India Moving

Title: India Moving – A History of Migration

Author: Chinmay Tumbe

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9780670089833

Pages: 285

India’s northeastern state of Assam was recently in the news when a process for identification of illegal immigrants found four million people who had infiltrated from Bangladesh in this state with a total population of 30 million. Assam is heavily scarred with the ill-effects of migration. Its Sylhet district had to be ceded to East Pakistan in 1947 as decades of immigration from East Bengal had made the district a Muslim-majority one and consequently was annexed to Pakistan. The same game is repeating there, with constant flow of people from Bangladesh which is changing the demographic pattern of the state that can cause great havoc in the near future. However, migration in India is not limited just to Assam and it is not always a bad thing. The lure of better economic prospects drives people from their hearths and homes to seek gainful employment in other provinces or even other countries. India is greatly benefitted by the remittances these people make back home and also by the entrepreneurial spirit exhibited by some of them. In politics also, migrant leaders excelled as seen in the best example of them all – Gandhiji, who had lived in South Africa for two decades before steering the freedom movement to victory in India. Not much research has gone into this phenomenon of migration in India yet and the author rectifies this anomaly with a good comparative survey of the causes and effects of migration from and to India. Chinmay Tumbe is a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He is passionate about migration, cities and history and was a 2013 Jean Monnet Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre, Florence and the 2018 Alfred D. Chandler Jr International Visiting Scholar in Business History at Harvard Business School. He had published widely on migration for a decade and has served on policymaking groups. This is his first book.

Even though India was well known in the ancient world, there was practically not much outmigration. The history of migration from the middle of the first millennium BCE to circa 1300 CE is one of immigration mainly from central Asia, instances of emigration to the west and the east and internal migration accompanying urbanization, colonization and deportation. The foreigners gave the name of India to the land east of the river Indus, and the Indians named the foreigners yavana and mleccha in the medieval period. This later changed to firangis to denote people from Europe. Curious it may seem, but the word came from the root term ‘franks’ which was an ancient Germanic tribe. Indians were not very particular in the racial profile of those coming in. In the sixteenth century, the Habshi slaves from Ethiopia were brought to Deccan states, who were later merged into the mass of Indian society.

Thumbe identifies a phenomenon known as the ‘Great Indian Migration Wave’ around the nineteenth century. By that time, the economic might of the country had fallen through the relentless conquests and invasions from Afghanistan, Iran and central Asia and also a century of colonial rule. The land and society were impoverished on all counts. It is said that Nadir Shah carted away so much treasure from India in 1739 that he remitted the entire taxation in Persia for three years! Around the first half of the eighteenth century, slavery was outlawed in most British colonies and the slaves were freed. The sugar plantations needed an alternate labour force for their fields. Indentured labour was introduced as a substitute in which the workers toiled in the farms for a fixed tenure. Thumbe enumerates the characteristics of this migration wave as male-dominated, remittance-yielding and semi-permanent. Almost 70 per cent of them were male workers who had to undergo decades of separation for supporting their families back home. Railways and postal services aided in this process. The money order was the financial lynchpin of migration. Postal money order traffic constituted 2-3 per cent of GDP between 1900 and 1960. Eventually, this was lost to banks and private money transfer operators. The book then makes a summary review of Indian migration in various countries around the world. The wave of migration was cut across regions and communities. Marwaris, Chettiyars and Gujaratis were a few societies specifically mentioned. The Indian diaspora is now 25 million strong and it can be safely surmised that the sun does not set on them. This has reached considerable proportions in some countries such as Mauritius where two-thirds of the population is of Indian origin.

The author jestingly identifies two common practices followed by Indian communities residing anywhere in the world. Use of water in toilets and pressure cookers in the kitchen are two characteristics we seem unable to live without. Even though casteism is a bane of Hindu society in India, the caste system has dissolved itself in the case of expatriates of the second or third generations. In that sense, migration has changed the leopard’s spots. Thumbe illustrates this with examples from Fiji and Guyana. The indentured labourers who arrived in Fiji were called girmitiyas. They belonged to all castes and became jahaji bhais during the month-long sea crossing, a bond that lasted for a long time in the remote islands where caste identities would eventually fade away (p.124). In Guyana too, on the face of common adversities encountered by Indians as a whole, the caste system began to disappear as identities were reshaped along racial lines.

A good description of internal migration inside the country is given in the book. India’s position is unique in the global migration map. It sustains considerable volume of immigration, emigration and internal migration alongside involuntary transfer of populations as seen in the partition days and communities dislocated by developmental projects such as construction of dams or factories. Hindu Pandits who had to flee Kashmir in the early 1990s is a case in point. The stereotypes associated with internal diaspora are also identified, such as Bengali economists, Kerala nurses and Odiya cooks and plumbers. Thumbe also makes some guess about future migration patterns in the country. A wave of migration from the north of India towards the south is probable on account of the large wage differentials existing in those regions. While the history of the twentieth century was essentially a clash between capitalism and communism, the role of antagonists in this century might be taken up by cosmopolitanism and nativism because the large inflow of cheap labour from abroad is bound to instigate resentment in the native population.

The book is neatly and lucidly argued with clear logic and a lot of illustrative examples. It is graced with a foreword by Arvind Subramanian, the economic adviser to the prime minister of India, in which he comments that the book should be read, savoured and applauded. These words are never far from what it actually deserves. It includes a comprehensive collection of end-notes and a commendable index. Some photographs are also included which serves the requirement of form rather than utility.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star