Ageing with(out) kin: Migration, longing, and disenchantment in Punjab

Drawing on an ethnography with older adults in the northern Indian city of Patiala and its peripheral areas, this paper addresses three interconnected questions. How do older adults in Punjab experience ageing in the absence of kin members who migrate transnationally? How does migration reshape their perceptions of care, belonging, family reconfiguration, and other forms of social relatedness? How do these experiences reflect broader socio-political shifts in Punjab, both culturally and politically? First, the paper examines the paradox of transnational migration. Older adults actively facilitate the migration of younger family members by pooling resources and leveraging family networks. However, they are also the ones who live in the absence of their emigrated children occupying a liminal space. This paradox is explained through a temporality in which older adults situate themselves through their life course. Further, the paper highlights how ageing and migration unfold against a backdrop of growing disenchantment with the state among older adults. It also highlights their complex relationships with internal migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar amongst others. Growing disenchantment with the state is largely shaped by unemployment, agrarian distress, and systemic neglect and corruption. The complex relationships with internal migrant labourers and care workers stem from anxieties of older adults, who perceive a demographic shift in Punjab because of the growing presence of these migrants. This study contributes to ethnographic and qualitative scholarship. It shows how migration produces layered affective, social, and political entanglements. These entanglements shape the very experience of growing old within a particular socio-political and cultural setting.