Identities and the City: Socialities amongst Migrant Domestic Workers in Kolkata

Abstract

Migrant subjectivities, experiences and agency have not received the attention needed within development studies discussions on migration, and gender remains to be mainstreamed within understandings of migration. This article attempts to contribute towards bridging these gaps by outlining the findings of a study that explored sociality amongst migrant domestic workers in Kolkata. It outlines experiences of living the migrant identity amongst women migrating from rural West Bengal to Kolkata as well as forms of sociality they engage in at the level of the everyday. Socialities with their employers at the site of paid domestic work allow them to lay claims to the city by drawing on identities based in the Partition of India, 1947. Drawing on the concepts of ‘beings’ from Amartya Sen’s capability approach and of the ‘right to the city’, originally formulated by Henri Lefebvre, the article captures two significant questions emerging from these socialities: those of identity and self, and relationship with the city. It further shows the interrelation between these two frameworks that becomes apparent in the context of what the above socialities imply for the women in the study.

Introduction

Development discourses, specifically within the context of India, have treated the topic of migration predominantly through a statistical and macro-order lens. Migration has been seen simply as flows and movements of people across places. Initial theorising on the question of migration viewed the phenomenon as the result of an interplay of factors related to development (Brettell & Hollifield, 2014). Subsequently, however, work exploring the experiential dimensions of migration emerged, which laid emphasis on migrants’ subjectivities. Rogaly’s work on emphasising the life history approach to migration (2015) as well as Pattenden’s (2012) work on migration and circulation of labour in India and Picherit’s (2018) exploration of everyday relations in labour migration brokerage and Dalit politics are some examples here. Further, Carling and Collins (2018) have underlined the importance of emerging discussions on temporalities, emotions and imaginations in migration, which is increasingly also being seen as an end in itself rather than being a means to an end always. Shah’s (2006) work that shows how migration from rural Jharkhand, amongst members of tribal communities, to brick kilns in West Bengal is significant for the freedoms to explore sexuality, love and selfhood, not accessible in migrants’ places of origin, is a good example of this tenor of work. Shah and Lerche’s (2020) work emphasising the role of social reproduction in servicing ‘invisible economies of care’ in migration is another insightful exposition of this important strain of migration studies.

It is towards contribution to the latter approach that this article takes up narratives of migrant selfhoods amongst Bengali migrant domestic workers in Kolkata, West Bengal, India—these narratives emerged from a study conducted in 2019 on experiences of sociality amongst migrant women in Kolkata. Macro-order approaches to migration and the informal sector, especially paid domestic work, among women in Kolkata have pointed out the salience as well as the contours of these phenomena in the urban everyday. According to Banerjee (2014), Census 2011 data show 22% of Kolkata’s population to be migrants. Further, Bagchi and Ahmed (n.d.) note a 3.9% population growth between 1991 and 2001 in the Kolkata Municipal Corporation area and 30.4% in suburban areas, indicating the emergence of new ‘rural urban interfaces’ (p. 4) by means of expanding transport networks. With Roy’s ethnographic work (2003) on Kolkata, they show the commuting that women from suburban areas partake in to participate in the urban informal care industry catering to middle-class households.

Shaw (2016) shows, from aggregate data from the NSS and the Census, alongside local economic development questionnaires from 25 urban local bodies, that 58.41% of the total workers in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area in 1990 were in the informal sector. Census 2001 data on the Kolkata Urban Agglomeration indicated a 24.5% increase in home-based manufacturing work per year during the decade in between. Significant growth has also been noted amongst domestic workers. Debnath (2020) explores the gendered geographies of labour markets in Kolkata. Based on quantitative analyses of survey data from specific slum clusters in the city, she finds out that 85.35% of women work in their own enterprises or their employers’ or clients’ dwelling or enterprises. 85.06% of women made use of networks for job search, with 81.08% of the women reporting the network to be located in the very same neighbourhood. Debnath thus reads considerable restriction of mobility for women from these patterns.

