The labour of love : Seasonal migration from Jharkhand to the brick kilns of other states in India

TL;DR: The authors argued that seasonal casual labour migration in India has conventionally been understood as the result of extreme poverty whereby villagers are forced to become migrants for the dry six months to subsist or merely survive.

Abstract: Seasonal casual labour migration in India has conventionally been understood as the result of extreme poverty whereby villagers are forced to become migrants for the dry six months to subsist or merely survive. This article draws on fieldwork in a village in Jharkhand and a brick kiln in West Bengal to argue that migrants do not understand their movement in economic terms alone. Many see the brick kilns as a temporary space of freedom to escape problems back home, explore a new country, gain independence from parents or live out prohibited amorous relationships. It is suggested that Jharkhandi activists and policy-makers’ construction of such migration as a ‘problem’ is as much about their vision of how the new tribal state ought to be as about exploitation. Migration to the kilns is seen by them as a threat to the purity and regulation of the social and sexual tribal citizen. This moralising perspective creates a climate that paradoxically encourages many young people to flee to the brick kilns where they can live ‘freely’. In this way, the new puritanism at home helps to reproduce the conditions for capitalist exploitation and the extraction of surplus value.

Summary

Introduction

• In other words, I suggest that it is not contradictory to view brick kiln labour migration as exploitative, while also understanding that most migrants not only view their movement as a choice but also see the brick kilns as an important, if temporary, space away from the social constraints back home.
• These are quantitatively documented in the penultimate section.

Context

• Gardner and Osella (2003) show that contemporary patterns of migration are not merely a result of modernisation but have long been a central feature of life within the subcontinent.
• In the late 1800s, West Bengal, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Assam, Bhutan and even Burma attracted migrants from Jharkhand.
• The Yadavs, descendants of the old landlords, do not generally migrate.
• At first glance Tapu strikes the outside observer as an economically-depressed Jharkhandi village in an underdeveloped region (Devalle 1992; Prakash 2001).
• Limited irrigation means that many harvest only one main crop a year.

Escaping to the brick kilns

• I could hear the distant beat of drums in the akhra, the village dancing circle.
• Against Somra.s wishes, Burababa, well over 60 years old, had chosen to work as a dhangar (a live-in year-round general manual labourer3) in the house of a Yadav, who was a descendant of the old village landlords.
• The owners of the fields sown that day host a lunch for the men and serve them rice beer and wine from the mahua flower.
• Somra’s bitter memories of his childhood are dominated by moving from house to house as a dhangar, Burababa’s lack of concern about his children’s education, and his developing fondness for the local brew.
• Jitia, Somra’s sister, had also been married off to a man from a neighbouring village, only to return a year later declaring her love and determination to live with a married man named Minktu in her natal village.

The misery of the Daisy Brick Factory?

• The Daisy Brick Factory, apparently the largest of approximately 350 such factories in Hooghly District, produced around 500,000 bricks a year.
• The main entrance to the factory skirted a six-floor mansion.
• There was no sanitation, no bathing facilities and no electricity in the camp, although the furnace a few metres away was floodlit at night.
• While low-caste Bihari labourers specialise in moulding bricks and Bengali labourers extract clay, Jharkhandi tribal and low-caste labourers carry bricks to and from the furnace, trucks and stores.
• Labourers expect that, subtracting living costs, hard-working couples will bring home Rs 8,000-9,000 for the six-month season.

The love of labour

• It is difficult to imagine that the motivation to endure such hard working and living conditions could be anything other than the migrants.
• The first is that although many Tapu people could have earned as much at home, they preferred to go to the kilns.
• I do not have space for a full-scale economic analysis here, and I offer the Maheli example merely to illustrate my claim that when my informants say that economic considerations are not the most important ones behind the decision to migrate, there is some reason to believe them.
• In the week the authors were there, some complications developed in Jeevan and Shila’s romance.
• Later I realised that sleeping arrangements were indeed quite flexible and that, while food was always consumed in the ‘correct’ shack, some nights some of the girls slept in Jeevan’s in-law’s shack and some nights in their own.

The social constraints of the village

• First, intraclan, inter-tribe and inter-caste unions are prohibited.
• Nevertheless, they do occur and often end in secondary unions.
• Thus, a third village norm encouraging migration is that marital partners must not be of the boy’s or girl’s choice but must be selected by their parents.
• In fact, some of my more sceptical informants even suggest that this is the main reason why parents prefer brides for their boys from outside the village to ensure that the potential partners have not had sexual relations.
• On the one hand they are upset, not just because a child’s departure means one less hand in the fields, but also because they know that the kilns provide space for developing amorous affairs.

