How did German Jews experience life as refugees from Nazism in the British Empire? Scholars of the Holocaust have often turned to frameworks of racial triangulation to answer this question, emphasizing Jews’ ‘Other-ing’ in Nazi Germany to place refugees ‘in-between’ the binaries of coloniser and colonised, European and non-European. This talk, however, takes a deep dive into the history of Indian constitutional development and legislative reform to understand the place of Holocaust refugees in the racialised socio-political hierarchy of the British Raj. Focusing on the Government of India Act, 1935, Kaul shows how German Jews became white Europeans in the British Raj. In doing so, she calls on scholars to reframe their attention to the essential contexts, at once local and imperial, that structured Holocaust ‘refugeedom’ in the colonial and semi- colonial world.
Pragya Kaul Guido is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan’s Department of History and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. Her dissertation, Refugees in Empire: The Holocaust and Britain’s India, has been supported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the German Historical Institute, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.
