Malay Kotal

This project examines how marginalized working-class migrants from West Bengal enact “part-apart lives” along the West Bengal–Kerala migration corridor. Using a community-centered, on-the-move ethnography, the study treats the migration circuit itself as a field site to explore reconfigurations of care, obligation, and digital communication across distances and temporal horizons. By integrating human geography, migration studies, sociology, anthropology, and urban studies, the project theorizes part-apart living as a navigation of inclusion and exclusion across multiple worlds without a single point of full belonging. Centering embodied experience, and relational improvisation, the work reconceptualizes migration not as a one-time event, but as an ongoing, experimental process of multi-local worldmaking under conditions of precarity.