In Boats In A Storm: Law, Migration And Citizenship In Post-War Asia, Kalyani Ramnath, assistant professor at Columbia University’s department of history, provides deeply researched accounts of the legal struggles over citizenship following the end of World War II. In narrating this history as experienced by individuals and families, including traders, labourers and others who moved between South and Southeast Asia, the book reframes citizenship not only as a constitutional or legislative fact, but also as emerging from encounters that individuals had with the taxation, immigration and detention regimes of newly independent nation-states.
Ramnath, who studies legal history, histories of migration and displacement, and transnational history, was awarded by the Asian Law and Society Association in 2024 for the book, published first by Stanford University Press. It was also picked as one of the best history books of 2023 in History Today.
Indeed, questions of migration, belonging and citizenship that defined these accounts from mid-20th century Ceylon remain more than relevant today. Across South Asia and beyond, who “belongs” to a nation—and who gets excluded through law, paperwork or political design—continues to shape lives. For this reason, Ramnath’s narrative of ordinary men and women caught between states, borders and shifting definitions of nationality is especially resonant in present day India.
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Excerpt
MUTHIAH’S CITIZENSHIP APPLICATION
In 1942, Kandaswamy Muthiah gave up his hawking business in Kandupolle, a small town in Ceylon’s Central Province. Kandupolle, located in the heart of Ceylon’s plantation economy, was the highest elevation reached by the Ceylon Government Railway, nearly six thousand feet above sea level. Business was not good, and the threat of war loomed on the horizon. Muthiah had a new wife, Karuppayi, whom he had married that year, and he quickly realized that supporting his young family would require a stable income. He therefore found employment as a plantation laborer on the Pundaluoya Estate and by his own account quickly rose to become a kangany, an overseer and recruiting agent for plantation workers.
Five years later, in 1949, the war ended and Ceylon was granted independence from British rule. The new government, headed by the United National Party’s D. S. Senanayake, enthusiastically embarked on the project of nation building. Their tactics intentionally deepened schisms between the majority Sinhala and minority Tamil populations on the island, and new citizenship regimes were brought into force. Muthiah discovered that although he had lived, worked, married, and raised children in Ceylon, he was not eligible for citizenship under the new Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948, as he could not fulfill the requirements of Ceylonese nationality; instead, he was assumed to be of Indian origin. In 1949, a new law was passed—the Indian and Pakistani Residents (Citizenship) Act of 1949 (IPRA or “the 1949 Act”)—that provided an opportunity for plantation laborers like Muthiah to become citizens by registration if they met certain requirements. When Muthiah decided to file his citizenship application under the 1949 Act, he likely had no inkling of the legal struggles that were yet to come or foresaw that his fate would be determined by the most mundane form of paperwork: application forms.
Muthiah’s application to the Commission for the Registration of Indian and Pakistani Residents (and his subsequent appeal to Ceylon’s Supreme Court against the ruling of the deputy commissioner) was one of many hundreds of thousands of applications filed for naturalization by Ceylon’s Tamil-speaking plantation laborers. According to the commission’s reports, they received 237,000 applications on behalf of nearly 800,000 “Indian Tamils.” The Ceylon Workers’ Congress, the most prominent trade union in Ceylon’s plantation districts, offered resources, including legal representation at the commissioner’s inquiries, for plantation workers who would have otherwise been unable to access it. Muthiah’s appeal made it all the way to the Supreme Court, but most applications dismissed by the commission never made it that far. This chapter, then, draws largely upon the records held in the commissioner’s archive, for these laborers’ first and often only point of contact with the government was with the commission, not the courts.
The citizenship applications filled out by these laborers were forms that required applicants’ personal details such as places of “origin,” and along with these forms their application files included the notes of the investigating officers, the records of the commissioners who heard their cases at the preliminary stage, and the appeals (if any) to the Supreme Court of Ceylon. These applications were scrutinized by the Office of the Commissioner for Registration of Indian and Pakistani Residents; understaffed and unprepared to deal with the deluge of applications, investigating officers who staffed the bureau were pensioners, pulled back into government service in the postwar period. In 1953, branch offices were opened in Kandy, Matale, Gampola, Nuwara Eliya, Hatton, Bandarawala, Ratnapure, and Kegalle—all plantation districts, where the government expected the most applications to come from. This system was disorganized and inefficient: between 1951, when all applications were due, and 1961, when most of the applications had been adjudicated, numerous applications were mishandled or ignored. However, the officials often blamed applicants for their own mishandling of the documents. In many inquiries where the applicant was unsuccessful, officials informed families that it was because the paperwork was improperly filled out or because the documentary evidence that they had supplied was insufficient, unreliable, or even fraudulent.
