Historicizing Mobility Trajectories of Highskilled Migrants from Coastal Andhra to the United States

Introduction

While travelling across Guntur, one is struck by the myriad ways in which a transnational and particularly an aspirational American imagination is captured and conveyed through hoardings across the town. It could be through a board promising a studentship in the United State of America (henceforth the United States), which many consultancies stand guarantee for if one pays their fee, or a training institute that technically adepts one to the job market abroad, or even a language school, which prepares one in the language of global market and capital—English. One does not need to look hard to find such markers in Guntur, because it is ubiquitous. The imagination is not only aspirational but also articulative—articulating the successful culmination of the aspirations of those who have ‘dared to dream’, those who migrated to the United States and now are making a difference back home. ‘NRI Cell’, ‘NRI Academy’ and ‘NRI Hospital’—hoardings with the term NRI (non-resident Indians) ¹ —are pervasive in Guntur town and much of Guntur district. This local ‘NRI culture’ has produced a transnational plane of being and belonging, interlinking parts of coastal Andhra with the United States, and where social and economic remittances are a major means through which such transnational ties are maintained and strengthened (Levitt & Lamba-Nieves, 2011). This ‘NRI phenomenon’ is not just limited to this town but throughout the big and small towns and sometimes even villages in central coastal Andhra (Guntur and Krishna districts in particular where I sojourned during my fieldwork). The hoardings mark the corporeality of migration from the region.

Guntur and Krishna districts in the state of Andhra Pradesh has seen a strong pattern of ‘high-skilled’ transnational migration of doctors, scientists and engineers to the United States. The region saw a significant outward migration starting from the mid-1960s that peaked after the Y2K boom. ² Much like different parts of global South, these decades saw an intensified movement of large number of hitherto minimally exposed rural youth of the region to the volatile global flexible labour market in the West (Kearney, 1995). Today, Telugu migrants, who form the fourth biggest linguistic group among Indian migrants in the United States, ³ are living their ‘American Dream’ (Roohi, 2017) while simultaneously contributing to the US demand for ‘high-skilled’ knowledge workers (Peri, Shih & Sparber, 2015). Doing jobs in science, technology, electronics and mathematics (STEM), these STEM workers have made significant contribution to the productivity of American cities (S227). Most of the coastal Andhra NRI respondents I spoke to were either doctors—many of them living in the mid-west—or computer engineers working and living across the United States but highly concentrated in states such as California and New Jersey.

These developments have made some scholars of migration to call for a renewed understanding of the transnational phenomenon of migration that is increasingly seeing a collapse of spatial differentiation between the centre and the periphery or the rural and the urban, and where production, consumption, ideas of community, politics and identities have become deterritorialized (Appadurai, 1996; Kearney, 1995; Pieterse, 2015). However, in this literature, the local is merely seen as an important theoretical constituent that indicates towards larger global processes. Literature on the theme of transnationalism takes this lacunae head-on by focusing on the local at both migrants’ place of origin and settlement (cf. Gardner, 2008; Levitt, 2001; Taylor & Singh, 2013), to show how re-territorialization and re-embedding of the self and the community occurs despite increasing physical mobility. While this literature does take a more grounded view to explain migrant lives and the cumulative changes their transnational experiences bring about (Pitkanen et al., 2012; Vertovec, 2004), it does not fully explain why certain groups from the same region are more socio-spatially mobile than others—a gap this article attempts to fill.

Economics or policy-oriented literature takes another tangential approach to explain ‘high-skilled’ migration, seeing it as a key factor leading to economic growth of migrant sending countries and innovation in migrant receiving countries (cf. Boucher & Cerna, 2014; Kapur, 2010). However, much of this literature suffers from the problem of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002), because the creation of ‘high-skilled’ labour pool is often not a result of national schemes or policies nor does the outcome of such migration outcome have any significant impact on the state. Therefore, a statist view does not lend much analytical value in understanding transnational migration trajectories. This article not only takes a more disaggregated and grounded view to explicate chain migration from among the Kammas, a dominant caste ⁴ in the region (Roohi, 2017), but also takes a longe duree approach to understand why Krishna delta basin became the epicentre of this mobility pattern. In order to do so, the article takes a twofold—meso- and micro-level— approach to understand why only certain regions in India have successfully spawned a culture of transnational migration of ‘high-skilled’ professionals to the West.