Sen and Sengupta’s (2012) findings from a research project on marriage and other issues among domestic workers in two settlements of Kolkata are also useful. Domestic workers proved to constitute 90% of the adult women population. Further, 43.4% of the women had been married at age 11–15 years. In terms of expenditures incurred against wages, 85.2% of women spend their wages on their family and the bulk of the spending is devoted towards food (86.5% of the women) and education (62.8% of the women). In a later paper, Sengupta and Sen (2013) show the income distribution according to the type of domestic work done. 42.1% of the women engaged in cleaning earned around ₹500–1000 per month, and 47.4% of women engaged in cooking received only up to ₹500 per month. Overall, only 6% of the women received wages between ₹1,500 and ₹2,500.

The above details provide the larger context within which this study locates itself. The focus of the study was on experiences of migration and the nature of sociality among women in Kolkata as well as the roles of sociality in allowing these women to negotiate gender and other power structures. Using purposive and snowball sampling methods, the study involved 20 participants, with whom interviews were conducted. The interviews were conducted in December 2020 and January and February 2021. These were unstructured interviews, over varying durations of 20 minutes to around 2 hours. However, for the purposes of the topic that shall be discussed in this article, responses of nine Bengali women who migrated from rural and suburban West Bengal to Kolkata, the capital of the state, will be drawn on. The women who were approached were predominantly paid domestic workers in middle-class households in the city. Participant observation in a few workplaces and residential neighbourhoods of these women was also conducted. Full anonymity and confidentiality were assured to research participants with respect to the data gathered.

The principal findings of the study pointed towards the significance of sociality in allowing migrant women to construct a sense of self for themselves; sociality also played a significant role in group dynamics amongst these women, fostering intra-group solidarity and inter-group distinction. All these were performed at the level of the everyday, pointing towards the strong significance of the everyday as a site of mundane yet important social transactions, which both cumulatively contributes to larger phenomena and experiences and marks these larger phenomena in more easily accessible registers for people. What shall receive focus in this article is one amongst the multiple instances of sociality that were observed and noted in the course of the study. This instance bases itself on experiences and identities formed during and subsequent to the historical event of the Partition of India, 1947. With Bengal being divided, mass exoduses of populations taking place across the borders and conflicts ensuing from settlement and resource strains, this event has been more than just a matter of history for Bengali society. In the context of my study, Bengali women, who are migrants from rural and suburban areas, deploy this history, this knowledge, to negotiate their migrant outsider status and to lay claims to Kolkata, which otherwise has little place for them. They do this at different sites of sociality, as will be elaborated below.

The narratives emerging from these women underline the importance of the formation of selfhoods through these socialities. To bring in discussions of becoming within development discourses, then, necessitates underscoring what was the first intervention in favour of emphasising human subjectivity in the discipline—Amartya Sen’s concept of ‘beings’, part of the framework of ‘doings and beings’ within his capability approach, which also marked a new paradigm in development, the human development approach (1993). This concept of ‘being’, in line with similar conceptualisations of becoming and identity formation, allows for placing a discussion of selfhood firmly within development studies. On the other hand, the claims these women make to the city relate to the ‘right to the city’, formulated by Henri Lefebvre (1968/1996). This is relevantly articulated by Bhagat’s (2017) call for the ‘right to the city’ in the context of women and migration. The conversation between the findings of my study and these two theoretical frameworks shall be discussed below. Further, within the context of migrant life in the city, it will be shown how the two frameworks are in significant intercourse with each other.

The next section of the article will lay out the findings of the study. Amongst the implications and nature of sociality among migrant women in Kolkata, the specific socialities anchored in partition-based identities found amongst Bengali domestic workers, migrants from rural and suburban West Bengal to the city, will be narrated. The subsequent section shall place these findings within relevant theoretical frameworks. Subsections shall focus on the two major frameworks that are being employed here: Sen’s capability approach and Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’. The final section shall conclude.

Sociality and Migrant Women in Kolkata

Literature is scarce on migrant women’s experiences in India, and the question has not received adequate attention within development and migration studies. While works on migration have increasingly found place within development literature, scholarly attention to the specificities of migrant women’s experiences, where their gender intersects with their experiences of migration, is rarer to come by. Further, the little work that exists on migrant women in India (e.g., Agrawal, 2006; Palriwala & Uberoi, 2008) has statistics as well as certain dimensions about their lives to discuss, without necessarily bringing in the question of how migrants experience their selves through the process of migration. It is here that this study may be located, attempting to place the attention squarely on how migrant women experience their everyday lives; where and how, if at all, they articulate and frame for themselves a sense of agency; and how their selves are formed in the process.

