Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms: AHR Forum

AHR Forum
Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms
MANU GOSWAMI
Downloaded from http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New Orleans on June 8, 2015

INTERNATIONALISM IS COMMONLY HERALDED as a central political force of the twentieth
century. Yet its status as an analytical and historical category is profoundly ambig-
uous. While its valence stems from Karl Marx’s institution of the First International
in 1864, the year the term entered the Oxford English Dictionary, its subsequent
career has largely derived as a “back construction,” through reference to its semantic
other, namely, nationalism.1 The Communist Manifesto, a founding text of political
modernism, helped instill the idea that anti-systemic politics required conjuring an
alternate world order. The temporal referent of radical politics was the future. The
specific content of the manifesto’s imagined future, and of later liberal internation-
alisms associated with John Hobson and Woodrow Wilson, lost effective purchase
during the cataclysmic decades of the interwar era. In Europe and North America,
internationalism devolved into a residual category, an object, by turns, of moralizing
judgment and regressive nostalgia.2
This conceptual framing—figuring internationalism as the failed negation of na-
tionalism and in normative rather than analytical terms—refracts a specific regional
history. Yet it also defines studies of anti-imperial internationalisms that acquired
an unprecedented global prominence during the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, interwar
internationalism in colonial worlds encompassed a range of projects that were ex-
I would like to thank Partha Chatterjee, John Dunn, Greg Grandin, Harry Harootunian, Karuna Man-
tena, Sumit Sarkar, Joan Scott, Bill Sewell, John Shovlin, George Steinmetz, and Jay Winter for their
insights, as well as participants in the School of Social Science Seminar at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, the Center for Contemporary Critical Theory at the University of Chicago, and
workshops at Yale University and Heidelberg University.
1 Perry Anderson, “Internationalism: A Breviary,” New Left Review 14 (March–April 2002): 5–25,
here 5. For the vexed status of the category across disciplinary divides, see Fred Halliday, “Three Con-
cepts of Internationalism,” International Affairs 64, no. 2 (1988): 187–198; Kjell Goldmann, Ulf Hannerz,
and Charles Westin, eds., Nationalism and Internationalism in the Post–Cold War Era (London, 2000);
David Long and Brian C. Schmidt, eds., Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International
Relations (Albany, N.Y., 2006); Liisa Malkki, “Things to Come: Internationalism and Global Solidarities
in the Late 1990s,” Public Culture 10, no. 2 (1998): 431– 442; Malkki, “Citizens of Humanity: Interna-
tionalism and the Imagined Community of Nations,” Diaspora 3, no. 1 (1994): 41–68; Mark Mazower,
“An International Civilization? Empire, Internationalism and the Crisis of the Mid-Twentieth Century,”
International Affairs 82, no. 3 (2006): 553–566. For an early definitional effort symptomatic of the term’s
ambiguity, see John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902; repr., New York, 2005), 3–15.
2 See John Dunn, “Unimagined Community: The Deceptions of Socialist Internationalism,” in
Dunn, Rethinking Modern Political Theory: Essays, 1979–1983 (Cambridge, 1985), 103–118; Peter Lawler,
“The Good State: In Praise of ‘Classical’ Internationalism,” Review of International Studies 31, no. 3
(2005): 427– 449; Micheline R. Ishay, Internationalism and Its Betrayal (Minneapolis, 1995); Tom Nairn,
“Internationalism: A Critique,” in Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London, 1998), 25– 46.
1461
1462 Manu Goswami
plicitly anti-imperial yet neither reducible nor opposed to nationalism. Elaborated

by dispersed groups, without a determinate place in a given geopolitical order, co-
lonial internationalism improvised a distinct future-oriented politics. Anti-imperial
internationalists amplified political modernism into a global formation, sounding the
fusion of radical politics and futurity beyond an initial European sphere. Yet they
have largely been eclipsed, within and beyond the field of South Asian history, by
the preponderant focus on the presumptively primary narrative of nationalism.3
From this perspective, all anti-imperial struggles were a staging ground for the mod-
ular developmental endpoint of a sovereign nation-state rather than an open-ended
constellation of contending political futures.
By the mid- and late twentieth century, the dismemberment of European and
Japanese empires ushered in a United Nations with four times the national mem-

bership of the interwar League of Nations. The triumph of the nation-state as the
normative unit of the interstate system has been taken as methodologically con-
clusive, entrenching the sense that internationalism was either a minor key of anti-
colonialism or a “futile holding operation” against the inevitable consolidation of the
nation form.4 This historicist conflation of a contingent outcome as a methodological
premise obscures the fact that the course of interwar struggles was neither knowable
in advance nor determined in some “last instance” by the nation form.5 The flattening
of anti-imperial politics to nationalism and the depiction of decolonization as a linear
transition from empire to nation has acquired the fixity of common sense. It orients
political and intellectual histories of colonial societies and underwrites postcolonial
theories forged in an intimate, if melancholic, relation to anticolonial nationalism.
As a consequence, we know very little about a political imaginary that galvanized
collective identification and an intensity of lived attachment on a scale comparable
only to nationalism. And we know even less about its concrete workings in colonial
worlds, where competing conceptions of a non-imperial future animated a heady mix
of utopian aspiration and pragmatic reckoning, collective action and conceptual im-
provisation. For while the scholarship on nationalism, and its imagined pasts, is vast,
that on internationalism, and the imaginary futures it elaborated, is sparse.
It is partly because internationalism represents a future-oriented schema that it
has occasioned scant historiographical treatment. While the discipline of history is
about more than just the past, insofar as it is principally concerned with the relations
3 Key works on anticolonial nationalism include Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Re-
flections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought
and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London, 1986); Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and
African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996). For divergent in-
ternationalist framings of nationalism, see Rebecca E. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at
the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C., 2002); Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-
Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2007).
4 Tom Nairn, “Internationalism and the Second Coming,” Daedalus 122, no. 3 (Summer 1993):
155–170, here 166. Recent exceptions include Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and
the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London, 2005); Mrinalini Sinha, “Suffragism and Internationalism: The
Enfranchisement of British and Indian Women under an Imperial State,” Indian Economic and Social
History Review 36, no. 4 (1999): 461– 484; Gauri Viswanathan, “Ireland, India and the Poetics of In-
ternationalism,” Journal of World History 15, no. 1 (2004): 7–30.
5 On the “nation form,” see Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Etienne
Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London, 1991), 86–106;
Manu Goswami, “Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Toward a Sociohistorical Conception of Na-
tionalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 4 (2002): 770–799.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2012

Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms 1463
between past and present, it embraces the future only tangentially. Precisely because
the future is the realm of what the interwar German philosopher Ernst Bloch called
the “not-yet” of what has not been experienced, it cannot be grasped as an inde-
pendent temporal dimension apart from a given historical present.6 Historical stud-
ies, as Reinhart Koselleck argues, encompass past futures as an object of analysis
and the phenomenological realm of present futures as an element of their own ho-
rizon of expectation. Yet historians have tended to cleave to what Koselleck calls the
“space of experience,” the lived memory of past events and movements, rather than
their animating “horizon of expectation.”7 The privileging of experience over ex-
pectation glosses over changes in conceptions of the historically possible. It effaces
the shifting valence of the future encoded in sociopolitical “movement concepts”
such as internationalism and socialism that, even when not literally temporal (such

as the concept of progress), index shifting horizons of collective aspiration.8 As si-
multaneously a lived practice and a “movement concept,” colonial internationalism
was grounded less in a common or pre-given collective experience than in a dis-
juncture between experience (the imperial present) and expectation (a non-imperial
future). Yet, contra Koselleck, this disjuncture was neither guaranteed by a pre-given
bourgeois logic of progress nor inscribed within modern time as such. Colonial in-
ternationalisms underline the improvisational constitution of imaginary futures, of
the way perceived geopolitical openings foster collective speculations on substan-
tively other futures.
Revisiting internationalism provides a concrete portal into the larger challenge
of thinking historical futures from a comparative and transnational perspective. Co-
lonial internationalisms are best understood as a specific temporal politics, forged
within a worldwide conjuncture, and part of the global articulation of twentieth-
century political modernism. They were neither a historical anomaly nor an intrinsic
category error. They marked the interwar expansion, and radicalization, of political
modernism in two interlinked respects. First, they offered a future-oriented con-
ception of politics that affirmed what was new in an unstable present. The cascading
crises of the interwar era spawned a conception of politics as the dynamic (re)con-
stitution—the willed production and transformation—of society. Diagnoses of the
present as an unprecedented crisis were a shared element of interwar political mod-
ernisms, especially during World War I and its immediate aftermath. But the sub-
jective valence of crisis was also realized differentially across geopolitical locales.
From the standpoint of anti-imperial intellectuals and activists, the interwar moment
marked a crisis not just within but of an extant geopolitical order. Crisis was aligned
less with an immutable order of constraint than with an anticipatory sense of open-
ended possibility. What set colonial internationalist thought and practice apart was
not just the insistence that the immediate present marked a potential transition to
6 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, 3 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass., 1995), vol. 1.

7 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York, 2004), 255–277.
See also Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, Calif.,
2002). For usages of Koselleck to rethink anticolonial politics, see David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity:
The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, N.C., 2005), 25–37; Gary Wilder, “Untimely Vision:
Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia,” Public Culture 21, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 101–140.
8 Reinhart Koselleck, “The Temporalisation of Concepts,” Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 1
(1997): 16–24, here 21.

