Migration and the Making of a Village

Abstract

It is a myth that only cities are made by migrants. Citing from his fieldwork in a village in Bihar, the author establishes how the historical conditions and processes that went into the making of the village influenced, and continues to influence even today, the sense of home and belonging. For an estate under the Permanent Settlement System, the making of a village was an exercise in adding a revenue unit, i.e., creating a new source of ground rent. For the people, however, it was an exercise in mobilising themselves into a social formation that had, on the one hand, a codified relation with land and other natural resources, and on the other, social relations that kept challenging the boundaries of prevailing customs, norms, and power dynamics while continuing to operate within them. The chapter mobilises people’s memories to create historical evidence and, in this way, takes anthropological accounts beyond an objectified history that privileges archival and other documentary material over people’s subjectivities. This land-centric ethnographic account of migration makes foray into an anthropological exercise in which people make sense of their abrasions with history in a timeframe with which they can easily relate.