Witnessing Empire's End

Abstract This article examines how Malayans seeking refuge in Bombay engaged with anticolonial ideas and practices circulating in soon-to-be independent India. Escaping just days before the Japanese conquest of Singapore in February 1942, refugees drew comparisons between relatively subdued prewar Malayan anticolonialism and the wartime Quit India movement. Treating these narratives of evacuation as evidence for an alternative genealogy of Malayan political thought, this article argues that transcolonial networks across the British Empire complemented processes occurring within Malaya to shape Malayans’ imaginations of a new political order. Newspaper articles, correspondence, oral history interviews, and biographies show that witnessing the electrifying lead-up to the transfer of power in India generated varied worldmaking projects that envisioned empire's end in Malaya. Even though some of these projects were suppressed and many transcolonial connections were downplayed after the war, tracking these futures past demonstrates how anticolonial nationalism and internationalism were once mutually constituted.