Further reasons for migrating

• Not all Tapu migrants at the Daisy Factory, however, had come to live out prohibited sexual relations, or for the fun and games of the kilns.
• Migration to the kilns provided some relief from the tensions at home.
• When his father died, Pera inherited land and livestock and considered staying in Tapu throughout the year.
• But while Sanicharwa recognised the difficulties of looking after a baby in the beating heat in a tiny tiled house, she was convinced that life in the kilns would be liberating in comparison with the claustrophobic atmosphere of the village, where she would be looked down on for her lower-caste status.
• This, and the fact that she had a daughter to marry off, gave her reason to continue migrating to the kilns, where she eventually became an assistant labour contractor.

Some quantitative indicators

• In Tapu, 155 persons, that is 47 per cent of the adult population, have at some point been to the brick kilns.
• They saw the brick kilns as a space in which they could do certain things and be with certain people away from home.
• He was expressing his broader exasperation with Manju who said he migrated because life at the kilns was more .fun.
• More than 20 per cent of the migrants who said there were enough resources at home for them not to need to migrate − that is, 16 per cent of the total − were people with young families who wanted to be independent from joint households.
• In these cases, paternal land had not yet been divided, precluding their setting up their own households, and the young families did not get on with their parents.

A threat to the Jharkhand State

• As Jonathan Spencer (2003) has pointed out, social theorists and policy-makers tend to perceive migration as .a problem., and policies and development strategies are often aimed at reducing pressures to migrate (De Haan and Rogaly 2002: 4).
• Towards the end of November 2001, I read in the Ranchi daily newspaper, the Prabhat khabar, the views of a Jharkhandi activist vehemently arguing for an anti-migration bill to be passed in Jharkhand:.
• The separation of Jharkhand from Bihar was a long-standing ambition of the activists, but they see the particular way in which it happened and the scant regard that was paid to the tribal communities in the process as undermining the idea of Jharkhand as a state in which tribals would be protected.
• The anti-migration campaign thus allows the Jharkhandi political elite to manipulate and recreate the image of the ideal adivasi citizen of the state − an embodied image of a socially and sexually transformed Jharkhandi.
• As this case illustrates, notions of sexual propriety are crucial to the dislike of migration to the brick kilns that middle-class Jharkhandi activists share with workingclass people with aspirations to upward mobility (including many of the local parha/ JMM members).

Figures

Table 2: Reasons Given for Migration by the Tapu Migrants, 2000.2001: Migrants Who Say They Would Have Difficulty Making Ends Meet in the Village All Year

Table 1: Reasons Given for Migration by the Tapu Migrants, 2000.2001: Migrants Who Say They Have Sufficient Resources to Stay in the Village All Year

Full text

The labour of love: Seasonal migration from Jharkhand to
the brick kilns of other states in India
Alpa Shah, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths
Abstract
Seasonal casual labour migration in India has conventionally been understood as the
result of extreme poverty whereby villagers are forced to become migrants for the dry
six months to subsist or merely survive. This article draws on fieldwork in a village in
Jharkhand and a brick kiln in West Bengal to argue that migrants do not understand
their movement in economic terms alone. Many see the brick kilns as a temporary
space of freedom to escape problems back home, explore a new country, gain
independence from parents or live out prohibited amorous relationships. It is
suggested that Jharkhandi activists and policy-makers’ construction of such migration
as a ‘problem’ is as much about their vision of how the new tribal state ought to be as
about exploitation. Migration to the kilns is seen by them as a threat to the purity and
regulation of the social and sexual tribal citizen. This moralising perspective creates a
climate that paradoxically encourages many young people to flee to the brick kilns
where they can live ‘freely’. In this way, the new puritanism at home helps to
reproduce the conditions for capitalist exploitation and the extraction of surplus value.
Introduction
Clutching a small bag of clothes, Sanicharwa Mundein left Tapu village
1
one
frosty January morning to board a bus for Ranchi, Jharkhand’s capital, the
first leg of a journey to a brick kiln in West Bengal. I walked with her to a
nearby village
1
where she was to joinother villagers and the labour
contractor, Ganga Yadav. Two months before, after a devastating argument,
her husband Rana had fled to a brick kiln with Ganga. Sanicharwa said she
was afraid to lose Rana to another woman at the kilns. She had to join him.
Following Meillassoux (1981 [1975]), seasonal casual labour migration of people like
Sanicharwa and Rana is usually understood as part of a broader system of
exploitation and oppression characteristic of capitalist production (Breman 1985,
1

