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Making Refugees in India

OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS

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.  .  . 

.  c  .  . 
.  .  . 
Making Refugees in
India
RIA KAPOOR
1
3
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© Ria Kapoor 2022
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Acknowledgements
The first incarnation of this book was a DPhil thesis, and so my first major
research project. Its existence owes much to the kindness, camaraderie, and
advice of more people than I can count.
The first of many thanks is to the archivists in Geneva, New Delhi, and
London, who gave invaluable advice and kind direction as I researched. The
first inklings of this project came during my time working as an intern with
the Archives team at the UNHCR, and I am especially grateful for their
advice and friendship—and a further thanks to Heather Faulkner is due
here, too.
My greatest debt of gratitude is to Faisal Devji, supervisor and teacher par
excellence. He has carefully read every single iteration of this project, from its
existence as a single page to messy early drafts to this latest version. At every
stage, he has encouraged me to push my intellectual boundaries, with
kindness, good humour, and patience.
Shruti Kapila and Samuel Moyn, who examined my dissertation, gave me
incisive feedback and the courage to think more expansively. Every conver-
sation I have had with Yasmin Khan, whether an exam, email, or in passing,
has been rich in good recommendations and kind words.
The transition from dissertation to book would have been impossible
without my fantastic mentor and even better friend, Elisabeth Leake. This
book made it across the finish line because of her intellectual generosity,
careful reading of particularly knotty draft sections, and some much-needed
encouragement and support in a year of upheaval and transitions. Jonathan
Saha, Amar Sohal, and Smriti Sawkar have kindly and painstakingly read
draft chapters. Patricia Clavin has been very generous, and I thank her for
opportunities to reflect and to teach that influenced the shape of this work.
Many offered advice as reviewers, listened to early versions of these ideas
at conferences and seminars, and made generous suggestions in casual
conversation. They have all helped bring blurry, newly formed ideas into
more decisive forms. This project was also supported by a Clarendon Fund
Scholarship, a grant from the Beit Fund, and by Lady Margaret Hall’s
Santander travel fund.
vi 
I am so grateful to dear friends who were on their own academic journeys

alongside me. Béa, Amar, Smriti, Lynn, Lucie, Dom, Priya, Vanya, Vânia,
and Haya have spent time in Oxford’s many libraries (and outside them) as
I worked on the project. The Radja and Kearney-Mathur families made sure
I never felt like I was too far from home. Ben has been patient and
compassionate as I tackled this cherished undertaking, even as he sailed
tumultuous waters of his own.
My grandparents set out to write down their own memories of being
refugees in case I should ever need it, and I am stunned and thankful for
their enthusiasm. Ira has provided her own special brand of sisterly affec-
tion, even from afar. My parents, Lalit and Rajni, have inspired me and
cheered me on not just as I wrote and researched but always.
This book is dedicated to my family, whose own history on the move has
shaped mine.
Contents
Introduction 1
1. The Refugees’ Imperial Past: The Search for
Self-Determination in Empire 17
2. Resisting an Alien Invasion of Principles:
The Second World War and the New World of the UN 54
3. Refugees to (Re)Build the Nation: Partition and the
Humanitarianism of Developing the Postcolony 94
4. A Nation-in-Exile in the Age of Non-Alignment:
Rights for the Tibetan Refugees in India 138
5. Ten Million Reasons for Self-Determination:
The 1971 East Pakistani Crisis and Its Many Solutions 180
Conclusion 222
Bibliography 231
Index 251
Introduction
In 1948, aviator and plane manufacturer Antonius Raab and his wife Hilda
were deported from India, despite their status as subjects of the princely
state of Baroda.¹ They had arrived in India in 1941, classified within the
subset of ‘Balkan Refugees of Various Nationalities’ who came to India from
the ‘Mid-East’. They had been sent onwards to the subcontinent from Cairo,
as many dissident or politically inconvenient evacuees from Europe were.
Antonius was noted in British records as a German with a Costa Rican
passport, while Hilda is recorded as being of Czechoslovakian origin. Within
the larger bureaucratic category of refugee, British officials managing such
movements of people considered them ‘suspects’ as nationals of an enemy
power.² Raab’s Costa Rican documents—and the principle of nationality
arising from the husband’s status that would extend to Hilda—were disre-
garded by British officials in both Egypt and in India.³ Despite their well
recorded anti-Nazi sentiments and Antonius’ Costa Rican documents, the
Raabs were treated like the bulk of Axis power nationals.⁴ By 1942, Antonius
was officially identified as a ‘non-Nazi’.⁵ Under the orders of V. Shankar of
the Government of India, Raab was subsequently declared an ‘alien friend’
rather than an ‘alien enemy’.⁶ And yet, the Raabs found themselves leaving
for Italy in 1948 despite their desire to stay in the country.
India’s first home minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, explained to the
Constituent Assembly in 1948 that the decision to remove the Raabs from
¹ ‘Deportation of Antonius Raab, a Baroda State Employee’, Official Report of the

Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative) Debates, Vol. 6, 1948, pp. 575–7.
² National Archives of India (hereafter NAI) Digitised Public Records, Home Political, EW,
1941, ‘The Question of Accommodating Certain Balkan Refugees of Various Nationalities from
Mid-East’.
³ NAI Digitised Public Records, Home Political, EW, 1941, ‘The Question of Accommodating
Certain Balkan Refugees of Various Nationalities from Mid-East’.
⁴ NAI, Digitised Public Records, Home Political, EW, 1941, ‘The Question of Accommodating
⁵ NAI, Digitised Public Records, Home Political, EW, 1941, ‘The Question of Accommodating
⁶ NAI, Digitised Private Papers Sardar Patel, ‘Baroda 1948–49’.
Making Refugees in India. Ria Kapoor, Oxford University Press. © Ria Kapoor 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192855459.003.0001
2    
India under the Foreigners Act of 1946 had been made by the previous,
wartime British government.⁷ After the Second World War, new British
policies dictated that all foreigners who were ‘enemy nationals’ should be
refused visas and any extensions. Refugees, on the other hand, were to be
referred to the (British) government of India, who would make any decisions
on this front.⁸ In 1945, the British Indian government had decided that the
Raabs should be ‘repatriated’, even against their will if necessary.⁹ Antonius
is hardly the sort of figure traditionally thought of as a refugee, particularly
not in the latter half of the 1940s in India—a skilled aircraft manufacturer of
German origin, employed by an Indian prince. Yet, he had occupied that
category, within the subset of enemy alien, in the Indian subcontinent. His
position underlined that such humanitarian categories were hardly static or
consistent, and utilised in arbitrary ways that aligned with the movements of
people across imperial outposts.
Rather than providing clear answers, the Raabs’ story complicates the
category of the refugee in India. Even as the Raabs were challenging their
deportation by the British Indian government, a nationalist, Indian-led
government would take the helm—and this latter government oversaw
their departure. The Foreigners Act of 1946 that the Raabs were removed
under was vague about the circumstances of the foreigners themselves,
uniting all aliens in being non-Indian despite their reasons for being in
India. In the midst of this, the category of refugee shifted in the Indian
vocabulary from the internationally recognised refugees, internees, and
evacuees of the war to mean solely those displaced by the mass migrations
of the subcontinental Partition in 1947. The Raabs’ deportation points to a
changing idea of the refugee, an inconsistent refugee policy, shifts from the
colonial to the postcolonial, and also highlights questions of belonging in the
independent state. The case is a microcosm of the many currents that
governed India’s larger refugee policy in the years to come, perched on the
transition from colonial to independent. The colonially created ‘refugee’ was
folded into the undifferentiated category of foreigner by the officials of the
new Indian state, under a law inherited from colonial predecessors. How did
⁷ ‘Deportation of Antonius Raab, a Baroda State Employee’, Official Report of the

Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative) Debates, Vol. 6, 1948, pp. 575–7.
⁸ NAI, Digitised Public Records, Home Political, E, 1945 NA F-10-16, ‘Post-War Policy Inn
[sic] Regard to the Admission and Control of Foreigners’.
⁹ NAI, Digitised Public Records, Home Political, EW, 1941, F-24-7, ‘Missionaries originally
Intermid [sic] at the Central Internment Compound their Subsequent Transfer to A Parole
Centers or Family Camp Reunion of German Internees With their Families’.
 3
this relate to the progress and development that had been promised with the
achievement of the independent sovereign state? It is here that the consti-
tutive and destructive powers of the category of the refugee become clear.
India never signed the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Status of
Refugees, nor the 1967 Protocol that widened its geographical mandate. In
the seventy years since independence, India has provided sanctuary to
millions of refugees, beginning with those of Partition and extending to
the Tibetans, Afghans, and Sri Lankan Tamils. The modern refugee, who
crosses international borders seen as integral to sovereignty and who has lost
the protection of his own state, had been defined as such by Europe well
before the independent Indian state came into existence. The origins and
conditions governing refugees thus had their origins away from subcontin-
ental peoples’ experiences. India’s stance on refugees has recently seen a
shift, with the recent Citizenship Amendment Act’s naming of particular
religious communities and geographies as well as the expulsion of the
Rohingya Muslims. Despite the seeming change, it lies within the longer
history of India’s relationship and understanding of the category of refugee
in ways other than those prescribed by international consensus. That
choice had everything to do with an understanding of the refugee that
simply could not align with India’s own experiences, and a vision for
what self-determination meant for the Indian people.
The ‘problem’ of the refugee became institutionalised in the twentieth
century, starting with the displacements in Europe as a result of the First
World War. The first High Commissioner for Refugees, Fridtjof Nansen,
would be appointed by the League of Nations to deal with the largely
continental question of displaced White Russians and Armenians in
Europe. The Great Powers who held sway over the contemporary inter-
national order after the First World War had created the model of the
modern refugee, but one that privileged the European experience. While
that idea would evolve into the UN Convention and subsequent Protocol,
present-day practices surrounding the refugee have never shed the core
ideas derived from early twentieth-century European experiences.
Those who have had a greater say in international law, organisations, and
practice—often actors from Europe and North America—have obviously
had a greater influence on the prevalent international idea of the refugee.
Buying into international instruments would thus acknowledge their under-
standing of the refugee experience as universal, even if it obscured the
realities of mobility, displacement, and vulnerability for those who were
not from or of the so-called West. As Valentine Daniel has pointed out, the
4    
refugee is a discourse upheld by a manufactured infrastructure and categor-

isations that have the power to legitimise and verify the truth of the refugees’
experiences. Any study needs to account for how localised experiences
reflect wider global prejudices.¹⁰ To further borrow from anthropologists,
refugees are a product of the national order of things, and need to be
understood within that longer history—and so within that national order’s
relationship to the international order, and to colonial experiences.¹¹ In the
case of India’s approach, its leaders’ understanding of the construction of
universal principles and their relationship to Indian experiences within the
British Empire made the internationally created refugee suspect.
Much of this had to do with India’s colonial past, and the racial, social,
and other limitations on Indian colonial subjects in that British imperial
polity. An analysis of the clinical legalese surrounding refugee policy and
justifying its limitations, particularly in the former imperial metropole,
demonstrates these measures are really the product of a racialised thinking.
This rhetoric has been sanitised over time, erasing the language of difference
in favour of that of illegality.¹² These discriminatory hierarchies were clear to
Indian political actors when they had been colonial subjects engaged in anti-
colonial struggle, and they were quick to recognise their continuation in new
guises. Therefore, understanding personhood and refugeehood needs to
extend beyond an idea born in a world of imperial hierarchies. The core of
this study is to understand India’s needs and responses to these global
prejudices. India’s ‘strategically ambiguous’, ad hoc approach to refugees
thus has a startling ideological consistency when viewed in tandem with the
longer question of anti-colonial self-determination and its postcolonial
afterlives.¹³
¹⁰ E. Valentine Daniel, ‘The Refugee: A Discourse on Displacement’, in Jeremy MacClancy

