ABSTRACT
Freedom and un-freedom permeate debates about labour. From patron-clientism of pre-capitalist agriculture to neo-bondage in informal economy, the labouring poor exemplify exploitative work in the economies of the global south. Recent interpretation of migrant worker mobility has been positive, being focussed on accumulation, articulations of freedom and assertive identities. Based on ethnography and insights from Paul Ricoeur’s moral anthropology, this chapter examines the complex interlinkages between debt-bondage and seasonal migration through narratives of ex-ploughmen from an East-Central Indian village. While the ploughmen evaluated past labouring relations as exploitative and rejected hierarchies that legitimised bondage, their understanding of seasonal migration was equally circumspect raising concerns about the redundance of ploughmen and decline of agrarian morality. Creating order over past experiences and constructing identities relevant to the present, these stories not only describe the limited freedoms of the labouring poor but are reflections about time that communicate the sense of what has passed based on experiences of the present and articulate what should be in future. The ex-ploughmen strived to create coherence in a world over which they had little control through stories of improvement and loss that also provide fresh insight into historical changes in labouring identities in a region facing agrarian decline.
