# Archive(s) of the Present: Homebound by Puja Changoiwala

Vanessa Guignery

► To cite this version:

Vanessa Guignery. Archive(s) of the Present: Homebound by Puja Changoiwala. Éditions de l'Université de Lorraine. The Itineraries of Puja Changoiwala's Artivist Practices: 'To Dispel Darkness and Herald Change'. Eds. Adriana Haben, Monica Latham, Doriane Nemes and Solène Rossion., pp.163-80, 2025, 9782384512003. hal-05441274

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Submitted on 6 Jan 2026

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# Archive(s) of the Present:
## Homebound by Puja Changoiwala

Vanessa GUIGNERY

In the Author's Note to Homebound (2021), Puja Changoiwala, referring to the plight of India's internal migrant workers who attempted to go back home during the 2020 Covid pandemic, wrote that she 'wanted to seal their cold realities in ink, ensure that we never drown them into oblivion' (p. 230). She added that she chose fiction as a medium to keep a trace of their experiences and ensure that their sudden visibility would not dissipate. While fictional texts ontologically differ from archived documents, this chapter argues that Homebound contributes to an archive or a counter-archive of the present in its representation of often unrecorded and unarchived people and events. After defining the concept of 'archive(s)' in the plural and in the singular, this chapter explores the relation of journalism and non-fiction to the archive(s) before examining some of the ways in which Homebound archives the present. The chapter draws in particular from Boaventura de Sousa Santos's concepts of 'palimpsest archive' and 'insurgent or counter-hegemonic archive' in order to show the ways in which Homebound archives 'a nonofficial and nonauthorized present' and relies on 'anarchical practices' which enable Puja Changoiwala to record the affective, sensitive and embodied aspects of lived experience.

A recent trend in contemporary fictional and non-fictional Indian literature in English consists in representing the lives and experiences of underprivileged people or characters from the working class who are essential to the country's functioning and yet remain invisible in official discourses and records. In a 2002 article entitled 'The Urban Turn', historian Gyan Prakash refers to 'the growing number of poor housed in slums and streets, who provide the cheap labour and services without which the official city could not survive. Exploited and disenfranchised, the existence of this other cannot be acknowledged by the official city as part of its self' (p. 5). While authorities are reluctant to recognise the crucial role of this large population, writers and artists can give it visibility, as was done, for instance, by Aman Sethi in *A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi* (2011), a literary reportage about homeless daily construction workers in Old Delhi, or by Mridula Koshy in *Bicycle Dreaming* (2016), a novel

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which relates a year in the life of the teenage daughter of a Muslim itinerant waste
buyer in South Delhi.<fnref n="1" /> In her debut novel *Homebound* (2021), Mumbai-based
journalist and author Puja Changoiwala turns the spotlight on the situation of
India's internal migrant workers who, for lack of work and means of subsistence,
attempted to walk back to their rural homes during the COVID pandemic
in 2020, 'humans who form the bulwark of our economy, while living in
Dickensian tenements, mostly working as daily-wage labourers without safety
gear, written contracts, job security, paid leaves, health care benefits, social
security, or fair wages' (Changoiwala, 2021, p. 229).

