Introduction
When Aruna Asaf AliFootnote 1 was asked to accompany her husband to his posting as Ambassador to the United States in February 1947, she refused. Despite strong entreaties from M.K. Gandhi himself, Aruna insisted that her place was in India where, she believed, “[t]he final battle for India’s freedom has yet to be fought.”Footnote 2 Like others on the Left within and beyond the All-India Congress movement, Aruna envisaged the negotiated ‘transfer of power’ settlement reached between British and Indian leaders as little more than “a change in the managing agency.”Footnote 3 By contrast, the wave of strikes and popular protests she had helped ferment since the war appeared to signal the possibility of real socio-economic transformation or, as she termed it, “the freedom of the many.”Footnote 4 For a widely celebrated socialist freedom fighter, an adjunct diplomatic position as the wife on an Ambassador was unimaginable at this crucial point and her response to the Congress high command was unwavering: “How can I leave my country without finishing my programme?”Footnote 5 For the time being, Aruna located the real fight for postcolonial freedom in the mills, railyards, and villages of India, which is where she now focused her thoughts and her energies. Yet as the country transitioned from colony to sovereign state in the months that followed, Aruna began to view the question of revolutionary change in India from a different standpoint, approaching, for the first time, national problems from a global perspective. This reassessment, and the postcolonial career that flowed from it, is the subject of this article.
Aruna, who is best known for her underground leadership of the prohibited Quit India movement, does not feature in the historiography of the postcolonial Left in India.Footnote 6 However, her career in the two decades after independence offers a valuable opening for exploring the history of Indian socialism as activists, politicians and thinkers engaged with evolving domestic and international realities. During this period, Aruna embarked on a distinct political journey during which she travelled from Congress socialism to the Communist Party of India (CPI) before distancing herself from party politics to advocate for a Congress-communist ‘Left unity’ alliance at home and Third World solidarity abroad. This included various journalistic and associational roles. From 1958 onwards she edited the publication Link, which functioned as a mouthpiece for her domestic-international agenda. Aruna was also a prominent figure in Afro-Asian peace organisations and the communist-aligned National Federation of Women in India (NFWI), which was affiliated to the Soviet-oriented Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). A unifying principle connecting these diverse activities was alignment to the Soviet Union, a position she adopted in the early months of independence and consistently maintained in following decades. However, Aruna’s specific trajectory was governed by longer-standing ideals that can be traced to her activities in the 1930s and 1940s. This combination of long-term and immediate factors reveals a story of both continuity and change as Aruna repurposed her pre-independence commitments to nationalism, economic change, and women’s rights for the evolving national and global conditions of decolonisation.
The early postcolonial Left in India incorporated a broad spectrum of politicians, thinkers, and activists that can be organised into two loose categories.Footnote 7 The first includes socialists associated with the Congress Party, a group that is divided into those who remained in the Party and those who left to form a “loyal opposition.” This category is capacious, incorporating figures as disparate as Jawaharlal Nehru, Jayaprakash Narayan, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Vinoba Bhave.Footnote 8 The second group is made up of the two wings of the communist movement: parliamentary communists represented (after 1951) by the CPI and revolutionary radicals who were committed to armed struggle.Footnote 9 In the decades after independence, the Left was typically consumed by bitter disagreements between and within different groupings. As divisions in the communist movement suggest, a fundamental area of contention concerned revolutionary methods: whether or not to take “the parliamentary path.” But even amongst those who supported democratic methods, differences arose in response to questions about how best to engage with the ruling Congress Party, the ‘socialistic’ Nehruvian state, and the urban and rural masses. International questions were also divisive. Although there was broad agreement on the need for Third World solidarity, the Left was split on how closely to align, if at all, to the Soviet Union. Aruna’s political journey was an ongoing negotiation with these questions.
Important studies have begun to draw out the temporal and geographical specificities of the Indian Left after 1947, compelling us to consider Indian socialism ‘on its own terms’ as a set of contextual responses to the unique challenges of the developing nation.Footnote 10 Primarily, however, studies of postcolonial socialism (which are heavily weighted to histories of political thought) are located in the national context, even if international matters are an enduring theme.Footnote 11 By contrast, this article adopts a local-global framework that is alert to the combined significance of national and international activities undertaken by political actors in shaping postcolonial socialism. Further, Aruna’s career, which transcended the boundary between ‘Congress Socialism’ and communism, uniquely connects different leftist strands in a single frame. This offers new understanding of important areas of similarity and contestation within Indian socialism and their connection to national and international conditions.Footnote 12 In particular, it sheds light on the meaning of the divisive issues of Soviet alignment and authoritarian politics.
