The Crisis-Mobility Nexus
Edited by Leandros Fischer
Mobility & Politics
Series Editors
Martin Geiger Carleton University Ottawa, Canada
Nicola Piper School of Law
Queen Mary University of London London, UK
Parvati Raghuram Open University
Milton Keynes, UK
Editorial Board Member
Tendayi Bloom University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK
Michael Collyer University of Sussex Brighton, UK
Charles Heller Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland
Elaine Ho
National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore
Shadia Husseini de Araújo University of Brasília Brasília, Brazil
Alison Mountz Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo, Canada
Linda Oucho African Migration and Development Policy Centre Nairobi, Kenya
Marta Pachocka SGH Warsaw School of Economics Warsaw, Poland
Antoine Pécoud Université Sorbonne Paris Nord Villetaneuse, France
Shahamak Rezaei University of Roskilde Roskilde, Denmark
Sergey Ryazantsev Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow, Russia
Carlos Sandoval García University of Costa Rica San José, Costa Rica
Everita Silina The New School New York, NY, USA
Rachel Simon-Kumar
University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
William Walters
Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada
Mobility & Politics
Series Editors:
Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Nicola Piper, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Global Advisory Board:
Tendayi Bloom, University of Birmingham, UK
Michael Collyer, Sussex University, UK
Charles Heller, Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland
Elaine Ho, National University of Singapore
Shadia Husseini de Araújo, University of Brasília, Brazil
Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada
Linda Oucho, African Migration and Development Policy Centre, Nairobi, Kenya
Marta Pachocka, SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Poland
Antoine Pécoud, Sorbonne University Paris Nord, France
Shahamak Rezaei, University of Roskilde, Denmark
Sergey Ryazantsev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Carlos Sandoval García, University of Costa Rica
Everita Silina, The New School, New York, USA
Rachel Simon-Kumar, University of Auckland, New Zealand
William Walters, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Human mobility, whatever its scale, is often controversial. Hence it carries with it the potential for politics. A core feature of mobility politics is the tension between the desire to maximise the social and economic benefts of migration and pressures to restrict movement. Transnational communities, global instability, advances in transportation and communication, and concepts of ‘smart borders’ and ‘migration management’ are just a few of the phenomena transforming the landscape of migration today. The tension between openness and restriction raises important questions about how different types of policy and politics come to life and infuence mobility.
Mobility & Politics invites original, theoretically and empirically informed studies for academic and policy-oriented debates. Authors examine issues such as refugees and displacement, migration and citizenship, security and cross-border movements, (post-)colonialism and mobility, and transnational movements and cosmopolitics. This series is indexed in Scopus.
Leandros Fischer Editor
Regimes of Mobility in Times of Accelerated Crisis
Leandros Fischer
Abstract This chapter elucidates the condition of capitalism’s current organic crisis and its complex effects on mobility. With theoretical groundings in the mobility paradigm, it examines the intricate connections between various aspects of this crisis—economic, political, biological, geopolitical—and their cumulative infuence on human movement. The role of migrant autonomy, solidarity, and citizenship in actively shaping and even subverting regimes of mobility is highlighted. Rejecting methodological nationalism, this chapter delineates the European space as the volume’s area of focus. ‘Europe’ is not understood as the end-point of history, but as contested space, shaped not only by exclusion but by hybridity and innovation as well.
Keywords Crisis-mobility nexus • Organic crisis • Europe • Mobility • Solidarity • Citizenship
L. Fischer (*) Institute of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark e-mail: fscher@ikl.aau.dk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
L. Fischer (ed.), The Crisis-Mobility Nexus, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44671-9_1
IntroductIon
In the spring of 2020, an extraordinary occurrence unfolded. To curtail the fresh SARS-CoV-2, or coronavirus pandemic, nations worldwide imposed a succession of lockdown measures. These varied signifcantly across diverse national and regional contexts in their breadth and intensity. Nonetheless, their foundational premises were congruent: citizens were required to remain indoors, put on hold quotidian activities such as commuting to their workplaces, socialising over a drink afterwards with friends, or holidaying in a different city, country, or even continent. Movements had to be drastically diminished and social interactions physically distanced, in response to an enigmatic virus, whose mechanism of action in those initial days of the pandemic confounded the scientifc community. Moreover, in stark contrast to Margaret Thatcher’s renowned assertion that “there is no such thing as society”, ‘social responsibility’ emerged as the rallying call in the effort to control the virus.
The COVID-19 pandemic was both unanticipated and foreseeable, its ramifcations signifying a discontinuity as well as perpetuation of events in the preceding decades. Whilst the virus inficted pain and suffering on a scale hitherto unprecedented, the circumstances leading to its emergence were by no means indecipherable. Industrial livestock farming, catalysed by surging demand, the intimate cohabitation of this farming adjacent to natural ecosystems, and the ensuing phenomena of zoonosis, collectively fabricated ideal conditions for a novel and lethal virus. The continuation of these conditions implies that COVID-19 may not be the last deadly coronavirus that humanity will encounter in the foreseeable future. Owing to the highly indiscriminate movements emblematic of late capitalism, the virus swiftly metamorphosed into a pandemic of global proportions. Not the impoverished migrants from the tropics aspiring for a better life in the Global North, but affuent cosmopolitans, those possessing “the class consciousness of frequent travellers” (Calhoun, 2002), transpired to be among the most notorious ‘super-spreaders’ during the pandemic’s early stages.
