Introduction
While looking to the world for a vision of the future nation, India’s freedom activists and intellectuals of anti-British persuasion remained deeply ambivalent in drawing lessons from Europe’s experience of Fascism and National Socialism. Indian nationalists cautiously admired elements of National Socialist and Fascist ideology—for instance, strong leadership, service to the organic national community, unity through elimination of social difference by the state, and so on—and expressed their distress with the imperialist expansionism, racism, and anti-Semitism that accompanied the two regimes. In this article, I draw on the exemplary “global biography” of one such Indian intellectual and educator, Taraknath Das (1884–1958), to document interwar Indian preoccupation with Fascism and National Socialism in articulating the discursive ground of Indian nationalism.Footnote 1
Historical narratives exploring the first three decades of the twentieth century in South Asia have generally tended to ignore the importance of global engagements that informed the nationalist political, intellectual, and socioeconomic agendas and policies on and for the Indian subcontinent. In recent years, however, scholarly attention has shifted to South Asian internationalism(s) and global interactions.Footnote 2 New publications not only aim to map the global networks of South Asian (inter)nationalists and intellectuals, they also reconstruct their transnational interventions and their involvement with multiple forms of internationalism.Footnote 3
According to Manu Goswami, after the experiences of the First World War, internationalist intellectuals, including South Asians, devised diverse visions of a non-imperial future while being positioned between the empire and the nation.Footnote 4 Goswami convincingly argues that many Indian radical intellectuals engaged with various “internationalist dream worlds—communist and anarchist, social scientific and socialist, literary and aesthetic” in the interwar period.Footnote 5 Similarly, Kama Maclean and J. Daniel Elam have recently pointed to the “production and global circulation of new literary, political, aesthetic and philosophical forms” from the 1920s to the 1940s, and they have argued that Indian activists participated and contributed to this “cacophony of thought.”Footnote 6 In both cases, however, the authors’ comprehensive analysis omits the sphere of international(ist) fascism, which has been studied more comprehensively in the last decade (see below).
Furthermore, Indian participation in and contribution to growing internationalisms often occurred in the realm of education and culture, as became evident in efforts to establish closer networks and exchange programs, which leads to the question of how one might understand the relationship between these cultural initiatives and political aspirations. Kris Manjapra has recently brought forward a convincing answer to this question by analysing Indo-German entanglements between 1880 and 1945. Manjapra argues that, while challenging the nineteenth-century world order created by Great Britain, German and Indian actors “used each other’s intellectual institutions and platforms of recognition to claim political distinction on a world stage.”Footnote 7 This article goes beyond Manjapra’s observations on Indo-German interactions by examining multiple worlds of reference (Italy, Germany and the United States) used by Taraknath Das to pursue his work, especially focusing on Italian Fascism and National Socialism. Thereby, I argue that in the case of Taraknath Das, both spheres—the cultural-educational and the political—were closely intertwined since his engagement in various cultural and educational projects directly aimed to establish support networks working towards India’s independence.
Anticolonial nationalism in Asia and the Middle East was affected by diverse ideologies ranging politically from the left to the extreme right in the interwar years and during the Second World War. The influence of Fascist Italy, National Socialist Germany, and Japan on nationalist intellectuals, politicians, and the media in dependent colonial countries or mandated areas such as Vietnam, China, Syria, North Africa, Lebanon, and Iraq has been examined extensively in the last decades. Although it is highly debatable if any of these countries saw the emergence of a genuine fascist organizationFootnote 8 or even a fascist mass movement, studies clearly highlight the largely positive reception and adaptation of certain fascist/right-wing policies and ideas as well as prospects of collaboration with the Axis powers amongst anticolonial nationalists.Footnote 9 Research on Fascism and National Socialism as perceived in colonial South Asia focused for a long time mostly on Hindu nationalist engagementsFootnote 10 and the “collaboration” of Subhas Chandra Bose with the Axis powers.Footnote 11 Lately, however, the theoretical and practical engagement of Indian public figures with Italy and Germany has attracted greater attention. Many of them remained critical of fascist ideologies but also displayed an interesting ambiguity when it came to identifying a model for laying the discursive grounds for the Indian nation state, especially with regard to the future form of governance and economic planning.Footnote 12 They saw Italian Fascism and National Socialism—or to be more precise certain policies—as role models for an anti-imperialist struggle for an independent India. While the economic and social policies of Italy and Germany were favourably compared to British colonial practices, their expansionist foreign policies evoked widespread criticism and rejection amongst Indians. However, several Indian individuals and groups in the interwar period nursed their own imperial ambitions. They hailed India as a former colonizing and civilizing power and did not criticize contemporary Italian and German expansionist policies.Footnote 13
