Perspective

Migration: A Moral Social Change

49(2) 315–328, 2019
Protest © CSD 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0049085719844108
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Gopal Guru1

Abstract
This essay seeks to make an argument which is different from the research work
that is available on migration. It tries to understand the connection between the
creation of moral community that is premised on the mediation between migra-
tion and physical space. Migration from one place to another is intrinsically
moral as it is forced. It happens through the disruption of life plans of working
population. Forced migration, the essay argues, is the results of an inability of
the state to provide people adequate and decent jobs at the natal place. Migration
as a protest , thus provides the moral critique of state. The fall out of migration,
however, leads to two opposite social phenomenon. It provides condition for the
formation of moral community through solidarity and at the same times it also
produces an unencumbered individualism through mobility.

Keywords
Morality, mobility, negative responsibility, untouchability

Dear friends! At the very outset, let me join everyone in celebrating the Golden
Jubilee of Social Change, one of the outstanding social science journals in
the country. I have two reasons to feel particularly honoured to be the part of the
journal’s Golden Jubilee celebration. First, it has been my privilege to be part
of the editorial team of the quarterly and, second, I have been honoured by the
organising committee to give the Golden Jubilee lecture today on 22 February
2019. I sincerely thank each one of them for giving me this opportunity. I wish
Social Change all the very best in its mission to mobilise radical scholarship for
orienting the social imagination in favour of the marginalised and oppressed
sections of our society.

1
Editor, Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

Corresponding author
Gopal Guru, Economic & Political Weekly, 320-322, A to Z Industrial Estate, Ganapatrao Kadam
Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai, Maharashtra 40013, India.
Email gopalguru2001@gmail.com
316 / Gopal Guru Social Change 49(2)

Arguably, migration, as a universal phenomenon, has always been of great

interest to researchers who have studied migration by focussing on its different
dimensions such as historical, sociological, economic and political (Deshpande,
2004; Kapoor, 2008; Rao, 1981).These scholars seem to have approached the
theme of migration in terms of how it has affected gender relations. Some
scholars, for example, looked at the crucial question that involves differential
wages in labour market, relative freedom and the gendered nature of jobs. Within
the domain of feminist scholarship, some scholars consider migration as the
process as well as a window to create the possibility of autonomy that women
can exercise vis-a-vis patriarchal power (G. Rodgers & Rodgers, 2011). There
are also feminist scholars who make a different point in so much they argue
that migration tends to aggravate gender bias in the labour market (Mazumdar,
Neetha, & Agnithotri, 2013). However, other feminist scholars seek to focus on
migration as one possible source that enables women to enjoy a relative degree
of freedom (Krishnaraj). The migration theme also figures quite prominently
in various modes and forms in the literature of regional Indian languages.1
Literary representation covers both the time and space dimension of migration.
In addition, literary representation seeks to narrativise the social and emotional
costs involved in migration. It is also significant that protagonists in such
expressions are very often women because the literary representation of migration
seeks to ontologically relate the pain (of migration) to women.
Finally, migration has been a matter of serious concern for policymakers.
The policymakers’ response to the process of migration needs to be understood
particularly in terms of social tension that erupts from migration. Social tension,
which is apparently caused by migration, prompts policymakers to adopt measures
either to reduce the flow of migration or to felicitate it. Policymakers also seek
solutions to this internal tension by promoting international labour migration.2
In this regard, we can cite efforts made by the Indian government which has set
up a regular institutional mechanism to particularly promote international
migration. Policymakers find in migration, both external and internal, a promise
of positive contribution that a migrating individual can make to self as well
as to the nation. Policymakers seek to endorse migration on the grounds that
it contributes to the GDP growth, skill development and remittances (Bhagat,
2010). Other field observations show3 that women’s autonomy at the local level is
the direct function of the inadequacy of remittances; however, it also questions the
gender significance of remittances. Put differently, if remittances were adequate,
women would not be stepping out of the house and taking decisions on their own.
Second, as we discuss, in brief, in the last section of this article, remittances tend
to tighten the patriarchal grip over the autonomy of women.
On a completely different note, it is also interesting to acknowledge
the theoretical fallout of migration. At the global level, historical formations
of migration seem to have given rise to different epistemic standpoints such as
communitarianism and its resultant concept of multiculturalism (Kymlicka, 2012).
Moreover, it has also led to the emergence of identity studies which seek to focus
on the study of difference (Mosse, Gupta, & Shah, 2005). At the specific contextual
level, arguably, the theoretical fallout of this phenomenon can be linked to the
 Migration: A Moral Protest / 317

