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9781503632981

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"""Ramnath offers a rich rethinking of the seismic shifts in governance and citizenship that accompanied war and decolonization in South and Southeast Asia. She shifts our gaze from official narratives, written from the perspective of politicians and diplomats, to the experience of the everyday subjects who had for generations made the interconnected shores of the Bay of Bengal their homes. A marvel of archival research and storytelling, Ramnath breathes life into dusty, crumbling records of legal disputes to reconstruct deeply moving tales of human separation and suffering, but also resilience and bravery.""—Julia Stephens, Rutgers University ""Boats in a Storm provides a moving and ethnographic panorama of people caught in the midst of changing contortions of nation, citizenship and borders in the era of decolonization. It tracks personal displacements and disputes, through tax, inheritance and remittance, and shows the everyday dilemmas that shot through people's lives. In place of diplomacy or high politics, we are left with the granular in comprehending jurisdictional demarcations that have potent afterlives to the present, for violent structures of statelessness, nationalism or for conflicts and authoritarianism that followed in later-twentieth century Sri Lanka, Burma, India or Malaysia.""—Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge ""Boats in a Storm is a magnificent contribution to the history of law and displacement in the Indian Ocean. Using a rich legal archive, Kalyani Ramnath shows us the history of decolonization in a new light through this astonishingly detailed picture of the loss suffered by migrants who found their itineraries interrupted by new borders and new jurisdictions. This is a spectacularly accomplished and insightful book!""—Sunil Amrith, Yale University"

"""Ramnath offers a rich rethinking of the seismic shifts in governance and citizenship that accompanied war and decolonization in South and Southeast Asia. She shifts our gaze from official narratives, written from the perspective of politicians and diplomats, to the experience of the everyday subjects who had for generations made the interconnected shores of the Bay of Bengal their homes. A marvel of archival research and storytelling, Ramnath breathes life into dusty, crumbling records of legal disputes to reconstruct deeply moving tales of human separation and suffering, but also resilience and bravery.""—Julia Stephens, Rutgers University ""Boats in a Storm provides a moving and ethnographic panorama of people caught in the midst of changing contortions of nation, citizenship and borders in the era of decolonization. It tracks personal displacements and disputes, through tax, inheritance and remittance, and shows the everyday dilemmas that shot through people's lives. In place of diplomacy or high politics, we are left with the granular in comprehending jurisdictional demarcations that have potent afterlives to the present, for violent structures of statelessness, nationalism or for conflicts and authoritarianism that followed in later-twentieth century Sri Lanka, Burma, India or Malaysia.""—Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge ""Boats in a Storm is a magnificent contribution to the history of law and displacement in the Indian Ocean. Using a rich legal archive, Kalyani Ramnath shows us the history of decolonization in a new light through this astonishingly detailed picture of the loss suffered by migrants who found their itineraries interrupted by new borders and new jurisdictions. This is a spectacularly accomplished and insightful book!""—Sunil Amrith, Yale University ""In her beautifully written book Boats in a Storm, Kalyani Ramnath scrutinises a plethora of archived legal accounts, memoirs, and administrative records to reconstruct the multiple migratory destinies of Indian migrants in Burma and Malaya after the Japanese occupation in 1942.""—Antje Missbach, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs"

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Kalyani Ramnath is Assistant Professor of History at University of Georgia.

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