review of migration

7/30/2019 Review of Migration

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TO AND FRO INDIA,

WITH LOVE

PARTHA S. GHOSH

OUR STORY

Cross-national movements of people, for long-term settlementor triggered by circumstances, have been a critical elementin Indias national experience. India has been both the

destination for adventurous outsiders as well as the farewell dock forenterprising emigrants. During the past two millennia, thousands ofpeople have either come and settled in India or left India for good insearch of greener pastures. Partition migrants in the millions wereindeed driven by the most tragic circumstances of communal riots.Nevertheless, is it only the numbers that matter? Should only thesad and sordid stories of migration concern us? What about theinnumerable human stories that accompany these migrants? Dothey carry their hopes and fears alone? Do they not carry with themtheir cultures and lives to new lands, and, invariably, their politics?

Does this not result in the cross-breeding of human stories? TheIndian experience, thus, stands out as an example of one of the mostfascinating of such human sagas.

THE WANDERER

In 1953, the science of DNA was discovered. Well-known New YorkTimes columnist, Nicholas Kristof, curious about his pedigree, tookadvantage of this. Tests proved that he owed his origin to what is

present-day Ethiopia or Kenya. On 11 July 2003, Kristof, till thenapparently pure Caucasian, entitled his column, Is Race Real? I am aBlack American.

Human beings are perpetual wanderers and knew noboundaries until the rise of nation-states and, more importantly, till


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the introduction of passports in the wake of the First World War.In his 2007 bestseller, Chanda talks about four agentstraders,preachers, warriors and adventurerswho contributed to the

process of human migrations during the past three millennia.It would not be an exaggeration to say that the story of human

migrations and the history of man are virtually similar. In ourhistorical memory of the last two millennia there have been severalmajor migratory movements. In the 8th century the Arabs expandedto Europe and India. In Europe they were halted by the Franks atPoitiers in 732 ad. In the 13th century Chenghis Khans Mongoltribes pushed west as far as Hungary. In the following centurythe Ottoman Turks began to drift from Asia Minor towards theBalkans and, in 1453 ad, conquered Constantinople. Their ultimatedrive was cut short only at the gates of Vienna, in 1529 ad and1683 ad. These invasions broke traditional trade routes and in turnled to the search for alternative routes, resulting in the voyages ofChristopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci and Vasco da Gama, andthe discovery of sea routes to the New World and to India. Withthis, the process of colonisation was set in motion.

During colonial times, from 1801 to 1914, approximately7,500,000 people migrated from European Russia to AsiaticRussia (Siberia). Owing to the uncontrolled growth of Englandspopulation, Thomas Malthus had predicted its doom in the lastdecade of the 18th century. However, what saved the country wasmigration. More than 200,000 Britons left England in the 1820s, andby the 1850s, the numbers rose to 2.5 million. The most massive

migration, however, occurred between 1846 and 1930 when over50 million Europeans left their homes to settle in the Americas,Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and within America, theybegan to move westward, one of the most fascinating phenomenaof American history known as the Westward Expansion. HistorianFrederick Turners frontier thesis (1893) became a landmarkcontribution to American historiography. The European settlementprocess in America gave an unprecedented boost to the slave trade

to feed Americas edgling cotton industry. Within a period of abouta hundred years, the total number of slaves shipped from Africaacross the Atlantic exceeded 10 million.

These outward movements from Europe, and from Africa toAmerica, were matchedthough not on such a massive scaleby


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the movements of indentured Indian workers to the West Indies,South Africa, Fiji, Suriname and, closer home, Southeast Asia andSri Lanka. In the post-Second World War phase, as the process

of decolonisation set in, millions of Africans and Asians migratedto the countries of their past colonial masters. Presently, thereare about ve million African Muslims in France and two millionpeople of South Asian origin in the United Kingdom. The creationof Israel in 1948 led to the migration of diaspora Jews fromall over the world to the new Jewish state. White-collar South

Asian migration to the United States and Turkish migration toGermany took place post-1960 when both countries witnesseda huge economic boom. Currently, there are over two millionprofessionally successful Indian-Americans. The Indian saga beganin 1956 when Dalip Singh Saund became the rst Indian-Americanto be elected to the US Congress (Ghosh, 1990). The communityis now politically vibrant with Piyush Bobby Jindal and NamrataNikki Randhawa Haley elected as Governors of Lousiana andSouth Carolina, respectively.