By focusing on a South Asian actor involved in meaning-making exercises amidst competing ideologies of anti-imperialism, nationalism, Italian Fascism, and National Socialism, this article contributes to discussions of the complex global trajectories of these ideologies. It also furthers our understanding of the particular ways in which nationalists and intellectuals used these ideologies for promoting Indian independence by devising alternative visions of nation-building, state formation and rejuvenation, and foreign policy. At the same time, this article provides a nuanced reading of the diverse worlds of Taraknath Das in the context of the many international agendas discussed by Goswami, Maclean, and Elam. My analysis of Das’s activities in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s inevitably leads to the question of his engagement with Fascism and National Socialism, but also looks into his involvement with alternative ideologies and internationalist projects. The ultimate aim here is to understand how Das perceived and discussed both Fascism and National Socialism, and which aspects he considered worth emulating and why. This article argues that, while his engagement with National Socialism was rather short-lived and showed severe ruptures after 1933, his interaction with Italian Fascism was marked by greater continuity until the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Life of an Expatriate Patriot: The Multiple Worlds of Taraknath Das
Born in 1884 in a village near Calcutta, Taraknath Das became involved in the nationalist anti-British movement during his student days.Footnote 14 Threatened with arrest by the British, he left the country in 1905 for Japan, from where he took ship after a year to the United States. Working in various jobs in different American and Canadian cities, Das also obtained a master’s degree in political science in 1911 from the University of Washington in Seattle.Footnote 15 At the same time, he became deeply interested in questions of immigration, naturalization, and the citizenship of Indians in North America, even while he continued to propagate anti-British views and the independence of his homeland, for instance with the publication of his journal Free Hindusthan.Footnote 16 Das eventually joined the revolutionary Ghadar Party, which propagated an armed struggle against the British Empire and endeavoured to liberate India militarily with German help during the First World War.Footnote 17 Due to his activities, Das was sentenced to twenty-two months’ imprisonment in the course of the Hindu-German Conspiracy case.Footnote 18 After his release, he distanced himself from any form of violent struggle. However, he continued to work for India’s independence by writing numerous books and articles on the subject of international politics and India, and by setting up and maintaining wide-ranging contacts with politicians, intellectuals, political organizations, and academic institutions. As executive secretary of the Friends of Freedom for India Society, an American organization that campaigned for India’s independence, Das forcefully continued his anti-British propaganda by addressing mass meetings, giving lectures, and writing newsletters.Footnote 19
In 1924, Taraknath Das married Mary Keatinge Morse, an active suffragette and founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who belonged to the “affluent upper-class New York society” and supported him, his work, and his travels, even financially, in the subsequent years.Footnote 20 One year later they travelled to Europe and lived in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland until 1934, punctuating their stay with brief visits to the United States, where the couple was involved in the campaign for naturalization of Indians. After their return to the United States, Das held a variety of teaching positions from 1936 onwards and finally became an adjunct professor at New York University as well as lecturer in the history department at Columbia University.Footnote 21 He witnessed India’s independence, but was devastated by the partition. In 1952, Das returned to Germany, where he once again took up the work of Indo-German cooperation.Footnote 22 He died in December 1958 in New York.
Historical research has so far mainly dealt with Das’s life and works before, during, and shortly after the First World War, and has discounted his global engagements and anticolonial initiatives during the interwar period.Footnote 23 A variety of labels, all of them overly simplistic, are therefore applied to describe him: Indian revolutionary, anticolonialist, (itinerant) nationalist, socialist, and antifascist.Footnote 24 Two biographies portray him as an antifascist, and will be reconsidered critically in this article. This assessment of Das seems to be influenced by the temporal and spatial focus of both works, which briefly explore Das’s relations with National Socialist Germany and his critical stance towards anti-Semitism, but do not take into account his interactions with Italian Fascism.Footnote 25
The latter theme, however, is examined by Mario Prayer, who sees Das as a typical representative of Bengali internationalism.Footnote 26 Bengali internationalists aimed to formulate “an Indian cultural horizon for modern times, also keeping in mind examples coming from contemporary non-British Europe,” for instance from Italy.Footnote 27 Though Prayer refrains from explicitly classifying Das as a proponent of Italian Fascism, he nevertheless points to his deep admiration of different aspects of Mussolini’s Fascist policies, and argues that Das considered different facets of Fascism as lessons for the Indian nation-in-the-making.Footnote 28 His exclusive focus on Das’s interactions with Fascist Italy, however, omits the latter’s engagement with multiple ideological worlds, which inhibits a more complex and nuanced reading of his interests and the influences that shaped him.
In addition to being subject to simplistic ideological-political labels, Das is also frequently situated close to Hindu nationalism.Footnote 29 Although these readings avoid the unequivocal label “Hindu nationalist” for Das, he is described as a person who preferred that India be a Hindu nation and who pleaded for Hindu unity as a means to achieve swaraj (independence). Keeping these multiple characterizations in mind, this article also conducts a close reading of Das’s notions of the future Indian nation state and his understanding of Indian nationalism. Finally, the secondary literature also portrays Das as an intellectual, educationist, and international scholar whose multiple engagements become visible in his extensive writings.Footnote 30 His contributions were published in newspapers, journals, and books in Europe, North America, and Asia and engaged with diverse debates about foreign policy, political theory, demography, citizenship and immigration rights, national defence, as well as opium diplomacy and abuse.Footnote 31
Networks for India’s independence