1464 Manu Goswami
a new egalitarian world order. It was the way this temporal reckoning was mobilized
to counter both the historicist orientation of cultural nationalism and a restored
interwar imperialism. This was not the pure temporal modernism whose “only ref-
erent is the blank passage of time” associated with the much-mined terrain of bour-
geois cultural, aesthetic, and literary movements in interwar Europe and North
America.9 They were impelled not by an abstract logic of temporal negation, of “out
with the old and in with the new,” but by a concrete historical and geopolitical fu-
turity, of a non-imperial, and in the case of various anarchist groups a non-statist,
future.
Second, internationalist projects upheld equality as the central problematic of
politics. By taking equality as a point of departure rather than an abstract normative
ideal or juridical status, they transected both liberal imperial ideology and the pro-

cedural limits of reformist nationalism. The emphasis on equality impelled a con-
comitant engagement with comparative frameworks that had served as the intel-
lectual bases for imperial discourses of hierarchical difference and the deferral of
collective self-determination. Colonial internationalists sought instead to establish
commensurability across worlds conventionally deemed discrete and disparate. In so
doing, they exemplified the way that comparison was simultaneously an epistemo-
logical practice and a vernacular politics. This doubled valence animated questions
about the translatability of strategies, concepts, and institutions across regions and
the hard slog of forging and sustaining alliances across an uneven and unequal geo-
political field.
BENOY KUMAR SARKAR (1887–1949) WAS the most prominent social scientist in in-
terwar colonial India. Sarkar alchemized into emergent sociology the expansive as-
piration toward a non-imperial future that coursed through interwar colonial worlds.
Deeply committed to sociology as a political vocation, yet an unrelenting critic of
its imperial common sense, he prefigured a line of critique commonly associated with
late-twentieth-century postcolonial theory. From the perspective of histories of so-
cial science, this analytic was remarkable for its reflexivity about the predicament of
universalistic paradigms in an imperial age. In a 1917 lecture at Clark University, he
characterized this collective burden as a joint overcoming of “colonialism in politics
and . . . ‘orientalisme’ in science.”10 This project sought to combine what he called
a conceptual “critique of Occidental reason” with a demonstration of the political
claim that contemporary anti-imperial movements were the embodiment and em-
blem of the future in the present.11
Initially forged in the wake of the collapse of the swadeshi movement (1905–
1908), the first mass-mobilization campaign of Indian nationalism, Sarkar’s schema
9 Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review, no. 144 (March–April 1984): 96–
113, here 113. See also Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism (London, 2007); Fredric Jameson, The
Modernist Papers (London, 2007); Steve Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1983).
10 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia, and Other Essays on the Relations between the
East and the West (Berlin, 1922), iv.

11 Ibid., 1.

was part of a wider efflorescence of radical politics.12 By the mid- and late teens,
so-called militant nationalism had transmuted toward a sporadic campaign of an-
archist violence propelled by underground groups in Bengal and Punjab and
spawned a globally expansive network of exiled activists and intellectuals.13 That so
many of these dispersed political exiles, including Sarkar, embraced various modes
of internationalism spoke to a shared reckoning of the First World War as an au-
thentic historical opening toward a non-imperial future. The political and ideological
fractures that the war disclosed, especially the proclamation of loyalty to the British
Empire by the Indian National Congress at the outset of the conflict and its pursuit
of “home rule” or autonomy within empire, had a deconstructive effect, straining the
purchase of liberal nationalism for many radical intellectuals while generating new
political aspirations and affiliations. Theirs was a long-distance incubation of mul-

tiple internationalist dream worlds—communist and anarchist, social scientific and
socialist, literary and aesthetic.14
Sarkar’s internationalism was manufactured across a global terrain during an
eleven-year political exile between 1914 and 1925 that took him to Cairo, Dublin,
London, Shanghai, Japanese-occupied Manchuria, New York City, Berlin, Cologne,
Paris, and Rome. His prodigious oeuvre, composed in multiple languages (Bengali,
English, German, French, and Italian) and published across regional public spheres,
spanned debates in sociology, political economy, aesthetics, political theory, and
demography.15 His lectures at various U.S. universities in the late teens were fa-
cilitated by the Columbia University economist Edwin Seligman and the philosopher
12 For histories of the swadeshi movement, see Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal,
1903–1908 (Delhi, 1973); C. A. Bayly, “The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian
Society, 1700–1930,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Per-
spective (Cambridge, 1986), 285–322; Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to Na-
tional Space (Chicago, 2004), chaps. 7 and 8. For accounts of interwar Indian nationalism from a broader
imperial and Indian Ocean perspective, see Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Re-
structuring of Empire (Durham, N.C., 2006); Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (New York, 1983);
Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Mass.,
2006), chap. 5.
13 Durba Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Imperial Strategies of Political Violence and Its Containment
in the Interwar Years,” in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring Empire: Britain, India and
the Transcolonial World (New Delhi, 2006), 270–292; Sohan Singh Josh, Hindustan Gadar Party: A Short
History, 2 vols. (New Delhi, 1978); Maia Ramnath, “Two Revolutions: The Ghadar Movement and
India’s Radical Diaspora, 1913–1918,” Radical History Review, no. 92 (Spring 2005): 7–30.
14 Among them were M. N. Roy (Lenin’s interlocutor on the national and colonial question), Har
Dayal (a co-founder of the anarchist Ghadar party, established along the Pacific coast, and a secretary
of the San Francisco Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World), Taraknath Das (a co-founder of
Ghadar and a political scientist at Columbia University), Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (a member of
the German Communist Party and leading organizer of the 1927 League against Imperialism), and
Dhiren Sarkar (Benoy Sarkar’s younger brother and a key Ghadar participant). Emily C. Brown, Har
Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist (Tucson, Ariz., 1975); Nirode K. Barooah, Chatto: The Life
and Times of an Indian Anti-Imperialist in Europe (Oxford, 2004); Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How
the Ghadar Party Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley,
Calif., 2011); Sibnarayan Ray, Selected Works of M. N. Roy, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1987); Sanjay Seth, Marxist
Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India (New Delhi, 1995). See also Heike Liebau,
Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Dyala Hamzah, and Ravi Ahuja, eds., The World in World Wars:
Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia (Leiden, 2010).
15 These included Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “La théorie de la constitution dans la philosophie politique
indienne,” Revue de synthèse historique 31, no. 5 (August–December 1920): 47–52; Sarkar, Die Lebens-
anschauung des Inders (Leipzig, 1923); Sarkar, “Die Struktur des Volkes in der sozialwissenschaftlichen
Lehre der Schukraniti,” Kölner Vierteljahrshefte für Soziologie 11 (1933): 42–58; Sarkar, “Società ed eco-
nomia nell’India antica e moderna,” Annali di economia 6, no. 2 (1930): 303–347.

1466 Manu Goswami
John Dewey, who identified him as a “distinguished . . . representative of the in-

tellectual life of the Orient.”16 A self-taught polyglot, Sarkar was an advocate and
an example of the affinity between internationalism and translation as a lived prac-
tice. This commitment was concretized in a rich corpus of translations that included
works by Friedrich List, Friedrich Engels, and Paul Lafargue (a leading communard
and Karl Marx’s Cuban-born son-in-law), and in essays composed and published in
German, French, and Italian.17 It also fueled the pedagogic ambition of such works
as Political Philosophies since 1905 and the popular multivolume Bengali work Vart-
taman Jagat (Contemporary World ), which combined travelogue with commentary on
such emergent theories and movements as Freudian psychoanalysis, feminism, wel-
fare economics, and cubism. It is hard to think of a scholarly career in late colonial
India that realized more fully what Benedict Anderson, in a study of anti-imperial

anarchism, calls “the true, hard internationalism of the polyglot.”18
Upon Sarkar’s return from exile in 1926, he was appointed professor of eco-
nomics at Calcutta University, and established research institutes focused on po-
litical economy, Asia, Germany, Italy, and the United States.19 A commemorative
article by Haridas Mukherjee in the early 1950s claimed that “with the solitary ex-
ception of Mahatma Gandhi, there is hardly any other living leader of thought in
India to whose name ism has ever been applied.”20 Mukherjee considerably inflated
the popular reach of Sarkar’s work. Yet it is hard to dispute its general currency
during the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, by the 1930s, Sarkarism had come to name
sociology as such.21
Sarkar did more than help to inaugurate a comparative historical sociology in
colonial India.22 The distinction of his work resides in its categorical internation-
16 Quoted in Haridas Mukherjee, Benoy Kumar Sarkar: A Study (Calcutta, 1953), 14.
17 See, for example, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “Parivar, Goshthi O Rashtra” (Calcutta, 1924), a trans-
lation of Friedrich Engels, “The Origins of Family, Private Property, and State”; “Dhana-Daulater Ru-
pantar” (Calcutta, 1924), a translation of Paul Lafargue, “The Evolution of Property from Savagery to
Civilization”; and “Negro Jatir Karamvir” (Calcutta, 1920), a translation of Booker T. Washington, “Up
from Slavery.”
18 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Varttaman Jagat, 8 vols. (Calcutta, 1914); Sarkar, The Pressure of Labour
upon Constitution and Law, 1776–1928: A Chronology of Ideals and Achievements in Societal Recon-
struction (Benares, 1928). Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags, 5.
19 These were the Bangiya Dhana Vijnan Parishat (Bengali Institute of Economics, est. 1926),
Bangiya Samaj Vijnan Parishat (Bengali Institute of Sociology, est. 1937), Bangiya Asia Parishat (Bengal
Asia Institute, est. 1931), Bangiya German Samsad (Bengal German Institute, est. 1933), Bangiya Dante
Sabha (Bengal Dante Society, est. 1933), and Antarjatik Bangiya Parishat (International Bengal Insti-
tute, est. 1934).
20 Haridas Mukherji, “Benoy Sarkar as a Pioneer in Neo-Indology,” Modern Review 87 (February
1950): 134 –138, here 134.

