Wartime Authenticity: India and Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere during WWII

When the Imperial Japanese Army swept across Southeast Asia in 1942, the region’s large and diverse South Asian diaspora was incorporated into Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In recent years, the story of the Indian National Army (INA) and its leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, have received much popular and scholarly attention. However, Bose’s relationship with his Japanese supporters is often framed around the issue over whether Bose was an Axis collaborator or a patriot who was willing to go to any length to achieve India’s independence. Yet this opportunist/collaborationist binary ignores a fundamental fact about the wartime Japanese empire. Japan’s purpose in articulating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was precisely to create an empire of client-states that could mount a serious challenge to the liberal internationalism of the League of Nations and the socialist internationalism of the Communist International. It was in the interest of both Bose and Japanese military administrations to present Indian nation-building exercises in the diaspora as “authentic” expressions of Indian nationalism. This talk explored the complicities between empire, nationalism, and internationalism through the language of authenticity as Japanese and Indian leaders in wartime Southeast Asia attempted to mobilize the South Asian diaspora behind a vision of a resurgent India that would play an active role in Japan’s community of nation-states to overthrow Euro-American colonialism in Asia. It highlighted both the possibilities and limitations of a Pan-Asianist universalism that privileged the nation-state as the building block of transnational solidarity, as well as the violence and exploitation that Tamils and Muslims in particular experienced at the hands of both the Japanese military and Bose’s Provisional Government of Free India.

Speaker Bio
Aaron Peters recently completed his PhD dissertation at the University of Toronto, Department of History on Japan-South Asia relations titled, “A Complicated Alliance: Indo-Japanese Relations, 1915-1952.” He is currently a lecturer at Ambrose University in Calgary.