The meso-level approach (de Haas, 2010, p. 1591) will focus on the historical changes that the political economy of the region underwent because of its encounter with the colonial state and which set in motion such dynamics which precipitated the emergence of a regional dominant caste. Most of these insights are drawn from secondary sources and my fieldwork largely corroborates to these developments in the region. A micro-level approach (that primarily draws on secondary sources as well as ethnographic fieldwork) ⁵ will concentrate on the agentive role played by this caste group to respond to such changes over the last century. These responses can be broadly combined into two broad yet inter-linked processes: (a) the wave of anti-Brahmin movement within the community that generated community-led investments in education and (b) caste-based consolidation and simultaneous bargaining with the British to upgrade their Brahminically endowed Sudhra status to that of Sat Sudhra and later, as Kshatriyas. Both these processes, along with the transformation of the political economy of the region facilitated Kammas to migrate—first, from rural hinterlands to urban areas and second, from the delta region to the United States. Therefore, the intra-regional and transnational migration can be seen as part of a continuum that forged multiple pathways (Werbner, 1999), social as well as spatial, for the community. In this article, I not only bridge the existing literature gap on these underemphasized areas of events that lead to outward migration of particular communities but also foreground the emergence of Krishna delta region in general and Guntur town in particular as an important node in the transnational circuit of migration, which enabled a ‘culture of migration’ (Connell, 2008) to take root in the region.

Agriculture, Monetization and Change: A Social History of Coastal Andhra

Coastal Andhra (also referred to locally as ‘Kosta’) was one of the three geographical and socio-political regions that together made up the state of Andhra Pradesh in South India until 2014. ⁶ This region was part of the erstwhile Madras state before 1953 and was incorporated into the newly formed linguistic state of Andhra Pradesh in 1956. Coastal Andhra includes the coastal districts along the Bay of Bengal, bordering with the states of Orissa in the north and Tamil Nadu in the south. While coastal Andhra comprises 9 of the 13 districts of the bifurcated state of Andhra Pradesh including Srikakulam, Vizianagaram, Vishakapatnam, East Godavari, West Godavari, Krishna, Guntur, Prakasham and Nellore (in order from north to south), the top three districts across the coastline form a sub-region that is referred to as Uttarandhra, and considered as ‘backward’ or ‘underdeveloped’ (Sivaramakrishnan et al., 2014, pp. 11–12). It is usually the four of these nine districts, namely, Krishna, Guntur, East and West Godavari, which are drained by Krishna and Godavari rivers, that are considered to be the heartland of the coastal Andhra region and also rank among the top five districts of Andhra Pradesh in terms of development indicators, mainly due to their high levels of agricultural, educational and (to some extent) industrial development. The remaining five districts rank much lower in the indices of development. ⁷ This article focuses on this sub-region and delves into the socio-economic history of Krishna and Guntur districts arguing that it played a transformative role for the Kammas, who turned from tillers to land owners in the decades prior to Independence, and after Independence, further urbanized and entered into agro-based trading, while simultaneously controlling large swath of lands.

Through the work of Upadhya (1988a, 1988b) and others (Baker & Washbrook, 1975; Satyanarayana, 1990; Washbrook, 1976), we can briefly sketch a history of the region and see how its specific political economy differentiated it from the other two regions of undivided Andhra Pradesh, namely, Rayalseema and Telangana. Coastal Andhra was part of the Madras Presidency and saw significant intervention by the colonial state in the Andhra delta region. Due to the construction of dams across the Krishna and Godavari rivers, which were completed in 1852 and 1854, respectively, and the development of canal irrigation systems by the colonial authorities in the late nineteenth century, the region saw a sharp increase in agricultural productivity and the commercialization of farming during the early twentieth century (Satyanarayana, 1990). Sir Arthur Cotton’s scheme for major irrigation works in Krishna and Godavari rivers saw an agricultural ‘revolution’ (Washbrook, 1976, p. 91) with rice becoming the main agricultural product and mono-cropping became the norm, leading to the emergence of commodity markets for agricultural produce in the deltaic region. One of the prominent outcomes of these colonial interventions in agriculture was the monetization and commercialization of the regional economy. The monetization of economy got a further boost because of freeing up of labour due to period of inactivity between harvests and sowing where payment was done in cash (Upadhya, 1988b, pp. 54–68). Sir Arthur’s contribution is acknowledged even today, and it was not uncommon for me to see his pictures alongside other coastal Andhra notables during any felicitation programmes in the region.