In the Author's Note to Homebound, dated 17 May 2020 at the start
and 20 August 2021 at the end, Puja Changoiwala remarks that the workers'
mass departure from the cities gave these unseen, unheard, and yet essential
communities 'sudden visibility' (2021, p. 230). Realizing that 'their exodus
belonged to history' (2021, p. 230), she wished to make sure their ordeals would
not be forgotten: 'I wanted to seal their cold realities in ink, ensure that we never
drown them into oblivion' (2021, p. 230). She thus describes *Homebound* as
her 'attempt at documenting their story' (2021, p. 230). Her first instinct, as the
author of two non-fiction books and as a journalist 'who has reported on India's
informal economy and the workers who pillar it' (2021, p. 230), was 'to write a true
account, relaying the journeys of a few migrant workers as they marched home'
(2021, p. 230). This is partly what she does in the Author's Note, which starts with
the mention of an authentic person: 'Surrounded by a sea of migrant workers
like himself, Gaurav, whose name I've changed to prevent further persecution,
stood in the blistering heat of Gujarat, awaiting a bus that the state had promised
would take him home' (2021, p. 227). The Note goes on to provide context, dates,
precise figures and details that one may find in a work of journalism, such as Puja
Changoiwala's own well-informed articles on the situation of underprivileged
workers during the COVID pandemic, 'Social Distancing Is Not an Option for
India's Poor', published in *Slate* on 20 March 2020, and 'India's Coronavirus
Response Ignores its Slumdwellers, all 65 Million of Them', published in *The
New Arab* on 12 May 2020, only five days before the opening date of the Author's
Note in *Homebound*. However, because Puja Changoiwala herself could not
travel during lockdown and interview workers, she chose fiction as another
medium to keep a trace of the internal migrants' experiences and to ensure that
their sudden visibility would not dissipate.

While fictional texts ontologically differ from archived documents, I would
like to argue that *Homebound*, together with other contemporary works of fiction
and non-fiction about invisibilised workers in India, contributes to an archive
or a counter-archive of the present in its representation of often unrecorded

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<footnote n="1">1. For an analysis of these books, see Guignery 2025.</footnote>
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and unarchived people and events. Whereas archives are expected to store a knowledge of the past (anthropologist Arjun Appadurai notes that ‘the archive is usually sacralized as the site of the past’, 2003, p. 15), a novel such as *Homebound*, which was written contemporaneously with the events, documents a situation in the present so that the workers’ condition during the COVID pandemic may be known in the present (thus conveying, via fictional means, information which journalism can also provide) as well as remembered in the future. As such, and despite obvious ontological differences, *Homebound* shares some characteristics with the archive as defined by Appadurai as ‘the product of the anticipation of collective memory’ and thus ‘an aspiration rather than a recollection’ (2003, p. 15). I therefore suggest that *Homebound* be read as being part of the ‘living archive’ which, according to Stuart Hall, is ‘present, on-going, continuing, unfinished, open-ended’ (2001, p. 89), an in-process archive which ‘acts or proposes to act with living reality’ (Araeen, 2001, p. 93) and can make space for, and give visibility to, otherwise unacknowledged subjects. After briefly defining what I understand by archive(s) – in the plural and in the singular – I will explore the relation of journalism and non-fiction to the archive(s) before examining some of the ways in which *Homebound* archives the present.

## From Archives to Archive and Counter-Archive(s)

The word ‘archives’ in the plural traditionally refers to documents that are collected, catalogued and preserved, as well as to the place where such records are being kept (Mbembe, 2002, p. 19). Archives are thus assigned a protected and fixed space (sometimes away from public inspection),<fnref n="2" /> in a fixed time; they are governed by a logic of classification and can form the basis for the constitution of a narrative. In their materiality as paper, manuscripts, recorded sounds and images, but also in digital form, archives are what media theorist Wolfgang Ernst, drawing from Pierre Nora’s seminal concept, calls ‘a functional *lieu de mémoire*’ (Ernst, 2004, p. 49) and ‘a storage agency’ (p. 48), which may only then be turned into a narrative. ‘Archive’ in the singular, as used for instance by Michel Foucault to refer to a system of knowledge and a ‘practice’ (2002, p. 146) or by Arlette Farge in *Le Goût de l’archive* (1989), is a broader and more fluid concept which supposes ‘a more inclusive view of records and recordkeeping’ (Foscarini *et al.*, 2016, p. xii), ‘a wider sweeping space of knowledge, a potential for knowledge that may be found in a variety of materials including those that are yet undiscovered’ (Bastian, 2016, p. 8). In ‘Moving the Margins to the Middle:

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<footnote n="2">2. Howard Caygill highlights ‘the origins of the archive in oligarchic rule’ as in ancient Greek, only the *archons* (the keepers of public records) – and not everyone – had access to the preserved records (1999, p. 2).</footnote>
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Reconciling “the Archive” with the Archives’, Jeannette A. Bastian broadly defines the archive as ‘a site of both community identity and self-realization, a monolithic accumulation of knowledge on the one hand, a sponge-like fluidity of information on the other, a particular location but with no fixed address, a place of affect and emotion [...] and, importantly, a context for evidence and memory’ (2016, p. 6). Marlene Manoff, a scholar in archival studies, points to ‘the inflation of the term “archive”’, which has become a ‘loose signifier for a disparate set of concepts’ (2004, p. 10).

