The universal migrant experience
RECENTLY, I read a joke about two Malayalis who make a trip to Bengal. Upon their return, one of them enthusiastically exclaims, “Oh, it felt so much like Kerala. There were Bengalis everywhere.” Now, swap the Malayalis with natives from any Gulf country visiting Kerala, and you end up with the same punchline. Beyond the chuckles, this narrative sheds light on the pervasive nature of migration, whether internal or external, in our lives. But then, is migration truly as integrated as it seems?
Consider Karnataka, where governmental directives alternate between ordering nameboards in Kannada and mandating jobs for locals in multinational corporations. In Punjab, emigration concerns have become a focal point in political debates. Meanwhile, in Manipur, the flames of discontent continue to smoulder, prompting the Centre to contemplate a border fence with Myanmar. The politics of nativism and an “anti-outsider” political mobilisation has in some form affected every part of India, and the world. A few years ago, The Economist magazine put up a cover that read, “The new political divide”, suggesting a shift from the traditional left versus right dichotomy to an “open vs closed” paradigm.
The question then boils down to who is a migrant, especially when we tend to “other” this figure. In a broad sense, we all are migrants, says philosophy professor Thomas Nail in his book ‘The Figure of the Migrant’. We all traverse great distances or move cities or countries in search of jobs, for education or other personal reasons, and this is a pervasive phenomenon. Our motivations, experiences and integration paths may differ, but migration has become a shared reality.
In each of the six Indian metros, migrants comprise half the population. From the neighbourhood grocer to the cab driver to the office colleague, everyone is a migrant. Furthermore, in nearly every middle-class household, someone is either working or studying abroad. Our own history, like that of any other nation, is a history of migration.
According to migration scholars Stephen Castles and Mark Miller, “There can be few people in either industrialised or less developed countries today who do not have personal experience of migration and its effects; this universal experience has become the hallmark of the age of migration.”
In our literature, the figure of the migrant has been most represented by the people who were displaced by the twin partitions that affected a newly birthed nation, and effected one of the largest migrations in human history. “The gains of migration are always a risk, while the process itself is always some kind of loss,” writes Nail. This sense of loss, confoundment and memory foregrounds many a migration narrative.
In the book ‘Aage Samandar Hai’ (The Sea Lies Ahead) by Pakistani writer Intizar Hussain, the protagonist is finally bewildered by the city he chooses: “Which city is this? The same city. Then I am not the same person.” Talking of the migrant in her book ‘Remnants of a Separation’, writer Aanchal Malhotra says, “Somewhere in between the original city of their birth and the adopted city of residence, would lay their essence — strangely malleable.”
In an interview, Hussain said he owed his creative life to Partition, for he could not “intellectually” share the experience of migration. “I have been attempting to comprehend this experience through my stories… This is a kind of experience which I am incapable of describing convincingly if I try to abstract myself from my stories, if I try to stand apart from my stories,” he said.
The question is, can the world at large afford to abstract itself from the migrant experience? Or is this experience, to paraphrase Amitav Ghosh, to be imprisoned in their own lives, their own histories and their own shadow lines?
