PhD Thesis Title: Progressive Politics, Poetic Revolutions: Literary Imagination, Textual Entanglements, and Indian Decolonization c. 1934-1989
PhD Supervisors: Gopalan Balachandran & Anna Leander
PhD Co-Supervisor: Samson Okoth Opondo (Vassar College)
Expected Completion Date: 2026
On the evening of November 23, 1934, a group of Indian students met in the backroom of the Nanking restaurant in London to lay the foundations for their vision of a “progressive” literature for the times. Critically reflecting on their shared experience as colonized subjects in the metropole, they sought to outline the role that writers and artists would play in the struggle to free the Indian subcontinent from British rule. While born out of the political agitations for Indian independence, they aligned themselves to a global movement against imperialism and fascism. Active from the 1930s to the 1980s, they published journals and magazines; set up literary associations; brought into their fold poets, painters, and performers through different forums; and built networks of Third World solidarity with other Asian and African artists across territorial borders. My project seeks to chart the personal, political, and transnational journeys of this set of self-avowedly “progressive”, left-wing, peripatetic anticolonial Indian activist-intellectuals and artists. Tracing these histories allows us to grasp how writers, artists, and performers crafted visions for a world free from colonial domination, imperial rule, and fascist repression. Methodologically, my project weaves together public, print, and personal archives to examine a vibrant body of textual material including surveillance reports, manifestoes, bulletins, private correspondences, conference proceedings, newspapers, and journals. Doing so, my dissertation aims to reveal new lines of affiliations, associations, and collaborations that arose and spread across interwar London, decolonizing South-Asia, and postcolonial Afro-Asia. In looking back at the worldly, relational, and transnational aspirations of the subjects who make up this study, my dissertation will recover the rich imaginations of postcolonial belonging, freedom, and subjectivity that decolonization spanned beyond the realm of state-relations and narratives of anticolonial nationalisms.
I am a PhD candidate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva. I am broadly interested in studying the interconnected and entangled histories of South-Asian decolonization, progressive aesthetics, and Third World solidarities. Previously, I completed my master’s in international relations/political science at IHEID. My MA dissertation explored how the words and worlds of the Martinican poet, theorist, and philosopher Edouard Glissant offered ways of designing and shaping world poetics differently.