Das was involved in wide-ranging networks and engaged with diverse causes, and his life was marked by continuities as well as ruptures. The most important continuity that influenced Das’s thinking and actions was his work for India’s independence. For this purpose, he resorted to different methods, all of which aimed, first, to provide information to the international public about India’s status and, second, to find suitable partners and supporters, especially in the field of cultural and educational cooperation. Therefore, he communicated and cooperated with Indian and non-Indian politicians, activists and publicists such as Jawaharlal Nehru, B. C. Roy, Lala Lajpat Rai, Rabindranath Tagore, Rash Behari Bose, Agnes Smedley, J. T. Sunderland, W. E. B. Du Bois, Eamon de Valera, and Sun Yat-sen.Footnote 32
One of Das’s strategies for achieving freedom was the promotion and defence of India’s national demands on a global scale by establishing worldwide contacts and spreading “unbiased” information about India.Footnote 33 Das undertook this task personally, through a combination of his bimonthly journal Free Hindusthan in the 1900s, his work for the Friends of Freedom for India Society, and his booklet about India’s famous Nobel laureate and internationalist, Rabindranath Tagore.Footnote 34 However, he also recognized the need for a broader, more comprehensive approach. In an article in the Calcutta Review in 1928 he listed those places where political and educational propaganda should be carried out: the United States, Germany, France, Spain and Portugal, the Latin American republics, the Soviet Union, and Scandinavia.Footnote 35
Das’s recognition of the importance of foreign contacts and propaganda in the context of political reform in India, however, was by no means a new one. Indian nationalists had begun to campaign for the sympathy and support of other countries from the late nineteenth century.Footnote 36 The 1920s witnessed a new wave of more extensive activities that included, according to T. A. Keenleyside, four major components: the setting up of the Foreign Congress Department (in 1928 and again in 1936); the establishment of different Indian nationalist bureaus overseas, in particular in Great Britain and the United States; participation in nongovernmental conferences; and personal diplomatic initiatives.Footnote 37 Thus, Taraknath Das was only one amongst India’s internationally oriented nationalists. Like Rai, Tagore, and Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Das moved flexibly in multiple worlds in order to achieve his aims. During his long stay in Europe, he built personal relations with individuals and institutions interested in India; for instance, he was involved in the Danish Society of Friends for India.Footnote 38 To disseminate information about India’s plight as a colony he not only produced an inexhaustible flow of articles but also actively supported different anti-imperialist publication projects. Das even arranged for reviews and took pains over translation to broaden the circulation of these books among and beyond their original, mostly English-speaking, audiences.Footnote 39 In the case of Jabez T. Sunderland’s India in Bondage, Das attempted—unsuccessfully—to find a German publishing house and to secure the necessary funding for more than one and a half years.Footnote 40
Another instrument that could be deployed in the long term to promote India’s independence was, according to Das, the League of Nations, of which British India was a member. Das viewed the institution as providing the recognized international platform to achieve support for India by giving the world outside the British Empire accurate information about Indian opinions and the country’s internal and external affairs. In this case, correct information meant views that were at variance with the official standpoints of the British Indian government.Footnote 41 Writing about the importance of the League of Nations in 1924, Das requested that his fellow countrymen “utilise the League of Nations and present India’s case before the members of the League collectively and individually, officially and unofficially.”Footnote 42 He was convinced that even if India’s efforts to secure international justice through the League of Nations were not successful, the people of India would gain internationally and would learn which countries sided with British imperialism and which supported India.Footnote 43
The idea of approaching the League of Nations in order to present India’s claim for self-determination was widely discussed during the 1920s on the subcontinent. After the end of the First World War, the nationalist Indian press and different politicians had supported this option; several Indian nationalists like Bal G. Tilak and Subhas Chandra Bose also travelled to Geneva to make their respective demands. However, these initiatives did not prove successful, and from the mid-1920s, the League of Nations was rarely perceived as an institution that could help in gaining India’s independence by either the Indian nationalist press or members of the Indian National Congress.Footnote 44 By suggesting in 1928 that help should be sought from the League of Nations, Taraknath Das ranked among a small minority who still considered this action beneficial. His recommendation nevertheless took into account the widespread Indian criticism about the League’s inefficiency in supporting dependent colonial countries. After visiting Geneva at least twice,Footnote 45 Das confessed in a private letter in 1927 that work for India’s independence could only prevail if it were equipped “with proper credentials from the most powerful and representative organizations in India,”Footnote 46 that is, nationalist organizations such as the Indian National Congress. Therefore, in a 1928 article, Das proposed a double strategy to make best use of the League of Nations: to insist that the selection of Indian delegates to Geneva be approved by the Indian Legislative Assembly; and to establish a real—in other words a nationalist—Indian representation on site such as an Indian Information Bureau.Footnote 47 His first recommendation aimed at altering the mode of selecting Indian delegates to the League. These delegates were neither elected nor nominated by the Indian population, but rather appointed by the Secretary of State for India in consultation with the British Indian government,Footnote 48 and thus they misrepresented, in Das’s view, “the Indian people and their aspirations.”Footnote 49 To further support and agitate for the latter’s interests, Das promoted the idea of an Indian Information Bureau organized by a suitable Indian nationalist leader adept in world politics and, most important, free of British control.Footnote 50
Germany in the Weimar and National Socialist Periods: A Partner for Cooperation?
