Part II - From the Transimperial to the International: Lived Uncertainties

Summary

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.