South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent 9789400604544

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Introduction. South Asia Unbound
Part I. (Inter)national Orders and State Futures
Introduction
Chapter 1. A Thwarted “Westphalian Moment” in South Asia? The Triple Alliance against Tipu Sultan
Chapter 2. “Nothing in Common with ‘Indian’ India:” Bhutan and the Cabinet Mission Plan
Chapter 3. Extra-territorial Self-determination: East African Decolonization and the Indian Annexation of Goa
Part II. From the Transimperial to the International: Lived Uncertainties
Introduction
Chapter 4. Battlefields to Borderlands: Rohingyas between Global War and Decolonization
Chapter 5. Other Partitions: Migrant Geographies and Disconnected Histories between India and Malaya, 1945-1965
Chapter 6. Re-Uniting Split Families: The 1972 Ugandan Asian Refugees and the Internationalization of an Imperial Diaspora
Part III. South Asian Roots of the International
Introduction
Chapter 7. An “Indian Hermes” between Paris and the Pacific: Kalidas Nag, Greater India, and the Quest for a Global Humanism
Chapter 8. Fellow Travelers: Global Decolonization and Gandhian Peace Work
Chapter 9. The Islamist International in Lahore: The Jamaat-i Islami, the Middle East, and the Quest for an Islamic State
Part IV. Ambivalences and Sensibilities of Internationalism
Introduction
Chapter 10. Hindu Nationalism in the International: B.S. Moonje’s Travel Writing at the Round Table Conference
Chapter 11. Culture and Progressivism in Pakistan, ca. 1950s-1970s
Chapter 12. Radio’s Internationalism: A View from Modern Afghanistan
Chapter 13. South Asian Diasporic Connections and Afro-Asian Solidarities in the Life of Phyllis Naidoo
Afterword
Index

Citation preview

South Asia Unbound

Global Connections: Routes and Roots Global Connections: Routes and Roots explores histories that challenge existing demarcations between and within local, regional, and interregional arenas. The series encompasses single-site and vernacular histories as much as studies of long-distance connection. This series seeks to bridge early modern and modern history. By taking a wide timeframe of c. 1200 to the present, we embrace the many and shifting nodal points, key regions, modes of transportation and other forms of connectivity that together form the “routes” and “roots” of global history. This includes the making and unmaking of power in different manifestations, as well as the intellectual genealogies and trajectories of the ideas that did so. We welcome all work that explores the global as method. We stress the need to recover local primary sources as a way of investigating both the individual and the collective agency of all those involved in the making of the global. Series Editors Carolien Stolte, Leiden University Mariana de Campos Francozo, Leiden University Editorial Board Ananya Chakravarti, Georgetown University Scott Levi, The Ohio State University Su Lin Lewis, Bristol University Gerard McCann, University of York Prasannan Parthasarathi, Boston College Alessandro Stanziani, École des hautes études en sciences sociales Heidi Tworek, University of British Columbia Other titles in this series: Carolien Stolte and Su Lin Lewis (eds), The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism, 2022 Harald Fischer-Tiné and Nico Slate (eds), The United States and South Asia from the Age of Empire to Decolonization. A History of Entanglements, 2022 Neilesh Bose (eds), India after World History. Literature, Comparison, and Approaches to Globalization, 2022 Jos Gommans and Ariel Lopez (eds), Philippine Confluence. Iberian, Chinese and Islamic Currents, c. 1500–1800, 2020 Michele Louro, Carolien Stolte, Heather Streets-Salter and Sana Tannoury-Karam (eds), The League Against Imperialism. Lives and Afterlives, 2020

SOUTH ASIA UNBOUND New International Histories of the Subcontinent

Edited by Bérénice Guyot-Réchard and Elisabeth Leake

Leiden University Press

Global Connections: Routes and Roots, volume 6 Cover design: Andre Klijsen Cover illustration: Concluding Session of the Asian Relations Conference (April 2, 1947). Attribution: Nehru Memorial Museum/India, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Lay-out: Crius Group Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. ISBN 978 90 8728 409 1 e-ISBN 978 94 0060 454 4 (e-PDF) https://doi.org/10.24415/9789087284091 NUR 692 © Bérénice Guyot-Réchard and Elisabeth Leake / Leiden University Press, 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the publisher and the editors of the book.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

7

List of Contributors

9

Acknowledgements

11

Acronyms and Abbreviations

13

Introduction. South Asia Unbound

15

Elisabeth Leake and Bérénice Guyot-Réchard

15

Part I. (Inter)national Orders and State Futures Chapter 1. A Thwarted “Westphalian Moment” in South Asia? The Triple Alliance against Tipu Sultan

41

Tanja Bührer Chapter 2. “Nothing in Common with ‘Indian’ India:”Bhutan and the Cabinet Mission Plan

61

Swati Chawla Chapter 3. Extra-territorial Self-determination: East African Decolonization and the Indian Annexation of Goa

83

Lydia Walker

Part II. From the Transimperial to the International: Lived Uncertainties Chapter 4. Battlefields to Borderlands: Rohingyas between Global War and Decolonization

103

Jayita Sarkar Chapter 5. Other Partitions: Migrant Geographies and Disconnected Histories between India and Malaya, 1945-1965 Kalyani Ramnath

125

6 table of contents

Chapter 6. Re-Uniting Split Families: The 1972 Ugandan Asian Refugees and the Internationalization of an Imperial Diaspora

145

Ria Kapoor

Part III. South Asian Roots of the International Chapter 7. An “Indian Hermes” between Paris and the Pacific: Kalidas Nag, Greater India, and the Quest for a Global Humanism

167

Yorim Spoelder Chapter 8. Fellow Travelers: Global Decolonization and Gandhian Peace Work 187 Carolien Stolte Chapter 9. The Islamist International in Lahore: The Jamaat-i Islami, the Middle East, and the Quest for an Islamic State

203

Simon Wolfgang Fuchs

Part IV. Ambivalences and Sensibilities of Internationalism Chapter 10. Hindu Nationalism in the International: B.S. Moonje’s Travel Writing at the Round Table Conference

227

Stephen Legg Chapter 11. Culture and Progressivism in Pakistan, ca. 1950s-1970s

247

Ali Raza Chapter 12. Radio’s Internationalism: A View from Modern Afghanistan

269

Mejgan Massoumi Chapter 13. South Asian Diasporic Connections and Afro-Asian Solidarities in the Life of Phyllis Naidoo

289

Annie Devenish

Afterword

311

Srinath Raghavan Index

317

List of Illustrations

Fig. 4.1.

Battle of Arakan, 1943: A Sampan Convoy on the Mayu River, by Anthony Gross

Fig. 4.2.

108

Map of British and Japanese forces in Cox’s Bazaar-Maungdaw area on 17 February 1944

111

Fig. 5.1.

Antonio Cecil Pereira’s passport application

129

Fig. 5.2.

Cecil Pereira’s home in Thumba, Thiruvananthapuram, in former Travancore

131

Fig. 10.1. Portrait of Dr. B.S. Moonje at the Indian Round Table Conference Second Session, 1931 Fig. 13.1. Portrait of Phyllis Naidoo

232 291

Fig. 13.2. The first nineteen volunteers to take part in the 1946 passive resistance campaign

295

Fig. 13.3. A family reunited: Phyllis and her husband MD Naidoo with sons Sahdhan and Shah, and daughter Sukhthi facing away from the camera.

301

Fig. 13.4. Phyllis Naidoo looking out from her window with her three children during her time under house arrest in Durban, 1971.

302

List of Contributors

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard is an associate professor of international history at King’s College London and the founder of NIHSA, the New International Histories of South Asia network. Elisabeth Leake is an associate professor of history and the Lee E. Dirks Chair in Diplomatic History at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. She is a co-organizer of the NIHSA network. Tanja Bührer is Professor of Global History at the University of Salzburg. Swati Chawla is an associate professor of history at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University. Annie Devenish is a lecturer in history at the University of the Witwatersrand and sits on the editorial board of the journal, Historia. Her research focuses on the intersections between feminism and political liberation in India and South Africa and the lives of women activists. Simon Wolfgang Fuchs is a lecturer in Islamic and Middle East Studies at the University of Freiburg. He is interested in religious authority and how the Islamic tradition gets renegotiated between modern South Asia and the Middle East. Ria Kapoor is a lecturer in history and Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences fellow at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Making Refugees in India (Oxford University Press, 2022). Stephen Legg is a professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham and is an editor-in-chief of the Journal of Historical Geography. Mejgan Massoumi is a historian and teaching fellow in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education Program at Stanford University. Srinath Raghavan is a professor of international relations and history at Ashoka University. He is the author of several books, including Fierce Enigmas: A History of the United States in South Asia (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

10 list of contributors

Kalyani Ramnath is an assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia 1942-1962 (Stanford University Press, 2023). Ali Raza is an associate professor of history at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He is the author of Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Jayita Sarkar is an associate professor of economic and social history at the University of Glasgow. Her research and teaching areas are connected partitions, global histories of capitalism, and nuclear infrastructures. She is the author of Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022). Yorim Spoelder is a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the Global History chair at Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the modern connected histories of Europe, South and Southeast Asia. His forthcoming book, Visions of Greater India: Transimperial Knowledge and Anti-Colonial Nationalism, c. 1800-1960, will be published by Cambridge University Press. Carolien Stolte is assistant professor of history at Leiden University and co-director of the Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective. Lydia Walker is an assistant professor and Seth Andre Myers Chair in Global Military History in the Department of History at The Ohio State University. She is the author of States-in-Waiting: Global Decolonization and its Discontents (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) which focuses on nationalist movements that did not achieve statehood during postwar decolonization and their use of advocacy networks in pursuit of international recognition.

Acknowledgements

As is fitting for a text whose alternative title might well have been The Many Lives of South Asian Internationalism, this book has undergone many mutations. What began as a proposed two-day international conference on “South Asia Unbound: Spaces & Scales of Internationalism” morphed, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, into a six-part event series held online during the spring of 2021 (recordings are available at www.kcl.ac.uk/events/series/south-asia-unbound-spaces-and-scales-of-internationalism). Finally, the project coalesced, with a slightly different list of contributors, into the current volume. Collective, transnational endeavours like South Asia Unbound are never simple, even without global pandemics. That the project, initially formulated at a time when we did not know the word “Covid-19,” not only survived its upheaval but thrived is testimony to the energy and solidarity of the community of international historians of South Asia, a field in full momentum at present. This volume is the result of a truly collaborative effort. Contributors to the volume took part in a series of workshops across 2021 and 2022, creating a real community while also helping each other (as well as us, the editors) to shape and finesse the volume. Our authors have stuck with us, no matter how much life seemed to fall apart at times, and it is to them that we first want to express our thanks and appreciation. We also want to thank our peers who presented at the initial event series. Rohit De, Maria Framke, Antia Mato Bouzas, Amna Qayyum, Benjamin Siegel, Joanna Simonow: your work provided much needed intellectual fuel to the endeavour. Thanks also to Farhana Ibrahim, Swapna Kona Nayudu, Avinash Paliwal, and especially Martin Bayly, who chaired the events and prodded our arguments with care and precision. Carolien Stolte put us in touch with Leiden University Press, and we have not regretted it: our experience of working with the team, especially Saskia Gieling, has been fantastic. Srinath Raghavan has perhaps done more than anyone to foster the rise of international history in South Asia as a field, and we are delighted that he agreed to write the afterword to the volume. South Asia Unbound forms a cornerstone in a longer-term initiative to foster continued momentum in researching the subcontinent’s international connections and dimensions. This has taken shape through NIHSA, the New International Histories of South Asia network. Founded in 2019, NIHSA (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ nihsa) is an international, multi-disciplinary network of scholars who focus on the histories of South Asia in and outside of its geographic borders, all of whom are committed to sharing their academic insights with the wider public. We hope South

12 acknowledgements

Asia Unbound will encourage readers to look at more examples of this wide-ranging and expanding field. We hasten to add that we see this volume as a starting point, rather than a conclusion, to important conversations about South Asian global engagement past, present, and future. We look forward to what comes next. Bérénice Guyot-Réchard and Elisabeth Leake, 1 December 2022

Acronyms and Abbreviations

AIPWA – All-India Progressive Writers Association AIR – All India Radio ANC – African National Congress BJP – Bharatiya Janata Party BL – British Library, London CCF – Congress for Cultural Freedom CCWEU – Co-Ordinating Committee for the Welfare of Evacuees from Uganda CIA – Central Intelligence Agency CONCP – Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas CPI – Communist Party of India CPP – Communist Party of Pakistan CPWPA – The Communist Party of West Pakistan in Action EIC – British East India Company FOSA – Friends of the Sick Association GIS – Greater Indian Society GLDC – Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa ICEM – Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration IESH – Indian Economic and Social History Review IJT – Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba IISH – International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam INC – Indian National Congress IOR – India Office Records JCWI – Joint Committee for the Welfare of Immigrants JI – Jamaat-i Islami NAI – National Archives of India, Delhi NEUM – Non-European Unity Movement NIC – Natal Indian Congress NIHSA – New International Histories of South Asia PAFMECA – Pan-African Freedom Movement for East and Central Africa PWA – Pakistan Progressive Writers Association RSS – Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangha RTA – Radio Television Afghanistan RTC – Round Table Conference SACP – South Africa Communist Party

14 acronyms and abbreviations

SAIC – South African Indian Congress UK – United Kingdom UKNA – United Kingdom National Archives, Kew UN – United Nations UNESCO – United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization UNHCR – United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees US – United States USNA – US National Archives, College Park, Maryland WPC – World Peace Council WRI – War Resisters’ International

INTRODUCTION

South Asia Unbound1 Elisabeth Leake and Bérénice Guyot-Réchard

Abstract Whose international matters, and why? How are geographic regions constructed? What are the channels of engagement between a place, its people, its institutions, and the world? How do we understand the non-West’s influence in contemporary global interactions? From humanitarianism and activism to diplomacy and institutional networks, South Asia has been a crucial place for the elaboration of international politics, even before the twentieth century. South Asia Unbound gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars from across the world to investigate South Asian global engagement at the local, regional, national, and supra-national levels, spanning the time before and after independence. Only by understanding its past entanglements with the world can we understand South Asia’s increasing global importance today.

Key words: internationalism, decolonization, South Asia, space, scale, non-Western international relations

One month after Pakistan’s independence, Lord Mountbatten, the subcontinent’s final viceroy who stayed on as independent India’s first governor-general, invited Mohammad Ali Jinnah to London to preside over an exhibition showcasing “the Art of India and Pakistan.” The Qaid-e-Azam asked to change it to “the Art of Hindustan and Pakistan.” No single country, he argued, held the rights to the name “India.” Jinnah was unsuccessful.2 Since 1947, “India” has exclusively been used to refer to Pakistan’s neighbour – the neighbour that, by inheriting the Raj’s treaty rights, obligations and diplomatic infrastructure, claimed the mantle of key successor to the Indian Empire. It was only decades later that an alternative name for the region as a whole, “South Asia,” started appearing. Even then, compared to geographic notions such as East Asia or the Middle East, or even the much more recent IndoPacific, the term met limited success. While South Asia was intended to replace “India” or “Indian subcontinent” in the post-colonial, post-partition era, the latter two terms nevertheless remain often more immediately recognizable. Not only that, but the very attempt to do away with them ends up, more often than not, underscoring India’s long shadow over the region.

16 elisabeth leake and bérénice guyot-réchard

These naming issues betray the deep instability of the notion of South Asia, not just as a regional identity marker but as a category of analysis. The concept of “South Asia” gained currency in the 1980s, at a time when Indian political elites championed the Indira Doctrine, a programmatic statement of Delhi’s ambition to be South Asia’s recognized hegemon, with a duty to preserve peace in the region to the exclusion of any other power.3 Though couched in a Nehruvian discourse of fraternity and civilizational brotherhood, this was still a power-laden region-building effort, and it pushed India’s smaller neighbours to craft new geographies for themselves. Pakistan asserted its links to a wider Islamic world centred on western Asia, while Sri Lanka asserted the primacy of the Indian Ocean as its geographical context and unsuccessfully sought entry into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Like many geographic notions referring to world regions, talking of South Asia therefore rests on a certain understanding of the international. More than many of these terms, perhaps, it is also shot through with powerful centre-periphery dynamics, including in the construction and dissemination of academic and popular knowledge. This book seeks to give texture to South Asia as a regional space through an extended, multi-vocal investigation of its interaction with the rest of the world. Individually and collectively, our chapters ask three sets of questions: what shapes has this interaction taken? Who has effected, transmitted, and imagined this engagement between South Asia and the world? And, last but not least, what have these varieties of internationalism done for the notion of who, or what, is South Asia? Implicit in all these questions is the idea that internationalism has been, for a range of reasons, core to the way that South Asia’s inhabitants have made sense of their lives and of their worlds. This internationalism has, in turn, decisively shaped the conditions for the development of their identities and societies. In other words, we argue that the very idea of South Asia is the product of such internationalisms – a deeply unstable, multi-faceted region whose geographical contours depend, in part, on who is involved in defining them, and when. The international, in short, makes South Asia come unbound. This volume seeks to “unbind” South Asian internationalism in several ways. First, it centres South Asia, and South Asians, as key drivers of international exchange. The internationalist imaginaries and endeavours found across the following chapters were not enforced from outside the subcontinent. Rather, they emerged through processes of engagement and entanglement, in which a wide range of South Asian actors took leading roles. As such, South Asia Unbound questions Eurocentric understandings and chronologies of international relations, revealing alternative centres of internationalist activity. To do this, this volume unpacks the spatial and temporal moments where the distinction between the international and the national, between the foreign and the domestic, and indeed between South Asia and “the rest of the world,” have been blurred.4 Chapters also

south asia unbound 17

highlight how different “moments of decolonization” (from the transfer of power in British India in 1947 to India’s annexation of Goa in 1961) threw open, or conversely closed down, alternative modes of imagining, belonging, action, and geopolitics – modes that often exceeded the limits of the would-be nation-state. South Asia comes further unbound in these pages in the sense that investigating international contacts and imaginations helps us question the historical and historiographical construction of India as the region’s centre of gravity. Like other strands of scholarship, international history and international relations show an overwhelming attention to India at the expense of its neighbours. This is understandable, not least because access to archives in, for example, Pakistan or Myanmar has been comparatively difficult historically. However, it threatens to flatten the history of South Asia, rather than acknowledging some of the ways forms of internationalism both paralleled and diverged in the era of decolonization – a time of vast social and political change, both within the subcontinent and across the world. This book problematizes India’s centrality in two ways. First it brings other South Asian states and state-claimants into view, in this instance through chapters focusing on Bhutan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. These chapters offer a simultaneously comparative and connective history of South Asian internationalism, revealing shared historical roots but also an increasingly diverse array of motivations for, attitudes to, and interpretations of international engagement. Second, South Asia Unbound interrogates “India” as a monolith, providing a more textured definition that emphasizes sub-national and trans-regional forms of internationalism. We particularly pay attention to the borderlands between India and the rest of the world, whether Kerala (whose location at the tip of the Indian peninsula should not elide the fact that it was strongly connected, via the ocean, to other places) or, pre-transfer of power, the borderlands between Arakan and the Chittagong Hill Tracts (today deemed, for highly contingent reasons, “Burmese” and “Bangladeshi” territory). Moreover, while many of the actors mentioned in this book might be considered “Indian” in one way or another (be they Ugandan Asians, South Africans of Indian descent, Goans in Dar-es-Salam, or Malabari migrants to Malaya), “India” itself was not necessarily the centre of their lives – neither as a territorial entity, nor as a civilizational homeland, a political project, or a place to live and realize one’s aspirations. This book, then, counters narratives that merely use “South Asia” as a stand-in for “India.”

Embodied Internationalisms In an effort to complicate what, or whose, “international” gets remembered or forgotten, we adopt a more capacious definition of internationalism. South Asia Unbound

18 elisabeth leake and bérénice guyot-réchard

extends its focus beyond ideologies and supra-national institutions to look at internationalism through, and from the vantage point of, its human actors. These count among them statesmen and royals, scholars and intellectuals, refugees, migrants, anti-apartheid and peace activists, teachers-turned-separatist militants, as well as popular singers, writers, and artists. With the exception perhaps of the Islamist intellectual Abu l’-A’la Mawdudi, few of them can be considered usual suspects in historical narratives of South Asian international relations. At best, they are secondary characters in broader histories, like B.S. Moonje who helped shape the development of Hindu Nationalism in the late colonial era, as Stephen Legg shows in his chapter. By revealing the role Moonje and others had in shaping networks of international activism and imagination within and without South Asia, we contribute to a recent historiographical shift that has seen historians and others move beyond figures like Jawaharlal Nehru, once too readily assumed to be the fount of Indian internationalism and foreign policy. The high level of continuity in foreign policy institutions between late colonial and early independent India (notably through the dominance of ex-ICS officers in the so-called Nehruvian era) has been repeatedly pointed out, not least in a spate of recent biographies that retrace the contributions of individual diplomats like Srinivasa Sastri, Vijaylakshmi Pandit, or Subimal Dutt. The paucity of work on the international history of India’s neighbours means that their statesmen and diplomats – like the Sikkimese King Palden Thondup Namgyal and the Bhutanese Prime Minister Jigmie Palden Dorji, discussed by Swati Chawla, who defended their countries from incorporation into India upon the transfer of power in 1947 – have not benefited from such attention. This book does not centre statesmen, however. By placing them amid other actors, we suggest possibilities for non-state-centred international histories of South Asia. Peopling this story restores an international ecosystem constituted by day-to-day encounters and initiatives by a multiplicity of actors – encounters that were small-scale, ground-level, not always state-led, and often invisible. These actors may not consciously have thought of themselves as internationalists, but their lives made little sense without their engagement with the world “out there,” beyond the limits of the nation-state. South Asian internationalists accordingly did not share a single way of imagining South Asia. Indeed, their diverse understandings of its place in the wider world (and its contributions to it) often competed with one another. Where some saw the subcontinent as a vanguard of the Islamic world, others argued in favour of the Himalayas as a single cultural and political sphere, clearly distinct from the “Indian” one. Some conversely looked east. As Yorim Spoelder shows, the inveterate traveler-networker-scholar Kalidas Nag harked back to the past, arguing that Greater India had, pre-European colonization, provided the civilizational inspiration not just for Angkor and Borobudur’s architecture, Javanese theatre, or

south asia unbound 19

most Tai-Burmese scripts: its influence had travelled much further than peninsular Asia, all the way to Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia, and it decisively inspired their societies. By expanding French Orientalist notions of India’s civilizing influence beyond Southeast Asia and into the vast Pacific Ocean, Nag was arguably envisioning a future where, with colonialism receding from the “sea of islands,” India would recover its entire global footprint.5 This idea still shapes current-day Indian perspectives on the “Indo-Pacific.” Meanwhile, as Kalyani Ramnath shows, for people like the estate clerk Antonio Cecil Pereira, born in a family with ties both in Malabar and Malaya, life and belonging were anchored in the circulatory movement around the Bay of Bengal. Space, as such, was less important to Pereira than networks. Our emphasis, therefore, is on internationalism as a lived, embodied experience. At times an intellectual or cultural (pre-)disposition, it can also be a mode of living or a political choice, and sometimes still the result, often laden with painful consequences, of living at the interstices between empires and nation-states. Sometimes this takes place all at once, sometimes at different points in a person’s life. That this internationalism is lived does not mean it is necessarily a chosen experience. One of the principal axes of difference revealed in this volume is between actors for whom crossing or acting across the borders of states and empires, and indeed thinking through them, was a conscious choice, pursued with intent, and those for whom it was not – that is, those who had internationalism imposed on them by the circumstances of their lives. There is a big difference between Kalidas Nag and Antonio Cecil Pereira. The first dedicated his life to disseminating his theories of India’s global footprint across intersecting internationalist scholarly circles. The second was forced to reconsider his sense of attachment and belonging by the advent of Indian independence. The situation was even more extreme in the case of the Asian families discussed by Ria Kapoor, expelled from Uganda and rejected by successive governments across the world. To speak of internationalism as a lived experience brings to the fore the role of emotions and interpersonal relations. Our contributors speak of the constitutive role of friendship and fellowship sentiments for the development of the Sarvodaya Movement’s international pacifist networks (Carolien Stolte’s chapter), Pakistani intellectuals’ ties to Afro-Asian literary circles (Ali Raza’s chapter), or the South African activist Phyllis Naidoo’s lifelong struggle to fight apartheid across borders (Annie Devenish’s chapter). For the popular Afghan singer Aḥmad Ẓāhir, internationalism was an articulation of hope and aspirations, through cultural miscegenation and cross-pollination, as Mejgan Massoumi illustrates. Internationalism, however, could also provoke feelings of disgust, like that B.S. Moonje felt while wandering the streets of 1930s London. Moonje’s repulsion solidified his sense of isolation and Indian exceptionalism, and they, in turn, informed his Hindu nationalist ideology.

20 elisabeth leake and bérénice guyot-réchard

Family ties, meanwhile, could enable concerted international lobbying. Thondup, Sikkim’s king, and Bhutan’s Prime Minister Jigmie were first cousins who had been brought up together. This enabled them to mount a concerted campaign in defence of their countries’ sovereignty in 1947. Yet the same family ties, along with male-centric understandings of citizenship, could relegate people to a no man’s land between countries none too eager to host them, as in the case of Ugandan Asians where British wives were separated from stateless husbands and denied settlement in Britain. It follows that internationalism might in fact not be sought after. On the contrary, travelling, interacting with people from across the world, were not necessarily markers of internationalism. For Moonje, the very cosmopolitanism of London and his interactions with others during the Round Table Conference provoked strong feelings of rejection. Phyllis Naidoo, meanwhile, spent much of her life actively pushing away her Indian background and had an ambivalent relationship with the cross-oceanic networks and activism other South African Indians had mobilized. Naidoo, most of the time, sought to assert herself as African, and only African. As for Ugandan Asians, their desperate struggle to be recognized as “from one place” in the face of governmental forces determined to relegate them to the interstices of nation-states highlights the oppressive potential of internationalism in some cases, notably when couched in humanitarian terms, as Ugandan Asians were framed as refugees who states accepted out of charity.

Modes of Internationalism Given the multiplicity of South Asian internationalist actors, their practice of internationalism was correspondingly diverse. South Asian elites certainly asserted themselves in the traditional arenas of international relations. From an early stage, the eighteenth-century rulers of Hyderabad and the Maratha Confederacy formed political and military alliances with the East India Company on an equal footing, as Tanja Bührer shows. This tradition of diplomacy would persist, though in often fraught, unequal or ambiguous ways, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The negotiation and promulgation of treaties between the rulers of South Asia’s princely states and the British Raj formed an important facet of Western colonial expansion, often giving imperialists exceptional influence in these semi-autonomous polities. Yet treaty relations also offered South Asia’s princes a unique (though often ultimately unsuccessful) opportunity to renegotiate their place in the world, as the colonial hold weakened. Rulers of princely states such as Hyderabad and Travancore, as well as in Bhopal and Sikkim, pointed to longstanding treaties to assert their independence from colonial India in the talks

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that ultimately resulted in the 3 June plan to partition India. In turn, as partition took place, the leaders of newly independent Pakistan and India reacted with hostility to the ambiguity of the princely states’ older sovereign arrangements, actively working to subsume these polities into Indian and Pakistani national projects. Yet while South Asian elites in the era of decolonization often ignored or rejected older practices of international relations within their newly national borders, they actively pursued diplomacy abroad to assert their legitimacy. International organizations and alliance-making were especially prominent. Thus, Jawaharlal Nehru took full advantage of the opportunities offered by the nascent UN General Assembly to express his views on South African treatment of its Indian minority and co-headed the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung. Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Mohammed Ali, signed a strategic alliance with the United States in 1954, embedding Pakistan in the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization and Baghdad Pact in return for military and economic aid. Afghanistan’s central government, meanwhile, turned to the UN to air its grievances against neighbouring Pakistan, citing tenets of international law to claim the illegality of their shared border, and to demand ethnic Pashtun self-determination. In these instances, international law and inter-state diplomacy were key to establishing South Asian foreign relations. These modes of South Asian international engagement have been most visible in the existing scholarship, but they are far from unique. South Asian internationalism took place in numerous spheres, both tangible and intangible. Formal and informal networks – political, intellectual, religious, cultural – embedded South Asians in global frameworks and foregrounded South Asia in the international sphere. The act of traveling, of moving abroad for education, to take part in political gatherings, or to disseminate knowledge offered South Asians opportunities to reflect on the subcontinent’s place in the world. Conferences offered a crucial site in which South Asian elites and intellectuals negotiated notions and means of independence in an age of imperial decline, as when B.S. Moonje attended the Round Table Conference.6 So, too, did educational circuits. Much like Kalidas Nag, wellknown Indian intellectuals such as M.N. Roy travelled across interwar Europe and America to promote India’s civilizational significance and to reframe the subcontinent’s history away from colonial subjection. Meanwhile, thousands of South Asians, often nameless in the archives, studied across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia. Their experiences of international education not only informed their perspectives on matters at home – whether on issues of caste and race, on modes of political and social modernization, or on India, Pakistan, or Afghanistan’s place in the world – but also embedded them in a host of transnational movements such pan-Asianism, pan-Islamism, Afro-Asianism, socialism, women’s rights, and more.7 South Asians thus became involved in an array of transnational organizations, some of which required them to go out into the world, others which rooted

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internationalism within the subcontinent. For many political activists, South Asia provided a model for further internationalist mobilization. This could be seen in the way that Indian activists in the World Peace Brigade rooted pacifism in Gandhian thought and action. It was similarly visible in Jamaat-i Islami’s arguments that Lahore, not Tehran or Cairo, was the centre of global Islamist thought, thanks to the works of Muslim intellectuals like Mawdudi, as Simon Wolfgang Fuchs argues. In these organizations, which intentionally blurred the boundaries between the national and international, South Asia was prominent for the ideas and movements it represented–anticolonialism and civil disobedience, nonalignment and pacifism, the fusion of religion and politics (Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist)–not just due to the individual South Asians who took part. Internationalism, then, could manifest through practices that did not require South Asians’ own mobility. The emergence of numerous, overlapping, sometimes conflicting public spheres brought South Asians into contact with international influences. The act of writing provided a particularly powerful way for individuals and communities to debate the relationship between local, national, and international developments. Many South Asians used personal correspondence to develop their views on the worlds in which they lived, as well as to lobby comrades across the world to participate in shared social and political projects. This becomes especially clear in the writings of the anti-apartheid activist Phyllis Naidoo, who, through her correspondence, developed her ideas regarding the relationship between her Indian heritage and her belief in political “non-racialism.” The South Asian republic of letters encompassed both the private, intimate spaces of personal correspondence and the public print sphere of newspapers, manifestos, and literary texts. The printing of local newspapers, such as the Goan Voice in east Africa, provided powerful fora for members of the South Asian diaspora to reflect on their at-times tenuous links with the subcontinent–in this instance, Lydia Walker argues, for local Goans to debate the meaning of self-determination against the backdrop of the Indian annexation of Goa. Likewise, the printed word offered audiences within South Asia opportunities to draw additional linkages between their daily lives and events across the world.8 In Pakistan, as Ali Raza reveals, writing and publishing provided a means for members of the Pakistani left to simultaneously criticize growing authoritarianism at home and engage with a global intellectual sphere that celebrated the promises of socialism and the transformative potential of a progressive transnational culture. Yet print media was not the only key technology of internationalism. As Mejgan Massoumi shows, sonic internationalism could be equally potent. Through the extension of Afghanistan’s radio programs in the 1960s, local Afghans heard covers of Elvis and the Beatles, embraced a musical culture that fused traditional musical practices with international influences, and imbibed the heady global protest culture of the 1960s.

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From the Transimperial to the International As the contributions to this volume and a growing body of scholarship show, South Asian internationalism did not abruptly begin at the moment of independence for states like India and Pakistan. It had much longer, deeper roots and older chronologies. These were both practical and ideational. Some forms of South Asian diplomacy and leadership had lineages reaching back into the precolonial period, as Bührer and Chawla show; meanwhile, many intellectuals and elites rooted their demands about South Asia’s place in the world in the subcontinent’s longer history, even if this required radical reinterpretations of its past, as in the Greater India movement. Colonial interactions further informed modes of foreign engagement: some South Asian elites would take advantage of colonial administrative systems and joint endeavours, such as the Round Table Conference, in attempts to reshape not only governance within the subcontinent but the empire’s broader systems. Others would actively reject engaging with colonial agents, instead seeking ideological and political allies (pan-Asian, pan-Islamic, communist, pacifist, fascist) across the Pacific, East and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America to create alternative platforms to critique empires. Moreover, for generations millions of South Asians lived internationalism through their very mobility. Theirs was often an internationalism informed by economic and educational opportunity or personal necessity. It included not only labour migrants who went to work in Britain’s other colonies but also, especially in the early twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of South Asians deployed to serve in the two world wars and other imperial conflicts. Employment, war, politics, and diasporic familial ties drove South Asians to position themselves as liminal internationalists, traveling via imperial conduits away from the subcontinent and creating global entanglements through their life choices. Many of the modes of internationalism described above became especially visible in the early years of the twentieth century, preceding the partition of India and Pakistan. Yet the regional and global shift from a world of empires to a world of nation-states revealed both continuities and fractures within the realm of South Asian internationalism. Many of the same ideas remained: aspirations to conduct foreign relations that subverted an international system reliant on imperial precedents; the need to coordinate local activities across the world to undermine white supremacy in its many forms; the desire to safeguard individual and community rights. But the forms that international mobilization could take often became more constricted. The same international ordering process in which many South Asian elites actively participated created new barriers for South Asian internationalists. Debates about the nature of state sovereignty, which predated the era of

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decolonization, took on new urgency. Imperial powers had exercised many different forms of sovereignty within and across empires, using very different methods and justifications to assert colonial dominance in, for example, colonial India’s north-east and north-west frontiers than what they employed in the subcontinent’s plains and cities, or in the princely states. The nature and meaning of sovereignty, and the forms that post-independence sovereignty should take, provoked debate among anti-colonial activists in South Asia and elsewhere, leading to debates about federalism, federations, and commonwealth membership, among other alternatives. Nevertheless, newly independent state elites became increasingly intolerant of sovereign ambiguities that threatened to undermine their own rule. The desire of governments in Delhi, Karachi/Islamabad, Kabul, or Yangon to assert their eminence in domestic and foreign affairs revealed the contradictions of decolonization and the need for certain types of sovereignty to eclipse others. The processes by which India assumed its current political boundaries exemplified these incongruities. Nehru’s government rejected the older semi-autonomy of the princely states and any attempts by them to assert their independence from post-independence India, as seen in the decision to send troops to annex the major Princely State of Hyderabad in 1948. Where, in the colonial period, the princely states had been neither fully incorporated nor fully autonomous, correspondingly blurring the boundaries between domestic and foreign policy, in the era of India’s decolonization, they were fully domesticized and made internal to independent India. Even more controversially, Nehru’s decision to annex Goa in 1961 brought to the fore decolonization’s paradoxes: a decolonized state invading a colony. As Goans in the diaspora were quick to point out, a fundamental tension arose. Indian elites disregarded Goan self-determination in the name of ending imperialism in the subcontinent. In turn, potential sovereign alternatives for Goa were subsumed within the Indian nation-state and declared illegitimate. In the process, the types of internationalist activities in which South Asians could engage narrowed further. These debates about the nature of state sovereignty correspondingly hardened the boundaries between national and international, domestic, and foreign. In its most visible manifestation, the very acts that created visible state boundaries – partitioning and bordering – complicated embodied internationalism and its earlier transimperial fluidity. The drawing and monitoring of state borders became a topdown manifestation of South Asian internationalism. But rather than embracing the ability of people, goods, and ideas to circulate across the world, this form of internationalism derived its potency from the state’s ability to regulate who or what forms of transborder circulation were acceptable. By demarcating and policing borders in India’s north-east, state officials intentionally sought to disrupt the older mobility of local communities, such as the Rohingyas, forcing them to settle in either India,

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Pakistan/Bangladesh, or Burma/Myanmar (and, in turn, become “Indian,” “Pakistani/ Bangladeshi,” or “Burmese”), as Jayita Sarkar shows. Through passport and visa regimes, Indian officials barred or ejected members of transnational organizations, such as the World Peace Brigade’s Michael Scott, who were seen as enemies of state interests. Pakistani elites used border controls both along the Durand Line and in the port of Karachi to prohibit the movement of goods into Afghanistan, punishing Afghan elites for their promotion of an independent “Pashtunistan,” which would have further complicated South Asia’s sovereign arrangements. Both land and maritime borders offered state elites the means to enforce or criminalize certain forms of international activity, even as many citizens found licit and illicit ways to circumvent such state controls. As previously mobile South Asians increasingly encountered systems of border controls and passport regulation, they consequently confronted potential elisions or ruptures between identity, on one hand, and formal citizenship, on the other. Many South Asians (with the explicit backing of South Asian state governments, especially India) chose to root themselves in their domiciles in Singapore, Malaysia, East and South Africa, or the Persian Gulf, pursuing local citizenship while seeking to maintain cultural and familial links with their homelands. But others were not given this choice, notably those who were refused Ugandan citizenship or from whom it was withdrawn. Expelled, and left rootless, they were neither accepted in India (where most families had roots) nor immediately settled in the older colonial metropole of Great Britain, whose passport many of them held. Internationalism as a lived experience became increasingly visible and involved more explicit choices. States more actively policed citizenship and migration, thus particularly complicating the internationalism of the South Asian diaspora, instead making it increasingly multi-, rather than trans-, national. Thus, for the South Asians in this volume, the nation(-state) held an often ambiguous, even contradictory place in their internationalism. It did not necessarily inform the global nature of the ideas that drove many South Asian internationalists, which were often far more universalist. But increasingly it shaped the types of actions and activities they could undertake – the arenas of internationalism. In other words, looking at the different forms and agents of South Asian internationalism, what becomes clear is that internationalism was not necessarily nation-state centric, even as the nation-state increasingly became a constricting factor.

Further Unbinding the International When we first began work on South Asia Unbound, we were driven by the twin concerns of “space” and “scale.” By centering scale, we sought to question the

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geographical and temporal logics undergirding dominant accounts of the region: how do we write about South Asia’s international engagement without assuming the primacy of the nation-state, or that its international relations started after independence in the late 1940s? In turn, the following chapters investigate states, institutions, informal and formal networks, communities, and individuals as South Asian agents of global engagement at the local, regional, supra-national – and yes, national – levels. They do so in ways that consider varied temporal horizons, notably those spanning the time before and after political independence in 1947. The volume simultaneously focuses on space: reflecting on the arenas, places, and interstices at which the “membrane” between South Asia and the world has been constantly enacted, made, and remade. Where does South Asia end and the international begin? How have South Asians shaped sociopolitical, economic, and ideological trajectories of other states and communities across the world? Likewise, what are the key sites of international engagement within South Asia? Contributions to this volume demonstrate that these spaces can be concrete and material – capital cities, embassies, borderlands, oceans, human bodies – as well as conceptual or imagined – in conferences, intellectual exchanges, literary and artistic production, legal arguments, and so on. As a consequence, South Asia Unbound questions “international” as a category. Each of its chapters stretches the term’s semantic range to take in the South Asian diaspora, transnational activists, insurgent groups, non-governmental organizations, and minority groups (to name a few) and revisiting the role of traditional actors like political and bureaucratic elites. This represents quite a stark departure from understandings of international relations as primarily a matter of state-to-state interactions and issues of war and peace (how decisions to wage one and seal the other are made). Srinath Raghavan, in his incisive afterword, both commends this pluralism and cautions against unthinkingly expanding international history, lest it dilute research into these issues and turn it into an amorphous field. Raghavan’s point is an important one, and points to a wider debate on these questions among international historians that dates back at least to Akira Iriye.9 Our intent here is not to settle this debate either one way or another, and for good reason. We see this very tension between diplomatic or strictly “international” history, on the one hand, and more pluralist understandings of the term, on the other, as deeply productive – all the more so in a South Asian context where both approaches remain, as Raghavan stresses, under-researched. Debating this tension can only be beneficial. We therefore hope that the volume will generate historiographical conversations in multiple directions. This volume also offers a purposeful question: Whose international matters, and why? By targeting subaltern, subordinated, and silenced groups for more sustained scholarly attention, we seek to bring into view the lived realities of the “international.” Our aim is to encourage the view of the international

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from the ground up, and also to reveal the performative effects of international politics upon regional actors at state and sub-state levels, whether legal, economic, cultural, or intellectual. As such, we argue that state-centric international history (to term it inelegantly) stands to benefit from this book’s conceptualizations. For, in revisiting the international as South Asia Unbound does, we move beyond a simplistic dichotomy of South Asian exceptionalism (that South Asia has its “own” vision of the international) or assumptions of diffusionism that treat South Asia as the passive recipient of Eurocentric understandings of international order. Last but not least, our exploration of new international histories of South Asia not only integrates the region into wider geographies and scales of analysis but also provides a model for thinking more broadly about the nature of international relations and international histories, particularly as they have emanated from the decolonizing world. Moving between the local, national, regional, and global has always been a practical fact of South Asian history through the sheer mobility of its populations; the same can be said for many of the other communities whom imperialism internationalized. The patterns of transnational, transregional, and global exchange found in the following chapters were replicated by individuals, organizations, communities, and states across many parts of the “Global South,” even if some of the more specific concerns discussed in the following chapters derive from subcontinental dynamics. It is only by foregrounding agents and ideas of internationalism from regions like South Asia that we can truly understand the “international” as such a potent, yet problematic, aspiration and arena. South Asia Unbound thus presents South Asia as a key region for a versatile approach to the international and for challenging conceptual, temporal, and disciplinary orthodoxies in international history.

South Asia Unbound: An Illustrative Bibliography This bibliography is regularly updated on the website of NIHSA – the New International Histories of South Asia network: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/nihsa/ research/bibliography. Internationalisms Bhagavan, Manu, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Balasubramanian, Aditya, and Srinath Raghavan, “Present at the Creation: India, the Global Economy, and the Bretton Woods Conference,” Journal of World History 29 (2018), 65–94 Bayly, Martin, “Lineages of Indian International Relations: The Indian Council on World Affairs, the League of Nations, and the Pedagogy of Internationalism,” International History Review 44 (2022), 819–35

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Bose, Neilesh, South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020) Crews, Robert D., Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) Davies, Andrew, Geographies of Anticolonialism: Political Networks across and beyond South India, c. 1900-1930 (Oxford: Wiley & Sons, 2019) Featherstone, David, “Reading Subaltern Studies Politically: Histories from Below, Spatial Relations, and Subalternity,” in T. Jazeel and S. Legg (eds.), Subaltern Geographies (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2019) Featherstone, David, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London: Zed Books, 2012) Goswami, Manu, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review 117 (2012), 14610-85 Green, Nile, “Afghanistan in Asia: Reflections on the Study of Afghan Transnationalism,” Afghanistan 4 (2021), 50-6 Hauser, Julia, “Internationalism and Nationalism: Indian Protagonists and Their Political Agendas at the 15th World Vegetarian Congress in India (1957),” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 44 (2021), 152–66 Ho, Engseng, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006) Leake, Elisabeth, “Afghan Internationalism and the Question of Afghanistan’s Political Legitimacy,” Afghanistan 1 (2018), 68–94 Legg, Stephen, “Of Scales, Networks and Assemblages: The League of Nations Apparatus and the Scalar Sovereignty of the Government of India,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (2009), 234–25 Legg, Stephen, “Imperial Internationalism: The Round Table Conference and the Making of India in London, 1930-32,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 11 (2020), 32–53 Legg, Stephen, “‘Political Atmospherics’: The India Round Table Conference’s Atmospheric Environments, Bodies and Representations, London 1930-32,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110 (2020), 774–92 Legg, Stephen, “Political Lives at Sea: Working and Socialising to and from the India Round Table Conference in London, 1930-1932,” Journal of Historical Geography 68 (2020), 21–32 Lewis, Su Lin, “Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Post-Colonial Freedom, 1952-1956,” Journal of World History 30 (2019), 55–88 Louro, Michele Comrades Against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Ludden, David, “The Centrality of Indo-Persia in Global Asia and Historical Formation of Afghanistan,” Afghanistan 4 (2021), 57–9 Manjapra, Kris, “From Imperial to International Horizons: A Hermeneutic Study of Bengali Modernism,” Modern Intellectual History 8 (2011), 327–59 Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009) Mukherjee, Sumita, “The All-Asian Women’s Conference 1931: Indian Women and Their Leadership of a Pan-Asian Feminist Organisation,” Women’s History Review 26 (2017), 363–81 Olcott, Jocelyn, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

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O’Malley, Alanna, “India, Apartheid and the New World Order at the UN, 1946-1962,” Journal of World History 31 (2020), 195–223 Raza, Ali, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah (eds.), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917-39 (New Delhi: Sage, 2015) Raza, Ali, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) Singh, Sinderpal, “From Delhi to Bandung: Nehru, “Indian-ness” and “Pan-Asian-ness,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 34 (2011), 51–64 Stolte, Carolien, and Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905-1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54 (2012), 65–92 Walker, Lydia, “The Political Geography of International Advocacy: Indian and American Cold War Civil Society for Tibet,” The American Historical Review 127 (2022),1579–605

International Relations & Foreign Policy Abraham, Itty, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014) Bhagavan, Manu (ed.), India and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) Chawla, Swati, “Fashioning a “Buddhist” Himalayan Cartography: Sikkim Darbar and the Cabinet Mission Plan”, India Quarterly 79 (2023), 1–16 Chacko, Priya, Indian Foreign Policy: The Politics of Postcolonial Identity from 1947 to 2004 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012) Craig, Malcolm M. “‘Nuclear Sword of the Moslem World’?: The United States, Britain, Pakistan, and the ‘Islamic Bomb’, 1977-80,” The International History Review 38 (2016), 1–23 Fischer-Tiné, Harald, and Nico Slate, The United States and South Asia from the Age of Empire to Decolonization: A History of Entanglements (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2022) Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, “Before the Indo Pacific: The Legacy of Indian Ocean Geopolitics During the Cold War,” Asia Program Seminars (Wilson Center, 10 December 2019), https://www.wilsoncenter. org/event/the-indo-pacific-the-legacy-indian-ocean-geopolitics-during-the-cold-war (accessed 31 January 2023) Leake, Elisabeth, “The Great Game Anew: US Cold-War Policy and Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, 1947-65,” International History Review 35 (2013), 783–806 McGarr, Paul M., The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Nayudu, Swapna Kona, “In the Very Eye of the Storm: India, the UN, and the Lebanon Crisis of 1958,” Cold War History 18 (2018), 221–37 Paliwal, Avinash, My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal (London: Hurst, 2017) Raghavan, Pallavi, Animosity at Bay: An Alternative History of the India-Pakistan Relationship, 19471952 (London: Hurst, 2020) Raghavan, Pallavi, Martin Bayly, Elisabeth Leake, and Avinash Paliwal, “The Limits of Decolonisation in India’s International Thought and Practice: An Introduction,” International History Review 44 (2022), 812–18 Sarkar, Jayita, “The Making of a Non-Aligned Nuclear Power: India’s Proliferation Drift, 1964-8,” International History Review 37 (2015), 933–50

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Sarkar, Jayita, Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022) Stolte, Carolien, “‘The Asiatic Hour’: New Perspectives on the Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, 1947,” in N. Miskovic, H. Fischer-Tiné and N. Boskovska (eds.) The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014) Thakur, Vineet, “An Asian Drama: The Asian Relations Conference, 1947,” The International History Review 41 (2019), 673–95 Thakur, Vineet, “Liberal, Liminal and Lost: India’s First Diplomats and the Narrative of Foreign Policy,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45 (2017), 232–58 Thakur, Vineet, India’s First Diplomat: VS Srinivasa Sastri and the Making of Liberal Internationalism (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2021) Thakur, Vineet, “Travels in Diplomacy: VS Srinivasa Sastri and GS Bajpai in 1921-1922,” The International History Review 44 (2002), 874-91 Thakur, Vineet, and Alexander E. Davis, “A Communal Affair over International Affairs: The Arrival of IR in Late Colonial India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40 (2017), 689–705

Imperialisms, Anti-Imperialisms, & Post-Imperialisms Ahmed, Faiz, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017) Ahmed, Manan, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020) Aydin, Cemil, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and PanAsian Thought (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007) Bannerjee, Sukanya, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) Bayly, Martin, Taming the Imperial Imagination: Colonial Knowledge, International Relations, and the Anglo-Afghan Encounter, 1808-1878 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Biedermann, Zoltan, (Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) Boittin, Jennifer Anne, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2010) Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005) Ghosh, Durba, and Dane Kennedy (eds.), Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2006) Gopal, Priyamvada, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso Books, 2019) Green, Nile, “The Trans-Border Traffic of Afghan Modernism: Afghanistan and the Indian ‘Urdusphere’,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (2011), 479–508 Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud (ed.), Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia: Pioneer of British Colonial Rule (London: Hurst, 2019) Hasan, Mushirul (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981) Hopkins, Benjamin, Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020)

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Khan, Raphaëlle, “Disrupting Empire and Forging IR: The Role of India’s Early Think Tanks in the Decolonisation Process, 1936-1950s,” International History Review 44 (2022), 836–55 Kia, Mana, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020) Luarsen, Ole Birk, “Anti-Colonialism, Terrorism and the ‘Politics of Friendship’: Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and the European Anarchist Movement, 1910-1927,” Anarchist Studies 27 (2019), 47–62 Legg, Stephen, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007) Manchanda, Nivi, Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) Manjapra, Kris, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) Matera, Marc, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015) Pinto, Rochelle, “Race and Imperial Loss: Accounts of East Africa in Goa,” South African Historical Journal, 75 (2007), 82–92 Sinha, Mrinalini, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) Sinha, Mrinalini, “Whatever Happened to the Third British Empire? Empire, Nation Redux,” in A. Thompson (ed.), Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) Six, Clemens, “Challenging the Grammar of Difference: Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Global Mobility and Anti-Imperialism around the First World War,” European Review of History 25 (2018), 431–49 Stolte, Carolien, “‘The People’s Bandung’: Local Anti-Imperialists on an Afro-Asian Stage,” Journal of World History 30 (2019), 125–56

Decolonization and Postcolonial Statehood Bangash, Yaqoob Khan, “Betrayal of Trust: Princely States of India and the Transfer of Power,” South Asia Research 26 (2006), 181–99 Beverley, Eric Lewis, “Rethinking Sovereignty, Colonial Empires, and Nation-States in South Asia and Beyond,” special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40 (2020) Carney, Scott, The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2011) Chari, Sharad, Fraternal Capital (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004) Copland, Ian, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) De, Rohit, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in The Indian Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018) Engerman, David, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) Fejzula, Merve, “The Cosmopolitan Historiography of Twentieth-Century Federalism,” The Historical Journal 64 (2020), 477–500 Gupta, Pamila, “The Disquieting of History: Portuguese (De)colonisation and Goan Migration in the Indian Ocean,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 44 (2009), 19–47

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Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, “The Indian Ocean after 1945,” in P. Parthasarathi (ed.), Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives (Boston, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, 2020) Haines, Daniel, Rivers Divided: Indus Basin Waters in the Making of India and Pakistan (London: Hurst, 2017) Immerwahr, Daniel, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) Kapoor, Ria, “Nehru’s Non-Alignment Dilemma: The Tibetan Refugees in India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42 (2019), 675–93 Leake, Elisabeth, Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) Leake, Elisabeth, “States, Nations, and Self-Determination: Afghanistan and Decolonization at the United Nations,” Journal of Global History 17 (2022), 272–91 Nayudu, Swapna Kona (ed.), “Modern Indian Thinkers,” special issue, Global Intellectual History 2 (2017) Purushotham, Sunil, From Raj to Republic: Sovereignty, Violence, and Democracy in India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021) Raghavan, Srinath, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) Ramnath, Kalyani, “Histories of Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonisation,” Itinerario 45 (2021), 152–73 Semyanov, Alexander (ed.), “The Ambiguity of Federalism as a Postimperial Political Vision,” special issue of Ab Imperio 3 (2018) Siegel, Benjamin, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Terretta, Meredith, “Anti-Colonial Lawyering, Postwar Human Rights, and Decolonization across Imperial Boundaries in Africa,” Canadian Journal of History 52 (2017), 448–78 Walker, Lydia, “Decolonization in the 1960s: On Legitimate and Illegitimate Nationalist Claims-Making,” Past and Present 242 (2019), 227–64

South Asians Abroad & Intimate Internationalisms Ahmed, Rehana, and Sumita Mukherjee, South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858-1947 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011) Aiyar, Sana, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) Amrith, Sunil S., Crossing the Bay of Bengal. The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) Amrith, Sunil S. “Indians Overseas? Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya 1870-1941,” Past and Present 208 (2010), 231–61 Fisher, Michael H., Shompa Lahiri and Shinder Thandi, A South-Asian History of Britain (Westport, CT: Greenwood World, 2007) Framke, Maria, “Shopping Ideologies for Independent India? Taraknath Das’s Engagement with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism,” Itinerario 40 (2016), 55–81 Goebel, Michael, “Geopolitics, Transnational Solidarity or Diaspora Nationalism? The Global Career of M.N. Roy, 1915-1930,” European Review of History 21 (2014), 485–99 Harper, Tim, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021)

south asia unbound 33

Immerwahr, Daniel, “Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States,” Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007), 275–301 Khan, Raphaëlle and Taylor Sherman, “India and Overseas Indians in Ceylon and Burma, 1946-1965: Experiments in Post-imperial Sovereignty,” Modern Asian Studies 56 (2021), 1153–82 Liebau, Heike, “Networks of Knowledge Production: South Asian Muslims and German Scholars in Berlin (1915-30),” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40 (2020), 309–21 Loomba, Ania, Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018) Manjapra, Kris, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010) Markovits, Claude, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Markovits, Claude, India and the World: A History of Connections, c. 1750-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) McGetchin, Douglas T., “Indo-German Contact Through the Lens of Gender: Three Cases of Anti-Imperialist Miscegenation: Dr. Zakir Husain, Virendrenath ‘Chatto’ Chatto-padhyaya, and S.C. Bose,” in Joanne Miyang Cho and Douglas T. McGetchin (eds.), Gendered Encounters between Germany and Asia (Switzerland: Springer, 2017) Namakkal, Jessica, “Decolonizing Marriage and the Family: The Lives and Letters of Ida, Benoy, and Indira Sarkar,” Journal of Women’s History 31 (2019), 124–47 Sen, Satadru, Benoy Kumar Sarkar: Restoring the Nation to the World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015) Shehabuddin, Elora, Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2021) Slate, Nico, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) Slate, Nico, “‘I am a Coloured Woman’: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya in the United States, 1939-41,” Contemporary South Asia 17 (2009), 7–19 Srinivas, Mytheli, Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2021) Sriraman, Tarangini, In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) Stoler, Ann Laura, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002) Wardaki, Marjan, “Rediscovering Afghan Fine Arts: The Life of an Afghan Student in Germany, Abdul Ghafur Brechna,” Modern Asian Studies 55 (2021), 1544-80

Humanitarianisms Durbach, Nadja, “The Politics of Provisioning: Feeding South Asian Prisoners during the First World War,” War & Society 37 (2018), 75–90 Fischer-Tiné, Harald, “‘Unparalleled Opportunities’: The Indian Y.M.C.A.’s Army Work Schemes for Imperial Troops During the Great War (1914-1920),” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 47 (2019), 100–37 Framke, Maria “Political Humanitarianism in the 1930s: Indian Aid for Republican Spain,” European Review of History, 23 (2016), 63–81 Framke, Maria, “‘We Must Send a Gift Worthy of India and the Congress!’ War and Political Humanitarianism in Late Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 51 (2017), 1969-98

34 elisabeth leake and bérénice guyot-réchard

Hyson, Samuel, and Alan Lester, “‘British India on Trial’: Brighton Military Hospitals and the Politics of Empire in World War I,” Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012), 18–34 Kapoor, Ria, Making Refugees in India (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022) Kapoor, Ria, “Removing the International from the Refugee,” Humanity 12 (2021), 1–19 Marcussen, Eleonor, “Cooperation and Pacifism in a Colonial Context: Service Civil International and Work Camps in Bihar 1934-1937,” in HerStory: Historical Scholarship between South Asia and Europe (Heidelberg: CrossAsia, 2018) Nunan, Timothy, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Ruprecht, Adrian, “The Great Eastern Crisis (1875-1878) as a Global Humanitarian Moment,” Journal of Global History 16 (2021), 159–84 Simonow, Joanna, “The Great Bengal Famine in Britain: Metropolitan Campaigning for Food Relief and the End of Empire, 1943–44,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48 (2020), 168–97

Borderlands Bashir, Shahzad, and Robert D. Crews (eds.), Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) Chester, Lucy P., Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009) Dubnov, Arie M., and Laura Robson (eds.), Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019) Dutta, Anwesha, “Forest Becomes Frontline: Conservation and Counter-insurgency in a Space of Violent Conflict in Assam, Northeast India,” Political Geography 77 (2020), 1–10 Gardner, Kyle, The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) Gohain, Swargajyoti, Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Place (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020) Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, “Tangled Lands: Burma and India’s Unfinished Separation, 1937–1948,” Journal of Asian Studies 80 (2020), 293–315 Leake, Elisabeth, The Defiant Border: The Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization, 1936-65 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) Leake, Elisabeth, “Where National and International Meet: Borders and Border Regions in Postcolonial India,” International History Review 44 (2022), 856–73 Leake, Elisabeth, and Daniel Haines, “Lines of (In)Convenience: Sovereignty and Border-Making in Postcolonial South Asia, 1947-1965,” Journal of Asian Studies 76 (2017), 963–85 Longkumer, Arkotong, The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020) McGranahan, Carole, “Imperial but Not Colonial: Archival Truths, British India, and the Case of the ‘Naughty’ Tibetans,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59 (2017), 68–95 Murton, Galen, “Facing the Fence: The Production and Performance of a Himalayan Border in Global Contexts,” Political Geography 72 (2019) Omrani, Bijan, “The Durand Line: History and Problems of the Afghan-Pakistan Border,” Asian Affairs 40 (2009), 177–95

south asia unbound 35

Van Schendel, Willem, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (London: Anthem, 2004) Van Schendel, Willem, and Itty Abraham, Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005)

Notes 1

For an extensive list of recent scholarship on South Asian internationalism, much of which touches on themes addressed in this introduction, see the bibliography at the end of the introduction. As such, this introduction keeps footnotes to a minimum.

2

Paris, UNESCO archives, Jinnah Papers no. 50 vol. 5, 358, cited in Rainer Grote and Tilmann Röder (eds.), Constitutionalism in Islamic Countries: Between Upheaval and Continuity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

3

P. Chacko, Indian Foreign Policy: The Politics of Postcolonial Identity from 1947 to 2004 (London: Routledge, 2012), chapter 6.

4

For an overview of some European parallels, see Jessica Reinisch, “Introduction: Agents of Internationalism,” Contemporary European History 25 (2016), 195–205. For broader context, see also Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A TwentiethCentury History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

5

Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1994), 148–61.

6

On conferencing and internationalism, see Stephen Legg et al. (eds.), Placing Internationalism: International Conference and the Making of the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

7

See, for example, Marjan Wardaki, “Rediscovering Afghan Fine Arts: The Life of an Afghan Student in Germany, Abdul Ghafur Brechna,” Modern Asian Studies 55 (2021), 1544-80.

8

For broader comparisons, see Emma Hunter and Leslie James (ed.), “Colonial Public Spheres and the Worlds of Print,” special issue in Itinerario 44 (2020).

9

For a taste of this debate on the boundaries of the discipline see Akire Iriye, “Culture and Power: International Relations as Intercultural Relations,” Diplomatic History 3 (1979), 115–281; David Reynolds, “International History, the Cultural Turn and the Diplomatic Twitch,” Cultural and Social History 3 (2006), 75–91; Anthony Best, “The “Cultural Turn” and the International History of East Asia: A Response to David Reynolds,” Cultural and Social History 3 (2006), 482–89; Joe Maiolo, “Systems and Boundaries in International History,” The International History Review 40 (2016), 1–16.

PART I

(Inter)national Orders and State Futures

38 (INTER)NATIONAL ORDERS AND STATE FUTURES

For much of the modern period, South Asia was home to a diversity of politico-­ territorial formations: massive land-based empires like the Mughals and the Marathas, networked maritime possessions of European empires like Portugal’s Estado da India, tiny principalities, and non-state spaces. Managing “foreign” relations between these entities was fundamental, both to negotiating political, military, or economic settlements and to enacting, or performing, their differentiation from one another. Straddling three centuries, this first section highlights three historical moments of systemic adjustment to the South Asian international order, moments when the future (and future shape) of the region’s polities was thrown in question. Tanja Bührer takes us back to the late eighteenth century, when the East India Company, the Maratha Confederacy, and Hyderabad defeated Tipu Sultan. Tipu’s fall was not merely the result of a conflict between Mysore and the rising power of the EIC, but of an alliance with other South Asian powers – an alliance between equals. The Marathas, Hyderabad, and the EIC saw themselves as part of a sophisticated, rule-based, reciprocal international order in which they all had a stake, and they negotiated as such. Rather than a linear story of world politics from which non-European powers were systematically and fully excluded under the so-called “standard of civilization,” Bührer reveals the late eighteenth century as a time when Indian and European polities saw themselves as equally legitimate, and integral, parts of an inclusive and truly global international order. By the twentieth century however, areas “directly ruled” by the Raj sat alongside princely states big and small and frontier areas where colonial authority was fragile; polities like Afghanistan and Nepal enjoyed varying, ill-defined degrees of independence. Formal decolonization therefore meant an extended moment of flattening and streamlining for state sovereignty in South Asia. Swati Chawla’s chapter underscores how worrying 1947 was for Bhutan and traces the creative diplomatic and discursive strategies this Himalayan state deployed to preserve its independence and seek international recognition. Determined to avoid the fate of the princely states, its ruling elites coordinated with neighbouring Sikkim – with whose rulers they shared both family ties and educational experiences – to assert their countries’ political sovereignty and to construct themselves as culturally distinct from India. Sikkim would fail, but Bhutan successfully kept its relationship with India international. In 1961, Delhi continued what it saw as the territorial reintegration of India by annexing Goa from Portugal. For the many Goans who had moved overseas to pursue opportunities in trade and colonial administration, the international crisis was deeply personal. Lydia Walker’s chapter highlights how fractious the debate over Goa’s future was among the diaspora established in East Africa, and how it played out through newspapers crossing international boundary lines. The

(INTER)NATIONAL ORDERS AND STATE FUTURES 39

Nairobi-based Goan Voice positioned itself against Indian “colonization” of a people marked as fundamentally Catholic, diasporic, and anglophone – a people whose real world was a “Greater Goa” straddling oceans and state boundaries and thus, fundamentally internationalists.

CHAPTER 1

A Thwarted “Westphalian Moment” in South Asia? The Triple Alliance against Tipu Sultan Tanja Bührer

Abstract This chapter examines practices of British-South Asian diplomacy and Indian initiatives for inclusive international relations, with a specific focus on the Triple Alliance between the Maratha Confederacy, Hyderabad, and the British East India Company against Mysore (1790-92). It shows both the existence of shared legal principles and the possibility of commensurability between diplomatic frameworks across cultures. These intercultural encounters stand against nineteenth-century narratives that the European international emerged in a unique endogenous evolution into which non-Western polities did not fit. Instead, the chapter argues, the Triple Alliance should be perceived as a thwarted Westphalian moment, in the sense it was a missed opportunity to integrate South Asian and European states into a joint family of nations built around a globally inclusive international law.

Key words: intercultural diplomacy, eighteenth-century India, legal pluralism, treaty making

In February 1792, a sea of tents, divided in three sectors, representing the Maratha Confederacy, Hyderabad, and the British East India Company (EIC), was set up in a camp near the Mysore capital of Sringapatam. This was the Triple Alliance, a joint military campaign set up against the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan. With Tipu’s defeat, the ground was prepared for peace negotiations. Hyderabad, the Marathas, and the EIC were very different allies, yet they acted as a united diplomatic front, one that shared a set of normative legal principles in foreign relations. The Alliance cited Tipu’s expansionism and his treaty violation as legitimate reasons to go to war, which they agreed upon in a multilateral treaty signed on equal terms.1 Moreover, the allies pledged to strictly abide by this treaty and agreed not to enter in any separate peace negotiations with Tipu Sultan.2 A major issue in peace negotiations was whether the Alliance should destroy the defeated dynasty and divide its realm among them. The three parties eventually agreed that Tipu should retain his throne over a considerably reduced domain.3 Although no party explicitly referred to the concept of a “balance of power,” much indicates that this is what they had in mind.

42 tanja bührer

This story of the Triple Alliance in South Asia cuts across a still-dominant narrative in international history, according to which non-Western polities were excluded from international society from the start, on the pretext they did not meet the “standard of civilization.” Such states would only be integrated into the international community during the second half of the twentieth century when they were perceived as ripe for self-governance (relying in part on a Eurocentric civilizational scale) and became decolonized. Entwined with this line of reasoning is the narrative of a distinct and cultivated family of European states emerging out of a unique endogenous political evolution within Europe that stretches back to the Westphalia treaties of 1648.4 This chapter argues that the Sringapatam peace negotiations of 1792 excavate what could have been South Asia’s own “Westphalian moment:” a moment that signaled a distinct possibility to create a family of nations incorporating European and Indian polities alike, under a globally inclusive, and therefore truly universal, international legal framework. I use “Westphalia” as a heuristic device, rather than as shorthand for the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The concept’s roots lie with the Congress of Vienna 1815 and its mythologizing of the Peace of Westphalia. Conservative historians and diplomats aimed to depict the European continent of the Ancien Régime “as an orderly system of states, characterized by restraint and mutual respect, that had to come to be threatened by Napoleon´s expansionist imperialism.”5 The understanding attached to this normative construct is a community of sovereign and equal states, which check hegemonic aspirations through fear of collective military might and punishment and inter-state aggression through a mutually respected balance of power.6 As I show here, there is no reason to adopt the Westphalia concept as a package of ideas with a “first in Europe and then elsewhere” periodization;7 nor is it supposed to set up a European norm as the benchmark for other parts of the globe. On the contrary, cross-cultural British-South Asian foreign relations of the 1780s and 1790s, culminating into the Triple Alliance, show that there was no specific “Europeanness” to the concept. This paper thus contributes to historiographical challenges to the dominant narrative of the international as an essentially European emancipatory project, and recognizes European relations with polities outside Europe, colonial encounters, and inter-imperial relations as formative factors for the emergence and shaping of international law.8 Even if South Asia’s “Westphalian moment” did not come to fruition, the Triple Alliance highlights the key agency of South Asian states and elites in shaping both terms and modes of international relations from an early stage.

a thwarted “westphalian moment” in south asia? 43

The Political and Diplomatic Setting of Eighteenth-Century India All South Asian warring parties to the Third Mysore War (1790-2) had emerged in the context of far-reaching transformations within the subcontinent. Given the decomposition of the Mughal Empire at the beginning of the eighteenth century, ambitious power-holders across India sensed the opportunity to build up their own strongholds.9 Although a variety of regional states emerged, their rulers took similar steps to become de facto autonomous hereditary rulers. They began to appoint key offices, such as the divān (chief revenue officer, chief minister), to build up their own successor dynasties, to use revenues collected increasingly within the region, and to launch independent diplomatic missions as well as military campaigns.10 As in early modern Europe, inter-state competition led to the rise of innovative and dynamic fiscal-military states that introduced more efficient and centralized revenue extraction and management to increase resources for the payment of military forces.11 Ending their earlier cooperation with the Mughals, Maratha landholders and warrior chiefs asserted their independence and created a confederacy with its core in Poona (now Pune). 12 Mysore, likewise, was a warrior state created by military entrepreneurs. Heydar ʿAli, a Muslim soldier, rose to independent rule through extraordinary military achievements and by taking advantage of internal struggles between the Hindu Wodeyar dynasty and the chief minister.13 Hyderabad, meanwhile, was one of the “classic Mughal successor states,” which were carved out of imperial provinces by former governors.14 The Nizam continued to maintain Mughal forms of patrimonial feudalism and to depend upon the military assistance of vassals, who often began bargaining upon request. Governmental policy was shaped by loosely structured patron-client relationships between local authorities, inter-regional, and foreign intermediaries.15 Yet, new social groups such as revenue farmers also emerged, whose relationship to local rulers was largely mercenary and contractual rather than being bound by loyalty or military ethos.16 The Sultans of Mysore most thoroughly implemented reforms of resource extraction through a revenue system of land tenants with hereditary rights paying their taxes directly to the central administration, which enabled the changeover to a standing army with standardized contingents and the direct payment of appointed officers by the state treasury.17 Regional Indian rulers continued to display symbolic allegiance to the Mughal Emperor, who remained the highest source of legitimacy on the subcontinent. Yet, their search for sovereignty and struggles for legitimacy led to complex networks of layered and competing suzerain-vassal relationships that were in constant negotiation and change. 18 These transformations all over the subcontinent were not a mere by-product of an ending era, nor simply anarchy

44 tanja bührer

and chaos, but a consequence of dynamic regional state building processes in their own right.19 The EIC became another participant in this ongoing struggle for sovereignty, legitimacy, and resources. Such corporate bodies of early modern British expansion were characterized by their dual nature as a private body of enterprise and as a public authority; they were built on overlapping and competing constitutional foundations that were constantly being renegotiated between the Crown, the national government, local councils, and polities abroad. Yet the EIC differed from most agencies in the Atlantic world in that it also relied on cross-cultural sources of legitimacy, as discussed below.20 In fact, its transformation from merchant company into territorial empire in the 1760s and the bolstering of its sovereignty initially was caused and shaped by its increasing interactions with Indian rulers. Crucially, the EIC and regional Indian states’ differing political frameworks could be made commensurable. Indian states were composite political organizations encompassing various polities and corporations with different legal standing and configurations of sovereignty.21 Legally speaking, both the EIC and the early modern British state and monarchy were forms of corporations without clear-cut hierarchies; they stretched over various jurisdictions and were entangled with one another.22 Moreover, in broader global context, the Indian subcontinent’s constellation of competitive regional states, most of them maintaining outward allegiance to the Mughal Emperor in Delhi, also was not as exceptional as it might appear. The rulers of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli during the seventeenth century concluded treaties with foreign powers even as they continued to receive their investiture from the Sublime Porte.23 In Europe, the German princely states of the Holy Roman Empire acknowledged the Habsburg Emperor as their suzerain and moral authority, but engaged in foreign relations without consulting him. They were full members of the European international community, while simultaneously competing over sovereignty claims in diplomacy and ceremonial controversies.24 Given Europe and Asia’s early modern context, it is potentially more appropriate to talk of interstate relations or even interpolity relations (covering polities from empires to small states and political communities of uncertain status) rather than international relations; consequently, “interpolity law” might be preferable to “international law.”25 This anachronism notwithstanding, European early modern foreign relations were configured as international history, and thus, regulations of external interactions with non-European polities must also be taken into account.

a thwarted “westphalian moment” in south asia? 45

Practices of Cross-cultural British-South Asian Foreign Relations Whether a political body becomes member of a “family of nations” or is included as a participant in interpolity legal circles is largely decided by practice. Before the thickening of European-Indian diplomatic encounters in the mid-eighteenth century, foreign relations between South Asia and Europe were limited. European states and trading companies sent temporary envoys to the Mughal court only on rare occasions. These envoys had to rely on a chain of interpreters to guide them through an unfamiliar diplomatic culture. From an Indian view, a lack of concern with European affairs meant that Europe figured mainly as a vague and very remote place from where the “hat-wearers” came.26 Instead, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mughal ambassadors travelled frequently to the neighbouring Uzbek Khans – who ruled their ancestral domain – and the Safavids, and even to the more distant Ottomans. Despite the universal title they claimed, Mughal Emperors recognized neighbouring Islamic empires as part of a world-wide system of equal empires; and although the body of Islamic law formally excludes interpolity law, geopolitical interests and migration movements created, in practice, norms of conduct regulating the relations across the Muslim communities in Central and West Asia.27 The emerging regional Indian states of the eighteenth century maintained much of Mughal diplomatic and courtly culture, which, like many other aspects of governance and administration, was largely modeled on Turko-Persian patterns. The form and geographical scope of South Asian foreign relations nevertheless evolved. Since the Mughal Emperor remained the highest source of symbolic and legal authority, relations with the Delhi court continued. However, Mughal-centered diplomacy transformed into multi-centered networks of regional interactions across South Asia.28 Regional courts dispatched envoys to each other and to Delhi, who were not called ilchi (Turkish for ambassador) or safir (Arabic for peacemaker), as in the case of relations between great Asian empires, but vakil. Vakils already figured in the Mughal patrimonial bureaucracy and were dispatched by vassals such as high-ranking officials, provincial governors, and subordinate rulers to operate internal patronage-client relations at the Delhi Court.29 Vakil literally means “one entrusted,” and is best translated as “intermediary” or “envoy” rather than “ambassador,” which implies the distinguished rank of a kingly representative.30 Vakils can be understood as intermediaries of foreign relations – even if it often was difficult to distinguish “internal” from “external” affairs – and important vakils were frequently involved in factional infighting. They influenced who attended court on a temporary basis to negotiate boundary quarrels, revenue-collection rights, military alliances by ceremonially exchanging greetings, gifts, and payments.31 Like Mughal and imperial Asian ambassadors, vakils were only sent on ad hoc and temporary missions.

46 tanja bührer

According to geostrategic realities, it was mainly vakils from neighbouring powers who attended regional courts. If Mughal vakils were pre-eminent at the Court of Hyderabad early in the eighteenth century, by the second half of the century, vakils from the Peshwa, major Maratha chiefs, the Nawab of the Carnatic, the Sultans of Mysore, and last but not least, the British “Resident” were more highly represented.32 Among regional Indian rulers, the first European missions to the Mughal Court had created the stereotype of “paltry, contemptible merchants” without the dignity to be admitted to South Asian courts.33 This idea was still circulating in eighteenth-century political rhetoric.34 Yet, Indian rulers had a strong interest in European military services. This enabled the French and British merchant companies to gain entry into South Asian political settings and to use territorial revenue as a new source of wealth to build their company states. Before 1750, the main issue of cross-cultural exchange was trade; afterwards, political-military alliances and revenue rights increasingly became issues of negotiation.35 The absence of a royal ambassador status had a significant advantage, in fact: residents did not have to struggle for ceremonial superiority, enabling them to adapt to local protocols and build upon existing forms of diplomacy.36 Regardless of differences in status, EIC residents’ position at Indian courts from the second half of the eighteenth century was that of a vakil. The years 1760-85 were a formative period during which a small group of European diplomatic experts with knowledge of Indian societies emerged.37 British and Asian intermediaries shared a spatial as well as an intellectual mobility and a professional self-understanding as “diplomat-scholars.” Their interests in one another’s societies and scholarship crystallized into strongly felt commonalities. This provided the glue of mutual trust at a moment where mutual skepticism, driven by the lack of shared historical diplomatic practices could have prevailed. These diplomat-scholars enabled European vakils to identify and negotiate common rules of engagement with Indian regional rulers.38 Far into the nineteenth century, it was British company envoys who adapted to local customs around symbolic and ceremonial courtly interactions. At the same time, the second half of the eighteenth century saw the introduction of treaty-making, a European-style legal instrument of foreign affairs, into the broader frame of cross-cultural alliance building in India. “Treaties,” in the sense of contractual agreements signed by the plenipotentiaries of two sovereigns, were not common in Islamic Asian diplomacy. Interpolity agreements usually took the form of letter exchanges, which contained offers from one sovereign to another other (or the acceptance of such offers), and these letters were bound to the person of the sovereign. Mughal Emperors invested regional authorities and the European companies with firmans, one-sided royal orders granting commercial or legal privileges. 39 Successors to the throne, however, often extended such capitulations beyond the reign of a ruler, so that in practice, they developed into a quasi-permanent mutual

a thwarted “westphalian moment” in south asia? 47

agreement. The formal disparities between these legal tools are probably ones of emphasis rather than substantial difference and should not be overdrawn. As such, it is safe to say that treaty-making was not altogether alien for South Asian rulers.40 In addition, the introduction of treaty-making in South Asia did not mark the clear-cut displacement of Mughal legal regulations, nor the beginning of the end for Indian rulers’ sovereignty. Rather, it generated layered legal regulations. This can be illustrated by the most prominent transaction in South Asia at the time. The commander-in-chief of the armed forces in India, Robert Clive, used his military triumph over the Mughal Emperor Shāh ʿĀlam II in the Battle of Buxar in October 1764 to obtain a firman for the right to collect revenues in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. He also received an imperial charter over territories in the Carnatic, where Company troops had driven back the Hyderabad ruler, Nizam ʿAli Khān.41 Clive, like regional Indian rulers, recognized the emperor as the highest source of legal authority and aimed to exploit the firman for territorial ambitions. For the agreement on the details of this royal order, however, the Madras Government sent a British envoy to Hyderabad. Nizam ʿAli Khān grudgingly accepted the Mughal firman but stipulated in the treaty attached to this order that the Company should provide him with military forces in everything that was “right and proper whenever required,” in return for the territories granted.42 Enclosed with the treaty were sanads under the Nizam’s seal that ordered the servants and officials in the discharged territories to obey the Company authorities henceforth and pay them the revenues collected.43 The Nizam thus used treaty-making to bolster his sovereignty claims by stipulating that the British recognize domains contested by Mysore as Hyderabad’s “traditional” realm.44 Much indicates that in these early British-South Asian treaties, the EIC figured in the role of a tributary or at least a minor party. Yet, the emerging Company state could use such cross-cultural legal encounters to establish itself as a technically equal member of the South Asian interstate community.45 The Mughal Emperor, the Nizam of Hyderabad, and the Company government thus managed their inter-state transactions in one hybrid package of multiple legal instruments explicitly referring to one another. In addition, they managed to negotiate and mutually recognize their claims of sovereignty and legitimacy in a culturally diverse legal pluralism.

Indian Initiatives for a Globally Inclusive International Law and Metropolitan Responses By the early 1780s, Indian rulers’ complaints about the failures of the EIC to abide by existing treaties had increased. The Ruler of Mysore, Heydar ʿAli, and a Maratha vakil complained to EIC officials about violations of treaties, arguing that the

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Company did not live up to its own legal principles.46 Nizam ʿAli Khān desired the British resident stationed at his court to encourage the “members of the Company’s Government, who hold Supremacy in Europe” to reflect upon their deficiencies of governance and treaty-making in India.47 In looking for a higher instance to grant justice, but probably also to extend his diplomatic network to Britain and European polities, in 1784 the Nizam drafted a treaty of alliance to be finalized directly with the Crown.48 Similar diplomatic missions were dispatched by other Indian authorities to reach out to the British Crown. Some rulers sent their own representatives to London, others entrusted returning Company officials or former Company officials with this task.49 The fundamental problem underlying the arbitrary and erratic behaviour was not imperialistic arrogance; rather, the EIC’s state-building and governance capabilities could not keep pace with its rapid diplomatic expansion across the subcontinent. The Regulating Act of 1773 had already aimed to create a stronger executive by investing the new institution of the governor general and Supreme Council of Bengal with superior and supervisory powers over the Madras and Bombay Presidencies. Nevertheless, the diplomatic policies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay with various Indian rulers remained uncoordinated, resulting in contradictory contractual agreements that were incompatible with one another. The EIC’s increasing involvement with Indian powers under Warren Hastings (1773-85) became uncontrollable when France seized the opportunity to use the conflicts of the American Revolutionary War (1775-83) to restore its territorial power in India through military cooperation with Indian rulers disaffected with the EIC. Expensive wars ensued in South Asia, bringing the EIC close to bankruptcy. British parliamentary committees consequently began to pay attention to the EIC’s dysfunctional diplomatic relations with Indian powers.50 The tendency towards a stronger constitutional integration of the Company into the national imperial project was part of the overall attempt in British domestic politics to bring the empire worldwide under firmer control of a sovereign parliament.51 The coinciding of issues of South Asian governance with the wider crisis of the British empire helped envoys sent by South Asian rulers to place their demands in front of metropolitan British authorities. Domestic efforts to investigate the EIC’s mismanagement and abuse of power culminated in Hastings’s impeachment trial (1788–95), which was staged as a public scandal of colonial corruption in Westminster Hall.52 The prosecutor, the Whig politician Edmund Burke, used Indian voices to morally condemn Hastings’s arbitrary government and ultimately to legitimize the authoritarian reforms of British power abroad. Burke categorically rejected the defence of a presumed need to adapt to culturally different normative orders, which he termed a “geographical morality.” Instead, he insisted on shared legal principles.53 He framed treaty violations as

a thwarted “westphalian moment” in south asia? 49

the product of wrong legal assumptions and insisted on a fluid conception of sovereignty that included semi-independent Indian rulers and a broad reach of the law of nations, by definition universal. The British consequently were obliged to respect the sovereignty and internal constitution of Indian polities, as well as to follow the law of nations in their diplomatic encounters with them.54 The great legal treatises of the eighteenth century, such as those by Christian Wolff and Emer de Vattel, supported Burke’s approach of applying the law of nations, whether within or outside Europe. These “enlightened” works tended to be written in resolutely universalist language, arguing that the law of nature alone regulated foreign relations by treating one another in the equality of men.55 Jennifer Pitts has emphasized that the late eighteenth century saw an unusual openness to the possibility of shared legal frameworks and mutual obligations across the cultures. It was in this period, when “hostility to ‘infidels’ was losing its hold and the divide between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarous’ was not yet as deeply entrenched as in nineteenth century,” that this great potential for new ways of framing the legal relations with non-European powers arose.56

The Triple Alliance and the Potential to Reframe the Global International According to the overall metropolitan approach, EIC directors in London ordered the Supreme Council of Bengal to strictly abide by treaties, emphasizing that legal agreements were to be treated “conformable to honour and justice” so as to make a “favourable impression on the minds of the Native Princes.”57 By the end of the 1780s, Mysore had developed into a superior regional military power that was able to invade and conquer large parts of Hyderabad’s domains. Their splendid victory over the British in the Battle of Pollilur (1780) had also turned Mysore into the EIC’s most serious rival. To make the humiliation worse, Mysore regularly entered alliances with Britain’s European archenemy, France, and in 1787 even sent a diplomatic mission to Versailles.58 Tipu Sultan’s invasion of the Rajah of Travancore’s territory in late 1789 caused Governor-General Cornwallis (1786-93) to instruct EIC residents in Pune and Hyderabad to negotiate a “defensive alliance” against Mysore. The Triple Alliance was born. Yet it was not Cornwallis who was the creative mind behind it.59 Both the Nizam and the Marathas had long wished to put an end to Mysore’s hegemonic aspirations, and as early as 1784, they had approached EIC residents at their courts with suggestions for a military coalition.60 The political language adopted in the communication between the potential allies to legitimize their joint attack against Mysore reveals that the legal norms of treaty-making were firmly established as cross-cultural rules of engagement. The

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Triple Alliance presented Tipu’s aggression against Travancore as a “flagrant violation” of treaty and therefore a reason for just war.61 The Nizam even claimed that the interstate legal norm to abide by treaties was a “custom of Princes of ancient and honourable families” and that no other ruler of the Deccan embodied these qualities like his dynasty.62 All parties became part of an alliance on equal terms, in which separate peace negotiations were strictly forbidden; for the weakest member, Hyderabad, the agreement even included protection from invasion.63 Although military cooperation was not without frictions, the three parties abided by the treaty and rebuffed Tipu’s tempting offers of a separate peace. When they entered joint negotiations, they appointed their vakils only after mutually consenting to each other’s suggestions.64 The Triple Alliance first discussed whether the Mysore dynasty should maintain its throne. The Maratha vakil observed that, with the enemy at their mercy, they had two options: to annihilate him completely and be deaf to his prayers and entreaties or to show mercy and restore him to at least part of his estate. Poona itself would countenance the first option, but preferred the second one (potentially seeking to check British hegemonic aspirations). The EIC and Hyderabad representatives shared this latter view.65 Secondly, war reparations (in the form of territories and ready money) were divided on equal terms between the allies.66 Expansion of revenue suited the individual interests of all allied parties. However, they also respected each other’s different forms of trust-building and their specific desires and concerns, including them in the treaty stipulations. For example, Cornwallis accepted swearing on the Koran as testimony of truth67 and the payment of “durbar [darbār] charges” for the major Indian vakils (Company officials had to decline this reward due to the metropolitan anti-corruption policy).68 He also agreed that Tipu Sultan had to offer two of his sons as hostages until the stipulations of the treaties were accomplished, a practice that was no longer common in the European international. For the EIC, in turn, it was a matter of great importance to stipulate the immediate release of prisoners (most of them taken in earlier wars).69 Reports of their mistreatment, their use as engineers and interpreters, and their forced conversion to Islam touched specific British sensitivities in India.70 The Triple Alliance’s interstate regulations contained the whole package of ideas about international relations, sovereignty, and collective security familiar in contemporary Europe. The coalition was finalized between equal sovereigns, negotiations were conducted and agreements were settled on equal terms, and eventually the spoils of war were divided into equal shares. The Alliance rested on shared norms of abiding by treaty, the protection of weaker states, and the check of hegemonic aspirations. British imperial historiography traditionally credits Cornwallis with implementing the European Westphalian system and international law in South Asia and

a thwarted “westphalian moment” in south asia? 51

considers him as having acted like a conventional eighteenth-century European diplomat who taught South Asian rulers mutual respect and to refrain from destroying each other.71 This chapter shows that this narrative needs revision. Certainly, Cornwallis followed the guidelines of the British domestic government by applying the legal norms of treaty-making and respecting the sovereignty of Indian rulers. Yet, as shown in the preceding section, this approach was a metropolitan response to concerns about South Asian cooperation: local cooperation was necessary to secure the young Company state on the subcontinent, and as such, subcontinental leaders could, and did, exert power in negotiations. Furthermore, Cornwallis himself never described his policy in terms of a Westphalian order or balance of power. By all indications, the concept of a balance of power in this specific historical context and constellation met the interests of all allied parties involved. It happened to be what Phillip Wagoner termed “fortuitous convergences:” when certain ideas and assumptions were shared by different communities involved in transactions and thus facilitated intercultural exchange.72 The Westphalian system, as it was practiced by the Triple Alliance, was thus neither transferred from Europe to South Asia, nor was it a genuinely European invention. Rather, it was the result of regional interpolity cooperation and negotiation. The transcultural forms of transactions during the various stages of the Triple Alliance’s negotiations and peace talks corroborate that relations between the allies were far from being implemented or dictated by the British. They were shaped by a shared agency and agenda among the Triple Alliance’s members. They revealed their flexibility in considering individual and culturally different requirements in their negotiations and agreements. The Triple Alliance’s diplomatic practices demonstrated both the existence of shared principles of legal and political orders across cultures and the possibility of communication, as well as commensurability, among different legal frameworks. Visions of a universal international system could be realized, and there existed great potential for an inclusive global legal order.

