At Home in the World: Jawaharlal Nehru and Global Anti-Imperialism

Abstract

This dissertation situates Indian nationalist politics in a broad, international context of anti-imperialist movements beginning in the late colonial and interwar period. The archival record is rich with sources on the international and transnational connections of the Indian National Congress (INC); however, scholarship on the independence movement almost exclusively concentrates on the micro-histories of `locality, province, and nation' or the `subalterns' of India. Instead, this project contributes a much-needed international perspective to Indian colonial history. As a case study, this dissertation traces the relationship between Jawaharlal Nehru, then a prominent leader of the Indian independence movement and later India's first prime minister (1947-1964), and the League against Imperialism (LAI), a significant, yet little studied organization founded in Brussels in February 1927. The League offered a significant space for Nehru, and by extension the Indian National Congress, to interact and build partnerships with political leaders in other colonies, mandates and dependencies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; as well as North American and European social reformers concerned with working class and racial equality. A history of Nehru and his League connections underscores the significance of the international terrain in which Indian nationalists contested empire. In this project I argue that the making of Indian anti-colonial nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s emerged as a complex set of interactions on the ground in India, but also beyond the colonial borders of the subcontinent.