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JAS0010.1177/00219096251332933Journal of Asian and African StudiesDas et al.

Original Research Article

JAAS
Journal of Asian and African Studies

Forced, Reversed and Sustained:

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of Migrant Workers During the journals.sagepub.com/home/jas

COVID-19 Pandemic in India

Amiya Kumar Das

Department of Sociology, Tezpur University, India

Soumen Ray
UNICEF, Timor-Leste

Ahana Choudhury
Department of Sociology, Tezpur University, India

Abstract
The article explores the multi-faceted phenomenon of forced migration, particularly in the context of the
COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered large-scale reverse migration among marginalised workers. Focusing on
migrant workers from Odisha, the study applies the concept of liminality and employs a qualitative approach
to examine the dialectics of social mobility. It highlights the ruptured experiences of these workers and the
paradoxes of mobility during the crisis. The analysis reveals how the pandemic reshaped work structures,
governance, family relations, gendered morality and community participation, redefining social mobility not
simply as upward or downward movement, but as a process marked by ambivalence and transformation.

Keywords
Forced migration, pandemic, social mobility, migrant workers, work structures, governance, family
relations

Introduction
Migration or the movement of people from one place to another has been deemed as the utilitarian
economic order of development. Access to quality education, employment facilities and the aspira-
tions for better standards of living were often regarded as the main outcomes of migration. However,
this process (re )produced the desired symbolism of the middle or upper class as visible socio-
economic ‘actors’ actively engaging in global-transnational networks of communication, exchange,

Corresponding author:
Amiya Kumar Das, Department of Sociology, Tezpur University, Tezpur, Assam 784028, India.
Email: [email protected]
2 Journal of Asian and African Studies 00(0)

and mobility. This perspective also equates migration with the realization of cosmopolitan identi-
ties, promoting cross-border cultural interactions and influencing consumption patterns (Horst and
Olsen, 2021). In a way, it is the act of moving from one place to another that offers manifestations
of multiple spatial being(ness) as well as the networks of sociability.
However, migration is not merely a reinforcement motivated by intra or inter-group structural
changes but also releases the flow of vulnerabilities, transgression of demographic orders and
social ambiguities (Findlay and Wahba, 2013). It is important to decode the dominant linearity of
migration as a transference between the departing and the host state/country. In some cases, migra-
tion embodies an existential crisis cultivated between material developments as well as stagnant
social mobility. Therefore, understanding the wider context of the COVID-19 pandemic in India
becomes essential. This article focuses on Eastern Indian state of Odisha to explore the pervasive
effects of displacement and recurring spatial shifts of the migrant workers working across the
informal sectors. The adverse effects on lower-income migrant workers and their life chances dur-
ing the pandemic were driven by low resources, a precarious work environment and the absence of
effective social support structures. This leads to important discussions on migration and the status
of social mobilities experienced by such workers, dwelling in ambivalences of durability and loss.
The origin and destination points for migrant workers often intersect through the relations of
bodies, life courses, work experiences and spaces. The COVID-19 pandemic which disrupted the
globe in the 21st century, de-stabilised people’s lives along with the economic, social and political
systems. Declared a global outbreak by the World Health Organization on 30 January 2020
(Cucinotta and Vanelli, 2020), the pandemic triggered severe and grave implications for human
health, social justice, welfare and rights. A large number of people, primarily the migrant workers,
lost their lives, their families, sources of livelihood and psycho-social health, further exacerbating
the asymmetries present across informal work structures (Kumar et al., 2021). Other realities of
overcrowded housing or the accommodation standards of the migrant workers working in informal
sectors made them more prone to contracting Novel Coronavirus, which was further exacerbated
by the lack of health insurance policies and administrative hurdles (Sengupta and Jha, 2020). In
broader forms, it led to many of the ‘chaotic’ travels and issues of repatriations (Rajan and Arcand,
2023), giving rise to the de-stabilisation in work, the social environment and experiences of life
course. Ghimire et al. (2023) in their work on the Nepali migrant domestic workers affected during
the COVID-19 pandemic, observed the workers as people who are less likely to recover economic
support as well as experience the jeopardisation of their personal lives.
Several draconian measures implemented by the state, such as ‘lockdown’ in subsequent phases,
inter-state shutdowns, social distancing or strict quarantine protocols (Aneja and Ahuja, 2021),
offered piecemeal assemblages of the massive health breakdown. Even if India turned into a mas-
sive harbinger of health diplomacy with its interventions in the vaccine business (Gupta et al.,
2023), the sporadic awareness, inconsistent information, and gaps in vaccine distribution exacer-
bated existing social inequalities and inequities (Agarwal and Naha, 2023). ‘Health’ then oriented
its selective attention to social configurations of class, status and perceptiveness of hierarchies and
representations. It is the intricate and layered embeddedness of the statist and historico-social ide-
ologies that correlates ‘migration’ and its aspirational values as imaginaries of class respectability
and accessibility to the diverse schemes of resources – social, economic, cultural, legal and even
recreational. Such processes also ventilate critical debates on social mobility and its multi-scalar
relationship to the COVID-19 pandemic. Relatively, in this context, the paper deals with the
nuances of ‘reverse migration’ of the migrant workers, working in the informal economic sectors
during the pandemic. The paper explores the navigations of migrant workers across spatial mobili-
ties vis-à-vis the spatio-temporal uncertainties of settling and resettling. Understanding the voices
of the migrant workers, it has been established that the concept of ‘social mobility’ requires more
Das et al. 3

extensive reach in the context of India, where it might lead to prolonged de-stabilisation in social
reproduction and community identities. So, two main research questions have been explored in this
paper. First, how social mobility during the pandemic is reconfigured within functional-dysfunc-
tional social structures, and second, how multiple implications of the pandemic and social inclu-
sion or exclusion function across the dialectical impingements of governance, class, gender and
domestic-moral networks.