The study focussed on women belonging to a specific class that includes paid domestic workers—this allowed for experiences of intimacy in the workplace to be reflected in the narratives emerging from the field. One of the principal concepts in the study, sociality, merits some explication. Sociality, a primarily anthropological concept, has been used to understand the very mundane nature of social interactions, which are articulated at the level of the everyday. The concept has not received sufficient academic attention, and academics have struggled to capture and theorise what has been a rather fluid, amorphous entity. Empirical works, therefore, have been able to explicate it best, and Amit et al. (2015) have engaged in one of the most sincere efforts to capture its complex multidimensional nature—processual, open-ended and polythetic. Sidnell’s (2010) characterisation of sociality as the site at which fundamental everyday ethics is performed and affirmed by virtue of social participation is arguably one of the best approximations of the concept.

The study, in exploring forms of sociality among women, who were migrants from north-eastern India, Bihar and rural and suburban West Bengal to Kolkata, came to arrive at the importance of this everyday nature of sociality on multiple fronts. Sociality engaged in by women with other women from similar origin areas has proved to be useful in forging and strengthening solidarity and support. Sociality that has involved women across different areas of origin has served as a tool for the crafting of the self, using perceptions of the other’s impressions of the self in the process. The engagements in and performance of sociality at the level of the everyday, then, allow for both the formation of self and the articulation of everyday politics, akin to the politics in pleasure captured by Khalili (2015).

Migrant women who were participants in my study narrated experiencing behaviour and treatment at the everyday that clearly made them feel like outsiders, alienating them from the city. Bengali women who migrated from rural and suburban West Bengal to Kolkata reported being made to feel like backward and poor outsiders. Yet they have been able to engage in greater negotiation of this kind of alienation compared to migrant women from other areas, like from other states. Their shared linguistic affiliation and state origin have, of course, both made them more acceptable and allowed them to navigate better the situations they find themselves in as migrants to the city. I have stated earlier that paid domestic work predominates among the women my study focussed on, with these employments being in upper-caste middle-class Bengali households. Here, through multiple socialities, they engage in enunciating their positions and identities vis-à-vis different issues, including social class distinction and caste, among which enunciation of identities based on the partition of 1947 will be treated here.

What, clearly, stands out in this aspect of the socialities captured in the study is the reach of history in lending grounds for such exchanges—more than 70 years later, the event of the Partition of India continues to bear relevance in the life of this society, however underlying and subtle. It is well known, of course, that the partition divided two states in India: Punjab and Bengal. The division of Bengal led to mass population exoduses across the border, where large inflows of Hindus from what came to be East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) travelled over into the newly created West Bengal. They came to be called ‘refugees’, who descended on West Bengal, raising tensions around land and resource strains. What emerged subsequently is a binary of identities—the bangal (Bengali colloquial term referring to Bengalis having origin in erstwhile East Pakistan) and the edeshi (similar term referring to those tracing their lineage from native West Bengal inhabitants). The former is also deemed offensive by some, yet it has continued to be used and to carry relevance in conversations in society. The two terms and identities have, of course, been marked by the grave historical, socio-cultural and political conflicts that have spawned the identities. At the same time, however, with the passage of time, with the routinisation of these identities, their everyday life has taken on a texture that is far more mundane, jocular and, at times, even joking.

It is in this backdrop that Bengali migrant women leverage their identities and positions vis-à-vis the partition to engage in socialities that allow them to negotiate their otherwise alienated statuses in the city. The performance of these socialities takes place at the site of paid domestic work. Most of the Bengali migrant women in the study identified themselves as edeshi in the above-mentioned identity binary based on the partition in Bengal and most of their employers were bangal. Interestingly, this entire instance of sociality emerged purely from the field, during fieldwork conversations and encounters, where the women themselves referred to awareness of their identities when talking about their experiences of work. This is important because it points out the hold of this historically coloured category on the imagination of these women, even when it comes to the households they work for as paid domestic workers. Now, given their awareness of the history of the arrival of bangals in Kolkata, of the struggles related to their settlement and of the contentions that have coloured their claims to the city and its lands, these women leverage their own edeshi identity to claim greater ownership over the city than their employers. Thus, it is through sociality and everyday conversational life that these women attempt to negotiate their alienated outsider status within the city by claiming belonging to it, over their employers’ claims to the city, based on originary identities drafted from their positions vis-à-vis the histories of the Partition of India, 1947.

