Alexander, Claire, Joya Chatterji and Annu Jalais.

The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking

Muslim Migration. New York: Routledge, 2015.

This book destabilizes the “Eurocentric bias” in most migration studies which
are centered on the political experiences of advanced Western industrial states, by
using the case of the Bengal diaspora (2). Internal movements within Bengal are not
given enough attention or significance compared to most of the scholarship based on
rational models of the (male) working migrant who travels across continental borders
over long distances. Their focus on Muslim identity is also an intentional one aimed
at addressing a pervasive atmosphere of Islamophobia with its naturalizing
tendencies. While their project covers the six decades after 1947, their interviews
were conducted from 2008-2014 with a total of 227 respondents scattered across
India, Bangladesh and Britain (9). The authors explore the life histories of the
Bengali diaspora without approaching this category as a unified social identity,
illustrating through their book’s various chapters that the experiences of ‘Muslim’ are
irreducibly diverse and varied. The first chapter goes back a little more in time to
explore the historical trends of migration within and outside the Bengal delta. For the
authors, postpartition migration trends must be understood with reference to an
awareness of pre-existing movements since the 17 th century when commercial
linkages with the East India Company took root, as they show in the second chapter
(see also Chatterji, 2013). Thereafter, chapters three to five go on to detail the life
history narratives of Bengali Muslim migrants with a heavier emphasis given to their
meaning-making practices in the Bengal borderlands and urban Calcutta. Before
concluding, chapters six to eight explore the concepts of ‘homeland’ and ‘origin’, with
a special emphasis given to the agency of migrants in reimagining the possibilities of
what ‘home’ can mean in the minds of diaspora communities (13). For the current
Indian migration project, this book seems to encourage an emerging theme of paying
more attention to the differentiated colonial experiences of the British Empire, which
for many nation-states today have resulted in interior divides becoming more
significant for the everyday experiences of Indian migration compared to the broader
concepts of international relations.

Castles, Stephen, Hein de Haas, and Mark Miller, eds. The Age of Migration:
International Population Movements in the Modern World. 5th ed. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. (Introduction chapter)

This book adopts an international scale of modern international migrations

and their implications for both sending and receiving societies, many of which have
both emigrant outflows and immigrant inflows in varying proportions. The central
argument of the authors remains the same in this fifth edition since their book was
published in 1993. They find that global migration flows are reconstituting domestic
and international economies in ways that influence bilateral and regional diplomatic
relationships, policy choices, border politics, national identity and state sovereignty
(xii). Nonetheless, states do retain important traditional powers of autonomy in the
domain of migration policies and the degree to which their borders are made porous.
A broader theme of this book is the massive societal changes and cultural diversity
that large-scale international migration has brought to host destinations over the
world, sometimes in ways that result in local dissent and xenophobic sentiments.
Racial divisions remain stark in the United States as the issue of Mexican migration
continues to divide the local population (3). From a historical perspective, the
governance of migration has more to do with the exclusivist (and racist)
requirements of nation-state formation than actual problems with the movement of
people for work, which has been an ancient custom in indigenous societies. The
notion of ‘irregular’ migrant in this sense is likely a result of institutional controls on
pre-existing practices of “spontaneous mobility” which never saw settlement as an
issue to be managed (5). For today’s migrants, the decision to migrate comes up as
not only economic since both material and psychological aspirations of a better life
are at stake (7). Despite the wide variations of migration profiles in nation-states
today, some general characteristics can be outlined. These include the “globalization
of migration”, the “changing direction of dominant migration flows”, the “differentiation
of migration”, the “proliferation of migration transition”, the “feminization of labor
migration”, and the “growing politicization of migration” (16). Indian migrants both
domestic and international also face the hostility of receiving destinations which
remain reluctant to implement human rights guarantees (18), which raises questions
of the social legitimacy that such injustice enjoys in host destinations, perhaps an
even stronger obstacle for institutional reform.

Chatterji, Joya. "Dispositions and destinations: refugee agency and" mobility capital"
in the Bengal diaspora, 1947-2007." Comparative Studies in Society and History 55,
2 (2013): 273-304.

