The Longue Durée of Migration

Research record

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.

Section index

1. 97.1 Migration must be treated as a recurrent social institution, not as an exceptional crisis
2. 97.2 A longue-durée history requires a vocabulary broader than the modern census category of migrant
3. 97.3 River corridors made mobility structural long before railways
4. 97.4 Early historic towns and religious institutions created circuits of travel without implying mass labour migration
5. 97.5 Scholarly, scribal and ritual mobility linked Mithila to courts and centres of learning
6. 97.6 The India–Nepal plains formed a borderland mobility zone before and after the modern international boundary
7. 97.7 Agrarian seasonality made temporary absence compatible with continued village membership
8. 97.8 Flood, river change, scarcity and disease accelerated movement but should not be reduced to single-cause explanations
9. 97.9 Colonial revenue and tenancy regimes widened the economic pressures behind mobility
10. 97.10 Railways transformed the radius, regularity and social organisation of migration
11. 97.11 Calcutta became a major colonial and postcolonial destination, but its specific migration system belongs to the next chapter
12. 97.12 Plantation, mine and industrial recruitment introduced more coercive and contract-bound migration regimes
13. 97.13 Gender divided migration streams but did not divide mobility into ‘male work’ and ‘female immobility’
14. 97.14 Marriage migration is quantitatively large but analytically different from labour circulation
15. 97.15 By the early twentieth century migration had become a normal component of many village economies
16. 97.16 Independence and Partition changed political boundaries without ending older labour geographies
17. 97.17 The Green Revolution created a major seasonal agricultural corridor to Punjab and Haryana
18. 97.18 From the 1980s onward national destinations multiplied rather than replacing older ones
19. 97.19 Education migration created a second geography of mobility that increasingly overlaps with labour migration
20. 97.20 Overseas labour migration widened the horizon beyond India while remaining household-centred
21. 97.21 The Nepal–India corridor combines international movement with the social familiarity of a local borderland
22. 97.22 Circular migration produces a household stretched across two or more locations
23. 97.23 Migration is stratified by caste, class, landholding, education and networks
24. 97.24 Remittances reshape consumption, housing and education but do not by themselves remove structural dependence on migration
25. 97.25 The costs of migration are partly transferred to those who remain
26. 97.26 Networks, jobbers, contractors and prior migrants turned mobility into path-dependent chains
27. 97.27 Transport, mobile phones, banking and identity systems changed the technology of circulation
28. 97.28 The 2020 lockdown exposed the scale of circular migration by abruptly breaking its transport and employment infrastructure
29. 97.29 Modern data demonstrate migration’s scale but still undercount circularity and open-border movement
30. 97.30 The longue durée is a history of changing migration regimes, not an unchanging ‘Bihari migrant’ type

Cite this record

Gajendra Thakur. “The Longue Durée of Migration.” Videha Digital Research Archive: Mithila–Vajji–Anga. Videha — https://www.videha.co.in/ · ISSN 2229-547X · GitHub mirror: https://videha-ejournal.github.io/videha/ · Digital Research Archives on GitHub: https://github.com/videha-ejournal. https://videha-ejournal.github.io/mithila-vajji-anga/records/history/social-97/