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Before we move on with this episode of the scene in the unseen do check out another awesome podcast from IVM Podcast Cyrus says
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Hosted by my old buddy Cyrus Brocha
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Mere Pia o mere Pia gaye rangoon kia hai wahan se telephone
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Bhatma.
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen.
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I'm a migrant, but I wouldn't be able to tell you exactly where I am from.
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My father was born in Lahore in 1941 and moved with partition to Bengal and grew up in Calcutta.
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There he met my mother, a Bengali, and married her after a scandalous love affair that was
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I was a product of this marriage between Punjab and Bengal and was born in Chandigarh, but
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spoke Bengali at home and ate fish every day.
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I went to college in Pune and have lived in Mumbai for the last 24 years.
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I can't quite say, but I'm an Indian and like all Indians, at some level or another,
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My guest today is Chinmay Tumbe, who teaches at IIM Ahmedabad and is the author of a marvelous
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book called India Moving.
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India Moving is a history of a country on the move.
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It documents migrations out of India, into India, and within India, and tells the story
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of a society that has always been in flux.
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It's a riveting read as a book of history, and it also carries much sociological insight
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into what makes us what we are, a nation shaped and defined by its diversity.
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Before we get to the conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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This episode of The Seen and the Unseen is brought to you by Storytel.
#
Storytel is an audiobook platform which you can listen to on your Android or iOS app.
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They have thousands of audiobooks that you can listen to on your mobile, including hundreds
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in local languages like Hindi and Marathi, and unlimited monthly subscription costs only
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And you can also get a 30 day free trial if you hop on over to Storytel.com slash IBM.
#
I actually use Storytel myself regularly, so as long as I sponsor the show, I'm going
#
to recommend one book a week that I love.
#
The book I want to recommend today is by an author who is an Indian favorite, certainly
#
of my generation when we were growing up.
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And the name of the book is My Man Jeeves, but there are plenty of other books by him
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And remember, you get a 30 day free trial only at Storytel.com slash IBM.
#
Chinmay, welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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So before we kind of start talking about your book, tell me a little bit about yourself.
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I mean, you've written a book on migration.
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Are you a sort of migrant yourself?
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Yeah, like pretty much everyone in this city, pretty much everyone in India, I think, you
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know, migration has hugely influenced my sort of education and career path.
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Started off in a boarding school.
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So you can say I started off, you know, moving at a very young age.
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And I've been pretty much I think in the last six years, I moved five different cities.
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So I've definitely been much more on the move and that kind of reflects, I guess, in the
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And you were trained as a political scientist?
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No, trained as an economist.
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So I wrote my PhD on migration history, but it's sort of the economic impact of migration.
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And this book in a ways, after that, I did a lot of other research.
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And this book is in a way culmination of about 10 years of research, starting with my PhD.
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And one of the things that struck me while reading this book is, you know, I've done
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a number of episodes with historians like Ram Guha, Srinath Raghavan, Manu Pillay.
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And one of the things that struck me reading this book is that this is really a fairly
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deeply researched book of history as well.
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Was that a sort of skill that you had to train yourself in given that you were trained in
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Completely self-trained.
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I've never taken a course in history after my class 10.
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So history is all about reading a lot.
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I spent a year and a half in the US as a house husband, but I just read a lot.
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And so I think that really trained me into, you know, reading the core aspect.
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Of course, most of my readings in economic history, migration, of course, is linked heavily
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And then I got an opportunity to start teaching history at IMM, the birth, when I moved then
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And in fact, this year we'll be organizing a conference on history at IMM.
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So I'm definitely into this field of business, economic history, and migration is a lovely
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subject because you can look at it from practically every discipline, whether it's law or sociology
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or economics and so on.
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And so my PhD thesis was fairly interdisciplinary.
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And so I thought, okay, I should just, you know, extend that.
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So though I didn't have a background in history, I think this reading over the last 10 years
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and then professionally going to different conferences and just meeting different people
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has helped tremendously in sort of shaping my thoughts.
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When I was studying in London, they had a department of economics, which I was part
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of, but I used to audit the courses in the department of economic history, probably the
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only university in the world, LSE, which has a specialized department of economic history.
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So I think that's where the interest really got seeded.
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And since then, I read something on history every day.
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And you're right, this book is heavily, heavily researched sites, I think more than 500 studies
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and it's, it's, it's been a lot of fun because a lot of the challenges to get this in an
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accessible way and, you know, this book, I thought there should be at least some book
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which brings out this rich history.
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And does the quality of your reading change when you know you're writing a book like this?
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And let's say you're reading partly for pleasure because obviously you love the subject, but
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also you're reading to gather in all the information.
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Does it change the way you read?
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Do you stop more often to take notes or to, you know, look at the bibliography and get
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Yeah, I mean, I think this is, I call this a semi-academic book.
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So it's got the academic stuff, but it's also written for the general audience.
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And so the more challenging part, I think the academic stuff is simpler in the sense
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you get some books, you know, you make some notes and that's fine, but it's really how
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do you intersperse popular culture?
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How do you get the sort of really day-to-day anecdotes, conversations into the book?
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And there's so much that one can get in a book on migration, but one has to be really
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And so that has, you know, that's, I think, taken more time in passing through a variety
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For example, songs, there's so many songs on migration, but I've chosen some, which
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I thought, you know, exactly.
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So I thought that was an iconic song of migration and it's really worked because I actually
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asked around, I chose a few songs and then this song seemed to be, of course it was App
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because I was talking about Burma in that chapter, but that song, it's incredible.
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The resonance I've received people across India have heard, you know, that song is,
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or they've just flipped through the book and bought the book because they saw that particular
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And it's really resonated multiple levels because a lot of the questions I'm going
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to ask you later can easily, you know, go back to that song in the sense that it sort
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of shows the loneliness and the longing you feel for a loved one.
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It also sort of is almost a commentary on gender in the sense it's a wife who's left
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back and it's a husband who's gone.
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And also to me, it never really struck me because I'm born in a generation as are you
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where Indians don't really migrate to Rangoon anymore.
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And reading your book in that sense was a revelation in terms of figuring out that,
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you know, Burma was such a huge source of Indian migration.
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I mean, Burma for the East coast, it was like what today the Persian Gulf is for the West
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Rangoon 100 years back is what we see Dubai today.
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It's almost like a mirror image 100 years back and today and, you know, people, even
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if you look at the city of Mumbai, I mean, the diamond dealers like Ketan Mehta after
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his wife, this leela of the hospital is built, Ketan Mehta started off in Burma.
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And then, you know, a lot of people had to leave Burma eventually.
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So a lot of capital was there in Burma, different communities.
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I mean, of course, a lot of people are jailed as well in Burma, had a famous jail, Tilak
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most famously was there.
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And let's not forget that the last king of Burma himself was exiled in Ratnagri, which
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is not too far from here.
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In fact, you point out the very interesting parallel that, you know, Tilak was a migrant
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from Ratnagri and when he was jailed in Burma, the king of Burma was jailed in Ratnagri.
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Yeah, that's pretty wide.
#
Getting to your book, you begin by pointing out that there are traditionally two routes
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to diversity, which are basically one is through migration and the other is through isolation
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and the lack of migration.
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And you point out that there's often been a misconception about what makes India so diverse
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and that is one sort and not the other.
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I mean, you know, if you look at languages, for example, we feel that we're very proud
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that India is such a diverse country, but actually there's some, like this Papua New
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Guinea, which has more languages than India, and that's because the islands never talk
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They didn't have the sort of technology to bridge that.
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So the question is, you know, in India, we know for a fact that communities are very
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isolated in the sense even today in inter-community marriages are very practically non-existent
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as per some survey, the Indian Human Development Survey, large nationally representative survey,
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something like 94% of Indians still marry within their own cast and communities.
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So this is a very highly endogamous society.
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But what's interesting is even though people are marrying within their groups, they're
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And in that process, there's a transfer of language, culture, customs.
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So what I argue is, I mean, is this what I ask, is it the case that all these communities
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were sitting isolated and bang, you have the British coming and then you have independence
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and then they've been forged into a common nation?
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And what I find is actually that people have been on the move, and not just for pilgrimage.
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They've been moving for work, they've been moving for a variety of reasons, and the most
#
fundamental form of migration, of course, is marriage.
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And more women have moved permanently in India than men for marriage, and it's not necessarily
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just the neighboring village.
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So they also go, you know, at least 100 kilometers, many, many paths.
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And because it's a strong sun preference in some parts, women are moving more than 100
#
kilometers in many places.
#
And it's actually these small, small migrations, which at the margin are spreading or diffusing
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different cultures, especially when you see linguistic overlap.
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So where does the Kannada-speaking boundary end?
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And where does the Marathi speaker or where does the Telugu speaker start?
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These sort of these marginal linguistic boundaries are in a way sort of, you know, massaged through
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these marriage migrations, because it's the woman of the household who often marries into
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a different linguistic background, same caste, but different linguistic, and she learns the
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And so this is a sort of bridge.
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It's a very subtle bridge.
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Nobody sees this as migration, but it's actually these millions of women migrations on almost
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a day-to-day basis that actually what I argue is the invisible threads that hold India's
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diversity, to paraphrase Nehru.
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And I guess along with the languages, it's also an intermingling of other parts of culture,
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like our cuisines and all of which is a melting pot.
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I mean, I'll come back to caste later, because you've got a lot of insights on that in your
#
And what you just kind of said about endogamy reminded me of a quote from David Reich's
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book, Who We Are and How We Got Here, where he speaks about how India is not really one
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In his words, a Han Chinese would be one large population.
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India is really a collection of many, many, many small populations because of the caste
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system over the last 2000 years has been very little intermarriage.
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But as you're pointing out, that doesn't mean that there hasn't been intermingling of cultures.
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It has been a whole amount and a lot of that is because of migration.
#
Now about three months back, I did an episode with Tony Joseph on his book, The Early Indians,
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which is also, I guess, in a sense about migration.
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But that kind of covers early India.
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So you get a sense of, okay, there was a migration out of Africa, and then there was the Indus
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Valley Civilization, which was the early Indians and the sort of East Asians, and then later
#
you have the Aryan migration and so on and so forth.
#
And that's kind of where his book leaves off, having covered that part.
#
And you sort of mentioned that briefly in your first chapter, but then you sort of go
#
on to talk about how forces like geography and the weather shaped migration from that
#
And particularly how the Indo-Gangetic Plain, which is a sort of a hub and spoke of all
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the migrations that have been happening here, which now contains 10% of the world's population,
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how the center kind of shifted there.
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Can you talk about that?
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We still don't know exactly how or when this center shifted from the Indus Valley to Bihar.
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But as I say, two of the most famous migrants, arguably, are Buddha and Mahavir, both associated
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with Bihar, not necessarily born there.
#
And what's fascinating for me is that today Bihar is the epitome of out-migration, whereas
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2000 years back, it was arguably the sort of Asia's number one hotbed for in-migration.
#
You had students visiting Nalanda University from far and so on.
#
So this is a really rich culture.
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It's really dense, which it is even today.
#
And it's a culture which is kind of probably relatively much richer than the rest, and
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it's gone into relative decline over several centuries.
#
These migrations have happened through multiple kinds.
#
One of course is through the wandering ascetic.
#
So that's the pilgrimage and variety of forms.
#
But there's a particular social group called the Brahmanas, which in the first millennium
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And in a way, you can't understand the spread of Hindu thought, Hindu philosophy, consolidation
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without understanding the travels of Shankaracharya, or understand even the geography of the Indian
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subcontinent, where you have these four martyrs placed in four different corners.
#
They kind of map out the geography.
#
And this is important because actually, we don't have good records of maps.
#
Before the arrival of the Europeans, actually no record that we visually mapped out spaces.
#
But clearly, we were very good with directions, and we knew how to get from one place to the
#
So this migration of the social group of Brahmanas is very interesting because they were given
#
orders by the king to go and settle down and collect taxes from people.
