Session 3: Anand Yang
Mobile Subjects: The Long and Short of Migration in Colonial Bihar
Chair: Ankita Choudhary
Respondent: Dev Nath Pathak
- Tuesday 2026-07-07 14:00-15:30
- Location: Seminar Room
- Type: session
What follows is the first section of a longer paper made up of three parts. The opening bit focuses on internal migration between Bihar (primarily the north Bihar districts of Champaran, Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur, and Saran and the south Bihar districts of Gaya, Patna, and Shahabad) and the rest of India, with most people initially moving towards purab or the “East.” Although not detailed here as yet, this discussion will trace the places migrants originated from, down to the thana- and village-levels, and the destinations they journeyed to across Bengal and increasingly to other regions of India.
The second part of the paper looks at overseas migration from Bihar, mostly involving people moving to locales across the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the Caribbean. Empirically and theoretically, it emphasizes the linkages between internal and international migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The final section examines the lived experiences of Bihari migrants by exploring the different subjectivities they assumed, particularly in their lives beyond India, but also closer to home in the “East.” It utilizes migrant self-narratives and other utterances extracted from folk songs, plays, and oral testimonies to piece together “keywords” they employed to recount and understand their experiences. My interest in their lexicon seeks to comprehend the acts of ‘translation’ that men and women engaged in away from home in bidesh. A fragment of this work recently appeared as: “First Person Singular? North Indian Migrant Narratives from the Era of Indenture,” History and Theory 64, 3 (2025):405-12)