During the Second World War, India was under British rule and functioned as a military, industrial, and logistical base for Allied operations. The British government mobilized India’s resources to pay for the war effort, and the Indian Army expanded dramatically, becoming the largest volunteer army in human history. Nearly two-and-half million Indian troops served and fought around the world, in all four theatres of the global conflict. Building on the pioneering work of historians Indivar Kamtekar, Yasmin Khan, and Srinath Raghavan, among others, this interdisciplinary special issue argues for the centrality of the war to political, cultural, and economic developments in twentieth-century South Asia. Alongside a growing body of scholarship on India and the war, this special issue hopes to put to rest the idea of the war as mere ‘mood music’ once and for all as it tunes in to its cultural, social, and technological reverberations in South Asia across the decades. In addition to reconstructing some key events of the war in the region, the six authors—with expertise spanning history, media studies, and literature—rethink key issues in their respective fields of study by centering the global war. Two guiding questions connect the articles: How did the Second World War transform society in the Indian subcontinent during the transition from empire to independence? How might a perspective from South Asia allow us to reconsider the war’s global trajectory and its technological, social, and cultural transformations?