Abstract
This article examines how childhood parental absence shapes the migration trajectories and masculine identities of working-class men in contemporary India. Drawing on qualitative, psychosocial research with ten migrant men from rural Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal now living in Delhi, the study explores how early experiences of death, abandonment, or prolonged parental separation are retrospectively narrated as formative life events. Using narrative interviews and abductive thematic analysis, informed by relational psychoanalysis and masculinity studies, the analysis demonstrates that parental absence often precipitated premature responsibility and early entry into labour, making migration a response to survival and obligation rather than aspiration. The findings show how early relational rupture reverberates across the life course, structuring patterns of emotional containment, peer bonding, and relational distance in adulthood. Masculinity emerges not primarily through dominance or authority but through endurance, provision, and affective restraint under conditions of structural precarity. By integrating psychosocial theory with migration and masculinity scholarship, the article reframes parental absence as both social rupture and psychic imprint, contributing a biographically grounded account of marginalised masculine formation in South Asia.