The Shift to an Exclusive International Law Shortly after the Peace Treaty of Sringapatam was finalized, the French Revolution broke out, unleashing twenty-three years of war in Europe. The French threat provided Cornwallis’s successor, Richard Wellesley (1798-1805), with metropolitan approval to implement an aggressive imperialistic policy and to pursue preventive wars.73 Immediately, Wellesley aimed to replace the subcontinental balance of power with a security system of indirect control, isolating strong states like Mysore and controlling weaker ones like Hyderabad. This time, the Marathas refused to

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join the military alliance between the EIC and Hyderabad: they were aware of British hegemonic aspirations. When Tipu was killed in the storming of the Mysore capital in 1799, Wellesley installed a puppet regime under the former Wodeyar dynasty. Already the partition treaty between the EIC and Hyderabad, which settled the spoils of the war, was far removed from the spirit of equality that ran through the Triple Alliance.74 The “protective alliance” of 1800, despite its rhetoric of voluntariness and reciprocity, was in fact unilaterally dictated; it put an end to Hyderabad’s external sovereignty.75 It would provide a blueprint for a new system of “subsidiary alliances” all over South Asia. The main markers of such unequal treaties were the maintenance of British subsidiary forces, financed by vast local territories yet put under the exclusive management and authority of the EIC. Further, Indian rulers were no longer allowed to declare war or peace, nor to negotiate with other foreign powers without consulting the British resident.76 These stipulations neither met the pre-modern European understanding of responsibility to protect the weaker and smaller states from the stronger, nor local conceptions of protection. Although the terms of such treaties were largely built on former agreements, most of them were transformed to such an extent that their original spirit became unrecognizable. They became a farce, with the EIC masquerading as an ally and protector when it was, in practice, the true landlord of the dominions, thus annihilating Indian states’ external sovereignty.77 South Asian diplomat-scholars were well aware of this sudden shift, their exclusion from the international community, and their new imperial submission. The chief minister of Hyderabad, ʿAzim ol-Omarāʾ, voiced on several occasions in an unusually frank manner his serious concerns about the unfair and dictatorial spirit of the Company.78 He claimed that this approach would interrupt “the harmony existing between the two states” and implied an “abatement in friendship.”79 The Nizam of Hyderabad accepted the loss of external sovereignty only on the condition of a contractual guarantee preserving his internal sovereignty. The EIC complied with the Nizam’s “favourite stipulation against interference in domestic Affairs” by granting his sovereignty towards relatives, relations, and servants.80 In his compilation of memoirs and history from 1802, ʿAbdollatif Shūshtari, who acted as Hyderabad’s vakil in Calcutta at the time, offers an account that bears striking resemblance to the dominant European narrative of the Westphalian system. Shūshtari described European international relations established after the turmoil of confessional and religious wars as based on sound principles of statecraft, diplomacy, and treaty-making. No state was allowed to transgress the territorial sovereignty and integrity of another, and if a state violated this ethical code, the other states intervened to support the weak and prevent a single state from becoming a hegemon. When an adversary in war surrendered, his sovereignty

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and honour was preserved. Yet, Shūshtari emphasized, these legal regulations were restricted to the European community of states and were not supposed to be transferred to areas abroad like South Asia.81 Shūshtari had to rely on British informants, as he knew no English. The representations of a specific European tradition of a stable Westphalian order is quite strange, considering that at the time, various coalitions against French hegemonic aspirations failed because their members sacrificed higher values of international law and common security repeatedly in favour of their individual interests. Concerns with the security of the empire and Britain’s overall anti-French policy do not appear to provide sufficient explanations. It is therefore necessary to reconsider the metropolitan rhetoric of an inclusive law of nations of the 1780s and 1790s outlined above. The great eighteenth-century legal treaties disregarding the language of humankind and the fact that numerous treaties had been signed with non-Christian powers, refer only randomly, if at all, to cross-cultural agreements. They also reveal a very limited knowledge of extra-European legal regulations.82 European advocates for legal inclusion predominantly used this idea as a powerful tool to criticize inadequacies of imperial conduct. Burke’s speeches strongly suggest that he was not so much concerned with Indian rulers’ suffering from injustice than with his aim to reform and control EIC governance and service in order to harness imperial wealth and control in national interests. Finally, all South Asian rulers’ efforts to finalize a treaty or alliance with metropolitan authorities failed. The Court of Directors in London used all in its power to forestall such Indian initiatives: an implementation would have reduced the Company’s sovereignty and political agency both at home and abroad. Despite a moralizing discourse of respecting the sovereignty of Indian rulers and European legal norms of the international, metropolitan authorities continuously refused to assume any responsibility for British foreign relations in South Asia or to establish direct communication with Indian rulers on equal footing. This left Indian authorities without any straight or clear relation to the European international community and deprived them of the type of safeguard and commitment from the community that legal systems should provide. Pitts’ and Benton’s line of argument – that we cannot assume universal language was automatically intended to apply globally and that European governments at no point during their imperial expansion perceived world regions outside Europe as a truly integral part of their emerging international law – can therefore be corroborated regarding eighteenth-century South Asia.83 Nor should the Triple Alliance be mistaken as a harmonious mutual adaption. As Travers showed regarding the question of land rights in Bengal, grand gestures of respect for ancient legal regulations did not imply that the EIC government was not determined to consolidate its authority as the ultimate sovereign power.84 Much

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evidence indicates that Cornwallis did not intend to establish a permanent system of alliances or a permanent balance of power in South Asia.85 This overall lack of a true and formal commitment to an inclusive global legal order on reciprocal and equal terms helps to explain the seemingly sudden and sharp shift to a policy of imperial subordination in British-Indian relations around 1800, which then became a cornerstone for the development of nineteenth-century discriminatory international law.

Conclusion: The Nineteenth Century’s Legal Amnesia In retrospect, the last quarter of the eighteenth century appears as a missed opportunity to integrate South Asian and European states into a joint family of nations. Here was a tangible potential moment to build a globally inclusive international law upon such relations. Through their diplomatic practices on the ground, the members of the Triple Alliance proved able to regulate their relations by sharing common norms of comportment, negotiating legally pluralistic rules of engagement into a hybrid package of multiple legal instruments. Political authorities and legal scholars at the time showed an unusual openness to the possibility of globally shared legal frameworks and culturally different imaginations of sovereignty and legitimacy. Shaped by a shared agency and fortuitous convergences, the Triple Alliance, for a brief moment, created the vision of a South Asian Westphalian order. In a somewhat ironic twist, the imbalanced European international scene of the time, and the aim to check French hegemonic aspirations, contributed to shattering the promising opportunities of a global inclusive international law, both in theory and practice. The sharp shift from a community of sovereign and equal states into a system of subordinate alliances must nevertheless be understood against the background of a deliberate impermanence with respect to norms of equality in the context of European expansion, which was hidden behind a rhetoric of friendship and inclusiveness. The shift to an exclusive international law was not an accident caused by war, but rather a long-harboured desire to seize the opportunity of imperialistic subordination whenever it arose. Although these new Indian protectorates were granted internal sovereignty by treaty, the Company would increasingly interfere in internal affairs throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, and even annexed certain polities, most notably through the “doctrine of lapse” under the Lord Dalhousie’s governorship (1847-56).86 Awadh’s annexation in 1856 was one of the main triggers for the Great Rebellion of 1857, which led to the liquidation of the EIC. Just before the uprising’s outbreak, Awadh’s deposed Nawab Wajid Ali Shah had petitioned the British parliament to

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protest, appealing to British justice. The renowned legal scholar Travers Twiss found that the annexation was a violation of the law of nations.87 Queen Victoria’s November 1858 proclamation assured Indian rulers that their ancient customs would be respected and that the law would offer equal protection. In the 1870s, however, Disraeli promoted the British monarchy as the symbolic umbrella for the British nation and empire and proclaimed Queen Victoria as Empress of India. This construction of royal British authority in India produced a neo-feudalistic rhetoric of patronage, conceptualizing Indian aristocratic rulers as “loyal feudatories” of the Queen. Ceremonies around the Imperial Assemblage of 1877 displayed this new order of allegiance and rank, which marked a series of so-called imperial durbars.88 Yet this “invented tradition,” which claimed to connect the past with the present by drawing on both European and South Asian feudal orders, deliberately ignored the history of eighteenth-century Indian state-building, regional Indian states’ emancipation as sovereigns, and their largely autonomous interactions with European agents of foreign relations. Many Indians refused to forget this, however. In their correspondence with the British, Hyderabad’s successive nizams would continue the eighteenth-century diplomatic rhetoric of friendship, insisting that their alliance was one between two independent sovereigns. These assertions would take on especially explosive resonances as the British withdrawal from the subcontinent came into view, and Hyderabad resisted joining the new Indian state, citing its extant treaties with the British. Thus, these treaty ambiguities would continue to shape British-Indian relations, and metropolitan and subcontinental debates about the nature of sovereignty and interstate relations, far after the failure of South Asia’s first “Westphalian moment.”

Notes 1

Tipu Sultan’s invasion of the Rajah of Travancore’s territory at the end of 1789 allowed Lord Cornwallis to accuse him of a flagrant violation of the Peace Treaty of Mangalore, finalized after the Second Anglo-Mysore War in 1784, and therefore justified war against Mysore. Hyderabad’s Nizam followed this line of reasoning. National Archives of India, Delhi (NAI), SC 1789, 403–05, Letters from Nizam ʿAli Khān, ʿAzim ol-Omarāʾ, and Mir ʿĀlam.

2

British Library, London (BL), IOR/H/253, 24–25, Tipu Sultan to Mohammad ʿAli Beg, 18 February 1791; Ibid., 66, Tipu Sultan to Hurry Pandit, 1 June 1791.

3

BL, IOR/H/391a, 27–28, Journal of what passed at the different conferences held with Tipu’s vakils from 14 February to 19 April, 10 April 1792.

4

For an overview on the dominant narrative of international history, see Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–8; Jennifer Pitts, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire (London: Harvard University Press, 2018), 1–7.

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5

Claire Vergerio, “Beyond the Nation State,” Boston Review, 27 May 2021, https://bostonreview.net/ articles/beyond-the-nation-state/ (accessed 15 July 2022).

6

For various meanings attached by scholars to the “Westphalian system,” see Sebastian Schmidt, “To Order the Minds of Scholars: The Discourse of the Peace of Westphalia in International Relations Literature,” International Studies Quarterly 55 (2011), 601–23.

7

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

8

Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2016); Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Anghie, Imperialism; Pitts, Boundaries.

9

Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4, 12; Christopher A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 8, 18.

10

In his pioneering study on Awadh, Richard Barnett outlined this typology of transformation (North India between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals and the British, 1720-1801 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1987), 20–22).

11

For a detailed account, see Christopher Storrs (ed.), The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth Century Europe (Farnham: Ashgate 2008).

12

Michael H. Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764-1858 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 47.

13

Irfan Habib, “Introduction: An Essay on Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan,” in Irfan Habib (ed.), Confronting Colonialism: Resistance and Modernisation under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan (London: Anthem Press, 2002), xx.

14

The most prominent among these successor dynasties were the Nawabs of Bengal, the NawabWazirs of Awadh, and the Nizams of Hyderabad (Ramusack, Indian Princes, 4, 12).

15

Munis D. Faruqui, “At Empire’s End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth-Century India,” Modern Asian Studies 43 (2009), 17–9; Sunil Chander, “From a Pre-Colonial Order to a Princely State: Hyderabad in Transition, c. 1.784-1865” (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge, 1987), 50–7.

16

Bayly, Indian Societies, 9–10.

17

B. Sheik Ali, “Developing Agriculture: Land Tenure under Tipu Sultan,” in Habib, Confronting Colonialism, 161–64.

18

Steward Gordon, “Legitimacy and Loyalty in some Successor States of the Eighteenth Century,” in John F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 297–300; C.H. Alexandrowicz, An Introduction to the History of the Law of Nation in the East Indies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 15.

19

Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–1748 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); Barnett, North India; Chander, “From a Pre-Colonial Order.”

20

Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7–24, 41.

21

For a general account of early modern polities, see Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 29–31.

22

Stern, Company-State, preface, 3–9. Jon Wilson even claimed that “Britain’s first modern state emerged in Bengal” (Jon Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780-1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), ix).

23

Christian Windler, “Interkulturelle Diplomatie in der Sattelzeit: Vom inklusiven Eurozentrismus zur “zivilisierenden” Ausgrenzung,” in Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler (eds.), Akteure

a thwarted “westphalian moment” in south asia? 57

der Außenbeziehungen: Netzwerke und Interkulturalität im Historischen Wandel (Cologne: Böhlau, 2010), 449. 24

André Krischer, Reichsstädte in der Fürstengesellschaft: Politischer Zeichengebrauch in der Frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).

25

Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, 4.

26

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Frank Submissions: The Company and the Mughals between Sir Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris,” in H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (eds.), The Worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2001), 70–71. Besides Akbar’s failed representation to King Philip II of Spain and Portugal in 1582, no great Mughal sent a formal diplomatic mission to a European monarch. See N.R. Farooqui, “Diplomacy and Diplomatic Procedure under the Mughals,” The Medieval History Journal 7 (2004), 59–69.

27

Athar M. Ali, “‘International Law’ or Conventions Governing Conduct of Relations between Asian States, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Athar M. Ali (ed.), Mughal India: Studies in Polity, Ideas, Society and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 307–15.

28

Michael H. Fisher, “Diplomacy in India, 1526-1858,” in H.V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid (eds.), Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Oceans Worlds, c. 1550-1850 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 249–28.

29

M.A. Nayeem, Mughal Administration of Deccan under Nizamul Mulk Asaf Jah (1720-1748) (Bombay: Jaico Publ. House, 1985), 69, 91; Fisher, “Diplomacy in India,” 250–1.

30

The Steingass dictionary describes the term as “ambassador, agent, deputy, representative,” but also as a “confidential of a vassal at the court of his suzerain” (F. Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary (London: Routledge, 1892; 1998 edn.), 1479).

31

Karen Leonard, “The Hyderabad Political System and its Participants,” Journal of Asian Studies 30

32

Leonard, “Political System,” 572–3. Leonard does not list the vakils from Mysore, but disregarding

(1970/1), 572–3; Chander, “From a Pre-Colonial Order,” 50, 68–9. the predominantly inimical Hyderabad-Mysore relations, the Sultans of Mysore in the 1780s and 1790s dispatched several missions to the Hyderabad Court. 33

BL, Additional Manuscripts (Add Mss) 29146, 106, Hollond to Hastings, 10 October 1780.

34

Michael T. Fisher, “The Resident in Court Ritual, 1764-1858,” Modern Asian Studies 24 (1990), 419–58.

35

Stern, Company-State, 121–22.

36

ʿAbdollatif Shūshtari, the Hyderabad vakil deployed to Calcutta in the 1790s, argued that such adaption to local customs was the perfect disguise. Because of the strict adherence of company envoys to ceremonial etiquette, their submissive performance at courts and their disguise as merchants, Indian rulers felt flattered and did not entertain the idea that the English would assume power over territories (ʿAbdollatif Shūshtari, Tohfat ol-ʿĀlam (Hyderabad, 1802; Bombay, 1847 (lithograph)), 310–11.

37

Fisher, Indirect Rule, 88–90; Peter J. Marshall, “Warren Hastings as Scholar and Patron,” in Anne Whiteman, J. S. Bromley, and P. G. M. Dickson (eds.), Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973), 259; Bernard S. Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” in Bernard S. Cohn (ed.), Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton University Press, 1996), 19–20.

38

Tanja Bührer, “Intercultural Diplomacy at the Court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, c. 1770-1815,” The International History Review 41 (2018), 1039–56; Kapil Raj, “Mapping Knowledge: Go-betweens in Calcutta, 1770-1820,” in Simon Schaffer et al. (eds.), The Brokered World: Go-betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820 (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2009), 105–50; ʿAbdollatif Shūshtari, Tohfat ol-ʿĀlam.

58 tanja bührer

39

Similarly, legal relations between Europeans and the Ottoman Empire were regulated through “Capitulations”, which were one-sided, temporary, limited, revocable guarantees of protection on behalf of the Sultan (Windler, “Interkulturelle Diplomatie;” Ali, “International Law”, 307–15).

40

Many postcolonial jurists argue that some of the fundamental principles of international law such as treaties were also to be found in African or Eastern thinking and diplomacy (Anghie, Imperialism, 7).

41

Firman from the Moghul for the Northern Circars, 12 August 1765, in C.U. Aitchison (ed.), A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads, Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries, vol. 9: The Treaties &c., Relating to Hyderabad, Mysore and Coorg (Calcutta: Government of India, 1929), 21–2.

42

Art. 2 of Treaty with the Nizam, 12 Nov. 1766, in Aitchison, Treaties, 23; NAI, SC 1766, 65–88, Caillaud

43

The grant of sanads once was a prerogative of the administration of the Mughal Emperor, but

to Clive. became increasingly fragmented and regionalized when regional states emerged. A variety of sanad-givers, such as subadārs (governors of a Mughal province) were established, whereas firmans still had to carry the personal seal of the emperor (Steward Gordon, “Legitimacy and Loyalty in some Successor States of the Eighteenth Century,” in John F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 286–303). See the sanads for the cession of the sarkārs, in Aitchison, Collection of Treaties, 25–6. 44

BL, Add MS 29167, 16–17, Johnson to Hastings, 6 November 1784; Ibid., 87–92, Johnson to Hastings, 21 November 1784.

45

Stern, “Bundles of Hyphens,” 29–30.

46

NAI, SC 1780, 1142–3, Hollond to Governor General and Council, 16 June 1780; Ibid., 1779, 1200, Conferences between Colonel Goddard and the vakil from the Government of Pune, 13 and 16 August 1779.

47

BL, Add MS 29152, 81, Hollond to Hastings, 12 December 1781.

48

NAI, SC 1780, 1209, Hollond to Governor General & Council, 21 June 1780; Ibid., 1213, Letter from Nizam, rec. 29 June 1780; BL, Add MS 29152, 81, Hollond to Hastings, 12 December 1781; BL, Add MS 29167, 88, Johnson to Hastings, 21 November 1784.

49

In 1765 and 1773, the Emperor Shāh ʿĀlam, in desperate attempts to secure justice in treaty making with the EIC, had taken the initiative for establishing direct relations with the British sovereign. Likewise, the London mission dispatched by Raghunath Rao, a Maratha claimant to the office of Peshwa at the beginning of the 1780s, sought justice for the EIC’s breach of treaty. During factional conflicts, he had negotiated the 1775 Treaty of Surat with the Bombay government, giving the Company large territories in exchange for his permanent use of 3,000 Company troops. Hastings superseded the authority of the Bombay governor by unilaterally annulling the treaty (Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin, The Wonders of Vilayet: Being the Memoir, Originally in Persian of a Visit to France and Britain in 1765, trans. by Kaiser Haq (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2002); John Morrison, The Advantages of an Alliance with the Great Moghul (T. Cadell in the Strand, 1774); Michael H. Fisher, “Indian Political Representations in Britain during the Transition to Colonialism,” Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004), 649–75).

50

Robert Travers, “A British Empire by Treaty in Eighteenth-Century India,” in Saliha Belmessous (ed.), Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 150.

51

Peter J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750-1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 378.

52

Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).

a thwarted “westphalian moment” in south asia? 59

53

Peter J. Marshall (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 6: India: The Launching of

54

Jennifer Pitts, “Empire and Legal Universalisms in the Eighteenth Century,” The American Historical

the Hastings Impeachment 1786-1788 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 346. Review 117 (2012), 110–114. 55

Pitts, Boundaries, 19–23.

56

Pitts, “Legal Universalisms,” 97–8.

57

NAI, SC 1787, 1965-73, quote 1968, The Bengal Council delivered a minute regarding the state of the Guntur Sarkar and the Company’s claim to it, as well as the arrear of Peshcush (pishkesh) due to the Nizam, 23 March.

58

Jean-Marie Lafont, “Some Aspects of the Relations between Tipu Sultan and France, 1761-1799: Tipu Sultan’s Embassy to Versailles in 1787,” in Jean-Marie Lafont (ed.), Indika: Essays in Indo-French Relations 1630-1976 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000), 150–76.

59

Franklin B. Wickwire and Mary B. Wickwire, Cornwallis: The Imperial Years (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 37–54; Fisher, “Diplomacy in India,” 256.

60

BL, Add MS 29162, 90–101, General Governor and Council to Johnson, 3 Feb. 1784; BL, Add MS 29164, 513–14, Johnson to Hastings, 18 July 1784; BL, Add MS 29165, 91–99, Johnson to Hastings, 1 August 1784; NAI, SC 1789, 289–90, Kennaway to Cornwallis, 19 February 1790; Memorandum of Nizam ʿAli Khān, 18 March 1790, in Calendar of Persian Correspondence, vol. 9 (New Delhi: National Archives of India, 1949), 53–4.

61

NAI, SC 1789, 209–15, Cornwallis to Kennaway, 28 January 1790; Ibid., 403–5, Letters from Nizam ʿAli Khān, ʿAzim ol-Omarāʾ, and Mir ʿĀlam.

62

NAI, SC 1790, 398, Kennaway to Cornwallis, 5 March 1790.

63

Ibid., 322–27, Cornwallis to Kennaway, 19 March 1790; Ibid., 603–4, 609–10, Kennaway to Cornwallis, 13 and 29 April 1790; Ibid., 978–84, Malet to Kennaway, 7 June 1790; Treaty of Offensive and Defensive Alliance with the Marathas, 1 June 1790, in Aitchison, Collection of Treaties, vol. 9.

64

BL, IOR/H/253, 161–7, Hurry Pandit to Nizam ʿAli Khān, 14 August 1791, and answer, rec. 20 September 1791; BL, IOR/H/253, 164-7, Nizam ʿAli Khān to Hurry Pandit, rec. 20 September 1791.

65

BL, IOR/H/391a, 27–28, Journal of what passed at the different Conferences held with Tipu’s vakils from 14 February to 19 April, 10 April 1792.

66

Ibid., 41–46, 22 February 1792.

67

Ibid., 25–9, 19 February 1792.

68

Devon Record Office (DRO), 961M/1/B/1, Kennaway to the Court of Directors, 21 September 1796.

69

BL, IOR/H/570, 270–1, 281–2, Notes on Wars in India, Prisoners in Mysore 1782; BL, IOR/H/391a, 23–25, Journal of what passed at the different conferences held with Tipu’s vakils from 14 February to 10 April, 18 February 1792.

70

Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (London: Pimlico, 2003), 253–84.

71

Charles Lewis Tupper, Our Indian Protectorate: An Introduction to the Study of the Relations between the British Government and its Indian Feudatories (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1893), 29–30; Wickwire and Wickwire, Cornwallis, 170–2.

72

Phillip B. Wagoner, “Fortuitous Convergences and Essential Ambiguities: Transcultural Political Elites in the Medieval Deccan,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 3 (1999), 241–64.

73

Stig Förster, Die mächtigen Diener der East India Company: Ursachen und Hintergründe der britischen Expansionspolitik in Südasien, 1793-1819 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992), 119–24.

74

Partition Treaty of Mysore 1799, in Aitchison, Collection of Treaties, 54.

75

BL, IOR/H/640, 34, William Kirkpatrick to James Kirkpatrick, 17 May 1800; BL, IOR/H/640, 125–6, William to James Kirkpatrick and Wellesley to James Kirkpatrick, 17 May and 15 June 1800.

60 tanja bührer

76

Treaty of General Defensive Alliance concluded with the Nizam, 12 October 1800, in Aitchison, Collection of Treaties, 64-7; William Lee-Warner, The Native States of India (London: Macmillan and Co., 1910), 32–3.

77

Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), 14.

78

BL, IOR/H/640, 563–8, Translation of monshi ʿAzizollāh’s report of his conference with ʿAzim ol-Omarāʾ, 19 July 1800.

79

Ibid., 585, Translation of monshi ʿAzizollāh’s report of his conference with ʿAzim ol-Omarāʾ, 22 July 1800; Ibid., 603–5, James Kirkpatrick to Wellesley, 27 July 1800.

80

BL, IOR/H/640, 79–80, James Kirkpatrick to Wellesley, 26 May 1800; Art. 15, Treaty of General Defensive Alliance concluded with the Nizam, 12 October 1800, in Aitchison, Collection of Treaties, 66.

81

Shūshtari, Tohfat ol-ʿĀlam, 275–8.

82

Pitts, Boundaries, 23, 95.

83

Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 29–31; Pitts, “Legal Universalisms,” 101.

84

Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 139–41.

85

At the beginning of the negotiations of the Triple Alliance, for instance, he urgently reminded Resident Kennaway that he must not raise any hopes with Hyderabad for a permanent offensive or defensive alliance with the Company (NAI, SC, 1790, 1261, Cornwallis to Kennaway, 29 July 1790).

86

Fisher, Indirect Rule, 1, 7, 243–4; Lee-Warner, The Native States, 126.

87

Andrew Fitzmaurice, “Equality of Non-European Nations in International Law,” in Inge van Hulle and Randall Lesaffer (eds.), International Law in the Long Nineteenth Century (1776-1914): From the Public Law of Europe to Global International Law? (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 80.

88

Bernhard Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 165–8, 178–9.

CHAPTER 2

“Nothing in Common with ‘Indian’ India:” Bhutan and the Cabinet Mission Plan Swati Chawla

Abstract In the months leading up to the transfer of power in India, the eastern Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan argued before the Cabinet Mission and other constitutional bodies that its position was not analogous to the princely states that were slowly merging with the Indian union. Bhutan emphasized that it was more akin to Tibet to its north than to India in its race, religion, and social customs. This chapter traces the history of this articulation of difference in imperial geopolitical writing – especially Olaf Caroe’s “Mongolian Fringe” thesis – its subsequent afterlife in postcolonial India’s relations with Bhutan, and its implications for the place of the Himalaya in India’s self-definition as a nation.

Key words: Bhutan, Sikkim, Himalaya, princely states, decolonization

In the North-East we have in the forefront the juridically independent state of Nepal, Sikkim, hitherto considered as an Indian State, and the protectorate of Bhutan, a semi-independent State in special treaty relations with the Government of India; while behind them stands Tibet, also in special treaty relations with us but under the shadowy suzerainty of China. —Olaf Caroe (1940)1 So, the next time you are told about the timeless unity of the Indian nation, ask yourself why Nagaland is a part of India, but not Myanmar, why Sikkim is a part of India but not Nepal or Bhutan, and you will begin to distinguish between the truths and lies of nationalism. —Partha Chatterjee (2021)2

In the months leading up to the transfer of power in India, the eastern Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan made several representations to the Political Officer in Sikkim, the Cabinet Mission, and the Constituent Assembly regarding its position in relation to India. Bhutanese representatives were often joined by their counterparts from

62 swati chawla

the neighboring kingdom of Sikkim. The correspondence reveals Bhutan’s understanding of its relationships with British India and its other neighbors – Sikkim, Nepal, and Tibet – and how it envisioned relations with the successor Government of India. Bhutan argued that it was politically sovereign and culturally more akin to Tibet than to India. This articulation was at odds with how Bhutan had come to be oriented within the Indian orbit of political and economic influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how the nationalist mainstream within India understood the Himalayan region at the time. However, Bhutan’s vocabulary for this assertion of difference from India was derived from the same racialized imperial writing and realpolitik that had informed colonial policy towards the Himalayan states, most notably Foreign Secretary Olaf Caroe’s 1940 thesis on the “Mongolian Fringe.”3 In a series of letters, memoranda, and personal and official meetings, Bhutanese representatives told the Cabinet Mission, the outgoing, and successor Indian governments that it was racially and culturally distinct from India, and that its people had social and religious ties to the north, with Tibet. It argued that its position should not be conflated with the 500-odd princely states that were slowly being integrated into the Indian Union and, in fewer numbers, into Pakistan, because it was neither Hindu nor Muslim, but Buddhist. Moreover, as a border state, it had always been treated as a special case. Bhutan also demanded the retrocession of territories it had ceded to British India and an increase in the annual subsidy that it received from the Government of India. Following India’s independence, Bhutan wanted to join the British Commonwealth as a member country, even if India chose not to, and asked for a tripartite agreement with Britain and India that acknowledged its position.4 Histories of Indo-Bhutan relations mostly neglect this correspondence in favour of a narrative of seamless transition from the colonial to the postcolonial Governments of India, sealed with a new treaty in 1949.5 Those that mention it focus on Bhutan’s demands for an increased subsidy and returned territories – which were subsequently addressed in the treaty – and not on Bhutanese insistence upon having little in common with India.6 But this brief episode of Indo-Bhutanese history is instructive for several reasons. Firstly, it helps us understand how the racialized othering of Himalayan peoples under colonialism had a long and influential afterlife in the relationship between postcolonial India and its neighbours, and how the latter could deploy the same tropes to their advantage. By doing so, it adds to the growing scholarship on the Himalaya which has shown how regions across the so-called “Mongolian Fringe” demanded greater autonomy or resisted incorporation based on a perceived racial difference from mainland India.7 Secondly, the story of Bhutan’s negotiations with the Cabinet Mission and the Constituent Assembly nuances the history of the Indian republic’s forging.

“nothing in common with ‘indian’ india:” 63

Postcolonial India did not inherit from the British the nation-state seen on maps today. Through partition, the integration of the princely states, and signing fresh treaties with its neighbours, which often involved hitherto non-demarcated borders, the Indian republic was painstakingly welded together in the years leading up to and after independence. Bhutan’s firm resistance to joining the Indian union is an important reminder that the territorial contours of the Indian nation were not natural or timeless, but forged through negotiation and compromise. What was internal and external to the Indian state – and correspondingly national and international – had to be increasingly sharply delineated.8 The liminality of Bhutan’s colonial-era relations with both Britain and India brought into question these boundaries. Thirdly, this archival evidence emphasizes Bhutanese agency and helps excavate an imagination of the Himalaya from within the region. From the earliest accounts of Indo-Bhutan relations beginning in the eighteenth century, Bhutan was depicted as a “passive placeholder of an inbetweeness” that served imperial interests.9 Postcolonial Indian diplomatic writing and nationalist histories often relied on British sources and regurgitated the trope of Bhutan’s passivity and supposedly “natural” orientation towards India. Both were self-congratulatory about India’s economic and military assistance to Bhutan.10 In contrast, as this chapter shows, it is also possible to retrieve the imagination and lived experience of an interconnected and syncretic Himalayan Buddhist world by reading the colonial archival record against the grain.11 Bhutanese actors helped guide negotiations about Bhutan’s future, taking active part in debates about the nature of sovereignty and statehood in the era of decolonization. Taking seriously Bhutan as a regional player allows us to think carefully about the contours of “South Asia,” its current political map, and the nature of both regional and international relations within, as well as extending beyond, the subcontinent.

Bhutan and the Dilemma of Indian Statehood Even before 1947, Bhutan’s place in South Asia’s geopolitical map had been contested. While Bhutan’s representation to the 1946 British Cabinet Mission unequivocally stated that it was not an Indian princely state, its status had been debated extensively in Delhi and London over preceding decades without reaching a firm conclusion. The government of India believed that Bhutan was no longer an independent sovereign state, since it had accepted control of its external relations by India per Article III of the 1910 Treaty of Punakha in exchange for an increase in subsidy. As early as the 1920s, Bhutanese Maharaja Ugyen Wangchuk asked the political officer in Sikkim personally to install and secure the succession of his dynasty, fearing opposition to his succession upon his death.12

64 swati chawla

Subsequently, in 1924, Viceroy Reading examined two separate questions regarding the legal status of Bhutan: “Was Bhutan under HMG’s suzerainty? If so, was it a state in India?” He concurred that, per the 1910 treaty, Bhutan had “parted with that full external sovereignty which ‘is the necessary attribute of an independent Sovereign State’.” The answer to the second question “depended on whether HMG’s sovereignty over Bhutan was exercised through the Governor General in India or any Governor or officer subordinate to the Governor General.” Since the political officer in Sikkim, who was responsible for exercising the British government’s control over Bhutan’s external relations, acted under the instructions of the government of India, the Viceroy concluded that Bhutan was an Indian state. The view was supported by the Maharaja of Bhutan’s homage to the King Emperor at the Imperial Darbar in Delhi in 1911, a ritual in which only Feudatory Chiefs participated.13 While Reading realized that Bhutan “had been left to enjoy and experience the function and authority of internal sovereignty,” 14 he found sufficient grounds for claiming that “if it is going too far to say that Bhutan is already in the position of an Indian State, it is certainly time to say that it is in the process of becoming one.”15 The India Office in London would reaffirm this view in August 1946, albeit in a different phrasing, calling Bhutan “an embryonic Indian State.”16 However, while this was the case legally, in practice, Viceroy Reading noted that Bhutan had not been treated “juridically” as an Indian state and had enjoyed internal sovereignty. He believed it best to “leave the status of Bhutan in convenient ambiguity, with its easy transition – should this hereafter prove advisable – to the status of an Indian State.”17 A 1929 India Office note echoed this idea: while agreeing that Bhutan was under His Majesty’s suzerainty, officials believed it was “expedient to leave its status ambiguous as it is undesirable to extend British commitments in regard to Bhutan.”18 For British colonial officials, “independence was largely a question of recognition,” and degrees of dependence and independence existed among the Indian states.19 In the early 1930s, in anticipation of legal changes with the incorporation of Government of India Act 1935, the Federal Structure Committee re-examined the status of Bhutan. The Committee argued that the ambiguity about its status was unacceptable, and its members believed that the best means to integrate frontier states such as Bhutan into the orbit of India was to include, in the new constitutional settlement, provisions for their adherence to the future Indian federation. To achieve this, Bhutan would have to secure the status of an Indian State or a federal unit. Again, Bhutan did not fit comfortably in either category: while its relations were handled by the British political officer, its frontier affairs were attended to by the Governor General in the Reserved Department of External Relations. British officials nevertheless concluded that Bhutan fell into the category of a federal

“nothing in common with ‘indian’ india:” 65

unit, even though it was akin to an Indian state insofar as its dynastic and internal matters appertained to the Viceroy.20 As the Second World War raged on and the Himalayan frontier became crucial to India’s security, Foreign Secretary Olaf Caroe reviewed relations among Bhutan, Nepal, and Sikkim, as well as their relations with India, Tibet, and China. While Sikkim had been regarded as an Indian state and could have been encouraged to federate to India, Caroe believed that, in general, federation was not a good option for the frontier states, since they had “external interests:” to wit, “decidedly Mongolian affinities.” Furthermore, he argued that the “Mongol States” had weak central rulers with several powerful regional satraps, which would make it challenging for them to function as stable federal units.21 He noted that both Sikkim and Bhutan were “jealous” of the special position attained by Nepal. Instead of federation, he advocated that the three be treated as “States in special treaty relations with HMG.” Caroe’s primary concern was the security of India’s northeastern frontier and a resurgent China, and he wanted to attach the frontier states to India in an “indissoluble union of interest.” He hoped that acknowledging Bhutan was not an Indian state might convince it to allow the frontier of India to be drawn in line with Bhutan’s frontier with Tibet.22 In Caroe’s analysis, the whole of the northeastern frontier was regarded as “irredenta” (lost or unredeemed territory) by Tibet and China, which thus threatened to undermine India’s own sovereignty and sphere of influence. As early as 1774, the Panchen Lama in Tibet had claimed Bhutan as a dependency of the Dalai Lama, and Bhutan had continued to maintain an agent in Lhasa up to the 1940s. Similarly, in 1877, the Deb Raja of Bhutan had been supported by Chinese and Tibetan officials in his refusal to let the British construct a road through Bhutan. In the 1940s, with China engaged to the east with Japan, Caroe wanted to “fasten in the Indian orbit” the entirety of the Mongolian fringe from Nepal to Assam.23 He argued Sikkim and Bhutan were “appanages of Tibet,” and Bhutan was “completely and absolutely Mongolian in outlook and tradition,” even more than Nepal and Sikkim.24 Caroe’s thesis – what became known as the “Mongolian fringe” thesis – was highly influential and widely cited in subsequent policy discussion on the eastern Himalaya (up to and beyond partition). It placed the Bhutanese and Bhutan with Tibetans and Tibet, separating them from the Indian princely states, and further supplying both geopolitical and racial arguments for Bhutanese resistance to incorporation into India. The “Mongolian fringe” thesis set states like Bhutan geographically and racially apart from the Indian heartland. While British (and Indian) officials used the thesis’s strategic implications to demand the region’s integration for the security of the Indian heartland, Bhutanese leaders used the frontier states’ presumed difference (in both sovereign and racial terms) to make alternative demands, including the right to political autonomy. The strongest articulation of

66 swati chawla

these arguments was found in Bhutanese demands before the Cabinet Mission and the outgoing and successor governments of India at the cusp of the transfer of power in 1946-7.

Indian Princely States in the Cabinet Mission Plan The Cabinet Mission Plan proposed that India become a federation: “There should be a Union of India, embracing both British India and the States which should deal with the following subjects: Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Communications; and should have the powers necessary to raise the finances required for the above subjects,” and “the States will retain all subjects and powers other than those ceded to the Union.”25 The plan gave groupings of provinces and princely states considerable autonomy, along with the freedom to set up their own legislatures and executives. While it was eventually rejected by both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, the plan significantly influenced the subsequent proceedings of India’s Constituent Assembly and deliberations by Jawaharlal Nehru’s interim government. The Cabinet Mission Plan was vague about how and when the Indian princely states could enter the Constituent Assembly and the proposed Indian union. It acknowledged that while the states were expected to cooperate in the building of a new constitutional structure, the precise form of that cooperation was open to negotiation and would not be identical for all states. The states would be represented by a negotiating committee in the preliminary stages of deliberations and would be given appropriate representation in the final Constituent Assembly (not exceeding ninety-three out of a total of 389 seats). The negotiating committee was presented with the task of distributing the reserved seats. Meanwhile, the standing committee of the Chamber of Princes set up a representative committee to negotiate their entry into the union.26 The Mission issued a memorandum to the Chamber of Princes on 22 May 1946 announcing the impending cessation of British paramountcy upon the coming into operation of an independent government(s) of India. While assuring the states that they would not be pressured into entering the new Indian set-up, the Mission also made clear that the British government would not have the “influence” with the new government(s) to carry out the obligations of paramountcy, nor would it retain British troops in India for that purpose. All political arrangements between the states and the British Crown and British India would end. “The void” was to be filled either by the states entering into a federal relationship with the successor government(s) of India or by entering into new political arrangements.27

“nothing in common with ‘indian’ india:” 67

The Mission acknowledged that British India’s negotiations with the states on matters of common concern, particularly economics and finances, might still be incomplete at the time of India’s independence, and that existing arrangements with the states might need to continue until new ones were inked.28 Indian nationalist leaders, meanwhile, were worried that the successor government would inherit vastly varying relations across the different states upon withdrawal of paramountcy. In a prescient analogy with the partition of Northern Ireland under British rule, they feared that it would “create 560 and odd Ulsters in India,” and they could not guess how each would behave vis-à-vis the successor government.29 The states committee of the Constituent Assembly, chaired by Nehru, was tasked with working out the representation of the princely states in the Assembly. In January 1947, Nehru extended the Committee’s scope to “examine the special problems of Bhutan and Sikkim.” He did not say what Bhutan’s position would be in relation to India but assured that it would be “determined in consultation with Bhutan’s representatives,” and “there was no question of compulsion in the matter.”30 From the time of the Cabinet Mission’s arrival, Bhutan and Sikkim had lobbied for an early review of their treaties with the British government and asked that their representatives be allowed to put their case before the Mission. Their request for a meeting was turned down, but the delegation assured them that their position would be given careful consideration before the transfer of power in India.31 On 17 May 1946, Arthur J. Hopkinson, the Political Officer in Sikkim, relayed Bhutan’s “anxiety” to the External Affairs Department: “Bhutan fears that it may be confronted with some decision classifying it as an ‘Indian State’, which is it not, and lumping it along with other Indian states.”32 Bhutanese representatives highlighted Bhutan’s unique history to demand alternative political arrangements. It is worth briefly reflecting on the representatives from Bhutan and Sikkim to highlight how they were able to make these arguments.

A Bhutanese Prime Minister, a Sikkimese King, and Forgotten Himalayan Friendships In 1942, as the Second World War raged, two young cousins were probationers at the Indian Civil Service (ICS) training camp in the town of Dehradun in the western Himalayan foothills. While most trainees would go on to postings in the British Indian provinces, a few were princes from the “native states,” who joined the course to learn the fundamentals of administration and “[establish] contacts with the future administrators of independent India.”33 Within a decade of taking the course, the duo would assume the highest positions in the administration of

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the Himalayan kingdoms of Sikkim and Bhutan and shape their relationship with newly independent India, as well as Tibet and China. The personal biographies of the cousins are evidence of a Janus-faced, syncretic, and cosmopolitan Tibetan and Himalayan world under British imperialism. Indeed, one of them was compared to a Janus – with one face, a progressive, educated, and enlightened democrat, and with the other, a reactionary, prejudiced, corrupt, and communal autocrat.34 The youngest among the cousins was Maharajkumar Palden Thondup Namgyal (1923-82). Thondup was believed to be the reincarnation of his late uncle, Maharaja Sidkeong Tulku, and was recognized as the spiritual head of Sikkim’s most revered monasteries, Phodong and Rumtek. He received a monastic education in Tibet and Sikkim, alongside a western-style education at St. Joseph’s Convent in Kalimpong, St. Joseph’s in Darjeeling, and Bishop Cotton School in the summer capital of Simla. At nineteen, he had been deemed too old to start at Oxbridge, and was on his way to becoming the School Prefect at Bishop Cotton, when his older brother, Paljor Namgyal, was killed in a flying accident while working for the Royal Air Force, making Thondup the heir apparent to the kingdom of Sikkim.35 The British political officer in Sikkim, Basil Gould, had taken a personal interest in the brothers’ upbringing “to ensure that the princes and princesses should be well-equipped to feel at home in western-style society as well as in their own.”36 Joining Thondup was his cousin Jigmie Palden Dorji (1919-64).37 Jigmie’s mother, Rani Chuni, was the sister of Thondup’s father, Maharaja Tashi Namgyal. His father, Raja Sonam Tobgye Dorji (1896-1953), was the assistant to the political officer of Sikkim and a C.I.E. (Companion of the Indian Empire). The Dorji children, like their Namgyal cousins, were educated in elite British schools in Darjeeling and Kalimpong. The Dorjis were subsequently related to the Bhutanese royal house of Wangchuk by marriage; Jigmie’s sister, Kesang, married Jigme Dorji Wangchuk in 1951, who became king the following year. Thondup and Jigmie’s families also shared a connection with the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan aristocracy in Lhasa. During his exile in British India, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama stayed for three months at the Dorji family’s Bhutan house in Kalimpong, as did the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in 1957. A Tibetan tutor from Lhasa accompanied the cousins to Dehradun in 1942. The Dorjis were equally close, if not closer, to the political and social elite of British India. Jigmie’s grandfather, Kazi Ugyen Dorji,38 had rendered crucial assistance to the British government in its attempts to open negotiations with the Dalai Lama’s government in Tibet, and was bestowed with the titles of Rai Bahadur and Raja, subsequently inherited by his son and Jigmie’s father, Sonam Tobgye Dorji. Ugyen Dorji set up his headquarters in Kalimpong as the king of Bhutan’s agent, responsible for handling foreign affairs (in effect relations with India).39 Ceded by Bhutan to British India in 1865, Kalimpong offered easy access to the Chumbi Valley of Tibet via the Jelep la Pass. The town was located on the Lhasa-Calcutta

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trade route in present-day West Bengal, and served as an important political and economic hub, especially for the wool trade. The Dorjis cultivated close relations among the political elite in Bengal and Sikkim, as well as among the Tibetan aristocracy in Lhasa. They held the additional title of Trungpa (administrator) of Ha in western Bhutan and, later, Deb Zimpon (Chief Minister). Like the Namgyals of Sikkim, they were among the first Bhutanese to be admitted to western-style schools; their education and fluency in English were important qualifications in the sphere of foreign relations with the British and its successor Indian governments.40 Thondup and Jigmie’s admission to the ICS course was evidence of the complex political and administrative structure of the British empire in India at the time: the British provinces, princely states, and a number of border states, each in a different “special arrangement” with India. Their shared sense of being out of place within the heart of the Indian administrative corps in the 1940s, and their identification – whether by birth, vocation, or friendship – with an interconnected Tibetan cultural world were both indications of things to come in the eastern Himalaya. From the time of the Cabinet Mission’s arrival, Jigmie and Thondup had represented Bhutan and Sikkim, respectively, in Delhi. The two feared that existing treaties might lead to the assumption that Bhutan and Sikkim were like other Indian princely states, when in fact, they were determined to maintain their independence.41 To that effect, they made several representations to the constitutional bodies that were giving shape to the successor Government of India and the Cabinet Mission.

Bhutan as a “Rather Special Case” As Bhutan’s agent, Jigmie wrote to the Cabinet Mission in Simla on 7 May 1946 to assert: Bhutan is not an Indian state; but its geographical position on the borders of India and Tibet necessarily involves very close relations with both these countries. In [its] Race, Religion and Social customs, it is much more closely akin to Tibet and China, than to India. Until the 1860s, Bhutan acknowledged the (sic) Tibetan sovereignty. In fact, Bhutan still pays a nominal subsidy acknowledging Tibet as its religious Centre.42

While Jigmie assured the Mission of the Maharaja’s “sympathy with the aspirations of the Princes and people of India,” he also communicated the Maharaja’s “apprehension” over forthcoming “political changes between the people and States of India and the British Government,” lest these “affect the happy relations which have existed between his people and himself and His Majesty’s Government.”43 As the British political officer in Sikkim who was also in charge of Bhutan, Hopkinson

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endorsed this view and relayed Bhutan’s “apprehension” and “anxiety” to various offices in Delhi and London, occasionally citing Caroe. After repeated entreaties, most of which were ignored, the External Affairs Department asked him to prepare a memo – “not too long but sufficiently explanatory” – listing the “facts” that made Bhutan (and Sikkim) “rather special cases” on “geographical, historical, cultural and ethnological grounds, among others.”44 Bhutan aimed to clarify its position and secure favourable treaty terms from the British before they left, and Jigmie and Hopkinson lobbied energetically to bring that about. E.B. Wakefield, the deputy secretary of reforms in the Political Department in Delhi, also advised Sikkim and Bhutan in June 1946 to take up the question of new treaties and agreements with India, while they still enjoyed the backing of the British government and there existed the possibility of defining their position in the proposed treaty between the UK and India.45 As a subtle acknowledgment of the imminent decoupling of British and Indian interests, Bhutan’s representatives addressed the Cabinet Mission and the External Affairs and Home Departments as “British,” or as representatives of His Majesty’s Government, not (for the latter two) as the government of India. They asked for a tripartite agreement with Britain and India. Hopkinson endorsed the view: “Bhutan’s treaty is with Britain. Bhutan at present wants to remain within the British Commonwealth… even if India goes out [of it].” He suggested that “as a friend of both India and Bhutan,” Britain continue to pay Bhutan’s subsidies for some time.46 However, the British government doubted the feasibility of excising Bhutan’s protection from the government of India to London; it also pointed out that if India chose to leave the Commonwealth, it would be impracticable for Bhutan to remain within it. They feared that Indian nationalist opinion would not countenance the perpetuation of British influence and paramountcy in the frontier states at a time when they were to lapse elsewhere in the subcontinent. They were also loathe to undertake any fresh commitments or reopen thorny questions about the frontier states’ political status.47 Both British and Bhutanese officials wrestled with the transfer of power’s potential impacts on international and domestic norms and relations, as well as the blurring of the two. In Delhi’s Political Department, Wakefield could not respond to Bhutan’s probing questions about the consequences for Bhutan, under international law, of the transfer of power in India, except to state that the new government of India would succeed to the rights and obligations of the British government with respect to Bhutan. He pointed out that “international law was not a universally recognized and codified law to which reference could be made when points of doubt arose, but was merely a body of precedents, often conflicting, to which ‘Nations’ could refer when it seemed expedient in their interests to do so.”48

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Further, he “doubted whether international law was in any case applicable to the special relationship that existed between the British Government and Bhutan.”49 In the absence of a clear precedent and an exact definition of this “special relationship,” it was difficult to make a definitive case as to whether Bhutan should, or not, join the Indian union. Representatives from Bhutan and the political officer in Sikkim often had to remind authorities in Delhi – both British and Indian nationalist – of Bhutan’s special status. On 3 April 1947, in correspondence regarding revisions to the memorandum on Indian states, Hopkinson reiterated to the External Affairs Department that “Bhutan is not an Indian state, and should not be included.”50 But in Indian understanding at the time, especially in Delhi, Bhutan was sometimes considered analogous to an Indian princely state. When The Statesman reported on talks between Bhutanese and Indian delegations, the article title was “Bhutan’s Entry into Indian Union: Exploratory Talks in New Delhi.” According to the report, Bhutan was an “independent country” reliant on India for administrative purposes, such as defence. Bhutan was asked to continue discussions with the negotiating committee of the Constituent Assembly, which had in turn been tasked with working out the representation of the other states as well.51 To prepare for discussions with the negotiating committee and understand the nature of their treaties, Hopkinson tried to secure legal counsel for Bhutan in India and England. He applied to Fatteh Sinhji of the princely state of Limbdi (in present-day Gujarat) for recommendations about constitutional experts. Like other princely rulers at the time, Fatteh Sinhji was negotiating with India regarding his kingdom. He recommended his own lawyer in Bombay, as well as a firm of solicitors in London which dealt with Indian cases in the Privy Council.52 Hopkinson supposed that “Bhutan [was] not as skilled as other Indian states who have been schooled in this language of the law.” Moreover, it was a “poor country” dependent on an Indian subsidy and could not afford to pay exorbitant legal fees. Its inhabitants were racially othered and infantilized in Hopkinson’s descriptions of them as “nice and simple folk… without the guile of serpents.” “I dearly love [them]… and I should dearly like to do all I can to help them,” he said.53 He betrayed a nostalgia for empire, including the gory Younghusband Mission (1903-4), and appealed “for the sake of Auld Lang Syne” to outmoded ideas of honour and “long-standing good manners” in championing assistance for Bhutan.54 Echoing Caroe, who had wanted to fasten Bhutan (with its trade routes into Tibet) to India, Hopkinson argued that it was equally in India’s interest to have a “a friendly and contented Bhutan, within the Indian rather than the Chinese orbit.” But he also framed this in terms of respecting Bhutanese autonomy. He cautioned that “negligence or contempt would soon drive it [Bhutan] and much else besides – into the open arms of China, and bring a foreign power, perhaps Russia, to India’s doors.”55 He underscored that warning ten days later with intelligence reports

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from Kalimpong: “Tibetan Trade Agent, Kalimpong, has written to the Tibetan Government advising them to claim Sikkim and Bhutan.”56 Fearing increased aggression from Tibet as a result of the British withdrawal from India, Bhutanese representatives also appealed for an increased subsidy for armament and military training and duty-free transit of goods through India. Hopkinson backed Bhutanese requests, warning that India could “easily have a North East Frontier problem” if they were not “reasonable” in negotiations with Bhutan.57 He repeatedly pleaded for recognition Bhutan’s “special position” from the highest authorities among the outgoing and incoming governments in Delhi – for India’s sake, as much for Bhutan’s.58

“If India is for Indians…” Bhutan’s most contentious demand was for the retrocession of territories it had ceded to British India under the Treaty of Sinchula (1865). There were eighteen duars (“doors”) or passes in the areas at the base of the lower range of the Himalayas, where the mountain rivers of Bhutan met the plains of Bengal and Assam.59 They varied in breadth from ten to twelve miles; eleven, including Buxa, touched on the northern frontier of Bengal, and seven were in Assam. The Deb Raja had resisted articles on the cession of Bengal duars and the appointment of a British commissioner to mark Indo-Bhutanese boundaries; he ratified the 1865 treaty only under threat of renewed hostilities on the frontier.60 The Bhutanese had customarily been the sole arbiters of the administration of the duars.61 The annexation of the Bengal duars resulted in a loss of 220 miles of border territory and a major source of revenue for Bhutan, while also leaving the frontier undefined, since the boundaries between Bhutan and eastern Bengal and Assam had not been demarcated.62 When surveying of the Indo-Bhutanese boundary began, the boundary guidelines of the Survey of India (est. 1767) followed the same racialized taxonomy that had relegated mountainous areas and populations to the fringes of India: “no territory which could be called a hill tract was to be included,” and the boundary was to include the tribal peoples of the duars, but not the Bhutanese cultivators.63 Much like the provinces of British India, the violence of colonial rule in the Himalayan kingdoms comprised the dismantling of fluid frontiers, overlapping jurisdictions, customary trading, and property rights. British cartographers and surveyors demanded proof of ownership, possession, and trading privileges in the form of modern legalistic documents such as property deeds and contracts. In a representative correspondence (ca. 1866-70) between the Deb Raja of Bhutan and the collector of Rungpore regarding Bhutanese authority over some villages, the

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former pointed the mutual incomprehensibility between their two methods: “It is not customary for us Bhutias to be regulated by records, but by the custom of possession… [T]he English and the Bhutias are very different in their modes of transacting.”64 Furthermore, the demarcation of boundaries did not translate into a single site of administration and control over the territory and its inhabitants. Multiple loci of taxation and loyalty continued as before. For example, in the boundary demarcated in 1872-3, Dewangiri was marked off and declared Indian territory with the erection of boundary pillars, since it had been ceded to India in 1865. However, the Bengal government had done nothing to establish British administration in the area, and Bhutanese officials deputed by the Tongsa Penlop – who was installed as Bhutan’s first hereditary monarch in 1907 – continued to collect taxes in the area, while inhabitants remained reluctant to submit to the demands of tax authorities from Assam.65 In staking its claim in 1946-7, Bhutan employed the vocabulary which had already found purchase with the British government: that of self-determination and separate statehood based on a claim of separate national identity. “If Great Britain is parting with Indian territory in general to Indians, on the sound plea of India for the Indians, so logically Great Britain ought to part with this small piece of territory, which is not Indian at all, to the Bhutanese,” Bhutanese representatives reasoned. The areas they demanded – Buxa Duar and Dewangiri – were “inhabited only seasonably, [and] exclusively by Bhutanese, biped and quadruped.” They were of little consequence to India but were “the apple of Bhutan’s eyes.”66 Lobbying for Bhutan, Hopkinson departed slightly from established colonial discourse that had squarely blamed the Bhutanese for frontier “raids,” which had provided the excuse for annexing the duars.67 He argued that the areas had been “snatched” by British India as a punitive measure, and “what Britain took away, Britain should restore to herself (Bhutan), and not to a third party (India).” It should do so “before people snatching.” While the demand had been raised and dismissed earlier, Hopkinson hoped that it could now be accommodated in a new treaty between India and Bhutan.68 His sympathetic position on retrocession stood in marked contrast to most British political officers in Sikkim, who had opposed realignment of the boundary in Bhutan’s favour.69 The demand for retrocession brought to the fore thorny questions about colonialism, cartographic uncertainty, the nature of paramountcy, and its relationship with sovereignty and territorial control. Bhutan seemed to rely on British paramountcy – and its imminent cession – in making the case for return of territories, even as its agents simultaneously argued the opposite in staking a position of difference from the other Indian princely states in representations to the Cabinet Mission and Constituent Assembly. Hopkinson cautioned that although

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he was sympathetic to Bhutan’s claim for retrocession, and to Britain’s intercession on Bhutan’s behalf in securing this before independence, his support was based on “equity and common sense,” not legal right. He was responding to two related questions: “Does HMG exercise powers of paramountcy over Bhutan?” And, “As Bhutan ceded territory to the Paramount Power, can she not claim that territory back as Paramountcy has (will have) ceased?” Hopkinson conceded that there was room for interpretation on the first question, and he did not know the official answer. However, he pointed out that “paramount means supreme,” and since the British controlled Bhutan’s foreign relations, it could be argued that Britain was the paramount power. Hopkinson was unequivocal on the second question: “No.” In his understanding, Britain held the ceded Bhutanese territory in “absolute sovereignty.” Whether or not British paramountcy existed over Bhutan, areas ceded through the 1865 Treaty had “ceased to have any connection with Bhutanese sovereignty,” and “Britain can do what she likes with them.” Bhutan had no legal claim for retrocession. In an extended analogy which serves as a reminder of imperial hubris and the protracted stitching-together of the Indian nation, he provided a counter-factual which deserves to be quoted in full: … were the case otherwise, Britain would not bequeath “‘independence’ on India” instead it would restore Bombay to the Portuguese from whom she received the sovereignty over Bombay, and Lucknow to the eldest surviving descendant of King Wajid Ali Shah of Oudh, likewise Delhi to the eldest surviving Mogul (still living there), with some Mahratta in hot dispute: and this would of course solve all our problems, for large chunks of potential Pakistan would be ‘restored’ to some Sikh ruling in Lahore on the gaddi of the Lion of the Punjab. Chunks of Behar would go to Nepal, and Mahrattas would come up near Calcutta.70

However, as shown, on-the-ground reality in erstwhile Bhutanese territories belied any claims of undisputed Indian sovereignty over them. While those areas had acquired immense economic importance as tea-growing areas in the eight decades since the treaty, cartographic and administrative uncertainty continued to prevail.

Conclusion Just three weeks before imperial affiliations ceased and the British government transferred power to the dominions of India and Pakistan, Bhutan was officially told that existing arrangements pertaining to all Himalayan states would devolve upon India alone, while the UK would continue to take a “friendly interest” in Bhutan.71 In the new postcolonial order, Bhutan no longer asked for a tripartite

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agreement with Britain, and gestured towards anticolonial solidarity with India by reminding it of the circumstances under which its territories were annexed. 72 Nehru assured all neighbouring states that India was bound by its predecessor’s treaties and obligations. In the interregnum before new treaties were negotiated, India signed standstill agreements with Nepal, Sikkim, and Tibet, but not with Bhutan, “with both governments choosing to operate as if they had.”73 Negotiations for a fresh treaty began on 23 April 1948. The Treaty of Perpetual Peace and Friendship was signed on 8 August 1949 in Darjeeling, with Sikkim’s Political Officer Harishwar Dayal representing India and five Bhutanese representatives, including Sonam Tobgye Dorji and his son Jigmie, representing Bhutan. The treaty was ratified by the Maharaja of Bhutan and the Governor-General of India, C. Rajagopalachari. Bhutan asked for recognition of its independence, an increase in subsidy, and the restoration of territories.74 Ceded Bhutanese territories were now part of Bengal and Assam states, and the government of India asked each to surrender a small piece of territory to Bhutan as a goodwill gesture. Accounts of Indo-Bhutanese relations on both sides have often lauded the treaty as being advantageous to Bhutan.75 Within a year from signing of its signing, India restored about thirty-two square miles of territory in Dewangiri (formerly in Assam) to Bhutan and increased the subsidy from one lakh (one hundred thousand) rupees to five lakh (five hundred thousand) rupees. India also agreed to grant access to seaports, forest, and other roads through its territory for Bhutanese trade. The treaty incorporated essential provisions of the 1910 Indo-Bhutan Treaty, whereby “the Government of India [undertook] to exercise no interference in the internal administration of Bhutan,” and “on its part, the Government of Bhutan [agreed] to be guided by the advice of the Government of India in regard to its external relations.”76 Thus, while the treaty acknowledged the status of Bhutan as an independent and sovereign nation, it was not fully sovereign. For example, when Bhutan wanted to bring Christian missionaries to work in its hospitals, schools, and leper colonies, Jigmie had to raise the issue of India’s “strict attitude” over inner line permits required for foreigners’ entry into Bhutan. The Indian side, while assuring Jigmie that missionaries would be allowed into Bhutan, suggested that Bhutan could also invite Hindu missionaries from the Rama Krishna Mission for educational and medical activities.77 Though lessened, “strategic hypocrisy” remained the order of the day in the eastern Himalayas.78 Masking hard realpolitik, India employed the language of political equality and cultural affinity and sought to distinguish itself both from colonial Britain and allegedly expansionist China. Nehru was cautious about the charge of imperialism levelled at India, especially by China, as the successor state of the British empire. The interim Indian Government had been served a forewarning about China’s position a few weeks before independence, when it directly invited Bhutan to a

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UNESCO conference in Nanking, rather than routing the invitation through India.79 Nehru told B.M. Kaul, Chief of General Staff in the Indian Army, that “we must treat smaller countries like Bhutan as our equals and never give them an impression that they were being ‘civilized’ by us.” That Chinese authorities also rejected the MacMahon Line, which India considered its official border with Tibet in the eastern Himalayas, may have increased Indian concerns about Bhutan.80During his visit to Bhutan in 1958, Nehru reiterated that India wished for Bhutan to remain an independent country, choosing its own way of life, while simultaneously emphasizing that Bhutan and India’s defence were interlinked. In effect, he echoed the imperial geopolitical conception of the Himalayan nations as oriented towards India and constituting a “family:” “We, as members of the same Himalayan family, should live as friendly neighbours helping each other. Freedom of both Bhutan and India, should be safeguarded so that none from outside can do harm to it.”81 India supported Bhutan’s seat at the table of sovereign nation-states, but simultaneously tried to draw Bhutanese economy and politics further into its own ambit. Bhutan became a member of the Colombo Plan (1962) and joined the United Nations (1971) with Indian sponsorship.82 At the same time, Soviet-style Five Year Plans, adopted by India, were promoted in Bhutan (and Sikkim), and their implementation depended heavily on Indian aid.83 In 1960, the Indian Political Officer wrote to the Ministry of External Affairs in language that was almost identical to Curzon and Caroe, “[A]n easy market for minerals now being mined in Bhutan shall have to be found in India and India alone … We must do everything in our power to orient the economy of Bhutan towards India…” The Ministry concurred, “[W]e have decided to afford all possible assistance and concessions which would draw Bhutan into our sphere of influence.”84 From its currency to its local time, Bhutan was anchored to India. In 1979, when it decided to adopt Bhutan Standard Time (BST), thirty minutes ahead of Indian Standard Time (IST), the Indian Embassy brusquely remarked: “Since Bhutan has not been inconvenienced in any way by following IST … BST can only be interpreted as yet another device to mark off Bhutan’s separate identity from India and another symbol of Bhutan’s independence from India.” The Embassy called out a worrying trend: in the same year, Bhutan had also proposed to increase the supply and circulation of its own currency, Bhutanese Ngultrum (BNT), with the objective of making it the country’s sole currency. The Indian rupee was also legal tender in Bhutan at the time, and the BNT was (and continues to be) tradeable at par with the rupee.85 Later that year, Bhutan took a position different from India on the controversial issue of Kampuchea at the summit conference of Non-Aligned States held at Havana (Cuba) and, subsequently, the United Nations General Assembly. Transiting via Bombay on returning from Havana, the Bhutanese King hardly assuaged the Indian press by publicly expressing his preference for “updating”

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the 1949 treaty, to clarify that India’s advice on Bhutan’s external relations was not binding on Bhutan.86 The Treaty was revised in 2007, when the clause about Bhutan being guided by India in its external affairs was replaced with a more equal responsibility of “common security” between the two countries, wherein neither would allow its territory to be used for activities harmful to the other’s security.87 These episodes do not just betray conflict within India’s foreign policy in relation to its Himalayan neighbour, given India’s contradictory imperatives of respecting Bhutan’s sovereignty while controlling its neighbour’s external relations. Bhutan’s adoption of a different local time, to say nothing of its avowal of difference from India, also exacerbated Delhi’s distance from the northeastern states, which Indian elites were trying to stitch into the Indian union. Many of these states were further from Delhi than Bhutan, and some made their own nationalist claims. China, meanwhile, never stopped contesting India’s incorporation of the North-East Frontier Agency (now the state of Arunachal Pradesh), immediately to the east of Bhutan; it considers it as the southern part of Tibet.88 Current tensions between India and Bhutan are thus much deeper and older than generally thought, and they hit closer to home: they challenge India’s very self-definition as a nation and the place of the Himalaya within it. Beneath this unrelenting “cartographic anxiety,” as Sankaran Krishna famously called it, lie the soft, porous, and often undefined borders inherited from the Raj, notably in the Himalaya.89 The transfer of power unleashed a “fraught process of disentanglement and redefinition between polities hitherto part of a single imperial formation, rather than just between colony and metropole.”90 For Bhutan and its elites, this disentanglement entailed very explicit attempts to internationalize relations with its giant Indian neighbour, as well as taking part in universalist debates about the nature of state sovereignty and international law. That this process, and consequent autonomy, was no foregone conclusion can be gauged from Sikkim’s annexation by India in 1975 – which, some have argued, resulted in part because it took its international ties too far by pursuing closer ties with the United States.91 In 1947 as perhaps in the twenty-first century, embracing internationalism in just the right amount has been, for Bhutan, a pre-condition for survival.

Notes 1

Olaf Caroe, “India and the Mongolian Fringe,” in Parshotam Mehra (ed.), The North-Eastern Frontier: A Documentary Study of the Internecine Rivalry Between India, Tibet and China, vo. 2 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), 111.

2

Partha Chatterjee, The Truths and Lies of Nationalism (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2021), 41.

3

Caroe, “India and the Mongolian Fringe.”

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4

National Archives of India, Delhi (NAI), External Affairs (EA), Sikkim Agency, 1946, File 21(3)P/46, “Constitutional Changes: Bhutan Representation.”

5

Amar Kaur Jasbir Singh, Himalayan Triangle: A Historical Survey of British India’s Relations with Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan 1765-1950 (London: The British Library, 1988); Nari Rustomji, Bhutan: The Dragon Kingdom in Crisis (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978); Rajesh Kharat, “Indo-Bhutan Relations: Strategic Perspectives,” in K. Warikoo (ed.), Himalayan Frontiers of India: Historical, Geopolitical and Strategic Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009), 137–66.

6

Rustomji, Bhutan; Kharat, “Indo-Bhutan Relations”; T.T. Poulose, “Bhutan’s External Relations and India,” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 20 (1971), 199.

7

See Mabel D. Gergan and Sara H. Smith, “Theorizing Racialization through India’s ‘Mongolian Fringe’,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 5 (2021), 1–22.

8

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, “Tangled Lands: Burma and India’s Unfinished Separation, 1937–1948,” Journal of Asian Studies 80 (2020), 293–315; Elisabeth Leake, “Where National and International Meet: Borders and Border Regions in Postcolonial India,” International History Review (2021).

9

Nitasha Kaul, “‘Where Is Bhutan?’ The Production of Bhutan’s Asymmetrical Inbetweenness in Geopolitics,” Journal of Asian Studies 80 (2021), 320.

10

Ibid., 332.

11

This work joins recent scholarship drawing on Bhutanese, Tibetan, and Indian materials, including non-English sources, that has corrected this imbalance, and emphasized Bhutanese autonomy, as well as its links with Tibet and other neighbors. See Karma Phuntsho, The History of Bhutan (Gurgaon: Vintage, 2016); Michael Aris, Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom (Warminster: Aris & Phillips Ltd., 1979); Adam Pain, “State, Economy and Space in Bhutan in the Early Part of the 19th Century,” in Karma Ura and Sonam Kinga (eds.), The Spider and the Piglet: Proceedings of the First Seminar on Bhutan Studies (Bhutan: Thimpu, 2004), 160–93.

12

Singh, Himalayan Triangle, 365.

13

Ibid., 354. See also Nirmola Sharma, “When Bhutan Got Caught Up in the Tug-of-War Between Colonial Britain and China,” ICS Analysis no. 87 (2020) https://www.icsin.org/publications/whenbhutan-got-caught-up-in-the-tug-of-war-between-colonial-britain-and-china (accessed 21 July 2022).

14

Singh, Himalayan Triangle, 366.

15

Notes by Chamier and Hirtzel, 16 and 21 Apr 1924, quoted in ibid., 366.

16

Ibid., 368.

17

Reading to Olivier, 7 February 1924; quoted in ibid., 366.

18

Note by India Office, 8 January 1929; quoted in ibid., 355.

19

Ibid., 366.

20

Ibid.

21

See, Ibid., 347–49; Rustomji, Bhutan, 17; Caroe, “India and the Mongolian Fringe,” 111, 117.

22

Caroe, “India and the Mongolian Fringe,” 121–4.

23

Ibid., 115–7, 120–1.

24

Ibid., 111, 115.

25

Sub-points 1 and 4 of Point 15 of the Plan laid out the basic structure of the Constitution and the federal structure of India. See Centre for Law and Public Policy Research, “Cabinet Mission Plan (Cabinet Mission, 1946).” Constitution of India https://www.constitutionofindia.net/historical_­constitutions/ cabinet_mission_plan__cabinet_mission__1946__16th May 1946 (accessed 23 September 2020).

26

Government of India, Ministry of States, White Paper on Indian States (Delhi, 1950).

27

Ibid.

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28

“Memorandum in Regard to States Treaties and Paramountcy,” Cabinet Mission, Simla, 12 May 1946, presented to the Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes on 22 May 22 1946, quoted in Government of India, Ministry of States, “White Paper on Indian States” (Delhi, 1950).

29

“Paramountcy to Cease: States Must Enter into New Treaties,” The Statesman, 24 May 1946.

30

The Statesman, 24 January 1947.

31

NAI, EA, Sikkim Agency, 1946, File 21 (3) P/ 46, “Constitutional Changes: Bhutan Representation,” Cabinet Delegation to Bhutan Agent, 26 May 1946.

32

NAI, EA, Sikkim Agency, 1946, File 21(3)P/46, “Constitutional Changes: Bhutan Representation.”

33

Nari Rustomji, Sikkim: A Himalayan Tragedy (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1987), ix–x.

34

Sikkimese pro-democracy leader Lal Bahadur Basnet, quoted in E.K. Santha, Democracy in Sikkim:

35

NAI, EA, Sikkim Agency, 1942, File 1(1)P/42, “Further education of Palden Thondup Namgyal,

An Untold Chronicle (Gurgaon: The Alcove Publishers, 2021), 9. Maharajkumar of Sikkim and Jigmie Dorji of Bhutan in ICS Probationers Training School in Dehra Dun.” 36

Rustomji, Sikkim, 19.

37

Jigmie Palden Dorji spelled his name with “ie” at the end, to distinguish it from the name of the Bhutanese king and his contemporary, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck (Rustomji, Bhutan, 8).

38

The title “Kazi” is associated with the hereditary landed gentry of Sikkim.

39

Rustomji, Bhutan, 17–18.

40

Ibid., 19.

41

Letter from Palden Thondup Namgyal to Nari Rustomji, 6 July 1943, quoted in Rustomji, Sikkim, 25.

42

NAI, EA, Sikkim Agency, 1946, File 21(3)P/46, “Constitutional Changes: Bhutan Representation,” Bhutan’s Memo to the Cabinet Mission in Simla, 7 May 1946.

43

Ibid.

44

Ibid., G.C.L. Crichton, Joint Secretary to the Government of India in the External Affairs Department, New Delhi to P.O. Sikkim, 28 June 1946.

45

Ibid.

46

Ibid., P.O. Sikkim to Foreign, New Delhi, 17 May 1946.

47

Singh, Himalayan Triangle, 368.

48

NAI, EA, Sikkim Agency, 1946, File 21(3)P/46, “Constitutional Changes: Bhutan Representation.”

49

Ibid.

50

Ibid.

51

“Bhutan’s Entry into Indian Union,” The Statesman, 10 February 1947.

52

NAI, EA, Sikkim Agency, 1946, File 21(3)P/46, “Constitutional Changes: Bhutan Representation,” Kumar Fatteh Sinhji, Natwer Niketana, Limbdi to Hopkinson, Sikkim, 7 March 1947; ibid., Jigmie Dorji, Bhutan House, Kalimpong to Hopkinson, Sikkim, 15 March 1947.

53

Ibid., P.O. Sikkim to Fatteh Sinhji, New Delhi, 25 February 1947.

54

Ibid., Hopkinson, Sikkim to L.A.C. Fry, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, External Affairs Department, 16 May 1947.

55

Ibid., P.O. Sikkim to Foreign, New Delhi. 17 May 1946.

56

Ibid., 27 May 1946.

57

Ibid., 5 July 1946.

58

Ibid., P.O. Sikkim to Foreign, New Delhi. 28 October 1946.

59

Aniket Alam, Becoming India: Western Himalaya under British Rule (New Delhi: Foundation Books imprint, 2008), 27–8; Singh, Himalayan Triangle, 299–300, 372.

60

Singh, Himalayan Triangle, 324.

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61

Ibid., 299–302, 372. On the economic motives of early British interest in Bhutan, see Kaul, “Where Is Bhutan?”

62

Quoted in Singh, Himalayan Triangle, 328.

63

Ibid.

64

Quoted in Kaul, “Where Is Bhutan?” 326.

65

Singh, Himalayan Triangle, 328–9.

66

NAI, EA, Sikkim Agency, 1946, File 21(3)P/46, “Constitutional Changes: Bhutan Representation,” Hopkinson, Sikkim to L.A.C. Fry, Delhi. 16 May 1947, 19 May 1947, and 27 June 1947.

67

See Kaul, “Where Is Bhutan?” 324–27.

68

NAI, EA, Sikkim Agency, 1946, File 21(3)P/46, “Constitutional Changes: Bhutan Representation,” Hopkinson, Sikkim to L.A.C. Fry, Delhi. 27 June 1947. Retrocession was discussed, inter alia, between Olaf Caroe (letter dated 18 September 1944) and Basil Gould (telegram dated 13 October 1944). Gould was Hopkinson’s predecessor as the Political Officer in Sikkim.

69

Singh, Himalayan Triangle, 380.

70

NAI, EA, Sikkim Agency, 1946, File 21(3)P/46, “Constitutional Changes: Bhutan Representation,” P.O. Sikkim to George, 26 May 1946. Emphasis in original.

71

Ibid., Foreign, New Delhi to P.O. Sikkim. 23 July 1947; Ibid., Hopkinson, Sikkim, to Jigme Wangchuk, Maharaja of Bhutan, 29 July 1947.

72

Ibid., Jigmie Dorji, Bhutan House, Kalimpong to P.O. Sikkim, 11 August 1947; Ibid., Jigmie Dorji, Ha Dzong to Hopkinson, Camp Yatung, 7 September 1947.

73

Singh, Himalayan Triangle, 369.

74

NAI, EA, Sikkim Agency, 1946, File 21(3)P/46, “Constitutional Changes: Bhutan Representation.”

75

See Singh, Himalayan Triangle, 369–70; Phuntsho, The History of Bhutan.

76

Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs, “Treaty of Perpetual Peace and Friendship between the Government of India and the Government of Bhutan,” 1949, https://mea.gov.in/ bilateral-­documents.htm?dtl/5242/treaty+or+perpetual+p (accessed 21 July 2022).

77

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), N.K. Rustomji Papers, Subject File No. 27, Meeting between Jigmie Dorji, Prime Minister of Bhutan, and V.M.M. Nair, Joint Secretary, Eastern Division, Ministry of External Affairs, 25 February 1964.

78

Dibyesh Anand, “Strategic Hypocrisy: The British Imperial Scripting of Tibet’s Geopolitical Identity,” Journal of Asian Studies 68 (2009), 227–52.

79

NAI, EA, Sikkim Agency, 1946, File 21(3)P/46, “Constitutional Changes: Bhutan Representation,” Governor General (External Affairs and Commonwealth Relations Department), New Delhi, to Secretary of State for India, London, copied to P.O. Sikkim, 21 July 1947; Foreign Department, New Delhi, to P.O. Sikkim; Ibid., Indian Embassy in Nanking, copied to Secretary of State for India, London, 21 July 1947.

80

Itanagar, APSA, NEFA Secretariat Files (1947), Protest by the Chinese government regarding the Indian government’s policy on the MacMahon Line, 24/C/47, quoted in Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

81

Quoted in Kharat, “Indo-Bhutan Relations,” 140.

82

Jigmie’s sister, Tashi Dorji, led the Bhutanese delegation to the Colombo Plan Secretariat upon its admission. For the Dorji family’s role in facilitating Bhutan’s admission to the Colombo Plan, see Rustomji, Bhutan, 19, 24, 32–36.

83

To date, Bhutan remains the largest recipient of Indian aid. See Tanushree Basuroy, “India: Foreign Aid by Recipient Country, 2020,” Statista, 19 March 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1060959/ foreign-aid-outflow-india-by-recipient-country/ (accessed 21 July 2022).

“nothing in common with ‘indian’ india:” 81

84

Kaul, “Where Is Bhutan?” 330–1.

85

NAI, EA, Historical Division, Research and Intelligence Section, 1979, File HI/1012(28)/79, “Political Reports etc. from Thimpu (Bhutan),” Monthly Record of Events for January 1979, 1 February 1979; Monthly Record of Events for September 1979, 6 October 1979.

86

Ibid., “Political Reports etc. from Thimpu (Bhutan),” Monthly Record of Events for September 1979, 6 October 1979.

87

For an account of the treaty revision in 2007, see Ashok K. Mehta, “Why Bhutan Is India’s Achilles’ Heel,” The Tribune, 23 February 2022, https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/why-bhutanis-indias-achilles-heel-372152 (accessed 21 July 2022).

88

Sino-Indian border disputes erupted into war in 1962, and the relationship between Delhi and Beijing remains tense.

89

Sankaran Krishna, “Cartographic anxiety: Mapping the body politic in India,” Alternatives, 19 (1994), 507–21. See also Guyot-Réchard, Shadow States.

90

Guyot-Réchard, “Tangled Lands,” 309.

91

See, for instance, Zorawar Daulet Singh, Power and Diplomacy: India’s Foreign Policies during the Cold War (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), 317.

CHAPTER 3

Extra-territorial Self-determination: East African Decolonization and the Indian Annexation of Goa Lydia Walker

Abstract During decolonization, for peoples divided by oceans – such as Goans residing along the coasts of the Indian Oceanic world spanning East Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere – there could be no realizable aspiration for making territory, polity, and community congruent. Their existence did not align with the growing norm of the postcolonial state as anticolonial nationalist liberation’s ideal ending. Therefore, these communities had the potential to pose a definitional stumbling block for new national governments and institutions of international order during the transition between imperial rule and national independence. For Goans, two such moments occurred simultaneously in December 1961 – independence for Tanganyika (which became Tanzania in 1964) and the Indian annexation (or liberation) of Goa. This chapter juxtaposes those events in order to explore some of the uneven layering of African and Asian decolonizations from the perspective of particular communities within the Goan diaspora.

Key words: decolonization, diaspora, South Asia, East Africa, India, Goa

Decolonization transformed borderlands into homelands, nationalizing interstitial regions by splitting territories and identities. Yet for communities divided by oceans – such as Goans residing along the coasts of the Indian Oceanic world spanning East Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere – there could be no realizable aspiration for making territory, polity, and community congruent. Their existence, as with other informal diasporic confederations or global minority networks, did not align with the growing norm of the postcolonial state as anticolonial nationalist liberation’s ideal ending. Therefore, these communities had the potential to pose a definitional stumbling block for new national governments and institutions of international order during the transition between imperial rule and national independence. For Goans, two such moments occurred simultaneously in December 1961 – independence for Tanganyika (which became Tanzania in 1964) and the Indian annexation (or liberation) of Goa. These events when juxtaposed, provide

84 lydia walker

a double angle of analysis, exploring some of the uneven layering of African and Asian decolonizations. For both the public performance and metropolitan reception of decolonization, India served as a possible model and emblem of “peaceful,” “successful” national liberation, Third World leadership, and the potential for Afro-Asian solidarity.1 However, in December 1961, for some Goans in British East Africa, themselves an embodiment of Afro-Asian links,2 independence on one side of the Indian Ocean occurred simultaneously with conquest on the other. Yet neither “independence” nor “conquest,” “liberation” nor “annexation,” were universally accepted or defined, bringing into question the utility of these categories as labels for the processes they described. Globally, Goans were split between supporters of (and abstainers from) Indian, Portuguese, and independent Goan rule of Goa, as well as between British empire and Black African majority rule in East Africa. A decade later in the 1970s, the demise of Portugal’s African empire led to further uneven and circumscribed decolonizations for Goans, a process that also evolved from their forced choices of 1961.3 In response to the multiple, yet hedged possibilities of prospective government, Goans articulated strategies of political belonging that were individual, community, and civil society-based. Crucially, these strategies were not formulated through citizenship and state membership, even – or especially – at a political moment when the political affiliation of (national) citizen fought to replace that of (imperial) subject. This chapter explores some of these competing strategies from the perspective of a small slice of Goans in East Africa as “voiced” by The Goan Voice, an East African English-language newspaper published every Saturday in Nairobi, Kenya from 1946 onwards.4 Their voices articulated strands of South Asian internationalism that bypassed, challenged, and hid from the state, at the political moment that the state was visibly shifting from colonial to postcolonial.5 The Voice’s editorial and authorial team remained anonymous except for its resident astrologer, S.P. Maharaj Jyotishi. Its audience and letters’ writers were the Goan middle-class of doctors, merchants, shopkeepers, bakers, photographers, tailors, secretaries and lawyers, predominantly located in the British East African cities of Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, and Nairobi. Due to limitations in the constructed categories utilized in colonial and postcolonial censes, as well as internal disagreement over who qualified as “Goan,” a specific figure for quantifying the number of Goans in British East Africa remains elusive. The lack of such an agreed-upon, concrete figure was a symptom of the dilemma Goans posed to nationally defined definitions of counted, categorized, and legalized definitions of citizenship. Historically, the readers of The Voice and their families had crossed the Indian Ocean from the nineteenth century onwards as traders, railway construction laborers and clerks, as well as civil servants for the British colonial government in Uganda,

extra-territorial self-determination 85

Kenya, and Tanganyika (an initially German colony that became a British-ruled mandate in 1919 and subsequently a UN Trust Territory administered by Britain).6 The newspaper featured reoccurring columns such as “Catholic Corner,” which reported on the happenings at the Vatican in Rome, and “Letters from Bombay, Goa, and Karachi” with news of charity fundraisers, births, marriages, and deaths from across an ocean, reflecting a Goan geography where Indian and Pakistani independence and partition seemed to alter little in daily, middle-class life. Since Benedict Anderson’s theorization on the causal relationship between print capitalism and the rise of nationalism, newspapers and their dissemination have been considered key drivers for nationalist identification and mobilization.7 During decolonization across the Indian Ocean world, vernacular newspapers and pamphlets aided and accelerated these processes.8 Newspapers in colonial contexts played crucial roles conceptualizing and patrolling notions of a “public” sphere that fed political mobilization within and against empire.9 The Goan Voice, as with other South Asian newspapers, exemplified such developments across the decolonization divide in East Africa. It communicated in English, a postimperial language, rather than the Goan vernacular, Konkani. The intermixing of a colonial, transnational language with a specifically ethnically defined readership delineated a public sphere based upon the category of people, rather than nation or language.10 Spheres of print culture are defined by the identities of their readership, where those readers are located, and why they choose to belong to that sphere. A Goan, anglophone, globalized East African print culture undermined concepts of a Kenyan or Tanganyika national public sphere at the same time that it was part of the many print cultures in former colonies that worked to dislodge empire. The Voice’s readership was local (urban Goans in East Africa) and global – as members of the Goan diaspora world-wide regularly sent in letters and announcements – rather than national. While it was published out of Kenya, still a British colony in 1961, its readership resided in a range of territorial units: Portuguese colonies, independent India and Pakistan, western and Southeast Asian cities, among other locales. The multiple sites of this transimperial and transnational readership outlined a networked political space that bypassed the nation-state, showing how ideological currents can jump geopolitical scales. Goans problematized as well as participated in currents of anticolonial nationalist self-determination, making them ambivalent subjects of a state-making process that they did not get to determine for themselves.11 Through the pages of the Voice as well as through more formal petitioning processes to the United Nations, this slice of a global Goan community articulated forms of extra-territorial self-determination, a strand of South Asian internationalism that was not territorially bounded to the subcontinent, but responded directly to the newly inscribed national boundaries taking shape on multiple coasts of the Indian Ocean world.

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This particular internationalism documented a networked geography of a “greater” Goa (a phrase not found in the Voice), which emanated out from “little” Goa, a phrase used regularly by the newspaper to refer to the subcontinental territory. It privileged a particular form of extra-territorial Goan identity – Catholic, diaspora, and anglophone. There were, and remain, many other forms of diaspora and Indian Goan identity, divided along fault lines of religion, geography, caste, economics, and language. Highlighting one strand of Goan-identified internationalism in an era of heightened nationalism can open avenues of analysis for others. However, the choice to focus on one specific strand of Goan internationalism reflects hierarchies of privilege and access existing within communities, asymmetrical relationships that corresponded with which Goan voices were found in the Voice itself.

