Circular Migration and the Spaces

of Cultural Assertion
Vinay Gidwani* and K. Sivaramakrishnan**
*Department of Geography and Institute of Global Studies, University of Minnesota
**

Department of Anthropology, University of Washington

Harnessing primary and secondary evidence from India, our essay conceptualizes the cultural dynamics of migration.
In so doing, it demonstrates the incompleteness of standard marginalist and Marxist accounts of labor circulation.
As a corrective, we examine the linkages between culture, politics, space, and labor mobility and offer a way to think
about them by building on poststructural critiques of development and postcolonial theories of migrant subjectivity.
The proverbial compression of space-time not only has made extralocal work more viable for members of
proletarianized groups but, more importantly, has allowed them to transfer their experiences of new ways of being
into local contexts through acts of consumption and labor deployment that can become elements of a Gramscian
counterhegemonic praxis. We argue that the possibility of this sort of body politics compels not merely a critique
of the modernization paradigm that has organized classical migration studies but, more profoundly, a reassessment of
the way we understand modernity itself. We advocate an approach that provincializes the Eurowest and foregrounds
the existence of pluritopic regional modernities. Key Words: consumption, India, migration, regional modernities,
work.

his essay examines the relationship between

circular migration, identity politics, and livelihood
strategies against the backdrop of agrarian change
in India. We consider the cultural dimensions of labor
deployment and mobility in order both to evaluate and to
supplement the practical reason embodied in the livelihood strategies of migrants.1 Although neither migration
nor its understanding as a material and symbolic activity is
new, we suggest that what is new and important in terms of
agrarian social relations is the intensity and rate at which
labor, goods, and meanings are now able to circulate
through space. In many parts of India, the forces of
modernity have saturated the countryside to such an
extent that semiotic and spatial dualisms that identify the
rural as the realm of production and tradition and the
urban as the realm of consumption and modernity now
seem anachronistic.2 At the same time, it is quite evident
that the erasure of boundaries and the multiplication of
spatial linkages have not followed a uniform pattern. As
Watts (1992, 6) observes, [G]lobality and locality are
inextricably linked, but through complex mediations and
configurations of traditional society; the nonlocal processes driving capital mobility are always experienced,
constituted, and mediated locally . . . [through] a working
and reworking of modernity.
This underscores the point that villagers and villages
have become cosmopolitan in myriad ways. In the process,
they have become acquainted with worlds of goods and

significations that carry all the baggage that accompany

modern forms of desire.3 But remarkably, these same forms
of desire, and the consumptions of modernity they entail,
can occasionally contain emancipatory potential for
groups subordinated by place-specific relations of hierarchy. We are referring here to ideologies of class, caste,
ethnicity, and gender that slot agents into normalized roles
or identities and qualify their agency by making these roles
appear as giventhat is, as historically and spatially
invariant. The primary purpose of this essay is to discuss
migration and identity politics in terms of the renegotiation of group identities at the level of caste and tribal
differences.4
The sprawling literature on globalization within
geography and associated social-science disciplines makes
it abundantly clear that global modernity has been an
uneven and inequitous phenomenon, marked by simultaneous processes of time-space compression (Harvey 1989)
and expansion (Tsing 2000b) at various scales, with the
result that some cities, regions, and countries have
become increasingly interlinked in terms of material and
cultural flows, whereas others have become increasingly
dissociated and marginalized (Piot 1999; Appadurai 2000;
Bauman 2000; Beck 2000; Tsing 2000a). Our essay refers
to three regions within India that fall into the first
category, where time-space compression not only has
made extralocal work more viable for members of
subordinated groups but, more importantly, has allowed

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(1), 2003, pp. 186213

r 2003 by Association of American Geographers
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

them to transfer their experiences of new ways of being
into local contexts through acts that recast the body,
either through forms of consumption or through the way
their labor power is valorized in pursuit of livelihoods.5
Such body politicsa term that we qualify below
mirror new attempts at self-making by marginalized caste
and tribal groupsor, to invoke Bourdieu (1977, 16869),
aheterodoxy at the level of identity that has sporadically
enabled disempowered migrant groups to repudiate
established structures of authority and oppression.6 More
pointedly, we argue that with the rise of rural cosmopolitanism, modes of consumption and labor valorization
have become elements of a Gramscian counterhegemonic
praxis: a symbolic and material vocabulary for challenging
ruling ideologies. However, we are the first to concede that
the analytical recovery of such praxis is not easy, because
the discursive universe from which it emerges is rarely well
articulated or coherent. Intent is never clearly spelled out.
Instead, as Gramsci (1971, 32526) points out, subaltern
praxis often reflects fragmentary conceptions and goals
bundled together in bizarre combinations.7
We do not, therefore, base the possibility of counterhegemonic practice on the premise (pace Hebdige 1988,
206) that for Gramsci all social relations are contestable.
Rather, we share the interpretation of Comaroff and
Comaroff (1991, 27, 30) that hegemony is intrinsically
unstable because it is the product of the dialectic whereby
the content of dominant ideologies is distilled into shared
forms that seem to have such historical longevity as to be
above historyand, hence, to have the capacity to
generate new substantive practices along the surfaces of
economy and society.
But, having interpreted hegemony as a perforated
rather than seamless structure of controlling ideas, whose
legitimacy has to be constantly reproduced by the ruling
classes, we want to make several qualifications to our
thesis. First, at no point do we intend to suggest that the
two types of body practices we highlight (styles of
consumption and labor deployment) are equally effective
everywhere as a language of antidomination. Second, we
do not, in fact, even want to claim that forms of
consumption and labor valorization are invariably premeditated acts of resistance. More often than not, these
actions originate as relatively innocuous transgressions of
social codes that then produce unexpected results. To put
it another way, agency often surfaces like an uninvited
guest from the byways of routine or everyday practice. We
believe this is an important corrective to studies of popular
culture (particularly subcultures of marginal groups) that
are quick to anoint consumerism as a form of resistance
against traditional, elitist culture (Campbell 1995, 98).
Agency, in our view, is a more elusive and less purposive

187

beast.8 Third, our thesis does not claim to supplant

standard narratives of migration within geographyfor
instance, the collection of articles in Robinson (1996), the
textbook by Golledge and Stimson (1997), or the work of
Skeldon (1997); rather, it supplements and complicates
them by bringing a cultural gaze to geographies of work
and migration.
The essay is organized as follows. We begin with an
overview of conventional Marxist and marginalist explanations of migration, and question their pervasive
economism and links to modernization theory. We then
evaluate some recent literature on migration by geographers and anthropologists that critique these conventional accounts from feminist, postcolonial, and postdevelopment perspectives. These new approaches to
migration stress the need to reassess migration as a
cultural event (McHugh 2000), organized by practical
consciousness, that transforms migrant subjectivities and
notions of place in gendered, raced, and classed ways
(Halfacree and Boyle 1993; White and Jackson 1995;
Silvey and Lawson 1999; Lawson 2000). In short, they
seek to transform population geography by bringing it into
engagement with social theory. Although the new migration scholars succeed admirably in their efforts to free
population geography from its behavioral and structural
straitjacketsand, more importantly, from its links to
Eurocentric ideologies of modernization and developmentwe argue that there is scope for an even more
profound rethinking of modernity. Existing postcolonial
and postdevelopment critiques of modernity are timely,
acute, and correct in many respects, but too undifferentiated. There has been a strong tendency to identify
modernity exclusively with its excesses, which then
becomes the basis for its repudiation. Correspondingly,
there has been a postmodern celebration of difference,
whose critical origins now threaten to be overshadowed by
the (selective) installation of difference as the new
guiding universal. This is particularly evident in postdevelopment manifestos (for instance, Sachs 1992;
Escobar 1995; Rahnema 1997), where the postdevelopment imaginary has room for those new social movements that oppose development or express longing for
a state of predevelopment, but none for those that
desire development in a variety of ways. This sort of
exclusionary move not only has the ironic effect of
consolidating the pernicious Eurocentric distinction
between modern and nonmodern, but also threatens
to impose a new regulative ideal (Butler 1993) or
normalizing vision that reveals the same modernist desire
that is ostensibly posited as the object of critique.
As a way of formulating a more theoretically consistent
and politically nuanced account of circular migration that

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Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan

furthers the work begun by the new migration scholars, we

introduce two organizing concepts: an oppositional notion
of self-making we term body politics that underscores
the liberatory potential of migration within the context of
development; and a provincialized notion of modernity we
term regional modernities that avoids the conceptual
contradictions of existing postcolonial and postdevelopment appraisals of migration. In its crudest form, our use of
the term regional modernities can be read as a
repudiation of Eurocentric scholarship that postulates (a
singular) Modernity as self-validation of the Eurowests
intrinsic cultural superiority and the cause for its economic
and political centrality within world affairs postfifteenth
century. (See Dussel 1999 for an incisive critique of the
Eurocentric paradigm.) By contrast, we make the case for
scholarship that carefully untangles how the ideals,
practices, and institutional forms of Eurowestern modernity have traveled via colonialism and neocolonialism and
articulated with regional polities and practices to produce
distinctive regional modernities, which operate at scales
that are spatially and temporally transitive. One notable
feature of regional modernities is their uneven rejection
and acceptance of the universalizing theses of Eurowestern
modernity. Hence, discursive and modular formations
such as nationalism and development whose originary
moments are claimed as European9 may be appropriated
and resignified as power/knowledge relations of a quite
different sort within the context of regional modernities. A discourse of Indian nationalism that combines
the temporal domains of the spiritual/divine and the
material/secular claims a very different ontology (vide
Chatterjee 1993) than, say, a French nationalism
founded on the premise of empty, homogenous time
(vide Anderson [1983] 1991). Similarly, manifestos of
development within a Costa Rican context, or modernity within the Zambian context, may become potent
icons in struggles for justicein one instance, by
peasants who contrast the justice of development to the
injustice of neoliberal macroeconomic policies that
threaten their livelihoods (Edelman 1999); in the other
instance, by Zambian masses who embraced modernity
as vindication of a successful anti-imperial struggle
(Ferguson 1999).
It is this self-alienated aspect of both modernity
and development that we wish to foreground in this
essay. In contrast to postdevelopment theorists who view
modernity and development as uniformly disempowering, we want to propose that these are discursive
formations whose operations are geographically and
historically uneven, and which contain the elements of
their own critique. In short, modernity and development can produce both vocabularies of self-repudiation

(hence, the language of an unrealized development

imaginary can become the basis for critiquing actually
existing development) and spaces for an oppositional
politics of self-making by subaltern groups (hence, uneven
development may undermine emplaced relations of
domination and exclusion).
Our essay makes the additional move of linking this
oppositional politics, which takes the form of body
politics, to circular migration. Harnessing primary and
secondary evidence from three regions within India
rural Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengalwe identify
the ways in which members from subordinated caste and
tribal groups have attempted to use the labor mobility
promoted by development within the context of
regional modernities to their advantage.

A Discontented Look at Standard

Models of Migration
Shreshta (1988, 183) suggests that five types of
modeling approaches have shaped migration studies since
Ravensteins influential 1885 article, The Laws of
Migration, formally inaugurated the field. They include:
economic/behavioral models premised on utility maximization by migrants seeking better economic opportunities
elsewhere; ecodemographic push models that identify
population pressure and diminishing returns to labor as
the primary causes of migration; spatial attraction or
gravity models that emphasize urban pull factors,
compensating for the rising transaction costs imposed on
migration decisions by distance; anthroposociological
models that highlight the importance of group networks
and modernizing influences on migration; and neoMarxist dependency models that view uneven development and the articulation of precapitalist with capitalist
modes of production as the root cause of migration. In fact
Shreshtas five-fold typology can be condensed, without
grievous loss of precision, into two dominant approaches:
on the one hand, dual economy models from the
marginalist and rational choice tradition in economics
(Ravenstein 1885, 1889; Lewis 1954, 1958; Jorgensen
1961, 1967; Ranis and Fei 1961; Harris and Todaro 1970;
Todaro 1976; Stark 1991); and on the other, variants of
the Marxist tradition that explain migration as a response
to or consequence of uneven capitalist development and
class struggle (Kautsky [1899]1990; Van Schendel and
Faraizi 1984; Breman 1985; Standing 1985; Shreshta
1988; Pincus 1996; Wells 1996). Anthroposociological
approaches that underline the importance of social
networks are typically revisionary offshoots of these
dominant frameworks (Stark 1991 is an example from
the marginalist tradition and Breman 1996 from the