formulation of a concept of political society (Chatterjee, 2004). A distinct character

of migration in India, I argue, does provide the conditions of definition of this
particular concept. For example, local authorities stationed in different cities, such
as Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru, in the name of urban governance,
have declared incoming migrants as illegal. The migrants who normally squat on
government space resist and defy efforts that have been continuously made by
local authorities that who seek to displace them from these places. Thus, it is the
tension between illegal migrants and local authorities that provides an epistemic
ground for the formulation of the concept of political society.
However, such a concept seems to be facing methodological difficulties.
Since its formulation is based on the physical existence of illegal migrants and
the resultant resistance from migrants to local authorities at the destination, such
conceptual formulations, especially in the Indian case, appear to be inadequate
in terms of fulfilling conditions of its definition. For example, such theorisation
factors in places are at the receiving end of illegal migrants and not places that
produce these migrants in the first instance. As empirical evidence indicates
illegality of migration, it is arguably associated exclusively with Kolkata, Mumbai,
Delhi, Surat and Bengaluru. Arguably, manifest conflict and simmering social
tensions occurring between illegal migrants and local members of civil society
have been quite acute in Kerala, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka and Assam.
Conversely, tensions arising out of migration are almost absent in states such as
Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha. Second,
as per evidence from conflict arising from migration to cities, as mentioned
earlier, migration does not remain as a constant phenomenon nor does it form
into social patterns of resistance. Hence, such fleeting forms of reality do make
it difficult for a concept to acquire epistemic sustenance. In such cities, as can
be easily observed, resistance to local authorities by ‘illegal’ migrants normally
gets replaced by mutual manipulation. It is manipulation between the local
authority and migrant vendors rather than resistance to the former that tends to
weaken the theoretical claim of such a concept. It is also necessary to take note of
varied articulation of tension between migrants and the state and local members
of civil society.
However, working out fully the theoretical implications of migration is not
the main focus of this essay. What is more important is to dwell on questions
that seem more significant for unfolding a less revealed dimension of migration.
Migration has to be seen as a form of moral protest but has remained hidden
from scholarly attention. To put it differently, what is being suggested here is that
economic, administrative, social and political categories are inadequate to throw
light on such a hidden dimension of migration.
In this regard, it is therefore imperative to raise the following questions: why is
migration considered a moral protest? What is the ethical/moral vocabulary that
tends to articulate such protest? What implication does it have for the formation of
a moral community? Why is that migration from the rural to the urban provides
necessary ground on which such a community could become a possibility?
Hypothetically, migration also reflects that the natal place fails to provide an
internal reason that is necessary to normatively reconfigure social relations along
318 / Gopal Guru Social Change 49(2)

the lines of Begumpura (Omvedt, 2003) as envisioned by Ravidas and Kabir in

the 15th century. The further question that needs to be asked in this regard is: why
is the natal place or Gandhi’s self-sufficient village morally incapable of providing
reasons that are necessary for the very formation of a moral community? How
does migration as a mediating process help thinkers like Ambedkar to fulfil
the transcendental promise of such a community? However, one needs to keep
in view that migration may promise the formation of a moral community at its
best, and it can also consolidate caste and communal-based communities that
can re-establish social hierarchy.4 Let me thus offer to explain the meaning of
protest as a moral enterprise.

Why migration is a moral protest?