These negotiations have been performed at three different sites of sociality by the Bengali migrant women in my study. The first is the site of paid domestic work itself. The women, in these settings, engage in a form of sociality with members of the employing household that is extensively marked by the tensions inherent in interactions that take place across social class and caste borders—thus, the sociality taking place here becomes the everyday and mundane site for the enunciation of an exchange that is casual, and joking too at times, but which at the same time is marked strongly by the underlying tension of exchanges straddling real barriers. Here, the women have often claimed that they know what different parts of the city have been like, before the bangals came, the ancestors of the current employers, for example. This claim to knowledge has been articulated pointedly, which they use to indicate that they have greater claim to the city than their employers by virtue of knowledge of the spaces of it before the likes of their employers arrived.

The second site of sociality has been that of the exchange between these women and myself as the researcher. My positionality as one of their employing class, one who would be identified by them and everyone as bangal, has been instrumental here. In fact, through the course of the study, sociality has been proven to be a crucial dimension of how ethnographic research takes place. In this specific context, the women have questioned whether I am bangal or edeshi and, upon finding out I am bangal, have, either through greater joking or by getting more regulated in how they articulate their own edeshi identity, indicated that even the sociality between the researcher and the participants mattered to them for what sense they could make of themselves, their identities and the relevant other. The third and final site has been the sociality amongst the women themselves. Exchanges between women identifying as bangal and those identifying as edeshi, within their own residential neighbourhoods, have been fully casual, where jokes about differences in cultural rites as a result of belonging to either category are commonplace although turns of conversations can render such exchanges serious at any sudden moment with any comment being taken amiss and leading to what are sometimes engaged quarrels.

Thus, as shown above, in my study, Bengali migrant women, subject to being treated as outsiders by their employers in Kolkata, use the same site of paid domestic work to engage in socialities that allow them room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis their own selves. They leverage their edeshi identities and knowledges of histories of bangal presence in the city, drawn from the partition of 1947, to claim belonging to the city as well as appropriate a sense of self that is agentic and subversive of the subordinate positions they are thrust into otherwise. These findings are located within theoretical frameworks in the following section, Amartya Sen’s concept of ‘beings’ (1993) and Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city (1968/1996) being two principal approaches to be employed.

‘Beings’ and ‘Right to the City’

As shown above, Bengali migrant women working as paid domestic workers in Kolkata deploy their identity anchored in the partition of 1947 at sites of sociality with their employers to be able to lay claims to the city that they are otherwise seen as outsiders to. Two important subjects are at contention in these exchanges: identity and claim to the city. These are often denied to the women, in this context, and at the same time, they stake their claims on these aspects as well. Here, I place these discussions within the frameworks of Amartya Sen’s concept of ‘beings’ (1993) and Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the ‘right to the city’ (1968/1996), which allow situating these women’s experiences within the broader question of development. I further link the two approaches through the implications of my study to show how selfhoods and access to the city complement each other for migrant women in the given context.

‘Beings’

Amartya Sen (1993) formulated the path-breaking capability approach, where he placed humans at the centre of development discourse and emphasised freedoms and their promotion as the ultimate goals of development, an approach that, then, also came to be called the development as freedom approach. The central idea behind this approach is well known: capabilities, consisting of different ‘functionings’, in the form of ‘doings’ and ‘beings’, are what should receive attention from development projects. Sen advocates for improving the range and quality of capability sets, that is, sets of choices available to people, such that development produces results that expand people’s freedoms and the quality as well as the quantity of choices available to them. According to him, the specific decisions regarding the kinds of choices, functionings and capabilities that should be aimed to be expanded and improved by development processes are best left for the people, societies and cultures in question to decide consensually.

What is significant about Sen’s approach, and relevant to this article, is the underlying emphasis on human subjectivity that it espouses. Sen’s approach stands out for being among the most important of the human development approaches in arguing for not only putting human beings firmly at the centre of development planning but also, and significantly, encouraging developmentalists to listen to people’s voices regarding what the priorities of development should be and how these should be fulfilled. Thus, his approach made way for development agenda and processes to be shaped by those whom these concerned and addressed most.

