Labour migration and dislocation in India’s silicon valley

Rebecca Bowers

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The migrant families who build India’s cities do so to meet practical and ritual aspirations rooted in the village, undergoing spatial and temporal fragmentation to maintain rural longevity and the possibilities of ritual time. This article contributes an alternative position to linear-framed presumptions of migration and urbanity, illustrating instead how everyday experiences of dislocation can be productive through labor, timespace, and imagination; bridging the gulf between residence on urban construction sites in Bengaluru, southern India, and desired village homes. However, lived experiences of dislocation remain stratified by gender and class, leading to highly conjugated experiences of precarity, mobility, and possibility. Despite the urban ambivalence felt by women and girls as a result, a shared experience of dislocation enables entire families to undertake the grueling yet regenerative work of circular migration, ensuring the continuation and renewal of village life and ritual time through its incompleteness.

Keywords: labor migration; gender; dislocation; timespace; construction work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 N0 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2021-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-ure
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Published in City and Society, 1, December, 2021, 33(3), pp. 542 - 563. ISSN: 0893-0465

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