Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India 9781108494427

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Leaving the Land During the last decade, indigenous youth from Northeast India have migrated in large numbers to the main cities of metropolitan India to find work and to study. The migration is facilitated by new work opportunities in the hospitality sector, mainly as service personnel in luxury hotels, shopping malls, restaurants, and airlines. Prolonged armed conflicts, militarization, a stagnant economy, corrupt and ineffective governance structures, and the harsh conditions of subsistence agriculture in their home villages or small towns impel the youth to seek opportunities outside their home region. English language skills, a general cosmopolitan outlook as well as a non-Indian physical appearance have proven to be key assets in securing work within the new hospitality industry. Leaving the Land traces the migratory journeys of these youths and engages with their new lives in cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Thiruvananthapuram. Dolly Kikon is Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology and Development Studies Program at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India (2019), Life and Dignity: Women’s Testimonies of Sexual Violence in Dimapur (2015), and Experiences of Naga Women in Armed Conflict: Narratives from a Militarized Society (2004). Bengt G. Karlsson is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. He is the author of Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People’s Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal (2000) and Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India’s Northeast (2011). Karlsson is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.

Leaving the Chains Land Global Value Indigenous Migration and Affective and Labour Development in India Redefining the Contours of 21st Century Capitalism

Dolly Kikon

Bengt G. Karlsson Gary Gereffi

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314 to 321, 3rd Floor, Plot No.3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108494427 © Dolly Kikon and Bengt G. Karlsson 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed in India A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-108-49442-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For indigenous migrants around the world

All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones you love, No hands to left or right, And emptiness above – Know that you aren’t alone. The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And some for all their years. – Vikram Seth, All You Who Sleep Tonight, 1990

Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction 1 1. Wayfinding

26

2. Light Skin and Soft Skills

42

3. Departures and Returns

60

4. Interlude: Photoethnography

83

5. Dreams and Desserts

97

6. Talking about Method

113

Conclusion 129 Afterword: Bridging Ruptures

134

References

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Index

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Acknowledgements Northeast India has played an integral role is shaping our lives as anthropologists. It was never a peripheral geographical location for us. On the contrary, this region has moulded us as researchers and given us the chance to present a world that generates complex debates and political concerns. Research ideas and themes always emerge in conversation with different groups of people. We have received generous feedback and critical comments from student activists, cultural associations, scholars, feminists, and above all from the mobile youths we interacted with during this project. We have dedicated this book to them, the young wayfinders, and further to the indigenous migrants of the world struggling to survive in often inhospitable circumstances. The research collaboration for this book was funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, grant number P12-1342:1. We would especially like to thank Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora for giving a vision and working with us to shape the themes of this research project. As authors of the book, we have often shared our reflections about Northeast India and underlined the importance of locating key themes emerging from the region. In shaping the ideas and themes, we acknowledge our interlocuters, colleagues, the research communities, students, migrants and their families, and the larger audience. We benefitted immensely from their generosity and commitment in engaging with us on the topic of migration. In this regard, this book is a collaboration of many voices engaging with indigenous migration in Northeast India and beyond. We benefited from various seminars and roundtables where we presented our research findings. We are grateful for the comments and support we received from the following meetings: the Stockholm University migration seminar (Stockholm 2014), the Tata Institute of Social Sciences Roundtable on Migration (Guwahati, 2016), and the Morung Express Foundation Roundtable on Migration (Dimapur 2016), and the two workshops on Care and Control in Asian Migration organized by Johan Lindquist, Mark Johnson, and Paul Boyce (Stockholm 2015, London 2016). We would like to thank Mrinal Gohain, Johan Lindquist, Nicole Constable, Shahram Khosravi, Willem van Schendel, Filippo Osella, Rajdeep Singha, Debdulal Saha, DK Srivastava, Aküm Longchari, Aheli Moitra, Annika Rabo,

x Acknowledgements x 

Hege Höyer Leivestad, Erik Olsson, Staffan Löfving, Sanjib Baruah, Alpa Shah, Melinda Hinkson, Charisma Lepcha, Tanka B. Subba, Swargajyoti Gohain, and Anna Lindberg. We really appreciate Rozelle Mero for believing in this project and helping us to think about migration and the hospitality sectors in Dimapur. Carrying out the research at The People Channel, we were humbled by the generosity and excitement they showed for our work. Thank you to the team at The People Channel (2014–2016). Thank you, Sarat Phukan, for helping us with the maps. Duncan McDuie-Ra’s work inspired us to think about migration. We thank Joel Rodrigues for helping us with the references and copy editing the manuscript at various stages of our writing process. We have also benefitted from other scholars’ work on migration on Northeast India, in particular, Nandita Haksar, Nandini Ramamurthy, Denjil Basumatary, Deepak K. Mishra, and Andrea Wright. A special thanks to Andrzej Markiewicz, who has contributed the wonderful photographs to the book. Andrzej travelled with us to India, carrying heavy photo equipment, taking thousands of images and filmed and edited over 20 longer interviews. It was through Andrzej’s painstaking efforts that we managed to organize the Wayfinding exhibition, touring India and Nepal in 2016, and later also displayed at the European Association for Social Anthropology (EASA) conference in Stockholm, August 2018. Through hours of hard labour Andrzej has produced an amazing visual archive. A selection of the images and films are available on socant.su.se/wayfinding. Rasmus Carnebäck, Erica van der Sijpt, Snehashish Mitra, and Avelu Chotso, masters students and younger researchers worked with their respective studies in the project. They have presented their work independently, but we are indebted to conversations and insights shared in the process. We would like to thank the amazing team at Cambridge University Press: Qudsiya Ahmed, Sohini Ghosh, Anushruti Ganguly, and Aniruddha De. They took care of the manuscript and rendered their support in every imaginable way. Earlier versions of Chapter 1, ‘Wayfinding’, appeared as ‘Wayfinding: Indigenous Migrants in the Service Sector of Metropolitan India’ (South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40, no. 3 [2017]: 447–462). A revised version of Chapter 2, ‘Light Skin and Soft Skills’, is appearing in a special issue on ‘Care in Asian Migration’ in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, and a shorter revised version of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Dreams and Desserts: Indigenous Migration, Service and Mobility in India’ (International Journal of Communication 12 [2018]: 4143–4157). Dolly Kikon: I would like to thank my interlocuters in Mumbai and Dimapur. Families of migrants in Dimapur who shared their time and stories with me. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the University of Melbourne, the Australia India Institute (AII), and the North Eastern Social Research Centre (NESRC) for engaging with the ideas of indigenous migration. I am grateful to

Acknowledgements

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Karen Farquharson, Craig Jeffrey, Haripriya Rangan, and Andrew May for their support. On a personal note, I thank my friends and family in Kharguli for their company and indulging me with good food and company during the final stages of writing this book. Vikas Jain, Mamun and Mihir, Purnima, Joel, Mrinal, Jila, Parismita, RK Debbarma, Sarat, and Korobi. Thank you for your fellowship and affection. The famous Riviera Kallu was a source of joy. She made me laugh every day as I put together this book. Xonzoi Barbora put up with me as I carried this project from Stockholm, Melbourne, to Guwahati. His patience, love, and grace with my fieldwork schedules and work is humbling. Bengt G. Karlsson: I would like to thank all those that took time to share their stories and introduced me to their friends in Varkala, Thiruvananthapuram, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad, especially Apan Manpongshu, Williem Gray Chongloi, Natha Wahlang, Phoban, and Santosh Lama. I would also like to thank Henrik Berglund, then Director for The Forum for Asian Studies at Stockholm University, who facilitated a small proposal-writing grant, which got the ball rolling. Colleagues at the Department of Social Anthropology in Stockholm have provided a generous and stimulating intellectual environment; thank you all. My debt also to Lina Lorentz, Peter Skoglund, and Eva Eyton for persistent logistical support. Academic life is often a lonely pursuit. I have the great luck of having the most wonderful family who keeps me going and strangely sticks around despite frequent travels and long periods of absence. Emanuel, Agnes, Love, and Ella, you spin my world. And to Louise, my wife, for letting love in.

Introduction Ours is a century of uprootedness. All over the world, fewer and fewer people live out their lives in the place where they were born. – Michael Jackson, At Home in the World, 1995

In the last decade, the migration of indigenous youths from the uplands of Northeast India to metropolitan cities across India has become one of the most significant social and economic transformations of the region. Since India’s independence, the region has captured the limits of India’s cultural and political imagination, and its citizens and histories have been refracted through the prism of militarization and an extractive resource regime. In this book, we examine the increasing trend of migration among indigenous youths from Northeast India and illustrate how these movements offer us new insights about the insecurities, desires, and expectations among indigenous citizens in global India. Until recently, the journey of young indigenous migrants who travel across metropolitan cities in India, constantly looking for new employment possibilities and opportunities, was unthinkable. Indigenous mobility in the highlands of Northeast India was associated with jhum1 at best, and with violent ethnic conflicts at worst. In addition, the imagination of indigenous people as attached to their land to be able to inhabit their culture and history was a powerful one. Therefore, the experiences of indigenous migrants we highlight in this book offer a new trajectory about citizenship, mobility, and indigenous experiences in contemporary India. By interrogating the myth of isolation, insularity, and remoteness that has defined Northeast India, we present the struggles, aspirations, and vulnerabilities of young indigenous migrants who constitute the underbelly of the service industry in global India today. The presence of young indigenous migrants, once  Jhum is the regional term for shifting or swidden cultivation.

1

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Leaving the Land

regarded as savages, backward, and primitive, and their experiences in this book draws our attention towards new ways of generating a theoretical framework about the everyday experiences of a section of the population previously categorized as ‘simple’ and ‘childlike’ and disqualified from having elaborate ideas about serious and sophisticated matters in contemporary India. People from Northeast India have also earlier moved to the Indian mainland to work, for example, as civil servants in various government departments or as soldiers in the Indian army. Yet the large-scale migration of young people we account for here is a different and novel phenomenon.

Background India’s northeastern region consists of eight states – Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Sikkim. Before the inclusion of Sikkim in the North Eastern Council (NEC) in 2002, these states were known collectively as the ‘Seven Sisters’. In 2011, the total population of the region was about 46 million, out of which the majority, 31.2 million people, lived in Assam, and subsequently, in order of size, Tripura 3.7 million, Meghalaya 3.0 million, Manipur 2.6 million, Nagaland 2.0 million, Arunachal Pradesh 1.4 million, Mizoram 1.1 million, and Sikkim 0.6 million (Census of India 2011). Northeast India is extremely diverse in terms of language, culture, and ethnicity; it includes 101 communities defined as Scheduled Tribes (STs) and 114 languages. When we talk about the indigenous peoples in this book, we refer to individuals belonging to the ST communities. Even if some of the larger ST communities in the region, for example, the Bodos, live in the plains of Assam, our main focus is on the indigenous peoples of the less populated hill areas. Northeast India is surrounded by international borders: China, Nepal, and Bhutan in the north, Bangladesh in the west and south, and Burma (Myanmar) in the east. The region is connected to the Indian ‘mainland’ through a narrow corridor known as the ‘chicken’s neck’. Land-based transport of people and goods is hence restricted through the highway and the railway line that pass through this corridor. This, as discussed in great detail elsewhere, makes Northeast India’s geopolitical situation rather delicate (Karlsson 2017c). Since India’s independence in 1947, violence and armed conflict have predominantly shaped the relationship between the Indian state and its indigenous population from Northeast India (Baruah 1999; Kikon 2005, 2009a; Bhaumik 2009). Due to the long-drawn-out conflict, the postcolonial state in India perceived indigenous people like the Nagas as violent communities and adopted a colonial trope of primitivism and barbarism to support this colonial construction (IWGIA 1986). This produced, among other things, a hostile situation whereby

Introduction

3

Map I.1  Northeast India

Note: Map not to scale and does not represent authentic international boundaries.

the citizen–state relationship between indigenous people from Northeast India and the Indian state was framed in oppositional terms as rival parties, leaving behind a long history of extra-judicial killings and violence (Haksar and Luithui 1984; Talukdar, Borpujari and Deka 2009). However, after the Indian state signed a series of ceasefire agreements with numerous armed groups across Northeast India beginning in 1997, it initiated numerous development programmes and skill-enhancement workshops within a broader programme to usher in peace and generate employment in the region (Kikon 2015a). This period also witnessed an accelerated rate of outmigration from Northeast India to other parts of India, particularly of youth in search of employment and livelihood (McDuie-Ra 2012; Barbora 2016; Bhattacharjee 2016; Singha 2016). According to a 2017 study brought out by the North East

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Leaving the Land

Support Centre and Helpline, a Delhi-based organization, the outmigration from the region has increased 12 times in the last five years, and over 5 million people from Northeast India are likely to become migrants in the next five years. Who are these migrants and for what purposes do they leave home? The study brought out by the North East Support Centre and Helpline notes that around 66 per cent migrate for educational purposes but less than 5 per cent of them return to their native places, while the remaining 34 per cent leave the region in search of employment (Press Trust of India 2011). One of the biggest employers of indigenous youths who migrate in search of jobs is the hospitality sector, which includes beauty salons, spas, hotels, retail shops, and restaurants. Yet this trend of internal migration is not limited to migrants from Northeast India alone. In India, according to Abbas and Varma, the 2001 census showed that 19 per cent of the population was internal migrants, which means that they had moved either to the neighbouring districts or states, or long distances across the country for jobs, education, or family reasons. The 2011 census classifies 31  per  cent of the population of India as living in urban centres, while the remaining 69 per cent living in rural areas. Given the increasing mobility and movement of people within the country, two out of ten Indians today are categorized as internal migrants (Abbas and Varma 2014). In this context, internal migration is a complex process of permanent, semi-permanent, or seasonal movement regulated by needs of the family, agricultural work, the market, or a combination of factors put together. Given that 69 per cent of India’s population continues to live in rural areas, migration literature on indigenous/tribal people classified as Scheduled Tribes/Scheduled Castes (STs/SCs) has predominantly underlined poverty, livelihood, low income from agriculture, and lack of opportunities as reasons for migration (Breman 1996; Roy, Singh and Roy 2015; Haberfeld et al. 1999). Focusing on internal migration in India, Alpa Shah argues that experiences of tribal migrants in India cannot be solely measured in economic terms. Shah’s work on seasonal migrants from the tribal state of Jharkhand in eastern India describes the challenges and encounters of young migrants who work in the brick kilns and highlights the interconnections of culture, citizenship, state, and capital in a rapidly changing tribal society (Shah 2006). As Shah notes, the majority of tribal migrants are categorized as part of the footloose labour force in India. Listing the dominant jobs that tribal migrants carry out in India, Abbas and Varma state that most of them, ‘… are employed in a few key subsectors including construction, domestic work, textile and brick manufacturing, transportation, mining and quarrying and agriculture’ (Abbas and Verma 2014). The high visibility of indigenous migrants from Northeast India as masseurs, waiters, receptionists, and salespersons in big retail stores tells a different story.

Introduction

5

Who are these indigenous migrants from Northeast India? How do they become servers in high-end dining restaurants, pour aromatic oil and massage aching bodies in spas, or work magic with their scissors to give makeovers to customers in salons? What do they say about their world and how do they negotiate their lives as workers in the hospitality industry? How do they express their aspirations and hopes for the future as indigenous peoples? In answering these questions, this book explores how they negotiate the boundaries of being indigenous migrants in metropolitan cities and their status as modern yet inferior citizens in contemporary India. We flip around the complex and often prickly question about belonging, race, and ethnicity. The constant question of who qualifies, or not, to belong in Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, or Meghalaya has dominated the debate whenever indigenous migrants from Northeast India report that they have been discriminated against and abused. Dismissing these reports, a counterargument is put forth that people from Northeast India constantly discriminate against migrants from other parts of India who work in the region, including families who are settled in the tribal hill states such as Nagaland, Meghalaya, and Mizoram. These debates often present polar cases as though there are no points of contact, alliances, or relationships that are forged through various networks. In this book, we resist the binary position of discrimination or assimilation, and offer an ethnographic framework that is creative and addresses the nuances of this complex landscape. The lives of indigenous migrants from Northeast India capture the ordinariness of violence and discrimination that is embodied within citizenship practices in India. We elaborate how the privileges of citizenship beneath the constitutional provisions and rights are marked by culture, class, race, and capital. The disenfranchised status of indigenous migrants in metropolitan cities is made visible by their everyday struggle to secure basic needs like safe housing, access to government offices, and employment benefits. These deep insecurities play a dominant role in referring to their respective home states such as Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, and Meghalaya as ‘home’ and defining their places of work as located in ‘India’ or ‘mainland India’. Yet the marker of metropolitan cities as a different national space is produced through a series of connections. For indigenous migrants, their sense of belonging to their villages or towns – places that they might never return to and yet are obligated to retain their ties with – is deeply situated in the distinct experience of living on their ancestral and communal lands. From stories of origin, memories of their ancestors, and current traditional alliances and politics, land is perceived as the reservoir of history and knowledge about these processes. Hence, between the pressure from family members and kin groups to ‘return home’ eventually and take up their responsibility as ‘elders’, and their individual desires to look for opportunities, young indigenous migrants find different ways to interpret the meaning of freedom, care, and labour. In the

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following sections, we highlight the central themes in this book that constitute the experiences of migration and mobility of indigenous migrants in the hospitality industry in global India.

Leaving the Land Migration is a collective experience. When 18-year-old Huvelu Nienu shared her dream to work in the aviation industry as a cabin crew member, she said, ‘I wish to serve people, to help people, and to fly across the world.’ Her ultimate destination was Malaysia, a country she had not visited but learned about through Gloriana, a SpiceJet flight attendant from Nepal whom she followed on Instagram. Huvelu’s cousin was also part of the cabin crew for an airline. During the course of our fieldwork across metropolitan cities in India, many young migrants from Northeast India described their aspirations to travel, earn, and achieve their dream jobs. Large numbers of young migrants left their home regions where communities had witnessed decades of armed conflict in states like Nagaland, Manipur, and Assam, or the structural violence and unemployment crisis in Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Tripura. The majority of young migrants said that they left to escape the violence and the militarization in their respective homelands and states. One of the consequences of the long-drawn-out armed conflict has been the structural breakdown of the social and economic relations across indigenous communities. The most important transformations that connect with the story of indigenous migration are the changes in land relation and the emergence of rich indigenous landowners. An increasing number of households from the upland indigenous communities are moving away from subsistence agriculture and looking for alternative livelihood opportunities as jhum is no longer regarded as a viable source of income to sustain a household. Land is increasingly becoming a valuable asset to speculate for profit, and turn into tea and rubber plantations, or start monocropping ventures such as ginger, turmeric, and other commercial crops. These ventures require large sums of investments that are in the hands of powerful and wealthy indigenous families who are connected to important political actors such as political groups, tribal councils, and non-state actors. In this book, we are concerned with the lives and lifeworlds of indigenous migrants who have travelled from their villages and towns to the metropolitan cities across India. Their movement does not involve the crossing of any international borders, yet, both geographically and culturally, it is a movement into a very different place. It is a movement away from predominantly rural livelihoods with subsistence agriculture and politics revolving around ethnic homelands. It is a journey of survival, leaving behind the histories of armed struggles and massive human rights violations and a corrupt local state structure; it is a relocation to an urban hub and

Introduction

7

adapting to a life in major Indian cities where indigenous migrants are seen as outsiders, yet where their un-Indian looks and English-language skills help them obtain jobs in the growing global service sector. The category indigenous migrants in this book is a broad term that refers to people who are categorized by the Indian state as STs and who also self-identify and assert themselves as tribal or indigenous, but who live and work outside their home regions. The two terms, ‘tribal’ and ‘indigenous’, are often used interchangeably in Northeast India, and in India more generally, but can, in some contexts, evoke different political or affective registers. Being indigenous is a new way of placing oneself in the world. It is a political articulation, a way of identifying oneself and claiming rights and recognition as peoples with the right to self-determination and cultural survival. The term has travelled globally and everywhere it is being questioned and discarded as a misnomer and politically malign (Karlsson 2003, 2013; Shah 2010). We take indigenousness to be an empirical reality as a form of identification and political practice in most parts of the world, and so also in South Asia. As we will show then, indigeneity – ‘the conditions, theories and values of being indigenous’ (Cattelino 2008: 3) – is constitutive to the present migratory moment in the Northeast. While Northeast India is a landlocked part of the country, many of the youths who enter the hospitality industry hope to join luxury cruise ships and sail the Caribbean Sea, the Florida coast, Australia, or the Arabian Sea. As Lallian Thangsing, who used to work in a five-star hotel in Mumbai, puts it, ‘In the spa section all the girls were from Northeast India, and whenever I met any of them, they kept saying, “When will I go to cruise, when will I go to cruise”.’ Lallian explained that jobs on a cruise ship were better paid in comparison to the spas, and his female colleagues were hoping that they would be able to save a lot of money. But more than that, indigenous migrants were excited about the cruise ship jobs because they took them out in the world. His friends who sought these jobs often said, ‘We Northeasterners love to go places.’ Muanching Simte from Manipur has been working on an exclusive cruise ship for several years and she similarly stressed that you go to work on cruise ships to earn money and to see the world. She has also been successful on both fronts, travelling to most continents. Muanching loves Japan, especially Osaka, as it is clean, and one of her favourite destinations in Europe is Norway and the spectacular Geirangerfjord with its beautiful waterfall.2 Before she joined the cruise ship, she worked as an assistant manager in a five-star hotel earning about 30,000 a month, whereas she now makes about 200,000 a month. With such a salary, she has managed to save a substantial amount, as well as help her family to repair their house in Manipur and buy a plot of land for herself in Guwahati, the largest city in Assam. Despite this, her return seems uncertain.  Geirangerfjord was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005.

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Leaving the Land

She recently married a man from her community living abroad and they were (in December 2017) planning to move to Canada and settle there. While it can rightly be argued that people have always been on the move and mobility is the most universal form of human existence, migration has become a massive force of social change reshaping lives locally as well as on a global scale. On a general level, one can say that people migrate to avail themselves of new possibilities elsewhere or to escape hardships like famine, war, or societal collapse. Yet, on the level of particular migrant situations or in the case of individual migrants, things become endlessly complex. Every migrant has his or her own story and hence, reasons to be on the move. The places that indigenous migrants leave behind often have the characteristics of a resource frontier with extractive resource usage, and overlapping legal regimes that allow for appropriation by state and capital forces. These places are also accompanied by violence and undemocratic governance. The interior indigenous hinterlands have deeply militarized histories with decades of armed conflict situations and lack the modern infrastructure that people desire today. In Arunachal Pradesh, for example, residents leave their interior villages to settle along the highway, leaving jhum plots to revert to dense forests (Aisher 2007). Along with this, new migrant communities are renting land or entering into sharecropping arrangements with the indigenous landowners (Harris-White, Mishra, and Upadhyay 2009). A massive construction boom of hydropower projects is also reshaping the entire Arunachal landscape, not only displacing people, destroying unique riverine ecosystems, and giving rise to protest and large-scale resistance but also generating dreams about salaried jobs and development (Ete 2018). Nabam, whom we met as he was washing dishes and making pineapple juice on the Varkala Cliff in Kerala, comes from an interior village that a decade ago had resettled at the outskirts of a small town on the Arunachal Pradesh–Assam border. When we met the family in Arunachal Pradesh, the father explained how they have still kept the land in the village but travelled there sporadically. They shifted to the town to have access to educational centres and health care services, and to seek employment opportunities to make ends meet. This is something that is echoed in stories of indigenous migration elsewhere in the world. It is, for example, estimated that almost 50 per cent of the indigenous peoples of Latin America now live in cities, most of them recent migrants due to the loss of land – pressures from an expanding agricultural frontier as well as mining and other extractive industries – but equally important is people seeking work, education, and health care that are more readily available in metropolitan areas.3 Even in an iconic wilderness like the

 T his is based on the findings of a recent World Bank study, Indigenous Latin America in the Twenty-First Century: The First Decade (Freire et al. 2015).

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Introduction

9

Amazonas, scholars are now pointing to a dramatic process of ‘indigenous urbanization’ (Alexiades and Peluso 2015; McSweeney and Jokisch 2007). While it is not hard to see why the indigenous youth in particular look for new openings in prosperous urban areas in metropolitan cities, this has significant consequences for the communities back home and for the indigenous societies more generally. When the young are gone, as one of the Northeastern migrants pondered, ‘Who will cultivate our land and keep the relations with the ancestors?’ But even if people are concerned with family and kin at home, return is rarely a realistic option. There are no jobs back home in their villages and towns, and for that reason most indigenous migrants prolong their stays in the metropolitan cities. This kind of indefinite extension where migrants stretch their plans to return home also changes their views about the world, making it harder for migrants to connect with those that have stayed behind in their villages and towns.

Indigenous Migration In this book, we examine a particular form of migration that we call ‘indigenous migration’ (Trujano 2008).4 By this, we refer to the movement of people who would otherwise be perceived as holding on to their land and livelihoods or being attached to their lands. Here, we propose that there are certain characteristics or distinct features of indigenous migration that motivate linking the prefix ‘indigenous’ to migration. Hence, we chose to keep it analytically separate from other forms of mobility or migration. We especially focus on the mobility of indigenous youths from India’s northeastern resource frontier to megacities like Bengaluru, Mumbai, Thiruvananthapuram, and Hyderabad, and further abroad (Map I.2). The terms ‘indigenous youth’ and ‘resource frontier’ are critical here, again indexing something distinct and different that has analytical bearings beyond the mountain tracts of Northeast India. As pointed above, a similar trend of indigenous migration and urbanization has also been noted globally and it is noteworthy that the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues dedicated the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples to this very topic in 2018 (this day is celebrated every year on 9 August). Indigenous peoples’ struggle all over the world centres around questions of selfdetermination and rights to ancestral territories. But as this quest is unfolding  We borrow the term ‘indigenous migration’ from an IOM Report by Carlos Yescas Angeles Trujano entitled Indigenous Routes: A Framework for Understanding Indigenous Migration (2008). This is the first usage of the term that we have come across. The report is mainly concerned with international or transnational migration of individuals who belong to indigenous peoples, something that the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII) earlier had brought attention to.

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Leaving the Land Map I.2  Migration Routes from Northeast India

Note: Map not to scale and does not represent authentic international boundaries.

globally, we also note a strong trend of indigenous peoples leaving their ancestral lands to move into urban centres and metropolitan areas. Across cities as different as Delhi, Stockholm, Sydney, New York, Bangkok, and Dhaka, one finds sizeable communities of indigenous peoples making the city their home. In some instances, these communities have a longer history of dwelling in the city, whereas others are of a much more recent kind. Despite earlier forms of mobility, this book presents a distinct story about leaving the land and the reasons behind the surge of indigenous migration from Northeast India in recent years. Our time is indeed one of migration and uprootedness. People, as noted, are on the move to escape war, oppression, and general economic and social misery, hoping to start a new life for themselves and their children in another, hopefully better,

Introduction

11

place. For many, such a place is in the more prosperous countries of the Global North (Berg 2015). News organizations report daily about people drowning while seeking to cross the Mediterranean Sea to enter Europe, dying and being exploited while crossing the Sahara Desert, or trying to bypass fences and border patrols that protect the European countries. The same happens around other borders like in the United States of America, Australia, and South Africa. For recipient countries, this flow of people presents itself as a major challenge, talked about as a ‘migration crisis’ that offers no easy solutions; governments straddle the space between adhering to liberal human rights obligations, not least the right of people to seek asylum, and financial and logistical constraints in receiving, providing housing, feeding, policing, and eventually integrating large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers. All this against the backdrop of increasingly vocal xenophobic and populist forces that call for the complete closure of borders to refugees and migrants from the Global South. Research and public debate regarding migration subsequently also put focus on the dramas unfolding around international borders and the often desperate acts of border crossing (Khosravi 2010; Andersson 2014). This book, however, is not directly concerned with such issues. The migration process we study here largely takes place within the parameters or borders of one nation-state, that is, India. The young migrants who actually do travel further abroad as part of their journey commonly do so through formal channels. Yet, despite the lack of dramatic border crossings, moving from Northeast India to mainland, metropolitan India is still a life-changing event, altering not only the individual life of the migrating youths but also the indigenous societies back home. The type of migration we are concerned with should further not be conflated with earlier much discussed form of cyclical migration where tribal people move during slack agricultural seasons to work in plantations, construction sites or brick mills, as noted earlier (Mosse, Gupta, and Shah 2005). The goings and comings we are concerned with are different, a venturing out in the world with less secure destinations and returns. We refer to this as ‘wayfinding’ to stress the openness of the journey. As people move along, they also foster new modes of being and belonging in the metropolitan city. Ethnic student bodies as well as ethnic churches play a critical role in the tribal diaspora, filling the role of a social network that protects and cares for its members. As one migrant, who had been staying in Chennai for almost a decade, told us, when someone dies parents rarely come to collect the body; instead, they send money to the community organization that does the necessary work transporting the body back to his or her home place. Most parents would simply not be able to navigate in the metropolitan cityscape. In this way, the ethnic diaspora is a critical part of the ‘migration infrastructure’ (Xiang and Lindquist 2014) that mediates the long-distance mobility of the indigenous youths. This is also the case with the training institutes and emplacement agents that prepare and

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assist larger hotel chains like Marriott or airlines like SpiceJet to recruit the aspiring Northeastern youths. Anthropologists Biao Xiang and Johan Lindquist have advocated for migration research to move from a sole preoccupation with migrant experiences – following the migrant approach – to one where the focus is rather on the infrastructure that facilitates or enables people to move (Xiang and Lindquist 2014). In his research, Lindquist (2017) has particularly looked at the role of brokers and middlemen who make a living by recruiting and sending out migrant labourers. Besides the human actors facilitating migration, Lindquist and his associates suggest giving attention to technological and material structures like the Internet, mobile phones, airlines, roads, documents, passports, and media (Lin et al. 2017). While we acknowledge and partly adhere to such an analytical move, in this book we seek to capture the migrant experience and engage with the voices of the young wayfinders and the families and communities. Their stories are captivating. The dilemma of feeling attached to their land and family in the village and town yet at the same time being attracted to a place that is elsewhere – one that is not yet fixed to a particular geography – produces a specific affective connection and a particular intensive form of ‘hauntedness’. Anthropologist Ghassan Hage argues that migratory culture is haunted by the places or homes left behind. Such hauntedness is not just the ordinary nostalgia for home that might strike anyone far from home, but rather the profound presence of another place in the everyday life of the migrant. Hage describes this as the ‘vacillatory lifeworld’ of the migratory subject:5 the connection to a place that young indigenous migrants have left behind and the longing for a place that is yet to become home. If there is a theme that grounds these young migrants from the experiences of the present that constantly involve moving around or circulating their biodata to prospective employers or acquiring skills to escape their old positions, it is food. Eating cultures and food such as fermented soya beans, dried herbs, and smoked yam leaves, which are grown and prepared back in their villages and towns, represent the stretched lifeworlds of young indigenous migrants – being present at home while spanning geographical distances at the same time in powerful ways. Although the book captures different experiences of indigenous migration, we felt that it is essential to devote a chapter to dreams (about aspirations and anxieties) and food (about serving foreign food and consuming food from home).  We take this from a lecture by Ghassan Hage at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, 19 April 2013.

5

Introduction

13

Consumption, service, and food mark the distinction between the foreign and the local (Chapter 5). Indigenous migrants from Northeast India, and especially those working as servers in the fine dining restaurants and the hotel chains, learn about taste and what is and what is not palatable to their taste buds. We can refer to this as the development of subaltern taste buds, which is contrary to the elite or cosmopolitan understandings about taste. Taste, as Giorgio Agamben notes, is concerned with the form of knowledge that is devoted to the enjoyment of pleasures. It is knowledge that extends to all that is considered beautiful and is deeply ingrained in one’s ability to use the senses to judge and apply rules to establish an objective value (Agamben 2017). Even though many indigenous migrants arrive as employees new to the hospitality industry, their ability to develop a taste for what has come to be generally referred to as ‘Northeast food’ draw our attention towards an affective understanding of consumption. Here, the emotions invoked in eating Northeast food are full of passion ranging from talking about Naga chilli that burns the mouth to how the pungent smell of fermented fish and soybeans establishes powerful resentments from neighbours, including the police (Kikon 2015b). Food gives the comfort of connecting the migrants with their families back home in Northeast India. Over the decades, restaurants serving pan-Northeast India food across Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Bengaluru have come up. While the cosmopolitan crowds in these cities have embraced the new taste, these eating places mainly cater to the migrant communities living in these cities. During our fieldwork, many indigenous migrants who worked in fine dining restaurants that served Japanese, Italian, and pan-Asian cuisine said that they longed to eat food from ‘home’. During weekends, they gathered and cooked meals using ingredients they had carried from Northeast India. Therefore, as indigenous migrants move around and seek better employment opportunities, food enables them to nurture and care for one another. And as for migrants who decide not to return to their home states, they find food as a strong anchor to keep their connections with their communities back home. For instance, Maongnungsang Jamir’s Naga restaurant in Chennai is called Naga Reju, meaning ‘the house of the Nagas’ in Tamil, caters to migrants and visitors from Northeast. Journalist Vishal Menon describes that such food joints came up after migrants from the Northeast began to settle down in the city. Today, localities like Choolaimedu, Shenoy Nagar, Basha street, and Namachivaya Puram have become hubs where indigenous migrants from Northeast India stay together. Among many challenges that these migrants face, as Menon highlights, is the complicated process of getting ingredients all the way from Northeast India (Menon 2018).

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Leaving the Land

Militarized Mobility In thinking about migration, the classical push and pull reasoning still has popular currency; poverty, violence, and catastrophes push people to leave, whereas greener pastures elsewhere like job opportunities and excitements attract people, pulling them along. Indeed, one could also say that these two forces are at play here. The postcolonial experience of the state has not been a very happy one for indigenous peoples of Northeast India. Many indigenous communities have expressed a desire to maintain sovereignty in one way or another after India attained independence in 1947. The Indian state has opposed this position and has responded with military intervention, the most extreme case being the bombing of the city of Aizawl, today the capital of the state of Mizoram, to crush the Mizo National Army. In the case of the Naga people, the now half-century-long attempt by the Indian armed forces to quell the Naga armed groups’ demands for a sovereign Naga homeland has led to the longest insurgency in South Asia. More or less throughout the postcolonial period in India, the northeastern region has been kept in a permanent state of emergency, where the elected governments and civil authorities are relegated to a subordinate position vis-à-vis the military structure legitimized by the ongoing threat of these insurgencies. Even if some parts of Northeast India have had less violence and political and social turmoil, one can speak about a general situation in the region of a ‘durable disorder’. The term ‘a durable disorder’ proposed by political scientist Sanjib Baruah is a perpetual state of political turmoil with human rights violations, rampant corruption, a nonfunctional local state, and a massive resource extraction carried out by government officers, army personnel, and businessmen, including local political elite and insurgent groups (Baruah 2005). Normal state functions relating to social security, infrastructure, health care, and education have been sidelined. Education suffers due to frequent and drawn-out strikes sometimes keeping children home for months at a stretch. Long-term economic investments are largely absent and instead you find the ruthless ‘grab and run’ capitalism that is the hallmark of unsettled resource frontiers. The armed ethnic militias or the insurgent groups active in the region are also involved in the scramble for extraction of valuable natural resources, and some finance their activities through clandestine economic activities like drug and arms trafficking, which exacerbates violence and social distrust. The combined effect is a situation that offers little hope for the young, and it is not hard to see why many choose to leave. And what are the attractions outside pulling people? Here again one has to think of a complex conjuncture of social, economic, and historical processes. Even the starkest critics of the liberalization of the Indian economy that started

Introduction

15

in the mid-1980s and was intensified in the early 1990s under the Narasimha Rao government, with Manmohan Singh as finance minister, cannot fail to recognize the economic growth that this triggered.6 The service sector explosion, not least relating to the information technology sector and various forms of outsourcing activities, is certainly noteworthy. Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs in his book The End of Poverty (2005) praises these reforms, writing, ‘[W]ho would have guessed twenty-five years ago that impoverished India would burst upon the world economy in the 1990s through high-tech information services? Nobody’ (ibid.: 186). Others again take a more cautious view, pointing to the underbelly of the economic miracle with a larger number of people ending up under the level of extreme poverty, pushed out into urban slums after their land and resources are appropriated by forces of the state and capital. The situation in the mineral-rich adivasi or indigenous peoples’ territories in eastern and central India is the most violent example of such a process. In Orissa, the main conf lict has been around bauxite mining and the aluminium industry’s destruction of adivasi lands and livelihoods (Padel and Das 2010). Opposition has been met with a full-blown military campaign, described and justified as a fight against Maoist rebels. In adjoining areas of Bastar, in the neighbouring state of Chhattisgarh, the struggle has mainly been around the mining of iron ore and production of steel. As sociologist Nandini Sundar describes, to pacify the Maoists and open these areas for the mining and industrial projects, the Indian government unleashed a counter-insurgency campaign involving both direct army and police operations like the well-known Operation Green Hunt in 2009, and also the creation of the vigilante force Salwa Judum to terrorize the local population. What then unravelled was a decade of killings, rapes, tortures, and other gross human rights violations. Where the adivasi have f led, settlers have moved in, accentuating the demographic shift that has been taking place during last decades with a rapid increase of non-tribal settlers in Bastar taking over adivasi lands as well as political control of the region (Sundar 2016: 38–42). Neoliberal India’s economic miracle has, in other words, not been much of a triumph for the indigenous peoples sitting on the natural resources that are required to sustain the celebrated high growth rate. The neoliberal geography of ‘New India’ is not a uniform one. By highly unlikely circumstances an economic niche has opened up in the emerging service industry for the English-speaking indigenous youth of Northeast India. In his book Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refugee and Retail, Duncan McDuie-Ra points to the opening for racialized  For a wider account see Atul Kohli’s Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India (2012).

