Translocal Householding

Abstract

Abstract The urban experience remains inextricably entangled with the rural for millions of poor migrants to cities in the global South who labor in informal economies. Translocal households, households that share the labor and costs of social reproduction spatially across the city and the country, are an important site of entanglement, empirically and imaginatively. The dynamics of translocal householding in the oral histories of two migrants to Delhi reveal intermittent pathways of escape from and recuperation of normative hierarchies of social difference—especially of gender and caste—over life times and spaces. The need for care and rejuvenation lead to creating new forms of community and unexpected friendships in cities, with village households a fallback. In the process of seeking aspirations, refuge, belonging, and a final resting place, it is likely that hierarchies based on social difference shift but are recuperated in translocal households.