21 Satish Deshpande, “Fashioning a Postcolonial Discipline: M. N. Srinivas and Indian Sociology,”
in Patricia Uberoi, Nandini Sundar, and Satish Deshpande, eds., Anthropology in the East: Founders of
Indian Sociology and Anthropology (Delhi, 2007), 496–536, here 506; Subodh Krishna Ghoshal, Sarkar-
ism: The Ideas and Ideals of Benoy Sarkar on Man and His Conquests (Calcutta, 1939).
22 Contemporary analyses of Sarkarism include Banesvar Dass, The Works of Benoy Sarkar, Edu-
cational, Culture-Historical, Economic and Sociological: A Chronological Statement (Calcutta, 1938);

Dass, The Social and Economic Ideas of Benoy Sarkar (Calcutta, 1939); Nagendra Nath Chaudhury,
Pragmatism and Pioneering in Benoy Sarkar’s Sociology and Economics (Calcutta, 1940); Haridas Mukh-
opadhyay, Benoy Sarkarer Baithak (Calcutta, 1944). Later works include Giuseppe Flora, Benoy Kumar
Sarkar and Italy: Culture, Politics, and Economic Ideology (New Delhi, 1994); Flora, The Evolution of
Positivism in Bengal: Jogendra Chandra Ghosh, Bakimchandra Chattopadhyay, Benoy Kumar Sarkar (Na-
ples, 1993); Roma Chatterji, “The Nationalist Sociology of Benoy Kumar Sarkar,” in Uberoi, Sundar,
and Deshpande, Anthropology in the East, 106–131; Robert Frykenberg, “Benoy Kumar Sarkar, 1887–

alism. At its core were three interlocking strands: an emphasis on the historical cat-
egory of the possible, a dual rejection of imperialism and cultural nationalism, and
an insistence that equality was the central problematic of political and epistemo-
logical struggles alike.
THIS NEW ANALYTIC WAS FIRST elaborated in a series of lectures at the Bengal National
College in 1908–1909. Published in 1912 as The Science of History and the Hope of
Mankind (Itihas Bijnan O Manavjatir Asha), they sought to advance a “philosophico-
comparative method” attuned to temporal “uniformities in the sequences and co-
existences of social events and movements.”23 This framing directly echoed his in-
tellectual mentor, the neo-Hegelian philosopher Brajendranath Seal, who a decade

prior had urged the adoption of a comparative model in which “the objects compared
are of co-ordinate rank,” treated as belonging “more or less to the same stage in the
development of [world] culture.” Seal had mounted a sharp critique of Spencerian
evolutionism for reducing social multiplicity to an untenable “uniform formula,” and
of the “historico-genetic” method of the German historical school for conceiving
development as a lineal, punctual series. These comparative methods relied upon an
“abstract and arbitrary standard” derived from European history that could figure
other societies only as either “monstrous or defective forms of life” or “primitive
ancestral forms, the earlier steps of the series.” As a consequence, “mere European
side-views of Humanity” substituted for “the world’s panorama” as such.24
Sarkar’s opening reflections on the conundrums that beset the terms and tasks
of comparison echoed the main lines of Seal’s bracing critique. While Sarkar shared
the mandate of forging a new comparative method, he departed from Seal’s pes-
simism about its realization. The central task, he argued, was to secure a rapproche-
ment between “the science of History” and “the hopes and aspirations of man”
(manavjatir asha). The proper vocation of history was universal in the specific sense
of encompassing “the whole of human life and its thousand and one manifestations.”
What bears emphasis is the advocacy of a new measure of historical analysis, namely,
its fidelity to figurations of collective hope, to conceptions of the possible. This urging
was tied to a paradigmatically modernist assertion and expression of an actor-ori-
ented sociological schema. It was one that Sarkar in 1916 would explicitly name
“futurist.”25
From the mid-teens onward, Sarkar’s work focused on concrete signposts of the
present as a transformative juncture. This expansive imaginary seized upon appar-
ently discrete developments—the growing visibility of Muslim politics and lower-
caste mobilization in Bengal; the experiment enshrined in the Soviet Union, which
1949: Political Rishi of Twentieth Century Bengal,” in Georg Berkemer, Tilman Frasch, Hermann Kulke,
and Jürgen Lütt, eds., Explorations in the History of South Asia: Essays in Honour of Dietmar Rothermund
(Delhi, 2001), 197–217.
23 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Science of History and the Hope of Mankind (London, 1912), v.
24 Brajendranath Seal, Comparative Studies in Vaishnavism and Christianity with an Examination of
the Mahabharata Legend about Narada’s Pilgrimage to Svetadvipa (Calcutta, 1899), i, iii, iv, v.
25 Sarkar, The Science of History and the Hope of Mankind, 11, 12; Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Love in Hindu
Literature (Tokyo, 1916), 87–89. It does not reference Filippo Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto, but Sarkar
likely encountered one of its many translations.

1468 Manu Goswami
had “out-Frenched the French in the enunciation of the rights of man”; the rise of
formerly repressed nationalities in Eastern and Central Europe; the republican
movement in China that followed the dissolution of the Qing Dynasty—as portents
of an egalitarian non-imperial future that was at once already present and yet to
come.26
Sarkar’s sociology sought to conceive the present in a manner that enabled the
possibility of participating in history, one that opened up rather than foreclosed
transformative practice. The signature categories of this project were visvashakti and
shakti/viriya. The term visvashakti was a neologism: a literal welding of visva (world)
and shakti (power), it was first used in 1914 and translated in subsequent English-
language works as “world-forces” or “disposition of world-forces.”27 Visvashakti re-
ferred to the objective configuration of political and economic relations on a world-

wide scale at a specific historical moment. Akin to emerging conceptions of world
history, it provided a basis for reframing histories seen as discrete and separate as
interdependent. The term refigured the concept of atma-shakti (atma as “self” and
shakti as “power”) advanced by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali philosopher-poet
and 1913 Nobel laureate, in the early years of swadeshi, promising the joint real-
ization of an autonomous nation and self.28 Visvashakti marked a scalar reorientation
from the self to the world.
Sarkar skewered assertions of nationhood as the culmination of an inner dia-
lectic, insisting that “what an individual nation regards as the principal factor of its
own progress, as the chief and indispensable element of its own glory, is nothing but
a mere by-product of the general process of the whole of human affairs.” A com-
parative optic illustrated that the presumed “individuality” of societies—their “pe-
culiar type of social and literary life” and “structural characteristics”—were “joint-
products” of a historical system of “world-forces.” Following the epochal shift of the
industrial revolution, there was little ground for disputing the “development of na-
tions through international relations.” The liberation of Greece was beholden to the
interstate competition of England, Russia, and Turkey, which remapped political
space into a tripartite division of “foes, friends, and neutrals.” The constitution of
the German Empire and the unification of Italy were similarly founded upon the
refraction of local struggles by a wider geopolitical arena.29
An analytic attuned to “constant interactions and intercourses of life and
thought” on a world scale upended nationalist claims of singularity. It also signaled
a turn from the what (the metaphysics) to the how (the materiality) of historical
change. From this standpoint, detecting the logic of “world-forces” in a given present
was as much a political as an analytical practice. It required situating the trajectory
of particular societies relationally, that is, with dual reference to “the position of the
political and social centre of gravity of the world” and “the mutual alliances and
26 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “The Eugenic Potentialities of the Alleged Inferior Races and Classes,”
Calcutta Review, August 1938, 341–352; Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia, 207. See also Sarkar, Navin
Rusyar Jivan Prabhat (Calcutta, 1924), for the significance of the Russian Revolution. Sarkar, “The
Fortunes of the Chinese Republic,” Modern Review 26 (September 1919): 296–303; Sarkar, Cina Sab-
hatar A, A, Ka, Kha (Calcutta, 1923).
27 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “Visvasakti,” in Sarkar, Grihastha Prakasani (Calcutta, 1914). See also
Sarkar, Naya Banglar Gora Pattan, pt. 1 (Calcutta, 1932), 371–377.

28 On Tagore and swadeshi, see Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal.
29 Sarkar, The Science of History and the Hope of Mankind, 21, 27, 28, 32, 48, 44.

enmities” forged by states within an interstate field.30 This lexicon informed the work
of a range of radical nationalists and internationalists, from Lajpat Rai’s Young India
(1916) and The Political Future of India (1919) to various works by Taraknath Das
(a founding member of the anarchist Ghadar party, and a political scientist at Co-
lumbia University), including Is Japan a Menace to Asia? (1917), India in World Pol-
itics (1923), and a prescient later essay, “Human Rights and the United Nations”
(1947).31
In 1926, writing from the town of Bolzano, which Germany had lost to Italy in
World War I, Sarkar revisited the question of nationalism in light of the spectacular
remaking of political space wrought by the war. He argued for an “emancipation”
of theories of nationalism, “on the one hand, from the mystical associations forced
upon it by the ardour of patriots and idealists, and, on the other, from the clean-cut

logicality or comprehensiveness injected into it by political thinkers and philoso-
phers.” The nation was a contingent geopolitical formation, and as such, its differ-
entia specifica was “not unity, but independence”:
Nationality is not the concrete expression of a cult or culture or race or language, or of the
Hegelian “spirit” or “genius” of a people. It is the physical (territorial and human) embodi-
ment of political freedom, maintained by military and economic strength. The problem of
nation-making is . . . establishing a sovereign will in territorial terms, i.e., giving sovereignty
a local habitation and a name.32
Both here and in a later work, the comparative referent of Eastern Europe, par-
ticularly Czechoslovakia, haunted Sarkar’s realist and anti-organicist account of na-
tionhood.33 The fact that Czechoslovakia’s accelerated path to sovereignty had
hinged on the recognition extended by Britain, France, and the U.S. demonstrated
the conjunctural and relational making of nationhood. For Sarkar, the dynamics of
a geopolitical field that had mobilized, destroyed, and remade entire societies and
states during the war underscored the limits of historicist and idealist approaches to
nationhood.
Unusual, even unprecedented, for its comparative focus on Eastern European
traditions, The Social Philosophy of Masaryk was both an argument for and an ex-
ample of a relational analytic. Its substantive innovation was to embed ideas of na-
tionhood in geopolitical dynamics. It posited and sought to explain the break be-
tween Tomáš Masaryk’s cultural conception of the nation, as expressed in his 1895
Česká otaśka (The Czech Question), and the realist understanding of his 1925 his-
torical memoir Světová revoluce (World Revolution). The organizing assumption of
Masaryk’s early work, that “the nation created the state,” echoed, Sarkar observed,
the German romanticism of Johann Gottfried Herder, Adam Müller, and Johann
30 Ibid., 66, 23, 48.
31 Lajpat Rai, Young India: An Interpretation and a History of the Nationalist Movement from Within
(New York, 1916); Rai, The Political Future of India (New York, 1919); Taraknath Das, Is Japan a Menace
to Asia? (Shanghai, 1917); Das, India in World Politics (New York, 1923); Das, “Human Rights and the
United Nations,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 252 (July 1947): 53–62.
See also Das, ed., India in America: The Diary of Professor Benoy Sarkar’s Travels and Lectures in the USA,
March 7–June 22, 1949 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1949).
32 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Politics of Boundaries and Tendencies in International Relations, vol. 1:
Analysis of Post-War World Forces (Calcutta, 1926), 7.

