Home as Assemblage: Architectures of Circular Migration

Pranjal Sancheti

Being a migrant to the city of Mumbai, I always wondered about the huge influx of migrants who come to the city for work, education, leisure, etc, and the way in which the city incorporates them all. Some experiences during my stay in some other cities drew attention towars the practices of migration of seasonal salesmen, construction workers, etc. Migration is a practice performed differently by different groups of people according to their convenience and needs.“Migration is defined as the movement of people away from their usual place of residence, either within the country or across countries’ borders.”Migration can be highly effective in terms of securing improved socio-economic conditions, access to higher education, and giving the family and children a chance to better their future prospects. Large numbers of the poor migrate to towns and cities for daily, or contract wage employment, or self-employment.

When one has to migrate to a place they have to shift their livelihood to the new place, and set up things like food, living(house), place of work, transportation, etc. Living in these cities for a considerable amount of time and observing many people practicing the same migratory way of living, generated interest in studying the migratory practices of various people in the city of Mumbai. It became evident that this phenomenon was not unique to my own experiences but was a widespread societal pattern. People migrate either alone or with their family members depending upon various conditions. Specifically, when it comes to low-income migrants their livelihood depends upon the kind of work they find in the urban setting. Making a space for themselves in the city becomes a challenging task. My area of research focuses on a category of migrants who move between places within a short period of time are temporary migrants and when they repeat the process periodically they are called circular migrants. 

Circular migration is a form of migration that challenges conventional notions of settlement and belonging. Circular migrants navigate the city in a cyclical manner (a pattern of movement where individuals or groups of people migrate temporarily or periodically between two or more places). Their livelihood depends on the new opportunities that they get and they make a huge impact on the city and its urban spaces. They constantly try to make new connections that help them in their future.

The temporary nature of living makes lives precarious and uncertain. Shifting between places makes one question the idea of home for these migrants. The home gets shaped by the correspondents along the way. Within this context, the concept of ‘home’ undergoes a fascinating transformation, evolving into a multifaceted assemblage shaped by the rhythms of mobility and the fusion of diverse experiences. A focus on ‘home as assemblage’ could help envision alternate delivery mechanisms and spatialities for housing precarious lives.

My study focuses on circular migrants who move between Mumbai and their village in pursuit of new opportunities related to work, living conditions, and health for themselves and their families. The primary emphasis is on studying the living arrangements and conditions of these migrants in the city. It started with random walks in the city while observing the people around me and striking up a conversation. The migrant establishes a foothold within the city and secures a specific presence in a particular area of the landscape. After studying the twelve cases and analyzing them based on the pattern that they generate, two cases from extremities and two from the in-between were selected to be detailed further. profile. The profile encompasses fundamental aspects such as age, gender, religious affiliation, caste, community, and the composition of their household in the city. These demographic details play a pivotal role in understanding the diverse range of migrants who embark on this journey. Throughout the journey of the migrant, they generate various networks, and in the process of this network generation lies the home i.e., the home not just remains an entity but becomes an assemblage of space, people, objects, etc. These networks lie in the social and economic interactions that the migrant makes regarding living, work, leisure, pleasure, etc. All these networks hold the life of a migrant.

Life is formed around the idea of space and its affordances. Here in  the case of circular migrants the idea of movement adds up a layer to it, where the inhibition is transformative and temporal. Due to the precarity of the lives of circular migrants the home almost becomes a fluid entity which holds the lives of migrants. In this impermanent sense of living, the idea of home making gets formulated through networks and assemblage. The research unravels these networks at multiple intersecting scales of tenement, cluster, neighborhood and the place of origin of the migrant, that produce the infrastructural encounters of home-making practices. The strength and durability of these networks shape home for the migrant.

My research got an opportunity to be a part of a two day international conference ‘Experiencing Home: Domestic Architecture in Urban Writing’ organized by the Department of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, in collaboration with the Association for Literary Urban Studies where the ideas were shared between scholars from various disciplines.

Further,  I had an opportunity to exhibit my thesis work in the exhibition ‘The Waiting Room’ which became a place within the ICAS13 conference in Surabaya, Indonesia which invited people to linger through the inquiries of the research programme ‘Youth on the Move: Performing Urban Space in Global South’.  'The Waiting Room' exhibited about 50 stories of youth on the move across the region of Asia and Africa to consider the dialectics of youth-actions and corresponding (un) folding urbanities.