“The people of Tanganyika deserve independence because they have not murdered their minorities” Goans had occupied a precarious political and social position on both sides of the Indian Ocean well before 1961. As members of a subaltern elite, Goans were both global and (in Pamila Gupta’s framing) “local cosmopolitans,” a phrase that captures a sense of geographic rootedness as well as global connection within, as well as beyond, the state.12 They operated within interstitial geographic, economic, racial, and political spaces,13 considering themselves imperial citizens rather than colonial subjects.14 Notions of cultural superiority underpinned this differentiation. An anonymous Goan from Karachi wrote the Voice that “other communities are jealous of [us] and hence often hostile … Goans are a widely talented people … [we are] the Italians of the East!”15 It was not accidental that this appeal to high culture made an analogy to a (predominantly Catholic) white European ethnic group with a large diaspora community, rather than an Asian or African people – articulating the aspirational civilizational position of that particular reader. A few weeks before the Indian annexation of Goa in December 1961, the Voice had celebrated the independence of Tanganyika, with attention to the Goan community in Dar es Salaam, part of a substantial South Asian minority within the region for nearly two centuries:16 We Goans have watched with satisfaction the rapid success of Tanganyika in obtaining their independence. The people of Tanganyika have shown that independence can be given in their hands for they have not murdered nor threatened their minorities. They have in fact gained the full confidence of all the communities and are today reaping that harvest.17

extra-territorial self-determination 87

This statement expressed The Goan Voice’s support for Tanganyikan independence. It presented a straightforward pronouncement of what was at stake for South Asian minorities within new postcolonial African states. The statement also disclosed two uncomfortable realities. First, from the perspective of the Voice, which presented itself as an East African Goan (rather than a Kenyan) newspaper, with a large readership in Dar es Salaam, “the people of Tanganyika” (however constructed that category may be by colonial border-making) did not necessarily include the Goans who resided in that new country. Tanganyikans were “they,” while Goans were “we.” And second, the mark of deserving independence through (majoritarian) self-rule should be how the new ruling government treated its minority citizens. If “majority” and “minority” are mutually constitutive categories, then a newly constructed “Tanganyikan” identity relied in part on differentiation from its Goan citizens.18 A significant component of what eventually became Tanzanian nation-making depended upon the Swahili language, and its print and public culture that created, revised, and re-visioned ideas of liberation, self-rule, and progress.19 At the public civil society organization meetings chronicled by the Voice, newspaper writers were careful to note which language each speaker spoke, whether English, Portuguese, or Konkani. Swahili was rarely mentioned and Black East Africans and their voices do not feature prominently in its pages. Language politics, and their concomitant questions of assimilation versus separation, outlined ethnic and racial divisions. Rochelle Pinto articulates how “Goan elite aspiration to colonial power” crafted a vested interest to identify with Portugal’s own imperial self-representation as the colonial “discoverer” (in contrast to Britain).20 A Goan in British East Africa could “carve out a racial space that allowed him to mediate between” his (South) Asian racial identity and his professional role as “a vehicle of empire,” whether as a tradesman or colonial civil servant.21 Within this complex of apprehensive inconsistency towards empire, conceptions of Goan racial identity and the community’s relative power kept shifting, while continuously posed as a counter-weight to that of Black Africans.22 For Goans in East Africa, decolonization and Black African majority rule upset both the hierarchy and the previous perpetual mobility of this dynamic. Within a Black African ruled state, Goans could no longer continue to hold on to the “role of discoverer, settler, and creator,” (however tenuous had been that connection) while situating themselves “into a slot in the racial hierarchy” that was bolstered by their economic clout.23 As a community, Goans were nestled within a broader population of South Asians in East Africa which formed the economic and administrative middle class under British rule.24 All were precariously positioned in relation to Black Africans and European colonizers, creating competing and contradictory paths for their political claims and fates. In Tanganyika, there was

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a significant debate in 1961 over whether to define citizenship in terms of race or residence, and a political struggle from 1961-1964 over preferential treatment for Black Africans.25 While Indian populations were never expelled as they were in Uganda (a process chronicled in Ria Kapoor’s chapter), threats to their political and economic status were of meaningful contemporary importance, making the prospect of a necessary “return” to Goa not just a figment of East African Goans’ imaginations, but a potential reality. Departing empires, nationalist movements, and international institutions have often cast national independence as a moral or civilizational question of whether a people “deserves” independence when it is almost always a political question of power relations. The notion of “deserving” independence frames self-rule as a reward or prize for which a people must demonstrate their legitimate candidacy, often through civilizational discourses of “readiness.” This discourse was connected to the establishment of UN Trust territories, which Tanganyika was until 1961, and which was also a political model proposed by certain Goan nationalists for what a “little Goa” in South Asia could become. It is self-evident why a minority would consider their own treatment to be the marker of whether or not their ruling state “deserves” independence. Violence, disenfranchisement, and their potential were both a political reality for minorities in many parts of the world as well as a justification that colonial authorities had used for maintaining imperial rule. Placing the treatment of minority peoples at the center of the moral question for why a country “deserved” independence refocuses justifications for self-rule, from how would new (aspirationally) democratic postcolonial national governments rule “themselves,” to how would they rule the “others” who resided within their borders.26 State-sponsored decolonization, the bureaucratic transfer from imperial to postcolonial government, rarely aligned with the competing wishes of local communities, particularly in enclaves and port cities that had experienced longer, more complicated, and more layered colonizations, such as Goa, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Maputo, and elsewhere on the rim of the Indian Ocean where Goans resided.27

“Goa is not a Colony” As a Portuguese colony whose land borders were surrounded by “mainland” India, Goa had held an uneasy geopolitical location since Indian independence in 1947. This awkward international-legal positionality intensified in 1960, when the UN General Assembly established national self-determination as an international norm. That same year, the International Court of Justice ruled that Portugal no longer held the “right of passage” across Indian territory to Goa’s neighbors, the inland enclaves of

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Dadar and Nagar Haveli in Western India, which had seceded from Portugal in 1954 and were officially ruled by local liberation forces and unofficially administered by Delhi.28 The western Indian enclaves were recognizable under international law as Portuguese or Indian; their quasi-autonomous status between 1954 and 1961 (when India incorporated Goa) were not. At the United Nations, the Indian annexation of Goa clarified international-legal understanding of western India, even while some UN member states critiqued it as military aggression. Emboldened by the International Court of Justice’s ruling, frustrated by the generally lukewarm international concern for the issue of continuing European colonies on land claimed by postcolonial states, and emboldened by African anticolonial nationalists, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru ordered his military to invade the Portuguese colonial territories of Goa, Daman, and Diu in western India in the middle of December 1961.29 Regarding the territories’ invasion and subsequent annexation, the Goan Voice was irate. Its headlines read: “Goa is not a Colony;” “India imitates Hitler with its invasion of Goa.”30 The East African newspaper presented a strident critique of, and rebuttal to, Nehru’s decision to invade “little” Goa. Yet the headline, “Goa is not a Colony” begs the question: was not Goa already a Portuguese colony? Even if Indian annexation might be considered akin to colonialism for some Goans, why would it be preferable to be a colony of Lisbon rather than of New Delhi? Were there other political or analytical options available for Goa and Goans outside these colonial frames? These questions underscore the many layers of empire and subsequently, of decolonization. The geopolitical, racial, linguistic, religious, and class-based position of Goans cut across these layers in ways that mix and merge geographic and ethnic-based labels, historically as well as in more recent times. In contemporary India, “Portuguese” has become synonymous with “mixed race,” and in British colonies (in India, as well as in East Africa), “IndoPortuguese” labeled all Goans, regardless of class.31 To further complicate matters, many Goans considered Indian rule to be national liberation, or at least as close as possible to it among the repertory of limited available political possibilities. These multiple combinations and perspectives within Goan identity was a result of the group’s long history of navigating empire. In some contexts, colonialism in the Indian Ocean world provided Goans with access to privileged social and political spaces, for example as colonial officials or as members of the gentlemen’s clubs that were important sites of civil society organization. Yet in others, their racial identity could undermine their access to those imperial and formerly imperial spaces at the same time that it distinguished them from other, less privileged (and potentially more racialized) colonial subjects.32 Geographic and class-based mobility coupled with the unfixed-ness of race relations in the Indian Ocean world, in multiple (and even overlapping) colonial contexts, requires nuanced attention

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to the fluctuating dynamics of race and power.33 This is especially the case when these dynamics shifted dramatically in moments of regime change, such as that of independence or annexation. Within the pages of The Goan Voice, the most vocal pro-nationalist – that is, supportive of a theoretically independent Goa – organization was the Goan Association. The Association was relatively new, registered in Nairobi in January 1962, according to the Voice. It was set up in response to what its members perceived to be the apathy or even opportunism of their community’s existing civil society organizations towards annexation – the Goan Overseas Association, the Goan Tailors Society, the East African Goan League, as well as several social clubs.34 According to the Goan Association, these other civil society groups “were trying to flirt with India because th[eir members] expected top posts in a [new] Goan administration [in India] if they had to leave Africa.”35 As chronicled in the pages of the Voice, civil society organizations such as churches, clubs, schools, and sports teams formed the sites for Goan social mobilization as well as public and private political articulation. This socio-political landscape depicted how non-state spaces took on outsize roles when their members did not feel they were fully represented within the state, a dynamic heightened by the transformational geopolitical shifts of 1961. Even as the Goan Association disparaged its competitor organizations, its critique articulated two undercurrents: the first, was that of fear, as many East African Goans were afraid that they might have to leave the newly independent, majoritarian-ruled African countries in which they resided – a fear which proved to be founded, as shown by the experiences of Ugandan Asians (a group that included some Goans). The second was that of ambivalent belonging to postcolonial India, a country that in this period made a concerted decision not to claim its diaspora as citizens because of population and power concerns, while nevertheless presenting itself as their international protector particularly against the racist policies of settler colonial regimes.36 The Goan Association sent several open letters to the United Nations, including one in late January 1962, published in the Voice. This letter asked the UN to force India to make Goa a UN Trust Territory and carry out a plebiscite that would create an “Independent Republic of Goa.”37 As a former German colony, Tanganyika had been a League of Nations Mandate administered by Britain after the First World War and was transformed into a UN Trust Territory after the Second World War. Therefore, East African Goans were intimately familiar with that political arrangement. In addition, the United Nations had agreed to administer a plebiscite in Kashmir after Indian and Pakistani independence and partition (a plebiscite that never occurred); indeed, against the backdrop of failures in Kashmir, the international institution was not exactly eager to oversee another, contentious, theoretical South Asian plebiscite. In this open letter to the UN, the Association pointed out that if India’s claim to Goa was justified on the grounds of geographic propinquity, then “India would be

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entitled to claim Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, and [even] Pakistan … There are so many little nations in the world which mighty next-door neighbours could claim for their own.” Here, the Association alluded to Indian expansion in a geography far from the Indian Ocean world, specifically the Himalayan borderlands, where new postcolonial states were engaged in competitive state-building practices, seeking to rationalize and nationalize what had been the edges of empires.38 As shown in Swati Chawla’s chapter in this volume, Bhutan in particular was a crucial zone for this ambivalent integration of what India construed to be its unruly periphery. The annexation of “little” Goa showed how the Indian Ocean world, much like South Asia’s land borders, was a space where postcolonial states attempted to regulate mobility, social and economic life, and political membership, especially for those residing in regions that had been less governmentally delineated under imperial rule.39 Furthermore, the Goan Association argued that it was hypocritical for Nehru to invade Goa while supporting “a little country like Kuwait against Iraq” even though “Kuwait was part and parcel of Iraq only 20 years ago” unlike Goa “which has been a separate entity [from India] for over 450 years.”40 Kuwait, a British Protectorate in the Persian Gulf region that became independent in June 1961, had been separated from Iraq in 1920 by the British in order to prevent Arab nationalists from having access to its prosperous port of Kuwait City, which also had a small Goan population. In a similar manner to other minority nationalist movements,41 the Goan Association used both regional and international geopolitical analogies to compare and contrast their claim with those of other “little countries,” particularly those with which they had a degree of familiarity. They also justified their claim of separateness from India on the basis of a chronology associated with Portuguese imperial rule in Goa. Just as colonial boundaries were instantiated into international-legal borders by decolonization’s state-making, Goan claimants relied on a colonial periodization to make demands of postcolonial autonomy. In addition to their open letters directed to the institution, the Association actively petitioned the United Nations, whose presence in Central Africa was quite substantial during the Congo Crisis and its subsequent UN intervention (1960-1965).42 UN civil servants found the Goan Association a nuisance. After R.J. Da Silva, the Association’s secretary cornered G.K.J. Amachree, UN under-secretary for civilian affairs in Congo, in Kampala, Uganda, with a Goan petition to the United Nations, Amachree wrote his boss, C.V. Narasimhan, with annoyance: “I am sure you are already familiar [with this man]. I do not attach any importance to these documents, especially as I was able to discover in the course of my conversation with Mr. Da Silva that he was last in Goa about thirty years ago!”43 While Mr. Da Silva’s urgent, and perhaps intrusive, persistence may have irritated UN officials, for Amachree of Nigeria and Narasimhan of India it was the fact that Da Silva was not himself from “little” Goa that undermined his legitimacy

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as a potential nationalist claimant. The state-centric United Nations whose General Assembly was growing with new postcolonial member states did not (and did not want to) consider extra-territorial self-determination as a legitimate, addressable political claim. If Da Silva had not been to Goa in thirty years, he could not be a spokesman for Goan nationalism, regardless of heritage and identity. Goans across the world cabled the United Nations, asking the institution to intervene both in support and against Indian annexation, though the institution did not – indeed could not, for self-preservation reasons – consider global Goans as true representatives of Goa.44 Though a minority perspective within a minority community, the Association’s Goan nationalism responded to the Indian annexation of Goa by arguing for their own, eventually independent country, not for continued Portuguese rule. This viewpoint is important because it landed on neither side of the UN General Assembly debates surrounding Indian annexation, demonstrating the complexity of decolonization for minority peoples, and how their perspectives rarely entered the considerations of state-centric international institutions. However, based upon the contents, number, and composition of such cables, the Goan nationalist perspective appeared to be a vocal, minority view. In East Africa, the community’s dominant civil society organizations declined to participate in the Association’s endeavors. The Voice commented that it was general apathy rather than intimidation or false rumors that kept most East African Goans away from the Association.45 People were more caught up in their daily business, rather than aspirational political causes. A silent majority dwelt alongside the multiple voices of Goan political claims-making.

Goan Nationalists There were several different strands of Goan nationalism and the Voice was only one organ of globalized East African Goan political culture. Some of these strands linked East African Goans more directly with the Indian state. After the Indian annexation (or liberation) of Goa, the Goan-Kenyan anticolonial nationalist politician and trade unionist, Pio Gama Pinto (who was assassinated by political foes in 1965), signed and helped circulate a broadsheet titled, “Long Live the Freedom of the Colonial People,” which articulated a global perspective of Afro-Asian anticolonial solidarity that backed Nehru’s annexation of Goa: We, Goan Nationalists, fully support the action taken by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru the great Indian statesman and nationalist. His action has the support of not only the vast majority of Goans, both Christian and Hindus, but of the nationalist organizations who are fighting for their liberation in Angola, Mocambique, Guinea and Cabo Verde.46

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This was a very different conception of Goan nationalism from that promulgated by the Goan Association. Gama Pinto subsequently traveled to Goa and New Delhi, meeting Nehru and receiving financial support from the Indian Prime Minister to continue printing his anticolonial nationalist publications. He operated his press in Nairobi as “the voice of the people” in order to print anticolonial nationalist newspapers and pamphlets in local African languages.47 His publications compared and contrasted with The Goan Voice in theme as well as practice. Both utilized print culture for political and social mobilization, though one employed a postimperial language to appeal to global audiences around an ocean, while the other adopted local vernaculars to build a national (Kenyan or Tanzanian or eventually Mozambican) community and readership. The broadsheet and Gama Pinto’s activities characterized Goan nationalism as a transnational movement that did not claim its own state. Gama Pinto and his colleagues supported Kenyan rule in East Africa and Indian rule in South Asia, fighting British and Portuguese imperialism on both sides of the Indian Ocean. While the Goan Association likewise used the frame of nationalist resistance to colonial oppression, it disagreed upon their preferred political outcome and the identity of the oppressor. Nationalisms can have competing meanings. Rather than contradicting each other, this competition underpins the force of the national claim. During the contentious period surrounding the events of December 1961, many African nationalists within Portuguese colonies urged to Nehru to act against Portugal, first at the United Nations and then by invading Portuguese Goa. The international debates that swirled around India’s annexation of Goa paralleled a shift among African anticolonial nationalists who lost faith in the United Nations as the midwife for their national liberation during the institution’s flawed efforts in Congo-Leopoldville in 1960-61. In April 1961, three months after Patrice Lumumba’s assassination destroyed many anticolonial nationalists’ hopes that the UN could assist their political aspirations, Lusophone imperial world anticolonial nationalists formed an umbrella organization, Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas (CONCP) in order to coordinate their activities against the Portuguese empire.48 CONCP was co-run by a Goan nationalist, João Cabral. Right before he decided to invade Goa, Nehru hosted collection of CONCP-affiliated nationalists in Delhi, including the Angolan anticolonial leader, Jonas Savimbi.49 The Angolan war for independence had begun that year in February, when anticolonial nationalists attacked a police station in Luanda.50 Cabral himself lobbied Nehru to invade Goa and served on the Indian delegation to the UN during the 987th and 988th Security Council meetings during the 18 December discussions on Goa.51 The Portuguese UN delegation also had a Goan on staff, Leo Lawrence, who had volunteered his assistance.52 While these Goan

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delegates were ornamental rather than active participants at the United Nations, their presence served as a consistent reminder that there were Goans across the political spectrum, and that their participation was generally marginalized from the center of political action.53 João Cabral, who had been a close colleague and correspondent with the more famous Cabral, Amilcar, drops out of transnational anticolonial nationalist circles (and the Portuguese government’s surveillance records of them) after 1961 when he presumably returned home to “little” Goa.54 His son, Nilesh Cabral is (as of 2022) a Cabinet Minister for the state of Goa and a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) representing the Cuchorem constituency in the Goa Legislative Assembly.55 The family remained political, shifting from transnational anticolonial activism to regional government with the passage of time and shift in regime. While not all Goans are Catholic (and many Christian communities in India support the BJP),56 the Cabral family’s politics show that over time, the national territorial frame of all-India, Hindu-centric party membership came to serve greater utility than ethnic, group-based political affiliation. The term “Goan nationalist” could refer to an Indian Goan antagonist to Portuguese imperial rule, such as João Cabral, who desired Indian citizenship. It could also describe Goan supporters of a future independent Goa, such as the Goan Association, who in theory claimed the possibility of Goan citizenship, if it were obtainable. In addition, “Goan nationalist” was also a chosen label for East African supporters of African and Indian anticolonial nationalism, such as Pio Gama Pinto, who sought Kenyan citizenship. These definitions aspired to very different citizenships even as they claimed the same national identity and participated in the global politicization of a greater Goan community.57 They show that for Goans, being a Goan nationalist did not equate to a specific national citizenship, disaggregating concepts of nation from state, at the political moment when the conflation of anticolonial nationalism with decolonization did its best to hyphenate them into a single term and concept. The father of Goan Indian nationalism, Tristao de Braganza Cunha, wrote a pamphlet during the Indian independence movement in 1944, titled The Denationalization of Goans.58 Cunha argued that Portuguese imperial rule and the coerced conversions of the Catholic Inquisition had de-nationalized Goans, erasing their cultural memory. For him, “a people that had lost connection with their intellectual and cultural heritage were a people that had become denationalized.”59 This claim stood in stark contrast to how Goans in the Voice articulated their identity through cultural, ethnic, professional, and religious rather than national affiliation. Leaving aside discussions of imperial hybridity,60 and whether or not the concept was antithetical or detrimental to nationalist actualization, Cunha’s use of the term “denationalization” deserves attention regarding the multiplicity of Goan nationalisms. These nationalisms did not just represent different categories of political

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affiliation; they also outlined fractures within a global (and local) community, as well as competing framings of belonging. For Goans in East Africa, “national” identity and citizenship were linked neither by the hyphen between nation and state or that between post and colonial. When The Voice chronicled disputes and silences among Goans over the Indian annexation or liberation of “little Goa” and the place of a Goan minority within soon-to-be independent African countries, the newspaper created a discursive sphere for these debates to take place, often on the same page.

Conclusion: “Little” Goa versus a Greater Goan World If Goa was “little Goa” as it was referred to in The Voice, what – or perhaps who – was greater Goa? The Goan people? The neighborhoods and civil society associations in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Maputo, Karachi, Bombay, Muscat, London and elsewhere? These communities were linked by family and professional ties, but not by any geopolitical system of organization. The Goan Voice documented a network composed of church, technocratic, and civil society affiliation. The newspaper did not contain the phrase “Greater Goa” within its pages to describe the extra-territorial community of its readership. The concept remained unspoken even as it outlined the existence of the Voice’s audience. As shown throughout this volume contextualizing South Asia and South Asians beyond the territorial boundaries of the subcontinent, minorities are often cast as perpetual migrants.61 In contrast, the concept of “settlers” within colonial and postcolonial political framings are dominated by ways of understanding derived from White, anglophone settler contexts. In these framings, the settler can never become a native, because the “native” is the creation of the settler state.62 In other frameworks, Goans in East Africa were characterized as settlers, emphasizing their connection to empire.63 In Southern and Eastern Africa, South Asian minorities were caught between the categories of settler and native, defined as perpetual migrants even when they were no less “settled” than white settler populations.64 This dynamic was not limited to South Asian communities on the African continent, as Jayita Sarkar’s chapter featuring Arakan Muslims in Burma/Myanmar articulates similar unstable dynamics and the subsequent peril that such insecurity can bring. From the position of a “greater” South Asian experience, diaspora – the “society of the absent”65 – has become the territorially disembodied political category for situating Goans in the world. Broader theorization from this perspective provokes discussions of decolonization’s state-making that foregrounds peoples rather than territory, that decouples the nation from the state. This analytical separation is practical as well as theoretical because it does not replicate or re-instantiate

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colonial boundaries and conceptions of territoriality on to the process of decolonization. Whether characterized as a global minority or a diaspora, being “Goan” was more important than any other category. It was an extra-territorial identity radiating outwards from “little Goa” in South Asia. When a people do not fit (or in some cases, such as that of refugees, are deemed unfit for) a nation-state frame, they are often depicted as rootless, unsettled, without territorial belonging.66 Yet what comes through in the pages of the Voice is the material presence of middle-class Goan life: of birth, marriage, and death announcements categorized by city rather than country. This was an extra-territorial self-fashioning in the era of national self-determination. In the words of the Indian Goan journalist and public intellectual George Menezes, “does Goan identity exist at all except in a nebulous cocoon of our own making? Or has our collective consciousness evolved to truly claim a unique identity?”67 Extra-territorial self-determination for a people who could not even aspire to make their territory congruent with the places in which they resided was not unique to Goans. A comparison could be made to many diasporas or the long-term South Asian “migrant” peoples, including the Ugandan Asian refugees, Keralans in the Persian Gulf States, or Tamils across the Bay of Bengal world.68 Untangling the nation from the state, or extracting the people from the territory, alters the scale at which questions of political belonging are negotiated and understood. Such scales include that of time (of temporary versus permanent residence), space (local, regional, national, and global) and power (related to the possession of citizenship, wealth, visibility, autonomy, and participatory governance). Extra-territorial self-determination crafts a concept of “the political” that circumnavigates that of the state, even and especially at a moment when a new state was formed and a new territory was subsumed, such as in December 1961 for Tanganyika and Goa.

Notes 1

On problematizing the peacefulness of peaceful national liberation, see Judith Brown, “Nonviolence on Trial” in Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991) 314–395; on Third World leadership, see Manu Bhagavan, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); on Afro-Asian international solidarities, see Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte, “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 30 (2019), 98–147.

2

Pamila Gupta, Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

3

Carolina Costa described how her mother decided to be Mozambican in 1974 because she was obliged to become Portuguese in 1961. Comment made when workshopping this chapter with the Amche Hisorr virtual Goan history workshop, 20 May 2022.

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4

The Goan Voice, East Africana Collections, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Frederick Noronha of Amche Hisorr noted that The Goan Voice of Nairobi is an ancestor of the digital publication, goanvoice. org.uk, edited by Eddie Fernandes. Before The Goan Voice, there was Goan World, and after, Goa Today. All these publications were run by, and served a readership from, the Goan diasporic community.

5

For individual narratives of Goan mobility within anglophone imperial and postimperial circuits, see Selma Carvalho with Frederick Noronha, Into the Diaspora Wilderness: Goa’s Untold Migration Stories from the British Empire to the New World (Goa: 1556 Publishing House, 2010).

6

Selma Carvalho, A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East Africa, 1865-1980 (Margao: CinnamonTeal Publishing, 2014). On the cultivation of professional identities, see Sukanya Bannerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). On Tanganyika’s international-legal categorization, see Margaret L. Bates, “Tanganyika: The Development of a Trust Territory,” International Organization 9 (1955), 32–51.

7

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). For Goa specifically, Rochelle Pinto, Between Empires: Print and Politics in Goa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

8

Emma Hunter, Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, Democracy and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Isabel Hofmeyr, Preben Kaarsholm, and Bodil Folke Frederiksen, “Introduction: Print Cultures, Nationalisms, and Publics of the Indian Ocean,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 81 (2011), 1–22; Prasun Sonwalkar “Indian Journalism in the Colonial Crucible,” Journalism Studies 16 (2015), 624–636.

9

Emma Hunter and Leslie James, “Introduction: Colonial Public Spheres and the Worlds of Print,” Itinerario 14 (2020), 227–242.

10

For analysis of the shifting definitions/conceptions of “a public sphere,” and its relationship and resistance to colonial rule, see Stephanie Newell, “Afterword: Newsprint Worlds and Reading Publics in Colonial Contexts.” Itinerario 44 (2020), 435–445.

11

Margret Frenz, “Transimperial connections: East African Goan Perspectives on ‘Goa 1961’,” Contemporary South Asia 22 (2014), 240–254.

12

Pamila Gupta, “The Disquieting of History: Portuguese (De)colonization and Goan Migration in the Indian Ocean,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 44 (2009), 19–47.

13

Margret Frenz, Community, Memory, and Migration in a Globalizing World: The Goan Experience, c. 1890-1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

14

Thomas Metcalf, India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 2.

15

The Goan Voice, 23 September 1961.

16

Lois Lobo, They Came to Africa: 200 Years of the Asian Presence in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: Sustainable Village Press, 2000).

17

The Goan Voice, 16 December 1961.

18

Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 318–330.

19

Hunter, Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania.

20

Rochelle Pinto, “Race and Imperial Loss: Accounts of East Africa in Goa,” South African Historical Journal 57 (2007), 82, 86.

21

Ibid., 89–90.

22

Ibid., 90.

23

Ibid., 91.

24

Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

25

Ronald Aminzade, “The Politics of Race and Nation: Citizenship and Africanization in Tanganyika,” Political Power and Social Theory 14 (2001), 53–90.

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26

Lydia Walker, “Minority Nationalisms in Postwar Decolonization” in Michael Goebel, ed., “Rethinking Nationalism,” The American Historical Review 127 (2022), 351–4.

27

For how multiple, competing, transimperial projects played out in the enclave of Pondicherry, see Jessica Namakkal, Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021).

28

Case Concerning Right of Passage Over Indian Territory (Merits) Judgment of 12 April 1960. Available at: https://www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/32/4523.pdf (accessed 26 June 2022). This case ruled that while Portugal had the right of passage across independent India to supply Dadar and Nagar Haveli before 1954, it lost that right after the territories left Portugal.

29

For a contemporary international-legal perspective, see Quincy Wright, “The Goa Incident,” The American Journal of International Law 56 (1962), 617–32. For the complexity on the ground in Goa surrounding the annexation, see Teotonio R. De Souza, Goa to Me (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1994), 161–3.

30

The Goan Voice, 30 December 1961.

31

Rochelle Pinto, “Race and Imperial Loss: Accounts of East Africa in Goa,” South African Historical Journal 57 (2007), 87. Elements of this dynamic held similarities to the colonial and postcolonial experiences of Anglo-Indians.

32

Ibid., 88.

33

Ibid.; Francoise Verges, “Writing on Water: Peripheries, Flows, Capital, and Struggles in the Indian Ocean,” East Asia Cultures Critique 11 (2003), 241–57.

34

The Goan Voice, 30 December 1961. On the role of clubs among Goan East Africa, see Margret Frenz, “Goanais du monde. Mouvements migratoires et identité dans une perspective historique,” Lusotopie: Les Indiens d’Afrique orientale et centre orientale 15 (2008), 183–202.

35

Q.C. De Souza quoted in The Goan Voice, 30 December 1961.

36

Alexander Davis and Vineet Thakur, “‘An Act of Faith’ or a New ‘Brown Empire’? The Dismissal of India’s International Anti-Racism, 1945-1961,” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 56 (2018), 22–39.

37 38

The Goan Voice, 27 January 1962. Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Elisabeth Leake, The Defiant Border: The Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization, 1936-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Swati Chawla, Himalayan Strivings: Bhutan, Sikkim, and Tibet (Dissertation, University of Virginia Department of History, 2022).

39

Pamila Gupta, “Some (not so) Lost Aquatic traditions,” Interventions 16 (2014), 854–76.

40

Arthur Noronha quoted in “‘Goa for Goans’ Movement Gaining Popularity,” The Goan Voice, 17 February 1962.

41

Lydia Walker, “Decolonization in the 1960s: On Legitimate and Illegitimate Nationalist ClaimsMaking,” Past & Present 242 (2019), 227–264.

42

Petitions located in UN Archives, New York City, File S-0291-0008-15.

43

UN Archives, File S-0291-0008-15, Godfrey Kio Jaya Amachree to Chakravarthi Vijayaraghava Narasimhan, 7 November 1962.

44

UN Archives, File S-0884-0015-11, Cable of 13 December 1961, from Caracas, Venezuela; Ibid., Cable of 15 December 1961, from Madison, Wisconsin, USA; Ibid., Cable of 17 December 1961, from Kampala, Uganda; Ibid., Cables of 17, 18, 19 December 1961, from Nairobi, Kenya; Ibid., Cables of 20 December 1961, from Cairo, etc.

45

Q.C. De Souza, quoted in “‘Goa for Goans’ Movement Gaining Popularity,” The Goan Voice, 17 February 1962.

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46

“Long Live the Freedom of the Colonial People: Long Live the Forces Struggling Against Portuguese Imperialism in Africa and Asia,” undated pamphlet, collection of Adeel Haq, from the papers of Dr, Yusuf Eraj, published by Pheroze Nowrojee, Awaaz Magazine, available at: https://www.awaazmag�azine.com/volume-18/issue-2/special-feature/pio-gama-pinto-a-new-document-dated-1961 (accessed 26 June 2022).

47

April Zhu, “Emma Gamma Pinto,” Elephant Magazine, 31 October 2020, available at: https://www. theelephant.info/reflections/2020/10/31/emma-gama-pinto/ (accessed 26 June 2022).

48

Aurora Almada e Santos, A Organização das Nações Unidas e a Questã Colonial Portuguesa: 19601974 (Lisbon: Instituto da Defesa Nacional, 2017), 59.

49

John P. Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War 1961-74 (Warwick: Hellion and Company, 2012), 70.

50

Santos, 82.

51

“The Security Council discusses Goa at the 987th and 988th meeting,” available at https://www. unmultimedia.org/avlibrary/asset/2532/2532617/ (accessed 26 June 2022).

52

Leo Lawrence, Nehru Seizes Goa (New York, NY: Pageant Press, 1963), 1–2.

53

Radharao Gracias, “Liberation: The Other Side,” Herald (Goa, India), 30 April 2019.

54

Correspondence with R. Joseph Parrott, 8 May 2021, regarding his research on transnational support for Lusophone-world anticolonial nationalism.

55

Available at https://www.goa.gov.in/ministers/shri-nilesh-cabral-2/ (accessed 13 June 2022).

56

For the permeation of Hindu nationalism among Christian communities in Northeast India, see Arkotong Longkumar, The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).

57

For the complex history and historiography of citizenship in South Asia, see Kalyani Ramnath, “Histories of Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonisation,” Itinerario 45 (2021), 152–73.

58

Tristao de Braganza Cunha, “Denationalization of Goans”, in Goa’s Freedom Struggle (Bombay: Dr. T.B. Cunha Committee Press, 1961), 55–98.

59

Peter Ronald Desouza, “The Recolonization of the Indian Mind,” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 114 (2017), 139–40.

60

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004 [1994]).

61

Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

62

Ibid., 144.

63

Rochelle Pinto, “Race and Imperial Loss,” 91.

64

Luise White, Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015) chooses not to use the word “settler” to refer to White Rhodesians for this reason.

65

Enseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 13.

66

On fear of this unsettledness/rootlessness and of the prospect of international intervention led to the domestication of the category of refugee in India, see Ria Kapoor, Making Refugees in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

67

George Menezes, A Very Naked Liberal (ARB Press, 2014), 83.

68

For Keralan “migrant” workers in the Persian Gulf region, see M.H Ilias, “Malayalee Migrants and Translocal Kerala Politics in the Gulf: Re-conceptualising the ‘Political,” in Anthony Gorman (ed.), Diasporas of the Modern Middle East: Contextualising Community (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 303–38; for Tamil-world mobilities and immobilities across the decolonization divide, see Kalyani Ramnath, “Intertwined Itineraries: Debt, Decolonization, and International Law in Post-World War II South Asia,” Law and History Review 38 (2020), 1–24.

PART II

From the Transimperial to the International: Lived Uncertainties

102 FROM THE TRANSIMPERIAL TO THE INTERNATIONAL

Decolonization entailed a transition from intra- and trans-imperial to international relations. This had momentous consequences for all sorts of polities as well as for communities who had built lives and livelihoods in diasporic mode. “Greater Goa” was not alone in finding itself destabilized. Long-standing and extensive patterns of human mobility in and around South Asia meant that the advent of international borders over the twentieth century destabilized many forms of belonging, turning some people into (mostly unwitting) actors of internationalism. The three case-studies in this section bring to the fore people who embodied this tension. The transition was particularly brutal in regions that, from cultural, political, and economic meeting grounds, were divided up when the nation-state and the attendant notion of linear borders imposed themselves. Jayita Sarkar historicizes the plight of the Rohingyas by exploring the international reconfiguration of Arakan and Chittagong under the impact of the Second World War and Pakistani independence. As elsewhere in the India-Burma borderlands, war intensified ethnicization as well as transnationalization, pitting Buddhists against Muslims and leading them to make unstable political bargains with British, Burmese, and Japanese powers. Arakanese Muslims’ efforts to forge their own political future through international alliances floundered, leaving them at the mercy of a post-colonial Burmese state intent on treating them as alien to the new nation. As on the north-eastern Bay of Bengal, many people enjoying circular lives between southern India and the Malay Peninsula experienced 1947 as its own kind of partitioning. Kalyani Ramnath offers us a forensic yet deeply empathetic study of Antonio Cecil Pereira, a twenty-year old Malayali who, after some hesitation, renounced his allegiance to India in 1950, instead choosing to establish himself in Selangor, in the Federated Malay States where he had been born. Pereira’s efforts to navigate the uncertainties of a new international climate and its attendant passport regimes highlight decolonization as a moment of disconnection, where individuals had to make urgent and decisive choices about who they were in the face of increasing state-made restrictions. Pereira had a choice, at least. “Asians” who had established themselves in colonial Uganda saw that possibility taken from them after 1972, when Idi Amin brutally expelled them. This left families at the mercy of countries like Britain and India and of the international community – for mercy, rather than rights, became the basis for their resettlement around the world, regardless of their Indian origins, their family ties, or the British passports many of them, often women, held. Ria Kapoor’s chapter highlights how an entire community became unwittingly internationalized, turned into the object of a ping pong match between countries, each less eager to welcome them than the next.

CHAPTER 4

Battlefields to Borderlands: Rohingyas between Global War and Decolonization Jayita Sarkar1

Abstract This chapter examines the transformation of borderlands into bordered lands, mediated by the spectacular violence of the Second World War and partitions, which made Arakanese Muslims (or Rohingyas, as they are known today) minorities in their own lands. First courted by the Japanese, and later trained and armed by the British Military Administration of Arakan, Rohingyas emerged out of the war with new dreams of political futures that had no place in the formal decolonization and partition(s) of South Asia. Designated as smugglers and insurgents, they responded, albeit unsuccessfully, to the carceral regimes of borders and checkpoints with scriptal politics as their strategies of belonging.

Key words: Rohingya, Arakan, Rakhine, Second World War, borderlands, decolonization

Omra Meah was a schoolteacher in his early 30s in Maungdaw, a township and district on the banks of the Naf River that separated Arakan from Chittagong, and Burma from Bengal. In May 1942, Meah gave up teaching to establish the Maungdaw Central Peace Committee.2 Together with Nur Ahmed and Munif Khan, fellow Arakanese Muslims (or Rohingyas, as they are known today), Meah established a court, a police station, and even a rent collection agency, countering Japanese-backed wartime governance of Northern Arakan. His peace committee collected rent from abandoned properties of Arakanese Buddhists, who sought refuge south of Cox’s Bazaar in the Chittagong district of Bengal after being driven out by the Muslims during the Second World War.3 Six years later, Omra Meah would re-emerge as one of the militant leaders of the separatist Arakan Mujahed Party, rising in armed rebellion against the independent Burmese state. Hardened by the War, not least by guerilla training from the British military, and with access to ammunition dumps left behind by departing Allied forces, the mujaheds, or freedom fighters, such as Meah would become a force to contend with. The newly independent Burmese government, in response, would arm the Arakanese Buddhists against Muslims as early as 1948.

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The Arakan frontier where Burma ended and India began was a menacing place during the Second World War. Its deltaic topography and inland hills made its terrain difficult to travel without local knowledge. Watercrafts such as the flat-bottomed wooden sampans were the main mode of transportation through the intricate web of rivers and canals. Monsoon rains on the soft soil made the watery landscape even harder to traverse. But the frontier was geopolitically significant for both British and Japanese militaries. The British wanted to prevent any further Japanese incursion into India, while the Japanese wanted to push ahead from Arakan into Bengal and Assam. As geopolitical ambitions and military tactics collided in Northern Arakan, serious consequences for Muslim-Buddhist communal relations, postwar state-making, and relations across South Asia’s hardening borders ensued. The story of northern Arakan in this chapter is one of transformation, of “borderlands to bordered lands,” as Aron and Adelman called it.4 It was a metamorphosis mediated by the spectacular violence of war and decolonization. Arakanese Muslims remade the Second World War, formal decolonization, and the 1947 partition nearly as much as those global and extraneous processes redefined them. As India and Burma’s porous, dynamic frontiers became battlefields, then borderlands, and finally bordered lands, the Muslims of Northern Arakan found themselves at a turning point in history. Powerful actors courted them during the war: first, the Japanese and then the British. The Muslim League’s anticolonial politics influenced their political visions for a Pakistan and their potential place within it. When negotiations for Indian and Burmese independence went against their goals, they sought out prominent leaders such as Mohammad Ali Jinnah to advocate for territorial inclusion within East Pakistan. Their efforts did not bear fruit. Neither settlers nor natives, Arakanese Muslims or Rohingyas did not even become permanent minorities in the body politic of East Pakistan (later Bangladesh).5 Excluded from a Burmese body politic that framed them as perpetual migrants, the Arakanese Muslims remained suspended in forced transience. Following recent scholarship on the brutalizing legacies of the Second World War and the imposition of the nation-state model in the India-Burma-Bangladesh borderlands, this chapter takes it further by examining the multiple strategies local populations such as Arakanese Muslims resorted to under perilous global forces.6 As such, it examines South Asian internationalism from the ground up. It de-centers the processes of formal decolonization and partition by viewing the world away from the political and cultural metropoles of New Delhi, Karachi, Rangoon, Dhaka, and Calcutta. Like the chapters by Swati Chawla and Lydia Walker that discuss alternative territorial conceptions and fluid transnational identities that could not and would not conform to the straitjacket of nation-states, this essay adopts new spatial and scalar imaginations by peering out into the world from an interstitial

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space between South and Southeast Asia – the connected peripheries of southern Chittagong and northern Arakan.7 It draws the readers’ attention to the dreams of a “Pakistan in Arakan” in wartime, its effects, and afterlives. The chapter further explores local Muslim identity in the broader historical context of the Indian Ocean world through foregrounding complex linguistic and scriptal strategies of belonging of the Arakanese Muslims, thereby expanding our understanding of the international in South Asia and its processes of entanglement and disruption. The rest of the chapter proceeds thematically, in a roughly chronological order. First, it discusses the Muslim-led wartime governance in Northern Arakan amidst the refugee crises arising from Muslim-Buddhist communal violence. Second, it broaches the Japanese offer for a Pakistan in Arakan to court local Muslims, spurring the British into action, who recruited them as guerilla fighters for the “V” force under direct British military control. Third and finally, it probes the postwar rearmament of Arakanese Muslims, their territorial demands, and how these intersected with complex linguistic politics. It concludes with observations on the effects of the Arakanese Muslims’ malleable and pluralistic identities on their claims-making in the mid-twentieth century.

Wartime Governance Northern Arakan and southern Chittagong were part of a common cultural and linguistic universe whose inhabitants’ intertwined social and economic lives were disrupted by the key mid-twentieth-century global events of war, decolonization, and partitions. Cosmopolitan connectedness competed with boundedness and unfreedom.8 Arakan had played host to Arab traders since the 9th century CE, leading to a sizeable Muslim population centering around the region named after its famed entrepôt, Chittagong.9 The Buddhist kingdom of Mrauk-U emerged in Arakan in the fifteenth century, concurrent to and rivaling the Bengal Sultanate. Portuguese traders and the Dutch East India Company consolidated their trading settlements in the area in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively. The slave trade led by Mrauk-U with European involvement, on the one hand, and Mughal-Mrauk U political rivalry, on the other, contributed to the pejorative descriptor, moger muluk (literally, the land of Mrauk-U), as an idiom for lawlessness in the Bengali language.10 The British East India Company established territorial control over Arakan after the first Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-26. Racialized understandings of loyalty influenced British colonial policy on non-European mobility. Colonial administrators considered Muslims and Hindus of Bengal more reliable and loyal than Buddhists of Arakan, encouraging migration of the former into the region, thereby

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increasing the local Muslim population. The British also gifted land to loyalists who had fought in the first Anglo-Burmese War, creating new Muslim landowners in Northern Arakan.11 After the third Anglo-Burmese War of 1885, when Burma officially became part of British India, migration from Bengal presidency and southern India to Burma further increased. Economic crisis fueled racial tensions during the 1930s, taking the forms of riots in Rangoon and the Saya San rebellion in the countryside.12 Burmese anticolonialism had a strong Buddhist underpinning and an anti-Indian sentiment. To most Burmese, the “Indians” jointly benefited with the British from Burma’s colonial rule. The “Indian” in the Burmese imagination was a racial category that was not Buddhist, not Burmese-speaking, and not indigenous to Burma. George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, which revolved around magistrate U Po Kyin’s rivalry with Dr. Veraswami over the latter’s social proximity to British timber merchant John Flory, had the hindsight of the 1930 Rangoon race riots.13 Orwell himself had witnessed firsthand the racial tensions between Burmese and Indians during his posting in Burma as part of the Imperial Police. The 1937 partition of British Burma from British India created new borders and immigration controls between the two Crown colonies. As Bérénice Guyot-Réchard has shown, India and Burma’s separation remained largely unfinished, however.14 The fluid topography and history of Northern Arakan and south Chittagong were such that circular migration of labor and commodities continued, leading to the transformation of inhabitants into illegal migrants, rice smugglers, and disobedient subjects. During the Second World War, Northern Arakan witnessed a refugee crisis within a refugee crisis and a “war within a war.”15 The Japanese established the nominally independent state of Burma in May 1942. As they drove out British forces, communal violence caused a large-scale exodus of Indians from various parts of Burma, who embarked on a precarious journey north, often on foot with few supplies.16 The first wave of refugee crisis in Northern Arakan, which resulted from Muslim-Buddhist tensions, became intertwined with the plight of Indian refugees fleeing from across Burma and heading to Chittagong in hopes of safe passage to India through Bengal. When Arakanese Buddhists assaulted Indian refugees passing through Arakan, there were “serious communal reprisals by Moslems in ARAKAN against the Arakanese [Maughs], 10,000 of whom fled to the TEKNAF PENINSULA” in the southern part of Chittagong district of the neighboring Bengal province.17 British authorities feared further reprisals against Buddhist refugees by Muslims in Chittagong, to avenge the plight of their co-religionists in Northern Arakan. The Bengal government posted 300 personnel of the Eastern Frontier Rifles in Cox’s Bazaar and Dohazari to protect the Arakanese Buddhists refugees. Communal tensions were triangular in Arakan: they involved the Arakanese Buddhists (referred to as “Maughs” in British colonial documents), Arakanese

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Muslims in Northern Arakan located predominantly in places such as Akyab, Buthidaung, Maungdaw, and Rathedaung, and the “Thakins” in charge of the Japanese-supported wartime government of Burma. Thakins literally meant “master,” originating in the 1930s anticolonial movement. In wartime Burma, “Thakins” denoted members of the Burma Independence Army, whom the Japanese had appointed in its administration. Northern Arakan witnessed violent Muslim resistance to Japanese-backed Buddhist-led governance.18 Local Muslims responded to the power vacuum caused by the initial British exit by forming peace committees to maintain law and order at local levels. This solidified Muslim opposition to pro-Japanese Thakin governance, as well as allowing group leaders to consolidate their hold on different townships and areas. During 1942-3, Muslim control was confined mostly to coastal Maungdaw and its surrounding area. Buthidaung, which was inland, was controlled by the Japanese, with Thakins at times supported by Arakanese Buddhists. Muslim leadership was prominent but deeply fragmented. Several Muslim peace committees emerged in and around Maungdaw, which served to mobilize Muslims against the Japanese and Thakins. Powerful landowners such as Abdul Majid Chowdhury of Buthidaung, meanwhile, offered cash, rice, and men in support of the Muslim resistance against the Japanese. Schoolteacher Omra Meah led the Maungdaw Central Peace Committee, along with Munif Khan, a former assistant township officer, and Nur Ahmed, formerly a clerk at the Akyab district court. Amir Ali Mir and his son Faruq Ahmed, whose family had received a land grant from the British East India Company after the First AngloBurmese war, led the peace committee at Bawli Bazaar, twenty miles north of Maungdaw. Two other peace committees were located further north in Shahib Bazaar and Faquira Bazaar. Buthidaung also had a Muslim peace committee led by Zahruddin but was under greater Thakin and Japanese influence. Not every Arakanese Muslim opposed the Japanese. For instance, Sultan Ahmed, the former parliamentary secretary to the government of Burma, established himself as the leader of Muslims in Akyab district by forging close ties with the Japanese.19 Meah’s main competitor, E.D.S. Maracan, ran a peace committee, Majlis-i-Shura, covering the area south of Maungdaw.20 Maracan was a wealthy landowner of Chulia heritage, whose family had lived in Arakan for several generations while retaining family ties to the French Indian territory of Karikal on the Coromandel coast.21 Maracan had been a member of the legislative council of Akyab, prior to the war. From Lambaguna, his peace committee maintained a police force and court. His people were believed to be responsible for the murder of Thakin leader and former Akyab officer, U Chaw Khine, and the capture of a herd of nearly five hundred cattle from abandoned Buddhists villages.22 Maracan even tipped off British

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military administrators about the Thakin and Japanese presence in Buthidaung, leading to the successful bombing of the Buthidaung Court House in mid-1942.23 While the Muslim peace committees maintained the vestiges of a ground-up civil administration in Northern Arakan, infighting and political intrigue were commonplace. Political rivals Meah and Maracan disputed the borders of jurisdiction of each other’s peace committees. The robber Faruq and his gang terrorized river traffic and local villagers on the east bank of the Mayu River, between Buthidaung and Rathedaung. He was reportedly shot by British military personnel after refusing to join forces with the British Indian Army.24 Maracan, after close cooperation with the British, became “politically undesirable” because of his rising political ambitions, which caused colonial officials to question his loyalty. Maracan and his family of about twenty people relocated to Karikal in French India in April 1943, at the height of the first Arakan offensive, after which British authorities attempted to move him to Madras Presidency to keep him under British surveillance.25 He “certainly cannot be trusted and is ready to work for either side [British and Japanese], according to circumstances and his own appreciation of the situation,” wrote Major General Pearce of the British Indian Army, requesting a “close watching lest he engages in subversive activities in India itself.”26 The Arakan offensive from December 1942 to May 1943 led by Allied forces ended in failure. The Japanese were back in Maungdaw and Buthidaung by

Fig. 4.1. Battle of Arakan, 1943: A Sampan Convoy on the Mayu River, by Anthony Gross (Imperial War Museum, London, Art.IWM ART LD 3340)

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mid-May 1943. Although they were disadvantaged by the monsoon’s downpour, Japanese troops successfully held onto inland Buthidaung, while the British were able to gain control of coastal Maungdaw. British artist Anthony Gross, who was stationed in Burma in 1943, created several sketches of the battlefields of Arakan. One such sketch shows a Muslim lascar (a colonial term for a local sailor) rowing a sampan on the Mayu River with British troops on board (fig. 4.1). A vast number of Arakanese Muslims provided intelligence, supplies, and labor to Allied troops during the war. They were armed and trained in guerilla warfare by the British Indian Army from the summer of 1942 onward. As Arakanese Muslims returned to their villages, crossing the Naf River supported by Allied troops, they faced retributive violence from the Buddhists. Violence was not one-sided: there was a “a large number of Mohamedans bent on loot and revenge” as troops re-entered Buddhist villages. Rule 24(A)1 of the Defence of Burma Rules forbade “prohibiting entry to British Burma of British subjects previously domiciled in Burma.” However, communal violence between Muslims and Buddhists was such that British military administrators marked Akyab as a “protected area” under Rule 8 of the Defence of Burma Rules; immigration in Northern Arakan was “stopped for so long as expedient, and thereafter strictly controlled, and limited to strictly those refugees who had valid reasons or return.”27 The British Military Administration of North Arakan wanted to have a whole Burma Army battalion “stationed as soon as possible in the said area, to keep peace between MUSLIM and MUGH, to prevent a disorderly Muslim influx, to suppress violent crime, and to keep a watch on the KALADAN line.” Establishing a civil administration in the area was considered “premature” until “a strong security force of Burma Army personnel was firmly established there.”28 The border between Arakan and Bengal only hardened as military personnel managed refugee flows to prevent Muslim-Buddhist communal violence. By 1945, as the war shifted in favor of the Allies, the Burma Independence Army expressed allegiance to the British, who armed them to fight the Japanese. This had serious implications for postwar governance. The British, eager to reestablish control over Arakan and the rest of Burma, needed the Thakins of the Burma Independence Army and the Arakanese Buddhists. From the point of view of Muslims of Northern Arakan, they, and their enemies – Thakins and Arakanese Buddhists – were now fighting on the same side, all armed by the British. The sympathy of British military personnel who had served in Northern Arakan often lay with the Muslims, just as it did for the Karens in eastern Burma.29 The deputy administrator of the Military Administration of North Arakan wrote in 1949 that the Arakanese Muslims were “much more hard-working and prolific than the Arakanese [Buddhists].” Some were “great seamen” who “manned about 20% of the British merchant navy during the war.” Despite Japanese military successes in Arakan, wrote Murray, the “fact that at no time did the Japanese succeed in overrunning the entire

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area was in great measure due to the staunch loyalty to the Allies of the Moslems.”30 Thus the internationalism of the Second World War, the creation of battlefields, and the forced migration of civilians caught in the crossfire complicated local identities and exacerbated tensions. Ethnic and communal identities, in turn, became intertwined with Allied and Axis alliances and counter-alliances, creating questions about locals’ loyalties, whether to their homelands, Burma, or the British or Japanese empires.

Japanese Offers for a Pakistan Arakan’s wartime story fits into broader trends in the India-Burma borderlands, where the Second World War “acted as an agent of ethnicization and of transnationalization – revivifying and expanding the region’s ties to the wider world beyond India [and Burma].”31 With Muslims resisting Thakin-led governance, the Japanese began to court the community’s leaders in June 1942 with promises of “complete Moslim independence in Aracan,” stirring up local calls for a Pakistan.32 The borders of this “free state” were kept deliberately ambiguous. The Japanese encouraged various spatial imaginaries – land west of Mayu river or west of Kaladan river – the latter being a more substantial part of territory than the former (see fig. 4.2). The offer of a potential (though contested) Muslim nation-state in Arakan stoked colonial anxieties, leading the British not only to arm local Muslims against the Japanese but to remain intentionally vague about Northern Arakan’s potential political futures. Arakanese Muslims’ interest in a Japanese offer for a Pakistan in Northern Arakan was in alignment with anticolonial politics of the time. In British India, politicians openly discussed multiple political and spatial imaginaries for South Asia’s decolonized futures. Public calls for a separate Muslim-majority state of Pakistan since the 1930s had resonated with many in Bengal, as well as in Northern Arakan. Between 1940 and 1943, Fazlul Haq, Bengal’s premier (1937-43) floated a territorial option distinct from both Jawaharlal Nehru’s secular India as well as Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Pakistan that prioritized religion.33 Haq’s third option, although unsuccessful, combined religion with region, addressing the pluralism of Islam in Bengal and its regional identity. The Japanese offer shook British military officers. One of them wrote with great alarm: With this situation in view it appears that if the Bhutidaung-Maungdaw Moslims are to be retained as pro-British immediate contact must be established with them and every promise of support and aid should be made. Had such contact been made a month ago the assurance of cooperation would have been easy to come by, now it may take some considerable time and it may not be possible to contact leaders direct[ly] and gain over their assurance and active support.34

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Fig. 4.2. Map of British and Japanese forces in Cox’s Bazaar-Maungdaw area on 17 February 1944 (UK National Archives, Kew, PREM 3/148/3, Arakan Operations, Feb-Mar. 1944)

Muslims of Northern Arakan were already armed. They had 75 rifles, twelve light machine guns, five Thompson submachine guns, shot guns, a mortar, and about 20,000 rounds of .303 ammunition for rifles. Swaying them away from Japanese influence was urgent.

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Chittagong’s district magistrate Colonel G.F. White pressed military authorities for the “speedy delivery of arms and ammunitions” because the “enemy [Japan] is negotiating with the Mohammedans.” Mere counterpropaganda was not going to be enough. “[S]uch an attractive bribe by the enemy [promise of ‘Pakistan’ beginning in Arakan] must be countered by something more tangible than mere promises by us,” he recommended. Thus began active British recruitment of the Muslims of Northern Arakan to form a guerilla force to fight the Japanese. White instructed Chittagong headquarters to “raise, organize, arm, and train a force of approx. 1,000 (One thousand) Mohammedans,” allocating one lakh (or 100,000) rupees from the Chittagong Treasury for that purpose, which was a considerable allocation. 35 He allocated a salary for headmen or group leaders at fifteen rupees per month, for guerillas at ten rupees per month, and an advance of a half-a-month’s pay in silver to lure new recruits. He assigned one convoy of the Punjab Regiment to Cox’s Bazaar for the purpose of Muslim guerilla recruitment. Given the imminent food shortage in Arakan because of the war, White also recommended food imports to feed the Muslim guerillas and their headmen: “Food in belly [is] better than political idealisms.”36 For most of the Second World War, Northern Arakan was in the gray zone between military and civil administration. Food distribution was a civilian task, but feeding guerillas to fight the Japanese was a military priority. Local British military authorities needed a civilian administrator who could win over Muslim leaders at a time when they were feared to be already enamored with Japanese promises of an independent Muslim nation-state in Arakan. A.A. Shah, subdivisional officer of Cox’s Bazaar in Bengal fulfilled this role. Shah belonged to the highly selective Imperial Civil Service, and was a Muslim fluent in Urdu and, likely, Arabic; deemed to be on service from New Delhi, not from the Bengal provincial government to which he was originally appointed, Shah was deputed to accompany British military officers to Maungdaw to “stiffen Moslim opposition to Thakins.”37 The fluidity between military and civilian control of North Arakan between 194245 was evident not least in bureaucratic institutions. The Military Administration of North Arakan, as the British wartime regime in the area was called, was under Civil Affairs Services of the central government in New Delhi. British troops nicknamed the area “Phelipstan” after Denis Phelips, former Defence Secretary to the Burma Government, who was entrusted with its governance.38 Phelips, himself a civil officer, was commissioned as a lieutenant-colonel and expected to “run a purely military administration” directly under the British Indian Army.39 Even before the British decision to arm the Muslims of Northern Arakan, Chittagong’s Muslims had already proven a resource for military goals against the Japanese. While the Royal Air Force bombed Buthidaung where the Japanesebacked Thakin administration was believed to have been set up, in June 1942,

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an armed group of Muslims from Chittagong had “advanced on Buthidaung and recaptured the town.” This set the initial stage for the British decision to “back up the Moslems.” However, faced with Thakins’ inability to govern Northern Arakan because of armed Muslim resistance, the Japanese decided to back local Muslims as well. They floated offers of “arms, money, food, and the establishment of PAKISTAN.”40 When Sultan Ahmed of Akyab and E.D.S. Maracan of Majlis-i-Shura of Lambaguna met in Buthidaung to discuss the Japanese political offer, British military authorities were spurred into action. Neither the provincial government of Bengal nor the government of Burma (exiled in Simla) were willing to “offer anything more tangible than promises to reward our friends after the War.” Neither did they have “any serious counter to PAKISTAN.” Both insisted that “no idle [political] promises should be made by any Military Commander” to the Muslims of Northern Arakan. British military administrators, therefore, decided that arming local Muslims was their only plausible option. Uncertainty remained, at least at the beginning, about the Muslims’ allegiance to the British. “The danger lies in the fact that we may distribute arms [of 700 muskets and ammunitions] to the Moslems, only to find them used against us. This may well occur through our inability to outbid the Japanese politically.”41 The British military in India had already formed a V Force of irregular troops in the hilly areas of Tripura and Assam, arming local populations to support regular Allied troops.42 British military administrators “suggested that “V” Force extend their activities to raise these guerillas” in Northern Arakan. Recruiting guerillas in Chittagong and Arakan was easier said than done. This was not least because the Bengal government opposed the British Indian Army’s plans for Muslim recruitment on communal grounds, fearing postwar political and social consequences of wartime military choices. It advised that Muslim guerillas “should have as their ideal, anti-Japanese and anti-Thakin feelings” – not religious animosity against Buddhists.43 The chief secretary to the Government of Bengal was unequivocal about A.A. Shah’s role in Northern Arakan: “Very definite instructions have already been given to Mr. Shah that he is not to prejudice the future Muslim Arakanese problem by showing any concern for Muslim demands for “Pakistan” or union with Chittagongian Muslims or other demands of an anti-Burmese character.”44 Another administrative problem was inadequate local paramilitary forces to back up V Force guerillas in Arakan and Chittagong. In Assam, the Force was backed by Assam Rifles. In Tripura, the Tripura State Forces were expected to back it up as needed. But the Bengal government refused to provide the support of the Eastern Frontier Rifles in Arakan and Chittagong, opposing its deployment in any “anti-Japanese role” and insisting that its purpose was merely to “preserve law and order and as a Provincial Police Reserve.” Originally founded as a frontier protection force by the British East India Company in the late eighteenth century to protect

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Bengal against Burma, the Eastern Frontier Rifles was reconstituted in the early twentieth century, predominantly with Gurkhas hailing from various ethnic groups of Nepal and of Hindu and Buddhist faith. During the Muslim-Buddhist communal violence of May-June 1942 that had led to the first wave of wartime refugee crisis in the area, the Gurkhas had killed several Muslims, thereby “becoming bad odour on the [Northern Arakan] coast,” where the Muslims lived.45 Bengal authorities therefore feared further communal tensions in the area caused by Eastern Frontier Rifles personnel themselves. The responsibility to train, lead, and manage the guerilla troops in Northern Arakan thus directly fell on the British Indian Army, while A.A. Shah provided extensive support to military personnel. Shah himself was aware of the gray zone in which he was expected to function: “Governments of Bengal and Burma both disown responsibility for me and the Army seems to think that I represent the civil government… it appears to me that if it is decided to ‘do’ anything in these parts I should have a better status than visualized in these instructions (or lack of instructions).”46 Shah developed good relations with Omra Meah, who provided intelligence about the Japanese and Thakin presence in Buthidaung and Akyab. Shah considered Meah trustworthy, unlike Maracan, whom he considered unreliable, opportunistic, and potentially pro-Japanese. Meah once asked Shah about the possibility for the “separation of the predominantly Muslim portion of Arakan from Burma after the war and joining it to India.” In response, Shah admitted that he “had no instructions regarding this matter.” Meah then wanted to know whether Arakanese Muslims could “send representations” to the British Indian government to discuss the territorial plans, to which Shah replied, “Yes.”47 Wary of jeopardizing British plans to recruit the Muslims as guerillas, Shah publicly maintained a studied ambiguity. Together with British military officers Calvert and Robey, Shah agreed that the Arakanese Muslims they had developed ties with were “sincerely friendly people” such that “there was no likelihood of muskets or rifles we might issue these people being used against us.” Nevertheless, “it was too much to expect these people to fight for us [the British] gratuitously.” In the face of the Japanese offer of Muslim “hegemony in these northern parts of Arakan,” Shah and his military colleagues resolved to “counterbalance this suitably.” But how? Insinuating the Bengal government’s restrictions on his role, Shah’s note in his diary read, “It was too much to ask, if this job of work is to succeed, that we must avoid ‘propaganda of a character which would be likely to prejudice the future Muslim-Arakanese problem’.”48 His main task was to unite the Arakanese Muslims under a common anti-Japanese and anti-Thakin banner, prevent infighting among the many peace committees, and inspire them to fight as guerilla warriors of the V Force. By August 1942, a small force under the command of British military officers was sent to “teach guerilla warfare to Arakanese Muslims” and to provide them with food and medical supplies.49

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The British Indian Army wanted more freedom of action for Shah so that he could further influence local Muslims. The military administrators advocated that the governance of Northern Arakan, including training Muslim guerillas, should fall under direct military control, while Shah should be given “some sort of special commission” to allow him “the maximum possible scope” of action. Shah had become very easily “a persona grata [sic] with the Muslims” of North Arakan. Providing a special position to Shah would remove any responsibility from the Bengal government with respect to the V Force (a major headache for the provincial authorities), as well as reducing civilian bureaucratic hurdles for the military. Legal wrangles would remain, but military administrators hoped that “surely a de facto arrangement could be arrived at, even if a declaration to this effect is de jure impossible.”50 The British Indian government in New Delhi accepted the Army’s request, making Shah the “civil adviser” to the Military Administration of North Arakan led by Phelips.51 Shah thus became an employee of the Government of India’s Defence Department in the middle of August 1942, formally departing the Bengal government. Shah spoke Urdu, which was not comprehensible to all Arakanese Muslims except for the educated (such as Meah), the cosmopolitan wealthy (such as Maracan), and religious leaders (such as maulvis). At a meeting with 500 Arakanese Muslims in July 1942 to form a civil government combining the various peace committees, Shah had brought an interpreter.52 At this meeting and others, Meah remained adamant about his demand that Northern Arakan join British India after the war – a goal he would openly embrace against the backdrop of decolonization and partition. The role of Urdu in Arakan remains ambiguous. Several Arakanese Muslim leaders could speak Urdu, but it was not a language that was spoken by all the population. The British military administration had brought A.A. Shah into the area to inspire Arakanese Muslims to fight on the side of the Allied forces. The British authorities assumed that because Shah was Muslim, like the locals whom he was expected to work with, he would wield a significant influence, notwithstanding the language barrier. After the war, some Arakanese Muslims would agitate for an Urdu-speaking territorial entity belonging to the future state of Pakistan – adding a further layer of complexity to this history. British attempts to undermine Arakanese Muslim support for the Japanese allowed for in-between spaces to persist in which locals debated imaginary political futures.

Postwar Rearmament The formal decolonization of India and Burma and the partition of British India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan allowed Arakanese Muslims to further nurture their dreams of new political futures, their territorial

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desires hardened by their wartime experience. In August 1947, Pakistan’s territorial constitution as two geographically separate wings in the east and west gave them hope that Muslim-majority areas of Northern Arakan could still merge with East Bengal, thus becoming part of (East) Pakistan.53 As Burma became independent of British colonial rule in January 1948, separatist Arakanese Muslims reconstituted themselves as the Arakan Mujahed Party. The ammunition dumps left behind by departing Allied forces, such as in Ukhia just south of Cox’s Bazaar, became a source of the Mujaheds’ postwar rearmament. They formed a loose and opportunistic alliance with the Burmese communists jointly to fight the Burmese state with the “object of ultimately carving out an independent Muslim state in Arakan,” which “might eventually join up with East Pakistan if the party achieved success.”54 The Mujaheds, many of whom were “ex-army men” on the side of the Allied forces, attacked “the flanks of regular troops” of the Burmese military before crossing the Naf River to find refuge in Chittagong in East Pakistan.55 Support for the rebels was uneven across East Pakistan. Although they expressed some sympathy for their co-religionists in Northern Arakan, “some Bengali Muslims are indifferent to non-Bengali speaking Mujahids.”56 Neither the political leaders of East Pakistan nor the Pakistan government in Karachi were keen to support the Mujaheds, considering it an internal matter of the Burmese government. The district-level officers in Chittagong were, however, sympathetic and eager to help. Also called “Pyaukkyas” or P.Y.K. in the archives, the Arakan Mujaheds received arms and ammunition from the sub-divisional officer and township officer at Cox’s Bazaar. Their wounded guerillas fleeing the Burmese military received treatment in the hospital there. The Mujaheds smuggled rice to the Chittagong district, making them desirable to Chittagong officials who were struggling to meet local demand for rice.57 Smuggled rice, however, was not the only reason for local support across the Naf river. Cultural and linguistic affinities between Northern Arakan and southern Chittagong were key. Yet, the Mujaheds also laid claims to a more expansive belonging – extending far beyond Chittagong – through their calls for Urdu to be the official language of their future independent state. They vowed complete loyalty to Pakistan, leading Major N.H. Niblett, deputy commissioner of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, to draw parallels with other violent borderlanders fighting political outcomes of decolonization in South Asia. According to Niblett, the Mujaheds of Northern Arakan employed tactics that were “almost identical to those of the Mahsuds and the Wazirs on the N.W. Frontier, attacking the flanks of regular troops and then retiring to hills and forests.” Niblett had met with the leaders of the Mujahed Party at the border, when “they declared ‘their heartfelt devotion to Pakistan and their longing to be linked with this Islamic State if it were possible’.”58 Niblett allegedly even offered the

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Mujaheds that “if they would surrender their arms, he would give them ‘personal guarantee’ that these would be used in Kashmir fighting” by their co-religionists.59 It is unclear what the Mujaheds’ response was to Niblett’s offer. Omra Meah, Sultan Ahmed, Jafar Meah, and others in Maungdaw had transformed themselves from wartime peace committee leaders to postwar violent agitators for a Muslim state in Arakan. Meah articulated the demands of his party to the Deputy Commissioner of Akyab in Burma, Maulvi Jafar Kawal: “(a) to declare Akyab district as a free Muslim State under the Burma Government (similar to Hyderabad under the British Government); (b) the state language must be Urdu; (c) the establishment of a free Urdu school; (d) all convicts to be released unconditionally; (e) to declare the Mujahed party legal.”60 Since they received no response from the Burmese government, the Mujaheds, together with the communists, despite their at-times uneasy relations, conducted violent attacks in Bawli Bazaar and Ponnagyun.61 By the fall of 1948, the situation in North Arakan had become dire, with Burmese government forces and Muslim insurgents engaged in direct armed conflict. The Burmese government reportedly “brought planes to bomb the insurgents at Maungdaw and Buthidaung,” while Mujahed groups “armed with light automatic weapons,” were patrolling the Naf River.62 In November, the situation worsened. Burmese forces attacked the Mujaheds from land, sea, and air, “burning 13 villages, including six mosques near Maungdaw.” In response, the insurgents – likely a combination of Mujaheds and communists – ambushed a Navy motor launch, which had to fire its guns for “half an hour before it could break through.”63 Fearing a refugee crisis on its border with Burma, the East Pakistan government decided to “strengthen their armed forces in Cox’s Bazar subdivision.”64 The Burmese government armed the Arakanese Buddhists against the Muslims, leading to concerns of renewed communal violence, as had happened in 1942. However, by 1949, the Arakanese Buddhists also grew restless with the Burmese government, which was paying far more attention to the Shan and Chin states than to Arakan. The identity of the Muslims of Northern Arakan became the site of violent contestations by the Burmese state and a malleable tool for Muslims themselves to express allegiance to nation-states born in the vicinity of their lands. Linguistic and scriptal politics became a defining point of contestation. Depending on whether an Arakanese Muslim group campaigned to join Pakistan (such as the Arakan Mujahed party) or it desired regional autonomy within independent Burma (such as the Arakanese Muslim autonomy movement), it pushed for the Urdu language or, alternatively, the Burmese script of their language. Geographically speaking, Maungdaw saw more Mujahed support, while Buthidaung, Akyab, and other areas further south witnessed a stronger regional autonomy movement. The autonomy

118 JAYITA SARKAR

movement was “considerably stronger than the two” movements, agitating for a separate state within the union of Burma.65 In this context, local language, rather than foreign Urdu, took on a life of its own. The spoken form of the Arakanese Muslim language resembled Chittagongian – which is close to but different from the standardized Bengali spoken in Dhaka and Calcutta due to its absorption of Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, and Burmese words. The Muslims of Northern Arakan thus sought to preserve their identity through their language script, which remain a motley assemblage of their dreams for various political futures: the Perso-Arabic, Burmese, Urdu, the Arabic-based Hanifi, or the contemporary Latin-based Rohingyalish scripts. The Bengali language movement in East Pakistan in the early 1950s and the violent creation of Bangladesh and Bangladeshi society throughout the 1970s made the Arakan Mujaheds’ affinity for joining Urdu-speaking Pakistan even more complicated, even traitorous. To Bangladesh, Chittagong and Arakan remain incomprehensible troubled borderlands, where people speak a strange language that can never belong to the core of Bengali language and culture as viewed from Dhaka. The ambiguities in language, religion, race, and territoriality in the long cosmopolitan and bounded histories of these people, hardened in the battlefields of the Second World War and reproduced in the violent borderlands, continue to haunt the Rohingya people’s identity till this day.

Conclusion Wartime alliances created opportunities for local actors either to reinforce certain hierarchies and communal divisions or to create new ones. Whether in the form of joining Pakistan or aspiring for statehood, Arakanese Muslim demands for political self-determination in the era of decolonization partly stemmed from the exigencies produced by the Second World War. The war coincided with, aggravated, and further complicated longstanding ethnic and communal tensions within Northern Arakan. Not only did it shine light on the multiple, often competing identities embodied by locals – Indian or Burmese, Muslim or Buddhist, local or cosmopolitan – it also reinforced violence as the key means for asserting intra-regional and transregional relations, further exacerbating local divisions. Wartime internationalism in this South(east) Asian borderland was multi-directional. British and Japanese officials brought international, regional, and local concerns to Northern Arakan. They needed local allies to make regional strategic gains (preventing or securing control of Burma and India, respectively) with consequences for the global war. But the agency of local actors – in this case, Arakanese

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Muslims – necessarily complicated this agenda. As demonstrated by individuals like Meah and Maracan, Arakanese Muslims did not merely think or act locally. They were attuned to broader regional and international shifts taking place. Thus, not only did they seek the security of their local communities, but they also participated in broader conversations about alternative forms of belonging, citizenship, and statehood at a time of boundary-making in South and Southeast Asia. Their ability to serve as British allies, against the backdrop of Japanese promises of Muslim statehood, created a space in which Arakanese Muslims could make demands about their political future that the British could not readily dismiss. In turn, this reinforced the ambiguous place of this community in a postwar world. In this, the Arakan-Chittagong frontier’s trajectory mirrored that of the wider Indo-Burma borderlands in the 1940s. The war’s transnationalizing impact unsettled existing spatial imaginaries, not least the idea of India and Burma as clearly separate cultural and geographical spheres, and opened space for additional ones, which were often but not necessarily congruent. Local people and colonial officials alike began discussing and lobbying for alternative cartographies for South and Southeast Asia to depict a multitude of territorial possibilities. The Maungdaw-centered Arakan Mujaheds’ campaign to make Arakan part of a future Pakistan rubbed against the efforts of Buthidaung’s and Akyab’s Muslims to negotiate autonomy for themselves in independent Burma. But they also mirrored, intersected with, and sometimes clashed with, visions of distinct post-colonial futures elaborated by neighbouring Naga, Zo, or Kachin people, visions some British officials encouraged. Their hope was to redraw the map of India and Burma’s border-worlds before the border became an international dividing line and as such, solidified. As in Arakan, most of these discussions and petitions never came to fruition. Even in their failure, however, these efforts highlight the nature of decolonization as an internationalizing process, violent and contested to this day.66 Arakanese Muslims were neither Burmese, Pakistani, nor Indian. Despite the hardening of postcolonial borders, which ostensibly rooted Arakanese Muslims in the Burmese nation-state, Arakanese Muslims did not see themselves as Burmese. Instead, they laid claim to Pakistani belonging or autonomy. In turn, political authorities reframed them as enemies of the state, often with brutal outcomes. Questions of wartime loyalty persisted in postwar years in the form of debates about citizenship and (il)legitimate belonging in newly independent states.67 North Arakan’s transmutation from borderland to bordered land is ongoing. The liminalities of Arakanese Muslim identity and belonging, many of which were distilled in wartime, thus continue to persist, complicating local, national, regional, and ultimately international relations.

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Notes 1

The author thanks Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, Elisabeth Leake, Willem van Schendel, anonymous reviewers, and participants of the 2020 Boston University CURA fellows’ seminar, 2021 NIHSA conference at King’s College London, 2022 Beyond Partition conference at Royal Holloway London, 2022 University of Edinburgh IASH fellows’ seminar, and 2022 Geneva Graduate Institute’s IHP/ ANSO Forum for insightful comments on earlier drafts.

2

British Military Administration of North Arakan, 1942-43: Note by Peter Murray, Deputy Military Administrator of North Arakan, 1942-44, 1 November 1971, https://www.networkmyanmar.org/ESW/ Files/peter-murray-1980.pdf (accessed 12 July 2022).

3

National Archives of India, Delhi (NAI), File 21/19/42-Poll(I): “Subject: Raising of Guerilla Organisation in Arakan Hill Tracts and the Country Generally South of Chittagong” by Maj. Gen. T.G.G. Heighwood, 2 July 1942.

4

Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between North American History,” American Historical Review 14 (1999), 814–41.

5

Rohingya Muslims in Arakan/Rakhine and Indian-origin Tamils in Ceylon/Sri Lanka have a similar trajectory of not even becoming permanent minorities in the nation-state of their belonging. Conceptually speaking, this is at odds with Mamdani’s framework of the co-constitution of the nation-state with the construction of an ethnic majority and minorities, see Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

6

Willem van Schendel, “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2002), 647–68; Rajashree Mazumdar, “Illegal Border Crossers and Unruly Citizens: Burma-Pakistan-Indian Borderlands from the Nineteenth to the Mid-twentieth Centuries,” Modern Asian Studies 53 (2019), 1144–82; Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, “Tangled Lands: Burma and India’s Unfinished Separation, 1937-1948,” Journal of Asian Studies 80 (2020), 293–315; Malini Sur, Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2021).

7

Van Schendel, “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance;” Jonathan Saha, “Is it in India? Colonial Burma as a ‘Problem’ in South Asian History,” South Asian History and Culture 7 (2016), 23–9.

8

Sujit Sivasundaram’s critique of connected histories of another entrepôt, Colombo, often hailed as “the most connected place on earth,” helps conceptualize the concurrent connectedness and boundedness of the Chittagong region. Sujit Sivasundaram, “Towards a Critical History of Connection: The Port of Colombo, the Geographical ‘Circuit,’ and the Visual Politics of New Imperialism, ca. 1880-1914,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59 (2017), 346–84.

9

Chittagong’s prominence as an entrepôt resulted from its position between “two grand commodity circuits – the seaborne Eastern Indian Ocean network and the river-borne Brahmaputra-andmountains network” (Willem van Schendel, “Spatial Moments: Chittagong in Four Scenes,” in Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue (eds.), Asia Inside Out: Changing Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 101–02.

10

Ishrat Alam, “Indian Ocean Slave Trade: The Dutch Enterprise,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 68, (2007), 1178–90; D. Mitra Barua, “Arakanese Chittagong Became Mughal Islamabad: Buddhist–Muslim Relationship in Chittagong (Chottrogram), Bangladesh,” in I. Frydenlund and M. Jerryson (eds.) Buddhist-Muslim Relations in a Theravada World (London: Palgrave Macmillan,

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2020), 227–60; on slavery in the Indian Ocean world, see Nira Wickramsinghe, Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2020). 11

In May 1942, Amir Ali Mir and his son Faruq Ahmed led another peace committee in Northern Arakan at Bawli Bazaar 20 miles north of Maungdaw. Mir was a wealthy landlord, whose family had received a land grant from the British East India Company after the First Anglo-Burmese war.

12

On the Saya San rebellion, see Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2010); Robert L. Solomon, “Saya San and the Burmese Rebellion,” Modern Asian Studies 3 (1969), 209–23.

13

George Orwell, Burmese Days (London: Harper & Brothers, 1934).

14

Guyot-Réchard, “Tangled Lands.” On how boundary-making as a result of the 1937 partition affected migration in the Bengal delta, see Sur, Jungle Passports; Mazumdar, “Illegal Border Crossers and Unruly Citizens.”

15

A war within a war would resurface in the Bengal delta three decades later during the 1971 war with the involvement of “borderlanders” fighting on Indian and Pakistani sides. Willem van Schendel, “A War Within a War: Mizo Rebels and the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle,” Modern Asian Studies 50 (2016), 75–117.

16

Hugh Tinker, “A Forgotten Long March: The Indian Exodus from Burma, 1942,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 6 (1975), 1–15.

17

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): “Subject: Raising of Guerilla Organisation in Arakan Hill Tracts and the Country Generally South of Chittagong,” 2 July 1942.

18

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Report of conditions and situation in Cox’s Bazar Subdivision (Chittagong) and Bhutidaung-Maungdaw area of Arakan by Capt. E.J. Calvert, 26 June 1942.

19

British Military Administration of North Arakan, 1942-43: Note by Peter Murray, Deputy Military Administrator of North Arakan, 1942-44, 1 November 1971.

20

Ibid.

21

The Chulias were Tamil Muslims who, like the Arakanese Muslims and the Ceylonese Moors, claimed seafaring Arab heritage as part of the maritime cosmopolitanism of the Indian Ocean world. On Islam in the Indian Ocean world, see: Fahad Ahmad Bishara, Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Scott S. Reese, Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 18391937 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018); Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (ed.), Oceanic Worlds: Muslim Universalism and European Imperialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); Anthony Reid, “Islam in South-East Asia and the Indian Ocean Littoral, 1500-1800: Expansion, Polarisation, Synthesis,” in David O. Morgan and Anthony Reid (eds.), The New Cambridge History of Islam, 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 427–69.

22

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Letter from T.B. Jameson, District Magistrate Chittagong, to J.R. Blair, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 6 June 1942.

23

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Note prepared by T.B. Jameson, 5 June 1942.

24

Ibid.

25

On wartime legal and political ambiguities in French India, see Akila Yechury, “‘La République continue, comme par le passé’: The Myths and Realities of the Resistance in French India,” OutreMers, Revue d’histoire 103 (2015), 99–117.

26

NAI, File 46/3/43-Poll(9): Arrival from Arakan of Mr E.D.S. Maracan in Karikal and Proposal to Secure his Ejection from There into British India and Keep Him under Surveillance, 22 April 1943.

27

UK National Archives, Kew (UKNA), File WO 203/309: Most Secret D.O Letter R/ 43-2182 from D.C.C.O. A.B. Eastern Army to Col. K.J. Lindop, 16 July 1943.

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28

UKNA, File WO 203/309: Office of the Military Administration, Arakan, No. 416, C.C.2/43, Maungdaw, February 1943.

29

Matthew Foley, The Cold War and National Assertion in Southeast Asia: Britain, the United States and Burma, 1948-1962 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).

30

UKNA, File DO142/453: F1323/1015/79, Peter Murray, Foreign Office to Robert W.D. Fowler, Commonwealth Relations Office, 26 January 1949.

31

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, “When Legions Thunder Past: The Second World War and India’s Northeastern Frontier,” War in History 25 (2018), 328–60.

32

NAI, File No. 21/19/42-Poll(I): Report of conditions and situation in Cox’s Bazar Subdivision (Chittagong) and Bhutidaung-Maungdaw area of Arakan.

33

Sana Aiyar, “Fazlul Huq, Region and Religion in Bengal: The Forgotten Alternative of 1940-43,” Modern Asian Studies 42 (2008), 1213–49.

34

NAI, File No. 21/19/42-Poll(I): Report of conditions and situation in Cox’s Bazar Subdivision (Chittagong) and Bhutidaung-Maungdaw area of Arakan.

35

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Letter from Col. G.F. White, Chittagong, Headquarters V. Force, “Organisation of Mohammedan Resistance in Arakan,” to H.Q., 15 Corps, 26 June 1942.

36

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Reference Col. White’s report, 26 June 1942, Para 2(e), Note 4.

37

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Telegram from Bengal, Calcutta to Home Department, New Delhi, 30 June 1942.

38

British Military Administration of North Arakan, 1942-43: Note by Peter Murray, Deputy Military Administrator of North Arakan, 1942-44, 1 November 1971; See also: Jacques Leider, “Territorial Dispossession and Persecution in North Arakan (Rakhine), 1942-43,” Policy Brief Series 101 (TOEP, 2020).

39

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Note from Directorate of Military Operations to General Staff, 5 August 1942.

40

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Correspondence No. 835/I H.Q. 15 Ind. Corps, C/O No. 12 Adv. Base P.O. to H.Q. Eastern Army, 2 July 1942.

41

Ibid.

42

Guyot-Réchard, “When Legions Thunder Past.”

43

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): “Subject: Raising of Guerilla Organisation in Arakan Hill Tracts,” 2 July 1942.

44

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Resistance to Japanese in Arakan, from J.R. Blair, Secretary to the Government of Bengal to Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, 27 July 1942.

45

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): “Subject: Raising of Guerilla Organisation in Arakan Hill Tracts,” 2 July 1942.

46

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Diary of Mr. A.A. Shah on a military mission in Northern Arakan, 7 July 1942.

47

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Diary of Mr. A.A. Shah on a military mission in Northern Arakan, 9 July 1942.

48

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Diary of Mr. A.A. Shah on a military mission in Northern Arakan, 11 July 1942.

49

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Note signed 1 August 1942.

50

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Note signed 4 August 1942.

51

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): A.A. Shah, Civil Adviser to Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, Maungdaw, 21 September 1942.

52

NAI, File 21/19/42-Poll(I): Diary of Mr. A.A. Shah on a military mission in Northern Arakan, 12 July 1942.

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53

On the protracted and political nature of Bengal’s partition see Joya Chatterji, “The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape, 1947-52,” Modern Asian Studies 33 (1999), 185–242.

54

UKNA, DO 142/453: Pol 9560/48, Weekly Report No. 28 for the period ending 18 July 1948 from the Deputy High Commissioner for the United Kingdom in Pakistan, Dacca.

55

UKNA, DO 142/453: Burma-Arakan, Secret, Enclosure to REF.144, 4 August 1948.

56

UKNA, DO 142/453: Secret Questionnaire, Enclosure to REF.144 from the Deputy High Commissioner, Dacca, 16 December 1948.

57

UKNA, FO 371/83115: Note No. 51 from James Bowker at UK Embassy in Rangoon to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Ernest Bevin, 12 February 1949.

58

Ibid.

59

UKNA, DO 142/453: Burma-Arakan, Secret, Enclosure to REF.144, 4 August 1948.

60

UKNA, DO 142/453: Pol 10550/48, II Border Affairs, Extract from Report from Deputy High Commissioner in Dacca on events in E. Bengal (Enc. To Despatch No. 240), 5 September 1948.

61

UKNA, DO 142/453: Pol 10550/48, Extract from Report from Deputy High Commissioner in Dacca on events in E. Bengal (Enc. To Despatch No. 216), 1 August 1948.

62

UKNA, DO 142/453: Pol Pol 11743/48, Extract from Report No. 43 for the period ending 31 October 1948, from Deputy High Commissioner in Pakistan.

63

UKNA, DO 142/453: Savingram from UK High Commissioner in Karachi, Pakistan to Commonwealth Relations Office, 245 Saving, 17 December 1948.

64

UKNA, DO 142/453: Pol 10206/48, Extract from report from Deputy High Commissioner in Dacca on events in E. Bengal (Enc. To Despatch No. 229), 22 August 1948.

65

UKNA, FO 371/69489: 1148/19/48 British Embassy Rangoon to UK High Commissioner Karachi, 11 September 48.

66

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, “Tangled Lands.”

67

Mazumdar, “Illegal Border Crossers and Unruly Citizens.”

CHAPTER 5

Other Partitions: Migrant Geographies and Disconnected Histories between India and Malaya, 1945-1965 Kalyani Ramnath

Abstract This chapter looks at postwar South Asia and Southeast Asia through the lens of its “other partitions” in the age of decolonization. Following the journeys of migration and return of Malayalis between India and Malaya/Malaysia in archival documents, oral history interviews, travel writing and fiction in Malayalam and English, it shows how language politics became a key factor in how territorial reorganization and self-determination struggles played out across the Indian Ocean. These journeys forged minor internationalisms in contrast with those of lawyer-diplomats like John Thivy or K.P. Kesava Menon, whose stories are more likely to figure in international histories of South Asia. Shifting between different scales of governance, migrant journeys for work – rather than for politics or art – reveal a different set of anxieties and imaginations about territory, belonging, and citizenship.

Key words: migration, decolonization, Malaysia, partitions, Kerala

At the end of the Second World War in 1945, a new wave of South Asian migrants crossed the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia. Others journeyed in the opposite direction to mark new beginnings in old homes. As these migrant journeys along imperial networks of labor, capital, credit, and trade were inscribed with new political borders, they encountered – and in the process, shaped – understandings of belonging based on caste, class, language, nation, and state, that unsettled the shared and (dis)connected histories of these two “regions.”1 Narrating these journeys and mapping these migrant geographies requires shifting between multiple scales of governance – the international and the local – and following itineraries that did not necessarily include stops at capital cities like Delhi, Rangoon, or Bandung that often figure in accounts of mid-twentieth century internationalisms written of this part of the world.2 It also becomes necessary to employ sources in the multiple languages in which these migrants spoke, wrote and dreamt, especially as the language became a critical marker of political identity within postwar (inter)

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nationalisms.3 This essay places migrant journeys – and their anxieties, aspirations, and political imaginations – in this mid-twentieth century moment amidst the partitions and partitioning in/of two regions, South and Southeast Asia, once densely connected by maritime migrations and networks of labour, capital, and credit. In his pivotal work on British rule in Sri Lanka, Sujit Sivasundaram discusses how Ceylon was “islanded” from mainland India in the nineteenth century as the new British Crown Colony on the island sparred with the English East India Company on the mainland. He describes how boundaries between India and Ceylon were created within sites of colonial knowledge production – science, medicine, law – what he calls partitioning. Partitioning through forms of knowledge regulated the mobility of people, places, and things across borders as, or even more, effectively than the material structures of fences, boundaries, or walls.4 Although the historical context for Sivasundaram’s work is the period of transition to British rule in Ceylon, “islanding” and “partitioning” are valuable in thinking about other political transitions more generally in these former colonies of European empires. In this case, through a (dis)connected history of self-determination, language, and political identity in India and Malaya, this essay explores how the partitioning of South and Southeast Asia inflected these migrant journeys. This chapter follows the lives of postwar Indian migrants to Malaya and their entanglement with debates over political belonging in their adopted homes and places of work.5 The places and people mentioned in this chapter moved together and then drifted apart between the years 1945 and 1965, as political reconfigurations in the Indian subcontinent and the Malayan peninsula take place: the formation of the British Malaya in 1946 and its dissolution in 1948, the merger of the princely state of Travancore with the Indian Union in 1949, the redrawing of state boundaries in India based on majority language spoken in 1956, Malaysian independence in 1957, and the separation of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965. During this time, both present-day India and Malaysia experimented with the exact nature of their federalism. Language and language politics played a critical role in this self-fashioning.6 Following the lives of people and families that embarked on oceanic migrations from India to Malaysia and tracing their migrant geographies unsettles the international borders of these two former British colonies. These migrant journeys took place amidst lesser-known partitions, territorial reorganization, self-determination struggles, and the rise of linguistic nationalisms. In the scholarship produced in the 1970s on Indian international affairs, these political and constitutional changes are often written from the perspective of states or representatives of states.7 But these changes were never far removed from peoples’ everyday lives in India and Malaysia. Some of these everyday effects might be explored by studying postwar print cultures in Malaya. Noted Tamil journalist G. Sarangapany’s Indian Malay Mail called them India’s “popular” controversies

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of “grouping and partition, federation and unification” that deserved the reading public’s attention.8 Across the ocean in India, popular novels like P. Singaram’s Kadalakku Appal in Tamil and Vilasini’s Niramula Nizhalukal in Malayalam would later recount vivid descriptions of life during the Second World War and the Japanese occupation in Malaya and Singapore. Scholars of Tamil diasporas in Southeast Asia use newspapers such as Tamil Nesan and Tamil Murasu to produce a rich account of how political ideas of the self-respect movement circulated beyond and back to the shores of Madras.9 Thus, political demands and constitutional changes altered the postwar maps and political geographies of South and Southeast Asia and unraveled the lives, identities, and attachments of those who travelled between the two places. These “maps in the mind,” to quote David Ludden, looked markedly different from the map of postcolonial South Asia viewed from national capitals or imagined by national leaders of the new states.10 This chapter focuses on migrants from the princely states of Travancore and Cochin and, to some extent, British Malabar (part of the province of Madras). These migrants are often referred to in official documents such as the colonial-era census as “Malayalee,” referring to the migrants’ language. In 1951, after the end of the war and Indian independence, Malayalees were the second-largest group of Indian migrants to Malaya at 6%, after Tamil migrants at 80%. However, they also exercised, as the narrative below shows, an important influence on the political life in Malaya – consider the examples of lawyers and politicians K.P. Kesava Menon or Nedhyam Raghavan, who figure later in this chapter, or Malathi Pillai, the first female candidate of Indian origin who contested elections in Singapore in 1948.11 In this chapter, alongside my informational interviews, I employ published oral history interviews conducted by writers, historians, and community archivists in Singapore. Their migration histories provide a new perspective on how South Asia becomes unbound: not from its centres, but its geographic and epistemic margins, through boundaries drawn not only on land but at sea, across oceans, in journeys made and unmade across time, as Sivasundaram terms “recycling,” looping forward and back.12 Although everyone whose lives are described in this chapter crossed borders of nation-states, only a few of these lives figure in histories of internationalism in/from South Asia. These histories invoke the question: who is an agent of internationalism in South Asia?

A Passport for Cecil In July 1950, twenty-year-old Antonio Cecil Pereira filled out an application for a passport to Malaya before a district magistrate in Travancore-Cochin in newly independent India (fig. 5.1).13 He wished to join his uncle, Antony Lazar Fernandez,

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the chief clerk on a rubber plantation in Selangor in the Federated Malay States. Cecil supplied the authorities with the necessary paperwork: an application form listing the date and place of birth, his height, the colour of eyes and hair, and visible distinguishing marks, letters from the local parish priest affirming that his parents “Silvie” and “Thresia” lived near the church, and clearances from the police authorities. He also enclosed, per passport regulations, a black-and-white photograph, hair neatly parted in the middle, eyes looking straight into the camera, a collared shirt crisply ironed. The application is unremarkable, and like the thousands filed during the time, except for two details. In response to the question, “Do you claim to be Indian?” he wrote, “ yes.” In response to “Have you made a declaration of allegiance to the Dominion of India?” he wrote “yes” in blue ink. Two months later, he wrote to the chief secretary of Travancore-Cochin, noting that “due to a slip,” he had written “yes” in response to a declaration of allegiance to India. It was his “fervant [sic] prayer” that his “yes” be struck out and replaced with “nil.” In the departmental files relating to his passport application, Pereira’s original “yes” is scratched out with a pencil but is, critically, not replaced with a “nil.” His passport endorsed for Malaya was issued on the same day. Imagine Pereira, preparing for his voyage across the Bay of Bengal to pursue a new life, faint echoes still of the celebrations that followed India’s political independence from British rule in 1947 and, as a new constitution promised him and millions like him, new freedoms. In these first years of decolonization in South Asia, ostensibly a time of possibility and hope, why did Pereira choose to emigrate? This curious clerical error unravels a (dis)connected postwar future in India and Malaysia distinct from the transnational solidarities imagined by an internationalist elite. On the application form, Pereira’s place and date of birth offer important archival leads. The form notes the year and location of his birth as 1929 in Malaya, just before the global economic depression that profoundly affected the labour networks between towns and villages in southern India and plantations and mines in Malaya and which necessitated labour repatriation. Cecil’s father Silvie also died, and Thresia returned to Trivandrum and remarried.14 After the Second World War ended, reconstruction efforts offered social and economic mobility opportunities for Indian migrants through employment in middle-class occupations. In 1950, Pereira would have been one of many thousands of young men, women, and children from southern India travelling to seek employment as clerks, teachers, traders, cooks, and drivers across the Bay of Bengal to Malaya and Singapore in Southeast Asia, and across the Arabian Sea to Kenya, Tanganyika and the cities around the Persian Gulf. Pereira’s journey to become an estate clerk was typical as part of this new wave of postwar migration. But it was also atypical because he was travelling to a place – Malaya – where he was born but had not lived as an adult.

