ARI Working Paper Series

In the construction of national space, is there a contrast between continental and oceanic determinants? I consider this question by looking at how India was conceptualized, conceived, imaged, and imagined in the first half of the 20th century, before it became independent. More specifically, how did the idea of India came to be articulated from two ends of the Indian Ocean, by M. K. Gandhi in South Africa, and, later, by Subhas Chandra Bose in Singapore? Gandhi was the author of the seminal anti-colonial and, some might add, anti-modern text, Hind Swaraj (1909). Bose became the commander of the Azad Hind Fauj also known as the Indian National Army. Though these leaders belong to two different ideological and discursive traditions, what united them was anti-imperialism and “colourful” cosmopolitanism. I argue that their work as not just normatively constitutive of the Indian nation, but that it might more fruitfully be seen as part of an older, looser, and more fluid Indian Oceanic cross-currents of cultural formation and circulation. These networks are today almost forgotten, with the end of empire and the rise of independent nations in the Indian Ocean system. Yet, it is of vital importance to reconsider, if not resurrect, them if we wish to arrive at a better understanding not just of the Indian Ocean but of Asia. This presentation, with the help of both textual and visual sources, illustrates how the national space was shaped by geo-critical politics, by oceanic hybridity, and by a special type of anti-imperial, colourful cosmopolitanism. The space which gave rise to such discourses constitutes a vital link between world shaped by Western imperialism and the post-national world which we might regard as coming into being before our very eyes and one of whose key constituents is signified by the “shifter” term, “the Global South.”