Review of literature
Today, contemporary scholarships on migration and mobility have been expanded towards the
regimes of labour movements, border regulations and social protection measures. Coalescing into
the market structure and the neo-liberal world order, mobility has been categorised as an economic
formation or spectrum of life processes that expands the business estates and urban infrastructures
in developing and developed countries such as India, the United States, Canada and so on.
(Prytherch, 2022). It has been portrayed as the segmentation of the people migrating to other coun-
tries, inviting debates on spatial appropriation, class transformation (Portes and Rumbaut, 2001)
and racial categorisations (Chetty et al., 2020). Low wages, discrimination across formal and infor-
mal networks and an exploitative form of administrative paternalism shaped migration as a glob-
ally transformative consciousness (Behtoui et al., 2020); reproducing the dichotomous identities,
reflections, practices and materialities of transnational capitalism and imperial nets. Understanding
migration as a nuanced form of mobility has also been explored as asserting relationships of power
while shaping the (re)organisation of gendered behaviour (Thimm and Chaudhuri, 2021). The
global capitalism normalises poor women’s work and migration to other countries as ‘cheap’, even
if this is structurally mystified as ‘empowering’ (Misra et al., 2006; Yeoh and Ramdas, 2014). In
other words, migration and socio-geographic mobilities have been construed as (re)constituting the
urban models of development, cross-border claims of being legal and para-legal citizens and so on.
However, the severe disruptions to people’s movement and social connections caused by the
COVID-19 pandemic significantly altered the relationships and processes that intersect with the
politics of migration, work, healthcare governance, and the state.
Scholarships across the disciplines of sociology, economics and public policy reflected on the
disruptive, productive and reproductive life courses of lower-income migrant workers. On one
hand, the COVID-19 pandemic affected their work of livelihood in different states, and on the
other, it constricted opportunities to refurnish their work skills. This resulted in vulnerabilities,
exclusion from public spaces, psychological stress and lack of access to justice systems (Maiti
et al., 2024). Furthermore, some scholarly works highlighted the social class dynamics and dispari-
ties during the pandemic. The upper-income people benefited from the increased access to digital
resources and the ability to work from home while the lower-income migrant workers faced chal-
lenges such as extreme heat, heavy luggage, the need to find the shortest routes or endure long
walks along the roads and highways to reach their homes (Pandey, 2020; Misra and Gupta, 2021).
This further emerges from the differentiating social imaginaries of the ‘migrants’ and ‘immigrants’
where elite or upper-income migrant workers often share different relationships with the state than
lower-income migrant workers. Hunkler et al. (2022) analyse the ways in which differences in the
social class of the migrants not merely shape their access to different forms of capital but also influ-
ence the notions and perceptions of social and spatial mobilities.
Today, migration (re)configured the nations as an ephemeral and dynamic mode of govern-
ance, generating political ‘subjects’, their consciousness and symbolic identity. While literature
on migration, spatial mobility and immobility today are too taking turns to settle ‘emotions’,
emotional life and changing ethno-political boundaries (Boccagni and Baldassar, 2015; Carling
4 Journal of Asian and African Studies 00(0)

and Collins, 2018), scant works offer reflections on the complex and shifting life processes of the
lower-income migrant workers. The lower-income migrant workers stay and work far away from
their homes and cultural community while navigating the precarity of losing their jobs. Rather
than placing the incomes and achievement of material assets as chief markers of ‘social mobility’
(Neidhöfer et al., 2024), the paper moves beyond the ‘economic’ discourses to locate the multi-
faceted ways in which social mobility is more than the dyadic upward or downward axis. In large
number of scholarly works across the globe, social mobility has either been defined in terms of
downward mobility where the individual life chances are diminished by a sense of pathological
de-growth such as occupational demotions and social lags such as crimes, wars and weak compe-
tition in the labour market (Paskov et al., 2021) or upward mobility as a more enhancing and posi-
tive indicator of life chances, increasing the quality of life, and expanding of generational
standards of living (Ackers, 2020). However, the COVID-19 pandemic, which entailed forced
and reverse migration of the informal sector migrant workers from their destinations to sources
(Dandekar and Ghai, 2020), assured a partial communication of recuperative mobility on one
hand while thwarting their former status quo across public and domestic sites.
Suhardiman et al. (2021) looked at how people migrated during the pandemic in Asian countries
like Myanmar, China, Thailand, Bangladesh, and India. They suggest that when migrant workers
returned home, it could lead to new ways for people to develop. This happened because the pan-
demic disrupted how people earned a living, forcing them to make different choices and organize
themselves in new ways. But such a transformation often remains hierarchical, fixed and exclusive
relative to the upper-income groups who possess the necessary or uplifted skills and educational
credentials to (re)construct their livelihood. In other words, the stark formal as well as informal
economic precarity flowing towards a division of mental (professional work) and manual (low-
skilled or low-scale waged work) labour, further perpetuated the rigidities of such existing frame-
works in social mobility. This enfolds the scopes of different symbolic and material manifestations
of the ‘social mobility’ index. It primarily reflects ‘ascriptive’ social locations within the political
economy of neo-liberalism. The link between mobile spaces and immobile social reproductions
remains a key indicator of social mobility, as it is embodied and transferable rather than
eliminated.
The reverse migration, which intesified during the pandemic, has been the pivotal recorded event
of ‘forced migration’. In this sense, the ‘forced migration’ is not merely caused by displacement,
war, poverty, or natural calamities but also materialises through health panic and crisis. Even if the
migrant workers migrate outside their state or regions for economic upliftment, it also turns to
‘forced migration’ in case of the lack of work prospects, social security measures, organisational
support and social satisfaction in one’s home state. Gangopadhyay (2020) in her work on ageing in
urban Kolkata projects that with the politico-economic stances on resisting privatisation and corpo-
ratisation in the state of West Bengal for a long time, the employment rates structurally declined
while facilitating diverse routes towards migration. In that case, migration transitioned the socio-
demographic constitution of the state. So, instead of restricting ‘forced migration’ to structural-
political causations such as wars, invasions and developmental displacements, it is also important to
look at the COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated the essence of alienation and segregation. This
has disrupted the work, social sustainability and aspirations to experience ‘urban’ citizenship for
people, specifically lower-income workers in India. While the existing literature on the adverse
effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on informal sector migrant workers in India mainly focused on
the harmful state policies, economic instabilities and severe poverty affecting India’s 1.3 billion
people (Bhattacharyya, 2020); the paper moves beyond to explore the micro-politics and mundane
experiences of displaced migrant workers, reflecting on their social lives during and after the pan-
demic migration.
Das et al. 5

