Each year hundreds of thousands of workers journey to the fields of central southern West Bengal to transplant and harvest rice. Some come from the Chhotanagpur plateau to the west, others from Santal Parganas to the northwest and still others from the northeast and the southwest. Migration east (pube jawa) for rice work from the Chhotanagpur plateau is not new. Even before the canals were constructed in the alluvial plains of Bengal's Barddhaman district in the 1960s, workers from Chhotanagpur were involved in West Bengal's rice cultivation. Indeed, they claim to have been central to the canal construction as well. What has changed is that there are more roads and more buses and a larger number of days' work available.
Anecdotes suggest that as recently the 1950s, it would have been common to walk to the area of intensive rice cultivation. At that time, men travelled alone or in small groups and did not wait to be solicited by employers. Payment was commonly in kind – migration meant survival and there was little to save. With the coming of a second rice crop in alluvial West Bengal from the 1970s, the number of days of available employment doubled. This crop became much more widespread in the 1980s as farmers invested in shallow tube wells and the agrarian conflicts of the previous two decades appeared to have been put behind them. West Bengal's Communist Party of India (Marxist) government has been able to take credit for this capitalist revolution in agriculture, which continued well into the 1990s. It was not the second crop alone which increased the demand for labour, but also the more intensive cultivation of monsoonal rice with new 'high yielding' varieties of seeds and the now almost universal use of chemical fertiliser. Only, since the late 1990s the prosperity of rice cultivation in Barddhaman has come under threat because of a decline in prices associated with newly liberalised rice imports.
While these changes have been going on at the destination of the Chhotanagpur migrant labourer, Chhotanagpur has lacked comparative agricultural growth, further hindered by intermittent drought. When we were in the area to make the journey with the employment seekers of a village in eastern Puruliya district one cold November morning in 1999, the drought was in its third year – agricultural activities in this part of Chhotanagpur had had to be drastically curtailed and more people were seeking work, some of them now for different reasons. In more prosperous periods, landed people – albeit cultivators of very small plots of land – would migrate to bring in additional lumps of money for small investments, perhaps towards the cost of a marriage ceremony, or the purchase of a goat. Now the money was needed, as it always had been for the poorest landless people, in order to make ends meet across the year.
The journeys, though over relatively short distances, were often experienced as long and dangerous while the distance away from the familiarity of home was perceived as great. In most other migration streams, journeys were made on a combination of bus and train or by truck, and from certain areas and social groups men alone made the journey with women and children staying behind at home. In this stream, the journey was made at a stretch by bus. In the bus, women and children would be crammed inside with men on the roof.