ABSTRACT
Launched in the wake of the Bandung Conference in line with India’s non-aligned policy and proposed to apply Panchsheel in cultural matters, the 1956 Asian Writers’ Conference (AWC) held in Delhi turned out to be a “site of contest,” where Cold War politics manifested not only as conflict along political lines but also as competition between modernist and socialist realist aesthetic systems promoted respectively by the two Cold War superpowers. This resulted not so much from direct American or Soviet interference, but from the divergent ideological positions and literary creeds Asian writers themselves had internalized. Comparing the different ways in which Chinese and Indian writers, as well as Indian writers of various kinds, participated in the AWC shows that although Third World literary solidarity was established with supra-nationality as its defining feature, this solidarity was in fact destabilized by vastly differing national and subnational situations. Despite the pervasive anti-communist sentiment at the AWC, the Chinese delegation nevertheless actively engaged in the conference with a politically moderate and culturally open attitude, which corresponded with the PRC’s relaxed cultural-political atmosphere of the time. This allowed China-India writerly contact to focus considerably on literary subjects and, indeed, fostered an effective exchange of information, ideas, and experiences.