Coastal Andhra was part of the Madras Presidency under British colonial rule and followed the ryotwari system of land revenue collection ⁸ because of which it took revenue in cash leading to selling of crops. Moreover, the ryotwari system also instituted a system of private ownership of land by cultivators and creating land markets in the process. Also since ryotwari codified land in names of ryots, the ryots could therefore sell their lands leading to a market for land. Between then and until the 1930s, there was tremendous pressure on land with increase cultivation, even bringing grazing land into paddy (rice) cultivation, leading to the emergence of a large and prosperous peasant community from certain castes who owned anywhere between six to 45 acres, bringing them into the cash economy (Rao, 1985). Farmers in the drier parts of today’s Guntur district also diversified to other crops like tobacco during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries further leading to accumulation of capital in the hands of large farmers. Through tobacco cultivation, bigger ryots made huge profits by buying the crop at cheap rates from smaller ryots and hoarding it in anticipation of price rise before independence or by taking advantage of the unregulated market in the decades after independence—a trend that declined only in the 1970s when tobacco cultivation declined (Duvvury, 1986).

Contrasting this to the dry region that falls in Rayalaseema, Washbrook (1976, p. 70) argues that the big landlords in these dry regions continued to control finance and market products, whereas in the delta region, it was the ryots who started financing their cultivation and selling their products in the markets too. Paradoxically, agrarian expansion and deteriorating conditions of agricultural labourers went hand in hand during the second half of the nineteenth century (Rao, 1985). Another change that the region started to see was expansion in urban areas and growth in urban population (Washbrook, 1976, p. 81), a point to which I will come back later in the article. These developments led to the rise of a prosperous class of large landowning cultivators who consolidated their power as dominant agrarian castes, especially the Kammas, Kapus, Reddys and Rajus. But because of their numerical concentration in the Krishna delta region, the Kammas rose as a prosperous peasant community in that region who subsequently participated in the growing cash economy (Kumar, 1975), while simultaneously controlling agricultural land. Harrison estimates that in the Krishna delta region, Kamma farmers owned 80 per cent of the fertile delta land (1956, p. 381).

Commoditization of agriculture took another decisive turn when Green Revolution technologies were adopted in the 1960s. With its hybrid seeds, use of pesticides and machineries among other things brought more acreage into cultivation of cash crops, particularly paddy in many parts of India, and critics of the Green Revolution argue that it benefitted large farmers everywhere (Ludden, 2005). A similar trend was also conspicuous in coastal Andhra where Green Revolution technologies were adopted. Green Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s stimulated the growth of commercial agriculture further, and, according to some scholars, capitalist relations of production (Bardhan, 1970; Frankel, 2015), leading to economic diversification into business activities and non-agricultural occupations as well as urban migration within these groups (Upadhya, 1988a). Agricultural development programmes were greatly boosted by the government, which facilitated the access to market, credit and irrigation facilities (Parthasarathy, 1975). The construction of the Nagarajuna sagar dam that completed in 1961 brought hitherto dry areas of Guntur district under irrigation. V. N. Reddy informs us that another 770,000 hectares came under cultivation by the mid-1970s because of the barrage (Reddy, 1985).

One of the prominent features of the changing political economy of the region was the emphasis on education. Ananth (2007, pp. 24–26) suggests that agricultural surplus got rerouted not only to agriculture but also to trade, money lending and education. Further, generation of surplus from trade went back to the rural hinterlands. Moreover, trade, mostly in agricultural commodities, let to the growth of urban towns (Washbrook, 1976, p. 96) and ‘kulaks’ rapidly took over the role of mercantile castes, often replacing them (Ananth, 2007, p. 25). In fact, Ranga (1926) argues that in those early decades enterprising Kammas with surplus money were willing to invest it in some business but were not very successful. Their enterprise remained limited to trade, rice mills and general stores. Besides this, another area where money was invested by the landowning caste of coastal Andhra was in the higher education of sons. This new occupation intensified the urbanizing impulse during the time of the Green Revolution among the land-owning castes like the Kammas, and by the 1960s, urban migration became ‘well established’ among the land-owning castes (Upadhya, 1988a, p. 1378). While Green Revolution precipitated, these changes in this region cannot be seen as a point of departure, rather it only intensified certain processes in the region that had begun by the turn of century. Green Revolution and the building of dam further led to simultaneous increase in agricultural output and urban expansion, making the region substantially more commercialized and monetized. Accumulating wealth through business investments (mostly in agricultural commodities), landowning castes like the Kammas gradually emerged as an affluent, rural-based community that also has a strong urban presence in business and professional occupations in the region (Damodaran, 2008, p. 95).