In the mid-1920s, Das returned to Germany. Following his cooperation with German authorities during the First World War, he held Germany in high esteem and declared that Germans were “the best educated and most civilised and highly cultured people of the world.”Footnote 51 Das’s admiration for Germany was closely linked with his belief in the importance of education as the principal method for national regeneration. For the same reason he called for Indian mass education,Footnote 52 and like several of his Indian contemporaries,Footnote 53 in his writings he also promoted cultural and educational cooperation between India and other countries.Footnote 54 He gave particular importance to Indian students pursuing their studies in foreign countries, as he viewed them as shouldering a twofold responsibility in regard to their homeland: to study the achievements of other countries and pass on this knowledge to their fellow Indians on their return, and to interpret for global audiences India’s aspirations and past accomplishments.Footnote 55 As early as 1912, Das together with other Indians living in the United States set up the Hindusthan Association of America, which aimed to promote cultural and educational activities for Indian students. He extended his efforts in the mid-1920s, and aimed at the establishment of contacts between Tagore’s famous international university Visva-Bharati and educational institutions in the United States.Footnote 56 In a 1931 article in the Indian journal Prabuddha Bharata, Das campaigned again for the establishment of educational and cultural relations—this time between India and the United States, Germany, China, Japan, and Italy—as the necessary method to combat India’s degeneration.Footnote 57
Das’s efforts were not limited to giving advice to Indian audiences; he actively strove to promote Indian relations with Germany from 1927 onwards. In Munich, together with the German geographer and geopolitician Karl Haushofer, he was involved in setting up the India Institute of the Deutsche AkademieFootnote 58 (a cultural institute established in 1925, forerunner of the Goethe Institute), which officially began its work for the betterment of Indo-German culture and education exchange in 1929.Footnote 59 In addition to providing scholarships to Indians studying at German universities, the institution delivered information about universities and colleges of technology for prospective students and assisted in finding internships in German companies, hospitals, and laboratories. To promote future research about India at German universities, it also invited Indian scholars to present their work. Since one of the principal objectives of the Deutsche Akademie was to disseminate German culture on a global scale, the India Institute cooperated locally with Indian universities and cultural societies.Footnote 60
Das, who became an honorary member of the Deutsche Akademie in 1929 and served on the board of the India Institute,Footnote 61 wrote about the German initiative in Indian newspapers.Footnote 62 The Deutsche Akademie, however, did not rely primarily on the assistance of Das to propagate its work and to announce available scholarships for Indian students in Germany; it also regularly contributed short articles to different Indian journals and newspapers such as the Calcutta Review and the Times of India.Footnote 63 Das’s pro-German information policy was nonetheless of great importance for the objectives of the Deutsche Akademie. He advocated the “spread of German culture” in different articlesFootnote 64 and projected a clearly positive image of Germany in his writings, describing the country as being sympathetic to India’s aspirations for independence.Footnote 65
As with his engagement in the United States, Das also actively promoted the organization of Indian students in Germany.Footnote 66 Presiding over the First Conference of Indian Students in Germany in October 1931, Das, in accordance with his ideas on the necessity of foreign contacts and the significance of education, urged the assembly to take up the task of establishing a World Federation of Indian Students. Such a federation, he declared, would enable more coordinated and prolific efforts for “cultural co-operation and assertion of the Indian people as equals to others”Footnote 67 and hence foster the self-help needed for India’s regeneration.
With the National Socialists coming to power in 1933, however, Das’s relations with Germany became ambivalent and finally underwent significant modifications. A series of incidents, in which Indians living in Germany were attacked or insulted, led to vigorous discussions in the Indian press about the increasing racism in Hitler’s Germany and ultimately challenged Indo-German cooperation.Footnote 68 Hitler’s racism had already become visible in his political manifesto-cum-autobiography Mein Kampf, published in 1925/26. In the book he had delineated a racially divided world and argued not only for “racial purity”, but also for domination of “superior [white, Aryan] races” over the “inferior [non-white, non-Aryan] races.”Footnote 69 Consequently, Hitler endorsed British colonial rule in India and only began to lend indirect support to Indian nationalism during the Second World War. Although Hitler’s racist ideas were absorbed and shared by Nazi intellectuals, his party members, and parts of the German media before and after 1933, the regime hesitated to sever all of its relations with India, mainly due to economic motives, but also because of the continued commitment for Indo-German exchange relations by institutions such as the Deutsche Akademie.Footnote 70
After his return from Italy in April 1933, where Indian visitors and students were hardly exposed to similar experiences of Fascist xenophobia, Das gradually intervened in the ongoing political debates taking place in Germany. In an article in the Modern Review, a monthly journal published in Calcutta, he stressed the predominantly positive experiences most Indian students and he himself had had in Germany in the aftermath of the National Socialist seizure of power. He thereby downplayed the violence against Indians as exceptional cases that could happen in the course of any political upheaval, even though he strongly advised Indian students living in Germany to keep away from politics and to concentrate on their studies.Footnote 71
The regime’s ongoing racist and political persecutions, however, made Das revise his opinion, at least privately. He felt increasingly uncomfortable in Germany, as he admitted in a letter to his friend J. T. Sunderland in October 1933.Footnote 72 But despite his growing discomfort, and following his final return to the United States in April 1934, he was not prepared to put a halt to his efforts for cultural cooperation between Germany and India. Responding to debates about the conditions for studying in Germany, he wrote a lengthy letter to the Bombay Chronicle in September 1934 in which he gave a positive assessment of the work of the Deutsche Akademie and stressed that it was primarily interested in the establishment of cultural cooperation with institutions in other states. He insisted that the institution lacked any interest in domestic and foreign policy and that it also abstained from any kind of political propaganda.Footnote 73 Urging continued Indo-German cultural cooperation, Das wrote: “I earnestly request the Indian public to strengthen the work of cultural co-operation with all nations which are ruled by dictators—Russia, Italy, Germany, etc.—also those which have democratic institutions—Great Britain, France, the United States, Czechoslovakia, etc. All activities involving cultural co-operation should be conducted soberly; and one must not be too hasty to alienate cultural co-operation of a great nation like Germany.”Footnote 74