33 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Social Philosophy of Masaryk (Calcutta, 1937).

1470 Manu Goswami
Gottlieb Fichte. This schema privileged the “folk or people as inneres Vaterland (in-
ner or internal fatherland)” as normatively and logically prior to “the external fa-
therland, i.e., the state.” Its concrete expression, in Masaryk’s instance, was a “cul-
tural program,” an internal shoring up of nationality, rather than an open struggle
for independent statehood. No “Czech nationalist,” Sarkar noted, could even
“dream” of empire’s end, for the Austro-Hungarian Empire was perceived as the
condition for the stability of southeastern Europe as a whole. And it was from this
vantage that Sarkar constellated Tagore’s early 1904 notion of nationhood, of a
swadeshi samaj (indigenous/national society), and Masaryk’s early “romantic notion
of volk” as formally similar. Their resonance was rooted in not only a shared phil-
osophical idealism, but a geopolitical field. The fact that Masaryk’s political realism
emerged in the aftermath of the First World War was, for Sarkar, analytically de-

cisive. A new conjuncture had made it plausible to hope that the rival states seeking
to break up the Austro-Hungarian Empire might aid, however unwittingly, in the
liberation of “subject, oppressed and small nationalities.” Specific geopolitical or-
ders delimited the horizon of the possible.34
Sarkar’s concept of visvashakti was not a precocious structuralist category linked
to an account of the mechanical reproduction of geopolitical and socioeconomic
inequalities. Quite the converse: it represented a modernist language and assertion
of political agency. The dynamism of this account of historical change rested on the
actual and prospective capacities of strategic action in altering the web of “mutual
alliances and enmities” and shifting the “centre of [political-economic] gravity.” The
political modernism of this vision found expression in the claim that “the forces and
conditions of the existing world” did not choke “human affairs and control the for-
tunes of movements.” Existing social relations could be “modified, re-arranged, and
regulated” by collective and individual action oriented toward the creation of “new
international arrangements.”35 Sarkar inveighed against theories that eternalized the
state over and above political agency. There was, he claimed,
no mystical absoluteness or inalienability to the limits of the state . . . The “scientific frontiers”
may advance or recede . . . according to the dynamics of inter-social existence. The only ar-
chitect of the world’s historical geography from epoch to epoch is the shakti-yoga or energism
of man.36
While the efficacy of collective and individual agency varied across time, creative
agency was deemed an anthropological invariant, one variously termed viriya (willed
energy in the Buddhist lexicon) or shakti-yoga and interchangeably translated as
“unifying power” or “energy.” The concepts of shakti and viriya were the correlative,
in a subjective sense, of the objective configuration of “world-forces.” Shakti in its
specific signification as transformative political agency was an internal expression of
visvashakti. Each constellation of world-forces represented the objectification of past
aspirations and collective action.
Sarkar had concluded a pre-exile 1912 work with a diffuse wager: “the interests
of modern mankind are hanging on the activities of the ‘barbarians’ of the present-
34 Ibid., 8–9, 11.
35 Sarkar, The Science of History and the Hope of Mankind, 23, 48, 70, 71.
36 Sarkar, The Politics of Boundaries, 14 –15.

day world, who, by altering the disposition of the forces of the universe, are silently
helping in the shifting of its centre of gravity to a new position.”37 This anticipation
only assumed a more precise internationalist referent amid a growing involvement
with a network of dispersed Indian, German, Chinese, and American intellectuals
and activists and the wider political opening afforded by the interwar era. By the early
1920s, his conviction that the present was a transformative conjuncture came to cor-
respond to the certitude with which he identified the bearers of a new historicity.
PUBLISHED IN BERLIN IN 1922, The Futurism of Young Asia sought to meet the ex-
orbitant burden of this mandate. It was at once a prospective alchemy of geopolitics,
a polemic against dominant models of comparison, and a performative enactment

of an egalitarian social science. The preface to the collection announced “the leit-
motif of this volume” as “war against colonialism in politics and against ‘orientalisme’
in science.” The challenge confronted by the work was therefore “twofold: political
and cultural.” It sought to outline the ontological complicity between imperial rule
and extant social science, and to demonstrate the political futurism of contemporary
anti-imperial struggles, for which “Asia” functioned as political allegory.38 The open-
ing essay, first delivered as a lecture at Clark University in November 1917, was
published a year later in the International Journal of Ethics (the current journal Eth-
ics).39 It captures the peculiar mix of generalizing sociological sweep and starkly
outlined political positions that marked the work a whole. Its first paragraph was a
frontal assault:
Towards the end of the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason,
the Critique of Applied Reason, and the Critique of Judgment. The basic idea of this Critical
Philosophy was to examine the methods and achievements of the human intellect between
the great awakening of the Renaissance and the epoch of the French Revolution. Kant’s
criticism was “creative,” it led to a “transvaluation of values” as deep and wide as the “ideas
of 1789” . . . If it is possible to generalize the diverse intellectual currents among the Turks,
Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, Chinese, and Japanese of the twentieth century . . . it should be
called the “critique of Occidental Reason.”40
The “critique of Occidental Reason” stemmed from a political domination that had
“engendered . . . a vast body of idolas.” These encompassed claims of racial supe-
riority, the “jingo cult of difference” between the Orient and the Occident, and the
gutting of world history to a mere “preamble to the grand domination of the Orient
by the Occident.” Iterated daily in “school lessons and university lectures and news-
paper stories,” these postulates saturated “life and thought in the West.”41 They
constituted what he called, more than sixty years before Edward Said’s work, “Ori-
entalism.” Although terms such as “Occidental reason” prefigure the lexicon of post-
colonialism, the impetus of Sarkar’s project was to effect commensurability, not to
37 Sarkar, The Science of History and the Hope of Mankind, 75.
38 Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia, iv.
39 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “The Futurism of Young Asia,” International Journal of Ethics 28, no. 4 (July
1918): 521–541.
40 Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia, 1.
41 Ibid., iii, 1–2.

1472 Manu Goswami
claim radical alterity. It was substantively and historically an anti-imperial, not a

postcolonial, undertaking.42
Orientalism, he argued, was nowhere more apparent than in the “comparative
method” that underwrote extant social science. Comparative study had long been a
monopoly of administrative scholars, who had “studied the life and institutions of
their dependencies, colonies, protectorates, spheres of influence, and ‘mandated’
regions.” Given this overt inequality, “the mirror that has been held up to servile and
semi-servile Asia by Eur-America” was more fabulous than actual. Sarkar proceeded
to demonstrate an abbreviated “specimen” of Orientalism through a reading of scat-
tered passages from the first volume of Homer’s Iliad. Rereading the Iliad through
the textualist optic of Orientalism would result, he continued, in a range of claims
that the West had never known how “to act in union,” that the alternation between

treason and war was rooted in various ignoble practices, from “concubinage” to
“polygamous marriage,” and that the only suitable form of government was therefore
“unalloyed despotism.” The point was to produce a structure of experience within
the reader that approximated that of political and conceptual subjugation. Surely,
he queried, the “injustice of this method” was more tangible when applied to a foun-
dational text of Western civilization?43
“Eur-America” named not an ontological difference but a geopolitical category
allied with a specific temporal and epistemological schema. This comparative schema
consisted of three interlocking moves. “In the first place,” Sarkar argued, “they do
not take the same class of facts. They compare the superstitions of the Orient with
the rationalism of the Occident, while they ignore the rationalism of the Orient and
suppress the superstitions of the Occident.” “Secondly.” he continued, “the Eur-
American sociologists do not apply the same method of interpretation to the data
of the Orient as to those of the Occident. If infanticide, superstition and sexuality
for instance have to be explained away or justified in one group of races by ‘historical
criticism,’ or by anthropological investigations, or on the strength of the studies in
adolescence, Freudianism, psychanalysis . . . these must be treated in the same way
in the other instances as well.” Finally, “Occidental scholars” were “not sufficiently
grounded in ‘comparative chronology,’ ” for they continued to “compare the old
conditions of the Orient with the latest achievements of the Occident.”44
The Euro-American historical present was indeed “the age of Pullman cars, elec-
tric lifts, bachelor apartments, long distance phones, Zeppelins, and the ‘new
woman.’ ” But prevailing comparative schemas assumed “that these have been the
inseparable features of the Western world all through the ages.”45 As a consequence,
the proximate ascendancy of Euro-America was rendered into a continuous long-
term teleology. Such synchronic comparisons did more than reify differences be-
tween societies on a diachronic, developmental scale. The evolutionary time of this
comparative schema translated the historical predicate of modernity into a static
hierarchy.
Against this analytic of temporal distancing, Sarkar advocated “parallelism” as
42 Manu Goswami, “Autonomy and Comparability: Notes on the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial,”
boundary 2 32, no. 2 (2005): 201–225.

43 Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia, 3, 6, 4, 5.
44 Ibid., 14 –15.
45 Ibid., 15.

the strategy for a new comparative sociology. The stock-in-trade of imperial ide-
ologies was, he argued, the denial of the contemporaneity of colonial and semi-
colonial societies, of the growing “coincidences in social life” made possible by the
expansion of capitalism. He advanced parallelism as capturing two kinds of regu-
larities that were routinely ignored: the accelerated “migration of ideas or institu-
tions” across geocultural divides in the postindustrial era and basic psychic unifor-
mity. While the precise itinerary of ideas and institutions could not always be shown,
the latter helped account for their “naturalization and assimilation to the conditions
of new habitat.”46 Sarkar advanced both possibilities even though the historical spec-
ificity of the former line of inquiry conflicted with the transhistorical assertion of
psychological unity. As a methodological principle, parallelism was less a conceptual
synthesis than a gamble on a future social science.