Despite the drastic effects that lockdowns had on the social fabric of most societies, it would be naïve to frame COVID-19 as a caesura, putting an ignominious end to more than three decades of seemingly uninterrupted and expanding mobility. To begin with, being socially responsible by staying at home in most of Europe, North America, and beyond relied on an expanding army of often mobile workers—care workers, nurses,
food delivery personnel, warehouse employees, supermarket cashiers, frst responders, and others deemed ‘essential’—whose composition more often than not refected racialised class hierarchies. And while having to work from home—and in some cases allowed to leave the house only once a day or not at all—was a new experience for millions, this restriction of mobility was not exactly news for countless others. Deepening European integration since the early 1990s has gone in tandem with an increasingly restrictive migration policy that many detractors have labelled ‘Fortress Europe’. As such, thousands of migrants are stranded at the borders of Europe in a state of geographical, social, and existential immobility that fnds its clearest expressions today in the macabre spectacle of the Mediterranean shipwreck and the liminality of the Greek camp. Meanwhile, thousands of individuals in Europe live under the radar, enjoying only the most rudimentary forms of mobility for fear of being deported. Furthermore, despite the all too fashionable talk of a withering away of the state in the aftermath of globalisation, states, and the various conficts among them have been instrumental in shaping various ‘regimes of mobility’ (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013). The attacks of 9/11 ushered in an era of securitisation that gave us everything from externalised border controls, heightened surveillance, and biometrical data collection to denationalisation for unwanted subjects and the ‘black sites’ of Guantanamo and other localities beyond the ambit of any legal framework (Rygiel, 2010). Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has put another nail in the coffn of the idea of a world where capital fows trump geopolitics, a phenomenon increasingly talked about as ‘deglobalisation’ (D’Eramo, 2022). Massive economic sanctions imposed on Russia—still the world’s largest country by size and the ninth most populous—have drastically impacted the global economy with unforeseen consequences as of the time of writing. It’s not just that Russia has been largely cut off from Western physical transportation links and information circuits. Russian ‘oligarchs’ have been targeted in both discourse and actual practice. Billionaires—the ultimate ‘global citizens’—are fnding themselves stripped of their residencies and assets. The idea that enough money can buy everything from plane tickets to permanent residency and even citizenship represents another holy cow of globalisation sacrifced on the altar of renewed inter-state competition, long regarded as a nineteenth century relic.
At frst, the interconnections between lockdown policies, migrant struggles for mobility, and contemporary geopolitics might seem vague or coincidental. However, a closer look reveals a common denominator: the
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ongoing systemic crisis of capitalism, a crisis whose present form has been brewing since the fnancial crash of 2007–2009. Adopting an understanding of capitalism as a totality of social relations (Lukács, 1923 [1968]), this edited volume perceives this crisis not as merely economic but as a deep and protracted political, social, ideological, ecological, and biopolitical crisis as well. Systemic crises, both in their essence and in their discursive articulation, bring forth and/or legitimise a reconfguration of both mobility and immobility. The purpose of this book is to provide theoretical conceptualisations as well as concrete examples of the mechanisms through which these reconfgurations take place. As such, the existence of a specifc crisis/mobility-nexus is posited. Rather than conceptualising a new theoretical paradigm, the aim is to contribute to a more holistic understanding of mobility in contemporary capitalism, as well as of the myriad struggles around it. While there is a rich body of work on the effects of crisis, migratory mobility, refugee struggles, social mobility, as well as an emerging literature on mobilities relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is—with notable exceptions—a lack of literature bridging these different aspects together under one framework. Taking a mobile ontology as well as their research as a starting point, the authors of this edited volume not only wish to provide examples of how different facets of crisis reconfgure mobility regimes; they also aim at demonstrating how various aspects of crisis intersect with one another to both enable and constrain mobilities.
This is certainly not the frst work exploring the entanglements of crisis and mobility. In her book Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller (2018) speaks of a ‘triple mobility crisis’—a climate crisis, an urbanisation crisis, as well as a refugee crisis. Sheller brings these different mobility-affecting crises into conversation with each other to put forth a ‘mobility justice’ paradigm. Such an approach not only recognises the unequal distribution of mobilities in today’s world, but also that “the management of mobilities under post-slavery and postcolonial regimes in the West is fundamental to the making of classed, racial, sexual, able-bodied, gendered, citizen and noncitizen subjects” (Sheller, 2018, p. 16). The authors share and adopt Sheller’s invaluable contribution in demonstrating the co-constitutive and power-permeated character of mobility and immobility. Our own work differs primarily in our conceptualisation of crisis. Rather than a ‘triple crisis’, we adopt as our frame of reference a very specifc period: the 2007–09 fnancial crash and its ongoing aftermath. Furthermore, and based on the aforementioned understanding of capitalism as a totality of social relations, the authors perceive various events in their respective
articulations—the so-called refugee crisis, the pandemic, or the war in Ukraine—as sharing a common origin in the ongoing systemic crisis of capitalism.
How does this crisis affect mobility? An obvious answer relates to the ways in which economic slowdowns lead to a decrease in trade and investment fows, while spurring individuals to emigrate in search of a better life. Conversely, economic crisis serves as a justifcation for restricting mobility. It was the end of capitalism’s trente glorieuses with the oil shock in the mid-1970s that ended many ‘guest worker’ programmes in Western Europe, while establishing ‘immigration’ as contentious a subject of public debate. Nonetheless, there are many more ways in which a crisis can reconfgure mobilities. Think about the ‘golden visa’ or ‘golden passport’ schemes concocted by states in the crisis-hit European periphery (Fischer & Rakopoulos, 2020). Legitimised by economic meltdown, these schemes have commodifed European citizenship, with the purpose of facilitating the mobility of non-European elites in a world still characterised by the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano, 2007), the persistence of the colonial mental construct of ‘race’ as an ordering principle that presides over contemporary global socioeconomic inequalities. As a chapter in this volume demonstrates, educated but racialised Europeans of Muslim origin in crisis-ridden Europe seek upward social mobility by emigrating to the cosmopolitan hub of Dubai. Even Europe’s so-called summer of migration in 2015 was only framed a ‘crisis’ due to its coexistence with the deep socioeconomic crisis affecting the continent, as numerous politicians pitted downwardly mobile Europeans against non-Europeans feeing war and poverty. The handling of the pandemic in most states was torn between locking down on the one hand and reopening on the other, to avert a worsening of the economic contraction caused by COVID-19. The welcoming attitude of the European Union towards Ukrainian refugees in early 2022 and its mobility-restricting sanctions against Russia are subordinated to an acute geopolitical struggle, itself a refection of the crisis of hegemony in the world system following the decline of the ‘unipolar moment’ that emerged with the end of the Cold War. Finally, the everimpending climate catastrophe is throwing up critical questions about the sustainability of a mobility paradigm largely dependent on the extraction of fossil fuels. These are just some of the many ways in which the current conjuncture of crisis reorders our perceptions of movement in the world. This does not imply that questions of mobility and immobility play no part in times of economic boom. They do, however, assume a more critical role
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in a crisis conjuncture that stands in marked contrast to the optimism inherent in the post-1990 vision of a globalised world of an ever-expanding movement of goods, services, and people, where the role of states and their bordering practices is supposedly constantly diminishing.