Let me offer a threefold justification as to why I find morality as an important
starting point for the comprehensive study of migration.
A moral protest is different from other kinds of protests such as political, social
and cultural. It is different because its ‘agency’, unlike the one in, for example,
political protests, uses its moral capacity to fix ameliorative responsibility on
others. Fixing responsibility involves a moral appeal for human intervention
at its best or accusing others for failing to intervene in one’s depressing/
frustrating conditions at its worst. In this sense, there is a protest which has a
moral component to it inasmuch as the agency that holds a third party responsible
for one’s predicament implicating such a person in the difficult decision about
something such as migration. Such a moral protest is based on the principle of
negative responsibility which suggests the fact that those seeking migration
instead of taking responsibility by themselves expect others to take the initiative
on the former’s behalf.
As we discuss in the following sections, those who migrate locally or across
regions within or outside the country seek to justify their decision to migrate in
terms of a failure of the state in not providing decent work and job opportunities
at the local level within the country. The IIT and science graduates, for example,
prior to globalisation, were seen to be justifying their decision to migrate to other
countries by blaming it on reservation policy of the government. Of course, in
the age of globalisation, 10 per cent quota, that has been very recently granted
by the NDA government to economically weaker sections, is expected to save
reservation from such an accusation.
As we discuss in the following, those who are migrating to the IT sector are
somehow using this negative responsibility as a pretext to justify their personal
ambition/aspiration to acquire hyper-mobility. Fixing responsibility on the other
is constitutive of its negative ethical charge. A protest that places a moral burden
not on the self but on the other is thus constitutive of negative responsibility and
is thus counterfactual, in the sense that it involves the question of ‘if’ and ‘but’.
To put it simply, the argument goes: ‘If the government had given us decent
jobs in the country we would not have left the country, since it has not we were
forced to migrate’. The question of labouring force within the country is different.
Those who migrate also suggest rather less vocally that if the government had
 Migration: A Moral Protest / 319

provided work, water, electricity, road at the natal place, they would not have had
reasons to migrate to different destinations. It is the responsibility of the state to
protect the destitute from undertaking footloose migration.5 In fact, some state
governments in India have been avoiding taking responsibility. Interestingly, such
governments do use constitutional morality as a screen to hide their incapacity to
provide employment opportunity at the local level. Constitutional provisions tend
to acquire a contradictory character. On the one hand, it gives migrants the right
to take a job or work anywhere in the country, but on the other, it also provides
an opportunity for the state which can use the same constitutional provisions to
evade its own responsibility of providing adequate and decent jobs at the local
level. States do suggest that those who are opposing migrants at the destination
tend to violate constitutional morality. Different state governments in India do
take shelter under constitutional morality.
On another note, Rajni Kothari also holds the state responsible for its failure
to practise constitutional morality (Kothari, 1989). Kothari sees the state’s failure
in being responsible in forcing people to resort to violent methods of protest,
like mass satyagraha that they seem to be using for settling their grievances.
In a constitutional point of view, morality seeks to impose a duty on the local
population at the destination which is that it is part of such a duty to respect
the migrants’ right to work anywhere in the country. But at the same time, such
constitutional morality also helps the natal state (the origin of the migrant) to use
it as a pretext in order to gloss over the latter’s responsibility of providing jobs
to its working population at the local level. It is assumed that the elimination
of conditions that produce distress migration is necessary to prevent the local
population from migrating to an unfamiliar destination which is perceived as
undesirable. The assumption behind such an argument is that federating states in
India are expected to achieve social and economic development that will enable
people to get decent jobs in their natal places. To put it differently, the lack of
opportunities in the natal state is one of the fundamental reasons for people to
migrate. I am just reproducing reasons for migration that one often comes across
in literature on migration. As suggested in migration studies, the main reasons
behind migration are listed as follows: lack of work opportunities at the local
level, famine, drought, natural disasters (like the flooding of the Kosi river in
Bihar), and caste and communal violence. However, it is an acute sense of distress
that compels people to migrate. Thus, it is the frustrating sense of distress rather
than a desire for mobility that forces people to migrate.
The government refuses to take responsibility, while patriarchy arrogates itself
the responsibility towards women who are left behind at the natal place. A moral
protest thus involves the ethical capacity to either take responsibility by oneself
or fix it onto others.

