Table of Contents for Boats in a Storm
Introduction: Boats in a Storm
The Introduction outlines how labor, credit, capital, and trade networks between South and Southeast Asia unraveled following the military occupations and the threat of attack by Japanese forces during the Second World War. Drawing from the archives of law in India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Singapore, it emphasizes a shift from citizenship claims to jurisdictional claims in ordinary migrants' postwar legal disputes. It offers an alternative perspective on citizenship and decolonization, centering on wartime displacements, which unfold in a series of seemingly ordinary encounters with taxation, immigration, and detention regimes across new national borders.
1.1942
In 1942, as Japanese forces occupied Southeast Asia and threatened to attack India and Sri Lanka, people abandoned coastal towns and cities around the eastern Indian Ocean for the relative safety of villages in the hinterland, many arriving as evacuees and refugees in Madras in South India. Ongoing negotiations on immigration control between India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya had been abandoned because of the war. After the war, there were no agreements in place for travel, movement, and residence between these colonies. Taking advantage of this uncertainty, some political parties in Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya, which had portrayed migrants as outsiders stealing jobs, market shares, and land from locals, argued that migrant laborers and financiers who had fled during the war should not be allowed to return.
2.Banana Money
Struggling to recover from galloping inflation during the war, postwar economies in South and Southeast Asia teetered on the brink of collapse. Business communities who traded between India, Ceylon, Burma, and Malaya, notably the Nattukottai Chettiars, who lent money and owned mills, mines, and plantations, dealt with the aftereffects of demonetization of "banana money"—currency circulated by the Japanese occupation—in the form of legal disputes that affected debt recoveries, property transactions, and land ownership. This roused the suspicion and resentment of governments that were already skeptical about the place of foreign-owned business in postwar national economies, leading them to claim that there was a flight of "refugee capital" out of Burma. Ordinary people, laborers, small shopkeepers, and plantation workers, whose meager earnings or small plots of land might have been pledged as collateral to these moneylenders, were also affected.
3.Partnership Deeds
Postwar restrictions on travel and land ownership made it difficult for Chettiars to return to Burma to claim the rest of their fortunes. India redesigned its income tax regimes to claim that Chettiars' remittances to India of money they had acquired in Burma were subject to taxation in India. Although the Chettiars' customary familial and commercial practices kept their Burma transactions tied to India, they argued during income tax litigation that these customary ties did not mean that the money should be subject to Indian taxation. Chettiar firms in Burma and Malaya also attempted to show governments that they were integral to postwar economies and should be allowed to return. They were unsuccessful in the face of rising nationalist sentiments: their wartime displacements were held against them, their landholdings were nationalized, and the Chettiars were left holding worthless title deeds that had once represented their fortunes in Burma and Ceylon.
4.Application Forms
Postwar governments wielded paperwork as a threat. The demand for paperwork to establish ties to adopted homes was an enormous burden, particularly on migrant laborers. During the adjudication of naturalization applications filed by plantation laborers in Ceylon, remittance forms, property deeds, letters to loved ones, and travel tickets were used as adverse evidence. As these pieces of paper crossed the border between India and Ceylon, their value changed, posing two different types of threats in the two new nation-states of India and Ceylon. These fragile pieces of paper separated families who had lived across India and Ceylon.
5.Women Who Wait
Traders who fled from Ceylon to their hometowns in South India during the war in 1942 because of fears of Japanese air attacks later found themselves having to answer the question "Where were you in 1942?" in the context of taxation and immigration disputes. They were asked to show why the fact that their wives and children lived in India should not be construed as disloyalty. These disputes took place in a political climate that conflated race, religion, and ethnicity with territory. Migrant traders sought to prove that their sojourns in India were customary, but their now cross-national familial, marital, and kinship ties were used to exclude those who lived and worked in both India and Ceylon. The story of Katheesa Bi and Umbichi Haji overturns ideas of "women who wait, while men migrate" as well as notions of family, loyalty, and migration that undergird views of national citizenship.
6.Red Flags
Trade unionists, writers, and journalists became advocates for migrant rights when postwar nation-states mobilized legal regimes of banishment, exile, and deportation against migrants by labeling them communists and insurgents, setting a precedent for similar actions in the Cold War. This chapter follows the legal encounters of six dockworkers banished from Singapore and detained on arrival in India. Many of them were descendants of Indian indentured laborers who had been born in Malaya and were being sent back to a "home" that they had never seen. Drawing on habeas corpus applications that these dockworkers filed in the Madras High Court as well as letters that they wrote to their families and leaders of various political parties, the chapter shows how migrants navigated statelessness caused by deportation and exile based on racial grounds.
7.1962
In 1962, migrants were once again displaced from Rangoon and Burma, this time following a coup in which military forces under General Ne Win took over civilian government. Legislative measures were adopted to restrict remittances and to subject foreigners to increased surveillance, more documentary requirements, and higher tax rates. From this point, the chapter surveys the twenty years that elapsed after wartime displacements in 1942 and the outcomes of disputes involving taxation, immigration, and detention regimes. It looks at how citizenship as legal status in India, Burma/Myanmar, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, and Malaysia responded to the jurisdictional claims that were made in these cases. The Partition's aftereffects were felt not only in the territorial boundaries of the subcontinent but also in the jurisdictional borders between South and Southeast Asia, as Partition-era schemes were repurposed for "refugees" and "repatriates" from Burma and Ceylon in South India.
Conclusion: An Uneasy Calm
The year 1942, a time of major wartime displacements from Burma and Malaya, became a juridical marker, one to which nationality, immigration, and citizenship regimes continued to return during ordinary legal disputes between states and migrants. Migrants between South and Southeast Asia navigated a spectrum of legal statuses between citizenship and statelessness as they attempted to revive the rhythms and patterns of migrant life that had unraveled after wartime displacements. Decolonization unfolded as a political or diplomatic process, but also, by returning to wartime displacement and in the everyday lives of people, as a legal process. These processes generated legal temporalities that altered how decolonization was experienced in the lives of former migrants themselves. They continue to shape the lives of diasporic communities today.