#
And so this is the first real record that we have of migration that comes in the first
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Now, you can argue that almost every war required some migration.
#
Marriage would require some migration.
#
But something which is mentioned clearly in the scriptures as to so-and-so move from here
#
to here comes from this migration of this particular social group.
#
And I would argue that it's very important to understand how Hindu thought really consolidated
#
in the subcontinent because we think today that, you know, Hinduism is, for example,
#
But in the first millennium, there were actually various philosophical thoughts.
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We could have been a completely Jain country.
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We could have been a completely Buddhist country.
#
But ultimately, as we see, about 70% or 80% of the subcontinent today is Hindu.
#
And these migrations were important to consolidate.
#
And were these migrations of the Brahmanas purposeful in that sense that, you know, a
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sort of a religious colonialism that we want to spread Hinduism and this is how we do it?
#
Was it kind of purposeful in that way?
#
I don't think we have enough evidence of that.
#
But clearly, you can call it land-based colonialism in the sense that they were given villages
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to sort of maintain, collect taxes, and of course, send the taxes back.
#
So we know that, you know, there's a relationship between where the people are going and the
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And you have numerous inscriptions.
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There are many books written on this.
#
I mean, if you ask, you know, why does Orissa have so many of these temples and centers
#
And you find a lot of these inscriptions suggest that there was this massive migration towards
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Orissa sometime in this first millennium.
#
These are the stray references to migration.
#
They are the outsiders.
#
So for example, even Alexander's armies, there's references to Indians being taken back to
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Europe as soldiers and so on.
#
And when I was doing research on this period, I found it's very interesting because you
#
never really think of Indians being in Europe 2000 years back.
#
But apparently some of them were, you know, maybe a handful, but there are actually references
#
In fact, you've got a reference somewhere in your book, if I remember correctly to 15,000
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It's pretty wild because I'd be like, okay, are there 15,000 Indians in Armenia today?
#
And it's one of those mysteries because it's always tough to understand exact numbers.
#
But this is one of those loose ends where we, there's some evidence that people were
#
there, but we don't know what happened after.
#
So they were either wiped out or they got completely assimilated or converted.
#
And there are a lot of stories like that.
#
The fascinating stories, of course, of the Roma's, of the gypsies in Europe.
#
And now there's genetic evidence which suggests that they sort of went out of Northwest India.
#
But interestingly, they were just not, you know, Northwest Punjabi so to speak, but they
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belong to the low ranking castes.
#
So the genetic studies map out very closely with particular castes and them.
#
So it's very interesting as to how different social groups have had different sort of types
#
of patterns of mobility throughout history, and that's an important theme of this book.
#
And you, you know, you write elsewhere in your book that migration is one way of resistance
#
You know, it's like the political scientist A.O.
#
Hirschman said that if you don't like the regime you're in, you can either leave, complain
#
And migration is a common way.
#
And, you know, one maybe doesn't know the historical circumstances, but the fact that
#
it's lower caste who, you know, who migrated in this instance is telling in a way, it's
#
very interesting that, you know, given that India is basically not just composed of, but
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populated by migration.
#
It's interesting that for a long time we had a negative attitude towards out migration.
#
You know, we would call outsiders, as you write in your book, the Mlechas.
#
And there would be these myths about how you lose your caste if you cross the Kalapani
#
I mean, I remember reading Gandhi's biography also where Gandhi was, you know, for a while
#
ostracized by his fellow caste members because he went to England to study and so on.
#
That's kind of curious, isn't it?
#
I mean, when I started writing this book actually, because I do most of my historical work in
#
And so it's very challenging to understand the past before that.
#
And I assume that, you know, the passport release was a major instrument devised in
#
the early 20th century, which curtailed mobility.
#
But as I did start to stumble across more sources, I realized actually mobility has
#
always been, there was never really a world in the last 2000 years where everyone could
#
move anyhow they felt like.
#
So in the Arthashastra, you have clear references of like a passport, spies, or like control
#
officers in the kingdom.
#
So it's not the case that you could just pick up your bag and go anywhere unless it's
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It's also unsafe and so on.
#
But the social norm, as you said, has been so strong.
#
This idea of crossing the, you know, Kalapani and the forbidden waters, the dark waters
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and the idea that you would lose your caste upon return has been such a strong driving
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So much so that about 15 years back, there was a temple priest fight in Udupi.
#
And one priest actually, you know, tried to pull the other down by saying, this fellow
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actually went to the US.
#
So it was a notion alive even in the 21st century, this idea of the Kalapani.
#
But as I argue, in the 19th century, when these colonial sort of overseas recruitment
#
migration started, it also flipped and for a lot of people who wanted to lose their caste,
#
the idea that you could lose your caste actually became very attractive.
#
And so while a lot of the literature actually sees indentured migrations as exploitation,
#
I would see that a lot of it was exploitation, but a lot of it was also driven by people
#
who wanted to leave because they wanted a better future.
#
It's not that the people who didn't leave were having a very idyllic life.
#
There's a lot of exploitation in India as well.
#
And so it was all relative choices people were making and a lot of people sort of left
#
and a lot of people actually benefited by these migrations.
#
They were choosing it in contrast to something even worse.
#
You do have lots of exceptions you mentioned in your book, like most intriguingly the 12,000
#
Indian musicians who were taken to Iran by the Persian King Barangor.
#
Then you come to sort of medieval migrations.
#
And you said that in the medieval period from the 13th century to the early 18th century,
#
there were three major changes that increased spatial mobility, that increased migration.
#
The first was of course, what really happens in this period is that Delhi becomes a major
#
But most importantly, for the first time Delhi is connected to both figuratively, you know,
#
the East coast and the West coast.
#
So this opens tremendous opportunities of maritime trade merging with Indian trade.
#
So till then it was always separate.
#
You also had urbanization in the sense a lot of large cities coming up, Delhi, but also
#
by the end of the period Surat and so on.
#
As a result of which a lot of people started moving to these places.
#
And finally, there's also pilgrimage networks, which started and you had different religious,
#
not maybe faiths, but philosophies.
#
So you have the Sufi wanderers, then you have the sort of Vaishnav, Pushti Margi Vaishnavism,
#
which is a new form of philosophical thought which emerges.
#
You have the Sikhism emerges as a religion.
#
And all of these, I argue actually a lot of these religions had a much more benevolent
#
outlook towards not only trade, but also migration.
#
And so they weren't less taboos of sort of moving in many philosophies.
#
So arguably, the pace of mobility increased.
#
Note also there's time of a lot of warfare.
#
And so there's what economists would call as a military labor market.
#
And this is different because you have full-time warriors.
#
But when the size of the army grows, you also need to have part-time warriors.
#
And so you also have like agriculturalists coming into warfare.
#
And many of the dominant, you know, sort of warfare, warrior groups of India consolidated
#
themselves in this period, like the Rajputs and the Marathas, for example.
#
And this is important because some of these mobility streams continued well into the recent
#
past, that is we're talking about 200 years earlier.
#
So there's some districts of India which supplied the soldiers, you know, in Saran, for example,
#
in Bihar, supplied the soldiers to the Shersa Suri army, then the Mughal armies, then the
#
British, the Bengal native infantry, and then much later to the industrial sort of mills
#
So it's the same region sending out people, and that becomes a sort of pattern for many
#
So the development of a military labor market in this medieval time, city building, which
#
became very big, and this integration of inland trade with overland and overseas trade.
#
So these sort of three major factors really boosted mobility in a big.
#
Note that the speed didn't change much, essentially until the advent of the railways, the speed
#
of the horse was the constraint.
#
But because of this demand for variety of economic sort of needs, mobility increased
#
I find it really intriguing the way you sort of describe the military labor market.
#
It's almost like there's a gig economy and you can just turn on an Uber for warriors
#
and figure out which is the most profitable war for you to go to.
#
Another thing that struck me as very interesting, and I hadn't really thought about it in the
#
same way before, was that a lot of the urbanization, like you point out in South India, was temple
#
generated urbanization, benefiting merchants and artisans, whereas typically today we think
#
of urbanization as driven by economic imperatives.
#
You want to form larger economic networks and so on.
#
But religion being a force in both urbanization and migration was really interesting.
#
What I also found fascinating was your whole account of slavery, like typically when we
#
talk about slavery, we obviously imagine the American South and the civil war and so on
#
But India was a market for slaves in both directions, tell me a bit about that.
#
Slavery has been mentioned since the times of the Arthashastra, maybe even before.
#
Different types of slaves, we are accustomed to thinking of slaves usually as men.
#
But in Indian history, you also have a lot of accounts of female slavery, whether it's
#
in the Chola Empire, the Rajputs, the Mughals.
#
So women slaves have always been there.
#
In this time period for roughly 15th to 18th century, especially in the US and South America
#
and North America, this transatlantic slave trade really began.
#
India really developed two or three major circuits.
#
One was from Africa to India, via Arabia, and the most fascinating community which exists
#
to date is the Siddhi community, who trace the ancestry to this sort of group.
#
And there's a famous guy called Malik Ambar, who becomes this big noble in the Ahmedangarh
#
And he comes from Ethiopia to Arabia, to what we would call as Maharashtra today.
#
And he comes as a slave and he rises up to be a fairly rich man with a lot of power.
#
And Jahangir hates him because he's thwarting the Mughal attack in the Deccan.
#
And his descendants, I mean, the community has a huge setback.
#
The slave imports stop after they sort of lose wars, but the community still exists
#
And so in some parts of, in Gujarat, for example, even Maharashtra, you'll find black-skinned
#
people with sort of African ethnicity living today.
#
And I work at IM Ahmedabad, and our logo actually comes from the Siddhisai Jali mosque, which
#
is designed by these artisans coming from this community.
#
So I often tell students, actually, that you have to really think twice before selling
#
fair and lovely, because you have the logo of your institute was designed originally
#
by a black, a descendant of a black African slave.
#
In terms of slavery on the other side, and this is a less known fact, one theory of why
#
the mountains Hindu Kush are called so low is because they were a killer of Hindus, in
#
the sense, Hindu slaves being taken over the mountains because of the cold.
#
And so there's a huge slave market also of Indians, or people, mainly Hindus, being taken
#
over the Hindu Kush to the slave markets of Persia and Central Asia.
#
So there's a circuit from Africa and Arabia coming to India, but there's also a circuit
#
from India going into Asia.
#
Again, even in North India, slave dynasties existed.
#
So very interesting ways in which slavery existed, of course, very harsh, but I would
#
argue compared to the US experience, or the experience of the American world, a lot of
#
avenues for upward mobility, which we've still not really found in the American world.
#
I think that's a distinctive aspect of slavery in India.
#
Many people have been able to break, it was never sacrosanct.
#
You could always sort of rise to the top if some accident happened.
#
Like Malekambur and the slave dynasty with the mission, but I guess those are the slaves
#
that we've imported, but might be slightly harder for slaves that we export to other
#
Yeah, we don't know enough.
#
Again, this is a slightly mismatch in the records.
#
You in fact talk about the slogan in Central Asia when slaves would be taken, the slogan
#
being slaves from India, horses from Parthia, which is something you can imagine on the
#
side of a medieval billboard.
#
And you also have a mention of in the early 17th century, some 18,000 Bengali slaves in
#
two small centers of the Arakan, which is North Burma, which is also kind of quite fascinating.
#
And it's the same channel of this Rohingya migration today.
#
So it's interesting because we're talking about three to four centuries back, Bengali
#
slaves being taken to Burma.
#
And today we have a reverse sort of an issue of refugee trafficking on the other sort of
#
And the Rohingyas are basically the descendants of migrants who went from modern day Bangladesh,
#
And then we sort of come to colonialism, which obviously has a bunch of different impacts.
#
But one of the interesting things they try to do, which harks back to what you said about
#
they're never really being freedom of mobility anywhere, is that they try to cut down on
#
migrating groups like the Banjaras and try to make them settle down for reasons of both
#
surveillance and I guess taxation because a state just wants to be an efficient state.