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

Marxist that recognize the role of networks in migration
decisions). An important third category of models that
do not appear in Shreshtras taxonomy is feminist interventions in the migration literature (exemplars include
Abu-Lughod 1975; Chant 1992; Schenk-Sandbergen
1995; Mills 1999; Silvey and Lawson 1999).
Since reviews of the marginalist and Marxist perspectives are staples in the migration studies literature (see, for
instance, Standing 1985; Shreshta 1988; Brown 1991), we
offer only a cursory overview here. In the marginalist
universe, individuals migrate from one sector to another if
they expect better wages or marginal returns to labor in the
other sector, net of migration costs.10 The standard model
has two sectors: agriculture (rural/traditional) and industry (urban/modern). The normal assumption is that
the marginal value product of labor is lower in the
agricultural sector relative to the industrial because of
demographic pressure, poorer production technology,
and relatively inelastic demand for agricultural products.
As a result, agriculture on net expels laborers and industry
on net receives them. In this essentially gravity-flow
model, migration ceases and the system achieves equilibrium when marginal returns to labor are equalized in
agriculture and industry.11 Imperfect competition, imperfect information, and bounded rationality on the part of
agents can be inserted into the basic model to explain
variations in migration patterns and, in general, produce
more sophisticated accounts of migration (see, for
instance, Stark 1991), but the distilled wisdom of the
approach remains fundamentally unchanged. Instrumental rationality, embodied in the migrants exquisite sense of
utility-maximization or risk-minimization, rules the
day.
Marxist approaches harness a different system logic to
explain migration: at the heart of these explanations lie
efforts by dominant classes to sustain or expand levels of
(absolute and relative) surplus extraction by exploiting
spatially uneven patterns of proletarianization and depeasantization. Hence, the divide and rule thesis (Hart
1986; Pincus 1996) argues that locally dominant classes in
core areas recruit seasonal migrants from peripheral,
economically underdeveloped sites as a way of creating a
surplus labor pool that exerts downward pressure on local
wages and, in addition, makes the local demand for labor
more elastic, thereby weakening the likelihood of collective bargaining by resident workers. The Kautskian
version argues that migration is a forced livelihood
response undertaken by semiproletarian households who
own or lease some amount of land in home areas, but not
enough to generate a subsistence income. Migration
becomes a way of covering the income shortfall. But
precisely because extralocal (rural or urban) employers

189

know that migrants have continuing economic ties [with

their village homes, and that these] . . . village homes bear
part of the cost of maintaining and reproducing this labor
force . . . [it allows] employers to pay [migrant workers]
lower wages and offer lower benefits (Mills 1997, 38).
Migration, in this narrative, becomes the spatial analog of
Kautskian superexploitation, which subsidizes surplus
extraction by capitalist employers. The third prominent
Marxist account is migrant as the archetypical worker in a
capitalist (and imperialist) world system, recruited to
travel sometimes vast distances to sites of capitalist
production (Breman 1989).
It is fairly clear that although both marginalist and
Marxist approaches offer useful and credible insights on
migration, they share an economistic bias that underplays
or else entirely ignores the cultural universe of labor
circulation. Moreover, both ultimately identify the uneven
spatial development of the capitalist economy as the motive
force of migration. But whereas the marginalists paint
migration as a voluntary choice by instrumentally rational
agents seeking better economic prospects, Marxists are less
sanguine about the element of choice and are prone to view
migration as the outcome of spatial variations in class
interaction and capitals penetration of agriculture. To
put it baldly, marginalist approaches posit migrant
agency (although a curiously deterministic version of it,
governed by the imperatives of utility optimization)
relatively unhindered by structure, while Marxist approaches posit structure relatively impervious to migrant
agency.
Neither the marginalists nor the Marxists question the
Eurocentric, historicist metanarrative of modernity
that undergirds their models of migration, and that has
taken the form of Orientalism under colonialism, Modernization under imperialism and nationalism, and Globalization under late capitalismin each instance
ascribing an underlying structural unity . . . to historical
process and time that makes it possible to identify certain
elements in the present as anachronistic (Chakrabarty
2000, 12). What is pernicious, of course, are the moral
valences and prescriptions that accompany these stagist,
secular accounts of time; they enable the production of
binaries such as uncivilized/civilized, traditional/modern,
backward/industrialized, and underdeveloped/ developed
that justify, under the guise of Reason, often violent
transformations of society and nature (Scott 1998
catalogs numerous misguided schemes hatched under
colonial, capitalist, and socialist modernities). In this
universalized story of Progress, migration and its upheavals are reduced to a necessary, if sometimes unfortunate, subplot in the unfolding of History in Europes
image.

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Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan

Culture, Space, and Labor Mobility

Recent studies of migration by geographers and
anthropologists have sought to expose the ideological
moorings of the social categories that organize developmentalist understandings of time and space within
modernization theory, its colonial antecedents, and its
post-Fordist cognates. Contrary to the behavioralism of
marginalist theories of migration and the structuralism
of Marxist theories, new migration scholars have sought
to restore agency to migrants by showing, through biographical and ethnographic research, how migrants
apprehend, negotiate, and transform the social structures
that impinge on their lives (Halfacree and Boyle 1993;
Lowe 1996; Stack 1996; Mills 1999; Lawson 2000;
McHugh 2000). In short, although structuration theories,
building on Saussurean semiotics and Marxist dialectics,
have been around for at least two decades (exemplars
include Bourdieu 1977 and Giddens 1984) and have
offered sophisticated insights on the spatiotemporal
recursivity of structure and agency, their empirical
deployment within population geography and migration
research is relatively recent.
Ben Rogalys work on rural seasonal migration in
eastern India is a stellar example of this trend. His (1998b,
22) basic argument, based on fieldwork in Bardhaman and
Purulia districts in West Bengal, is that seasonal migration . . . is not simply an inevitable part of the cycle of
indebtedness, but can enable workers to save and even to
accumulate capital on a very small scalethereby
augmenting their abilities to alter institutionalized structures of oppression. This conclusion echoes some of the
findings Wells (1996) documents in Strawberry Fields,
her fine study of Mexican braceros and undocumented
workers in the California strawberry industry. She describes how these workers toil in appalling conditions for
their Mexican-American padrones in the North Monterey
hills, often surviving on as little as U.S.$500 for an entire
year and sustaining families or farming in Mexico by
diligently dispatching their annual savings of $2,000
3,000 across the border (Wells, 20910). Wells (164)
describes the psychology of these migrants by noting that
undocumented workers . . . aspire to return to Mexico for
their long-term economic advancement. Thus, migration is viewed as a means for accumulating surpluses that
may enable workers to augment economic and social
status in their places of origin.
Despite the ethnographic richness of these studies, the
organizing paradigm for Wells and Rogaly is a dialectical
materialism that views migration primarily as an economic event that fits into rural livelihood strategies,
rather than as a simultaneously cultural event that

transforms migrant subjectivities and perceptions of place.

Our essay draws theoretical inspiration from three
literatures: (a) new work in population geography that
questions longstanding essentialisms (Silvey and Lawson 1999, 128) within the field, particularly the binaries
that have shaped studies of migration empirically and
normatively; (b) new anthropological work on migration
and modernity that stresses the transformative power of
consumption, whether of physical goods or of representations (Ong 1987, 1991; Miller 1995a, 1995b; Mills 1997,
1999); and (c) renewed interest in phenomenologies of
the labor process (Joyce 1987; Scott 1990; Kapadia 1995;
Freeman 2000).
The empirical justification for our article comes from
the unprecedented multiplication of rural-urban and
rural-rural linkages in South Asia over the past two
decades, which has enormously expanded labor circulation and caused the catchment area of workers to become
regional in scale, rather than locally rural or urban (Ghose
1990; McDowell and de Haan 1997). This has happened
through occupational diversification for rural labor
(Harriss 1991; Chandrasekhar 1993; Basant 1994), the
spread of rural and periurban industrialization (Mukhopadhyay and Lim 1985; Islam 1987), the increased
prevalence of contract farming (Little and Watts 1994;
Panini 1999), and greater circulation of labor to agricultural and urban destinations due to declining labor
intensity of farming in both irrigated and dryland areas
(Breman 1985; Ramachandran 1990; Conway 1997;
Rogaly 1998a). As Srivastava (1998, 584) points out in
the Indian context, official statistics such as census data
and National Sample Survey (NSS) data tend to underestimate population mobility and labor migration to a
significant extent, because they rely on survey instruments that primarily cover permanent and semipermanent migration and handle short-duration circular or
seasonal migration far less effectively. By contrast, microlevel studies of migration (Dupont 1992; Breman 1996;
Jayaraman and Lanjouw 1998; Breman and Das 2000)
attest to large increases in labor mobility, particularly
short-duration migration. In fact, a recent estimate
suggests that one-sixth of Indias population moves each
year, many to work in agriculture, forestry, small industry,
and construction (Rogaly 1998a, 273, n. 2).12
As more and more people enter into new work
arrangements in rural areas or travel seasonally to work
in informal sectors of the urban economy, their social
relations, their sense of self, their relation to a sense of
place, and their understandings of work undergo changes
that are manifest in identity formation. To invoke Gramsci
([1957] 1980, 77), [M]an [sic] changes himself, modifies
himself, to the same extent that he changes and modifies

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

the whole complex of relationships of which he is the
nexus. Based on the accumulating empirical evidence,
we contend that rural households in Asia are increasingly
generating livelihoods by participating in plural, coeval,
and spatially dispersed labor processes that display feudal,
Fordist, and post-Fordist characteristics. The emerging
space of work is regionalneither exclusively local or
nonlocal, nor exclusively rural or urbanand the culture
of work is one of liminality and fluidity: migrants are part
of a traveling culture that exposes them to diverse worlds of
association and signification that sow the seeds of discontent. Such are the modest origins of counterhegemony.
In their recent Annals article, Silvey and Lawson
(1999) have charted new directions for migration studies,
combining the insights of population geographers who
draw on social theory to interrogate migration with
insights from feminist, postcolonial, and postdevelopment
theories that destabilize metanarratives of patriarchy and
modernization and foreground the politics of difference.
They do so by unraveling the developmentalist assumptions that have framed the categories place and
migrant in classical migration studies. They note, for
instance, that place has been commonly understood in
the conventional migration literature in terms of some
index of economic development or modernization. According to Silvey and Lawson (122), the focus on places as
arenas of development that structure action rather than
as domains of contested power relations has precluded
attention to important sites of subject formation and
negotiation such as communities, households, and bodies.
It is precisely these places of difference, which have been
silenced within the homogenizing discourse of modernization, that are brought to the forefront in feminist and
postcolonial theorizing.
Inevitably, this rethinking of place within population
geography demands a corresponding rethinking of the
category migrant, who, in classical migration studies,
has been implicitly male and rural, and rarely inflected by
the markings of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality,
and nationality (Silvey and Lawson 1999, 125). We learn
from Silvey and Lawson that to recognize the influence of
these markings on the formation of migrant subjectivity is
to simultaneously acknowledge the contingent nature of
migrant identities and discover the ambivalence migrants
voice about their mobility.
Our essay explores and augments the leads Silvey and
Lawson offer, with two major differences. First, we appeal
to recent anthropological studies of consumption and
labor deployment in order to demonstrate how migrants
from subaltern classes can rework processes of modernization and development to their advantage. Our
primary intention is to show the spaces of hope (cf.

191

Harvey 2000) that dialectically sprout in the interstices of

domination. But in so doing, we also want to argue that
many contemporary critics of development and modernity tend to universalize these processes, rather than
give them the spatial and cultural particularity they
deserve. We introduce the idea of regional modernities
as a provisional corrective. Second, and correspondingly,
we appeal to recent critiques of postcoloniality and
postdevelopment in order to demonstrate that these
perspectives, which begin with a welcome humbling of
certain hegemonic regimes of Truth (Scott 1999, 4),
often and unintentionally end up perpetuating elements
of that same Truth.

Field Sites and Fieldwork

In giving empirical substance to our theoretical arguments on migration and modernity, we focus on two
categories of subordinated groups in rural India: tribals
and dalits.13 We draw evidence from secondary materials,
as well as fieldwork conducted by the authors between
1993 and 2001 in the Kheda and Baroda districts of
Gujarat, Tiruvannamalai District of Tamil Nadu, and
Midnapore District of West Bengal (Figure 1).
A brief note on the genesis of this article seems necessary.
Our initial projects were independent evaluations of the
distributive and political impacts of development programs
in two different agrarian settings (Gidwani studied how the
introduction of a large surface-irrigation scheme transformed agrarian social relations in central Gujarat, particularly the bargaining power and political consciousness of
low caste workers; Sivaramakrishnan examined how the
introduction of joint forest management (JFM) schemes in
eastern West Bengal intersected with regional tribal
politics, and whether JFM marked a devolution in state
control or a new form of governmentality). Although the
link between circular migration and changes in the cultural
assertiveness of subordinated caste and tribal groups was
not the explicit focus of our initial research programs, the
parallels between these geographically dispersed research
sites soon became evident to us. And while we were clearly
struck by the upsurge in intercaste tensions and the rise of
regional identity (caste, dalit, and tribal) politics in the
1990s, we were also intrigued by microstudies of migration
(notably the work of Dutch anthropologist Jan Breman)
that suggested a rising trend in labor mobility in rural India,
particularly after 1991the year when the Indian government formally adopted the macroeconomic tenets of
economic liberalization and structural adjustment.
We decided it was important to explore whether there
was a relationship between rising labor circulation and the
intensification of regional identity politics.

