Suffering and surviving homelessness : Psychopolitical journeys of resilience through gender, culture, psyche in India

The sense of ‘home’, rarely addressed in its own right as an inner world condition, is uniquely transcultural and psychosocial – and, through these attributes, of value to understanding the nuanced experience of displacement as a psychopolitical phenomenon. Millions of migrant women in India struggle against a dual displacement: geographical and structural, located respectively in the multi-layered placeless-ness that accompanies migration through the harsh conditions surrounding rural-urban movement within the country, and in the un-belonging which contours the experience of a culturally-embedded womanhood. This thesis weaves together and applies a conceptual language for understanding the sense of ‘home’ – drawing upon psychoanalysis both as a theory of subjective being and becoming through intersubjective and unconscious processes, and as a methodological frame suited to such an interpersonal unfolding across a set of interviews – to foray into this dual homelessness in the lives of 8 rural-urban migrant women residing in urban villages around Delhi. In this encounter between the frames of psychoanalysis (particularly drawing from what have been called ‘relational’ perspectives), the faith-based cultural orientation in India (towards Self, suffering, healing, and rootedness in everyday life), and socio-politico-historical realities, what emerges is a set of stories containing the subjective tellings of inhabiting an objectifying life-world. These stories speak of suffering and survival, revealing some of the inter-psychic sources of resilience which can be made available through gender, culture, and psyche, to allow the inner anguish of homelessness to be borne: continually inhabited, as well as personally transformed. Locating the mutuality and recognition which makes 'home' possible in the cultural self, in bonds of women, and in interspecies kinship with the more-than-human, they allow for a discernment of often-overlooked shades of subjectivity and subjective belonging in the world, buttressed by a new breadth of relational possibilities.