#
I mean, we think of the British, I mean, if you ask, did the British increase spatial
#
mobility or did they fall, you probably think of the railways, the steamboats and say, obviously
#
people started moving more, which is true.
#
But there are lots, again, and this is the thing, some social groups started moving more
#
and some social groups started moving less.
#
And the less ones are people who are sort of negatively impacted were precisely those
#
groups who are historically always on the move.
#
These are basically the nomadic groups and the most famous being the Banjaras, famous
#
in logistics, called different names in different parts of India.
#
In Hyderabad you have the Banjara Hills, for example, which comes from that.
#
And the Banjaras, you know, are really affected because one, the transport systems are being
#
shifted so there's a technology shock, two, there's a surveillance shock where they need
#
to be settled down in different places.
#
And you can really see sort of, you know, communities getting poorer as a result of
#
So this is one way in which a lot of communities became richer, thanks to colonial rule, but
#
some communities became poorer.
#
And definitely the ones which are on the move historically definitely saw a lot of, and
#
they are some of the poorest social groups even today in India.
#
And I was just coming from Dadar and Dadar stationed the porters, even today they trace
#
the ancestry to this group.
#
And as I sort of write in the book, it's sort of slightly ironic because they were displaced
#
by the railways in the first place and today they're sort of working on the railways.
#
It's going to come full circle and it's even more ironic because a lot of the other communities
#
and castes which migrate often do it for specific purposes, they go for jobs or marriages or
#
And you could say with people like the Banjaras that the journey was a destination, you know,
#
it was part of their culture to travel and to have that taken away would have been.
#
Yeah, it was deeply traumatic and that's why many of the revolts also started coming from
#
Again, we don't know too much about those revolts, but on the whole there's been this
#
You know, definitely some groups, especially the coastal India got this massive positive
#
shock on movement that there's a lot of people started to move because the British connected
#
the whole world in a major way.
#
And so this whole overseas migration started in a big way.
#
The second chapter of your book is called The Great Indian Migration Wave.
#
And what you say about that later is a great Indian migration wave is arguably the largest
#
and longest non-coerced migration stream for work in documented history.
#
Elaborate on that a bit.
#
So when we talk migration Indian history, it's remarkable that if you ask the average
#
person, they talk of two migrations.
#
One is the Aryan migration hypothesis many thousand years back.
#
And then you come to the 19th century and people talk of indentured migration and that's
#
And my reason of, and this I would say is the core sort of contribution of this book
#
is to give a phrase to one of the world's greatest migrations.
#
And these are migrations which are male dominated as I'll give you that are three core features,
#
male dominated, remittance based, semi-permanent.
#
And they're happening pretty much even today.
#
So when you see the Ratnagri people in Mumbai, most of them do not settle down in Mumbai.
#
And this has been happening since the middle of the 19th century.
#
A lot of my research has been to document these regions, which are these regions, go
#
there and find out more.
#
Almost the entire west coast on one side of the Western Ghats from Ratnagri to Kanyakumari
#
A large part of the coastal tracks on Eastern India.
#
A whole chunk of Eastern UP, Western Bihar, Uttrakhand.
#
Pretty much all of central India and the Deccan is actually out of it.
#
They were not really affected by it.
#
So this is a story of mostly coastal India and the low Indo-Gangetic belt.
#
And what happened out here is that a lot of initial recruitment took place in the colonial
#
era, not necessarily by force.
#
Density was very high in these places.
#
But these migrations have now led to a culture of migration where young boys grow up thinking
#
that they will spend their lifetime outside and come back.
#
And girls grow up knowing that they have to look after the family and land when their
#
And it's so strongly rooted in many parts of India.
#
And my sort of estimate suggests that these districts, there are more than 150 districts
#
out of about 600 districts of India which have this.
#
Another way of saying it is that regions covering over 200 million people which are completely
#
remittance-based economies, principles of economy runs on money coming from outside.
#
And it has been going on since more than 140 years.
#
So if you compare it with other epochs, this actually turns out to be the largest and longest.
#
The largest migration right now is the urbanization of China.
#
So China has taken hundreds of millions of people out from farms to cities.
#
But that's happened in the last 30 years.
#
What's happened in India, much smaller compared to Chinese urbanization, but it's been happening
#
for more than 100 years.
#
So the classic indicator for this is the sex ratio.
#
And in India, we typically, sex ratios of 800, 900 females to 1,000 males in some parts
#
And we're used to this phenomenon of the missing women.
#
But Ratnagri, many of the districts in India have the phenomenon of missing men.
#
And in Ratnagri, for example, the sex ratio has never dipped below 1,100 females to 1,000
#
So it's a female surplus because the men are working outside.
#
In fact, you point out that this is not just true at a given point in time, but between
#
1872 and 2011, that's a heck of a long time.
#
No census has recorded it till date.
#
And the Ratnagri, of course, is very extreme, but a very similar story, especially if you
#
get the age group 25 to 40.
#
You'll find it in Azamgarh, in UP, in Udupi, in South India, in Sivaganga, in Tamil Nadu.
#
So virtually every state of India has a few districts which have become these remittance
#
And there's very strong networks which enable these migrations to sustain.
#
In Udupi, in fact, if between 1901 to 2011, it never fell below 1,090 females per 1,000
#
You know, in your chapter, you mentioned a number of places, and like you mentioned
#
Saharan in Bihar, their sex ratio in 1901 had risen to 1,200 females per 1,000 males.
#
And if you go to the taluks and villages, it's 1,400, 1,500.
#
And so it's a massive phenomenon.
#
What are the cultural impacts of something like this?
#
You would think that fertility reduces because the men are away, but that's not the case
#
because as I argue, you just need one good night in order to sort of get a kid.
#
And these migrants do come back.
#
It's not like they're away for years.
#
They come back at least once or twice a year.
#
As a researcher, I thought fertility would be affected, but clearly Bihar has very high
#
You might think that women would get more autonomy in the sense that the men are away
#
so they'd have to take more decisions.
#
And that is true in some parts of India.
#
But on the whole, not much has changed.
#
What has changed on the West Coast is that with some decent governance, they've been
#
able to use these remittances in a smarter way.
#
And you could say that migration has fundamentally transformed this region for the good.
#
In Bihar and Eastern UP, however, it's been much, much less.
#
And Ratnagiri is a particularly interesting case because a common phrase in Ratnagiri
#
was, I mean, they looked at Mumbai as something really aspirational.
#
A common phrase you've quoted is, jai chi kholi te chi Mumbai.
#
I hope I'm pronouncing it right.
#
Mumbai belongs to those who own a room.
#
And it's very interesting that a lot of the luminaries of Mumbai and indeed India are
#
migrants from Ratnagiri.
#
You say here that 10% of all awardees of the Bharat Ratna have been given to people directly
#
or indirectly associated with mass migration from this region, like, I assume, the Mangeshkars
#
It's a remarkable region.
#
I mean, we remember, as I say, Ratnagiri is famous for mangoes, but it's also famous
#
So it's this massive migration effect.
#
This contribution has really been, truly been outsized.
#
But I mean, Ratnagiri, of course, the Konkan is one region, but of course, there are many
#
other regions of India who have also exported.
#
And for example, the Udupi cluster, all the South Indian restaurants that you see across
#
India, most of them are actually run by the Udupi guys.
#
And it's a remarkable story of how a guy goes, learns the sort of tricks of the trade, and
#
then starts a new restaurant.
#
And it's just like this, literally like a McDonald's franchisee model, but very indigenous.
#
Many years before McDonald's, and really spread its sort of tentacles across India.
#
And part of it is almost happenstance, isn't it?
#
Because you mentioned that there was a flood in the region in 1923, and a lot of people
#
were forced to migrate because of that.
#
And this turned out to be a natural sort of...
#
Often you have one starting shock, which starts pushing out.
#
More recently, the diamond industry got this massive shock in the 1980s.
#
That's why a lot of the Saurashtra Patel's got into this business.
#
More recently, just a lot of Bengalis are now in the sort of gold business, like this
#
goldsmith kind of business.
#
And from literally Kochi in the South to Surat, most small towns and cities, these are a particular
#
sort of Bengali community, which is managing.
#
And again, they had a massive sort of natural calamity in the 80s, because of which many
#
Many of these other regions also, there were a lot of famines in the late 19th century,
#
but it's almost all of India is affected by famines.
#
So it's not just the fact that there was something bad, or there's a negative shock, but at the
#
same time, like you said, happenstance, where they find an opportunity.
#
And that is the combination which clicks.
#
So while famines affected pretty much all of India, it's the coastal areas where they
#
had the opportunity to go to Burma, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, anywhere to work, that they found
#
this safety wolf, where they realized that if there's a famine, they could always go
#
But as much of Deccan India, though there was famine, they tried to move, but they couldn't
#
get an opportunity to latch on to.
#
And as a result of which, even though they had negative shocks, they didn't sort of cultivate
#
these migration networks so much.
#
Today, of course, some parts of the Deccan are into migration streams, Northern Karnataka
#
for example, and some parts of Maharashtra.
#
There's something you wrote about Udupi, which kind of brings me to a larger question.
#
What you wrote was, quote, migration from Udupi was unique in that it involved a considerable
#
number of child migrants in search of work in the key destination, the restaurant provided
#
free food and accommodations, top quote.
#
And my question really isn't about the child migrants, so that's an interesting thing in
#
But it's about how a common thread through all the communities and peoples that you describe
#
in this, whether it's the Parsis or the Sindhis or the Marwaris or the Gujaratis, all of whom
#
we'll talk about later in this episode.
#
But a common thread to all of them is the force of community as a force multiplier.
#
So that if you want a better life, you just see where your community has gone.
#
And you can be guaranteed that you'll go there and you'll either get a place to work and
#
learn the trade, as in the case of an Udupi restaurant, or in the case of, say, Marwaris
#
or Gujaratis, you might even get funding from those community networks.
#
And what therefore happens is that, number one, communities tend to specialize in certain
#
kind of trades or vocations.
#
And this almost then seems to have, in a way, a ghettoization effect.
#
Like I was chatting with a friend who was brought up in Surat on the show.
#
In fact, I did an episode with Aakar Patel on Hindutva.
#
And Aakar was brought up in Surat.
#
And while he was describing Surat, we realized that Surat was both simultaneously globalized
#
and ghettoized, that you had communities from across the world kind of gathering there to
#
trade and to intermingle, but they were also deeply ghettoized.
#
And it seems that that ghettoization or the strengthening of those community bonds is
#
It is as much a feature as a bug because that's what makes it happen.
#
How do you see the two sides of this in the trade-offs involved?
#
I think the reason why communities are still so close-knit is because it sustains itself
#
And so the number one reason is marriage rules.
#
It's also linked with the age at marriage.
#
Even today, Indian women for its per capita income marry at an extremely young age.
#
We say 18 is a legal age for women to marry.
#
But when you look at surveys, the median age for marriages among women today is 18, which
#
means half the population of India today, even today, women marry below 18.
#
And this is the way community has its grip.
#
Because if you can control marriage and if you can control marriage within your community,
#
that's how it remains close-knit.
#
The minute women, for example, can work till 25, 30, and then choose their own partners,
#
if that freedom is given, then this community network sprays down.
#
So that's the big trade-off.
#
And I would, of course, argue that women should be working or should be getting married by
#
much later age groups and so on.
#
Of course, the strange part about this is that, as you said, communities work as major
#
They subsidize accommodation, food, networks, especially if you're going.
#
And so what's interesting is some of the social groups which have been not in business or
#
not in sort of the money-making activities, the way they've stormed these things is using
#
the network and using the community.
#
And so you'll see this in the Saurashtra Patel's move from farming to business, the
#
Gounders in South India from, again, farming to business, and now slowly some sort of what
#
people are calling as Dalit capitalism, where Dalits themselves are using their networks.
