Migration in the Times of Immobility: Liminal Geographies of Walking and Dispossession in India
Migration in the Times of Immobility: Liminal Geographies of Walking and Dispossession in India
This chapter takes the idea of housing outside the realm of private dwellings to explore the migration of thousands of laborers out of India's largest and wealthiest cities during the early days of lockdown. It discusses how the laborers walked, sometimes thousands of kilometers, back to their home villages because lockdown meant that their ability to earn livelihoods in the city had abruptly come to a halt. It refers to precarity that was exacerbated by the withdrawal of the state in providing assistance to the laborers, generating liminal spaces of dwelling, governance, and citizenship. The chapter argues that the Covid-19 pandemic generated new forms of dispossession and vulnerability for migrant laborers. It elaborates how the laborers inhabited a state of both social and spatial liminality as they moved from their homes to their native villages.
Keywords: housing, India, lockdown, Covid-19, COVID pandemic, liminal spaces, migrant laborers, native villages
Policy Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
