HT Picks; New Reads

Set against the tumult of the post-war period, Boats in a Storm illustrates how migrants experienced citizenship and decolonization

From the debris of imperial collapse

312pp, ₹699; Context (Unsettling the notion that static national identities emerged unblemished by the migrant past in the aftermath of empires.)

For more than a century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and labourers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set against the tumult of the post-war period, Boats in a Storm by Kalyani Ramnath centres on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization.

Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires.

Drawing on archival materials from India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, London, and Singapore, Kalyani Ramnath shows how decolonization was ultimately marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states assembled and ordered from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by these forgotten stories of wartime displacements, their unintended consequences, and long afterlives.*

*All copy from book flap.