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"Indians in War and Revolution in the Asia-Pacific Region" | Canberra 20. and 21. February 2017
On February 20-21, 2017, historians from Germany, Australia, and India met at the Australian National University in Canberra to discuss the role of Indians in the vast region of "East Indies" during World War II and in the postwar period.
The workshop was organized by Philipps-Universität Marburg in cooperation with the Australian National University (ANU) and was part of a 12-day visit program funded by the DFG as part of the initiation and intensification of bilateral cooperation. The ICWC and the Southeast Asia Institute of the ANU were the leading participating institutions. The conference was organized by Dr. Wolfgang Form (ICWC, Marburg) and Professor Robert Cribb (ANU) in cooperation with Dr. Kerstin von Lingen (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg) and Professor Sandra Wilson (Murdoch University, Perth).
The workshop marks the beginning of a new phase in the collaboration between the Marburg ICWC and Australian Research Council-funded researchers from the Australian universities ANU, Murdoch and Curtin University. In addition to representatives of the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context", scientists from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, were invited. In addition, other participants were welcomed from ANU, Monash University Melbourne (Australia), RMIT University (also Melbourne) and the Australian Command and Staff College.
In December 1941, the Second World War began in the Asia-Pacific region with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Indians participated in many ways in the war effort and later in the punishment of war crimes: they were combatants, deserters, prisoners, workers, rebels, guards and, after the end of the war, occupation troops, journalists and diplomats, as well as judges, investigators, informants, witnesses and legal participants in war crimes trials. Last but not least, crimes against Indians were tried by British and Australian courts (Indians as victims).
The war and post-war experiences of Indians, whose own identity was also shaped by decolonization processes and the partition of British India, illustrate in a special way the complexity and dynamics of the Second World War and the subsequent conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region.
Discussions focused, among other things, on the contradictions between "transitional justice" and decolonization. The workshop and joint source research at the Australian National Archives and the Australian War Memorial condensed new possibilities for innovative, collaborative research on the specific role of Indians in the 1940s. In the process, already describable sub-projects on Indian judges, Indian victims of war crimes, and Indian nationalist activists coalesced.