This encompassing conception of the archive needs to be understood in relation to what has been called ‘the archival turn’ of the mid-to late-twentieth century in several disciplines, defined by art historian Sara Callahan as ‘a loose configuration of writing, theory, art, and visual culture that uses the terminology or image of the archive to describe a set of ideas about the structural power of history and its ideological and technological conditions’ (2024, p. 74). In the wake of Derrida’s concept of ‘archive fever’ introduced in 1995, taken up by curator Okwui Enwezor in *Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art* in 2008, art critic Hal Foster points to ‘an archival impulse’ (2004, p. 4) among artists that spurred them to ‘make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present [...] in a gesture of alternative knowledge or counter-memory’ (2004, p. 4). This turn to the archive aimed to reveal the dissonances, gaps and omissions in official archives, and to encourage scholars and artists to read those documents and records both along and against the grain, to refer to Ann Laura Stoler’s study *Along the Archival Grain* (2009), by looking closely for what may not be apparent at first glance, for the ‘discrepant accounts, dissenting voices, and extraneous detail’ (Stoler, 2009, p. 51), as well as for what is absent and spectral. Boaventura de Sousa Santos coined the concept of ‘palimpsest archive’ to refer to the act of ‘scraping the surface of what the archive shows in order to identify the marks, traces, shadows, and silences of what was destroyed or produced as absent, invisible, and irrelevant in the process of building the archiveable world’ (2018, p. 200). Saidiya Hartmann also invites readers to speculate from the absences of the archives, a process she names ‘critical fabulation’ (2008, p. 11) or ‘history written with and against the archive’ (2008, p. 12).

In *Homebound*, Meher, the teenage narrator who aspires to become a journalist and pens letters to a female reporter, draws attention to the gaps and silences of official records when she relates the story of a man murdered by his wife and her lover, whose body was dismembered and thrown into a river. Although the man’s age and professional status as ‘a worker in a wax-printing unit’ (2021, p. 56) and the identity of his killers were known, his name remained unknown and, because the man was poor and an orphan whom no one missed when he died, he failed to appear on news reports and was turned into an ‘unidentified body’ whom nobody would grieve and mourn, thus being effectively silenced in the archive. He became ‘an unidentified body, murdered

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by unidentified persons over unidentified reasons. Case closed' (2021, p. 58).
The hypnotic repetition of 'unidentified' followed by the firm nominal group
of alliterative monosyllables seemingly dissuades anyone tempted to rescue the
man from erasure and oblivion, confirming Judith Butler's claim that '[s]ome
lives are grievable, and others are not' (2004, p. xiv). The fact that only parts of
the man's dismembered body were recovered from the river seems to reflect the
incompleteness of the archive. Only Meher's report of this story in her letter
to a journalist acts as a memorialisation of the man, in the same way as she
memorialises the unnamed migrant worker who was thrown out of a truck on
his way home because he probably had COVID. Meher's family offers to help
and call a hospital but the feverish man orders them away and, although they
have to abandon him by the road to die, the teenager notes: 'my disobedient
mind refused to leave him behind' (2021, p. 82), and she thus keeps a trace of
him in her mind and on the page. The teenager is likewise attentive to the debris
and marks left by the workers walking home, noticing that 'the empty road told
many stories' (2021, p. 40): 'Their slain footwear lay strewn on the sidewalk, with
their empty water bottles and newspapers that had doubled as plates. Footprints
of all sizes carpeted the muddy walkway, as the sun rose, illuminating the shoe-
shaped epitaphs' (2021, p. 41). The walkers' precarious lives are registered in the
discarded objects while the footprints leave an ephemeral trace that demands
to be deciphered, an epitaph through which the workers may be momentarily
remembered and commemorated. Such traces, as vulnerable remains of what
is no longer, call for a specific type of care and attention to 'unexplored fault
lines, ragged edges, and unremarked disruptions' (Stoler, 2009, p. 52).