Conceptual framework
The paper uses the concept of ‘liminality’ to explore the existential state of the migrant workers
who were living within social transitions as well as stagnancies. Hooker and Kerridge (2022: 57)
explain it as a processual traction that is ‘neither singular or unidirectional but has the potential for
distress and joy, for collapse and growth, for resolution or persistence, and for disconnection and
connection’. In the context of denoting people living with illness, Willig and Wirth (2018: 7) refer
to liminality as a ‘space that is in between what was (i.e. their healthy lives) and what will be (their
death/nothingness), a kind of twilight zone . . . experiential space’. Relatively, the COVID-19
pandemic entailed a health crisis that not only affected the bodily resilience and mechanisms of the
migrant workers but also threatened their social status and relationships with the larger society.
Transposing across expansive spatial and temporal zones, the liminal intakes of the pandemic still
linger in their social worlds with hardships of tracing new jobs, lamenting over losing earlier ones
and experiencing a sense of vulnerability in the rearranged form of work (closing down of factories
and a newly transitioned characteristics of production). The fixity and fissures of the pandemic, as
well as the perceptiveness of social mobility, can be located within the strings of disjunctive social
identity vis-à-vis the affective movement of fear and the social representations of recuperative
actions. Such conflictive ties of bodies and voices of migrant workers during the pandemic and
beyond, however, also reinforced ‘neo-bondage’ that refers to the ‘casualisation . . . informalisa-
tion of employment and . . . increased monetisation of commodity exchanges and of social
relationships’(Breman, 2008: 86). So, the conceptual framework of ‘liminality’ offers ways to
revisit ‘reverse migration’ and understand the rapid social, health and economic transitions in peo-
ple’s lives.

Methodology
Location
Migration is a significant and widespread phenomenon in the Eastern Indian state of Odisha. A
huge share of the migrant workers from Odisha contributes to the economic production and devel-
opment of the country. The ‘Economic Survey of Orissa 2005–06’ report states that the primary
income generation of the state emerges from agriculture and seasonal farming such as wheat, jute,
gram and mustard and so on. However, over the years, the lack of a strong tertiary sector, limited
revenue options, repeated disasters such as floods and the absence of modern agricultural technolo-
gies have compelled people to migrate to other states in search of alternative sources of livelihood
(Government of Orissa, 2006). This also created the space for a huge pool of ‘migrant’ workers
finding them in unorganised, semi-skilled and unskilled sectors of work and often recruited through
the unlicensed contract of the middle-men. This remains a pivotal fact to grasp that the COVID-19
pandemic did induce more ‘reverse migration’ to Odisha due to the unsystematic and lack of reg-
istration of the workers in recruitment agencies – sequestering their legal claims over their work
environment. Supplementing the estimations from the 68th round of the National Sample Survey
Organization, it has been attributed that around 61% of the rural males, 15% of rural females, 56%
of urban males and 8% of urban females are engaged in the labour force from Odisha (National
Sample Survey Office, 2014). Apart from the shares of immigration, the internal migration from
Odisha offers significant visions of labour economy, disposability and neo-liberal regime where
the state withdraws from infrastructures such as health, education and welfare; hence increasing
the market culture and the entrepreneurial surveillance over the work and lives of the marginalised
workers (Jha and Pankaj, 2021).
6 Journal of Asian and African Studies 00(0)

With a more precarious system of work and informal economy, the migrant workers who came
back to Odisha also suffered a huge setback from the slow progression of other income sources
such as farming. Srivastava (2022: 450) in analysing the precarious social existence of migrant
workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in India, writes, ‘Agriculture, which accounted for nearly
30% of the total GDP in 1991, now accounts for 14.8% of the economy . . . the average gross value
added (GVA) per worker in industry and services is 4.5 times the GVA per worker in agriculture’.
So, as 8,53,777 migrant workers returned to Odisha amidst lockdown (Bisoyi, 2020), the
Government of Odisha, ‘negotiated with Chief Ministers of other states to provide food, taken vari-
ous initiatives to ensure their (informal migrant workers) passage back home and were rescued by
the authorities’ for allocating the quarantine facilities (Nabakrushna Choudhury Centre for
Development Studies, 2020: 16). But, the survival of the workers who returned became more chal-
lenging in Odisha even if the civil society workers and organisations speedily dispatched necessary
health and sustenance facilities to contain the ‘shocks’ (BAIF Institute of Sustainable Livelihoods
and Development – Odisha, 2021).

