Shatrunjay Mall

My dissertation “Indian Anti-Colonialism and Japan’s Empire: Pan-Asianism in the Liberal Imperial Order, ca. 1900-1960” examines intellectual, political, religious, and cultural engagements between imperial and post-imperial Japan, and colonial and post-colonial India. This project is simultaneously a macro-level global history of ideas, and a micro-level study grounded in specific individuals. I analyze a wide range of itinerant figures from both countries, including soldiers, writers, religious leaders, anti-colonial revolutionaries, lawyers, intellectuals, and anti-militarist activists from 1900 through the end of the 1950s. I argue for the significance of ideological kinships and mutual perceptions based on Pan-Asianism and ideas of Asia in facilitating affective affinities between Indians and Japanese across the early to mid-twentieth century.

My research provides the concrete and layered understanding necessary for providing an overarching narrative for encounters between these two Asian societies from the turn of the twentieth century to post-World War II. Existing scholarship on India-Japan links is fragmented and sporadic, taking the forms of biographies of charismatic individuals who constituted these connections, or emphasizing pragmatic alliances of convenience between Indian and Japanese figures during World War II. By contrast, my dissertation, as a case study of the global circulation of ideas, demonstrates the surprisingly convergent ideas and visions of intellectuals and activists from both countries across this entire period. Indians and Japanese identified with each other, and with overlapping conceptions of “Asia” leading to varying degrees of interest, collaboration, and tension. Indeed, the diverse iterations of Pan-Asian ideas that I uncover were reckonings and responses to the dominance of the Euro-American liberal imperial order, in its various forms.