India in the 1940s: War, Partition, and Decolonization

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs program on Global and International History presents Dr. Sunil Purushotham and “India in the 1940s: War, Partition, and Decolonization.”

It is a widely understood that the Second World War marked the beginning of a new historical era: the “postwar” world we are thought to inhabit today. This paper revisits the global conjuncture of the 1940s by centering South Asia, and Britain’s Indian Empire, as a key site of global transformation. Britain’s vast Indian Empire, comprised of territories ruled directly by the British as well as over 500 “princely states” ruled by Indian monarchs – was by far the most populous and strategically and economically important colony in the world. The independence of India and Pakistan in August 1947 thus inaugurated the global process of decolonization. From the vantage point of the global south, decolonization – the transformation of European colonies into independent nation-states – was the twentieth century’s most salient fact. While 1947 marked the onset of freedom and political independence for India and Pakistan, it was also marked by epochal violence and dislocation as the two new nation-states sought to secure their national territories and establish democracies. Focusing on the princely state of Hyderabad, this talk revisits this moment of rupture and transformation by connecting the Partition to the end of the princely states and to the founding of the Republic of India in 1950.
 
Dr. Sunil Purushotham, Associate Professor of History at Fairfield University, is an historian of modern South Asia whose research focuses on the history of sovereignty and democracy in India, Indian political thought, and global intellectual history. From Raj to Republic: Sovereignty, Violence and Democracy in India was published by Stanford University Press in 2021. His work has also appeared in Modern Asian Studies, Modern Intellectual History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, among other journals and edited volumes. He teaches courses on modern South Asia and global histories of colonialism, imperialism, and decolonization. 

In person event. 

Co-sponsored by the Axinn Center for Humanities and the History Department.

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