Pride and shame in the city: young people’s experiences of rural–urban migration in India

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complex emotional experiences of young male rural migrants in the city of Delhi, India. Based on multi-sited fieldwork, and drawing on a long-term study in Bihar, India, this paper contributes to emerging scholarship on the emotional geographies of migration that prioritise young people’s perspectives. I show that while young migrants are active agents in their own migration, they are also subject to specific vulnerabilities and exploitation. At the same time, they undertake challenging emotional labour in the city to create particular working identities that are both a source of pride and shame. I argue that an insertion of emotions in the analysis of migration helps disentangling this dissonance between migrants’ economic success and social rejection in the city. The article makes a case for the incorporation of emotions for a more comprehensive and nuanced analysis of young people’s migration in academic and policy discourses.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural–urban migration
• youth
• identity
• emotions
• India
• Bihar

Acknowledgements

Fieldwork for this paper was funded through a grant provided by the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and it draws on long-term research on rural Bihar undertaken at the Institute for Human Development, New Delhi. I am thankful to my fieldwork companions Subodh Kumar and B.K.N. Singh, in Delhi and Bihar respectively, for all their help. I remain particularly grateful to Kabita Chakraborty for her feedback and support in the course of writing this paper. The paper benefited greatly from the constructive comments of two anonymous reviewers. Any errors remain solely mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Persons in the age 15–29 years are included in the definition of youth in India’s National Youth Policy, 2014. At the same time, it is acknowledged that ‘youth is a more fluid category than a fixed age-group’ (Government of India 2014, 9). One of the objectives of this lofty national development project is to ‘create a productive workforce that can make a sustainable contribution to India’s economic development’ (2014, 20). It is noteworthy that this policy categorises migrants among ‘youth at risk and marginalised youth who require special attention’ (2014, 66). This clichéd label holds little ground the case of Bihari migrants in Delhi, who tend to have better economic and social indicators, and in particular, a higher income compared to residents (Institute for Human Development 2013).

2 Migration from Mahisham is predominantly to distant labour markets across urban India. Earlier streams of short-term migration to agricultural work in rural northwestern India have declined.

3 This is also seen in the transnational migration literature, for instance, in Raffaetà’s (2015) work on Ecuadorian immigrants in Italy (2015, 120).

4 ‘Had I not been educated, I wouldn’t have been able to start my own business’, JM asserted.

5 The context is cultural here. This behaviour can be located in Asia’s entrenched reverence of family values and cultural traditions, which are principally concerned with maintaining family and social harmony rather than endorsing individualism (Ennew, n.d. in Editorial 2015, 259).