Not a homecoming: The tragedy of return in Leeladhar Mandloi’s poem

By Ravi Ranjan* 

The image is seared into recent memory: millions of migrant workers, stripped of wages and hope, walking hundreds of miles back to their villages. For many, this was not a joyful homecoming but a desperate flight for survival. Leeladhar Mandloi’s Hindi poem, ‘Ve Laut Nahīm Rahe’ (‘They Are Not Returning’), captures this tragedy with startling precision. Written before the COVID-19 lockdowns, the poem has become painfully prophetic, exposing the deep contradictions between India’s development narrative and the dignity of its working poor.

Mandloi, a major figure in contemporary Hindi literature, builds his poem on a single, devastating irony: the transformation of ‘returning home’ from a festival of love into a spectacle of terror. The poem is not merely a disaster scene; it is a sharp critique of the structural insensitivity that renders the nation’s builders invisible and disposable.

The Past: A Festival of Labour

The poem begins with memory. “Yes, they used to return,” the poet insists, recalling a time when the seasonal migration of workers was woven into the cultural fabric of the village. They would come back for Teej and Diwali, carrying wages in their pockets and joy in their hearts. The imagery is deliberately humble yet radiant: cheap toys in children’s hands, but their faces so bright that the rest of the world looked “impoverished.” Upon their arrival, the very flowers deepened in colour and scent, and the household air turned into “Eid and Diwali.”

This section is crucial. Mandloi is not romanticising poverty. Instead, he highlights the moral economy of the worker’s life—a cycle where labour earned self-respect, and reunion created a shared, inclusive culture. The mention of both Muslim and Hindu festivals signals a composite cultural space, a “third space” of belonging where the worker, despite economic disparity, was a dignified part of a living folk tradition.

The Present: A Flight of Terror

The poem then shatters this memory with a brutal turn: “Now, those millions, driven and terrified… Are fleeing on foot.” The verb changes from the gentle repetition of ‘lautte the’ (used to return) to the frantic, rhythmic ‘bhaag rahe hain’ (are fleeing). The worker who once returned with earnings now carries the “remnants of his life” on his head. He is without transport, without money, hungry, thirsty, and “eating batons.”

The language here is naked and violent. The state forces these men and women to “crouch like fowl,” stripping them of physical dignity. The poem refuses to aestheticize suffering. This is not an exile across borders, but an exodus within one’s own country. The destination is still the village hearth, but the nature of the journey has changed entirely. The poet concludes with a direct address to the reader: “My friends, this is no returning home.”

The Sociological Gaze: The Precariat Exposed

Why has ‘returning’ become impossible? Mandloi’s poem points to the structural failures of India’s capitalist development model. Sociologists like Jan Breman and Amitabh Kundu have described the phenomenon of ‘footloose labour’ and ‘exclusionary urbanisation’ . Megacities like Delhi and Mumbai use the sweat of rural migrants—primarily from Dalit, Adivasi, and backward communities—to build skyscrapers, yet grant them no permanent citizenship, social security, or rights. They are the ‘precariat’: a class with no stable employment or protection.

The festive return in the first half of the poem represents circular migration—a temporary attachment between village and city. However, the crisis in the second half reveals the truth: when global tensions (like the America-Iran war) or pandemics cause an economic shock, these workers are declared surplus. The poem’s image of begging for “a crumb of mercy” is the logical end of a system that values utility over dignity. The state’s baton replaces the social contract.

The Deconstruction of ‘Home’

From a philosophical and literary perspective, Mandloi dismantles the very idea of ‘home’. Psychoanalytically, ‘home’ is the archetype of security. But here, that security is annihilated. The fleeing worker is trapped in a ‘double displacement’ : he is an alien in the city and insecure even in the village he is running towards.

Comparing Mandloi to global poets of displacement sharpens this point. Unlike Emma Lazarus’s ‘New Colossus’, which welcomes the “huddled masses” to freedom, Mandloi shows that for the internal migrant, arrival is not liberation. Like Warsan Shire’s line—“no one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark”—Mandloi rejects the romanticism of the journey. But where Shire focuses on international borders, Mandloi focuses on the borders within a nation. His workers are refugees on their own land, echoing Hannah Arendt’s crisis of the ‘right to have rights’.

A Moral Verdict

Ultimately, ‘Ve Laut Nahīm Rahe’ is a philosophical lament. It challenges Immanuel Kant’s principle that man should never be treated as a means to an end. Here, the worker is purely a means—a replaceable unit of production. When his utility pauses, he is beaten and forced to squat like an animal.

The poem forces the reader to confront an uncomfortable question: If the path of progress leaves millions behind, sitting in a humiliating crouch, then what exactly is the direction of that progress? Mandloi answers that as long as development remains non-inclusive, every act of ‘return’ will be incomplete and tragic. This is not a homecoming. It is a systemic expulsion, a moral crisis, and a warning that the hollowing out of working-class dignity will eventually collapse the very foundation of the nation.

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Professor & former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper