We began this unit by looking at how, from the very dawn of civilizations, goods and objects, ideas and biota flowed into, out of, and through the Indian subcontinent, crossing vast physical and cultural geographies, connecting it to different parts and peoples of the world. Specifically, we followed the movements of a range of things and non-human beings along three historically critical trading nodes and routes: (i) the Indus Valley trading network, which connected its urban centres with their counterparts in Mesopotamia, and through Mesopotamia to Egypt and the Mediterranean world; (ii) the Silk Road network that spanned the Asian continent, running through its middle, linked to ports along its southern rim, in which India was a geographically key site and played a culturally transformative role; (iii) and, the Indian Ocean network that began with the Indus-Mesopotamian trade movements and grew over thousands of years into a vast and expansive maritime economy with multiple, far-flung regional nodes--peninsular India being a central one. We saw how how deeply consequential, culturally and politically, these trade networks have been over the course of recorded history, and, from the perspective of the present, perhaps none more so than the appearance of western European nations in the Indian Ocean waters.

Goods, biota, and ideas, to state the obvious, do not move on their own; they move with people. And it is to the latter that we turn our attention to this week. A dizzying variety of people move along trade routes--including the ones noted above--in different capacities, serving different functions. Commercial and other trade-related socioeconomic classes/groups--from merchants to ship-hands--emerge in different societies through such motives and mobilities. While the histories of such communities and movement of individuals within these trade networks are absolutely fascinating to learn about, that is not our  focus this week, however. Instead, what will concern us here is a very specific kind of movement of people--migration. Specifically, this week, we will survey the long history of different ethnic groups, native to lands outside of the Indian subcontinent, who, over millennia, right down to the present, have come to the subcontinent and made India their home.

Over the course of this survey, we will encounter the proto-historical Steppe Pastoralists, or the 'Aryans' as we have come to call them; different ethnic groups from Central Asia, such as the Graeco-Bactrians, Yeuzhis, Turks, and Mongols; Jews from different parts of western Asia; Zoroastrians from Persia; Black Africans from the eastern parts of the continent, known in India as Siddis; Han Chinese people, Tibetan, Sri Lankan Tamil, and Rohingya refugees--the list runs long.  Indeed, some of these communities have become so mixed into the fabric of Indian society and culture that they have lost their distinct identities as migrants, while others wear their distinctiveness proudly through different means.

Sure enough, given the limited time we have, it is not possible to engage in any appreciable depth the unique histories of all the migrant communities mentioned above. Instead, armed with basic familiarity about different histories of migration into India, we will focus on only two--that of the Aryans and the Siddis.  The reason being that the former is a deeply controversial issue in contemporary India, and has been so for more than a century, whereas the latter is largely forgotten, leading to complete marginalization of the community in both racial and caste terms.