Paperwork and citizenship in postwar South Asia

Kalyani Ramnath’s Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration and Citizenship in Post-War Asia looks at the impact of various forms of bureaucracy on the lives and movements of migrants in South and Southeast Asia in the 1940s. “It was in these seemingly inconsequential encounters—collecting on unpaid debts, paying income tax, remitting money to relatives, writing up a will—that people experienced the afteref­fects of the war and witnessed decolonization,” Ramnath writes. “Postwar governments wielded paperwork as a threat, with citizenship held out as the prize for compliance with documentation regimes.” This excerpt from the book focusses on how newly independent nations demanded a host of documents as proof of belonging, at a time when they were attempting “to separate putative citizens from ‘undesirable’ for­eigners.”

Ordinary migrants and labourers confronted the consequences of wartime displace­ment primarily through encounters with bureaucracy. These encounters are documented in application forms. The application forms were for permits, passes, certificates and the passports that would enable migrants to con­tinue traveling between South and Southeast Asia after the war ended. As we will see, the officials and departments that processed these application forms were constantly being redesignated, and paperwork was not equally recognised and honoured across emergent national borders.

The paperwork that migrants possessed—both its nature and its value—fluctuated wildly in postwar South and Southeast Asia, changing with the shape and form of borders as they ebbed and flowed, redrawn in law. At a time when prin­ciples of immigration and citizenship were yet to be firmly established in South and Southeast Asia, migrants encountered juridical borders like restrictions on travel or remittance limits firsthand through paperwork.

These ebbs and flows in the value of paper took place in the context of surging nationalist movements, with new governments in South and Southeast Asia trying to separate putative citizens from “undesirable” for­eigners. The lack of proper paperwork was thus wielded as a threat. Filling out an application form—or having a form filled up by a clerk, transla­tor, or lawyer—became an act with potentially life-altering consequences. These forms were standardised and provided little space to explain or elaborate on answers, and they were highly fraught: answers to seemingly innocuous questions—such as acknowledging an occasional remittance overseas to family members or explaining absence because of a brief trip to attend a religious festival in one’s ancestral village—were seen as a lack of evidence of “permanent settlement.”