MUTHIAH’S TRAVELS
By his own account, Muthiah had come to Ceylon from Madras in 1911, when he was five or six years old, with his parents and many others. During that period, many made the short but perilous journey across the Palk Strait to Ceylon’s coastal Mannar district, and from there to the tea plantations in Nuwara Eliya. Men and women from South India had been making these journeys since at least the mid-nineteenth century, when a plantation economy had been established in Ceylon, with coffee, then tea, as the main plantation crop. Although most of these laborers settled on the island without returning to their villages in India, they were still, in the 1940s, being viewed as “recent arrivals” when immigration and citizenship regimes began to be implemented.
These plantation laborers were often recruited by a kangany—an experienced laborer on a plantation who rose to be an overseer or a supervisor and went back to his or her village in Madras to recruit men and women to the tea, coffee, and rubber plantations in Ceylon. The plantation laborers were “free”—that is to say, there was no contract for indenture, nor were they enslaved. In theory, they could quit their employment with a month’s notice and return to their homes in India. Throughout the nineteenth century, historian Patrick Peebles notes, colonial officials framed Tamil-speaking plantation workers as “seasonal laborers” in government reports. They highlighted how different kangany-led migration was from the slavery and indentured migration that were prevalent in other parts of the British Empire—types of migration that entailed permanent stays on plantations. Unlike the indentured migration of Indian labor to Natal, Fiji, the British Caribbean, and beyond, it was presumed that the kangany-led migration to Ceylon, because of the proximity of the island to Indian shores, allowed laborers to maintain their links with their villages of origin.
This “import” of labor by plantation owners from South India had not gone unnoticed in political circles in Ceylon. Beginning in the early twentieth century, electoral politics had coalesced around Sinhala and Tamil nationalism, especially as separate electoral seats for Sinhalese and Tamils were introduced as part of constitutional reforms under the Donoughmore Commission in 1928. Although the Ceylon National Congress, which represented Ceylon’s interests to the British government, included both Tamil and Sinhala leadership, these collaborations soon disintegrated, as Ceylon’s interests began to be seen as coincident with Sinhala interests. The Congress, acting on the desires of Tamil and moderate Sinhalas, demanded complete independence from Britain. However, a more radical wing of the Congress’s Sinhalese delegation, led by D. S. Senanayake, broke away in 1943 to form the United National Party, which sought Dominion status within the British Empire.
In spite of—or because of—the war, simmering nationalist tendencies among both among Sinhala and Tamil political leaders in Ceylon intensified. As Peebles notes, British planters perceived migrant laborers as being more willing to do difficult manual labor—labor that local Kandyan peasants would never deign to do. This was true primarily because there were no socioeconomic reasons for Kandyan peasants and low-country Sinhalese to take up the kinds of wage labor offered by British plantations. However, this perception of innate difference between the two groups—one framed as suited for hard manual labor, the other for less grueling work—heightened the existing tensions between the two communities. Although an official report in 1938 noted that Indian immigration to the plantations in Ceylon had not taken employment away from Ceylonese workers, the discontent surrounding labor migration from India continued. In 1939, the Indian government banned emigration to Ceylon, citing looming war clouds. As we saw in chapter 1, negotiations between the two governments to resume migration began in 1940 but failed to reach a satisfactory consensus around the issue of labor immigration—a failure that set the stage for the difficulties of citizenship applications from after the war.
With the Japanese occupation of Singapore in 1941, the British Empire lost control of its premier plantation economy in the Straits Settlements and its most important source of rubber and tin. Ceylon filled this gap, becoming more important to the British Empire both economically and strategically. But only a year later, in 1942, there was a great need for wartime labor in Ceylon, restarting the flow of people across the Palk Strait. With the end of the war, questions of immigration shifted from the management of labor to the management of putative citizens. In 1945, the year that the war ended, Muthiah’s wife, Karuppayi, gave birth to Saraspathy, their first child. Saraspathy’s birth would prove crucial to the fate of Muthiah’s application before the commission.
