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other. When Sutan Sjahrir flew in for the final days of the meeting, he apologized for the size of his retinue: Indonesians, he explained, had so few opportunities in the past to meet their fellow Asians. Sjahrir was met at the airport by his Dutch wife: such was the sum of his own years of isolation and exile that they had not seen each other since 1932. The visitors were entertained in the Viceroy’s House with the full ceremonial of the Raj, but, in the words of one Irish observer, they ‘felt they were witnessing the last departing gleams of its sunset splendour, not only in New Delhi, but throughout a continent’.2

Over the next few days the delegates surveyed their shared inheritance. Panels on social and cultural problems heard harrowing testimonies to the continuing issue of war. A session on ‘economic development and social services’ revealed that, from the left to the right, from Malayan communist to Indian businessman, the new generation of leaders saw a common future in planning and state intervention. But, paradoxically, it was the climactic forum on ‘National Movements for Freedom’ that proved to be the most divisive. The very cause that brought these men and women together – anti-colonialism – was now diminishing for some of them. In New Delhi there was no echo of the war cry of ‘Asia for the Asiatics’: the memory of Japanese rule was too immediate and traumatic, and leaders of new nations could ill afford to alienate the West. The crucial question of how ‘free Asia’ should aid nations ‘struggling to be free’ was left unresolved. The spiritual support offered by Nehru was far less than was sought by the Vietnamese and Indonesians. The closing session was addressed by Gandhi, who arrived following a tour of Bihar and Bengal, where he was trying to stem the tide of communal violence. ‘He looked’, recalled one witness from Malaya, Philip Hoalim, ‘very tired and extremely frail’. The Mahatma was an inspiration, but, in the words of Abu Hanifah from Sumatra: ‘We thought the idea of turning the other cheek was silly. We had then preferred the ways of Kemal Ataturk, the hero of Anatolia.’3 Southeast Asian nationalisms shared a martial cast of mind, and the area’s representatives found that they had most in common with each other. In New Delhi they witnessed at first hand the spectacle of India and China vying for influence, and it alarmed them as much as the revived imperialism of the West. The regional entity that was later to emerge, in the shape of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967, was much smaller than that envisaged in New Delhi. The summit was the high-water mark of pan-Asian solidarity, but it also signalled the beginning of its decline as a political ideal. ‘We seek no narrow nationalism,’ Nehru had proclaimed. But narrow nationalism was to prevail. A second meeting in China did not materialize: civil war and Cold War intervened. Purana Qila was the start of a road that led to Bandung in 1955. But the Afro-Asia Conference was to be a conclave of sovereign nation-states, and not a parliament of peoples.

THE CRESCENT FRAGMENTS:ORPHANS OF EMPIRE

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the great crescent had begun to fragment. The perpetual motion of peoples across frontiers that had given it unity began to still. By the end of the war, transport had ground to a halt, and borders were battle fronts. During the Japanese occupation, the largest migrations were internal: they were either forced, as in conscription for the railway projects, or took the shape of flight from troubled areas, as in the mass exodus of Chinese from the towns and mines into the forests of Malaya. By the beginning of 1947 travel, trade and remittance had resumed, and migrant communities raced to restore ties with their homelands. As many as 20,000 Indians from Malaya chose to travel back to South Asia at fares six times their pre-war level. Overseas Chinese businessmen returned to invest in the economic reconstruction of their ancestral regions. Most of them later went back to Southeast Asia but, in the longer term, the great