Strategic lives: when the Indian knowledge migrant returns home1

By Ratnakar Tripathy

‘We do not want your investments, we want your ideas. We do not want yourriches, we want the richness of your experience’ - Atal Bihari Vajpayee,Indian Prime Minister addressing audience in New Delhi on Overseas IndiansDay, January 9, 2003.

Introduction: return as process rather than actThe present article is an outcome of a research projectinvolving extensive field work focusing on returnmigrants in India who belong to the knowledge workercategory. These were highly qualified professionals whospent a significant part of their working lives in thedeveloped world before returning to India. Apart fromlong free-flowing conversations with over 70professionals in the cities of Pune, Hyderabad,Bangalore, and Delhi, the article uses material from anumber of memoirs, narrative essays and semi-fictionalaccounts written by returnees. While conversations withthe return migrants carried an air of spontaneity, thepublished works may represent more measured and wellthought out opinions formed over time. Among the Indiancities, Bangalore has of course been the better knowndestination for the return migrants [Khadria 2004]. Butcities such as Hyderabad, Pune and Gurgaon in Delhi areno longer far behind.

1 This article is an outcome of fieldwork carried out over 2013-2014 in Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore as part of a collaborative research project done by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Free University, Amsterdam and the Asian Development Research Institute [ADRI], Patna, India, and was funded by WOTRO, The Netherlands. The author is grateful to his colleagues Kathinka Sinha Kerkhoff, Ellen Bal and Kate Kirkfor their comments and responses.

The broader purpose of the project was to relate themigrant’s professional and personal experience abroad andat home to see how their sense of civic engagement andidentity impact their contribution to the developmentprocess in India, and how substantial such contributionmay be. But the present article with its limited purposefocuses closely on the migrant’s experience of return toIndia after a significant stint in a developed country.Return is thus seen here as a relatively prolonged andstructured process rather than an abrupt act of comingback. The decision to treat return as an elaborateprocess is an outcome of the numerous conversations thatbrought out the strategic and the emotive aspects of thereturn process, enabling the researcher to go beyond theobviousness of physical movement that the word ‘return’tends to suggest and to see it in all its existentialcomplexity.The purpose of the article is to examine the dilemmas,ambivalences and problems that seem to characterize thedecision to return home, as well as the entire process ofreconstructing a new life back in India. The suggestionhere is that without a good understanding of the twoprocesses of return and settling down, it may be somewhatpremature to pass a verdict on whether or how the returnmigrant relates to the development processes in India.Perhaps more important, a closer look at the returnprocess may reveal the variety of direct and indirectpathways through which migration and remittances connectwith the themes of growth and development in the contextof a knowledge worker’s life history. The professionalsinterviewed were mostly of high calibre representing in amajority of cases the very top among the knowledge elite.Although this bias was neither planned nor foreseen andwas a result of snowballing contacts, it was subsequentlyobserved that such candidates are perhaps most suitablefor the specific purpose of assessing the impact ofreturnee knowledge workers on development. Thedisproportionately high impact of elite migrant groups onthe home country has been emphasized in studies on India

in recent times [Kapoor 2010] and phrases such as‘epistemic community’ have been used, though in aslightly different context, to convey the enormouslydense impact of ideas circulated by networks of experts[Haas 1992].

Dramatizing return: locus and remittances Despite the fact that the popular phrases ‘brain drain’and ‘brain gain/brain circulation’ are associatedsuccessively with departure and return, we need to admitat the outset that the act of return cannot be madesynonymous or synchronous with either brain gain ordelivery of remittances. The reason is that even thosewho do not return form an integral part of the remittanceprocesses, despite the impression of relative‘indirectness’. Especially in the context of knowledgeworkers, one is compelled to see remittances as a broadercategory including the social, cultural and knowledgecomponents apart from the economic one [Levitt 2001]. Allthese of course, operate through a variety of networks.A categorical differentiation between the returnees andthe non-returnees becomes even more problematic in thenew millennium when travel and communication have becomefar easier than ever before, enabling a non-residentIndian to make substantial financial and intangibleinvestments in India. The assumption thus that the returnmigrants contribute more remittances to India than thenon-return migrants seems questionable and would requireempirical verification. In the absence of tangibleevidence, it would appear baseless for example, to claimthat those migrants who come back to India arenecessarily more engaged with India than those whocontinue abroad. In fact one may even ask why thereshould be such a premium on return at all. These areissues to be resolved for specific contexts throughempirical substantiation, even if anecdotal, rather thanintuitive reasoning.

