Belonging in Transit
Sahib Singh Tulsi, PhD.
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
On a July afternoon in 2023, Smriti called out and waved while returning with other girls. It was a part of the day she looked forward to – the stretch between school and hostel where, for a while, she was claimed by neither. The walk became its own space of inhabitation. Across such evenings in Bastar, as students move back toward the hostel in loose clusters, there is a brief interval where movement becomes a condition of being. In such moments, a different form of belonging comes into view: one that is not anchored in place, but sustained through movement across villages, schools, and hostels, as well as the relationships and affective negotiations this movement entails.
This entry introduces the concept of ‘belonging in transit’ to reimagine how Adivasi youth inhabit their educational journeys. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with 12 Adivasi youth, aged 14-19, living in state-run hostels and attending government schools in a town in the Bastar region, I extend work that understands belonging as relational and emerging through practices of recognition, participation, and exclusion (Meloni, 2023; Pugh, 2009). This scholarship reveals how belonging is partial, contingent, and often ambivalent across different social worlds. What is less explored is how such forms of belonging are worked through movement. I argue that belonging cannot be located in bounded sites such as home, community, or town, nor can it be understood as something undone by mobility. Rather than treating movement as a disruption or a backdrop, I show how it becomes central to belonging as lived experience. Belonging is not lost in transit; it is produced through it.
Belonging Across Uneven Worlds
Across Bastar, many young Adivasis leave their home villages to pursue schooling in nearby towns, where they reside in state-run hostels. These movements are not one-time departures. They are rhythmic, recurring, and layered with obligations, memories, and expectations. A young person may spend months in a hostel governed by routines, discipline, and peer life, then return to a village where life unfolds through agricultural cycles, kinship, and shared labour. Neither site exists independently; each is experienced through the presence of the other. It is within this ongoing circulation that belonging in transit takes form.
In hostels, belonging emerges through proximity and repetition. Beds are arranged in rows, meals are shared, and friendships grow within institutional constraints. There is comfort in being among peers who are similarly distant from home. At the same time, hostel life regulates time, movement, and interaction. Privacy is limited, and everyday life is collectively organised. Girls, in particular, spoke about how these regulations shaped their lives. As Ishika noted, “Hostel staff don’t let us go outside… Then they scold us when we get back late from school.” Pihu similarly remarked, “We don’t get permission in the evening for anything… In the village, we can go anywhere.” These accounts highlight how institutional care is experienced alongside constraint. The hostel can feel at once like a space of care and a site of containment. Belonging here carries the weight of adjustment and the negotiation of institutional control.
The village is not just a place of origin, but remains an active part of Adivasi youth’s lives even as they move away. When I asked what they liked discussing most in our interviews, many smiled and said, “Our village,” recalling the familiarity of food, family, and the lived textures of daily life. It evokes a sense of recognition – the ease of movement, the intimacy of relationships, and the feeling of being known. This familiarity coexists with constraint. Expectations of labour, limited opportunities for study, and the pressures of social norms organise everyday life. For some, the village becomes both a place of attachment and a space they must leave, in part, to imagine their futures. Belonging here is not secure; it is tied to obligation as much as comfort.
Between these locations, young people carry multiple orientations. A girl may value the hostel’s discipline while longing for the quiet of the village. A boy may describe the city as a site of possibility while remaining attentive to family responsibilities at home. These are not contradictions to be resolved. They are conditions through which belonging in transit is lived. They point to a form of belonging that is stretched across uneven social fields, where young people remain partially attached and unsettled in each.
Education and the Work of Mobility
In this context, education extends beyond classrooms. It unfolds through movement: negotiating distance, managing relationships across spaces, and cultivating new forms of sociality. Over 11 months of fieldwork, I observed how learning took shape through sharing rooms with peers, navigating unfamiliar urban environments, and balancing personal aspirations with familial responsibilities. In everyday hostel life, this appeared in small moments such as studying together in the evenings, exchanging notes, and sharing leisure time. These experiences constitute what education comes to mean.
Mobility is commonly understood in terms of opportunity, aspiration, and access, particularly in relation to how young people encounter uneven distributions of resources and institutions across space (Dyson & Jeffrey, 2022; Farrugia, 2016; Singh, 2025). This body of work has been crucial in showing how movement is structured by inequality while also being informed by future orientations and imagined possibilities. Yet these accounts do not fully capture how movement across multiple, often competing, social worlds becomes the condition through which belonging is lived. The experiences of Adivasi youth in Bastar suggest that mobility is not only about accessing opportunities but also about navigating these worlds simultaneously. Hostels and schools open access to education and new forms of social life, while embedding young people within institutional routines that structure time, movement, and conduct. The village, in turn, does not recede. It remains a site of belonging even as it becomes a place some feel compelled to move away in order to build their lives.
Belonging in transit also foregrounds the affective dimensions of these journeys. There is anticipation in arriving in the city at the beginning of a school term, and a sense of relief in returning home during holidays. Pride in acquiring new skills and knowledge sits alongside uncertainty about what these might yield. Laughter among friends coexists with moments of solitude and longing. These feelings do not attach themselves neatly to particular places. They circulate, much like the young people themselves, across the spaces they move through.
Importantly, this movement is relational. Decisions about schooling are entangled with family expectations, economic constraints, and community values. Young people carry with them the aspirations of their parents, the sacrifices of their households, and the moral worlds of their communities. These forms of care are not easily reproduced in the city. As Sudeep reflected, “Sometimes when we fall ill, no one asks about it in the city.” Belonging, then, is not only about where one feels at home; it is about remaining answerable to the relationships that make movement possible.
To think of belonging in transit is to move beyond narratives that treat mobility as a straightforward pathway to development or belonging as something either secured or lost. Educational journeys are lived through ongoing negotiation between attachment and aspiration, familiarity and change. These journeys require continuous recalibration, giving rise to ways of being that enable young people to inhabit multiple worlds at once. Belonging emerges through this, without fully settling in any one of them.
This reframing reshapes how educational journeys in contexts such as Bastar are understood. It emphasises the significance of education not only in its outcomes, but in the processes through which young people come to understand themselves and their worlds. In the fading light of Bastar’s evenings, as students walk back toward the hostel, these dynamics come into view not as abstract concepts, but as lived realities. Belonging is not fixed in any one place, but held in the spaces between departure and return.
References
Dyson, J., & Jeffrey, C. (2022). Fragments for the future: Selective urbanism in rural North India. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112(4), 1008–1022. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2021.1947770
Farrugia, D. (2016). The mobility imperative for rural youth: The structural, symbolic and non-representational dimensions of rural youth mobilities. Journal of Youth Studies, 19(6), 836–851.
Meloni, F. (2023). Ways of belonging: Undocumented youth in the shadow of illegality. Rutgers University Press.
Pugh, A. J. (2009). Longing and belonging: Parents, children, and consumer culture. University of California Press.
Singh, R. (2025). Between gendered selfhood and patriarchal family: Young women’s non-metropolitan education mobilities in urban north India. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 26(2), 277–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2025.2458399
Bio: Sahib Singh Tulsi is an ethnographer of education and youth in central India. He recently completed his PhD in Educational Studies (Anthropology of Education) at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His research is based on long-term work with Adivasi youth in Bastar, examining how schooling, rural-urban mobility, and belonging are lived under conditions of inequality.