LICENCE TO TRAVEL 

What do we know about the passport which Salman Rushdie termed ‘the most precious book’ he possessed and Byron said was a ‘wealth to everywhere’?

In four sections of this book�"‘A Prehistory of the Passport as We Know It’, ‘The Advent of the Passport as We Know It’, ‘The Passport as We Know It’ and ‘Good Passports and Bad Passports’ �"Patrick Bixby, Professor at Arizona State University, attempts to educate us. The book was conceived during COVID-19 when countries had ‘begun to close borders, restrict internal movement, and require quarantines for visitors and returning citizens alike.’ Indeed, vaccine passports emerged. Global inter-connectedness was under threat; brakes were applied to mobility and migration. The right to travel�"Indians would recall that a Supreme Court judgement (1978) had declared travel as a fundamental right�"was circumscribed to cater to higher demands of public interest.

Replete with details across a broad spectrum covering literature, novels, cinema, history, and politics, the book tells us about its ubiquitous utility for assertion of state sovereignty; enforcing border and mobility controls; establishing citizenship; personal identification through data collection, biometrics, retinal scans, and photography (what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben termed ‘bio-political tattooing’); as also its multiple vulnerabilities including fraudulent issue and use; impersonation; misrepresentation; travel on borrowed passports.

Would it surprise the reader to know that Lenin travelled on a fake passport wearing a wig to cover his bald head and a shaved-off beard? So did the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass while fleeing enslavement in 1838 or that through the inability of the presiding clerk to read Hemingway’s handwriting, his passport declared his profession as ‘waiter’, instead of ‘writer’? Or that Shakespeare used the word ‘passport’ in his play Henry V anachronistically as it was not until fifty years after the Battle of Agincourt�"the context in which he places the reference�"that it emerged in its present meaning. Indeed, it was not originally English; it was transmuted from the French term passeport, a compound of passer and port. Again, in 1780, Benjamin Franklin as the then US envoy to France, created a US passport a decade before the US State Department officially issued one, and seven decades before the US Congress passed an Act governing passports in 1856. (In India, a comprehensive Indian Passport Act came into force in June 1967; the colonial era 1920 Act regulated entry into India)

Freedom of movement was among the casualties of the First World War. The autonomy of freely visiting friends or relatives across borders was curbed. French novelist André Gide lamented about ‘toutes les formalités de passeport’ while Ezra Pound grumbled about ‘hell’s own time about passports’. Travel restrictions and controls had been established. Among the first acts of the League of Nations which came into existence at the instance of Woodrow Wilson in 1920 was to hold the Paris Conference on Passports and Customs formalities in October that year to standardize the general guidelines of the passport booklet. It prescribed the size and other details including the prescription that the booklet should be in the national language and in French. It thereby codified the national identity in an internationally recognizable form.

This did not resolve the consequences of the societal convulsions that led to mass displacement and migration in Europe following the War and the collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Czarist empires. There were more than 1.5 million émigrés, stateless persons who had become refugees, deprived of citizenship, denaturalized and denationalized. (The 2025 figure is nearly 120 million; 43 million refugees and 68 million internally displaced.) The next year, in 1921, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, a zoologist and oceanographer, Nobel Peace Prize winner, proposed a supranational passport. The eponymous Nansen passport offered a lifeline to those thus cut loose. Marc Chagall, Igor Stravinsky and Vladimir Nabokov were among countless other celebrities who were beneficiaries. The passports could not be cancelled; the holder was protected from deportation; but it did not automatically confer the right to work and notice for travel had to be given in advance. Refugee law emerged. Alongside came intolerance, suspicion as fifth columnists, varied vulnerabilities. The concepts of Man and Citizen, as Hannah Arendt observed, were collapsing. For the Europeans, the US was a safe haven during the War. Many made the voyage, often clandestinely as did Benjamin Franklin.

There is all this and much more in the book to illustrate how the passport beyond being a facilitator for travel has come to be, in the hands of the state, an instrument for control, surveillance, denial and other exclusionary measures. There is analysis of books, films, ballet, cultural artefacts and projects, as also the lived experience of prominent personalities like Trotsky, Ai Weiwei, Paul Robeson, Pablo Neruda, Sun Ra, Elon Musk, Gary Davis and many others to show how enjoyment of freedoms and rights can be subverted through the instrumentality of a passport. There is also a discussion of peoples’ movements to bring back universality. The EU has a list of over a hundred different travel documents which do not qualify as legitimate. There are fantasy (Slovenian NSK) or make-believe passports (World Passport), as also those issued by minority sects or associations: the Aborigines, Planetary, Sealand, Hare Krishna, etc. passports.

The world has, indeed, come a long way. During the Gupta period (third century BCE), the Chinese pilgrim Fa Hien visited India and noted that people could travel freely across the country without ‘passports’, or mandatory household registration.