Introduction: (re)constructing the rural in an era of decolonisation

Scholars of twentieth century European history have suggested already a while ago that the rise of the modern state in Europe was particularly visible in and closely connected to the formation of modern agricultural policy.Footnote ¹A similar argument, adapted to some historical specificities and the complex heritage of the colonial era, can be made about nation and state-building processes in decolonising Asia after 1945. Decolonisation, understood as an experimental process of reimagining and re-designing state, society and, to a certain extent, also the world after the imperial era,Footnote ²manifested itself and took shape not only in agricultural and food policy but also in efforts to re-conceptualise the rural and implement comprehensive social reform outside the cities.

This article analyses the involvement of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in India and British-Malaya between 1947 and 1965 to understand how the way decolonisation unfolded in these societies determined FAO’s approach to rural welfare. Particularly during the first two decades after its foundation in October 1945, FAO was a politically relatively autonomous, yet financially weaker organisation of the growing United Nations family.Footnote ³In their evaluation of FAO’s impact on rural development, historians have argued that the organisation left little if any traces on agricultural and food policies on the ground.Footnote ⁴Measured by its own mission to promote “rural welfare in the widest sense,”Footnote ⁵FAO indeed needs to be evaluated in terms of its practical contribution to more equal opportunities, social justice, human dignity, and, more generally, rural people’s quality of life.Footnote ⁶As important as this approach might be, I prefer to understand FAO’s role particularly during its early years less in terms of concrete policy outcome but in its efforts to globalise a shared understanding of rural problems including their root causes and to canonise expertise on how to successfully tackle these issues in concerted, often trans-regional efforts. In brief, I suggest framing FAO as a knowledge-producing and knowledge-multiplying institution that determined and was determined by the policies and programmes drafted by other international institutions, political elites in decolonising societies as well as scientists and rural experts around the globe.Footnote ⁷As historians have evaluated FAO’s impact in the light of policies, I will focus on the strategies of knowledge production and knowledge administration triggered by the specific ways decolonisation shaped India and British-Malaya.

My analysis of decolonisation builds on two existing forms of historiography that produced important knowledge about the history of rural development in late-imperial and early postcolonial (Asian) societies. The first group of research addresses rural planning after 1945 from the perspective of continuities since the colonial era and highlights particularly the intellectual and conceptual origins of many approaches in the (colonial) interwar period and before.Footnote ⁸The second group, by contrast, illuminates the international and transnational character of rural development after 1945 and emphasises the newness of international development institutions but also global and national aspirations nourished by the decline of empires and the evolving Cold War to do away with ‘underdevelopment,’ poverty, and hunger in the foreseeable future.Footnote ⁹

My impression is that the multiple ways in which decolonisation unfolded around political independence deeply influenced the economic, social, and political relations in rural areas and thus co-determined the development of rural communities. At the same time, they are insufficiently acknowledged in the existing historiography on FAO and rural development after 1945. Violence and mass displacement prepared the ground for rural restructuring which, in a different context, would have either taken a different shape or been altogether impossible. Cold War anti-communism increased the urgency of rural interventionism even further. In brief, I examine two assumptions. First, decolonisation created a new context for national and international policy making on rural communities, which altered the approach to rural welfare after 1945. Second, the rural evolved as a key concept to generate new data on communities and regions, re-negotiate the modernisation of state and society, and reframe the narratives of local and international futures. If empirically correct, we should consider both assumptions more centrally in our understanding of 20^th century rural Asia.Footnote ¹⁰

To illustrate these points, I will discuss FAO’s approaches and policies in the context of two distinct cases of decolonisation resulting in large-scale disruptions of socio-economic and political relations in rural areas: large-scale violence and mass displacement around the Partition of British-India in August 1947; and late-imperial warfare against a communist guerrilla movement, the so-called Emergency warfare in British-Malaya, 1948-1960. In both cases, the authorities were concerned about the far-reaching consequences of (self-inflicted) violence for rural communities but also identified unique planning opportunities created by large-scale disruptions of rural life. In their specific courses, though, both cases of humanitarian disaster illustrate different approaches to transform rural communities and to integrate them into a new internationalised development regime under the auspices of the modern development state.Footnote ¹¹

My analysis of FAO’s rural policies in decolonising South and Southeast Asia also entails a closer look at elites, both in urban and rural areas, and the ways with which they framed rural life as the object of local and international development initiatives. In post-Partition India and British-Malaya, this group includes imperial administrators and militaries; Christian missionaries assisting them in their efforts to engineer rural life; postcolonial elites in the capital cities and the provinces trying to define their new role within the state and towards (rural) society; and the landed rural elites who exercised considerable influence on the design, implementation, and obstruction of rural policies. In this regard, my emphasis lies on development concepts and aspirations that resulted in concrete political and economic measures or fizzled out with no further results. Consequently, I suggest taking decolonisation more seriously as a distinct context and event which facilitated the emergence and cultivation of various post-imperial aspirations on social reform, political reorganisation, and the (national) future.