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Fig. 5.1. Antonio Cecil Pereira’s passport application (Kerala State Archives Confidential Section, Thiruvananthapuram)

Embarking on their journey, postwar emigrants like Pereira encountered new territorial borders and new and nascent juridical borders in the form of immigration, nationality, and citizenship legislation. As Sunil Amrith shows, over the first half of the twentieth century, Indian migrants to Malaya travelled between the two different colonies as imperial citizens on British Indian passports.15 Between 1945 and 1957, as elsewhere in the former British Empire, several political reconfigurations and constitutional changes took place in Malaya, with implications for those looking to acquire citizenship. Malaya faced the challenge, as did British India at the time, of formulating a constitutional framework for a multiracial and multiethnic society, built on the labours of migrants from India, China, and the Netherlands East Indies. Under the terms of “common citizenship” for Malayan Union citizenship (1946-8), all those born and permanently resident in Malaya would become citizens by operation of law. “Aliens” had to apply for citizenship through a registration process. The United Malays National Organisation, positioning itself politically as a protector of “Malay” rights, demanded stronger protection for rights to land, education, employment, and welfare. In 1948, the Federation of Malaya was formed within the British Commonwealth (Penang, Malacca, and the Federated Malay States) with special guarantees for Malay rights. Minority rights, including those of Indian origin in Malaya, were limited.16

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Immediately after this new constitutional arrangement, Malaya plunged into widespread violence, marked by clashes between the Malayan Communist Party and British military forces, a period referred to in imperial histories as the “Malayan Emergency.” Semenyih in Selangor, one of the Federated Malay States, where Cecil was ostensibly headed to meet his uncle Lazar, had been heavily bombed and occupied during the Japanese attack on the Malayan peninsula during the Second World War. Labourers on the estates were rounded up and sent to work on the “death railway” on the Thailand and Burma border or conscripted to work for the occupation in Singapore. After the end of the war, the dense jungles surrounding the rubber plantations in Selangor and the neighbouring states of Perak and Negri Sembilan were used by the guerrillas belonging to the Malayan Anti-Japanese Peoples’ Army. Semenyih, Cheras, and Beranang in Selangor were declared “special areas” under emergency regulations, with restrictions on movement in and out of them.17 These restrictions were perhaps less consequential to new migrants. Michael Fernandez, another Malayalee migrant who travelled from Travancore to Malaya in the 1940s, notes in his oral history interview that estate workers referred to the guerrilla fighters as kattukkar (jungle-folk) and were relatively undisturbed by them.18 A wave of strikes had swept across Selangor and Negeri Sembilan in the 1940s, and perhaps labourers had grown accustomed to these continued disruptions. In Travancore, young men like Pereira likely discussed their prospects for employment abroad as India emerged from the war and stood on the brink of political independence. Going to Ceylon or “FMS” (for the Federated Malay States like Selangor) in search of a good job and higher wages was a popular choice. Michael Fernandez, a political and trade union leader in Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s, recounts that news of better prospects from men who had gone to Malaya as estate clerks, conductors, or supervisors was relayed back to families in Travancore by post. Fernandez noted how these letters were read aloud by the recipients or the postman. Everyone, he said wryly, knew “everyone’s affairs.”19 Malaya existed in the Malayalee popular imagination as a land of possibility, outlasting even the trials and tribulations of the war, partitions, and counterinsurgency operations of the postwar period. But there were likely other reasons that might have influenced their decision to travel to Malaya. Many young men in the parish in Travancore strongly supported the Indian National Congress, were exposed to this political ideology in school, and did not want to support Britain during the Second World War. The rulers of the “princely states” in the south, including Pudukkottai and Travancore, having contributed troops for the war effort, sent out constables to round up young people. Young men who did not want to join the war effort would have tried to look for opportunities outside the country. Others, drawn to the cause of Indian independence and the Indian National Army, led by Subhash Chandra Bose, trekked

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Fig. 5.2. Cecil Pereira’s home in Thumba, Thiruvananthapuram, in former Travancore (Kalyani Ramnath)

thousands of miles to Burma to join the Indian National Army. Malayalees such as Nedhyam Raghavan, Janaki Athiappan, Lakshmi Swaminathan, and others had already joined the Indian Independence League in Singapore by this time. Wracked by famine and loss of remittances from Malaya, Michael’s father wanted him to go to Malaya to join his brother and become, in his words, a “white-collar man.”20 Like Fernandez and so many others in the princely state, Pereira’s family also likely experienced war, famine, and loss of foreign remittances in the years leading up to Indian independence. For Cecil, Malaya was the place of his birth, and he had kin there. In 1950, therefore, Malaya promised “better” citizenship for men like Pereira and Fernandez, higher wages, and better working conditions than in India.

Postwar Citizenships When Cecil Pereira boarded a steamship from Madras to Malaya, he likely did not expect a state of political uncertainty. By 1950, the Second World War had taken its toll on Malaya’s plantation economy. The Malayan Communist Party on whom the British had depended to counter the Japanese occupation during the war had

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morphed into a guerilla army fighting the return of former rulers. Anti-immigrant sentiment was largely directed against Malaya’s minority Chinese and Indian populations. Nevertheless, many Malayalee migrants moved to Singapore as apprentices or tradespeople at the time part of the Federation. Notably, the British Naval Base in Sembawang and the Royal Air Force base in Seletar were popular destinations for Malayalee migrants who worked as engineers, mechanics, clerks. It came to be known as “little Kerala.”21 Although the world seemed to be in flux, the stream of young men who sought better fortunes abroad continued, even as the question of political representation for Indians in Malaya remained unsettled. The parameters for Malaya’s citizenship were not settled by this time. John Thivy, the head of the Malayan Indian Congress, was amenable to reconciling the interests of newer immigrants and the established “Indian” communities. Unlike Thivy, his successor, Sardar Budh Singh, believed that the Congress should represent only those Indians who permanently resided in Malaya. More “recent arrivals,” he argued, would not have a political stake in Malaya.22 Singh’s stance aligned somewhat with the Indian government’s stance towards overseas Indians at this time, which encouraged Indians overseas to seek citizenship in their adopted homes. But it was met with hostility from immigrant Indians employed on the plantations, the bulk of the membership of the Malayan Indian Congress. They feared that it would fracture the unity of Indian interests by distinguishing between prewar and postwar migrants. These uncertainties and calculations about the nature of political belonging would also have been playing in the minds of immigrants as they weighed the options for citizenship available to them. Even as these political discussions unfolded in Malaya with possible repercussions for their kin, between 1947 and 1950, members of the Pereira and Fernandez families in Travancore would have witnessed rapid changes in their nationality and citizenship status. Before July 1949, the date of Travancore’s accession to the Indian Union, they were Travancorean nationals and citizens and British protected persons, the latter status accorded to those territories outside British India – like the princely states – which were under indirect rule. These citizenship statuses terminated in 1949, although passports and nationality certificates continued to be issued in the name of British India. Since Cecil was born in British Malaya, he had access to Malayan citizenship under restricted terms available to immigrants under the Federation of Malaya agreement in 1948. As a British subject born in Malaya or Singapore, Cecil was also eligible for Citizenship of the United Kingdom and the Colonies under the terms of the British Nationality Act, 1948. This last status was introduced to grant British nationality to formerly colonized subjects while new nation-states enacted their own nationality and citizenship legislation.23 But it carried with it the possibility of travelling to Britain. By 1950, citizenship had become a hotly contested subject in India and Malaya, particularly related

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to Indian nationals “overseas,” but it would be 1955 before the first statute on citizenship would be enacted in India.24 One such change was the declaration of allegiance to the Dominion of India as a precondition for a passport if one was an Indian national born abroad, which confused Pereira on the application form and caused him to alter his initial answer.25 Given the uncertainty over the parameters of Indian citizenship, this confusion would have been a common experience for many applicants at the time. On the other shore of the Bay of Bengal where Pereira intended to go, the subjects of the Sultan of Selangor were also – like the former subjects of the Maharaja of Travancore – British protected persons as well as “subjects” of their kingdom. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the constitutional relationship between the Malay “states” like Selangor and Negeri Sembilan, ruled by the sultans, and the British Crown had undergone a multitude of changes, resulting in a dizzying range of legal protections for those born within the territory of what came to be known as British Malaya in the late 1940s.26 Between 1950 and 1957, when Malaysia (including Singapore) achieved independence, there was steady progress towards a jus soli citizenship that would extend citizenship to children of immigrants born with the territory of the Federation. After the 1957 Constitution came into force, it conferred citizenship by operation of law on all peoples born in the Federation of Malaya after July 1957 (Merdeka Day). Still, for those born before that day, like Pereira, Malaysian citizenship was only on offer if they were born in Penang or Malacca of the former Straits Settlements. In contrast, an estimated sixty per cent of the Indian population lived in the former Federated Malay States of Selangor and Perak, and in Singapore.27 By 1953, immigration restrictions were tightened, allowing only highly skilled or highly paid workers (earning more than five hundred Malayan dollars) to enter, a standard that would be raised further in 1959 to $1,200. Without meaningful access to Malaysian citizenship and with British citizenship on offer only to a select few, the vast majority of Indian immigrants would have faced challenges while acquiring citizenship.28 In Malaysia, for one, it would require that Silvie and Thresia be recognized as “Indian” within its racial rubric for Pereira to become legible as a Malaysian Indian. Underlying this legibility was language politics and its relationship to the lesser-known partitions in postwar India and Malaya.

Linguistic Nationalisms On Selangor’s rubber and coconut plantations, the office of the chief clerk, the kirani, that Cecil’s uncle Lazar occupied, was considered a prestigious and powerful one, one occupied by Malayalees or Tamils from Ceylon.29 On the deeply segregated

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space of the plantation, the owner’s bungalow was built on an elevation, just below which the clerks and their families lived; the labourers, largely “Tamil” and “Chinese,” lived in the valleys below. Michael Fernandez noted how, as a child, he was amazed at the relatively higher position that his brother occupied as a kirani on a Malayan plantation than he did in Kerala, deeply divided as it was by caste and still plagued by the practice of untouchability. In Malaya, Fernandez noted, labourers riding their bicycles would have to dismount and bow their heads to his brother. The former would have been considered a lower caste Catholic fisher in his hometown in Travancore.30 He was the same person, noted Fernandez of his brother, but what a difference crossing the ocean made! Identities were fractured and remade in this fashion; where many Malayalee migrants like Fernandez might have imagined themselves rid of caste struggles, “race” in postwar Malaya became an important marker of political belonging by which they were legible to the state.31 Running like a red thread through both was the question of language politics and linguistic nationalisms, a new form of old borders. Although caste and class distinctions between “Tamil” and “Malayalee” employees on port and plantations in Malaya and Singapore were not fully recognized or documented by colonial governments, instead festering just below the surface, there were simultaneous encounters between Tamil and Malayalee political interests in newly independent India. In the new state of Travancore-Cochin, the Travancore Tamil Congress and the ruling Praja Socialist Party faced off over the domination of Malayalee Nair landlords over Dalit and lower-caste Christian and Muslim labourers and tenants in the Tamil districts of south Travancore.32 These borderland districts of Travancore and Madras had a significant minority of Tamil speakers who campaigned for a separate Tamil state within Travancore. Meanwhile, the Maharajah of Cochin, supported by the Indian National Congress, demanded Aikya Keralam, a unified political unit of Malayalam speaking areas in southern India formed by merging British Malabar Travancore and Cochin. These negotiations ended with these borderland districts, Gudalur and Kanyakumari, being separated from Travancore and merged with neighbouring Madras state during the territorial reorganization in India’s states in 1956 that created the present-day Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and former Andhra Pradesh. Across the Bay of Bengal, all these political developments were faithfully reported by English language newspapers in Malaya such as Indian Daily Mail and The Straits Times, and quite likely the Malayalam language Kerala Bandhu and the Videsha Malayalee, which several Malayalee migrants reported to have read every day.33 They likely believed they were escaping these shackles by crossing the oceans and taking up positions in government or plantations in Malaya. Note how, having escaped caste struggles in India, the office of the kirani was seen as “prestigious” by Malayalees but viewed by Tamil labourers who they oversaw as oppressive.

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The differences between these linguistic identities – Malayalee, Tamil, Ceylonese – were subsumed by electoral politics as postwar Malaya struggled to balance the demands of its Indian, Chinese, and Malay populations for representation in the initial years following the end of the war.34 Rachel Leow has demonstrated how the governance of language was central to this postwar political project, beginning with the requirement in 1948 that citizens of the Federation of Malaya must learn the Malay language. Immigrants labelled Indians and Chinese struggled with this decision. On the other shore, Sardar Baudh Singh, the new head of the Malayan Indian Congress along with the Madras-born lawyer and politician R. Ramani (later the Permanent Representative of Malaysia to the United Nations), lobbied the Indian Government from Malaya for an expansive definition of Indian citizenship that would include Malayan residents whose grandparents were born on Indian territory, political developments that led to the question about swearing allegiance to India that might have initially confused Cecil. Singh and Ramani’s demands were not met favourably. The Indian National Congress leaders in India encouraged overseas Indians to settle in adopted homes and places of work. This was particularly thorny for Indians in Malaya, which was still negotiating its independence from Britain at the time that the first of the Indian citizenship legislations – the Indian Citizenship Act of 1955 – came into force. No dual citizenship was permitted for either India or Malaya. However, as Raphaëlle Khan and Taylor Sherman show, there was a brief consideration of a proposal for Commonwealth citizenship for former British colonies.35 As Sunil Amrith has argued, postcolonial citizenship in India was crafted through a disavowal of emigration from its territories that had lasted for more than a century.36 The leaders of India’s interim government struggled not so much with the economics of repatriating Indians from Southeast Asia but with confronting the paradox of diasporic nationality.37 Pereira’s confusion over the questions on the passport application form shows how there were multiple, putative citizenships on offer for Indian emigrants in the decade following the end of the war, with no easy or obvious choices for those who wished to retain the mobility to travel back and forth across new international borders. In their own time, with language becoming key to political identity, the families of migrant men like Pereira and Fernandez must have grappled with the swiftly diverging paths to citizenship in India and Malaya, being born in British Malaya and regarded as Indians by nationality. Considering his options, Cecil chose to become a Malaysian citizen. Although Cecil chose to become a Malaysian citizen, he married an Indian woman, Celine, from Travancore, as many Malayalee migrants of his time did. A brief survey of announcements for “Indian marriages” in English-language newspapers such as the Indian Daily Mail or the Straits Times shows that migrants continued to marry from their hometowns, some even returning there for

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ceremonies.38 Celine travelled back and forth across the Bay of Bengal to visit her husband. He continued to be employed at the Semenyih estate while their six children remained in Kerala with their grandparents. Josephine Pereira, Cecil’s daughter, who attended school and college in India and learnt both Malayalam and English, noted that she and her siblings migrated from Malaya to Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s because they had limited access to jobs in Malaya, not knowing Bahasa Melayu.39 As in Josephine’s case, language continued to play a critical role in the lives of Malayalee migrants to Malaysia. After its separation from Malaysia in 1965, Singapore adopted Tamil as one of its three official languages, allowing Tamil migrants to pursue their language learning in schools. However, Malayalam was not given this status. Interviews with Malayalee migrants in Singapore by writers Anitha Devi Pillai and Puva Arumugham show that official recognition of Malayalam language instruction became one of the pre-eminent goals of Malayalee associational life on the island, showing how these frictions and fractures around language, race, and political identity continued to inflect everyday life.40

Law, Lawyers and Language Politics The main interlocutors for the Indian political interests in prewar Malaya – largely around the interests of plantation workers – were Malayalee lawyers and politicians like K.P. Kesava Menon, P.K. Nambyar, the chairman of the Penang Indian Association, N. Raghavan, Nambyar’s son-in-law and later, member of the Indian Independence League and the first Indian National Army. Arriving in Malaya via Malabar, Madras City, and London, Nambyar, Raghavan, and Menon all campaigned for Indian immigrant plantation workers’ rights but were themselves far removed from these struggles. While Raghavan and Menon, along with John Thivy, retired to India at the end of the war and commenced diplomatic careers with the new Indian government under Nehru, many more clerks, teachers, merchants, and other professionals, including the Pereira and Fernandez families, continued to live in Malaysia or Singapore, their homes.41 While the lives of Menon, Nambyar and Raghavan are legible within internationalisms of South Asia, those of the Malayalee migrants they represented are often not. Contrast the travels of the Pereira and Fernandez families to Malaya in the late 1940s with that of K.P. Kesava Menon’s journey in the opposite direction to return to India. Menon was a lawyer and political leader from British Malabar in Madras, who began his political career as a member of Annie Beasant’s Home Rule League in Madras. He rose to prominence, having participated in the Vaikom Satyagraha against the practice of untouchability in Travancore and eventually gave up his law practice as part of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. Financially depleted by

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his political activities in India, Menon decided to leave for Malaysia and Singapore to set up his law practice there in 1921. He not only succeeded in establishing a law practice in Malaysia but also became part of the Central Indian Association of Malaya, the most prominent organization representing Indian interests in Malaya. With the coming of the war in 1941, Menon joined the Indian Independence League but parted ways with Subash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army, which had strategically allied with the Japanese occupation forces for the cause of Indian independence. Menon disagreed with Bose’s course of action. He returned to Malabar from Malaya in 1949, shortly before Cecil embarked on his journey in the opposite direction across the Bay of Bengal. Menon returned to a political landscape in southern India markedly different from what he had left in the 1920s. In south India in the late 1940s and early 1950s, political leaders demanding linguistic reorganization claimed a Tamil or Telugu speaking population beyond the newly drawn international borders of India, drawing diasporas into the fold of “regional” politics in India.42 Darinee Alagiriswamy has shown how the question of Tamil belonging in Malaya, for example, rose and fell with the fortunes of the self-respect movement in Tamil Nadu led by Periyar E.V. Ramswamy Naicker that also called for the erasure of caste politics and a political allegiance towards Tamil, the language but also took on a distinct form in Tamil diasporas in Malaysia and Singapore.43 A parallel to the Tamil thai movement, which revered the Tamil language as a motherly figure, J. Devika shows, was built around Kerala mathavu, the figure of a savarna Hindu woman on a map of an imagined Kerala, similar to the figure of the Bharat Mata.44 Similar linguistic identity-driven political demands surged across India, from Gujarat to Orissa to Kerala.45 The Dar Committee, appointed to look into the possibility of linguistic reorganisation of provinces, recommended to the Indian Constituent Assembly in 1948 that linguistic provinces were not in the national interest, a stance that the Aikya Kerala Committee vehemently disagreed with.46 Menon’s future in politics seemed like it depended on taking sides on the language question, a task for which his involvement in Malaya’s politics must have prepared him well. In India, Menon rejoined the Indian National Congress and was involved in the demand for an Aikya Keralam, or a united Kerala, which he defined as including Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar, but also Coorg, Gudalur, and Kanyakumari that today form part of Tamil Nadu. Apart from integrating the Malayalam-speaking areas in southern India, the Aikya Kerala Working Committee also reiterated the importance of protecting Mahe, which was under French rule but situated as an enclave in Malabar, which Aikya Kerala leaders described as being overrun with French police forces and “rowdies.” In 1946, a year after he returned from Malaya, Menon presided over the Kerala Provincial Congress that called for an Aikya Kerala Conference. In 1949, the merger of Travancore and Cochin states formed the first

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step towards the reality of a United Kerala. However, Menon himself was not involved in Kerala’s “regional” politics for long. By 1951 he was appointed as the High Commissioner for India in Colombo, marking the beginning of a successful career as a Nehruvian diplomat, like his colleagues from Malaya, John Thivy and Nedhyam Raghavan. The problems of diasporic Indian migrant labourers became apparent to him in Ceylon as well. Labourers recruited from southern India to work in Ceylon were increasingly denied a pathway to citizenship. In 1955, as the linguistic reorganization was finalized and the recommendations of the States Reorganization Commission Report were being debated widely, Menon returned to Malaya. By now a veteran statesman and diplomat, Menon clarified that the Aikya Kerala demand was targeted at the region’s social, economic, and cultural advancement rather than the triumphant victory for linguistic identities.47 The leadership of associational life in Malaya had changed in the years since Menon had left, and the changing tenor of political demands an immigrant population determined to make their homes in Malaysia and Singapore. Soon after the official creation of the state of Kerala on 1 November 1956, an Aikya Kerala celebration was hosted in Singapore, the culmination of a decade of organizing. A year later, Malaysia became independent; less than a decade later, Singapore would separate from Malaysia. On this small island, the most politically engaged Malayalees would settle.

A United Kerala In S.K. Pottekkat’s Malayalam short story Avalude Keralam, a nineteen-year-old girl named Prabha sits in front of her house on a plantation in Malaya, puzzled by a map of puthiya Keralam (“A New Kerala”) in the Mathrubhumi newspaper that the postman had brought her.48 Prabha did not know that there was a “new” and “old” Kerala. There was just one Kerala in her mind, constructed from the fragments of stories, novels, and snippets that her father Vasudevan told her of his homeland – verdant green paddy fields, still backwaters, a land where children ran carefree and wild. Prabha asks her father what puthiya keralam meant, but it leaves Vasudevan at a loss for words. How could he explain partitions, separations and solidarities to his child who had never lived or visited Kerala? He finally resorts to a metaphor. Picking up a book whose spine had come apart, binding frayed, and whose pages were fluttering loose, he explains to Prabha that Malayalam-speaking regions of Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar were like the disengaged parts of the same book that were being brought together again on 1 November in 1956. It is striking that Pottekkat’s story about Kerala’s formation is set outside India, in Malaya. Via Vasudevan’s musings on his homeland, Pottekkat remarks that the idea

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of an Aikya Kerala was first formed in the minds and imagination of the Malayalee diaspora. For was it not, wrote Pottekkat in a reference to popular Malayalee names and surnames, in the hearts and minds of Ananthan from Kannur, Abdullah from Kasargod, Sudhindran from Mayyanad, Pankajaksha Menon from Kollengode, Mohammedkunji from Tirur, Kunjikannan Nambiar from Katiroor, Varghese from Pala, Kanjappu from Kozhikode, who came together to celebrate Onam abroad and take pride in their shared identity as Malayalam speakers and Malayalees, that an Aikya Kerala took place before it was a political ideal and a territorial reality? This is no mere nostalgia for a lost homeland. The story is set against the background of the counterinsurgency operations in the days leading to Malaysian independence; Pottekkat writes of Prabha watching warplanes hunting “communists” roaring overhead, a barbed-wire fence separating her house and garden from a military camp housing Australian soldiers, her fear that Vasudevan would be captured by guerilla fighters who hid out in the jungle. Once again, it is the language that becomes a refuge. Prabha remarks that she has been able to trick Moideen, a Malayali Muslim shopkeeper on the plantation, into thinking she can speak only Malay when she is equally fluent in Malayalam. Revealing a key mystery about Prabha’s identity and how she became Vasudevan’s daughter, Pottekkat sketches out the relationship between Indian, Malay, and Chinese workers on the plantation, showing diasporic Malayalis as invested in the politics leading up to the formation of Kerala. Regardless of religious affiliations, Malayalis were equally at home in Malaya and Kerala, comfortable speaking in Malay but secure in their love for Malayalam. Avalude Keralam is a fictionalized snippet from Pottekkat’s travel writing about Asia and Africa in the 1950s. His observation that the idea of aikya keralam as being nurtured among diasporic Malayalis was not wrong either – in 1950, an All Malayan Aikya Kerala Convention was sponsored by the Singapore Kerala Samajam; in 1953, the All Ceylon Malayalee Association passed a resolution supporting the Aikya Kerala demand. Pottekkatt himself visited postwar Southeast Asia and published an account of his travels in Malaya titled Malaya Naadukalil in 1953. The details and observations about War, military operations, and interethnic solidarities were likely drawn from these travels. Pottekkat’s reference to KP Kesava Menon’s Mathrubhumi is also significant. As fellow Malabaris, Pottekkat and Menon were associates in political life, although belonging to different political parties. It demonstrates the acceptance of the linguistic reorganization principle across the political spectrum, including the Communist Party and the Praja Socialist Party in Travancore-Cochin and Malabar. As J. Devika notes in her careful reading of Pottekkat’s travel writing in the first decades of Indian independence, his observations are refracted through his identity not as much as an Indian but as a Malayali, reflecting the peculiar optimism and developmentalist thinking of the early years

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of Indian independence.49 Most significantly, in this context, Pottekkat’s writings show how migrant geographies might illuminate postwar citizenship, conscious of how language and political identity were being assembled and leveraged by new nation-states, but revealing possibilities for solidarities beyond new territorial borders.

Conclusion By way of three accounts of postwar migration, two real and one fictional, this chapter explores partitions and partitioning not only as events or processes that unfolded in the Indian subcontinent, but following Sivasundaram, as constructed in forms of knowledge that which continued to resonate and recycle across the oceans, on the edges and margins of old empires and nation-states. Beginning with an application for an Indian passport found in an archive in former princely state of Travancore in British India for Selangor in the former Straits Settlements, this chapter weaves in stories of migrants who crossed oceans for work, retracing old imperial networks of labor, capital, credit across the Bay of Bengal in a time of new nation-states. Like the migration stories of Cecil Pereira, Kesava Menon, Prabha and Vasudevan who traveled between Travancore, Malabar, Selangor, and Singapore that are woven through this chapter, there are attachments, identities, and memories, provide insights into what the experience of crossing new national borders, even as their own ideas and imaginations about political boundaries shifted shape and took new forms. It is reflected in the anxieties over postwar citizenships, the “recycling” and looping back and forth of language and language identities and the ways in which they play into race, class, and caste identities, and the political imaginations of territorial reorganizations and self-determination struggles at “home” and among the diasporas across the ocean. As “South Asia” and “Southeast Asia” are themselves named and disengaged following the end of the war, these migrant stories that cross international borders retreat into the realm of “local” or “regional” histories. To recenter them in international histories of South Asia, this chapter shifts between different scales of governance, follows migrant journeys for work – rather than for politics or art – across the Bay of Bengal in this mid-twentieth century moment, employs sources in languages that they spoke, revealing a different set of anxieties and imaginations about territory, belonging and citizenship. Consider two other possible reframing of internationalisms in/from South Asia that mapping migrant geographies might offer, building on the work that scholars of migration, diasporas, and citizenship have been engaged in. First, many former migrants and returnees to/from Southeast Asia left for the (Persian)

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Gulf, which became a preferred “regional” destination for Malayalee migrants. Like the Malay States and former kingdoms/Indian states, the city-states around the Persian Gulf were also protectorates in the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1970s, the scale of migration from southern India, and in particular Kerala, to the Gulf intensified as a result of the oil boom. As Andrea Wright and Neha Vora have shown through their ethnographic work with Indians in Dubai, there is no path to legal citizenship for foreigners and migrants. Yet the allure of higher wages continued to attract young men and women to employers under difficult and often hazardous conditions.50 And yet, Wright and Vohra argue, like the planters and clerks in Southeast Asia, many Indian people in business play an outsized role in the Gulf economy, and enjoy citizenship-like rights, while labourers do not. Mapping the (dis)connected postwar histories of these three “regions” through migrations for work might provide insights into the lesser-known worldmaking projects and new directions for international histories of South Asia. Second, the entangled histories of partitions, separations, and political federations in India, Sri Lanka and Malaysia narrated by way of migrant geographies remains underexplored. For instance, the Malaya-born S.J.V. Chelvanayakam returned to Ceylon/Sri Lanka where he practiced law, set up a newspaper Suthanthiran and led the demand for an autonomous Tamil province within Ceylon by setting up the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (the Federal Party) in 1949, the same year that Kesava Menon’s returned from Malaya and was appointed as the High Commissioner for India in Ceylon. Many more “Jaffna Tamils” continued to work and live in Malaysia, facing uncertainty over citizenship when Ceylon’s citizenship laws came into force the previous year.51 Chelvanayakam’s private papers are now catalogued and available for researchers at the University of Toronto.52 As the stories of Cecil Pereira, Kesava Menon, Prabha and Vasudevan show, these migrant geographies too may map an intense, complex understanding of the “international” and internationalisms from South Asia that gently questions the limits of contemporary political imaginations.

Notes 1

For postwar South and Southeast Asia, see Christopher Bayly, and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For migrations from south India to Malaya during the colonial period, see Sunil Amrith, “‘Indians Overseas?’ Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya 1870-1941,” Past & Present 208 (2010), 231–61.

2

On archival method in international histories that moves between national, international, and transnational scales, see Jake Hodder, Michael Heffernan and Stephen Legg, “The Archival Geographies of Twentieth-Century Internationalism: Nation, Empire and Race,” Journal of Historical Geography 71 (2021), 1–11.

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3

Gerard McCann, Su Lin Lewis, Carolien Stolte, Leslie James, Rachel Leow, Reem Abou-El-Fadl, “Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa,” Radical History Review 131 (2018),176– 82, highlights the importance of exploring internationalism using multi-sited and multilingual research.

4

Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

5

“Malaya” in this chapter refers to the post-1948, pre-1957 “Federation of Malaya,” which was under British rule.

6

Rachel Leow, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

7

Scholars of Indian international affairs in the 1970s, K.S. Sandhu, Usha Mahajani, and Sinappah Arasaratnam, have written eloquently about Indian migrations to Southeast Asia during the colonial period. Their studies show how “Indians” were not a unified migrant community but fractured by language, caste, religion and profession. Kernial Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of Their Immigration and Settlement (1786-1957) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Usha Mahajani, The Role of Indian Minorities in Burma and Malaya (Bombay: Vora, 1960); Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Indians in Malaysia and Singapore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

8

“India’s ‘Popular’ Controversies,” Indian Daily Mail, 20 August 1946.

9

Darinee Alagirisamy, “The Self-Respect Movement and Tamil Politics of Belonging in Interwar British Malaya, 1929-1939,” Modern Asian Studies 50 (2016), 1547–75.

10

David Ludden, “Presidential Address: Maps in the Mind and the Mobility of Asia,” The Journal of Asian Studies 62 (2003),1057–78.

11

Sinnappah Arasaratnam, “Indian Society of Malaysia and its Leaders: Trends in Leadership and Ideology among Malaysian Indians, 1945–60,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 13 (1982), 236–51.

12

Sivasundaram, Islanded, 11–12. On borders and border regions in international histories, see Elisabeth Leake, “Where National and International Meet: Borders and Border Regions in Postcolonial India,” The International History Review (2021), 1–18; Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Elisabeth Leake, The Defiant Border: The Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization, 1936-65 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

13

I discussed the vignette about Pereira’s passport application in a book review essay for Itinerario in 2020. Kalyani Ramnath, “Histories of Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonisation,” Itinerario 45 (2021), 1–22. I am grateful to Carolien Stolte for permission to use the vignette in this chapter.

14

Interview with Luciamma, Cecil’s sister-in-law, Trivandrum (October 2021). Luciamma refers to Cecil’s “uncles,” but this may refer to male cousins of her mother or other men from the same location as well.

15

Sunil Amrith, “Indians Overseas?”

16

Tim Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 308–56.

17

Indian Daily Mail, 4 July 1949.

18

Michael Fernandez, Oral History Interview, National Archives of Singapore, Accession Number 000076.

19

This observation also recalls recruiting labour via kanganies, popular in Ceylon and Malaya by the beginning of the twentieth century. Kanganies returned to their home villages to recruit people, often offering them advances to pay off their debts and then withholding wages as a form of repayment. See Ravindra K. Jain, South Indians on the Plantation Frontier in Malaya (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970).

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20

Fernandez interview.

21

Anitha Devi Pillai and Puvaneswari Arumugam, From Kerala to Singapore: Voices from the Singapore Malayalee Community (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2017).

22

Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown, The Indian Minority and Political Change in Malaya, 1945-1957 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1981), 97.

23

Clive Parry, Nationality and Citizenship Laws of the Commonwealth and of the Republic of Ireland (London: Stevens & Sons, 1957). For a broader discussion involving immigration and nationality legislation and South Asian migration to Britain, see Ria Kapoor in this volume.

24

Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) See also Ramnath, “Histories of Indian Citizenship.”

25

Transitional provisions existed in the Indian Constitution and came into force in 1949, before the rest of the Constitution. See Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

26

Andrew Harding, The Constitution of Malaysia: A Contextual Analysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

27

Arasaratnam, “Indians in Malaysia and Singapore,” 41–2.

28

Contrast this with Chinese nationality law at the time that applied to the Chinese diaspora in Malaya and Singapore, which was based on jus sanguinis, or citizenship by descent. Anyone born of Chinese nationals anywhere would be considered a Chinese citizen.

29

On migration from Ceylon/Sri Lanka to Malaysia, see Rajakrishnan Ramasamy, Sojourners to Citizens: Sri Lankan Tamils in Malaysia, 1885-1965 (Malaya: R. Rajakrishnan, 1988).

30

Fernandez interview.

31

Rajakrishnan Ramasamy, Caste Consciousness among Indian Tamils in Malaysia (Malaysia: Pelanduk,1984); John Solomon, A Subaltern History of the Indian Diaspora in Singapore: The Gradual Disappearance of Untouchability 1872-1965 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). What Fernandez’s observation makes clear is that even after the formal abolition of untouchability in Travancore, it was still socially observed.

32

D. Daniel, Travancore Tamils: Struggle for Identity, 1938-1956 (Madurai: Raj Publishers, 1992).

33

Pillai and Arumugham, From Kerala to Singapore.

34

For the prewar history of race categories in the colonial census, see Thaatchaayini Kananatu, Minorities, Rights and the Law in Malaysia (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2020).

35

Raphaëlle Khan and Taylor C. Sherman “India and Overseas Indians in Ceylon and Burma, 19461965: Experiments in Post-imperial Sovereignty,” Modern Asian Studies 56 (2021): 1153–82.

36

Sunil Amrith, “Struggles for Citizenship around the Bay of Bengal,” in Gyan Prakash, Michael Laffan, and Nikhil Menon (eds.), The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

37

Malayan Citizenship and Local Indians, Indian Daily Mail, 21 March 1946.

38

Simon Rozario Nelson, oral history interview, National Archives of Singapore, Accession Number 000573.

39

Interview with Josephine Pereira, 9 January 2021.

40

Pillai and Arumugham, From Kerala to Singapore.

41

Raghavan and Menon both served in the Indian High Commission in Colombo, where there was a significant estate labour population. See Valli Kanapathipillai, Citizenship and Statelessness in Sri Lanka: The Case of the Tamil Estate Workers (Delhi: Anthem Press, 2009).

42

On parallels with the politics of the India-Pakistan partition alongside the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, see Oliver Godsmark, Citizenship, Community and Democracy in India: From Bombay to Maharashtra 1930-1960 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

43

Alagirisamy.

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44

J. Devika, “A People United in Development: Developmentalism in Modern Malayalee Identity,” Centre for Development Studies Trivandrum Working Paper (2007), available at https://core.ac.uk/ download/pdf/19918813.pdf; see also Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) for cartographic representations of India as a mother goddess.

45

Godsmark, Citizenship, Community and Democracy in India; Pritipuspa Mishra, Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha, 1803-1956 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

46

For an overview of the developments between 1947 and 1956 about linguistic reorganization, see Satish Arora, “The Reorganisation of the Indian States,” Far Eastern Survey 25 (1956), 27–30.

47

“KPK Menon to speak on the SRC Report,” Indian Daily Mail, 12 November 1955.

48

S.K. Pottekkat, “Avalude Keralam,” Antharvahini (Mathrubhumi Books, 2020). Translation from Malayalam is my own.

49

J. Devika, “Decolonising Nationalist Racism? Reflections on Travel Writing from Mid-twentieth Century Kerala, India,” Modern Asian Studies 52 (2018), 1316–46.

50

Neha Vora, Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Andrea Wright, Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021).

51

On Chelvanayakam, see A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, S.J.V. Chelvanayakam and the Crisis of Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism, 1947-1977: A Political Biography (London: Hurst & Co., 1994).

52

See https://discoverarchives.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/samuel-james-velupillai-s-j-v-chelva� nayakam-fonds (accessed 7 July 2022).

CHAPTER 6

Re-Uniting Split Families: The 1972 Ugandan Asian Refugees and the Internationalization of an Imperial Diaspora Ria Kapoor

Abstract This chapter focuses on the reconceptualization and reconfiguration of both citizens’ rights as well as human rights in the aftermath of the Ugandan Asians’ expulsion. In particular, it focuses on the question of reuniting stateless husbands sent to India with their wives in Britain. In claiming the right to family, reunification was used as a bargaining tool by the UK, India, representatives of NGOs, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and Asian families split by the expulsion. Families where each member could possess different travel and nationality documents, as many Ugandan Asians did, defied an easy logic of nation-state belonging. Instead, the Ugandan Asian family became both a site and a unit of contested internationalism in the global transition from a world of imperial diasporas to one of postcolonial nation-states.

Key words: refugees, migration, East Africa, family, rights

In August 1972, Idi Amin issued an order expelling Uganda’s ethnically South Asian population, requiring them to leave the country by 8 November. Far from an idiosyncratic act by Amin, the expulsion was rooted in the longer identity politics of East Africa. The “Asian” presence in East Africa had predated the establishment of the British Empire, but colonial officials had encouraged the activities of that transnational mercantile community. The subsequent settlement of Indians who helped build the railways in East Africa further helped to create a “subimperial” class of non-white, non-African subjects who consolidated the British Empire’s encroachment into East Africa. Decolonisation put Asian communities’ future in question throughout the region. The revolution in Zanzibar and the introduction of Kenya’s Immigration Act and Trade Licensing Act had already prompted many departures. By enumerating but also questioning their legitimate place in the country, Uganda’s 1971 Asian census had heralded the threat of expulsion.53 While the initial expulsion was aimed at the British Ugandan Asians – those with passports and legal connections to the UK – soon orders were expanded to include all Asians

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regardless of their documents. In the ensuing crisis, family members (particularly intergenerational, extended families, but also nuclear ones) ended up divided across different countries. Ugandan Asians became the first major non-white group to be resettled primarily in the Global North. Rather than remaining a UK-Uganda or even a Commonwealth issue, the Ugandan Asian expulsion was internationalized: London asked the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to intervene, despite the UK passports and UK ties many in the community held.54 Besides acting for those who, having lost the protection of a state, more traditionally fell within its mandate, the UNHCR also supported requests to resettle those with valid passports, including British ones. In the end about 28,000 of them went to Britain, 6,000 to Canada, 4,300 to India, and smaller numbers to Pakistan. 55 Countries from the USA to Australia agreed to take in some expelled Asians when approached by the UK and UNHCR. In the process, the idea that Asians could have legitimate claims to British citizenship was undermined. The expulsion also led to a self-interested Indo-British tussle over what constituted belonging – where Britain argued for ethnicity and ancestry, India countered that it was legal ties that mattered, since the diaspora’s subject status had derived from the British Empire. The crisis intensified ongoing international debates about the interplay between the categories of citizen, refugee, stateless person, and passport-holder. The process of family reunification, in particular, exposed such categories as both easily changed and transferable. In public memory, Ugandan Asians’ plight is largely remembered as a refugee crisis. Britain’s welcome to some of them is consequently cast as a proud moment in British humanitarian history, hiding the fact that many of these “refugees” already held British passports. For Britain was one of several nation-states, formerly part of the erstwhile British empire – India, Uganda, Britain, Pakistan, even the newly-created Bangladesh – whose citizenship Asians in Uganda could claim, depending on their individual choices and circumstances. Asians faced with expulsion lined up outside the British and Indian High Commissions or the special office Canada had opened to support them, depending on the passports and documents they held (or did not hold). They hoped to secure permits, visas, affidavits, emergency certificates, and, in Canada’s case, verification and acceptance as “refugees.” The UNHCR would only take practical action on behalf of those unable to secure any such documents to leave the country. In this process of verifying documents, members of the same family, who had lived in the same home in Uganda, could end up in different places after the expulsion. The variety of passports that they could possess reflected what scholars like Divya Tolia-Kelly have described as entangled identities that spread across South Asia, East Africa and Britain, with nation-state citizenship unable to reflect

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the mobilities of mercantile and labour communities of the transnational British empire.56 This chapter focuses on stateless husbands whose wives, and often children, went to the United Kingdom, but who – after going to India in the first instance – were not permitted to join them under British law. As debates over who would be responsible for the Asians turned into a tug-of-war, family ties became a bargaining chip for states, NGOs, and Asians themselves, to push for resettlement in Britain, India, or elsewhere. The family thus became the agent and object of a postcolonial internationalism in a moment where complex questions of imperial responsibilities to subject-citizens were answered via humanitarian solutions. Ugandan Asian UK passport-holding wives saw their gender mobilized to deny their families reunification within the UK. To overcome the restrictions of postcolonial immigration, they appealed to a closely held liberal, Western value – the nuclear family structure – and so to a liberal internationalist view of human rights, especially that to family.57 This chapter therefore explores the replacement of both citizens’ rights and human rights with humanitarianism, as well as the creation of the family as a unit of international scrutiny, through the splitting and reunification of these Asian families in the UK. Focusing on these split families demonstrates that while the former colonial metropole appealed to colonially created hierarchies even in the era of decolonization, former colonies and diasporas could resist and reshape them. These hierarchies revealed themselves in the different treatment received by stateless husbands who had been evacuated to Europe versus those sent to South Asia, despite the fact they technically held a similar status. The UK government permitted family reunification where the stateless or Ugandan passport-holding member was in a transit camp in Europe in 1973.58 The position of husbands in India and Pakistan, meanwhile, was considered different from that of the stateless in Europe until 1974.59 Family reunification in the UK had certainly never been inevitable for any party, but this lack of universal application is revealing. Further, securing South Asian families’ reunification made use of humanitarian discourse above that of human rights and the status of the stateless. I particularly draw on a report by Margaret Owen for the Co-Ordinating Committee for the Welfare of Evacuees from Uganda (CCWEU), which focused on two categories of “refugees” who went to India. The first group, the subject of this chapter, comprised split families where some members were in the UK. Owen suggested their reunification with “distressed relatives” on compassionate grounds. The second group comprised entire stateless families who were in India and who either held useless Ugandan passports or had no documents at all. Her report considered the activities of the UNHCR, the Indian government, and the British government in addressing how Ugandan Asians should be resettled. Shared with the UK government as well as the UNHCR, the report was leaked to the Guardian, which reported that Owen

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called for 300 destitute, stateless husbands to be settled in Britain under “‘exceptional compassionate circumstances’ in the rules.”60 Placing the report within its wider context, the chapter will first explore the questions of citizenship that led to the splitting of the Asian family, then move to the international tussle that this created between the UK, India, and UNHCR, and finally elucidate how family and internationalism elided as a crisis of citizenship and human rights was made one of humanitarianism.

Splitting by Citizenship The South Asians of Uganda, like so many other Indian Ocean communities, led lives marked by a transnational mobility that did not fit any neat citizen-nation-territory axis. Their varied claims to citizenship made their resettlement complex. Besides the option of British nationality that Uganda’s Asians retained as subject-citizens of empire, Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947 and Uganda’s adoption of its constitution in 1962 meant that the Asians had the option of several new, postcolonial citizenships. The families Margaret Owen studied represented the problem posed by Ugandan Asians’ translocal and transnational identities. Their lives connected specific cities and regions across Britain, Uganda, and India as nodes where extended families resided, where the young attended educational institutions, and where they had established business interests.61 The industrialist N.K. Mehta, for example, had spent a lifetime travelling between his hometown of Porbandar in Gujarat and Uganda, where his business interests were located. Mehta’s Ugandan successes became reflected in his family’s contributions to the landscape and people of Porbandar, where they built a temple and supported a girls’ school.62 The variety of passports family members could hold represented exactly the complexity and evolution of citizenship through multiple waves of decolonization. The British government’s attitude to issues of postcolonial citizenship was to limit its obligations to former colonial subjects. The 1948 British Nationality Act had granted former subjects across the world access to UK nationality; its supporters had not expected its benefits to be taken up in such large numbers, expecting former subjects to prefer citizenship of newly decolonized nation-states.63 In Uganda, British negotiators had hoped that rather than retaining the UK-linked citizenship they had since the 1950s, Asians would assume Ugandan citizenship.64 In fact, not all those the British saw as belonging to India or Pakistan by “race” chose to become citizens of these new entities after 1947, notably in the diaspora.65 Even before Amin’s rule Asians had encountered significant administrative barriers to securing and retaining Ugandan citizenship; they notably had to register for it, rather than

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receiving it as a birth right like African Ugandans. These barriers reflected the precarious position of this often-wealthy minority, seen to have supported East Africa’s colonization.66 By strategic choice or bureaucratic necessity, many Asians therefore retained their British nationality. The large number of non-white British nationals abroad with an unstable position in newly decolonizing states stoked fears of immigration to Britain. This prompted legislative changes to British municipal law that effectively weakened their legal citizenship. The 1962 and 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Acts and 1971 Immigration Act effectively limited non-white citizens’ access to the UK based on their ethnicity and ancestry beyond the British Isles, even if they held legitimate documents. The decline of the Commonwealth coincided with the further politicization of race in British politics. By the 1970s, people who had started out, in theory, with the same citizenship as Macmillan or Churchill had been systematically stripped of their rights. This process reached a crescendo with the Kenyan and then Ugandan Asians’ expulsions. The anxieties of a waning empire led to attempts to control immigration and reframe minority rights, while intensifying concerns about race.67 During the Kenyan exodus in the 1960s, the UK government had set up a “queue” capped at 1,500 heads of household a year; a similar queue was created for Ugandan Asians, even those holding British passports. British authorities encouraged Asians to go to India to await their turn in line to enter the UK, officially temporarily. In fact, the UK government hoped they would remain there.68 The legal ties of citizenship had been watered down, notably through entry restrictions, to limit obligations to Britain’s former colonial subjects. While London evaded its legal responsibilities, Delhi rejected ethnicity as the basis for automatically accepting Ugandan Asians as Indian citizens. Despite early hopes that East African Asians would have a sort of satellite status, the 1955 Citizenship Act barred India’s diaspora from an automatic recourse to citizenship. From Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi, Indian Prime Ministers encouraged Asians to take local citizenship, partly so as not to infringe upon other new states’ right to determine their own citizenry. The Aga Khan, whose Ismaili followers constituted a large number of East Africa’s Asians, similarly encouraged local citizenship.69 While other expelled “Asians” were reabsorbed by the Indian state – such as Burma’s Indian community in the 1940s and 1960s and as Sri Lanka’s Tamil population continued to be in the 1970s – Uganda’s Asians were treated differently. India’s Foreign Minister, Swaran Singh, argued India could not accept all the Ugandan Asians as Indians: it could not allow Britain to shirk its responsibilities towards its subject-citizens.70 In Uganda, the bureaucratic barriers placed on acquiring local citizenship often had limited its acquisition to the head of the household or breadwinner. Some families made strategic choices to hold different nationalities, allowing a foothold

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both in Uganda and elsewhere. The precarious position of Asians across East Africa had led to a desire to retain some legal ties with other countries, usually Britain. Many of the husbands who became stateless actually had Ugandan papers: only citizens could hold a trading license, and so operate businesses. For others, nationality was not a strategic decision at all but was simply based on ease of registration, or even a failure to register. However, Ugandan documents ceased to offer protection to most Asians after Amin’s announcement. Many were accused of securing false documents.71 Once Amin announced that Asians had to leave Uganda, the places they could go varied with the documents that they held. Asians were hardly passive in this exercise. Many made more than one application. Mike Molloy, who verified “refugees” requesting to enter Canada, recalled that plenty of people applied to the British High Commission to enter that country as passport-holders or citizens, even as they made applications to the Canadian office.72 Stateless persons and Ugandan passport holders who had remained in Uganda, rather than heading to India or elsewhere, came under the protection of the UNHCR. The Red Cross, as after the Second World War, issued travel documents, and the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) arranged transport to transit camps in Europe.73 Indian officials even noted that many Indian document-holders declared themselves stateless and “joined the U.N. bandwagon.”74 Refugee status, whether in Canada or in Europe, could offer an alternative way to access rights and reunite families. Urmila Patel, whose father had arranged for the family to travel to relatives in India while he remained in Uganda to oversee his interests, recalls that they were reunited with him after he fled to Europe.75 This process of leaving-by-document could split families. Besides Indian nationals, Delhi temporarily allowed in those with UK passports, those with Ugandan papers, those with dubious papers, and sometimes those without any papers. Ugandan Asians who failed to secure a permit to enter India, the UK, or Canada became the responsibility of the UNHCR and were sent to its European camps. The only members of the Asian diaspora allowed in Britain held British passports or were close relatives (wives or children) of someone who did, even while they were described and treated as “refugees.” The British government issued 9,601 entry certificates to heads of households – mostly men – which permitted the entry of 28,057 individuals to the UK.76 The early stages of the evacuation of British passport-holders from Uganda demonstrated how family ties could be used to deny access to legal citizenship, as well as the ways that the power to bring family members to the UK varied with gender. Women married to Ugandan passport holders or passport-less men were unable to secure their position in the queue to enter Britain in the earliest days of the expulsion. This initial refusal was based on the notion that a woman’s

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nationality followed that of her husband.77 Niranjan Desai, a member of the Indian Foreign Service sent to Uganda to help the evacuation, recalled a case where the British High Commission denied a female British passport-holder assistance. She was told she was the responsibility of the Indian state, as her husband was not a UK citizen.78 The gendered notion of keeping together a male-led, nuclear family was used to deny women the full rights of citizenship. Eventually, the British state would permit such women, along with any dependent children, to enter the country – but not their husbands. In contrast, Asian men, when permitted into Britain, were allowed to bring their families.79 In the case of Kirit Thakrar, his mother’s expired British passport allowed her and her (minor) children, including Kirit, to travel directly to Britain from Uganda. Her husband was barred, lacking a valid British document.80 The logic of humanitarianism was used to explain these uneven practices. The British government insisted that it had acted in good faith, as a humanitarian agent, in allowing women and children “refugees” into the UK in light of the deteriorating situation in Uganda. However, the government had decided that UK passport-holders wishing to reunite with family members would have to travel to a third country, usually depending on the head of the household, husband, or breadwinner. The government insisted that nationality had always been determined by the status of the patriarch, according to international law. Allowing women and children into the UK was, in this narrative, only to ensure their temporary safety.81 Asians’ varied citizenships, and particularly a patriarch’s lack of UK citizenship was thus exploited to limit British obligations towards unwanted former subject-citizens. As the next section explores, this created an international tussle around specific obligations to Uganda’s Asians, as well as broader conversations about the right to family and international responsibilities towards the stateless.

An International Tussle The question of who was responsible for Uganda’s Asians became a multifaceted one, at the intersection of the UN-led international community’s duties and nation-states’ responsibilities, whether former imperial metropoles or colonies. British domestic legislation insisted that ancestry was important in determining citizenship, while the Indian state championed legal ties as the key to belonging.82 Updated technicalities in British law limited legitimate citizenship for non-white subjects of the former empire. The UK declared that many Asians were stateless in order to pass on responsibility to the international community. London also called for other countries to take on those who had ties to Britain allegedly to prevent “overcrowding.”83 These efforts to limit the numbers the UK was responsible for

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also extended to the specific issue of split families. After all, Owen’s report was specifically concerned with stateless husbands. The UK’s foreign and commonwealth secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, even asked the UNHCR if there was any way to make a case for UK passport holders to leave Britain to join the stateless heads of families overseas. Douglas-Home was keen to paint the issue of split families as an international reunification effort, not a British responsibility for all with possible ties to the UK. Intriguingly, he asked the High Commissioner if the UK could lose some Asian British passport holders in return for taking these stateless husbands, to avoid the impression that other stateless persons in India could come to the UK.84 Such backroom conversations exposed a determination to avoid duty, negotiating away the right to family in favour of the practicality of uniting some people and casting citizens’ rights as interchangeable with those of the stateless. Responsibility could be shifted by moving people to other places, using family to justify their departure from the UK, especially as ethnicity-as-belonging gained greater acceptance in international thinking. International understanding of the underlying causes of statelessness, and associated solutions, had undergone a shift in relation to ideas about nationality and belonging. By the second half of the twentieth century, international legal thinkers, especially those from places in the West like Britain, held that legal statuses of nationality – including those of non-belonging – needed to map onto social ties. This interpretation could potentially absolve states of the duty to protect supposed nationals, instead placing the burden to prove these solid social ties, including ancestry, upon those whose rights (like citizenship) were cast into doubt. This took place against a backdrop where newly decolonizing states resented increased international oversight that potentially infringed upon their right to self-determination and full control within national territories. Caught between the United Kingdom’s and India’s opposing insistences on the primacy of social versus legal ties, Ugandan Asians’ plight exposed this tension. At the UN, Douglas-Home referred to expellees’ “primal” ties with India, a clear appeal to perceived ancestral and social connections that, in his view, trumped the legal documentation (British passports) that many of them retained.85 On the ground, Kirit Thakrar recalled that Ugandan guards at checkpoints monitoring departing Asians would ask how much money the family held in India, revealing widely held assumptions that Ugandan Asians retained deep ties with the subcontinent.86 In contrast, Delhi insisted that non-nationals were not its responsibility. To the Indian state, all those without Indian documents were either the responsibility of the UK – as UK passport holders or their close family members – or that of the UN-led international community. India insisted that about 3,000 of the Ugandan Asians within its borders be resettled elsewhere as a matter of urgency.87

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For its own part, the UNHCR, and through it the UN, was reluctant to play a role in this debate. Rather than focusing on legal complexities arising from the Asians’ many competing citizenship claims, the UNHCR’s priority was to advise what was most likely to guarantee practical assistance for resettlement. It saw no need for a “global decision of group eligibility criteria,” recognizing that the gift of asylum lay within the power of individual nation-states. Even so, it hoped that they would acknowledge the Asians as refugees, as outlined in the 1951 and 1967 Conventions. The UNHCR only took on an active role for those whom no other state was willing to accept or who had been unable to leave and were at risk within Uganda as Amin’s 8 November 1972 deadline for Asian departure loomed. Still, each individual’s travel documents needed to be examined (regardless of whether they wished to use that particular document), and the country an Asian wished to migrate to had to be consulted.88 The UN prioritized individualization in the recognition and evacuation of Uganda’s Asians, as well as the sovereign state’s right to choose who crossed its borders. Amongst those deemed stateless, two distinct groups appeared: those under UNHCR protection and those who had been permitted entry into another country, usually India. The UNHCR prioritized the former, who were sent to European transit camps.89 As Owen noted critically in her report, the UNHCR saw refugees in India as the responsibility of the state, even as the agency was aware of the limited assistance India could (or was willing) to offer.90 The international community was thus complicit in offering nation-states that received stateless people varying support. The Indian government had always intended to facilitate the mobility of at least some of these stateless Asians, rather than automatically assuming that they would settle in India. The Indian High Commission in Uganda issued emergency certificates in the early days of the crisis and began to issue affidavits once the situation in Uganda grew worse and the numbers of people making requests increased. Unlike emergency certificates, which expired on entry to India, affidavits were a travel document underwritten by the Indian government that allowed re-entry into India.91 While Indian authorities assisted Indian passport-holders upon arrival, they made clear that the same was not on offer for those with Ugandan passports or without papers. Optimistic that these groups would leave Indian territory, Delhi maintained they were the duty of the international community.47 Indian authorities feared any admission of responsibility would encourage such groups to stay in India. That precedent could place other Indian diasporas across the world at risk of deportation or make them India’s responsibility regardless of their legal status. As such, for the stateless who went to India on emergency certificates or affidavits declaring them of “undetermined nationality,” the international impasse often led to destitution and dire circumstances. Members of the Displaced Citizens of Uganda

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Association wrote to Sadruddin Aga Khan, the High Commissioner for Refugees, that they had been promised assistance from the Indian government but had not received it. It is not clear who promised this to them, if there was a promise at all.92 By 1973, the deadlock over stateless Asians residing in India was evident. Delhi directed them to the UNHCR, which directed them back to the Indian officials. As late as 1974, no Indian assistance for those without passports or who held UK passports had materialized, leaving migrants to approach extended families if they could or to reach out to community organizations and NGOs. Yet, though India wished to discourage settlement, emigration was equally unlikely. Going to a place like India first endangered many Asians’ later resettlement to the UK or Canada, even if this was to re-join family. They often became subject to normal emigration requirements to the UK, Canada, USA, and other European countries.93 As Owen’s report made clear, the British officials dealing with Ugandan Asians in India referred to these people as “potential immigrants,” a term associated with voluntary and often economic migration. Owen herself used the more sympathetic terms “refugee” and “evacuee.”94 Partly through the power of language and naming in limiting obligations, the stateless were transformed into unwanted immigrants once they were within India, despite having left Uganda in a humanitarian emergency and meeting the criteria of the UN’s refugee convention. Owen specifically sought to explain why India was not a natural choice for many Ugandan Asians and what prevented their settlement in the UK. She added that the question was a global one, involving international NGOs and the UNHCR. When removed from their Indian Ocean and East African networks of mobility, even skilled and formerly prosperous Asians could not easily resume their livelihoods within new postcolonial national geographies, even if they were sent to cities and places where they had ancestral ties. For many Uganda Asians who ended up in India, it was not a sense of identity that led them there, but the fact India offered the speediest route of escape in a time of crisis.95 A Guardian piece on Owen’s report even loudly proclaimed in its headline that “[UK] Govt. Ignoring 300 Asians in Destitute Condition in India,” acknowledging that the stateless husbands of UK passport-holding wives were denied entry to the UK despite having no access to support in India.96 Owen was hardly alone in advocating for the rights of the stateless stranded in India. Mary Dines, of the UK-based Joint Committee for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), which supported new arrivals at airports and took them to resettlement centres, urged the UNHCR to act. Delhi insisted that many who had initially been given only a six-month permit to stay in India should leave on its expiration. Dines called upon the UNHCR either to support those who were stateless or to admit that it could not take responsibility for settling them elsewhere.97 Just as the Ugandan Asians in India themselves wrote to the High Commissioner for Refugees, members

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of NGOs supporting the Asian community in the UK similarly lobbied the international community to address the position of the stateless in India. In this tussle between the UK, India, and the UNCHR, all parties appealed to family intimacies as a principle to manage migration and as an appeal to humanitarian compassion. Re-uniting families became a way for India and the UK to encourage unwanted Asians to move away from these countries.

Family as Humanitarianism With the Ugandan Asian crisis, the nuclear family became a new category of international humanitarian attention. Reunification was presented as compassion rather than as a right. The liberal values of the bourgeois, domestic, nuclear family were a product of a nineteenth-century Europe, shaped by the prosperity brought by its colonial empires; they deliberately excluded those whose labour European wealth relied on, instead commodifying colonized peoples deemed unfit for modernity.98 Such notions of family and marriage, and the place of women’s sexualities, became a marker of a colonizing modernity that set colonizers apart from those they conquered, even as it justified intervention and absolute governance over others.99 By the twentieth century, family ties became a way to assimilate some (formerly) colonized peoples who met an arbitrary, racialized standard of modernity in the western world, excluding those who did not.100 It limited the rights of those within families not recognized to be nuclear, for example in the case of Asian women in polygamous marriages in early twentieth century South Africa. Women’s mobility became entirely dependent on their husbands – even as in the process of being made legible to the state, some wives were made concubines in an effort to make these polygamous families fit liberal, modern notions.101 Such manipulations of the “proper” nuclear family informed belonging and immigration into the late twentieth century. In the UK, policies towards nonwhite (nuclear) families could reverse over time. British fears of racial mixing in the mid-twentieth century led to the promotion of non-white nuclear families becoming reunited in the UK; however, this policy was reversed to limit non-white immigration entirely, restricting visas for spouses by the 1970s. 102 The racialized logic of the nuclear family played out in both the splitting and the reunification of the Ugandan Asians. The international community embodied by the UNHCR recognized the importance of reuniting families. UNHCR lobbying accompanied on-the-ground action by Asians and civil society groups. The High Commissioner appealed to a universal goal of uniting families, though this initially heavily focused on stateless husbands in European camps.103 Privately, those working for the UNHCR were sympathetic

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to the plight of stateless husbands in India and their desire to settle in the UK with their families.104 The emphasis on these husbands demonstrated how a particular type of family seemed to be the object of international scrutiny. But the family within Britain, and who could be absorbed and who could not, was considered by UK officials to be different from the family elsewhere. Officials from British High Commission in India promoted the stereotype of the extended Hindu “joint” family as being able to absorb all far-flung kin.105 In contrast, those without British passports travelling to be with their families in the UK were deported or jailed under orders from the Home Office, regardless of their status as refugees or as stateless persons.106 The British government thus claimed the family outside of Europe was different from that within it, arguing for fewer obligations to its non-white subjects. The nuclear family became both the site of claims making by British Ugandan Asians and of rights denial and deprivation by British authorities. The question of split families and their reunification in the UK was also framed around an older idea of women’s dependency on the men in their families. The UK government relied on longstanding patriarchal principles for determining a family’s nationality and on the regulations of the 1971 Immigration Act, even as the British public and parliament questioned its implications for gender equality. In 1974, the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, admitted that there was an obvious gendered-based discrimination; he simultaneously defended it as preventing a wave of immigration from the subcontinent – an unsurprising concern in an era defined by Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech.107 However, the logic of the nuclear family was also turned against the British state. As Jordanna Bailkin notes, Ugandan Asian women in UK camps specifically appealed to the notion of reliance. They drew on contemporary British ideas about Asian families, specifically the dependency of women on men that defied wider 1970s UK norms of women finding paid work. These women also pointed out that reunification with stateless husbands would make them less of a burden on the UK’s welfare state.108 A Mrs. Rahemtula, whose husband had gone to Bombay, told the Guardian that he could not get a work permit there, whereas if he was allowed into the UK, he would be able to find work and support their family of eight children. Without him, Mrs. Rahemtula was too afraid even to leave the camp to accept the offer of a house in Teeside. Dines of the JCWI pointed to the impracticalities of reuniting such families in India and Pakistan, where these men were denied a living and so kept in destitution.109 By the time of this interview, husbands in European camps had been permitted to re-join their wives, so this plea was specifically for such a concession to extend to South Asia. Ugandan Asian women and NGOs supporting them were not alone in making such claims. In a conversation with Douglas-Home, Sadruddin Aga Khan (the High Commissioner for Refugees),

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made the case that split families were different from other types of stateless people the UK wished to deter, as these men were mostly “breadwinners.”110 This gendered and familial approach pitted British municipal legislation against a much wider, but unenforceable, set of international principles and obligations. Escape and evacuation in the Ugandan crisis prioritized individual status, much like the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol (which globalized the Convention’s definition of the refugee). The right to family life became a casualty of nation-state concerns about migrant influxes. Outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this right has had a complex history of non-realization in relation to refugee relief and law.111 Multiple sites of resettlement actively adopted an approach that has been described as a “toxic” humanitarianism that prioritized and publicized the act of rescue without necessarily considering the longer-term welfare or desires of the parties concerned. Vietnamese refugee children transported to the UK stand out as an example here, with the political context of the humanitarian crisis and the problems of adoption across borders ignored.112 Ugandan Asian families became subject to state manipulation; reuniting them meant appealing to humanitarian principles that saw these stateless husbands as a case for exceptional compassion, rather than conceding the wider question of their (and others’) right to family. Even once family re-unification was finally accepted by the UK government it differentiated between stateless husbands by location, exposing the tension between ethnicity and legal ties that shaped wider conversations about statelessness. A January 1973 UK government note suggested allowing husbands’ entry in three stages: first, those already in the UK (many of whom had been detained), then those in camps in Europe, and finally those further afield, as in India. Having been given initial refuge in India, the latter were seen to have the least claim on the UK. And yet, the Foreign Office was aware that many Ugandan Asians did not have the right to re-entry and that Delhi had been quite strict about not re-admitting non-citizens.113 Owen’s study of split families exposed how the UK’s assumption that these men were or could be settled in India was flawed; these stateless patriarchs in India were no better off, despite their ostensible local ethnic ties. Dines’ and Owen’s reports (from the JCWI and CCWEU respectively) reveal two distinct approaches to the case of stateless husbands in South Asia. Owen made the case for compassion for a select few persons, rather than a universal obligation to former British colonial subjects. Of the forty-five refugee heads of household whom Owen surveyed in Gujarat, she considered none of them “settled” or able to support their families within India. They had neither jobs nor homes nor access to resettlement support from the Indian government. According to Indian officials, they were aliens to life and society in India.114 Owen, according to a British consular officer in Bombay, “… did not agree … that all Commonwealth Citizens should have

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the right of abode in the UK but she would campaign very loudly (this I believe) for the alteration of the law so that all husbands should be allowed to join their wives if the wife had right of entry to U.K.”115 Owen, then, appealed to the notion of reuniting these families because of their exceptionally difficult circumstances rather than their legal right to be together. Dines, on the other hand, appealed more closely to the legal and human right to family, rather than the exceptional situation created in a humanitarian crisis. She called for the international community to lean heavily on the British government: Those whose families are in the U.K. cannot make a claim on any country with the exception of Britain and that pressure should therefore be put on the British to admit them. As long, however, as the British Government are able to say that they are the responsibility of the international community, it is clear that they will not face up to this fact.116

Dines also pointed to another tendency, that of the UK to pass off the Ugandan Asian crisis as an international problem. In all of this, the Indian government too had realized the power of family. India’s determination that Britain and the international community shoulder their “responsibilities” led the government to direct the stateless to travel to their families, asking the UNHCR to help any Asians who wanted to leave. As Indian government officials predicted, few UK-passport-holders wished to relinquish their citizenship rights to come to India to join their male family member there, especially since he often could not support himself. Their only recourse to rehabilitation assistance in India was citizenship by naturalization, acquired after five years of residence. However, even when stateless Asians wanted to re-join their families abroad the UNHCR redirected them to diplomatic missions.117 A major international humanitarian actor – and by extension the international community – passed back the problem to state manipulations of immigration law. In 1974, a couple of months after Jenkins’ admission of a deliberate, gendered discrimination to prevent South Asian migration, a change of policy meant that all husbands of British Ugandan Asian women could enter the United Kingdom, not just those in European camps. While hailed by campaigners, the decision was accompanied by caveats to offset broader South Asian immigration, especially to prevent arranged marriages and so further spousal arrivals.118 Gender, marriage, family, and race remained part of this conversation on limiting migration and became increasingly visible, especially with the subsequent late 1970s scandal of virginity testing for South Asian women.119 Re-uniting split Ugandan Asian families was a one-time concession undertaken for compassionate and humanitarian reasons. It did not signal a wider change in UK policy.120

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Conclusion Humanitarian action has historically replaced lost rights with (often time-limited) assistance. Within the British Empire, humanitarianism often reinforced the imperial mission, serving to counteract the revolutionary promises of rights by replacing them with charitable action.121 Even the postcolonial Indian state was criticized for restricting rehabilitation to those who were not able bodied rather than instituting rehabilitation as a basic right for India’s refugee citizens.122 Human rights, as Stephen Hopgood argues, are increasingly inconvenient to the agenda of the state; humanitarianism acts to limit that inconvenience and to provide some solace for the vulnerable.123 In the case of Ugandan Asian families, humanitarianism justified both their splitting and reunification. The postcolonial international order presided over a similar management of intimacies across oceans as the imperial order had, but compassion replaced commodification in determining why and how people should move. The violence of the postcolonial state could be observed in its bestowal of compassion in lieu of a recognition of the rights of citizens. In this volume on South Asian internationalisms, the case of the Ugandan Asians allows us to ask who shaped the international order, exposing the limits and manipulations of rights when applied to the Ugandan Asian family. As new borders were drawn over transnational lives through processes of partitioning (see Kalyani Ramnath’s chapter), the difficulties of neatly fitting into postcolonial states transformed Asians from imperial subjects to national minorities and international objects and agents. In creating this as an exception or as a particular prioritization, the future claims of other groups could be delegitimized.124 Limiting international action to humanitarianism was the only way to account for three postcolonial nations’ competing ideas of what citizenship should look like. As Lydia Walker points out in this volume, diasporic South Asians gradually and willy-nilly forged new relationships with nation-states in the aftermath of multiple decolonizations; this was reflected in the complex process of dispersal-by-passport in the aftermath of expulsion for Uganda’s Asians. The South Asian diaspora’s resettlement was made a one-off, humanitarian act rather than an acknowledgement of the complex rights of subject-citizens in the unravelling British empire. Britain, India, and even the UN, all used the family itself as a site for asserting the logic of the nation-state. Meanwhile, Asians themselves, as well as those supporting split families, lay claim to the humanity of reuniting families in distress. In 2022, efforts for Ukrainian refugees in the UK cite the Ugandan Asians’ reception as part of Britain’s great humanitarian history.125 Yet in 1973, the European Court of Human Rights found that the British state had, in “preventing them from entering Britain after admitting their respective wives to permanent residence, violated their rights to respect for their family life” under Articles 8 and 14 of its Human Rights convention.126 The decision laid bare the falsehood of humanitarian kindness,

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which split families by offering women and children shelter without allowing their remaining family members to join them and framed reunification as a one-off act of compassion. Family, as applied to a South Asian diaspora being resettled in the Global North, was itself used to reshape a liberal internationalist view of rights, subjugating it to the politics of nation-state belonging through humanitarian practice.

Notes 53

For Kenya, see Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), introduction and chapter 1. For Tanzania, see Eric Burton, “‘…What Tribe Shall We Call Him’: The Indian Diaspora, the State, and the Nation in Tanzania since ca.1850,” Strichproben 25 (2013), 1–28. See also Douglas Tilbe, The Ugandan Asian Crisis (London: Community of Race Relations Unit of the British Council of Churches, 1972); K.C. Kotecha, “The Shortchanged: Uganda Citizenship Laws and How They Were Applied to Its Asian Minority,” The International Lawyer 9 (1975) 1–29.

54

Sara Cosemans, “The Politics of Dispersal: Turning Ugandan Colonial Subjects into Postcolonial Refugees (1967-76),” Migration Studies 6 (2018), 99–119; Sara Cosemans, “Undesirable British East African Asians: Nationality, Statelessness, and Refugeehood after Empire,” Immigrants & Minorities 40 (2021), 210–39.

55

National Archives of India, Delhi (NAI), HI/1012(63)72: Political Report for October-November 1972, Political Reports (Other than Annual) from Kampala, 1972; Freda Hawkins, “Uganda Asians in Canada,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 2 (1973), 268.

56

Divya Tolia Kelly, “Materializing Post-colonial Geographies: Examining the Textural Landscapes of Migration in the South Asian Home,” Geoforum 35 (2004), 675–88.

57

Jordanna Bailkin, Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 134–56.

58

Archives of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Geneva (UNHCR), Fonds 11 Series 1, Box 18, 1.IND.ASI vol. 1: Letter from Sadruddin Aga Khan to Douglas Tilbe, 2 October 1973.

59

UK National Archives, Kew (UKNA), Uganda: Split Families FCO 50/455: B3 division, 25 January 1973; UNHCR, Fonds 11 Series 1, Box, 1.IND.ASI 18 vol. 1: The UNHCR representative in Delhi on Ugandan Asians – Family Reunion, 21 January 1974.

60

UNHCR, Fonds 11 Series 1, Box 18, 1.IND.ASI Vol. 1: Report by Mrs. Margaret Owen on Uganda Asians in India; Kew, UKNA, FCO 50/461, News cutting – Peter Cole, “Britain ‘Opting Out’ over Asians,” Guardian, 4 December 1973, 6.

61

Joanna Herbert, “The British Ugandan Asian Diaspora: Multiple and Contested Belongings,” Global Networks 12 (2012), 296–313; Margret Frenz, “Global Goans: Migration Movements and Identity in a Historical Perspective,” Lusotopie 15 (2008), 183–202.

62

Savita Nair, “Despite Dislocations: Uganda’s Indians Remaking Home,” Africa 88 (2018), 497–503.

63

Mira Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 199–200.

64

Chibuike Uche, “The British Government, Idi Amin and the Expulsion of British Asians from Uganda,” Interventions 19 (2017), 823–4.

65

Sarah Ansari, “Subjects or Citizens? India, Pakistan and the 1948 British Nationality Act,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41 (2013), 285–312.

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66

For a contemporary description of Ugandan discussions of Asian citizenship leading to the expulsion, including two memoranda submitted to Amin’s government, see Hasu H. Patel, “General Amin and the Indian Exodus from Uganda,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion 2 (1972), 12–22.

67

Ian Sanjay Patel, We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (London: Verso, 2021).

68

Yumiko Hamai, “‘Imperial Burden’ or ‘Jews of Africa’? An Analysis of Political and Media Discourse in the Ugandan Asian Crisis (1972),” Twentieth Century British History 22 (2011), 421; Cosemans, The Politics of Dispersal, 105–9.

69

Derek Humphry and Michael Ward, Passports and Politics (London: Penguin Books, 1974), 14. Hugh Tinker, “Indians Abroad: Emigration, Restriction, and Rejection,” in Michael Twaddle (ed.), Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Asians (London: Athlone Press, 1975); Deborah Sutton, “Divided and Uncertain Loyalties: Partition, Indian Sovereignty and Contested Citizenship in East Africa, 1948-1955,” Interventions 9 (2007), 276–88; Itty Abraham, How India became Territorial (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014),73–106.

70

UNHCR, Fonds 11 Series 2, Box 204, 100.UGA.ASI vol. 2: India to Consider Some Cases, Uganda Argus, 5 September 1972.

71

Tilbe, The Ugandan Asian Crisis; Kotecha, The Shortchanged; Gijsbert Oonk, “Gujarati Asians in East Africa, 1880-2000: Colonization, De-colonization and Complex Citizenship Issues,” Diaspora Studies 8 (2015), 66–79.

72

An Oral History with Mike Molloy, Oral History Project, Uganda Collection, Carleton University. Available at https://carleton.ca/uganda-collection/people/michael-molloy/ (accessed 4 November 2021).

73

UNHCR, Fonds 10c, Box 5, Press Releases 1973: First Group of Stateless Heads of Family from Uganda Arrives from Transit Centre in Europe for Family Reunion in United Kingdom.

74

NAI, Annual Reports from Kampala HI/1011 (70)/73: Annual Consular Report for 1972, High Commission of India, Kampala, 8 January 1973.

75

Urmila Patel, Out of Uganda in 90 Days (Fremont: Create Space, 2014).

76

NAI, HI/1011(70)/73: Annual Report from Kampala 1972.

77

Oliver Pritchett, “‘Queue-jumping’ Asians Released,” Guardian, 4 October 1972, 6.

78

Niranjan Desai, “Persona Non Grata in Idi Amin’s Uganda,” in Krishna V. Rajan (ed.) The Ambassador’s Club: The Indian Diplomat at Large (London: HarperCollins, 2012), epub edition 1413–1419.

79

Mark Arnold-Foster, “A Passport to Separation,” Guardian, 17 October 1972, 15.

80

UKNA, “Kirit Thakrar: Personal Memories of the Expulsion” narrated by J.P. Agrawal, Uganda Asians 40 Years On, https://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/kirit-thakrar-narrated-by-agrawal-chandran-­ personal-memories-of-the-expulsion/ (accessed 4 November 2021).

81

Ugandan Asians, House of Commons Debate, 13 November 1972, Hansard vol. 856, 35–52. https://api. parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1972/nov/13/ugandan-asians (accessed 14 February 2021).

82

Siegelberg, Statelessness; Cosemans, “Modern Statelessness and the British Imperial Perspective: A Comment on Mira Siegelberg’s Statelessness: A Modern History,” History of European Ideas 47 (2021), 99–119.

83

Cosemans, “Undesirable British East African Asians.”

84

UKNA, FCO 50/455: Draft, “Uganda” (Minuted meeting with UNHCR).

85

Robert Alden, “Britain Asks U.N. Assembly Seek to Delay Expulsion of Asians by Uganda,” New York Times, 28 September 1972, https://www.nytimes.com/1972/09/28/archives/britain-asks-un-assemblyseek-to-delay-expulsion-of-asians-by.html (accessed 8 February 2021).

86

UKNA, “Kirit Thakrar: Personal Memories of the Expulsion.”

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87

UNHCR 1.IND.ASI Vol. 1: Report by Mrs. Margaret Owen.

88

UNHCR, Fonds 13 Series 4(i), Box 43 Vol. 1, Uganda Asians: Uganda Asians in Zaire, from the UNHCR REP in Republic of Zaire to Antoine Noel, 29 December 1972.

89

UNHCR, Fonds 11 Series 2, Box 98, 100.IND.ASi: Uganda Asians in India – Guidelines, 17 May 1973.

90

UKNA, FCO 50/461: “Asians from Uganda who Fled to India in 1972/73,” Letter from CP Scott to Lord Balniel, 20 November 1973.

91

UNHCR, Fonds 11 Series 1, Box 18, 1.IND.AS [I]: Hordijk to UNHCR, Ugandan Asians in India, 19 April 1973.

92

UNHCR, Fonds 11 Series 1 Box 18, 1.IND.AS [I]: Letter to Sadruddin Aga Khan from the Displaced Citizens of Uganda, 17 April 1973.

93

UNHCR, Fonds 11 Series 2, Box 98, 100.IND.ASI vol.2: Uganda Asians in India – Guidelines, 17 May 1973.

94

UNHCR 1.IND.ASI Vol. 1: Report by Mrs. Margaret Owen.

95

Ibid.

96

Cole, “Britain ‘Opting Out’ over Asians.”

97

UNHCR, Fonds 11 Series 1, Box 18, 1.IND.ASI vol.1: Asians Expelled From Uganda, M Dines, 31 May 1973.

98

Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

99

Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 41–78.

100

Joe Turner, Bordering Intimacy: Postcolonial Governance and the Policing of Family (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).

101

Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 85–112.

102

Joe Turner, “The Family Migration Visa in the History of Marriage Restrictions: Postcolonial Relations and the UK Border,” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 17 (2015), 623–43.

103

UNHCR, Fonds 10c Box 5, Press Releases 1973: First Group of Stateless Heads of Family from Uganda Arrives from Transit Centre in Europe for Family Reunion in United Kingdom.

104

Cole, “Britain ‘Opting Out’ over Asians.”

105

UNHCR 1.IND.ASI Vol. 1: Report by Mrs. Margaret Owen.

106

House of Commons Debate, Ugandan Asians, 13 November 1972.

107

Jake Watson, “Family Ideation, Immigration, and the Racial State: Explaining Divergent Family Reunification Policies in Britain and the US,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 (2018), 331–5; NAI, Digitized Public Records External Affairs, Political Reports etc. (other than Annual Report) from London, File HI/1012(56)/74: Political Report for March 1974.

108

Bailkin, Unsettled, 119–23.

109

Rosemary Collins, “Wives in Waiting,” Guardian, 6 August 1973, 6.

110

UKNA, FCO 50/455: Draft, “Uganda” (Minuted meeting with UNHCR).

111

Alice Edwards, “Human Rights, Refugees, and the Right ‘to Enjoy’ Asylum,” International Journal of Refugee Law 17 (2005) 293–330.

112

See Becky Taylor, “‘Don’t Just Look for a New Pet’: The Vietnamese airlift, Child Refugees and the Dangers of Toxic Humanitarianism,” Patterns of Prejudice 52 (2018), 195–209.

113

UKNA, FCO 50/455, Uganda: Split Families, 26 January 1973.

114

UNHCR, 1.IND.ASI Vol. 1: Report by Mrs. Margaret Owen.

115

UKNA, FCO 50/457: Letter from A.D.G. Stephenson to E. Loader, 29 October 1973.

116

UNHCR, Fonds 11 Series 1 Box 18, 1.IND.ASI vol.1: Asians Expelled from Uganda, M Dines, 31 May 1973.

re-uniting split families 163

117

UNHCR, Fonds 11 Series 1 Box 18, 1.IND.ASI vol.1: Hordijk to Kelly, Uganda Asians in India, 26 October 1973.

118

NAI, File HI/1012(56)/74: Political report for June, 29 July 1974.

119

Evan Smith and Marinella Marmo, “Uncovering the ‘Virginity Testing’ Controversy in the National Archives: The Intersectionality of Discrimination in British Immigration History,” Gender & History 23 (2011), 147–65.

120

UNHCR, Fonds 13 Sub fonds 1 Series 4(i), Uganda Asians vol. 6: Interoffice memorandum no 22/74 on “Uganda Asians – United Kingdom,” 9 April 1974.

121

Alan Lester, “Humanitarian Governance and the Circumvention of Revolutionary Human Rights in the British Empire,” in Michael N. Barnett (ed.), Humanitarianism and Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 107–26. For the longer history of humanitarianism’s imperial origins and its new, secular forms in the postcolonial state, see Michael N. Barnett, Empire of Humanity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

122

Joya Chatterji, “Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal,” in Suvir Kaul (ed.), The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 74–110; Uditi Sen, Citizen-Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

123

Stephen Hopgood, “For a Fleeting Moment: The Short, Happy Life of Modern Humanism,” in Barnett, Humanitarianism and Human Rights, 89–104.

124

This hierarchy has been observed elsewhere, for example in the prioritization of certain kinds of sexual and medical cases at the expense of other types of migrants. See Miriam Ticktin, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

125

“Lessons from the Past on Hosting Refugees in Britain,” Guardian, 18 March 2022, https://www.the�guardian.com/world/2022/mar/18/lessons-from-the-past-on-hosting-refugees-in-britain?utm_term​ =Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter (accessed 27 June 2022).

126

European Court of Human Rights, “East African Asians vs/the United Kingdom,” 3 EHRR 76, [1973] ECHR 2, https://www.bailii.org/eu/cases/ECHR/1973/2.html#note1 (accessed 31 May 2022).

PART III

South Asian Roots of the International

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For many South Asian elites and intellectuals, international engagement was not something forced upon the subcontinent by the advent of colonial rule. Rather, South Asia offered diverse prototypes for global exchange and mobilization, and South Asians could – and did – take the lead in promoting alternative forms of internationalism. This section traces three different lineages of South Asian internationalism, each of which were rooted in the history and practices of the subcontinent. Yorim Spoelder traces the movements and evolving ideas of Kalidas Nag, the founder of the Greater India Society who traveled the world between the two world wars. Nag’s outlook was simultaneously global and local. While he advocated for global humanism as a means of avoiding another catastrophic world war, he linked this intellectual project to a rewriting of history that gave India the leading role in “discovering” the Pacific in the Age of Exploration. He thus positioned India, rather than Europe, at the head of both past and present global orders. Moving into the era of Afro-Asian decolonization, Carolien Stolte reveals how the transnational organization, the World Peace Brigade, had its roots in personal relationships established at the Gandhigram ashram near Dindigul, in southern India. The movement, which sought to promote peace against the backdrop of a nuclear Cold War, derived both ideas and practices from Gandhian models of nonviolence. However, it increasingly came up against the imperatives of newly independent states more interested in establishing their sovereignty. Lastly, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs explores the history of Pakistan’s Jamaat-i Islami, the political party established by the prominent Muslim thinker, Abu l’-A’la Mawdudi. Jamaat, like Mawdudi, sought both national and international revolutions deriving from the sociopolitical power of Islam. They linked this political project to South Asia’s much longer history of pan-Islamic mobilization, questioning the assumed central importance of the Middle East. In all these cases, South Asian internationalists argued that the subcontinent should take a leading role in shaping the world order, citing its history and diverse ideological lineages. But they also wrestled, often unsuccessfully, with the fraught relationship between nationalism and internationalism, struggling to create systems or networks that could comfortably accommodate both universalist ideas and nation-state practices. 

CHAPTER 7

An “Indian Hermes” between Paris and the Pacific: Kalidas Nag, Greater India, and the Quest for a Global Humanism Yorim Spoelder

Abstract This chapter explores the networks and internationalism of Greater India Society co-founder Kalidas Nag (1892-1966). Nag’s interwar trajectory and travels bring into focus a range of networks and geographies that are rarely studied in relation to interwar Indian internationalism. Steering clear of the currents of left-wing internationalism and Wilsonianism, Nag aligned his internationalist agenda for a global humanism with the Asianist visions of Rabindranath Tagore and the pacifism of the French writer Romain Rolland. Nag’s schemes were fully invested in interwar civilizational discourse and were inspired by the ancient cultural geography of Greater India. The chapter maps the various influences that shaped Nag’s internationalist outlook and zooms in on his role as a pioneer in Indo-Pacific studies in the 1940s.

Key words: Greater India, Kalidas Nag, interwar internationalism, Indo-Pacific studies, global humanism

This chapter explores the networks and internationalism of Tagore-associate and Greater India Society (GIS) co-founder Kalidas Nag (1892-1966). In the historiography on Indian interwar internationalism, Nag remains a side-character operating in the shadow of Tagore and has elicited considerably less attention than his more famous contemporaries, such as Subhas Chandra Bose and M.N. Roy, who each have inspired a voluminous literature.1 Yet Nag was arguably one of the most widely travelled and well-connected Indian intellectuals of his generation. Moving with equal poise in international scholarly, Orientalist, and literary circles, Nag was, unlike Roy and Bose, not a political activist engaged in an all-out assault against the British Raj. Instead, he was a “university personality” and tireless institution builder who subtly attacked the Raj in the realm of knowledge by establishing rapport with scholars and writers across the globe. His dazzling and ever-expanding itinerary was, quite literally, “unbound” and covered all continents. Steering clear of extreme political positions that would jeopardize his freedom of movement, Nag acted as a savvy

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“go-between” and used his considerable domestic and global network to organize the Greater India movement. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the GIS radically and lastingly reconfigured the narration of India’s ancient past by spreading a popular awareness of its historical role as Asia’s cultural and spiritual fount. Nag’s interwar trajectory and travels bring into focus a range of networks and geographies that are rarely studied in relation to Indian internationalism. Almost perpetually on the move and tirelessly cultivating connections with Orientalists in continental Europe and Southeast Asia, Nag was one of the key driving forces behind the Greater India movement and helped turn Calcutta into the South Asian node of a transimperial knowledge network that linked Orientalist clusters in Paris, Hanoi, Batavia, and Leiden.2 Steering clear of the currents of left-wing internationalism and Wilsonianism, Nag aligned his internationalist agenda for a global humanism with the Asianist visions of Tagore and the pacifist stance of the French writer Romain Rolland. Nag’s schemes were fully invested in the civilizational discourse of “East” and “West,” and steeped in historicism. According to Nag, Indian internationalism had a long history that could be traced back to the Mauryan emperor Asoka and the ancient template of Buddhist cosmopolitanism that, he believed, had marked the heyday of Greater India. The ancient cultural geography of Greater India, in turn, energized Nag’s internationalist agenda in the interwar period. The central role of the historical imagination in this Asianist scheme was reflected in Nag’s impressive oeuvre of essays, journal articles, and monographs on the historical legacies and contemporary relevance of “Greater India.” Yet, although oriented towards the “East,” the Greater India that emerged from Nag’s writings transcended the Asian sphere. Nag’s understanding of the geographical contours of this Greater India was more elastic than Tagore’s, and his travels, study trips, and lecture tours in the US and the Pacific region in the 1930s and 1940s further stretched its geographical scope. The chapter proceeds chronologically. The first part charts Nag’s early intellectual formation. It maps the various influences that shaped his internationalist outlook and inspired him to become the steering force behind the Greater India movement in the 1920s. The second part probes how Nag’s understanding of “Greater India” evolved in the 1930s and zooms in on his role as a pioneer in IndoPacific Studies in the 1940s. The conclusion offers a broader assessment of Nag’s intellectual legacy, in particular with respect to the template of Greater India.