Only by pursuing this approach, Das believed, could India become free from British colonial rule in the long run. Aware of the sensitivity of his demand for cooperation with Hitler’s Germany, however, he stated explicitly that he neither sympathized with the National Socialists nor supported dictatorships, and that he opposed all modes of racist, religious, and political persecution. He nevertheless recommended studying in Germany, with the proviso that Indian students keep away from the internal politics of their host country.Footnote 75
Das’s readiness to continue supporting Indo-German educational cooperation was linked to his belief that well-educated young people were needed to advance India’s independence. Furthermore, his long personal commitment to education initiatives seems to have influenced his decision to recommend German universities in spite of his private misgivings. His unease, however, became publicly and explicitly manifest in regard to anti-Semitism, which became a visible and constitutive feature of National Socialist politics from the spring of 1933. In India, journalists, intellectuals, and politicians belonging both to mainstream nationalist and Hindu nationalist camps observed and commented on developments in Germany. In the beginning, these debates were characterized predominantly by neutral or apologetic articles. But critical reports and writings increased apace from 1938 onwards, in particular after the so-called Kristallnacht.Footnote 76 One consequence of Germany’s anti-Semitic policy in the 1930s was an increase in the number of Jewish emigrants from Central Europe. As a number of these emigrants left Europe for Asia, the question of Jewish immigration was discussed in India and engendered controversial debates right from the beginning.Footnote 77 Both advocates and opponents of immigration could be found amongst intellectuals and politicians of the Indian National Congress. Hindu Nationalists opposed any further immigration of foreign minorities to India, stating that their rejection of immigration was not based on anti-Semitism but stemmed from their concept of an exclusively Hindu nation.Footnote 78
Das strongly supported the idea of Jewish immigration into India and tried to utilize his personal contacts to help the Jewish cause. For example, he wrote to the Bengali Indian National Congress politician B. C. Roy in March 1938 asking him to facilitate the admission of Austrian Jewish doctors into India. Das, who knew about the dangers for Jews in Central Europe, hoped that the physicians would find employment in Calcutta’s medical institutions or the university.Footnote 79 However, although he tried to help the persecuted Jews, his letter also reveals his anti-British “pragmatism” in dealing with Germany and Italy. Fearing that Indian protests against the Axis powers would indirectly help British colonial rule in India, he recommended acceptance of the fascist powers:Footnote 80 “Anti-India feeling in Japan, Italy and Germany will be asset [sic] to Britain and will help Britain to keep India under subjection. I am opposed to Fascism as British statesmen are but British statesmen are courting aid of Fascist powers. India should not antagonise others for mere sentimentalism.”Footnote 81
Roy’s responses to both the points in Das’s letter are revealing. Though he agreed with Das’s request to not antagonize the fascist powers, he also emphasized that he was not ready to cooperate with the Axis powers even in exchange for their potential help against Great Britain.Footnote 82 This rejection of Fascism and National Socialism seems less unambiguous if one takes into account that only one year earlier Roy had been very impressed by the economic successes of the National Socialist regime. During a tour through Germany, Roy had pleaded that the academic exchange relations be maintained and had spoken positively about study opportunities for Indian students in Germany.Footnote 83 Regarding the Austrian doctors, Roy pointed to the expected difficulties that their immigration might bring, but also wrote that he would try to provide work for one or two of them.Footnote 84
Although Roy’s answer was hardly encouraging, Das continued to champion the cause of Jewish immigration to India in several pieces in the Indian press.Footnote 85 In a reader’s letter published in the Modern Review in January 1939, he labelled the anti-Semitic violence in Central Europe as “civilized barbarism.”Footnote 86 He argued that it would contradict the holy tradition of “Mother India” to decline help to persecuted people. Religious and racial persecution, in his view, was not part of “Hindu India,” which Das depicted as a place of universal tolerance.Footnote 87 His account, although full of support for European Jews, not only exalted “the spirit of Hindu India” but also ignored the existence and ramifications of communal violence on the subcontinent. In this context, Paromita Biswas argues that Das’s equation of India and “Hindu India” negated Muslim contributions to India’s cultural heritage and also clearly shows his understanding of the Indian nation as Hindu and of Muslims as a separate race.Footnote 88 Although Das’s Hindu nationalist leanings,Footnote 89 visible in this understanding of India as “Hindu India,” are beyond doubt, it is worthwhile reminding oneself of the ambivalences in his thinking and writings. While in the aforementioned article India’s identity is defined by its “Hinduness,” Das explicitly pressed in other publications for a noncommunal character for “nationalist India-in-the-making.”Footnote 90 Furthermore, his insistence on allowing the immigration of Central European Jews to India dissented clearly and vocally from the prevalent opinion in the Hindu Nationalist camp, which deprecated any such move.
Das’s (cautious) dismissal of National Socialist racism and his categorical rejection of anti-Semitism resulted from his understanding that nobody should be persecuted due to his or her individual religion, race, or political views.Footnote 91 However, Das took a slightly different stance on racism when it came to questions of power politics and imperial expansion. While he viewed Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies as brutish, without historical parallel, and a severe rupture in Germany’s high civilization and culture,Footnote 92 a similar understanding of decline from civilization to barbarism is not discernible in his writings on Fascist Italy.
New Italy under Fascism: A Role Model for a Free and United India?
The mapping of Das’s activities has so far shown that he was engaged in multiple internationalist worlds. In the late 1920s, Fascist Italy became one of those worlds. From 1926 to 1935, his writings show a considerable interest in and sympathy with different facets of Italian Fascism.Footnote 93 Das was, in his own words, particularly impressed by the national resurrection and “rejuvenation” of New Italy, by its belief in strength, discipline, and duty, its adherence to a leader as well as its supposed class harmony.Footnote 94 He also suggested that India should learn from Fascist Italy in the following areas: Hindu-Muslim communalism, social regeneration, national defence, and military and civil education.Footnote 95 However, he did not systematically discuss the structures of Italian Fascism, its concept, or its ideology in his writings. Engagements with the ideological foundations of fascism were often ignored or omitted in Indian debates. Instead, Indian commentators addressed specific political measures of Italian Fascist and National Socialist regimes.Footnote 96 While Das’s intellectual and personal engagement with Fascist Italy was quite diverse, the focus of this analysis will be on two sets of themes that figured prominently in his thoughts and actions: Indo-Italian cooperation and education, and “national resurrection” and foreign policy.
