When you’re a migrant in your land

I was born in Kottayam Kerala However I am not Malayali it just so happened that my Tamilian motherrsquos parents settled in Kerala ages ago Thanks to my motherrsquos firmhanded diligence I read write and speak Tamil Since my father was Tamilian that ought to make me one too Kinda sortaHowever history records that soon after birth by the light of kerosene lamps in a rubber plantation I was taken to Calcutta as it was called then My early schooling up to Class IIIE1 was at Hindi High School in that city Since I returned to Calcutta for another five years after college to work in JS magazine I have spent 13 years of my life in West BengalDuring that time driven by both my interest in languages and the company of Bengali friends who spoke no English I learned to read write and speak Bengali If there is an Indian city and culture I feel most at home in I would have to say West BengalTo complicate matters I lived in Delhi from age 9 completing school and then college living alone in Delhi after my parents shifted to Mumbai Absorbing Delhirsquos exuberant but sometimes irreverent and rough culture was unavoidable My Hindi is better than fluent and I have more than a smattering of street PunjabiBut after 1977 it was Bombay all the way till 2000 when I left India to work in Africa The person I married was Maharashtrian and my children have no clue which part of India theyrsquore fromI am not unique My gypsy Indianness mirrors that of many other Indians And it raises a head scratchermdashwhich part of India am I from Should my provenance be decided by birthplace The language spoken at home The place I have lived the longest The special city where I feel most at homeIt also raises a deeper questionmdashif I move away from whichever part of India I came from would it make me a migrantForty million Indians are officially labelled migrants In my mind the image of the Indian migrant worker was set in stone in 2020mdashthousands of threadbare people with no more than the clothes on their backs abandoned by their employers and their government braving hunger exhaustion and disease to walk a thousand miles to their villages while a lethal virus devastated the country No one it seemed gave a damn about themApparently not one of them was protected by any meaningful kind of law that vouchsafed them safe and decent work reasonable hours a roofmdashand protection against acts of God like pandemicsThink of a migrant as a manmdashor womanmdashtrudging from point A the place they consider home to point B the place where they hope to find work in a quarry salt flat construction site truck depot or similar At this point you will want to ask three questionsmdashWho defines point A the place you call homeIs any person working away from the ldquohomerdquo place a migrantAnd are there any benefits to being labelled a migrantLast one first Migrant workers defined as persons from one state employed in another state have only become more dispensable over time Under cover of special powers under COVID19 the 29 laws that protected them earlier were fused into four Acts that greatly benefited the corporations that use migrant workers To be a migrant in todayrsquos India you must earn less than Rs 18000 a year be in a workplace that employs fewer than 10 workers and break your back working 12 hours a day The eighthour workday is for the better heeledThe hands that build our cities and bridges are crushed under the boots of the bureaucracies that use them Migrant workers do not realise that they cannot be treated as outsiders in their own country whose Constitution guarantees freedom of movement The price they pay for this ignorance is being battered and bruised by the corporations and contractors who pay them as little as possible in return for their blood and toilIndia teaches them that they belong to a corner of the country and are migrant outsiders everywhere else India is not theirsMy deepest insight into this intricate area came years ago in the village of Jitwarpur in Biharrsquos Madhuban district I was in my jeans and sweater swaddled in a borrowed blanket sipping hot tea at 5 am in the village tea shop surrounded by biting winter fog I was the new face the stranger Everyone was curious but no one spokeAn airplane roared overhead and when it had passed a villager leaned over to ask ldquoWhich country are you fromrdquoAffronted I replied probably with mild indignation ldquoIrsquom from the same country as you Irsquove come from DelhirdquoMany heads lifted from their teas and nodded The villager next to me said ldquoAh Yoursquore from that countryrdquoHere viewed from there C Y Gopinath in Bangkok throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai the city that raised him You can reach him at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper