‘Feet in Both Places’: Affective Spaces of Circular Migration

Introduction

On a Thursday afternoon in June 2017, I sat talking to Uma, Shashi, Mala and Sunita outside their homes at LB Nagar in Bengaluru. ¹ Uma, who had migrated to the locality as a bride 20 years ago, was stitching a traditional patchwork quilt while she responded gingerly to my questions about what life in Bengaluru was like for her. Her sister-in-law Shashi, who moved between the city and their ooru (village) frequently, had been more forthcoming, curious to know if I could offer something worthwhile (monetary or in kind) for the time she was spending talking to me. At one point in this group conversation, ² I turned to Mala and Sunita, both in their early twenties and who had recently migrated to the city after marriage, and asked if they preferred Bengaluru or their ooru. Shashi interjected:

Will their mother-in-law and father-in-law accept it quietly if they say they want to be in Bengaluru because they like it? There are farms back in the ooru to look after. If you don’t go when crops have to be harvested, will they take it lying down? Can you let go of your farm simply because you want to stay in Bengaluru?

For good measure, she added: ‘How can we stay in one place only? You should have your feet in both places!’ (Shashi, 2017).

A month after I had finished fieldwork, on a Sunday morning in February 2018, I visited Amba, one of the earliest migrant-residents ³ of LB Nagar and my most frequent interlocutor. Around 60 years old, Amba spent most of her waking hours stitching patchwork quilts since her body was no longer considered eligible for the hard manual labour required on construction worksites. She had stitched four such quilts and asked me if I wanted to buy them from her. Under the canopy of the tree where she usually sat during the day, I met her and Rama and told them that I was in Bengaluru only for a brief while before I returned to my university in Delhi. Both were surprised at my leaving what they called the desha to stay in distant Delhi. Amba said that she had planned to invite me to her ooru for the Yellamma festival (celebrating a popular goddess of the region). But ‘you are leaving the desha and going away’, she said (Amba, 2018). Later, as I chatted with her co-parent-in-law, Rama, about the latter’s recent stay in the ooru for undertaking harvest work and then about cropping patterns in her ooru, she said, ‘You should come to our ooru and see for yourself. Then you will understand all this better. But you are leaving the desha and going away. How will you come?’ (Rama, 2018).

These two vignettes foreground the different spatial locations—Bengaluru, ooru and desha—that animate the experience of being a poor, labour migrant. While Shashi’s brief outburst succinctly summarised the necessity for migrants, particularly women migrants, to maintain a dual presence in Bengaluru and the ooru, conversations with Amba and Rama drew attention to the affective entity of the desha, one that I tentatively describe as a space of familiarity. In the desha, familiarity occurs through a shared experience of language, social practices, kinship networks and work relations, marking spaces that resemble the social worlds of the migrant’s ooru in some respects. In our conversations, the village, commonly referred to as ooru, remained without a name unless I asked for it. The ooru was generic, with the story of the village being the same across interlocutors: lack of adequate rainfall, unviable land holdings and mounting debts made survival, based solely on the rural economy, impossible and migration the rational choice. Bengaluru—which is how the city is called in the local language of Kannada—was always referred to by name while the category of the city remained absent in migrant articulations. ⁴ Their story of Bengaluru was similar too: migrating to work in the construction sector, building settlements on wastelands and now struggling to retain their settlements in the face of threats of eviction. The ooru without a name and the city with only a name had differing affective investments among migrants. This article explores migrant attachments with the ooru, Bengaluru, and desha and their struggles with notions of im/permanence, in/security and belonging/estrangement. Through this, it foregrounds the ineluctably spatial nature of the experience of being a migrant.

Moving away from traditional scholarship on migration, the article argues that the fixity of places and duration such as ‘origin’, ‘destination’, ‘permanent migration’ and ‘short-term migration’, which animate this scholarship, exists in far less determinate ways for migrants and for poor migrants in particular. ‘Circular migration’ is a recent term used to encapsulate the nature of migrant mobilities in the contemporary moment, and this article engages with, and advances, this category conceptually. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in two migrant settlements in Bengaluru, I study the city and ooru as experiential, rather than merely physical, categories. I also introduce the desha as both an affective spatial entity and a process of inhabitation. Studying migration through the prism of experience—or more precisely, through the articulations of experience—introduces a certain mobility to the otherwise static understandings of migration. The focus on poor migrants in particular provides insights into life that takes place at the intersection of a globalising economy and a failing agrarian system. By examining the intimate effects of migrant life spread over different spatial contexts, this article explores the subjectivities that such mobilities produce.

