ABSTRACT
Migration is a gendered phenomenon. While the drivers of migration impact men and women differently and patterns of circulation differ based on gender, the totality of the migration experience in terms of the risks, vulnerabilities, needs, exclusions, relationalities and interdependence that are involved in the migration process significantly differ on the basis of gender. Inquiries of migrant cultures and social realities of migrant journeys have engaged with the cultural and materialities perspective, tracing the temporal and socio-spatial dynamics of embodied migration processes based on the experiences of migrants and their families. Migrant subjectivity offers insight into what goes into the understanding of attachment and relatedness, which comprehensively informs the migrant’s sense of ‘belonging’, i.e. emotional connection and personal feelings regarding a particular group, place or social location and the influence of it on the trajectories of migration. Particularly for circular migration, “which refers to repeated migration experiences between an origin and destination involving more than one migration and return” (Hugo, 2013), it is significant how belonging influences and shapes these repeat migration processes that keep bringing the migrants back to the place of origin and sending them off to the destination. This essay traces how gendered belonging in their particular spatio-temporal context, impacts circular internal migration processes through the complexities in migrant subjectivities. I analyse the life histories of women in the context of labour migration in the Indian Sundarbans. The Sundarbans that has salt-tolerant mangrove forests, the place being criss-crossed by rivers, mudflats and small islands, lying in the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers on the Bay of Bengal are shared by Bangladesh and India. Both women and men in the small islands of the Indian Sundarbans, resort to circular migration as a prominent livelihood strategy. This study is based on ethnographic data collected from Sundarban island villages in the Canning and Kakdwip blocks of South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal and Kolkata. It traces the socio-spatial dynamics of gender to analyse the changing nature of belonging of those influenced by migration to space and place. Situating migrants and their families in terms of their subjectivities and practices, I explore how migration is experienced in the ecologically fragile translocal village communities of the Indian Sundarbans, subjectively and affectively, in context of gendered spatialities (both material and symbolic) in the post COVID-19 context. I analyse the complex and layered socio-spatial dynamics of gender that emerge from the women’s narratives of navigation of the structures of patriarchal constraints through agency and access to resources. I demonstrate how gendered belonging influences circular labour migration, which through its influence on relational arrangements, in turn shape the nature of belonging to the place the circular migrants keep returning to, i.e. “home”. I argue that over time changes in gendered belonging that emerges through material and symbolic context of circular labour migration is found to bring about shifts in gender arrangements within the household space, which in turn brings about transformative changes in gender relations in the space of the community.
