors came from somewhere else and adopted the land as their own, without legally owning it. Legal ownership was to become a point of conflict and struggle, something to live for. Staying in the village might have been extremely difficult and painful, but they did not leave, except temporarily. It did not matter today whether they had opportunities to leave or not. Living was prosaic, leaving was palliative. Living defined them, leaving did not. Living created a sense of ancestry in the village. Genealogy mattered but only for knowing their origin, for establishing the identity of their social being. Ancestry mattered for belongingness. Leaving might have been disruptive but did not cause a rupture in living. On the contrary, it deepened the idea of living. Living, however, is incomplete if the agenda of land, dignity, and freedom remains unfinished – that is, as long as the painful past lives on in the present.

Notes 1 A slightly different version of the chapter was first published in an online, biannual journal entitled, Journal of Migration Affairs, Vol. 2 (1), September 2019. https://migrationaffairs.com/migration-and-the-making-of-a-village/. To maintain confidentiality, only pseudonyms have been used. 2 Also called the land consolidation programme, aimed at rearranging the parcels of land in a holding or in different holdings for the purpose of rendering such a holding or holdings more compact. 3 The fieldwork was carried out from March to early June 2010. The field notes have so far been unpublished. Parts of field notes, which dealt with the past – the making of the village, crucial events and changes majorly influenced by migration – have been used to write this chapter which, in my view, remain relevant irrespective of the long gap between the fieldwork and writing of this chapter. At some places, narratives have been supplemented with quantitative data to give background information about the village. 4 In terms of caste and community groups, while Brahmin belonged to the general category of castes, Noniya, Godhi, Kewat, Nai, and Halwai belonged to the OBC-I (also known as the extremely backward castes); Baniya, Yadav, Sudhi, and Barhai belonged to the OBC-II; Chamar and Musahar belonged to the Scheduled Castes (SC), and Santhal belonged to the Scheduled Tribes (ST). Among Muslims, both Momin and Ansari belonged to the OBC. 5 Of the total land area, 94.74 acres belonged to the state government. Of these, 45.6 acres was gair majarua khas. Some of these lands had been settled, but some had been lost due to change in the course of Bhalua. 42.14 acres of land had been classified as gair majarua aam which was under public use. 7.54 acres belonged to the erstwhile District Board. 28.35 acres were declared ceiling surplus which were distributed among the landless families. Some bhoodan land was also distributed among the landless, but the descendants of land donors recaptured the land. 6 A system of patronage where certain social services were provided by a professional class that was remunerated not with instant cash or kind payment but summarily with a fraction of gross agricultural produce or with a parcel of land free of rent or bearing a reduced rent. The Nai family in the village had a jajmani of forty-five families in the Noniya tola who would each pay 10 kg per crop (wheat and paddy crops only).

80  Pushpendra 7 Private waste and uncultivable lands of the proprietors. 8 Anna was the smallest unit in the then used anna-rupee system of currency. Sixteen annas were equivalent to one rupee. Anna was minted in the form of a coin. It was subdivided into four (old) paise or twelve pies (thus, there were 192 pies in a rupee). When the rupee was decimalised and subdivided into 100 (new) paise, one anna was therefore equivalent to 6.25 paise. 9 Here taka refers to the Indian Rupee. Colloquially, people used to call a rupee a taka. It should not be confused with Bangladesh’s currency. 10 A tenant of a tenant, a sub-partner; when the tenant’s holding was of considerable size, sub-letting was practised. 11 Denotes tenant’s rights in land signifying a “permanent occupancy holding”. 12 A twelfth-century ruler of Ajmer whose territory was spread over the vast expanse of north-west India. 13 One acre is equal to 1.6 bighas. 14 Solkan is a derogatory term for lower castes. 15 Public register of ownership of parcels of land. In fiscal terms, it meant a register of properties according to their value. Cadastral Survey succeeded Revenue Survey undertaken by the British in the second half of the nineteenth century. Cadastral Survey was based on the plots prepared in the traverse survey. 16 Khesra (also known as khasra) is a written record of the particulars of a rough map of a village in which different plots of land are numbered, and their numbers which are known as khasra are entered in the book along with the area and the crop; list of fields serially numbered according to the map showing occupants, area, and class plot by plot. 17 A record of tenants’ rights, including the identity, extent, quality, and possession of the land. 18 Register of proprietors, under proprietors and perpetual lessees with their interests and share of revenue payable. 19 All lands utilised for public purposes, e.g., lands occupied by the railways, canals, etc. 20 Hari Charan Sancheti was a wealthy businessman who traded in grain and one of the biggest moneylenders in the area. Technically he was not from Jitwarpur as his house was near Patengana market. 21 Give fodder to the buffalo, peg the buffalo, bring drinking water from a well/ handpump, carry the bundle, put the sack on the loft, help in preparing rick of plant residual, clean the open yard of the house, weed the kitchen garden, collect the dry leaves, water the plants in the kitchen garden, cut a wood log into small pieces for use in the kitchen, take the wheat for grinding in a flour mill. 22 Dafadars were village-level part-paid staff of the police who were supposed to keep records of village level events and report crimes to the police. The post was handed over from generation to generation. 23 The residual dry plant of patua (jute) is called santhi. A layer of cattle dung is applied over the santhi and dried in the sun. This fuel is also called santhi. 24 These are wild plants with the stem. Not used for any other purpose than fuel for cooking. 25 Building rick of plant residual, preparing bamboo-made structure of grain storage on which mud plaster is applied, thatching the grain storage structure, ploughing the field with own bullocks, and spraying pesticide in the black gram crop. 26 Later, I came to know that the then local MLA, Mr. Pradip Kumar belonged to a caste called Gangai. According to the Purnea’s Gazetteer by P.C. Roy Chaudhary (1963), the Gangais migrated to Purnea from the borders of Nepal in the Terai region. They are included in the OBC-I list.

Migration and the making of a village  81 27 Cultural capital consists of a set of assets usually associated with information, knowledge, abilities, skills, and motivation. Poor and ‘low’ caste people are characterised by their lack of these assets, thereby being unable to utilise available opportunities of social mobility or to guard themselves against discrimination and humiliation. 28 Yajna literally means sacrifice. It is a type of Hindu worship usually lasting for several days in which the essential element is the ritual fire which is kept alive at a temporary altar for the entire duration of the yajna. Oblations are poured in the fire, and it is believed that everything that is offered into the fire reaches God. During the entire period of yajna, priests and singer groups offer chants and devotional songs. 29 Shrikunj is one of the three forms of yajna practised in this area, the other two being Vishakha Kunj and Lalita Kunj. Together they form the mahatrikunj yajna. 30 This is a Brahminical ritual in which an upper-caste boy, usually under the age of twelve years, receives the sacred thread (known as yagyopavita or janeu) in a ceremony and continues to wear the thread across his chest throughout his life. 31 Crops grown in winter and harvested in the spring after their ripening at the beginning of the hot season. 32 Crops sown before the commencement of the rains and harvested before winter. 33 The English equivalent of the Hindi Calendar is as follows: Asadh: June–July; Sawan: July–August; Bhado: August–September; Asin: September–October; Kartik: October–November; Agahan: November–December; Poos (Pausha): December–January; Magh: January–February; Phagun: February–March; Chait: March–April; Vaishakh: April–May; and Jeth: May–June. 34 20 kattha constituted one bigha of land.

4 “Freedom talk of ploughmen” Bondage and seasonal migration in East-Central India Sohini Sengupta

Impression Most evenings, a Binjhal man, white haired and gaunt, could be seen walking down the village road, shouldering two large baskets of fuel wood, balanced on a pole. He had been a ploughman in his youth. During a conversation one afternoon, he had described his past derisively saying, a naukar (servant) that is who I was. Can you understand what that means? Now, I go to the forest every day, it is my habit but also freedom. My son wants me to work on his paddy field. But I prefer to roam the forest. I do not like to ask him for anything, neither food nor money for a drink to ease my bones…. (Sudama, 70 years) We recount things that we hold as true and we predict events which occur as we foresaw them. (Ricoeur 2012: 9) Migrant narratives are a significant resource for accessing awareness, intentionality, and the voice of the migrant. In these narratives, the event of migration occupies a crucial position. These narratives have been viewed as strategic social productions, being stories with an internal structure, external referent, and temporal dimension. For instance, young immigrants from Kosovo always told similar, consistent stories, that presented a contrast between “life here and now” and life in “past times and places since this was the basis for obtaining legal and social recognition in destination country” (Adams 2009: 160–161). South Asian immigrants would narrate “hardship tales” that focused on personal strength, independence, resource-fulness, creative capacity to overcome adversity in order to instil in their children work ethic and obligation to succeed (Herbert 2012). Attending to narrativity and temporality of recalled experiences open new windows in understanding the phenomenon of migration. Located in the southern end of the Chota Nagpur plateau and bordering Chhattisgarh, Borasambar is a hilly-forested area in Odisha. This article examines DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-5

“Freedom talk of ploughmen”  83 accounts of debt-bondage and seasonal migration among the ploughmen from the ex-zamindari of Borasambar. Forested Central India was a region of highly mobile people till the middle of the nineteenth century. In Borasambar, at the end of the nineteenth century, famines, wars, and colonial institutions produced currents of sedentarisation and dislocation. While agricultural castes in-migrated to pacified forests; adivasis, pastoralists, soldiers, caravan traders; struggled to obtain a foothold in the emerging society. Occupations such as forest clearing and farm labour with few entry requirements were crowded with groups with past of banditry, soldiering or rebellion. Such groups laboured as ploughmen, tree cutters, land-levellers, tank diggers and cattle herders for farmers and malguzars. Colonial administration discouraged “unsupervised movement by the poor” (Arnold 2008: 8) and promoted legibility of contracts from indentured labour (see Bates 1985, 2000; Bates and Carter 1994) to customary unwaged work such as “begaar”. The colonial period thus is associated with the emergence of “distinct forms of unfree labour” (Major 2019). In the latter half of the twentieth century, increased demands of productivity coincided with stressed rain-fed agriculture in the forest frontiers. In drought-prone Borasambar, agricultural workers freed from colonial-era bondage flowed outwards to neighbouring areas in streams of circular migration. Seasonal migration of agricultural labour to intensive rice cultivation area irrigated by the Hirakud multi-purpose project from the middle of the twentieth century provide the context for the narratives collected and analysed in this essay. Narratives through emplotment provide unity, coherence, and temporality to complex human experiences, argued Paul Ricoeur (2012). Narratives are simultaneously truth and fiction, stories that maybe universal or charters for identity claims. In Borasambar village, people commonly used the phrase “ehadey samaste swadhin heleno” (now everyone is free). “Freedom” invoked here, supported varied claims and served different purposes based on the speaker, listeners, and conversational context. When the ex-ploughmen used the term, it was most often to describe their improved present with reference to a past, which was described as the time when they were “paradhin” (controlled by others). Recounting experiences of farm work and seasonal migration under relations of debt-bondage provided the context for such statements. Usually, stories with negative outcomes were shared with reluctance and placed within the safe confines of the past. However, accounts of seasonal migration were more willingly shared as these represented the “improved present” that made the claims of overcoming the devalued aspects of the past more credible. This chapter both draws upon and departs from scholarship on “labour subjectivities” (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003; Shah 2006; Guérin 2013). Guérin (2013: 125) show how for the Paraiyar circular migrants to brick kilns, “what counts is to feel independent” though they remained at “the bottom of the local social hierarchy”. For Shah (2006), Jharkhandi brick kiln migrants viewed migration not as “torture and drudgery” but as

84  Sohini Sengupta an escape or freedom to “live out prohibited amorous relationship”. While ploughman stories discussed in this chapter maybe viewed as oppositional discourse or ideologies that enabled labour reproduction, the focus here is on how the labouring experiences, whether at home or migrant destinations, were remembered and interpreted as stories of improvement. Following Paul Ricoeur (2012), narratives of ex-ploughmen are viewed as reflections about time that communicates the sense of what has passed based on experiences of the present and articulate what should be in future. Narrative agency reveals the attempts to create coherence in the world over which the ploughmen had little control and lends insights into historical changes in labouring conditions and identities in rural Borasambar. My main argument is that, while the outcome of seasonal migration was uncertain, linked to memories of distress and seldom brought changes in living conditions, the ploughmen organised their experiences of travel, bargaining for wages, forging solidarities, overcoming challenges, supporting kin, relishing absence of an obligation to be loyal or offer recognition to employers, through stories about changing time. A focus on this “improved present” not only enabled them to gloss over the continued urgencies of subsistence or erase their longing for some certainties of the past but also created the basis for younger men to conceive the possibilities of a future outside their familiar social and cultural context. While ploughmen stories did not uncritically valorise seasonal migration over local farming or labouring, every story centred on some incidents of existential crisis and how these were resolved. The resulting effect, while conveying the agency of the ploughmen, also revealed the threadbare conditions of their uncertain lives. Ex-ploughmen stories underscore the need for migration research to attend to the complexity of migrant voices in their particular social and historical context. Borasambar ex-ploughmen do not live in a world that is outside the universal story of rural India’s exploited labour subsisting on high-risk agriculture and “wage-hunting gathering” in the informal economy (Breman et al. 2009). The “freedom-talk” of ploughmen should be read neither as acknowledgement nor evidence of attaining “liberal freedom” through better work-wages-rights-entitlements with the demise of semi-feudal labouring ties. These are nevertheless powerful stories that help the ploughmen to assert control over their changing world and forward claims and aspiration for the transformation of individual and group status through their continued dependence but divided allegiance towards the village moral economy and seasonal migration.

Agency-unfreedom of seasonal labour migrants Short-term circular migration is the dominant form of mobility among the rural poor from areas with low agro-ecological potential, poor access to credit, high frequency of drought. From an area bordering ­Borasambar, an estimated 300,000 rural people out migrated annually to work in urban brick kilns (Bird and Deshingkar 2009). Breman describes circular

“Freedom talk of ploughmen”  85 migration as distress migration by land poor and resource-less people best viewed not as choice-driven mobility but coping strategy supported by the need to sell labour in advance and through debt-bondage (Breman et al. 2009). Seasonal migration signals a dearth of physical and social capital to settle in destination areas, inability to escape cycles of dependencies, to attain social and economic mobility and created “stretched households”, “floating population”, informalisation and promoted debt-bondage in labour relations (Breman et al. 2009; Guérin 2013; Picherit 2018; Singh 2019). Such views contest policies (UNECE 2016) that evaluate circular migrants either as individuals exercising free choice or exploited victims divested of all agencies (Davidson 2013). My aim here is not to resolve this binary, but to understand what the exploration of local discourses of social transformation woven around labour servitude and seasonal migration would add to these critical debates. Micro sociological studies have shown that seasonal migration led to “diversification of entitlements, changes in social relations of production and reduced dependence on patron-client ties” (Rogaly et al. 2001; Mosse et al. 2005; Rogaly 2008). Migration scholarship that focuses on perceptions of migrants tend to emphasise “emancipatory potential” (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003: 186; Rogaly and Coppard 2003; Shah 2006). Postcolonial perspectives direct attention to the resistance and agency of labouring people even under dire conditions of servitude (Prakash 1990; Bates 2000; Steinfeld 2003; Derks 2010; Mcgrath 2016). Particular stories of migrants draw attention to the complexity and diversity of experiences and changing meaning of work and employment (Rogaly and Coppard 2003). While not irrigating the fields of radical transformation, these are valuable insights that would be lost in the universal narratives of labour exploitation under capitalism. In liberal approaches, capital and labour act as free agents in labour markets to create non-exploitative labour relations (Lerche 2011). Unfree labour is viewed as a deviation from standard labour relation, extracted under threat of penalty and mark the absence of willing participation of labour (ILO Forced Labour Convention 1930, no. 29). A series of influential studies criticise the free-unfree paradox, describing this as insufficient grounds to evaluate the condition of labouring people. These studies show that the boundaries between free and unfree labour is not rigid but complementary (Lerche 1998, 2011; Breman et al. 2009; Stanziani 2012; Carswell and De Neve 2013; Guérin 2013; Picherit 2018: 180). Moreover, slavery, indenture, or housework were not archaic custom but intrinsic to the capitalist economy (Steinfeld 2003; Brass 2008; LeBaron and Phillips 2019; McGrath 2016). Important shifts in recent years, in the context of India, have seen rising debt-bondage in textile and brick kiln industries, the preferred destination of rural labour seeking new opportunities (Carswell and De Neve 2013; Guérin 2013). This literature cautions against the attribution of agency to labour as unfree conditions abound at migrant destinations. Mining Borasambar ploughmen’s “freedom-talk”, for evidence

86  Sohini Sengupta for labours’ resistance or their exploitation would add little new to the extensive literature on labour and migration. Using the notion of narrative agency (Ricoeur 2012), to show how the ploughmen narrated experiences of seasonal migration and labour servitude as the passage of time that was supportive of their desired identities provide fresh insights towards understanding the insecurity, exploitation, and survival of labouring people from rural India by going beyond the freedom-unfreedom paradox.

Being “halia”: stories of survival in Borasambar, Odisha The situation of Borasambar ploughmen was shaped to a large extent by the history of colonial land settlement and emphasis on agricultural intensification following independence (see Bhattacharya 2018), resulting in the widespread occurrence of what Lerche 2007, has described as “classical bonded labour” or “agricultural bondage”. The halia (ploughman) was a farm worker who worked full time for a single land-owning household on fixed wages through the ek-khed or one-crop season. Their contract began in early summer and ended in the month of January–February, marked by the push punni harvest (full moon in the month of poush). This was also the occasion for a festival of reversal, similar to phag (holi). The halia who received their nistar (annual wages) on that day were free to find work with a new employer if they had been on chirrul contract. If they were bahbandha (arms-tied) they would work with the same employer through the summer, into the next kharif season. Ploughmen celebrated push punni by drinking, feasting and overturning convention by composing and reciting, teasing and abusive rhymes about social superiors and employers. In the next kharif, the halia could seek a new employer or continue with the old one. Acceptance of ploughman work was deemed as an acknowledgement of subordination in the fluid and contested caste-tribe hierarchy of Borasambar. Ploughman work was available for six–eight months. Longer employment was possible with landlords with more land, headmen (gountia), and large farmers (praja), who employed the halia for the year, for many chores in summer and winter: managing cattle, irrigating vegetable gardens (bari), stocking wood, firing bricks, undertaking repairs and construction, collecting and selling forest produce. When ploughmen took cash or paddy loan from employers, they worked for their creditors till it was repaid. The interest rate for repayment was high. For one khondi (15–20 kg) of paddy that was borrowed, one and a half khondi and for one khondi of seed-paddy, double the amount had to be returned at push punni. Since the halia lacked resources to farm, they laboured to repay loans. They were paid wages in paddy at rates that barely changed since the zamindari times. Summer and monsoon months were times of hardship when many impoverished people from the land-poor adivasi, Dalit and herds-men castes routinely sought work as halia. Boys would work as kuthia, also referred to as “ghar khia kuthia” because they stayed at the home of the sahukars and were usually paid in meals.

“Freedom talk of ploughmen”  87 It was rare to find a ploughman in the twenty-first century. This work was despised and associated with servility and un-freedom. A typical way to insult a man in Borasambar villages was to call him a halia. When a person from a disadvantaged group, built a house, graduated from college, made prestigious marriage, bought a tractor, rode a motorbike, secured the rare government job or spent lavishly on birth, marriage or death, ex-landlords would remark, “he who thinks no end of himself, his father was nothing but our halia”. Being a halia meant belonging to the employer households. Emphasising the exploitative nature of the work, older women from poor families complained, “bones of my sons have rotted working as halia”. The few who still worked as halia refused to admit their status, preferring to call themselves bhutiyar (daily wager). Being a halia signalled discredited past shrouded in hunger, shame, and caste subordination. Srihari was a middle-aged Binjhal (a tribe) man who agreed to speak to me about his experiences of being a halia. I had many conversations with him as he walked down the village street with a tangia (axe) slung on his shoulders, in his field as he rested in between ploughing, in the courtyard of his home as he helped his sons to build their new cattle shed. Often his wife and sons would say a few words. Srihari was a fluent speaker, sprinkling his stories with self-deprecating humour and proverbs. Yet, I had also seen him uncomfortable and unable to speak before a clutch of government officials. The talk about halia was triggered by my questions about the poverty of the Binjhals. It took me a while to understand that Srihari, like others in the village, had mixed views about discussing poverty, a status that brought disrepute in the village but the admission of which was associated with government surveys and welfare programmes. His father, Srihari had admitted reluctantly, had worked as a halia for many years. After his father’s sudden death, he had found the same work. Srihari spoke with some bitterness. An important point in his account was the insistence that his household was one among many where the adult men worked as halia. Srihari’s story describes the lives of many adivasi men of his generation who began working in childhood as a kuthia. As they grew up, the kuthia graduated to halia work for the same or different household. In all stories of this period, there is mention of child death and starvation. Consumption shortfall was the most compelling reason to enter tied farm work in most accounts. Those days, almost everyone we knew worked as a halia. If you did not, you would die of hunger. I was twelve when two of my brothers died. Soon after my father died. My mother went through terrible hardship to keep us alive; you would not believe it today. She was the daughter of a gountia (headman) family. Things were bad. My mother suggested that I stay with a rich household. At first, she gave me away to be a kuthia to my uncle and I worked for them for three years. From there, I moved on to work as a halia in the D … household. They were very wealthy and had kept four halias. I worked there for eight years. During that time I got married and also arranged marriage for my two sisters …

88  Sohini Sengupta Every time there was a marriage in the family, I brought money from the sahukar. Sometimes, the sahukar himself insisted that I take money from him. (Srihari, 55 years) Working as kuthia and halia, served to reduce the status of already diminished households. Most people, like Srihari, would mention social connections, even if these did not help them to improve their conditions. For Srihari, his mother being a daughter of a gountia (headman) family, fallen in hard times was important to impress not just the extent of their loss but also their essential worth. In old Borasambar, gountia (headman) implied status, influence, and landed wealth. Srihari highlights the critical role played by parents in contracting with sahukars and pledging children for work, a common practice. The involvement of elders in these transactions is interpreted differently. Most young men saw this as the unjust power and control of senior kin, while older men saw this as the legitimate conduct of elders in times of crisis. Yet, Srihari did not see his entry into servile labour as being forced by his mother but by his family circumstances. It was important for him to mention that the households for which he worked were wealthy and prestigious. His re-telling of being halia was woven around necessities and responsibilities, rather than subordination or shame. He had provided for his family, organised marriage for his sisters, thereby fulfilling his expected social role as a patriarchal household head. But fulfilling these duties had meant incurring debt and further engagement in tied-farm work. By describing a similar predicament faced by others, he had argued that his conduct was not unworthy by the standards of those times. Sahukars (employer–moneylender) were seldom seen as performing a benevolent role in stories related by halia. Instead, the view that the sahukar was naturally exploitative was widespread. Ganesh, an elderly man of Goud (herdsman) caste, who had worked as a halia, described how the sahukars avoided making payments or loans in cash. Thus, paying the bride price during the marriage was difficult for young men from poorer families. All those who worked as halia would also marry late. For if they borrowed money, it created further dependence on the sahukar. Thus, taking credit from the sahukar was as a trap. Most ex-ploughmen denied the existence of reciprocities of the “patron-client” variety in their relationships. The sahukar valued neither hard work nor longstanding service and actively discouraged the ploughmen from farming their own fields, as this weakened dependence. According to Majhi, a man from the Keunt (boatmen and confectioner) caste, whose father had worked as a ploughman, things had changed for labouring people. We spoke on their beaten earth porch, where a giant pot of paddy boiled and bubbled all day long. The women of the keunt households made puffed rice from paddy for all in the village people and also sold puffed rice from their porch.

“Freedom talk of ploughmen”  89 When I was small, people were dying to do bhuti. There were many bhutiyars and a few sahukars. People said, take me halia. If they went to ask for loans for seeds or to eat, they were made to wait for hours. In sahukar houses you would be put to work: dehusking paddy, breaking and shelling tol (mahua) seeds before they relented and gave you what you asked or heard your request. During those years of privation, my father got weak, his health broke, his breath would come ‘san san’ after he did a bit of heavy work. It was hunger. We used to go several bels without eating rice. Things have changed now. Although even today there were many sahukars but men were not there at your beck and call to do bhuti. They would go to government public works or pick up a kegi-tagri and cycle to neighbouring villages to buy and dried shrimps or cultivate their tiny fields. They wished to be swadhin (free). (Majhi, 55 years) In Majhi’s narrative above, freedom denoted the loss of control of local sahukars over the ex-ploughmen, who could now find work where they saw fit. Most ploughmen remembered the past like Majhi, attributing poverty and hunger to ploughman work. But older men also spoke about desperate alternatives when one could not obtain ploughman work. Nileshwar, a Binjhal man around 70, who had worked as halia with many sahukars as had his father and uncles said that when he could not find ploughman work, he had to “going to the forest”. A young family to feed he would walk to the reserve forests 20–30 km on foot every day to get bamboo, mushrooms, small timber, and firewood, to exchange it for paddy or rice. He described this as “back-breaking work” and the time as “terrible years” when he was forced to look “for rice every day” to feed his family. Ploughmen recount helplessness when referring to these times “when there was no work to be found in Borasambar villages”. Such stories, usually about the past, revolved around incidents of survival crisis. For some years, said Nileshwar, (speaking about the droughts of nineteen sixties and seventies) people were “harvesting straw”. No one could afford to employ a halia for even six months. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, sahukars had pruned wages of ploughmen, shortened their contracts, and mobilised their own family labour and started hiring more women. Many ex-ploughmen recounted how despite working as a halia in the same household for several decades, the sahukar had refused to give them kulapari (a measure of paddy for every batch of paddy threshed during harvest) in a bumper harvest year. Some mentioned how the sahukars had never given buna (a field given for self-cultivation for the period of employment), to them or their father who had worked for the same family for many years. Both, buna and kulapari were part of traditional payments to the halia in addition to his monthly or yearly wages. Many recounted how they were forced to migrate outside Borasambar during this time, giving rise to “two decades of empty homes and silent streets”. Bino, a middle-aged man from the Dalit caste (Ganda),

90  Sohini Sengupta recalled with great sadness how the death of his children precipitated his flight from the village. Our family originally did the chowkidari work in the village. After a dispute leading to case-mukaddama, they lost the post and the land that came with the service. Four of my children died, three sons and a daughter. We grabbed the surviving child, my daughter and went away to Remenda in the canal area and stayed there. When we returned to the village, she was old enough to be married. (Bino, 60 years) In ploughmen stories, subsistence crisis is always at the centre of accounts about past and present. In these stories, the extremes of predicament, mortality, and hunger are located in external factors, such as loss of land through the actions of envious kin or landlords, exploitative employers, and natural disruptions like drought. Within this, the ploughmen view their own actions as moral conduct, as dutiful sons and honest, hardworking men, whose actions despite the intrusion of obstacles always led to some resolution of the crisis. Thus, the criticism of labour-bondage, though always present and bitterly discussed, is never central to their narratives, that are entwined with the necessity to tell stories about the personal agency that supported their claims for equality and respectable identity, with respect to others in the local society. Such positionings by older ploughmen earned them condemnation as foolish (bhokua), from the former landlords as well as younger men from their own households who were more literate and exposed to the world outside and disdainful of the mores of the local community.

Stories of canal migration: moving east and coming back Migration within the ex-zamindari of Borasambar was not uncommon in the early twentieth century but much of this was within the region, as young men sought ploughman-work with large farmers and headmen. Both women and men itinerant traders of oilseeds, food grains, dried vegetables, yarn, and forest produce roam from village to village seasonally. With the completion of the irrigation canals of the Hirakud multipurpose project in the Bargarh district, came a new opportunity for long-distance migration for Borasambar ploughmen. Completed in 1956–57, the Hirakud dam was part of the post-independence development of multipurpose river valley projects whose main purpose was flood control. The dam submerged dense forests, dislocated villages, and expanded canal irrigation to promote HYV monoculture of Paddy, establishing Bargarh as the granary of Odisha (see D’Souza et al. 1998). Notwithstanding its devastating impact (the dam submerged 249 villages, affected 22,144 households and 112,308 hectares of prime agricultural land) (see Baboo 2009), the irrigated area became the lifeline for starving surplus labour from the Borasambar region. Young men from Borasambar started moving eastwards, travelling 150 km, in search

“Freedom talk of ploughmen”  91 of work, opening the routes of seasonal migration that continues till the present. Stories of the early migrants to the canal area are usually positive. Srijano, an older Binjhal man, recalled going to eastern Bargarh when canals had first opened in the early 1960s. There was a general demand for agricultural labour to “make land” suitable for rice cultivation and later to transplant and harvest paddy. On his first trip, Srijano had gone alone for a paddy harvest season. Next year, in the transplantation season, he took a work party consisting of both women and men from the village. We had carried two days ration with us, some rice, bhuja (puffed rice) and wood. No one was going to pay us in advance during the palla rua (transplanation). We had only worked for a week when our food ran out. One evening I found a woman from our village crying … no food tonight, she had said. I felt we had to do something. So, we asked everyone to bring whatever money they had. We managed 7 rupees between the twenty of us. Taking that money, I went looking for rice. Luckily for us, the woman who kept a shop in the village knew me from my last visit. She liked me … maybe because my name was the same as her son’s. So, there was this good feeling and trust between us (like mahaprasad). I told her that we were working on an empty stomach and desperately needed rice and that I had brought all the money we had. She asked me to keep the money and instructed one of her shop boys to take out a sack of rice for us. You can return it later she had said. So, we ate, worked, and came home. Since then, many of us go every season, twice, even four times a year, to the canal. But that was the first time. (Srijano, 60 years) Srijano’s story spoke of equal ties, friendship, reciprocity and cash wages that had seemed generous. A new theme in the narrative was the perceived agency in self-contracted work and cash wages. The sharing of meagre resources created friendships that lasted decades and rejuvenated horizontal ties of cooperation among the poor. Canal and (later brick kiln migration) was enabled through connections forged by younger men and not patriarchal household heads. Emphasis on bonds of goodwill, especially through mahaprasad friendship and continued moral conduct, was how people like Srijano domesticated the act of flight not as a sharp break or exclusion from the familiar world of their own community and society but providing means to embed more strongly in the new world. Such recounting of migration suggests continuity in lives and identities. Here seasonal migration is viewed as mending and not breaking the code of conduct and beliefs that people treasured while providing new opportunities. By the end of the century, when farmers from the canal area started arriving in Mahulkonda to look for workers, they would seek out their old contacts. Men like Srijano and later his son became group leaders and jobbers, who assembled work parties and negotiated price with canal farmers every year at the time of sowing, transplantation, and harvest seasons. There were several such men

92  Sohini Sengupta in Mahulkonda whom the poorer families could now depend on for work, though many also migrated independently. Canal migrant households often depended on each other for credit, small loans and consumption. Village work parties were heterogeneous, consisting of men and women, of different jati and adivasi groups who referred to themselves as “labour”. Cash earnings, even though small, enabled them to help their neighbours and friends to tide over a crisis. It also helped them to bargain better with local sahukars. The equalising of women’s daily wages to that of men in Mahulkonda was directly attributed to canal migration. Canal migration also created a scarcity of labour during peak agricultural season, forcing sahukars to provide better terms to the halia. But migration to the canal did not end ploughmen work. During the 1970–80 decades, the young men from Borasambar who scouted the Hirakud irrigated villages for more permanent work had ended up living in distant villages as ploughmen (halia) for many years and started their families by finding brides among other migrants’ families and raising families. Bhagato, a Binjhal ex-ploughman, remembered a drought year from the late 1970s. Like Srijano, though at least ten years younger to him, he had initially gone there to work for the sowing season to transplant paddy. He had already been working as a kuthia in a village sahukar’s house for six years. Bhagato sat in his yard twining some jute on a spindle as he spoke to me that afternoon reminiscing about the year when he had first gone to the canal. That year no farmer in Mahulkonda could harvest even seeds. I went to the canal with my mother and sister for the first time for palla rua (transplanting rice seedlings). We had gone to Kornatikra village in Attabira, where they were paying Rs. 150 for sowing an acre of land. After working for two weeks, we earned Rs. 200 that seemed like a large amount. I did not come back home. I took an advance of 5 purug paddy and sent it home with my mother and became a halia. I stayed there for 6 years. My wages went up to 8 purug dhan at magh punni, and they gave me a tiny field to cultivate. While there, I married Lepa, a Binjhal girl whose father and elder brother were also working as halia. They had left their home village in Patna (Bolangir district). Things were so bad at home that my father and mother came to stay with me for a year in the canal…. Sanat, my eldest son, was born in the canal. (Bhagato, 50 years) An important aspect in Bhagato’s narrative was the responsibility he shouldered in looking after his family, how he succeeded in improving his wages and was also able to start his own family despite being away from his village. It was common for canal migrants to emphasise their prowess in negotiating wages and surviving hardship. Bhagato, for example, laughed and described his younger brother’s difficulties in the canal area. This was yet another drought year when his mother and brother had visited the canal for a sowing season.

“Freedom talk of ploughmen”  93 …my younger brother, Tikelal had come to the canal with my mother to do palla rua (transplant paddy seedlings) and to borrow money from me because it was hard to live in the village. He was only there for three months when his feet were eaten up with ketra (wounds). The water in the canal area is very messy with muck and fertilizer. He had cried and gone back home. He could not take the hard conditions. Not everyone remembered being migrants as an achievement. This is especially if they had been children when they had been sent away to work. Kulo, a Binjhal man in his thirties, described his childhood as abandonment. According to him, his parents had left him with a household in Khaliapalli village to work and fend for himself even before, “he had started wearing clothes”. In a drought year, his mother and father had gone to the canal for the sowing season work taking him and his little brother who had just started crawling. They left him there and come back with his brother. Despite the unhappy story he conveyed, Kulo was quick to point out that the household where he had worked initially had not ill-treated him. They were Goud (herdsman) in caste. The family consisted of only three people, father, mother, and a small child. Since I was small, the woman would allow me to sleep with her. I was there for two years when I heard about my father’s death. People came from my village to take me home. After the last rites and funeral, my mother took me to another village where F…’s father was working. By then, I was doing everything, from tending the cattle, cutting grass for them, bathing them, to ploughing the land. I do not know how much they were paying me. I got food and a place to sleep. At year-end, my mother would come and take some money from the employer. I stayed there for the next 8 years. I was big by then and realized that I could go back to the village. We had some land. My father had done some work on land, and it was cultivable, but we did not have any hal (plough animals). Well, we could not afford to be farmers. Despite these complex stories that evoked such disparate feelings, canal area work was considered qualitatively different from what the previous generation had experienced under village sahukars. An important difference was how it was young men rather than elders who entered into ploughman contracts. Working at a distance from home also helped their households to negotiate better terms and wages with local employers. Labour relation in the canal was viewed positively because it was seen as comparatively better paying than the terms at home as there was high demand for labour in the area. In the early twentieth century, most young men and women visited the canal area for seasonal wage labour, sometimes four times in a year, but none stayed back or left their children to work there. Back, in their own village, few continued to work as ploughmen, though on shorter contracts and better wages.

94  Sohini Sengupta

A story of brick kiln migration: moral breakdown While most ploughmen stories about tied work and canal migration were the positive reconstruction of times past, more recent stories were more complex and less streamlined. Mahulkonda villagers rarely went to work at the brick kilns in other states. They were familiar with this circuit as this was a preferred route of thousands of migrant labourers from the contiguous district of Bolangir. Often, family members of Mahulkonda households who lived in Bolangir villages would migrate to the brick kiln industry. In 2003, a few Mahulkonda families had travelled this route. After Madhabo’s wife sudden death, soon after their return from the brick kiln, people gossiped in Mahulkonda village. “The old people should not have gone so far”, many said. Some had remarked maliciously: “They really were too old for that kind of heavy work, but what could they do if their son refused to feed them”. A few days before his wife’s sudden death, I had spent an afternoon talking to Madhabo, an elderly man from the Haldiya Teli community. In Patna, Madhabo had said, shaking his head ruefully, everyone migrates whereas in Borasambar we like to live at home … people were spendthrift, they did not save and ate a lot of meat and fish. Whereas in Borasambar, people were frugal and would prefer to live on rice-water at home, and their migration was limited to the canal area. It was common for people in Borasambar to contrast their superior “culture” with the people in the neighbouring district, drawing upon the long history of rivalry between neighbouring kingdoms. Women collecting mahua flowers in early spring had often pointed out, to strangers like me, the mahasimna, where Borasambar’s boundary ended and Patna began. In this frame, the cause of long periods of migration among Patna villagers was viewed as derived from their lifestyle geared to conspicuous consumption. Like every year, Madhabo and his wife had gone to visit their married daughter who lived in a village in the neighbouring Patna area (the old name of Bolangir district). Madhabo’s daughters’ family seasonally migrated to the brick kilns every year. During this time, he would help them to tend and harvest their paddy crop. That year, Madhabo’s son in law had insisted that they accompany them to the brick kilns because he had taken Rs. 7,000 as advance money from the malik but two people in their group backed out at the last minute. Madhabo had felt they could not refuse and had accompanied the group. He was to help make bricks while his wife would cook and take care of the young grandchildren who were going with them. By supporting his kin, Madhabo was fulfilling his responsibility. The experience of working in the brick kiln was related to coercion and loss of respect. About 25 families had left together to work at a particular brick kiln in Waltair. Madhabo said that,

“Freedom talk of ploughmen”  95 the malik or sardar was a ‘harijan’ from Belpara who had nothing at the beginning but after being in this business, of supplying labour to the Waltair brick kilns, for the last twenty years, he had bought land and was now making a large RC house. Almost everyone knew about the sardar from Belpara, and his low social status was often contrasted with his remarkably good fortune as a migrant. For Madhabo, his own higher caste status as a Haldiya Teli was important and remarking on the low status of the labour contractor indicated his need to assert his discomfort from accepting work and acknowledging the greater economic wealth of the other. Most Haldiya Teli in Borasambar tended to be farmers with land, and some were landlords and headmen. Traditionally they were itinerant traders of turmeric and pulses, with large networks across Borasambar and Patna villages. From Jharpalli Madhabo’s group first travelled in a bus to Belpara and then boarded a crowded train at 3 in the afternoon. The next morning at 10, they had reached Waltair (Vishakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh). Their tickets and food during the journey were purchased by the sardar. From the station they had taken a bus that reached them to the “place where they made bricks”. Madhabo’s group was given a place to stay. They were also paid a sum of money per group for food and some extra if they were mixing bhusa with mud. They started work early in the morning, took a one-hour break in the afternoon, and worked late into the night. Their group could make about 2000 bricks every day and about 12000 every week. There was one man, Madhabo remembered, “who was immensely strong and worked without breaks, making 16000 bricks every week. He was a paik and wore a ‘paita’, a kshatriya like you”, he said to some men who were sitting on the veranda listening to us. The malik gave a ‘inam’ of Rs. 30 to anyone who would make more than 10000 bricks every week. They gave us a notebook to keep track of how many bricks we made every day. None of us could read but my daughter is smart, smarter than my son in law. When we set the raw bricks to dry that time, we counted them. One morning, when they woke up, one family among their group had disappeared. Running away from the kiln was not uncommon. According to Madhabo, the employer did not bother if you worked hard but was very angry with people who ran away. But people do it all the time. When Homa’s family disappeared overnight, they sent notices to all the railway stations. If they were caught, they would be beaten up. Mostly they cannot do anything if you reached your village. They can’t surely beat you in your own house that would become a police case. But when Homa’s family ran away, some families from my daughter’s village, Jharpalli,

96  Sohini Sengupta pointed to us as their relatives. The malik cut Rs. 5000 from our wages. That was really hard to take; we had tears in our eyes. Those people need not have pointed us out. But that is what we are like; we do each other harm. After our food expenses, the advance money and Rs. 5000 that they took away, there was nothing left to bring home. For Madhabo, being denied wages after undergoing the travails of new work and spending their own money to finance their journey in a new place was a defining moment in the experience of migration. He also voiced the general understanding that migrant workers were safe once they reached their own village, where the distant employer had less reach. While being matter of fact about the harsh treatment of the workers who ran away and the rigid work routine, he expressed real anger at the callous members of their own group, who had pointed them out as accountable for the run-away family. This highlighted the absence of solidarity among the kiln workers. Later, Madhabo’s son in law had also not given him any money for the work that they had done. He had told me, with his head hanging down that he was too ashamed to ask his daughter. He expressed anger about being tricked into going to the brick kiln. For Madhabo, brick kiln migration was for the immoral people of Patna who needed that form of work to support their extravagant consumption styles. Madhabo said that “in my daughter’s area, they ate chicken every other day, some had made savings, they were buying land and making houses. Over the years, my daughter has also saved money and invested in paddy cultivation”. Madhabo had continued recounting to the group of avid listeners, on that hot afternoon, as they sat balanced on their haunches in the veranda while his wife lay nursing a fever inside, Many people died working in the kilns, especially children and old people. After their death, the malik gave them money to buy wood and other expenses. There was no time to mourn, they get rid of their dead and go back to work almost immediately, the last rites left for when they would return to the village. Many children were born there. A mother had died giving birth. Seven couples, girls and boys, eloped. When they run away, it is terrible for the people who are left behind. Even if you wanted to take a day, the malik would ensure that you left some family members behind. The point in Madhabo’s story was to contrast the gains made by the brick kiln migrant in terms of gaining wealth as against the price that they paid in their inability to lead moral lives, having no time to celebrate birth, regulate the lives of the young or even mourn the dead. Elopement was not uncommon in Borasambar villages, but when brick kiln couples ran away, their family members faced the ire of the jobber and the boss. The malik’s control over workers movement and their persons describe here the unjust absence of freedom. The brick kiln was an inhuman place, Madhabo seemed to say. That day the listeners had shaken their heads, torn in their

“Freedom talk of ploughmen”  97 loyalties, convinced and yet not in complete agreement and said, “it was true what you say, the brick-kiln was not a place for old people”. Later, they would refer to this incident to debate not the merits and demerits of migration versus starving at home but the responsibility of young men towards looking after the old people, criticising Madhabo’s son for allowing this to happen. Most were convinced about the need for seasonal migration.

Narrative agency and freedom Jan Breman et al. (2009: 18), based on exhaustive research among South Gujarat seasonal migrants, has argued that the migration undertaken by landless and land-poor peasants is primarily to fend off destitution. However, these strategies are temporary, rarely result in better work or higher wages as circular migrants lack the requisite capital to settle down either at home or in migrant destinations. Most importantly, their decision to migrate indicates not “free” but “forced choice”. The narratives recounted by the ploughmen from Borasambar villages are examined here as their claims to establish themselves as intrepid, capable, and moral persons despite the low-status tasks undertaken by them and the destitution of their lives that such forms of work revealed. By telling these stories, the ploughmen established themselves as subjects in control of their lives and productive members of their community. The stories about ploughman work highlighted the initiative of young men to resolve subsistence crisis despite the sahukar’s miserly conduct. Canal migrants viewed themselves as intrepid workers who had survived in unfamiliar places, and they had defied the control of village sahukars. When more recent migration evoked bitterness, such as the trip to the brick kiln, narrators took care to protect their reputation. Ploughmen’s freedom talk, while suggestive of great personal agency, does not imply that the deprivation and loss experienced by them were irrelevant. What it indicated was their dependence on the local agrarian society and the need to be recognised as accountable and hardworking persons in order to avoid censure and to maintain social relationships of support that aided them through the recurrent seasonal crisis. In Borasambar’s caste society, it was common for farmer landlords (sahukars) to speak disparagingly of ploughmen and canal-migrants by describing their hunger, poverty, low ritual status and uncivilised practices such as drinking alcohol, consuming meat or neglecting their small farms. The ex-ploughmen, in turn, were deeply critical of the sahukars as greedy-grasping castes and relished telling stories about their immorality. But the ploughmen were more conscious about the messages they were sending to their own social networks of kin, friends and neighbour, people like them, on whose mutuality they were dependent at present. They were also wary about giving personal information to external authorities like the government officials, being uncertain about how this information would be used. Stories about seasonal migration could vary depending upon the ploughmen’s assessment of their listeners’ aims and interests.

98  Sohini Sengupta In general, the ex-ploughmen believed in presenting their best face to the world. For instance, Srijano often spoke about his third brother, Ganit who had been the most educated person in the family and who had made the transition from rural labouring by obtaining employment in the forest department. Srijano would shake his head and say: “if he had lived, he might have become a ranger”. Ganit had died as a young man of cerebral malaria within a year of joining employment. Other villagers remembered Ganit as a prodigy, “in those days, it was unusual for a Binjhal of the jharpat (forest) to have been so educated and accomplished”. Ex-ploughmen’s “freedom talk” was not about “freedoms” of migration but mobilising small gains to weave credible stories about their abilities and successes in being moral persons despite continuities in extreme social and economic hardships. Accounts of ex-ploughmen were assertions of improvement, but like millions of other landless and land-poor rural people, these men who belonged to marginalised jati and adivasi groups were scarcely “free” from the coercion of capitalism. Yet “freedom talk” was about demonstrating personal initiative and defiance of subordination that shaped complex subjectivity that was dependent on creating coherence out of discordant actions.

Glossary of measurement terms Tambi: Local measure and measuring vessel for grain, 1 Tambi = around 900 grams Khondi: Local measure for grain, 1 Khondi = 20 Tambi = around 18 kg Purug: Local measure for grain 1 Purug = 10 Khondi = around 180 kg Ludar: Grain measure. 1 Ludar = approximately 8 sacks of paddy (each sack = 75 kg)

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100  Sohini Sengupta Major, Andrea. 2019. “Unfree Labour in Colonial Southasia”. Asian History, Oxford Research Encyclopedias. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.360. McGrath, Siobhan. 2016. “Unfree Labour”. In International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology. doi:10.1002/ 9781118786352. Mosse, David, S. Gupta, and Vidya Shah. 2005. “On the Margins in the City: Adivasi Seasonal Labour Migration in Western India”. Economic and Political Weekly 40 (28): 3025–3038. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4416873. Picherit, David. 2018. Rural Youth and Circulating Labour in South India: The Tortuous Paths Towards Respect for Madigas. Journal of Agrarian Change 18: 178–195. doi:10.1111/joac.12196. Prakash, Gyan. 1990. Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labour Servitude in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2012. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rogaly, Ben. 2008. “Migrant Workers in the Ilo’s ‘Global Alliance against Forced Labour’ Report: A Critical Appraisal”. Third World Quarterly 29 (7): 1431– 1447. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20455118. Rogaly, Ben, Jhuma Biswas, Daniel Coppard, Abdur Rafique, Kumar Rana, and Amrita Sengupta. 2001. “Seasonal Migration, Social Change and Migrants’ Rights: Lessons from West Bengal”. Economic and Political Weekly 36 (49): 4547–4559. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4411446. Rogaly, Ben, and Coppard, Daniel. 2003. “‘They Used to Go to Eat: Now They Go to Earn’: The Changing Meanings of Seasonal Migration from Puruliya District in West Bengal, India”. Journal of Agrarian Change 3: 395–433. doi:10.1111/1471-0366.00060. Shah, Alpa. 2006. “The Labour of Love: Seasonal Migration from Jharkhand to the Brick Kilns of Other States in India”. Contributions to Indian Sociology 40 (1): 91–118. doi:10.1177/006996670504000104. Singh, Chandni. 2019. “Migration as a Driver of Changing Household Structures: Implications for Local Livelihoods and Adaptation”. Migration and Development 8 (3): 301–319. doi:10.1080/21632324.2019.1589073. Stanziani, Alessandro. 2012. “Introduction”. In Labour Coercion and Economic Growth in Eurasia, 17th–20th Century, edited by A. Stanziani. Studies in Global History. Leiden, Boston: Brill. Steinfeld, Robert. 2003. Coercion, Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (A Response to Gunther Peck). 51 Buff.L. Rev. 893. Available at: https:// digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/articles/591. UNECE. 2016. Defining and Measuring Circular Migration. Prepared by the Task Force on Measuring Circular Migration. Retrieved from https://unece. org/fileadmin/DAM/stats/documents/ece/ces/bur/2016/October/18Add1CircularMigration_for_Bureau_final.pdf.

Part II

Engendering migration

5 Gender and migration A contemporary view Samita Sen

It is only very recently that the field of migration studies is beginning to consider the question of gender seriously and a body of work is gradually emerging on women’s migration in different contexts. Prior to this efflorescence, there were only rather fragmentary pieces of research on the subject. Moreover, much of the new work has tended to focus on the last two or three decades, prompted by increasing international migration by women to work in what is termed the global “care” economy. To explore the (dis) continuity of this “new” development, we have to turn to existing research (inadequate though it is) about the presence of women in various streams of labour migration in colonial South Asia. This research has not been taken sufficiently into account in considering questions of migration in the contemporary period or in the more recent past. In fact, historical scholarship on migration provides critical clues to understand the gendered nature of labour migration in this region, especially what has changed and how such change may be explained. This essay engages with gender and migration in a relatively long historical perspective and highlight some of the changes that mark contemporary trends. The whole question of migration as treated by scholars and policymakers in South Asia remains inflected even today by a set of conflicting and contradictory colonial postulates. It is one of the conundrums of the nineteenth century that despite the massive mobilisation of labour, much of it under the aegis of the colonial state, the state nevertheless clung to the orientalist stereotype of the Indian peasant as inherently immobile. On the one hand, there was an explicit preference for migrant labour over local labour in many emerging capitalist enterprises, such as in the mills and factories of urban centres such as Bombay and Calcutta, in the mines of the Chota Nagpur, and most dramatically, in the plantations in Assam and north Bengal; on the other, there were debates and controversies throughout the period on the desirability of large-scale migration, conditions of migration suitable for specific social categories such as peasants, women and adivasis, and concerns about the means of mobilisation, particularly forms of intermediation based on kin, caste and community networks. Much of the heat in these debates was fuelled by the fact that neither the migration nor the labour contracts in the destination were either quite “free” or favourable DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-7

104  Samita Sen to workers. All these questions applied with additional force when it came to women, especially since seclusion and segregation were thought to render women even more immobile than men in the South Asian context, and “freedom” in the case of women was moot anyway. The chapter draws on some of my earlier work on the colonial period as well as from a project I supervised (2013–15). The first section of the essay is based on my already published historical research. The final section is based on a recent study, as yet unpublished, focusing on single women migrants from the district of South 24 Parganas to Kolkata city, who are engaged in paid domestic work. The method used in this study was qualitative, including semi-structured interviews. There was a total of 135 interviews of domestic workers, falling broadly into three categories. One group was of single women migrants from South 24 Parganas to Kolkata, including 26 live-in, 31 day workers, and 22 commuting workers. Another group included women migrants from South 24 Parganas, employed as domestic workers, who had come to Kolkata as part of a family group; these included 14 who lived in family groups at the time of the interview and 25 who had been rendered “single” after migration and headed their own households. The third group of domestic workers was 17 single women migrants from various districts of West Bengal working in Delhi. In addition, we interviewed 25 sex workers in Kolkata, who were migrants, mostly from South 24 Parganas. The arguments in the final section of the essay are based mostly on these 160 interviews.1

Gender and migration: patterns in Colonial India Migration was a key constituent in labour arrangements desired by emerging capitalist enterprise in the nineteenth century. The “needs of capitalism” argument, not in academic currency in the last few decades, is making a strong comeback in our struggles to understand contemporary social, economic, and political change, and must indeed be deployed to explore the significance of migration in the making of wage labour in the colonial period. In existing colonial historiography, three strands of migration have received considerable attention, which have influenced our understanding of more recent and contemporary migration. There was, first, the migration of indentured labour to plantations – to Assam, north Bengal, and the Nilgiris within India, but also to sugar and rubber plantations in British, Dutch, and French colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Overseas migration began in the early nineteenth century, picked up momentum after the abolition of slavery, and remained significant until World War I. In the case of Assam, migration began later, picked up in the 1870s, and continued until the 1930s. Given that such migration took place within the regulative mechanisms of the colonial state, it is amenable to counting. Between 1830 and 1930, by a rough estimation, about 4 million people migrated to work in plantations.2 The mines, especially coal and iron, attracted some long-­ distance migration too, but they depended more on short-term migrants

Gender and migration  105 and commuting workers. The third major stream of migration was the vast rural–urban migration, which provided workers for expanding cities and towns, including industrial, construction, transport, artisanal and service sector workers. The archetype of this migration has been constructed from a rich vein of scholarship on the development of two major colonial cities, Bombay and Calcutta, and two of the most important industries centred round these cities, cotton and jute (Chandavarkar 1994; Sen 1999). There were many other kinds of migration as well, including rural–rural, temporary, seasonal, inter-provincial, and inter-district migration for agriculture and small-scale manufacturing and roads, railways and other infrastructural projects (Anderson 2004). In these various strands of migration, we see three common patterns. The literature on colonial migration has paid most attention to the numerically significant rural–urban circular migration, in which the migrants were usually single men. One or more male members of rural families came to the city to work, sometimes for the best part of their working lives, leaving women, children, elderly members, and some men too, perhaps, behind in the village. There has been considerable discussion about the functional relationship between the rural and urban in such migrations. Earlier, scholars believed that debt and rural crises pushed such migration. Ranajit Dasgputa argued that colonial capitalism was subsidised by the sub-­subsistence economic activities of women and children in the rural economy, which bore the entire burden of the reproduction of the urban workforce (Dasgupta 1987). The decisive intervention in this debate came from R.S. Chandavarkar in the early 1990s, challenging views that perceived rural and urban economic activities as functional to each other, either the rural as the buffer to the urban labour market or the urban as the supplement to deal with crises in the rural economy. He argued instead that poor households did not fit into analytic categories of rural and urban, industrial and agricultural, but devised strategies that encompassed both (Chandavarkar 1994). Arjan de Haan pointed out the need to examine who migrated and why, since even in acute crises, not everyone took to migration (de Haan 1994). Chandavarkar also pointed out that family migration was usually prompted by the exhaustion of rural resources. When whole families moved to the city, little by way of economic link remained to tie them to the village, though familial and other connections may have persisted (Chandavarkar 1994). Such migrants were usually proletarianised. This kind of migration is seen in urban employment, plantation, and mining. But family migration may also have led to peasantisation as in the case of colonisation of new land. In the context of Bengal, the migration to South 24 Parganas, the Sunderbans in particular, illustrates this atypical pattern. Some of the plantation migration also followed this pattern, since workers were sometimes settled on small pieces of land and required to supplement their wages with subsistence production. In all these streams of migration, there was a significant presence of single women. It should be noted that in these descriptions, “single” does not

106  Samita Sen pertain to marital status. In migration literature, single women or single men migrants are not equivalent to unmarried migrants since the reference is to the process of migration. The term describes men and women who migrated singly, unaccompanied by other members of the family. The contrast is to family migration. In the case of women, such strategies of individual mobility have been seen as induced by social marginalisation such as widowhood, desertion, and domestic violence (Sen 1999). Such migration may in fact have happened in groups, with several men of a family or caste group or village migrating together; women may also have migrated in small groups and, on occasion, may have been accompanied by children. We refer to this kind of migration as “single” migration for the purpose of this study, as indeed it is thus described in a great deal of migration literature to denote that such migration meant a separation from the family. In the case of men, it usually meant that the women and (some) children remained in the village, and the men visited them in the rural home from time to time. The family straddled the village and the city; there were at least two households, one rural and one urban. Some of the men also married a second wife (and bore children) in the city and maintained two-family households, one in the city and one in the village. For women, however, migration other than family migration usually meant severance or expulsion from family. By such migration, women broke their rural connection and were proletarianised. This kind of migration was seen in both rural–urban flows (including in sex work repeatedly noted from the nineteenth century) and, controversially, in indentured migration to plantations and short-distance migration to mining settlements (Sen 2004). These colonial typologies have been hugely influential in migration studies in India and continue to inform our understanding of migration patterns today. Empirically speaking, it is well established that all three of the above remain significant and perhaps describe the bulk of (certainly) internal migration in the country. There can be no doubt that single male rural–urban migration continues to be a crucial, perhaps the single most important, constituent of employment migration even now. Though perhaps, as research indicates, the relative importance of family migration has been increasing.

Gender and migration: recent developments If the nineteenth century witnessed spectacular spatial mobilisation of labour, the late twentieth century was also a period of heightened migration. A dramatic change in global migration flows has been documented from the early 1980s, one element of which is inter-Asian labour migration. From the 1970s onwards, migration to other Asian countries has replaced older patterns of migration to the industrialised West. One of these new flows involves the migration of domestic workers from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka to the Gulf countries. Leela Gulati notes that this

Gender and migration  107 change is of direction as well as gender; women are now a significant proportion of migrants in occupations marked as exclusively female. These new flows of migration are linked with structures of particular occupations such as domestic work. This change is often conceptualised as a “substitution effect”, in which women replace men in similar migration flows such as from Kerala to the Gulf and are supposedly demand-led. The scale of this gender substitution, with women sometimes outnumbering men, has come as a surprise to many (Gulati 2006). Nana Oishi terms this phenomenon the “feminization” of migration, given the high share of female migrants to the total female population (Oishi 2002: 2). The “feminization of migration” is most evident in Asia, where hundreds of thousands of women migrate each year. In 2000, Asia witnessed 85 million female migrants compared to 90 million male migrants (Jolly et al. 2003: 6). In most countries, abject poverty at home, lack of work opportunities, very low wages and unstable political situations have made migration a significant survival strategy for both women and men. Moreover, the changing pattern of migration is linked to changing social norms that sanction new forms of mobility for women. The causes and dynamics of this international migration are also echoed in internal migration in India, though we know much less about these changes or indeed whether or how much these can be identified as change. Indian cities (like cities in other regions) are constituted by migration, primarily from rural hinterlands. For instance, colonial Calcutta attracted as much or even more labour from United Provinces, Bihar, Orissa, and Andhra Pradesh as from its own countryside. These flows changed dramatically from the 1970s, when inter-state immigration diminished in response to the city’s commercial decline. However, it still attracts labour migration from districts in West Bengal and some limited numbers from neighbouring states. The increase in migration in the last few decades is considered to be driven by distress. Migrants have been seen as “ecological refugees”, compelled to move by demographic pressure, declining agricultural production, deforestation, water scarcity or soil erosion (Gadgil and Guha 1995). While poverty figures largest in explaining migration, its link with state policies is also a matter of discussion. In colonial and independent India, development practices have led to dispossessions, displacements, landlessness, unemployment, and impoverishment, forcing people to move (Arya and Roy 2006: 27). Most scholars have characterised labour migration as a forced livelihood response, arising from a complex set of social relations (including relations of debt and dependency) rather than simply a response to subsistence failure. For others, however, migration provides a better opportunity to save, accumulate capital or invest in assets. Doubtless, migration is informed by livelihood and income comparisons between source and destination. Recent studies suggest the need to combine these factors in our understanding of migration. Thus, the agency of the migrant worker may be viewed as “structurally embedded” (Mosse et al. 2002).

