Dear Readers,
One of the concurrent topics of research in the field of Social Science is Migration and demographics. It includes a vast array of subjects like diasporic studies, systems of exchange in antiquity, trade, making and unmaking of states etc. and is highly interesting because of its sheer holistic coverage. It gives ample scope for unraveling the deep connections between ecology and human evolution in the sense that it assigns optimum recognition to environmental factors as 'the most' important factor.
From a layman's point of view, it can be said that the appeal of this area of study lies in imagining that how interesting it would be to understand why and how we are where we are. Irrespective of what caste, creed, community or region to which we belong, we all have a story of how we arrived where we stay today. While a Rajput of Central India might narrate how his family migrated from the Thar to the Vindhyas six centuries ago, a bania family from Rajasthan might have a clear version of how they moved from Calcutta to Rangoon and then to the Carribean within a span of hundred years or yet still, a Baluch might know how just in his last generation, they moved from Karachi to London.
Movement of people is one of the most fascinating accounts, and also, more correctly put, events, that have shaped human evolution since millennia. Aryans moved from the Caucasus to the Sapt-Sindhu region and gave rise to the Vedic age and the Mughuls moved from Farghana to Kabul. Putting these grandiloquent meta-narratives aside, migrations of lesser communities and sometimes individuals also have had a bearing on human history. A family of Kashmiri Pandits residing near a canal or Neher had migrated to Delhi in the eighteenth century which played a prominent role in Indian politics throughout the twentieth century. A man named Mohundas had migrated to South Africa where he started his satyagraha.
History flows underneath the current of our movement. While we flow as sediments in a large stream of unfathomable gravity, the silt sticking to the river-bed is our story. Much of this story or history is lost to the deep oceans. We come to make attempts at knowing our past with whatever silt is left on the banks......
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