(ed.), Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002), 280.
¹¹ Liisa H. Malkki, ‘Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of
Things’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995).
¹² For a significant attempt to understand the coloniality underpinning Britain’s present-day
refugee policy see Lucy Mayblin, Asylum After Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of
Asylum Seeking (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). The book draws on the ‘myth of
difference’ outlined in B.S. Chimni, ‘The Geopolitics of Refugee Studies: A View from the
South’, The Journal of Refugee Studies 11, no. 4 (1998).
¹³ The characterisations of India’s regime are borrowed from Sarbani Sen, ‘Paradoxes on the
International “Regime” of Care: The Role of the UNHCR in India’, in Ranabir Samaddar (ed.),
Refugees and the State (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003), 398 and B.S. Chimni, ‘Status of
Refugees in India: Strategic Ambiguity’, in Sammadar, Refugees and the State, 396–442.
 5
The process of making refugees in India drew on the principle that the
individual’s enjoyment of rights rested on the larger Indian collective’s
rights. Partition has been regarded as the defining moment in India’s refugee
policy, even its very foundation as a sovereign, independent state. But prior
to 1947, Indians had been subjects of the British Raj, and these experiences
coloured most of their postcolonial institutions, whether with surprising
continuities or obvious disruptions. The 1946 Foreigners Act remains the
primary legislation (subject to amendments) that deals with aliens in India,
from displaced persons to tourists, and predates Partition. The 1948
Foreigners Registration Act cemented this earlier law’s dissolution of cat-
egories into the larger one of ‘foreigner’ in associated documents, while the
1920 Passport (Entry into India) Act remains in force to this day too.
Indians had written a uniform policy of asylum out of the story even prior
to the creation of the new state. It points to Indian refugee policy’s origins in
the colonial past rather than beginning abruptly in 1947. The story
begins with the prospect of the nation-state rather than its ultimate realisa-
tion, as citizens of empire realised their status was a veneer for a limited
subjecthood.
Beyond international definitions, philosophy and theory have understood
the refugee in ways that cannot explain this Indian practice arising from that
region’s particular colonial experiences. Hannah Arendt famously observed
that it was not the loss of rights but the loss of a theatre in which to exercise
them that afflicted refugees—that is, the loss of citizenship.¹⁴ Within refugee
studies too, those occupying the category are acknowledged to be a casualty
of the system of nation-states.¹⁵ As Giorgio Agamben points out in his
reading of Arendt, refugees serve to remind us of the limits of human rights,
for their experiences disprove that such rights are inherent—for they should
otherwise exist even where the nation-state could not protect them. His
recommendation, that of the ‘perforation’ of the nation-state and an extra-
territorial recognition of rights in light of these failures, would not come as
¹⁴ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company,
1976), 295–9.
¹⁵ Emma Haddad, The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008); C.B. Keely, ‘How Nation-States Create and Respond to
Refugee Flows’, The International Migration Review 30. no. 4 (1996); Aristide Zolberg, ‘The
Formation of New States as a Refugee Generating Process’, The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 467 (1983).
6    
news to the Indian state as revealed in Chapter 4 of this work.¹⁶ These

conceptualisations, often consciously based on a Western experience of
receiving refugees, cannot apply worldwide. All see the early twentieth-
century break-up of European empires and the rise of the nation-state
form that failed to protect minority citizens as the start of the refugee as a
‘problem’. And so, all these understandings rest on the basis of what could
not be true for India in the first half of the twentieth century—that citizens
had a certain set of rights.
The process of making refugees in India began alongside the country’s
anti-colonial nationalists’ realisation of the revolutionary, ‘worldmaking’
potential of self-determination that gave rights (via meaningful citizenship)
to those who had been denied them in an imperial world order.¹⁷ The
nation-state form as it tends to be recognised was born of Western thought
and experience, always tracing its antecedents to Westphalia. It globalised in
the twentieth century with the so-called ‘Wilsonian moment’. The version
espoused by the anti-colonialists of the world was closer to Lenin’s revolu-
tionary vision of self-determination rather than Wilson’s, which tried
to walk back the concept from the precipice of such a revolution.¹⁸
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister and architect of much of the
anti-colonial nationalist Indian National Congress’ programme, famously
believed that securing Indian independence was a necessary precondition
for a more equal world. Through his vision of One World which viewed
the atomic age of the Cold War as destructive beyond the science of the
bomb, he sought to eradicate the vestiges of an equally disastrous imperial
order. The rights that leaders like Nehru called for challenged the effects of
imperialism, colonialism and the world order these processes had built.
Human rights as we understand them today were thus not the same rights
that anti-colonial nationalists were campaigning for. Prior to the worldwide
uptake of this more individualised idea of rights in the 1970s, anti-colonial
¹⁶ Giorgio Agamben, ‘Beyond Human Rights: A Potential Politics’, in Pablo Virno and
Michael Hardt (eds.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996), 159–65.
¹⁷ I borrow this term from Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of
Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). While her framework focuses
on the Black Atlantic, there are parallels with the Indian project, particularly the Nehruvian one.
¹⁸ A term popularised by Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the
International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
For Lenin’s conception of self-determination, see V.I. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-
Determination’, in Bernard Isaacs and Joseph Fineberg (trans.), V.I. Lenin Collected Works vol.
20 (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 393–454. Also available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/
lenin/works/1914/self-det/ [accessed 22 June 2020].
 7
movements focused on collective rights—notably self-determination as the

right from which all others stemmed.¹⁹ Decolonising states developed their
own relationship with individual human rights, contributing to their world-
wide realisation even as these states’ leaders measured them against the
notion of sovereignty and self-determination.²⁰ The Indian state was
attempting to seize for its people the promise of liberal universalism, finally
weeding out the racial and civilisational superiority that had previously
barred them from equality within the empire and the international order.
The idea of the nation-state, which could guarantee such rights, had been
decided by certain powers long before some parts of the world were admit-
ted to the club, along with international organisations that could govern
their behaviour. The League of Nations certainly did not represent all of the
peoples of the world, let alone in an equal way. Nor was the nation-state a
foregone conclusion in the 1940s, with many visions of what access to
citizenship, sovereignty, and their benefits could look like.²¹ India’s own
journey towards the territorial form was governed by external facing con-
cerns of international representation. Internal diversity and difficulties of
belonging posed by a substantial diaspora further complicated the realisa-
tion of the postcolonial nation-state.²² Self-determination also had to reign
supreme for another reason, that of altering the very nature of supranational
forums—prior Indian experiences with international agencies had made
clear that the transformation of international organisations also required a
decolonisation of their methods and goals.²³ Humanitarianism often had
(and still has) political motivations, and certainly political implications, that
could not be allowed to threaten newly acquired collective rights where they
¹⁹ Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 2010).
²⁰ To understand the relationship between human rights, anti-colonialism and cultural
relativism, see Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human
Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
²¹ A recent reminder of this is to be found in Frederick Cooper, Citizenship in between
Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2017).
²² Itty Abraham, How India Became Territorial (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014).
²³ Sunil Amrith, Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia 1930–65
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). For an understanding of how UNRRA failed to do
so, see Manu Bhagavan, ‘Towards Universal Relief and Rehabilitation: India, UNRRA and the
New Internationalism’, in Dan Plesch and Thomas G. Weiss (eds.), Wartime Origins and the
Future United Nations (New York: Routledge, 2015), 121–35. For an example of India’s
transformation of this world order as an actor from the so-called Global South, see Alanna
O’Malley, ‘India, Apartheid and the New World Order at the UN, 1946–1962’, Journal of World
History 31, no. 1 (2020).
8    
had so far been absent.²⁴ Refugee history has moved beyond institutional
histories of international world order and the Office of the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The refugee has been recog-
nised as an important player in the story of the nation-state and its citi-
zens.²⁵ This widened historiographical field has paved the way for an Indian
view of the ideas and practices surrounding refugees.²⁶
Immigration and asylum regulations tend to prioritise the needs of the
receiving nation-state, in particular governed by concerns for a hazily
defined ‘national security’. A conventional understanding of such hospital-
ity, whether to immigrants or to refugees, sees it governed by a condition-
ality so as to prevent the host becoming a hostage to these guests.²⁷ I contend
that this understanding does not account for experiences of states like India.
Self-determination had brought with it the potential to change the world,
and this needed to be jealously guarded—but not from the refugee. The
relationship between host and guest in India does not meet the standard of
hostility implicit in this conditionality either.²⁸ It was not the guest or the
refugee who threatened the Indian state so much as the afterlives of an
imperially created international order that India strove to transform. The
refugee was familiarly human rather than a dreaded intruder. That latter
role, of hostage-taker, was played by an international order that placed
burdens on former colonies rather than alleviating them, and so restricting
the hard-won rights of the Indian people.
²⁴ Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Davide
Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire 1815–1914
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). A recent work contributing to the idea of the
human and stranger underpinning humanitarianism is Keith Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones:
The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2017).
²⁵ The creation of the refugee as a ‘problem’ is best understood through the work of Peter
Gatrell: Peter Gatrell, Free World: The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees 1956–1963
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Peter Gatrell, Making of the Modern Refugee
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For ideas of the place of refugees in the history of the
nation-state, and the need for histories of refugees, see Philip Marfleet, ‘Refugees and History:
Why We Must Address the Past’, Refugee Survey Quarterly 26, no. 3 (2007); Philip Marfleet,
‘Explorations in a Foreign Land: Refugees, States and the Problem of History’, Refugee Survey
Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2013).
²⁶ The first book-length work is Pia Oberoi, Exile and Belonging; Refugees and State Policy in
South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).
²⁷ Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000). For an argument against universalising the hostility supposedly inherent in
hospitality, see Anne Norton, ‘Democracy’, in On the Muslim Question (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2013), 118–40.
²⁸ For a theorisation of hostility inherent in hospitality, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality’,
Angelaki 5, no. 3 (2000).
 9
The story of the refugee in India is also one of the tensions of progress and
the individual enjoyment of rights within the sovereign nation-state. ‘Awake
[ning] to life and freedom’, as Nehru promised in his famous midnight
speech on India’s Independence Day, was hardly an equal proposition, and
the progress of the larger community could dispossess its component groups
and individuals. Even those acting out authoritarian forms of government in
the postcolonial world did so in the name of the people.²⁹ The Indian state’s
revolutionary promise, and its approach to a democratic participatory
politics, was not always a guarantee of all Indian peoples’ rights when it
came to a vision for the nation’s progress and the greater good. Nehru
himself was aghast that student protests in the 1950s would use methods
of anti-colonial agitation against the postcolonial state, despite acknowledg-
ing the importance of dissent in a democracy. In granting popular sover-
eignty, the Nehruvian postcolonial state had created citizens that it had a
direct relationship with. Nehru thought it obliged them to this state rather
than choosing to act independently from, or even against, it.³⁰ The freedom
of Indian people, and the Nehruvian belief in its subsequent worldwide
emancipatory potential, came at a price.
This project is obviously adjacent to those histories of social and eco-
nomic rights that the framers of India’s constitution never codified in a
binding way in the constitution, lest dictating the methods of development
and distribution cut against cherished democratic principles. Thus, the
Directive Principles remain a guideline despite their inclusion in this docu-
ment. By not codifying such rights, enacting social and economic protec-
tions themselves created a lesser, ‘undeserving citizen’ who needed help
from the state rather than exercising the reciprocal obligation of rights and
duty outlined in the constitution.³¹ The Constituent Assembly debated
social and economic rights, and in making them non-justiciable placed
them in a second-tier category to civil and political rights. Just as the
question of equality for individuals who belonged to historical socio-
economically disadvantaged minorities was mediated through their group
identity, so too was the progress of the individual subjugated to larger Indian
²⁹ Barry Hindess, ‘Citizenship and Empire’, in Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat
(eds.), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005), 241–56.
³⁰ Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘ “In the Name of Politics”: Sovereignty, Democracy and the
Multitude in India’, Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 30 (2005).
³¹ Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2013), 109–35.
10    
progress. The Assembly had decided that correcting backwardness and