It was a directly political presumption of equality that enabled a short-circuiting
of Orientalism. While the assertion of “identities and resemblances” was as empty
as “the tendency to discover diversities and differences,” the former opened up a
transformative politics:
When the whole academic world, vitiated by imperialism as it happens to be, is obsessed with
the dogma of diversity and divergence the bomb-shell which is destined to crush it can be
pervaded only with the spirit of identity and resemblance. And this new message of racial
equality, revolutionary as it is, is an outstanding element in the “futurism of Young Asia.”47
In a recorded speech at Berlin University in 1922, Sarkar refused to play the role
of eastern messenger: “I am not here to advise you that Germany should have to
import the message of Nature from India or the East.” Instead, he sought to lay bare
the imperial unconscious of social science: “I am here to announce to the world that
reform in social science will be possible only when . . . equality . . . is accepted as the
first postulate in all [social] scientific investigations.”48 The repudiation of an on-
tological distinction between a spiritual East and a material West cut against the
grain of prevalent cultural nationalisms and imperial ideology alike. It was consid-
ered new and newsworthy enough to prompt an interview in the New York Times in
1917 featuring a youthful Sarkar astride the tag line “Difference between East and
West has been exaggerated.”49 The interview, exceptional for its focus on a colonial
intellectual, sketched Sarkar’s critique of this entrenched common sense, noting its
tension with the position elaborated by Tagore, who had become, following his own
break from swadeshi nationalism, an icon of a humanist and humanitarian inter-
nationalism.50 Sarkar did not directly address this juxtaposition, but it illustrates the
internal distinctions within two coeval colonial internationalisms.
46 Ibid., 108.
47 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “Social Philosophy in Aesthetics,” Rupam: An Illustrated Quarterly Journal
of Oriental Art, nos. 15–16 (1923): 88–99, here 92.
48 Quoted in Ghoshal, Sarkarism, 19–20.
49 “American Idealism Constantly in Evidence Here, Says Hindu Scholar; Difference between East
and West Has Been Exaggerated, According to Benoy Kumar Sarkar,” New York Times, March 11, 1917,
sec. 7, 4.
50 On Tagore’s relation to nationalism, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000), chap. 6; Partha Chatterjee, Praja o tantra
(Calcutta, 2005); Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (New York,
2011), chap. 5; Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York, 2003), Epilogue; Sarkar,
The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal; Louise Blakeney Williams, “Overcoming the ‘Contagion of Mimicry’:

1474 Manu Goswami
During an extended world tour in 1916–1917, Tagore elaborated an ethical cri-

tique of nationalism, affirming the subject position of “we of no nations of the world.”
Cautioning audiences in Tokyo against “national carnivals of materialism,” he in-
sisted that “modernizing is a mere affectation of modernism . . . It is nothing but
mimicry, only affectation is louder than the original, and it is too literal.” For “true
modernism” was “independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European
schoolmasters.” Born within an exclusionary European “civilization of power,” na-
tionalism could only ensnare “personal humanity” into “iron hoops.”51 A decade
later, addressing Indian nationalists, Tagore decried the “feverish political urge” that
led many “to imagine ourselves to be dream-made Mazzinis, Garibaldis and Wash-
ingtons” and to entertain economic doctrines “caught in the labyrinth of imaginary
Bolshevism, Syndicalism or Socialism.” He continued: “As the film of this dream-

cinema is being unrolled before our eyes, we see the trade-mark ‘Made in Europe’
flashed in the corners, betraying the address of the factory where the film originated.”
Against this mirage, he upheld the “inner truth” of a Pan-Asian “ethic of sacrifice”
that was spiritual rather than materialist.52 Tagore’s utopian internationalism re-
mained epistemologically bound to the ontological absolute of swadeshi discourse,
namely, an incommensurable difference between a spiritual East and a material
West. Immanent to this ethic of indigeneity was the construal of all non-organic
political and social (although not, curiously, aesthetic) concepts as counterfeit.
Sarkar, in contrast, valorized political movements crafted from heterogeneous
worlds, taking such amalgams as creative agency.
In the late 1920s, the Peruvian socialist José Mariátegui acknowledged the rhe-
torical force of Tagore’s distrust of industrial modernity, placing it within a utopian
tradition that extended from John Ruskin. But he rejected its ontology of difference
for its non-recognition of the materiality of domination. Writing about the vexed
“Indian question” in Peru, Mariátegui inveighed against humanitarian displace-
ments of politics. “The tendency to consider the Indian problem as a moral one
embodies a liberal, humanitarian, enlightened nineteenth-century attitude that in
the political sphere of the Western world inspires and motivates the ‘leagues of
human rights.’ ” Indeed, such “appeals to the conscience of civilization” had punc-
tuated the course of European empires from the days of anti-slavery societies. But
“humanitarian teachings have not halted or hampered European imperialism, nor
have they reformed its methods.” Mariátegui invested his hopes instead in “the sol-
idarity and strength of the liberation movement of the colonial masses.” In a passage
that might well have been composed by Sarkar, Mariátegui proclaimed that “the
hope of the Indian is absolutely revolutionary. That same myth, that same idea, are
the decisive agents in the awakening of other ancient peoples or races in ruin: the
Hindus, the Chinese, et cetera. Universal history today tends as never before to chart
its course with a common quadrant.” The “et cetera” glossed an internationalist
The Cosmopolitan Nationalism and Modernist History of Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats,” Amer-
ican Historical Review 112, no. 1 (February 2007): 69–100.
51 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (San Francisco, 1917), 60, 141, 93, 94, 22, 17, http://archive
.org/details/nationalism00tagorich.
52 Rabindranath Tagore, “From Greater India,” in Amiya Chakravarty, ed., A Tagore Reader (Boston,
1966), 197–199, here 197, 198.

conviction that anti-imperial struggles, however concretely distinct or geographically

dispersed, were, by virtue of their temporal “consanguinity,” heralds of a new prac-
tical universalism.53
By starting out from equality, colonial internationalists such as Sarkar and
Mariátegui refigured the problem of historical representation from a narrowly schol-
arly one to a wider geopolitical terrain. Once those outside “Eur-America” achieved
equality—defined by Sarkar not just as political sovereignty but as equality “in the
discussions of learned societies, in school rooms, theatres, moving picture shows,
daily journals, and monthly reviews”—these new social and political subjects would
redefine the sites of the enunciation of the modern.54 They would come to bear, or,
more precisely, they already bore, the promise of new historicities.
From a global perspective, the future resided with anti-imperial struggles that

sought to actualize, on a practical terrain, the critique of “Occidental Reason.” The
“problem of world-reconstruction of our own times” would assume the accelerated
rhythm of “the great conflict between revolution and status quo” that had once riven
Europe. Within contemporary Europe, “the association of the victorious allies, mis-
called the League of Nations,” represented a mere updating of “the reactionary
regime of the Congress of Vienna, the Holy Alliance, and the dictatorship of Met-
ternich.” The radical counterpart in the European nineteenth century had been “the
revolutionism militant, which born in the ‘ideas of 1789,’ maintained its checkered
career,” bursting episodically in “1815, 1830, and 1848.” This mantle now resided
outside Europe, for it was within “the fire-baptism of this new war or series of wars
that Asia seeks liberation from the imperialistic and capitalistic domination by Eu-
rope and America.” World War I had emerged “neither out of the nationality prob-
lems in Europe nor out of the class-struggle in the Western world”; its genesis lay
in inter-imperial rivalry. This logic had even enfolded Japan, the only sovereign
power in Asia, illustrating the geopolitical constraints of a “compulsory Occiden-
talization.”55 This reckoning with Japanese imperialism departed from its more san-
guine treatment in works by Taraknath Das and the later alliance pursued with Ja-
pan, Germany, and Italy during World War II by the dissident Indian nationalist
Subas Chandra Bose.56 Imperialism, whether European or Japanese, marked a per-
vasive “international pathology.” An “emancipated Asia, independent of foreign
control,” was the condition not only of peace but of the realization of “Humanity.”
This required “an ethical revolution in Eur-America” where the “Orient” was
treated in substantively equal terms as warranted by “the dignity of man” and “a
psychological revolution” that overcame Orientalism in “the field of scholarship.”
The proximate, and formal, condition for realizing these shifts was democratic self-
determination—“every inch of Asian soil has to be placed under a sovereign state.”57
Sarkar’s impatience with “internationalist Eur-America” targeted a recurrent ar-
gument of British socialists, including Ramsay MacDonald and John Hobson, that
53 José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Austin, Tex., 1971), 117, 245,
25, 26, 29.

54 Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia, 22.
55 Ibid., 24, 26, 20.
56 Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire
(Cambridge, Mass., 2011).

57 Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia, 20, 25, 22, 25.

