The world that we live in today is characterized by movement of information, things, and beings--both human and non-human--across national borders and natural frontiers, at unprecedented speeds and volumes. For example, news that a massive mutiny had broken out in India took 40 days to reach England in 1857. Today, it would take less than perhaps 4 seconds for the information to cross the same distance. In 1857, there was no known instance of any Indian resident in the United States of America. Today, there are more than 4 million!  Or, to put in terms of a currently unfolding event: during the first cholera pandemic, which broke in 1817, it took the disease 4 years to reach China from its ground zero in Bengal. In 2019, it took the COVID-19 coronavirus about 4 weeks to travel in the reverse direction.  

In order to distinguish this contemporary moment of heightened world-wide movement and connectivity, we call our times the age of globalization. But such a characterization tends to obscure the the fact that people have been moving large distances in large numbers, with other beings, things, and ideas, all throughout human prehistory and history. To wit, our prehistoric species ancestors walked out of Africa to populate the rest of the world! And, within the realm of history, we know that the very rise of human social organization as 'civilization' was accompanied by trade, with long-distance networks, both overseas and overland, solidifying by the 3rd millennium BC--the first World Wide Web!

Treating such flows of things, people, ideas, even germs as the focus of our enquiry, in this unit, we will  explore how the Indian subcontinent has been an important node in these movements across space and over time, both as a recipient and as a source. The purpose of this unit will be to show that far from being an economically, botanically and zoologically, and demographically isolated region of the world, the subcontinent has been integrated into various far-flung trade and migration networks since the rise of the Indus Valley civilization. We will see how trade and migration have deeply impacted and informed various facets of life and culture in India and of Indians in different parts of the world.

Hence, this unit is crucial for interrogating the increasingly shrill claims of autochthony and purity--the idea that everything good about India is native to it, without any contribution of 'outsiders'--that permeate popular discourses about India and Indianness in these times. This purpose of the unit resonates with one of the main learning objectives of UI1, which is to demonstrate, understand, and appreciate that India’ has been forged within the cauldron of global, regional and local processes, over time, with spatial and cultural linkages to other parts of the natural and social world, involving a continuous movements of people, goods, and culture within and across its shifting frontiers.

The unit comprises three themes: (i) Flows of Goods and Biota; (ii) Flows of People into India; and (iii) Flows of People Out of India. Given how capacious each of the three themes is, we will be looking at select historically significant events and processes under each. In that, we will look at flows in the past that help us better understand India's present diversity in its social, cultural, and environmental constitution. The assessment for this unit will be a group-based blog project, where you and your colleagues will work together to create a blog page on an assigned topic related to the themes addressed in the unit.