Book review: 'Boats in a Storm' by Kalyani Ramnath

I recently reviewed Kalyani Ramnath’s excellent Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962 for Contingent, a non-profit history magazine.

You can get her book here, and read my review here.

Fig. 1. Boats in a Storm by Kalyani Ramnath

Boats in a Storm tells the story of traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers who crisscrossed the Indian Ocean, trading, providing finance, and looking for work. Ramnath’s book, set in the aftermath of the Second World War, provides insights into how the lives of ordinary people were affected as new nation-states emerged post-WWII. These states, in South and Southeast Asia, reconfigured their identity, negotiating boundaries and ideas of citizenship, with people stuck in limbo, “adrift in a sea of competing territorial and political claims.”

Ramnath has parsed “disputed income tax assessments, unfulfilled promissory notes, discarded foreign exchange remittance forms, and dismissed immigration appeals” to show how “migrants sought to reimagine their worlds in the aftermath of war, partitions, and displacement.” [p. 11-16]

One of the many striking things about this book is that it shows the gulf between the high politics of nation formation and decolonization and the daily lived realities of people who (post WWII, usually) had trouble accessing lands where they once lived, had familial ties to, or did business in.

Ramnath scoured archival material from India, Myanmar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom, and the United States to make her argument, looking for legal archival sources “that have not been sought or studied,” as I note. The author cautions readers against reading too much of the present against the history. However, one can’t help but draw parallels between the past and the present, given “the contemporary discourse on citizenship in India, questions around migration in South and Southeast Asia, and the status of refugees in the region” as I write in the review.

Fig. 2. The author’s review of my book review (source: Author’s social media)

A note on Contingent: The magazine is a great source for anyone interested in history - very broadly defined. The folks at Contingent do the good work of democratizing history - their ‘about’ page states that “history is for everyone,” “every way of doing history is worthwhile,” and “historians should be paid for their work.”

Some of my favorite Contingent articles include: how to write a biography, the Marvel TV show ‘What if…?’ and counterfactuals, a dentist who defrauded the U.S. government, and the need to go to archives. Check out their work, and consider writing for them - the editorial team is fantastic.