1476 Manu Goswami
since “the form of government at home cannot but affect the colonial policy of na-
tions,” a temporally deferred path of eventual self-government was preferable to
militant activity in the present. But this counsel ignored the fact that a “theoretical”
contradiction had never been more honored than in its breach. The defining aspect
of British imperialism had been democracy at home and empire abroad; “justice in
home politics” and “injustice and tyranny abroad” had long “gone hand in hand.”
Nor were there good empirical grounds for the idea that internally democratic gov-
ernments were “less detrimental and ruinous” for subject peoples than “formally
autocratic states,” considering that France, the very “cradle of liberty,” had exploited
Indochina with a “notorious repressiveness” that had outstripped the Dutch in Java
and the East Indies. Or consider, he continued, the imperial “inroads of America,
again, although Monroe-doctrinated, through the Hawaii and Philippine Islands.”58

The Russian experiment served, in contrast, as a galvanizing referent for anti-
imperial struggles. It had thrown up an entirely “new democratic type” with ram-
ifying consequences for societies deemed “economically and intellectually ‘back-
ward.’ ” The “almost spontaneous emergence of Soviets” across Russia had morphed
the “Mirs of the Slavic peasants,” long derided as the symbol of Russian “back-
wardness,” into the incubator of futures elsewhere. Their “communal principle” un-
derwrote emergent industrial guilds, imparting a “profound significance” to “the
Russian experiment” for thinking the potential futures of colonial and semi-colonial
societies as multiple rather than unitary, as non-lineal rather than sequential. By
repudiating imperial treaties undertaken by the tsarist regime and declaring “the
independence of subject races both Asian and European,” the Soviets enacted a new
“parallelism” between the proletariat and the colonized. They were “demonstrating
that in order to evolve a democratic republic every people need not, item by item,
repeat the industrial revolution, capitalistic regime and the centralized parliamen-
tary system by which Western Europe and the United States were transformed in the
nineteenth century.”59 These developments had upended the ambient necessitarian
teleology that, expressed in evolutionary, orientalist, and racialist schemas, fore-
closed substantively other futures for colonial and semi-colonial polities.
The emphasis on the intersections between movements spoke to a larger con-
ception of revolutionary events as containing a temporal surplus. In an arresting
formulation, Sarkar likened “revolutionary ideals” to “the steam-engine and the U-
boat,” which as “goods of the modern world” were intrinsically “universal or cos-
mopolitan.” His study of the republican movement in China, for instance, elaborated
not only its “family likeness” to “the ideas of 1789” and the American “Bill of
Rights.” He also argued that the proliferating quest for democratic sovereignty must
be seen as “an event in the liberalization of mankind.” The democratic idiom of
Chinese republicanism accorded with both “the partisans of Carranza” in Mexico
and “the pre-Bolshevik revolution in Russia.” This logic of entanglement would
likely frame subsequent revolutions in “any of the lesser republics in Latin America
as among any of the peoples in Asia or Africa.”60 For revolution in the twentieth
century was not
58 Ibid., 32, 33.
59 Ibid., 31, 34, 31.
60 Ibid., 181, 182, 180, 181, 208, 181.

the “patent” of the individuals or races in and through whom they were born . . . Probably
it is well-nigh impossible for a people to be essentially original in the manufacture of a rev-
olution. For this we should perhaps have to wait for the epoch of socialism triumphant. That
is likely to usher in a radically new psychology with its ethics of the “rights of human per-
sonality” as distinct from the conventional “rights of man” and “rights of woman.”61
The refusal to territorialize history in an ethnological register was tied to an inter-

nationalist conception of historical time. In this view, revolutionary events made
certain subsequent transformations possible, through a process of which they were
either the origin or a decisive element. The significance of anti-imperial struggles
could not be grasped through a past-oriented topology, that is, “from the platform
of the history that was, but pragmatically, i.e., with reference to the result that is to
be.” This futurist internationalism fueled speculations about a proximate era of “ab-

solute” revolution that would suture the political and the ethical, sundered by empire
and orientalisme, in new ways. He ventured that “the revolutions of the twentieth
century and after would have their raison d’être more specifically in abstract con-
siderations of social justice,” in concerns about “international equity, the equaliza-
tion of opportunities for the progress of the races, the highest development of men
and women, in one word, the dignity of man as a human being.” “The liberators of
man” would no longer “wait to count the barbarities inflicted on defenceless men
and women by kings, capitalists, or landlords.” In a future world order, “revolutions
will be welcomed as Nishkâma Karma (duty for its own sake) or ‘categorical im-
peratives.’ ”62 The Futurism of Young Asia was a performative enactment of a political
will to realize an egalitarian future on a global scale. It was written as if this future
were assured precisely because it was not. The most speculative, and overreaching,
of his works, it captures the representational difficulty of picturing other futures
substantively.
THE BOLD JUXTAPOSITIONS THAT characterized Sarkar’s writing mimed the aesthetic
form of cubism. His political modernism was integrally tied to an impassioned in-
vestment in avant-garde aesthetics. There is little warrant for the sundering, in ex-
isting scholarship, of his sociological and aesthetic works.63 Considered together,
they elucidate the insistence, repeated with incantatory force, on the links between
emergent political and aesthetic forms as portents of a new future.
This connective effort framed Sarkar’s 1918 lecture at Columbia University. It
asserted a kinship between avant-garde art that broke from the past in the name of
a new collective experience and the aspiration to a sovereign future expressed in
anti-imperial movements. The formalism of contemporary art was directed against
not only the “Academicians’ rule of thumb” but also a “Bolshevistic” aspiration to
remake the world. The import of the “revolution against the status quo of art” hinged
on a growing recognition that the past did not exhaust the realm of the present future.
Exemplary of this futurity was Gauguin’s conception of “the truth that the modern
61 Ibid., 182.
62 Ibid., 208, 207.
63 See fn. 22. A recent example is C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of
Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge, 2011), 281–284.

1478 Manu Goswami
European and his like all over the globe, could not and must not, be the type of the
future.” This future-oriented logic was apparent in aesthetic practices that traversed
the ancient and the contemporary, the near and the far, drawing “inspiration from
the Mexicans, Mayans and other American-Indians, from the Negro art of the Congo
regions, from Karnak and Nineveh,” attesting to the “neo-eclecticism of the modern
world.” Contemporary art and anti-imperial politics pointed to a future when “Asia”
would become free, “unhampered to struggle, to experiment, to live,” “to borrow and
to lend as an independent unit in the bourse of [world] exchange.”64 This inter-
articulation made possible an experience of both art and politics as in themselves
international.
The championing of aesthetic modernism elicited outrage among Indian nation-
alist art circles. Overtly revivalist in orientation, the nationalist school of art sought

to concretize, as Tapati Guha-Thakurtha argues, the presumed “spiritual” essence
of Indian, or more precisely Hindu, art.65 And it was precisely this axiom that Sarkar
dismantled in his 1922 manifesto “The Aesthetics of Young India.”66 Identified by
the art historian Partha Mitter as the first defense of aesthetic modernism in colonial
India, it anticipated the left-identified Progressive Art Movement of the late 1940s.67
It also sparked an extended, and truculent, debate. The immediate ripostes were
offered by Odhendra Gangoly, an advocate of the nationalist school of art, and the
Austro-Slovakian art critic Stella Kramrisch, a visiting professor of art history at
Calcutta University, who became, during the 1950s, the leading scholar of Indian art
in the U.S.68 Sarkar critically elaborated the complicity between the organizing logic
of the nationalist school and that of “Euro-American ‘orientalists.’ ” The welding of
an imagined Indian idealism with a past-oriented topology was beholden to an un-
critical “Hegelian analysis” that anchored claims of a divide in “spirit between the
East and West.” Hostage to this imperial common sense, debates about art had
devolved into an adjudication of the correspondence between an allegedly singular
national aesthetic and an individual artwork. Furnishing recent examples of sculp-
tures and paintings denounced as insufficiently Indian by a narrowly nationalist and
Hindu-centered criterion, Sarkar observed that this metric imposed a virtual con-
traband against everything deemed outside a “Hindu heritage” or “our own pun-
yabhumi, sacred Motherland.”69
Aesthetic theory had to situate itself within rather than outside the logic of the
artworks themselves. The ground of aesthetic theory was necessarily immanent; it
required attention to morphological forms, or the knowledge of forms (the “vidya
64 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Hindu Art: Its Humanism and Modernism (New York, 1920), 41, 42, 43, 44,
43– 44.
65 Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics, and Nationalism in
Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge, 1992). See also Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India,
1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994).
66 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “The Aesthetics of Young India,” Rupam 9 (January 1922): 8–24.
67 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947 (London,
2007), 16. For accounts of progressive artists during the 1940s and beyond, see Vasudha Dalmia, The
Moderns: The Progressive Artists’ Group and Associates (Bombay, 1996); Sumathi Ramaswamy, ed., Bare-
foot across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India (New York, 2010).
68 Agastya [Odhendra Gangoly], “The Aesthetics of Young India: A Rejoinder,” Rupam 9 (January
1922): 24 –27; Stella Kramrisch, “The Aesthetics of Young India: A Rejoinder,” Rupam 10 (April 1922):
66–68.
69 Sarkar, “The Aesthetics of Young India,” 9, 15, 12.

of rupam”), and to geometry as “the science of space.” What rendered contemporary

painting and sculpture universally intelligible was their basis in geometry, “the most
abstract and cosmopolitan of all vidyas [knowledge].” This was nowhere more ap-
parent than in the “pure paintings” of cubism, which, breaking from a reliance on
figuration, the “support and background of drawings,” articulated a geometric de-
ployment of form and a radically experimental use of color. The measure of advance
in aesthetics was neither mimetic skill nor conformity to existing ideologies, whether
“bolshevistic or nationalistic.”70 It was the intrinsic unfolding of technique and new
experimental forms. The argument against a content-driven aesthetic theory did not
so much negate the opposition of formalism and realism as suggest that the formal
elements of an artwork precede the representation of empirical reality.
Sarkar ventured that this refutation of extant aesthetic orthodoxy would be un-

derstood as “tantamount to inviting an alleged denationalisation.”71 This was an
accurate wager. Gangoly had decried Sarkar as an “ex-nationalist” peddling “cheap
internationalism,” and alluding to his socialist commitments noted that the only
“color visible” in the essay was a “dull red.” Gangoly’s claim that “distinctive racial
traits and psychological attitudes” were ineluctable components of national art had
been reiterated by Kramrisch’s rejoinder, which, while agreeing that “the ‘how’ of
artistic realization” mattered, nonetheless insisted on “the Indianness of Indian
arts.” Sarkar read such responses as symptoms of an anxiety that “the tariff walls of
nationalism in Indian art are being broken in by internationalism.” He pilloried the
“Indianness of Indian arts” response as a tautological argument par excellence. Not
only did such assertions “end where they began,” but they were of a piece with such
everyday ethnological banalities as the “Greek way of putting things” or the “Chinese
genius.” His critics had insisted on identifying particular sculptures, paintings, and
objects (e.g., the Buddha of Sarnath) as necessarily Indian. But this was as valuable
as contemplating “ ‘Why A must needs be A?’ The mystery lies in the ‘law of identity.’
To know something to be Indian by the usual conventions is not a great discovery
except to the novice in ethnography, and then to philosophize about its being bound
to be Indian is no contribution to thought.”72
This spirited rejoinder followed two significant art-historical events. In December
1922, the first exhibition of the Bauhaus school outside of Germany was held in
Calcutta. Organized by Rabindranath Tagore at the explicit urging of his nephew
Gaganendranath Tagore, the exhibition included works by Paul Klee, Wassily Kan-
dinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Georg Muche.73 It was followed in 1923 by an exhi-
bition of contemporary Indian art at the German National Gallery in Berlin. Sarkar
had secured the venue for the Berlin exhibition and authored the accompanying
catalogue, emphasizing the affinities between German romanticism and Indian na-
tionalism. The review by Max Osborn, the prominent art critic for the Vossischen
Zeitung from 1914 to 1933, seized upon this comparative framing, noting its par-
ticular purchase for German viewers. They were able to grasp “better than before
70 Ibid., 21, 22, 21, 16.
71 Ibid., 14.
72 Sarkar, “Social Philosophy in Aesthetics,” 99, 91, 92, 94, 90, 92, 95. Sarkar’s rejoinder to Gangoly
referenced the debate in Rupam and the Bengali-language journal Bijoli.

