Movement of internal migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic in India: Enacting embodied citizenship

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the distress movement of circular internal migrants working in the urban informal sector back to their home states following the country-wide lockdown in India, to contain the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It analyzes the migrant as being bodily materialized through the denial of relationality, intercorporeality and the situational experiences of their bodies, at the intersections of labour and gender. It argues that citizenship in India is substantively an embodied experience as validated by the return movement of the migrants, whose suffering bodies stood out in the public eye, in sharp contrast to rest of the citizens who stayed locked in their homes to protect themselves from the COVID-19 virus as per government order. It concludes that the movement by migrants constitutes their ‘acts of citizenship’, through which they performatively negotiated their migrant identity resisting their embodied difference by enacting themselves as political subjects.