#
And so when you have a body like the Dalit, you know, Dickie, which is a Dalit industry
#
in Chambers Commerce of India, it's basically a front, just as you would have a Marwadi
#
So they've realized the power of the community.
#
And so what's interesting to me is that everyone now in India is trying to come up through
#
Which is great, but historically, as you point out at various points in your book, it's much
#
harder for someone from a lower caste to really come up because there are barriers to entry.
#
For example, if you want to be in the diamond trade, you basically got to be one of the
#
Palanpuri Jains and so on.
#
So what you have is that, you know, the trade that the Marwari's control or the trade that
#
the Gujarati's control or, you know, across those, they almost have a stranglehold on
#
it where it's very easy for someone from their community to get a step up and become prominent.
#
But that kind of upward mobility within that specific trade is much harder for somebody
#
As you correctly point out that one reason why the lower castes both migrated less and
#
benefited less from migration is because they didn't have access to these networks.
#
I mean, it's a good thing that they're now getting built up and it's also a good thing
#
that barriers to entry are sort of less than they were across professions.
#
I mean, this is a wonderful book by Devesh Kapoor and others called, I think, Define
#
It's basically a profile on Dalit entrepreneurs.
#
And what they find, you know, is remarkable that when they look at commonalities of success,
#
even more than reservations or the factors, it's actually migration.
#
The ability to go out to develop new networks and about the ability to fail but be anonymous,
#
which means that if you fail, oftentimes you start something different and you fail and
#
immediately a community says, you know, you're not really born to do this.
#
There's a huge psychological setups of what you can and cannot do.
#
And migration is remarkable because it puts you in settings in which nobody knows you
#
and in situations where you can fail.
#
And I think that's really the power of migration.
#
I know a better person than Ambedkar who really realized this power.
#
And that's why Ambedkar was a huge champion of migration.
#
It helped him in his personal life and, you know, he advocated.
#
And so if you've seen Dalit activist circles today, historically they were these motives
#
of educate, agitate, and so on.
#
Today, migrate is also, you know, coming into that timeline.
#
And interesting international migration.
#
So a lot of it is now, okay, now we need to go abroad.
#
And cross the Kala Pani as it were.
#
And sort of, you know, reclaim the space.
#
In fact, you point to three recent memoirs which also underscore this Narendra Jadhav's
#
Untouchables, Daya Pawar's Balutas, Sujata Gidla's, and Samang Elephants, which is an
#
excellent book, which talk about how international or internal migration are linked with the
#
beginning of social emancipation.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break and we'll come back after that.
#
Welcome to another awesome week on the IVM Podcast Network.
#
If you're not following us on social media, please make sure you do.
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We're IVM Podcasts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
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One more reminder, we are still hiring.
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We're looking for producers, content creators, audio engineers, developers, and basically
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Go onto our careers page, ivmpodcast.com slash careers and apply.
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Please send us your resume and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.
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Also wanted to make a note to you all that, hey, if you are listening to us and you hear
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something you like, take a screenshot of what you're doing.
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Send it to us on social media, tag us on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or wherever, and we'll
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repost you on our own page.
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This week, your favorite fitness podcaster, Urmi Kothari, is back with season two of the
#
Kinetic Living Podcast.
#
Urmi is doing two bite-sized episodes every week, Tabata Tuesdays, which will be a four-minute
#
workout, and a second called Thriving Thursdays, where Urmi will share motivating personal experiences
#
of challenges she's faced.
#
On Cyrus says, actor and improviser Mukul Chadda talks to Cyrus about his central role
#
in the Indian adaptation of The Office, the process of adapting the scripts, and how he
#
went from being a research analyst in New York to an actor and improviser in Mumbai.
#
On the first episode of Tech Careers in the New, presented by Accenture, Sheila Ditya
#
is in conversation with Sanjeev Narsipur.
#
He's the Managing Director and Blockchain Lead at Accenture Technology Services, and
#
they talk about blockchain is real-world practical applications and what it takes to have a career
#
On IVM Likes, IVM staffers delve deeper into the universe of independent and parallel cinema.
#
On The Habit Coach, Ashton talks about Never Missing Mondays.
#
He also talks about maintaining the momentum and owning that habit.
#
On ATKT Talent, Ten, P-Man and Krupa are joined by Sai, a rapper, and Kala, a music producer
#
They talk about their ATKT journey, the first songs they composed and produced together,
#
and collaborations with other rappers.
#
On Not Just Dan Sak, Parzen talks to Roxanne Bombot and Maruk Mogrelia about immersive
#
Parsi food experiences, like Parsi food walks and home dining.
#
On Water Player, Siddharth Mikhail and Akash review the previous week of the ongoing ICC
#
Cricket World Cup, preview the upcoming week along with some unusual predictions, and give
#
out their Water Player of the Week.
#
On the Prakriti Podcast, Pranay Kotastane returns to help us understand how fiscal federalism
#
And with that, let's continue on with your show.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Chinmay Thumbe about his very fine book, India, Moving, A History of
#
You know, before the break, we were discussing various sort of communities where the female
#
to male ratio has gone out of whack and there are missing men because men cannot leave.
#
And the interesting thing as I was going through the list of these communities is that they're
#
all sort of migrating from different social circumstances for different reasons, like,
#
you know, the whole Ratnagiri and going to Mumbai or Bombay as it then was is one thing.
#
With Udupi, it's kind of the restaurant trade, perhaps held along by the happenstance of
#
a cyclone and other events which come together and then they're completely dominating that.
#
And then there's Saran in Bihar, which is really interesting, where the sex ratio in
#
fact at one point rose to 1200 females for 1000 males.
#
Tell me a little bit about that.
#
So Saran, as I said, it has this really long history, starting many centuries ago.
#
And Saran is one of the few districts of India where you can trace the migration history
#
because of three different historians who wrote about its migration for three separate
#
The first people in Singapore, for example, from the British side was the Bengal Native
#
infantry and these were soldiers recruited from Saran.
#
And so in the 19th century, some of the major sort of infantry stock was coming from Saran.
#
And as British rule sort of consolidated, it says actually the demand for army personnel
#
sort of started reducing.
#
In fact, if you compare the Mughal army and the British army, the British army is very
#
And so this whole military labor market, which had developed, was beginning to collapse,
#
which means people who are on the move historically had to find new vacations.
#
And so people from Saran actually got hold of the jute mills in Calcutta.
#
And so they became, just like Ratnagri labor fueled the cotton textile industries of Bombay,
#
it was Saran labor which sort of got hold of the jute industries.
#
And one company, for example, Saran labor from across the 20th century, I think it went
#
from being about one fourth to three fourths of the workforce.
#
So again, a very strong network built between Saran and Calcutta.
#
The fourth district I talk about is Ganjam in Orissa.
#
And I call it cyclone psychology because Ganjam is a very unfortunate geography.
#
All cyclones tend to end up battering Ganjam.
#
It's faced some sort of a super cyclone once in 15 years.
#
And so 100 years back, they were going to Burma.
#
Today they go to Surat, Ujrat, work in a variety of urban sectors.
#
In Surat, it's the synthetic textile and so on.
#
But it's a culture which kind of has come to the conclusion that if we just focus on
#
agriculture, it's very risky because the super cyclone is going to come once in 10, 15 years.
#
And so migration relatively is a very stable livelihood strategy.
#
It can be exploitative.
#
It has all the social costs of separation, loneliness.
#
But given the realities of climate, it's a very safe and I would say smart strategy that
#
they've sort of developed over the last 100 years.
#
And in all these places, they have the money orders.
#
They have the migration songs, the folk songs.
#
So this is a huge sort of, it's very similar.
#
I mean, if you go to Ratnagar, if you go to Ganjam, if you go to Udupi, if you go to
#
Saran, differences in development, but that migration culture that you'll find that the
#
kind of conversations they're having, it's remarkably similar.
#
And in fact, you give an interesting statistic here that the number of migrants from Ganjam
#
to Surat are more than a lakh, more than 100,000.
#
And that's interesting.
#
And the point you make elsewhere in the book is that it might seem strange or counterintuitive
#
that if you are say in a village in Odisha or wherever, you don't go to the nearest
#
town or the nearest city.
#
You go all the way to Surat, but the reason is that's where your community is.
#
So in a different sense, with a different kind of geography in mind, that is actually
#
the place closest to you.
#
I mean, if you look at Bombay, you might think that, you know, Madhya Pradesh is closer
#
to Bombay than Uttar Pradesh.
#
You might think that many more people from Madhya Pradesh should be in Bombay than Uttar
#
That's completely the reverse.
#
UP is further, but we have more.
#
And that's because once a network starts, it is so strong because it helps you find
#
It helps you find accommodation.
#
Above all, information.
#
It's migration is all about information.
#
What information do you know about the destination place?
#
How safe is that place?
#
A lot of you will see a lot of migrant families diversifying nowadays.
#
Same household, three sons, two daughters, or three sons will go to three different cities.
#
And so from a household perspective, it's also like a, you know, diverse, it's like
#
a portfolio diversification.
#
You're hedging your bets.
#
So it's not just sort of these places, but it's almost, you talk about how clustered
#
there are these clusters and corridors all along the coast on either side, all the way
#
down and then all the way around the coast and back up again.
#
And I particularly found it interesting that Goa, which is where everyone wants to go,
#
is where there was a lot of out migration.
#
People wanted to leave Goa.
#
Goa is India's biggest remittance economy for a long time, until the 1960s.
#
And some taluks even today are remittance economies.
#
Not many people know that, you know, most people love to go to Goa, but a lot of Goans
#
actually work outside, especially in the merchant Navy.
#
So when they did this migration survey, they had to actually keep an option, you know,
#
where are you outside India?
#
They had to keep an option saying no man's land.
#
And that was, that returned the most number of sort of responses.
#
There was a Goa migration survey done and they found that in taluks like Bardes-Salsette,
#
about one third of the households were receiving money from outside.
#
That's pretty much the same number in Kerala and Ratnagri.
#
It's mass migration, however you define it, where one third of households are receiving
#
And that's happening in Goa today.
#
And the survey was done about six years back.
#
But of course, it's not all of Goa today.
#
So Goa is today an aberration on the west coast from Kanyakumari to Ratnagri, some parts
#
And that's because, of course, a lot of the population permanently left after this Portuguese
#
separation to Portugal or Mozambique.
#
But a lot of Goans also started developing new things because it became, it faced this
#
And so a lot of construction activities started happening in Goa, et cetera.
#
Vizag is another place where a lot of people used to live.
#
They built the port and they start more migration towards Vizag rather than from it.
#
In fact, there was a very nice little tidbit in your book about how Goan Catholics became
#
so good at baking that that's how they got the name Makapav.
#
Apparently that's the moniker that they got.
#
It's very hard to verify, but apparently this is considered to be the source of the word
#
Makapav that we use in Bandra and Khar.
#
It is full of this particular population.
#
And Kerala also has been obviously very famously an area from which there's been a lot of out
#
We should probably, for listeners who may not be completely clear about this, maybe
#
What's the difference between emigration, immigration and migration?
#
Emigration in today's context is out of country, so people leaving India going outside.
#
Immigration is people coming into India, for example, Nepalese or Bangladeshis coming to
#
India or Mexicans going to US, so they're called Mexican immigrants in the US.
#
And we say migrants or internal migrants for people within the country.
#
You might ask, who is a migrant?
#
In the census, there are two options.
#
You can be a migrant based on the place of birth, which means if I'm born in Pune and
#
I'm living on the day the census officer arrives in Bombay for more than six months, six months
#
is the cutoff, then I'm a migrant on the basis of place of birth.
#
But you'll see that suppose I was in Pune and I moved to Bombay, spent 10 years, and
#
And if the census officer asked me in Pune, what's your place of birth, I say Pune and
#
I am in Pune, then I would be not a migrant.
