Abstract:

"Sojourners," as this term of Biblical origin suggests, reside temporarily in places before moving on to others. The term implies an itinerant life as opposed to a fixed one in spatial terms. In this paper, I conjoin this term to the notion of a "circulating society" (Markovits, Subrahmanyam, and Pouchepedass 2006), that is, one in which circulation and mobility are not exceptions but the norm. According to the last census in 2011, an estimated 450 million women and men, over a third of the population, were living away from their homes and families. By most accounts, this is an underestimate, and despite the lack of a census in 2021, this count is widely believed to have risen appreciably over the past decade or so. Drawing on two case studies from my fieldwork over the past decade in Mumbai, India and Doha, Qatar, I aim to flesh out certain shared socio-cultural and political-economic logics of labor migration within and beyond the borders of contemporary India. Stretched kinship relations generate distinctive obligations, I argue, and remake mobile persons and the rural and urban places they straddle simultaneously. Given the deep histories of Indian Ocean circulation, where South Asia begins and ends is a key question for me here.