uplifting the state as a whole were its main goals, but in practice progress
towards that modernity could dispossess these vulnerable groups further.³²
Projects like the dams that Nehru had cast as the ‘Temples of New India’
brought with them massive internal displacement, submerging entire vil-
lages or affecting the livelihood of local residents for miles around. The state
rarely compensated these people, instead justifying an (unwilling) sacrifice
for the greater good, often made by the same groups whose circumstances
had necessitated other sorts of protections.³³ In making such rights unen-
forceable, the state dispossessed and displaced persons while creating a
rhetoric of the failures of these citizens to dutifully contribute to progress,
instead needing state assistance to lift them out of poverty. The absence of a
welfare state in India allowed for inequalities, even those perpetuated in the
name of progress, to be addressed in the language of charity rather than
rights.³⁴ The history of refugees is a similar history to those of socio-
economically oppressed communities, of minorities and of what was owed
to the postcolonial state.
Indians needed the vehicle and protections of the nation-state in order to
challenge the inequalities in so-called universal principles, making the figure
of the refugee difficult to reconcile. Protecting refugees certainly upheld the
liberal idea of rights, but their crossing of national borders left open the door
to another threat. In being a subject for universal concern and international
governance (and possible intervention), the refugee became a threat to
the sovereignty of the democratic nation-state governed for and in the
name of the Indian people. Understanding the challenge posed by the
internationally defined refugee requires rejecting the individuality associated
with the refugee, as the bounds of personhood extend far beyond this to
³² For a discussion on backwardness and the constituent assembly, see Jayal, Citizenship and
its Discontents, 136–62.
³³ For the speech from which the phrase ‘Temples of New India’ is taken, see Jawaharlal
Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, vol. 26 (New Delhi: Jawaharlal
Nehru Memorial Fund, 2000), 130–4. For an overview of displacement caused by projects like
dams and the loss of rights and displacements from 1951 until recently, see Smitu Kothari,
‘Whose Nation? The Displaced as Victims of Development’, Economic and Political Weekly 31,
no. 24 (1996); Biswaranjan Mohanty, ‘Displacement and Rehabilitation of Tribals’, Economic
and Political Weekly 40, no. 13 (2005); Arun Kumar Nayak, ‘Big Dams and Protests in India:
A Study of Hirakud Dam’, Economic and Political Weekly 45, no. 2 (2010).
³⁴ A connection examined in the case of Partition’s refugees in 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: Indiana University
Press, 2001), 74–100.
 11
relationships, communities, and societies. Instead, clarity lies in appreciating

both where the refugee has come from and what this means for those
receiving them.³⁵ India treated incoming groups in accordance with their
potential to either fit into or assist the national project in defiance of the
Manichean terminology of the Cold War that divided the world into com-
munist and Western democratic camps just as the new state was finding
its feet.
Outline
This work writes the postcolony into histories of refugee-related humani-

tarianism by examining India’s voluntary exclusion. Looking at refugees in
India is an exercise in understanding the interaction of universalisms like
human rights, nationalism, and the experience of the individual. The refugee
was caught between India’s stated commitment to both human rights and a
better world order, while needing to defend the national sovereignty that
gave it a voice to argue in favour of both these universalisms. India accepted
human rights as legitimate, but kept asylum fluid to deal with this contra-
diction. Indian policies might seem ad hoc, but this opportunistic stance was
a product of the evolution of India’s understanding of the relationship of the
international order with the countries of the mid-twentieth-century wave of
decolonisation, and of the differences between human and citizen in the
postcolonial state.
Inequalities experienced by Indians in empire were clearly based on a
racialised hierarchy, which begs the question of whether the new Indian
government was reacting with a similarly racialised thinking. I do not
believe the majority of leaders of the newly created Indian state were
thinking in racial and ethnic terms so much as about who they shared a
common past with. In that context, the government was establishing who
was to benefit from the development promised by the acquisition of this new
state. Its mistrust of the European refugee was more of a reaction to the
exclusions of transnational whiteness and the nation-states that rested on its
discriminatory practices, rather than an idea to be emulated in reverse.³⁶
³⁵ Daniel, ‘The Refugee’, 278.

³⁶ Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s
Countries and the Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008).
12    
Chapter 1 is set in the early twentieth century and serves as a prehistory of

the refugee under colonial rule in India. It primarily examines the interwar
years, with some reference to earlier events. Its focus in on the place of
Indians in the transnational British Empire even as the nation-state-based
order of the League of Nations came into being. Looking at these side-by-
side brings issues of citizenship within the empire, including the place of
minorities, into tension within the prevailing international norms for bur-
eaucratic categories like refugees and their relationship to sovereign terri-
tory. In particular, it emphasises a lack of sovereign power for a people, and
the resultant lack of equal rights for Indians. Layering issues operating at
various geopolitical scales helps to understand how imperially created
categories—in an international order where empires held sway anyway—
could affect how the refugee was understood as the transnational empire
gave way to the postcolonial nation-state.
Chapter 2 is set in the 1940s. In this decade, the world transitioned from
the Second World War to a new peace, and India went from colony to
independent nation-state. India declined to join the International Refugee
Organization (IRO) and had withdrawn from its predecessor, the United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), both prior to
the mass migrations of Partition. The only law codifying the presence of
aliens in India, though subject to future amendments, was passed in 1946.
The chapter places India’s idea of refugees within the international moment
in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Examining the anti-
colonial nationalists’ challenges to the liberalism that underpinned both
empire and the international order of the League makes clear the decolo-
nised nation-state’s moves towards a new internationalism that protected
the rights of its population that had been denied them in empire. They rested
on a certainty that despite their victimhood, interventions on behalf of
European refugees threatened the worldwide equality—both economic and
otherwise—that the new nationalist government aspired to for its Indian
citizens-to-be. The iron grip of the idea of the nation-state, and membership
of this state as the sole guarantor of rights pushed Indians towards rejecting
international norms. It is thus the point at which India’s alternative geneal-
ogy of human rights, including that of asylum, diverged from those of the
international order.
Chapter 3 will look at the refugees of Partition, specifically how they were
understood in relation to the secular, democratic, development-oriented
state envisioned by Nehru’s government. The aim is to understand how
those empowered to shape refugee policy—the Nehruvian elite and their
 13
critics—approached the displaced millions alongside the other problems of

