Kalyani Ramnath’s Boats in a Storm is a fascinating and minutely researched scholarly account of the consequences of post-war decolonisation. It examines how the rise of the new nation states of South and South-East Asia impacted the lives of Indian migrants: the “privileged” plutocracy and the marginalised labouring poor alike. The title of the book is inspired by the Tamil writer Pa. Singaram’s novel Puyalile Oru Thoni, which describes the travails of a Chettiar lad travelling from Madras to Medan and Malaya.

In many ways, Boats in a Storm is a companion volume to the historian Sunil Amrith’s magisterial Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (2013). While Amrith highlighted the making of a borderless world—one defined by the circular migration of capital and labour across the Bay of Bengal in response to colonial commercialisation and market forces—he also touched upon the disruptions caused by the Great Depression and the Second World War. Picking up from where Amrith left off, Ramnath focusses on the neglected post-Second World War scenario, the era of barriers that emerged between the 1940s and 1960s.

The narrative dwells at length on the period between 1942 and the 1960s, a time of intense political and economic upheaval. In the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of large parts of South-East Asia and the subsequent decolonisation, new nation states began to scrutinise, monitor, and review the status of immigrants. By labelling them “foreigners” and “outsiders”, these states prevented their re-entry into these countries and denied them any claim to citizenship. Ramnath attempts to reopen a history that is often submerged beneath the broader national histories of the time. She captures the struggles of migrants following the dissolution of “imperial labour, capital and trade networks”. This includes the “28 million journeys chartered between India, Burma, Ceylon and the Straits Settlements between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries”.

Drawing upon a wide range of archival and legal records and documents from Chennai, Colombo, Yangon, Singapore, Princeton, Cambridge, and London, Ramnath expertly captures the voices of migrants from across the social spectrum. These include plantation workers, manual labourers, peasants, small-time traders, conservancy workers, and the more influential merchants and moneylenders, especially the Nattukottai Chettiars, as they sought to navigate the post-World War entry barriers through a maze of legal and administrative hurdles and re-establish their claim to citizenship and residence before the newly emergent, ethno-nationalist states.

Some of the voices are more privileged than others, especially the influential and resourceful Nattukottai Chettiar banker moneylenders. This may well be owing to the greater availability of source material, records, and legal documents pertaining to the “privileged” financiers compared with the socially disadvantaged and often unlettered subalterns who lacked access to legal aid. Despite this unavoidable imbalance, this slender book of seven chapters deftly interweaves concepts and theories with a rich variety of data.

The opening chapter of the book is appropriately titled “1942”, the iconic year of disruption, dissonance, and destruction. It provides a snapshot of the life and conditions in Burma (now Myanmar) just before the Japanese overran the country, when fear and panic induced the exodus of thousands of migrants from Burma to India, some by ship but most others by a hazardous land route. Their attempts to return after the end of the war proved to be harrowing. Their absence was perceived as a sign of “disloyalty” and provided a convenient pretext to deny them residency.

The Chettiar crisis

Ramnath devotes two whole chapters to the problems faced by the Chettiars, both during and after the war. She details how they navigated an unfavourable and often hostile environment to safeguard their vast commercial and financial interests in Burma, Malaya (now Malaysia), Indochina, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Chapters 2 and 3, titled “Banana Money” and “Tax Receipts” respectively, stand out for their rich detail. They vividly capture the struggles of Chettiar bankers by focussing on the destabilising effects of the Japanese occupation—and the subsequent decolonisation—on their vital business interests in Burma, Singapore, and Malaya.

The Seethalakshmi Achi and Veerappa Chettiar case discussed in Chapter 3 highlights the problems caused by dealing with devalued Japanese occupation currency (known as “banana money”). It also examines the larger question of the breakdown of trust and the resulting friction between agents and their principals. This chapter also examines the problem of “double taxation” and the difficulties the Chettiars faced in remitting their capital back to India and of disposing of their immovable assets, especially their enormous landholdings.

This book is probably among the first to address the severe crisis that the Chettiar bankers faced in South-East Asia following the 1942 Japanese occupation and the rise of new nation states, which eventually led to the economic eclipse of this enterprising community. Hitherto, much of the literature has focussed on the quiescent pre-1930 expansion of Chettiar enterprise, rarely addressing the subsequent era of crisis and declining fortunes.

Nevertheless, some of the arguments that Ramnath advances with respect to Chettiar business in pre-war, wartime, and post-war Burma appear overstretched. That the Chettiars were heavy users of “banana money” and that “their wealth was all but wiped out” appears questionable, given that many of the Chettiar agents had shut shop and fled to India by 1942. The few that stayed back, it was said, virtually went underground to avoid having to deal with their debtors wishing to repay loans in the highly devalued “banana money”.

There is also barely any evidence in support of the argument that Chettiars advanced credit to the urban poor in Burma. Likewise the assertion that some of the Chettiar firms had moved operations to India specifically because of the separation of Burma from India in 1937. The firms in question, namely the Chettinad Corporation and the Chettinad Bank, had been promoted much earlier and were not the outcome of the separation. This was also the case with the Indian Overseas Bank founded by M.Ct.M. Chidambaram Chettiar. Likewise, the repatriation of Rs.3.25 crore from Burma to India on the eve of the Second World War is made out as a major outflow when, in fact, it represented, by a conservative estimate, no more than 4 per cent of their total investments in Burma.

Chapters 4 and 5, titled “Application Forms” and “Women who Wait” respectively, focus on Ceylon. These chapters narrate the trials and tribulations faced by plantation workers, as revealed by the case of Kandaswamy Muthiah, and small-time Muslim merchants such as Mohamed Ibrahim Saibo, Syed Abdul Cader, and Umbichi Haji. It details their struggles with the bureaucracy to establish their long-standing ties with the island and secure their rights to naturalisation despite their periodic sojourns to India.

Chapter 6, titled “Red Flags”, examines the paranoia surrounding the spread of communism, particularly among the working class, and the reluctance on the part of the new regimes to absorb them. Deportation was an easy way out of this conundrum.

The final chapter, titled “1962”, highlights the replacement of civilian rule by that of the military and the resultant regression, generally, of the policy direction with respect to the migrants, as revealed in increased surveillance and scrutiny, restrictions on migrants’ remittances, and escalation in income tax rates, all of which led to the second wave of displacement.

A wish list: It would have been enlightening to see more space devoted to migrant workers in the rubber plantations in Malaya or conservancy workers in Burma. Was their experience any different from Muthiah in Ceylon?

Despite these silences and a few misplaced assumptions about the Chettiars, Boats in a Storm is an outstanding work of scholarship. It is a major contribution to trans-regional and diasporic history, one that will undoubtedly find a wide and enduring audience. 

Raman Mahadevan is a Bengaluru-based economic and business historian.

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