Connecting Internationalism and Orientalism: Greater India, Revisionist Pedagogy, and the Quest for a Global Humanism Nag was born in the environs of Calcutta and hailed from a Bengali family well-connected to the city’s leading intellectual circles. Nag’s memoirs remain silent about

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his parents but his father, Matilal Nag, appears to have been a musician, and he mentions spending his “infancy at the huge residence of the Dutts at Bowbazar.” 3 Members of the prominent Dutt family were at the forefront of cultural and political developments in Calcutta and managed the Savitri Library, which Nag remembered as a “leading centre of Bengali culture” and where his father acted as a “honorary librarian.”4 Following his Calcutta college days, which culminated with honors obtained in the history BA exam, Nag joined the postgraduate department of the University of Calcutta in 1912 and moved into the orbit of the Tagores, the educational pioneer Asutosh Mookerjee, and the humanist philosopher Brajendranath Seal. As Nag reminisced, “Sir Asutosh” played a crucial role in opening new intellectual horizons by drawing “towards our university a veritable galaxy of scholars” from both India and Europe and “thus helped us in forming a world outlook long before we had the opportunity of undertaking a world tour.”5 But it was Tagore who was Nag’s intellectual lodestar; he had early on become “a Tagore fanatic” and the Bengali poet facilitated Nag’s international trajectory by introducing him as a potential student to the prominent French Indologist Sylvain Lévi.6 This “international” phase of Nag’s life had started with a spell as principal of Mahinda College in Galle (Ceylon) in 1918, but was given a decisive impetus during his sojourn in Paris (1921-3) as a doctoral student working with leading French Orientalists, including Lévi, the Central Asian explorer Paul Pelliot, the archaeologist Joseph Hackin and the Sinologist Georges Maspero.7 A tireless networker, Nag seems to have been permanently distracted from his dissertation on Kautilya’s Arthashastra.8 If not attending meetings of the Société Asiatique, he was on the move, crisscrossing Europe to establish rapport with leading Orientalists in Christiana (Sten Konow), Leiden (J.Ph. Vogel), Rome (Carlo Formichi and Giuseppe Tucci), and Prague (Moriz Winternitz). But Nag was not just a passive visitor gathering insights about the research agendas of different Indological research clusters and cultivating relations with the crème de la crème of European Orientalism. During his peregrinations abroad, he often accepted an invitation to deliver a talk on ancient Indian history or the ideals and missions of Tagore and Gandhi.9 Despite his busy schedule and longer absences from the French capital, Nag still found time to participate in the inauguration of the Indian Association in Paris, collect book donations for Tagore’s newly founded international university of Visva-Bharati, and roam the Khmer and Serindian collections of Musée Guimet. This may sound like too much to handle for any PhD-student, but Nag also managed, during his two-year Parisian sojourn, to squeeze in short visits to Amsterdam, Antwerp, Stockholm, Berlin, Potsdam, Dresden, Weimar, Munich, Vienna, Geneva, Lugano, Venice, Florence, Naples, Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Cordoba, and London, where he was hosted by his future GIS-colleague, Suniti Kumar Chatterjee. Nag’s international network was, thus, energized by personal travels and relied on

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establishing rapport in person with leading scholars and intellectuals. His close acquaintance with Tagore certainly opened doors, but Nag gathered further introductions along the way and swirled across Europe from host to host. However, his own financial position remained, throughout the interwar period, precarious.10 Often relying on external funding or financial support from his younger brother, the artist and co-founder of the Kallol literary group Gokul Chandra Nag, his stays abroad typically resembled pit stops. All the same, Nag made the most of every opportunity and even managed to utilize the return voyage to India to embark on an extensive sight-seeing trip. Brief visits to Alexandria, Cairo, Memphis, Gizeh, Saqqara, and Jerusalem allowed him to study the monumental legacies of Egypt and Palestine, which predated the legacies of the “classical civilizations” of both India and Europe.11 Yet if Paris triggered a zest for travel and networking in Nag, this was complemented by the exploration of new intellectual horizons. Whereas the lectures of Sylvain Lévi and Paul Pelliot left a lasting impression and reconfigured Nag’s understanding of Indian history, his close affiliation with the French pacifist writer and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland (1866-1944) inspired the internationalist and humanist-inflected agendas that Nag kept promoting throughout his life. As Nag confided in his memoirs, Rolland “fulfilled Goethe’s expectation” and was “the first really ‘great European’” he had encountered.12 The two had established instant rapport during their first meeting in Rolland’s Parisian apartment and Nag became like a “younger brother” to the isolated French writer and his sister Madeleine.13 Throughout the 1920s, Nag acted as a crucial in-between, an Indian “Hermes” as Rolland aptly put it in a letter to Tagore, who brought one of Europe’s leading pacifist intellectuals within the orbit of Indian currents of thought, ranging from the political to the spiritual plane, and often blurring the boundaries between the two.14 In his alternating roles as a close confidant, research assistant, and correspondent, Nag helped fan the flames of Rolland’s infatuation with India that found expression in a series of essays and biographies on Gandhi, Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda, a journal on Indian matters he diligently kept for the remainder of his life, and a voluminous correspondence with notable Indian intellectuals, ranging from Gandhi and Tagore to Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru.15 Rolland’s accessible essay “Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One With the Universal Being” (1924), appeared in multiple translations and became a bestseller across Europe. The booklet introduced readers to Gandhi’s non-violent philosophy and activist career, and with Nag’s help, Rolland became Gandhi’s unsolicited popularizer, presenting the barrister and anti-colonial activist – then largely unknown in continental Europe – as “the molder of a new humanity.”16 Nag, in turn, familiarized Indian audiences with Rolland’s pacifist idealism as expressed in treatises such as “Above the Battlefield” (1914) and “Declaration of the

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Independence of the Mind” (1919), his novels (above all the multi-volume moralist roman-fleuve, Jean-Christophe), and a series of heroic biographies of “great personalities” such as Beethoven and Michelangelo. These short essays and translated fragments of Rolland’s oeuvre appeared in the widely read monthlies the Modern Review and Prabasi, both conveniently edited by his father-in-law Ramananda Chatterjee, and the Visva-Bharati Quarterly.17 This formative period of intellectual ferment and frenetic networking paved the way for Nag’s various internationalist and educational projects upon his return to Calcutta in the winter of 1923. The GIS (1926) was probably the best-known, long-lasting, and influential among Nag’s various interwar institutional initiatives. The Greater India movement tied Orientalism, and the study of ancient India’s template of internationalism (Greater India), to humanist and Asianist-inflected visions for a new world order and East-West civilizational symbiosis. Formed by a loose network of predominantly Bengali scholars, including Prabodh Chandra Bagchi, Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, and Benoy Kumar Sarkar, all of whom had moved into Nag’s orbit during their overlapping spells in Paris, the GIS aimed to recover, study, and create a popular awareness of ancient India’s cultural and artistic legacies abroad. This initiative was a direct outcome of Nag and his compatriots’ exposure to French and Dutch research on the ancient transregional circulation of Indic art, religions, and culture across the wider Asian sphere.18 For Nag, however, the template of Greater India was more than just an ancient cultural geography marked by the evocative templescapes of Angkor and Borobudur; it signified a forgotten history of “ancient Indian internationalism” and Pan-Asian community building that held important lessons for the present. These included, firstly, that India had never been “splendidly isolated,” as maintained in the colonial school textbooks of his day, but that it had once been Asia’s cultural and spiritual linchpin. This observation inspired Nag to embark on a life-long quest to overhaul outdated school curricula and decolonize the narration of India’s history by stressing India’s connections with, and impact on, the world beyond the subcontinent. Secondly, Nag concluded that India, emboldened by the recovery of its ancient internationalist legacies, was destined to become, once again, the cultural leader of a rejuvenated and united East.19 Nag first expressed these key tropes in two talks delivered, in 1922, at the Third International Congress of Moral Education (Geneva) and the Women’s International Congress for Peace and Freedom (Lugano).20 Echoing Tagore and Rolland (who was present at the Lugano conference), Nag fully bought into the civilizational dichotomy that postulated a spiritual East coming to the rescue of a morally bankrupt, war-torn, and imperialist West. Nag pitched the ancient Greater India ecumene, allegedly molded by pacifist, spiritual, and benign cultural impulses, as an alternative model for community building and rapprochement

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that bypassed statist institutions (including the League of Nations). The latter, Nag maintained, were, ultimately, vectors of nationalism and incapable of solving the world-crisis. In contrast, Nag noted that “the real secret of India’s success in her career of internationalism” could be attributed to the fact that, since ancient times, the “Indian people as a whole, stuck substantially to the principle of Peace and Progress.”21 Nag used the historical legacies of “Greater India” to buttress claims of Indian exceptionalism and contrasted the internationalism of figures such as the Mauryan emperor Asoka and the Kushan emperor Kanishka with the “economic internationalism of exploitation” and the “imperialistic internationalism of compulsion” that, he argued, characterized both ancient and modern instances of “Western” internationalism.22 India, according to Nag, had always been a peacemaker, and he evoked the formation of a historical Greater India as the “overflow of Indian humanism” and an “empire of peace and progress for all.”23 Nag’s vision for a truly global humanism inaugurated through intellectual and cultural cooperation, and inspired by the past template of Greater India, chimed with the idealist internationalism informing Tagore’s Asianist agenda.24 But Nag had no illusions about being another clairvoyant prophet on a par with the Bengali poet; he perceived himself as an inspired foot soldier playing a humble role in the service of “world-personalities” and exceptional figures of moral fortitude – an avant-garde of intellectuals, artists, and dreamers – who, through their exemplary conduct and uncompromising ethical stance, would act as beacons guiding humanity towards a saner future. Tied to this “great man” theory of history and progress was a firm belief in spiritual re-enchantment that went beyond a commitment to pacifism or Gandhian ahimsa but which remained non-doctrinal, ecumenical, and above all eclectic, stressing the unity of humankind, the sanctity of human life, and the absolute need for a new moral compass to prevent another global conflagration. This outlook inspired Nag to devote his energies to outlining a revisionist pedagogy that called for the “humanization of history.” In line with his efforts to raise awareness of the forgotten and neglected internationalist legacies of “Greater India,” Nag campaigned for a curricular revolution in which the statist and nationalist emphasis on heroic wars, communal antagonism, and territorial consolidation would be replaced by narratives foregrounding regional and global histories of cultural exchange, harmonious coexistence, and cross-civilizational cooperation. Despite his multiple roles as lecturer at the University of Calcutta, secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and Honorary Secretary and international spokesman of the GIS, Nag was almost perpetually on the move throughout the 1920s and 1930s, adding new destinations to an ever-expanding itinerary that included Greece, Japan, and China (in Tagore’s company), French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, the Philippines, the United States, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Hawaii,

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Australia, and New Zealand. Although remaining closely involved with Tagore’s Visva-Bharati, he increasingly vented his disenchantment with what he perceived to be the discrepancy between Tagore’s noble mission and Visva-Bharati’s messy day-to-day organization.25 Unwilling to antagonize the ageing poet and ever the savvy go-between, Nag decided in 1931 to capitalize on his extensive international network and launch his own institutional vehicle, the India Bureau, to promote Indian internationalism in a decidedly Tagorean/Rollandian key. The India Bureau marked yet another attempt to streamline “the development of a systematic cultural exchange between India and her sister nations and of a permanent understanding between the orient and the occident” through intellectual cooperation.26 Whereas Rolland realized, around the cusp of the 1930s, that his infatuation with Gandhian non-violence as a possible avenue to promote lasting European peace could offer little solace in light of geopolitical developments, Nag made very little concessions to the Zeitgeist.27 The bureau’s organ, India and the World, kept shooting out late flickers of interwar idealism in an intellectual universe that was increasingly painted in Manichean colors and marked by the ascent of Fascism, left-wing internationalism, global rearmament, and reloaded nationalisms. Like Visva-Bharati, the India Bureau subscribed to a new world order and aimed to unite “cultural ambassadors,” artists, writers and “thought-leaders,” scholars, and students of East and West who shared the dream of a new world-fellowship achieved through intellectual and cultural cooperation. The elitist notion of a global and spiritual avant-garde guiding the flock of humanity towards civilizational symbiosis and a world no longer torn by war, racism, and colonialism, was directly reflected in the eclectic cosmopolitan pastiche that characterized both India and the World and the Visva-Bharati Quarterly. Peppered with inspiring quotes of past and present “world-personalities” such as Tagore, Rolland, Goethe, Einstein, and William Morris, and featuring the occasional poem of Whitman, Rumi, or Hafiz, these Anglophone outlets were rife with pacifist and idealist sentiment. Such lofty rhetoric could not patch up the fact that the leading voices of East and West eulogized in India and the World – Tagore, Gandhi, and Rolland – were increasingly discordant. Gandhi and Tagore’s relationship, though marked by mutual respect, was characterized by profound disagreements on pretty much every topic and further complicated by their radically different temperaments, with the former being a man of action and the latter a poet who was increasingly reluctant to forsake his art to meddle in politics.28 Rolland, in his turn, was deeply disturbed by Tagore and Gandhi’s respective visits to Fascist Italy, where they let themselves be naively feted by Mussolini.29 This was symptomatic of a general trend among Indian intellectuals to keep an open mind about “the Fascist experiment”, Nag was no exception in this regard. It was Nag who had brought Carlo Formichi and Giuseppe Tucci into Tagore’s orbit in the early 1920s, and even though

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he denounced, in his extensive letters exchanged with Rolland, Mussolini’s spell over some of his compatriots, he still enthusiastically mused about the prospects of Indian-Italian cultural cooperation and approvingly quoted an endorsement of a book on Gandhi by the leading Fascist ideologue, Giovanni Gentile, as late as 1932.30 Nag reiterated his commitment to a new world order and pedagogical vision inspired by “the cult of humanity” in his convocation address “Above all Nations is Humanity,” delivered in his capacity as a visiting professor at the University of Honolulu (1937). Dismissing political solutions, Nag affirmed his belief that only “a new World Educational Board, based on mutual respect and cooperation” would be able to “drag us out of this quagmire of suspicion and hatred, threatening the peace of the world.” In this internationalist scheme, education became a pacifist tool. Nag argued that the “humanization” of history was a first crucial step on the long and winding road to global peace, and he envisaged a key role for leading intellectuals to inaugurate this humanist revolution. More than fifteen years after his first encounter with Rolland, Nag hailed the French pacifist, once more, as a beacon and “symbol of an awakened conscience of the West” who had been “trying to hold aloft the torch of Humanity in this age of nationalistic obscurantism.” Nag did not put his faith in the League of Nations but, with the “muffled war drums … threatening us on all fronts,” he urged his audience to heed “the clear verdicts of the ‘Representative Men’ of the East and the West” who stood “above these vagaries of nationalistic politics and economics.” Although “numerically negligible,” these great personalities embodied the “cult of humanity” and were, Nag proclaimed, “spiritually invincible.”31 Apart from dreamy schemes for a World Educational Board, Nag’s speech did not offer practical take-aways indicating how exactly humanity was to be saved from the impending doom. Besides, the mantra of East meets West had, by 1937, acquired a somewhat anachronistic ring. It harked back to the idealist moment of the early 1920s when Tagore and Rolland, emboldened by their Nobel momentum, had briefly captured the global spotlight to outline a shared humanist agenda and what, with hindsight, turned out to be a remarkably prescient and similar assessment of the implications of the rising tide of reloaded nationalisms across the globe.

New Orientations: Nag as a Pioneer in Indo-Pacific Studies Nag’s sojourn in Hawaii and travels in the Pacific realm also reconfigured his understanding of “Greater India.” Initially, the GIS had been primarily interested in charting Indic cultural legacies in Central and Southeast Asia.32 Yet the template of Greater India had always remained a projection without clearly demarcated geographical boundaries. In his memoirs, Nag flagged the work of his former

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mentor Sylvain Lévi and the painterly visions of Gauguin as an early source of inspiration to trace India’s cultural imprint across the different communities islanded in the vast watery expanse of the Pacific. Lévi’s lecture series on L’Inde et la mer, in particular, had left a lasting impression, and primed Nag to “reinterpret the ancient history of India, from the dynamic vision of oceanic migration” and “make a survey of Greater India against the background of the vast Pacific Ocean.”33 Research trips and travels in Indonesia and Japan also inspired Nag to extend the purview of Greater India studies beyond the lands of the Western Pacific. In Batavia, he met the prehistorian P.V. van Stein-Callenfels and became familiar with the writings of the art historian W.F. Stutterheim. The latter had waxed lyrical about the fact that “practically all countries washed by the Pacific, have seen the cultural light rise in the West in some form or other … and have seen their own autochthonous cultures adopt the wonderful colours which they now display.”34 These early primers evidently energized Nag’s quest for ancient India’s cultural legacies across the Pacific. But Nag also made new connections that transcended the triangular French-Dutch-Indian knowledge network that had been crucial to the activities and agenda of the GIS, especially in relation to Southeast Asian history. A crucial interlocuter in this regard was the Honolulu-based ethnologist E.S. Craighill Handy. This expert in Polynesian religion had moved into Nag’s orbit while presenting a paper on “Indian Cultural Influence in Oceania” at the Indian Science Congress, held in Calcutta in 1928.35 With the Greater India movement in full swing, the topic of the talk couldn’t have been timelier, and Nag invited Craighill Handy to lecture on ancient India’s expansion across the Pacific at the Calcutta premises of the GIS. Craighill Handy was impressed by the work of the GIS and praised Nag, in a short article that appeared in the journal Pacific Affairs, for “stimulating interest in and spreading knowledge of Greater Indian culture of the past, present and future.”36 However, as in the early 1920s, it was above all through his own travels that Nag expanded his network and knowledge. A spell in 1930 as a visiting professor at the Carnegie Institute in New York and a subsequent lecture tour that involved a series of talks at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Yale University, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, and the University of Evanston exposed Nag to the latest trends in the budding disciplines of anthropology and prehistory. He also added other nodes to his ever-expanding web of institutional connections during his sojourn in Hawaii and a series of travels, following the British Commonwealth Relations Conference in Sydney (1938), across Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. As during his student days in Europe, Nag used his travels to collect research materials and establish rapport with local scholars and research bodies. In line with his pedagogical philosophy, he generously compiled the information

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gleaned during his trips in a comprehensive booklet that aimed to inspire Indian students to embark in his footsteps and pursue studies and research abroad.37 Nag’s Pacific itinerary triggered a geographical, disciplinary, and temporal shift in his research agenda. While his interest in the wider cultural realm of the Indian Ocean and the Buddhist “manuscript roads” of Central Asia persisted, it was now complemented by efforts to bring the Pacific Ocean within the orbit of Greater India. The Pacific realm did not yield an equivalent of the architectural oeuvres of Angkor and Borobudur that had come to epitomize, in the Greater India imagination, the “classical” era of post-Mauryan, Hindu-Buddhist Indianization across Southeast Asia. Furthermore, whereas the latter field was primarily shaped by archaeologists, epigraphists, and Indologists, the emerging subject of Pacific studies was energized by the work of anthropologists and prehistorians. Consequently, Nag’s “classical” Hindu-Buddhist lens was increasingly complemented by an interest in the transoceanic legacies that linked the “primitive” communities of Polynesia and beyond to Vedic India. This burgeoning interest culminated in the monograph India and the Pacific (1941).38 The book offered a pioneering work of historical synthesis, but Nag was, as he acknowledged, not the first Indian scholar traversing the Pacific, nor the first to embark upon a quest to collect evidence of ancient Vedic, Hindu, and Buddhist legacies among the different island communities of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Nag had been preceded in the early 1930s by Panchanan Mitra, a lecturer in English and anthropology at the University of Calcutta who had joined Honolulu’s Bishop Museum following an invitation extended by Craighill Handy. After his spell in Hawaii, Mitra travelled “through Northern, Central, and Southern Polynesia in search of Indian elements in Polynesian culture.”39 He conveyed some first glimpses of his findings regarding “the cultural affinities between India and Polynesia” in two short contributions to Sarat Chandra Roy’s anthropological quarterly Man in India but passed away suddenly in 1936, only 45 years old, without having finished a monograph on the topic.40 In his scholarly articles, Mitra had steered clear of the appropriative rhetoric typical of many Greater India publications, but his broader agenda to launch “the comparative study of culture over intercontinental regions” and “reveal the important role of India as a primary and secondary centre of diffusion of cultures” chimed with the mission of the GIS, and was evidently an inspiration for Nag’s own study.41 Nag’s India and the Pacific ventures beyond familiar sites and shores and opens with a cultural survey of the Pacific Basin. However, a significant portion of the book recycles a series of previously published articles on the art and archaeology of Java, Sumatra, Indochina, Thailand, Japan, and China. These appear to be envisaged as handy state-of-the-art summaries for students interested in India’s ancient cultural legacies abroad. It is important to bear in mind that when the book appeared in the

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early 1940s, the Greater India movement was past its zenith. A younger generation of scholars, spearheaded by the French conservator of Angkor Henri Marchal, had moved away from the diffusionist paradigms of cultural transfer that glorified the role of Indian agents, and reframed the problem of “Indianization” as one of local adaptation.42 Yet although Nag was willing to concede a measure of local initiative, he remained unapologetically Indocentric, and the monograph is peppered throughout with allusions to the colonizing agency of Indian missionaries, artists and merchants. As Ramananda Chatterjee noted in the book’s preface, the story of Greater India had indeed been well-told since the foundation of the GIS. He conceded that “the Indian schoolboy of to-day” was “more fortunate than ourselves when at school” because “now even school children can learn something about (the spread of Indian culture and civilization) from their text-books in the mother-tongue.” Yet, Chatterjee continued, “the real position of India in ancient pre-historic and proto-historic times, with the world” and “India’s part in the bringing about of inter-continental contacts and the fusion … of cultures separated by oceans” remained unrecognized and demanded more research.43 Nag concurred and lamented, in his introductory remarks, that “the Pacific Ocean in our early school days was made to appear too far away to have any relations with India and too vague and vast for seeking human relationship.”44 India and the Pacific aimed to remedy this blind-spot, not in the least because Nag considered the broader Indo-Pacific domain “the true historical setting and geographical background of Greater India.”45All the same, the lack of awareness of India’s pre-historic role in shaping the Pacific domain could not simply be attributed to scholarly indifference or a lack of perspective among Indian researchers only. Nag leveled a two-pronged critique at “western scholarship” which, he asserted, had long displayed an Atlantic bias. Firstly, Nag exposed the inclination among European and American scholars to celebrate the Age of Exploration as the advent of history in the Pacific. Europe had indeed “discovered” unfamiliar territories, but Nag reminded his colleagues that much of this “so-called New World (was) already peopled by the Oriental Races” before the ships of Columbus, Magellan and Captain Cook appeared on the horizon. This deep history of transoceanic migration put the exploits of Western explorers in perspective and also allowed Nag to adopt a comparative lens. Nag contrasted the peaceful, pre-Columbian penetration of the Pacific by Oriental races with the “individual greed and imperialistic scramble of the Buccaneers and Conquistadores” who “super-imposed a new Atlantic civilization on the dead bones of the Pacific races.”46 The bloodshed and ruthless destruction that marked the advent of European “civilization” in the Pacific, had, Nag claimed, been preceded by the decidedly more friendly intrusions of the “Indo-Polynesians.”

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Nag evoked these “Indo-Polynesians” as a “highly gifted race” which penetrated the Pacific Basin and generally had a beneficial influence on the development of local peoples, ranging from New Zealand’s Māori to far-flung and scattered communities islanded in the vast oceanic sphere of the Pacific.47 Anchoring his vision of an Indo-Pacific cultural sphere in the geographically and racially ambiguous Indo-Polynesians allowed Nag to frame the transoceanic circulation of Vedic, Hindu, and Buddhist cultural repertoires, a long-drawn out and scattered process unfolding over millennia, as a story of Indian historical agency. And just as the history of Greater India had not been tainted by any “sordid chapter of economic exploitation or political domination,” Nag asserted that India’s “real and abiding contributions to the nations of the Pacific were not the conquering armies or the ruling dynasties long forgotten, but a veritable fertilizing influence in the domain of the spiritual, intellectual and artistic creation.”48 Nag alluded here specifically to “traits of Brahmanical culture,” such as the cult of the lingam which, he alleged, had been central to ancient worship practices across Polynesia.49 Nag’s comparison of different “Western” and “Oriental”/Indic modes of historical agency in the Pacific buttressed a broader civilizational critique which was, as I have argued elsewhere, central to Greater India projections.50 Nag and like-minded colleagues of the GIS pitched Greater India as an ecumenical template energized by a form of cultural agency that was “colonial,” yet benevolent and pacifist, and thus different from and superior to the imposing and violent mode of imperialism that characterized the global rise of the West. It was, in other words, an historical argument which bolstered visions of Indian exceptionalism. Secondly, Nag took issue with what he perceived to be “a sort of cultural Monroe Doctrine” prevailing among American anthropologists and antiquarians.51 Barring a few exceptions amply cited throughout India and the Pacific, Nag accused scholars conducting research across the Americas of being “isolationists” who ascribed cultural development to autochthonous evolution. He noted a reluctance to take into account the impact of “intrusions from or exchanges with the Asiatic mainland and the Pacific islands,” even when scholars appeared to have stumbled on evidence to the contrary.52 Further stretching the already quite elastic boundaries of Greater India, Nag sought to challenge such “Atlantic biases” by compiling all sorts of fragmentary evidence gleaned from an impressive range of anthropological and prehistoric studies that hinted at early points of cultural contact between the “Indo-Pacific” and the Americas. Ultimately, however, Nag refrained from pitching a compelling argument of his own about the cultural agency of prehistoric India in the Americas. Throughout the book, he also takes the bite out of any such claims by stressing the role of Malaya and Indonesia as crucial springboards mediating the transmission of “races and culture from India to the Pacific World.”53 This begs the question how “Indian” the Indo-Polynesians had really been if they operated

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primarily from the island-world of the Western Pacific, rather than hailing directly from the subcontinent. The Indo-Polynesians, in other words, could hardly be put on a par with the “Indian colonizers” that Nag and the GIS held responsible for the diffusion of Indian art, culture, and religion across Asia. If it proved hard to muster convincing evidence that would bring the Eastern Pacific and the Americas within the orbit of Greater India, the Philippines offered a decidedly easier case study. Falling outside the French and Dutch colonial spheres and lacking evocative templescapes that had triggered visions of Magna India in Indochina and Java, this zone of maritime Southeast Asia had initially received little attention from scholars puzzling within the research paradigm of Greater India. Far from discouraged, Nag visited Manila and environs in 1938 as part of his broader quest for India’s Pacific legacies and lectured at the University of Manila. Drawing on the research of American anthropologists, including A.L. Kroeber, and a nineteenth-century comparative study of Sanskrit and Tagalog conducted by the Paris-based polymath T.H. Pardo de Tavera, Nag concluded that, before the advent of Islam, “the Filippos were influenced by the Chinese in their economic life but their social and religious life was throughout influenced by Hindu civilization.”54 In this argument, language was interpreted as a carrier of culture and the prevalence of Sanskrit-derived words signifying “intellectual acts,” “moral conceptions,” and “emotions” was interpreted as evidence indicating “that the Hindus must have been present in the Philippines.”55 Nag was not the first Indian scholar, nor the only GIS-member interested in “Indo-Philippine” cultural relations. His colleague Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, himself a well-travelled linguist who had accompanied Tagore on his tour of the Dutch East Indies in 1927, had written an appreciative review of India and the Philippines, a monograph by Dhirendra Nath Roy, about whom we only know that he was “an Indian professor sojourning in the Philippines.” Roy’s book set out to explore “the ancient relation between India and this group of islands now called the Philippines” which had once “formed an integral part of the cultural existence of Greater India.”56 Spanish colonialism and aggressive Christian missionizing had allegedly wiped out almost all traces of this old cultural relationship, but both Roy and Chatterjee were hopeful that an exploration of ancient bonds might, as Roy put it, “break the spell of a long estrangement” and mark “the beginning of the end of a long cultural isolation of the two peoples.”57 The study and evocation of “a shared past” thus served to reconnect the two Asian peoples in the present. This was deemed a timely and even urgent endeavor in light of the regrettable tendency among “the Filipino” “to cut himself adrift from his racial moorings in his haste to be modern and western,” and thus embark on a trajectory that would reinforce alienation from this shared Indic past. As Chatterjee reminded his compatriots in the Modern Review, even though “the Spanish priest and the American missionary

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have now taken the place of the Brahman and the Bhujanga…we can claim them as having originally belonged to the same culture world of India as ourselves – as having formed a part of Greater India.”58 Although Nag seems to have missed Roy’s study, perhaps because it was published in Manila and might not have been widely available in India, he evidently concurred and used the work of A.L. Kroeber to draw similar conclusions: under a Muslim and Christian veneer lay the core of Philippine civilization which had been profoundly shaped by “a set of influences emanating from India.”59 The prehistorical musings and speculations underpinning Nag’s attempt to bring the Pacific within the orbit of Greater India were tied to an appeal for a scheme of cooperation in which he envisaged a leading role for India and China, the “historical and authentic leaders of the Pan-Pacific movement through ages.”60 Nag’s scheme anticipated and naturalized a scenario that has become reality today but on terms that are a far cry from Nag’s Asianist-inflected notion of a shared and harmonious Sino-Indian leadership. In the 2020s, the Pacific is the theatre of a zero-sum game in which India and China, as well as a range of other actors, compete for strategic interests. Nag’s vague and expansive framing of the Indo-Pacific has found new resonance among Indian foreign policy circles and is reflected in the Indian government’s definition of the Indo-Pacific as a “single strategic construct linking the contiguous waters of the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean.” Prime Minister Modi has in different speeches further stretched this concept by stressing that “the geographical reach of India’s idea of the Indo-Pacific” covers the vast maritime expansive “from Africa to the Americas.”61 Nag’s geocultural label of the Indo-Pacific has thus morphed into a geopolitical construct and the findings of prehistorians and anthropologists have been replaced by concerns pertaining to maritime cooperation, economic partnership, security architecture, and the ambition to turn the Indo-Pacific into a platform for New Delhi “to pursue its global strategic ambitions.”62 In contrast to New Delhi’s regional foreign policy agenda, which aims to leverage India’s ancient civilizational bonds and cultural legacies across Asia as soft power, the rhetoric of Greater India does currently not inform Indo-Pacific projections.63 Instead, the presence of Indian diasporic communities across the wider Indo-Pacific, a legacy from the more recent history of indenture and labor migration, offers a more concrete source of leverage as New Delhi pursues its foreign policy schemes. This modern aspect of India’s overseas legacies was, in fact, a blind spot in interwar Greater India projections that remained preoccupied with “high-brow” cultural imprints of ancient times. Nag’s complete silence on this topic in India and the Pacific is not an exception and reflects an elitist bias that was shared by his colleagues of the GIS. Tellingly, Nag did not even once allude in India and the Pacific to the monograph of Tagore-associate Charles Freer Andrews, who published, under the almost eponymous title India

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and the Pacific World, a pioneering survey of the conditions of Indian laborers across the different island economies of the Pacific. 64 The vision of ancient India as Asia’s cultural and spiritual fount, and by extension the Pacific, was thus disconnected from the contemporary reality in which Indian laborers and soldiers were moved across the oceans on the whims of the colonial authorities and the demands of the global labor market. Instead, Nag and his colleagues of the GIS harked back to an idealized past that was not tainted by the colonial present: a period in history when the subcontinent had been the confident exporter of a sophisticated and superior civilization, rather than a reservoir of cheap labor.

Conclusion Nag’s shifting interests and obsession with Pacific studies illustrate that his career and network transcended interwar Pan-Asian or East-West schemes of intellectual cooperation. He constantly invented new roles for himself, steered clear of ideological controversies, cultivated his global network, and endeared himself to figures in the limelight. His two-volume memoirs, describing his travels and travails in the early 1920s, read like a Who’s Who of the period. Nag’s versatility, combined with his evident knack for organizing, generated new opportunities and meant that his name kept popping up in surprising places. For example, in 1936, Nag found himself as one of the Indian representatives attending the International PEN Congress in Buenos Aires, and his detailed dispatches of the atmosphere and proceedings appeared in the Modern Review.65 The spirit of PEN chimed with Nag’s idealist humanism and his unwavering faith in cultural and intellectual rapprochement inaugurated by a global elite of writers and dreamers. Perhaps less surprising, Nag participated in the Asian Relations Conference organized by Nehru in 1947 and penned a “Memorandum on the literary, artistic and cultural collaboration of the Asian nations.” This exercise completely escalated and ended up as a long manifesto which defies easy summarizing but essentially framed “Asian collaboration” as the long history of “Greater India.” Occasionally the flood of historical detail is interrupted by grandiose, Borgesian schemes for a Museum of Man in Asia and an Encyclopedia Asiana or Grand Dictionary of Asian Culture. These schemes aimed at nothing less than to inaugurate a “planetary and dynamic conception of history where every clan, race, and nation would be assigned its proper place in the orchestra of Asian humanism.”66 Informed by the rhetoric of Greater India and drawing on Rolland’s unfulfilled aim to found a “World Library,” these vaguely articulated initiatives went down like a lead balloon.67 Furthermore, they had an anachronistic ring in an era marked by decolonization, nation-building and the reshuffling of alliances in the context of the Cold War.

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Following a short spell in parliament (1952-4) and a visit to Japan to attend the fifth anniversary of the First Pacifist Conference (Santiniketan), Nag spent the remainder of his life compiling his prolific output in two collections of essays, The Discovery of Asia (1957) and Greater India (1960). From the latter volume, published six years before his death, we can gather that Nag took a belated interest in Afro-Asian cooperation, for under his name on the title page we find the title “Director of Studies of the Institute of Asian African Relations, Calcutta.”68 This might have simply been a Bandung-inspired fad, because on the front cover we find, unambiguously embossed in gold against a navy-blue background, the familiar words “Greater India.” It is this concept, and the movement it inspired, which remains one of Nag’s lasting legacies. A century after Nag’s Parisian student days, Greater India has long shed its interwar ecumenical meaning and humanist glow. Instead, it buttresses the colonial fantasies and global projections of Hindu nationalists. As one of the main driving forces behind the Greater India movement, Nag occupies an ambivalent position in an intellectual trajectory that connects the visionary ramblings of Tagore and the legacies of colonial archaeology with the appropriative rhetoric of the RSS.69 Nag’s “soft” vision of Greater India and his commitment to inaugurate a global humanism closely aligned with the ecumenical agenda of Tagore and drew heavily on the uncompromising anti-nationalism of Rolland. Although thus not a typical Hindu nationalist in the mold of Savarkar, the broad-minded idealism and anti-nationalist stance that inspired Nag’s interwar trajectory later turned out to be philosophical at most. Nag’s post-war writings on Greater India changed little in tone and substance and once India became a nation-state, he had no scruples aligning his activities closely with state institutions. There was also no urgent intellectual need to do so because Nehruvian India had embraced the notion of Indian exceptionalism at the heart of Greater India projections; India was to be a “different nation state,” a force for good in the global theatre, and a worthy heir of Asoka, the Mauryan emperor and patron of Mahayana Buddhism who Nehru had hailed as India’s first “internationalist” avant la lettre.70 Today, the BJP-government’s endorsement of a cruder and decidedly less inclusive vision of a Hindu “Greater India” is in many ways only a less nuanced and “saffronized” version of this same story that Nag and his colleagues of the GIS had impressed on their compatriots since the 1920s, and which proclaimed that HinduBuddhist civilization was a superior cultural force with a mission to fulfill abroad.

Notes 1

For a recent exception that briefly touches on Nag’s internationalist activities, see M.J. Bayly, “Lineages of Indian International Relations: The Indian Council on World Affairs, the League of Nations, and the Pedagogy of Internationalism,” The International History Review (2021), 12.

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2

The Sorbonne-based Institute of Indian Civilization, L’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi, the Kern Institute in Leiden, and the Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies pursued in the 1920s and 1930s similar research agendas that foregrounded the study of the historical diffusion of Indic art, culture, and religions across Asia. Y. Spoelder, “Staging the Nation Beyond the Raj: Transcolonial Knowledge Networks and Visions of Greater India, ca. 1800-1950s” (PhD Dissertation, Free University Berlin, 8 July 2020).

3

Kalidas Nag, Memoirs Volume 1 (1891-1921) (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1991), 14.

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid., 29.

6

Ibid., 23.

7

Nag was joined by Prabodh Chandra Bagchi, one of India’s first professionally trained Sinologists and later a prominent GIS-member. For Nag’s own detailed account of his travels and travails during his Parisian student days, see Kalidas Nag, Memoirs Volume 2 (1921-23) (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1991). See also Spoelder, “Staging the Nation Beyond the Raj,” chapter 2.

8

Nag successfully defended his dissertation, and the French publication of the manuscript was positively received. See, for example, the review by the eminent Orientalist and director of the EFEO, Louis Finot. L. Finot, “K. Nag. Les theories diplomatiques de l’Inde ancienne et l’Arthaçâstra,” Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient 23 (1923), 461–2.

9

For example, Nag lectured in Christiana’s Oriental Hall Institute on “Tagore and Modern India,” while in Stockholm he delivered a talk on the internationalism of Akbar and Asoka in front of an audience that included members of the Swedish Academy (Nag, Memoirs Volume 2, 64, 75).

10

See C. Guha (ed.), The Tower and the Sea: Romain Rolland and Kalidas Nag Correspondence (19221938) (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2010), 121–5.

11

Nag, Memoirs Vol. 2.

12

Ibid., 54.

13

Letter Rolland to Nag, 8 July 1925, cited in C. Guha (ed), The Tower and the Sea, 65.

14

Letter Rolland to Tagore, 27 March 1925, cited in C. Guha (ed.), Rabindranath Tagore and Romain Rolland Correspondence (1919-1940) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 29.

15

R. Rolland, Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One with the Universal Being, trans. C.D. Groth (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924); Prophets of the New India, trans. E.F. Malcolm-Smith (London: Cassell and Company, 1930); Inde. Journal (1915-1943) (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1960). For a handy overview of Rolland’s correspondence with various Indian intellectuals, see Romain Rolland and Gandhi Correspondence (Letters, Diary Extracts, Articles, etc.), trans. R.A. Francis (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Government of India, 1976).

16

Apart from various Indian translations, the book appeared in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, German, and Japanese. Despite a lukewarm critical reception, the French edition went through its fiftieth printing in 1926. See D.J. Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 122, 125.

17

See for example Kalidas Nag, “Note on Romain Rolland’s Autobiographical Fragment,” VisvaBharati Quarterly 3 (April 1925), 80–2. Nag wrote to Rolland that “the Modern Review of Calcutta is now in my hands and I wish to transform it into an organ of International amity.” Letter Nag to Rolland, 19 March 1925, cited in Guha (ed.), The Tower and the Sea, 131.

18

See also S. Bayly, “Imagining ‘Greater India’: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode,” Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004), 703–44; M. Bloembergen, “The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past: Sites, Scholarly Networks, and Moral Geographies of Greater India Across Decolonization,” in M. Thomas and A.S. Thompson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 391–413; C. Stolte, “Orienting India:

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Interwar Internationalism in an Asian Inflection, 1917-1937” (PhD dissertation, Leiden University, 2013), chapter 3. 19

Spoelder, “Staging the Nation Beyond the Raj.”

20

Kalidas Nag, “A Study in Indian Internationalism. Paper read at a Symposium on The Role of Internationalism in the Development of Civilisation, Lugano, Switzerland, 1922,” in Kalidas Nag (ed.), Greater India (Bombay: The Book Centre Private Limited, 1960), 117–148; “The Humanisation of History. Address delivered at the Third International Congress of Moral Education, Geneva, July 18 – August 1, 1922,” in Nag, Greater India, 551–61. For the original French excerpt of his talk in Geneva, see Kalidas Nag, “L’esprit international et l’enseignement de l’histoire,” in Troisième Congrès international d’éducation morale. Rapports et mémoires. Genève, 28 juillet – 1er août 1922, vol. 2 (Geneva: Secrétariat du Congrès-Institut J.-J. Rousseau, 1922), 61–9.

21

Nag, “A Study in Indian Internationalism,” 147.

22

Ibid., 120.

23

Ibid., 124–5, 133.

24

For Tagore’s Asianist vision, see Spoelder, “Staging the Nation Beyond the Raj,” chapter 3. See also R. Bharucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore & Okakura Tenshin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905-1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54 (2012), 65–92.

25

For an early expression of this critical sentiment, see Letter Nag to Rolland, 9 December 1926, cited in Guha (ed.), The Tower and the Sea, 202–3.

26

École Française d’Extrême-Orient Archives (EFEO), Carton XXIV Correspondance avec des scientifiques, des organismes de recherche, des sociétés savantes et des associations (s.d.) (1921-1954) Dossier 36 “Indes Angles,” “India Bureau,” Letter Kalidas Nag to EFEO Paris, 30 July 1931.

27

Fisher, Romain Rolland, chapter 3.

28

S. Bhattacharya (ed.), The Mahatma and the Poet. Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore 1915-1941 (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997).

29

K. Kundu, Meeting with Mussolini: Tagore’s Tours in Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Spoelder, “Staging the Nation Beyond the Raj,” chapter 3.

30

Kalidas Nag, “The Visvabharati and Prof. Carlo Formichi,” Modern Review 38 (December 1925), 710–12; Kalidas Nag, “India and Italy,” India and the World (August 1932), reproduced in Nag, Greater India, 604–8. For Tucci and Nag, see also E. Garzilli, Il Duce’s Explorer: The Adventures of Giuseppe Tucci and Italian Policy in the Orient from Mussolini to Andreotti, vol. 1 (Milan: Asiatica Association, 2015). For the broader interwar Indian engagement with Fascism, see M. Framke, Delhi – Rom – Berlin. Die Indische Wahrnehmung von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus 1922-1939 (Darmstadt: Verlag WBG, 2013); B. Zachariah, “At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism: Framing the Volk in India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38 (2015), 639–55.

31

Kalidas Nag, “Above All Nations is Humanity. An Address Delivered at the Twenty-sixth Annual Commencement of the University of Hawaii June 22, 1937,” University of Hawaii Bulletin 16 (1937), 3–14, 4, 6, 9.

32

Spoelder, “Staging the Nation Beyond the Raj.”

33

Nag, Memoirs Vol. 2, 150–1.

34

Ibid., 132; W.F. Stutterheim, Indian Influences in the Lands of the Pacific (Weltevreden: G. Kolff & Co., 1929), 1. For Nag’s travels in Indonesia, see also Kalidas Nag, “Greater India Revisited. Eastwards Ho!” Modern Review 42 (July 1927), 68–74; “Greater India Revisited. Through the Island of Bali,” Modern Review 42 (October 1927), 389–98.

35

E.S. Craighill Handy, “Indian Cultural Influence in Oceania,” Man in India 8 (1928), 1–5.

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36

E.S. Craighill Handy, “The Renaissance of East Indian Culture: Its Significance for the Pacific and the World,” Pacific Affairs 3 (1930), 364.

37

Kalidas Nag, Art and Archaeology Abroad: A Report Intended Primarily for Indian Students Desiring to Specialize in Those Subjects in the Research Centres of Europe and America (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1937).

38

Kalidas Nag, India and the Pacific World (Calcutta: Book Company, 1941).

39

P. Mitra, “Cultural Affinities Between India and Polynesia,” Man in India 11 (1931), 217.

40

Ibid.; P. Mitra, “Cultural Affinities Between India and Polynesia,” Man in India 12 (1932), 30–44.

41

P. Mitra, “Research Leads in Anthropology in India,” Man in India 13 (1933), 9–10.

42

H. Marchal, “Indépendance de l’art khmer vis-à-vis de l’art hindou,” Revue des arts asiatiques 3 (1926), 173–9; “H. Parmentier: L’art architectural hindou dans l’Inde et en Extrême-Orient,” BEFEO 45 (1952), 602–18.

43

R. Chatterjee, preface to Nag, India and the Pacific.

44

Nag, India and the Pacific, ix.

45

Ibid., 282.

46

Ibid., 1.

47

Ibid., 46.

48

Ibid., 284.

49

Ibid., 50.

50

See Spoelder, “Staging the Nation Beyond the Raj,” chapter 3.

51

Nag, India and the Pacific, 2.

52

Ibid., 7.

53

Ibid., 94.

54

Ibid., 75; A.L. Kroeber, Peoples of the Philippines (New York, NY: American Museum Press, 1919); T.H. Pardo de Tavera, El Sánscrito en la Lengua Tagalog (Paris: Imprimerie de la Faculté de Médecine, 1887).

55

Ibid.

56

D.N. Roy, The Philippines and India (Manila: Philippine Islanus, 1930), i, 28. See also D.N. Roy, “The Philippines and its Past,” Modern Review 50 (September 1931), 262–5.

57

Roy, Philippines and India, i.

58

S.K. Chatterjee, “Review, The Philippines and India by D.N. Roy,” Modern Review 50 (1931), 55–6.

59

Nag, India and the Pacific, 77.

60

Kalidas Nag, Discovery of Asia (Calcutta: Institute of Asian African Relations, 1957), 59. Nag does not explain why he includes China here. He was, however, deeply familiar with Chinese history and had accompanied Tagore on his Far Eastern tour in 1924. Nag was certainly aware of Chinese historical agency in Southeast Asia (if not the Pacific) and seems to have regarded China (rather than Japan) as the other main civilizational beacon in the Pacific realm.

61

H. Siddiqui, “India’s Concept of Indo-Pacific is Inclusive and Across Oceans,” https://mea.gov. in/­articles-in-indian-media.htm?dtl/32015/Indias_concept_of_IndoPacific_is_inclusive_and_across_ oceans (accessed 7 July 2022).

62

D.M. Baruah, “India in Indo-Pacific: New Delhi’s Theater of Opportunity,” https://carnegieendow​ ment.org/2020/06/30/india-in-indo-pacific-new-delhi-s-theater-of-opportunity-pub-82205 (accessed 7 July 2022).

63

On the foreign policy of the BJP-government and its link to Greater India thinking, see Y. Spoelder, “The Long Shadow of Greater India. New Delhi on the Silk Roads” (forthcoming).

64

C.F. Andrews, India and the Pacific World (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1937).

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65

Kalidas Nag, “The International P.E.N. Congress of Buenos Aires,” Modern Review 60 (December 1936), 637–43.

66

Nag, Discovery of Asia, 61. Nag was one of the 51 Indian delegates present at the conference. For a handy overview of the conference, see Asian Relations, Being Report of the Proceedings and Documentation of the First Asian Relations Conference (New Delhi: Asian Relations Organization, 1948).

67

Rolland repeatedly tried to enthuse Tagore and Nag for his scheme of a “Weltbibliothek” and a “House of Friendship,” the latter envisaged as a meeting place for intellectuals from across the globe. The series, to be published in Switzerland by Emil Roniger, would “attempt to re-unite, on a purely intellectual plane, the free spirits of Europe and Asia.” Letter Rolland to Nag, 26 November 1922; Letter Rolland to Nag, 4 January 1925, both cited in Guha (ed), The Tower and the Sea, 40, 119.

68

Nag, Greater India.

69

On the RSS and the Greater India imagination, see A. Longkumar, The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021).

70

See also P. Olivelle, J. Leoshko and H. P. Ray (eds.), “Introduction,” in Reimagining Asoka: Memory and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

CHAPTER 8

Fellow Travelers: Global Decolonization and Gandhian Peace Work Carolien Stolte

Abstract This chapter shows how Gandhian peace workers connected to international pacifist circles in the 1950s and 1960s, particular the War Resisters’ International. Personal relationships forged between pacifists in India resulted in the Africa Freedom Action, an effort to bolster the decolonization process in Tanzania and Zambia. It is, however, also a story of disconnection: of Gandhian peace workers joining method, but not necessarily intent, with the War Resisters’ International. This disconnection was caused by the difference in weight that peace workers from different regions attached to decolonization as a prerequisite for world peace. As a result, the project developed a distinct Afro-Asian orientation, with peace workers in Dar es Salaam looking east, rather than west, for support.

Key words: peace movement, Cold War, decolonization, non-violence, internationalism, Afro-Asia

We are fortunate in India that we are not looked upon as cranks or stoned when we speak of World Peace. But in both cases, whether in the West or in India, as cranks or wise men, we are considered to be a group separated from the general community. —Asha Devi Aryanakam1

The Gandhigram ashram sits nestled between the Sirumalai hills in the east and the Kodai hills in the west. It was founded by a Gandhian couple, Dr. and Mr. Ramachandran, who hoped to implement Gandhi’s plan for the “reconstruction of the social order” in the villages of the Dindigul region , in central Tamil Nadu.2 Despite its remote location, the ashram’s trajectory ran parallel to that of the country it sought to serve. Just weeks before independence, Chinnalapatti village had offered twenty-five acres of land to Dr. Ramachandran on which to build the ashram. A few weeks after independence, operations officially started. Like their counterparts in Delhi, the ashram’s founders had long been active in the freedom struggle and were now eager to turn their focus to “constructive work,” the social uplift program set out by Gandhi. Within a few short years, the Bhoodan land reform movement would claim the attention of both.

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Nevertheless, Gandhigram seldom looked towards Delhi, and the ashram’s views on freedom were not framed in terms of political power or electoral politics. Their program was more ambitious both spatially and conceptually. Noting the “tidal waves of freedom” across the world in the “century of the common man,” the shattering of empires had, according to G. Ramachandran, introduced deeper and wider conceptions of justice into human thought: “One vote for every person is no longer the last word in a democracy. It has ceased to be even the first word of freedom. Political freedom and justice are no longer adequate. Economic freedom and justice are the demands of the new age.”3 In another vein, the organization soon felt disenchanted with the national government. Holding fast to the Gandhian doctrine that “good ends can only be achieved by good means,” they privileged method over objectives. Many Gandhians considered the compromises and tradeoffs inherent in electoral politics to be fundamentally at odds with that principle.4 As a result, over the course of the 1950s and 1960s the ashram prioritized connections to local and international organizations with similar methods, even if the intellectual genealogies of that method were sometimes different.5 These connections shared an existence outside the realm of state power. They also shared a firm commitment to non-violence in principle, and non-violent direct action as method. But their non-violence was informed by Buddhist, anarchist, Quaker, and other strands of thought. This story starts in Gandhigram but ends in Dar es Salaam. It shows how workers from the Bhoodan and Sarvodaya movements folded into the international peace movement of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the War Resisters’ International and the organizations in its orbit. At its core, it is a story of friendship forged in Gandhigram, which resulted in the Africa Freedom Action, an effort to support decolonization in Tanzania and Zambia under auspices of the World Peace Brigade, an organization conceived at a conference in Gandhigram, made concrete in the outskirts of Beirut, and finally implemented in Dar es Salaam. It is, however, also a story of “productive misunderstanding”: of the Gandhian Sarva Seva Sangh joining method – non-violent direct action – but not necessarily intent with the War Resisters’ International. This “productive misunderstanding” was caused by the difference in weight that peace workers from different regions attached to freedom from empire. This issue became pertinent when practical questions arose around the allocation of manpower and resources; or more principled ones, such as the potential for violent escalation. In other words, was the pursuit of political independence a prerequisite for world peace, or did the pursuit of world peace supersede the struggle for political independence? Not every pacifist organization put the emphasis in the same place, and as a result, the World Peace Brigade developed a distinct Afro-Asian orientation, with the peace workers in Dar es Salaam looking more towards the “Asian Bureau” of the organization than to the leaders of the War Resisters’ International in London.

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In the larger setting of the peace and anti-nuclear movements of the early Cold War years, the issue of how to anchor peace work in active decolonization efforts was a familiar question. Even if most peace workers agreed on the importance of global decolonization, the question of how important it was relative to other goals was also raised in the conference halls of the World Peace Council and the organizations in its orbit.6 Overall, the Soviet-oriented World Peace Council was more explicit in its denunciation of colonialism and more deliberate about engaging the decolonizing world.7 In India, as in other parts of Afro-Asia, there was considerable institutional overlap between the WPC and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization when it met in Cairo (1957) and Conakry (1960) and vocally campaigned for Algerian independence.8 In other words, when it came to international affiliations, peace workers had a choice. Depending on ideological persuasion, it was possible to pursue peace in different inflections with different international interlocutors. On the surface, the vocabularies of peace appeared similar across organizational lines: terms like “disarmament,” “peace-loving peoples,” and “brotherhood” marked one as a peace activist but did not necessarily betray institutional affiliation. Beyond the surface, however, there were differences that proved hard to bridge, in spite of many attempts to do so. The pacifist orientation of the international peace movements in which Gandhian groups were active determined not just their international connections, but also the vectors of the peace work itself. If the World Peace Council sought out famous intellectuals and artists, pressured governments, and appealed to the UN in an effort to effect top-down change, the War Resisters’ International and its member organizations centered “peace within.” World peace would be achieved by instilling a non-violent consciousness and working to strengthen, in the words of Japanese Buddhist pacifist Ananda Gyoryo Maruyama, “the natural human aspiration for peace … by offering bridges of reconciliation.”9 In this reading, peace was a moral good, strengthened by local social work as much as by international organization. In short: more Tolstoy, less Lenin. Naturally, religious groups felt more at home in this corner of the international peace movement. The archives of Cold War-era peace organizations nevertheless bear silent testimony to the efforts that peace activists from a range of ideological orientations invested in creating an inclusive global peace movement. It is striking how many of those attempts to reach across borders, both material and ideological, were invitations to specific individuals – to old friends, hosts, supporters, and correspondents. Like the term “fellow traveler,” the framing of Cold War era-international communities as “friendship” is associated with Soviet outreach to the decolonizing world.10 It is likewise associated with specific registers of interstate diplomacy, particularly in Afro-Asia.11 It was precisely the discourse and practice of friendship and intimacy which caused western political analysts to dismiss Afro-Asian diplomacy as overly

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emotional.12 But by definition, any peace work involved critique of the nation-state, as well as its counterpart: an internationalist reflex. The emotional world of peace workers was an international one, but those emotional ties cut across political lines. In place of “friendship,” this chapter therefore conceives of “fellowship,” both as a nod to the concept of fellow travelling as well as to the centrality of “fellowship” to international pacifist communities.13 However, petitions to governments, embassies, universities and other organizations for the inclusion of friends from across Cold War lines were mostly fruitless. From inside the peace movement, any fellow peace activist was a would-be “fellow traveler,” but the pursuit of peace nevertheless ended up divided along lines that resembled those of the Cold War itself.14 The War Resisters’ International and the World Peace Council were among the larger international bodies on their respective sides of the line. With the destination similar at least on the surface – an end to Cold War, nuclear weapons, and colonial empires – affiliation nevertheless decided one’s fellow travelers for the road. But as shown by the three-act story of Afro-Asian decolonization efforts told below, institutional affiliations could hide considerable differences as well. The question that must therefore be asked of every fellow traveler is: how far will he go?15

Act I: Gandhigram, 1960 The “road” existed in more than a metaphorical sense, and in either case it was long and full of obstacles. In late 1956, the War Resisters’ International (WRI) set out to revitalize its links between Gandhians and international pacifists. They were hoping to build on long-standing – particularly Quaker – connections to India, several of which had found a degree of institutional solidification through Visva Bharati in West Bengal, culminating in a World Pacifist Meeting there in December 1949.16 The task of establishing contacts strong enough to get a WRI conference off the ground in India from halfway across the world fell to Arlo Tatum, the WRI’s London secretary. Arlo Tatum had been born into an Iowan Quaker family who had come of age right as the United States entered the Second World War. As a conscientious objector, he spent three and a half years in federal prison in Minnesota. Blessed with a deep baritone voice, he studied music after his release and had some professional success as a soloist before serving another term in prison when a new draft law was passed.17 Tatum moved to London in 1955 to become the Secretary of the War Resisters’ International and limited his musical career to the writing of peace and protest songs. His first letter to Gandhigram in that capacity, therefore, was truly a “cold call.” He had few personal contacts in India. It was here that the presumed kinship between European pacifists and Gandhians offered a start. “Dear friend,” he started, “… I know that as a Gandhian you are well disposed towards the WRI.”18

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By 1959, after more than two years of exchanging correspondence, the tone of the correspondence between G. Ramachandran and Arlo Tatum had become far more informal, enticing Tatum to travel to India several months ahead of the conference to work alongside his Gandhian colleagues. He decided to travel by boat rather than flying “so that I can read up recent issues of Bhoodan and Sarvodaya and in other ways try to get myself a bit more educated about the current activities and ideas of the Gandhian movement.”19 On the way, Tatum toured Ceylon to meet with religious representatives – Buddhists in Panadura, an ashram at Chunnakam, and a church near Jaffna. His visit received considerable attention from the local press. An interview that Radio Ceylon had planned with Tatum did not quite materialize – instead, listeners were treated to Tatum’s pacifist songs, accompanied on autoharp.20 The Gandhigram conference was a conscious attempt on the part of the WRI to extend the geographical scope of their activities, but for Arlo Tatum this was also an opportunity to further develop his own “non-violent consciousness.” This was not a one-sided process, however: Arlo Tatum also received many unsolicited letters from India, eager to connect Sarvodaya efforts to international pacifism. One Ramesh Vyas from Ahmedabad wrote that “all the peaceloving people of the world should come on one platform. Sarvodaya wants to do this and has an idea of Sarvodaya International, an organization of peace-loving people … Myself is interested [sic] in your movement as a peace lover. I invite you to visit our place, where Gandhi and Vinoba had stayed. We, the believers of one-world should come together.”21 This is how connections were made: Ramesh Vyas’ letter resulted in an invitation from the WRI for him to attend the Gandhigram conference, which he promptly forwarded to a colleague from the Bhoodan movement.22 Financing the conference likewise required considerable reciprocal investment. Gandhigram turned to the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, the Gandhi National Memorial Fund, for financial assistance.23 Connections to the fund were easily made, as G. Ramachandran was also its secretary. The Gandhi Smarak Nidhi made the considerable sum of 10,000 rupees available to the Conference to ensure that all participants receive free hospitality over the six days of the conference.24 The WRI likewise invested significant funds, only to be faced with further difficulty: when the chartered plane that was to take British and European delegates to the conference failed to turn up in the week before the conference, refunding participants who had signed up to the charter sank the organization deeply into debt. However, not all participants relied on the chartered plane. Individual pacifists also invested considerable time and effort. Arlo Tatum noted ahead of the conference that six of the younger pacifists had decided that the most cost-effective way to reach the conference was to purchase a second-hand van and drive to Gandhigram.25 One Pierre Ovaldé, a French peace activist from Paris, requested his

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invitation letter several months early so that he could travel to India by bicycle.26 Max Heinegg, a delegate from New Zealand, travelled by ship to Bombay, and from Bombay by train across the south. He spent his entire life savings on the trip – from his diary, it does appear he considered it worth the expense, even if “exhausted by the heat, and itching from countless bedbug and mosquito bites, I left India like a refugee.”27 There is good reason to delve into the material aspects of the Gandhigram conference, since it is in the material realm that the distinction between organizations pursuing the path of non-violent direct action and those pursuing international disarmament and peace accords becomes most pronounced. For one, their funding streams were vastly different – the former relying mostly on donations, the latter directly or indirectly on state funding. The WRI tended to meet in schools or other sites with dormitories; the World Peace Council typically convened in large hotels in major cities. It would go too far, however, to attribute the difference to funding streams alone. There was a performative element as well. Pacifist movements, irrespective of regional or religious origin, propagated living simply and soberly. The World Peace Council, by contrast, effectively functioned as a foreign-policy tool of the Second World and sought out high-profile conference spaces to project an image of international diplomatic legitimacy and respectability. One was a realm of sleeping bags and flashlights, the other of banners and parades. Finally, the lack of material comfort in Gandhigram served to strengthen the bonds that were forged there. The conference was a communal affair. Every day started with a 7am prayer meeting. The attendees slept in the Gandhigram dorms, but not always on mattresses, which were in short supply. Most used their sleeping bags or topcoats. This was no surprise – all attendees had been informed well in advance that conditions would be somewhat spartan. The WRI News Bulletin eight weeks before the conference left little to the imagination: “Do not ask for hot water as you will probably not get it.”28 Max Heinegg, in any case, did not get much sleep, although this stemmed partly from the fact that he had volunteered to translate speeches into French, a task that kept him at work into the small hours of the morning.29 The fact that such a detailed record of bodily discomfort remains speaks to pacifist meetings as self-consciously embodied experiences. Sober arrangements were not just to be expected, they were actively embraced. Bonds were likewise strengthened through the fact that many of the participants’ life stories were interwoven with common threads. Irrespective of national origin, they had participated in peaceful protests that had been met with violence. They had been arrested and imprisoned. They also shared intellectual trajectories. War Without Violence, by Krishnalal Sridharani, had hit bookstores in the United States when Harcourt published it internationally in 1939. Offering “the sociology of Gandhi’s Satyagraha” to an international audience, it inspired a generation of

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conscientious objectors. These were the fundaments of peace work as fellowship, born of the conviction that their spiritual beliefs, irrespective of the label, were incompatible with the waging of war. The shared experience of non-violent direct action certainly applied to the three main characters in this paper. The first was Siddharaj Dhadda, a prominent Gandhian in the freedom struggle who had become active in state politics upon independence, but who resigned from the Congress Party in 1957 to devote himself fully to the Sarvodaya Movement. In the World Peace Brigade, he would join hands with the second, Bayard Rustin, an African-American civil rights activist who had spent time in prison as a conscientious objector in the Second World War, and had toured India in 1948 to further acquaint himself with the Gandhian movement.30 The third was Bill Sutherland, an African-American civil rights activists who, like Rustin, had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the Second World War, but who had moved to Ghana in 1953 and eventually took Ghanaian citizenship, becoming an important liaison between decolonizing Ghana and the world.31 He too had previous experience of India, having visited along with Ghanaian finance minister Komala Agbeli Gbedema for a World Bank meeting in the 1950s.32 Many of the pacifists travelling to Gandhigram, therefore, were no strangers to Gandhian thought, even if the specifics might elude some of them. Among the latter was certainly Dutch delegate Hein van Wijk, who wrote to G.L. Puri, then India’s Ambassador to the Netherlands, in a state of panic confessing that he had no idea where Gandhigram was.33 Closer to the conference, he asked the WRI: “Is Gandhian Ashram Gandhi’s ashram, and is an ashram a kind of settlement?”34 When he arrived, however, he found kindred spirits. Van Wijk’s life story had many parallels with the biographies sketched above: he had spent most of the Second World War in concentration camps for hiding conscientious objectors from Germany in the Netherlands. Narrowly escaping a death transport in April 1945, he went on to defend those refusing to serve in the Dutch decolonization war in Indonesia as a lawyer and became a national legislator for the Pacifist Socialist Party (PSP). At Gandhigram, meanwhile, everything was set for the conference. An exhibition depicting peacemaking and nuclear disarmament activities throughout the world provided global context. Charts, photographs, and posters of the Bhoodan and Grandam movements in India provided local context.35 After the opening of the exhibition, the delegates gathered for the first speeches in the late afternoon. First, G. Ramachandran, who also addressed the conference during the opening session as director of Gandhigram and therefore host of the event, reminisced about the 1949 World Pacifists Conference held at Tagore’s Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan and later at Gandhi’s ashram in Sevagram. Some of the international delegates at Gandhigram had attended the 1949 conference as well, so this offered the conference a framing that appeared natural but shifted the geographies of

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peace work away from the WRI and away from Europe. Aside from Ramachandran, Norwegian peace activist Diderich Lund, Michael Scott, and Sarva Seva Sangh director Vallabhaswamy had been at the Santineketan gathering. In other respects, too, Ramachandran’s speech provided an extremely provocative start to the conference. He blasted Asian nationalism, and Indian nationalism in particular. He lauded peace activists from other countries who had stood up to their own governments and communities, and wondered if Indian peace activists would have the same courage when the situation called for it. He questioned whether the United Nations was not actually an obstacle to a “United Peoples” rather than a road towards it. He argued that Gandhi was misunderstood in Quaker circles. He asked all the conference attendees to prove him wrong. Then he asked for a real and truthful conference under Divine Providence.36 The first full conference day, a “world panoramic view” of peacemaking helped the delegates get in the right mood. In addition to Bayard Rustin and Bill Sutherland, speakers included Joseph Abileah from Israel and Japanese Anarchist Federation president Taiji Yamaga. Civil disobedience and civil rights figured prominently on the conference agenda. While these were themes more closely related to the core business of the WRI, a large role was reserved here for Rustin, Sutherland, and Nana (Nelson) Mahomo, a South African anti-Apartheid activist active in the Pan Africanist Congress. Both the US and South African situations, and the strategies for non-violent direct action deployed there, were extensively discussed. On the evening of 24 December, the attendees were treated to a “Nativity Pantomime” as well as a play written by V. Rengarajan. Entitled “I have no part in the blood of this innocent man,” it dealt with the issue of moral culpability, framed by the deaths of Jesus and Gandhi, and linked it to the modern pacifist movement: “The peace-loving scientist of tomorrow would, like the Pilate, say ‘I have no part in the blood of this innocent man’. Would we cry then as did the Jews of the Pilate and the religious megalomaniacs who caused the death of Gandhiji – ‘His blood will be upon us’? We should not – that is what this play has to tell you.”37 This blending of religious traditions that fed international pacifism was also evident from the session on Sarvodaya, chaired by Vallabhaswami, the president of the Sarva Seva Sangh. He insisted that addressing his “brothers and sisters” that day was more than rhetoric. “Our relation cannot be less than that of brothers and sisters … our family consists of Buddha, Jesus, Gandhiji and many such men of God.”38 Along with the commitment to work outside the mechanisms of the state, the rooting of peace work in individual spirituality – rather than in any one specific religious tradition – was another way in which this community of fellow travelers was forged. After the conference, many of the international visitors no longer addressed their letters to Ramachandran as “friend” or “sir,” but as “Mama” (uncle). To Arlo Tatum, the conference had indeed been deeply transformative. As he wrote to

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“Dear Mama,” he was now convinced the conference marked the end of the era in which pacifists thought that the refusal of military service was the only way to oppose war. For an official in the WRI– an organization which was founded on the principal of conscientious objection – who had spent much of his early twenties in prison for that exact conviction, this was a fundamental shift. He voiced the hope that “a new sense of dynamic will become evident in the movement. From my own personal point of view I am sure that my time in India represents one of the most valuable experiences in my life and I shall always be grateful for the opportunity … of all the people I met in India I felt you to be the least hampered with prejudicial constrictions.”

Act II: Brummana, 1961 The Gandhigram participants left the conference with a very concrete task. The “Gandhigram Statement,” widely publicized in Pacifist circles, had “endorsed the idea of an International Shanti Sena or World Peace Brigade and considered that the establishment of such a body was a matter of urgency. Such a World Peace Brigade should be independent of the United Nations and all governments. The conference envisaged practical constructive work as being an integral part of the activities of the World Peace Brigade.”39 The idea of a World Peace Brigade dated back to the 1940s. Gandhi pioneered the concept when he proposed the creation of a people’s nonviolent army, recruited from all over the world, to step in wherever conflict threatened.40 By 1960, there had been several failed attempts to establish one, leading to some skepticism among the more seasoned pacifists at Gandhigram. Even Bayard Rustin, who was otherwise excited about the good a World Peace Brigade might do in Africa, noted that “the idea should either be implemented or forgotten.”41 It is no surprise, then, that when the details of that Peace Brigade were again tabled for a separate conference, “to be held as soon as feasible,” the main advocates of the Brigade pressed on. Not wanting to lose momentum, they aimed to get the Brigade up and running within the year. They took the preparations upon themselves. Siddharaj Dhadda and Rustin took part in the steering committee. One year later, almost to the day, the World Peace Brigade was formally established at the premises of a boarding school in Brummana, Lebanon. The setting, in many ways, resembled the meeting in India. The Brummana High School is nestled in the hills above Beirut. Funded by a community of Quakers from Darlington, England, the place was originally called Darlington Station. Education at Brummana followed the principles of the Society of Friends and stressed non-violence, equality, self-reliance, and the “spirit of service.” As had been the

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case in Gandhigram, the delegates to the founding conference of the World Peace Brigade slept in dormitories. The conference was able to use the school because of the December holidays, but that meant that the school was unheated and the weather bitterly cold. The fire came from within, as American Quaker Bob Gilmore later reminisced about the warm excitement from taking on the power of imperial interests and Cold War alliances.42 The Indian delegation consisted of G. Ramachandran, Devi Prasad, Narayan Desai, S. Jagannathan, and Siddharaj Dhadda, all of whom had played an important part in the Gandhigram conference the year before. Rustin and Sutherland were in attendance as well. Together, they decided the World Peace Brigade should focus on Southern Africa as a site where non-violent direct action was most urgently needed. At a session chaired by G. Ramachandran, Rustin, and Sutherland shared their previous experiences with organizing in Africa, especially in Ghana in the 1950s, but also urged that no final decisions be made until African leaders had been consulted. In the run-up to the conference, there had been some discussion about the name the World Peace Brigade was to take. Swami Sri Bhadra wrote to Arlo Tatum to strongly argue in favour of a Shanti Seva over a Shanti Sena, thinking the concept of service still underrepresented in the initiative.43 Sutherland, too, wrote to the WRI in the run-up to Brummana that “I sure hope we can find a better name.”44 Rev. R.R. Keithahn, at the Sarvodaya Ashram at Batlagundu in South India, likewise wrote in to remind the Brummana conference of its Sarvodaya roots, and to ensure that the World Peace Brigade did not run “way off track of the concern expressed at Gandhigram.”45 But there was also consensus: “World” Peace Brigade was favored over “International” Peace Brigade, to avoid the impression that its workers represented their respective nations.46 This mirrored Ramachandran’s contrasting of “united nations” versus “united peoples” a year earlier in Gandhigram. Another point of contention was the main purpose of the Brigade. It is here that old differences within the peace movement surfaced. Rustin, Sutherland, and Dhadda came firmly down on the side of supporting decolonization efforts. Others, such as the American pacifist Brad Lyttle, saw nuclear testing as the primary threat to peace. This division, however, was not as clean-cut as it appeared. Rustin and Sutherland had previously been involved in the “Sahara Team,” an international initiative launched from Ghana to prevent French nuclear testing in the Sahara in 1959. As Rob Skinner has shown, the Sahara Team was very much rooted in existing anti-colonial networks and informed by Pan-Africanist solidarity. 47 Choosing the Brigade’s first project, albeit important, was a matter of emphasis, not principle. By now, a strong friendship had developed between the advocates of this World Peace Brigade. This also found expression in a certain amount of homosociality – while the Gandhigram meeting had included several prominent female delegates,

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by Brummana, the World Peace Brigade had become a decidedly more masculine affair. This is evident from the less formal aspects of the conference as well. The Gandhigram conference had ended with a “talent night” that only reinforced the idea that an unlikely marriage between Gandhians and conscientious objectors was taking place – the German delegation performed a “Christmas cabaret” full of anti-militarist jokes, while local female social workers performed a selection of traditional Indian dances. The two were both appreciated, but they did not go very well together. The last night of the Brummana conference provided an interesting contrast: the secretary of the War Resisters, Arlo Tatum, Bayard Rustin, and Narayan Desai sang the conference to a close, together. All three were known to possess musical talents, but Rustin in particular was known to move audiences to tears. This intimate moment of joint singing, just as the new year was starting, was the real start of the World Peace Brigade project.

Act III: Dar es Salaam, 1962 In 1962, three of the founders of the World Peace Brigade moved to Dar es Salaam – Dhadda, Sutherland, and Rustin – to implement the Africa Freedom Action (AFA). This was the World Peace Brigade’s first real test. Their aim was to amplify Kenneth Kaunda’s struggle for Zambian independence in Northern Rhodesia. Kaunda’s commitment to non-violence and civil disobedience had brought him into the orbit of the World Peace Brigade. At first glance, the AFA seems another child of the unlikely marriage between the conscientious objectors of the War Resisters’ International and Gandhian social workers otherwise deeply involved in the local uplift efforts of the Bhoodan movement in India. A closer look, however, reveals a very concrete and material project of Afro-Asian solidarity, best illustrated by the travels of Rustin, Sutherland, and Dhadda. The World Peace Brigade set up a Positive Action Center in Dar es Salaam. Dhadda laid the groundwork for active Indian involvement. He met with Kaunda and Julius Nyerere in Dar es Salaam. Nyerere was adamant that, before anything else, the World Peace Brigade secure backing from the most important stakeholders in the region. Once that was arranged, the Tanganyikan government would “render all possible assistance.”48 Nyerere considered PAFMECA, the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East and Central Africa, the best forum for the AFA to build a network. Its third conference was about to open in Addis Ababa.49 Dhadda admits to feeling a little lost. He had not travelled much outside India and had hoped to rely on the experience of Michael Scott, noted British peace activist and one of the chairmen of the Brigade.50 Scott could not make it, however, so Dhadda joined “Bill and Bayard,” to whom Dhadda now referred affectionately even in his formal

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reports about his work in Africa, in Addis Ababa. Dhadda was able to get observer status to attend the proceedings. In the opening speech, Haile Selassie himself devoted special attention to the situation in Northern Rhodesia. The solidarity shown at the conference and the “realization of the desirability of African Unity” clearly made an impression on Dhadda. He returned to Dar es Salaam with a great sense of urgency, reporting that “the situation in Rhodesia is reaching boiling point and whatever action we propose, should be taken quickly.”51 The East African travels of Dhadda speak to the strength of existing Afro-Asian ties as well as the forging of new ones. In Addis, Dhadda spoke with Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, and Oginga Odinga, as well as some of Kaunda’s Zambian colleagues. In Nairobi, he got together with an Indian friend from Mozambique, who helped him strategize the best locations for volunteer training centers in Central Africa, and “gave hope of financial assistance from local sources.” The World Peace Brigade workers proceeded with their plans to organize an international march from Tanganyika to Rhodesia to ensure Kaunda’s cause would occupy the front pages of the world’s media outlets. It is interesting to note that these efforts were primarily directed from the World Peace Brigade’s Asian Regional Council in India, further cementing the Brigade’s Afro-Asian orientation. That was true in a material sense as well. By March 1962, an initial Rs 10,000 in foreign exchange had been secured for the AFA, and the Sarva Seva Sangh committed to raising an additional Rs 20,000. But the Sarva Seva Sangh also did not intend to “invent the wheel” from India: they decided to send out volunteers to contact the Indian community in Tanganyika to engage them in the Brigade’s work.52 The strong diasporic ties between India and East Africa were part of the AFA as more than passing references.53 In fact, they had been instrumental in the development of Kaunda’s pacifism. Kaunda was a devout Christian, but his introduction to non-violent thinking had been decidedly Gandhian, at the hands of a Lusaka storekeeper named Rambhai Patel.54 Patel translated parts of Gandhi’s writing for Kaunda, who wrote them into his early speeches. He even paid for Kaunda, in whom he saw a future leader, to travel to India in 1958 on a pilgrimage to the main sites of Gandhi’s life and work. Without irony, he later wrote: “I owe Rambhai Patel much and can see why Jesus made a shrewd businessman the hero of one of his parables of the Kingdom.55 And so, the intended march became a largely Afro-Asian affair. In fact, the European Regional Council was hardly involved, and when it was, it was to urge caution or argue that the project’s agenda of decolonization no matter the cost risked resulting in violence. These types of communication only reinforced the idea that peace work towards decolonization would have to be an Afro-Asian effort. This trend would continue over the short lifespan of the World Peace Brigade. By

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1965, and especially after the Delhi-Peking Friendship March had run into a series of obstacles, the World Peace Brigade was re-evaluating its existence.56 By then, Siddharaj Dhadda had lost all patience with the European Regional Council: “the World Peace Brigade has no doubt functioned inadequately. Without meaning any disrespect I might say that the European Regional Council has unfortunately had the largest share of this inadequacy.”57 A more permanent Indian volunteer was sent to assist the AFA in Africa after Dhadda’s return to India. The Indian section of the World Peace Brigade sent Bhoodan veteran Suresh Ram to Dar es Salaam to assist Sutherland and Rustin, taking care of both his expenses in Africa and those of his family back in India. Ram’s mentor Vinoba Bhave wrote to the AFA that “… it is a matter of great satisfaction that thoughtful Africans are getting inclined towards non-violence, and a Satyagraha project is being planned in that continent… Jaijagat [victory to the world]!”58 Relative to the other pacifist traditions represented in the Brigade, Gandhian peace work was well-suited to a peace project that prioritized decolonization. For the Brigade at large, however, it was the fork in the road which answered the question asked of every fellow-traveler: how far will he go?59

Epilogue But what of the march to Rhodesia? News of the march had spread quickly, thanks in part to long volunteer lists from India who “were ready to go if called.” The march itself was never held, but it succeeded in transferring some of the “sense of urgency” that Dhadda had felt to government circles. The semantic discussion around the World Peace Brigade’s name seems to have had some effect, too: the Rhodesian government nervously declared that their country was going to be invaded by a “Brigade.” The threat seemed credible enough that the Welensky government rushed troops to the border.60 This helped start negotiations with Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere. Kaunda, on his part, was quite matter of fact about the decision to withdraw the march. “In the event, the Brigade never marched. That is no disgrace. At least its members cared enough about our plight to do something about it.”61 His notes on the Sarva Seva Sangh members he met over the course of the AFA were collegial and appreciative, and he became an active leader in the War Resisters International. He tentatively agreed on the overall change of atmosphere the World Peace Brigade had effected in the Zambian struggle for independence: “I have no wish to sell short movements such as the Peace People. At the very least they help to create a climate in which people allow themselves to think about the hitherto unattainable.”62

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Devi Prasad, a Gandhian member of the WRI who had been present at Gandhigram and Brummana, and later in life became the institutional biographer of the War Resisters, was convinced that the World Peace Brigade’s efforts had paved the way for Zambian and Tanzanian independence: “It would be wrong on my part to give an impression that it was the action of the WPB that brought about the freedom of these countries. Nonetheless, it is true that such “small” happenings can sometimes tip the balance.”63 Prasad may have overstated the role of the World Peace Brigade in forcing the British to the negotiating table. What the AFA accomplished, was to offer a method of non-violent direct action that spoke to international pacifism but drew from specifically Gandhian methods and ideas. That method would not have come into being without the fellowship of Dhadda, Rustin, and Sutherland: their parallel trajectories of organizing on three different continents, and their shared commitment to aid decolonization efforts thousands of miles from home.

Notes 1

International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (IISH), Devi Prasad Papers 46: Notes on Talks with Vinoba on World Peace and World Peace Brigade, 2 January 1961.

2

IISH, War Resisters’ International Archives (WRI), Gandhigram, Silver Jubilee Souvenir booklet, 1973, iii.

3

IISH, WRI, G. Ramachandran, “Gandhi and the Future of Human Society,” 29.

4

Not least the most prominent Gandhians of the era, Jayaprakash Narayan and Vinoba Bhave. See, for example, Lydia Walker, “Jayaprakash Narayan and the politics of reconciliation for the postcolonial state and its imperial fragments,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, (2019), 147–69. On the theoretical underpinnings of the divergence in development ideas between the Indian state and the Gandhians, see Taylor Sherman, “A Gandhian Answer to the Threat of Communism? Sarvodaya and Postcolonial Nationalism in India,” IESHR 53 (2016), 249–70.

5

On the divergent intellectual underpinnings of non-violence, see Mithi Mukherjee, “Transcending Identity: Gandhi, Nonviolence, and the Pursuit of a ‘Different’ Freedom in Modern India,” American Historical Review 115 (2010), 453–73.

6

Rachel Leow, “A Missing Peace: the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing, 1952, and the Emotional Making of Third World Internationalism,” Journal of World History 30 (2019), 21–53.

7

As Patrick Iber notes, the WPC represented peace-as-communism, promoted as defending national sovereignty against the imperialist west. Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 14.

8

Reem Abou El-Fadl conceives of these overlaps as “infrastructures of solidarity.” Reem Abou El-Fadl, “Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub,” Journal of World History 30 (2019), 157–92.

9

IISH, WRI, Appeal to the Triennial Conference of the WRI, 10th Triennial Conference IV, 1960.

10

See, in particular, Abigail Judge Kret, “‘We Unite with Knowledge’: The Peoples’ Friendship University and Soviet Education for the Third World,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33 (2013), 239–56.

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11

Priya Chacko, Indian Foreign Policy: The Politics of Postcolonial Identity from 1947 to 2004 (London: Routledge, 2012), chapter 3.

12

Rachel Leow, “A Missing Peace,” 50; Roland Burke, “Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights at the United Nations,” Human Rights Quarterly 39 (2017), 273–95.

13

Of these, the International Fellowship of Reconciliation is arguably the most well-known, but pacifist fellowships were spread across locations as well as denominations. On the organizational forms of pacifism, see Peter Brock and Nigel Young, Pacifism in the Twentieth Century (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999); Elise Boulding, Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History (Syracure, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), chapter 3.

14

For a detailed discussion of this process, see Günter Wernicke, “The Communist-led World Peace Council and the Western Peace Movements: The Fetters of Bipolarity and Some Attempts to Break Them in the Fifties and Early Sixties,” Peace & Change 23 (1998), 280–1.

15

Trotsky, quoted in David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, rev. ed. 2009 [1973]), 2.

16

On these longer connections, see Marjorie Sykes, Quakers and India: A Forgotten Century (London:

17

“Arlo Tatum Obituary,” The Guardian, 7 May 2014.

18

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, Arlo Tatum to G. Ramachandran, 26 November

Allen & Unwin, 1980).

1956. 19

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, Arlo Tatum to Banwarilal Choudhri, 3 March 1960.

20

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, WRI News Bulletin, 20 September 1960.

21

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, Ramesh Vyas to Arlo Tatum, 1 August 1960.

22

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, Ramesh Vyas to the Assistant Secretary of the WRI, 28 September 1960.

23

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, Arlo Tatum to G. Ramachandran, 8 June 1959.

24

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, Gandhi National Memorial Fund, Tenth Triennial Conference of the War Resisters International, 1 March 1960.

25

Ibid.

26

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, Arlo Tatum to R. Srinivasan, 1 June 1960.

27

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference, V: cuttings, Max Heinegg, “Indian Pilgrimage.”

28

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, WRI News Bulletin, 27 October 1960.

29

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference V: cuttings, Max Heinegg, “Indian Pilgrimage.”

30

There are several biographies of Bayard Rustin. The most comprehensive biography is John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). Daniel Levine, Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000) and Jervis Anderson, Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1997) look at Rustin mainly through the lens of the African American Civil Rights movement.

31

Jake Hodder, “Toward a Geography of Black Internationalism: Bayard Rustin, Nonviolence, and the Promise of Africa,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 106 (2016), 1373.

32

Bill Sutherland and Matt Mayer, Guns and Gandhi in Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc: 2000), chapter 2. Gbedema was finance minister of Ghana between 1954 and 1961.

33

IISH, Archief Hein van Wijk, Hein van Wijk to G.L. Puri, 24 May 1960.

34

IISH, Archief Hein van Wijk, Hein van Wijk to Tony Smythe, 26 September 1960.

35

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, WRI Newsbulletin, 20 September 1960.

36

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, Welcome address.

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37

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, Playbill.

38

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference I-III, 1956-1961, Vallabhaswami’s speech, 23 December 1960.

39

IISH, WRI, 10th Triennial Conference IV, 1960, Gandhigram Statement, adopted 27 December 1960. For the most extensive treatment of the World Peace Brigade’s activities in the decolonizing world, see Lydia Walker, States in Waiting: 20th Century Global Decolonization and its Discontents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

40

See in particular Thomas Weber, Gandhi’s Peace Army: The Shanti Sena and Unarmed Peacekeeping (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 1996).

41

D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, 315.

42

Ibid., 317.

43

IISH, Devi Prasad Papers 45a: Arlo Tatum to Swami Shri Bhadra, 6 December 1961.

44

IISH, Devi Prasad Papers 45b: Bill Sutherland to Arlo Tatum, 4 March 1961.

45

IISH, Devi Prasad Papers 45b: Dick Keithahn to Arlo Tatum, 8 December 1961.

46

IISH, Devi Prasad Papers 45b: Arlo Tatum to Fred H. Blum, 28 November 1961.

47

Rob Skinner, “Bombs and Border Crossings: Peace Activist Networks and the Postcolonial State in Africa, 1959-62,” Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2015), 418–38.

48

IISH, Devi Prasad Papers 49, “Report on African Tour” by Siddharaj Dhadda, 22 February 1962.

49

PAFMECA was founded by Julius Nyerere in Tanganyika. It was an important steppingstone towards the Organization of African Unity (OAU), established in Addis Ababa in 1963, a year after the Addis PAFMECA Conference.

50

On Michael Scott’s international peace work, see Walker, States in Waiting.

51

IISH, Devi Prasad Papers 49, “Report on African Tour” by Siddharaj Dhadda, 22 February 1962.

52

IISH, Devi Prasad Papers 49: WPB Asian Section (1961-1962): Kashi, 27 March 1962.

53

On the role of the Indian diaspora in Zambian politics in this period, see Friday Mufuzi, “Indian Political Activism in Colonial Zambia: The Case of Livingstone’s Indian Traders,” in Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola (eds.), Living the End of Empire: Politics and Society in Late-Colonial Zambia (Leiden: Brill, 2011): 207–23.

54

Kenneth Kaunda himself credits Patel in Kaunda, On Violence, ed. Colin Morris (London: Collins, 1980), 15. See also Mufuzi, “Indian Political Activism,” 221.

55

Morris, Kaunda on Violence, 16.

56

The Delhi-Peking Friendship March was attempted in 1963 following the Sino-Indian war. Dhadda took on an important role in the organization of this March as well.

57

IISH, Devi Prasad Papers 48: Devi Prasad on behalf of WRI to WPB, 15 January 1965.

58

IISH, Devi Prasad Papers 49: WPB Asian Section, Vinoba’s Message for the Project of Non-Violent Action in Africa.

59

Caute, The Fellow-Travellers, 2.

60

D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, 318.

61

Kaunda, On Violence, 22.

62

Ibid., 24.

63

Devi Prasad, War is a Crime Against Humanity: The Story of War Resisters’ International (London: War Resisters International, 2005), 330.

CHAPTER 9

The Islamist International in Lahore: The Jamaat-i Islami, the Middle East, and the Quest for an Islamic State Simon Wolfgang Fuchs

Abstract This chapter recentres South Asian actors and ideas at the heart of Islamist debates in the twentieth century. It shows how Pakistan’s Jamaat-i Islami (JI), well-connected to the Middle East, claimed a leadership role for the idea of a global Islamic revolution. The fall of the Shah in Iran in 1979 constituted a source of pride for the party. At the same time, the JI was careful to highlight the Shiʿi clerics’ comprehensive ideological indebtedness. When Iran became increasingly less ecumenical in outlook throughout the 1980s, the JI moved away from the country and grasped the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as another opportunity to position itself a leading international Islamist actor and keeper of the true revolutionary flame.

Key words: Islamism, Jamaat-i Islami, Islamic revolution, Mawdudi, Pakistan, Islamic state

When the influential Egyptian Muslim Brother and long-term resident of Qatar, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, led the funeral prayers for Abu l’-Aʿla Mawdudi in November 1979, it was clear that no ordinary Pakistani was laid to rest that day.1 Thousands attended the ceremony along with Pakistan’s military dictator Zia ul-Haq in Lahore’s Gaddafi stadium.2 al-Qaradawi, who has been called a “global mufti” in his own right, termed his fellow Islamist to be not only a leader of the subcontinent’s Muslims but rather of the entire world (tamam-i dunya ke imam).3 Mawdudi had distinguished himself by mastering the traditional Islamic sciences as well as directly approaching the “new sciences” and forging an Islamic system with “solid proofs.” His prolific output, according to al-Qaradawi, underlined his achievement of presenting Islamic thought in a truly “influential, successful, and clear manner.”4 From the Middle East to Southeast Asia, fellow activists simultaneously celebrated the legacy of Mawdudi, one of the most original and influential Islamist ideologues of the twentieth century, and deplored his demise.5 The international ties of his party, the Jamaat-i Islami (JI), continued to thrive, as manifested, for example, in a well-attended seminar on the future of the Muslim world held ten years later in

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Lahore in November 1989. This gathering at the flashy Alhamra Arts Center, located right off Lahore’s Mall Road, assembled everyone who had a name in international Islamic circles. Yet, the importance of colonial India and post-partition Pakistan for the emergence of global Islamism is usually erased from conventional, Middle East-focused histories of the phenomenon. According to the established narrative, South Asia was only the place that witnessed the initial spark of the most influential Islamist ideas of the twentieth century. Their later perfection and subsequent popularization happened in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. My chapter, by contrast, aims at writing Mawdudi, the JI, and their continued global involvement and influence back into the story. It is simply not the case that Mawdudi and his party retreated from the global stage after having laid the groundwork for the envisioned functioning of an Islamic state. Instead, the JI continued to consider itself the steward of political change and indeed the uncontested “vanguard of the Islamic Revolution.”6 In making this claim, this chapter recentres South Asian actors and ideas at the heart of Islamist debates in the late twentieth century. I explore, in particular, how Mawdudi’s long-held call for an Islamic Revolution rippled across the Middle East, where it was even picked-up by the Shiʿi Iranian Revolutionaries. 7 To Pakistani observers, the case of Iran constituted an intriguing and somewhat unnerving demonstration of Mawdudi’s ideas being finally put into action. For some JI members, Tehran turned into a revolutionary dream city, while others noticed the warning signs of sectarianism early on. Tensions and disagreements as to whether the Iranian model should be considered a “real” revolution in Mawdudi’s understanding remained, even among members of the JI student organization, the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba (IJT) in Pakistan and, to a certain extent, the Students’ Islamic Movement of India.8 Increasingly, the embrace of Iran became an embarrassment due to its questionable commitment to ecumenical Islam and the ruthless liquidation of political enemies. Even this setback did not mean that the JI lost confidence in its global mission, however. From the late 1980s onward, continued international outreach to fellow Islamists allowed the JI to quietly move away from Iran without abandoning the country completely. The JI was careful to actively shape the narrative both on an international and domestic level. In conversations with fellow Islamists, the party made clear that its propagated model of Islamic transformation was not tainted by the breakdown of Iran’s great anti-Shah coalition. At home, these outreach activities enabled the JI to distance itself from its erstwhile flirtation with the military dictator Zia ul-Haq (d. 1988), who had set the country on the path toward Islamization but turned out to be interested most of all in his own preservation of power. The first part of the chapter delineates how South Asia formed an undisputed center of Muslim scholarship, patronage, and political mobilization during the

the islamist international in lahore 205

colonial period. Muslim actors from South Asia had the distinct advantage of communicating fluently in English, which enabled them to directly engage global audiences. I then show how the acknowledgement of this leadership role became increasingly, and paradoxically, marginalized in Western scholarship shortly after the emergence of Pakistan, founded as an unprecedented home for India’s Muslims with ambitions to revive Islam worldwide. This is despite the fact that Mawdudi, who had initially been skeptical about Pakistan, came to embrace the state during a time when his reformulation of modern Islam became mandatory reading for Islamists everywhere, as we shall see next. The final parts of the chapter delve into how the JI in general, and its student wing in particular, grappled with the Iranian Revolution, which it tried to read both as a fulfillment of its own mission and a call to action.

