Yasmin Khan

Performing Peace: Gandhi's assassination as a critical moment in the consolidation of the Nehruvian state

The consolidation of the Nehruvian states sovereignty after Independence is traced here as a contingent event which was tightly linked to the impact of Gandhis assassination and the mourning rituals which followed his death in 1948. The Congress was able to use the funeral, mortuary rituals and distribution of Gandhis ashes to assert the power of the state and to stake the Congress Partys right to sovereignty. This intersected with localized and religious expressions of grief. Gandhis death therefore acted as a bridge, spatially and temporally linking the distant state with the Indian people and underscoring transitions to Independence during the process of postcolonial transition from 1947–1950.

Wars of displacement: exile and uprooting in the 1940s

Issues of war finance engaged Japan, republican or nationalist China and the Chinese Communists throughout all fourteen years, and for the Japanese also included Southeast Asia between 1941 and 1945. This chapter shows that long periods of war and occupation in Asia could be financed by printing money because the demand for it held up sufficiently well that hyperinflation was largely avoided and confidence in money was not entirely destroyed. Japan, although its mobilization for war was badly managed and often poorly executed, never had any difficulty in financing war, starting with the so-called Peking Incident in 1937 and continuing until the Pacific War ended in 1945. Finance for both the Sino-Japanese and the Pacific War was at the expense of much higher inflation than for other major combatants, drastic cuts in civilian consumption, and considerable repressed inflation. In China and Southeast Asia, the financial techniques Japan adopted to finance occupation avoided any real payment.

The Ending of an Empire: From Imagined Communities to Nation States in India and Pakistan

Abstract The ritual and rhetoric of Independence Day celebrations in New Delhi and Karachi masked confusion about the kinds of state coming into existence and complex new questions about nationality and citizenship that would take a long time to resolve.