Document Type
Book Review
Abstract
Kalyani Ramnath’s Boats in a Storm undertakes the formidable task of retelling the histories of decolonisation in India, Burma, Malaya, and Ceylon using characters who would rarely fit the description of conventional historical actors. Ramnath departs from the rich political and diplomatic histories that celebrate the independence of nation states from the yoke of imperial rule. Instead, she focuses on the ways in which these states, with their newly re-instituted legislative, juridical, and bureaucratic regimes, wreaked havoc on the lives of itinerant migrants who straddled between ‘homes’ and places of work across the Bay of Bengal and eastern Indian Ocean in the mid-twentieth century. Boats in a Storm illuminates how migrant bodies—stranded in the high seas by the decolonised nation states’ multiform technologies of self-determination—navigated their lives and negotiated their livelihoods via ‘seemingly banal’ encounters with the law.
DOI
10.55496/YZRW4773
Publication Date
2023
Recommended Citation
Ghosh A, ‘Book Review l Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942–1962 by Kalyani Ramnath (Stanford University Press 2023)’ (2023) 17 National Law School Journal 96
Journal
National Law School Journal
Included in
Asian History Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, International Law Commons, International Relations Commons, Legal History Commons, Migration Studies Commons