Downplaying (Islamist) South Asia and the role of Mawdudi South Asia remains largely invisible in the literature on contemporary global Islam. The reasons lie in the logic of area studies as well as in the rise of the nation state as a unit of analysis, resulting in the fact that Muslim actors are primarily studied within self-contained boxes.9 Even such divergent phenomena as Salafism or Shiʿi Islam have been studied with an almost exclusive focus on the Middle East.10 What gets lost with this approach are the continuing transnational connections of the subcontinent. Scholars of pre-colonial and British India, by contrast, have displayed a much greater awareness of these crucial ties. A significant number of Arab specialists of the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, were attracted to Indian courts since the fourteenth century, which, in turn, led to the subcontinent developing its own tradition and leadership role in the discipline from the eighteenth century onward.11 Muslim religious scholars and the rulers of princely states operated within the logic of the British empire to foster personal relationships and intellectual networks.12 South Asian Muslim rebels aptly navigated the in-between zones of the Ottoman and British empires and frequently moved between South Asia and the Middle East.13 Until the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, princely states in India were leading centers of Muslim patronage.14 What’s more, British India attracted the intense interest of Arab reformists due to its unrivaled engagement with colonial modernity and pioneering embrace of print in order to defend Islam against missionary activities (and supposedly wayward Muslims).15 South Asian actors, such as the Deoband movement, proved highly innovative in fusing modern Western ways of education with a revivalist mission, which led to the emergence of the famous Dar al-ʿUlum Deoband and many madrasas attached to it.16 The willingness to adopt state-of-the-art methods was also

206 simon wolfgang fuchs

demonstrated by new ways to organize the calling to Islam (daʿwa) in many settings beyond the subcontinent, as in the case of the lay missionary movement of the Tablighi Jamaʿat.17 After the First World War, the Khilafat movement, which tried to save Turkey from becoming partitioned by Western powers, captured global Islamic imaginations. As Cemil Aydin has argued, the Khilafatists emphasized “the implicit contract of World War I Muslim loyalty – namely that the victorious British Empire must honor Muslim sacrifices for their cause by respecting Muslim religious sensibilities and demands, as well as the holy sites.” Indian Muslims were instrumental in funding the fight of the Turkish nationalists. They also “sent a delegation to Paris to remind Wilson that his original Fourteen Points speech had promised independence and self-determination for ‘the Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire.’”18 During the age of subsequent Islamic congresses, which attempted to devise alternatives to the office of the Caliph abolished by Republican Turkey in 1924, organizers tried hard to attract a substantive Indian presence.19 After the emergence of Pakistan in 1947, the country continued to host international gatherings, even though the influx of Petrodollars let the weight shift gradually toward Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.20 For Muslim scholars in the Middle East, however, the ties with South Asia kept their crucial importance. Interestingly, this held true both for more traditionalist minded authors, who had a high regard for ordinary Muslims and religious scholars alike clinging to the traditional schools of law (madhhab, madhahib) in general and the Hanafi madhhab (which dominated in South Asia) in particular, as well as for Islamists, as we will see in the remainder of this chapter.21 How does Mawdudi fit into this general assessment? He began his career in journalism in 1917/1918 at the age of fifteen and worked within a particular late-colonial context in which both the public and British authorities strove to define what “proper” religion should look like. The young Mawdudi came to increasingly rebel against this privatized and apolitical notion of colonial religiosity. 22 His intellectual formation thereby leaned heavily on secular subjects, such as history, political science, or economics, which he studied in English with the help of a tutor. While Mawdudi also emphasized that he was “fully accomplished” in the traditional religious sciences and boasted of his “extraordinary abilities in Arabic,” this claim was repeatedly challenged throughout his life by the ʿulama with whom Mawdudi continued to have an uneasy relationship.23 Yet, his hybrid (if spotty) education enabled him to engage in intensive discussions on communism, fascism, and scientific thought, which inter alia led him to structure the JI along the lines of a Leninist organization, led by a male “vanguard” and to sell his conception of “Islam” as a scientifically verified insight.24 Starting with al-Jihad fi ’l-Islam (Jihad in Islam), published in 1927, Mawdudi’s writings thus display from early on a tendency to speak in very general terms and within a strictly Quranic framework without

the islamist international in lahore 207

limiting themselves to the Muslim situation in South Asia.25 This can be seen in how he envisions the “ideal renewer,” a version of the Islamic mahdi, whom he portrays as a decidedly this-worldly, revolutionary leader who will “establish a strong Islamic state which will on the one hand enforce the full spirit of Islam, and on the other bring the scientific progress to its highest top.”26 The last quote demonstrates already how fascinated Mawdudi was with the strength of the modern state which he wanted to put to use for the sake of Islam. In Mawdudi’s conception, the Islamic state which he was striving for seeks to mould every aspect of life and activity in consonance with its moral norms and program of social reform. In such a state no one can regard any field of his affairs as personal and private. Considered from this aspect, the Islamic state bears a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist states.27

It took some time, however, until Mawdudi would be willing to entertain the thought that Pakistan could serve as such a political entity. He initially rejected the call for the establishment of Pakistan as a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent, since he took issue with the supposedly “nationalist” orientation of the Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah (d. 1948). The League, he warned, intended to establish “a democratic-secular state where non-Muslims will have as much share in government as Muslims.”28 According to Mawdudi, an Islamic state was unachievable without a thorough mental revolution that would inculcate the people with the true understanding of Islam.29 Once the plan for Pakistan was officially announced and the state was finally established in 1947, however, Mawdudi gradually changed course and no longer resisted the pull of the novel concept that endowed the idea of Pakistan with global ramifications as it gave Muslims a political vision they had not had for several centuries.30 Pakistan was supposed to be neither a successor to the Mughal realm nor to British India. Instead, the state was envisioned as an entirely new, social contract–based entity without any connection to the colonial state. It was meant to serve as a laboratory for the global renewal of Islam.31 Mawdudi and the JI were willing to accept such labels after Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly had passed the so-called “Objectives Resolution” in 1949 which set guidelines for a future constitution of the state. Crucial for the Islamists were two clauses. The first was the opening statement: “Sovereignty over the entire Universe belongs to Allah Almighty alone and the authority which He has delegated to the state of Pakistan, through its people for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust.” The second was the provision that Pakistan’s Muslim citizens should be enabled to “order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in accordance with the teachings and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Quran and Sunnah.” This unequivocal emphasis on Pakistan’s

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Islamic identity meant, in Mawdudi’s view, that the state now fulfilled its proper global role. He argued that “it had become binding for every Muslim to contribute toward its strength and development.”32 In reality, Mawdudi’s relationship with the new state remained complicated. In 1953, for instance, he was imprisoned and sentenced to death (but later pardoned) due to his role in the anti-Ahmadi agitation of the time.33 During the 1960s, Ayub Khan’s military regime saw the JI as a competitor for its own attempt to remake Pakistan in a modernist image of Islam.34 It was during this period of domestic tensions, however, that Mawdudi became a fixture of the global Islamist scene. Yet, the geographical limits of Area Studies and related constraints in terms of language skills have meant that colleagues who do not happen to specialize in South Asian Islam have only displayed rather negligible interest in Mawdudi and the JI. Take the telling example of yet another Muslim Brother, Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966). In his writings, Islam is turned into an objectified political, economic, and social “system” that can and should be implemented politically.35 In making his case, Qutb displays a significant intellectual arrogance by dismissing the entire Islamic scholarly tradition. He insisted that his landmark idea of divine sovereignty was revealed to him in a dream while imprisoned.36 Qutb argued in this context that God alone has the right to enact laws and that no “man-made laws” can be tolerated. Any political order that is not explicitly erected on divine law (shari‘a) is ipso facto illegitimate and should not be obeyed by the Muslim population. This line of reasoning has entered the “bloodstream” of Islamist thought to the extent that it has become seemingly self-evident for many authors and groups on a global scale.37 Qutb’s peculiar conception of divine sovereignty and the rejection of human systems is the dominant theme in almost all Islamist and Jihadi texts written after him. It has so thoroughly shaped the thinking of countless Islamist organizations that it has turned into almost common knowledge without the need to refer explicitly to the originator of these ideas.38 Yet, though we find this claim repeated in the literature, Qutb’s supposedly groundbreaking contribution did not originate with him.39 It was Mawdudi who developed this successful idea as his own signature contribution to Islamist thought, focusing, as already discussed, on the near limitless powers of the envisioned Islamic state.40 However, even those scholars who acknowledge Qutb’s indebtedness to Mawdudi emphasize the Egyptian’s outsize role in adopting and ultimately popularizing Mawdudi’s notion of divine sovereignty.41 Mawdudi’s ideas, according to this line of reasoning, only took off beyond the subcontinent once they were translated into Arabic. A crucial role is usually assigned in this context to the Indian scholar Sayyid Abu ‘l-Hasan Nadvi (d. 1999). He was responsible for facilitating the contact between Mawdudi and the experienced editor and gifted translator Masʿud ʿAlam Nadvi (d. 1954), a connection which led to the JI establishing a dedicated

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translation and marketing office for the Arab world. By 1951, nine of Mawdudi’s crucial writings were available in Arabic translation. Sayyid Abu ‘l-Hasan Nadwi drew further attention to this body of scholarship when he toured the Middle East in 1951.42 Allegedly, it was only in the able hands of Sayyid Qutb, then, that Mawdudi’s potential was reworked and brought to fruition. Even today, Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood remain the main focus of countless publications on Islamism. Media reports single out Qutb as the “father of terror” or the trailblazer of modern Muslim theocracy and the caliphate.43 Even more so, we lack any meaningful studies of how the JI continued to engage with the wider Islamist world after Mawdudi’s demise. Interestingly, this sidelining of Mawdudi was, and has been, noticed in Islamist circles as well, an observation which brings us back to Yusuf al-Qaradawi. In an interview he gave to the Pakistani periodical Asia in Delhi in spring 1980, Qaradawi made it clear that unlike in India, where many of the ʿulama did not buy into Mawdudi’s reasoning and saw him as someone who lacked higher Islamic training, the Arab scholarly scene was in unison in its appreciation of Mawdudi as a flagbearer of the global Islamic movement and a brother who stood for “correct Islamic thought” (sahih Islami fikr).44 Initially, however, this attitude had not been widely shared beyond the Muslim Brotherhood, whose activists early on became aware of Mawdudi and the JI. Already in 1949, and thus fifteen years before Mawdudi’s influence became clearly visible in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, some of them requested the complete collection of Mawdudi’s treatises from a publishing house in Aleppo in order to familiarize themselves with his thought and “to put an end to the frivolous pastime of some students.”45 After receiving thirteen publications delivered to their Egyptian prison, they realized that while there may be different approaches and methods in propagating the message, “Islam was truly one single entity for anyone who is discerning and experienced” (al-Islam wahid min ladan ʿalim khabir).46 This meant that, through Mawdudi, the Muslim Brothers came to appreciate and construct Islam as a comprehensive and all-encompassing system. Outside the Islamist camp, however, not everyone in Egypt’s leading Islamic circles was initially aware of the movement’s significant intellectual debt to the Pakistani thinker. When Yusuf al-Qaradawi acted as a tour guide to the visiting Mawdudi around al-Azhar University in Cairo in the early 1960s, Mawdudi’s limited appeal became painfully clear. Mawdudi had by this time period not yet turned into a household name. To Qaradawi’s surprise, even the well-known Egyptian political writer and intellectual Ahmad Hassan al-Zayyat (d. 1968), who at this time served as editor for the Azhar periodical Majallat al-Azhar, knew nothing about Mawdudi and the JI.47 This insular Egyptian attitude did not square with the self-perception of the JI, which throughout the second half of the twentieth century continued to see itself as the vanguard of the coming Islamic revolution globally, not only in the context of South Asia.

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Debating Revolution and the Path Forward When Mawdudi founded the Jamaat-i-Islami in 1941, such claims to a global reach were still far from the minds of the original members, who comprised several younger Muslim religious scholars and secular educated professionals from a wide range of intellectual backgrounds. Many of them spent the years between 1942 and 1947 away from the political turmoil leading up to the partition of the subcontinent. The initial JI founders retreated to the Punjabi town of Pathankot, where they formed “strong personal, intellectual, and organizational bonds.”48 Yet, the emerging party was plagued by inherent tensions between the desire to build a “holy community” and form a “repository of Muslim values,” on the one hand, and the necessity to “spearhead the drive for power,” on the other.49 Ultimately, Mawdudi, who advocated for the primacy of pursuing political objectives, won the day over opposing voices.50 The JI came to be increasingly built on the understanding of an Islamic revolution, as reflected, for example, in the motto of its student wing: Inqilab, Inqilab, Islami Inqilab (Revolution, Revolution, Islamic Revolution). While at first glance, this sounded very much like slogans chanted against the Shah’s regime by Iranian revolutionaries during the years 1978-9, Mawdudi’s conception of revolution was more of the peaceful and gradual type: Revolution, in Mawdudi’s view, did not erupt from the bottom up but flowed from the top of society down. The aim of Islamic revolution, therefore, was not to spearhead the struggle of the underclass but to convert society’s leaders. During an election campaign in 1958, Mawdudi summed up the Jama’at’s plan of action in the following terms: “first of all it brings intellectual change in the people; secondly [it] organises them in order to make them suitable for a movement. Thirdly, it reforms society through social and humanitarian work, and finally it endeavors to change leadership.”51

In other words, with regard to the goal of rendering Pakistan into a model Islamic state, Mawdudi did not believe in a brutal rupture but rather laying the groundwork for a gradual societal transformation. The Iranian revolution, unexpected as it had been in bringing down one of the most powerful authoritarian regimes of the time, constituted an important challenge to this view.52 The JI, and particularly its student wing had, from the late 1960s onward and under the impression of the rise of leftist challenges, “radicalized” and became more open toward violence and radical revolutionary change. The IJT did not shy away from breaking up mixed-sex gatherings on campuses and torturing its opponents to the extent that they were accused of serving as the “terror arm of the Jama‘at” in the 1970s.53 IJT discussions in the early 1980s thus still reflected the JI heritage but remained ambiguous as to whether this circumspect approach

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was still desirable, as we will see shortly. The shared underlying assumption was not questioned by students or more senior activists, namely that the JI had preceded the Iranians and that the party had been the original propagator of the idea, the wiser older brother, so to speak. Sayyid As‘ad Gilani (d. 1992), leader of the JI in Punjab, emphasized in the early 1980s (and hence during a moment of global Islamist opportunity) the JI’s unmitigated desire for a revolution, no matter where. He gladly conceded that the JI members were not necessarily eager to bring it about themselves. At some point, they had expected it to occur in Pakistan, then Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood looked rather likely. At other times, they had hope for Turkey and its rising Islamist movement. Later signs had been pointing to Indonesia: “We turned our attention to all these cases, from wherever might come the revolution which we had been expecting for centuries.” Its surprising occurrence in Iran was no reason to be less enthusiastic. After all, when some Iranian friends conveyed the message to Mawdudi, the ailing JI leader despite his illness was “not able to contain himself from joy” (musarrat se phule nahin samate the). He immediately labelled it a “pure Islamic revolution.”54 Such reasoning formed the background when in early June 1979 around 3,000 IJT students assembled at Punjab University in Lahore. Their gathering was a clear demonstration of power. The organization, present in every Pakistani province, constituted “the only student organization capable of acting on a national scale. As a sign of its continued vitality, the IJT has managed to retain control over the University of Punjab, the most important Pakistani university and the prize of student politics.”55 The stated goal of the meeting was that through group discussions and character building (sirat o kirdar ki taʿmir), the allure of an eventual Islamic revolution in Pakistan could be strengthened. 56 The inspiration of the Iranian success was definitely palpable. The provincial leader (nazim) delivered an excited speech in which he emphasized the commitment each individual participant had shown just to be present for the sake of the Islamic revolution and the preservation of Pakistan’s ideological framework (Pakistan ki nazariyati sarhaddun). It was only fitting that on the evening of the first day, the assembled students listened to an address by Ibrahim Yazdi (d. 2017), then Iran’s foreign minister. Yazdi had received Mian Tufayl Muhammad (d. 2009), the leader of the JI, in February 1979 in Tehran. In recalling their meeting, Muhammad had emphasized the deep affinity between the Iranians and the Pakistanis who were members of the same caravan headed to the same goal.57 Yet, the traditional and more careful approach of the JI toward an Islamic revolution was likewise on display during the gathering. On the next day, a teaching session on hadith focused primarily on how to prepare one’s individual life to reach the future goal of an Islamic revolution.58 This intense debate was essentially about who could claim ownership over the future course of the global Islamic revolution. Should the Iranians learn from

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Pakistan and/or the JI and hence modify their own approach toward transforming their country or, rather, should the IJT members cast aside Mawdudi’s guidelines and adopt the Iranian example that was playing out in real time in front of their eyes? We find both discursive strategies one year later, in February 1980, at another IJT gathering. While the provincial leader Bashir Ahmad stuck to the line that, in order to usher in a revolution, the inner human has to be turned into a Muslim, Iran clearly played a role. He stated that in the Iranian revolution, the common people had been influenced and the youth had been turned into the voice of the oppressed masses (nojavan mazlum-i ʿavvam ki avaz ban gaye).59 Such an analysis reflected an ongoing deficit within the JI and the IJT. While the latter served as the “nursery” of the “garden” that was the JI, the focus of both organizations had always been on the muʾassir tabaqa, the influential class of educated professionals and officers, not the common people.60 Other speakers were even more straightforward. Khalil Hamidi, who had translated for Mawdudi into Arabic several times during the latter’s travels, emphasized that the Iranian revolution was the most important event of the present era. The struggle had started in 1963 when Khomeini confronted the Shah for the first time. Afterward, Iranian thinkers had decided to adopt the path of jihad as the philosophy and foundation of their revolution.61 Sayyid As‘ad Gilani during his speech at the JIT convention went as far as describing Iran as a “mirror” for the JI and the IJT in Pakistan. The neighboring country demonstrated to the two Pakistani organizations that they had reached a crucial way station where they had to make a difficult choice. Gilani was here clearly advocating for a more forceful and bold approach to fulfill the promise of Pakistan in staging an Islamic revolution. He was careful, however, to tie this call back to the JI’s history when he continued that it was now the time to fulfill the diligent work done by Mawdudi. In arguing this way, Gilani reminded his audience that the Shiʿi clerics in Iran depended on the crucial ideological groundwork laid by Mawdudi with additional input by further thinkers, such as the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hasan al-Banna (d. 1949), the pan-Islamist itinerant scholar Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897), or the Iranian sociologist ʿAli Shariati (d. 1977).62 Gilani expressed his conviction that the new, revolutionary Iran was clearly built on the acknowledgment of divine sovereignty (hakimiyya), Mawdudi’s signature Islamist idea, as we have already seen. This implied that in Pakistan the time was ripe, too, to push not only for “reform” (islah). “Instead, we want a revolution,” Gilani declared.63 Naeem Siddiqui (d. 2002), a founding member of the JI and close associate of Mawdudi, followed the same, more activist line when he emphasized that jihad was the most distinguishing feature of revolutionary movements in general. To establish Islam’s outward signs and preponderance (din-i aʿzam), people were willing to shoulder many sacrifices, as manifested in the Iranian Revolution.64 Shabbir

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Ahmad, the former provincial leader, called the Iranian struggle a fight of the truth (haqq) against falsehood (batil) in which the latter had suffered defeat and tyranny had been destroyed. Yet, they prayed that its success got complete along the lines of Mawdudi.65 Eventually, however, the JI became wary of embracing Iran too closely. In a speech from 1984, the country was no longer mentioned, yet the Iranian experience still lingered in the background. Khurram Murad (d. 1996), who had been the leader of the IJT from 1951-1952 and worked at the time for the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, emphasized in his speech during the 33rd annual gathering of the IJT that Mawdudi’s model still held out promise and attraction to fellow Muslims worldwide: he had discussed the question of an Islamic revolution with activists from Indonesia, Africa, Malaysia, the Middle East, Europe, and the US. In his recollection, there was never the slightest hesitation – all of these people desired such a change.66 In practical terms, however, only the most basic preparations had been accomplished, namely to pursue the propagation of the faith (daʿwa) and to collect forces. This was not a small task, globally speaking, since hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been active in this regard. Murad emphasized several times that it was hard to predict how a revolution could come to pass. Such a development was not analogous to a chemical reaction where you just had to combine two or three elements to set the whole process into motion. Instead, he preferred to highlight the goal, which he described in Mawdudian terms similar to hakimiyya by labeling it “servitude toward God” (Allah ki bandegi): “We do not know how society will develop, which changes are in store and as to whether a gradual approach of reform is better or to fight. It all depends on whether the revolution requires us to give blood, money, or our lives.”67 Murad clearly intended to update Mawdudi’s model for the post-1979 period. He emphasized that the precise means of how to achieve the “exemplary society” (misali muʿashara), envisioned by the JI on the level of both Pakistan and the world, could, if necessary, also include violence. Muslims should be clear they wanted a commonwealth in which even a commoner could dare to hold the caliph publicly accountable, where women could travel alone at night and reach their goal safely without fear, and where a man could leave his house with gold in his hand and nothing would happen to him. Drawing on another lesson from the Iranian revolution, namely its success in mobilizing all segments of society from villagers to workers and university students, Murad put the role of the common people center stage.68 He was quick to add that of course change would happen through the power of God, not through the people.69 It was crucially important at the same time to activate the masses so that they would be willing to step out of their homes to join the fight. In encounters in the market, on trains, in villages, it became obvious that there were always simple Muslims who felt the thirst and a deep longing in their

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heart, even if they were only semi-literate: “All of this means: if we can present the message in a way that it resonates with the heartbeat of these people, then to bring about this demand for thirsting and wishing for the revolution should not be such an infeasible task.”70 To seize this opportunity, the JI had to reinvent itself. Similar to what Lebanese Islamists had debated in the early 1980s, Murad perceived the current focus of the JI as way too elitist.71 He argued that the organization’s entire output in terms of literature, speeches, and slogans should be reconsidered in light of their perception by the common people. Mawdudi’s ideology should be boiled down to a couple of easily understandable aspects, namely faith (iman), jihad, and salvation (nijat). These three concepts are supposedly the “key to the heart of the Muslim.” Muslims had in the past risen against evil rulers (zalim badshahun), stood up for their reform and to confront the forces of imperialism, donated their blood and money “when they were convinced that the true meaning of iman is jihad (iman ke lazimi maʿna jihad hen). Without jihad there is no iman and without iman there is no salvation, which is our true goal.” Murad closed on an encouraging note, underlining that the Islamist message was not tricky to understand for the common man since it was only the expression of his dreams (ye daʿvat is ke apne khvabun ki taʿbir he). If the JI’s daʿwa settles in the hearts, it would not be thousands but rather hundreds of thousands of Muslims who would rise for its sake.72 What we have seen in this section, then, is how the JI and the IJT both wrestled with the idea of a global Islamic revolution. The political change in Iran constituted a source of pride for the party. At the same time, the JI was careful to highlight the Shiʿi clerics’ comprehensive ideological indebtedness to Mawdudi. When Iran became increasingly less ecumenical in outlook throughout the 1980s and the war with Iraq made the country shift priorities away from exporting its revolution, the JI found itself in a problematic position to convince Pakistani and global audiences that – despite Iran slipping away – it still could offer a credible, alternative path to revolution.73 The Jamaʿat’s close alliance with the military dictator Zia ul-Haq cast doubt on its newfound commitment to socioeconomic justice, as emphasized by Murad above. Instead, these ties to Zia “created unprecedented opportunities for organizational reach and personal gain for members at almost all levels of the party.”74 The JI’s woes did not end there. Zia moved gradually away from the party as he came to realize that the JI’s abstract “notions about the working of Islamic dicta in economic and political operations” did not provide him with a “coherent plan of action.”75 The party was consequently shaken by bitter internal quarrels about whether to break with the dictator and to move toward the secular, populist opposition camp.76 Such a move did not materialize. This had to do both with a strong current inside the party that warned about moving to the left as well as with its substantial engagement in the Afghan war in close cooperation with the

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Pakistani military.77 It was only with the restoration of democracy after the death of Zia in 1988 and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 that the JI could once again focus on the global implications of its role.

Recovering the JI’s International Standing The combination of domestic and external factors worked in conjunction with the fading challenge and opportunity of the Iranian Revolution. Consequently, the JI tried once again to recover its position as the leading international actor and the keeper of the true revolutionary flame. Yet these extensive international connections of the JI, fostered through publications, travels, outreach activities across the wider Muslim world, and the hosting of international gatherings of the who’s-who of Islamism over several decades have gone completely unnoticed in the academic literature. A striking, illustrative manifestation of how the “Islamist international” was thus assembled on the initiative of the JI is a seminar in Lahore on 11 November 1989, which I have briefly mentioned above. The conference was convened to discuss the questions and challenges facing the “Muslim World.” More than 30 Islamist organizations sent high-ranking representatives. Among them was the founder and leader of several (subsequently banned) Islamist parties in Turkey, Necmettin Erbakan (d. 2011), the vice-leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Mustafa Mashhur (d. 2002), Rachid al-Ghannouchi of Tunisia, and the Palestinian scholar and activist in the Afghan Jihad ʿAbdallah ʿAzzam (d. 1989). The experience of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan that had been completed in February of the same year loomed large in almost all of the speeches. For the participants, the success of the Afghan Mujahidin showed that the way forward for the Islamic community was not international conferences and appeals to the UN. Multilateralism only held back the Muslim world in economic and military terms. The umma had to break free from these constraints, unite, and strive decisively on the “path of jihad.”78 Palpable excitement about the ongoing Islamic revival ran through these speeches, as well as the hope that after the abolishment of the Caliphate, a new global Islamic movement was indeed taking shape.79 The assembled Islamists agreed that Islam’s global domination was close at hand in the form of a global Islamic revolution which implemented the Sharia.80 Prevalent was also a deep admiration for Mawdudi, who had constantly raised his voice for the sake of fellow Islamists, be it in Tunisia or Algeria.81 Maʾmun al-Hudaybi (d. 2004), who served as the sixth General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood from 2002 until 2004, stressed the identical approach of his organization and the JI in terms of creating an Islamic movement and converting other Muslims to their causes before stating that “100,000 adherents of the Muslim Brothers consider Mawdudi

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to be their Imam.”82 The Palestinian activist ʿAbdallah ʿAzzam (d. 1989), founder of the Services Bureau which facilitated the participation of Arab fighters in the Afghan Jihad and “icon of jihadi pop culture” with a “brand value of recognizability comparable to Che Guevara on the political left,” explicitly tied the expected domination of Islam to the JI’s ideological underpinnings.83 Channeling Mawdudi, ʿAzzam referred to the former’s concept of establishing religion (iqamat-i din) as the major responsibility of all Muslims. If each single Muslim followed Mawdudi’s concept for an Islamic revolution on a personal level and carried out this individual responsibility, “then the dream of an Islamic revival will come into being very quickly.” Erbakan condoned this statement and emphasized that after the failure of communism and capitalism, it was now Islam that could solve the “intellectual darkness” in which the non-Muslim world found itself. Due to the intense efforts of Mawdudi and the JI, the feelings of Muslims had been awakened and Muslim governments were showing signs to care for greater unity.84 In the final speech of the seminar, Qazi Hussain Ahmad (d. 2013), leader of the JI from 1987 until 2009, concluded that the last few days in Lahore had brought home to him how united the Muslim umma was at this critical juncture. The prospects of a “global Islamic revolution” (ʿalami islami inqilab) as envisioned by the JI for several decades had become increasingly close.85

Conclusion The international seminar and the views expressed in Lahore have the potential to rewrite conventional Islamist histories of the twentieth century. Existing works on transnational Islamic activism in the modern period, such as studies of the Saudi sponsored Muslim World League or the phenomenon of Islamic congresses in the twentieth century, have so far ignored the contributions by South Asian actors.86 Yet, thinkers and activists attached to the JI should not be seen as mere curiosities or local carbon copies of Middle Eastern movers and shakers. Rather, the colonial legacy and the capability to communicate in English meant that Islamist thought from Pakistan made its way around the globe, with the JI never ceding its own leadership role in the coming Islamic revolution. As I have demonstrated in another article, it was the JI who took the lead role and chartered a special plane to arrange an early visit of prominent Islamists from North America, Europe, the Arab World, South Asia, and Southeast Asia with Ayatollah Khomeini after the victory of the Iranian Revolution in February 1979.87 Recovering this South Asian angle, I argue, can also help to revise the dominant picture that the shadowy international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood (al-tanzim al-duwali li-l-ikhwan) is merely a chimera that was never really put into practice.88 Instead, I propose that if we carefully trace

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the extensive output of the JI in Urdu, Arabic, and English, including its various journals and newspapers plus travelogues and biographies, we gain a much better understanding of Islamist cooperation since the 1960s. In doing so, we can arrive at a detailed and illuminating mapping of meetings, contacts, and the exchange of ideas. Bringing this new archive to the table will potentially fill crucial gaps in Islamist history. In both India and Pakistan, where the JI entertains branches, the political landscape was less authoritarian and oppressive than in the Middle East, which means that Islamist actors could publish without the widespread fears of censorship and/or repression that were so ripe in many Arab countries. If we try to link back the JI to some of the broader themes that inform South Asia Unbound, it becomes clear that the party should be seen as a key participant in South Asian attempts at adopting an internationalist lens. The Pakistani branch of the party claimed the mantle of global Islamism while its Indian sister organization increasingly gave up on these international pretensions and pursued its own, more India-focused path.89 The JI constitutes a non-state actor for whom the exploration of perspectives beyond the nation state was a conscious choice. At the same time, the JI remained heavily invested in Pakistan’s domestic politics, thus constantly blurring the boundaries between the national and the international. Connected to fellow Islamists in the Middle East and beyond both through longstanding personal connections and the power of print, the JI actively worked to recover older, even pre-colonial historical trends of South Asia forming a global Islamic centre in its own right.

Notes 1

https://twitter.com/alqaradawy/status/385276680748535808?s=20&t=O7YoAnIahrdD3R5XarT2jg (accessed 18 July 2022).

2

The cricket stadium, formerly simply known as Lahore Stadium, had been renamed in honor of the Libyan leader after he declared his support for Pakistan’s nuclear armament during the second summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Lahore. For more on the summit, see Ellinor Schöne, Islamische Solidarität: Geschichte, Politik, Ideologie der Organisation der Islamischen Konferenz (OIC) 1969-1981 (Berlin: Schwarz, 1997).

3

Bettina Gräf and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen (eds.), Global Mufti. The Phenomenon of Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī (London: Hurst, 2009).

4

“ʿAllāmah Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī se interview,” Asia 19 (May 1980), 5. For more on Mawdudi’s educational background, see below.

5

Muḥammad ʿImāra, Abū al-Aʿlā al-Mawdūdī wa-l-ṣaḥwa al-islāmiyya (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 2011).

6

Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jamaʻat-i Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994).

7

For an exploration of how the concept of divine sovereignty (hakimiyya), a signature idea of Mawdudi, was incorporated into the Shiʿi scene in Iraq, see Oliver Scharbrodt, “Divine Sovereignty

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and Clerical Authority in Early Shi‘I Islamism: Bāqir Al-Ṣadr (1935–80) and Taqī Al-Mudarrisī (B. 1945) on the Islamic State,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 32 (2022), 311–32. 8

Unfortunately, the scope of this article prevents me from discussing the internal debates among JI students in India. For an account, see Irfan Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 137–87.

9

Jan-Peter Hartung, “‘Die Mauer muss weg!’, oder: Alles für sich ist singulär. Gedanken zur islamwissenschaftlichen Beschäftigung mit Südasien in Deutschland,” in Abbas Poya and Maurus Reinkowski (eds.), Das Unbehagen in der Islamwissenschaft: Ein klassisches Fach im Scheinwerferlicht der Politik und der Medien (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2008).

10

For recent works on the emergence of Salafism that have demonstrated only limited engagement with South Asia, see Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016) and Aaron Rock-Singer, In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2022). For a discussion of South Asia’s unjustified peripheral status with regard to contemporary Shiʿi Islam, see Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, In a Pure Muslim Land. Shiʿism between Pakistan and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

11

Joel Blecher, Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 143–8.

12

Juan Ricardo Cole, Roots of North Indian Shīʻism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722-1859 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988); Claudia Preckel, “Islamische Bildungsnetzwerke und Gelehrtenkultur im Indien des 19. Jahrhunderts: Muḥammad Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Ḫān (st. 1890) und die Entstehung der Ahl-e ḥadīṯ Bewegung in Bhopal” (PhD dissertation, Ruhr Universität, 2005).

13

Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Wilson Chacko Jacob, For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).

14

Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 143; Meir Litvak, “Money, Religion, and Politics: The Oudh Bequest in Najaf and Karbala’, 1850-1903,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33 (2001), 1–21.

15

SherAli Khan Tareen, Defending Muḥammad in Modernity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).

16

Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 87–137.

17

Marloes Janson, Islam, Youth, and Modernity in the Gambia: The Tablighi Jama’at (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

18

Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World, 215.

19

Martin Kramer, Islam Assembled: The Advent of the Muslim Congresses (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986), 93–5.

20

Reinhard Schulze, Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Islamischen Weltliga (Leiden: Brill, 1990); Michael Farquhar, Circuits of Faith: Migration, Education, and the Wahhabi Mission (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).

21

Ahmad Khan, “Islamic Tradition in an Age of Print: Editing, Printing and Publishing the Classical Heritage,” in Elisabeth Kendall and Ahmad Khan (eds.), Reclaiming Islamic Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Heritage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 52–99.

22

Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); David Gilmartin, “Rethinking the Public Through the Lens of Sovereignty,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38 (2015), 371–86; Brannon D. Ingram, “Crisis

the islamist international in lahore 219

of the Public in Muslim India: Critiquing ‘Custom’ at Aligarh and Deoband,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38 (2015), 403–18; Dietrich Reetz, Islam in the Public Sphere: Religious Groups in India, 1900-1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). 23

Jan-Peter Hartung, A System of Life: Mawdūdī and the Ideologisation of Islam (London: Hurst, 2013), 14–15. Mawdudi shot back against the ʿulamā, in turn, and argued that their “grown social and political prestige” would not justify a privileged position for them – their reasoning was as fallible as that of any other human being (ibid., 103).

24

Hartung, A System of Life, 38–60.

25

Ibid., 17–18.

26

Cited in ibid., 82.

27

Cited in Andrew F. March, The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2019), 88.

28

Mawdudi quoted in Ali U. Qasmi, “Differentiating Between Pakistan and Napak-Istan: Maulana Abul Ala Maududi’s Critique of the Muslim League and Muhammad Ali Jinnah,” in Ali U. Qasmi and Megan E. Robb (eds.), Muslims Against the Muslim League: Critiques of the Idea of Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 131.

29

Ibid., 128.

30

David Gilmartin, “A Magnificent Gift: Muslim Nationalism and the Election Process in Colonial Punjab,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1998), 427. For Mawdudi’s continuing critique in 1948 of Pakistan’s political elite and how they could not be trusted, see Qasmi, “Differentiating between Pakistan and Napak-istan,” 136–7.

31

Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial India (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Naveeda Ahmed Khan, Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

32 33

Qasmi, “Differentiating between Pakistan and Napak-istan,” 139. Aziz Ahmad, “Mawdudi and Orthodox Fundamentalism in Pakistan,” Middle East Journal 21 (1967), 369–70.

34

For an analysis of his conflict, see Ali U. Qasmi, “God’s Kingdom on Earth? Politics of Islam in Pakistan, 1947-1969,” Modern Asian Studies 44 (2010), 1197–1253.

35

Dale F. Eickelman and James P. Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 38.

36 37

Gilles Kepel, The Prophet and Pharaoh: Muslim Extremism in Egypt (London: Saqi Books, 1985), 28. Shiraz Maher, Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea (London: Hurst, 2016); Sayed Khatab, The Power of Sovereignty: The Political and Ideological Philosophy of Sayyid Qutb (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006).

38

Joas Wagemakers, A Quietist Jihadi: The Ideology and Influence of Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 12.

39

Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf, Herrschaft und Gesellschaft: Der islamistische Wegbereiter Sayyid Quṭb und

40

Muhammad Q. Zaman, “The Sovereignty of God in Modern Islamic Thought,” Journal of the Royal

seine Rezeption (Würzburg: Ergon, 2003), 78–85. Asiatic Society 25 (2015), 415–8; Humeira Iqtidar, “Theorising Popular Sovereignty in the Colony: Abul a‘La Maududi’s ‘Theodemocracy’,” Review of Politics 82 (2020), 406; March, The Caliphate of Man, 112. 41

Jan-Peter Hartung, Viele Wege und ein Ziel: Leben und Wirken von Sayyid Abū l-Ḥasan ʻAlī al-Ḥasanī Nadwī (1914-1999) (Würzburg: Ergon, 2004); Roy Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam:

220 simon wolfgang fuchs

Authority and the Islamic State (London: Routledge, 2010); Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996). 42

Hartung, A System of Life, 194–203.

43

David Brooks, “This Is How Theocracy Shrivels,” New York Times, 27 August 2021, https://www. nytimes.com/2021/08/27/opinion/terrorism-afghanistan-Islamicism.html?searchResultPosition=1 (accessed 8 July 2022).

44

“ʿAllāmah Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī se interview,” Asia 19 (May 1980), 5.

45

As William Shepard has argued, it is the sixth edition of Sayyid Qutb’s Social Justice in Islam, published in 1964, which most clearly shows an emphasis on ḥākimiyya. See William E. Shepard, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism: A Translation and Critical Analysis of Social Justice in Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1996), xxvii–viii.

46

ʿImāra, Abū al-Aʿlā al-Mawdūdī, 15.

47

Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwi, “Ziyārat al-ʿallāma al-Mawdūdī li-Miṣr,” https://www.al-qaradawi.net/node/4520 (accessed 8 July 2022). On al-Zayyat, see Dennis Walker, “Turks and Iraq’s Impact on Early Egyptian Pan-Arabs: Ahmad Hasan al-Zayyat,” Journal of Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies 2 (1995), 60–80.

48

Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution, 23.

49

Ibid., 16, 32–33.

50

Ibid., 38.

51

Ibid., 8–9.

52

Charles Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

53

Humeira Iqtidar, Secularizing Islamists? Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-Da’wa in Urban Pakistan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 72–6.

54

Sayyid Asʿad Gīlānī, Safarnāmah-i Īrān (Lahore: Maktabah-i Taʿmīr-i Insāniyyat, 1983), 46–7.

55

Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution, 77.

56

Bashīr Lākhānī, “Tīn ṣūbah jāt meṉ kānfaransūṉ kī rūdād: Inqilāb, Inqilāb, Islāmī Inqilāb,” Ham qadam (July 1979), 6.

57

See Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, “A Direct Flight to Revolution: Maududi, Divine Sovereignty, and the 1979-Moment in Iran,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 32 (2022), 333–5.

58

Lākhānī, “Tīn ṣūbah jāt meṉ kānfaransūṉ,” 7.

59

Khālid Maḥmūd Shawq, “Cār din jāmiʿah- Punjāb meṉ,” Ham qadam (April 1980), 9.

60

Iqtidar, Secularizing Islamists? 73.

61

Shawq, “Cār din jāmiʿah- Punjāb meṉ,” 10.

62

On these figures, see Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Q. Zaman (eds.), Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from Al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

63

Shawq, “Cār din jāmiʿah- Punjāb meṉ,” 10.

64

Ibid., 11.

65

Ibid.

66

Khurram Murād, “Inqilāb-i raheṉ,” Ham qadam (February 1984), 6.

67

Ibid., 7.

68

On the rural manifestations of the Iranian Revolution, see Mary Elaine Hegland, Days of Revolution: Political Unrest in an Iranian Village (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).

69

Murād, “Inqilāb-i raheṉ,” 8.

70

Ibid., 9.

the islamist international in lahore 221

71

See Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, “Tehran’s Open Horizon: Lebanese views on the Iranian Revolution of 1979,” Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, October 2019, https://www.rosalux.de/en/publication/id/41232/ tehrans-open-horizon (accessed 8 July 2022).

72

Murād, “Inqilāb-i raheṉ,” 9.

73

Wilfried Buchta, Die iranische Schia und die islamische Einheit: 1979-1996 (Hamburg: Deutsches Orient-Institut, 1997).

74

Iqtidar, Secularizing Islamists? 94.

75

Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution, 194.

76

Ibid., 203.

77

Ibid., 195.

78

“Iʿlāmiyyah-i International Seminar,” Asia 38 (1989), 23; ʿAbbās A. Aʿvān, “ʿĀlam-i Islām ko dar pesh masāʾil aur challenge,” Asia 38 (1989), 10.

79

Aʿvān, “ʿĀlam-i Islām ko dar pesh masāʾil aur challenge,” 13.

80

“Iʿlāmiyyah-i International Seminar,” 24.

81

Aʿvān, “ʿĀlam-i Islām ko dar pesh masāʾil aur challenge,” 13–14.

82

Ibid., 16.

83

Thomas Hegghammer, The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 466.

84

Aʿvān, “ʿĀlam-i Islām ko dar pesh masāʾil aur challenge,” 20–21.

85

Ibid., 22.

86

Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World; Kramer, Islam Assembled.

87

Fuchs, “A Direct Flight to Revolution.”

88

Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010), 38–9.

89

Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India.

PART IV

Ambivalences and Sensibilities of Internationalism

224 AMBIVALENCES AND SENSIBILITIES OF INTERNATIONALISM

South Asian internationalism emerged in many spheres, and efforts to create truly “postcolonial” cultures within newly independent nation-states offered provocative arenas through which (inter)national notions of citizenship and belonging were inculcated. Equally, internationalism remained its own source of contestation, and individuals and communities could, and did, reject global entanglements. Internationalism, in other words, could be a source of both opportunity and ambivalence. This last section draws attention to ways in which internationalist sensibilities were both developed and actively denied. Various technologies were deployed to foster international sensibilities. South Asian state elites asserted their right to govern and mobilize citizens through mediums such as radio and literature, engineering a sense of national identity and participation; equally, their opponents used the same means to give voice to competing visions of the national and international. Yet there also existed individuals who, in their own ways and for very different personal and ideological reasons, rejected internationalism in favour of other struggles and sensibilities – at least for parts of their lives. This last section explores ways and means of relating to internationalism across this spectrum. Stephen Legg provides a much-needed study of Dr B.S. Moonje, an interwar proponent of Hindu reformism and anti-Muslim activist who remains poorly accounted for in scholarship on Hindu nationalism. Moonje’s communalist turn began in the mid-1920s, but it was his experience attending the Round Table Conference of 1930-2 that solidified his ideas – largely because of his decisive rejection of the cosmopolitanism he witnessed in London and his international interactions at the conference and during the long sea voyage. Ali Raza’s chapter demonstrates how Pakistani progressives, struggling against an increasingly authoritarian state, used literature, and particularly the process of (re)writing histories of Pakistan, to rethink their country’s place within South Asia and international socialist networks. They further rooted Pakistan’s past, present, and future in a broader Afro-Asian milieu through which decolonizing states had the collective responsibility of reshaping postcolonial culture and rejecting ongoing imperial repression. Mejgan Massoumi traces the history of radio programming in Afghanistan, demonstrating its origins in processes of international collaboration. While Afghan elites sought to use radio to extend the state’s reach to its citizens, Afghan artists used the radio waves to their own ends, sharing songs that melded local and global sonic influences and, at times, surreptitiously critiqued state motives. Artistic and educational mediums encouraged readers and listeners to reflect on their place within new national spaces while staying sensitive to Afghanistan’s interconnectedness with mid- to late twentieth century. international networks.

AMBIVALENCES AND SENSIBILITIES OF INTERNATIONALISM 225

Moving many degrees south and west to South Africa, Annie Devenish offers a moving and enlightening account of the life choices of Phyllis Naidoo, a political activist who spent most of her life resisting apartheid and colonialism, at the cost of a long exile. Born to parents whose ancestry lay in southern India, Naidoo affirmed her diasporic connections only at specific junctures in her life. Initially influenced by a political imaginary linking African and Indian shores, Naidoo later rejected her diasporic connections and the international linkages they offered in favour of an anti-racial notion of African-ness – only returning to them after her return “home” to South Africa following a forced exile to Lesotho, Swaziland (Eswatini), and Zimbabwe. Devenish reminds us that those we identified as diasporic South Asians did not necessarily identify, or mobilize, as such. South Asian internationalism could be just as readily rejected by actors as it was adopted – and why this might be the case is a critical issue.

CHAPTER 10

Hindu Nationalism in the International: B.S. Moonje’s Travel Writing at the Round Table Conference Stephen Legg

Abstract This chapter provides an early account of Hindu nationalism emerging through the spaces of British imperial internationalism. The diary entries of Dr. B.S. Moonje during his journeys to and experience of the Round Table Conference sessions (1930-32) in London are read as a form of travel writing. Moonje admired British science and militarism but denounced its gendered cosmopolitanism, especially when expressed in the Indian diaspora. His fiercest ire was reserved for fellow Hindu delegates, whom he felt were outplayed by the disciplined Muslim delegates. Moonje took back to India a heightened sense of communal crisis but also a heightened desire to militarize India’s Hindu youth, both products of this brief but formative interwar international moment.

Key words: communalism, conference, imperial, London, Hindu, Muslims

The Round Table Conference (1930-2) marked the first time that Indian representatives had been directly invited to London by the British government to engage in constitutional debate. Over three sessions the conference worked up detailed proposals for India’s political future within the British Empire. The resultant scheme was for an all-India federation of the “British” and “Indian” (or “Princely”) States with safeguards for minorities and reservations for continued British supremacy and paramountcy.1 The conference, in one sense, fitted into an older tradition of colonial and then imperial conferences through which the British invited delegates of the white settler colonies, and later India, to confer.2 However, beyond the breadth of delegates brought to London (although they were still nominated, not elected), it marked something new. This conference fitted into the interwar paradigm of modern, international conferencing. This paradigm combined histories of diplomatic congresses with the more technical, scientific conferences which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.3 The League of Nations was the model of

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this new form of conferencing but various strands of internationalism modelled the liberal conference into their own shape.4 The Round Table Conference (RTC) marked an “imperial international” form of modern conferencing.5 It attempted to reconcile the rival demands of delegates who were explicitly categorized by the British into separate camps. Both British Indian and Princely delegates were divided by their religion and their politics. Some of the latter were subdivisions of the former, such as the liberals, who refused religious designation but were mostly classed as Hindu. Others, such as trade unionists or commerce delegates, crossed religions. The three sessions of the RTC were lengthy, lasting roughly two, then three, then one month. The conference method was explicitly internationalist, and various forms of internationalism were appealed to, mostly unsuccessfully, at conference.6 Most delegates were in London to pursue explicitly nationalist agendas, but the act of travelling to and staying in the imperial capital exposed the delegates to international, cosmopolitan migrant communities and diasporas.7 For many internationalists it was what Jane Haggis, in a paper about RTC delegate S.K. Datta, calls the “cosmopolitics of friendship” at conferences that attracted them.8 Such visitors also brought a newly internationalist interrogatory eye to London. Having been the subject of the surveying and ethnographically violent gaze of Europe for centuries, Indians now came to London in an authoritative position, albeit a curtailed and subaltern authority. This marked a beginning of an international India that traced a varied journey to its contemporary position of nascent superpower. Currently, Hindu global assertiveness is exerted through Hindu international organizations such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad (Universal Hindu Council) or the international campaigns and diplomacy of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party under Prime Minister Modi. This chapter will sketch out an earlier historical and cultural geography of Hindu nationalism abroad, through the private travel writings of the belligerent Hindu delegate, Dr. B.S. Moonje. Having trained in medicine, Moonje became engaged in nationalist politics in the early-1920s but gravitated towards Hindu reformism and anti-Muslim politics in the mid-1920s. It was on account of this that he was invited to the RTC in London. There had been a long tradition of a small number of Indian visitors to Europe who wrote about and published accounts of their travels.9 RTC delegates’ accounts of their trips, private or public, can be read as continuations of such forms, though in a more explicitly political vein. The international space of the conference honed Moonje’s fear of an organized Muslim bloc, his despair at the divided nature of the Hindu delegates, and confirmed his concerns about the degenerative effects of cosmopolitanism on British society. His project in international London would be one of communal anti-cosmopolitanism, and reminds us that the “unbound” India that

hindu nationalism in the international 229

this volume explores could also be a bitter and communal one.10 After introducing existing scholarship on travel writing, this mode of interpretation will be used to explore how Moonje admired and criticized Britain in his writings, his concerns regarding Indian delegates abroad and, finally, his plans for the militarization of Hindu communities in India on his return.

Empire, Mobility and Travel Writing The British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli famously suggested, in 1847, that the “the East is a career.”11 Whilst this was undoubtedly the case, careers were also made through moving (careering) across boundaries, whether billed as East and West, North and South, core and periphery, or Occident and Orient. 12 These movements had ancient histories via routes of trade, pilgrimage, and curiosity. While the twentieth century witnessed new forms and means of internationalist interconnection, these emerged from the radical and rapid shifts in transportation and movement of the long nineteenth century. David Lambert and Peter Merriman have surveyed the large and diverse approaches to thinking about movement in and across empires.13 Alongside studies of the movement of objects (like ships), technologies (like medicine), and individual subjects lies a vast body of work on migration (of free and indentured labour, slaves, elite governors and sovereigns, minor officials, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, and planners).14 One of the chief challenges in this scholarship remains to track historically mobile bodies moving across different scales and to chart their experiences of moving across space while acknowledging “…the complex meanings, sensations and power relations associated with different forms of movement.”15 The archive has been used to explore various experiences of such mobility. Responding in part to the new forms of international and trans-imperial mobility necessitated by the First World War, the interwar period saw a radical expansion in the mobility of South and Latin American, African, and Asian workers and campaigners.16 Yet, the imperial internationalist moment also created new opportunities for a different sort of mobility for some colonial subjects. Those willing to work with the empire could be propelled along imperial networks to campaign for imperial reform, whether through humanitarian networks or through working for colonial states directly.17 New forms of politicking and socializing were created not only in the locations within these networks but in the often-lengthy periods of travel themselves, for reformists, pacifists, and non-aligned campaigners alike. 18 In the years of decolonization and post-colonialism, new forms of interconnection built on the routes of empire to facilitate exchanges of knowledge, expertise and political mobilization.19

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How, then, might we consider these forms of international mobility, attending to their “…complex meanings, sensations and power relations?” Nilanjana Mukherjee suggests, following Mary Louise Pratt, that we consider travel writing in contact zones between cultures: “Travel writing thus also involves a mapping, a production of an imaginative geography which turns the experience of an unfamiliar place into narrative. In this it employs all the literary devices and tropes, which grants it a complex mix of fact and fiction, of objective reality and subjective experience.”20 The majority of thinking through these literary devices and tropes has focused on contact zones beyond European and North American imperial cores.21 From late-nineteenth century realist narratives to interwar modernist literary forms, travel writing came to embody the disillusionment with the modern world’s sordid metropolises, fragmentation, jumbled cultures, and decaying civilization.22 While the sense may have tipped from wonder to despair and the style from realism to modernism, across the nineteenth to twentieth century, certain tropes in colonial travel writing recurred. For James Duncan and Derek Gregory, the two-way process of translating the otherness of imaginative geographies remained, domesticating the foreign for a home audience whilst also “foreignizing” and registering its difference.23 For David Spurr, travel writing displayed much of the broader rhetoric of empire, placing visited territories and people under surveillance; appropriating land; aestheticizing local inhabitants; classifying and ranking places; debasing, negating, and judging other cultures; affirming the righteousness of the travelling subject and insubstantializing the visited peoples; naturalizing and eroticizing the other; and acknowledging the possibility of resistant narratives.24 However, for Spurr this resistance emerged from within colonial discourse, the possibility of actual dialogue with the “Third World” being thwarted by the untranslatability of cultural difference.25 Stepping outside the bounds of western travel writing does not escape colonial discourse, but it presents at least the increased possibility of resistant and alternative voices. A smaller but substantial body of literature has explored the empire (travel)-writing back. Early engagements with Europe from the subcontinent were documented in ancient religious texts and reports from those who travelled onwards after Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca.26 Pioneering work by Rozina Visram has made visible the centuries of Asian presence in Britain, where they settled, temporarily resided in, and passed through.27 Antoinette Burton’s early call for a critical geography of imperial Britain that made space for the action there of colonial people still merits heeding.28 As with European travel writings, Indians published accounts of travel within their own vast homeland as well as of surrounding regions, Europe, and America.29 From the eighteenth century, Indian travel writing regarding Europe became more common, and Supriya Chaudhuri has noted four of its common themes: wonder at the marvels of this new world;

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admiration for inventions and laws; comparisons between East and West; and anxiety over the practicalities of travel.30 Whilst still expressing many of these themes, Simonti Sen suggests that late-nineteenth century Bengali travellers were also driven by the urge to test Indian views of the West and to test their own systems of belief. Regarding their reversal of the interrogatory gaze, Almost all of the typical Romantic motifs, such as aestheticized conception of nature, a critical attitude towards industrialised culture, a nostalgic longing for the past and so on, were deployed in the narratives of the Bengali travellers to articulate their modern Indian Self in opposition to their European Other.31

For others the act of travelling to Europe allowed new acts of political self-formation. Travel was reflected upon in writing but also provided the space and time to write, and to forge different ways of being.32 For instance, while the Indian princes travelled to London for the RTC in considerable style and at considerable expense, Gandhi chose to travel second class and conducted his preparations on deck.33 Charu Gupta’s recent work has pioneered the analysis of Hindi language travel writing, specifically those of Swami Satyadev “Parivrajak,” concerning trips to Europe and the USA, mostly in the first half of the twentieth century.34 This analysis chimes with the reading of Moonje below, with its focus on a Hindu nationalism forging itself through international travel, and through the writer’s recurrent interest with masculinity and the body.35 Though Moonje didn’t publish his writings, many of Parivrajak’s purposes were replicated in Moonje’s self-reflections in his diaries, namely: to showcase exotic landscapes, beauty and people; to provide a mirror to Hindu middle-class fantasies; to celebrate the West as a space of fulfilment of desires; to fashion ‘perfect’ male bodies; to advertise a violent, muscular nationalism; to craft and publicise the self; to challenge colonialism…36

Parivrajak’s writings from the 1930s articulated admiration for European society’s openness, political education, personal freedom, and cleanliness, but this was always through and in vibrant debate with Indian society and traditions. This played out on the space of Parivrarak’s body, where the anxieties of travel were combatted through a fitness regime and a focus on semen protection as a supreme duty.37 The international travelling body thus became a space in which to play out both anti-colonialism and Hindu nationalism. This anticipated and contributed to the mass movements in interwar India which crafted a communal biopolitics out of which the “private armies” and armed militias of the late-colonial and pre-partition riots would emerge.38

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Moonje’s Returned Gaze Dr. B.S. Moonje was briefly described in the official who’s who of the RTC as a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha Society and a member of the Legislative Assembly in New Delhi since 1926.39 Referencing his later work in India, however, a commemorative volume published in 1972, on the centenary of his birth, described him as “… the first and foremost character of the great hymn of militarisation of Hindus” and sketched out an account of his life.40 After training in medicine, Moonje had been politicized by “Lokmanya” (Bal Gangadhar) Tilak and engaged Fig. 10.1. Portrait of Dr. B.S. Moonje at the Indian Round Table Conference Second Session, 1931 (British Library, T 11187)

with Congress in the early 1900s but, unlike them, participated in council elections in the 1920s. From the mid1920s, his loyalties switched from Congress to the Hindu Mahasabha

and the question of military training. This was not just a question of defence from external aggressors. Moonje emphasized the need for Hindu military preparedness to counter a perceived internal threat posed by Muslims.41 Rifle clubs, gymnasiums, and sports grounds were used to strengthen the Hindu public and to draw working class youths, especially, to the Hindu Sabhas (societies) that Moonje had formed to feed into the national Hindu Mahasabha, of which he was President from 19271933. In this role he came to London with the explicit intention of blocking Muslim demands for further securing their safeguards in provincial legislative chambers. There is no full biography of Moonje, and he only appears in footnotes or marginal commentaries in most academic works. This is perhaps because he was primarily an activist and not a writer of political philosophy or theory, like his mentor Tilak or the founder of “Hindutva” Vinayak Savarkar.42 It is certainly not for the lack of materials. Moonje was an exceptionally detailed diarist, and the materials below are drawn from his papers at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi.43 These writings are of the moment, and he often noted his “spaces of representation,” accounting for where and how he was composing his diary entries.44 The two-week crossing from India to London presented plenty of

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opportunities for writing, while Moonje devoted any spare hours at the conference to recollecting his discussions, in some detail, in his diary. This practice seemed to aid Moonje’s reflections on his work and was doubtless used as an aide-mémoire during future work, but it was also a tool for campaigning in London. For instance, on 15 December 1930 he noted dining with an American journalist, Mr. Binder, at the American Club in Piccadilly. After this Moonje took Binder to his room where he showed him the notes he had made of an earlier, informal meeting with MacDonald.

Admiration and Counter-Colonial Inversion If the western travelling gaze to the colonial East/Orient fetishized and naturalized the authentic, the erotic, and the aesthetic, for the Indian visitor to Britain the sense of wonder and admiration was often reserved for service and science. European cities were examples of technological cosmopolitanism, bringing together inventions, solutions, problems, and energies in ways that visitors found fascinatingly and frighteningly futuristic. London was a shocking and thrilling space of modernity for its foreign visitors, a pulverizing dazzle of crowds, light, traffic, and transport infrastructure, the trains especially.45 Moonje noted on 21 October 1930, two days after arriving: “For the first time we passed through what are known as Tube Railways. They are a wonderful conception. We used also the self lifting staircase. The trains are luxuriously furnished and are all of one class. But they are far better than our first class.” He dined that night with other Hindu delegates at the Savoy Hotel, said to be one of only four such hotels. The setting and food were magnificent, but the talk of his co-religionists was said to be despondent. Towards the end of the first session the conference Social Secretaries organized a trip to the public baths in the poorer East End district of Bethnal Green.46 Whereas Gandhi later stayed a mile to the east in Bow to get to know the “real” people of London, for Moonje this was a thoroughly ethnographic trip. The technology of the site was certainly admired, with swimming, Turkish, electric, and ordinary baths, and machinery for washing linen. But so were the locals, described as poor people: “I saw a number of men quite naked who were going about in their part of the bath. They did not feel any kind of awkwardness either among themselves or with us.”47 If to the working classes Moonje deployed a counter-colonial rhetoric of naturalization, for other classes and professions the mode was that of comparison and anxiety. On 3 October 1931 Moonje was taken by the Social Secretaries to Brooklands racetrack in Surrey where he witnessed cars travelling at over 100mph: “What daring! What enterprise! What discipline and organisation! Where are we in comparison

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with these men? Everyone was going on as clockwork as previously arranged… How can Mahatmajis [Gandhi’s] Love and Non-Violence and Simple living appeal to these people?” The combination of technology, discipline, and skepticism of Gandhi’s politics and spirituality was not coincidental here. Eight months prior Moonje had used his time after the end of the first conference session to tour military sites in the country. On 27 January 1931 he had visited Halton in Buckinghamshire, a training site for the Royal Air Force. Moonje was inspired, but also wracked with doubt at the challenge he had set himself for his home region of Maharashtra: The thought that worries me is – Can I establish a Military school in the Maharashtra for the training of one thousand boys of all castes from the Brahmin to the lowest untouchable, all treated on absolutely equal social and religious basis? Anyway, I shall try. This is now the mission of my life…. It is no joke to lodge, feed, […] and train 3500 boys but the whole establishment is so highly organised and disciplined that its different parts and departments are working with clock like precision.

Moonje followed up his visit with further meetings and interviews with military officials in London and field visits to military and naval institutions, including Sandhurst. He continued his trips during the second conference session, noting on 9 November 1931, after witnessing the boys of the Naval Corps marching in the Lord Mayor’s procession, that his life aim was now to have something similar in India. We will return in conclusion to consider some of the afterlives of these military inspirations. If Moonje was wowed by the British military, he was underwhelmed or ambivalent about many members of the British government. Being the face of an authoritarian colonial government, the “show” and ceremony of the Raj was famously opulent. In the liberal, though still imperial and inegalitarian, democracy of Britain the show was much lessened, and the authority of familiar figures much diminished. For instance, Moonje met the Finance Minister of the Council of India, Sir George Schuster, on 23 October 1930, shortly after arriving in London. While in Delhi he was said to put on so much dignity and airs, in London Schuster seemed simple and ordinary. Four days later Moonje met RJ Wilson who had once held high office in Moonje’s Central Provinces but who, he believed, had taken up work in a solicitor’s office in London: “In India he was a great man and held sway over us. Here he is merely a clerk.” An invitation on 22 November to Wilson’s home in Golders Green, which he had built himself, only heightened the contrast: “How small are the people here. In India they are very big people and look down upon us as contemptibles.” Even King-Emperor George V (dressed in morning suit) failed to impress when he opened the conference on 12 November, comparing poorly to his (enrobed) representative in New Delhi: “His manner of reading his speech was not impressive and though loud speakers were there we could not hear him all the

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while… The function did not strike even as impressive and awe inspiring as the Viceroy’s addresses in our Legislative Assembly.” Once the conference work had begun, Moonje quickly built up an admiration, however, for the British political class in general, which cast him into despair regarding his fellow delegates: These English statesmen are so clever, diplomatic, so realistic and practical that I feel that, out of the group of Hindu Members to the Conference, perhaps none other than Jayakar and I will be able to hold his own before them… These Hindu Leaders are theorists, philosophers, metaphysicists and moralists. They are not fit for executive duties and have no executive mentality.

The Houses of Parliament also impressed Moonje, less for their architecture than for the thousand-year unbroken historical tradition. Passing to the nearby Westminster Abbey, on 24 November 1931, he located some figures who did not seem diminished in their homeland: “poets corner evokes touching memories of the poets whose poetry I had to study in our schools and colleges.” This was one of the few direct connections Moonje made along the imperial networks which strung together India and Britain and one not dominated by the comparative or anxious travelling observations explored below.

Communal Geographies and Anti-Cosmopolitanism While many of Moonje’s trips were part of his formal schedule, they nevertheless allowed for plenty of sightseeing, and he noted in his diaries the communal geographies he encountered. In committees and in the press, Moonje constantly campaigned to resist constitutional shifts that would secure or enhance Muslim majorities in the provinces of the Punjab and Bengal. In private he also nurtured and fed his insecurities and superiorities regarding the Muslim Indians and British. On the sea route from Bombay to Marseilles Moonje was observant of social and political life aboard ship.48 But he also noted the places through which he passed, including the port of Aden on 8 October 1930 (“A well fortified town, a British watch dog on the route to India”). Two days later during sightseeing in Cairo, having passed the medical exam at Suez, he suggested that Islam had made Egyptians slaves in mentality and daily life. Once in England the landscape impressed on the 18 October train journey to London, the meadows and dales appearing like wellkept lawns. If Egypt compared badly due to Muslim culture, Britain at times fared badly in comparison to Mughal culture in India. On 5 November Moonje visited Windsor Castle, where the architecture was thought to be unimpressive compared

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to the Mughal Places of Agra and Delhi. It also fared badly in comparison to the eleventh to sixteenth century Hindu Dilwara Temples at Mount Abu, in terms of architecture, and Shivaji’s seventeenth-century forts, in terms of impregnability. In London Moonje focused less on comparing monuments and more on comparing cultures. Whereas the techno-cosmopolitanism of London as a scientific feat dazzled Moonje, its cultural cosmopolitanism repelled him. His Hindu nationalist project was premised on simultaneously proclaiming and defending the purity of Hindu culture (in terms of race, religion, sexuality, and gender). In London Moonje saw his Indian (Hindu) culture being hybridized and juxtaposed in intolerable ways. In his first days in London, music was an interest, in which non-Hindu forms fared badly. During the journey to Europe in October 1930 the European music played at sea was felt to lack the melody of Hindu music, while Moonje was outraged when the Maharaja of Alwar employed two Muslim singers to perform in Urdu.49 In London, on 22 October, Moonje ate at the “Caucasian” Hotel Splendide in Piccadilly at which a “Caucasian orchestra” played, the guitars of which reminded him of the sitar. Praise was, eventually, given to a female Muslim singer, who was hired to sing and dance at a Diwali dinner on 25 October, organized by Dr. Pardhy of the Indian Social Club, at the Café Royal on Regent’s Street. The Indian dance was described as nice, but mainly in contrast to “… the beastly English dances.” The degeneracy of British cosmopolitan culture (as opposed to the invigorating discipline of its military and politics) was a recurrent trope in Moonje’s musings. On 16 November 1930 he reported that Dr. Pardhy’s wife had heard that girls and boys at Oxford and Cambridge were drinking and smoking to a degree that made her nervous for the future of her daughter. Moonje immediately triangulated her dilemma between his three communal orientations. Reflecting on Britain he concluded: “What a social life and yet the Nation is so great. Her greatness is dependent on sound practicalism and military and naval power. Hindus have a much sounder sociology but not physical might and until India develops physical power she will be a down trodden community. She will have no peace from her Muslim neighbours.” While always inflected by national if not religious community, Moonje repeatedly classified and ranked places and people via gender.

Comparing Gender through “Hindueyes” First, Moonje noted the freedoms of European women. On the RMS Viceroy of India, en route to the first conference session, Moonje went for a swim on 6 October 1930 and noted that “There was an English lady swimming with us in what is called mixed bathing. Oh. She swims very artistically and can swim very fast. It is a pleasure to see her swimming.” On his return to London in August 1931 he also passed through

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Marseilles where he noted the women sunbathing wearing so little clothing it barely covered their breasts. In general, this was Moonje’s view of European women, of being overly sexualized and a threat to the women and girls of the Indian diaspora. Within his first week in London he found Piccadilly to be populated after dark by any number of prostitutes, openly “accosting” people in the street. On his first evening in London, on 18 October, at a students’ association social event Moonje had noted English girls being “very free” with Indian boys, and some Indian girls “aping” English manners and views. At the Diwali dinner the following week, Moonje noted Indian students dancing in the English style: “The sight was abhorrent to me as it was quite contrary to the Hindu notion of womanly modesty.” He then met Sir GP Roy, Director-General of Posts and Telegraphs in India, with his wife and daughter. The latter had her hair in a fashionable bob (“…like that of a boy with well cropped hair”), a good deal of powder on her face, lips painted red, and English girl affectations and vices, including not only smoking but having her father light her cigarettes. Moonje concluded that “Our boys and girls soon pick up English habits but do not cultivate English virtues. I felt disgusted.” Moonje acknowledged that his unease with changing gender and generational roles was inflected by his regional (Maratha) and international (Indian-British) positioning. On 27 November 1930 he noted having been to dinner with the Begum Shah Nawaz, one of the two female delegates, whose daughter had recited a selfpenned poem, in English, which was an ode to the motherland of India. Moonje suggested that his stoic and matter-of-fact Maratha upbringing left him unaffected and able to see that the girl was being led into the manners of the modern English girl, which was not the way of Indian girls: “It is easy to pick up the vices but hundred times more difficult to cultivate the virtues of the great English race of which I am such an admirer- in the sense of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.” Such vices were felt to have found a home in the UK-raised nephew of the Gaekwar and Maharani of Baroda, whom Moonje met on 8 December. The nephew did not speak Marathi and smoked in front of his relatives and seniors: “To my Indian Hindueyes [sic], it looked most irreverential for a nephew to smoke in the presence of his uncle and aunt of such exalted position. Even ordinary people in India abhor doing this.” Moonje’s disdain for Indians abroad regularly extended to his fellow delegates (see below) regarding their politics, but also their gender and sexuality. On 20 November the Begum Shah Nawaz had been appraised well for her looks, despite being a mother, but dismissed in terms of her politics: “She has a charming face though she is mother of a few children and has also a charming and clear voice with clear pronunciation. Her speech was enlivening just as the presence of ladies in the midst of men is enlivening and pleasing. Of course not much seriousness is attached to their speeches.” An extraordinary account of a discussion with the Sindh Muslim

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delegate Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto on the return journal from the second conference session perhaps gives a sense of some of the day-to-day taunting and psychological gameplay between the delegates. On 3 January 1932 Moonje recounted a deck top conversation during his return to India from the second conference session. Bhutto had suggested that his two conference trips to Europe had been a drain on his “vital fluid” (semen) and that his erections were no longer strong, being quite weak. As a doctor, Moonje was asked to supply him with a reviving tonic. In response, Moonje recalled asking only one question; how much had Bhutto paid for his women? He replied that he only went with middle class girls, as street girls were too dangerous. All he had to pay for were dinners, drinks, cinema trips, and the like. Moonje didn’t pass comment on Bhutto’s supposed tales of his sex life, making two diary judgements only. First, that 43 was a young age to be having weak erections, regardless of the stress of travel. And second, that this was the calibre of (Muslim) men being honoured with an appointment to the Round Table Conference. Moonje was clearly an attentive and anxious reader of others’ bodies, sexuality, and politics. These anxieties were only heightened in self-reflection. As opposed to the drinking, smoking and idleness of Indian youth abroad, Moonje obsessed over his health and fitness regimen when mobile. On the outward trip to Europe, on 5 October 1930, he had noted that walking around the upper deck seven times was equivalent to walking a mile, which he committed to doing three times a day, as well as his swimming. This seemingly paid off, with the Maharaja of Bikaner apparently complimenting Moonje, on 6 November, on his stiff and muscular arm, which showed that he exercised. In contrast, on 17 November, Moonje reported in his diary on the physique of C.Y. Chintamani, who though able to recount endless facts during his long speeches, “…has not a pleasant appearance, being fatty and bloated.” Moonje recorded feeling miserable when ill, such as during a bout of seasickness on the return to Europe for the second session in August 1931. Within days he was racing around the upper deck, passing fellow delegates, who apparently marveled at his recovery. Sir Muhammad Shafi and Lady Shafi, the Begum Shah Nawaz’s parents, approached him the following week, apparently telling him on 23 August that “…you are looking very beautiful and you possess a developed body. If you would only shave off your beard you would look 20 years younger…” As with Bhutto above, it seems that delegates played on Moonje’s concerns with his body and his looks, the European commerce delegate Gavin Jones drawing and circulating caricatures of Moonje during the journey. Three days later Moonje pondered Shafi’s compliment in his diary, speculating that he might be showing affection to mask a plot to have Moonje killed by a young Muslim assassin. Moonje vowed not to die a dog’s death but to kill at least three of his assailants first, unless taken by surprise.

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Anxiety Abroad: “Often Times I Feel Ashamed Having Been Born a Hindu” These comments on Moonje’s body were just one small subset of the slights and insults he recorded in his diary. While he worried about London’s cosmopolitanism this was nothing compared to Moonje’s fears over the presumed inferior qualities of Hindu and Sikh delegates and a better organized Muslim bloc of delegates.50 There was also a near-constant drip feed of condescension for those he deemed his co-religionists throughout the first session.51 A fortnight after arriving in London, during a train journey back to London after a fieldtrip to Coventry on 30 October 1930, the Sikh delegate Sardar Ujjal Singh tried to join a conversation Moonje was having with Earl Russel, the Labour Under-Secretary of State for India, to the latter’s apparent displeasure. Moonje noted in his diary “These people have no self respect. They lower their own position and lower also that of the whole lot of Indians.” The following day Moonje had dinner with leading “Hindu” delegates Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru (who refused religious affiliation), Srinivasa Sastri, and other Madrasi delegates, all of whom he felt regarded themselves as “…the wisest of all.” A few days later, on 2 November, Moonje attended a dinner hosted by the Maharaja of Bikaner, where he was shocked by the amount of money the princes wasted and their behaviour: “Maharaja himself drinks and then talks without balance. What a contrast these Rajas provide with English Viceroys and Governors who never lose their balance of mind and never drink to that extent.” A week before the conference was opened, informal committees were established by delegates who nominated six colleagues each. The Muslim Northwest Frontier Province delegate Sir Abdul Qayyum somehow found out that Moonje had nominated himself and announced this to the group, eliciting much laughter. Moonje confided to his diary on 5 November that it had been a tactical blunder, and that he told Shafi that this was how Hindu-Muslim bitterness came about. The vote resulted in Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Shafi being elected alongside Sapru and Sastri, who Moonje felt to be pro-Muslim. Moonje, not elected, was disgusted: “Who can save the Hindus? They do not want to be saved. They can not recognise their own benefactors; they can not recognise the work done by them for the protection of Hindus from the Moslem aggression.” Over the following days Moonje became convinced that the non-Muslim Princes were no good for supporting his defence of the communal line at the conference. On 8 November he debated the possibility of a détente over the communal issue at the Mayfair home of Muslim Indian States delegate, the Nawab of Bhopal: “Muslim Nabobs support the Muslims while Hindu Rajas waste their money on luxuries and enjoyments and have no sentiment to support Hindu workers.” Moonje was doubtless referencing Bikaner’s dinner and drinking of the week before, but also the preparedness of other Hindu Princes. The next day he was invited to dinner

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with the Maharaja of Alwar at his hotel but reported that “Maharaja Alwar is a fool and understands nothing of the public problems we have come here to deal with. I got disgusted …” Moonje’s fears were confirmed on 24 November when Alwar suggested to the Federal Structure Committee that a British constitutional expert should be called to give a lecture on federation: “All laughed and Alwar knew that he has made a fool of himself. Alwar is really a big fool and a beast.” The Hindu British Indian delegates were also quickly dismissed, especially the Hindu liberals, who Moonje felt were too divorced from the realpolitik of diplomacy. On 20 November, during the opening plenaries, he wrote of Sastri’s speech, “These liberals are arm chair politicians. They have studied much and are well informed and very intelligent but not having the grit and courage like the Moslem leaders are no match for the Moslem leaders on one side and for the Britishers on the other.” Liberals led the British to expect Hindus to concede to Muslim demands, felt Moonje, who commented on 19 December that “It is the tactlessness and the weak kneed temperament of these philosophic and learned Hindu liberals who have absolutely no personal touch of the rough and tumble of Moslem aggression, that has brought us to this abyss of nothingness in every way.” Having parted ways from Congress in the 1920s in favour of election to legislative assemblies and his leadership of the Hindu Mahasabha Moonje was displeased when Gandhi finally confirmed that he would attend the second RTC session as Congress’s sole representative. On 20 August 1931 Moonje was onshore at Aden, during a stopover en route to London for the second session, when a telegram was received from Bombay regarding Gandhi’s negotiations: “We all regard it as an indication of his swell-headedness and his incapacity to judge properly of practical politics. He really believes that the Britishers are defeated by him. He is so ignorant of human nature generally and of the British temperament and capacity of practical politics is so very limited in him.” Moonje’s fears were confirmed at the conference. During his first speech at the Minorities Committee, on 1 October, Moonje felt Gandhi made a sorry exhibit of Hindu weakness to the world, proceeding without caution. On 7 October Gandhi blamed Moonje’s resolutions for preventing the committee reaching any conclusions, but Moonje felt the delays were due to Gandhi’s inability to lead the conference or to see that Jinnah was forcing him into a corner. The following day Gandhi announced to the Committee his humiliation at being unable to solve the communal deadlock, leaving Moonje feeling “…abused, ridiculed, insulted and humiliated.” Informal meetings continued over the following weeks in an attempt to break the impasse, with Moonje being seen as a major block to progress. On 17 October he was invited to dine with the businessman and Congress supporter G.D. Birla, who pressured him to give in to Gandhi’s requests. Moonje was enraged: “Oh! These backboneless Hindus, I hate them. They are a contemptable lot. Often times I feel

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ashamed having been born a Hindu. They have not the Capacity, if not of fighting for justice and equality themselves, even to appreciate the […] fight the Hindu Mahasabha is putting up in the Cause of true Nationalism.” Moonje found himself excluded from meetings of Hindu delegates, while the Muslim delegates were felt to still work together. On 23 October he asked of his diary how Hindus could compete with the Muslims’ fine teamwork: “I admire them from the bottom of my heart. They deserve to live and dominate.” Moonje’s admiration was, however, of an adversary not of a moral equivalent. During his return to Bombay, on 1 January 1932, Moonje suggested that Muslim obsession with communal interest meant that they could not distinguish right from wrong. “This forms the chief virtue in their savage character which makes them fanatic and impervious to reason and logic. It’s this quality which makes them an aggressive bully. The Hindus by nature possess a contrary character and that’s why they, although in overwhelming majority of 3 to 1, are always pushed to the wall and dominated by them.” This came after MacDonald had concluded the second session, on 1 December 1931, announcing progress on plans for federation but no issue on the communal question. Moonje felt the Muslims had played the conference well, but that the main victory was for the British, returning him to the anti-colonialism that was always a part of his aggressive masculine Hinduism, as with Parivjarak:52 Show of all India Federation with promise of central responsibility with safeguards kept as a cloak or a sort of sweet smelling chloroform under which the whole nation may go to sleep again. As a result the central responsibility is indefinitely postponed because the Princes will be controlled by Political Department of Govnt of India to keep at arms length from the Federation.

Conclusion: Military Afterlives The Round Table Conference was a unique experiment in mobility making. Moonje’s diaries represent an intimate and brutally honest form of travel writing that shared many of Spurr’s rhetorical tropes of empire. They classified and ranked the places visited, using these hierarchies to debase and judge the degeneracy of British culture. Moonje affirmed his righteousness by overcoming the challenging environments and the temptations he faced and naturalized the “natives” he encountered in his explorations to the east (Bethnal Green). But Moonje also embodied his own sort of resistant rhetoric, which fitted into the more general modernist travel writing trope of disillusionment with the modern world. For Moonje this resistance took the form of being critical of almost everything, but of Indian delegates especially, and his fellow Hindus in particular.

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While Moonje was galvanized at the RTC by the seeming consonance of the Muslim delegates in constitutional debates, his experience of British military institutions and the disciplining of boyhood perhaps left an equally deep mark on his post-conference life. The retention of separate electorates in the proposals to emerge from the conference, which were embodied in the Government of India Act of 1935, meant that Muslim majorities in Bengal, the Northwest Provinces, Punjab, and Sind would remain. For Moonje this meant that Hindus would have to be ready to defend themselves on the ground.53 After he lost the Presidency of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1933 and his seat in the central Legislative Assembly in 1934, he sought other channels of influence, one of which attempted to rekindle his earlier targeting of Hindu youths via the Hindu Sabhas. Since 1905, Moonje had been the mentor of Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, who had also become disillusioned with mainstream nationalism in the 1920s and turned to communal politics. In 1925 Hedgewar founded the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangha (RSS) in Nagpur.54 This organization attracted youths through its facilities and social events, and from 1927 Moonje helped spread the RSS through the province, so as to help Hindus prepare for conflict with Muslims.55 His attempt to politicize the RSS and make it a platform for Hindu Mahasabha anti-Congress politics after the RTC, however, led to a rift with Hedgewar who would work to expand the RSS without Mahasabha support in the 1930s. Moonje continued, however, to address Sangh gatherings throughout the decade. He founded a volunteer corps for the Hindu Mahasabha directly, named the Ram Sena, although it failed to replicate the success of the RSS.56 Moonje found more success with another project which sought to militarize Hindu India, however. He managed to scrape together funding to establishing the Bhonsala Military School at Nasik in 1937.57 The authoritarian school was, as Ali Raza and Franziska Roy put it, “…a veritable heterotopia of ‘Greater India’ and ‘Golden Age’ Romanticism coupled with hyper-masculinist dreams of a military public school for Hindu boys (only) and a proposed feeder school for the British Indian Army.”58 As Roy has shown, in an unpublished statement from 1935 Moonje had laid out the objects of the School out clearly: “This training is meant for qualifying and fitting our boys for the game of killing masses of men with the ambition of winning victory with the best possible Casualties [sic] of dead and wounded while causing the utmost possible harm to the adversary.”59 Much has been made of Moonje’s visit to Italy and his interview with Mussolini on his return from the first RTC session.60 But this paper has shown that his exposure to imperial British militarism, rather than just their public school or boy scout system, was equally transformative. What is more, it has situated this exposure and Moonje’s reaction to it with the context of his broader views on gender, the Hindu corporal body and body politics, and his conflicting views of British imperial

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culture and politics. This presents us with another lens to think through the imbrications of imperial internationalism and itinerant Hindu nationalism through an intimate travel writing archive.

Notes 1

See R.J. Moore, The Crisis of Indian Unity, 1917-1940 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); C. Bridge, Holding India to the Empire: The British Conservative Party and the 1935 Constitution (Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1986); I. Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); S. Legg, Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

2

M. Ollivier, Imperial Conferences (Ottawa: E. Cloutier, 1954); N. Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience: Volume Two: From British to Multiracial Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1982).

3

S. Legg, M. Heffernan, J. Hodder and B.J. Thorpe (eds.), Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

4

On the varieties of twentieth-century internationalisms, and some of their conferences, see M.A. Raza, F. Roy, and B. Zachariah (eds.), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917-39 (London; Delhi: Sage, 2015); G. Sluga and P. Clavin (eds.) Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

5

On varying interpretations of imperial internationalism, see M.B. Jerónimo and J.P. Monteiro (eds.), Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World: The Pasts of the Present (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017); D. Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

6

S. Legg, “Imperial Internationalism: The Round Table Conference and the Making of India in London, 1930-32,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 11 (2020), 32–53.

7

R. Ahmed and S. Mukherjee (eds.), South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858-1947 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012); M. Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015).

8

J. Haggis, “The Limits and Possibilities of a Cosmopolitics of Friendship: The Cosmopolitan Thought Zones of Sk Datta 1900-1942,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 22 (2021).

9

S. Chaudhuri, “Indian Travel Writing,” in N. Das, and T. Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 159–74.

10

For an agenda-setting analysis of the feelings produced for and by international relations and experiences, see I. Scaglia, The Emotions of Internationalism: Feeling International Cooperation in the Alps in the Interwar Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

11

Cited in T. Jazeel, Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 2019), 43.

12

D. Lambert, and A. Lester (eds.), Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 2006); J. Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

13

D. Lambert, and P. Merriman, “Empire and Mobility: An Introduction,” in D. Lambert and P. Merriman (eds.), Empire and Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 1–28.

14

S. Legg, “Population, Mobility, and Moral Regulation,” in Mona Domosh, Mike Heffernan, and Charles W.J. Withers (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Historical Geography (London: Sage, 2020), 355–73.

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15

Lambert and Merriman, “Empire and Mobility,” 11.

16

M. Matera and S.K. Kent, The Global 1930s: The International Decade (London: Routledge, 2017).

17

A. Lester and F. Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); V. Thakur, India’s First Diplomat: VS Srinivasa Sastri and the Making of Liberal Internationalism (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2021).

18

J. Hodder, “Conferencing the International at the World Pacifist Meeting, 1949,” Political Geography 49 (2015), 40–50; S. Legg, “Political Lives at Sea: Working and Socialising to and from the India Round Table Conference in London, 1930-1932,” Journal of Historical Geography 68 (2020), 21–32; S.L. Lewis, “Skies that Bind: Air Travel in the Bandung Era,” in Legg et. al (eds.), Placing Internationalism, 234–51.

19

R. Craggs and H. Neate, “Post‐colonial Careering and Urban Policy Mobility: Between Britain and Nigeria, 1945-1990,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42 (2017), 44–57; Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective, “Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa,” Radical History Review 131 (2018), 176–82; R. De, “The Jurisprudence of Decolonization: Tracing the Archive of Rebellious Lawyering in the Postcolonial Career of D.N. Pritt,” Humanity (forthcoming).

20

N. Mukherjee, Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India (London: Routledge, 2020), 19.

21

P. Hulme and T. Youngs, “Introduction” in P. Hulme and T. Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion

22

H. Carr, “Modernism and Travel (1880-1940),” in Hulme and Youngs (eds.), Cambridge Companion

to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–13. to Travel Writing, 70–86. 23

J.S. Duncan and D. Gregory, “Introduction,” in J.S. Duncan and D. Gregory (eds.), Writes of Passage:

24

D. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial

Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 1999), 5. Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 25

Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 200.

26

Chaudhuri, “Indian Travel Writing.”

27

R. Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002).

28

A. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1998), 8.

29

For a detailed survey, see S. Bhattacharji, “Indian Travel Writing,” in C. Thompson (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 2015), 125–38.

30

Chaudhuri, “Indian Travel Writing,” 165.

31

S. Sen, Travels to Europe: Self and Other in Bengali Travel Narratives, 1870-1910 (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2005), 8.

32

Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity.

33

Legg, “Political Lives at Sea.”

34

C. Gupta, “Masculine Vernacular Histories of Travel in Colonial India: The Writings of Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 43 (2020), 836–59.

35

While there is evidence that Parivrajak was read by leading figures such as Rajendra Prasad, Gandhi, and Motilal Nehru, and that his writings aligned with the Hindu right in his later career, there is no known evidence that Moonje read him, though it seems probable (Charu Gupta, personal correspondence).

36

Gupta, “Masculine Vernacular Histories of Travel in Colonial India,” 838.

37

Ibid., 853.

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38

A. Raza and F. Roy, “Paramilitary Organisations in Interwar India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38 (2015), 671–89; S. Legg, “A Pre-Partitioned City? Anti-Colonial and Communal Mohallas in Interwar Delhi,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42 (2019), 170–87.

39

India Office, Indian Round Table Conference, St. James’s Palace: Delegates from the Indian States and British India London, 1930, 48. Available at https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/confer​ encing-the-international/representations/official-delegate-whos-whos.aspx (accessed 18 July 2022).

40

V. Hardas, “A Brief Life-Sketch,” in N. Dixit (ed.), Dharmaveer Dr. B.S. Moonje Commemorative Volume (Nagpur: Centenary Commemorative Committee, 1972), 5.

41

D.E.U. Baker, Changing Political Leadership in an Indian province: the Central Provinces and Berar, 1919-1939 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), 99.

42

Sarvarkar is one of the four main case studies, for instance, in S. Kapila, Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Unversity Press, 2021), 121, whereas Moonje appears in one footnote.

43

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (NMML), B.S. Moonje Papers, Microfilm 1.

44

Duncan and Gregory, “Introduction.”

45

Sen, Travels to Europe, 75.

46

On the social activities around the conference, see Legg, Round Table Conference Geographies, chapter 7.

47

For an early analysis of the racialized depiction of British working classes, especially the Irish diaspora, see A. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995).

48

Legg, “Political Lives at Sea.”

49

Ibid, 27.

50

On Moonje’s sense of the “organic unity” of the Muslim community see B.K. Jha, “Militarizing the Community: Hindu Mahasabha’s Initiative (1915–1940),” Studies in History 29 (2013), 119-46.

51

For Moonje’s long-standing anxiety over divisions within the Hindu community, see C. Jaffrelot, The

52

Gupta, “Masculine Vernacular Histories of Travel in Colonial India,” 855.

53

Baker, Changing Political Leadership, 103.

54

Ibid., 105.

55

On paramilitary voluntary organizations in the interwar period more broadly, see Raza and Roy,

Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999), 21-22.

“Paramilitary Organisations in Interwar India.” 56

N.R. Ganneri, “‘Whither Hindu Unity?’ Unravelling the RSS-Hindu Mahasabha Relationship: Perspectives from Maharashra,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 76 (2015), 474.

57

F. Roy, “The Torchbearers of Progress: Youth, Volunteer Organisations and National Discipline in India, c. 1918-1947” (PhD dissertation, University of Warwick, 2013), 182-99.

58

Raza and Roy, “Paramilitary Organisations in Interwar India,” 679.

59

Roy, Torchbearers of Progress, 187. Also see C. Marzia, “Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-Up in the 1930s: Archival Evidence,” Economic and Political Weekly 35 (2000), 221.

60

Marzia, “Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-Up in the 1930s.”

CHAPTER 11

Culture and Progressivism in Pakistan, ca. 1950s-1970s Ali Raza

Abstract If the formal transfer of power in August 1947 was an occasion of profound optimism in India and Pakistan, it was also accompanied by the dissatisfaction of those who felt betrayed by freedom. Blurring the lines between national and international and revealing the persistent influence of transnational ideological and mobilizational networks, this chapter traces the emergence of culture as a key battleground between the Pakistani state and its progressive critics throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Literature, poetry, music, film, and art were central to this seemingly cosmic battle between ideologies and world systems, and Pakistani communists and progressives of the time envisioned their politics in both national and international terms. In much the same way, culture was an extremely significant sphere for societal reform for the left’s ideological opponents and state authorities, particularly in the context of a global Cold War in which Pakistan was the United States’ key regional ally.

