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

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 -