Data collection
The primary study was conducted between May to July 2020 and again resumed from May to July
2021. However, in an attempt to track the developments in the lives of the former migrant workers,
brief periods of fieldwork were extended until 2023 through telephonic calls and field visits.
The period of data collection was distributed between the two waves of the pandemic. Although
this distribution was not a conscious move, the lockdown effect, application of legal protocols and
sporadic curfew periods, influenced the planning and duration of data collection. As a part of the
research objectives to explore the nuances of spatial-social mobility among marginalised migrant
workers from Odisha, a grounded theory method was adopted. As a qualitative and an inductive
method, such a method ‘shapes collected data and provides explicit strategies for analysing them’
while leading well-built pathways for ‘learning about the participants’ lives’ (Charmaz and
Thornberg, 2021: 305). In the context of the study, consecutive and timely processes of data col-
lection enabled researchers to be attentive to the patterns of motivations as well as meanings behind
such testimonies, forming the scope of the argument.
To derive the data, 45 in-depth interview sessions were conducted with a semi-structured form
of interview schedule consisting of both closed and open-ended questions. In some cases, casual
conversations also took place to learn more about the workers and their state of delirium while
easing the space to speak about it. The interview guide comprised several questions on socio-
demographic profile, migrant workers’ experiences of working in destination states, threatened
social life during the pandemic and the maladies of returning to Odisha with sufferings. This also
coalesced with Lechner and Renault (2018:15) who note that listening to the migrants’ narratives
‘unveils the ipse dimension of their identity, which is . . . frequently unnoticed in the accounts of
(the) migrants’ lives’.
The participants of the study primarily worked in manufacturing and construction sectors (low-
paid industrial/shopfloor workers) across the destination states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh,
Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Delhi and Maharashtra. They were from lower-income backgrounds and
often lacked efficient social, economic and political resources to manage their crisis during the
pandemic. Their age group ranged from 21 to 40 years and they remained unemployed during the
four phases of lockdown in India1 (25 March 2020 to 31 May 2020). We used the purposive sam-
pling technique to ensure that the participants were migrant workers specifically affected by the
lockdown. In addition, the snowball sampling technique was also used to track migrant workers.
Two of the researchers were acquainted with some people, each from the Pitapiti, Uchabali,
Das et al. 7

Gopalpur and Mallikapur villages in Odisha and asked them to refer to some of the migrant work-
ers who had returned. The workers were either primary income generators or contributed a fraction
of their incomes to their families. The pilot surveys conducted before the interview sessions clari-
fied that most of the participants were comfortable speaking Hindi and Odia. While Hindi is one of
the official languages of India besides English, Odia2 is the state official language of Odisha. Both
languages functioned as a viable communication link, enabling the researchers to decipher innate
gestures and phrases on connoting mobilities, such as ‘sangrama’ (struggle, in Odia), ‘naa aage
jaa paa rahen hain, naa yahan reh paa rahe hain’ (neither are we able to move forward, nor are we
able to stay here, in Hindi), ‘aago jibon naa maati?’ (Is life a priority or land?, in Odia) and
‘dwandere podichi’ (confused, in Odia). The pandemic-related losses were expressed in terms of
the significant costs incurred by individuals returning from Southern states to their home state of
Odisha. Some sold utensils and furniture in destinations, some broke their fixed deposits, while
others borrowed money from their peers, kin or employers.

Data analysis
To conduct the data analysis, the data were translated and transcribed into English (from Odia and
Hindi). For filling the gaps that emerged in the data, two vital phases of cross-checks with the
research participants also took place. Subsequently, transcribed testimonies were processed for
coding and tracking the relevant informational categories. Relative to the grounded theory
approach, three processes of coding, such as open, axial and selective coding, were followed
(Strauss and Corbin, 1990). First, open coding was prepared by breaking the data into smaller
chunks and highlighting the data to develop pivotal codes and descriptors. Second, axial coding
was conducted to explore the relationship between the tracked codes – tracing similarities and
contrasting positions. Here, elaborate forms of codes were placed adjacent to their transcribed data
for arriving at a level of abstraction and reduction. Lastly, for organizing the codes, selective cod-
ing was applied. In this process, the six central codes identified through axial coding were inte-
grated to develop key core categories, ultimately forming a cohesive theory (Vollstedt and Rezat,
2019). While the sequences of coding were followed, it was individually reviewed by three
researchers to establish the consistency and validity of the codes.

Ethical considerations
For drawing ethical clarity, informed consent was taken from the participants before the inter-
views. As this study did not deal with any sensitive matters of the participants, it was cleared
with a clearance received from the research committee of the department in the university on
01 July 2020. Besides, since the research work was initiated during the pandemic lockdown, the
researchers stringently followed Standard Operating Procedures issued by the Ministry of
Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. The researchers used medically prescribed
masks and sanitisers to ensure safety and health practices for themselves as well as for the
research participants. Since the pandemic brought tumultuous times of uncertainty in work,
families and administrations, the conveniences and inconveniences of the participants’ health
and their time schedules were taken into account. In cases where the participants were not com-
fortable enough to answer a few questions due to a complex allotment of identities, they were
free to withdraw and clarify it later. The interviews were conducted in their homes, farms and
the village tea stalls. To ensure confidentiality, pseudonyms have been delete were used instead
of their real names.
8 Journal of Asian and African Studies 00(0)