108  Samita Sen The problem with demand-led hypotheses of migration lies in the deceleration in many urban economies; Kolkata is not alone in this. Even in the preceding period, better-paid organised sector jobs were limited. During the period from 1962 to 1971, only 6.4 million additional jobs were created in the organised sector, which meant that the overwhelming majority of workers had to find a living outside the organised sector (Banerjee 1978: 5). The 1980s and 1990s witnessed further shrinkage. The closure of factories and mills intensified poverty in both rural and urban economies. In this period, new advances in technology reduced labour demand in large-scale industry, creating instead more skilled jobs with education requirements, which excluded the rural poor. These changes in demand in the urban economy influenced rural–urban migration. The state, argues Jan Breman in an influential thesis, is complicit in the informalisation of the urban economy (Breman 1996; Roy 2003). Thus, the unorganised sector has become the only recourse for the toiling masses. How do the rural poor respond to serial failures in rural and urban economies? The solution is circularity, a response that was developed in the colonial period, when both rural and urban economies suffered intermittent crises. The influence of colonial literature has been particularly strong in migration studies because we see the persistence or recrudescence of some crucial elements of colonial patterns of migration in the contemporary period. The significance of circularity is at the heart of this comparison. The “peasant-proletariat” discovered by the Indian Industrial Commission in 1918 appears to have become once again the mainstay of the labour market; workers are able to access the informal economy of the city and also to retain their rural link. The centrality of the “rural connection” in understanding labour and migration thus endures. At present, temporary migration is higher in India compared to the world average. A new development, flagged by Breman, is the precarity characterising vast swathes of the informal sector, including the urban. On the one hand, precarity dictates even more forcefully strategies that combine the rural and the urban; on the other, in a climate where precarious forms of livelihood dominate, the few forms of regular employment available are gaining importance (Breman 1996). As in the case of international migration, the option of domestic work employment is driving a gender substitution in internal rural–urban migration. There has been a dominance of structuralist arguments in explanations of circular migration, as exemplified in the debates around the “peasant-proletariat” of the colonial period. Among the many arguments around the “rural connection” of the urban worker, one of the most important has been the sub-subsistence level of industrial wages, which required a subsidy from the unpaid labour of women and children in the village (Dasgupta 1987). From the 1950s, with industrial wages having risen to levels approximating family wage, a formal sector has emerged on the basis of the exclusion of women and children from employment, with provision for social insurance and job security (Sen 2008). The process of formalisation, however, as

Gender and migration  109 scholars have shown, never covered more than 10 per cent of the working population and, since liberalisation in the 1990s, has been shrinking gradually but surely. This means that the majority of workers have remained in insecure and ill-paid jobs and continue to require some sort of subsidy, which in many cases is still provided by the rural economy. Thus, short-term or circular migration remains a means of survival, a livelihood strategy of families and linked to accumulation regimes (CWDS 2012). The reverse has also been true and continues to hold good. The essence of circular migration is that workers do not relocate to the city completely; they move between the village and the city. A single-family household has to straddle village and city to ensure survival or improve their situation. Which end is providing the subsidy? Increasingly, there is no clear answer. The agrarian crisis of the last two decades has been seen as the prime context for increasing migration, but the crisis has not led to unilinear rural– urban migration to the same extent as it has driven circular migration. Some forms of circular migration, especially temporary and seasonal migration, are strategies to bridge lean periods in the rural economy. For poor households, especially those with relatively closer access to a city, there is no demarcation between the rural and urban economies; their survival strategies encompass the two. According to Priya Deshingkar, circular migration persists due to mutual cooperation and assurance between sending families and the migrants themselves (Deshingkar 2008). The rural economy does not offer access to capital or much-needed cash, but it continues to offer the shelter of a homestead when urban labour markets fail or when illness and old age no longer allow the unremitting physical labour demanded in low-paid and informal jobs in the city. Thus, the security of a family home and a patch of land remain critical elements in the persistence of circulation. It is the renewed focus on circularity that has helped to bring women into the framework of migration studies. This has happened because the focus is no longer exclusively on rural–urban or agriculture–industry movements. Scholars had argued earlier too that in short-distance rural– rural labour migration, women have always outnumbered men. Breman’s study in the 1980s concluded that 58 per cent of migrant labourers in the local and regional context were women (Breman 1985). Historically, such deployment of women’s labour has been a part of the household’s survival strategy. In such contexts, women’s seasonal migration does not challenge family authority (Karlekar 1995; Sen 2004). Rather, a pattern of periodic migration of women is integral to the labour strategy of small and marginal peasant families. The dominant values of seclusion and segregation do not preclude poor women’s participation in the field and other visible work, even when it involves travelling long distances. We see such migrant women workers in non-agrarian occupations such as brick kilns or coal mines (Karlekar 1995), tobacco grading (Rao 1981) or loading (Brahme 1990). The single migrant woman participating in rural–urban circular migration fits into this pattern and may even be considered an extension of

110  Samita Sen it. Women are part of the stream of mobility from villages to cities. Some of them accompany families, some may travel alone. The dynamics are determined by a host of factors, including the relative employment possibilities of children and adults, female and male members of the family. In the case of women, the decision to migrate to the city is further prompted by the absence of remunerative work in the village. In land-poor families, men’s labour is better utilised in the agricultural economy, rendering women more expendable in rural households. According to Neela Mukherjee, for every migrant woman, there are four others waiting to migrate (Mukherjee 2001). As mentioned earlier, women’s migration has once again increased in the twenty-first century, this process being noticed from the 1980s. From the 1980s, scholars began to challenge the long-held perspective of dismissing women’s migration as associated with marriage rather than labour. It has been pointed out that women cannot be considered “passive movers” (Fawcett et al. 1984: 5). V.N. Thadani and M.P. Todaro’s enormously influential intervention recast our understanding of both marriage migration and women’s migration outside marriage. They popularised the notion of autonomous female migration (Thadani and Todaro 1984). According to the 2001 census, among 309.4 million migrants, 218.7 million were women and 90.7 million were men. Globalisation, a gender-specific labour market, extreme poverty, mechanisation of agriculture and environmental degradation have contributed to an increase in female migration in India. A mesolevel study of about 3000 women in twenty states in the period 2008–11 showed that almost a quarter (close to 23 per cent) of women workers migrated alone, indicating that autonomous migration by women was on the rise. In addition, about 7 per cent of women migrated in all-female groups (CWDS 2012: 63). The sixty-fourth round of the NSS included a special report on migration that suggests male migration has lagged behind female migration in the last decade, in both rural and urban economies. In rural areas, the female migration rate (per 1000 females) was 477 while the male migration rate was 54, and in the urban areas, the male migration rate was 259 compared to the female migration rate of 456 (NSSO 2010).3 This study by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) has been received with great enthusiasm by researchers because it has taken into account short-term migrants as a separate category, even though it is beset by definitional problems. By and large, national datasets have tended to ignore circular, seasonal, and short-term migration to privilege permanent settlement, which overly values family migration and hinders gender analysis of migration patterns. Many economists are grappling with the feminisation of migration. Sadhna Arya and Anupama Roy echo Oishi’s thesis of the feminisation of migration for internal migration (Arya and Roy 2006: 35), though it is difficult to date or track the numerical significance of this phenomenon in the absence of data. How do we explain the recent phenomenon of increasing female migration? Nirmala Banerjee argued that in inhospitable labour market conditions when men cannot find jobs under conditions they are willing to

Gender and migration  111 accept, they deploy the labour of women (also girl children) in adverse or even abject conditions of employment (Banerjee 1978: 6). Does this explain the influx of women migrants in domestic work employment? Is this why women are beginning to participate in temporary and circular rural–urban migration previously considered the preserve of men? This kind of migration decision is influenced by opportunities as well as constraints, and even if taken independently, it is not devoid of familial and cultural concerns. Many scholars have pointed out that women cannot always be labelled associational migrants, either accompanying their husbands because of marriage or participating in family migration in response to higher male earnings. Leela Kasturi first pointed out the importance of the availability of domestic work in migration decisions of the poor. In this context, it is men who are associational migrants (Kasturi 1990). Neetha N. argued that regarding women as associational migrants betrays a male bias and is a reflection of the general stereotype of women’s labour as unproductive and insignificant (Neetha 2004: 1681). According to Anuja Agrawal, the conformist image of women as firmly situated within the household domain is challenged by those engaging in paid wage work outside the home, and even more so by those moving away from family or community to seek work (Agrawal 2010: 24). There are now studies on the migration of sex workers which also show complex and multifarious patterns of single women’s migration. The tendency to simplify these variations within a rubric of “trafficking” is being challenged by scholars (Joshi 2001; Kotiswaran 2011). Thus, studies on “single women migration” – women migrating unaccompanied by men or not migrating as associational migrants or not as a part of family – have added a whole new dimension to our understanding of migration. In the contemporary period, women’s migration includes all the earlier kinds of migration, that is, women migrating with families to cities from villages, both as permanent and circular migrants; deserted wives and widows who migrate alone or with children, who tend to be permanent migrants but are also occasionally circular migrants; and women who are short-term circular migrants, with families or in all-female groups, in both rural–rural and rural–urban as well as urban–rural streams. There is, however, a pattern of women’s migration that is relatively new in migration literature, and in the following section, we highlight this trend. There is now a gender shift in the pattern of migration previously considered peculiarly male; we see married women who are single migrants, leaving behind family in the village and returning to it from time to time. There are two elements to this new kind of women’s migration which call for attention. There is, first, the phenomenon of women in extant marriages migrating for work away from home; and second, this constitutes circular migration. In an earlier period, a married woman’s long-term and long-distance migration usually signalled expulsion from the family. What we see now is married women’s migration as part of the family’s survival strategy, similar to the logic of single male migration.

112  Samita Sen

Single women migrants and women single migrants: continuity and change We saw a glimmer of single circular married women’s migration in 2006–9, when we were working on a research project on domestic workers in a neighbourhood in south Kolkata. We argued that this kind of migration, while not unique to domestic work, is nevertheless most prevalent in this and some related occupations (Sen and Sengupta 2016). A new research was undertaken in 2013–15 to follow up on these preliminary findings. From the 160 interviews taken as part of this research (as detailed above), some new trends in women’s migration became evident. The research focused primarily on domestic workers (with a small number of interviews taken of sex workers); thus, there is little scope to compare migration patterns in different occupations. However, domestic work is a major occupation of poor women in West Bengal, and as such, these new patterns of migration – especially married women’s single migration – must be deemed to be significant. From the interviews, we found two subsets to single women’s migration. First, there are young single women migrants, girl children of ages as low as five years, but more commonly between ages seven to fourteen years, who are single rural–urban migrants doing live-in domestic work in the city. Ishita and Deepita Chakravarty’s work indicates the incidence of this is very high, especially in West Bengal (Chakravarty and Chakravarty 2016). Second, we also see adult single women migrants of whom only some follow the older pattern of being rendered mobile by social marginalisation. An equally important numerical segment seems to be analogous to the single male migrants, which is the most crucial new finding of this research. We found that adult women in subsistent marriages (in a few cases, adult daughters) had come to the city to work as live-in or (accompanied by one or more of their children) day workers. They leave husbands and (some) children behind in the village but visit them regularly, and their remittance is crucial to the subsistence of the rural household. Many women maintain such arrangements for long periods of their lives. We can claim this to be “new” in that this pattern has not been included in migration studies, but we cannot argue that this is altogether a new phenomenon, precisely for the same reason. Interestingly, this pattern of migration has been noted and studied in the context of international migration of nurses and domestic workers. We need similar enquiry for internal migration and historical enquiry to be able to say how far back in time it goes. A gendered analysis of labour migration cannot rely on existing national data: first, because it invariably underestimates women’s labour migration; and second, because the definitional shifts allow no temporal pattern to emerge. The colonial stereotypes have persisted in the gendering of migration well after even the most casual observation indicates that they have changed quite drastically. Migrants can no longer be fit into the old boxes: single male labour migrant, female marriage migrant or permanent family migration. We find single women migrants who follow the earlier pattern

Gender and migration  113 of migrating to the city by reason of widowhood or social marginalisation or because they are forced out of village society for the transgression of gender/sexual norms, women for whom marriage and employment are linked reasons for migration, and families who allocate for young girls and married mothers the circular pattern of migration earlier believed to be the preserve of single male migrants. If we begin to look at women’s migration from this new perspective, we see that there is far more to women’s migration than indicated by conventional data. To explore these questions further, we need more qualitative studies to try and capture the flows of movements, complex and multiple motivations as revealed in the migration histories of individual women. These connections are many and varied. The study conducted by Seema Joshi (in a slum area in Delhi) focused on the interconnection between migration and domestic work. She argued that on the supply side, there is neither any barrier to entering this segment of the informal sector nor is there any formal skill requirement (Joshi 2004). Thus, the relative ease and certainty of finding domestic work employment enables migration of women but also of families. The CWDS meso-level study too has identified the single woman migrant as a new finding in their report (CWDS 2012). Our study has been qualitative, the numbers being insignificant for any discussion of trends. In the case of domestic work, numbers have proved difficult to establish. Several studies have spoken of an expansion in domestic work employment in the past few decades. Estimates vary considerably. An oft-quoted figure is 2.52 million arrived at by the NSSO Report (2010); 4.2 million is the figure quoted by the ILO, while NGO sources have claimed 7 million. According to the NSSO data, 75 per cent domestic workers are urban and 57 per cent are women. One recent estimate suggests that 23 per cent of women workers in West Bengal are domestic workers (Chakravarty and Chakravarty 2016). Various studies show that for poor urban women, domestic work is an increasingly significant occupation. Our study focuses on the significance of domestic work in influencing migration. This interlinkage of domestic work and migration works in two ways. The evidence points, first, to the relative ease of access to domestic work (and the possibility of live-in work) as a major influence on migration decisions of the household, allowing women to undertake what might otherwise have been risky migration decisions; and second, to migration influencing wages and working conditions in this sector. There can be no doubt that wage labour for migrant women is highly exploitative and cannot be romanticised as freedom, but migration has different implications for women’s lives compared to that of men. Indeed, the desire for freedom from family and community often prompted such migration (Sen 2004). While women were mobile for various purposes in the nineteenth century, there was an attempt to render them less mobile in the early twentieth with their exclusion from many sectors, such as mills and mines, in which they had found employment. The only industry in which they retained their share was in the plantations. In this period, women

114  Samita Sen were concentrated in a narrow range of jobs in the urban economy. We see their increasing presence in domestic work from the 1930s, and the sex industry remained a staple employer. Nirmala Banerjee noted a shift in the 1970s and 1980s, when there was a noticeable increase in women’s non-agricultural employment in the rural sector and in some export-­ oriented industries (Banerjee 1991). These opportunities were utilised by new categories of women, who were entering the manufacturing labour force, in some significant numbers, for the first time. This seemed to be the case also in some  traditional industries, such as textiles and embroidery as  well as some  “modern” industries, such as gem cutting in Tamil Nadu (Sen 2008). Parents began delaying the marriage of daughters and accepting their employment even when it involved long daily commutes or long-distance migration. Though a highly restricted phenomenon, a beginning was made in the creation of a labour pool of unmarried young women. The interviews show multiple trajectories of migration in the lives of individual women. Indeed, taken together, we find a somewhat bewildering range of movements from this research. We are provisionally calling this hypermobility, even though such a label presumes a “normal” level of mobility, which may prove a difficult argument to sustain. The notion of hypermobility is deployed to signal different kinds of mobility undertaken by an individual at different stages in their lives. Many individual migration histories show that they have been at some point a participant in family migration, which may consist of a whole household or a fragment thereof. Many women interviewed have experienced single migration, a large majority as child domestic workers. Moreover, patterns of migration include multiple spatial relationships, such as rural–rural, rural–urban and urban–rural. To add to the mix, there is employment migration, marriage migration and/or associational migration. Of the many patterns that can be identified, seven stand out as numerically preponderant. I will provide a few examples for some of these patterns to exemplify the analysis, since the brief remit of this chapter does not allow exploration of the many life stories collected in this research. First, and perhaps the most common pattern is that of young girls under fourteen who travel from village to city, usually as live-in domestic workers. They have many kinds of experiences of work, some more adventurous, oppressive and exploitative than others. Sabita’s migration history is complex and multi-directional.4 She was thirty-seven years old and a live-in domestic worker in Kolkata when we interviewed her. She first came to Kolkata with a relative at the age of about ten years and began to work as a live-in because she did not get along with her mother. Her job in Chandannagar involved looking after a young child. The mistress was very harsh and bit (not beat) her so badly one day that she had to be hospitalised for two weeks. She was taken to the hospital by an older woman of the locality and then brought by her to live with some of that woman’s relatives. They did not give her proper food, just boiled vegetable peels. Her hair was cut off. Realising that she was being ill-treated, the woman took her to a house

Gender and migration  115 in Howrah to work, where she was given only boiled rice and potato to eat, without salt. She was then moved to another house to work, where she was finally comfortable. Many girls like Sabita, when they are a little older, return to the village for marriage, providing a second template. Sabita got romantically involved with a co-worker in the city and married him. Her marriage failed but she remained in the city and continued to work. Aparna had a very different experience, even though she also started in domestic work at the age of ten as a live-in. She was given in marriage to a man in a different village in the same district by her parents. When she had several children, she found she could not make ends meet. She returned to the city and domestic work when her daughter was about five years old. In another variation, girls are brought back after a few years in domestic service; they are not immediately married off but kept at home for a period before marriage. This may be because the income from her work is no longer required or because families are less sanguine about older girls working outside the home. In our 160 interviews, we have found high levels of marriage migration (expectedly, since migration literature emphasises women’s marriage migration in northern India) and in all possible directions: rural–rural, rural–urban and urban–rural. However, unexpectedly, we found on occasion marriage migration closely entangled with employment. Apart from the three patterns discussed above, there is the classic single women’s migration, which continues to be of continuing numerical significance. There are adult women, who are widows or deserted wives, at times with some or all their children, who come to the city from the village in search of work. Such women may remain in the city for most of their lives. In a few cases, however, they may be able to accrue resources in the village (usually land, homestead, and cattle) which enable them to return to the village. This may be by inheritance, which we found in a small number of cases. In most cases, women build these resources from their own income. Let us take the case of Shila. Married at fifteen to a very poor family, she had her first child after four years. The following year, her husband fell ill. Her parents took in Shila and her child because there was no food in the marital home. After about one and half years, the husband died. It was difficult in her natal home; they too were poor. When the son was eight years old, Shila came to Kolkata. All this was about twenty-five years ago. Her mother lived in the city at that time; Shila joined her and worked in one house. Her brother and sister-in-law looked after the son. They were goodhearted but were also not well-off. Shila recalled: I found it difficult to stay without my son. I could not stay without him. I used to imagine that he was crying. I found it really difficult. My mother used to say, “Don’t think about it. I am with you here.” Still, it was difficult to forget. But I made a lot of effort to get used to it because I had no income. Who would give me anything? Who would feed me? These were my thoughts.

116  Samita Sen Her brother was very caring and wanted her to return home with her mother. But they both decided to work in the city; she remained because she wanted to earn, and her mother stayed with her because she did not want to leave Shila alone in the city. The last three patterns pertain to the “new” pattern of migration discussed earlier. These are adult married women who come from the village for, usually, live-in domestic work in the city. Occasionally, we find these women living in the city’s tenements with other family members, female kin or one or two children, and undertaking day work. Parul Gharami was forty-six at the time of the interview. She had been a day worker for twenty years after her marriage and had started doing live-in work only seven months before the interview. Her husband was asthmatic and unable to work, so she earned for the family. He did a little agricultural work in the village. She proposed that he stay in the village and look after the children while she worked in Kolkata. Her husband agreed. She commuted for some years but found this increasingly difficult as she grew older, so she first came to live in the city and then took a live-in job. This is the pattern analogous to the single male migration so well known in colonial labour history. Kalpana Purakait told us a very similar story. She looked after her husband, father-in-law, one son and one daughter. Her husband was ill and could not earn much. When she tried to take the children out of school, the teachers said she must try to educate them. She was finding it difficult even to feed the children. So, she moved to Kolkata to try and earn more. The children were at the time of the interview in classes 6 and 7. Her husband worked intermittently as an agricultural labourer and looked after the household and the children. She found work as a live-in domestic worker and is able to send money regularly. She feels guilty about not having the children with her but is pragmatic about what she has to do. Some women also undertook reverse migration, which meant in effect that they gave up their jobs and returned to the village. In most cases, this signalled retirement, enabled by children’s earnings, usually that of a son. In a few cases, daughters were inducted into similar work situations. Thus, mother and unmarried daughter(s) or sisters might work in separate middle-class homes as live-in workers in the same or even different cities. In one unusual case, Rita, a deserted wife, played these roles for her natal family. Her husband left her when she was very young, and she never had any children. She looked after her parents and helped her mother build a house in the village. She gave money to one sister and another sister’s son and brought all her sisters to work in the same city. She is independent but with a strong sense of family obligation. And she will return to the village home she helped build when she is too old to work. This study of migration of women domestic workers is placed in the context of the contradictory logic of gender and mobility bequeathed to us by the curious paradoxes of colonialism. All migration studies acknowledge that in India, women have always been the largest group of migrants; the share has held more or less at a steady rate of about 70 per cent since

Gender and migration  117 counting began. This is marriage migration, however, and to be studied as a custom of village exogamy in the north Indian marriage system. By contrast, migration studies focused on employment and dismissed marriage migration as of no relevance to its analytic purpose. Recent research is trying to break these sharp divisions, such as between marriage and employment, to suggest that the two are at times closely implicated. To begin with, marriage migration is also single women’s migration. It is not usual to think of it thus. The custom of village exogamy is explained as a patriarchal instrument to isolate young women from their natal kin to enable greater control over them. Such strategies are not, however, devoid of the logistics of labour. In this respect, it may be useful to reflect on another conundrum: why are women who are otherwise considered (or even rendered) immobile, compulsorily migrants at marriage? It is usually imagined that marriage migration is primarily rural–rural or at best rural–urban. But the most interesting finding of this research is the quite significant presence of urban–rural marriage migration. Young girls who migrate to the city to work prior to marriage often migrate back to the village for marriage and have to fall back upon sporadic and poorly remunerated work in the village. Their re-incorporation into the rural economy is quite often unsustainable unless the marital family is sufficiently well-off to be able to maintain non-earning wives, and this seems to be getting more and more difficult. The deepening agrarian crisis has undoubtedly a major role to play in this context. Most women who must earn to supplement the marital family’s livelihood find it impossible to do so from resources available in the village. Many of these women then migrate back to the city. If they are close enough to the city, they may commute daily; many are forced to move to the city (alone or with a part of the family). Of these women, some may return to the village at the end of their working lives, some may not. For these women, the trajectory of migration is rural–urban–rural–urban–(occasionally) rural. Equally, migration remains, as in the colonial period, an exit strategy from marriage (Sen 2004). Given dwindling economic opportunities in the village, women who wish to exit marriages have very few options. The combination of virilocality and village exogamy renders it virtually impossible for wives to remain in their marital village outside their marital home. The low returns of labour in the village economy reinforce the problem. In this context, it may be interesting to reflect on the right to residence in the marital home provided in the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act of 2005. Very few women seem willing or able to make use of this provision, preferring either to return to their natal home/village or to migrate to the city in situations of domestic violence, other forms of marital discord or widowhood. Moreover, there are exceptions to virilocality and village exogamy, even in the rural context, with some men electing to live with their marital family. This is far more flexible in the urban context, where rules of exogamy do not apply and living arrangements are varied. These divergences underline the complex relationship between marriage and migration: all kinds of marriage migration cannot be jumbled together into one box.

118  Samita Sen

Conclusion The question of migrant domestic workers has received considerable scholarly and policy attention in recent decades but mostly in the context of international migration. This essay has drawn attention to the very significant phenomenon of migrant domestic workers within India. Even though the numbers involved are difficult to establish, there can be no doubt that the label describes millions of workers. This numerically large labour segment has attracted little or no policy attention, and even research on the subject has been quite fragmentary. Our qualitative study was focused on small numbers but yielded rich material on the complexity of the interlinkages between domestic work and patterns of migration as well as the multiple trajectories of migration. The essay has additionally sought to place women’s migration in a longer historical trajectory. It draws on my own previous work to show that in the contemporary, we find patterns of women’s migration not noticed in the colonial period. Instead, a pattern of migration considered exclusively male in the colonial period is now noticeable among women, particularly among women domestic workers. Moreover, the essay shows the variations within a descriptive label such as “single women migration”. Such migration can be broken down into several constituents. One of them is the migration of “single women” – an older pattern of the migration of women widowed or otherwise marginalised in the household or the rural economy. Such single women migrants were usually dis-embedded from the rural family. These women were proletarianised in the sense that they lost access to rural resources, which were contingent upon familial role fulfilment. The other category is women migrating singly (who are not single women). These are similar to male migrants, who have been the focus of much of the literature on migration. The implication of such changes in the gendering of migration is as yet imperfectly understood, but it does suggest the need for a serious reconsideration of the link between marriage and employment migration, which has received little attention in migration literature so far.

Notes 1 This project was undertaken in collaboration with and funding from Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Berlin, and coordinated by Nandita Dhawan and Ranjita Biswas for some of the time. I thank them and Srabasti Majumdar, Anindita Ghosh and Somdutta Mukherjee, the research assistants who helped with the data analysis. 2 There is considerable variation in these estimates. For a recent account, see Rana Behal’s book on Assam tea workers (Behal 2014). 3 The data is based on the last usual place of residence, and also includes those males and females who reported marriage as a reason for migration. 4 The names of all interviewees referred to in the chapter have been changed to maintain confidentiality.

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References Agrawal, Anuja. 2010. “Introduction: Women, Work and Migration in Asia”. In Migrant Women and Work (Women and Migration in Asia, Vol. 4), edited by Anuja Agrawal, 21–45. New Delhi: Sage. Anderson, Michael. 2004. “India, 1858–1930: The Illusion of Free Labour”. In Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, edited by Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, 422–454. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Arya, Sadhna, and Anupama Roy. 2006. “When Poor Women Migrate: Unravelling Issues and Concerns”. In Poverty, Gender and Migration (Women and Migration in India, Vol. 2), edited by Sadhna Arya and Anupama Roy, 19–48. New Delhi: Sage. Banerjee, Nirmala. 1978. “Women Workers and Development”. Social Scientist 6 (8): 3–15. Banerjee, Nirmala, ed. 1991. “The More It Changes, The More It Is the Same”. In Indian Women in a Changing Industrial Scenario, edited by Nirmala Banerjee, 237–298. New Delhi: Sage. Behal, Rana. 2014. One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam. New Delhi: Tulika. Brahme, Sulabha. 1990. “Economic Plight of Hamal Women”. In Women Workers in India: Studies in Employment and Status, edited by Vina Mazumdar, 173–266. New Delhi: Chanakya. Breman, Jan. 1985. Of Peasants, Migrants and Paupers: Rural Labour Circulation and Capitalist Production in Western India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Breman, Jan. 1996. Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS). 2012. Gender and Migration: Negotiating Rights, A Women’s Movement Perspective. New Delhi: CWDS. Chakravarty, Deepita, and Ishita Chakravarty. 2016. Women, Labour and the Economy in India: From Migrant Manservants to Uprooted Girl Children Maids. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Chandavarkar, R.S. 1994. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dasgupta, Ranajit. 1987. Migrant Workers, Rural Connections and Capitalism: The Calcutta Jute Industrial Labour, 1890s to 1940s. IIM Working Paper Series, April, Mimeograph. Calcutta: Indian Institute of Management. De Haan, Arjan. 1994. Unsettled Settlers: Migrant Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Calcutta. Amsterdam: Hilversum. Deshingkar, Priya. 2008. “Circular Internal Migration and Development in India”. In Migration and Development Within and Across Borders: Research and Policy Perspectives on Internal and International Migration. Geneva: IOM and Social Science Research Council. Fawcett, James T., Siew-Ean Khoo, and Peter C. Smith, eds. 1984. Women in the Cities of Asia: Migration and Urban Adaptation. Colorado: Westview. Gadgil, Madhav, and Ramachandra Guha. 1995. Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India. London and New York: Routledge.

120  Samita Sen Gulati, Leela. 2006. “Asian Women Workers in International Labour Migration: An Overview”. In Migrant Women and Work, edited by Anuja Agrawal, 46–72. Women and Migration in Asia Series. New Delhi/London: Sage Publications. Jolly, Susie, Emma Bell, and Lata Narayanaswamy. 2003. Gender and Migration in Asia: Overview and Annotated Bibliography. Bibliography No. 13. Sussex: Institute of Development Studies. Joshi, Seema. 2004. “Marriage, Migration and Labour Market: A Case Study of a Slum Area in New Delhi”. Paper presented at the SALISE 5th Annual Conference, 31 March–2 April. http://www.sta.uwi.edu/salises/workshop/csme/paper/sjoshi. pdf. Accessed 30 May 2010. Joshi, Sushma. 2001. “‘Cheli-Beti’ Discourses of Trafficking and Constructions of Gender, Citizenship and Nation in Modern Nepal”. Journal of South Asian Studies 24: 157–175. Karlekar, Malvika. 1995. “Gender Dimensions in Labour Migration: An Overview”. In Women and Seasonal Labour Migration, edited by Schenk Sandbergen, 23–78. New Delhi: IDPAD Sage. Kasturi, Leela. 1990. “Poverty, Migration and Women’s Status”. In Women Workers in India: Studies in Employment and Status, edited by Vina Mazumdar, 3–169. New Delhi: Chanakya. Kotiswaran, Prabha. 2011. Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mosse, David, Sanjeev Gupta, Mona Mehta, Vidya Shah, Julia FNMS Rees, and KRIBP Project Team. 2002. “Brokered Livelihoods: Debt, Labour Migration and Development in Tribal Western India”. Journal of Development Studies 38 (5): 59–88. doi:10.1080/00220380412331322511. Mukherjee, Neela. 2001. “Migrant Women from West Bengal: Ill-Being and WellBeing”. Economic and Political Weekly 36 (26): 2337–2339. Neetha, N. 2004. “Making of Female Breadwinners: Migration and Social Networking of Women Domestics in Delhi”. Economic and Political Weekly 39 (17): 1681–1688. NSS Report No. 533 (64/10.2/2). 2010. Migration in India, 2007–8. 64th Round. National Sample Survey Organisation, Government of India. Oishi, Nana. 2002. “Gender and Migration: An Integrative Approach”. Working Paper No. 49. Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, 1–18. http://eprints.cdlib.org/uc/item/0s04g29f. Accessed 8 May 2014. Rao, M.S.A. 1981. “Some Aspects of the Sociology of Migration”. Sociological Bulletin 30 (1) (March): 21–38. Roy, Ananya. 2003. City Requeim, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty. Minneapolis: University of Minesotta Presss. Sen, Samita. 1999. Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sen, Samita. 2004. “‘Without His Consent?’ Marriage and Women’s Migration in Colonial India”. International Labour and Working Class History 65 (Special Issue) (Spring): 77–104. Sen, Samita. 2008. “Gender and Class: Women in Indian Industry, 1890–1990”. Modern Asian Studies 42 (1): 75–116. Sen, Samita, and Nilanjana Sengupta. 2016. Domestic Days: Women, Work and Politics in Contemporary Kolkata. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Thadani, Veena, and Michael Todaro. 1984. “Female Migration: Conceptual Framework”. In Women in the Cities of Asia: Migration and Urban Adaptation, edited by James Fawcett, Siew-Ean Khoo, and Peter C. Smith. Colorado: Westview.

6 Home away from home? Belonging and dislocation among migrant domestic workers Anindita Chatterjee

Impression You know, if I would even go to a kin’s house, then my father would go out to look for me, but ultimately my father left me at Pishi’s (employer) house forever and never came to see me. He used to come to take MY SALARY…? How could he do this with me? Shame, guilt had killed him, and he died. I did not even go to visit my natal village. (Tara, a 40-year-old female domestic worker) How is home perceived by young girls like Tara who get dislocated from their natal village for work? The definition of home is particularly complex for a migrant, for whom the sense of home is dislocated since the place of origin is necessarily separated from the place of being (Ahmed 1999). Tara was born in a poor lower caste family and lived in a remote village ten kilometres away from the nearest constructed road. She and her family often went hungry. They were three sisters and one brother. Her mother did household chores, and her father was a landless lease farmer who would manage to get some share of the crops which would be far less for the entire family. But this was the home where Tara belonged with her family members. Tara’s father brought her into the urban city life to work for a family to get some money, but he overlooked Tara’s choice. She came away from her own home, which she had left behind, to create newer relations in the unfamiliar space. Tara, now in her forties, volunteers for old age homes and continues to care and tend for old people. She lives alone and could manage to buy a shelter in the outskirts of South Kolkata. Tara could never forgive her father. She strongly felt that shame and guilt had killed him, and when he died, Tara did not visit her village. By then, she had already been dislocated from her community and felt deceived by her father’s action of leaving her in a space where she did not belong. While recalling the events, she asserts that, when I first came to pishi’s house, I thought baba1 knows her, the house was large, nice and clean, but while I was playing, baba left me there DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-8

122  Anindita Chatterjee and went away, I started to cry. Initially, I was very scared since everyone was unknown to me, so I cried a lot; I felt deceived and cheated, I thought that why baba had left me here? This illustrates that Tara’s dislocation is intensified with a sense of belongingness to her own home while slowly creating a fear of uncertainty and transience with her own family, as she gets connected with her newly formed relations with those she works for. This makes the notion of home a complex space, where people like Tara develop fictive kinship ties and make other’s home like their own home. Based on the narrative accounts, this chapter explores the ways in which the migrants perceive “home” that they had to leave behind and the one they are creating in a new place despite the constant fear of its unfamiliarity. I argue that the experiences of migration matters, and the constant fear of being a vulnerable migrant adds a unique dimension while they build their sense of belonging in the unfamiliar space—a new home. Tara’s anecdote highlights cultural meanings and interpretations that bring out the agential representation or choice of a woman. It shows how Tara could embrace the family where she worked for, and the family too accepted her as one of their members. According to the 2001 census, about 185,595 children are employed as domestic workers and in dhabas (roadside tea and food stall) (Mehrotra 2010). Employers generally prefer children as full-time live-in workers since they are cheaper. However, women and children both migrate from poor rural areas in search of jobs. The migrant domestic workers’ accounts reflect that work is central to their lives. The need for getting some work often forms a basis for their departure from their own homes to urban metropolis to seek a better life. In this chapter, I focus on the narrative accounts of four migrant workers, each illuminating the tellers’ intricate subjectivities while also offering a lens into broader social forces. It uncovers the multiple layers of home as a place where people’s roots and dreams live, where they have an umbilical cord that connects them to life. Home is not just a place; it is a feeling of belongingness (Lee et al. 2010). Home is not only a physical space but an imagined place psychologically (Dickey 2000). The migrant women discuss it as desh or aapna gaon in Bengali and Hindi. For some women, the sense of one’s own home can remain even when the geographic location changes – because they arrived as an outsider in search of domestic work. People and communities move to new places, but their identities are still connected to the places they left behind. People strive to make a place feel like home, a place where they build a sense of belonging and establish a new community. I have utilised narrative accounts to understand migration as captured by migrants in their own words. The way people tell stories influences how they perceive, remember, and prepare for future events (Daiute and Lightfoot 2004). Sense of home and belonging emerges in varying ways among the migrants. For some women, home is where they came from; for others, home is where they are going; while for some, home is where they are

Home away from home?  123 situated in. The central focus emerges on the perspectives of their memory of leaving and living in a new space, and the young migrant women’s agential representation. Many of them also underscored critiques of society: “We are women, and so we need to work, but this samaj or society will undermine our workforce”, or, “every women’s work”, and some would say, “our nation or desh was better than this unfamiliar location, here people treat us like animals or jontu-janoarer moton”. These narratives reveal the agential representation of women aspiring to migrate to cosmopolitan cities with no feeling of loss or memory when they leave their desher bari or nation.2 The central question is that how do we understand memory that has migrated from its familiar local habitation to an unfamiliar location? It entails a unique insight into a journey of exiled memory into the present, and to understand the agential representation of women (Creet 2011). A growing body of South Asian historiography has produced rich analyses on the trends, causes and memories of migration, particularly in relation to partition of the Indian sub-continent (Butulia 2000; Kaul 2001; Saikia 2004; Gulati and Bagchi 2005; Bagchi et al. 2009), but engagement with sense of belonging that relates to memory during migration in the contemporary period has been largely understudied. With a focus on migrant domestic workers, located in the National Capital Region, Delhi and ­Kolkata, this study focuses on the contemporary female migrants who voice their own viewpoints regarding dislocation from their natal kin while building emotional attachments with the families that they work for. At another level, the study aims to locate itself in the scholarship on the feminisation of labour and India’s urbanisation since its adoption of neoliberal economic reforms in the 1990s (Kanji and Menon-Sen 2001; Ganguly-Scrase 2003; Chakravarty and Chakravarty 2010; John 2010). Building upon these two trajectories of memory, migration, and feminisation of labour, the study claims for a case in which the contemporary workers themselves do not identify as passive movers, but rather they believe in playing an agential role in taking a decision to move away from home to migrate to advanced cities. The study explores the feelings of up-rootedness and yet belongingness to the new, unfamiliar cityscape that promises aspiration for their children to escape the life of servitude. For this purpose, a focus on individual women’s accounts or what Sienna Craig terms “narrative ethnography and a focus on biographies” (2011: 194) has been mobilised to address the complexities of transregional and transnational migration. Anthropologists and sociologists studying gender and labour have emphasised that migration is driven due to economic and social factors, where male migration is based more on economic liability than female migration in India. Moreover, in short and medium distance migrations, social factors like marriage and relocation with the household are the major reasons for migration, while in long-distance migration it is mainly for work or some form of employment.3 Some studies show a growing demand for female workers in urban centres and recognise a shift in migration patterns (Dannecker 2005; Constable 2007; Sen and Sengupta 2016; Ahmad

124  Anindita Chatterjee 2017). Scholars have also pointed out that currently, migration is essentially a female-driven phenomenon, which is due to the availability of employment for women (Chandrashekhar and Ghosh 2007; Neetha 2008). Urban households are driving the rising demand for female domestic workers since families are becoming increasingly dependent on them (Ray and Qayum 2009). However, the focus of discussion among scholars on the causes of the huge inflow of migrants into urban hubs is still circulating within economic and social factors. Unlike this dominant discourse, the study explores the woman’s “choice” to migrate and in what manner the female migrant identifies “memory” after migration to suggest that “choice” and “memory” are intertwined in this journey. Given the contextual landscape of Kolkata and its possibilities, the “choice” of the city has been historically shifting, giving, in turn, a hierarchy among advanced cities. In comparing Kolkata and Delhi, female domestic workers who migrated from rural West Bengal to Kolkata did not have a place to stay, so they often opted for a full-time live-in service since it offered them with food, shelter, and wages to support their families. In Kolkata, there has been a rising trend in part-time or thika kaaj due to their settlement pattern and migration that took place many years back, which led some to manage their livelihood in squatter settlements (Ray and Qayum 2009). With the rising demand for domestic workers in other cities, there are many women who prefer to migrate to Delhi for better standards of living and better remuneration as compared to Kolkata. In comparison to their own homelands, the domestic workers complain of their vulnerability and precarious situation in Noida, the national capital region (NCR) as well as in Delhi. The workers live in the edges of precarious housing made from self-made structures commonly referred to as jhuggis or squatter settlements in Delhi’s new urbanscape. The majority of the research participants of this study came to Delhi in search of social mobility, better education for their children, and higher wages that would secure their children’s future. In some cases, marriage migration was also seen to be a common practice since it is still perceived that migration into the capital city (Delhi) seemed to have a better prospect than Kolkata (Ganguly 2009). However, in most cases, it turned out that the husbands either managed to find temporary jobs or earned less money to run the family, whereas a domestic service job was rather easily available regular job. The women in such circumstances were forced to become domestic workers. The narrative accounts will help us rethink the category of gender identity arguing that the agency of women’s choice to stay or leave has not received adequate attention in migration literature. The stories discussed here indicate diverse ways of conceptualising the “choice” to leave home to make new homes. The majority of the migrant women have been seen to do the hard work which re-defines migration as forms of aspiration, mobility, and belongingness with the new geographical location; yet some find their paths still behind in the nostalgic memories of homeland (Phinney et al. 2001).

Home away from home?  125

Moments Tara said that she looked after the family when she finally realised that she was appointed for domestic work. Slowly she shifted from being a worker to a caregiver. She articulates I used to take care of everyone in the family; it was a joint family. I gradually became a member of the family, and I still believe that the affection and love were from both sides. I had nothing to adjust since they never treated me like a worker, rather meshomoshai would always address me as his another daughter. He and pishi taught me Bengali and some English; they also taught me refined manners. For all these reasons I will be grateful to them. They have fulfilled my dream, my aspiration for learning. While discussing her newfound home, Tara reminisces that “I was so fond of the small school few kilometres from our house, I would always stand outside the gate and watch their activities, but never had a chance to enter”. Tara added on sharply by saying that I just do my duty by sending money to my natal family, but I hardly visit them. They have remembered me for money, and I give them the money. I still remember those days when my father left me behind for money, now I have also grown old, my mother has grown older, and my sisters too. I always felt a sense of belonging to Pishi’s family. When meshomoshai died, there was no one to look after Pishi. So, I had to send her to an old age home; I would often go and look after her. When she died, I felt that I lost my own family – it was a loss for me, losing my family relation. Tara acknowledged that Pishi gave some money to her to buy a shelter of her own. They even wanted to fix her marriage, but Tara resisted since after being a little educated and refined, her choice and taste also changed according to middle-class marker (Bourdieu [1984] 2007). Tara’s account of life experience reveals that her own family transplanted her into another family, although Tara wanted to stay with her own family. While young Tara did not expect to become a domestic worker by choice, but the new home gave her a new life into a family where she felt she belonged. This is where she became more independent and learned to struggle in every step of her life. Some of her memories were bitter, while some were still fresh in her mind. With such varied memories of past and present, she learned to look forward in life with new dreams and better future. Tina lived in Kanthi, a village in the Midnapore district in West Bengal. She got married when she was just sixteen.4 Tina agreed since she aspired to be a part of a big glamorous metropolis. Tina dropped her studies, got married, and relocated to Delhi. When I met Tina, she was in her forties but looked older; she had dark circles, rough hands, and wrinkles on her face.

126  Anindita Chatterjee Tina was usually silent, avoided talking much, but one evening we spoke at length. I went to meet her in her quarter near Zamrudpur,5 where she lived with her husband and son in a tiny room. Tina described her life story about how she got married and imagined relocation in an urban metropolis as social mobility. After a long silence, Tina explained her desire to be financially independent: I wanted to earn, so I was forced into domestic work since I was not educated. I work at eight houses as a domestic worker, but when I stayed with my mother, I didn’t even wash my own plate. I did all these for my children, spent huge amounts of money for their tuitions, schooling and other courses. But ultimately what happened? My daughter ran away with a guy who is less educated and is also not from our community, my son is doing something, but I am continuing to work in eight houses. I left hope for myself, but at least something for my son so that he doesn’t have to go through a dreadful path in life. As she was speaking, I interrupted in between to ask her about her village in Kanthi; she replied with a falling tone: “I hardly visit my village, I don’t like to”. Although she said that the daily routine and habits in Delhi are different from those in her village. Initially, I assumed that Tina wanted to earn, so she chose this livelihood, but this interpretation did not ring true. Tina laughed when I disclosed my assumption. She said that nobody in her village knew about the kind of work she does. This reflects the disrespect and loss of face that Tina might encounter if anyone from her natal kin knew about domestic work. Her friends with whom she studied in school are now working women, but not domestic workers. Tina softly mumbles that nobody does this kind of work there, our relatives and friends have never asked me, since they think that I am a housewife, and my husband is respected by everyone there. My heart pains to keep myself invisible (nijeke dheke rakhte hoy) like wearing a burqa for my husband’s status. But, in reality, I work so hard to earn our daily living. Tina’s account gives an indication that marriage migration might seem to be social mobility but ultimately it pushes towards becoming an unrecognised, demeaning domestic worker. Her account shows a duality of “here” and “there”. Tina voluntarily chose to relocate to Delhi yet undergoes a sense of belongingness to her past life in Kanthi. She rejects going to the village by giving many explanations to escape the connection, yet she divulges the pain of being a domestic worker which is unknown to most of the villagers there. Although Tina has lost dreaming for her own “self” but she still aspires for her son. The urban life and the job will give him a better livelihood. Her account is a testimony of the difficulties, struggles, and hardships that a woman has to bear in order to relocate into an unfamiliar space and turn that place as one’s home.

Home away from home?  127 Dolly commutes daily on her bicycle from Sorkha to the main sectors in Noida to work in six households. She starts from her home early in the morning and works till 8 pm, leaving her own home unattended while caring for others. Dolly explains Sorkha as a village, where the entire area is owned by a particular community, and the place to be quite unsafe. Therefore, she commutes on a bicycle, which makes her journey shorter and faster. Dolly was born in South-Dinajpur, a district in West Bengal along the India-Bangladesh border. Her mother entered India without any legal documents during the 1970s.6 Dolly’s mother unknowingly took shelter in a Muslim family. By the time her mother realised, it was too late. While narrating the entire event, Dolly started to weep while saying: “Who will believe me? Who will? No one will believe this real incident now. The times have changed. I was converted and later married to a Muslim family”. I met Dolly through my friend.7 Our interactions happen outside the workspace. It is a silent place near the high-rise apartments.8 Dolly was happy that she had her husband’s support when she made the choice to migrate for a better life and education for her children. Dolly was very enthusiastic and said: “He has opened a small stall, selling grocery, and I have also started working in several households. Now we have a fairly okay income, and everything is going well”. I visited her in 2019 during the Durga Pooja celebrations, and we sat at a place away from the apartment buildings in a quiet place to converse enthusiastically about the neighbourhood, but Dolly’s silence emerged larger than the loud celebrations of the annual festival. She was very distressed about recent developments which she avoided sharing. I visited Dolly again after the Durga Pooja, and this time,9 she looked darker, miserable, and tired after toiling daily. We sat in that same quiet place, but her anxiety could be clearly visible (Portes 2012). I asked her that “why the place looked so empty?” I could always recognise the place because of an open market, which appeared to be an ensemble of the fancy neon lights from the apartment rises and the highpower bulbs in the markets and small shacks. I truly loved the market or haat (as we popularly refer to in Bengali). Dolly’s husband owned a shack in that open unauthorised market. Based on the account, the majority of the stall owners and shacks were from minority groups. Dolly silently uttered: One day everything was bulldozed off. So many years of our hard work, hard earned money were shattered, but still we will not leave this place, we still have hope, and believe that our aspirations will come true one day. Dolly narrates more on a migration journey from rural to urban and then aspired for a better metropolis. Her account is tied with migration, agency and identity of being a Muslim, which makes her doubly vulnerable; yet her narrative grasps the notion of “choice” that she made, and she continues to hope for a better future in the present geographical location. Dolly aspires to thrive and live in the place while leaving the memories of her hometown.

128  Anindita Chatterjee The autumnal festival of Durga Pooja is celebrated with great grandeur in Kolkata. In an old, landed gentry’s household in Kolkata, Sabitri works as a contractual worker and prepares holy food during religious occasions since she is a Brahmin. Over time, Sabitri has acquired the authority to direct commands to other full-time workers: “All the showbiz you can do later, first we need to arrange everything to prepare the holy food for Maa Durga”. Quite emphatically, she demanded everyone to move away so that she and her co-Brahmin workers could organise materials required to prepare the holy offering. Sabitri has been working on a regular basis during religious rituals for the past twenty years, so the full-time workers and the family members know her quite well. The workers and Sabitri have a collaborative relation when they have usual chit-chats and fun over her Bangladeshi dialect. My family had also migrated from East Bengal, so this similar belongingness and the bangal bhasa (Bengali language spoken by East Bengalis) have given me a good vantage position to interact with Sabitri mashi.10 She is extremely eloquent and a great narrator. When I met her, she was in her fifties (my assumption). Sabitri mashi told me: “I migrated from Bangladesh after a big riot, little later after independence, around 1973”. While recounting past memory, she became emotional rather than her usual authoritative self. Later, while she was cooking, I got a chance to speak to her about Bangladesh. Sabitri emotionally said: It is my motherland, my physical body is here, but my soul is still there. If I get any bad news about Bangladesh, my heart and soul cries because I was born and raised there. I had very fond memories. I can never forget my motherland. When we came here, we stayed like refugees … now we are okay, but the earlier days were horrible, I don’t even want to think about it. How will one understand the love for their motherland (amar desher bhalobasha)? Sabitri, in her narrative, articulated belongingness as something that goes beyond a national boundary: she spoke at length about her memories that encircled happiness and idyllic moments but declined to ponder on any violent events. She states that Bangladesh is her motherland, and nothing can change that.11 Sabitri mentions that her soul (atma) is in Bangladesh, but her physical body (deho) remains in India as a resource to be exploited in some form or the other. Interestingly, her account reflects the duality of “here” and “there” – she feels a sense of belonging and an intimate attachment with the familiar Bengali language and its culture. Sabitri recollected how she used to play with her long-lost friends, some of whom were Bengali Muslims. Migration involves a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are permanent or certain. It calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation. Remaining in transit, the process of home-coming – completing the story,

Home away from home?  129 domesticating the detour – becomes an impossibility (Chambers 2008), especially for migrants like Sabitri who left their homeland in Bangladesh. They have to adjust and create a sense of belongingness with India.

Memory and migration among women migrants As we move further beyond Partition literature, scholars have looked at the rural-urban migration due to agrarian crisis and distress migration in particular among female children (Mitter and Banerjee 1998; Roy 2003; Bagchi 2005; Neetha 2008). It is assumed that the nostalgic moments and memory is a part of their life when they got uprooted and dislocated from their own land (bhite-mati) and had to settle in an unfamiliar location where they are categorised as migrants. But the narrative accounts of the migrant female workers do not tell us the same story. They show a different perspective regarding memory, cognizant of the fact that they do get affected in the complex daily practices of living, interacting, and forming relationships in an unknown location. Tina adjusts to create a sense of belonging with her new life in Delhi, although she has fond memories of her past life. Despite the dangers and uncertainties in the unfamiliar space, she has now established herselft to live, work, and become part of the local community. Although Tina’s identity is rooted in the village, she makes a conscious effort to forget her past. In this context, Tina does not want to visit her village since she must forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations that link together in the society of origin and settlement (Schiller et al. 1995). Tina has been toiling as a domestic worker in Delhi, which most kin members, including her friends, are unaware of. Hence, Tina feels more comfortable remaining attached to Delhi and belonging to with the place she now resides. Dolly, another character, wanted to migrate because she did not want to live in that village anymore, with less work and poverty. She wanted a better future and life for her children, hence she took the decision to migrate to Noida for a better job and education for her children. Dolly never visited her natal family since she decided to settle in Noida to earn money and aspire for a better livelihood. Dolly being a Bengali Muslim makes her migrant status more vulnerable, and she fears being a part of any religious group. Dolly prioritises her work, but some recent developments left her in shock. But Dolly’s narrative reflects “the moment we are in now”, with all its uncertainty, she still hopes for a better future. As Attiya Ahmad notes that in gulf countries, the majority population believes in Islam, hence many South-Asian immigrants are converted which she calls “Everyday conversions” (2017); but Dolly’s narrative is significant to understand the reason behind migrating from the village. She did not want to remain located in a place where she is labelled as “Muslim” and Dolly did not have any sense of belongingness with her native village. She made the decision to migrate and leave the place for a better living.

130  Anindita Chatterjee Ultimately, almost all the migrant women I have known in my research, including the four accounts in this chapter, have expressed ambivalence about their situation, the “here and there” and the “then and now” evoking a sense of belongingness and memory in different ways. The accounts suggest that during the process of migration, some women like Tina and Dolly got dislocated from their villages and aspired to a better living in a new geographical space. Creating a space in an advanced city is a source of pride and accomplishment for these women. It is a moment of joy. In cases of marriage migration, there are issues that women have to face when they visit the villages. Hence, they try to forget the past and want to live and adjust to the present as a migrant domestic worker. For a trans-regional migrant worker, the distinction between the urban and village is the border that separates the “here” and “there”. Their dreams of a new and better life start just on the other side. But, for women like Sabitri, her sense of belonging and identity is with Bangladesh, although she crossed the border, she is a displaced migrant. Hence her place is rooted in Bangladesh. Finally, the central part of the recollected narratives brings out subtle themes that characterises migration with identity, caste, religion, and work that shapes spatial movements that are a symbolic manifestation of group belonging and boundaries (Dickey 2000; Sharma 2016) in understanding the relationship with the location.

Opting to move out: “choice” and “agency” in migration Aspiration to migrate to a better place is meaningful for the migrant, and this evolves over time. The choice to leave their village comes out in many narrative accounts of several migrants that I spoke with over time. However, this area of work has been under-played since women’s agency to migrate has not been given that much of importance in the existing literature on migration. It is true that the majority of early migration during the period of Partition and even after were either forced to move out or displaced. Sabitri mashi’s case is an example of how she was forced to move out of Bangladesh and entered India without documents. Henceforth, her memories are also tied with her birthplace, and she feels the journey of migration as a ghastly nightmare. Public media and discourses highlight the opting out theme, as well, crafting a vision of the new breed of modern, independent-minded women with cosmopolitan aspirations in a new metropolis. In the case of Tara, she clarified that it was not her decision to migrate, her father had pushed her into domestic work, which she was unaware of. Tara states, “I was very young, yet they did not even tell me or took my permission that I could never come to my village again … so I never came back”. It is quite clear from her narrative that she was forced, as she expresses her opinion. Though the narrative points out as a case of distress migration, yet Tara’s viewpoint was not given much importance in the existing literature. Tara did not want to go to work as a domestic worker, but she did want to visit Kolkata. Agency

Home away from home?  131 remains problematic for women who migrate into cities and ultimately join the job of a domestic worker. Tara wanted to study in a school, which she could do in the family where she worked. Hence, she became attached to her workplace since her dreams were partially fulfilled. The narrative accounts reflect that they wanted to pursue education either for themselves or for their children (like Tina), who went off into a marriage relation in Delhi because of her own choice, aspiring that she will have a better prospect in Delhi, but she became a domestic worker and now she yearns and aspires for her son for a better living and future. This is similar to Dolly who took the agential role to migrate from Kolkata to Noida for a better future in evolving time. In my interactions, workers expressed a realisation of changing times, even though there persists a structural inequality when it comes to educating either a girl or a boy child. These waged working mothers aspire for generational mobility through the means of education which will provide them with a better living. These women in the narrative accounts described that they do not want to remember the past, rather they would prefer to live in the present. Their aspirations, hopes, and desires are connected with the present, hence memory is not tied with migration in such instances.

Concluding remarks A standard interpretive framework of agency and resistance to the journey of migration, however, do not capture the complexities of broader social forces that a female migrant worker has to negotiate, or the social critique that women face, as they strive to craft a life in the new, unfamiliar metropolis of their dream. The fascinating narrative accounts witness an interconnection between how women migrate and, then the hardship and struggles of life, make the memories diminish, and they want to belong to the present with new hopes and aspirations. Aspiration in migration literature in South Asia is less documented, but narratives mentioned in this chapter show that women do aspire for the future generation. Tara, Tina, Dolly, Sabitri mashi, and other migrant women in Delhi, Noida, and Kolkata, whose stories of migration are varied, offer a kaleidoscope of experiences with rich textures to help understand the notion of home from the perspective of migrants. It invites us to reflect on several reasons that they had to move away from home to re-live in unfamiliar locations. Though women claim it to be their “choices”, they are also forced to take many decisions. In particular, when women work as domestic workers, which Tina recounted that she did not even wash her own plate in her natal family. But later, she was forced to take up this “disrespectful” job for sustenance since her husband did not have any permanent form of job. Trying to get settled in what is mostly a precarious form of existence with the constant fear of their vulnerable livelihood, these women experience different degrees of attachment to a home “back home”, the place of birth where the umbilical cord is buried, in counterpoint to the pride of accomplishment

132  Anindita Chatterjee in building a home “right here”, where they live in the present. Tina aspires for a better life for her son. Similarly, Tara too demonstrates her “choice”, since she broke all ties with the village community but does not forget to perform the duty of giving her family the money they need. Tara’s sense of belonging was built in an urban space with the family she worked for, since they recognised her aspirations and valued her dignity and respect. Sabitri Mashi was forced to leave Bangladesh, had to settle in Kolkata and work as a domestic worker. As an immigrant arriving in a new country, she had to either assimilate within the new culture or retain her old habits. But, to become a part of the new society, she had to acquire the standard Bengali language and other habits. In the new society, these attitudes interact with the actual and perceived levels of acceptance of immigrants and with official policies toward immigration (Phinney et al. 2001). Dolly, like Tara, also feels strongly about her decision to migrate from her natal village to Kolkata and finally into Noida. Dolly shows her strength, even though she is shattered that her husband’s shack was bulldozed a month back. Based on my conversations with migrant workers, I have realised that the workers who reside outside West Bengal are more silent, quiet, and bear a sense of fear, in particular the marginalised community like Bengali Muslims. I have also observed the ways in which they perform the daily work activities without much interaction. Silences have meanings that suggest monitoring, surveillance, and avoidance structures (Goffman 1981; Gal 2000). The varying way the women spoke, with a quiet, morose sense, or more sharply, with an acute sense of consciousness to say that migration was the “right” thing yet trying to murmur the treacherous scheme in minute detail about the journey of migration. The gestures, smiles, silences, and tears vividly bring out the urgency of leaving the homeland and living in the present. In this chapter, the narrators were diverse not only across backgrounds but also in their own unique experiences. Migration to cities like Delhi continues to be a dream for many of the women I met with, but little do they know about the hard work for sustenance. Some said casually that: We thought that the journey would be exciting, just like we travelled in local trains from Howrah to Kolkata, but the excitement was more because it was Dilli! [Delhi] but little did we know that what was waiting for us (tears). Kolkata was better, now when we think of our childhood days (tears) we can never be there anymore. Sakhina is living her present life while the memories of her idyllic past keep coming back; however, she never allows her past to intervene in the present. As Thapan (2009) notes that “the imprint of gender is unmistakable in women’s construction of their subjective experience of poverty” (2009: 161). Poverty and gender inequality are critical reasons for migration, which these women experience in their everyday life. It is true that women tend to speak out, often engage in acts of confrontation, and above

Home away from home?  133 all, feel that they have a choice and can exercise their agency as it is reflected in Tara and Dolly’s experiences of agential action taken not to think of the past and to migrate to an advanced city, but we must look at other women who face the consequences of making a choice to migrate to advanced cities, especially unmarried women. Tina’s sister Gita came to Delhi after Tina’s marriage with a lot of hopes and expectations; instead, she was physically abused, and she had nowhere to go. The choice of migration has been both painful and traumatic for her. All migrations may not be safe as girls are vulnerable to be trafficked for domestic work by agents and abused physically, psychologically, and sexually by employers and agents. They may also be exploited through long hours of work and in conditions similar to bonded labour—isolated and solely dependent on employers. In this instance, Gita could not take the best benefit from the city instead she was exploited. Tina reveals the shock, and still searches for Gita since she never came back to the locality. An unknown, unfamiliar space is now so known and (in)famous for Gita that she could never come back. Where is she now? It may be another migratory journey to another place where she will remain invisible for the rest of her life. The compelling accounts suggest that domestic service was never the choice of women who migrated, and though they feel the pain of leaving their homeland still they yearn to live in the present. The past remains to be bitter for some and pleasant for others, so most of them want to diminish the memories of the past and live in the present with fresh present memories. Most of the accounts tell us that women’s self-worth emerges from a social identity acquired through marriage which they willingly or unwillingly identify as being essential to carry on the paid work in an unknown cityscape through migration. The narratives also depict that the women never give up, they live to toil and work harder for their children since they still dream, hope, and aspire to live a better life in the future.