Arrogated Responsibility: Patronising and Patriarchal

What is the difference between taking responsibility and arrogating responsibility?
Is it, taking responsibility for action and stamping it with a sense of heroism?
320 / Gopal Guru Social Change 49(2)

This is evident in terrorist attacks. The other one is found in the Gandhian
framework. Gandhi wanted caste Hindus to take responsibility for Praychita for
the sin of untouchability. There is another metaphysical sense of taking
responsibility of creating a moral community by taking not only one’s own social
groups with oneself but also other groups. We throw more light on this in the last
section of this article. Arrogating responsibility is inherited, whereas taking
responsibility is acquired. Those who are better equipped due to their knowledge
and expertise would take responsibility to educate the uneducated, the less
informed people. Dalits take this responsibility to educate themselves and others,
giving these ideas coherence through organisation and put them into practice
through agitation!6
It is in the context of the aforementioned slogan that morality has a conceptual
bearing on the very definition of protest. Arrogating to oneself the responsibility
of looking after others or caring for others can trigger a protest. It involves
an asymmetry of power which is mediated through the notion of care. Patriarchal
responsibility distinctly belongs to this category.
As already mentioned in an earlier section of this article, there are two mutually
exclusive views on migration and its impact on gender relations. One view
suggests that migration has aggravated gender discrimination in the labour market.
The other view suggests that women are no longer the passive followers of a
migrant male household head. Many empirical studies provide evidence to this
effect. The poet Narayan Surve, in his poem on Aminabi, also suggests that
male migration, particularly to the Gulf, has given a women spiritual sense of
empowerment that has come to her as a part of domestic responsibility that befalls
her on account of her husband’s migration. In this poem, the defiant Aminabi
is replying to her nagging husband that she has to step out of her house in
order to fulfil different, but nevertheless important, responsibilities. It has also
been recorded by scholars that remittances are inadequate to confine women
to their household responsibilities. However, my observation of certain villages
in western Maharashtra suggests that remittances actually tend to tighten the grip
of ‘long distance patriarchy’. The male members of the household who migrated
from Brahmanghar, located in Bhor taluka of Pune district, to Mumbai have not
only established their control over the decision-making process happening at the
level of the household, but such long-distance patriarchy has been successful in
influencing the decision of the All Women’s Gram Panchayat in Brahmanghar.7
Women from this village were not in a position to exercise autonomy in terms of
taking decisions even in the functioning of Panchayati Raj institutions.
Taking responsibility, on the other hand, defines the positive nature of the
protest. Positive responsibility is aimed at creating a moral community. I further
argue that the creation of a moral community becomes a concrete possibility
through migration. Historical evidence suggests that the creation of moral
community is possible. The movement in migration has proved it. Migration from
one place to another thus produces conditions for a person to develop ethical
stamina to take responsibility that is necessary for solidarity. Solidarity, in turn, is
necessary for assigning coherence and stability for moral community. I argue that
negative responsibility does not lead to solidarity and hence the creation of moral
 Migration: A Moral Protest / 321

community. Negative responsibility which underlies individual consciousness

makes it difficult for solidarity to become a possibility. The notion of mobility
plays the spoil game. This brings us to draw the conceptual difference between
migration and mobility.

