KOCHI: Malayalam-speaking folks have got a thing for going global!
A new study shows among India’s major linguistic diasporas, Malayalam speakers have the highest ratio of international to internal migration.
According to Chinmay Tumbe of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, the Malayali diaspora – hailing mostly from Kerala – numbers over 4.6 million. That is 3 million outside India and over 1.6 million within.
Tumbe’s study maps out India’s linguistic diasporas and finds over 60 million Indians in ‘internal’ diasporas in 2010 – nearly thrice the size of India’s ‘international’ diaspora estimated to be 21.7 million.
The internal diaspora is larger than its international counterpart for all major linguistic groups except for Malayalam and Tamil, and a third of the internal diaspora is dispersed across India’s 10 largest cities.
The paper reveals that while the phrases ‘internal migration’ and ‘international migration’ are widely used around the world, ‘diaspora’ is specifically used for international migration, almost by definition. Diaspora’s original meaning of being dispersed away from the original homeland has in recent years also encompassed recent immigration and temporary international migration, in addition to old settlements that have been formed over centuries.
Tumbe writes that a detailed analysis of Kerala’s migration patterns over the past century reveals that internal migration was significant during the 20th Century, particularly to northern India, but shifted dramatically since the 1970s due to the Gulf oil boom. This redirected outmigration toward the Gulf region, including the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. There is also a Malayalam-speaking diaspora in USA and Italy and many other countries, as also an older diaspora in Sri Lanka.
In the internal diaspora, among cities, Mumbai was by far the most important in 2001, followed by Bengaluru, Chennai and Delhi, the study states.
Speaking to TNIE, Tumbe said that Kerala is unique in having both mass outmigration and now mass in-migration as well. While men still dominate outmigration from Kerala for work, it is more gender-balanced than what you see from the North, he said.
“I think now that Kerala has a very low birth rate, the pressure on land will reduce in the coming days and the migration propensity will gradually wear off. It would well become a state with net in-migration in the coming decades,” he added.
The Hindi-speaking diaspora (encompassing numerous sub-languages as defined by the Indian Census) is the largest, totalling around 40 million in 2010 across both internal and international migrants. Its estimated international diaspora of over 6 million includes historic communities in Latin America and Africa drawn from the Bhojpuri-speaking belts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, outmigration to Nepal, and subsequent flows to countries around the world.
The Indian Tamil diaspora comprises over 8 million people, with more than 4 million outside India and nearly 4 million within the country. It stands as the second-largest linguistic diaspora in India, after Hindi.