A Complicated Alliance: Indo-Japanese Relations, 1915-1952

This dissertation argues that understanding Japan-South Asia relations during the first half of the 20th century (1915-1952) provides a method for explicating the linkages and complicities among empire, nationalism, and internationalism in the modern world. It joins a growing body of literature that adopts a transnational and trans-imperial approach to analyze Japan’s relationship with the world beyond the traditional area studies reference points of the West and East Asia. Bringing critical studies of British and Japanese imperialism together with postcolonial theory, I show how the imperial and nationalist visions of both Japanese Pan-Asianists and prominent Indian independence activists were mutually constitutive projects that were welded together through appeals to cultural and spiritual authenticity. In other words, visions of Pan-Asian community were inseparable from empire and nation in the non-European world even as such visions articulated a universalism that attempted to resist the West. During and after the First World War, Pan-Asianists in Japan mobilized the language of national self-determination to advocate for the establishment of a regional order in the Asia-Pacific that would challenge Euro-American colonialism, while also affirming the universalization of Japan as the guiding model of an authentic “Asian” modernity. This was evinced through the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as an empire of client-states, similar to what the United States and the Soviet Union were undertaking in their own ideological registers through the League of Nations and the Third International. Indian nationalists on the other hand, particularly Hindu nationalists, looked to Japan and to some extent Manchukuo as a model of modernization and progress without compromising the authentic spiritual values of their nation. The allure of Pan-Asianist rhetoric, which combined both Orientalism and revolutionary nationalism, appealed to a wide range of middle-class Indian nationalists, including the often-celebrated Subhas Chandra Bose who led the Indian National Army and established the Free India government with Japanese military and diplomatic support. However, such complicities between these groups in their imperial and nation-building projects, especially during the Asia-Pacific War, obscured the violence committed against minorities and labouring classes. Far from celebrating the transnational as an effective method to critique imperialism, this dissertation explores the Japan-South Asia case to highlight how transnational encounters and alliances were both conditioned by, and complicit in, imperialism and nationalism.

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