As for the economic impact of the knowledge workers, thepivotal place of the Indians in the Silicon Valley andits contributions to facilitating international businessfor the home country firms has become for long a nearcliché thanks to an early work of Saxenian [1999]. Evenway back in the 1995-1998 period she found that more thanthree fourths of the Indian born respondents had one ormore friends who returned to India to start a company. Itseems near impossible here to determine who contributedmore to India’s growth – the return migrants or those whostayed back in the USA but continued to provide contactsand lucrative contracts to the returnees? Thus any hunchrequires substantial empirical inputs for confirmation inthe era of the internet when money, ideas, algorithms,prototypes and blueprints may be moved instantaneously.After all, interaction by itself, however intensive isnot the same thing as contribution! All such reasoningand doubts must of course be seen in the light of thecontinued difference between physical and virtualpresence, a difference unlikely to be obliterated anytime soon. The difference however no longer seemsabsolute after the communications revolution of theinternet era and needs to be qualified. To put it simply,a returnee does not become more engaged than the non-resident as a matter of definition. All this justifies aclose focus on the return process and its manyramifications before and after the event of return.The article is thus broadly divided into the followingthree parts with smaller sub-sections:1. The first part attempts to explore the strategicallyand emotionally wrought issue of return, 2. The second would try to chart the more prosaic andpractical issues that routinely influence the decision toreturn to India, in the context of a knowledge worker. 3. A third segment would examine how the return migrantsreconstruct their lives in India after return.

Numerous conversations with returnees in India repeatedlyconfirmed that they often come back as profoundlytransformed individuals only to find that even India hastaken several strides during their absence and is nolonger quite the same old homeland of their childhood andyouth. Though the dual transformation indicated herewould to a great extent depend on the time gap and lifestages, it is mostly serious enough to rid the word‘return’ of its pristine literalness. There is thus avery good basis to ask the somewhat overstated question –is the returnee entirely the same person who departed anddoes he return to the same India?

IMeanings of Return under scrutiny

Why does a migrant knowledge worker from India decide tocome back? What are the debates and questions that themigrants and their families go through before taking themajor decision in life? Finally, especially in cases whennon-resident migrants seem to visibly invest a greatamount of engagement or energy towards India, one mayalso ask – ‘with such deep concern for India, why aren’tyou coming back’? And the inevitable ‘why have you comeback’, when a migrant does decide to come back! All suchqueries cut across the purely personal into matters morepublic, involving the dynamics of the global job markets,the migrant’s civic engagement at the host and the homecountry, the identity dynamics and their overall impacton the professional and personal decisions that may ormay not meld with the wider process of India’sdevelopment. The simple and old-fashioned words ‘home’and ‘belonging’ of course, never cease to peek frombehind the grander constructs like ‘civic engagement’ and‘identity’, lending them the energy of lived experience.As the protagonist in ‘Memory Remains’, a thinly veiledautobiographical novel by Karhade [2008] admits ‘...I

decided to come back to India because I was going tohave kids but didn’t want to raise them in the US.’Mulherkar, a returnee in her memoir “Back to thePavilion’ says ‘I was thankful that I was going back homewhere I didn’t have to be an ‘alien’ or a ‘non-resident’citizen, or be confused or ambiguous about commonplacequestions like where are you from?’ Kelkar, the editor ofa volume of essays titled ‘The Salmons of Narmada’, useda very awkwardly un-English though affectionate phrase‘nest returned Indians’ as the book’s subtitle, preciselyto emphasize the cosy sensation of homecoming! To begin with, quite incredibly, the simple word ‘return’in the light of the narratives collected in the fieldfrom return migrants in the cities of Pune, Hyderabad andBangalore in 2013-14 would seem to acquire the flavour ofenormous complexity. ‘Return’, whether voluntary orinvoluntary is a theme that plays a near mythic role inthe lives of the migrant, including the knowledgeworkers. Just like departure, the defining experience atan earlier stage of life, the possibility and thedesirability of return sits on the migrant’s mentalhorizon as an ever present beacon, even when the migrantstays back forever. The perceptions on return may rangebetween a sweet dream and a trauma depending on whetherit turns out to be a voluntary act or an unavoidablecompulsion. Missing home however dearly or eventragically, may paradoxically allow a migrant to carry onabroad with a greater sense of meaning and worth bycreating nostalgic emotional buffers! This becameapparent from numerous conversations where the returneesrecollected the essential weekly ritual as a highlightfrom their years abroad - that of getting together withother Indians on weekends and expressing the serious orthe non-serious desire to return. Narayan in her memoir‘Return to India’ [2012] starts her description of onesuch night with ‘After a few drinks, the conversationturned, as it always did [emphasis added], to the return toIndia question’.

