ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on the subjectivation of an extremely vulnerable population group whose contribution to the Indian economy is usually kept invisible in hegemonic Indian culture: migrant workers in the Indian state of West Bengal. Whereas migrant labourers face various forms of exploitation, social exclusion and, in some cases, physical repression, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic they attracted the attention of the international media by embarking on hazardous journeys from the regions where they worked to their home villages in a situation of emergency, interrupted communications and deep insecurity. Drawing on extended fieldwork, the chapter shows how informal labour conditions are experienced by Bengali workers in times of social crisis and contingency, and how migration can be a contested site of subject formation. In spite of a good degree of self-organisation, there are little signs of political subjectivations as the migrant workers struggle vis-à-vis deep marginalisation within Indian society, mirroring the enduring impacts of colonialism, caste system and religious discrimination. In the current geopolitical climate, what hopes are there for such precarious subjectivities to generate a transversal political figure, as “people-on-the-move”?