6

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Leaving the Land

northeastern subjects in the cosmopolitan cityscape of metropolitan India, with jobs in high-end restaurants, shopping malls, and spas. He writes, In these global spaces, Northeasterners perform these roles because they look, speak, and act ‘un-Indian’. They are not associated with a particular caste, religious or regional group within the boundaries of mainstream India. They are simultaneously neutral and exotic. Their high visibility in Delhi is recent, owing to the surge in migration, and thus they act as a new labour force to complement the new consumer spaces of the global city. The labour force crafted through orientalised exotica, mixed at times with a sense of East Asian cool, constructs a space that is in India but not of India; perfect for ‘world-class’ aspirants of the middle classes. (McDuie-Ra 2012: 74)

What McDuie-Ra notes for Delhi also holds true for other major cities, not least the south Indian metropolitan areas that we are concerned with here. As we will see, their looks, that is, their racial features, and English language skills and general Western sensibilities make Northeastern Indians highly attractive as labourers in the new service industry. Getting jobs, hence, is fairly easy for those that fit this slot. Our book extends this conversation and describes how the markers of difference such as ‘un-Indian’ appearance that make them attractive to the corporate service sector also place them in the most vulnerable position. All Northeasterners working and studying in metropolitan India report almost daily experiences of racial discrimination, sometimes only in the form of casual remarks, but most of the time aggressive attacks such as physical harm, sexual assault, and killings. Life in the city is hard for indigenous migrants. To survive in this hostile, urban environment, indigenous migrants organize in regional and ethnic bodies, commonly studentand church-based organizations. Being away from home, one’s family, kin, and friends, is a challenge that young migrants struggle with, but as we lay out in different chapters of the book, return is rarely an option for them. Many indigenous migrants aspire to a life outside of subsistence agriculture and away from the troubled hills of their ancestral territories in Northeast India. Yet, leaving the land and going away as migrants is not perceived as an abandoning of their ethnic community. Being a collective and belonging to their respective tribes remains as important as ever as they aspire to acquire skills to work in the hospitality industry. It is this complex negotiation about learning to care, cultivating a professional outlook, and remaining connected to their indigenous lands back home that significantly re-fashion the indigenous self. It is through food, taste and dreams that memories of homes and aspirations for the future are constantly invoked, a theme we describe throughout the book. It is here that experiences of indigenous migrants become ever more complex than what the push–pull thinking allows for,

Introduction

17

and calls for an understanding of the particular type of labour most of them are involved in, what we with others call ‘affective labour’.

Affective Labour One of the advantages of indigenous migrants from Northeast India is their looks, that is, their fair complexion and generic Asian features that make them look exotic and ‘un-Indian’. These appearances combined, as mentioned above, with English language skills and a training that focuses on soft skills enhance their chances to enter the hospitality industry. The flipside, as we present the lived experiences of indigenous migrants in this book, is the highly exploitative nature of the work and inherent racism they encounter. These experiences disrupt the simplistic understandings about citizenship and race in global India. Indigenous migrants from Northeast India are considered foreign and familiar at the same time. The exotic racial appeal of young indigenous migrants is enhanced by the skill sets and habitus instilled in them by instructors in placement centres in order to make them employable. This involves basic elements, described as ‘soft skills’, like how to walk, talk, stand, dress, apply make-up, and present oneself to the world. It is this re-fashioning of bodies and the process of learning to care for the self – which requires seeking out better employment opportunities and being conscious of the uncertainty of the hospitality industry – that leads us to call it affective labour. Such labour is all about care, or caring for others, which presupposes the care for and making of the self. Our understanding of affective labour in this context draws from Purnima Mankekar’s formulation of affect. She notes, As I conceptualize it, affect is also not tied to tropes of interiority. The relationship between affect, individual agency, and social action is complex and multilayered. Affect cannot be located solely in an individual subject nor can be relegated to the psyche or to subjective feelings. Subjects are not where affect originates; rather affect produces subjects through the traces it leaves upon them. (2015: 13)

By exploring the different matrixes of care and control that young indigenous migrants adopt and experience in hospitality industry workplaces such as restaurants, hotels, bars, and spas, or as cabin crew, we trace how they constantly seek to cultivate a professional image and values that are constitutive of their relations and encounters with customers and employers.7 By foregrounding the  We also drew upon Kathleen Stewart’s work on affects and the everyday experiences of human emotions (2007). Yet, we focus on the politics of affect among indigenous migrants in global India as a transformative moment and not something that is

7

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Leaving the Land

experiences of young indigenous migrants, we show how affective labour is produced from the relationship between the young migrants and the hospitality industry in India and highlight the affective forms of anxieties and aspirations among these migrants in global India. Among indigenous migrants, irrespective of the grade or position within the hospitality sector that different indigenous migrants occupy, it is the face and distinct racial features that operate as the containment of a distinct citizenship and social hierarchy. Even as indigenous migrants demarcate the boundaries of taste, hygiene, and aesthetics for the consumers, as employers perceive them to have cosmopolitan and appealing dispositions, they are harassed and exploited at the same time. This connection between affective labour practices and acquiring new tastes means that the experiences of these migrants cannot be solely limited to a political and social conversation about discrimination and citizenship. The pursuit of better opportunities and salary in extremely uncertain and exploitative working conditions drives them to acquire additional qualifications and skills to gain more knowledge about taste, service, styles, massage techniques, and the consumption practices of their clients. These desires and constant training produce distinct indigenous migrants deeply shaped by consumption cultures. For instance, the bartenders and hair stylists Karlsson met in Bengaluru said that it was important to invest in their appearances. They regularly got expensive facial treatments and haircuts, and bought branded outfits to camouflage their working-class background. Mapping out their clientele and the high-end salons and bars they worked for, their investment to be well-groomed, stylish employees was an investment for better opportunities. Throughout our fieldwork, young indigenous migrants emphasized the importance of ‘looking nice’. Beneath the emphasis on the visual appeal, there was a deep history of violence they carried with them from their homelands and a constant anxiety to find better work and opportunities.

fragmentary and ordinary. Lauren Berlant’s work (2011) also helped us to think about the desires and the struggles of indigenous migrants in their quest to secure better opportunities in the hospitality industry in India. By engaging with issues of citizenship, racism, and discrimination, our ethnographic accounts focused on the aesthetics and the training of the indigenous bodies. Constantly managing their anxieties and desires, indigenous migrants seek to get extra diplomas and training to become better at their jobs to have a better future in a neoliberal market place. If we consider that affect theory in Stewart and Berlant’s world gives rise to contemporary questions about living in the neoliberal age and examining “new political feelings” as Hua Hsu points out (2019). Our book focuses on the lives of indigenous migrants and animates new questions about their aspirations and anxieties in global India. Always seeking “better opportunities” and a “brighter future”, we trace the experiences of indigenous migrants in the precarious hospitality world.

Introduction

19

The relationship between this visual appeal and the everyday experiences of being indigenous migrants emerged during our fieldwork with trainers in recruitment agencies like The People Channel (TPC) in Dimapur. Underlining both the professional and aesthetic requirements, Ms Lisa, a trainer at TPC, said, ‘Visual is very important. Just imagine if they come to class with clothes all wrinkled and dirty. Even the teeth that are stained have to be cleaned. We advise them on all these.’ For the trainers at TPC, it is important to recognize this reality. The values and knowledge required to become a server in the high-end hospitality industry in India is dependent on presentation. A trainer explained that ‘the package’ she offered provides an important foundation for the students. She described the package as a set of skills: I use one make-up style for all the students to make them look presentable. Of course, the companies will have their own make-up code, but I help them with basics like maintaining healthy diet for good skin and then seeing to it that the students with coloured hair are able to bring their hair to the original colour. The reason is that most of the companies will not allow employees to have coloured hair. I make sure I do light make-up for them because they also undergo a shock. I show them pictures and visuals about what constitutes a party formal, a business formal, and a party dress. They should not wear high heels to interviews. We do not let them wear red, black, and white because it does not go with all skin tones. But many of them do not understand these dress codes. If I tell them to come in formals for the training, the girls will wear gowns and come to class. Many of them cannot afford the clothes as well, so I tell them to go to the secondhand markets and pick up their outfits, like the coloured shirts, the shoes, etc. The girls wear tight-fitting pants and their panty lines are visible. So, I advise them to wear seamless panties. Even to the extent of telling them to use panty liners! I teach them how to do their hair according to their facial structures. For instance, for girls with round-face I tell them to use puffs to their hair. For those with long hair I tell them not to use puffs. I also show them videos and teach them the make-up vocabulary that I download from YouTube.

The rules of the hospitality sector govern which face of the indigenous migrant is able to signify the meanings and qualities of a luxurious experience. When the citizenship test fails to recognize the tribal migrants from Northeast India, the hospitality industry and corporations embrace this diversity. However, the celebration of diversity in a profit-driven market is not based on constitutional guarantees about equality and respect for human rights, but one founded on the privatization of labour and the imposition of a corporate value and culture driven by capital and individual success.

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Leaving the Land

For indigenous migrants from Northeast India, their generic Asian features have proved to be an important asset for securing jobs in the hospitality industry in India. Focusing on the processes that produce the servers, masseurs, receptionists, and hostesses, we followed indigenous youth who were trained for employment as service personnel in luxury hotels, shopping malls, restaurants, and airlines. In cities like Mumbai and Thiruvananthapuram, managers and human resource officers from the hospitality sector informed us about the culture of hospitality, hygiene, and honesty that young indigenous migrants from Northeast India possessed. The emphasis on this trope of indigenous culture as a valuable asset diverges from the dominant perceptions about savagery and primitiveness that have defined tribal people and indigenous communities in India (Skaria 1998; Kikon 2009b). Dwelling on the trope of cultural values, we refer to Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ cultures to trace how particular indigenous traditions are extracted in the neoliberal consumption culture. For Williams, residual culture is that which is not solely an element formed in the past but continues to be experienced and lived with values and meanings. Although these elements are not connected with the dominant culture, certain cultural practices of indigenous communities such as the clan networks, respect for indigenous elders, and kin affinities are underlined as values that serve specific functions. For instance, managers and human resource officials we interviewed described how indigenous migrants from Northeast India were inherently honest, simple, and hardworking, unlike their colleagues from other parts of India. These qualities were often exaggerated as cultural traits. As Williams notes residual culture is ‘… the incorporation of the actively residual – by reinterpretation, dilution, projection, discriminating inclusion and exclusion – that the work of the selective tradition is especially evident’ (1977: 123). The process of including and excluding what constitutes culture and tradition routinely surfaced during our fieldwork. Contrary to the managers and officials who praised the simpleton nature of the indigenous migrants, we learnt that many of them were frustrated and unhappy. They worked extended shifts and often missed their breaks, yet they did not protest these excruciating work schedules because they were anxious that they would lose their positions if they complained. The majority of them were on probation for 12–16 months as new staff and without any support from labour unions (see also Haksar 2016). These struggles and challenges significantly shaped their experiences and the way they articulated their desires to be mobile and look for opportunities and acquire additional skills to become better service-rendering professionals. In this context, we adopt the concept of emergent cultures from Raymond Williams to describe the emerging cultures among young indigenous migrants in global India. The meanings and values of caring for others and for the self, or the emergence of

Introduction

21

recruitment centres and training institutes, are new elements, but they are not produced in isolation. That is the reason why, as new social values and practices appear among indigenous migrants through songs, poems, protests, or aspirations (to become successful migrants), a process of incorporating them within the dominant culture as ideal citizens who are hardworking and enterprising begins to take place (in policy documents and guidelines). Williams notes this trend in the incorporation of working-class literature in nineteenth-century England. Although such incorporation of emerging cultures by dominant cultures appears as ‘a form of acceptance’ (1977: 125), there is always an element of selection and exclusion. Take for instance the acknowledgement and acceptability of indigenous migrants from Northeast India as an integral part of the hospitality sector in India, but the exclusion and invisibility of their social reality, such as the precarious working conditions and the militarized societies they come from. Following Williams’ call to ‘resist’ this process of incorporation, we interrogate the processes whereby young indigenous migrants become the face of the hospitality sector but their life experiences are excluded and categorized as private or personal. This book examines what Williams notes, ‘[The] practical consciousness, in specific relations, specific skills, specific perceptions, that is unquestionably social and that a specifically dominant social order neglects, excludes, represses, or simply fails to recognize’ (1977: 125). In this sense, this book traces the experiences of presentday young indigenous migrants in global India – constantly mobile and seeking new opportunities – and the forms of relations and connections that are produced as a result. Affective labour as we present in this book is intrinsically connected to labour circulation and mobility. Tracing the everyday lives of young indigenous migrants who grapple with their uncertain futures but are anxious to return home where there are no opportunities for them, this book also draws on the relationship between affect and economics that Sara Ahmed lays out. According to Ahmed, ‘… emotionality involv(ing) movements or associations … “feelings” take us across different levels of signification, not all of which can be admitted in the present’ (Ahmed 2004: 119–120). Working towards a theory of economics, passion, and affect, Ahmed notes that this process involves ‘… relationships of difference and displacement …’ whereby its meaning, value, or power is produced and accumulated over a period of time (ibid.). In this book, we apply the concept of emotion and its circulation to understand how indigenous migrants and their families assign values to and, in some cases, valorize and fetishize migration. Indigenous migration, understood this way, is not a movement to accumulate wealth and become rich. Instead, it is a path to acquire more exposure and become more marketable in the global economy. For young indigenous migrants from Northeast India, this logic of circulation constitutes converting their affective labour value in the hospitality

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and service industry in contemporary India, while remaining attached to social relations and a past that continues to displace them emotionally from the present. As indigenous migrants connect with their families back home through mobile phones and conversations about sickness, death, and remittance take place, the feelings of responsibility and anxiety to work harder and take care of ageing parents or siblings generate intense emotions. This resonates with Purnima Mankekar’s conceptualization of affect as that which, ‘… entails the circulation of intensities across spatially and temporally located subjects’ (Mankekar 2015: 15). These conversations often linger on buying land in the village or nearby towns as investments or to start cash crop plantations, and seldom have any connections with jhum or subsistence agriculture for sustaining the family. Even though there are different needs for every indigenous household in the villages or towns, it is crucial to recognize how the increasing trend of indigenous migration has brought about significant transformation in the structure of the family and in the lives of the migrants. Although we focus on internal migration in India, Mankekar’s work on transnational public cultures in India and the United States speaks of the processes of affective regimes that are produced in the increasing outmigration of indigenous youth from Northeast India. These movements constantly, as Mankekar notes, ‘… undergrid processes of in/habitation, being moved, feeling attached, and feeling in or out of place’ (2015: 15). In this book, we reiterate how affect is central to understanding forms of labour, including that of the indigenous migrants, which have become central to the neoliberal economy in contemporary India.

The research process and earlier research We undertook a multi-sited ethnography from 2013 to 2016. Karlsson conducted fieldwork in south India, mainly in Kerala, but also shorter visits to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and other major cities in the south, and further follow-up trips to Northeast India. Kikon carried out parallel research at other sites in Northeast India and Mumbai. Her focal point was the training centre TPC in Dimapur. We also supervised four researchers working on themes relating to migration. Together we conducted a series of workshops with scholars, NGOs, migrants, and other societal actors that were based on the photo exhibition Wayfinding, which we developed with photographer Andrzej Markiewicz. These were highly productive events that generated a general overview of migration processes in the region. At these events, we also conducted a series of filmed interviews with young migrants, which proved a rich source of understanding the highly varied migrant pathways. Applying a multi-sited approach, we followed a number of indigenous migrants closely, meeting them at their workplaces and homes, and in some cases,

Introduction

23

also visiting them and their families back in Northeast India. We knew some of them before; in other instances, it was people we met at restaurants or in public places like bus stands, train stations, or on the streets. In some instances, these turned into formalized interviews, but were often just informal discussions and reflections on the go. In some instances, we retained the names of our interlocutors as they preferred it. In other cases, we changed the names to grant anonymity, and also changed some place names or the name of workplaces (Reyes 2017). In most instances, we use only first names. Most of the research on migration in Northeast India has focused on ‘illegal migration’ from Bangladesh. The illegality of such movement stems naturally from the creation of international borders, the independence of India, and drawing of present borders through which the entity we refer to as Northeast India was created (Van Schendel 2017). Earlier, various trade routes and contacts stretched all the way from the Himalayan peaks down to the Bay of Bengal as well as in east–west directions. Many people also crossed over during partition and the subsequent creation of Bangladesh as a separate country. During the last decades, the migration from Bangladesh has remained highly controversial in India and especially in the Northeast where many of the migrants have settled. As Myron Weiner (1978) pointed out long back, the Bangladeshi migration to Assam has been accompanied by tragic events of large-scale ethnic violence. The first major study to turn the migration field on its head, and instead of influx look at the outflow of people from Northeast India, is the aforementioned book by Duncan McDuie-Ra. Our research is based on and stands in conversation with McDuie-Ra’s work. We are, therefore, excited to include an Afterword by him. As we will discuss in the following chapters, there are also other recent works on outmigration from the Northeast of concern. In the edited book Internal Migration in Contemporary India (Mishra 2016), there are two chapters on Northeastern migration. The human rights scholar and activist Nandita Haksar has also recently published the book The Exodus Is Not Over: Migrations from the Raptured Homelands of Northeast India (2016), where she gives an in-depth account of a few individuals belonging to the Tangkhul Naga community in Manipur struggling to establish themselves across metropolitan cities in India. These stories speak directly to what we explore further in this book. In addition to published work, we are also in contact with several younger scholars who are carrying out fieldwork and are in the process of writing up their findings relating to specific migrant communities from the Northeast. Through our combined efforts, we hope this body of research will contribute to a deeper understanding of why so many youths from Northeast India are leaving their homes in the hills and how their new lives in the metropolitan city are unfolding.

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Leaving the Land

Chapterization Chapter 1 explores the notion of indigenous migration in relation to three male migrants who inhabit different positions in the hospitality industry in cities like Thiruvananthapuram and Bengaluru. The key question asked is – if moving away from home really imply ‘uprootedness’ or do the migrants somehow still partake in the lifeworlds of those who stayed back despite not being there physically? In doing so, we explore the concept of stretching or ‘stretched lifeworlds’ and migrant life as being ‘haunted’, oscillating between the places at home and away. In this chapter, we expand the discussion on indigenous migration and why we believe this is a relevant term to use. Chapter 2 examines how prospective migrants prepare for a new life in the hospitality industry. This is done through a fine-grained ethnography of the activities at a training institute in Dimapur, the main economic hub in Nagaland. We are particularly interested in the skill sets and habitus that the instructors try to instil in the participants to make them employable. Described as ‘soft skills’, we examine how notions of care and control are instilled to re-fashion their bodies. We apply the notion of ‘affective labour’ in analysing the work within the recruitment centre and later in the hospitality sector itself. While we put emphasis on migrant labour in the hospitality sector, it is important to stress that many of those who leave the Northeast do so with the purpose of pursuing higher studies. Chapter 3 explores the aspirations, dreams, and hardships of this group who go out to study. The chapter revolves around eight Northeastern students who spend most of their schooling or university years in south India. The university and the city often become a platform or site for community building. Ethnic student organizations and church fellowships play a critical role in the life of a Northeastern student. Many of those who had gone out to pursue higher studies find it difficult return to Northeast India; this is not only due to lack of employment opportunities but also because they have changed and feel less ‘at home’ in the places they have left. In Chapter 4, we turn our attention to the visual archive we have produced together with photographer Andrzej Markiewicz. We think of this engagement as photoethnography, where images offer alternative readings and understandings of the migratory experience. Subsequently, this chapter mainly consists of images and some reflections related to the practice of photography in anthropological research. Chapter 5 focuses on dreams and food. In this chapter, we describe how migration is a collective experience and highlight how dreams of indigenous migrants informs us about experiences of migration. We connect the topic of dreams with food and highlight how taste and consumption are intertwined with

Introduction

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experiences of citizenship as well as forms of stretched lifeworlds. Focusing on dreams that haunt their loved ones back home and conversations about food, we examine how dreams and food renew migrants’ attachment to their respective ancestral lands and enable them to adapt to their new surroundings at the same time. It is the affection of loved ones back home who worry about their welfare and the food they define as items from ‘home’ that help them to remain connected or rooted to their lands and villages. Chapter 6 looks at methodological issues. In a conversational style, we reflect on anthropological methods and what it is to be a migrant. In the most basic sense, this chapter stems from the researchers’ own experiences with migration and connects them with the multi-sited fieldwork we carried out. Following migrants from their homes in the hills to their workplaces, and places where they hang out and live in the metropolitan area, we reflect on what it feels to be constantly mobile, and the restlessness and longing for settling in a particular place. We have also focused on specific locales and institutions that facilitate the migration. One such brokering institution is the training centre, which has come up all over the Northeast. Working with mobile people has its special challenges that we discuss in relation to our earlier work on more place-based communities in the region. Here, we also think about our own life trajectories and how these influence the research and our engagement with our interlocutors. It does, of course, matter that Kikon is from the region, sharing ethnicity with some of those whom she encounters in the field, and has experienced some of the vulnerabilities as an indigenous migrant herself. Karlsson as an outsider, a Westerner and male, is obviously positioned in a very different way in the field. With this follows several limitations, not only the linguistic ones but also certain advantages, opening up spaces that the ethnically marked insider would not be able to access. This chapter presents these reflections of the authors. The Conclusion seeks to bring all the threads together and in so doing provides some directions for future research. The Afterword is written by Duncan McDuie-Ra. This contribution is especially valuable as McDuie-Ra is a pioneer in the field and as a friend he has been an accompanying interlocutor in the project. McDuie-Ra suggests that the next decade, that is, 2020–2030, might be that of returns. If indeed the young wayfinders described in this book eventually start to return in large numbers and hence bring their new skills, experiences, and resources back to the Northeast, this might indeed be a critical rupture changing things in the region.

1 Wayfinding ... The sooner you wise up, the sooner you realize Home is real vibes. Real guys. Real ties. Please don’t get me wrong NE is where I’m from NE is where I’m born NE is where I belong.... – Feyago, Khasi Bloodz, Symphonic Movement, and Stunnah Beatz, Anthem for the North East, 2016

It was the second time we were meeting with Choro – this time in his home, a twobedroom apartment, where he lived with his wife and a three-year-old daughter. A few weeks earlier, we had visited his workplace, one of the top five-star hotels in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala. Choro had heard about our research and, as soon as we sat down, he started narrating a story about a magical stone he had found in the village where he grew up, which was situated in the hills of Manipur, a state adjacent to the border of Myanmar. It was a rare blue stone, traditionally used for ritual purposes, which he had brought along to Thiruvananthapuram. During the last year, Choro’s family had faced exceptional misfortune and Choro had been forced to travel back and forth to his village, exhausting most of his savings on airfares and medical treatments for sick family members. In a dream, he learned that it was the stone that was causing all this ill fate. After consulting his mother, he threw the stone into a lake. After this, things started to improve, he conveyed cautiously. Despite a successful career in the service sector that has made him a senior manager of one of the hotel’s restaurants, Choro claimed he could think of nothing else than to return home, to the hills of Manipur. His family was there and he had several younger siblings in need of monetary support and encouragement to finish school. The plan was to settle in Ukhrul, the nearest town and the district headquarters, mainly populated by Tangkhul Nagas, the ethnic group to which his

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wife and he belong. The question they struggled with was how to make a living there. They wanted to start some kind of business but were still trying to figure out what. Choro was from a family of musicians and he was considering taking up music again, perhaps to start a music school. His wife was interested in clothing and fashion and was learning design during her hours off from long shifts at the hotel. This, she believed, could be something to build on. Choro has been on the migration route, moving between various cities and workplaces in south India, for more than 15 years. Today he spends most of his waking hours in the ultra-modern setting of a luxury hotel, interacting with people from various parts of the world. It all appeared natural to him, talking and walking in the confidence of someone who seems to embody a modern, global subjectivity. Yet this cosmopolitan sensibility apparently did not displace the cultural dispositions and lifeworld of the community back home; perhaps the contrary. Choro had earlier bought some land in his home village, not to cultivate, but, as he puts it, to maintain for sentimental reasons.8 He told us that due to a curse issued long ago by the precolonial ruler, the Manipuri raja, the land in the village was more or less infertile. Choro seemed besieged by the desire to return to Manipur. He had been most successful in the service industry and had acquired the skills and sensibilities necessary to function in the global environment of a luxury hotel, yet he was not at peace with himself. He was haunted by what he had left behind, and return seemed the only way for him to fix a world that had been stretched too far and for too long. Choro’s situation speaks of the dilemma we sensed among many indigenous migrants, torn between the desire to move out into the world and responsibilities towards family, community, and ancestral lands. Magic stones and cursed infertile land are, we argue, as present and haunting to Choro as his new life in the highend hospitality industry in metropolitan India. In this chapter, we are concerned with the lives and lifeworlds of indigenous migrants who travel from Northeast India to the expanding cities of south India. As mentioned earlier, it is a movement away from predominantly rural livelihoods with subsistence agriculture and politics revolving around ethnic homelands, to a life in major Indian cities, where migrants are seen as outsiders, yet where their un-Indian looks and English-language skills have paved the way to salaried work in the growing global service sector.9 The category indigenous migrants, as we noted  Land, as Ferguson (2013) suggests, has many more uses than just those relating to agriculture, for example, as a source of attachment and, increasingly, in the case of South Africa, as a node in the circulation of government welfare payments. 9  As Wouters and Subba (2013) note, Northeastern phenotypes such as ‘high cheekbones and yellowish skin tones have not found a place in common imaginaries of the Indian Face’. Even if this is a main source of marginalization, it has paradoxically also opened up new avenues of employment. Regarding racism in India, see McDuie-Ra (2015b). 8

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in the Introduction, is not clear-cut, but broadly refers to people who are categorized by the state as STs and who also self-identify and assert themselves as tribal or indigenous, but who live and work outside their home regions. An increasing number of indigenous youth from Northeast India have started to emigrate in the last decade. This mobility has to be understood in the context of an affirmative action regime and a political culture that privilege sedentarism, that is, that people stay put in one place and claim rights to ancestral territories.10 Along with geographer Tim Cresswell (2001: 11), we explore ‘how particular forms of mobility become meaningful and what other movements are enabled or constrained in the process’ of such migration. We focus on what labour migration to the south and to the metropolis entails in relation to caring for family members and community in the hills. We aim to assess the cultural fissures at work in people’s attachment to the places of their travels. Young indigenous migrants seem to be on a journey without a fixed destination, struggling to make out what and where home is. We refer to this as wayfinding:11 a journey without a map or pathway to follow, with no clear destination or end point, but rather a form of movement in which the traveller constantly adjusts direction, seeking out new places and possibilities as he or she is moving on. In the following sections, we begin by discussing migration research and the significance of long-distance migration without border crossings, eventually suggesting that the type of indigenous migration we are concerned with has some special qualities to it. Second, we look at the situation in Kerala, one of the emerging migration destinations for people from the Northeast. In the third section, we focus on three individual migrants and their stories. Finally, through the notions of ‘stretched lifeworlds’ and ‘being haunted’, we seek to unravel what it entails to inhabit this particular migratory space.

Migration and Crossings Migration seems self-explanatory: people move somewhere else in search of a better life, to avail themselves of new possibilities, or to escape misery and hardship. Every migration has its own social and historical particularities. For every individual migrant, there are specific circumstances or reasons why he or she decides, or feels compelled, to leave home. Understanding migration, in that sense, can be an endlessly complicated endeavour. The present movement of indigenous youth  Special constitutional provisions have been granted to several hill communities in Northeast India through the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. For Meghalaya, see Karlsson (2011). 
 11  We borrow the notion of wayfinding from anthropologist Tim Ingold (2011), but use it in a metaphoric, less precise manner. 
 10

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from the Northeastern hills to the Indian ‘mainland’ can be linked to a number of structural features, such as high levels of insecurity and violence, a non-functional local state, lack of educational facilities, a stagnant economy, dependence on subsistence farming, and unsustainable extraction of natural resources.12 These, arguably, have snowballed into the present situation where the young are seeking a new life outside the region in an unprecedented manner. But leaving the hills for the Indian mainland is a deeply charged act. For some it is seen as a betrayal of sorts. To what extent can individuals, as well as communities, hold on to land in a situation where the young move out and away from agriculture? This question is critical, given that since Independence, the political struggle in the Northeastern hills has been for indigenous self-determination, which represents a challenge to the Indian state’s supremacy in this frontier region. Furthermore, migration goes against the grain of much of the thinking of indigenous peoples who are deeply attached to the land. Control of land, especially alienation of land to outsiders, is one of the key drivers of ethnic animosity and inter-community violence in the region.13 There is an affirmative action regime in place in the Northeastern hills to prevent land alienation, which bars people who do not belong to the STs from owning land in the various Northeastern states (Baruah 2005; Karlsson 2011). In our research experience, migration neither seems to entail the young giving up their indigenous identity, as exemplified by Choro’s stone story, nor their support for the ethnic struggles of their respective communities. Several of the youths we spoke with had a background in ethnic student organizations – some had even been part of ethnic militia groups – and they all closely followed political developments in their home states. Several of them were also members of particular denominations or ethnic organizations in the south, which again affirms that migration is not about leaving one’s community. What their mobility does entail, however, is a move away from agriculture, that is, the young migrants neither want to cultivate the land any longer, nor do they envision their lives as evolving within the space of ancestral territory. They seek something else, another way of being indigenous. New and unexpected possibilities have also been opening up for Englishspeaking youth within the service economy in Indian cities. In the recent collection of essays titled Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, James Clifford argues that if the 1980s and 1990s were concerned with indigenous histories of survival, struggle, and renewal, towards the end of the twentieth century, one began to see a new form of indigenous becoming that was built on a strategy of  See, for example, Rajan and Chyrmang (2016).  Land alienation and conflict over land between settlers and indigenous groups. Refer to Makiko Kimura’s book, The Nellie Massacre of 1983: Agency of Rioters (2013). 


12 13

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Leaving the Land

‘pragmatic engagements with global powers, with diverse capitalisms, and with particular national hegemonies’ (2013: 7). We think that this is a useful point of departure in understanding young indigenous migrants. While working and studying in Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai, Thiruvananthapuram, or other major cities, these youngsters have developed a more inclusive sense of self. In addition to belonging to a particular ethnic group or tribe, they identify themselves as ‘Northeasterners’ and simultaneously seek recognition as Indian citizens; they state: ‘We are also Indians’ or, alternatively, ‘we are not outsiders’.14 It is not that they deny their difference and the importance of their indigenous histories and collective aspirations, but that they seem to take a more pragmatic attitude to life, embracing the wider possibilities that exist outside the Northeast and seeking job openings and education in these rather distant and somewhat hostile places. The field of migration research suffers from a kind of border fetish. Being a migrant implies crossing borders and the border crossing itself is usually perceived as a traumatic, life-changing event that comes to constitute the future life of the migrant (Holmes 2013). Certainly, at a time when there are horrifying stories of hardship and the deaths of refugees fleeing the war in Syria, or of young aspirational Africans enduring arduous journeys through deserts, stranded for months at the high-tech borders of Europe and eventually lured onto unseaworthy boats by unscrupulous smugglers, borders and border crossing seem critical in grappling with the contemporary predicaments of migrants (Andersson 2014). It is still worth remembering that, globally, the majority of migrants are internal migrants who remain within their country of origin, and hence lack the experience or trauma of border crossing. The total number of migrants in the world is estimated to be about one billion, of whom a little less than a quarter are migrants who have crossed an international border.15 In the wake of the last decades’ hype around globalization, migration research has mainly been concerned with transnational migration and diaspora, with people pursuing a new life by crossing international borders. Internal migration, by contrast, has almost disappeared off the radar of migration research (King and Skeldon 2010). In the case of India, the situation is somewhat better, with recent work undertaken on rural–urban migration, as well as studies directly concerned with the mobility of tribal or indigenous communities (Breman 1996; Mosse, Gupta and Shah 2005; Shah 2010; Shah 2014; Mishra 2016). In the case of tribal  Protesting Northeastern youths were making such claims after the killing of a student, Nido Tania, from Arunachal Pradesh. They were seeking inclusion and rights as Indian citizens. See Karlsson (2017a). 15  These are figures from 2010 by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM 2010: 8). 14

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or indigenous communities, the focus is commonly on cyclic or seasonal migration where members of rural households work during certain times of the year on urban construction sites, or in brick kilns, and return to their homes during the peak agriculture season. In the comings and goings of these migrants, there are certainly dramatic events, but not in the sense of the heightened tensions associated with border crossings, where entry into another country can put a person on a radically different life course. The type of indigenous migration addressed here is neither the transnational one nor the cyclic internal one. There are important similarities with both these forms of migration, but also differences. One striking aspect is that we are concerned with migrants from a frontier region where people from the early colonial period were considered as wild and savage races who engaged in headhunting, animal sacrifice, and constant tribal warfare. This trope has been reproduced in various ways; for instance, despite his sympathy for the tribal groups he studied, it is no accident that anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf titled two of his best-known books The Naked Nagas (1939) and Himalayan Barbary (1955).16 The post-Independence insurgencies in the Northeast, beginning with the Naga armed independence struggle in the 1950s, have added to the stereotype of hill people as being particularly uncivilized and unruly. The public in India seems somewhat oblivious to the situation in Northeast India, accepting the state’s centrist position that there is a law and order problem in the region.17 Recently, a Muslim man who was charged with the rape of a young Naga woman was dragged out of the prison and lynched by a mob in Dimapur, the largest town in Nagaland. This tragic event was widely reported in the national media as particularly barbaric, reiterating the portrayal of the Nagas as xenophobic, narrow-minded tribals (Kikon 2015c). Yet despite this legacy, Northeastern youth are now establishing themselves as desirable employees in the private service sector where they have earned a reputation for being hardworking, loyal, and proficient.

Guwahati–Thiruvananthapuram Express Kerala is something of an enigma in India. It is regarded by some as a development success story in terms of progress in welfare, education, health, and civil society participation (Parayil 2000). Yet, economically, the state has remained rather stagnant and is highly dependent on remittances from expatriate Gulf workers. For anyone visiting Kerala, it is hard not to notice the large number of massive concrete  For a further discussion on Fürer-Haimendorf ’s work, see Baruah (2015).  A n example of such a state-centric view of Northeast India as a governance problem is the canonical book by B. G. Verghese (1996). 


 16 17

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houses scattered throughout the countryside – elegantly painted and with satellite dishes and one or two cars neatly parked outside – built by these migrant workers. Many of these Gulf mansions remain empty because their owners are away, living abroad (Osella and Osella 2000: 26–30). Furthermore, despite its high scores on social indicators, Kerala has amongst the highest suicide rates in India. This seems difficult to account for: one strand of public reasoning attributes it to a general social and moral breakdown propelled by large-scale migration, with many families living apart, and often with women left with the sole responsibility of caring for children and the elderly.18 Without necessarily subscribing to these reasons, migration nevertheless does have a darker side, with emotional suffering, loneliness, and stress affecting both those who are working abroad and those who stay at home and run the household. Kerala has become a hub of migration, with people going out and others coming in. This larger history, we believe, can be productively juxtaposed with the migration that is unfolding in Northeast India today. Kerala often figures in discussions about transnational migration, in particular of the many Keralites who travel to work in the Gulf countries (Osella and Osella 2007). That Kerala has subsequently also become an important migrant destination for people from other parts of India has to a large extent passed unnoticed by scholars. We became interested in the situation in Kerala after reading a newspaper article titled ‘North-East Hands Pep Up Kerala Look’ (Smitha 2012), which stated that in most of the 3,000 hair salons and beauty parlours in the state, the employees come largely from Northeast India. In the article, the owner of Catalyst Salon and Spa in Thiruvananthapuram confirmed that all her staff come from the Northeast. For the Northeastern migrants, Kerala offers jobs, and a pay scale that is substantially higher than what they could earn at home, but it is a long way from the hills of Manipur, Nagaland, or Arunachal Pradesh to Kerala. Most of the Northeastern migrants travel by train, and getting train tickets is the most arduous endeavour; besides, the journey itself takes at least three to four days. This can be compared to Gulf migrants who travel by air, a journey of four to five hours. During our fieldwork in Kerala, we soon came to realize that the indigenous migrants we were studying constituted only a small section of the migrant community in the state. We observed that the most attractive place for migrants from other parts of India is the factory town of Perumbavoor, some 40 kilometres from the ancient spice-trading city of Kochi. There, a market known as Gandhi Bazar has grown up

18

 W hile the Gulf migrants are mainly men, there are also women who emigrate. See, for example, George’s (2005) ethnography of Keralite nurses who have migrated to the USA. See also Chua (2014).