Non-Brahmin Movement, Education and Urbanization

While most studies in the region’s political economy explain the investment in education as a way of routing some of the surplus generated through agriculture and trade, I contend that it was part of a larger social process among the landowning agrarian groups during the early twentieth century, who began a quest for not just economic mobility but social mobility, and education was a prime mean to achieve this (Ranga, 1926; Slater, 1918). While agrarian change secured the dominant economic position of rural elites like Kammas, their social status, however, did not befit their economic status, which was considered to be much inferior to that of Brahmins. They had also been largely excluded from modern Western education that Brahmins were able to access under colonial rule (cf. Dirks, 2001). This narrative is strong till date, with many of my Kamma respondents suggesting that it was their competitiveness with the Brahmins that made the Kammas pursue education and become urbanized.

Further, these agrarian landowning castes strove to improve their rank in the caste stratified Telugu society by organizing themselves politically and socially. The Non-Brahmin movement, which emerged in response to perceived Brahmin supremacy in Madras Presidency (Pandian, 2007), also engulfed the Andhra region during the 1920s. The formation of the movement in the Telugu-speaking districts reflected the frustration of the landowning groups with the monopolization of Western education and government jobs by Brahmins, who constituted a small minority of the population (Ramaswamy, 1978). By placing strong social value on higher education, these agrarian castes emphasized its central role if they were to achieve social mobility vis-à-vis the Brahmins. They also followed the Brahmins in pursuing higher education and moving from villages to towns, while remaining strongly rooted in the agricultural economy. Through these strategies, the Kammas and other landed caste groups over time succeeded in displacing Brahmins as the dominant groups in the region (Ramaswamy, 1978, pp. 191–192).

Another reason that did not limit the access to education by the economically dominant but socially inferior agrarian castes was the activities of the missionaries and the colonial government. They built institutions of learning, matched later by the numerous caste-based societies running schools in the region—a point I return to later in the article. The 1931 Census shows that the literacy rate in the delta districts ‘grew faster than anywhere else in the Presidency’ (Damodaran, 2008, p. 97). Guntur district became a hub of higher education during the early part of the twentieth century. Hindu College, started by Brahmins and Andhra Christian (AC) College started by the Lutherans, was established in Guntur town prior to Independence, offering undergraduate courses in sciences and arts. AC College nurtured future leaders such as ‘NTR’ (Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, the matinee idol who later became Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh). Coastal Andhra also saw the establishment of two medical colleges—Andhra Medical College at Vishakhapatnam in 1923 and Guntur Medical College in 1948. The benefits of the availability of higher education in the region directly translated into opening up possibilities to migrate abroad. In fact, one of the first to migrate to the United States from the region after the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 came into effect were doctors who graduated from these colleges.

Frykenberg’s (2008) work highlights upon the availability of education in the region because of the establishment of several institutions by Christian mission-aries. Lutheran missionaries in particular had built schools, colleges and hospitals in Guntur district and elsewhere as part of their evangelical mission. As a sixth-generation, Christian convert and an ex-principal of Andhra Christian College had once explained to me:

Father Hayer from the Lutheran Church of America had come to India in the 1840s to start the Lutheran church and founded the AELC (Andhra Evangelical Lutheran Church) … The church ran charitable hospitals and colleges in Andhra, and through these institutes it carried the mission of spreading the Gospel.

The advantage of these facilities were taken by the elites of the region, including Brahmins and agrarian castes. According to Frykenberg (2008, p. 337), the expansion of

…advanced learning in English for elites did not occur without corrosive changes in the very character of the most prestigious missionary institutions. Elite missionary colleges soon tended to cater more heavily to non-Christian upper-caste mahajans, with sometimes up to 80 per cent of students enrolled not being Christians.