Mobility within crisis: Compliance, adaptation and resistance

Lockdown and social dilemmas
The rapid transmission of the Novel Coronavirus and the stringent lockdown protocols in India
shifted migrant workers’ attention from their health security to the availability of food. Hunger
evoked a complex categorisation of their ‘bodies’. On one hand, the suspected transmission of the
virus was conceived as a pathology and a distanced probability, while on the other, food and eata-
bles were an immediate requirement to replenish the bodily energies and productivity for work and
spatial movements. The virus was both feared and mystified as a symbolic representation of the
body. However, during the pandemic, food—and its scarcity—became a crucial social object
through which people sought to assert their agency. A worker who (22 years old) returned to Odisha
from the state of Andhra Pradesh, claimed:

I had no work during the Corona period. While I was scared about the virus, I was more scared to stay
hungry, since it is uncontrollable. You don’t have food, how can you work and survive? Even if you have
no work, you have to search for work, right? That is also work! It is better to die from the disease than
dying from hunger. If I fall sick, at least there’s a chance I might recover. But if I don’t work, there’s no
way to feed myself and my family. Hunger will kill faster than the disease.

The pandemic, in a way, affected the migrant workers’ identity and social networks. The fear of not
merely succumbing to the virus but clinically manifesting the materiality of ‘virus’ body led to an
exclusion from their collective peer group activities (of other migrant workers) and social respon-
sibilities. But this too sprouted ways of navigating, ensuring and reorganising altruistic practices,
such as taking someone to the hospital, keeping food items near a peer’s door, sitting near employ-
ers’ homes for money, their employer offering them small tasks for money and receiving motivat-
ing calls from families and so on. A migrant worker (31 years) who returned during the 2021 phase,
stated:

While being affected by the virus led to a sense of alienation in some cases, I never lost my heart. I ran to
the hospital with my fellow workers, as they were not well or had digestion issues. On one hand, everything
was jeopardized and on the other, small acts of kindness made us feel that we were alive and provided us
with some confidence!

For some migrant workers, the pandemic surpassed the temporality of distress that shaped their
existential and ideological manoeuvring towards dynamic inter-personal reinforcements. Such as,
a significant share of migrant workers is still grappling with assembling their past ‘self’ while
socially transitioning into an aspirational state of ‘selfhood’. In a session, while talking to a former
migrant worker (24 years) turned shop assistant (around 2023), he sunk into a dilemma:

Pandemic is still not over for me. I am chased by a sense of loss, as if I am not any more my active self.
Kya hua, nai pata! (What happened, I don’t know!, in Hindi). Being a shop assistant is not making me
much happy as earlier when I used to work, I had a ‘movement’. Now, just one shop and monotony!

The pandemic erupted through the experiences of individual and collective social suffering. Across
institutionalised structures like health and information, the body is construed as a ‘possession’ or
‘resource’, not merely for the present but also for the futuristic goal of familial-social mobilities.
The families during the pandemic and beyond, in turn, persisted in a state of ‘liminality’ – dashed
hopes for retaining a familial member’s former work while also feeding possibilities for their
Das et al. 9

safety to restore familial well-being and social sustainability. A migrant worker (23 years) who
worked in the food packaging industry, recalled his situation during the pandemic:

I was not very aware of the gravity of the Coronavirus. Humko toh laga yeh bukhaar hein baas, theek hoo
jaayega! (I thought it was just a fever, which would be cured on its own, in Hindi). But it was destructive
for all the workers. I lost my job but still hoped my company would open again after 14 days. But, it didn’t.
My family members started calling me back and said, if I die, they would lose a father-like figure and my
family would be scattered.

Despite the social and moral challenges—such as fear, ruptures, and anxieties—that defined their
workplaces, migrant workers did not consider leaving the work place as their first option. Instead,
they sought to maintain their occupational identity, social recognition, and embodied role as ‘work-
ers’. So, in this context, social mobility for the migrant workers and their families is a dynamic
social process that involves both the experience of their existing social identity i.e. being and the
aspiration to transform into their desired status of ‘becoming’.

Contestations and disruption of communication networks

Transportations are not mere logistical routes to travel but evoke the realities of socio-political
order and practices of power. In turn, transportation and its various routing or utilisation by the
migrant workers projected a kind of social inclusion interplayed through deviance. During the
pandemic, the overcrowded buses or trains represented the complexities of social mobilities –
between the rapid processual actions of saving lives vis-à-vis making disempowering choices for
migrant workers to return. A former carpenter (26 years) narrated his journey with the onset of
lockdown in India:

The journey was troublesome. There was no food available in railway stations, except tea and bottled
drinking water which cost me around ₹50. I satisfied my hunger with few badam (groundnuts) which I
brought from the beginning of my journey. The children in the compartment were crying in hunger and
their parents could manage only a few biscuits!

There was estrangement not only from the legitimate entitlements located within the structure of
work or commodity production but also from one’s bodies, in precarious autonomy as well as
authoritative standards of the ‘new normal’. The predicament of travelling for long hours in loaded
buses and trains with few stops made such journeys exhausting for most of the participants. This
also reinforced normative gendered behaviour and socialising practices of privacy, morality, sexu-
ality and shame. A woman migrant worker (30 years), who returned to Odisha on a stacked bus
from another Indian state, Gujarat, stated:

Travelling from Gujarat to Odisha in a bus is not a joke. I was worried about the nature calls! For men, the
scenario was at least smooth as they could stop the vehicle and release themselves . . . but for us, women,
we had to think twice and search some secluded space. Moreover, we felt uncomfortable with the number
of men in the bus and sit jampacked with them. Some even called us ‘besharam’ (shameless) as our clothes
slipped in those circumstances!

