Travels in Diplomacy: V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and G.S. Bajpai in 1921–1922

Abstract

In April 1921, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri was appointed as India’s representative to the Imperial Conference in London. His secretary was a young Indian Civil Service officer, G.S. Bajpai. Over the course of the next two years, the two Indians travelled together as India’s diplomatic representatives to London, Geneva, Washington, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The young Bajpai and his ‘chief’ developed a loving bond that was to remain strong for the rest of their lives. These travels, as I will show, were very crucial to the making of India’s pre-eminent diplomat in the interwar years, Sastri, and the country’s foremost foreign policy bureaucrat at independence, Bajpai. But the afterlives of these journeys were also to manifest beyond their personal/political lives. These two years were formative to the making of Indian diplomacy in general and to India’s response on the questions of race and the commonwealth in particular. This essay will follow Sastri and Bajpai as they travel together as ‘diplomats’ and map the ways in which they came to ‘learn’ the conduct, expectations and execution of diplomacy.