Based on their own research, the volume contributors focus on the geographical space of Europe as the primary unit of analysis. What is called ‘Europe’, of course, is a matter of contentious scholarly and public debate. Nicholas De Genova (2016a) has aptly shown how migrant mobility in light of the crisis of the European border regime has thrown up fundamental questions about who and what European is. In line with rejecting an essentialist ‘methodological Europeanism’ (Garelli & Tazzioli, 2013), this work fnds itself in agreement with De Genova’s conception of Europe as defned by what it isn’t, namely by a negatively constructed Other refecting colonial legacies and used to obscure the numerous differences within that same European space. ‘Provincialising Europe’ (Chakrabarty, 2000) by rejecting the notion implicit in much of social science of ‘Europe’ as lying at the top of an evolutionary pyramid of capitalist transition, this book also adopts Etienne Balibar’s (2009, p. 200) concept of each region of Europe being a ‘centre’ in its own right, “because it is made of overlapping peripheries, each of them open […] to infuences from all other parts of Europe, and from the whole world”. According to Balibar, “this creates a potential for ethnic and religious conficts, but also for hybridity and cultural invention”. In other words, we take note of the discrepancy between ‘Europe’ as a fuid and internally asymmetric institutionalised mobility regime permeated by ideologies of cultural or civilisational difference on the one hand and a lived reality characterised by various shades of hybridity and innovation on the other.
What follows is a theorisation of three key components of our problematic. First, an understanding of crisis as an organic crisis of capitalism is presented. An overview of useful theoretical concepts from mobility and migration studies is then provided. Finally, the crisis/mobility nexus’s social effects are taken into consideration, by presenting conceptualisations of citizenship, as well as solidarity and de-solidarisation.
understandIng the Present conjuncture of crIsIs
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. This famous quote by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci
(1971, pp. 275–276) from his Prison Notebooks adequately sums up the predicament of the world in the third decade of the new millennium. Gramsci was writing the Notebooks at the onset of the Great Depression, capitalism’s greatest crisis prior to the 2007–09 crash. For Gramsci, this crisis was an organic crisis. It did not merely represent a temporary economic disequilibrium like the numerous recessions, the bursting of speculative bubbles, or crises of overproduction that regularly take place under capitalism, but it threatened the very foundation of capitalist rule. The ideology of the liberal capitalist order that collapsed in 1929—unfettered trade and minimal state intervention—was replaced by crisis of hegemony of the global capitalist system.
By ‘hegemony’, Gramsci meant the ability of the capitalist ruling class to portray its particular economic and political goals as universal interests shared by society as a whole. Hegemony allows capital to rule not just by coercion but by consent as well, that is by convincing the subaltern classes like the proletariat that they have something to gain from the capitalist class’s pursuit of its own interests. The 1930s witnessed conficting attempts to fll the vacuum created by this crisis of hegemony. On the one hand, the labour movement in key countries like France, the United States, Sweden, Germany, or Spain was on the offensive, propagating socialism as an alternative to crisis-ridden capitalism. At the same time, revolts were shaking the colonial world in India, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East. On the other hand, however, stood attempts that moved in the opposite direction. Numerous dictatorial strongman regimes of various fascist varieties emerged in Europe, most notably in Italy and Germany. The heightening economic, ideological, and geopolitical contradictions brought forth by the crisis were played out in a global fully mechanised confict that resulted in the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
Today, a similar organic crisis with comparable ‘morbid symptoms’ engulfs the globe. An organic crisis cannot be understood as an isolated moment in time but must be seen as a protracted condition composed of numerous stages and dimensions and played out across different scales that interact with each other. The present crisis has its starting point in the collapse of the housing market in the United States that in a domino-like sequence engulfed the global fnancial system. Far from being an accident, this was the result of a decades-long pursuit of proftability characterised by a fnancialisation (Lapavitsas, 2012) of the economy at the expense of productive sectors. The general framework of fnancialisation was the
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advent of neoliberalism, a political-ideological project to restore capital’s stagnating proftability in the early 1970s and roll back the power of labour (Harvey, 2007). Neoliberal policies included, among others, the wholesale privatisation of public assets, the deregulation of fnancial markets, a weakening of organised labour, the abandonment of import-substitution development in the Global South in favour of low-wage export-led strategies, and the opening up of new markets for capital in Asia, Latin America, and the former Eastern bloc. It is important to note that the dislocations caused by neoliberal structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in the Global South or in Eastern Europe have in many ways prefgured the current crisis. SAPs and other neoliberal measures have been instrumental in provoking a mass migration to the cities of the Global South, leading to the creation of what Mike Davis (2005) famously described as a ‘planet of slums’.
States responded to the banking collapse by injecting billions into the fnancial sector. However, this had the effect of transforming a crisis of the banking sector into a broader fscal debt crisis. In Europe, the fnancial meltdown evolved into the Eurozone crisis, as countries in the European South, particularly Greece, came under the direct supervision of European fnancial institutions. Their states went bankrupt due to excessive borrowing from banks that now demanded repayment. The political ramifcations of the crisis were as signifcant as its economic consequences. The ruling parties of the centre-right and centre-left, both adhering to the neoliberal consensus, saw their share of the vote diminish drastically as they imposed harsh austerity measures. They were left ‘ruling the void’ (Mair, 2013). This collapse of liberal hegemony and the subsequent political polarisation paved the way for different types of challenges. On the left, ‘movements of the squares’ like Occupy and the Spanish Indignados, as well as antiausterity ‘left populist’ parties like the Spanish Podemos and the Greek Syriza (Della Porta et al., 2017), called for ‘real democracy’. On the right, ‘right populist’ and openly neo-fascist forces blamed migrants, Muslims, and other minorities for society’s problems, while promoting conspiracist worldviews that echoed the anti-Semitism of the inter-war period. ‘Illiberal democracies’ have become frmly entrenched from Russia, Turkey, Greece, and Hungary to India, Brazil, and Israel. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump signalled a growing appeal of nationalist isolationism, in which Eastern European and Mexican mobilities, respectively, have been portrayed as the primary adversaries.
Another shock of the crisis was experienced in the Global South, in the form of escalating food prices in the Middle East, which served as the catalyst for the so-called Arab Spring that erupted in 2011 (Hanieh, 2012). The contradictory nature of the Arab uprisings, the absence of clear leadership, the active interference of numerous geopolitical rivals, as well as the intertwining of socioeconomic grievances with ethnic and sectarian tensions, have resulted in the reestablishment of dictatorships in countries like Egypt and bloody civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. These circumstances have led to an increasing exodus from these nations (as well as from countries at the epicentre of the previous ‘war on terror’, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia) towards Europe, commonly referred to as the ‘refugee crisis’. The autonomous mobility of migrants has become a contentious issue within Europe’s already polarised political climate, giving rise to a ‘migration dissensus’ (Trimikliniotis, 2019), various civil society alliances with migrants (Agustín & Jørgensen, 2019), and ‘misplaced alliances’ (Mayo, 2016) against them. Meanwhile, far from serving as a bulwark against resurgent racism, liberal transnational institutions such as the European Union have been legitimising far-right talking points for years. They have imposed restrictions on non-European migration to curb ‘asylum tourism’, escalated anti-Muslim racism by creating a position to ‘promote the European way of life’, engaged in lethal pushbacks of migrants in the Mediterranean, and outsourced border responsibilities to authoritarian states like Turkey (Fekete, 2018), all the while projecting a misleading image of openness and cosmopolitanism.
