We're all from some place else

You're an immigrant. And so am I. As are Abhishek and Aishwarya, George W Bush, and the Pope. In fact, it would be very hard, if not impossible, to find a single person on the planet, whose ancestors, if you go back far enough, weren't migrants.
Mass movements of peoples, from place to place, was the natural order of things even before tectonic shifts caused the continents to drift apart.Seen from this perspective, immigration is an attribute not of movements of people but of the latter-day invention of geopolitical borders. Everybody is from somewhere else. And has been so long before they devised national frontiers and visa control.
Travellers who'd visited Naga tribals deep in the hills of the north-east part of what is now called India were intrigued by the long wooden community drums, exactly like dugout boats turned upside down, that occupied pride of place in each settlement. How and why did the landlocked Nagas design drums the size and shape of inverted sea-going vessels? In the 1930s, anthropologist Verrier Elwin came up with his now generally accepted theory that the Nagas were originally Polynesian islanders who millennia ago had made the ocean voyage to India and trekked inland, carrying with them the boats which, useless in the hills, became iconic symbols of their remote origins.
My family comes from Kutch, on the coast of western India. On a visit to Mexico City years ago, I visited the local Museum of Anthropology which depicts life-size tableaux of traditional village life in that country. The facial characteristics of the mannequins displayed, their clothing, the foods eaten by the people represented, bore an uncanny resemblance to the indigenous Kharva fisherfolk of Kutch. Proto-history suggests that the Olmec civilisation of Meso-America (1500 BC-100 BC) culminated in a diaspora whose ripples might have reached the shores of the Indian subcontinent. So am I really a PMO, a Person of Mexican Origin? Might explain why I like Tex-Mex grub.
We've all been coming and going, for aeons. The Coorgis are said to be descendants of the remnants of Alexander's army who settled down on the Deccan plateau. According to one theory, the Nairs of Kerala can trace their roots to the Newars of Nepal. And in a way, we're all out of Africa, where humankind supposedly was born from the womb of what anthropology calls the ‘mitochondrial Eve', the great Earth Mother of us all.
So no matter where you think you're from, you're almost certainly from someplace else. Never mind what that fictive document called your passport says.
jug.suraiya@timesgroup.com