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India and overseas Indians in Ceylon and Burma, 1946–1965: Experiments in post-imperial sovereignty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2021

Raphaëlle Khan Open the ORCID record for Raphaëlle Khan [Opens in a new window]  and
Taylor C. Sherman
Raphaëlle Khan*
Affiliation:
Asia Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Taylor C. Sherman
Affiliation:
Department of International History, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Despite the existence of a large Indian diaspora, there has been relatively little scholarly attention paid to India's relations with overseas Indians after its independence in 1947. The common narrative is that India abruptly cut ties with overseas Indians at independence, as it adhered to territorially based understandings of sovereignty and citizenship. Re-examining India's relations with Indian communities in Ceylon and Burma between the 1940s and the 1960s, this article demonstrates that, despite its rhetoric, independent India did not renounce responsibility for its diaspora. Instead, because of pre-existing social connections that spanned the former British empire, the Government of India faced regular demands to assist overseas Indians, and it responded on several fronts. To understand this continued engagement with overseas Indians, this article introduces the idea of ‘post-imperial sovereignty'. This type of sovereignty was layered, as imperial sovereignty had been, but was also concerned with advancing norms designed to protect minority communities across the world. India’s strategy to argue for these norms was simultaneously multilateral, regional, and bilateral. It sought to use the United Nations, the Commonwealth, and the 1947 Asian Relations Conference to secure rights for overseas Indians. As those attempts failed, India negotiated claims for citizenship with governments in Burma and Ceylon, and shaped the institutions and language through which Indians voiced demands for their rights in these countries. Indian expressions of sovereignty beyond the space of the nation-state, therefore, impacted on practices of citizenship, even during the process of de-recognition in Asia.

Keywords

DiasporamigrationminoritiesAsianscitizenshipsovereignty
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , July 2022 , pp. 1153 - 1182
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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6 Ibid., p. 2.

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14 Ibid., p. 98.

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23 See, for example, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), Chapter 3; Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Joya Chatterji, Partition's Legacies (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021); Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Datta, Anjali Bhardwaj, and, ‘“Useful” “Earning” Citizens: Gender, State and the Market in Post-colonial Delhi’, Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 6 (2019), pp. 1924–1955CrossRefGoogle Scholar; William Gould and Sarah Ansari, Boundaries of Belonging: Localities, Citizenship and Rights in India and Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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26 Raman, ‘The “Postwar ‘Returnee”’, pp. 121–140; Alagirisamy, ‘The Self-Respect Movement and Tamil Politics of Belonging’, pp. 1547–1575; Ramnath, ‘Intertwined Itineraries’, pp. 1–24.

27 Rao, P. Kodanda, ‘Indians Overseas’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 233, no. 1 (1944), p. 204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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29 A. V. Pai to D. V. Rege, Department of Commonwealth Relations (CR), New Delhi, 13 October 1945. In ‘Indian Labour working in Ceylon, Malaya etc.—Enquiry by labour investigation committee regarding protective measures taken for the benefit of labourers at the instance of the Govt. of India’, CR Dept., Overseas II, File No. 125(5)-O.S., 1946, the National Archives of India (henceforth: NAI).

30 These efforts led to the 1927 Cape Town Agreement, according to which India agreed to assist in the voluntary emigration of Indians in South Africa, while South Africa promised to take measures to uplift the Indian community remaining in its territory.

31 S. K. Agrawala and M. Koteswara Rao, ‘Nationality and International Law in Indian Perspective’, in Nationality and International Law in Asian Perspective, (ed.) Ko Swam Sik (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1990), p. 108.

32 Shastri, Amita, ‘Estate Tamils, the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 and Sri Lankan Politics’, Contemporary South Asia 8, no. 1 (1999), pp. 69–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rajagopalan, T. S., ‘Indians Overseas: The Position in Ceylon’, India Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1945), pp. 169–171Google Scholar.

33 Times of India, 12 February 1941, p. 7.

34 Girja Shankar Bajpai (1891–1954), a former Indian civil servant during the Raj, was then secretary-general of the Ministry of External Affairs.