Then, in early 2020, COVID-19 emerged, leading not so much to an entirely new crisis but a new stage of a pre-existing one. The pandemic has dashed hopes of an economic stabilisation or the withering away of challenges to the political status quo, laying bare the effects of decades of underfunded public health and other social services. Private pharmaceutical companies, the prime recipients of billions invested by states for the development of COVID-19 vaccines, have become richer on the backs of a ‘vaccine apartheid’ that prioritises developed countries at the expense of the Global South. The economic dislocation caused by lockdowns has led to the emergence of new billionaires and the astronomical enrichment of existing ones, while leading to the further impoverishment of millions. Some authors have claimed that the new discourse of protection and social responsibility employed by states during the pandemic might signal the emergence of a ‘post-neoliberal’ era (Gerbaudo, 2021). While this is an interesting hypothesis, little indicates that key countries in the core of the
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world system are breaking with the old orthodoxies in a meaningful way that would necessarily have to include reining in the fnancial sector by bringing it under public ownership on the one hand and strengthening workers’ rights on the other.
And if the state might be experiencing a comeback, it might not always be in a good way. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 seemingly signalled the violent return of great power politics. While clearly odious, the invasion cannot be explained away as an irrational outburst of Vladimir Putin, but as a foreseeable response to two decades of NATO expansion eastwards, not to mention the precedents of violating international law established by the United States and its allies in the name of a ‘responsibility to protect’ or protecting the world from non-existent weapons of mass destruction during the past three decades. Governments are increasing their military budgets in a new Cold War, where even the use of tactical nuclear weapons is being dangerously normalised in public discourse.
The combination of multiple emergencies—a stagnating world economy, infation, the pandemic, supply chain shortages, impending environmental doom, geopolitical sabre-rattling—has created a novel condition of accelerated crisis, a ‘new age of catastrophe’ (Callinicos, 2023), which economic historian Adam Tooze (2021, p. 6) has labelled a ‘polycrisis’. Like the works of Tooze, Callinicos, and others, this book is a modest attempt to decipher the specifcity of this accelerated condition of multiple crises, by focusing on its manifold and contradictory effects on the mobility of human beings. It does not understand the various aspects of this crisis as separate felds in need of ad-hoc management. Applying an understanding of capitalism as a totality of social relations, the contributors view the various crises not only as interconnected but also as sharing the same root cause—an ongoing organic crisis of capitalism since 2007–09, the kind Gramsci talked about in his Prison Notebooks.
Yet, how exactly does this organic crisis affect aspects like the handling of the pandemic, the ongoing crisis of political representation giving rise to the far right, the dangerous escalation over Ukraine, and other aspects? How does this crisis differ from the previous organic crisis of capitalism in the 1930s, and why, after decades of seemingly managed and peaceful ‘globalisation’, is there an entrenched inability to think beyond the destructive confnes of the present system? Or—in the words of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher (2009)—why is it “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?” Here, we draw on Neil Davidson’s
(2017) theorisation of the post-2008 period as a ‘crisis regime of permanent exception’. According to Davidson, the 2008 crisis marks the frst time an organic crisis of capitalism has not been succeeded by a radical restructuring of the entire capitalist mode of production. The 1929 Wall Street crash signalled the failure of laissez-faire economics, giving rise to various degrees of state interventionism across the world in the following four decades. Whether in the Western world, the Eastern Bloc, or in the different postcolonial regimes of the Global South, states actively assumed a regulatory role in the workings of the market, while welfare states secured the legitimacy of the political systems involved. When the 1973 oil crisis revealed the limits of this arrangement, governments gradually shifted to the ideas of neoliberalism. Davidson (2017, pp. 618–625) distinguishes between two historical phases of neoliberalism in the Western world. Socially conservative ‘vanguard regimes of reorientation’ that defeated organised labour were succeeded in the 1990s and 2000s by ‘social regimes of consolidation’, which secured the allegiance of millions through cheap credit, promises of individual self-fulflment, and reforms in the sphere of social rights. The 2008 crash has discredited the ideology of unfettered markets; however, no strategic change of course has been registered so far, a condition Colin Crouch (2011) has described as the ‘strange non-death of neoliberalism’.
In the regime of permanent exception, a radical rethinking within the system is impossible, according to Davidson, since neoliberalism, with its depoliticisation of the economic sphere and its politicisation of state management, has undermined such capacity. This enables the dominance of short-term interests over any grand design to restore both the proftability of capitalism and secure popular consent. The liminal condition, where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”, describes the current condition of crisis of neoliberalism. While there is, for example, an overwhelming consensus on the imminent danger that fossil fuels pose to the existence of human life on Earth, little is actually being done to address this urgent issue. Establishment of self-perceptions of openness and tolerance coexist next to the reality of a ‘departheid’ (Kalir, 2019), record numbers of imprisonment among minorities such as in the United States, and murderous migration policies. At the same time, the period is characterised by a ‘return of irrational beliefs’ (Davidson, 2017, p. 631), exemplifed in the rise and normalisation of racism and the far right. Other ‘morbid symptoms’ include environmentally harmful amounts of energy used in the production of Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, various
conspiracy theories in the context of the pandemic and beyond, a social media-induced collapse of meaningful political discourse, the trivialisation of the dangers of nuclear war, and the increasing hold of unaccountable billionaires over logistics and big tech, to name just a few. It is within this evolving context of crisis regimes of permanent exception that we identify the main social parameters of mobility and immobility in the world today.
regImes of mobIlIty and mIgrant autonomy
The concept of ‘mobility’ has undergone signifcant re-evaluations and reappraisals since the emergence of a ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006). This paradigm challenged the sedentarist bias in the social sciences, which viewed social processes unfolding within fxed terrains as the norm, while treating movement as an anomaly (ibid., pp. 208–209). Similar to Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) theorisation of ‘fows’, such as ‘ethnoscapes’, ‘ideoscapes’, and others, this ‘mobile turn’ was in line with a global perspective in the social sciences, refecting the spirit of globalisation, which implicitly celebrated an increasingly mobile world. However, in their conceptualisation of ‘regimes of mobility’, Nina Glick Schiller and Noel Salazar (2013, p. 184) note how the “current global economic crisis seems to be accompanied by a normalisation […] of national borders and ethnic boundaries […]”. Even before the outbreak of the fnancial crisis, some had already identifed a downside to globalisation, highlighting a ‘single global mobility regime’ (Shamir, 2005) designed to maintain a high degree of social inequality across the globe, expanding the mobility of some while restricting that of many others. Schiller and Salazar adopt the notion of a ‘mobility regime’ to speak of the many, vastly unequal mobility regimes across the globe today.