CHALO INDIA, CHALO DELHI

India has always been a favoured destination. The Greek warriorAlexander came to India about three hundred years before Christ.It was as early as 52 ce that St. Thomas arrived in Kerala, therebymarking the beginning of Christianity in India. In the ancient andmedieval eras, Arab traders conducted brisk trade with ports onIndias western coasts. During the European Renaissance of the 15th

and 16th centuries, Christopher Columbus of Italyhis voyagessponsored by Spainand Vasco da Gama of Portugal, had searchedfor sea routes to India, which the latter eventually found via Africassouthern tip. Indology as a eld of research and study emerged as animportant subject in the colonial period with the Asiatic Society ofBengal playing a seminal role in this process. William Jones, founderof the Society, was keenly interested in Indias ancient past andhelped set the tone for many of the Societys subsequent activities.

Together, this contributed to India becoming the reference pointwhen new areas were classied. Hence, we have the Indian Ocean,the West Indies (Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Bahamas),East Indies (Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia and Malaya), andIndo-China (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos).


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Throughout history, people from all over came to India andmade it their home, including the Aryans. Rabindranath Tagorepoetically expressed this phenomenon in his well-known poem,

Bharat Teertho (India, the Pilgrimage):

Keho nahi jane kaar ahobane kato manusher dhara

Durbar shrote elo kotha hote, samudre holo haara.

Hethaye arjo, hetha anarjo, hethaye dravid cheen

Shauk, hun dal pathan mogole ek dehe holo leen.

Poschime aaji khuliachhe daar, setha hote sobe aaney upahaar,

Dibe aar nibe, milabe milibe, jabe naa phire

Ei bharater mahamanaber sagarteerey.

Its free translation in English reads:

No one knows to whose clarion call

Peoples responded and came

In streams

And joined the ocean!

Hither lived the Aryans, the non-Aryans,

The Dravidians, the Chinese, the Scythians,

The Huns, the Pathans, the Mughals

And merged into one body and soul,

Today, doors to the West are open

New ideas are owing

Incessant giving and taking

Meeting and mingling are onThey will not return

From this supreme Ocean of Humanity

That is India.

The effect of this intermingling is noticeable, sometimes visibly,at other times not, everywhere in India. In microcosmic terms,Delhi is a good illustration. In the Mahabharata, the Pandava king,

Yudhistara, established his capital at Indraprastha (now the PuranaQila area) in about 1400 bce. The name Delhi is attributed toKing Dhilu who built a town near present-day Qutub Minar in therst century bce. For several centuries thereafter one did not hearmuch about Delhi. It was in the 12th century that the Chauhan


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king, Prithviraj III, made Delhi his capital. Thereafter, it fell to theMuslim rulers who shifted their capital from one part of the townto another. During the rule of one of the great Mughals, Shahjahan,

the present walled city of Old Delhi became the capital and wascalled Shahjahanabad. In 1911, the British Indian Governmentshifted its capital from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to Delhi and built anew township south of Shahjahanabad that came to be known asNew Delhi, which continues to be the capital of India. Delhi, whichincludes both the Old and New, has expanded beyond the river

Yamuna in the east and beyond the Ridge in the west.Ever since the British shifted their capital from Kolkata to

Delhi, the nature of Delhi changed and it became signicantly morecosmopolitan. From being a virtually Muslim town, as reected inthe literary and cultural traditions of the city, Delhi began to assumethe tone of a Punjabi city with the massive ow of Hindu and Sikhrefugees from Pakistan. The road signs in Delhi are now writtenin Hindi, English, Urdu and Gurumukhi (the Punjabi script),highlighting the citys ethno-linguistic mosaic. With the passageof time and as Delhis economy grew rapidly, accompanied by aconstruction boom, large numbers of enterprising Indians from allover the country, especially from less-developed states such as Bihar,Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Rajasthan, ocked to the city. The lure ofDelhi spread even beyond India, particularly to Bangladesh. Delhiis now the eighth-largest metropolis in the world with a populationof 16.7 million. The hinterlands have been included in the NationalCapital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, which has spread much beyond

Delhi into the adjacent states of UP and Haryana. It is the largestmetropolis by area and the second largest metropolis by populationafter Greater Mumbai. According to the Census of 2011, thepopulation of the NCT is 22.2 million.

