Research Interest: Work, Labor, Value, Migration, Social Class, Economy

I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the National University of Singapore, Department of Sociology. Currently I am doing my fieldwork and a visiting fellow at the Center for Social Studies, Surat. Along with it I also serve as the Managing Editor of Asian Journal of Social Science. Previously, I finished my MSc in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and also held a scholarship at the Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg.

Research:

My doctoral research analyses labor migration to Surat from the 1960s. Focusing on a community in eastern India who have for the last five decades migrated to Surat’s powerlooms I problematize the invisibilization of internal migrants both from numbers and narratives. My research re-frames Surat’s capitalism as precarity capitalism by focussing on labor migrant’s experiences of the absence of labor mobilization, downward social mobility and changing structure of powerlooms. It focuses on the relationship among different forms of precariousness experienced by the workers, how they conceptualise value and the emergent politics of labor mobilization. In my thesis I argue that the understanding of labor migration in political economy of capitalism, particularly in Surat, has predominantly focussed on capital-capital relations. A story of the workers who form the spine of Surat’s powerloom has been missing. I demonstrate how the understanding of the labor lifeworld allows us to re-evaluate contemporary Surat, bring a focus on spaces where labor mobilization is invisible and labor movements are absent and analyse how migration emerges from what I call dispositional precarity. My research although qualitatively focuses on internal labor migrants from eastern India to Surat’s powerloom sector, explores questions such as How does a community become insecure and theorize their moving? How do we understand spaces of labor where labor unionization, mobilization, protests or revolutions are absent ? In absence of labor mobilization how do workers dissent ? How do labor migrants use their cultural capital in framing their selfhood ? How does a city or home or village as a social space appear to people who become labor migrants? My concern is mostly to understand the sensibilities of labor migrants. Centering their sensibility, my research explains why people migrate despite being aware of the multiple layers of exploitation and extraction involved in migration ?