Perhaps best described as a transnational socio-legal history set in the Bay of Bengal, Kalyani Ramnath's Boats in a Storm chronicles the stories of people who found themselves stateless at a particularly turbulent moment in the histories of South and Southeast Asia. Like the titular boats in a storm, which, as Ramnath notes, was inspired by Tamil literary writing on migrant experiences set against the backdrop of war (p. x), lives strewn about by decolonisation form the book's focus. Boats in a Storm tells this story over seven chapters which span twenty years, beginning with the developments of 1942 and culminating in ‘the uneasy calm’ of 1962 (p. 210). The Introduction outlines the book's key contributions, methodological interventions, and emplots its place in the historiography of the eastern Indian Ocean world. The conclusion summarises the book's key arguments with a focus on their broader implications.
Whereas the field of Indian Ocean world history is dominated by perspectives on migration, settlement, or both, this book makes a major contribution by presenting a third perspective—of migrating without necessarily settling. It probes a context wherein empires were rapidly unravelling, hastening the formation of the post-independent state in South and Southeast Asia. Yet Ramnath subverts the expectation of statist biases by reconstructing from the archives ‘a peopled history’ that illuminates facets of human tragedy, enterprise, and resilience from the various forms of statelessness she examines (p. 7). Indeed, the migrant's experience is the beating heart of this history. Ramnath shows that neither mobility nor settlement during decolonisation necessarily brought the stability that migrants sought. Conversely, she argues that demonstrating loyalty became the unfair test of citizenship as the project of state formation necessitated forging citizens out of imperial subjects.
National loyalties, Ramnath argues, were thrown into question not only for migrants who had been exiled from their former homes or had opted to leave for safer shores during the Japanese Occupation years, but also for those who had stayed behind. Nation-states forged out of the remnants of empire frame decolonisation and independence as moments of great glory, hope, and liberation. However, Ramnath calls for a delinking between the two. For people who found themselves at the peripheries of nation-states waiting to be born, she demonstrates that the moment before independence was one of great uncertainty and upheaval. Ramnath's work thus decentres the nation even as it engages with the processes that brought it into existence. By focusing on the multiple human flows and patterns of circulation that the end of empire wrought across the Indian Ocean, she foregrounds the maritime world as the principal site of historical change (see Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, 2013; Dilip M. Menon, Nishat Zaidi, Simi Malhotra and Saarah Jappie, Ocean as Method Thinking with the Maritime, 2022).
While the book interrogates what happened when borders shifted and changed in unpredictable ways, it should be pointed out that some boats were in a better position to weather the storm than others. Among the boats were cruise ships and yachts. We are shown how, between the turbulent 1930s and ‘50s, members of the powerful South Indian business community, the Chettiars, fought against various disruptions to the capital and credit networks they had worked hard to establish. The stories of Raja Annamalai Chettiar, Meyyappan Chettiar and Ramanathan Chettiar populate the pages of chapters 2 and 3 (pp. 54–78). While these stories present a subset of misfortune that informs a layered perspective on displacement, the victims’ relative class and caste privilege should not be forgotten. The Chettiars could protest the loss of previously acquired wealth with connections and clout that their working-class counterparts did not have and could not claim. If they made it into the record at all, labouring migrants often disappear without a trace subsequently, as Ramnath herself notes (p. 36). Notwithstanding this archival bias that arises from the circumstances in question, chapter 5, ‘Women who Wait’, offers rare insights into the lives of women. By teasing out stories of families that were fragmented and displaced by decolonisation, Ramnath shows us how women, importantly including Muslim women, navigated the challenges that decolonisation presented for family life. The book thus fills a critical gap in the history of the Indian diaspora in Southeast Asia, which, with few exceptions, has been told largely from the perspective of men as migrants and settlers (see Arunima Datta, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya, 2020).
In 2019 the image of a Syrian toddler who had washed ashore on a Turkish beach sent waves of shock and sympathy rippling around the world. Alan Kurdi's tragic demise elicited a collective reckoning about humanity and borders. It prompted difficult but necessary questions about what makes one a refugee, a migrant, or, for that matter, a citizen. Set against the backdrop of different shores in a different time, this layered history of humanity caught up in the throes of decolonisation reads as a poignant reminder that this question remains as relevant today as it was in the not-too-distant past.
