Migrant Childhoods and Temporalities in India: A Reflective Engagement with Dominant Discourses

Temporality is recognized as critical to the understanding of childhoods by contemporary scholars of childhood. This paper explores the varying temporalities through which marginal childhoods (and their educational inclusion), particularly those situated in contexts of temporary internal migration, are constructed in the Indian context. Drawing on ethnographic data from the city of Bangalore, this paper problematizes how dominant ideals around migration, childhood, and schooling frame migrant children’s lives through linear temporalities. Furthermore, the paper argues that policy interventions that ostensibly include migrant childhoods do not engage critically with the politics of linear temporality which, in turn, is central to the exclusionary dynamics of migrant children’s schooling.