A more complex dialectic emerged between one’s resilient abilities to adapt to the emotional-
bodily language of pain and self-conscious mystification of social ruptures. Many formative rou-
tines adopted during the pandemic turned into a normalised disposition of mundane meaning-making
10 Journal of Asian and African Studies 00(0)

affirmations, such as changing food habits or even eating eggs for proteins, working with scarce
resources, investing in health and so on. A participant (28 years) who experienced pandemic jour-
neys as a development of his physical and psycho-social competencies, stated:

When we boarded the bus to return home, we simply sat straight on the bus for four days. We could not
even fold our legs. We had to manage with a one-time meal . . . minimal chuda (flattened rice dish) for
three days, somehow brought from the starting point. Now, many of us who came back, eat two-time meals
but made it a priority to invest money for health.

Alternatively, the abrupt relocation back home has been narrated as a ‘relief’. The decisions taken
to return home provided a sense of both physical and symbolic-moral security against the backdrop
of pandemic vulnerability. In a way, the act of returning reproduced their multi-scalar relationships
with the community people, memorable places and things that refurnished their social identity. But
this further required political legitimisation of their corporeal bodies by different state agents as per
the defined governance procedures. A former migrant worker (32 years) stated with a smile:

My employer picked up my call and suggested registering for communication portals. I did that through a
friend’s help. When I landed in Odisha, I had to undergo several tests. After I was found to be okay by the
doctors, I was allowed to go home. I was so happy that I was ‘negative’. I also found a doctor praising me
for my good immunity.

So, the disorganisation and reorganisation of transportation, peer networks and relationships with
the state during the COVID-19 pandemic offered the complex shaping of life processes, personali-
ties and reformations of collective community across multiple spaces and times.

Mobility, class and domesticity

Suffering and dislocations make adaptations to social changes more complex with the changes in
economic possessions and prowess. This also influences the social life of the kinship-based units
of the family. For the participants, the crisis-induced migrations not only represent a loss of
employment but also threaten their domestic authority, self-esteem and social status. Some of them
stated that relocation or shifting back home induced silent familial peripherality, where a sense of
them being ‘burdens’ was felt through their exclusion from the familial decision-making spaces. A
participant (26 years) depressingly voiced that:

With pandemic lockdown, my company was shut down and whatever savings I had, I spent it on my
survival. While I was happy to return to my home as well as family, gradually I sensed that they were not
very welcoming! I don’t have a say now while my brother who is into some work has more say! Ghaar
mein saab uska sunte hein (Everyone listens to him at home, in Hindi)!

The state’s brawl for managing the fear and scepticism of the migrant workers stacked com-
plex regimes with multi-layered co-ordinations, mobilisation of funds, and the involvement of
large number of ‘active’ stakeholders. The state government of Odisha largely addressed this
issue despite lingering grievances, as it tackled the enormous challenges of the pandemic with-
out any prior experience. A participant (39 years) gave a glimpse of the arrangements made by
the government while staying calm about his present state:

During pandemic lockdown, I along with my roommates registered Government portals and started our
journey from the West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh. It took us four days to reach Odisha. Although
Das et al. 11

it was extremely difficult, we received some food throughout the journey. But the safety protocols were
followed such as health check-ups and medicines disbursal across state camps.

The pandemic lockdown also gripped the reproduction of class inequalities and consciousness.
While workers belonging to lower-income groups organised a few meals a day through routing
herculean and challenging tasks, the workers belonging to the upper-income and formal sectors
transformed the disillusioned social ‘world’ of the pandemic into a more creative endeavour of
performing yoga (spiritual exercises), baking cakes, painting and so on. In other words, the migrant
workers from high-paying sectors such as Multinational Corporations (MNCs) were not only
attuning themselves to healthy or immunity booster meals but also coalescing them with aesthetic
choices and claiming upper-class memberships across digital and social networks. A well-off
migrant worker (30 years) discussed her ‘work from home’ conditions and dissatisfaction over the
non-availability of luxury items:

As a paying guest, I was regularly provided healthy food by my owner. I was concerned about the hygiene,
so I got all kinds of disinfectants. But, I was regularly performing some exercises, while also uploading my
baking stuff on social media. However, with partial openings, I could not buy my diet milk and chips as it
was not available.

Such narratives offer insights into understanding the associations and dissociations across the spec-
trum of how anxiety is contextually, locally, structurally and institutionally placed to form differ-
ences across social groups and their mobilities. Such a changing perception of ‘social mobility’
even after the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, stimulated emotional regulations that shaped
the intricate dynamicity of familial and public spaces.

Discussion
The voices of the actors often bring into account the divergent social realities, which makes the
understanding of ‘social mobility’ as a linear or undynamic concept less tenable. In relation to the
context of the study, the empirical analysis of the narratives of the migrant workers affected by
‘reverse migration’ during the pandemic warrants the exposition of a complex route of ‘social
mobility’ that operates within the juncture of ruptured life processes vis-à-vis the aspirational values
of therapeutic and restorative activities. While the pandemic lasted for a specific period of time, the
intensity and effect of its residues on the migrant workers’ lives have led to many deficiencies of
de-skilling, stark marginalisation, stigmatisation which is further shaped through their caste, class
and ethnic identities. So, the ‘reverse migration’ of the marginalised migrant workers offered many
such possibilities to explore the intersections between health and governance. The malleability and
precarious intersections between such structures made workers a ‘subject’ of the state and govern-
ance while they devised their strategies to retain their agencies and bargaining positions (Das, 2022).
Over the years, social mobility has been primarily bounded within human development and eco-
nomic achievements. Heckman and Mosso (2014: 690), in their analysis of ‘social mobility’ as a
relationship between the skill formation of children and parental income, write:

multiple periods in the life cycle of childhood and adulthood and the existence of critical and sensitive
periods of childhood [ensures] in the formation of skills . . . multiple skills for both parents and children
that extend traditional notions about the skills required for success in life, and . . . multiple forms of
investment.
12 Journal of Asian and African Studies 00(0)

