BOOK REVIEW
without much disciplinary narcissism. The
Ontology of Being and Becoming
Subjectivities of Migrants in India
Dev Nath Pathak
S
ince the subject is subjectivity, it is
tempting to turn a few leaves of a
seemingly unrelated discourse, as
a point of departure. Anna Freud, the
prodigal daughter of Sigmund Freud,
renowned for her contributions and deve-
lopment of child psychology, emphasised
the psychic movement of ego in response
to the conditioned experiences in child-
hood. A dynamic psyche is, however, a
picture of conditioned mobility vis-à-vis
a living fraught with leaving and vice
versa! Such psychoanalytic insights were
bound to emerge, speculating along the
biographical experiences of the Freuds
(father-daughter duo), given their own emi-
grations to a non-native land (London).
Adding more historical-sociological com-
plexity to the phenomenon, wedding
psychoanalysis with sociology and anthro-
pology, Erich Fromm underlined a psychic
movement in which home and the world
have manifold and chequered inter-
actions. Exploring the reasons behind
why a troubled psyche fears freedom and
slips to authoritarianism, Fromm empha-
sised the perpetual breaking and mak-
ing of relationships qua psychic move-
ment in/from the family and kinship to
the formal world of actions.
Such an unseemly commencement of a
review of a book is appropriate given the
concurrence of the underlying nuances.
Aimed at the complex experiences of
migrants, the informal–formal, primary–
secondary, living–leaving, home–world,
the book under review is organised under
five key themes pertaining to human
migration in South Asia, that is, labour,
gender, folk, the self and religiosity. A
rare work of its kind, with wide-angled
discursive panorama, the book not only
provides explanation and understanding
of the issue(s) on the anvil, but also
enables for sharpening questions, some
direct and some oblique. Even though the
book does not centralise it as a question,
the migrant subjectivities of scholars,
32
Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration:
Leaving and Living edited by Sadan Jha and
Pushpendra Kumar Singh, London and New York:
Routledge, 2022; pp 312, `1,595.
researchers and writers play a considera-
ble role in the way they understand home
and the world, and living and leaving.
One shall wonder with this very impor-
tant book, how much of migrant subjec-
tivities of the scholars qua authors in this
book underpinned by psychic freedom-
unfreedom play a role in their attempts
to narrativise the migrant subjectivities?
Could one write about migrant experi-
ences without factoring in the ordinary—
everyday—biographic accounts of the
self? The editorial pronouncement has
conscientiously put the self as a refrain,
more in terms of promise than in delivery.
The self as the second or third fiddle
in the larger dramatics of narrativising,
however, serves the same perfunctory
role as does the visual testimonies in the
age of Photoshop. One wonders whether
the idea of subjectivity is orientalised.
Such an ominous tacit assumption—the
subjective self of the “other,” while the
objective self of the scholar—even after
the worldwide pandemic that humanity
experienced in the last few years!
Whither Subjective?
Much more than mere fragments from
psychoanalysis could be recounted in
order to allude to the psychic and socio-
cultural subjectivities pertaining to mobi-
lity and, more precisely, migration. The
various turns in social sciences, which
some sociological orthodoxy of Yoda
age refuse to accept, brought about novel
realisations about the instrumental
significance of subjectivities in social sci-
ences. They have been called linguistic
turn, affective turn, sensorial turn, visual
turn and so on lately, while formerly such
critical discourses emerged in construc-
tivism and hermeneutics of various orders
march 11, 2023
post-World War II social sciences were
talking about the adverse delimiting im-
pacts of the techno-instrumental ways
of seeing and the sophisticated scientism.
Even the diehard empiricists, the tribe
of the economists, began to realise that
an accidental migrant named Robinson
Crusoe too had a complex symbolic com-
panionship of Friday, and was cast away
with a web of significance rather than
without it. And yet subjectivities of the
sociocultural actors remained an undesir-
able fugitive at large. The whole of social
sciences, in spite of the predominant pale
of positivism in perspectives and practices,
dealt with the question of mobility and
migration. But the vital question that
haunts a social science student, and the
editorial scheme of this book under re-
view, is about the conspicuously absent
subjectivity in the discourse of migration.
Reduction of subjectivities of migrants
into quantified population statistics in the
state-centric approaches to migration
seems to have impeded conceptual and
theoretical advancements in understand-
ing migration experiences of various social
groups, including the marginalised castes,
tribes, the homeless, transgenders, sex
workers and the disabled. The editorial
scheme agreeably avers, “subjectivities,
belongingness, and the affective dimen-
sions of the migrant’s social realities are
better narrativised and analysed than
measured” (p 12). And hence, in order to
reclaim the “personhood of migrants
and their experiential dynamics,” the
book envisages “a theorisation of human
mobility as ordinary and inherent dimen-
sions of human social life” (p 10).