The term ‘regime’ in turn originates from the feld of international relations. Unlike realist and neo-realist assumptions, regime theorists do not view outcomes in international politics as solely the result of competition between different states. Regime theory emerged in the mid-1970s to emphasise the growing role of international organisations, transnational NGOs, multinational corporations, norms and values, international treaties, social movements, and others in shaping political outcomes on the international stage (Keohane, 1984). When discussing the intersections of migratory and urban regimes in the Sankt Georg neighbourhood of Hamburg, Andreas Pott and Vassilis Tsianos (2015, p. 124) describe regimes as comprising an ensemble of “heterogeneous actors, practices,
norms, or discourses and images”. These are subject to (re)negotiations, which manifest spatially within ‘zones of negotiation’ defned by asymmetric power relations. Regimes are scaled across multiple levels—neighbourhoods, cities, regions, states, continents—refecting vertical social hierarchies. Pott and Tsianos emphasise that regimes are not entirely autonomous and should not be confused with the social felds that shape them. A well-known example of a mobility regime is the European border regime. This regime is codifed in international treaties (the Dublin regulations), which have been agreed upon and enforced by sovereign nation states (the EU’s members). It is also premised upon a set of interconnected discourses: the EU’s claim of being a humane ‘normative power’; the socially entrenched idea that welfare and migration are somehow mutually exclusive and have to be balanced by giving asylum to some migrants and deporting others; racialising discourses of cultural incompatibility that frame some groups of migrants in securitised terms of a threat (e.g., Muslims) while welcoming others, either due to perceived cultural similarities (e.g., Ukrainian refugees) or to fll labour shortages in highskill sectors (e.g., tech workers from the Indian subcontinent, Greek doctors in Germany).
Finally, this regime is also shaped by the different political subjectivities that affrm or reject its premises. Solidarity movements with refugees, for example, negotiate the European border regime by enabling migrant mobilities, either by clandestinely assisting migrants to cross borders, or by creating safe spaces for illegalised migrants, thus challenging both restrictive practices and securitising discourses. The threat of organised racist violence, on the other hand, might restrict migrant mobilities, even when migrants do reach their destination and receive asylum. Whether or not an individual feeing war, persecution or poverty can make it safely to his or her preferred point of destination does not ultimately depend exclusively on legal technicalities but on a specifc confguration of several factors.
Within the context of migrant mobilities, we would also like to draw attention to the concept of the ‘autonomy of migration’ (AoM) (Bojadžijev & Karakayali, 2010; Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013; et al.), a clear break from overtly structuralist explanations of human migration as conditioned exclusively by economic considerations. Infuenced by Italian autonomist Marxism (e.g., Tronti, 1966 [2019])—which emphasises the centrality of labour resistance to capital rather than structural factors such as crises in the development of capitalism—AoM sees migrant practices as generative of their own autonomous logic. Accordingly, restrictive bordering
practices must be seen as responses to migrant agency rather than the other way around. States are one step behind migrants in adjusting their policies to cope with the autonomous fow of migrations not entirely reducible to economic factors. In drawing on AoM, we also employ two further concepts associated with it, the concept of ‘differential inclusion’ (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013), as well as that of the ‘mobile commons’ (Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013; Trimikliniotis et al., 2016). Differential inclusion refers to the process whereby “the boundaries between the dynamics of fltering […] that once occurred at the international border and those that take place within the bounded spaces of national societies have been blurred” (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013, p. 159). This idea contrasts with notions, such as ‘Fortress Europe’, that view harsh bordering practices as intended to restrict migration in its entirety. On the contrary, such practices employ a fltering logic that allows some migrants to enter borders both legally and illegally, leading to the creation of highly segmented labour markets premised on separating native workers, those ‘with papers’, as well as those ‘without’. Think, for instance, of the heavy reliance of the US food and beverage industry on undocumented labour from Mexico and Central America, a condition that allows for heightened overexploitation in that sector, thus maintaining employer proftability. The EU’s asylum system also creates an array of legal categories (‘applicant’, ‘subsidiary protection’, ‘refugee status’), which in many member states leads to a differential access to the labour market premised on the needs of local economies for cheap and unskilled labour (Demetriou, 2022). Such regimes of differential inclusion need not be solely applicable to conditions of labour precarity and overexploitation. Neha Vora (2014) shows how processes of labour segmentation and segregation can also be applied to high-skilled workers, such as university teachers in rich rentier states like Qatar. The main idea here is that there is no inherent interest of states to end migration once and for all. However, by employing a wide array of legal categories—from irregularisation to granting full citizenship—states, as regulators of capitalist organisation, are actively trying to shape migrant fows existing independently of them to the beneft of capital proftability.
The concept of the mobile commons, on the other hand, refers to those elements shareable among migrants on the move that are conducive to the migration process. These include the ‘knowledge of mobility’ shared by people on the move, such as knowing which route is safe; an ‘infrastructure of connectivity’ by which information on mobility is circulated, such
as online forums and information and communication technologies (ICTs) like smartphones; a ‘multiplicity of informal economies’, such as those found in borderland regions; ‘communities of justice’ through the formation of solidarities with others, such as migrant solidarity movements; as well as the ‘politics of care’, aspects of mutual and altruistic cooperation (Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013, pp. 191–192). Central to the mobile commons is the idea of migration not as a simple transitory state from one sedentary position to another, but as an entire system of autonomous social organisation that escapes the gaze of territorialised sovereign states.
Consistent with the autonomy of migration approach is the mobility regime paradigm’s implicit rejection of methodological nationalism, an attitude that insists on viewing social processes as contained within national boundaries (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2003; Hanieh, 2014). Migration studies have traditionally viewed migration from the vantage point of states and their economic needs. Neoclassical ‘push and pull’ theories of a win-win game for both sending and receiving states (Lee, 1966) have long dominated migration studies, rendering invisible the variety of motivations behind migrant mobility, as well as the affective ties of place-making that migrants make, even in extremely exploitative environments such as the Gulf. Even the mobilities paradigm in the social sciences has come under criticism for reproducing certain assumptions about mobility as an inherently transnational process, where geographical mobility automatically equals upward socioeconomic mobility. In the case of Chinese migrant workers to Israel, for example, Barak Kalir (2013) has demonstrated how transnational migration can simply be an exception to a trajectory of internal migration, a kind of compensation for not being able to migrate to a preferred destination within one’s own country.
