Indians in Britain at War: The Indian Workers Association, Anticolonialism and the Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Second World War Britain

The Indian Workers Association was founded in Coventry in 1938, on the model of the American-based Ghadar Party, sought to combine the anticolonial struggle against the British Empire with protecting the welfare and interests of Indian workers in Britain. In the context of the Second World War, the group’s anticolonial agenda stayed, and its attention to Indians in Britain expanded to include protecting the diaspora from wartime obligations, such as National Service. The War however brought considerable pressures onto the swollen membership of the group; its ranks enlarged by wartime restrictions to movement which effectively detained Indian sojourner communities in Britain. Personality clashes and ideological disputes led to the splintering of the organisation, into an alternative Indian Workers Association, which aligned itself with Subhas Chandra Bose and his Axis collaborationist Indian National Army. The Indian diaspora in Britain was split on the question of the war, and the two branches of the Indian Workers Association found themselves in conflict with one another. This paper seeks to explore the Indian diaspora’s multi-layered experience of the Second World War and the internal conflicts it unleashed on the diaspora. It seeks to follow Leslie James’ work on the positioning of Caribbean and West African anticolonials on the question of war and Fascism. This paper argues that through attention to the Indian Workers Association we can examine the contradictory position of the Indian anticolonial diaspora in Britain, seeking to destroy the British Empire from its very heart. The wartime splintering of the group between those sympathetic to Axis powers and Axis Japan in particular, highlights the complex and varied forms anticolonial thought and activism took in the late colonial period, when the World War made the Empire increasingly vulnerable.

Ciara is completing her PhD in Imperial History at Trinity College, the University of Cambridge. Previously, she studied at the University of Oxford, where she completed her undergraduate degree and a Master of Studies in Global and Imperial History. Her interests lie in global history, migration, race and anticolonialism, focusing on the 19th and 20th century British Empire and post-colonial Britain.