Migration and Mobility

Interestingly, it is also evident that mobility leads people to migrate to ‘darling’
destinations. Migration is not the result of competitive choices that are available
in local job markets; on the contrary, it is the absence of such choices that
explains the phenomenon of outmigration either through a shorter or through a
longer distance. In this regard, it is necessary to make a distinction between
mobility and migration.
Arguably, mobility puts limits to morality, which is evident in the following
attitude that is found among the people. ‘I am not responsible for every question’.
Of course, this attitude cuts across caste. As we see in the following section, dalit
migrants are an exception to this attitude. We defend as to why dalits do not take
this position.
Mobility and migration, in a literal sense, may be indistinguishable. This is
because both these words, when put into an empirical process, involve physical
movement. Thus, at this level involving physical movement, both these words
may have a certain naturalness attached to them. However, both these words
on qualitative grounds tend to differ from each other. Mobility as a condition
involves aspirations that motivate a person to look for different destination that
are perceived to be proficient in the fulfilment of his or her aspirations. Mobility
is based on individual choices that essentially emerges from a competition for
attractive jobs. Ultimately, it is the market that has formative consequences for
aspiration. A hyper-mobile person is driven by the ambition like, ‘Karlo duniya
muthi mein’, a popular advertising jingle, which roughly translated into English
suggests that the sky is the limit for a hyper-mobile person. The image of a
hyper-mobile person is also portrayed graphically by the revolutionary Marathi
poet Narayan Surve who says, ‘Aple apta gan visurini tu pan, ek ek gad sarkar.
In English, this translates to ‘conquering one fort after another’ (Surve, ‘Aisa Ga
Mi Brahma’).
In this connection, it is interesting to acknowledge that in a mobility syndrome,
a mobile person tends to assign an ascending order of a utilitarian value to each
level. For example, many of those who qualified for the Indian Police Service
(IPS) are not satisfied with their placement, so they try for the more ‘prestigious’
Indian Administrative Service (IAS). It would be morally undesirable to take
risks and make efforts. Mobility no doubt involves an ethical drive in it. This
is expressed in the following sentence: ‘If you do not move out of your village
and do not take risks you are likely to lose your self-esteem’. The ethical ability
to take the decision of moving out of one’s cosy comfortable location may not
necessarily create a moral community. This is because mobility could be replete
with possessive individuals who are least interested in creating a moral community
322 / Gopal Guru Social Change 49(2)

in which there is no space for mutual isolation, alienation and frustration. There
is no place for a stranger in such a community. Let me make a rather provocative
argument. In a moral community, there is, thus, a concrete opportunity for everyone
to enjoy social freedom. Creating a moral community must be the core project of
migration. The question that one has to ask is: which social group in our country
places this moral concern as the primary motivating factor in migration? Let
me offer a rather provoking answer by drawing on my own field experience in
some metropoles in India.
An upper caste does not move out in search of social equality or social freedom.
She or he moves out only to enjoy freedom in his/her attempt to capture the world
in her/his fist (muthi). The mobile upper caste in cities are, however, not able
to associate with larger principles that are constitutive of a moral community.
This inability to participate in the creation of a moral community has to be
attributed to lingering caste consciousness that accompanies these upper castes
whenever and wherever they migrate. The history of migration from the rural to
the urban shows that migrants have reproduced a caste community rather than a
moral community. This is clear from the social morphology of Indian cities that
underlie and renew the sense of caste hierarchy (Chaturvarna in the upper caste
household) and now communalism (the emergence of localities with vegetarian
communities) hierarchy. However, these castes are not in a position to enjoy
the sense of social superiority which they used to partake in their natal village.
This is true of urban residents whose social identity is not easily visible. There is,
to some degree, an atmosphere of anonymity that makes it difficult for an upper
caste to observe a caste distinction. They often fail to identity the caste of their
next-door neighbour as they do not offer any clue about his or her caste. Thus,
their caste confidence gets dissolved into anxiety, leading to acute forms of social
frustration. The upper caste keeps guessing the caste of a person. Mobility, as
a pure individualistic concept, gets corrupted with urban bodies that usually exist
with stuffed minds. Modern cities inherit caste from the villages.
The questions that one has to ask are: Do those who chose to stay behind and
are internally mobile contribute to the creation of a moral community inside India?
Is staying back and migrating to urban places constitutive of a necessary condition
for the creation of such a community? Why should we see such a possibility
in the migration from the rural to urban? Is the urban, a given benign and a village,
pathologically grotesque? Has the possibility of a moral community always
existed in urban spaces? Can one imagine a moral community without migration?
In the context of these questions, let me offer certain initial but affirmative
assertions. First, in the specific context of India, urban cities as sites, inhabiting
modern and hence emancipatory ideas, do make migration to such places an
attractive and emancipatory proposal at least to certain social groups such as
women and dalits, who find their natal place a moral burden. To put it differently,
migration to urban centres, in a historical sense, offers an anticipatory precondition
for reorienting villages along egalitarian lines. Here, an attempt is being made
to suggest that the socially closed character of Indian villages does not provide
untouchables an advantage of emancipatory ideas, as these ideas in their perception
do not exist in the vicinity of a villages. Remember what Ambedkar had to say
 Migration: A Moral Protest / 323

