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partition of Palestine, the Jews were expelled from Baghdad.6 Still seeking security, they dispersed again: to Sydney, Los Angeles, London and Israel. The Jews of Singapore diminished in number, but survived: Alfred Lelah re-established a booming business in Singapore’s legendary travellers’ bazaar, Change Alley. The community would achieve brief prominence with the rise of David Marshall, a charismatic lawyer and politician. He had been sent in the later part of the war to a coal mine in northern Japan, and on his return had busied himself in the causes of ex-prisoners of war and Jewish welfare – ‘I am’, he was to declare, ‘both a Jew and an Asian’ – and proved that it was possible for a Jew to win the political support of Chinese and other communities.7 His spell in 1955 and 1956 as the first chief minister of Singapore was one of the final flourishes of the city’s pre-war cosmopolitanism.

Between 1945 and 1950 a substantial number of the Eurasian communities of India and Burma, including many technicians, teachers and railway workers, left Asia. During the days of nationalist agitation they had identified themselves closely with the continuation of the British presence. They hoped that, at the very least, India, Pakistan and Burma would continue as dominions within the Commonwealth. As this possibility receded and ethnic conflict deepened across the crescent, they were increasingly uncomfortable. They felt betrayed by the British and suspicious of the exclusive nationalism of the incoming independent governments. Some of this anxiety was captured in fiction by John Masters’ powerful novel Bhowani Junction, filmed in 1956 with Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger, as Hollywood’s first retrospective of the Raj. Some Eurasian families packed for ‘home’, a mythical Britain which their ancestors had left as long as a century and a half before. But the cannier or less sentimental members of the community had sensed that racial and class prejudices were still deeply ingrained in the United Kingdom. They too left, but for Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Though these countries still maintained discriminatory immigration laws, they seemed more open and friendly and their cheerful citizen soldiery had made a positive impression in India and Burma during the war. Some ‘Britasians’ tried to enlist the support of Eurasians in Malaya for a colony in the Nicobar Islands, just as some of the Dutch had looked to New Guinea as a new frontier.8 But the leaders of Malaya’s 10,000 or so Eurasians saw a role for their community, perhaps above all others, in defining a new ‘Malayan’ nationalism. In Singapore, Gerald de Cruz and John Eber, founders of the Eurasian Progressive Association, were two of the main sponsors of the Malayan Democratic Union. De Cruz’s anti-colonialism and embrace of communism was spurred by his rejection of his Indian-Irish father’s slavish attachment to a colonial culture and ‘an alien patriotism’.9 The Eurasians of Malacca traced their roots to the Portuguese conquest of 1511. They petitioned the Malay sultans to be recognized as their non-Muslim subjects and as co-claimants of the status of ‘sons of the soil’.10 But two generations later, this claim had yet to be acknowledged.

As Britain’s Asian empire broke apart, India came to play a much reduced role in the affairs of Southeast Asia. In the wake of Nehru’s visit, Congress sent a medical mission to relieve the sufferings of local Indians: its ability to defend its own was an important test of its new authority. But, after this, the diaspora dropped out of vision. In 1942 and 1943 the Indians of Southeast Asia had been the vanguard of the freedom struggle, but these epic days soon passed into legend. INA veterans still paraded in their tattered uniforms and clung to the memory of Subhas Chandra Bose. Around this time stories first appeared in the Malayan press – rumours which would never be dispelled entirely – that he was alive and somewhere in Tibet. The British witch-hunts against the INA cast a long shadow. Many of its civilian leaders left Southeast Asia to