Additionally, a migrant may plan endlessly to return toIndia without success, another one may come back open tothe possibility of yet another departure. During thefield work for the project the very first intervieweeAtul, a 46 year old software engineer from Pune who cameback to India in 2007 after twelve years in the US,admitted glumly that he is returning to the US after afive year stay in India. According to him, for someone athome in the Bay Area of California, the Indian investmentclimate was simply not good enough, even though he wassatisfied with the talent available locally. At his age,he said he would make a last stab at founding a start upand see it grow, having sold two successive companiesfounded by him in the past. As for feeling professionallyat home, it is the Bay Area in California where heclaimed to belong – anywhere else in the US would be aforeign land to him. Similarly, Patil in hisautobiographical account says – ‘I was born in Sangli,lived in Mumbai for fifteen years, and now I stay inPune. But if you were to ask me to name my native place,I would say “Bay area”. Without hesitation’! A researcherinured in methodological nationalism would be veryuncomfortable hearing this, accustomed as she would be tothinking of places as territorially defined countries. Acomplementary thought – imagine a knowledge worker comeback from Europe to India, but not to his home town ornot even his home state! How fulsome should this returnbe regarded? Or is one to completely ignore or maskinternal migration while speaking of transnationalmigration? Is such discreetness justifiabletheoretically?Several other similar instances encountered during field-work take the feeling of finality out of the word‘return’, which unlike the word departure seems to betwo-ended, threatening to empty itself of any meaning. Orshould one invent an oxymoron of a neologism – re-return?Which is perhaps why, it would seem in retrospect, someof the interviewees such as the Gholap couple from Pune,who run two biotech firms in the USA and India, saw no

meaning in the word ‘return’ and took pains to arguetheir point, a quibble that seemed rather trifling duringthe interview process. They claimed with considerableangst that there is only coming and going in life,depending on where business or work is located. Thecouple were reacting to an anthology titled evocatively‘The Salmons of Narmada’, a collection of personal essaysby twenty five return migrants from Maharashtra aroundthe experience of return. The editor of the volumeBhushan Kelkar never forgot his visit to Alaska in theUS, where he witnessed the genetically hardwired journeyof the salmon back to the mountain springs. He used theRiver Narmada as a metaphor and a myth suited toMaharashtra. After coming back to India in 2000s, he gottogether a panel of 26 prominent returnees of Maharashtraorigin and created a chorus of voices, an anthology ofbrief memoirs that subtly but persistently invite theknowledge worker migrant to come back to India. Is therea tacit implication here that you contribute more or atleast more easily to India by coming back? Such queriesof course are of more than semantic significance.

Return of the knowledge worker: a matter of ‘surplusengagement?’

Kelkar, the editor of above-mentioned volume and severalother contributors in their accounts see a clear need andpossibility for contributing substantially to thedifferent aspects of India’s development ranging betweenfinancial investment to fields like education,agriculture, entrepreneurship, scientific research andindustry. Very often these accounts reflect a sense ofowing as if the sense of civic engagement in the case ofthe return migrant must come with a particularly andabnormally heightened zeal, distinguishing the migrantfrom the ‘normal’ resident citizens unable to rise abovethe workaday concerns. In such cases the return migrantsand the anthropologist at work may complicitly and

tacitly arrived at the idea of ‘surplus engagement’ – aclaim that the migrant and the return migrant inparticular is instilled with a higher level of engagementthan the resident Indian. Such are the hazards of doingfield work among the knowledge workers who often takeconversations beyond the level of confessional narrative,at times even threatening to adopt an argumentativerather than a narrative stance! As a methodologicalaside, one may add that the researcher in such instancesneeds to look at the ‘surplus engagement’ as no more thana claim to be confirmed on the basis of evidence. While the phrase ‘surplus engagement’ may convey emotiveplenitude or extra zeal, this cannot be the ground forascribing greater engagement among the return workers,since it remains to be examined how the rhetorical zealtranslates into action. The question also is what kind ofaction, indeed. Further, can one assume that civic zealwould necessarily have a positive impact on the largerdevelopmental issues, or can patriotic fervour end upwith negative impact as well? The continuing contributionof the non-resident Indians to the growth of viciouslycommunal and anti-democratic Hindutva politics in Indiais perhaps the most profound and enduring example[Nussbaum 2003].Coming back to the variety among return migrants however,there are notably also those who remain open to goingback, leaving their options open. In several instances,the informants only dwelled on career plans, stages oflife cycle and family journeys with no reference tobroader issues of civic engagement. On occasions when theinterviewer explicitly brought up the issues ofengagement and development, some of the responses, unlikeKelkar’s, seemed strikingly lukewarm, often made apparentthrough grumblings over the daily discomforts and chaosthat return to India entails. In such cases, it was infact the ‘deficit’ rather than the ‘surplus’ that seemedmore striking, as the return migrants despite theirwealth, privilege and professional abilities seemed to

