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By Root 1714 0

just north of Goa, carrying a cotton bag with all his possessions: a sleeping sheet, a change of clothes, saffron prayer beads, some folded rupees. He is excited: After spending the past 11 months sleeping on the four-meter-square floor of a tea shop backroom beside a train station in northern Mumbai, he is returning home for the annual rice harvest and wedding season. His worn plastic flip-flops slap in the monsoon puddles as he runs to a friend’s waiting motorcycle; they race along jungle roads into a fertile emptiness of deep red mud and dense green foliage. Though he has been in the city since he was 14, and will likely spend the rest of his life there, this is home.

If you want to experience the raw edge of the great migration, to see the first, formative steps in a movement that is transferring a third of humanity from the village to the city, you’re more likely to find it by joining the tides moving in the other direction, on trains and boats and minibuses, back to the village at harvest time. It is in this return movement that the new urbanites are most unified, most likely to build the networks that lead to permanent arrival, most conscious of their political and economic centrality. Their arrival in the city is part of a rural process, governed at first by the seasons, in which single individuals build links for larger communities. Nowhere in the world, except in war zones, will you find rural families packing up en masse and moving at once to the city. It doesn’t happen that way, much as it didn’t when Europe and North America were urbanized by villagers in the nineteenth century. The world’s population shifts cityward in a back-and-forth oscillation of single individuals and clusters of villagers, pushed and pulled by tides of agriculture and economy, climate and politics.

When the urban economy takes a plunge, as it did in the crisis that began in 2008, large populations of tentatively settled workers move back to their home villages. Recent years have seen large-scale return moves of Chinese peasants from the Pearl and Yangtze river deltas, of Poles in Britain and Ireland, of villagers in the cities of sub-Saharan Africa. But they leave the knowledge of urban life and the networks of attachment in place, along with the hundreds of thousands who do not return, having earned or married or acculturated themselves into the permanent population; these arrival-city pioneers remain in the city, linked to the village, waiting for the migration cycle to begin again. It is a reciprocal, dialectic movement, which urbanizes the village as much as it revitalizes the city. It serves as a sorting and selection mechanism, leaving the most ambitious and able in the city, with a large number—typically about half of all rural-to-urban migrants throughout history—returning to the village for good.

Sanjay jumps off the motorcycle and slips down the steep red-mud footpath to his tiny village of Kolhewadi, a cluster of mud-and-dung huts at the foot of a forested valley around a swollen river. It is, to both outsider and resident, a small, fertile paradise. Children strip off and dive into the river, bringing back plump fish; the trees yield mangoes and coconuts, and the rice harvest this year is good. Sanjay is welcomed warmly; it has been a year since his mother saw him, almost a decade and a-half since he first left home, at 11. His mother, Aruna, has prepared him a lunch of rice-flour rotis and bowls of curd topped with rock salt, followed by mangoes and jackfruit. The family cluster on the mud floor, leaning against sacks of rice, and hear his tales of the city.

His grandfather, Sitaram, now almost 70, realized in the 1950s that his family needed a source of cash—something they had never had, or needed, before. Drawn by newly laid roads, he was the first to make the 14-hour road journey, decades before the village was connected by railway, telephone, or electricity. “I was not getting much out of the farm,” he says, “enough to live off but never quite enough to keep us from being hungry from time to time—we sometimes wouldn