In the introduction to *Refiguring the Archive* (2002), Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris and Graeme Reid point to the existence of alternatives to public documentary archives: ‘Literature, landscape, dance, art and a host of other forms offer archival possibilities capable of releasing different kinds of information about the past, shaped by different record-keeping processes’ (2002, p. 10). Antoinette Burton also acknowledges the ‘power of literature to materialize those countless historical subjects who may never have come under the archival gaze’ (2006, pp. 16-17) and therefore recommends expanding ‘the definition of archival material’ (2006, p. 17) and considering fictional discourses ‘as legitimate and powerfully articulate archival locations’ (2006, p. 17). Meher in *Homebound*, as well as other fictional and non-fictional narrators in contemporary Indian literature, deploy various methods to offer counter-archives of the present through their preservation and transmission of the memory of insufficiently archived and recorded current events, practices and ordinary lives. As ‘sites of knowledge production and political resistance, interpretation and challenge to the ruling exclusive classifications’ (Istok, 2016, p. 5), these counter-archives operate against the grain of dominant discourses – be they official documents

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or the news reports of influential press organs – which may later become the official archives that will be transmitted to later generations.

The constitution of the archive and the selection of what is to be preserved are indeed intrinsically related to power and politics, as Derrida points out: ‘there is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory’ (1995, p. 11). Thus, as noted by Burton, the histories of some marginalised groups and communities ‘have not been written because they have not been considered legitimate subjects of history – and hence of archivization per se’ (2006, p. 2), or, to quote Boaventura de Sousa Santos, they were not deemed ‘worthy of being stored’ (2018, p. 197). When Puja Changoiwala writes that she wants to ‘seal [the internal migrant workers’] cold realities in ink’ (2021, p. 230) and to ‘document’ (2021, p. 230) their story, one could argue that, as a novelist – and not only a journalist – she acts as an archivist (or a counter-archivist) so as to keep a trace of underreported and underarchived populations and events, and that she and other writers do so by redefining what an archive might be and might include.

## Journalism and Non-Fiction as Archive(s)

Before her debut novel *Homebound* and alongside the journalistic pieces she regularly writes, Puja Changoiwala published two books of non-fiction, *The Front Page Murders* (2016) and *Gangster on the Run* (2020), which are examples of the invigorating development of literary non-fiction in India since the beginning of the twenty-first century. If one agrees to expand the definition of archival material and diversify the locations where it can be stored, journalistic texts and non-fictional literary narratives may be said to contribute to the constitution of an archive of the present, a ‘living archive’ (Chandra and Sunderason, 2023, p. 9) in process or in the making, ‘developing its own narrative in real time, in presence’ (Chandra and Sunderason, 2023, p. 9).

In *Homebound*, teenager Meher writes letters to journalist Ms. Farah, hoping that she will ‘report on [their] expedition’ in her news articles (2021, p. 20) and thereby give visibility to the migrant workers walking home who, even when they strain their ‘raspy voices’ (2021, p. 9), ‘vocalizing their fear, anguish and despair’ (2021, p. 9), are ‘[l]oud, so loud’, but ‘[u]nheard’ (2021, p. 9). Three different types of traces can be distinguished: letters, which can form part of traditional archives; journalistic reports, which may contribute to the archiving of current events; and the voices of the distressed migrant workers, which, however loud, remain ‘[u]nheard’ (2021, p. 9) – a word that is all the more powerful for being isolated between two full stops at the end of a paragraph after the vain repetition of ‘[l]oud, so loud’ (2021, p. 9). When workers get beaten by the police for speaking to the press about their mistreatment, Meher notes that ‘no one spoke’ (2021, p. 130). Even if she herself wants ‘to be

