The Idea of Home in a World of Circulation: Steam, Women and Migration through Bhojpuri Folksongs

Abstract

AbstractThe historical juncture of the 1840s to 1860s witnessed three developments: first, the introduction of the new means of communication (steamships and railways); second, new industrial and plantation investments in and outside of India, creating demand for labour; and third, the expansion of a print culture that went beyond the urban elite domain to reflect the world of small towns and villages. In this constellation of social, economic, and technological changes, this article looks at the idea of home, construction of womanhood and the interlaced lifecycles of migrant men and non-migrant women in a period of Indian history marked by “circulation”. Moving away from the predominant focus on migrant men, the article attempts to recreate the social world of non-migrant women left behind in the villages of northern and eastern India. While engaging with the framework of circulation, the article calls for it to be redesigned to allow histories of mobility and immobility, male and female and villages and cities to appear in the same analytical field. Although migration has been reasonably well explored, the issue of marriage is inadequately addressed in South Asian migration studies. “Separated conjugality” is one aspect of this, and the displacement of young girls from their natal home to in-laws’ is another. Through the use of Bhojpuri folksongs, the article brings together migration and marriage as two important social events to understand the different but interlaced lifecycles of gendered (im)mobilities.