Rejecting methodological nationalism, however, does not mean denying the stark correlation between transnational geographical mobility on the one hand and social mobility within bounded societies on the other. Oliver Nachtwey (2016), for instance, has shown clear links between Germany’s polarised climate around migration after 2015 on the one hand and local anxieties about downward social mobility in the context of a ‘society of descent’ (Abstiegsgesellschaft) and a zero-growth ‘secular stagnation’ capitalism. Social and geographical mobility thus interact in ways that transcend a simple identifcation between both movements. According to Ghassan Hage (2009, p. 97), “the social and historical conditions of permanent crisis we live in have led to a proliferation and intensifcation of [a] sense of stuckedness”, conceptualised as the opposite of ‘existential
L. FISCHER
mobility’, the feeling that someone is ‘going somewhere’ (ibid.). As such, challenging restrictive bordering and citizenship regimes might not just be about the right to seek better fortunes in another country; it might also be about an assertion of a right to mobility as a right in itself, a marker of being ‘normal’ by being able to travel to other countries, as the experience of Palestinian and Kurdish migrants who want to remain in Cyprus but feel ‘stuck’ in it shows (Fischer, 2021).
Finally, while mobility in recent years has been conceived mostly in relation to migratory processes, a new dimension has entered the fray in early 2020 centred on the pandemic. ‘Pandemic (im)mobilities’ (Adey et al., 2021) have come to describe the dynamics of mobility and stasis unleashed by the pandemic, with lockdowns restricting to various degrees the movements of millions around the globe. The global stasis caused by the pandemic, even if temporary, has had in many instances a detrimental effect on other mobilities, such as those of migrants, pushed away for ‘hygiene reasons’ (Tazzioli & Stierl, 2021), while leading to an exponential growth of mostly precarious and racialised mobile labour sectors associated with the ‘gig economy’—food delivery drivers, logistics, seasonal farm workers, and others. Overall, the outbreak of COVID-19 demonstrated the precarious nature of global mobility—already experienced by the vast majority of humanity lacking the ‘right’ passport and fnancial resources to travel freely around the world—while demonstrating that while unrestricted mobility has been globalised, so too have risks such as diseases that undermine it.
concePtualIsIng solIdarIty and cItIzenshIP
The effects of the previously described and multifaceted organic crisis of capitalism could not but leave their mark on societies the world over. As mentioned earlier, economic crises are characterised by a corresponding crisis of political hegemony, in which social and political forces of differing persuasions attempt to fll the void. To better illuminate the way in which the crisis/mobility nexus interacts with processes of social and political contestation, we turn our attention to two concepts that we regard as central to our analysis: solidarity and citizenship
‘Solidarity’ as a concept has been subject to countless interpretations, such as Émile Durkheim’s (1893 [2013]) categorisation of ‘mechanical’ solidarity in small societies and its ‘organic’ equivalent in modern, more differentiated societies. In both cases, ‘solidarity’ assumes the function of
ensuring ‘social cohesion’, a meaning of solidarity to which governments still subscribe when, for instance, proposing welfare measures to ameliorate the effects of economic crisis. More recently, in the context of crisis and austerity, solidarity has been described as a ‘bridge concept’ (Rakopoulos, 2016, p. 142), linking together different “diverse modes of practice, forms of sociality, and mechanisms of envisioning future prospects for people’s lives”. Thus, solidarity should not be understood merely as a vacuum-fller amidst the collapse of the welfare state, but also as a reactivation of long-dormant traditions, such as traditional forms of ‘village solidarity’ (Loizos, 1975 [2009]), as well as a mode of prefguring a different kind of future.
We do not deny the usefulness of these and many other conceptualisations of solidarity. However, we believe that a contentious defnition of solidarity is more appropriate to the subject matter of our book. Following David Featherstone (2012), we understand solidarity as both a relational and contentious practice, one that clearly posits a political antagonism. It emerges in certain conjunctures, generating political subjectivities and new collective identities, while engendering alliances between different civil society actors. In the context of the so-called refugee crisis in the mid-2010s, different forms of contentious solidarity were visible throughout Europe, ranging from the ‘autonomous solidarity’ practiced by horizontal movements and self-managed social spaces, to ‘civic solidarity’ composed of citizens concerned with providing logistical support to refugees, all the way up to the ‘municipal solidarity’ exhibited by elected local offcials, such as former mayor of Barcelona Ada Colau and mayors of southern Italian cities refusing to obey the restrictive migration policies of the national government (Agustín & Jørgensen, 2019).
There are many cases where ‘solidarity’ and ‘mobility’ as concepts intersect, but we will focus here on two examples. During the ‘long summer of migration’ of 2015, when the European border regime was temporarily breached by the movement of thousands of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, countries of the more prosperous European North, such as Germany and the Scandinavian states, were the preferred destinations for many of those on the move. However, in order to reach those countries, migrants had to transit through peripheral, crisis-hit countries such as Greece. Arrival and transit represent two types of mobility with different effects on solidarity efforts in both cities. While those arriving in the North made claims to being citizens but without papers—for instance, by enacting a form of ‘urban citizenship’ in cities like Hamburg—those
transiting, as well as those in solidarity with them in places like Athens, were unable to establish sustainable forms of community (Fischer & Jørgensen, 2021). While in the latter case, the form of solidarity corresponds more to the conceptual framework of the ‘mobile commons’—an autonomous form of social organisation on the move with no fxed territorial point of reference—the former case aligns more with so-called activist citizenship or acts of citizenship (Isin & Nielsen, 2008; Isin, 2009), a practice undertaken by those without papers but who nevertheless emphasise their belonging to a certain place through contentious politics.
Citizenship is generally understood to be a form of legal status attaching an individual to a nation-state, while conferring certain rights and obligations. Critical Citizenship Studies (CCS), however, has redefned citizenship as a more relational concept liberated from the constraints of the state. Instrumental here was the thought of Michel Foucault and his concept of ‘governmentality’, which emphasises the governing of people’s actions through positive means rather than the coercion associated with the law emanating from sovereign states. In a famous speech, Foucault (1981) pointed to the existence of a global citizenship, one engendered by a condition of common governance and based on solidarity and a striving for justice. Citizenship today is enacted by different actors, on multiple sites, across various scales, and through various acts, redefning our idea of the political by creating “new sites of contestation, belonging, identifcation, and struggle” (Isin, 2009, p. 371).
