In a richly layered account of migrant labour and climate change along the littorals of the Bay of Bengal during the last two centuries, Sunil Amrith tells us a story full of insights for the present and future. The Bay of Bengal forms a strategic arena between the rising Asian powers, as it once had been among the European powers in the eighteenth century. On the other hand, the littoral and its more than half a billion inhabitants are continuously exposed to the vagaries of climate change. The major thrust of the book is on human migration and climate change, and the impediments that Area Studies and postcolonial national boundaries have created for the reconstruction of a connected past. By exploiting valuable data from several archives, field research and interviews, as well as oral history accounts, Amrith weaves an important narrative of the lived experiences of the past around the Bay.
The stories of Ahmad Rijaluddin and Palanisamy Kumaran represent two different eras. There were relatively few success stories of the likes of enterprising families such as Rijaluddin's in the early colonial period. Yet they give a glimpse of pre-colonial merchant migration across the Bay of Bengal. But the experience of farm workers such as Palanisamy echoes through the lives of the millions of migrants who crossed the Bay in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, the ‘deep structures’ of the Bay complemented the long history of Indian Ocean migration, giving its port cities a truly cosmopolitan character during the early modern period. Although far ahead of the Atlantic Ocean in terms of facilitating mobility and connectedness, it was not a perfect world. The author rightly cautions against the ‘tendency to romanticize the Indian Ocean's pre-colonial history, downplaying earlier episodes of violence and older forms of predatory behavior in favor of a world in equilibrium’ (p. 27). One can also agree when the author complains about the short shrift given to the strategically, economically and environmentally important Bay of Bengal in Indian Ocean scholarship. Along with addressing these concerns, the book is also about ‘[t]he sea's role in human history — and the consequences of that history for the sea’ (p. 31).
As migration across the Bay is a running theme, the author traces the slave traffic from eastern India. The Portuguese were foremost suppliers of labour for the Dutch East India Company in the Indonesian archipelago during the seventeenth century. One commonly held assumption that the Mughal conquest of eastern India stemmed the slave traffic may be open to question. By the nineteenth century, migration across the Bay assumed an unprecedented scale. British political integration of the Bay of Bengal facilitated such movements, as demand for labour in the plantation economy peaked. Unfree labour would remain the cornerstone of the capitalist production system that put its full weight behind the paddy, tea, coffee, and rubber plantations across Ceylon, Burma, and Malaya. Colonial conquest, the economic dislocation of weavers caused to a large measure by the import of cheap Lancashire textiles, and recurring famines exacerbated by the weakening of entitlement for subsistence in rural southeastern India resulted in a large section of poor migrants undertaking uncertain journeys overseas, mostly as indentured workers, from the latter half of the nineteenth century. While they became cogs in the wheel of the plantation-based economy supported by high imperialism, inadvertently they also became agents of environmental transformation across the Bay of Bengal littoral.
Amrith is at his best discussing the experiences of the diaspora and their social world in Southeast Asia. At times, he captures lively snapshots through the works of photojournalists such as Elizabeth Lewis (in the early 1930s) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (in the late 1940s). Along with cultural reproduction in the celebration of festivals such as Thimithi and Thaipusam, the migrants' world remained riven by caste prejudice, inviting tours of the lower caste or dalit leader E.V. Ramasamy (Periyar). In immigrant society, rather than disappearing, caste distinctions mutated, and notions of purity and pollution found expression on the estates and symbolically in architecture. Yet, as the author remarks, ‘social life on the plantations could be a leveler’ (p. 163). While broadly accepting Benedict Anderson's proposition about the role of the daily newspaper and print media in forging national consciousness, Amrith problematises it further. He argues that in immigrant societies in the Bay of Bengal region the vernacular press spoke of/to ‘many “imagined communities,” appealing to constituencies defined in local, regional, religious, and ethnic terms, which were not always mutually exclusive’ (p. 165).
In the aftermath of the First World War, the Great Depression formed a watershed separating Burma from British India in 1937 and affecting the political language of Malaya, Indonesia, and Vietnam. This separation also created the artificial academic categories of ‘South Asia’ and ‘Southeast Asia’. The hitherto porous borders of the Bay became harder to cross as ‘[s]tates viewed each other with suspicion’ (p. 182). These developments and divisions further affected migrants and their descendants who became ‘minorities’ in the emerging nation-states. Debates around the issue of citizenship often questioned their loyalty to the place that they developed with their own sweat and blood, and many were second-generation migrants born in the country of migration (p. 213).
While acknowledging the British empire's integrative capacity, which created a vast zone facilitating relatively easy migration across the Bay (‘the British lake’), Amrith has also indicted high imperialism for allowing exploitative labour relations and ignoring the environmental degradation which proceeded in tandem. After the age of empire, the nation-states conveniently stepped into imperial shoes to continue with many of the past legacies. The parcelling out of the Bay as an extension of national territories has allowed national interest groups to continue their assault on nature by overexploiting its resources. Amrith assesses that this has exposed about half a billion people to the furies of flooding (p. 263).
In the case of migration, Amrith follows the thread of pre-colonial movements of unfree labour (slaves) and enterprising merchants into the late colonial and contemporary eras. The study of diasporas is the author's real forte, and he tells this story in an admirably succinct way. However, the narrative of natural disasters and climate change pays insufficient attention to the pre-colonial past. Some readers may also wonder why the Bhojpuri-speaking workers from the Ganga valley have been left out in this narrative as if they did not belong to the world of the Bay. But considering the focus on the littorals of the Bay in the present work, this may be a minor point. Students and researchers of transnational history, diasporas, and climate change as well as general readers interested in the modern history of Indians in Southeast Asia will find the book very useful. With its flowing narrative and subtly argued points, this important volume is a welcome addition to the growing body of Indian Ocean literature.