The article comprises three argumentative steps. The first two sections look at the specificities of decolonisation and rural policy making in India and British-Malaya with a strong emphasis on the role of local circumstances, conflicts, and aspirations. By contrast, the third section discusses concerns about decolonisation’s psychological impact on children and youth to highlight how FAO sought the establish its international agenda in this field nourished by its experience in India and British-Malaya. Finally, the conclusions frame decolonisation as a structuring event for both local rural policy-making and the evolving international (rural) development expertise.

FAO and the disruption of rural life in partitioned India

During the first years of its existence, in its search for legitimacy and relevance FAO established a comprehensive reporting system with its ever-growing number of member states. Collecting information on rural communities around the globe was a means for the organisation to establish itself as an information hub in the field of agriculture, food, and more generally rural welfare. At the same time, this attempt responded to one of the foremost problems in late-imperial and early postcolonial societies, i.e., the lack of reliable socio-economic data and statistics on rural communities across their territories. This problem was particularly prevalent in countries such as India with a vast and geographically diverse territory, a complex social stratification, a patchy track record of agricultural statistics, and a general lack of information on the welfare of rural communities.Footnote ¹²

In addition to this form of information gathering, FAO also conducted its own research and worked closely with scientists mainly in Western academia to gain a more detailed picture on the impact of decolonisation and particularly armed conflict. In the perception of food specialists around India’s independence in 1947, the world’s most troubled areas in relation to food supply were “the Orient and Continental Europe.”Footnote ¹³Although these two regions were comparable in their struggles, the Asian recovery from war-related destruction was slower and further aggravated by internal conflict, political disruptions related to decolonisation, and late imperial warfare. As a consequence, major parts of India, British-Malaya, and China experienced a calorie intake of less than eighty percent of the already low pre-war diet.Footnote ¹⁴In spite of some encouraging trends in maize, rice, and wheat production in some areas of Malaya, Northern India, and Northern China, the general situation of food supply and food intake in South, Southeast and East Asia remained highly precarious.

The Partition of British-India, i.e. the territorial separation of India and Pakistan in the course of political independence in August 1947, triggered large-scale violence particularly in the border regions leaving up to 2 million people dead and around 15 million people evicted from their homes. Both confronted the political leadership in New Delhi and in the Northern Indian provinces with the overwhelming tasks of restoring peace and meeting the basic needs of as many refugees as possible. While the impact on Northern Indian cities and the conditions in the refugee camps in and around these cities is well-documented,Footnote ¹⁵rural communities in the bordering regions between India and Pakistan were also strongly affected by the large-scale violence and socio-economic disruptions. By extension, these regional challenges also steered national (rural) policy-making.

Already a few weeks before Partition in May 1947, FAO collected information on housing conditions in Europe, Asia, and Africa through its Ad Hoc Committee on Rural Welfare. The results were unflattering, in many details even embarrassing for British-India. The Committee’s information gathering revealed that, compared to other European colonies, the living conditions and housing circumstances in Indian villages were “too often deplorable” with a rapidly growing population further increasing the pressure on housing and rural welfare.Footnote ¹⁶According to the (colonial) government’s own figures, the rural-urban divide was particularly prevalent in areas later affected by Partition such as Punjab. The percentage of population served by “protected water supply,” i.e., water protected from contamination and overuse, was 57.5% in urban Punjab, a record number for British-India and an indicator for high sanitary standards in water supply. In rural Punjab, though, the number was as low as 0.8%.Footnote ¹⁷In brief, right before Partition in a context of worldwide disruptions of rural life and agriculture, India was a low performer in terms of rural living conditions and housing with Northern India characterised by pockets of urban wealth and severe undersupply of rural areas.

