Unfree Mobility: Advasi Women’s Migration

Abstract

On a hot summer’s day in 1982, while walking through a jungle path in Bankura, West Bengal, anthropologist Narayan Banerjee asked an old Santhal woman who was accompanying him to narrate her experiences as a migrant agricultural laborer. At this, she stopped and exclaimed “what a foolish question to ask! I have lost count of how many times I have gone to ‘your’ village and of course you know how we stayed and worked there, what we gave and what we received. Even if you were young in those days, surely you noticed.”