Collaborators! Aftermath of Wartime Support for the INA among Indians in China

Abstract

This article discusses the plight of the Indian community in China after the World War II. During the World War II, a sizeable number of Indian immigrants in China had been mobilised under the banner of the Indian National Army (INA), which was fighting for freedom from British colonial rule in alliance with Japan. This article seeks to understand the complex problems faced by the Indians in China in the aftermath of the War both because of the general dislocation they had suffered on account of war and occupation, and also because of their active or passive participation in a movement seen as ‘collaborationist’. It looks at how, for the British, Chinese and even Indian authorities, the issue of their status as ‘collaborators’ coloured the humanitarian issue of providing relief to a severely afflicted community. It also attempts to show how the wartime political activities of Indians in China not only had immediate consequences for them but also in some cases had an afterlife, which lasted for quite a few years after the War.

Keywords

Collaboration India–China relations Indian National Army (INA)Indian diaspora Japan World War II

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

National Archives of India (NAI) , New Delhi, India:

Indian National Army (INA) Papers.

Proceedings of the External Affairs Department(EAD)

Proceedings of the Home Political Department(Pol(I))

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Maryland, USA .

Brook

Timothy

. 2000. ‘Collaborationist Nationalism in Occupied Wartime China’, in Schmid

Andre

Brook

Timothy

(eds), Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 159–90.

Brook

Timothy

. 2005. Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Brook

Timothy

. 2008. ‘Collaboration in the History of Wartime East Asia’, The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Vol. 6, No. 7, http://apjjf.org/-Timothy-Brook/2798/article.html (accessed on 10 July 2017).

Poshek

. 1993. Passivity, Resistance and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937–1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

10.

Mukherji

Priyadarsi

. 2008. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian Liberation Movement in East Asia: Declassified Documents in China and India. New Delhi: Har Anand Publications Private Limited.

11.

Thampi

Madhavi

. 2005a. Indians in China: 1800–1949. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distributors.

12.

Thampi

Madhavi

. (ed.). 2005b. India and China in the Colonial World. New Delhi: Social Science Press.

13.

Wasserstein

Bernard

. 1998. ‘Ambiguities of Occupation: Foreign Resisters and Collaborators in Wartime’, in Yeh

Wen-hsin

(ed.), Wartime Shanghai. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge, 23–38.

14.

Zanasi

Margherita

. 2008a. ‘Globalizing Hanjian: The Suzhou Trials and the Post-World War II Discourse on Collaboration’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 113, No. 3, 731–51.

15.

Zanasi

Margherita

. 2008b. ‘New Perspectives on Chinese Collaboration’, The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Vol. 6, No. 7, July 2, http://apjjf.org/-Margherita-Zanasi/2828/article.html (accessed on 10 July 2017).