about Indian villages? For him, it had a stink of localism, a den of ignorance,
narrow-mindedness and communalism (Moon, 1994). Village is not the source
for untouchables to fashion out their emancipation from caste and the pernicious
stain of untouchability.
I argue that from Ambedkar’s perspective, villages and towns infected by
hierarchical caste consciousness do not provide us with an internal reason to
reorient villages on egalitarian lines. For untouchables, migration becomes a
necessary condition for enjoying social freedom. Second, the dalit’s conception
of migration which, unlike mobility entailing possessive individualism, is
necessarily accompanied with a deep sense of responsibility for solidarity. It is
more likely to provide a proficient condition for the redemptive reorganisation
of both urban and rural spaces. It is further argued that an element of morality
provides a constitutive force to responsibility and solidarity. Morality as a binding
force involving the principle of responsibility and solidarity plays a crucial role
in educating people to take evaluation of the self and society seriously. Reflective
evaluation becomes everyday moral practices for migrants who should not be lost
to the flow of modernity of possessive individualism.
Third, morality as a collective responsibility acquires a positive character in as
much as it involves producing solidarity across time and space. Migration tends
to facilitate the revolutionary ideological integration of the rural with the urban.
I am leaving out efforts made, for example, by organisations like the Shiv Sena
which has also integrated the rural with the urban but not for creating a moral
community that is human in character. It becomes a social responsibility of the
migrant to connect the rural with the urban in terms of movement and ideas. The
migrant has to put a positive content in responsibility through recontextualisng
urban ideas into the rural so as to empty out the rural from the burden of
obscurantist ideas of caste. It is in this context that it becomes imperative on the
part of urban dalits to take ethical initiatives in terms of taking emancipatory ideas
from the urban to the rural. The reverse trafficking of subversive ideas from the
urban to the rural is necessary for changing the local configuration of power in
favour of egalitarianism. It is in this sense that migration has to be defined as a
transformative process, which therefore involves a level at which an individual
can take an ethical initiative in order to create a moral community. In migration
studies, it is necessary to keep in mind that morality on its own does not become
intelligible; in fact, it requires additional or a second-order language for its
conceptual illumination and political articulation. Responsibility does provide
this necessary ground on which the moral content in the dynamics of migration
can be firmly located.
Fourth, there is a strong ontological dimension to the concept of migration.
In fact, it encourages us to develop methodological understanding of migration that
in turn would compel us to move away from making migration as a mere empirical
question or making it tantalisingly analytical to rendering it more evaluative in
its thrust. Migration of certain social groups from one region to another within
the country plays an important role in either changing or consolidating the local
configuration of patriarchal and social power.
324 / Gopal Guru Social Change 49(2)