the newly independent, decolonising state. Uplifting an economy that had
been ravaged by colonialism, the crises of the princely states of Kashmir and
Hyderabad, and the clash of the secular ideal of India with a Hindu
nationalist vision all intertwined with the rehabilitation of Partition’s refu-
gees. In the new Indian narrative of citizenship, the term ‘refugee’ was used
deliberately to define those whom the state felt it owed something to.
Everyone else, if at all in receipt of government assistance, was subject to
the kindness and charity of a government already stretched to its limit
building the new nation. Refugees were not allowed to ‘wallow’ and become
a burden, with the government machinery encouraging them to become
proactive citizens of the new nation. Their discontent with this situation
formed the beginnings of a resistant politics. While the government tried to
soothe dissent to bring the refugees in line with the Nehruvian vision of the
state, opposing voices co-opted the refugees to push their own vision of
the state. The refugees of Partition became a snapshot of the domestic
ideologies of the Indian state, demonstrating the blurry line between sub-
jecthood and citizenship that carried on into the postcolony. To build the
refugee was to build the state. In this context, the more Eurocentric vision of
the host as different from the guest was completely shattered because the
refugees were part of the national self. Instead, refugee rhetoric aligned with
that of Indian progress, and the many versions of what that could look like.
Chapter 4 looks at India’s approach to refugees who were recognised as
such by the international regime versus the new state’s treatment of a
returning diaspora who were part of the fallout of decolonisation. The
circumstances of Tibetan refugees in India in the 1960s attracted inter-
national attention. The question of providing them asylum provoked
domestic debate about India’s relations with China and had implications
for India’s vision of non-alignment, particularly regarding how human
rights and self-determination would be brought together in the changing
postcolonial world. Ultimately the Indian government led by Prime Minister
Nehru would focus on the Indian state’s right to grant Tibetans asylum and
assistance with limited involvement from the international community, with
public opinion calling for the group right to self-determination in Tibet.
Simultaneously, the Nehruvian vision of non-alignment was undergoing a
change from its immediate postcolonial form to one which actively
responded to Cold War currents. This was in stark contrast to the returning
Indians from Burma, who were termed ‘repatriates’ in the early 1960s
despite being treated similarly to the refugees of Partition. The term ‘refugee’
14    
no longer implied belonging to the Indian state as it had in the first fifteen
years of its existence. The Indian government tried to draw a clear line
between those displaced by India’s own decolonisation and Partition, and a
crisis that was a thorn in the side of Sino-Indian bilateral relations in the
bipolar world of the Cold War. The 1960s can therefore be seen as India’s
reframing of the term ‘refugee’ to reflect its own interests both domestically
and internationally.
Chapter 5 examines India’s approach to the influx of millions of East
Pakistanis into its territory in 1971. Early in the crisis, India had appealed to
the international community for assistance. To India’s mind, the project of
Partition was complete, and it was not prepared to accept a massive influx
from the Bengal borderland in the vein of Partition’s refugees. India’s
representatives insisted that these were Pakistani citizens entering Indian
territory, rather than a last migration from the Partition of India premised
on religion. This chapter aims to understand the place of 1971 in India’s
relationship with refugees who did belong to the subcontinent but not to
India, at least not any longer. It also highlights India’s relationship with the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the international com-
munity’s primary channel of engagement with the subcontinental crisis.
India reframed the crisis away from Partition, insisting that the international
community assist it in achieving a complete refugee return rather than
buying into a religious logic to the influx. Effectively, India was attempting
to understand where humanitarian impulse met realpolitik, in a total rever-
sal of its attempts to depoliticise the Tibetan refugee presence.
This book starts with migrations within empire and how they correlate to
a lack of equal rights. It finishes in 1971, with the project of Partition finally
deemed to have come to a decisive end with the East Pakistani refugees seen
as disenfranchised citizens of Pakistan rather than Hindus or Muslims
belonging to either state born of the Raj. It argues that India’s refugee
story predates Partition. The Indian state had achieved its intended
secular-democratic form in a victory against the two-nation theory, held
by the Muslim League and Hindu nationalists alike, that saw Hindus and
Muslims as separate, distinct cultures and therefore called for separate
homelands. This Nehruvian architecture is subject to change as the present
government’s re-conception of the Indian state has brought up the relation-
ship of citizen and refugee once again through amendments to India’s
citizenship law.
My work is a study of deviations from European experience-based notions
of the refugee and hospitality, and how they are manipulated in this new
 15
context. Indian leaders’ idea of rights, like that of self-determination and the
nation, was in conversation with global discussions. They were conscious of
the origins of this discourse in other parts of the world, and that it did not
follow the same sequence as these places in its arrival and evolution in India.
Awareness of how similar ideas applied differently to different contexts also
explains that the conception of the refugee relies on the moments in which it
found application in India.
The term refugee meant different things to the Indians at different points
in time, and these meanings were tied to how groups of displaced people
related to the sovereign Indian state. I look at how those empowered to
design India’s refugee policy understood and shaped this concept with
relation to the international order. This was done in response to domestic
concerns but largely remained in the hands of the Nehru-Gandhi family and
those who worked closely with them. The timeline for this project corres-
ponds roughly with the Indian National Congress elite’s hold on the state,
prior to the fuller realisation of political society in the 1970s and 1980s and
the simultaneous rise of more pragmatic electoral politics.³⁷ Even as the
Congress-led state was establishing this ad hoc relationship between citizen
and refugee as the mainstream version, other ideas of this relationship
developed too. Religiously defined notions of citizenship and refugee rights,
which are in vogue today, bubbled under the surface. Their proponents
engaged with these larger conversations on self-determination and rights,
even as a state-led secular-democratic rhetoric papered over these prejudices
in the first decades of the republic.
All of this points to the notion of two ideas born in the West being
transformed in this theatre. The first was the notion of the nation-state and
self-determination, while the second was human rights. I suggest two oper-
ations at work: one was maintaining independence from an international
order based on Eurocentric experiences; the other was the state’s relation-
ship with the refugee populations as an object of policy that acknowledged
its impact on citizenship. The Indian state’s granting of asylum would then
make refugee groups subject populations rather than necessarily sharing in
the sovereign power of the state, made possible only by the situation of
citizenship in flux in the decolonising world.
³⁷ For an understanding of the idea of ‘political society’, see Partha Chatterjee, Politics of the
Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004).
16    
Indian resistance to an umbrella refugee definition and associated uni-

versalising practices reveals the realities obscured by such an artifice of
terminology. Underneath legal language and the prevalent notions of
migration—in which some people should settle for a flimsy ‘safety’ over an
enjoyment of the simplest of rights of citizens—that dominates the news, is a
weaponisation of the category of the refugee. The legacies of empire and its
attendant hierarchies still govern the worldwide conversation on migration
and the fear of unassimilable minorities. Assessments of these peoples’
situations are far more ad hoc and flexible than the static, absolute norms
that today’s immigration regimes and associated propaganda would have us
believe. Like B.S. Chimni, I reject the idea that refugees from the Global
South are something different from those, mostly European, refugees who
came before so much as those receiving them classifying and filing them
differently.³⁸ India serves as an example with its open and frequent redef-
initions of the bureaucratic category of refugee and of migrant, and therefore
the larger self-determined collective, that so clearly operate elsewhere. This
global history of a postcolony offers insight into what is, essentially, a
worldwide postcolonial problem.
Concealed in Indian practice, as so much of India’s political thought is, is
a clearly stated theory of the refugee that sees this category as both consti-
tutive and destructive of citizenship and therefore self-determination. Born
at the pinnacle of Nehruvian India’s worldmaking ambition, it offers a
version of the refugee that is not Eurocentric. Instead, a close look at the
Indian conception also has the effect of understanding the current inter-
national refugee regime as but one version of the relationship of citizenship
(or the loss of a meaningful version of it) and rights. At every turn, India
challenged the meaning of the refugee, preserving self-determination as the
right from which all others stemmed, even as the promise of its revolution
dimmed in the 1970s.
³⁸ Chimni, ‘The Geopolitics of Refugee Studies’.

1
The Refugees’ Imperial Past
The Search for Self-Determination in Empire
In 1927, Brussels played the unlikely role of host to anti-imperialists from all
over the world. Belgium was still reeling from the revelation that King
Leopold’s humanitarian organisation that had ruled the Congo Free State
had in truth mistreated and mutilated residents of the Congo, who had been
forced to labour in rubber production. The shame of the scandal had made it
easier to persuade the authorities in Brussels to permit a World Congress of
Oppressed Peoples. In the avenues of a city that had flourished from the
spoils of colonisation and subjugation, representatives from Asia and Africa
mingled with European and Russian trade unionists and even members of
British Labour. Any event of this magnitude was bound to be of concern to
the Great Powers, and spies infiltrated the ranks of the attendees.¹ Brussels
became a site for the solidarity of anti-colonial movements, and what would
eventually become the Third World.²
Jawaharlal Nehru, a member of the anti-colonial nationalist Indian
National Congress, had been travelling in Europe in 1926, having escorted
his wife Kamala to a Swiss sanatorium. Aside from winter sports and improv-
ing his French, he filled his days socialising with exiled Indian dissidents.
Berlin was a natural point of convergence for radical thinkers and commun-
ists, and where he first heard of the gathering at Brussels. Nehru immediately
wrote to the Indian National Congress, suggesting that he represent their
interests at the event. Its leaders acquiesced, and Nehru was off to what would
become the founding of the League Against Imperialism.³
Nehru, who would go on to be independent India’s first Prime Minister,
made a credible debut on the world stage at Brussels and articulated
¹ Nehru recalls the story of a French spy who dressed in blackface to mingle amongst the
delegates as an African representative. Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, 3rd edition (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 164.
² This introduction to Brussels in 1927 is drawn from Vijaya Prashad, ‘Brussels’, in The
Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007), 16–30.
³ Nehru, An Autobiography, 161.
Making Refugees in India. Ria Kapoor, Oxford University Press. © Ria Kapoor 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192855459.003.0002
18    
the tenets of India’s internationalism that would dominate its politics in the
following decades. Heading the first nationalist Indian delegation to the
United Nations, his sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit would recall his words
from this maiden outing:
The Indian National Congress stands for the freedom of India; freedom for
the poor and the oppressed from all exploitation . . . We realise that there
is much in common in the struggle which various subject and semi-
subject and oppressed peoples are carrying on today. Their opponents
are often the same, although they appear in different guises. The means
employed for their subjection are often similar . . . As our great leader
Mahatma Gandhi has said, our nationalism is based on the most intense
of internationalism. The problem of Indian Freedom is for us a vital and
urgently essential one; but at the same time it is not merely a purely
national problem. India is a world problem and, as in the past, so in the
future, other countries and peoples will be vitally affected by the condition
of India.⁴
Nehru introduced India’s freedom from British colonialism as an essential

precondition for the transformation of the imperial world order. His social-
ism became more moderate in the coming years, but the internationalist
core would remain. The very name of the organisation born at Brussels, the
League Against Imperialism (LAI), implied criticism of the imperial associ-
ations of the premier world organisation of the time. Nehru saw India as a
poster-child for all oppressed peoples and declared that the Indian problem
‘affects a large number of countries directly, and the world indirectly, in
the sense that it affects the most powerful imperialism of our time’.⁵ His
experience with the LAI gave Nehru a wider understanding of imperialism
which saw class and anti-colonialism as intertwined, and which allowed
for a conflation of India’s status with other, similar resistances.⁶ Nehru’s
⁴ Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir (New York: Crown
Publishers, 1979), 220. For the full text of Nehru’s speeches at this conference, see Jawaharlal
Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund,
1979), vol. 12, 270–6.
⁵ Nehru, Selected Works, vol. 2, 275. For a detailed study of how Nehru’s nationalism and
internationalism developed in tandem against wider currents, see Michele L. Louro, Comrades
against Imperialism: Nehru, India and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge
⁶ Louro, Comrades against Imperialism, 19–64.
  ’   19
internationalism, and by extension that of the Indian National Congress,

