A year later, I completed my degree with the best grades in my university. I enrolled in a master’s degree course and returned home. But within days of my return, I discovered, hidden in a cupboard, a stack of continuing correspondence between my parents and their chosen groom for me—the same Bengali boy living in Tokyo. My parents had not given up.
This was the situation that motivated me to leave India. I was curious about the world, but my curiosity was not a strong enough factor to make me want to leave home. Instead, it was the situation that I felt trapped in that pushed me towards the decision.
Like Robert Butler’s monkey in a cage, I immediately recognized a window of opportunity when it opened up.
One morning, a professor at my university called me to his office to say he would like to recommend my name for an academic fellowship to study for a year in Paris at Sciences Po, France’s premier university. He asked me if I would be comfortable with that. After a brief conversation, I agreed. After a few months, I managed to win a monthly student stipend of €624 from the French government. The only challenge was my air ticket to Paris. It cost €1000, and I did not wish to burden my parents with this amount. My younger brother was bright and my parents were spending a fortune on his coaching classes so that he could make it through the IIT entrance exams. They had taken several loans for his studies already and worked overtime to make ends meet at home.
I wrote to thirty organizations—private companies, foundations, government agencies—to sponsor my air ticket to France. None responded, except one non-profit firm located in south Delhi. Its founder was an Indian woman who lived in the United States but was briefly visiting Delhi. I was asked to meet her at the organization’s office.
The office turned out to be an apartment in a residential complex. It was run by three staff members, one of whom accompanied me to the lounge. A few minutes later, a woman who appeared to be in her fifties entered the room dressed in pants and a floral chiffon shirt. She was smiling, her eyes twinkling. Seating herself across me, she introduced herself as the founder, and then, even without much of a chat, she took a chequebook out from her bag and flipped through its pages.
Holding a signed cheque for Rs 50,000 in her hand, she told me, ‘Here, you get this cheque for your air ticket on three conditions. One, you will forget this ever happened [I try but I obviously have not]; two, you will never, ever get in touch with us, three, you will do this for another girl if you ever can later in your life.’
This was how I moved out of India to an unknown country 6500 kilometers away.
My story is one of hundreds of millions. Every migrant who moves to another city or country has a compelling situation that motivates them to leave, and a few enabling factors or people that help them make the move. Each era in history has had ‘push factors’—situations that compel a person to leave their place of origin—and pull factors which are aspects of the host location that attract a person to live there. For these reasons and more, each migrant has a unique story and journey.
During the course of my academic research on migration, I met migrants across Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Rome, London, New York, Geneva, Cairo, Dubai, Nairobi, Beijing, Lahore, Islamabad and Dhaka. At university, I learnt migration theories and history from books, but my real learning came from the streets. The journey of every migrant I met has been unique, often linked to their specific situation in India. Yet, among the thousands of stories I heard, the most fascinating ones, and indeed the most heartbreaking, were the ones that emerged out of the subcontinent’s history of war and strife. I came across entire families that were forced to move every few years across unexpected routes—one of them through Uganda and Rwanda, before ending up in Dubai! I found that until 1948, the majority of Indians migrated to other countries neither because of curiosity, nor even by consent. For a better explanation, let us look at three major migration waves of Indians moving to live overseas. In doing so, my objective is to point out how much of it was out of free will and how much was not.
The first wave of forced migration occurred in the colonial era. From the 1830s onwards, international migration from British-colonized India comprised largely unskilled workers from the poorer socio-economic groups who went to other colonized countries. Even in faraway Australia, a small number of Indians arrived as convicts and later as labourers, transported by the British colonial government in India. Between 1834 and 1937, nearly thirty million people were forced to leave India for other British colonies, of which nearly four-fifths managed to return.11 Those who stayed back in other colonies often became ‘twice-migrants’ when they again moved to the UK or other colonies. Many would embrace the new culture and never return to India.
My second example is the migration that occurred from the early twentieth century onwards, during the independence struggle. As compared to the first wave, this was a smaller but still significant migration. While the Indian subcontinent fought for freedom, there were several Indians who voluntarily left to study at universities, often in the UK and other parts of Europe. While in Europe, many members of this overseas Indian intelligentsia were actively involved in covert activities that they felt contributed to the fight for independence in their motherland. Berlin, Paris, Vienna and Zurich, at various times, became offshore hubs of India’s freedom movement. Freedom fighters such as Subhash Chandra Bose mobilized hundreds of Indians in Berlin to help in the struggle. Bhikaji Cama founded the magazine Vande Mataram, publishing it out of a basement in Paris, for the readership of these Indian revolutionaries in Europe. Covert meetings were organized in the attics of Indians residing in Europe each time an Indian freedom fighter visited their city from the homeland.
It is fairly well known that many Indians, including India’s first prime minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, and business leaders such as Jehangir Ratanji Tata, studied in Europe and then returned to India. But we often forget that there were many others who could never return. They stayed back because of the crackdowns that took place across Europe, instigated by British authorities. Homes were searched and any Indian suspected of carrying out activities related to the freedom struggle in the Indian subcontinent was taken into custody. Thousands of Indians were forcibly detained and many more went undercover, fleeing from the authorities. Much against their will, they could never board a ship back to India.