THE VIRUS OF POLITICS

Where there are people, politics is a natural corollary, with migrantssupplying the added fodder. Since demography is destiny, as

Augustus Comte reminds us, politics and migration go hand inhand. As soon as the initial sympathy for migrants dies down inthe host society, nativist suspicions about their continued presencecome to the fore. Concerns such as pressures on civic amenities,resource shortages and the rise in the crime graph tend to enter


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popular imagination. The experience of later Jewish immigrants inIsrael, later European settlers in America, and that of Chinese and

Japanese immigrants in the United States in the latter half of the

19th and early 20th centuries, all tell the same story. In Mumbai,the Shiv Senas opposition, rst to Tamil settlers and later to illegalBangladeshis, or Maharashtra Navnirman Senas current tiradeagainst immigrants from Bihar and UP, are some recent expressionsof the same anxiety.

In most cases of migration there is a strong underpinningof communal and ethnic sentiment. It is not surprising that afterPartition, Hindu refugees in India and Muslim refugees in Pakistancontributed significantly to the growth of Hindu chauvinisticpolitics in India and Islamist politics in Pakistan, respectively. Thereis a similar element in the case of Bangladeshi infiltrations into

Assam. The opposition to these migrations has primarily been ledby the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP), both of which have latent ethnic or communal agendas.Occasionally, migrants contribute to the militarisation of localpolitics. It has been argued that prior to the arrival of the Jaffnaboys, most political fights in the state, even when they turnedviolent, were limited to the use of cycle-chains and stones, butnever guns. Politicians everywhere take advantage of the situationin various ways. Jacques Chirac, the former French Premier, stirreda political storm in the 1970s when he remarked that a countrywith 900,000 unemployed but with two million immigrant workersis not a country with an insoluble labour problem. In 1973, there

were brutal attacks on Algerians in Marseilles.

THE INSECURITY SYNDROME

If politics is inevitable, so is the fear of insecurity. Internationalrelations theories presuppose that borders are sacrosanct but cross-border movements, whether of emigrants, refugees, drug peddlers orsmugglers, and terrorists of late, make a mockery of those borders.In JulyAugust 1989, millions of East Germans migrated to Austria

via Czechoslovakia and Hungary, which led to the collapse of EastGermany and its subsequent unification with West Germany. Itwas not war but migration that reunited Germany. Dialectically, itis the violation of a border that proves the existence of that border.

Within South Asia, inter-state relations between India and Pakistan,


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Pakistan and Afghanistan, India and Nepal, India and Bangladesh,and India and Sri Lanka are all caught in the syndrome of cross-border movements. Since 17 states of the Indian union abut one

foreign nation or another, Indian foreign policy often becomeshostage to the politics of cross-national ethnic issues pertaining tothe concerned state.

Sometimes, the very presence of refugees affects therelationship between the host and the sending countries. Tibetanrefugees in India do contribute to Sino-Indian animosity. In theaftermath of the Sino-Indian border conict of 1962, India tookadvantage of the presence of Tibetan refugees in India to raise its

Vikas regiment. Known in Ladakh as the Lama Fauj, its serviceswere of particular importance during the Kargil crisis. There isalways some connection between migration and security. India tookadvantage of the millions of East Pakistani refugees to successfullywage its war against Pakistan in 1971 and, later in the 1980s, it madeuse of the refugee problem to twist the Sri Lankan governmentsarm. That the policy eventually boomeranged is history. Therewere six registered Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in the Rajiv Gandhiassassination case. The Taliban, who virtually rule the large Pushtunareas of Afghanistan, were once refugees in Pakistan, but it isPakistan that has trained them for the job they are now doing.

THE OTHER INDIANS

If Tagore talked about people from all over Indias extendedneighbourhood choosing India as their land of hope, during the past

two hundred years many Indians have considered several places inthe world as their land of destiny. In the rst phase, that is, in the19th century, there were massive out-ows of contract labourers tothe West Indies, Southeast Asia, South Africa and Sri Lanka. In thesecond phase, later in the same century, mostly Gujarati and Punjabitraders made their fortunes in East Africa and eventually moved toother Commonwealth countries as the political climate in Africabecame hostile. White-collar migration constituted the third phase

that began in the 1960s, particularly during Kennedys presidency.In the fourth phase, following the West Asian oil boom thatcommenced in the early 1970s, large numbers of Indians moved toSaudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, although not permanently aslocal law disallows citizenship rights to foreigners.


