As the lands that bordered the eastern Indian Ocean gained independence from colonial rule between 1947 and 1957, they renegotiated their relations with one another, and jostled for position in a world divided by the new tensions of the Cold War. The Bay of Bengal became a sea of nations; this lecture examines the histories of the many communities that were marooned or displaced by those transformations in sovereignty. It considers the multiple struggles for citizenship that took place in the first decade after independence – in Sri Lanka, Burma, and Malaysia - by peoples of South Asian origin, many of them second- or third-generation residents overseas, who now had to find their place as “minorities” within new nation states. As well as providing a comparative view of the different political trajectories these struggles took, this lecture also examines the question of “endings” in Indian Ocean history, arguing that we must be as attentive to the breaking of connections as to the connectedness so celebrated in recent historical scholarship.

Sunil Amrith is the Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. His research is on the trans-regional movement of people, ideas, and institutions. Areas of particular interest include the history of public health and poverty, the history of migration, and environmental history. His most recent work has been on the Bay of Bengal as a region connecting South and Southeast Asia. He has a PhD in History (2005) from the University of Cambridge, where he was also a Research Fellow of Trinity College (2004-6).