look at themselves as the sullen victims rather than theoptimistic reformers of the system. Equally strikingly though, even in the most dismal cases,the interviewees did not fail to mention along with theirfrustrations, the concrete contributions made by them tothe stock of knowledge and expertise in India. Gupte, nowin his early seventies and ailing, recounted how he waspart of the earliest drive for computerization in Indiain Mumbai of the 1970s, working on the punch card formatfor generating consumer bills over the early computersfor the Bombay Electrical Company, a government concern.Gupte had little trouble in admitting that he is in Indiaentirely due to his wife and that even after threedecades he still misses on daily basis the civic orderand common decency he observed in Scotland. So shouldone hesitate to juxtapose or link the ‘patriotic deficit’with the solid contribution made by Gupte in terms ofknow how! It would thus seem that in the case of knowledge workers,in particular the highly skilled ones, the returnmigration and the development processes link up in themost meandering and entangled ways. To put the same thingas a paradox, it is not unlikely that the return migrantmost tacit on issues of civic engagement and developmentmight end up making a greater contribution to growth anddevelopment than the ones who voice explicit developmentideologies? All this is meant to demonstrate that in thecontext of the knowledge worker, even though the wire ofreturn cannot be directly plugged into development, itsenergies do often end up contributing to the nation’sgrowth and development. But this may be happening inmyriad ways difficult or even impossible to systematizeinto a ‘theory’ of return migration.

Linking return with development: ‘Development bydefault!’

The question one may thus begin to ask is if one claimsdirect or indirect linkages between the migrants,remittances and development at the level of largercollectivities, can such links be mapped precisely todetect standard patterns in the context of individuallife histories? Notably, even among the knowledge workersinterviewed, a great variety and hierarchies of knowhowwere found – those who come back for retirement orsemiretirement, those who take up salaried jobs, thosewho come home to start full-fledged businesses, and thosewho get involved in start-ups as entrepreneurs orinvestors. Even among the salaried, there seemed a cleardifference among those who worked in R&D set ups and onesresigned to performing more routine work. Among the‘angel’ investors similarly, some seemed definitely moreintent on investing in the social sector, while othershad clear preference for innovative service or productdevelopment with purely business considerations. Partlyshaped by professional stances, by personal convictionand ideology, the professionals seemed to have divergentviews on the very idea of development, despite somecommon grounds. Is it possible to speak of this greatvariety within the knowledge worker category in onebreath and generalize?And yet, the fact is during the interviews, far too manyof the autobiographical narratives seem to spontaneouslylead to developmental themes, surprising the researchertime and again. This happened with sufficient frequencyfor the researcher to wonder if he should ask anadditional question – under what circumstances are returnmigration of knowledge workers and development notrelated? This is not just a rhetorical flourish as itjust might makes perfect sense in the context ofknowledge workers or even skilled professionals, who arewont to disseminate their knowledge and skills just bythe virtue of their presence in India. This is not todeny that some forms of dissemination and learning aremore effective than others, especially among thosereturnees who regard such dissemination as their

pedagogical mission. Returned knowledge workers couldmake a serious difference in the highly intangible butvital aspect such as work culture of a company. A goodexample may be that of Dr Pranati from Hyderabad whoadmitted that her stint as a medicine student andphysician in UK converted her from a disease-basedapproach to medical treatment to a patient-based one, afundamental philosophical shift in professional stanceand not just piecemeal learning that she also tries toimpart and implement at her workplace. As the researcher’s conversations with over 70 informantscame to a close, it seemed reasonable to toy with theidea of ‘development by default’, where the very fact ofthe knowledge worker’s presence in India seemed tocontribute to development in numerous tangible andintangible ways. At least from a policy viewpoint it mayseem unimportant to pinpoint the precise process of suchcontributions. Add to this the often consciouslyarticulated and implemented schemes and pathways fordevelopment suggested by the informants that are far frombeing ‘default’ and closer to the conventional idea ofdevelopment as a consciously implemented plan rather thanan impulse or an unintended consequence of actions. Much of the ambiguity and confusion in connecting thethreads of migration, various forms of remittances anddevelopment may in fact be caused by the conceptualdistinction between growth and development, a distinctionthat is acknowledged to be inherently debatable. In aspecific instance for example, one person’s developmentmay be another person’s growth and no more, and also viceversa. It occurred to the researcher that instead ofprompt decision on the matter, it is more useful to posita ‘growth-development’ continuum [cum disconnect?] as arough and ready touchstone for the assessment of themigrant’s contributions. Whether a specific migrant’spersonal and professional decisions and actions find aplace in the terrain of growth-development continuum isafter all is a somewhat easier matter to resolve than to

judge his contribution to development as such. Thepurpose of such a conceptual strategy is not to escapethe unavoidably complex and contested idea ofdevelopment. The intent here is to assess the impact ofthe returnee knowledge workers in a fulsome manner beforegetting entangled inexorably in the wider and notoriouslycomplex philosophical issues around the idea ofdevelopment. In order to begin answering all such questions in aspecific context, one thus needs to look at the returnexperience in its empirical details rather than simply asa vivid image of a plane coming to land at a runway onthe home territory.