The role of missionary activities in educational advancement of non-Christians was not lost on the Kamma notables I interacted with during my fieldwork. Dr Sheshaiah, ⁹ (a community notable in Guntur and president of Guntur Educational Society, a private educational conglomerate), had told me that these missionary activities inspired local Guntur intellectuals and wealthy individuals to start charitable educational institutions in the pre-independence period (Roohi, 2018).

In Guntur and Krishna districts, Kammas with meagre landholdings who could acquire education began to occupy lower level government jobs such as teachers in government schools or clerks in government offices in the early decades after Independence. Education allowed for their transition from marginal land owners to lower level government officials, clerks and bureaucrats. My research suggests that their children were one of the first to migrate to the United States when the opportunity arose. A common saying in both Guntur and the United States is that ‘children of teachers are now in the United States’, pointing to how the basis for transnational migration was laid through the education of Kammas in earlier decades.

Caste Associations and Caste Consolidation

While some sections of the dominant landowning castes of the coastal Andhra region were becoming urbanized and educated in their attempt to achieve social parity with the Brahmins, they also made efforts to consolidate localized sub-castes within larger caste categories such as ‘Reddy’ and ‘Kamma’. Caste associations and caste-based patronage played an important role in building cohesive caste communities and allowed for the consolidation of the various vertically placed Kamma sub-castes into a larger horizontally unified caste identity. Caste associations sprang across the length and breadth of colonial India in the early twentieth century (Conlon, 1974; Michelutti, 2007; F. Osella & C. Osella, 2000, pp. 193–195), demanding equal representation in education and employment, and ‘as part of a strategy geared towards ritual status upgradation in the local and regional caste hierarchies’ (Bairy, 2009, p. 90). Such associations were a product of India’s tryst with colonial modernity, when the ‘dominant discourses’ in the late colonial period ‘sought to de-legitimize caste as a resource for self-making and interest articulation’ (Bairy, 2009, p. 90). These movements required that caste groups consolidate themselves to not only make caste a relevant mean of identification under colonial administration but also a measure to press for various demands from the colonial state. One such demand was the upgradation of their caste position within the varnashrama system. ¹⁰

An important element of the non-Brahmin movement in the region was to claim Kshatriya status for landed castes (Keiko, 2008), and the rejection of the Brahminically endowed Sudra ¹¹ status for the purpose of census enumeration—despite the fact that the varna system was not very salient in most of south India (Ramaswamy, 1978). Alternatively, some landowning communities claimed a higher Sat Sudra status to distinguish themselves from other sudra castes (Bayly, 1999, p. 301). One modality through which claims to a higher caste status were made was through caste associations. In Andhra, the early 1900s saw the sprouting of caste associations in different parts of the region, under the aegis of caste notables. The famous Kamma Mahajana Sangam was founded in 1914 under the patronage of the Raja of Chellapalli and other prominent Kammas. Similarly, the Reddy Mahajana Sangam was started in 1920, while the Velamas too founded an association around the same time (Ramaswamy, 1978, p. 294). Various patronage activities, such as building caste hostels, educational institutions and providing scholarships for poor students, were undertaken by the affluent community leaders of that time. Charitable hostels and subsidized or free educational institutions came up in the trading towns of the region and made accessing of education away from the countryside possible for the rural youth of the community. It paved way for rural-to-urban migration for those within the community who did not have resources to do so.

Scholars have argued that as a result of these developments, the jajmani system of patron-client relations in rural India, marked by a ‘hierarchical interdependence’ between castes (Fuller, 1996, p. 14), gave way to a situation in which castes became autonomous units that competed with each other (Dumont, 1998 [1970]). Dumont refers to this shift as the ‘substantialization’ of caste, a term used by scholars to explain how caste groups began to resemble ethnic or political groups or classes (Barnett, 1977; Dirks, 2001; Srinivas, 1996). However, although caste associations promoted solidary and ‘discrete’ caste identities (Gupta, 2005), hierarchy remained the principle around which many of these associations articulated their interests (for instance, in their efforts to achieve a higher caste rank). Building such discrete identities led to the ‘reinvention’ of caste (Guha, 2015) as caste became a principal axis for bargaining and accumulating resources vis-à-vis the colonial and post-colonial nation-state.