1994, 1996; Mukherji 1985; Standing 1985). A result of this analysis is a conflation of
the role of migration in the broader social system and the migrant.s point of view. The
migrant is rarely depicted as opting for departure and is usually assumed to live in
extreme poverty with little alternative but to leave the home area for the dry six
months of the year to subsist or survive (Breman 1985; Shah et al. 1990). In recent
years the migrant has acquired more agency. Yet, most often he/she is seen as a
rational actor striving for an economic optimum (Lal 1989), or participating in a
defensive coping strategy in the context of debt and extreme economic vulnerability
(Mosse et al. 2002).Although some object that the migrant is not just ‘homo
economicus’, and consider social, religious and ‘ethnic’ factors, their accounts argue
that it is mainly economic choices that drive such migration (De Haan 1994; Rogaly
and Coppard 2003). Those who integrate the social and cultural contexts of migration
do so more in their analysis of change in the areas receiving immigration (Appadurai
1996) or generating emigration (Gardner 1995; Osella and Osella 2000, 2003), rather
than in their consideration of why people move.
Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in the undulating, degraded landscape
around Tapu village in Bero Block of Ranchi District, I suggest in this article that, from
the point of view of those who migrate from Jharkhand to the brick kilns of other
states in India, it makes little sense to understand seasonal casual labour migration
in economic terms alone. In focusing on such movement, marginal but increasingly
important to labour studies (Breman 1999: 416), my aim is to further important recent
contributions to the study of migration (Osella and Gardner 2004; De Haan and
Rogaly 2002). These show that while economic considerations might shape or
constrain it, seasonal casual labour migration is a dynamic sociopolitical process. I
argue here that the migrants do not see brick kiln migration just in terms of money;
nor as the irredeemable torture and drudgery that much of the literature portrays.
Rather, they view their migration as a temporary escape from a problem at home and
an opportunity to explore a new country, gain independence from parents, and live
out prohibited amorous relationships. These are important dimensions of seasonal
casual labour migration which, though occasionally hinted at, have generally been
neglected in the literature and are rarely projected as a primary impetus for migration.
For many migrants, life at the kilns is seen as ‘free’. The desire for freedom is
1 I have changed most place and personal names.
2

historically situated: its motivational force cannot be assumed as self-evident. I am
not suggesting that the kilns give Tapu migrants freedom, but I do see it as significant
that Tapu migrants often describe the kilns as a place where they can live ‘freely’.
Thus, I do not aim here to conduct an economic analysis of migration, nor do I
contest the view of migrant labour at the brick kilns as part of an exploitative system
of capitalist production. Indeed many migrants acknowledge that they are cheap
labour for wealthy industrialists and that they expect to be cheated at the kilns. As
Willis has proposed with regard to why working-class children in England want
working-class jobs, ‘there really is at some level a rational and potentially
developmental basis for outcomes which appear to be completely irrational and
regressive’ (1978: 120). In other words, I suggest that it is not contradictory to view
brick kiln labour migration as exploitative, while also understanding that most
migrants not only view their movement as a choice but also see the brick kilns as an
important, if temporary, space away from the social constraints back home.
A brief context to seasonal casual labour migration from Jharkhand is followed by an
extended story of the escape of Burababa from my courtyard in Tapu to a brick kiln in
Uttar Pradesh. This story reveals that Burababa’s children also had complex reasons
for migrating. I then look at the other side of the picture of unmitigated misery in the
brick kilns, and at the reasons people give for migrating. These are quantitatively
documented in the penultimate section. In conclusion I suggest that the Jharkhandi
anti-migration campaign partly reflects a desire to redefine Jharkhand as a tribal state
and to reimagine a .purer, adivasi state citizen. Opponents of migration, who see the
kilns as a threat to the ideas of purity and regulation of the social and sexual tribal
body, create a moral climate that paradoxically encourages many young people to
flee to the brick kilns where they think people can live .freely. away from these
regulations. I suggest that these discourses of freedom point to transformations of
power in which the new puritanism at home helps to reproduce the conditions for
capitalist exploitation and the extraction of surplus value.
Context
Gardner and Osella (2003) show that contemporary patterns of migration are not
merely a result of modernisation but have long been a central feature of life within the
3