IIMigrant life-cycles: Calendars and choreographed

decisions

This section will dwell on the mundane and the practicalissues of individual and family life cycles with crucialbearing on the return decision and present a calendar oflife stages in the career of the knowledge migrant. Thisbrief section also aims at justifying the use of theloaded phrase ‘strategic lives’ from the title for thispaper. The phrase is borrowed from a returnee friend, ascientist based at one of the premier researchinstitutions in Bangalore not interviewed formally due toclose personal relations. During a conversation aroundthe return decisions of the Indian migrant, at some pointthe scientist friend interjected with ‘oh, the strategicchild’ as he threw up his hands in disgust. The friend inquestion saw the Indian knowledge worker’s routinepathways as clichés he consciously avoided in his owncareer. He explained that Indian migrants often time thebirth of their children to ensure they are born on theAmerican soil and automatically become American citizens,even if the parents may soon have to come back to India –

the scientist admitted that he found the reproductiveforesight morally repulsive and used the word ‘strategic’with sarcasm! The title of the paper is however innocentof the derisive and hostile irony intended by thescientist and may even be empathetic to some extent. To explain matters further in a different vein, asurprisingly large number of interviewees used thestrategic phrase ‘small window of opportunity’ whilediscussing their decision to return. This ‘small window’,clearly a stock phrase, has a very simple meaning – if amigrant family has to return, it must be done before thechildren are too old. ‘Strategic’ would thus in thepresent context should be taken to mean what may seemexcessive, over-cautious or over-meticulous planning. Infact, several interviewees came up with their own storiesof how a particular couple had to go back to the USAafter a child failed to adjust to the new conditions inIndia. The age of ‘returnable’ children is defined veryprecisely and the consensus was the age of twelve, when achild is supposedly still open to displacement, as theabsolute upper limit. Of course, ideally a child shouldbe brought back to India at the age of a few months,ruling out any problems of adjustment altogether, butthen an early departure will notably not allow theparents to continue in the US long enough to create anoptimal bank balance. Thus the careful calculation toarrive at an optimal trade-off! However vital, thechildren are only one part of the story and the followingsection constructs a stereotype life cycle of a fictionalcharacter A, formulated on the basis of numerousconversations and written accounts available. ‘During the third year at a premier engineering collegein India, A starts working on the mandatory GRE and TOEFLand by the time he completes his graduate degree, he hasalready secured admission in an American university’sMasters/PhD Programme. He often manages to get aresearch/teaching assistantship during his secondsemester in the American university and even ends up with

savings by the time he is through with the Masters orPhD. He is promptly offered a well-paid job along with avisa in a good company in US where he goes through a fewsalary hikes before getting married. Typically, themarriage initiative is taken by the parents and relativesafter a decent bank balance is built or a house has beenbought. It is not uncommon for the wives to work if theycan get a permit but once a child is born, often thewife’s career is forever put on hold. As the couple getsanother child, it finds itself looking at the option ofreturn, if at all. As years pass and a green card or afull citizenship begins to loom, the couple begins toconsider return more seriously. In the meantime,properties may have been bought at home and abroad, ofcourse and the couple feels financially secure, evensated. A’s professional and family story must be seen againstthe backdrop of the strict regimen of visas imposed onhis likes by the USA and other governments. In the caseof the US, interviewees like A admitted to going throughhigh anxiety levels till they won their green cards,which is when they began to feel less vulnerable andcapable of enjoying their financial security to the full.During this phase, even the highly qualified migrant feltvery much at the mercy of the legal processes, despiteassurances from an employer who was neverthelessperceived to be in a menacingly strong bargainingposition. This phase could often be fairly prolonged anddictated the vital decisions taken by A. Quite likely amigrant couple like A and his wife begins to ‘strategize’its life in response to the insecurities and distresscaused by the long grind involving their legal and workstatus. Notably, if A had not gone abroad, he wouldperhaps not face similar levels of insecurity at home.Indeed, it is possible to claim that this may be thecrucial difference between life at home and abroad for awider variety of migrants, including intra-nationalmigrants, even if many often leave home due to distressand pressures of another kind.

To continue with A’s story, as his children grow up, asthe couple build up their savings, the parents at somepoint show serious signs of aging. Typically, the need togive children adequate exposure to India coincides withthe failing health of the aging parents. The idea is toestablish firm contact between the parents andgrandchildren. A has already reached a professionalstatus and recognition difficult to improve on and iswilling to move back to India for a less challenging jobor a lower salary. Even though A’s wife knows she willregret the loss of independence once she is back inIndia, her parents too are getting old and there is onegreat element of relief awaiting her at home - she looksforward to leaving a great part of domestic work to hiredhelp and driver in India and get time for other pursuits.She has now turned from a housewife into a home managerwith ample time for hobbies, if one may use a stereotype.Lastly, to take a leap in time, as the couple grow olderand the children complete school in India, as American orCanadian citizens they find it easy to go back asundergraduate students and continue their lives abroad.Whether they come back to India or not, according to amajority of the interviewees, remains an open questionand certainly not a part of life strategies.’