‘Autonomists’ are generally sceptical towards the concept of citizenship in its entirety, highlighting its exclusionary capacity (e.g., Mezzadra, 2015; Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013). Another argument concerns the fact that concepts of ‘urban citizenship’ (e.g., Kandylis, 2017; Vaiou & Kalandides, 2017), while escaping the gaze of sovereign power, nonetheless require a defned spatial organisation, precluded by the highly mobile conditions of contemporary workforces under late capitalism, such as those engaged in logistics (Cuppini, 2016). We do not wish to prioritise one approach— autonomy or citizenship—over the other. What we do emphasise, however, is that mobility does not unfold evenly across the globe but is still determined by vast asymmetries in the distribution of wealth and power in the world today, not to mention the various attributions of race and ‘cultural compatibility’ that determine the right of movement of millions of people. As such, we deem both approaches appropriate, depending on the specifc context.
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CHAPTER LXVIII.
SKETCHES ON THE RIVER FROM BINDACHUN TO ALLAHABAD.
“IF YOU BELIEVE, IT IS A GOD; IF NOT, PLASTER DETACHED FROM A WALL[51] . ”
Bindachun—Devī Ghāt—The Temple of Bhawānī—Bhagwān—The Thug—The Hajjam—The Tashma-baz Thugs—The Pleasure of Wandering—Sirsya— Munyah Ghāt—Arail—Arrival at Allahabad—Native Sugar-cane Mills.
1844, Dec. 11th. We lugāoed early in the evening four miles above Mirzapūr at the far-famed Bindachun. The first remarkable object on approaching the place is the ghāt of the Devī (goddess) which stands out into the river; it is adorned with six bastions, which present a very fort-like appearance, and just above it we moored our boats. Taking an old bearer with me, whilst our people were preparing their evening meal, I hastened up to see the famous temple of Bhawānī, the place of resort of the Thugs, where they meet and take the vows. I ascended the steps of the ghāt of which there are about eighty, and very steep; from their summit you enter the bazār. This is a most curious place, and it is so narrow it can scarcely be called a street, being not more than six feet in the widest part, and in many places the breadth does not exceed three or four. It is lined on both sides with native shops, as thick as possible, and paved throughout with flag-stones. The people from the shops called out to me, “Will you not buy a garland for the goddess, or a tāgah?” “Will you not buy sweetmeats for the shrine?” Garlands of fresh flowers were in profusion for sale.
THE TEMPLE OF BHAWĀNĪ.
TEMPLE OF BHAWANI.
Sketched on the Spot and on stone by
I encountered a man who happened to be an hajjām, a cupper and scarifier. Now, in all Eastern stories a personage of this description appears to be a necessary appendage, and mine, who was also a barber and an Hindū, offered to show me the way to the temple of the Devī. The road, which is straight through the narrow paved alley of the bazār, must be half a mile or more in length: in time we arrived at the temple; three flags were flying from an old peepul-tree, and the noise of the bells which the Brahmāns were tinkling for worship told of the abode of the goddess. The temple, which is built of stone, is of rectangular form, surrounded by a verandah, the whole encompassed by a flight of five steps. The roof is flat, and the pillars that support it of plain and coarse workmanship. On the left is the entrance to the Hindū holy of holies. The Brahmāns begged me to take off my shoes, and said I might
then enter and see the face of the goddess. I thought of the Thugs, and my curiosity induced me to leave my shoes at the door, and to advance about three yards into the little dark chamber. The place was in size so small, that when six people were in it, it appeared quite full; the walls were of large coarse stones. The worshippers were turned out of the apartment, and they gave me a full view of the Devī, the great goddess, the renowned Bhagwān!
The head of the figure is of black stone with large eyes, the whites of which are formed of plates of burnished silver: these glaring eyes attract the admiration of the Hindūs:—“Look at her eyes!” said one. Thrown over the top of her head, strings of white jasmine flowers (the double sweet-scented chumpa) took the place of hair, and hung down to the shoulders. If you were to cut a woman off just at the knees, spread a red sheet over her, as if she were going to be shaved, hiding her arms entirely with it, but allowing her feet to be seen at the bottom, making the figure nearly square—you would have the form of the goddess. The two little black feet rested on a black rat, at least they called it so, and a small emblem of Mahadēo stood at the side. Six or eight long chaplets of freshly-gathered flowers hung from her neck to her feet festooned in gradation,—they were formed of the blossoms of the marigold, the chumpa, or white jasmine, and the bright red pomegranate. The figure stood upon a square slab of black stone. It was about four feet in height, and looked more like a child’s toy than a redoubtable goddess. The Brahmān or the Thug, whichever he might be, (for at this shrine all castes worship,) took a white flower, and gave it to me as a present for the goddess, at the same time requesting a rupee as an offering at the shrine. I had no money, but the old bearer had five paisā (about one penny three farthings), which he gave to the Brahmān, who said, “This is not enough to buy a sweetmeat for the goddess!” I made answer,
“I give thee all, I have no more, Though poor the offering be.”
The man saw it was the truth, and was satisfied. The old bearer then requested me to hold my sketch-book for a few moments whilst he went in and put up a prayer: this I did, and the old man returned very quickly, much pleased at having seen the Devī.
I sketched the goddess when before the shrine, the Brahmān holding the lamp for me. Over her head was suspended from the ceiling an ornament of white flowers, and a lamp like that in the robber’s cave in “Gil Blas” was also hanging from the roof. There was also a lamp on the black slab, which had the appearance of a Roman lamp. Ornaments worn on the wrists of Hindū women, called kangan, formed of a small hank of red, or rather flame-coloured cotton, intermixed with yellow, were offered to the Devī: the Brahmāns put them on her shoulders, as arms she had none. Why and wherefore the kangan is offered, I know not. Before a satī ascends the funeral-pile, some red cotton is tied on both wrists. This may, probably, account for the kangan offered to Bhagwān, the patroness of satīs.
Sketched in the Temple and on Stone by
I thought of the Thugs, but mentioned not the name in the temple; it is not wise “to dwell in the river and be at enmity with the
BHAGWĀN.
crocodile[52].” In the verandah of the temple were two massive bells of a metal looking like bronze.