This is why his concept of ‘beings’ is important for this article. In further explicating his argument in favour of placing the question of capability and well-being centrally within development, Sen ropes in other concepts like agency, to construct the different human development results that the state and individuals might want to consider for evaluation and value exercises in the development process: different combinations of well-being, agency and freedom. To discuss these concepts, in the first place, as questions to be focussed on within-development processes is an important first step towards bringing human subjectivity and participation into development discourses. Further, then, the concepts Sen brings in are interesting for their different connotations and their bearings on understandings of what development should entail.

To mark these concepts, the first is the concept of ‘beings’ itself. The concept is extremely dynamic and interesting for the multiple meanings it captures at the same time. Being, to be, could be read to index selfhood and the formation of the self. This could include both a conscious construction of a sense of self and an awareness of a self constructed through the course of time by virtue of going through and experiencing multiple eventualities. Being, then, also indexes becoming, the process of construction of the self, of one’s own identity, through forces that can be active or passive or a mixture of the two in how they are registered and performed by the human being. Being, thus, straddles the overlapping space between the active and the passive, indicating a conscious engagement, yet with what is given. This first concept of ‘being’, then, is unravelled well by drawing in the other concepts such as ‘well-being’, ‘agency’ and ‘freedom’. Well-being marks a good life, which does not necessarily index being active, while agency underlines the exercise of active will as essential to life. Freedom marks the space to exert agency. ‘Being’, then, as a concept brings into conversation, and maybe even debate, the different visions of what a good life is and, more importantly, where to locate the self in it, visions that differ based on the extent to which active agency is seen as integral to it.

It is with this concept of ‘being’ that the agency and the sensibility of selfhoods and their constructions displayed by Bengali migrant women resonate and relate. Bengali migrant women in my study articulate paid domestic work, the sites and contexts afforded by this work and the socialities taking place at and by virtue of this work as very significant in their experience of their migrant selves and of the city. Paid domestic work becomes the site at which they encounter the hegemonic upper-caste middle-class Bengali household that constitutes a significant part of the fabric of the city. Their socialities, here, are, as mentioned above, both casual and underscored by the quite serious tensions and contradictions expected to exist in such interactions. These socialities and these sites, then, become spaces where these women, on one hand, receive the platform to perform their selves, a performance intended to convey meanings as much to their employer as to themselves and, on the other, make a note of and observe what contributes to making the hegemony. All these, then, contribute to the process of becoming for these women, where both their observations and their performances contribute to their sense of self. How they fare on the registers of tensions within the sociality becomes critical to how they see themselves coming into a migrant self that is firm yet flexible. Becoming and identity formation are, then, useful ways to understand the significance of the socialities explained in the lives of these migrant women. The crafting of selfhoods in the course of everyday conversations assumes incremental accumulative value by allowing these women to imagine some amount of autonomy to how they see and understand themselves.

Right to the City

The concept of ‘right to the city’ was formulated by Henri Lefebvre (1968/1996). For Lefebvre, the city was epitomised in urban life, a site of encounters and priority assigned to use value over exchange value. Thus, he points out that he would rather see ‘right to the city’ as ‘right to urban life’ (1968/1996). Lefebvre, further, underlined the importance of the working class as the agent who could collectively engage in the city so as to be able to restore urban life back to the city. The city, according to him, had been rendered a ground of industrial capitalism so that urban life no longer flourished in the city. In his outline of the right to the city, then, Lefebvre lays out a plan for rekindling urban life and its accompanying values. Lefebvre’s concept of right to the city has been, subsequently, employed by scholarship across disciplines in discussions around urban space and questions of accessibility, justice and inequality. A specific articulation of his framework was the use of this concept in the context of women and migration in India by R. B. Bhagat (2017). Bhagat highlights contemporary processes of urbanisation, where neoliberal urbanisation has led to the commodification and commercialisation of city spaces. He outlines how female migration to the cities has increased over time—while mobility caused by migration of the married partner has been one form of movement, women have also moved looking for work.

