Stitching Selves, Spanning Spaces: Making Sense of Migrant Religiosity in Mumbai

Drawing on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in millennial Mumbai, stitching selves and spanning spaces describe two simultaneous processes at the heart of migrant religiosity in contemporary India and beyond. These twin processes of circular migration permit women and men from eastern India to travel across the breadth of the country to the metropolis of Mumbai and back home again.

Dr. Uday Chandra will narrate the stories of construction and domestic workers who stitch together new selves in the city as they rework popular Hinduism and indigenous Catholicism as resources for spiritual succor as well as bodily refuge. These are two very different sets of migrant narratives, the former rooted in the politics of caste-based contestation and empowerment in Bihar and the latter in “tribal” or "indigenous" articulations of Christianity in the forest state of Jharkhand. Yet these divergent narratives, shaped by gendered processes of negotiating new postcolonial selves, help us make sense of the religious lifeworlds emerging in tandem with urban aspirations in contemporary India and beyond.

Between the political economy of labor circulation and the ethics of socio-religious change, the new selves stitched by migrants unsettle and rework established notions of place and belonging in unexpected ways.