New Delhi, Oct. 18 -- In a public conversation in Kolkata in 2010, writer and scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was asked if she would describe herself as a "cosmopolitan". To which, like any erudite Bengali public intellectual of her generation, she gave a fitting reply. "I fall into a place and I become of that place," Spivak said. "I feel sometimes, when someone asks me the question, that I have roots in air. I am at home everywhere and I am not at home anywhere. It seems to me when one is at home, the place where one is at home has no name."

In new-age jargon, this statement may sound like the very definition of "digital nomadism". But the instinct to be rootless and unhomed has a long, complex and intensely human history. As Aatish...