Yet, as Bhagat records, the city has only grown more exclusionary for migrant women. Socio-cultural discrimination and exclusion, amounting to different forms of violence as well, is as routine a feature of these women’s lives as the plethora of other problems that have to deal with issues with material facilities and services. Thus, women have been denied access to or have had to face substantial obstacles to access health services, reproductive services, basic working conditions at their workplaces, housing and rental services and benefits of public distribution systems. Further, the lack of or inadequate coverage within the necessary citizenship and identification documentation systems excludes them from important publics. In this context, Bhagat calls for a right to the city approach, where the city can be viewed as a shared space and resource that everyone has a right to. An important step towards this, according to him, would be to democratise governance systems, whereby there is fairer representation from the marginalised sections in these domains such that it is better possible to shape the nature of the urban space according to what serves the most excluded the best.

Coming to the article, and as detailed above, the women who my study focussed on were migrants from rural and suburban West Bengal to Kolkata. Being rural-to-urban migrants meant these women had significant problems accessing opportunities and services in the city—this, of course, alienates them and weakens their rights over the city. But, and significant for this article, when these women are employed in paid domestic work in households in the city, their dominant construction by their employers is one that stereotypes them as the rural poor outsider, arriving in the city for economic exigency. These women are, then, seen as those who could have work to do in the city, but in terms of owning and possessing city spaces, their claims are not strong at all.

Within these contexts, when these women reach back into the histories of the formation of areas within the city, of significant and major events that mark a common shared consciousness between their employers and themselves, that is an important claim to space that they make. That they should even bring up the histories of city-making in their current navigations of the spaces of the city allows them to relate across time—this temporal straddling is an important step to claiming the city. Claiming knowledge of the histories of the formation of its spaces among those who occupy those spaces is also seen by these women and their employers alike as claims to these spaces, often successfully staked. Further, when they claim themselves to be edeshi, natives of West Bengal, their claims to the state’s capital are strengthened, again both for themselves and for their employers.

Thus, what needs to be recognised here is the many layers at which the question of the right to the city operates for those for whom this right matters. As much as accessibility over tangible and material resources, opportunities and benefits that a city has to offer determines the extent of belongingness people experience to the city, perceptions, beliefs and discourses matter strongly too in facilitating or obstructing how people see themselves vis-à-vis the question of belonging to the urban. Thus, advocacy for the right to the city needs to take into account not only greater equality in accessing the material but also shifts in attitudes towards and understandings of who should have rights over the city. It surely needs to pay attention to the ways in which the marginalised are already claiming the right to the city and to further work with these.

Interconnections

As explicated above, two distinct aspects of the narrative emerging from the findings of my study presented in this article resonate with two notable theoretical frameworks. The sense of identity, agency and selfhood relates significantly to the definitions that can be read into a concept like ‘beings’ given by Amartya Sen as part of his capability approach to development. How women in the study lay claims to spaces of the city invokes the right to the city, which gains especial import in the backdrop of the alienation from the city these women, as migrants, are subject to. Here, then, Bhagat’s argument regarding the importance of the right to the city framework to migrant women’s experiences of and presence in the city is apropos.

The findings here, of course, also indicate a strong interconnection between the two aspects discussed. Bengali migrant women deploy their identity to engage in sociality that not only negotiates their claims to the city but also contributes to constructing their sense of self. Their laying claim to an identity that anchors itself in specific histories is an act that sutures identities across different temporalities for their persons. Further, when they also lay claim to the city by deploying the above identity, it is also an attempt on their part to incorporate themselves as rightful owners of the city. The manufacturing of their selves, of course a continuous process, significantly hinges upon their ability to claim the city for themselves, in the context of migration. Socialities performed at the site of paid domestic work, then, is a space for articulating, crafting and performing their selfhoods, one that they have indicated attaching considerable consequence to.