Acknowledgement The research for this paper was conducted during a fellowship at the M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies “Metamorphoses of the Political: Comparative Perspectives on the Long Twentieth Century” (ICAS: MP), an Indo-German research cooperation funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). All views expressed here are solely that of the author.

Notes 1 Baba/Maa – In Bengali it means father/mother. 2 Desher bari is a Bengali phrase which is colloquially used to mean one’s own homeland; it has no reference to another country. Migrants coming from rural area often mention their village as their nation.

134  Anindita Chatterjee 3 For example, Ananya Roy, reflects on how the process of rural to urban migration engendered distress migration where young girls were taken to cities to perform the job of a domestic worker in lieu of monthly wages (Roy 2003). 4 This is recorded in Tina’s narrative account. 5 Tina resided near a posh South Delhi locality; the exact location is deliberately not revealed to protect her privacy. 6 This incident happened after Bangladesh gained freedom (mukti juddho andolon). 7 My friend was Dolly’s past employer. I met Dolly at my friend’s place. 8 We meet at that place, since it is away from her workspace, and Dolly feared to take me to Sorkha. 9 In 2019, I met Dolly several times: this was after the Durga Pooja. 10 Mashi – It means mother’s sister in literal Bengali language; but in this instance, it is reciprocated as a kinship term between worker and researcher/worker and employer. 11 Later when I had discussions with her regarding national/anti-national discourse, Sabitri did not care. She said, “I have lost everything, now I have my sons but I will still not fear to say that Bangladesh is my motherland”.

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7 Migration, gender, and religion A study of Malabar migration and gendered Christian identity in Girideepam (1961–71) Sharon Rose There are various dimensions to the Malabar migration that started in the 1920s and lasted till the 1970s. The Malabar migration and the history of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church in Malabar are closely interrelated. The Malabar migration led to an expansion in the power of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church beyond the boundaries enforced by the colonisers (Kudilil 2012: 22). It is therefore important to discuss the history of the Church here (Varghese 2012: 502–523; Kudilil 2012: 15–30). The Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, one among the twenty-three Eastern Catholic Major Archiepiscopal Churches that are in full communion with the Pope, is believed to be one of the oldest Churches in India. The establishment of the Church, it is believed, dates to 52 A.D. when St. Thomas the apostle baptised many upper caste Hindus. This belief enables the Syro-Malabar Christians to trace a common ancestry of all the Syrian Christians, also known as the Nasranis, the St. Thomas Christians, or the Marthoma Christians, all of whom claim to have been descendants of upper-caste Hindus baptised by St. Thomas. The power of the Church had spread across many parts of India till the fifteenth century, but with the Portuguese invasion, this power got restricted to the Southern part of Kerala. With colonial intervention, the St. Thomas Christians in Kerala, who had hitherto enjoyed special privileges in the caste-ridden society, began to lose their hold. Syrian Christians faced discrimination from the authorities of the state of Travancore in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The government preferred to give jobs to caste Hindus and neglected even the educated members of other communities. This in turn led to the Syrian Catholics, who were the most repressed among the Syrian Christians, turning to agriculture in a big way (Virutheyil 1982: 81). Land became an invaluable asset for the community when plantation estates were introduced by the British in Travancore (Varghese 2012: 510). However, with the appointment of Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer as the Dewan of Travancore, things became bleaker for the Syrian Christians. With the liquidation of the Travancore National and Quilon Bank in 1938, Christians were targeted. Many were imprisoned. Unfair taxes were imposed. Moreover, the alarming growth in the population of Syrian Christians in Travancore, the insufficiency of land for cultivation (Varghese DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-9

138  Sharon Rose 2012), economic stress and food shortage due to the World Wars, and the Great Depression, made migration necessary for their existence. It was in the early 1920s that the advantages of migration to Malabar became evident to the people of Travancore. While in Travancore there was a shortage of land, Malabar had substantial stretches “of arable land left unoccupied and uncultivated” (Varghese 2006: 106). There was also land available in Malabar in the form of “private and government forests and ‘waste lands’”. Barring a few exceptions, most of the migrations that took place were individual initiatives by peasants. Despite Malayalam being the language of communication for the migrants as well as the original inhabitants of Malabar,1 the migrants found very little in common with the largely non-Christian population of Malabar (Joseph 1988: 102). Religion became the basis on which the migrants united in Malabar. As Eppsteiner and Hagan (2016: 50–51) observe, “migrants turn to churches, shelters, and religious organizations to perform network functions”. Religion becomes a powerful guiding force during the preparation of the journey, travel, and adjustment in the new land. The Church played a vital role in the establishment of the migrants as a community in Malabar. K.V. Joseph (1988: 102) notes how [t]he first thing that the migrants did after arriving in Malabar was the construction of churches in or around settlements. Starting with two churches in 1928, the number of churches went up to 16 by 1947. Forty-two churches were built during the period between 1947 and 1956. By 1966, there were 113 churches and 75 filial churches in addition. It can be observed that their religious identity was what held the Syrian Catholic migrants together in the new land. Initially, it was the Latin diocese of Kozhikode2 that served the migrants. For the Syrian Catholics from Travancore, who were used to their own liturgical practices, following the Latin liturgy was difficult. As the priests were mostly foreigners or Mangaloreans, communication was also an issue. The Syrian Catholics demanded priests from their own community to be sent to Malabar. However, the Syro-­Malabar Church could not send its own priests to lead and serve its people because it had no authority beyond the river Bharatapuzha. Until the fifteenth century, the Marthoma Christians had exercised power across India, but the arrival of the Portuguese had restricted their power to the South of Kerala (Kudilil 2012: 20). When Bishop Patroni was anointed the bishop of the Calicut diocese in 1948, he found that there were almost 74,000 Syrian Catholics in the Malabar region. Following the recommendations of Bishop Patroni and the requests of the priests and migrants of Malabar, on 31 December 1953, a diocese was established for the migrants in Malabar. This new diocese had 74, 217 members (Virutheyil 1982: 140). Fr. Sebastian Valloppilly became the first administrator of the diocese. He was later anointed the first bishop of Telicherry diocese. The Malabar migration exemplifies the argument put forward by Knott (2016: 77–78) that “[r]eligions travel through migrants,

Migration, gender, and religion  139 but also with them. It also travels to them in their places of settlement” and how, “‘Migrants’ and ‘migrant communities’ are brought into being, constituted and sustained through a variety of practices”. Discourses on gender are observed to be an important one of such practices in the case of the Malabar migration; this shall be discussed in a later section. Girideepam, a magazine published by the Telicherry diocese between 1961 and 1971, is taken as the primary source of information for understanding the notions of religious identity, family, and gender with respect to the Malabar migration. I chose Girideepam mainly to understand the relationship of the migrants in Malabar with the Church, particularly in regulating and structuring practices, values, and gendered identities among these migrants. The Church holds considerable power on the lives of its Catholic members in Malabar even today. It is interesting that even though historically the Church has expanded to the northern part of Kerala because of the Malabar migration, discourses have been constructed around the Church and the migrants proposing that the migrants would not have flourished so well in Malabar without the assistance they received from the Church. Girideepam is an important source of information for understanding the regulating authority of the Church on the lives of migrant Christians of Malabar as it was published by the Church during the Malabar migration. Informal talks with first- and second-generation migrants during the field work for this study have substantiated that Girideepam had considerable influence on these migrants. Even 50 years after it was last published, people who had grown up around that time still recalled and fondly referred to pieces published in the journal. For Fr. Jacob Narikuzhi, the first editor of the magazine, Girideepam was the voice of the migrants in Malabar. Bishop Valloppilly’s initiative to start a new magazine for the migrants was rooted in his belief that a new magazine was needed to unify migrants in faith and Catholic consciousness, and to help them overcome the many hurdles that they had to face in Malabar (Kudilil 2012). These hurdles included eviction threats, outbreak of fatal diseases, and non-availability of proper healthcare. Deepika3 was hitherto the only daily that wrote on behalf of the migrants, but it was difficult for it to reach Malabar all the way from Kottayam. Girideepam was first printed in July 1961 at the St. Joseph’s press in Mananthavady, with Fr. George Kazhikkachalil as the first editor and Fr. Jacob Narikkuzhi as the first manager. In August 1967, Fr.  Abraham Porunnolil and Mon. Thomas Vazhaparambil took over as its editor and manager, respectively. The magazine was the voice of the migrants for ten years. Girideepam addressed many contemporary issues relevant to the migrants, regarding politics, religion, theology, economics, family, etc. In the November 1967 issue of Girideepam, the editors of the magazine wrote about the role of Girideepam in the life of the migrant and the objectives of its publication. They emphasised that the magazine was being published not as an indulgence but to address a dire need – reflecting the management’s understanding of the necessity for a magazine to be published that would tell the stories of the migrants. The difficulty for a daily

140  Sharon Rose or weekly to be published in the Malabar regions during those times, owing to the non-availability of support facilities, was duly noted by them. The editors stated with pride that despite their limitations, they were able to portray the life of the migrants in Girideepam and be a voice to them. Girideepam aimed at being a means for the outsiders to understand the life of the migrants and their hardships. The editors called Girideepam a source of strength for the migrants. They opined that a publication like Girideepam could do a lot to organise the migrants scattered in the new land. The cultural and traditional variations found in Malabar made it difficult for the migrants to form a stable society unaided. The editors felt that Girideepam could continue to contribute, as it had done in the past, to the creation of a stable society in Malabar that was firmly based on Christian ethics and morals in all its activities, be it economic or social (Girideepam 1967, November, pp. 3–4). In the souvenir published by the diocese of Telicherry called Kudiyettathinte Ithihasam [“The Legend of Migration”] (Ponnattu 2005) to commemorate the golden jubilee of the Telicherry diocese, it was documented that the magazine was sold for 13 paisa per copy and Rs. 1.50 per annum.4 The migrants, who primarily depended on agriculture for their livelihood, were still only in the process of establishing themselves in the new land. Low returns in agriculture combined with the existing government policies amongst other factors, had made the lives of the migrants rather difficult (Girideepam 1970, November, p. 4). The resulting financial crisis that the migrants faced during these years made it impossible for them to buy the magazine, and the diocese was forced to stop publishing the magazine in November 1971 (2005, Kudiyettathinte Ithihasam, p. 608). In the short histories of different migrant settlements that were published every month in Girideepam, the publishers made sure to emphasise that the presence of a priest was what made the area prosper. The 1963 June edition of Girideepam discusses the history of Edoor where the migrants suffered a lot initially, but with the arrival of the priest – the “Shepherd” – the lamp of development was lit. In the article Kudikayattam [“Migration”] that appeared in the June 1964 issue, the writer says that the migrants should not just focus on material benefits but should also pay due attention to their spiritual well-being. The writer exhorts believers to first make sure that God’s Kingdom was on earth – he assures them that every problem will be resolved thereafter. According to him, believers in the migrant settlements were to first focus on building a Church – “palli” – and schools associated with the Church – “pallikoodam”. He offers the assurance that God will take care of the rest (MMFCMI 1964, June, p. 22). The migrants rely on religion to help facilitate the retention of traits and characteristics that they believe are important for the future generations to survive in the new land (Eppsteiner and Hagan 2016: 62). Although the Malabar migration can largely be seen as an unorganised endeavour by individual families initially, the Church gave its steadfast support once the migration began to gain pace. V.J. Varghese (2006: 170) observes that the Syrian Christian migrants who were in a “modernist developmental mission of reclaiming

Migration, gender, and religion  141 the “premodern” landscapes to agriculture and human activity reinstated religion as the central agency of their community formation in Malabar”. Many articles in Girideepam, like the Kudiyetta Charithram5 [“History of Migration”] published in June 1963 which gives a brief history of different migrant settlements, discuss the different stages of migration. There is a common thread in all these articles as they talk about the wilderness of the land to which the migrants arrived, the presence of natives who are mostly uneducated and uncivilised, the arrival of the migrants which leads to the area beginning to develop, and ultimately the arrival of the priest, followed by the establishment of a church and a school associated with the church, which is what accelerates the development of the area. As Wilson and Mavelli (2016: 263–264) propose, “[r]eligion is often a key aspect of individual and group identity and can at times be used to designate an in-group and an out-group, ‘us’ and ‘them’” and that “religion contributes to the politics surrounding migration … in the assistance provided by different religious traditions and organisations to migrants”. For instance, Kudiyetta Charithram gives a brief description of migration to the Iritty region of Malabar. The history starts with an anecdote about a very familiar narrative of migration. When migrants travelling to Iritty by train from Travancore were asked about their destination, the passengers would enquire if there was no light in Iritty, as Iruttu in Malayalam means darkness. The migrants would reply saying that Iritty will glow with their presence after they reach and establish themselves there. The article gives a detailed description of how the place flourished because of the presence of the migrants and the appointment of Fr. Varkey as their parish priest. The peasants from Travancore, who had been exposed to “colonial planting enterprise” (Varghese 2006: 146) and had an advanced knowledge of agriculture, technology, and money, considered themselves superior to the “uncivilised” natives and tribes in Malabar. The Church portrays the history of the Malabar Migration as a “great civilizing process” and the Christian migrants as the “torchbearers of civilisation” (Varghese 2006: 141, 161). Bishop Sebastian Valloppilly is today remembered as the Father of the migrants and the Moses of Malabar (Kudilil 2012). Through Girideepam, the Church reiterates the argument that the area developed because of the presence of the Church. In the June 1966 article by Fr. Thomas Moothedan titled “Is Telicherry just a dozen years old?”, the writer glorifies Bishop Sebastian Valloppilly, the clergy and the migrants who made the region prosper by their hard work. He says [t]he colonists, the priests, the Bishop hailing from one enlightened corner of Kerala famous for apostolic zeal, missionary fervour, economic self-sufficiency and hard toil could easily work together with one mind and there is no wonder if the diocese has grown so large in so short a time. (Moothedan 1966, June, p. 12)

142  Sharon Rose He also provides the figures: in 1954 the Catholic population of the diocese was 7417; the number of churches, filial churches, priests, primary schools, and upper primary schools were 22, 15, 26, 14, and 12, respectively. There was only one high school and the diocese did not have any Colleges, training schools, seminaries, convents and nuns, hospitals, press, and orphanages. By 1966 the Catholic population had increased to 2,10,988, churches to 113, filial churches to 75, priests to 142, primary schools to 37, and upper primary schools to 32. In addition, there was one college, one training school, one seminary, one press, seven hospitals, fourteen monasteries, ten orphanages, and 58 convents with 604 nuns. As Eppsteiner and Hagan (2016: 56) have observed, in addition to being providers, religious institutions advocate for the rights of the migrants and regularly monitor and document state policies for their welfare. This was true in the case of the Malabar migration. The May 1963 editorial in Girideepam titled Pothukaryangalilek (Editorial 1963, May) exhorts the migrants to participate in socio-political public discourses such as opinion formulation before an upcoming election (Editorial 1966b, September) and an exchange of opinions on the candidate running for elections, etc. (Editorial 1966a, August). To work “for God and the Country” is the motto of Girideepam as the article reiterates. The editors are counting on the “age old”, Catholic “traditional capital” to provide them with enough strength to be part of the public discourses. Girideepam (1966, April, pp. 7–8) voiced the protest of the migrants and the Church against the eviction threats faced by many migrants in different regions. In the 1966 August editorial, the editors condemn the government’s inhumanity in evicting the migrants from Shimoga and Chandanakkampara. The article notes how the Catholic Church, in the name of God, came forward and took a stand against the eviction of its people who would otherwise have been left to the mercy of the inhuman government. The article notes how Bishop Sebastian Valloppilly and the clergy stood by the migrants irrespective of their caste, religion, and class. Thus, Girideepam validates the power of the Church over the migrants – it was the Church that provided them with the moral, spiritual, ritualistic, infrastructural, political, and economic strength during the journey and afterwards. This made the Church and its ideologies a necessity for the migrants. The Church played a great role in maintaining the social order and provided them with a continuity of experiences in the new land, as shall be analysed in the next section. Girideepam works largely in the framework of traditional gender roles. The magazine prescribes how gender must be performed and normalises the binary of masculine and feminine roles. Writers subscribe to the traditional gender roles and reinforce gender stereotypes of men being breadwinners, protectors, etc., and women being homemakers.

Migration, gender, and religion  143

Gendered Christian identity: a study of Girideepam An analysis of Girideepam indicates that one of the ways in which the Church reinforced its power in Malabar was through family and gender. The Church was one of the main organisers of “power relations of gender” (Behera 2006: 39) with respect to the Malabar migration. Scholars have sensitised us about the gendered dimensions of the institution of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church in which “gender is present in the processes, practices, images and ideologies, and distributions of power in the various sectors of social life” (Acker 1992: 567). In this context, it is noteworthy that there are only a few women’s voices speaking about their experiences of the migration to Malabar. Women’s voices are often mediated by “patriarchal” voices which makes it difficult to understand fully how they coped with the experience of migration. The Malabar migration was centred on the family. The family played an important role in a migrant’s efforts to “settle” and mark their presence in a place. Interestingly, the arrival of the oxymoronic “migrant-settler” became the pivotal point from which the Syrian Christian community began to flourish in Malabar. The notion of “settling” itself is centred on the family. A person “settles” in life only when he/she has a family. In the Catholic imagination, the family is essentially a heterosexual family: “a man, his wife, “his” children” (Menon 2012: 5). The peasants from Travancore migrated to Malabar in order to settle there. What made it possible for the migrants to “settle” in Malabar was the presence of the family. Lalcy Mol Jacob (2005: 259–260) contends that the relationship between family and religion is reciprocal as religion legitimises family structures, and families produce faithful religious members. Jacob also asserts that for the Syrian Christians “[t]heir religious set up helped the continuation of the family structure”. The Syrian Christian migrants from Travancore sold all their fortunes back home, gathered their belongings, and migrated with their families to Malabar to settle in the new land. They held on to their religion and faith. It is noted that it was the “[f]amilial collectivism and structure of authority” (Virutheyil 1982: 231) that helped the migrants flourish in Malabar. The Church which considers the family as the fundamental unit of the community provided the necessary guidance and assistance to promote families bound by faith. For the Church, the fourth commandment “Honour thy father and mother” is the basis of all matters familial. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) describes this commandment as “one of the foundations of the social doctrine of the Church” (1994: 2198, 2204, 2207). This centrality of the family is vehemently defended and promoted by the Church in Girideepam. The article Mission Pravarthanam [“Mission Work”] by Karimannur (1965, October) discusses what the family is to Christianity. He says that the family is the fundamental unit of a community. Only if there are good families can a community expect to flourish. Good families produce nuns, priests, and leaders, all of whom are important

144  Sharon Rose for the bringing up of a faithful community. There are other articles that describe what an ideal Christian family should be like. The one-act play Kudumbam Oru Devalayam [“Family – a Church”] (Mundakkayam 1968, May), describes the ideal Christian family where parents and children love each other, are tolerant and patient with each other, and work for the happiness of the family members. The youngsters are also constantly reminded about the importance of familial love. In the article Ilamprayakkarod [“To the Youngsters”], J.N. (this is how the author’s name is given in the magazine; 1966, April) advises the young to love their family and make every effort to keep their family together. He advises them to have at least one meal with the family every day, to pray together and to get along with parents and siblings so that the family, and in turn the society, is in good condition. The example of the Holy Family is often put forth for migrants to imitate. In Adhwanich Jeevikkanam [“Toil and Live”], Isac (1965) gives the example of the Holy Family as the ideal Christian family. He says that though Jesus had the power to turn water into wine, and other powers, he never used it at home, but became a model for the Christians to emulate by being hardworking and helping his parents earn their livelihood. The image of the hardworking Holy family is again invoked in the articles Mattullavarkuvendi [“For Your Brethren”] and Antharvahinikkullil [“Inside the Submarine” by Ittiyavara (1965, December) and George Valiyathazhathu (1966, August). Families indeed became the backbone of the Christian community in Malabar and Girideepam contributed almost completely to this discourse. As pointed out earlier, in the Catholic imagination, the core of the family is essentially heterosexual – a man married to a woman. The family sustains the social order. It was usually the male head of the household who made the decision to migrate. In the stories and articles in Girideepam, nowhere can a woman’s voice be heard with regard to the decision to move to Malabar. There is a deafening silence as far as women’s voices and women’s perspectives are concerned, in the narratives of the Malabar Migration. Lalcy Mol Jacob (2005) observes that women had no identity outside the family and most of them, especially in the rural areas, were confined to the domestic space in the first half of the twentieth century. Jacob (2005) also discusses the numerous traditional practices that led to such a confinement of the Syrian Christian women to the domestic space of the family. In a memoir written in 1988 about his migration to Malabar, Varkey Kapiarumlayil writes, Only my father and wife’s father supported my decision to move to Malabar. Nobody else wanted to go. My wife got sick just being near a vehicle. She did not want to leave. She was pregnant. Still, carrying four tins [to vomit], she accompanied me. In 1949 Meenam I migrated with my family.

Migration, gender, and religion  145 Drawing from Palriwala and Uberoi (2008: 24–25), we can say that the Syrian Christian women were largely considered as “‘passive’, ‘tied’ or ‘associative movers’” devoid of agency because of the “specific rules of marriage, [inheritance], and (post marital) residence”. The rules of “patrivirilocal residence and with kinship rules of patriarchal descent, inheritance and succession” resulted in a “patriarchal kinship system” which “structurally affirms and enables the authority of senior men over both women and junior men in the family” (Palriwala and Uberoi 2008: 29). Without property, money, and support from the natal family, the women had no choice but to follow their husbands with their children, to build new homes in an unknown land. Perhaps the solemn faces of the migrant women who looked like they were brought to be sacrificed in the new land as observed by J.M. Vazhakkulam (1963, June) in Ente Malabar Yathra [“My Journey to Malabar”] stemmed from the helplessness and hopelessness that the women must have felt in their situation. There are articles in Girideepam which spell out the characteristics of an ideal man/husband and an ideal woman/wife. In the story Kunjaniyude Kudumbajeevitham [“Family Life of Kunjani”], Eliamma George Valiyathazhathu (1963c, August) lists the characteristics of the ideal husband. The writer believes that the ideal husband should be hard working, has family as his first priority, and not waste his time gambling, drinking, or gossiping. She elaborates that he should like to spend time with his family and should not spend all his time with his friends. The writer also says that it is the wife’s responsibility to make sure that the husband finds his family pleasant enough to want to spend time there. She goes to the extent of saying that even if the husband is abusive or rude the wife should not retaliate in order to maintain the peace in the family. She should instead wait for his anger to pass. It is interesting that many articles in the magazine seem to suggest that an ideal wife is a prerequisite for an ideal husband, e.g., Mamsanibidamalla Ragam (Girideepam 1968, August), Mahamanaskatha (Girideepam 1968, April). It reinforces the attitude that if the women are good, families and communities become inevitably good. Women become responsible for the quality of the community, as is evident in Aadhunika Shilpikal: Mathakkalod (Girideepam 1966, Special Edition) and Ammayum Makkalum (Girideepam 1968, October). Another story Ini Njan Ennum Nintethanu [“I am Yours From Now On”] (Joseph 1963, December) portrays similar qualities in a wife. Even after the husband has an extra-marital affair, the wife is shown as forgiving and forgetting. In another story by Eliamma George Valiyathazhathu (1963b, July) titled John Sirinte Dambathya Jeevitham [“The Marital Life of John Sir”] she portrays the ideal wife in the character of Jossy, a responsible, literate woman. In a conversation between her and her friend Jessy regarding family life, they conclude that it is the responsibility of the wife to make sure that the family life goes smoothly and that if the wife is not careful, many lives around them would be adversely affected. To illustrate this,

146  Sharon Rose Jossy narrates the story of John Sir who, despite having a very prestigious job, is always angry and makes the lives of his subordinates very difficult. Jossy believes that John Sir behaved this way in the office because his wife was a very selfish person who did not take care of him. Augusti Srambikkal (1963, December) in his article Nammude Veetil [“At Our Homes”] proclaims the same by giving a very peculiar interpretation of a Biblical story. There is an incident in the Bible where Jesus cooks for his disciples on the shores of Tiberias. This incident could very well have been interpreted as Jesus breaking gender stereotypes. Instead, Augusti interprets this as indicating that by cooking for his disciples Jesus establishes that the women who cook and feed the household – the husband and the children – should be perfect and that even while doing their daily chores they should spread the light of goodness. The idea of motherhood propagated in the magazine also conforms to the framework of patriarchal stereotypes and restrictions. The Catholic Church quite often identifies womanhood with motherhood where the “subordination of women is an affirmation of those relational virtues attributed to maternal love and care, and an expression of the church’s concern that they be preserved and maintained” (Primeaux and Beckley 1999: 124) In Eliamma George Valiyathazhathu’s article titled Enthanorammayude Prarthana? [“What is a Mother’s Prayer?”] (1963a, June, p. 11), the writer constructs each moment of a mother’s life as a prayer, an offering to God. She gives a whole list demonstrating how the entire life of a mother is a self-sacrificing prayer. According to Eliamma, the ultimate prayer for a mother is, “My God make me your faithful servant, good Catholic, wife and mother”. In special edition of Girideepam, K.L. Kuttiyamma (1966) wrote an article titled Adhunika Shilpikal: Mathakkalod Oru Vakku [“Sculptors of Modernity: A Word to the Mothers”] in which she romanticises the idea of motherhood, suggesting that a mother is the sculptor who sculpts the artist, the administrator, the creative thinker and the poet from unending depths of artistic talent.

Land, inheritance and migration In Kannimannu [“Virgin Land”], the young narrator makes an interesting observation about her father and his relation to land. Like any typical peasant, the girl says, her father wanted virgin land for cultivation. Only in such a land could he hope to prosper. She says that a farmer’s life is a pilgrimage in search of untouched lands. When debts increased, her father sold whatever land he had and decided to set off to Malabar (Manimala 1968, March). The gendered perspective of land here is inescapable. In Girideepam, the metaphors and qualifiers used in many articles to describe land are in feminine terms. Examples of such articles include Malanad [“Land of Hills”] (Benedict 1963, April) and Mannin Makan [“Son of the Soil”] (Mathew 1963, May). The migrant, who is defined in masculine terms, has

Migration, gender, and religion  147 to battle all odds to “conquer” the land and make it his own. The editorial Lajjakaram [“Shameful”] (Girideepam 1965a, March) also confirms how many migrants came to Malabar to find new lands after selling their ancestral property. Acquiring land for cultivation was the driving force behind Malabar migration (Varghese 1963, Special Edition). This is also mentioned in Wayanadinte Kannilunni Kellur [“Wayanad’s Apple of the Eye – Kellur”] (Girdeepam 1964, April). The problem of land fragmentation followed the Syrian Christian migrants to Malabar as they continued their traditional practices of patrilineal inheritance, dowry system, etc. The editorial Kudiyettakkarude Makkal [“Children of the Migrants”] (Girideepam 1965b, June) talks about second-generation migrants and the dwindling chances of sufficient land being available to them even in Malabar. Whatever land was taken over by the early migrants, the editorial says, has been divided among the children. The editorial foresees the land being further divided among sons and advices the people capable of migrating, to do so in the interest of their children’s future. The Church, we can thus see, encourages the migrants to acquire more land (Girideepam 1963, June). In the history of migration to Payyampally described in Girideepam, it is said that the priests foresaw that if they helped migrants settle in the erstwhile wilderness, it would become a Christian centre in time, which indeed it did become. The Church therefore extended all support to the migrants. Acquisition of land/property in distant places by families intending to settle there was a means for the Church to expand its pastoral power. It is noteworthy here that while more sons meant more division of property, more sons also ultimately meant a strengthening of the Church. Migration (and a continuous one at that) helped in propagating Christianity in new places and was hence seen as being desirable for the family property as well as the Church – thus in a way resolving the contradiction.

Acknowledgement This chapter is a revised and rewritten part of author’s M.Phil dissertation submitted to University of Hyderabad.

Notes 1 The original inhabitants of Malabar also consisted of adivasis whose language and culture were considered as “other” by the migrants (Jose 1970, April, p. 14). 2 The Latin Catholic diocese of Calicut was established in 1923 by separating it from the diocese of Mangalore. 3 Deepika started publication as the first Malayalam newspaper in 1887 with the name Nasrani Deepika… It was printed in the press built by Fr. Kuriakose Elias Chavaraat Mannanam, near Kottayam, and had Fr. Emmanuel Nidhiry as its founder editor… In 1927 Nasrani Deepika was converted into a daily and subsequently in 1939 when it was shifted to Kottayam from Mannanam to ‘give it a more secular outlook’ it was renamed Deepika (Varghese 2012).

148  Sharon Rose 4 The exact year cannot be known because not all the issues of the beginning years are available today. For a few months in 1963, the amount is as mentioned here. Also, in the souvenir, the same amount is given. So, I guess it was so when the magazine started in 1961. 5 There are many articles outlining the history of different migrant settlements, see Girideepam 1963 April, 1963 May, 1963 June, 1964 April.

References Acker, J. 1992. “From Sex Roles to Gendered Institutions”. Contemporary Sociology 21: 565–569. doi:10.2307/2075528. Behera, N.C. 2006. Gender, Conflict and Migration. Vol. 3. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Benedict, T. 1963, April. Malanad [Land of Hills]. Girideepam, p. 13. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 1994. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Editorial. 1963, May. Pothukaryangalilek [To the Public Matters]. Girideepam, p. 3. Editorial. 1964, April. Wayanadinte Kannilunni Kellur [Wayanad’s Apple of the Eye – Kellur]. Girdeepam. Editorial. 1965a, March. Lajjakaram [Shameful]. Girideepam, p. 1. Editorial. 1965b, June. Kudiyettakkarude Makkal [Migrant’s Children]. Girideepam, p. 1. Editorial. 1966a, August. Shimogayum Chandanakkamparayum [Shimoga and Chandanakkampara]. Girideepam, p. 2. Editorial. 1966b, September. Malabarinte Sthanarthikal Arayirikkanm? [Who Should Represent Malabar?]. Girideepam, p. 2. Editorial. 1967, November. Girideepam: Chila Paramarshanangalum Soochanagalum [A Few Words about Girideepam]. Girideepam, pp. 3–4. Eppsteiner, H.S., and J. Hagan. 2016. Religion as Psychological, Spiritual, and Social Support in the Migration Undertaking. In Intersections of Religion and Migration: Issues at the Global Crossroads, edited by J.B. Saunders, E. FiddianQasmiyeh, and S. Snyder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Isac, L.C. 1965, February. Adhwanich Jeevikkanam [Work Hard and Live]. Girideepam, pp. 20–21. Ittiyavara, S. 1965, December. Mattullavarkkuvendi [For Your Brethren]. Girideepam, p. 11. J.N. 1966, April. Ilamprayakkarod [To the Youngsters]. Girideepam, p. 23. Jacob, L.M. 2005. “Changing Social Space of Women: Special Reference to Women in Syrian Christian Community of Central Travancore”. Doctoral Dissertation, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam. Jose, K. 1970, April. Valarunna Colonikal [Developing Colonies]. Girideepam, p. 13–14. Joseph, K. 1963, December. Ini Njan Ennum Nintethanu [I Am Yours from Now On]. Girideepam, pp. 15–16. Joseph, K.V. 1988. Migration and Economic Development of Kerala. New Delhi: Mittal Publications. Karimannur, J. 1965, October. Mission Pravarthanam [Mission Activities]. Girideepam, p. 18. Knott, K. 2016. Living Religious Practices. In Intersections of Religion and Migration: Issues at the Global Crossroads, edited by J.B. Saunders, E. FiddianQasmiyeh, and S. Snyder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Migration, gender, and religion  149 Kudilil, G. 2012. Mar Sebastian Valloppilly: Malabarinte Rajashilpi. Tellicherry: Sandesha Bhavan. Kuttiyamma, K.L. 1966. Adhunika Shilpikal: Maathakkalod Oru Vaakku [Architects of the Modern World: To the Mothers]. Girideepam, p. 48. (Special Edition). Manimala. 1968, March. Kannimannu [Virgin Land]. Girideepam, pp. 23–26. Mathew, C.K. 1963, May. Mannin Makan [Son of the Soil]. Girideepam, p. 13. Menon, N. 2012. Seeing Like a Feminist. New Delhi: Zuban-Penguin. MMFCMI. 1964, June. Kudikayattom [Migration]. Girideepam, pp. 20–22. Moothedan, T. 1966, June. Is Telicherry Just Dozen Years Old? Girideepam, p. 12. Mundakkayam, C.C. 1968, May. Kudumbam Oru Devalayam [Family: A Church]. Girideepam, p. 17. Nechikkat. 1966, April. Mysore. Girideepam, p. 7. Palriwala, R., and P. Uberoi. 2008. Exploring the Links: Gender Issues in Marriage and Migration. In Women and Migration in Asia: Marriage, Migration and Gender, Vol. 5, edited by R. Palriwala and P. Uberoi. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Ponnattu, A. ed. (2005). Kudiyettathinte Ithihasam: Athiroopatha Charithra Smrithikal [The Legend of Migration: Historical Memoirs of Archdioces]. Thalassery: Golden Jubilee Documentation Committee. Srambikkal, A. 1963, December. Nammude Veetil [At Our Homes]. Girideepam, p. 26. Valiyathazhathu, E.G. 1963a, June. Enthanu Oru Ammayude Prarthana? [What Is a Mother’s Prayer?]. Girideepam, pp. 11–12. Valiyathazhathu, E.G. 1963b, July. John Sirnte Dambathya Jeevitham [John Sir’s Marital Life]. Girideepam, pp. 12–13. Valiyathazhathu, E.G. 1963c, August. Kunjaniyude Kudumba Jeevitham [Kunjani’s Family Life]. Girideepam, pp. 24–25. Valiyathazhathu, E.G. 1966, August. Atharvahinikkullil [Inside the Submarine]. Girideepam, p. 25. Varghese, M. 1963, June. Kudiyetta Charithram: Irittiyude Prakasam-Edoor [History of Migration: The Light of Iritty-Edoor]. Girideepam, pp. 18–20. Varghese, V.J. 2006. “Memory of History a Study of Peasant Migration in Kerala from Travancore to Malabar, 1920–1970”. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. Varghese, V.J. 2012. The Alluring Music of Labour: Modernity, Migrations and Recreation of the Syrian Christian Community. Research Gate, pp. 502–510. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258884972_The_Alluring_Music_ of_Labour_Modernity_Migrations_and_Recreation_of_the_Syrian_Christian_ Community. Accessed 10 December 2019. Vazhakkulam, J.M. 1963, June. Ente Malabar Yathra [My Journey to Malabar]. Girideepam, pp. 24–26. Virutheyil, J.V. 1982. “Migration and Social Structure in Rural Kerala”. Doctoral Dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Wilson, E., and L. Mavelli. 2016. Taking Responsibility: Sociodicy, Solidarity, and Religious-Sensitive Policymaking in the Global Politics of Migration. In Intersections of Religion and Migration: Issues at the Global Crossroads, edited by J.B. Saunders, E. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, and S. Snyder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Part III

Migration, memory, and longing

8 Making sense of migration Reflections on the contexts and contents of Bhojpuri women’s folksongs Asha Singh

The migrant and the left-behind, or two migrants? Kahe dhani angawa ke paatar ho ram Kahe dhani chowkathiya dhaile jhuruvas ho ram Toharo je maiya prabhu ho awari chhinariya ho Tauli naapiye telwa dihalan ho ram Toharo bahiniya prabhu ho awari chhinariya ho Loiye ganiye hathwa ke dihalan ho ram [Husband: Why do you look so thin, dear wife? Why do you look so sad, standing at the doorway, dear wife? Wife: Oh husband! Your mother is such a bitch She gives me only a few drops of oil Oh husband! Your sister is such a bitch She gives me some flour to cook]1 This exchange between a migrant husband who has returned home and his wife is from a long jatsaari – literally, songs sung while grinding grain on a jaata or jaant, a stone grinding mill; it is essentially a work genre folk song or “shram geet” (Sinha 2008: 266).2 When the husband asks his newly-wed wife to explain the reasons for her frail frame and sorrow, she complains about how her mother-in-law and sister-in-law limit her access to oil (telwa) and kneaded flour (loiye). The song is woven together additively, “prabhu ho awari chhinariya ho” providing a bridge to progressively add new content.3 This dialogic exchange, which imagines “face-to-face” interactions, is a common feature of oral cultural productions.4 Here, the dialogue is between a husband and a wife. Like other women’s folk songs on migration, the protagonist is a left-behind wife who is “newly-wed”. One rarely comes across songs of this type where a middle-aged married woman is the protagonist (other than songs that have a co-wife as their central theme). The “newly-wed” is a migrant coping in her marital home. The husband is also a migrant who is coping in a destination unknown to his wife. Thus, this folk song becomes an imagined exchange between two migrants. Such a reconceptualisation helps us move beyond the static emotions of pain DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-11

154  Asha Singh associated with “left-behindedness”, as we acknowledge the migrant status of the wife. Along with it, we also begin to denaturalise the household as a space where a “marriage migrant” must fight with other women and men on a daily basis for her survival. This brings out what Palriwala and Uberoi (2005: 5–29) refer to as the political economy of gender relations. The micro-politics of oil and flour – daily necessities – is a slice of how women experience migration. It brings out the materiality of migration among rural peasant women of Bihar. Reconceptualising the figures of migrants’ wives, this essay attempts to look at Bhojpuri folk songs and their embeddedness as an epistemic field for the study of migration.

Folk songs as an epistemic resource for migration Migration as a process has left a deep imprint on the oral art forms of Bhojpuri-speaking Bihar (Narayan 2005, 2016). The “migrant” and his “left-behind wife” have historically emerged as creative subjects cutting across folk song genres in the region (Singh 2015). Folk songs produced and disseminated by women are key epistemic resources for the study of these culturally mediated figures of the migrant and his left-behind wife, to recall perceptions and dilemmas of male outmigration and marriage migration in the Bhojpuri-speaking community. Songs are part of a continuous, living tradition (as against revived traditions) in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.5 They continue to occupy a central space in the cultural and emotional life of women. Folklorists and sociologists have identified folk songs as reservoirs of said/unsaid expressions (see Narayan 1986, 1993; Raheja and Gold 1996; Gold 2003) and as socially sanctioned outlets for suppressed wishes and anxieties, without any promise of their alleviation (Dundes 1969). This essay analyses select genres associated with women, namely jatsaari, ropani and jhumar. Work songs like jatsaari and ropani (connected with planting seedlings; sohani is a related type) are generally melancholic in their mood, meter, and tone. Jhumar is generally associated with collective and playful performances of women (Christian 1891). Of the work song genres, jatsaari is not caste-specific; it has generally been associated with savarna (upper caste Hindu) households (see Jassal 2012).6 On the other hand, songs of agricultural processes (ropani and sohani) are sung by women of labouring castes, especially agricultural labourers. Jatsaari is often sung in solitude or as a duet, as not more than two women can run a stone mill at a given time. On the other hand, ropani is sung in a group, owing to the nature of agricultural work. While jatsaari is performed and enjoyed by women in the privacy of their home, ropani is usually performed in full public view. Work songs, in general, accommodate melancholy and combine their performance with labour processes. Songs used in this chapter were collected from anthologies and my fieldwork. My “unlettered” mother Lakhpati Devi was my inaugural source for Bhojpuri folk songs. I also collected songs from the field (details ahead).

Making sense of migration  155 Additionally, I referred to Bhojpuri folk song anthologies collected and compiled in the second half of the twentieth century, especially the works of folklorist Krishna Deva Upadhyaya (Upadhyaya 1984, 1990, 1991, 1999, 2011).7 Folklore research has for a long time viewed rural peasant women as unchanging repositories of orality without capturing their discontent with the conditions that produce such a characterisation (Upadhyaya 1990; Sinha 2008 are examples of such research). This study was conceptualised to contest such a perspective, by analysing new or renewed women’s songs and analyse their performance contexts. I conducted the fieldwork in 2012 and 2014 in ancestral and kin villages familiar to me: Dehari, Bhairotola (which is part of a much larger village called Khangaon) and Bhagwatpur in Bhojpur district, Bihar. These villages are predominantly Ahīr localities that lie within a radius of 20 kilometres in two Community Development Blocks – Sandesh and Koilwar – of Bhojpur district.8 The village settlements run parallel to the Sone river, a tributary of the Ganga. While Dehari is a single-caste village made up of Ahirs, Bhagwatpur and Khangaon are mixed-caste villages economically dominated by Bhumihars (a dominant upper caste in Bihar). Most of the Ahirs in Dehari, Bhairotola, and Bhagwatpur are marginal peasants or landless, according to the villagers. A significant population of able-bodied men in these villages were absent during my fieldwork owing to circular migration. During my visit, I recorded and transcribed songs from both young and elderly women. Most of the songs were collected from Dehari, my paternal village. In my village, I was perceived as an exception. One, I stood out as the only woman who had ever been to a college or university. I was the only one who was fluent in Hindi and English. I was often asked by my father to speak a few lines in English in front of a village audience; the perception was that this would cause them to take me seriously. Two, I was probably the only woman who did not sing. My mother, grand-aunts, cousins, sisters-in-law, and nieces sang on every occasion, ranging from weddings to daily chores in the household and the fields. Three, on the field, I was not identified as a researcher, but as an unmarried woman from the community. Women of my age, including my cousins, were married long back, and had children in their teens. Nevertheless, my insider status facilitated intimate conversations with women. (However, such familiarity also restricted my conversations with men, especially from outside the village.)

Placing folk songs within Bhojpuri orality Orality, unlike literacy, does not leave any residue (Ong 2002: 11). A story or a song ceases to exist once it is sung or narrated. All that is left is the potential of it being recalled again and creatively repeated. What we find in the field are “voicings” or oral/verbal art forms which are learned and mastered through a kind of gendered “apprenticeship” during life cycle events and everyday labour processes (Ong 2002: 62). Songs thrive because they are recalled and repeated, not because they are written down (Ong 2002:

156  Asha Singh 5–15). I could not find any woman in my field area who had documented songs as diary entries.9 However, a commercial performer from the neighbouring village whom I interviewed had maintained songs in a diary. Women in my kin villages were unhappy with the timing of my visit as it was not the wedding season. According to them, I would have learnt the songs better if I had attended weddings with them as an apprentice (in Bhojpuri: Biyaah-saadi mein ayibu, tab nu geet seekhabu). Despite my “off-season” visit, women could easily recollect songs.10 The experience of migration is “intellectually organized” through songs among other “voicings”.11 The limits and scope of such organisation are determined by the context. Songs form a social default and are not a social choice for women (and men) in the Bhojpuri-speaking region. They are integral to women’s socialisation, a point confirmed by women themselves in the field villages. They associate singing with their rurality and do not place it on a high pedestal. Growing up in a working-class Bhojpuri household, I had seen my mother sing on every occasion. Additionally, I had also known how songs and proverbs, as articulate thoughts of an oral speech community, become points of reference to explain customary “rules” of caste/gender socialisation. In other words, they assume jurisprudential significance, another point Walter Ong underlines in his observations on orality (Ong 2002: 35). In the field villages, women’s folk songs were performed in exclusive gendered spaces. It was observed that men may listen to these songs from a distance, but they do not constitute the immediate or expected audience. In addition, for such songs, there is no such divide as the performer and audience; women sing for other women and with women. Similarly, men sing for other men as audience, with men, though they might be singing about the pain and sufferings of women. Women in my field villages did not associate any “power” with songs. Here, power is understood in terms of tangible or intangible resources which provide greater say in decision-making within the household or in the community. Women did not speak of their life worlds as self-contained, independent, and unrelated to the world outside their immediate context. Rather, I found them highly inquisitive about a life devoid of songs. They actively placed themselves in opposition (and sometimes in subordination) to a written, Hindi/English urban sphere (my presence serving as a reminder). Thus, when I rationalised that I would be writing a book based on their songs, they did not question its usefulness as they knew that written documents are powerful and fetch decent jobs. Notwithstanding the disassociation of songs with power or influence, women do mobilise these as an art form that is fully in their control and command.

Two categories of migration Two categories of migration find voice in Bhojpuri women’s folk songs. One is the easily identifiable “male outmigration” that women in the Bhojpuri-speaking region of western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh have

Making sense of migration  157 experienced continually from at least the second half of the nineteenth century (Yang 1979; de Haan 2002; Sen 2004). In addition, in the past three decades, the growth of metropolitan cities, especially Delhi and Mumbai, sustains a continuous flow of outmigrants from Bhojpuri-speaking districts.12 During fieldwork, it was evident that women in these communities share aspirations to move beyond the limits of rural social and economic constraints, and are not merely passive recipients of migration processes. Second is an implicit category of marriage migration caused by patrilocal endogamous marriages. In this variety, the “left-behind” wife is the migrant, her husband’s village or sasural being her migration destination. R. Palriwala and P. Uberoi (2005: 5–29) observe that marriage has most often meant a shift in place for women in Asia. This shift may entail both patrivirilocality (which entails moving to a new residence) and territorial exogamy (moving beyond a circumscribed spatial boundary). Marriage has also meant a new work environment, with new structures of relations and authority. Being an “outsider”, the newly-wed requires time to learn new ways and be integrated with her husband’s patrilineal kin. The idea of a home left behind is central to women’s oral art forms. Due to marriage migration, women have historically spent more time thinking about migration and its emotional, social and material ramifications. Interestingly, long after marriage, women continued to be identified by their natal villages (as Dehariwali, Bhairotolawali, Bhagawatpurwali). Both male outmigration and marriage migration have deeply influenced oral cultural productions of Bhojpuri-speaking Bihar.13 The genealogy of “migration-driven” oral cultural productions would essentially begin with marriage migration followed by male outmigration. Women in the field villages (including my mother) recount marriage migration as their inaugural experience of migration. The cultural repositories of separation from one’s natal village are fundamental in the articulation of other experiences of migration.

Factoring in the absence of literacy Badhiya kalam ha wa, hamra ke debu? [This is a nice pen, can I have it?]. (Anshu Kumari 2014) During my fieldwork, a younger cousin, Anshu Kumari, recalled many folk songs for me. As I wrote them down in my notebook, she asked me whether she could have my kalam (pen). Without a second thought, I  handed it over to her. She immediately tucked it away deep inside her trunk or bakasa, explaining that a good pen was hard to come by and men in the family would not really like her to have one. This incident, among others, made me take a closer look at the conditions of the women who sang for me. Pen, paper, or any other supplies associated with writing were scarce and not easily accessible to women. My field engagements witnessed

158  Asha Singh the strange coevality of women who only sang and I – the researcher – who mostly wrote and recorded the same using tools of literacy.14 This contradiction profoundly disturbed me possibly due to my “insider status”. Being a gaon ki beti (daughter of the village) or someone part of the kin network, I was not received as a stranger. I was identified and held accountable to rules, rituals, and thoughts beyond my research questions. However, my educational status separated me from women and men of my field villages. Though I focused my enquiries on folk songs, I was also forced to take note of how reading out from a book or writing on a piece of paper were shared visions among women. Reading bhajans/songs from a printed book is an oft-repeated dream of my unlettered mother. She would often say, “Babhaniyan lekha kitab mein se dekh ke pooja kariha” (You should use a bhajan booklet to perform puja like the upper-caste women). Such instances, time and again, brought to the fore the fact that songs persisted in a condition shaped by the absence of literacy.15 Several scholars exploring the relationship between migration, women, and literacy have argued that male outmigration has historically provided a legitimate reason for home communities (especially women) to invest in literacy (Reeder 1998; Vieira 2016). Kate Vieira coins the term “migration-driven literacy” to underline this process (Vieira 2016: 422). Literacy and its associated materiality such as state documents (sarkari kagaj-pattar) play a crucial role in our daily lives and more so in situations of migration (Vieira 2013). Enquiries on the conditions and shifts in the home community in the absence of husbands are relatively few in migration literature. The absence of able-bodied men has a direct implication on the production process in the village. Researchers have time and again highlighted the increasing intensity of gendered labour in such a context. They have also commented on the shifts in decision-making processes (Jetley 1987; Paris et al. 2005; Binzel and Assaad 2011; Antman 2013; Ullah 2017). One does not find any specific focus on migration-driven literacy. Nevertheless, Leela Gulati’s work on the effects on Malayali women of male outmigration related to the oil boom gives us interesting insights on migration-driven literacy and socialisation (Gulati 1987, 1995). She writes that procedural aspects of remittance brought the migrant’s wife within the range of financial institutions such as banks and post offices. Institutional interactions led to a profound need to “read and write”. This spiked the demand for schooling (irrespective of gender) and adult literacy classes. The migrant’s wife also cultivated new networks (for instance, with other “left-behind” women in modern institutional spaces), which were non-existent earlier. Here, migration is conceptualised as a process that alters communication patterns, widens the ambit of socialisation, and sharpens the need for literacy. Gulati further notes that personal written communication with the husband introduced a new experience of privacy shaped primarily by guarding information from the extended family (Gulati 1995: 199). From her account, it becomes evident that women mitigated the human tragedy of alienation through literacy-based infrastructures.

Making sense of migration  159 However, folk songs or oral art forms do not surface as a significant coping mechanism in Gulati’s account of Malayali woman.16 Do we find these shifts and coping mechanisms in Bihar? Is there any potent movement of “migration-driven literacy” in the field villages? While answering this question adequately is beyond the scope of this chapter, some observations are certainly possible. Despite recording persistent male outmigration for over five decades, the field villages show an acute inadequacy of literacy as an infrastructure. The situation of persistent illiteracy can also be attributed to the absence of education in the mother tongue in the Bhojpuri-speaking region of Bihar, owing to the non-recognition of Bhojpuri as a “scheduled language”. During my field study, I did not come across any woman who was directly involved in letter-based communication with her migrant husband, on a one-to-one basis. Letters were written and posted through male mediation under the surveillance of older members of the household. With the advent of mobile phones, communication is once again driven by orality. In other words, one finds women who moved from old oralities to new oralities, often circumventing literacy (Ong 2002: 10).17 Again, access to mobile phones for women was curtailed actively by men of all age groups; this is confirmed by observations in the field. Often men question women on “call histories” and place them under surveillance while using the phone. Male outmigration is mediated through the socio-cultural milieu in which women live and the conditions in which men generate their incomes (Menjívar and Agadjanian 2007). A comparison of Leela Gulati’s study on Kerala and studies of Bhojpuri-speaking east Uttar Pradesh (Jetley 1987; Paris et al. 2005) is useful. While Gulati reports an expansion of the left-behind women’s autonomy, networks, opportunities, and institutional interactions, as mentioned earlier, Paris et al. (2005) and Jetley (1987, WS-52) speak of intensified labour with no meaningful shifts in existing structures of gender, caste, and class. Jetley argues that women did become decision-makers in domestic issues of daily consumption. Nevertheless, the “absentee” husband continued to be the main decision-maker (Jetley 1987: WS-52). Folk songs, for instance, involve a constant invocation of the absent husband. His physical absence does not mean his cultural or socioeconomic absence. These studies conclude that remittance does not structurally transform the lives of marginal peasants or landless households. This holds true for the villages I visited. While one may spot mobile phones and motorcycles in select households, institutional absences in healthcare, education, public transport, electricity, gas cylinders, bathing rooms, and toilets continue to persist. Out of the three villages I visited as part of the research two had no signs of electricity. The only field location with power supply, albeit irregular, was Bhairotola. It is within the oral economy of folk songs that one finds a widening of metaphors associated with migration. They play an irreplaceable role in “coping” with male outmigration in Bhojpuri-speaking Bihar (Jassal 2012; Sinha 2008, 2018). Persistent conditions of non-literacy or the absence of

160  Asha Singh “literacy as infrastructure”, inadequate remittance, and intensified labour shape folk songs and their gendered reproduction in Dehari, Bhairotola, and Bhagwatpur. In the following section, I will juxtapose select narrative themes of migration in women’s songs with field insights.

The migrant with no “home” The absence of the migrant husband has a direct impact on the negotiations of a woman at all levels (household, community, and neighbourhood). The situation becomes further complicated if she is childless or has mothered only girls. The husband’s absence adds to her material difficulty as other members of the conjugal household (or her migration destination) are seldom willing to spend on/for her. Even the natal family members are reluctant to take responsibility of married daughters. The following ropani captures this crisis: Baba ho kate da na duyi-das dinwa nu ho Tale praabhu ji lawatiayihen ho E beti ho humase na kati toharo dinwa nu ho Chali ja na matariya bhiri ho E mai ho kate da na duyi-das dinwa nu ho Tale praabhu ji lawati ayihen ho E beti ho humase na kati toharo dinwa nu ho Chali ja na bhaiyawa bhiri ho [Oh father, let me spend few days at your home Till my husband comes back. Oh daughter, I would not be able to do that Go ask your mother. Oh mother, let me spend few days at your home Till my husband comes back. Oh daughter, I would not be able to do that Go ask your brother.] In this dialogic exchange, the protagonist is pleading with her parents to let her stay in their house till her husband’s return. Her parents evade this appeal and remain non-committal. This folk song indexes the generic conditions of “marriage migration” and is a reminder of women’s disenfranchised status in their parental home. As argued earlier, patrilocality ensures that women make no claims on resources in their natal village (Palriwala and Uberoi 2005). This disenfranchisement is regulated through social rituals, rules, and oral art forms. The conditions of the marriage migrant are clearly different from those of the male migrant. The former has no say in her “home community”, while the latter continues to be the khanihaar (breadwinner who has first claim to all resources) even in his absence. The khanihaar’s presence or absence decides the status of the marriage migrant. Unlike the

Making sense of migration  161 Malayali women in Leela Gulati’s (1995) work, Bhojpuri peasant women in my field villages did not handle remittances on their own, as observed earlier. This partially explains their dependence on the extended family. The marriage migrant finds herself doubly displaced, with no place to call her own, in the absence of her husband. This structural feature of patrilocality and village exogamy, an essentially gendered experience, is accentuated by male outmigration and captured skilfully in folk songs by women.

Migration and sexual desires The absence of the husband or the process of migration legitimises the act of singing about sexual desires. The “sexual”, culturally produced through a set of metaphors, rituals, and events, is an oft-repeated motif in women’s folk songs. However, there are several shades to the “sexual” in Bhojpuri folk songs, always in tandem with the social and economic vulnerabilities of migration. These include images of sexual desires, betrayal, disappointments, and fantasies. A prominent custom is gawana, a post-marriage event where the woman is brought from her natal home to her marital home. This custom is ritually associated with the onset of her puberty and is symptomatic of the consummation of marriage. Gawana also becomes the most conclusive metaphor for the displacement from one’s paternal home (naihar, peehar). Usually, the woman protagonist in a song challenges her man’s migration by reminding him that gawana has been performed and he cannot run away from his duties of consummation. Songs perceive migration post-gawana as a conjugal/sexual betrayal. This betrayal is challenged in songs with the help of sarcasm and black humour legitimising a woman’s revenge in the context of an unconsummated marriage. These emotions are shaped within socially sanctioned structures of caste and gender. The following jhumar captures the “anger” and consequent “revenge” of a life-­ behind wife on the return of her migrant husband: Gawana karayi Saiyan ghar baithawale; apne chalela pardes Barho baris par piya mor ailen; ab na jaihen bides. ‘Duru-duru kukura re, duru re bilariya; duru re saharwa je log.’ ‘Naahin hum hayi re kukura-bilariya; naahin re saharwa ke log Aare hum ta-je hayin re, naanhen ke biyahuwa, tora saathe karbi upbhog.’ ‘Jaahu tuhun hawe re naaneh ke biyahuwa; bhiti mein se chipari odar.’ Chipari odareti kaali bichhi marlis; saiyan karela pukar. ‘Aare kahiya ke badla saghawlu e goria; kahiya ke dewta manaw.’ ‘Gawana karayi ke ghar baithawale ohi din ke badla sadhaw.’ [Performed gawana, and left me to rot in this house, he went to pardes. My husband has come back after twelve years, now he will not go. “Go away O dog, go away O cat, go away you city dweller.” “I am neither a dog nor a cat, not even a city dweller

162  Asha Singh I am your husband, I want to have fun with you.” “If you are my husband, pull out the wall crust.” While pulling out the crust a black scorpion stung; my husband started screaming. “O my fair wife, for what fault did you take this revenge.” “You made me sit at home alone after gawana, it is revenge for that day.”] (Upadhyaya 2011: 401–402) In this jhumar, along with the exchange between the husband and the wife, one also finds a narrator explaining the consequence of the wife’s revenge. This narrator could be the wife herself in conversation with her co-singers. Jhumar is sung during life cycle events or change of seasons. They are essentially performed in a large group, capturing an array of emotions. The melancholy associated with jatsaari and ropani is not usually found in jhumar. The dialogue between the wife and the husband is centred round a sense of conjugal betrayal.18 The wife accuses her husband of having forgotten her. She calls him a city dweller or saharawa ke log. The anger on display also tells us about the long periods of non-communication which characterise their conjugal relationship. The explicit mention of twelve years of separation (Barho baris par piyamor ailen) serves as a metaphor for this non-communication. Apart from expressions of sexual desire, songs also voice the sexual vulnerabilities of the migrant’s left-behind wife. Since the men are absent, women get sexual proposals from other men. In such songs, the woman’s devar (brother-in-law) is the usual seducer. Songs usually project the devar as a character from whom she seeks protection in the absence of her husband. The seduction motif is often used to assert the wife’s “chastity”. However, in certain songs the woman is portrayed as having alternative sexual alliances leading to pregnancies. Folklorist Krishna Deva Upadhyaya in his writings on Bhojpuri folk culture has framed the former as sati and the latter as kulta (lit. promiscuous; Upadhyaya 1991: 17–39). The sati image is held as the rule while the kulta image has been discussed as an outlier (see Singh 2018b). However, such neat binaries are not readily obtained in songs (Singh 2015). For example, one comes across complex jatsaari, sohani and ropani narratives which articulate situations of extra-marital relationships – negotiations among women to “hide” illicit pregnancies and romantic encounters with “other men”. The following sohani is an example of how a left-behind wife’s “transgressive” pregnancy is negotiated with the help of her nanad (sister-in-law): Humro chhayailwa ke kewta yaar ho, machhari maari dela Machhari khaat nanadi rahi gayile pet ho, kekra sir dhaaro Humro chhyailwa bides ho, kekra sir dharo Sasur mor budhwa, dewra naadaan ho, kekra sir dhaaro Humro chhayailwa bides ho, kekra sir dharo

Making sense of migration  163 Sasur mor budhwa dewra naadan ho, bhasura sir dharo Humro chhayilwa bides ho, bhasura sir dharo [The fisherman friend of my husband feeds me fish O sister-in-law I became pregnant while eating fish, whom shall I blame? My husband has gone to foreign land, whom shall I blame? My father-in-law is old, brother-in-law is young, so bhasur19 shall be blamed My husband has gone to foreign land, so bhasur shall be blamed]. (Upadhyaya 1999: 299) Interestingly, this song documented by Upadhyaya is an example of both transgression and submission. On the one hand, we find a migrant’s wife pregnant by a man who is outside her kin and caste – a fisherman. On the other hand, she brainstorms with her sister-in-law to come up with a “suitable” explanation that places the blame for this transgression within the limits of the household, kin and caste. In other words, beyond the sati–kulta binary, songs seem to capture the complexities of women’s sexual lives in the absence of their husbands. Women’s folk songs voice their anxieties regarding migrant men’s alternative sexual/conjugal arrangements at the migration destination. The co-wife is a recurring character in Bhojpuri folk songs. In the songs, the protagonist often challenges the “wrongful” desires of her husband. However, the alternative conjugal spaces are clearly beyond the reach and control of Bhojpuri “left-behind” women.

