Chapter 5 - Other Partitions: Migrant Geographies and Disconnected Histories between India and Malaya, 1945-1965

Summary

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.” 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. 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) nationalisms. 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.