This, then, argues for making note of the ways in which the two concepts are in conversation with each other, specifically in the context of migration. An analysis of the life of migration highlights the criticality of a concept like ‘beings’ in capturing the states of selfhood that a migrant’s subjectivity can be seen as occupying. On the one hand, migration is a conscious act, involving active ways in which the migrant woman engages with her migrant position and makes meanings out of her experiences of migration. At the same time, being a migrant also entails being subject to structural influences and contexts that determine one’s own life situations and almost render states of passivity. Thus, for example, being a migrant for any participant in my study meant she was clearly subject to factors that question any possibility of agency on her part like the lack of basic amenities in life detailed by Bhagat. Yet, she also sets to add a sense of voluntariness and volition to the act of migration. Mired in the spaces between the active and the passive, then, living migration can be well captured by the idea of ‘being’. Yet, in the context of migration, it has been forcefully explicated by Bhagat that the right to the city is one of the most significant and elemental rights. This is also demonstrated by the findings of my study, as shown in this article.

This, then, makes the case for arguing that in the context of migrant lives in the city, the perspectives provided by the two concepts detailed above crucially interrelate in migrant experiences. The extent of the ability to exercise the right to the city contributes to the sense of selfhood and ‘being’ of the migrant woman. Further, being a migrant is shaped by the very processual nature of laying claim to the city, fighting for this right and negotiating with its multiple accessions, denials and manifestations. At the heart of both these conceptual frameworks, then, is an unrelenting emphasis on freedom and agency, the attempt to carve out one’s own space amidst the overwhelming force of structures that almost completely make up life situations. Thus, the emphasis on freedom that is woven into the concept of ‘being’ and the essence of freedom inherent in the right to the city approach interconnect to allow migrant women in the city to shape their identities and create a sense of self for themselves while asserting their right to the city. When, in the context of the findings of the study in this article, Bengali migrant women deploy their edeshi identity to claim as much as or even greater ownership over the city compared to their bangal employers, both the above conceptual frameworks are to be seen, not separately exercising themselves, but in critical combination with each other, mutually complementing the other, providing strength to each other through claims inherent in either.

An eloquent and forceful argument that could be borrowed here from Nussbaum’s (2003) work is the value of Sen’s capability approach in allowing very specific and identifiable sets of rights to be envisioned and advocated rather than the rights language to be rather vague and noncommittal, the latter also having brought on criticism from different political perspectives. Nussbaum argues how, thus, the Indian Constitution commits to an affirmative sense of rights by articulating a ‘right to’ something rather than pronouncing only negative liberties that do little by way of active interventions. Drawing on this significant observation, then, it is to be noted here that the right to the city is a positive intervention in the manufacturing and performance of the migrant woman’s ‘being’ in the city. It makes the way for as well as affirms the latter, and so the two approaches speak to each other within how marginalised migrant women live in the city.

Despite the emphasis on freedom and agency that underlines the active nature of what the two conceptual frameworks above emphasise in the experiences of the women in this paper, it is important, at the same time, to underline the everyday, mundane nature to these aspects that would defy any sense of an active and conscious performance. Thus, the socialities engaged in by these women are in the form of everyday casual conversations that might not always necessarily be intentional or targeted—these take place in the course of how day-to-day life and work carries on for these women as well as their employers. Yet, the texture of these conversations, meanings carried over across different days and the cumulative effects to which different senses conveyed through the socialities lend themselves are what make up for the larger essence of these experiences captured here. While the very act of being present in the city, at paid work, can be political, and is so too, it is not necessarily an engaged act of protest and claim-making that exists here but rather a meandering approach to attempting to appropriate any situation to the benefit of making one’s own self.

Conclusion

The aim of this article has been to explicate one significant branch of the findings of my study of sociality amongst migrant women in Kolkata. Within the larger findings of the study that point to the significance of sociality in allowing migrant women to develop their sense of self and to associate with fellow women in shared settings of work, this article set out to underline their experiences of migration, and, specifically, how Bengali migrant women from rural areas deploy identities from other sources like shared histories located within the local context to negotiate their alienated position with their employers in paid domestic work in the city and to stake claims over the city. It has been shown that different sites of sociality allow these women to articulate these claims and negotiations, among which paid domestic work and socialities with employers ensuing from thereon are attached considerable importance to by these women.

