1 India and Overseas Indians in Ceylon And

India and Overseas Indians in Ceylon and Burma, 1946-1965: Experiments in Post- imperial Sovereignty Raphaëlle Khan Asia Center, Harvard University Email: [email protected] Taylor C. Sherman Department of International History, The London School of Economics and Political Science Email: [email protected] Abstract Despite the existence of a large Indian diaspora, there has been relatively little scholarly engagement with India’s relation to overseas Indians after its independence in 1947. The common narrative is that India abruptly cut ties with overseas Indians from that time until the 1990s, as it adhered to a territorially-based understanding of sovereignty and citizenship. By re-examining India’s relations with Indian communities in Ceylon and Burma between the late 1940s and the 1960s, this article demonstrates that, despite its rhetoric, India did not renounce its responsibility towards its diaspora at independence. 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 migrant communities across the world. Keywords: diaspora, decolonization, migration, minorities, Asians, citizenship, sovereignty The authors are grateful to Ian Patel and to the participants of the workshop on Sovereignty and Power in South Asia and Beyond, organised by Neilesh Bose and Jon Wilson at King’s College London in June 2019, for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this work. They would also like to thank the anonymous referees of Modern Asian Studies for their helpful comments. 1 Introduction Over the past two decades, new historical scholarship has recast the study of the Indian diaspora by reframing the Indian Ocean as an interconnected space. Historians have located overseas Indians within the functioning and development of a wider British imperial system in the region.1 They have explored the circulation of ideas, trade, and people in the Indian Ocean before and during colonial times.2 Further studies have analysed the diaspora’s subjective 1 Robert Blyth, The Empire of the Raj: India, Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1858-1947 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860- 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 2 See Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013); Pamela Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Michael Pearson, eds., Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010); Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On specifically Tamil politics and connected histories across the Bay of Bengal, see Bhavani Raman, “The Postwar ‘Returnee,’ Tamil Culture, and the Bay of Bengal,” in The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia, eds. Gian Prakash, Nikhil Menon, and Michael Laffan (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2018), 121-140; Kalyani Ramnath, “Intertwined Itineraries: Debt, Decolonization, and International law in Post- World War II South Asia,” Law and History Review 38, no. 1 (2020): 1-24; Darinee Alagirisamy, “The Self- Respect Movement and Tamil Politics of Belonging in Interwar British Malaya, 1929-1939,” Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 5 (2016): 1547–1575; Sunil Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2011). 2 experience of home, identity, and culture.3 Scholars have provided a more refined understanding of diasporas’ relation to homeland and their political imaginary, as well as of diasporas’ roles in the production of new ideas of nationhood, race, solidarity, and belonging.4 Several of these historians conclude their works by tracing the ways in which the coming of independence in South and Southeast Asia abruptly terminated the circular migrations of the age of empire. This process, as Amrith has shown, ‘immobilized people that had once been mobile’.5 Relying on the public speeches of the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, these historians regard the end of the circulation of people as the end of the Government of India’s involvement with the Diaspora. The research below, however, demonstrates that the political and social networks and the ‘imaginative worlds’6 that were fundamental to the experience of Diaspora did not disappear once the circular migrations of the age of empire had been halted. At the same time, historians of the Indian diaspora have shown that independence was also the culmination of a longer process of the minoritisation of Indians in Burma, Ceylon and elsewhere.7 In the pages that follow, we show that this very process of minoritisation was not 3 See for instance Gaiutra Bahdur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Marina Carter and Torabully Khal, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (London: Anthem Press, 2002). 4 Ned Bertz, Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean: Transnational Histories of Race and Urban Space in Tanzania (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2015); Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: London: Harvard University Press, 2015). 5 Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia, 120. 6 Ibid., 2. 7 Rajashree Mazumder, “Constructing the Indian immigrant to colonial Burma, 1885-1948” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2013), chap. 5; Hugh Tinker, Separate and Unequal: India and the Indians in the British Commonwealth 1920- 1950 (London: Hurst & Company, 1976); Tinker, The Banyan Tree: Overseas emigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). On minoritisation, Aamir R. Mufti, 3 simply foisted upon Indians overseas against their will, but was itself the product of a transnational and multi-scalar negotiation, albeit one conducted on the basis of a highly unequal balance of power between the parties. This negotiation mobilised some of the same networks and imaginaries of earlier eras. From the Indian side of the scholarship, these overseas Indians have been integrated into histories of nationalism and imperialism in the period before 1947. Scholars have uncovered the ways in which the imperial Government of India was called upon to protect the interests and develop a regime of rights for Indians overseas.8 In parallel, the diaspora played an important role in the development of Indian nationalism and helped foster a certain extra- territorial understanding of India.9 Aware of the difficult working conditions and discrimination overseas Indians faced, India’s nationalists called for reports on their conditions and, in the 1920s, for these workers to return ‘home’ to India.10 Enlightenment in the Colony: the Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) 8 Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Rachel Sturman, “Indian Indentured Labor and the History of International Rights Regimes,” The American Historical Review 19, no. 5 (2014): 1439-1465. 9 Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (London: Hurst & Company, 2012); Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi before India (New York: Knopf, 2014). On anticolonial diasporic networks, see Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Chartered Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 10 John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan, “Diaspora and Swaraj, Swaraj and Diaspora,” in From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, eds. Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 311-331. 4 In 1947, it was estimated that almost 3.5 million Indians lived outside the subcontinent. The majority of these overseas Indians lived in Burma, Ceylon and Malaya.11 There were 500,000 Indians in Burma and 900,000 in Ceylon, including 750,000 mostly Dalit labourers who worked on tea plantations on the island.12 Independent India, therefore, inherited a double nationalist and colonial legacy of responsibility for overseas Indians. Concurring with the scholarship on the Diaspora, historians of India have mostly agreed that India quickly abjured this responsibility after independence. There are several versions of this argument. One claims that with independence India’s new government adhered to a territorially-based understanding of sovereignty and citizenship. India moved to a territorial nationality, which required ‘publicly distancing itself from its long- standing concerns for the condition of its diaspora.’13 This meant that overseas Indians had ‘given up their rights of protection from the Indians state.’14 Some authors described a ‘dramatic shift in the Congress party’s policy’, which moved from being ‘very concerned with the fate of the expatriate Indians’ to ignoring them from 1947 onwards.15 A second, more nuanced, assessment notes the fact that overseas Indians remained in place, and records their struggles to

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