The Longue Durée of Migration

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. 97.1 Migration must be treated as a recurrent social institution, not as an exceptional crisis The language of ‘migration crisis’ is useful for moments of acute disruption, but it can obscure the ordinary and repeated movement on which many households have long depended. In agrarian societies with small holdings, seasonal labour demand, ecological volatility and uneven access to markets, mobility can function as insurance, income diversification and social strategy. It may be short-range or long-distance, temporary or semi-permanent, individual or household-based. In the study region, migration has repeatedly linked rural livelihoods to external labour markets without necessarily dissolving the village household. That combination—geographical movement with continuing claims on land, kinship, ritual membership and inheritance—helps explain why circular migration became so durable. Migrants often leave because they remain embedded in households, not because they have severed them. The relevant historical unit is therefore the circulation linking source, destination and return, rather than a one-way passage from ‘village’ to ‘city’. 97.2 A longue-durée history requires a vocabulary broader than the modern census category of migrant Mobility includes many movements that modern statistics classify differently or miss altogether. Marriage creates large female movements; pilgrimage and education can be repeated or temporary; pastoral, fishing and boat-based work can follow seasonal ecologies; soldiers, scribes and students may circulate through institutions; wage labourers may spend most of a year away yet retain their permanent household in the village. Census of India migration tables classify people by birthplace or last residence and distinguish reasons such as work, business, education, marriage and movement with the household. Those categories are indispensable for modern analysis, but they should not be mistaken for timeless social facts. Historical reconstruction must distinguish circulation, relocation, recruitment, exile, marriage migration, colonisation 983983 GAJENDRA THAKUR of new land, frontier settlement and occupational travel while still asking how each changed household economies and regional connections. 97.3 River corridors made mobility structural long before railways The Ganga, Gandak, Kosi and their tributary systems were not merely environmental barriers. They were also transport corridors connecting settlement clusters, ferries, pilgrimage sites, grain markets and craft exchange. Champa’s early commercial importance and Vaishali’s location within a dense north Gangetic world are reminders that mobility preceded modern roads. Yet river travel was seasonal, risky and unevenly distributed. Floods could open and close channels, alter ferry points and force settlement movement. Boats moved goods and people, while footpaths connected river landings to villages and markets. Such mobility was normally embedded in trade, ritual and agrarian schedules rather than recorded as a distinct ‘migration sector’. The historical significance lies in the repeated production of routes and service communities whose knowledge of crossings, boats, roads and market calendars reduced the social cost of movement for others. Figure 384 — Migration regimes widened in scale while older forms of mobility persisted 97.4 Early historic towns and religious institutions created circuits of travel without implying mass labour migration The second urbanisation associated with the middle Gangetic plain brought cities, monasteries, courts and commercial nodes into closer interaction. Buddhist and Jain traditions preserve narratives of teachers, merchants, monks, rulers and householders travelling among places such as Vaishali, Rajagriha, Champa and the wider Gangetic network. These sources demonstrate mobility, but not the scale of modern wage migration. Their value is different: they show that institutional life depended on routes, lodging, patronage and information flows. Monastic circuits, merchant journeys and political travel created social geographies larger than a single settlement. The distinction matters because a longue-durée account should identify continuities in connectivity without claiming an unchanged migrant labour system from antiquity to the present. 97.5 Scholarly, scribal and ritual mobility linked Mithila to courts and centres of learning Mithila’s intellectual history also required movement. Scholars travelled for debate, patronage, teaching and court service; scribes and administrators carried documentary skills across jurisdictions; ritual specialists moved through marriage and patronage networks. Such journeys could generate durable diasporic niches HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II without resembling later industrial labour migration. They also produced a recurring social pattern: specialised knowledge became portable capital. A household with education, manuscript learning or clerical skill could convert cultural resources into mobility, while the migrant’s reputation could raise the status of kin at home. Later educational migration would transform the institutions and destinations but retain this basic relationship between skill formation and movement. The history of migration is therefore also a history of unequal capacities to move. 97.6 The India–Nepal plains formed a borderland mobility zone before and after the modern international boundary The social geography of Mithila crosses the present India–Nepal boundary. Kinship, pilgrimage, cultivation, market exchange and seasonal labour long connected settlements on both sides. The 1950 India– Nepal Treaty of Peace and Friendship later gave a formal postcolonial framework to reciprocal movement; government statements continue to describe the border as open and thickly populated. But the treaty did not create the underlying cultural and