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around migrants from Bihar, West Bengal, and Assam.19 We met several young migrants from Assam and West Bengal who were working in cashew nut factories – roasting, peeling, and cracking nuts that had been imported from faraway countries like Australia and Indonesia20 – and others who were working in small-scale rubber factories, fish-packing factories, and the construction sector. The migration trajectory of this group is rather different to that of the migrants from the Northeastern hill states with whom we are mainly concerned. English-language skills are critical in determining whether a migrant will be able to enter the better-paid, up-scale service economy or end up in lower-end jobs in construction, manufacturing, or agriculture/plantations. Knowledge of English is quite widespread among the Northeastern indigenous communities, which is a consequence of the education system put in place by Christian missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of the missions privileged literacy in the vernacular language, into which the Bible was translated, as well as in English, which was often used as a medium of instruction for other subjects. As historians Joy Pachuau and Willem van Schendel (2015: 94) note for Mizoram, missionaries there began their educational efforts in the 1890s, opening the first primary school in 1894 and the first English middle school in 1907, which employed teachers from the Mizo community itself. Some parts of Mizoram today have 98 per cent literacy rate, which is the highest in India. There are high literacy levels and English proficiency in several other hill states, not least in Nagaland, where English is the sole official language and the medium of instruction in public schools. This contrasts with other parts of India where knowledge of English is commonly a privilege of the upper middle-class or elite groups who can afford education in private English-medium schools. Reena Patel (2010: 45) discusses this in her study of the call centre industry in Mumbai and Bengaluru, noting that most of the workers are recruited from the middle- and upper-class strata of society where there are people with the necessary level of fluency in English. The other migrants from Northeast India we met in Kerala largely lacked Englishlanguage skills and in general seemed to be on a different migratory path compared to the indigenous migrants (who were referred to as tribals). The typical trajectory we came across among the former was to work for one or two years in south India in order to earn enough capital to go back home and invest in land or in a small business venture. This contrasts with the more complicated or troubled relationship with home we found among the indigenous migrants; despite their attachment to  Interview with N. Ajith Kumar, director, Centre for Socio-Economic and Environmental Studies, Kochi, November 2013. The town of Perumbavoor is also known colloquially as Bihar city. 20  See further Lindberg’s historical study of the cashew nut industry in Kerala. Anna Lindberg, Modernization and Effeminization in India: Kerala Cashew Workers since 1930 (2005). 19

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family, village, and ethnic group in the hills of Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh, returning home was not the stated goal for the young indigenous migrants. Most said that there is nothing for them to do in the village or small town they come from, so their future lives are envisioned as lying elsewhere. Choro, with his urge to return to Manipur, is hence an exception. In the case of the non-indigenous migrants, it was mainly young men who were migrating, whereas both sexes were represented in roughly equal numbers among the indigenous migrants. And, finally, if most of the non-indigenous migrants worked as unskilled labourers earning between 5,000 and 10,000 per month, the English-speaking indigenous migrants usually pursued some kind of skilled or semi-skilled work in the service sector, for example as hairstylists, massage therapists, receptionists, bartenders, security guards, or flight attendants, and had a salary ranging between 10,000 and 20,000 per month or more.21 The stark difference between the two categories of migrants encouraged us to explore further if and how what we call ‘indigenous migration’ might be different from other forms of mobility in the region as well as in India and elsewhere in the world. Numbers seem especially critical: in Northeast India, the hill states have a population of about one to two million people each, and part of the population consists of small indigenous communities of only a few thousand people, or even fewer in some cases. In such circumstances, every individual who leaves will leave a mark. Mobility is certainly nothing new in these frontier areas; people have always been on the move crossing into territories that today comprise of Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan, China, Bangladesh, and Tibet.22 But the present migratory direction towards India proper, or to the ‘mainland’ as people in the Northeast commonly put it, as well as the scale and pace of migration among the young in particular, is something new and different to earlier forms of mobility. We explore this point later, but first let us introduce three individuals, all men, whose stories capture important aspects of the present migratory moment.

Migratory Lives Nabam Nabam, aged in his mid-twenties, worked long hours as a kitchen hand in a juice bar on the famous beach cliff in Varkala, some 50 kilometres north of 21

 One Indian rupee is equal to US$0.015, so that a monthly salary of 10,000 equals US$150.
  Schendel (2004). The indigenous hill societies have historically been part of larger polities with large-scale movements of people from the hills to the plains and with trade and religious networks spanning the Himalayas in the north to the Bay of Bengal in the south, see for example, van Schendel (2004), Scott (2009), and Chatterjee (2013).

22

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Thiruvananthapuram. This was Nabam’s first time outside his home state of Arunachal Pradesh. He had travelled to Kerala with his younger friend, Jina – both belong to the indigenous Nokte community whose main economic activity is shifting cultivation. Their journey had been facilitated by Pradip, a man of many trades from Assam who, now in his early thirties, had been on a migratory course for 10 years before eventually ending up in Kerala. The three of them worked in the same cafe: Nabam and Jina struggled backstage in the kitchen, washing dishes and preparing juices, while Pradip, who was fluent in English, was a waiter and socialized with the tourists. They each had their special reason for being in Kerala, but, above all, it was a matter of obtaining an income; none of them had been able to find work at home. When we met them, the tourist season was in full swing and they had already been working for three months, but they were still waiting for their first payday. The cafe owner kept postponing the payment of the stipulated monthly salary of 5,000 (although Pradip received some tips). They had no money and looked rather miserable. Nabam and Jina’s hands were cracked and raw from making the very popular pineapple juice and washing dishes for 14–15 hours a day. They were considering running away during the night, but were afraid of the owner, who had once threatened to throw an employee over the cliff on which the cafe was built. They remained in hope of receiving at least part of the salary that was due to them. Nabam told us that he had left home to see something different, to experience something new. His family had moved down from the interior hills and, along with others from their village, they had established a new village in the foothills close to the Assam border, adjacent to a small town and the district headquarters. When we visited Nabam at his home in Arunachal Pradesh a year later, his father explained that the family had wanted to move closer to jobs, schools, and hospitals. They still kept their land in their home village and travelled there once in a while, but it was far from roads and took more or less a full day to reach. Nabam was married and had a three-year-old daughter. During our visit, he told us he was getting ready to leave for another stint of work, most probably in Goa, where Pradip knew some people. The three men had eventually managed to get their salary from the cafe owner in Kerala; despite the hardship, it seemed that Nabam considered his first period of work outside Arunachal Pradesh a successful venture. When we met them in Kerala, Nabam’s friend, Jina, had just turned eighteen. He had dropped out of school at class eight when his family could not pay the  300 that he needed for books and uniform. He had wanted to continue studying, but eventually decided to try to earn some money so he could open a small shop at home. If he could get the salary they had been promised by the cafe owner, one season in the south would be enough. He was longing for home and worried about how his family was managing without him. His family had jhum fields that they

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worked for themselves. They were independent and self-sufficient, buying only a few things like oil and salt at the market. Jina was the youngest and was pampered by his parents and older sisters; ‘They all love me very much,’ he told us. He had never experienced such rude and aggressive language as he now faced daily at the cafe. At one of our meetings, as we walked along the beautiful beach watching people swimming and playing, Karlsson asked Nabam and Jina if they had ever been in the sea; they turned to him in disbelief, as if to say ‘Why on earth would we do that?’ The sea had, apparently, no attraction for them; they were people of the hills.

Naiba Naiba was working as a waiter in a restaurant in Thiruvananthapuram. He belonged to the Konyak Nagas from the Mon district in Nagaland. He had been in Kerala for five years when we met, for the first several years as a student in a theological college, and then staying on to study digital design and information technology (IT). He financed his studies by working in the restaurant, where he was provided with food and a room to stay. His father also sent him money every month to cover study expenses. The owner of the restaurant was an old friend of his father and, as Naiba puts it, treated him like a son. Naiba’s problem was a shortage of time. He wanted to move on in life, to become ‘somebody’ and to learn new things, go to new places, and meet new people. Earning money for its own sake was not what interested him. Several times he mentioned his friend, Longshaw, as a contrasting example: Longshaw was also working in a restaurant, had learnt Malayalam and had now risen to become a low-level manager; he was earning quite well, happy with his new life, and planning to stay on in Kerala. Naiba, however, was not impressed, telling us that he wanted more from life. At times, he had considered taking up his earlier theological studies again and perhaps become a missionary and travel abroad. His father encouraged him to discover new things, but had told him that at thirty he would have to return home and take charge of the family and their property, being the eldest son. Naiba’s father was a retired teacher, and it was obvious that the family was economically quite well-to-do. Naiba had an expensive laptop computer and a new smartphone, and was always nicely dressed. When we met him later in his hometown of Mon, he showed us large tracts of land and forest that belonged to his family. When we visited his natal village, it became clear that Naiba was well respected and had a strong grounding in the community. Yet, he had no plans for an immediate return to Nagaland. Since undertaking his theology studies, he had been active in the Naga Students’ Association in Kerala and tried to stay in touch with some of these friends. He showed us some birthday and wedding

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cards he had designed and told us that he thought this could become a prospective business once he moved back to Mon. A year after we met, he announced on his Facebook page that he had got his first proper job, working for a large IT firm in Thiruvananthapuram. He was full of anticipation and things seemed to be developing in the direction he had hoped for.

Lulin Lulin was a hairstylist working in one of the new upmarket suburbs of Bengaluru. When we met, he had been there for six years. He was well established, but not really at home, it seemed. Like many others, he had fled Bengaluru during the massive flight, or ‘exodus’, in August 2012, when rumours on social media alleged that Muslim organizations had threatened to take revenge on all Northeasterners for the killing of Bangladeshi settlers in Assam by ethnic militias.23 Lulin had bought an expensive air ticket for himself and a friend to leave because the trains were packed with people desperate to leave. He still suffers from the financial loss brought about by his sudden departure, having had to give up his job and flat in Bengaluru and stay home in Manipur for a month. Lulin is a Kuki from Manipur. As a child, he had experienced the Naga–Kuki ethnic conflict and his elder brother had been killed in the violence. ‘They are horrible people, I still find it hard to be around any Naga,’ he told us. He added after a while: ‘This is all so sad, we shouldn’t talk about it.’ Lulin’s mother was dead and his father had remarried. His stepmother was close to him, but despite this, he said, he did not have much contact with his family. He kept mentioning that his father failed to understand his situation, and constantly urged him to send money. ‘They live in another world; they have a house and garden and don’t need to buy much,’ he said. He contrasted this with his own situation where despite a wellpaid job – roughly 30,000 a month – he could barely cover his monthly expenses. But then, as he repeatedly stated, he also paid all the expenses for his younger sister who was studying to become a nurse. Just the rent for his room was 7,000 a month, and ‘when you work in fashion you need to spend money on clothing and appearance,’ he said; he had problems with acne, for which he sought various 23

 K ikon (2012) notes how rumours created turmoil across the metropolitan cities. Targeting migrants from Northeast India, threatening social media messages led to an exodus, with thousands of migrants fleeing the cities and returning home. Kikon writes: ‘A majority of those who left told reporters that they were going back home’, as they boarded overcrowded trains. Invoking home means several things that range from one’s home country to the intimate personal places of security. But the “home” in Northeast India they return to, seeking protection and security, has never been a safe place’. This event has become known as the ‘exodus’. See, for example, Biswas (2012).

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expensive skin treatments. Appearance is everything and Lulin is indeed all style: he has yellow, red, and blue dyed hair, and wears perfectly fitting T-shirts and jeans in the latest style. Lulin lives in a small flat in an area called Ejipura, sharing a kitchen with six or seven other young men and women from the Northeast, who also work in the beauty or fashion industries. Lulin was not happy with his present job, saying it was not a real challenge for him. He was hoping to join the best hair studio in the city, called Bounce Style, which caters to the glamorous elite of film and fashion. His long-term goal, however, was to travel to the West, and he was clearly hoping that we could help him in some way with his passage. Lulin said that he always spoke to clients in English and that he had never bothered to learn Kannada or Hindi; English, it seemed, put him in a position equal to or even above his clients. Nevertheless, being Kuki was central to him and his main contact with the community was through the Kuki church; lately, however, the church had split into three separate ones. Lulin was deeply disturbed by this, saying that there was too much politicking in the church. During the week that Karlsson met Lulin in Bengaluru, he often came back to how lonely and precarious life was in the city, saying that there was no one there for him.

Stretched Lifeworlds What then can we learn from these biographical snippets? Nabam and his young friend, Jina, stand out as the most vulnerable. Their lack of English-language skills prevented their entrance into more lucrative jobs in a higher rank of the global service economy, as was the case with Naiba, Lulin, and Choro. For the latter three, migration had proven successful in economic terms, yet their lives seemed riven with tension and unfulfilled expectations and aspirations. Choro wanted to return home, but was not really able to figure out how. Naiba and Lulin, who both were 10 years younger, were hoping to move further out in the world. What we found particularly telling, a theme which runs through all these stories, is how deeply entrenched the life back at home is with the new life in the south. It was Choro’s story about the magic stone that first made us think about this. Lulin was haunted by memories of ethnic violence, and he constantly affirmed that he did indeed fulfil his responsibilities towards his family, above all by paying for the education of his younger sister; yet he recognized that his father did not see it that way and instead was disappointed with him. Naiba kept stressing how his IT knowledge could be useful back in Mon, yet he expressed little interest in actually returning to the hills. He could easily slip into a comfortable life as the main heir of a large family estate, but again, his aim was to explore new places and possibilities.

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In connecting these stories, we found the notion of ‘stretching’ and ‘stretched lifeworlds’, developed by Fiona Samuels (2001) in her work on internal migration in Zambia, most compelling.24 Samuels writes: The language of migration conjures up an image of people moving away from home where they belong, and moving to a place where a disjuncture with the life in the previous location occurs…. For Kaonde people, who are the subject of this study, I found a situation in which people’s life-worlds consist of different spatial and physical locations. Experiences in these locations can be activated and can exist in succession, or consecutively, but they can also exist at the same time or contemporaneously. Whilst an individual may be located in a specific place, another location continues to play a central role in his/her life. (Samuels 2001: 14–15)

To describe how different physical and spatial locations figure in people’s everyday lives, Samuels introduces the concept of stretching (ibid.). While it can be said that much of the literature on transnational migration has pointed to how migrants today can pursue a life with one foot in their new country and one in the country of origin – not least through cheap mobile phones, the Internet, and lowcost airline flights – stretching, it seems, takes us beyond a back-and-forth movement between two fixed nodes, evoking instead a more fluid geography. Samuels holds further that stretching resonates with Kaonde idioms; for example, their claim that Kaonde people never migrate despite their highly mobile existence, moving from the village to the capital Lusaka and other places (ibid.: 14–15). This seems to hold true for the Northeastern youth too. As pointed out earlier, while inserting themselves into the emerging global economy of metropolitan India, they are equally emotionally invested in the life of their various communities in the hills. Their places of origin and present locations are not then to be perceived as belonging to two separate worlds, but part of one stretched lifeworld. Thinking through the notion of stretching can alert us to aspects that are rendered invisible by the more conventional lexicon of migration that stresses the disruption of social relations. We earlier pointed to the emphasis of border crossings as a life-changing event that produces the very figure of the migrant, and indeed, crossing borders can be a matter of life and death, although not always and not for all people (Hage 2005: 469).25 We have, in other words, to be attentive to different forms of spatial movement.  We thank Willem van Schendel for suggesting and bringing our attention to the work by Samuels, using the notion of ‘stretched lifeworlds’. See Samuels (2001). 25  As Hage (2005: 469) puts it: ‘It is a mistake to think that if people move across national borders, such a movement will necessarily be the most significant and defining element in their lives.’ 24

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Remittance is another key topic in migration studies. Those people who leave in order to find work are often expected to send money back to those in the family who remain at home. In the case of the indigenous migrants, however, money flows both ways: Some send money back home, while others need the support of their families to cover the high costs of housing, food and clothing while away. A young man from Manipur whom Kikon met in Mumbai told her that despite having a job with a five-start hotel that paid 15,000 a month, his father had to send him around 7,000 extra a month. But, as he puts it, he had his sights on better paying jobs that he was hoping his uncle in the United States would help him to get. In fact, many of the young Northeasterners in the south we spoke to expressed a desire to go abroad. That was the case with both Naiba and Lulin. Their present location in Thiruvananthapuram and Bengaluru was not an end station, a place of attachment or a new home, but rather a node in an ongoing voyage with no definite destination. They were constantly looking for new and better opportunities, seeking to move on whenever a chance appeared. This was also the case with three women from Mizoram who worked in a spa in a hotel in Kerala, who told us that they hoped to eventually go abroad, perhaps to the Gulf, albeit only through reliable connections. South India was preferred to the cities of north India, yet many of the Northeastern migrants we talked to witnessed almost daily experiences of racial discrimination and, for women, sexual harassment.26 They felt vulnerable, constantly reminded that they did not belong there. Yet going home was still not an option for many of the migrants we met in south India. Part of this relates to what anthropologists Jansen and Löfving (2009) describe as a ‘struggle for home’, a contest over how places are endowed with hope and a sense of possibility. Movement, thus, is not seamless travel, but entails conflict, struggle, and power asymmetries. There are temporal and spatial limits to how far things can be stretched before they snap.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have pointed to some of the daily experiences of vulnerability that indigenous migrants encounter and, at the same time, the new freedom and the aspirations their life away from home seems to engender. Naiba invited Karlsson to meet him in Mon, in Nagaland, where he was staying during a longer break  One of our female interlocutors, who has been a student in Hyderabad for six years, told us that she has to endure sexual harassment on an almost daily basis, commonly approached as if she were a prostitute or open to sexual invitation. For an overview of racial discrimination against people from Northeast India, and especially women, see Northeast India Support Centre and Helpline (2011). 


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from Thiruvananthapuram in the winter of 2016. Naiba arranged accommodation for him in a government guest house and took him around the small town, introducing him to several people who they ran into and calling friends over to meet at a cafe. Interestingly, though, he did not introduce Karlsson to his parents, only pointing out where their house was located. He insisted that they go to his family’s village instead, which is located one and a half hours from the town. They spent a day walking around the village, having tea with relatives and neighbours and looking at the land that belongs to the family. This, it seemed, was his home. Yet when talking about his father’s expectations of his eventual return and future prospects in Nagaland, it was all about Mon town, which again encompassed his sense of home. Naiba’s present life in Kerala seemed to lack emotional attachment to specific places and people. As we read it, he was just passing through Kerala despite the many years he had spent there. This also holds true for the majority of indigenous migrants in south India. It can certainly be the case for migrants more generally, but as we have suggested, the affective and political register of indigeneity – predicated on still-unfolding entanglements with people and the natural world of ancestral lands – seems to prevent attachment to the present place of habitation. This is why we propose that it is relevant to further theorize indigenous migration as a particular form of mobility that is rooted in the wake of continuing political change in India. In the following chapter, we examine how indigenous youths who see themselves as prospective migrants undergo training to become servers and professionals in the hospitality sector in far flung cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Bengaluru. As we connect the labour market, conflict, and poverty with the demands for an indigenous workforce in particular sectors of the hospitality industry, we propose how migration is not solely related to economic marginalization. Instead, experiences of indigenous migrants underline how new meanings and practices are produced for consumers (in neoliberal India) and service providers (as indigenous migrants). We connect how the process of ‘otherness’ – the alleged barbarousness or unruliness – we noted in this chapter about indigenous migrants does not disappear, but is articulated in new sites across the country, as discussed in the following chapter.

2 Light Skin and Soft Skills Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. (Message on white board at The People Channel, 2015)

The People Channel (TPC) is a placement centre that offers grooming classes. Most of the students come from rural Nagaland. Located in Dimapur, the biggest commercial hub of Nagaland in Northeast India, TPC has proven highly successful in providing placements for its trainees in the high-end hospitality sector, for example, in five-star hotels across cities like Mumbai, Delhi, and Pune. The term ‘five-star’ is an international hotel rating based on luxurious service and facilities offered to customers. This ranking in the hospitality industry is premised on a wholesome experience of service and care. Each fivestar luxury hotel explicitly spells out the high-quality facilities it offers, such as spas, world cuisine restaurants, banquet halls, swimming pools, and the different categories of rooms and suites. For example, the Mumbai JW Marriot, a five-star hotel in India that employs students from TPC Dimapur, describes the quality of the bed and its fabric in microscopic details. The official website states: ‘Plush beds include the Marriott Revive Bedding Package with custom duvets and cotton-rich linens.’ But more than the material comforts, high-end hospitality is about personalized services. The more exclusive the hotel, the more personalized the care will be, even to the extent of the staff being able to anticipate and satisfy demands that have not been explicitly articulated by the guests, as Rachel Sherman (2007) convincingly elaborates in her study of the workers that care for and cater to the rich in luxury hotels in the USA. It is the making of such labourers, turning rural youths into exclusive service personnel, that interests us here. While the hospitality sector to a large extent is built on universal formats, we still have to consider the specific backgrounds, experiences, and aspirations of those who make up its workforce. Important in this case is the recent history of prolonged civil war and massive human rights violations as well as popular struggles for rights to ancestral territories, indigenous livelihoods,



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and cultures in Nagaland. As outlined earlier, the young indigenous migrants are vested in this history, concerned with the welfare and political mobilization of their respective communities, yet, obviously, still seeking a life outside the geographical confines of imagined ethnic homelands. Race and physical appearance are also critical. Fair complexions and generic Asian features – along with English-language skills and a general cosmopolitan outlook – make the indigenous youths of Northeast India particularly attractive to the employers in the hospitality sector. While these racial attributes work to their advantage in securing jobs, they simultaneously mark them as different and as outsiders to the dominant communities of metropolitan India. Many of the migrants point to discrimination, racist attacks, and sexual harassment as regular experiences not only in Delhi but also in other metropolitan cities in India (Northeast Support Centre and Helpline 2011; McDuie-Ra 2015b). In this chapter, we discuss various aspects of the physical appearance and the importance of how one looks – the face as well as the body – in hospitality work. While focusing on the activities at TPC, a grooming and placement centre in Dimapur in Nagaland, we place our ethnography in relation to a larger context of the growing importance of what is known as ‘affective’, ‘intimate’, or ‘emotional labour’. Such labour is not geared towards the production of material goods, but, as we will see, towards the ‘production of good feeling’ (Muehlebach 2011: 61). Our focus in this chapter is not directly on feelings, but more on the production of certain bodies or bodily habitus dimension of affective labour. Embodiment implies tacit structuration, a process that the subjects themselves might not directly be aware of. The migrants we met very rarely talked about exploitation, but rather about how tired they were, about skin problems, body aches, stomach problems, and other health-related aspects linked to their long and stressful workdays. They also talked about lack of time to meet people outside the workplace, to hang out with friends, or to attend church regularly. Such experiences allow us to understand the experiences of individual indigenous migrants and their positions of vulnerability and the everyday lives of serving in the hospitality industry. We make two points in this chapter. First, we locate how soft skill training classes reveal the connections between care and control. As prospective indigenous migrants are trained to seize opportunities to work in the high-end hospitality industry in India, we examine how their caring and hospitable services are constantly monitored and controlled by managers, human resource offices, and their employers. In that context we argue that, rather than material artefacts, such labour produces well-being and care in various forms. Second, we highlight the new body regime in the hospitality industry and underline what it does to the indigenous youth, both in terms of general well-being and for their social and political assertiveness. While the work situation in a five-star hotel or on an airplane might be much more

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pleasant than what an industrial worker would have on the factory floor, affective or emotional labour might be more exploitative. As Arlie Russell Hochschild convincingly shows in her pioneering study The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983), such labour penetrates at a deeper level of the worker’s self, thereby risking the estrangement of the labourer from his or her own feelings (ibid.: 17). The reason Northeastern youth migrate is to escape one impasse – the lack of jobs and education, widespread conflict, insecurity, and corrupt state institutions in the region – but they end up in another impasse, one that seems even more challenging; that is, the disciplinary control of the corporate world. The situation appears like what Gregory Bateson calls a ‘double bind’, ‘a situation in which no matter what a person does, “he can’t win”’ (Bateson 1972: 205). The concept was initially developed in relation to work on schizophrenia, but has later been taken up by scholars in several fields to point to situations where a person or a group is exposed to contradictory messages or demands that appear unresolvable and hence create a blockage or a severe impasse (Green 2014; Eriksen and Schober 2016). The anxiety and high level of tension that we note among the young migrants as well as their families at home might eventually be of a passing nature, easing off as both sending and receiving societies get accustomed to this new kind of mobility. It may also be of a more enduring nature, an intrinsic part of this new labour regime. In the following sections, we connect with the theme of control and care and present how questions about ethics, gender, race, and labour emerge in the training centre at Dimapur. As we noted earlier, the focus of this chapter is an ethnographic engagement with processes of affective labour in neoliberal India.

At The People Channel The director of TPC, Ms Mero, was a confident entrepreneur. Her commitment and vision was to secure employment for Naga youths outside the region in the expanding service industry. But, as she stated with emphasis, her sole focus was the high-end luxurious hospitality sector like five-star chains, private cruise ships, prestigious hotels, boutique spas, and international airlines.27 It was a matter of securing safe jobs for her students, so she made sure that the employers were big and reputable companies who offered good benefits and career prospects for their employees. She was equally focused on selecting responsible and trustworthy students for the  Ms Mero underlined that her students were recruited by international airline companies such as Emirates, Air Asia, Jet Airways, Singapore Airlines, and Vistara. Among the high-end, five-star chains, the alumni of TPC worked at the Ritz Carlton, Hyatt Regency, JW Marriot, Hilton Resorts, The Leela Hotels, and the ITC Resorts.

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companies; this, as she told us, was to maintain the reputation of her placement and grooming centre. Explaining her philosophy about being selective, the director stressed the importance of the customer and described why such interaction would be helpful for the students who were all aspiring migrants. She said: … Because the students who come from very low level are interacting with people from a very high level, their intellect is being broadened. Because, really, at the end, it is who you interact with. You do not grow if you do not interact with the right people. The challenges and the exposure these students are getting is about growing up in life. If you go from the top down, the respect is more. If you go from the bottom up, the respect you get is not as much. Why we do well is because we are connected at the top; that is why our boys and girls are treated better.

Ms Mero explained that despite the meticulous training, some students were not ready to take up good job offers as they did not want to leave their families behind. At other times, there were unpleasant incidents where the alumni had drinking problems and caused trouble. As researchers we were initially apprehensive about our chances to explore the activities at the training centre, but from our first meeting the director welcomed us and allowed us to engage freely with her students and trainers, and gave us contacts to speak to families and the alumni of the centre. Our research, it seemed, offered students exposure to another world, something that the director apparently liked to encourage. In 2016, the annual statistics on school education conducted by the National Institute on Education Planning and Administration (NIEPA) reported that 19.4 per cent of children at the primary-school level across Nagaland dropped out of school. This percentage was measured against the country average of 4.34 per cent. According to the NIEPA report, the state reported the highest number of school dropouts in India between 2013–2014 and 2014–2015. The statistics provided by the study showed how more than 70 per cent of students who entered primary-level education in Nagaland never made it to high school. A local daily in Nagaland, the Morung Express, reported that this was due to poor infrastructure such as schools, libraries, and absentee teachers.28 The official numbers and studies seemed to corroborate the observation of the TPC director about the increasing number of school dropouts who enquired about job placements and grooming sessions at her centre. Personality development and communication skills were terms that were carefully underlined at TPC in Dimapur. Our first encounter with TPC was the impressive  Available at http://indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/drop-outs-in-north-east-india/​1/66​0697.html http://morungexpress.com/low-performance-of-states-education-system/ (accessed on 13 September 2016).

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signboards where catchy slogans and words of wisdom by business gurus and global celebrities were presented along with monthly bulletins announcing the extraordinary placement records of the agency. Serving and working in the high-end hospitality sector was packaged as a respectable form of employment with self-respect and dignity. Students were made to reflect on their future and the opportunities for working in prestigious and privileged working environments. Taking part in TPC courses became a transformative process that set them onto a new path in life, out of the village and away from subsistence farming. A key part of the training related to acquiring new skills to reinvent their looks and posture and pay attention to hygiene. A trainer at TPC said: Most of the students who come here are raw and fresh. Some of them come here with no idea about make-up at all. So, it becomes a little difficult for me to teach them. Suddenly from no make-up to full make-up – they are also shocked and feel awkward. So, what I do initially is that I study their background. As in like what kind of families do they come from; do they come from the village. I look at all these things. They have to apply make-up for their interviews.

The People Channel might be one of the early and more successful ones, but similar training centres are appearing all over Northeast India. While most of these centres are privately run, the Indian government is also taking up the call and is about to launch a major programme for skills development to enhance the employability of Northeastern youths. Between 2011 and 2021 it is estimated that as many as 17 million youths will come into the job market to compete for 2.6 million new jobs in Northeast India, hence creating an ‘excess of 14 million jobseekers’.29 It is this latter group that the government seeks to target for service sector jobs elsewhere in India and abroad. Such a scenario with large-scale outmigration of the young raises critical questions relating to the future of many of the indigenous peoples in the region: who will be caring for the land and the community when the young are out catering to the needs of others?30 In looking at the production of migrant subjects for the hospitality sector, we subsequently also think about the wider societal transformation this engenders.  These figures were repeatedly mentioned at a government conference in Guwahati in February 2016 on the potential of the service sector for the Northeast. The conference proceedings are available on the web, both documents or roadmaps and video recordings of the presentations: see http://www.icsiindia.in/past.html. The scenario was based on a 2013 PricewaterhouseCooper study called ‘Development and Employment Generation Potential of the North-Eastern states’. We have not been able to get hold of this document. 30  A study titled Study on Naga Professional Working outside Nagaland conducted by a nongovernmental organization called YouthNet from Nagaland showed that the highest number of migrants from Nagaland worked at call centers and beauty salons (YouthNet 2010). 29



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Affective Labour The training for the hospitality sector in India we account for here can productively be analysed through the emergent scholarship around ‘affective labour’, or the earlier mentioned analogous terms ‘intimate labour’ and ‘emotional labour’. We have been especially inspired by the contributions to a special issue of the journal Positions: Asia Critique (2016). In the introduction, the editors explain that ‘[I]ntimate industries rely on affective labor or work that “produces or manipulates affect such as feelings of ease, well-being, satisfaction excitement or passion”’ (Parreñas, Thai, and Silvey 2016: 3).31 The proliferation of such industries seems to have particular salience in Asia, quickly becoming institutionalized in several different sectors of the economy. With the commodification of intimate relations, social relations are also more generally radically transformed, as the contributions to the special issue outline in compelling ways. We would like to take note of two texts that speak directly to our case: Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta’s study of call-centre workers in Bengaluru and Eileen Otis’ study of rural migrant women turned into cosmetics sales representatives for a major global retail chain in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China. The call-centre agents are trained to adopt particular affective repertoires that resonate with those of their overseas clients in the USA or the UK. Even if the relation with clients is through speaking or voice only, to establish an intimate relation of trust and care implicates a bodily transformation. The training to become an agent also involves body posture, hygiene, manners, and style. As agents work strange shifts, often having to inhabit multiple time zones, their body clocks are disrupted with all kinds of stress symptoms and ailments like sleep deprivation, disrupted menstrual cycles, depression, and emotional exhaustion. Their social life is also disrupted, and instead of family and earlier friends, intimacy and leisure is now mainly with people at the workplace (Mankekar and Gupta 2016: 38).32 The corporeal aspect is also central in the case of the Chinese cosmetics sales representatives, for whom the cultivation of a new body aesthetic is experienced as ‘pleasurable and part of a personal project of upward mobility’ (Otis 2016: 157). The learned bodily practices also instil a new labour discipline, ‘embodied hegemony’, that makes it harder for the women to question their low salaries and precarious conditions of employment, according to Otis (ibid.: 157–158). The skills that the trainers at TPC seek to pass on to the young students – from picking up facial expressions and adjusting body languages all the way to learning  The quote is from an article on affective labour by Michael Hardt (1999).  Reena Patel also stresses this in her excellent ethnography of female call-centre workers (2010: 123–141).

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what kind of make-up colour captures sobriety and grace – are all defined as ‘soft skill’ knowledge. As we will highlight in the following sections, such processes called for a particular kind of care, value, and labour practice that needed to be communicated with expressions perceived as real or genuine by the ‘client’, the one care is provided for. However, several migrants working in the hospitality sector also told us about the challenges of managing their ‘professional face’ and the personal turmoil they were experiencing. Tiala, a Naga woman working with Qatar Airways, shared emotional and mental trauma of working in the hospitality sector. Tiala joined a five-star hotel in Mumbai after completing her higher secondary education in Nagaland and worked there for five years. However, she wanted to move on because she felt, ‘… stagnant; the progress was not there. The salary was not good enough. Then my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and that pushed me. I thought I had to earn more money.’ She joined an Indian airline company called Kingfisher and worked as a flight attendant for a year and took care of her mother’s medications during that period of time. When the airline closed down she applied for Qatar Airways. She was successful at the interview, but before she could return to Nagaland, her mother died She could not attend her mother’s funeral. Reflecting on her experiences, Tiala said: … My Mom passed away, but (she) had the confidence. She knew that I was going to join some international airline and I was going to be paid better than before…. She had confidence in me. So I had no regrets that I left her when she wanted me to be there. I was not there. It was not because I did not want to take care of her. It was because I wanted to do something and show her that don’t worry, I can stand on my own! She understood that. I am very happy that I got through the job interview.

For Tiala, her independence was her way of honouring her mother. The ways in which she channelled her emotion to understand her achievement and respect her mom’s courage to push her towards financial independence were apparent. The basis of caring for children, in terms like economic freedom, finding a path, or seeing the world, became an integral part of defining what constituted caring and being responsible parents. For instance, during a conversation with Naro, the mother of an alumnus from TPC, the mother shared how her daughter had told her that the most important person in the high-end hospitality industry was the customer. The mother fondly remembered her daughter, who was currently working as a front desk employee in a five-star hotel in Pune, and shared how her daughter had one day explained why the figure of the customer was very important. The mother summed it up with an example:



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If the customer comes to the hotel tired and drowsy, she has to know how to welcome them. For example, she has to say, ‘Are you very tired? Are you coming from a long journey?’ Then there are different kinds of rooms. There are different kinds of facilities and these are the price range. ‘Which one would you prefer? If you would like a calm and quiet room, then there are specific rooms for that as well.’

And the mother continued: I hear that some of the rooms are 70,000 rupees per night. It is a five-star hotel. With tax it will come to 85,000 rupees. If she is able to sell that room, her reputation will go up. The customer comes with money, so if she can convince the customer, the company is making a profit. She will get the perks for such sales. The company will reward her for the hard work.

The students, like the alumnus who was working as a front-desk employee, were made aware of expressions and how to make their sales pitch, along with their roles as servers. The customer is assumed to be a traveller: a global, mobile, moneyed person checking into the high-end, five-star hotel from a long journey. As the figure of a tired, moneyed customer becomes part of the training manual in a placement and grooming centre in Dimapur, the actual experiences and incentives required to handle the model often become complex. The students are worlds apart from the clients. Also, despite the training, as several TPC alumni anxiously said, they had little idea of what actually awaited them at work. A young man who had served for two years in a luxury hotel in Mumbai explained it as a daily struggle with difficulties he had never foreseen. ‘Nagas are good at hard work, but this is not enough, you need to be smart also,’ he said. Such smartness, it seemed, was not a human trait he valued or wanted to embrace in his life, adding with remorse that several of his friends had asked why he did not go to college instead.33 In the cases narrated above one can sense how work in the hospitality sector transforms not only the looks and body posture but also the inner self of the young migrants, and eventually relations with family and wider social relations. As we will see further ahead, this affirms what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2006) analyse in terms of the biopolitical significance of affective labour. They write, ‘[A]ffective labor is biopolitical production in that it directly produces social relationships and forms of life’ (Hardt and Negri 2006: 110).

 Public statement at a seminar on migration that our project group organized in Dimapur, 3 December 2016.