In 1950, i.e. several years after Partition, the Government of Punjab evaluated the progress of ‘rehabilitation’ in the districts of Rohtak and Hisar (today Haryana province). It found that the hardship in rural refugee camps continued due to the refugees’ lack of means to earn their livelihood. The situation even worsened when the government cut down on the supply of food and other essentials. However, the biggest problems existed outside these camps. In an area where high-standard housing and irrigation had been the foundation of regional prosperity before Partition, the transformation of housing into permanent settlements was now widely insufficient for the number of newcomers. Partition-related violence had destroyed canal irrigation systems and left “kacha houses” (i.e. proper housing) in a “dilapidated condition.” Furthermore, as the government had decided to allot agricultural and residential land to new arrivals with some agricultural background, conflicts between tenants and landlords were sharply increasing, for which the government had still found no solutions.Footnote ¹⁸

FAO closely observed the evolving situation in India and the persistent problems of food supply, political inefficiency, and the consequential lack of progress in rural reform.Footnote ¹⁹The food crisis after 1945, by contrast, was a much larger problem that would become a key question for FAO’s legitimacy in the long run.Footnote ²⁰For the organisation, one of the most promising strategies to improve the situation was cooperative farming. Both India and British-Malaya reinforced their commitments to cooperative farming after the Second World War with (British) India appointing the Cooperative Planning Committee as early as 1945 and the British authorities in Malaya passing the Cooperative Society Enactment at the beginning of the counter-insurgency war in 1948. After Partition, the postcolonial elites focused on regions in Northern India with their efforts to stimulate cooperatives as a means to address the socio-economic and political disruptions and initiate state-building in rural areas. The Government of India saw the most important rural consequence of Partition in the fact that “some of the best agricultural regions of undivided India have gone over to the share of Pakistan; and this has enhanced rather than diminished the importance of agriculture in India’s national economy.”Footnote ²¹In this view, cooperatives were a central means to achieve rural welfare and establish the postcolonial state as the main guarantor for the provision of consumer goods and agricultural requisites such as iron and steel.Footnote ²²

Next to general or multipurpose societies, which assisted various cooperative activities of entire villages or areas, more specialised cooperatives such as rural credit societies and marketing societies were active in all over South and Southeast Asia to improve farmers’ access to capital for investment and other forms of economic and technical modernisation. In the late 1940s, rural credit societies actually declined in several countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and as governments and development experts increasingly saw them as malfunctioning, reinforcing poverty traps, and thus outdated. In India, however, they were still the predominant form of cooperative society.Footnote ²³FAO also had high expectations regarding what it called “better living societies.” Their general aim was to eradicate “social evils” and “undesirable traditions and customs, the promotion of thrift and more responsible attitudes toward community as a whole, and the provision of services and amenities that will benefit the village or social group as a whole.”Footnote ²⁴The UN organisation observed that such societies existed in many different forms across Asia but were united in these social goals they all worked towards. Cooperatives were supposed to target material-economic problems such as food supply, innovation in food production, marketing-related improvements, or access to markets and capital.

Equally, if not even more, important was the mental dimension of rural change. FAO experts had observed earlier that a key problem for improving rural welfare was “the psychology of rural people and their resistance to innovations.”Footnote ²⁵To achieve progress, FAO would thus need to promote cultural studies and attach specialists in rural sociology to every mission to the field. Mental and social transformation would be achievable through more cultural knowledge and the systematic study of rural communities’ distinct psychological condition. Cooperatives could help to enhance social activities including education to propagate cooperative ways of thinking, national awareness, and social reform recognised by local elites and within FAO as indispensable prerequisites for rural modernisation.

In India, governmental authorities concentrated their efforts on better living societies in East Punjab and, to a lesser extent, West Bengal. In these two regions, carved out of larger provinces during Partition and strongly affected by inter-religious violence and mass exodus, the government counted 1351 such societies with more than 66,700 members in East Punjab and 141 with 4,350 members in West Bengal.Footnote ²⁶Both numbers were significantly above those of other parts of India and, although their actual reach on the ground was far from comprehensive, they constituted an important political priority for postcolonial nation-building. Their agenda included a wide variety of concerted activities and campaigns including school constructions, the paying of loans, the installation of water and irrigation facilities, the levelling of roads, but also sanitary instructions to improve the nation’s hygiene standards, the construction of model sanitary houses, rat-killing campaigns, and the collective addressing of social misbehaviour and social problems. In the course of the 1950s, particularly East Punjab turned into a national torchbearer for agricultural innovation and community development.Footnote ²⁷

