Intimate Internationalism: Relationships of Desire, Solidarity, and Power between White Women Radicals and South Asian Anticolonialists in 1910s California

Abstract

A long-standing research desideratum is to understand more fully the place of gender in the cultures of early twentieth-century transnational South Asian anticolonialism. One avenue into this field is the study of feminists and other socially or politically transgressive women who chose to support the cause of Indian independence in “Western” countries like the United States. These women and the variegated, often gendered ways in which they contributed to the struggle challenge the notion of an anticolonial movement abroad that was built and populated only by men. To locate such women, this paper focuses on to the private, personal, and intimate aspects of the lives of South Asian anticolonialists in 1910s California, at the height of the Ghadar Movement’s activities there. The paper seeks to arrive at a fuller understanding of friendship and intimate relationships as deeply gendered sites on which anticolonial solidarities were built and undone in this context. It asks about the political significance of the relationships that radical white women entertained with South Asian men: Did they consciously frame, understand these intimacies as radical acts, perhaps even acts of anticolonial solidarity, in the context of the white supremacist, colonialist societies in which they lived? On the other hand, to what extent did gendered regimes of power permeate such comradeships, and what were the consequences of this gendering of their “affective community”?