Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration

Leaving and Living

Sadan Jha, Pushpendra Kumar Singh, Sadan Jha, Pushpendra Kumar Singh

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000429428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Einwanderungspolitik

This volume explores ideas of home, belonging and memory in migration through the social realities of leaving and living. It discusses themes and issues such as locating migrant subjectivities and belonging; sociability and wellbeing; the making of a village; bondage and seasonality; dislocation and domestic labour; women and work; gender and religion; Bhojpuri folksongs; folk music; experience; and the city to analyse the social and cultural dynamics of internal migration in India in historical perspectives. Departing from the dominant understanding of migration as an aberration impelled by economic factors, the book focuses on the centrality of migration in the making of society. Based on case studies from an array of geo-cultural regions from across India, the volume views migrants as active agents with their own determinations of selfhood and location.

Part of the series Migrations in South Asia, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of migration studies, refugee studies, gender studies, development studies, social work, political economy, social history, political studies, social and cultural anthropology, exclusion studies, sociology, and South Asian Studies.

1 Introduction

Locating subjectivities and belonging in migration

Sadan and Pushpendra

In between leaving and living

A migrant leaves his or her home to live somewhere else. This movement, the shift from home to locations elsewhere, is foundational to the migrant experience. In this shift, the journey entails a certain distantiation. While in the phenomenon of leaving, the act is necessarily attached to the home (i.e., leaving home), in the case of living, the suffix is a nondescript “somewhere else”. The living remains ambiguous, to say the least. Somewhere else implies a place other than home, a non-home. While the home has a definite location, living lacks the audacity and the depth. It is as though by living somewhere else, a migrant is condemned to a foundational lack – the lack of dwelling. You might live somewhere else, in fact, anywhere, but you cannot dwell anywhere – as if “somewhere else” necessarily comes before us as a concept emptied of its own dwelling, a concept hanging loose in the void. If correct and not fallacious, this is a dangerous proposition. How can a concept be devoid of its own location? How can a social reality exist bereft of its belonging?

Such a line of inquiry then makes it imperative to contemplate the journey, the shift, the movement, or the processes between leaving and living. How can one make sense of this movement from home to somewhere else, a going away from the supposedly well-defined dwelling invariably associated with the word “home”? At one level, the move appears fundamentally spatial. Unless there is a shift in location, there cannot be migration. However, what may seem to be so obvious turns out to have by and large escaped scholarly attention. In fact, the concept of migration has been primarily studied in temporal and not in spatial terms (we will return to attend to this apathy to spatial dynamics shortly).

Following the question of belonging (or the lack of it), and the movement that is inherent in the leaving of home and living somewhere else, another question confronts us: is the journey from home to somewhere else so unidirectional, conceptually uncomplicated, and emotionally well-sorted that we pay attention merely to the reasons behind leaving and the consequences of living somewhere else? Are the grids and scaffoldings already in place, and is the filling in sociological and historical details all we need to do? The answer would be an obvious no. Among other things, the social realities of the journey, the process of leaving, changes not only the vantage points but the very idea of home and of living as well. This process, its temporal entanglements, and socio-spatial embedding lead to the emergence of multiple coordinates between leaving and living. One realises that not only do home and somewhere else switch their positions, but each of them also has crucial bearings upon the other. Home and somewhere else no longer remain binaries locked in oppositional traits. At times, they become indistinguishable from each other. A migrant finds a home somewhere else. The ideas and imageries of home and belonging never leave a migrant even though s/he leaves his or her dwelling.

The essays presented in this volume touch upon some of these coordinates to unpack the social reality between leaving and living. More than excavating the objective reality and the defined dynamics between leaving and living, the essays privilege subjectivities and the perceptive contours that go into making this social reality called migration. Gazing at this vast and open field, where one enters through two tiny dots of leaving and living, one identifies a broad thematic rubric of belonging, which is what connects, the essays of this volume though loosely, with the same precarious bonding that connects migrants as a community among themselves. The idea of belonging encompasses home, memory, place, intersectionalities with identities, becoming, and heterogeneity. The focus of all of these, however, is on unravelling the social dynamics of migration in India.

Before moving on to deliberate upon the overarching rubric of belonging – its constituents, their interconnections, and their significance in unravelling the complexities of migration – it may be prudent to locate our intervention in the existing discourse on the subject by delineating a genealogy that will help identify the key epistemic shifts in this discourse and the proposed point of departure of this volume.

