Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics

During the mid-nineteenth century, many Tamils in Ceylon sent their children to Protestant missionary schools while some adults went to work for missionaries to gain education and employment. Though the ties to the Vellalar caste were strong, the gains of colonial employment and education were more influential to those of the Vellalar caste intermingling with Christian missionaries. Interaction with British and American missionaries in the early to late nineteenth century ultimately led to the migration of this group to British Malaya. Circumstances in Ceylon, as well as the drive for resources such as education and employment, led to the push away from the old colony of Ceylon to the frontier colony of Malaya. This article will showcase the agency of the Ceylonese Tamils within British Ceylon and Malaya during the late colonial era. In order to understand the clout of Ceylonese Tamils in the frontier colony of Malaya, an examination of the agency they held onto in British Ceylon is essential for review. The transfer of educational and religious networks from one colony to the other is the core of comprehending the migratory experiences and intergenerational mobility over generations in colonial to post-colonial Malaya/Malaysia.

JEL: N00, Z12, Z10

Guntur-Krishna districts in the state of Andhra Pradesh has seen intense mobility of professionals to the USA from among the ‘dominant’ castes of the region, particularly the Kammas. Kammas were a rural agrarian caste who have successfully transnationalized themselves, but continue to have strong connections with their region of origin. Rather than making sense of this duality only through anthropological literature on transnationalism, in this account, taking a longue durée approach, I show how certain historical moments in the region created possibilities for the Kammas to first become urbanized, and later, cater to the demand of flexible high skilled labour in the west. Using a meso and micro level schema, the article argues that transnational migration was preceded by changes in the political economy of the region due to the region’s encounter with the colonial state. Moreover, the response of the community to these changes to achieve social and economic mobility further facilitated their rural to urban migration and, later, transnational migration. Finally, this article argues that rather than understanding transnational migration patterns through a statist lens, a more dissgaregated historical analysis is vital to bring out region and community inflected constitutive elements of such migration.

JEL: O15, J61, N35

This article examines a particular village—Kunkeri—in Konkan, Maharashtra, characterized by persistent mass outmigration for over five decades, by combining a field study in 2017 with detailed ethnographic and statistical baseline data collected by the Census of India in 1961 and 1987. It documents the increase in outmigration rates, catch-up in outmigration intensities by the lowest castes to those of the upper castes, diversification of household migration strategies and outmigrants’ occupations, the lessening of single-male migration strategies, the presence of a diasporic association and the growing significance of commuting and migration for education. Yet, despite mass outmigration and a general rise in the standard of living across castes, we observe strong continuity in the distribution of castes and land ownership structures within Kunkeri. These findings point to both the transformative and status-quo preserving features of persistent mass migration from rural India.

JEL: O15, J61, N35

This article offers a political economy account of labour migration of Adivasi workers from southern Rajasthan to growth centres in Gujarat. It unpacks the structural forces that shape this labour mobility, which erupted only as recently as 30 years back. The article focuses on three industries that are key employers of migrant workers—construction, textile as well as small hotels and restaurants in the Gujarati cities of Ahmedabad and Surat. It presents evidence on labour market segmentation and resulting unequal wage distribution between migrants in this corridor by their social group. This is complemented by an extensive mapping of the informal practices that violate applicable legal provisions found in these industry segments. Through these, the article teases out the mechanisms by which the community undergoes what in Marxian terms are referred to as surplus extraction and super-exploitation. The article finds that Gujarat’s economy utilizes the historically low socio-economic position of Adivasis for capitalist accumulation, such that the community’s poverty and disadvantaged position is reproduced inter-generationally, instead of being interrupted by their employment in the growth centres of the state.

JEL: O15, J61, N35