The Longue Durée of Migration

Detailed chapter description

Migration is not a late disturbance imposed on a formerly immobile society. Across Mithila, Vajji, Anga and the adjoining Nepal plains, mobility has repeatedly connected household survival, scholarship, pilgrimage, military and administrative service, trade, marriage, cultivation and wage labour. What changed over the longue durée was not the existence of movement but its scale, duration, destinations, transport technologies, labour regimes and relationship to household reproduction. The same village could generate a scholar travelling to a court, a bride moving through a marriage network, a boatman following a river market, a seasonal labourer entering a harvest circuit and, much later, a construction worker cycling between a Bihar village and a metropolitan worksite. These movements cannot be collapsed into one category, yet together they make migration a central social institution rather than an appendix to regional history. This opening chapter of PART XI therefore establishes the historical grammar of migration before later chapters examine particular destination systems: Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai, Punjab and Haryana, the Nepal–India corridor, Gulf migration, remittances, urbanisation, informal economies and diaspora institutions. The argument is deliberately cautious. Ancient and medieval evidence often records routes, travellers, traders, monks, scholars and marriage alliances rather than statistically measurable migrant populations; colonial and modern censuses, by contrast, classify place of birth, last residence and reason for movement. A responsible longue-durée history must use each type of evidence for what it can actually show, without projecting the categories of the 2011 Census backwards into periods that organised mobility differently.