Table Of ContentIndia’s Migrant Workers and the Pandemic
A sudden announcement was made by the government on 24 March 2020
of a complete lockdown of the country, due to the spectre of Coronavirus.
India’s Migrant Workers and the Pandemic was being written as the crisis
was unfolding with no end in sight.
Migrant workers from different parts of India had no choice but to trek
back hundreds of kilometres carrying their scanty belongings and dragging
their hungry and thirsty children in the scorching heat of the plains of India
to reach home.
How did caste, race, gender, and other fault lines operate in this
governmental strategy to cope with a virus epidemic?
The eight papers in this collection, highlight the ethical and political
implications of the epidemic – particularly for India’s migrant workers. What
were the forces of power at play in this war against the epidemic? What
measures could have been taken and need to be taken now?
Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay works at the Department of Humanities and Social
Sciences at IISER, Mohali. His research area is Urban History, Informal
Economy and Infrastructure Studies. He is a historical anthropologist
of the Present. Some of his publications are “Caste and the Frontiers of
Postcolonial Accumulation”, alongside Ranabir Samaddar, in Accumulation
in Postcolonial Capitalism: India and Beyond (Springer, 2016), and
“Institutionalizing Informality: The Hawkers’ Question in Postcolonial
Calcutta” in Modern Asian Studies, 50 (2), (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Paula Banerjee, best known for her work on women in borderlands and
women and forced migration, is the President of International Association
for Studies in Forced Migration. She is a faculty member of the Department
of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Calcutta, one of the
largest and oldest Universities in South Asia. She is also the Director of the
avant garde South Asian think tank called Calcutta Research Group. Her
recent publications include Statelessness in South Asia (2016), Unstable
Populations, Anxious States (edited 2013), Women in Indian Borderlands
(edited, 2012) and Borders, Histories, Existences: Gender and Beyond
(2010) which has been acclaimed as a best seller.
Ranabir Samaddar holds the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced
Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group, and is a political thinker
and one of the foremost theorists in the feld of migration and forced
migration studies. Author of several well known books and distinguished
papers, his writings on migration, labour, colonialism, and the nation
state have signalled a new turn in critical postcolonial thinking. Some of
his best known works are Beyond Kolkata: Rajarhat and the Dystopia of
Urban Imagination (Routledge, 2014), Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age
(Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) and is editor of From Popular Movements to
Rebellion: The Naxalite Decade (Social Science Press, 2018).
India’s Migrant Workers
and the Pandemic
Edited by
,
RITAJYOTI BANDYOPADHYAY
PAULA BANERJEE AND RANABIR SAMADDAR
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 Social Science Press
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to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and
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Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh,
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 9781032158921 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781003246121 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246121
Typeset in Sabon LT Std
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REPORT X
Contents
General Introduction: The Shiver of the Pandemic 1
Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Paula Banerjee
and Ranabir Samaddar
PART I: ANALYSES
1. Corona Virus and the World-Economy: The Old is 29
Dead, the New Can’t be Born
Ravi Arvind Palat
2. Covid-19 and Gender Transgressions 40
Paula Banerjee
3. Covid-19 Jurisprudence: Triadic Ethical Framework 58
and the Faultlines of Constitutional Governance
Kalpana Kannabiran
4. Economic Implications of Covid-19 Pandemic: 99
Migration, Informality, Postcolonial Capitalist
Development
Rajan Pandey and Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay
5. Corona Pandemic, Sudden Visibility of Migrant 115
Workers, and the Indian Economy
Byasdeb Dasgupta
6. Between Homes; Without Homes: Migration, Circularity 138
and Domesticity
Samita Sen
vi CONTENTS
PART II: REPORTS: THE LOCKDOWN
EXPERIENCE/TRACTS OF TIME
Report I: Hunger, Humiliation, and Death: Perils of Migrant 167
Workers in the Time of Covid-19
Utsa Sarmin
Report II: Insecurity and Fear Travel as Labour Travels in 177
the Time of Pandemic
Manish K Jha and Ajeet K Pankaj
Report III: The Return of Bihari Migrants after the 191
Covid-19 Lockdown
Anamika Priyadarshini and Sonamani Chaudhury
Report IV: The Sudden Visibility of Sangram Tudu 205
Rajat Roy
Report V: Glimpses of Life in the Time of Corona 216
Madhurilata Basu and Sibaji Pratim Basu
Report VI: Migrant Workers and the Ethics of Care 232
during a Pandemic
Ambar Kumar Ghosh and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury
Report VII: Social Distancing, “Touch-Me-Not” and the 242
Migrant Worker
Ishita Dey
Report VIII: Bringing the Border Home: Indian Partition 2020 250
Samata Biswas
Report IX: Counting and Accounting for Those on the 263
Long Walk Home
Sabir Ahamed
Report X: How One State Can Learn from Another – 275
Migrant Workers in Kolkata
Swati Bhattacharjee and Abhijnan Sarkar
List of Contributors 284
REPORT X
Acknowledgements
This collection is in part reflections, part analyses, and part
reportages as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on. We are grateful to
the contributors who responded on impossibly short notice and
generously gave their time to write out these papers and reports. In
the process of initial discussions with the contributors on the possible
themes of this collection, the plan behind preparing the collection
became clearer. Ideas about the implications of the pandemic for
world economy and the possibilities of global restructuring of power,
the cutting lines of race, caste, and gender in the landscape of gender,
the new ethical issues of life in a post Covid-19 world, and above
all, the place of labour, particularly migrant labour, in what is called
the war against the virus became clearer.
We are equally grateful to the Calcutta Research Group (CRG)
members who went through the pieces and gave us editorial advice.
They are all veterans of this research collective. Because of them
CRG is what it is. Much of the research in this volume is facilitated
by the CRG partnership with Institute for Human Sciences (IWM)
Vienna. The volume is done under the aegis of the CRG Chair on
Migration and Forced Migration Studies. Finally, our thanks go to
the young researchers of CRG, Kusumika Ghosh, Piya Srinivasan,
Nandini Dasgupta, Utsa Sarmin, Rajat Sur and Samaresh Guchhait
who helped us in copy-editing the entire volume. Sabyasachi Basu
Ray Chaudhury played a key role in the conceptualization of this
volume. We are eternally indebted to him. We are thankful to Esha
Beteille of the Social Science Press for agreeing to publish this
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
volume, for encouraging us to keep the deadline, and for providing
many crucial suggestions. Finally, we are indeed grateful to the
anonymous reviewer who gave us many relevant recommendations
and a helpful critique of an earlier draft of the volume.
CHAPTER III
Introduction
The Shiver of the Pandemic
Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Paula Banerjee
and Ranabir Samaddar
There have been as many plagues in the world as wars, and yet
both wars and plagues catch us unawares…The word conjured up
old images of pestilence: appalled Londoners watching cartloads of
corpses going by. Or plague-ridden Athens, with the living fghting
each other to get their dead loved ones cremated on the burning
pyres rather than left rotting on the beach.
Albert Camus, Plague.1
A PARADOX
India began to feel the shiver of the Pandemic in late winter, 2020. In
the third week of March 2020, the confrmed corona positive cases
reached 500. On 24 March 2020, Prime Minister Modi declared a
21-day nationwide lockdown, crippling the mobility of the world’s
second-largest national population of 1.3 billion, to prevent the
spread of the Pandemic in the country. The lockdown was preceded
by a 14-hour voluntary curfew on 22 March 2020. Various state
governments extended the lockdown in their territories to 1 May
Written on 11 December 2020.