Educational and cultural cooperation
As in his attempts to promote educational exchanges with the United States and Germany, Das worked towards fostering Indian relations with Italy in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was convinced that closer contact with the Italian Fascist state would give Indian students, intellectuals, and nationalist leaders the necessary knowledge to unify and “rejuvenate” India, that is to make India as influential and great as it had been in the ancient past. Hence, in March 1931, Das contacted Giuseppe Tucci, the famous Italian scholar of Tibet and Buddhism, and suggested an academic exchange programme under which Italian scholars could go to India to deliver lectures on “Italy since the World War” at various Indian universities. He also recommended the inauguration of a chair of Italian history at the University of Calcutta.Footnote 97 Das thought that the study of Fascism would not only be a crucial means to overcome India’s cultural isolation but would also provide Indians with necessary knowledge about “the great experiment in government and all walks of life”Footnote 98 taking place in Italy.
Das’s insistence on the importance of studying, understanding, and adopting certain facets of Mussolini’s regime at this time can be explained by taking into account his belief that other forms of government were less suited for achieving India’s national unity and freedom.Footnote 99 During the Indian political crisis of 1929–30, which revolved around the issue of gaining increased constitutional and political rights from Great Britain, Das became convinced that his homeland was divided and that Indian nationalists lacked the necessary solidarity to work successfully towards the country’s independence.Footnote 100 This division, he thought, was particularly true with reference to the problem of Hindu–Muslim communalism, which he believed could be solved by adopting “Fascist” policies, such as the establishment of a strong state that would effectively strive against communal conflicts.Footnote 101 In his view, communalism in India was perpetuated by the contemporary British Indian government and could not be tackled by any communist form of state because communism stood for “class war,” not for a harmonization of different groups in society.Footnote 102 Being critical of British imperialism in India and elsewhere,Footnote 103 Das did not view British parliamentarianism as a role model for India’s nation building and future government. Although he repeatedly (and not only in the letter to Tucci) stressed the importance of studying the Fascist state in order to adopt fitting policies, he did not preclude other lasting influences on the future form(s) of Indian government, for instance from the United States, France, Switzerland, Germany, and the self-governing dominions of the British Commonwealth of Nations.Footnote 104 Das hardly reconciled in his writings the obvious ambivalences that characterized the proposed governmental systems. His contradictory suggestions can, however, be explained by his opportunistic propensity to single out certain “fitting” aspects that he thought necessary for achieving India’s independence.
As far as is known, the scheme for academic exchange suggested by Das was not implemented, probably because it was not the only existing proposal. The early 1930s saw parallel, overlapping, and even interacting ideas towards closer Indo-Italian cooperation. In addition to Das and Tucci, the Calcutta polymath Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Corrado Gini, professor of statistics at the University of Rome, and the Bengali scholar Kalidas Nag developed and partly implemented schemes to further educational, cultural, and economic ties between the both countries.Footnote 105 Yet, the institution that proved most successful for closer exchange relations between Italy and the “Orient” (including India) was established on the initiative of Tucci and the former Italian consul general of Calcutta, Gino Scarpa. The Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (IsMEO, the Institute of the Middle and Far East), established by the Fascist government in 1933, represented itself primarily as a cultural institution also interested in economic matters, although it simultaneously served political purposes, especially as a propaganda tool for Mussolini’s foreign policy.Footnote 106 The IsMEO fostered Indo-Italian relations by providing scholarships for Indians studying at Italian universities. Furthermore, it published articles and books by Indian authors,Footnote 107 and invited Indian scholars to attend conferences and give lectures.Footnote 108
To promote cultural exchange between Italy and Asian and Arabic countries, the IsMEO also invited “Oriental” students to several congresses. In December 1933, the institute organized the First Oriental Students Congress in Rome, which was inaugurated by Mussolini. More than 500 Asian and Middle Eastern students studying in Europe took part in the first congress, including 113 Indians.Footnote 109 The first Indian IsMEO scholarship holder, Pramatha Nath Roy, was closely involved in the organization of the congress.Footnote 110 For this work he apparently received valuable suggestions from Das, who himself did not participate in this meeting due to financial constraints. In an undated letter to Roy, Das not only provided an elaborate scheme by which political and academic Indian guests living in Europe and from the subcontinent could be invited to the congress, but also proposed in detail other means to promote Indo-Italian and Indo-European relations, such as the organization of a European Congress of Indian students in Italy, the translation of pro-Indian anti-imperialist monographs into Italian, and an exhibition of Indian art in Rome.Footnote 111 Das considered IsMEO a valuable instrument for promoting relations between Italy and the Orient, that is India, and therefore advertised the institute’s activities in the Calcutta Review.Footnote 112
The students attending the First Student Congress responded positively to the Italian initiative and decided to set up a permanent office in Rome as well as an Oriental Students’ Confederation.Footnote 113 The confederation organized a meeting in the spring of 1934, which Taraknath Das attended. Das appreciated the students’ efforts and was convinced of their success, declaring to the students: “you are fortunate to have the blessings and personal support of Il Duce, a great statesman, who is conscious of the fact that the Twentieth Century is the century of the Orient and the oriental students, the future leaders of more than half of the population of the world, will play the most important part in the history of the world.”Footnote 114
Misjudging the “philanthropic” support of the Fascist regime, Das strongly recommended that the “Oriental” students show solidarity with each other. He also advised them to improve conditions in their own countries by reverting to his idea that students should acquire all necessary knowledge abroad and utilize it upon their return to their native countries.Footnote 115 Das was convinced that with the active backing of those “western” supporters who were interested in close cooperation between the “Occident” and the “Orient,” this approach promised to bring worldwide peace, freedom and equality.Footnote 116 Thus, his hopes for the assistance of Fascist Italy and his efforts for closer Indo-Italian relations intersected with Mussolini’s new foreign policy strategy. Since the mid-1920s, Fascist propagandists had been highly interested in India’s colonial status and its national movement for independence. However, the regime had not yet developed any precise policy towards India. This changed in the early 1930s, when the Fascist government revised its foreign policy approach regarding Africa and Asia. In 1933 it not only planned to establish contacts with “subversive” movements worldwide, but also aimed at an increased cultural and economic influence and penetration of the “Orient”; this of course did not preclude more expansionist actions in the future, first and foremost in Africa and the Middle East.Footnote 117 The speech Mussolini gave at the opening of the First Congress of Oriental Students was a propagandist manifestation of this new policy: he rejected the idea of the incompatibility of “West” and “East” and expressed his hope for a constructive cooperation between Italy and the “Orient,” fostered by the gathered students.Footnote 118 The regime’s search for allies and its declared readiness to cooperate with non-European countries seemed genuine to Taraknath Das and contributed to his attempts to bring Italy and India closer together.