#
So in order to capture moos, they ask you a question, what is your last place of residence?
#
And so in that case, technically, you should be saying Bombay.
#
As it turns out, there are a lot of biases in migration surveys.
#
And Kerala is a classic example.
#
The census and the National Sample Survey asks a question, what is your previous place
#
Now, we know almost a third of the workforce of Kerala has a Gulf connection.
#
But surprisingly, very few people answer saying that their last place of residence was the
#
Gulf, because for them home is Kerala.
#
As a result, in the census and the National Sample Survey, we find very few, you would
#
conclude that there's very little Gulf connection.
#
There's another survey done by a research center there, large sample size, and just
#
a very specific question.
#
Have you gone to the Gulf and how many years you spent there?
#
It turns out one third of the population has a Gulf connection.
#
So it matters as to how you ask the question and how a person relates to a particular place.
#
There's a big gulf between this kind of question and that kind of question.
#
Kerala has always, again, as you point out, been incredibly open to outside influences.
#
Their maritime trade has been flourishing for a long time.
#
That's probably where Islam and Christianity first came to India from.
#
And now they are known for their high rates of out-migration.
#
Is it sort of a question of cultural openness to...
#
The fact that they've had this coastal culture for centuries definitely is part of the story.
#
But this out-migration started in a big way, partly also because they're one of the most
#
highly educated states of India, even in the early 20th century, within India, relatively
#
And it's a position they've had till date.
#
But it's a case of a highly educated state with less job opportunities.
#
And so you've seen a lot of educated young people leave Kerala, both men and women, and
#
go all across India first.
#
And then in the last 30 years, the Gulf, and then US, and a variety of places.
#
Interestingly the Gulf story starts with Mumbai.
#
The first recruitment offices of the oil companies were in Mumbai in the 1930s and 40s.
#
And interestingly, they had some norms as to who they could recruit.
#
And so it was the Keralites in Mumbai who got those jobs.
#
And that's how the network started.
#
And so from Mumbai, the locusts shifted to Kerala.
#
And that's why you have this massive Kerala.
#
And then the Gulf started booming in the 70s and 80s, and oil prices boomed, construction
#
activity started, and the Kerala connection was formed.
#
And so today in popular culture in Kerala, massive, massive migration from Kerala.
#
Of course, now there's a lot of migration to Kerala as well, because Kerala is fairly
#
They don't want to do the low-end jobs.
#
And so you have the curious case of more than 2 million North Indians now working in Kerala.
#
And there's just a Malayali movie just released where the film sort of breaks into a song,
#
and the song is sung in Bengali.
#
So there's a Bengali song in a Malayali film.
#
Later in your chapter on the Great Indian Migration Wave, you sum it up by saying, quote,
#
the Great Indian Migration Wave has for the most part been voluntary in nature.
#
It represents an adventure, the ability to break out of the family's gaze and yet be
#
able to support it, to enjoy the city lights and the company of friends and relatives,
#
and finally to return home with the satisfaction of a life well spent, at least in the eyes
#
For many, though, this would not have been the case, as life would have cruel twists
#
And you're obviously referring here to indentured labor, which was a significant factor in outmigration
#
of Indians all across the world.
#
In the 19th century, definitely.
#
As I said, some have called it a new form of slavery.
#
I think a lot of people strategically chose indenture as a way to get out.
#
But there's no doubt that there were harsh contracts, however you see it.
#
One way to see it is when Gandhi and the national movement, one of the first sticking points
#
for them was the indentured migration.
#
And they got it banned.
#
They got it abolished in the 1910s.
#
But the interesting thing is when they got indentured as a system abolished, but the
#
People continued to move.
#
They switched destinations.
#
So the pressure to migrate was always there.
#
Apart from indenture, of course, is exploitation on a day-to-day basis, people eviction, insecure
#
sort of land rights, as a result of which migrants in India, they lead fairly insecure
#
That is why this connection with the home is so important, because they know that they
#
can always fall back on something.
#
And so they never really snapped the connection with the rural place, even if an entire family
#
For example, my father's side family comes from Udupi.
#
And it's the rare Udupi family which actually settled in Mumbai.
#
I mean, of course, there are hundreds and thousands of Udupi families which have settled
#
But I would argue that's the minority.
#
And the minute you settle down, the kids get education.
#
And over some time, generations, their route with Udupi itself snaps.
#
For example, today, I really don't go to Udupi every now and then.
#
But there's a closer connection with previous generations.
#
Writing of indentured labor, for example, you write the code between 1831 and 1920,
#
two million people were transported across continents through indenture contracts.
#
One third towards the Caribbean, one fourth towards Mauritius, a tenth towards South Africa,
#
and the rest scattered in numerous islands and regions, including Fiji, Cuba, Peru, and
#
And the interesting thing is that a lot of these places are now heavily populated with
#
I think more than half of Mauritians are Indians in British Guiana, French Guiana, Trinidad
#
They've kind of settled down everywhere.
#
Even the political, I mean, in Mauritius, for example, Ujpuri is still a language, it's
#
Every Mauritius major political leader has had some sort of an Indian ethnic route.
#
And it's not surprising that when they come to India, they have to make a stop to Bihar.
#
Because most of these migrants to Mauritius and the Caribbean, they trace their roots
#
to the Indo-Gangetic plains.
#
Because I mean, V.S. Naipaul himself wrote these books and his heritage also comes from
#
that part of the world.
#
And it's kind of ironic that all of these sort of descendants of people who migrated
#
from Bihar and so on are now doing much better than their so-called, you know, their fifth
#
cousins or the sixth cousins or whatever.
#
I mean, that's a very good observation.
#
And it is true, relative to Bihar, but there's a huge diversity.
#
So Mauritius is spectacular.
#
It's got a per capita income many, many times, India many, many times, Bihar.
#
But there are also places like in the Caribbean, which are not that great, there's Guyana,
#
for example, which is still fairly poor.
#
There's Fiji, where Indians have not been treated well and is also fairly poor.
#
So I think the experience has sort of varied.
#
But it would be a mistake to say that, you know, hence they made the right choice.
#
I think it's not fair to judge the legacy, but rather the choice they made at that particular
#
For example, you might even say that, you know, it's good slavery happened in the trans-Atlantic
#
world, because the African Americans in the US are better off than Africans.
#
But I think that would be a bit harsh on the whole process of slavery and so on.
#
No, I mean, the significant thing about that observation, for example, is what it tells
#
you is that there's not something inherent in the people which stops them from developing
#
or progress or whatever.
#
Given the right institutions, climate, you will flourish.
#
And Indians have been very successful abroad.
#
Then we come to sort of two of the major impetuses towards progress, the first of them being
#
Tell me a bit about that.
#
Yeah, I mean, it started in this city, the first line, 1853, to completely transform
#
the speed of transport, completely.
#
Some say it's really unified India, massive role in migration because, you know, people
#
It's on the cover of the book as well.
#
I did a lot of my research interviewing people in the general compartment, and that's pretty
#
much where Migrant India moves of trains.
#
So train is a very special symbol of migration in India, both voluntary migration on a day
#
to day basis, but also involuntary migration like the partition where you have these death
#
trains, Kushwan Singh's famous train to Pakistan, for example.
#
So from, you know, life, death, and as I like to say, even love, so many people have found
#
partners in trains, like my parents who first met in a Bombay local train.
#
So this train is just a unique metaphor for various things in Indian life, but especially
#
And, and the second institution, which you describe as a post office.
#
Yeah, and I'll give that it's been even more important.
#
You know, travel happened through railways, but travel happened before the railways.
#
And even after the railways came, most people from Ratnagri, Kerala were coming to Bombay
#
So there was also water transport.
#
But the one thing migrant workers used everywhere was the postal money order.
#
And the postal money order was remarkable, because it's the first mass financial instrument
#
which everyone could relate to.
#
India had a unique system.
#
In 1884, they realized it was launched in 1884.
#
Four years later, they realized that most of the recipients were women, they were not
#
coming to the offices to collect the cash.
#
So they changed the system to make it home delivery of cash.
#
And it's a system, a unique system only in India, which survived until it was shut down,
#
the entire system was shut down a few years ago.
#
And so for more than 100 years, you had a system of home delivery of cash.
#
And that's why the postman became this symbol in many parts of India of like this messiah,
#
because he would come, he would undo his bag, and there'd be money, there'd be physical
#
And so there are songs on this variety of, you know, theatrical incidences based on this
#
And I spent a lot of my time actually digging out information, old postal cards on this,
#
because it also shows you that this remittance economy in India is not new.
#
It's been there now for more than 100 years in many parts of India.
#
In fact, you point out that, you know, postal money order traffic grew so much that it amounted
#
to two to 3% of the gross domestic product between 1900 and the 1960s, which is a heck
#
And there are young millennials today who will not know what their postman looks like,
#
or they will not know what a money order is.
#
But they will see a Western Union board, which is the proxy for that.
#
Let's talk about gender a bit now, because, you know, one of the things that is of course
#
obvious is that many of these regions from which out migration is happening, the gender
#
balance is skewed because the women stay at home.
#
And you've spoken a bit about how this affects the social and cultural impacts of this.
#
But it is also true that there were a lot of women who were sort of migrating and not
#
always for the most welcome reasons.
#
You know, you've got a section here on trafficking and female flight and all of that.
#
And there's a very telling quote, you know, which seems to indicate how people were forced
#
to, because of circumstances, look upon their children as resources.
#
And your sentence sort of is, quote, in one official record in the late 19th century,
#
a cultivator's girl was made to swap with a prostitute's boy, because apparently neither
#
was of any use to their natural parents, top quote, which is very poignant.
#
This book has also been a revelation to me because in terms of research, I found remarkable
#
sort of cases and instances just on which makes you think about, you know, how India
#
And we know that India has not really been the best place for women.
#
And especially for migration, you know, when we think of harsh forms of migration, women
#
have been disproportionately been affected, prostitution being massive.
#
I write in the book, I mean, it's not just Indian women, but European women who are trafficked
#
into India because you have this huge British standing army, almost completely men, and,
#
you know, they had their own sexual needs.
#
And so that's why there's this importation of white women as they're required.
#
So the Devdasi form, people have said, is also a very harsh form of servitude.
#
So varieties of, you know, problems related to female migration, and even when women are
#
highly educated, when they go, for example, to the U.S., it's, I argue, a sort of brain
#
drain where, you know, you're highly educated, you're going, but you're not getting work
#
because you're not allowed to.
#
Because most of the times it's the men who have the, you know, a visa, the H-1B, and
#
the women have the H-4 visa or the L-2.
#
It's very tough to get work because there are laws which restrict you from doing so.
#
And so, as I say, they inevitably become these desperate housewives in the U.S.
#
I mean, even in these modern times, you have sort of women wearing the brunt of that.
#
Let's kind of, you know, move from the migration of labor to the migration of capital.
#
And you talk about how that becomes a force for a lot of migration.
#
For example, the Parsis, and, you know, there's this famous myth about how the first Parsi
#
merchant comes and the king of Gujarat, Jadirana, tells him, why should I let you in?
#
And he asked for a glass of milk and he put some sugar in it to indicate that, you know,
#
they'll assimilate but not overwhelm.
#
Yeah, it's a very nice, you know, quote and tells you also how the community has gelled
#
It still maintains a strong identity, you know, but it's a small community.
#
It's dwindling in size.
#
But again, its contributions have been outsized.
#
You know, you look at virtually any sector and Parsis have made just tremendous contributions.
#
The one sector in which they've always sort of blasted against was that they'd never
#
contributed to the army.
#
And then you have a guy like Sam Manekshaw who comes.
#
So even that has been saturated.
#
So tremendously outsized.
#
And I think it boils down to a way of sort of a culture of excellence built into whatever
#
occupation you take at a very young age.
#
In Bombay, of course, it helped that they were in Bombay, which most cosmopolitan city
#
And so they got the best, you know, exposure to different things that were happening in
#
And so they leverage whether it was arts, whether it was business, you know, you have
#
these pioneers in these fields, even women.
