Nightmares of Decolonization: Paramilitary Violence and the Making of Modern South Asia

Could freedom be a nightmare?

To (mis)quote Jawaharlal Nehru, at the stroke of the midnight hour on August 14/15 1947 the Indian subcontinent was not just awakening to life and freedom; it was also being ravaged by ethnonationalist paramilitary movements who viewed freedom as the freedom to dominate the Other. In this paper, I trace the emergence of these movements and their ideologues from the 1920s through to the immediate aftermath of decolonization. In doing so, I offer a broad account of paramilitary movements across the subcontinent, the critical role they played in shaping the outcome of decolonization, and their constitutive role in state-making and nation-building in South Asia.

Ali Raza is an Associate Professor of History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Pakistan). He is the author of Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (2020)