This article is based on fieldwork and interviews conducted at LB Nagar and VB Colony, two poor migrant settlements located in the western parts of Bengaluru, just off the Outer Ring Road—a major infrastructure corridor. ⁵ Migrants from Hyderabad–Karnataka form a significant part, if not all, of the population in these two settlements, and most work as low-end construction labourers. ⁶ LB Nagar has been subject to redevelopment, that is, tin sheds have been replaced by low-rise buildings constructed by the Karnataka Slum Development Board (KSDB). In VB Colony, migrant-residents still live in ‘sheds’ and are unable to make any incremental changes to their colony, including building toilets, because of collusion between local political and real-estate interests that thwart any such upgrading measures.

Revisiting Migration

Internal migration is one of the key features of mobility in contemporary India, with scholars suggesting that nearly 3 out of 10 Indians have crossed the administrative boundaries of a village, town, district, city or state to live and work elsewhere than their place of origin (Srivastava, 2011, p. 2). Despite the significance of internal migration in contemporary India, the two primary sources for capturing migration-related data—the Census and National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) surveys—are not designed to capture seasonal and short-term migration; they are adequate for semi-permanent migration and best only for permanent migration (Srivastava, 2011, p. 4). However, despite the inadequacy of data sources, it is clear that short-term migration has been on the rise in recent years with data from Census 2011 showing 17.6 million migrants who had migrated only a year prior to the census and 63.9 million migrants who had moved between the last one and four years prior to the census. In Karnataka, the migrant population stood at 26.4 million, with nearly 4.2 million having moved between one and four years before the Census survey (Registrar General of India, 2019).

The term ‘circular migration’ has gained currency within migration scholarship in India in recent decades to describe the nature of internal migration. Used globally to describe migration between two or more countries, the term has been deployed in the Indian context to refer to the constant movement (primarily seasonal and short-term migration) that poor internal migrants in India undertake, often between the rural and urban. It is estimated that nearly 100 million people in India undertake this form of movement and contribute to nearly 10 per cent of India’s GDP (Deshingker & Akter, 2009). Circular migration, it is argued, ‘is now an integral part of livelihood strategies in agriculturally marginal areas’ and is especially so among those with few assets and little education (Deshingkar & Farrington, 2009, p. 18). ⁷

Despite a significant proportion of migration being classified as circular migration, there seems to be little attention paid to developing it as a distinctive concept. For one, it is not clear if circular migration is considered synonymous with short-term or seasonal migration or if the term is meant to encompass a different kind of migration altogether. Various definitions abound of what constitutes circular migration: ‘…where the migrant does not move permanently from the source to the destination’ (Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, 2017, p. 51); ‘…individuals who migrate from place to place for temporary periods’ (Ministry of Finance, 2018, p. 267); ‘individuals who migrate, leaving their families and property, with the intention of returning, either because they have precarious jobs in the destination areas or if the cost of permanent relocation is high relative to its benefits…’ (Nayyar & Kim, 2018, p. 18) or ‘…repeated migration experiences between an origin and destination, involving more than one migration and return. Effectively, it involves migrants sharing work, family and other aspects of their lives between two or more locations’ (Hugo, 2013, p. 2).

Temporariness, constant movement and an abiding relationship with the origin/source appear as key attributes of circular migration in the above definitions. Given that one or all of these features are present in different kinds of migration, including semi-permanent and permanent, the distinctiveness of circular migration seems difficult to sustain. In the case of rural-to-urban migration, exclusionary urbanisation ensures that spatial rights are not accorded to even long-standing migrants in the city, leaving poor migrants with a lasting sense of impermanence about the city. Further, the long tradition of scholarship on labour, work and the urban has established that rural migrants in cities have always drawn resources from the village to sustain life in the city and vice-versa, and as such, migrants have for long shared ‘work, family, and other aspects of their lives between two or more locations’ (see, for instance, Chandavarkar, 2009; Joshi, 2005).

