Hearing the phrase ‘civilizing mission’ usually conjures up the idea of European colonialism, so it seems to be a rather dated nineteenth-century expression. In the nineteenth- and twentieth-century era of imperialism the civilizing mission was an ever-shifting set of ideas and practices that was used to justify and legitimize the establishment and continuation of overseas colonies, both to subject peoples and to citizens or subjects in the homeland. For the British Raj in India the civilizing mission meant many things, including bringing the benefits of British culture to the subcontinent in the form of free trade and capitalism as well as law, order and good government. British rule was supposed to bring an end to a supposed condition of chronic warfare, violence, disorder and despotic rule in India, and it would institute peace and order in the form of Pax Britannica. At its core, the civilizing mission was about morally and materially ‘uplifting’, ‘improving’ and later ‘developing’ the supposedly ‘backward’ or ‘rude’ people of India to make them more civilized and more modern. A fundamental difference between colonial subjects in India and their British overlords was posited, with Indians and other subject peoples placed at lower or ‘inferior’ positions in new ‘scales of civilization’, and the British (and Europeans generally) at the top. Indians were thereby condemned to continually try to catch up to their British rulers and ‘European civilization’, which claimed to be – and was widely accepted as – the universal or ‘silent referent’.

This paper analyses the meaning of three different engagements with charitable and philanthropic activity in India between c. 1820 and 1960: it looks at the East India Company's movement into philanthropic activities in the decades after 1820; then it explores the significance of philanthropy, social service and social work carried out by Indian organizations in a period of growing nationalism between roughly 1890 and 1947; and thirdly, the paper considers the approach taken toward philanthropy and social work by the newly independent Indian state in the 1950s.

The essay shows some surprising continuities over this 140-year period, as well as some important differences. In each of the three cases listed above, philanthropic and charitable initiatives were linked to issues of moral authority and political legitimacy. In most societies, and certainly in India, ‘giving’ resources or services as charity or relief, without expectations of personal reward, can enhance the giver's social or political status. Charitable and philanthropic actions can even support claims or aspirations to political leadership and authority. Indeed, historically there have often been expectations that kings and other wealthy or prominent individuals ‘give’ to their communities. Rulers, in a sense, were responsible for the redistribution of wealth. It is not surprising, then, that in two periods when new states were being built, the Company state in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and the independent nation-state of India under Jawaharlal Nehru's leadership in the late 1940s and 1950s, embryonic governments took deliberate steps to involve themselves in charity, philanthropy or social work.

Introduction

In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, public education began to assume a special place within the colonial civilizing mission in India. On the one hand, an important shift occurred in the East India Company's approach towards education and learning, a shift which culminated in the ‘great education debate’. Leaving behind the patronage of ‘the learned natives of India’, the Committee for Public Instruction, which had been installed in 1823, formulated a consciously interventionist educational policy in the frame of a civilizing mission. Instruction in Western sciences in the English language was assigned a special role in winning the consent and cooperation of the Indian middle classes for the colonial project. Thereby, however, the Bengal Committee of Public Instruction – in accordance with the Court of Directors of the Company in London – almost exclusively concentrated its resources on higher education, hoping that knowledge would diffuse ‘downwards’ from there and thus transform Indian society as a whole.

At the same time, crucial developments also happened in the field of elementary, or popular, education, even if this field was frequently neglected and sometimes even discouraged by the Company. The efforts of privately operating educationalists (British as well as Indian), missionaries and voluntary educational associations found entrance in the colonial statistics and are also well known to historians. However, they attracted much less scholarly attention than the ideological (and financial) battles over higher education.

I have argued in this book that migration has shaped modern Asia. At the dawn of Asia's first age of mass migration, which began in the second half of the nineteenth century, large parts of Asia – Manchuria, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra – were still sparsely populated. Within half a century, these regions were home to millions. New cities, new forms of intensive agriculture, and new societies emerged. The losers from the new order were, usually, small and mobile communities. The winners were invariably states, and – in different and unequal measures – diasporas, settled peasantries, and urban residents, who benefited from new economic opportunities.

People on the move have taken with them ideas, cultural practices, political movements, social institutions, and religious faith. These ideas and practices have changed in the process of circulation, and they have changed the societies in which they implanted themselves. In studying the history of attempts to control migration, I have also touched on core aspects of state-formation in modern Asia: the drawing of imperial and national borders; the development of new ideas about citizenship; states' increasing concern with knowing, and acting upon, their populations.

