Precarious Mobility of Disposable Lives: A Reading of Samina Mishra’s Jamlo Walks

In modern humanities, mobility is understood not just as various forms of movement, but also in terms of the socio-cultural processes surrounding various forms of spatial and temporal flux which play an integral role in shaping settlements, development of cultural activities and heterogeneous social practices. Mobility, like countless other issues, is also conditioned by considerations of class, caste, gender etc. in a country like India because there are various societal restrictions in place regarding who can move where and how. As Ohnmacht, Maksim and Bergman assert, “Mobilities, both latent and manifest, are unequally distributed throughout society, while inequality engenders and reinforces mobilities. Consequently, mobilities must be understood as both a result of, and a contributing factor to, social stratification and social inequality” (15). The same argument is also highlighted by John Urry who states, “[A]ccess is unequally distributed but the structuring of this inequality depends inter alia on the economics of production and consumptions of the objects relevant to mobility, the nature of civil society (the association and organisations beyond the economy state), the geographical distribution of people and activities, and the particular mobility-systems in play and their forms of interdependence” (Urry 17). During any particular social crisis, such barriers to mobility acquire heightened dimensions and become instrumental in inflicting unprecedented adversities. Kenyon and others define such mobility-driven exclusion as “[t]he process by which people are prevented from participating in the economic, political and social life of the community because of reduced accessibility to opportunities, services and social networks, due in whole or in part to insufficient mobility in a society and an environment built around the assumption of high mobility” (210). The COVID-19 pandemic was a global crisis which foregrounded such faultlines. The pandemic had unleashed unbearable torrents of grief owing to the countless deaths caused by the disease, particularly during the dreaded Second Wave in India which saw people dying on streets for lack of oxygen, corpses floating across the Ganges and skirmishes in cremation grounds for performing a person’s last rites (Johri 2021; Biswas 2021). However, alongside the harrowing reports of death and suffering induced by the virus, the country also endured a traumatic lockdown as a result of which millions of migrant workers became jobless overnight and had to travel across the length and breadth of this country, in precarious circumstances, to reach the refuge of their village homes (Samaddar 2020; Suresh et al 2020; Vig 2021; Negi, 2022). The announcement of the lockdown on March 24, 2020 by the Indian Prime Minister gave migrant workers located in various corners of the country just four hours to prepare for an arduous return to their villages in different parts of northern, central and eastern India without either any governmentally arranged mode of transportation or any immediate financial support. Instantly these workers lost their wages, accommodations and networks of support and were forced to plunge into a future of uncertainty. A report by Reuters mentions, “For Indians who drive rickshaws or run food stalls, the economic shock of such control measures has been huge, pushing them to leave for family homes where they typically do not pay rent and food is cheaper.” (Jamkhandikar and Waydande 2020) As a result of such movements the Indian highways were suddenly flooded with enormous processions of migrants labourers who had embarked on excruciatingly long journeys on foot to their villages and since the Partition, the whole of the subcontinent had never seen anything like these scenes which were copiously broadcast through national and international media. As Utsa Sarmin remarks: 

Along with bearing the physical exertion, these workers had to shield themselves from continuous assault from the police which in many places lathi-charged the marching workers and humiliated them by making them doing sit-ups while holding their ears, a form of punishment widely used in the subcontinent mainly to discipline unruly children. In some videos circulated on social media, one can see the police making the workers jump while squatting in an attempt to teach them a lesson through humiliation for violating the lockdown. (Sarmin 50)