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Grooming in a Militarized Society Grooming, presentation, and confidence were critical aspects of the training at TPC. The trainer stressed the importance of being expressive and that of body language. As a majority of the students came from rural households engaged in subsistence farming, grooming has to begin with the ‘basics’. The trainer, Ms Lucy, explained what constitutes basics as follows: I teach them about hygiene and how to trim their underarm hair. I teach them about body odour and how to get rid of them. By prescribing home remedies that I see on YouTube, I advise them accordingly. Many of them do not know these things, since they directly come from the village. It is easier for the students from Dimapur to catch up since they know about fashion and make-up. At least they know what is a kajal and what is a foundation. But those from the village are not exposed. They have no idea about cosmetics. I go through the basics with them. I also make them walk and ask them to walk straight and not to drag their feet. There was a particular girl who came from the village. At first, she was so shy. She won’t open up her mouth in the class and just sat in one corner. Her hair was long but messy. I let her cut her hair and taught her make-up. She followed whatever I told her but would not speak. I was shocked on the interview day. It was a Skype interview. She was the loudest and spoke so well. She went off to Mumbai and is working at the JW Marriott (Sahar) now.

Before students were registered to attend the grooming session, the trainers carried out the height/weight/skin assessments during the admission process in order to customize the grooming sessions. As one of the trainers explained, ‘The airline companies require a particular body type. Many students come to the centre with a desire to join the airlines, but we are honest with them. We want them to be realistic. So, after the physical assessment, we tell them that there are other options besides the airlines.’ The experiences of the young men and women at TPC might be similar in other parts of the world, but the activities at the placement centre and grooming sessions in Dimapur need to be understood against the backdrop of the political history of the Naga people and the Northeastern region more generally. What is distinct in this case is the process of teaching and translating what constitutes care and being hospitable in militarized societies. This is a significant point because the growing number of migrant workers in Nagaland travelling to other parts of India is a consequence of, among other factors, the absence of livelihood options within the state. Under such conditions, prospective students at the training schools in Dimapur like TPC might not particularly have a background or interest



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in working in the hospitality sector. For instance, many students we met at TPC came with strong experiences of working in their local churches and choirs or, in some cases, as primary school teachers. The diverse backgrounds of the students forced us to examine what political and social conditions drove the prospective migrants to work in the hospitality industry. Since India’s independence in 1947, the Naga people have witnessed a violent armed conflict. Naga nationalists fighting for a sovereign Naga homeland and the government of India have waged a lowintensity war in Northeast India. Recognized as South Asia’s longest insurgency, the Indo-Naga armed conflict witnessed a cessation of hostility after both parties entered into a negotiation and signed a treaty known as the 1997 Ceasefire Agreement. From the 1950s till the mid-1990s, cases of torture, human rights violations, fratricidal killing, and extra-judicial executions dominated the Naga public life (Kikon 2009a). In the years that followed 1997, an increasing number of Naga youths and families migrated from the villages to urban centres such as Kohima and Dimapur for employment and education, and in search of livelihood options. A growing number of Naga households also gave up subsistence cultivation, popularly known as jhum cultivation, and took up cash crop plantation such as rubber, tea, and cardamom during the period of the Indo-Naga ceasefire. Yet the everyday violence and militarized state structure meant that overlapping authorities ranging from Indian security forces, state police, and traditional bodies to the Naga insurgent groups governed different aspects of the social and political lives of the Naga public sphere. Like many Naga youths, several students at TPC also acknowledged that they were anxious and tired of the persistent conflict, and sought to get away from Nagaland or from the adjoining hills of Manipur that are mainly populated by Nagas. Unlike accounts of people from conflict areas around the world who cross international borders as transnational migrants and refugees, the experience of the Naga youths from Northeast India is different. As we discuss in Chapter 1, though they travel to faraway places, culturally very different from their home societies, their migrant experiences do not revolve around the common trauma of border crossing, acquiring visas, and gaining a legal status in their new destinations. Neither do they follow the pattern of internal migration, for example, the type of seasonal or cyclic migration common among many tribal or indigenous peoples of central India (Breman 1996; Mosse, Gupta and Shah 2005; Shah 2010; Mishra 2016). In the case of the indigenous migrants from Nagaland and its neighbouring states in Northeast India, the question of return is more uncertain. The new life they envisioned seemed to be away from their villages and rural livelihoods. In this context, structural violence, poverty, the long history of armed conflict, and lack of infrastructure and industrial development contribute to the increasing migration of Naga youths from the state, as argued earlier.

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Un-Indian Looks Unlike the migrant workers we met from the Brahmaputra valley of Assam and other parts of the plains, the indigenous youth from Nagaland have fairer complexions and generic Asian features that make them look ‘un-Indian’. Englishlanguage skills and a sense of dress and body language became a point of reference during several conversations about indigenous migrants being cosmopolitan and desirable. Yet it was these very features that created tensions and drew racist comments. Anthropologists Jelle J. P. Wouters and Tanka B. Subba (2013: 127) note this, saying that Northeastern phenotypes like ‘high cheekbones and yellowish skin tones have not found a place in common imaginaries of the Indian Face’, something that is leading to discrimination against and marginalization of Northeasterners (ibid.), yet again something that works to the advantage of those in the service sector. Wouters and Subba write: Their lighter skin and mongoloid phenotypes seem to attract the international; for restaurants and café-owners in India’s major cities, ‘a sprinkling of Northeastern faces around the place helps create a cosmopolitan ambience’ (cited in the magazine Outlook India). (Wouters and Subba 2012: 131)

John, a Naga employee from Manipur, who worked in a high-end Japanese restaurant said he routinely experienced racial discrimination, but he was determined to stay on and work hard. His aspiration was to join a cruise ship and eventually leave India. He did not want to return to Manipur. ‘All my friends in the village are married and have children. Fourteen of us completed high school, but only three of us finished graduation.’ He completed a hotel management course in 2010 and was straight away picked up by a five-star chain in Mumbai. Describing his experiences with different kinds of customers, he said: Indian customers who come to the restaurant do not believe that we are Indians. A Muslim customer once asked me whether the meat was halal. I said ‘yes’, but he told me, ‘I do not believe you.’ He asked for an Indian waiter. A darker person came to the table and he was happy.

As John narrated further, ‘Due to Mary Kom34 and other popular figures, now they know Northeast India … but how does it matter? Nothing will change even  Mary Kom is a Member of Parliament, an international boxer, and hails from the state of Manipur in Northeast India. She belongs to the Kom tribe and is a famous Indian Olympian. She won a bronze medal for India at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. She became the most visible face from Northeast India and appears in commercials and national integration campaigns including the government of India’s programmes to emphasize racial and religious diversity in contemporary India (McDuie-Ra 2015a).

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if they (customers) know Nagaland or Manipur.’ Among many other migrant workers in the high-end hospitality industry we met, John came across as someone who struggled to keep up with these experiences. The contradictions he faced as an ‘Asian’ face working in a Japanese restaurant, yet being an Indian citizen, reproduced a peculiar kind of practice. It was as though his face in a Japanese restaurant gave the customer an authentic experience of eating Japanese food being served by a Japanese-looking waiter. Yet this performance was broken when the customer required an authentic Indian to validate his values and food taboos. In other words, John’s face constantly operates as a bridge for Indian customers in the Japanese restaurant to consume a global experience, but only as far as these experiences do not break their honour, beliefs, and status (class and caste). By demanding to see an ‘Indian waiter’ and rejecting John, the customer in global India emerges as an important agent who produces and defines citizenship values, and the legitimate acceptable face to speak on behalf of global India. Duncan McDuie-Ra’s (2012) work on tribal migrants in Delhi captures the everyday lives of migrants from Northeast India. He describes their encounters with different kinds of customers and employers in India’s capital, New Delhi, and highlights how indigenous migrants live with their anxieties and aspirations as they navigate the different identities and locations in the city. During our fieldwork, a Naga bartender named Richard who worked at a high-end bar in Mumbai said that he had to teach new employees from Northeast India how to work in such an environment. In the last 10 years, he had returned home only a few times. During a conversation with Kikon at his flat in Kalina he said, ‘In a five-star, we have to know how to work with hierarchy’ and continued, ‘During the 2012 exodus when Northeast migrants were attacked, the hotel gave us security. Nothing happened to us. The management cared for us and used to send us home early. Now they provide transport for women employees with security.’ Richard said, ‘[I]t was scary in the beginning to work here. Especially serving the Very Very Important Persons (VVIP) like Anil Ambani’s wife, Bajaj, Tata, Shahid Kapoor, Preity Zinta, Aamir Khan, Raveena Tandon, Karan Johar, Sonakshi Sinha, Katrina Kaif.…’ The names of customers he listed were the face of global India: wealthy industrialists, entrepreneurs, and bollywood celebrities. Many of them featured in the list of India’s richest people. Stressing the different personalities of the customer, Richard shared an anecdote. One day a wealthy Indian industrialist named Ashish Raheja walked into the bar alone. Before he ordered, Richard served him his preferred drink. ‘Oh. You remember?’ the gentleman commented and smiled at Richard. Richard’s story seemed to capture the essence of what constitutes high-end hospitality. As much as it is about service and the element of care, the server has to reify and acknowledge the wealth, class, and status of the customer. Unlike John’s case, where his face

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became a contentious site about authentic Indian citizenship, in Richard’s case, it was different. The knowledge that he was an invisible bartender came only by embracing the hierarchy that operated in the hospitality world. The established structure, power, and privilege of the wealthy and rich that accessed these places meant that the servers became visible only through the forms of service they provided. The moment of connection between the service provider and the customer took place within the realm of patronage between a servant and a master and not as fellow citizens. Richard’s ability to remember faces of important customers made him an ideal employee. Richard told that once he alerted the other servers about this particular VVIP customer; the manager came and greeted him personally afterwards. The security guard who had failed to recognize the tycoon was summoned by the manager and warned for being indifferent to a VVIP. Richard and John’s experiences speak about the fine-tuned skills required to succeed within the fivestar hospitality industry.

Soft Skills All students at TPC, both male and female, had to attend their daily classes in formal or business attires. The female students had to keep wearing their make-up as well. The students came in the morning and carried their grooming make-up kits and attire in a bag and got dressed at the centre. According to the trainers and the director, this aimed to equip the students with soft skills. Such skills involved teaching them how to walk, talk, stand, dress, apply make-up, and acquire communication skills. The trainer for make-up and hair, Ms Lisa said: See, it is not only about how they look; it is also about how they present themselves; posture, the way they talk, communicate. At the TPC, when we train them, we do not only train them about grooming but we also train them for communication and soft skills. So the package at The People Channel is different.

The emphasis on soft skills at TPC was indeed critical. The gaze and vision of the eyes were articulated and bodily experienced. It is impossible to sever the eyes from the face, and the face from the limbs, and, subsequently, from the entire body. In short, the inculcation of soft skills was a corporeal experience. The trainers at TPC seemed aware of this and, in fact, presented soft skill development as the unique selling point of their training centre. When we enquired about what ‘soft skills’ actually referred to, one of the trainers explained, ‘It means things like pronunciation, the way they talk, the way they walk, etc. So, we are also sending them off to work in the different companies as products of The People Channel.’ A trainer named Ms Lucy underlined why soft skills were important. She said:



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Soft skills are required for the airlines, corporate offices, and the hotel industry as well. We do a lot of mock interviews. How to sit during the interview, how to respond; we show the videos and all the trainers have their own modules so we show them accordingly.

Curious to learn about the trainer concept of soft skills, we enquired how Ms Lisa, the make-up and hair trainer, had acquired soft skills. Ms Lisa explained: Till class twelve I never applied make-up. But after I went to Shillong, I started using it slowly; but it was not much. Just mascara. But when I decided to join Kingfisher Airlines (as a hostess), everything was different. I was 22 years old. I joined in 2007. I joined and I learnt that we had to look really presentable and really well groomed.

On another occasion, she elaborated, telling us: See, when I was with the airlines, in order to serve a person, we have to look really good. We had to be clean; the make-up has to be done well. Thik thak! (an expression in Nagamese to emphasize perfection). The clothes should be well ironed because we are representing the face of the company. We cannot look shabby and just go and serve people.

Despite the focus on make-up, it was clear that soft skills was about perfecting the entire body. Even if most of the companies that recruited people from TPC primarily were looking for young women, male youths were also in demand and they too, subsequently, had to have a bodily makeover, though to a much lesser degree. Ms Lisa said: For the boys, it is not much since we do not use make-up for them. Of course, we conceal scars and make sure that the hair is not porcupine shaped. They should look decent. We advise them to wear pastel colours. For boys, if they wear brown shoes, they should wear brown belts; and learn to trim their nostril hair and shave well.

The hospitality industry follows a well-established gender divide. Irrespective of whether a female student has finished college, if she has the disposition and physical appearance to serve VIP customers, she has a high chance of securing a more attractive front desk job. The male students often ended up as security guards or in hotel housekeeping, the exception being if they had the looks, good skin, and  English-language skills, including soft skills. The face, ultimately, for both sexes, was required to be presentable, being a metonymic representation or an embodiment of the company.

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The Face of the Company Writing about the pervasive racial discrimination migrants from Northeast India experience, historian Yengkhom Jilangamba notes how the media and the larger public continue to refuse to name this phenomenon as racism. The larger Indian public considers racism a practice that exists only in the West, while depicting the entire non-Western world, including Indians, as merely victims. He further highlights how migrants from Northeast India living in Delhi have been routinely detained and asked to authenticate their citizenship by producing documents like passports ( Jilangamba 2012). Such a racial regime has become so mundane that he notes: For Northeasterners who look in a particular manner, everyday living in Indian cities can be a grueling experience. Be it the mundane overcharging of fares by autoricksaw-wallahs, shopkeepers and landlords, the verbal abuse on the streets and the snide remarks of colleagues, friends, teachers, or the more extreme experiences of physical and sexual assaults. It is often a never-ending nightmare, a chronicle of repetitive experience.

Sitting at TPC in Dimapur, we were intrigued by the conversations about appearance and the face. Jilangamba’s point about racial profiling of employment opportunities was not directly addressed by the trainers, yet obviously the refined Northeastern face was the very commodity they were selling to the hospitality sector. James T. Siegel describes the face as an aesthetic character that possesses a fragile stability. Siegel notes that the face has an ‘explosive power’ referring to the facial expressions, because the face is located as the site that gives access to the soul through the gaze of the eye. Siegel (1999: 105) argues that in real life, ‘we imbue what we see with significance’. The living gaze and the social relations it produces resonate with the experiences of the two waiters we discussed earlier; for instance, the racialized gaze that John endured in a high-end Japanese restaurant or the moment of recognition when the tycoon Mr Raheja looked at Richard and acknowledged his usefulness. This is the neoliberal gaze in global India where indigenous migrants as caring and hospitable servers experience the inequalities and hierarchies. The rules of the hospitality sector govern which face of the indigenous migrant is able to signify the meanings and qualities of a luxurious experience. Critiquing Simmel of attributing the painted eye to see pure image and form, Siegel notes that in life we reject the painted gaze. Because of this rejection we are able to ‘… appropriate our facial expression, choosing to be endowed with control of them, endowed with soul, at the expense of a more powerful vision.…’ (Siegel 1999: 106). This living vision that measures the tone of the skin, the structure of the face, the



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make-up on the face, and the different colours that students were trained to wear at the centre itself speaks about and reproduces the dominant racial order. This living ‘more powerful’ vision is located within a power network of the market and capital. As indigenous migrants from Northeast India continue to be branded as outsiders and foreigners (Wungkhai 2016), the hospitality industry and corporation have embraced this diversity. However, the celebration of diversity in a profit-driven market is not based on constitutional guarantees about equality and respect for human rights, but one that asserts the privatization of labour, and the imposition of a corporate value and culture driven by capital and individual success.

Caring for the Community A successful student at TPC is someone who manages to land a job outside Northeast India, in any of the major Indian cities or, even better, abroad. Exposure to the outside world is indeed presented as an intrinsic value for one’s professional career as well as for the individual’s growth as a person. Ms Meru, the CEO of TPC, and many other trainers at TPC use their experiences from living and working in various parts of the country and abroad while training students. A move back home is explained in terms of responsibilities to ageing parents, taking care of family property, or, as in the CEO’s case, a kind of mission to support and give a vision to the community. At a seminar, Ms Meru explained how as a child of a mixed marriage she was denied full recognition and membership in the Naga community.35 This was most painful to her because she grew up among Nagas and knew ‘no other way of being’. She left Nagaland as a teenager, and studied and worked in Delhi, Mumbai, New York, and several other places. After a successful career outside, she returned and started the training centre. Even if she was a driven businesswoman, she was also on a quest to reconnect with and establish a more secure sense of caring for the community as a Naga herself. Among the students and alumni of TPC, we sensed a similar type of care for or responsibility towards the community. They sought to get out in the world, highly aware that personal achievement was not all what was expected of them. This might be universal. We all have responsibilities towards family and kin, yet for the indigenous migrants such responsibility had a wider significance involving the obligation to the culture and ancestral lands of their respective communities. A TPC alumnus working as an airline hostess and based in West Asia said that when she came home to visit her mother the question of marrying a local Naga boy kept coming up, but she said she was not ready to marry. One 35

 T he seminar was organized by us, together with various civil society organizations in Nagaland as part of a series of event addressing the issue of migration from Northeast India.

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of her worries was that if she returned to Nagaland the insurgent outfits would pressure her for the money she had saved while working outside. That they would demand their share was hence taken for granted, but her dream was to eventually start a training centre for grooming indigenous youth in Nagaland to secure good jobs. These reflections spoke about more general longings and anxieties about the homes and communities that the young migrants had left behind. As they increasingly become visible as hospitable and caring servers, memories of homes and returning are entangled with social relations, the homelands they long for, and their families.

Conclusion Focusing on the training and work of young indigenous migrants in the hospitality sector, we addressed the wider social significance of this new type of mobility and form of labour. As this is a recent phenomenon – gaining in salience during the last decade – we focused on our ethnographic findings and cautiously stayed close to the ground. Many youths are choosing to leave the ancestral lands their parents have suffered so much to defend. In transforming themselves to appeal to the corporate sector and cater to the privileged elite who stay in five-star hotels and dine in posh restaurants, the question of care and service, as we highlighted in this chapter, raises larger questions as to whether young indigenous migrants will eventually lose touch with the lifeworld and everyday concerns of their respective communities in the hills. Yet what is clear is the determination and skills of these migrants in neoliberal India, which itself speak about their ability to craft new indigenous beginnings. The care for the self that the indigenous students practise in Dimapur set them on a new path in life; it facilitates their movement out in the world, away from their families, the community and an active engagement cultivating the land. The young migrants want more than what they could get from a life as subsistence farmers in the backdrop of a troubling militarized history. As highlighted in this chapter, the hospitality industry opens an avenue to work and travel outside. Yet the new life as migrant labourers is not an easy one. For many, it is a lonely existence in a hostile environment where they endure racial harassment and discrimination. Some have to perform racial Asian stereotypes and dress up during long work hours in Japanese or Chinese outfits. Many of the young migrants are torn by expectations and demands from their workplaces and those of their families and communities back home. The mobility they experience certainly creates a space of freedom, outside the grip of the coercive state in Northeast India as well the rebel groups and ethnic organizations that control much of public life in the region. But as we have shown, entering the



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hospitality industry imposes other forms of control and power, exercised through the refashioning of their bodies. They are produced as servers for the market under a highly disciplined labour regime that is founded on a slippery corporate framework of soft skills and being presentable. The situation, as we suggested, has something of a double bind to it. Staying back or migrating, neither seems a winning proposition. In the next chapter, we will look further into the anxieties of departures and returns, with stories of youths who have left the region.

3 Departures and Returns When he wasn’t looking, Barisha slipped rice into his bag. A small plastic container of red-husked uncooked grain that he probably wouldn’t notice on his travels. If it was nothing she could do to keep him from leaving, perhaps this would somehow bring him back. Every time she left Shillong, her mother would do the same – ‘to always bring you home safely’. It was what the Khasis believed, that rice, commonplace and ordinary, carried the power of the earth where it was grown, and would lead you back to where you belonged. – Janice Pariat, Boats on Land, 2012

The author, Janice Pariat, describes beautifully in one of her short stories how the young Khasi woman Barisha seeks to make her lover eventually return when he sets out on an uncertain journey to seek out his family’s past. Barisha, like her boyfriend, is from the colonial hill resort of Shillong, today capital of the hill state Meghalaya. While she belongs to the indigenous Khasi community, her boyfriend is Jewish and his family ended up there after fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany. The opening scene, quoted above, takes place in the south Delhi neighbourhood where, like many other migrants from Northeast India, they have taken temporary accommodation. Looking out from the balcony, Barisha thinks about them (her fellow migrants from the Northeast) as ‘perpetual pilgrims… always journeying elsewhere’ (Pariat 2012: 168). Pariat’s story takes us to the heart of the matter of this book – young people from Northeast India travelling out in the world, some to return and others to seek out yet other places, on a journey seemingly without a fixed end-station. In this chapter, we address various matters relating to such mobility, that is, ‘wayfinding’ – what it is to leave, how one stays in touch with people at home, how to balance individual desires with expectations from the family, kin, and community, and what it is to return or the hope or fear to do so. While the stories vary greatly, the focus in this chapter is on the indigenous youths who hail from a city or small town and who mainly leave home to pursue higher studies. In this respect, their



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journeys are different from those of youth with a rural background who might come straight from the village to look for work in metropolitan cities like Bengaluru or Mumbai. Many of these urban indigenous youths are also economically better off compared to their rural counterparts, and they have parents who already made the journey from subsistence agriculture in the village to government jobs or other salaried work in town. Yet again, as with Barisha, most of the urban indigenous migrants do have a connection to the land back home in their parents’ ancestral villages where many trace their descent and own land or have entitlement to community lands. This chapter is mainly concerned with conceptualizing the migration of young people to metropolitan cities; for example, whether ‘leaving the land’ eventually implies cutting the cord with indigenous societies or rather, as suggested in Chapter 1, implies a form of ‘stretching’, where the indigenous lifeworld is expanded and enacted in new places of the migrants. We argue on the latter, and as suggested for many indigenous youths, the metropolitan city – universities, workplaces, churches, and student organizations – becomes a critical site for identity formation and community building. The processes of identity formation and community building may take place through intimate cultural practices, such as cooking and eating traditional food, speaking indigenous languages, taking part in religious activities, celebrating festivals, and sharing information and petitioning about political issues or struggles back home. While we point to stretching, one must also note the emergent cultures of urban indigenous lives. Mobility and urbanization are not unique to people from Northeast India, and there is a global trend of indigenous peoples increasingly populating urban areas, often situated far from their ancestral territories. Perhaps, this again is not surprising considering the general process of urbanization where, as we have become used to hearing, more than 50 per cent of the world’s population now lives in cities. However, as we noted initially, indigenous peoples’ mobility and urban dwelling still remain outside the radar of most scholars, policy makers, and activists, who continue to think of these communities as stuck in and properly belonging in rural backwaters. Many indeed are, whereas others are not. The young migrants we are concerned with in this chapter come, as mentioned, to the large extent from an urban background, from cities like Shillong, Dimapur, and Imphal, or lesser known small towns in the hills of Northeast India. Growing up in a city certainly helps when seeking to establish oneself in the metropolitan as compared to arriving from a village, which is also the case with several of the young migrants discussed elsewhere in the book.. In this chapter, we will present the stories of eight young Northeasterners, in the age group between mid-twenties and early thirties, who have spent a substantial amount of time studying and working in south India and other parts of the Indian mainland. The first three

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stories relate to such journeys originating in Shillong – once the headquarter of the undivided province of Assam and, until a few decades ago, a famous educational destination, with students coming to the town to join missionary boarding schools and colleges from the entire Northeastern region and beyond. Since then, with decades of political turmoil and ethnic violence, even the families in Shillong who can afford such an education prefer to send their own children elsewhere for their studies, sometimes from a very early age. Schools and colleges in south India are especially popular, as people there are considered more tolerant of minorities, not least Christians, than is the case in north India. Despite this, Delhi with all its colleges and universities also continues to be the main destination for Northeastern students (McDuie-Ra 2012: 61). With more Northeastern students going to south India, some of the leading educational institutions there have become important sites for emergent indigenous culture and politics. The University of Hyderabad is one such place, and three of our young interlocutors have also studied there. Student organizations play a critical role in the life of these educational movers, providing care and also controlling their lives. As is the case with student bodies in Northeast India itself, these organizations are involved in all forms of social, cultural, and political issues, which one would think would otherwise be outside the mandate of student unions. In the Northeast, they function as key political actors often with an emphasized ethnic agenda to pursue the interests of their respective ethnic group. In the second group of stories, we follow three students who have left Nagaland and Manipur, states with the most violent postcolonial history in the region. These are also the states with the highest numbers of youths who leave to seek education and work elsewhere. The hardships people have endured during the last decades strengthen community bonds, and solidarity with one’s own community seems especially critical for students from these states living outside. Stepping beyond the ethnic community requires a concerted effort, as we will see. In the chapter’s last two stories, we meet two Northeastern students who have spent most of their life outside the places they regard as their home. For them, life as a student is particularly charged as it offers possibilities to socialize with people from their community. At the same time, it also poses the existential question of who they are and where they belong as they lack the cultural intimacy and language fluency of those who have grown up in the community. Many of the issues discussed in the chapter have universal salience and have to do with the increasing number of indigenous peoples in the world who live in larger cities. To go for higher studies often implies a movement to a city and to a place where the indigenous person would be in a minority situation. As opportunities are often concentrated in the large cities, many youths will also stay on to work and eventually build a more permanent relationship with these places. We will open this chapter



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with a comparative reflection about what indigeneity in the city might entail, and then move to the stories of our young interlocutors. These stories are being told in the structured context of an interview, and even if we can only include a shorter edited version of these interviews, we have tried to keep the intended storyline, the sequence and dramaturgy of how these stories were being told to us. We do not expect the reader to be able to recall the particularities of each story, but hopefully these convey a sense of the aspirations, fears, and lived realities of these young men and women. Nevertheless, let us first make a short comparative reflection on contemporary indigenous mobility elsewhere in the world.

Urban Indigeneity In At Home in the World, anthropologist Michael Jackson asks what it means to be home in the world in the present era of uprootedness. He pursues the quest with the Warlpiri people of aboriginal Australia, asking how they create and sustain a sense of belonging ‘when they did not build or dwell in houses, and house was not synonymous to home’ ( Jackson 1995: 4). Jackson’s ethnography beautifully conveys the richness of indigenous dwelling, a connectedness established through stories, travels, dreaming, and ongoing practices living on and of the land. In its closing, Jackson quotes Japangardi, one of his main interlocutors who had just returned after a long stint of work in another place: Home is where my family is…. My family. My language. Sharing talk with these old men, hearing stories about what happened before I was born. (Jackson 1995: 175)

Jackson’s ethnography is located in outback Australia, which presumably seems the most natural choice of fieldsite. Yet aboriginal peoples have a long history of urban dwelling and it is estimated that as much as half of the indigenous peoples live in major cities and smaller towns of the inner regional areas (Brand, Bond and Shannon 2016: 6–7; for Sydney, see Hinkson 2001). This begs the question of indigenous dwelling in the city, what does this entail in the case of aboriginal groups like the Warlpiri and also more generally for indigenous peoples in different parts of the world (UN Habitat 2010). In the USA and Canada, for example, an increasing number of native American Indian communities are living in cities, reaching 66 per cent in the USA and 49 per cent in Canada by the turn of the new millennium (Howard and Lobo 2013: 2). The main reasons found for their movement into cities are to escape the historically created situation of surveillance, economic misery, and poor living conditions on the rural reservations, and subsequently people seeking education, work opportunities, and health facilities in the urban areas (ibid.: 3). Interesting to note here, which speaks back to the situation with the indigenous youths moving

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to metropolitan India, is the high level of mobility after moving into the city. As Heather A. Howard and Susan Lobo explain in the case of USA and Canada: Many indigenous peoples living in cities are highly mobile, and to some extent maintain traditional patterns of migration, moving frequently within a city, migrating from city to city, or moving from a city to return to home reservations. (Howard and Lobo 2013: 4)

Another example is the Sámi people of the Nordic countries for whom cities have become critical sites to articulate indigenous culture, for example, in and through civic institutions like schools, universities, churches, cultural centres, and clubs, as well as through new Sámi symbols in fashion design, jewellery, art, and music (Nyseth and Pedersen 2014). As Torill Nyseth and Paul Pedersen argue, indigenous youths moving to the city for higher studies usually imply that they join Sámi organizations and occasionally that they become rights activists (2014: 142). The study referred to above concerns Sámi people living in three cities in the Nordic countries – the city of Umeå in Sweden, Tromsö in Norway, and Rovaniemi in Finland. Interestingly, most of the interviewed youths traced their primary belonging to the rural places or districts of their parents or grandparents rather than to the city they lived in (ibid.: 147). Nyseth and Pedersen also encountered a smaller section of youths who more confidently inhabited the city and were busy crafting urban modes of being Sámi. This again resembles the young Mapuche Indians in Argentina who struggle with what it entails to be indigenous in the city, developing different hybrid identities like ‘Mapunkies’ and ‘Mapuheavies’, the first being punk Mapuches whereas the latter is heavy metal Mapuches. For the youths themselves, there were no contradictions in these identity assemblages, whereas others questioned them, pointing out that such novelties ‘do not represent indigenous identity’ (Briones 2007: 105). As suggested, indigenous urbanity is a complex phenomenon. The connection to ancestral territories, the land, for many indigenous persons functions as a key source of identification and existential grounding. Active relations can be maintained in various ways for people who are not living on and of the land itself. The longing for the city among indigenous youths, as we suggest in the case of Northeast India, should not be mistaken for the rejection of such attachments. Such longing can be there even for the most emplaced person. A case in point is Marisol de la Cadena’s conversations with Mariano Turpo and his son Nazario Turpo in her monograph Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015). Here, we learn about the rich interconnections between people and place and how the Runakuna Indians exist together with a number of non-human beings in this harsh mountainous landscape, not least with the powerful earth-beings that father Mariano and son Turpo have the special knowledge of and engage with on a daily



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basis. In common anthropological parlance one could say they are shamans. They are knowledgeable and deeply embedded in this particular landscape. Yet as we learn, late Mariano Turpo told de la Cadena that he had always regretted staying back on the land and that he never had the chance as his two brothers had to go and live in the city. As he was the eldest son, Mariano’s mother had held him back, telling that he had to care for the animals. In a desperate attempt to get out, he had even tried to join the army. By leaving ‘this barren corner’, he explained, ‘I would have learned Spanish, and I would have learned more words to defend myself, I would have learned how to write’ (de la Cadena 2015: 39). This did not happen, yet he became a leader and effective spokesperson for indigenous land rights, instrumental in bringing the hated Hacienda System to a close in 1969 (ibid.: 75). It was his son, Nazario, who would be able to travel and combine a life in the village, upholding relationships with the earth-beings, with regular stays in the city, in Cusco and Lima and even abroad. People from various parts of the world who travelled to Peru also came to him to learn about Andean shamanism and the art of respectful living on earth (ibid.: 153–178). The larger point here is that indigenous dwellings in the new millennium need not be an either/or choice between the city and the ancestral village, but can, in different, ways incorporate the two. This again is what we refer to as a stretched lifeworld. In the recent edited volume Indigenous to the City (2013), the authors seek to ‘explore how Indigenous peoples in cities produce ways of living that move beyond marginalization and the everyday realities produced by the legacy of colonial dispossession’ (Peters and Andersen 2013: 9). Our approach is similar, seeking to look more closely at the new indigenous beginnings enabled by mobility away from ancestral territories. Along with youths moving to metropolitan areas in the Indian mainland, there is also a rapid process of urbanization within the region itself that is transforming the social, economic, and political landscape. Like migration, the growth of urban areas in Northeast India has to a large extent escaped attention by scholars and public debate (McDuie-Ra 2016, 2017). Leaving the land could, in other words, be a matter of moving from an interior village down to an urban settlement along the highway with better opportunities for employment, education, and healthcare, as was the case of Nabam’s family in Arunachal Pradesh, as discussed earlier. That initial move eventually facilitated Nabam’s labour migration to Kerala and, later, Goa. Nevertheless, indigenous mobility can also be a reverse movement, a reconnection to a past and to a place that had been lost in transit, as we will see.

Belonging in the City Let us return to Shillong, capital of the hill state of Meghalaya. It was established as a colonial hill station in the late nineteenth century, attracting people from near

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and far. In the early years, you would find indigenous Khasi people, British, Bengalis, Nepalis, and various other Indian and foreign people there. Shillong earned a reputation for being a cosmopolitan place, and many artists and writers who stayed there for short or long spells of time bestowed an aura of romance and exquisiteness to it. During the last three decades, the atmosphere has changed significantly and an exclusivist, ethnic agenda has come to capture the collective sentiment, sorting people into the opposing categories of insider–outsider, tribal– non-tribal, and, subsequently, pushing the latter category out of the city (Karlsson 2017b). When thinking about contemporary migratory movement in the Northeast, it does indeed seem to matter what kind of place you are leaving, that is, if it is a place that will continue to call you back or not. We will begin exploring this through the lens of those deemed outsiders and for whom departure becomes a more definite exit. Shillong-born author Anjum Hasan has wonderfully captured what it is to grow up in a city that recognizes you as an outsider, a non-tribal, and a nonindigenous imposter, and that eventually forces you out in the world, leaving behind what was your home. Hasan tells the story through her alter ego, Sophie Das. In Lunatic in My Head, from 2007, we follow Sophie’s early years growing up in Shillong in a Bengali family and in Neti, Neti/Not This, Not This, from 2009, Sophie is a young woman who has just moved to Bengaluru, working in the outsourcing industry transcribing Hollywood films for a US company. Sophie initially experiences an intensive sense of freedom in Bengaluru, being in control of her own life. As the months pass by, her hometown and family and friends there begin to haunt her. She increasingly feels alienated from the fast-moving world of Bengaluru, things feel unreal, and she is unable to sleep at night. After a year there, she decides to return home for a short visit. Being completely exhausted when she eventually arrives home, her stay gets extended and she begins to seek out old friends and places, seeking the traces of a past that can ground her, making her feel at home. She soon realizes that the city will not offer her such a comfort; it will not welcome her back. Hence, she has to face what her father had kept saying all along: ‘There is nothing for us here.’ The family subsequently leaves the city, all going in different directions: father to Santiniketan, mother to seek a spiritual path in Varanasi, and Sophie returning with her teenage sister to Bengaluru. In an interview, Anjum Hasan explains, ‘Through Sophie, I want to show how young people now increasingly live the life of a drift’ (Barooah Pisharoty 2008).36 This, again, is similar to Pariat’s point about the young Northeastern migrants being  T he interview concerned the then newly published first novel about Sophie Das, that is, Lunatic In My Head.

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‘perpetual pilgrims’. In this book, we are similarly concerned with young peoples’ increasingly drifting lives, but we go on to ask if and in what way it matters whether the young pilgrim belongs to an indigenous community or not. Sophie’s family lives in a rented house belonging to their Khasi landlord, as non-tribals are debarred from owning houses and land in Shillong (and Meghalaya) with the exception of certain designated areas. Further, the family has no relatives in the city. They have now all gone out to different parts of India, and it is hard to imagine that any of them would ever return to live in Shillong. As suggested earlier, belonging to the city is particularly charged for those deemed outsiders. The well-known journalist and author Kishalay Bhattacharjee told us how Shillong changed from being the happy place of his childhood into an ethnically divided city and a place he eventually had to leave after repeated threats by Khasi activists, some of whom he had grown up with. As he told: Interestingly, last month, in October, we shut down our house in Shillong, in Laban, where my father has spent 65 years of his life and my mother 50 years of hers, and when I packed up the things and left, shutting the door, I didn’t feel for a moment that my home, my hometown, was gone. The concept of hometown, home, was lost much earlier, I think, already in my youth. But still today if someone asks me ‘where are you from?’, ‘where is your home?’, I say Shillong. Because I don’t have another place that I belong to. I grew up there, got educated there, a lot of memories, many also bitter ones. But if you ask people I grew up with, in a very brute way they would say, ‘he studied in Shillong’. So there is neither acceptance, nor belonging.

Kishalay enjoys a successful career as a journalist and author,37 and, as he puts it, being a Brahmin and Bengali, a prominent community in India, has been to his advantage once he ventured out of Shillong. He does not want to identify himself as a victim, yet it is obvious that the loss of home still haunts him (Bhattacharjee, 2017). For most of the indigenous migrants, the inner conflicts are indeed different and for good and for bad, they are all struggling with bonds to the community and an ancestral home that call for continued attention and care, but that also provides a kind of ontological security, a grounding, and a place to return to. Karlsson recalls how he once travelled up to Shillong from the airport located in the  K ishalay Bhattacharjee has been covering Northeast India for the news channel NDTV. He has also published two books about the region, Bloods on My Hands: Confessions of Staged Encounters (2015) and Che in Paona Bazar: Tales of Exile and Belonging from India’s Northeast (2013). We made a longer filmed interview with him in Sikkim, November 2017.