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Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan

Figure 1. Fieldwork sites in India

Accordingly, in 1997, we initiated a collaborative

research study to investigate the connections between
short-duration (circular or seasonal) migration and
regional political assertion by oppressed social groups.
We decided to draw on Gujarat and West Bengal as our
regional field sitesnot merely for reasons of linguistic
fluency and prior ethnographic work in these areas, but
also because these states fulfilled the broad structural
requirements that a study with our goals seemed to
demand. Both Gujarat and West Bengal have long
histories of colonial rule and modernization programs
and, subsequently, nationalist interventions for development; both have a regional ecology that is a mix of
dryland and irrigated areas; both have large tribal and dalit
populations; both are highly industrialized and urbanized
states; and both have aggressively wooed domestic and
foreign capital investment in the aftermath of Indias
embrace of liberalization and structural adjustment. To

these we added a third state, Tamil Nadu, which shares all

the above structural characteristics.
To date, our project has tried to evaluate from a regional
perspective and at the morphological level of group
identity how processes of development and modernity
have influenced patterns of labor circulation and identity
politics in our study areas. The empirical findings presented in this essay derive from village-level survey and
ethnographic data, key informant interviews, and associated studies of migration drawn from our three field
areas. Our current research, still in its preliminary phases,
investigates the cultural micropolitics of rural and urban
work from the perspective of migrants and employers, and
how migration processes and group politics are differentiated by gender and religion. We are sensitive to scholarship calling for engendered migration studies, and we
recognize that the categories tribe and dalit deserve to
be more fully differentiated along axes of domination such

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

as gender, religion, and ethnicity. However, our initial
research responded to a South Asian context in which
several excellent recent studies on gender, migration, and
contestations of patriarchy and class relations are available
(Chen 1991; Feldman 1992; Pryer 1992; Kapadia 1995;
Schenk-Sandbergen 1995; Fernandes 1997; Sen 1999).
The literature on migration and dalit/tribal identities and
politics is, by comparison, curiously thin. In this article, we
offer a conceptual framework to fill this breach by
examining how circular migration, consumption, labor
deployment and identity politics interweave to produce
alternative understandings ofand, occasionally, realignments withinplace-based hierarchies of caste and tribe.

Migration and Body Politics

Like the new generation of migration scholars in
geography and anthropology, we view migration as a social
and cultural processnot merely an economic onethat
transforms space and place.14 Correspondingly, we regard
migrants as part of a traveling culture, who, as such, are
always straddling worlds, always negotiating shifting frames
of reference, always facing new possibilities and constraints,
and always grappling with new subject positions.
Our particular focus here are those dalit and tribal
migrants who, through their travels and travails, often
acquire political sensibilities that are strategically expressed in their places of origin as a body politics. We derive
the idea of a body politics from a feminist literature that
has sought to rewrite bodies as signifying and signified
entities that are neither brute nor passive but . . .
interwoven with and constitutive of systems of meaning,
signification, and representation (Grosz 1994, 18).15 This
literature rejects the notion of bodies as natural objects,
prior to culture, that can be differentiated on the basis of
self-evident biological characteristics (such as sex).
Indeed, as Judith Butler (1993, 2) argues in a radical vein,
the materiality of bodies is produced performativelythat
is, through a reiterative and citational practice by which
discourse produces the effects it names. Accordingly, she
considers it the task of social theory to understand how
and why certain bodies come to matter. She (1993, 9)
advocates a return to the notion of matter, not as site or
surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over
time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we
call matter (emphasis in original).
Why is this kind of corporeal feminism relevant to the
issue of dalit and tribal identities? We argue that it is deeply
relevant for several reasons. First, as we now commonly
appreciate, identities are individuated by externalizing an
otherspecifically, by the positing of an other which is
constituted symbolically as opposed to the identity of the

193

self (Norval 1996, 65). More perniciously, identities

come to be associated with a politics of purity, which
actively seeks to exclude externalized others as impure or
abject. The termabjection, Butler (1993, 243) explains,
designates a degraded or cast-out status within the terms
of sociality. This could easily stand as the constitutive
principle of Indias caste system, which, despite its regional
fluidity of hierarchies among endogamous groups who
belong to the four overarching and formally-anointed
(twice-born) castes, fixes on the bodily impurity of dalits
and tribals as a way of marking the latters social and
biological inferiority and thereby justifies their subordination by caste groups. In other words, just as the female
body has been constructed as the abject of the male body
and anointed as inferior within patriarchal ideologies,
so, too, have dalit and tribal bodies been constructed
within ideologies of caste.
Secondand linked to the previous pointis the
imposition on women of being the body for men while
men are left free to soar to the heights of theoretical
reflection and cultural production (Grosz 1994, 22). This
carries the implications within male-dominated society
both that women have been viewed as less capable than
men of intellectual and cultural activities and that
their value to society has consisted primarily of the
functions they have been able to perform for men. In
similar fashion, caste society has actively tried to diminish
the individuality and capacities of dalit and tribal women
and men (who, as matter of rote, are treated as lower
on the civilizational scale, verging on animality) and
valued them primarily as the working body for caste
groups.
It is therefore hardly surprising that dalits and tribals
should choose to express their dissent via a politics of the
body that entails two moves: first, the search for alternative
forms of employment that enable them to reject their
historical position of servitude to caste groups; and second,
the desire for forms of consumption that would have
previously only been affordable or possible for caste groups
and which, therefore, signify social transgression.

Resistance to the Working Body

Labor deployment is conditioned by the structural
features of uneven development and labor-market conditions; but we arguein concurrence with the new
scholars of migrationthat it is also inflected by the
desire of migrants to refashion place-based identities. We
hypothesize that cyclical migration may occur because it
can allow agents to loosenand occasionally repudiate
institutionalized forms of authority and control that are
exercised through the rural labor process. Clientist labor

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Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan

relations, debt bondage, and the drudgery of underpaid

wage work are some of the most visible examples of such
compulsion. Hence, rural workers who escape to daily or
semipermanent factory jobs may encounter arduous
working conditions in their new employment, even earn
lower real wages and temporarily suffer diminished food
security, but despite it express preference for economically
inferior employment because it allows them to undercut
the undesired roles thrust upon them by history. Parrys
(1999) work in Madhya Pradesh, central India, illustrates
this point very well: he describes how the Satnamis (a
religious sect formed mainly of dalits) were galvanized
after the mid-1960s by the prospect of employment
opportunities at the Bhilai steel plant and the industrial
city that developed around it.16 Consider, as further
evidence, the following example from central Gujarat,
where Gidwani conducted his fieldwork.

The Kolis of Kheda District, Gujarat

The Baraiya and Tadbda Kolis occupy a liminal position
in central Gujarats caste hierarchy. Several of the upper
castes consider them descendants of the original tribal
inhabitants of the region, who were assimilated into caste
society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
through intermarriages with Rajput lineages from Rajasthan fleeing Mughal incursions there. Interestingly, todays Garasia and Darbar castes, who consider themselves
the true descendents of the Rajput refugees, accept Koli
women in marriage but refuse to give their own daughters
in marriage to Koli men. This one-sided relationship
seems driven entirely by cultural pragmatism (since the
Garasias and Darbars are a numerically small community)
and is a clear sign that they do not consider the Kolis their
social equals. In fact, the Kolis are frequently disparaged by
the upper castes as rude, backward, and uncivilized.
The Kolis maintain that members of the landed and locally
dominant Patel caste dispossessed them of their oncesubstantial landholdings through usurious lending practices and subterfuge; but Patels dismiss these allegations as
the claims of an agnani praja (illiterate and ignorant
people), whose failure to prosper is entirely the result of
their bagdela lakshan (bad habitsthe reference is
to the liking many Kolis display for recreational gambling, drinking, and opium consumption) and their roodichustta (cultural conservatismfiguratively denoting
irrational adherence to custom, superstitiousness, and
backwardness).
The reaction among Kolis to this sort of stereotyping is a
mix of disdain and defiance. Many speak about the stigma
of working as laborers for Patels, given that their

forefathers (bapdada) were substantial landowners. A

cultural revivalist core among the Baraiyas and Kolis
exhorts their ritual status as kshatriyas or rajputs and
reminds them that the Patels, although now operationally
on par with the upper castes, were merely low-caste sudras
several decades ago.17 One Baraiya Koli agevan (community leader) characterized Patels as lanka dheds. Since
dhed is a derogatory form of address applied to Vankar
dalits, the term lanka dheds, which figuratively means
Vankars in guise, is meant not only to disparage the
lowly ancestral origins of Patels but to further indicate that
their present upper-caste status was managed through
subterfugehence the use of the word lanka, referring
to Ravans subterfuge in spiriting Sita away in the Hindu
epic, the Ramayana.18
Several Kolis have resorted to daily migratory work at a
local light-bulb factory in the hope of evading agricultural
work under Patel employers (ironically, this light-bulb
factorywhich is a collaborative between the Indian
subsidiary of General Electric and Apar Lightingis
owned by a wealthy Desai Patel from the city of Nadiad!).
The factory hires about 800 to 900 workersall men
over three daily shifts. Most workers are temporary and are
rehired periodically. The company does this in order to
minimize the number of permanent employees on their
roster, because permanent employees are eligible for
various nonpecuniary benefits under Indian labor legislation. Daily income from an eight-hour shift is Rs. 40
(slightly under U.S.$1.00) for the average worker. Workers
who attempt to organize a union (there were two cases
between 1994 and 1995) are thrown out of their jobs.
Since the company does not pay for the transportation of
workers from their home villages, this is an added daily
cost some workers must bear.
Meanwhile, agricultural wages for roughly six to seven
hours of work are Rs. 2530 ($0.55$0.65) in peak season
and Rs. 2025 ($0.45 to $0.55) in the lean season.
Workers expectand normally receivein-kind reimbursement for certain agricultural operations, such as the
harvesting and threshing of wheat in the rabi (winter)
season. Nonpecuniary benefits include the rights to
collect fodder and fuel for household use from the farmers
field, to glean leftover grains after harvest, and, often, to
solicit small zero-interest consumption or emergency
loans from the employer.
Although expected returns from factory work and
agricultural work are roughly equal when pecuniary and
nonpecuniary benefits are tallied, the clamor to find
factory work reaches fever pitch every morning, when
aspiring workers line up in front of the GE-Apar complex.
When asked to explain the attraction of uncertain factory
work, several Kolis in the queue of workers claimed they

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

were tired of being goaded by Patel farm employers; a few
Kolis took the stance that factory work was more
prestigious than farm work by invoking an inverted
form of a Gujarati proverb that has become popular in
central Gujarat:
Original proverb
Kheti uttam (Cultivation best),
Vyapar madhyam (Trade middling),
Naukri kanisht (Salaried job worst).

Inverted form
Naukri uttam (Salaried or nonfarm job best),
Vyapar madhyam (Trade middling),
Kheti kanisht (Cultivation worst).

The cultural dissent evident in the preceding example

is reinforced by Bremans (1996, 238) observations about
the motivations of younger generation dalit migrants in
south Gujarat:
The new generation of Halpatis seems to grasp every
opportunity to escape the agrarian regime. Away from the
village and from agriculture, they earn a few extra rupees,
mostly countered by greater effort besides the longer journey and
work times [emphasis added] . . . Hired for the day as loaderunloader, these young men and women stand in the back of
the truck with their mates and enjoy a freedom that is
denied them when working in the fields. For them, that is
also the attraction of the urban casual labor markets. They
are certainly treated there as commodities, but at least they
are not immediately identified and stigmatized as sala
Dubra. (authors emphasis for a derogatory local
term applied by upper-caste employers to the low caste
Halpatis)

One of the primary lessons we learn from these examples

is that the link between migration and economic reason is
less secure than is conventionally presupposed in migration
studies. It is, for instance, neither clear that migration
unambiguously improves livelihood security nor clear that
lack of livelihood security is the primary determinant of
migration. Relatively scant attention to the cultural
molding of migrant agency is a large part of the problem.
While it is clearly important to uncover and publicize the
abject treatment of migrant workers by powerful employers,19 it is equally necessary to document the quite distinct
motivations for migration and admit the possibility that
even in those cases where migration is involuntary workers
may in fact see their bargaining power improve in relation
to local source area employers (Rogaly 1999, 375). It is
precisely this ingrainedand sometimes wittingneglect
of migrant culture that has recently prompted anthropol-

195

ogists of work to caution against narratives of migration

that identify declining economic security as the sole or
overriding cause of the phenomenon. Such accounts, they
claim, are liable to be incomplete, or even misplaced,
because they exclude hermeneutic investigation into the
varied perceptions and desires of migrants and altogether
overlook how migration reflects and endows agency (Ong
1987; Safa 1990; Wolf 1992; Mills 1999).