But then, the envisaged meets with the
imprisoned, as it were. Hence, across the
book, the logic of measurement begins to
determine the logic of narrative, and at
times, measuring supersedes narrativis-
ing in the de-personalised and techno-be-
haviouristic accounts of migration. The
phantom of positivism haunts the intrigue
of experiences as soon as the analytics turn
to the optics of labour, colonial mobility,
regional migration, and such sociological
axes of analysis. For migrants, the binaries
turn slippery and for the scholars con-
ducting suave researches and attempt-
ing sophisticated writings, the binaries
vol lViII no 10 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

are unequivocally solid in spite of the
sporadic romance with the blurry bound-
aries in some of the essays in the book.
Such is a fait accompli in the time of
the crisis-ridden social sciences in South
Asia in which intellectual risk, creative
departures, and playful lightness in
experiments with experiences is as far-
fetched as is “dwelling” for those who
have left to live “somewhere else” (p 1).
And yet the book with 14 substantial
essays succeeds in holding the attention
of a reader seeking to understand as to
how “else” one can access the migrants.
Neatly divided into four parts, the book
presents the empirics of subjectivities
belonging to archival, historical, socio-
logical as well as from ethnographic and
auto-ethnographic contents. The first
section unravels the relationship of labour
and migration, which spills over with an
engendered focus in the second section.
And still later in section three and four,
labour looms large as a sublime ghost
even though the attention is directed to
the correlates of memory, longing, and
space. It is inevitable since the thematic
narratives of migration can seldom be
non-migrant (more precisely, immobile).
Equilibrium between
the Sublime and the Ridiculous
Perhaps, the whole book reads like a quest
of equibrium precariously hung between
the sublime and the ridiculous, kindling
a wishful thinking towards the imp-
erative of change in the ways of seeing
the migrants.
The struggle entailed in living and
leaving, of pathos and hope, constraints
and chances of redemption, comes sharply
in first three essays, by Dhiraj Kumar Nite,
Pushpendra Kumar Singh, and Sohini
Sengupta, respectively. Migrants’ subjec-
tive dispositions buried in the researcher’s
objective articulations lead to the trun-
cated readings of the deeper nuances in
otherwise banal details. Painstakingly
steering clear of the citation-heaviness
and the techno-instrumental devices, and
with the vignettes of abusive work rela-
tions, debatable sociality and sociability,
troubled schooling experiences, and socio-
economic advancements in the life of the
migrant workers of the coal mines, a
reader can stumble upon the relationship
Economic & Political Weekly EPW march 11, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
between well-being and development, The trope of understanding is engen-
cosmological and historical-material, in dered with three essays in the next section,
the lives of the migrants. If Nite stressed and gendering does not altogether dis-
on the making of the migrants’ world- appear in the four essays afterwards
view, Pushpendra shifts attention to the too. Recanonising the canon and reproduc-
making of a village—Jitwarpur in Araria ing the produce, Samita Sen turns to the
district of Bihar—combining census historical-sociology of migrant domestic
approach with ethnography, dwelling workers with a perpetuity of the labour
upon the experiences of the in- and out- aspect, spanning from late colonial to
migrants and the structural outcomes. contemporary India. If this was a largely
Not just cities, a reader learns in the time literature survey-based account, Anindita
of pervasive contemporary illusions, the Chatterjee takes to the ethnographic snap-
migrants also make villages, mediated shots through anecdotal accounts of the
through land, labour, power, violence, young girls in south Kolkata. Trajectories
oppression, resistance, subversion, social of memory and belongingness enable the
mobility and physical movements. And discussion to highlight the complexity
in the intrigue of making of a village, it underlying the idea of home, and also
unfolds that “living was prosaic, leaving the inadequacy of agency framework in
was palliative” (p 79). Making it more comprehending the Janus-faced agency
acute, Sengupta examines the debt bond- of female migrants such as Tara, Tina,
age and seasonal migration among the Dolly, Sabitri mashi and others. Sharon
ploughmen from the former zamindari Rose centralises a vernacular magazine,
of Borasambar in Odisha. Migrant nar- Girideepam, as a primary source to under-
ratives, a documentary of intentionality stand the religious identity, family and
and voices of the migrants, aimed at gender in the Malabar migration, at the
labour subjectivities, lead to fathom the cusp of the community and the Syro-
existential crisis and uncertain lives as Malabar Catholic Church. The text and
driving forces of seasonal migration. How context in this essay detail the reinforce-
unfree is one in the freedom that comes ment of gendered stereotypes, migrants
from psychic submissions, a Fromm becoming settlers on the premise of family,
question, is somewhat answered in the ideals of heterosexual men and women,
stories of survival, canal and brick kiln patriarchal descent and kinship, inherit-
migration in this essay, problematising ance and everything that belong to the
the narrative agency. world view of a settled migrant community.
