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Cosmopolitan Modernity and Post-imperial Relations: Dominion Australia and Indian Internationalism in the Interwar Pacific

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Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire

Abstract

In the penultimate chapter, this book turns to a range of cosmopolitan internationalisms active in transnational networks of the interwar Pacific. Indian and Australian cosmopolitans who were visitors in each other’s countries and delegates at the same international conferences epitomise the mobility and interpersonal exchange that characterises many of the cosmopolitan thought zones discussed in previous chapters. While their international activities in the interwar Pacific, linking interpersonal cosmopolitanisms with the ideal of world government in this era, offer further insight into the range of shared if also divergent grounds upon which cosmopolitanism thought zones formed and through which a variety of interconnected post-imperial worlds continued to be imagined following World War 1.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Madeleine Herren, Martin Ruesch and Christiane Sibille, Transcultural History: Theories, Methods, Sources (Springer, Heidelberg, 2012): Part I.

  2. 2.

    Tomoko Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919–45 (Routledge, London, 2002): 85–86; C.A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011): ch 9.

  3. 3.

    Ritu Birla, ‘Capitalist Subjects in Transition’, in Dipesh Chakrabarty et al. (eds), From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007): 252.

  4. 4.

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  5. 5.

    Tamsin Pietch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World 1850 to 1939 (Manchester University Press, 2013): 450. See also Clare Midgley,

    ‘Indian Feminist Pandita Ramabai and Transnational Liberal Religious Networks in the Nineteenth-Century World’, in Midgley et al. (eds), Women in Transnational History: Connecting the Local and the Global (Routledge, London, 2016): 13–32.

  6. 6.

    Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2002); on the British Left, see Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993).

  7. 7.

    Mark Ravinder Frost, ‘In Search of Cosmopolitan Discourse: A Historical Journey Across the Indian Ocean from Singapore to South Africa, 1870–1920’, in Pamila Gupta et al. (eds), Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Unisa Press, Pretoria, 2010): 79–80.

  8. 8.

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  9. 9.

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  10. 10.

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  11. 11.

    ‘A Critique of Some Assumptions’, S. Kodanda Rao, The Servants of India. Education in Pacific Countries, 301–304; quotations on 303 and 304. Proceedings, Vol 2. Institute of Education Library, London. Emphasis in original.

  12. 12.

    ‘Sastri’s Sophistry’, Truth 2 July 1922: 6; ‘Mr Sastri’s Visit’, Queenslander 1 July 1922: 9.

  13. 13.

    Meg Samuelson, ‘A Community of Letters on the Indian Ocean Rim: Friendship, Fraternity and (Af-filial) Love’, English in Africa 35:1 (2008): 29. See also Alison Bashford, ‘Immigration Restriction: Rethinking Period and Place from Settler Colonies to Postcolonial Nations’, Journal of Global History 9 (2014): 26–48.

  14. 14.

    Woollacott, To Try her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001): 122–123.

  15. 15.

    ‘Indians in Australia. Greatly Improved Status’, Courier-Mail, 17 November 1936, 17; and ‘Discriminations Against Indians Here and in W.A.: Visitor Investigating Position’, The Telegraph, 17 November 1936, 11.

  16. 16.

    Felix Keesing to Rao, 8 March 1938. Folder 5, ‘February 1938–June 1938’. Felix Keesing Papers. Special Collections. University of Hawaii, Manoa (hereafter UHM).

  17. 17.

    Samuelson, ‘A Community of Letters’: 305.

  18. 18.

    Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Suffragism and Internationalism: The Enfranchisement of British and Indian Women Under an Imperial State’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 36:4 (1999): 461–484; and Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Duke University Press, Durham, 2006).

  19. 19.

    Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights, 1919–1939 (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000).

  20. 20.

    Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific.

  21. 21.

    On women missionaries in India at the ‘cutting edge’ of modernity, see Margaret Allen ‘“That’s the Modern Girl”: Missionary Women and Modernity in Kolkata, c.1907–c1940’, Itinerario XXIV:3 (2010): 83–96.

  22. 22.

