Book Forum on Labor Skills and Migration in India

Abstract

This Book Forum features four recent books on the intersecting topics of Indian migration, labor, and class. Spanning disciplines that include anthropology, sociology, and political economy, the books examine different classes of migrants and feature multiple migration corridors at the domestic and global levels. The books carefully represent and analyze the experiences of highly educated Indian workers and their spouses migrating west-ward and of craftsmen and poorer, vulnerable workers migrating to other areas within the country or to the gulf. The books also explore government policies that shaped those migration flows, and especially the nexus between class and migration in India. For this Forum, the four book authors were invited to engage with each other’s books in an effort to spark conversations that bridge these different spaces of migration. Vivek Chibber, author of The Class Matrix , was invited to serve as a discussant on the Forum.