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This chapter examines the experience of Jawaharlal Nehru in the processes of decolonization. It focuses mainly on the 1930s–1950s, the transitional period of the end of British rule in India and the making of a new nation-state in India. We might call this phase “the long decolonization,” as the British devolved power constitutionally to Indian politicians and began to appoint Indians to senior roles in the civil service and the army, while at the same time much that was colonial in origin remained even after formal independence. Contrary to his popular image as a member of India’s political elite who moved seamlessly as Gandhi’s heir to become India’s first Prime Minister — much admired, successful at integrating India and maintaining her stability and establishing her as a world player — this chapter probes some of the problems of his role, particularly the dilemmas of his colonial inheritance.

List of Maps - Acknowledgements - A Note on Transliteration - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction: Hong Kong's Transitions J.M.Brown & R.Foot - Hong Kong in British Decolonisation J.Darwin - The Colony's Shifting Position in the British Informal Empire in China R.A.Bickers - Government and Politics in Hong Kong: A Colonial Paradox S.Tsang - National and International Interests in the Decolonisation of Hong Kong, 1946-97 B.Hook - Reflections on Being Chinese in Hong Kong D.Faure - Hong Kong Communities Overseas R.Skeldon - Hong Kong's Transition to Chinese Rule: The Fate of the Joint Declaration J.T.H.Tang - Hong Kong's Economy and Its Global Connections: Prospects for 1997 and Beyond M.Taylor - Hong Kong: A New Beginning for China? M.Yahuda - Index

The reversion of Hong Kong Island, the Kowloon Peninsula, and the New Territories to China at midnight on 30 June 1997 is an event of major historical significance, especially for the three parties directly involved: Britain, China and Hong Kong. The Sino-British Joint Declaration of December 1984, the most important set of documents in Hong Kong’s political evolution since the signature of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, has paved the way for this transfer of sovereignty. From 1 July 1997 Hong Kong will no longer have the status of Britain’s last great colony, but formally it will become a Special Administrative Region (SAR) under the jurisdiction of China, with the pledge of ‘a high degree of autonomy’ for 50 years until 2047. This official policy has been popularised under the slogan ‘one country, two systems’, a policy which Margaret Thatcher, as British Prime Minister, described as an ‘ingenious idea’ and which China’s paramount leader, the now ailing Deng Xiaoping, saw as ‘a product of dialectical Marxism and historical materialism’.1

Acknowledgements - Notes on Contributors - Introduction J.M.Brown & R.Foot - The Chinese as Overseas Migrants E.Wickberg - Three Phases of South Asian Emigration C.Peach - The Modern Zoroastrian Diaspora J.R.Hinnells - The Indian Diaspora in the United States R.Daniels - Renewing an Industrial Past: British Pakistani Entrepreneurship in Manchester P.Werbner - Why Move? Regional and Long Distance Migrations of Gujarati Jains M.Banks - The Movement of Indian Muslims to West Pakistan After 1947: Partition-Related Migration and its Consequences for the Pakistani Province of Sind S.Ansari - Illegal Foreign Migrant Workers in Japan: Change and Challenge in Japanese Society Y.Sellek - Relocation in Vietnam and Outmigration: The Ideological and Economic Context L.Hitchcox - The Movement of Population to the West of China: Tibet and Qinghai G.E.Clarke - Index

THE Raj still has a peculiar fascination for the British public, judging by the stream of popular books, radio and television programmes whose constant themes are the panoply of empire and the life-style of imperial rulers. Among English-speaking historians, however, approaches to Britain's Indian empire have changed markedly in the last twenty years. By the 1950s ‘Imperial history’ was a thing of the past. Gone was its admiring concentration on the men who ruled India and their measures as a way of understanding political change in the subcontinent. Attention shifted to indigenous initiatives and growth points. At first the emphasis was on India's western educated as organizers and spokesmen of a new kind of overtly nationalist politics. In the late 1960s the focus altered to whole localities within the subcontinent as it became clear that the western educated were not elites divorced from local, more traditional societies, but were still subject to its pressures, influenced by its perceptions and involved in its webs of patronage and alliance. In such an environment apparently nationalist politics were shot through with conflicts and contraditions: they were only one aspect of diverse manoeuvres for influence in society and the state structure. In the present decade the wheel has almost come full circle. Imperial overlords again receive attention: not now as architects and guardians, but as elements essential in the analysis of the changing style and content of Indian politics to the extent to which they created the framework of political life, defined its categories, means and ends.

Centenary celebrations of the birth of any prominent man attract assessments of his character, career and influence. Nothing could be more understandable, particularly in the case of M. K. Gandhi, who was by common consent one of the greatest leaders Asia has produced in an era of colonial nationalisms and decolonization, who in his own life time was called a saint and a machiavellian politician, and who has become in independent India both a national myth and an embarrassment. Accounts of the importance of Gandhi in modern India tend to fall into two main categories. There are those who dismiss him, often regretfully, as an idealist whose Utopian plans for a democracy of village commonwealths and a non-violent society have collapsed in the face of economic and political necessity and the machinations of unscrupulous politicians. In the words of Jayaprakash Narayan, ‘If you consider the political ideologies attaining in India today, you would find that somehow one who is called the Father of the Nation is completely missing from all of them’. Such pessimism assesses Gandhi as if he had been solely a dispenser of blue-prints for a brave new world, and fails to see him as a dynamic leader whose greatest influence flowed from the type of movement he led and the techniques he used, rather than from the peculiarly personal ideals he held. On the other hand, there are those who hail him as the Father of India and try to draw direct causal connexions between his ideals and many of the major changes which have occurred in India since 1947, particularly the official abolition of Untouchability and the institution ofpanchayat raj.But this is the perspective of the biographer. It underrates the complexities of politics and society and their interaction, and turns a blind eye to the innumerable cross currents which make up the main stream of Indian social and political activity.