How to decide where in India you’re from? Your birthplace? Your native language? Where you’ve lived the longest? What happens if your own country decides you’re a migrant?
In my mind, the image of the Indian migrant worker was set in stone in 2020—thousands of people braving hunger, exhaustion walking a thousand miles to their villages
I was born in Kottayam, Kerala. However, I am not Malayali; it just so happened that my Tamilian mother’s parents settled in Kerala ages ago. Thanks to my mother’s firm-handed diligence, I read, write and speak Tamil. Since my father was Tamilian, that ought to make me one too. Kinda sorta.
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However, history records that soon after birth by the light of kerosene lamps in a rubber plantation, I was taken to Calcutta, as it was called then. My early schooling up to Class IIIE1 was at Hindi High School in that city. Since I returned to Calcutta for another five years after college to work in JS magazine, I have spent 13 years of my life in West Bengal.
During that time, driven by both my interest in languages and the company of Bengali friends who spoke no English, I learned to read, write and speak Bengali. If there is an Indian city and culture I feel most at home in, I would have to say West Bengal.
To complicate matters, I lived in Delhi from age 9, completing school and then college, living alone in Delhi after my parents shifted to Mumbai. Absorbing Delhi’s exuberant but sometimes irreverent and rough culture was unavoidable. My Hindi is better than fluent and I have more than a smattering of street Punjabi.
But after 1977, it was Bombay all the way till 2000, when I left India to work in Africa. The person I married was Maharashtrian and my children have no clue which part of India they’re from.
I am not unique. My gypsy Indian-ness mirrors that of many other Indians. And it raises a head scratcher—which part of India am I from? Should my provenance be decided by birthplace? The language spoken at home? The place I have lived the longest? The special city where I feel most at home?
It also raises a deeper question—if I move away from whichever part of India I came from, would it make me a migrant?
Forty million Indians are officially labelled migrants. In my mind, the image of the Indian migrant worker was set in stone in 2020—thousands of threadbare people with no more than the clothes on their backs, abandoned by their employers and their government, braving hunger, exhaustion and disease to walk a thousand miles to their villages while a lethal virus devastated the country. No one, it seemed, gave a damn about them.
Apparently not one of them was protected by any meaningful kind of law that vouchsafed them safe and decent work, reasonable hours, a roof—and protection against acts of God like pandemics.
Think of a migrant as a man—or woman—trudging from point A, the place they consider home, to point B, the place where they hope to find work in a quarry, salt flat, construction site, truck depot or similar. At this point, you will want to ask three questions—
Who defines point A, the place you call home?
Is any person working away from the “home” place a migrant?
And are there any benefits to being labelled a migrant?
Last one first. Migrant workers, defined as persons from one state employed in another state, have only become more dispensable over time. Under cover of special powers under COVID-19, the 29 laws that protected them earlier were fused into four Acts that greatly benefited the corporations that use migrant workers. To be a migrant in today’s India you must earn less than Rs 18,000 a year, be in a workplace that employs fewer than 10 workers, and break your back working 12 hours a day. The eight-hour workday is for the better heeled.
The hands that build our cities and bridges are crushed under the boots of the bureaucracies that use them. Migrant workers do not realise that they cannot be treated as outsiders in their own country, whose Constitution guarantees freedom of movement. The price they pay for this ignorance is being battered and bruised by the corporations and contractors who pay them as little as possible in return for their blood and toil.
India teaches them that they belong to a corner of the country, and are migrant outsiders everywhere else. India is not theirs.
My deepest insight into this intricate area came years ago in the village of Jitwarpur, in Bihar’s Madhuban district. I was in my jeans and sweater, swaddled in a borrowed blanket, sipping hot tea at 5 am in the village tea shop surrounded by biting winter fog. I was the new face, the stranger. Everyone was curious, but no one spoke.
An airplane roared overhead and when it had passed, a villager leaned over to ask, “Which country are you from?”
Affronted, I replied, probably with mild indignation, “I’m from the same country as you! I’ve come from Delhi.”
Many heads lifted from their teas and nodded. The villager next to me said, “Ah. You’re from that country.”
Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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