Indians, Indians everywhere

Chinmay Tumbe's book 'India Moving - A History of Migration', the Foreword to which is written by Arvind Subramanian, former Chief Economic Advisor, is a breeze to read

When someone attempts an exhaustive piece of work on migration, irrespective of nationalities, it becomes pertinent to examine a few things within German geographer-cartographer Ernst Georg Ravenstein’s so-called “Laws of Migration”. These eight laws state: Short-distance migrations produce waves of migrants usually towards great centres of commerce and industry; economic migration generally happens in stages rather than as a mass exodus; each stream of migration produces a compensating counter-current of migrants; city and town people are less migratory than their rural counterparts; females will migrate more over shorter distances than males; long-distance migration will also invariably proceed towards great commercial and industrial centres; the process of dispersion of migrants will always be inversely proportional to the process of absorption in the place to which they migrate; and, finally, migration increases with technological progress.

Chinamay Tumbe’s India Moving — A History of Migration manages to examine historical migration in and out of India within the scope of many of the laws Ravenstein framed in the 19th century. This book is not an empirical study. So one should forgive him for not paying enough attention to the “push-pull” factors that primarily play on the minds of migrants when they decide to move. The book does little to examine the socio-economic conditions of the times he describes. It fails to explain — in clear economic terms — why a particular region or country became a magnet for Indians. One should also forgive Mr Tumbay for his distorted sense of ancient Indian history – especially when he relies on the Arthashastra to arrive at a conclusion that ancient Indians beat the Americans and the Europeans in terms of barbarity and truculence while practising slavery.

These are but minor aberrations. Mr Tumbe’s book presents an exhaustive perspective on how Indians have moved over the centuries to form a diverse country where customs and languages change in the blink of an eye. It provides interesting bits of information on the number, gender and regional composition of Indian emigration. It is no mean achievement to produce a body of work to which every Indian, irrespective of region or state, will relate.

Mr Tumbe’s work is not a scientific study of present-day migration in India, but he does accurately prophesise future migratory trends: “The north-south corridor in India will be the latest addition to the great Indian migration wave, already reflected in the fact that over 2 million north Indians work in Kerala,” 

he says. The “2 million North Indians” part is one of sweeping generalisations in this book but should not concern a light reader, for the historical enlightenment about their forefathers will more than compensate for such literary and factual irritants.

The third and fourth chapters of the book, “Merchants and Capital” and “Diasporas and Dreams,” are a must-read for all those who wish to understand how money made Indians move. These meticulously researched chapters give a fascinating account of various communities in India who moved home as they followed the money. From the Parsi movement to Mumbai, to the exodus of Chettiars of Tamil Nadu to Burma, the mercantile migration of the Punjabi Khatris and their domination of Bollywood, the proliferation of ‘notorious’ Marwaris in every town and village of India, the inward and outward march of the enterprising Gujarati, the immaculate migration networks of the Muslim merchants especially the Khojas (the sect to which Wipro founder Azim Premji belongs) and the Bohras — the book covers a lot of ground.

Mr Tumbay presents an engaging history of the Indian “diaspora” — a term that, according to the book, surfaced as late as 2001, in India’s diplomatic parlance. From the movement of indentured labour to the plantations of South East Asia, to the movement of Biharis and other people from the Gangetic plains to Mauritius and the Caribbean (a history that still reflects in people like the late V S Naipaul and West Indian cricketers Sunil Narine and Shivnarine Chanderpaul), to the movement of Punjabis to Britain and Canada (pronounced Kehnedaa), the surfacing of Gujaratis in Africa to the rise of the curd rice- chomping Tamil Brahmins as model citizens of the United States of America and the massive influx of the Malayalee in West Asia (or the “Gelf” as it is known in Kerala) — there is little that Mr Tumbe leaves unsaid.

Mr Tumbe’s book, the Foreword to which is written by Arvind Subramanian, former Chief Economic Advisor, is a breeze to read. Mr Subramanian had Mr Tumbe write a part of a chapter in the 2016-17 Economic Survey. After the chronicles are over, it is hard to disagree with Mr Tumbe’s jokey assertion that the day is not far when a book is published about Indians in Antarctica with the publisher, quite naturally, being Penguin. Whoever the publisher, Mr Tumbe would be the best man to do justice to the Indians of Antarctica, whenever they make their first appearance. Just as he did to Mr Subramanian’s last Economic Survey.

India Moving

A History of Migration

Chinmay Tumbe

Penguin Random House

235 pages

Rs 599