Given these academic difficulties, it may seem that the use of circular migration as a descriptive term does not offer any clarity and may possibly obscure some traditional distinctions based on duration and movement within migration scholarship. While macro-studies of migration rely on certain stable (even static) categories of time (seasonal, short-term, semi-permanent and permanent), space (origin and destination) and movement (arrival and return) to classify migration, circular migration unsettles these fixities. If the movement is circular, the question of origin and destination and arrival and return do not arise. Given that migration decisions are also contingent on matters of health, security and stability, reliance on durations as a distinguishing feature also seems untenable. Further, migrant articulations are at variance with these broad classifications, and fluidities—of time, space and movement—rather than fixities mark their experience of migration. Recognising the necessity of studying migration through the perspective of fluidity, scholars have focussed on unsettling some of the essentialist premises that govern migration scholarship. Griffiths, Rogers and Anderson (2013) call for understanding migrant subjectivities temporally and decisions to migrate as ‘on-going, complex and often opportunistic rather than planned’. This, they argue, ‘might lead us to an understanding of how it is that there’s nothing as permanent as a temporary migrant’. Further, paying attention to rhythms of migration help us study ‘mobility as non-linear, recognising the importance of repetition, simultaneity, seasonality, and cycles’ (Griffiths, Rogers, & Anderson, 2013).

Following this, it is the argument of this article that the productive potential of circular migration lies in the possibilities it opens up for interpreting migrant experiences. Paying attention to the adjectival term ‘circularity’ in circular migration helps foreground the rhythm of ceaseless repetitive movement that animates the life of poor labour migrants. The repetitive circularity of this movement dispels notions of linearity and breaks down the discreteness of spatial entities such as city, village, rural and urban. Often, for migrants, origins become destinations, cities become homes, returns never take place despite clear intentions, temporariness can become a permanent feature, arrivals take on the texture of return and the native village can acquire a sense of foreignness.

This churning of spatial and temporal relations due to circular migration is an aspect with which migration scholars have been recently engaging. In his work, Jonathan Rigg (2013), drawing on new strands in migration scholarship, suggests studying the village both as a ‘physical unit’ and ‘identifiable entity’, as well as a ‘discursive category or notion’. He argues that the urban could be studied as ‘a state of mind’ and as ‘a set of social and cultural practices’, thereby allowing for a ‘more thorough-going and pervasive identification of the urban’ (Rigg, 2013). Unmooring these entities from their fixity as only or merely geographical locations enables us to see them as key coordinates of migrant experiences. However, even as fixities are replaced by concepts that better capture the dynamism of migration, scholars have been attentive also to the importance of places to the experience of migration. Translocality is one such concept deployed by scholars to study the networks through which places are connected and the ways in which people, ideas and practices circulate between them. In a review article on translocality, Clemens Greiner and Patrick Sakdapolrak argue that the concept allows for us to ‘comprehend the tension between mobility and locality and to enhance understanding of this relationship’ and ‘to capture the diverse and contradictory effects of interconnectedness between places, institutions and actors’ (Griener & Sakdapolrak, 2013). Within migration scholarship, then, theoretical frameworks grounded in perspectives of fluidities have opened up new ways to understand the phenomenon of migration in the contemporary moment.

Locating itself within such scholarship, this article focusses on the experience of circular migration for my interlocutors who ordinarily reside in two poor settlements in Bengaluru. While some moved from the village to other places such as Goa or Pune before settling in Bengaluru, others directly moved to Bengaluru from their village. Such movement can simply be called back and forth migration between the source and destination. But by designating them as circular migrants, I foreground the sense of inescapability from this circle of movement for poor migrants caught between unviable rural systems and exclusionary urban regimes. Circularity is also appropriate, for these migrants not only traverse between the physical city and village but also inhabit affective spaces of the city, village and desha and live with notions of home and without home, even though a house exists in the settlements they reside in.

