She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942–1962, and reported the following:
Page 99 – from Chapter 3 titled ‘Tax Receipts’ – describes the impact of the postwar economic conditions in Burma (now Myanmar) on the Nattukkottai Chettiars, a diasporic trading and moneylending community from south India who had operations across South and Southeast Asia. By the time of Indian and Burmese independence from British rule, in 1947 and 1948 respectively, many Chettiar firms wound up operations in Burma, unable to navigate the strict restrictions on travel, movement, residence, trade, and land ownership placed on migrants, opting instead to invest in educational institutions or industry in India. At the same time, Chettiar firms also faced the prospect of income tax liability in two countries even as nationalization threatened to deprive them of their landed wealth. Page 99 describes how Indian income tax legislation was initially poised to take advantage of this “refugee capital,” suggesting that the tax residence of Chettiar firms had shifted during the War. But later, these moves were reversed because of the tax implications for those displaced by the India- Pakistan Partition in 1947 (“the Partition”) It describes how double taxation regimes to deal with the aftermath of the World War, the struggles for independence, and the formation of new national borders in India, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka were based on those developed for the Partition.Learn more about Boats in a Storm at the Stanford University Press website.
A browser who turns to page 99 might get a good sense of the context of the book – the postwar world in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka) and Southeast Asia (Myanmar, Malaysia) in the age of decolonization. They might also see an illustration of an important historiographic reframing that Boats in a Storm offers – that the unraveling of economic networks across these two regions in the aftermath of the War are the lesser-known “other partitions” in the region. As the seemingly banal example of income tax liability shows, the long shadow of the better-known territorial Partition and the violent and traumatic displacement that it occasioned – was cast over diasporic Indians unconnected with it elsewhere in Asia. This led, as in the case of the Chettiar firms, to unexpected and devastating consequences where they could not return to their homes and places of work. Everyday legal encounters – with the income tax authorities or the offices that issued immigration documents – rather than widely publicized courtroom trials, feature throughout the book. At the same time, the account on page 99 does not capture the broad sweep that Boats has – it is not only about migrant traders or moneylenders, but also about those who may not have had access to resources to help them navigate stormy legal seas, from laborers who worked on tea plantations in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and to dockworkers and clerks at the Singapore Harbor. The descendants of plantation laborers, for example, form part of marginalized communities in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. Page 99 also does not feature any lawyers, journalists, or trade unionists, many of whom figure prominently in the narrative elsewhere, such as SP Amarasingam, the lawyer and newspaper journalist who wrote about immigration across the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka, and later, advocated for plantation laborers to be naturalized as Ceylon citizens before the Supreme Court. As the book proceeds – page 99 is chapter three of seven – the reader might also note how taxation regimes seeped into immigration and later, deportation regimes, unsettling and rearranging rhythms and patterns of migrant life: families spread out across two different countries had to choose one “home” to prove their political loyalties, people charged with being “communists” for engaging in activities perceived as political dissent in south India and Singapore, yet others faced the risk of statelessness for not possessing the right documents. In other words - to push the literary metaphor in the title of the book even further! - page 99 is a glimpse of the brewing storm, the aftermath of which the book chronicles.
--Marshal Zeringue
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