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or a person of Indian origin covered under the rst two clausesmentioned. Notably, Iranian nationals of Indian origin can begranted the PIO card if the Ministry of Home Affairs so approves.

To what extent is the diaspora an asset for India? As far asNRI remittances go, they are, but in terms of FDI ows they are nomatch for their Chinese counterparts. The then Finance Minister ofIndia, Pranab Mukherjee, bemoaned this reality when he addressedthe 1,900-strong gathering of NRIs and PIOs in early 2012 in Jaipur.There is no simple answer to this phenomenon. One obvious reasonis that a large chunk of these remittances ow from relatively weakersections of the community for whom domestic savings are the bestinsurance against any crisis.

An undisputed fact that requires no documentation isthat diaspora Indians, much like the average human being, giveprecedence to their own welfare over that of their country. Forexample: American Zionists contributed heavily to the creation ofIsrael, but once created, they did not migrate to the Jewish state.Similarly, after they were evicted from East Africa, Indians preferredto emigrate to Australia, Britain, Canada or New Zealand ratherthan to India. It has been observed that the Indian diaspora, withinvestible capital, is willing to invest in the mother country onlyif the latter shows signs of promise. It is but natural that a grimoutlook does not invoke condence. While it is common wisdomthat money glitters more than patriotism, NRIs should never beconsidered a liability, although they are not as valuable an assetas the Indian government would have us, or the NRIs themselves,

believe. Moreover, because of their ethnic roots, the Indian statends itself duty-bound to ensure their welfare if they are in distress,as has been demonstrated in the cases of Indian Tamils, FijianIndians, Indian students in Australia, or whenever the heat of West

Asian politics has touched Indian migrants, although not alwayssuccessfully as the Fijian experience has established.

CULTURES TOO MIGRATE

The most fascinating aspect of the migration saga is the movementof cultures. When migrants moved to culturally unfamiliar lands itled to interesting fusions in music, dance and food, as with Africanslaves in America or indentured Indian workers in the West Indies.The folk tales of the Black slaves became an important segment


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of American literature and their Blues music metamorphosedinto Jazz. Americans were unfamiliar with fried foods prior tothe arrival of the Blacks; now KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) is a

global identity marker for America. Before the Portuguese came toIndia, we did not know of the chilli, potato or tomato. Indians whohave settled in the West have added their curry, tandoori or butterchicken, and pilau to Western cuisine. Most Singaporean Indiansare now either bi-lingual or multi-lingual, assimilating Malay andHokkien words in their speech. We are familiar with tongues suchas Hinglish or Chinglish. Religious places, too, show signs of thisamalgamation with many Hindu temples in Mauritius and the WestIndies resembling Christian churches where one is not expected totake off ones shoes.

In India, the impact of migrations on literature, musicand cinema is clearly noticeable. Whether it is Bengali, Hindi,Punjabi or Urdu literature, the impact of Hindu and Sikh refugeemovements from Pakistan is palpable. In the realm of cinema, whileboth the Bombay and Calcutta lm industries suffered nancially,they gained in other areas. Bombay gained many new artistes andtechnicians at the cost of Lahore. Calcuttas gain was not in termsof artistes but in terms of some outstanding productions directlyinspired by the displacements that greeted the Partition of Bengal.Some notable lms in this genre were Nemai Ghoshs Chhinnamool(The Uprooted, 1950); Ritwik Ghataks Meghe Dhaka Tara (ACloud Covered Star, 1960) and Subarnarekha (The Golden Line,1962, also the name of a river now in Bangladesh). In his lms,

Ghatak narrated how the Partition of the country struck at the rootsof Bengali culture. He sought to express the nostalgia that manyBengalis felt for their pre-Partition life.

At the other end of the scale, the thriving Indian diaspora hasgiven rise to a new genre of English writing which is competing forthe top slot with native English and American writers. Writers suchas V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Bharati Mukherjee,

Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Bapsi

Sidhwa, Pico Iyer, Rohinton Mistry, and others, tend to draw theirinspiration from the hybrid cultures that South Asian communitiesin the West and elsewhere have generated.

