Subaltern Worldmaking after War: India, Indonesia and the Indian Ocean Anticolonial Moment, 1945-1946

Abstract

This paper considers how mass wartime transit engendered new anticolonial affinities and shared imaginations of decolonised futures. In exploring the presence of Indian and Indonesian subalterns across an embattled Indian Ocean, this paper looks at an understudied moment of subaltern solidarity between peripatetic colonial subjects in the transition from the end of the Second World War to decolonisation in India and Indonesia. It discusses the presence of Indian soldiers, sailors and journalists in Indonesia, and that of Indonesian sailors, refugees and anticolonial youths in India, to explore the ways in which transit informed – and broadened – their visions of colonialism and anticolonial struggles and produced articulations of pan- colonial “friendship” and “brotherhood”. These sentiments  were also shared by a section of Indian soldiers in Indonesia: there was growing dissatisfaction, desertion and even defection. At the same time, in Bombay, hundreds of Indonesian seamen went on strike and addressed anticolonial political meetings.  In mapping the reverberation of this protest movement against re-colonization across the Indian Ocean, the paper argues that these projects of subaltern ‘worldmaking’ encompassed geographical scales corresponding to their lived experience of global wartime mobility, and ruptured the Allied vision for the postwar world order.