35 Times of India, 12 February 1941, p. 7.

36 Ibid.

37 Mazumder, ‘Constructing the Indian Immigrant’.

38 Times of India, 19 June 1941, p. 7.

39 Ibid., 22 July 1941, p. 7.

40 Ibid., 29 July 1941, p. 9; 20 January 1942, p. 5.

41 Ibid., 22 July 1941, p. 7.

42 S. P. Singh and Saroj Kumar, ‘Indian National Movement and Sri Lanka (Ceylon) during 1930–1947’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 61, Part One: Millennium (2000– 2001), pp. 714–717.

43 Times of India, 26 July 1939, p. 11.

44 Ibid.

45 Talk to a delegation of overseas Indians at Meerut on 24 November 1946, in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (hereafter SWJN), 2nd series, Vol. 1, (ed.) Sarvepalli Gopal (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1984), p. 546.

46 Speech in the Legislative Assembly, 14 March 1947, SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 2, p. 433.

47 Times of India, 28 December 1947, p. 1.

48 James Baxter, Report on Indian Immigration (Rangoon: Government Printing and Stationary, Burma, 1941).

49 Speech in the Legislative Assembly, 14 March 1947, SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 2, p. 438.

50 See, for instance, Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontents.

51 Press Information Bureau, Government of India, 15 August 1949, IOR/L/P&J/7/15292, India Office Records, British Library.

52 See, for example, Times of India, 20 April 1954, p. 5.

53 Ibid., 22 June 1959, p. 1.

54 Ibid., 9 September 1953, p. 6.

55 R. N. Banerjee to R. T. Chari, New Delhi, 20 May 1946. In ‘Ceylon-Indians in-Position of –’, MEA, File No. 34-O.S.II, 1946 (Confidential), NAI.

56 See Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens; Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

57 Raghavan, ‘The United Nations and the Emergence of Independent India’, pp. 143–156.

58 See Cindy Ewing, ‘Codifying Minority Rights: Postcolonial Constitutionalism in Burma, Ceylon, and India’, in Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Birth of Global Human Rights Politics, (eds) A. Dirk Moses, Marco Duranti and Roland Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 179–206.

59 Bhagavan, Peacemakers; Lorna Lloyd, ‘“A Family Quarrel”. The Development of the Dispute over Indians in South Africa’, The Historical Journal 34, no. 3 (1991), pp. 703–725; L. Lloyd, ‘“A Most Auspicious Beginning”: The 1946 United Nations General Assembly and the Question of the Treatment of Indians in South Africa’, Review of International Studies 16, no. 2 (1990), pp. 131–153; Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Thakur, Vineet, ‘The “Hardy Annual”: A History of India's First UN Resolution’, India Review 16, no. 4 (2017), pp. 401–429CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Indian engagement with anti-apartheid politics after the UN debate of 1946, see O'Malley, Alanna, ‘India, Apartheid and the New World Order at the UN, 1946–1962’, Journal of World History 31, no. 1 (2020), pp. 195–223CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anna Konieczna, ‘We the People of the United Nations: The UN and the Global Campaigns Against Apartheid’, in A Global History of Anti-Apartheid: ‘Forward to Freedom’ in South Africa, (eds) Anna Konieczna and Bob Skinner (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 67–103.

60 On India's role in building a human rights regime at the UN, see Raphaëlle Khan, ‘Between Ambitions and Caution: India, Human Rights and Self-Determination at the United Nations’, in Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Birth of Global Human Rights Politics, (eds) A. Dirk Moses, Marco Duranti and Roland Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 207–235. On the role of decolonized states more generally, see Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

61 Thakur, Vineet, ‘An Asian Drama: The Asian Relations Conference, 1947’, The International History Review 41, no. 3 (2018), p. 2Google Scholar.

62 ‘A United Asia for World Peace’, 23 March 1947, SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 2, pp. 503–508.

63 Ibid.

64 Frederick James, Asian Relations Conference, March–April 1947: A Note on the Agenda of the Asian Conference (New Delhi: Indian Council of World Affairs, 1947), p. 2.