I can fancy terror acting on the Hindoos when worshipping the great black hideous idol, Kalī Ma, at Kalī-ghāt, near Calcutta; but this poor stump of a woman, with quiet features, staring eyes of silver, and little black feet, inspires no terror:—and yet she is Bhagwān— the dreaded Bhagwān!
The temple was crowded by men and women coming and going, as fast as possible, in great numbers. The month of Aghar is the time of the annual meeting; it begins November 15th, and ends the 13th of December; therefore Bindachun must be full of rascals and Thugs at this present time, who have come here to arrange their religious murders, and to make vows and pūja.
This visit to Bindachun interested me extremely; the style of the temple surprised me; it is unlike any of the Hindoo places of worship I have seen, and must be of very ancient date. The pillars are of a single stone without ornament, rough and rude. Some of the shops in the bazār, like the one on the right where sweetmeats are sold, are of curious architecture; stone is used for all the buildings, quarries being abundant in this part of the country.
The people crowded around me whilst I was sketching the exterior of the temple, but were all extremely civil: the Brahmāns and beggars clamoured for paisā (copper coins), but were civil nevertheless. It is a disreputable neighbourhood: I hope they will not rob the boats to-night, as all the rascals and murderers in India flock to this temple at the time of the annual fair, which is now being held. Having made my salām to the great goddess, I was guided by the barber to another idol, which he said was worshipped by very few people. It was a female figure, very well executed in stone, with four or five figures around it, carved on the same block. I was much inclined to carry it off; it is one of the handsomest pieces of Hindū sculpture I have seen. A few flowers were lying withered before it in the hovel where it stood, placed there, it may be, by the piety of the barber. Even my husband was induced to climb the steps of the
ghāt, and to walk through the bazār to the temple, but he did not enter it. A number of idols were under a peepul-tree in the bazār; they were a great temptation, but in this high place of superstition it might be dangerous to carry off a god.
This wandering life is very delightful; I shall never again be content “to sit in a parlour sewing a seam,” which the old song gives forth as the height of feminine felicity! Much sooner would I grope through a dark alley idol hunting—Apropos, by the idols under the peepul-tree was a satī mound, broken and deserted, not even a kālsa was there to claim the passing salām of the Hindū, nor a flower to mark the spot: perhaps the great goddess draws off the worshippers from the deified mortal, although all satīs are peculiarly under her protection.
THE TASHMA-BAZ THUGS.
“Thuggee and Meypunnaism are no sooner suppressed than a new system of secret assassination and robbery is discovered, proving the truth of Colonel Sleeman’s remark, that ‘India is a strange land; and live in it as long as we may, and mix with its people as much as we please, we shall to the last be constantly liable to stumble upon new moral phenomena to excite our special wonder.’ As anticipated, at least one set of new actors have to be introduced to the public, and these are the Tashma-baz Thugs.
“The Thugs formerly discovered went forth on their murderous expeditions under the protection of a goddess, the Tashmabazes have for their genius a European! Who in England would be prepared to credit that the thimble-riggers of English fairs have in India given rise to an association that, in the towns, bazārs, and highways of these provinces, employs the game of stickandgarteras the lure for victims destined to be robbed or murdered? Yet this is the simple fact. The British had hardly gained possession of this territory before the seeds of the flourishing system of iniquity, brought
to light almost half a century afterwards, were sowed in 1802 by a private soldier in one of his majesty’s regiments stationed at Cawnpore. The name of this man was Creagh. He initiated several natives into the mysteries of the stickand garter, and these afterwards appeared as the leaders of as many gangs, who traversed the country, gambling with whomsoever they could entrap to try their luck at this game. It consists of rolling up a doubled strap, the player putting a stick between any two of its convolutions, and when the ends of the strap are pulled, it unrolls, and either comes away altogether, or is held at the double by the stick, and this decides whether the player loses or wins. A game requiring apparently no peculiar skill, and played by parties cleverly acting their parts as strangers to each other,—being even dressed in character,—readily tempted any greedy simpleton to try his luck, and show his cash. If he lost, he might go about his business; if he won, he was induced to remain with the gamblers, or was followed, and as opportunity offered was either stupified with poisonous drugs, or by any convenient method murdered. Many corpses found from time to time along the vicinity of the Grand Trunk road, without any trace of the assassins, are now believed to have been the remains of the Tashmabazes’ victims; and distinct information has been obtained from their own members of murders committed by them. The merest trifle, it seems, was sufficient inducement to them to commit the crime, there being one case of three poor grass-cutters murdered by those miscreants in a jungle, merely for the sake of their trifling personal property. Indeed, these gangs seem to have been of a more hardened character than any other yet discovered, for their sole aim was gain, however it might be secured, without the plea of religious motive which regulated the proceedings of the other fraternities. Parties of them used to visit all the chief towns and stations of the Doab and its neighbourhood, and established themselves in the thoroughfares leading to the principal cities. Under the guise of gamblers, they were
often brought to the notice of the authorities, and subjected to the trifling punishments due to minor offences; but this was the very thing that lulled suspicion as to their real character. They were constantly in the power of many dangerous acquaintances; but these were bribed to silence out of their abundant spoils. The police almost every where seem to have been bought over. In the city of Gwalior, the kotwal got one-fourth of their profits; and in the British territory, five rupees a day have been paid as hush-money to the neighbouring thannah. Amongst their friends was the mess khansaman of a regiment at Meerut, the brother of one of their chiefs, and an accomplice. Gold and silver coin, and ornaments of pearl and coral, formed part of the remittances that used to be sent to their head-quarters at Cawnpore. Indeed, they seem to have carried on a very safe and lucrative business, until the magistrates of Boolundshuhr and Cawnpore pounced upon them in the beginning of this year. Mr. Montgomery followed up their apprehension by a full report to Government, when the matter was taken up by the Thuggee Department, the sifting machinery of which, in the hands of Major Graham, soon brought to light all the facts necessary to establish that the gang formed a hitherto unknown class of Thugs.”—AgraMessenger,Dec.2,1848.
12th.—One mile above Bindachun are the dangerous granite rocks of Seebpūr. After a very quiet day and very little difficulty, we anchored off the village of Bhoghwa, where we were informed by the chaukidār, that turkeys, fowls, and birds were abundant.
The exertion of yesterday quite fagged me; I was up and sketching from six in the morning to eleven A.M., at Mirzapūr, and again in the evening at the temple of Bhawānī,—a day of overfatigue, but a very agreeable one. How I love this roaming life on the river, with the power of stopping at any picturesque spot!—Even tracking against the stream is most delightful to one who, like Dr. Syntax, is in search of the picturesque. My husband objects to