Using ethnographic interviews with migrant families in the Bengal Delta in

India, Bangladesh, and in Britain, this article aims to illustrate a case-specific
manifestation of migration patterns that can be understood on a comparative and
global basis. The concept of ‘mobility capital’ is offered, following Bourdieu, as a
driving factor in enabling movement (279). Although most were of middle-class
background and possessed considerable educational credentials, there were also a
good number of cases where migrants moved to Britain without English-language
literacy but with far-flung connections in ethnic communities. Unexpectedly for the
author, he found that migrants to Pakistan after the partition often cited a sense of
entitlement toward public goods and state services there as a huge reason for
choosing that destination over Britain, where the likelihood of socioeconomic
discrimination was higher (284-286). In contrast to the primary significance of
international borders and diplomacy, many testimonies revealed that everyday
concerns of “security and survival” in a “pragmatic” sense are more significant than
nationalistic commitments to any one nation which indeed, did not emerge as a
strong theme from the migrants’ perspective. The experiences of the interviewed
migrants also debases the conventional dichotomy of “forced” (refugees) and
“economic” migrants since the decision to move often has both at stake in varying
degrees (303), and for the author so-called refugee displacement movements cannot
be separated neatly from the demands of labor market changes in terms of their
qualitative characteristics (278).

Chatterji, Joya. “On Being Stuck in Bengal: Immobility in the ‘age of migration’”.
Modern Asian Studies 51, 2 (2017): 511-541.

This article brings attention to the issue of immobility which is understudied in

classic migration studies. For the author, the immobility paradox refers to a lack of
attention and significance given to many cases of rural villagers staying behind
instead of moving, despite the prevalent historical data on pan-Asian migration and
in South Asia. From 1834 to 1940, some over 28 million left India. By 2013, some
one-fifth of India’s population was estimated to be an internal migrant (514). These
observations point to the overriding significance of domestic national divides in India
of rural-urban differences, caste-based differentiations, gender expectations and
otherwise – also the Household registration system (hukou) in China for example –
which may very well matter more for Indian migrants than international borders per
se. While remaining in one’s home community is taken as a natural state of affairs
that needs no explanation (513), this article seeks to explain immobility as a
constraint and a type of social inequality that needs accounting for. Based on
ethnographic interviews in the Bengal Delta, the author develops the notion of
‘deficits’ at various scales –“macro, micro and cumulative levels” – which each
constrain both individuals and groups from achieving mobility resources (516-517).
These help to explain why prospective migrants end up choosing to stay, often
becoming more destitute and entrenched in the poverty cycle as a result compared
to their migrant counterparts in the cities or abroad. This research also showed that
racial stereotypes of incoming migrants also exist in sending countries albeit in
different forms that are more related to one’s capacity and value as a worker rather
than phenotypical differences. The author finds that regional biases exert a heavy
influence on the perception of local communities in the tea gardens of Darjeeling and
Assam, among other locations, in ways that deem a “specific type” of laborer more
suitable for a given sector (527-528). One’s gender identity also comes up as a
crucial source of differentiation, as many women repeatedly cited caregiving
concerns and being responsible for the health of ailing family members as reasons
for not migrating, indeed in ways that do not imply there was a choice. Most of the
interviewed in fact came not from the most destitute classes but had connections
with labor diaspora in the railway industry across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh,
plus they possessed considerable literacy levels. Yet poor bodily health status and
care obligations, especially for women, consistently came up as obstacles in
accessing “mobility capital” (535).

Menon, Bindu and T. T. Sreekumar. “’One More Dirham’: Migration, Emotional

Politics and Religion in the Home Films of Kerala.” Migration, Mobility, &
Displacement 2 (2) (2016), 4–23.

This article explores a collection of Home video productions as part of the

Islamic home-film movement in Kerala, India, started by beginner filmmakers in the
Muslim community. Since the 1970s, the state of Kerala in India has been notable for
its comparatively remarkable economic success, and emigration flows are part of its
developmental strategy for economic growth. Migration is heavily male-dominated to
the Gulf countries, with remittances forming a huge part of domestic consumption
and investment, but also bringing with it social problems over the years including
family breakdown. The narrative films take an everyday approach to migration by
adopting the migrant’s viewpoint, and show that common problems include the non-
payment or withholding of salaries, a denial of the non-working benefits promised in
work contracts, passport confiscation, and most of all unsanitary living conditions
(10). The kafala system is also itself an asymmetrical institution that confers an
unfair amount of autonomy to the host employer for a minimum of two years. Seen
collectively, these films show that risk as a concept in migration studies is not just an
economic category but is a historically pervasive element of the migration experience
(15). For the authors, migration studies which surely includes Indian migration, must
be studied for their relational effects on how people relate to social identity
categories such as “gender relations, family norms and religious practices” (18).

