For diasporic Indian communities living in Burma (present-day Myanmar), the Second World War was a period of massive upheaval. As the Japanese military bombed the colonial capital of Rangoon (present-day Yangon) in December 1941 and conquered large swaths of Burma by the spring of 1942, many Burma Indians fled across the Bay of Bengal by steamship, aircraft or on foot. They, along with much smaller numbers of Anglo-Indians, Anglo-Burmese and Europeans, reached British India’s borders, numbering approximately 500,000 in total. Upon their arrival in India, these displaced people became the subject of large-scale relief projects developed by the government, which included limited efforts to employ ‘skilled’ workers, labour projects to absorb ‘unskilled’ evacuees and the issuance of repayable loans. The final stage of colonial relief for the Burma evacuees came after 1945, when the government cobbled together a repatriation programme to assist those who wished to return to Burma after the war. By providing an overview of these policies, this chapter will track the colonial administration’s changing responses to Burma Indian populations as they went from ‘migrants’ to ‘evacuees’ to ‘repatriates’ during the 1940s. Drawing on historical evidence from Visakhapatnam district, which received the largest number of Burma Indian evacuees of any district in India during the war, the chapter also provides a brief discussion of evacuees’ responses to government-run aid programmes.

In recent years, scholars have begun to reappraise the impact of the Second World War on South Asia. One of the outcomes of this new research has been to see the war years not only as the lead-up to national independence, but also as a period that caused massive disruption and social and political change throughout Asia. Within this broader literature, a growing number of authors are now examining the effects that the war had on migratory and diasporic Asian communities. Scholarship from the 1970s onward on Indian communities in Burma, for instance, has presented the regional onset of war and the evacuation of Burma as the start of a precipitous decline for people of Indian descent. For instance, Nalini Ranjan Chakravarti, a Burma Indian Civil Service (ICS) member, wrote of the period from 1942 onwards as ‘the end of Indian interests in Burma’.