Research Paper
Year: 2018 | Month: December | Volume: 5 | Issue: 12 | Pages: 430-437
Peasants to Migrants: A Neo-Marxist Perspective on Indentured Labour System in Rural India
Shilpi Smita Panda1, Nihar Ranjan Mishra2
1Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela
2Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela
Corresponding Author: Shilpi Smita Panda
ABSTRACT
Labour migration has been a complex phenomenon that has been affecting the lives and livelihood of the marginalized and resource deprived people. The push and pull factors extending from origin to destination has been a well- established cause for this form of mobility. But the major factor which influences the process is the decision-making for migration, whether man decides on the basis of his own free will to migrate calculating the pros and cons of migration before taking the journey, or they are forced, entrapped and enslaved through economic coercion and physical force. There has been conflicting interpretation of labour migration. A group of anti-colonial, neo-Marxist scholars argue it as a process of indentured labour system; a ‘new form of slavery’, where the labour is a victim of various forms of deception, coercion and manipulation of the recruiters and intermediaries. While other group of scholars from the Colonization and Modernization school argues labour migration to be an economic diversification strategy for improving the livelihood of the migrants and their family. The present paper follows the anticolonial strand of thought and attempts to explore the process of distress seasonal labour migration from Odisha (place of origin) to southern states (place of destination).The study is undertaken in the migration pockets of Kalahandi, Balangir and Koraput (KBK)districts in Odisha. Extensive labour migration from this region has been a consequence of land alienation and resource deprivation in the origin. The changing power relationship in the origin has opened up new forms of domination and subjugation for the agricultural labourers by trapping them into cycles of indebtedness by the recruiters and intermediaries every season.
Key words: anti-colonial, coercion, indebtedness, indentured labourer
[PDF Full Text]