critiqued the sort of imperialism inherent in the League of Nations inter-
national order. A world community that supported the broader exclusion
of an exploited South Asian diaspora from white men’s nations despite
their status as British subjects was symptomatic of colonialism and imperi-
alism at large.
The roots of India’s departure from international norms for refugees lie in
its experiences within a transnational empire. Within the subcontinent and
beyond it, India was subject to British concerns. They affected the move-
ments of Indian people within the empire, shaped political considerations of
refugees and humanitarianism, and, as Indian nationalists discovered, cre-
ated a racially unequal international order. Additionally, the end of the First
World War and the solidification of the homogeneous nation-state as the
successor to heterogeneous empire within Europe meant an exclusion of
minorities from a full national belonging. The problem of the refugee is
commonly understood, as famous in the writings of Arendt, as marginal-
isation and exclusion by the nation-state that acts as the guaranteed plat-
form for rights.⁷ The question of minorities and associated restrictive
immigration policies played important roles not only within Europe but
also for the intra-imperial Indian diaspora. There were similarities between
these citizens of empire and those European ‘refugees’ who came to the
subcontinent—often prisoners of war from imperial armies or dissidents
who were not accepted by the new nation-states created by the war. But once
any migrant group reached India, and resettlement rather than repatriation
became the call of the hour, those people were subject to immigration
conditions similar to those that applied to Indians in the empire. There
was one crucial difference, as these refugee Europeans did not have to pay as
much to migrate away from the subcontinent to the white settler dominions
in the empire. Examining the movement of Europeans to and from India,
alongside those of Indian migrants within the British Empire, reveals the
extent to which British officials used internationally accepted definitions—
‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’—in what were essentially imperial exercises of moving
people between British-controlled regions. The juxtaposition illuminates a
double standard, with the application of the category of refugee to
non-subject Europeans seemingly justifying policies of movement that
excluded Indian subjects on grounds of race. In turn, this exploration also
⁷ Emma Haddad, ‘The Inter-War Perspective’, in The Refugee in International Society,

99–127; Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
20    
highlights the circumstances in which the internationally created refugee,

born of the same imperialist internationalism that Indian leaders decried,
would never be accepted by Indian people.
Indian understandings of and policies towards ‘refugees’ were fundamen-
tally shaped by experiences of empire and internationalism in the first half of
the twentieth century. On one hand, the treatment of the Indian diaspora
across the British Empire reinforced a sense of community and Indianness, a
tangible (rather than imagined) community whose unequal treatment
brought Indian nationalist attention to issues of mobility and the uneven-
ness of migration and settlement. On the other hand, Indian engagement
with liberal internationalism, as embodied by Wilsonian self-determination
and the League of Nations, turned Indian nationalists’ attention to the issue
of citizenship, but through the lens of the minority. Together they forced
new considerations of what a future independent India might look like—
could it be a federation, a single nation-state, or a community of national-
ities? Engaging with the League brought forward the tensions of empire and
imperial citizenship, while also forcing Indian nationalists to think about
their own non-majority populations, whether religious and ethnic minor-
ities or the handful of refugees hosted in the subcontinent. This had its own
tangible consequences that intertwined with pre-existing community prac-
tices. These issues all set the stage for what would come during and after the
Second World War.
Indian Movement within Empire
Indians born in the directly British-controlled territories of the subcontinent

were considered British subjects, all of whom were theoretically equal across
the empire. However, towards the end of the nineteenth and beginning of
the twentieth centuries, there was a tension between the envisioned uni-
formity of this citizenship (used interchangeably with subjecthood by this
time)⁸ and the nationalist states in the colonial white settler dominions.
Immigration and movement within the empire would expose this tension,
with racial exclusion limiting the experience of British citizenship for the
⁸ Mark R. Frost, ‘Imperial Citizenship or Else: Liberal Ideals and the India Unmaking of
Empire, 1890–1919’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 46, no. 5 (2008),
889–90.
  ’   21
non-white subjects of the empire.⁹ The beginning of the twentieth century

saw the introduction of passports and migration regimes. Migration regu-
lations emerged simultaneously with the idea of the nation-state as the
building block of the international system. Rather than the universal system
of sovereign governance that we see it as today, this earlier form was limited
on the basis of a racially differentiated hierarchy that bestowed the right of
self-government upon a select few ‘White Men’s Nations’. Studies of pass-
port regimes and their role in enforcing borders show that they were created
to keep Asians from white settler colonies, not just within the British Empire
but as part of a consensus that extended beyond it. Rather than a natural
prerequisite for a nascent international system based on the nation-state,
they developed to exclude people from accessing it.¹⁰
Racial discrimination within the British Empire was often disguised as
laws governing movement. White settler colonies used passports and travel
documents to prevent the entry of other (non-white) imperial subjects.
Canada employed a series of methods, including claiming unsuitable cli-
matic conditions and imposing financial restrictions. The clause of a ‘con-
tinuous journey’ for voyages by ship from the starting port to the final
destination was near-impossible for potential migrants travelling from the
subcontinent to Canada. And finally, the emergent passport regime sup-
ported such discriminatory approaches too.¹¹ Australia had similar methods
in place to enforce a colour-bar. In 1901, Australia used dictation tests in
English or a European language to exclude Asian settlers. By 1904, author-
ities agreed to recognise those holding a bona fide British Indian passport,
though this applied more to merchants and other wealthy, ‘respectable’
Indians. Moreover, movement was limited at the source, and district magis-
trates in the Raj were instructed not to grant identity certificates to labour-
ers, peasants, petty businesspeople, and other undesirables. By the beginning
of the twentieth century, it was not citizenship but ‘respectability and means’
that guaranteed a British Indian subject a passport and mobility.¹²
⁹ Daniel Gorman, ‘Wider and Wider Still? Racial Politics, Intra-Imperial Immigration and
the Absence of an Imperial Citizenship in the British Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and
Colonial History 3, no. 3 (2002).
¹⁰ Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 2–3; Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens
and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
¹¹ Radhika Mongia, ‘Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport’, Public Culture
11, no. 3 (1999).
¹² Radhika Singha, ‘The Great War and a “Proper” Passport for the Colony: Border Crossing
in British India, c.1882–1922’, Indian Economic & Social History Review 50, no. 3 (2013), 295–8.
22    
Deliberately replacing a discrimination based on race with the terminology

of class became the preferred solution to the ‘colour’ question that under-
mined the notion of an equal British citizenship.¹³ Canada also adopted this
tactic, with the Immigration Act of 1910 calling for Indians to prove they
possessed £200, compared to £25 for other migrants.¹⁴
British officials deliberately kept the norms of migration for labour and
coolies separate from passport regulations, and so considered the movement
of these people to places like Burma and Ceylon beyond their regulatory
scope. Instead, British authorities painted this as a ‘free migration’, allowing
them to claim that they were not responsible for these migrants’ welfare
despite their movement underpinning the productive capacity of empire.¹⁵
Labour movements to other parts of the empire formed the bulk of the
diaspora. The British had created a situation of exploitative inequality, given
the inhuman treatment of coolies and the refusal of the state to claim
responsibility for their welfare.
The British Indian state controlled movements of subject people who
visibly disproved the claims of enrichment and progress brought by empire.
In the case of the Hajj, the British government ended up creating an official
policy for the repatriation of poor Muslim pilgrims by the early twentieth
century. British officials recoiled at the idea of visibly destitute pilgrims
living in squalor, risking starvation and disease at the doorstep of the
British Consul near Mecca in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Humanitarian feeling hardly motivated their response to the pilgrims’
plight. As with the later limitations on acquiring passports, officials first
attempted to prevent such a situation from recurring by asking local Indian
authorities to manage whom they allowed to leave for pilgrimage. It was
only when this failed that they set up a proper system to assist pilgrims
already travelling for Hajj. The British imperial government had assumed
greater tactical control and consequently made greater contributions to
the Hajj pilgrimage out of a sense of embarrassment at the state of
the travellers.¹⁶ Optics and a need for control rather than benevolence
¹³ Frost, ‘Imperial Citizenship or Else’, 854–5.

¹⁴ C. Kondapi, Indians Overseas 1838–1949 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1951), 207.
¹⁵ Singha, ‘The Great War’, 294.
¹⁶ This is not the only aspect of the reasons for and eventual trajectory of how the British
controlled the Hajj—for greater detail on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see John
Slight, The British Empire and the Hajj, 1865–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2015).
  ’   23
governed their decision. Indian movement within the empire made clear the
intertwined nature of race and labour within the hierarchy of an unequal
imperial citizenship.
Within the British Empire, London condoned racial policies of exclusion
from the white settler colonies, but many Indians did not react passively.
Demands for equality, to which imperial citizens were entitled, often under-
pinned India’s international activities in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. By the 1880s South Africa had enacted laws that
restricted the entry of more British Indians. The struggle in this corner of
the world turned to the rights of those who had already settled there and
now faced several discriminatory laws against ‘Asiatics’.¹⁷ Gandhi’s satya-
graha in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century was an early
example of the mobilisation of an internationalist consciousness. The
minority outside of the subcontinent came to define what it meant to be
Indian. Gandhi mobilised local networks, dissolving religious, professional,
and socio-economic markers.¹⁸ South Africa discriminated against ‘Indians’,
rather than distinguishing between various religious and regional subcon-
tinental groups. Collectively, the South Asian diaspora came to represent a
politicised community prior to the formulation of the nation-state, and
within the context of the empire, colony, and dominion. The nascent
nationalism of Indians in South Africa developed in pursuit of civil rights
within empire, not franchise, which indicated its transnational nature.
Though the status of an equal nation within empire would not be achieved,
the movements of people and ideas that underpinned this formulation of
‘Indianness’ bears emphasis.¹⁹ Activists sought the entitlements of citizen-
ship for a dispersed, and therefore portable, nation, not safeguards for
religion or even race.²⁰
¹⁷ Kondapi, Indians Overseas, 181–4.

