Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T16:31:04.610Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Shopping Ideologies for Independent India? Taraknath Das’s engagement with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2016

Maria Framke
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While looking at the world’s politics and ideologies for a vision of the future nation state, India’s anti-British freedom activists and intellectuals remained deeply ambivalent about drawing lessons from Europe’s experience of Fascism and National Socialism. Indian nationalists cautiously admired elements of National Socialist and Fascist ideology and expressed their distress with imperialist expansionism, racism, and anti-Semitism that accompanied the two regimes. This article draws on the exemplary “global biography” of one such Indian internationalist thinker, Taraknath Das, to investigate interwar Indian preoccupation with Fascism and National Socialism in articulating the discursive ground of Indian nationalism.

Keywords

IndiaItalian FascismNational Socialismindependence movementTaraknath Das
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , April 2016 , pp. 55 - 81
Copyright
© 2016 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Maria Framke (Rostock University) is an historian of modern South Asia. She has researched and published on the history of international organizations, imperial and nationalist politics, humanitarianism, and international relations and ideologies in the twentieth century. She would like to thank Harald Fischer-Tiné, Vasudha Bharadwaj, Katharina Schembs, Götz Nordbruch, Harshit Rathi, Anna Mohr, Jonas Kreienbaum, Nitin Sinha and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on different drafts of this article.

References

Bibliography of Works Cited

ArchivesGoogle Scholar
Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome, Italy (ASMAE)Google Scholar
British Library, London, United Kingdom (BL)Google Scholar
Fondazione Gentile, Rome, ItalyGoogle Scholar
Nehru Museum and Memorial Library, Delhi, India (NMML)Google Scholar
Universitätsarchiv, Munich, GermanyGoogle Scholar

Newspapers & Journals

AmerasiaGoogle Scholar
Amrita Bazar PatrikaGoogle Scholar
Antioch ReviewGoogle Scholar
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social ScienceGoogle Scholar
Bombay ChronicleGoogle Scholar
Calcutta ReviewGoogle Scholar
Congress SocialistGoogle Scholar
Forward/ since 1929 LibertyGoogle Scholar
MahrattaGoogle Scholar
Modern ReviewGoogle Scholar
Prabuddha BharataGoogle Scholar
Süddeutsche MonatshefteGoogle Scholar
The New York TimesGoogle Scholar
Times of IndiaGoogle Scholar
Young AsiaGoogle Scholar

