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Nehru's dream and the village 'waiting room': Long-distance labour migrants to a central Indian steel town

Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK

This article focuses on long-distance rural migrants to the steel town of Bhilai. The Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP) was built with Soviet aid and by largely migrant labour drawn from all over India. It was one of a handful of mega-projects intended to kick-start India's modernisation, epitomising the Nehruvian dream. The central question addressed here concerns the extent to which its workforce have become permanent urban dwellers or form part of a pattern of rotating migration. The argument is that different patterns of migration are characteristic of workers in public and private sector factories, and at different levels of the industrial hierarchy. The aristocracy of labour are most likely to become fully-fledged townsmen. Surprisingly, this pattern is not significantly inflected by regional origin. The supposedly visceral commitment of migrants from Bhojpur to their villages does not make them more likely to return there. There are pragmatic reasons why not, but the article suggests that this is also a consequence of the extent to which the BSP workforce has internalised a vision of modernity which antithetically constructs the village as an area of darkness—a 'waiting room' from which one hopes to escape.

Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 37, No. 1-2, 217-249 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/006996670303700110


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