#
Parsis women have been trailblazers in law like Cornelia Sourabji, variety of fields.
#
So it is a tremendous community.
#
But we should also not forget that, like many mercantile communities, the wealth really started
#
with the opium trade and, you know, whether it's the almost, I mean, this is not just
#
Practically every community in China and India owed their wealth in the 19th century to the
#
opium trade, which was basically narcotics, including the Tata's where they start.
#
One could argue everything in a sense is the opium trade.
#
Do you think and I'm just thinking aloud here, since you spoke about how Parsis tend to,
#
for whatever reasons, strive towards excellence, you know, just as people talk of, say, the
#
protestant work ethic being a factor in how Europe did, whatever they did.
#
Would you say that in many of the communities which you describe separately, where you talk
#
about the Sindhis, the Gujaratis, the Marwaris and so on, and the Parsis, that each of them,
#
can you pinpoint at the risk of generalizing, but are there sort of these cultural qualities
#
which carry through and therefore become a prominent part in the success of later generations?
#
Like you could say, okay, the Marwaris are good at trading and doing deals and whatever
#
Yeah, I'm usually very hesitant to give culturalist explanations to practically everything that
#
might reflect the economics training.
#
Economists in general do not like culturalist explanations, but there's no doubt that if
#
you look at the Marwaris, for example, risk-taking appetite, competitiveness, it's tremendous.
#
So there's definitely something in the community which, but I would say it's a network effect.
#
You know, like in migration, something starts it and then there's this massive corridor
#
I think it's a very similar thing.
#
So it's not got to do with Marwaris per se.
#
You might have social groups, completely non-business like, who might be doing the same in two decades,
#
but they need that one role model or one, you know, massive star to be born and everyone
#
And you've seen that, you see that in football where you see certain African countries become
#
very good in football because they see these role models performing very well in Europe.
#
And so I would boil it down to some strong early role models.
#
And of course, in the world of business, capital matters and so if capital is retained within
#
a community, then everyone sort of, you know, benefits.
#
And a lot of people with sort of a North Indian bias may not kind of realize that one of the
#
really significant communities in this aspect in India are the Chettiyars from Chettinad
#
At one point, you write, quote, at the peak of the power in the 1930s, estimates suggest
#
that the Chettiyars had 1650 firms in Burma, 1000 each in Malaysia and Singapore, 500 in
#
Sri Lanka, 200 in French in Indochina, which is Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and 150 in
#
other East Asian regions.
#
And that's quite mind blowing and people don't at least, you know, maybe it's my Amit bias,
#
but people don't often think of them in these terms.
#
I mean, Chettiyars were by far the richest community in India, again, like the policies
#
numbering just about 100,000, so it's not a very big community.
#
These firms, of course, small firms, but still, as you can imagine, it's just a sheer number.
#
Most of them in money lending, but then also in timber and then they start plantations.
#
So really a very widespread transnational community at the early 20th century.
#
And it's a remarkable case of decline actually over the 20th century because they lose all
#
their money in Burma and sort of they really fall down.
#
But if you go to Chettinad, even today, you'll see these houses like if you go to, you know,
#
parts of close to Pilani in Rajasthan, where you see these Marwadi Havelis of old style
#
In Chettinad, you have these Burmese teak wood houses, even today, which is a reminder
#
of this Burmese connection.
#
Even today, there's a Burma investors group of the Chettiyars, and they stake claim to
#
land in Burma even today.
#
They feel they were unfairly knocked out of Burma, which they're never going to get, but
#
they've not yet lost hope.
#
So you know, reading about many of these, one of the things that is common between these
#
groups that were responsible for the migration of capital, whether it's the Khatris, who
#
were moneylenders, or whether it's the Marwaris.
#
In fact, in 1844, the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, which is now the Times of India
#
for whom I write a column, ran a brief piece called Beware of the Marwaris.
#
And I want to quote from that, and the quote is in your book, quote, these Marwaris leave
#
their own country for the purpose of trading and they are spread all over Hindostan.
#
A Marwari shop may be seen as a hamlet, may be seen in a hamlet consisting of only four
#
In fact, were you to search all Hindostan, it would be difficult to find an agricultural
#
village without a Marwari.
#
When they arrive here, they commence by selling gram.
#
And in the course of four or five years, they become opulent bankers.
#
The causes of this are their unjust dealings.
#
Therefore, my advice to my countrymen is this, that they avoid entering into any transactions
#
of this nature with such deceivers as these.
#
Top quote and for my Marwari listeners, these are not my words, I was quoting from the Times
#
And this takes us back to a sort of this very suspicious outlook towards trade.
#
Again, you quote from the Artha Sastra, which is, you know, 1800 years old, which also refers
#
to traders as quote, all thieves in effect, if not name.
#
And the stop quote and then says, quote, they shall be prevented from oppressing the people.
#
So a lot of these migrants were fundamentally both traders and moneylenders, professions
#
looked upon with suspicion.
#
You see, you know, after 1991, where this liberalization, economic boom, a lot of people
#
have kind of wrongly concluded that India has always been open to trade and so on.
#
And I would argue that yes, but in only a few communities, actually the default, like
#
the notion of Artha Sastra, was this healthy skepticism towards trade.
#
You can almost call it like this, you know, a culture where salvation is more important
#
And you find that in many communities even today.
#
And hence, when a lot of communities in India started making a lot of serious money in the
#
19th century, especially the Marwadis, there was a lot of opposition.
#
And it's important because today when we see anti-immigrant sort of views, whether it's
#
in the US or UK or even in India, it's labor migration, you know, whether it's in the Northeast
#
India or US, it's anti-labor migration.
#
But there are also cases in history where there's anti-capital migration.
#
And the classic example is Marwadi migration in India.
#
And the Bengali nationalist PC Ray called them parasites.
#
The Chettiyars were also abused and thrown out.
#
Most famously in East Africa, Idi Amin kicked out, you know, Indian traders.
#
And what's interesting is it's not sustainable because in any region you need some capital
#
And so whether it's East Africa who are actually wooing back the Indians who they kicked out
#
30 years back, they're actually wooing them back to Kenya and Uganda today.
#
And in the case of Times of India, of course, the ownership, you know, moved on to Marwadi
#
hands a hundred years later.
#
Which is the ultimate revenge, take that, bitch.
#
And you know, speaking of the Gujaratis getting kicked out of East Africa, you know, 50,000
#
Partidaars get kicked out of East Africa, a bunch of them go to the UK.
#
And you've got a very nice anecdote about how, quote, in one local cricket match in
#
Bradford in 2001, all 21 players on the field were Patels.
#
The scorekeeper himself, a Patel, had the fairly amusing job of recording a scoreboard
#
on the lines of Patel, caught Patel, Patel bowled Patel, Patel run out Patel and so on.
#
It's a remarkable cricket match.
#
Let's, let's kind of move on to another significant section of your book, which is about the diaspora,
#
which is about not the sort of internal migration, but the diasporas that have formed.
#
And you say that today there's a vast Indian diaspora of over 25 million people across
#
Can you tell me a little bit about this?
#
Because one of the crucial points you also make is that these diasporas reside both within
#
and outside India and the diaspora within India is double the size of the international
#
This is actually not well known.
#
For example, the number of people who speak Bengali, there are more people speaking Bengali
#
within India, outside Bengali heartland than outside.
#
You wouldn't have thought I was Bengali, right?
#
And this, this is also a surprise for me, except the Malayalis, I think the Malayalis
#
have this massive international diaspora, but of this most Indian linguistic groups
#
have a larger internal diaspora.
#
And this is important because often the internal diasporas, firstly, what is a diaspora?
#
Diaspora is basically a scattering of a particular, you know, identity, whether that's a language
#
or ethnicity or religion.
#
And if you see the global diaspora is about 25 million, internal diaspora, linguistic,
#
I say it's about 60 million.
#
And the internal diaspora is like a launchpad for the international diaspora.
#
Even like we said, you know, the Biharis who are now going to the Gulf are going via Kerala
#
through networks cultivated in Kerala.
#
The Gujaratis who went outside, Bombay was a major launch pad, for example.
#
So this is, this matters, you know, these, these small sort of connections matter.
#
The international diaspora is varied.
#
You have the old diaspora that you can call it the plantation diaspora.
#
So there were mainly sugar plantations, but there's rubber plantations, tea plantations,
#
These are the guys who went to Mauritius, Fiji, and so on.
#
And in a lot of these countries, Indian, ethnic Indians now make up more than half the population.
#
The new diaspora can be summarized as a U-turn, U meaning three U's.
#
So that's U-S-U-K-U-A-E.
#
And these three countries specifically, you know, today attract a lot of Indians, a lot
#
of investment, a lot of overseas investment, a lot of remittances comes from those places.
#
But today, India, you know, earlier there were also concerns of brain drain and so on.
#
Today nobody talks so much.
#
And the fundamental reason is India is today the world's largest recipient of international
#
remittances and we get more than $70 billion from people outside.
#
It's about two to three percent of India's GDP.
#
I mean, it's a huge part of the balance of payments.
#
Without it, India would really be struggling.
#
So we've kind of recognized the contribution of migrants for coming from outside.
#
And a lot of this money comes from Gulf, which is on, you know, which also has a lot of low
#
skill labor, a lot of it comes from the U.S., which is at the high skill labor.
#
Today's diaspora, however, is slightly different from the old diaspora because it is much more
#
elite in the sense the guys who are going out are disproportionately drawn from the
#
Religion wise, it's different because in the Gulf, there's an over-representation of Muslims.
#
In the U.S., over-representation of Hindus.
#
But caste wise, there's this massive Gulf, which was not the case 100 years back because
#
it was almost like a cross-section of an Indian village would be found on a boat going to
#
But today, when you see the plain, it's not really a cross-section of Indian society.
#
So it's much more elite.
#
And in the U.S., like the political scientists, Devesh Kapoor and others have called it the
#
other one percent, it's really an extremely elite diaspora.
#
So when we say, you know, Indians are so brainy or a classic comment I get is, you know, Indians
#
are very good at mathematics and they're looking at Indians in the U.S.
#
But this is really the top end, where you have the privilege to go there.
#
And like I said, you know, it's not just a selection bias, it's what you call the triple
#
Triple selection, yeah.
#
Not I, but yeah, Devesh Kapoor has said that, yeah.
#
And which is why Indian Americans outperform every subgroup in America in terms of income
#
and education, as you write here.
#
But it's not just the three U's, it's also Southeast Asia, which is often ignored, isn't
#
it, when it comes to looking at the diaspora?
#
But if you look at the whole arc, Burma, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, this was the hub 100 years back.
#
Burma and Sri Lanka have fallen out, but Malaysia, Singapore especially, are still very strong.
#
So today, I mean, outside the three U's, Singapore definitely is a huge hub for Indians, a lot
#
of Indian entrepreneurs, businessmen.
#
And it's here, when you talk of diaspora, inevitably, you start talking about the Sindhis,
#
because the Sindhis are a group which has become so transnational.
#
I mean, virtually every country.
#
Gujaratis and Punjabis, I would say Sindhis, Punjabis, and Gujaratis are most transnational.
#
And then the Malayalis and Tamils, of course, Kannadaigas to a slightly lesser extent.
#
What's interesting is Bengali diaspora, of course, we add Bangladesh, it's very wide,
#
but the sort of more recent sort of migrations have been more internal, that is, you know,
#
from West Bengal to different parts of India.
#
But again, what's not changed is that Central India, this whole arc of the Deccan Plateau
#
and North East India, like a hundred years back, they are really not into this international
#
migration in a big way.
#
Why do you think that is?
#
It's again, these historic networks, I would argue that.
#
So less opportunity, therefore, basically.
#
More like, yeah, the coasts have had sort of starting advantage, because they've had
#
these old ties, and so they've just been synced with it.