Das’s high hopes, however, proved vain. The Fascist regime did not renounce its economic aspirations in Asia, especially in a future independent India,Footnote 119 nor did it give any tangible support to independence movements in colonial countries. Meanwhile it increasingly pursued an expansionist course of its own, visible in the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. Furthermore, the envisaged solidarity amongst the non-European students dissolved quickly,Footnote 120 with the result that only 130 students, around 40 of them Indian, attended the Second Students’ Congress in the winter of 1934–35 in Rome.Footnote 121 The Fourth Congress in 1936 was heavily influenced by the Abyssinian war, which was strongly criticized by Indian students and by large sections of the nationalist public in India for its aggressive and unjustified nature.Footnote 122 Italy’s assault on the African country not only made a mockery of Mussolini’s statement about constructive cooperation between the “West” and “East,” it also proved to many Indian observers that the Fascist state had unambiguously joined the European club of imperialist powers. Against the background of their own experiences with British imperialism, many Indian students seemed to consider it important to disassociate themselves from the activities of the IsMEO. While overall attendance during the Fourth Congress did not drop significantly—around 115 students attended it—only 2 Indian students participated.Footnote 123
National resurrection and foreign policy
Enthusiasm for Mussolini’s government disappeared among Indian students due to the Abyssinian war; yet, a similar shift of opinion is not discernible for Das who never participated in any of the students’ congresses organized by IsMEO. Das refrained from openly criticizing Fascist Italy for its invasion of the African country. One explanation for this could be his long-cherished belief that Mussolini’s government was sympathetic to the Indian struggle for independence.Footnote 124 For this reason, Das criticized those Indian politicians and intellectuals who opposed Fascism at the international level and urged them to “learn to think in terms of ‘Indian interest first’ and … [to] realize that India will have nothing to gain by following an anti-Italian policy.”Footnote 125 Das’s “pragmatic views” on cooperating with all potential anti-British powers, though most visible before the Abyssinian war, were shared by a number of Indian politicians and intellectuals. The best-known example was the Indian National Congress leader Subhas Chandra Bose, who collaborated with the Axis powers during the Second World War.Footnote 126
Pragmatism, however, only partially explains the continuation of Das’s uncritical and sometimes naïve views on Italy. Before the outbreak of the Abyssinian war, Das not only admired particular aspects of Fascism but also believed that, if adopted in India, they could play a crucial role in the unification and liberation of his homeland. He considered what he perceived as Italy’s internal strength and stability a necessary premise for a successful foreign policy determined by a realistic, strong, and decisive stance on international politics and relations.Footnote 127 In this context, he stressed the friendly attitude of Mussolini towards other nations, albeit placing this approach in a context of realism and of cultural pride by describing friendship as a tool to achieve the government’s foremost interest, that is, “to make Italy great.”Footnote 128 Das therefore did not voice criticism of the Fascist attempts to expand its territory in Europe or of the Italian colonial policy in Africa, but rather implicitly approved these measures. In 1934, for instance, he wrote in the Calcutta Review: “Fascist Italy, conscious of the glorious past of her people, is determined to carry on such activities as will result in territorial, political, commercial, economic as well as cultural expansion in all parts of the world—Europe, Africa, Asia and America—Italian leaders of all political parties agree with the formula of “sacro egoismo” which was enunciated by [Prime Minister Antonio] Salandra during the World War. Italy has a mission to fulfill; and they carry on their activities to make Italy one of the greatest nations in the world.”Footnote 129
While being vigorously opposed to British imperialism, Das did not, unlike other Indian nationalists, criticize Mussolini’s government for its imperialistic ambitions.Footnote 130 Even in the course of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, which was condemned by large sections of Indian public opinion, Das did not change his opinion, nor did he address the regime’s racist justifications for the assault.Footnote 131 Although he asserted his belief in the freedom of all peoples and his sympathy for Abyssinia’s plight, he questioned any condemnation of Mussolini’s policy by explicitly pointing to the “double standard of international morality” and to Britain’s and France’s colonial empires.Footnote 132 He described in detail British interests in the region and eventually explained the Abyssinian war as a manifestation of the Italian-British rivalry in Africa.Footnote 133 Das was not the only voice in Indian debates to criticize Great Britain’s role in the conflict—for instance, Jawaharlal Nehru vocally questioned London’s foreign policy although he was vehemently antifascist.Footnote 134 Das, however, was one of the few who at the same time sympathized with Italy precisely because of his views that British and French had inconsistent approaches to the issue of imperialism.