My interlocutors form part of the country’s vast army of internal, circular migrants. They undertake different durations of migration from the ‘underdeveloped’ Hyderabad–Karnataka region to the Bengaluru city. Their mobility patterns, like migrants elsewhere, do not allow for easy classifications. Most first-generation migrants have returned to the village after decades of working in the city, once their bodies were not valuable for construction labour. They sometimes leave because there is a farm in the village to tend to and/or because the ‘shed’ they lived in needs to be taken over by their sons to live with their families. Young migrant households also depart for the village, locking up their houses and sheds, sometimes with a clear sense of when they would return and other times not knowing if they would at all. Women who lose their husbands and sons stay in the village for months and years, sometimes returning to the city to carry on work as construction labourers. Finally, even within a migrant household, experiences of migration are different and cannot be neatly classified according to generations—a temporal mode of classification often used to assess the gains and losses of migration. For instance, the husband might be a second-generation migrant, but his wife who migrated from the village after marriage is still a first-generation migrant for whom the city is a foreign place; the mother and son can both be first-generation migrants because both worked at the same construction site from the time they arrived in the city. ⁸ These are some of the complexities in the act of classifying migration that I encountered during fieldwork. Only two things seemed predictable: that migrant decisions are not always purposive and with preset intentions and that most migrants retain strong ties with their villages. Their stock answers to researchers who ask them their reasons for migration include low agricultural incomes, higher wages and the availability of regular work in the construction sector and the need to pay off debts incurred due to losses in agriculture or in conducting social events such as weddings. But underneath these answers lies an intricate web of personal contingencies and structural determinants that this article explores to foreground the spatiality of experience.

Desha as Process and Place

My conversations with the residents of VB Colony often took place in a small open space, under the shade of a large tree, in the settlement. On my first visit, I noticed an idol placed inside a protective metal cage under the tree and was told that the deity was Thaiamma (akin to mother). She had ‘appeared’, they said, after a fire had engulfed the settlement. The lack of casualties and minimal damage to houses in this fire was because they were protected by the deity, they said. Six months later, the entire space had been remade with a large canopy built over the shrine, musical instruments hung from the metal ceiling as decorations and the space had acquired a flavour of festive permanence.

This particular development brings together three crucial aspects of life in the settlement: the threat of eviction, a felt need for protection amidst hostility and a constant process of creating familiarity in the face of uncertainty. Located amidst a largely middle-class neighbourhood, residents of VB Colony are under great pressure to move out, and the three fires that have erupted in the settlement were meant to be threats issued by local real-estate interests to force them into leaving. ⁹ Remaking the space with seemingly permanent structures such as a ‘shrine’ is then a form of claim-making for the residents. Apart from the pragmatism of this move, the settlement deity is also a form of solace to the residents, suggesting that there is a cosmic force looking out for them. Finally, the ‘appearance’ of Thaiamma and her consecration is a common practice in rural India, where each village has a deity looking over the community’s well-being. This is a practice of inhabitation that draws on the familiar—a practice, I call, of the desha—but deployed in hostile urban contexts.

The desha is not the ooru, even as it contains elements similar to the ooru. It is more appropriately defined as being host to an imagined community bound together by affinities of language, traditions, space and sometimes kinship. It is not the political nation but a cultural universe whose practices can be transposed to different spatial contexts, as with the shrine at VB Colony. In this settlement, some residents were connected familially, but many were strangers to each other until they began living here. But now, nearly every household in the settlement had contributed to the upgradation of Thaiamma’s abode, reflecting some effort at community living. Part of what makes this possible is the familiarity that emerges from having inhabited the larger region of the desha (most residents here are from in and around Raichur district) before migrating to the city. Cultural and linguistic differences are not vast, even if caste distinctions might prevent anything more than this contingent living where familiarity binds. For Ganga, around 60 years old and one of the earliest residents of VB Colony, this living together is laya, a word that gestures to a place of rest and repose, a dwelling and a feeling of embrace. ‘When we get out of our houses, we ask after each other, have you had food, did you sleep well, etc. We talk to each other in the language of our desha, about the cares of our lives’, she said (Ganga, 2017). A local pushcart vendor often arrives at their settlement with various condiments that women use in cooking food specific to the region; neighbours arriving from the ooru are requested to bring back essential food supplies like jowar (also called sorghum, a staple cereal) or chilli powder (jowar is expensive in Bengaluru, and the city’s chillies are not spicy enough, they say.). For migrant-residents in VB Colony, threatened by eviction and haunted by impermanence, these practices of the desha offer laya.