FAO and the decolonisation of land and jungles in British-Malaya

The counter-insurgency war in British-Malaya against the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the armed wing of the Malayan Communist Party, began in June 1948 with the British authorities declaring a state of ‘Emergency.’ The war, which lasted for more than a decade, comprised the resettlement of around half a million, mainly ethnic Chinese into existing urban and semi-urban settlements as well as so-called New Villages, i.e., newly designed, frequently fortified estates.Footnote ²⁸The impact of the Emergency confronted Malaya with a combination of immediate effects such as massive social upheavals and ecological destruction and the colony’s long-term problems related to rural poverty and inequality. Similar to the Indian case, FAO played an important role in the gathering of information on the situation in British-Malaya and the development of potential solutions in a regional, (Southeast) Asian context. Generally though, FAO’s involvement in Malayan debates and concrete measures on the ground was more restricted than in India due to the armed conflict and the colonial authorities’ limited willingness to allow more international observation and involvement.Footnote ²⁹Still, the Malayan case demonstrates more clearly than India how the evolving Cold War transformed the meaning of the rural and shaped FAO’s policies.

A first area in which Malayan society was confronted with the impact of war and rural social engineering was the persistent trouble related to the resettlement of Chinese communities itself. Within the New Villages, the authorities struggled to provide the new settlers with the most basic social services including food supply, health care, employment, and education.Footnote ³⁰In spite of select amenities in some new settlements such as close location to main roads and thus better access to markets and credit facilities,Footnote ³¹the British had severe problems convincing the Chinese settlers to convert these new settlements into their permanent homes.Footnote ³²

From an international perspective, FAO and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) observed the evolving situation in the mid-1950s with growing concern and interpreted the settler problem as a decisive element of a much broader, conflictive nature of the rural situation in Malaya and, more generally, in Southeast Asia. Under FAO’s aegis the International Bank Mission, a consortium of thirteen members, four of them drawn from FAO itself, toured Malaya, i.e., the Federation and Singapore, from January to May 1954 to provide the first comprehensive study of the Malayan economy.Footnote ³³A closer look at the situation within the New Villages revealed that, although there had been some important progress concerning the socio-economic circumstances in these settlements, the Chinese settlers remained very hesitant to accept their new situation and apply for titles of land. Under the threat of “permanent agrarian unrest,”Footnote ³⁴the Mission urged the authorities to undertake more efforts to understand the complex psychological condition of these settlers.

Among other things, the settlers perceived the land offered to them as unfavourable for their economic interests and capabilities. Furthermore, many of them were not trained agriculturalists but had come to Malaya as traders and miners and had so far worked on the land only during periods of recession when other employment opportunities were either scarce or altogether non-existent.Footnote ³⁵Because the current resettlement policy would reinforce fear and resentment, the authorities should take a “more psychological approach” and address the specific economic and social needs in order to transform settlers into citizens.Footnote ³⁶In this view, the complex situation in Malaya’s rural areas and particularly within and around the new settlements was a combination of recent tensions related to the war and unaddressed long-term problems concerning land tenure and land administration. Similar to India, international development institutions, in this case FAO and the World Bank, claimed more psychology and psychologically sensitised approaches into rural policies.

Beyond the need for more psychology, the Emergency and the resettlement programme also aggravated Malaya’s long-range struggle with land administration. In the months around independence in August 1957, the Federation’s new Minister of Agriculture visited several countries in the region including Thailand, Indonesia, India, and Japan to learn from their experience and progress with “rural reconstruction.” The main conclusion, conveyed to FAO as well as the general public, was that the Federation would need a “complete reorientation and change in outlook of the rural population” with the goal to turn rural communities from passive bystanders in measures of rural change into owners of all developmental activities.Footnote ³⁷Nation-building after the imperial era and the counter-insurgency war would thus work centrally via a total change of course in rural areas and a comprehensive mental transformation of rural communities.

One important repercussion of the Emergency had been that authorities had widely neglected the technical matter of land administration. Due to the shared legal responsibilities between state and settlement governments, there existed a diversity of land legislations and administrations that even FAO experts struggled to understand.Footnote ³⁸During the war, the disposal of land turned into a major problem between conflicting claims of mining, forestry, and agriculture. The British authorities’ aggressive push towards ever-bigger exploitation of Malaya’s natural resources to meet the financial needs of post-war reconstruction in the United Kingdom and of colonial warfare, had devastating consequences for the environment. The predominant form of mining in Malaya, tin mining, destroyed the fertility of the soil and the crops growing on it on an economically and socially significant scale.Footnote ³⁹Incompetent land officers,Footnote ⁴⁰the persistence of small landholdings, and growing (forced) mobility in rural areas added to these challenges of land holdings and land administration.Footnote ⁴¹

