ABSTRACT
By the 1930s, the objectives of India's independence struggle extended far beyond the colonial context and engaged a wider world of anti-fascists and anti-imperialists. Major cities across India hosted wide-scale demonstrations against fascist aggression in Abyssinia, Republican Spain, and China. For many in India in the 1930s, fascism was the recent and more aggressive manifestation of imperialism. As India's Jawaharlal Nehru noted in 1937, ‘imperialism and fascism march hand in hand; they are blood brothers’, and India had to stand against both. Under his leadership, the Indian National Congress established a foreign department, which concentrated on developing and strengthening India's ties to anti-fascist movements abroad and providing support for struggles in Abyssinia, Spain, and China. This chapter offers both a study of the ways the INC Foreign Department leveraged international connections to strengthen India's anticolonial resistance, as well as the significant role played by India in the global anti-fascist struggle in the 1930s.
