FROM MIGRATION TO INTEGRATION: THE JOURNEY OF MIGRANT WORKERS IN KERALA

Abstract

Culture continues to be a constantly evolving and dynamic. With the continuous interactions between people at all levels and between different cultures, the notions of culture of a particular target group keeps changing. The development of a cultural notion is dynamic and will continue to be so, and it can only be comprehended over a longer period of time.
Migration is a social fact that cannot be attributed specifically to one point in time. For a variety of reasons, people have crossed boundaries. Some individuals relocate in quest of better career prospects. Others relocate to avoid violent conflict, hardship, hunger, fear, persecution, or abuses of human rights. Others do it in reaction to the unfavourable consequences of environmental issues like natural catastrophes, climate change, or other environmental problems. Many people relocate for a mix of these causes. However, there is an unavoidable relationship between a number of social, economic, political, cultural, and ecological elements that forms the foundation of migration with each journey that is performed by a person or a group of people. It is hard to generalise a consistent theory or a cause due to the very dynamic character it exhibits. Migration, which is sometimes thought of in terms of uniformity, is a phenomenon that differs from person to person. The effects of migration impact the economy, society, and state, however minimal they may be.
Migration to a place with a different culture generally involves a difficult journey. Blending into the host society is often a practical choice for migrants. An individual or group habituates to the customs and values of another culture while keeping its own unique culture via the process of acculturation.
In the background of the Indian society, the variety of languages, dialects, beliefs, traditions, and festivals continues to play a crucial role in the acculturation of immigrants. Migrants have a choice: they may either adapt to the dominant group's culture, reject it in order to preserve their own, or merge into a hybrid group (Berry, 1980). According to Üstüner (2017), three key factors shape the consumer lives of poor migrants, including (1) migration strips migrants of their naturalised cultural moorings from their previous local identities and forces them to deal with a mass-produced alien culture; (2) their minority ideology clashes with the dominant culture and is actively marginalized by it; and (3) they are forced to cope with the dominant consumer ideology.
India, which is rich in several diverse forms of culture, continues to serve as a social hub for people from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. The paper attempts in reviewing the migration to Kerala, in the background of the factors that pull the workers from other parts of the country and their responses and ability to negotiate – both at workplace and in the society, which are crucial for their social inclusion.