The Lodhas of Midnapore District, West Bengal

The conflicted relationship that landless Lodha tribals
in western Midnapore, West Bengal, bear to farm work is
revealing in this regard. One immediately noteworthy
feature of this relationship is its similarity to the attitudes
of the Kolis of central Gujarat and the Halpatis of south
Gujarat. Historically, the imperatives of rain-fed agriculture placed the landed, higher-caste Mahato farmers in
relations of dominance over Lodha labor. An economic
hierarchy based in control over cultivable land (the
primary means of production) was reinforced by a cultural
hierarchy that privileged Mahato agronomic knowledge
and farm-management skills. Lodhas, meanwhile, were
disparaged by the cultivating Mahato and Santhal groups
for their poor cultivation skills. Lately, Lodha laborers
have begun to counter these allegations of ignorance and
sloth by pointing to declining standards of remuneration
for farm work and the reminders it carries of historical
processes of dispossession and denigration that have
created their current status as Midnapores landless
proletariat. While the various income-earning options
open to Lodhas differ little in strictly monetary terms,20
the evaluation of these options by Lodha workers is
colored by social memories of dependency on the Mahatos
and the Lodhas compulsion, as a result, to perform tasks
that they consider humiliating. This is the single most
important reason why the Lodhas try to avoid working in
agriculture for the Mahatos whenever possible.
The case of the Lodhas illustrates the ambivalence of
development, both as a process of change and as a
signifier of aspirations within the context of a distinctive
regional modernity. On the one hand, the story of the
Lodhasunrealized land reforms and dashed hopes of an
agrarian transformation through canal irrigation21can
be written as a postdevelopment critique of development. The emancipatory promises of development
remain illusionary, but, through their discursive operations and appeal to expert knowledge, they depoliticize
local struggles and secure the status quo. We find this
postdevelopment perspective only partially convincing.
Lodha work opportunities have always fluctuated with
the fate of the dry deciduous sal (Shorea robusta) forests of

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Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan

southern West Bengal: the collection of minor forest

produce for the Forest Department and its contractors has
long been an important source of supplementary income
for the Lodhas. But their exclusion from a development
program that fleetingly promised them the restored status
of smallholders sabotaged deeply nurtured aspirations for
farming and autonomy. This historical context, and the
renewed social memories of exclusion that it contains for
Lodhas, goes a long way in explaining the puzzling
preference of Lodha men for coolie work in local bazaars
over farm work, despite the physical hardship and
instability in employment associated with coolie labor.
However, not all Lodha men can make real the aspiration
to abandon farm work for coolie work. Only those who can
break the circle of debt and conscription can make the
transition, and this is only possible when alternative,
seasonally reliable, nonfarm work becomes available.
Recently, with the active promotion of JFM initiatives in
southwestern Bengal by the state, regional hierarchies of
material and ideational domination have undergone a
marked transformation.
Lodhas are acknowledged experts of the jungle. They
have minute knowledge of forest flora and fauna. Their
intimate knowledge of forest products has made them
valued participants in JFM. State forestry officials and
local leaders actively seek to employ them in JFM
programs, often as van mazdoor (forest laborers) in Forest
Department nurseries. As opportunities for alternative
employment and intrarural migration expand, Lodha
women and men find themselves increasingly able to
disengage themselves from oppressive work relations with
Mahatos. Their growing preference for cash wages over inkind wages, which have been the historical route to debt
bondage, is one visible example of their rising bargaining
power. In this alternative narrative, which the Lodhas
themselves valorize, development in the form of JFM
becomes an avenue for justice.
This self-alienated character of development is
also evident in the life histories of female and male
migrants from different tribal and caste groups in Purulia
District of West Bengal that Rogaly and Coppard (2002)
have recently begun to record. One such history, of a
woman they call Soma Mahato, reveals how regionally
uneven processes of development can enable circuits of
migration that are liberatory.22 According to Rogaly and
Coppard (20),
Somas story can be read as one of emancipation as a woman in
terms of her move away from difficult marriages towards
effectively running household affairs in her natal village.
When she first migrated she required her fathers permission
and was only allowed to go because she was accompanied by

relatives. Migration has been central to her small-scale but

steady accumulation of wealth for the household, some of
which she expects to inherit. It has also enabled her to
purchase goods on the journey home, including the blouse
and petticoat, which are signs of upward mobility for many
women. She has a very positive view of migration, clearly
indicating, moreover, that it was and continues to be her
choice.

A recent econometric study by Haberfeld and colleagues (1999) on the impact of seasonal migration on the
social status and income levels of tribal households in
Dungarpur District of Rajasthan, on the border with
Gujarat, reinforces Rogalys ethnographic findings from
West Bengal. The authors note that migration is widespread, that migrant households have significantly higher
income levels than nonmigrant households, and that
income from migrant labor accounts for almost 60% of
their total annual income (Haberfeld et al., 487). More
pertinently, income from migration appears to allow
migrant households to compensate for structural disadvantages in access to education and agricultural income
vis-a`-vis more privileged caste groups.
Each of the cases cited above reveals the efforts of
subordinated tribal or dalit groups to reject their identification by caste groups as inferior persons whose bodies
and labors can be used, abused, and controlled.

The Vankars of Central and North Gujarat

Consider also the case of Vankars, a widespread dalit
community in Gujarat, traditionally weavers by occupation,23 who came to be valued as paddy workers by
employers from the Patel and Rajput castes. This was
reputedly because they had nimble fingers that allowed
them to transplant rice saplings and weed fields faster and
more expertly than workers from other laboring groups.
But another reason quickly surfaces in conversations with
Patel and Rajput employers: namely, that unlike other
dalit groups, Vankars knew their place in society (pota
ni jigya jaanta hata). The implication is clear: Vankars
were docile and rarely rancorous in their behavior with
upper castes, unlike their fellow dalitsthe Rohits,
Vaghris, and Bhangis. As ably documented by Marxist
scholars, compliance or obedience is an attribute that
employers value in workers.
But todays Vankars are different. Gidwani (1996)
interviewed twenty Vankar families in his census survey of
353 households in the central Gujarat village of Shamli.
Whereas older-generation Vankars still display deference
towards upper-caste groups, younger generation Vankars
openly defy the prevalent caste hierarchy. Their attire and

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

demeanor reflect their hostility to caste norms: they are
invariably better dressed than their upper-caste counterparts; they refuse to tolerate the use of the term dhed, a
derogative that upper castes frequently employ in conversations to describe Vankars; and they place a premium
on education as a mark of their difference. It comes as no
surprise to learn that the majority of younger-generation
Vankars are schooled outside the village (highest educational attainment in years averages 9.11 in Vankar
households, as contrasted to 6.50 in Rajput and 10.88 in
Patel households). Half of the twenty Vankar households,
moreover, have family members engaged in nonfarm
employment: six work as clerks or chaperones in the subdistrict headquarter, two work in the diamond-polishing
industry in the city of Surat in south Gujarat, one works as
a civil engineer in the Public Works Department in a
provincial north Gujarat city, and one is a career politician
(whose rise to prominence in local politics is signaled
by the enormous house he built in Shamlis Vankar
quarter).24
None of the Vankars holding nonfarm jobs is a woman.
The proximate reason for this imbalance appears to be the
fact that even the more educated among the younger
generation Vankar women are unable to pursue jobs once
married due to patriarchal norms that prioritize household
duties as the primary obligation of married women.
Notwithstanding persistent gender inequities in employment and intrahousehold relations, however, migration
has clearly transformed the political consciousness of
young Vankars (although more visibly among Vankar
men, who are able to operate in the public sphere, than
Vankar women, whose participation in the public domain
remains tightly circumscribed). Ketanbhai Shamabhai
Parmar, son of a Vankar agevan (caste elder), told Gidwani
of the various indignities his father had to suffer in Shamli
as late as 1975among them unpaid work (veth) for
prominent Patel families and restrictions forbidding him
from walking in the village without headgear or within ten
feet of a member of the upper castes, lest these actions
pollute village hierarchs. Pointing to a portrait of B. R.
Ambedkar (the charismatic founder of organized twentieth-century dalit politics in India), Ketanbhai vowed
that Vankars and other dalits would one day displace
upper-caste rule in Gujarat. In his view, education leading
to off-farm employment (preferably in a secure government job) was key to this aspiration. With this goal in
mind, and at considerable personal expense, he has
recently dispatched his eleven-year-old daughter to a
reputable boarding school in the city of Ahmedabad. As
Tarlo (1996, 141) points out, Vankars in Saurashtra (the
western expanse of Gujarat) have followed a roughly
similar trajectory:

197

While they are still considered ritually impure, some have

made good use of government support both in education and
employment and now hold relatively prestigious white-collar
jobs . . . in the city of Larabad. But if these jobs, combined
with the money they have generated, have made these
[Vankars] slightly more respected in the village, they have
also made them more resented.

The Limits of Agency

As illustrated by the preceding case studies of the Kolis
and Vankars of Gujarat and the Lodhas of West Bengal,
the growing participation of dalits and tribals in circular
migration circuits carries with it a potential for their
economic and political empowerment, and may enable
members of these subordinated groups to contest placebased hierarchiesindeed, to repudiate their interpellation (cf. Althusser 1971) as working bodies by the
dominant castes. In some instances, the diverse lifeworlds
of association and signification that migrants encounter in
the course of their travels may lead to their participation in
formal modes of political organizing, like unionization
efforts in small-scale industries like brick-making, quarrying, dyeing, and construction. Work in urban areas may
also bring dalit and tribal migrants into contact with
political agenda that challenge the legitimacy of existing
caste and class hierarchies and that suggest possibilities
rival to their lived realities. This may happen either via
radical nongovernmental organizations working in areas
where migrants congregate or through contact with
activists of dalit/lower caste political parties, such as the
Dalit Panther movement or Rashtriya Party (RP) in western
India, the Puthiya Tamizhagam in Tamil Nadu, or the
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in northern India. Engagement
with party activists may alert dalits and tribal migrants to
the considerable political power they can wield within a
democracy as a collective electoral bloc (Pushpendra 1999
furnishes empirical evidence for this claim).
Regardless of involvement with organized politics, the
travails of migration invariably produce street smarts
and, with them, an oppositional consciousnessthat can
be mobilized to resist subordinating relations at home.25
Breman (1996, 42) records the case of Babubhai, a dalit
from one of his study villages who migrated to Bombay and
returned after eighteen years:
Bombay had been a hard training school where Babubhai
expanded his social horizons and acquired a rebellious attitude
towards work bosses, slumlords, authorities and other power
holders. He now earns an independent living doing plastering
and painting work. . . . He refuses, however, to work as
agricultural laborer for less than minimum wage. Never again,

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Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan

he has assured me more than once, will he accept such

treatment.

While these varied instances of political opposition are

important reminders of the spaces of cultural assertion
that can take shape when migrant subjects undermine the
sedentarist metaphysics of modern forms of domination, it
is equally important not to be naively celebrationist. The
limits on counterhegemonic practices by subordinated
groups are real and formidable. For instance, as Breman
and Das (2000) observe, unionization attempts by
migrants are sporadic and rarely successful. Moreover,
fearing the political assertiveness of dalits and tribals, caste
groups have adopted a variety of tactics to mitigate against
a loss of control over their pools of labor power. These
tactics attempt to render dalit and tribal laborers immobile and to prevent the growth of political opposition and
bargaining power that circular migration may produce. The
following example from one of Gidwanis study villages in
central Gujarat illustrates the efforts of caste groups to
regulate dalits as bodies for labor.

