Social Change

The hyper-precarity, enforced immobility and invisibility of India’s migrant workforce have been starkly in focus since March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began. The papers in this special issue explore migrants’ lived experiences of mobility and immobility during the Covid pandemic. They provide granular accounts of the translocal and temporal strategies of migrants as they navigate state controls, citizenship rights, patriarchal norms and barriers to accessing welfare schemes. The case studies empirically delve into the gendered subjectivities of exclusion and power and how these vary by caste and ethnicity. They provide unique insights into what it means to migrate, live and work in today’s India, where neoliberal values have undermined labour rights and protection. At the same time, migrants stories of everyday struggles and socialities reveal how they have created spaces of hope, aspiration and resistance.

In this article, I explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of migrant cab drivers in the Indian city of Hyderabad. Drawing on ethnographic data collected before and during the pandemic, I unpack how cab drivers who have migrated to the city in the hopes of a better life for their families make sense of waiting as an experience that constitutes and undoes the notion of upward mobility. I analyse how my interlocutors relate to time in differing ways through the day and how the pandemic has altered their expectations around the mundane activity of waiting. Building on scholarship that pushes us to apply a temporal lens to migration along with a spatial one, I argue that the uncertainties and precarities created by the pandemic have reconfigured migrants’ aspirations, their relationship to work, their imaginaries of the future and their articulation of hope and despair.

This article analyses the lived experiences of migrant workers in India under different regimes of coal mining and engages with their contemporary precarious labouring conditions and resilience. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in the Talcher coalfields of Odisha, I argue that the labouring lives of migrant workers from marginalised communities have been invisiblised in a ‘shadow economy’ of coal extraction through subcontracting and labour recruitment by local contractors working with state-owned coal companies. The process of invisiblisation has taken place at three levels: first, at the workplace which includes recruitment patterns, contracting systems and precarious labouring conditions inflicted by the employer; second, through the exclusion of migrant workers in the land and labour politics of local dispossessed communities for coal mining jobs; and finally, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent lockdowns, observed as ‘invisible’ essential workers under the Essential Services Maintenance Act of 1981.

The reverse migration of workers at the beginning of the first lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic forcefully crystalised underlying issues such as poverty, hunger and the precarious lives of the working class in India’s megacities. With the easing of lockdowns, workers are again on the move. Against this background, this article aims to examine and unpack the reasons that have shaped labour mobility during the ongoing pandemic. It uses the framework of mobility studies and translocality which provide a strong analytical framework to understand linkages between rural and urban areas. In the process, the article highlights the politics associated with the mobility of workers. It draws on a case study of a peripheral industrial region of Delhi known as Narela. After briefly situating the study in the historicity of Narela with respect to the Industrial Relocation Policy of Delhi and resettlement of bastis, it highlights the lived experiences of the working-class population during and after the first lockdown of the pandemic. Based on detailed in-depth telephonic interviews, the article reiterates the crucial relationship between spatially stretched social reproduction and the social embeddedness of workers which suggests that there are a host of factors affecting workers’ mobility.

Through a multi-sited ethnographic study of 30 internal migrants working in informal occupations in Delhi, I show that the everyday lived experience of these migrants in India is negotiated by multiple and often intersecting forms of inequalities and exclusion. To that end, I give an overview of their efforts to access available social welfare schemes. Their interactions with street-level bureaucrats and the paperwork (such as an Aadhaar card or a ration card) required to access welfare schemes show how their mobility is restricted, compelling them to enter into a relationship of dependency with brokers, employers and others. The article explicitly centres on state-migrant relations and provides tools to understand the efficacy of social welfare policies in contemporary Indian bureaucratic transformations. It reveals the multitude of complex factors that motivate workers to move and find work that must be acknowledged in any administrative effort to ensure access to rights and legal aid. In doing so, the article also raises pertinent questions on the move towards digitisation and the creation of a central database of migrant workers.

While metropolitan cities are framed as emancipatory spaces for women migrants, we know less about their experiences in smaller cities, which are driving urban transformation in India. Drawing on pre-pandemic fieldwork with employed youth (aged 15–29 years) in Mangalore and Kishangarh, this article investigates young women’s work, education, aspirations and mobilities in smaller cities which have relatively weak scalar positions in terms of global economic, political and social power. This article finds that small cities act as regional action spaces for women from villages and small towns to capitalise on fleeting opportunities and push against patriarchal boundaries through mobilities. It shows how women use a range of strategies from individual power tactics within households to leveraging institutional support systems to do so. The article suggests that situating migrant-friendly policy initiatives in small cities can potentially improve employment and mobility outcomes for young women.

This article traces the experiences of accompanying wives who had migrated with their husbands from southern Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and returned to their villages during the COVID-19 pandemic. It dwells on post-marriage migration and work which is an under-researched aspect of women’s migration. Our study offers insights into the ways in which married women navigate power relations within the family as well as their places of work to fulfil their family obligations and personal aspirations. The analysis shows how they juggle multiple family roles as wives, mothers, daughters-in-law and daughters in their decisions related to (im)mobility, work and earning. Theoretically, the article speaks to the production of gendered and racialised work and how these fit into capitalist accumulation, women’s productive and reproductive labour, and the tensions between family duties and personal aspirations. The women in the study were ‘factory’ workers, home-based workers and ‘homeworkers’, all with different subjectivities. Although women’s work and mobility are shaped by patriarchal norms in both states, the women in our study were pushing the boundaries of tradition and asserting their views within the family. Work in cities has given them the means of fulfilling aspirations, especially related to their children’s education.

The Partition of 1947 saw approximately 8 million Hindus and Sikhs leave Pakistan to settle in India and 6–7 million Muslims leave India to settle in Pakistan between 1947 and 1951. This article attempts to discuss one such ‘small voice’, a female Tamil Muslim voice, that of Ansari Begum, in Madras, as it surfaces through the ‘lines of the law’—bureaucratic and juridical—that inscribe frontiers. The idea of citizenship, it is argued, is more than the definition of a relationship between the individual and the state—it is a relationship of intimate belonging that is ‘multi-layered’, spatially and culturally shaped and is both abstract and specific.

Abhishek Jha (Ed. & Trans.), Traster Shikarbakar: Nirbachito Miya Kabita [Roots of the Oppressed: Select Miya Poetry]. (Bengali) Boibashik, 2019, 56 pp., ₹120, ISBN: 978-93-88747-05-9 (Paperback).

Vinod Kapri, 1232 km: The Long Journey Home. HarperCollins, India, 2021, 232 pp, ₹399, ISBN13: 9789354226519 (Paperback).

Abhishek Saha, No Land’s People: The Untold Story of Assam’s NRC Crisis, HarperCollins, 2021, 303 pp., ₹599, ISBN-10 9390351855 (Paperback).

Arvind Mohan, Bihari Mazdooron ki Peeda [The Pains of Bihari Labourers], (Hindi) Radhakrishna Prakashan, New Delhi, 2017, ₹172 pp., ISBN: 978-81-8361-847-2 (Hardcover).

Praveen Kumar Jha, Coolie Lines. (Hindi) Vani Prakashan, 2019, 286 pp., ₹410, ISBN: 978-93-88684-04-0 (Hardcover)