Migration and Politics

NMML, Occasional Paper, History and Society New Series, No. 48, 2014

Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship, 2022

The Great Depression was a moment of rupture and dispossession in the history of the plantation economy and colonial Indian migration in the Bay of Bengal. The developments of this period provide important insights into the shifting patterns of Indian migration, labor regimes, (im)migrant-native relations, and the rise of xenophobic politics in the region. Given the historical importance of migration and the persistence of xenophobia in Burma, a study of migrant labor within the emerging nationalist politics of the interwar period is crucial. This period witnessed provocative but well-established questions concerning Indian migration: whether Indian migrants were supplementary or surplus, whether they were filling a void or generating local competition, whether colonial policies regarding Indian migration and their work and life in the colony were exclusionist or assimilatory, whether Indians shared a harmonious relationship of peaceful co-existence with the ‘indigenous’ community, and whether they were they ‘well off’ in Burma. This article focuses on the interwar interactions between empires, colonies, and capital in the Bay of Bengal rim and transatlantic economies, as well as the intersections between the reordering of the global economy, ethnocentric nationalism, migrants’ changing lives and the patterns and system of Indian migration. The intersections between emerging nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiments reflected in the many ethnic riots of this period provide historical precedents to the persisting alt-right politics, xenophobia, ethnic injustice, and racial-religious bigotry perpetrated against minorities and migrants in Burma - the Rohingyas being a major target of this xenophobic nationalism.

Almanack, Brazil, 2018

The significance of Burma to the history of global and Indian migration can be understood by the fact that it was the destination accounting for the largest mobility of Indian migrants during the century 1830s-1930s. This article is an attempt to complicate the parameters which have conventionally defined the characteristics of Indian migration during the colonial period. Broadly, it is also attempted to challenge and deconstruct the Eurocentric perceptions on non-European migrations in the global migration framework, by focussing on the quality, quantity, stimulating agency and nature of the colonial Indian migration. To do so, the article delves into analysing the content, pattern, nature and functioning of the informally regulated maistry system, which mediated the recruitment of Indian labour and their supervision in Burma through networks of “kin-intermediary” called maistry. Keyword : Colonial India; Indian labour; Indian migration; Burma; Rangoon; Maistry system

Social Change, 2020

A song sung at weddings in the musahari tola 3 in village Banma: "Friends, had I known that he would consume poison and die like this… I would not have married him."

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2018

Why and how do labour migrant brokers engage with henchmen of bosses, small-time criminals and violent politicians? What significance do labour brokers’ political relations have in the fabric of labour circulation? This article argues for migration brokerage to be examined along a broad continuum of brokerage to explore the local fabric of labour circulation in the Indian construction sector. Considering migration brokerage as part of a broader landscape of brokerage firstly allows look at how migration brokers concretely navigate the worlds of labour and politics to pursue their activities and to further their own agendas. It secondly offers insight into how the everyday relations between migrant brokers and henchmen of bosses shape the lives of migrant labourers in the urban construction sector. Based on a detailed ethnography of the relation between a Dalit labour maistri and a Dalit henchman of a boss in a context of violent criminal political economy, this article explores the roles of Dalit politics in shaping the Dalit fabric of labour circulation and labour broker’s trajectories in South India. It further looks at the ambivalent production and mobilisation of Dalit identities in the making of an ideal Dalit migrant labourer.

International Review of Social History 59 (1): 1-37, 2014

From the conclusion (pp. 35-6): “In focusing on consciousness, previous discussions of caste’s role in organizing labour tend to reproduce the questionable assumption that caste is itself ultimately a matter of culture – that is, as something subsisting in representations, religious sentiments and values, ritual proscriptions, and so on. Thus, even as the highly reified understanding of culture that appeared in works such as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Rethinking Working Class History has been roundly criticized by labour historians for treating culture as a transhistorical essence, what I have implied in this essay and argued in detail elsewhere is that the culturalization of the caste remains a problem even when culture is understood as historically constituted. Caste is not reducible to culture. It is also a matter of social organization, political-economic relations, endogamous kinship arrangements, and the property regimes and rules of inheritance these imply. It entails exclusion from resources (symbolic and otherwise) not merely accidentally, but in its very essence. And in the case of Dalits, especially in Madras Presidency in the period I am describing, it also entailed being born into a category of people who were virtually to a number, servile labourers. This fact poses a fundamental problem for formulations that seek to understand a relation between caste and class, because in the specific case of Dalits – in some parts of India and in some historical periods – these are not two intrinsically distinct matters that can be 'correlated' a posteriori. They are ontologically inseparable. What needs to be historicized is not their relationship (because relationship implies difference) but precisely how they came to be conceptually separated in the first place. In the case I have described here this separation was simultaneously the political defeat of Madras’s most exploited workers, the outcome of social and political struggles that produced in Madras’s governance the naturalized intelligibility of ‘labour’ as an unmarked category.