For Aruna, national and international questions were inseparable and in constant conversation. In exploring her career from this perspective, this article connects scholarship on the history of the Indian postcolonial Left to the historiography of Afro-Asianism, which explores the “spirit of the Bandung” from the perspective of below-state-level actors.Footnote 13 As the latter richly illustrates, ‘worldmaking’ was a constitutive element of decolonisation that incorporated a plethora of overlapping political and social aspirations, including socialists of various hues.Footnote 14 Although many on the Left envisioned Afro-Asian solidarity as a tool of non-alignment, others, including women’s organisations, developed strong connections to Second World networks oriented towards Moscow.Footnote 15 This tactic did not necessarily imply uncritical loyalty to the Soviet Union, as Francesca de Haan and others have noted.Footnote 16 However, a question remains as to the precise perspective of communists such as Aruna who expressed unapologetic admiration for the Soviet Union. Her opponents criticised her politics as naïve and dogmatic; even an otherwise sympathetic biographer describes her as “bewitched.”Footnote 17 To some extent and for certain points in her life this assessment is accurate. However, the full picture is somewhat more complex.
This article argues that Aruna’s conversion to communism, her support of Soviet agendas in her journalism, and her involvement with Soviet-aligned international networks reflected certain anti-colonial nationalist modes and aspirations that pre-dated independence and continued to underpin her outlook. It begins with Aruna’s life and career in the pre-1947 period, during which she was closely involved with the Congress-led independence movement including, latterly, as a leader of the underground Quit India movement. This identifies the origins of the ideas and attitudes that guided her postcolonial activism, including a certain ‘freedom fighter’ mentality. Part II explores Aruna’s journey from socialism to communism in the immediate post-independence period. This was a distinct ideological moment that was marked by a turn to political theory, the primary significance of which is the new international perspective it offered her politics. Part III examines the ways Aruna’s subsequent work as a journalist and activist in the 1950s and 1960s was shaped by a combination of domestic and international questions against the backdrop of decolonisation and the global Cold War.Footnote 18
This examination of Aruna’s career speaks to fundamental historiographical questions relating to decolonisation from in global perspective. On the one hand it enriches a growing body of scholarship that, in emphasising Third World agency, offers a decentred history of decolonisation that is shaped, but not determined, by the priorities of Cold War power blocs.Footnote 19 Disrupting this more or less optimistic chord, however, is the troubling question of authoritarianism in decolonising contexts, including in India.Footnote 20 In this context, Aruna’s alignment to the Soviet Union, which included an unwillingness to confront the repressive aspects of the communist regime, has darker and far-reaching implications.