Secondary Sources

Aydin, Cemil. “Taraknath Das: Pan-Asian Solidarity as a ‘Realist’ Grand Strategy, 1917–1918.” In Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Vol. 1, edited by Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, 305–310. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011.Google Scholar
Baldinetti, Anna. “Fascist Propaganda in the Maghrib.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 37 (2011): 408–436.Google Scholar
Bayly, Susan. “Imagining ‘Greater India’: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode.” Modern Asian Studies 38:3 (2004): 703–744.Google Scholar
Bhatti, Anil, and Voigt, Johannes H., eds. Jewish Exile in India: 1933–1945. New Delhi: Manohar, 1999.Google Scholar
Biswas, Paromita. “Colonial Displacements: Nationalist Longing and Identity among Early Indian Intellectuals in the United States.” PhD diss., University of California, 2008.Google Scholar
Bose, Subhas Chandra. La lotta dell’India: Previsioni. Firenze: G. C. Sansoni, a cura dell’Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1943.Google Scholar
Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Bose, Sugata and Manjapra, Kris, eds. Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.Google Scholar
Casolari, Marzia. “Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-up in the 1930s: Archival Evidence.” Economic and Political Weekly 22:1 (2002): 218–228.Google Scholar
Clinton, Maggie. “Ends of the Universal: The League of Nations and Chinese Fascism on the Eve of World War II.” Modern Asian Studies 48:6 (2014): 1740–1768.Google Scholar
Connelly, Matthew. “Population Control is History: New Perspectives on the International Campaign to Limit Population Growth.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45:1 (2003): 122–147.Google Scholar
Daechsel, Markus. “Scientism and its Discontents: The Indo-Muslim ‘Fascism’ of Inayatullah Khan Al-Mashriqi.” Modern Intellectual History 3:3 (2006): 443–472.Google Scholar
Das, Taraknath. British Expansion in Tibet. Calcutta: N. M. Raychowdhury, 1928.Google Scholar
Das, Taraknath. Foreign Policy in the Far East. New York: Green, 1936.Google Scholar
Das, Taraknath. India in World Politics. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1923.Google Scholar
Das, Taraknath. Is Japan a Menace to Asia? Shanghai: The author, 1917.Google Scholar
Das, Taraknath. La questione de Pacifico vista da un Orientale. Roma: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1934.Google Scholar
Das, Taraknath. Politica estera nell’Estremo Oriente: Studio sull’imperialismo e il nazionalismo. Messina: G. Principato, 1938.Google Scholar
Das, Taraknath. Rabindranath Tagore: His Religious, Social & Political Ideals. Calcutta: Saraswaty Library, 1933.Google Scholar
Das Gupta, S. N.. L’intimo aspetto dell’antica arte indiana. Roma: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1940.Google Scholar
Delfs, Tobias. Hindu-Nationalismus und europäischer Faschismus: Vergleich, Transfer und Beziehungsgeschichte. Hamburg: EB-Verlag, 2008.Google Scholar
Egorova, Yulia. Jews and India: Perceptions and Image. London: Routledge, 2006.Google Scholar
Fasana, Enrico. “Deshabhakta: The Leaders of the Italian Independence Movement in the eyes of Marathi Nationalists.” Asian and African Studies 3:2 (1994): 152–175.Google Scholar
Ferretti, Valdo. “Politica e cultura: origini e attività dell’IsMeo durante il regime fascista.” Storia contemporanea 17:5 (1986): 779–818.Google Scholar
Fischer-Tiné, Harald. “‘The Cult of Asianism’: Asiendiskurse in Indien zwischen Nationalismus und Internationalismus (ca. 1885–1955).” Comparativ 18:6 (2008): 16–33.Google Scholar
Fischer-Tiné, Harald. Shyamji Krishnavarma: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-Imperialism. New Delhi: Routledge, 2014.Google Scholar
Flora, Giuseppe. “Benoy Kumar Sarkar: An Essay in Intellectual History.” PhD diss., Jawaharlal Nehru University, 1993.Google Scholar
Flora, Giuseppe. Benoy Kumar Sarkar and Italy: Culture, Politics and Economic Ideology. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publ., 1994.Google Scholar
Flora, Giuseppe. “Tagore and Italy: Facing History and Politics.” University of Toronto Quarterly 77:4 (2008): 1025–1057.Google Scholar
Framke, Maria. Delhi–Rom–Berlin: Die indische Wahrnehmung von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus 1922–1939. Darmstadt: WBG, 2013.Google Scholar
Framke, Maria. “Fascist Italy: Ideal Template for India’s Economic Development.” In Zero Hours: Conceptual Insecurities and New Beginnings in the Interwar Period, edited by Hagen Schulz-Forberg, 77–96. Brussels: P. I. E. Peter Lang, 2013.Google Scholar
Framke, Maria. “India’s Freedom and the League of Nations: Public Debates 1919–33.” Paper presented at a conference, Munich, Germany, 17–20 June 2009.Google Scholar
Gopal, Sarvepalli, ed. Selected works of Jawaharlal Nehru. Vol. 7. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1975.Google Scholar
Goswami, Manu. “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms.” American Historical Review 117:5 (2012): 1461–1485.Google Scholar
Günther, Lothar. Taraknath Das: Ein Lebensbild. Berlin: Taraknath-Das-Stiftung, 1996.Google Scholar
Hayes, Romain. Subhas Chandra Bose in Nazi Germany: Politics, Intelligence and Propaganda 1941–43. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf: 2 Bde. in einem Band. München: Eher, 1932.Google Scholar
Holzwarth, Simone. “A New Education for ‘Young India’: Exploring Nai Talim from the Perspective of a Connected History.” In Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-cultural Exchanges in (Post-)colonial Education, edited by Barnita Bagchi, Eckardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere, 123–139. New York: Berghahn, 2014.Google Scholar
Hoover, Karl. “The Hindu Conspiracy in California, 1913–1918.” German Studies Review 8:2 (1985): 245–261.Google Scholar