#
Because remember, the British Empire worked from three ports, Delhi came much later.
#
It was Bombay, Chennai, Kolkata.
#
So the coastal sort of India had much wider exposure to trade ideas, movement for international
#
sort of connections than the hinterland.
#
So there's this clear bias towards the coast rather than the hinterland.
#
In sort of independent India, apart from Delhi, and now, much more recently, Pune had the
#
But apart from that, there's a huge part in the center, which has kind of been sort of
#
ignored, and with migration, you need information.
#
And so it's only now that the information is percolating.
#
And so who knows, in maybe 20 years down the line, you'll find a lot of migration from
#
In 2006, I traveled through Pakistan, I was covering India's cricket tour there.
#
So I was there for a couple of months.
#
And one of the things that sort of struck me is that wherever I went, people's sense
#
of community identity seemed stronger to me than their sense of being Pakistani.
#
So for example, with my friends in Lahore, it would be the Punjabi identity was really
#
strong, much more than their sense of the idea of Pakistan.
#
And at that point, it seemed to me, and this was probably a shallow observation, but the
#
idea of Pakistan seemed weaker at that level than the idea of India.
#
But reading your book, one thing I thought was that, if you look at the histories of
#
these communities and the way they've kind of stuck together through the centuries, and
#
they have these sort of tides which lift an entire community along, or you actually have
#
small communities getting displaced en masse, as it were, very often, that it even seems
#
that the idea of nation, especially India, which is just over 70 years old, seems relatively
#
nebulous to the idea of community.
#
So much as I absolutely deplore identity politics, for example, I can also see why people naturally
#
Absolutely, I mean, the central theme of a person growing up in India, I mean, is implicitly
#
that and explicitly that you need to be within your fold, right?
#
I mean, that's so strongly ingrained into who you eat with, who you live with, spatial
#
segregation, and eventually who you marry with.
#
And these norms, I mean, of course, they're breaking down very slowly, right?
#
And so as a result of which this community logic is very strong.
#
Now, Raghuram Rajan has a new book called The Third Pillar, and he argues that one of
#
the reasons for this kind of stuff you're seeing around the world today is that between
#
markets and the state, there's also the community, and the community has been ignored.
#
And I think that's a very interesting observation that he's making.
#
And maybe in India, I would argue that, of course, the communities have always been at
#
the forefront, you know, whether it's for reservation or political thing, specific communities
#
have always been able to galvanize and so it's a very core part of the political process
#
I mean, you could say that, you know, it just simply works on community blocks.
#
And then what are the sort of trade-offs involved there?
#
Because on one hand, the advantage of being part of a community is that you of course
#
have a sense of belonging and you have a sense of home, not necessarily just in a geographical
#
sense, and you also have access to all these networks and these people who will take care
#
But the flip side of it is that can also be divisive, though, I mean, I would argue if
#
you look at India's history, it hasn't necessarily been divisive, you have so many communities
#
sort of coexisting and intermingling to mutual benefit.
#
But it can be divisive, and especially in these times where our politics becomes more
#
and more polarized and divisive.
#
How do you see these sort of trade-offs playing out?
#
Yeah, it's a very good question.
#
I don't have any clear sort of, you know, answer to that.
#
I just say, like, my experience has been when you talk to different friends, right?
#
So if I talk to friends coming from Dalit backgrounds, when I talk about community with
#
them, the experience is much more of, you know, what are you talking about?
#
This is basically exploitation.
#
You can call it caste community, for us it is exploitation.
#
And I think one has to be very sensitive to that.
#
Whereas you talk to several other groups who have been more privileged, and like we discussed,
#
you know, they are often seen as the outsiders, they now have a grouse that people are out
#
For example, the Brahmins have this classic grouse that we were forced to move because
#
You know, there's this huge identity around that.
#
So I think these are the sort of different tensions in which each community is facing,
#
some which justifiably have been exploited for long, and some which now feel that they're
#
being exploited, even though there might not be any evidence on that.
#
So in a strange way, every community feels that they're being exploited.
#
It's a very unique sort of situation that we are in now.
#
And I wonder if, you know, some of these resentments between communities or between peoples and
#
so on also comes from a kind of forced migration, which you describe in the second half of your
#
book, which is all the displacements which have happened because of partition, for example,
#
being a very big reason, and not just one partition of 1947, but the multiple partitions
#
you sort of point out, you know, the Bangladesh in 71, the Burma just before that, and all
#
the displacements, for example, in 1990, the Kashmiri pundits being forced to flee.
#
Another striking statistic in your book is about how two thirds of the people in Delhi
#
are in some way migrants, especially in 1951.
#
And do you think that lingers on through the generations?
#
Like, if you look at some of the sort of support for, say, Hindutva forces today, would you
#
say that some of it comes from memories and resentments and therefore are not all that
#
I mean, if you look at Kashmiri pundits, it's very obvious, you know, where the grouse is
#
It was a painful incident.
#
It was a horrendous incident.
#
This whole Kashmiri pundit exodus.
#
But fundamentally, it's the same reasons.
#
It's hypernationalism in Kashmir at that point.
#
It's hypermasculinity, aggression.
#
And unfortunately, this is being repeated now in different ways in India.
#
Partition, you're absolutely right.
#
For example, the RSS would say that, you know, it is us who actually protected people at
#
So, you know, similar thing in Bombay.
#
A lot of people love the Shiv Sena because they say, you know, in the 90s, during the
#
riots, it's the Shiv Sena who stood up and protected us.
#
And so this becomes a very solid part of the identity building process.
#
And so it's a clear connection.
#
I mean, Sindhis, for example, very, very closely aligned with hardcore nationalist feelings,
#
is also the case in the case of Sindhis of trying to prove themselves that they are Hindu
#
in a very, very strong way.
#
And so this kind of seems to dominate a lot of the logic because a lot of people, because
#
they're often being taunted as being coming from the other side.
#
And so in order to sort of dismiss any notion of that, it kind of go to the other extreme
#
and say, no, no, no, we are, you know, you need to assert your identity even more.
#
So I do think some of it, you know, comes apart in that way.
#
I don't know if there's any empirical relation, like on average to Sindhis, you know, are
#
they more nationalist than others?
#
But I can clearly see the reason why.
#
And there's no, for example, Kashmir Pandya, it's very clear cut.
#
It's a solid injustice which has been done against them.
#
It's still not really been solved, it's still outside.
#
And so this sort of resentment will obviously continue.
#
And another question too, I guess, none of us will have an answer.
#
And I don't know if you can get metrics for that either is that as the generations pass
#
and the memories of the forced migration sort of grow dimmer, are you likely to see some
#
And if not, does that indicate that apart from the event, the resentments come from
#
something more primal and tribal or whatever?
#
Yeah, it's a good question.
#
I have no clear answer for that.
#
The cases we have in India, for example, the Parsis, the Bugdadi Jews, it's too long.
#
I mean, these we're talking about many, many centuries.
#
The more recent ones like the Tibetan refugees, whether internally displaced or even damn
#
displaced projects, it's too recent.
#
So I think it's kind of caught up in between having persecuted communities in India who
#
have come very far and who have assimilated very well and sort of groups which are much
#
more recent and who are in the first or second generation.
#
And maybe it's too early to tell, maybe we know 50 years down the line how these groups
#
And one of the major points you make is that a lot of the forced migrations are not just
#
because of partitions or politics, they're also because of development projects where
#
people are building dams and people are...
#
The numbers are astonishing.
#
I mean, clearly more people have been displaced because of development-induced projects cumulatively
#
than all the partitions put together, the three partitions that I say in 1937, 47, 71,
#
which is a crazy statistic if you think about it, because partition was massive.
#
I mean, you have the images of the strains moving across...
#
Seven and a half million people.
#
The Bangladeshi refugee crisis, 71, 10 million refugees in eight months.
#
Districts having more refugees than the population of the district themselves, short-term though.
#
And we're seeing cumulatively more than 40 million people have been displaced internally.
#
And these are small displacements.
#
This could be happening outside your house, a small busty being sent forcibly demolished
#
and people are on the streets tomorrow.
#
But when you actually count this across the country, it's quite a staggering number.
#
And so for me, what's interesting is that often, for example, the Tibetan refugees,
#
we've been more hospitable or we've extended more privileges and rights to international
#
refugees because we've been under the scanner.
#
Than our own internally displaced, which is some sort of irony.
#
It's also indicative of how these are normalized.
#
I could imagine 40 million people and we are a democracy, there would be some kind of movement
#
around this, there would be a cry and so on.
#
Yeah, but the 40 million is an aggregation of many small ones.
#
We don't really see it.
#
Yeah, and they don't talk to each other.
#
And it's just, oh, this is just my bad luck, what do I deal with it?
#
Some of the damn incidents that I sort of read about were insane.
#
I mean, some of them were literally flushed out.
#
I mean, just one fine day, the water comes and you're forced to leave.
#
I think the Andhra Pradesh, you mentioned the government got confused about when the
#
displacement will be finished.
#
What is the timing of the flow of the water?
#
Now, there's no doubt that a lot of these dams have also worked, there's good that's
#
come out, but then you'd have to say that, you know, what has been, there has to be a
#
way of, you know, I think it's been only very recent that this principle of rehabilitation
#
has been enshrined earlier.
#
You could pretty much do what you wanted.
#
Some of the first big dams of India, unfortunately, don't know what, you know, how they went about
#
acquiring land or how they went about submerging, but clearly there was no process, which means
#
even if you take them, if these numbers will also increase, if you go before independence,
#
if you start considering the really big dams in South India, for example, built in the
#
early 20th century, celebrated today, but they must have submerged massive, massive
#
No, and I have very little sympathy for sort of cost benefit analysis of this sort of thing
#
because the cost is normally on one section of people, disproportionately the poor and
#
the benefit is somewhere else.
#
And who usually don't get the electricity, don't get the water.
#
The moral and humanitarian cost is huge to begin with, and then why would you sort of
#
You know, there are a lot of little things in your book, which I wanted to talk about,
#
but I've taken up a lot of your time, so I'll kind of go to the bigger questions at the
#
One of the very interesting contrasts you make about attitudes towards migrations is
#
the attitudes of Ambedkar, Gandhi and Thackeray.
#
Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
#
Yeah, Thackeray comes across as this staunch nativist, of course, he's a brilliant strategist,
#
so he used opportunities for, you know, talking about migration.
#
But like Trump, like any staunch nativist, basically saying your people first, immigrants
#
are something to be looked against, often even attacked, you know, Shiv Senix have also
#
attacked people on this issue.
#
And it's sporadic, you know, I mean, in the sense that the violence is sporadic, but the
#
basic ideology is that our people first.
#
And when you think of cities as sites, it's strange, because Mumbai, for example, is a
#
city built by migrants, for migrants, even today about 60% of the population is migrants.
#
Thackeray himself is a migrant.
#
Thackeray himself is a migrant, and Thackeray's surname, for example, is anglicized, you know,
#
Will you make peace, Bal Thackeray?
#
And now his movie is being played by, you know, Muslim migrant from UP.
#
It just doesn't get more bizarre or ironic than-
#
In fact, when you were growing up, did you ever feel victimized by his tirades?
#
Because you're from UDP, right?
#
And you were in Mumbai.
#
So we have an interesting family story to this.
#
Our surname, for example, is direct sort of fallout of this.
#
We used to live in Shivaji Park, and I believe family, friends, I was not, of course, there
#
at that time, but these are stories passed on in the family.
#
And we used to, apparently, our building was neighboring Thackeray's.
#
So as you know, very cordial relations.
#
And obviously, I mean, he was a very nice guy on a personal basis, so, you know, nobody
#
had hard feelings against that.
#
But in this whole anti-South Indian movement in the 1960s, eventually we actually had to
#
rather strategically change our surname.
#
And we took this name, Tumbe, because it sounds Maharashtrian.
