Pranab Bardhan calls his latest book Charaiveti an “academic’s quasi-memoir”. It’s not so much about himself as about people he’s known, places he’s been, and interesting times he’s witnessed, like the Indian Emergency and the Tiananmen Square crackdown. It’s the life of a widely-travelled economics teacher. But cultural references from an age that is almost history enlivens the narrative—Czeslaw Milosz, Thomas Mann, Antonio Gramsci, Iris Murdoch in literature, Bruno Bozzetto interpreting Maurice Ravel in cinema, memento mori provided by Yudhishthira and Aeschylus. “The curse of old age is the paralysing sense of pervasive loss, more than one’s own physical infirmities and indignities,” writes Bardhan.
Charaiveti is a collection of Bardhan’s general interest columns (see shorturl.at/kyzF0). The word, uttered by Indra in the Rigveda, is an exhortation to keep moving on. The note to self by Bardhan, who left his land but not his culture, has special resonance today, when the migrant is becoming the face of the globalised world. This is even more true today than it was almost a decade ago, when a photograph of Alan Kurdi, a child drowned during a Mediterranean crossing to Europe, moved the world’s conscience. But not for ever. The other day, Donald Trump, who is lining up another shot at the White House, said some illegal immigrants are “not human”.
That’s rhetoric for an anti-immigration poll campaign, which has been projecting a fictitious immigrant Anschluss and crime wave in American cities. It raises a scare among voters because, while illegal immigration on foot continues from neighbouring countries, the number of undocumented Indians in the US has been growing at the rate of 70 percent. The phenomenon is so big it merited its own Shahrukh Khan movie, Dunki, in spite of horror stories like that of a Gujarat family dying of exposure within yards of the US-Canada border.
The surprise element of that tragedy was the nature of the family: it was visibly middle class and a nuclear family, while emigration out of India has been led by men with nothing to lose. The new Indian illegal immigrant is a different class—someone whose assets can finance a journey halfway around the world, plus traffickers’ fees.
Traffic from India has been rising since 2010, when the UPA2 government began to lose credibility by the India Against Corruption movement. In 2019-20, the AfrAsia Bank’s Global Wealth Migration Review noted the exit of over 7,000 high net-worth people from India. Now, passport trackers Henley & Partners reveal another twist: Indian millionaires, travelling legally, are jettisoning the Indian passport in ever-larger numbers. India’s poor have always moved for lack of prospects, right back to the girmitiyas lured into taking one-way passages to the Caribbean. But when the rich begin to move, alarm bells should start ringing.
Ironically, a World Inequality Lab paper suggests Indian rich are far more advantaged than their peers in South Africa, Brazil and the US. The paper’s focus is the “billionaire raj”, but the irony applies even to people whose worth can be expressed with three zeroes fewer. When they leave, they are trading creature comforts for greater security, perhaps from a grasping government and its enforcement agencies, and, as Kaushik Basu has pointed out, youth unemployment that could trigger a social crisis.
Many Indians who headed for the US after Independence were between the extremes of rich and poor. They were middle class, a demographic much smaller then than it is today. And within it was a tiny segment of economists, some of the most prominent being Bengalis from Kolkata, via Delhi. Bardhan attributes this phenomenon to “high standards of undergraduate economics teaching in Presidency College for post-war decades, begun by professors like Bhabatosh Datta”, and carried forward by teachers like Dipak Banerjee, Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee’s father.
Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amartya Sen served as role models. Many of them also taught at the Delhi School of Economics, a transit point to Western campuses. Economics in the capital was more multicultural than in Kolkata, with the presence of scholars such as K N Raj, Jagdish Bhagwati and the still-redoubtable Subramanian Swamy.
“Starting from the obscure crevice of a poor neighbourhood in north Kolkata, I have traversed a stretched-out, rather cosmopolitan life,” writes Bardhan. His family migrated from present-day Bangladesh, but his grounding in Indian academia eased the transition to campuses overseas. He recounts he left India bound for Glasgow, but a timely intervention by Amartya Sen brought him to the much livelier Cambridge, UK. Later, at Berkeley, US, a student protested when he included some school-level calculus in a course. She had chosen yoga over calculus at school. It would have been unthinkable in an Indian school.
What’s interesting about Bardhan’s account is he had almost the same advantages and problems as immigrants of lesser standing, like South Asian storekeepers. His wife and he found it difficult to find accommodation in Cambridge, like Muslims in north Indian metros do today. Equally, Bardhan suffers the pain of all first generation migrants—they are neither at home in their home countries nor in their adopted homes, and seek wistful comfort in the thought that perhaps they are world citizens. Sadly, huge numbers of new migrants, displaced by economic and political failures, are perhaps dwelling on that now.
(On X @pratik_k)
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