Migration

The once-derided culinary tradition of Bangal refugees from East Pakistan is slowly gaining acceptance and pride of place in popular culture and gastronomical writing.

The early 20th-century nationalist discourse in India held the colonial state and the middlemen (maistry) responsible for the exploitation of the migrant labourers. The issue of their miserable condition eventually merged within the nationalist movement. This paper studies the experiences and perspectives of Dalit migrants in Burma and their role in the social and political movements in that period. The paper argues that the caste oppression, enmeshed in the labour exploitation, was the defining factor in their migration overseas. Dalits who migrated to Burma primarily struggled against caste oppression in their immediate socio-economic and spatial context, a fact that was hardly acknowledged in the nationalist discourse. Hence, the Dalit migrants were critiques of the upper-caste nationalist discourse.

Due to centralised and infl exible infrastructures of state care involving upper-level bureaucratic decision-making and heavy reliance on documentary modalities, even the radically decentralised states such as Kerala are underperforming in their welfare responsibilities. A greater role for local governments needs to be re-envisioned.

Resilient remittances will help cushion the impact of volatility in foreign investment inflows.

Reclaiming Development Studies: Essays for Ashwani Saith edited by Murat Arsel,Anirban Dasgupta and Servaas Storm, London and New York: Anthem Press, 2021; pp 300, $40.