Rana, Junaid. Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. (Introduction chapter)

Taking the contemporary 1980s onward neoliberal market context of

international labor movement as a context, this book draws on mostly ethnographic
data to examine the racialization of Pakistani immigrants in especially but not just the
United States. The author situates the state as an abstract yet concrete entity of
study, since its exact character is hard to pin down yet there is a general consensus
that the state exerts a heavy degree of intervention in legitimizing the asymmetrical
power relationships between host destinations and precarious transient populations
(15). The figure of “the Muslim” immigrant as potentially dangerous and by default
criminalized comes up in his analysis as a universal theme with case-specific
manifestations depending on domestic racial politics (5-6). Importantly, racialized
social statuses cannot be separated from class analysis, since one’s racial identity
profoundly affects the degree to which one’s credentials and skills as a worker for
the domestic economy is recognized and rewarded (13). The role of the U.S. cannot
be underestimated in outlining a global racial schema for the category of South Asian
migrants which has been applied reductively in ways that do not correspond to the
immense diversities of the immigrant profile. For migration studies, this book is
valuable for charting the intricate linkages between neoliberal market policies heavily
supported by America, imperial ideologies in the formation of empire, and the
constitution of material and psychological social identities for all involved (7). From a
comparative perspective, Pakistani emigration since the 1970s had served as an
important lesson for other newly independent states who have since implemented
developmental models of industrialization, most notably the East Asian Tiger states.
The trope of “migrant illegality” which so burdens the Pakistani immigrant more than
race or class position is also one that stretches to these other host destinations of
guest workers (11), a trend that again cannot be separated from their early economic
dependence on Western imperial powers. In America, Pakistani immigrants are
perceived as both South Asian and Middle Eastern in a conflation of nationality,
ethnicity, cultural background, and religion with a unidimensional notion of racial
identity (20).

Samaddar, Ranabir. The Postcolonial Age of Migration. London: Routledge, 2020.

(Introduction chapter)

This book is based on the inadequacies of The Age of Migration which takes
as a starting point a liberal democratic order of nation-states and migration
governance. Although Castles and colleagues have good intentions, for the author,
migration and forced migration studies need to be conducted with a deeper sense of
historical awareness around the colonial and imperial genealogies of the modern
international order. The liberal market theory of citizenship does not adequately ask
the more pertinent questions about what contemporary migration signifies to the
capitalist system, the bourgeois age and society, much less about the role of
historical developments in border making mechanisms (4-5). Importantly, the role of
transient labor forces, who are also made insignificant in the economic, social and
political lives of host destinations, is perhaps the most indispensable element in
constituting the global order. The book goes on to argue that any contemporary
analysis of migration has to consider how the logic of human rights has and
continues to function in legal yet unjust ways that result in uneven distributions of
power among migration stakeholders. The regime of citizenship has to be rethought
in ways that address its over-romanticized nature, since its border consolidating
justifications have had to rely on “race, religion and resource (the three Rs)” to
produce others as stateless persons (13). Letting go of these historical legacies of
our current international order also means dismissing the creative agencies including
the coping mechanisms on the part of migrants on the move.

Zachariah, Mathew and S. Irudaya Rajan, “Impact of Migration on Kerala’s Economy

and Society.” International Migration 39 (1) (2001), 63–87.

This article is a report of the results from the first migration study covering the entire
state of Kerala. The authors draw heavily on a large-scale sample survey carried out
from March to December 1998 of 10, 000 households selected from 200
Panchayats/Municipal wars from all districts and taluks of Kerala state (64). Up till
the 1940s Kerala was not prominent on the migration scene, but after Indian
independence in 1947 human labour flows outside of the state gradually became a
key part of the Kerala model of development as well as a common route for middle-
class youth. During the 1980s, the number of emigrant outflows outweighed
immigrant inflows by about three to one, a trend that was heavily exacerbated by the
1970s oil crisis (68). This study found that emigration to Arab countries in the Middle
East accounted for 95%, with Saudi Arabia alone accounting for almost 40% (66).
The study confirms the general predominance of male migrants in all streams who
accounted for 90.7%, with female emigrants comprising only 9.3% (70-71). A notable
feature of Kerala emigrants is their general lack of technical credentials and
qualifications: two-thirds had none; one-eighth had some degree of knowledge
without any formal training experience. The major selectivity factors other than sex
(males are more likely to emigrate) include that of age (the younger the more likely),
education levels (the higher the more likely), marital status (singles more likely), and
also an individual’s community context in terms of the expected norms of appropriate
emigrant profiles (77-78).

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/internal-labor-migration-india-raises-integration-
challenges-migrants (online link, may be relevant)

Suggestions:
Sunil Amrith (2011) Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia. https://www-cambridge-
org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/core/books/migration-and-diaspora-in-modern-asia/
4765F3C9E5DFC165555E753FDC8204B1