The ‘Heroine of Many Legends’Footnote 21
Although Aruna’s political outlook morphed and shifted after independence, the foundations of her thinking were embedded in her upbringing and in her pre-1947 career. Aruna Ganguly was born in Nainital, Northern India to middle-class parents influenced by the Brahmo Samaj, a religious reform movement associated with ‘progressive’ ideas.Footnote 22 As such she belonged to a social milieu that encouraged the education of girls and opposed restrictive marriage customs, issues she would later campaign on as part of her work in the women’s movement. Aruna herself was educated in an English-medium Catholic mission school and in 1928 rejected her parents’ choice of husband in order to marry Asaf Ali, a Muslim Indian National Congress leader twenty years her senior. Although she would later diverge from her husband politically, Aruna credited the connections afforded by her marriage with enabling her involvement in public affairs and saving her “from being doomed to be a housewife and no more.”Footnote 23 As the wife of a high-ranking Congressman in the 1930s, Aruna was well-connected in nationalist circles and intimately engaged with the heightened anti-colonial politics of the time. She participated in Gandhian civil disobedience campaigns, part of a phenomenon that made women’s political activism ‘respectable.’Footnote 24 Around the same time she was inducted into the Delhi women’s movement by Rameshwari Nehru, a relative of Jawaharlal, and was associated with the work of the All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC). Through this connection, Aruna became involved in campaigns for women and girls’ education and the reform of marriage customs, amongst other social reform issues. Her involvement with Congress also brought her into contact with socialist ideas. Aruna declared herself “deeply influenced” by the socialist perspective of Jawaharlal Nehru, who rose to prominence in the Congress around the time of her marriage.Footnote 25 More radical was the youthful revolutionary movement that existed at the margins of the Congress organisation and in dialogue with it.Footnote 26 In 1929, Aruna witnessed the detonation of a bomb by Bhagat Singh and members of the Hindustan Republican Socialist Army in the Delhi Central Legislative Assembly, an event she later celebrated as “ruthless resistance.”Footnote 27
The defining period in Aruna’s anti-colonial career was the final Congress-led campaign against the British – the Quit India agitation – which was launched in August 1942. With the immediate arrest of the Congress leadership, including Aruna’s husband, the organisation of the campaign was left to lower-ranking activists such as Aruna, who interpreted Gandhi’s final pre-arrest message - ‘Do or Die’- as they thought best. This meant that the Quit India movement was markedly more militant than previous agitations and Aruna’s involvement had far-reaching implications personally, both in terms of her politics and her celebrity. Working alongside Congress Socialist Party (CSP) colleagues, her political outlook clarified during this period as she embraced the principles of class struggle and land reform as integral aspects of the movement for political independence. The Quit India agitation also marked a shift in her relationship with the Congress leadership. Coordinating the movement underground through illicit radio broadcasts and homemade cyclostyled pamphlets, she and others advocated destructive methods, including the targeting of telegraph wires, railway lines and government offices.Footnote 28 These tactics subverted the principles of Gandhian non-violence and prompted much criticism from the Congress high command. However, Aruna, whom the British considered “the chief leader of the movement in Delhi,” was unrepentant, and defied appeals from her husband and others to surrender to the authorities.Footnote 29 Through these activities, Aruna captured the popular imagination and having evaded capture for three and a half years, emerged from the underground only when warrants for her arrest were cancelled in January 1946, long after the release of the Congress leadership. By this point the British had agreed to the ‘transfer of power,’ the Congress high command had switched focus from agitation to negotiation and the political sphere was dominated by sectarian conflict and debates about Partition. In September, Congress leaders joined the Interim Government. The new government-in-waiting included Aruna’s husband, Asaf Ali, who took up a cabinet post before being appointed Ambassador to the United States in early 1947.
As historians of the ‘transfer of power’ period have long pointed out, high-level negotiations took place against a backdrop of popular unrest aimed at pushing the anti-colonial movement in a more radical direction.Footnote 30 Aruna played a prominent role in these events. In February 1946, she travelled to in Bombay where she agitated alongside CSP colleagues and communists in support of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) strike and urged supporters to “fight the British on the battlefield.”Footnote 31 Weeks later she was rallying railway workers in Calcutta.Footnote 32 By May she was in the hill regions close to Simla dismissing the “elegant vacuity” of the Congress leaders and organising anti-landlord agitations.Footnote 33 She warned that the British were “never going to sign the death warrant of imperialism through conferences and compromise.”Footnote 34 In any case, according to Aruna, constitutional questions were irrelevant because the real power of British imperialism lay in systems of economic and social exploitation that would continue to enfeeble Indians after the British had left.Footnote 35 On the pressing issue of communal division, Aruna and other Congress socialists vehemently opposed Partition, arguing that it was an outcome of British ‘divide and rule’ policies that pandered to reactionary elements in Indian society.Footnote 36 In the face of spiralling communal violence, she instead prescribed working class struggle as a unifier. Reflecting on this period many years later, she remained convinced that “the revolutionary spirit” of Quit India and the RIN strike, if properly mobilised, would have averted Partition.Footnote 37
For Aruna, as for many others on the Left, the transfer of power negotiations proved the need for a change of leadership. She urged “[s]tatesman leaders” to stand aside and allow “fightermen,” by whom she meant the CSP leaders Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan, Ram Mohan Lohia, and Achyut Patwardhan, to take up the reins.Footnote 38 For someone married to the Interim Government’s Ambassador to the United States, the implications of this were deeply personal; it was impossible for Aruna to accompany her husband to Washington under such circumstances. In time, her attitude towards the Congress leadership would change. A few months later, she in fact joined Asaf Ali in America and, later still, she would become an active supporter of Nehru. However, these rapprochements did not signal a change of political heart. On the contrary, Aruna’s activities during the ‘transfer of power’ period anticipate and explain her later turn towards communism and the Soviet Union in two ways. Most obvious is her ideological framing of British imperialism not just as political subjugation but as an international system of economic exploitation. In the months that followed this would influence her analysis of the new international role of the United States of America. Easier to overlook is her ‘freedom fighter’ mentality: the lack of interest, perhaps even distrust, of constitutional questions and representative politics. Aruna never shifted from this mode, a factor that is linked to her willingness to overlook the authoritarianism of the Soviet model. After independence, this was one of the key distinctions between Aruna and her (by now) former socialist colleagues.
