A few years ago I gave a presentation to Class 5 students in Delhi on migration into the Indian subcontinent over the ages. I told them about farmers who had migrated into Mehrgarh, in western Balochistan, from the Zagros mountains of southern Iran 9,000 years ago. After my talk, a ten-year old boy raised his hand and asked a most insightful question. ‘Why would farmers migrate?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t they tied to their land? What would make them want to leave it?’
I had no immediate answer, except to tell him that young men did seem to migrate. That most of the migrants into South Asia – with the exception of the very first Homo sapiens that left Africa and spread out over millennia reaching here with their womenfolk – had been men. Could it have been climate change? Or just a wish to get more space for themselves? But his question stayed with me: I was sure there was more to this early migration of farmers than just a wish to explore.
My first inkling that there could be something… normal going on came during a visit to Masai Mara, in Kenya. One day as we drove through the grassland we came upon a herd of Thomson’s gazelles. What was striking about them was that they all had horns, and they all seemed to be young adults. ‘A bachelor herd,’ our guide called them.
Then just a few minutes later we met another herd of Thomson’s gazelles, but these were all female, without horns, except for one large intimidating looking alpha male standing in the middle, and one lone male, barely adult, standing timidly at the edge. ‘He is soon going to be driven out of the herd,’ our guide said, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.
The sight of that alpha male standing guard over a herd of females took me back to a story in the first mandala of the Rig Veda. It was the story of Vritra, a ‘demon’ who ‘withheld the waters’, a demon of drought who dwelt in the rivers or celestial waters, or in a cavern in the earth. Vritra kept under his charge the cows, the wealth, prosperity and progeny. In short, Vritra kept the Vedic men away from the women they needed access to in order to find wives and have children. Indra killed Vritra with his thunderbolt, something every young male in a bachelor herd fantasised about doing.
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We tend to think of young men leaving and moving on as something brought on by crisis, by failure. But when we look at the situations that immediately preceded their exit from the old homelands, what we see instead is… success. The migration of Austro-Asiatic men into eastern India 4,000 years ago came in the wake of successful farming of Japonica rice in Southeast Asia that had brought a surge in the population.
This phase change probably brought on not so much crowding as inequality. The transition to a more ‘developed’ society after taking up cultivation must have created more hierarchy, where the rich got more access to everything. This would have resulted in an underclass of young men with less and less prospects for work, for women, for children, and for the other things they needed to survive. Because of the success of agriculture in their lands, these young men had become… surplus.
One good way to understand how this turns into migrations that upend traditional societies is to consider the most recent male migration into India: the British. That influx began gradually, small groups of men who came as traders in their big ships and stayed close to the coast in their ‘factories’, isolated, gloomy, sickly and not looking anything like a threat. These early explorers did as other male migrants to the subcontinent did: many of them were happy to get away and find local wives and settle down, and to have families with half-local children. But there was a later phase that brought many more British men, and this second iteration was backed up by military might, the once-upon-a-time traders metamorphosing into conquerors. Who were these British men, and why did they come to India?
Among the British aristocracy, sons are described as either heirs or spares. An heir is a firstborn son, the one who will inherit the ancestral property, which will provide him with income throughout his life. The spare is the other son, or other sons, as they may be more, who cannot count on being looked after in the same way. In medieval times, these younger sons would often go out and wage battles in order to capture the estates of other aristocrats, slaying the liege lord and marrying his widow or daughter and installing themselves as the new rulers of the fiefdom. It is a short step from this scenario to imagining the British men who came to India to serve the colonial government as primarily spares. Young men made ‘surplus’ in their own lands, by design.
The world is now more crowded, and it is not easy for people to move to new lands any more. There are borders, and visa regimes, that hold them perpetually in place. But the same pattern of growth continues. As countries and their economies follow this road it brings them more inequality, and more hierarchy, making many more young men… surplus. People the society has no use for. Men who know they will never marry, will never own their homes, will never have the lives their parents had.
At the turn of the millennium, between 1994 and 2004, Japan experienced an ‘Employment Ice Age’, when the Bubble Economy collapsed and young men lost their jobs, and other fresh graduates did not get jobs at all. There had never before been anything like this in Japan, where young men expected to go smoothly from university to corporate jobs they would stay in for the rest of their working lives. Many of these men withdrew from society altogether, some of them becoming hikikomori, refusing to ever step outside their parents’ homes. And others in this lost generation gave up on traditional masculinity and became sōshoku-kei danshi, ‘herbivore men’, no longer interested in marriage or having children. They had, in essence, conceded defeat and declared themselves ‘surplus’, and resigned themselves to living unobtrusively, or even in seclusion, for the rest of their lives.
It is in this light that the young Indian men in the news these days, looking for ingenious routes into Western lands of opportunity – and getting deported for their pains – look like signs of hope, not of despair. Their enormous risks to get themselves across the Mexican border are not that different from what young men, orphaned by the world of ‘success’, have been doing since forever. They do not go as conquerors, but they have not given up and ‘turned tail’, in the manner of scorpions, cancelling themselves out of the race in the face of near-impossible odds – instead of feeling the anger they have a right to feel against a system that has wronged them. Migration is not the most aggressive response they could have had to being discarded, in the interest of ‘efficiency’. All they have done is relocate themselves to fight the same fight for survival in another arena.
This desperate impulse to migrate, then, is a tiny sign of hope, because everything we see about where the world is headed speaks of more inequality in store, young job seekers to be assailed by newer forces that want to make them redundant. We are following a roadmap to a future where the ‘system’, in its quest for an inhuman sort of ‘efficiency’, finds ordinary people less and less ‘useful’, less and less worth investing in, more and more of a ‘problem’. Migration is a primal quest for change, a readiness to exit a situation that is not working, and to find another way.
But perhaps we are coming to a turning point. The system has become so confident that ordinary people will behave self-destructively, and not question it, that in its hubris it has begun to reveal what it really is and whose interests it serves. How will this play out? I don’t know. But it has always been the young who have been willing to take risks, and to think of better ways to live. Maybe they will do it again. At least their urge to migrate tells us that they know they have reached a dead end, and that they have not lost their ability to embrace change.
Peggy Mohan is a linguist and the author of four books, the most recent being Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through its Languages, Gurgaon: Penguin Random House, 2021. She teaches linguistics at Ashoka University.