Finally, I argue that migration also involves an element of negative

responsibility. This negative responsibility holds the other, in the present case,
the state, responsible for producing involuntary migration. Put simply, migrants
may suggest and, in some cases, do suggest that it is the unavailability of decent
jobs or livelihood resources that forces them to migrate to other places. Such a
negative responsibility is counterfactual in its emphasis. Hence, I further argue
that negative responsibility has to be explained in terms of the state’s failure to
provide decent jobs at the local level. In this case, one is fixing the responsibility
on the state. The moral basis of negative responsibility, as mentioned earlier,
is the assumption that given the choice, many people would want to migrate
to far-off places. They migrate under condition of distress and social violence.
On the other hand, the respective state government would like to shirk its
responsibility under the pretext of constitutional provision and national progress.
For example, the Bihar Chief Minister said that migrant labour can contribute to
the growth of the place of migration and also to national growth; migrants are not
the burden but assets. This particular chief minister also suggested that opponents
should follow constitutional morality according to which migrants have a right to
work anywhere in the country.
I would like to foreground the complex relationship between migration
and solidarity that is mediated by the principle of responsibility. To bring out
the interconnection between these three concepts, I have chosen the context
of the early 20th century debate between Gandhi and Ambedkar. As we all
know, the debate between these two thinkers was about the differential response
to the phenomenon of migration. Gandhi, for example, seemed to be selective
about the migration question. For example, he seemed to be concerned about
the migration question of the Indian migrant in South Africa while he did not
attach much significance to the question of migration in India. Gandhi took
up the question of migration vis-a-vis White imperialism in South Africa.
He sought to mobilise Indian support in favour of Indian migrant labour that
had been subjected to bad treatment by imperialists in Africa. The answer to the
last question lies in the colonial configuration of power.
Back in India, migration from the rural to the urban does not figure prominently
in the Gandhi’s imagination of India as ‘Ram Rajya’. However, when Gandhi
situates his activism within the local configuration of power based on hierarchical
social relations, he does not see any role for migration to alter such a configuration
power. In fact, he seeks to remove social evils, like untouchability practices, that
are often responsible for migration, particularly of untouchables. Gandhi sought
to eliminate social conditions that produce the need for migration. He suggested
caste Hindus to remove from their heart the evil of untouchability. He attacked the
generative source of untouchability in caste Hindus and therefore singularly rests
with caste Hindus the responsibility of overcoming their hierarchical sense of
superiority. He believed that the moral transformation of the village would enable
untouchables to develop a strong faith in self-rule and voluntary rotation of jobs
at the village level. In Gandhi’s imagination of the ideal village, the very need for
migration is eliminated.
 Migration: A Moral Protest / 325

The questions that Ambedkar asked of Gandhi are the following: Does
Gandhi’s conception of village provide this creative space for the realisation
of a moral community without any mediation through migration? If yes,
does this Gandhian village have the necessary moral resources to create this
normative order at the local level? Or is there any suggestion for migration in
the Gandhian model? Ambedkar answered all the questions in the negative. In
fact, he suggested to untouchables that migration from villages to cities was the
possible route for their emancipation.
However, the focus and thrust in Ambedkar’s conception of migration was
radically different from that of Gandhi. Ambedkar, contrary to Gandhi, advised
untouchables to migrate to urban cities. He believed that migration to the cities
guarantees to untouchables an escape from caste atrocities that have infected
Indian village with the paralysing impact of caste and untouchability. He, on the
face of it, did not think that the Gandhian village has an innate normative capacity
to produce a moral community at the local level. It is the inegalitarian character
of the village that compels Ambedkar to advise untouchables to migrate to urban
cities (Khairmode, 1978).
In Ambedkar’s framework of migration, untouchables seek a conscious
separation from villages and to establish their association with cities such as
Mumbai, Ahemdabad, Kanpur and Chennai. Migration from the rural to the urban
is objectively generated by the materially insignificant position of dalits in rural
economy. The acute sense of this position was felt at the level of the denial of
social freedom to express them. They were put behind the barbed wire of caste
and untouchability. Thus, it is the promise to take up any job and to exercise
freedom of expression, and movement was seen to be present in urban centres.
But this migration was accompanied by the moral responsibility to go back to
the natal village not with any cultural modernity but with a philosophical one.
To put it differently, not to go back with money/remittances but with copies of
MookhNayak and Bahishkrut Bharat. Both these publications were published
from Bombay and were being collectively and avidly read in the dalitwadas of
the villages (Bahishkrut Bharat, 1928). In fact, intellectual interaction between
migrant dalits and the dalits at the origin led to a social churning in entire villages.
It shook the caste-ridden village out of its slumber and caste complacencies. This
was evident in regular attacks that were unleashed by upper castes in several
villages in the country. It was turning the frozen character of casteist villages.
Urban dalits were attacked by the upper castes in several villages in the post-1927
Mahad Satyagraha, located in present Raigad district in Maharashtra, launched
by Babasaheb Ambedkar (Bahishkrut Bharat, 1927). Migration of dalits from
villages to cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries in Maharashtra thus played
an important role in producing the experience that was spiritually edifying. To
put it differently, for dalits, migration to cities, thus, did not mean to return to
the essence of untouchability. The dalit’s periodical return to the villages was in
fact meant to undercut the hierarchical base of caste system and untouchability.
In a particular case of untouchables, migration did not mean to run away from
problems of untouchability but to confront it and transcend it. It was more to
confront it both at the point of origin as well as at the new destination of cities.
326 / Gopal Guru Social Change 49(2)

