From Delhi to Bandung: Nehru, 'Indian-ness' and 'Pan-Asian-ness'

South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 51-64

  Singh, Sinderpal ^a  

^a NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE   (Singapore)

Author keywords

Asia; foreign policy; identity; India; Nehru; non alignment; regionalism

Indexed keywords

DOCUMENTARY SOURCE; FOREIGN POLICY; IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION; POLITICAL IDEOLOGY; REGIONALISM;

ASIA; INDIA;

EID: 79952692108     PISSN: 00856401     EISSN: 14790270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2011.549084     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Itty Abraham, 'From Bandung to NAM: Non-Alignment and Indian Foreign Policy, 1947-65', in Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Vol.46, no.2 (April 2008), p.195.
2. Itty Abraham, 'From Bandung to NAM: Non-Alignment and Indian Foreign Policy, 1947-65', in Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Vol.46, no.2.,2008 p.196.
3. For an example of the idealist perspective see Narendra P. Jain, 'A New Approach to International Relations', in D.R. Goyal (ed.), Non-Alignment: Concepts and Concerns (Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1986), pp.1-16.
4. For an argument that Indian foreign policy was actually steeped in disguised calculations of realist, interest-maximisation behaviour, see A.P. Rana, 'The Intellectual Dimensions of India's Non-Alignment', in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.28, no.2 (Feb. 1969), pp.299-312.
5. Andrew Hurrell, 'Regionalism in Theoretical Perspective', in Andrew Hurrell and Louise Fawcett (eds), Regionalism in World Politics: Regional Organization and World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.66.
6. See for example Joseph Nye (ed.), International Regionalism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968);
7. Richard Falk and Saul H. Mendlovitz (eds), Regional Politics and World Order (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1973);
8. and Karl Deutsch, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
9. Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (eds), The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (London: Lynne Rienner, 1996).
10. Other related contributions during this period are David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992);
11. Bill McSweeney, Security, Identity and Interests: A Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
12. and Rodney Bruce Hall, National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
13. Iver Neumann, 'A Region-Building Approach to Northern Europe', in Review of International Studies, Vol.20, no.1 (1994), pp.53-74.
14. For Neumann's related works on this theme, see I. Neumann, Uses of the Other: The 'East' in European Identity Formation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999);
15. and Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations (London & New York: Routledge, 1995).
16. For example see C.S. Browning, 'The Region-Building Approach Revisited: The Continued Othering of Russia in Discourses of Region-Building in the European North', in Geopolitics, Vol.8, no.1 (Jan.2003), pp.45-71; (Pubitemid 36209674)
17. Carina Keskitalo, 'International Region-Building: Development of the Artic as an International Region', in Cooperation and Conflict, Vol.42, no.2 (2007), pp.187-205;
18. and W. Larner and W. Walters, 'The Political Rationality of "New Regionalism": Toward a Genealogy of the Region', in Theory and Society, Vol.31, no.3 (2002), pp.391-432. (Pubitemid 37142505)
19. Keskitalo, 'International Region-Building', p.188.
20. Bjorn Hettne and Fredrik Soderbaum, 'Theorising the Rise of Regionness', in New Political Economy, Vol.5, no.3 (2000), p.461.
21. Neumann, Uses of the Other, p.115.
22. For examples of works with other approaches to states as 'region-builders', see Ole Weaver, 'Three Competing "Europes": French, German, Russian', in International Affairs, Vol.66, no.3 (April 1990), pp.477- 93;
23. and K. Jayasuria, 'Singapore-The Politics of Regional Definition', in Pacific Review, Vol.7, no.4 (1994), pp.411-20.
24. An example of a work which explicitly considers the politics of 'inclusion' and 'exclusion' in regional spaces is Michael Wesley, 'The Politics of Exclusion: Australia, Turkey and Definitions of Regionalism', in Pacific Review, Vol.10, no.4 (1997), pp.523-55.
25. Neumann, Uses of the Other, p.134.
26. Itty Abraham makes the point about the shared views on anti-racialism and civilisational standards between several of the countries at the Asian Relations Conference as well although he does not make the link between this and Nehru's own representation of Indian state identity at this point in time. I. Abraham, 'From Bandung to NAM', pp.195-219.
27. Nehru's speech in the Constituent Assembly, 8 November 1948. See Jawaharlal Nehru, India's Foreign Policy-Selected Speeches, September 1946-April 1961 (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1971), p.17.
28. Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.153.
29. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (London: Meridian Books, 1956), p.49.
30. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India.1956, ibid,p.47.
31. For a deeper discussion of the link between British imperialism and 'creating' India, see Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
32. An excellent and insightful treatment of such legitimations of imperial control can be found in Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
33. Prasenjit Duara, 'The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism', in Journal of World History, Vol.12, no.1 (2001), pp.106-7.
