Crossing the Border to India: Youth, Migration, and Masculinities in India by Jeevan R. Sharma is an ethnographic account of young male Nepali migrants in, and on their way to, India. It is a product of fieldwork that Sharma conducted across western Nepal and in Mumbai, India, between 2004 and 2013. Sharma frames his ethnography around the concept of livelihood, describing migration as a living strategy in which cultural, demographic, and gender factors inform economic decision-making. Some of the most evocative ethnographic analyses in the book describe in detail how migration is a complex response to changing masculinities in rapidly globalizing rural Nepal. Facing poor employment prospects at home and without the social capital necessary to obtain more lucrative jobs in the Persian Gulf, many young Nepali men leave their homes to work in Indian cities, principally as security guards, in restaurants or hotels, or as domestic workers in Indian households.

One of the strengths of this book is the thorough treatment given to the political economy of Nepali migration. Until the fall of the Rana regime in 1950, opportunities for labor migration were severely restricted, with the exception of the Gurkha military recruits who served with the British and Indian armies. After 1950, Nepal began opening its borders to the wider world and negotiated an open border policy with India that is still in effect today. Sharma argues that the open border renders young migrants docile, liminal subjects who live beyond the protection of their state, but these young men work in India legally and are not subject to the persecution of the host state, as in much of the rest of the world.

A variety of motivations encourage young migrants to suffer the risks and indignities of migration to India, but all of these are predicated on the rapidly changing rural economy in Nepal. Though agriculture remains important, the domination of subsistence farmers by urban rent-seeking elites that characterized Nepal in the past has been transformed by modernization and the unleashing of market forces that is a consequence of its engagement with the wider world. Rather than submitting to growing poverty as subsistence farmers, Nepali youth are leaving. Some are applying to the lucrative and coveted—but also costly—opportunities in the Persian Gulf, while others have migrated internally to Nepal's rapidly growing urban areas, particularly for education and service sector employment. Sharma's men, however, have followed the less prestigious but far more common path to Indian cities.

Those well-worn paths lead from Nepal's midwest across the open border to Mumbai and Delhi. Sharma describes patterns of motivations of these mostly unmarried young migrants as they struggle to become men in a challenging local context. One of the most common patterns in the past was the practice of running away (bhagne), in which boys, often as young as eleven or twelve years of age, would leave their homes to find work and perhaps their autonomy elsewhere. Often these runaways were escaping severe parenting or doing poorly at school, where they were harshly disciplined. Others migrated to support their families or to escape problematic family relationships or debt burdens.

Crossing the open border exposed migrants to the exploitation of middlemen who profited from migrant vulnerabilities. Once they arrived at their places of employment, they were subjected to the structural violence of their liminal status, living in slums and without basic access to health care. At the same time, these young men lived beyond the conservative cultural patterns of village life and availed themselves of “beer bars,” Bollywood films, and sexual adventures, which transformed their conceptions of masculinity. Sharma provides a critique of NGO efforts, both in India and Nepal, to address these perceived “risk behaviors” through HIV/AIDS education and outreach. These efforts, he argues, are grounded in a medical model that focuses on individual behavior rather than the structural violence that render migrants vulnerable in the first place, but the idea that these behaviors are risky is taken at face value. In understanding the heteronormative sexuality of young migrant men as a “risk behavior,” Sharma inadvertently embraces the same discourse he is criticizing.

Crossing the Border to India is a coherently written ethnography that contributes a significant account of a seldom-studied phenomenon. Cross-border migration between Nepal and India plays an increasingly important role in Nepal's economy and in the livelihoods of the young men who embody that role. One limitation of this book is the that much of the material presented is dated and does not reflect many of the recent developments in Nepal. A reader may think after reading this book that the Maoist insurgency is still raging in Nepal's hills (it ended in 2006), and there is little mention of the political and economic turbulence that followed, which must have had some effect on migration practices. This may be due more to the slow pace of academic publishing rather than Sharma's neglect, but this book might have better placed its findings in historical perspective. That quibble aside, this book is essential reading for scholars, students, and civil society activists who want to better understand the lives of young male migrants, both in Nepal and in other contexts.