¹⁸ Written about in more detail in histories of South Africa, as with Maureen Swan, Gandhi:
The South African Experience (Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1985).
¹⁹ Isabel Hofmeyer, ‘Seeking the Empire, Finding the Nation: Gandhi and Indianness in
South Africa’, in Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook (eds.), Routledge Handbook of South
Asian Diaspora (New York: Routledge, 2013). They were even compared to helots, as in H.S.
L. Polak, The Indians in South Africa: Helots within Empire and How They Are Treated (Madras:
G.A. Natesan, 1909); see also Hugh Tinker, Separate and Unequal: India and the Indians in the
British Commonwealth 1920–1950 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1976);
Charles Freer Andrews, The Indian Question in East Africa (Nairobi: The Swift Press, 1921).
²⁰ Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (London:
Hurst & Company, 2012), 41–66.
24    
A travelling intelligentsia also transmitted ideas back to their homeland

that helped to build an Indian nationalism.²¹ Nationalism itself was, in part,
a response to the treatment of Indians in other parts of the empire, be it the
conditions that prompted Gandhi’s satyagraha in South Africa or those of
migrant labourers in South East Asia.²² The latter case brought up imperial,
colonial, and national concerns. For Indian nationalists, the rights of the
migrant labourers depended on belonging to a political formation that could
lobby for them. The need for a government that spoke for them—a nation-
alist government—resonated with those concerned about overseas Indians
in the 1930s, prominently the Indian Tamil labour population that had been
at odds with locals in Malaya.²³ Indians abroad served as a reminder to those
seeking Indian independence that they belonged to a wider global and
imperial community, but also drove home a need to represent Indian rights
and needs even in these new homelands. The case of Kenya points to a clear
consciousness of being from India as the basis for Indian demands for
greater access to the European-only highlands, very similar to the attitude
embraced by Gandhi in South Africa. Nationalists within the subcontinent
were equally indignant about the diaspora’s experiences of inequality.²⁴ The
transnational formulation of Indian nationalism came from the diaspora,
which, despite being spread across diverse spaces and circumstances, dem-
onstrated an ‘Indian-ness’ that necessitated creating a government to protect
their rights.
Even prior to the realisation of the nation-state in the subcontinent,
Indian nationalists possessed a growing national consciousness that had a
territorial connotation. Indian soldiers who fought in Europe and across
Africa and Asia developed loyalties to the empire and to the idea of India.²⁵
Indian participation in the Great War brought with it several hopes,
prime amongst them the dream of dominion status and self-government.
The Indian nationalists also sought a better platform to negotiate for
Indian residents in white settler colonies. However, these dominions of
the British Empire retained the right to determine their populations by
²¹ Sunil Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 73–4.
²² An example is outlined in Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age
of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 151–70.
²³ Sunil Amrith, ‘Indians Overseas? Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya 1870–1941’, Past
and Present 208, no. 1 (2010).
²⁴ Sana Aiyar, ‘Anti-Colonial Homelands Across the Indian Ocean: The Politics of the Indian
Diaspora in Kenya, ca. 1930–1950’, American Historical Review 116, no. 4 (2011).
²⁵ Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 122–47.
  ’   25
controlling immigration.²⁶ The British Indian government pushed a circular

understanding of the rights of Indian settlers, particularly regarding fran-
chise. As Indians had not experienced this form of government at home,
they could not expect to be treated on par with those of European descent in
other parts of the empire. The 1919 Government of India Act that allegedly
introduced democratic methods of government to the Indian people would
begin their training in the matter.²⁷ ‘Training’ and a gradual move towards
self-government became a way to deny Indians across the empire the rights
and equality that, in theory, a cosmopolitan, liberal British imperial citizen-
ship promised to all its subject people regardless of race.
The formula for ‘within the Empire’ clearly did not work, and the
treatment of Indians seemed unlikely to improve given the state of affairs
in the early 1920s. The rights of the individual, under the umbrella of the
universality of imperial citizenship, had been effectively tied to the sort of
participatory politics and self-government that had yet to be granted to the
subcontinent’s people. The right of the dominion nations and communities
to exclude other imperial citizens undercut the value of this shared citizen-
ship. Equality before law in the empire became subjugated to implicit racial
discrimination in the guise of historicised differences.²⁸ India thus possessed
the sovereign right of international representation as a founding member of
the League of Nations (as discussed later in this chapter), while unfettered
domestic sovereignty was vested in the British imperial project, as repre-
sented by the British officials who governed India. By the 1920s and 1930s,
it was clear that ‘small improvements’ promised by the British in pursuit
of self-government would not do.²⁹ A series of developments emphasised
the need for a revolutionary shift beyond the territorial subcontinent,
and in the very nature of liberal citizenship promised by a transnational
empire: Gandhi’s testing of the limits of British citizenship in South Africa;
the uproar on the return of the ship carrying Indians, the Komagata
Maru, that challenged the Canadians’ unequal migration clauses; and the
connections built between Home Rule and the necessary participation of
citizens for self-government by that movement’s proponents in India,
the Anglo-Irish theosophist Annie Besant and Congress member Bal
²⁶ ‘The Colour Question in Politics’, The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of
International Affairs 13, no. 49 (1922), 47.
²⁷ ‘The Colour Question in Politics’, 47.
²⁸ David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002).
²⁹ Tinker, Separate and Unequal, 35–6.
26    
Gangadhar Tilak.³⁰ Indian nationalism extended far beyond the territorial

borders of the Raj, and the Indian notion of the self had obvious inter-
national and transnational origins. It is thus possible to locate Indian
identity in response to the myriad ways in which the universalism of
imperial citizenship failed the Indian people as migrants within the empire
as well as beyond it.
The League of Nations
Those who called for the Indian nation-state did so in a particular inter-
nationalist moment, which in turn influenced how independent India would
treat those displaced across its borders. The Paris Peace Conference and
associated treaties created the world order of the League of Nations. Despite
an obvious commitment to internationalism and a stated recognition that
this was based on a coming together of nations, the League of Nations
effectively adopted the paternalism of the British Empire in its formative
years and justified its guiding hand. This version of the international order
gave contemporary imperial powers the right to decide who was included
through their power to determine the sovereignty of the League’s constituent
nation-states. The greater participation of former colonies at the United
Nations eventually shifted this power away from them. India, as a proxy for
the postcolonial world, would challenge the undisputed right of European
powers to determine sovereignty through the South Africa Question in 1946,
discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. However, the rhetoric of
sovereignty and the state would gain unquestioned universal acceptance in
the United Nations too, even as anti-colonial actors transformed it into a
forum to critique the previous imperialist international order of the League
and limit the European powers’ hold over what this meant.³¹ On the surface,
it seems that notions of sovereignty were created in Europe and applied to
other parts of the world via means such as colonialism. In truth, sovereign
self-determination and self-government had been formulated through
the relationship between the colony and the imperial metropole, and the
latter’s promise of an eventual realisation of self-determination and self-
government to colonial peoples. These principles and the right to exercise
³⁰ Frost, ‘Imperial Citizenship or Else’.

³¹ Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the
United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 188–9.
  ’   27
such rights were adapted in light of these earlier exclusions. What happens
when history is seen through the perspective that ‘Colonialism cannot be
accounted for as an example of the application of sovereignty; rather,
sovereignty was constituted and shaped through colonialism’?³² As early
as 1927, Nehru had been speaking of the Indians’ limited rights and poor
treatment alongside questions of international representation.³³ Given
India’s role in shifting the site of these powers of recognition regarding
who had the right to sovereign representation after 1945, that worldwide re-
conceptualisation relied on how nationalists like Nehru understood the
relationship of the international order and self-determination in the inter-
war years.
India held an anomalous international position as a member of the
League of Nations despite being a British colony. Within India, the League
was at odds with the British government, with the two competing over what
was international and what fell within the domain of an imperial domestic
sphere. The League acted for a family of states, but also for the populations
resident within them. It established a direct relationship between individuals
(who made up the population) and the international order, its reach extend-
ing as far as matters of the body through its interventions on practices like
trafficking.³⁴ India too was part of the laboratory for the internationalism of
the League of Nations, given its anomalous representation and the League’s
interventions in labour practices. India’s place in this international organ-
isation resembled the position of Indian people within the transnational
empire—India made a disproportionately large financial contribution, more
than that of Italy, with only a limited number of Indian officials hand-picked
by the British government in the ranks of the League in return. Only six Far
East positions existed, created to increase representation from Asia, despite
this region including India, China, and Japan. It was also evident that
League agencies did not function for the benefit of Indians in proportion
to the subcontinental contribution of resources. In contrast to the United
³² Antony Anghie, ‘Finding the Peripheries: Sovereignty and Colonialism in Nineteenth-

Century International Law’, Harvard International Law Journal 40, no. 1 (1999), 6.
³³ Louro, Comrades against Imperialism, 28.
³⁴ Stephen Legg, ‘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, no. 2 (2009); Stephen Legg, ‘An International Anomaly? Sovereignty, the
League of Nations and India’s Princely Geographies’, Journal of Historical Geography 43
(2004); Stephen Legg, ‘ “The Life of Individuals as well as of Nations”: International Law and
the League of Nations’ Anti-Trafficking Governmentalities’, Leiden Journal of International Law
25, no. 3 (2012).
28    
Kingdom and France, whose expenditures far overshot their contributions,

Indian officials’ expenditure was a very small proportion of the Indian
financial contribution. India’s status as a colony meant that, despite some
successful efforts, its interests as a country became secondary to the interests
of British enterprise.³⁵ In this context, an international body that could
intervene in practices pertaining to the lives of individual Indians served
as a reminder that the state was an important means to an end, to secure
representation at such a forum that could alter everyday conditions.
Notably, nationalist leaders were never part of the British-selected delega-
tion, which consisted of those nominated by the British and those chosen to
represent the Chamber of Princes, like the Maharaja of Bikaner and the Aga
Khan, with the latter even serving as the League’s president in 1937. The
scholar and eventual member of independent India’s parliament, Lanka
Sundaram, would observe of the nature of representation at the League that:
If the so-called suppressed peoples of the world hope to regain their lost
liberties, as we ardently do, it is some sort of League of Nations, based as it
is on the right of the people to self-determination, which will bring about
such a consummation.³⁶
Sundaram was writing about the relationship between India, the