In the 1930s, patterns of inter-Asian migration broke down and went into reverse. The middle decades of the twentieth century were a period of disconnection, shattering many of the links between East, Southeast, and South Asia. The 1920s marked the height of migration in Asia; not until the 1990s would levels of migration in Asia reach the same level. By the 1930s, and for the first time since the 1870s, the number of Indian and Chinese migrants returning home outstripped the number of new arrivals in the ports and plantations of Southeast Asia. Just as the circuits of migration began to reconstitute themselves with the first signs of economic recovery, a new age of global warfare intervened, producing mass migration of an entirely different kind: the mass migration of refugees, in flight from catastrophic violence and social collapse. The mid-twentieth century, in Asia as elsewhere, was the age of the refugee.

The 1970s marked another turning point in the history of migration in Asia. The balance of economic power within Asia began to shift, with the economic rise of East and Southeast Asia, and the growing power of the oil-producing nations of the Middle East. These economic transformations opened new frontiers of migration. As the post-colonial projects of national development began to falter, the international dimension of migration grew once again, facilitated by cheaper air travel and communications.

Asian migration in a global age continues to follow regional patterns, taking people from South Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines to the growth economies of Southeast Asia (particularly Malaysia and Singapore), and to the Persian Gulf.

In the 1930s, large empires – British, Dutch, French, American, and Japanese – controlled Asia. By 1950, Asia was divided into nation-states. Between 1945 and 1949, India, Pakistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Philippines became independent. The Communist revolution in China created two states – the People's Republic of China and a de facto nationalist state in Taiwan – as did the partition of Korea into North and South Korea: both divisions last to this day. The breakup of empires and the drawing of new borders produced countless refugees (Chapter 3). It also produced a patchwork of minority populations within each new set of borders. Each new state faced the historical legacy of the mass immigration of an earlier era (Chapter 1), with the presence of large populations of what imperial administrators had once called ‘foreign Asians’: primarily people of Indian and Chinese origin.

Long used exclusively in relation to the Jewish Diaspora (and later encompassing the African experience of slavery), the term ‘diaspora’ has undergone a significant expansion in its usage and definition. At its most imprecise, diaspora has become synonymous with migration; almost any migrant group is now labelled a diaspora. The term is more useful, however, when it draws our attention specifically to the kinds of connections migrants maintain with their homelands and with others of shared origin dispersed around the world. ‘Diaspora’ can be used to describe a process of migration and dispersal, and also the condition of living in diaspora – that is to say, a form of consciousness that arises from the experience of migration and exile.

Contemporary discussions of diaspora draw heavily on the recent experience of diasporas in the multi-cultural democracies of Western Europe, and especially North America. This chapter shows that the formation of Asian diasporas within Asia developed from the distinctive characteristics of Asian migration in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (Chapter 1): the relative proximity between homelands and destinations; the dominance of sojourning or circular migration; the relative absence of women; the sheer scale of the movement.

Over the past 150 years, the scale of human migration within Asia has been vast, greater than at any other time and place in human history. This book argues that migrants have been central to enduring and significant changes in modern Asian history: to economic and environmental transformations; to the spread of new political ideas and religious practices; to social and demographic change. Until recently, most histories of Asia have emphasized the perspectives of states, empires, and sedentary peoples. This book seeks to place migrants at the heart of modern Asian history.

Migration has been a widespread experience in many regions of Asia, but one that has, over time, come to be seen by states (and many historians) as anomalous or exceptional. ‘We imagine that mobility is border crossing, as though borders came first, and mobility, second’, David Ludden wrote in 2003. Historians have been too quick to project into the past the modern world of nation-states with strict controls over movement into and out of their territories. This book seeks to consider Asian history in more mobile terms, by emphasizing the importance of movement and by seeking to illustrate the connections that migrants made between distant places. Borders did not pre-date mobility.

Between 1850 and 1930, migration in Asia reached massive and unprecedented proportions. This expansion of migration took place amid widespread political and economic transformations. In these decades, most of Asia came under the domination, if not the direct control, of European empires. Asian peasant producers were more closely integrated – or subordinated – to world markets. Human migration and intensified production brought about fundamental ecological change. Many parts of Asia remained frontiers in the mid-nineteenth century: they were lightly populated, inhabited by shifting cultivators, and covered by jungle. Less than a century later, there were few Asian frontiers left.

At the same time, historical change in Asia became ever more closely connected with change on a global scale. From the middle of the nineteenth century, C.A. Bayly wrote, ‘contemporary changes were so rapid and interacted with each other so profoundly, that this period could reasonably be described as the “birth of the modern world”’. Imperial states grew in power and capacity, and made greater demands on their subjects; ideas travelled around the world more rapidly and spread more widely than ever before; industrialization began to connect markets around the world more closely together. There was a ‘step change in human social organization’.