113 – What Shade of Red?: Footprints of Socialism in South Asian Intellectual and Political History

October 2, 2025
8:30 am
H13
This panel explores the political, cultural, and intellectual formations of socialism in late colonial and early postcolonial South Asia. Socialism indicates here the broad constellation of the proto-, non- and/or anti-communist left that emerged in the course of the 1920s to the 1940s via the “salvoes of the October revolution” and encompassed organizations as diverse as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, the Congress Socialist Party, and others. As a political ideology, socialism is understood by scholars as comprising various left-of-center streams in the political spectrum of twentieth-century South Asia (Nehruvian, Gandhian, radical humanist, “oppositional” etc.). This panel wishes to examine the range of ideas that underpinned socialist thought and discourse in the period of the long decolonization in the subcontinent, probe their global and domestic backdrop, and analyze the kind of political agenda and practices they came to ground. Equally interesting to us are the various inroads into the literary and cultural field the socialists made and the effects of such interventions in shaping the contours of intellectual discourse in postcolonial South Asia. The broad themes the panel seeks to address include, but are not limited to the following: • The significance of anticolonialism in Indian socialist thought • Socialist internationalism in India from the interwar period to the Cold War • The place of language, class, caste, gender, and religion in socialist discourse and practices • Institutional presence and organizational efforts of the socialists • Political-economic vision(s) of the socialists • Socialist thought on environment, natural resources, land, and economic redistribution • Ambivalent relations between the socialists, communists, the Congress, Ambedkarites, the Hindu Right and others • Socialists in the wider cultural, literary, and intellectual milieu

Convenors

Sarkar Judhajit
Prateek Pankaj

Presentations

Socialism, Anti-Communism, and the Cold War: Vijay Dev Narayan Sahi and the Politics of Postcolonial Hindi Literature
Sarkar Judhajit - South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
Socialists and the Question of Land and Caste in 1950s India
Pankaj Prateek - South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
The Psychology of Multilingualism: Rammanohar Lohia’s Critique of English and Linguistic Inequalities
P. Veetil Akhil - Department of South Asia Studies; Comparative Literature Program, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
A Marxist Sufi Vision: Punjabi literary imaginaries of radical change in the work of Najm Hosain Syed (b. 1935)
Murphy Anne - University of British Columbia, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Socialism in India: The Congress Socialist Party and Its Non-Marxist Politics
Motam Pruthvi Sai - Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India
JP Narayan, Ambedkar and the question of moral and social transformation
Khiamniungan Chiangmong - Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India