Kate Imy “Crossing the Black Waters: Purity and the Body in the First World War British Indian Army” ; Kalyani Ramnath “Madras, Rangoon and Colombo: Life and Law in Postwar South Asia”

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8 Nov. Kate Imy (U North Texas) and Kalyani Ramnath (Harvard)

4:00-5:15 Kate Imy “Crossing the Black Waters: Purity and the Body in the First World War British Indian Army” Link to Readings: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)(6) (7)

Kate Imy is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Texas, where she is affiliated with the History Department, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and the Military History Center. She earned her PhD from Rutgers University and was a recipient of a Fulbright fellowship (India), an IHR-Mellon fellowship (U.K.), and two Critical Language Scholarships (Hindi and Urdu). Her first book, Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army will be released by Stanford University Press in 2019. Her work has appeared in Gender & History, Twentieth Century British History, the Journal of British Studies, and the blogs of the Institute of Historical Research and Royal Historical Society. Her first article, entitled “Queering the Martial Races: Sex and Circumcision in the Twentieth Century British Indian Army” won the Nupur Chaudhuri prize of the Coordinating Council for Women in History at the American Historical Association Conference. She is currently a managing editor of the British Journal for Military History. She is developing a second book project on international soldier and civilian experiences of war in Singapore and Malaya.

Abstract: During the First World War, roughly 1.4 million South Asian soldiers and civilians fought on behalf of the British Empire. Most fought in campaigns and battlefields as far afield as France, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Singapore. Yet for many, overseas service engendered intersecting concerns about crossing the “Black Waters” of the ocean. Novelist Mulk Raj Anand described this belief as “all who went beyond the mountains or across the black waters were destined for hell.” For some, the issue related partially to the caste purity of high caste Hindus, and the need for specific provisions in matters as diverse as dining, bathing, and seeking medical aid. Yet this proved to be far more than a “religious issues” for colonial officials to condemn or accommodate. As many as 200,000 soldiers who fought in the “Indian Army” were not Indian but Nepali. Most of them did not identify as Hindu or as high-caste. Nonetheless, British military officials coordinated unprecedented efforts to facilitate purification ceremonies for Nepali—but not Indian Hindu—soldiers. Instead, they increasingly demobilized Indian Hindus for being too logistically burdensome due, they alleged, to caste requirements. This paper explores caste purity in the Indian Army within the context of debates about health, anti-colonialism, and national sovereignty. It suggests that soldiers, colonial officials, and civilian leaders understood, regulated, or rejected so-called “religious” mandates for complex reasons that reveal the contested state of soldiers’ bodies in the midst of global war and anti-colonial rebellion.

5:30-6:45 Kalyani Ramnath “Madras, Rangoon and Colombo: Life and Law in Postwar South Asia”

“I am a historian of modern South Asia, with research and teaching interests in legal history, histories of migration and displacement, transnational history and questions of archival method. At present, I am a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at the Centre for History and Economics at Harvard University. I received my Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2018. I also hold a bachelor’s degree in arts and law (B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) (JD equivalent) from the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) and a master’s degree in law (LL.M.) from the Yale Law School. From 2010 – 2012, I served on the faculty of the NLSIU. See Transit, my latest piece on the forgotten ferry crossing across the present-day India Sri Lanka maritime boundary here. For a list of upcoming talks, see here.”

Abstract: If we begin from marginalia and footnotes of legal texts, what new histories of decolonization and postwar reconstruction in South Asia might emerge? Shifting emphasis from geopolitics to everyday experiences, I explore how ordinary lives were remade and reimagined through law after World War II disrupted labor and capital flows between the port cities of Madras, Rangoon, and Colombo. Thus far, conventional narratives have focused on displacements to India from across South and Southeast Asia following Japanese occupations during the war. Here, I suggest that ordinary legal encounters, often noted only as insignificant details in legal practitioners’ reporters or manuals, show how people coped and maneuvered around the consequences of war and displacement.

I will draw from a forthcoming article that centers on an ordinary debt recovery case in Madras and Rangoon that in a surprising turn of events, invokes arguments from international law. Set against the emergence of new nation-states in South Asia, this invocation signals how people already began to reimagine their lives in an age of national-territorial borders. Decolonization and postwar reconstruction in South Asia, I argue in this talk, was not solely associated with the demobilization of armed forces, the rebuilding of cities, the setting up of international institutions or marked by new moral legitimacies acquired by fighting a war against dictatorships. From the perspective of ordinary legal encounters, the postwar moment was also a postcolonial moment. People navigated – or were forced to navigate – these two temporalities.

November 8, 2019

Presenter: Kate Imy, Kalyani Ramnath (Harvard)