Compulsion and Necessity: Migrant workers’ experiences in Gurgaon, North India

This paper examines the entanglement of labour, class, and religion among migrant workers in Gurgaon, North India. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it invokes the Hindi term majboori (compulsion or necessity) as a key idiom through which workers interpret their precarious conditions. Migrants locate their hardships in the worldly order rather than divine will. This moral landscape is inseparable from Gurgaon's religious and class geography, where an ostensibly secular urbanism naturalises Hindu middle-class religiosity while rendering other working-class identities suspect. Engaging Shankar Ramaswami's Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Contemporary India, the paper argues that majboori provides a framework through which migrants interpret labour precarity while sustaining dignity. It does so within a city that simultaneously depends on their labour yet excludes them from its moral community.