Places can also become part of the desha over time. For Amba and Rama, who were surprised that I was leaving for Delhi, Bengaluru had become part of the desha, given that they had spent over 20 years in the city, most of those years in the same locality. At the LB Nagar settlement, Amba and Rama had received a small flat each from the KSDB and were less affected by feelings of impermanence than those at VB Colony. Most migrants from Hyderabad–Karnataka in this settlement were related familially and had migrated from Yadgir district to work in the construction industry. As two of the earliest migrants in the settlement, both Amba and Rama have seen a steady flow of immediate and distant family members into and out of the city. Their sons have now joined the construction workforce, and Rama’s grandchildren are among the first generation from this migrant community to be enrolled in schools. This form of generational residence is part of the reason for the embrace of the city as desha. Children from migrant families, many of whom were born or grew up in the city, have replaced their parents as the primary workforce in construction industry. Now married and with school-going children of their own, migrant families have struck roots in the city, even though ties with the ooru continue to tug.

Economic logics also aid in this expansion of the desha. The presence of migrant families in the city provides cushioning for short-term migrants from the region who may seek work in the construction industry to tide over contingent crises. Anjaneya, a second-generation migrant in VB Colony, described the pattern of migration quite simply: ‘You face a loss, you bundle up some jowar, your belongings and you come here [to Bengaluru]’. Once here, you make do with some relatives until you set up your own shed, he added (Anjaneya, 2017). Basava, about 25 years old and another second-generation migrant at LB Nagar, recounted how his relatives took out a loan for ₹50,000 and lost it all when the rains failed. If this happens over two years or more and people are deep in debt, they come to Bengaluru to pay off the debts, he said. Anjaneya and Basava’s statements are explanations that reveal how Bengaluru has become part of the circular life-worlds, or the desha, of rural migrant communities from the region. For those who reside in the city for longer durations, the constancy and repetitiveness of this circulation of people from the desha fosters a sense of belonging, making the city itself part of the desha.

The desha also contains within it an implicit reference to a spatial outside, which is the terrain of the foreign, the unfamiliar—as when Amba and Rama were surprised to learn I was leaving the desha to go to Delhi. As an explanatory device, the concept could help clarify certain long-standing mobility patterns within the wide rubric of internal migration, namely that migrants prefer to travel short distances between adjoining villages and districts and more recently, within boundaries of linguistic states. ¹⁰ The desha maps spatially the reluctance of migrants to travel outside an affective realm where precarity is heightened because of the unfamiliar; travelling outside the desha could possibly indicate distress migration. In this sense, the desha can also foreground the forced-ness of migration when migrants choose precarity over familiarity and travel outside this realm. The narratives of first-generation migrants on what prompted them to undertake the move outside of their desha indicated great distress: Ganga narrated how her husband lost his lands to alcoholism, gambling and prostitution, and the family was forced to migrate to the city; Rama had lost her husband, had five children to care for and no land to draw income from; Basava’s mother migrated to the city to mitigate some of the crushing poverty which had forced her to put her son into bonded labour in the village. For these first migrants, Bengaluru’s initial unfamiliarity meant that they worked for daily wages as low as between ₹25 and ₹40 in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This period marked the beginning of migration from parts of the Hyderabad–Karnataka region to Bengaluru, and a study of recruitment practices in the construction industry in the city found that ‘labour catchment areas’ had moved from villages around Bengaluru to distant districts within the state such as Gulbarga and Kolar, as well as adjoining districts in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in this period. Shivakumar, Sheng and Weber (1991) argue that with the growth in construction activities, job contractors needed to recruit peasant communities in distant rural areas to be able to control and maintain a constant supply of labour working for low wages. What began in the 1980s as a steady inflow of migrants from this region to Bengaluru has only been increasing, and significant numbers of ‘Gulbarga migrants’ (as most migrants from the region are colloquially called) largely work as unskilled labourers in the construction industry. Several of my interlocutors who had travelled outside the desha to unfamiliar Bengaluru had to confront a foreignness in everyday living. Uma, who migrated to LB Nagar from Yadgir recalled the incomprehension she faced because she could not understand the dialect of Kannada spoken in the city. ‘We would just stare at people blankly if they spoke to us. We didn’t understand what they said and they would not understand what we said’, she said.

For second-generation migrants with some security of settlement and established networks, wage precarity is somewhat reduced. Both VB Colony and LB Nagar have been recognised as residences of construction workers, and job contractors often arrive at the settlements to call people for work. Residents also travel in groups looking for work. Yet, even as these migrants establish themselves, new migrants from faraway regions in eastern India are beginning to take their place in the construction workforce. Activists working to organise such workers in large construction projects such as the Metro Rail face language hurdles as most migrants are from West Bengal, Orissa and Bihar. ¹¹ Thus, even as older migrants strike roots in migrant destinations, recreate the desha through modes of inhabitation and embrace the city as part of their circular life-worlds, long-distance migrants from other regions are recruited to ensure that low wages continue to be the norm in the construction sector.