The third wave came in 1947 with the greatest migration of humans ever recorded in the history of the world. Millions of Muslims were forced to move from India to West and East Pakistan while an equal number of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction. Hundreds of thousands never made it and died on the way.12 The memories of this catastrophic episode still weigh on the Indian psyche.
Meanwhile, after Independence, the nation’s leaders went about establishing educational institutions and developing industries. Prime Minister Nehru was a passionate believer in industrialization as much as he was in the socialist model of developing it. The country, under Nehru’s leadership, took the unusual path of becoming a democracy without capitalism, and building industries without a free market. One of the consequences of this was the lack of a level playing field for Indians. Restrictive state controls and red tape hindered entrepreneurship. The elites, who were favoured by the state, benefited from the system, whereas the much larger majority who were poor and anonymous became even poorer. The need to earn a living, combined with the poor environment for entrepreneurship, drove people towards education and jobs that were available only in specific cities. Opportunities for prosperity were few and not uniformly distributed across the country. And so a few cities became more crowded than others as Indians flocked to them for education and jobs. This trend of moving to the cities for jobs continues even today.
Yet, interestingly, Indians have migrated within India mostly for the purpose of marriage. It is difficult to find exact data on this, but several sources indicate that close to 90 per cent of marriages in India are arranged by families of the groom and the bride, who usually do not
know each other prior to the match.13 It is common for the two to be living in different cities or villages, oblivious to each another’s existence till they are brought together. These marriages are often arranged across cities between those belonging to the same caste and regional origin or linguistic group. According to the census, a total of 454 million Indians living in India were domestic migrants in 2011, and 49 per cent of these Indians, or 224 million people, migrated for marriage. Just as a comparison, only about 10 per cent moved because of work or employment in the same year.14
After a wedding, it is customary for the bride to move to the husband’s house, wherever that might be. The most recent census data reveals that 97 per cent of the 224 million Indians who migrated after marriage are women.15 Moreover, 78 per cent of rural women who migrated in 2011 did so for marriage as compared to 46 per cent of urban women who moved for the same reason.16
The reasons for Indians living abroad are not too different from those of our domestic migrants who leave their homes.17 Many have migrated abroad for jobs. Approximately half of the total migrants are women who have followed such men after marriage, which is often arranged with a boy of the parents’ choice, just like mine nearly was. Indian migrants have moved to high-income countries, and, as of 2015, they are concentrated the most in the UAE, which is inhabited by around 3.5 million Indians, and in the US, where around two million Indians live.
Overall, it is in search of a better life—emotionally, socially, financially—that we leave. The fact that India produces the largest number of migrants in the world, but hosts only about 5.2 million international migrants18 is an indicator of where migrants perceive the environment is conducive for a better life. The Middle East has offered migrants jobs, the United States has beckoned to them with its universities, and they’ve been attracted to the quality of life in Europe, Singapore and Hong Kong. But in the future, a change of political or economic scenarios in these countries could alter the factors that attract migrants to them. We are witnessing this already in Indian migration to the US, where President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies have resulted in Indian migrants hesitating to go to the United States since January 2017,19 and a larger number of Indians now seeming more likely to choose to live in Europe.20 In the medium to long term, the overall number of Indians moving out of India will not drastically reduce if the environment offered by the destination country is no longer attractive; they will find another destination. It will reduce only if the living conditions for Indians in India improve. Unless the fundamental reasons and situations—often exacerbated by economic and social inequality—that drive us out of India change, we will continue to find new destinations to move to.
Also, a more equitable society for the boys and the girls of this land, and the rich and the poor, irrespective of caste and ethnicity, will offer a meritocratic platform for us to strengthen our roots here in India. The strength of our roots will determine our commitment and attachment to being an important stakeholder in India’s future. It will not matter then whether we leave or stay, because strong roots do not mean that the tree cannot have branches that reach out to the sky. Quite the contrary. Exploration and attachment are related, and in fact, the latter is a prerequisite for the former.
About five decades ago, researchers21 observed fifty infants in a situation that was new and not too frightening. In some cases, the infant’s mother was present, in others, she had left, and in yet others, she was replaced by a stranger. They found that exploration was greatest when the mother was present. Observation of young apes and monkeys and other studies of human infants in similar experiments since then have all supported the view that successful exploration takes place, ironically, when there is secure attachment.
The establishment of attachment is an instinctual priority. When it is absent, the need for attachment is dominant and we engage in attachment-searching behaviour similar to that of a baby, who is likely to cry or seek its mother. When we are attached to our city or country of origin, attachment can be taken for granted. In this case, just as an infant would feel free to move out of its crib knowing the mother is always present, we feel more secure in leaving our home base to explore the new and often frightening world. Exploring other lands clearly does not just mean physically living elsewhere. It means being curious about and getting emotionally involved in those places.