Commonwealth, and the League as part of his 1944 book India in World
Politics. Trained in international law in Geneva and Oxford thanks to the
assistance of the Maharaja of Baroda, Sundaram would even present a paper
on India’s status in the international order to the famed Grotius Society in
London in 1931. That first paper, evidently the beginnings of the larger
book-length undertaking, also hinted at the problems of international rep-
resentation limited only to that which was permitted by the Secretary of
State for India in London.³⁷ Sundaram’s later book is much more critical,
stating that the ‘position of Indian delegations at these conferences had
never been effective’. His analysis employs the experiences of the Rt. Hon.
V.N. Srinivasa Sastri, a moderate nationalist who had represented India
³⁵ For example, India’s relationship with the International Labour Organization at this time
is outlined in J. Krishnamurty, ‘Indian Officials in the ILO, 1919–c. 1947’, Economic and
Political Weekly 46, no. 10 (2011); Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 60.
³⁶ Lanka Sundaram, India in World Politics: A Historical Analysis and Appraisal (Delhi:
Sultan Chand & Co., 1944), 47.
³⁷ Lanka Sundaram, ‘The International Status of India’, Journal of the Royal Institute of
International Affairs 9, no. 4 (1930). He also presented a similar thesis to the Grotius Society.
  ’   29
abroad at various forums, to make the connection between India’s unequal

place in the Commonwealth and its position in the League. On the surface of
things, it seemed as though the various problems and inequalities faced by
Indians in the other Commonwealth dominions could be improved by this
formal representation at the League. Sastri noted, however, that the position
of India was not comparable to the dominions, represented not by an Indian
Prime Minister but by nominees of the British. Sundaram, writing of Sastri’s
reaction in 1944, characterised this criticism as holding true for the duration
of the League’s operations.³⁸ Indian thinkers and political actors were keenly
aware of the need for self-government and the paradox of representation at
the League without the same rights within the subcontinent. The many
debates about the nature of Indian participation in the League, and the
strides made in the International Labour Organization, all contributed to
clarifying the importance of the relationship between international repre-
sentation and the stoking of nationalist feeling.³⁹
India’s anomalous position in the League of Nations has often been
remarked upon, with scholars usually limiting themselves to pondering the
nature of its inclusion in the first place.⁴⁰ Any hopes India may have had of
this new order, which had declared the importance of self-determination at
its founding moment, were quickly quelled. Nehru wrote that ‘the Powers
did just what they liked, but they put on a more sanctimonious garb, and
thus lulled the consciousness of the unwary’.⁴¹ However, focusing primarily
on India’s anomalous position conceals how Indian nationalism and inter-
nationalism intersected. India achieved external self-determination, in the
form of representation in the League of Nations, prior to internal self-
determination or political independence from the British. Though seen by
many as a mere extra vote for the British at the League, contemporary
actors—like the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Samuel Montagu—
understood this external recognition as prompting further demands for
³⁸ Sundaram, India in World Politics, 15–16.

³⁹ Discussed at length in the second chapter of Sundaram, India in World Politics, 52–113.
See also Sundaram, ‘The International Status of India’, 458–62.
⁴⁰ T.T. Poulose, ‘India as an Anomalous International Person (1919–1947)’, British Yearbook
of International Law 44 (1970); Legg, ‘An International Anomaly?’; R.P. Anand, ‘The Formation
of International Organizations and India: A Historical Study’, Leiden Journal of International
Law 23, no. 1 (2010).
⁴¹ Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to his Daughter,
Written in Prison and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1989), 632.
30    
self-determination domestically on the basis of national feeling.⁴² The

creation of the national space was in conversation with global currents,
but also with colonial experiences prior to the creation of the independent
national state in 1947.⁴³ The internationalism of the League of Nations had
exposed the blurry hierarchy of sovereignties within the empire, as well as
the different enjoyment of powers of representation. After all, the dominion
states, the Indian princely states, and those territories governed directly by
British colonial officials did not speak for the benefit of their residents in the
same ways, despite being united under the umbrella of empire.
Indian thinkers, whether the hugely influential Bengali writer and poet
Rabindranath Tagore or Nehru, had certain universalist visions. Nehru saw
the nation-state as a stepping-stone to a world federation. This was not at
odds with the liberal internationalist idea that the nation-state was a stop on
the way to a truly equal internationalism.⁴⁴ But even at the birth of the new
disciplines of international relations and political science, Indian thinkers
articulated a version of an emancipatory international order free from
discriminatory imperial hierarchies in contrast to that espoused by the
West.⁴⁵ Writing in 1930 on India’s anomalous position in the League
ahead of his presentation at the Grotius Society, Sundaram outlined the
potential for a nationalism born of Indian participation at the League despite
the delegation’s selection by the British. Sundaram notes that domestic and
inter-imperial matters were kept out of the remit of the League, but the
unanimous election of Sir Atul Chatterjee as head of the International
Labour Conference went some way to spurring a nationalist consciousness.
Sundaram observes the irony of international representation, which he
clearly frames as within the limits of British tolerance for such activity,
and the nationalist potential of this internationalist ‘training’.⁴⁶ The realisa-
tion of internationalism for India is associated in most scholarly work
with the United Nations, as this was the first time a nationalist delegation
represented the Indian people. There was a dissonance then, as the first
version of a liberal internationalist world federation that was creating
⁴² Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 160–2.

⁴³ For a detailed account of this process, see Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial
Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
⁴⁴ Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 45–117.
⁴⁵ Martin J. Bayly, ‘Imagining New Worlds: Forging “Non-Western” International Relations
in Late Colonial India’, British Academy Review Summer 2017. https://www.thebritishacademy.
ac.uk/imagining-new-worlds-forging-non-western-international-relations-late-colonial-india
[accessed 22 June 2020].
⁴⁶ Sundaram, ‘The International Status of India’, 459.
  ’   31
universal norms and categories did not actually account for the experiences
of many of the people it claimed to speak for. A world federation that was
truly representative could only be created by first giving the people of
the world an adequate voice in its framing in the Nehruvian vision. The
League of Nations’ perpetuation of such exclusions disqualified it, as it
had not undone that liberal paternalism so abhorred by the anti-colonial
nationalists.
The League of Nations’ blatant denial of racial equality made its exclu-
sions look even worse to Indian eyes. In 1919, the Japanese call for a clause
affirming racial equality was denied at the Paris Peace Conference.⁴⁷ Japan
had been acknowledged as a Great Power, so this refusal could only be
interpreted as a reassertion of the superiority of white men’s nations. India’s
own delegation had not voted for the clause, perhaps the most damning
piece of evidence that it did not speak for the Indian people so much as their
imperial masters. The question of race and equality in this first manifest-
ation of an international organisation is significant. Racist thinking was
often masked by a rhetoric of potential for self-governance and civilised
living, all closely tied to hierarchical colonial societies and economies. As
discussed earlier in this chapter, there were also strict controls on who could
move to the societies that seemed to be making greater economic progress.
Lake and Reynolds use the ‘Colour Line’, made famous by W.E.B. Du Bois,
to understand the transnational notions of whiteness that underpinned the
formation of white men’s nations, and therefore the sovereign nation-states
that tended to have a larger say in world politics. These ideas of race had an
impact on global politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though
they were most often understood within the national frameworks and
restrictive immigration policies of individual nations rather than as part
of a larger transnational idea of ‘historicised’ difference. The larger issue
with liberalism was that ‘individual liberty and freedom of movement were
heralded as universal rights, but only Europeans could exercise them’.⁴⁸
The South African leader Jan Smuts and America’s Woodrow Wilson
certainly painted self-determination as compatible with imperialism’s
racialised hierarchies in 1919. They replaced Lenin’s secessionist, revolu-
tionary self-determination with a counterrevolutionary interpretation that
⁴⁷ For a history of this confrontation, and the role of Australia, Britain, and the United States,
see Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (New York:
Routledge, 1998).
⁴⁸ Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 26.
32    
only acknowledged a limited participation for some peoples.⁴⁹ The British

promise of progressive realisation of self-government in India, and the
limited franchise of the 1919 constitutional reforms, can certainly be recon-
ciled with this version.
Though anti-colonialists perceived it as imperialist, the League of Nations
still marked a significant engagement with the international order for both
the Indian population and its nationalists. The internationalism of the
League of Nations was often at odds with the imperialism that constituent
powers sought to maintain and legitimise, challenging some aspects of
British imperial power in the colonies.⁵⁰ Despite its close relationship with
imperial powers, the League of Nations became a forum where different
visions of what the world should look like could compete with each other. It
created a public sphere that allowed petitions and complaints from those
who would otherwise not have had a voice, like those in Mandated territor-
ies, in the League.⁵¹ Indian nationalists might not have been represented at
the League, but this did not mean that they did not consider what form the
international order should take, and what form of sovereignty would allow
them to effect change in this international order so as to take part in the
promise of economic advancement on equal footing. The League as it was
symbolised a form of internationalism that was informed by—and reified—
the national, irrevocably altering the status of India, and Indians. It put India
in a strange position in this new family of nations. Internationally recog-
nised sovereign states were the constituent nations of the League, enforcing
the state as the nation.⁵² In turn, its conception of the nation as state would
become a standard that many within India would try to meet or reconfigure
to fit with pluralities of the subcontinent and the questions of Indians
abroad. The pursuit of a more authentic Indian representation at the
League prompted thinking about an acceptable political configuration that
matched the realities of the Indian situation with regard to territory, minor-
ities, and diaspora.
⁴⁹ Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire, 37–71.