The Harijans of Village Astha, Kheda District,

Gujarat26
The Harijans (Bhangis) of Astha own eleven acres of
land, five owned by Bholabhai Chhaganbhai Harijan. Four
of these five acres are unirrigated goradu that is able to
produce only one crop annually; one acre is irrigated kyari
land, which can be double-cropped. Bholabhai is fortunate. The other Bhangis have smaller plots and survive
largely on wage labor. The Bhangis have traditionally had a
strongly clientalist relationship with upper castes. Several
have worked, at one time or another, as mahinadars (farm
servants; literally, monthly contractors) for Brahmins
and Patels in Astha. Because cultivators have begun to
perceive permanent labor contracts as more expensive
than casual labor contracts, and because the younger
generation of Harijans resents the element of unfreedom
that permanent contracts contain, the prevalence of
mahinadari has declined. A few decades ago almost every
upper-caste cultivators had one or more mahinadars,
servility being an emblem of status; today, only two
Harijans work as mahinadars.
The recent introduction of canal irrigation into the area
and the use of tractors, mechanical threshers, and
combine-harvesters has transformed production, raising
cropping intensity. According to the Harijans, agricultural
mechanization has led to only a slight reduction in labor
demands compared to the pre-irrigation scenario. Soil and
climatic conditions make it difficult to switch away from
rice; moreover, rice production is not readily amenable to

mechanization. Transplanting, weeding, fertilizing, and

watering are labor-intensive operations. The harvesting
and threshing of the rice crop are the only two operations
where labor can be replaced with relative ease. While the
use of mechanical threshers is catching on, adoption is
slow, because cultivators feel mechanical threshing results
in greater damage to the grain. Meanwhile, the use of
combine harvesters is constrained by plot size and soil
texture. Harvesters cannot maneuver well in small plots
with awkward corners, and they tend to flounder in the
sticky, water-retentive, loamy clay soil around Astha.
Given that cultivators are married to paddy cultivation
for the foreseeable future, they depend on labor and
pursue strategies to discipline them, including the
active recruitment of migrant workers from adjoining
Panchmahal District. Cultivators also attempt to control
the Harijans access to the means of production, including
surplus village grazing lands (gauchar) and governmental
small-enterprise loans. The Bhangis believe that the
gauchar is cultivable. Has the salt-affected gauchar in the
adjoining village of Limbdevi not been given to members
from backward communities, they ask, and has it not
become cultivable? The Bhangis say that they have
repeatedly appealed to the district collector (DC) to award
them gauchar lands. The DC evidently bears no objections, provided that the village council (gram panchayat) is
agreeable. Yet, the gram panchayat head (sarpanch)a
Patelrefuses the request, declaring that the land is for
grazing village cattle. Apparently, the optimistic appraisal
of the Bhangis regarding the gauchar is at variance with
the opinions of caste groups in the village, particularly the
Patel elite, who categorically assert that the gauchar is
unfit for cultivation.
The Harijans feel that this denial of gauchar lands is an
attempt by land-owning caste groups to keep them
landless and idle, so that larger farmers can continue to
have ready access to a reserve army of underemployed
workers. If dalits were to become landed, labor scarcity
would increase and agricultural wages would rise. But,
more damagingly for the village elite, dalits might be able
to accumulate savings to realize their aspirations for
nonfarm work. Bholabhai Chhaganbhai Harijan claims
that this is the primary reason why the Patel sarpanch does
not heed his loan petitions: Bholabhai Chhaganbhai
wants to set up a small retail shop in the village but cannot
apply for a government loan without the sarpanchs
signature on the loan application form. He narrated an
instance when the sarpanch rejected his request for a
signature with the remark: Shoon Bhola, kyaan paisa
malshe? Aa dhandha ni vaat chhod, majuri ma dhyaan raakh
(What, Bhola, who will give you a loan? Drop this idea of
a business and concentrate on work).

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

Resistance through the Consuming Body

Given the difficulties subordinated groups face in overtly
resisting exploitative social relations, the norm is a more
subdued, often obtuse repudiation of place-specific social
hierarchies through aesthetic transgressions that recast
bodies and therefore the body politic.27 As Bourdieu (1984,
5657) writes, The most intolerable thing for those who
regard themselves as possessors of legitimate culture [i.e.,
dominant groups] is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes
which taste dictates shall be separated . . . [because]
[t]astes are the practical affirmation of an inevitable
difference. Aesthetic transgressions challenge this inevitability and the doxa that sustains extant power
relations. These trangressions take many forms, including
nonconformist attire, speaking styles, mannerisms, diets,
and consumption habits. In short, they bespeak a cultural
style,28 a term we borrow from anthropologist James
Ferguson (1999, 83), who found that migrant workers in
the urban Copper Belt of Zambia, in considering how one
might succeed or fail in the task of going home to a rural
area . . . turned quickly from questions of remittances to
matters of dress, styles of speech, attitudes, habits, even
body carriage.29

Consumption and Politics

During field work in Tiruvannamalai District, Tamil
Nadu, in June 1997, Sivaramakrishnan observed that
dominant peasant and business castes who reside in the
plains area nurture deep antagonism towards Malayali
tribals from the Javadi Hills. Over the past decade, these
tribals have begun to participate in seasonal labor circuits
that crisscross Tamil Nadu and adjoining Karnataka. Their
travels have generated money and growing disdain
towards the plains elite. Resentful over this loss of social
control and superior standing vis-a`-vis the Malayalis, one
farmer in the village of Chengam told Sivaramakrishnan
with considerable indignation that [T]he Malayali
returns from urban work with lots of cash and then buys
fancy face creams in the local store while we [the local
farmers] continue to use cheap soaps!
Writing on rural Bangladeshi womens growing participation in the urban workforceparticularly in publicsector employment and export-processing firms in Dhaka
Shelley Feldman (1992) captures the ambivalence of, and
transformations in, body practices associated with the
migration process. According to her (12324), migration
[o]n the one hand . . . provide[s] women with an
opportunity for employment previously denied them. On
the other hand . . . [it] tie[s] women to forms of obligation
and social control that establish new forms of subordina-

199

tion and domination. Young unmarried women are

attracted to urban employment because it allows them
to exert independence from male family members
control, to engage in unaccompanied inter- and
intracity travel and new consumption patterns, and
to leave the sari and burkha behind and don shalwar (long
shirt) and comise (loose trousers) to reflect their age and
mobility (Feldman, 122).
Why do parents permit young women to travel to
Dhaka? One explanation most certainly seems to be the
slow erosion of economic security (Feldman 1992, 121) at
home. But an equally valid one that Feldman does not
foreground is the likelihood that repatriated incomes from
working daughters generate consumption opportunities for
parents that enhance the familys social status. In short,
whereas earlier a working daughter often signified the lack
of concern with purdah and appropriate female behavior
and was interpreted by other villagers as representing the
lack of family status and resources (Feldman, 117), the
charged significations carried by modern consumer goods
may have the capacity to counteract social norms predicated upon religious and patriarchal ideologies. As several
theorists have pointed out (Bourdieu 1984 and Miller
1995b are representative), consumption can offer new
sources of social distinction and status, and even supply the
semiotic elements for a counterhegemonic vocabulary.
Mary Beth Mills (1997, 1999) study of Thai rural
women shows they are attracted to urban employment
because of both ongoing obligations to assist cash-strapped
rural households and opportunities to pursue personal
autonomy and self-expression through engagement with
urbanmodernity and progress. She argues that despite
diverse backgrounds, these women found common
ground in the labor movement (in which they became
involved after working and establishing temporary residence in Bangkok). They were able to explore new ways of
thinking about themselves and their gendered experiences. Through limited means and opportunities for
oppositional expression, unionized migrants began to
contest inequitable labor relations and gender roles, and
learned how to press their demands through a discourse of
rights as workers and as women.

Attire and Politics

Garment is a central element in dalit body politics
because of the severe proscriptions that have been
imposed on their dress by the upper castes (see Tarlo
1996). Under the old jajman (patron) system, it was
customary for dalits to receive clothing from their jajman
at festival time. Dalits were almost universally prohibited
from wearing headgear of any sort in the presence of an

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Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan

upper caste; in parts of Tamil Nadu, they were prohibited

from carrying an umbrella or wearing a shirt, shoes, or
sunglasses. More degradingly, until the 1930s, dalit
women in Ramnad District of Tamil Nadu were not
allowed to cover their breasts or wear a sari that reached
below the ankle, and dalit men were compelled to wear
loincloths that could not reach below the knees (Deliege
1999, 107). Historian Chris Bayly (1986, 286), in a
provocative essay on the politics of attire within
Indian society, observes that one of the most important
uses of cloth in the social process . . . [is] its use in
symbolizing status or in recording changes of status.
While this function is common to all societies, there is a
special significance granted to cloth in many regions of
India:
[C]loth as a transactional medium was conceived as a unique
conveyor of spirit and substance, holy, strengthening, or
polluting. Thus, cloth of different textures, colors, or origins
could do more than simply impart information in society; it
could change the moral and physical substance of the
individual. . . . Cloth, then, was almost literally as integral to
the person as his skin (Bayly 1986, 287, 291).

On a field visit in June 1999 to the village of

Vanampuram, a multicaste periurban village just a few
miles out of the town of Tiruvannamalai, we received a
first-hand introduction to the politics of attire. In
conversation with a local landowner and politician, a
member of the socially dominant but numerically small
Agemudi caste, we inquired about labor availability in the
village for agricultural operations. Our informant complained bitterly about labor scarcity. He told us that
younger-generation dalits in the village, who constitute
the bulk of the rural workforce, prefer to work in
construction and urban industries in Hosur, Tiruppur,
and other industrial centers in south India. Then, with
obvious ire, he mocked the dalits on their newly acquired
dress habits: They parade around in jeans and costly
sports shoes. Although the dalits are still overtly
deferential towards the local elite, their preference for
migratory work and consumption of Western attire
indicates to landed groups like the Kurumbar and
Agemudis that the traditional social order is under siege.
Field observations made by French anthropologist Robert
Deliege in another part of rural Tamil Nadu on the social
conditions of the dalit Paraiyars supports this conclusion.
He (1999, 111) writes that when it comes to clothing,
dalits are required to dress with a certain humility, and
that young dalits like to tell how furious it makes highcaste people to see them dressed in fashion; and this
stylishness can spark reactions ranging from sarcasm to
blows.

Consider also the politics of cultural style in Valiyambadu, a multicaste study village, where dalit families
constitute over 40 percent of the village residents (687
families). At the time when migration details were
collected, in the fall of 2000, 15 percent of all families in
the village (110 families) were engaged in some type of
migration. Circular migration was the dominant form,
involving 72 families. Of these, nearly two-thirds were
from dalit households, and destinations included the cities
of Tiruppur, Chennai, and Bangalore. Migrants engaged in
unskilled labor and semiskilled employment, a common
vocation being masonry work at construction sites in
Bangalore. About a dozen dalit migrants had mustered
resources to set up petty businesses in Chennai and
Tiruppur (for example, one barber from Valiyambadu now
plies his trade in Tiruppur, while another dalit has a
tailoring shop in Chennai). In 60 percent of the circular
migration cases, young, single sons left for Kerala, Coorg,
Bangalore, and Chennai to work in construction, as
coolies in public-works projects, as seasonal labor in
plantations, and as attendants or guards (chowkidars) at
private firms and homes. They contributed remittances to
their rural, impoverished families in Valiyambadu, along
with urban styles and city fashions to their peers, younger
siblings, and other children in the village.
In other cases, nucleated dalit families traveled to
Bangalore, where the men found work as masons,
carpenters, and bricklayers and the women worked as
unskilled labor in the same construction sites or, occasionally, ventured into neighboring residential areas to
work as domestic servants. These young men and women
returned to Valiyambadu as bearers of cosmopolitan
lifestyles, in the clothes they wore, the sights and images
they described, and the urban work opportunities they
relayed to kin and neighbors. Their comportment and
display irritated landed families from the Agemudiyar,
Vellala, Naidu, and Kurumba castes, who, habituated to
subservience from older dalits, witnessed these changes
among younger-generation dalits with consternation.30

Consumption as Counterhegemony
The dalits of Vanambaram and Valiyambadu may or
may not consider their consumption and labor deployment choices acts of resistance. But if we judge
resistance through political effect rather than intent, it is
abundantly clear that dalit body practices are experienced
negatively by the dominant group as a repudiation of their
social codes and hierarchiesin other words, as elements
of a counterhegemony. Bourdieu (1984, 57) reminds us
that an important function of the working classes, in any

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

society, is to serve as foil, a negative reference point, in
relation to which all aesthetics define themselves, by
successive negationsin short, as the abject other or
constitutive outside of civilized society. But what if the
working classes should violate the aesthetic hierarchy and
begin to exhibit dispositions that were hitherto the
purview of the elite, making elite identity insecure?31
Indeed, caste elites in Tamil Nadu (and elsewhere) have
responded by reinforcing social hierarchies in a variety of
ways. In Tamil Nadu, for instance, members of the
dominant castes are exhibiting renewed interest in local
history and sponsoring the discovery of hero-stones buried
in the landscape that consolidate their claims to have
settled and civilized the villages in which they live. The
ancestral exploits of caste groups are celebrated in
vernacular newsletters and caste forums, and new
struggles over village temples and access to them are
emerging in villages around our study area in Tiruvannamalai District.
Our argument, quite simply, is that much of social life is
about marking distance and naturalizing difference.
And distance and difference are typically plotted through
the invention of aesthetic hierarchies and dispositions,
which include forms of consumption and the manner in
which labor is deployed. We do not argue, however, that
such expressions of body politics are symptomatic of late
capitalist modernity. The historical record of migration is
instructive. Early nineteenth-century migrants from
northern Tamil Nadu were poor, lower-caste, and from
dryland areas like Tiruvannamalai that were well connected to Madras and Pondicherry (Barnabas 1991). The
flow of migrants thickened as Tenassarim was conquered,
and plantations were established in Sri Lanka, Mauritius
and the West Indies. The abolition of slavery in 1834
provided a great impetus to these flows, made up
preponderantly of men (Geoghehan 1873, 422). By the
early twentieth century, migrants from northern Tamil
Nadus drylands and hill areas were also supplying factory
demands in western India, Burma, and the Ganges delta.
These factory workers, like our contemporary informants,
cherished the hope of returning home with assets and
social standing (Report of the Royal Commission on Labor in
India 1931, 13).32 And, like the Tamilian plantation
workers who traveled to the Caribbean and Straits
Settlements in the previous century, factory migrants
went to extraordinary lengths to accumulate and repatriate wealth to their homes.33 The memories and social
consequences of such travel and return worked to
consolidate a regionally modern history of mobility.
Over the past twenty years, it is the growing intensity of
circular migration by dalit and tribal groups in dryland
India that is of striking interest. Their travels present

201

aspects of continuity and rupture from the colonial period.