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outskirts of Guwahati, the capital of Assam. Two young Khasis, both living abroad, offered him a lift in their taxi. The young man was working as an event manager in a club in Dubai and the young woman as an air hostess for an international airline. The five-hour ride was most memorable: they stopped halfway for traditional pork dishes they had been longing for, and the closer the taxi got to Shillong the more excited they became. The young woman was living in another part of town and she switched into another taxi once we reached the outskirts of the city (perhaps also to hide that they were a couple). Finally, as the young man arrived at the house, the street was soon filled up with people greeting him. He had arrived home. Arrivals and departures are never simple. We will now turn to the stories of three young Khasis and their ordeals and anxieties in leaving and coming back to their hometown Shillong.

Leaving Shillong and (Not) Coming Back Story 1, Bynta We came to know Bynta through our photo exhibition Wayfinding, which was shown at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Guwahati, in November 2016. We circulated a note there asking people with migrant experience to sign up for an interview. This was also done in the three other places where we displayed the exhibition. Many people turned up for interviews, and Bynta was especially eager to share her story, insisting that her experiences might be of help to other young women in similar situations. Bynta is now in her late twenties and following a path of life of her own choosing – studying. Her last 10 years, however, have been a real struggle. Her story is different from those of others in this chapter as it mainly revolves around her experiences in workplaces rather than those from her life as a student, as is the case with the others. But, as we hope will be clear, it nevertheless makes sense to open with her story. As Bynta38 narrates, her venturing out of Shillong at the age of 18 years was due to immense pressure from her mother, the sole provider and head of the family (the father did not figure). Bynta was not ready to go out at the time and wanted instead to continue her studies at a college in the city. Her mother, as a young woman, had worked in Delhi and now wanted her daughter also to get some exposure to the outside world and start to earn her own money. Bynta had to obey 38

 Filmed interview in relation to the exhibition Wayfinding, Guwahati, 31 November 2016. Bynta was clear about wanting to get her story out, to help other young people having faced similar pressure from home.



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and got admitted to a one-year professional course in aviation and hospitality at the Frankfinn Institute in Mumbai. The course was expensive and to afford it she worked part-time at a call centre. Studying and working, however, turned out to be extremely stressful and Bynta gave up the call-centre job after six months. Perhaps, more than the long hours, it was the constant sexual harassment she had to face both at the institute and at the call centre that took a toll on her. She was always stressed and afraid, and did not know how to deal with the unwanted flirting, the comments, and the sexualized gaze from men both at work and at her studies. However, she struggled to stay on. After the course was completed, she got an internship at the prestigious five-star hotel Kempinski in Bengaluru. The situation there was worse, and after six months, she had had enough of sexual harassment by superiors, co-workers, and guests. Bynta was in charge of bookings in the spa section, an environment where she felt especially vulnerable and exposed to unwanted attention. Girls from Northeast India, she said, had also gained a reputation in the city for being sexually promiscuous, not serious with relationships, but easy to get in bed. There was also this saying circulating at the time: ‘Students by day, call girls by night.’ Such talk offended her, but as with stares and comments she did not dare to do anything and she kept everything inside and just tried to keep out of trouble. To cope with the hard work, lack of sleep, discrimination, and loneliness, Bynta, as she puts it, picked up the ‘bad habits’ of drinking and smoking. She felt that life was just too hard. After 18 months away in Bengaluru and Mumbai, she had enough of it all and packed her bags and returned home to Shillong. The return was not a happy one. Her mother greeted her at the door with, ‘Why have you come back? There is nothing here for you. You need to go out again.’ Staying home was difficult, with Bynta constantly being pressured by the family to go out and earn again. It was about a year after her return when Jet Airways visited Shillong to recruit for cabin crew. Bynta was pushed into attending the interviews, and was selected. After a three-month training course in Chennai, she started working as an air hostess on domestic and international flights. The pay was very good; some months she could make as much as  50,000–80,000. However, she experienced the same type of sexual harassment and discrimination as before, especially by north Indian pilots. She was also living alone in Chennai and always felt afraid. ‘There were days,’ she said, ‘I thought I was gonna lose it.’ The climate in Chennai was also difficult to cope with. It was too hot, and she started getting problems with skin rashes and pimples. One early morning when she arrived at work for an international flight, her superior told that she could not fly looking like that. Bynta replied that she could cover the pimples (which was what several of the other air hostesses with skin problem did), but they did not agree and she was grounded.

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Bynta felt she was singled out on racial grounds, being from the Northeast. Bynta quit the job and returned home again. Her mother could not believe her eyes when she again appeared on the doorstep with all her bags. Why on earth would she leave such a well-paid job, seemed to be going through her mind, and she protested by not speaking to Bynta for the next six months. Her grandmother and Bynta’s boyfriend stepped in and helped her to rebuild a sense of self and begin a new life in Shillong. As Bynta explained, ‘[W]e love our home. I love my home. I love my land. We are not interested in going out.’ She was switching between we and I, suggesting, as she later ventured into saying, that her predicament was not unique and that several of her friends had had the same pressure to go out to find work. It was all a middle-class thing, she explained; parents wanting to brag about their children doing well in the big city. Naturally, as there were no jobs in Shillong, many youths also felt obliged to leave, she added. According to her, youth from better-off families had more freedom to choose for themselves. Bynta managed a U-turn by first becoming a volunteer worker with disabled children and completing a distance college degree alongside. When we met her, she was pursuing full-time studies for an MA in Social Work at TISS in Guwahati. Every weekend she travels up to Shillong to be with her grandmother, and visit her boyfriend. The name Bynta, she told us, means ‘being part of ’ and her aspiration was clearly to stay on in the hills and be part of the community. Reflecting on Bynta’s story one might say that, though painful, her ordeal was relatively mild compared to the misery some migrants have to face. Some Northeastern youth have been lured into trafficking rings and exploited for sex work, or forced to work endless hours as spa masseuses. The latter was the case for a group of young women from Manipur and Nagaland working in a spa in Goa, massaging clients during 12-hour shifts six days a week and earning 10,000 per month. The management also delayed payments and commonly deducted money from their salaries for various reasons (Wright 2016). Bynta had entered a more privileged track within the hospitality industry where salaries are substantially higher and opportunities for advancement as well as to work abroad are plenty. Many of the young migrants ultimately aim for this. Yet structurally, she was exposed to the same racial stereotyping that renders Northeastern women vulnerable especially for sexual assault. What stands out in her story, however, is how her departure from home was forced upon her by her mother. This appears as a betrayal of sorts, the mother’s lack of care for her and forcing Bynta out again despite the obvious pain and hardship she experienced. Bynta herself had no desire to leave the Khasi Hills, nor to join the hospitality sector. And now, in command of her own life, she is seeking a career as a social worker with a focus on social ills within Khasi society.



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Story 2, Paul Paul’s story39 is again very different. He left Shillong of his own accord to study in south India. His relationship with his hometown, however, is more torn or ambivalent than Bynta’s. A return to Shillong is not in his plans but he aspires to move further out in the world. Yet, as we parted late one evening, he paraphrased the well-known saying, ‘You can take a man out of Shillong, but you can’t take Shillong out of him.’ By the time he was in class six or seven, Paul wanted to go outside. As he puts it, he never really felt that he fitted in and that he had tried to mold himself after people’s expectations for long. When he eventually realized that his attempts did not work, he decided that he needed to leave Shillong. He applied to several schools in south India, and eventually got accepted at Garden City College in Bengaluru, which he took on without hesitation. Adjusting to the new situation with new food and another language was not much of a problem to him. He also stands out from other Northeastern migrants in his decision as he does not seek company with fellow Khasis or other Northeasterners who are studying or working in Bengaluru. As he puts it, he has a different attitude to life and has never been into hanging out, which would be the common ‘timepass’ ( Jeffrey 2010) for Northeastern youth. Being Khasi is important to him and he is close to his family in Shillong. Yet he seems to prefer to travel alone while venturing out in the world, seeking out the anonymity that urban life in a new place can offer. In Shillong, he explained, he feels under constant surveillance; that people want to know everything about him. ‘You can’t show your face in town without everyone knowing that you are home,’ he said. So, when he returns to Shillong, within a few days at home, he starts to feel restless and claustrophobic, wanting to leave again. While Paul appreciates the personal integrity and freedom in the metropolitan city, as he puts it, life there is highly vulnerable, especially when you work in the corporate sector like him: ‘You are all alone; no one is there for you. It is tough, very much like “survival of the fittest”.’ Paul eventually got married in Bengaluru, with a local Kannadiga woman. After 12 years in the city, he has started considering a new move and perhaps try to get a job abroad. At the same time, the present political development back home concerns him greatly. During our meeting in Bengaluru, he pointed out the ‘sheer madness’ of the Inner Line Permit movement (Karlsson 2017b), where people in various parts of Northeast India demand the introduction of a colonial regulation restricting the movement of people from other parts of India. ‘How can you create new jobs when you seek to enclose or isolate yourself; we need to get out of the clan mentality,’ he asserted. 39

 Interview in Bengaluru, 10 December 2013.

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As noted earlier, Shillong used to be a centre of learning attracting students from all over India. Now, as has been the case with Paul and also with the next story of Margareth, many Khasi families who can afford it seek to send their children to study elsewhere, particularly to south India, considered more tolerant and open. This also goes for Northeast India more generally, with several thousand youths leaving the region to pursue higher studies in the mainland.

Story 3, Margareth Our third Khasi wayfinder is Margareth, a woman in the same age bracket as the previous two. Margareth has spent most of her schooling in south India, her early years in Chennai, then in Bengaluru, and, subsequently, Hyderabad for postgraduate studies. During her childhood, her father worked for the church and their family moved around a lot. Now, after retirement, the parents have returned and settled permanently in Shillong. Her parents as well as the wider kin group are hoping that Margareth will also return home. They keep telling her that with a PhD she might qualify for a job at the North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) based in Shillong, and she can subsequently start a family. Margareth is the youngest daughter in the family. According to tradition in Khasi society, she is the custodian of the family property out in the village and has a responsibility for the continuation of their matriclan. Above all, she is well aware that she is expected to produce an offspring. Margareth is torn by these expectations and her own desire to pursue an academic career which most likely would take her further out in the world. But again, she is also engaged in and concerned with the political and cultural scene in Shillong that pulls her back, besides family and kin obligations. During one of our meetings, Margareth told Karlsson about a recurrent nightmare she used to have in which she was back in Shillong and stuck there without any means to get out again. This would scare her. Most of her Khasi friends who have been studying outside also feel a stress around return. It is a struggle with their responsibilities towards the Khasi society – giving back something – and their own personal aspirations which commonly revolve around the desire to lead a more independent life elsewhere. If return used to terrify Margareth, she has begun to see the advantages of moving back to live in Shillong or elsewhere in the Khasi hills. One such advantage is to escape the annoying sexual harassment she has been enduring for years now, especially during her time in Hyderabad. She has also had the most unpleasant experience of being intimidated at the university by a PhD supervisor. She is now trying to complete the thesis from distance, living with her brother in Bengaluru. Margareth, like many others from Northeast India, finds Bengaluru comparatively easier to live in, saying it is more cosmopolitan and has less moral



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policing. She feels free to dress however she likes in Bengaluru, something she could not do in Hyderabad. Bynta, Paul, and Margareth, all have very different experiences of living away from their hometown. Migration commonly assumes a rupture and a dramatic, often illicit, crossing of national borders. Such dramas of displacement – border crossings, waiting for asylum and working permits, and other bureaucratic difficulties in the new country – are then made the very essence of migrant life. As argued in the Introduction, the type of mobility we are concerned with here follows another script and evades both the analytical register of transnational migration and that of the circular, internal migration of agricultural communities travelling to work in urban areas during lay seasons. Many of the young migrants we met have moved from a village to a city, but, as we discuss in this chapter, most of those who leave the Northeast for higher studies come from an urban background. After studying away for several years, returning home is usually difficult not only because there are few available jobs matching their competence but also due to newer aspirations and orientations. Universities and colleges are important sites for community building away from home. In 2014, the University of Hyderabad, for example, had a student body of about 240 Northeastern students, Nagas being the largest community of 170 students, followed by Mizos with 50 and 10 Khasis. Northeastern students sometimes act on a joint platform and develop an inclusive sense of regional belonging pursuing common interests, but more commonly organize along community lines with their own student bodies and Christian fellowships who carry out independent events and activities. Such new ethnic, diasporic, organizations are extremely important in the lives of the young migrants. In case of death, for example, the student union often collects money and helps the families with the transport of the body back to their homes in the Northeast. While providing both practical and emotional support, these organizations also control community members. If someone is found to be involved in socially disapproving behaviour they can be warned and even disciplined and returned home. Women, as we will see, also feel that student bodies function as moral police, discouraging them from socializing with and, more so, dating someone from another community. If this happens, parents back home might be informed about ‘inappropriate’ relations. The following three stories will take us further into the possibilities and dilemmas arising out of the education journey in the south. We begin with Jasmine from Nagaland who has been out for 15 years, and then Lallian and Pavei, both from Manipur, who have been out for seven and eight years, respectively. Critical here is the earlier mentioned tension between individual aspirations to pursue a professional career, on the one hand, and family and community expectations, ‘giving something back’, on the other. For those who go for higher studies, a steady

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government job used to be the assumed end station. This is changing now, not least as the prospect for landing a government job is rather slim in Northeast India regardless of one’s educational qualifications, and with the expanding possibilities of getting better paid private sector jobs if one stay on in the larger, metropolitan cities.

Desires and Expectations Story 4, Jasmine Jasmine’s journey out of her hometown – a small town close to the border of Burma – has been long and eventually successful. She is the first in her community, one of the smaller Naga tribes, to be awarded a PhD. After the initial schooling in Nagaland, she went to Guwahati for higher secondary education and further to Shillong for her BA, and later to south India for her MA and PhD studies at the University of Hyderabad. In between, she worked as a journalist in Guwahati and Hyderabad. She has recently joined Sikkim University as a lecturer and central for her, as with Margareth, is the aspiration to pursue a further career in academia. Due to this, she sees little prospect in returning to her small hometown or even to the state of Nagaland. Such a return would imply giving up further specialization in her field. However, her relatives and others from the community put pressure on her to return and ‘serve her people’, as they have been lacking in educational possibilities compared to the larger and more ‘advanced’ tribes like Ao and Angami. Even if lack of jobs makes a return difficult, this is obviously not the sole reason. Being away for such a long stretch and during the most formative years in her youth has created a distance with her relatives and friends who stayed back, she hesitantly recalls. The annual returns for Christmas holidays and other important occasions are becoming increasingly challenging. She explained: When I go home now I find it difficult to relate to my relatives. I feel I have been removed from their codes and conventions. I can’t really connect to what they are talking about, even if it is just about the simplest everyday things. I have to put in some efforts in being home. Sometimes I prefer not going home at all. Yet coming from a place like Nagaland, that sense of ‘home’ [gesturing quotation marks with her hands] as in native place, one’s village or clan identity, is still quite strong.

Jasmine’s parents are both retired government employees, and her two elder sisters as well as several cousins had gone outside to study before her. Sending children out for higher education is rather common within their community, which again is the case with Nagas more generally. In Hyderabad, Jasmine found a large Naga student community, making her feel as if she never left Nagaland. Most of



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her social life in the University circled around activities organized by the church or various other Naga student bodies. They frequently called meetings around political issues or events back home, and there were regular festivals with food and music from home. While this was most comforting, it was also felt as confining. For example, to socialize outside the community, or all the more so because to date a non-Naga was not considered appropriate for female students. Jasmine gave the example of one of her seniors who eventually married a man from Hyderabad, and even if she had been an active and highly respected member of the church, some students questioned why the Naga pastor had gone to bless the couple. Jasmine is about to be married herself. The husband-to-be is a Naga from the neighbouring state of Manipur whom she met at the University. Neither of them, as she puts it, is into the ‘tribe thing’ and they are open to teach wherever they are offered a job.

Story 5, Lallian Lallian also went to study at the University of Hyderabad. He belongs to one of the indigenous communities of Manipur, but instead of seeking the company of fellow students from home he tried to venture out and make friends with students from other parts of India. As part of this effort, he learned to speak both Telugu, the local language, and Hindi. He did this following the advice of his father who as a young person had studied in Shillong and had ended up spending too much time socializing with people from home, who had a weakness for drinking. Thus, the father insisted that Lallian should not repeat his mistake and instead be open to all people. While Lallian has tried to live by this, he said it has not been an easy road. People made fun of him, calling him ‘Chapatti’, for his allegedly round face, and other demeaning names, asking whether he was from Japan. But it eventually paid off and today he has a wide circle of friends from all over India. After four years in Hyderabad, he was unsure what to do when his father fell ill and the family was in a difficult situation. He decided to take a break to earn some money. Through the network of his cousins who worked in the hospitality industry, he got a job at a prominent five-star hotel in Mumbai. Lallian was hoping to get into the human relations department, but the manager hiring him said that he had to begin in the restaurant to learn the trade from bottom up. Things worked out very well for him and after only a month he was promoted to the butler service taking care of VIP guests, for example, serving celebrities like the then prime minister Manmohan Singh and several famous Indian cinema stars. Once he even had a chance to interact with hollywood actor John Travolta. As Lallian puts it, this was a kind of place any Indian would love to be. Outside of work, he was mainly socializing with other Northeasterners who were working in hotels. After the closing time at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m., they would go

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out together for drinks or to visit someone’s home. He was surprised and delighted to explore the different cuisines of Northeastern people; food he never tried before like pork cooked with fermented soya bean, fermented beef fat, and different types of bamboo shoot dishes. He really enjoyed life; with no pressures from his studies, he had his own money and was free to do whatever he liked. Amidst these, his mind was still on getting back to his studies. After a year in Mumbai, he moved to Delhi to take up studies again, beginning with coaching classes to prepare for the central government exams required for government jobs. His parents pushed him in that direction. A government job was not really his thing, he told us; he had always fancied the corporate sector where the pay was substantially higher. In Mumbai, the corporate people also impressed him, and he wanted their type of life. However, for that life Lallian needed to get into any of the premier Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) or equivalent, and for that he required yet more coaching classes. If he were to be successful and get admission, the annual fee itself was beyond what his family could afford. In addition, he found Delhi a very unfriendly city to live in, constantly being harassed and discriminated against. He felt that he was treated as a ‘second-class citizen’. Instead, he opted for a less costly education avenue that had now brought him to Guwahati where we met. Lallian speaks impeccable English, a result of his schooling in a Catholic school where the strict priests punished them for speaking their own language. The schooling apparently also imprinted a particular mode of being that resonated with the sensibilities of the hospitality sector. The Mumbai hotel did not agree with his resignation at first, insisting that he pursue the assistant manager training that he had been selected for. But again, he chose not to pursue such a career further and is now in Guwahati studying for a master’s degree at TISS. As he puts it, he would always prefer to get a stable job at home, but if he has to choose somewhere else to live it would clearly be Mumbai. We will come back to Lallian, but let us first meet a student friend of his, Pavei, who after eight years in Chennai, in the southernmost Indian state of Tamil Nadu, has also taken admission at TISS. Pavei is from Manipur and belongs to the Poumai Naga community.

Story 6, Pavei In 2007, Pavei went for his higher studies to Chennai, staying there for eight years completing both BA and MA degrees. It was his elder brother who had been in Chennai since 2000, then working with Barclays Bank, who covered all the expenses during this period. Pavei’s brother recently returned to Manipur after securing a government job and is just about to get married. After Pavei, his sister and a younger brother have moved to Chennai to work in the service sector. As Pavei



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recalls, during his studies there were as many as 120 people belonging to the Poumai community in Chennai. He lived in a part of the city where most of the Northeasterners lived and kept running into people he knew all the time. The Poumai community there frequently came together for various cultural or political programmes, or just to cook and eat together. Despite this, he found it hard to adjust to life in Tamil Nadu. He was the only Northeasterner in his college, and he said he never really figured out whether people there liked him or not. Tamilians, as he puts it, are very frank and his student friends used to call him by different slang words. This made him confused and insecure. His body never managed to adjust to the southern way of having lunch in the afternoon. At home, they had food in the morning before going to school and this body rhythm has somehow stayed with him. Travelling to his home in Manipur took about five days: three days and nights on the train, and then buses and taxis. Train tickets were hard to come by, and one had to make reservations at least three months in advance, he explained. Even if the ticket itself was affordable, food and other expenses made the journey very costly. He tried to make it home every other year, but once he was not home for three years. When my friends ask me if I didn’t miss my parents and home, I would say sure I do miss them. But we don’t have that close relationship, as they have in Tamil Nadu and other parts of India, sharing everything and hugging and kissing parents as soon as they meet. We don’t practise that. We do love and miss our parents, but as parents!

Pavei said that his parents do not really push him to move back home, but whenever he or his siblings visit they take them out to show the land that belongs to the family, saying, ‘We are going to die soon, who is going to take care of all this?’ Hence, they insist that their children learn where the borders are so that nobody can take the land from them, and as Pavei puts it, the parents want them to keep the land, which has passed down from generation to generation. When he visited his parents at home he would bring the popular banana chips and sometimes steel plates and cups. When returning to south India, his bags would be filled with food items. Through the cooking and eating of often ‘smelly things’ like fermented fish or soya beans, Pavei and his siblings and friends created a place in the city (see Chapter 5). Pavei told us that some of his Tamil neighbours who used to complain about the smell now have started enjoying eating their indigenous foods. For Pavei, the future is open, and if eventually he gets a job in Manipur he would go back but, according to him, this is unlikely considering the corrupt Manipuri state. Otherwise, he has his networks in Chennai and as he speaks Tamil things

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could work out for him there as well. Marriage is a factor here. He mentioned one of his cousins who recently got married and had their first child. For them the hard question now is whether they should remain in Manipur or return to their earlier jobs in the south, but then have to face the many difficulties of raising a family in the city. In Chennai, several Northeastern communities have organizations and networks that help out if anyone falls sick or dies. Parents rarely come down in such instances as travel is expensive and as they do not know their way around in a big city. Sending a body back to Manipur, Pavei told, costs somewhere around 1  50,000, which is a substantial amount of money considering the general economic situation in Northeast India. With the inflow of ever larger numbers of migrants from Northeast India, such diaspora networks play an increasingly important role. In 2014, the Northeast India Welfare Association Chennai (NEIWAC) was established. As stated on its Facebook page, the organization is to look after the interests of ‘the community’ of about 10,000 Northeasterners living in Chennai and its suburbs. NEIWAC has helped out in cases where people ended up in trafficking or had trouble with the police, landlords, or employers. The association also organized registration camps for Aadhaar numbers (individual identification numbers), advertised job openings, and negotiated for transport of coffins in cases of deaths.40 NEIWAC, as the name indicates, organizes people across ethnic divides, which itself is worth marking. The organization seeks alliances with the political leadership and critical government bodies in Chennai, which points to a long-term strategy of establishing a legitimate presence in the city. Despite staying outside their indigenous homelands for most of their youth, Jasmine, Lallian, and Pavei are confident members of their respective indigenous communities. Even if return is not on the immediate horizon, they seem to have no doubt that they would be welcomed and have a place in the community were they to eventually decide to go back. In this respect, one can speak of a kind of existential or ontological security, a sense of being grounded and part of something larger than themselves. Being a student in Hyderabad or Chennai, as we have seen, offered plenty of space for interactions with their own community as well as the larger multi-ethnic network of Northeasterners. In the last two stories, we will meet Regia and Lian, who have had a rather different journey in life and for whom being a student in the city offers a possibility to connect with their tribe. But as we will see, this is not always an easy path to take. Regia and Lian are both in their early twenties and both have a history of mobility from an early age.

 For the Facebook page of NEIWAC, see https://www.facebook.com/pg/NEI​WAC/posts/ ?ref=page_internal (accessed on 5 September 2017).

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Routes of Indigeneity Story 7, Regia Regia was born in Punjab. Her father is in the Indian army and was stationed, at the time, close to the Jammu–Kashmir border. For as long as she can remember, the family has been moving from place to place. When she was in class four, they moved to Guwahati, which allowed the family to visit their home village more regularly. Both her parents belong to the Kom tribe, an indigenous community in the state of Manipur. Kom has its own language, a language Regia is not fully fluent in. She has grown up with Hindi spoken around her, and this also became the language her parents use at home. As a child, she believed that they were the only Kom family in India. It was only when they started travelling back to their village more often that she realized that there was a larger community of Kom people they were part of. Yet it was first as a student in Delhi that she started to socialize on an everyday basis with other Kom people as well as other Northeasterners. Regia told us: In Delhi, we have different student unions, one of each of the different tribes. I think there are some 200–300 Kom students there, and also others that are working in Delhi. When they found out that I was admitted to University of Delhi, Kom students contacted me and told that I should let them know if I needed any help or assistance. I stayed three years in Delhi. To be honest, I learned more about Northeast and our language there than anywhere else. You must be knowing that Northeast has a different taste; the food is very different. It is less oil and more king chili. I was not used to this type of food, as I was eating all kinds of north Indian and south Indian dishes. I was not at all comfortable with Northeastern food, say for example, to eat pork. I didn’t eat it before, but since I came to Delhi, staying with people from Northeast, I have become used to it. I have also learned the Meiteilon language, the main language of Manipur, the Meiti dialect, which is the common one in the state. I also had a lot of Kuki friends and other tribal friends. I learned some Kuki, not fluently but enough to understand when people speak.

For Regia, studying in Delhi became a critical event that set her on a new journey to connect to her indigenous roots. ‘I get a lot of love from my own people,’ she explained. She further told that she enjoys learning about her people, the Kom tribe, as well as about other Northeastern tribes. As she puts it, ‘We are different, that is what a tribe is.’ Regia added that she has become a ‘sucker for the traditional’, for example, dressing up in traditional clothing for church every Sunday. Regia wants to do something for the people in her village, though settling there does not

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really appear as an option. She is now studying in Guwahati, which she finds the ideal place for her to be.

Story 8, Lian Lian has also been living most of his life outside the place he considers home. He was born in a small town in Manipur and lived there until the age of six when his parents, who were missionaries, were assigned to work in Jharkhand. During their work, they would have to travel extensively, covering a large missionary field. Hence, they decided to send Lian to a boarding school in Tamil Nadu, in south India. He remained in the same school for his entire schooling, from class 1 to class 12. During this time, he went ‘home’ only every third or fourth year and as a result he never managed to learn ‘his own language’, the language of his community. He speaks only Tamil and English. Due to this, he finds it difficult to communicate with his grandparents and cousins. As he summed it up, ‘I have lost touch with my tribe, my culture,’ and further, ‘When I am with my own people I don’t get the sense of belonging.’ After Tamil Nadu, Lian went to Delhi for his undergraduate studies. Going to Delhi was a traumatic experience for him as for the first time he had to face real racial discrimination. He was called ‘Chinky’ and people passed negative comments about his looks or dress in the metro or in the street. In Delhi, he was further challenged about who he was and where he belonged. As Lian narrated: Stepping out of Tamil Nadu, I felt I had a loss of identity. In Manipur, there are so many tribes and each tribe have their own clans. I was at loss. Which tribe am I? Because on paper I am one tribe, but when I go back home I am another. One is recognized (as ST), the other not. But in fact, one could say that we all belong to the same, larger tribe. Wherever I go, people always ask, ‘Why don’t you know the language?’ And when I tell that I have been living outside since I was six years old, they still insist, ‘Why don’t you learn?’

He could not adjust to the situation in Delhi and also found the city too expensive to live in. In addition, not being firmly embedded in his tribe increased his sense of loneliness and feeling of being lost in the world. Due to this, he gave up his studies and moved to Shillong, where his parents now live, to get enrolled in a college to study English. With encouragement from his parents, during the last few years, Lian has started to learn their language and the culture of his community. It is difficult, he said, not least because he lacks friends from the community to hang out with. While asked about his parents’ decision to send him off to Tamil Nadu, he said it was for the best. Had he stayed in Manipur, his education would have been severely hampered due to the armed conflict situations



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in the state. Schools sometimes are closed for months at a stretch, and exams are interrupted or delayed. Security further remains a constant worry while going back and forth to school. Lian stated that he has been spared such troubles and has instead been lucky in getting proper education. He is now in Guwahati studying social work, hoping to join his father to run an NGO that supports primary education in tea garden areas later. While Delhi became Regia’s point of entry into her community and the larger indigenous Northeastern community, this experience still awaits Lian. Regia seems happy with her new life, but lack of language skills and general cultural belonging haunts Lian. It is also something that he is constantly reminded about, with people questioning him about not speaking or wanting to learn his own ‘mother tongue’. As he said, he does indeed wants to learn and reconnect, but seems unable to make it happen on his own.

Conclusion The different stories presented in this chapter engage the aspirations, hopes, dreams, sorrows, and hardships of the mobile youth leaving Northeast India for the Indian mainland to study and work. While these stories have much in common with young people anywhere setting out to explore the world, there are certain features that stand out as more specific and characteristic of Northeastern wayfinders. Prominent in the stories is the experience of being different; that even if they have moved within India, they are perceived and treated as foreigners and strangers. There are horrible instances of murder, gang rape, aggravated assault, and other forms of unprovoked violence against Northeasterners. These naturally are a cause for alarm, but what comes out more clearly in these stories is the small acts of racism that they endure on a daily basis. These include people calling them names or making demeaning, racist comments on the streets, buses, or markets. This also happens in more intimate environments, with fellow students or teachers commenting or making jokes about them, and their food habits and culture. Women also point to constant unwanted sexual attention, eve-teasing, or flirting. A young woman who studied in Delhi told us that as soon as she stepped out of her room, shopkeepers, rickshaw pullers, and ordinary passers-by would throw unpleasant comments at her. She would put on her headphones with loud music and march out, looking straight ahead and trying to ignore them. Nevertheless, it took a toll on her and some days she just could not muster the energy to leave the room. As it never stopped, she decided to quit her studies and return home. Another significant theme that was not directly emphasized but runs through the stories is the loneliness; the feeling of being thrown out in a hostile environment where they ultimately are on their own. This might seem a universal aspect of life

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as a student; being on your own and struggling with difficult studies and exams. However, the subtext of our young migrants speaks of a more profound sense of being alone in the world. Edward Said (1999) in his memoir Out of Place describes a life marked by his many departures, above all leaving his home in Cairo to study in the USA. As he puts it, ‘The great fear is that departure is the state of being abandoned, even if it is you who leave’ (1999: 440). A similar experience seems to be at play with our young migrants struggling with a sense of being abandoned. In view of this, ethnic student bodies and churches play an understandably critical role as an extension of the community, taking over functions of the family and kin. Even in cases of death, the community network collects money and arranges transport of the body home. Some of the youths have tried to keep their distance from other students of their own community, but not being able to draw on the resources and solidarity of these indigenous organizations makes student life very difficult, as was the case with Lian (story 8). Despite harassment, racist discrimination, and feelings of abandonment, the stories also convey an expansion of the realm of the possible: the opening of new opportunities and the ability to make choices about staying, going back, moving elsewhere, pursuing further studies, or opting for a particular job or career. The older idea among Northeastern youth that the ultimate aim of higher studies is to acquire a steady government job no longer holds sway. Such jobs are rare to come by, and for many, they are not even an attractive proposition anymore. The stories also reveal that return is not really attainable. The first story sticks out, with Bynta doing everything to be able to create a life in her hometown and choosing a career as a social worker that is in demand there. In her case, the departure was enforced on her and against her wish to go to college in Shillong. For the others, we see a clear insistence on mobility as an intrinsic value. Most state that they are open to go wherever there is a better scope for work or further studies. No one speaks about Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai, or Hyderabad as a final destination, as the place where they see themselves settling permanently or as being their home. They already have such a place and that is the ancestral land of their respective community; it continues to remain where life seems to be existentially grounded. But as McDuie-Ra (2012: 145–173) points out for Delhi that there are various place-making projects through which Northeasterners make themselves at home in the city. Lallian (story 5) says that if he would not be able to return to Manipur, Mumbai would be his preferred choice. Similarly, Pavei (story 6) mentions that return to Chennai remains a possibility as he speaks Tamil, the local language, and has a large network there.

4 Interlude

Photoethnography It is possible, for example, however roughly, to describe the way somebody walks, but it is impossible to say anything about that fraction of a second when a person starts to walk. Photography with its various aids (lenses, enlargements) can reveal this moment. – Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography, 1972

At what moment do you become a migrant? When does a journey away from home begin? Some of our interlocutors told us that they wanted to go out to study or work from an early age, whereas for others it seemed to have happened out of a whim, a decision in the spur of a moment. Many just dreamt about setting out on such a journey. But more or less all those we talked to knew someone – a friend, a relative, or a neighbour – who had gone out and now lived in the big cities of the Indian mainland. In addition, as numbers of migrants increase, more of those who stay home are also drawn in to and participate in the new migratory culture where their lifeworld encompasses sensory experiences from work in five-star hotels, beauty parlours, or spas in distant megacities like Mumbai and Thiruvananthapuram. Early on in the project we felt that we wanted to bring some kind of visual element into the research. Just think of the landscape, the contrast between the green, rolling hills dotted with villages and jhum fields that the migrants have left behind in the Northeast, and the metropolitan cityscape with fashionable designer interiors in hotels and spas where they now work in the south. The service industry is also about looks: Having the right appearance, being the face of the company, as discussed in Chapter 2. All this, it seemed, called for images. Photography can also, as Walter Benjamin suggests, capture a transitory moment: a particular expression, a passing sentiment, or a feeling (1972). More generally,

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we both appreciate photography and were inspired by anthropologists who incorporate images, for example, the work by Joao Biehl who collaborated with photographer Torben Eskerod (2005, 2007) and Fillip de Boek who worked with Marie-Francoise Plissart (2004), and that of anthropologists who themselves are skilful photographers, like Rebecca Empson (2011) and Jeffrey Schonberg (Bourgois and Schonberg 2009).41 As put by the latter, ‘[P]hotography’s strength comes from the visceral, emotional responses it evokes’ (Bourgois and Schonberg 2009: 14). As it turned out, we managed to get the Polish–Swedish photographer Andrzej Markiewicz interested in the project and he accompanied us several times in the field. Andrzej works like an ethnographer. For several years he has been photographing people in Fatbursparken, a small park in the southern part of central Stockholm. Getting to know the people who frequent the park and learning about their lives are as important to him as taking their photographs. The everydayness, the mundane and uneventful life, yet full of special moments, is his topic: people getting along in the city, living side by side, and sharing a public space across cultural, gender, class, and age differences or, as he puts it, ‘How they practice the art of living together.’42 Strong colours and focus on the eyes of those whom he photographs are his signature. The realist depiction, the almost too real, creates a sensation of something else going on, a presence of more elusive dimensions of human existence. It is exactly this quality and skill that he has brought along to the project and to what eventually became the exhibition Wayfinding: A Photoethnography of Indigenous Migration, which comprises about 100 photographs from various field locations and, during a second phase, filmed interviews with 20 migrants. Bengaluru is the main node for Northeastern youths in south India. We followed Williem and his friends who are working in a unisex hair salon and spa in a fashionable suburb. They are all from various parts of Northeast India, sharing a flat in Ejipura, a part of Bengaluru where many Northeasterners live.

 Here we would like to mention our friend and colleague Staffan Löfving’s project The Imperfect Shot, where he brings photographs that he took during the war in Sarajevo, in 1994, back and open for memory work, see images available at https://www.klix.ba/magazin/kultura/​ u-saraje​ v skoj-galeriji-zvono-otvorena-izlozba-ratnih-fotografija-staffana-lfvinga/ 160907118#10 (accessed on 24 January 2019 ) 42  Staffan Löfving, ed., ‘Park Life’, in Fatbur: Photography and Ethnography, 2012, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University (an exhibition booklet). 41

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The Wayfinding photographs were displayed at four locations during November and December 2016: in Gangtok in Sikkim, during the International Conference on Northeast India; in Guwahati in Assam, where we organized a migration workshop at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences; in Dimapur, Nagaland, where we together with TPC and the Morung Express invited migrants to share their experiences in one of the major hotels; and, finally, in Kathmandu, Nepal, at the International Conference on Asian Borderlands Studies.To travel with the exhibition was a great experience, but the tour was equally full of logistical problems and challenges. In December 2016, Prime Minister Modi’s demonetization was in full swing and drawing enough cash to organize the respective events and travels became a complete nightmare. The exhibition venues were all very different and hanging the photographs (and taking them down) – 100 large-sized, delicate, unframed cotton paper photographs, not to mention packing and travelling with them – was nerve-wracking and physically exhausting. The materiality of the exercise, from the cameras, flashes, and memory cards, to choosing images and paper, having them developed, packing, unpacking, hanging, and taking them down, required stamina, the brunt of which ended up on Andrzej. At the first show in Gangtok, we had just managed to complete the hanging before the opening of the conference, and as the first group of conference delegates entered the exhibition hall, the initial reaction – the comment that spread from mouth to mouth – was, ‘but where are the captions?’ The emperor was naked, they seemed to suggest, and

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they all turned to us, asking for an explanation as to the absence of texts to accompany the photographs and hence suggesting that without captions, the photographs had no value.