The article, then, has moved on to placing the two critical dimensions of identity and relationship to the city, within two significant conceptual frameworks, ‘beings’ (Sen, 1993) and ‘right to the city’ (formulated by Lefebvre, 1968/1996) and as argued by Bhagat (2017). The critical force of the idea of agency and well-being written into the concept of ‘being’ has been explicated. The right to the city approach has also been appreciated for its strengths in allowing migrant women the rights language to exercise access to and to engage with the city and its inhabitants. Migrant women’s subjectivities have been kept at the forefront, and by virtue of this, it has been argued that the casual and meandering nature of the everyday is perhaps the most striking feature of their experiences of living a migrant life in the city. The interconnections between the two frameworks have also been discussed—each not only contributes to the other but also makes for and critically constitutes how the other is exercised and played out.

Thus, this article located itself in the academic discussions around migration, migrant women’s experiences and the city. In development studies, migration and domestic workers have not received adequate attention, while the very little attention that exists has not adequately captured the experiences of women occupying these categories. In this backdrop, then, this research contributes towards underlining the importance of locating and seeing the experiential dimension as well as the agency of these women, in their everyday life, in how they deal with their employers and how they navigate the city. Finally, the lack of coherent policy structures pertaining to either migration or domestic work is widely noted. But what I wish to emphasise here is the introspection that would strengthen policy contributions in these domains.

Policies in the context of paid domestic work are conspicuous by their absence, especially in the context of India. A significant international policy discourse has been carved out by the Convention 189 (C189) and Recommendation 201 (R201), Decent Work for Domestic Workers, adopted by the International Labour Conference (International Labour Organization [ILO], 2011). C189 and R201, read together, provide for protection of human rights, decent working and living conditions, fair working time and remuneration, occupational safety and health and social security. Yet, a handful of countries have ratified the instrument: many South American and some African and European countries, along with the Philippines, have ratified the instrument.

India has not ratified Convention 189. The non-ratification of C189 by India implies the lack of legislation within the country on the matter, preventing paid domestic workers from having fair working conditions. This only worsens the plight of migrant women, who already, due to their migrant status, face precarities pertaining to the kinds of provisions outlined by C189 and R201. Their identity as paid domestic workers, of course, then, further adds to their travails. C189 and R201 pay some attention to the question of migrant domestic workers, although these provisions mostly relate to situations of international migration (ILO, 2011). Clearly, then, no policy exists that takes into account the specific circumstances and experiences faced by migrant women like those in my study. However, I want to take a step further to claim that arguments for including these women within relevant legislation need to go beyond mere integration to shaping policy contours according to perspectives that stem from their subjectivities.

The discursive constitution of policy frameworks provides for certain targets and goals that follow a broad understanding of what, in a given situation, the principal problems are and what the possible solutions could be, based on feasible targets. The result is, often, a straightjacketing of what are, sometimes, widely divergent situations. Neither women’s experiences nor their agency is foregrounded in how policy solutions are formulated, and the migration policy-legal-administrative corpus has followed a homogenised male lens in framing the very issues that need to be addressed. An important indicator has been the ‘women empowerment’ discourse that has treated women as passive beings, waiting to be given power to rather than ideally as potential participants, to be included in the very processes that generate power. This has been in line with larger development positions, which have seen women as beneficiaries and recipients of aid only. These approaches need to be abandoned in favour of stances that aim to place women’s self-understanding and self-expression centre-stage as well as to work with these capacities (Cornwall & Rivas, 2015; Kabeer, 1994).

Finally, Bacchi’s (1999) extraordinary insights into the policy formulation process need to be drawn on here. She builds what she calls a ‘What’s the Problem (Represented to be)?,’ or WPR, perspective to analysing policy measures. This highlights the importance of a constructionist approach to understanding policy-making, whereby it is encouraged to go back to the stage of crafting the problem itself that will be later treated to policy consideration. Bacchi encourages us to pay attention to the very processes that determine what issues will be considered for policy attention instead of solely focussing on the solutions and the implementation processes that follow and that are already determined by virtue of the specific way in which the problem is articulated. Policy and what problems it claims to address should, thus, be deconstructed not only for what it conveys but also for what it obscures. This approach is significant here because this allows for advocating listening to migrant women in the city, for example, and allowing their voices to determine what policy addressing them should focus on rather than formulating policy that imposes certain set structures of goals and targets on them that might not speak to their reality and how they actively make sense of their lives. The discursive level at which the women in my study construct their selves and their place within the city need to be, thus, included and not dismissed while formulating policy that intends their welfare.