Rethinking Citizenship, Community and Rights

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between state, citizenship, communities and rights by exploring the ways in which nurses from Kerala experience their professional lives and migration. Far from being a straightforward relationship between relocation and homogeneous citizenship as an Indian, cultural and linguistic attachments are sought by these women. Common, unmarked citizenship embodied in legal membership in the Indian state as Indian citizens with legal and fundamental rights enables these migrant women from Kerala to exercise individual choice regarding work; their choice of profession and their movement seeking work are in major ways determined by their linguistic and ethnic identities. Their status as workers opens up new spaces—physical and social—and leads them to ways and means of living with more freedom in the social realm. The migrant women, therefore, feel that they have left behind the attachments and associations of dependence and feel ‘autonomous’ in the anonymity that the public space in Delhi has given them. On the other hand, their anonymity is marked by their linguistic and gender identities. Their repositioning in Delhi looks like an opportunity to negotiate the patrifocal nature of the community and family. Gender and ethnic hierarchies are reinforced in the communal sphere of a strange city in the event of changes in the traditional status of various communities and both genders.

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