In Search of a New Muglan

Culture of Migration in the Eastern Himalayas

Abstract

Seven decades after India’s independence, tea plantations across Darjeeling are being abandoned by owners. This article explores afterlives of abandoned plantations in Darjeeling. Working through an analytic of livability, this paper asks what forms afterlives take—in these spaces of post-industrial ruination and decay. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in six abandoned plantations in Darjeeling and Siliguri, conducted by participant observation between 2019 and 2021. This article explores workers’ struggle to maintain a life of dignity in the wake of abandonment. This article will first describe two brief encounters where sentiments of dissatisfaction are expressed, which provide an understanding of the everyday precarity and marginalization of workers and their children. Abandonment has also engendered an increase in migration from these tea plantations. I will then explore the effects of transnational migration which displaces people’s identities and sense of belonging. I discuss how migration has been facilitated by kinship networks across borders. I will then discuss another set of encounters in a recruitment agency. Recruitment for transnational labor markets has engendered its own set of exploitation owing to India’s deficient migration policy and regulatory oversight. In this paper, I explore the choice to migrate as a wider political question of freedom and social transformation—a rethinking of the conditions of life to explore conditions for flourishing lives.