At the moment when the British handed over the political authority to indigenous elites, the Federation’s rural planning efforts were confronted with two major information challenges. Between May 1959 and December 1960, FAO conducted a census of agriculture in the Federation to record and cartograph small-holdings, estates, government or quasi-government farms, and group farms. Irrespective of the details, the undertaking demonstrated serious problems of data collection. Large farming areas remained altogether unrecorded and population data and data on agricultural production existed side by side without clear coordination and correlation.Footnote ⁴²

The second problem was that whatever data was available demonstrated utter inequality between rural and urban areas. Rural areas lagged behind in virtually all socio-economic categories with rural Malay households forming the most deprived group of the Federation’s population.Footnote ⁴³The postcolonial authorities framed the “grave imbalance” between the urban and the agricultural sectors as “a legacy inherited from the inequitable policies of the past” including the strong concentration of the rural economy around natural resource extraction and the plantations.Footnote ⁴⁴

The possible solutions envisioned by the authorities were similar to India. Rural cooperatives should facilitate the access to “essential credit”; land redistribution should make agricultural production more profitable; and a diversification towards palm oil should reduce the dependency from rubber.Footnote ⁴⁵In addition, more resettlement, this time not imposed by the military but incentivised, should drag fishermen and other insufficiently profitable agriculturalists away from their limited sources of income towards more profitable large-scale agriculture.Footnote ⁴⁶The land required for these campaigns had to be won through land clearance of jungle areas.

During the counter-insurgency war in the 1950s, the jungles acquired a political character as dangerous, uncontrolled spaces inhabited by ‘uncivilised’ and dangerous communities, whose existence legitimised special measures of state control and environmental destruction.Footnote ⁴⁷The indigenous communities living in remote jungle areas (Orang Asli) suffered in particular from military aggression, forced resettlement, and cultural devastation.Footnote ⁴⁸In a long-term perspective on human interactions with the Malayan forests, this decade marked the beginning of a new era defined by the almost complete destruction of lowland forests, large-scale soil erosion, declining biodiversity, but also the evolution of new conservation efforts.Footnote ⁴⁹In other Asian countries including India around that time, forests were increasingly recognised as a distinct subject of postcolonial state-building and planning. In the course of the 1950s, South Asian politics at the national and the provincial level were increasingly preoccupied with the formation of a new forestry policy in the light of conflicting interests between the preservation of forests, on the one hand, and the expansion of agriculture and plantationsFootnote ⁵⁰and an expansionist forest industry on the other.Footnote ⁵¹FAO claimed a key role in this debate and tried to feed its growing expertise in forestry matters into the national debates.Footnote ⁵²

In the Malayan Federation, forestry became a promising sector to reduce export dependency on rubber. With a growing rural population asking for more land, the authorities drafted plans on how to convert around sixty percent of its national territory covered by tropical rain forest into areas of profitable land use. One aspect was the exploitation of timber. Timber export increased significantly in the second half of the 1950s due to rising domestic and international demand.Footnote ⁵³The number of saw mills in Malaya rose from 228 (1950) to 373 (1955) and the government established a new Forest Department Road Unit to construct and sustain roads as permanent forms of access to all forests in the Federation.Footnote ⁵⁴For quite some time, though, due to lack of capital and bad planning, the quality of logging roads remained poor with the exception of some areas such as Johore.Footnote ⁵⁵However, controlling and exploiting the jungles and thereby turning them into forests as viable resource pools had already been a political priority of the imperial authorities during the counter-insurgency warFootnote ⁵⁶and also became an important element of postcolonial reconstruction and planning for future rural and national welfare.Footnote ⁵⁷

Another facet of forest exploitation was planned land settlement. The government set up a resettlement scheme with a strict selection procedure for potential candidates: landless, with a rural background, between twenty-one and fifty years old, and married “preferably with children.”Footnote ⁵⁸Interested people were encouraged to apply and, if selected, the Town & Country Planning Department provided them with housing in a newly designed “small town.”Footnote ⁵⁹Each of those larger villages would be provided with services and facilities “that can be economically maintained by the metalled access road constructed by the Public Works Department.” This resettlement package also included piped water and sanitation while the Ministry of Education would provide the schools and the Health Ministry the clinics and midwife’s quarters. Economically, the new settlers would earn their living in pre-established rubber and palm oil areas “in co-operative effort”. Even a standard ¼ acre would be included in every house slot for vegetable gardening to achieve “self-sufficiency.”Footnote ⁶⁰Together, these measures would convert unproductive jungles beyond the control of the state into model villages, the design of which was an evolution of counter-insurgency warfare’s New Villages.Footnote ⁶¹Many of these new settlements were indeed successful in the sense that they attracted interested parties who turned these former jungle areas into their permanent homes.

