Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Kenneth Dean, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

During the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, over thirty million Indians traveled abroad as laborers, merchants, soldiers, policemen, students, performers, and pilgrims. This paper traces the history of these itinerant subjects by looking at the most intimate, but also often most public, moment of many migrants’ lives—their deaths. British officials developed an elaborate bureaucracy for documenting the deaths of migrant Indians and of remitting estates to their relatives back in India. In the process they created an “archive of diasporic death,” including wills, inheritance disputes, lists of effects, statements of next-of-kin, and coroner-court reports. These records provide a window into the everyday financial lives of migrants. Coroner-court records offer rare glimpses of “subaltern” credit-networks, noting, along with fatal wounds, stashes of IOU notes found on the dead bodies of Indian migrants. Wills and inheritance disputes reveal unwelcome deathbed revelations, such as a telegraph sent to a wife in India informing her that her deceased husband’s meager savings had been taken by his Chinese “housekeeper.” The presence of such private revelations in public archives also testifies to the deep entanglement of Indian migration with British bureaucracy. The paper asks how this history of “mobile” governance troubles assumptions about the modern, bureaucratic state that focus more narrowly on its territorial facets.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Julie Stephens‘ research focuses on how law has shaped religion, family, and economy in colonial and post-colonial South Asia and in the wider Indian diaspora. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). The book moves between official archives of colonial law and wider spheres of public debates, bringing into conversation vernacular pamphlets and newspapers, Urdu fatwas, colonial legal cases, and legislative deliberations. Drawing on these wide-ranging legal archives, Governing Islam explores how colonial law constructed a new religious/secular binary that was deeply influential, and vibrantly contested inside and outside colonial courts. Alongside her book manuscript, she is working on a new project on inheritance and diasporic Indian families, tentatively entitled Worldly Afterlives: Death and Diaspora in the Indian Ocean. The project traces the lives of Indian migrants—sailors, petty moneylenders, female merchants, and even circus performers—by looking at the assets they left behind after their deaths. These estates ranged from mercantile fortunes to a few treasured personal effects, including letters, jewelry, or a pocketful of receipts for small debts owed by fellow travelers. Relatives in India and abroad struggled to navigate complex international bureaucracies in order to track down information about long-lost relatives and the property they left behind. This archive provides a window into the intersecting histories of diasporic families and the formation of state bureaucracies for managing global flows of labor and capital. In the coming years this research will take her to India, South Africa, Zanzibar, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. Her teaching includes surveys on modern South Asia and political Islam, and more specialized seminars on Islamic law, postcolonial and subaltern theory, and diasporic family histories. Before coming to Rutgers, she taught at Yale, Cambridge, and Harvard.

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