For instance, the hill-tribe Malayalis of the Javadis are
relative newcomers to such travel, which takes them
across district and state boundaries. A group of six
informants told us in the summer of 1999 that neither they
nor their parents had traveled to construction sites in
Bangalore, or plantations in the Coorg, before the 1980s;
their migrations are still organized around the sowing and
harvesting of dry rice (samai) in the monsoon season
(JulyDecember). A primary motivation for migration is
the prospect of lump-sum earnings that are used for the
liquidation of high-interest debts owed to moneylenders in
the Javadi Hills. Bride price, house-building, and the
consumption of cigarettes, soaps, radios, watches, clothes,
and shoes are additional priorities. In sharp contrast to the
tribal Malayalis, dalit youth migrants from adjoining
plains villages were more likely to use the migration
experience to enhance their qualifications for semiskilled
work and elude the drudgery of farm work for caste
landowners. Some stressed prospects for economic
mobility by highlighting opportunities to work for, and
learn, tile manufacture as it mushroomed around a
booming construction industry in expanding towns.
Others underscored the excitement of travel and the
new-found solidarity they experienced with dalit coworkers as they journeyed through south India erecting
and disbanding temporary structures (pandals) used
for political meetings, government functions, festivals,
and fairs.34

Provincializing Migration, Modernity,

and Development
Silvey and Lawson (1999, 122) are justifiably critical of
economistic approaches to migration that have evaluated
it as part of a prefigured Western modernization
trajectory, and so have authorized theoretical exclusions
of development itself as contested and problematic
(emphasis in original). We interpret their claims as a
corrective to conventional migration scholarship based on
two relatively recent strands of theorizing. First, their
article invokes postcolonial scholarship because such
scholarship contains a cognitive-political demand for the
decolonization of representationspecifically, the decolonization of the Wests theory of the non-West. Second,
they appeal to postdevelopment scholarship, which assails
development as a Eurocentric discourse that imposes its
normalizing and teleological vision on the world through
an ensemble of social institutions, semiotic categories, and
practices that regulate the realms of thought, subjectivity,
and action (Sachs 1992; Ferguson 1994; Crush 1995).

202

Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan

We have no disaffection with either postcolonial or

postdevelopment scholarship at these general levels of
characterization; indeed, we are sympathetic to their
efforts to create a counterspace for representational and
political practice. Our disquiet stems from the fact that in
their attempts to destabilize the master narratives of
modernity, both postcolonial and postdevelopment scholarship have tended to portray modernity and development as monolithic, depoliticizing processes, everywhere
the same and always tainted beyond redemption by their
progressivist European provenance. Setting up the target
of criticism in this manner has led many postcolonial
scholars to privilege what David Scott (1999, 135)
perceptively summarizes as the responsibility to otherness over the responsibility to actin other words,
the opening up of cognitive space for the play of
difference over the affirmation of institutional frameworks
that embody normative political values and normative
political objectives. Postdevelopment scholars have
similarly tended towards a celebration of difference.
The logical endpoint of their critique has been the
celebration of antidevelopment, an inversionary discourse that is retrieved by foregrounding forms of
cultural difference that development has tended to
homogenize or suppress, and by recovering the hitherto
silenced communitarian, antimarket, antidevelopment
voices of developments countless victims (Sachs 1992;
Esteva and Prakash 1996; Rahnema and Bawtree 1997).
It is in this spirit of recovery that we can read Silvey and
Lawsons (1999, 123) call to researchers to interpret the
voices of migrants themselves as theoretically meaningful as a way of problematizing development and
critiquing categorizations of place as undeveloped, backward, and traditional. While we are sympathetic to this
spirit, however, we feel it is necessary for migration
researchers to be aware of the large debate that has
circulated within postcolonial studies on the epistemological possibility and methodological challenges of recovering subaltern voices (see endnotes 35 and 36). This is
particularly problematic when the underlying conceptualization of power is the Foucauldian one of biopower or
disciplinary poweras, in fact, it is for most postcolonial
and postdevelopment scholarship. If biopower is indeed
the practical manifestation of the modern power/knowledge regime of social control, then it is difficult to see how
an antidisciplinarian agency can be meaningfully recovered.35 After all, biopower owes its name to the fact that it
penetrates deeply into the reified body and confiscates the
whole organism along the subtle paths of scientific
objectification and subjectivity generated by technologies
of truth (Habermas 1996, 285). Where such a notion of
power inspires the Foucauldian postdevelopment/post-

colonial critique of modernity, it leaves little room for the

sort of oppositional consciousness or transformative acts of
resistance (rather than simply acts of resistance that are
enabled by power and reproduce it) that we take as marks
of counterhegemonic agency.36
We merely point this out as a methodological conundrum within the development-as-discourse argument. In
our view, it is more analytically consistent to regard
development as a system of hegemonic ideas, following
Gramsci, that is perforated rather than saturating, whose
legitimacy must be constantly reproduced, and, which, as
such, is potentially open to contestation.37 As William
Roseberry (1996, 77) points out, Gramsci understood
and emphasized, more clearly than did his interpreters, the
complex unity of coercion and consent in situations of
domination. Hegemony was a more material and political
concept in Gramscis usages that it has since become . . .
[Indeed,] Gramsci well understood the fragility of hegemony (emphasis in original).
Our more deep-seated concern with the Foucauldian
critique is that while it exposes development as part and
parcel of a Eurocentric discourse of modernity, it unskeptically accepts the idea that modernity emerged
autonomously in Europe and later spread, via colonialism,
to the rest of the world. This formulation never entertains
the possibility that the rationalizing processes within
economy and society that we typically associate with
modernity (capitalist production, division of labor, contractual exchange, bureaucratic administration, the mapping of people and places, the disjuncture between state
and civil society, and the ascendance of science) might
have sprouted at different times, on different levels, over
different scales, and in different cultural incarnations in
various regions of the world, quite autonomously of
European influence. Scholars of different theoretical
persuasion have recognized, for instance, the distinctive
historical processes contributing to the construction of
Indian modernities. Partha Chatterjee (1997, 198) has
recently illustrated this point in his discussion of nationstates and modernity, in which he says, [T]here
cannot be just one modernity irrespective of geography,
time, environment and social conditions. The forms of
modernity will have to vary among different countries
depending upon specific circumstances and social
practices.
Such omissions in the conventional Foucauldian take
on modernity render the recent literature on alternative modernities particularly salient. As we view it, the
intellectual and political motivation of this literature has
been to vernacularize Eurowestern modernity (henceforth, Modernity) by unsettling its pretensions to universality, by arguing that Modernity imposes a false

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

uniformity on the diverse and multiple encounters of nonWestern cultures with the allegedly culture-neutral forms
and processes . . . characteristic of societal modernization
(Gaonkar 1999, 15).
Despite this shared political impulse, the practical task
of provincializing Modernity has been undertaken by
scholars in quite different ways. The first is a cultural
angle which maintains that Modernity, far from replicating
itself in its own image (the convergence theory of societal
modernization that lurks in classical migration studies and
that the new migration scholars soundly critique), unfolds
within a specific cultural or civilizational context and
that different starting points for the transition to modernity lead to different outcomes (Gaonkar 1999, 15).
Scholars who subscribe to this viewpoint (exemplars
include Lee 1993; Appadurai 1996; Gaonkar 1999)
tend to stress the cosmopolitanism that arises from the
global flow of ideas, images, and commodities and the
multipleoften subversiveways in which modernity is
consumed.
The second angle from which Modernity has been
critiqued is the political; and here the objective has been
to provincialize Reason and illustrate the ambivalent
encounter of Europe with colonized societies. While
acknowledging the influence of Western political ideas
such as secularism, democracy, equality, and justice on the political imaginaries nurtured in anticolonial
struggles, scholars such as Chatterjee (1993), Prakash
(1999), and Chakrabarty (2000) have been at pains to
show how the historicist assumptions embodied in these
Western ideas were upstaged and reinterpreted by colonial
subjects.38 Adherents of the political critique have
sought not so much to reject the liberatory impulse
contained in the universalizing ideals of Modernity as
much as to show how the diffusion of these ideals in
colonized societies was socially and spatially uneven, and,
more importantly, that the promise of freedom held out by
Modernity was always tainted by the violence of its
imposition.
A third angle from which the metanarrative of
Modernity has been challenged is best described as the
articulationist angle. Here, the effort has been to
demonstrate historical continuities between non-Western
and Western forms of economic and political organization.
Thus, within the Indian context we have begun to learn
from revisionist historiographies of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries about the precolonial emergence of
capitalist relations in the economy and patterns of modern
state formation that were later adapted, rather than
supplanted, under colonialism (for key syntheses, see
Bayly 1990; Subrahmanyam 1992; Bose and Jalal 1997,
4856).

203

We incorporate each of these three perspectives in our

concept of regional modernities, which we consider a
theoretically consistent, empirically nuanced, and politically radical way of advancing the critique of classical
migration studies and Modernity initiated by the new
migration scholars. Thus, the idea of regional modernities has a triadic structure. First, we emphasize the flow
of ideas, images, and goods and how these facilitate a
counterhegemonic politics of consumption among subordinated groups. Second, we underscore the ambivalent
and self-alienated character of modernity and development. This formulation, on the one hand, means
acknowledging the (material and symbolic) violence of
these hegemonic formations in agreement with postcolonial and postdevelopment critics. On the other hand, it
leaves open the possibility for the appropriation of the
practices and languages of modernity and development by subordinate groups in emancipatory ways. This is
precisely why we argue against a discursive determinism
that seems to preclude a space for the political and argue
instead for situating modernity and development as
hegemonizing processes that are brittle and open to
contestation.39 We also insert here the notion of the
material into the concept of hegemony by suggesting that
counterhegemonic struggles by subordinate groups are
conducted through the language of body politics that
consists of two lexical elements: first, the recasting of the
working body, and, second, the recasting of the consuming
body. The third component of our concept of regional
modernities emphasizes a movement away from stagist or
transition narratives of modernity that tend to reinforce a
Eurocentric view of the world and towards articulationist
narratives that underscore discontinuities and continuities between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial social
formations. What is different about migration in the late
twentieth century is not migration itself, but how
habitually it is undertaken and what it can symbolically
accomplish for the migrant through the avenues of
consumption and labor deployment.40

Conclusion
Our essay has asked two broad questions: First, how do
circular migrants create spaces for cultural and political
assertion within the context of regional modernities?
And second, what role do cultural politics play in the
subjective experience and assessment of circular migration? These questions relate in important ways to the
historical centrality of migration in the struggle for
livelihood securitya chronic problem in dryland India,
even for villagers with means and status. People from all

