Abstract
‘Migration’ is an interdisciplinary subject like few others can claim to be. Demographers, economists, sociologists and researchers across disciplines have analysed the causes and consequences of migration for individuals, families, communities and regions. This literature is quite broad in scope and has developed in several directions. Two of these themes, however, are particularly relevant for the economic historian. First, migration and long-term economic change are interdependent processes. For example, industrialization, agrarian expansion, or large-scale development projects can induce migration; and equally, migration, via effects on labour markets that lose or gain workers and via remittances sent back home, can influence economic change.
Second, migration is necessarily embedded in social institutions. Since social institutions change relatively slowly, this embeddedness imparts an inertia or a quality of persistence on the way migration decisions take place. Caste, class, gender, household form and religion impinge on the propensity to move, the choice of destinations and strategies to reduce risks or even to feel at home. While decisions to migrate are often responses by individuals to risks at home or earning opportunities abroad, these ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors alone explain little of some of the really large-scale voluntary population movements. They also need to be seen as social decisions in some sense. 1
South Asia has long been familiar to episodes of large-scale voluntary migrations, or ‘circulation’ to borrow a term from a study of precolonial migrations in the region (Kerr, 2006). Not surprisingly, historians have written at length on migration episodes. They have studied, for example, migration in the medieval world (Ramaswamy, 2016) and the precolonial and colonial worlds (Haynes & Roy, 1999; Markovits, Pouchepadass, & Subrahmanyam, 2003), with a greater focus on international migration (Amrith, 2011; Lal, 2006) than internal migration. Historians have linked migration in the region with waves of globalization (Roy, 2012) and shown the persistence of mass migration in various parts of the region for over a 100 years. 2
Despite this potential overlap between history and migration studies, it would not be wrong to say that the potential remains underutilized. Historical scholarship and present-day migration research remain distinct fields with little collaborations and crossovers between them. Historians writing about migration have rarely engaged with the interdependence between migration and economic change in a systematic way. Similarly, migration scholars have rarely taken a historical perspective in their research (Tumbe, 2012).
This Special Issue attempts to bridge the gap, in a region of the world—South Asia—where the distinction between ‘history’ and the ‘contemporary’ has been, somewhat artificially, demarcated by independence from British rule in 1947, and a region which has received relatively little attention in the recent turn towards ‘globalizing migration history’ (J. Lucassen & L. Lucassen, 2014).
The editors’ strategy was to invite contributions from historians and social scientists of any relevant specialism, which would explicitly address the two themes that bring history and the contemporary nearer to one another—namely interaction between migration and development, and embeddedness of migration in caste, class and religion. The contributors were explicitly encouraged to take a historical perspective spanning at least several decades, even when the main body of the data came from recent surveys. Beyond that broad mandate, no further restrictions were imposed on methodological choices or disciplinary orientation.
The four articles compiled here can be divided into two sets. In one of these, the social and cultural context figures explicitly and prominently. Kristina Hodelin-ter Wal highlights the relationship between missionary movements, education, caste and outmigration from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to Malaya (now Malaysia) in the long nineteenth century. The article bases its account on books and diaries written by the Ceylonese Tamils. The linkages between education and religious networks and outmigration is a relatively under-researched phenomenon in South Asian migration historiography and the article provides a compelling explanation of the eventual clout that the Ceylonese Tamils enjoyed in the economy of Malaya.
Sanam Roohi explores the relationship between caste, education, religion and outmigration in a completely different setting—from Guntur on the east coast of India towards North America—using the anthropologists’ methodology of field observations and oral histories. Both these articles stress on ‘agency’ of the migrants activated by education which in turn was spurred by local missionaries. And both the articles show how particular castes began to migrate, the manner in which migration networks were cultivated over time and ultimately their experience of upward mobility over many generations.
For the other two articles in the Special Issue, the migration–development interface is of main interest. Kalyani Vartak, Chinmay Tumbe and Amita Bhide study the relationship between migration and development in one village of Konkan Maharashtra over five decades. It brings migration into the focus of ‘village restudies’ by combining recent field work with historical baseline data provided by village level census studies in the 1960s and 1980s. The article emphasizes the significance of the dominant caste in being the first to out-migrate, the link between education and migration, the significant rise in absolute standards of living across castes and also the inability of the lowest castes to rise in relative terms. The article by Priyanka Jain and Amrita Sharma observes a similar pattern for the historically marginalized tribal communities of south Rajasthan, who face severe exploitation in the booming economy of Gujarat in western India. History is important here because the gradual disappearance of common property resources led to more outmigration, with little gains in development outcomes over time. The chances of upward mobility for the tribal communities in south Rajasthan through migration, in absolute and relative terms, appear to be extremely low at present.
Collectively, the four articles provide a useful antidote to cross-sectional studies on migration that lack a historical perspective. They show not only the prospects of upward mobility over generations but also downward mobility, the value of education for improving outcomes of outmigration and the significance of caste and social group networks in sustaining migration flows and shaping their outcomes over time. While wage differences are a proximate determinant of work-related migration, this Special Issue shows why even with similar wage differences, some people migrate and not others and why some move up and others fail to.