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heard' (2021, p. 130), to 'dissent against the silence' (2021, p. 130) and scream their innocence, she stays silent and is left with 'subdued screams' (2021, p. 130) and 'a frozen echo' (2021, p. 130): 'I knew no one was listening, neither god nor government' (p. 130). Could these loud but unheard, dissenting but silent voices be recorded and stored in news articles, and could the latter constitute an archive of the present? Meher refers at some point to 'the barrage of news reports' (2021, p. 105) telling stories about 'millions like us, who had set out on foot for their villages' (2021, p. 105); she often relies on news reports for her own knowledge (2021, p. 106) and transcribes the interview of a brick-kiln worker by a journalist (2021, p. 112-116). However, some of these reports can be rapidly outdated and then forgotten when a more important piece of news replaces them. Their paper or digital format may enable their preservation but also cause their disappearance as the digital format itself does not guarantee preservation.

In addition, some news reports may form unreliable archives when they are politically biased or convey deceptive information. In *Homebound*, Meher refers to Whatsapp and social media messages which 'conspire to alter reality, warp lives' (2021, p. 8) and spread 'digital falsities' (2021, p. 9), and defines the Internet – a 'mega-archive' (Foster, 2004, p. 4) which generates 'a new memory culture' (Ernst, 2004, p. 51) – as '[a] web of lies' (Changoiwala, 2021, p. 11). One example of manipulation is to be found in the 'choreographed pictures' (2021, p. 110) of the politician handing food to the stranded workers, when he briefly visits the place where they have just been sprayed by chemicals and instructs them not to smile to the camera but to '[l]ook distressed, hungry' (2021, p. 110). Such propaganda snapshots will become part of the visible archived traces of the event while the painstaking daily work of NGOs to support migrant workers goes unnoticed in the press, although young Saleha's activity for a community kitchen in the Govandi slum outside Mumbai is archived by Meher in one of her letters (2021, p. 107-108).

While news reports are ephemeral and can be unreliable, a different type of archival material is provided by long-form narrative journalism which, in India, can be found in such publications as *The Caravan* – a Delhi magazine – *Fountain Ink* – a magazine founded in 2011 and specialised in long-form reportage – or newsweekly *Outlook*, which has regularly published Arundhati Roy's long essays (her piece 'Walking with the Comrades' on the Maoist insurgency occupied most of the issue of 19 March 2010). In book form, what Marianne Hillion calls 'documentary narratives' (2024, p. 173) and Maitrayee Basu 'literary journalism about marginalised subjects' (2018) include such non-fictional books as Aman Sethi's *A Free Man* (2011), Sonia Faleiro's *Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance* (2010), Siddhartha Deb's *The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India* (2011), or Rajat Ubhaykar's *Truck de India!* (2019) – a travelogue that documents the working and living conditions of truck drivers in India. These books are emblematic of writers' efforts to renew the conventions
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of non-fiction and the modes of writing about disenfranchised people, offering
diverse ways of archiving the lives of neglected people.

The Author's Note to *Homebound* draws from some of the methods of journalism to give readers a vivid image of the unacknowledged migrant workers. As in her own journalistic pieces, Puja Changoiwala humanises her topic by focusing on a few specific people among those she interviewed during the course of her research for the book, such as the renamed Gaurav, a migrant worker who ended up in prison after waiting for a bus that was supposed to take him back home (2021, p. 228), or the unnamed elderly woman willing to walk 400 kilometres to reach her home (2021, p. 229). For the novel, the methods the author used drew from her experience as a journalist as she visited the highways in and around Mumbai to 'witness the migrant exodus for [her]self' (2021, p. 228), and, in October 2020, went to many villages in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan, talking to migrant workers but also to NGOs, villagers, lawyers, police officers and migrant specialists (2021, p. 231). In the Author's Note, she is careful to provide precise figures of the '991 lockdown-related, non-Covid deaths until 30 July 2020' (2021, p. 229), citing 'unofficial documentation' (2021, p. 229) as the Indian government has been very reluctant to disclose the number of COVID or non-COVID deaths and the accuracy of official statistics has been questioned - a topic Puja Changoiwala addressed in an article published in July 2020 and entitled 'Why South Asia's Covid-19 Numbers Are So Low (For Now)' (see also Guilmoto). By providing such 'unofficial documentation' in the Author's Note, Puja Changoiwala can be said to be proposing a counter-archive, one which documents what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls 'a nonofficial and nonauthorized present' (2018, p. 202). It is also this nonofficial present which she records in the novel, using some of the means and methods available in fiction and thereby providing a different type of archive or counter-archive.

