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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the moral and ethical dilemmas of “borrowing time” from kin and the expectation and negotiation of 'appropriate' return, to foreground the temporal dimensions of becoming and belonging among northeastern women moving to the southern Indian city of Bangalore for higher education.

Paper long abstract

Over the last decade, many young people have moved out of ‘Northeast’ India, a borderland fraught with ethno-religious conflict and State repression, to ‘mainland’ Indian cities for higher education and work. Drawing on 15-months of ethnographic fieldwork with college-going women from various northeastern states in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, this paper thinks through the temporal dimensions of their racialised mobilities.

In foregrounding the idea of ‘return’—both as they use education to bargain for time from their families, and as a negotiation of the expectation to return home to “where one belongs”—I suggest that rather than disentangle the fantasies that underscore their orientations to living otherwise and elsewhere from the familial and ethnic ties within which their other aspirations are shaped and constrained, there is value in holding them together. Through this approach, what emerges is a view of belonging that intertwines intimacy with projects of individual and collective aspiration. Simultaneously, it allows us to see how belonging is constituted not only in and through people’s orientations to the past and the places they come from, but also the future, and to the other places they hope they might come to see.

In describing how Bangalore becomes a space of “borrowed time” for young women from the northeast, I thus explore the affective contours, pressures, and moral dilemmas of such borrowing and its attendant expectation of ‘return,’ as indeed how it allows them to test the extent to which such intention itself might be stretched.