By Amrita Datta | Issue 26
The Covid-19 pandemic is globally recognised as a period during which mobility was disrupted and constrained. However, for some in positions of relative privilege and with access to resources, it became an impetus for mobility. In this article, I examine the motivations and negotiations that shaped these movements through the case of Indian migrants. I consider these mobilities from my position as a researcher based in Germany, where, for many years, I conducted research among highly skilled Indian migrants before, during, and after the pandemic. During one of these periods, one of my participants shared an unsettling rumination: “Had the pandemic not happened, I would not realise how pathetic my life was and would hardly gather the courage to leave home”. It was unsettling in its visceral tone and the juxtaposition it offered - the need to move at a time when movement, globally, was constrained.
While unsettling, the desire for migration was not surprising. The pandemic emerged as a defining moment in people’s personal biographies that acted as migration catalysts for some. This is especially true for non-male individuals. Centring the male body here is intentional and crucial to emphasise the gendered privileges that cis-men hold within heteropatriarchal society in India and globally. Gender privilege translating to gender inequality is a global phenomenon but the gap between access to resources, burden of household responsibilities, childcare and mobility restrictions is much wider in what we call the Global South compared to the Global North. In light of this, I will discuss two contexts that emphasise how gender-based mobility restrictions in some countries with acute gender inequality mimic immobilities imposed at large during the pandemic, and how that realisation prompted non-male actors from India to make their migration decisions. The insights shared here emerge from my own research on India and the Indian migrants in Germany.
During the course of my research, I met many women migrants from India arriving in Germany once the pandemic-induced global lock-down eased. They shared that they made the migration decision during the pandemic, as home confinement was already disrupting their careers and professional lives. Some of these women were single while several became single when they ended their marriages and migrated to Europe. Others made joint decisions with their spouses to move as a family.
For several such non-male actors in India, the pandemic-induced immobility arrived as an entrapment at a time when they were already suffering from and negotiating domestic violence from their partners in the form of physical abuse, forced isolation, and loneliness. A participant revealed that in India, her mobility was usually limited to daylight hours due to her parents’ strict rules. Coming from a middle-class background, she would either have to take the family car when available or have one of her brothers accompany her. “This was claustrophobic. I could not have any privacy and meet my friends or even go on a date”, she shared. Though privileged in her access to a private vehicle, when the pandemic broke out, the global lockdown came as a double constraint on her mobility. It is during this period that she contemplated leaving home for higher education abroad and started applying at universities in Germany for a PhD programme. It took her a little more than a year and she finally migrated to a university town in the North Rhine-Westphalia region in 2022. Her move was not an easy one. She shared: “It was difficult to leave because I had applied for universities without the knowledge of my parents”. When she told her parents, she was faced with their shock and anger at her unilateral decision-making. Her initial move to Europe was undertaken without the support of her family. She had to use her savings to pay the initial tuition fees, until she could secure a scholarship. Acquiring funding for international education has been a key strategy for Indian youth to overcome their family’s resistance to studying abroad.
Her account points to the tensions, contradictions, and ambivalence of privileges that can be witnessed among the Indian middle class, where a daughter has constrained mobility due to her gender but simultaneously has access to chauffeured private vehicles, which enable her mobility differently. Therefore, while she has certain class privileges, her freedom of mobility is compromised by gender-based restrictions.
In a second case, one of the participants found themselves in a similar situation. Their mobility in the local neighbourhood was constrained and monitored by their family to prevent the neighbours from finding out they were gay. When the pandemic broke out, this participant was about to migrate to the Netherlands for a job in IT. But the closure of borders forced them to continue living with their parents and extended family, the people who severely restricted their mobility and would not accept their sexuality. Like many LGBTQ+ youth who are faced with non-supportive family members, my respondent wanted to leave home to find a place where they could live and be open about their sexuality. Instead, home, which was already a site of conflict, turned into a battleground as their family did not approve of their decision to migrate.
The Covid-19 pandemic remains a watershed in the history of the world. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge, firstly that it impacted the Global South differently from the Global North, and secondly that different social groups in the Global South were affected differently based on class, gender, and other social privileges. Looking at pandemic immobilities in the Global South through the lens of gender, it is interesting to note that while the pandemic brought temporary restrictions on people`s mobility across the world, it also motivated, pushed, and provoked many to choose migration as an act of reinventing their lives.
Amrita Datta
Amrita is the author of Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany: Why Move?. She is currently based at Bielefeld University, Germany. Earlier, Amrita was a Marie-Slodowska Curie Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Siegen and earned a doctoral degree in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
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