The most fascinating impact, however, is perhaps in thefield of music. Bhojpuri folk musics influence on Caribbean


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pop music, which Surabhi Sharmas documentary, Jahaji Music,brilliantly presents, is one such example. The idea of the filmcame from Tejaswini Niranjanas work (2006). After having heard

Goan musician Remo Fernandes, Niranjana observed that hismusic contained strains of the Trinidadian Calypso. Intrigued, shecontacted Fernandes who responded with enthusiasm. Sharma notes:

This was the journey Tejaswini asked me to document: Remos

encounter with the music and musicians of Jamaica and Trinidad.

But this journey had to resonate, I felt, with other journeysof

African slaves and Indian indentured labourers being shipped to

Jamaica and Trinidad to work on the colonial sugar plantations in

the mid-nineteenth century. The world was on the move.

According to ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel:

Indo-Caribbean music culture is a rich and heterogeneous

entity, comprising syncretic commercial popular hybrids like

chutney-soca, unique neo-traditional forms like tassa drumming

and local-classical singing, and traditional genres like chowtal which

are essentially identical to their south Asian forebears (2012: 115).

Of the Indian festivals Diwali has become popular wherever theIndian diaspora has a visible presence. Since it is a festival of lights andreworks accompanied by dining and much joy it has popular appealwith the local population. Even in far-ung New Zealand, which has a

small population with a not-too-insignicant Indian minority1 lakhin a population of 44 lakhmostly of Gujarati, Punjabi and Fijian-Indian descent, Diwali is celebrated in public places in Auckland and

Wellington with great gusto. Even city councils, besides communitygroups and semi-government organisations, have come forwardto nancially support these events which have been characterisedas cultural supermarkets where one feasts on a range of social andcultural identities (Johnson, 2005: 19).

INTO THE FUTURE

Migration is not merely an element of historyit is history itself,and, in all probability, the global future as well. Surprisingly,however, while the world is becoming increasingly more globalised


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every day, national barriers are being raised to prevent humanmovements across borders. There is a global capital market anda global product market, yet labour migration faces hurdles.

Multinationals prefer to choose cheap labour from supply areas toset up their operations, rather than inviting workers from outside,which was earlier the case. Predictably, Indian emigration coulddecrease in the future. This would also be the case because of greatereconomic opportunities at home. For the same reason, India wouldattract larger numbers of people from the neighbouring regions,mostly to cater to the needs of Indias growing middle classes. Assuch, while more migrations from Bangladesh and Nepal appear tobe unavoidable, Indias corporate professionals would be welcomedanywhere the world over.

So, what would then ultimately happen to Tagores BharatTeertho? Is the phenomenon reaching its end? By no means; it ratherseems to be all set for its new incarnation. The global future pointsto a direction where more than humans, it is their ideas that willmigrate. The unabated technological growth would ensure that.In this milieu the vibrancy of Indias composite culture, whichincludes its innovative polity, would attract the attention of theworld at large, as never before in recent times. The purpose will notnecessarily be for emulation but also for quenching curiosityhowcan a semi-literate country be a successful democracy, how can asemi-feudal society be a corporate giant? It is no wonder that Indianstudies are mushrooming in foreign universities. Let Tagores India:the Pilgrimage be rechristened India: the Ideational Fountain.

REFERENCES

Chanda, Nayan. 2007. Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, andWarriors Shaped Globalization. New Delhi: Penguin/Viking.

Ghosh, Partha, S. 1990. Beyond the American Melting Pot, India International CentreQuarterly, New Delhi, Spring.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_population

Johnson, Henry (with Guil Figgins). 2005. Diwali Downunder, New Zealand Journalof Media Studies, 9(1).

Manuel, Peter. 2012.Asian Music, 43(2), Summer/Fall.

Niranjana, Tejaswini. 2006. Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration BetweenIndia and Trinidad. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.


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Tharoor, Shashi. 2012. Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century. New Delhi:Penguin/Allen Lane.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1893. The Signicance of the Frontier in AmericanHistory. Paper presented to a special meeting of the American Historical

Association at the 1893 Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Seehttp://www.learner.org/workshops/primarysources/corporations/docs/turner.html,accessed on 23 July 2011.

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