Redefining the Archive(s)

In *The End of Cognitive Empire*, Boaventura de Sousa Santos introduces the concept of 'insurgent or counter-hegemonic archive' (2018, p. 202) which 'breaks with the archive form by scattering it through a multiplicity of sites and kinds of practices that aim to archive, even if in an ephemeral form, a nonofficial and nonauthorized present, a dense present whose strength comes from claiming a suppressed past' (2018, p. 202). Fiction might be one of these sites and novel writing one of these practices, and what is claimed is not only a suppressed past but also a suppressed present when categories of populations are unheard, unseen, ignored and therefore unarchived. In April 2020, Arundhati Roy published an essay entitled 'The Pandemic is a Portal', in which she quotes a carpenter who planned to walk all the way to the Nepal border because the lockdown suddenly

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decreed by India's Prime Minister – Narendra Modi – was condemning him to unemployment, homelessness and starvation. He told Roy: ‘Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us’, to which Roy adds: “Us” means approximately 460 million people’. These are the people essential to India’s economy, who remain unarchived and unreported, and whom Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not know about when he gave a four-hour notice of the lockdown. In *Homebound*, teenage boy Sameer shares his awareness of this enforced invisibility in a conversation with Meher: ‘the world does not even know we exist. Hundreds of millions like our fathers work in India’s informal workforce. They constitute the backbone of our economy. Yet, they have no legal safeguards. [...] The world does not see them’ (2021, p. 202), they are ‘invisible and unintelligible’ (2021, p. 202). For the world to see these spectral, ‘nonofficial and nonauthorized’ (de Sousa Santos, 2018, p. 202) figures, one needs ‘a multiplicity of sites and kinds of practices’ that may keep a trace of their lives (de Sousa Santos, 2018, p. 202).

The novel *Homebound* is one of these sites which records the lives of disadvantaged workers in the informal sector through means that differ from traditional archival material, more specifically through an ‘insurgent or counter-hegemonic archive’ (de Sousa Santos, 2018, p. 202) of the type provided by teenager Meher in her letters to the journalist. Over the course of her journey home, Meher’s rebellious spirit grows at the injustice suffered by the internal migrant workers: her ‘subdued screams’ (2021, p. 131) are replaced by ‘angry eyes’ (2021, p. 131), ‘rage’ (2021, p. 131) and ‘a discontent’ (2021, p. 202) which reaches its climax in her last letter to the journalist and particularly the very powerful three final pages marked by anaphora, rhetorical questions and accumulation that convey the depth of her outrage and despair, but also her emergence as a writer and, maybe, an archivist. After the anaphora of ‘I am tired’ (2021, p. 221) and her rhetorical questions starting with ‘How do I hope’ (2021, p. 222) and ‘Must I argue’ (2021, p. 224), Meher uses preterition to tell the journalist she will not endeavour to prove the humanity of the workers from the informal sector and will not make arguments about the value and grievability of their lives. However, she acknowledges them in a compelling one-sentence paragraph in which she enumerates what all these invisible workers (‘factory hands, loaders, painters, welders, barbers, carpenters, waiters, gem polishers, cobblers, sweepers, drivers and rickshaw pullers’, 2021, p. 223) perform so that the middle- and upper-classes may live comfortably (‘who build your homes, offices and schools, construct your cities, shrines and multiplexes, erect your hospitals and hotels, assemble your ships and bridges, unclog your drains and dispose your shit’, 2021, p. 223). The long enumeration testifies to the workers’ essential role and to the fact that they should not be excluded from, and silenced in, the archive of the present. Likewise, Meher archives the condition of labour when she transcribes the interview of the brick kiln worker who explains at length what his job consists in:

