Ideas of India, Asia and Africa
In 2016, the Leslie James wrote a piece on this blog discussing visual mapping as a tool for the history of ideas. James discussed two projects that had recently been launched — the University of Texas, Dallas’s animated map that tracked the movement of Western cultural hubs across Europe and outward, to Asia and North America specifically, and Stanford University’s Mapping the Republic of Letters, which was also situated around key thinkers and the movement of ideas facilitated by their own movement across the globe. I was instantly fascinated by James’s critique of the projects as possibly creating ‘maps of exploitation’ by focussing on key individuals and those mostly based in the Euro-American space. The piece resonated deeply with me because I knew from my own experience in using archival material on India in the Cold War that the problem of representation was pervasive, but that the focus on key thinkers was also deeply problematic, not least because it told us very little about the thinkers themselves.
Let me explain — I am not a cultural historian, neither is my work focussed on non-elite networks. Empirically, I am a diplomatic historian, and my work seeks to answer larger political theory questions through the investigation of India’s international relations using deep archival work. The period I work on is early- to mid-twentieth century India, and the primary subject of my study has been India’s external affairs under Jawaharlal Nehru’s prime ministership. Thus, I am almost exclusively focussed on the political thought of elites, mostly Nehru himself, but also Gandhi and Tagore. James refers to the various layers of network through which ideas percolate, yet I have mostly emphasised those layers that tend to be institutionalised within the machinery of the State. Indeed, my work rarely focuses on non-State actors at all.
Yet, when I was invited to join the collaborative research group at Amsterdam’s Institute of International Social History, I found that the focus on networks of individuals working outside or overlapping with the state’s apparatus had rich dividends to pay for my own elites-focussed work too. Indeed, the archival loot I brought back from the research trip has now found shape in a forthcoming paper on a periodical produced out of Bombay in the 1950s and the 1960s and the India-Africa intellectual exchanges made possible in the pages of that publication. For those working on non-State actors, and networks of intellectuals in the Afro-Asian space, the significance of this archive is pretty straightforwardly understood. For diplomatic historians, and those like me who use the diplomatic historical archive as evidence to investigate theoretical claims, it is not very useful to look at this periodical merely as distinct from official correspondence between African state leaders such as Kenyatta and Nkrumah and Nehru.
It is more productive to look at the archive as an examination and appraisal of Nehru’s ideas, particularly his specific brand of non-alignment (also the subject of my doctoral thesis and forthcoming book). A now extinct periodical, United Asia, published out of Bombay in the 1960s, was the last place I thought I would find the leading figures of African decolonisation articulating their responses to Indian non-alignment. Yet, in a special issue of the periodical brought out in 1957 to celebrate Ghana and African nationalism, I found that the foreword had been authored by Kwame Nkrumah, sourced from his autobiography, and was a discussion of Gandhi’s principles of non-violence and whether they could be adapted to a postcolonial state’s foreign policy. Nkrumah examined the case of India under Nehru and drew connections between non-violence and socialism — a possibility as theoretically exciting now as it was back then. But this is only one essay in an issue that fascinatingly, also has a contribution from George Padmore. Indeed, in terms of themes, United Asia deals with various issues relating to the Afro-Asian sphere, and often circles back to the question of non-alignment.
Thus, even after I had already undertaken extensive and probing searches in multiple archives around the world, working in at least 5 languages, I had now found a whole treasure trove of material from my own hometown, archived in a European institute of social history. Naturally, this speaks to the immensely rewarding experience of collaborative historical research and of specifically the project I was part of. But it also points to the need to take periodicals more seriously as sources for the history of Indian ideas, or ideas that Indians made their own (that distinction also deserves more attention). But, where could these be periodicals be found? The rotting state of India’s official archives did not leave me very hopeful about finding periodicals that had already been out of circulation for a good while. Without a compendium of periodical names, and indexing information, how could one even know what one was looking for?
As if on cue, nearly four years later, in November 2019, the ‘Ideas of India’ database (https://www.ideasofindia.org/), an extensive index of Indian periodicals was launched. The site currently houses 255 periodicals with 315,000 entries. After March 2020, the site will be updated to 365 periodicals with 350,000 entries, covering a period from 1837 to 1947. This is presently an extensive index, an unprecedented insight into the vastness of periodical presence in India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The periodicals listed on the database have vast significance for many historical sub-disciplines, and for interdisciplinary work outside of history too.
One notable payoff of that archive becoming organised, and thus more visible than it has ever been is that we can now know more about India’s place in Afro-Asianist movements than we ever have before. The period in which these publications were in active circulation is an internationalist era, a time in which India’s opening up to the world was becoming complete with independence from British rule, membership of the United Nations, and an international presence much beyond its material capacities. A large and critical element of that presence was in India’s relations with nationalist movements within colonies on the African continent and subsequently, with newly independent African states. Indian periodicals may prove to be the single largest source to study that expression of India’s international relations.
