Dolly Kikon (University of Melbourne) BengtKarlsson (Stockholm University) In the last decade, large numbers of indigenous youths from the uplands of Northeast India have migrated to metropolitan cities across in India. Many end up in the new service sector, getting jobs in high-end restaurants, shopping malls and spas. The demand for their labour is due to their “un-Indian” looks, “the exotic Asians,” and in association with this, their reputation for being hardworking and loyal. Such labour market value is a remarkable reversal considering the earlier colonial stereotypes of savagery and disobedience, reproduced through the de- politicization of their armed insurrections during the postcolonial period. The daily experiences of vulnerability and marginality as well as the freedom and aspirations that a migratory life seems to engender is an important issue. As anthropologists studying migration in Northeast India, we are concerned with the lives and lifeworlds of indigenous migrants who have travelled from the far-away Northeastern frontier to the expanding cities of South India. This movement does not involve the crossing of any international border, yet both geographically and culturally it is a movement into a very different place. It is a movement away from predominantly rural livelihoods with subsistence agriculture and politics revolving around ethnic homelands, with armed struggles and massive human rights violations and a corrupt local state structure, to a life in major Indian cities, where migrants are seen as outsiders, yet where their “un-Indian” looks and English language skills helps provide relatively well paid jobs in the growing, global service sector.The category of indigenous migrants is not a clear-cut one, as we have observed in our research work, but refers here broadly to people that are categorized by the state as Scheduled Tribes (STs) and who besides their respective ethnic communities also self-identify and assert themselves as being tribal or indigenous. Although, the term indigenous people have been a source of debate in India, we argue that the two latter terms – tribal and indigenous people – across Northeast India are often used inter-changeably, and in India more generally. An important question we ask in our research is why there is an increasing trend ofmigration among indigenous youth in Northeast India. We feel that asking basic questions like this draws our attention towards why people move and why at this particular point of time? This mobility and the questions we raise emerges as a complex puzzle since these developments has to be understood in the context of an affirmative action regime and a political culture that privilege sedentarism, that is, that people stay put in place and claim rights to ancestral territories.Our work on indigenous labour migration to the metropolis across India needs to be understood in the backdrop of changing land relations, providing and caring for family members and community in the hills, and also new dreams and aspirations of indigenous youths. By doing so, we assess the cultural fissures at work in people’s attachment to the places of their journeys. The young indigenous migrants seem to be out on a journey without fixed destinations, as they struggle to make out what and where “home” is. We refer to this as wayfinding; a journey without a map or beaten paths or pathways to follow and with no clear destination or end station, but rather as a form of movement where the traveller constantly adjust the direction, seeking out new places and economic opportunities as they move on.
The research was conducted between 2013-2015 under the research project, “The Indian Underbelly: Marginalisation, Migration and State Intervention in the Periphery” at Stockholm University.