Captions had been one of the things we had struggled back and forth with; we did not really know how to deal with them.43 We wanted the photographs to tell a partly independent story or be at least ones that would not reduce the images to mere illustrations. The initial idea was to include minimalist captions, mentioning only names of persons and places and when the shots were taken. But this turned out to be more difficult than expected. Some people did not want their names displayed, and in other cases, we could not retrieve or remember the names of the persons in a particular photograph. There were also instances when the photographs had been taken on the go, ‘road shots’, or were of larger gatherings, where we did not know all the people. What we eventually opted for was to build the exhibition around four named key persons – Williem, Rozelle (Ms Meru), Phoban, and Apan – with a shorter caption story accompanying each of them. However, in the haste and 43

  Having or not having captions is a larger discussion within photography, with some photographers arguing against it and for allowing the viewers to make their own interpretations. Others again speak in favour of captions. Here it is interesting to note that Benjamin was in favour of captions, which as he argued, would bring out the revolutionary potential of the image (see Esther Leslie’s ‘Preface’ to a new translation of Benjamin’s essay (2015).

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exhaustion at the opening of the Gangtok exhibition we had forgotten to print and hang these caption texts. As it was, the only textual information about the images was the main exhibition text that was hanging at the entrance of the exhibition hall. This was both embarrassing and depressing (considering all the work that had gone into it). Later, thinking back, it struck us as rather odd that a group of scholars who are specialized in this region were unable to engage with photographs without textual guidance. These are after all images of places and everyday situations many of them would be familiar with. Yet, obviously, this was not something that could generate enough interest standing alone. But if most of our academic colleagues only hastily glanced at one or two photographs, we noted during the exhibition how students and the non-academic staff (guards, cleaners, and chai-wallahs) kept coming back to look at the photographs, asking us about them and bringing friends along to point out details, discussing, laughing, and reflecting. In Guwahati, the TISS was a generous host. After the Sikkim events, we were better prepared with the texts and the captions, and put up signposts in several locations, yet something else happened. TISS faculty members along with ActionAid (the Northeast regional office) participated in a panel discussion on migration from Northeast India and generated a vibrant discussion about livelihood, precarity, and the gendered nature of these migrations. However, it was the students who lingered in the exhibition halls much after the panel discussions were over. They came forward and engaged with the images. TISS students across Northeast India including Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh came up to us and shared stories about their families and friends who had left home and were working in cities and towns across India. They all knew someone who was a migrant from their respective states. We also met TISS students like Lallian (Chapter 3) who had worked in the hospitality industry before deciding to get a university degree. We also came across students who opted outmigration from Northeast India as their topic for research. The exhibition site in Guwahati helped us to learn about the stories of indigenous migration from the perspective of a critical and engaged TISS student body. What we found fascinating was how this topic was finding its way into the classroom via texts, statistics, and case studies in programmes like the Masters in Labour Studies and Social Protection and the Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies at TISS Guwahati. Once we arrived in Dimapur, we were welcomed by our co-hosts, the Morung Express (a local daily in Nagaland) and TPC (Chapter 2). Mainly young people who themselves aspired to go out and work seemed especially attracted to the photographs. Many kept coming back with friends, looking at particular images. Several of them told about plans they had: to start their own business or to get into a particular profession or work. They were clearly excited about the prospect of trying out a different life in the big city. Mumbai was the favourite destination among the prospective migrants. And the very fact that the exhibition had come to Dimapur

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seemed to be read as a confirmation that such new beginnings were possible. A young man in his late teens told us that he never expected an ‘art exhibition’ to take place in Dimapur, something he associated with metropolitan life. Unlike the other exhibition sites which were mainly in academic settings (Gangtok, Kathmandu, Guwahati, and a later one in Stockholm), the Dimapur exhibition had three public engagement sessions: A session each with policy makers and community members, and a research component where we shared the objective of the project. The People Channel students came and helped us with exhibition in Dimapur. They helped us to put up the pictures and the captions including the texts a day before the event was officially inaugurated. However, the spontaneous reaction of the TPC volunteers after seeing the images made the Dimapur event special. The volunteers studied the pictures closely and immediately felt a connection to the personalities that Andrzej Markiewicz had captured for the project. What caught us off guard was the volunteers deciding to hang around the venue looking at the pictures long after we had finished putting up them up. We had to gently remind them to go home and come back the next morning to take part in the exhibition. College students, parents of migrants and prospective migrants, community leaders, cultural associations, and politicians from Dimapur attended the event. It was vibrant, lively, and filled with warmth and generosity. People often walked up and talked to us about their experiences as migrants or their aspiration to go out of Northeast India and work. Towards the afternoon, TPC volunteers stayed on, absorbing the photographs and talking among themselves. They appeared excited as they came and enquired about the lives of the people in the pictures. As anthropologists, we reflected on these interactions and how the composition of the audience and their reaction spoke volumes about research and engagement, and in all these conversations, we felt that the academia had much to learn about communicating and bringing back research to the host communities and the public sphere. Perhaps, these kinds of exercises will enable us to connect our research to larger social and political transformation in society, and make us reflect about creating a culture of accountability in the social sciences. At the Kathmandu conference, we had a similar experience to that of Gangtok. Despite positive feedback it seemed that most of our academic colleagues did not attribute much value to the images. This again stood in stark contrast to the enthusiasm of the younger and general audience that visited the shows in Guwahati and Dimapur. At both these events, several people with the exception of researchers came forward to tell their own story of migration. There are many ways of making sense of this, but we believe it speaks about a general visual illiteracy within academia, an institution still so heavily privileging textual representations or words. At the Kathmandu conference, it was the non-academic crowd like the Nepali servers, the cab drivers, and the technical support team from the hotel where the event was being

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held who closely engaged with the pictures. The photographs invited a conversation about their own and others’ aspirations and mobile lives. For instance, the staff of the hotel where the conference was being held told stories about hotels and restaurants in India that they or some of their friends had worked in. They also recognized the pictures from migrants’ home villages in the Northeast and the stark contrasts between concrete houses and paved roads in the city and bamboo and wooden houses and mud paths in the village. It seemed they relived the moment where these two worlds fused in the life course of the young migrants in the photographs serving drinks at Hard Rock Café or styling customers in trendy hair salons. After the India–Nepal tour, Wayfinding has also been exhibited at the European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference in Stockholm in August 2018. The theme of the conference was Staying, Moving, Settling, which perfectly overlapped with that of the exhibition. The exhibition also seemed to be highly appreciated by several of the conference delegates, and it generated a debate about how best one can communicate migrant experiences through images.The experienced visual anthropologist Melinda Hinkson,44 for example, suggested that when one is dealing with complex topics like indigenous mobility, images usually benefit from a more thoughtful curating that also involves texts and other representations. This again is something we eventually have come to realize ourselves. Photography has from the very foundation accompanied ethnographic field research. Malinowski and many of his peers were, for example, keen photographers (Edwards 2015). With the reflexive turn in anthropology and postcolonial theory pointing to unequal power relations in the field and the othering that anthropological representations generated, photography lost a bit of its appeal too, with some scholars going so far as to dismiss it ‘as inherently racializing or objectifying’ (Poole 2005: 159). The visual archive of Northeast India, for example, the voluminous photo collection by Christoph Fürer-Haimendorf (von Stockhausen 2013) can certainly be attributed to this, with photographs often displaying naked or seminaked people to stress their primitiveness and closeness to nature (van Schendel 2002).45 Even if anthropologists have continued taking photographs and thinking about people’s own production of photographs, in-depth engagement with photography and ethnographic film gravitated in the 1980s and 1990s from the core of the discipline to the sub-field of visual anthropology (Pinney 2011). In the last two decades, however, one can detect a revolution of anthropological engagement with images and digital technologies more generally. Young men and women mainly from rural Nagaland come in for short-term training courses at TPC in Dimapur to learn basic soft skills: to present themselves,  Melinda Hinkson’s work concerns Aboriginals in Australia (2001, 2014).  For the indigenous or Aboriginal peoples of Australia, see the powerful work by Jane Lydon (2006, 2012).

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stand, sit, communicate, dress, and apply make-up, all essential requirements for a job in the service sector. Many of them find placements in hotels, spas, restaurants, airlines, or security companies. Rozelle is the owner of and lead instructor at the institute, drawing on experiences she has acquired through a varied professional career in Mumbai and other metropolitan cities.

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Phoban and his friends working in a café washing dishes and making juice for tourists. They work in Varkala, a tourist destination along the coast of the Arabian Sea, some 30 kilometres from Thiruvananthapuram. His wife, daughter, and parents are living in Arunachal Pradesh.

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Apan is from Mon town in Nagaland. He went to study theology in Kerala and later graphic design after finishing his degree. He financed his studies by working at a restaurant in Thiruvananthapuram. The images below were taken during our visit to his ancestral village, beautiful green-blue hills rolling along the Burma border.

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One of the themes that Andrzej photographed more extensively was tracks or footpaths zigzagging down the hillsides in Northeast India. Indeed, such pathways were the beginning or the first part of many of the young migrants’ journeys. These included following the trail, walking down the road, getting on a bus, entering a train, and, for some, boarding a plane. Out in the world.

5 Dreams and Desserts Are you sleeping well? Are you eating well? I ask my son. I worry if he is doing okay in Mumbai. – Narola, mother of a migrant during an interview in Dimapur, 2007

This chapter describes how dreams and food capture the experiences of oscillating between the places migrants call home and away. We specifically focus on conversations about dreams and food to connect with the layered articulations of sensory experiences of mobility and consumption. Food, as Kikon notes in her work on consumption of fermented food in India, are deeply intertwined with experiences of citizenship. In our work on migration, we noticed how accounts of dreams and food were, ‘… connected with people’s lives and small details or passing comments (were) necessarily not just ignored’ (Kikon 2015: 330). We present accounts of dreams and food to highlight how leaving the land, a theme we highlight in this book, captures the experience of indigenous youth who are moving away from ancestral territories. By focusing on dreams (as nightmares to describe the anxieties and alienation of families and homes) and food (as items that produce new values and knowledge about community), we describe how indigenous migrants negotiate their way in the hospitality industry as servers fraught with standards and definition about world-class service, taste, and luxury. The reason we juxtapose dreams and food is to elaborate the different levels of signification about migration among indigenous communities in Northeast India. The effect of migration is deep and emotional. It is a movement that involves displacement and circulation, and embodies the essence of what Ghassan Hage refers to as the element of haunting that migration encounters. Haunted by the places and the homes, Hage notes that these are not merely nostalgia but the deep ways migrants experience another place (and life) simultaneously in their new destinations.46  We take this from a lecture by Ghassan Hage at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, 19 April 2013.

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As indigenous migrants move away from their families and homelands, there is a sense of sadness among the parents and loved ones who stay behind. They recount how their worries come to haunt their dreams as well. Accounts of mobility and food have been captured well stretching across the Indian Ocean (Ho 2006), colonialism (Mintz 1985), migrant workers (Holmes 2013), immigrants’ experiences with taste (Ray 2015), and ethics (Desoucey 2016). We connect the themes of dreams and food; although food as a single topic could have been more attractive given that the Northeast food is a ‘happening’ thing among cosmopolitan foodies in India, we take on dreams as well because our aim is to offer new ways of understanding and conceptualizing indigenous migration. By narrating dreams and nightmares, new meanings and values are produced. As anxious dreams and uncertain futures linger, the taste of foreign food and ingredients carried from home creates new affections and connections with the land and villages that indigenous migrants have left behind. This helps us to capture what Purnima Mankekar calls ‘… the circulation of intensities across spatially and temporally located subjects’ (Mankekar 2015: 15). In the process of moving and becoming migrants, dreams and food both play a significant role in helping indigenous migrants negotiate their place in contemporary India as citizens. The first section describes how the separation and anxieties affect families that stay behind. Between the pressure on indigenous migrants to return and take up responsibilities back home as elders eventually, and the aspirations to look for opportunities and go away from home, indigenous mobility presents powerful accounts of longing and anxieties that surface as dreams and nightmares. The second section focuses on indigenous youth who work as waiters in restaurants and highlights how their experiences reflect a culture of consumption and the production of indigenous taste in neoliberal India. Here, we highlight servers in high-end fine dining places who describe the social values of their customers and provide intimate details about what constitutes racism and discrimination in the hospitality industry. We also present how food from their home states in Northeast India creates new connections and experiences about citizenship and identity in global India. We specifically show how taste and service are produced in the high-end dining restaurants through the accounts of indigenous migrants from Northeast India and connect this with experiences of cooking and savouring the traditional food they carry from their respective villages and hometowns. Indigenous migrants expressed how they are able to retain the connection with their indigenous cultures and histories back home by consuming these food items. Highlighting experiences of migration through accounts of dream and food, the following sections describe how meanings of affection and taste are produced in relation to external factors like labour and economic conditions such as employment and career enhancement,



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while embracing dreams and food as emotional sensations that connect them with land and culture.

Capturing Experiences In order to trace mobility and taste among indigenous migrants, we begin by focusing on the element of dreams that families of migrants in Northeast India often shared with us. Values, ideals, or virtues described as conducts of indigenous societies cannot guarantee the economic security and success that indigenous migrants and their parents desire. As a result, dreams that families experience in their sleep represent the formless yet violent realities of becoming cheap dispensable labour. Thus, behind the world of aesthetics and taste that is central for indigenous migrants to acquire, we employ temporality as a conceptual and methodological framework to examine migration as a moral journey that transforms relations (within the indigenous family unit) and creates new vocabularies of suffering and meaning. By this, we mean how the politics of acquiring taste for indigenous migrants starts with a departure from their homes and the region (Northeast India). This includes, among other things, the programmes and training to acquire soft skills and personality development courses we described in the previous chapters of this book. Bringing an ethnographic insight to communicating indigenous migrants’ experiences with dreams and food, we highlight how migration is not an individual experience but a collective one. As young indigenous migrants leave home, the families that stay behind also begin to experience new forms of migration in distinct ways. For example, new mobile numbers or networks, pictures, or communication about lives in the metropolitan cities, and at times stories of accidents and hardships begin to arrive. In a similar way, food packets, sweaters, shawls, and sometimes extra pocket money also begin to arrive at the address of the migrants who leave home and settle down in their respective locations in urban India. Therefore, accounts of migration (for migrants and their families that stay behind) are associated with both physical absence and the many ways in which social relations are upheld. At any given time, conversations with migrants and their families about experiences of mobility and movement became very emotional during our fieldwork. They went back and forth between the past, present, and their dreams about the future. Initially, we felt awkward that parents broke down and migrants we met shared intimate stories of heartbreaks and their insecurities about their future. These relations among indigenous societies, as we highlight in Chapter 3, are enabled by mobility and migration and not accounts founded on marginalization or remoteness.

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As anthropologists working on the theme of indigenous migration, we were able to capture some experiences in language, but we initially lacked the ability to record and analyse others, like our encounters with migrants’ dreams and nightmares. However, these dream narratives emerged as important ‘interruptions’ for us since they allowed us to divert from the extensive conversations and interviews on labour, service, and mobility. Eventually, we perceived accounts of dreams as processes that helped us to understand human realities and struggles. Illustrating the importance of analysing the dreams and nightmares of female migrants in China, Pun Ngai notes that she was provoked to explore whether such moments could ‘… produce a new genre of writing … one capable of articulating a personal itinerary into a historical narrative and analysis’ (Ngai 2000: 532). In a similar fashion, the connections and relationships we highlight through dreams and food are established against the backdrop of a history of violence and militarization in many parts of Northeast India. Illustrating the accounts of migrants in this respect means exploring the possibilities of producing a distinct perspective about the ongoing transformations in the lives of indigenous migrants from the region. In the context of food, a theme we discuss in the second section of this chapter, we define taste as sensory values and practices acquired by indigenous migrants to satisfy the preferences of clients in the hospitality sector. Here, taste is referred to as the knowledge that is appealing in terms of both consumption practices that include gustatory cuisine and material goods that produce a distinct aesthetic lifestyle. We extend the conversations about palatial taste that Krishnendu Ray offers in his work on the culinary history across the Indian Ocean. We dwell on what Ray refers to as the ‘corporeal sensory experience’ (Ray 2015: 23) to describe the experiences of desires and expectations of indigenous migrants and their perception of taste. While Ray focuses on connections (transnational and transoceanic) to deterritorialize what constitutes ‘good food’ and critiques the idea of national cultures whereby cuisines and taste are territorially bounded, we underline the constant anxieties among indigenous migrants in deterritorializing and reterritorializing what constitutes global taste and ‘good food’. Although indigenous migrants are connected to the pan-Asian and European cuisines they serve in high-end dining places, they equate their indigenous food as delicacies from ‘home’ and not as goods connected to the global. On the one hand, indigenous informants differentiate their experiences of eating ‘local food from home’ not only to savour and invoke a nostalgic past of their homelands and villages in Northeast India but also as an act of metabolic nourishment of the home and consuming items grown on ancestral soil. On the other hand, they do not dwell on the intimate sensorial relation to the global cuisines such as Asian or European dishes they serve and are trained to define and explain in detail to customers in the high-end dining restaurants. This professional connection with



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food they serve vis-à-vis the personal affection for food items from their homelands informs us about the indigenous migrants’ experience. Their experiences, as we highlight in this chapter, tell us about the everyday practices of inclusion and exclusion regarding the incorporation of taste within a global order and hierarchy in the hospitality industry. In this context, we adopt the concept of studying culinary globalization that James Farrer proposes whereby he argues for a conceptual framework to study ‘travelling cuisines’. We adopt a similar lens whereby taste and food including highend dining service undergo ‘simultaneous processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization’ (Farrer 2015: 1) among indigenous migrants from the Northeast. We show how migrants consume their local herbs and delicacies such as fermented yam leaves, soya, meat, fish, and several seasonal vegetables to identify their taste and culture as distinct and unique geographically, even though they adopt a ‘foreign’ disposition and produce a Japanese or a Chinese experience to serve an ‘international’ experience in the fine dining restaurants. Adopting this process of connecting with the world, or as Farrer calls it ‘foodways’, to trace the production of taste among indigenous migrants, we present how service, taste, and mobility are labelled within a particular order and power structure with the aim to fulfil the sensory pleasures of the client. For instance, one of the distinct experiences we present in this chapter about taste and service is the process of experiencing the Indian state through encounters with the management and the customers who seek a taste of world class service, yet routinely relegate indigenous servers as unequal and ‘foreign’ by addressing them as Nepali or Chinese. While indigenous migrants from Northeast India increasingly promote and sell consumer products and services in malls, salons, and the hotel industry, their encounters with state agencies (through police, various departments, and documentation offices) and the larger public (consumers, housing societies, and transportation agencies) including colleagues continue to be fraught with anxieties and violence (physical, racial, and structural). Yet their ability to negotiate these challenges as migrants in India and their uncertain futures in these precarious occupations highlights the experiences of indigenous migrants.

Dreams ‘Chuba had returned home. There was a commotion and something was happening. I was heartbroken. I asked him why he had to come back home. I suddenly woke up and realized that it was only a dream. This is my biggest nightmare. I fear that he will come back home one day.’ Chuba’s mother Narola was worried about her son returning to Nagaland. He had migrated to Mumbai six months before and worked as a waiter. Since her son left home, nightmares of return began to haunt

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Narola. These dreams, which she called beya sopon or ‘bad dreams’ in Nagamese, came up in numerous conversations with families of Naga migrants. When discussing dreams and nightmares, dreams about return (of migrants within the family) were often categorized as a nightmare. Kikon sensed that Narola missed her son, yet her conviction that places elsewhere – far away from Nagaland – were safer and better became evident. During the course of our fieldwork, several families shared stories about siblings, children, or relatives who were migrant workers in large metropolitan cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, and Thiruvananthapuram, but focused on the conversations about encouraging them to stay away from home. Narola’s dreams about her son Chuba allowed us to explore experiences of migration among indigenous communities from Northeast India. Insomnia, anxiety, fear, and bad mobile network obstructing communication were common themes. Thousands of families across the region were experiencing migration and mobility in powerful ways. Across Northeast India, the number of youths leaving the state as migrants has increased in the last decade. The experience of return, for many, is characterized as a humiliation. The moral value attached to mobility and migration as a way of exploring the world is immense among families who see migration as a way for their loved ones to make it in life. Yet, once a family member became a migrant, the process radically transforms the lives of the family. For example, Moala, a mother of a migrant from Dimapur, described how her daughter Asangla cried when she left Nagaland to work as a front desk receptionist in a hotel. Describing the experience, she said, ‘My daughter cried till Bihar,’ and continued, ‘She called me every time the train entered a new state. The phone call started in Assam, and then it became routine as she crossed West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, before finally arriving in New Delhi.’ Moala said it was only when the train entered Uttar Pradesh that Asangla was excited about her future. Here, the sorrow of leaving home is not measured solely by the geographical distance, but through the various emotions and moods as well. In a similar manner, the process of settling down for new migrants in metropolitan cities meant getting accustomed to the long working hours at their workplace. In particular, families of migrants in Northeast India shared that they were initially uncertain about how to communicate with their sons and daughters who worked in the hospitality industry in cities like Mumbai and New Delhi or Thiruvananthapuram. Eventually, they adjusted their sleeping hours according to the timings of the respective restaurants and the breaks allotted to their children. In several villages across Nagaland and Manipur, ageing parents slept late in order to keep in touch with their children. The majority of the migrants sent back remittances to their respective families, yet many families were aware of the hardship and struggles that migrants faced. As a result, families of migrants referred to cities as places of suffering although they had not visited them. Where did they get these impressions? Many vignettes and details



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about Indian cities that relatives shared with us in Northeast India were often recreated from telephonic conversations with and photographs from migrants. Although Narola never visited an Indian city, she said, ‘Some say city life is good and fun, and others say, Ah! See even if you live in a city, there is suffering.’ Her impression of Mumbai, the city where her son worked as a server in a fine dining Italian restaurant, was predominantly through the experiences of her son. She said, ‘How do I imagine Mumbai to be? Only my son comes to my mind when I think of that city. If he is okay, if he is safe, if he can carry on with his work, if he gets a good job one day, I want to go there. At least once in my life I hope to visit that city.’ She described her son as someone ‘… who did many things without succeeding in anything’. This was a dominant account of the indigenous youth that we came across during our fieldwork. Given the declining number of jobs and avenues for young people, Chuba struggled to find employment within the state and sought opportunities outside. Kikon learnt that Chuba left for Mumbai with 40 other migrants from Nagaland in 2015. This experience sounded similar to that in other parts of India. Outlining the struggles of the educated unemployed youth in Meerut, Craig Jeffrey describes what he calls ‘cultures of limbo’, a state where the youth aimlessly wait and linger as a consequence of the political and economic uncertainty in contemporary India ( Jeffrey 2010). Narola’s description of her son as someone who drifted from one project to the other was typical of the educated unemployed youth in Nagaland as well. Her desperation to send her son away from Nagaland was shaped by the social and political environment in Nagaland. The fear of her son staying home was a nightmare not because he was unemployed and would be perceived as a failure. In Northeast India, the grave danger and threat to life among the youth given the political history of armed conflict and militarization added a layer of fear to the prevailing insecurities of unemployment that Jeffrey highlights in his work. Over the decades, the scale of counter-insurgency operations predominantly targeted the youth. Able-bodied young men and women were profiled as either insurgents or prospective candidates who would be recruited as insurgents or political mobilizers. The automatic reaction of the Indian security forces was to pick up youths and interrogate them. Over the years, stories of torture during routine interrogation of youths in Northeast India became well known. In addition, decades of armed conflict gave rise to a disproportionate distribution of resources and wealth into the hands of few politicians, technocrats, and the military organizations – both state and non-state actors. The sons and daughters of influential indigenous families captured all the salaried jobs and government funding in Nagaland. Therefore, the stories of struggle and suffering that indigenous migrants like Chuba face are tied to the broader issues of corruption and nepotism of powerful indigenous families and a dysfunctional militarized state system back home.

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Realizing that Chuba had no employment opportunity in Nagaland, his mother reminded him to ‘… adjust all the time’. Narola’s advice to her son resonated with Bynta’s account we presented in Chapter 3. Like Bynta’s mother, who was unhappy to see her daughter in Shillong when she left her job and returned home, Narola wanted Chuba to stay away from home. What kinds of adjustments does it take to stay in Mumbai and work in a fine dining Italian restaurant? According to Narola, there was a constant flow of ‘foreigners and wealthy Indian customers’ and her son was the first person to arrive and the last person to leave the restaurant. Given the long working hours, he was tired and preferred to sleep during his off days, so she only called him ‘during the rest time’, which meant during the short break he got at work. Her conversations with Chuba were erratic, but she dreamt of him regularly. She narrated one of her recent dreams about her son and her anxieties as follows: I had a bad dream again. We were having a conversation, and he told me he wanted to return to Nagaland. I told him not to come back. If you return, you will just linger here like a mad man without doing anything. Your mom and dad cannot afford to send you off again. Since we were able to send you out once, you have to do something with your life. After this dream, whenever I called Chuba he did not pick up his phone. Finally, I got through to him, so I asked him, ‘What happened?! What happened?’ He told me that some nights ago he got mugged. It happened like this. After he got off from work late that particular night and returned home, there was no rice to cook dinner, so he went off looking for a store to buy rice. When he stopped by and asked a group of youth standing on the road for direction, they took away his wallet. It contained his identity card, driving license, PAN card, and ATM cards. He started crying over the phone and said he wanted to come back home. I told him not to cry because he was unharmed at least. Then we locked his ATM. We told him to be cautious. The following day, his colleagues at the restaurant contributed some money and gave it to him. When his manager learnt what had happened, he gave 2000 Rupees to Chuba. I told him that God is with him.

The anxieties of migration are real. Arriving in new cities and towns for work requires furnishing proper documentation and paperwork. Given the diversity and size of big cities, the process of authenticating documents and identity often touches upon issues of race, citizenship, and the rights of the migrants. Many indigenous migrants who arrived in cities came with documentation like letters from their local church pastors, village headmen, or from their respective indigenous traditional councils. These were not the regular official documents like ration cards or the Aadhaar cards and were often considered as inauthentic papers to verify proof of residence or to open bank accounts and secure gas connections.



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Therefore, recruitment agencies like TPC in Nagaland told us that they made it mandatory for prospective migrants to obtain national documents like passports, voter identity cards, and driver’s licenses before leaving the state. These documents provided the security and safety that was required for the migrants in the city. Therefore, when Chuba, an alumnus of TPC, lost his documents, the anxiety about racial discrimination against migrants from Northeast India due to their ‘un-Indian’ appearances, at times leading to violent attacks and in some cases death as well, played on his mother’s and his minds during the conversation.47 Eventually, Chuba’s new documents were sent to him from Nagaland and he continued to work as a server. Describing dreams and the interpretation of dreams among the Yine, an indigenous community from the Amazon region, Minnas Opas notes that dreams are an integral part of the social life among the Yine people. Opas states, ‘Dreams (gipnawlu) do not constitute a realm separate from the everyday, even if they may be perceived as such. Rather, they are both affected by the prevailing sociocultural and political conditions, and are themselves of great social relevance.…’ (Opas 2016: 6). Like the Yine, indigenous people in Northeast India also have an intimate connection with dreams and interpretation of dreams. Anthropologist Michael Heneise’s work on dreams and social relation among indigenous Naga communities in Northeast India shows us the significance of dreams and sociality. Describing dreams as an important analytical category to understand the cultural construction of space, Heneise draws our attention to the ‘… choices and liberties one might take that might not be easily reproduced in waketime reality’ (Heneise 2017: 211). In other words, Heneise underlines how the importance of dreams among indigenous communities might help us to not only understand the power of dreams to interpret the spirit world (the supernatural forces of good and evil) but also powerfully illustrate the power relations and the negotiations founded on the experiences that the dreamer encounters with his/her kin group, friends, or neighbours during their waking hours. In this context, we extend the conversation about leaving the land and mobility among young indigenous migrants as a way to understand, in Heneise’s words, ‘… an ongoing productive social dialectic in the act of waking from imagined into wakeful, enacted sociality’ (ibid.: 211). If dreams become a way of interpreting the everyday social experiences in the world of indigenous migrants, the other common theme that occupies a significant place and possesses the power to alter the mood and emotion is food and consumption.

 For example, the 2014 murder case of Nido Taniam in New Delhi, available at http://shang​ haiist.com/2014/02/04/beating_and_death_of_chinese-lookin.php.

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Desserts During our conversation about global cuisine with a Naga migrant who worked in a high end Japanese dining restaurant, it became apparent that the world of consumption, particularly food and taste, in the fine dining world focuses on a hierarchy of invigorating the senses. The pleasure of taste starts long before the food is consumed. Among other things, by aesthetically presenting the food and service, both the server and the customer perform their respective functions. For the server, it means possessing an impeccable knowledge of the food being served, while the customer (irrespective of the knowledge) is considered as the authoritative tasteful consumer of global gastronomy. The increasing number of indigenous migrants who work as waiters in the hospitality sector, particularly those who are visible in the high-end Asian restaurants, fundamentally capture this trend of consumption and taste. What is deemed appetizing is not simply the food, but the process of packaging the experience as a global experience in contemporary India. The experiences of indigenous migrants from Northeast India showcased how consumption as acquiring taste as servers in the fine dining world in contemporary India is intimately connected with the complex politics of promoting authenticity and citizenship. Their lives dressed up in uniforms, these young migrants who serve neatly packed menus and food that are presented as international cuisine routinely negotiate the labels of foreign, taste, and culinary authenticity. Nandita Haksar poignantly highlights such encounters in her work on Naga migrants who work as servers in the hospitality sector. Haksar writes about a Naga server called Atim. She notes: On one occasion, the manager told Atim that the rare Eastern Dining or RED restaurant on the first floor was going to have a Thai food festival and they wanted her to dress like a Thai woman. She was sent to the spa and for forty-five minutes Atim was subjected to a beauty treatment. She emerged looking radiant, dressed in a Thai silk dress, and the manager took her around introducing her as a Thai. (Haksar 2016: 164)

As we discussed in the previous chapters, migrants who worked in fine-dining restaurants spoke about long working hours and about their aspirations to move on and find some other work that paid them enough. Surely, one could pass off as a Thai or a Korean server, but these identities were controlled and managed under the watchful eyes of the managers and were performances driven by profit. These everyday experiences, like the economic uncertainties of finding affordable housing in the city, saving enough for the future, or the failure to find a satisfactory job back home, were symptomatic of the larger social and economic transformations that were taking place in Northeast India.



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There is a growing emphasis on ‘providing training and employment to the youth’ as a way of addressing the unemployment crisis and the lack of opportunities across the states in Northeast India. For instance, in Nagaland, state officials and politicians point out two categories of unemployment. The first kind is the uneducated and unemployed youth who are unskilled, while the second group is the educated and unemployed youth who have not received any skills or training to be gainfully employed.48 A conversation about Japanese dessert revealed what constitutes skills to become waiters in luxury restaurants. These processes offer a critical lens to examine how the skills to acquire taste, aesthetics, and fine dining, as we observed during our fieldwork, is founded on deeply unequal power relations. In this context, many migrants like Atim in Haksar’s work drew our attention towards the oscillating experience of acquiring skills and leaving the land, and invoking the past and being transported back home. Food, we realized, emerged as an important theme for many indigenous migrants to talk about their experiences. For instance, John, a young server from Manipur, said, ‘Going home is like becoming a preacher. I have to explain to my family and friends in the village everything. They are constantly asking me about Mumbai.’ He described how he bought different kinds of food and gifts for his friends and family in order to let them ‘taste the city’. John worked in a Japanese high-end dining restaurant called Yuuka at the Palladium, a luxury five-star hotel in Mumbai. Described as an award-winning Japanese restaurant, besides local employees from Mumbai, the kitchen workforce comprised Assamese, Naga, and Nepali workers, while the chef was from the Philippines. The work schedule was anything but extraordinary. The restaurant opened at 11 a.m. for lunch and closed by 3 p.m. From 3 to 7 p.m. the employees took their break. Some of them slept on the bunks in the staff units, while others went out and hung out in the shopping malls and cafes. The restaurant opened again at 7 p.m. for dinner and closed at 12 a.m. Besides explaining the strict work schedule, John described the menu of the restaurant and revealed the complexity of learning the names of Japanese dishes. While describing one of the restaurant’s favourite dishes called Yuuka scallop maki, he paused and said, ‘maki means “roll” in Japanese’. Then he described the avocado tartare as the signature dessert of the restaurant. ‘What kinds of customers come here?’ Kikon asked him during their conversation. ‘Someone with a developed taste for food and wine that they have acquired though extensively travelling around the world,’ John responded. Not  See http://www.skillreporter.com/hand-of-applause-for-skill-development-nagaland-govern​ ment-declared-2016-as-year-of-construction-workers-will-focus-on-skill-training/. Also refer to http://morungexpress.com/nagaland-state-70422-educated-unemployedyouth/ (accessed on 23 August 2017).

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only did this answer provide a significant insight about the cultures of consumption, taste, and hierarchies in India but it also became an important aspect to understand racial politics, identity, and the relationship between the state and its indigenous population from Northeast India. The temporal dimensions of consumerism where customers come to savour the experience of an edible globalism, as perceived through the eyes of indigenous servers like John, also shape their own desires to get ‘out there’. The process of serving and consuming global food like Japanese desserts in this context produces different sensibilities and accounts of value. It came as a surprise when John commented, ‘Who pays so much money to eat dessert?’ as he showed Kikon different pictures of Japanese desserts on his mobile phone. Serving expensive Japanese food and desserts to famous customers like Karan Johar (an Indian bollywood producer), he was aware of the bewildering amount of money customers spent to eat in the restaurant. The exquisite experience of dining in this restaurant was captured through its signature dessert. Calling it an ‘art on the plate’, a food website described the food item at this Japanese restaurant as follows: The tartare, crested with parsnip crisps and somen noodle tempura in a shape evocative of the sakura tree is served on a thin ice sheet that ingeniously holds beneath itself a layer of corn dashi. The server, after Presentation of the dish, cracks open the ice sheet to mix the tartare and the dashi. The result is an explosion of complex flavours and textures.49

Contrary to the sophisticated food review that compared the dessert to an explosion of complex flavours, for John, the avocado tartare was expensive and priced at 1,660. Clearly, such comments were made not because John was uneducated about the process of preparing the dessert or the conditions under which Japanese cuisine was carefully promoted as an exquisite and aesthetic high-dining experience in this restaurant. Describing the philosophy of taste, Denise Gigante (2005: 3) notes a similar phenomenon where consumption and taste are grounded in ‘the power of metaphor’. Taste is not something that can be grounded merely as an appetite located and experienced bodily, but one that is deeply influenced by a consumer culture that includes material desires. John’s reaction to the Japanese dessert can be read as a counter experience of appreciating food and the high-end dining experience, but the conversation about Japanese dessert allows us to have a deeper insight into consumption experiences among indigenous migrants. In this context, what is considered as a pleasurable experience or a distasteful one is bound up with experiences of class and social consciousness, among other 49

 See https://www.foodlovers.in/restaurants_travel/avocado-tartare-yuuka-ting-yen/ (accessed on 17 August 2017).



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things. Not all dining experiences turned out to be pleasant. For example, John told how there were some ‘incidents’ on Valentine’s Day (in 2015). The first incident was a nasty fight that broke out between a couple after the man offered a ring and a bouquet of roses to the woman. The table had a lavish Japanese spread but the couple left without touching the food. The second incident involved a young couple that had fallen short of money to pay the food bill. ‘They were very embarrassed and frightened,’ John said. Clearly, the medium of dining and consumption captures the power of food to connect the worlds of relations, taste, and emotions. Many social gatherings and events for these migrants included food. In that sense, food constituted an important part of their leisure and bonding with one another, but it was a particular kind of food they were drawn towards. For example, when Kikon sought an appointment to meet a young server who worked in the ‘continental food’ section of a five-star restaurant, he took her out for lunch to his favourite restaurant in Kalina (Mumbai) called King Chilli. This restaurant served fermented soya beans, bamboo shoot, and varieties of herbs and spices. Indigenous migrants we met across metropolitan cities, irrespective of whether they lived in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, or Cochin, stocked up their kitchens with dried bamboo, fermented yam leaves, and fermented fishes from their respective towns and villages in Northeast India. We learnt that part of ‘having fun’ during weekends meant cooking various indigenous dishes in their small flats and having prolonged conversations about seeking lucrative employment, moving abroad, and visiting cities and countries like Singapore, Dubai, and Australia. These conversations ignited memories about home and the political crisis that limited their opportunities and future at the same time. Cooking and eating these meals together seemed to ground them in a sense of home and gave them the assurance to carry their dreams beyond their current positions. Food, in this regard, became an important mirror to understand the connections of being at home while living as highly mobile migrants.