Defining Freedom from Abroad: The Transition to Communism
At this point, the moment of independence, the heroine of Quit India disappears from historical accounts and from popular memory of the freedom struggle. However, the progress of Aruna’s transition from Congress socialism to communism between 1947 and 1951 charts crucial disagreements on the Left as India became an independent democratic state. For Congress socialists disenchanted with the negotiated transfer of power process, the early months of independence brought further disappointment. Nehru as Prime Minister spoke of secularism, state planning, and the need for radical wealth redistribution, but in the immediate post-colonial moment, his government was pre-occupied with a series of crises, including the arrival of refugees from Pakistan, conflict in Kashmir, and insurrection in Hyderabad. Just as significant was the power struggle at the heart of government. Although Nehru’s popularity on the ground was unparalleled, his deputy Vallabhbhai Patel commanded the support of the Congress right-wing. Up until his death in 1950, Patel and his supporters continuously sought, often successfully, to disempower Nehru and steer policy to the right.Footnote 39
Aruna later regretted her lack of support for Nehru during this period when, she recalled, Congress socialists dismissed the Prime Minister as “a potential Lenin fallen among Kerenskys.”Footnote 40 In March 1948, she was amongst those to split from the Congress and form the Socialist Party under the leadership of JP Narayan. The role of the new party was to offer “healthy opposition” to the Nehru government’s revolutionary caution and to lead the struggle for true freedom against vested interests and “big business.”Footnote 41 The Socialist Party position can be contrasted with the evolving stance of the CPI, which, in March 1948, declared the ‘bourgeois’ Congress-led independence a sham and adopted a policy of violent insurrection. Yet after having led an armed rebellion in Telangana and in the face of significant repression from the Nehru government, the CPI reversed this position to take part in the 1951-52 General Election.Footnote 42 In the midst of this turmoil, Aruna left the Socialist Party and joined the CPI-aligned Left Socialist Group, part of the United Front strategy that propelled the CPI towards electoral credibility as the second largest party behind Congress.
Aruna’s journey from the Socialist Party to communism took place, for the most part, outside India and was underpinned by an international perspective shaped by the emerging Cold War context. Shortly after independence, on the insistence of Nehru she had travelled to the United States to join Asaf Ali, who still served as Indian Ambassador. There, in between a smattering of diplomatic duties, she spent time reading and thinking, turning to Marx to make sense of the evolving world order into which the new Indian state was born.Footnote 43 This new perspective reframed her outlook. With the British defeated in India, it was the United States, now actively repelling communism under the Truman Doctrine, that was “spearheading of reaction, i.e. feudal and fascist interests everywhere.”Footnote 44 In this context, she considered Stalin’s efforts to secure Eastern Europe for the USSR as justified in the fight against “counter-revolutionary and American conspiracy”.Footnote 45 This international outlook, which replaced British rule with American imperialism as the primary threat to Indian freedom, would frame her postcolonial career.
