‘Boats in a Storm’ by Kalyani Ramnath: Citizenship and belonging

The renewed focus on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the reworked citizenship legislation gives a sense of deja vu while reading Kalyani Ramnath’s assiduously researched book, ‘Boats in a Storm’.

The title borrows from Tamil novelist P Singaram’s two novels about World War II and its aftermath in South and Southeast Asia from the perspective of the migrants. The political climate of the 1940s and ’50s was similar: rising ethnonationalism, enforcing a restricted citizenship regime and the threat of an ‘ism’, in this case communism.

Ramnath adopts a unique perspective in narrating the storms that were caused in the lives of lakhs of Indian labourers, traders and moneylenders when labour and capital, till then freely circulating in the colonial British empire, suddenly acquired new boundaries with the emergence of the nation-states of India, Burma (Myanmar), Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia.

This book is an account of the alterations to the concept of citizenship and belonging that began with the records of the Madras High Court.

Ramnath, an LLM from Yale, among other loftier academic accomplishments, noticed that the case files from the 1940s and ’50s often dealt with loss of property, employment, trading connections or legal status in the aftermath of the Second World War. So, she began to trace their movement through these legal records, which went across the Indian Ocean to Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Singapore. Ramnath also travelled to these countries, as also delved into libraries across continents.

One has the impression that the Partition of 1947 in Punjab, Kashmir, Assam and Bengal was much bloodier. But what Indians today, especially in the north, will appreciate from this book is that the “other partition” in the east and the south due to the dissolution of the British empire, or decolonisation, upended many more lives over a larger geographical spread.

With the withdrawal of colonial administrations and the establishment of new nation-states in India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaya and elsewhere, Indians largely living there began facing obstacles to their claims of citizenship and property. They turned to the courts, in the process creating what Ramnath calls “a historian’s treasure trove of legal and administrative records”.

Most challenges were fruitless. Each chapter is based on a personal history. Some chronicled in the book fled Myanmar and Ceylon after the Japanese invasion and air raids, respectively. There are accounts of a few young men though born in Singapore but deported to Madras for communist leanings.

Through the legal cases and considerable legwork, Ramnath offers a glimpse of people and societies that is different from the impressions gleaned from books about diplomatic wrangling and military manoeuvring of the time in those regions. We learn, for example, of the immense wealth that the Chettiar community of Tamil Nadu had at that time in Burma. Nehru signed several pacts, many of them unhonoured, to alleviate their travails.

But, as the fate of the stateless Rohingya shows, and as any renewed focus on NRC and CAA will demonstrate, questions over belonging and loyalty will continue to bedevil the lives of people.

— The reviewer is a senior journalist