    Jill Roe, ‘A Shadowy Figure? Bessie Rischbieth, Theosophic Feminist’, Australian Cultural History 23 (2004): 79–95; and Roe, Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia 1879–1939 (New South Wales University Press, c1986). See also Frank Bongiorno, ‘In this World and the Next: Modernity and Unorthodox Religion in Australia, 1880–1930’, Australian Cultural History 25 (2006): 179–207. And see Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule (Routledge, London, 1995). See also, Alison Mackinnon, ‘Knowledge Beyond Reason: Highly Educated Women and the Continuing Quest for Commensurability’, Australian Cultural History 23 (2004): 59–78; and Angela Woollacott, ‘From Moral to Professional Authority: Secularism, Social Work and Middle-Class Women’s Self-Construction in World War 1 Britain’, Journal of Women’s History 10 (1998): 85–111.

  23. 23.

    ‘India Women’s Conference’. Printed Flyer. MS 2004/11/562, Rischbieth Papers, National Library of Australia (hereafter BRP).

  24. 24.

    ‘Mahatma Gandhi: A World Figure’, dated 1930. Hand written notes, several pages. Ms 2004/11/572, BRP.

  25. 25.

    Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003);Catherine Candy, ‘Competing Transnational Representations of the 1930s Indian Franchise Question’, in Ian Christopher et al. (eds), Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation, and Race (Routledge, London, 2000): 191–206; Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement(Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1997); Angela Woollacott, ‘Australian Women’s Metropolitan Activism: From Suffrage, to Imperial Vanguard, to Commonwealth Feminism’, in Fletcher et al. (eds), Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire, 207–223; Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune, 122ff; and Marie Sandell, The Rise of Women’s Transnational Activism: Identity and Sisterhood Between the World Wars (IB Tauris, London, 2015): Chapter 7.

  26. 26.

    Jus Suffragi 16:10 July 1922, Supplement, p.1.

  27. 27.

    Jus Suffragi, 23:2 November, 18, and 23:3 December, 36. It would not be until 1952, however, that the All-India Women’s Association sent a delegate to the PPWA. See Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific, 76 ff.

  28. 28.

    E.C. Carter to Frederick Whyte, 2 March 1927. E.C. Carter File, 6/4/12. Royal Institute of International Affairs Papers. Chatham House, London. Carter would lead the IPR into controversial waters in the 1930s and was later denounced as a radical. See Alan Roucher, ‘The First Foreign Think Tanks’, American Quarterly 30:4 (1978): 499.

  29. 29.

    SKDatta, The Desire of India (Church Missionary Society, London, 1908).

  30. 30.

    William Richey Hogg, Ecumenical Foundations: A History of the International Missionary Council and its Nineteenth-Century Background (Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York, 1952): 177.

  31. 31.

    Margaret Allen, ‘“A Fine Type of Hindoo” Meets “the Australian type”: British Indians in Australia and Diverse Masculinities’, in Desley Deacon et al. (eds), Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World (ANU E Press, Canberra, 2008): fn 22.

  32. 32.

    Hogg, Ecumenical Foundations, 245.

  33. 33.

    John L. Mott, ‘At Edinburgh, Jerusalem, and Madras’, International Review of Missions 27:3 (1938): 304.

  34. 34.

    Jack Priestley, ‘A New ERA – Beginning from Jerusalem? Some Reflections from 1928 on Matters Pertaining to 1988’, British Journal of Religious Education 13:3 (1991): 143–151; and Peter Kallaway, ‘Education, Health and Social Welfare in the Late Colonial Context: The International Missionary Council and Educational Transition in the Interwar Years with Specific Reference to Colonial Africa’, History of Education, 38:2 (2009): 217–246.

  35. 35.

    ‘Dr Datta’s Position’, West Australian Saturday 2 June, 1923, p. 8.

  36. 36.

    ‘The YWCA’, The Pioneer Mail, 31 December 1920, p. 35.

  37. 37.

    ‘All India Women’s Conference Sessions’, Folder 11A 9668. United Nations Archives, Geneva.

  38. 38.

    ‘Address by Merle Davis at the Opening Session’, 5. B-3/6 Conferences – Kyoto 1929 – Proceedings #6. IPR Papers, UHM.

  39. 39.

    ‘Address by Merle Davis’, 6. Ibid.

  40. 40.

    Circulated by Dr G. A. Johnston Ross, an ecumenical preacher at Vassar in the United States. Ross preached Christianity as a social force in real life. See ‘Sermon by the Reverend G.A. Johnston Ross’, The Vassar Miscellany News IV: 47, 24 April 1920: 7.

  41. 41.

    ‘A letter from Rabindranath Tagore. For private circulation only. (By courtesy of Dr. G. A. Johnston Ross) Institute of Pacific Relations Second Session – 1927’, typed sheet, no date. IPR B-2/1, Conferences – Honolulu 1927 – Proceedings #7. UHM.

