ABSTRACT
Recent South Asian scholarship has recognized processes of movement and circulation as integral to a full understanding of regional social, economic, and cultural histories, especially in the modern period, after the mid-eighteenth century. Markovits et al. have posited that the “totality of circulations occurring in a given society and their outcomes” define a kind of “circulatory regime” that varies over time and shapes society, “which can be seen as an ensemble of crisscrossing circulatory flows.”2 This study examines how processes of circulation have linked regions across the Indian Ocean, especially as circulatory regimes have been influenced and transformed by colonial and post-colonial dynamics. There has been an accumulating amount of research on social and political change among communities in Pashtun majority settlement territories, including the greater Peshawar valley and neighboring districts-a diverse region characterized by agrarian village economies, ethnic Pashtun/Pakhtun social dynamics, and a history of close involvement with sub-continental networks of politics, employment, and trade.3 This chapter introduces a larger, continuing study of the historic impact of circulation and emigration on select Pashtun communities and socio-cultural practices as residents left the Peshawar valley, often for decades or permanently, to pursue outside employment and opportunity. Over generations, Pashtuns in permanent or temporary diaspora were transformed by the range of possible social consequences as they circulated in the greater Indian Ocean region, variously experiencing degrees of assimilation, integration, ethnic self-awareness, and, increasingly, notions of “national” identity. For centuries in the second millennium of the common-era, Pashtuns traveled within the Indian sub-continent and greater Indian Ocean arenas.4 After c. 1775 Pashtuns circulating in northern India from both urban and rural settings moved increasingly in British imperial spheres. After 1947 Pashtuns sought opportunities
within a rapidly changing Pakistani urban environment and within the new nationstates left by departing empires. From the early 1970s Pashtun workers pursued livelihoods within a global economy transformed by the demand for Middle East energy resources. This chapter briefly traces these processes and uses the historical case study of particular districts within colonial and post-colonial South Asia to introduce questions about migration and globalization, including theories that have attempted to explain economic, social, and cultural changes and continuities observed in local villages, Pakistan, and the world during the late modern period, c. 1775-2000. This study is a preliminary statement contributing to wider interpretations of interregional history and to more difficult discussions of complex regional “Pashtun” identities and how they have, inevitably, undergone change over time.5
