The Limits of Decolonisation in India’s International Thought and Practice: An Introduction

Abstract This special section responds to the call for renewed attention to the international implications of decolonization with a particular focus on India and the South Asia region. The section offers insights into historical continuities and ruptures in Indian internationalism, interrogating divides between colonial and postcolonial as well as between national and international. In turn, it de-centres histories of global order-making in the twentieth century, building on the work of a growing chorus of international historians, political scientists, and international relations scholars seeking alternative visions of the international in an increasingly multipolar world order. In challenging the binary rupture of India's international outlook in the pre- and post-independence period, this special section forces us to reconsider the temporal landscape of India's decolonisation moment. Through an avowedly international outlook, many of the papers introduce new spaces, connections, and entanglements through which Indian independence was realised, and in turn through which the scales of the international can be scrutinised. This brief introduction introduces the papers, teasing out the wider themes that link them, and their connections with the broader purposes of the special section itself.