India Moving: A History of Migration

By Chinmay Tumbe

This book is a collection of anecdotes and stories about migration of refugees, employment seekers, forced laborers, nativists and much more. It covers almost every major migration within India as well as away from India, and it is very likely you will find some interesting anecdote about your own community's migration patterns in the book.

It has interesting stories from Ratnagiri, Udipi, Saran, Ganjam, Kerala, coastal Tamil Nadu, Assam and Punjab among others. He provides some context as to what lead to migration of folks, and what was the nature of migration - was it temporary? was it circular? was it permanent? where did they go? what kind of employment/industry did they choose? etc.

He sometimes explains deeper things at play like how Gujarati businessmen were more predisposed to trade than banias from the rest of the country. Or sometimes talks about these migrants adapted to change. Or how migrants from Odisha to Gujarat are a major ingredient in the prosperity of Gujarat.

He spends a disproportionate amount of pages on migrants from Ratnagiri and their influence on Bombay. He tries to weave some symbolism around mangoes and freedom fighters from Ratnagiri but I wasn't super impressed with it.

There are quite a few 'thats interesting how that came about' moments in the book - my favorite being money orders by the Indian Postal Service. Money orders in post offices across the world are supposed to be collected at the post office. However, since a lot of Indian men were migrant workers and sent money to the ladies of their household, Indian Postal Service had to improvise and start delivering money to door steps. I thought that was pretty cool!

Another cool story was how migrants from Odisha to Gujarat, travel 2 hours in reverse direction to Puri just so they can get a comfortable seat on the Puri-Okha express to Gujarat! They throw in a bonus of Jagannadha darshan along with a seat on the train.

The coverage on internation migration is also pretty extensive from Africa to Latin America to South east Asia to Europe to America. He talks about the Tebbit test in UK, where in, its a real test of patriotism for Indians on who they support, when its a cricket match of India vs. England. It even mentions Guntur's craze for America.

He observes that if there is one striking cultural practice that unites Indians across all these identities and separates India from the places they usually migrate to, it is the use of water in toilets as opposed to tissue paper abroad.

This has been on my reading list since the pandemic, and I really wanted to like the book. I mean, there is much to like in the book, but its more of a survey of migration than explaining wider context of it.

Amongst the rubble of factoids there are interesting nuggets of insights, but its mostly that - nuggets. The book really doesn't answer the question - "so what?". How did their food change? How did their festivals change? How did their religion change? (It does talk about effects on caste sometimes). So how did my life change because of these various migrations? It doesn't really answer that consequential question. The book also needs a good editor. It tries to pack interesting but sometimes irrelevant and therefore distracting facts about the subject at hand. But I am glad someone attempted a decent book about the topic of migration.