Migration: In south, fortunes head north
As children, we learned that most major Indian rivers flow eastwards and empty into the Bay of Bengal. However, we were also taught that the Narmada and Tapti rivers flow from the Vindhya and Satpura ranges in the central highlands into the Arabian Sea.
I now imagine people as water, and waves of migrants as rivers that flow hither and thither, and, like the Narmada and the Tapti, it is time to think of rivers of people flowing from the north to the south in what one might call 'osmotic migration'. We have come a long way from when maritime trade, colonialism, the Industrial Revolution and the abundance of opportunities in the north drove people from the south to Calcutta, Bombay and New Delhi, besides new industrial hubs. Much like the names of cities changing to Kolkata and Mumbai in a cultural shift, we now have migration patterns that reflect a new India —both within and outside the country.
These thoughts on the reverse swing in migration came to me last week as I heard news from Tamil Nadu and Kerala cheering the offspring of migrant workers from Bihar. Tamil Nadu cheered Jiya Kumari on her acing of the state-level board examination. Jiya, a government school student in southern Chennai, scored 93 out of 100 in her Class X Tamil exam and an impressive 467 out of 500 overall. Her Bihari parents settled in Chennai as construction and industrial labourers in 2008.
Across the Western Ghats, in Kerala, a letter written in Malayalam by Dharaksha Parveen, the 19-year-old daughter of a Bihari migrant worker, to Pushpa, the daughter of a migrant from Uttar Pradesh, is now part of a prescribed school textbook for sixth-standard students. The letter describes how a school teacher in Ernakulam bought a sewing machine to encourage Dharaksha's interest in tailoring, setting her off on an ambitious foray into the fashion world.
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