⁵⁰ For an understanding of the League’s relationship to Imperialism via the Mandate system,
see Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015).
⁵¹ Susan Pedersen, ‘Empires, States and the League of Nations’, in Glenda Sluga and Patricia
Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017), 113–38; Natasha Wheatley, ‘New Subjects in International Law and Order’, in
Sluga and Clavin, Internationalisms, 265–86.
⁵² For a detailed understanding of the role of nations in the international order in Geneva in
the interwar years, see Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 45–78.
  ’   33
All of the forms that Indian interwar internationalism took were closely
tied to nationalism in some way or the other, most notably with the
Pan-Islamist, transnational Khilafat movement that was combined with
Gandhi’s nationalist Non-Cooperation Movement. Jawaharlal Nehru’s
own experience was closely tied to the anti-colonial internationalism of
the Second International, not least because of the 1927 Brussels meeting of
the League Against Imperialism. In some way, whether within the League or
within communist internationalism, the elite voices who represented India,
and who would form the bureaucracy and government of the independent
state, also bought into the close link between nationalism and internation-
alism. One was a means to the other, and vice versa.
The Minority—An Imperial Category
The end of the First World War had marked the shift from empire to nation-
state within Europe and tied a community to a territory while also making
other communities minorities in this new entity. Borders, a hallmark of the
creation of the nation-state, became sites of power and contention. Even the
earlier writings of Nehru reflect a ‘cartographic anxiety’ for the borders of
India, particularly their porous nature.⁵³ This was hardly surprising, given
that British India’s peripheral borders had traditionally been subject to
constant remaking and fluctuation both by previous colonial officials and
by locals.⁵⁴ Lenin and Wilson had given the colonised world the rhetoric of
self-determination (though not the idea itself), but its practical application
defied a simple national-group-and-territory framework. While Indian
thinkers presented many potential versions of the Indian nation(s), they
tended to uphold the idea of borders, often existing imperial ones.⁵⁵ Even as
Indian nationalists hoped to extend the promise of self-government for and
by Indians to properly ensure rights for the diaspora, they envisioned its
associated sovereignty within subcontinental territorial bounds. It is thus
impossible to divorce the empire from the international. Indian nationalists
felt the need to alter who controlled activities within these borders, but also
wanted to uphold the borders themselves, in order to meet the criteria for
⁵³ Sankaran Krishna, ‘Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India’, Alternative
Global, Local, Political 19, no. 4 (1994), 509.
⁵⁴ Thomas Simpson, ‘Bordering and Frontier-Making in Nineteenth-Century British India’,
The Historical Journal 58, no. 2 (2015).
⁵⁵ Abraham, How India Became Territorial, 51–2.
34    
international representation that would allow Indians to challenge existing

imperialist international norms. It fostered the need for a national space in
order for India to be properly represented in the international sphere.
However, imperial borders contained within them a plurality of languages,
religions, and cultural traditions that did not easily meet the prevalent
definition of the national at this time.
Anti-colonial nationalism and demands for Home Rule predated Wilson’s
declaration. While it is a stretch to say that Wilson provided the idea itself, he
did provide the terms and conditions through which to argue for self-
determination. The India Home Rule League of America, for example, argued
for freedom for India in the same vein as Canada and Australia.⁵⁶ His
declaration led to colonised peoples thinking about the ways in which they
met the conditions for this alleged universality within the spaces of empire.
India was no exception to this, and many Indians set out to think of the
ways in which India could be construed as a nation and therefore a self-
determined state. The petition of the Indian Home Rule League, sent by post
to Paris since the anti-colonial leader Tilak was denied a passport, is one
such example. It harked to the modern notion of federalism, creating space
for distinct ethnic and linguistic groups united by a common racial and
cultural past coming together to make an Indian federation.⁵⁷ The Hindu
nationalist activist V.D. Savarkar’s tome on the Hindu Rashtra or the Hindu
nation is another product of the 1920s, taken further in later decades by
Hindutva ideologues like the second chief of Rashtriya Swayam Sevak
Sangh, M.S. Golwalkar.⁵⁸ This particular strand of thought disavowed the
idea that a Western concept of the nation had been imposed on India,
instead tracing a national consciousness back many centuries into Hindu
culture.⁵⁹ The Aga Khan, leader of the Shia Ismaili sect of Muslims, floated
another vision after the First World War. As one of the founding members
of India’s Muslim League, he was preoccupied with the position of the
imperially created Muslim political minority. The Aga Khan suggested a
loose South Asiatic Federation based on four distinct civilisations, premised
⁵⁶ The theme of India Home Rule League of America, Young India III, no. 10, 1920. Available
at https://www.saada.org/item/20111027–434 [accessed 22 June 2020].
⁵⁷ Abraham, How India Became Territorial, 57–63.
⁵⁸ While the original text was published in 1923 under the title Essentials of Hindutva, the
edition consulted for this book was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? 5th
edition (Bombay: Veer Savarkar Prakashan, 1969); while it was first published in Marathi in
1934, Golwalkar’s ideas were accessed in the abridged English translation: M.S. Golwalkar, We,
or Our Nationhood Defined, 4th edition (Nagpur City: Bharat Prakashan Mahal, 1947).
⁵⁹ Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined, 60–5.
  ’   35
on India’s primacy in the empire and reliant on imperial geography for its
perpetuation.⁶⁰ The territorial nation-state was only one of many possible
versions of representative political structures that allowed the realisation of
self-determination, and certainly not the foregone conclusion to such
aspirations.
Questions of self-determination led to meditation on the question of
minority populations. The right to self-determination had been framed
with reference to the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was
not intended for non-European sites. Creating national states also made
minority communities in these new entities. They became the subject of
minority treaties across the continent, which loosened their claims to the
state. The international order of the League of Nations was more concerned
with defending the rights of minorities within Europe than elsewhere.⁶¹ The
flaw in the system set up at Versailles in 1919 was that ethno-national
groups rarely corresponded to territory, most infamously evident in Nazi
justifications of their expansionism to protect German peoples beyond the
state’s borders. Casting those who did not belong to a majority national
community as needing the protection of an international organisation
against the state in which they lived reinforced that the state could not
(or did not have to) take care of all its citizens. It also created minorities of
those at fault for failing to assimilate.⁶²
For those who were trying to make the case for their own state, the
question of minorities was just as important. The India Home Rule League
would compare caste in India to class in Britain and claimed religion in
India as being not dissimilar to different churches in Britain. In that vein,
they proposed their federal vision for an India made of twelve distinct
nationalities.⁶³ Those previously mentioned notions of the Hindu Rashtra
stood in direct opposition to the views of persons like the Aga Khan. They
portrayed the Muslims and Christians of India as having failed to
assimilate—and not truly part of Hindu India since these communities
⁶⁰ Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013), 70–7.
⁶¹ A.W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the
European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Paul Gordon Lauren, The
Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen, 3rd edition (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Mark Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights
1933–1950’, The Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004).
⁶² Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph’, 382–4.
⁶³ India Home Rule League of America, Self-Determination for India, available at https://
www.saada.org/item/20130123–1240 [accessed 22 June 2020].
36    
had supposed allegiances to locations and peoples beyond Hindustan. But

more surprisingly, such writings would justify their exclusions based on the
internment camps into which the British had put civilians during the First
World War. M.S. Golwalkar, writing much later, cited the example of
Germans who settled in Britain and eventually became citizens. One of
these naturalised citizens had been an Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer in
Madhya Pradesh and was interned by the British at the outbreak of the First
World War lest he present a hitherto latent German loyalty. ‘This is their
mature and correct understanding of nationalism’, Golwalkar tells his
reader, ‘So too is the case with our nation’.⁶⁴ These camps, which have
an afterlife in the detention camps being set up for ‘non-citizens’ in India
today, served as a reminder of the ‘correct’ fate envisioned for unassimilable
minorities: a more right-wing, anti-minority version of the nation borrowed
directly from exclusionary practices for enemy aliens in the war, as well as
from British prejudices against those who were perceived to have other
national attachments.
Hindu nationalists were not the only people in India moved to think
about minorities in the subcontinent. The Aga Khan’s vision was self-
consciously part of the same post-war internationalism that underwrote
both the League of Nations and Pan-Islamism. It also had the added benefit
of providing representative politics for the Muslims while removing their
status as a minority. In his vision, the nation-state was almost an incidental
symptom of the imperialist and internationalist aspects of the League.⁶⁵
Though his vision would not come to realisation, and minority politics in
India developed along a different trajectory, it drew a clear connection
between the international minority and the imperially created minority.
Congress nationalists had long viewed the Aga Khan as a product of the
same British imperialism that influenced the League, suspicious of them as
well as any categories that they endorsed. The British argument for retaining
control until the question of separate electorates and minority representa-
tion had been solved in India was eerily similar to the League’s minority
protections in Europe that reinforced the idea that nation-states could not
take care of their minority citizens.
⁶⁴ M.S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts (Bangalore: Vikrama Prakashan, 1966), 129–30.

⁶⁵ For a detailed examination of the internationalism embodied by the Aga Khan, see
Soumen Mukherjee, Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge
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Kāturā, Grabmal A. 272.
Kbēs, Monsieur 214, 215, 216, 222, 223.
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Making Refugees in India (Oxford

Historical Monographs) Ria Kapoor

Making Refugees in India

OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS

.  .  . 

I am so grateful to dear friends who were on their own academic journeys

¹ ‘Deportation of Antonius Raab, a Baroda State Employee’, Ofﬁcial Report of the

2    

⁷ ‘Deportation of Antonius Raab, a Baroda State Employee’, Ofﬁcial Report of the

4    

refugee is a discourse upheld by a manufactured infrastructure and categor-

¹⁰ E. Valentine Daniel, ‘The Refugee: A Discourse on Displacement’, in Jeremy MacClancy

6    

news to the Indian state as revealed in Chapter 4 of this work.¹⁶ These

movements focused on collective rights—notably self-determination as the

8    

10    

progress. The Assembly had decided that correcting backwardness and

relationships, communities, and societies. Instead, clarity lies in appreciating

This work writes the postcolony into histories of refugee-related humani-

³⁵ Daniel, ‘The Refugee’, 278.

12    

Chapter 1 is set in the early twentieth century and serves as a prehistory of

critics—approached the displaced millions alongside the other problems of

14    

16    

Indian resistance to an umbrella refugee deﬁnition and associated uni-

³⁸ Chimni, ‘The Geopolitics of Refugee Studies’.

18    

Nehru introduced India’s freedom from British colonialism as an essential

  ’   19

internationalism, and by extension that of the Indian National Congress,

⁷ Emma Haddad, ‘The Inter-War Perspective’, in The Refugee in International Society,

20    

highlights the circumstances in which the internationally created refugee,

Indian Movement within Empire

Indians born in the directly British-controlled territories of the subcontinent

  ’   21

non-white subjects of the empire.⁹ The beginning of the twentieth century

22    

Deliberately replacing a discrimination based on race with the terminology

¹³ Frost, ‘Imperial Citizenship or Else’, 854–5.

  ’   23

¹⁷ Kondapi, Indians Overseas, 181–4.

24    

A travelling intelligentsia also transmitted ideas back to their homeland

  ’   25

controlling immigration.²⁶ The British Indian government pushed a circular

26    

Gangadhar Tilak.³⁰ Indian nationalism extended far beyond the territorial

The League of Nations

³⁰ Frost, ‘Imperial Citizenship or Else’.

  ’   27

³² Antony Anghie, ‘Finding the Peripheries: Sovereignty and Colonialism in Nineteenth-

28    

Kingdom and France, whose expenditures far overshot their contributions,

Sundaram was writing about the relationship between India, the

  ’   29

abroad at various forums, to make the connection between India’s unequal

³⁸ Sundaram, India in World Politics, 15–16.

30    

self-determination domestically on the basis of national feeling.⁴² The

⁴² Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 160–2.