Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State by Radhika Mongia (review)

Mongia’s stimulating account of Indian migration announces its larger argument on the first page: “This study traces a shift from a world dominated by empire-states into a world dominated by nation-states” (1). Like Anderson in his pathbreaking work on nationalism, Mongia insists that this transformation cannot be explained by metropolitan developments alone but that it took place initially within Europe’s colonies.¹ She develops her argument through a close study of three controversies surrounding Indian overseas migration from the 1830s to the 1910s—indentured labor recruitment, Indian marriage practices in South Africa, and Canadian efforts to deny Indians entry—and she places her analysis in a larger context of theories of law and the state.

The earliest instances of extensive Indian overseas migration involved indentured recruitment to replace slave labor on colonial plantations. At the heart of this recruitment was state regulation based on free assent to a contract. The presence of such a contract, as Mongia argues, not merely signified but “brought into being that which it supposedly embodied, not only consent, but freedom itself” on the part of the intending migrant (48). Through indenture, the state, paradoxically, “regulated ‘free’ migration precisely in order to ensure that it was ‘free’” (16). Gone were the days when state regulation was challenged as an infringement of the subject’s liberty.

At the same time, Mongia insists, a “contract whose validity began and ended with consent” dispensed with fairness and with equality in exchange (55). Thus was initiated, not within the metropolitan heartland but within the colonial periphery, an enduring reformulation of liberal notions of consent and contract. Almost inevitably a “massive bureaucracy,” embodying an intrusive “disciplinary power,” emerged to manage this migratory enterprise (58). Unlike most previous scholars who tended to take this development for granted, Mongia details the establishment and functioning of an “unrelenting system of registration, surveillance, documentation, and record keeping” that endured for seventy years across the face of the empire (80). This regulatory regime, “a thoroughly modern formation,” exemplifies “the colonial genealogy of the modern state” (84).

Mongia then turns to non-indentured free Indians in South Africa. She shows how considerations of gender and race shaped migration policies that produced a sense of the nation-state, and of nationalism, apart from the British Empire. As imperial Britain, committed to a unified empire of free movement, prohibited outright racial discrimination, the newly formed post-1910 South African government endeavored to circumvent this prohibition by refusing legal recognition to polygamous marriages. By including within this ban not just individuals but all marriages conducted under any religion that recognized polygamy, the prohibition in effect invalidated all non-Christian Indian marriages. The resulting outburst of protest, led by Mohandas Gandhi, raised the cry of “an insult to our religions,” and, as Mongia argues, turned a piece of racist legislation into “a gendered discourse of national honour” (106). Indians, far from being mere subjects of the empire, now began to see themselves as participants in a “new logic of nationality” (111).

In Canada’s restrictive legislation, Mongia sees the final “unmaking of the empire-state” (126). Initially, Canada sought to evade British, and Indian, hostility to avowedly racial legislation by using apparently banal entry requirements, such as a continuous direct journey from India to Canada, to obscure racial discrimination. In the end, this “tension between maintaining empire and nation simultaneously” could not be sustained. In its place emerged “an appeal to the ‘national,’” as embodied in the passport (127, 136). The passport, as a defining marker of the nation, thus contains within it, Mongia contends, “a history of twentieth century racism” (139).

Legal theorists will find this work suggestive for its engagement with several key liberal concepts, most notably consent, contract, and freedom. Historians will find much to debate in the assertion that the origins of the modern state should be tied to a diffuse “colonial genealogy.” Surely, for instance...