In their essay, Vinay Gidwani and K. Sivaramakrishnan argue that while migration as ‘a material and symbolic activity’ has been well-established, ‘what is new and important in terms of agrarian social relations is the intensity and the rate at which labour, goods and meanings are now able to circulate through space’ (Gidwani & Sivaramakrishnan, 2003, p. 186). The desha, in this contemporary moment of circular migration, is one such affective and spatial register that as practice can be transposed to new contexts and as entity can expand spatially to include the previously unfamiliar.

Belonging and Estrangement in the Ooru and the City

Yet, it needs to be reiterated that this embrace of Bengaluru as desha is tenuous. The precarity of work and residence in the city for migrant-residents leaves them with a sense of being permanently temporary. Workplace accidents and fatalities or the devaluation of older bodies by contractors could result in sudden or gradual losses of income; without work, it is difficult not only to make ends meet in the city but also to justify not returning to the ooru. ¹² The ooru then retains salience as both material and affective resource. Migrant households sometimes leave Bengaluru for months together to return to their ooru, for jathras (village fairs), construction of houses, resolving household disputes and in cases of illnesses and deaths. Some households only undertake temporary stays in the city. The forging of such ties with the ooru may aid in the sustenance of life in the city but it also comes in the way of fostering relationships of trust for which a permanence of locality seems essential. This was most apparent in VB Colony where people live under the threat of eviction.

Gowri, who lives in this settlement, is around 35 years old and has lived the migrant life since the age of 11 when she was married and moved to Goa with her parents-in-law and husband. She has always wanted to return to the ooru, her daughter joked. ¹³ Gowri agreed and said that the ooru offers solace that the city never could. ‘In the ooru, we are at peace. We live like one family. Everyone knows that we will never leave the ooru and go away somewhere. But here everyone is from a different ooru’, she explained. In times of difficulty, neighbours refuse to lend money because of the uncertainty of whether it will be returned. ‘What if the debtors go back to their ooru and never come back? … What faith can you have here?’ she asked. In the ooru though, ownership of land and house ensure that the household is rooted to the place and will not abandon it (Gowri, 2017a). For someone who has lived most of her life outside the ooru, Gowri is very certain about the ooru as a repository of affect and the city as something temporary that she inhabits until she returns to the ooru. ‘Our ooru is what is permanent. Here, nothing is permanent’, she declared (Gowri, 2017b). Thus, although Gowri has lived in Bengaluru for over 20 years and could traditionally be considered as a permanent migrant, permanence for her ‘…is associated less with duration of time and more with emotional attachment’. ¹⁴ Further, for Gowri, a Kuruba by caste, ¹⁵ her discomfort partly arises from having to share the settlement space with members of other castes, particularly scheduled castes and tribes. The ooru, for her, is also a return to the ‘safety’ of single-caste neighbourhoods.

At LB Nagar, caste is not of much consequence, for most are connected familially and belong to the Bestru caste, a backward community whose traditional occupation has been fishing. What rankles older residents, though, are the changes in affective relationships in the settlement. Uma, recalling her initial days 20 years ago said,

Back then, it was like an ooru. Calling someone mother or sister meant you treated them in that fashion. Now no one supports anyone, my concern is with me and you are concerned with yourself. Earlier, if I had food, you could eat, if you had, I could eat. Now it is not like that (Uma, 2017).

While in Gowri’s descriptions of life in the city, the ooru is a repository of affect, in Uma’s account, life in Bengaluru itself resembled the ooru. This community, bound together by shared experiences of distress and poverty has dissipated, according to Uma, as people now prioritised opportunities for accumulation offered by the city. ¹⁶ For her, the relative affluence experienced by the current workforce had emptied community relations of affect. ‘Now, everyone is here to make money. Back then, there was no money. Now, they work and look only after themselves’, she said (Uma, 2017). ¹⁷

