Notes on India on the move

INDIA LENDS ITSELF to kinetic metaphors. Commentators frequently speak about India being in flux, on the move, rising. Arundhati Roy describes the country as a “heaving ocean”. At the end of the spectrum, many also bemoan India’s chaos, or as V.S. Naipaul put it, India’s “million mutinies”. Gone today are references to the timeless stasis of Indian villages, or the rigidity that supposedly characterised social life in the pre- or early-modern period. At the heart of many of these commentaries on India-in-flux is a core reality: the country is on the move, energised by the movement of a population striving for change. Indians are moving across state borders, and frequently crossing over into other countries in an accelerated manner. Even as many institutions are bursting at the seams, there is no doubt that Indian society is being remade by mobile Indians, and the ideas, capital, skills, cultures, and networks that they are carrying around with them.

Is this sort of migration a new phenomenon? Most historians would agree that long before modern nations with their policed borders came into existence, people traveled distances in search of meaning, livelihoods, and security, often to settle in new places far away from their points of origin. As Jeremy Harding puts it, human movement is an “incorrigible habit”, an existential trait that has found itself staring down the barrel of militarised borders and hi-tech border regimes.

Historically, the tension generated by the migrant’s impulse to move, and the nation-state’s need to regulate migrants at the border became most clearly visible after the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War. This tension became further amplified as the pace of decolonisation accelerated in the 1950s, with over 60 new nations emerging within a span of 30 years. Each new nation acquired its own security regime, and a desire to regulate “insiders” and “outsiders”.

The emergence of this reality with all of its ramifications led to the creation of the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe in 1951. This was the entity that later morphed into what we now know as the International Organisation for Migration (IOM)—an important monitor of global trends in human migration. Of course, the world has come a long way in the past 60 years. Since the 1990s, discussions have been framed in terms of a new global interconnectedness, also called “globalisation”. Through all of these changes, the human propensity for movement has remained unchanged, forging the creation of new pathways and channels for people to traverse.

According to the IOM’s World Migration Report 2013 some 250 million people today began their lives in one country, and now live in a different one. This means that roughly one in 30 people has experienced international migration. Contrary to popular perception, this movement is not entirely determined by economic opportunity or political hardship (although these are significant drivers), but a variety of other factors. Only 40 per cent of migrants move from the global South to the global North. At least one third of migrants move from South to South, and just over a fifth of migrants (22%) migrate from North to North. A growing percentage of migrants (5%) migrate from North to South.

But things get interesting when one broadens the discussion to include data on in-country migration, i.e., the movement of people within national borders. This phenomenon has accelerated in the wake of the global ascendency of neo-liberal capitalism. In China alone, by 2011 more than 250 million people had left their place of origin, their home, to go and live in some other part of China, largely for work. The figures for India (based on data from Aajeevika Bureau, an organisation that monitors migratory patterns) are impressive. According to IOM figures, of the world’s total population, the total number of people to have migrated (in-country and across international borders) comes to one billion people, i.e., one out of every seven people in the world. If all this movement is happening, are borders really a hindrance to modern ways of living? Not always. Borders provide stability, identity, and a sense of definition to what resides within them. The French intellectual Régis Debray, scoffing at the idea of borderless-ness, believes that the border is like a necessary outer fabric for any country, like a skin, porus but binding. A border has functional value, allowing us to monitor the to-and-fro of human life as it unfolds over time, thereby providing insights valued by policy makers and politicians. It also delineates cultures, ways of life, and notions of identity.

But in our mobile political economy, migration produces emotive reactions, especially in host populations. A number of European nations are struggling with the issue, as are the US, South Africa, and parts of India. Many of these responses are reactionary, incapable of comprehending how people, capital, and ideas are crossing intraand international boundaries through new channels. As these flows feel hemmed-in by the nation-state system, they have the potential to dismantle 20th century orthodoxies.

The limitations of such orthodoxies are already apparent, best illustrated recently by powerhouse publisher Penguin’s decision to “pulp” Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus. Even if Penguin felt victimised by the Indian Penal Code’s Section 295 and went on to destroy all copies of Doniger’s book, in today’s interconnected world in which PDFs fly fast, her book is easily downloadable from countless websites. Like capital, ideas and texts now float across borders with completeabandon. The world we live in today requires an understanding of the human propensity for migration, and the problems inherent in borders that pin people down in ways that kill the human spirit. It would be wise to acknowledge the “place-centric” prejudices that plague many of our existing systems, notions of sovereignty, citizenship, and to think beyond them in creative ways. As we hurtle into an uncertain future, the questions confronting India are the following: How should we make sense of trans-regional, trans-national, multicultural movements, and the conflicts over identity, belonging, and citizenship that they trigger? Aren’t identities mobile, geographies shifting, and capital fluid? What happens when we make human movement a central component of our institutional arrangements? What happens when—to invoke the anthropologist James Clifford—we treat “routes” and “roots” as equal determinants of the human experience?