Revisiting the discourse on migration

Migration has been the foundation of human civilisation and its social formations across time periods. Palaeo-archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists have convincingly delineated the various phases of migration whereby human groups branched out of Africa and populated the globe. However, the scholarly discourse on migration predominantly conceives human migration as brought on by exceptional moments in a society’s life, caused by one or the other factor. These factors are then further traced to the economic dynamics of societies. Broadly, a scenario emerges where staying in the vicinity of a home is considered normal and routine, but leaving it becomes extraordinary, abnormal, and a rupture in the rhythm of the social life. The binaries of living and leaving as well as staying and mobility, thus, envision home as a privileged epistemic location. To borrow Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 23) criticism, “history is always written from a sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary state apparatus”. They call for replacing such history with nomadology. A call for nomadology must not be seen as an attempt to erase the specificities that have gone into making the figure of a migrant and conceptually treat migrants as nomads without paying attention to their distinctiveness in history. The allegory of criticism comes from an altogether different context:

The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory. Nomads and migrants can mix in many ways, or form a common aggregate; their causes and conditions are no less distinct for that (for example, those who joined Mohammed at Medina had a choice between a nomadic or Bedouin pledge, and a pledge of hegira or emigration).

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 380)

The relevance of such a criticism of history lies in its potential to open new perspectives and fresh questions to return to aspects like belongingness and home. Far from diluting the significance of migration, a call for nomadology makes migration central to the idea of society and history.

Emphasising the centrality of migration in social formations, historians, and social scientists from other disciplines, have started looking at human movement as an ordinary rather than exceptional dimension of human life, as a ubiquitous characteristic feature of human experience itself. Following Peter Manning (2004) and other recent interventions in history writing, Donna Gabaccia calls this approach as “integrating migration into world history”, where humans are recast as a “migratory species” rather than a sedentary one (Gabaccia and Hoerder 2011: 3). However, this recent integrationist scholarship also points out that while we ought not to see human mobility as extraordinary, “Migration and mobile persons came to be problematised conceptually only during the formation of a modern international system of nation-states in the centuries after the 1648 treaty of Westphalia”, a period also identified as “foundational for the concept of sovereignty, and thus border controls over mobility” (Gabaccia 2015: 40).

At another level, this scholarship gets closely interwoven with the history of industrialisation and later with globalisation. Increasingly, the modern state’s concerns, economics, and law gave rise to a public climate filled with insecurity towards the immigrants and a sense of what is termed as “moral panic” (Lucassen et al. 2010: 4).¹ In recent times, the influx of Syrian immigrants to European countries, Mexican immigrants to the US, or Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar to India have raised such moral panic. The attribution of such banality to migration will have serious implications for the discourse of migration itself. While dealing with “moral panic” as unethical, migrations scholars are also faced with the risk of “normalising” migration. It could be argued that conceptualising migration as “ordinary” runs the risk of undermining and trivialising the exploitative, traumatic, and agonising aspects of the suffering caused by displacement and dislocation. Normalising mobility might also potentially entail normalising the forces responsible for such suffering and letting them off the hook. While acknowledging these ethical concerns, it is paramount for migration scholars to refrain from the kind of moral panic referred to earlier and not treat migrants as mere objects devoid of sociality and subjectivities.

To overcome the moral panic and “to surpass the exceptionalism of migration and the figure of the migrant”, scholars have suggested “demigrantization of migration research” and that this “should be paralleled and connected with the migrantization of research on society and culture initiating a process of ‘normalisation’” (Dogramaci and Mersmann 2019: 12). Effectively, this necessitates approaching migration from different perspectives as migration is indeed multifaceted and, therefore, demands interdisciplinarity in its study – something that is often ignored or at best attended to in passing.

While recognising that migration has always been a critical constitutive factor of human history, the subject formation of the migrant has taken a particular historical trajectory. The modern migrant (and immigrant in the international context) is different from that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century under the colonial conditions. Samaddar (2016) refers to

[t]he hidden histories of conflicts, desperate survivals, and new networks growing as well as old networks being transplanted across great expanse and zones. Studies of hunger in the nineteenth century, of itinerant movements, transportations of coolies, spread of famines, shipping of children, adult girls, trafficking in sex, labour, and human organs, and welfare legislations to cope with this great infamy tell us how actually we have arrived at our own time of subject formation under the conditions of empire.

Modern migration is caused not just by the reasons referred to above, but a host of new factors which we will discuss at appropriate places. However, extending this argument, one might safely claim that while migration has been an ongoing historical process, the figure of the migrant is a modern conception.