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Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan

groupshigh and low castes, landlords and laborers,

artisans and service workershave migrant histories in
their families. However, patterns of migration and the
specific dynamics of mobility and subject formation within
the context of place-based hierarchies and inequalities
have varied by groups and over time and space.
Our essay quite deliberately focuses on the migratory
experiences of dalits and tribals in the late twentieth
century and tries to ask whether mobility at this juncture in
time has enabled these historically marginalized groups to
oppose the hegemony of dominant caste groups in their
home villages and regions. In underscoring a historic
moment, we intend to draw attention to two aspects of
agrarian life in India. First, we want to emphasize that
circular migration has been a longstanding survival
strategy for dalits and tribals in dryland Indiaat least
since the colonial period, if not earlier. As such,
experiences of mobility have been integral to the
subjectivities and cultural/political aspirations of these
groups. Dalits and tribals from Bengal, Gujarat, and Tamil
Nadu have traversed a bewildering array of migratory
circuits. They have traveled as agricultural workers to the
fertile agricultural plains of the Indian river valleys, as
plantation workers to tea, coffee, and rubber estates in the
Nilgiri hills of southwestern Indian, the Himalayan
foothills in the north, and the hilly tracts of northeast
Bengal and Assam, as mine workers to mines and allied
industries in eastern and southern India, as indentured
construction and plantation workers to Uganda, Malaysia,
Natal, and the Caribbean, and have served as a reserve
army of labor for the heavy industries around steel cities
and petrochemical complexes in postcolonial India.
Like the circuits themselves, the duration of circular
migration has been varied. In some cases, the cycle is a
daily one between places of work and home; in other cases,
it is seasonal; in yet other cases, migrants return home
sporadically, after long intervals; and some migrants even
leave permanentlyor so they thinkand then return
home to retire. What is interesting and common to these
biographies of circular migration is the imprint of
mobilitywhat we might call migrant memoryon
subsequent practices of labor deployment. For instance, in
all three multicaste villages included in Sivaramakrishnans current research site in the northern Tamil Nadu
district of Tiruvannamalai, there are several families from
which members left as indentured workers for Natal or
Malaysia. Some sent their children back to newly
independent India to farm, but their children have
migrated in turn to work in the jute mills of Calcutta or
the Bhilai steel plant in Chhatisgarh, in central India.
Regardless of the particular trajectories and outcomes of
travel, however, upper-caste, dalit, and tribal migrants

from Tiruvannamalai have been willing to travel great

distances in order to accumulate and remit surplusesall
part of their unequal struggles for recognition in a place
they continue to call their sontha uuru (native place). One
future research direction for our project is to document
family biographies of migration, differentiated by caste,
religion, ethnicity, and gender and explore how varied
experiences of migrant cosmopolitanism (the cultural,
political, and economic resources enabled by mobility)
have influenced anticolonial, national, and now subnational politics.
This brings us to the second aspect of agrarian life at this
historical conjuncture. We want to suggest that political
upheavals in India over the past fifteen years as a result of
the second democratic upsurge(Yadav 2000)a reference to the rise of dalit, tribal, and other minority
participation in electoral and other political processes in a
more open, assertive way41may be responsible for
enabling previously unimaginable counterhegemonic
practices by dalits and tribals. Indeed, even as we present
evidence of body politics in this article, we are groping
to answer a much larger question: whether dalit and tribal
migrants are, wittingly or unwittingly, operating as agents
for the diffusion of political sensibilities across the rural
landscape and providing the impetus to regional political
movementsseveral of which explicitly claim dalit and
tribal subalterns as their primary constituencies and
challenge not merely regional hierarchies but also the
hegemony of the caste-ist/Hindu nation. The significance of this line of thought derives support from
microstudies of migration that testify to an increase in
the forms and extent of migrationin part as a result of
uneven development and globalization that have produced regional labor markets, regional political forms, and
regional spaces for cultural assertion of the sort we have
illuminated in this article.
More pertinently, the sort of questions thrown up by our
research provoke us to examine closely the efforts of the
new migration scholars to liberate population geography
not only from its behavioral and structural straitjackets
but alsoand more importantlyfrom its links to
Eurocentric ideologies of modernization and development. Predictably, these scholars invoke postcolonial and
postdevelopment critiques of modernity in support of their
project. But while these critiques are powerful, we try to
show that they remain problematic, partly because they
fail to theorize the spatial and cultural particularities of
modernity (a task that involves vernacularizing and
pluralizing the notion of modernity), and partly because
they rely on a Foucauldian analytic of power that seems to
preclude any effective space for political action of the sort
we describe in this essay.

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

To recognize the ways in which counterhegemonic
practices are enabled by circular migration and thus contribute to the work begun by the new migration scholars, we
introduce two organizing conceptsan oppositional
notion of self-making we term body politics that
underscores the liberatory potential of migration within
the context of development, and a provincialized
notion of modernity we term regional modernities
that avoids the conceptual contradictions of existing
postcolonial and postdevelopment appraisals of migration.
Our findings on the varied encounters of migrants
with regional modernities and their rising cultural assertiveness resonate with those of recent migration scholars
who have conducted research in eastern and western
India, as well as in Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, and
Ecuador.
In their survey of geographies of consumption, Jackson
and Thrift (1995, 205) note that, in their engagement
with consumption, eminent Marxist geographers such
as David Harvey treat it as part of the politics of
distraction rather than as a substantive topic on its own
account. They go on to note that in Harveys work,
[t]he culture of consumption is reduced to the economic
imperative of sustaining sufficiently buoyant levels of
demand to keep capitalist production profitable. Consumption is about the cultivation of imaginary appetites;
it is part of the surface froth and evanescence, the
fragmentation and disruptions, so characteristic of present
political economy. We do not dismiss Harveys critique of
consumption as misplaced, for we recognize that modern
economies of desire can dissipate political projects and
disempower people. But we want to keep open the
possibility that the cosmopolitan world of goods and
significations can have emancipatory potential for groups
subordinated by traditional, place-specific relations of
hierarchy.
While we depart from Harvey on this point, it is hardly
into the waiting arms of subculture theorists, such as
Miller (1995a, 1995b), who anoint consumerism as a new,
diffuse form of resistance. These celebrationist narratives
offer a mythologized consumer as agent of history. By
contrast, in our framework, the migrant as consumer is a
creature of more modest aspirations, prescience, and
agency. Like Gramscis peasant, he or she exhibits a streak
of conservatism and realizes his or her agency in unlikely
rather than clearly articulated ways. More often than not,
migrants continue to retain primary attachments to their
home villages, and successful migrants utilize their newly
acquired wealth to upgrade social and political status at
home. In this sense, they are circumspect rebels who
seek to ascend or modify a given hierarchy rather than to
dismantle it.

205

One of our major claims in this essay is that once the

cultural logic of migration is taken into account, the
frequently invoked link between declining livelihood
security and increasing proclivity to migrate becomes
harder to sustain. In the evolving world of rural cosmopolitanism, livelihood security may no longer be the
overarching factor in determining migration. In fact, we
would go so far as to suggest that migration may be
undertaken, even if it sometimes compromises the livelihood security and working conditions of the migrant
provided it contains the promise to positively transform
place-based identities and relations of subjugation.
Finally, we suggest that our understanding of agrarian
change can be substantially enriched by returning to an
older but ailing tradition of Marxism, one that sees labor as
a simultaneously material and symbolic activity. Precisely
because some form of work is a prerequisite for social
reproduction, the terms and conditions under which
individuals deploy their labor become core to identity
formation, particularly their internalized notions of
hierarchy with reference to caste, class, gender, community, and place. In dialectical fashion, these notions then
inform subsequent labor deployment in time and space,
including patterns of migration. We have already explained why these acts of migration can be a potent force of
social change. In short, we think there is tremendous
scope for energizing and expanding intellectual and
political debate on the agrarian question within human
geography by renewed commitment to phenomenologies
of rural work.

Acknowledgments
Special thanks to John Paul Jones III for his advice on
content and organization, and to the various anonymous
reviewers for their helpful comments on the original
article. We particularly acknowledge the detailed critiques
of two referees, who compelled us to undertake difficult but
entirely necessary revisions and, we hope, write a substantially stronger article. We are grateful to Ron Aminzade,
Ben Crow, Michael Dove, Ben Rogaly, James Scott, and
Mark Steinberg for their meticulous comments on earlier
versions of this article, and we thank Paul Alexander, Tania
Li, Mary Beth Mills, David Mosse, Pauline Peters, and Jeff
Romm for helpful conversations along the way. Thanks also
to Sula Sarkar for her cartographic assistance. Responsibility for remaining errors or inconsistencies is entirely ours.
The various pieces of research on which this essay is based
were supported by grants from the American Institute of
Indian Studies, the Izaak Walton Killam Foundation of
Canada, the Population Council, the Social Science
Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for

206

Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan

Anthropological Research, the Institute of Development

Studies, the University of Sussex, U.K. and the Royalty
Research Fund, University of Washington. Our heaviest
intellectual and emotional debts are to friends and
acquaintances in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal
who made our research possible. Our abiding thanks as well
to V. Arivudai Nambi and Muniappan for their crucial
support during field research in Tiruvannamalai District,
Tamil Nadu, in 1999, 2000, and 2001.

Notes
1. The observations developed in this essay apply to seasonal or
circular migrants and relay migrants, not to permanent outmigrants. Labor circulation encompasses transhumance,
rural to urban, and intrarural migration, whether of a short
term or semipermanent nature. For taxonomies of migration,
see Chapman and Prothero (1985) and Rogaly (1996).
2. Our stance on modernity deserves clarification: we reject
both the transition narrative that portrays the history of
societies as a discontinuous switch from the traditional to
the modern (hence, implicitly suggests a defining moment
when modernity takes hold of rural society) and the related
modernization narrative that portrays history in progressivist, evolutionary terms. Instead, we take the position of
South Asian and Latin American scholars of subalternity
(Chatterjee 1993; Coronil 1997; Dussel 1998; Mignolo 1999;
Prakash 1999; Chakrabarty 2000) that modernity is a
pluritopic phenomenon, not confined to Europe, and that the
rationalizing effects we observe in societies and ascribe to a
singular, European modernity are in fact the operation of an
Eurocentric discourse that has collapsed geographically
differentiated processes of modernity (representing the
articulation of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial polities) into a unitary, historicist account. Watts (1995) makes a
similar point.
3. Harvey (1989), Anderson (1998), and Twitchell (1999) offer
trenchant analyses of these pathologies, particularly commodity fetishism.
4. Although we bracket the issue of gender in this article,
obviously our intention is neither to suggest that the
migrating body is only male nor to say that the renegotiation
of gender identities is politically less salient than the tussles
over class, ethnic, caste, and tribal identities. Rather, our
emphasis in this article on caste and tribal identifications
reflects our research trajectory, as well as a perceived gap in
the migration literature on these struggles.
5. We understand labor valorization, in Marxs ([1876] 1976,
ch. 7) sense, as the process whereby the commodity, labor
power, is purchased and consumed for its use-value within a
capitalist production process in order to generate surplus
value. However, in this article we understand acts of
consumption and labor valorization not as merely about the
acquisition of use- or the transfer of exchange-values, but just
as crucially, for their symbolic value in communicating social
distinction. The communicative aspect of commodities is the
subject of a rich literature. We owe debts primarily to Veblen
([1899] 1994), Douglas and Isherwood ([1979] 1996),
Bourdieu (1984), Appadurai (1986), Baudrillard (1988),
McCracken (1988), Parry and Bloch (1989), and Miller

(1995a, 1995b). Like several of these authors, we want to

underscore the signaling and gate-keeping functions of
commoditiesthe ways in which they serve to mark social
boundaries and hierarchies.
6. Bourdieu (1977) contrasts heterodoxy (the universe
of competing possibilities) to doxa (the universe of
undisputed ideas) and orthodoxy (the universe of straightened or rationalized ideas). We employ the word heterodoxy in this precise sense to convey the point that body
politics is intrinsically about the dominated challenging
the institutionalized or internalized censorships of the
dominant.
7. Arnold (1984) discusses how Gramscis ideas can augment
our understanding of peasant subalternity in India.
8. Aside from the work of Stuart Hall (see, for instance, Hall and
Jefferson 1976) and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the work of Michel de Certeau (1984)
also deserves mention here. Witness this account (1984,
xiixiii):
To a rationalized, expansionist and at the same time
centralized, clamorous, and spectacular production [i.e., a
dominating media] corresponds another production, called
consumption. The latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it
insinuates itself everywhere, silent and almost invisibly,
because it does not manifest itself through its own products,
but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a
dominant economic order.
We appreciate the spirit of subversiveness that pervades de
Certeaus account, but we find it overly instrumental and
optimistic. Our view is much closer to Gramscis, who
recognizes the contradictions and brittleness of both
hegemony and agency.
9. Significantly, Frederick Coopers work claims that the origins
of development were not exclusively Europeanthat, in
fact, it is tied to how the labor question was resolved in
Europes African colonies (vide Cooper 1992).
10. The key variable in the migrants decision to move is net
expected earnings. In other words, the rational migrant weighs
the industry to agriculture wage differential by the probability
of finding urban employment and subtracts migration costs
from this expected income.
11. In the popular Harris-Todaro (1970) model of migration,
the equilibrium condition reads: (LF/LF 1 LI)wF 1 (LI/LF 1 LI)wI
5 wA, where LF is total formal employment available in
the urban sector, LI is total informal employment available
in the urban sector, wF is the fixed or mandated wage rate in
the formal sector, wI is the wage rate in the informal sector,
and wA is the wage rate in agriculture. The term (LF/LF 1 LI)
is simply the probability that the migrant will find formal
employment in the urban sector; similarly, the term (LI/
LF 1 LI) represents the probability that the migrant will find
informal employment in the urban sector. Thus, the left-hand
side of the equation gives the migrants expected earning in
the urban sector. In equilibriumthat is, a state where no
person wishes to migrate from one sector to the other
expected urban sector wage must equal the prevailing
agricultural wage.
12. The decennial census of India provides figures on the stock of
rural migrants (urban residents of rural origin) in the survey
year and can therefore be used to track decennial changes in
migrant inflows to urban areas. Unfortunately, the census

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

13.

14.

15.
16.

17.

18.