III

Returning to India: reconstructing India as limboThe earlier subsections in the article dwelled on thevariety within the returnee knowledge worker community,the differing motivations behind return and how thesedifferentiations become relevant to the questions aroundgrowth and development of the Indian society. A separatesection also spelled out the time table of residency in adeveloped country and return to India. In a sense thesemake what may be called the preface to the long tale ofreturn.

In order to further grasp the business and the meaningsof return, we may start with a widely shared joke fromthe lore of the Indian knowledge workers in the USA –‘the ‘X+1’ [or N+1] type of migrant’. This is a clichédjoke that may turn into an enduring myth soon. The humourhere is a black sort. X+1 are he or she who forever saysthey will return to India ‘next year’, but never do. Itis quite likely that this joke is aimed at the majorityof Indian migrants in the USA and elsewhere, who on theirway back to US after a vacation in India make promises totheir parents, friends and relatives to definitely returnhome the next year. But of course, the promise is made tooneself as well with varying degrees of resolve,including bad faith. This may also become a joke directedat oneself, in cases when a couple forever debates returnbut is unable to resolve the dilemma. Ajay Gupte, now inhis seventies put it graphically - his Indian friendsleft behind in Scotland say they are stuck in a ‘daldal[quicksand], strong language by any standards to describea lifetime, and too old to return. X+1 is thus atragicomic term drenched in pathos, depending on how theplan and the dream to return ends up eventually,especially in cases when the desire to return could beequated with the hapless sentiment of being irretrievablymired in the west. The X+1 category are most likely thefar larger category than those who do manage to return. Given that almost half of the 70 return migrants spokento in Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore admitted to feelingthe wrench of leaving US and other host countries, andnearly 80 per cent readily admitting to feelings ofnostalgia for the host country, the word ‘return’ becomeseven more complexed. If this is not enough, consider whatkind of homes the return migrants come back to and whatkind of schools their children attend. Above 80 per centof the interviews that took place at homes were in gatedcommunities. In some cases, when solicited for more namesand contacts for further interviews, the joke wasrepeatedly – ‘walk into any house in the neighbourhoodand you will find a return migrant’, a very tempting

proposition for an ethnographer worker more eager onquantity rather than quality. After numerous visits to a variety of gated communities,the researcher was left with the distinct impression thatthe return migrants have brought back their America,England, or Canada with them – they have rebuilt a ‘new’India suited to their new requirements. These elaboratemetaphors aim to capture the novelty and the ratherunique positioning of the return migrant in India – sheoften orchestrates a carefully worked out regimen ofcontact and insulation from the wider society at thethree major sites of his lifescape – work/office, home,and school. It is notable that several interviewees did admit thatlife has not changed much after returning to India or hasreally become even better with the ‘best of both’ [abroadand in India]. These were moments when the return migrantcandidly admitted his privileged station and situation inthe Indian society. Among all the interviewees, a merefour expressed strong feelings against the idea of livingin gated communities, but these were all invariablyprofessionals who inherited their capacious ancestralhomes. At least one top ranking professional emphasizedthe absurdity of coming back to India only to encloseoneself in a gated community where the children mightnever get an exposure to real India. Satyam, a topranking executive in a pharmaceutical company decided tolive in the old quarters of Hyderabad and commute 35 kms[one way] everyday rather than join a gated residencecomplex close to workplace. Unlike a normal home or an apartment building, a gatedcommunity looks for both – extreme insulation from thewider society, as well as a certain kind of self-sufficient autonomy of varying degrees. A close look athow a particular gated community in Hyderabad functionedrevealed that while physical insulation was a greatconcern, the administrative structure of the communityaimed at taking as much control of infrastructural

resources, civic amenities and other facilities aspossible. The housing community with 160 apartments wasthus in a position to guarantee physical security, watersupply from three different sources, non-stop electricalsupply, a club for the elders, an activity hub for thechildren, two tailors, a laundry, a permanent staff ofelectricians, plumbers and gardeners, a grocery forcasual shopping, orderly parking and a number of cleanersand attendants who kept up the premises spiffy. In brief,the residents only had their indoors to worry about. Thisis typically solved, according to several residents, withthe help of a driver cum factotum, a live in maid and acook cum cleaner. In the specific gated community inHyderabad studied in some detail, a head manager, hisassistant, an accountant and a clerk ran the affairs ofthe community with the efficiency of an office building.The staff of course took directions from a smallcommittee of elected members who change on annual basis. Similarly, it was found that more than fifty per cent ofthe interviewees among the sample send their children towhat are known as international schools. These areexpensive and well-equipped schools with a wide range offacilities, including the provision for an internationalbaccalaureate or senior Cambridge certificate. Thestudents in such schools often come from diversenationalities in an ambience that makes minimalreferences to the locale. In this they mimic the gatedcommunities and despite their high academic standards maybe termed as ‘gated schools’ aiming at a sense ofdistance and insulation from the chaotic world outside.So if you have a gated community called ‘Jaybheri SiliconCounty’, you also have a Greenwood High Internationalschool or even a MapleBear Canadian Pre-School inGottigere, Bangalore. This is highly ironic since nearlyall the returnees spoke rather passionately of theirdesire to see their children grow up in the midst ofIndian culture. There were a few exceptions of coursesuch as Vaishali who painstakingly sought out local but