#
So Tumbe, because there's a Tembe and a Tambe, but we are the only Tumbes in the world.
#
You are literally the only Tumbes in the world.
#
And yeah, so this is a remarkable story that thanks to the Thackerays, you know, we sort
#
of changed our surname.
#
And it's because he's got our surname changed.
#
I mean, this is, of course, in jest, because he didn't have a direct connection.
#
The city's name has changed, but his surname has not.
#
And tell me also then a bit about...
#
And I should say Tumbe is the name of a village in Odupi.
#
Tell me also a bit about, you know, given that urbanization is basically a process of
#
migration, tell me a bit about Ambedkar and Gandhi's views on, contrasting views on urbanization,
#
like you've quoted Ambedkar famously as calling the Indian village court, a sink of localism,
#
a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness in communalism, stop court.
#
And Gandhi, perhaps inspired by Ruskin and Tolstoy and all those guys, sort of die-fied
#
And in fact, he seemed to...
#
I mean, if you read Hind Swaraj, for example, I had a couple of episodes on Gandhi with
#
Ram Guha where we discussed this, almost seems to be against so much of modernity, like railways,
#
like doctors and whatever, but Gandhi's approach to urbanization was sort of a complete contrast.
#
And you've sort of very nicely exposed the counterplay between these three approaches.
#
See, Gandhi himself was a migrant.
#
I don't think he had a position to migrants.
#
And as I mentioned, he's on record saying that if people are being oppressed, then they
#
So he doesn't have a really problem with that.
#
But I think his ultimate disdain for cities came about because I think he was more in
#
sync with the village life.
#
And also, I think at heart, he had this idea of being an environmentalist, that he's not
#
called an environmentalist then, but I think it's the harmony.
#
And even today, you'll find this return to this idea of environmentalism that the rural
#
life is much more, is less polluting, et cetera.
#
In the book, I make my position very clear that I take the Ambedkarite view that India
#
needs more organization, not less.
#
More people have to move to cities.
#
And ultimately, it's coming from Ambedkar's perspective, because if you look at caste-wise
#
urbanization, if you look at social groups as these small concentric circles, it's well
#
off have these wide spatial networks.
#
The concentric circles span the world.
#
And the social groups where these concentric circles just span a few villages.
#
And if India really has to flourish, one, these concentric circles have to start interacting,
#
but they also have to start widening.
#
And that's what migration brings about.
#
And so what India really needs is more rural-to-urban migration.
#
Of course, of the safe kind, not exploitative and so on.
#
But to have a blanket policy saying, you know, we should have reverse migration.
#
And the other thing is, I think what people have failed in this Gandhian world of rural
#
development is the basic flaw in the ideology that is rural development almost always gets
#
That is, as people get rich in rural areas, they actually leave.
#
And you've seen this in coastal Andhra, where people became very rich, high productivity,
#
and they start moving to Hyderabad, U.S.
#
Because as you get richer, you're not going to do farm work, you're not going to do back-paying
#
And what are we part of larger economic networks?
#
So I'm not against rural development, obviously.
#
But my sort of view is that with rural development, you will get more migration.
#
And that should not be seen as a failure of what you're trying to do, but just as an inevitable
#
part of a sort of development.
#
And you see it in China, it's got tremendous benefits, people moving from villages to cities.
#
And you're seeing it in India.
#
It's still very slow in India compared to in China.
#
Because as I say in this book, the Great Indian Migration Wave means people also go back.
#
So it's not that people are coming and setting in Indian cities, and a lot of them spend
#
their life here, but they go back.
#
So India, in a way, has an inbuilt check on permanent migration.
#
I argue mostly it's coming from the source region, women are moving less.
#
Some of it is also housing, high exorbitant costs, people can never really put a foot
#
So these three views of the nativist, of the completely sort of celebratory account of
#
migration, safe migration, which is Ambedkar, and Gandhi in the middle where he loves the
#
idea of, you know, ideas moving about, or even people moving about.
#
But fundamentally, the focus is always on the village.
#
And if possible, there should be no cities, everyone should be living in a village.
#
And Ambedkar would never support that.
#
And the three positions are, for me, very fascinating.
#
And for Ambedkar, of course, the crux of this was caste in the sense that if you move to
#
the city, you would sort of weaken your caste.
#
Now it's a good question to ask, has caste really disappeared once you move to the city?
#
But I would argue it's less.
#
I think that that's the whole point when you talk about urbanization, it's not a panacea
#
But as you point out in your book, if you're traveling on the crowded Virar local, you don't
#
have time to see what the caste of the guy next to you is.
#
And there's a lot of evidence now, such as that the anonymity, it helps our entrepreneurship,
#
it helps a variety of things.
#
So overall, this romantic idea, which policy makers in India have held for a long time,
#
that is, if we do enough in rural areas, people won't have to move, is fundamentally flawed.
#
In fact, if you do enough in rural areas, people will still move.
#
And the rural areas will also then consolidate into urban areas.
#
And which is happening.
#
You see these small townships and so on emerging.
#
One of the very interesting things that you say in your book, which kind of seems obvious
#
now in the light of current events.
#
But if you told me this 15 years ago, it would have seemed very counterintuitive.
#
And I would have said no way, which is that just as you point out the major ideological
#
battle of the 20th century was between capitalism and communism.
#
Your sense is that in the 21st century is likely to be between cosmopolitanism and nativism,
#
which we see playing out all around us, but is nevertheless still a little surprising
#
to me because you'd imagine that as we become more urbanized and cosmopolitan and globalized,
#
there'll be less chance for nativism to rear its ugly head.
#
Actually, I mean, this is not completely new.
#
I think, I mean, I use that sentence just because in the 20th century, capitalism can
#
But you did for a brief moment in the early 20th century also have this battle between
#
nativism and cosmopolitanism.
#
For example, after the great depression, or actually after the first world war, there
#
were these massive racist visa walls that emerged blocking off, you know, migration
#
flows in Europe and in the US.
#
So this is not the first time.
#
They have been people like Trump before.
#
But because this economic ideological battle is pretty much done and dusted with, there
#
might be new ones which might emerge in the century.
#
And because we have this massive backlash against globalization, remember, it's more
#
a backlash against globalization of people.
#
There is, of course, the trade war and the capital flow war.
#
But between the movement of people, goods, and money, or capital, political sort of position
#
is towards the first, slightly less against the second.
#
And on capital, nobody's talking about stopping capital flows.
#
But it's the people which people have a problem against.
#
And so, you know, I mean, this is a battle that's going to really rage on.
#
And we're seeing it in all the elections across the world.
#
In India, where immigration is such a huge issue, it is never a political issue for a
#
central election, this time, you know, it also mattered there to some extent.
#
And so I argue that, of course, there's a bias.
#
I myself happen to be born in Mumbai, cosmopolitan city of India, maybe Asia.
#
But this book is a celebratory account of cosmopolitanism.
#
It's a defense of that.
#
We benefit from ideas transferring.
#
Some of these ideas may not be good, but, you know, you might even have counter ideas
#
coming from these exchange flows.
#
And I think history serves as a nice reminder that especially for social groups to rise,
#
migration is very important.
#
And if not for any other reason, I think that's one of the reasons why one should support
#
Towards the end of your book, you start off by saying that there are at least three major
#
developments that you foresee in the 21st century.
#
So the first, of course, is the North to South migration.
#
This is started in bits, but it's going to increase.
#
And the reason is because the earlier linguistic barrier, Hindi speakers trying to learn South
#
Indian language is kind of broken, partly because now the wage difference is so high
#
that people don't mind learning these languages.
#
And so you're finding, you know, Bhojpuri Bengali speakers who are learning Tamil or
#
learning Malayalam, or who are working without these languages because they're desperate
#
for good wages and they're getting very good wages.
#
The added benefit being that the South has better labor laws.
#
So they're actually also getting better labor protection than working in, say, Gujarat or
#
It's practically the opposite of Hindi imposition.
#
So, so they're getting a good deal by migration.
#
Now you might get a backlash, like you have this, the Kannada Rakshika Vedike in Bangalore.
#
Until now you've not seen any political movements against migrants, thankfully.
#
But this is definitely a feature.
#
And so the Great Indian Migration Wave, which I argue went East 19th century, West 20th
#
century, is now going South.
#
Then there's a point of climate, climate change, and you're seeing crazy temperature variations.
#
It's going to affect agriculture.
#
Historically, migration has obviously been linked, even the Arthashastra has a mention
#
of what kingdoms should do in terms of famine, move the kingdom to another place and so on.
#
So that's very climate change, especially because the flooding, if the sea levels rise
#
and so on, Bangladesh is a low-lying place.
#
And so that's like a huge hotspot of migration.
#
And third is, of course, also expats, international immigrants coming into India.
#
And so far we've had Nepalis and Bangladeshis in large numbers.
#
But with India growing, you'll also see immigrants coming from Europe and US.
#
You see that in a few cities, but it's still in the few thousands.
#
And this could dramatically grow up in 2050.
#
You might find, you know, you're walking down a street in Bombay and you might find literally
#
a lot of races which you're not seeing today.
#
In a way, it would be a return to the late 19th century.
#
Maybe Thackeray's descendants could meet Thackeray's.
#
They could also marry outside, you know, they'll have a transnational family.
#
But Bombay was so, when you read Bombay's history, late 19th century, you had communities
#
from across the world in Bombay.
#
And you could probably see that again in the next 50 years.
#
Makes me feel even better about living in and loving the city.
#
Did the process of writing this book change how you look at India?
#
I mean, I've always loved this place because it just, I mean, it's cliched, but it is true
#
that it's just so beautifully diverse and you just learn something every day.
#
I think Ramgua said that, you know, this is the most fascinating country, something like
#
And I completely agree.
#
And I have had the opportunity to travel a fair bit in the world.
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And every time you travel in India, it's just something new that, you know, opens up.
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Writing history, especially for a general audience, has been really fun and also a real
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eye-opener because there are many aspects of history where, you know, I also had certain
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And when I sort of dug in more, I realized, okay, hang on, you know, need to sort of look
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at this in a very, very different way.
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So yes, I think it's been a very fun process overall.
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And don't ask me if I'm writing another book.
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Are you writing another book?
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Hopefully, but yeah, it'll take some time.
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Chinmay, thanks so much for coming on The Scene Unseen.
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Thanks so much for having me over.
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If you enjoyed listening to this show, do hop on over to your nearest online or offline
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bookstore and pick up India Moving by Chinmay Tumbe.
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You can follow Chinmay on Twitter, at Chinmay Tumbe, one word.
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You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene Unseen at sceneunseen.in, thinkpragati.com
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The Scene in the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution, an independent center
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for research in education and public policy.
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Takshashila offers 12-week courses in public policy, technology policy and strategic studies
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for both full-time students and working professionals.
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Visit takshashila.org.in for more details.
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Thank you for listening.
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We are from the Open Library Project and we host a podcast called Paperback.
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Paperback is a podcast where we engage with stalwarts and experts from various industries
#
suggesting non-fiction titles that contributed to their journey in a big way.
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We've had guests like Anjali Rehna, Dr. Marcus Rani, Dr. Swati Lodha, Ambhi Parmeswaran,
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Apurva Damani and many more on our show Paperback.
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Find new episodes every Wednesday on the IVM Podcast app, website or wherever you listen
#
Hey, Kripa, check out my beatboxing.
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Boots and cats and boots and cats and boots and cats.
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Alright, check out my singing.
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Because you're genuinely bad and because you've got actual talent to showcase.
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During the 80KT Talent Time Podcast where I, Kripa, and I, P-Man chat with some immensely
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talented college students about the fun part of college like freshers life, the music and
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poetry scene, side hustles for college students and the not so fun like weird dress codes,
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hostile deadlines and ragging.
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New episodes every Tuesday on the IVM Podcast app, the IVM Podcast website and wherever
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else you get your podcasts from.
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Hey, Kripa, check out my poetry.