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We dig pits, moisten them, hack out clay from the wet pits, make the mud mixture, put the mixture in brick moulds, let the bricks dry and then unload them from the moulds. Then, we carry the bricks on our heads and put them in a burning furnace, as big as a cricket pitch, and as red-hot as hell. We also sweep and clean the baking area, hammer coal, keep the furnace fired day and night by feeding it with coal, among other things. [2021, p. 112-113]

When the reporter, astounded by the sheer accumulation of tasks, asks him: 'No, I mean, what is your exact job at the kiln?' (2021, p. 113), he answers: 'This is my exact job at the kiln' (2021, p. 113). Her incredulous reaction is emblematic of the general lack of knowledge of what the workers in the informal sector actually do, and Meher's attention to such information suggests that it is 'worthy of being stored' (de Sousa Santos, 2018, p. 197). Puja Changoiwala's precise description of labour in *Homebound* can be compared to Aman Sethi's 'ethnographic bias' (Hillion, 2021, p. 257) in *A Free Man*, when he meticulously documents the daily workers' professional skills, their tactics to get hired in the Old Delhi labour market of Bara Tooti Chowk, or the hierarchy between workers in an attempt to 'understand the mazdoor ki zindagi – the life of the labourer' (2011, p. 7).

Another method deployed by Puja Changoiwala to archive the lives of the internal migrant workers might be viewed through the prism of what has been called 'anarchical practices', in which the Greek prefix 'ana-' may mean 'above', 'against' but also 'upside down' and 'wrong', with the term bearing echoes of 'anarchy' as well (Adami and Ferrini, 2014). The counter-knowledge produced by the anarchive bears relation to the living archive in the attention being paid to what is 'unstable, fluid, ephemeral or transitory' (Chandra and Sunderason, 2023, p. 9), to 'dynamic and elusive forms of being and becoming' (Chandra and Sunderason, 2023, p. 9), to 'the body, the trace, the fragmented, the in-flux' (Chandra and Sunderason, 2023, p. 9). While traditional archives rely on concrete documents and tend to leave aside the affective, sensitive and embodied aspects of lived experience, *Homebound* draws on these very elements to portray the internal migrant workers. In her letters to the journalist, Meher thus documents the scars and traces left on the bodies of the spectral labourers whom the Indian authorities choose not to see. She notes that the migrants' feet 'spoke more than their eyes – naked feet, muddy feet, plastered feet, blistered feet, bruised feet and bleeding feet' (2021, p. 166), in which the enumeration testifies to the physical and embodied ordeal experienced by the migrants as they walk home over hundreds of kilometres. Meher also records the trembling and coughing body of a man on the verge of dying, 'the image of his sunken face' staying vivid before her eyes even after she has moved along (2021, p. 83). She recalls 'the dirt and sweat' (2021, p. 146) and is careful not to homogenise experiences, paying tribute instead to the variety of situations and affects: 'portraits of our migrant exodus kept emerging, some distressed, some determined, some desolate, and some dying' (2021, p. 167).

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Meher thus complexifies any archiving of the present by introducing nuance in her portraits of the migrant workers, so much so that some traces can unexpectedly veer into the poetic. Going further backwards in her memory, Meher recalls the body of Kalu Uncle, a farmer in Rajasthan who committed suicide because he could not repay his debts. As an eight-year-old girl at the time, Meher focused her gaze on the farmer's ebony skin as he hung from a tree, 'glisten[ing] in the afternoon sun, as if a million stars danced on his flesh, as if the universe had cast a spotlight on him, cheering him as he put on a show' (2021, p. 86). Momentarily, in the mind of the eight-year-old girl, the forlorn man was not the destitute farmer everyone ignored and would soon forget about, but a highly visible and sparkling figure who would remain in the girl's memory and later find his way into one of her letters to the journalist, thus memorialised and commemorated as a valuable and grievable person.