The objectives and mode of functioning of caste associations changed over time, however. In the late 1950s and 1960s, a few caste associations had almost become defunct. There overt caste dimension was also internally critiqued in newly independent India. Writing in the 1960s, Elliott observed:

By comparison with caste associations elsewhere, those in Andhra have been less self conscious in their conception. Their histories show an increasing embarrassment over identification with caste. The establishment of one Kamma hostel in Krishna brought much controversy over the use of Kamma in the hostel name, for the leaders were anxious to demonstrate that all castes could use the facility. They eventually used the name in order to appeal to traditional landlords for funds, but did not restrict the membership. (Elliott, 1970, p. 137)

Yet the period after the 1970s saw the re-emergence of caste associations or societies in Andhra Pradesh after a brief period of lull in the decades after independence. In this period, a shift was observable in the way Kammas related to the newer caste associations with renewed vigour. Speaking to members of such associations, either in Guntur or Hyderabad, my research suggests that by the late 1970s a spate of newer caste associations sprang across different parts of the state (including Rayalaseema, coastal Andhra and Telangana regions), in areas where there was a sizeable Kamma population. These associations had a proactive agenda to promote caste-based interests, and wrest concessions from the state during this period were under the firm control of Reddy-led Congress party.

Privatizing Education in the 1970s

Coinciding with the re-emergence of caste associations, the 1970s was also the time when for the first time Andhra Pradesh witnessed privatization of higher education institutions (especially engineering and medical colleges), run by caste-based educational societies. One could get a seat in these colleges by paying donations and by-passing public held entrance exams (Kamat, 2004, p. 11). Although caste-based societies had been at the forefront of establishing schools and colleges in the region since the early 1900s, their involvement was limited to its day-to-day administration as these institutions were aided by the government. For the first time, privatized technical educational institutions by wealthy businessmen and politicians allowed many youth from the agrarian castes to get direct admission in lieu of either a donation or because of caste and kinship networks. Therefore, landowning castes acquired an ‘educational edge’ not only through the individual efforts of landowning families who sent their sons and daughters to medical and (later) engineering colleges, but also through concerted and organized community initiatives (Roohi, 2018).

It was during this period that the Nagarjuna Educational Society and Siddhartha Academy were established in Guntur and Krishna districts, respectively. These educational societies’ foray into education was comprehensive. Both these societies, run by caste-based Trusts, had gradually ventured from school education to higher technical and professional education. Students who could not gain admission to government engineering institutions such as the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology—the most preferred destinations for engineering education in the country) or other state colleges such as the Regional Engineering College in Warangal now had the option of these private colleges.

Privatized education made Guntur and Krishna districts pioneers in providing ‘career-oriented’ education to those who could either afford to pay the fees, or could secure a seat sponsored by one’s caste members. Neighbouring districts’ inhabitants would recount how those seeking ‘quality’ education headed to Guntur or Vijayawada if Hyderabad was a far off option. Due to these developments, Guntur and Vijayawada towns emerged as major centres of private higher education in the region, providing degrees in engineering, medicine and other professions to students who earlier would have gone to Hyderabad, Chennai or Bangalore for higher studies. The proliferation of private engineering colleges produced its initial batches of engineer in the 1980s and early 1990s—coinciding with the time when the Y2K boom unfastened opportunities for Indian engineers to migrate to the West.

The private ‘coaching’ industry also had its inception in this region during the 1970s and 1980s. ‘Coaching centres’ trained aspiring students for competitive entrance tests for institutions of higher education, such as the EAMCET (Engineering, Agriculture and Medical Common Entrance Test) and the ECFMG (Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, for doctors applying for post-graduate courses in the United States). After the US Immigration and Nationality Act came into force and requirements for medical professionals in the United States proliferated, clearing the ECFMG exam was seen as a ‘sure shot’ way to reach the United States as many residencies ¹² were available, and one ‘only needed to know about them’. ¹³

One of the spectacular stories in the rise of private education in the region began with such coaching centres—the ‘Vignan’ group. Vignan University, which now has a sprawling and picturesque campus a half-hour drive from Guntur city, had humble beginnings in the late 1980s when its founder started it as a coaching institute, according to its founder whom I interviewed in February 2012. While Vignan may have transformed to a full-fledged university, coaching centres took a new shape in the form of training centres. A whole network of training centres and bodyshops (Xiang, 2007) started to come up in the 1990s with the sole purpose of making engineering students job ready. A single neighbourhood in Hyderabad—Ameerpet—became the focal point where students from all over the state would converge to receive training to be placed in information technology (IT) jobs in India, or abroad. These centres not only trained for Graduate Records Examination (GRE) to get admission in universities abroad, but specialized in teaching computer languages or programs that were in demand by the IT industry. Moreover, they also helped aspiring students to acquire H-1B visa by providing fake work experiences and liaisoning with their counterparts in the United States.