65 Abraham, How India became Territorial, pp. 69–70. While Abraham also noted that Indian delegates ‘[sought] to establish more general principles for inter-Asian migration and protection for alien minorities’, he did not dwell on that point. See Itty Abraham, ‘Bandung and State Formation in Post-Colonial Asia’, in Bandung Re-visited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order, (eds) See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), pp. 55–56. Thakur challenges Abraham's interpretation in Thakur, ‘An Asian Drama’, pp. 1–23.

66 A. V. Pai, ‘An Observer's report of the discussions of Group “B”: “Racial Problems and Inter-Asian Migration”’, 27 March 1947. In ‘Inter-Asian Relations Conference—Report on discussions on “Racial Problems and Inter Asian Migration”’, EA & CR Department, File No. 11(13)-UNI, 1947, NAI, p. 2.

67 Asian Relations: Being Report of the Proceedings and Documentation of the First Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, March–April, 1947 (New Delhi: Asian Relations Organization, New Delhi, 1948), p. 90.

68 Pai, ‘An Observer's report of the discussions of Group “B”’, p. 2.

69 Asian Relations, p. 91.

70 Ibid., pp. 90–91.

71 Ibid., p. 94.

72 Ibid., p. 95.

73 Ibid., p. 97.

74 Ibid.

75 ‘1. Complete legal equality of all citizens; 2. Complete religious freedom of all citizens; 3. No public social disqualification of any racial group; 4. Equality before the law of persons of foreign origin who have settled in the country.’ Asian Relations, p. 98.

76 Pai, ‘An Observer's report of the discussions of Group “B”’.

77 Ibid., p. 2. Emphasis added.

78 ‘Indo-Ceylon Relations’, Times, 18 April 1947. In ‘Seventh Annual Session of the Ceylon Indian Congress and the Sixth Annual Session of the Ceylon Indian Congress Labour Union Proceedings of Ceylon’, CR Dept., OSII, File No. 67(1)/47-OSII, 1947, NAI.

79 Pai, ‘An Observer's report of the discussions of Group “B”’, p. 2.

80 Ibid.

81 In Asian Relations, p. 103.

82 Ibid., p. 102.

83 Ibid., p. 104.

84 Ibid.

85 Those delegates were H. N. Kunzru and A. Appadorai, the ICWA secretary. Ibid.

86 Ibid., p. 105. On that UN resolution, see Bhagavan, Peacemakers.

87 Raphaëlle Khan, ‘Sovereignty after the Empire and the Search for a New Order: India's Attempt to Negotiate a Common Citizenship in the Commonwealth (1947–1949)’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (forthcoming).

88 Campbell-Johnson was Lord Mountbatten's press attaché.

89 On 24 March 1947. In Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1985), p. 45.

90 ‘Cable to Vallabhbhai Patel’, London, 18 October 1948, SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 8, pp. 245–246.

91 Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012 [1979]), Vol. 2, pp. 48–49.

92 Pandit Nehru's ‘Ten Points’, in Clement R. Attlee, Memorandum, ‘Relations with the Commonwealth’, Annex A, 10 November 1948, Top Secret, CAB 129/30/24, UKNA.

93 C[abinet] M[inutes] (48) 67th conclusions, minute 3—Confidential Annex, in ‘Agenda: 3. Commonwealth Relations—Constitutional Developments in India and Eire’, 28 October 1948, Top Secret, CAB 128/14/3, UKNA, p. 9.

94 ‘Note of discussion in Dr. Evatt's room, Palais de Chaillot, Paris, at 6 P.M on Wednesday, 17th November 1948’, in Attlee, Memorandum, ‘India's Relations with the Commonwealth’, Annex B, CAB 129/31/16, UKNA.

95 Gopal, Nehru, Vol. 2, p. 52; Michael Brecher, ‘India's Decision to Remain in the Commonwealth’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 12, no. 1 (1974), p. 77.

96 ‘Note to Foreign Secretary’, 29 May 1951, SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 16, Part I, p. 522.

