Cards and carriers: migration, identification and surveillance in Kerala, South India

Abstract

Identity cards and surveillance practices form an important part of migrant experience and politics. Drawing on fieldwork in construction sites and factory premises in Ernakulam district and a market frequented by migrants in Perumbavoor, a small city near Kochi in Kerala, this paper argues that ID-based surveillance of migrant workers occurs through a complex spatial web of state repression, local power structures and fissures within the classes of workers in Kerala. Migrant workers from North and Northeastern India, and unionized Malayali workers in construction sites and factories in Kerala, battle for and against these cards. Migrant workers resist not necessarily class power that inheres in capital, but the state and surveillance practices.

Keywords:

• surveillance
• identification
• migration
• workers
• India

Acknowledgement

This article is drawn from my PhD thesis submitted at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram. I am grateful to K. N. Harilal, Praveena Kodoth, Vasudha Chhotray, Fiona McConnell and two anonymous referees for comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Bauman (1998) and Hardt and Negri (2001) implicitly characterized ‘mobility’ as immanent to the post-modern condition. While human mobility has been a huge part of the modern era (Lucassen and Lucassen 2009), the mobility that these authors refer to involve a compression/erasure of time and space. It also involves liquidation of boundaries between different kinds of spaces-economic, cultural and social. For example, the idea of ‘immaterial labour’ suggested by Hardt and Negri is predicated on connectivity and mobility that results in the production of intellectual labour that thrives on digital communication and common cultural assets. Their notion of mobility and migration sets it up as seamless and as technologically driven and as something that involves compression of time. There is a valorization of mobility and a repudiation of locatedness that effaces the very different experiences of mobility that people experience (Pritchard 2000).

2 Agarwala (2006) mentions that carrying an identity card issued by a trade union was empowering for migrant women while commuting in the city of Mumbai.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma

Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma researches migration and Urban Studies in contemporary India. She recently submitted her PhD at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.