Comparing the “left–behind” woman The “left-behind woman” (protagonist) is also a creative subject in men’s folk song genres.20 Similar to women’s genres, men’s songs use the woman protagonist in the “first person feminine” (Singh 2015: 33–44). Human tragedies of pain and separation are perceived as “women’s emotions” in folk songs, probably owing to the longer history of gendered marriage migration. The relative absence of the “first person masculine” in voicing experiences of migration is fascinating.21 Though folk songs with the migration motif are not transgressive enough to imagine the “left-behind women” beyond the pains and pangs of (sexual) longing, women’s folk songs seem to go beyond simple articulation of desires, unlike men’s. The politics of survival is strongly linked with the politics of intimacy in women’s folk songs.22 One can see in these songs that the woman protagonist is not just yearning for her migrant husband, but also exposing the unfolding crisis of migration. She negotiates and strategises to fulfil her material requirements. Unlike men’s genre songs, which often limit themselves to romantic portrayals of desire, women’s songs go beyond

164  Asha Singh this to draw a strong connection between the material and the sexual. An example is how bigamy is dealt with in the songs. In Bhojpuri peasant society, bigamy (characterised as biyahi-sautin conflict or sautiya-daah in Bhojpuri) is often portrayed in women’s folk songs as a consequence of male outmigration. This phenomenon has been dealt with from a masculine perspective not only in men’s folk songs, but also in their commercial extension (stage performances and cassette songs).23 Men’s songs discuss the “co-wife” to spice up the narrative, whereas women’s songs discuss it as a social problem which affects a wife’s status and leads to further deprivation. Let us examine a few songs. Jhumar (Women’s)

Kaharwa (Men’s)

Jaahu hum rahitin baanjh-banjhiniya; tab aayit sawtiniya

Purub deswa se aawele sawatiya re na

Raajawa humro do-do hain laal; kaahe ko laayo sawtiya

Nakiya mein bawele re lawangiya re na

Jab hum rahitin langad-lujhi; tab aayit sawtiniya

Daantwaa mein jadele misiya re na

Raajawa humro sota aisan deh; kaahe Ankhiya mein karele surumiya re na ko laayo sawatiya Jab hum rahitin kaali-koyilia; tab aayit sawtiniya

Hanseli ta jhalke la batisiya re na

Raajawa humrolaale-laalegaal; kaaho ko laayo sawatiya

Roweli ta jhalera surumiya re na

[If I was a childless woman, co-wife should have come

Soraho singaar karke chalali bajariya re na

I have two sons, why did you bring a co-wife

Bhent bhayil chauk-bajariya re na

If I were physically challenged, co-wife should have come

[Co-wife has come from East

My body is voluptuous, why did you bring a co-wife

She wears a nose pin

If I was like a black koyel (cuckoo), co-wife should have come

She decorates her teeth as well

I have red cheeks, why did you bring a co-wife]. (Upadhyaya 2011: 389)

She puts kaajal in her eyes When she laughs, her teeth shine When she cries kaajal flows She adorns herself and roams in the market]. (Upadhyaya 1999: 299)

The male perspective is evident in the above example. In the men’s genre, the “co-wife” is a highly sexualised subject, with the song including meticulous details of her bodily conduct. Further, the song imagines the “left-­ behind wife” and the “co-wife” as sexual competitors. On the other hand,

Making sense of migration  165 the women’s genre combines narratives of sexual and conjugal betrayals (with the coming of the co-wife) with issues of social standing and access to domestic resources. Also, they often imagine husband–wife as an unhindered romantic unit (occasionally “spiced up” with co-wife motifs), while women’s songs speak of domestic strife and negotiations. The content of the men’s songs is, to an extent, influenced by their physical mobility as migrants. This mobility has meant an expansion of their communication networks, entertainment choices, institutional interactions and cultural exchanges (de Haan 1999). New visions of “conjugality” dealing exclusively with the sexual desires of the married heterosexual couple could be read as a consequence of such expansion. The influence of such visions is much more evident in commercially driven genres. Also, one finds the influence of literacy and textualisation of songs in men’s genre as they do away with additives. Orality based on mnemonic patterns of memory utilises additive features to compose oral art forms. For example, the jhumar mentioned above is constructed additively; on the other hand, the kaharwa is one long description of the “co-wife”. Women’s songs represent the travails of married life by articulating conjugality in terms of power relations, division of labour and gendered relations between the characters. These songs picture the household as a site of contestation over resources and give a glimpse of how conversations on conjugal politics are imagined by women within their marital home. In other words, women’s songs reveal the politics of hearth. Such awareness in women’s folk songs could be attributed to the displacement caused by marriage, which is absent in men’s songs. Women, as argued earlier, denaturalise the taken-for-granted household, not necessarily with the aim of transforming its nature but to capture their stories of “coping” in their marital home.

Conclusion: voicing change Bhojpuri folk songs image conjugality in conversational form between the wife and her migrant husband. On an everyday basis, the “image” of marriage is reproduced through the folk songs the women sing. However, the contexts of conjugality in the field villages mark different experiences. The places in the folk songs are often at odds with the places in the field (see Singh 2018a). Women’s songs index memories of two migrations, interlaced with each other. The language of pain codified as feminine is used by men and women to convey sufferings. Could this be because migration/displacement/separation has been primarily a woman’s experience in a patrilocal, endogamous society? From our discussions, I would argue in the affirmative. Migration’s historical recovery as a cultural experience would also mean placing women’s displacement through marriage at the centre stage of cultural expressions. However, neither folk songs nor their cultural expressions of aspiration are static. They manifest visible markers of change. These changes lend voice to aspirations which may look beyond folk songs to culturally negotiate migration. The remittance from Bhojpuri labour migration has not

166  Asha Singh been particularly transformative for peasant women, a point ascertained by scholars working on home communities elsewhere in Bhojpuri speaking region (Jetley 1987; Paris et al. 2005). Nevertheless, their oral art forms have responded to certain other changes. The changing vocabulary and metaphors in folk songs on migration thus need special attention. Modes of communication have always been a prominent motif in Bhojpuri folk songs on migration. The letter – a mode of long-distance communication – finds significant mention. In such narratives, the migrant’s wife struggles to get a letter written to her husband by someone who is capable of reading/writing, usually an upper-caste scribe, as she herself is unlettered. In other words, folk songs of this variety capture the problems associated with non-literacy and absence of accessible institutional mechanisms of communication. In recent times, letters are being rapidly replaced by mobile phones. Present-day songs voice women’s aspirations to possess an exclusive mobile phone. The field observations suggest that mobiles have become a matter of pride and status among Bhojpuri peasant women. However, as we have seen, their access is severely curtailed for women in the field villages. Women’s songs with the motif of mobile phones are often anchored in their attempts and negotiations to acquire one for their own purposes. The following song collected during my fieldwork in Dehari village of Bhojpur from a teenager, Seema Kumari, in 2014, captures such a negotiation: Naaya mobile, naaya charger laa di E raja ji Saanjhe-saberwe raure se batiya-em E raja ji Katano saasu jarihen, chhaka uda-em E raja ji Halo-halo kah ke batiya-em E raja ji [O my Rajaji, buy me a new mobile and a charger Day and night, I will talk to you alone Even if my mother-in-law is jealous, I will hit a six I will say hello-hello and talk to you] Songs with such new metaphors can be found among younger women. In the song, the newly-wed wife is trying to convince her husband (Rajaji) to get her a mobile phone so that she can establish an exclusive channel of communication with him – an aspiration common among women in the field. This aspiration for privacy also captures an ambition to move beyond folk songs as the primary coping mechanism. One also finds a desire to hide information from in-laws and extended family members. These songs also respond to shifting destinations of migration. In old songs, migration destinations were imagined within frames of ambiguity (sometimes termed pardes or as a direction – purab or east, denoting Kolkata-based migration). Recent songs refer to specific migration destinations. One can find names of cities like Delhi, Ludhiana and so on, indicating an increased spatial awareness among women due to communication technology, irrespective of a trickle-down access to mobile phones. It also tells us about the broader

Making sense of migration  167 shifts in migratory patterns. The following song, recorded in 2014, from Shail Kumari, an anganwadi teacher in Dehari, captures this change: Phulwa gire-la chapal pa gamak aawela Papa aisan bar khojani tensan rahela Jaake dilli-ludhiyana mein basal rahela [The flower fell on the “chapal” (sandal) spreads its aroma O papa, you found me such a groom who gives me tension He often goes and lives in Delhi–Ludhiana] One can also see increasing usage of English words in Bhojpuri folk songs, for example, the use of “papa” and “tensan” (tension) in the song above. The vocabulary of the song points towards a “transitional oral society” of Bhojpuri and its greater code mixing and translingualism.24 It may also be seen as the influence of urban Bhojpuri cultural practices of Mumbai and Delhi on the language of folk songs in the Bhojpuri homeland. Along with this, a slow and steady increase in literacy among women and men has also led to the introduction of new words. Finally, it can be said that folk songs represent both drudgery and solace in a socially inequitable rural Bihar. Women use it as a tool to voice their shared experiences, conditions and aspirations. Folk songs emerge as a social default for women – the only controllable art form in the absence of other means of expression. Women in the field villages acknowledge this condition. The aspiration for a mobile phone or a pen or a book, freely communicated through songs or conversations, gives us a glimpse of how women imagine change. Migration is a core ingredient of this change.

Notes 1 I have done a free translation of all the folk songs used in this chapter. My mother Lakhpati Devi shared this particular song in 2014, in Arrah, Bhojpur (Bihar). 2 Krishna Deva Upadhyaya, writing in the early 1990s, characterizes jaata or the stone grinding mill as a marker of rural feminine self-sufficiency. He laments the displacement of stone mills with mechanized flour mills (Upadhyaya 1990: 191). Contrary to his fears, I noticed a persistence of jatsaari among women in my field villages irrespective of the presence of mechanized flour mills. 3 Additivity (as against subordination) is identified as a feature of oral expressive communication. For more details see Ong (2002: 36). 4 Stylized verbal tongue-lashings of oral cultures or schemes of active exchanges – between a wife and a husband, a woman and her in-law or a messenger, etc. – are sometimes included in or form the content of the songs. Dialogic exchanges are a feature of oral cultures (Obiechina 1975, cited in Ong 2002). 5 This point is crucial, as folk songs are often understood as ancestral heritage within Bhojpuri diasporic communities. An example would be how geet gavnai has assumed heritage status in Mauritius, to be carefully conserved from extinction. 6 Jatsaari songs documented in Krishna Deva Upadhyaya’s anthologies (1984, 1990, 1999, 2011) were recorded from savarna households. Upadhyaya has said that his mother Moorti Devi was the source of most of these folk songs. However,

168  Asha Singh he had to collect ropani and sohani songs from Chamar and Musahar (Scheduled Caste) women because these songs are associated with agricultural labour, which is not performed by upper-caste women. 7 Notable folk song anthologies and analysis include those by W.G. Archer and Sankata Prasad (1941); Durga Prasad Singh (1944, 1958, 2012); Karmendu Shishir (1983); Vindyavasini Devi (2001); B.L. Dwivedi (1998); Hanskumar Tiwari and Radhavallabh Sharma (2011); Akhileshwar Sinha (2008); and H.S. Upadhyaya (1967), to name a few. The first systematic compilation of Bhojpuri folk songs is often attributed to Krishna Deva Upadhyaya. Among colonial scholars and administrators, the work of George Grierson in both compiling and codifying Bhojpuri language and folklore has been well acknowledged. 8 Ahirs are part of a caste cluster called Yadav, which is numerically and politically visible in Bhojpuri-speaking regions of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. They are classified as a socially and educationally backward caste in several states of India, including Bihar. Historically, they have been associated with cattle herding. 9 This is not to argue that Bhojpuri women do not maintain entries of their songs. An early example of such entries can be found in the work of Krishna Deva Upadhyaya who collected several songs from his sister’s diary entries. 10 This contradicts Krishna Deva Upadhyaya’s assertion that women can recall songs only when they were accompanied by labour processes. He explains this with the example of a Musahar agricultural labourer who insisted that she would sing ropani only in the field (Upadhyaya 1999: 6). Nevertheless, women in my village, probably owing to my relationship to them, were ready to recall songs even without the labour process. 11 ‘Intellectually organized’ is a term used by Walter Ong to explain how a given speech community arranges its thoughts. For example, in the case of predominantly oral speech forms, its speakers intellectually pattern their thoughts within fixed communal formulas mnemonically (Ong 2002: 35). 12 Cultural productions by Bhojpuri migrant workers in their destinations have emerged as an important point of reference to understand the affective consequences of migration (see Tripathy 2012). 13 This holds true for many other societies as well. For example, Dubey (1998), drawing from the work of Toni Morrison and others, links the evolution of jazz music with the ‘Great Black Migration’ of the 1920s. Similarly, Somalian love songs of ‘lament and longing’ are a direct consequence of industrial migration in the latter half of the twentieth century (Kapteijns and Ali 2001). 14 The term coevality has been used by J. Porter in his methodological reflections on folklore research to underline the difference between the researched and the researcher in a folklore research situation (Porter 1993: 79). 15 Here, literacy should not be reduced to reading and writing Hindi. Rather, drawing from D.R. Olson and N. Torrance (2009), W. Eggington (1990), and Jack Goody (1975), literacy is understood as a process that has a decisive impact on consciousness, ways of documentation, and analysis and ordering of thoughts which are best done in one’s mother tongue (here Bhojpuri). 16 However, one does find the genre of kathu-pattu (letter songs) emerging among Malayali migrants, especially backward-class Muslims in the 1970s. Kathupattu is the format of a private letter authored primarily by the left-behind wife to her overseas husband. It clearly shows the influence of formal letter writing. See S.A. Jameel’s Dubai Kathu-Pattu, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=44UDKYKKUbA (I thank Nidhin Donald, a PhD scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, for this input). 17 Walter Ong uses the term ‘new orality’ to refer to forms of communication that are mediated through literacy. Telephonic communication is one example. On the other hand, old orality refers to those oral speech forms which existed without the mediation of print or electronic media.

Making sense of migration  169 18 Disruption and redefinition of conjugality was/is a key consequence of migration. Drawing from the work of V. Geetha (2007) and Cecile Jackson (2012), one can understand conjugality as a set of social relations between gendered husbands and wives mediated by power, division of labour, family composition, caste, community, sexuality and place. 19 Husband’s elder brother. 20 Men’s genres typically include purbi, chaita, nirgun, gond and kaharwa. While gond and kaharwa are performed by lower-caste men, purbi is a stylized genre that has received a lot of literary attention, for instance the purbi songs composed by Mahinder Misir. Nirgun is a mystical genre that supposedly deals with the separation of body and soul; however, it predominantly uses the longing wife and migrating husband as metaphors. Chaita is sung during a specific season, Chaitra (March–April). 21 Birha songs could be an exception; these have both male and female voices to express the human tragedy of separation. Devendra Satyarthi argues how birha captures the Ahīr man’s longing to go back to his beloved family and a ‘congenial life’ (Satyarthi 1951: 130–131). 22 Richa Nagar, while discussing lesbian sexuality in rural India, argues that feminist theories give primary importance to desire and isolate the discourse of sexuality from livelihood struggles. She emphasizes that the politics of survival and sexuality are intimately linked (see Swarr and Nagar 2004). 23 Merely typing the word ‘Bhojpuri’ on YouTube, one can find endless lists of overtly sexualized Bhojpuri video songs with ‘co-wife’ as one of the dominant themes. 24 While code mixing indicates the mixing of two or three languages, translingualism indicates the relevance of the same word/expression in various languages. The term ‘tensan’ (tension) in Bhojpuri is relevant irrespective of its English origins.

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Making sense of migration  171 Satyarthi, D. 1951. Meet My People: Indian Folk Poetry. Hyderabad: Chetana Prakashan. Sen, S. 2004. “‘Without His Consent?’: Marriage and Women’s Migration in Colonial India”. International Labor and WorkingClass History 65: 77–104. Shishir, Karmendu. 1983. Bhojpuri Hori Geet. Patna: Bhojpuri Academy Patna. Singh, Asha. 2015. “Of Women, by Men: Understanding the ‘First Person Feminine’ in Bhojpuri Folksongs”. Sociological Bulletin 64 (2): 171–196. Singh, Asha. 2018a. “Bhojpuri Folksongs as Scripts of Conjugal Performance”. In  Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication, edited by D.N. Pathak and S. Perera, 205–221. New York and London: Taylor & Francis. Singh, Asha. 2018b. “Conceptualizing Bhojpuri for a National Hindi Elite: A Critical Reading of Folklorist Krishna Deva Upadhyaya”. Prabuddha: Journal of Social Equality 1 (1): 33–44. Singh, Durga Prasad. 1944. Bhojpuri Lokgeet mein Karunaras. Allahabad: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, Prayag. Singh, Durga Prasad. 1958. Bhojpuri ke Kavi aur Kavya. Patna: Bihar Rashtrabhasha Parishad. Singh, Kedarnath. 2012. “Bhojpuri ke Bhavishya”. Bhojpuri Janpad 5 (1): 9–19. Sinha, Akhileshwar. 2008. Bhojpuri Lokgeeton mein Sanskar. Patna: Janki Prakashan. Sinha, N. 2018. “The Idea of Home in a World of Circulation: Steam, Women and Migration through Bhojpuri Folksongs”. International Review of Social History 63 (2): 203–237. Swarr, Amanda Lock, and Richa Nagar. 2004. “Dismantling Assumptions: Interrogating ‘Lesbian’ Struggles for Identity and Survival in India and South Africa”. Signs 29 (2): 491–516. Tiwari, Hanskumar, and Radhavallabh Sharma. 2011. Bhojpuri Sanskar Geet. Patna: Bihar Rashtrabhasha Parishad. Tripathy, Ratnakar. 2012. “Music Mania in Small-town Bihar: Emergence of Vernacular Identities”. Economic and Political Weekly 47 (22): 58–66. Ullah, A.A. 2017. “Male Migration and ‘Left–behind’ Women: Bane or Boon?” Environment and UrbanizationASIA 8 (1): 59–73.doi:10.1177/0975425316683862. Upadhyaya, H.S. 1967. “Some Annotated Indian Folksongs”. Asian Folklore Studies 26 (1): 63–98. Upadhyaya, Krishna Deva. 1984. Bhojpuri Lokgeet Bhaag 3. Patna: Bhojpuri Academy. Upadhyaya, Krishna Deva. 1990. Bhojpuri Lokgeet Bhaag 1. Allahabad: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, Prayag. Upadhyaya, Krishna Deva. 1991. Bhojpuri Lok Sanskriti. Allahabad: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, Prayag. Upadhyaya, Krishna Deva. 1999. Bhojpuri Lokgeet Bhaag 2. Allahabad: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, Prayag. Upadhyaya, Krishna Deva. 2011. Bhojpuri Lokg-Geet Bhaag 1. Allahabad: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, Prayag (reprint). Vieira, K. 2013. “On the Social Consequences of Literacy”. Literacy in Composition Studies 1 (1): 26–32. Vieira, K. 2016. “Writing Remittances: Migration-driven Literacy Learning in a Brazilian Homeland”. Research in the Teaching of English 50 (4): 422–449. Yang, A. 1979. “Peasants on the Move: A Study of Internal Migration in India”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1): 37–58.

9 The idea of home in a world of circulation Steam, women, and migration through Bhojpuri folksongs Nitin Sinha1 The railway has become a co-wife, It has taken away my beloved; It has taken away my beloved to Rangoon, It has taken away my beloved to Bengal; Neither the railways nor the steamships, The real enemy is money; It forces one to wander from one to another country, The real enemy is money; The country of Rangoon has a city of Yadavs, It will seduce my beloved; The country of Bengal is the city of enchantment, It will entice away my beloved; I feel no hunger, nor thirst, I just feel a swelling affection; When I see your face, I just feel deep affection; I will survive on a ser2 of saag3 the full year, But I won’t let my beloved go away (unless otherwise specified all the translations are by the author). This is one of the most popular folksongs from the region of western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP), culturally and geographically referred to as the “Bhojpuri belt”. There are regional variations of the song; for instance, in one of the UP versions instead of saag, gehun (wheat) is used. Wheat is more popularly grown and consumed in UP than in Bihar, so these folksongs easily adapt to and reflect local cultural and environmental settings. Some of these folksongs are based on older narrative traditions that go back to the early modern period but the inclusion of objects and metaphors from the immediate past and contemporary times, primarily the nineteenth century, shows the elasticity of these songs and their ability to weave in issues related to immediate social concerns.4 Using Bhojpuri folksongs on marriage and migration, this article attempts to capture the social realities of labour migration by keeping the migrant’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-12

The idea of home in a world of circulation  173 wife in the centre of the narrative. Labour migration, predominantly male, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards (stimulated by the expansion of a industrial employment, transport and communication, and the emergence of a new print bazaar) recast the relations of family and gender in the labour-supplying, Bhojpuri belt. In this constellation of social, economic, and technological changes, the article looks at the idea of home, the construction of womanhood, and the interlaced lifecycles of migrant men and non-migrant women. Moving away from the predominant focus on migrant men, the article attempts to recreate the social world of non-migrant women left behind in the villages of northern and eastern India, whose lives were structured by double displacement engendered by marriage and migration.

The source: themes and historical contexts Folksongs are malleable social texts, often defying any precise dating or authorship. A contextual reading of these songs, without presupposing any essentialised generalisation, allows us to uncover both historical shifts as well as processual “structures of feeling”, particularly when used for understanding social phenomena and identities (Williams 1977: 128–135). Amongst other characteristics, the most useful aspect of this concept for the current essay is its emphasis on the interlocking of the personal and the social, ridden with tensions and hierarchies. These songs pry open the intimate spaces of home and marriage but are equally observant of the compulsions of changing modern technologies and the economy. In this way, they offer a unique opportunity to combine both. In the case of migration, this structuration is inherently processual as departure, stay, and return happens in a cyclical manner, thus constantly demanding migrants and non-migrants to “recalibrate” their feeling or memory of it. One significant concern in these songs was (and is) migration, perhaps precisely because of its long historical tradition from this region. In the early modern and early colonial periods, it provided men to work in the armies of the Mughal Empire and the English East India Company. Despite the long history of movement and migration from this region, there was an intensification of the phenomenon in the decades of the mid-nineteenth century.5 With the abolition of slavery and the beginning of the indenture system in the 1830s, labour demand in plantation colonies of the British Empire grew exponentially. This decade, not so coincidentally, was also when steamboats and tugs started plying the Ganga. Two decades down the line, the jute industry in Bengal and tea plantations in Assam emerged. Both required labour inflow. While the majority of the “coolies” that went to Assam were not from the Bhojpuri belt, the jute industry of Bengal relied heavily on Bhojpuri male migrants.6 Once again, the decades of the 1850s and 1860s, which kicked off this industrial-plantation expansion, were also the period when the East Indian Railway linked Calcutta to upper parts of northern India and then to Assam. The colonial state and the railway companies were apprehensive of passenger travel, but they soon realised

174  Nitin Sinha the opposite to be the case: travellers, including coolies in the third-class compartments, formed the bulk of passenger traffic. These modern means of communication – steamships and railways – were also seen as enemies by those whose lives, marriages, and homes were ­broken due to migration. New transport technology became both the means to connect as well as separate. Certain genres of Bhojpuri folksongs that deal with migration, such as bidesiya and poorbi, capture this in the most expressive way (Tiwari 2012). In recent times, a new revisionism, proposing the simultaneity of connections and dislocations, is on the rise in the discourse on migration (Huber 2013). This migration was overtly male in nature. According to an estimate of the total number of emigrants to overseas indenture plantations, only twenty-five per cent were women (Mohapatra 1995: 231). The trend was similar for the internal migration that took place from the Bhojpuri belt to Bengal and elsewhere. Between 1921 and 1930, for instance, women comprised sixteen per cent of the total labour force in the jute industry of Bengal; in the following decade, this reduced to thirteen per cent (Chakrabarty 1996: 9). For the overall period, it rarely exceeded 14–16 per cent (Sen 1996: 137). Debate on the nature of migration has been focused primarily on the binaries of “free” and “unfree”, in which the specific natures of contract, debt, and coercion have been explored in recruitment strategies as well as on the actual work sites. The argument in this set of literature challenges the received wisdom of “free will” that is assumed to be enshrined in the instrument of contract. A study of South Asian labour history has now firmly shown that the contract did not represent free will but rather was an instrument to close the exit route for workers. This was true for a variety of migrant workers, from indenture and plantation coolies to maritime lascars (Ahuja 2006). This argument is applicable to both overseas and internal migrations. There were some differences though: for male migrants to Calcutta, who worked in various professions ranging from domestic servants in households to coolies in mills and factories, it was more profitable not to completely immobilise them. Keeping a section of this labour force “floating”, as Sen has argued, was useful to employers (Sen 1996: 138; de Haan 1999).7 The historiography on immobilisation through contract has obfuscated our engagement with histories that might be hidden behind the term “floating”. Seen from the other side of the migration spectrum, the floating nature of the workforce meant the existence of the cyclical nature of migration, which is well reflected in the folksongs of this region. In folksongs, this cyclicity was crucial in the ways the ideas of home and womanhood were formed.

Conceptual departures: gender and circulation As most migrations were largely male, these men have become the subject of study. Coolies and lascars have made a prime place for themselves in this new scholarship. Female subjects also received some attention; female

The idea of home in a world of circulation  175 migrants are part of this historiography, but only as migrants. Even then, the disparity is noticeable. While lascars have been independently studied both in monograph and essay forms, travelling ayahs still await a dedicated monograph. Still poorer is our focus on non-migrant women whose lives were nonetheless intrinsically affected and shaped by migration.8 Increasing theoretical sophistication has recently questioned the application of the term “migration” as simplistically symbolising a one-way movement and instead suggested the concept of circulation or circular migration. First, migration did not capture the historical process of the return journey. Second, it did not capture the “incremental aspects” of mobility that transform things and people when they are in the act of movement. The concept of circulation aims at broadening this by bringing into the fold those who were “on the move” along with layers of categories existing in between, such as commuter, migrant and itinerant (Kerr 2006). Recently, G. Balachandran has suggested this to be the core definitional characteristic of the term coolie: “no matter how firmly locked into place, the coolie’s immanent condition was always one of apparently random mobility”.9 Once again, this circulatory nature of the labour movement also applied to many of the men who migrated from the Bhojpuri belt to work in Bengal (Chaudhary 1992: 21). This is a distinctive feature of the Bhojpuri migration to purab (east, for which read Bengal). Ties were not as severely cut as was the case with overseas indenture or Assam tea plantations. Thus, the links between the rural and the urban were not simply metaphorical in the folksongs discussed here. Men did return with gifts and money. Women did actively desire to consume the objects and tales of Kalkatwa (Calcutta). Between them, the figure of batohi worked as a migrant-informer, who would pass on the news between the rural wife and the city-based husband, while being himself on the move. From being “purabiya peasants” employed in Mughal and East India Company armies to becoming industrial workers, menial servants, and footloose labourers in Calcutta, the region’s men created a world of circulation. They were on the move, and with them moved language, objects, and emotions. This new conceptual thinking on circulation links the study of social change and migration; it is the figure of the migrant and the space of the city that remains in the core of the conceptualisation.10 The question, then, is: can we even begin to think of writing the history of migration from the non-migrants perspective? In an interview, Amitav Ghosh reminds us of the importance and requirement of place, which does not fritter away with travels and movements (Boehmer and Mondal 2012). Perhaps, the idea of home becomes even more gripping when mobility accelerates. How did non-migrants make sense of their place? What happened to their ideas of home and the web of relationships they were part of? Is this existing gap (less focus on non-migrants as part of the social history of migration) simply a matter of our research choices or a condition arising out of conceptual limitations? Has the concept of circulation now become an easy tool to map (only) the histories of movement of people

176  Nitin Sinha and groups who were on the move? It seems that by privileging mobility as its core concern or angle of vision, the framework of circulation has ironically constricted the space to think about those who did not travel but were crucially implicated in the history of movement and circulation. The Bhojpuri women are one such significant group with which this article deals. This might be a provocative as well as speculative argument, but the applicability of the framework of circulation seems to have a gender bias in favour of men. If historical scholarship has prioritised the migrant subject, who were mostly male, the literary world has beautifully captured the experience of the journey, albeit still of the migrant. Through Deeti, Amitav Ghosh gave us a telling sketch of women who managed to migrate (Ghosh 2008). What has remained fairly neglected is the memory and history of hundreds and thousands of Deetis who were left behind in the villages. They did not travel and hence slipped out of the net of the analytical category of circulation. Through the use of folksongs, this article attempts to bring them back into the analytical fold of mobility by exploring the interconnectedness of spaces (rural and urban), gender (female and male), and physical conditions related to mobility and immobility. The triangulation of urban–male–mobility is much explored in the existing literature. This article, therefore, is avowedly tilted in favour of the other triangulation of rural, women, and immobility. In both overseas and internal migration of coolies, longing is a common theme in songs. But in contrast to the experience of overseas coolies who yearn to return to their homeland, both the marriage and migration songs used in this article do not reflect an overarching longing by men to return to their homes and villages in Bihar and UP.11 The act of longing is performed by the non-migrant subject who remained in the village. The woman is usually depicted as longing for two things: first, the return of her husband and, second, the inflow of city goods and tales. The sense of longing, therefore, remains the same in both types of migration, but its nature changes when seen from different perspectives. Overseas migrants (usually male) longed to go back to their homeland; the rural women longed to see their husbands return. For lack of any better word, I characterise the women’s world as immobile (and also to make a stronger conceptual plea for integrating the histories of “immobility” in the social history of migration), otherwise this is not exactly a fair historical reality. Women’s world in villages was not static. When they pleaded with their men not to leave, they remained in the villages, but were caught in the web of mobility. Their immobility was not a physical reality, but a relational mode of existence when their men had migrated for work. The second important qualification is the fact that marriage itself was a kind of mobility, both physical and emotional. Marriage songs, as used below, clearly show this. The male emigration did not lead to the glorification of spinsterhood and denigration of marriage, as folksongs from some other societies indicate (Brettell 1986: 140). The social class of women these

The idea of home in a world of circulation  177 folksongs represent mostly stayed back in the villages in their marital house, but, before their unknown prospective husbands left in search for work, they themselves had moved from one village to another, from one house to another, as a bride.12 Therefore, while obviously being aware of the mobility embedded in marriage, I try to give primacy to the “reimmobilised” non-migrant subject in the history of migration. In this regard, we need to critique and redesign the framework of circulation to include both immobility and small-scale circulations (from natal to marital, for instance) and to put the framework in dialogue with other aspects and institutions of social life, such as marriage. The metaphors and imageries of exile and longing, fear of the appearance of a second wife, and the excessive offering of physical intimacy on the part of wives to compensate for separated conjugality populate Bhojpuri folksongs. All these signify that social reproduction remained suspended until the periodic return of the male migrant to his village.

The birhani wife in “exile” The whistle of the train, reminds me of my beloved. The direct reference to railways irrefutably suggests this popular tek (first opening lines of the song) to be from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Many of these songs of separation (birha) are based upon the well-established genre of the barahmasa, in which the mood of the wife/ woman changes according to the twelve seasons of the year (barah meaning twelve, masa month). The female voices her “pining for and devotion to the absent lover” (Orsini 2009: 51). The sub-genres of barahmasa, such as chaumasa, depicting the mood of separation during the four months of the rainy season, did the same: My friend, the rains have set in, nights are dark and my heart is perturbed, My beloved is in pardesh (foreign lands), he has not sent any word.13 Hey friend, the month of saawan has arrived, I long for my beloved as the rain pours in, All my friends are enjoying the swings, But my beloved has completely forgotten me. (Prasad 1902)14 True to the circulatory nature of migration, in many of the folksongs the husband returns after twelve years. This is borrowed from the epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata. In the Ramayana, Sita accompanied Ram in exile for twelve years. But unlike Sita, the Bhojpuri women did not accompany their men. The men migrated to the city, but it was their wives who, ironically, experienced “exile” in the villages. “Homelessness” due to separated conjugality was experienced, paradoxically, by being stuck at home.

178  Nitin Sinha Interestingly, not only in purabiya and bidesiya varieties, but also in sohar songs, the woes of women are described.15 A few lyrics from one song show this: My delicate husband has gone to pardes, He has not sent me a word. Mother- and sister-in-law have turned into foes, They inflict a lot of pain. My brother-in-law speaks the language of birha, His taunts pierce my heart. (Upadhyaya 1984: 26) The woman’s woes double up as she has no child. Further on, in the same song, she again laments the unresponsive nature of her husband. She is convinced that the man has found a sawti (sawti or sawatiya means the second wife). The song ends with a note of desperation – the end of exile requires the end of life itself: I kept my patience, And pondered. I should have consumed poison, It would have ended my birha. Life in exile, as represented in these songs, required idealisation of the figure of the wife. The show of unflinching love and unconditional dedication were two of the most important tropes in the construction of this image (Upadhyaya 1976 [1991]: 25; translation is by the author). The idealisation presented in the songs is the final outcome of a process of mundane negotiations that happen between the husband and the wife, sometimes just before the man is supposed to depart. The wife, as expected, pleads with him not to leave. She conjures up all sorts of reasons and strategies to hold him back. In one of the songs, she dubs the water of the east venomous, which would kill her husband and leave her widowed (the literal meaning of the Bhojpuri word would be orphaned, highlighting the individually felt as well as socially sanctioned form of dependency; Upadhyaya 1976 [1991]: 36). Usually, women adopt three strategies to hold back their men. They cook food, offer Ganga water, and promise physical intimacy. The ancient cultural values of fidelity, as Upadhyaya suggests, get recast into desperate acts of enticement and allurement, all meant to detain the migrating husband. Rather than reading the wife’s fidelity as the expression of an age-old cultural value, these songs suggest why fidelity became such an important issue for the representation of women. This excessive focus on the wife’s fidelity, without much chastisement of migrant men’s sexual escapades in the city, is clearly an outcome of the separated conjugality engendered through a new wave of late nineteenth-century migration.

The idea of home in a world of circulation  179 Once again, the theme of separation is not only limited to migration, but present in marriage songs as well. In the following a jhumar (song usually sung at marriages and has a happy content and rhythm), the wife is scared of her husband migrating to the east. The presence of migration and separation as themes in different song genres shows the centrality of these issues in the lives of both migrants and non-migrants. It also reveals their pervasiveness in different aspects of social life; migration is socially remembered in the context of various acts, from pounding grains to celebrating marriage and childbirth. I filled my pitcher with the Ganga water, He doesn’t drink but sets out to leave for purab. On hearing the word purab, I feel suspicious, On hearing the word purab. In purab, he will eat banana, coconut, will become negligent, He will stop thinking about his home. Of thousand flowers, I got the bed prepared, He doesn’t sleep but sets out to leave for purab. On hearing the word purab, I feel suspicious, If you go to purab, my beloved, if you do. Hold this handkerchief, and make a promise, On hearing the word purab, I feel suspicious.16 There are hardly any songs in which men agree to stay home.17 There are a few that are conversational and in which we hear the male response. For instance, in three different stanzas of another song, the wife uses the above three reasons – water, food, and intimacy – to hold her husband back, but the man’s reply, which is interjected after every verse, remains the same: “all this is very sweet, my love; please wake me up at four in the morning/I have to leave by a freight train” (Upadhyaya 1984: 169).18 In the absence of letters and money and under the sufferance of not being asked about her well-being, the exiled home of the woman has the new prescription of conduct. She must discard shringaar (physical beauty and adoration), which is, in the cultural milieu of the region, tied to the idea of conjugal love and romance. As the husband is not present, shringaar is of no use to her. One folksong categorically says: “What worth is promise to those who lie?/What worth is adoration to those whose men are in foreign land?” (Upadhayaya 1976 [1991]: 29). Her social identity blurs being a wife and a widow because practising sobriety in physical appearance is the normative state of widowhood. This aspect of idealisation was premised upon women’s withdrawal from worldly pleasures. For male poets, authors, and composers, it was important to depict her physical and sexual vulnerability to strengthen the imagery of idealisation. Her sexuality was both an element of entertainment in the emerging print bazaar and an aspect to control due to the new social condition of migration. Sita, from the epic Ramayana, had to undertake

180  Nitin Sinha agni-pariksha (a test of fidelity) because she had migrated and then got separated from her husband, Ram. The Bhojpuri women had to undergo such fidelity tests without migrating. The third aspect of this idealisation is to present the longing wife in a constant state of jealousy and anxiety. The word “east” evoked suspicion. The formation of a dependent subjectivity is only fulfilled when she not only pleads with her husband not to leave, but also remains in a jealous state in his absence.19 Jealousy displays her emotional concern as well as confirms her romantic longing. I have been hearing about purab since ages, Tell me how the people over there are, my beloved. There are beautiful Bengali women in purab, What do they cook to make you insensible, my beloved. I have heard about purab for long now, Tell me how the people over there are, my beloved. By sleeping with you they make you insensible. (Upadhyaya 1984: 237) It is not just migration that casts a gloom over conjugality but also the presence of the unseen Bengalin sawatiya (a co-wife or mistress). In one folksong, the wife says: I am the priceless charm of your life, my king, Why did you bring a sawatiya. Had I been barren, you could have brought a sawatiya. Had I been dark and ugly, you could have brought a sawatiya. My love, I have a young attractive body, Why did you bring a sawatiya. (Upadhyaya 1976 [1991]: 73) The ideas of loyalty were tied to physical beauty (in order to remain loyal, abstinence from overt adoration was prescribed), and physical beauty itself became a tool to invoke loyalty, to deter men from migrating, albeit ineffectively. Unlike the colonial discourse on indenture migrants, in which men were often seen as “wife enticers”, these folksongs clearly place the agency for “enticement” upon women. The only difference is that in the Bhojpuri world, the wife enticed the husband in order to save the marriage, home, and conjugality. This explains the wife’s generosity in letting her man have a co-wife; what is inexplicable to her is the neglect of her “young, attractive body”. Her physical beauty has failed to keep her husband loyal. And for this, she could only blame the beautiful Bengalin. It is important to note that at both locations, the rural and the urban, it is the female body and its charms that acquires a central position in describing the limits and possibilities of

The idea of home in a world of circulation  181 the (non-) migrant conjugal life: the Bhojpuri woman’s body is shown as the ultimate inducement to refrain from migration; the Bengali woman’s body as the reason why the otherwise innocent husband went adrift.20 The married woman’s “structure of feeling”, however, is preceded by another structure, that of girlhood and carelessness. As the course of the lifecycle changes from girl to wife, the “structure of feeling” also changes and gets reflected in living in the new home under new codes of conduct, in leaving the natal to settle in the marital home.

From naihar21 to sasural22 Move steadily, O! My Lord, I am lost and defeated… On the one hand, I part with my nose-ring, On the other, O! Lord, I leave behind my mother. Move steadily… On the one hand, I part with my necklace, On the other, O! Lord, I leave behind my transparent saree. Move steadily… On the one hand, I move away from my village and my habitat, On the other, O! Lord, I leave behind my home and hearth. Move steadily… On the one hand, I part from my brave brother, On the other, O! Lord, I leave behind all my [female] friends. Move steadily… On the one hand, I part with my garden and my fields, On the other, O! Lord, I leave behind my beloved cow. Move steadily…. (Sinha 2008: 15) The above kajli encapsulates the pain of separation felt by young girls at the time of marriage, foreshadowing the agony of migration that would be experienced a few years later. The succession of one after the other was quite obvious, as seen in one song: “I was eight when married, and nine when sent off to in-laws. At twelve my husband left me to go to a foreign land” (Sinha 2008: 203).23 For understanding the women’s world, a focus on migration alone, without looking at how marriage-based separation was represented and felt, would be inadequate. Interestingly, the metaphor of bides (foreign lands) is not only used in migration songs, but also for depicting the young girls’ dislocation from naihar to sasural, natal to marital. This representation goes back many centuries, as seen in one of the famous compositions of the medieval litterateur Amir Khusrau. The song, which has many renditions by different artists, starts with the girl questioning her father as to why he has married her off to a foreign land.24 In Khusrau’s song, as well as in the first song of this section, we see the girl complaining about missing her home – from the house to the fields, which bear the marks of her childhood and adolescence. She will miss her relationships with friends, family, and

182  Nitin Sinha animals. Even the jewellery that she wears is suffused with the emotion of home. New ornaments are given to her or are worn at the time of gawna (the time of actual departure from the natal home, which might be anything between few months to some years after the marriage), so she laments taking off her old nose ring and necklace that are full of memories of her parents and her natal lands. The emotional lament is accompanied by the pinch of financial discrimination felt by married girls. While Khusrau’s girl protagonist complained to her father about him giving two-storeyed houses to her brothers while packing her off to a foreign land, in a Bhojpuri song, similar accusations are made: “To my brother you have given property/My fate you have sealed off to a far-off land” (Sinha 2008: 212). Songs in which girls demand their “half share” in the father’s property are rare (Jassal 2012: 123–125, 129). The pre-marriage construction of girlhood in these songs uses two tropes: one, of treating girls as paraya dhan (someone else’s wealth), and the other, showing them bereft of any sahur (good conduct). There appears to be a contradiction in this construction: in spite of being discriminated against because of their “wrong” gender, the girl child is adored and pampered in her naihar. This contradiction becomes explicable if we recognise the centrality of marriage in such depictions of the female social world. The birth of a girl is regarded as inauspicious because it means trouble and dowry-debt for the family, and hence the sense of discrimination against girls. However, marriage also means separation; therefore, the sense of emotional lament is not absent. The father is crushed under the dowry-debt of having to marry off his “treasure” girl. The irony is very telling. The movement from naihar to sasural engendered through marriage brings out the graded nature of both homes. Naihar is a place of carefree and careless freedom, where thresholds of courtyards mattered a little, but not so much. It is because of this that the mother of the girl child scolds her for not learning any good conduct, as one day she will go to sasural and there encounter a different set of rules and expectations that will necessitate new modes of moral and physical conduct. The change of home will mean a shift in the very meaning of home. At sasural, even the architecture of the home would acquire new meanings. Access to different parts of the home would be based on the boundaries of intimacy and permissibility. Duwari and duwariya – both meaning the gate/threshold – separated the outer and inner courtyards. In houses with one courtyard, this was the boundary between the outer, public space and the inner quarters of the home. However, beyond its physical value, this gate or threshold also strongly marked the passage into intimacy. Crossing the gate/threshold into the anganwa (inner courtyard) was allowed only to the familiar and the intimate. In one folksong, even the divinities – Ram and Lakshman – had to stay back at the gate/threshold because they had arrived at the same time as the migrant husband, whose claim to enter the inner courtyard was far greater than theirs.25 The inversion of this function of the gate/threshold is therefore noticeable in a teasing song in which

The idea of home in a world of circulation  183 the wife keeps back her younger brother-in-law at the threshold, but lets her lover come and sleep in the inner courtyard. Yet, for her, crossing the threshold or being at the gate on some occasions was a matter of shame and embarrassment: Oh! Lord, I lost my earring at this place… I searched the bed, I searched in the anganwa… I blushed while searching at the duwari…. (Sinha 2008: 92)26 Compared to the natal, the marital home entailed less freedom of movement. Even the inner courtyard, which is largely a female space, sometimes becomes inaccessible due to male presence. In one song, when it rains, the girl complains that this space has become the realm of the male members of the family. The whole day is passed in touching the feet of her father-in-law and elder brother-in-law. How could she, she asks, sweep the floor of the courtyard while veiled due to the elderly male presence? (Sinha 2008: 92) The new home means new discipline and new rituals of everyday life. It is therefore obvious why, in many of the folksongs, the girl, who is now a wife in her new home, threatens to go back to naihar when confronted with arguments and displeasure from her husband and in-laws. Even after marriage, naihar retains the value of being an intimate space for many reasons, particularly at the time of the childbirth (Upadhyaya 1984: 115). Also, when the husband insists on migrating. If you, my beloved, migrate, if you migrate; Call my brother, I will go to naihar. If you, my love, go to naihar, if you go to naihar; First pay the money I have spent on you. If you, my beloved, ask for money, if you ask for it; First provide me the home as was my father’s. (Sinha 2008: 98)27 While looking at migration and marriage together, we can better observe the depictions of two parallel but interconnected lifecycles. One is of the migrant male who works in the city and periodically returns to his rural home. He otherwise appears to be the centre of this migration cycle and one whose departure is lamented. This cycle tells us about the city and village, about husband and wife, and about longing and belonging. The other equally important lifecycle is of the non-migrant subject, who, in these social texts of folksongs, is an inferior subject, whose birth is seen as a curse and a burden for the father, and whose marriage brings debt upon her family. While being unfavourably positioned in her natal home compared to her male siblings, her marriage is still a moment of lament, dislocation, and movement. Having arrived at her new house, she again goes through the trauma of separation, this time from her husband. This lifecycle

184  Nitin Sinha tells us about the complexities of home(s) and homemaking in the wake of the movement from natal to marital homes, about the double meaning of migration (first being married off in a foreign land and then seeing the husband leaving for the foreign land), and about the female subjecthood that first undergoes one kind of migration and movement (marriage) and then feels the pathos of the second kind while being “static”.28

Beyond idealisation: work, sexual transgressions and modern desires If the absence of the husband created a form of an ideal wife, then the anxiety inherent in the act of separation also created spaces of transgression. These folksongs reveal a range of emotions, and not just suffering and pain, which remain the more dominant aspects. Together with idealisation, there is also a strong depiction of “moral depravity”. In the context of the long absence of her husband, the predominant form of relationship that exists between the wife and the female in-laws is feud and enmity. The flavour of their speech is particularly pertinent here as relationships evolve in the new house: Tell me, how do the words of mother-in-law [saas] sound, they sound like the piquant of red chillies, Tell me, how do the words of sister-in-law [gotin] sound, they sound like the burn of black peppers, Tell me, how do the words of sister-in-law [nanad] sound, they sound like the blaze of a glowing stove. (Sinha 2008: 42)29 This enmity plays an important role in the construction of the trope of moral depravity in these folksongs. It is often the mother- or sister-in-law who will “inform” the husband of the wife’s moral laxity and force him to ask for proof of her fidelity. Thus, we return to the cycle of exile in which the person who stayed behind had to take the test of moral and physical purity, rather than the one who had gone away. However, it is not just the backhand reporting on the wife’s character that these songs allude to, but also to her very direct overtures on the matter of unfulfilled sexual desire. This is a recurrent theme in these songs. What is important to highlight is that the places in which such transgressions were possible ranged from railway platforms to the secure space of the inner courtyard. Men’s circulatory life, as we know, had added to the female workload – albeit in the low-paid sector (Banerjee 1989; Sen 1999: 71–74).30 In spite of the new norms of domesticity that propounded the idea of “home” as women’s natural habitat, men’s migration had forced women to go out and work. In fact, the circulatory work cycle of men was dependent on women’s labour back in the villages. In various folksongs, their presence at the railway station, in fields and on farms is noted.31 In an example, a domaniyaan (wife of dom, engaged in the occupation of waste

The idea of home in a world of circulation  185 clean-up and treated as social untouchables) pleads to leave her town; she asserts that she would find a rozgaar by making baskets and other things from bamboo.32 I will also do rozgaar, O! my tawny groom, I ask you, the groom, why have I become a domaniyaan. Please, I plead you, do tell me, O! my tawny groom, I will also come with you, O! my tawny groom. (Upadhyaya 1984: 89) It is not very clear whether she is pleading to her own husband to take her with him or to the groom who had come to marry the girl of the household where she probably worked. The reference that she belongs to the town of Mithila (the birthplace of Sita) could mean that the “tawny groom” is Ram, who had come to marry Sita. The untouchable female cleaner uses the opportunity of Sita’s marriage to escape her own caste-ordained hardships. For some women, migration through someone else’s marriage provided an opportunity to escape the “traditional” occupation and become a “modern” wage earner. The diversification in potential work brought women out of the home. With this, their sexuality became a public matter and a theme of public print consumption. I was preparing food on the Balia railway station, And I was feeling restless in between; First of all, I am fair, and second, young, Third was the thrust of my youthfulness in your absence, my beloved. (Upadhyaya 1984: 214) It was not just in the public space, but also in the household where a breach of morality could occur. Smita Jassal has written on the wife–devar (younger brother-in-law) relationship, which is one of the most popular ways in which this breach has been represented (Jassal 2007). The possibilities of transgressions with other male in-laws also existed. Wonder does the blouse spell on my youth [read breasts]. Wonder… While going to the market the passerby hoots, In the garden the gardener pounces. Wonder… My beloved calls me to prepare the bed, While cooking, the brother-in-law scoots [husband of sister-in-law]. Wonder… While sweeping the anganwa my brother-in-law [brother of husband] calls, Showing betel leaf my beloved darts. Wonder…. (Upadhyaya 1984: 214)33

186  Nitin Sinha While choli, the blouse, plays a key role in song narratives, attracting the male gaze to the female body, many of these songs also depict women asking their husbands to get a particular kind of blouse material from distant cities. New migration created new desires and led to an inflow of new objects and commodities. The demand for choli, on the one hand, confirmed the centrality of the physical aspect of conjugality as described above, on the other, of discipline and control as in many instances the mother-in-law grew suspicious of the wife’s conduct when she visited the tailor to get her blouse stitched. For those who stayed back, the return of the circulating men was a moment of joy and reunion. The same railways and steamships that engendered fear of the second wife also brought back metropolitan goods in the form of sarees, blouses, and jewellery. These new trinkets and apparel made the women noticeable when they wore them to the local bazaar. It was not only in terms of new goods that the journey back home became a moment of renewed expectation: the material constituents of Calcutta modernity were expected to bring back a “new man”. Migration created separation, but also a great deal of anticipation. I would have exchanged my man, who has alighted from the train, Had he been dark, I would have exchanged, The fair dandy is too tempting to replace. Had he been dhoti wearing, I would have exchanged, The suit wearing is too tempting to replace. Had he been with walking stick, I would have exchanged, The watch wearing is too tempting to replace. Had he been in floaters, I would have exchanged, The one in boots is too tempting to replace.34 Suit, boots, and watch – all symbolised the acquisition of new forms of modernity.35 The image of the village wives presented here is not based on docility, but the overt expression of certain desires around what they wanted their men to be. They were also explicit in what they wanted for themselves: the petticoat from Arrah, sandals from Balia, and a blouse from Patna.36 Intimacy was promised only when gifts and goods were given. Sometimes, women directly asked their men what they would bring on their return: You will go to purab, my beloved, what will you bring for me? For mother-in-law a nose ring, for sister-in-law gunjesri [a kind of an ornament] For you my wife, I will get tikulee [an ornament worn on forehead]. And there is a sense of competition, too, as the wife claims in the end: The nose ring will break and the gunjesri will crack, But wonders will do the tikulee on my forehead. (Upadhyaya 1984: 167)37

The idea of home in a world of circulation  187 In the real sense of the term, circulatory migration is not all about separation, but also a reunion. The homecoming of the migrant man is an event through which the politics of gift and affect, intimacy and jealousy, unfurl in the household. Migration has led to a split in conjugal life. It has led to the creation of new anxieties, discipline, and jealousy between the husband and the wife, as well as between the wife and her in-laws. The reunion re-establishes the codes of these relationships, but only temporarily. Being jealous of the better gifts, the mother- and sister-in-law scorn the wife; the husband later consoles her in the bed, but then, after a few days, he has to leave again. He would remind his wife to wake him up early in the morning to catch a freight train. In other instances, a reunion could lead to questions of fidelity and even murder due to jealousy or revenge. With every cycle of migration and reunion, something new happens to the home. With remittances, the migrant’s sister gets married. The younger s­isterin-law, who enjoyed girlhood, enters her own lifecycle of being married. In a migrant’s house, it means one less member. Part of the remittance money is used to improve the house: to add an extra room, to build a pucca roof (changes from mud to brick walls or from a thatched to the cemented roof is very popular in these songs), or to dig a well. These are quantifiable changes. There are changes that are emotional as well. One of the major concerns that emerges in these songs is related to the birth of a child. The suspicious husband is not sure if he is the father. The narrative once again comes full cycle: life in exile with its great concomitant possibility of moral depravity and sexual transgression naturally leads to the question of loyalty at home.

Reflections The migrant man sleeps with the Bengali woman; he threatens to bring back a co-wife, but questions are not raised about his moral conduct and loyalty.38 In fact, in some folksongs, it is the wife in exile who takes the blame, justifying in some sense the extra-marital liaison of her husband (who is presented as innocent and timid). She blames herself for not doing enough to prevent him from leaving. As mentioned in the beginning, the themes of these songs, such as migration and pangs of separation, and the certain genres in which they were sung, such as barahmasa, were part of the long popular tradition of the region. Newer elements, such as the railways and the force of the nineteenth-century capitalist demand for labour, got added to this existing repertoire of themes, which also led to the rise of new genres, such as poorbi and bidesiya.39 The commercial expansion of print, which happened in the same period, created a new possibility in writing for and entertaining the public. The oral culture, as represented in folksongs and the printed word, did not conflict. The boom in print forged a dynamic relationship with different practices of orality – performance, theatre, communal and individual reading. These printed materials – particularly those that were meant to provide entertainment and pleasure – used the existing oral repertoire

188  Nitin Sinha of folksongs, ballads, and plays of this region to talk about the two most noticeable groups that were tied to each other in a dialectical social relationship: the migrant man and the exiled wife.40 Once printed, these songbooks re-entered the zone of orality through the same multiple sites of performance both at home and outside. In this context of fluid movement between the oral and the printed and between male authorship and female subjecthood, the questions of agency, representation, and social reality become tricky. For the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, different acts related to songs might suggest a non-linear flow of agency and representation. The act of composing, collecting, and publishing might show the male perspective, the act of singing while pounding the grain might tell us about women’s agency. Do they tell us about how women saw their lives spent in separation or how men imagined and desired their women to lead their lives? Who is in “exile” here: the one serving in the mills and factories of Calcutta or the one waiting in the village? And who breaches the line of loyalty? The man who is “lured” by Bengali women or the woman who finds it difficult to resist the sexual temptations? Many of these songs can be read against the grain, thereby suggesting that the male authorship created a hidden script of the migrant male subjecthood that betrayed its anxiety and hence resurrected an image of women that comprised two tropes: moral depravation and hyper-dedication.41 The typologies of relationships are complex. The poetic imagination, which is predominantly a male one, need not be an exact mirror of the social reality. Did the references to Hindu epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata also apply to Muslim migrants and households? Caste and its subdivisions governed marriage alliances. What the exact nature of the relationship between caste and migration was for those who stayed back needs future research.42 At the speculative level, it can be said that most of these songs definitely reflect the lower-caste lived realities, which is also attested by the way the theatrical form, bidesiya, was made by Bhikhari Thakur by integrating lower-caste performance styles and genres (Prakash 2016: 62–64). What can be said with greater certainty is that in all their playfulness and subversion, the woman is the central subject of these folksongs. Either in her idealised form or as her sexualised transgressive avatar, she comes across as the main subject through whom love and jealousy, feud and affection, separation and curiosity are represented. Both migration and marriage songs allow us to see the graded nature of homes and relationships, which might be inaccessible through colonial archives.

Notes 1 This chapter is an abridged version of the essay originally published in International Review of Social History, Vol. 63, Issue 2, 2018, available at https:// www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-review-of-social-history/article/ ideaof-home-in-a-world-of-circulation-steam-women-and-migration-throughbhojpurifolksongs/85D91BEE831246BA5A99AA9EA5C6B72C#metrics.

