Learning to be resilient by moving between ‘poor by chance’ to ‘not-so-poor by intent’ identities: Lessons from conversations with labor migrants in Southern India

IntroductionThe slum is understood or, put another way, consumed as an image: flat, without history, without structure and emptied of those who live within it.(Bhan, 2009, p. 140)Although discussed in the context of forced evictions in Delhi, Bhan's words reveal a subtle subtext, that is, a tendency to conceptualize poverty by ignoring the poor as well as the geographical and political context within which they are grounded. The authors pick up on this analytical thread, and drawing from fieldwork carried out in India, argue that not only do the poor have to be seen in context, but also, with their divergent circumstances and preferences, they cannot be conceptualized as a unified whole. To substantiate this, the authors will reference key lessons learned from interviews carried out with two labor migrants working at construction sites in Kerala in southern India. Both labor migrants, male and in their early twenties, were from the Koch Bihar region of northeastern India. (Also spelled Cooch Behar, this region is in West Bengal and is located 1,500 mi/2,500 km from the construction site where the migrant laborers were interviewed.) Interviews were conducted in June-July 2011 as part of a project funded by the British Academy. The authors also interviewed a range of other actors (including members of local poor populations) to capture perceptions of poverty from the point of view of those occupying local spaces within the city of Trivandrum in Kerala.The aim of interviewing migrant laborers was twofold. First, the authors sought to develop a richer understanding of poverty experienced by migrant laborers and to determine whether there were overlaps with conventional images of poverty associated with migrant poor populations on construction sites (Le., images of very poor laborers living and working in unsafe, unhygienic, and temporary shelters). Secondly, the authors intended to understand how (and if) migrant laborers as one among various poor population groups were attempting to be resilient. The term resilience is used here to refer to "capabilities of poor populations to use their resources to reduce their vulnerability" (Moser, 1998, p. 14).One of the initial questions was intended to tease out how and why the two migrant laborers were pursing their livelihoods in Kerala. According to Respondent 1,I am a resident of Koch Bihar and belong to the sarkar caste. Currently, I am living on a construction site in Kannanmoola in Trivandrum [the capital city of the state of Kerala in southern India]. It's been a year and three months on this site and before that I worked in Gujarat [one of the states in western India] for a year in a tile-making factory. We are an agricultural community and I go home to Koch Bihar during the agricultural season to help my family. Drought is a major problem especially for agricultural families such as our self. We are dependent on the rains. But although we have vegetables and cash crops, we don't have hard cash.Respondent 2 said,I am a resident of Koch Bihar and belong to the sarkar caste. I have been working in Kerala for over three years now and I have some understanding of Malayalam. There are problems of drought and this affects our agricultural produce back home in Koch Bihar. But we don't have starvation. Tomato, potato, rice, wheat, and vegetables are all cultivated in our fields.At one level, and drawing on criteria such as permanent place of residence and/or place of origin, neither respondent considered himself local although both were temporarily occupying local spaces. One might say that they considered themselves as outsiders (or migrants), what De Flaan (1997) refers to as unsettled settlers, or what Bird and Deshingkar (2009) refer to as those participating in circular migration (by which migrants move to an urban area for a few months and then return to their village when they are best suited for work there). And yet their presence on construction sites contributes to what Roy (2004) refers to as an aestheticization of poverty, whereby labor migrants conjure up an image of poverty in local spaces. …