Aruna’s developing outlook is reflected in a speech she gave in November 1947 at the General Conference of UNESCO in Mexico City.Footnote 46 Aruna’s appointment to the delegation came directly from Nehru who was keenly alert to the diplomatic value of an articulate women representing India on the world stage. Led by the philosopher and religious scholar Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, and including the physicist Homi J Bhabha, the Indian delegation of three reflected competence, expertise and modernity, all qualities newly independent India sought to project in its bid to establish authority on the world stage. Aruna’s speech, which chided the UNESCO Conference for its complacency, evidently lived up to expectations. Radhakrishnan wrote to Asaf Ali to celebrate “the remarkable impression which Mrs. Asaf Ali made today by her spirited appeal for the common man,” a note that later made its way back to Nehru who proudly passed it on to Gandhi.Footnote 47 But in addition to fulfilling the state’s diplomatic function, Aruna’s speech hinted at her communist sympathies. UNESCO’s objective of creating a peaceful world would not be achieved until both the “political and economic pattern of the world is radically altered,” she argued.Footnote 48 Aruna spoke of “equality and social justice” as “the only sure foundation for peace” and urged UNESCO to “align with progressive forces only” and “strive for a united front of the common people.” In an echo of Soviet scepticism about human rights being aired in the committees of the United Nations during this period, she also cast scorn on liberal conceptions of human rights, declaring that notions of individual liberty were hollow “if it means liberty to suffer want, to die of hunger.”Footnote 49 Interestingly, her speech, which also referenced the lack of language diversity at UNESCO (she complained about not being enabled to deliver her speech in Hindustani) foreshadowed Soviet-aligned, anti-Eurocentric Afro-Asian cultural campaigns at UNESCO in the 1950s.Footnote 50 In this respect, Aruna’s Stalin-era speech can be seen as pre-empting Khruschev’s soft diplomacy agenda of a later period.
Aruna returned to India early in 1948 with developed views, not just on political ideals but also on the type of party required to effect change. Her study of Marxism in the United States had convinced her of the need for a vanguard party in India “to train men and women to work for replacing the present State by a workers’ and peasants’ State.”Footnote 51 For a short time, the newly formed Socialist Party appeared to be the “militant party of the working class” she was looking for.Footnote 52 However, she was soon expressing doubts about the “correctness” of the Socialist Party’s “democratic socialism,” which she later branded “essentially reformist.”Footnote 53 In a departure from her former activist mode, she resolved to withdraw from active political work and commit to further study. This meant travelling to Britain, where she met with influential figures in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and eventually the Soviet Union. “I wanted to see for myself,” she later explained, “how men and women who were inspired by …the Communist Manifesto… were creating a new world for themselves.”Footnote 54
Aruna’s evolving thought should be seen in light of the interactions she had in Britain as well as her subsequent visit to the Soviet Union. One notable contact was Rajani Palme Dutt, the British-Indian-Swedish founder member of the CPGB, who had recently conducted a lecture tour of India and followed postcolonial developments closely.Footnote 55 Around the time of his meeting with Aruna (May 1950), the CPI was in the midst of the crisis that would see it renounce armed insurrection in favour of the “parliamentary path.” The crisis, which had been sparked by an editorial in the Cominform organ For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy!, was a major turning point in CPI policy and it seems certain that Aruna and Dutt would have discussed it.Footnote 56 Dutt’s notes from the time paint a dire picture of the economic and political conditions in Nehru’s India and the need for change. But he was supportive of the CPI’s turn towards parliamentary methods, a question Aruna would also grapple with when she returned to India a few months later.Footnote 57
Aruna later described her three-month trip to the Soviet Union in 1950, which had been arranged by communists in Britain, as “one of the most educative periods of my life.”Footnote 58 During this curated visit, she was assigned Soviet “intellectual guides,” with whom she had “long sessions of discussion,” and was taken on sightseeing tours to admire the highlights of Soviet achievements in economic development and planning. This included a trip to the Central Asian parts of the Soviet Union where she readily found “something to model India on.” She noted “the amazing development of industry and agriculture,” the freedom of women and the absence of “medieval superstition and feudal modes of production.”Footnote 59 Clearly she was impressed; her discomfort at Soviet boastfulness did not dull her conviction that “If socialism can be a practicable solution [in Central Asia], it can be so in India.”Footnote 60 Amid this awe at the achievements of communism, Aruna’s silence on the question of political repression is conspicuous. But was she duped? This would suggest that Aruna was a more passive actor than she was. The initiative for the trip came more from her desire to find an egalitarian economic and social model for postcolonial India than from top-down Soviet policy. In this respect, her tour confirmed what she was predisposed to see. The question of civil and political rights, meanwhile, was not on her agenda.
