Seasonal migration, employer-worker interactions, and shifting ethnic identities in contemporary West Bengal

Abstract

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.

Roadwork: expertise at work building roads in the Maldives

“…In contemporary West Bengal, migrant workers are courted politely at the point of recruitment but spoken of in discriminatory terms in private (Rogaly et al . 2003: 293). By contrast, Janaka was sympathetic to the plight of the Bangladeshi workers employed on the site: he did not make inappropriate jokes, did not speak harshly or aggressively, and was not, according to his Sri Lankan colleagues, sari (spicy, aggressive).…”

From labour contractors to worker-agents: Transformations in the recruitment of migrant labourers in India

“…Adivasi workers from this region had also migrated to the colonial plantations in the Caribbean, Fiji and South Africa (Roy 2008). Rogaly et al (2003) (2003: 308). We would agree that migration has created a collective identity, that of the Jharkhandi migrant labourer, that functions above and beyond affiliations of caste, religious or ethnic differences to enable potential workers to find work and a place to live.…”

“…Adivasi workers from this region had also migrated to the colonial plantations in the Caribbean, Fiji and South Africa (Roy 2008). Rogaly et al (2003) recount how since colonial times, farmers from West Bengal travelled to Jharkhand to recruit seasonal labour. A more recent migration stream took large numbers of male workers from Jharkhand to India's Himalayan borders, where they were employed by the General Reserve Engineer Force to build roads.…”

The Entrapment of Unfree Labor

“…• Agrarian scene 1 Other authors who have conducted empirical work regarding employment relationships using similar assumptions include Rogaly (1997;Rogaly and Coppard, 2003), Kapadia (1996), Olsen, 2007, Guerin, 2013, and Venkateswarlu and Dacorta (2001.…”