Churchill is often ranked as one of the most hated figures in Irish history but he was also one of the most influential politicians in shaping relations both within and between Britain and Ireland. Churchill played a formative role in the ‘Irish Question’. At the beginning of his career he was a Unionist, inheriting his father’s sympathy for Ulster, but converted to Home Rule. The chapter contrasts the impact of social reforms in helping Irish pensioners with the role of Irish suffragettes in defeating Churchill at Manchester in 1908. It looks at how he tried to navigate between the Unionists and nationalists in the Edwardian era, before showing how the war (including Irish losses at Gallipoli) led to rebellion. Thereafter, Churchill pursued a dual strategy of repression and negotiation and played a key role in the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the subsequent events surrounding partition. His belligerence has tended to overshadow the multi-faceted ways he dealt with and thought about the Irish.

Federation was promoted as an ideal before and between the two world wars, in both colonial independence movements and internationalist thought. It also became a term for promoting reforms to imperial governance, referring sometimes to greater political and economic integration and at other times to devolution or self-rule. Writers around the world responded to these developments directly, in specific political and constitutional discussions, and through indirect engagement with federalism’s rhetorical, conceptual, historical, and affective structures. Modernists such as Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner exemplify the range of white metropolitan writers’ playful, earnest, and creative engagements with federal themes during the interwar period. Paradigmatic of a so-called ‘federal moment’ amidst global decolonisation movements during the post-war period, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children illustrates federalism’s contested status as both a legacy of colonial rule and a potential mechanism for imagining postcolonial futures.

Beginning with the transition from Mughal and Ottoman rule, this chapter focuses on the forms and schedules of the census as a site of negotiation and as a battleground infused by the axis of suspicion between administrators and communal leaderships, comparing bureaucratic negotiations and processes of separation in each of the colonies. It compares how hybrid bureaucracy deployed the census as a toolkit of government, in which categories of religion, language, and region gradually solidified into ethnonational identities. Through attempts to standardize, homogenize, and separate, communities were constituted as essentially different to justify the selective pairing of administrative practice to population. Division into majorities and minorities turned the census forms into a site for negotiation between subjects and officials, as well as an arena for rivalry between communities. Suspicion or embrace of enumeration techniques depended on one’s proximity to the negotiation over resources, amidst fears of control.

In 1947, Britain decided to relinquish its Mandate over Palestine and refer the issue of the status of Palestine to the United Nations. The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish States with economic union between them and that Jerusalem be a separate area to be administered by the United Nations for an initial period of ten years. The recommendation was not legally binding. The Arab population of Palestine and the Arab States rejected the partition plan. The Jewish population of Palestine accepted the plan, although with misgivings. The partition plan was not implemented.

The Partition of the South Asian subcontinent in 1947 into modern nation states of India, Pakistan is the historic event that not only inaugurated nationalities where political identities were based on religious differences, but also erased the collective identities different religious communities shared in their struggle against British colonialism over two centuries. In the celebration of India’s independence, the unprecedented violence of Partition is written out of the narrative of the nation as an aberration, a cataclysmic moment of madness. This chapter engages with this moment of madness captured in the Urdu short stories of Sa’adat Hasan Manto and highlights the psychoanalytic role of literature in remembering the violence that haunts India in the its pervasive communal strife. Focusing on Manto’s short stories, this chapter explains how literature allows working through the repressed violence of Partition fostering possibilities of mourning collective communal losses.

This chapter examines the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan after the passing of the Lahore Resolution in March 1940 and the drive for independence by the Congress – processes which turned the Sikh world upside down. It examines Sikh leaderships’ opposition to the division of the Punjab and its articulation of a minority nationalism that accommodated a multicultural, consociationalism governance in a multi-religious and multi-ethnic (resized) province. It assesses how the failure to reach an agreement between the Congress and the Muslim League, and the determination of the British government to cede power to only two dominions, led the Sikh leadership to then demand a Sikh state, and then, as violence engulfed the province, to ensure the ethnic consolidation of the community in East Punjab. The partition holocaust revived memories of persecution and massacres in the eighteenth century, permanently dividing the Sikhs’ homeland and holy land. It would also shape profoundly the outlook of the community in post-independence India and abroad after 1947.

This chapter uncovers how the 1947 Partition of India shapes South Asian America in particular, and Asian America more generally. Engaging with recent Asian American studies of war and displacement, it situates Partition in its wider history of decolonization and the emergent Cold War from 1930 to 1970, to show how it constitutively shapes South Asian American literature about the circuits of travel, migration, internment, and displacement that link Asia and Asian America. In this period, South Asian writers and critics like Santha Rama Rau circulated back and forth between the USA, England, and Asia, and produced writing that reflected on race relations in the USA and under empire; the traumatic mass migrations of 1947; and the geopolitical and ideological conflicts linked to the Cold War that shaped decolonization in Asia. Daiya traces the linkages between the 1947 Partition and subsequent border conflicts and war in South Asia, including Tibetan refugees’ exile in India, the little-discussed 1962 war between India and China, and Chinese-Indians’ ensuing, traumatic internment. This chapter shows how inter-Asia solidarities and conflicts, along with US involvement, shaped South Asia in this period of radical transformation and realignment in Asia, and for Asian America.

This chapter addresses two moments in world history: the 1940s, with World War II, decolonization, and the emergence of postcolonial nation-states, and the 1980s, which saw new modes of ethno-nationalism, genocide, the end of the Cold War, and a global reckoning with war trauma. By analyzing two novels that link postcolonial and Asian American literatures – Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate – I argue that their representation of transnational histories of human and ecological trauma provincializes America, as well as the nation-form. Taken together, these novels depict minority lives that negotiate British imperialism in Asia, the Holocaust, the 1947 Partition of India, World War II, Japanese internment, the Cold War, and ecological destruction. These novels map the lost intimacies of four continents in the middle of the twentieth century. They bear witness, inscribe postmemory, and enact genocidal remembrance – and they do so to provincialize the nation as an imagined community. They reveal its consolidation forged in geopolitical violence, and illuminate the unraveling of human rights for those rendered ethno-racial minorities in the nation.

South Asian, Palestinian, and Zionist politicians and thinkers also participated in this discourse of national liberation and state-foundation. They too sought to guarantee permanent security for an imagined people by constructing ethnic homogeneity or guaranteeing ethnic dominance over minorities. Permanent security entailed a nation being housed in “its” state; the consonance of the cultural and political nations. In addition to partition and population transfer, another modality of permanent security was “communal hostage taking”: the “occupier” can imagine minorities as potential hostages, objects of possible reprisal for perceived mistreatment of their own nationals likewise “stranded” across the border. These mental operations were necessarily global in projection and meta-reflective in practice, as leaders of states-in-waiting not only studied political dramas in other parts of the world but also scrutinized the lessons that their rivals drew from them. A political history of ideas can show how national security thinking was embedded in practices of analogy making.

These demographic transformations caused by partitions and population “transfers” in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia after 1945 were and remain foundational for the postwar order. The imperative to omit this foundational violence from legal proscription and moral purview informed the negotiation and ultimate formulation of each constituent element of the human rights revolution. These states set the threshold of what “shocks the conscience of mankind” to exclude liberal permanent security from legal proscriptions and moral condemnation. The language of transgression we use today narrowed and crystallized at this moment in global history. This chapter reconstructs how the notion of human rights developed as a function of liberal permanent security from the 1920s until the 1940s among British, Czechoslovak, and Zionist politicians and thinkers.