“A Theatre—or, More Aptly, a Laboratory”: India in the 1940s Egyptian Left as an Antecedent of Bandung Internationalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Delving into an ephemeral 1940s Cairene magazine and conducting oral history, this essay focalizes an unrecorded Egyptian–Indian moment wedged between the two countries' anti-imperial cooperation in the 1920s and 1930s, and their postindependence solidarity most visible in the 1955 Bandung Conference. The textual material is in the nature of a representation of India, suffused with identification; the oral history yields a virtually unknown Egyptian–Indian solidarity among student networks. Far from claiming to cover any and all engagements with things Indian in 1940s Egypt, the essay argues that the supranationalism of the specific Egyptian dialogue with India tackled here, while squarely anti-imperial, acquires more pronounced socialist internationalist hues due to a much-invigorated stage in the Egyptian left. Recouping that moment enables us to form a more nuanced picture of the later, postindependence internationalism, attuning us to various precursor orientations that fed into it, if in unremarked ways. Dwelling on these instances of 1940s internationalism resists the tendency to subsume the later Third Worldist internationalisms under the shadow of the Cold War, notwithstanding their imbrication within it. And yet this intervention is non-teleological: the conclusion considers the implications—the continuities as much as the discontinuities—of the 1940s moment for the succeeding Afro-Asian Third Worldism.