A growing global concern: children, youth, and the psychology of decolonisation

Besides FAO’s efforts to flesh out rural policies that responded to the local specificities of decolonisation in India and British-Malaya, the organisation also facilitated and, in some cases, initiated international trends in (rural) development aid around problems it framed as growing global concerns. One such concern was the impact of decolonisation on children and youth including the long-term consequences of economic deprivation, social tension, conflict, and war.Footnote ⁶²Also in this field, a historic interplay evolved between FAO’s own agenda, local elites in South and Southeast Asia, and the way decolonisation processes unfolded within those societies.

In India, concerns around the impact of decolonisation on children and youth became prominent soon after Partition. Reacting to a motion on refugee relief and rehabilitation moved in parliament by the minister responsible, K.C. Neogy, Prime Minister Nehru stated in November 1947 that the most terrible consequence of Partition was its “psychological part,” i.e. the perversion of “man’s mind” especially of the younger generation “growing up seeing these horrors.” Together with women that needed more effective protection from violence, the salvation of young people had to be considered a national priority: “After all, the future of India depends on them. They must be educated, they must be looked after and they must be made proper citizens of India.”Footnote ⁶³Three years later, Nehru still deemed it necessary to remind India’s national and provincial bureaucrats that the refugee problem was not “a matter of figures and files” but of millions of individual human beings with girls, boys, and women being the most vulnerable ones and thus deserving “our first attention.”Footnote ⁶⁴Although the existing historiography on children and youth during Partition is still very limited,Footnote ⁶⁵the evidence that we do have suggests that, from a children’s and youth’s perspective, the realities on the ground were different from Nehru’s ideas and connected social problems in rural areas with (semi-)urban restructuring.

Among the foremost challenges the authorities were confronted with was the integration of refugee children into the education system. As late as two years after Partition, mothers of school-aged children in Delhi protested or even went on hunger strike to force the government to provide sufficient food and basic educational arrangements for their children.Footnote ⁶⁶Those refugee children actually in school were frequently confronted with discrimination due to their language backgrounds that were different from local communities.Footnote ⁶⁷In the name of rapid integration into their new social environment and the conversion into good citizens of the new state, migrant children were openly discouraged from using their mother tongues in schools, which only aggravated their unsettling experience of cultural alienation and uprootedness. Newly arriving children belonging to minority communities such as Dalits became victims of bullying and physical harassment by their local counterparts.Footnote ⁶⁸

A severe social consequence of decolonisation concerned babies and small children without parental protection. Children who had lost their parents in the turmoil of Partition frequently became subject to questionable adoption practices that reflected gender-specific attitudes and discriminatory treatment. While some adoptive parents openly expressed their exclusive wish for boys,Footnote ⁶⁹other people interested in an adoption of a girl were actually looking for cheap domestic labour rather than another daughter.Footnote ⁷⁰The national government reproduced these patriarchal norms in its political discourse on the role of women and children in the post-Partition social order. Together with his Minister for Relief and Rehabilitation, Nehru sought to transform rural areas around Delhi into a small colony exclusively for women and their children to collect them from rural areas all over Northern India and set up a local subsistence economy with what they considered distinct female features such as gardening, dairy farming, poultry keeping, and a small cottage industry.Footnote ⁷¹In brief, in rural as well as urban areas decolonisation confronted children, youth and, by extension, also women with specific psychological, social, and economic problems which the state not only found hard to tackle but also reproduced and reinforced.

In British-Malaya, the counter-insurgency war also had severe, although somewhat different consequences for children and youth. Apart from the traumatising experience of violence, repression, and social uprooting in the course of forced resettlement,Footnote ⁷²children and youth were also strongly affected by the physical and psychological circumstances within the new settlements, particularly in the early period of the war. Since British authorities and police forces did not systematically gather reliable data on children and youth in the new settlements,Footnote ⁷³Christian missionaries working in the New Villages were generally better informed about the smaller and bigger calamities children and young people experienced.

