“I wanted to show the faces of these migrant workers, their struggles to breathe, and their undignified deaths”: In conversation with Puja Changoiwala

ABSTRACT

Journalist and author Puja Changoiwala has been critically acclaimed for her passionate writings on crime and social issues across India, such as gender discrimination and poverty. Her debut novel, Homebound (2021), details the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Indian society, which saw the largest exodus of people since Partition, the majority of whom were from India’s poorest regions. In the book, Changoiwala tells the stories of Indian migrant labourers, showing how years of exploitation converged in a single moment of humanitarian crisis and homelessness. In this interview, Changoiwala talks about her experience as a journalist and an author in unveiling the atrocious realities of migrant life in front of a largely complacent nation and world. The discussion highlights Changoiwala’s reflections upon the conveniently neglected history of oppression that has contributed to the silencing of these marginalized populations, and her call for an awareness of such discrimination through her fiction.

KEYWORDS:

• Puja Changoiwala
• migration
• labour
• India
• COVID-19
• journalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. India underwent its first COVID-19 lockdown from March 25, 2020, with a complete ban on movement of people and goods except for those related to essential services. Those in the informal labour sector, especially those who had migrated to cities outside their domicile state, were out of work and had no pay for weeks.

2. “Internal labour displacement” refers to the movement of individuals or groups within the borders of their own country for employment. Financial benefits depend on the service or business, the period or cycle of migration, and the city of employment, as well as other factors such as age and gender. The migrants referred to in the context of the COVID-19 migrant labourer exodus, originating from rural areas, had mostly undertaken short-term circular migration to cities.

3. The announcement of a complete lockdown in India with effect from March 25, 2020 came the previous evening, rendering people without basic amenities or the means to travel.

4. One of the largest slum areas in the world, Dharavi is home to the world’s biggest informal workforce, creating a thriving micro-economic system and attracting numerous rural migrants.

5. According to Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson (2000, 94), the legitimacy of residency significantly influences both the level of citizenship and the rights granted to migrants. Those with formal, leased residences through legal employment have voting rights. Conversely, migrant labourers face a lack of legitimacy due to their informal, contractless employment and their residence in unauthorized slums. In Changoiwala’s novel, Meher’s family and friends are threatened by Mumbai locals for this reason, so Mumbai does not become home to these people.

6. Rural Indians often migrate to cities for better financial opportunities because they are economically exploited through generational farm debts in their native places, like Meher’s family in the novel. They do not find a home in the cities either. The pandemic exacerbates this situation. They have left their native place but are not considered a full citizen in their place of relocation.

7. As per the data given in the 2011 census, the consolidated number of internal migrants, both inter-state and intra-state, was 450 million (De Supriyo 2019).

8. “Neocapitalism”, theorized by Ernest Mandel (1964) and Michael Miller (1975), is a contemporary form of capitalism that has adapted to and integrated various aspects of technological advancements, globalization, and changes in economic structures. Kevin Bales (1999) uses this prototype of modern capitalism in relation to the new forms of slavery in India.

9. Marriage migration refers to the movement of individuals due to marriage or a similar partnership, relocating to their partner’s place of residence. See Oded Stark (1988) on the connection between marriage, labour-market opportunities, and migration as a part of maximizing family financial benefit. Women in India, especially those not involved with the formal sector of labour, are mostly marriage migrants.

10. The statistics from the 2019 Lok Sabha elections corroborate the aforementioned figures. See Bharti Jain’s (2021) report.

11. Infectious diseases have often been studied along with contemporary migration patterns, but mostly with migration as a causal factor for outbreaks and not the other way round. There is very little scholarship on pandemic refugees, even though the biggest pandemics in history have always caused people to flee from pandemic hotspots; see Stuart Borsch and Tarek Sabraa (2017). Even Hein De Haas, Stephen Castles, and Mark J. Miller (2020) do not mention epidemics as a factor in forced migrations; in fact, it is not considered a disaster in the sections on disaster-induced migration.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pritikana Karmakar

Pritikana Karmakar is a research scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India. Her research focuses on the biopolitics of the trans-species imaginary and the interlocking oppressions at the intersections of ecological disasters and counteractive biotechnological progress with a special focus on epidemic narratives.

Nagendra Kumar

Nagendra Kumar is professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India, as well as a Fellow of the MELUS_MELOW, the Salzburg Seminar (Austria), and the International Shaw Society (Canada). Besides publishing the book The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee: A Cultural Perspective (Atlantic, 2001), he has published research articles in journals such as South Asian Review, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, South Asian Popular Culture, Asiatic, Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Caesura: Journal of Philological and Humanistic Studies, Neohelicon, Scrutiny2, and ANQ.