Co-spatiality and Dissent: The Migrant Workers’ Walk in Retrospect
Pandemics are, in a way, states of exception. They bring “normal” social life to a halt. Among other things, state authorities purportedly leverage pandemics to contain mobilities because mobile subjects are perceived as potential threats. In administering mobile subjects, the state apparatus restricts the flow of people and goods, which it otherwise encourages to facilitate the global circuits and networks of wealth and power. The modes through which such restrictions are enacted reveal the nature of the state’s territorial power at work and the structural inequalities that undercut the politics of mobility. This throws into question the principles of liberal democracy upon which the post-capitalist, globalized societies are (or at least claim to have been) founded. This recently became evident in India around the public discourse on migrant workers, especially in light of mass reverse-migration, following the lockdown and precarity into which it had thrown the migrants.[1]
During the lockdown, migrant workers, whose informal labor sustains the city, had to undergo “sanitization” and a greater degree of surveillance than they would normally encounter. The pervasive and invisible entanglements of governmentality and power took the form of rigid territorial exclusions, enforced largely along class lines. The exodus of the migrants from the cities, particularly from the national capital, received wide attention in the news and social media. Although migrant workers elsewhere may have faced difficulties to varying degrees, what was remarkable about the Indian case was that that the lockdown here was nation-wide: inter-state borders were sealed and the lockdown was declared overnight with no advance notice. This added to the plight of the migrant workers. It is a truism now to say that the state failed the migrant workers.
In this article I discuss how the workers’ reverse migration during the pandemic, unfolded on television and social media as a spectacle, kindles ideas of dissentient mobilities. With wide-spread closure of railways, thousands of migrants literally walked hundreds of miles to get home. Some perished on the way; others were hosed with disinfectants upon arrival. A freight train ran over fourteen migrants who had collapsed in exhaustion on the railway tracks. The phenomenon was discussed on primetime news, academic papers were written on the topic, and “economic packages” announced, but nothing (practical) was done to actually help the migrants. Indeed, this mobility was forced, for the walking was imposed on the migrants. Detractors see this as emblematic of how the state has pushed the urban poor to extreme precarity. To lose sight of the subjectivities of the walkers, however, would be tantamount to stripping the migrants of their agencies.
Figure 1. Migrant workers on the move during the lockdown.
Immanent in the praxis of the walk is an unintended but active agency that became evident in this forced migration. This act of mobility is intensely political. And, it is amazing in retrospect now to observe how the act of walking, though not consciously organized, appeared fizzing with political energy and how significant such a practice could be, considering the class confrontations that the pandemic has so starkly exposed.
The term, movement, has two connotations: first, the literal meaning, that is, mobility, and second, its socio-political association with dissent. Recent scholarship on “nomadology”—consider, Deleuze & Guattari, Braidotti, for instance—make forays into the cultural-political association between mobility and dissent. Mobilities as dissent have had a fraught relationship with advanced techniques of demographic control and governmentality which, following the pandemic, have come down heavily on the mobile subjects. Such state apparatuses seek to contain mobility by sedentarizing and disciplining the mobile bodies. The intent to sedentarize, however, is premised upon a framework of cultural polarity that deems certain movements acceptable and others undesirable. Bauman observes that in a capitalist regime, the utility-/rationality-maximized mobile subjects (tourists, business travellers; in sum, the global elite) are the prototype of “good” travellers, while the “vagabonds” whose mobility do not endorse the statist visions are deemed “undesirable.” In the face of this, subjects that continue to engage in “undesirable” mobility—the migrant walker being a case in point—may be assumed to be defiant. Thinking in these terms, certain mobilities, or better still, mobile bodies are inherently dissentient. Such mobile subjects embody radical politics, which has to be understood with reference to the specific set of modalities that deem certain forms of mobility (un)acceptable and certain spaces (in)accessible.
Put differently, dissenting mobility, that I have elsewhere referred to as “counter-mobility,” arises whenever a mobile subject is subjected to enhanced control and territorial constraints. How certain mobilities come to embody dissidence then is a function of territoriality and governmentality. In parallel, consider how the migrant workers walked on the highways during the lockdown, at a time when everyone was required to stay put. Highways, in most instances, built by the migrant workers themselves, facilitate the movement of automobiles. They are not meant for walking! Therefore, by walking on the highways, not only did the migrant workers defy the state’s intent to contain mobility, they also inhabited certain spaces—the highways, to be precise—in ways other than designated.
The concept of co-spatiality may be instructive in making sense of how spaces—in this case, the highway—are used, imagined, or interpreted by different groups, concurrently or consecutively, for both sanctioned and unauthorized purposes. Co-spatiality invites us to consider how the body technique of walking, when undertaken collectively, pushes against the powers and emerges as an effective cultural technique of dissidence. Here, a certain technique of bodily movement—that is, an embodied performativity—toward occupying certain restricted spaces becomes the foundation of resistance. The way in which the migrant walkers reclaimed the highway (or, for that matter, the railway track) thus illustrates the entanglement of spaces—social and differential, public and restricted—and their double or parallel use.
Rife with symbolism, the walk thus exposed how competing actors jostle to determine the meaning of and exercise territoriality over public, quasi-public and social spaces, largely along class lines. The competing use, and the subsequent reclamation and production of complex and unintended spatialities, as characterized by the subversive reappropriation of the highway, may, therefore, be read as a metaphor of the utopic imaginations, narratives and discourses of occupying social spaces.
Notes
[1]In the context of the pandemic, the expression “reverse-migration” may refer to two different sets of migrations: one, following the national lockdown, announced early in the pandemic, requiring migrant workers to go back to where they came from; and another, after the relaxation of lockdown, summoning them back. Here, I am focusing on the first walk back home.