The idea of home in a world of circulation  189 2 One ser equalled a little more than a kilogram. 3 Saag is the generic word for all leafy vegetables, primarily spinach. 4 Not only the railways, but new things such as bijli (electricity), nal (hand pump), motorcycle, refrigerator, and punkah (fan) began to be mentioned in the repertoire of folksongs. 5 There is now a greater unanimity on the dynamic forms of mobility existing both in pre-modern Europe and on the Indian subcontinent. There is no denying, nonetheless, that capitalist economies of the mid-nineteenth century did lead to the intensification of connectivity, at least of those segments that brought profit to both state and capital (Lucassen and Lucassen 2009, 2017). 6 The Bhojpuri coolies were recruited at half the wage of Chota Nagpur tribals, who were rated “first class”. Between 1880 and 1900, out of 710,000 adult coolies recruited for tea gardens, no less than 46 per cent were from Chota Nagpur; only 21 per cent were from the congested plains of UP (Behal and Mohapatra 1992: 153). In 1921, of the approximately 280,000 workers in the jute industry only 24 per cent were Bengalis. The largest proportion came from Bihar (33 per cent) followed by UP (23), Orissa (10), Madras (4) and the rest of the country and outside (3) (Chakrabarty 1996: 9). Also see Pradipta Chaudhary (1992: 14) for shifts in destinations of migrating labour. 7 Arjan de Haan questions the intentionality of the jute mill managers or the state in keeping the labour force floating although he does agree that they profited from it (Arjan 1999). 8 For an exception (see Brettell 1986; Sen 1999, chap. 2). Brettell makes use of a variety of historical sources as well as ethnographic modes of inquiry to create a thick description of social and economic contexts, particularly related to land and property ownership, in which men migrated. Such wide-ranging use of sources from wills and testaments to those of church records and songs is beyond the methodological scope of this article, precisely because we simply don’t have such kinds of sources for social marginals and subalterns who migrated from the rural to the city. Also, the question of why the men migrated from the Gangetic region of India is fairly well researched in the existing literature (Chaudhary 1992; Sen 1999: 65–69). 9 One can have reservations about the word “random”, as mostly these movements were regulated, even if they appeared otherwise; the important observation is that for writing the “globalizing” histories of labour, the category of mobile coolie-lascar is inescapable (Balachandran 2011: 268). 10 So, while attempting to break new grounds, to this author, the text of Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen, and Patrick Manning, still inadequately theorizes the writing of the migration history from the non-migrant perspective (Lucassen et al. 2010: 3–8; Amrith 2014; Lucassen and Lucassen 2017: 460). 11 Compare Prabhu Mohapatra (1996). One of the most popular Bhojpuri folksongs representing the idealized “home country” for indentures is Batohiya composed by Raghuvir Narayan in 1911 (Narayan 1911). 12 In periods of acute shortages, such as famines, family migration took place (Sen 1999: 70). 13 The Hindi word patiyaan would literally translate as “letters”, but communication between the city migrant and his rural wife was not only maintained through formal exchange of such. Individuals from within the larger network of kin, village, caste, and region moved back and forth, bringing news from both ends. Therefore, I have chosen to translate patiyaan as “word”. Letters, nonetheless, remained the most important method of communication in overseas indenture (Tiwari 2012: 291–292). 14 Prasad (1902). With certain changes, another text was published by two authors with the encouragement of Munshi Lala Bhagwati Prasad, Munshidas and Lalaram, Baramasa (Bithur (printed in Kanpur), 1904). I do not comment on the

190  Nitin Sinha internal organization of the texts in which doha and shayari existed side by side, or on the discursive formations such as the centrality of the figure of Krishna in another birahmasa (Das 1881). See Das (1881). Birahmasa. Patna. My concern here is to remain focused on the issue of depictions around the theme of migration and portrayal/construction of womanhood. 15 Sohar songs are sung at the birth of a child (usually that of a son) and tend to be gleeful. Bidesiya (from the word bides, meaning foreign land) songs signified a more or less permanent migration to places such as Suriname, Fiji, Mauritius, or British Guyana. The chance of return was slim. In contrast, the poorbi or purabiya songs and performances had the cyclical/circulatory nature of migration at their core. These were often characterized by male migration to places such as Bengal and Rangoon, but with the possibility of returning to home, either seasonally or permanently (Tiwari 2003). 16 The essence here is to extract a promise from the husband that he will not cohabit with another woman and that he will take care of his wife’s well-being (Upadhyaya 1984: 160). 17 There are songs, though, in which they explain why they migrated. See Tiwari, “Separation”, pp. 288–290. 18 In a barahmasa with the sawal-jawab structure, which is of the same conversational type, the husband accepts that he, too, would suffer from being away from his wife and that he would become a jogi (ascetic) in Bengal, but keeps pleading to his beautiful wife to let him go (Husenilal [n.d.]: 5–8). 19 In fact, dependency is embedded in the manner of pleading itself: “My beloved, listen to me, this pain is unbearable, I request you with my bowing head, [if you leave] who will take my responsibility” (Husenilal [n.d.]: 4). 20 So, although envious of each other, a striking and fatal similarity exists between the wife and the Bengalin co-wife in two different folksongs, which are structurally the same. In the one, dealing with the wife, the mother-in-law poisons the wife before asking her to sleep in the father-in-law’s bed, so that she could present the wife’s moral depravation to her son, who would then punish his wife. In the co-wife song, the mother-in-law instigates her daughter-in-law to mix poison into the flour and give it to the Bengalin before the mother-in-law asks her (the Bengalin) to go to bed with the father-in-law. In both cases, the enraged husband strikes the wife or the co-wife hard with a stick before realizing that they were already drugged. Death was the shared outcome of this violence, just as the body was its inducement (Songs with English translations in Jassal 2012: 53–57). 21 Parent’s home. 22 In-laws’ home. 23 Reference to this quick double displacement, that is, first leaving the natal house and then being left by the husband, is widespread in these songs (Sinha 2008: 273). 24 A reliable translation of this song in English is available at: http://qawwal. blogspot.de/2010/03/kaahe-ko-biyahe-bides-by-hazrat-amir.html (last accessed on 6 September 2017. 25 This emotional architecture is not fixed. When Ram and Lakshman have come together with Sita (Ram’s wife) then their access is upgraded. The brothers get a seat in the courtyard and Sita occupies a more intimate space in kohbar (loosely translated, bedroom or an intimate ritual room) (Upadhyaya 1984: 182). 26 In the full song, the wife does go to search for her earring, even in the farm and the field. There is always a renewed binary of accessibility and inaccessibility present in the song, which can be understood more as a narrative construction than the reflection of a fixed social fact. So, she went to the farm and the field to search for her jewellery, but felt embarrassed about looking for it on the road and near the well.

The idea of home in a world of circulation  191 27 And precisely because of going to naihar, she also had to suffer from her husband’s as well as other in-laws’s indifferent attitude. The homes become the site of playful mock reprimand as well as serious discipline. The sasural is also a home where the visits by the girl’s kin, especially her brother, become restrictive and are taunted by the in-laws. The jantsar (grain-pounding) genre of songs, which are usually sung in an all-female space, capture this (Jassal 2012: 46). 28 It is only for want of any better term that “static” can capture the situation in the conjugal home, otherwise, as also explained below, marriage and then migration led to an increase in new kinds of work for women. Furthermore, if migration of the husband meant a change of balance in the social relationships existing in sasural, with time, the bonding with naihar also underwent changes. In other words, neither the women’s social world is “static”, nor either of their households. 29 Other folksongs dealing with the behaviour and speech of female in-laws also have similar expressions. In contrast, the flavour of speech of the husband is sugar-coated (Upadhyaya 1984: 136, 153). 30 Some folksongs also refer to this directly; the wife asks the migrating husband who would help her in reaping and bringing the grain to the market, suggesting the increased household chores as well as agrarian work (Upadhyaya 1984: 185). 31 Jassal cogently argues that these folksongs indicate women’s contribution to the peasant household economy, but also, and perhaps more importantly, “the uncompensated and unrecognised nature of this contribution” (Jassal 2012: 14). 32 Originally a Persian word, rozgaar had different meanings such as “day”, “time”, “toil”, and “labour”. In this period, the meaning had stabilized into wage-based employment. 33 A lot of folksongs are centred around the choli (blouse). More explicitly, apropos the desire of all three main male in-laws (father, elder and younger brothers) (Upadhyaya 1984: 227; Sen 1999: 84). 34 Personally collected from the author’s family member. The musical composition can be heard at: https://www.raaga.com/carnatic/song/album/Jhumar-Vol2-BJ000036/Railgadi-Se-Utraa-68741 (last accessed on 20 October 2017. 35 In other folksongs, we find references to different types of jewellery for women and to watches and bicycles as gifts for men (Upadhyaya 1984: 95). 36 These three towns are situated along the Ganga in the migrant belt (Upadhyaya 1984: 196). 37 The enmity caused by the husband bringing better gifts for his wife is the theme of many folksongs, sometimes evoking suspicion on the part of female in-laws as to whether these gifts were truly brought by the husband or if the wife received them from someone else, possibly her secret lover. 38 Scholars like Upadhyaya were writing in the period of nationalism, so they categorically labeled these men as “evil”; otherwise, this type of condemnation is not readily noticed in folksongs. 39 Bhikhari Thakur’s ability to weave songs from different genres and also performances, particularly lower-castes, to make one bidesiya genre is well explained by Prakash (2016: 64–66). 40 For Jassal, the cultural worlds of women and men were separated in concrete ways. I tend to disagree with this if we look at these songs as mediums through which gendered subjecthood was constructed and represented (2012: 23). But, as far as performative spaces are concerned, Jassal’s argument of segregation has validity. Also insightful is her suggestion that these songs had a didactic purpose as well; they can be seen as preparing womenfolk for the hardships.

192  Nitin Sinha 41 As an extension of this discursive formation can be read the popular image of “childlike husband” or “feeble husband” who cannot physically satisfy his wife. The fault, if any, was again that of the woman, of her past lives’ deeds. And this “feebleness” justified the opposite image of the “shrewd” Bengali women. 42 This issue has been discussed, through ethnography, in the existing scholarship (Jassal 2012). For the mix of religion and caste from the standpoint of itinerant performers and singers with an eye on the long durée, a compelling account is found in Catherine Servan-Schreiber (2003). For those who migrated, the lexicon of “community” takes precedence over caste (Prakash 2016: 62–64).

References Ahuja, Ravi. 2006. “Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c. 1900–1960”. International Review in Social History 51 (S14): 111–141. Amrith, Sunil. 2014. “South Indian Migration, c. 1800–1950”. In Globalising Migration History: The Eurasian Experience (16th–21st Centuries), edited by Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, 122–148. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Balachandran, G. 2011. “Making Coolies, (Un)making Workers: “Globalizing” Labour in the Late-19th and Early-20th Centuries”. Journal of Historical Sociology 24 (3): 266–296. Banerjee, Nirmala. 1989. “Working Women in Colonial Bengal: Modernization and Marginalization”. In Recasting Women, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Suresh Vaid, 269–301. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Behal, Rana P., and Prabhu P. Mohapatra. 1992. “‘Tea and Money versus Human Life’: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations 1840–1908”. In Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia, edited by E. Valentine Daniel, H. Bernstein, and Tom Brass, 142–172. London: Frank Cass. Boehmer, Elleke, and Anshuman Mondal. 2012. “Network and Traces: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh”. Wasafiri 22 (2): 30–35. Brettell, Caroline B. 1986. Men Who Migrate, Women Who Wait: Population and History in a Portuguese Parish. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1996. Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890– 1940. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chaudhary, Pradipta. 1992. “Labour Migration from the United Provinces, 1881– 1911”. Studies in History 8 (1): 13–41. Das, Brijballabh. 1881. Birahmasa. Patna. de Haan, Arjan. 1999. “The Badli System in Industrial Labour Recruitment: Managers’ and Workers’ Strategies in Calcutta’s Jute Industry”. Contributions to Indian Sociology 33 (1–2): 271–301. Ghosh, Amitav. 2008. Sea of Poppies. New Delhi: Penguin Books India. Huber, Valeska. 2013. Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husenilal. n.d. Barahmasa: Naagar Sundar ka Jawab Sawal. Kanpur: [n.p.]. Jassal, Smita Tewari. 2007. “Taking Liberties in Festive Song: Gender, New Technologies and a ‘Joking Relationship’”. Contributions to Indian Sociology 41 (1): 5–40. Jassal, Smita Tewari. 2012. Unearthing Gender: Folksongs of North India. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

The idea of home in a world of circulation  193 Kerr, Ian J. 2006. “On the Move: Circulating Labor in Pre-Colonial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial India”. IRSH 51 (S14): 85–109. Lucassen, Jan, and Leo Lucassen 2009. “The Mobility Transition Revisited, 1500– 1900: What the Case of Europe can offer to Global History”. Journal of Global History 4 (3): 347–377. Lucassen, Jan, and Leo Lucassen. 2017. “Theorizing Cross-Cultural Migrations: The Case of Eurasia since 1500”. Social Science History 41 (3): 445–475. Lucassen, J., L. Lucassen, and Peter Manning. 2010. “Migration History: Multidisciplinary Approaches”. In Migration History in World History: Multidisciplinary Approaches, edited by J. Lucassen, L. Lucassen, and Peter Manning, 3–38. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Mohapatra, Prabhu P. 1995. “‘Restoring the Family’: Wife Murders and the Making of a Sexual Contract for Indian Immigrant Labour in the British Caribbean Colonies, 1860–1920”. Studies in History 11 (2): 227–260. Mohapatra, Prabhu. 1996. “Longing and Belonging: The Dilemma of Return Among Indian Immigrants in the Carribean”. In IIAS Yearbook. Leiden: International Institute for Asian Studies. Munshi Lala Bhagwati Prasad, Munshidas and Lalaram. 1904. Baramasa. Bithur: Brahamprakash Yantralay (printed in Kanpur). Narayan, Raghuvir. 1911. Batohiya. http://kavitakosh.org/kk/बटोहिया_/_रघुवीर_नारायण. Last Accessed 1 October 2017. Orsini, Francesca. 2009. Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Prakash, Brahma. 2016. “Performing Bidesiya in Bihar: Strategy for Survival, Strategies for Performance”. Asian Theatre Journal 33 (1): 57–81. Prasad, Munshi Lala Bhagwati. 1902. Bahaar Varsha. Kanpur: Bahaar Varsha. Sen, Samita. 1996. “Unsettling the Household: Act VI (of 1901) and the Regulation for Women Migrants in Colonial Bengal”. International Review in Social History 41 (S4): 135–156. Sen, Samita. 1999. Women and Labour in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Servan-Schreiber, Catherine. 2003 “Tellers of Tales, Sellers of Tales: Bhojpuri Peddlers in Northern India”. In Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia 1750–1950, edited by C. Markovits et al., 275– 305. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Sinha, Akhileshwar. 2008. Bhojpuri Lokgeeton Mein Sanskaar. Patna: Janaki Prakashan. Tiwari, Badri Narayan. 2003. “Bidesia: Migration, Change and Folk Culture”. IIAS Newsletter, 30 March 2003. Available at: http://iias.asia/sites/default/files/IIAS_ NL30_12.pdf. Last Accessed 3 September 2017. Tiwari, Badri Narayan. 2012. “Separation, Emotion and History: A Study of Bidesia Bhav in Indentured Migration”. Man in India 92 (2): 281–297. Upadhyaya, Krishna Dev. 1984. Bhojpuri Lokgeet Bhaag 3. Patna: Bhojpuri Academy. Upadhyaya, Krishna Dev. [1976] 1991. Bhojpuri Lok Sanskriti. Allahabad: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, Prayag. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

10 Jaun-Yeun Simultaneous engagement of Konkani migrants Amita Bhide and Kalyani Vartak

The study of migration has been mostly categorised in terms of borders (internal, international, state, district), duration (long-term, cyclical, seasonal, short-term) and places (urban, rural). Although academic studies have critiqued these categories, pointing to the fact that they do not adequately depict the complicated nature of migration, they continue to be used mostly due to a lack of alternatives. Attempting to move beyond these categories, this chapter focuses on the characteristics of the movement of Konkani migrants and invites readers to think of the possibilities brought up by such a conceptualisation. What is the nature of simultaneous engagement and what are its forms? Does it change over time? What does it imply for the migrants themselves, for the places with which they engage and for the society at large? Migration studies have come to recognise the sedentary bias in academia and policies towards a static conceptualisation of the “rural”. This has led scholars to perceive society and movement in different ways. Scholars working on simultaneous engagement of migrants propose the alternative of the “bounded” notion of a society (Glick-Schiller et al. 1992; Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004). “Simultaneity or living lives that incorporate daily activities, routines and institutions located both in a destination country and transnationally, is a possibility that needs to be theorized and explored” (Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004). Literature that has touched upon the concept of simultaneity is seen to embed three broad themes: i) description of simultaneity ii) what happens to the places inhabited iii) experience of migrants living in multiple places. Deshingkar and Farrington (2009) have used the term “multilocal” to describe circular migration and migrants’ involvement in different places. They conceptualise this multilocality as a part of circularity. Breman (1996) has used the term “footloose” labour to denote the spatial movement of people. Echanove and Srivastava (2014) describe migration while also looking at what happens to the places inhabited by migrants. They contend that migration to cities actually contributes to “migration of villages”. The railways contribute to the movement of migrants by making it affordable and fast. They note that migration is not a “one-way street” and that people keep ties with the ancestral village even after two or DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-13

Jaun-Yeun  195 three generations. They observe that “the village is reinventing itself as an urban habitat”. “Circulatory urbanism” refers to the “pendular movement of people in India between rural and urban areas, facilitated socially by extended families and physically by railway networks”. Circulatory urbanism proposes that the “urbanization processes reveal an uneven pattern in which rural and urban spaces morph into complex cross referential phenomena in which the megapolis develops peculiar characteristics” (ibid.:103). Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2003) examine what happens to migrants themselves. They (ibid.:340) describe the “cosmopolitan” behaviour of circular migrants as they reside in cities feeling “at home”, but, at the same time, continue to also be involved in the politics and culture of their villages of origin. They offer their alternative version of “rural cosmopolitanism” as “that art of being which is able to straddle a political world of difference and deploy the technologies of one to some advantage in the other” (ibid.). Rogaly and Thieme (2012) have conceptualised migrants’ experiences of space-time as “stretching of life worlds”. They try to integrate time into the spatial experiences of temporary migrant workers. For them, understanding the role of the political economy in workers’ spatiotemporal experiences is important. “Straddling between urban and rural areas”, “divided lives”, “circular migration”, “circular urbanism”, and “footloose” are concepts with overlapping meanings used to describe the nature of movement. While these theorisations have overlaps with “simultaneity”, there are differences as well. Circularity examines only the “to-and-fro” nature of movement rather than the nature of engagement with places. The term “footloose” implies a limited agency of the migrants in choosing to move. Frequent movement for these migrants is more due to a lack of choice than an exercise of agency. The concept of simultaneity is based on studies of transnationalism and argues that people can have meaningful social relations across boundaries, and that they need not be restricted to one nation-state alone (Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004: 1029). In the context of international migration, simultaneous engagement means lives divided between two or more countries. Levitt (2001: 208–210) notes that migrants practice dual membership through politics, religion, and community organisation. In the case of internal migration, simultaneity would mean lives divided across places in the same country. It includes economic, political, social, and cultural activities. Migrants engage with the places of origin and destination in a sustained, meaningful way, establishing themselves in both places. They straddle these worlds with ease, with one foot in each place, becoming “cosmopolitan” citizens (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003). This engagement is sustained over generations allowing migrants and their families to make the best of both places. This chapter focuses on how simultaneity is practised and how migrants perceive and shape the place of origin and destination at various points in their migrant life.

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Migration from Konkan to Mumbai and the historicity of simultaneous engagement The coastal strip extending from Palghar in Maharashtra to Goa is known as the Konkan region. A large part of the Konkan region comes under two districts in Maharashtra – Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg. Its peculiar geographical location – between the Arabian Sea and the Sahyadri mountain ranges – has connected this region with the rest of the world while simultaneously separating it from the rest of Maharashtra. Its location has also shaped its developmental trajectory and made migration an essential part of the life of its inhabitants since historical times. Stories of migration from Konkan to Pune – a socio-politically powerful centre in the region prior to British rule – abound but persistent migration from Konkan to Mumbai began only around 150 years ago during the British rule. The British developed Bombay at the cost of Konkan. Timber and labour from Konkan were used in the construction of railways in Bombay, while Konkan itself remained untouched by the benefits of railways (Savur 1982). The changing economy of the region under the British rule made migration necessary for small landholders in rural Konkan. Migration to Mumbai from Konkan predates the emergence of textile mills; by then, Konkani migrants were already employed in large numbers in the British army and police. The textile mills, however, created a steady demand for labour which led to a rapid increase in migration (Chandavarkar 1994: 131). According to the Census of 1881, heavy migration from Konkan led to a decrease in the local population by 2.16 percent between the years 1872 and 1881 (Choksey 1960: 72). According to the Census of 1961, Ratnagiri contributed to 45 percent of the total migrants in Bombay even though its share in Maharashtra’s population was only 5 percent (Zachariah 1966: 51–52). Migration from Konkan has been male dominated. The male migrant who worked in the city in the mills sent remittances to the family back in the village. In the heyday of the textile mills, remittances were sent in such large amounts that Konkan came to be seen as a “money-order” economy. Simultaneous engagement of migrants has been an attribute of this migration stream since then. Choksey (1960: 85) notes that migrants returned seasonally to their fields in Konkan in time for paddy-sowing. A shortage of labour was blamed for hindering the expansion of the textile industry (Mehta 1953: 81–83, cited in Savur 1982). The mill owners were said to employ various tactics to retain workers (Savur 1982: 189). The reasons for simultaneity articulated right from the mid-nineteenth century are found to be contradictory. Traditionally the main crop in Konkan was paddy which is a labour-intensive crop. Migrants returned seasonally to their villages in time for farm work of sowing or tilling. Mumbai’s migrants did not lose their rural base. Migrants did not become urban, but “struggled actively to preserve their rural base and to resist its dissolution” (Chandavarkar

Jaun-Yeun  197 1994: 150). While sources such as the Gazetteer (1901) and Savur (1982) interpreted the continuing rural connections of migrants as “extreme attachments to land”, Chandavarkar (1994) contends that, “behind such sentiment lay hard material imperatives and fluctuations in the demand for labour”. Rural ties were not “ephemeral but essential” to the industrial context of Mumbai (ibid.:169). “By holding on to the land, the ryot might emancipate himself from the vagaries of the labour market or at the very least retain his foothold in the village. For those who migrated to Bombay, the reasons to maintain this base were even greater” (ibid.). Even though land holdings were fragmented and gave diminished incomes, and the region was impoverished (Savur 1982), the village was a fallback for migrants in the event of “unemployment, severe economic distress, old age and the like” (Patel 1963: 37). An increase in the status of the migrants in the village as a result of migration could also have influenced the migrants’ desire to retain a foothold in the village. Interviews from Kunkeri (a village in Konkan that is the subject of this study) also show that the migrant was a celebrated figure, bringing presents and remittances with him. Along with fluctuations in demand for labour in cities, there were reasons on the rural side as well that contributed to the to-and-fro movement of migrants. Yamin (1991) points out that outmigration occurred largely from the khoti1 villages in north and central Ratnagiri. Konkan peasants could not become permanent workers in Bombay as the feudal nature of the agrarian society did not allow peasants to cut off completely their connections with the rural area. Since most tenants were indebted, they had to work for the khot (Suradkar 2013: 71). Suradkar (2013: 11) notes that “the khoti tenure seriously affected the possibilities of migration”. Both the khots and the tenants had one foot in the village and the other in the city. In Bombay, the khots were employed in education and administration while the tenants were a part of the industrial working class. The struggles once confined within the villages now extended to the city: it eventually became their battleground. Tenants tried to mobilise in the city to fight the khots, while the khots used their clout to ensure political backing. While exploitation by the khots tied the migrant to the village and fuelled simultaneity, simultaneity itself was what led to anti-khoti agitations in the city. Over time, as fluctuations in demand for labour in mills decreased, seasonal migrations gradually became semi-permanent in nature, with migrants spending most of the year in the destination and returning home only for festivals or important occasions (Choksey 1960). However, these visits, though fewer, could still be seen as signs of simultaneous engagement. The specificities of simultaneous engagement have slightly changed over time, but as a social process it has endured over generations. As Chandavarkar (1994) succinctly puts it, “the maintenance of the village connection remained an enduring characteristic in the patterns of migration to Bombay City”. This enduring characteristic of nineteenth- and twentieth-century migration continues in the twenty-first century.

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Simultaneity in Konkan in contemporary times Despite a rich history of migration, there have been very few studies post2000 examining migration from Konkan. One of these is Echanove (2012) work on Konkani migrants which documents the phenomenon of simultaneity of migrants without calling it so. They note that Konkani migrants, …go back and forth, but they never fully leave one space for the other. The village is a real presence in the life and mind of a migrant worker in Mumbai who may have left his family behind. Even while in the city, he remains in the village through his social networks, his professional skills, and the frequent exchanges he has with his family back home. It is only because he has never left the village that he can endure the harshness of his city life. Is simultaneity only to “endure the harshness” of city life? Can simultaneity also be a choice in the truest sense, an exercise of agency on the part of migrants and their households? How is simultaneity produced in present times? How does it manifest itself? What are its key dimensions? What are the implications of this simultaneity? The following sections try to answer some of these questions.

Movement and simultaneity in Kunkeri In one of our papers (Vartak et al. 2019), we have presented data showing a steady mass migration from Kunkeri village in Konkan, Maharashtra. Kunkeri is a village located close to Sawantwadi town in Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra. This village, along with two others, was studied by the Census in 1961 and later in 1987 as part of its village monographs. The availability of rich baseline data made it possible to observe migration patterns over time. The present Chapter studies movement and simultaneity in Kunkeri based on household survey, in-depth interviews and studies of family genealogies done across castes in Kunkeri in 2017. The rapid changes observed in rural areas across the country, to which Kunkeri village is no exception, have influenced simultaneity. In Kunkeri, landholdings are notably fragmented. The share of landholdings less than half a hectare increased from 20 per cent in 1961 to 33 per cent in 1987 and to 49 per cent in 2017 (Vartak et al. 2019: 57). The share of total income attributable to agriculture is decreasing. In 1961, 75.98 percent of the households were engaged only in agriculture (Census Report 1966: 41), while in 2017, for 58 percent of the households, there was at least one non-agricultural source of livelihood (Vartak et al. 2019: 57). Twenty-six percent of the households did not cultivate (ibid.). There is a visible shift in migration patterns across gender and castes. In 2017, 20 percent of the migrants were women who had migrated for reasons other than marriage (Vartak et al. 2019: 55). Migration is no longer a

Jaun-Yeun  199 privilege of the upper castes, but a livelihood strategy employed across caste groups (ibid.). The number of commuters has increased from three in 1961 to 169 in 2017. One-third of the households are accessing employment and educational opportunities outside the village on a daily basis. While in 1961 all commuters would presumably have been male, in 2017 there were a significant number of women commuters as well. Sawantwadi and other towns in Sindhudurg district, and also Goa, are linked to the village via daily commute. High number of commuters coexists with high migration (Vartak et al. 2019: 58–59). Between 1961 and 2017, literacy, longevity and available infrastructure have increased in the village (ibid.). The total number of households across wadis2 have increased from nine in 1961 to twelve in 2017. While only three percent of the households in Kunkeri were reported to have migrated permanently in the 1960s and 1970s, the percentage of households sending outmigrants increased from 26 percent in 1961 to 60 percent in 2017 (ibid.). Persistent migration over generations has not led to a “rural exodus”. Instead, migrants have straddled both places, the destination and the origin, and “extended their life-worlds” (Rogaly and Thieme 2012) to include both. In 2017, 85 percent of the households in Kunkeri reported having experienced mobility (migration and/or commuting) at some point in time. This shows the level of exposure that the households have had of places outside the village.

Changing Mumbai Along with the village, the main destination Mumbai too has undergone rapid change. Madgavkar (2009: 58) describes nineteenth-century Mumbai to be a city of opportunities and jobs. Many took to studying English so as to get a government job (Masselos 1995). Educational facilities attracted a large number of Konkani brahmins who studied in English schools and later got jobs as teachers (Kosambi 1995: 20). In Kunkeri, the percentage of migrants in government jobs has drastically gone down from 74.7 percent in 1961 (Census Report 1966: 54) to 10.8 percent in 2017. The percentage of migrants employed in the informal sector has dramatically risen to 79 percent. Large scale informalisation of work makes it more difficult to find work that pays decent wages. Yet, the perception of Mumbai and expectations from migration remain unchanged. It is a magnet that continues to attract migrants from all over the country. Housing and overcrowding have been a problem in Mumbai since the nineteenth century (Kosambi 1995: 8). Housing conditions and living costs continue to be a major factor in practicing simultaneity. Access to housing and sanitation is much lower for migrants than non-migrants in Indian cities (Kundu and Banerjee 2018: 56–57). The ownership and access to kholi (the term migrants used for housing) is crucial to the decision to migrate,

200  Amita Bhide and Kalyani Vartak to maintain a base in Mumbai, and to either choose or be forced to engage in simultaneity.

Complexity of contemporary simultaneity During fieldwork in 2017, we realised that migration was a complex exercise with numerous underlying factors. Movement of people did not fit into neat categories of “permanent migration”, “semi-permanent migration”, or “seasonal migration”. Most migrants described movement as an attempt to be in the right place at the right time. Home for many was the village, for some it was both places. Simultaneity was a ubiquitous practice, continued over generations. The genealogy of Pandurang Sawant’s family (see Table 10.1) shows simultaneity across five generations. Migration to Mumbai in this family began two generations ahead of Pandurang, with Pandurang being the third generation. Of the 37 members traced in the chart, 24 have been in Mumbai for varying periods. While almost all members of the previous four generations consider themselves to belong to Kunkeri, six members of the fifth generation consider themselves “Mumbaikars” and one has become an international migrant. Pandurang Sawant, now in his 80s, was sent to Mumbai for his schooling; their wadi used to be cut off during the monsoons making it impossible for him to go to the village school. He used to visit his parents in the

Figure 10.1   Pandurang Sawant’s family genealogy. Source: Based on in-depth interviews and family genealogy exercise conducted in Kunkeri village, May 2017.

Jaun-Yeun  201 Table 10.1  Biographical information of members of Pandurang Sawant’s family Serial number

Age/estimated age (e) Biographical details

1, 2 3 4, 5 6, 7 8, 9 10 11 12, 13 14 15, 16 17

120e

18

85

19

78

20, 21, 22 23

75–85e 75

24 25

48 51

26

42

27

45

28

45

29

41

30

39

31 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37

42

120e 120e

100e

83

Illiterate. Agriculture. No migration. Havaldar in police in Mumbai. Mill workers in Mumbai. Illiterate. Mill workers in Mumbai. Illiterate. Agriculture, did not migrate. In police service, Mumbai. In military service. Recruited in Mumbai. Literate. Agriculture, did not migrate. Police Sub-Inspector (PSI) in Mumbai. Illiterate. In agriculture, did not migrate. Pandurang Sawant. 10th pass. Return migrant. Lived in Mumbai with relatives. Spent 43 years in the destination. Returned to the village on losing his job. Return migrant. Has returned with wife. Children in Mumbai. Refused to migrate to Mumbai even when parents insisted. Marriage migrants to close-by villages. 2nd pass. Vaijayanti Sawant. Worked as a rural health worker for 18 years in the village. 12th pass. Housewife. B.Sc Computers. In private sector. Based in Mumbai. 12th pass. Has a permanent job in postal service in Mumbai. B.Sc Computers. Completed 12th from Sawantwadi. Did graduation in Mumbai. At present working in Dubai. Before that he was in Singapore and Indonesia. B.E Originally from a village in Malvan. Works in Mumbai. B.E (Computers) Works in a private company in Mumbai. MBA. Assistant manager in a multi-national company in Mumbai. Works in a private company in Mumbai. Grandchildren of respondents. In school in Mumbai. Not interested in coming to the village.

Source: Based on in-depth interviews and family genealogy exercise conducted in Kunkeri village, May 2017.

202  Amita Bhide and Kalyani Vartak summers. After his secondary exams, he came back to the village to farm. Shortly thereafter, he went to Mumbai and got a job in a printing press. After the press shut down, he was unable to find another job and returned to the village. In a few years, his children were in Mumbai, studying. As of now, Pandurang Sawant and his wife have returned to the city. The couple have been to many countries to visit their son who works for a multinational company. They now own two flats in the city but that has not diminished the allure of the village house for them. Sawant, his children and grandchildren: all engage with the village. In the case of Pandurang’s family, as with many other families in the village, five generations of migrants and steady affluent lives in Mumbai have not led to permanent migration. There is simultaneous engagement with the village over generations. Pandurang Sawant’s is not an isolated example. Simultaneity over generations is reflected in the data collected in the household survey. Of the total households sending outmigrants from Kunkeri, around 60 percent have outmigration in two or more generations, indicating simultaneity. This percentage across castes is higher for Marathas (65 per cent), followed by the SCs (38 per cent) and the OBCs (35 per cent). For the Nomadic Tribes, the percentage of families with outmigration in two or more generations is zero, as for them migration is a fairly new practice. This is not to say that simultaneity is absent; the recent migrants too have displayed simultaneous engagement. Contemporary forms of simultaneity are complex. Simultaneity can be because of a lack of choice or it can be an expression of agency. It could be to improve the quality of life, have a work-leisure balance and maintain family relationships and traditions. For some migrants, to-and-fro movements are necessary because they are not able to support themselves fully either in the destination or the village. Hence, they try to secure their footing in the city without letting go of the village. For others, especially those with intergenerational mobility who have secured a place in the city, visits to the village are to maintain traditions and/or are an expression of their emotional attachment. Some migrants visit frequently to meet their parents and relatives. For others, visits to the village are for leisure – they enjoy their holidays, summers, harvests from the fields, etc. before returning to the hustle and bustle of city life.

Frequency of visits The coastal location played a part in early connectivity. The well-­ developed ports and means of water transport that had helped establish trade in the area, later also helped ferry migrants to Mumbai. The Census Report (1966) for Kunkeri village was able to present the number of times migrants visited the village. Only 24 percent of the migrants had visited the village annually. The rest came once in two or more years (Census Report 1966: 54). Back then it took more than 30 hours to reach the village by sea. One had to cover the distance from Sawantwadi to the

Jaun-Yeun  203 village on foot. Sea travel was popular till the 1980s even after roads had been developed. Today, the distance between the village and Mumbai can be covered in eight hours by road and in slightly more time by train. Along with reduced travel time, modes of transport are frequent, cheap and accessible. Increased ease and lesser time required means most migrants visit the village at least twice a year. Most of them come for Ganpati and Holi, the two important festivals of Konkan. During festivals, the railway ministry has special trains running from Mumbai to Konkan. Migrants also come in May and during local elections. Access to mobile phones has made communication easy and instantaneous. Migrants can now engage with places, events, and people on a daily basis without being physically present. Transport and communication infrastructure boosts simultaneous engagement.

The significance of the village and Mumbai The village remains significant for many reasons: practical, economic, religious, and emotional. The village stands for the right kind of values and way of life, with which many migrants want to stay connected. The village symbolises roots: they enable the migrant to grow. Ties to the village are organic and lifelong. For some migrants, simultaneity arises from practical necessities. Ram Gawde built a house in the village after retiring from his job in the railways. He and his wife vacated their Mumbai kholi to make room for his son’s family, but he gave his Mumbai address for pension so that they could keep going to Mumbai once every few months and keep an eye over things. Vishal Gawde and his brother both visit the village once every fortnight. Both brothers are entrepreneurs in Mumbai, and they take turns visiting their old and ailing father who lives alone in the village. They tried taking their father to the city, but there he had to spend the day alone in a small flat on the third floor, in a building with no elevator. In the village he has ease of movement; the neighbours keep him company. When in the village, Vishal, an interior designer, tries to coordinate work over the phone. The village is a fallback option for migrants. Around 18 percent of the return migrants returned because of health reasons. Access to healthcare infrastructure is limited and expensive in Mumbai, making the village a better option for receiving care in times of poor health. Shankar Gawde used to work in a printing press in Mumbai. Diagnosed with mental illness, he was hospitalised for long durations first in Mumbai and then in Ratnagiri. His wife is a domestic maid, and their son is in school. Eventually, the wife could not afford to look after him and so sent him back to live with his elderly mother. The wife sends remittances to bear his expenses. Laxmi Parab, aged 97, came back to the village with her granddaughter after spending decades in Mumbai. At her age she could no longer stand in queue to use common toilets; the migrant family thought she would be better off in the village.

204  Amita Bhide and Kalyani Vartak Many migrants had come to the village to vote in the gram panchayat elections. Some of the migrants also acknowledged that they cast their votes in the city as well as the village. Political participation in both the city and the village shows a deeper level of engagement and developmental concerns for the village. Ramesh Rane is a young chemist working in a pharmaceutical company in Goa. When asked about his plans of settling down there, he was upset and responded, Barobar ahe. Pan asa tikde milnar kay? Asa milu Shakta? Hawa, vatavaran, sanskruti ji ithe ahe, ti tumhala milu shakte kay? 4 bhintichya kholi madhe tumhala kay milnar? [You are right. But will we get everything like this there? The air, the atmosphere, forget that, the culture here, can you get it there? What will you get in a room of four walls?] Even those who are staying (permanently) in Mumbai think of going on trips somewhere. But we don’t think like that here. Those coming on tour say Konkan is so beautiful. Amchya nashibat he changla miltana kashala tikde janar? [When we have such a good life in our fate, why should we go there?] That is why nobody leaves the villages and goes. They go for work but not forever. On retiring, a person will come back! My uncle for example is going to retire next year, but he already sent his wife here. He is winding up his life there. Usually people do not stay there (in Mumbai) post-retirement. Gaav bara mhantat! Last la ikdech yetat. [They say, the village is better. In the end, they come here.] K. Vartak: Then why do people work in Mumbai? Ramesh: Tyanna nailaaj asto… [They have no option but to work in Mumbai] for they have to work for their daily bread. But what do they think towards the end? Thank God, 40 years are over, now let me return to my village! Since they have spent their childhood in the village, they have love for the village. While Ramesh gives practical reasons, this rationale stems from his attachment to the village. This emotional attachment that is felt by the migrants is actively encouraged by the non-migrants, and also the migrants’ association (the “Mandal”) which expects a certain attachment for the native village from the migrants. Sunil Sawant, a second-generation migrant in his 50s, is an affluent engineer in Mumbai. His father had migrated from Kunkeri. Sawant was born in Mumbai and went to the village in vacations and for festivals. He says, Amcha asa concept ahe ki, kuthlahi san asel … toh gharakade karaycha. [Our concept is, be it any festival, celebrate in the village.] Many people follow that and celebrate all festivals in their village home. Everything

Jaun-Yeun  205 related to the gods is present in the village. I think it is true for all Konkani people. Our devotion is to the village. We go to the village once or twice a year. During Holi or Ganpati or in May. We have “paali” [turns] for looking after and bearing the expenses of the Ganpati festival. Our turn comes after every three years. In the year when it’s our turn, we do not miss it. Even though everyone has houses or kholis in Mumbai, the concept in Konkan is to do important things in the village. This sentiment was echoed by several respondents. Those not able to take leave for the entire period of festivities try to visit the village at least for a couple of days. Rupesh Sawant, a 70-year-old migrant from Mumbai who was visiting the village for a family puja, said, It is not good to keep the village house shut. The house must be taken care of. My father migrated to Mumbai as also his four brothers. The youngest of them, my uncle, kept falling sick. He also lost his textile mill job. After suffering a series of setbacks, he decided to return to the village. After he returned his health recovered and he also did well in farming. The Gods were unhappy that the house was shut. His family continues to live in this house. What could have been permanent migration for the brothers ended in the return of the youngest and simultaneity for generations. There are tales of the village deity punishing non-believers and those who do not visit it. Similar beliefs prevailed among Dalit households; they were afraid to send their children out for work or education fearing that some misery would fall upon them. Ritesh Chavan, a migrant of the Nhavi3 caste based in Mumbai, said that he came for village festivals so as not to get the evil eye cast on him. We were told that one man came from the USA every year to participate in Holi festivities. His father had migrated to Mumbai but had returned each year to wear the mask of a lion in Holi festivities. The son discontinued the practice and thereafter became severely ill. Since then, he had been coming to the village for two days every year even though he neither had a house in the village, nor any interaction with the people in the village. Such beliefs and superstitions contribute to simultaneity. As Vaman Sawant, a retired bus conductor from Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST), explains, Amchi mula ithlich ahet. Tyanchyavar amhi ikadache sanskar kelet. Jari mula shaharat vadhlit, tari amhi tyanchyavar ikadchech sanskar kelet. Mula pan amchi yeun jaun astat. Tyanna ikadcha sagla mahitiye. [Our children belong here only. We have inculcated our values in them. Even though they are city bred they have village values. They keep coming to the village. They are familiar with the village.]

206  Amita Bhide and Kalyani Vartak Vaman Sawant emphasises the values that he has tried to inculcate in his children. It also reflects his attachment to the village. There is simultaneous engagement across four generations in his family. When asked where he felt at home, Vishal Gawde expressed surprise. “Donhikade [At both places!] After all, both [village and Mumbai] are home!” Such a sentiment is also an expression of simultaneity. Simultaneous engagement is best summed up by the phrase “jaun-yeun” which means “to-and-fro”. The migrants do not use the Marathi word for migration but rather describe their movement as jaun-yeun i.e., to-and-fro. Jaun-Yeun ascribes equal importance to both places in terms of assets, relationships, and events. It renders terms such as “source” and “destination” irrelevant. The importance attached to places is not linked to the duration of stay in either place.

Building assets Land holdings have become fragmented in Kunkeri and there has been a shift from paddy cultivation to crops such as cashew nut that require less effort and attention (Vartak et al. 2019: 56–57). For a village with persistent migration, there is no major change in landholding patterns (ibid.). Migrants as well as non-migrants realise the importance of land and hold on to it. Ownership of land, however small, ensures engagement with the village. Construction of houses by the migrants in the village also contributes to simultaneity. Housing in the village and in the city serves different purposes. Access to affordable housing is an important factor in the decision to migrate as well as continuing to stay in the city. A house in the village is regarded as a place of comfort and leisure. It also becomes a status symbol for many migrants: a symbol of their success in the city. Ownership, construction, and maintenance of a house in the village provide a base to the migrant. They require attention and ensure engagement with the village.

Role of the migrants’ association or Mandal The Migrants’ Association popularly known as the Mandal was started in 1980 in Mumbai. The primary aim of the Mandal was to build reliable social networks in the city – for an exchange of news and information and for deliberations on village affairs. The Mandal continues to meet biannually. It collects and contributes funds for village development: roads, electricity, taps, schools, and festivals, among others. The Mandal encourages simultaneity; at times it even demands it. The Mandal office bearers frown upon those who miss the meetings, and remind attendees that it is their duty to engage in village matters. The Mandal President in his opening speech of a meeting held on 6 August 2017, Lalbaug, Mumbai reminded everyone, that “gaavashi apli naal jodli ahe” [we are tied to the village by our umbilical cords].

Jaun-Yeun  207

Women facilitating simultaneity Migration from Konkan has been male dominated. Cultural norms and gender stereotypes prevented women from following the men to the city. Staying behind, the women maintained the men’s base in the village. The remittances sent by the migrant aided the family; the family in turn ensured a rural base for the migrant. The family provided a structure for simultaneous engagement, because of which “workers could be both permanent in their dependence upon the city and yet maintain a close attachment to the village” (Chandavarkar 1994: 160). Within the family, it was mainly the women who stayed back and enabled this simultaneity. Bagwe (1995), based on her ethnographic study of Masure village in Konkan, called the women supporting migrants “relay teams”. One woman of the household would migrate to cook and clean for the migrants, while one woman stayed behind to look after the ancestral house in the village. Even women who migrated to the city would be moving constantly between the village and the city. In the village, the burden of farming, household responsibilities and of caregiving to the elderly and young fell upon women. Bagwe (1995) notes how these issues are reflected in the folk songs sung by Konkani women. All outmigrants from Kunkeri in 1961 were male (Census Report 1966: 54). In contrast, 20 percent of the migrants in 2017 who migrated for education or work were female (Vartak et al. 2019: 55). Saraswati Kunkerkar, a Dalit in her early 50s, was in Mumbai for more than 25 years. All these years she kept shuttling between the two places, looking after her husband and daughter in Mumbai, and looking after the village house, the in-laws and relatives in the village. When her husband decided to return to the village for good, they thought of constructing a bigger house in the village prior to moving back. She came back to the village one year before their final move to supervise the construction of the house. Likewise, Samapti Rane too shuttled between the two places. She came to the village to set up the house before her husband retired. It is not just wives who shuttle between places but also mothers. Prema Parab’s two unmarried sons live in Mumbai. She visits them once every two months to cook and clean for them. Ritesh Chavan, of the Nhavi caste, kept his wife and children in the village while his parents were alive, and his brother was unmarried. His wife looked after the household in his absence; Ritesh visited only once a year. It was ten years after their marriage, when his younger brother was married and his parents had passed away, that Ritesh took his wife and children to Mumbai. Simultaneity is thus also practised through marriage. There is a preference for partners with roots in Konkan. Swarada Sawant works in Pune and does not plan to return to the village. Her family members are searching for her a groom, of their caste, who works either in Pune or Mumbai and is originally from Konkan. Ties with the region are maintained through marriage. Raksha Parab, a woman in her late 50s, had come

208  Amita Bhide and Kalyani Vartak to Kunkeri from Mumbai as a bride. Her natal family originally belongs to the region, but she was born and brought up in Mumbai. She remembers how underdeveloped Kunkeri was when she had first arrived here – people died of malaria, roads were not developed and there was no electricity. She had trouble adjusting initially. Sunaina Gawde, who is in her 30s, was born in Mumbai, and lives there with her husband and children. She visits her husband’s family on vacations and important occasions. She reminisces, When I first came as a bride people made fun of me as I didn’t know the ways of the village. In all summer vacations we visit the village. It is important that the children know what village life is. They also like it here. I have come with the children this year – as we are constructing a bigger house. I am supervising the work. People who used to make fun of me now look at me with respect. Women play an important role in sustaining male migration from Ratnagiri. They are the roots which bind the men to the region. Their labour and presence enable men to have a foothold in two places: the origin as well as the destination. They look after the house and property while the men are away and are caregivers to the young and old. The reasons for the women staying back are not just economic but also cultural. They are entrusted with maintaining traditions and roots. Their staying behind in the village ensures that the link with the village is maintained. They are actors who practice simultaneity, and through whom simultaneity is practised. However, they lack individual agency of their own. They are multi-local but occupy these spaces only at the instance of others. As younger women migrate to cities to work and study, it remains to be seen if, and to what extent, they can have real agency.

Conclusion Using simultaneous engagement as a lens to look at internal migration allows us to acknowledge the complexities of migration, the lives of migrants and the significance of places to migrants. Simultaneity has always existed in migration from Konkan – historically, it was due to a lack of choice for the migrant, almost a necessity orchestrated by the then political economy. In-depth interviews show that for a brief period before the demise of the textile mills, upper-caste migrants were able to seize opportunities and build assets in Mumbai. For families with migration in more than one generation and with some assets in the city, simultaneity is a choice consciously exercised. Families that have a kholi in Mumbai have lesser obstacles in Mumbai than those with no history of migration. Families like that of Pandurang Sawant (Figure 10.1) choose to shuttle between places, maintaining and strengthening ties in the source region. There are many families like Sawant’s who have generated assets both in the village and in Mumbai and who choose to engage simultaneously for a variety of reasons. These

Jaun-Yeun  209 families gain prestige and power in the village based on their success in the city. They straddle both worlds with ease and are Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan’s (2003) “cosmopolitan’ citizens’. For lower-caste households with migration only in one generation, simultaneity is a compulsion. It is a way of protecting their extremely precarious existence. As conditions in Mumbai become more uncertain – with the increase in unemployment and informal work, unforeseen costs such as health expenditures and limited access to services – the village provides the migrant with a safety net in the form of the village house, income from agriculture and a lower cost of living. Presence of family members in the village, accessible transport and communication, religious activities and responsibilities, social networks, and village associations – all of these facilitate simultaneity to the extent of making it almost inevitable. Maintaining their presence in both places becomes a strategy on the part of migrants to deal with uncertainty; it paves the way to accumulate resources and also allows them to aspire for “the best of both places”. Simultaneity shapes places. We agree with Echanove and Srivastava (2014) that migration is not a one-way street. However, the village does not reinvent itself as an “urban habitat”. Through economic and social remittances, migrants do push for changes such as kitchen countertops and western toilets in their houses along with infrastructure development in the village, but they also recognise and actively safeguard ways of village life that they see as advantages. Migrants see the clean air, the quietness, the congenial relations with neighbours, the values of rural life and the customs and traditions as being superior to urban life. Migrants engage economically, socially, and politically with the city as well as the village. Their active participation shows their agency in shaping city life. The Mandal tries to recreate the advantages of village life in the city – a support system based on networks. The Mandal members realise that the challenges faced by migrants are complex, and that social networks act as a small but significant safety net in uncertain times. Women play an important role in maintaining simultaneity. Women of the household stay back to look after the village house. In the instances where they do migrate along with their husbands, they continue to move between places. A preference for spouses with roots in the region, strengthens connections with the region. Most academic literature on regions with high male outmigration tends to conceptualise women as “left behind”. Desai (1982) and Gogate (1991) have argued as to whether male outmigration in fact gives more autonomy to women in Konkan. However, the questions on women and migration need to be framed more broadly in terms of their agency. As more and more young women migrate to cities, these questions become increasingly relevant. Transport and communication technologies have increased spatio-temporal mobility and engagement. Migrants today can be informed of activities in the village in real time. The possibility of being multi-local has reached a new level. This, however, does not bridge the gap between the rural and

210  Amita Bhide and Kalyani Vartak the urban. The differences and inequalities between the two places remain – perhaps starker than ever. The implications of simultaneous engagement across places over generations are twofold for research methods on migration, academic studies, and policy. Research methods in migration studies need to be innovative. Simultaneity calls for triangulation of methods and a multi-sited approach. The links between people and places need to be acknowledged and explored further. In a way, the simultaneous engagement of migrants makes words such as “source” and “destination” redundant. The word “source” implies beginning or origin, “destination” has a sense of ending or finality but when there is a simultaneous engagement over generations, source does not necessarily mean the village, nor does destination mean only the city. Binaries of “rural” and “urban” need to be re-theorised. While there have been studies critiquing the static portrayal of the rural, the need to reconceptualise the urban also needs to be acknowledged. The sedentary assumptions implicit in the way we collect macro-level data through the Census of India need to be examined. Citizenship and entitlements need to be imagined differently. When simultaneity is a way of life, why should belonging to a singular place be a condition for granting people entitlements? At present, almost all entitlements, and even rights such as voting, can be exercised by people only in one place. Widespread simultaneity demands a reimagining of the rural, the urban, the concept of citizenship and the granting of entitlements in India. This will have significant implications for millions of people.

Notes 1 The Khoti system was a system of revenue collection. While the khoti system had existed since the sixteenth century, it became exploitative after the British came to power. Khots or landlords collected revenues and had administrative rights. The Khoti system was abolished in 1950. For more see Yamin (1991) and Suradkar (2013). 2 Villages in Konkan are organized in wadis or hamlets. These wadis usually organized around caste lines and bear caste names. For more see Mehendale (1947). 3 The traditional caste-based occupation of Nhavi caste was hairdressing. They belong to the Other Backward Castes (OBC) category.

References Bagwe, A. 1995. Of Woman Caste: Experience of Gender in Rural India, Kolkata: Stree. Breman, J. 1996. Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Census of India. 1966. Village Survey Monograph of Kunkeri. Vol. X, No. VI(I). Bombay: The Maharashtra Census Office. Chandavarkar, R. 1994. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jaun-Yeun  211 Choksey, R.D. 1960. Economic Life in the Bombay Konkan (1818–1839). Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Desai, R. 1982. “Migrant Labour and Women: The Case of Ratnagiri”. World Employment Programme Research, WEP No. 82. Deshingkar, P., and J.A. Farrington. 2009. “Framework for Understanding Circular Migration”. In Circular Migration and Multilocational Livelihood Strategies in Rural India, edited by P. Deshingkar and J.A. Farrington, 1–36. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Echanove, M. 2012. “Konkan Diaries: Chiplun”. Urbz Website. Available at: http:// urbz.net/articles/konkan-diaries-chiplun. Last Accessed 13 August 2018. Echanove, M., and R. Srivastava. 2014. “Mumbai’s Circulatory Urbanism”. In Empower! Essays on the Political Economy of Urban Form, Vol. 3, edited by M. Angelil and R. Hehlpp, 82–113. Zurich: Ruby Press. Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island. 1901. Vols. I–II. Bombay: Government Central Press. Gidwani, V., and K.C. Sivaramakrishnan 2003. Circular Migration and Rural Cosmopolitanism in India, Contributions to Indian Sociology (Sage) 37 (1–2): 349–367. Glick-Schiller, N.G., L. Basch, and C. Blanc-Szanton. 1992. “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645 (1): 1–24. Gogate, S. 1991. “Impact of Migration to the Middle East on Rural Ratnagiri”. In A  Reader in Urban Sociology, edited by M.S.A. Rao, C. Bhat Rao, and L.N. Kadekar, 371–388. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Kosambi, M. 1995. “British Bombay and Marathi Mumbai: Some Nineteenth Century Perceptions”. In Bombay, Mosaic of Modern Culture, edited by S. Patel and A. Thorner, 1–24. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kundu, D., and A. Banerjee. 2018. “Migration, Caste and Marginalised Sections: Inequality in the Coverage of Basic Services in Urban India”. Economic and Political Weekly 53: 62–70. Levitt, P., and N. Glick-Schiller. 2004. “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society”. The International Migration Review 38 (3): 1002–1039. Levitt, P. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Madgavkar, G.N. 2009. Govind Narayan’s Mumbai: An Urban Biography from 1863. Translated by M. Ranganathan. New Delhi: Anthem Press. Masselos, J. 1995. “Migration and Urban Identity: Bombay’s Famine Refugees in the Nineteenth Century”. In Bombay, Mosaic of Modern Culture, edited by S. Patel and A. Thorner, 25–60. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mehendale, Y.S. 1947. “Wadi Names of Ratnagiri District”. Bulletin of the Deccan College-Post Graduate and Research Institute 8: 404–421. Mehta, S.D. 1953. The Indian Cotton Textile Industry: An Economic Analysis. Bombay: Published by G.K. Ved for the Textile Association, India. Patel, K. 1963. Rural Labour in Bombay. Bombay: Popular Prakashan. Rogaly, B., and S. Thieme. 2012. “Experiencing Space-Time: The Stretched Lifeworlds of Migrant Workers in India”. Environment and Planning 44: 2086–2100. Savur, M. 1982. “Ratnagiri – Underdevelopment of an Area of Reserve Labour Force”. Sociological Bulletin 31 (2): 182–219. Suradkar, S.P. 2013. The Anti-Khoti Movement in the Konkan, c. 1920–1942. New Delhi: V.V. Giri National Labour Institute.

212  Amita Bhide and Kalyani Vartak Vartak, K., C. Tumbe, and A. Bhide. 2019. “Mass Migration from Rural India: A  Restudy of Kunkeri Village in Konkan, Maharashtra, 1961–1987–2017”. Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics 31 (1): 42–62. Yamin, G.M. 1991. “The Causes and Processes of Rural–Urban Migration in the 19th and Early 20th Century India: The Case of Ratnagiri District”. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Salford, Salford. Zachariah, K.C. 1966. Migrants in Greater Bombay. Mumbai: Asia Publishing House.

11 Migration and music Incarnations of Birahā Praveen Kumar Jha

A large-scale transcontinental migration from India to sugar cane plantations in different British, Dutch, and French colonies, as indentured labourers, occurred from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries (Jha 2019: 52–53). As the migration involved primarily the agrarian class, myriad forms of social identities were transplanted to a culturally isolated island. An interesting facet of such migration is the music, which the migrants carried with them from Indian villages, through a long, arduous ship journey to plantations scattered over Caribbean lands such as British Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, and Suriname (118–209). Many of these raw musical forms have evolved over decades of socio-cultural and historical transformations, giving rise to different genres (Niranjana 2006: 85–87). Prevalent Indo-Caribbean musical forms are tān music, baithak gāna, coutāl, birahā and the fusion form called Chutney music. Tān music is a crude rendition of the Hindustāni (Indian) classical music genres called dhrupad, khayāl and thumrı̄ in India.1 Baithak gāna is a semi-classical form that takes its cues from north Indian light songs; the improvisation is in a unique diaspora style, particularly in Suriname. Coutāl is an archaic devotional folk group-song tradition from north India preserved in the Caribbean, which has almost disappeared from the musical scenario in India. Birahā is a purely folk form prevalent in both India and the Caribbean with its own nuances in either location. Chutney music is a unique progeny of the compact multi-ethnic environment of Caribbean soil, consisting of a fusion of Indian musical forms with African Creole music. Because of its popularity and characteristic Caribbean flavour, Chutney music has been widely explored and discussed (Ramnarine 1996, 2001). Since Chutney music lacks a comparative axis in India, the study of other ethnic musical forms can provide better insights into migration. In present-day India, coutāl is almost obsolete, as we have observed, while the baithak and tān traditions never existed in the forms practised in the Caribbean. The only thriving form with a strong presence in both continents is birahā, essentially a song of movement and separation (viraha), which can be projected as a precursor to a similar genre called bidesiyā – Bhojpuri migration folk songs. Another musical form, alhā-khand, could have been equally useful for this DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-14

214  Praveen Kumar Jha exploration (see Manuel 2012). This is a song of glory and valour from rural India, but it does not have the same degree of retention among the Caribbean diaspora as birahā. Which forms of birahā exist in the two continents, and what could be the reasons for their survival? These can be examined considering the historical context (time) and the local environs (space) (Lidskog 2016). This essay embarks on a comparative study of Indian and Indo-Caribbean birahā for insights into the cultural pathways and intersections resulting from migration. Discourses on music conceptually involve the aspect of migration; however, discourses on migration seem to pay little attention to music. A recurrent theme of migration studies has been the cultural transformations and retentions in the diaspora (Manuel 2013; see also Niranjana 2006). In case of indentured labour migration, the focus had been on the caste dynamics, status of women (Bahadur 2013), agrarian practices (Lai 1993) and the politico-economic struggle (Lal 2004). But the evaluation of creativity, as an outcome of migration, requires us to move away from this dominant socioeconomic discourse Schiller and Meinhof (2011) and Meinhof and Triandafyllidou (2006) coined the term “transcultural capital” at this juncture. The term was derived from the concept of the “cultural capital” coined by Bourdieu which suggested that the social assets of person (education, intellect, dressing style, living style, etc.) have role in the social mobility. Meinhof elaborates it in form of capital resulting from migration of culture from one nation to another (Meinhof and Triandafyllidou 2006). Caribbean studies have, to some extent, elaborated on the musical traditions of diaspora. Scholars like T.K. Ramnarine (1996), Peter Manuel (2012), and Tejaswini Niranjana (2006) have explored Indo-Caribbean music ranging from traditional folk songs to the fusion Chutney songs. Niranjana particularly stressed that the comparative axis is to be shifted from the West to the Indo-Caribbean axis since there is no other musical equivalent in the West. Peter Manuel’s work has opened the debate on two musical trajectories of the transplants, particularly birahā, where he concludes that the transplanted birahā is the archaic form and very different from the birahā practised in present-day India. This essay will explore birahā to understand the role of music in migration in general. The musical heritage of the migrants having common social and cultural identity, forms their “transcultural capital”. The musical retention and transformation are further affected by external factors. While I agree with Peter Manuel’s notion of two trajectories, instead of seeing these as divergent, I suggest looking upon them as reference points on the same trajectory. In this essay, those points will be termed by me as “first-wave”, “second-wave” and “third-wave” birahā for convenience. The Caribbean birahā seems to have been planted in parallel with the first and second waves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the indentured immigrants brought its early seeds with them. In the isolated micro-environment of the Caribbean, the growth of a musical genre was

Migration and music  215 stunted and could only retain some vestiges of the “first wave” and the early forms of the “second wave” of birahā. On the other hand, the home environment of India nurtured a dynamic and diversified growth driven by the ambitions and social engineering of people, resulting in a “second wave” and “third wave” of birahā. In this chapter, I will also examine how the external politico-social environment in India led to a pace of musical transformation that Caribbean birahā could not match.