While the migrant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic were already exposed to a lack of
educational opportunities and poor inter-generational familial assets, the pandemic not only threat-
ened but also in turn processed a ‘social mobility’ for them in a different manner. Such a form of
mobility might not be located in an upward or downward form, categorically. Though the migrant
workers encountered a breakdown during the pandemic, they gradually joined other occupations
even if they did not receive their embodied essence of accomplishment or socio-symbolic prestige
at work. This affected the relationship and movements between their ‘selves’ and society, yet not
without their complex roles to be performed in multiple spaces as well as organisations. In a way,
it diversified their occupational strata to work across multiple factories and industries, further
mobilising their public-personal identities. So, rather than triggering an absolute dysfunctionality,
the pandemic generated counter-realities that edged dynamic forms of liminality – sustainability
vis-à-vis the threatened control over being(ness).
The reverse or ‘forced’ migration during the pandemic has still been a pervasive affair in the
memory-making processes of migrant workers. Encountering a health crisis, though many of the
participants migrated back home in the first flash of lockdown, some stayed back in their work-
place accommodations until their livelihood collapsed. During that time, they formed a commu-
nitarian affinity with their peers and other people who faced similar dilemmas. A substantial
number of participants depicted ‘mobilities’ through phrases such as hum ghum rahe hein (being
a wanderer), badlav mein rehe rahe hain (living within changes), koshish kar rahe hain (trying to
settle down) and so on. Such unsettling life processes, as well as social adaptations, not merely
induced uncertainty but also functioned as an exercise of power which expanded itself beyond the
health crisis of the pandemic. Most of the participants referred ‘hunger’ and dwindling of food
resources during the pandemic as a habitual action that is derived from their historico-existential
practice. Relative to their life chances, they started to ‘eat less’ and manage it, which issues hier-
archical class segregation from the upper-income people. For instance, one of the workers inter-
viewed once uttered that ‘their’ (the collective signification of a class) immunity is far too good
than the ‘elites’ as they have managed to stay in the dirt, eat less, or be hungry during the pan-
demic. This propels a complex relationship between class, consumption and (re)socialisation of
physiology. This perceptiveness also constituted the social resilience of the migrant workers who
vented out in their representative immunised bodies to find work during the pandemic or practice
commensalities by sharing food with their peers and keeping food packets near their peer work-
ers’ doors at their workplaces. The pandemic hibernated a bridge between what Bebaise and
Stengers (2016) would impinge as between the probable and possible, taking into account the
paralysis of life progressions while gaining novel experiences of meanings and their significances.
Many participants spoke about how they engaged in performative practices to accumulate com-
munication resources and re-establish everyday routines and a sense of normalcy after the
COVID-19 pandemic. With the onset of lockdown and the shutting down of factories and indus-
tries, the migrant workers who made reverse migrations marked mammoth struggles or elaborate
journeys by their antimonies of language, body, social sufferings and gendered entitlements. It is
their struggle of securing a seat in transport services or the socio-cognitive awareness of returning
home, that imbued them in nets of empowerment and disempowerment. Many of the participants
referred to it as ‘aacha nahi lag raha ghaar jaana’ (not feeling like going back home), ‘pata nahi
logo ko kya batau, konsa kaam karta hun’ (I don’t know what to tell people, what work I do?),
‘bojh saa lagta hein’ (feeling like a burden) and so on. This offers a situation similar to the sym-
bolic capital, formed through the narrativisation of ‘trauma stories’. Such ‘trauma stories’ then
crack open the varied ways to arrange ‘physical resources’ while achieving ‘the status of political
refugee’ (Kleinman and Kleinman, 1997: 10).
Das et al. 13

In navigating the uncertainties of pandemic journeys, reinforcement of gendered normativity,

propriety and notions of honour has been evident. The migrant women participants in the study
stated that the crowded or stacked buses were specifically traumatic for them in their advanced
stages of pregnancy or menstruation, while men had more opportunities to stop the buses on dif-
ferent routes. Castrodale and Lane (2015: 73) would analyse this as the ‘disciplinary and regula-
tory role . . . in shaping how people are constituted and positioned in society in relation to such
identity vectors such as race, class, sex, gender and dis/ability’. So, the buses/transportation
remain a fragment of the society, shaping gender hierarchies and moral censures.
However, with the passage of the pandemic and resulting lockdown, ‘home’ or the social action
of returning to ‘home’ turned into a relieving as well as a subjugating zone of experience. This
ambiguity has been further tracked with the loss of their embodied lived spaces as well as their
domestic roles within and across their larger familial networks – affinal or consanguineal kins. This
affected their intra-household negotiations and traditional patrilocal familiality. For them, the
home was a space of inter-personal existence until they transferred economic, social, cultural and
informational resources from their workplaces, such as educating parents about schemes and gov-
ernment identification cards. Such an enigma of socio-material dislocations fostered a complex tie
between the building of a life vis-à-vis making of a life (Marques, 2018). On the other hand,
migrant workers oscillating between various institutional functionaries of the state also felt a sub-
jective apparition of ‘social mobility’ while conceiving national citizenship – the fact that their
names were registered in medical institutions and quarantine facilities as COVID-19 ‘negative’. In
hindsight, a large number of the participants also experienced a ‘stigma’ with regard to their label-
ling in quarantine set-ups and the community’s surveillance over them in later periods; re-consti-
tuting the governance of bodies, health and ecology.
Furthermore, the pandemic led to an augmentation of the situation for the migrant workers to
fear not merely their own but others’ death or imaginaries of infectious dead bodies. But such fears
also manoeuvred into a ‘hope’ of owing back one’s social position. Peterson and Wilkinson (2015)
analyse hope as a temporal relationship between the present and the future while constructing one’s
newer selves. This is not without the differentiating ideologies and practices of class-based identi-
ties and inequalities. While the poor migrant workers viewed leisure or the lack of income-gener-
ating work as a threat and socio-political oppression, those employed in public formal sectors or
MNCs embraced leisure as a break from their work, using time to develop new creative habits such
as cooking, dancing and singing. So, it is pertinent to understand ‘waiting’ as a longing for closure
in tuning, learning and translating to mobilising cultures. Jeffrey (2010) analyzes such a period of
fixities as a ‘chronic waiting’ or waiting for a lifetime with expectations while tying time to indus-
trialised notions of chronological economic values. But, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic
and beyond, ‘time’ has been used by the participants as a scarce resource to socially process and
contain the vitality of their bodies, livelihood and ways to navigate ‘social mobility’ in multiple
forms. In such cases, dissociations did not lead one to retreat but share existential meanings with
diverse people and places to renew multiple mobilisations across and within the social, legal,
political and economic structures of power.

