Bureaucratic Genealogies of Dead Bodies in Transit: India, 1914–55

Interwar internationalism had a curious collateral: it reorganized the international transportation of dead bodies. Focusing on colonial India and port cities such as Calcutta and Bombay in particular, this paper argues that four seemingly distinct events set in motion global legal structures that informed the port and aviation rules of transporting corpses in 1954-5 India. First, these included transformations in international public health and the renewed role of L’Office International d’Hygiène Publique. Second, it related to changes in coffin and corpse-packaging technologies. Third, it involved the desire to transport bodies of British soldiers back to Britain, or Indians who died elsewhere. Fourth and finally, it had to do with changes in the burial pilgrimage from India to Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, following the Corpse Traffic Law of 1924. Drawing on sources from L’Office International d’Hygiène Publique, the League of Nations Health Division and the Government of India, this paper studies the bureaucratic practices of international deliberations. It focuses on the creative adaptations by the Government of India to understand how dead bodies became state subjects, and argue about how identities of citizenship became mapped on to older regulations of public health. In the process, this paper makes three historiographical contributions: it periodizes the legal identities of dead bodies which are otherwise predominantly studied as sites of affect, by arguing how extremely personal choices of burials are mediated by the international agreements. It brings to light how an insignificant “port rule” of 1955 on transportation of corpses in India contains vestiges of WWI legal regimes generated by the League of Nations rather than those by India despite its decolonization in 1947. It suggests that an underfunded and disaggregated bureaucracy creatively adopted from local and international rules, often bypassing the more “nation-wide” concerns of a newly independent nation.