34. Prasenjit Duara, 'The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism', in Journal of World History, Vol.12, no.1 (2001),Ibid., p.110. Duara observes that in the Japanese case in the early part of the twentieth century, 'pan- Asianism both fed and resisted the nascent imperialism of that nation'.
35. For details of the Baku Congress see Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford & Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p.135.
36. For the Brussels Conference and Nehru's personal ruminations on it, see Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, an Autobiography: With Musings on Recent Events in India (London: Bodley Head, 1953), pp.161-5.
37. Quoted in Being Report of the Proceedings and Documentation of the First Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, March-April 1947 (New Delhi: Asian Relations Organization, 1948), p.23.
38. Ibid,.
39. In his classic study, Sisir Gupta notes 'the conference has been viewed as a success by most Indian writers . . . within the limited context of its aims'. See Sisir Gupta, India and Regional Integration in Asia (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1964), p.37.
40. Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), p.151.
41. The highly-regarded Indian political scientist, A. Appadorai, terms Nehru's efforts to blend a socialist, redistributive ethos into the workings and the idea of democracy in India an example of 'democratic socialism'. See A. Appadorai, Indian Political Thinking: From Naoroji to Nehru (Madras: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp.117-8.
42. For details of the Bogor meeting, see Roeslan Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection: The Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955 (Jakarta: Gunung Agung, 1980), pp.20-22. Abdulgani, an Indonesian diplomat, was secretary-general of the Organising Committee for the Bandung Conference.
43. George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956), p.3.
44. From Soekarno's opening address at the Asian-African Conference, 18 April 1955.
45. Full text of the speech is reproduced in Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, p.43.
46. See also Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection, p.173.
47. For a discussion of Bandung's significance for later discourses on neo-colonialism in Asia, see David Camroux, 'Asia . . . Whose Asia? A "Return to the Future" of a Sino-Indic Asian Community', in Pacific Review, Vol.20, no.4 (2007), pp.555-6.
48. For an elaboration, see S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Vol.II (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979), p.232.
49. See also Jyoti Sengupta, Non-Alignment: Search for a Destination (Calcutta: Naya Prokash, 1979), pp.94-5. Sengupta was an Indian journalist during this period with access to the Ceylonese prime minister, Sir John Kotelawala, Ceylon's representative at the Bogor preparatory meetings and at the Bandung Conference.
50. See Anthony Reid, 'The Bandung Conference and Southeast Asian Regionalism', in See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (eds), Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), p.23.
51. As Krishna Menon, Nehru's long-time confidante and Indian foreign minister later pointed out, from the Indian perspective 'Bandung was largely Asian'. See Michael Brecher, India and World Politics: Krishna Menon's View of the World (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p.60.
52. For details on the factors leading up to the formation of SEATO, see Yano Toru, 'Who Set the Stage for the Cold War in Southeast Asia?', in Yonosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye (eds), The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1977), pp.329-33.
53. Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, pp.66-7.
54. See Jamie Mackie, Bandung 1955: Non-Alignment and Afro-Asian Solidarity (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2005), pp.73-4.
55. For an interesting account of how the US government itself was concerned about its military pacts being seen as vestiges of 'white' Western imperialism in the run-up to Bandung, see Matthew Jones, 'A "Segregated" Asia?: Race, the Bandung Conference and Pan-Asianist Fears in American Thought and Policy, 1954-1955', in Diplomatic History, Vol.29, no.5 (Nov. 2005), pp.841-68. (Pubitemid 41693230)
56. For details on how certain 'aligned' states approached the Bandung Conference, see Ang Cheng Guan, 'The Bandung Conference and the Cold War: International History of Southeast Asia', in See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (eds), Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), pp.27-47.
57. Even as early as 1957, one writer lamented that 'since Bandung, it has become fashionable to invoke the "Bandung Spirit" on every possible occasion'. See Georgiana G. Stevens, 'Arab Neutralism and Bandung', in Middle East Journal, Vol.11, no.2 (1957), p.148.
58. For a more recent call to re-examine such 'triumphalist' interpretations of Bandung, see Pang Yang Huei, 'The Four Faces of Bandung: Detainees, Soldiers, Revolutionaries and Statesmen', in Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol.39, no.1 (Feb. 2009), pp.63-86.
59. Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, pp.76-85;
60. and Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection. pp.197-206.
61. Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection, p.202.
62. Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, p.84.
63. Kahin, The Asian-African Conference ,Ibid., p.74.