73 Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 16–19; Ratan Parimoo, The Paintings of the Three Tagores:
Abanindranath, Gaganendranath, Rabindranath—Chronology and Comparative Study (Baroda, 1973).

1480 Manu Goswami
the war” the “ardent aspirations animating” contemporary Indian artists as colonial
subjects. In a more literal vein, Osborn singled out “the German usage of the cubistic
doctrine” in Gaganendranath Tagore’s paintings and declared those by the Bengali
woman painter Sunayani Devi to be “the Indian counterpart of the pictures of the
German Emil Nolde.”74 Yet within the institutional precincts of nationalist art,
Gaganendranath Tagore’s cubism had a decidedly fraught signification. Not only
were his cubist paintings kept out of national art exhibitions, but they posed a con-
ceptual challenge for a revivalist aesthetic. In a 1922 essay, Kramrisch had declared
that “Indian cubism is a paradox,” reiterating that “forms of different civilization are
incompatible.”75 In contrast, Sarkar affirmed works by A. K. Majumdar, Sunanya
Devi, and above all Gaganendranath Tagore for their “vitalizing colour compositions
and architectonic expressions,” which, “without the scaffolding of legends, stories,

messages and moralizings,” pointed toward a new collective and “democratic” sen-
sorium.76
The heralding of aesthetic modernism, especially cubism, refracted a formative
immersion in avant-garde circles in New York City during 1914 –1915 and 1917–1919.
Two examples, overlooked till now, illumine the experiential nodes of this categor-
ical internationalism. An unexpected, if tangible, artifact of this engagement lies
in a painting by the early modernist Jewish American artist Florine Stettheimer.
Her salon encompassed a transatlantic avant-garde, including Marcel Duchamp, the
art critic Henry McBride, the sculptor Gaston Lachaise, the cubist painter Albert
Gleizes, Carl Van Vechten, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Albert Stieglitz.77 Stettheimer’s
paintings, rarely exhibited publicly, took this milieu as their object, evinced in her
portraits of Duchamp and Van Vechten. In Studio Party, or Soiree (1917–1919),
Benoy Sarkar is figured as a still presence perched in front of a nude self-portrait
of Florine and set apart from the others—Leo Stein (Gertrude Stein’s brother),
Avery Hopwood (the playwright), Gaston and Isabelle Lachaise, Albert Gleizes and
his wife, and Florine and Ettie Stettheimer—who swirl around absorbed in con-
versation or repose. (See Figure 1.) The awkwardness of Sarkar’s pose belies the
centrality of his placement. His forward-directed gaze and formal posture seem to
come at the expense of an engagement with the other, more assured, figures in the
room. The tension between placement and pose invites the viewer to register an
unanticipated, even exotic, presence. Yet the compass of Sarkar’s gaze, ranged be-
yond the immediate scene, also hints at a mode of internationalist belonging that is
simultaneously candid and equivocal. The fact that Sarkar’s depiction in the painting
Soiree has long escaped notice is due not only to the rarity of public exhibitions of
Stettheimer’s work (the first was organized posthumously in 1946 at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York City by Duchamp and McBride), but also to a spelling error
in his name in the original catalogue entry.78 And it accords with a wider forgetting
74 Max Osborn, “Art Exhibition in Berlin,” Rupam 15–16 (1923): 74 –78 here 76, 77.
75 Stella Kramrisch, “An Indian Cubist,” Rupam 11 (July 1922): 107–109, here 109.
76 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “Tendencies of Modern Indian Art,” Rupam 26 (1926): 55–58, here 58.
77 Barbara J. Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer (New Haven, Conn., 1995).
78 The catalogue entry records Sarkar as the Hindu poet Sankar; ibid., 96, and Elisabeth Sussman,
Barbara J. Bloemink, and Linda Nochlin, Florine Stettheimer: Manhattan Fantastica (New York, 1995).
Sarkar had recently published an experimental volume of poems: Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Bliss of a
Moment (Boston, 1918). For supporting evidence, see Virginia Budny, “Gaston Lachaise’s American


FIGURE 1: Florine Stettheimer, Studio Party, or Soiree (1917–1919), oil on canvas. Yale Collection of American
Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
of colonial internationalisms. Sarkar was also the only foreign (and non-white) par-
ticipant in a noted intellectual collective in Greenwich Village, the Heretics Club,
whose other members included the Boasian anthropologists Elsie Clews Parsons and
Alexander Goldenweiser (whose essays on Freud Sarkar secured for the Calcutta
Review in the late 1920s), the feminist Henrietta Rodman, and the radical pacifist
writer Randolph Bourne.79 His Boasian critique of the “race problem” of U.S. im-
migration policies, particularly those targeting Chinese workers, echoed Bourne’s
earlier challenge to assimilationist narratives in “Trans-National America” even as
Venus: The Genesis and Evolution of Elevation,” American Art Journal 34/35 (2003/2004): 62–143, here
133 fn. 38.
79 For a list of the members of the Heretics Club, see Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, Wealth and Rebellion:
Elsie Clews Parsons, Anthropologist and Folklorist (Urbana, Ill., 1992), 143 fn. 22. On Greenwich Village
modernism, see Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New
Century (New York, 2001).

1482 Manu Goswami
its indictment of a dominant “Americanization” model that marked Chinese and

Japanese immigrants as unassimilable exceeded Bourne’s celebration of cultural hy-
bridity.80
Sarkar’s entry into these worlds was partly assisted by the Columbia University
economist Edwin Seligman (Stettheimer’s cousin), who, as a protégé of Gustav Von
Schmoller, the leading figure of the second-wave German historical school, shared
a common commitment to historical political economy.81 Sarkar’s participation in
radical aesthetic circles in New York City was also evinced in an enduring friendship
with the Russian-born American cubist pioneer Max Weber, known for early cubist
renderings of a Chinese restaurant, Sabbath, and Hasidic rabbis.82 Many decades
later, Weber recalled how much Sarkar had “adored my writing,” particularly the
experimental 1914 work Cubist Poems, centered on juxtaposed African, Buddhist,

and Chinese artifacts. Weber had hoped to publish as a separate volume the “beau-
tiful little brief statements” that Sarkar had offered on his 1916 work Essays on Art,
which joined cubist aesthetics with anarchist politics.83
Sarkar’s epistemological and aesthetic commitments were heterodox. They were
at the opposite pole from those of his contemporary Sir Jadunath Sarkar, whose
endorsement of Rankean “scientific history” was, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues,
part of a “utopian” faith in the British Empire.84 Sarkar’s pragmatist insistence that
“Not ‘Truth,’ but truths constitute the objective verdict of philosophy” construed
sociology as a political vocation.85 This project remained a conceptual dominant
despite a deepening disillusionment with the post-Lenin trajectory of the Soviet
Union and the near-absolute sway of the Indian National Congress, which he con-
demned for its predominantly upper-caste leadership and its co-optation of trade
union and labor movements.86 In the late 1930s, he continued to urge that “the
sphere of human possibilities” had to become an integral component of social sci-
ence. Otherwise it would remain hostage to what he called “history-riddenness” or
the assimilation of history to constraint. This disease of “over-historicism” had in-
flected various “sociological isms” of “the third quarter of the nineteenth century”
from “raciological interpretations” to “geographical monisms.” They shared a com-
mon conviction that “races or classes that have not achieved anything in the past”
80 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “Americanization from the Viewpoint of Young Asia,” Journal of Inter-
national Relations 10, no. 1 (July 1919): 26– 48, here 26–28. Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National Amer-
ica,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 86–97.
81 On Stettheimer and Seligman, see David Tatham, “Florine Stettheimer at Lake Placid, 1919: Mod-
ernism in the Adirondacks,” American Art Journal 31, no. 1/2 (2000): 4 –31. For the significance of Edwin
Seligman within U.S. social science, see Thomas Bender, Intellectuals and Public Life: Essays on the Social
History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore, 1997), chap. 4. Seligman was a doctoral
adviser of B. R. Ambedkar, a fierce political modernist, prominent Dalit leader, and major architect of
the Indian constitution.
82 For an account of Weber’s joining of cubism and anarchism, see Allan Antliff, Anarchist Mod-
ernism: Art, Politics and the First American Avant-Garde (Chicago, 2001).
83 “The Reminiscences of Max Weber,” 1958, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University,
New York, 96.