Strong roots in our home base liberate us to explore or engage more meaningfully with the world. Lacking this, we will move in large numbers but spend less time exploring, instead seeking the missing mother (land) anxiously in a place where she does not exist.
References
Ainsworth, Mary D. Salter, and Silvia M. Bell. 1970. Attachment, exploration, and separation: Illustrated by the behaviour of one-year-olds in a strange situation. Child Development 41.1, pp. 49-67.
Alikuzai, Hamid Wahed. 2013. A Concise History of Afghanistan in 25 Volumes, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Trafford Publishing).
Anand, Geeta. 2017. For Indians, Trump’s America is a land of lost opportunity. New York Times, 23 April.
Buhler, George, trans. 1886. The Laws of Manu (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Business Standard. 2016. 97 per cent of Indians migrating for marriage are female. 15 December.
Butler, Robert A. 1954. Curiosity in monkeys. Scientific American, pp. 70–75.
Callahan, Sharon Henderson. 2013. Religious Leadership: A Reference Handbook (California: Sage Publications).
CNN. 2012. The Freedom Project. http://edition.cnn.com/specials/world/freedom-project.
Connor, Phillip. 2017. India is a top source and destination for world’s migrants. Pew Research Center, 3 March, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/03/india-is-a-top-source-and-destination-for-worlds-migrants/.
Dalrymple, William. 2015. The great divide: The violent legacy of the Indian partition. New Yorker, 29 June.
Das, Gurcharan. 2002. India Unbound, first edition (New York: Anchor Books).
Davis, Kingsley. 1968. The Population of India and Pakistan (New York: Russell & Russell).
Langevin, R. 1971. Is curiosity a unitary construct? Canadian Journal of Psychology 25.4, p. 360.
Loewenstein, George. 1994. The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116.1, pp. 75–98.
Menozzi, Clare. 2016. International Migration Report 2015, United Nations, New York.
Olivelle, Patrick, ed. 1999. The Dharmasutras: The Law Codes of Ancient India (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Rana, Preetika, and Joanna Sugden. 2013. India’s record since independence. Wall Street Journal, 15 August.
Sims, Alexandra. 2016. India has the largest diaspora population in the world, says UN report. Independent, 14 January.
Saha, Devanik. 2016. 97 per cent of Indians migrating for marriage are female. Indiaspend, 5 August.
Statistic Brain. 2016. Arranged marriage statistics. https://www.statisticbrain.com/arranged-marriage-statistics.
Times of India. 2017. US universities register drop in Indian student applications. 27 March.
Tinker, Hugh. 1974. A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Varma, Subodh. 2016. 4 of 10 Indians are migrants, most move for marriage: survey. Times of India, 2 December.
4
Procreation
Sex is a dirty word in India, but our population numbers are still booming. In the land of the Kamasutra, most Indians deem it inappropriate to teach children about sex at home or at school. In a country where family, the government and various institutions have stifled the subject, we continue to make babies and are all set to overtake China by 2030 to become the most populous country in the world.1
The list of ironies around our attitude to sex is long and extremely baffling. Here are some more. We are shy about discussing sex with our spouses, but we worship with gusto the lingam, which is God’s phallus. We expect our women to produce babies but often do not offer t
hem pleasurable sex—only 32 per cent of Indian women achieve orgasm, which is half as many as the men who said they do.2
In fact, we have been hypocrites on this topic for a while, because a part of India’s sexual history is not very different from the present. The Rig Veda says that the vaginal blood from the bride’s deflowering is highly dangerous. If clothes are stained with this blood, they must be given away to a priest, or anybody who touches them will be destroyed. The Arthashastra provides guidelines on what must be done if a girl loses her virginity, and it also declares that a marriage is invalid if the girl is not a virgin. The girl is not a virgin, according to the Arthashastra, if blood is not seen on the sheets after the wedding night. The Manusmriti, an ancient legal text, imposes large fines on men who destroy the virginity of a girl outside marriage.3 An entire book written in India around 2000 years ago, as part of the seven-volume Kamasutra—otherwise a fascinating source of progressive erotic commentary—is devoted to the kanya or the virgin. This book also mentions, or rather assumes, that a girl is a virgin on her wedding night and so the man must make her content, or he will ensure the girl’s marital life is unhappy.4
Due to this age-old emphasis on chastity, a woman is not allowed to experience sexual pleasure until she marries, and when she does, she is only allowed to have sex with one man and bear his children. Unfortunately, these extreme views on sex in Indian history are the only ones that have survived, and the more liberal ones—which I will elaborate upon in this essay—have been erased. This has led to lies and deceit in millions of relationships and marriages in India, which could otherwise have been healthy and transparent. Young girls, unable to seek guidance from their parents, get abortions done under dangerous conditions on the sly, even though abortions before twelve weeks of pregnancy have been legal in India since 1972.5 And devastatingly, we implant guilt, contradictions, timidity, and shame in the minds of millions of our women for their sexuality.
Indian Instincts Page 7