In its first official report covering the year 1952, the New Village Service Fund Committee of the British-Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) included a detailed review of four medical centres it had built up in New Villages. The general observations the Society gained from more than 21,000 medical cases it had treated in one year illustrated that children were more than others affected by low hygienic and food-related conditions in the new settlements. Children were particularly prone to insect bites which they scratched and became infected. Due to poor living conditions and overcrowded small houses, children suffered from respiratory infections which often recurred.Footnote ⁷⁴The lack of clean water and soap caused worm infections, septic spots on all body parts, ear infections, and stomatitis.Footnote ⁷⁵Babies and children were at high risk of suffering blindness from painful eye infections. Furthermore, malnutrition caused iron-deficiency anaemia and slowed children’s physical development.Footnote ⁷⁶In other cases, the lack of appropriate food made children go to the jungle and collect whatever looked edible to them.Footnote ⁷⁷In brief, the social, economic, and psychological consequences of forced resettlement and the military campaign had a particularly strong impact on children’s wellbeing owed to their specific physical and mental conditions.

Another area of concern for the missionaries and, by extension, the British authorities was education and the struggle against boredom and aimlessness. As the British struggled to provide sufficient infrastructure and financial means for both, the missionaries came up with their own strategies to address these social issues. Similar to post-Partition India, the main challenge was to improve the access to primary education for the new settler families and address the children’s language skills and provide them with standardised education in Mandarin and English.Footnote ⁷⁸The general policy was to move children away from the Southern Chinese languages belonging to the Hakka language group they had spoken earlier and instead train them in English in missionary schools or in standardised Mandarin in reformed, formalised, and thus tighter controlled Chinese schools.Footnote ⁷⁹In other words, also in British-Malaya, resettlement meant to acquire new language skills and adjust to the official language policy reflected in the education system, which demanded a significant degree of adaptation from children and young adults. Psychological dynamics also played an important role. In their educational efforts, the missionaries were frequently confronted with strong reservations towards any form of state-induced policy resulting in fears among parents about sending their children to schools they knew little or nothing about.Footnote ⁸⁰Furthermore, missionaries tried to involve children and youth in social activities to provide them with a sense of purpose and use these challenging circumstances to win some of them over with Christian zeal.Footnote ⁸¹

The Emergency also exacerbated the shortcomings of material infrastructure specifically relevant for young people. Particularly in the first half of the 1950s, resettled rural and semi-urban communities were confronted with a lack of schools, a shortage of teachers, underqualified teaching personnel, and a lack of teaching material that corresponded with the actual life circumstances of resettled children.Footnote ⁸²Taken together, these educational deficits prevented schools from facilitating social integration and helping children address and, ultimately, overcome their traumas resulting from violence and the collective experience of uprooting.

In the evolving international aid industry, children and youth living in rural areas shaken by the impact of imperial decline and the rise of postcolonial statehood became a more prominent issue towards the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s when the global Cold War shifted its centre of gravity from Europe to Asia. Together with other international development players such as UNESCO, the ILO, WHO, the UN Department of Social Affairs, and US institutions including the US Division Farm Population and Rural Life and the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, FAO urged the international community to work out a plan to specifically address the needs of children in “under-developed areas.” In these areas, these organisations assumed responsibility for some 500 million children, most of them living in rural areas and a “large portion” suffering from malnutrition and the diseases and physical damages it caused. Also, they lacked the most basic medical and educational facilities as key requirements for individual and economic growth.Footnote ⁸³Consequently, the international community was responsible for meeting children’s most basic needs.

FAO and other development organisations also increasingly saw children as the key to success of any development intervention, particularly the long-term project of mental change. As children exerted a significant degree of influence in their homes and tended to be more open towards change than other generations, whose habits were generally hard to influence, development experts framed young people more and more frequently as crucial drivers of (rural) change.Footnote ⁸⁴Correspondingly, children’s distinct social and psychological dispositions in the context of the family and the rural community more generally required more scientific attention and a more central role in development planning.

There existed a broader context in international development that favoured such an approach. During the second half of the 1950s and particularly during the 1960s, leading development thinkers within FAO pressed for a different understanding of development away from what they criticised as an exclusive focus on economic change. As an alternative, they suggested a more comprehensive understanding of developing societies. One such development theoretician was Sushil K. Dev.Footnote ⁸⁵Dev had started his career in the Indian Civil Service and later became the Deputy Director in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs at the UN Headquarters in New York. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dev acquired high decision-making positions within FAO and the World Food Programme. In his view, to trigger rural change it was essential to move beyond the material-economic focus in development and try to understand the “psychological processes” of rural communities.Footnote ⁸⁶For foreign aid, or any aid, for that matter, to achieve its objectives, it ought to be based on “the most intimate and sensitive understanding of the specific psychological and historical circumstances which must shape any viable change.” By contrast, any notion or degree of change to much aloof from or ahead of “people’s behaviour, attitudes, motivations and values” was bound to fail either immediately or in the long run.Footnote ⁸⁷As a consequence, collective psychology, and particularly rural psychology and rural sociology, ought to play a much more prominent role in the design and implementation of development. Thus, at a time, when Western psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry reinforced their interest in cross-cultural experiments and diagnosis in the so-called Third World and also influenced anti-colonialism,Footnote ⁸⁸development thinkers from the global south working in international organisations such as FAO sought to mobilise psychology for rural change.