97 Zamindar, The Long Partition; Taylor C. Sherman, ‘Migration, Citizenship and Belonging in Hyderabad (Deccan), 1948–1956’, Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 1 (2011), pp. 81–107.

98 Times of India, 25 August 1949, p. 7; 7 July 1950, p. 5.

99 Ibid., 19 June 1947, p. 5.

100 Ibid.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid., 24 June 1947, p. 7.

103 Ibid., 1 March 1948, p. 6.

104 Ibid., 24 June 1947, p. 7.

105 Ibid., 1 March 1948, p. 6.

106 Ibid., 12 July 1947, p. 10.

107 Ibid., 11 May 1956, p. 11.

108 Ibid., 9 August 1958, p. 6.

109 Ibid., 14 November 1959, p. 10.

110 Ibid., 15 November 1950, p. 7.

111 Ibid., 11 September 1948, p. 8.

112 Ibid., 2 September 1950, p. 10.

113 Ibid., 25 August 1949, p. 7.

114 Ibid., 7 November 1952, p. 1.

115 Note by Subimal Dutt, Commonwealth Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs, 23 May 1954, Ministry of External Affairs (henceforth: MEA), C/54/6472/5, NAI.

116 C. C. Desai, High Commissioner for India in Ceylon to Subimal Dutt, Commonwealth Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs, 21 September 1954, MEA, C/54/6472/5, NAI.

117 Subimal Dutt to C. C. Desai, 28 September 1954, MEA, C/54/6472/5, NAI.

118 Times of India, 19 April 1953, p. 14.

119 C. C. Desai, to Subimal Dutt, 21 September 1954, MEA, C/54/6472/5, NAI.

120 Times of India, 19 April 1953, p. 14.

121 Times of India, 14 February 1954, pp. 1 and 9.

122 Ibid., 12 March 1955, p. 7.

123 Ibid., 2 August 1967, p. 9.

124 ‘Colonisation of Nicobars—proposal to settle Ceylon repatriates’, Ministry of Home Affairs, 8/9/59-ANL, 1959, NAI.

125 Times of India, 15 May 1948, p. 9.

126 Ibid., 28 December 1947, p. 1.

127 Ibid., 20 April 1954, p. 5.

128 To K. P. Kesava Menon, 6 June 1952, SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 18, p. 510.

129 Cable to K. P. Kesava Menon, 3 June 1952, SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 18, p. 507.

130 Times of India, 29 September 1947, p. 10.

131 Ibid., 20 April 1952, p. 10.

132 Ibid., 3 May 1952, p. 1.

133 Ibid., 11 November 1952, p. 1.

134 C. Kondapi, Indians Overseas, 1838–1949 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1951); Editorial, Times of India, 8 April 1952.

135 Times of India, 3 July 1949, p. 1.

136 Ibid., 24 June 1949, p. 7.

137 Ibid.

138 For the full story on the Nakarattar Chettiars, see Mazumder, ‘Constructing the Indian Immigrant’.

139 Times of India, 25 October 1948, p. 4.

140 Ibid., 9 June 1950, p. 1.

141 Ibid., 26 July 1950, p. 7.

142 Ibid., 10 September 1953, p. 3.

143 Lok Sabha Debates (Third Series), Vol. xxx, no. 60, 28 April 1964 (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1964), pp. 13181–13182.

144 Ibid., pp. 13184–13185.

145 Ibid., p. 13187.

146 Ibid., p. 13188.

147 Times of India, 10 May 1964, p. 7.

148 Ibid., 21 May 1964, p. 7.

149 Ibid., 2 August 1964.

150 Ibid., 15 June 1953, p. 1.

151 Ibid., 8 January 1954, p. 3.

152 For example, Aiyar, Indians in Kenya, Chapter 3.

153 Ian Patel, We're Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (London: Verso, 2021), p. 224. The authors are grateful to Ian for giving us an advance sight of this manuscript.

154 Cosemans, Sara, ‘The Politics of Dispersal: Turning Ugandan Colonial Subjects into Postcolonial Refugees (1967–76)’, Migration Studies 6, no. 1 (2018), pp. 99–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

155 Times of India, 3 August 1949, p. 5.