WEDNESDAY DEC 14, 2022 3PM CET
Home, transit, and destination have remained central in studying migrants’ lives and the networks they rely on to cross borders. Alongside, the place of origin and destination as scholars have shown are linked through transportation networks, border controls, documents, and brokers that have played a dominant role in bypassing state-regulated borders. Critical to these debates has been the right to/ of return.
Historical scholarship on migrants’ lives has provided a window to studying journeys – land, rail, and waterways. Reports suggest that forced migrants on high seas have increased significantly in 2022. Scholarship on forced migration in South Asia, especially in the context of the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent, has shown how trains played an important role in the movement of refugees. Marian Aguiar, in her work, shows how the trains, from being a symbol of colonial modernity, and civilizing mission, turned into “death trains” during the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent. She takes us through “Partition literature” where images of the train are evoked “to confront the notion of imminent transformation that lies at the heart of modernity’s colonial narrative,”.
She observed that in “this counter-narrative of modernity” – “the train carriage, once a symbol of liberation through mobility” turned “to a place of incarceration where people await their death”.
Yet journeys remain invisible in post-colonial scholarship on internal migration in India except in what can be categorized as accounts of
“arrival” to destination”. Taking a cue from the scholarship on the literature of partition and existing scholarship accounts of arrival I feel the scholarship on internal migration in India might benefit from an ethnographic reading of journeys. A reading of journeys might allow us to understand “borders within borders” and its impact on India’s migrant workers. Journeys will allow us to strengthen the need to understand rural and urban as a continuum and provide a robust understanding of circular migration and provide us new possibilities for revisiting the state infrastructures that shape lives in transit also mobility. In this presentation, I focus on railway networks that have played a role in the lives of internal migrant workers especially in the context of Bihar in Eastern India and highlight possibilities of ethnographic engagements on journeys as a method in migration studies.
