Circular migration and rural cosmopolitanism in India

Abstract

In this article we present a provisional theory of rural cosmopolitanism as a counterpoint to conventional discussions of cosmopolitanism and demonstrate its significance for studying South Asian modernities. We explore our ideas through the figure of the circular migrant: someone who transmits through movements in geographic space not just sensi bilities and ideas, but also the materials and techniques that enable the transformation of social space in multiple worlds. The regionalisation of labour markets in India, with a consequent rise in labour circulation, provides empirical justification to our foeus on circular migrants. But neither circular migration nor rural cosmopolitanism is a new phenomenon. Instead, we suggest that by probing the largely invisible histories of move ment within South Asia, we may end up writing the rise of nationalisms, regional political movements, and modernities in that part of the world in very different ways. This is pre cisely why it is necessary to reject the figure of an international or transnational subject as the standard bearer of cosmopolitanism and realise that cosmopolitanism operates at various scales; and, equally, that the cosmopolitan is a person who disrupts conven tional spatial divisions and produces newly salient spaces of work, pleasure, habitation and politics.

The Diaspora Within: Himalayan Youth, Education-Driven Migration, and Future Aspirations in India

“…These are relevant but too complex to engage with here. mistaken identity to explore how new subjectivities and vernacular or subaltern forms o f cosmopolitanism (Bhabha, 1996;Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003;Jeffrey and McFarlane, 2008;Mitchell, 2007) are being formed in part through this oppositional space o f not looking 'Indian'. Wouters and Subba (2013, page 132) observe that 'N ortheastem ers' "are to be understood as a category produced and reified vis-a-vis mainstream India".…”

“…Diasporic practices o f shoring up boundaries, and a heightened sense o f cultural identity are complicated by self-consciously cosmopolitan practices. We seek to understand the ways that self-fashioning practices (Ho, 2011) "confound conventional, dualistic notions o f cosmopolitanism and parochialism" (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003;Kothari, 2008, page 500). Drawing on Jeffrey and McFarlane's (2008, pages 424-425) formulation, then, we approach cosmopolitanism "as a strategic and performed resource that is complexly enfolded in the social and political projects o f subaltern populations" and understand it to be "emerging out o f the friction between dominant projects and subaltern strategies within and across multiple scales".…”

Muslim Cosmopolitans? Transnational Life in Northern Pakistan

“…Ferguson 1999, 211-21;Hannerz 1996; see also Das and Poole 2003;Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003;Gupta 1992;Pollock 2004;Tsing 2005;Van Schendel 2002b;Wilson and Donnan 1998). As a result of these debates, there is now a wider recognition among anthropologists of the ways in which open-ended subjectivities may emerge from rural-rural migrations as much as they do from transnational movement (Gidwani and Sivaramakrisnan 2003).…”

Geographies of identity: the intimate cosmopolitan

“…While scholars might like to limit the concept of subaltern cosmopolitanism to those who are struggling against dominance and injustice, this is certainly not always the way that actual 'subalterns' (eg, those of marginal castes or classes in society) might utilize the important symbolic power of a cosmopolitan identity. Thus seemingly secure social and spatial distinctions framed as binaries, such as subaltern versus hegemonic, worldly versus parochial or even urban versus rural, fail to capture the complexities and contradictions of cosmopolitan subjectivities and practices as they play out on the ground (see also Gidwany and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003;Herzfeld, 2005;Jeffrey et al, 2004).…”