84 Dipesh Chakrabarty,“Bourgeois Categories Made Global: The Utopian and Actual Lives of His-
torical Documents in India,” in Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, eds., Utopia/Dysto-
pia: Conditions of Historical Possibility (Princeton, N.J., 2010), 73–93, here 75, 88.
85 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Political Philosophies since 1905: Their Origins and Their Tendencies
(Madras, 1928), 1.
86 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “Demo-Despotocracy and Freedom,” Calcutta Review, January 1939, 234 –
238.

could never lay claim to a different world. Yet a genuinely universalistic sociology
had to embrace the notion that the “pariahs of mankind”—ignored alike by con-
temporary “eugenicists, economists, political philosophers, sociologists”—had a “ca-
pacity for developing a future.” Extant theories had sentenced “alleged inferior races
or classes” to a doubled erasure. Not only had their present actuality “escaped the
serious attention of eugenicists, political philosophers and culture-historians,” but
they were denied the prospect of overcoming present inequalities. The exhortation
to attend to the “prospective capacities” of marginal classes and races sought to show
up the analytical and ethical deficit of historicist schemas.87
The urging of a future-oriented sociology was positioned against a shifting array
of analytics that, by reducing history to a fixed sequential series, could only coun-
tenance the future of those deemed historical latecomers as a simple continuation

of the present. Against them, Sarkar sought to retain a conception of the objectivity
of world-forces without twisting the sheaf of historical process into a single tight line.
The future of what, in a 1938 critical essay on the colonial science of eugenics, he
characterized as the “hydra-headed multitude”—the term encompassed “Muslims”
and depressed castes, “whether scheduled or un-scheduled,” as well as “railway coo-
lies, plantation labourers, mine-workers, factory labourers, peasants”—was vitally
open.88 The claim of history as an open-ended process, characterized by a “creative
disequilibrium,” was the ground for a transformative politics and sociology alike.89
The alignment of politics with a future-oriented temporal logic and of sociology with
a notion of the possible carried a dual impress. It accorded equality, if in a pro-
spective mode, to those denied a substantively coeval present. And it located itself
within the temporal register of a future anterior, or what in the 1920s he had more
confidently claimed as a “futurist” internationalism.
THERE IS A DISJUNCTURE BETWEEN Sarkar’s interwar prominence and his reduction in

the postcolonial era to what a recent anthology on Indian social science laments as
a regional footnote.90 This postcolonial forgetting requires some accounting.
Sarkar’s project refracts the depth and variety of political and aesthetic modernisms
in late colonial India. It resonates with, and anticipates, the efflorescence of self-
consciously modernist literary, aesthetic, and theater movements in late colonial and
early postcolonial India, B. R. Ambedkar’s effort to constitutionally vouchsafe social
egalitarianism in the late 1930s, and the internationalist impetus of the Nehru-led
Non-Aligned Movement of the 1950s. Yet, at the same time, Sarkar’s sociological
futurism does not properly belong to a single disciplinary or political community. It
was forged in an era before the formal consolidation of sociology as a professional
discipline in colonial India. For M. N. Srinivas, the doyenne of post-independence
Indian sociology, the conflation of Sarkarism with sociology was a sign of profes-
87 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “The Acceptable and the Unacceptable in Bankim’s Social Philosophy,”
Calcutta Review, August 1938, 113–131, here 127, 131, 128, 130, 129, 130, 128.
88 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “The Eugenic Potentialities of the Alleged Inferior Races and Classes,”
Calcutta Review, March 1938, 341–352, here 350, 346.

89 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “A Shortcoming of the Hegel-Marxian Dialectic,” Calcutta Review, February
1939, 233.
90 Chatterji, “The Nationalist Sociology of Benoy Kumar Sarkar,” 106.

1484 Manu Goswami
sional lack.91 Sarkar’s interventions, unlike those of coeval internationalists—includ-

ing his former student M. N. Roy, Lenin’s interlocutor during the 1920 debate on
national and colonial policy; the anarchist political scientist Taraknath Das; his
friend Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, a member of the German Communist Party,
and a key figure, along with Willi Münzenberg, in the League against Imperialism;
and the patrician Parsi activist Shapurji Saklatvala, elected in 1922 to the British
Parliament as a member of the British Communist Party and a founding figure of
the Workers’ Welfare League, which became an organizing vehicle for C. L. R James
and George Padmore in the 1930s—were principally intellectual and pedagogical.
They belie easy entry into the nation-centered referents of dominant intellectual
history or institutional political history.
Making sense of Sarkar’s futurism, and other cognate projects, requires renewed

attention to the interwar prospering of internationalisms. Situated between empire
and nation, internationalist intellectuals offered multiple visions of a non-imperial
future. Their political modernism was less a cohesive, univocal entity than an en-
semble of “family resemblance” practices that converged in the crucible of a globally
refracted conjuncture. The universality they affirmed—whether Tagore’s “we of no
nations of the world”; Sarkar’s “pariahs of mankind”; Mariátegui’s “common quad-
rant”; W. E. B. Dubois’s futurist novel Dark Princess (1928), which conjured the end
of Western imperialism through the miscegenation between a Hindu princess and
an African American; or C. L. R James’s internationalist reworking of the French
Revolution in The Black Jacobins (1938)—was fragmentary, multivocal, and demotic.
Their linking of political and intellectual currents conventionally considered sepa-
rate attests to a learned practice of insurgent comparison in an imperial age overrun
by coercive differentiations. Their use of comparison invokes what Walter Benjamin,
writing in 1933, called the “gift” of a “mimetic faculty,” the ability to see likeness
in difference, to produce “non-sensuous similarities.”92
It was during the interwar moment that the category “international” came to
signal a distinct scale of institutional organization, political solidarity, and a disci-
plinary object of analysis.93 Part of the novelty of colonial internationalisms was their
expansive use of this concept as at once a promissory note for an egalitarian future
and a new ethical imperative. Relegating this “movement concept” to a specific re-
gional context alone elides the international making of the concept “international.”
It also ignores the way this category was shot through with heterogeneous horizons
of expectation. This “non-contemporaneous contemporaneity” was overt in the dis-
crepant usages of the new science of geopolitics.94 Sarkar’s insistence that a non-
91 Deshpande, “Fashioning a Postcolonial Discipline,” 506–507.

92 Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” New German Critique, no. 17 (Spring 1979): 65–69,
here 68.
93 For the disciplinary history of international relations, see David Armitage, “The Fifty Years’ Rift:
Intellectual History and International Relations,” Modern Intellectual History 1, no. 1 (2004): 97–109;
Nicolas Guilhot, ed., The Invention of International Relations Theory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation,
and the 1954 Conference on Theory (New York, 2011); Brian C. Schmidt, “Lessons from the Past: Re-
assessing the Interwar Disciplinary History of International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly
42, no. 3 (1998): 433– 459; Risto Wallin, “Movement in the Key Concepts of International Relations,”
Alternatives 32, no. 4 (2007): 361–391.
94 Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” New German Critique, no. 11
(Spring 1977): 22–38.

imperial world was a formal condition for an egalitarian social science exceeded the
state-centered, imperial, and territorial expansionist impetus of the extensively stud-
ied geopolitical theories of the British geographer Harold Mackinder or the Nazi
strategist Karl Haushofer. It was a mobilization of geopolitics against the geopo-
litical.
The neglect of colonial internationalisms has impoverished our understanding of
the global making of twentieth-century political modernism. It has also made it
harder to grasp the affiliations of interwar movements with subsequent waves of
internationalism that have oriented an advancing wave of interdisciplinary research.
Ironically, we know a good deal more about the afterlife of colonial international-
ism—the “third-worldism” of the European 1968 left, black internationalism in the
U.S., and the project of the “third world” during the Bandung era of non-align-

ment—than its crisis-borne appearance between World War I and World War II.95
The privileging of histories of experience over expectation has worked to propel
studies of movements, institutions, and categories regarded as durable, prevalent, or
immediately recognizable in the present. Those perceived as episodic, abortive, or
untimely have more often than not been consigned to history in the pejorative sense.
Not all “past futures” have been considered equal or accorded equivalent scholarly
attention.
95 This literature presents mid-century internationalism as an inaugural moment. On black inter-
nationalism, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of
Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black
Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997); Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh,
guest eds., The Afro-Asian Century, Special Issue, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11, no. 1 (Spring
2003). On Bandung-era third-worldism, see Samir Amin, Re-reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual
Itinerary (New York, 1994); Clifford Geertz, “What Was the Third World Revolution?,” Dissent 52, no.
1 (Winter 2005): 35– 45; George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia,
April 1955 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1956); Christopher J. Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire: The Bandung
Moment and Its Afterlives (Athens, Ohio, 2010); Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History
of the Third World (New York, 2007). On the third-worldism of the European New Left, see Kristin Ross,
May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago, 2002); Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties
West Germany (Durham, N.C., 2012).
Manu Goswami is an Associate Professor of History at New York University.

She is the author of Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space
(University of Chicago Press, 2004). During 2010–2011, she was a member of
the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,
New Jersey.

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Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms

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plicitly anti-imperial yet neither reducible nor opposed to nationalism. Elaborated

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2012

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(Cambridge, Mass., 1995), vol. 1.

(1997): 16–24, here 21.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2012

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East and the West (Berlin, 1922), iv.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2012

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2012

John Dewey, who identified him as a “distinguished . . . representative of the in-

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1950): 134 –138, here 134.

cational, Culture-Historical, Economic and Sociological: A Chronological Statement (Calcutta, 1938);

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Sarkar, Naya Banglar Gora Pattan, pt. 1 (Calcutta, 1932), 371–377.

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Analysis of Post-War World Forces (Calcutta, 1926), 7.

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claim radical alterity. It was substantively and historically an anti-imperial, not a

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boundary 2 32, no. 2 (2005): 201–225.

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During an extended world tour in 1916–1917, Tagore elaborated an ethical cri-

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1966), 197–199, here 197, 198.

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conviction that anti-imperial struggles, however concretely distinct or geographically

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25, 26, 29.

(Cambridge, Mass., 2011).

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The refusal to territorialize history in an ethnological register was tied to an inter-

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Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge, 2011), 281–284.

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of rupam”), and to geometry as “the science of space.” What rendered contemporary

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referenced the debate in Rupam and the Bengali-language journal Bijoli.

Abanindranath, Gaganendranath, Rabindranath—Chronology and Comparative Study (Baroda, 1973).

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