Das’s attitude was greatly influenced by his assessment of Italian civilization in the past. Just as the East had enjoyed India’s formative influence, so was the West, in his estimation, indebted to Italy’s ideals and contributions.Footnote 135 The notion of Italy’s mission civilisatrice was not confined to ancient times but referred to the period of the Risorgimento, which was highly esteemed in certain Indian circles as a successful example of national unification, and of present-day Fascist Italy.Footnote 136 Mussolini’s regime was, in Das’s understanding, the rightful heir to the country’s glorious past, and unlike in the German case, its “imperial destiny” in Africa did not constitute a regression towards barbarism.Footnote 137 His veneration for Italian civilization and Mussolini’s contemporary foreign policy, however, did not stop there. By remarking that “Young India, seeking the ways for Freedom, National Consolidation and National Expansion, can learn much from New Italy,”Footnote 138 Das again presented Fascist Italy as a role model worth emulating not only for the regeneration of a united Indian nation, but also for the building of a “Greater India,” an “Indian culture as a supra-local civilising force,” as “expansive Indian nationhood.”Footnote 139 This “hyper-nationalism,” most visible in calls for national expansionFootnote 140—Das even envisaged Africa as a fitting region for Indian colonizationFootnote 141—contributed to his lack of criticism of Fascist foreign policy.
Das’s positive assessment of Italy did not change immediately after his return to the United States in the mid-1930s. In the preface to his book Politica estera nell’Estremo Oriente, he still commented enthusiastically on Italian Fascism: “In the present transformative period of the occidental civilization, the Italian ideal of the cooperative state, conceived of and implemented by the political genius of Mussolini in the Fascist regime, can be considered as a milestone in the possible evolution of a new social order.”Footnote 142
The book, edited in 1938 under the auspices of the IsMEO, was the Italian version of Das’s monograph Foreign Policy in the Far East, published in New York in 1936. The positive statement on Fascism in its preface had not been part of the original English edition. However, his academic connections to the Deutsche Akademie and IsMEO were favourably mentioned in the foreword of this monograph, written by Herbert Wright, professor of international law at the Catholic University of America.Footnote 143 It seems that at this point neither Das’s intellectual acquaintances nor the American press, which also wrote about them, regarded Das’s linkages with Fascist Italy and Germany as questionable.Footnote 144
Conclusion
One of the key internationalist thinkers and publicist for a post-colonial India, Taraknath Das was actively involved in India’s independence struggle for more than four decades. Starting as a militant revolutionary, he became an expatriate lobbyist for India’s cause; an intellectual who after 1905 would return only once to his homeland, for a short visit in 1952. Das was certainly not the only South Asian intellectual who engaged in several internationalist worlds and diverse projects focussing on the establishment of global support networks for India and on the provision of information about India’s situation. His life-long absence from the subcontinent, the scope and flexibility of his incessant search for allies, models, and ideas outside the Anglo-imperial frame to help ending British rule in South Asia, and his extensive writings published in the United States, Europe, and Asia, however, distinguish him from both the majority of participating members in the Indian national movement and the greater part of Indian internationalists engaged in global scholarly, scientific, literary, and political encounters.
After abandoning any form of violent struggle after the First World War, Das worked for the establishment of both bilateral and multilateral cultural and educational relations in the 1920s and 1930s. He reasoned that doing so would initiate the urgently needed transfer of knowledge from “efficient” western countries to India. Due to their high civilizing achievements in the past, both Germany and Italy seemed particularly fitting partners, and Das was very active in promoting, implementing, and propagating educational exchange initiatives such as the IsMEO and the India Institute of the Deutsche Akademie.
The analysis of Das’s activities in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s leads to the question of his engagement with Fascism and National Socialism and brings fascism to the fore as an aspect of “internationalist dream worlds.”Footnote 145 This article has argued that Das’s relations with Germany after the National Socialists’ seizure of power in 1933 were short-lived and showed distinct changes of direction. While Das continued to promote Indo-German cooperation in the field of education for some time, he rejected anti-Semitism and actively supported Jewish immigration into India. His interaction with Italian Fascism, in contrast, was marked by greater continuity until the outbreak of the Second World War. Das perceived Mussolini’s Italy as an inspiring role model for India. He naively believed that emulating different Fascist policies might support Indians’ struggle for freedom by uniting and regenerating the Indian nation. He therefore recommended selective adoption of those aspects that could help to improve current social and political conditions in India and that would allow for a rejuvenated world position in the future. Ultimately, his engagement fails to betray any clear characteristic; his relationship with Italian Fascism was highly eclectic, in spite of his support for emulating certain aspects of it. Das’s engagement with fascist ideologies did not have a lasting impact on the future of the national movement or post-colonial India. Still Indian “flirtations” with fascism cannot be dismissed as obscure episodes, but have to be understood as genuine expressions in the search for alternatives to the dominant British model of parliamentary democracy and imperialism, and as an attempt to recalibrate and improve India’s political status in the world.
In the late 1930s and during the Second World War, Das continued his efforts as a vocal publicist for India’s independence. He continued to employ the same strategies of disseminating knowledge about India’s status in the media and in public talks and of building up support networks for the cause. His audience was now first and foremost the American public, who learnt about Das’s vision of a postcolonial India, either as an equal partner in the British Commonwealth of Nations or as an independent nation state.Footnote 146 Arguing that India was “possibly the most important determining factor for winning victory for the cause of the United Nations,”Footnote 147 Das urged the allied governments to prompt London to end British colonial rule and to finally free India. The way to achieve independence had, in Das’s understanding, changed again, but the goal remained unaltered.