19.

data allow no way of discerning permanent migrants from

circular migrants. As mentioned in the text, most estimates of
circular migration rely on intelligent conjectures from smaller
regional surveys and ethnographic studies. Papola (1997) and
Srivastava (1998) discuss limitations of the Indian census
data for migration studies.
The word dalit applies to those downtrodden groups who,
within the scheme of orthodox Hinduism, were considered
ritually impure and therefore untouchable. Unlike the
euphemism harijan (people of god) coined by Mahatma
Gandhi, the term dalit has an explicitly political, anticaste
connotation. Zelliot (1992), Omvedt (1995), Fernandes
1996, Mendelsohn and Vicziany (1998), Deliege (1999),
Michael (1999), and Moon (2001) ably document the rise of
dalit social consciousness and dalit movements in India. A
note of clarification: we employ the term dalit for members
of historically subordinated low-caste groups because this is
increasingly how they choose to represent themselves (and
when they do not, we substitute the proper term of
referencefor instance, harijan). By contrast, the term
adivasi (original inhabitant) does not carry the same
positive or political connotations as the term dalit. Tribal
groups do not use it self-referentially (instead, they use their
proper group namefor example, bhil). And upper-caste
groups often employ the term adivasi derogatorily. Hence,
we prefer to use the term tribal in place of adivasi.
For our purpose, space, in any historical context, can be
circumscribed by material social processes that involve the
traffic of goods or ideas between sets of people; by contrast,
place refers to the forms of consciousness with which
individuals and groups apprehend and transform particular
material spaces, taking for granted that these forms of
consciousness are dialectically related to social power relations. This distinction builds on Heidegger (1977, 332ff.) and
the evocative discussion of place that is developed in Basso
(1996, 10549). Creed and Ching (1997, 7) offer a related
definition of place as a grounded metaphor.
We thank two of the anonymous referees for urging us to
foreground the feminist literature on body politics.
Parry (1999) goes on to provide a vivid account of a tension
between young and old that crosses caste lines and is the
result of a generalized disenchantment with agrarian life. He
(117) notes that [T]he fact is that agricultural work is now
regarded with deep distasteespecially by the young . . . even
unemployed youngsters resolutely refuse to so much as
supervise the work of day laborers in the fields, let alone work
in them themselves . . . the young see agriculture as
emblematic of the rustic world.
Whereas the Patels ultimately chose to emulate Vanias, the
Kolis adopted the Kshatriya modelparticularly after their
political mobilization in the 1950s and 1960s by the Gujarat
Kshatriya Sabha (on the role of caste associations in the
prosecution of Rajput Kshatriya identity, see Kothari and
Maru 1970; Shah 1975; Lobo 1995). Like Patels before them,
the Kolis retained the services of Barots to build Rajput
genealogies for them (Shah and Shroff 1959).
Again, it is difficult to sift fact from fiction in this contest over
identities. If anything, the struggle over rank exposes that an
essentialist account of caste, one that sees it as fixed in time
and space, is irretrievably flawed.
Breman (1985, 1996) does an especially fine job of this in the
Gujarat context. Karlekar (1995), Menon (1995), Sarada-

20.

21.

22.
23.
24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

207

moni (1995), and Teerink (1995) document the difficult

work environment of women migrants in various other parts
of India, based on detailed ethnographic fieldwork. Pryer
(1992) discusses the Bangladesh case.
At the time of our field research in 19931994, the Lodhas
were paid five kilos of rice (dhan) and two rupees for tiffin at
the end of the workday. They could make the cash equivalent
of that wage and sometimes slightly more performing coolie
work in the nearby market town of Jhargram, if such work was
in fact available. When they took a head-load of fuel-wood
into the bazaar, it usually fetched fifty to sixty rupees (three
times the daily earning from farm or coolie work). But the
preparation of such a head-load usually involved two days of
work by a Lodha man and half a day of walking to the location
of sale by a Lodha woman.
The Kangsabati canal project failed in part due to the
enactment of the Forest Conservation Act in 1980 by
the government of India and the subsequent refusal of the
Forest Department to allow conversion of forest land into a
watercourse. For details, see Sivaramakrishnan (1998).
We are grateful to the authors for granting us permission to
cite from their preliminary record of findings.
The name Vankar is a synthesis of the Gujarati noun van
(meaning unginned cotton) and the verb kar (to do);
hence, a Vankar is someone who transforms cottona weaver.
The figures on educational attainment are drawn from
Gidwani (1996, 8, table 1.1). Remaining information is
distilled from Gidwanis field notes on changing agrarian
relations in the village of Shamli in the Matar subdistrict of
the Kheda District, Gujarat, recorded between 8 May 1994
and 31 August 1995. Village and respondent names here and
below have been altered to preserve confidentiality.
Hence, Gooptu (1993, 27798) describes how the Adi Hindu
movement in Uttar Pradesh in the early twentieth century,
which gained momentum with urbanization and migration,
transformed the labor practices of the untouchable Chamar
castealthough she is careful to qualify that the rejection of
degrading menial work by Chamars did not translate into a
pointed rejection of the caste system itself. In short, subaltern
agency can express itself in ways that are simultaneously
unconventional and conservative.
Field notes, Gidwani (1996). Names of villagers and villages
have been altered to preserve confidentiality. Gidwani used
the term harijan rather than dalit because this is how his
respondents referred to themselves.
It is important to clarify that we view aesthetics as an aspect of
politics. In so doing, we abjure a common view (sometimes
linked to the works of Adorno and Horkheimer) that
interprets aesthetics as a form of escape from (the despair
of) politics. We want to assert the materiality of aesthetics and
hence its expression not just in consumption styles but also in
the recasting of the working body. Having clarified this, we
clearly believe that body politics exceeds aesthetics, because
the domination of bodies cannotand should notbe
reduced to aesthetics alone. That would diminish the
physical and psychological violence of domination.
Ferguson (1999, 95) writes: I use the term cultural style to
refer to practices that signify differences between social
categories. Cultural styles in this usage do not pick out total
modes of behavior but rather poles of social signification,
cross-cutting and cross-cut by other such poles. He uses the
term style to emphasize the accomplished performative

208

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan

nature of such practices. Ferguson cautions that we should not
assume shared cultural commonalities can survive persistent
stylistic differences that may arise in situational behavior.
Equally, we must be careful not to presume that similar styles
signify similar things for different people (Ferguson 1999,
9397).
This body politics of consumption echoes the notion of
cultural production advanced by Lisa Lowe (1996). As she
(158) observes, [C]ultural forms of many kinds are
important media in the formation of oppositional narratives
and are crucial to the imagination and rearticulation of new
forms of political subjectivity, collectivity, and practice.
The struggle over attire and lower-caste consciousness of the
uses of attire in making defiant gestures is not a new
phenomenon in Tamil Nadu. Andre Beteilles classic study
([1966] 1996) of a Thanjavur village contains evidence of
similar assertion by young men returned from breathing the
fresh air of self-respect in cities where they studied or worked,
even as casual labor. The interesting twist in the story is the
way the struggle over attire in the 1960s was about violating
proscriptions about covering parts of the body or affecting
upper-caste styles of traditional dress. Thirty years later the
contest is conducted in cultural styles evoking modern
fashions and cosmopolitan attire.
Dressing in styles considered as hip or chic in the
metropolitan centers visited by migrants in their work-related
travels often proves to be the most easily available form of selfassertion when they return to social relations of dependency
and subordination in their home villages. Osella and Osella
(1999) provide comparative endorsement of this point in their
study of the low-caste Izhavas of Kerala. Their study also notes
how low-caste groups adopt differentiated, rather than uniform, consumption strategies in their efforts to assert new
identities.
According to Geoghehan (1873, 71) more than 20 percent of
overseas migrants returned home, braving the most appalling
traveling conditions, between 1842 and 1870. So this
aspiration clearly cut across historical periods and the spatial
seams of the migration experience.
Comins (1892) provides detailed information on wealth
created and returned by emigrants to India. The scale of
repatriation led to a fear in colonial governments of a drain of
wealth and skills from the island colonies.
This description and the preceding paragraph draw on
Sivaramakrishnans field notes for June 1999. A study is
presently being conducted in four villages, including one
tribal village, and three multicaste villages with significant
dalit populations in Tiruvannamalai District, Tamil Nadu,
India. One of these villages has been specifically selected for
its periurban location less than ten miles from the district
town. In addition to open-ended interviews and periods of
participant observation, a baseline survey of socioeconomic
characteristics was conducted in all four villages during 1999
and 2000, covering 1,534 families in the multicaste villages
and 56 families in the tribal village. Information on migration
stories was collected in the course of these surveys.
Our skepticism on the possibility of exercising freedom
within the framework of biopower is offset by an altogether
different skepticism on the part of theorists such Wendy
Brown (1995, 6364) who fear that Foucault, in fact, yields to
a naive volunteerism that arises from his tacit assumption
about the givenness and resilience of the desire for freedom.

She (64) attributes Foucaults optimism about freedom to

his rejection of psychoanalysis and his arrested reading of
Nietzsche (his utter neglect of Nietzsches diagnosis of the
culture of modernity as the triumph of slave morality). We
find Browns psychoanalytic critique curiously totalizing,
unlike Gramscis understanding of subaltern consciousness
as a fragmentary, bizarre combination of conceptions and
goals sutured together.
36. Foucault (1977, 1979, 1980) asserted that he was offering an
analytics of power rather than a theory of power. This is
entirely consistent with his picture of power as a capillary
force that suffuses bodies and the body society. Since power is
everywhere (there is no outside) it is, then, logically
impossible to give an account of power that is objective or a
priori, as theories claim to be. By the same token, it is difficult
to imagine a subjectivity that does not serve powerand if
this is so, in what sense is it meaningful to speak of human
agency? Silvey and Lawson (1999) contend that migrant
narratives contained in life histories, folk songs, poems and
other nonconventional sources of information offer us a way
of recovering uncolonized subjectivities. But this fails to
address the problem that Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983, 203)
concede in their largely sympathetic appraisal of Foucaults
work: The force of biopower lies in defining reality as well as
producing it. This reality takes the world to be composed of
subjects and objects and their totalizing normalization. Any
solution that takes these terms for grantedeven if it is to
oppose themwill contribute to the hold of power. Some of
the methodological problems in recovering subaltern voices
are discussed in Guha (1983), Spivak (1988), Bhabha
(1994), and Pratt (1999). Foucault evidently began to move
away from his pervasive emphasis on power and tackle the
analytics of agency in his later writings (the three-volume
History of Sexuality [beginning in 1979] is thought to
represent the beginning of these endeavors). Regrettably,
his task remained unfinished.
37. Butlers effort to combine theoretical insights from Jacques
Derrida, Foucault, and Luce Irigaray to discuss the possibilities of politically transgressive agency is noteworthy in this
regard. She introduces a temporal factor in Foucaults notion
of discourse through the idea of citationality. This simply
means that the terms of discourse must be reiteratively and
performatively reproduced by those who are enacted as
subjects by that discourse. This injects the possibility of
slippage during reiterations and hence, for Butler, the
possibility that the realm of the abjectthe constitutive
and excluded outsidewhich is ordinarily uninhabitable
and unlivable, becomes imagined as an alternative to some
normalizing regulative ideal (such as heterosexuality). But
despite her rejection of voluntarism, even Butler seems to
succumb to the need to smuggle in a moment of free will in
order to argue the possibility of resistance. See Butler (1993,
introduction; 1997, ch. 3). The work of Robert Sack (1997)
offers provocative insights on the necessity of free will.
38. As Chakrabarty (2000, introduction and ch. 1, 8) explains,
historicism spawned a not yet or waiting room version of
history on the part of colonial rulersand even liberal
intellectuals such as John Stuart Millwho maintained that
some historical time of development and civilization
(colonial rule and education, to be precise) had to elapse
before they [Indians or Africans] could be considered
prepared for [the task of self-rule or government].

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

39. See Simon (1997), Moore (2000), Sivaramakrishnan and
Agrawal (forthcoming), and Gidwani (forthcoming) for
detailed critiques of postdevelopment.
40. Circular migration has a long history in the Indian subcontinent. Rarely, however, did it permit subaltern classes to
repudiate traditional hierarchies and codes of conduct. But
today, the spread of television, city editions of newspapers,
retailing, transportation, and state-sponsored literacy programs has hugely expanded and accelerated the flow of
materials and meanings and granted new potency to consumption as a source of counteridentity. Similarly, the political
space in which subordinated groups like dalits and tribals can
operate has also widened with the entrenchment of state
affirmative-action programs and the rise of panregional dalit
movements that recognize the influence dalits can exert in a
democratic nation-state via their immense collective voting
power. These sorts of structural changes in postcolonial India
make subaltern body politics possible and effective.
41. For a discussion of the second democratic upsurge, see Yadav
(2000). As he points out, this needs to be juxtaposed with the
first upsurge in the 1960s, which witnessed the widening
and deepening of political participation in the country
through the channels of strong middle-of-the-road parties.

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Correspondence: Department of Geography and Institute of Global Studies, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, e-mail:
[email protected] (Gidwani); Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-3100, e-mail: sivaram@u.
washington.edu (Sivaramakrishnan).