offbeat schools with enlightened educational visions andmethods. Notably, almost as a rule the interviewees living ingated communities were not in their home towns and oftennot even in their home states. This is anothercomplication in the meaning of return – when aprofessional originally from Uttar Pradesh comes back toIndia to settle down in Bangalore. Can this be calledreturn at all? There is thus a clear linkage betweeninternal migration of knowledge workers in India andtheir transnational migration, an area barely exploreddespite a large body of work on labour circulation withinthe country.

The puzzle of the traffic obsession: out of the cocoonAt some point after completing around a dozenconversations, the researcher found himself confrontedwith a puzzle. The vehemence with which the returneescomplained about the traffic and the roads in India hadseemed quite natural initially, given the trafficconditions in Indian metropolises, larger cities and evensmall towns. But over time, the vehemence began to seemlike an obsession almost as if the chaotic traffic wasthe presiding national problem faced by India today. Infact towards the end of the fieldwork the researcher hadto check the transcripts to confirm if someone did notmention the traffic issue – the result was nil. It thuscertainly seemed the greatest irritant to the returnmigrant. The perception was reaffirmed further as thevenue of field work shifted from Pune to Hyderabad andthen to Bangalore. Traffic chaos came to acquire anoverarchingly symbolic significance, representing all thegreat and small inconveniences associated with civicamenities in Indian cities. In the end it occurred thatalmost all the returnees spoken to had made sure to bringup the traffic issue during the conversations. This wasindeed a puzzle to be made sense of.

A simple way to understand the obsession may be to takeit as a case of primal insecurity about movement of thebody and basic physical unease with congestion andchaotic herd behaviour in a densely populated countrylike India, and leave matters at that. But one needs toremember that unlike the majority, the inmates of thegated community tend to systematically insulatethemselves from all possible inconveniences at workplace,home and school, the three strategic sites in life andperhaps the only arena where they continue to unavoidablyrub shoulders with the unruly commoner in the streets.Chaotic traffic thus creates unusual fears and unhygienicsights like spitting and urinating on the roads, all ofwhich are quite common practices in India justifiablyseen as a menace by the gated resident. In brief, thetraffic seems to be the big gap in lives that have beenmade exceptionally, even overly orderly and safe byIndian standards. If only the roads got safer, lifewould be perfect! But if that were the case, there wouldperhaps be no need to live a life under siege in a gatedcommunity. Traffic chaos thus becomes a powerful metaphorfor the daily disorder of Indian life and the rest ofIndia.

Gated existence: assertion of model living or retreatfrom outer world?

There is a great deal of irony in the fact that eventhough the world of the knowledge worker seemssystematically insulated from the chaos of Indian life,this disengagement can only be understood in conjunctionwith the returnee’s seminal engagement in the processesof growth and development in the country. This supposedlydeep ambivalence needs a more elaborate description andexplanation. While the gated existence substantiates to agreat extent the claim of insulation, we need to brieflyrecount a few prominent pathways through which thereturnees seem to connect and contribute vitally with the

processes of growth and development in the Indiansociety. Although the main focus of the article is not the returnmigrant’s overall impact on the growth and development inIndia, the question cannot be ignored and must bediscussed at least synoptically if one has to appreciatethe meaning of ‘return’ in all its complexities. The longconversations with over 60 returnees made it clear thatas a social group their contributions to the knowledgeand skill economy seemed impressive in both senses – interms of what they contributed directly at their workplaces and also in a broader social sense. Unlike thebusiness community who mostly make philanthropiccontributions, the knowledge workers go far beyond[Bondre 2013]. The varied contributions at theprofessional level ranged from investing in and ideatingover new enterprises, start-ups, vital technology inputsinto the Indian workplace, inception of efficient andopen work culture, and upgrading of the workplace tointernational industry standards. A good measure of thesetangible and intangible contributions is the over 100incubation centres all over the country that are oftenmanned by returnees. Of course, the very idea of theincubation is an import from the developed world.‘Incubation centre’, a trade jargon means hubs orclusters of start-ups where entrepreneurs with newtechnology ideas are provided infrastructure andmentoring at affordable rates. The expectation here isthat they would soon develop products with steady demandand turn into successful companies. For example, it wasfound that Hyderabad alone has above 8 incubation centresfunded by the government and private agencies. While theprivate agencies such as multinationals tend to guardtheir patents jealously, the government and cooperativeagencies like the Indian Institutes of Technology orIndian Institutes of Management leave the entrepreneursfree to move out as going concerns with independentstatus. Despite some issues and limitations, such