subcontinent. Migration from Jharkhand to other states is no exception. Indeed, De
Haan (2002) has argued that circular out-migration from Bihar, the state from which
Jharkhand seceded in November 2000, is at least a hundred years old. In the late
1800s, West Bengal, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Assam, Bhutan and even
Burma attracted migrants from Jharkhand. These ‘aboriginal’, ‘tribal’ or ‘jungli’ hill
people of Chotanagpur were preferred in railway and road-building projects, and
especially tea plantations, where they were considered ‘more industrious and
tractable than other classes’ (Government of India 1861: 2). By 1895, at least 50 per
cent of workers in Assamese tea plantations came from Chotanagpur (Badgaiyan
1994: 177). Weiner (1988: 161) estimates that by 1921 nearly a million tribals, one
third of Chotanagpur’s tribal population, had emigrated. In Tapu there are many
adventurous tales of forebears, and some personal recollections of those who went
to build roads and pick tea near the Chinese border, where the rain fell in little white
flakes and one’s feet turned to ice.
With the saturation of tea plantation labour, many of the offspring of Assam and
Bhutan migrants went instead to the new brick kilns of West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh
and Bihar. They joined a stream of seasonal migrants from across the Indian
landscape in search of work. Although it is difficult to estimate Jharkhand’s annual
migration, most agree the figure is at least several hundred thousand.
2
Of the 100
Tapu households, at least 47 per cent of the adult population has ventured at some
stage to the brick kilns in those states. The Yadavs, descendants of the old landlords,
do not generally migrate. It is mainly the Munda, Oraon, Maheli, Badaik and Lohra
tenant descendants, classified by the government as either Scheduled Tribe (ST) or
Scheduled Caste (SC), who do. In 2000-2001, 36 per cent of Tapu’s ST and SC
population above the age of 16 migrated − a total of 73, of whom 47 per cent were
male and 53 per cent female.
It would be easy to conceive of this migration as merely a survival strategy. At first
glance Tapu strikes the outside observer as an economically-depressed Jharkhandi
village in an underdeveloped region (Devalle 1992; Prakash 2001). All the villagers
live in mud houses; there is no electricity and no schools or public health facilities.
2 Rogaly et al. (2001) highlight the problem of quantifying the scale of seasonal migrant labour in an interesting attempt to
estimate the number of seasonal migrants entering Bardhaman District, West Bengal, in the rice-harvesting season.
4

Literacy rates are low. Apart from those still studying, only 15 per cent of Tapu
people have attended school up to Primary Class 8; 8 per cent have passed
Matriculation, and only 4 per cent have passed Intermediate. Although every
household owns some land, limited irrigation means that many harvest only one main
crop a year. After the November harvest, livestock-rearing, and manual labour in the
village stone-chipping industry and in nearby government schemes are the main
sources of livelihood. It would therefore be reasonable to assume, as the Department
for International Development (UK) and the Indian government development projects
in the area do, that people from the ‘deficit’ classes of the village, especially ST and
SC families, have little option but to migrate. But in Tapu the situation is more
complex: economic motives may be significant, but they are not incompatible with
others on which I concentrate. Indeed, it is the latter that the migrants stress most.
Escaping to the brick kilns
It was an August night in 2001, during the run-up to the rainy-season festival of
Karma. I could hear the distant beat of drums in the akhra, the village dancing circle.
Suddenly there was a commotion in my courtyard. Somra Munda told me that his
father, Burababa, had not been seen for two nights. Somra had just discovered that
Burababa was on his way to the plains of Jonepur, Uttar Pradesh, to join his second
son Mangra for the rest of the year at the brick kilns.
Somra was upset that his father had run away. The past year had been frustrating.
Against Somra.s wishes, Burababa, well over 60 years old, had chosen to work as a
dhangar (a live-in year-round general manual labourer
3
) in the house of a Yadav,
who was a descendant of the old village landlords. Somra had wanted his father to
live at home, and to be able to feed and clothe him like any decent son. He also
needed him to look after the family’s cattle and work in their irrigated fields. Yet
Burababa wanted to work and eat at the Yadav’s, sleep wherever he liked, and earn
a meagre Rs 1,200 for the year. With the beginning of the rains and the rice-
transplanting season, Somra had finally convinced Burababa to leave the Yadav and
3 In this part of India, a dhangar was a person who, in return for their availability at any time for a multitude of tasks ranging from
farm work to general cleaning and building work, was provided meals, clothes, housing and a nominal annual wage by his
employer. Most dhangars in Tapu and the surrounding village were children between the ages of 5 and 13.
5

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What have the authors contributed in "The labour of love: seasonal migration from jharkhand to the brick kilns of other states in india " ?

