Kalyani Ramnath. Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962. Stanford University Press, 2023. 308 pp. Paperback $30.00.
What can income tax litigation cases, filed in South and Southeast Asian courts, tell us about citizenship, international law, and migration? As historian Kalyani Ramnath illustrated in her superbly researched book, Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962, “seemingly banal encounters with the law” shed considerable light on questions surrounding nationalism and decolonization.(p. 212)
Moving across archival repositories in India, Myanmar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Ramnath parsed “disputed income tax assessments, unfulfilled promissory notes, discarded foreign exchange remittance forms, and dismissed immigration appeals” to reveal how “migrants sought to reimagine their worlds in the aftermath of war, partitions, and displacement.”(p. 11-16)
As soon-to-be nation states navigated the convulsions wrought by the Second World War, stamped their sovereignty, and negotiated boundaries and ideas of citizenship, ordinary people who crisscrossed South and Southeast Asia found themselves stuck in limbo, adrift in a sea of competing territorial and political claims. In the book’s first chapter, Ramnath effectively deployed “oral histories, memoirs, and newspaper reports” to reveal how migrants and migration had to contend with varied emerging political projects that sought to reorganize, and in the process restrict movement and residency. The opening chapter skillfully set the tone for the rest of the book as we learn of what it meant to be shaped by, and equally important, to shape varying jurisdictional claims through the histories of people living in the region.(p. 20-50)
At the heart of Ramnath’s book are migrants who had to “navigate taxation, immigration, and detention regimes, charting new courses within meandering bureaucracies and confronting paperwork barriers, setting in motion legal processes that would last for decades.”(p. 53) Over the course of seven chapters, with an introduction and conclusion, Ramnath took the reader through stories of (former) migrants and their many interactions with administrative, legal, and political systems. In the second chapter, Ramnath highlighted the travails and legal cases of migrants seeking to return to postwar Burma and Malaya – economies decimated by war – from India noting how these cases symbolized a “whole host of postwar concerns, including the legality of wartime currency, the wartime fulfillment of contracts, and the intertwined legal issues of remittances and taxation.” In chapter three, Ramnath recounted how Chettiar firms (from the Chettinad region of India) in Southeast Asia found themselves buffeted between newly-revised laws around income tax (in the case of India) and newly-created laws restricting remittances (in the case of Burma).(p. 53-77)1
In the following two chapters, readers became more acquainted with the bureaucratic hurdles that ordinary migrants and laborers had to overcome through application forms for worker permits and passports, and in citizenship regimes that demanded documents and proof for familial attachments. In chapters six and seven, set primarily in India and Burma respectively, Ramnath sketched how nations that had just stepped into independence grappled with ambiguities around political ideologies. In the sixth chapter, Ramnath demonstrated how “postwar nation-states mobilized legal regimes of banishment and deportation to expel migrants, often labeling them “communists.”” In the following chapter, the author documented how Burma, from 1942 to 1962, saw an “intense political debate over the form of government and the relationship between majority and minority communities.”(p. 162-194)
An 1856 nautical chart of the Indian Ocean region, Hydrographic Office of the Admiralty, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The brief chapter summaries recounted before are a fraction of the author’s dogged focus on ordinary peoples’ histories set against the backdrop of a broader geopolitical context in South and Southeast Asia where nations ravaged by war sought to forge independent paths. It is crucial to underline here that Ramnath is aware of the limited attention that working people, whether manual laborers or dockworkers, have typically received in the historical accounts that focus on this region in the mid-twentieth century. The author noted that the chronicles of these people are often lost with time, with national governments or international organizations little interested in documenting and preserving their experiences. To remedy this issue, Ramnath reached deep into legal archival sources that have not been sought or studied.