Through such passages that give visibility to communities who are not commonly represented in official archives, *Homebound* proposes a living archive which addresses ‘the spectre of absence, exclusion or marginalisation’ (Chandra and Sunderason, 2023, p. 13). However, Meher’s memorialisation of the internal migrant workers’ lives and experiences significantly suffers the same fate as many archives which have been lost or destroyed, since the reader is told in the afterword that after Meher died from COVID, her ‘notebook, where she wrote her eleven letters, was buried with her’ (2021, p. 226). This burial re-enacts the invisibilisation and silencing of the labourers in the archive while simultaneously pointing to the very existence of traces that will require an active scraping of the surface of the palimpsest archive to be recovered.

## Conclusion

In the Author's Note to *Homebound*, Puja Changoiwala writes that, faced with the resilience, hope, grief, despair and anger of the migrant workers walking home during the lockdown, her first instinct was 'to write a true account' (2021, p. 230), by which she meant a work of non-fiction through which she could have documented this massive exodus. Although she eventually wrote a novel, one could argue that she did propose a 'true account' because she stayed 'true to the narrative and to the humans who inspired it' (2021, p. 231), which entailed including '[n]o imagined atrocities, no made-up brutalities, no fictional victories, just what happened, just what *really* happened' (2021, p. 231). She stayed true to the narrative by avoiding the pitfall of what Aman Sethi called 'abjectivity', which he defined as 'the tendency for narratives about the working class to deliberately and thoughtlessly describe entire ways of life as abject' (qtd. in Lau, 2018, p. 378). While not overlooking the strenuous living and working conditions of the labourers, Puja Changoiwala's portrayal embraces the nuances of the lives

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of the inhabitants in the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, ‘a specimen of disturbing resilience’ (Changoiwala, 2021, p. 27), ‘a factory of human spirit’ (2021, p. 36), marked by the ‘audacity to dream’ (2021, p. 36). Thereby, to quote Ananya Roy, she confers ‘recognition on spaces of poverty and forms of popular agency that often remain invisible and neglected in the archives and annals of urban theory’ (2011, p. 224). Likewise, the hardships endured by the workers in their attempts to reach home during the COVID-19 pandemic, which fictional Meher relates in her letters and whose authenticity Puja Changoiwala attests in the Author’s Note (2021, p. 231) are neither aggrandised nor diminished.

By documenting the lives of the slumdwellers in Dharavi and their journeys during the 2020 lockdown without either exoticising or romanticising them, the novel also steers away from what Lisa Lau calls ‘narratives of “aspiration”, where “aspiration” is couched in terms of the neo-liberal pursuit of highly individualistic and consumerist lifestyles’ (2018, p. 378) and from readings of subalternity which, according to Ananya Roy, tend to overemphasize the autonomy and agency of the subaltern (2011, p. 235). Such narratives may be found in Aravind Adiga’s *The White Tiger* (2008), in which a village boy and son of a rickshaw puller becomes a successful businessman, in Danny Boyle’s 2008 film *Slumdog Millionaire* (loosely based on Vikas Swarup’s 2005 novel *Q & A*), in which a slumdweller wins the grand prize in a television game show, or in Shivani Sibal’s *Equations* (2021), in which a servants’ son becomes a minister in the state government of Delhi. Puja Changoiwala would have taken that aspirational route if she had depicted relief at safe returns home after all the travails endured by the migrants and if she had let fictional Meher ‘live, flourish, become the journalist she wanted to become’ (Changoiwala, 2021, p. 232), but that, as mentioned in the Author’s Note, ‘would have defied the cardinal rule’ (2021, p. 232) she set for the book: ‘It would have meant being dishonest to her story, and to the truth’ (2021, p. 232). By choosing plausibility and by relying on ascertained facts and events within a fictional framework to keep a trace of the internal migrant workers’ exodus during the COVID-19 pandemic, Puja Changoiwala supports the claim that fictional narrative can be seen as ‘an alternative site of archival imagining’ (Booth, 2006, p. 275), her debut novel *Homebound* thus contributing to the living archive of commonly disregarded communities in contemporary India.

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