economic geography. For households in the Janakpur–Terai and north Bihar borderlands, crossing the boundary could be shorter and socially easier than travelling to a distant city within the same state. At the same time, the open border makes statistical measurement difficult because many crossings require no passport or labour approval. Modern administrative data therefore understate a form of mobility that is central to everyday borderland life. 97.7 Agrarian seasonality made temporary absence compatible with continued village membership Agriculture generates peaks and troughs of labour demand. Sowing, transplanting and harvesting can require concentrated work, while other months leave underemployed labour. Households can respond by combining cultivation at home with wage work elsewhere. This is one foundation of circular migration: the migrant does not necessarily abandon agriculture but rearranges the household labour calendar. Land-poor households have stronger incentives to seek outside earnings, yet even cultivating households may migrate to finance inputs, repay debt or accumulate cash for marriage and construction. Seasonal mobility can therefore coexist with strong attachment to land. The apparent paradox of the ‘peasant worker’—rural proprietor, tenant or labourer at home and wage worker at destination—is better understood as a household strategy than as an incomplete transition from agriculture to industry. 97.8 Flood, river change, scarcity and disease accelerated movement but should not be reduced to single-cause explanations The Kosi belt, north Bihar floodplains and parts of the eastern Ganga corridor repeatedly experienced floods, river-course shifts, crop loss and disease environments. Such shocks could force temporary displacement, destroy assets or intensify the need for cash earnings elsewhere. Yet environmental pressure rarely acts alone. The ability to migrate depends on transport, credit, social networks, recruitment and destination demand; the poorest may be trapped rather than mobile. Likewise, repeated flooding can produce both out-migration and return because families maintain land and kinship claims in hazardous places. Environmental history therefore enters migration history through its interaction with property, labour markets and infrastructure, not through a deterministic claim that flood automatically causes migration. 985985 GAJENDRA THAKUR 97.9 Colonial revenue and tenancy regimes widened the economic pressures behind mobility The Permanent Settlement and subsequent agrarian institutions did not invent migration, but they changed the distribution of rent, debt, security and market risk. Colonial records and later district gazetteers describe dense agrarian populations, small holdings, tenancy and labour dependence across parts of north and eastern Bihar. Grierson’s Bihar Peasant Life documented the intricate economic world of late nineteenth-century rural Bihar, while later scholarship has shown how peasants combined village production with work outside. Mobility became one response to an agrarian economy in which cash obligations and unequal property relations could not always be met from local cultivation. The important point is not that every migrant was ‘pushed’ by the same cause, but that colonial property and revenue regimes increased the value of external cash income. 97.10 Railways transformed the radius, regularity and social organisation of migration The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century railway network altered migration more decisively than any earlier transport change. It shortened travel time, reduced some costs, enabled repeat journeys and connected villages through feeder roads and stations to Calcutta, Assam, industrial Bengal and later wider destinations. Railways did not simply cause migration; they interacted with labour demand and recruitment networks. Once migrants established a foothold at destination, return journeys carried information about wages, lodging and employers back to the village. Route knowledge became collective property. This path dependence explains why particular villages and districts became associated with particular trades or destinations. The railway carriage thus became part of a social infrastructure linking the source household to an external labour market. 97.11 Calcutta became a major colonial and postcolonial destination, but its specific migration system belongs to the next chapter Calcutta’s docks, markets, transport services, mills, construction sites and informal economies drew labour from Bihar over a long period. Research on migrant workers in Kolkata continues to identify streams from districts such as Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur, Bhagalpur and Banka. Cultural memory in Mithila likewise preserves the absent husband travelling to Calcutta as a recurrent figure. Chapter 98 examines this relationship in detail. Here the wider significance is that Calcutta demonstrated how an external metropolis could become functionally integrated into village reproduction hundreds of kilometres away. Migration became repeatable because stations, jobbers, relatives, caste and village networks lowered the uncertainty of arrival. A destination could therefore become ‘near’ socially even when it remained distant geographically. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 385 — Circular migration links source household, migrant, destination and return 97.12 Plantation, mine and industrial recruitment introduced more coercive and contract-bound migration regimes Colonial labour mobility also included forms very different from relatively autonomous circulation. Assam tea plantations, mines and overseas indenture relied on recruitment systems that could bind workers through contracts, advances, penal sanctions or recruiter control. Migrants from the wider Bihar– Chotanagpur region entered these systems, though regional origins and community composition varied sharply. Women’s recruitment became a site of colonial regulation and patriarchal claims over household labour. Samita Sen’s work shows why women cannot be treated simply as passive dependants of male migrants: some moved through plantation, mine and city labour markets under harsh and gendered conditions. The history of migration must therefore hold together opportunity, coercion and constrained choice rather than assume that movement itself signified freedom. 