Conclusion
The article uncovers the embodiments of ‘social mobility’ among the migrant workers working in
the informal economic sectors as well as their experiences of forced and reverse migrations during
the COVID-19 pandemic in India. It contests the idyllic definitions of ‘forced’ migration as the
visible transgressive or calculated effect of dislocations on people through phenomena such as
wars, conflicts, environmental crisis and so on. Instead, this article explored forced migration as
14 Journal of Asian and African Studies 00(0)

the complex existentialities and socio-spatial mobilities of the marginalised migrant workers,
denoting the forms of forced movements owing to their sudden unemployment, lack of mental sup-
port, uncertain living and societal inequities. In that case, the ‘social mobility’ by its prior stand-
ardisation cannot be mapped as either downward or upward in levels but offers a structure of
liminality between the social processes of mobility and immobility. The movements in midst of the
pandemic do not ensure a transference from one social role to the other but make social roles per-
meable between persistence and destruction. Such shifting and fixing of life processes are expressed
in negotiating with state institutions, accessing communicational resources, sharing traumas with
peer migrant workers at the former workplaces even after reverse migration, searching for new
jobs and so on. Disrupted and intensified shifts toward alternative forms of livelihood management
occurred both within and beyond the physical and social spaces inhabited by the ‘affected’ indi-
viduals. Though reverse migration highlighted the challenges faced by migrant workers in India’s
informal economic sector, where they often lack adequate economic and social security measures,
it also encodes that social mobility is not only the end result of a dyadic scale – prosperous or
declining spatial movements.
The article, by highlighting the dilemmas faced by migrant workers during the pandemic, argues
that ‘social mobility’ should be understood as a multi-faceted process of transformation. In this
process, the normalisation of social organisation is not only destabilised but also actively re-navi-
gated. The condition of liminality, as well as the politics that shape and are shaped by this liminal-
ity, deeply influence migrant workers’ identities, domestic relationships, and their aspirations to
reform and reshape their social lives. Social mobility, therefore, emerges not simply as a linear
outcome or effect of socio-economic shifts but as a dynamic, ongoing process that actively recon-
figures one’s sense of being(ness).
To effectively address the vulnerabilities and uncertainties faced by migrant workers during
such crisis, a more efficient governace mechanism need to be steered by the state. Policy frame-
works must move beyond reactive welfare models. Moreover, embedding social mobility within
governance structures as a right rather than a privilege will acknowledge the agentiality of migrant
workers. This approach reimagines governance as a more contingent and responsive system. Most
importantly, there is a need to start seeing social mobility not as a distant desire for the marginal-
ised but rooted in the everyday realities of those who are too often left unheard.

Acknowledgements
We are highly grateful to all the research participants of the study who took time from their busy schedules to
address our questions and interact with us. We would also like to extend our gratitude to all the informants
who helped us to reach the participants experiencing significant challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during the current study are not publicly available due to the request of the participants
who revealed certain sensitive information of their COVID-19 pandemic crisis. But it is available from the
corresponding author on request.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publi-
cation of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Das et al. 15

Ethical approval statement

The departmental research committee of the University (Department of Sociology) approved the work in July
2020. The respondents gave informed (verbal) consent before starting the interviews.

ORCID iD
Amiya Kumar Das https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6031-5221

Notes
1. The participants joined other occupations during and after the pandemic. But it took some time to recover
from the adverse effects of the pandemic. Despite joining other occupations like shop assistantship, car-
pentry and so on. They never felt satisfied, which led to shifts in their motivations, social existences, life
processes and accumulation of resources.
2. Two of the authors were well-versed in Odia while the third author had some understanding of the
language.

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Author biographies
Amiya Kumar Das is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology, and Coordinator of the Centre for
Public Policy and Governance at Tezpur University, Assam. His research interests include the sociology of
development, migration studies and the sociology of the state and governance. He has published on issues
related to citizenship, governance, marginality and everyday state practices.
Soumen Ray, PhD, is currently the Chief of Social Policy at the UNICEF Office for Timor-Leste. He has
published a number of academic articles, authored book primarily focusing on poverty and human rights. Dr.
Ray has over 20 years of experience working with UN agencies, which he brings to his current role.
Ahana Choudhury is a Research Scholar at the Department of Sociology, Tezpur University, Assam. She
possesses substantial research experience and her research interests include aging and social care, gender
issues, migration and family as well as digital humanities. She has published research articles in international
journals.