Jensen, Joan M. Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Kathe, Steffen R. Kulturpolitik um jeden Preis: Die Geschichte des Goethe-Instituts von 1951–1990. München: Martin Meidenbauer, 2005.Google Scholar
Keenleyside, T. A. “Diplomatic Apprenticeship: Pre-Independence Origins of Indian Diplomacy and its Relevance for the Post-Independence Foreign Policy.” India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs 43:2 (1987): 97–120.Google Scholar
Kuhlmann, Jan. Subhas Chandra Bose und die Indienpolitik der Achsenmächte. Berlin: Schiler Verlag, 2003.Google Scholar
Maclean, Kama, and Daniel Elam, J.. “Reading Revolutionaries: Texts, Acts and Afterlives of Political Action in Late Colonial South Asia.” Postcolonial Studies 16:2 (2013): 113–123.Google Scholar
Manjapra, Kris. Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Manjapra, Kris. “Knowledgeable Internationalism and the Swadeshi Movement, 1903– 1921.” Economic & Political Weekly 47:42 (2012): 53–62.Google Scholar
Michels, Eckard. Von der Deutschen Akademie zum Goethe-Institut: Sprach- und auswärtige Kulturpolitik 1923–1960. München: Oldenbourg, 2005.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, Tapan K. Taraknath Das: Life and Letters of a Revolutionary in Exile. Calcutta: National Council of Education, 1998.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, Tapan. “Taraknath Das.” In Distinguished Asian Americans: A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Hyung-chan Kim, 81–83. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.Google Scholar
My-Van, Tran. “Japan through Vietnamese Eyes (1905–1945).” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 30 (1999): 126–146.Google Scholar
Nanda, B. R., ed. The Collected Works of Lala Lajpat Rai. Vol. 10. New Delhi: Manohar, 2008.Google Scholar
Nordbruch, Götz. Nazism in Syria and Lebanon: The Ambivalence of the German Option, 1933–45. New York: Routledge, 2009.Google Scholar
Payne, Stanley. Fascism: Comparison and Definition. 3rd ed.Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Prayer, Mario. “Creative India and the World: Bengali Internationalism and Italy in the Interwar Period.” In Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, edited by Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, 236–259. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.Google Scholar
Prayer, Mario. In Search of an Entente: India and Italy from the XIX to the XX Century, a Survey. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1994.Google Scholar
Prayer, Mario. Internazionalismo e nazionalismo culturale gli intellettuali bengalesi e l’Italia negli anni Venti e Trenta. Roma: Bardi, 1996.Google Scholar
Prayer, Mario. “Italian Fascist Regime and Nationalist India, 1921–45.” International Studies 28:3 (1991): 249–271.Google Scholar
Prayer, Mario. “Nationalist India and World War II as Seen by the Italian Fascist Press, 1938–1944.” Indian Historical Review 36:2 (2006): 89–111.Google Scholar
Price, Ruth. The Lives of Agnes Smedley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Puri, Harish K. Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation, and Strategy. Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Ramnath, Maia. Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Raucher, Alan. “American Anti-Imperialists and the Pro-India Movement, 1900–1932.” Pacific Historical Review 43:1 (1974): 83–110.Google Scholar
Sareen, Tilak Raj. Subhas Chandra Bose and Nazi Germany. New Delhi: Mounto Publ. House, 1996.Google Scholar
Sartori, Andrew. “Beyond Culture-Contact and Colonial Discourse: ‘Germanism’ in Colonial Bengal.” Modern Intellectual History 4:1 (2007): 77–93.Google Scholar
Sohi, Seema. “Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in the Transnational Western U.S.-Canadian Borderlands.” Journal of American History 98:2 (2011): 420–436.Google Scholar
Srivastava, Gita. Mazzini and his Impact on the Indian National Movement. Allahabad: Chugh, 1982.Google Scholar
Stolte, Carolien. “‘Enough of the Great Napoleons!’ Raja Mahendra Pratap’s Pan-Asian Projects (1929–1939).” Modern Asian Studies 46:2 (2012): 403–423.Google Scholar
Stolte, Carolien, and Fischer-Tiné, Harald. “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940).” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54:1 (2012): 65–92.Google Scholar
Tejani, Shabnum. “Re-considering Chronologies of Nationalism and Communalism: The Khilafat Movement in Sind and its Aftermath, 1919–1927.” South Asia Research 27:3 (2007): 249–269.Google Scholar
Terp, Holger. “Ellen Horup and Mohandas Gandhi.” 2009. http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/nordic/ellen1.htm (accessed November 26, 2013).Google Scholar
Thierfelder, Franz. India Institute of the Deutsche Akademie, 1928–1937. München: Wolf, 1937.Google Scholar
Verma, D. N. India and the League of Nations. Patna: Bharati Bhawan, 1968.Google Scholar
Voigt, Johannes H. “Hitler und Indien.” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 19:1 (1971): 33–63.Google Scholar
Wien, Peter. Iraqi Arab Nationalism: Authoritarian, Totalitarian, and Pro-Fascist Inclinations, 1932–41. London: Routledge, 2006.Google Scholar
Zachariah, Benjamin. “A Long Strange Trip: The Lives in Exile of Har Dayal.” South Asian History and Culture 4:4 (2013): 574–592.Google Scholar
Zachariah, Benjamin. “Rethinking (the Absence of) Fascism in India, c. 1922–1945.” In Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, edited by Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, 178–209. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.Google Scholar
Zachariah, Benjamin. “Transfers, Formations, Transformations? Some Programmatic Notes on Fascism in India, 1922–38.” In Cultural Transfers in Dispute: Representations in Asia, Europe and the Arab World since the Middle Ages, edited by Jörg Feuchter, Friedhelm Hoffmann and Bee Yung, 167–192. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2011.Google Scholar