दी माइक्रोफाइना स िर यू THE MICROFINANCE REVIEW
प्रकाशन हे तु आलेख आमंत्रण CALL FOR PAPERS
Bankers Institute of Rural Development (BIRD), Lucknow is a premier training
establishment promoted by NABARD. Centre for Research on Financial Inclusion
and Microfinance (CRFIM), set up within BIRD, has been publishing a half
yearly journal titled “THE MICROFINANCE REVIEW”. Papers / commentaries
are invited for publication of its January-June 2023 issue, Volume-XV, No.1
issue. Detailed guidelines for submission of papers / commentaries are available
at https://birdlucknow.nabard.org/center-of-excellence/cmr/microfinance-
review-journal/.
Interested persons may transmit papers / commentaries on Financial Inclusion
and Microfinance sector latest by 30 April 2023 to The Editor, THE
MICROFINANCE REVIEW, Bankers Institute of Rural Development, Sector-H,
LDA Colony, Kanpur Road, Lucknow-226 012; e-mail: birdjournal@nabard.
org/cmr.bird@nabard.org / bird@nabard.org; Tel : 0522-2421119 / 2421136.
Website: https://birdlucknow.nabard.org.
Director
vol lViII no 10 33
BOOK REVIEW
As stated before, the engendering per-
sists in unravelling the contents pertai-
ning to sociocultural memory. And so
does the category of labour. Asha Singh
and Nitin Sinha dwell upon Bhojpuri
women’s folksongs in their respective
essays. The motif of desire overplays the
feminine subjective dispositions toward
the male migrants’ perpetual enactment
of belonging. Not only the folk socio-
cultural world of promises but also ordi-
nary existential vulnerabilities, thus, tend
to occupy a characteristic part of the
experience of migration. A notion of
simultaneity, a veritable play of ego and
superego, home and the world, at the
heart of the subjectivity, underscores the
discursive trope in this section. It is how-
ever named and explained, in a candidly
conservative way, in Amita Bhide and
Kalyani Vartak’s essay focused on the
Konkani migrants in Maharashtra, to
provide a behaviouristic explanation of
the contemporary simultaneity. And as a
34
compensation to the dip in the music, a
crescendo emerges in Praveen Kumar
Jha’s exploration of the relationship of
the Caribbean migration and music, and
thereby the various incarnations of bira-
ha at the interface of society and history.
Bathed in humanised articulations of
subjectivities, the essay is a treasure
trove of meanings for any sensorially
equipped student of social sciences who
does not dismiss musicality and poetry
as a mere leisurely pastime. On this high
octane, the last section of the book pro-
vides with the three essays seeking and
showing an equilibrium between the
sublime and the ridiculous, as it were.
The human face of the migrants’ subjec-
tivity is unspooled in Garima Dhabai’s
discussion on the making of purusharthi
refugee vis-à-vis Sindhi migrants in
Jaipur, Swati Mantri’s exploration of
des-desavar in the context of the Marwari
migrants in Kolkata, and Sadan Jha’s
unabashedly confident ethnography of the
march 11, 2023
self, perhaps, wandering more intently
than a dervish, across spatial-sensorial
cartography of experience.
The book, in a nutshell, presents various
moments of intellectual ruptures, while
there is reinforced reifications aplenty; all
with noble intent, from commencement
to curtain down. This may excite young
researchers who need refreshing re-
searchers to shed the fatigue of the tried-
and-tested and get inspired for under-
taking much needed risks in approach-
ing something as ubiquitous as migration.
The book would, hopefully, upset the
diehard conservative scholars who nursed
a bizarre complacence of truth claims
about the phenomenon of migration. And
that is the hope ignited in this book for
which it deserves manifold recommen-
dations. Rest is just quibbles of curiosity.
Dev Nath Pathak (dev@soc.sau.ac.in) is
with the Department of Sociology, South
Asian University.
vol lViII no 10 EPW Economic & Political Weekly