97.13 Gender divided migration streams but did not divide mobility into ‘male work’ and ‘female immobility’ Modern migration statistics often show a strongly male pattern for labour migration from Bihar, while women’s moves are heavily classified under marriage. That statistical contrast is real but incomplete. Male circulation can intensify women’s agricultural work, care responsibilities, debt management and dealings with local institutions at the source. Women also migrate for work, education, household movement and escape from difficult domestic circumstances, although many forms are under-recorded or folded into family categories. Colonial evidence likewise complicates the image of the stationary rural woman. A gendered longue durée therefore asks not only who moved, but who absorbed the work created by absence, who controlled remittances, and how migration altered bargaining power within households. 97.14 Marriage migration is quantitatively large but analytically different from labour circulation Marriage is one of the largest recorded reasons for female migration in Indian census data. In Mithila and adjoining regions, marriage networks historically connected villages across wide territories and, in the Nepal borderland, across the international boundary. Such movement can be permanent in residence yet retain dense ties to natal households. It affects property claims, care flows, ritual exchange and the geography of kinship. Because census tables aggregate all migration reasons, analysts must avoid using total migrant counts as a proxy for labour out-migration. A district can simultaneously record extensive female marriage migration and extensive male work migration, two processes with different causes and social consequences. The distinction is essential to any historically serious reading of migration statistics. 97.15 By the early twentieth century migration had become a normal component of many village economies Anand A. Yang’s classic study of internal migration showed that peasant mobility in India was not an aberration produced only by modern industrialisation. By the late colonial period, temporary labour migration, return and rural attachment could coexist over long periods. This pattern matters for Bihar because it undermines a linear model in which a rural worker leaves agriculture, becomes permanently urban and eventually ceases to belong to the village. Instead, migrants often maintained land, houses and family 987987 GAJENDRA THAKUR obligations in the source area while working elsewhere. This circular form would prove remarkably durable after independence even as destinations changed. 97.16 Independence and Partition changed political boundaries without ending older labour geographies The end of colonial rule restructured administration, citizenship and industrial geography, but it did not erase the networks that linked Bihar to Bengal, Assam and other labour markets. The partition of Bengal’s wider economic space and later the creation of new states altered routes and institutions, while the India– Nepal border acquired the special legal framework of the 1950 treaty. Postcolonial development policy also created new public-sector and industrial destinations. Yet household migration decisions remained tied to wage differentials, land constraints, education and network effects. Continuity and change are therefore both visible: the state changed, the destinations diversified, but circular migration remained compatible with rural residence and property claims. 97.17 The Green Revolution created a major seasonal agricultural corridor to Punjab and Haryana From the late 1960s and especially in subsequent decades, rising agricultural labour demand in Punjab and Haryana generated a major destination for workers from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. Harvest and transplantation cycles could be matched with source-area agricultural calendars, while rail connectivity and contractor networks made repeated movement easier. This stream differed from factory migration because the destination itself was rural, yet wages were tied to a more capitalised agricultural economy. Chapter 100 examines this corridor in detail. In the longue durée, its importance lies in showing how migration adapted to uneven agricultural development within India: rural-to-rural mobility could be as significant as rural-to- urban movement. 97.18 From the 1980s onward national destinations multiplied rather than replacing older ones Delhi–NCR, Mumbai, Gujarat, Rajasthan and other urban-industrial regions became increasingly important alongside Kolkata and Punjab. Construction, small manufacturing, transport, security work, vending, hospitality and services expanded the occupational range of migrants. The growth of these destinations did not produce a single national labour market with equal conditions. Migrants entered through kin and village networks, contractors and subcontracting chains, often with limited formal housing or social protection. Diversification reduced dependence on one destination but also spread households across multiple precarious labour regimes. Chapter 99 follows the major metropolitan circuits in detail. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 386 — Local, regional, national and international mobility accumulated rather than replacing one another 97.19 Education migration created a second geography of mobility that increasingly overlaps with labour migration Students from Mithila, Vajji and Anga have long travelled for advanced learning, but the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries produced a massified educational migration. Coaching centres, universities, technical institutes and professional colleges in Patna, Delhi, Kota and other cities became destinations in their own right. Educational migration differs from manual labour circulation in class composition, gender balance and expected returns, yet household financing often depends on the same remittance and credit systems. Successful education can convert migration into occupational mobility; failed examinations or weak labour markets can instead generate prolonged dependence on family support. The history of migration must therefore include the movement of students as a major route through which regional inequality is reproduced or challenged. 97.20 Overseas labour migration widened the horizon beyond India while remaining household-centred From the late twentieth century, Gulf labour markets and other overseas destinations entered the migration repertoire of some households from Bihar and the wider region. International migration requires passports, recruitment, higher upfront costs and greater legal distance than most internal movement. It can therefore produce larger remittances but also higher debt and recruitment risk. Chapter 102 treats Gulf migration directly. In the longue durée, overseas work represents an extension—not a replacement—of the household strategy already visible in internal circulation: members diversify income spatially while continuing to finance houses, land, education, health and ceremonies at home. 97.21 The Nepal–India corridor combines international movement with the social familiarity of a local borderland The open India–Nepal border produces a distinctive migration regime. The 1950 treaty provides reciprocal privileges concerning movement and economic participation, and the border can be crossed without the visa regime that governs most international migration. Nepal’s Labour Migration Report 2024 notes that more than 0.74 million Nepalis were in India in the 2021 census and emphasises the long history and low cost of the India corridor. For the Mithila–Madhesh borderland, everyday movement includes work, study, marriage, health care, trade and pilgrimage. Because much of it is undocumented administratively, 989989 GAJENDRA THAKUR national statistics cannot fully represent its intensity. The border is therefore simultaneously an international boundary and a lived social corridor. 97.22 Circular migration produces a household stretched across two or more locations The strongest contemporary research on rural Bihar describes migration as long-duration yet circular. Amrita Datta’s analysis of the 2016 Institute for Human Development Bihar Household Survey found that 18.8 per cent of individuals in the sample were migrants and nearly two-thirds of households had at least one migrant member; most working-age male migrants moved for work, and many were away for much of the year. Such households are neither simply rural nor urban. Their income, care, consumption and investment are distributed across locations. The village home remains the site of reproduction, ageing parents, children, land and social membership; the destination supplies wages but may provide insecure housing and weak welfare access. This split geography is one of the defining institutions of modern Bihar’s political economy. 97.23 Migration is stratified by caste, class, landholding, education and networks The capacity to migrate is unequal. Poorer labouring households may enter shorter-term and more precarious work because they lack money to search, train or wait for better jobs. Better-resourced households can finance longer-distance journeys, education, business or professional migration and can sustain family members at destination. Datta’s research shows that social hierarchy at origin can reappear at destination: Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, poorer backward classes and labouring households are disproportionately represented in precarious streams. Migration therefore does not automatically generate social mobility. It can reproduce hierarchy through different occupations, housing conditions and exposure to risk even while raising cash income. 97.24 Remittances reshape consumption, housing and education but do not by themselves remove structural dependence on migration Remittances can stabilise food consumption, repay debt, finance health care, support children’s schooling, build brick houses and pay for marriage. They may also fund farm inputs or small businesses. Yet the development effect depends on wage levels, migration costs and the availability of productive opportunities at home. Where local labour markets remain weak, a better house may coexist with continued dependence on outside wages. Longitudinal research in Bihar therefore treats migration not merely as an emergency escape but as an increasingly integral source of household income. Chapter 103 examines remittance-led transformation directly; the present chapter establishes why remittances became structurally important over time. 97.25 The costs of migration are partly transferred to those who remain A migrant’s wage is visible, but the labour that sustains migration is often less visible. Women, older people and other household members may take on cultivation, livestock care, child care, elder care, administrative work and debt management during prolonged male absence. Emotional strain, interrupted schooling, health emergencies and the uncertainty of remittance flows also shape source households. Conversely, migration can increase women’s control over everyday decisions or expose them to new burdens without greater authority. The social history of migration must therefore value unpaid reproductive work as part of the migration economy rather than treating the migrant worker as an isolated individual. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II 97.26 Networks, jobbers, contractors and prior migrants turned mobility into path-dependent chains Migrants rarely enter anonymous labour markets alone. A relative, neighbour, caste fellow, village intermediary, recruiter or contractor can provide the first address, job lead, rail route, advance and introduction. Such networks lower search costs and risk, but they can also lock migrants into occupations controlled by the same intermediary chain. Over generations, source villages develop destination specialisations: one cluster may supply porters or rickshaw workers to Kolkata, another construction labour to Delhi, another harvest workers to Punjab. Network effects explain why migration geography persists even when wage differences alone would predict broader dispersal. They also explain the speed with which information about new destinations can travel through a village. Figure 387 — Subregions entered different destination chains through path-dependent networks 97.27 Transport, mobile phones, banking and identity systems changed the technology of circulation Railways made repeat migration possible on a new scale; buses and roads widened access to stations and cities; mobile phones reduced the cost of maintaining family ties and searching for work. Bank accounts and digital transfers made remittances faster, while Aadhaar-linked and mobile systems created new forms of identification and welfare portability. These technologies did not abolish precarity. A worker can own a smartphone and still depend on a contractor, sleep at a worksite or lack portable ration access. Yet the informational geography of migration has changed profoundly: destination wages, train schedules, emergencies and household decisions can now be negotiated in near real time across hundreds or thousands of kilometres. 97.28 The 2020 lockdown exposed the scale of circular migration by abruptly breaking its transport and employment infrastructure COVID-19 did not create migrant labour; it made an existing system impossible to ignore. When the national lockdown halted work and transport, millions of workers were stranded away from their source households. By late May 2020, Indian Railways reported that nearly 80 per cent of passengers carried on Shramik Special trains were travelling to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. In a 2021 Supreme Court proceeding, Bihar reported that about 1.9 million returning migrant labourers had been registered and skill-mapped on arrival. The Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan was launched from Khagaria in June 2020 in districts receiving 991991 GAJENDRA THAKUR large numbers of returnees. The episode revealed how dependent both destination economies and source households were on a circulation system that public policy had often treated as temporary and informal. 97.29 Modern data demonstrate migration’s scale but still undercount circularity and open-border movement Census 2011 provides detailed Bihar tables by last residence, duration, reason, age, sex and economic activity, including district-level data for Madhubani, Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur, Vaishali, Samastipur, Bhagalpur, Banka and other study districts. These data make migration measurable in ways impossible for earlier periods. Yet the decennial census is poorly suited to repeated circular movement by people who remain members of rural households, and it cannot fully capture undocumented India–Nepal crossings. Survey research therefore complements census data. The IHD Bihar survey’s finding that nearly two-thirds of sampled rural households contained a migrant member illustrates how deeply circulation can penetrate household life even when standard residence-based statistics appear less dramatic. 97.30 The longue durée is a history of changing migration regimes, not an unchanging ‘Bihari migrant’ type Across the centuries, mobility moved through different institutional regimes: river and market circuits; scholarly and service travel; agrarian seasonality; colonial recruitment and rail migration; postcolonial agricultural and industrial labour; national construction and service work; educational mobility; India– Nepal circulation; and international migration. Each regime had distinct gender relations, risks, contracts and destination geographies. What persists is the repeated use of mobility to bridge uneven resources between places. The analytical task for the chapters that follow is therefore not to explain why an allegedly rooted society suddenly began to migrate, but to trace how older practices of circulation were reorganised by colonialism, transport, labour demand, development inequality, borders and globalisation. Migration became one of the principal social infrastructures connecting Mithila, Vajji and Anga to the wider subcontinent and world. Table 97.1 — Migration regimes across the longue durée Period Dominant forms Key infrastructure / Historical institutions significance Early historic– River, market, pilgrimage, Road/river knowledge, Connectivity more early medieval monastic and court travel ferries, patronage visible than migrant counts Medieval–early Scholar, scribe, soldier, Courts, lineages, Portable knowledge and modern ritual and marriage patronage networks kinship capital mobility c. 1793–1850s Seasonal agrarian and Revenue pressure, Mobility embedded in service movement tenancy, market cash agrarian reproduction c. 1850s–1947 Rail migration, Calcutta, Railways, jobbers, Circular labour plus plantations, mines, contracts coercive regimes recruitment 1947–1980s Industrial centres; National labour demand, Rural-to-rural and Punjab–Haryana seasonal rail networks rural-to-urban streams work 1980s–2010s Metros, construction, Contractors, phones, Multi-destination services, education, Gulf finance, education household strategies 2020s Long-duration circular Mobile communication, High connectivity, migration with digital banking, identity systems persistent precarity and coordination weak portability