This long history of affluent agrarian castes led venture into private education, the roots of which lay in the anti-Brahmin struggle, had a direct bearing on the way education came to define Kammas. Today, being ‘well qualified’ in terms of education and degrees is now seen as a Kamma trait, a component of their community ‘habitus’14—so much so that in the Krishna delta region, a less-educated Kamma feels as an ‘outcast’, ashamed of his or her relative lack of ‘qualifications’. Moreover, acquiring education and training and finding a suitable job facilitated the mobility of rural youth (initially boys but over the last two decades, increasingly girls) to urban centres, such as Guntur, Vijayawada, Hyderabad or Bangalore. This internal mobility became the stepping-stone to international mobility.

Transnational Migration

There are few examples of mobile communities from India that are comparable to Kammas in this regard. While Punjabi Jats (Taylor & Singh, 2013) and Gujarati Patels (Guha & Rutten, 2013) are also transnationally mobile communities, Kammas are distinct in that they are educated professionals who are also relatively recent and often ‘permanent’ migrants to the West, unlike, for example, Kerala migrants working in the Gulf countries (F. Osella & C. Osella, 2000). As mobile ‘knowledge workers’, Kammas may be more comparable to the Tamil Brahmins (Fuller & Narasimhan, 2014), but an important difference is that they are a dominant agrarian community that continues to have a strong foothold in rural areas with considerable ownership of agricultural land—a social profile that inflects their transnational migration and forms of engagements with the home region.

Based on ethnographic research, I concur that transnational migrants from coastal Andhra are not a homogenous group: the region has seen extensive migration of ‘unskilled’ or ‘low-skilled’ workers to the Gulf and other places, in addition to the migration of ‘high-skilled’ professionals to the West. Yet, what is remarkable is that most highly educated migrants belong to the dominant castes, while labour migrants are more often from Muslim and lower caste groups. Strong caste-based networks have facilitated both these patterns of migration, as migrants from the region, irrespective of their class and profession retain social, cultural and economic links with their towns and villages of origin (Roohi, 2017). Migration from the Krishna delta region to the United States started in a noticeable way from the late 1960s onwards although my research suggests that children of a few affluent rural families had migrated to the United States to pursue higher studies—particularly PhDs since the 1950s. Migration from the region can be heuristically divided into three periods, phases or ‘waves’. Though a neat compartmentalization is not possible, these three phases with each wave could be seen as a response to the larger changes in the region: These three waves include: (a) the post-Green Revolution period of the late 1960s and 1970s (b) the post-IT revolution phase and (c) the most recent phase starting from the early 2000s.

The first wave of migration can be traced to the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which is seen as a watershed that allowed many skilled professionals to migrate to the United States (Subramanian, 2000). With this law, the background of Indians migrating to the United States changed ‘fundamentally’ (Bhatia, 2007, p. 14). Migrants who left India in the 1960s and 1970s were invariably from big landowning families, who had benefitted from the adoption of Green Revolution technologies, for whom migration can be seen as a risk mitigation strategy. Within families as Sharath Babu, one of my informants, put it:

The propertied class could afford to go. The reason was not to earn money … their social and economic position had declined. With abolition of the zamindari act and the Land Ceiling Act ¹⁵ their social standing came down, even though they were rich. Every farmer prefers to get his child educated and not do agriculture. Only those who are not good in studies settle into agriculture.

The second wave of migration began from the 1990s, when many more professionals from the region started going to the United States to work in IT-related jobs, often as contract workers on H-1B visas. ¹⁶ Although computer engineers from India had started moving to the United States from the late 1980s, by the turn of the century, this movement intensified due to the boom in the software industry. But since the ‘Y2K boom’ was rapidly followed by the dotcom bust in the early 2000s, aspiring migrants began to go to other destinations such as Australia and Europe, as stop-over points in their quest to reach the United States (Xiang, 2007).

