Being Bihari

Social media is agog with the news that a migrant labour Pandav Kumar, has been shot dead by a policeman, this time round in Delhi. (Times of India, 27 April 2026) allegedly, because he identified himself as a Bihari, 

As I bemoaned during one such seasonal moistening of the soul, when Mumbai police had hunted down Rahul, a young boy from Bihar, that Biharis are subject to persecution which is both random and routine because the mere label of Bihari seems to have become a necessary and sufficient provocation.

Murders, mindless or with motives, are no anomaly in our times. Trigger-happy policemen have also been, more or less, normalized. The likelihood of a migrant Bihari being at the receiving end is also quite par for the course. One thinks, but thinks with a deep sense of humiliation, that there is nothing new to be said except to rehash what has been said before and mourn the death anew.

That reminded me of a Facebook post by a Bihari expatriate, now an American citizen, going into raptures after visiting the "magnificent" Bihar Museum at Patna. Writing to his Guyanese and Trinidadian relatives, he says, “Nowhere is your history better preserved and your story better narrated than at a magnificent museum in the city of my birth, Patna. The new Bihar Museum has an entire wing dedicated to the Bihari diaspora, primarily composed of the hundreds of thousands of indentured laborers that the British "recruited," or rather tricked into a contract, from the sugarcane belts of West Bihar and East UP.”

Generally speaking, a people’s story becomes history when it passes from the domain of lived experience into the shared memory of the community, when it is no longer endured but remembered, recorded, and interpreted by those who come after. Migration for Biharis is still an overwhelmingly contemporary experience. The ‘hard life and inhuman living conditions of these indentured labourers faced in their new environment’ could very well be a report on the condition of today’s Bihari migrant labour.

Biharis are no longer ‘tricked’ into boarding ships destined for unfamiliar and heartless lands. It is a deliberate choice, born out of compulsion. These are needy, necessitous people – either they leave home or starve. What difference does it make to them that instead of the British colonialists we have our own governments helpfully providing direct trains – cattle cars, facilitating the transport of human raw material; minerals have gone to Jharkhand – from every poor and distant locale to keep the metropolitan and industrial centres of our great country going. The Biharis are so frugal. They come in cheap, get along for almost next to nothing, are undemanding, and carry out the most hazardous jobs with sweet docility. Nevertheless, Bihari migrants are considered inglorious job hunters who carry the bacillus of dirt, filth, disease and crime and infect the host state. Only if their physical presence could somehow be separated from their cheap, exploitative labour!

The nationwide lockdown in the wake of Covid-19 was the moment of truth for the migrant workers from Bihar. Suddenly, so much indispensable manpower, which had kept the mighty heart of Indian urban settlements beating, became not only so much disposable waste, but it was felt that it was hazardous to have them around. So, hordes and hordes of Biharis undertook the long march back home. The degradation of Bihari migrants on the march, afflicted by hunger and often reduced to being mendicants on people’s charity, provided a feast for the media. Poverty porn still entices.

But the very next season, Bihari migrant labour, dusted and done up, was yet again ready to be carted to those heartless cities which had discarded it earlier as objects of urban consumption which were past the use-by date. Of course, this time round they were escorted in air-conditioned buses; some tasted the thrill of air travel for the first time. But again, without any guarantees, without any insurance against such contingencies! The lessons were learnt and forgotten quickly by all concerned – the victim, the callous employer, and the care-do-little supplier of cheap labour. To the best of my knowledge, there is not even an official report on this. The tragic episode is written in invisible ink, in people’s memory. We have to be in constant denial. How could a resurgent, developed and transformed Bihar talk about the misery of the migrants?

Meanwhile, back in Bihar, we are hard at it, finding a remedy for our ancient problem: which caste gets how much. Because for a Bihari, the existential question is defined solely and squarely in casteist terms: who are you and what is your justification for being? We have not got so far yet, but we may soon find it pasted on our heads. It will be that much simpler.

We have just completed a detailed caste census, down to the last subdivision of a caste. I find myself suspended between being and nothingness, almost invisible, belonging to a caste with a count of 0.60 percent of the population. Call me now by the code 123 assigned to us. But till such time the panacea promised by the caste census arrives, Biharis still leave, loaded like cattle for distant lands; they still hide their identity for fear of being ridiculed, reviled or ostracized. And the naïve ones who don’t, allegedly, get shot from close quarters by the agent of the state, in the heart of the Indian capital of Delhi.