Humiliation was not limited to scenes like these. In one particular case, in UP, the returning migrant labourers were also sprayed with bleach, apparently to disinfect them. In Delhi-UP border, Haryana, Gujarat and Maharashtra, the police also attacked and arrested migrant workers on several occasions as they tried to walk home or demanded arrangements for their safe transportation to faraway villages. It was only on the last week of May 2020, more than two months after the beginning of the lockdown that the Supreme Court ordered the Centre and the States to mandatorily ensure food and shelter for the migrant workers and bear the cost of their transportation as till then migrants were often being forced to pay exorbitant fares for their journeys via different forms of road transportation (June 29, 2021). Even more significantly, such journeys forced several labourers to lose their lives due to the unbearable combination of exertion, heat and lack of food and water. By June 2020 alone, according to Reuters, almost 200 migrant labourers had died on the road (Jamkhandikar and Waydande 2020). In June 2021, one year later, Indian Express reported that over 8700 people died on the railway tracks during 2020 and the majority of them were migrant labourers (Indian Express, June 2, 2021). Particularly shocking was the death of 16 migrant workers in Aurangabad who were run over by a freight train while they slept on the railway tracks. Surprisingly, when responding to queries of MPs, the Indian government declared in September 2020 that it had no data either about the death of migrant workers or their loss of jobs (Nath, 2020). In contrast, by 5^th May 2020 the government had already decided to operate 64 flights from May 7 to May 13 to bring home around 14,800 Indian nationals stranded abroad (The Week, 5 May 2020). Such blatant apathy, inadequacy and disparity operate as stark reminders of the systemic elitism of governmental apparatuses and the precarity to which lakhs of migrant workers were carelessly consigned. 

The preacrity of these workers becomes a classic example of that notion of bare life which became one of the constitutive concepts of the modern polis in Agamben’s analysis. As Agamben asserts, “bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men” (Agamben, 6). In the same way the Indian government’s absolute lack of any policy or mechanism for the safety and the safe transportation of the migrant labourers, prior to the deluge of media reports regarding their suffering and the interventions of the Supreme Court, exemplifies a vision of the nation which has come into being through the exclusion of the precarious lives of the migrant workers who had been reduced to that category of “bare life” which might be subjected to death without amounting to sacrifice. The insistence on complete shutdown of transportation and industry and commerce and confinement within households with only a few hours’ notice inevitably excludes that crucial section of the population whose mere existence in metropolitan cities or agricultural areas reliant on migrant labour depends on the continuation of routine economic activities. As Agamben explained, “Bare life remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion” (Agamben 7). Being forced to leave their tenements and bereft of the means to return to their villages, the migrant labourers become a classic example of the disposable bare life within the domain of Indian biopolitics.

My paper focuses on this precarious bare life associated with the migrant labourers through the representational matrix of Samina Mishra and Tarique Aziz’s picture book, Jamlo Walks which tries to communicate, to both children and adults, the nature of social disparities and the excruciating impact they often inflict. The text begins on the 7^th day of the nationwide lockdown with people observing how “the skies are blue again”. Such remarks, coupled with sights of mountain peaks and other distant objects flooded the social media in those days. However, all such observations could only stem from the comfort of one’s own home which was obviously unavailable to the thousands of migrant workers on the march across India. Jamlo Makdam was one of them. The twelve year old Jamlo belonged to the Muria tribe of Bastar in Chhattisgarh and had gone to Telengana to work as a labourer in the chilli fields. Children from such impoverished families, across Chhattisgarh and especially in Bastar, regularly provide such labour to supplement their families’ meagre incomes (Status of Child Labour in India, 2021; Kim and Olsen 2023). They are paid either in cash or in the form of sacks of chillies. After the announcement of the lockdown, the labour contractor asked them to return and she along with fellow villagers who had made the same journey, started their long and arduous walk back to their village on 16^th April – a journey of around 200 kilometres. The first illustration with Jamlo refers to this march and the exhausting nature of the journey becomes evident from the visual representation of the seemingly interminable stretch of roads and fields. This entire ordeal highlights, on the one hand, the terrible physical toll which the lockdown exacted from the migrant workers, and on the other hand, the acute structural inequality which compelled the migrant workers to endure such a fate even as policy makers and the supporters of governmental measures remained safely ensconced within their own homes.