Towards the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, when decolonisation entered a new phase in Asia and Africa and youth protests developed around the globe, questions around the role of young people in development experienced renewed international prominence. Within FAO, this prominence circulated around three topics: youth as a driver of change in Asia and elsewhere; youth as a facilitator of inter-organisational development cooperation; and the role of education in the formation of political identity.

In the late 1950s global development experts re-emphasised the role of young people for development and change in international development debates such as The Far East Rural Youth Conference held in Bangkok in February 1957 and the Second Far East Rural Youth Workshop in Tokyo in August 1959.Footnote ⁸⁹Close observers of Asian societies saw a “new Asia” evolving, a region characterised by historical dynamics around young people, their interest and participation in nation-building efforts and their strong enthusiasm “for the emancipation of the common man.”Footnote ⁹⁰To unlock this potential for societal change and channel it in the right direction, these dynamics ought to be shaped by the right kind of education in order to use this impetus for the improvement and uplifting of human welfare. Due to their “receptiveness (…) to new ideas,” young generations in rural areas were potentially the best partners to train farmers in new agricultural techniques and create a new mindset away from the existing conservatism and scepticism towards innovation.Footnote ⁹¹In brief, the international development community including FAO saw a unique opportunity in young people to reinforce its efforts in agricultural renewal, rural social reform, and mental change.

In the following years, FAO attempted to deepen its cooperation with other players in the field of rural development. Together with UNESCO, the UN organisation in charge of education, culture, and social sciences,Footnote ⁹²and rural development NGOs, FAO expanded different forms of informal training in new agricultural techniques and promoted new forms of leadership in the villages and small towns across Asia in order to increase the responsibility and ownership within rural communities towards agriculture and rural social relations. New Associate Rural Youth Enterprises should foster rural youth associations to carry out projects on new methods of youth work and evaluate and promote them through publications.Footnote ⁹³Together with UNICEF, the UN organisation responsible for providing children with humanitarian and developmental aid, FAO promoted youth work brigades and youth clubs in various Asian societies as vehicles for leisure and recreation activities but also for food production innovation and nutrition education.Footnote ⁹⁴These social activities were meant to bring rural and urban youth closer together and facilitate social and intellectual exchange between them. Finally, FAO cooperated once again with the Ford Foundation. At that time, the Foundation enjoyed a significant reach outside the cities through its regular publications and was an important information provider on agricultural extension and social youth activities in South America.Footnote ⁹⁵In a similar way, FAO sought to expand its own information network and strengthen its distribution of knowledge and literature on farming and social reform. Taken together, these initiatives indicate that youth work and the international resonance it enjoyed during the 1960s was a welcome opportunity for FAO to revise and deepen its institutional partnerships.

Lastly, FAO drew attention to the persistently worrisome situation of millions of rural youths who had either prematurely dropped out of school or had never attended school. As FAO saw it, the problem was a complex combination of several factors including poor educational quality, missing institutions or their poor quality, economic deprivation and inequality, and a general lack of social reform. The consequences were dire: “unproductive traditional agriculture,” “depressed community life with sparse rural services,” “adult-dominated and disintegrating family life,” “general lack of educational and job opportunities,” and “the attraction of the city” with large rural areas with too few young people to sustain agricultural production.Footnote ⁹⁶Since these problems would persist or even worsen in conflictive times of nation-building and the search for new political identities after the end of the imperial era, these young people would constitute a potential source for political instability and “anti-social behaviour.” While the better-educated would leave for the cities simply because they can, rural youth with insufficient education would either remain stuck in the villages or turn into a challenge for cities where they crowd urban slums.Footnote ⁹⁷Through both centralised and decentralised forms of group training, more vocational training in youth clubs and training centres, initiatives to improve the quality of rural education, and more attention to staff training in countries such as Ceylon, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea,Footnote ⁹⁸FAO and other organisations tried to tackle a massive problem which by far exceeded their financial, logistic, and also political capacities.