Betweens: City Lives, Rural Ties
Speaker
Vinay Gidwani
Affiliation
Chair, Department of Geography, Environment, and Society
Date and Time:
-
Location:
ICGC Commons for Critical Inquiry (537 Heller Hall) and Zoom.
Abstract: Working-class rural migrants make urban India. They are people we encounter everyday to whom we rarely spare a second thought. We know surprisingly little about their life stories and aspirations. How do these migrants speculate on urban futures and toil to craft meaningful lives in the face of uncertainty, hardship, and hostility? What in their assessments makes their lives consequential and livable? While each migrant story is unique, their lives reveal themselves as a stage on which larger forces play out, sometimes in unpredictable ways. No story is black and white. People live contradictions, dreams collide, desires are never free of ambiguity. Based on oral histories of “middle migrants” in Delhi and Hyderabad over several years, the talk opens a window into the speculative spatial strategies, moral orientations, and affective worlds of migrants who have managed to establish a foothold of some sort in these cities. Everyday philosophies guide their practices against patriarchy, caste oppression, and religious dogma. The life worlds of our interlocutors straddle the urban and rural in complicated ways, such that it becomes impossible to understand their urban lives without a sense of their rural ones. This “subaltern cosmopolitanism” is highlighted through the stories of a handful of working-class migrants.
Note: The talk is based on a collaborative book with Professor Priti Ramamurthy (GWSS, UW-Seattle) on the social worlds of working-class migrants in urban India (forthcoming with University of Washington Press, 2026).