Journal of African Development

This research paper will discuss the Bhikkharipuri husband, (migrant husband figure) Bhikhari Thakur, in his work Bidesiya in terms of the migration trauma with regards to the physical displacement to psychological exile. Although the play was based on the historical fact of labour migration between the areas with Bhojpuri speaking population, it prefigures the emotional effects of separation, namely nostalgia, abandonment, and fragmented subjectivity, that acculturation and immigration can impose especially upon those who remain. The theme of mental exile is used to examine the manner in which the characters exist in a state of permanent emotional detachment whereby home is a location of desire but not belonging. Using the theory of trauma and cultural memory, the research paper proposes that Bidesiya is an affective archive of migrant pain, whose mode of articulating loss is based on folk idioms, song, and performative lament. The dramaturgy by Bhikhari Thakur turns migration into a permanent psychic state and brings out the way social organization of movement creates silent emotional crises in the lives of subalterns