THE CITIZENSHIP ACTS
On August 26, 1950, almost a year before the deadline for filing applications for naturalization, Muthiah, Karuppayi, his five-year-old daughter Saraspathy, and his one-year-old son Balakrishnan filed their application for citizenship in Ceylon. There was no word about the status of the application for more than five years, during which Muthiah and his family remained at the risk of statelessness. On October 3, 1955, Muthiah received a notice from the deputy commissioner in Nuwara Eliya, containing the disappointing news that his application had been refused. But the notice also summoned him to appear in person before the deputy commissioner for an inquiry to prove that he fulfilled the requirements. He would have some time before the hearing to gather paperwork and find character witnesses who would speak for him.
The IPRA afforded an opportunity for citizenship by registration for those who could not claim citizenship by descent under the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948. It was directed primarily at Indian workers in the plantation districts. Under the 1948 Act, Tamils from Ceylon born in Malaya were eligible to register for citizenship but often experienced challenges to their registration. But the IPRA, directed at Indian or Pakistani residents, offered a different route. It defined an Indian or Pakistani resident as someone who had “permanently settled” in Ceylon but whose “origin” was in British India or an Indian state (a kingdom like Travancore or Hyderabad) before the passing of the Indian Independence Act of 1947 and the territorial partition of the subcontinent. To demonstrate “permanent settlement” and prove “residence” for the purposes of immigration regimes, applicants had to demonstrate that they had been present in Ceylon for seven years before January 1, 1946—that is, from 1939 onwards. This seven-year time period (which came from the draft agreements and proposals put forward during wartime negotiations between India and Ceylon on labor immigration) was referred to as the “minimum period of uninterrupted residence.” Applicants also had to prove that they had an “assured income,” could conform to Ceylonese laws of marriage and inheritance, and were willing to give up allegiances to any other country.
Although the act claimed to be designed to give a path to citizenship for “Indian Tamils,” political leaders at the time were quick to note that these excessively rigid requirements seemed to be designed to exclude the group. Several “Ceylon Tamils” were able to claim citizenship under the 1948 Act on the basis of citizenship by descent, but for “Indian Tamils” (the bulk of immigrant laborers), the only way to secure Ceylonese citizenship was through the IPRA. And with the stringent nature of the documentary proof demanded by the commission, Muthiah’s hope for citizenship, like that of many other “Indian Tamils” in Ceylon, appeared to be fading.
By 1950, the definition of Indian citizenship was organized around the territorial partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. According to the new Indian constitution, one had to be born within the territory of India or one’s parents or grandparents had to be born there. Dual citizenship was not allowed owing to the partition of India and Pakistan. As with Ceylon (and, later, Malaya), citizenship by registration was possible for migrants to these countries. But the interim government of India encouraged Indians overseas to claim citizenship in their adopted homes, where they had invested their labor. In Ceylon, when the citizenship registers were opened in Kandy and Colombo, very few Indians came forward to claim Indian citizenship, and it is unlikely that many plantation laborers were among those who did. Shut out of both Indian and Ceylonese citizenship, plantation laborers like Muthiah were at the risk of statelessness.
A distinction between “Indian” and “Ceylon” Tamil appears in the official documents of the time. This distinction demand further explanation. The “Indian Tamil,” which the census report in Tamil designated one of the separate races to be counted, was an official category with a complicated history. The sense that “Indian Tamil” was a separate category took on a dangerous valence in the 1940s, both during and after the war, as debates over the need for immigrant labor from India entered Ceylonese political discourse. As documents from 1946 show, census officials in Ceylon could not classify the “races” with any degree of certainty. For instance, the Paravars of the Mannar district and the Chettis of Colombo, who had migrated from Madras many centuries prior and intermarried with both Tamil and Sinhalese, were classified in the census as “Ceylon Tamils.” Yet these blurry racial designations were important: someone who declared themselves an “Indian Tamil” to a census official or on a census form during the colonial period (often because they did not know the political consequences of that designation) would find the outcome of their citizenship application radically different from that of a “Ceylon Tamil.”
(Excerpted with permission from Boats In A Storm: Law, Migration And Citizenship In Post-War Asia published by Westland Books.)
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