Physical versus imagined communities: migration and women’s autonomy in India

ABSTRACT India has seen a rise in the proportion of internal migrants between 1983 and 2007-08. Much of this increase is attributed to female marriage migrants. However, there is limited literature analysing the well-being of female marriage migrants in India. This paper seeks to examine whether women’s autonomy in the public sphere is a function of: (a) the geographical community where the woman resides, or (b) imagined communities (the mindset of the communities to which the woman’s family belongs), using multilevel mixed-effects logistic and ordered logistic regression. Analysing data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), 2012, for more than 34,000 ever-married women aged 15–49 years, the study finds that the communities in the mind (norms about marriage migration in the caste/sub-caste to which the woman’s family belongs) are more important than the physical communities to which the women have migrated, in relation to certain aspects of women’s physical autonomy and autonomy to participate in civic activities. In contrast, a woman’s economic autonomy is a function of both ‘imagined’ and ‘physical’ communities. Thus, the opportunities available to women who migrate for marriage are shaped by both geographical communities, and more importantly, by the norms in her community about marriage migration.