The rapid growth of the construction sector has indeed offered a continuous flow of work for migrant labourers. The increase in daily wages for women and men from ₹25 and ₹40 in the 1990s, respectively, to ₹250 and ₹400 (for unskilled labour) has made the sector attractive to migrants who want to flow in and out of the workforce. This instability of the migrant identity—that is, people move in and out of being a migrant, as they travel between the city and the village periodically—possibly accounts for changes in the nature of community relations as they have less incentive to build communities of affect in the city. Several factors coalesce in ensuring this fluctuating affiliation: the arduous nature of labour on construction worksites that forces workers to withdraw from the labour force periodically when they can afford to; the precarity of residence in the city as land becomes real-estate and piecemeal interventions by the state in rural areas which offer hopes of sustainable life in the village. ¹⁸

This last factor is particularly under-studied and is of importance to understanding migration among low-caste households with small and marginal landholdings. Most households in my fieldwork settlements owned anywhere between four and ten acres of land in their villages but had either leased it out or left it to other family members to farm on while they worked in Bengaluru. ¹⁹ Ownership of land was a major factor for retaining ties with the village—unlike in the city where work and residence are precarious, in the ooru, they are owners of property, even if this property is economically unviable. Government loans, when possible, are also availed to buy farmland. For instance, Basava, the 25-year-old migrant from LB Nagar who had talked about agricultural losses leading to migration to Bengaluru, narrated how his brothers and he had bought land in the ooru after borrowing from a public sector bank. Migrants often retained some of their legal entitlements in the village. Amba and Rama often travelled to the ooru to collect widow pension. Bama, a Dalit woman who had lived with her parents in VB Colony since childhood, was, along with her husband, constructing a house in the latter’s ooru. For this, they had received grants earmarked for scheduled caste communities from the village panchayat; their stay in the city had become intermittent. Manikantha, also from VB Colony, worked in the city as a construction worker for decades and then as a mestri (foreman/supervisor) but had, until recently, accessed the ration subsidy for his household in his ooru. These, and other such material resources offered by the state at the site of the village, motivate people to continue to retain ties with it through generations. But put together, these are piecemeal measures offered by the state and do not create an economically sustainable life in the village even as crop failure, scarce irrigation resources and mounting debts create the conditions for circular migration and fractured belonging, in the region and the city. ²⁰

Even as the ooru retains salience as both a material and an affective resource, the city is also ground for making claims of permanent residence. In VB Colony, against the backdrop of threats, my interlocutors were keen to emphasise the permanence of their stay in the settlement. Absamma, in her late fifties and one of the first among the migrants at VB Colony to arrive in Bengaluru, repeatedly stated how the city is her permanent home now. ‘We go to our ooru once in a while only. We vote here, our ration card has this address. We have a labour card here. We have got everything done here and not in the ooru’, she said (Absamma, 2017). The reality may be far more complex with different entitlements spread out between the ooru and the city, but what is of concern here is the manner in which ‘belonging’ is articulated. The documents Absamma cites as evidence of belonging are comprehensible to the state; claims by the poor are made in this idiom with the understanding that their migrant status needs to be underplayed. In the eyes of the state, migrants’ origins are far more important than their destinations, and thus, they remain ineligible for the space of, and rights in, the city. Another response to this demand by the state to produce evidence of permanence is to emphasise the long duration of their stay in the city, thus erasing the constancy of circular migration that marks their lives. VB Colony residents often stated that they have lived for over 30 years in the area; Ganga recollected, for instance, having moved to Bengaluru a year before Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination and moving to their current residence during the unrest in 1984, after the assassination. Such articulations by the poor are made recognising that permanence and immobility are implicit requisites for the state to consider their claims on the city as legitimate.

Yet another mode of claiming permanence is to assert their status of being the first or original inhabitants of the neighbourhood. All older residents I spoke to recollected how the area was initially a kadu—while the word literally translates into a forest, it signifies the isolation from, and absence of, a human settlement such as in the village. At LB Nagar, residents recall the marshy, swampy outpost that the area had been, how they regularly encountered snakes and other such dangerous creatures and that they made the area habitable by raising the height of the settlement using construction debris. These histories show that the city’s expansion into these wastelands takes place partly through the work of the first settlers, that is, the migrant, labouring poor, in making these areas habitable. As we walked through a middle-class neighbourhood back to the settlement, Rudra alluded to the work put in by his community when he said, ‘All these buildings you see around, they are here because of us. Not because of anyone else…’ (Rudra, 2017).

