Crossing the Bay of Bengal: the Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants by Sunil Amrith (review)

Sunil Amrith announces the central argument of this compellingly crafted work in its first sentence. The Bay of Bengal, he says, “was once a region at the heart of global history” (1). Suffused with nostalgia for what once was, Crossing the Bay of Bengal tells us the story of the growth, both cultural and economic, of this “densely woven together” region during the centuries of European imperial dominance, followed during the 1940s and 1950s by a collapse of “astonishing rapidity” (3). In the end the Bay fragmented into two distinct global regions—labeled South Asia and Southeast Asia—governed by a patchwork of jurisdictions with little in common among them.

Much of this story is of course well-known, and, from the era of the trading companies through to the crisis of the Second World War, it has been the subject of much research over many decades. At one level, Amrith’s account effectively brings together this existing scholarship. At another, he pulls the reader into a richly textured narrative, based on extensive original research that gives the story a fresh, even exciting, telling. At its heart are the two themes identified in the subtitle: the challenges of nature, and the experiences of overseas migrants. The work is fundamentally chronological in its organization.

The Bay of Bengal is of course the eastern half of the much larger Indian Ocean, and it cannot be consistently kept separate from its western half, linking India with Africa and the Middle East. As Amrith makes clear in his opening chapter on “the life of the Bay of Bengal”, the monsoons, arising in the western ocean, shape the life of the entire oceanic basin. Migrant flows too went west, to Mauritius and beyond, as well as to Burma and Malaya. Kerala and Gujarat looked westward much as maritime Bengal and the Coromandel coast looked eastward. Linking the two oceanic halves is the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where one can stand, as I did recently, on the ramparts of the Portuguese fort at Galle, and look both east and west across the sea. Still, the Bay of Bengal possesses a coherence of its own, and Amrith sensibly keeps his focus on the coastal traders, merchants, and migrants, who crossed that vast body of water. For many people over many centuries, the “far shores of the sea’s littoral” were “closer—culturally, economically, imaginatively—than their own hinterlands” (27).

Throughout, Amrith endeavors, wherever possible, to give the reader a sense of the life of the ordinary Indian who ventured across the Bay. Initially these migrants were predominantly merchants, like the Tamil Muslims who settled in the Straits, married local Malay women, and financed shipments of textiles, rice and pepper. From their marriages, and those of Chinese merchants, emerged the mixed Jawi Peranakan community of the colonial era. These merchants too, as they built shrines in the form of those they knew from Tamilnad, made of the Bay’s littoral “an arc of holy places” (88). The coming of steam, and with it an imperial order seeking access to the resources of the region, vastly increased its “human traffic” (the title of chapter 4). This movement, from the 1840s, Amrith insists, “took place amid servitude”, involving various kinds of recruitment and indenture, and was often propelled by famine in India (111). Most of these migrants traveled to the three rapidly growing colonial territories of Ceylon, Burma, and Malaya. In each chapter Amrith moves back and forth between these three territories as he assesses the fortunes of the migrants who settled in each. In Ceylon and Malaya, brokers or agents employed by estates “used a combination of inducement, coercion, and above all debt to mobilize workers in South India, and then immobilize them on plantations” (115). In Burma, by contrast, many of the migrants, known as Chettiars, were well-to-do merchants, who established banking firms to finance...