“The line between foreigner and subject was mutable”

Interview with Radhika Singha on the category of ‘foreign’ in colonial India

19th century colonial India was a patchwork of jurisdictions with territory under direct British rule, interspersed with territory under the so-called Indian princely states. At its hazily defined external borders the Government of India jousted for influence with Persia, Afghanistan, and China. Subjects of the princely states were claimed as British Protected Subjects in the international context, but could be treated as foreigners internally. Radhika Singha is a historian and an expert on colonial India. At the Kolleg, she studied the Foreigners Act of 1864 to understand how the mutable distinction between foreigner and subject allowed the government to manage the jurisdictional plurality of the Indian empire, while at the same time projecting itself as a coherent political entity in international forums.

Professor Singha, what exactly was regulated in the Foreigners Act of 1864?

Up to 1858, British territory in India had been ruled through the agency of a trading corporation, the East India Company (EIC), which had been as concerned about the unregulated entry of European British subjects into India as about controlling the presence of foreigners. The Charter Act of 1813 gave it the authority to remove British subjects who came to India without a license. Parliament gave it this power not only to defend its commercial rights, but also to ensure that the peace and security of British territory was not compromised by an influx of ‘European adventurers and vagrants’ who might oppress the ‘natives’, and trample upon their religious sensibilities.

In 1815, the British Parliament gave the EIC the power to remove ‘foreigners’ as well as British subjects from the territory. In this statute, as well as in the subsequent Acts of 1857 and 1864, foreigner was a default category. It was anyone who was not a European or an Indian British subject. It included therefore, subjects of the princely states whose territories made up two-fifths of the Indian empire, subjects of French and Portuguese enclaves in India, and of the autonomous states on India’s borders. The line between foreigner and subject was very mutable. Under the Foreigners Act, subjects of the princely states could be expelled as foreigners. However outside India, they were British Protected Subjects, who had to observe Britain’s foreign policy commitments, as for instance, in relation to slave-trafficking in Zanzibar and Muscat. Inhabitants of contested frontier territory could be treated in interior areas as ‘foreigners’ but as ‘subjects-in the-making’ at the border. 

The first four sections of the Foreigners Act of 1864 vested central and provincial governments with the power to deport foreigners, which they could exercise at any time. The other sections regarding controls over entry, residence, and movement, would come into force only in special circumstances. Thereby, the colonial regime could claim that it maintained free trade and liberty of movement, while allowing local governments to use orders of removal to dramatise the protection given to residents of British territory against disorderly or dangerous ‘foreigners’ from the princely states or frontier territory. 

You write that the modern international order with sharply demarcated nation-states emerged not only through the control of migration at national borders, but also through „a plurality of everyday police practices based on the inclusion or exclusion of people from internal jurisdictions“. Can you explain this in more detail?

The power of expulsion was sometimes used politically, to sever networks which threatened colonial authority. However, the Foreigners Act of 1864 tended to segue into a cluster of laws dealing with ‘vagrancy’. ‘Vagrancy’ was the generic label for ways of life which hampered colonial drives to create a pacified, sedentary, hierarchical agrarian society, pushing back against livelihoods based on free-wheeling military service, pastoralism, nomadic pack-trading, and forest ecologies. Those ‘criminal and vagrant’ elements which were held to have some cultural and territorial mooring in a particular British province, were supposed to be turned into governable British subjects. Under the bad-livelihood sections of the Criminal Procedure Code or by the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, these individuals were wedged more firmly into rural hierarchy and subjected to restrictions on their movement. However, with the Foreigners Act the district magistrate also had the option of declaring that some ‘predatory’ band was foreign to that province, that it originated in some ‘chaotic’ Indian princely state, or in some ill-defined stretch of frontier territory. 

In expelling ‘foreign Asiatic vagrants’ from British territory, the British authorities did not expect to meet with much resistance from either the princely states or from autonomous ‘Asiatic’ states such as Afghanistan and Persia. But in fact, by the 1920s Persia began to protest about the label ‘Irani’ being applied to any community cast as criminal or vagrant. The Foreign Department also began to worry that if Pashtuns were deported as ‘foreign vagrants’ from large commercial centers in India such as Delhi, Kolkata, or Mumbai, it would strengthen Afghanistan’s claims over Pashtun tribal territory lying across India’s North-west Frontier Province. We are confronted then, with intriguing situations in which the everyday policing of ‘vagrancy’, had reverberations in international relations.

 “The Foreigners Act operated through a hierarchical ordering of sovereign rights”

So, the Foreigners Act created legal distinctions – not only between individuals, but also between states?

The Foreigners Act, although formulated in universal terms, operated through a hierarchical ordering of sovereign rights: between civilized states, and ‘backward Asiatic’ polities, and between Britain as the paramount power and the Indian princely states. I have already referred to the way in which officials could show that territories under direct British rule were being protected against the disorder generated by unruly migrants from princely states or from trans-frontier areas. There was also an assumption that officers posted to border provinces were better able to control trans-frontier labour migrants, pastoralists, pack-traders, and soldiers in search of service, because they were vested with stronger executive powers than those in the interior. Under this regime of ‘frontier governmentality’ such forms of livelihood could in fact be made serviceable to empire.

From the turn of the nineteenth-century, with an increase in the tempo of global migration, the power of removal under the Act also began to be used to deport so-called East European ‘procurers’. This positioned India in the international campaign against ‘white slavery’. The threat of deportation was also used to police the circulation of activists and intellectuals associated with radical political movements or with labour and trade-union movements. In the 1920s as the nationalist movement gathered force the princely states began, with the approval of the colonial regime, to use the Foreigners Act to expel political activists coming in from British territory.

You argue that the Act created a link between the category of foreignness and deportability. What exactly do you mean by that?

As a result of a year’s work at the Kolleg I am now in a position to refine upon that statement. Historical work on forms of forced removal has shown that the meaning and purposes of banishment, exile, deportation, extradition, transportation, and repatriation, over-lapped and changed over time. We have to track historically the point at which deportation came to mean exclusion from ‘national’ territory and to be distinguished as a form of forced removal reserved for foreigners, undocumented migrants, or residents stripped of their citizenship rights.My work took up the period in the nineteenth-century, before the word ‘foreigner‘ really impinged upon India. ‘Foreigner‘ was a category of colonial governmentality, which shaped decisions about the jurisdictional dividing line between British territory, that of the princely states, and that of autonomous states on India’s border on a wide range of issues. As pointed out earlier, in some contexts, subjects of the princely states were foreigners and in other contexts they were British subjects. The word ‘foreigner‘ in the sense of someone excluded from a politically nationalised community, would begin to emerge with force in India from the turn of the century. It was spurred by the race-based nationalisation of borders in colonies reserved for white settler dominance, that is, South Africa, Canada, and Australia. Indians underwent the experience of deportation from these colonies even though they were British subjects. This, together with the introduction of a compulsory passport regime for India during  World War One, meant that the Foreigners Act began to be used in a different political and legal milieu. I propose to explore this shift in the next phase of my work.

Interview by Lennart Pieper.

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Cite as:

Radhika Singha /Lennart Pieper: “The line between foreigner and subject was mutable” Interview, EViR Blog, 21.05.2026, https://www.evir.uni-muenster.blog/en/interviewsingha/.

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​​This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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