Sunil S. Amrith

Migration and diaspora in modern Asia

Book synopsis: Migration is at the heart of Asian history. For centuries migrants have tracked the routes and seas of their ancestors – merchants, pilgrims, soldiers, and sailors – along the Silk Road and across the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. Over the last 150 years, however, migration within Asia and beyond has been greater than at any other time in history. Sunil S. Amriths engaging and deeply informative book crosses a vast terrain, from the Middle East to India and China, tracing the history of modern migration against the background of empires, their dissolution, and the onset of modernity. Animated by the voices of Asian migrants, it tells the stories of those forced to flee from war and revolution, and those who left their homes and their families in search of a better life. These stories of Asian diasporas can be joyful or poignant, but they all speak of an engagement with new landscapes and new peoples. Migration has been central to making Asian societies as complex and diverse as they are today.

Sites of Asian Interaction: An introduction

Recent work in history, anthropology, and related disciplines has opened up new ways of thinking about inter-Asian connections. The contributors to this issue aim to ground these themes in a concerted focus on particular spaces or sites. We suggest that sites can, in themselves, be constitutive of particular modes of Asian interactions. Much recent literature on Asian transnationalism has focused on Asian elites and on textual modes of interaction, notably focusing on the writings of pre-eminent Asian intellectuals and literary figures. In thinking about spaces of interaction, we aim to broaden the focus of discussion to include non-elite Asians and their interactions with each other. By focusing on spaces—real and virtual—these papers begin to conceive of new ways of capturing changing geographical imaginations and the fluidity of borders and boundaries across Asia.

Food and Welfare in India, c. 1900–1950

In 2001, the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties submitted a writ petition to the Supreme Court of India on the “right to food.” The petitioner was a voluntary human rights organization; the initial respondents were the Government of India, the Food Corporation of India, and six state governments. The petition opens with three pointed questions posed to the court: * A. Does the right to life mean that people who are starving and who are too poor to buy food grains ought to be given food grains free of cost by the State from the surplus stock lying with the State, particularly when it is reported that a large part of it is lying unused and rotting? * B. Does not the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution of India include the right to food? * C. Does not the right to food, which has been upheld by the Honourable Court, imply that the state has a duty to provide food especially in situations of drought, to people who are drought affected and are not in a position to purchase food?

Asian internationalism: Bandung's echo in a colonial metropolis

Abstract This paper argues that two conflicting discourses of internationalism stood in uneasy counterpoint and contention in the Asian arena of the 1950s, reflected in the legacies of the Bandung conference. The first drew on a language of global citizenship and rights. The second saw the international system as a source of strength and support for state sovereignty, and state‐directed programmes of national development. The remainder of the paper uses the case of late‐colonial Singapore to examine the intersection of these two discourses of internationalism. An Asian internationalism, which spanned to include Africa over the course of the 1950s, became one of a stock of narratives that made Singapore’s ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ possible, in the worlds of the hawkers, the dockworkers and the agriculturalists. The political aspirations of these groups were sacrificed, ultimately, to the goal of disciplined national development, supported by an international order that had closed in to defend the interests of state power.

Risk and the South Asian monsoon

South Asia’s dependence on the monsoon has always been a source of economic uncertainty. This paper examines the history of ways of thinking about the monsoon and risk, focusing on India. The science of meteorology, and a growing interest in ways to mitigate monsoon risk, developed in response to major famines. Piecemeal interventions, including a series of canals and small dams, began India’s hydraulic transformation. By the middle of the twentieth century, massive hydraulic engineering emerged as the dominant solution to controlling the monsoon’s risks. Large dams account for the largest share of government expenditure in independent India, but since the 1960s, intensive and mostly unregulated groundwater exploitation has played a greater role in meeting irrigation needs. The expansion in India’s irrigated area and an expansion in food production. But this has come at a cost: millions have been displaced by dam construction; groundwater exploitation has reached unsustainable levels, and has had an effect on regional climate.

Mobile City and the Coromandel Coast: Tamil Journeys to Singapore, 1920–1960

Abstract This article uses the notion of the ‘mobile city’ to re‐examine the history of Tamil migration to Singapore in the twentieth century. The article argues that the notion of ‘mobile city Singapore’ can help us to enrich and complicate histories of migration and citizenship. The argument of the article is that Singapore occupied a central but shifting position in the Tamil‐speaking world spanning the Bay of Bengal. Singapore was a ‘mobile city’ both in its role as a node for countless migrations, but also in the sense that ‘Singapore’ circulated throughout south India as a symbol of urban modernity. The final part of the paper considers the shifting balance of mobility and immobility that characterized urban modernity as experienced by Tamil migrants.