Throughout my fieldwork, ambivalence was the primary feature of migrant articulations towards both the city and the ooru. Individuals often vacillated between belonging to and estrangement from both these spaces. On being asked why they chose to migrate to Bengaluru and not to other places such as Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad or Goa, Basava, talks of Bengaluru as his ‘mother’ where he can speak and understand the language of the city. ²¹ This contrasts with an earlier conversation, where he had narrated the untimely death of his mother and said, ‘If my mother had been alive, we would never have come here. I would not have had to see Bengaluru. However difficult life may have been, we would have stayed put in the ooru’. Yet another time, he sat, silently in agreement, when his friend Linga declared, ‘No one prospers if they are in the ooru. Even if you are not addicted to drinking, drugs or smoking, it is impossible to achieve any degree of prosperity; the ooru is dead’. About why people like him still invested in land in the ooru, Basava said, ‘Desire. Why should we work under someone in Bengaluru? We can work on our own here (in the village). Such thoughts come to us then. We are still not in debt then, you see? We think let’s buy two oxen and we’ll be set’ (Basava, 2017).

Gowri, who longed for a return to the ooru, was in fact part of a vocal group of residents at VB Colony, who were demanding that they receive legal rights of residence to their settlement. Manikantha, whose daughter was married to a man in their ooru and had drawn ration from the government depot there until recently, spoke about his discomfort at staying for too long in the ooru. ‘I don’t know what to do there. I just come back to Bengaluru in two-three days every time I go’, he said (Manikantha, 2017). Rudra, 20 years old, from LB Nagar, who spoke with pride about their contribution to the development of the neighbourhood, was also intimately aware of a lack of future in the city and in working as construction labourers.

In migration scholarship, often geared towards policy prescriptions, migration is viewed either as a failure of development models or as a movement that needs to be encouraged by the state. ²² However, in doing so, they erase the affective contradictions in migrant articulations about the city, ooru and constant movement. The poignancy of Rudra’s conclusions about the lack of opportunities for upward mobility in the city needs to be set against his pride regarding the contribution of his community to the development of the city. Gowri’s constant feeling of the city being an exile from home needs to be placed alongside her desire to own a piece of land in the city. Basava’s investment in the village through land purchases need not be seen as incommensurate with his belief that the city is like his ‘mother’. Holding these ambivalences together, not tending towards a resolution in either direction of migration being positive or negative, can allow us to understand the migrant subjectivities produced in a mobile universe.

Conclusion

This article explores the contemporary condition of being a migrant, of having your ‘feet in both places’. In order to interpret this experience of being in two places, it focusses on affective investments made by migrants across spaces, the ways in which such investments are necessary for mitigating rural and urban precarities and how they are crucial to the formation of migrant subjectivities.

Drawing on the term circular migration, used frequently but not with clarity, in migration scholarship, this article argues that paying attention to circularity as a movement allows us to dispense with linearities of time, space and movement that inform traditional classifications of migration. Circularity as a mode links spaces together through movement, but these constantly replayed connections change the nature and meaning of these spaces for migrants who move between them. Such fluidities of movement are better suited to understanding the varying patterns of migration undertaken by the vast number of internal migrants in the country.

The article focusses on the material and affective resources of multiple spatial realms that a migrant draws from for sustenance. Through desha as a process of inhabitation, described in the case of VB Colony, I argue that these familiar practices of place-making offer its residents a sense of control about shaping their surroundings. Desha as a space of familiarity in LB Nagar is a consequence of the constancy and repetitiveness of circular migration, where migrants establish a foothold through semi-permanent residential rights and through their continuing ties with the ooru and aid in the flow of short-term, seasonal and occasional migrants belonging to kinship networks. This regular circulation over time allows for a tenuous embrace of the city as desha or part of an affective universe. Travelling outside the familiar realm of the desha is not often undertaken; when it is, it could indicate the forced nature of such migration.

The city and ooru are locked in a fraught relationship for the migrant as she traverses both these spaces seeking belonging and feeling estranged. The dependence on both spaces for affective and material sustenance, given the erratic wages, unviability of agriculture, uncertain residence, hostility of the urban and the state, and a short shelf life as a construction worker, do not allow for establishing herself in either space. Despite several pragmatic and affective strategies to mitigate the uncertainties of their circular lives, poor migrants are often left with a permanent sense of being temporary, in the village, city and worksite.