Neither it was to seek redemption in anonymity that defined the social character
of cities such as Mumbai and Kolkata. But to overcome the sense of anonymity
through sharing free labour, self-transcending universality was a difficult project
for the untouchables. The migrant of labour from touchable castes to the textile mill
in Mumbai, Kanpur, Ahmadabad and Chennai seems to be singularly responsible
for rendering such a project difficult for untouchables. The idea of transcendence
is never a specific or an individual project. It is always a collective realisation,
which means that touchable workers in the Bombay and Ahmadabad textile mills
were supposed to transcend their caste consciousness through their labour so as
to merge it into a universal class consciousness. But it was objectively difficult
for the touchable worker to join the untouchable worker in the collective project
of transcendence of their caste consciousness. As we know, migrant workers in
Bombay textile mills carried their caste right into sections of the textile mills.
In fact, these workers carried their caste to urban spaces, which in turn came quite
handy for touchable workers who deployed it against the touchable in order to
protect their material interest. They were supposed to take an ethical initiative
in order to create a moral community of the proletariat. The question of moral
solidarity never interested communist leaders during the 1930s. Post-migration,
I argue, therefore, is the ontological continuation of caste consciousness that
seamlessly travels from the rural to the urban. Ideally, universal consciousness
mediated through migration should have produced a separation between the
migrant and caste-based labour that was an organising principle of hierarchical
society like India. Migration that is regulated by conditions guarding the interest
of the textile mill owners as well as touchable workers does not provide an
automatic reason that can separate caste from its rural origin.

Conclusion
In conclusion, I therefore say that migrations that happened during the first half
of the 20th century was accompanied with a deep sense of moral responsibility
of consolidating movements for social change. Migrants particularly from the
untouchable caste showed a tremendous ethical stamina to take the ethical
initiative for the creation of community which we can find in the Neo Buddhism
of Ambedkar. This was possible because they avoided following the mobility
path that necessarily results in the loss to flow of modernity—modernity that
produces an unencumbered sense among the migrants. However, Gandhi works
at the village level with the purpose of transforming caste Hindus into a moral
community based on self-rule as a moral law. It is painful to conclude that
certain state governments have used constitutional morality as a cover to hide
their failure in taking the responsibility of providing jobs at the local level.
In terms of the gender question, migration has not been able to undermine
patriarchal power. In fact, it has produced a long-distance patriarchy.
 Migration: A Moral Protest / 327

Acknowledgement

The lecture was delivered on 22 February 2019 on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee
Lecture of Social Change at the India International Centre, New Delhi.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication
of this article.

Notes

1. Narayan Sarve and Anna Bhau Sathe, two revolutionary poets from Maharashtra, have
vividly portrayed the agony of migration.
2. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, India, has established the India Centre for Migration
in 2008. It deals with international migration.
3. My observation of the All Women’s Panchayat, Brahmanghar, Gram Panchayat in
Bhor taluka in Pune district, Maharashtra, in March 1994.
4. We have examples of upper caste migrants from abroad and from the Indian cities
investing their energies in rural India in order to establish this social hierarchy.
5. This term has been defined by P. Sainath in an article in The Hindu. According to
it, labour migrates in multiple directions quite desperately in search of employment.
It is the uncertainty of employment that forces labour to move in different directions.
For a detailed study refer to Jan Breman’s (1996).
6. This has been the most popular slogan given by Babasaheb Ambedkar to his followers.
7. This is my field observation of 1998. I visited this village with my student from Pune
University.

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