The modernity of the figure of migrant gets accentuated when we attempt to unpack the linguistic lineages going into making the figure of a migrant in the Indian context. There is still no specific word for “migrant” and “migration” in India’s various vernacular traditions. For example, in Hindi and other North Indian languages, the word used for a migrant is pravaasi. This is a generic term for someone who stays away from home. There is no doubt that pravaasi has a definite spatial connotation and is different from yaatri (traveller) or yaayaawar (wanderer). The term vaasi is used to refer to one’s roots, whereas pravaas refers to living at another place (destination). Vaasi and pravaasi are twin identities of a person denoting two spatial points of leaving and living. In recent times, pravaasi has entered the state lexicon as a term for the Indian diaspora community and Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) for whom the common term so far had been Bhartiya mool ke (Persons of Indian origin or PIO) and apravaasi, respectively. However, in the strict sense of the term, pravaasi neither means emigrant nor necessarily involves border-making. The right term would have been apravaasi. There are other related terms in Hindi. Pravajjan and pravajjani, for instance, can be linked with emigration. This term closely aligns with another frequently used word: pardesi (lit. foreigner, outsider). Both pravaasi and pardesi have acquired extraordinary fluidity and do not necessarily adhere to political nation-state boundaries. Fluidity is the strength of a word. In English, for example, “foreign” is one such word that is used not only to denote someone or something from across the border but also the unknown, alien.

Here, we must differentiate between videsh and pardes. Desh is a common word that refers not just to a country but also a “territory”. It stands for a perceived or real territory linked with territorialisation, whereas pardes points to de-territorialisation in the migratory process. Thus, a native from Bihar living and working in Delhi frequently gets identified as a pravaasi Bihari in his or her native state. Similarly, a lover coming from outside the village is marked as pardesi in poetic and cinematic registers. Here, it may be worth mentioning that the term exodus also does not have any commonly used linguistic sibling in the vernacular. For exodus, the closest Hindi word is niskraman or nirgaman. Using the phrase “bhari sankhya mein palaayan” (migration in heavy numbers) is the other way to refer to it. Moreover, languages expand, particularly living languages. We do have specific terms like coolie or girmitiya emerging out of a specific historical context of overseas indentured migration.² Thus, on the one hand, while the vernacular lacks a robust vocabulary and words with certain definitional finitude, on the other hand, we have these linguistic markers coming from specific contexts that have not been able to transcend their specific historical contextual meanings. Does this mean that we do not have practices and empirical evidence on the varied and differentiated dimensions of migration at social levels? Certainly not! Historians have pointed out that the exodus was quite frequent in pre-colonial periods, in fact, a routine phenomenon, to escape exploitation from the local landlords or ruling class in villages. In this context, we come across Palaayan, another generic term for the migration process, which literally means “escaping” and perhaps, for this reason, has prevailed over the use of another term, bahirgaman. Gradually, palaayan has become a popular term among migrating communities and vernacular literature referring to all sorts of migrations – voluntary and involuntary, those of labourers and students, and internal and across the border. Even a cursory glance at the vernacular vocabulary is enough to suggest a kind of disjuncture between the social reality of migration and its conceptualisation in vernacular languages. The volume aims to intervene at this level.

A flip side of this disjuncture lies in the manner migration has been addressed by scholars of social sciences in India. It is at this level that history writings on migration become insightful for two reasons. First, a growing volume of literature directly or indirectly engage with the subjects in historically grounded ways. Second, migration has not merely influenced the discourse of history in crucial ways, but this history continues to shape the key questions of identity politics in twentieth-century India. In sum, one can safely argue that migration is central to the making of modern Indian selfhood. Let us briefly substantiate this claim.

Recent scholarship convincingly argues that South Asian society has its civilisational roots in three waves of migration (Joseph 2018; Thapar et al. 2019). These happened in pre-historic and proto-historic periods. Subsequently, the subcontinent witnessed several episodes of human mobility that cumulatively formed the fabric of the social life of South Asia (Ramaswamy 2020). The earliest historically recorded evidence (epigraphic/written) of migration in India comes from Kumargupta II’s Mandasor Prasashti located in ancient Malwa. This inscription of 473 AD mentions the migration of a guild of silk weavers from the region of Lata to Dashpur (Malwa), who made a donation to a sun temple there. Migration played an important role in the spread of Buddhism to the countries of Southeast Asia in the ancient period. However, it is important to clarify that this volume does not deal with pre-colonial migration. Although it does invoke history or specific episodes of history at certain places, the purpose is not to excavate the historical context but to mobilise historical perspectives as a critique of the dominant understanding of migration. Distinguishing between genealogy and history and simultaneously recognising the relevance of both, the essays in the volume draw from the scholarship in history to inform and sharpen their questions.

It is noteworthy that a concerted effort to study migration systematically had to wait for the colonial state’s arrival. In the nineteenth century, in the context of the migration of indentured labour to overseas plantation economies, e...