Forgotten migrants, unfinished decolonisation: Why Kalyani Ramnath writes about citizenship history

Citizenship – understood as formal legal status, as a conduit for rights, a means of shaping one’s social and cultural identities and as a moral claim about belonging – is a matter of intense debate in India and across the world today. As these debates rage on in India, there are stories of people impacted by legislative and administrative changes in Assam, Bihar, and across the country who are marked and described in terms of governance categories – as “doubtful voters” or “illegal immigrants” – that arrive in our inboxes and pop up as notifications on our screens – accounts of people struggling to get identity documents, receive food rations or register in schools, contending with impossible choices between finding and keeping jobs or remaining with kin, or facing criminal charges and deportation on account of a perceived foreignness in India.

As a historian of migration and citizenship, reading these stories, I see resonances with the accounts of people’s lives in legal and administrative records from the 1940s through the 1960s that I worked with for my book, Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration and Citizenship in Post-War Asia. There are no straight lines from the past to the present; instead, recalling these...

Read more