The three birahā “waves” The genres of bidesiyā, birahā, batgamni and bhatiyāli are folk songs of movement on smaller and larger scales.2 Among these, birahā is particularly sung by cattle-herding agrarian societies, the Ahı̄rs, who move on a smaller scale from field to home, which could be termed a circumambulatory movement. On the other hand, batgamni, bhatiyāli and, to some extent, bidesiyā represent continuous and large-scale movement, sometimes similar to that of the Romani people. Thus, birahā is unique in beginning with a paradox, that is, it is a song of separation without an actual separation (Marcus 1989). The separation is only for a short while when somebody goes to work in the fields. This makes it similar to the genre called dhobiyā, which a washerman sings for his wife or the washerwoman when going off for his daily job. The word birahā is derived from viraha, which means separation. According to folklore (Yadav 2009), the Hindu god Krishna used to sing birahā songs for his female friends (gopı̄s), but obviously it is difficult to prove such claims. This theme is a hallmark of the earliest forms of “first-wave birahā”. “Suggā sanes” is one of the oldest (and less documented) lyrical birahā compositions (M. Singh 1965), conspicuously missing from both the present Indian and Indo-Caribbean world. It was written in the early eighteenth century by Razzab Khan, a Muslim birahā singer from Azamgarh during the rule of Mahabat Khān (Mahabat Khan ruled Azamgarh before 1730 BCE according to Rizvi [1980]). In this composition, the lady wishes to send a message to her beloved via a parrot (suggā),3 and when the parrot asks whether she does not have ink or paper, she replies: Ancharā fāri ke ham kāgaz banaı̄be Nayan kajrā ke masivān Anguri chı̄ri ke ham kalam banaı̄be Apne saiyānjı̄ ke likhabe havāl [I would tear my sari (cloth) to make the paper And the ink of kohl I would tear off my finger to make a pen And write my feelings to my love]4 There were some other well-known birahā poets apart from Razzab Khan, such as Razzaq Khan, Deen Ali, Bihāri and Sumer (M. Singh 1965).5

216  Praveen Kumar Jha Much later, Bisrām of this Azamgarh–Ghazipur birahā lineage composed birahā in the first half of the twentieth century (M. Singh 1965). These birahā had a poetic musical structure, with four musical stanzas (carakariyā) or three stanzas (tinakariyā). The primordial theme of separation (viraha), which was the soul of birahā and the oral tradition of lyrical ballads, would not survive much longer. George Grierson, in 1886, collected and published many rural folk songs including birahā. However, this genre did not seem to impress him much: I cannot say that they possess much literary excellence; on the contrary, some of them are merest doggerel. But they are valuable as being one of the few trustworthy exponents which we have of the inner thoughts and desires of the people. Birahā is essentially a wild flower. (Grierson 1886: 207–267) While Grierson’s assertion has some truth, particularly his calling it “wild flower”, he might not have analysed enough the lyrical nuances of firstwave compositions like “Suggā sanes”. It is quite likely that Grierson was referring to the immature seedlings of a transforming birahā, which I will call a second wave birahā. Second wave birahā eliminated the redundancies in musical structure (for example, fixed number of stanzas) as also the theme of separation, and became considerably unchained and free-flowing in composition. These birahā, called kharı̄ birahā, are defined by their impromptu lyrical structure (M. Singh 1965). Nā birahā kare khetı̄ bhaiyā Nā birahā phare dār Birahā base lā hiradaya me ho bhaiyā Jab umage tab gao [There is no cultivation of birahā Nor does it fruit on a branch The birahā stays in the heart, my brother! You sing it when it emanates from the heart] The second wave of birahā arrived with the rise of the Ahı̄r musician clan led by Bihāri Lal Yādav in the early twentieth century (Marcus 1989). A disciple of Swami Sivanand from Benares, he is, in fact, now universally recognised as the father of birahā and called “Guru Bihāri”. Bihāri Lal Yādav innovated with music ensembles for kharı̄ birahā. His own musical troupe consisted of him as lead singer and two chorus singers (Marcus 1989).6 This wave could be attributed to a social identity rather than a musical theme (rasa). Ahirs are a cattle-herding community, and birahā depicted their “field call” or “holler”, similar to Alpine yodelling but lower in pitch and higher in intensity (Claus 2003: 281). The stronger physique and loudness inherent in

Migration and music  217 Ahirs are reflected in this music, and it began to define a caste identity rather than stand as a form of universal music. While Peter Manuel links the Caribbean birahā to the primordial form, the predominant aspect of birahā compositions seems to be from this second wave. This form – kharı̄ birahā – could well have travelled across the sea with indentured labourers to the Caribbean. Early forms of second wave birahā had three essential components: terı̄, antarā and udān (Claus 2003: 281). Chorus singers would begin with terı̄ and were called terı̄ kahnewāle (singers of terı̄). The lead singer would move from softer tones (naram) to louder tones (garam), reaching a climax (udān). And these lyrical compositions would be intervened with long narratives to capture the interest of the audience, who would stir up the performances with emotive bursts such as “hāi hāi”, “arey”, and “wāh wāh”. This musical structure enhanced their popularity, and it became a regular feature of lower-caste weddings. Later forms of second wave Biraha did not follow such rigid structure. Caribbean birahā possesses a similar structure of long narratives, with variation from softer to louder tones, and this could have been inherited from the Yādav legacy. Post-independence birahā transformations in India led to a third wave. This wave incorporated Bollywood parodies and popular narratives along with the use of newer musical instruments and acoustic equipment. Birahā reached festivals in metros, particularly Chhath, when migrants from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh began to invite birahā singers. There are birahā inter-school contests in villages, and birahā duels (dangal) is a common sight on contemporary television screens. Top Indian birahā singers have their own Youtube channels with a good number of subscriptions, some of them crossing a million views. The singer Kalpana Patowary has launched an anthology of birahā, and also an album titled Kharı̄ Birahā. On the other hand, Caribbean birahā, because of its lack of innovation and survival tools, has been overpowered by genres such as Chutney music, phagwā, baithak gāna and coutāl. Although some tried to revive the genre – Ajit Praimsingh of Trinidad, for example, made CDs and distributed them through his shop7 – and many Indian birahā singers frequently visited these countries, third wave birahā could not find a footing in the Caribbean. Specific survival strategies of birahā in India and the Caribbean Despite some presence in the rural areas of eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, birahā of the first wave failed to make a mark on urban culture, as we have seen. During the rise of second wave birahā, initially the songs continued as carakariyā birahā, with four stanzas, with syntax and a set of rules as in first wave birahā; but these rules were soon relaxed (Yadav 2009). As we have seen, the addition of a narrative and audience participation in the form of sounds of encouragement helped to entrench the birahā in parts of rural India and this is the form that seems to have travelled to the Caribbean. Among the Caribbean indentured population, Ahı̄rs and similar castes (Kurmi, Koiri and Dhanuk) comprised nearly 30 per cent of the Indian

218  Praveen Kumar Jha immigrants (Jha 2019: 139). They were certainly in higher demand because of their agrarian background, strong physique, and social acceptance of migration. However, in the Caribbean, birahā extended beyond caste boundaries because of the existence of a compact and dependent community with a uniform work environment. In terms of choice of musical instruments, birahā chose a minimalistic, rhythmic, and fairly loud path. Earliest forms of second wave birahā involved two metal rods of approximately 9 inches length each, clapped together, called kartāl. This was unique to birahā at the time. While the lead singer sang, chorus accompanists provided beats with the kartāl. And it was such an instinctive and handy instrument that anybody from audience could play it (Marcus 1989: 97–99). Caribbeans brought (or may have invented it themselves) a similar minimalistic instrument called dand-tāl or dan-tāl.8 This is simply a horseshoe hitting the iron rod, initially made from wrought iron used for making railway tracks.9 Being a minimalistic instrument, it could well have been a respite for Jahajis (a term used for indentured emigrants on the ship). on the long ship journey. There are ongoing debates on whether the dand-tāl originated in India or the Caribbean, but what is striking is that while it has become a universal instrument for the Caribbean diaspora, it is conspicuously missing from the Indian folk arena. Surinamese singer Raj Mohan found a dhobiyā group in Kushinagar (India) playing a similar instrument similar, but that was a rare find.10 Moreover, in India, after the introduction of the dholak, harmonium and jhānjh (cymbal), the kartāl too was abandoned (Marcus 1989: 107–110). Apart from his innovative musical ensembles, another strategy Bihāri Lal Yādav employed was to take birahā from the rural to the urban temple environment. This may seem like the usual rural to urban migration narrative, but in colonial India, it was nothing short of a social revolution. Bihāri Lal Yādav was an Ahı̄r, a backward caste from village Patna in Ghazipur district (not Patna city, capital of the state of Bihar). In those days, temples of Benaras were filled with kajalı̄ (or kajarı̄) singers.11 They held competitive duels (dangal) popular in Ghazipur and Benaras. Birahā musically challenged kajalı̄ in Benaras temples, and its sheer strength almost knocked down the popular temple folk genre. This not only raised the status of birahā, but Ahı̄r society as a whole, which would have a long-lasting political impact on Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The kajalı̄ lineage was not only defeated, but their male singers gradually merged with birahā exponents and began to train under them. Birahā had religious themes in the past too but taking over the temples of Benaras was a huge feat (Marcus 1989: 96–97). Caribbean folk singers did not have such a competitive environment. While they did organise friendly dangals, those were amongst the birahā singers and not against any other genre. Kajalı̄ lost its meaning in the Caribbean, not because of any challenge from birahā, but rather due to weather patterns (Manuel 2013); the Caribbean simply did not have a fixed rainy season like India. Dangals once prevalent in the Caribbean have become rare these days, yet these did help to sustain the genre for a while.

Migration and music  219 After attaining a strong position, Ahı̄rs in India began to consolidate, dominate, and monopolise birahā. Like the gharānā tradition of the Khans of Hindustani music, the Yādavs of Birahā developed an akhārā system.12 It was an unofficial patenting of lyrics – a certain lyric would be the sole property of a certain akhārā. Any singer who enlists in an akhārā could only sing those lyrics, and these were non-transferable. Competitive duels between different akhārās became a common feature in venues ranging from temples to weddings (Marcus 1989: 96). This not only sharpened the skills of singers, but also gave them a long-term survival advantage. Just like the qawwālı̄ (another competitive musical form), the reason for the Darwinian survival of birahā lies in its competitiveness. On the other hand, this restricted the territory of birahā and it became pretty much limited to the Yādav lineage and some offshoots. Present exponents, such as the veteran Hira Lal Yādav (who is the grandson of Bihāri Lal Yādav) are of that descent. While competitive duels translocated to the Caribbean, such a restrictive akhārā tradition failed to flourish there. Birahā was shared among the Indian community in the Caribbean without any caste bias and there have been Brahmins13 who sang birahā with religious themes in temples (Manuel 2012). To strengthen the akhārā tradition, birahā singers made some subtle changes in musical structure. One of them was to replace the sumiran with chāp. A typical birahā begins with a sumiran, an ode to the gods and/or teachers. One of the older exponents of birahā in the early eighteenth century, Razzab Khan, would sing: Pahle ham sumirilā paravar dı̄gār ke Jeı̄ hamarā ke racle jahān Dusre ham sumirilā maı̄ sursatı̄ ke Jeı̄ hamarā ke dihilı̄ giyān Tisrā ham sumirilā rājā mahābat ke Je ki hamār rākhe lā parān [First, I remember our god who had designed this world Second, I remember mother Saraswati [goddess of wisdom] who gave me knowledge Third, I remember King Mahabat [Mahabat Khan, a landlord of Azamgarh] who takes care of our lives] However, a current birahā exponent, Mangal Yādav (son of Hira Lal Yādav), would sing (Marcus 1989: 97): Swamı̄ guru bihārı̄ ramman horı̄ dharma anuyāyı̄ Hı̄rā lakshmı̄ kavı̄ mangal sevaı̄ mandir nit bhaı̄

220  Praveen Kumar Jha Here, Mangal Yādav remembers his ancestors Bihāri, Ramman, Hira and Laxmi Lal Yādav. This chāp sings of the lineage of that particular akhārā, which provides a stamp of authenticity to the birahā singer. A birahā singer without a chāp would be considered a musically orphaned singer, without credibility. A musical ensemble was often called a “party”, for example, Hira Lal Yādav and party (Marcus 1989: 101). Although Caribbean birahā singers also had such an ensemble, they lacked a structured chāp system and they continued to employ the older sumiran system of remembering the gods. While it may be considered an archaic form on this basis, they probably did not need (or think of) such a survival and credibility strategy.

The converging and diverging themes of migration There are thematic differences in birahā compositions in India and Caribbean and this may have justification in migration as well as in the changes in the form in a long period of time There had been much stronger contenders for this migratory theme such as bidesiyā, which became the voice of the girmitiyā (indentured labourers) and all such migratory groups from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The songs of separation that formed the older or first wave birahā could have been a precursor to bidesiyā. An older birahā song of Bisrām shows a thematic overlap between birahā and bidesiyā (Singh 1965). Bisrām was a singer of the Ghazipur–Azamgarh lineage who wrote many birahā songs in memory of his wife, who succumbed to a disease at an early age. His songs exemplify the theme of separation of first wave birahā. This song of birahā is close to the bidesiyā theme and sets the mood for migration, a kind of musical trigger. Hotı̄ ham panchı̄ uda jātı̄ ohı̄ desvā Jahān rahe na dukh ke lavles Udı̄ ham jātı̄ chodı̄ dukh ke nagariyā Aur chodı̄ detı̄ pāpı̄ manaı̄n ke dagariyā Uhavān jāke ekatho madai banautı̄ Dukhavā ke jingı̄ tab sukh se bitautı̄ [If I were a bird, would have soared to a land Where there are no signs of sorrow Would have flown leaving this city of sorrow And would have left the path of sinners There I would make a hut And live happily this sad life of mine] Now, here is a Trinidadian birahā, sung by Sadhoo Boodram Ramgoolam: ̄ ājı̄ tātā tātı̄ bhārat des se āye hain Ajā Kālā pānı̄ pār karte trinidad me āye hain

Migration and music  221 Trinidad me āke dekho ghar ko basāye hain Mehanat kar ke āj ı̄ ājā ladake ko padhaye hain Koi teacher koi lawyer koi business chalaye hain Koi doctor judge koi magistrate banaye hain Vidyāvān prime minister banāye hain Koi pandit koi mullā bhı̄ banāye hain [My mother, father and grandparents have come from India Crossed the black waters to come to Trinidad They settled here in Trinidad, worked hard to educate their children Some have become teachers, lawyers, while some became businessmen Some became judges, and some magistrates A scholar prime minister they have made And some became priests of Hindus, some of Muslims] Both these narratives would be difficult to differentiate from the bidesiyā theme. The uniqueness and strength of the birahā lie in its free musical structure and thematic choices. This also helped the birahā to assimilate other lower-caste folk songs such as dhobiyā and lorik, as well as alhākhand. Usurbudha Arya (1968) mentions a dhobiyā song from Suriname,14 which he calls a dhobiyā birahā. Motı̄ motı̄ rotiā pakaū baraitin, bihāne jebaı̄ dhobı̄ ghāt Tı̄n cı̄j mat bhulio baraitin, hukkā tamākhu āg Dhobiyā calā rāh ko, panco! āı̄le badariyā gher Unchavā se dhobiniyā pukāre, lāvau gadahavā pher [Hey good lady! You should bake thick breads; I shall go to washerman’s place early in the morning You mustn’t forget three things, good lady hookah, tobacco and fire Jurymen! Washerman is on his way. Clouds gather The washerwoman calls from a distance, bring back the donkey again] Here it needs to be mentioned that Peter Manuel (2012) regards the modern Indian form of birahā as being close to dhobiyā tunes; however, dhobiyā exists as a different genre in India. Indian dhobiyā embraces romantic to lewd overtones in the present day, while birahā retains its socio-religious flavour. The true merger of dhobiyā and birahā, in fact, occurred in the Caribbean because of the breakdown of the caste structure – and not in India in spite of the wave of post-Independence socialism. However, there are some exceptions. For example, Ram Sevak Singh, a well-known birahā exponent in India, is a Kshatriya. These narratives, whether of a washerman or an Ahı̄r, became songs of movement. The striking difference from bidesiyā is its positivity. Birahā accepts migration as a way of life, while bidesiyā has an inherent sense of

222  Praveen Kumar Jha longing and despair. A Surinamese birahā recounts life in Suriname and the singer’s roots back in India in a direct, seamless way: Hansū sahar gulzār hai more bhaiyā Ab bastı̄ haı̄ aparampār O paramaribo me sahar ke habdā me more bhaiyā Ab parem ke lage bazār Are mariyamberg aisā kothı̄ nā dekhā Kantorā ke āge dukaniyā Ab Hansū aisā gāv nā dekhā Jahā carahan ke adhikār Are Ramaharakhā Hansū ke rahavaiyā Hum to aı̄le divākar āj Zilā Javanapur morā haı̄ Ab cakavaliyā haı̄ gāv Suparā bhagat ke putra hau Ab Bhagavantadas haı̄ nāv [City Hansu is flourishing, my brother! And habitation here is vast Across the river in Paramaribo, my brother! There is a market of love I haven’t seen an estate like Mariyamberg The shop is right in front of the office Haven’t seen a village like Hansu Where we have the right to herd our cows Ramharakh, a resident of Hansu I have come to Diwakar [office of the Arya Samaj] My district is Jaunpur And village is Chakavaliya I am the son of Supra Bhagat And my name is Bhagvant Das] This song also depicts the influence of the Arya Samaj on Caribbean Indian society and life in Suriname. The tone of migration is not despairing but joyful. The singer rejoices in finding a village that gives him the freedom to herd cows, something he has not come across before arriving in the Caribbean. This positive aspect of migration is what separates birahā from bidesiyā. In plantations, a tiring weekday would probably set the mood for bidesiyā, with a sense of longing for the home country. And the joyful weekend may bring the birahā back into the fray with its loud energetic songs and narratives. Ramdeen Chhotu sings a seemingly empathetic song with powerful dholak beating in the background, and this paradox of emotions exemplifies birahā (Chotu 2012). Pachavā se sāhab bole, kāte nā katārı̄ Kalakattā se sadhu āye dādhı̄ much udāye ke

Migration and music  223 Dāl pakāve bhāt pakāve kahunā ke khāye ke [Officer is saying from behind that your knife is not cutting (sugar cane) properly Sadhu (bearded priest) has come completely shaved from Calcutta Cooking lentils and rice, and eating it somehow] Birahā has declined in Trinidad and British Guyana, but it is still sung in Suriname. Mangre Siewnarine, an exponent of Surinamese birahā,15 composes songs on the changing culture and names in the Caribbean, an important feature of transcontinental migration. Pitā ke nām suno dharam singh bābū Aur mātā ke dharam deı̄ hai nām Putra ke nām suno henı̄ jonı̄ vimpı̄ Putri ke marı̄cā luisā nām [Father’s name is Dharam Singh Mother’s name is Dharam Dei Sons’ names are Honey Johnny Wimpy Daughters’ names are Maricha Louisa] Here he satirically illustrates the gradual changes in religious understandings and nomenclature. An investigation into why birahā survived longer in Suriname takes us briefly to other historical landscapes. Although the Caribbean looks like a homogenous group of islands, it has a marked heterogeneity in culture and history. Suriname was a Dutch colony while Guyana and Jamaica were British colonies. Guadeloupe, on the other hand, was a French colony. The French did not allow Indian culture to flourish in any of their colonies, assimilating the migrants into their culture instead. The British had a mixed intercultural relationship with the people they colonised, particularly in the Caribbean, where they allowed growth in some aspects of culture and restricted other aspects. The Dutch, on the other hand, had an ādat policy, whereby they encouraged the Indians in Suriname to retain their customs, so that they preserved their agrarian instincts. Although it affected their socioeconomic mobility, Indians in Suriname could retain their culture much longer than their neighbours.16 This is one example of how external factors influence migratory music. Migration in time and space in the Caribbean also led to mergers, overpowering and abandonment of folk genres. One of the obvious mergers related to caste-based songs, for example dhobiyā, as mentioned above. Mallāh-geet (river songs) merged with bhatiyāli tunes, both in India and the Caribbean. One of the popular lyrics, “Nadiyā dhı̄re baho” (Oh river! move slowly), flourished in the Caribbean because of its riverine and coastal habitation. Although quite different from birahā architecture, these songs

224  Praveen Kumar Jha of movement and migration with “holler” calls could be termed an aquatic parallel of birahā. There may have been other reasons for the disappearance or merger of certain genres. One of them was the disappearance of rice-grinding practices, both in India and the Caribbean, which resulted in the loss of song genres such as jāntsar.17 When the jānt (grinding wheel) was replaced with mechanical rice mills, jāntsar lost its charm. Birahā narratives in two worlds From the first wave to the second wave of birahā, the narrative shifted from separation (viraha) to socio-religious narratives. The first-wave narrative seems to have skipped the Caribbean; it was the early religious narratives of kharı̄ birahā which lingered here. A strong association with the religious book Rāmcaritamānas – on the life of Lord Rama, written by Tulsidas – was a key feature of the indentured immigrant. This bond stemmed not from a religious inclination as such, but from their relating of their life and journey with the life of the Hindu god Rāma who travelled through forests and the sea, leaving his home in Ayodhyā. The Sı̄ta haran (kidnapping of Lord Rāma’s wife Sitā) episode symbolised another prominent feature of plantations, where Coolie wives were cajoled or forcibly taken away by richer farmers or the overseers (Bahadur 2013: 103–105). One kharı̄ birahā song still sung in Caribbean includes the lyrics: Ramajı̄ ki bagiyā sı̄tā ke phulvāri Lachiman devrā baithā rakhvāri [Lord Rama and Sı̄ta’s garden Lakshman, brother-in-law, is keeping watch] Religious narratives were an important stepping-stone for birahā’s rise in both the continents. A subtle difference can be discerned between Rāma-based compositions in the Caribbean and Krishna-based compositions in India. While indentured immigrants associated themselves with the Rāmāyana, with the rise of the Yādav clan as birahā exponents, this song genre’s focus became Krishna-based lyrics, since they were Krishna worshippers. The riddle or competition form (dangal) has been common to both India and the Caribbean; however, it is gradually fading away from both continents, occurring only in the occasional televised presentation. A typical riddle from the Caribbean may look like this (Arya 1968: 145): Kāhe kı̄ torı̄ nagārā banı̄ hai Aur kāhe kı̄ lagı̄ ab khāl Kaun sā okrā bhı̄tar bole Abe uthe chattiso rāg? Chandan kā gathı̄ banı̄ nagarā he bahinı̄

Migration and music  225 Bhalā bakre ke lāge khāl Are kālı̄ bhavānı̄ okrā bhı̄tar bole Abe uthe chattiso rāg [What is your drum made of And what skin has been used? What speaks from its inside And thirty-six tunes emerge? This drum is carved of sandalwood And goatskin is affixed Kali goddess speaks from inside And thirty-six ragas emerge] Another common feature in both the continents is birahā being sung in wedding ceremonies at the bride’s place to entertain the bārāt (groom party members). In India, this is common only among Ahı ̄rs and backward castes, while Caribbean marriages have birahā irrespective of castes. Newer Indian birahā parody Bollywood songs for such occasions. But one static component is the gradual mood conversion from the softer tempo (naram) to aggressive tempo (garam) leading to a climax and ending with udān. Here, another phase of Indian birahā needs to be explained, where the schism between religious and politico-social narratives began. Two primary exponents of these two narratives illustrate this. Ram Kailash Yādav, known as Birahā Samrāt, had been performing birahā since 1949 for All India Radio. He kept the focus on religion-based lyrics based on Ram, Krishna, and Shankar (Shiva). Baleshwar Yādav, a singer born in Mau district of Uttar Pradesh, pioneered socio-political storytelling in the form of birahā, and composed such engrossing stories (prasang) that labourers would say, “If you play Baleshwar Yādav in the background, we can work two extra hours!”18 Baleshwar’s last concert was in 2008 in Suriname, just before his death. This was the post-Emergency era of Indian politics (1975–77; when president declared a state emergency due to internal disturbance), and Yādav power was beginning to emerge in both Bihār and Uttar Pradesh. This modern birahā (chuttā birahā) traversed caste boundaries, with the entire lower caste coming under one umbrella to enjoy this musical form. Many veterans and young birahā singers picked up this new art, switching from conventional narratives to stories (prasang) selected from newspapers. The Caribbean did not witness this kind of thematic innovation; here, religious influences from Sanatan Hindu Sabha or Arya Samaj kept the religious narrative uppermost. However, birahā’s response to social issues was not an unheard-of phenomenon in the Caribbean. An old birahā found in Caribbean soil could have been brought from India, that is, before 1920. It talks about a husband who indulges in gambling. Saiyā morā juārı̄ juā khele sārı̄ ratiā Bājū hāre band hāre hārı̄ gaye nathiyā

226  Praveen Kumar Jha Solaho singār suāmı̄ karā dele kuwatiyā Are matiyā khudāi ke sadak pitvāve re Are sadak ke upar rel daurāye saiyā morā juārı̄ Jāye ke tab gorakhpur me kar de ham nalisiyā Hathvā me berı̄ dāle gorvā janjı̄riyā Āge āge saiyā cale piche chaparasiyā Kanhavā kudāri dhare murvā pe hasiyā Are dhı̄re dhı̄re katau jahalkhanvā ke matiyā Kidhau suāmi ke bent lāge kidhau lāge lathiyā [My husband is a gambler; he gambles the whole night He lost the arm, and the armband; (and) lost my nose-ring All my sixteen jewelries has he pawned He digs the soil and makes the roads And on the road, runs the rails. O my gambler husband! So, I went to Gorakhpur [a city in Uttar Pradesh] police station to report Two policemen came from Gorakhpur They tied him with handcuffs and put chains on his feet My husband follows the policemen He has a shovel on the shoulders and sickle on his head Now he digs the soil in jail And my husband gets lashes with sticks]. (Arya 1968: 149) If we compare this with present-day Indian birahā from Hira Lal Yādav, we find some similarities in the tales. In his composition “Kāli dulhan” (The black bride), Hira Lal sings of a husband trying to abandon and eventually drown his wife because of her dark complexion. Somehow, she survives, and the husband is put behind bars. Dekhate suratiyā dulhaniyā ke Dulhā ke cadh gel bukhār ho Jab sab hı̄ cāhe madhubālā Ī kāl ı̄ jaharavā kā hoı̄? Jab sab hı̄ cāhe suraj ko Rajnı̄ ke sunartā kā hoı̄? Jab sab hı̄ rambhā ho jaı̄ Hamahan ke kadarvā kā hoı̄? [After seeing the face of the bride Groom caught a high-grade fever When everybody becomes a honey-girl What would happen to the black poison? When everybody likes the sun What would happen to the beauty of the night? When everybody becomes a damsel Who would care for us?]19

Migration and music  227 But this socio-political narrative did not progress in the Caribbean for unknown reasons. It could not have been the lack of issues, because the Caribbean too had social challenges such gambling, alcoholism, and racial discrimination. The migrants could not incorporate these themes into birahā and restricted themselves mostly to religious narratives.

Conclusion The Indian form of birahā underwent a journey of survival from a cattle-herding rural environment to an urban environment of temples and competitive duels and carved out a social identity. On the other hand, transcontinental migration led to the conservation of a musical capital amongst people with a common cultural identity. In the end, birahā has two incarnates in the two continents. Unfolding in the Caribbean story are themes arising from seafaring migration and the migrants’ newfound social life in a distant land. They hold on to a primitive instrument like dan-tal as a souvenir from past, just as they preserve the religious themes. Although this may be perceived as a “stunted growth”, the aesthetics behind such music is a result of migration. It may also be possible that cultural exchanges with the Indian form in future may influence the musical architecture of the Caribbean version, leading to a homogenised form of birahā. But what seems more likely is that the music will tread individual paths based on socio-political factors and the cultural pasts of the practitioners.

Notes 1 Dhrupad is an ancient Indian classical musical tradition, having links with the Hindu scriptures, and traditionally having a rigid structure. Khayāl is an Indian classical form, improvised under the Muslim rulers (late Mughal dynasty), with its meaning deriving from imagination and improvisation. Its structure is relatively non-rigid, and it thrived under various schools of music (gharānā). Thumrı̄ is a semi-classical form of Indian music, which flourished mostly among courtesans and nautch dancers. 2 Batgamni are songs of travel (walking along the road) in the Mithila region of Bihar (India) and Nepal. Bhatiyāli is a river song of Bengal (India). 3 Sending messages through birds became a recurring theme in folk songs such as ‘Jā jā re sugnā jā re’ (Go, my parrot, go!) popular in the Bhojpur region of Bihar. 4 All translations of the songs are by the author. 5 Razzaq Khan belonged to Bandi village in Mohammadabad tehsil, probably in present-day Ghazipur district. Deen Ali composed the birahā poem ‘Chirain ke panchayat’ (the court of birds). 6 There is no evidence of musical ensembles in the first wave. 7 Peter Manuel directed the documentary Tassa Thunder. 8 Conversation with Surinamese singer Raj Mohan on 9 July 2018. See also Singh (2019). Also mentioned in the conversation of Peter Manuel with Narinder Mokam Singh in the documentary Tassa Thunder: Folk Music from India to Caribbean (by Peter Manuel). 9 Conversation of Peter Manuel with Lakshmi Narayan Yādav in the documentary Tassa Thunder: Folk Music from India to the Caribbean (by Peter Manuel).

228  Praveen Kumar Jha 10 Conversation with Surinamese singer Raj Mohan on 9 July 2018. See also Singh (2019). 11 Kajalı̄ literally means kohl and is used for a form of folk music sung in the rainy season in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. 12 There were many other akhārās, e.g., Sadhu Akhārā, Gharaana Devideen, Gharana Kallu Mangal, Menhilal Gharana. See Dikshit (2016). 13 Some Brahmins in the Caribbean may not have been Brahmin by birth, but by choice and training under priests. Besides, many were self-declared Brahmins. 14 Lorik is a folk song of valour based on a historical warrior named Lorik. This song is very popular in India too, and has been sung by the legendary singer, the late Kishore Kumar, for a Hindi film Qatil Aur Aashiq. 15 From the documentary Tassa Thunder (by Peter Manuel). 16 Conversation with Chan Choenni at Harlem, the Netherlands, on 10 July 2018. 17 Jāntsar is a kind of folk song sung during grinding cereals in a hand grindingmill called jānt. 18 Author’s telephonic conversation with Nirala Bidesiyā, a folk music expert from New Delhi, India, 28 August 2019. 19 Hira Lal Yādav, Album Bhojpuri Purvanchali Biraha Kali Dulhan, [2014], Max Cassettes.

References Arya, U. 1968. Ritual Songs and Folk Songs of the Hindus of Surinam. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Bahadur, G. 2013. Coolie Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chotu, Ramdeen. 2012. Biraha Singing: Trinidad Style. Recorded by Ajeet Praimsingh. Trinidad and Tobago: Praimsingh Production [CD]. Claus, Peter J. 2003. South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. New York: Taylor and Francis. Dikshit, S. 2016. Awadh Sanskriti Vishwakosh. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Vani Prakashan. Grierson, G. 1886. “Art. XII – Some Bhoj’pūrı̄ Folk-Songs. London”. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 18 (2): 207–267. Jha, P. 2019. Coolie Lines. New Delhi: Vani Prakashan. Lai, W.L. 1993. Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies 1838–1918. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Lal, Brij V. 2004. Girmitiyās: The Origin of Fiji Indians. Lautoka: Fiji Institute of Applied Studies. Lidskog, R. 2016. “The Role of Music in Ethnic Identity Formation in Diaspora: A Research Review”. International Social Science Journal 66: 23–38. doi:10.1111/ issj.12091. Manuel, P. 2012. “The Trajectories of Transplants: Singing Alhā, ‘Birhā’ and the Rāmāyan in the Indic Caribbean”. Asian Music 43 (2): 115–154. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23253612. Manuel, P. 2013. “Retention and Invention in Bhojpuri Diasporic Music Culture: Perspectives from the Caribbean, India, and Fiji”. In Caribbean Issues in the Indian Diaspora, edited by Noor Kumar Mahabir, 45–56. New Delhi: Serials Publications. Marcus, Scott L. 1989. “The Rise of a Folk Music Genre – Birahā”. In Culture and Power in Benaras: Community, Performance and Environment, 1800–1980, edited by Sandria B. Freitag, 93–113. Oxford: University of California Press.

Migration and music  229 Meinhof, U.H., and A. Triandafyllidou. 2006. “Beyond the Diaspora”. In Transcultural Europe, edited by U.H. Meinhof and A. Triandafyllidou, 200–222. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Niranjana, T. 2006. Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ramnarine, Tina Karina. 1996. “‘Indian’ Music in the Diaspora: Case Studies of ‘Chutney’ in Trinidad and in London”. British Journal of Ethnomusicology 5: 133–153. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3060870. Ramnarine, Tina Karina. 2001. Creating Their Own Space. Kingston: University of West Indies Press. Rizvi, Syed Najmul Raza. 1980. “A Zamindar Family of Eastern Uttar Pradesh (A Brief Study of Rajahs of Azamgarh) (1609–1771 A.D.)”. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 41: 239–247. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/ stable/44141845. Schiller, N.G., and U.H. Meinhof. 2011. “Singing a New Song? Transnational Migration, Methodical Nationalism, and Cosmoplitan Perspectives”. Music and Arts in Action 3 (3): 21–39. Singh, Manoj. 2019. “Surinām me sarnāmı̄ bhojpurı̄ kā surilā girmitiyā”. The Wire (Hindi), 16 February. http://thewirehindi.com/6917/rajmohan-a-girmitiyamajdoor-musician-in-suriname/. Singh, Mukhram. 1965. Bisram ke Birhe. Edited by I. Sinha. Varanasi: Bhojpuri Sansad. Yadav, Chandradev. 2009. Lok Kavya Birahā. Lokarang. Vol. 1, 113–118. Assam: Sahayatra Prakashan.

Part IV

Negotiating the city space

12 The Purusharthi refugee Sindhi migrants in Jaipur’s walled city Garima Dhabhai1

In the twentieth century, the partition of the subcontinent into the nation states of India and Pakistan ushered in a massive wave of migration. This chapter examines the spatial arrangement of refugee groups within the walled city of Jaipur as a result of this migration in the period after 1947, marked by the braided histories of Partition and the merger of princely territories with the newly formed state of India. In the wake of Partition and migration of people from West Pakistan, several refugee camps were set up in Jaipur. Some reports put their number at almost 3000.2 These migrants mostly came from the urban areas of West Pakistan and were involved in trade (Chelliah et al. 1965). This urban character of the migrants led to a rearrangement of social and economic relations in the city. The migrant communities inhabited new neighbourhoods and markets that emerged, and also formed part of the burgeoning labour force in the city (39–40). Most such places came up outside of the walled city, the most important being Adarsh Bazar and Raja Park, which still retain a distinct Punjabi and Sindhi Hindu demography. This chapter focuses on one such market space that came up within Jaipur’s walled city, in the late 1940s and early 1970s, with shops of the Hindu Sindhi refugees in the city traversing the urban centres around the Rajasthan border.3 Their advent did not just lead to a demographic transformation in the city, but also generated social tensions in the latter half of the 1940s, which find mention in police reports in Jaipur. A report from 1948 mentions a scuffle between a Sindhi and a Muslim man in the Ghat Gate area of the walled city over the right to fill water from a public tap.4 Refugees from Punjab and Sindh created associations to put forth their demands.5 The Sindhi Sharnarthi Panchayat, for instance, held a meeting at Ramniwas Garden to air the grievances of the refugees, along with presenting an address to the ruler, Maharaja Man Singh II, on the occasion of his daughter’s wedding. The process of incorporating the Sindhi community, mainly a trading group, in the narrative of urban regeneration of the new provincial capital of Jaipur was carried out through the trope of purushartha, which roughly translates as “hard work” and has cultural overtones. However, this did not ensure their absolute inclusion in the representational matrix of the city, DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-16

234  Garima Dhabhai which is dominated by the image of Rajput royalty and is inhabited by Jain and Baniya traders. This makes the Sindhi purusharthi (roughly translated as “hard-working person”) a specific category for the purposes of governance, but not a legitimate enough identity within the burgeoning discourse of heritage in Jaipur. The city wall also played a metaphorical role in this “inclusive exclusion” (Agamben 1998: 12), as it were, of the community. On the one hand, the “walled city” absorbed them in the retail economy and benefited from their enterprise; on the other, the recent re-signification of the wall as “heritage” by the state authorities has made the position of Sindhi retailers rather precarious in this new regime of valuation of urban infrastructure. This chapter will delve into these dimensions of spatial arrangement of the “walled” enclave of Jaipur in relation to a migrant group, the Sindhi refugees, through an ethnographic exploration of Indira Bazar, one of the market spaces created in the 1970s for rehabilitating this group. With a focus upon purushartha as a trope in the value regime and the transformation of this migrant refugee group into purusharthis, the chapter charts the journey of the historically mediated relationship between the figure of the migrant and the landscape of the city. The transformation of the figure of the sharnarthi (refugee) into a purusharthi allows us to engage with a neglected area in migration studies, that is, the value regime and its centrality in making up the figure of a migrant.

The purusharthi in the walled city Indira Bazar, the market which came up to absorb refugee influx after 1971, is nestled at the south-western edge of the walled city, over part of an erstwhile drain or ganda nala, bordering the parkota (city wall). This market is a retail hub sliced into two parallel halves by a divider, with mechanics and repair workshops on one side, run by predominantly Muslim shopkeepers, and small shops selling readymade garments, furniture, cycles, and household items run by Hindu Sindhi refugees on the other. At the fork of the divider stands Purusharthi Park, set up in 2009. The bold black lettering prohibiting entry into the park makes it a rather paradoxical public space. A memorial structure at the centre of Purusharthi Park, installed in 1976, claims to be an ode to the purushartha. Today it stands in a dilapidated condition and the grey metallic remains of a modernist installation convey industrial decay in its rustiness. It frames several protruding figures, engaged in different acts of labour, often ambiguously represented. Acts of labour here are depicted alongside leisure activities in a bazaar – playing cards or simply sitting in a corner – apart from through the more conventional occupational figures of butchers, potters, and construction workers. A woman tending to a child and a few stray animals are also noticeable, perhaps re-creating everyday life in the marketplace. The motifs are framed in an unpatterned network of grey metallic pipes, nets, wheels, and rivets, like randomly placed useless machine parts. A uniformed but unnamed

The Purusharthi refugee  235 figure in military green ensemble is sculpted on top of the engraving. There is an undefined but strangely familiar coming together of national duty and labour in this entire structure. This is corroborated by the words one finds etched on a marble plaque in the middle – “Purushartha se Vikas … punarnirman … navyuga” (development through hard work … reconstruction … new era) – underlining the advent of a “new era” through “reconstruction, hard work and development”. Purusharthi Park takes its name from this structure commemorating the purushartha. There is no easy translation of the term purusharthi as it represents the convergence of several discourses, etymologically and philosophically. It may be roughly translated as a hard-working or enterprising person and offers somewhat of a counter-narrative to the usual term for “refugee” in Hindi: sharanarthi. It is imperative to have an understanding of the political history of Jaipur to make sense of this difference between sharanarthi and purusharthi. Jaipur, which was a Rajput princely state, boasted of a culture of Rajput generosity, where providing refuge was a form of patronage, representing the sovereign power of the king. In the post-merger (of princely states with the nation state) context of the 1950s, these idioms of princely sovereignty found their way into the practices of postcolonial politics, in efforts to draw political legitimacy. Iqbal Narain and P.C. Mathur (1990) delve into this tendency in order to understand the politics in Rajasthan during the last decade of the twentieth century, which they call a form of “Rajput Hinduism”. The sharanagat (seeker of refuge) was a figure to be accommodated in Rajput polity through patronage and protection. The postcolonial ramification of the sharan doctrine, according to Narain and Mathur, is manifested in a relatively peaceful coexistence of diverse religious communities in Rajasthan (33). We may note in passing that though this analysis may be true for Rajasthani politics of the late twentieth century, more recent happenings in the state signal a new phase of communalised politics with changes in the political context at the national level. Even the Hindu nationalist leaning Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) own idiom has in this regard undergone transformation in Rajasthan, where it ruled intermittently for almost two decades, first under the stewardship of Bhairon Singh Shekhawat and then Vasundhara Raje. Notably they belonged to different strata of Rajputs, the latter having a royal lineage while the former was active in the zamindari abolition movement of the 1950s (Basu 2015: 255–265). By their re-signification from sharanarthis to purusharthis, the Sindhi Hindu refugees from West Pakistan after the 1940s and then in the 1970s sought inclusion in the urban space and were subsequently made a part of the developmental agenda of the Nehruvian state. The discourse of purushartha perhaps made their inclusion more legitimate, owing to its undergirding by enterprise as an operative idea. It is therefore no surprise that one finds Jawaharlal Nehru’s name alongside a quotation on the marble plaque in Sanskrit, Hindi, and English. The quote is a Sanskrit verse from the Bhagavada Gita: “Karmanyavadhikaraste ma faleshu kadachana”, translated there as “Duty is thy concern and not the reward”. Interestingly,

236  Garima Dhabhai this verse has been commented upon and reinterpreted by many prominent nationalists such as Aurobindo Ghose, Mahatama Gandhi, and Balgangadhar Tilak (Bandopadhyay 2009) to legitimise the nationalist call for action through an underpinning of a spiritual sensibility. Sibaji Bandopadhyay (2009), in his analysis of the verse, calls it the “invention of nationalist motto”. Given the embeddedness of this verse in the web of nationalist history and Hindu mythology, it is interesting to see its invocation at another moment of nation building, in the aftermath of Partition, on a memorial dedicated to the purusharthi. The discourse of postcolonial development and rehabilitation legible in the terrain of Jaipur’s walled city was centred on the figure of the purusharthi – a term used in the archives of the state and refugee associations (such as the Purusharthi Thari Union Holders’ Directory, 2008). The refugee, manifesting the churn caused by Partition, emerged as a figure to be governed and managed within the limits of the new nation state, furthering its developmental imperative (Kudaisya and Tai 2000; Sen 2009). This purusharthi was embroiled in a history of wealth and land in Sindh, the credit economy of state-owned banks, and the politics of urban transformation in postcolonial India. A dominant trope of governance of the refugee during the Nehruvian period was its re-signification as a labouring body (Chatterjee 2017: 67–68). Several temporalities enmesh the “refugee” within Jaipur’s landscape:

Figure 12.1  An ode to the purushartha in Jaipur’s Indira Bazar. Source: Author (October 2017).

The Purusharthi refugee  237

Figure 12.2  Marble plaque narrating the history of the sculpture

Figure 12.3  Acts of labour. Source: Author (October 2017).

238  Garima Dhabhai the mythical, the princely, the national, and now the global. One mode of making claims over the city and its space was through participation in the market economy of the walled city. It should be noted that the bazaar has always been a male-dominated space, which essentially confined the notion of purushartha to the male refugee’s body, privatising women’s labour within homes or in shops selling “women’s items”. The employment of women in shops owned by the Sindhi traders generated anxieties among the older market communities in Jaipur, which rested on tropes of purity and morality. The next section takes us back to Indira Bazar, placing it in a history of the walled city’s transition through newer regimes of valuation – primarily urban development and heritage tourism.

Transforming the walled city How a person reaches Indira Bazar depends on her place in relation to the city space – as a tourist, walled city resident, suburban visitor, or daily labourer. The snail-paced traffic here consists of small goods carriers, two-wheelers, and battery-run rickshaws for short-distance travel. Unlike some other markets of similar physiology, Indira Bazar is not a controlled traffic zone. The reason for this is the marginality of the market to the heritage and tourism economy of the city, which is concentrated towards the other side of Kishanpole Bazar Road and Ajmeri Gate. Indira Bazar is a point of relative importance for the residents who live in the inner parts of the walled city, some of which have thriving craft production workshops in the streets around the area. One such street is Khajane Walo ka Rasta, which has numerous workshops of marble sculptors; however, it does not figure very prominently in a standard tourist map of the city. There is also a small shrine of Mata Leelavati on this street patronised by the Sindhi traders, who organise periodic satsangs (evenings of devotional music). The procession of Chetichand, marking the onset of the Sindhi New Year in the month of Chaitra, is taken out from the streets here.6 Indira Bazar is beyond the monumental city, which prides itself on royal palaces like Hawa Mahal and forts such as Amber. However, if one were to enter the city via Mirza Ismail Road, it could become the gateway to the walled city. This entry is only used by those who come to the market for a specific purpose: getting something repaired, buying a cheap pair of denims, or going to one of the streets attached to the market. Most of the people here have a purposeful walk and are focused on negotiating the array of vehicles on the road. Footpaths are taken over by display boards and parking. Indira Bazar was created with an initial investment of 65 lakh rupees under the Commissioner of Rehabilitation Department, Sher Singh Chittora. The State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur and Purusharthi Thari Holders’ Union, a political and social association of the Sindhi Hindu refugees, played a pivotal role in its establishment. The market initially had 529 shops, which have now multiplied to over 750.7 Anil Thadani,8

The Purusharthi refugee  239 who had come to Jaipur from another city of Rajasthan after marriage, helped his father-in-law with their cassette business in the market. After that phased out, he started retailing readymade garments, mostly denims and T-shirts for men. Pointing to a pair of faded blue jeans displayed near the entrance of his small shop, he says, “They [young men of the area] like this stuff here”. In 1988, he expanded his business by buying another small shop in the bazaar, for his younger son. The economy of space and commodity visible here is in strong contrast to the two adjacent markets, formed in the 1950s to accommodate refugees: Bapu Bazar and Nehru Bazar. As opposed to the small and unassuming shops of Indira Bazar, usually with a makeshift structure on top for storage, the shops in Bapu Bazar, Link Road, and Nehru Bazar, mostly owned by relatively well-to-do Hindu Sindhis, mostly serve tourists and an upper middle-class clientele. This explains their designer showrooms, complete with false ceilings, embedded lights, and air conditioning. Their shop floor employees, mainly from the Sindhi community itself, carry out the routine sales, while the shop owners sit at the cash desk. The communication in most of these shops is always almost bilingual: Hindi with the customers and Sindhi among themselves. Nandita Bhavnani’s account of the Sindhi community in smaller cities corroborates this linguistic practice as a part of cultural preservation (Dhar 2018). Owing to their bigger scale, these shops have apparently extended their godowns and storage facilities to the basement. Nehru Bazar has mid-range retailers of fancy items, cosmetics, lingerie, readymade hosiery garments, and other accessories. The burgeoning middle class of the city, which lives outside the walled enclave, patronises this economy, based on mass-produced goods and readymade garments. It could be said that the Sindhi economy marks a departure from the handicraft-based production system that earlier flourished in Jaipur’s princely karkhanas (factories/workshops). Hand-block printed cotton from Bagru and Sanganer have now become articles of niche consumption, found in occasional fairs or high-range boutiques. The reproducible block-printed textiles of Bapu Bazar are popular and reasonably priced, sourced from factories in the vicinity of Jaipur and even from textile hubs like Surat and Ahmedabad. The markets are also flooded with “fancy stores” or readymade garment shops, several of them selling hosiery cloth, which uses synthetic yarn.9 The nature of products on sale here also makes these popular among female customers. It is for this reason that several shops in Bapu Bazar and Nehru Bazar employ women – a departure from the older, male-dominated organisation of retail in the walled city. Indira Bazar, apart from being a space of refugee rehabilitation, may also be placed in the larger history of urban development during the mid-1970s, marked by the period of Emergency under Indira Gandhi. By this time, land and resources in the city were open to renegotiation between the older elites attached to the royal establishment and the new claimants to the spaces.10 Much of royal property was under revaluation by the Congress government

240  Garima Dhabhai of the time, leading to arrests of princely figures like Gayatri Devi, the last maharani of Jaipur who was also a Swantantra Party parliamentarian from the city.11 The refugees, who had set up temporary kiosks in the city, were granted more permanent establishments by this period. The urban renewal under the Emergency coincided with a “City Beautiful” campaign launched to mark 250 years of Jaipur’s foundation in 1977; this was conducted under the auspices of the Janata Party government led by Bhairon Singh Shekhawat (he joined the BJP in 1980), Jaipur Municipal Corporation, Urban Improvement Trust and Traffic Police (Arora et al. 1976: 83–84). The campaign entailed removal of “encroachments” or tharis (temporary kiosks made of tin and wood) from the walled city. It is locally believed that within a month around 800 tharis were removed. Indira Market was seen as a big “achievement” of the campaign. It emerged within a period of eight months in 1976 and was designed to rehabilitate the thari holders, many of whom were Muslims. The place where Indira Market is now located was considered “an ugly patch on the city surface where filth and dirt reigned” (Arora et al. 1976: 85). The market was fitted with underground electric wiring for unobstructed, smooth walking. A certain governmental “aestheticism permeates the total structure of the market. Enclosed by rows of shops in a patch of greenery stands a statue embodying the undaunted zeal of the purusharthis” (p. 85). Over time, the greenery and aestheticism gave way to an intensely commercial space, expanding in different ways. All these markets, Indira, Bapu, and Nehru, run parallel to the parkota of the old city, at its internal limit, from east to west. The Municipal Corporation, through a faded blue and white board placed inconspicuously at the southern gates to the walled city, has recently declared this parkota a “heritage” structure. The preservation of heritage in the walled city is being financed through international funding agencies such as the Ford Foundation, which initiated one of the first heritage restoration projects in Jaipur in 1985, following the models developed in Hyderabad and Ahmedabad. Over the years, the Asian Development Bank and Asia Urbs of the European Union have been other international agencies funding heritage restoration projects. Jaipur had also presented a dossier to UNESCO staking claims for heritage city status in the early 2000s (JMC 2002). International patronage has generated a different regime of governmentalisation of urban space. The earlier spatial distribution is now challenged by these new ways of framing space. As a result of this re-signification of the parkota and the walled city in general, a legal battle has ensued between the traders’ associations of these markets, whose office bearers are usually Sindhi, and the Jaipur Municipal Corporation. Notices have been served to several shopkeepers about the illegality of their shop constructions after the High Court ordered 15 metres on either side of the parkota be demarcated as a “no construction zone”.12 This order marks a new valuation of old urban space, based on the discourse of “heritage” and a reinterpretation of the historic significance of the parkota.

The Purusharthi refugee  241 The legal resistance to Sindhi trade also seems to coincide with the cultural lament against the excessive commercialisation they brought to the city. These anxieties of the old residents and traditional business communities of the city,13 expressed through a sense of nostalgia, were accentuated by physical transformations in the walled city. When a water body to the north of the City Palace, Rajamull ka Talab, was eventually converted into plots of land giving rise to the colony of Kanwar Nagar to accommodate the Sindhi refugees, it was characterised as “slum-like” (Parika 1984). Ironically, it is here that the community’s fortunes are palpable in the shape of a massive marble temple of Jhulelal/Jhoolaylal,14 the deity worshipped by the Sindhi community. Therefore, one may infer that the figure of the refugee in the city was seen as symbolically antithetical to the “old” economic, social and political markers of the princely city. And perhaps here lay seeds of the dissatisfaction among a section of old residents, whose cultural, social, and economic life was now interspersed with the mores of the newcomers. A fictional account published on 25 August 1962 in a weekly published from Jaipur, named Sahi Baat, registers the disappointment of Maharaja Jai Singh II15 on seeing the city when he visits Jaipur in the 1960s: increased traffic, tin kiosks of small retailers, high prices of grains, pollution, lack of maintenance of temples, and mounds of garbage on the roads (the August 1962 special issue of Sahi Baat focused on the Jaipur Municipal Council).16 However, unlike Kanwar Nagar, the new markets were lauded for their aesthetic homogeneity with the old city, especially their colour that resembled the “pink” of Jaipur (Arora et al. 1976: 141).17 The colour pink has been an important feature of Jaipur’s walled city since the nineteenth century. All the new markets created to rehabilitate the Sindhis were also pink, with a white design. Over time, the colour has faded, prompting pleas to the Municipal Corporation by the Indira Bazar Vyapar Sangh to maintain the ekrupta or homogeneity of the market, in line with the older bazaars. This centrality of colour in the official register as also in the discourse of Sindhi trading community is an example of the complex negotiations over symbolic and cultural resources in the walled city between the old residents and the new entrants. The subsequent section will trace the checkered political and cultural terrain of the city against which Sindhi traders sought legitimacy and trust. This language of contending authenticity was premised on laying claims to the space and economy of the walled city – the old enclave, today rechristened “urban heritage”.

Tropes of belonging in the city The Purusharthi Thari Holders, established in 1950, staked a claim on the economy and politics of Jaipur by delineating the role of the “nationalist” Sindhi Hindus in the freedom struggle, right from the days of the Swadeshi movement to Hindu revivalism in the 1920s through the documents published by it (in their Directory of 2008). Indeed, the history of Sindhi nationalism, with strong Hindu undertones, goes some way back. In 1919, Sindhi

242  Garima Dhabhai revolutionaries in Punjab published a newspaper called Hindu. The history of Sindhi nationalism is also tied with the activities of the Arya Samaj (Kothari 2006). Apart from the Muslim opposition, Christian missionaries challenged Hindu Sindhis since the nineteenth century and the Arya Samaj became more influential among them by the 1930s. Tarachand Gajara and Swami Krishnanand were its significant proponents (Malkani 1984). By 1945, the Muslim League had imposed a ban on Dayanand Saraswati’s book Satyarth Prakash in Sindh, alleging it to be the cause of communal tension. However, on 7 May 1945, “Satyarth Prakash Diwas” was celebrated across the province under the leadership of Tarachand Gajara. He even visited Jaipur to address a general meeting in Azaad Chowk on the alleged atrocities of the Muslim League and to mobilise people to demand revocation of the ban on Satyarth Prakash (Vijay n.d.: 56). This brand of Sindhi nationalism was also tied with the popularity of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) among the community. L.K. Advani, K.R. Malkani, and Jhamatmal Wadhwani emerged as important Sindhi leaders of RSS persuasion (Kothari 2006). This Hindu underpinning in the Sindhi narratives was palpable in the story of Kishore Manchandani, whose father owned farmland and stables in Sindh before he came to India in 1947. Being a moneyed Sindhi refugee who used to supply horses to Bollywood units shooting in Jaipur, he bought a house at a prime location on MI Road (an arterial road of the city), in which the respondent was born in 1953. He asserted, “The Muslim workers under my father in Pakistan turned out to be gaddar (traitorous), evoking a feeling of revenge among the Hindu landowners”.18 Interestingly, the Sindhi trader is placed alongside Muslims in this market, making the former’s negotiations with a predominantly Hindu Baniya and Jain business groups in the city extremely complicated, and creating forms of spatial exclusion from the dominant touristic economy of the city. Beginning with economic interests, the contest between these old and new business groups percolated to the level of social and, more specifically, gastronomic conflicts. Food items became symbols of drawing or denying legitimacy for/to the community of Sindhis. We have alluded to a scuffle between a Muslim and a Sindhi; when one Balram Sindhi, who owned Hindu Hotel in Fateh Tibba, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood towards the south of the walled city, went to fill water from a public tap near Masjid Qasaban, according to a confidential daily diary of the Intelligence Bureau in Jaipur from 1948. The entry then goes on to trace the economic root of thisconflict, contending the Sindhi’s proximity to sweepers of the area, who had earlier been the primary customers of waste from Muslim non-vegetarian hotels.19 Another diary during the same period details the meeting of around twenty-five Hindu ghee dealers in Purani Basti, a stronghold of Brahmins, to draft a petition to the state against Sindhi dealers who, they alleged, were responsible for importing vegetable ghee into Jaipur.20 The petition demanded custom posts to check the ghee entering the city. The purity with which ghee is associated in Jaipur is

The Purusharthi refugee  243 evident in the rows of shops lining Johri Bazar, a prominent market in the city, with banners claiming the sale of shuddh desi or pure ghee there. One of the side streets, in what is Chowkri Ghat Darwaza, is a popular thoroughfare named after ghee retailers themselves, Ghee walon ka Rasta. Deep inside it, around two ornate Jain temples, one can always find a crowd buying ingredients for goth, a traditional community feast organised in Jaipur mainly during monsoon months. Carrying on the lineage of jyonars or royal feasts of yesteryears, these goths comprise a meal of choorma bati, both wheat flour products, soaked in ghee. The success of this feast depends on the aroma of ghee, invariably also a test of its purity or shuddhata. The lane is cacophonous with the sound of loudspeakers advertising local retailers during the high season of ghee sale, Diwali, while the smell of fried snacks and parathas waft through the alley. At an explicit level, this narrative of ghee is to underline its importance in the social life of Jaipur, more importantly in Hindu rituals and feasts. Obliquely, ghee also creates a series of binaries around itself, the pure and the impure being primary among them. The purity of ghee also translates into the social and economic status of its user, as also generates goodwill for its retailer. A relation of trust is developed in this transaction between the customer and the seller, which then gets reflected in the hierarchy of shops in the neighbourhood on the basis of the ghee’s smell and its assumed quality. One hears common refrains such as “This shop sells the best desi ghee sweets in town”. The influx of new traders in Jaipur, long inhabited by its “original” settlers, injected anxiety into this structure of trust and purity, also risking the contamination of the community meal with impure ingredients. In the earlier example too, one notices a gastronomic underpinning of the conflict, with a new community of non-vegetarians creating cracks in the already established social and economic transactions between the Muslims and the group of sweepers. Purity of food and rituals was couched in religious terms when, in October 1948, a resolution was passed by Arya Samajis in the city against the “open sale of eggs and fish” due to the arrival of the Sindhis (Vijay n.d.: 61). Economy here was cushioned with narratives of social organisation around meals and rituals of partaking. Taking a cue from the ethnography of Surat’s Chauta Bazar (Jha and Thakur 2016), one can allude to economies based around “trust”, which were perhaps central to the construction of the bazaar. The rows of shops that proclaim themselves to be “original” sellers of ghee for years is similar to a narrative of authenticity spun around many other similar “original” retailers of carpets, sweets, and so on. The mushrooming of such claims drawing legitimacy from trustworthy names has sprung from an anxiety about inauthentic reproduction. This fear seemed to be at the heart of resolutions like that of the twenty-five ghee sellers in 1948, apart from their anxieties about a new system of governance. The disdain towards Sindhi “labour” among the non-Sindhi traders, unlike its appraisal as purushartha in the state’s register, is obvious in the narratives of the “original” residents of the walled city. One old resident asserts,

244  Garima Dhabhai “They [the Sindhis] have been responsible for bringing malpractices into trade in Jaipur”.21 Such social perceptions have been aggravated by examples of “unauthorized extensions” to Sindhi shops and sale of cosmetics and lingerie items there. The economic competition faced by the non-Sindhi merchant groups in Jaipur is thus translated into cultural stereotypes about the Sindhis, as Victor Barnow had contended in his sociological profiling of Hindu Sindhi migrants in Poona (now Pune). He characterised them as a “mercantile group” akin to Jews. They practised trade and created anxiety among local traders in the city of Poona in the 1940s. The popular perception castigated them as “dirty”, “showy”, luxurious, and so on (Barnouw 1966). The “other”, in the case of Jaipur bazaars, was the purusharthi Sindhi refugee.