The text further highlights this disparity by juxtaposing the condition of Jamlo with other fictitious privileged children such as Tara, Rahul or Aamir who neither suffer from any dearth of food nor any absence of  education nor any burden of manual labour. Pages involving these characters visually delineate for us a world of material and technological advantages characterised by laptops, internet connection, refrigerators, housemaids and so on which inevitably alienate these children from the plight of someone like Jamlo who has to depend on the charitable offerings of roadside food-stall owners and other shop-owners for receiving the minimum food and water required for sustenance. Jamlo, in this context becomes a representative of all those people whose labour is essential for the various privileges we take for granted even as they themselves remain utterly excluded from those privileges. This is why the text also indirectly refers to the plight of other labourers associated with the informal sectors, who constitute the modern precariat, such as the rickshaw-puller who is married to Rupa didi who works as a cook in Rahul’s house. As Rahul looks at the cluster of shacks where Rupa didi and her husband live, from a high window, the image again becomes illustrative of the structural inequality at the heart of the plight of the precarious workers. It is through such images that text compels its readers, particularly the children, to become aware of the inequalities and precarities which often remain occluded from urban middle class households. Unlike Tara’s Amma who shuts the laptop when she observes Tara peeping at the images of the migrant labourers on the march, the text obviously wants its young readers to confront these images, ask questions and develop empathetic understanding regarding surrounding inequalities and precarities.

Of course, it is through Jamlo that this precarity becomes most significantly exemplified as she dazedly keeps walking along the highways in scorching heat with the silence only being broken by either a zooming car or the sound of birds. As Jamlo ponders on the freedom of the birds flying and chirping around her, once again the natural world becomes a foil for the constraints circumscribing the lives of people like Jamlo. Eventually, Jamlo has to surrender herself to the exhaustion as she lies down under the shade of a handful of sal trees who “stand straight like soldiers” (21). However unlike the VIPs guarded thus by soldiers, Jamlo is the representative of the most vulnerable sections of the society who receive no protection from the state and are left to their own devices in the middle of a global crisis. This is why a couple of migrant workers who walk past a sleeping Jamlo whisper, “They are saying Corona kills… but bhai, so does hunger…” (21). Such a statement echoes the statement of Sanjay Sharma, a taxi driver in Mumbai, originally from Himachal Pradesh, given to Reuters, which perfectly summed up the macabre situation faced by the migrant workers in India: “Some people will die of the virus. The rest of us will die of hunger” (Jamkhandikar and Waydande 2020).

Jamlo too died. On 18^th April 2020, just 55-60 kilometers away from her village, Jamlo collapsed and passed away owing to lack of food and excess of exhaustion and heat. The image of a happy girl in the company of her parents, which the text showcases and which the narrator associates with the probable final thoughts of Jamlo, remains elusive and forever beyond the reach of many like her. Instead, the final image of the text, with a single slipper, a yellow leaf and the parents waiting for their deceased daughter, becomes resonant with all the agony that is associated with the kind of rejection, void and trauma which led to the utterly unbearable demise of twelve year old Jamlo Makdam – a tragedy that must pierce the passivity, indifference and insularity in which we are habitually ensnared. Significantly, this was not unique in the traumatic pandemic-riddled India of the time. Several other children also died during this period owing to varied forms of adversities brought about by the lockdown. For example, a four year old child named Ishaq died in the Muzaffarpur railway station of heat and exhaustion as his father desperately searched for some milk (PTI, 27 May 2020). The representation of Jamlo’s fate includes within itself all such traumatic events, reported and unreported, which occurred across India during this period. The text concludes by stating that “Her walk needs to be remembered if we want to create a world that shares resources fairly, a world that listens to everyone’s voices, a world that is just and kind” (31). This utopian longing however is undercut by the concluding image of the text which focuses on the seemingly interminable march of the workers that epitomises the deepening structural inequalities of our times. More than anything else, the text therefore forces its readers, both children and adults, to question what policies or measures may be undertaken, with regard to inclusive forms of mobility, alleviation of poverty, child labour and the nature of an economic paradigm which forces thousands of people, including children, into a life of miserable displacement and exhausting mobility.

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