Key words: Pakistan, communism, culture, Cold War, decolonization

In 1952, the Criminal Investigation Department of Punjab published two volumes titled, The Communist Party of West Pakistan in Action. Pakistani communists, it claimed, had built “a powerful party machine” out of the devastation of Partition. Migrant communists from India had succeeded in reviving a party decimated by the chaos, forced migration, and massacres that accompanied independence in 1947. Pakistan was left with a depleted communist base in poor financial shape. Nevertheless, the report’s authors claimed, Pakistani communists were now fomenting a conspiracy to overthrow the government.1 But more than the party or its ill-fated 1951 conspiracy, it was international communism itself that posed the biggest threat to Pakistan. Communism, the report declared, was “the most inexorable and momentous political force in the contemporary world.” Its “strength and potentialities (were) often under-estimated,” especially in Pakistan where this complacency was partly drawn from the belief that communism and Islam were “incompatible.” And yet, as the increasing

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influence of communism in one Muslim society after another attested to – in Malaya, Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt – the Communist Party and its affiliates could not be underestimated. Their “insidious” techniques, “fanatical zeal,” and “single mindedness of purpose” meant that communism would continue to be a dangerous adversary.2 The Communist Party of Pakistan was formally banned in 1954, but the danger its ideas posed remained a source of concern, anxiety, and paranoia for decades to come. Those ideas also went by the name of tarraqi pasandi, or “progressivism,” an umbrella term that became a byword for a politics that was broadly critical of colonialism, capitalism, and feudalism; regressive social customs, practices, and beliefs; and often of the Pakistani state itself.3 Whilst the Communist Party or affiliated organizations did not have a legal presence in Pakistan, their ideas nevertheless retained wide purchase nationally, regionally, and globally. “Communism,” as the 1952 report pointed out, had become inextricably interwoven with nationalism, especially in East Asia where national liberation movements against European and Japanese imperialism had found fertile ground. The struggle there was fierce, protracted, bloody, and costly – so much so, authors warned, that “in Malaya, it cost the British Government sixty thousand dollars to kill one communist.”4 Given these movements, the report anxiously commented, the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc at large came to be regarded as a leading anti-imperialist force that threatened to expand to multiple theatres. Thus, the fear that Pakistan could be affected by communist and radical anti-colonial movements had little to do with the existing state of communist or progressive movements in the country. The threat, much as the post-colonial state’s British predecessors ironically also imagined it, came from global movements that nourished, sustained, and gave succor to embattled communists and progressives in Pakistan. As the progressive movement picked up momentum through left-leaning political parties, student associations, trade unions, and assorted workers’ and peasants’ movements throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the terrain of culture emerged as a key battleground between the Pakistani state and its progressive critics. Literature, poetry, music, film, and art were central to this seemingly cosmic battle between ideologies and world systems. Though far removed from actual battlefields where insurgencies were fought, or indeed from the more familiar mass strikes, demonstrations, and rallies, this world was no less fiercely contested and significant. If anything, it was inextricably linked to direct action for Pakistani communists and progressives of the time, who envisioned their politics in both national and international terms. In much the same way, culture was an extremely significant sphere for societal reform for the left’s ideological opponents and state authorities, particularly in the context of a global Cold War in which Pakistan was the United States’ key regional ally. The Pakistan of the 1950s and 1960s, then, was the site of

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fierce debates over the question of culture, which were in turn linked to international communism and anti-communism, decolonization and imperialism, and Afro-Asian solidarities. Blurring the lines between national and international and revealing the persistent influence of transnational ideological and mobilizational networks, this was, in short, a story of Pakistan but also a story of newly emergent nations across the formerly colonized world. In charting this story, this chapter shows how the political and cultural landscape in Pakistan was intimately connected to the international. In doing so, it also contributes to the developing scholarship on progressive politics in Pakistan.5 In recent years, the works of Kamran Asdar Ali, Anushay Malik, Saadia Toor, and Maia Ramnath, amongst others, have all extended our understanding of progressive politics in Pakistan, together with its cultural and internationalist moorings.6 This article is also a step in that direction. Through a foray into debates on culture and socio-political transformation beginning with the emergence of the progressive literary movement in colonial India, the progressive recasting of history and civilizational identity, and finally, the profound influence of the Cold War and movements of national liberation and decolonization, this chapter shows how ostensibly national politics, and especially its progressive variants, were profoundly linked with international powers, developments, movements, and intellectual currents.

The Question of Culture Within the political and social landscape of Pakistan and the decolonizing world, few questions were as important or more closely linked to global debates as the question of culture. Why was culture so significant? One answer came from noted Chinese writer, Pa Chin. Taking the stage at the 1961 Afro-Asian Writers Congress at Tokyo, Pa Chin began his address by claiming to speak for the “1.5 billion people” in Asia and Africa. This vast section of humanity, he said, was “courageous, industrious, and of good will.” They also had a “common desire and a most beautiful ideal” to “eliminate all oppression, exploitation, evils, and disasters on earth so that the entire world may be replete with freedom, peace, friendship, and happiness and an immensely beautiful spring may be created in human life.”7 This beautiful ideal, though, could not be achieved merely through establishing new economic or political systems; it required a new cultural expression that could pave the way for liberation and unite formerly oppressed peoples. Put simply, political, social, and economic liberation was inconceivable without its attendant cultural expression. These concerns were at the heart of repeated Afro-Asian Writers Congresses. Beginning in 1958 and following the lead of the famed 1955 Afro-Asian Conference

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at Bandung, Afro-Asian Writers Congresses brought together literary personalities, primarily from the socialist and formerly colonized or decolonizing worlds.8 In an era of international conferences, these congresses were one of the most crucial sites where progressive writers, artists, and intellectuals convened to chart a cultural and intellectual agenda for the Afro-Asian world. At Tokyo, Pa Chin addressed delegates from twelve Asian and fifteen African countries, all of which had formerly been under formal European rule. As European imperialism wrought devastation in Africa and Asia, it also, as Pa Chin noted, “undermined” national cultures and hastened their “stagnation.”9 National cultures had been systematically degraded, denigrated, and brought under the heel of foreign domination. In lamenting the destruction of national cultures, Pa Chin also outlined a specific mission for the Tokyo Congress, as well as other prior and subsequent Afro-Asian Writers Congresses: the ongoing task of national liberation was a political and a cultural project. A post-imperialist and post-European future, he argued, required a “cultural renaissance” in the formerly colonized world. Writers would usher in this future; it was their “most pressing” task, and indeed the task of “every work and poem…to greet this grand spring.” The formerly colonized (and the still colonized) world was the “cradle of human culture,” and in powering its way to independence and freedom, it was reclaiming its past as well as its “glorious future.” The onus was on writers and artists to develop cultural traditions towards “a finer and new culture” that would finally break off the shackles of colonial rule. Crucially, this culture was not merely the preserve of individual nations. Instead, it was the collective inheritance of Africa and Asia. It was also, as the Tokyo Congress declaration put it, a “revival from a human standpoint.” Fittingly, then, Pa Chin closed off his speech by reciting the “fighting poems” of the Congolese, Laotian, Algerian, and Japanese peoples, eulogizing “their heroic struggles against imperialism and colonialism for independence freedom and democracy.”10 A “revival from a human standpoint:” such were the stakes attached to the question of culture – and not just by progressive writers, artists, and intellectuals. Culture was a crucial question for national liberation and communist, socialist, and leftist movements alike. Not only was it a vehicle of resistance against domination (broadly understood); it was also a medium through which the painful legacies of the past could be overcome to claim a new, emancipated, and unfettered future. Substantive freedom from the conjoined domination of imperialism, capitalism, and racism was impossible to conceive of and achieve unless it was accompanied by cultural freedom and a cultural renaissance in the decolonized and decolonizing world. These questions were equally urgent for progressives in Pakistan. Not only did Pakistani writers and intellectuals frequent these international platforms;11 they also carried forward a tradition of progressivist art and literature that had

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emerged in opposition to colonial rule in the interwar period. The most significant torchbearer of this legacy, the All-India Progressive Writers Association (Anjumani-Tarraqqi Pasand Mussanifin), founded in 1935, had made an explicit connection between literature and the task of transforming society. Its founders, including the famed writers and activists Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer, had called in the 1930s for the complete refashioning of Indian literature. In making this call, both Anand and Zaheer were profoundly conscious of the uniqueness of their moment. In the intellectual and political ferment of the interwar world – with its heady mix of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, post-colonial dreams and visions, communist and socialist internationalisms, and fascism and nationalism – literature could hardly afford to stay stagnant or neutral. Thus, the 1935 manifesto of the AIPWA had begun by recognizing the “radical changes taking place in Indian society.” “Fixed ideas,” “old beliefs,” and traditional political institutions were all rapidly becoming outmoded. Out of this turmoil and upheaval, a new society was arising. Moribund practices were condemned to “ultimate decay,” but Indian writers sought to help this new age on its way. Their responsibility was even greater given that Indian literature had the “fatal tendency” to escape from the realities of life, taking refuge in “spiritualism” and “idealism” instead. The result, the manifesto noted, was a “rigid formalism” and a “banal perverse ideology” characterized by emotional exhibitionism and a “total lack of rationality.” This stasis was an outcome of a recent past, left stunted by colonial domination and a condition of degeneracy, decadence, and lack of progress.12 It was this decayed past that was rapidly succumbing before the forces of progress, concluded the AIPWA manifesto. Given the tumultuous events of the 1930s, in which national liberation struggles were proceeding apace in India and elsewhere, and in which the spirit of communist internationalism posed a formidable challenge to the forces of parochial nationalism and even fascism, one could hardly fault its authors for reaching this conclusion. The present, with all its possibilities and promises for a liberated future, had to be seized by Indian writers. The manifesto, thus, issued a clarion call to Indian writers: It is the duty of Indian writers to give expression to the changes taking place in Indian life and to assist the spirit of progress in the country….It is the object of our Association to rescue literature and other arts from the conservative classes in whose hands they have been degenerating so long, to bring the arts into the closest touch with the people and to make them the vital organs which will register the actualities of life, as well as lead us to the future we envisage. While claiming to be the inheritors of the best traditions of Indian civilization, we shall criticise, in all its aspects, the spirit of reaction in our country, and we shall foster-through interpretative and creative work (with both Indian and foreign resources) everything that will lead our country to the new life for which it is striving. We

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believe that the new literature of India must deal with the basic problems of our existence today-problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness and political subjection so that it may help us to understand these problems, and through such understanding help us to act. All that drags us down to passivity, inaction and unreason we reject as reactionary. All that arouses in us the critical spirit, which examines institutions and customs in the light of reason, which helps us to act, to organize ourselves, to transform, we accept as progressive.’13

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, literature had emerged as a key vehicle for social reform in the subcontinent. The founding of the AIPWA lent this tradition a revolutionary impetus. Such was its impact that progressivism became one of the major influences in subcontinental literature.14 But this was also part of a global movement. Through their art, Indian progressives were in conversation with socialist, communist, and anti-colonial influences on artistic forms and genres across the world. As a later note from on the progressives commented, socialist realism was a dominant influence. This included the works of Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, Theodore Dreiser, and Henri Barbusse, amongst others. More broadly, progressive writers were profoundly inspired “by the successful building of a socialist society in the Soviet Union,” including its “striking achievements in the field of literature, art, and culture (especially fiction and cinema), wiping out illiteracy in a short space of time and the growth of national cultures of the diverse peoples of the USSR.”15 Across the 1930s and 1940s, the South Asian literary and artistic landscape flourished with experiments in translations, fiction, poetry, theatre, and cinema. Their contributions, in the left’s own estimation at least, were far reaching. To begin with, progressive writers fiercely critiqued literary forms associated with feudal society, which in their view, served to “make literature merely an object of enjoyment, pleasure, (and) escape for the upper classes.”16 Their sympathies instead were directed towards the downtrodden. Art, in this view, must not be for art’s sake, as their literary critics argued. Instead, it “must serve the people, should depict their life, and should put the workers and peasants and the oppressed middle class as the main actors on the stage of history.”17 Tied to this aim was the popularization of socialist ideals and principles, especially as they were practiced in the Soviet Union. Accordingly, a considerable number of travelogues, poems, translations, and books on the USSR were published in the subcontinent’s major languages. (Most, however, were immediately proscribed by the colonial state.) This was further linked to the development of literary criticism ostensibly based on Marxist principles. Additionally, the progressive movement also inaugurated new artistic forms and introduced radical innovations within established genres like poetry, fiction,

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folk music, and dance, a striking parallel to developments in mid-twentieth century Afghanistan, as Mejgan Massoumi shows in her contribution to this volume. These were then performed and recited in mass public rallies, conferences, and the frequent Inquilabi Mushaira.18 A key role was also played by the India People’s Theatre,19 which, together with the AIPWA and other allied and affiliated organizations, delivered the message of anti-colonialism, anti-feudalism, and anti-capitalism through drama, dance, and song to mass audiences across the subcontinent. By the end of colonial rule, the AIPWA had grown to become an organization with more than 4,000 members and more than 50 local branches, counting amongst its ranks some of the most prominent Indian writers, poets, artists, and literary critics in the subcontinent.20 With partition in 1947, the AIPWA split into its constituent Indian and Pakistani branches. From its very inception, the Pakistan branch worked as an allied organization of the Communist Party, which was in the process of reorganization and rebuilding under Sajjad Zaheer, a migrant from the United Provinces who also had taken part in the AIPWA’s founding in 1935. For the Pakistan branch of the AIPWA, the Communist Party offered the most viable means of support: it was only through Marxism’s “mastery” and by “allying itself with the people’s movement – through direct contact with and knowledge of the life of working people – that the progressive writer’s movement could grow and develop.” It was also necessary for writers to study the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin diligently and dutifully. They were expected to familiarize themselves with the works of Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, Alexei Tolstoy, Ilya Ehrenburg, and other progressive writers in Europe and the United States.21 Additionally, party poets, writers, and artists were expected to fight for the party programme through their literary creations and artistic activities. Their writings were meant to be a “weapon” through which forces of reaction and the ruling classes were to be fought in order to build a “new democratic order of socialism.”22 Culture, as Pa Chin would note in the 1960s, was the medium through which a new order, a new polity, could be forged. This was particularly true of the Marxist view, in which culture did not stand outside the struggle between the oppressed and ruling classes. It was, instead, a key element within it. A new culture and a new society were co-constitutive of each other, and they would be forged across borders.23 How could a fledgling Party and Association, with very few committed cadres left in its ranks after independence, be this ambitious in its outlook and political imagination? A key consideration here was the notion of freedom itself. What did it mean to be free after all? Leftists of various persuasions relentlessly posed this question to mainstream nationalist movements in the run up to independence, as did political actors across the spectrum, all of whom had their distinct visions of what independence, azadi, and swaraj could and should look like. In the case of

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Pakistan, the uncertainty of what freedom would mean was even greater given that its creation was largely an unexpected event, even for its most ardent supporters.24 This uncertainty triggered unprecedented communal conflict, but it also gave rise to a political and intellectual ferment about what “Pakistan” would look like. For that reason, countless visions of “Pakistan” were proffered, both within and extending beyond the politically prominent Muslim League. The concept of Pakistan was flexible enough to accommodate multiple and often contradictory visions. Thus, the Communist Party of India, in a stark shift from its earlier stance, enthusiastically endorsed the demand for Pakistan. Influenced by Stalin’s commentary on the “National Question” and driven by other political considerations, the CPI not only supported the Muslim League’s demands but also encouraged many of its Muslim cadres to join the League and support it in its electoral campaign. Driving these actors was a dream of an independent nation and a socialist utopia which would empower the downtrodden: a vision that was reflected in the electoral manifesto of the Punjab Muslim League, which promised unprecedented rights to workers and peasants. Unsurprisingly, the manifesto was authored by a leading member of the CPI.25 At the other end of the spectrum were groups and individuals who dreamt of Pakistan as a space where Indo-Islamic civilization could fully prosper and achieve its former glory. Interspersed with these visions were calls for organizing Pakistan on Islamic foundations.26 What that really meant differed from one political movement to the next. Yet, what bound all these disparate dreams and visions together was the idea of Pakistan as a utopia, a space where great experiments could be conducted, and a nation that could achieve greatness once unfettered from British rule and majoritarian domination. The question of what Pakistan could be, then, was far from exhausted after formal independence had been achieved. Independence had been won, but freedom still had to be obtained. And for communists, and the left at large, there was no question that Pakistan had to be reestablished as a socialist people’s republic if true, substantive, independence was ever to be achieved. That said, this vision was not as hopelessly idealistic and ambitious as it may seem in hindsight. In a newly established struggling state where questions of constitutional arrangements were still hotly debated, and in a global environment where empires were falling and communism seemed to be ascendent, one could hardly fault the left, broadly put, for gazing into the future with a hopeful and expectant gaze. Even amidst catastrophe, revolution seemed around the corner. This realization was not missed by Pakistan’s state machinery. Alongside inheriting other institutions from its colonial predecessor, the nascent post-colonial state also inherited its deep suspicion, fear, loathing, and antipathy for communism, as the extensive police reporting on the party testified. And much like the Communist Party, the Pakistan Progressive Writers Association, too, was kept under close

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surveillance. Recognizing it as a front organization for the Communist Party, the government initially forbade state functionaries from joining the PWA. Later, in 1954, the Association was proscribed, along with the Communist Party and other affiliated organizations, like the Democratic Students Association. What happened after was in keeping with a standard practice that had been perfected during the height of colonial persecution. Activists from a banned political association simply created another one under a new name. Thus, whilst the PWA were formally proscribed, its members, whether they were dyed-in-the-wool communists or not, remained part of the progressive movement through various alternative platforms.27

Moosa say Marx tak: On History and Identity Despite relentless surveillance and continual persecution by the authorities, progressives played a crucial role in Pakistan’s cultural landscape. Culture was not simply a means through which societal transformation could be achieved; it was also a terrain on which questions of (inter)national identity, belonging, and political futures were contested. In the case of Pakistan, this was an even more sensitive question given that its raison d’être was a presumed civilizational difference between Hindus and Muslims of South Asia. The question of Islam and Muslimness, then, was unavoidable for progressive intellectuals and activists.28 Another equally important question was the cultural and political legacy of colonial rule. Both culture and history, then, had to be reclaimed. Take the example of noted writer and intellectual, Sibte Hasan. Born in 1912 (some accounts suggest 1916) in the United Provinces in India, Sibte Hasan obtained his education from Aligarh Muslim University and Columbia University. Hasan was one of the leading members of the AIPWA, in addition to being a CPI member. He edited a number of journals in British India, and later in Pakistan, in particular the highly influential journals Naya Adab (New Literature) and Lail-o-Nihar. He further authored a number of works, such as Pakistan may Tehzeeb ka Irtiqa (The Evolution of Culture in Pakistan), Marx aur Mashriq (Marx and the East), and Moosa say Marx tak (From Moses to Marx), amongst other writings, including hundreds of articles, interviews, and essays.29 Moosa say Marx Tak, especially, acquired an iconic status in progressive circles in Pakistan. These titles reflected the political and intellectual concerns of progressives in Pakistan. They also were reflective of the twin desires to reclaim history and culture, and indeed of a larger moment in which noted progressives like Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, and others sought to give expression to a new literature and culture for Pakistan. More than that, these writers and

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poets fused what seemed like disparate intellectual and political traditions, bringing together globally resonant ideas in locally situated idioms. In doing so, they extended a longer tradition in which “leftist” ideas were translated and rooted in specific socio-cultural contexts.30 The very title, Moosa say Marx tak, which links ostensibly opposed “Islamic” and “Communist” idioms, is indicative of this tradition. More significantly, these articulations also spoke to a distinct sense of the past, and thereby of the future. The past happened to be the most contested terrain in a state and society that sought to (re)define itself. In Moosa say Marx tak, Hasan sought to provide a history and a primer on socialism that he claimed was lacking in Pakistan. It was extraordinary, he argued, that not a single book on socialism had been published in any one of Pakistan’s languages. In that, Hasan was guilty of exaggeration. There certainly had been books, pamphlets, novellas, short stories, journalistic accounts, and much else besides published in Pakistan on socialism. Nevertheless, Moosa say Marx tak, first published in 1976, was the certainly the first that attempted to provide a Pakistani world history of the evolution of socialism and communism. To that end, Hassan takes his readers from ancient history to the modern age. He begins his narrative with the age of primitive communism and Moses’s shariat (law). From there, he provides an overview of ancient Greek and Hellenic society and the military and Asharafi (genteel, elite, or landed) communism practiced by Sparta and Aristotle’s Athens, respectively. He then describes the kind of moral, social, and economic code inaugurated by Christianity before moving on to the modern age and the figures of Sir Thomas More (and Utopia), Sir Francis Bacon (and his brand of socialism), and eventually the French Revolution and its after-effects. The second half of the book introduces Karl Marx and Engels, together with their biographies, writings, and philosophical contributions. Interspersed in this paean to Marx and Engels is a detailed historical account of the first communist leagues, the European revolutions of 1848, Marxism’s view of Hindustan, the First International, and the Paris Commune. Notable in this ambitious sketch moving from the ancient to the modern world (which is intriguingly reminiscent of Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope) is an understanding of history that views yearning for a socialist utopia as a constant feature across historical time and space. For Hasan, history itself had been driven by this dream. And it was with the success of Bolshevism and the global revolutions it sparked that showed how “this was not a fool’s dream.” That alone was proof that a socialist dream could yet be realized, in Pakistan and elsewhere.31 Hasan’s view of history was further spelled out in other works. In another seminal work, Pakistan may Tehzeeb ka Irtiqa (The evolution of culture/civilization in Pakistan),32 Hasan intervened in a heated national conversation on the vexed question of culture. Noting that there was a vibrant discussion on culture

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and civilization in Pakistan, Hasan distanced himself from those who viewed culture primarily through the lens of religion. There were those, Hasan noted, who claimed that religion, and religious identity, was the basis of Pakistani culture and civilization. For them, any expression not in keeping with Islamic shariat, whether it was dance, music, art, or sculpture, was to be excised from Pakistani identity and culture. Similarly, Hasan observed, there were those who thought that Pakistani culture should be aligned and oriented according to the two-nation theory at the root of Pakistan’s origins. Advocates of this view called for severing links with “Hindustani” (read: “Hindu”) civilization and protecting Pakistani culture from the ostensible cultural invasion from India. Building on these arguments were those who advanced a unitary view of Pakistani civilization, which envisaged one polity, one nation, and one ideology. There was no space in this view to accommodate Pakistan’s rich cultural, linguistic, regional, and ethnic diversity. Hasan, in his introductory remarks, made explicit his disagreements with such views. His own arguments were aligned, though not quite similar, to those who thought of civilization in Marxist terms, i.e., as an expression of class antagonisms and conflicts. By his own admission, his understanding of “civilization” was based on a “scientific” instead of a primordial or essentialist understanding. To that end, Pakistan may Tehzeeb ka Irtiqa provided a detailed commentary of how modern philosophers, rationalists, and scientists, from Charles Darwin to Syed Ahmed Khan, had defined “civilization.” More pointedly, however, Hasan departed from the Islamist view of civilization by situating Pakistani culture and civilization in Pakistan’s pre-Islamic past. This gave it a continuity that anchored Pakistani identity in a specific landscape and geography instead of a religious identity. His narrative thus begins with the Indus Valley Civilization and covers a period of thousands of years in which he shows how the culture and civilization of what came to be Pakistan evolved over the ages. Key to his worldview, then, was an understanding of Pakistani identity, culture, civilization, history, and hence future, that was not bound to a religious identity. Nor was it bound to its current geography. It had instead been shaped by Greek, Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Central Asian influences, too. 33 This was a much more expansive understanding of Pakistan and its civilizational heritage that went beyond a simplistic Muslim/non-Muslim division.34 In other words, it mattered where one began their history. It also mattered what one’s relationship with the past was. As the foreword to Pakistan may Tehzeeb ka Irtiqa noted, there were many ways in which people related to the past. The most pernicious of them was an approach that fetishized the past and sought refuge in it, casting it in mythological terms. Such an approach, bereft as it was of a scientific, rational, and critical outlook, could only lead to

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sentimentalism, emotionalism, prejudice, and more alarmingly, a disavowal of the future in favour of an imagined past. In stark contrast, the progressive view of the past actively sought and embraced the future. The past offered both a lesson and an aspiration.35 Hasan, however, was hardly alone in his search for a history. As a nascent nation-state keen on differentiating itself from India and “Hindu” civilization, Pakistan was the site of fierce contestations over the interpretation of history. How Pakistan imagined its history was crucial to the way it understood itself in the present and imagined itself in the future. For that reason, writers, thinkers, and intellectuals adamantly opposed to the progressives advanced their own interpretation of Pakistan’s history, culture, and civilization. Noted intellectual and literary critic, Muhammad Hasan Askari, for example, criticized progressives for their flawed understanding of history and human nature, and consequently its misplaced vision for the future.36 Other writers also advanced their own conceptions of history, culture, and the future. Few in this constellation of anti-progressive writers and intellectuals were as influential as the novelist Naseem Hijazi. Through his historical fiction, Hijazi was crucial in popularizing a view of Pakistani origins and history in a glorious Islamic past. His adoptive name of Naseem Hijazi offered a clue to his politics: Hijazi literally means the “wind of/from the Hijaz,” the sacred land of Mecca and Medina. Hijazi’s historically situated novels, such as Muahmmad bin Qasim (about the man who was ostensibly the “first” Arab conqueror in the subcontinent), Shaheen (Falcon), Qaisr o Kisra (Caeser and Cyrus), Qafila-e-Hijaz (Caravan of Hijaz), and Daastan-i-Mujahid (The Warrior’s Tale), explicitly linked Pakistan with the glory of Arab and Islamic history and severed it from its shared past with the Indian subcontinent. He offered an alternative Pakistani geography and past, one divorced from South Asia and instead rooted in the Middle East, blurring Pakistan’s historic and contemporary place in the world. Nowhere does Hijazi make this as explicit as his semi-autobiographical novel, called Khaak aur Khoon, which recounts in graphic detail the experiences of East Punjabi Muslims during partition. Much like himself, the protagonist of his novel, Saleem, is from Gurdaspur and heavily involved with the Muslim League and the movement for Pakistan. Again, much like Hijazi, Saleem is caught up in the devastating violence wrought against Muslims in Gurdaspur after it was awarded to India. It is clear that Hijazi was deeply affected by his experience of violence and displacement. He even dedicated his novel to the tree that stood outside his village in Gurdaspur. But more importantly, the horrific violence of partition taught Hijazi that the “line of blood that was drawn in Gurdaspur was in effect a line separating two distinct civilizations – Hindu and Muslim.” Pakistani (read: “Muslim”) culture and civilization was, in his world view, fundamentally incompatible

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with Hindu-dominated Indian civilization.37 Instead, Pakistani civilization had to reestablish its ties with its Arab and Islamic predecessors. To that end then, Hijazi devoted the remainder of his literary career to telling tales of a glorious Islamic past replete with heroes, conquerors, and warriors who spread the glory of Islam to distant corners of the earth. At stake in this construction of a mythical past, then, was a vision of a future that would herald a golden Islamic age in Pakistan. This view could not be more different from the progressivist view of past and future represented by Sibte Hasan. The two writers rooted Pakistan as a nation in competing, largely incompatible regional spaces and international world-systems. Such interpretations brought into question Pakistan’s past as well as its future, highlighting Pakistan’s “South Asianness” as a point of contestation.

The Cold War and Afro-Asianisms Inter-Pakistani cultural debates were also informed by a literary and organizational circuit that spanned the globe. The Afro-Asian Writers Congresses, in which Pakistanis participated, were part of this network, as were similar associations linked either to the Anglo-American or to the Socialist bloc. Soon after independence, for example, a Pakistan-Soviet Cultural Association was founded by local communists. The association maintained links with the Soviet diplomatic and consular staff and regularly organized exhibitions and book fairs on communist literature, along with screening Soviet films.38 While the association did not last long, it was replaced by other organizations that continued to work on similar lines. The most renowned of these was the Russian Center of Science and Culture, better known as the “Friendship House.” Established in Karachi in 1966, Friendship House boasted an impressive collection of Russian and Soviet literature, offered Russian language classes, organized regular conferences, symposiums, and fairs, and arranged screenings of films produced in the Soviet Union. Friendship House became a leading cultural and meeting space for communists and progressives in the city and beyond.39 Associations such as the “Pakistan-China Friendship Society” and the “Pak-China Cultural Association” were established in a similar vein. These too, as the police reported, became a “medium for communist propaganda.”40 Visiting delegations, including Soviet and Chinese artists and troupes, were also popularly received, even if Pakistani officials suspected them of being subversive “mediums.” These delegations were part and parcel of Soviet and Chinese foreign policy, in much the same way as the United States sponsored tours of artists, such as black jazz musicians, for its Cold War propaganda.41 These visits created quite a

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stir across the country, as the following broadcast transcript from Radio Pakistan on a visiting Chinese troupe indicates: Stage, theatre, and entertainment seem to be the keynote of this season. First class entertainment was offered to the Lahore public by the Chinese Cultural team. These were a troupe of singers, dancers, musicians who enchanted the public for four days. Proof of this can be had from the car park outside the cinema where they were playing. The park was about 400 yards along two roads, with cars themselves two or three abreast each other. Ticket prices were high, but then, so was the entertainment value. The peacock dance was very popular but the Monkey King and his group tumbling over the blue silk flags was thunderously applauded…42

Aside from their undeniable entertainment value, these visits offered an occasion for local communists and “fellow travelers”43 to meet their Soviet and Chinese comrades. Whilst politics could often be a sensitive issue to discuss, given the blanket surveillance that surrounded them, conversations could always be had on art and its capacity for transforming society.44 These leftist bodies were opposed by associations covertly backed by the United States. Chief amongst them was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Founded in 1950 in Berlin, the CCF was a platform for writers, artists, and intellectuals opposed to communist totalitarianism. The CCF argued that totalitarianism posed an existential threat to free thought and expression. Six years after its inaugural Berlin meeting, the Pakistan chapter of the CCF was established in Karachi. Going by the Bangla and Urdu names of Pakistan Shakha Shanskhritik Azadi Pratishthan and Pakistan Kamiti Anjuman-e-Azadi-e-Tahzib, the Pakistan Committee adopted the manifesto of the Berlin Congress and added objectives that were specific to its context. One of its most important objectives was a commitment to advance “the positive role of religion in combatting the atheistic principles of communism.” The Committee also emphasized the “role of tradition in arts and literature,” which was a clear positioning against the progressive movement’s innovation, and perhaps heresy, in arts and literature. Though its affiliates and members were not aware of it, the CCF was a cultural front established by the CIA.45 Its Pakistani membership, many of them leading writers and intellectuals of their time, was united by their opposition to progressive art and literature, which to their mind had not only subverted and reduced the traditional role and substance of art but also communicated a dangerous message to the wider public. In one communique after another, the committee expressed its dismay at the “fascination for communist ideology” that had allegedly “cast a spell” over Pakistan, especially amongst students. It worried that the Soviet Union’s progress and achievements made it a model of progress and development

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for poverty-stricken nations like Pakistan. Most dangerous of all, the committee pointed out, was the danger of intellectual regimentation and regression brought on by a blind adherence to communist ideology. What was needed, then, as far as the Pakistan chapter was concerned, was the mobilization of locally situated social, cultural, and above all, religious resources against the intellectual influence of ideas tied to “extreme materialism” and “extreme collectivism.” Islam, then, became an antidote for these ideas. “At no time,” a speaker at a CCF conference noted, had the role of religion been more important.46 The Congress became a key organization in this moment, at least until its CIA links were exposed in the mid-1960s. Pakistanis participated in other associations and platforms also engaged with transformative changes taking place across the globe. These included local chapters of the World Peace Council, formally established in 1950. The Council was aligned with the Soviet Union’s policy of condemning European imperialisms and American military aggression. Accordingly, its Pakistan affiliates regularly organized rallies and symposiums protesting the imperialist militarism in Asia and Africa. In the era of Bandung, Afro-Asian solidarities became a part of Pakistan’s political landscape.47 Associations like the “Pak Afro Asian Cultural Council” and the “Pakistan National Organization for Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Council” (later renamed the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Organization) were founded in the 1960s. Of its members, “Abdullah Butt was known for his progressive pro Congress trends. Mir Abdul Qayyum and Mir Ahmad Talpur were known for their pro-communist views. Iqbal Cheema, though a Muslim Leaguer, cherished ‘progressive’ views. Malik Miraj Khalid was a Republican interested in Kisan activities.”48 In short, Afro-Asianism as a slogan attracted a motley crew of activists who were not necessarily ideologically committed to communism or progressivism; instead, national liberation, decolonization, and Afro-Asian solidarity were a demand that most could get behind. National liberation and decolonization from foreign rule offered a cause that a variety of political actors could get behind. Nevertheless, these associations had some overlapping objectives. Chief amongst them was the promotion of “friendship,” “cooperation,” and “coexistence” amongst Afro-Asian peoples. This was a renunciation, even if largely rhetorical, of relationships of domination and enslavement that had long characterized the relationship Europe had with Asia and Africa. Its corollary was strong support for movements of emancipation and national liberation. Accordingly, these associations affirmed a commitment to “fight against racialism and inhuman segregation of whatever type and in whatever form.” As ever, culture was a key question for these associations. Its preservation was as important as political and economic independence. Its flourishing also depended on “cultural relations amongst Afro Asian nations.” Cultural exchange amongst formerly colonized nations was crucial to overcoming the legacy and continued hegemony of European rule. Much like their Soviet, Chinese, and American

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counterparts, Afro-Asian solidarities were also emphasized through art and book exhibitions, concerts, performances, and cultural shows that showcased the cultural achievements from African and Asian countries.49 Few of these associations lasted for any appreciable length of time. Much like other platforms and organizations, they petered out due to internal disagreements and ongoing state repression that only grew worse after Pakistan became a military dictatorship in 1958. But the larger movement itself continued to find root in a variety of platforms and political spaces. Regardless of its varied expression, as a police report put it, the Afro-Asian solidarity movement, much like the peace movement, “declared full support to national liberation struggles of the Afro Asian colonial peoples as the (corner) stone of its policy.” 50 Whether in Pakistan or abroad, prominent political and cultural figures like Maulana Bhashani, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and others continued to participate regularly in these forums and their international counterparts. Still, it could not be claimed, as far as the state machinery was concerned, that the Afro-Asian movement had made a significant impact on the people of Pakistan.51 And yet, there were moments when the spirit of Afro-Asianism struck a deep chord. Thus, in writing of the early 1960s, the report on communism admitted that “it could hardly be denied that there was a fairly strong undercurrent of genuine Afro Asian sentiment among Pakistanis, as demonstrated by the country wide expression of solidarity with the people of the Congo vis a vis the murder of the then Prime Minister Lumumba.” This sentiment, it added warningly, “offer(ed) a fertile ground for exploitation by communists.”52

Conclusion Fifteen years after the first booklet was released in 1952, another two volumes of the Communist Party of West Pakistan in Action were published. Their preface, written by Deputy Inspector General of the Special Branch, Muzaffar Bangash, offered a fresh assessment of where communism stood in (West) Pakistan. By the mid-1960s, as Bangash noted, much water (had) flowed under the bridges of the rivers of the Afro Asian and Latin American countries. In Africa, over a score of countries threw off Western colonial domination. Cuba, situated at a distance of 90 miles from the American shores, liberated herself from American economic hegemony, with Russian military and economic assistance. Some other Latin American countries are in a state of political turmoil, determined to follow the example of “socialist Cuba”. Political instability appears to be writ large on the face of Latin America.53

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Elsewhere, political developments were equally worrisome. The Suez Canal conflict, Bangash wrote, had inflamed anti-colonial and nationalist sentiments in Afro-Asian countries. In Southeast Asia, too, American military aggression had considerably worsened matters. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had stepped up its economic and technological assistance to newly independent nations in Asia and Africa. The overall effect was the emergence of “pro-Russian, or in other words, pro-communist and anti-West trends, among the broad masses of these countries.” Pakistan also was a cause for concern, even if communists had been, as Bangash triumphantly reported, “completely routed.” They were “cowering,” he wrote. Nevertheless, Pakistani communists’ “sinking hopes (were) buoyed up at the prospect of their comrades turning the tables on the Americans in South Vietnam and eventually expelling them from South East Asia.” And given the fact that they had a “fertile soil for operation amongst the continuously swelling ranks of the working classes,” Pakistan was “not yet wholly out of the woods.”54 Communism, as the colonial state and its obedient successor imagined it, was always, in part, a phantom. It was present, but never fully developed. It was weak in strength, but the threat it posed could never be ruled out precisely because it never positioned itself as a nationally or regionally bound movement. And with national liberation, decolonization, and Afro-Asianism becoming tethered to international communism in many contexts, it was difficult, if not impossible, for the state authorities to parse, single out, and isolate these disparate, but fused, influences in the Pakistani political sphere. Put simply, communism, progressivism, or more generally the left may have been situated in Pakistan, but they were ultimately untethered and unbound to it. That paradox of situatedness and unboundedness dictated much of the left’s own trajectory and political fortunes in Pakistan. It also invited state persecution. Revolutionary insurgencies elsewhere in the world were enough of a reason to clamp down on an already weakened Pakistani left. For its part, the state machinery spared no expense in chasing communism, even if part of it was a figment of its paranoid imagination. Organizations were continually outlawed; so were newspapers and publishing outlets such as Progressive Papers Ltd. Activists were systematically and continuously surveilled, often arrested, restricted, tortured, and sometimes killed. The young communist Hasan Nasir, who died in police custody in what the authorities claimed was a suicide, was one such example. These restrictions extended to a censorship regime that relied on colonial acts like the Sea Customs Act, Post Officers Act, Security Acts, Criminal Law Amendment Acts, and Press and Publications Ordinances to intercept and proscribe “undesirable literature.”55 To that end, weekly and fortnightly police intelligence reports provided detailed summaries of intercepted and impounded texts, alongside breathless reporting about communist literature and newspapers from elsewhere in the world. Given

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that suspected communists were also involved in writing film scripts and songs, the Film Censor Board was instructed to carefully censor films “with a view to ensuring that they did not, in any manner, project communist ideas and themes.”56 Within the educational sphere, things were no different. Colleges and universities were instructed not to appoint any suspected “pro-communist” intellectuals keen on instilling “impressionable minds of young students with Marxist ideology.”57 What is more, a concerted effort was made by the state to popularize Islamiyat (Islamic Studies), which, much as the CCF also argued, could “serve as a shield against communism.” In the final analysis, religion was to play a crucial role in “protecting an individual against perversion … launched by communists.”58 Despite these restrictions, however, trade unions, farmers collectives, women’s and students’ movements, left-leaning political organizations, and, last but not least, progressive intellectuals, writers, artists, and poets continued to pursue their politics. Progressive writers, such as Sibte Hasan, adopted projects that were simultaneously national and international in their outlook. They sought to reframe Pakistan’s history in particular ways, often undermining a sense of Pakistan as civilizationally Islamic and instead focusing on the nation-state’s heritage in South Asia’s older history and landmass. They also rooted Pakistan’s past and future in a broader socialist milieu and introduced Pakistani audiences to key thinkers and tenets of socialism as it had been practiced and understood across the world, pointing to ways in which Pakistan, too, could become socialist. Pakistani progressivism necessitated a marriage of national and international interests and impetuses, blurring the boundaries between the two and seeking to take advantage of the early decades of Pakistan’s independence, in which its political future still seemed malleable. This chapter has sought to bring the world of Pakistani progressive culture into view: a world of the 1950s and 1960s in which debates on socialism, neo-imperialism, decolonization, Afro-Asian solidarities, and the much-vaunted “Third World” were a key part of the political landscape and the progressive world view in Pakistan. Pakistani progressives embraced the global scope and potential of these ideas at the same time they sought to apply them locally. In these debates, the question of culture was key. At stake was nothing less than the future of Pakistan – and the very meaning of Pakistan – and the various peoples and nationalities within it. But it was also a question of international importance that extended beyond Pakistan’s borders. As with other newly independent countries in Asia and Africa, culture was the frame, the medium, through which a nascent, struggling country could rid itself of the shackles of its colonial past and embrace an emancipated future. In Pakistan as elsewhere, these debates were also influenced and factionalized by Cold War rivalries. This period in Pakistan’s otherwise checkered past reminds us of alternative cultural, socio-political, and economic visions that have disappeared under the

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weight of prevalent narratives, which reduce Pakistan’s history to militarization, authoritarianism, and related themes. What is more, this was also a history that was not restricted to Pakistan alone. Pakistani progressives thought and acted both locally and globally. Theirs was a history of South Asia “unbound” that told a story not just of Pakistan, but of the wider region and the Afro-Asian world at large.

Notes 1

This was the famous Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, in which communist and military officers were tried, and convicted, for conspiring to overthrow the government of Pakistan. See Hasan Zaheer, The Times and Trial of the Rawalpindi Conspiracy 1951: The First Coup Attempt in Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008); Zafarullah Poshni, Prison Interlude: The Last Eyewitness Account of the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2019).

2

The Communist Party of West Pakistan in Action (CPWPA), vol. 1 (Lahore: Deputy Inspector General of Police, Criminal Investigation Department, 1952), 1.

3

In that sense, “progressivism” covered a range of political affiliations, from card-carrying communists to democratic socialists to varied “left-leaning” camps. As far as the Pakistani state was concerned, there was little to distinguish between these groups – they could all be collated under “communism.”

4

CPWPA, vol. 1, 605–6.

5

For the most part, this scholarship, including this article, focuses on West Pakistan. East Pakistan rarely, if ever, gets a mention.

6

Kamran Asdar Ali, Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and Class Activism in Pakistan 1947-1972, (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2015); Anushay Malik, “Public Authority and Local Resistance: Abdur Rehman and the Industrial Workers of Lahore, 1969-1974,” Modern Asian Studies 52 (2018), 815–48; Ibid., “Alternative Politics and Dominant Narratives: Communists and the Pakistani State in the 1950s,” South Asian History and Culture 4 (2013), 520–37; Saadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (London: Pluto Press, 2011); Maia Ramnath, Art for Life: Conversations with the Progressive Writers Movement (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2021). Ramnath in particular focuses on the international affiliations and entanglements of leading progressive writers in India and Pakistan.

7

US National Archives, College Park, MD (USNA), RG 59, A1 5518 Box 1, Files Related to Bandung I & II, Afro Asian Solidarity Committee and Sino Soviet Relations, 1951–71, “Afro Asian Writers Convene in Tokyo,” 28 March 1961.

8

For a brief introduction, see Kyle Haddad-Fonda, “Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences (1958-1979),” 2017 https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/afro-asian-writers-conferences-1958-1979/ (accessed 18 July 2022). See also Rossen Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and the Third Worlds (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2020), especially chapter 2.

9

USNA, RG 59, A1 5518 Box 1, Files Related to Bandung I & II, Afro Asian Solidarity Committee and Sino Soviet Relations, 1951–71, “Afro Asian Writers Convene in Tokyo,” 28 March 1961.

10

Ibid.

11

I have written about this elsewhere. See Ali Raza, “Dispatches from Havana: The Cold War, AfroAsian Solidarities, and Culture Wars in Pakistan,” Journal of World History 30 (2019), 233–46.

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12

“Manifesto of the Indian Writers Association, London,” Left Review, February 1936.

13

Ibid. See also the slightly revised manifesto at the AIPWA’s official launch in India at http://pwa75. sapfonline.org/gpage4.html (accessed 18 July 2022).

14

One the most notable forms in this respect was the use of the short story and the novella. For more on the progressive writers’ movement and their literary impact, see Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), Talat Ahmed, Literature and Politics in the Age of Nationalism The Progressive Writers’ Movement in South Asia, 1932-56 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009); Sarah Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan: Censorship, Literature, and Secular Nationalism in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

15

CPWPA, vol 1., 264.

16

Ibid., 266. For an extended argument, see also Akthar Hussain Raipuri, Adab aur Zindagi (Aurangabad: Anjuman-e-Tarriqi-e-Urdu, 1935).

17

CPWPA, vol 1., 266.

18

Literally, a “revolutionary poetry recital.”

19

While touring cultural and drama squads had been part of communist activism in the subcontinent, the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) was given formal shape in 1943 in Bombay, where the first Congress of the Communist Party, which had recently been unbanned, was also taking place. The IPTA played a key role in spreading the message of liberation through its art. It was also active during the Bengal famine. See, for example, Malini Biiaitacharya, The Indian People’s Theatre Association: A Preliminary Sketch of the Movement and the Organization, 1942-47 (Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1989).

20

CPWPA, vol 1., 266–8.

21

CPWPA, vol 1., “Central Committee Instructions,”, 31.

22

Ibid. 33.

23

CPWPA, vol 1., “A Note on the Cultural Front,” 252.

24

It was only in 1940, a mere seven years before independence, that the Muslim League first raised the demand for autonomous states for Indian Muslims, and it was only after the failure of the tripartite constitutional negotiations between the British, the Congress, and the League in mid-1946 that the creation of Pakistan looked anywhere near certain. See Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

25

Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), chapter 7.

26

See, for example, Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

27

One such short-lived association was the Anjuman-e-Azad Khiyal Musannifeen (Association for Free Spirited/Minded Writers), but it floundered soon after its creation. See CPWPA, vol. 4 (Lahore: Deputy Inspector General of Police, Criminal Investigation Department, 1967), 6. As I have pointed out, this was usual for a political landscape in which organizations were regularly proscribed or petered out.

28

See Kamran Asdar Ali, “Communists in a Muslim Land: Cultural Debates in Pakistan’s Early Years,” Modern Asian Studies 45 (2011), 501–34.

29

All three books were published in the late 1970s by Maktab-e-Daniyal in Karachi (Pakistan may Tehzeeb ka Irtiqa in 1977, Moosa say Marx tak in 1976, Marx aur Mashriq also likely in 1976). Given the wider circulation of reprints, it can be difficult to identify the original publication dates.

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30

One can trace these intellectual encounters all the way back to earliest days of pan-Islamism and communism. Maulvi Barkatullah, for example, called communism a “divine cry” and linked its ideas to Islamic ethics and principles. Similar arguments were made in relation to the Sikh faith. See for example, Raza, Revolutionary Pasts, chapters 2 and 6. In Pakistan, these connections were regularly made, too. “Islamic Socialism” became a rallying cry for left-leaning political parties, for example. Perhaps the most renowned exponent of this was Maulana Bhashani. See Layli Uddin, “Mao-Lana Bhashani: Maoism and the Unmaking of Pakistan,” Jamhoor, 25 May 2018 https://www. jamhoor.org/read/2018/5/25/mao-lana-bhashani-maoism-and-the-unmaking-of-pakistan (accessed 18 July 2022).

31

Syed Sibte Hasan, Moosa say Marx Tak (Karachi: Maktaba-e-Daniyal, 1977).

32

Syed Sibte Hasan, Pakistan mein Tehzeeb ka Irtiqa (Karachi: Maktaba-e-Daniyal: 1989 edn.).

33

The table of contents of Pakistan mein Tehzeeb ka Irtiqa alone gives an idea of these vast geographies and cultural worlds that fed into what became Pakistan.

34

For a comprehensive overview of this construction see, Ali Usman Qasmi, “A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan: Tracing the Origins of an Ideological Agenda,” Modern Asian Studies 53 (2019), 1066–105.

35

Foreword by Saeda Gazdar, in Hasan, Pakistan mein Tehzeeb ka Irtiqa, 1–6.

36

See, for instance, his collected works: M.H. Askari, Majmua: Muhammad Hasan Askari (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2008). See also Toor’s State of Islam, chapter 3, which helpfully outlines these debates in detail.

37

Nasim Hijazi, Khaak aur Khoon (1950).

38

CPWPA, vol. 2 (Lahore: Deputy Inspector General of Police, Criminal Investigation Department, 1952), 399–400.

39

The center still exists. For a recent report, see “Karachi’s Friendship House Working to Revive Russian Culture,” Dawn, 25 November 2019, https://www.dawn.com/news/1518697 (accessed 18 July 2022).

40

CPWPA, vol. 2, 402.

41

See, for example, Lisa E. Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009)

42

CPWPA, vol. 4, 44.

43

The term used for communist-leaning individuals who were not dyed-in-the-wool communists.

44

CPWPA, vol. 4, 48.

45

See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Publications, 2000); Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

46

International Association for Cultural Freedom Records, Chicago (CCF), Box 261, Folder 10, “Religion and Freedom,” 10.

47

On Bandung’s transnational impacts, see Christopher Lee, Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Akron, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), specifically part 1 and part 2.

48

CPWPA, vol. 4, 56.

49

CPWPA, vol. 4, “Aims and objectives” of the Pak Afro Asian Cultural Council and the Pakistan National Organization for Afro Asian People’s Solidarity Council, 56–60.

50

Ibid, 61.

51

Ibid, 61.

52

Ibid, 61.

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53

CPWPA, vol. 3 (Lahore: Deputy Inspector General of Police, Criminal Investigation Department, 1967), 1.

54

CPWPA, vol. 3, 3.

55

CPWPA, vol. 4, 12.

56

Ibid., 16.

57

Ibid., 14.

58

Ibid., 12.

CHAPTER 12

Radio’s Internationalism: A View from Modern Afghanistan Mejgan Massoumi

Abstract This chapter brings attention to the history of radio programming in Afghanistan, demonstrating how radio was the product of international collaboration. The first part provides a historical journey through the country’s modern experiences of broadcasting, highlighting transnational collaborations in the 1940s that cemented relationships with international collaborators who helped build the national infrastructure for radio in the 1960s. It is between these decades that the development of global communication technology proliferated another avenue of Afghanistan’s internationalism with(in) South Asia. The second part of this chapter deliberates on how radio technology allowed for expressions of social and cultural resistance and encouraged processes of radical deliberation through the example of Aḥmad Ẓāhir, an exemplar of Afghan musical life to-date.

Key words: radio, resistance, sonic internationalism, Afghanistan, music

The 1960s and early 1970s were defined by a series of world historical events including decolonization, the rise of student protest movements, cultural revolutions, and new ideologies and modes of identity formation. These events were affected by and produced a shift in consciousness.1 For Afghans, these decades not only signaled their engagement with new forms of consumption in technology, recreation, and entertainment that resembled cosmopolitan cultural forms in other parts of the world, but also marked a time of great social and political change. 2 The establishment of a constitutional monarchy in 1964 gave way to civil rights, including freedom of speech, directly impacting radio, music production, and other forms of art. A coup in 1973 led to a republic that inaugurated formal cultural institutions for film, theatre, and performing arts. By 1979, experiments with communism fused radio with television through the state-sponsored media corporation, Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA), and further popularized regional mahalī (local and folk) music. World historical events coincided with these domestic affairs, and Afghans came to see themselves at the center of ideological struggles that spanned

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the globe. The Cold War, the rise of student protest movements, decolonization and anti-imperialism, and new modes of identity formation inspired revolutions from Kabul to Herat, from Panjshir to Bamiyan, and from Kandahar to Balkh. Radio broadcast the pulse of these events, revealing the talents of a people who responded to these “accidents of history” through their engagement with music, poetry, and literature. Inspired by dynamic flows of people and ideas through Afghanistan and the rich history of its capital city, Kabul, as an important site of cultural production and intercultural exchange, this chapter brings attention to the history of the radio as a medium that connected Afghans to a wider international network in the latter half of the twentieth century. Contributing to recent historical studies of Afghanistan that have emphasized the importance of long-distance trade and commercial activity to the dynamics of life within the country, it highlights ways in which Afghan popular culture functioned as a site where significant patterns of mobility, regional exchange, and connectivity intersected.3 This chapter elucidates the channels of engagement between Afghan people and the world through the technology of wireless broadcasting. In terms of scale, a focus on Afghanistan questions the spatial and temporal logics undergirding dominant accounts of South Asia, particularly its India-centric nature. While there has been pressure for academic works on Afghanistan to be situated in one of three regions or area studies fields – namely, Central Asia, South Asia, or the Middle East – the irony is that Afghanistan is rarely granted fully fledged membership in any of the three.4 The basic tendency has been to exclude or partially include Afghanistan in physical maps of these regions based on the political profits gained by doing so. Denying Afghanistan’s importance as the geographical “heart of Asia” has resulted in this cartographic violence and the marginalization of Afghans to the periphery of regional histories, while presuming the impaired nature of their country. While area studies often continues to demarcate the study of Afghanistan according to the established borders of professional associations or geographic and linguistic expertise, the evidence presented in this chapter illuminates a deeper past of cultural exchanges and circulations of sounds, people, and information across vast distances over time.5 It explores how such networks have connected Afghanistan to multiple geographic locales in the region, and particularly to South Asia. Transgressing divides, this chapter approaches modern Afghanistan’s cultural heritage from a multiregional perspective by examining the contributions of a diverse cast of performers in Kabul – Indians, Iranians, Russians, Tajiks, Germans, Americans, but most of all, Afghans – who contributed to transforming the sonic and social environment of the country. The transnational and international dimensions at the center of this work emerge from the following questions: What role did international networks play in establishing radio in Afghanistan? How

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did Afghans connect to international radio broadcasts? Given some of the subversive sounds broadcast on radio, how did musicians and producers circumvent censors? What were some of the tensions in the new sounds radio cultivated and why? This chapter argues that radio provided a platform in which Afghans showcased their cosmopolitan sensibilities and actively engaged in global currents, including the changing social and political dynamics within the country during the formidable decades of the 1960s and 1970s. The first part of this chapter provides a historical journey through the country’s modern experiences of broadcasting, highlighting transnational collaborations in the 1940s that cemented relationships with international collaborators who helped build the national infrastructure for radio in Afghanistan in the 1960s. It is between these decades that the development of global communication technology offered another avenue of Afghanistan’s internationalism with(in) South Asia. The second part of this chapter deliberates on how radio technology allowed for expressions of social and cultural resistance and encouraged processes of radical deliberation through the example of Aḥmad Ẓāhir, an exemplar of Afghan musical life to-date. Music played a significant role in showcasing Afghan forms of dissent. As the shifting landscapes of revolution and counterrevolution continued to impact the country throughout the 1960s and 1970s, these expressions served as important frameworks for understanding how Afghans experienced and understood themselves within their larger social and cultural milieu. In short, this chapter hopes to derive a set of questions that will lead to more productive and discerning approaches for producing knowledge about Afghanistan’s internationalism and the wireless technology that connected Afghans to the world – and the world to Afghanistan.

The 1940s: Regulating Radio’s Reach As communication technologies like the radio became a staple of twentieth-century commerce and industrialization, the Afghan state’s ability to operate this technology became critical for managing the nation and demonstrating its fitness as a modern state. To this end, it began purchasing radio technology almost immediately after its global commodification in the 1920s. After winning diplomatic independence from Britain in the victory of the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, Afghan officials were deeply invested in proving they were worthy of sitting at the international policy table. Incorporating the latest global communication technology would bolster Afghan desires to appear competitive on an international scale. However, it was not until after WWII that radio developed at a more accelerated pace.

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From the time a radio transmitter was first introduced, the state relied on international support to build broadcasting infrastructure. This began with sending Afghans abroad to gain technical knowledge required to operate radio.6 In 1926, King Amānūllah Khān (r. 1919-1929), the royal architect of Afghan modernism, sent Engineer ‘Atāūllāh Khān to Germany to receive the necessary training to establish and install the radio in Afghanistan. After a year of dedicated learning, he returned to Kabul along with German technicians and two radio transmitters. By March 1940, Afghanistan was prepared to officially inaugurate Radio Kabul’s first broadcasts under the supervision of Khān.7 Kabul broadcast four and a half hours of programming a day, with an additional hour on Fridays.8 During this early phase of radio broadcasting, programs in Dari and Pashto were complemented by programs in Hindi, signaling the state’s accommodation of its growing Indian diaspora community. This was also a response to external broadcasts in Pashto airing from All India Radio (AIR). The service, which began in 1939, was intended to counter radio propaganda from Germany and Soviet Russia that were directed at Afghanistan, Iran, and Arab countries.9 Radio stations including Radio Berlin and Voice of Free Arabism adapted Nazi propaganda to the circumstances of the Middle East and the broader Muslim world.10 This illustrates the immediate impact that the Second World War had on foreign broadcasts, particularly for encouraging nationalist provocations and antidemocratic agendas. For example, broadcasting ideas about Aryan racial superiority and purity that were central to Nazi ideology echoed the civilizational theory advanced by Afghan intellectuals in the previous decade that connected Pashtuns to a greater Aryan past.11 On the other hand, anti-Nazi rhetoric appealed to some segments of the population, particularly those who celebrated Afghan independence from the British. In short, despite the fact that external radio broadcasts may have had a limited audience in Afghanistan (given that the number of radio sets remained modest), using vernacular languages to relay information during moments of crisis was a sure way to gain listeners and supporters. AIR’s external broadcasts also had another goal: to establish contacts with radio organizations abroad and exchange recordings for the purposes of cultural interchange, as well as catering to a region that spoke a host of different languages. In the early 1940s, India offered only one main service which was broadcast in twenty-four different languages and 146 dialects.12 This expansive reach served as a model for Radio Kabul. With the addition of Hindi programming, Radio Kabul hoped to further diversify its international broadcasts in the future, and to cater to more of Afghanistan’s local languages beyond Dari and Pashto (a goal that was temporarily realized in the 1970s). Until it acquired the technology to expand broadcasting, the radio station invested in hiring Afghans that could also diversify programing and draw in more listeners. A lasting example was Ustād ʿAbdul Ghafūr Brishnā.

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A significant figure in the early days of Radio Kabul, Ustād ʿAbdul Ghafūr Brishnā (1907-74), was one of several Afghan students sent by Amānullāh in 1921 to gain technical and scientific expertise to Germany, where he studied painting, lithography, and typography.13 In addition to being a multi-talented artist and painter, he was a composer, singer, and from 1943-53 served as the music director, and later, general director, of Radio Kabul.14 He also composed dramas and plays for radio broadcasts and theater. From 1940-53, he wrote more than 20 plays, the most popular of which was the satire and comedy, Lālā Malang (Uncle Malang).15 He also gained fame in India as a musician and composer. Most notably, Brishnā’s composition for the Afghan love song, Mūdat-i shud ki tūrā man nadīdum sar-i rāh (It has been some time since I last saw you), was adapted in the 1965 Indian film, Waqt (Time).16 Brishnā was trained in the practical and theoretical principles of Hindustani music and attuned to the melodies and musical compositions that would appeal to a broader Indian audience. Moreover, having traveled far and wide between Germany, India, and beyond, he gained new intellectual outlooks that informed his changing worldview. This made him critical of his society, using his art forms as the conduit to creatively express himself, even under the conditions of censorship and authoritarianism. Taking stock of Brishnā’s accomplishments in the arts, and particularly his work at Radio Kabul, indicates how he toed the line between his obligations as a civil servant and his own role as an artist in the public sphere. He is credited for having introduced Afghan women singers on radio, including Mīrmin Parwīn in 1951, and composed songs on their behalf.17 His efforts supporting the aural and physical visibility of women on radio proved controversial, especially as Prime Minister Hāshim Khān’s government wanted to pull away from reforms that drew any resemblance to Amānullāh, particularly those concerning women’s emancipation. However, Brishnā continued to push at the edges, finding ways to implicitly and cleverly assert his opinions. His satirical plays and short stories, printed in early editions of Zwandūn and Aryānā magazines, maintained critiques of political and social issues through the characters of Kākā (Uncle) Awrang and Kākā Badruh, as well as Ajab Khān and Rajab Khān, who represented different social classes.18 Even while an underground literature movement brewing as early as 1930 found relatively wide readership in Kabul, the government maintained strict and harsh censorship, which extended into usage and ownership of radio. Strict control over who owned a set, how it could be used, and where it could be broadcast exposed some of the anxieties that the ruling elite had about the technology. External broadcasts like Radio Berlin and AIR during WWII alerted Afghan elites about how radio could be used by governments to advance or counter wartime propaganda, but this also revealed the vulnerability of the technology if put in the hands of subversives or counter-elites. The institutionalized legal regulation of radio sets reflected the state’s paranoia about potential aurally transmitted dissent.

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In 1945, the state published the Uṣūlnāma, or the Legal Statute of the radio. The document highlighted policies regarding the purchase, exchange, trade, selling, and usage of the radio. To ensure the broad dissemination of the Uṣūlnāma, it was published in at least twenty-seven different articles, in both Dari and Pashto, by the Ministry of the Post and Telegram. The document contained regulations spanning across five sections and several articles detailing stipulations on the use and physical dissemination of the technology.19 How effective the Uṣūlnāma may have been to suppress dissident movements is questionable. In 1947, just two years after the legal statute was broadly distributed, the demand for the creation of Pashtunistan, a new, autonomous entity to be carved out of Pakistan, involved the efforts of Mīrzāʿalī Khān Wazīr, commonly known as the Faqir of Ipi, a Pashtun tribal leader. His cause attracted some Afghans, who were called on to resist the expansionist designs of Pakistan and to defend their Pashtun brethren. Toward this end, the Faqir mobilized Afghans to use the resources of Radio Kabul and the Afghan press department to further their campaign.20 What is important to note here is radio’s role in helping to spread an anti-nationalist movement despite the fact that legally, this was against the law. Here, the Afghan state bent its own rules regarding the use of radio in service of its own political agenda. On one hand, the state discouraged and even suppressed civil society debates by restricting the usage of mass media. On the other hand, mobilizing their citizens for the Pashtunistan cause served to strengthen their populist credentials. Taking into consideration the anomalies inherent in state policies also revealed the disjunctures and fissures of their nationalist discourse. Once again, reaching a sense of a unified “civil society” was, in theory, desired but, in practice, fractured. In addition, the Uṣūlnāma outlined specific details on the tax associated with owning a radio set. While there are no comprehensive figures on the income generated by radio, the required tax indicates that the technology was a source of some revenue for the state. In the third section, article ten mandated that businesses, including hotels, shops, and cafes, that broadcast the radio must pay a monthly fee of five Afghānis, and those who owned radios in the provinces were required to pay a monthly fee of fifty half-Afghānis. By 1948, Afghans owned around 8,000 radios, eight times as many as in 1930.21 While this represented just a small fraction of the royal treasury’s revenue, it nonetheless made radio ownership a valuable source of income for the Afghan kingdom. Taken together, the laws written into the Uṣūlnāma intended for the close monitoring and policing of radio within a larger political stage where fear of insurrectionary movements such as Kalakānī’s 1929 rebellion still loomed large. The state was heavily interested in minimizing the risk of secession in order to maintain its legitimacy over the Afghan polity. In a parallel discussion about cultural literary production in Afghanistan, the literary scholar Wali Ahmadi notes how under

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Musāhibān rule intellectuals who increasingly challenged and resisted the ideological dominance of the state were met with censorship, intimidation, imprisonment, torture, and in some cases, the killing of dissident poets and writers.22 Given this suppression of cultural production – of which radio was a part – reveals how the state aimed to appropriate modernity with material progress and economic development but placed little emphasis on the viable creation of a “civil society.” While the Uṣūlnāma was explicitly about regulation of mass media, it implicitly hinted at the broader issue of the capability and authority of the modern Afghan state. As the Afghan ruling elite came to treat mass communications as a type of state property, the technology evolved into a site in which the state’s authority could either be legitimated or questioned. As a result, technical expertise and discipline came to be markers of a new type of Afghan state authority, one in which the ability to rule was tied to managing the modern state and its technologies. Doing so required international collaborators equipped with the expertise to help the Afghan nation progress forward.

The 1960s: Afghan Nationalism and Radio’s Internationalism In the 1960s and 1970s, as radio broadcasting became a mass phenomenon worldwide, Afghans, too, were tuning into a national broadcasting station with newly equipped transmitters imported from Germany that extended the reach of radio to both rural and urban populations. This coincided with worldwide developments in radio across the Global North and Global South that expanded efforts to reach larger segments of the human population. A substantial portion of that reach can be attributed to transnational broadcasters including the BBC, the Voice of America, Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, the Voice of the Arabs, Radio Prague, and All India Radio, among others. For many people during this time, radio offered a new, everyday, supra-national experience. To echo Kristen Roth-Ey, in her discussion of Radio Moscow’s broadcasting during the Cold War, “The airwaves constituted a new transnational space for politicking and preaching, socializing and education, for sharing and promoting cultural experience.”23 Certainly, optimism about mass media ran high among modernization school thinkers in Afghanistan, including with Prime Minister Muhammad Yūsuf (r. 1963-1965) who inaugurated the opening of the new studios of Radio Afghanistan on 26 August 1964, stating: the dissemination of ideas, news, and other literary and scientific work through waves of radio is one of the greatest and most useful invention[s] of our time. This fruitful invention…has expanded in an unprecedented manner the process of public enlightenment which in the past had been confined only to school…24

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Broadcasting, he thought, had the capacity to push the population into the modern world and drive socioeconomic development. Destined to spur human development by extending community and advancing the nationalist dreams of the Afghan ruling elite, radio encompassed a communitarian vision to the technology’s enthusiasts in the twentieth century. Continuing his remarks, Prime Minister Yūsuf stated, “The increasing interest taken by people in making use of this medium of communication is a clear sign of people’s awakening…” – an “awakening” that needed to involve the majority of Afghanistan’s population, who lived outside of Kabul. The view from the top was that nationalism could not extend its ideological appeal beyond Kabul until the majority of the population was integrated into the collective life of society. As an extension of the state’s (vocal) authority, radio would help bridge this gap. As the intimate linkage between modernization, nationalism, and the institution of the monarchy penetrated intellectual circles and the educated elite of Kabul, the state wanted to convince the rest of the nation that this holy trinity would help Afghanistan move into the future. In practice, even the small, educated class in Kabul was, itself, deeply divided along ethnic lines. Pashtuns often claimed to represent the entire population and non-Pashtuns resented the virtual monopoly of power of the Pashtun elite.25 These debates spilled over into discussions of music planned for broadcasting on the national station. While cultural cohesion was a goal of the national radio station, it also proved to be a challenge. Shortly after Prime Minister Yūsuf’s inauguration of Radio Afghanistan, an editorial published in the national newspaper, Anīs, raised concerns over the establishment of the new recording studios. It read, “In our opinion, there is a wide gap in this connection and that is the lack of local orchestras to represent arts and songs of different parts of the country … in each province local orchestras can be created with the help of artists and art-loving people in a short period of time.”26 While ethnomusicologists describe the existence of musical ensembles and orchestras at the radio station as early as the 1940s – one with traditional Afghan and Indian instruments, a folk music band, and a western reed and brass band – these ensembles, they contend, often reflected the tastes of the urban elite.27 Over time, they grew into additional branches, as part of an effort to incorporate more diverse folk songs into radio’s repertoire, and by the late 1960s, as the station expanded, so did access to a wider network of regional musicians.28 Nonetheless, opinions and arguments about the content of radio continued in other newspapers that debated the merits and content of national broadcasting. “Broadcasting Radio Afghanistan” was the title of an editorial in Iṣlah newspaper published two days after the radio’s inaugural ceremony. In it, the writer expressed concern over the quality of radio programs and the need to recruit trained professionals to work for the station: “The radio needs to recruit qualified professionals

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from the universities to produce programs and create content that will be enjoyable for its listeners.”29 When the Afghan government launched the state’s first Five-Year Development Plan (1956-61), a chief goal was the expansion of university education and training Afghans in specialized fields with mostly European assistance. Many of the graduates of the Journalism Department from the country’s premiere institution of higher education, Kabul University, would go on to serve as producers, announcers, and content creators for Radio Afghanistan. The Five-Year Development Plan also contained provisions for the purchase and installation of new equipment in the new studios of Radio Afghanistan located in ʿAnṣarī Wat, on the outskirts of Kabul.30 The German Siemens Company introduced transmitters to produce long-range soundwaves that could reach further across the provinces. This development was key in the fundamental transformation of the rural landscape across the provinces. With radio cables came loudspeaker systems installed in main squares. They exposed many rural populations to broadcasting sounds for the first time. Through radio, the government was now positioned to offer a conception of national identification beyond the capital and in villages and towns throughout the country. The financial and practical negotiations that took place to expand radio across the nation reflect another global dimension to the story of the formation of the modern Afghan state and its mass communications system. To realize their vision for a unified Afghan nation through broadcast sound, Afghan elites required external logistical and financial support. As early as March 1963, West Germans and Afghans began negotiations for the installation of radio transmitters and their financing. A delegation from the Anstalt Credit Bank of the Federal Republic of Germany met with engineer ʿAbdul Karīm Atāyī, the Chief of radio’s Technical Department, to discuss the transmitters and the facilities of the radio station within the framework of Afghanistan’s Second Five Year Development Plan.31 By October 1963, Atāyī and Dr. Muhammad Amān, Vice-President of Dā Afghānistān Bānk, traveled to Frankfurt, Germany, to sign the credit agreement for projects concerning the development of radio and telephone communications. Showcasing the acquisition of “kilowatts” was a significant marker of the technical and scientific capacity of the Afghan nation. When the governments of France and the United States expanded their radio systems, it was quantifiable “kilowatts” that stressed technical power and superiority.32 By these standards, government documents, newspapers, journals, and magazines in Afghanistan highlighted the state’s acquisition of “kilowatts” as part of a larger projection of its technical strength. That this strength was made possible by international and foreign collaborators bolstered the “cosmopolitan” image the state desired. In 1964, when the Ministry of Information and Culture changed the radio’s name from Radio Kabul to Radio Afghanistan, the media celebrated the construction of seven

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recording studios, two concert studios, and a large auditorium that constituted the new broadcasting studios.33 German and American investors and advisors helped build the radio station and provided training to bolster programmatic and technical expertise.34 Another aspect of the new national broadcasting system that was highlighted in the press was long-range radio transmissions that reached across the world. Afghan elites were eager to showcase their recently purchased foreign transmission equipment that allowed Afghan radio programs to be broadcast in other countries, particularly those with sizable diasporas. By 1966, Radio Afghanistan could be broadcast to Europe, North America, North Africa, Southeast Asia, Pakistan, India, Iran, and the Soviet Union.35 An article in Aryana magazine reported that “Radio Afghanistan has now many listeners and fans in 35 countries of Asia, Europe, North and Latin America, Australia and some African countries.”36 For the visionaries of the Afghan state, this was a triumph of multiple proportions. Technological power, abundance, and high-speed execution of radio signals demonstrated the state’s professional competence and efficiency. First, radio programming focused on education. This served as a main priority for state-led modernization programs, which envisioned radio as the vehicle to engineer social change, while accommodating the needs of a largely agrarian and conservative Muslim society. The promise of radio to transmit knowledge meant that the population would acquire new skills, including the advancement of farming and agricultural techniques. A rural agricultural program was broadcast for fifty minutes daily and covered problems of harvesting, family matters, and health education. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) assisted the Afghans with the establishment of curriculum and support for agricultural programs.37 While proposals for educational broadcasting were presented to the Afghans as early as 1964, by 1976, UNESCO managed to improve rural radio services with the assistance of audio cassette technology. Audio cassettes provided recordings of programs intended to meet the diverse needs of agriculture in the country as well as the climatic and seasonal difficulties caused by changes in altitude. Radio Afghanistan administrators were trained in agricultural radio production and cassette technology operation, which significantly improved the “Village, Home and Agriculture” radio program.38 Radio Afghanistan broadcasted a variety of educational programs in various languages. They included courses in English, French, German, Russian, Pashto, and Urdu which were aired continuously throughout the 1960s and 1970s, casting bilingualism as a vital survival skill in a twentieth-century world. With the growing influence of both the Soviet Union and America in Afghanistan, acquiring both the English and Russian languages assisted Afghans in building stronger bonds with their Cold War benefactors. Learning French and German was not only part of a

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broader effort to institutionalize European educational models in Afghanistan but also to showcase that Afghans were cosmopolitan, efficient, and skilled at acquiring the languages of international relations and diplomacy. Given the sustained technical assistance the Germans provided to establish radio in Afghanistan, the benefit of learning German would particularly strengthen the skill and ability of Radio Afghanistan’s technocrats. Urdu, and Hindi slowly developed into the preferred second language of both Dari and Pashto speakers. Moreover, the desire to learn and engage with Urdu and Hindi was reinforced through cinema. Film scores were hugely sought after by listeners of AIR in Afghanistan. The Hindi film industry, or Bollywood, was quite popular amongst Kabul’s growing elite, and movie theatres featured the latest Bollywood blockbusters and introduced Indian film stars to the Afghan populace. Music scores from Hindi films were reinterpreted by Afghan artists, including Aḥmad Ẓāhir, who helped popularize many Bollywood songs by reinterpreting and singing them on Afghan radio. In 1975, Afghanistan was the setting for the Bollywood hit, Dharmatma (God Man), the first to be filmed in the country, and an attempt to localize the popular Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 American-made crime film, The Godfather. The main character, Ranbir, is cast by Feroz Khan, who plays the son of a gangster who is masked as a wealthy and influential businessman. Ranbir is at odds with his father’s values, and leaves for Afghanistan to help manage his uncle’s businesses. There he meets a nomadic Afghan girl, Reshma, who is cast by Hema Malini. The conflict between father and son, alongside a love story between Reshma and Ranbir, are played out against a beautiful backdrop that includes the gorgeous landscape of Bamīyān, Afghanistan. The song-sequences capture the Band-ī-Amīr National Park, Shahr-i-Zahāk, and the famous Buddhist statues of Bamīyān, which have since been destroyed by the Taliban. Hema Malini and Feroz Khan achieved incredible star status in Afghanistan after the making of this film, featuring on the covers of local magazines and newspapers and mingling with Afghan socialites. In an interview published in 1973 in Zwandūn, Afghan readers were introduced to Feroz Khan and learned about his family, his filmography, and even his hobbies, including swimming, horseback riding, skiing, hunting, and playing bridge – indeed the variety of pastimes only an elite movie star can enjoy. Musical and other influences, including fashion and social habits, thus circulated and germinated across borders, finding fertile ground, particularly amongst the growing urban elite in Kabul. Afghan radio producers, meanwhile, remained invested in scaling up the national service and gaining legitimacy among its listeners. In this vein, programs focused on music played a key role in unexpected ways. Musical programs were among the most popular for listeners, not the least of which had to do with the type of music being forged on airwaves – one that mixed local and global sounds and, indeed, created a revolution.

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Soundwaves of Dissent Born on 14 June 1946 in Kabul, Aḥmad Ẓāhir established himself as a singer in the 1960s. His popularity swelled over this decade and the next, as he took advantage of the burgeoning radio and recording industries and developed a broad repertory of romantic, self-reflective, and politically charged songs. The son of a court doctor, minister of health, and influential politician, valuable social connections enhanced his artistic success. He forged long-lasting relationships with cultural leaders, including musicians, composers, and poets across the region and the world. He socialized among a diverse spectrum of people from elites to everyday Afghans and was extremely charitable to the poor. Distinguished musically by his vocal stamina and new compositions, he sustained his career by producing an immense corpus of songs totaling more than twenty albums, surpassing what many singers could produce in a lifetime. Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s rise to fame also coincided with major political transformations, to which his archive of sound is indispensable for the historian. As many of Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s contemporaries contend, his music serves as the soundtrack to the formidable events of his life and to Afghanistan’s history through the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. A brief overview of his sonic interventions discussed in this chapter are as follows: When Aḥmad Ẓāhir began his musical career while he was still in high school, a constitutional monarchy formed under King Zāhir Shāh in 1964, giving way to civil liberties, including freedom of speech, which impacted the poetry, lyrics, and compositions he created and chose for his ballads. With President Dāūd Khān’s coup in 1973, Aḥmad Ẓāhir recorded songs that celebrated the change in guard and the establishment of the Afghan republic. As the political climate of the years between 1973 and 1978 became increasingly autocratic, once again, Aḥmad Ẓāhir took to the airwaves to sing of society’s social ills, including the famine of 1977 and the general poverty of the nation. When Dāūd Khān and his family were brutally murdered inside the Presidential Palace and another regime change inaugurated the arrival of communism in Afghanistan in 1978, Aḥmad Ẓāhir took to music as his outlet, singing songs of liberation and critiquing hegemonic power. The increasingly political tone of his songs received push-back by state censors, who did not allow for their broadcast on radio. However, these songs were circulated through cassettes and underground channels across Afghanistan and the broader region. Ẓāhir’s musical repertoire is also illustrative of his cosmopolitan sensibilities, fusing together new cultural patterns with indigenous ones, often creating covers from popular music that existed elsewhere. For example, his hit songs that could be heard on the radio included Tanha Shoudam Tanha (“I have become alone”), which is often compared to Bimbo Jet’s El Bimbo. Another song, Dilbara Agar Tu Yaareh

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Man Bashy (“My beloved, if you become my lover”), is compared to La Paloma, a popular Spanish song that has been reinterpreted in diverse cultures over the last 140 years. Ẓāhir also sang several of Elvis Presley’s songs, including It’s Now or Never in English. He sang many Hindi film hits, including Chaal Meri Saathi (“Come by Beloved/Companion”) from the film Haathi Meri Saathi and May shair to nahi (“I am not a Poet”) from the film Bobby, just to name a few. In addition to exploring the cross-cultural and transnational connections that Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s song choices reflect, what this also conveys is risk and experimentation. What kind of sound results from this juxtaposition of different musical genres over an Afghan one, and what does the end-product tell us about the types of things Afghans enjoyed listening to? Indeed, Aḥmad Ẓāhir was a critical point of linkage for a new generation of Afghans who were hopeful about the freedom and openness that characterized this time amongst urban populations. This included the expression of political dissent, which many of his songs conveyed. Accordingly, the Afghan soundscape of the 1960s and 1970s became a hub for diverse cultural and socio-political expressions which derived their vibrancy and strength from their encounters with international counterparts. As a symbol of the counterculture of the 1960s, Aḥmad Ẓāhir was to Afghanistan and its encompassing regions what John Lennon was to youth movements in Europe and America during the Vietnam War. The promises of global integration, equality, prosperity, and anti-war sentiments spread throughout Afghanistan and especially in Kabul. Faridullah Bezhan details how Kabul University became a political hotbed which led the institution to become a center of Afghanistan’s political struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. 39 Indeed, the many scales of internationalist politics in this era show how Afghanistan was profoundly tied to the global politics of not just the Cold War (a story that is well rehearsed in the historiography on Afghanistan) but also the politics of solidarity throughout the Global South.40 In Kabul in May 1978, only weeks after a coup that brought a Soviet-aligned government to power in Afghanistan, Aḥmad Ẓāhir performed in a concert in one of the city’s main movie theaters, Dā Mīrmanu Tulāna. At the time, Ẓāhir’s relations with the new government were hostile, mainly due to years of tension and his refusal to publicly support the new regime. His songs were increasingly censored from Radio Afghanistan, particularly as they began to take on a political undertone. He had already been the victim of a smear campaign launched by the Soviets, who accused him of murdering his second wife, Khālida.41 This confluence of events inspired a marked shift in Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s lyrical focus. He became more political and partisan in his song choices and his live performances became more provocative. A concert attendee recalls, “As hundreds of spectators watched, the singer with the golden voice and unique humble disposition came out onto the

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stage alone and took the microphone to his hand and his eternal, magical voice resonated through the entire hall, singing:”42 Life will eventually end, there is no use for submission. If submission is mandatory, there is no life. If pearl raindrops were to come down on you in humiliation Go and tell the heavens: go, there is no use for such downpour If the pressure from the enemies deluges you, do not despair remain a man/firm, oh you tired soul, there is no shame. Life is a human being’s freedom and independence Fight for freedom, for submission is not an option.43

The song lyrics of Zindagī ākhir sar āyad belong to the renowned Iranian poet, Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī (1887-1957), who spent much of his life in exile in the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic.44 Originally written in 1930, the chain of transmission by which Lāhūtī’s ghazal passed through the Persianate world is a testament to the timelessness of the prose. Samuel Hodgkin notes that Zindagī ākhir sar āyad was formally published in 1942 as a song coinciding with the Second World War, which permitted Soviet publishers and critics to read it as a rejection of fascism. As Soviet cultural influence accelerated in Afghanistan over the course of the 1970s, Lāhūtī’s works were sold in Kabul bookstores and were recited over the airwaves on Persian-language Radio Moscow. Given the spread and circulation of his prose, it is no coincidence that well before the December 1979 Soviet invasion, Ẓāhir was singing Lāhūtī’s love ghazals over the airwaves and in his concerts. Yet it is when Ẓāhir’s songs took on an increasingly political tone in the final years of his life that he would draw from Lāhūtī’s more revolutionary prose, including this one.45 At a time when a strict code of conduct permeated from the established Afghan political authority, the lyrics and feelings associated with this song, and Ẓāhir’s performance of it, allowed for political and cultural dissent through music. Using the poetry of a communist sympathizer (and poet laureate) allowed Ẓāhir to initially pass through the radio censors. It was through the usage of the state’s official register – in this case, the radio – that the creation of an alternative space was born where dissent became possible in a discrete yet clever way. In the performance of this song, then, Ẓāhir traversed the space between what James C. Scott has termed the “public transcript” (authorized by the dominant power) and the “hidden transcript” (the critique of power spoken behind its back), creating new meanings through this subtle yet effective subversive act of musical defiance.46 Like all social constructs, transcripts are multiple, and their forms and content depend on the given context. In this discussion, the “public transcript” is used to invoke what is permitted by the state, while the “hidden transcript” signifies what is not officially

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approved or what is disapproved. The enforcement of censorship was one way the Afghan state exercised its official authoritative culture. The disciplinary nature of this performativity reinforced the state’s paternalistic relationship to its subjects. It did so by intruding into a very personal sphere via monitoring lyrics and sounds that evoke feelings and various emotions. In the realm of cultural production and music, Ẓāhir, like other Afghan musicians, had to submit to official regulations against his beliefs and choices to obtain clearance for his lyrics and permits for his performances. Yet his performance could nevertheless become imbued with alternative meanings. A 1978 concert attendee concludes her recollections with her thoughts on the significance of the poem. She imagined that Lāhūtī produced his ghazal “in loathing for the suffocation and dependence that he, too, had experienced under similar conditions of Soviet occupation and subjugation in a country like Afghanistan, in Tajikistan.”47 Whether or not Lāhūtī’s intentions were to be subversive in his prose is inconsequential. The point is that the poem’s ability to traverse across space and time and embody collective experiences of oppression gave new, enduring power to its declaration of defiance. The poem’s lives are a testament to the continued durability and portability of traditional Persianate prose which can be repurposed for new occasions, new ideologies, and new revolutions.48 Moreover, the very nature of poetry-turned-music as an artistic medium was also a main contributing factor to its flexible and varied use by cultural producers. Musical mediations provided a wider space for expression than even verbal discourse or behavior. Music had the power to express political and social sentiments at a much lower risk than explicit verbal communication. While poetry and song can be analyzed for the weight of their content, their significance lies in their reception as political acts. Indeed, the reception of radio extended well beyond the determining function of the technology to address transformations that occurred in listener perceptions of the sounds that were broadcast and altered the soundscape.49 The concert space was one of the few events that brought together a public and allowed for the spontaneity of movement and physical action. Gatherings around music are also a critical and crucial window into Afghanistan’s (and the Persian-speaking world’s) long-standing cultural engagement with the embodied sense of sound, rooted in its cultivation of poetry as the master sonic form. Poetry, then, finds its strongest form of mass mediation through music, which serves as the vessel to magnify its social reach and impact. While Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s entrance on the national stage as a solo artist in the late 1960s enthralled a wide array of observers, his exit nearly two decades later is remembered as a national tragedy. In 1979, Aḥmad Ẓāhir died in what is officially reported as a car accident, although his father – a doctor – confirmed a bullet was shot in the back of his head.50 His death fueled a relentlessly impassioned

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and contentious debate that has persisted, unabated and unresolved, regarding not only his untimely passing but his legacy and contribution to modern Afghan music.51 Not only did the celebrity of Aḥmad Ẓāhir showcase the ways in which radio exposed the public to new sounds within the repertoire of Afghan popular music, but as described here, his unconventional sounds became emblematic of internal Afghan deliberations about various social and cultural issues, brought on by society’s changing attitudes towards a variety of social and political events. Moreover, as an undeniable figure of modern Afghan music, he embodied the cosmopolitan sensibilities of urban Kabulis by fusing together new cultural patterns with indigenous ones, often creating covers from popular music that existed elsewhere. As a critical point of linkage for a new generation of Afghans who were hopeful about the freedom and openness that characterized the 1960s and 1970s, Aḥmad Ẓāhir helped to build and sustain a new community of discerning listeners in Afghanistan and beyond.

Conclusion One might not immediately imagine Afghanistan as a cosmopolitan locus of cultural and economic interchanges stitching together American, Central Asian, English, German, Middle Eastern, Russian, and South Asian influences. But the fact that the radio enabled transnational exchanges and connections through the global circulation of sound and the ability of a pop-culture musical icon to refashion global sounds into an Afghan one, and to use music as a platform to critique the state and society, suggests that Afghans were certainly not isolated. This paper has shown that the radio and its programming served as an important political, societal, and ideational space, and Afghans, producers and consumers alike, imbued it with great significance. The radio connected Afghans to a wider transnational network in the latter half of the twentieth century and provided a space in which Afghans showcased their cosmopolitan sensibilities and actively engaged in global currents as well as the changing social and political dynamics within the country throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Kabul and its residents were not only receivers of globalization, modern technology, media, consumer culture, or government repression. They also acted in contradictory ways – articulating forms of subjectivity and agency – and moved within, through, and against state institutions. Indeed, Afghan identities have been, and are, contingent, internally contested, fragmented, and capable of multiple possibilities. In this vein, this study of Radio Afghanistan offers a fresh standpoint from which to engage and appreciate Afghan identities, classes of people, daily interests in music and the arts, and cosmopolitan sensibilities.

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As a mode of social relation in twentieth-century Afghanistan, the radio articulated new senses of Afghan personhood (identity) that were inextricable from global dialogues. The ways in which Afghans appropriated and imbued the radio with local meanings and global inspirations reflected a way of being in the world that was not only cognizant of larger trends but which made them relevant to the Afghan social environment. In twentieth-century Afghanistan, the adoption and appropriation of the radio was not reducible to simple coercion or Western cultural imperialism. Afghans had their own particular interests in global symbols, and they used modern technologies of communication and sound strategically for specific ends – as a tool to educate, inform, and entertain the masses. Academic analyses of globalization too often overlook the logic of such actions.52 If the goal is to dismantle the concepts of progress, development, and cosmopolitanism that are fundamental to Western definitions of essential difference, we should be careful not to gloss over the cultural and temporal implications of these terms particularly because of the modernizing impulse to “liberate” others from their traditions: practices that were often adaptations to a changing world.53 The Afghan appropriation of radio highlights matters that have remained at the center of people’s negotiations about intimacy, love, politics, religion, and identity, but also the story of the evolution of Afghanistan itself. As this paper has illustrated through the example of the radio, Afghans were, as much as others around the world, engaged in processes of self-definition and grappling with the idea of integration during a time of increased global interconnectivity.

Notes 1

For more on the Cold War as a global historical period, see, for instance, Prasenjit Duara, “The Cold War as a Historical Period: An Interpretive Essay,” Journal of Global History 6 (2011), 457–80.

2

I use “Afghan” here to describe a geographic and civic identity, not an ethnic one. Citizens of Afghanistan spoke multiple languages and applied a variety of ethnic, linguistic, religious, geographic, and other terms of self-identification.

3

Magnus Marsden and Benjamin Hopkins, “Afghan Trading Networks,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, 1–23. https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore­9780190277727-e-119 (accessed 8 July 2022).

4

See “The Future of Afghan History,” special issue of the International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013) and more recently, in the “Roundtable” discussions offered in the latest issue of Afghanistan 4 (2021).

5

For new directions and challenges for area studies and the Middle East, see, for example, Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Nile Green, “Rethinking the ‘Middle East’ after the Oceanic Turn,” Comparative Studies in South Asian, Africa and the Middle East 34 (2014), 556–64.

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6

For more on the circulation of scientific and technical networks of knowledge exchange between Afghans and Germans, see, for example, Marjan Wardaki, “Rediscovering Afghan Fine Arts: The Life of an Afghan Student in Germany, Abdul Ghafur Brechna,” Modern Asian Studies 55 (2021), 1544–80.

7

John Baily, Music of Afghanistan: Professional Musicians in the City of Herat (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 30; Vartan Gregorian, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969), 358; Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, “The Politics of Music in Afghanistan,” in Timothy Rice (ed.), Ethnomusicological Encounters with Music and Musicians: Essays in Honor of Robert Garfias (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 265; May Schinasi, Kabul: A History 17731948, trans. Robert McChesney (Boston, MA: Brill, 2016), 184.

8

Saīd Qāsim Rishtīā, “Kabul Calling,” Afghanistan (April, May, June 1946).

9

G.C. Awasthy, Broadcasting in India (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1965), 136.

10

Jeffrey Herf, “Hate Radio: The Long, Toxic Afterlife of Nazi Propaganda in the Arab World,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 November 2009, https://www.chronicle.com/article/hate-radio/ (accessed 8 July 2022).