Moral Self Isabelle De Solier (2013: 58) describes how consumption is driven by conceptions of moralities about value, taste, quality, and social status. Describing food cultures and taste in settler colonies like Australia, she defines the omnivore foodie in her study as a ‘moral self ’ because their love for food extends to all types of food and their sense of the self and taste is expressed through flavour, unlike politics as in the case of vegetarians or vegans. In a similar manner, indigenous migrants and their experiences of food and consumption are distinctly shaped by the value and love for food they trace back to their homes in the Northeast. Yet, unlike foodies

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in Melbourne, indigenous migrants employ a different register to frame and express what constitutes taste and the self. The world of consumption operates as the source of understanding social identity, aspiration, hierarchies, and dreams for the future. Often it was the disenchantment with their current working conditions in the restaurants and hotels that pushed migrants to seek out new jobs or to acquire more professional skills and qualifications and move on to other avenues. Understood in this manner, indigenous servers who constitute an important part of the consumption and production of a global culinary world in India are drawn to these jobs for work and not the love for the food they serve to the customers. For many indigenous servers, cultivating an image that would resonate with the core values and symbols of the high-end dining experience became an important part of their identity. Keeping up with a particular kind of appearance was extremely important as servers. During a conversation with John, he identified his job not solely through the food menu but the attention given to maintaining his appearance. He explained the logic behind this as follows: Body language, confidence, hygiene all matter because we are selling a package. See, looks matter in this business. It is just like a shopping mall (referring to the restaurant). We have to sell the food and its dressing too. It took me two months to learn the menu and memorize the ingredients before I was allowed to serve the customers. Back home the concept of restaurant is dirty and low class. Although I know the menu, I have to wear clean clothes and look good to serve the food.

Home and stories about home and families always became a way to distinguish the different experiences of food and lifestyle. Yet, it was also the absence of highend dining experiences in John’s village that created a particular kind of story about his life in Mumbai because he never revealed that his work included waiting on tables and serving in a restaurant. Unlike his friends who were all married and were farmers, he was still a bachelor. But that was not the only reason why he stood out. When he went to the village recently (in 2015), John said, ‘People did not recognize me. I looked fairer than all the rest. They think I work in a security agency. They look at my uniform (a black shirt and trousers) and the earpiece around my head. The picture reminds them of a security man back home. But the uniform was designed by a famous fashion designer.’ The focus on appearance came up constantly during our fieldwork highlighting how indigenous servers constitute an inherent part of producing the taste and sensibility of cosmopolitan consumers in global India. The visibility of indigenous migrants as servers in Asian or high-end restaurants serving global50 cuisines has led to a peculiar coalescing of what constitutes Indian-ness or an Indian identity.  We are taking the term ‘global’ from the brochures and the signs in the restaurants we visited during fieldwork. In addition, waiters and their colleagues also used the terms ‘global’ and

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The experiences of indigenous migrants we have described in this book resonate with what Aihwa Ong calls ‘flexible citizenship’. For Ong, citizenship underwent a transformation in neoliberal globalization. Flexible citizenship in this context meant the ways in which professionals including migrants cultivated a flexible approach to strategize the choices they made about their lives in the backdrop of a global market dictated by capital and a neoliberal state (Ong 1999). For example, John could not bring himself to develop a taste for Japanese desserts but he learnt to professionally invest his time and effort in selling them and marked his strategy to be flexible and acquire the skills to strategically navigate the world of consumption and markets. The flexibility could also be read as self-regulation or self-formation. Ways of experiencing, identifying, and belonging as a citizen between the server and the customer are constantly mediated and performed through consumption in the fine dining experience. Offering a distinct international and luxurious experience, the social reality of racism, violence, and discrimination towards indigenous migrants from Northeast India ceases to matter. Instead, the physical characteristics of indigenous migrants serving an international culinary experience to the cosmopolitan Indian customers accentuate and enhance the taste of the food. The Japanese desserts had well-defined names and were identified with Japanese culture on the menu, but what remained fluid was the identity of the waiters and the racial politics and expressions that reified the existing social and political hierarches and boundaries. Maintaining the racial distinction and working on their appearances became a strategy to gain employment. Several indigenous migrants who worked in parts of the hospitality sector such as spas, salons, hotels, and restaurants across metropolitan India emphasized how they spent considerable amount of money and time in maintaining their appearance and hygiene. Among other things, this meant the ways in which they perceived grooming as an investment even as they enhanced their skills by taking professional courses and sought to remain employable and secure their future. Therefore, underneath the professional aura and flexible approach that indigenous servers presented, their connection with consuming indigenous food and serving international cuisine opened up a world of connections where taste and consumption are charged with experiences of leaving the land.

‘world’ interchangeably at times. These references were in the context of discussing the different regional foods – such as Japanese, Thai, Continental, or Italian food – that were all laid out together where the customers had a choice to try out different types of food from around the world.

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Conclusion This ethnographic chapter focused on the concept of leaving the land, a central theme of this book, and accounts of dreams and food. We illustrated how dreams and food not only shaped the anxieties but also helped them to forge new connections and identities. From the dreams of families back home in Northeast India to the everyday experiences of indigenous youths, we presented the socio-political world of indigenous migrants. In the last two decades, indigenous migrants from Northeast India and their families have experienced poverty and unemployment, and suffered a dysfunctional and militarized system. As highly corrupt state governments and politicians including the Indian state enjoy impunity and remain unaccountable for the rehabilitation of insurgents and negotiations for a peaceful solution, the dreams and experiences of indigenous migrants and their families present us with the world of consumerism, inequalities, and the prevailing social order in neoliberal India. The dreams of loved ones back home and the consumption of their local food items show migration as a collective experience, a point we have highlighted in previous chapters as well. These dreams illustrate how the ongoing indigenous migration has deeply affected the relationships within the family unit and the larger kin groups as land relations and success are equated with economic security. In a similar manner, conversations about food also capture the world of taste and consumption. We highlighted how eating food from home renewed migrants’ attachment to their respective ancestral lands and enabled them to remain connected or rooted to the lands and villages they had left. We also focused on the distinctions that indigenous migrants created between the food they consumed at home and the food they served in the restaurants. These distinctions, among other aspects as we noted in the chapter, are founded on producing a taste (through consuming food from home) that is connected to their indigenous cultures and histories back home, unlike the food they serve in their place of work to satisfy the preferences of their customers. Dreams and dessert, as we illustrated in this chapter, are important ways to understand how indigenous migration plays a significant role in generating new meanings and practices. From changes in sleeping patterns in migrants’ households in the villages, recurring nightmares of parents, and invoking ‘home’ through consuming indigenous food in cities, indigenous migration in India has ultimately led to new social and political developments among indigenous societies from Northeast India. As migration and mobility become an increasing trend in the region and young indigenous migrants become part of the labour force in the hospitality sector, these developments significantly shape the relationship between the indigenous population and the state in contemporary India.

6 Talking about Method

DK: I think it is important for us to reflect on the migration project we started in 2013. The chapters we ended up writing are deeply ethnographic and describe the lives of young indigenous migrants. What was your experience? I ask this because we were working together in many places but at the same time we were also travelling to different cities and meeting groups of migrants. BGK: It might sound strange, but the topic of migration does not come easy for me. I still feel kind of reluctant or hesitant about it. I mean in my department in Stockholm, migration is one of the key issues discussed; almost everyone engages with it in one way or another. Its effect is there all around us. But I have stayed away from it; I have not felt the compulsion to engage with it myself. Perhaps, I take it as something rather self-evident; I mean, it is as if you know beforehand why people move, nothing that requires years of research. Some leave to escape war, conflict, poverty, natural hazards, oppressive regimes, or miseries of various kinds, yet others to seek out new opportunities or fulfil aspirations and dreams. But of course, once you get into it, it grows on you and as pointed out in the chapters of this book, migration becomes endlessly more intricate, challenging, and exciting. It is as if you have to approach it sideways, as I recall Slavoj Žižek’s writing about violence (Žižek 2008). I guess there is also something about my own sensibility, the fact that there is something inherently sad about it, which also kept me away from migration studies. Leaving a place is always leaving behind loved ones, family, people you grew up with, sites, and relations forged over time and that have made you what you are. Mayori, one of Nandita Haksar’s (2016: 240) interlocutors, told her after reading the draft manuscript of the book, ‘I did not realize how sad our lives are.’ Something always seems to be lost in the transition. And this, I think, holds true more generally. Just think of our own journeys or histories of mobility. In my case, on my mother’s side, several of her uncles and aunties migrated to the USA in the early twentieth century and this was a very definitive move. Only one of them came back. On my father’s side, my grandfather, while young, moved up to northern Sweden, taking up a teaching job in the then-Klondike-like mining town of Gällivare where they had discovered a large deposit of iron ore. This again

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was in the heart of Sámi territory and he unwittingly became part of the Swedish colonization project, appropriating resources and nationalizing the Northern frontier very much like Sanjib Baruah (2005) describes for Arunachal Pradesh during the recent decades. My grandfather eventually became a prominent labour party leader and later the chairman of the city council. He died when my father was only eleven, so I do not know much about him. I recall, however, a story my late father used to tell. At every dinner time, there would be people waiting to see my grandfather and often Sámi people came to ask either for help in drafting a letter in Swedish or discuss various matters. I think about this, about how such encounters would have transpired, and what kind of person he was. I do this also through the lens of my work on indigenous issues in Northeast India.51 I grew up in Piteå, a small town in northern Sweden, but left when I was nineteen as I wanted to travel and see the world. I have only returned to visit my parents once a year or so. Since then I have kept moving, living in several different countries like in Austria, India, the USA, England, Georgia, and, during the last years, in Kenya. I find it easy to adapt and yet – despite being a privileged traveller – I struggle with a sense of homelessness, a longing for a more grounded life. Several of my childhood friends have returned to our hometown after living and working in Stockholm for decades. I think this is a lovely thing, but it is not for me. I do not know why that is. I think of Zygmunt Bauman’s wonderful essay ‘From Pilgrim to Tourist: A Short History of Identity’ (1996), addressing the postmodern condition of keeping options open, a restlessness. But let me come back to the earlier mentioned thing about the Sámi people, the indigenous peoples in Sweden and neighbouring countries of Norway, Finland, and Russia. The topic of indigenous migration came up recently in relation to a controversy relating to the award-winning film Sameblod (‘Sámi blood’, 2016) by a young filmmaker, Amanda Kernell. The film deals with how the Swedish state and majority society have treated the Sámi people, and it is beautifully narrated through the eyes of a Sámi girl, Elle Marja. In the film, we follow Elle Marja and her younger sister going back after the summer break to the boarding school for children of nomadic Sámi families. This is in the 1930s and the Sámi are considered an inferior race that is not suited for intellectual pursuits. Elle Marja loves reading and the Swedish schoolteacher with her modern clothes, books, and manners fascinates her. In one of the dramatic, key scenes of the film, a researcher from the race hygiene institute in Uppsala visits the school and the children have to line up for head and nasal measurements and later for nude photography (with several 51

 See Karlsson (2017a) where I recount my fieldwork experiences in Northeast India.



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men present in the room). Elle Marja refuses to take off her clothes but is eventually forced by the teacher to comply. The humiliation is complete, and shortly afterwards Elle Marja runs away from the school, gets on a train to the south, removes all signs of her being a Sámi, and begins a new life as a Swede, enrolling in a higher secondary school in Uppsala under a false Swedish name. Before this, in the opening of the film, Elle Marja returns for the first time, now as an old woman, for the funeral of her sister. She is smartly dressed and keeps a distance from her relatives present, not responding when they speak to her in Sámi. After the funeral she turns down their invitation to come and join them in the nearby mountain camp. There is a helicopter waiting to take them there. Her son and granddaughter, who have accompanied her to the funeral, want to go and urge her to join them. But she insists and stays back by herself in a hotel. But the past comes haunting and at night she sets out on foot, climbing the mountain and eventually daring to enter her family and the society she turned her back on as a young person. Despite the painful history that has been revealed, Sameblod has been praised by most critics in Sweden as well as internationally.The author and columnist Lena Andersson, however, has generated a heated debate after arguing, in an editorial in the leading Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter,52 that the reason why Elle Marja left was not because of a racist Swedish state but because she like many other young people wanted to get out and explore the world. This, Andersson argued, used to be celebrated as an act of freedom and independence in the modern age, but not for the Sámi, who, she argues, are supposed to always want to stay put and follow the ways of the community. Several Sámi commentators have reacted strongly against this; for example, Helena Omma, a doctoral student at the Sámi university college in Kautokeino, argues that Andersson is completely oblivious to the historical context that the film addresses. That Elle Marja had to give up her Sámi identity – lie about her background and take a fake Swedish name – to be able to study and subsequently become a teacher was not an imposition by her parents or the Sámi community at large, but indeed by the Swedish state. Andersson, the commentators argued, blames the Sámi people for the colonial policies imposed on them and projects the Swedish society as a space of freedom and emancipation, hence completely denying the Sámi experience.53 Sorry, Dolly, this got much longer than expected and is not leading to any direct question, but I guess what I seek to ask about is: how your mobile life, departure from home, and the mobility of your family speak to this and how you  ‘Även samer kan längta bort ibland’ (Even Sámis can sometimes long for something else), in Swedish, Dagens Nyheter, 9 June 2017. 53  See ‘Tolkningen av filmen Sameblod möter hårt motstånd,’ Sameradion and SVT Sapmi, 14 June 2017 (in Swedish). 52

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think about indigenous migration as a possibly distinct experience? And further, how do our own past comes back haunting us? How are our lives entangled with the migratory experiences of the young migrants that we met and write about? DK: Unlike books I come across that refer to indigenous communities like Naga society and their way of life as remote or being rural in the 1970s, my experience of growing up as an indigenous child in Naga society was something else. I did not grow up in a village. My parents migrated from their village Tsungiki in Wokha district with my grandparents. My mother was the eldest child in the family and she came down from Tsungiki village to Wokha town with her parents when she was an infant. Both my grandparents were Baptist pastors and fluent in Assamese and other Naga languages. They were the founding members who established the Baptist church in Tsungiki village. After my grandmother passed away in childbirth and my grandfather remarried, my mother was sent away to study with the American missionaries at the Golaghat Mission Girls High School in Assam. My mother tells us that it took four days to reach her school, and that was the reason why she seldom returned to Wokha. Instead, my mother spent her school holidays with the American missionaries in Assam learning embroidery, knitting, and helping out with chores. Sometimes she was also sent to her grand aunty’s house in Dimapur as a babysitter. On my father’s side, he was the eldest child in the family too. My paternal grandfather was a medical compounder and worked in the medical camps across the Naga Hills during the Second World War. He met my grandmother during the war when she was working as a janitor at a local hospital. They never returned to the village and settled down in Wokha town. I was born in Dimapur and so my parents were migrants early on in their lives. I returned to Wokha once a year with my parents during the summer break. All I remember about those trips to Wokha is throwing up all along the way. I had terrible motion sickness and the mountain roads made my life miserable. But I frequently met my cousins and my relatives from the village who came down to Dimapur and stayed with us. You see, Dimapur is the biggest commercial hub in Nagaland, so our relatives came down for their medical and educational needs, and our home became a transit camp for all our relatives who were travelling beyond Nagaland. When I came across James Clifford’s essay ‘Identity in Mashpee’ (1988) in graduate school, I was very taken with the ethnographic description of the Mashpee community in the US. Such indigenous experiences, I realized, are not exclusive. Indigenous people’s experiences today include complex histories of mobility and migration. Their lives as city dwellers, as people holding various degrees and in different professions, forced me to reflect on complex questions of citizenship and social transformation.



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In my life, as the youngest child I experienced various kinds of departure very early on. My elder siblings moved away from home for their studies, and then I witnessed how my cousins and relatives from the village who arrived in Dimapur often went away to the neighbouring states for trade. They seldom returned to the village after finishing their studies in Dimapur. This constant movement of family members and relatives was quite unsettling for me; I think this is the reason why I picked up letter writing early on in my life. I used to write letters and send sketches of dresses or random things I came across to my sisters who were already in college. Was I lonely as a child of migrant parents in Dimapur? I guess I was. Did I miss my sisters? I think I missed them very much. But these thoughts did not cross my mind until now. Migration or being mobile always contains stories of sorrow, so what I experienced is not an individual experience. There is a predominant template to situate indigeneity and sedentary politics. Liisa Malkki’s article, ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’ (1992) triggered a series of questions that opened up new ways of combining my own taken-for-granted ways of seeing the world and my intellectual curiosity. My article titled ‘Jackfruit Seeds from Jharkhand: Being Adivasi in Assam’ (2017) is the result of the thoughts about the politics of rootedness I have been interested to explore. Yes, the connection with ancestral land and the culture is there, but many more experiences of indigenous mobility and movement are often set aside. These are not necessarily forgotten, but for some reason they remain unspeakable because there is an assumption that these indigenous histories of growing up and experiencing separation anxieties as children or being migrants are not part of the grand exhibitions of indigenous lives we see in official museums and textbooks. Coming back to the story of departures in my family, I feel migration and being mobile created the opportunity for my family to see the world and enabled us to take care of ourselves. In that sense, departures have been an extraordinary journey. This was also a recurring story that many indigenous migrants shared with us during the fieldwork. The dignity and the sense of achievement to be able to afford a piece of land or have the money to pay for a cousin or a relative’s education are special. Moving away as migrants is sad and liberating at the same time. Sad in a sense because none of us (three daughters) or my mother inherited any ancestral land, since we were not entitled to any history or culture that was supposedly passed down from ancestors. In that regard, the theme of leaving the land that emerges so prominently in our book illustrates the terrifying level of violence, power, capital, and patriarchy that is tied to tradition. When my sisters went off to college, well-wishers and relatives told my mother that men from our tribe are scared to marry young women who are more qualified and intelligent than them. Therefore, my sisters should not be allowed to study after their graduation. When

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they married non-Naga men, relatives came and enquired why such things had taken place. Why were they not married off to Naga men? My mother responded, ‘Are my daughters domestic animals? Should I have tied them up and waited for Naga men to come and marry them? Do you think I should have gone around begging from door-to-door asking Naga men to marry my daughters?’ What I am suggesting here is that everything happens simultaneously. Becoming a migrant and being mobile mean that the world also opens up and there are encounters – physical, emotional, and intellectual. In retrospect, it seems that things are not clear at the moment as they take place, but mobility and movement are deeply moral and political processes. But I am not saying everyone wants to go away. There is also comfort in the certainty of being able to remain in one place. For many years, my conversations with traders in Uzan Bazaar, a market in Guwahati (Assam) where I buy my vegetables and groceries, have centred on travels and various places I have studied and worked (Hong Kong, California, Stockholm, and Melbourne). The pharmacist from a shop in the market called The Ideal Pharmacy has followed my journeys. Every time I name a new city or country, he smiles and reciprocates with names of film directors and movies from those places. Or the owner of a grocery shop called Dimpa Store for many years has enquired about European cities and the best seasons to travel to these destinations. One day, I met Gauri Hazarika, a female trader from the market who told me that she had visited New Delhi for ten days a few months ago. She cried every day because it was her first trip out of Assam and she missed home terribly. ‘Do you ever cry because you miss home when you go away?’ she asked me. All these stories capture the different experiences of being mobile, the restlessness that you also mentioned in your reflection, and the apprehensions of being dislocated from places that give us a sense of security and connectedness. I suppose that all the different places we move about shape our thoughts and inspire us to see what is happening around us. Talking about moving, the region has been very close to your heart as an anthropologist for several decades. I want to ask you about your anthropological work in Northeast India, and in what ways can you trace the connection between your work on environment and ecology and the theme of indigeneity and leaving the land that we discuss in this book? BGK: Well, let me begin by talking a little about method, and more precisely about multi-sited ethnography. We state in the Introduction that we have carried out multi-sited fieldwork. And indeed this is what most anthropologists set out to do, or claim to be doing, during the last decade or so. But what does it entail? I started in Kerala working my way through migrant networks to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Mumbai, and then up to Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh. And you made the training centre, TPC, your point of departure



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and then traced students going out, meeting up with alumni as well as their respective families back home. And then we jointly arranged seminars and the photo exhibition, which became venues where youths planning to go out, as well as seasoned migrants, reflected on and talked about experiences and aspirations. So again, this has taken us to a multitude of places and we have travelled quite a lot during the fieldwork. In my earlier work, though not staying put in one village, I restricted myself to a more bounded geography. For example, in the study with the Rabhas in northern Bengal, I moved between a cluster of villages in and around Buxa Tiger Reserve and adjoining areas of the Duars, usually staying at least for a month in each place, taking a bus or sometimes bicycle to the next village. In my work in Meghalaya, I did travel much more as I was following resource flows over the entire state. Going from Shillong to Tura, for example, used to take me a full day of traveling in cars on bumpy roads. Timber, coal, and limestone were all for sale outside the state, exported to Bangladesh or brought down to Assam and further away to other Indian states. But again, for good or bad, I limited my explorations to what transpired within the boundaries of Meghalaya. I also conceptualized my research in terms of place-based political ecology. This certainly had its drawbacks, but what I gained, I believe, is a rather good grip on what was going on and understanding of the different actors that were involved in asserting rights over nature. And people also came to know me and through friends and their networks I always had someone who knew someone who could introduce me to a coal trader, minister, forest officer, politician, headman, activist, journalist, or scholar, as well as to people involved in clandestine extractive operations like smuggling timber or selling bush meat or other banned forest produce. They would trust me, as I was known to them or had been introduced by persons they trusted, and would hence speak relatively freely. In this project, we have chosen a different strategy and I must admit that it has been harder to follow people on the move than I expected. You remember how I, in the beginning, had to enrol my wife as a field assistant to go for manicures and pedicures and massage treatments to seek out people who could be enrolled in the project. Women especially were highly reluctant to meet up in the beginning, not really knowing whether I could be trusted or not. After all, they had to be cautious; stories about trafficking and sexual exploitation are common. This again speaks about the insecurity and vulnerability many of the young migrants felt living far away from home. With their long hours at work, many further simply did not have the time or energy to meet up for interviews. When they had a day off, there would be more pressing things to attend to or just to catch up on sleep. It also has to do with the people we are. Andrzej, the photographer, and I spent a day in one of the upscale beauty salons in Bengaluru, learning more directly what

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the workday would look like. It was an exceptionally long day. I had to sneak out several times for a smoke and chat with people at the tea stall to endure. It all felt as a confined and controlled space, and with customers and the owner around there was limited space to talk to the Northeastern employees. To do such work successfully, you need to be involved in the work itself and not just sit around and observe people and try to chat as soon there is a break between customers. Andrea Wright, who is doing a PhD at Brown University on Northeast migrants in Bengaluru, is doing exactly that and before fieldwork she even took courses in make-up and styling to pick up some basic skills. This is an excellent way to go about it. But then you have to invest time in a particular place and not move around too much. Yet again, covering a larger ground can also be useful. Even if it was Northeasterners working in hair salons and spas that was my starting point in Kerala, I spent a lot of time with various migrants there, not least groups of Assamese men working as casual labourers in construction, fish packing, cashew nut, and rubber processing. Most of them were circular migrants who had come down to Kerala to work for a year or two and then return home to their families. Even if this work does not figure in this book, I think it was valuable for us in developing the core themes of indigenous migration and affective labour. We could of course have opted for a more thorough study of migrant labour in Kerala, but this was not really what we wanted to do. But I guess what I am trying to get at here is to think about the pros and cons of being more mobile while being in the field. Ghassan Hage certainly has a point in questioning the almost hegemonic idea of multi-sited ethnography today. As he elaborates in relation to his study of Lebanese diaspora networks, multi-sitedness turned out to be an exhausting venture where he ended up spending most of the time flying around the world and being jet-lagged. The more he got into the research, the more he was drawn into and engaged in the relations of the particular sites, saying that he ‘simply could not be involved in such an intimate way in more than two sites, at the most’ (2005: 466). What Hage ends up with is a redefinition of what constitutes a site, suggesting that the globally dispersed locations of the Lebanese families he followed actually constituted one site and in so doing also calling into question the project of multi-sited ethnography (ibid.). I find that this resonates on many levels with our work. Think, for example, of stretched lifeworlds where ethnic church fellowships, students unions, food, and dreams transgress spatial boundaries encompassing migrant lives in the metropolitan city. This suggests that we are not so much working with an abundance of different sites, but a more limited number of stretched out sites that we engage in different locales. What do you say Dolly, could this be worth exploring in further works? DK: I agree. But this question makes me think about ethnographic writing and fieldwork. Recently, I read Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean’s edited book



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Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writings (2017) and was inspired by the conversations among anthropologists. So, I am glad we are having a conversation about fieldwork sites, but I wish to link that process to the aftermath of fieldwork, which is the in-between zone as we write and produce the text. What are the stories and experiences from the fieldwork we leave aside as the text proceeds to become a finished product and what are the hierarches and privileges at play? If conducting fieldwork allows us as anthropologists to keep a field diary, we bring our fieldwork notes and interviews or what is referred to as ‘data’ back to our writing tables, offices, and libraries to come up with an outline of drafts and a sense of obligation we have as researchers to connect with our sites and the questions/images from the field. In that context, many voices and conversations that I recorded and wrote down in my field notes did not make it in this book. But they allowed me to understand what was going on in Northeast India and also at the destination points of the young migrants, like Mumbai, Thiruvananthapuram, and Cochin. This was a significant process in thinking through and applying the concept of stretched lifeworlds. In my research work, the first ethnographic fieldwork was in the foothills border of Assam and Nagaland in Northeast India. It was as stretched as a fieldwork site could be. There were no demarcations, and people spoke multiple languages. I started to follow different ethnic groups and visited the coal mines, forests, jhum fields, rivers, and the weekly bazaars. Perhaps given the multiplicity of sites where people worked to earn their living and forge different business alliances, the foothills emerged as a dispersed location intersected with power relations, flows, and networks. I highlighted these accounts in my book Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India (2019). In this project, I spent a considerable amount of time in Dimapur tracing stories of migrants and their families before heading off to the cities to meet the young migrants. I could afford to travel from Northeast India to these cities and trace the lives of these young servers. The flight fares and our research budget were all secure unlike the families of migrants who were struggling to make ends meet. Here, the concept of stretched lifeworlds kept appearing to me not solely as an analytical category, but as a privileged, creative, and conceptual thread to report to the readers (mostly in the academic world) about the lives of young indigenous migrants in an appealing academic language. In addition, with fieldwork and the challenges of tracing the lives of an extremely mobile group of young migrants, I was often introduced to informants who were ‘on breaks’ or had ‘off days’. One day, when I was in Mumbai, I heard that a Naga boy from the housekeeping unit was unwell in a hospital. I went to the hospital to meet him and found out there was

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an issue with his medical bills. The boy had come to the hospital with a severe kidney infection and was immediately admitted. After a week of medication, the bill which included his bed, medicine, and doctor’s fees had come to 280,000 (two hundred and eighty thousand rupees, which is approximately US$4,400), which was beyond the cover of his medical insurance provided by his employers. As a result, this boy was kept as a hostage by the hospital management in his cabin unless his guardians (from Nagaland) or his employers cleared the bill. The hospital had also stopped his medications and food, so his colleagues from the housekeeping unit in that hotel took turns to bring him water, porridge, and fruits from their pocket money. The nurses allowed me to meet the boy and asked me to inform his wards to pay up the bill. All the time I sat down with him, he kept checking his phone to see if there were any text messages from home. I learnt that his mother was a daily wage worker from Jalukie (in the Peren District of Nagaland) and was unable to arrange the money for his medical bills. We did not speak to each other much, but both of us were clearly absorbed in our thoughts. When we spoke briefly, he said that he had imagined Mumbai to be ‘something else’. On enquiring if he has seen the city, he smiled at me and said, ‘This is Mumbai’, waving his hands around the cabin, and continued, ‘Sometimes I want to cry. I think I will stay here like this forever. Sometimes, I feel it will change.’ Between the sounds of the fan, the voices of nurses, and footsteps of visitors outside the cabin, I too felt lost. In many ways, both our worlds were merging and unfolding in different ways at that moment, mine as that of a researcher where I was thinking about being tired and negotiating the city and wondering about the location of the auto or taxi stand after I left the hospital. Like the patient at the cabin, I too was out of my depth in this city. I felt a sense of helplessness as I encountered similar stories of suffering of indigenous migrants in their quest to start new lives here. Yet, my worries were petty and crass in comparison to the situation of the boy who was being kept as a hostage in the hospital. The following day, I went to meet the HR officer at the hotel and she informed me that they were looking into the matter. In passing she commented, ‘These tribal boys from Northeast India are very fragile. They are not able to work hard. If they stand in the sun for eight hours as security guards, they faint! What is there to faint about?’ After a week, I learnt that the hotel paid for his medical bills, but the amount would be deducted in instalments from his salary for the next two years. He was getting 10,000 per month (approximately US$156). As I was doing the fieldwork and visited different sites within the same city, or multiple cities which were defined as fieldsites in our project, I was reminded of Seth Holmes’ book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (2013). In his ethnographic fieldwork and the reflections from the field (as he follows migrants and travels with them to their farms and their homes in the



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borderland), he questions his class contradictions and then situates these difficult class positions to write and present the violent and oppressive lives of the migrant workers in an extraordinary way. Unlike Seth Holmes, who is an American scholar and could reflect on his class disposition, in my case it was my identity as an indigenous researcher and the class element as well. This kind of writing for me is taking ethnographic writing and our fieldwork reflections a step beyond the reflexivity conversations in anthropology and situating our writing within the political and ethical realm of engaging with the world around us. I guess the boy from the hospital did not feature in this book because I did not know where to add his story, and since there were no conversations between us, it made me unsure about my own ability as a writer and a researcher to add his life story in the chapters. But his sadness and the situation he had to experience helped me to capture the anxiety and violence in the lives of young indigenous migrants. The sense of loss and the feeling of being away from home were so intense for the boy at the hospital cabin. BGK: Let me come back to the theme of loss you have brought up. What is lost as the young move away from their villages and small towns in the hills? Cultural loss is a trope that anthropologists tend to avoid these days, rather talking about the making or forging of new cultural differences. This is all well; I tend to put it in such terms myself. We introduce Raymond William’s notion of ‘emergent cultures’ to think about this (see Introduction). But again, as the migrants spend most of their youth and adult life in hotels, spas, and restaurants in Mumbai and other big cities, it certainly has implications on the skills they acquire, their sensibilities, and, subsequently, how they get embedded or rooted in a particular landscape or place. The life of a subsistence or jhum farmer depends on intimate knowledge about the place: about where, what, and when to plant, tend, and harvest your crop. Seeds, plants, trees, soil, seasons, rain, sun, animals, and insects are intertwined in highly complex manners that the subsistence farmer needs to master. And not to speak of the physical stamina; this is hard work that one learns by living on and of the land. Our young migrants certainly miss out on a lot of this knowledge. How do we address this, that is, the question of that which is not learned, that which is discarded or indeed lost? I am just reading Piers Vitebsky’s monograph Living Without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos (2017). This is a follow-up of his earlier book Dialogues With the Dead: The Discussion of Mortality Among the Sora of Eastern India (1993). These are both wonderful books, and in the new one we follow Vitebsky as he returns to the Sora and reflects on the changes that have happened during the 40 years since his initial field research in the 1970s. The most striking change he struggles to understand is why most people have converted to Christianity, ‘why the next generation of Sora have completely rejected that

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indigenous religion and the entire way of life that went with it’ (2017: 1). Vitebsky speaks about loss, a world that is being lost forever. There has been a lot of mourning in earlier work on the Nagas and other communities in Northeast India regarding the loss of indigenous ways due to their earlier adoption of Christianity and the modernization process more broadly. I am not asking you to revisit that debate here, but rather to think of some of the things that have come up in our interviews, for example, Lian who is deeply troubled by his inability to speak to his grandparents or cousins as he, due to his family’s mobile life, never had a chance to learn the language of his community, or Jasmine who finds it increasingly difficult to reconnect with family and friends after years of studying outside. Visits back home, she says, become emotionally exhausting (Chapter 3). What are your thoughts on this? DK: Long before indigenous communities from Northeast India became migrants, there was already a deep sense of loss. The experiences of militarization and violence across the hills of Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram, and then the decades of violence in the Brahmaputra valley and the Imphal valley have left behind numerous testimonies of devastating loss of human life, property, and livestock. Akum Longchari reflects on what it means to become an indigenous youth during a period of violence and war in his book Self Determination: A Resource for JustPeace (2016). Throughout these overwhelming decades of armed conflict, communities and families struggled to survive and resist the injustice that was taking place. As we relate to the theme of loss and moving away – or leaving the land as we refer to it in this book – they are intimately connected not only with the land, plants, and the seeds but also with the government bodies and the security forces who regulate these spaces of work and movement. For example, across Nagaland and Mizoram, accounts of burning granaries and rice fields as part of counter-insurgency operations or imposing curfews in villages during the harvest seasons and restricting the working hours of jhum cultivators are well known. Therefore, the theme of loss in this book is to recognize the lives that are lived and the bonds that are forged as indigenous youths become migrants in contemporary India. Michael Jackson’s book The Wherewithal of Life: Migration, Ethics, and the Question of Wellbeing (2013) traces the journeys of people from the Global South to Europe and deals with similar themes of loss, separation, and desires. Addressing the question of, as you put it, ‘that which is not learned, that which is discarded or indeed lost’ forces us to confront the paradox of ethnic assertions through cultural associations and religious fellowships among the young indigenous migrants across the cities we visited. How can they claim a sense of



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losing their tradition and culture while at the same time reviving an extremely strong sense of connection to their homelands and producing new ways of asserting their indigenous identity? This sense of losing their language and being frustrated while visiting family back home, stories that indigenous migrants shared with us, made me reflect on the human conditions and connect with the experiences of the indigenous migrants. It is true that the young migrants are seeking out new lives for themselves and in that process they will leave behind certain things and embrace other experiences. One feels a sense of loss being sedentary and being attached to certain places: the loss of not moving around and seeing the world and meeting new people. In that same manner, there is a constant sense of restlessness and a constant struggle to settle down for others who have left their homes. What we have been able to capture is some of these conversations among young indigenous migrants and in that process also present a biography of the state and the cultures of service. BGK: Finally, thinking back on the research and the meetings with so many of these young migrants, what is it that stands out the most for you? And is there anything in particular that has surprised you, challenged and something you feel that you learned along the way? DK: Yes, this was a challenging project. I wanted to write about the informants and the young migrants without patronizing them. I suppose, coming from Northeast India as an indigenous person myself, I wanted to understand this trend of migration that was taking place. While I left Nagaland to study, this was not necessarily the case for many young people we met during the period of our research. From the kitchen of five-star hotels, hostel dorms, and all the way to the residential quarters where I met with indigenous migrants, I was constantly trying to understand their experiences in those spaces and the transformation that was taking place in their lives. In the midst of challenging working conditions and financial pressures to send remittance back home, these young migrants constantly spoke about the possibilities of acquiring more skills or seeking out employment opportunities with higher salaries. There were seldom conversations about heading back home. It was during these moments I started thinking about presenting a meaningful portrait of these young lives. Does that make sense to you? Let me give you an example. When we were in Kerala conducting fieldwork for the project in December 2015, we met a Tangkhul woman who was working at a parlour. I thought she would miss her home and asked her about her plans to return. She said she was happy to be in Kottayam and did not want to go back to Ukhrul. She described how her relatives brought her from the village and made

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her work in Ukhrul for a year without paying her, and that she felt liberated when she managed to come away to Kerala and find work. The conversation with her made me reflect on the assumed meanings and significance that we impose on leaving the land and moving away from home. Here, two things are happening simultaneously. As young people are moving away, their experiences are no longer being contained within the prescriptive script of indigenous people who live in remote and rural areas. Instead, it appears as though the young are enchanted with moving away, call it migration and mobility, and transform themselves as professionals. Even as they feel the pressure to return home, they feel the attraction of moving further away from home at the same time. I met an indigenous migrant who was working as a server in Mumbai. He wanted to go away and join a cruise ship so that he could earn more. He said he was saving his salary and paying an agent who was arranging for an interview with a cruise liner company. I thought about these jobs as servers in restaurants and on cruise liners. Be it on land or on water, these jobs are similar in many ways. They are focused on serving people and the continuous demands to look after the clients 24 hours a day, and to be always available for the customers in uniforms constantly smiling and bowing to them. What continues to stay with me from this meeting with this young man is the conversation about his kidney treatment. Many of them are not used to drinking enough water since they spend more than 14 hours a day arranging the tables, polishing the cutlery, and then attending to the customers. When we look at these servers in the high-end dining restaurants, we might think that ‘they look so smart and presentable’. But if we think about their health benefits and working conditions, or ailments like kidney infections that they are unable to secure good treatment due to financial problems. How much should we spend our time demanding ‘world class’ service? What is it that makes human beings so entitled to buy ‘world class’ service just because they possess the money to buy service? Can there be a limit to these kinds of logic? I began to wonder. Such methods of extracting services are extremely primitive. A conversation between William Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris on mining and slave ships in their book That Which Is Not Drawn (2014) draws on the current working conditions in the mining areas across the world. For Kentridge, they are similar to those in the era of slavery. Their conversations reminded me of the existing labour conditions in the garment factories. It is in these cramped spaces without any safety regulations that many global fashionable brands are manufactured to satisfy the consumers around the world. Recently, I attended a photo exhibition titled Looking at the Tree Again in Guwahati by a Naga photographer, Zubeni Lotha. The exhibition focused on the early-twentieth-century works of colonial anthropologist Christoph von FürerHaimendorf and representations of the Konyak Nagas in the Naga Hills (see also



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Chapter 3). I remember a particular photograph that portrayed a session where colonial administrators and researchers measured the head and body parts of Naga men and women. When you look at this colonial photograph, it is an experience that many people across the colonized world can relate to. We also see this in the scene with Elle Marja in Sameblod that you talked about earlier. For Zubeni Lotha, such images depict the violence of colonialism. In order to erase the colonial text and give voice to the subjects being photographed, she juxtaposed the colonial image with current testimonials and interviews of families whose grandparents were in the photograph. She said, They [interviewees] said their grandparents were very upset when these white people touched their bodies, sharply twisted their neck and body parts for the camera, and forced them to look at the camera. Many naked pictures of Naga women that were taken by colonial ethnographers and administrators were also staged. I came across stories in the villages where families narrated how their grandmothers when they were young women were forced to take off their shawls and clothes. They were instructed to show their breasts or to put their hand behind their head to get frontal shots of their bare bodies.54

The experiences of young indigenous migrants as servers remind me of these colonial conditions. Such performances and staging of indigenous people as servers are established on training them with soft skills to make them employable in the marketplace. We need to ask ourselves why is it that majority of indigenous youth from Northeast India are being guided towards acquiring ‘soft skills’ such as housekeeping or to work in spa and massage parlours? As development and progress become the driving force to open up Northeast India, an increasing number of indigenous youth will become migrants. This has to do with land and the transformation of agriculture. It is not possible to make ends meet with subsistence agriculture, and the risks and capital required for commercial agriculture mean that experiences of land alienations among poor indigenous families are a reality. This is the reason why many indigenous migrants we met during our research constantly spoke about their desire to own a piece of land or to buy a piece of land for their parents back home. Therefore, the connection between land and migration has to do with the uncertain future of the indigenous people in the Northeast. Will the trend of indigenous migration from Northeast India ever end? I feel our role as anthropologists is to understand what is being erased and silenced as the development initiatives and the mainstreaming projects among  In conversation with Zubeni Lotha in Guwahati (December 2017).