In the third wave that started in the early 2000s and continues until today, many young people from coastal Andhra have become ‘education migrants’. Most are students who have graduated from local engineering colleges and enrol in masters of science or engineering courses in American universities (often in computer science). This education route may lead to permanent settlement, because students may be allowed to do a period of ‘Optional Practical Training’ (OPT) for up to 12 months after completion of their course. Students with strong social networks end up finding a job or placement within this period. Often, several potential migrants form a group, apply to the same universities and migrate out together. These boys and girls belong to either the same colleges or the same villages or towns, and often to the same caste.

Stories of successful migrants from one’s own caste and/or hailing from one’s own village or district village circulate widely in coastal Andhra, and one often hears about the ‘craze to go to the United States’. This indicates that it is not just money that pushes people to migrate out, but a dominant social imaginary that views migration as a positive, highly desirable, and even, inevitable process. This pattern of migration has created aspirational pathways for many dominant caste youths in coastal Andhra, who see mobility not as a rupture but as a desired extension of their life-worlds and who seek to become part of the affluent Indian community living the ‘American Dream’ (Roohi, 2017).

The outward migration of Kamma youth has triggered a parallel movement of their parents from village to town. While young people are pushed out of the towns and villages of coastal Andhra in search of a better life elsewhere—in larger cities of India or abroad—their families move from villages or provincial towns to regional cities such as Guntur or Vijayawada to enjoy a more comfortable lifestyle. Just as staying back in Guntur is seen as a sign of stagnation for the youth and is construed as a failure to ‘grow’ in life, the older generation see their own movement to Guntur town as a mark of progress. The NRI parents, in their quest of upward mobility and a ‘better life’, leave their villages in Guntur, Prakasham, Kammas or other districts for these neighbouring big cities or towns.

With this stream of outward migration from rural areas to towns and abroad, there is widespread fear that ‘Kamma villages’ (villages that may or may not have largest number of Kammas, but is dominated by them politically and economically) will soon be devoid of Kammas—an anxiety that was expressed by informants from Guntur to the United States. ‘We hardly have a hundred people in our village … most are in the US, Hyderabad or Guntur’, rued Dr Shivanand, a returned migrant settled in Guntur. This anxiety is linked to the perception that their dominant caste status is threatened locally, and it is this anxiety that, in part, prompts NRIs to create a presence in their native villages through philanthropy (Roohi, 2016). Despite this expressed perception that Kammas are losing ground in their ‘own’ villages, I found extended family members of NRIs still living in most of the villages I visited. The NRI parents too, although they may have moved to town, frequently visit their villages. Thus, the ties of migrant Kammas to their ‘native place’ remain strong.

Conclusion

The history of agrarian change and development in the region outlined above are key to understanding how the social structure of dominant groups, such as the Kammas have defined patterns of out-migration. With frequent mobility of people between villages in Guntur district, Guntur town, Hyderabad and various places in the United States, these sites have become closely interconnected. The US migration has become a norm or a rite of passage for hundreds of families in Guntur. Such migration creates a transnational social field (Levitt & Schiller, 2004) in which a village in the Krishna delta basin, towns like Guntur or Hyderabad and American cities like New Jersey of Seattle, become interconnected planes separated by space but united by historical continuities that have inflected the mobility trajectory of a particular caste group.

As this account has shown, there is a clear linkage between education, urbanization and migration—both internal and transnational. But rather than foregrounding this as a meta-theoretical analysis, I have looked into the particularities that shape migration and socio-spatial mobility in the Krishna delta region. Taking different moments in the history of the region, I have argued that it benefitted a small group of ryots (largely Kammas) to take advantage of the changing political economy under colonial administration. These groups were not only placed favourably to take advantage of such developments, but they actively responded to changes and transitioned into an urban community yet maintained strong rural linkages. Moreover, the response of the community to these changes to achieve social and economic mobility further facilitated their rural-to-urban migration and, later, transnational migration. Today, they have successfully transnationalized themselves, but continued to have strong connections with their region of origin.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This article draws on my PhD research conducted under the ‘Provincial Globalisation Programme’, a collaboration between the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, India, funded by the WOTRO Science for Global Development programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).