Conclusion In the history of Sindhi enterprise in Jaipur, one may trace the histories of small-town capitalism, to use Douglas Haynes’ (2012) phrase, marking out the small producers and retailers. It is here that we may begin to understand the developmental career of second-tier cities in India and the changing nature of capital22 in the contemporary period, when looked at through the prism of refugee encounter. Jaipur, a former princely territory, was definitely transformed in the wake of Partition, like many other urban centres of the subcontinent. Kudaisya and Tai (2000), in his study of four capital cities, namely Dhaka, Calcutta, Lahore, and Karachi, highlights the changes Partition caused in each of them: economic, demographic, social, and political. It materially dissected their industries, divided its labour force, sharpened communal edges, and cast pressure on existing infrastructure. This decay necessitated a new centre or capital – replete with bureaucratic paraphernalia and the symbolic infrastructure of the nation state – which materialised in the form of Islamabad and Chandigarh in Pakistan and India, respectively. In the urban context of Jaipur, the figure of the refugee, which was otherised in the everyday social and economic encounters of the neighbourhood or the bazaar, became the overarching entrepreneur for the state – the purusharthi responsible for the “re-territorialization” of Jaipur as the site of the capital. This is why Jaipur’s encounter with Partition and refugee influx does not sit well with Tan and Kudasiya’s analysis of decay. Over time, the urban economy has changed, and with it, different communities are being re-positioned vis-à-vis the built environment of the city. The undertone of cultural-moral expulsion of the Sindhis from the uncontaminated body of the local community was also tangibly present in the realm of state-led heritage conservation. This led to a reimagination of the city wall as well, rendering the presence of the refugee traders in the rehabilitation spaces of yesteryears illegitimate. The developmental rationale of the state has changed since the Nehruvian heydays and with it the processes of governance have also shifted. The Sindhis in Jaipur had considerable state patronage as purusharthis, unlike their East Bengali counterparts in

The Purusharthi refugee  245 Kolkata (Sinha 2000). However, in the new urban development paradigm unleashed post 2000s, the state has rolled back to invite global finance capital to revitalise its old city. In this context, the community of Sindhi retailers finds itself in a legal turmoil. The use of old structures as “infrastructure” to create new markets and colonies in the 1950s and 1970s has been replaced, at least theoretically, by a thrust on reviving the heritage economy through the prism of “conservation”. The task of capital city-making, in the course of which the Sindhi purusharthi was hailed by political elites, is now giving way to a new economy of world-class city building, which perhaps calls for another set of labour practices. Even for the upper middle-class buyers of the readymade garments, shopping malls in the areas outside of the walled city are the new avenue for leisure and consumption. Purusharthi was one trope for the production and management of the refugee population and their spatial placement defined their functionality. This trope has both historical and spatial dimensions. Tracing the journey from sharnarthi to purusharthi, the chapter has tried to delineate the historically shifting contours of this trope. At a spatial level, we have seen this entangled history in its relation to the cityscapes. The wall serves as a crucial axis here. The wall, which has been a defining character of the old city, was also an “apparatus” of security and demarcation of identity, to use Ranabir Samaddar’s analysis (2012). It stood for the physical and social border in the city, making Sindhi refugees a part of it in the early years after Partition. The re-capitalisation of the wall as built heritage in the recent past has led to the possibility of the expulsion of the Sindhis from the physical as also the symbolic body of the city, renewing the contest over urban space and its resources. The re-capitalisation of the walled city is dependent on the rearrangement of the finite space enclosed within the eighteenth-century wall. The state’s interest in this finite space has led to an overwriting of the imperative for urban economic expansion that was part of Emergency era policies. This overwriting requires either a reworking or erasure of the Sindhi refugees who are subjects crafted by the earlier governmental imperative.

Notes 1 This chapter is a substantially revised version of a previously published article: ‘The Purusharthi Refugee: Sindhi Migrants in Jaipur’s Walled City’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. LIII, no. 4 (27 January 2018). 2 See Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative Debates), Part I, Vol. VI, 1948: 33. 3 The history of Sindhi Hindu refugees in India has been dealt with in the works of Kothari (2007), Bhavnani (2014, 2016), and Barnouw (1966), among others. 4 Intelligence Bureau (IB) Confidential Daily Diary, No. 2537, 10 May 1948, Mahkama Khas Records, Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner. 5 IB Confidential Daily Diary, No. 1729, 17 March 1948, Mahkama Khas Records, Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner. 6 Personal interview, Shankar Lal Nanwani, Indira Bazar, 5 December 2016.

246  Garima Dhabhai 7 Personal interview, C.K. Rupani, Indira Bazar Vyapar Mandal, 3 December 2016. 8 Names of the respondents have been changed to maintain anonymity of personal narratives, while names of those interviewed in an official capacity have been retained. 9 To substantiate this further, perhaps a more intense ethnographic engagement with the trade economy of the old and new markets is required. 10 It is noteworthy that the Jaipur royals, who held a position of opposition to the ruling Congress party, were arrested and their properties re-evaluated in the wake of the Emergency. Rajasthan Patrika, 22 September 1977. 11 The Swantantra Party, founded by C. Rajagopalachari in the 1960s, was supported by erstwhile zamindars and princes; it later merged with the Janata Party. 12 ‘Hateingi 500 dukanein’, Dainik Bhaskar, 6 May 2015; ‘Parkote mein atikraman hatane ko lekar vyapari lamband’, Rajasthan Patrika, 3 May 2015. 13 Over a period of time, the city has had predominantly Hindu communities, mostly comprising Kayasthas, Agarwals, Khandelwals, Rajputs, and Brahmins, as also communities like the Gujjars and Kumawats, Jains (including Khandelwals, Saraogis, Oswals, and Maheshwaris) and Muslim craftsmen, each of which played an important role in the market economy (see Bhatnagar 1989: 235). 14 The myth of Jhulelal has been foundational to Sindhi Hindus. Jhulelal is believed to have been born in a silver swing or jhula, similar to Lord Krishna, and saved the community from the onslaught of the Muslim ruler Mirkhshah. Some of his images, with a flowing white beard, resemble Guru Nanak (see Malkani 1984: 36; see also Kothari 2007: 169–171. 15 Maharaja Jai Singh II was the founder-king of Jaipur, ruling from 1699 to 1743 CE. Well-known as an astronomer, the king developed the city in a planned manner. See Bhatnagar (1974). 16 The account was penned by Bhanwar Lal Sharma, a resident of Gangauri Bazar in the walled city, who was a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) volunteer and joined the Jan Sangh in 1956. He went on to become the first Jan Sanghi president of the Municipal Council in 1961. 17 Personal interview, S.L. Nanwani, Treasurer of Indira Bazar Vyapar Sangh, 5 December 2016. 18 Personal interview, Indira Bazar, 3 December 2016. 19 IB Confidential Daily Diary, No. 2537, 10 May 1948, Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner. 20 IB Confidential Daily Diary, No. 2430, 3 May 1948, Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner. 21 Personal interview with a shopowner, Sarafa Market, and a resident of the old city belonging to the Hindu merchant caste, 3 December 2016. 22 Capital is to be understood here in an economic as also in a political sense. The process of capital city-making after the merger of princely states was also intertwined with the practice of accumulation of capital necessary for ‘urban development’.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Arora, Ramesh, Rakesh Hooja, and Shashi Mathur, eds. 1976. Jaipur: Profile of a Changing City. Jaipur: Indian Institute of Public Administration, Rajasthan Branch. Bandopadhyay, Sibaji. 2009. “Translating Gı̄tā 2.47 or Inventing the National Motto”. Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences 16 (1–2): 31–94.

The Purusharthi refugee  247 Barnouw, Victor. 1966. “The Sindhis, Mercantile Refugees in India: Problems of their Assimilation”. Phylon 27 (1): 40–49. Basu, Amrita. 2015. Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Bhatnagar, Rama. 1989. “Domestic Architecture in Jaipur”. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. Bhatnagar, V.S. 1974. Life and Times of Sawai Jai Singh, 1688–1743. New Delhi: Impex. Bhavnani, Nandita. 2014. The Making of Exile: Sindhi Hindus and the Partition of India. Chennai: Westland. Bhavnani, Nandita. 2016. “Unwanted Refugees: Sindhi Hindus in India and Muhajirs in Pakistan”. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39 (4): 790–804. Chatterjee, Himadri. 2017. “Partitioned Urbanity: Refugee Politics and Planning in Kolkata”. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Chelliah, R.J., M.V. Mathur, and D.L. Gupta. 1965. Economic Survey of Jaipur City. Jaipur: Rajasthan University. Dhar, Arshia. 2018. “In Search of a Lost Home: Sindhis in India are Struggling to Save Their Language”. Outlook, 5 September. Haynes, Douglas. 2012. Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of Informal Economy, 1870–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jaipur Municipal Corporation (JMC). 2002. Report on Urban Renewal of Walled City, Asia Urbs. Jaipur: Jaipur Municipal Corporation. Jha, Sadan, and Nishpriha Thakur. 2016. “Ethnography of Trust and History as Circulating Commodities in Chauta Bazaar, Surat”. History and Sociology of South Asia 10 (2): 138–161. Kothari, Rita. 2006. “RSS in Sindh: 1942–48”. Economic and Political Weekly 41 (27–28): 3007–3013. Kothari, Rita. 2007. The Burden of Refuge: The Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Kudaisya, G., and Tai Yong Tai. 2000. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. London: Routledge. Malkani, K.R. 1984. The Sindh Story. New Delhi: Sindhi Academy. Narain, Iqbal, and P.C. Mathur. 1990. “The Thousand Year Raj: Regional Isolation and Rajput Hinduism in Rajasthan before and after 1947”. In Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order, vol. 2, edited by Francine Frankel and M.S.A. Rao, xx–xx. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Parika, Nandkisora. 1984. Rajdarbar aur Raniwas, Jaipur: Rajasthan Patrika Publication. Purusharthi Thari Union Holders’ Directory. 2008. Samaddar, Ranabir. 2012. “The Wall as an Apparatus”. Two Essays on Security Apparatus. Kolkata: MCRG. Sen, Uditi. 2009. “Refugees and the Politics of Nation Building in India, 1947– 1971”. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, Cambridge. Sinha, Dipankar. 2000. “Foundation of a Refugee Market: A Study in Self-Reliance Initiative”. In Refugees in West Bengal: Institutional Processes and Contested Identities, edited by Pradip Kumar Bose, xx–xx. Kolkata: Calcutta Research Group. Vijay, Omprakash. n.d. Arya Samaj Jaipur ka Itihas. Kishanpole Bazar, Jaipur: Arya Samaj.

13 “Once a migrant, always a migrant?” Negotiating home and belongingness in the city of Kolkata Swati Mantri

This chapter locates the idiom of belonging as a sentiment churned out through the social and material practices of the Marwaris in Kolkata. The memory of home is central to these practices and this chapter shows the ways in which a migrant community articulates and negotiates such regimes of belongingness vis-à-vis the memory of home. For a migrant community, a constant effort to reproduce and revitalise its culture and identity away from its “home” – the des (Marwari term meaning the native land) – necessitates emotional as well as material investment in desavar (Marwari term meaning the foreign land). Drawing from an ethnographic study of the “migrant” Marwari community of Kolkata, this chapter enquires into the nature of this investment by the community that embeds it in the collective space of the city and informs its idea of belonging in desavar. The study questions whether the portrayal of the Marwari trader in Kolkata longing for his des can ever match the community’s own perceptions of belongingness in the desavar. In other words, the study attempts to respond to the question of whether the community that had migrated decades ago to the region can still be recognised as a migrant community or has it over time managed to become enmeshed in the socio-political fabric of Bengal and become the “local” in Kolkata. While considering how the city of Kolkata – which was once a foreign land for Marwaris when they started out from Rajasthan – is now perceived and articulated by them, the chapter unpacks the modes through which the identity of the Marwari community is constructed and communicated in the city both by themselves and “others”, in this case primarily the natives of the state, the Bengali community. The study uses two main ways to locate the notion of belongingness in the self-perceptions of the members of the community of Marwaris in Kolkata. The first is the narrative that focuses on the material aspect of belonging. The symbolic and material investments by the Marwaris in the city are used to position the neighbourhood of Barabazaar, in the northern part of Kolkata city, as the Rajasthani microcosm where the community migrated to. Second, the chapter uses intergenerational narratives to trace the shifting idea of what constitutes home. Here, the concepts of “root” and “route” serve as a useful analytical lens to capture the ties with the native land or homeland across generations. Borrowing DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-17

“Once a migrant, always a migrant?”  249 from A  P.  Cohen’s argument (1982) on belongingness,1 the ethnographic narratives are used to posit that the idea of home and belonging can be best described through how the respondents understand the notion of their family “roots” in tracing their home. The notion that roots shape routes (Clifford 1997), is employed as a metaphor to understand how Kolkata as the migratory “route” that brought the Marwari community to Bengal for their successful trading pursuits become a new home, perhaps roots for future generations of the Marwari community in the region.

The Marwari as migrant Marwaris have been coming to Kolkata since the 1600s and have now been a “settled” community in the city for almost a century. But the context of the original migration and ties to the homeland continue to frame their identity. The term Marwari, as I discuss elsewhere (Mantri 2019), was first used in Bengal for migrants from the north-western region of India. It is a term based on the linguistic recognition of the Marwari language and does not necessarily refer to migrants coming from the Marwar region of Rajasthan. The historical trajectory of their migration is crucial to understanding the context within which a distinctive Marwari identity emerged in Bengal over time. It was the contextual frame of migration for the community that established “Marwari” as an umbrella term for any migrant coming from the north-western region of the country to Bengal. The journey of the migrant figure from Rajasthan and the various monetary-related activities that he2 involved himself in – as a moneylender, trader, or merchant – has been used as a basis to signify the migrant’s duty to invest in the land that has earned him his fortune. This is discussed in the succeeding section, but prior to that an overview of how literature locates the Marwari becomes important. Marwari historian Bhimsen Kedia defines a Marwari as: One who is a follower of the Sanatan dharma [referring to Hindusim] and ahimsa, one who wears his native dress and follows the lifestyle, a follower of the old culture, a staunch believer in God, one who cares for the poor and homeless, one who builds dharamshalas wherever he goes, and one who is known among all the jatis for his trading abilities and his business acumen. (Kedia 1969: 14) This definition highlights the trading identity of the Marwari. It reasserts the characteristics of this traditional community as traders who are frugal, charitable, religious, and traditional. The Marwaris, understood particularly with reference to certain vyapari jati (trading sub-castes) (Barua 1967) that fall within the Vaishya caste (comprising primarily merchants), are sometimes interchangeably seen as part of the Baniya ethnic category.3 In 1564 the Marwaris arrived as Rajput soldiers from the Mughal emperor Akbar’s army to help Sulaiman Khan Kirani, the ruler of Bengal,

250  Swati Mantri against the Maratha invasion of east India (Shah 2000; Taknet 2015). In 1585 they came with Raja Todarmal (the finance minister of the Mughal Empire during Akbar’s reign) and Raja Man Singh (a trusted general of Akbar, appointed the Governor of Bengal in 1594), and again in 1605 as logistic agents with the Mughal armies. One finds different documented versions which varyingly identify the Marwaris sometimes as Rajput soldiers and sometimes as suppliers of essentials to the Rajput soldiers who came with the Mughal army (Roul 2009: 100). It is believed that migrants from Marwar in Rajasthan were amongst the first of the Rajasthani migrants to arrive in Bengal (Shah 2000). The Marwari community gained prominence in Bengal through the Jagat Seths.4 The Jagat Seths, literally translated as “moneylenders of the world”, are documented by scholars as the first and primary banking institution in Bengal connected with deposit banking and credit banking (Little 1967; Shah 2000; Hardgrove 2004; Barman 2015).5 The shaping of aspirations for a Marwari trader to travel to Bengal and set up business there has been a characteristic feature of many studies discussing the Marwari (Saraogi 1998, 2015; Mukherjee 2014; Saraf 2017). The voluminous literature on contemporary Kolkata and its social life has managed to keep alive the figure of the migrant Marwari in his various avatars (Chaudhuri 1990; Hazra 2014; Ghosh 2016; Chakravarti 2017). Sujit Saraf in his fictional work Harilal & Sons (2017) writes about the necessity of a Marwari Baniya having “two sons, so one may go to Kalkatta”.6 Prosperity for any Marwari Baniya in Rajasthan was symbolised by the Marwari reaching Kolkata; Saraf’s protagonist directly links a Marwari trader wearing expensive silk clothes with the city of Kolkata. The Marwari migrant in the city projected the positive image of being cosmopolitan and adventurous (Papastergiadis 2000) for the native back home, inspiring others to migrate as well.

“Doing and giving”: making of a Marwari city In Itihaas ka Gawaksh, Radhakrishna Nevatia documents the many challenges the Marwari community faced in conducting business in Bengal and finally establishing a niche there. The community not only had to experience local competition in business but was also made aware of the social and cultural practices that had to be unlearned and critically looked at if they intended to settle amongst the Bengali community and make Kolkata their home. Besides learning and balancing trading practices of a different region, as Nevatia emphasises, they had to also engage culturally – “sanskritik vikaas ke saath taal-mel” – with the Bengali community who were seen as conventionally more educated. To overcome the barriers and improve their own educational situation, the community established several educational institutions for their children and women (Nevatia 1948). On the other hand, the community is also portrayed as pushing itself to rise beyond the average by becoming more efficient in business along with pursuing other career paths such as law, medicine, politics, etc.7 Known for

“Once a migrant, always a migrant?”  251 their widespread network and support system, trading acumen and entrepreneurial zeal, the Marwari merchant community earned praise for their productivity skills in contrast to the “lack thereof in the Bengalis” (Ray [1932] 1996: 16). Nevatia posits that despite the Marwari traders’ contributions to the city of Kolkata, they continued to be seen as outsiders whose “economic and political networks made up a kind of alternate universe” (Vidal 1997; Babb 1999). The Marwaris’ economic connections outside the region, which were inaccessible by the locals, not only made the latter prone to suspicion and malice but also undermined social relations between the Marwaris and the Bengali community. A popular depiction of the Marwaris – as that of a seth or a munim (head clerk in a trading firm) who would never use his hard-earned money for the prosperity of the state where he had earned the wealth but would rather spend it in his homeland of Rajasthan – played an important role in shaping the inter-community relations of Marwari and Bengalis. One manifestation was the “Amra Bangali” (We are Bengalis) movement that emerged in the region in the 1980s.8 The movement started as a radical pro-Bengal political party with the aim of ensuring that everyone staying in Bengal and some adjoining north-eastern states of India speak only the Bengali language and adapt to Bengali “ways of living”. It is important to point out here that “Amra Bangali” as a category does not necessarily only refer to people who are born in Bengal or speak in Bengali; according to the activists, it referred to those who by doing business and making profits in the state, reinvested it for the benefit of Bengal rather than for their respective native land (F­ruzzetti and Östör 2003: 186). One of the respondents, sixty-four-year-old Mr. Rajesh Gupta,9 a Marwari businessman with several gaddis (offices) in Barabazaar and a resident of south Kolkata, argues against this strong Amra Bangali sentiment (even as he jokes with his office staff and plies me with tea): Why is there a problem if anybody wants to invest in one’s homeland? It is not harming anyone. If I am earning the money, it is my prerogative where I want to spend the money. Of course, Kolkata has given my family more business opportunities and all the good fortune one can ask for in life, but Rajasthan is where my forefathers were born, made us who we are. Had it not been their farsightedness, we would have never come to Kolkata … Carrying on the family tradition, I am contributing to both Bengal, where my home is now, where my family has lived for years, and Rajasthan that will always be home. So why should I not contribute to the economy there, maintain my property there? … If you go around Kolkata and see how many institutions, organizations are built because of the Marwari contribution … is it fair to say that we are not Bengalis or do not belong here? This Amra Bangali and other such groups are just nonsense groups. They do not have any other agenda but to judge and question everybody’s contribution

252  Swati Mantri in what they call their state. If their voice resonated strongly with the city dwellers, this state would have had Bengali industrialists and only Bengalis living here… Why would the state government then have such good relations with the Marwaris? It is all give and take – someone who brings the revenue for the state will always be welcomed. But this is a strange theory that I cannot invest in Rajasthan. Arrey mazaāk hai kya? [Is this a joke?] Why are the Bengalis working outside Kolkata then? Do you know that so many of them are abroad and do not wish to return to this state, what about them? Amra Bangali groups are like goons who, though they take pride in their heritage, act against their own Bengali values. Marwaris have been peacefully working along with their Bengali brothers for so long now in Kolkata – why bring up such issues now? Mr. Gupta’s family has a history of being associated with several Marwari organisations as well as leading political parties in the state and is known for their philanthropic activities. He gives examples of how the city is as much Marwari as it is Bengali. The claims that the Marwari community is equally responsible for building the city is supported by several Marwari establishments one finds in the city. These can be construed as what Keith Hart refers to as a “memory bank” (Hart 2000), which serves as a concrete, visible source of Marwari identity derived from Kolkata, as well as connects the community members with each other through such activities. The analytical frame of “memory bank” captures the conscious attempts by the community to have consolidated their identity in the city via their monetary contributions and keeping this memory afresh over time by revisiting this through various modes – public meetings, celebrations, events, etc. The documentation of the achievements and doings of the Marwari community in the city strives to move beyond the archived granths (commemorative texts) and community texts, to inscriptions of monetary donations made by the community: visual statements making claims on physical landscapes of the city. These plaques are usually found fixed on the walls at the entrance, or any conspicuous location, of hospitals, schools, etc. Such inscriptions on slabs made of marble or some other stone meticulously document the details of the contribution, such as the donor’s name, donor’s place of origin in Rajasthan, date of donation, and most importantly, the amount contributed for the construction or functioning of the establishment (see Figures 13.1, 13.2 and 13.3). As the documentation of the achievements and doings of the Marwari community in the city strives to move further from the archived granths (commemorative texts) and community texts, these listings function as a purposive tool rendering these slabs sites of powerful evocation of Marwari identity in the city. Most of them also identify the donor’s native place in Rajasthan: “Bikaner-wale; Ratangarh-wale”, the suffix “wale” meaning belonging. This idea of belonging for the community can be juxtaposed with the plaques found in Rajasthan that listed the donors’ names as “Shri

“Once a migrant, always a migrant?”  253

Figure 13.1  Inscription outside Shri Vishudanand Saraswati Vidyalaya, a school in Kolkata, mentioning the name of the Marwari donor and indicating he is “of Ratangarh” (the donor’s place of origin in Rajasthan). Source: Author.

… Kalkatta-wale” (from Kolkata) or “Bambai-wale” (from Mumbai), representative of their movement from des to desavar, and the shifts in belongings of the Marwari community.10 Linking such philanthropic activities with Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of trusteeship, Das states that the “bania’s wealth belongs to the community and the businessmen is merely a trustee of this wealth during his lifetime” (Das 2003: 2).11 The community created its own public life through performative acts of charity and philanthropy (Hardgrove 2004), gaining visibility through activities carried out by Marwari relief societies and other institutional spaces.12

Barabazaar: the “second” native place Belongingness and migration acquire another layer when we move to the lived spaces of neighbourhoods and migration within the city. Barabazaar emerged as the major centre where the migrant community settled down before spreading to other parts of the city. Several Marwari establishments – institutions, clubs, offices, and centres of monetary as well as social aid – contributed towards making the neighbourhood exclusively a Marwari one. With time, however, the community is seen to have spread out of Barabazaar to other neighbourhoods, carrying with them their social and cultural appendages deeper into the city. In Alka Saraogi’s Hindi novel titled Kali Katha: Via Bypass (1998), the protagonist, an elderly Marwari businessman, is a former resident of Barabazaar who evokes the changing character of the city over time by juxtaposing his relationship with and memories of his older home with his present situation in the high-end south Kolkata locality he has moved

254  Swati Mantri

Figure 13.2  Inscriptions mentioning monetary donations outside Marwari Relief Society, a hospital in Barabazaar, Kolkata. Source: Author.

to. The protagonist’s narrative constantly brings up his experiences from the past when he had just arrived from Rajasthan in the holy city of river Ganga. While comparing the past with the present, he speaks of the streets as reflecting the history of the city that includes within itself the difference of attitudes, difference of lifestyle and difference of “cultures” that distinguished the Marwaris from the Bengalis. While the protagonist now stays in a palatial flat in south Kolkata, he ruminates about the cosiness of his one-room place in Barabazaar where lived the six members of the family. Saraogi highlights how the protagonist refers to Barabazaar as the real home outside Rajasthan (Parson 2012: 65). Saraogi’s text, like many other works of fiction, exemplifies the tenacious connections that are formed between “people and place” (Alexander et al.

“Once a migrant, always a migrant?”  255

Figure 13.3   Inscription outside Mangal Matri Sadan, a hospital in Barabazaar, Kolkata. Source: Author.

2016: 3). “Aādha Barabazaar band pada huā hai” [Half of Barabazaar is closed], said Pushpa Devi Lakhani, aged seventy-two, while talking about their first home in the city in Barabazaar, the family property, which has been locked up. This is a common feature for most of the Marwari families in the city who have shifted out of Barabazaar. The notion of “not letting go” has led to the retaining of rooms, property and “household things” in Barabazaar. Hence, one can draw parallels between the locked havelis and houses that the families still have in Rajasthan with the locked rooms in Barabazaar. Mrs. Lakhani was thirteen years old when she married into a prosperous Marwari family of Kolkata. Her paternal family migrated to Kolkata from Chappar, a town in Rajasthan, after her marriage. She recalls her excitement about getting married into a Marwari family from Jhunjhunu, a town in Rajasthan, settled in Barabazaar: Back then, staying in Barabazaar was a matter of prestige and pride. It signalled to others that you have achieved something in your life. Barabazaar was the path towards business success and Goddess Lakshmi … Even though we had just three rooms (inclusive of kitchen) for a family of almost thirteen members, we were seen as one of the well-to-do families in our community. Mrs. Lakhani had three sons and four daughters by the time they shifted out from their residence in Barabazaar in the 1970s. Moving from three

256  Swati Mantri rooms to a five-room apartment, from north Kolkata to “posh” south Kolkata, pointed to the family’s growing prosperity. She recounts: Moving out of Barabazaar was painful in the beginning, but everybody who could afford to do so moved out. The condition of Barabazaar, I hear, has only become worse over time. Due to my old age, I have not gone there for some time now. I just go to the Baikunthnath temple once a year during [the festival of] Janmasthami. It is accessible by car, so it is easy… My eldest son wanted to attend school in south Kolkata, and I wanted my daughter to marry into a family who were settled in south Kolkata at that time…. God favoured us and helped us move but we still have our home in Barabazaar. My sons think we are just blocking our money in the property and it is better to sell it off, but why should we? I think it is still prime property and it was our first home here. Mrs. Lakhani’s visits to the temple in the neighbourhood can be compared to the annual religious tours that many of the Marwari families who were interviewed undertook to revisit and refresh their ties with their places of origin. She states that her family visits the husbands’ native place in Rajasthan, Jhunjhunu, at least once a year: I am very happy that my family visits Jhunjhunu periodically. My husband and I spend at least three or four months every year there, but the children visit once a year when we have our religious ceremonies for the family deity. On being asked why it was important for her to maintain regular ties with her native place, considering she referred to Kolkata as her home, she responded, Why would one want to let go of one’s roots? It is a difficult question. Home is Jhunjhunu, Kala Chowk [a locality in Barabazaar] and this too … Isn’t this good? I have so many homes. I can go anywhere I want. But I think home is where my family wants to stay. Many interviewees expressed a similar sentiment: regular visits to the native place were seen as vital to keep alive the “link between the country of origin and residence” (Frenz 2014: 6). For most of these families, travel to one’s native land helped in endorsing their identities and values (Levitt 2009: 1236) that could be passed on to their children. Equating their arrival in Barabazaar in the early years to success, the Lakhanis spoke of the neighbourhood as a “route” towards success and business expansion outside Rajasthan. Both Mrs. Lakhani and her husband disagree with their sons about selling off the property in Barabazaar; they are not ready to part with the rooms. Mr. Lakhani stated that the real estate value of Barabazaar

“Once a migrant, always a migrant?”  257 was still soaring if the question was about money, but for them it was more to do with the social prestige and memories that Barabazaar held for them. Constituting the first home in the city for most of the respondents in the study, this neighbourhood can been seen as the “putative common place of origin” (Ghosh 2016: 162) for the residents who had moved out of Barabazaar to other parts of the city. It must be noted, however, that a strong desire to move out of the dingy lanes of this locality also emerged in many interviews conducted among the families still residing in the locality. The narratives suggest that the “dingy, rackety, overcrowded, daunting, and yet, oddly orderly place” of Barabazaar (Dutta 2013: 151) constituted the second home after Rajasthan for the migrant Marwari community. Barabazaar emerged both as “the first place” where the migrant community arrived and hence was the “route” to the consecutive successful years of business and networking. It also stood for the formation of new “roots” outside Rajasthan, the place of origin for the community. Barabazaar as a Marwari adda – Bengali term for a place/location where people gather for conversation – has been a recurrent theme in both literature and the narratives from the field used in this study. Reading this as the transformation of the desavar into the des by the community, it is argued that the symbolic investments in Kolkata were one of the most important ways in which belongingness was fostered and an emotional sense of attachment generated by this once migrant community. The serendipities in the field that I had with my respondents revealed Barabazaar as the second “native” place for many families. Calling these “branched-out roots”, many respondents, who had spent their formative years in the city, still acknowledged their des or “place of origin” in Rajasthan as the “real home”. By the virtue of “old connections” through grandparents’ and parents’ childhood stories, Barabazaar did constitute a major part in the consciousness of the new generation when they thought of belonging and home. But it was the city of Kolkata that was usually referred to as their home, and not Barabazaar. For the Bajaj family who has been staying in Barabazaar since 1950s, moving to any other part of city was unthinkable because of the sheer size of the family. An extended family of around thirty-five members, the family has four generations living together and working together in the same gaddi even now, albeit with separate kitchens for each married couple. K. Bajaj, aged eighty-two, the head of the family, observes: Earlier this was normal … the joint family system. Now everybody is surprised to hear that thirty-five people are staying together. This is becoming rare with each passing generation. I have had the fortune to see my great grandson too. The younger generation does keep telling me to shift to a better property, but where will we get such big houses? I  will have to build an entire building to accommodate everyone’s wishes, separate rooms, kitchens… Now nobody wants to adjust – everyone wants their own space, even the eight-year-olds in our family.

258  Swati Mantri Everybody wants to shift out, but what is the problem here? We have all the services – medical, school, temples, our market, office. We do not have to rely on transport, everything is within walking distance. Most importantly, we have all “our” people around us – where else will I get such familial support? Moving from ownership of six rooms to almost twenty rooms spread across three floors in the building on a prime street in Barabazaar was made possible only because other families shifted out, and they could rent or buy some rooms in the building. Bajaj’s wife, seventy-year-old Lakshmi Bajaj, says, Makān khāli hote gaye, humne kamre le liye … humāra parivār bhi badh raha tha … ādhe gharo pe taāle lage hue hain, kai parivāron ne abhi bhi apne kamre beche nahin hain. [As the other families left the building, we took those rooms for our growing family. But you would see, many rooms in Barabazaar are still kept locked up and not sold by the owners.] Referring to the riots in the city that her paternal family witnessed in 1918–19, and the Japan bombings in Bengal in the Second World War, during her childhood, when the family had to flee to des, Laxmangarh in Rajasthan, she recounts: Pura Barabazaar khaali ho gaya tha [all of Barabazaar was emptied out]. Almost all our family and relatives locked their homes here and went back. Only one or two senior members stayed back to take care of the business and gaddi. Rajasthan saved us back then and it will still save us if we fall on bad times… You ask why we still visit our des? We have our house there with a spare set of utensils still locked up – one never knows what circumstances might force us to go back, that is our safety net… It is fun for our grandchildren to revisit our old home, our history, where their grandparents were born. Now many are selling their homes in Rajasthan, but I hope our children will never do that – that is our very own thing, our home, our ancestors lived there. Emphasising that her grandchildren enjoyed their annual visits to des, Mrs. Bajaj also spoke of it as a place of recreation, of fun, for the family. For the Bajaj family, ownership of both their home in Rajasthan and their “family home” in present-day Barabazaar was equally important and carried equal sentimental value, which they could not think of “letting go”. The generational divide is apparent in the narrative of thirty-two-yearold Aayush Goyal, a Marwari resident of Barabazaar. Aayush remarks that a major part of his educational career was spent in commuting. With his school and college both located in south Kolkata, Aayush was accustomed to spending a little over an hour for classes as well as to meet his friends:

“Once a migrant, always a migrant?”  259 I did not mind the travel because unlike other cities, the distance is not so much in this city. Till school it was fine. Many of my neighbours and friends from my building also travelled with me by public transport or our family car, but in college I started feeling that having one’s residence in Barabazaar was not good enough. I do not know why, but I avoided saying that my house was in Barabazaar – it was a little awkward. My college group had people coming from south Kolkata or other better neighbourhoods. Every other place seemed better than Barabazaar. While I frequented their places during group studies before examinations, I could not call most of them to my place because of shortage of space and all. It seems stupid and silly now, but when I was growing up, this was important to me… I wonder if my children feel the same. I wish to shift out, but my parents are adamant and want to continue staying here. On being asked if he felt their parents’ desire to continue in Barabazaar was a matter of property rates or simply the feeling of home, Aayush observed that as per the real estate market, their family house was “worth a lot” and it would be an unwise decision to sell it off. He further stated that since affordability was not a concern, they could easily shift out if they all wished to. Aayush could not give a reason as to why he was not moving out of Barabazaar. However, towards the end of the interview, he said that the day his two children demand they should move to a new house in the city, maybe he would; until then, he was comfortable the way things were for him and his family. The conversation with Aayush laid bare two aspects. One, while Barabazaar was earlier the centre of success for the Marwaris, and they took pride in opening schools and colleges for the community in the area, over time, the educational institutions have failed to keep up with the changing demands and requisites of the modern-day curriculum, and the locus had gradually shifted to newer centres for education mostly located outside Barabazaar. Second, there was a spatial stigma that Barabazaar carried (Chatterjee 2015). While some Marwari families preferred to continue staying in the locality for easy access to their gaddi and other points of convenience in the neighbourhood, it was usually the younger generation who reported having no option but to live in such quarters with hardly any civic amenities. The narratives unravelled conflicts of interest in what constitutes home for the community in the city. In a series of articles on the Marwari community of Kolkata, Sandip Roy explains how the present generation finds the Barabazaar home “alien”.13 Apart from the generational divide, a stronger sense of belonging to Barabazaar is found in families belonging to the lower middle class or poorer families, where the younger generation articulated the inability of the family to move to any other place in Kolkata.14 The family members would discuss amongst themselves that the nostalgia or strong sense of belonging felt by the senior family members could also be due to the fact that they cannot afford to relocate elsewhere

260  Swati Mantri in the city, particularly when it comes to shifting of big families, such as the Bajaj family. The idea of ownership and control of space (Mallet 2004) emerges as a central constituent of the sense of home and belonging for most of the participants in the study. According to Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, the concept of belonging is strengthened through three important dimensions: commonality, which emphasises the profound effect of shared experience (over just having a collective identity); ties of material and immaterial attachment which take into account ownership of and positioning in spatial belongingness; and mutuality, which is the cognizance of the “other” that leads to a shared understanding of the differences and ordering of social relations (Weber [1958] 1921; Simmel [1908] 1950; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2011). In a similar vein, Floya Anthias suggests that belonging is not merely a “question of identification, but [also refers] … to shared values, networks, and practices” Anthias (2008: 21). Traversing between the idea of home as a symbolic phenomenon to a physical place that is owned, the following section takes forward the argument of how attachment to one’s property in Barabazaar and other tangible objects to some extent outlined the depth of socio-political presence of the Marwari community in the city. The participation or as popularly claimed in media – the absence of the Marwaris from the political machinery of the state does prompt one to think of their participation in the city which over time many respondents suggested has become their home.

“Bengal is your roots now, not Rajasthan” While Barabazaar served both as the bazaar and bari (Bengali word for home) for the Marwari community, their participation in formal politics and the electoral democratic functioning of the city space in general added another facet for the migrant community to display their loyalty and belongingness to the city of Kolkata over time. Discussing the respondents’ sense of belonging through their participation in the socio-political milieu of the metropolis locates the many elements that have perhaps contributed to the shifts in the migrant identity of the self, embedding the Marwari more strongly in the city. Most members of the Marwari associations in the city regarded their role in local politics as quite significant (Shah 2000; Sharma 2014). Many amongst the respondents holding administrative positions in the Marwari associations in the city claimed that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the incumbent power at the Centre, had found a foothold in the state because of them. The 2014 Lok Sabha polls were reflective of this strength when the BJP won in eighteen out of the twenty-five municipality wards in the east Kolkata neighbourhood, Hyde Park, leaving the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), the dominant political party in the state, far behind. Newspaper reports documented that the “sizeable Marwari population (nearly 33%), had turned the tables on the ruling party”,15 suggesting that both the dominant political parties in the

“Once a migrant, always a migrant?”  261 state, TMC and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)), need to develop their rapport with the Marwari community for garnering popular support. S. Sharma, in his commentary on the politics of Bengal, has argued that during their long rule of thirty-four years, the CPI(M) had practised the “fine art of dividing the population on the basis of ‘amader lok’ (our people) and ‘amader lok na’ (not our people)”. “The attitude that ‘if you are not with us, you are against us and can expect no help’, not even the support that a government is constitutionally bound to give all the citizens” forced the business community to forge new friendships and cordial relations with the government of the day (Sharma 2014: 103). Although such musing holds true for business to thrive in any place, the widely documented journey of industries migrating out of Bengal during the heydays of the CPI(M) governance marked the legacy of the state in 1960s until the early 1990s.16 While on one hand the politics around the rhythm of proletariat versus bourgeois, the capitalistic as anti-state, etc. forced industries like that of the Birlas, Mittals, and many others to take their threatened businesses to other regions in India where entrepreneurial environment was rather conducive to their endeavours; CPI(M) in its later years of its political governance on the other hand would witness a renewed attempt at rebuilding of amicable relations with the business communities in the city. The realisation that Bengal was gradually edging towards an economic distress and spiralling into a brain-drain syndrome, resources were extended to the business community settled in the region in their ventures. Although the political fulcrum in the region forced many Marwari families to settle elsewhere, several community archives emphasis upon why the Marwaris would not completely abandon the city. In fact, the closeness of certain Marwari individuals to the CPI(M) jokingly came to identify the bracket in the political party name as Marwaris rather than Marxist. With the change of governance, the proximity of the Marwari community to the political muscle of the state has only become strong over time. Reporting on one event, leading city dailies quoted a TMC MLA who while addressing the Marwari audience in a public event stated: “So what if you are minorities? You are now part of us. Bengal is your roots now, not Rajasthan”.17 Commenting on the community’s philanthropic efforts in the city, the minister was quoted as saying, “By setting your businesses, big or small, you provide livelihood to many others. And by this you contribute to our growth”.18 By using terms like “minority” and “roots” in the same sentence for the Marwari community in Kolkata, the political figures in the state of West Bengal acknowledge the belonging of Marwaris to the city through their “doing for and giving to the city”. Public statements by political figures have endorsed the belongingness of the erstwhile Marwari community in Bengal. For instance, in 2011 when arrest orders were issued for the Marwari directors of a city hospital held responsible for a fatal fire,19 the chief minister of West Bengal gave a public statement in the Hindi daily Sanmarg about the “Marwaris [being] as Bengali as I am” to offset the threat felt by

262  Swati Mantri the Marwaris of the city. Since then, the statement has been revisited and recorded by almost all the Marwari organisations of the city to reiterate their contributions to the city (Sharma 2014: 179). The current Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s categorical statement of her “special feeling for members of the Marwari community” comments on how spatial relations between the migrants and the socio-political machinery of the state constitutes as well as is renewed through both the “political imagery and everyday practices of place-making” (Donner 2012: 153). Belonging, therefore, is not merely a privilege that accompanies one’s membership in an association or a social group, but something that requires efforts through regular participation in diverse ways and various performances in public space (Hardgrove 2004; Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin 2011).

Conclusion Drawing from studies that suggest the role of traders and merchants as vital to the prosperity of any given region (Vidal 1997), this chapter argues for recognition of the contributions of the Marwari community towards the development of Kolkata through building of institutions, industries, sites of social recreation, etc. The ethnographic data lends to the argument that one’s identity is inflected by and implicated in one’s doings and being in any given space. Though the Marwaris have been arriving in Kolkata since the 1600s and have now been a “settled” community in the city for almost a century, the context of the original migration and ties to homeland continue to frame their identity. Arguing that the Marwari identity as articulated in the city of Kolkata is to a large extent shaped by the lived experience of the metropolis by the social actors; that is, through the materiality of the space, the narratives from the Marwari community of Kolkata make for an interesting case to explore how the three – migration, a sense of self and a related sense of belonging – overlap and shape each other. Georg Simmel has observed that “the trader’s relationship to the social order is different from that of any other social type … his lack of social ties frees him from the complication of local social obligations that earned the trader enmity of others” ([1907] 2004: 226–227). However, in the context of the Marwari community of Kolkata, it is this very social obligation that inspired the trader to give back to the city that had brought Lakshmi (wealth) into his home, eventually making the city his home. Recognising that the experience of a social space and the feeling of belonging are “symbiotically connected” (Anthias 2008: 7–8; Frenz 2014: 173), this study has charted out how spaces have the power to create a sense of belongingness through material culture. While ties with the native place were about symbolic investment, emotional attachment and affirmation of one’s identity and values, the respondents were seen to negotiate their feelings of belonging in the place of migration through ownership of home. The chapter explored questions such as whether the Marwari community feels

“Once a migrant, always a migrant?”  263 any native allegiance to the city of Kolkata or is it that Kolkata is not yet home; and whether the once migrant community can still be referred to as a minority in the city or not. The questions of how does one belong and what sustains this feeling of belongingness were the guiding factors in the narratives. To respond to these questions, the respondents primarily indicated their “doing” for and “giving” to the city, which made it necessary to understand the participation of the community in the everyday life of the city. Tracing this participation through philanthropic and political investments, it emerges that the relationships one develops in a place become vital in shaping a sense of home and belonging. The question of belongingness has been explored in this chapter by mapping the various contexts in which the respondents articulated how they “feel at home” in the city. The concepts of “roots” and “routes” helped in grappling with the question of what constituted home for a migrant community. The word “roots” was used interchangeably by the respondents to refer to their home, homeland, native place and place of origin. For this purpose, the concept of “routes” – often employed as an analytical tool in diasporic and transnational migration scholarly studies to theorise on home and belonging (Mallet 2004; Blunt and Bonnerjee 2013; Frenz 2014; Stock 2014; Alexander et al. 2016; Rocha 2016) – is useful in drawing a comparison between how the respondents referred to their home and the place of origin/native land. The responses elicited around the question of home and belonging provided deep insights when traced from an intergenerational perspective and complemented what Zarine L. Rocha describes as “a singular location, imbued with important memories; home as a family, friends and culture; home as a choice, constructed and changing with certain constraints; and home as fluid and multiple” (Rocha 2016: 130). The twin concern of feeling at home as well as socialising the new generations in one’s culture emphasised upon the questions of “who we are” and “where we came from. The boundaries of home extended beyond the physical aspect or the geographical space of the house to the neighbourhood, town or city and is best understood as a space that consists of ‘possessions, relations and is a repository of memories” (Mallet 2004; Stock 2014).20 For most of the respondents in this study, home was where they grew up and the associated formative experiences helped them find their roots or develop a sense of belonging, while for others it was less about the physical location and more about the social relationships. The varied understandings attached to the concept of home and the figure of migrant by the “self” locates them as both emancipatory and limiting for the new generation who perhaps understand home in an altered way. Hence, the ethnographic narratives recounted here reflect the mode of integration while simultaneously unravel the dynamics of how a particular social niche is consciously created to sustain native identity over generations and beyond the multiple strands of migration.

264  Swati Mantri

Notes 1 Cohen argues that one’s sense of belongingness is embedded in a certain context and that if we ‘abstract any piece of social process for interpretation without full consideration of its cultural context, we would derive, at best, only a very partial understanding … or misunderstand’ (Cohen 1982: 15). 2 The Marwari migrant figure is inevitably seen as a male figure, both in migration literature and by the respondents. The woman Marwari migrant emerged as the protagonist only in fiction. See, for instance, Prabha Khetan’s Pili Aāndhi (2001). 3 Lawrence Babb argues that the specific sub-castes to which Rajasthan traders belong is far more critical than varna in matters of social identity. In his study on Rajputs and traders of Rajasthan, Babb records 128 Marwari sub-castes in Rajasthan (Babb 1999). 4 Nawab Murshid Quli Khan, the first nawab of Bengal, bestowed this title on Seth Fatehchand in recognition of his financial support to the state (Roul 2009: 100). ‘Seth’ colloquially refers to the owner of an enterprise or a company; the term is ‘a respectable honour bestowed on the moneylenders by the Mughal’ (Roul 2009: 100). The Jagat Seths are Oswal Jains. Though their place of origin is Rajasthan, their culture, religion, and social practices vary from those observed in the Marwari community. However, over time, they have come to identify themselves as Marwaris in the city (Field notes, Kolkata, 2015–16). The Jagat Seths originally lived in Azimganj, the urban centre of Murshidabad, a town in West Bengal. With the eventual decline of Murshidabad, they moved to Kolkata in the eighteenth century (Little 1967; Hardgrove 2004). 5 Setting up their vyapar kothi (business houses) in Bengal, the Jagat Seths graduated from currency exchangers to controlling the mint. 6 “Bania’s eye view: Long reviled and caricatured by the city they have shaped, Calcutta’s Marwaris are humanised and demystified in Sujit Saraf’s novel”, Indian Express, 10 June 2017, http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/ harilal-sons-sujit-saraf-the-banias-eye-view-4696845/. 7 Several texts were produced by the Marwari community of Kolkata listing Marwari freedom fighters, social scientists, writers, academicians, etc. For instance: Kedia (1969), Nevatia (1982), and Barua (1967). 8 Amra in Bengali means ours. Such terms strongly emphasized who belonged to the land. The movement has a splintered presence in some of the eastern states of the country and hardly any presence in Kolkata city. https://banglar-bangali.blogspot. com/; http://proutglobe.org/2012/03/amra-bangali/; http://archive.indianexpress. com/news/who-are-the-amra-bangalis-/322021/. Fruzzetti and Östör, while documenting the meaning of ‘Amra Bangali’ as articulated by the activists of the political group, write that this term refers to a Bengali who does not act against the interests (social, economic, political) of the state (Fruzzetti and Östör 2003). 9 The chapter uses pseudonyms for all the participating respondents, institutions, and other identifiable markers to maintain anonymity. Interviewed in Barabazaar, Kolkata, 7 October 2016. 10 Although no fieldwork or data collection was carried out in Rajasthan, I noticed such inscriptions on several visits to the Marwari library in New Delhi and Kolkata and personal visits to Rajasthan (particularly public institutions, temples, etc.) as ‘Shri ABC of (place name)’. 11 According to Das, the prominent Marwari industrialist G.D. Birla’s close association with Mahatma Gandhi influenced the overall Marwari community members’ characterization as patrons of charity (Das 2003). 12 The Birla family set up the Marwari Assistance Committee to provide medical help facilities in Barabazaar. Some other important Marwari families involved in philanthropic activities include Prabhudayal Himmatsinghka, Poddar, Kanodia, and Nevatia.

“Once a migrant, always a migrant?”  265 13 A series of articles by Sandip Roy appeared in Firstpost that discussed the Marwari ‘ways of life’ in Kolkata. The first article in the series is https://www. firstpost.com/living/marwari-city-stories-of-kolkatas-heritage-often-exclude-itsprominent-community-2768084.html. 14 “A flyover crash brings Barabazaar into focus – once a hub of affluent Marwaris, it is now a place for those who have nowhere to go”, Indian Express, http:// indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/life-style/somewhere-in-north-kolkata/. 15 Mainak Sain and Saibal Sen, Times of India, Kolkata, 21 September 2015. http:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/. 16 For instance, see K.K. Birla (2009), Brushes with History, London: Penguin; Medha M. Kudaisya (2003), The Life and Times of G.D. Birla, Oxford: Oxford University Press; A. Sinha (2005), The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan, Indian University Press; T. Bandhyopadhyay and S. Dinda (2013), “Neo-Liberalism and Protest in West Bengal: An Analysis through the Media Lens”, Asian Journal of Research in Social Sciences & Humanities, 3(7), pp. 32–59. 17 Trinamool Congress (TMC) MLA Sabyasachi Datta, 22 September 2015. http:// www.millenniumpost.in-105746. 18 Mainak Sain and Saibal Sen, Times of India, Kolkata, 21 September 2015. http:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/. 19 After the fire disaster that claimed many lives at Amri Hospital in 2011, the public outcry against the hospital authorities led to the arrest of the directors of the hospital, who were all Marwari industrialists. The Marwari business chambers viewed this as an act of bias against the Marwari community; they vehemently defended the directors’ case, stating that the directors did not have a role to play in the ‘day-to-day functioning of the hospital’. Some media reported the continued denial of bail to the Amri accused as a ‘parochial Bengali versus Marwari issue’ and that the Bengalis were against the Marwari community because of their dominance in the business set-up of the city. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/kolkata-­ marwaris-feel-threatened-after-mamatas-reaction-on-amri-fire/articleshow/ 11381982.cms. 20 Probing what constitutes home, Mallet (2004:65) asks “whether or not home is (a) place (s), (a) space (s), feeling (s), practices, and/ or an active state of being in the world? Home is variously described as conflated with or related to house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying”.

References Alexander, Claire, Joya Chatterjee, and Annu Jalais. 2016. The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration. Oxon: Routledge. Anthias, Floya. 2008. “Thinking through the Lens of Translocational Positionality: An Intersectional Frame for Understanding Identity and Belonging”. Translocations: Migration and Social Change 4 (1): 5–20. Babb, Lawrence A. 1999. “Mirrored Warriors: On the Cultural Identity of Rajasthani Traders”. International Journal of Hindu Studies 3 (1): 1–25. Barman, K. Chandra. 2015. “Economic Thought of Panchanan Barma and Kshatriya Bank: A Brief Study on Historical Perspectives”. History Research 3 (2): 35–40. Barua, Rishi Jamini Kaushik. 1967. Main Apne Marwari Samaj Ko Pyar Karta Hoon. Kolkata: Jamini Prakashan. Blunt, A., and J. Bonnerjee. 2013. “Home, City and Dispaora: Anglo-Indian and Chinese Attachments to Calcutta”. Global Networks 13 (2): 220–240. Chakravarti, Sudeep. 2017. The Bengalis: A Portrait of Community. India: Aleph.

266  Swati Mantri Chatterjee, Anasua. 2015. “Narratives of Exclusion: Space, Insecurity and Identity in a Muslim Neighbourhood”. Economic and Political Weekly 50 (52): 92–99. Chaudhuri, Sukanta. 1990. Calcutta: The Living City. Calcutta: Oxford University Press. Clifford, J. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, A.P. 1982. “Introduction”. In Belonging: The Experience of Culture, edited by A.P. Cohen, 1–20. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Das, Gurucharan. 2003. Marwar Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Centre for Civil Society. http://gurcharandas.org/node/634. Donner, Henrike. 2012. “Whose City Is It Anyway? Middle Class Imagination and Urban Restructuring in Twenty-first Century Kolkata”. New Perspectives on Turkey 46: 129–155. Dutta, Krishna. 2013. Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History. 3rd ed. India: Supernova Publishers. Frenz, Margaret. 2014. Community, Memory, and Migration in a Globalizing World: The Goan Experience, c. 1890–1980. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Fruzzetti, L., and A. Östör. 2003. Calcutta Conversations. New Delhi: DC Publishers. Ghosh, Parimal. 2016. What Happened to the Bhadralok. New Delhi: Primus Books. Hardgrove, Anne. 2004. Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hart, Keith. 2000. The Memory Bank. London: Profile. Hazra, Indrajit. 2014. Grand Delusions: A Short Biography of Kolkata. New Delhi: Aleph. Kedia, Bhimsen. 1969. Bharat mein Marwari Samaj. Kolkata: National India Publication. Khetan, Prabha. 2001. Pili Aandhi. New Delhi: Rajkamal Paperbacks. Levitt, Peggy. 2009. “Roots and Routes: Understanding the Lives of the Second Generation Transnationally”. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35 (7): 1225–1242. Little, J.H. 1967. The House of Jagat Seth. Kolkata: Calcutta Historical Society. https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.98706/2015.98706.House-OfJagatseth-Ed-1st_djvu.txt. Accessed 30 October 2019. Mallet, Shelley. 2004. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature”. The Sociological Review 52 (1) 62–89. Mantri, Swati. 2019. “Marwaris of Kolkata: Community, Identity and City”. PhD Dissertation, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. Mukherjee, Neel. 2014. The Lives of Others. Great Britain: Chatto & Windus. Nevatia, Radhakrishna. 1948. Rajnetik Shetra Mein Marwari Samaj Ki Aahutiya Rajnetik Upasmiti. Kolkata: Akhil Bharatvarshiya Marwari Sammelan. Nevatia, Radhakrishna. 1982. Burabazaar ke Karyakarta: Smaran evam Abhinandan Granth. Kolkata: Sri Barabazaar Kumarsabha Pustakalya. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2000. The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. London: Polity Press. Parson, Rahul Bjorn. 2012. “The Bazaar and the Bari: Calcutta, Marwaris, and the World of Hindi Letters”. PhD Dissertsation, University of California, Berkeley. Pfaff-Czarnecka, Joanna. 2011. “From Identity to Belonging in Social Research: Plurality, Social Boundaries, and the Politics of the Self”. Social Anthropology. Working Paper No. 368. Bielefeld University, pp. 1–18.

“Once a migrant, always a migrant?”  267 Pfaff-Czarnecka, Joanna, and G. Toffin, eds. 2011. “Introduction”. In The Politics of Belonging in the Himalayas: Local Attachments and Boundary Dynamics, ix–xi. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Ray, Prafulla Chandra. [1932] 1996. Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist. Calcutta: Chuckervertty, Chatterjee & Co. Rocha, Zarine L. 2016. “Mixed Race” Identities in Asia and the Pacific: Experiences from Singapore and New Zealand. Oxon: Routledge. Roul, C. 2009. The International Jute Commodity System. New Delhi: Northern Book Centre. Saraf, Sujit. 2017. Harilal & Sons: A Novel. India: Speaking Tiger. Saraogi, Alka. 1998. Kali Katha via Bypass. New Delhi: Rajkamal Paperbacks. Saraogi, Alka. 2015. Jaankidas Tejpal Mansion. New Delhi: Rajkamal Paperbacks. Shah, Ratan. 2000. Marwari Samaj: Ek Tathyatmak Vivechan. 2nd ed. Kolkata. Sharma, S. 2014. West Bengal: Changing Colours, Changing Challenges. New Delhi: Rupa. Simmel, Georg ed. [1908] 1950. The Stranger: The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated by Kurt Wolff. New York: Free Press. Simmel, Georg. [1907] 2004. Philosophy of Money. 3rd ed. Translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge. Stock, Femke. 2014. Speaking of Home: Home and Identity in the Multivoiced Narratives of Descendants of Moroccan and Turkish Migrants in the Netherlands. Netherlands: University of Groningen. Taknet, D.K. 2015. The Marwari Heritage. India: D.K. Print World Ltd. Vidal, Denis. 1997. Violence and Truth: A Rajasthani Kingdom Confronts Colonial Authority. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Weber, M. 1958 [1921]. “The Nature of the City”. In The City, translated by D. Martindale and G. Neuwirth. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

14 The figure of the migrant as other Experiences, memory, and the politics of belonging Sadan1

Impression The dervish only wanders To obtain a vision. Otherwise, there’s bread aplenty And salt anywhere. (Markovits et al. 2003: 1)

Provocations With each passing decade, social sciences have been witnessing new sets of coinages and challenges. In a recent couple of decades, for example, the affective turn (Massumi 2002: 30; Thrift 2004; Clough 2007: 1–33; Hardt 2007; Leys 2011), the urban turn (in case of India; Prakash 2002: 2–7), and the migratory turn (in the context of art history Burcu Dogramaci talks about it; Dogramaci and Mersmann. 2019: 9-13; Dogramaci 2019: 17–37) are few such examples forcing in and pushing us to refine our engagement with the social reality and its understanding. Chasing these twists and turns is beyond the capacity of an individual and is not desired either. Yet, drawing insights help us to acknowledge the multifaceted dimension of social phenomenon leading towards a richer and nuanced understanding of the subject. In a study that deliberates upon the memory at both social and individual levels and the experiential dimensions of a migrant who is located in an urban milieu, it becomes essential to pay attention to these different strands of scholarship. Such apathy is ironic, particularly in the context of South Asia where Dalit studies, gender studies, discourse on the Partition violence, and the overarching frame of post-colonial scholarships have all harped upon the centrality of experiences and subjectivities in one or another manner. Thinking in the light of such a challenge posed by the contemporary developments in social sciences, the task at hand, here in this study, is how to render the relationship between memory and the figure of a migrant. By memory, I refer to both individual memory (i.e., experiential dimension of journey) as well as its collective ramifications (i.e., folk songs). The chapter further makes a strong plea that this migrant memory DOI: 10.4324/9781003199120-18

The figure of the migrant as other  269 (or in other words, the memoryscape that a migrant inhabits) does not function in isolation of the politics of belonging. Here, it may be beneficial to differentiate between the politics of belonging and the politics of identity. Following Anthias, one may argue that one may identify with the place and the community around but “not feel that you ‘belong’ in the sense of being accepted’ or being a full member” (Anthias 2006: 19; on an overview of scholarship on belonging see Lähdesmäki et al. 2016). Hence, the memoryscapes, the subjectivities, and the figure of the migrant ought to be approached by interpreting the manner in which s/he acquires the status of migrant, labelled as other, and stigmatised. What does it mean to study migration when you are a migrant yourself? Who owns the memory of the migration: its cultural milieu or its sites? Is it the figure of a migrant or is it the discourse that shapes the contours of this figure? The question of ownership approached in this manner may be fraught with numerous closures. Firstly, when it comes to memory and the figure of migrants, both elude us in their locations. This is not because you cannot find them at a given place. It is primarily because they occupy more than one location. Secondly, as Pierra Nora (1989) has convincingly argued that there is no possibility of reconstructing the milieu of memory (milieu de memoire). Instead, what we can access is the site of memory (lieux de memoire) In the aftermath of Nora’s intervention in memory studies, we ought to ask, what is the status and role of folk memories pertaining to migration? Are these mere sites, or do these play an active role in constructing the milieu of memory in so many different ways, something that escaped from the framework of Nora as she remained glued to the homogenising and nationalist terrains and to the past as the domain of the memory. When we consider itinerant forms such as folk sayings and folk songs related to migration, should we treat them as mere containers of traces of migration? Different disciplines engage with these memory traces differently. While for history, these traces come in the form of “the science of traces” (Marc Bloch cited in Ricoeur 2004: 13) or what Ricoeur broadly refers to us as the question of anamnesis, of epistemology, of “how” to access memory (on anamnesis and its difference with mneme see Ricoeur 2004: 19–44). For anthropology, it is chiefly about the occurrences and surfacing of these memory traces in the life of a society. Deep down, when we agree that disciplinary boundaries are not frozen and the social life function in isolated domains, the question is how does memory migrate from the past to the surface in the lives of the present? More concretely, perhaps, the question is how to access this memory-­ migration complex. This squarely brings us to the question of the method, particularly migration as a method, leading us to our third point where we find that the three elements of our study (migration, the figure of a migrant, and the discourse) neither form exclusive zones nor are they replaceable with one another. If we wish to invest ourselves in migration as a method,

270  Sadan we ought to pay attention to all these three layers and beyond. But, more cautiously, we need to pay heed to how they coalesce into each other, sometimes merging seamlessly at other times keeping apart their analytical autonomy. In this overlap, there is a multitude of analytical possibilities and methodological interventions inherent in it. The multisitedness of the figure of the migrant and her/his subjectivities is one such challenge that this chapter aims to partly engage as a way to treat migration as a method. At this point, more than the ownership of the migrant memory, it is important to ask how to access and approach it? Locating memory in the social world, then, the experiential dimensions and the politics of belonging create a kind of vortex in which the researcher as well as the research subject both coalesce together. We start this journey with two genres of Maithili folksongs.

