Over 500,000 people are regularly engaged in seasonal migration for rice work into southern West Bengal. This paper analyses social processes at work in the interactions between employers and workers, and the welfare/illfare outcomes. Group identities based on religion and ethnicity are strengthened through the experience of migration and deployed by some migrants to make this form of employment less degrading. In West Bengal seasonal migration can involve practical welfare gains. Importantly, an informal wage floor has been put into place and managed by the peasant union allied to the largest party in the Left Front regime. However, the costs and risks of migration remain high.seasonal migration, West Bengal, group identities, welfare gains,

This article uses migrant workers' testimonies to analyse whether and how much the act of migrating seasonally for wage work has contributed to changing social relations. We investigate changes in the meaning of this kind of migration to workers involved in it over their working lives. The emergence of peasant capitalism in West Bengal from the 1970s resulted in more days work and higher wages for migrant workers. This made it possible for wage workers to view migration as a way of earning and accumulating a useful lump sum, rather than simply surviving through food payments during the period of work, as had taken place in the past. However, there was no general move away from the compulsion to earn a wage through hard manual labour. Through the testimonies, we explore the ambivalence of migrant workers towards changes in the relations of production at home and at the destination workplace.

This article tells of changing social and spatial identities in the countryside of contemporary West Bengal. It draws on a study of interactions between those seeking wage work in agriculture and the people trying to recruit them. We find a continuing and nested process of both self-identification and categorisation. Unconscious as well as conscious ethnic affinities are consolidated and changed. At the same time, identities are used instrumentally by workers to make the outcome of negotiations less demeaning, and by employers to bargain more effectivelyfor the workforce they need. The context is one of the emergence of capitalist production relations in agriculture, presided over by a coalition government led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The newly prosperous agriculture has been a source of wealth for capitalist employers, reinforcing constructions of difference in relation to the migrant workers they employ. At the same time, many employers are attracted by the prospects of urban,jobs and life-styles and invest in their children's education. Migrant workers show a similar ambivalence, being attracted by the potential earnings and consumption possibilities arising out of being employed in the West Bengal 'rice bowl', and simultaneously repelled by the dangers they associate with the place.

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