11

Nile Green, “The Afghan Discovery of Buddha: Civilizational History and the Nationalizing of Afghan Antiquity,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49 (2017), 47–70.

12

Awasthy, Broadcasting in India, 136.

13

See, for example, Wardaki, “Rediscovering Afghan Fine Arts.” Ustād refers to master musician.

14

John Baily, War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan: The Ethnographer’s Tale (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 26.

15

Familie Breshna, Afghanistan 2001: Calendar with Paintings of Abdul Ghafur Brechna (1907-1974) (Ettlingen: Engelhardt & Bauer, 2001).

16

Mihrīya Anwarī, “Ustād ʿAbdul Ghafūr Brishnā, sitāra-ī dar haft āsmān hunar,” Radio Azadi, Kabul, 18 January 2010, https://da.azadiradio.com/a/25647756.html (accessed 8 July 2022). For a recording of Brishnā’s version of Mūdat-i shud ki tūrā see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR5vojlYbX​ k&t=38s (accessed 8 July 2022). The adaptation in the film Waqt can be heard here: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=tzFK1EGb-J0 (accessed 8 July 2022).

17

Sakata describes Parwīn’s early career. See Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, Music in the Mind: The Concepts of Music and Musician in Afghanistan (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1983), 98; Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, Afghanistan Encounters with Music and Friends (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2013), 51. Other Afghan female artists who Brishnā composed songs for include Kḥānum Zhīlā and Salmā. He is also credited for the composition of a noted Afghan singer who helped develop radio music, Ustād Jalīl Zalānd’s famous ballad, Ay shula-yī hazīn (Oh sad flame). A recording of the song can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-vjW01jqEI (accessed 8 July 2022).

18

Anwarī, “Ustād ʿAbdul Ghafūr Brishnā, sitāra-ī dar haft āsmān hunar.”

19

Uṣūlnāmah-ʾi Rādiyū Dar Afghānistān (Maṭbaʻah-ʾi ʻUmūmī, 1945), NYU Afghanistan Digital Library, http://hdl.handle.net/2333.1/kkwh710x (accessed 20 July 2022); Basīr Ahmad Hūssaynzada, “Az Rādīyū Kābul Tah Rādīyū Afghānistān, Sadhāyi 85 Sālha,” BBC Farsi, 2011, https://www.bbc.com/ persian/afghanistan/2011/03/110322_l09_radio_kabul_radio_af_85years (accessed 8 July 2022).

20

Arnold Fletcher, Afghanistan: Highway of Conquest (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), 254.

21

See UN Statistical Yearbook, New York (1959), 584; UNESCO, Basic Facts and Figures (Paris, 1954) 73. Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 359.

22

Wali Ahmadi, Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan: Anomalous Visions of History and Form (London: Routledge, 2008), 70.

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23

Kristin Roth-Ey, “How Do You Listen to Radio Moscow? Moscow’s Broadcasters, ‘Third World’ Listeners, and the Space of the Airwaves in the Cold War,” The Slavonic and East European Review 98 (2020), 713.

24

“Prime Minister Opens New Studios of Radio Afghanistan,” The Kabul Times, 27 August 1964.

25

Sạbahuddin̄ Kushkakī, Dahyī-Qānūn-Asāsī: Ghāflat Zadagī-e-Afghānha Wa Fursat Talabī-e-Rushā (Peshawar: Shura-i-Saqafatī Jihad-i-Afghānistān, 1986); Mīr Ghulām Muḥammad Ghubār, Afghānistān Dar Masīr-I Tārīkh, Jald-i Awal, vol. 1 (Kabul: Nasharāt-i Dawlatī, 1967).

26

Anīs, 26 August 1964.

27

Ahmad Sarmast, A Survey of the History of Music in Afghanistan from Ancient Times to 2000 A.D., with Special Reference to Art Music from c. 1000 A.D. (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2004); Sakata, Music in the Mind; Sakata, “The Politics of Music in Afghanistan”; Sakata, Afghanistan Encounters with Music and Friends; Baily, War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan; Baily, Music of Afghanistan; John Baily, Songs from Kabul: The Spiritual Music of Ustad Amir Mohammad (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011).

28

Baily, War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan, 29; Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, “Music in Afghanistan,” Afghanistan: Multidisciplinary Perspectives|Association for Asian Studies 17 (2012), 18–22.

29

“Broadcasting Radio Afghanistan/ Nashirāt-i Rādiyū Afghānistan,” Islah, 29 August 1964.

30

Shafie Rahel, “Cultural Policy in Afghanistan” (Paris: UNESCO Press, 1975), 35; Abdul Muhammad Ghīasī, “Nīm-Qarn Irtibāt wah Paywand az Tārīkh Sadhāh (The Brief History of Radio in Afghanistan),” Awaz Magazine (1975); Ghulām Omar Shākir, “Az Āghāz Tāh Imrūz,” Pashtūn Zhagh, 23 August 1968.

31

“New Transmitters for Radio Kabul: German Financiers Discuss Issue with Atayee,” The Kabul Times, 19 March 1963.

32

Derek Vaillant, Across the Waves: How the United States and France Shaped the International Age of Radio (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 1–5.

33

N. Malyar, Tarikh-i radiw-i Afghanistan (Kabul: University of Kabul, 1977), 2. Ghīasī, “Nīm-Qarn Irtibāt wah Paywand az Tārīkh Sadhāh,” 37.

34

“Contracts for New Radio Afghanistan Building Signed with Hochtief, Unimac,” The Kabul Times, 30 April 1964; Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, Laurel Sercombe, and John Vallier, “Radio Afghanistan Archive Project: Averting Repatriation, Building Capacity,” The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation, September 2018, 1–13.

35

Ghīasī, “Nīm-Qarn Irtibāt wah Paywand az Tārīkh Sadhāh,” 35.

36

Mir Ahmad Shah, “Our Radio and T.V.,” Aryana, Afghanistan Republic, 1977.

37

John Eyre, “Library Development (NATIS): Republic of Afghanistan – (Mission) 4 July-3 August 1976,” 0000024341, FMR/CC/DBA/77/115 PP/1975-76/4.221.4/Technical report (1977), https://unesdoc. unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000024341.locale=en (accessed 8 July 2022).

38

Richmond Postgate, Peter Lewis, and William Southwood, Low Cost Communication Systems for Educational Development Purposes in Third World Countries (London: UNESCO, 1979), 17–19.

39

Faridullah Bezhan, “Kabul University and Political Dynamics in Afghanistan, 1964-73,” South Asia Research 34 (2014), 225–39.

40

Ibid.

41

Ẓāhir was allegedly forced into a marriage with Khālida, the daughter of Saīd Dāūd Tarūn, an Afghan communist and Chief of Police under President Nūr Mohmmad Tarakī (1978-9). In the 1970s, Aḥmad Ẓāhir was put in prison as a suspect in the murder of Khālida, but was later found not guilty. For more discussion on Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s association with Khalida, see, for instance, Razzāq Ma’mūn, Ahmad Zahir Chigūnah Tirūr Shud (Chāp-i 1, 2005).

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42

Malālī Mūsī Niẓām, “Zindagī Ākhir Sar Āyad, Bandagī Dar Kār Nīst,” Āryānā Afghānistān ānlāyn, 17 June 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKVQXZcvnW0 (accessed 10 February 2023).

43

Song transcribed from another performance, Aḥmad Ẓāhir, fourth live (majlisī) album, track 10, with the addition of the ghazal’s final lines, which Niẓām specifically recalls from the performance that she witnessed.

44

Lāhūtī is the author of the Anthem of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic anthem. Two collections of Lāhūtī letters published posthumously in Tajikistan include: Mokāteba-ye Ṣadr-al-Din Lāhuti va Abu’l-Qāsem Lāhuti (Dushanbe, 1978) and Nāmahā-ye Ostād Lāhuti, ed., Ḵoršid ʿAtāḵānovā (Dushanbe, 2004). An English translation of Lāhūtī’s autobiographical article, entitled “About Myself,” appeared in Soviet Literature 4 (1954), 138–44. See also Samuel Gold Hodgkin, Lāhūtī: Persian Poetry in the Making of the Literary International, 1906-1957 (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, The University of Chicago, 2018).

45

Hodgkin, “Lāhūtī,” 363.

46

James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), as quoted in Nahid Siamdoust, Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 11.

47

Niẓām, “Zindagī Ākhir Sar Āyad, Bandagī Dar Kār Nīst.”

48

Hodgkin, “Lāhūtī,” 364–5.

49

For more on soundscapes, see, for instance, R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977).

50

See Mariam Atash Nawabi, “Interview with Zahira Zahir” (Washington, DC: Pul | America Abroad Media, 2009), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEhDJD5xGPk&t=159s (accessed 8 July 2022). For various theories surrounding Aḥmad Ẓāhir ’s death, which, to-date, has not been the subject of any government investigation, see, for example, Razzāq, Aḥmad Ẓāhir Chigūnah Tirūr Shud.

51

Ẓāhir’s first recorded song as a solo artist appeared in the early 1970s on Radio Kabul; however, he and the Amatourahye Lycee Habibiya had been performing and recording live songs since the time they formed their band in the early 1960s (Weiss Hamid, “The King Hasn’t Left The Building: An Oral History of an Afghan Musical Icon, Aḥmad Ẓāhir,” Ajam Media Collective, 15 April 2014, https://ajammc.com/2014/04/15/an-oral-history-of-an-afghan-musical-icon-ahmad-zahir/ (accessed 8 July 2022).

52

Robert Young has reminded us that globalization has not always entailed the idea of “irresistible totalization.” See Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (London: Blackwell, 2001), 2.

53

Ibid., 115.

CHAPTER 13

South Asian Diasporic Connections and Afro-Asian Solidarities in the Life of Phyllis Naidoo Annie Devenish

Abstract Lawyer, writer, traveller, exile, mother, friend: these were some of the facets that made up the complex personality of anti-apartheid activist Phyllis Naidoo (1928-2013). As a third-generation South African of Indian origins, the story of Naidoo is one of deep entanglement with South Africa and a rooted commitment to a place and its people. As the grandchild of indentured workers and a member of an Indian diasporic community on the east coast of Southern Africa, it is equally the story of migration and networks, speaking to the multilayered identities of migrant Indians. This chapter focuses on the life and activism of Naidoo as an entry point for exploring how the meaning of being African and the nature of Indian diasporic identity intersected and provided a space forging Afro-Asian solidarities centered around the liberation struggle.

Key words: Phyllis Naidoo, South Africans of Indian origin, anti-apartheid movement, Afro-Asian solidarity

Sitting in an uncatalogued box at the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre in Durban, South Africa, is a file labelled “Memorabilia from my walls at 4 Glenariff, Umbilo Road, Durban… July 2003.” Containing photographs, newspaper clippings, articles, and drawings, each of these images and texts, “[r]emoved to paint my walls,” represents a facet of the personal history and political activism of Phyllis Naidoo (1928-2013). There is an obituary and picture of Phyllis together with Abdul Khalek Mahomed Docrat, leading political activist in the Natal Indian Congress and a fellow comrade in the Durban underground struggle; a newspaper photograph of struggle stalwart Walter Sisulu together with Nelson Mandela; an article on imprisoned First Nation’s activist, Leonard Pelter, calling for a new society where we “share the wealth with the poor and needy;” a news clipping on US civil rights activist Angela Davis’s visit to Durban for the Global March Against Racism in September 2001; and a drawing of an imposing stone eagle sculpture found at the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, referring to Phyllis’s time in exile in that country.

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Amongst this collection is also a map of India, an historic photograph of a group of indentured Indians disembarking at the Durban harbour, and a dust jacket of Phyllis’s book Footprints in Grey Street.1 This collection of memorabilia takes us from the streets of Durban to the halls of post-apartheid South Africa, north to the United States and the struggles of First Nations and African Americans, then southeast to India, returning home again via neighbouring Zimbabwe. It situates the life of Phyllis Naidoo – political activist, socialist, lawyer, writer, traveler, exile, mother, and friend – as much in the local as in the global, and the many spaces in between. As a third generation South African of Indian origins, and as a member of a community with a history of resistance and anti-colonial protest going back to Gandhi’s 1913 Satyagraha, the story of Phyllis Naidoo is a story of deep entanglement with South Africa, and a rooted commitment to a place and its people. As the grandchild of indentured workers and a member of an Indian diasporic community on the east coast of Southern Africa, it is equally the story of migration and networks, speaking to the complex, dynamic, and “multilayered identities of diasporic Indians” identified by Sana Aiyer, Margaret Frenz, Avtar Brah, and others.2 The life and activism of Phyllis Naidoo therefore provides an entry point for exploring how the meaning of being African and the nature of Indian diasporic identity intersect, while being continually renegotiated across the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. For Phyllis, her embeddedness within the Durban Indian community, as well as the broader anti-apartheid struggle community in South and Southern Africa, meant that this renegotiation took place at local, national, and regional levels. Her travels, both real and metaphorical – through her correspondence networks and her engagement with global news events – expanded this process of renegotiation to supra-national levels. Through her life in exile in Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe and her travels to Angola, Hungary, and later Cuba to witness socialism in practice; her correspondence with the Global North; and her contacts with activists in the Global South, Phyllis was continually confronted with the question: “Who am I in relation to these changing spaces and places, and how am I part of the broader struggle for liberation in South Africa?” Just as for Imaobong D. Umoren’s “Race Women Internationalists,” travel and writing were two activities that provided scope for Naidoo to ask these questions, and to shape and reshape an identity for herself in response to them.3 In studying this process of renegotiation more closely, we see that Phyllis’s diasporic identity was dynamic. At times, it intersected with the anti-apartheid struggle that she was committed to and provided scope for reflection on herself as an activist and as a human being; at others, it sat in tension with her commitment to an inclusive South African identity and hence was rejected outright, or absorbed, within a broader understanding of Africanness. Phyllis Naidoo’s life and activism

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Fig. 13.1. Portrait of Phyllis Naidoo (Daily News)

reflects these shifts within an arc. Her political awakening occurred within an interracial trans-nationalist space, fostering an anticolonial political imaginary shaped by a strong connection with India in the 1940s and 1950s. The development of her political thinking, influenced by the traditions of non-racialism, however, mean that as she matured, these diasporic connections came to be seen as divisive and were rejected in solidarity with an expanded notion of being African – as the daughter of its soil and through the shared expression of oppression and resistance. Later in her life, the experience of exile, and the process of returning “home”

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to South Africa, encouraged Phyllis to equally return “home” to her diasporic roots, though in a more personal capacity by reflecting on her family history, her grandparents’ experience as migrants in relation to her own exile, and the legacies for her grandchildren. Naidoo was a prolific writer throughout her adult life, producing letters, diaries, local histories, speeches, and short stories. She was equally an avid collector and archivist leaving behind a rich collection of papers and personal effects. These writings, and the broader collection that they form part of, provide fertile grounds for tracing how Naidoo negotiated the meaning of being African and the nature of Indian diasporic identity through different scales of space and place. Of particular interest is the vast collection of letters written and received from friends, allies, and activists in the anti-apartheid struggle from across the globe. Drawing on the work of Jake Hodder, Michael Heffernan, and Stephen Legg, who explore how localized archives can be read to expose alternate practices and scales of internationalism, this chapter argues that Phyllis’s correspondence is equally rich in revealing the nature of the transnational networks she cultivated and harnessed, and the particular modes of engagement she used to raise worldwide awareness against apartheid and to gather resources to support detainees and their families back home.4 Roland Burke’s concept of emotional diplomacy offers a useful way of understanding how Phyllis used her global correspondence networks to practice her brand of transnational anti-apartheid activism.5 In Phyllis’s communications we can identify various emotive registers that spoke to a shared moral outrage between her and her correspondents regarding apartheid and its human rights abuses, and which operated as a call to action. Personal connections and friendships, and the shared history, duties, and loyalties that these entailed, were frequently referenced in this correspondence, and operated once more to inspire action and change. One can almost think of Phyllis as a “friendship envoy,” who used her personal networks to shape the international relations of her correspondents as representatives of various civil society organizations. Here there are similarly parallels with the ways in which Afro-Asian actors on the fringes of the Bandung Era conferences likewise interacted and conversed informally with each other through “journeys, private initiatives, personal communication, and underground or lesser-known conferences and gatherings,” expanding the reach of this important movement of global south solidarity, beyond political elites and across Cold War blocs, to encompass the lives of ordinary people in more localized initiatives. 6 Blurring personal and professional boundaries and drawing on the language of shared lived experience and emotion, Phyllis likewise moved within her networks, using these inter-personal relations to shape the way this network engaged with South Africa, while inscribing her own story in this process.

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“My Proud Roots” One of the items found in Phyllis’s collection of memorabilia is a newspaper reproduction of an historic photograph showing a group of indentured Indians disembarking at the harbour of Port Natal. The image was published in the Independent on Sunday on the 29 July 2000, marking the 140th anniversary of the arrival of the first indentured Indians in the colony of Natal. Above Phyllis had written, “My Proud Roots.” Phyllis’s family history, unfolding “within a complex and changing global and local context,” was already deeply embedded within South Africa by the time of her birth in 1928.7 Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, the first indentured Indians arrived in the colony of Natal in 1860 – as part of system of migrant labour which saw around 1.3 million Indian contract labourers dispersed to British colonies across the globe.8 Their numbers were supplemented with the arrival of passenger Indians from 1869 onwards. Phyllis’s maternal grandparents arrived from South India in 1878. Her paternal grandparents, who also hailed from a district near Chennai in Tamil Naidu, arrived later in 1903. By then, there was an established Indian community in the colony, with a population that had grown to 148,000 by 1910.9 Despite the social and legal obstacles they faced as second-class colonial subjects, over the course of their five-year indenture contract and their subsequent settlement, this community assembled the resources and skills to build new lives in what was to become the Union of South Africa in 1910. While Phyllis’s maternal grandparents had their caste listed as “Paria,” another term for Dalit or untouchable, her paternal grandparents’ caste is listed as “Christian.” Christian Indians had an advantage as they were likely to be better educated, and when they settled the Church played a key role in creating a coherent identity for this community.10 This possibly explains the social and economic mobility which allowed Phyllis’s father Simon David to acquire a formal education and to rise to the rank of schoolteacher, principal, and later an Indian school inspector. Her mother, Mary Violet Devadasen, stayed at home to look after the large family of ten children. The value of education, service to community, and discipline were some of the key qualities Phyllis inherited from her father. Although Simon David was not politically active, he was deeply invested in service to his community and took an active interest in current affairs, inculcating these values in his daughter. Years later, while writing to some of her siblings in exile, she scolded them for not keeping abreast with South African events: “I know that some of you do not read the papers. Don’t let me hear that you cannot afford at least one. You come from a family where our father brought the papers when he wore patched underwear.”11 From her mother she inherited her care for others, warmth, and hospitality. These were qualities that came to the fore in her political activism, when she kept an open house for activists and exiles – offering them a cup of coffee, a meal, and a temporary home away from home in exile.

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Coming of Age, the Passive Resistance Movement, and Indian Independence Phyllis Naidoo was born Vasantha Phyllis Ruth David on 5 January 1928 in the town of Estcourt in Natal. She spent her childhood and schooling in Pietermaritzburg and Tongaat on the Natal north coast. When she was in the final years of high school, a charity called Friends of the Sick Association (FOSA), which provided a home for tuberculosis patients to poor Indians, came to her school to give a talk about their work. Phyllis was strongly taken by the work of this organization and she persuaded her parents to allow her to leave school and join as a voluntary untrained nurse. With a father who highly valued education, this must have taken enormous persuasion on her part, and speaks to the determination of a young Phyllis to serve her community.12 In this decision we can see an early expression or understanding of service to others, in particular care for the vulnerable, which was evident throughout her life. This understanding was also evident in her father and mother who were active in their local communities. The “idea of service was something that all children were brought up with,” friend and former comrade Omar Badsha emphasizes.13 Where does this emphasis on service to others come from? Certainly, strong traditions of service emerged in connection with new political movements in India, such as the Brahmo Samaj and the revivalist Arya Samaj in the nineteenth century, and women’s social reform organizations and Gandhi’s political philosophy of Hind Swaraj in the twentieth. But there is an equally strong emphasis on service through charity and the uplift of the poor in Christian traditions. Although brought up Catholic, Phyllis was an atheist. She was, however, a strong humanist, articulating her opposition to apartheid in terms of its denigration of human values and dignity, and while she adopted a socialist framing to understanding the root causes of oppression, like her parents and grandparents, whose “prayers were never on their knees but in action,”14 her politics was grounded in the hands on, rather than the theoretical. Unsurprisingly, then, Phyllis soon became frustrated by the work of FOSA, which she came to see as merely addressing the symptoms of growing poverty and inequality rather than addressing the root causes: my split with them came when one of the fellows who was so sick and we had made well again was discharged to go home and of course home was unemployment and the family… and in two weeks’ time he was back and he died on us. I got the hell into Paul [one of the fellow volunteers at the organization]. I said, “What are we doing? What are we doing?” We’re spending our energies here and they come back again. I was about 17 then. And he said, “Look, that is politics.”15

This dawning realization of the need to engage with politics to challenge injustice occurred at a significant moment in the late 1940s, when India was strongly

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Fig. 13.2. The first nineteen volunteers to take part in the 1946 passive resistance campaign (Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, Durban, South Africa)

present in the minds of the South African Indian community, and the struggles of this community were, in turn, at the forefront of Indian public consciousness. Phyllis’s collection of papers includes a photograph torn from a journal showing a group of young women and men – the first group of passive resistance protestors campaigning against the Asiatic Land Tenure Representation Act of 1946. This discriminatory piece of legislation restricted the franchise of Indians through educational and property qualifications and enforced segregation by legalizing separate residential areas for Indians. When the Act came into force in June 1946, the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) launched a two-year civil disobedience campaign, which saw a total of 1,750 Indians jailed in protest.16 While Phyllis was too young to be directly involved, some of her student friends at FOSA were and went to jail for the cause. Witnessing these acts of resistance had a significant impact on her: “They were breaking laws and going in…That’s where it started…You see it’s very hard to live in a society like this and watch from the road as you’re going to work, people being arrested for being without a pass or watch people being kicked into vans.”17 It was this growing awareness that led her to join the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) in 1950, and which brought her into contact with debates and study groups where she learned “the mechanics of politics.”18

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India, likewise, had taken note of the plight of South African Indians. In November 1946, Indian National Congress member, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, India’s representative at the newly established UN, put forward a Resolution criticizing the South African government’s passage of the Act on the grounds of discrimination. In December of that year, after the Indian motion had been voted through the committees, India achieved a two-thirds vote for this Resolution in the General Assembly “asking South Africa to undertake negotiations with India and Pakistan for a better deal for the citizens of those countries in the Union.”19 While the passing of the Indian Resolution marked an important moment in the making of an “anti-colonial internationalism” and was hailed as a public relations victory for India, it was a hollow victory.20 The Smuts government ignored the censure of the UN resolution, and two years later, in 1948, the Nationalist Party was voted into power, ushering in apartheid – a system of systematic racial discrimination and oppression which would last for nearly half a century, until the first democratic elections in 1994. Meanwhile back at home new forms of Afro-Asian solidarity were emerging in the wake of closer collaboration between Indian leaders and African political organizations. Working on the Indian diaspora in Kenya in the first half of the twentieth century, Sana Aiyar and Margaret Frenz emphasize that Indian Kenyans were able to transcend the boundaries of race to participate fully in the anti-colonial movement in Kenya, as part of a united front and oppositional identity against the British.21 Arianna Lissoni argues that a parallel development took place amongst African and Indian political movements in South Africa during the 1940s and the 1950s.22 The mid 1940s saw the rise of a new generation of progressive Indian leaders, including Monty Naicker who espoused “the cause of a wider ‘non-European’ oppressed community and pledged closer working relations both within the different segments of the Indian community and between Indians and Africans.”23 This sense of cross racial solidarity was reflected in the Doctors Pact signed on the 9 March 1947 by Naicker representing the NIC, Dadoo as president of the Transvaal Indian Congress and Dr. A.B. Xuma, president-general of the ANC.24 This agreement brought these organizations together to pledge support for universal franchise, equal economic and social rights for all, and the removal of discriminatory and oppressive legislation.25 Just months after the signing of the Doctors Pact, India finally won its own independence on 15 August 1947 after a prolonged struggle against British colonial rule. Professor D.D.T. Jabavu, one of the delegates at the conference where the Doctors Pact was signed, commented in an interview with the Leader newspaper: “Denied human rights in this country, Africans will look to the east, particularly India, which is now on the eve of attaining sovereign status, as the champion of the coloured races of the world.”26 Phyllis equally recalled the strong Indian nationalist

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sentiment in her own home during this period, which “held pictures of Subbash Chandra Bose, Sarojini Naidoo, Manilal Gandhi, Pundit Nehru, Annie Besant and others.”27 Two intersecting dynamics therefore shaped the political imaginary into which Phyllis awakened as a young adult activist in the late 1940s and 1950s. The first dynamic was the political connection with India, the drawing of inspiration from its people, traditions of resistance, and newfound independent status. The second was a growing Afro-Asian solidarity defined by closer collaboration between Indian, “Coloured,” and Black communities in a joint struggle against racial discrimination and demand for universal suffrage, shaped by a sense of a of belonging to a shared oppressed community.28 Yet, while India remained an ally throughout the period of the liberation struggle and an outspoken critique of apartheid, the oppressive nature of state-imposed racial categories used to divide and rule, and the strong traditions of non-racialism that were prominent in the political organizations Phyllis joined, left little scope for the identity politics of Indianness. This led Phyllis, like that of many other South Africans of Indian origin, to identify with and position herself as African rather than Indian.

Afro-Asian Solidarity in Politics and Lawyering: Weapons to Fight Injustice In 1950, Phyllis joined the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). This organization had been established in 1943, with the purpose of bringing Africans, Coloureds, and Indians together into a single federation with the objective of “building a united, black political front” and fostering “non-collaboration with ruling authorities” by boycotting racist institutions. The organization emerged from South Africa’s political left, Trotskyist groupings in particular, and built “up a formidable reputation for its uncompromising stand on non-racism.”29 What did non-racialism mean in this context? Nanda Naidoo, who was a NEUM member and socialized with Phyllis in the same group of friends during their time as university students stresses, “one thing we learnt was to abandon identity.” You “can’t face racism by being racialist;” “you can’t ask for justice while saying I’m an Indian.” The response was to say “we were all human.”30 South African peoples have experienced long histories of racialization and entribement extending back to colonialism, slavery, and segregation. Apartheid built on these processes, but also systemized and entrenched them further.31 Race separateness was codified into law, determined access to resources and permeated every aspect of society. The Population Registration Act No. 30 of 1950 divided South Africans into four races – whites at the apex receiving the lion’s share of the

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country’s resources, rights, and privileges, followed by Coloureds and Indians in the middle, and Black South Africans at the bottom.32 Racial hierarchy and systemized discrimination were reinforced through separate residential areas and segregated public amenities. Education was likewise divided by legislation passed in the 1950s and 1960s, as were economic and employment opportunities. While some token representation in separate political bodies was available for Coloured and Indian communities, political rights and the franchise on equal terms were denied, while Black South Africans had no political rights at all. In fact, they experienced additional infringements to their freedom and mobility: through pass laws and influx control, which limited their access to urban areas, coupled with creation of the Bantustans in the 1970s, poverty-stricken rural homelands for each of the designated thirteen African “ethnic groups.” Responding to an oppressive state-imposed identity, the predominant political traditions from the 1950s onwards until the emergence of Black Consciousness in the early 1970s, rejected race outright through the language of non-racialism.33 As Phyllis moved into the 1950s and political opposition took on a new militancy, the earlier diasporic connections that had defined the 1946-8 Passive Resistance Campaign receded with her identification as part of a Black oppressed majority. Her activism within a movement grounded in non-racialism left little room for ethnic or racial identity politics. Non-racialism was a dynamic concept which evolved with the liberation movement and could take on different meanings within different political organizations but was underpinned by certain key principles. The first of these was an understanding of race as a social construct which therefore needed to be challenged in the name of political mobilization. Secondly non-racialism focused on what united people, their common interests rather than what could be used to divide, in order to create a national identity which encompassed all South Africans.34 In the context of NEUM, non-racialism had a strong internationalist dimension, which stressed the social constructedness of race as a function of both colonialism and capitalism.35 Within the ANC, a different tradition of non-racialism developed which saw South Africa as a multi-racial society but one that required a “racial alliance as the medium of resistance mobilization” which then became a “nonracial” space. The Communist Party of South Africa likewise acknowledged the ongoing existence of race-based political organizations, but like the ANC, saw the need for a cross racial alliance in the name of “national democratic revolution.”36 Even though this was a period of growing solidarity and cooperation between the Indian, Coloured, and Black political communities, the “historically uneasy relationship of Indians and Africans” remained a “persistent feature of the landscape,” fueled by the idea of the Indian as “foreigner” in South Africa.37 These tensions were brought home during the Durban Race riots of January 1949, which saw violent conflict break out

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between Indians and Africans, resulting in the death of 142 people, the injury of many more, and significant damage to property.38 While Phyllis’s commitment to socialism and non-racism were fostered during her time with the NEUM, she found the abstract and academic approach of the movement frustrating. Although they boycotted their graduation from the University, in alignment with NEUM’s strategic commitment to boycott racists institutions, their main activities, Nanda recalls, involved “lots of talking.”39 For someone who sought to understand and articulate justice in a practical way, NEUM’s theoretical approach was therefore limited. In 1952 the Defiance Campaign was launched, marking the “largest scale non-violent resistance ever seen in South Africa.” The campaign was multi-racial in its composition and led jointly by ANC and the South African Indian Congress (SAIC). Although unsuccessful in over-turning apartheid laws, it brought international attention to the situation in South Africa, bolstered the membership and confidence of the ANC, and marked a moment for non-racial co-operation in the resistance to apartheid. Non-racial co-operation was cemented further by the formation of the Congress Alliance in 1954, which brought together the various political organizations that had participated in the Defiance Campaign into a multi-racial alliance, with the objective of democratic rule.40 These principles found visible expression in the famous Congress of the People held in Kliptown in June 1955, organized by the Alliance, and the Freedom Charter, adopted at this gathering which declared “that South Africa belongs to all who live in it,” a reaffirmation of the inclusive non-racial commitment of the movement. While the apartheid government was unable to ban the gathering of the Congress of the People in 1955, they arrested 156 of Congress’s leaders in 1956, under the change of treason, conspiracy to overthrow the state and for being a communist movement. A long court case known as the Treason Trial followed, which was eventually overturned by the Supreme court of appeal in 1961.41 Responding to the plight of the stranded families of those put in trial, Phyllis organized a Human Rights Committee at the University of Natal Non-European Section, to help to raise funds for them.42 This was to be the start of a lifelong commitment to supporting political detainees, prisoners, and their families. Phyllis had recently divorced from her first husband Willy Joseph, an unusual and brave decision for a woman in the largely conservative Indian community of Durban, and one which reflected her strong and independent character. Raising her first-born son Nersen from this marriage as a single mother while simultaneously studying and working, Phyllis had a special empathy and understanding for the hardships and financial strain experienced by families separated through detention and political imprisonment. Further political work and activism followed as Phyllis came into contact with and joined the South Africa Communist Party (SACP) after marrying her second

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husband M.D. Naidoo in 1958; she joined the party in 1961.43 At this time, she also began working with other activists to challenge the Bantu Education Act of 1953 and to support those who had gone underground after the banning of the ANC, SACP, and PAC following Sharpeville in March 1960. The SACP was one of the earliest political organizations to pioneer non-racialism and collaboration across racial boundaries in the name of political organizing.44 In this sense Phyllis is likely to have felt quite a home in the party. Phyllis, however, was never an ideologue like M.D, who rose up to its senior ranks. The appeal of socialism for her lay “with her love for people and her commitment to equity,” in the words of her friend Gonda Perez.45 Phyllis’s activism did not go unnoticed by the apartheid security forces, and in March 1966 she was banned under the Suppression of Communism 1950 Act and placed under house arrest. A year later her husband was charged and sent to Robben Island. The restrictions of her house arrest and banning made it difficult to continue her job as a teacher, and she had to rely on the goodwill of family and friends. Nersen had moved to the United States to be with his father, but Phyllis had two younger sons to support, Sharadh and Sahdhan, and was pregnant with her daughter Sukhthi at the time. “With my husband on Robben Island I was expected to take care of 3 small children. It was a horrendous punitive measure,” she recalls.46 Despite these trying circumstances, Phyllis continued to support those in the underground. She also studied to become a lawyer. In 1973 she opened the legal practice, A.J. Gumede and Phyllis Naidoo, in partnership with Archie Gumede, a fellow anti-apartheid activist and lawyer, in downtown Durban. Antoinette Burton observes that it was unusual for an Indian woman to go into law practice with an African man at the time, and that this reflected Phyllis’s staunch commitment to non-racialism.47 Her personal friend, advocate Zak Yacoob, thinks that this may have been an instinctive rather than a conscious decision. It made sense for Phyllis and Gumede to go into practice together, as they shared the same principles and values. Regardless of her reasons, what is clear is that Phyllis’s activism and her open personality led to her to cultivate friendships and professional relationships across the racial divide. This was one of the ways in which Phyllis lived her AfroAsian solidarity. Within this lived experience, there was room for a cultural identity as Indian; however, there was little room for the identity politics of Indianness, where ethnic and racial identities were seen to be divisive and tools of the oppressor. In fact, the claim to such an identity could be seen to be disloyal. We can see this logic at work in a short story, based on factual events, called “Ntobeko,” written by Phyllis. Ntobeko was the daughter of Cynthia, who was Phyllis’s secretary in her legal practice. This story narrates the near death of Cynthia with Ntobeko’s birth and

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Fig. 13.3. A family reunited: Phyllis and her husband MD Naidoo with sons Sahdhan and Shah, and daughter Sukhthi facing away from the camera. (Nirode Bramdaw, 1860 Heritage Centre)

how on her recovery, she recalled to Phyllis the surprise of the Black nurses in the hospital who “were so shocked that I an ‘Indian’ cared for an ‘African’.” Here there is a clear sense of a rejection of a colonially imposed “Indian” identity, and a claim to a shared history: having been born on the same soil, working together, and with their families growing up together – this was the basis for a shared understanding of oneself as South African, as Phyllis writes: we are grouped as Africans, Coloureds, Indians and Whites. Not satisfied with these divisions, the Nationalists are set on a path to tribalise the Africans into about thirteen tribes. Cynthia is “African” – but so am I. I know no other home. This is my birthplace and the birthplace of my father. My grandfather was brought here by the British colonists so that he might work on the Natal sugar cane fields for ten shillings a month. Because my grandfather was brought from India, the white racists call me “Indian” and I am accorded certain “Indian” rights, distinct and different from those accorded Cynthia.48

Phyllis’s career change as a lawyer provided an important new source of income to support her family – she and M.D. Naidoo had divorced following his release from Robben Island in 1972 – and it offered another way to fight apartheid, through pro-bono legal advice and representation to anti-apartheid activists. Once again, however, this kind of work brought her into direct conflict with the state, resulting in her flight into Lesotho on 23 July 1977 under watch by the apartheid state security forces.49

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Fig. 13.4. Phyllis Naidoo looking out from her window with her three children during her time under house arrest in Durban, 1971. (Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, Durban, South Africa)

Networking and Solidarity in Exile: Letter Writing, Transnational Trails, and Emotional Diplomacy Phyllis crossed the border into Lesotho in July 1977, arriving with few resources. She was however able to find support within the established exile community in the country, which she was already connected with, because of her support to those in the underground movement. She also managed to tap into other channels of support. During her thirteen years of exile (1977-90) in Lesotho and Zimbabwe, Phyllis wrote and received thousands of letters. Phyllis’s letter writing had commenced earlier, during the time of her house arrest in the 1960s, itself a form of internal exile because of the isolation it imposed. This rich correspondence gave and sought love, consolation, and advice, trading in the valuable commodity of news and information about fellow activists, comrades, family, and friends. It reached out across space and time to comfort the families of comrades. “How can I share your grief at Steve’s death but to say that I wish you great strength…I’d like to walk back and come to you, to hold your hand,” Phyllis wrote to a mutual friend in September 1977, offering strength and courage after the death of Steve Biko in detention.50 Through

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this correspondence, she also channeled money and instructions to colleagues for the support of families of imprisoned activists; organized transport and permits for them to visit prisoners on Robben Island; and paid for school fees, food, clothing, even birthday presents. She likewise supported imprisoned and detained activists themselves, sending them letters and cards, arranging permission for them to study in prison, raising the fees for their studies, and ensuring activists had clothes and somewhere to go and work, once they were released. While many of these letters were for recipients in South Africa, a large number also travelled across the globe. Phyllis’s international correspondence networks consisted of personal friends and comrades living abroad, many of whom were members of the ANC in exile. They also included individuals associated with the United Nations, Amnesty International, and other anti-apartheid and human rights organizations. “My Mail this week is full. Sweden, Denmark, Swits [sic], Australia, UK, home too,” she wrote, commenting with delight on her cosmopolitan mailbox.51 This network stretched from the UK through to Europe all the way to Australia; from Florida and the Smokey Mountains in the United States, to Poona in the northwest of India, down to Hyderabad and Cochin in the south, then on to Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Gambia, and Zambia. Just as Roland Burke refers to Third World actors using emotion to strategically steer the direction of foreign policy relations in their interests, and Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte identify informal social spaces and interactions amongst Afro-Asian actors on the fringes of the Bandung Era conferences, Phyllis likewise operated as an emotional diplomat within her correspondence networks – drawing on shared histories and friendships, and a shared moral abhorrence to the injustices of apartheid to leverage much needed resources to support activists and their families in the Struggle, and to spread awareness of the brutal apartheid regime internationally. Exile deprives one of “home,” isolating one from the people and ideas we are closest to. In this context, letter writing offered Phyllis a way to re-reconstitute an emotional, social and ideological “heartland” in political exile, where attachment, shared histories, and loyalty created a way of “being at home” while away from her homeland. Letter writing likewise allowed her to stay in touch, with both people and global events, and to learn about the struggles of others. In February 1981 friends wrote to Phyllis from Hyderabad, India, for example, describing a visit to “a remote jungle area this week where people just live day to day – like a homeland in many ways.”52 The following year she received a letter from another contact in the town of Sylva in the Smokey Mountains, telling her about the forcible removal of the Cherokees “to the west” and the creation of “reservations” where “they can buy land” but where “there’s no employment, lots of federal guilt money building lavish schools.” Sarah adds in her letter that the “story of whites and the N. American Indians sounds very much like somewhere else we know.”53

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Phyllis’s friend Gonda Perez recalls that Phyllis had a wide range of knowledge “about elsewhere in the world,” and she was interested in learning from these struggles.54 This solidarity became “a central part” of the lives of many of those in exile, another friend, Pat Brickhill, stresses. It reminded activists that they weren’t alone and provided one of the most important sources of strength that allowed comrades to cope with the stresses of being a freedom fighter.55 This sense of solidarity is poignantly illustrated by a letter Phyllis wrote while in Hungary receiving medical treatment after being injured by a parcel bomb sent by the South African Security forces in July 1979. The explosion left her with pieces of shrapnel in her buttocks, seven broken teeth, a perforated eardrum and in terrible pain. During her treatment in Budapest, she wrote about meeting a Palestinian family also injured in bomb blast and described the struggle of the mother to breast feed her child, having lost a hand and injured one side of her chest. Phyllis found a common connection between her own suffering and that of this mother, condemning the American neo-imperialism of “Carter and his bunch of fascists who manufacture bombs for Israel, Vietnam, SA, South America, Korea, Turkey, W Europe and all the other places he’s in.”56 Through this critique, she powerfully connected the local and the global – drawing on the lived experience of this Palestinian mother’s suffering to condemn a capitalist system which had given rise to the very military-industrial complex that had produced the bombs that had caused such brutality.

Return On 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and the nationalist government commenced negotiations with the liberation movements for the peaceful transition to democratic rule in South Africa. A few months later, in May 1990, Phyllis returned home to South Africa. When she returned from exile, she started writing, and in between writing about struggle icons, she began to talk about herself and her family.57 This was when her series of Footprints books, profiling short biographies of struggle heroes and foot soldiers, was conceptualized and written, including Footprints in Grey Street, published in 2002. Writing offered Phyllis a way to reflect on the anti-apartheid struggle and to document many of its unsung heroes. It likewise allowed her to process her own story and that of her family history. As both Betty Govinden and Antoinette Burton emphasize, one of the ways in which Phyllis wrote about herself was through writing about others.58 Phyllis was in her early 60s on her return; the focus of the liberation movement had shifted towards negotiating and envisioning a new society, so there was now, for the first time, occasion for reflection. “People her age

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began to look at who they were,” Omar Badsha emphasizes, and “to relate that to her grandchildren.”59 Furthermore, as the post-apartheid nation state took shape, a new space opened for acknowledgment and celebration of South Africa’s diverse cultural heritage within the “rainbow nation.” The apartheid state had “exploited diversity to separate and dominate;” the new ANC government in contrast “provided space for South Africans to recreate themselves within particular cultural, racial and ethnic milieus.”60 And yet, while the post-1994 era ushered in a celebration of cultural diversity, it simultaneously renewed debates about the position of South Africans of Indian origin within the new nation state corresponding with a resurgence of ethnic and racial identity politics which was largely conservative. Phyllis’s interest in researching and understanding her diasporic roots should not be equated with this conservative trend. The assertion of ethnic and racial politics in this context was driven largely by claims to economic and political power. Phyllis’s desire to understand her diasporic roots, by comparison, was a personal search for meaning, which always remained firmly situated within a broader sense of South Africanness. Along with writing, Phyllis would reminisce about her Pāṭṭi – her paternal grandmother. While her grandmother would have been an old lady when Phyllis was growing up, in her reminiscing, Phyllis thought of her as a young girl. Her grandmother would have told stories, possibly repeatedly, which she would have listened to: about a young woman getting married and coming to a strange country. When Phyllis began writing, these memories became prominent. Reading a book about the history of Christian Indians in South Africa, she learnt more about the paternal side of her family, and this spurred her to further research on her family’s roots within the broader story of Indian indenture in South Africa. As a result, the issue of India “became one of many interests that defined the post-apartheid period of her life.”61 It was on returning to South Africa that Phyllis had the time and space to begin reflecting on her roots, but the origins of these reflections extend further back to her time in exile. Although apartheid South Africa was a place of oppression, it was both literal and ideological “home” for Phyllis, whose family was deeply rooted there, and who knew no other “homeland.” It was not only birth and experience that made South Africa “home.” Phyllis had equally found an identity for herself in South Africa through an inclusive sense of Blackness and Africanness, which encompassed all those who were oppressed, and as an activist who was part of a non-racial political movement that sought to bring all peoples together as South Africans. The all-consuming nature of political allegiance in this context left little room for alternative imaginings or understandings of self. This sense of identity, however, was disrupted with the uprootedness of exile, opening a space to begin thinking of her “other” identities, including those of her

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diasporic roots. Phyllis talked, for example, about her time spent in Hungary to receive medical treatment following her parcel bomb injury, reflecting on her alienation in a foreign country, where she did not speak the language: “when I went to Hungary bombed, I didn’t have the language to talk to those people and it was extremely difficult, mind boggling thing to do…” She mused on how this might have echoed her grandparents’ experience migrating to South Africa a century or so earlier: “I don’t know if they intended to go back – they certainly didn’t – and what must they have felt, coming to this strange country?”62 Omar Badsha suggests that Phyllis’s renewed interest in India and indenture might have partly stemmed from a desire to leave something behind, a legacy for her grandchildren.63 Phyllis’s drive to collect and archive could equally be seen as an attempt to leave something behind, to reconstruct an identity in the aftermath of the uprootedness of exile and to claim a space within struggle historiography itself. In exile one was constantly under surveillance and danger, with little control over one’s life, Pat Brickhill emphasizes. “When you lose roots, you compensate by clinging on to things” you “comfort collect.”64 Together with writing, researching and reminiscing, by collecting and bequeathing her collection of papers, Phyllis was putting down new roots in the post-apartheid era. She drew strength and inspiration from her struggle experience, but equally she drew on deeper diasporic connections and identities, weaving these into her own story as a daughter of the African soil.

Conclusion Vahed and Desai remind us that “If one gazes over the twentieth century one is struck by the way “Indian” identity has been constructed, deconstructed and re-made.” Across this time, Indians have “been variously ‘coolies’, British subjects, colonial–borns, aliens, Indians, non-whites, Black, and all the way back to ‘Indian’ South African.”65 Throughout Phyllis’s own life, the meaning of being a South African with Indian diasporic roots was equally dynamic, interacting with the many other facets of her identity – as a socialist, an anti-apartheid activist, a writer, a lawyer, and a strong independent woman. This illustrates the contextual nature of identity and belonging, which is “not a fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture.”66 The significance of India for Phyllis lay not in its geographical place but more in the emotions and ideas it came to represent. During her political coming of age, her diasporic connections evoked a sense of courage and embodied a particular understanding of the meaning of freedom. As she moved into the decade of the 1950s and political opposition took on a new militancy, these diasporic connections

south asian diasporic connections and afro-asian solidarities 307

receded behind her identification as part of a black oppressed majority. After her return from exile, it was the “emotional attachment of India” that took hold as she sought a sense of connection with the experiences of her grandparents, and a position for her life story within a larger historical narrative, co-coinciding with a time of renewed reflection and writing of self within broader struggle histories.67 For Phyllis the experience of exile opened up a space to reimagine not only diasporic connections, but also to strengthen other kinds of transnational relationships and associations. As this chapter has shown, she sought to harness her global networks while in exile, operating as an emotional diplomat or friendship envoy to channel resources to the anti-apartheid movement and to raise international awareness and condemnation of this regime. Her ability to navigate these transnational networks, and to create a “home” within them, forging solidarities and connections with other oppressed communities and their struggles around the world, positions her as a truly global South Asian.

Notes 1

Footprints in Grey Street (Durban: Far Ocean Jetty, 2002) provides biographical vignettes of individuals involved in the ant-apartheid movement who lived or worked in the Grey Street area – a commercial zone designated for Indian business in downtown Durban.

2

See, for example, Sana Aiyar, “Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya, ca. 1930-1950,” The American Historical Review 116 (2011), 990, 1012; Margaret Frenz, “Swaraj for Kenya, 1949-1965: The Ambiguities of Transnational Politics,” Past & Present 218 (2013), 151–77; A. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996).

3

See Imaobong D. Umoren, Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018).

4

Jake Hodder, Michael Heffernan, Stephen Legg, “The Archival Geographies of Twentieth-Century Internationalism: Nation, Empire and Race,” Journal of Historical Geography 71 (2021), 1–11.

5

Roland Burke, “Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights at the United Nations,” Human Rights Quarterly 39 (2017), 273–295.

6

Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte, “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War,” Journal of World History 30 (2019), 4–5.

7

Vishnu Padayachee, “Struggle, Collaboration and Democracy: The ‘Indian Community’ in South Africa, 1860-1999,” Economic and Political Weekly 34 (1999), 393.

8

Goolam Vahed, “The Protector, Plantocracy and Indentured Labour in Natal, 1860-1911,” Pacific Historical Review 87 (2018), 3.

9

Desmond Hobart Houghton and Jenifer Dagut, Source Material on the South African Economy 18601970, vol. 3 (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1977), 297; Andrew Duminy and Bill Guest, Natal and Zululand from Earliest Times to 1910: A New History (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and Shuter & Shooter), 431, quoted in Bill Freund, Insiders and Outsiders: The Indian Working Class of Durban 1919-1990 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1995), 11.

10

Interview with Omar Badsha, 25 October 2021.

308 annie devenish

11

Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa (GLDC), Phyllis Naidoo (PN) Papers, Letters from Phyllis Naidoo to friends and family 1980-1983 (Box 10, File 1) Phyllis to family, 11 August 1980.

12

Interview with Omar Badsha, 25 October 2021.

13

Ibid.

14

GLDC, PN Papers, Box: Other Countries – Germany, India, Cuba, Nordic Countries, File: India 1990, Speech at the Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Independence of India – Honouring India’s Freedom Struggle in 11 volumes by Pool Chand Jain, 14 August 1998.

15

GLDC, PN Papers, Personalia, Awards, Articles, (Box 1), Interview P. O’Malley with Phyllis Naidoo on 26 October 2003 in Durban.

16

Alanna O’Malley, “India, Apartheid and the New World Order at the UN, 1946-1962,” Journal of World History 31 (2020), 208; David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of his Ideas (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2003), 277.

17

GLDC, PN Papers, Personalia, Awards, Articles, (Box 1), Interview P. O’Malley with Phyllis Naidoo on 26 October 2003 in Durban.

18

South African History Online (SAHO), Biographies, Phyllis Naidoo, http://www.sahistory.org.za/ people/phyllis-naidoo (accessed 17 June 2018).

19

Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 179; Vijayalakshmi Pandit, The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir (Delhi: Crown Publishers, 1979), 210.

20

O’Malley, “India, Apartheid and the New World Order,” 222.

21

See Aiyer, “Anticolonial Homelands” and Frenz, “Swaraj for Kenya.”

22

See Arianna Lissoni, “Yusuf Dadoo, India and South Africa’s Liberation Struggle,” in A. Konieczna and R. Skinner (eds.), A Global History of Anti-apartheid “Forward to Freedom” in South Africa (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019).

23

Padayachee, “Struggle, Collaboration and Democracy,” 393.

24

Monty Naicker, Yusuf Dadoo and A.B. Xuma were all medical doctors by profession.

25

SAHO, “1947 Joint Declaration of Cooperation,” https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/1947-joint-­ declaration-cooperation (accessed 5 November 2021).

26

SAHO, “1947 Joint Declaration of Cooperation.”

27

GLDC, PN Papers, Box: Other Countries – Germany, India, Cuba, Nordic Countries, File: India 1990, Speech at the Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Independence of India – Honouring India’s Freedom Struggle in 11 volumes by Pool Chand Jain, 14 August 1998.

28

The term “Coloured” was one of the racial categories constructed and employed by South African governments in the first half of the twentieth century and adopted by the apartheid state, and it referred to people whose ancestors came from more than one of South Africa’s various population groupings.

29

Mohamed Adhikari, “Fiercely Non-Racial? Discourses and Politics of Race in the Non-European Unity Movement, 1943-70,” Journal of Southern African Studies 31 (2005), 403–4.

30

Interview with Nanda and Beverley Naidoo, 3 November 2021. Although sharing the same surname, Nanda and Phyllis were not related. Naidoo is a common surname for South Africans of Indian origin.

31

Ciraj Rassool, “The Politics of Nonracialism in South Africa,” Public Culture 31 (2019), 342, 345.

32

See Mavis Mhlauli, End Salani and Rosinah Mokotedi, “Understanding Apartheid in South Africa through the Racial Contract,” International Journal of Asian Studies 5 (2015), 204, quoted in Paalini Moodley, “An Ongoing Struggle: A History of Colourism in the Durban Indian Community in Postapartheid South Africa” (MA dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 2021), 81.

south asian diasporic connections and afro-asian solidarities 309

33

One notable exception to this was the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC).

34

Rassool, “The Politics of Nonracialism,” 360, 346.

35

Adhikari, “Fiercely Non-Racial,” 406.

36

Rassool, “The Politics of Nonracialism,” 361–2.

37

Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, “Identity and Belonging in Post-apartheid South Africa: The Case Study of South African Indians,” Journal of Social Sciences 25 (2010), 1.

38

Surendra Bhana and Bridglal Pachai (eds.), A Documentary History of Indian South Africans (South Africa: David Phillip, 1984). Extract reproduced in SAHO, https://www.sahistory.org.za/ archive/70-durban-riots-1949 (accessed 1 November 2021).

39

Interview with Nanda and Beverley Naidoo, 3 November 2021.

40

SAHO, “The Defiance Campaign 1952,” https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/defiance-campaign-1952 (accessed 23 April 2021).

41

Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa, 105.

42

SAHO, Biographies, Phyllis Naidoo.

43

Notably, while Phyllis’s second husband M.D. Naidoo and her brother Paul David held leadership positions in the Natal Indian Congress, Phyllis herself was not formally involved in this organization, although she socialized and worked with many friends and comrades who were. For a comprehensive study of how the revived NIC (post-1971) navigated the question of Indian identity within the context of non-racialism, see Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, Colour, Class and Community: The Natal Indian Congress, 1971-1994 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2021).

44

See Tom Lodge, Red Road to Freedom: A History of the Communist Party in South Africa 1921-2021 (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2021).

45

Interview with Gonda Perez, 3 November 2021.

46

GLDC, PN Papers, Personalia, Awards, Articles, (Box 1) “Banning Orders” 31 March 1966 to 31 March 1976, Extract from Submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee on 25 October 1996 in Durban submitted by Phyllis Naidoo.

47

Antoinette Burton, “Hands and Feet: Phyllis Naidoo’s Impressions of Anti-apartheid History (20022006),” in Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr (eds.), Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 142.

48

GLDC, PN Papers, Box 12: writings 1977-1989, Telegrams, File 3, “Ntobeko.”

49

GLDC, PN Papers, Letters from Phyllis Naidoo to Comrades and Friends 1977-1980 (Box 8 File 1), 1977 Letters from Phyllis Naidoo to comrades and friends (Box 8, File 1) Phyllis to Malcolm, 22 August 1977, Maseru.

50

GLDC, PN Papers, Letters from Phyllis Naidoo to Comrades and Friends 1977-1980 (Box 8, File 1), Phyllis to Sam, 18 September 1977, Maseru.

51

GLDC, PN Papers, Letters from Phyllis Naidoo to friends, comrades and family (Box 8, File 2) Phyllis to Raj, undated.

52

GLDC, PN Papers, Correspondence 1979-1982 (Box 9, File 1), MG and FM to Phyllis, 8 February 1981.

53

GLDC, PN Papers, Correspondence 1979-1982 (Box 9, File 1), Sarah Westcott to Phyllis, 19 April 1982.

54

Interview with Gonda Perez, 3 November 2021.

55

Interview with Omar Badsha, 25 October 2021.

56

GLDC, PN Papers, Letters from Phyllis Naidoo to Comrades and Friends 1977-1980 (Box), 1978-1980 Letters from Phyllis Naidoo to comrades and friends, Phyllis to Gwen and Frank, 28 January 1980, Budapest.

57

Interview with Omar Badsha, 25 October 2021.

58

See Devarakshanam Govinden, Sister Outsiders: The Representation of Identity and Difference in Selected Writings by South African Indian Women (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2008); Burton, “Hands and Feet.”

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59

Interview with Omar Badsha, 5 October 2021.

60

Vahed and Desai, “Identity and Belonging,” 2.

61

Interview with Omar Badsha, 25 October 2021.

62

GLDC, PN Papers, Box 3: Invitation cards, Donation books, Speeches, Rebecca Garrett Interview, Admission as an Attorney, File: Rebecca Garrett Interview 1992.

63

Interview with Omar Badsha, 25 October 2021.

64

Interview with Pat Brickhill, 29 October 2021.

65

Vahed and Desai, “Identity and Belonging,” 9.

66

Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in IP Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 395, quoted in Vahed and Desai, “Identity and Belonging,” 9.

67

Vahed and Desai, “Identity and Belonging,” 9.

Afterword Srinath Raghavan

Abstract The afterword considers the overall contribution of the book against the backdrop of the existing scholarship on the international history of South Asia.

Key words: internationalism, decolonization, South Asia, non-Western international relations

This volume has focused on two central questions. How do we plot the contours of modern South Asia’s interactions with the wider world? And how do we conceive of the idea of internationalism in this context? These questions and the answers proffered in this volume are the product of the collective deliberation of a younger generation of scholars who want to write “New International Histories of South Asia.”1 To understand what is distinctive about this volume, we need to juxtapose it with the older historiography that it seeks to leave behind. For a start, we may remind ourselves that international history has been the Cinderella of modern South Asian history. Given the extraordinary sophistication of this broader historiography over the past three decades – especially, in social, cultural, and environmental histories – it is striking that South Asia’s engagements with the world, beyond the imperial connection, have hardly attracted scholarly attention. Indeed, the historiography of modern South Asia has, for the most part, remained stubbornly insular. After some early works in the 1950s and 1960s, the external engagements of the Raj largely fell out of view, as historians moved on to Indian nationalism.2 The postcolonial period and its international dimension was deemed too recent in time to merit historical treatment. Indeed, the only aspect of South Asia’s international history that drew sustained interest in the next couple of decades was the Sino-Indian frontier – the dispute over which had led to the war of 1962.3 Ironically, the revival of interest in the region’s international history, especially in the late-colonial and postcolonial period, had to await the opening of official and diplomatic archives in Britain and the United States. This led to several important studies of South Asia’s relations with these countries, especially at the time of decolonization and the early Cold War.4 These books were cast as “international” or diplomatic history, focusing on the making and makers of foreign policies and

312 srinath raghavan

diplomatic maneuvers. Drawing all but exclusively on foreign archival materials, these studies could do only limited justice to the concerns and perspectives of the South Asian actors. Given the paucity of official archives, especially for the period after 1947, this seemed unavoidable. When I began graduate work some two decades ago, the National Archives of India had nothing on the postcolonial period. The only Indian archival collection that spoke to my work on the early years after independence were the private papers and oral histories at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (though Nehru’s own papers remained closed). These did open up several avenues for investigation, but had to be supplemented heavily by official archives in Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States. More talented and enterprising contemporaries trawled the Cold War-era archives in Russia and Germany, among other places. The upshot of this was a clutch of rather more detailed studies of the international history of South Asia – accounts that paid greater attention to policy-makers and other actors in the region, but still remained focused on the traditional questions of war and diplomacy, peace and security.5 Nevertheless, there was also a trickle of other books that pointed to a more capacious conception of the region’s international history, emphasizing economic development, transnational and global trends, and networks.6 The present volume aims at a sharper break with the older modes of writing diplomatic and international history. The chapters in the book do this in several ways. First, all the chapters in the book seek to challenge the centrality of India in much of the existing historiography. This is accomplished either by underscoring the importance and agency of smaller states in the region – Bhutan, Afghanistan, Pakistan – or by focusing on the lives and ideas of a range of individuals, who would not count among policymakers or feature in the standard diplomatic accounts of the region: the Hindu nationalist B.S. Moonje, the humanist Kalidas Nag, the Islamist thinker Maulana Mawdudi, the Gandhians Dr. and Mrs. Ramachandran, the Afghan singer Aḥmad Ẓāhir, the anti-apartheid activist Phyllis Naidoo. Second, the chapters in this book open up the category of “international” in remarkably broad ways, bringing in a host of lives and experiences that the boundaries of the nation-state could neither subsume nor confine: the Rohingya rebels who dreamt of their own “Pakistan;” migrants traveling back and forth between southern India and Malaya; South Asian refugees from Uganda. The editors argue that they intend to stretch the “semantic range” of the category of the “international” to include transregional and global actors. Cumulatively, the subnational and transnational accounts offered here scramble and revise our received understandings of the international history of South Asia. Finally, a running thread through all the chapters is the idea of internationalism. A protean and conceptually elusive term, we may minimally understand

afterword 313

it as any outlook or practice that seeks to transcend the nation towards a wider community.7 The contributors to the volume, however, encourage us to investigate internationalism as “a lived, embodied experience,” encompassing “travelling, moving abroad for education, to take part in political gatherings,” and so forth. This move dramatically widens the range of inquiry of any future international history of South Asia. Indeed, the contributions to the present volume offer a foretaste of the historiographical riches that lie ahead of us. While enthusiastically welcoming the new historiography presented here, I would also suggest that we think hard about some of the methodological, conceptual, and practical choices that this volume enjoins us to make. In the first place, it seems important to maintain some distinction between international, transnational, and global histories. Any attempt at rigid demarcation and policing of boundaries will, of course, be arbitrary, but the distinctions retain methodological and practical utility. As Erez Manela has recently observed, the term “international history” is perhaps best confined to interaction, however broadly construed, between nation-states. Transnational history focuses on flows and circulation of people, ideas, objects, and practices across the permeable boundaries of states. Meanwhile, global history examines processes and connections in a globalized space or under conditions of “globality.”8 In eliding these categories we may risk conflating different levels of analysis as well as losing sight of the importance of states and policymakers in international history. Similarly, an ontological conception of internationalism as “lived practice” – irrespective of whether it was by choice – could be problematic. Transgressing the boundaries of the nation-state is not tantamount to transcending the category of the nation-state. An ideological conception of internationalism, therefore, retains its importance – as demonstrated here by the chapters on Jamaat-i Islami and Gandhian peace workers. Holding on to internationalism as an ideology has another advantage. It reminds us that any form of internationalism can only be understood against the backcloth of prevalent forms of nationalism. Indeed, logically the meaning of internationalism depends on constructions of nationalism. Transnational practices of various kinds may or may not embody such understandings of the internationalism. It is not clear that applying the label of internationalism so widely necessarily yields conceptual clarity or analytic precision. By retaining our focus on internationalism as an ideology, we also remind ourselves that any idea or practice that seeks to go beyond the nation-state will nevertheless have to play out in a world of which nation-states are an integral part. “Unbounding South Asia” is a fertile historiographical move, but we also need to consider how this relates to the international system of states and the changes that it has undergone. In other words, the concerns of the more conventional diplomatic and international histories need to be revisited alongside the newer frames and lines of inquiry proposed here.

314 srinath raghavan

In his diaries, Walter Benjamin recalled Bertolt Brecht’s quip: “Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones.” Whatever the adjectives we attach to the old and the new, a future international historiography of South Asia can only benefit from keeping the concerns, concepts, and approaches of both in play. With the onset of the floodtide of postcolonial archival materials in most South Asian states, the moment seems propitious for such imaginative departures from the past.

Notes 1

See https://www.kcl.ac.uk/nihsa.

2

Sarvepalli Gopal’s early books included important analyses of the Raj’s foreign policy: The Viceroyalty of Lord Ripon 1880-1884 (London: Oxford University Press, 1953); British Policy in India 1858-1905 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1965). The notable exception to this broad trend is the work of Sneh Mahajan, British Foreign Policy: The Role of India (London: Routledge, 2002); Ibid., Foreign Policy of Colonial India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). See also Malcolm Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran, and Afghanistan, 1798-1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980); Edward Ingram, In Defence of British India: Great Britain in the Middle East, 1775-1842 (London: Frank Cass, 1984).

3

See, in particular, Alastair Lamb, The China-India Border: The Origins of the Disputed Boundaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1964); Ibid., The McMahon Line, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1966); Ibid., The Sino-Indian Boundary in Ladakh (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1975); Parshotam Mehra, The McMahon Line and After (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1974); Ibid., An “Agreed” Frontier: Ladakh and India’s Northernmost Borders, 1846-1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).

4

Anita Inder Singh, The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship 1947-56 (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1993); Dennis Kux, India and the United States: Estranged Democracies (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1991); Ibid., United States and Pakistan: Disenchanted Allies (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2000); Robert McMahon, Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India and Pakistan (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994); Andrew Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947-1964 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

5

C. Dasgupta, War and Diplomacy in Kashmir 1947-48 (London: Sage, 2002); Rudra Chaudhuri, Forged in Crisis: India and the United States since 1947 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014); Tanvi Madan, Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped US-India Relations During the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Press, 2020); Paul McGarr, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Pallavi Raghavan, Animosity at Bay: An Alternative History of the India-Pakistan Relationship, 1947-52 (London: Hurst, 2020); Rakesh Ankit, The Kashmir Conflict: From Empire to Cold War, 1945-1966 (London: Routledge, 2016); Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

6

Corinna Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien: Eine internationale Geschichte, 1947-1980 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015); David Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Kris Manjapra, The Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across the Empire (Cambridge,

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MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Ibid., Fierce Enigmas: A History of the United States in South Asia (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2018). 7

Perry Anderson, “Internationalism: A Breviary,” New Left Review 14 (2002), 5–25; Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (London: Allen Lane, 2014).

8

Erez Manela, “International Society as a Historical Subject,” Diplomatic History 44 (2020), 184–209. On “globality,” see Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “World History in a Global Age,” The American Historical Review 100 (1995), 1034–60.

Index

ʿAbdallah, ʿAzzam, 216

Area studies- logic of, 205, see also Pacific, see

ʿAli Khān, Nizam, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 55

also Greater India, see also South Asia, see

Abileah, Joseph, 194

also region-building, see also naming

Activists, 18, 20, 22, 23, 26

Artists, 18

Addis Abeba, 197-8

Ashram, 187-8, 191, 193, 196

Afghanistan, 17, 21, 23, 25, 38, 215, 237, 269-72,

Asia, 44, 45

274-88

Asian Relations Conference (1947), 181

Africa Freedom Action (AFA), 197-200

Asianism, 22, 23, 168, 171, 172, 180

African Americans, 290

Asians (in Africa), 17, 20, 21, 25

African National Congress (ANC), 296, 300, 303,

Askari, Muhammad Hasan, 258

305, Afro-Asia(nism), 19, 21, 85, 179, 187-90, 197-8, 237,

Asoka, 168, 172, 182 Assam, 65, 72, 75

249-50, 259-64 Afro-Asian Writers Congress, 249-50, 259

Bagchi, Prabodh Chandra, 171

Aga Khan 149, 154, 156

Balance of power, 41, 42, 51, 54

Aikya Keralam, 137, 139, 145, 149, 151

Bandung Conference (1955), 21, 250, 292, 303

al-Azhar University, 209

Bangladesh, 17, 25, 111, 126

al-Qaradawi, Yusuf, 203, 209

Bantu Education Act (1953), 300

Algeria, 189, See also Middle-East

Batavia, 168, 175

Algiers, 44

Bay of Bengal, 19, 145, 148, 149, 152

All-India Radio, 272, 273, 279, see also radio

Beirut, 188, 195

Alliances 20, 21, 52, 54, 181, 196, 298-300, see also

Belonging, 128, 135, 136, 143, 145, 149, 152, 237, See

Triple Alliance

also imaginaries, See also identity

Ambassador, see diplomats

Bengal, 47, 48, 72, 73

Anand, Mulk Raj, 251

Besant, Annie, 297

Anarchism, 188, 194

Bhashani, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan, 262

Anglo-Afghan War, 271

Bhoodan movement, 187-8, 191, 193, 197, 199

Angola, 290

Bhutan, 17, 20, 38, 61-81, 90

Annexation, 17, 22, 56, 73, 78, 84, 85, 88, 93, 94, 95, 97, 99, 101

Bhutan House (Kalimpong), 68 Bhutan Standard Time, 76

Anti-nuclear activism, 189, 197

Bhutanese Ngultrum, 76

Apartheid, 19, 238, 292, 294, 296-7, 299, 301, 303,

Boundary with India, 72-3

305 Security forces, 300-1, 304 Struggle against, 18, 290, 292, 304 Arakan, 17, 107, 109-28

Deb Raja of Bhutan, 65, 72 duars, 72, 73 Bihar, 47 Biko, Steve, 302

Arakan Mujahed Party, 110

Black Consciousness, 298

Arakan Muslims. See Rohingyas

Bombay, 48

Archives, 311-314

Borderlands, 84, 95, 109, 111, 117, 124, 126, 128

318 index

Borders, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 91, 95, 109, 111, 115, 117, 128, 135, 136, 138, 140, 145, 146, 149, 152 Bose, Subbash Chandra, 297

Craighill Handy, E.S., 175, 176 Cross-cultural, 45, 46, 49, 51 Cultural cooperation, 173

Boundaries, see borders Braganza, Tristao de, 100

Dadoo, Yusuf, 296

Brishna, Ustad ‘Abdul Ghafur, 272, 273, 286

Dalai Lama, 65, 68

Britain, 20, 25, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 51, 52, 53, 55, 109

Dar Es Salaam, 85, 88, 90, 91, 101, 187-8, 197-9, see

Brumanna, 195-7, 200 Buddhism, 168, 187, 189, 191 Burke, Edmund, 48, 49, 53 Burma, 17, 25, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 128, 141, 142

also Tanzania Decolonization, 17, 19, 21, 23, 26, 38, 84, 85, 87, 93, 95, 97, 100, 101, 103, 109, 111, 112, 123, 124, 126, 128, 136, 139, 179, 237, 311 Davis, Angela, 289 Dayal, Harishwar, 75

Cabinet Mission (1946), 61-3, 66, 69

daʿwa, 213, 214

Cabral, João, 100

Defiance Campaign, 299

Calcutta, 52

Democratic Students Association, Pakistan, 255

Ceylon, see Sri Lanka

Deoband, 205

Chatterjee, Ramananda, 171, 177

Desai, Narayan, 196-7

Chatterjee, Suniti Kumar, 169, 171, 179

Dewangiri, 73, 75

Chin, Pa, 249-50, 253

Dhadda, Siddharaj, 193, 195-200

China, 65, 71, 75-7

Diaspora, 20, 23, 25, 84, 88, 90, 103, 109, 138, 139,

Chittagong Hill Tracts, 17 Citizenship, 20, 25, 85, 88, 90, 91, 100, 101, 128, 132, 140, 142-4, 146, 148, 149, 150-4, 158, 159, 237 Citizenship Act of 1955, 149 Civil disobedience, 295

143, 146, 149, 151, 152, 238, 296 Dines, Mary, 154, 156, 157, 158 Diplomacy, 20, 22, 23, 38, 41, 44, 46, 52, 311-12 Diplomats, 18, 45, 46, 47, 52, 150, 311, see also vakil

Civil rights, 193-4

Disgust, 19, see also emotions

civil society, 94, 97

Docrat, Abdul Khalek Mahomed, 289

Civilization, 18, 19, 21, 38, 42, 88, 91, 168, 171, 178,

Doctors Pact, 296

Co-Ordinating Committee for the Welfare of

Doctrine of lapse, 54

Evacuees from Uganda (CCWEU), 147, 157

Dorji, Jigmie Palden, 18, 20

Cochin, 137, 138, 139, 145, 150 See also Kerala

Dorji, Jigmie Palden, 68-9, 75

Cold War, 179, 187, 189, 190, 196, 311

Dorji, Kazi Ugyen, 68

Cold War in Pakistan, 247-9, 259-64

Dorji, Sonam Tobgye (Raja), 68, 75

Colombo Plan, 76

Douglas-Home, Alec, 152, 156

Commonwealth, 70

Durban, 289-90, 298-300, 302

Communism, 22, 23, 125, 141, 142, 151

Durban Race Riots (1949), 298

in Pakistan, 247-8, 253-5, 259-60, 262-4 Communist Party of India, 254 Conferences, 227-228, 237, see also Round Table Conference Congress Alliance, 299 Congress for Cultural Freedom, Pakistan, 260-61

East Africa, 22, 25, 38, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 93, 97, 99, 101 East Asia, 15, 23 East India Company (EIC), 20, 41, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54

Conscientious objection, 190, 193, 195, 197

Egypt, 209

Constituent Assembly, 61, 66, 73

Elites, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 38, 87, 88, 89, 90, 139,

Cosmopolitanism, 20, 88, 112, 126, 236-8 Correspondence, 85, 97

179, 237 Emigration, see migration

index 319

Emotions, 19, 292, 302-3, 307, see also disgust, see also friendship

Hedgewar, K.B., 242 Heinegg, Max, 192

Eurocentrism, 27, 42

Heydar ʿAli, 43, 47

Europe, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51

Hijazi, Naseem, 258-9

Exceptionalism, 19, 27, 172, 178, 182

Himalaya, 18, 38, 61-81, 95

Exile, 238, 289-93, 302-07

Hindu nationalism, 19, 100, 182, 228, 231, 237 Homeland, 17, 25, 84, 117, 150, 151

Faiz, Faiz Ahmad, 255, 262

Humanism, 168, 172, 174, 182

Family ties, 19, 20, 23, 38, 101, 109, 148

Humanitarianism, 20, 23, 147, 148, 151, 157, 159

Faqir of Ipi, 274

Hungary, 290, 304, 306

Fascism, 23, 173, 174

Hyderabad, 20, 24, 38, 41, 43, 46, 47, 49, 50-2, 55

Federalism, 24 Fellow traveler, 189, 190, 194 Fellowship, 19, 190, 191, 200

Identity, 88-90, 100, 101, 103, 112, 117, 126, 128, 135, 136, 139, 146, 148, 150, 151, 152, 238

Foreign relations, 44, 45, 46, 49, 55

Ideology, 19, 22, 23, 130, 237, 311

Formichi, Carlo, 169, 173

Imaginaries, 16-8, 26, 86, 88, 91, 103, 117, 123, 128,

France, 48, 49 Freedom Charter, 299 Friendship, 19, 188-90, 196, 199

136, 138, 139, 141, 150, 151, 152, 154, 238 Immigration, 145, 147, 149, 155, 156, 158, see also migration Commonwealth Immigration Act (1962), 149

Gandhi, Indira, 149

Immigration Act (1971), 149, 156

Gandhi, Manilal, 297

Indenture, 290, 293, 305-6

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchan, 170, 173, 174,

Independence, 109, 111, 136, 139, 151, 152, See also

187, 191, 194-5, 231, 233-34, 240, 290, 294, 297 Gandhian, 22, 187-8, 193, 197-200 Gandhi Luthuli Documentation Centre, 289, 295, 297, 302 Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, 191 Gandhigram, 187-8, 190-3, 195-7, 200

decolonization India Bureau, 173 India, 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 38, 46, 48, 50, 90, 91, 93, 95, 100, 109, 111, 115, 117, 121, 122, 123, 128, 139, 141, 142, 144, 149, 154, 179, 290-1, 293-4, 296-7, 301, 303, 305-7, 311

Gbedema, Komala Agbeli, 193

Indian Civil Service, 67, 69

Gender, 147, 150, 151, 156, 157, 158

Indian National Congress, 66, 296

Geopolitics, 17, 45, 95

Indian Ocean, 15, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 95, 99,

Ghana, 193, 196,

112, 135

Gilani, Sayyid Asʿad, 211-12

Indian People’s Theatre, 253

Goa, 17, 22, 24, 38, 84, 88, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99,

Indianization, 176, 177

100, 101, 103

Indira Doctrine, 15

Goans, 17, 22, 24, 38, 84-101, 103

Indo-Pacific, 19, 168, 174–8, 180

Governance, 45, 48, 53

Indo-Polynesians, 177-9

Greater India, 18, 22, 23, 167, 168, 171, 172, 174–79,

Indology, 169, 176

182

insurgent groups, 18, 26, 110, 125, 151

Guerilla, 110, 112, 116, 120, 121, 122, 143, 151

Intellectuals, 18, 21, 22, 23, 179

Gumede, Archie, 300

Intergovernmental Committee for European

Hakimiyya see Divine Sovereignty

International community, 42, 44, 51, 52

Hanafi madhhab, 206

International History, 18, 26-7, 42, 311-3

Hanoi, 168

International law, 20, 21, 42, 47, 49, 51, 53-5, see

Migration (ICEM), 150

Hasan, Sibte, 255-9, 264

also Interpolity law

320 index

International relations, 42, 44, 50, 52, 55

Malayalam, 137, 138, 145, 148, 150, 151

Internationalism, definition of, 17-9, 311-3

Tamil, 148, 149

Interpolity law, 44, 45, 50, 51, 53, see also

Urdu, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 230, 249, 273, 291,

International law Iran, 211 Islamic Revolution, 204, 210, 211, 213, 216

292 Lawyers, 148, 149 Letters, 85, 86, 95, 141

Ireland, partition of, 67

Legitimacy, 43, 44, 47, 54

Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba (IJT), 204

Leiden, 168, 169

and Islamic Revolution, 211-2

Lesotho, 290, 301-2

Islamic law, 45

Lévi, Sylvain, 169, 170, 175

Islamic world, 16, 18, 22, 45

Limbdi, Fatteh Sinhji of, 71

Islamists, 18, 22, 204

London, 15, 19, 48, 49, 53, 188, 190, 233-38

Jabavu, D.D.T, 296

Mahomo, Nana (Nelson), 194

Jamaat-i Islami (JI), 22, 179, 213

Malabar, 19, 137, See also Kerala, See also

International ties of, 203-4 founding of, 206, 210 ties with Zia ul-Haq, 214 international standing of, 215 and global Islamism, 217 Japan, 189, 194

Travancore, See also Cochin Malaya, 17, 19, 109, 132, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 154, See also Malaysia Malaysia, 25, 136, 139, 144, 149, 154 See also Malaya

Jelep la (Pass), 68

Mandela, Nelson, 289, 304

Jenkins, Roy, 156

Marathas, 20, 38, 41, 43, 46, 49, 51

Jihad, 212, 215

Mawdudi, Abu l’-Aʿla, 179

Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 15, 111, 117, 207

legacy of, 203

Joint Committee for the Welfare of Immigrants

and Islamic Revolution, 204

(JCWI), 154, 156, 157 Joseph, Nersen, 299

education of, 206 conception of the Islamic state, 207 Arabic translations of, 209

Kabul, 270, 272, 273, 274, 276, 277, 279, 281, 284, 286, 287

and Islamic Revolution, 210 influence of, 215

Kalimpong, 68

McMahon Line, 76

Karachi, 86, 88

Meah, Omra, 110, 114, 115, 122, 123, 125, 128

Kaul, B.M., 76

Melanesia, see Pacific

Kaunda, Kenneth, 197-9

Micronesia, see Pacific

Kenya, 85, 86, 90, 99, 100, 139, 296

Middle East, 15, 23, 179

Kerala, 17, 138, 143, 145, 148, 149, 150, 154, See also Cochin, See also Malabar, See also Travancore

ties to South Asia, 205 Migration, 18, 23, 25, 45, 113, 117, 128, 135, 136, 143, 144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 293

Kesava Menon, K.P., 137, 138, 148, 149, 150, 154

Ministry of Information and Culture, 277

Khan, Amanullah, 272

Minorities, 26, 84, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 97, 101, 103,

Khilafat Movement, 206 Konow, Sten, 169

111, 140, 143 Mitra, Panchanan, 176 Mobility, 24, 89, 95, 109, 113, 136, 139, see also

Lahuti, Abu al-Qasim 282, 283, 288 Language, 86, 88, 90, 99, 117, 123, 124, 125, 126, 135, 136, 144, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152

Migration Mongolian Fringe thesis (Olaf Caroe), 62, 65 Mookerjee, Asutosh, 169

index 321

Moonje, B.S., 18, 19, 20, 21, 232-43

ol-Omarāʾ̄, ʿAzim, 52

Mughals, 43-7

Orientalism, 19, 168, 169, 171,

Murad, Khurram, 213

Orissa, 47

Muslim Brotherhood, 209, 215-6

Ovaldé, Pierre, 191

Muslim League, 66, 207, 254

Owen, Margaret, 147, 148, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158

Myanmar, see Burma Mysore, 41, 43, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52

Pacific Ocean, 19, 22, 176, 178, 179 Pacifism, 19, 22, 23, 170, 178, 187-96, 198-200

Nag Kalidas, 18, 19, 21, 167-82 Naicker, Monty, 296 Naidoo, M.D, 300-1

Pakistan 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 62, 74, 90, 111, 112, 117, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, 128, 179, 237, 212, 296

Naidoo, Phyllis, 19, 20, 21, 238

emergence of 205

Naidoo, Sahdhan, 300-1

Islamic identity of, 207-8

Naidoo, Sharadh (Shah), 300-1

Movement for, 253-5

Naidoo, Sukhthi, 300-1

relations with China, 259-60

Naidu Sarojini, 297

relations with the USSR, 248, 252, 259-60, 263

Nairobi, 40, 85, 94, 101

Palden Thondup Namgyal, 18, 20

Nambyar, P.K., 148

Pan-Africanism, 196-7

Namgyal, Paljor, 68 Namgyal, Tashi (Maharaja of Sikkim), 68 Namgyal, Thondup (Maharajakumar of Sikkim), 68

Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA), 197 Pan-Islamism, 18, 21, 22 Panchen Lama, 65

Naming, 15-6

Pandit, Vijayalakshmi, 296

Nasir, Hasan, 263

Paris, 168-71, 182

Natal, 293, 294, 301

Partitioning, 21, 24, 90, 104, 112, 123, 136, 138, 141,

Natal Indian Congress, 289, 295 Nation-state, 17, 18, 23, 25, 26, 27, 84, 86, 88, 90,

144, 150, 152, 154 Parwin, Mirmin, 273

91, 95, 97, 100, 101, 103, 109, 111, 117, 128, 135,

Pashtunistan, 21, 24, 25, 274

138, 152, 179, 237, 313

Passive resistance, 294-5, 298

Nationalism, 86, 88, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100, 145, 179, 311, 313

Passport, 25, 132, 139, 140, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 158, 159

Nationalist Party (South Africa), 296

Patel, Rambhai, 198

Nationality, 148, 149, 150-3, 156

Patron-client relations, 43, 45

British Nationality Act (1948), 148 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 18, 23, 66-7, 75-6, 93, 95, 97, 99, 117, 149, 170, 181, 297

Pelliot, Paul, 169, 170 Pereira, Antonio Cecil, 19, 109, 127-8, 136, 140, 141, 142, 144, 146, 148, 149, 154, 136

Nepal, 62, 65, 75

Persian Gulf, 154

Networks 18, 19, 20, 21, 26, 84, 86, 88, 135, 136,

Philippines, 179

139, 179, 237 Knowledge networks, 21, 136, 152, 168 Newspapers, 22, 38, 85, 86, 88, 90, 93, 99, 101, 145, 146, 230, see also The Goan Voice Non-Aligned States (summit conference), 76 Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), 295, 297

Pinto, Pio Gama, 97, 99, 100 Policymakers, 311 Polynesia, see Pacific Poona (Pune), 44, 49, 50 Portuguese colonies, 38, 86, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100

Non-racialism, 22, 291, 297-8, 300.

Prasad, Devi, 196, 200

Non-violence, 187-9, 191-200

Princely States, 20, 21, 23, 38, 43, 44, 45, 55, 63,

Nyerere, Julius, 197, 199

67, 69, 71, 130, 132, 154

322 index

Progressive Writers Association (Anjuman-i-Tarraqqi Pasand Mussanifin), 251-5

Sarvodaya Movement, 19, 188, 191, 193-4, 196 Satyagraha (1913), 192, 199, 290

Protectorate, 54

Scale, 18, 22, 25-7, 86, 103-4, 135, 152

Public sphere, 22, 86, 90, 97, 138, see also

Scholars, 18, 19, 46, 52

newspapers, see also radio

Scott, Michael, 25, 194, 197 Second World War, 23, 109, 110, 111, 113, 116, 117,

Quakers, 188, 190, 194-6 Qutb, Sayyid, 208-209

120, 123, 126, 135, 138, 139, 141, 142, 190, 193 Selassie, Haile, 198 Self-determination, 21, 24, 38, 86, 91, 93, 95, 97,

Ramani, R., 146 Radio, 22, 237, 269-86, see also All-India Radio Radio Afghanistan, 275, 277, 278, 279, 281, 287

103, 112, 117, 126, 128, 136, 152 Separatism, 18, See also insurgent groups, See also guerrillas

Radio Moscow, 275, 282, 287

Shah, A.A., 120-3

Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA), 269

Shanti Sena, 195-6

Raghavan, Nedhyam, 138

Shariʿa, 208

Rajagopalachari, C, 75

Sharpeville, 300

Ramachandran, G., 187-8, 191, 193-4, 196

Shūshtari, ʿAbdollatif, 52-3

Ramakrishna Mission, 75

Sidkeong Tulku, 68

Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangha (RSS), 242

Sikkim, 18, 20, 61-81, 90

Red Cross, 150

Gould, Basil (Political Officer in Sikkim), 68

Refugees, 18, 25, 113, 122, 125, 146, 147, 150, 151, 153,

Hopkinson, Arthur J. (Political Officer in

154, 156, 157, 159 Convention on the Status of Refugees (1951), 153, 154 157 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 146, 147, 148, 150 152, 153, 154, 155, 158

Sikkim), 67, 69, 70, 71, 73 Political Officer, 63, 73, 76 Singapore, 132, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149, 150 Singers, 18, see also Sonic internationalism, see also Ẓāhir, Aḥmad

Protocol (1967), 153, 157

Singh, Swaran, 149

Refugee rights 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154-6,

Sino-Indian relations, 311

158, 159

Sisulu, Walter, 289

Region-building, 16

Slavery – abolition of, 293

Resident, 46, 48, 49, 52

Smuts government, 296

Rhodesia see Zambia, see Zimbabwe

Socialism, 21, 22

Robben Island, 300

Solidarity, 189, 196-8

Rohingyas, 24, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 122,

Sonic internationalism, 22, 237

123, 124, 126, 128 Rolland, Romain, 168, 170, 171, 173, 174, 181, 182 Round Table Conference (1930-2), 20, 21, 22, 23, 227-28, 234-43, see also Conferences Roy, Dhirendra Nath, 179 Roy, M.N., 21 Rulers, 18, 20, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55 Rustin, Bayard, 193-7, 199, 200

South Africa, 17, 19, 20, 21, 25, 238, 292-3, 295-9, 303-6 South African Communist Party (SACP), 298-300 South African Indian Congress (SAIC), 299 South Asia, 15-17, 22, 23, 25, 26, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54 and Islam, 205 South Asia, 38, 91, 95, 99, 101, 103, 128, 136, 138,

Santiniketan, See Visva Bharati University Sarkar, Benoy Kumar, 171 Sarva Seva Sangh, 188, 194, 198-9

148, 152, 154, 179 Southeast Asia, 23, 112, 128, 135, 136, 138, 139, 146, 152, 154

index 323

Sovereignty, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 38, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50-5, 179 Divine Sovereignty, 208, 212, 213

Triple Alliance, 41, 42, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54 Tucci, Giuseppe, 169, 173 Tunis, 44, See also Middle East

Soviet Union, 189 Space, 25-7, 104, 112, 117, 128

Uganda, 19, 20, 21, 25, 84, 90, 91, 95, 109

Sri Lanka, 16, 133, 136, 139, 141, 150, 154, 191

ul-Haq, Zia, 203, 204

Sringapatam, 41, 42, 51

United Nations Educational, Scientific and

Stateless, 146, 147, 148, 150-8 Statesmen, 18, 98, 150, 311 Stutterheim, W.F., 174

Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 76, 278 United Nations (UN), 21, 76, 86, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 100, 296, 303

Sultan, Tipu (Sultan of Mysore), 41, 43, 46, 49, 50, 52 Sutherland, Bill, 193-4, 196-7, 199-200

Vakil, 45, 46, 46, 47, 50, 52, see also diplomats Visva Bharati University, 169, 173, 190, 193

Swaziland, 290 Wagoner, Philip, 51 Tagore, Rabindranath, 167, 169-74, 179, 182

Wakefield, E.B., 70-71

Taiji Yamaga, 194

Wangchuck, Jigme Dorji (Maharaja of Bhutan),

Tamil Nadu, 187, 293

68

Tanganyika see Tanzania

Wangchuck, Kesang Dorji, 68

Tanzania, 84, 86, 87, 90, 103, 139, 187-8, 197, 200

Wangchuck, Ugyen (Maharaja of Bhutan), 63

Tatum, Arlo, 190-1, 194, 196-7 Territory 88, 92, 97, 100, 101, 103, 104, 117, 122, 123, 124, 126, 128, 136, 144, 146, 152 retrocession of territory, 62, 74, 75

as Tongsa Penlop, 73 War, 109, 110-4, 125, 126, 128, 142 War Resister’s International (WRI), 187-8, 190-6, 200

The Goan Association, 94, 95, 97, 99

Westphalian order, 41, 42, 50-4

The Goan Overseas Association, 94

Wijk, Hein van, 193

The Goan Voice, 22, 40, 85, 86, 88, 90, 94, 97, 99,

Wilsonianism, 168

101, 103, see also newspapers Third World, 85 Thivy, John 143, 148, 150 Tibet, 61, 62, 65, 68, 75

Winternitz, Moriz, 169 World Peace Brigade, 22, 26, 179, 188, 193, 195-200 World Peace Council (WPC), 189, 192. 261

Chumbi Valley, 68

Writers, 18, 22

Lhasa-Calcutta trade route, 68-69

Writing, 152, 179, 237

Tibetan Trade Agent, 72 Transvaal Indian Congress, 296

Xuma, A.B., 296

Travancore, 20, 49, 50, 132, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 150, 152, See also Kerala

Younghusband Mission (1903-4), 71

Travel, 18, 20, 21, 136, 138, 139, 145, 152, 179, 230, 235, 237, 238 Travel writing, 228-31 Travers, Robert, 53 Treaties, 20, 41, 44, 46-53, 55 Treaty of Punakha, 63, 75 Treaty of Sinchula, 72 Indo-Bhutanese Treaty of 1949, 75-7 Negotiation of treaties, 43, 46, 50, 51

Zaheer, Sajjad, 251, 253, 255 Ẓāhir, Aḥmad, 19, 269, 271, 279, 280, 281, 283, 284, 287, 288 Zambia, 187-8, 197-200 Zimbabwe, 289, 290