Becoming hybrid selves: identity negotiations among rural-to-urban migrant women in urban India

Rural-to-urban migration for education and employment is expanding among Indian women, yet their identity work is understudied. Using focused ethnography and constructivist grounded theory and guided by Galliher, McLean, and Syed (2017) four-level identity model, we analyse interviews and observations with 18 first-generation Maharashtrian women living in Pune and Mumbai. We develop the grounded theory Becoming Hybrid Selves through Situated Everyday Negotiations. Women negotiated hybrid selves through dialect switching, strategic self-presentation, role multiplicity, and the formation of micro communities of reflection. Negotiation here did not resolve tensions; it produced workable settlements within patriarchal oversight, rural–urban stigma, and caste- or tribe-coded judgements. Mobility brought opportunity, but also the costs of freedom, including fear, vigilance, reputational risk, and narrowed options, especially around caste-based categories in education and jobs and endogamy pressures in marriage. The study reframes hybridity as iterative identity work that is simultaneously enabling and costly.