This is a transnational intellectual history of encounter between thinkers who stood on either side of the colonial divide in the interwar years. A wide range of sources, including published and unpublished treatises of political philosophy, surveillance reports, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, films and literary works, are used to map cosmopolitan zones of exchange. I study how the itineraries of Germans and Indians converged within the world of international communism, on one hand, and within conservative revolutionary circles of the Radical German Right, on the other. I focus on the dynamic of mirroring between these groups--the way their respective international imaginations saw self reflected in the distant other. The experience of massive defeat created rapport between Indian anti-colonial nationalists and German Radicals after 1918. Embedding my study of ideas within a specific social setting, I uncover the cosmopolitan zones of encounter that subsequently opened up in interwar Berlin, which became laboratories for the development of Indian diasporic anti-colonial nationalism. Apart from mapping zones of exchange, I hone in on the thought of M.N. Roy, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Rosa Luxemburg and her followers, Werner Sombart and Karl Haushofer.
I situate German and Indian intellectuals within their respective intellectual and political horizons, as well as within the intertemporal context of the traditions that informed their thought and activities. Thinkers applied ideas and created meaning in ways informed not only by new encounters, but also by where they had come from. I consider the recapitulation of Swadeshi internationalism and Pan-Asianism amongst Indians and of Orientalism and Eurocentrism amongst Germans within interwar zones of thought. The communication between German and Indian thinkers belied persisting and significant difficulties. I point to the endemic breaches in transcultural communication, the possible illiberal implications of cosmopolitanism in specific historical contexts, as well as the personal toll that cosmopolitan life inflicted on Indian diasporic nationalists, as they affronted both the regime of British imperialism, as well as of the independent nation-state later on.
