City in Their Imagination: Narratives of ‘Left-behind’ Bhumihar Women

This paper addresses how 'left-behind' women imagine the distant city spaces and how their imagination, experiences, and aspirations of migration are shaped by their caste, class, and age.Through the narratives of upper-caste rural Bhumihar women, this paper aims to spotlight some vignettes of gender and migration.Migration is common among various caste groups in Bihar, although its history, intensity, nature and pattern differ for each group.While migration as a livelihood strategy is a dominant theme in academic studies, its emotional and aspirational aspects, especially in the context of gender, have not received much scholarly attention.This paper, therefore, foregrounds the category of 'left-behind women', and privileges the experiences, aspirations, and meaning-making by left-behind women of their social worlds and the world their men inhabit.These women, of course, are not a homogeneous category, but their class and family locations engender specific power dynamics mediating not only their existence but also differing aspirations related to the 'distant' migrant city perceived and imagined in diverse ways.