Abstract
Mobility is understood as displacement or the act of moving between locations and is a primeval spatial practice and a ubiquitous phenomenon. It signifies high modernity and connotes power, exclusion, resistance as well as criminality and gives rise to new hybrid cultures and contemporary cosmopolitanism. While mobility or ambulation was represented by the image of the flâneur in the western literary tradition, the east had its ghumakkaṛ or yayavar, where both were mimesis of nomads par excellence. This essay tries to grapple with the worlds of fluidity, flux and flow as pitted against sedentarism, fixity and stasis. It engages with the varied conceptions, complexities and contradictions as well as the “webs of signification” of mobility and nomadism in the eastern and western context. Further, the essay explores the “gendered” and emancipatory nature of mobility as well as its future and threat along with its micropolitics and metaphysics and nomadism in the intellectual traditions of the east and the west. While doing so, the author critically examines two seminal texts on nomadism represented by Ghumakkaṛ Śāstra by Rahul Sankrityayan from the east and Nomadology as conceived by Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari as illustrative of the west.
“Travelling for profit is encouraged. Travelling for survival is condemned…The globalized world is a hospitable and friendly place for tourists, but inhospitable and hostile to vagabonds. The latter are barred from following the pattern that the first have set. But the pattern was not meant for them in the first place.” (Bauman 2002: 84)
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter has been possible due to my own interest and curiosity about mobility and nomadism which is reflected in my doctoral work that focuses on a mobile cluster of street entertainers popularly called Nats and who are now into intergenerational sex work in Bihar.
- 2.
In everyday parlance, mobility and movement are used synonymously but have different meanings. According to Cresswell (2006), movement is mobility abstracted from the context of power or a general fact of displacement of a body which is divested of its context, history and the differentiation between movement and mobility. In other words, mobility is movement with meaning. For details see Cresswell (2006), pp. 2–3.
- 3.
Scholars like Bauman (2000) argue that mobility differentiates the human condition rather than unifying it and therefore it is not universal. Moreover, mobility is a matter of choice for some but fate for others thus pointing towards different social topologies of mobility. Also, mobility can be for different purposes, for example, there are elite forms of movement—such as for business, holidays or diplomatic journeys, which are largely shown in a positive light in contemporary societies—while it is a way of life for nomads and Gypsies.
- 4.
In a paper titled “Mobility as Resistance”, Cresswell (1993) draws attention to the way the author Jack Kerouac uses mobility as a symbol of a countercultural resistance in 1950s America in the novel On the Road.
- 5.
Movements refer strictly to a geographic dimension which occurs between an origin and one or several destinations that are identifiable on a map, and are measured according to flow forms.
- 6.
Network capital is explained here as the interrelationship between social relations and social support that makes resources available through interpersonal contacts and ties.
- 7.
According to Bauman (2000), such places are emic, phagic, non-places and empty places.
- 8.
According to Urry (2007), there are five highly interdependent “mobilities” that form and reform social life, bearing in mind the massive inequalities in structured access to each of these, which points to its differentiated nature. These include mobility of objects, corporeal mobility, imaginative mobility, virtual mobility and communicative mobility. Leopoldina Fortunati and Sakari Taipale proposed an alternative typology taking the individual and the human body as a point of reference. They differentiate between “macro-mobilities” (consistent physical displacements), “micro-mobilities” (small-scale displacements), “media mobility” (mobility added to the traditionally fixed forms of media) and “disembodied mobility” (the transformation in the social order). According to Paul Virilio (1995), there are three kinds of mobility related to transportation, transmission and transplant.
- 9.
Translated as The Wanderer’s Manual or a treatise on nomadism, Ghumakkaṛ Śāstra was written by Rahul Sankrityayan in 1948. In this chapter however, wandering and nomadism have been taken as co-terminus so as to see the differences or similarities between the two forms of mobility.
- 10.
Mobility has a positive and negative side with respect to the biological functioning of human beings. It is assumed that in the body, the sperm’s mobility is coded as masculine and active, whereas the egg is passive, relatively immobile and feminine.
- 11.
For details, see Cresswell (2006), p. 9.
- 12.
The third culture is a hybrid cultural space created by the gathering of foreigners living or working abroad and from the intersection of different cultures. It is an interstitial culture, operating above the limits of territorial cultures, made up of neither the first (home) culture, nor of the second (host) culture.
- 13.
For more, see Rana, S., 2016. “Nomads”, Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Eds. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
- 14.
For details, see Paul Harrison. A similar argument relating mobility with colonialism and sedentism with progress and modernity is observed in Seuffert (2011).
- 15.
Free from the fetters of caste.
- 16.
According to Chudal, Sankrityayan experimented with many religions and wore his robes accordingly and therefore was also known by other names like Baba Ram Udar Das.
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Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Ms. Anne Ostby, who has enriched this chapter with her suggestions and editorial help.
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Rana, S. (2018). The Micropolitics and Metaphysics of Mobility and Nomadism: A Comparative Study of Rahul Sankrityayan’s Ghumakkaṛ Śāstra and Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari’s “Nomadology”. In: Giri, A. (eds) Social Theory and Asian Dialogues. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7095-2_12
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