In a podcast conversation on archival methods, Ramnath mentioned that she wanted to study the “hyper-local” and move her gaze upwards.2 She does exactly this to stunning effect in her book. In reading the story of Sayed Abdul Cader, a shopkeeper and trader, whose legal interactions with the Madras High Court on what remittances should (and shouldn’t) be counted as taxable income, one comes away with insights on how “families were constructed in [Indian] law,” distinctions between Hindu and Muslim familial arrangements, and how states reinterpreted familial ties as “political and economic attachments.”3 Through this “hyper-local” case, Ramnath provided a glimpse into how “negotiations over citizenship in postwar South and Southeast Asia, familial attachments were treated as evidence of economic ties and of political loyalty.” With a focus on the stories and struggles of ordinary migrants, and then zooming out to trace political and socio-economic upheavals across the Bay of Bengal, Ramnath bridged the gulf between the high politics of nation-formation and decolonization to the everyday lived realities of the region’s people.(p. 143-146)4
The notion that there existed a divide between what political elites proclaimed and what transpired on the ground in this period is not novel. In fact, as Ramnath documented, the gap between word and deed was clearly visible to people at the time. Compiling the many asks made of laborers who migrated from Burma to India, and India to Burma, the author recounted the observations of intelligence officers who were based out of the Rangoon (now Yangon) port, “Noting how refugees left for India with their meager possessions and “rolling tears,” one of the officers noted that the laborers’ inability to read made these regulations even more opaque, and a difficult journey even worse.”(p. 50)
As the author stated in the introduction, “the aspirations of political leaders receded into the background in the harsh light of migrants’ immediate attempts to navigate a world of new nation-states through taxation, immigration, and detention regimes.”(p. 17) In detailing the accounts of migrants and laborers and by focusing her gaze on their encounters with the legal system, Ramnath compels readers to revisit traditional historiographies of nationalism, citizenship, and decolonization set in South and Southeast Asia. Ramnath’s book is a solid addition to scholarship that looks from the bottom up and at the deep historical ties across South and Southeast Asia.5
Through stories and histories of everyday migrants and traders, Ramnath’s book helped break down simplistic configurations of unwieldy concepts like citizenship and jurisdictions. For instance, the author reminded readers that “political belonging in postwar South and Southeast Asia was, as it continues to be today, a spectrum, on which citizenship and statelessness were but two points.”(p. 11-13) Through her protagonists’ cross-border negotiations, Ramnath argued that these legal cases demonstrate that jurisdictional lines were carved not only in space but also across time.
A minor quibble a person, especially a non-specialist, might have with the book is that it is easy to become tangled up in legalese or under-appreciate the consequences of a migrant being labeled as a “immigrant” over an “evacuee” or “refugee” due to unfamiliarity with such concepts. Ramnath could have spent more space providing scene-setters for the more cumbersome concepts or legal terms that she deals with while still keeping the book and her arguments taut. This felt like a missed opportunity given the author’s remarkable abilities to have the reader familiarized with and concisely make her point on varied topics such as the circulation of Chettiars’ capital across South and Southeast Asia or the relationship between communist parties and the Government of India.(p. 75-165)
While Ramnath cautioned readers of her book by stating that a “straight line cannot – and arguably, should not – be drawn from 1942 to the present,” the author also noted that the insights one can draw from her work inform “debates on migration, citizenship, refugeedom and statelessness today.”(p. 18) Given the contemporary discourse on citizenship in India, questions around migration in South and Southeast Asia, and the status of refugees in the region, a reader would have to have blinders on to not draw parallels between the past and the present.6 What readers of Ramnath’s book can draw though is that they are reading an impressive work that analyzes previously unexamined archival material in three languages from across six countries to present a historical account of a region that accounted for a quarter of the world’s population at the time from the ground up. To do so in a work that richly demonstrates how questions such as what is a migrant’s relationship to a nation-state or what it means to be a citizen is extraordinary. Historian Pieter Geyl famously noted that history is “an argument without end.” Ramnath illustrates this with clarity and force in Boats in a Storm.