processes would indisputably seem to belong to the verycore of development, not to mention economic growth. None of this may have been possible without the tangibleand intangible inputs the returnee brings from thedeveloped world. The cumulative impact of such inputsthrough the decades is difficult to underestimate and onecan only take recourse to piecemeal case studies. Theearly history of CMC takes us back to what may be termedthe prehistory of computer revolution in India. Itillustrates the point very vividly - according to Gupta,an early MBA from UK in the 1960’s and an informant inhis mid-80s, Computer Maintenance Corporation [CMC], apioneering company founded by the Indian government in1978 was staffed mostly by foreign-returned personnelmany of whom were employed by IBM, and left it afterIBM’s decision to withdraw its operations from India. At the domestic level, the returnees were found to paybetter wages [often twice as much or more than theprevalent rates] for workers and maids in the gatedcommunities, providing them with funds for medicalinsurance and education of children. This clearly impliesprofound democratization of work culture even among themanual labour that is often semiliterate or illiterate.Even though the ethnographic work done in the cities ofPune, Hyderabad and Bangalore do not allow a broadergeneralization, the fact remains that without exceptionthe returnee migrants interviewed seemed to makedramatically or even disproportionately high levels ofcontribution to the Indian knowledge pool.

Conclusion and Discussion

Metaphors like ‘limbo’ and ‘cocoon’ stand far apartsemantically and etymologically and are not used togethercommonly. But they must be used here as near synonyms totypify the lifestyles and life-stances of the returnmigrant to serve a specific purpose – the idea is to

bring out the precise nature of civic engagement of thereturnees in India in all its structural depth. How thesoftware industry and the Indian middle class are‘mutually imbricated’ has been explored in an earlierstudy [Upadhya 2006]. Indeed, it would seem that in thelight of the overall contributions made by the returneesand their lifestyles, they seem to engage with theircountry through a carefully orchestrated scheme ofengagement and non-engagement, involvement andinsulation, and commitments and disavowal. In brief, evenif it seems paradoxical, the return migrant seems toengage with India through a zigzag stratagem of removaland distancing and not a straightforward one-way returnto the home country. Such strategic manoeuvring takes agreat degree of resilience and foresight, of course! The strategy of combining extreme insulation with highlevels of engagement has its own existential andpsychological hazards. It is quite capable of making asubject feel simultaneously as the privileged and thevictim – in fact a large number of conversations seem toimply such angst-ridden self-perception. This is wherethe basic philosophical predicament of the returneeknowledge worker may seem to merge with that of anyentrepreneur in India. A typical Indian entrepreneurknows no better and may have grown up to take thechallenges for granted. Though the situation differsamong the different states of India, the basic perceptionmay be that the Indian political and economic system is amassive constraint rather than a channel of opportunitiesthat one cannot fight frontally and yet ‘heroic’ effortsat growth and development must carry on against all odds.To simplify, perhaps oversimplify the point further – howwould it feel if a foreign land eagerly valued andpampered your talents, whereas your own country seems toundervalue and discourage you? Are we now close to thefigure of a tragic hero who is given to broody despairand self-pity even in the midst of tough and forwardlooking executive action?

Such intense levels of ambivalence bring us to the latesttrend among the knowledge workers in India which cannotbe examined here – their massive participation in the2014 parliamentary elections in India as volunteers,propagandists, ‘war room’ operators, and contributors. Auseful question may illustrate the point - if an Indianwith American citizenship is able to influence a fewhundred or even a few thousand votes in India, does it orshould it make us question and reconsider our idea anddefinition of citizenship or should one just look awayfrom the reality? Such political processes may indeed goa long way in breaking or mitigating the privileged-victimhood double bind and hopefully lead to a majorchange in the returnee knowledge worker’s predicament andself-perception. The walls of the gated existence maycontinue but increasingly with many more exit and entrypoints, exposing the porous nature of the very ideas ofcitizenship and civic engagement in times to come. In the interim, one has to be content with how ShobhaNarayan in her prologue to ‘Return to India’ summarisesthe predicament:‘The problem for immigrants like me is that we areequally at ease in two disparate cultures and therefore,fit into neither. We belong to both countries, yet chooseneither. Most of us end up in a no-man’s-land, neitherhere nor there, in an angst-filled limbo.’ Ironically thus the decision to return to India may oftenbegin to take shape only after the relevant papers forunrestricted residency or citizenship in a developednation have been already acquired. Return to India, nowseen as a luxury of the will suddenly becomes aproposition to ponder!

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