Rootless, but Not Lost: An Academic Nomad’s Journey across India

Reflecting on migration, memory, and identity from Bihar, tracing the ache of never quite belonging.

I am an academic nomad, looking not for arrival, but for a place where I can simply belong.

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People often ask me where I am from. These days, the question has taken a new shape: "Where next?"

My wife asks gently, friends ask out of habit, and colleagues ask with the expectation of a neatly plotted academic trajectory. A university in Europe, perhaps? A think tank? A tenure-track dream? But the truth is, I don’t know.

Or maybe I do, but I don’t know how to say it without disappointing someone. My heart says: I am tired. I have been an academic nomad for as long as I can remember, moving across cities, institutions, fields of research, constantly searching for a place where the world makes a little more sense, and where I don’t have to explain myself quite so much.

When people ask “Where are you from”, I want to say Bihar. But then my mind hesitates, will they judge me? I've seen it in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Hyderabad: those subtle raised eyebrows, the awkward pauses, the mispronounced assumptions.

And yet, I have barely lived in Bihar. My parents passed away early. I left home after high school and have never truly rooted myself in any single state or city since. Siblings are the only reason I travel home. My memories of Bihar are not of daily life alone, but of essence, of language, of loss, of a landscape I carry in my bones.

Once, someone introduced me as a Lakhnavi. My heart recoiled: No, I am from Bihar. The moment surprised me. Perhaps we don’t always choose where we’re from; sometimes, the place chooses us.

Hyderabad and the Mirage of Belonging

Now living in Hyderabad, which people say is better for Muslims - more cosmopolitan, more “comfortable.” But even here, I often feel distant. Distant from communities, from rituals, from certainties.

We grew up waking up to bhajans echoing from a temple loudspeaker near the mosque. The call to maghrib prayer was often timed with the temple’s evening aarti. How can one forget that as a child, when that sound marked the unspoken deadline to run home from the playground, wipe the dust off your knees, and start your homework?

That was our Bihar: messy, mingled, and somehow deeply intimate. The sounds shared, the rhythms intertwined. I realise now that this intermingling feels less present. Perhaps it’s the times. Or perhaps I’ve lived too long in academic accommodation away from home, detached from the pulse of everyday modern metro life, unaware of how much the outside world has changed or hardened.

Today, I feel more like a cocktail of the whole country now. A child of movement, a citizen of in-between spaces.

And that’s what makes the question “Where next?” so heavy. Not because I don’t want to go, but because I’m no longer sure what “going” means. Is it just a different institution? A better postcode? Or is it something deeper, like finding a place where I no longer have to wear a version of myself?

The Silent Weight of Rootlessness

I often wonder how many others carry this same weight, those like me in academia, administration, media, and countless other fields, quietly navigating lives of movement and quiet dislocation.

And how can I forget those with even fewer privileges, the auto drivers, the street vendors, the daily-wage workers who leave behind small towns and familiar dialects to build lives in unfamiliar cities, surviving through sheer grit and hope that their children might one day know a gentler life. Then some have moved across borders.

I sometimes ask myself: are they truly happy, living far from friends, from the soil where their parents are buried or cremated, from the old homes that grow older without them? In a world that romanticises migration, how does one admit to longing? If they are content, that is a blessing. But if they are not, what must it feel like to quietly endure that ache, while the world offers applause, not understanding?

Stillness as the Next Chapter

I am an academic nomad, looking not for arrival, but for a place where I can simply belong.

There is a part of me that still yearns to move out. And yet, friends caution that even distant shores are not free of prejudice; that names and origins, no matter how far they travel, are still met with quiet suspicion. But I also long for stillness, to not live with one foot already stepping elsewhere.

Maybe that’s the next chapter, not a destination, but a season. One of the slower mornings, honest writing, less explaining, and more listening to what the heart wants when the world stops asking so many questions with so many prejudices. Until then, I remain rootless but not lost, weary but still walking.

In the end, I wonder, perhaps Bihar is not just a place, but a metaphor. A symbol for every child who grew up in a small town or village, trying to make a living, trying to find a home, forever caught between nostalgia and necessity.

For some, home offers everything a career, comfort, and community. For others, the less fortunate, the path leads away for longer, perhaps a lifetime, in search of dignity, if not for themselves, then for the next generation. And when do they return? Perhaps only to be buried or reduced to ashes if they’re fortunate enough. Will they find peace then, a home at last? Only God knows.

(Sharique Hassan Manazir is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Kautilya School of Public Policy, Hyderabad. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)