  42. 42.

    Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries Within the British Empire (P.S. King and Son Ltd., London, 1923): xvii.

  43. 43.

    David Cannadine, ‘The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution 1880–1980’, Past and Present 103 (1984): 131–172.

  44. 44.

    Waqar Zaidi, ‘Liberal Internationalist Approaches to Science and Technology in Interwar Britain and the United States’, in Daniel Laqua (ed), Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars (I.B. Tauris, London, 2011): 22–24.

  45. 45.

    J.B.Condliffe, The Third Mediterranean in History: An Introduction to Pacific Problems with an introduction by John R. Mott (Student Christian Movement, New Zealand, 1926): 11.

  46. 46.

    ‘The Third Biennial Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Kyoto, Japan’, 12. IPR B-3/1, Conferences – Kyoto 1929 – Proceedings #1, IPR Papers. UHM.

  47. 47.

    Sarah Paddle, ‘“For the China of the Future”: Western Feminists, Colonisation and International Citizenship in China in the Interwar Years’, Australian Feminist Studies 16:6 (2001): 325–341; and Paddle, ‘The Limits of Sympathy: International Feminists and the Chinese “slave girl” Campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4:3 (2003): 1–28.

  48. 48.

    ‘Oriental Industry. Welfare Work in China. Interesting Address by Miss Hinder’, The Maitland Daily Mercury (Newcastle), 28 March 1925: 6.

  49. 49.

    Loy-Wilson, ‘“Liberating” Asia’, 96.

  50. 50.

    ‘Industrialization Report’, 30 and 31 October 1929, 2. B-3/10 Conferences-Kyoto1929 – Proceedings #10, IPR Papers. UHM.

  51. 51.

    ‘Industrialization Report’, 31 October 1929, CHECK. B-3/10 Conferences-Kyoto1929 – Proceedings #10, IPR Papers. UHM.

  52. 52.

    Rev A.J. Brace, ‘An Adventure in Friendship’, The West China Missionary News, n.d., 33. Press clipping. B-4/8 – Kyoto Articles/Press Releases #2. IPR Papers. UHM.

  53. 53.

    Ibid, 33 and 34.

  54. 54.

    ‘Industrialization Report’, 30 and 31 October 1929, 2–3. B-3/10 Conferences-Kyoto1929 – Proceedings #10, IPR Papers. UHM.

  55. 55.

    ‘Industrialization Report’, 30 and 31October 1929, 3. B-3/10 Conferences-Kyoto1929 – Proceedings #10, IPR Papers. UHM.

  56. 56.

    ‘Industrialization Report’, 30 and 31October 1929, 3–4. B-3/10 Conferences-Kyoto1929 – Proceedings #10, IPR Papers. UHM.

  57. 57.

    Partha Chatterjee, ‘Whose Imagined Community?’, in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed), Mapping the Nation (Verso, London, 1996): 214–255.

  58. 58.

    Sinha, Mother India, 15–16.

  59. 59.

    Brace, ‘An Adventure in Friendship’. IPR Papers. UHM.

  60. 60.

    Dr James T. Shotwell, ‘When East meets West’, Press clipping. B-4/8 – Kyoto Articles/Press Releases #2. IPR Papers. UHM.

  61. 61.

    Eleanor Hinder, ‘Women in the Pacific’, The White Ribbon Signal, 8 August 1929, 119.

  62. 62.

    Kris Manjapra, ‘Introduction’, in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (eds), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010): 6.

  63. 63.

    ‘Industrialization Report’, 31 October 1929, 7. B-3/10 Conferences-Kyoto1929 – Proceedings #10, IPR Papers. UHM.

  64. 64.

    Anderson, ‘Pacific Dreams’, 74–75.

  65. 65.

    Tomoko, Internationalising the Pacific, 272–273.

  66. 66.

    Anderson, ‘Pacific Dreams’: 70.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

    Jane Haggis

  2. Department of Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Clare Midgley

  3. Gender Studies and Social Analysis, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

    Margaret Allen

  4. School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Fiona Paisley

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Haggis, J., Midgley, C., Allen, M., Paisley, F. (2017). Cosmopolitan Modernity and Post-imperial Relations: Dominion Australia and Indian Internationalism in the Interwar Pacific. In: Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52748-2_5

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