The Indian Ocean from the Sri Lankan coastline, Praveenshashika, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Chettiars, from the Chettinad region of Tamil Nadu, are a mercantile community that have set up flourishing trading and business enterprises across Southeast Asia. See: “Chettinad’s Legacy,” Frontline, accessed October 8, 2024, https://frontline.thehindu.com/arts-and-culture/heritage/article25547717.ece.
- Kalyani Ramnath on “Doing Archival Research,” Il-literate, An International Law Podcast with Aman Kumar, https://www.audacy.com/podcast/illiterate-an-international-law-podcast-with-aman-kumar-21f15/episodes/dr-kalyani-ramnath-on-doing-archival-research-33e38, 15:50 mins onwards.
- The city (Madras) is now called Chennai and is located in the southernmost state of India, Tamil Nadu. The city’s name changed in 1996.
- Also see this conversation between Ramnath and Sahana Ghosh where the author discusses new juridical borders around income tax and familial attachments: Ramnath and Ghosh, “Bordering and Partitioning in South Asia: A conversation between Kalyani Ramnath and Sahana Ghosh,” Parichay – The Blog, June 25, 2024, https://parichayteam.wordpress.com/2024/06/25/bordering-and-partitioning-in-south-asia-a-conversation-between-kalyani-ramnath-and-sahana-ghosh/.
- Recent examples of these two strands of scholarship include Raphaelle Khan and Taylor C. Sherman, “India and overseas Indians in Ceylon and Burma, 1946-1965: Experiments in Post-Imperial Sovereignty,” Modern Asian Studies 56, no. 4, (July 2022): 1153-82; Ornit Shani, “The People and the Making of India’s Constitution,” The Historical Journal (2022): 1-22; Kalathmika Natarajan, “The privilege of the Indian Passport (1947-1967): Caste, Class, and the Afterlives of Indenture in Indian Diplomacy,” Modern Asian Studies (2022): 1-30; Natarajan, “Entangled Citizens: The Afterlives of Empire in the Indian Citizenship Act, 1947-55,” in The Break-up of Greater Britain, (eds.) Stuart Ward and Christian Damm Pedersen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), 63-83.
- On migration and the status of refugees in the region: As per UN data, an “an estimated 23.6 million Southeast Asian migrants live outside their country of origin” see: ‘Migration data in South-eastern Asia,’ Migration Data Portal, May 31, 2023, https://www.migrationdataportal.org/regional-data-overview/south-eastern-asia#:~:text=An%20estimated%2023.6%20million%20Southeast,(UN%20DESA%2C%202020). South Asia is the sub-region with the “highest number of emigrants globally” at 43.4 million and migration within and from the sub-region is common with “an estimated 13.9 million international migrants” residing in the region, see: ‘Migration data in Southern Asia,’ Migration Data Portal, accessed on August 26, 2024, https://www.migrationdataportal.org/regional-data-overview/southern-asia#:~:text=Migration%20%E2%80%93%20both%20within%20and%20from,(UN%20DESA%2C%202020); The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates there are “16.9 million refugees, internally displaced persons and stateless people” in the Asia and Pacific region as of 2023. ‘Asia and the Pacific,’ UNHCR, accessed on August 26, 2024, https://www.unhcr.org/us/about-unhcr/where-we-work/asia-and-pacific; On the discourse on citizenship: Ramnath has engaged with this issue, see: Swati Chawla, Jessica Namakkal, Kalyani Ramnath, and Lydia Walker, “Who is a Citizen in Contemporary India?” Epicenter, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, February 11, 2020, https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/who-citizen-contemporary-india. It is interesting to note that the author revised her research material into this book as the Government of India was revising its citizenship legislation between 2018 and 2021: “5 Questions with Kalyani Ramnath,” South Asian Studies Council, Yale Macmillan Center, https://southasia.macmillan.yale.edu/news/5-questions-kalyani-ramnath-llm-10, July 10, 2024; Also see: Niraja Gopal Jayal, “Reinventing the Republic: Faith and Citizenship in India,” Studies in Indian Politics 10, no. 1 (2022): 14-30.
