Kalyani Ramnath’s “Boats in a Storm” begins with the author’s modest claim that this is “a history of citizenship and decolonization set in South and Southeast Asia, narrated through seemingly banal encounters with the law.”Footnote ¹ In fact, the book more than delivers on this promise and takes us on a multi-layered journey to uncovering the minutiae of legal life across India, Burma, Malaya, and Ceylon in the aftermath of World War II through a series of interconnected arguments underlined by rigorous multi-sited archival research. Two dates loom large in this story—1942 when Indian migrants fled the advancing Japanese and eventually 1962 when events in Burma made life impossible for its Indian diaspora, many of whom chose to leave in the face of new hostile citizenship laws. Stretching our temporal scope of the aftermath of displacement to these two decades means that while Partition and its historiography remains a silent referent throughout the book, the repercussions of the rupture of 1947 are shown to extend well beyond the borders, both real and historiographical, of Punjab and Bengal.

As the Japanese advanced into Southeast Asia, thousands of Indian laborers who had made their way to these regions as part of a circular migration of trade, labor and credit for over a century, began to flee for their lives. However, the decisions they made in 1942 would have enormous repercussions when the guns fell silent and the British departure from South Asia heralded an era of rapid decolonization in the region. As people tried to return to their former homes, Ramnath shows, most impressively through a close reading of citizenship applications found in the National Archives of Sri Lanka, these new nation-states keen to “perform their newly won sovereignty” would adjudicate their claims based on whether they felt these groups were “loyal” or not in 1942.Footnote ² Fleeing for safety to India was seen not as an act of prudence but a mark of disloyalty that could dent any future claims. After the War, with the onset of decolonization, a slew of new legislation defined the boundaries of citizenship in Malaya, Burma, and Ceylon. As they navigated their claims to legal belonging, their resistance to this exclusion unfolded in everyday litigation about property, inheritance, tax, and debt alongside actual citizenship applications through the lens and language of the forms they filled out in the tumultuous aftermath of the war. While colonial and post-colonial states labeled the displaced as “evacuees,” “migrants,” and “repatriates” and rarely as “refugees,” Ramnath argues that many of these were not “migrants” at all, but often long term residents whose status had been thrown into doubt.

This central argument in Boats is made possible by Ramnath’s methodology, which focusses on uncovering what she describes as “seemingly inconsequential” legal encounters. She argues that these familial and personal histories can help us tell a “people’s history” from the archives of law. Her deep engagement with archival cases then allows Ramnath to look at the circulation of labor, trade, capital, and even legal arguments across the eastern Indian Ocean while not falling prey to the often overly deterministic economic histories lens through which these connections have been studied. This comparative historical gaze then brings South and Southeast Asia into a singular lens in this work.

This shift began with Sugata Bose extending the territorial scope of South Asian history to include the Indian Ocean realm conceptualizing it as an inter-regional arena that was both simultaneously local and global.Footnote ³ His call to focus on this realm had been answered by Sunil Amrith’s path-breaking work on the movement of people, goods, and ideas across the eastern Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal.Footnote ⁴ Ramnath’s work enlarges this historiographical scope further by examining the ways in which the rupture of the Second World War did not bring an end to this circulation and the new ways in which the same migrants, picking up the fragments of their lives, resumed these journeys both literally and figuratively. In this, her work is reminiscent of Enseng Ho’s desire to study the way in which Inter-Asian connections were not just about one-off migrations but an example of “thick transregionalism” which provides us with an analytical and historical lens that makes these connections visible.Footnote ⁵

Boats in a Storm opens up two big questions for historians of migration and displacement in South Asia. By moving beyond the paradigm of Partition, Ramnath has made an important contribution to our understanding of how the diaspora’s presence disrupted the effort made by post-colonial states to neatly fit displaced people within new territorial boundaries. It forces us to ask how Indians who became “foreigners” could be understood alongside foreigners who were resident in India at the end of the War. Thousands of European refugees found a home in South Asia during and after the War, and their repatriation from the subcontinent coincided with the claim-making of Ramnath’s protagonists. Moreover, as Ramnath argued this claim-making is countered by the states by using “repatriation” as a form of deportation. Boats then opens up a productive space in which we can explore how our understanding of this broader South Asian diaspora can include not just the tangible exchange of people and money, but the more intangible exchange of ideas in the late colonial and early post-colonial period. If we heed Sana Aiyar’s call to examine the “sacred geography” of this region, we could further examine the rise of majoritarianism and exclusionary nationalism of not just territorialized nation-states but through an interconnected intellectual thread connecting this eastern oceanic littoral.Footnote ⁶