After almost three months of providing medical relief work, shortly before their departure from the country in August 1946, Rajabali Jumabhoy (1898–1998), a prominent businessperson and philanthropist of Indian origin, praised the Congress Medical Mission at a tea party in Singapore for being a promoter of Indo-Asian unity. One year later, a book titled Congress Mission to Malaya was published by C. Siva Rama Sastry, one of the mission's members. The Indian National Congress (INC) politician and mission organiser Bidhan Chandra Roy (1882–1962) provided the foreword. Roy stated, ‘We the people of India, feel proud of their [the mission members’] achievement and appreciate with gratitude the services they rendered in the name of the Congress.’ In both instances, the work of the Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was presented as successful; this success was based partly, but not exclusively, on the mission's effective promotion of domestic and foreign policy objectives of the INC.

In the history of humanitarianism, the Congress Medical Mission to Malaya has been forgotten. It does not figure in the research on the transitional period between the end of the global Second World War, late colonial rule, and early decolonisation in South Asia, nor does it figure in the standard accounts of Indian nationalism, although it is at times mentioned in passing in the histories of Malaysia. Nevertheless, examining the humanitarian undertaking of the INC, the anticolonial organisation that would soon become the party leading India's postcolonial government, is crucial, as the mission represents the last instance of Indian non-state nationalist humanitarian aid provided to civilians in need outside the South Asian subcontinent during the period of colonial rule.

The Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was the last Indian non-state relief initiative that was sent abroad to provide humanitarian aid during late colonial rule and in the early postcolonial years. Whereas South Asian humanitarian initiatives had provided comprehensive aid for Indian and Allied soldiers at various fronts during the world wars and had given assistance to war victims in China and Malaya, the summer of 1946 became a turning point for their work when in mid-August, Calcutta was ravaged by the communal violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims. Trapped in the riotous city for a few days was Dr C. Siva Rama Sastry, who was part of the Congress Medical Mission that had just returned from Malaya. When Sastry was finally able to return home to south India, he had to leave all his belongings behind.

After the so-called Great Calcutta Killings, the violence spread throughout British India, leading to riots and massacres in East Bengal, Bihar, Bombay, the United Provinces, Punjab and in other places before reaching its climax with partition. The end of colonial rule with the formation of two new nation states, India and Pakistan, in August 1947, was accompanied by large-scale violence that may have caused up to 1 million deaths and led to the displacement of approximately 12 million people.3 The unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in South Asia, however, did evoke a mixed international response. Several non-state humanitarian organisations from around the globe forwarded aid in cash and kind; some also sent relief workers to South Asia or already had volunteers on-site.

State of the Art

Eurocentrism has long dominated historical scholarship on the First World War. Apart from the literature that explores the entry of the United States (US) into the conflict in 1917, research on the First World War has ignored, as Oliver Janz has pointed out, the war's global dimension(s). During the last years, however, research into the history of the First World War has witnessed a global turn. Fuelled by the war's 100-year commemoration, First World War studies have been expanded both spatially and content-wise. The entanglement of the world war with non-European conflicts, the war's transition into a worldwide economic battle, and the complex ramifications it has had on all world regions have since then become topics explored by historians of the First World War. This research has developed such that the First World War is now understood as a moment of global mobility that caused mass movements of people across national borders, including soldiers, prisoners of war, labour forces, refugees and displaced people. Humanitarian initiatives and organisations, which tried to alleviate the war-caused suffering of the people, are part of the history of these mass movements.

In response to the circulation of news items and publicity campaigns that depicted the suffering of people in other parts of the globe, a myriad of local, regional and national aid committees were established from the outset of the conflict in Europe in August 1914. The activities of these committees often became integrated into border-transcending support networks of global reach.

The models posited in Chapter 2 are applied to the problem set out in Chapter 1. Sources in Greek, Elamite, and Old Persian, taken together, give every reason to believe that mass nonnative acquisition of Persian was underway from the reign of Darius I onward. The cooperation of multiethnic groups of armed forces, work forces, and especially domestic staff, such as concubines and eunuchs, with their Persian-speaking masters evidently played a large role in the formation of Middle Persian. Contrary to a widespread assumption, Aramaic turns out not to be a lingua franca of the Achaemenian Empire, except at the level of provincial administration, but rather Persian was probably the best candidate for such a role. Middle Persian arose from Old Persian through a process of semicreolization as the term was defined carefully in Chapter 2.

Linguistic history requires reliable models that correlate varieties of grammatical change with social factors. The composite model presented here considers scenarios of intergenerational monolingualism leading to stable language transmission, intergenerational multilingualism leading to areal features, and mass nonnative acquisition leading to grammatical reduction. It considers the agency of the individual in the transfer of features from one language to another according to patterns of linguistic dominance. These factors allow the linguistic historian to diagnose social changes from specific kinds of grammatical change and, vice versa, to predict some kinds of grammatical change within known historical upheavals of population. Terms from contact linguistics, such as pidgin, creole, and semicreole, are adopted after thorough explanation and contextualization.

Since 1931, the two powers China and Japan had fought intermittently in localised engagements. In 1937, however, these conflicts turned into a full-scale war between the Empire of Japan and the Republic of China governed by Chiang Kai-shek's (1887–1975) Guomindang, which entered into an alliance with the Chinese communists. The Second Sino-Japanese War which had begun with a local conflict near Beijing (the Marco Polo Bridge incident) ushered in four years of Chinese resistance against an expanding enemy before it became part of the global Second World War, following Japan's simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor and European colonies in Southeast Asia in 1941. The conflict in East Asia evoked various responses from humanitarian organisations and actors abroad. However, some relief initiatives decided not to take up this new cause and to continue to concentrate on the ongoing Spanish Civil War. In other cases, offers to help were declined by Japan. The international humanitarian system that emerged during the first four years of the war in support of China was majorly sustained by non-state initiatives, both established and newly founded ones. The latter especially were hardly impartial in their aid giving and often also had political motives in addition to altruistic ones. They came from strong left-leaning backgrounds and/or were rooted in diasporic Chinese, missionary or philanthropic communities.

In India, political and social actors and organisations and the press had, for a long time, followed the developments in East Asia. The outbreak of the war brought forward the question of humanitarian relief for the belligerent parties.

The High Commissioner for India, Sir S. E. Runganadhan (1877–1966), extolled the work of the Indian Comforts Fund (ICF) in the foreword to the fund's War Record as ‘a remarkable piece of humanitarian work carried out during the war largely by British women for the benefit of India's fighting men and merchant seamen’. After providing a short overview of the fund's work between 1939 and 1945, the High Commissioner expressed his and his country's gratitude by writing, ‘India will ever remain deeply indebted to them [the members of the fund's executive committee and the host of unseen helpers throughout Great Britain] for this practical expression of their sympathy and goodwill towards her.’ Although the imperial tone of this message, coming from the High Commissioner appointed by the colonial government in Delhi, might not come as a surprise, the used framing of India's indebtedness for British humanitarian assistance to Indian soldiers and merchant seamen (lascars) who had done their share to contribute to Britain's and the empire's war effort must have been puzzling for many contemporaries on the subcontinent. Next to doubting the underlying idea of the voluntariness of India's war contribution, they might also have raised questions about who should be indebted to whom.

Early in the war, the fund's public appeals for support in the form of knitted comforts and donations had struck a different note. Back in the spring of 1940, the fund had justified its appeal by emphasising that Indian soldiers had ‘come so far across the sea to help in our [the British] war effort’.