This article draws on fieldwork in a village in Jharkhand and a brick kiln in West Bengal to argue that migrants do not understand their movement in economic terms alone. It is suggested that Jharkhandi activists and policy-makers ’ construction of such migration as a ‘ problem ’ is as much about their vision of how the new tribal state ought to be as about exploitation. 

Q2. What have the authors stated for future works in "The labour of love: seasonal migration from jharkhand to the brick kilns of other states in india " ?

Each season they migrated to be ‘ alone ’ at the kilns, until Samu was able to build a hut for them to live in, thus enabling their separation from the extended family. 

Q3. What is the likely effect of this double standard, moralising discourse?

The likely effect of this double-standard, moralising discourse, The authorsuggest, is to limit the freedom of women in an area in which they have been relatively autonomous. 

Q4. What is the time to buy a basket?

From December to June, smaller baskets are bought for vegetable-picking and cowdung-gathering, as baskets made in this season are the strongest. 

Q5. How many people have ventured to the brick kilns in Tapu?

Of the 100 Tapu households, at least 47 per cent of the adult population has ventured at some stage to the brick kilns in those states. 

Q6. What are the common disputes in Tapu?

Of the twenty-nine disputes The authorrecorded which had been ’solved’ by the parha, the most common were postmarital love affairs or elopements, locally called ‘dhuku-dhara’. 

Q7. What is the significant pressure that led to the reforms?

In a fascinating analysis of the outcry that led to the first sex-specific protective legislation in Britain, the 1842 Mines Regulation Act, Humphries (1988: 118.19), for example, argues that the most significant pressure that led to the reforms was the affront to bourgeois notions of sexual propriety and proper femininity that the supposed promiscuity of the mines represented. 

Q8. How many bricks did the Daisy Brick Factory produce?

The Daisy Brick Factory, apparently the largest of approximately 350 such factories in Hooghly District, produced around 500,000 bricks a year. 

Q9. What is the time to dance in the akhra?

Those with energy to spare (especially youngsters), then move on with their singing and drumming into the akhra where the night is danced away. 

Q10. What did Jeevan say to the girls?

When the bhatu left, Jeevan shouted at the girls to shut up, bellowing that the shack had turned into a ‘free zone’, and that they were ruining their reputations. 

Q11. What was the reason why they went to the kilns?

Puzzled as to why they should continue to migrate, Anita finally confirmed that in Tapu she was accused of witchcraft and that the brick kilns provided a welcome space of escape from the malicious village gossip. 

Q12. What was the common pattern in the relationship between Jeevan and his younger brother?

In fact, as is common in relationships between younger brothers and their elder sisters-in-law in Tapu, The authoroften found Jeevan’s younger brother flirting, teasing and joking with Shila. 

Q13. What did Corbridge (2002) argue about the success of the Indian democracy?

Jharkhand finally gained statehood in November 2000, but this, as Corbridge (2002) argues, hardly signalled a success for India’sdemocracy − autonomy having far more to do with political bargains between a restricted number of elite actors than with pressures from below.9 

Q14. What is the significance of the debate on sex in Jharkhand?

In Jharkhand perhaps an additional dimension to the middle-class discourse is that it lays blame not just on the women themselves, but above all on immoral or ‘outside’ men who seduce and steal12 1Whether this bears relevance for Jharkhand is a question for further investigation, but one insightful explanation that Humphries (1988: 120) gives for the obsession of ruling-class men with female sexuality is that female infidelity and impurity threaten the integrity of the bloodline. 

Q15. Who provided comments on versions of the argument presented to them?

Colleagues at the Asian Development Research Institute in Ranchi, the London School of Economics and Political Science Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, the British Association for South Asia Studies Annual Conference and the University of East Anglia South Asia Research Group provided helpful comments on versions of the argument presented to them.