A031Dhwani Jain Reflection Piece On Citizenship

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A031Dhwani Jain
Dr. Brijesh Tripathi
Sociology of citizenship and migration
31st October,2022
Reflection piece
Internal mobility is an important component of economic growth and development
because it allows labor to be reallocated to more productive opportunities across sectors
and regions. While the impact of state borders varies depending on education, age , and
reason for migration, it is always substantial. We contend that the existence of state-level
entitlement schemes, ranging from access to subsidized goods through the public
distribution system to a bias in access to tertiary education and public sector employment,
impedes inter-state mobility.
I am more focused on inter-state mobility because my lived examples are related to it.
India being a country of a wide variety of cultures, sometimes, migrating from one Indian
state to another might as well give you cultural shocks. When I migrated from Madhya
Pradesh to Maharashtra, as a 7 year old, language came out to be one of the obvious
cultural differences I felt. When i made new friends in the community, They used various
peculiar marathi terms or phrases which I had never heard of and they seemed weird to
me, There was a time when i had this discussion with my mother that the tone of
Marathi language is a bit harsh , It doesn't feel great to the ears, at that time, i started
developing a resentment towards the language, i was adamant that i don't want to pick up
words and phrases from this language, i deliberately made attempts to hangout with peers
who speak english or hindi rather than marathi, whenever i use to go back to Madhya
Pradesh and other family members use to jokingly associate me with being a
maharashtrian, I always resented it. Maybe the resentment came from the natural instinct
that i wanted to protect my own culture inside of me and also my mother as it was also
her first time moving out of her home- state, she was also reluctant in accepting the new
culture.
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Anyway , escaping from the new culture was obviously not possible as it was everywhere
in my surroundings . There were times when suddenly my friends would naturally switch
to marathi and I would feel like an outsider because I wouldn't understand the language.
That made me realize the need to embrace the new culture to feel more belonged to the
new community. There the paradigm shift happened, I started adopting marathi jargon. The
cherry on the cake was the Maharashtrian food. I really loved the taste of it from the very
beginning. It played a huge role in my acceptance towards the new culture. When I started
embracing and accepting the culture, It gave me a sense of more belongingness and
acceptance from the community.
As mentioned in the reading, “ Mexicans in Alaska”, chapter 5, “ stuff of transitional lives”,

Along with food, another major topic on the table was the comparison of food tastes in
Alaska from that of Mexico, also the comparison of prices of various food items was a
general topic of conversation. I encountered similar conversations by my parents at the
dinner table, how vegetables were more fresh and tasted better in their hometown in
M.P than it tasted here in M.H. Also conversations about how specific dishes like poha are
cooked differently in both the states.
There was also the transition of material culture, for the longest time our family use to
buy clothes from the specific shops in our hometowns and carry them here all the way
from MP to MH instead of buying from the markets here.Also we use to carry with us,
certain vegetables which we don't find here in maharashtra, all this gave us a sense of
comfort in the new environment. We also used to carry small things like pickles made by
my grandmother, to our new locality, so as to feel more like home.
People of our own community play a huge role in such kinds of migration, after we
shifted to maharashtra, my parents became more active in the religious gatherings so as to
meet new people, we discovered more families from MP who shifted here recently, we
shared nearby home towns, spoke the same kind of language and had same cultural
background in general,eventually we formed a small group of people sharing similar cultural,
religious and social background, the families gelled up well, and it gave them an “ at
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home” feeling, I still remember how excited my parents use to be to go in these gatherings
rather than gatherings which happened in our neighborhood which involved families of
different cultural background.
We discussed a concept of returning back to roots, which says that immigrants, who
migrate to a new country, for certain year feel good and highly of their new community
but after some time passes, they start embracing their roots and return to their own
culture, such examples have been shown by people who have lived 15 - 20+ years in the
foreign country. I've encountered people in my life, who had this paradigm shift, for the first
5-8 years they felt so satisfied , successful in the foreign country but after the 8th year,
there was a sudden shift in their perspective, they wanted to be associated with the indian
culture more, even more than they wanted it when they lived in India. They started
celebrating the culture more and wanted to be associated with it and represent it as a sense
of identity in the foreignland. Some of them who were so adamant about shifting to a new
country for a better standard of living, returned back to their homeland even when they did
achieve the living standard which they always wished for. They were ready to leave their high
paying jobs, well-settled businesses, just to return to their homeland and start from scratch.
All these, examples hint towards the concept of belongingness, people migrate to a newer
community maybe due to socio-economic factors but at the end everything comes down
to “belongingness”.In the new community, they want to be identified by their original
community but simultaneously also want to feel a sense of acceptance belongingness from
the new community, belonging is best understood as an entanglement of multiple and
intersecting relations, reflecting relational dimensions of inclusion and exclusion. Majority of
the discussions in citizenship and migration basically talk about the challenges, dilemmas
and perspectives people encounter during migration to feel the sense of belongingness.
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As mentioned in the reading, “ Mexicans in Alaska”, chapter 5, “ stuff of transitional lives”,

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