e before colonialism came to build on and transform these earlier conceptions, and he sees these conceptions emerging from migration and pilgrimage. In both forms of movement, there is a constant circulation of persons, goods, and information connecting specific communities with the larger world. Migration and pilgrimage may seem like two very different sorts of movement, notes van der Veer, but they are more closely linked than it might seem, with one being secular and the other sacred:
Pilgrimage has always been closely linked to long-distance trading, to networks of commerce and finance, and therefore to political regimes. Migration, while governed by the rules of supply and demand in a labor market, is intimately connected to holy wars and other forms of religious expansion, to the spread of ideas (for example, in colonialism), and, most significantly, to the construction of a "public sphere" outside the homeland in which new forms of national and religious identity are imagined (van der Veer 108).
Much of what van der Veer has to say about the development of a more modern consciousness challenges prevailing views about nationalism, community, and religious fervor in Hindu society. For one thing, his view of migration and pilgrimage as a mass and continuous movement of people from one place to another flies in the face of the prevailing view that Indian society consisted of "autarkic villages" in which the people lived in independent, self-governing "village republics" challenged by the colonialism of the British, who removed larger state structures to allow the villages to develop and prosper. Van der Veer sees this as a myth, one that has become pervasive and that supports a number of theories of colonialism and imperialism. Van der Veer says that Indian society depends on its migration and abounds with stories of migration, as do Muslim nations (van der Veer 109).
Migration is discussed by van der Veer in terms o...