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indigenous communities are implemented across Northeast India. Since India’s independence, the first transformative movements have been around the right to self-determination. Then we witnessed the armed conflict, and thereafter came the dark period of counter-insurgency and the secret killings. All through these decades, the demands for autonomy and ethnic homelands also grew. Subsequently, we saw the era of the Look East Policy in the beginning of the 1990s and the 1997 Indo-Naga ceasefire agreement ushered in the decade of the ceasefire across the region. All through these processes, there was a pressure to constantly seek a lasting solution to peace because the ceasefire and the cessation of hostility were only provisional. There was a feeling that even if this is a time of peace, the time of war is not far away. For instance, in Assam, Nagaland, Tripura, Meghalaya, and Manipur, we are not sure if the ceasefires will continue forever or whether the armed conflict will break out again. In this regard, these political processes have deeply impacted the lives of young indigenous migrants and will continue to do so. Therefore, our story about leaving the land and the experiences of the indigenous migrants is part of presenting the ever-changing relationship between the Indian state and its indigenous population.

Conclusion It is significant that the phenomenon of indigenous migration is as diverse as the individual communities involved. – Carlos Y. A. Trujano, Indigenous Routes, 2008

For two days, the 25th and 26th of February 2016, ministers, senior government officers, scholars, and business people gathered in the posh, newly built, five-star Radisson Blu hotel – situated on the outskirts of Guwahati, close to the airport – for the international ‘Advantage North East India’ conference on the potential of the service sector in Northeast India. At these types of government-sponsored events in and on Northeast India, speakers tend to focus on the untapped potential of the region. It was also the case during these two days. However, instead of focusing on the natural resources that could be tapped, this conference was focused on the untapped human resources. As stated, the estimated rate of creation of new jobs in Northeast India will not be able to keep up with the number of young people graduating from schools and colleges in need of jobs. The good news, though, is that the level of education and more importantly fluency in English among these young people are comparatively high. This speaks, as the organizers pitched it, to a potential for young people to get employed elsewhere in India or abroad. The person at the conference who most elaborately described such potential was the chief guest from Thailand, Professor P. S. Narula. He compared the people of Northeast India to an ‘unpolished diamond’ in terms of skills and service potential. According to Professor Narula, people from Northeast India and Thailand are similar. They share the same qualities, or as he puts it, both possess ‘an inborn quality to put up a smile and to extend hospitality’. It is a matter of passion, he stated with emphasis. And as Professor Narula explained further, being passionate about one’s work is critical in the service industry. If you go to work seven days a week and you are always on time and you do not keep looking at the clock for the shift to end, then there is passion.

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In this book, we have engaged with the ongoing movement of indigenous youths from the Northeastern borderlands to metropolitan cities in mainland India and further abroad. There are specific circumstances or a conjuncture of different historical processes that converge at this particular point of time that explain why people leave their homes and where they travel. The expanding Indian service economy, with its large demand for English-speaking labourers, as noted above, is critical at this juncture because it provides ample opportunities for salaried employment for many indigenous migrants. This was not the case two or three decades ago. Not only are such employment opportunities missing in their respective home states but the salary is also far lesser than what a young person can earn in the hospitality sector outside the region. Working for a cruise ship is a case in point here: recall young Muanching, a migrant from Manipur, whose monthly salary was 200,000. For someone whose alternative is to pursue subsistence agriculture, even a much more meagre salary can be highly attractive. Nabam, for example, who was washing dishes and making juice for tourists in a café in Kerala, cherished the stipulated monthly pay of 5,000, as discussed in Chapter 1. English language proficiency is intimately linked to the history of Christianity in the region, reaching back to the latter part of the nineteenth century. Christian missionaries became an early force of English-medium education in Northeast India, and many of the youths we met in metropolitan India had gone to either  missionary or state-run English-medium schools. Along with English, Northeasterners have accrued a kind of ‘cosmopolitanism’ (McDuie-Ra 2012: 166) or a ‘global chic’ (Pachuau and Van Schendel 2015: 288), which also adds to their attractiveness for the corporate service sector. Another key dynamic relates to the rise of Asia as both an economic and cultural force during the last decades. Northeasterners’ generic Asian features, their un-Indian looks, have also become an asset in the hospitality industry by providing a fresh ‘Asia cool’ ambience to restaurants, spas, and airlines with an eastern profile. Northeasterners easily pass as Japanese, Thai, or Chinese, and at times they are dressed up in ethnic attire – for example, a Japanese kimono – to enhance a supposedly authentic eating experience. The indigenous societies themselves are changing and as we note the young aspire to something else; they want to see the world, experience things, and earn money. Staying back and living on the land is not an attractive proposition. As part of this, the migrating youth also seem to build a more inclusive sense of self. While asserting their special rights as indigenous peoples, they also seek recognition and rights as Indian citizens. This again is different from their parents’ generation, which more directly emphasized their exclusiveness. Subjects of mobility, home, return, dreams, taste, and aspirations were issues that not only illustrated the lives of indigenous migrants but also enabled us to

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conceptualize indigenous migration and affective labour and mobility. Pushed out of their homes through histories of militarization and violence, the experiences of the indigenous migrants gave us the texture, life, and rhythm of their movements and aspirations. All the cities and towns across India they had lived and worked in as migrants touched their lives deeply. Despite accounts of violence, discrimination, or a lack of recognition of their work, they were constantly seeking to enhance their value and professional skills to become more employable. More specifically, with the term ‘indigenous migration’, we claim that the migration of youths from the highlands, however unique, shares certain features with the mobility of other indigenous communities elsewhere in the world that leave their ancestral homelands and move to capital cities or major towns. Hence, in this book, we have subscribed to the idea of certain shared traits that allow us to speak about this form of mobility as an ‘indigenous-specific experience’, to quote Carlos Trujano (2008: 8), from whom we have also borrowed the very notion of ‘indigenous migration’. As we have highlighted in the book, the people from the highlands of Northeast India have all had a troubled relationship with the Indian state since its independence in 1947. Many indigenous communities from the region have over time objected to the idea of being part of a larger Indian nation and have fought violent independence struggles as in the case of the Nagas and the Mizos. The hills can be described as a resource frontier from where hydropower, oil, coal, timber, limestone, and other valuable resources are being extracted in a thoughtless and unsustainable manner. All these ongoing activities inform us about a larger politics of natural resources, including the management of land. Much of the politics in Northeast India revolves around keeping land and natural resources in the hands of the indigenous communities, hence avoiding these being controlled by outsiders. Corrupt and ineffective governing structures have failed to deliver economic development, a view upheld by many indigenous migrants, as shown in different chapters of this book. Many of them desired a life outside subsistence agriculture and there are fewer options than to migrate. The youths who go out for higher education often stay on to work after graduation. As we have highlighted in each chapter of the book, the project of leaving home commonly turns into a journey without the prospect of returning. We have referred to this movement as ‘wayfinding’, stressing the openness of the journey. The majority of the indigenous migrants we interviewed referred to their journey as incomplete and were constantly in search of better employment opportunities. We see many similarities with indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world; for example, the Sámi people of northern Scandinavia, Native American Indians in the USA and Canada, and indigenous Indian communities like the Mapuche in Chile and Argentina.

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The mobility of indigenous migrants, however, is Janus-faced. Many of them are strongly attached to family, community, and ancestral territories. Thus, the memories of life back home are an integral part of their lives and they recreate it through cultural associations and networks. For this reason, all the ethnographic chapters have shown how the ‘indigenous lifeworld’ is stretched and encompasses different groups in Mumbai, Bengaluru, or Hyderabad. There is always a sense of home and a longing to go back, but at the same time many of the indigenous migrants do not see themselves at home in the highlands of Northeast India. Anxious about being unemployed, the violence, and the corrupt system, and having no desire to do farming, they continue to move further away from home. Throughout the chapters of this book we travelled with indigenous migrants, listening to their stories about hardships, adjustments, and their experiences of living through the gruelling working hours. From the cafes along the coast of Varkala, the five-star hotels in Thiruvananthapuram, the fine-dining restaurants in Mumbai, the bars in Bengaluru, the beauty salons across the cities we travelled, to the training centre in Dimapur, indigenous migrants were visible as part of the labour force but often invisible when issues of workers’ rights and wages emerged (Haksar 2016). Dreams, as longings for better future, as nightmares, or as ambitions to secure better jobs, have emerged as a critical theme in this book. The artful ways in which dreams of home and memories of families were kept alive by the eating of indigenous foods became a mode of metabolic transgression, incorporating the soil and labour of those at home who cultivated the crops. Preparing and cooking those dishes, many of which we participated in and shared as guests of interviewees in the cities, made it impossible for us not to be intimately drawn into the lives of indigenous migrants in unexpected ways. They could be painful memories of siblings killed in ethnic conflicts, or everyday worries about how families were coping back home and about relations not working out, or skin rashes that would not heal. Their lives, as portrayed in dense ethnographic accounts across chapters of this book, tell us that building a new home away from home is difficult. Young indigenous migrants experience discrimination and racism regularly in the big cities. Women are especially vulnerable and frequently become victims of sexual violence and harassment. As the Northeastern exodus in 2012 clearly showed, in a situation of crisis, cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune are not considered safe for them. Several migrants we met had rushed home during these dramatic weeks leaving well-paid jobs and rented apartments behind, and when the fear had passed after a few months, most of them returned and had to rebuild their lives from scratch. Staying back with their families, however, implied a loss of freedom and being economically and socially dependent on their parents, something they could not take for long.

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By focusing on the experiences of indigenous migrants in the hospitality sector in India, we have applied the concept of affective labour to analyse what it entails to constantly strive to improve oneself and be ‘professional’: a term that we often came across during our conversations and interviews with informants. To be employable, and to get into the more well-paid parts of the hospitality industry, meant undergoing a radical makeover and acquiring ‘soft skills’, a theme we describe in Chapter 2 of this book. Learning how to stand, walk, talk, dress, apply make-up, and eat, as well as developing personal hygiene, social etiquette, and a general readiness to serve and appease clients or customers, are ‘skills’ that are both performed every day and performances that radically transform their perception of themselves and the world they seek out. In a high-end restaurant, this would involve knowing in detail how a particular dish has been prepared and what it contains. In a fivestar hotel, it might be to anticipate what a particular customer needs or wants; for example, to suggest a massage to someone who has arrived after a long overseas flight. The experiences of work within the service sector might stand out as different from that of indigenous peoples more generally who have been forced to leave their ancestral territories. Caring for the needs of others, and the long hours and stressful work, certainly takes a toll on the migrants and their families at home, who worry about their safety and try to stay in contact, often having to wait until late after midnight to speak over the telephone. That young people still look for these jobs does not have anything to do with a passion to serve, as claimed by Professor Narula, but rather shows that people have the determination and stamina to change their lives and seek out new possibilities. The state modality of affirmative action for those categorized as STs has less currency today. Paradoxically enough, it is instead the corporate sector that operates the hospitality sector that has embraced the indigenous migrants from the uplands of Northeast India.

Afterword

Bridging Ruptures Duncan McDuie-Ra

Migration from the Northeast frontier to other parts of India (and beyond) has progressed from a peripheral topic a decade ago to an essential component for understanding the region. Leaving the Land adds further richness and texture to the journeys being undertaken by migrants, mostly youth from the Northeast India, to salons, hotels, and even agricultural lands all over India. These stories expand knowledge of Northeast migrants and labour markets beyond Delhi – the site where I explored the idea in the very early 2010s – to locations in south India in particular, demonstrating the extent of labour niches coveting Northeast migrants and the social, kin, and familial networks stretching from villages on the borders with Myanmar to villages in coastal Goa. Through these stories Kikon and Karlsson paint a picture of migrant life familiar to many young people who have left the Northeast over the years. Yet they also paint a picture of a region left behind that is fast becoming devoid of young people. Many of those who remain are dreaming about leaving, and many of those who have returned are living with nostalgia for the life they lead outside the frontier. As the authors remind us throughout the book, the poignant issue facing the region in the contemporary age is retaining indigenous youth – or at the very least, encouraging their return – to ancestral homelands gravid with the memories, struggles, and uneven spoils of what Sanjib Baruah (2005) has famously called the ‘durable disorder’ of the Northeast. And it is on this last point that Leaving the Land brings us to another critical conjuncture in the history of the region. ***

The modern history of the Northeast can be thought of as a series of ruptures. Lund conceptualizes ruptures as ‘open moments’ (Lund 2016), moments when ‘opportunities and risks multiply, when the scope of outcomes widens, and when new structural architecture is erected’ (ibid.). As an analytical tool for accounting for

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change, ruptures are ‘dramatic and violent’ change as opposed to slower, incremental change (Lund 2016). As such, ruptures recalibrate notions of rights, entitlements, and the social and political order of different polities; and often the very constitution and boundaries of the polities in question. If we take the ‘modern’ history of the erstwhile territories that make-up the contemporary Northeast as beginning – more or less – with the various phases of colonial incursion in the nineteenth century that brought them into the imperial order, and that by 1947 made mergers into the Indian Union possible, even if unpopular, then I suggest there are four main ruptures that characterize the region’s encounters with modernity. To reiterate, I am not referring to four historical periods or themes, but four ruptures: four ‘moments’ that have recalibrated the region – unevenly to be sure. These are not necessarily episodic; one need not end for another to begin, but there is a trajectory here, and the remnants of each rupture remain in the bedrock of what follows. Leaving the Land helps to locate us among these four ruptures, bridging the third and fourth.

Rupture 1: Colonization The colonization of what is now the Northeast was characterized by extreme violence, the creation and enforcement of categories of people who have persisted and remain objects of desire – tribals in particular, the dismantling of erstwhile kingdoms and princely states, the transformation of belief systems, and the reorganization of relations of production, land use, and authority.55 As a rupture, colonization is best captured by the infamous Inner-Line that separated parts of the Northeast as ‘backward tracts’, which Kar (2009) refers to as a ‘line in time’. He writes, ‘[T]he advance of the Line on map was read as the progress from precapital to capital, from the time of “no law” to the time of “law”.’ Colonization was an extraordinary rupture occurring in a relatively brief period, especially in the hill areas. Multiple agents participated in the processes of rupture, very unevenly, and in different moments making singular characterization difficult. By the end of the Second World War and the creation of India and East Pakistan in 1947, along with the earlier separation of Burma in 1935, the external boundaries of what is now the Northeast were more or less fixed, though certainly not accepted by all. Often a footnote to stories of empire in South Asia, and even excluded altogether, whether colonization even ended in the Northeast remains a legitimate question, given that integration into India was resisted immediately and enduringly in the decades following Independence (Kar 2011).  T he literature here is enormous and well beyond the scope of this short Afterword. Three standout examples are: Longkumer (2010); Robb (1997); Zou and Kumar (2011).

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Rupture 2: Rebellion Armed rebellion against the Indian state brought further violence, the militarization of social and political life through extraordinary laws like the Armed Forces Special Power Act 1958 – still in operation in parts of the region, and created a system of ‘parallel authority’ (see Baruah 2001) wherein civilian and military positions are interchangeable and governance is only partially enacted by elected representatives. Having taken different forms in different parts of the Northeast, armed rebellion has eased completely in places such as Mizoram, appears close to easing in Nagaland, and has re-emerged in others such as in parts of Assam and Tripura. As many scholars have noted, rebellion against the Indian state has evolved into the defence of ‘homelands’, often steering the focal point of violence away from the state and to other communities: whether neighbours, migrants or refugees, or local authority. Perhaps there is no clearer manifestation of this than calls to reintroduce the colonial Inner Line Permit system to prevent non-indigenous people from settling in specific ethnic homelands. As a rupture, rebellion – and the counterinsurgency response of the state – has normalized militarization and extrajudicial killing, empowered local elites within and outside formal political structures, embedded patron–client relations at the heart of economic and social development, and left ethnicity – often predicated on colonial categories institutionalized in the postcolonial state – as the defining boundary of community to be protected and courted depending on the political winds.

Rupture 3: Leaving the Frontier Ruptured lands provide limited opportunities, and in recent decades, migration out of the region has become an integral part of the social and economic worlds of the Northeast communities. It has also drawn the attention of scholars focusing on different elements of migration, from the lives lived by migrants, the debates that their experiences have catalysed in the national public sphere (McDuie-Ra 2015b), to the connections they have to home, the latter being a powerful theme in Leaving the Land. In my own work on Northeast migrants in Delhi, I argued that migration is symptomatic of push factors – seeking refuge from conflict, changing attitudes towards India, and increased connectivity between the frontier and other parts of India – and pull factors – the availability of work in retail, hospitality, and call centres and the opportunity to study outside the region. Further, the availability of work means that migrants from the Northeast can support themselves and/or family members to study, which will give an edge – or at least the perception of an edge – in labour markets back in the north-east, especially in the public sector, and to meet changing aspirations and consumer desires (McDuie-Ra 2013).

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Almost a decade on it is clear that this was merely scratching the surface. Works that followed, including Leaving the Land, have demonstrated the deepening dependence on migration for individuals, families, and whole communities, and the ways racialized labour niches have proliferated beyond just retail, beauty, and hospitality sectors into care work in both hospitals and private facilities – even households – not only in other parts of India well beyond Delhi but also beyond major metropolitan areas in general. Migrants from the Northeast are going further and further for work, which sometimes does not seem more lucrative or even more plentiful than work back home. And the distances just seem to grow. In late 2017, I was walking past a domestic labour agent in the Katong area of Singapore. On the window was a list of source countries for maids. The list read: Indonesia, Myanmar, Mizoram. Here, thousands of kilometres and many countries from the frontier, Mizoram finally gets the equivalent of sovereign status on a Singapore shopfront. The sign also completed an unexpected loop, as back in 2010 when completing work on Northeast migrants I photographed a sign in Aizawl offering placement to Mizo workers abroad, including in Singapore, an image that appeared in the book (McDuie-Ra 2012). Migration, work, and encounters between frontier dwellers and people in other parts of India are changing the way the region and its communities are perceived on the one hand and heightening stereotypes and vulnerabilities on the other. And while migration and paid work might be empowering, especially for women, they bring Northeast migrants into labour markets where their education and skills are often undervalued. Indeed, sticking with the example above, Mizoram is often flaunted for its impressive literacy rates and gender equity indicators – usually the highest in India depending on the survey in question – yet increasingly its young workforce covet and are coveted for jobs that require no such education or skills. Risks, opportunities, and scope have been multiplying at a rapid pace, yet as Kikon and Karlsson remind us, we must still pay heed to lands left behind, to the frontier and the prospect of return.

Rupture 4: Return Returnees will shape the Northeast of the 2020s and 2030s: The ways they imagine the region, the ideas and networks they bring back to the region, and the distance from the generation who fought against India. Leaving the Land bridges the third and fourth ruptures. It adds further to the literature on Northeast migrants, their lives, their experiences, their aspirations, and the changing labour and education markets in different parts of India that draw migrants far from home. Yet it also begins to delve into the fourth rupture, into the possibilities and implications of return. Though it is difficult to make general statements about

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Northeast migrants, most spend anywhere between two years and a decade out of the region – some less and some much longer – and there is enough research to suggest that return is both a desire and obligation for most migrants. As Kikon and Karlsson show in the book itself and in their travels throughout the Northeast to exhibit the visual material from the project, return is the latest ‘open moment’, a conjuncture from which risks and opportunities are spewing forth in ways that are difficult to capture, let alone calculate. As research in and of the Northeast progresses, understanding the ways return to the region shapes urbanization, building and construction, labour and land markets, and party politics is crucial. However, return is creating new dynamics that are yet to be fully explored. Returnees carry with them knowledge of metropolitan India, of private sector capitalism, of care and service industries, of ways of making do, of different languages, and of various national and regional cultural forms – both embraced and rejected. The scale of migration over the last two decades means that more and more of the smart, educated, and ambitious youth from the Northeast are spending their formative years and early stages of their working lives outside of it. So too are those who simply cannot find a future at home. For many young people, it is better to pass time far away from home vaguely seeking some kind of future, away from watchful eyes, gossip, and the spectre of failure. More and more indigenous youth are growing up far from the homelands that older generations fought for and carrying much more of India with them when they return. And indeed whether they return for good is becoming a much more difficult scenario to predict. Return can be underwhelming and frustrating, and memories of a time of life lived in other places are a strong pull back to India or elsewhere. Leaving the Land begins to question what this means for the land itself, for the communities and cultures that have persevered through the ruptures of modern state-making, and for the local political agglomerations seeking a closer alignment with what is happening in the rest of India rather than resisting it. Kikon and Karlsson invite us to follow the paths of migrants from the Northeast to faraway places and back again. And it is attention to return that opens new avenues for scholarship in and of the region.

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Index Abbas, Rameez, 4 Advantage North East India, 129 affective labour, 17–22, 24, 43–44, 47–49, 120, 130, 132 Agamben, Giorgio, 13 Ahmed, Sara, 21 Arunachal Pradesh, 2, 6, 8, 32, 34–35, 65, 88, 93, 114, 118 Nokte, 35 Assam, 2, 5–8, 23, 33, 35, 37, 52, 62, 68, 86, 88, 102, 116–119, 121, 128, 136 Guwahati, 7, 68, 70, 74, 76, 79–81, 86, 88–89, 118, 126, 129 aviation industry, 6 Barbora, Sanjay, 3 Baruah, Sanjib, 14, 114, 134 Bateson, Gregory, 44 Bauman, Zygmunt, 114 Benjamin, Walter, 83 Bengaluru, 9, 13, 18, 22–23, 30, 33, 37–38, 40–41, 47, 61, 66, 69, 71–73, 82, 84, 109, 118–120, 132 Ejipura, 38, 84 Bhattacharjee, Kishalay, 67 Biehl, Joao, 84 Boek, Fillip de, 84 borders, 2, 6, 11, 22, 30, 39, 51, 73, 77, 134 brickkilns, 4, 31 Cadena, Marisol de la, 64

capital, 4–5, 8, 19, 33, 57, 117, 127, 135 businessmen, 14 investments, 6, 14, 21 Christianity, 123–124, 130 Church-based organization, 16 citizenship, 1, 4–5, 17–19, 24, 53–54, 56, 97–98, 104, 106, 111, 116 documents, 20, 56, 104–105 Clifford, James, 116 conflict, 2, 6, 8, 15, 37, 40–41, 44, 51, 80, 103, 113, 124, 128, 136 construction, 4, 33, 120, 138 projects, 8 sites, 11, 31, 105 Cresswell, Tim, 28 cultivation jhum (or shifting or swidden), 1n1, 6, 8, 21, 35, 51, 83, 121, 123–124 monocropping, 6 plantations, 6, 11, 21, 33 sharecropping, 8 culture residual, 19–20 emergent, 19–20, 61–62, 123 indigenous, 19, 62, 64 Delhi, 30, 41–43, 53, 56–57, 60, 62, 68, 76, 79–82, 102, 109, 118, 134, 136–137 diaspora, 11, 30, 78, 120 economy, 15, 21–22, 29, 33, 38–39, 47, 130

Index Empson, Rebecca, 84 Eskerod, Torben, 84 Facebook, 37, 78 Farrer, James, 101 Ferguson (2013), 27n7 food, 13, 16, 24, 40, 53, 61, 71, 75–77, 79, 81, 105–109, 112, 120, 122 experience, 12, 97–99, 109–110 indigenous, 13, 77, 98, 100, 111–112 nostalgia, 12 savour, 100, 108 taste, 12–13, 16, 18, 79, 98–112, 130 Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von, 31, 90 Gigante, Denise, 108 Gupta, Akhil, 47 Hage, Ghassan, 12, 97, 120 Haksar, Nandita, 23, 106–107, 113 Hardt, Michael, 49 Hasan, Anjum, 66 Heneise, Michael, 105 Hinkson, Melinda, 90 highways, roads, 2, 8, 12, 35, 65, 75, 90, 95, 104, 116, 119 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 44 Holmes, Seth, 122-123 hospitality industry, 5–7, 13, 16–19, 23, 27, 41–43, 48, 51, 53–55, 57–59, 70, 75, 88, 97–98, 101–102, 130, 133 art on the plate, 108 bars, 17–18, 29, 132 experience, 6, 17, 19, 21, 43, 83, 132 five-star hotels, 26, 42, 58, 83, 125, 132 restaurants, 4–5, 12–13, 16–17, 19, 22, 26, 42, 52, 58, 90–91, 98, 100–102, 106–107, 110–112, 123, 126, 130, 132 taste and service, 98, 101

151

Howard, Heather A., 64 Hyderabad, 9, 22, 72–75, 78, 82, 118, 132 University of Hyderabad, 62, 73–75 hydropower projects, 8 identity formation, 61 Indian Institute of Management, 76 indigenous belonging, 5, 11, 16, 30, 39, 63, 80, 111 citizenship, 1, 4–5, 17–19, 24, 53–54, 56, 97, 98, 104, 106, 111, 116 communities, 2, 6, 14, 19–20, 31, 33–34, 67, 75, 78–79, 97, 102, 105, 116, 124, 128, 131 culture, 19, 62, 64, 98, 112 dreams, 6, 8, 12, 16, 24, 26, 98–105, 109–110, 113, 120, 130, 132 experiences, 1, 116 food, 13, 98, 100, 111–112 frontiers, 14 land (hinterlands), 8, 16 land alienation, 29, 29n12, 127 lifeworlds, 6, 12–13, 23–24, 27–28, 38–40, 58, 61, 65, 83, 120–121, 132 migrants, 1, 4–9, 12–14, 16–22, 24, 27–28, 30, 32–34, 40–41, 43, 51–53, 56–58, 61, 67, 97–101, 103–113, 117, 121–125, 127–128, 130–133 mobility, 1, 63, 65, 90, 98, 117 peoples, 2, 5, 8–10, 14–15, 29, 46, 51, 61–65, 114, 130–131, 133 population, 2, 108, 112, 128 return, 4–5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 21, 24–27, 31, 34, 36, 37n22, 48, 52–53, 58, 60, 64–67, 69–73, 76–78, 81–82, 98, 101–102, 104, 114–116, 120, 126, 131–132, 134, 137–138 savage/backward/primitive, 2, 19, 31, 90, 126

152 Index vulnerability, 40, 43, 119 youth, 1, 4, 9, 11, 15, 19, 22, 28–29, 41, 43, 52, 58, 60–61, 63–64, 97–98, 103, 112, 124, 127, 130, 134, 138 Ingold, Tim, 28n10 Inner-Line Permit, 135 Instagram, 6 insularity, 1 isolation, 1, 20 Jackson, Michael, 63 Jamir, Maongnungsang, 13 Jansen and Löfving (2009), 40 Jeffrey, Craig, 103 Jet Airways, 44n26, 69 Jharkhand, 4, 80, 117 Jilangamba, Yengkhom, 56 jobs better opportunity, 104, 117, 136 probation, 20 salary, 7, 18, 34–35, 48, 122, 126, 130 skills development programmes, 46 JW Marriott, 50 Kar, Bodhisattva, 135 Karlsson, Bengt G., 18, 22, 25, 31 Kempinski, 69 Kentridge, William, 126 Kerala, 8, 22, 26, 31–33, 35–36, 40–41, 65, 94, 118, 120, 125–126, 130 Thiruvananthapuram, 9, 19, 23, 26, 30, 32, 35–37, 40–41, 83, 93-94, 102, 121, 132 Kikon, Dolly, 22, 25, 37n22, 53, 97, 102–103, 107–108 law, 31, 135–136 Lindquist, Johan, 12 Lobo, Susan, 64 Lotha, Zubeni, 126–127

Malkki, Liisa, 117 Mankekar, Purnima, 17, 21–22, 47, 98 Manipur, 2, 5–7, 23, 26–27, 32, 34, 37, 40, 51–53, 62, 70, 73, 75–80, 82, 88, 102, 107, 118, 124, 128, 130 Imphal, 61, 124 Hill areas, 2 Kom, 52n33, 79 Kuki, 37–38, 79 Mapuche, 64, 131 Markiewicz, Andrzej, 22, 24, 84, 95

McDuie-Ra, Duncan, 16, 23, 25, 53, 82

McLean, Stuart, 120 Meghalaya, 2, 5–6, 34, 60, 65, 67, 88, 118–119, 128 Shillong, 55, 60–62, 65–72, 74–75, 80, 82, 104, 119 Sora (or Sohra), 123 Menon, Vishal, 13 metropolis life, 28 anxieties, 53, 101, 104–105 migration anxieties, 12, 17, 53, 58, 68, 97, 100–101, 104, 112, 117 class, 14, 53 collective experience, 6, 24, 112 communication, 45, 54, 99, 102 cyclic, 11, 31, 51 destination, 6–7, 11, 28, 32, 40, 51, 62, 82, 88, 93, 97, 118, 121 emigration, 28, 32 external, 98 internal, 4, 21, 23, 30–31, 39, 51, 73 mobility, 1, 4, 6, 8–11, 13–17, 21, 28–29, 31, 34, 41, 44, 47, 58, 60–61, 63–65, 73, 78, 82, 90, 97–102, 105, 112–113, 115–118, 126, 130–131 origin, 5, 30, 39

Index out, 12 pull factors, 136 push factors, 136 recipient countries, 11 remittance, 21, 32, 40, 102, 125 return, 4–5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 21, 24–27, 31, 34, 36, 37n22, 48, 52–53, 58, 60, 64–67, 69–73, 76–78, 81–82, 98, 101–102, 104, 114–116, 120, 126, 131–132, 134, 137–138 militarization army personnel, 14 counter-insurgency, 103, 124, 128 extrajudicial killings, 136 youth-profiling, 56 Mizo, 14, 33, 73, 131, 137 Mizoram, 2, 5–6, 14, 33–34, 40, 88, 124, 136–137 Aizawl, 14, 137 Morris, Rosalind C.,126 Morung Express, 45, 86, 88 Mumbai, 7, 9, 13, 19, 22, 30, 33, 40–42, 48–49, 50, 52–53, 57, 61, 69, 75–76, 82–83, 88, 91, 97, 101–104, 107, 109–110, 118, 121–123, 126, 132 Kalina, 53, 109 Naga, 2, 13–14, 23, 26, 31, 36–37, 44, 48–53, 57, 73–76, 102, 106–107, 116, 118, 124, 126–128, 131 barbarism, 2, 31 ceasefire, 51, 128 citizenship, 106, 111, 116 out migration, 12 primitivism, 2 Nagaland, 2, 5–6, 23, 31–34, 36, 40–43, 45, 48, 50–53, 57–58, 62, 70, 74, 86, 88, 90, 94, 101–105, 107, 116, 118, 121–122, 124–125, 128, 136

153

Dimapur, 18, 22-23, 31, 42–45, 49–51, 56, 58, 61, 86, 88–90, 102, 116– 117, 121, 132 Jalukie, 122 Mon, 36–38, 40–41, 94 Narula, P.S., 129 National Institute on Education Planning and Administration, 45 Negri, Antonio, 49 Nepal, 2, 6, 34, 86, 90 Kathmandu, 86, 89 Nienu, Huvelu, 6 North Eastern Council, 2 North Eastern Hill University (NEHU), 72 Northeast India, 1–7, 9–17, 19–24, 27–28, 31–34, 37, 42–43, 46, 51–53, 56–58, 60–62, 64–65, 69, 71–72, 74, 78, 81, 84, 86, 88–90, 95, 97–103, 105–109, 111–112, 114, 118, 121–122, 124–125, 127–134 Northeast India Welfare Association Chennai (NEIWAC), 78 Norway, 7, 64, 114 Geirangerfjord, 7 Ong, Aihwa, 111 Opas, Minnas, 105 Operation Green Hunt, 15 Orissa, 15 Otis, Eileen, 47 Pachuau, Joy, 33 Pandian, Anand, 120 Pariat, Janice, 60 Patel, Reena, 33 photo ethnography, 24, 83–96 physical harm, 16 Plissart, Marie-Francoise, 84 Punjab, 79

154 Index Qatar Airways, 48 Rabha, 119 race racial discrimination, 16, 40, 52, 56, 80, 105 grooming and style, 42–43, 45, 49–51, 54, 58, 111 language skills, 7, 16–17, 27, 33, 38, 43, 52, 55, 62, 81, 130 make-up, 17–19, 46, 48, 50, 54–55, 57, 91, 120, 133, 135 racial features, 16, 18 Railways, 2 Ray, Krishnendu, 100 resource extraction, 14, 119, 131 coal, 119, 131 limestone, 119, 131 timber, 119, 131 retail industry, 4, 47,136 Malls, 16, 19, 101, 107 right to self-determination, 7, 128 riverine ecosystems, 8 Sachs, Jeffrey, 15 Salwa Judum, 15 Sámi, 64, 114–115, 131 Sameblod, 114–115, 127 Samuels, Fiona, 39 Schendel, Willem van, 33 Schonberg, Jeffrey, 84 service industry, 1, 15–16, 21, 27, 44, 83, 129 salons, 4–5, 18, 32, 90, 101, 111, 119, 120, 132, 134 spas, 4–5, 7, 16–17, 42, 44, 83, 91, 111, 120, 123, 130 Shah, Alpa, 4 Sherman, Rachel, 42

Siegel, James T., 56 Sikkim, 6, 88 Gangtok, 86 Sikkim University, 74 Simte, Muanching, 7 Singha, Rajdeep, 3 Solier, Isabelle De, 109 state local, 6, 14, 29 political elite, 14 postcolonial, 2, 136 student-based organisation, 11, 16, 24, 29, 36, 61–62, 73–75, 79, 82, 88, 120 Subba, Tanka B., 27n8, 52 Sundar, Nandini, 15 Tamil Nadu, 76–77, 80 Chennai, 11, 13, 41, 69, 72, 76–78, 82, 102 Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Guwahati campus), 68, 86 Thangsing, Lallian, 7 The Ideal Pharmacy, 118 The People Channel, 18, 42, 44–46, 54, 89 transport, 2, 4, 11, 53, 73, 78, 82, 101, 107 Tripura, 2, 6, 88, 128, 136 Trujano, Carlos, 131 urbanization, 9, 61, 65, 138 Varma, Divya, 4 violence, 2–3, 5–6, 8, 14, 18, 23, 29, 37–38, 51, 62, 81, 100–101, 111, 113, 117, 123–124, 127, 131–132, 135–136 racial, 16, 101, 105 state, 3, 6, 8, 14, 51, 62, 103, 112, 136 insurgent, 14–15, 31, 51, 58, 103, 112, 124, 128, 136 sexual assaults, 70, 132 Vitebsky, Piers, 123

Index wayfinding, 11, 22, 26–41, 60, 68, 84, 86, 90, 131 Weiner, Myron, 23 West Bengal, 33, 102 Williams, Raymond, 19–21, 123 Wouters, Jelle J. P., 27n8, 52 Xiang, Biao, 12

YouTube, 19, 50 Yuuka at the Palladium, 107 Žižek, Slavoj, 113 ZubeniLotha, 126–127

155