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

Abstract

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

Worldmaking from the margins: interactions between domestic and international ordering in mid-20th-century India

“…Mehta's struggle for enforceable human rights at the United Nations is part of broader attempts to protect Indians abroad and thus not included in the territorial foundations of postcolonial citizenship. These attempts combined the advocacy for enforceable transnational rights at the United Nations with further multilateral negotiations in the context of the Commonwealth and the Asian Relations Conference (1947) as well as bilateral support extended to individual diaspora communities (Khan and Sherman, 2021). As part of this broader set of strategies, the Indian arguments for enforceable human rights delineated above are not abstract and disembodied iterations of universal norms.…”