ABSTRACT
This chapter is a study of the intellectual moorings of India’s participation in Afro-Asian collectiveness at the United Nations in the 1940s and the 1950s. The chapter provides a pre-history of that time, discussing Indian UN diplomacy as rooted in the anti-colonial political thought of Tagore, Gandhi, and Nehru. The chapter argues that histories of the intellectual motivations and normative commitments of state-led Afro-Asian collectiveness at the UN are rarely written. In the case of India, this chapter will argue that in the early years, the approach to Afro-Asianism was fashioned from a larger perspective on independent India’s internationalism. As this internationalism did not stem from a strong theoretical foundation, in its later phases, the larger Afro-Asianist vision was compromised in favor of a more limited and comfortable Asianism. Through a discussion of the limitations of constructing a durable Afro-Asianist politics, this chapter will try to locate the difficulties that India faced in maneuvering UN diplomacy with its own decolonial politics. The chapter will end by discussing ways in which histories of this unraveling may be written, primarily making a case for rejecting the state/non-state binary.
