The British Raj formally ended on 15 August 1947. In the years following the bifurcation of British India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, between 11 and 18 million people migrated to escape sectarian pogroms at the hands of the majority population. By 1950, many South Asian – specifically Bengali – refugees were radically critiquing decolonization. Theorizing from their experiences of proletarianization, East Bengali refugees argued that decolonization had been incomplete. The postcolonial Indian state was a neocolonial state allied to Western imperialism. Refugees imagined themselves as part of a worldwide struggle between Anglo-American imperialism and Sino-Soviet-led socialist anti-imperialism. Refugees assembled in hundreds and thousands across the Indian state of West Bengal to overthrow regimes of big private property. They condemned the operations of money economy. They aimed to overcome capitalism. Inspired by Chinese communists, they built a vast confederal democracy uniting refugee camps and colonies – a ‘refugee polis’. This talk offers a socially-contextualized intellectual history of this epic transformation, which delegitimized the postcolonial Indian state and dramatically drew the country, through struggles waged by refugees, into the tumult of the Cold War. It prompts us to visualize the subaltern origins of the Cold War in India.

Dr Milinda Banerjee is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom. He specializes in History of Modern Political Thought and Political Theory, and is Programme Director for the MLitt in Global Social and Political Thought. He is the author of The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and co-author (with Jelle Wouters) of Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being against the Capitalocene (Prickly Paradigm, 2022). He has co-edited the volume, Transnational Histories of the ‘Royal Nation’ (Palgrave, 2017); the forum ‘Law, Empire, and Global Intellectual History’, in the journal Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 2020); the special issue ‘The Modern Invention of ‘Dynasty’: A Global Intellectual History, 1500-2000’, in the journal Global Intellectual History (Routledge, 2022); the special issue ‘Political Theology and Democracy: Perspectives from South Asia, West Asia, and North Africa’, in the journal Political Theology (Routledge, 2022); the special issue ‘Forced Migration and Refugee Resettlement in the Long 1940s: A Connected and Global History’, in the journal Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions (Cambridge University Press, 2022); the volume The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2024); and the special issue ‘The Refugee Political in the Age of Imperial Crisis, Decolonization, and Cold War, 1930s-1950s’ in The Historical Journal (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Banerjee has published two other monographs and several articles on the intersections of Indian and global intellectual history and political theory. He is a founder-editor of the series ‘South Asian Intellectual History’ with Cambridge University Press, a founder-editor of two series with De Gruyter, ‘Critical Readings in Global Intellectual History’, and ‘Transregional Practices of Power’, and Special Projects Editor of the journal Political Theology (Routledge). He is Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and Member of the Editorial Board of the Royal Historical Society’s book series ‘New Historical Perspectives’.