Sohars and jhumars Sohar and jhumars is a genre of folk songs in Maithili, Bhojpuri, and other languages of Bihar, often sung on auspicious occasions like childbirth, marriage, etc. One such sohar begins with Hari more ayale kalkatwā se auru Darbhangwā se ho Lalnā lei ayale prem chunariyā ta dhani ke manaiebii ho [Hari has come from Kalkatta (Kolkata) and from Darbhanga, for the son, a drape of love has arrived, and he will now please her (his beloved/wife)]. (Archer and Prasad 1943: 186; translation is mine) Hari is both the mythic Krishna as well as the migrant husband in this song. Darbhanga and Kalkatta (and not Calcutta or Kolkata) both are actual locations as well as metaphorical coordinates which link together pain and suffering of birah (separation) as well as the hope of return. The song speaks about the agony, longing, and pangs of separation at different levels. At one level, the song is articulated in and documents the time of the present when the beloved has actually returned home on the occasion of the birth of a child, their child. At another level, this time is merely an imaginary, elusive, and mythic one where the hope of the return is ritualised and rendered in singing. Notwithstanding the elusiveness of time, one may argue that this hope rendered through a ritualised singing is potentially bestowed with therapeutic properties soothing the heart, and healing the wounds of separation. A scholar says that if history is not therapeutic, it is useless. Similarly, if songs lose such qualities, they will be bereft of social moorings and not of much use for a researcher. Returning to the song, we find that Kalkatta is in the company of Darbhanga. Kalkatta in colonial times acquired a ubiquitous presence in the psyche of this region of north eastern Bihar called Mithila. The region supplied workforce and imported longing in return. The city may throw “ambiguous” charm for males from poverty-ridden and “poisoned villages”

The figure of the migrant as other  271 (to borrow from Ashis Nandy), but for women, it acquired monstrous proportion (Nandy 2006). A Jhumar (a genre of folk song) makes the following plea: Kalkatta tu jan jaa raajaa, hamaar dil kaise lagi. Ohi Kalkatta men randi basatu hai, mozraa karihen din raati. Hamaar dil kaise laagi… Ohi Kalkatta men malhoriyaa basatu hai, gazlaa lagaihen din raati. Hamaar dil kaise lagi… Ohi Kalkatta men tamoliya basatu hain, Birbaa lagai hain din raati. Hamaar dil kaise lagi [O’ my beloved king! Don’t go to Kalkatta (Kolkata), how will I keep my heart stay (calm). In Kalkatta prostitutes live, performing shows day and night how will I keep my heart stay (calm)? In Kalkatta malaria resides, with coughing day and night how will I keep my heart stay (calm)? In Kalkatta betel seller lives selling betel day and night how will I keep my heart stay (calm)?]. (Archer and Prasad 1943: 171; translation is mine) This jhumar in fact begins with a complaint: Kalkatta sahar badnaam nayanaa naa mane ho, Amma ke bheje likh likh patiyaa jodu ke bheje salaam. Kalkatta sahar badnaam… Amma ke bheje paanch rupaiyaa jodu ke pure pachaas Kalkataa shahar badnaam [Kalkatta (Kolkata) is a city of ill repute, eyes are restless, (he) sends complains to the mother but greetings to the wife. Kalkatta is a city of ill repute… {he} sends five rupees to mother and full fifty to the wife Kalkatta is a city of ill repute]. (Archer and Prasad 1943: 167; translation is mine) The above-mentioned song is in the form of a complaint in which a normative voice vents anger and discrimination when it says that Kalkatta is a city of bad repute. This city has tossed a migrant’s morality upside down. Therefore, while he sends long letters (Patiya literally mean letters but may be inferred as bearing negative connotations and implies complaints/complaining) to his mother but only a word of greeting (in fact, salutation) to his wife. While he sends five rupees to the mother, a whopping fifty for his wife. It may be a safe assumption that this jhumar may be from the late nineteenth or first half of the twentieth century. Contrasting

272  Sadan these sohars and jhumar with a prose register from the late nineteenth century may provide us an interesting slice of the history of migration from the Mithila region.2 This is a letter written by a migrant Durmil Jha (name changed) to “Musamma’t Champabati” (name changed; presumably, his wife living with her father [father-in-law of the letter writer, Durmil]) which entered into colonial archive only to be retrieved by Grierson. The letter was translated and published by Grierson (but carefully changed the identity of the people involved; see Figure 14.1) verbatim et literatim as a sample specimen of Maithili language in his Maithili Chrestomathy in 1882.

Figure 14.1  Specimen of a letter written by migrant husband Durmil Jha to Shree Champawati, published with a translation by George A. Grierson in 1882 as the first specimen of Maithili prose writing. Courtesy, George A. Grierson. 1882. An Introduction to the Maithili Language of North Bihar Containing a Grammar, Chrestomathy and Vocabulary Part II Chrestomathy and Vocabulary, Extra number to Journal. Asiatic Society. Bengal. Part I for 1880: 1–2.

The figure of the migrant as other  273 [Translation of a letter written by Durmil Jha’ to Musamma’t Champa’bati’: After compliments, may you live for a long time. My good wishes to Champábatí. Moreover, I have learnt both from the mouth of Lachhuman, and from your letter that you are all well, and my heart has been pleased thereby. Lakshmí Debí has had a little child, and we must make arrangements for its support; she has no mother, and I hope that you will keep an eye on her and see that she gets everything necessary (lit. oil and pots). I have sent you a box herewith, and it is for you, keep it. In the box, there are six rupees, and some Kábulí* fruits; open the box, and give two rupees and half fruit to Lakshmí Daí but give it privately. You will keep two rupees, the remainder of the fruit and the box; I have sent them for you. Do not be unhappy about anything: all your property, which has been spoilt, will be recovered for you, and then only will I be easy in my mind. My compliments to the father-in-law. Moreover, it is a long time since you have passed Bholá Sáhu to pay the money he owes. You know what sort of temper my son has, so realize the money quickly, or you will repent afterwards. He has sold all the paddy in the granary. When will the fool get decent wisdom? My good wishes to Gobind Bábu. Rs.         Slabs of mango conserve. For Rahiká bridegroom … 2 … 2 ,, Lakshmí Dái     … 2 … 2 ,, the Little Folk     … 2 … 2 * The word masala usually means “spices”. I am, however, assured that here it must be translated as above.] (This explanation is inserted in original) (Grierson 1882: 1–3) The question is, how we can engage with such registers? Economics treats migration largely from the rigid confines of its disciplinary boundaries and policy frames, and is populated by statistics.3 History, which is my parental discipline and to which I still pay certain allegiance, pays, even otherwise, quite fleeting and almost dismissive look at poetic registers and remains premised upon precision of language and celebrates unambiguous sources for its reconstruction. The prose in such a frame remains far superior to poetry. The challenge is how to engage with such poetic registers not merely as cultural traces, not merely as resources and locations for the winnowing of social and cultural facts which can reflect historical trends, but as dynamic and contested sites for writing about migration. Drawing upon insights from recent scholarship traditions and their epistemic energy (i.e., Dalit Studies and Gender Studies in particular), this chapter explores

274  Sadan some facets and circuits of subjectivities in and through which the figure of migrant surfaces. These regimes of subjectivities are narrated and analysed here by grounding them in fragments which constitute the journey for a migrant. In this engagement with the journey, the fragments are sutured with each other by creatively mobilising the perspectives of both micro and macro studies, and in return, the analytical landscape gets conflated with the physical geography to tell a tale.4 At another level, such poetic registers in their ambiguity also open possibilities of looking at geography and the spatial dimensions of migration in new ways (Buat 2018). For example, in a very popular Kajri (a genre of song) we come across Banaras, Mirzapur and Rangoon all connected to a circuit: Sejiyā par lote kālā nāg ho Kachauri gali sun kail balamu Mirzapur kail guljār ho, kachauri gali sun kail balamu. Ahi Mirzapur se urale jahajiya, urale jahajiyaa re guiyān urale jahajiyaa Saiyān chal gaile rangoon ho … kachauri gali sun kail balamu [Black cobra is restless on the bed O’ dear, you have emptied out the Kachauri lane You have made Mirzapur bustling, O’ dear, you have emptied out Kachauri lane A ship has taken flight from this Mirzapur, O’ companion! a ship has taken flight Beloved husband has gone to Rangoon, O’ dear, you have emptied out Kachauri lane]5 Once again, we can ponder about geography which is both real and metaphorical. These get connected through historical and economic coordinates, but only after inserting the imaginary or desirous journey routes, flying from Mirzapur to Rangoon. These are also historical in the sense that coordinates keep changing. New place-names get added in this oeuvre. Surat, one of the most significant migrant destinations in recent decades, is a case to point: Mehri ke chhorlā ke, kā rahe jarurat Saiyān gail Surat. Sona as bigār ke ail surat. Shisha men dekh āpan surat, saiyān gail Surat …Barah ghantā duty kail, tabo naikhe jurat Saniyān gail Surat, sona as bigār ke ail surat… [What the need to desert the wife, what was the need Husband has gone to Surat wiping off shine from his golden face Look at your face in the mirror, husband has gone to Surat

The figure of the migrant as other  275 Dehydrating your bouncing cheeks Husband has gone to Surat, wiping off shine from his golden face]6 However, before reaching Surat, before the husband (Saiyan) has to labour twelve hours a day and lose shine from his face as the song laments, and before locating the figure of a migrant by grounding our analytical gaze in the cityscape called Surat, let us defer the dynamics of destination for a while to the in between – ness which connects the source and the destination. Let us allow our narrative to travel. Let us briefly talk about the journey without which migration cannot occur. Unfortunately, this is the least explored thread of migration studies in South Asia.

Journey Saaon sukla saptami jaun garze aadhi raat, Tum jao piya Malwa, hamjaibon Gujarat. [If on the seventh of the bright half of Sawan, it thunders at midnight (there will be draught). O dear, you go to Malwa and I will proceed for Gujarat]. (Christian [1891] 1986) This proverb documented in the last decades of the nineteenth century contains the memory of scarcity and migration. It may be worth noticing that the text of the couplet does not mention scarcity. It is rather assumed only to be recovered explicitly as draught in the English translation by a colonial administrator. The act of translation is an act of intermediation. Let me talk a little about a different kind of mediation. This is about my own subjectivity as a researcher in this exercise. This is about a slice of my own journey (which will follow in the next section) to Gujarat of this above-mentioned Dak Vachan and Surat of the earlier mentioned Bhojpuri song. Pointing towards the negligence accrued to journey in the scholarship on migration, Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma, in her work on migrant workforce from Bihar, Jharkhand and Bengal working in Trivandrum, Kerala has argued that “Journeys, rather than settlement, characterize the life of these workers” (Prasad-Aleyamma 2009: 2). Scholarly apathy accrued to aspects pertaining to journey and travel reveals certain salient features which have predominantly shaped the migration discourse within different disciplinary domains in South Asia. Firstly, an obsession with dividing the discourse of migration in the binary, i.e., between the source and destination, stems from the desires of capital and the empire which treat the figure of a migrant merely as a unit which is bereft of any subjectivity. Thus, for both the capital and the empire, while geographies which produce raw human force and finished goods matter, the intermediate processes do not merit serious attention. In this scheme, travel acquires attention only when the governance of the intermediary spaces is

276  Sadan required to safeguard the means of production. Thus, as recent scholarship on the history of indenture reveals, we come across a dense investment in regulating gaze over sea voyages from India to the Caribbean and other plantation destinations across the oceans.7 Secondly, methodologically, these disciplinary concerns, guided by the larger and invisible logic of capital and the empire, cannot anchor themselves on subjects which are not located in specific geographies and which are constantly on the move. Thus, for the subjectivities of the migrant figure to emerge, we had to either wait for the literary turn in social sciences or for the interdisciplinary endeavours to tell us that migration as a subject of study should not be located within the methodological confines of any one discipline. The period which witnessed literary turn and a growing urge for interdisciplinarity in the social sciences was also a period when post-structuralist concerns were making decisive in-roads. These turns further helped social sciences to appreciate the significance of looking at processes. However, it may not be far from the truth that the discourse on migration in South Asia largely remained untouched by such developments in social sciences. Subjectivities and journeys became relevant when scholarship on South Asia started moving away from the centrality of pull-push factors on the one hand and the disciplinary domains of economics on the other. Scholarship on politics induced dislocation like the mass exodus in the wake of South Asia’s partition into the nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947. The Partition again furthered with the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. It is a case to cite. However, as we know, until the middle of the 1980s, historiography on the Partition violence was driven by the dynamics of high politics, transfer of power (decolonisation in the post-World War II period) and conspiracy theories. Until the anti-Sikh riots of Delhi in 1984, the history of the Partition in particular and social science discourse on this ordeal was oblivious to the pain and sufferings of ordinary people. The articulation of this trauma was restricted to the domains of literature and cinema. Only when scholars-­concerned citizens started visiting the houses of the victims of the 1984 riots, the discipline of history began attending and listening to the long-buried pain and sufferings. The Partition no more remained a dead event of the past but surfaced as an unfinished and unending nightmare along with characterising itself as a process which spilt over from the past into contemporary India. Never before history in South Asia felt an urge with such a passion for being in the company of literature. Never before it moved towards anthropology and oral history with such fervour. Never before it paid close attention to the memory. Building upon this journey of social sciences in South Asia, I further wish to mobilise this memory, albeit differently. For me, what is crucial is the cultural memory of the migration. In this terrain, folk registers and literature commit us to a wide and open field to engage with the specificities of migration in South Asia. An engagement with the journey is neither detached nor fully consumed in the logic of either the capital or the empire in this sphere.

The figure of the migrant as other  277 Here we can converse with disciplines as well as remain outside of their methodological rigidity. However, before returning to my own journey, it may be worth paying attention to the anxiety for direction. The choice of direction of travel obviously precedes the journey. In the following Maithili song, we find the wife/ beloved pleading with her husband not to go east, west, and north but he may venture to south: O’ my dear beloved! Do not venture in the direction of the east; the water in the east is impure You too will die drinking that water I will remain alone in the temple Will play Holi in the Palace, will wander alone Kānhā does not pay heed to my words Do not venture in the direction of the north, huge lion from the jungle of the north will eat you I will remain alone Kānhā does not pay heed to my words Do not venture in the direction of the west, women of the west are smart In the night they will make you sleep in the palace of love and in the morning make you fetch water for them Women outsmart men, there, O’ Kānhā Kānhā does not pay heed to my words (if you must) you venture in the direction of the south, there flows mother Ganga (Ganges) With a dip in the Ganga, you will come alive We both will play Holi Kānhā does not pay heed to my words I will remain alone in the temple Will play Holi in the Palace, will wander alone Kānhā does not pay heed to my words. (Singh [1993] 2015a: 340; translation by the author) The question is, what is so special about the south? Is it about the direction or does the South also serves any metaphorical function? Usually, it can be both as such songs often carry a nirgun spirit underneath. Secondly, is it specific only to Mithila? Does the South in the song specifically concerns itself to the south of Mithila and, in this way, serves a limited documentary function acting as a definitive geographic trace in a regional setting? By locating this song in the immediate geography of Mithila, we may find Morang, Nepal, in the north. This has always been a disease-prone, hilly, and wild territory in the psycho geography of Mithila. Bengal and Assam are identified with the east and with the fears of Tantra and tea plantations, respectively. One may equate the west with the regions of Bhojpur and Awadh. In terms of climate, culture, and food habits, these are quite

278  Sadan distinct from Mithila. For example, while Maithil Brahmins are predominantly Shakta (one who worships Shakti/goddess) and customarily eat fish and meat, these are considered as profane in the Brahmanical tradition of Bhojpur and Awadh. For Mithila, the immediate south is the river Ganges, the most pious river for Hindus with a capacity to wash the guilt and free a human being from all the sins.8 Folksongs are powerful as they have the endurance to accommodate our interpretation. We interpret them, identify with their content and essence in our own ways. Through such interpretations, they continue to remain relevant and attract our cultural selves. In such a zone of meaning-making, it is difficult to resist the pull. However, with a little persuasion of our critical faculty, we also realise another possibility of contradictory interpretations. For example, the South of Mithila is also the region of Magadh, a forbidden territory in the cultural geography of Maithil Brahmins. Secondly, it is not very difficult to empirically establish that a good number of folksongs and other such registers, in fact, share a lot of common elements and concerns across Maithili, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Angika and even with Avadhi and Braj. This makes the issue perplexing, and we are left wondering not with what the south mean in Mithila but how to look at the South? As you will notice the reference to the Ganges in the south is unmistakable, yet it does not stop me from thinking about the South in the way I have outlined above. In the process, defying the prescription of woman who stayed in the palace, I travelled towards the west.

Journey to Surat It was a rainy morning, the first day of September in 2007. They said the monsoon was receding. We had arrived in Surat from Delhi by Mumbai bound Gareeb-Rath Express. Much before reaching Surat, in fact, soon after the train left Bharuch junction, a commotion began in our compartment. The passageway was getting crowded, and bags of all size and shapes were queued at the gates which jammed the pathways. We too joined this celebration of waiting for the arrival of Surat Railway station. With thirteen big and small bags, one and a half year old son, mother and wife, the usefulness of jamming the door early was quickly realised. It was drizzling at the platform when we deboarded the train. Hiring a taxi was hassle free when compared to Delhi, and the roads were wide and clean. The downpour in the night and ongoing drizzles had added an extra glaze on the tar surface. This was my third visit. I had earlier come for two short but eventful trips. However, for new visitors (my wife and mother), the city presented a sense of awe filled with anxieties. Anxiety related to entering a new unknown urban terrain. Thinking retrospectively, they were probably bewildered. They had expected a much less spectacular cityscape than what they were used to in Delhi. The wide roads, long flyovers, and multi-storied apartments in the City light area were beyond their

The figure of the migrant as other  279 comprehension for an image of Surat, a city located on the western coast of India. The gaze outside the Maruti van taxi window also met women sweepers neatly dressed in sidha pallu glittering synthetic silk saris. This was an impressive sight. The city was charming, clean, and inviting to her visitors.

Shahar/the city Cities produce “others”. This is not to agree with the romantic, all-­inclusive, harmonious, and utopian villages of Mahatma Gandhi. Like any other socio-spatial formation or, for that matter, similar to any other analytic category, cities too are intrinsically constituted in and through different processes which simultaneously generate regimes of otherness and selfhood. Othering in this perspective is inherent and constitutive to the process itself. Away from the hermeneutic engagement with the construction of others in the meaning-making or from psychoanalysis of the self, I look at othering as a socio-spatial and dynamic process. I attempt to locate this process at two levels. Firstly, a brief analysis is offered to understand the implications of perceiving and framing migrants as undesirable others. The gruesome communal outbreak that shook Surat in the aftermath of the destruction of Babri Mosque on 6 December 1992 was marked by surfacing of this figure of the other in quite an ironic and tragic manner. This is rather surprising in the context of a city that claims to have a cosmopolitan and multicultural past. Secondly, this section will unravel the politics of othering at a deeper level – in terms of everyday social life that largely constitute the field of the urban experience in Surat. It is at this level; we hope to discover how the mundane detail of urban life and perceptions about people and communities shape the contours of otherness and reveal different shades in the politics of belongingness. A city known for diamond polishing and synthetic textiles, Surat is one of the most rapidly growing cities in India. According to a UNESCO study based on the Census of India, 2001, Surat receives the largest percentage of internal migrants in million-plus cities of India (Faetanini and Tankha 2013). With an official population of more than forty-five lakhs, Surat urban agglomeration stands at the ninth position in the country in terms of population. The lineage of the contemporary urban growth of Surat directly goes back to the 1960s when the city acquired an unprecedented momentum in terms of size as well as population. With the expansion of city limits and the inclusion of new areas, this period also witnessed a massive influx of people from outside. With the diamond polishing and synthetic textile industries, in the 1960s, Surat not merely witnessed a massive expansion but also began receiving a large influx of migrant population. Over the decades, some of these groups acquired a dominant position in terms of their hold on the capital. Communities of Patidars from Saurashtra and Marwaris from Rajasthan are two such groups.

280  Sadan According to a survey conducted in October–November 1973, covering 1964 families from different blocks, selected through random samples from different wards of this decade-old corporation (in 1964 Surat municipality became a corporation), almost every other family came from outside, and 16 per cent of the total families came to Surat city only in the last eight years (Shah n.d.: 12–13). This report further claims that one-third of emigrant families came from different states of India, but mainly from Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh. 25 per cent of emigrant families were from the same Surat district. Such heterogeneity gave this city “a cosmopolitan character” (Shah n.d.: 14). The report also seems to suggest that a large number of problems and difficulties that the city was facing in the early years of the 1970s had their roots in the growing dimensions of the city. Migrants and the lower caste population had a fair share in creating such problems. It reports that all kinds of crime increased during the last two decades. A caste-wise break-up has been provided showing “a majority of the history sheeters belong to low castes, including the SCs and STs. A large number of them – 32 out of 47 belong to the Scheduled Tribes – Halpatis, Gamits, Chodhuris, Talaviyas, etc. The number of non-Gujaratis among them, say, Maharashtrians and South Indians is not small” (Shah n.d.: 84, 86). The report adds that the city remained no longer a peaceful one, and the most of the culprits who were responsible for it were migrants (Shah n.d.: 91–102, 106). The study concludes by offering the following suggestion: “Looking at the existing amenities, land and hazard of health, Surat has reached its optimum level of population. Therefore, efforts should be made to check migration to the city from other parts of the state and country” (Shah n.d.: 115). The difficult question is who are these migrants? When every other family comes from outside the city, who speaks on behalf of the city’s original self? In such a scenario, can there be a search for migrants’ identity and who are the “original” inhabitants? If yes, what can be the yardstick for such a definition – time spent in the city? Can a Maharashtrian living and working in Surat for thirty years be considered as a migrant when compared to a Ghanchi who came to the city merely a few years back? It is difficult to sustain this line of enquiry, and the division between migrants and non-migrants may not be pertinent if not pitched at another level. This level is where the city produces alienation and perceptions of others at different layers. It is only by investing focus at these different and subtle layers of everydayness that one can engage with the narratives which surfaced in the nightmare of Surat. What is intriguing here is both the figure of the migrant as well as the process of othering through which the politics of the city defines its shade of belonging. The report, with which we began this section, is both symptomatic of such a politics as well as a crude reminder for the mindset which was to play a vital role in coming decades. Twenty years after this report, when the city exploded in communal fire, a frame was already ready for scholars to identify and blame the perpetrators.

The figure of the migrant as other  281

Migrant as perpetrator Babri Mosque in Ayodhya was demolished on 6 December 1992. Following this watershed event in the history of secular democracy in the post-independence era, a massive communal riot broke in Surat, leaving an official figure of 185 people dead (Lobo and D’Souza 1993: 152–154), 95 per cent of those killed in the riots were Muslims (Breman 1993: 739). This was the second-highest death toll for any city in India and amounted to more than half of the total number of deaths in December riots across the state in Gujarat (Khare 1993: 9; Sheth 1993: 151–152). By an estimate, the city suffered a loss of Rs. 500 crore. 250,000 power looms, producing goods worth Rs. 25 crore per day, remained closed during the riots, and curfew resulted in a loss of a wage of Rs. 2 crore a day for the city’s 4 lakh power loom workers. Associated works like dyeing, processing, warping, texturing, and textile mills also remained closed during this period (Sheth 1993:  152). A  study has shown that the aftermath of the riot transformed the cityscape by segregating neighbourhoods along the religious lines (Desai and De 2003: 45–48). Apart from the orgy of mass violence, post Babri Mosque demolition riots also left intelligentsia bewildered for the reason that “the long spell of caste and communal peace since 1948 in a city which had remained insulated from the violent incidents and movements of 1956, 1969, 1974, 1981 and 1985–86 in the state was broken” (Sheth 1993: 151). It has been remarked that while the immediate reason was the outburst in the aftermath of the mosque destruction by religious zealots, riots exposed the vulnerability of the “growth model” (Sheth 1993: 151). The riot was catastrophic not merely for those who faced its brutal violence and for the city in general. It also came as a shock for those who loved the city, cared for it and believed in the theory of harmonious social existence of different social groups due to mutual economic interdependence of communities. Reasons were sought and projected in order to overcome this shock and comprehend the brutality of the event. In the descriptions, the events of the riot were quintessentially marked by the clear understanding of self and other, victims and perpetrators, Hindus and Muslims among those who faced the whirlwind (Lobo 1993: 152–154; Shah et al. 1993: 50–58). Jan Breman writes, There can’t be the slightest doubt whatsoever that most of the hunters came from among the horde of labour migrants who have flocked to Surat. The victims, the next of kin of those who did not survive, and other eyewitnesses are unanimous in naming the “kathiawadi” diamond cutters, the UP “bhaiyas” and the Oriya “malis” operating the powerlooms as the main culprits. As if to confess their guilty implication in the pillage and massacre an exodus took place in the days immediately after the pogrom. (Breman 1993: 739)

282  Sadan Similar binaries knowingly or unknowingly cropped up in a number of commentaries and analysis of the event. In such accounts, those who belonged to the city were contrasted with those who did not, and the onus was largely transferred on to the latter. For example, Pravin Sheth looked at the events as “a degeneration of a city”. In the core of this theory of decay rests the carnal of an “original city of Suratilala (standing for a carefree, peace-loving, easy-going commercial culture)” which was “inhabited by educated forward castes followed by the industrious business castes”. He traced the roots of the fall of this city by going back to the decade of 1960s, the arrival of “Hiraghasus (or diamond cutters) mainly illiterate Kanbis from Saurashtra”, “labour immigration from backward areas” of Khandesh, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, and Orissa. Such a trajectory of infiltration of illiterates into a landscape inhabited by the “educated forward castes” was followed in this analytical scheme with an easy flow of illegal incomes from smuggling and bootlegging activities, mushrooming of “jhopadpatis” (slums), the emergence of nouveau riche, local dons and slum lords (Sheth 1993: 151). Sudhir Chandra rightly points out, In popular memory the city was remembered as having forever been free from any kind of group violence. Let alone the disturbances of 1669 and 1795, even the riots of 1927–28 did not figure in the Surtis’ collective cognitive map. (Chandra 1996: 83–94) For Jan Breman, the temporary and underpaid migrants working and living as “footloose proletariat” supplied the force of perpetrators. He was “intrigued” that the members of “this underclass” and “victims of the criminalized economic regime that reigns the city” were “singled out as the ones who did it” (Breman 1993: 739). However, much against his wish, he remarked, “it seems that any other explanation than just to refer to the brutal lumpen behaviour of an alien mass not rooted in the polished “surthi” tradition is considered to be superfluous” (Breman 1993: 739). Sheth goes on to add, The power and patronage structures and the economic interest groups were taken over by the new class of entrepreneurs, the nouveau riche and the mafias. They and the de-classed lumpen elements and the underclass of migrant labour brought with them their own political sub-culture. They hardly had any stake in the system and no interest in the city’s traditional liberal, peace-loving, and easy-going patterns of life. (Sheth 1993: 151) This is not to deny that he also offered to see the pogrom in a slightly different perspective and brought into consideration the pathetic conditions in which migrant workers work and live in the city, their insecurities, the

The figure of the migrant as other  283 sexual and repressed anger of these males who then transformed from victims into perpetrators. However, unlike Pravin Sheth, Jan Breman, and other similar dominant narratives, there also exist other reports that contradict the theory of orgy being largely done by single male migrants. These are the accounts that speak volumes about not merely mass killings but violence perpetrated by those who were known, had a shared relationship, and who betrayed the trust. “The Nightmare of Surat”, an article by three women scholars (Kalpana Shah, Smita Shah, and Neha Shah) does not attempt to fix the guilt on migrant outsiders and brings the ambiguity quite evocatively. In this report, we find that Muslim localities and Muslim women were attacked by mobs consisted both of people coming from Varacha Road (a neighbourhood largely populated by diamond cutters) as well as the local Hindus who had otherwise a good relationship with Muslims. These Hindus had also agreed to maintain peace and who were patrolling (the neighbourhood of Vijaynagar-2 where the incident took place) together with Muslims. But “when a mob of 15,000 people came from Varacha Road, the local Hindus joined up with them… Hindu women were throwing stones, acid, and hot water from the terrace on those who were trying to escape”. Muslim women were dragged, raped, and killed by “men mostly from the neighbouring societies and they were married men”. The authors of this report write, “The largescale plunder and destruction would seem to confirm that “local” residents actively helped communal elements by pointing out their Muslim neighbours” (Shah et al. 1993: 50–58). The theory of male migrant perpetrators has also been contradicted by the active presence of women from affluent sections in the acts of violence and looting (Shah et al. 1993: 50–58). Comparing these accounts of the composition of the mob of the perpetrators is perplexing yet reveal a deep grudge against migrants. They have often been labelled as the source of conflict, degeneration, and crime. Such a grudge is ironic as Surat, like any other industrial city, has catered for a large percentage of the migrant population. Thus, this grudge also points that while people think of themselves as belonging to city and its civilised citizen, they almost reject others, in most cases, their neighbours and co-workers as belonging to the same landscape. We have noticed that in that nightmare (as mentioned above), the perpetrators were not merely migrants but people from the same localities, those who were invested with faith. In order to engage with such perpetrators from within, we need to move to the manner in which cities have crystallised the fuzzy boundaries of self and other. This is more a story of city’s flirtation with modernity. We began this section with a report and one communal event which criminalised migrants. It is ironic that a migrant enters a city only to discover that scholars wait for him with a survey schedule neatly hidden under their palms so that a migrant’s shoulders can be tattooed with ink straight from the Police FIRs. Such a treatment, though ironic, may not be surprising as we have been accustomed to seeing the metropolis assaulting its migrants with

284  Sadan stereotypes and ridicules. Through this abusive language and its vocabulary soaked in the syrup of discrimination, an urban society invents its hierarchy. With a shift in our analytical location and focus, we find ourselves in the middle of narratives and lives which are full of warmth towards the city and obligatory towards what this urban landscape has bestowed upon them. This is a city traversed by migrants, their struggles, and their achievements. The detail in and through which we get a glimpse of this city of migrants may be trivial and banal; the mise en scene may be dotted with small houses having worn out plasters on their walls. But, in its approach, this city is much more inclusive, open, and inviting than those inhabited by social scientists and traditionally dominant communities. For this is a city where the past is no longer a territory of loss but a terrain of struggle and achievements. Here, their desires have found a dwelling.

Conclusion I grew up in Darbhanga, a small town in north Bihar. It was a large old house with a well and a courtyard in the middle. The house, purchased and restored by my father, was in ruins. Our native village was merely 29 kilometres away. Yet, it was Darbhanga with which I identified myself. The house I grew up with, stayed in. Even when I moved on to other cities and even when my father sold it after his retirement, I continued to dwell in the same house in my memory and in my dreamscapes. Yet, it is ironic that this house from Darbhanga was always named as derā (i.e., Darbhanga wala derā; that residence of Darbhanga), a term which essentially conveys a sense of temporary residence. After the matriculation, I was admitted to Patna College, and my accommodation (till the allotment of the hostel) was arranged in a rented room in Ranighat, a lower middle-class neighbourhood not far from my college. It was evening, the time for my brother and brother-in-law to leave. They had accompanied me to make all the necessary arrangements. We three walked down the busy Ashok Raj Path and, at the Patna Market, they moved further to return home. I turned back alone towards my new accommodation. Deep down, a realisation began sinking in. I had acquired the status of a migrant. The feeling of being alone in the city continued with varied intensity and longevity. After intermediate, I moved to Delhi for under-graduation and continued to stay there for another fifteen years. Delhi was intimidating in its vastness and imposing built environment. Yet, there was an open, accommodating and embracing attitude which was soothing for a migrant like me. For the first time, I was given a label. I became a Bihari. Gradually, the city acquired certain familiarity, more and more migration from kith and kin followed, and the feeling of being alone in a city gave way to a wide and layered sense of being in a community. The label Bihari continued too but hearing it became less and less a matter of enragement. I had developed a certain kind of numbness by now. Deep down, I had

The figure of the migrant as other  285 distanced myself. In retrospect, the category Bihari had acquired a neutral connotation for me in the sense that I was both owing it yet was less anxiety-ridden about its ownership. However, a different term, which had come in vogue around this time (the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s), occupied my mindscape. The term was “Delhi brand”. This was more in circulation in Mithila, and it was used for those migrant bachelor males from the region living in Delhi who were employed in well-recognised government departments. Obscurity of their job profile in the eyes of the society back home, temporary and vulnerable character of their employment, and certain identifiable loudness in their personality all contributed towards this category (Jha 2005: 169–173). While the label Bihari was an imposition made by the society at the “destination”, the Delhi brand was an internalisation of migrant conscience by the society back home. The term Bihari came back to the foreground soon. This time it was in an aggressive and violent manner. By now, we had already moved to Surat, a city in western India. Not far from Surat, Mumbai and few other cities of Maharashtra witnessed massive violence against North Indian migrants, particularly those coming from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. These attacks began in February 2008 and were preceded by derogatory remarks against the Chhath, an auspicious festival for the migrant population from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. These attacks (in cities like Mumbai, Pune, Aurangabad, Beed, Nashik, Amaravati, Jalna, and Latur) were reportedly led by Maharashtra Navnirvan Sena (MNS) created an environment of fear which led to an exodus of a large number of migrant workers from areas like Pune and Nashik. Again, in the month of October in the same year, students from these states appearing for Railway recruitment in the examination centres of Maharashtra were attacked (Gaikwad 2008). These attacks on North Indian migrants in Maharashtra are not standalone incidents in the history of migration. In the case of Mumbai, it has a long history that goes back to the politics of the 1960s, and in the history of the subcontinent, there are various parallel examples that tell us how migrants acquired a label of outsider and became targets of condescending gaze in the city. In the case of violent attacks on South Indian migrant population of Mumbai in the 1960s, Shiv Sena was at the forefront which was formed in 1966 to safeguard the interests of what it termed as the “sons of the soil”. Protests were launched in particular against South Indian migrants who, it was claimed, had monopolised secretariat and clerical jobs in Bombay in that period.9 In Mumbai and Maharashtra, these attacks had definite political strands with an electoral dividends at stakes. However, as I mentioned earlier, this violence is rooted in a larger mindset and history of looking at migrants in a specific manner. In this history, Mumbai and Surat are connected to each other in othering the migrants and in labelling them as outsiders, one who does not belong to the city, one who has no right to the city spaces. This larger history is not confined to electoral politics alone. As I have tried to unpack in the section on the city, this politics is

286  Sadan quite dispersed, and knowledge production at very sophisticated terrains of critical social sciences is firmly implicated in this politics. The mindset which blames single Oriya male migrants for the post Babri Mosque demolition riots of Surat in 1992, which uncritically subscribe the FIR versions and puts the onus of urban tension in the early years of the 1970s in Surat squarely on the lower caste population (as we saw in the section on the City) has a genealogy easily going back to the early decades of the twentieth century. To track this genealogy, let us briefly move to Calcutta at the turn of the twentieth century and observe how the mark of criminalisation was imposed on migrants and how they were termed as “Goondas”. Although various scholars have argued that the term “Goonda” came into being in the 1920s, Debraj Bhattacharya (2004) extends the origin further backwards. He notes that by the 1910s, the Marwaris were employing “extra darwans” or toughs from North India. For Bhattacharya, In all probability the word originally referred to them and was then used more widely. What is also clear is that many of these “durwans” who were brought to the city by the Marwaris to act as their toughs soon got out of hand. (also see Das 1994; Nandi 2010) Recapitulating different strands, varied registers, fragments of experiential narratives, and scholarly discourses mentioned in this essay, I find myself standing along with the wife who stayed when her husband migrated to Kalkatta (Kolkata). In that Sohar (mentioned at the beginning of this essay), when she voices her anxieties pertaining to the ill repute of Kalkatta (Kalkatta sahar badnaam nayanaa naa mane hoi), little did she know of the branding of her husband as a “goonda”. It is the history that whispers in the ears of the folksongs and alerts her about the politics of otherness that shapes the identity of her migrant husband in the city. She keeps waiting as a birhani (Hakani 2014) and in turn gets circulated as washable stickers with a yearning “ghar kab aaoge” (when will you return home) featuring a train and the figure of a birhani against a serene background? The gazing unflinchingly straight with her eyes tired by waiting, the birhani whispers in a void. All that we need is to hear her voice.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as “From Calcutta comes my husband, from Darbhanga he comes… Some Reflections on Culture, Memory and Migration” in Public Arguments-11, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Patna Centre, 2018. 2 The term ‘migration’ has a specific connotation and trajectory in social sciences as well as in official registers like the Census. It has been differentiated from nomadism or wandering. Yet, at the core, it is about the movement of people, about their dislocation and relocation. I am harping back onto this essential feature where ‘to migrate’ is ‘to move’.

The figure of the migrant as other  287 3 For some recent attempts to engage with folk registers in social, historical, and cultural dynamics of migration (see Singh 2015b, 2016, 2017, 2018). 4 Here, I wish to refer Carlo Ginzburg’s usage of Kracaeur’s perspective (Ginzburg 1993). Ginzburg mobilises this perspective to bring together techniques of micro and macro history. 5 Kachaudi gali… a kajari by Malini Awasthi, available at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=fsRi3bBRluk (accessed on 22 January 2021). 6 Album: Saiyan Gaila Surat, Bhojpuri Nach Programme, Artists: Geeta Rani, Shams Jamil, Pappu Puskar, Shadid Aslam, Arvind Tan Tan. T-Series, available at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvEuTxzGn-o, uploaded on May 2011 (accessed on 22 January 2021). I am indebted to Dhananjay Singh for this reference. 7 See Persaud (2009: 50); Kumar (2017, particularly refer to chapter no. 4: “The Journey”, pp: 76–124); also see the novels by Mohan (2007) and Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy consisting of Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015). 8 I am thankful to Shrutikar Jha for sharing this interpretation with me. 9 This may be seen as a nativist agitation where nativism refers to the reaction against ‘outsiders’ or those believed to be ‘outsiders’ (Joshi 1970; Katzenstein 1973).

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Index

Page numbers in bold indicate tables, page numbers in italic indicate figures and page numbers followed by n indicate notes. absence of (migrant) husband 158–159 ādat policy 223 Adivasi 31–34, 49, 86–87, 93, 223 affective frames of sociality 12, 223 affective turn 223, 268 African Creole music 213 agency: of labouring people 86; of migrant workers 11, 86; in migration 11, 15, 22, 85–86, 91–92, 98, 107, 124, 127, 130–131, 133, 141, 145, 180, 188, 195, 198, 202, 208–209 agency of migrant workers 30, 48, 174, 285 agricultural labourer 62, 116, 167n6, 168n10 agricultural wage labourers 61 agricultural worker 70 agriculture 16, 33, 62, 71–72, 76, 78, 84, 86, 105, 109–110, 137, 140–141, 198, 201, 209 Ahir 155, 168n8, 169n21 Akbar 249–250 akhārā system 219 akhārā tradition 219 alhā-khand 213 All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) 45 Ambedkar 35, 42, 48 Amir Khusrau 181 Amra Bangali 251–252, 264n8 anamnesis 269 Anganwadi 61 anti-khoti agitations 197 anti-Sikh riots of Delhi 276 apravaasi 5 Arjan de Haan 105, 189n7 Arya Samaj 6, 222, 225, 242 aspiration 29, 84, 123–125, 165–167; cosmopolitan 130; in migration literature 131

aspiration for learning 125 aspiration to migrate 130 Assam 103–104, 118n2, 173, 175, 277 attachment: with families 123; to home 21; to land 21; to the space 21; to the village 128 attachment to home 11, 131, 202, 204, 206–207, 257, 260, 262 Aurobindo Ghose 236 Azamgarh–Ghazipur birahā lineage 216 Babri Mosque 279, 281, 286 Bachu Ghosh 35 baithak gāna 213, 217 Baleshwar Yādav 225 Banaili estate 62, 64–65 Baniya 22, 60, 79n4, 234, 242, 249–250 Baniya trader 234 Barabazaar 248, 251, 253–260, 254, 255, 264n9, 264n12, 265n14 barahmasa 177, 187, 190n18 Bargarh as the granary of Odisha 91 batgamni 215 batohi, as a migrant-informer 175 Bauris 31, 32, 32, 41–42 bazaar and bari 260 begaar 70–71, 77, 84 belonging: concept of 248; and identity 248; of Marwaris to the city 261; material aspect of 248; politics of 261; sense of 259; and subjectivities 261 benami 69 Bengal 6, 45, 77, 103–105, 107, 112–113, 120, 124–125, 127– 128, 132, 172–175, 190n15, 190n18, 227n2, 248–251, 258, 260–262, 264n4–264n5, 265n16, 272, 275, 277

Index  291 Bengali 122, 125, 127–129, 132, 133n1–133n2, 134n10, 180–181, 187–188, 192, 244, 248, 250–252, 257, 260–261, 264n8, 265n19; women 77; women's body 122 Bhabha 9, 23n5 Bhagavada Gita 235 Bharatiya Janata Party 235, 260 Bhartiya 5 bhatiyāli 215, 223 Bhikhari Thakur 188, 191n39 Bhojpur 227n3, 293–294 Bhojpuri 18, 153–157, 159, 161–167, 167n5, 168n7–168n9, 168n12, 168n15, 169n23–169n24, 172–182, 188n1, 189n6, 189n11, 213, 228n19, 270, 275, 278, 287n6 Bhojpuri coolies 189n6 Bhojpuri folksongs 172, 174, 177, 188n1, 189n4, 189n11 bhoodan land 67, 79n5 Bhowra colliery 42, 44, 52n60 Bhuinya 31 bidesiya 174, 178, 187–188, 191n39 bigamy 164; and male outmigration 166 Bihar 5–6, 16, 19, 32, 38–39, 50n7, 50n21, 50n25, 51n59, 52n60, 52n74, 59, 63, 67, 69, 75, 77, 107, 154–157, 159, 167, 167n1, 168n8, 172, 176, 189n6, 217–218, 220, 227n2–227n3, 228n11, 270, 272, 275, 282, 284–285 Bihar government 38 Bihari 5, 216, 284–285 Bihari Lal Yadav 216 Bihar Public Service Commission 63 Binodananda Jha 38 birahā 19–20, 213–227, 227n5, 228n19; Indo-Caribean 216; kharī 217 birahā duels (dangal) 217 birhani 177 Bisrām 216, 220 blouse 75, 185–186, 191n33, 216 boundaries of home 216, 263 Brahmin 33, 47, 60–78, 79n4, 128, 216, 228n13 Breman 7, 29, 49n1, 84–85, 108–109, 194, 281–283 Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) 205 British Empire 173

caste 15–16, 29–39, 41–44, 47–49, 59–68, 70, 73–75, 79n4, 80n14, 81n27, 81n30, 82, 87–90, 93, 95, 103, 106, 121, 130, 137, 142, 154–159, 161, 163, 166, 167n6, 168n8, 169n18, 169n20, 185, 188, 189n13, 191n39, 192n42, 199, 205, 207–209, 210n2– 210n3, 214, 217–219, 221, 223, 225, 246n21, 249, 280–281, 286 Catholic population 142 ceiling act 69 ceiling surplus land 68 Census 10, 32, 50n5, 50n7, 50n12, 50n15, 50n17 chakbandi 59 Chakrabarty ( Dipesh) 7, 45, 174, 189n6 Chandavarkar(Raj Narayan) 7, 29, 50n20, 105, 196–197, 207 Chhath 217, 285 child death and starvation 87 Chitradhar Jha 62, 69 choice-driven mobility 85 Chota Nagpur 47, 103, 189n6 Chutney music 213, 217 circular migrants 84, 111, 195 circulation instead of migration 23 Circulatory urbanism 195 Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 8 colliery 35–46, 51n26, 51n30–51n31, 51n45–51n46, 52n60, 52n62 colliery settlements 38–39 colliery tenements 39 colonial land settlement 86 communication 138, 173, 209 Communist Party of India (Marxist) 261 conjugal: betrayal 162; home 41; split in conjugal life 187 consumption culture 9 coolie 4 cosmopolitan 123, 130, 195, 209–250, 279–280 cosmopolitan citizens 195 Coutāl 213 co-wife 153, 163–165, 169n23, 172, 180, 187, 190n20 C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer 137 the criticism of labour-bondage 91 cultural capital 72–73, 214 cultural geography of Maithil Brahmins 278 culture of Rajput generosity 235

Cadastral Survey 65, 80n15 Calcutta 103, 105, 174–175, 244 Caribbean marriages 225

Dak Vachan 275 Damodar river 30 dand-tāl or dan-tāl 218

292  Index dangal 217–218, 224 Darbhanga 63, 270, 284, 286n1 Dashrath Manjhi 35, 50n21 death 44, 65, 76, 78, 87, 90, 94–96, 225, 281 debt-bondage 16, 83, 85 Deen Ali 215 Deleuze and Guattari 2 desavar 21, 248, 253, 257 Desh 5 desires 9, 131, 161, 163, 165, 184, 186, 216, 275, 284 destination 4, 20–21, 29, 31, 49, 78, 83, 85, 103, 107, 141, 153, 157, 160, 163, 194–195, 197, 199, 201, 202, 206, 208, 210, 275, 285 Dewan of Travancore 137 Dhanbad 30, 32, 35–36, 42, 46, 48, 50n7, 50n12, 50n17, 51n26 dhobiyā 215, 218, 221, 223 diaspora 5, 13, 213–214, 218 discourse of postcolonial development and rehabilitation 236 domestic 13; violence 17; workers 17 Domestic Violence Act of 2005 117 Dusadh 31, 32, 32, 38 Eastern Catholic Major Archiepiscopal Churches 137 East Indian Coal Company 37 East Indian Railway 173 education 42–47, 61, 78, 108, 124, 127, 129, 131, 159, 197, 205, 207, 214, 259; in mother tongue 42; lack of 42 emergency 225, 239–240, 245, 246n10 emigrant 5, 9, 280; families 17, 280; identity 9 emotional registers of migrants 14 E.S. Hoernle 36 exile 13, 177–178, 184, 187–188 exploitation 5, 42, 69–70, 86–87, 197 family migration 17, 105–106, 110– 112, 114, 189n12 famines 4, 84, 189n12 female migrants 107, 123 feminization of migration 107 figure of a migrant 3–4, 11, 234, 268–269, 274–275 fire 68, 82, 221, 261, 265, 280 folksongs 153, 172, 174–177, 180, 183–184, 187–188, 188n1, 189n4, 189n11, 190n20, 191n29–191n31, 191n33, 191n35, 191n37–191n38, 278, 286

Fr. Abraham Porunnolil 139 Fr. Jacob Narikuzhi 139 Fr. Sebastian Valloppilly 138 free service(called begaar) 69 fuzzy boundaries of self and other 283 gair majarua khas land 68 gair majarua malik or sikmi 69 Gareeb-Rath Express 278 gawna 182 Gaya 35 genealogy 2, 6, 10, 64, 157, 200, 200, 201, 286 genealogy and history 6 genealogy of migration studies in India 10 Georg Simmel 262 Ghadar Party 6 ghee 242–243 Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 9, 23n6, 84–85, 195, 209 Girideepam 20, 137, 139–147, 148n5 Grierson (George) 6, 168n7, 216, 272, 272–273 Gujarat 19, 275, 281 halia 87, 89 hardship tales 83 Harijan 38, 42, 48, 50n21 Harijan Sevak Sangh 42, 48 Hindi 4–5, 38, 122, 155–156, 168n15, 189n13, 235, 239, 261; Hindi belt 73; Hindi calendar 81n33; Hindi film 228n14; Hindi novel 253 Hindustan Khan Mazdoor Sangh (HKMS) 40 Hiraghasu 282 Hirakud multipurpose project 84, 91 Hira Lal Yādav 219–220, 226 history of migration 8, 29, 147, 175–177, 198, 208, 272, 285 history of the Church 137 home as a choice 263; as a site of longing 13; as fluid and multiple 263 household: Dalit 205; landless 61; peasant 191n31; as production units 13; working-class Bhojpuri 156 humour 74 identity: caste 43; conceptualisation of 12 ILO convention 45 immigrants 3, 32–33, 41, 83, 129, 132, 214, 218, 224; acceptance of 3; insecurity towards the 3; as “moral panic” 3

Index  293 Indentured Cooly Protection Society or anti-Indentured emigration League 7 indentured migration 5–6, 106 indentured population 217 Indian Coalfield Committee 44 Indian Colliery Employees Association (ICEA) 45 Indian Colliery Labour Union (ICLU) 40, 45 Indian Mines Act, 1923 (Amendment) 43 Indian peasant as inherently immobile 103 Indira Bazar 21 inter-Asian labour migration 106 internal migrants 279, 282 International Labour Organisation (ILO) 30 itinerant traders 91 Jagat Seth 250 Jagjivan Ram 38 Jamadoba 36 jatsaari 153–154, 162, 167n2, 167n6 Jawaharlal Nehru 168n16, 235 Jharia 15, 30–31, 43, 45–46, 50n19, 52n68 jhumar 154, 161–162, 165, 179–272 Jitwarpur 59–61, 64–65, 69, 72–73, 77, 80n20 journey 1–2, 8, 14, 19–20, 74, 96, 123–124, 127, 130–133, 138, 142, 175–176, 186, 213, 218, 224, 227, 234, 245, 249, 261, 268, 274–277 jute 189n6–189n7 kajalī (or kajarī) 218 kajli 181 Kali Katha Via Bypass 253 Kalkatwa see Calcutta kartāl 218 kayami rights 63 Kerala 20, 107, 137–139, 141, 159, 275 Kewat 60 kharif 75, 86 khewat 67–68, 77 kholi 199, 203, 208 khoti system 210n1 khoti tenure 197 Komagata Maru incident 6 Konkani brahmins 199 Konkani migrant 20–21, 194–196, 198

Konkan region 196; migration from Konkan 196, 198, 207–208; village in Konkan 197–199, 207, 210n2; women in 209 Krishna Deva Upadhyaya 155, 162, 167n2, 167n6, 168n7, 168n9–168n10 Kudiyetta Charithram 141 Kumargupta II’s Mandasor Prasashti 6 Kunkeri village 197–198, 201, 202 labour: footloose 197; social realities of 4–5, 10, 12–13, 15, 18, 29–30, 32, 32, 33–49, 52n63, 52n68, 59, 67–79, 84–88, 103–118, 123, 133, 154–155, 158–160, 165, 168n10, 169n18, 172–175, 184, 187, 189n8, 191n28, 194, 196–197, 208, 214, 233–238, 243–245, 275, 281–282 labour employment called lagoria 69 labouring poor 16 labour migration 197 labour subjectivities 197 Lagwas (agricultural worker) 69 Lalu Prasad Yadav 67, 69, 75 land 11, 16, 21, 38, 48, 59, 61–87, 91–110, 115, 129, 137–147, 163, 179–184, 189n8, 190n15, 197, 206, 220, 227, 236, 239, 241, 248–251, 256, 263, 264n8, 280; mortgage of 68 land-ownership pattern 59 land redistribution 68 land Survey and Settlement 62 land survey, called Revisional Survey 66 lascar 174 left-behind 153–154, 157–159, 162–163, 168n16; wife 153; women 153 literacy 18, 34, 50n17, 155, 157–160, 165–167, 168n15, 168n17, 199 longing for home 14, 176 longing wife 169n20, 180 Magadh, a forbidden territory 278 Mahabat Khān 215 Maharaja Man Singh II 233 Maharashtra 196, 198, 280, 285 Mahatma Gandhi 6, 253, 264n11, 279 Mahindra Committee 36 Maithili 63, 270, 272, 272, 277–278 making of a village 16, 59, 79, 79n1, 79n3 Malabar migration 20, 137–143, 147 male migration 17, 110–111, 116, 123, 190n15, 208; effect of 9; outmigration 10, 18, 156–161, 164, 209

294  Index Mangre Siewnarine 223 marriage and employment 113, 117–118 marriage migration 110, 114–115, 117, 124, 126, 130, 154, 157, 160, 163 Marriage songs 176 Marthoma Christians 137–138 Marwadi trader 69 Marwari adda 257 Marwari community 6, 248–253, 253, 257, 259–263, 265n13, 265n19 material aspect of belonging 248 memory 2, 8, 11–13, 17, 19, 22, 123–124, 128–131, 151, 165, 173, 176, 220, 248, 252, 268–270, 275–276, 282, 284 memory and belonging 13 memory bank 252 memory-migration complex 269 memory of home 248 memory of migration 19 migrants’ association (the “Mandal”) 204 migrant worker 13, 96, 107, 130–131, 198; variety of 174 migration as method 269–270 migratory turn 268 Mithila 19, 185, 227n2, 270, 272, 277–278, 285 mobile phone 159, 166–167 mobility 2–4, 6–7, 10, 15–16, 18, 30, 82, 84–85, 107, 110, 114, 116, 124, 126, 131, 165, 175–177, 189n5, 199, 202, 209, 214, 223 mobility in the colonial period 16 mobility (for women), new forms of 3 mobility of the population 7 modernity 4, 9, 146, 186, 283 Mon. Thomas Vazhaparambil 139 Morang 277 Mughal Empire 173 Munshi Rahman Khan 7 Musahar 60, 62, 64–65, 70–71, 75, 79n4, 167n6, 168n10 Musahars 31–32, 32, 34, 61–65, 68, 70–71, 75 naihar 161, 181–183, 191n27, 191n28 natal village 121, 132, 157, 160 National and Quilon Bank 137 Nehru 235 New visions of “conjugality” 165 nomadology 3; a call for 3 non-communication 162

Noniya 60–65, 68–69, 75, 77–78, 79n4, 79n6 Non-Resident Indians 5 object of longing 13 Odisha 83 oral and print 59 orality 18, 155–156, 159, 168n17, 187–188 original inhabitants of Malabar 138 outmigration 59, 70, 76, 79n3, 154, 157, 159, 197, 202, 209; of households 18, 138; of peasants 20, 138 ownership 21, 59, 65, 67, 189n8,199, 206, 258, 260, 262, 269–270, 285 pardes 5, 161, 166, 178 pardesi 5 Partition 244 Paschimas 39 patriarchal attitude to women’s wage-work 48 patriarchal household 89, 92 patriarchal instrument to isolate young women 117 patriarchal kinship system 145 patronage 79n6, 235, 240, 244, 282 Patua 76 Paul Ricoeur 16, 82–84, 86, 269 peasant 40, 103, 108–109, 146, 154–155, 161, 164, 166, 191n31; mass movement 20; peasant-miners 40; women 154 peehar 161 Peter Manning 3 Pierra Nora 269 plantation 6, 18, 103, 105, 137, 173–174, 276 ploughmen 16, 83–95, 98 politics of survival 163 poorbi 174 Portuguese 137–138 postcolonial 9–10, 19, 23n5, 235–236 postcolonial theory 9–10 poverty 29, 63, 72, 87, 90, 107–108, 110, 129, 132, 270; escape from 29 powerloom 281 praja 86 pravaasi 4–5 Prithvi Raj Chauhan 63 proverb 87, 275 purab 166, 175, 179–180, 186 purity and pollution 35, 69 purushartha 233–236, 236, 238, 243 Purusharthi 233–238, 241, 245

Index  295 Purusharthi Park 234 Purusharthi Thari Union 236 Purusharthi Thari Union Holders’ Directory 236 push punni harvest 86 rabi season 76 Radhakrishna Nevatia 250 railway construction workers 31 railways 18, 80n19, 105, 172, 174, 177, 186–187, 189n4, 194, 196, 203 Raja Todarmal 250 Raj Mohan 218 Rajput polity 235; through patronage and protection 235 Rāmcaritamānas 224 Ram Sevak Singh 221 Ranabir Samaddar 245 Rangoon 172, 190n15, 274 Ratnagiri 196–197, 203, 208 Razzab Khan 215 realm of migrant-memory 13 refugee 8, 21, 233–245; camps 245; ‘s body 238; spatial arrangement of 245 rehabilitation 8, 239, 244 Rehabilitation Department 238 remittance 79, 112, 158–160, 165, 187 Report on the Colonial Emigration from the Bengal 6 re-territorialization of Jaipur 244 return to the village 78, 96, 115–117, 204, 207 riot 128, 258, 276, 281 river Bharatapuzha 138 river Kosi 60, 62–63, 138 root and route 248 roots 4, 6, 8, 13, 15, 21, 47, 49, 73, 122, 203, 207–209, 221, 249, 256–263, 280, 282 ropani 154, 160, 162, 168n10 route 8, 16, 77, 95, 174, 248–249, 256–257 rules of patriarchal descent 145 rural cosmopolitanism 9, 195 Sadan Gupta 40 Sadhoo Boodram Ramgoolam 220 Santhal 31, 32, 32, 42, 48, 50n9, 60, 62, 65, 79n4 sasural 157, 181–182, 191n27 sati–kulta binary 163 Saurashtra 279, 282 Scheduled Caste 76, 167n6 Scheduled Tribe 163

seasonal migrants 62, 98 seasonal migration 7, 16, 83–86, 92, 98, 109, 197, 200 sexual desire 161–162, 184 sexual economy 40, 49 sex workers 104, 111–112 Sharnarthi 233 Shiv Kali Bose 36 Shiv Sena 285 Shrikunj 75, 82 shrine of Mata Leelavati 238 significance of circularity 108 sikmi land 65 sikmi rights 65, 67, 69 Sindhi community 21, 233, 239, 241 Sindhi migrants 233, 244 Sindhi nationalism 241–242 Sindhi refugee 245 Sindhi Sharnarthi Panchayat 233 Sindhudurg 196, 198–199 single-caste village 155 single women migrant 104 sirdar 33–34, 37–38, 44 Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 6 slum 113, 241, 282 social hierarchy 35, 84 social mobility 79 social untouchables 185 sohani 154, 162, 167n6 sohar 178, 190n15, 270, 286 Sone river 155 spatial dimensions of migration 274 spatial geography 59 spatial movement 59, 79, 194 splitting of the postcolonial or the migrant subject 23n5 Srikrishna Singh 38 strategies of individual mobility 106 St. Thomas Christians 137 subjectivities 1–2, 4, 7–10, 12, 15–16, 19, 22, 59, 84, 122, 268–270, 274, 276; and belonging 11–14; and migrants 8 substitution effect 107 Sumer 215 Surinamese birahā 221 surveillance 132, 159 Syrian Catholics 137–138 Syrian Christian migrants 140, 143, 147 Syrian immigrants 3 Syro-Malabar Catholic Church 20, 137, 143 system of dafadari 70 tān music 213

296  Index tea plantation 277 technological changes 18 tharis (temporary kiosks made of tin and wood) 240 TISCO mines of Jamadoba 36 tola 60 Totaram Sanadhya 7 transcultural capital 214 Travancore 20, 137–138, 141, 143 Tunu Chamar (Ram) 37 UNESCO 240 unfreedom 15 United Provinces 39, 107 unsupervised movement by the poor 84 untouchability 35–36, 46, 50n21, 73, 75 UP “bhaiyas” 281 uprooted subjectivities 8 vernacular traditions (migrant and migration in) 4–5 videsh 5 videsh and pardes 5 Walter Ong 91, 156

wellbeing 15, 29–30, 48–49; pursuit of 30 wellbeing of migrant 291 West Bengal 104, 264n4 Whitely (Royal) Commission on Labour 36 widow 33, 41, 47, 179 womanhood 18, 146, 173–174, 190n14; construction of 146; and motherhood 146 women and strategies of individual mobility 106; left-behind 153; non-Brahmin 153; and work 33 women’s agency 188; aspiration 166 women worker 42; in informal sectors 9; in underground sectors 9 work (gendered division of) 33, 35; song 154 Workers Welfare League of India 45 working class 7, 44, 48, 78, 156, 197 workplace 131; identities in 35 worldview of workers 48 zamindar and zamindari 65, 68–69, 83, 86, 90, 246n11 zamindari abolition movement 236