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By Root 1585 0

’t eat when the crops were bad, so at first I wanted to use the money just to buy some cows.” For the first time, these subsistence farmers had a need for cash. As well, their one-room house was becoming unhygienic and was slowly collapsing. And, once they learned of gas-cylinder cookstoves, they realized they needed one. Schools arrived in their village, and books became important. And so on. Sitaram’s rice crop wouldn’t generate cash: the cost of bringing such small harvests to market would be greater than the earnings. (This is true for many peasant farmers.) So he made the long journey up the road to Bombay. There, he found a job with a grain store and grocery shop, working from 7 a.m. till 9 p.m. He brought over his sister, who worked as a domestic servant, and they shared a chawl, or concrete-floored one-room slum house, in Vile Parle, in those days a busy arrival city on the northern fringe of the city. Like almost everyone in that district, they lived for their village, sending home packets by post each month, visiting the family every few years. In 1967, they built a new, sturdy home in the village, roofed with terracotta tiles they’d saved for three years to buy. They developed close ties with Bombay’s established community. Sitaram went home to marry a village girl and then sometimes went half a dozen years without seeing her. He fathered a lone son, Dashrath, who has stayed in the village and harvested rice his whole life, keeping the peasant life organized while father and son provided increasingly important cash.

Everywhere in the developing world, this mounting oscillation of back-and-forth movement was how the great urban migration began. In the two decades after the Second World War, manufacturing economies in South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa bloomed and became labor-intensive, and a great wave of road building made it possible for isolated farmers to consider the possibility of working in the city between harvest periods. At the same time, peasants became aware of several new pressures: Agriculture began requiring purchased inputs, like feed and fertilizer; electricity and roads made vehicles and appliances desirable even to the poorest farmers; and, perhaps most important, telephone and radio began to spread word to isolated villages of a better urban income. At first, governments encouraged this rapid urbanization as a boon to industrial growth; there was a need to strip the overpopulated countryside of unproductive farmers and fill the factories with labor.

By the time Sanjay came along, the pattern had changed. He stayed in school until he was 16—an option that hadn’t been available to his father. From the age of 11, though, he spent months working in Mumbai, at rudimentary jobs, and he knew all his life that he would be the family member required to move there. And his move to the city was aided by a political organization, the Hindu-nationalist Shiv Sena Party, which provided wells and roads in the village and help finding jobs in the city. After finishing school he landed a spot at the tea shop, where he works from dawn to dusk and sleeps, with his bag of possessions, with three other young men in the backroom. He is almost certain to become one of the 100,000 people who come from villages to settle for good in Mumbai every year, 92 percent of whom say they never want to go back, even if they find themselves unemployed.1 Virtually all of them have moved directly from their village of birth to the big city, without a stop in between—this is the pattern today almost everywhere, not just for internal migration but for overseas moves, too. A number of Sanjay’s village neighbors have made the move to Dubai, where they work on construction sites; everyone on those sites has come straight from a village somewhere. Newcomers to big cities, throughout history and around the world, are almost all rural people.

The meaning of a “job” has changed dramatically in places like Mumbai. Until the economic crises of the 1980s, the cities of the developing world were dominated by an elite core of