Making Friends and Making ‘Asia’: Sino-Indian Friendship, 1947–1957

Abstract

Abstract Despite their different political and economic systems throughout the 1950s, state and non-state actors in India pursued a fragile policy of friendship towards the People’s Republic of China. Instead of focusing on the failures of this relationship or its naivety, this article examines the intellectual moorings and political aspirations of its major organizational advocate, the India–China Friendship Association (ICFA). Through dynamic transnational exchanges of ideas, the ICFA imagined India’s friendship with China as the harbinger of an Asia that could overthrow imperialism and navigate the complexities of Cold War bloc politics. In doing so, it drew a contrast between a horizontal friendship that respected differences and saw them as productive in the shared struggle for nation-building and upholding regional peace, and the more hierarchical relationship augured by the Cold War’s security pacts and military alliances. Drawing on a rich collection of sources across numerous countries, this article argues that by invoking both countries’ colonial past and dreams of a shared postcolonial future, the ICFA and its backers in the Indian state promoted Sino-Indian friendship as the blueprint for a peaceful, decolonized Asia capable of creating a better world. At the same time, these visions of Asia were mediated by local renderings that both reinforced and complicated the ICFA’s vision.