How Migrant Workers in Pandemic India Rebuilt the Meaning of Freedom

When India imposed one of the world’s strictest COVID-19 lockdowns in March 2020, millions of internal migrant workers found themselves suddenly stripped of income, mobility, and, in many cases, their sense of self. A new qualitative study published in SN Social Sciences argues that this episode was not simply a story of freedom lost. Instead, it shows how migrant workers actively reworked the meaning of liberty under conditions of coercive pandemic governance, reconstructing freedom through ethical self-discipline, care for others, and the act of telling their own stories.

The study, conducted by Thomas A. Mattappallil of Rajagiri College of Social Sciences in Cochin, Saji Varghese of CHRIST University in Bangalore, and Jasmine Mathew of Rajagiri College of Social Sciences, draws on three semi-structured oral history interviews carried out in early 2022 with migrant workers who lived through the lockdown. Rather than treating these testimonies as raw data to be coded, the researchers read them as narrative performances: deliberate acts of self-making in which speakers negotiate dignity and identity within circumstances they did not choose. The authors argue that this approach reveals dimensions of freedom that conventional legal or policy analyses tend to miss.

At the theoretical heart of the paper lies a distinction borrowed from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who in his 1969 essays separated liberty into two strands. Negative liberty refers to freedom from external interference, the absence of obstacles placed by other people or by the state. Positive liberty, by contrast, concerns self-mastery: the capacity to be the author of one’s own life, to act according to one’s own purposes and values. The researchers’ central claim is that pandemic governance in India produced a paradox by operating on both registers at once. The state withdrew negative liberty through enforced immobility and confinement, while simultaneously compelling migrant workers to reconstruct positive liberty through their own moral and practical resources.

This paradox, the authors contend, exposes a structural weakness in liberal conceptions of freedom. Formal rights and juridical status mean little when material security collapses. Migrant workers in India, most of whom labour in the informal economy without contracts, social protection, or savings buffers, experienced the lockdown not as a temporary suspension of ordinary life but as an existential rupture. The loss of wages, housing precarity, and social exclusion combined to make the deprivation of negative liberty inseparable from the deprivation of the material conditions that any meaningful freedom presupposes. The study situates this finding within a broader body of scholarship on India’s informal labour, including work by Jan Breman on footloose labour and by researchers documenting the ‘crisis of mobility’ that saw workers walking hundreds of kilometres toward their home villages after transport systems shut down.

The analytical framework also draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which describes how modern states govern not only through coercion but by shaping conduct, expectations, and self-understanding. Pandemic measures in India, the paper suggests, functioned as techniques of security governance: containment zones, quarantine rules, and mobility restrictions that classified and managed populations in the name of collective health. Scholars of critical security studies, including Didier Bigo’s work on the securitization of migration and Ken Booth’s arguments about security as emancipation, provide the second theoretical pillar. From this perspective, the migrant testimonies become a lens for interrogating who gets protected by crisis governance and who bears its costs.

What makes the study distinctive is its insistence that freedom under lockdown was neither simply suppressed nor simply endured. Through close analysis of the interviews, the researchers show that workers articulated liberty in three interlocking ways. The first was ethical self-discipline: adopting routines, restraint, and self-regulation as a way of retaining agency when external choices had vanished. The second was relational care: sustaining obligations to family members, co-workers, and neighbours, which the authors interpret through feminist care ethics, notably Joan Tronto’s idea of caring democracy and Judith Jordan’s concept of relational resilience. In these accounts, freedom was not an individual possession but a practice sustained through connection to others.

The third mode was narrative self-making. Drawing on narrative theory, including Arthur Frank’s account of the wounded storyteller and Paul Ricoeur’s work on identity, the authors treat the interview itself as a site where freedom is enacted. Speaking about one’s suffering, ordering memory into a coherent account, and addressing an audience that acknowledges one’s experience are, in this reading, exercises of moral agency. The testimony does not merely describe a loss of liberty; it performs a claim to selfhood that coercion could not extinguish. Oral history scholarship, particularly Alessandro Portelli’s work on the form and meaning of personal stories, underpins this methodological stance.

The phenomenological dimension of the analysis adds a further layer. The authors engage with philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Havi Carel, whose work on illness as a phenomenological tool explores how embodied experience reshapes one’s sense of possibility. Related empirical research on the pandemic, including studies documenting slowed and disoriented time perception during COVID-19, suggests that confinement altered not only what people could do but how they experienced temporality itself. The migrant testimonies in this study are read against that backdrop: as accounts of people whose horizon of possible futures contracted dramatically, and who nonetheless found ways to reorient themselves within it.

The paper also contributes to debates on dignity under crisis conditions. Previous research on migrant labourers in India during the pandemic has documented profound human rights concerns, including the exclusion of informal workers from relief mechanisms and the mental health toll of sudden displacement. By foregrounding how workers themselves speak about dignity and selfhood, the new study shifts attention from policy failure alone to the moral lives of those affected. The authors note that particular care was taken during the interviews to avoid retraumatising participants, who provided informed verbal consent and are identified in the article only through pseudonyms, with identifying details altered to protect their identities.

Methodologically, the study is deliberately small in scale, resting on three interviews, and the authors are transparent that no datasets were generated or analysed beyond the qualitative material. Its contribution lies less in statistical generalisation than in theoretical refinement: demonstrating, through close reading, that liberty becomes a lived and contested practice rather than a purely juridical status. For scholars of mobility, governance, and crisis, the findings suggest that pandemic governance should be evaluated not only by epidemiological outcomes or economic costs, but by how it reshapes the conditions under which vulnerable populations can author their own lives. For a wider audience, the study offers a sobering insight: freedom, even in its most intimate forms, depends on the material and social scaffolding that crisis can strip away, and on the remarkable human capacity to rebuild meaning from within confinement.

Subject of Research: Migrant workers' lived experiences of liberty and freedom during India's COVID-19 lockdown

Article Title: Re-reading liberty: migrant testimonies and the paradox of freedom in pandemic India

Article References: Mattappallil, T. A., Varghese, S., & Mathew, J. (2026). Re-reading liberty: migrant testimonies and the paradox of freedom in pandemic India. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 434. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01721-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01721-0

Keywords: migrant labour, liberty, COVID-19 lockdown, India, oral history, narrative testimony, Isaiah Berlin, governmentality, critical security studies, human dignity, positive liberty, pandemic governance