30 Narratives of Left-Behind Women Neha Rai* INTRODUCTION Migration has been an important phenom- enon in eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) since the people of eastern UP, that is, Azamgarh, Jaunpur, Gazhipur and Banaras, migrated as indentured labour to Dutch colonies such as Mauritius, Surinam, Guyana, Trinidad and Fiji in 1830 after abolishment of slavery (Laal, 1983; Narayan, 2005). But it was trans- national migration, also known as a new form of slavery (Tinker, 1993). After independence, Article 19(1)(d) and Article 19(1)(e) part iii of the Constitution of India declared movement of people as a fundamental right, that is, ‘All citizens shall have the right to move freely throughout the territory of India, to reside, and settle in any part of the territory of India’. This established internal migration as a constitu- tional right. Internal migration can be defined as physical mobility of an individual to a dif- ferent administrative territory to reside but within the national boundary. Typically, this is a change in residence that crosses provincial or urban boundaries (Bhagat, 2011). Earlier, there was little information about internal migration in the census of India; only few reports were available with some descriptive and linguistic material because earlier people used to cross only village boundaries of their ancestral land for cultivation (Bhagat, 2012). Construction of railways made movement easier for the people in the colonial period (Chattopadhyay, 1987). Internal migration was paid serious attention by scholars such as Everett S. Lee (1966), Kingsley Davis (1951) and K. C. Zachariah (1964) due to population growth and its socio-economic implications. Earlier, migration was a subject for geogra- phers, demographers and economists only, but nowadays it is popular among sociologists. Being a social phenomenon, it is important to understand the social aspects of migra- tion such as identity, gender discrimination and gender relations in the migration pro- cess. The trend of internal migration became more prevalent after globalization, which brought a significant change in rural areas. * The author sincerely thanks Dr Archana Singh and Dr Kunal Keshri of G. B. Pant Social Science Institute for their suggestions and comments.