The Great War and a ‘Proper’ Passport for the Colony: Border-Crossing in British India,c.1882–1922

Abstract

Racial controls on Indian migration to the British Dominions can explain only some features of the compulsory passport regime as it crystallised in India during the Great War. The streaming of population movement across India’s borders was shaped by regional geo-political imperatives as well. While race issues certainly haunted the Indian intelligentsia’s stance on border management, its positions were also shaped by the class and gender parameters in which it cast citizenship. Both the colonial regime and the Indian intelligentsia conceived of the passport, for different reasons, not just as a document of identity and nationality but also as a civic testimonial which only some kinds of Indians were qualified to hold. Behind the seeming homogeneity of the ‘international’ form of the passport were accommodations to ‘local’ colonial protocols of recording and attesting identity, and keeping ‘undesirables’ under surveillance. However the new British Indian passport regime bore some trace also of the trans-national constituencies which intervened in the new order of travel being shaped by the Euro-American world.