Session 4: Camille Buat
Shifting Pardesh: Labour Migration and Territorial Reconfiguration in North India (1880s-1950s)
Chair: Nupur Choudhary
Respondent: Christopher L. Diamond
- Tuesday 2026-07-07 16:00-17:30
- Location: Seminar Room
- Type: session
The incorporation of North India into the British imperial economy from the late eighteenth century onward brought about a profound reorientation of labour mobility, as earlier patterns—rooted in mercantile, pastoral, and military circuits—were progressively displaced by the spread of long-distance wage migration, both inland and overseas. This paper reconstructs changing patterns and representations of labour migration from the eastern Gangetic plains, especially in the Bhojpuri-speaking regions of eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, to examine how this migratory configuration evolved between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, amid the wide-ranging political, administrative, and economic transformations spanning the late colonial and early postcolonial periods.
Drawing on a range of sources—including census data, political debates, and a corpus of Bhojpuri songs and plays—the paper pursues two interrelated lines of inquiry. First, it examines how the generalisation of long-distance wage migration fuelled the emergence of a new spatial configuration, oriented towards eastern India, particularly Calcutta. This configuration was shaped by a persistent tension: while rural-urban migration became widespread, it continued to operate through an array of localised, segmented, and historically embedded patterns. These included both residual elements of earlier circuits and new forms shaped by the segmentation of regional labour markets.
Second, the paper examines how this evolving migratory landscape intersected with the formation of a new politico-territorial order that took shape from the late nineteenth century and was structured through the complex interplay of linguistic region, administrative province, and national scale. In doing so, it shows that labour migration both contributed to and was reshaped by processes of regional and national consolidation in the transition from late colonial to early postcolonial India, highlighting its crucial yet ambivalent role in the making of modern territorial identities.