KCL Event: South Asia Unbound: Rethinking South Asian migration and diaspora

Conveners: The New International Histories of South Asia (NIHSA) network

Speakers: Jayita Sarkar (Boston University); Kalyani Ramnath (Harvard University); Antia Mato Bouzas (London Metropolitan University)

Chair: Swapna Kona Nayudu (Harvard University Asia Center)

Short and long-distance migration has been a common feature of life in South Asia for millennia, so much so that the subcontinent is often identified with and through its diaspora, one of the biggest in the world.

How and why did people move in and out of South Asia? Why did they choose not to ? At a time when migration is at the forefront of the global political, economic and social agendas, there’s a crucial need to answer these questions.

Our first panel of speakers sheds light on the impact of the erection of “national” borders on who gets defined as a citizen or a migrant, and how the complex relationship between states and their diaspora.

Speakers

Jayita Sarkar (Boston University), “Frontiers to Battlefields to Borderlands: The Connected Partitions in the Rohingya Question, 1942-1952”

Kalyani Ramnath (Harvard University), “Other Partitions: Law and Displacement in Postwar South and Southeast Asia”

Antia Mato Bouzas (London Metropolitan University), “The Pakistani Gulf: Migration to the Gulf and the Development of Pakistan’s State Project”

Chair

Swapna Kona Nayudu (Harvard University Asia Center)

Format

Covid19 has forced us to think creatively about how to organise academic events. Each "South Asia Unbound" event will be organised as follows:

• A week before the event, each panellist will post a short video presentation on this page for the audience to watch and ponder at their leisure;
• The event itself will take the shape of an extended Q&A session with the audience.

In other words: if you want to attend, make sure not just to register for the panels but also to watch the videos in the week before. You'll receive details on how to attend once you've registered.

For more information, see the main South Asia Unbound Conference Website.

This event series is organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network.

REGISTER HERE

Jayita Sarkar (Boston University), “Frontiers to Battlefields to Borderlands: The Connected Partitions in the Rohingya Question, 1942-1952”

British imperial networks connected the fluid topography of the Bengal delta with coastal Arakan or Rakhine engendered the free circulation of laborers, traders and merchants as well as ascribed on those migrants various degrees of loyalty to the British Raj. These divided loyalties determined battlefield strategies in the Arakan Campaign of the Second World War. The British recruited a large number of this population from southeastern Bengal/northwestern Arakan, who British War Office records called “Chittagongian Muslims” for counterintelligence and counterinsurgency operations against the Japanese in Burma since 1942. One of the bloodiest rounds of communal violence in Arakan transpired during the War between pro-Japanese Buddhists and pro-British Muslims. With the Partition of British India on religious lines in August 1947 and the independence of British Burma in January 1948 amidst ethnic strife and communist threat, the battlefields became borderlands entangled with the multiple nation-states that emerged in the malleable geography of the Bengal delta: Burma, East Pakistan and India. Communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims in northwestern Arakan reached a peak in August 1948, when ammunition dumps left by parting Allied forces became a source of re-armament for both the Muslims and the Buddhists. The separatist Muslim “mujahids” of Arakan began to fight both the local Buddhists as well as the Burmese military as they violently campaigned to join the recently partitioned Muslim-majority nation-state of Pakistan, and to even adopt Urdu as their official language. With the rise of Bengali language movement in East Pakistan that reached a crescendo with the violent police crackdown of February 1952, the mujahids’ affinity for joining Urdu-speaking Pakistan became complicated and perhaps even traitorous. The ambiguities in race, religion and language produced in the borderlands around Naf River, and reinforced through the partitions and aggregations of the territory of the Bengal delta led the Rohingya people (literally, those from Roang or Arakan or Rakhine) to pursue multiple strategies of belonging to the nation-states in their vicinity albeit unsuccessfully.

Kalyani Ramnath (Harvard University), “Other Partitions: Law and Displacement in Postwar South and Southeast Asia”

This presentation explores the unraveling of networks, connections, and convergences of people, places, capital, goods between South and Southeast Asia following the end of the Second World War. It picks up on lesser-known histories, disappeared memories, and hidden geographies that emerge in this context as instances of partitioning (Sivasundaram, 2013) as opposed to territorial partitions, revealed through the archives of law. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar and on materials from Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, this paper considers how the role of the legal fragment in reconstructing these (dis)connections shapes our understanding of South Asia viewed from across and around the eastern Indian Ocean.

Antia Mato Bouzas (London Metropolitan University), “The Pakistani Gulf: Migration to the Gulf and the Development of Pakistan’s State Project”

The term ‘Pakistani Gulf’ refers to a stable space, characterised by its continuity over time, which is constituted by the various actors, interventions, policies, symbols, and relations that connect Pakistan to the Gulf. Pakistani migration to the Gulf and its significance for Pakistan goes beyond the economic dimension. Between the need (of remittances) by Pakistan and the exclusion (policies) exercised by the Gulf states, there is a more complex relationship that deserves attention. Migration to the Gulf is often understood as exercising an influence within Pakistani society, but this influence is often considered as a sign of an unequal relationship for this sending country in relation to the oil-rich states of the Arab Peninsula. This presentation challenges this assumption by paying attention to the existence of Pakistani settled communities in certain Gulf states. Through the study of these communities, the presentation discusses the way the Pakistani state has sought to portray itself in the regional neighbourhood.