On her return to India, these views brought Aruna into conflict with her erstwhile colleagues in the Socialist Party, against which she now launched a stinging ideological attack. Bitter and dogmatic, her pamphlet “The Socialist Party. Its Rejection of Marxism” (1951) accused her former comrades, and JP in particular, of an “insufficient acquaintance with Marxist theory” and allying with Western social democrats against communism.Footnote 61 Her central grievance was the Socialist Party’s policy of democratic socialism, which she branded “revisionist and petty bourgeois.”Footnote 62 The only way to achieve the next (proletarian) stage of Indian history was through “genuine” peasant and workers vanguard parties that were committed to seizing power for the proletariat and “smashing the capitalist State machine.”Footnote 63 This echoed not just classic Marxist ideals but an argument made a generation earlier by the Indian communist, MN Roy, who had predicted in his Thesis on the Eastern Question (1921) that the nationalist bourgeoisie would turn against the proletarian masses as soon as it gained power.Footnote 64 Rejecting the “bourgeois” Socialist Party, Aruna accordingly, shifted her allegiance to the Left Socialist Group in Bombay and supported the CPI 1951-52 General Election campaign under the banner of “Left Unity.”
“The Socialist Party. Its Rejection of Marxism” was more polemic than political theory and there was little original thought in the way it applied existing ideas to the postcolonial moment. Aruna’s opponents in the Socialist Party dismissed her arguments as naïve and insubstantial.Footnote 65 Nevertheless, it reveals the fundamental principles now distinguishing Aruna from the Socialist Party: alignment to the Soviet Union, acceptance of a strong communist state and a willingness to prioritise socio-economic revolution over questions of civil liberties.
India and the World
Despite a brief period during which she served on the CPI Central Committee in 1954, Aruna largely avoided party politics after the first General Election, preferring instead to promote her ideals as a journalist and though voluntary associations. As she settled into this mode in the late 1950s, she turned away from polemics towards some of the practical questions confronting the postcolonial nation. From her base in Delhi, Aruna’s primary commitments included the weekly publication Link, Afro-Asian and peace organisations, and the CPI-aligned women’s movement. This wide-ranging work predominantly addressed three interwoven causes. On the domestic front, despite her prior radicalism, she became concerned with bolstering the government of Jawaharlal Nehru against the Congress Right, while at the same time picking up the thread of women’s social reform as a founder of the NFWI. In the international sphere, she was active in promoting Third World solidarity and alignment to the Soviet Union. These “national priorities” and “imperative duties on a global plane,” as Aruna framed them, were connected and perpetually interacted in Aruna’s work.Footnote 66
In 1958, Aruna helped found Link, a weekly news publication modelled on Time, the purpose of which she described as “explain[ing] socialism to intelligent people.” Footnote 67 Backed by a number of prominent left-leaning figures, including V.P. Krishna Menon, a Congress left-winger, and A.V. Baliga, a patron of the Indo-Soviet Cultural Society, Link’s editorial line reflected Khrushchev’s “rediscovery of the Third World” – an ideologically-open policy of encouraging diplomatic and economic ties with moderate Third World leaders such as Nehru.Footnote 68 In her writing, Aruna followed suit by moving away from her earlier insistence that true proletarian parties alone could be agents of revolutionary change to urging unity between the Nehru-supporting (bourgeois) Congress Left and communists. This sort of pragmatic reassessment was not unusual in within Indian communism – MN Roy himself had made a similar journey towards rapprochement with Congress in the 1930s – and in Aruna’s case reveals her as a political rather than a purely ideological actor. Writing in 1959, Aruna now deemed “the Nehru formulation” of democratic state planning as sufficient for bringing in “a socialist order of production and distribution” and urged readers to turn their attention to challenging the “real adversaries ..the [capitalist] believers in an acquisitive order of society.”Footnote 69
Aruna’s promotion of an alliance between the CPI and the Congress is a significant shift away from her earlier criticisms of Nehru. This raises the question of whether she was simply adopting Khruschev’s policy line uncritically. It is certainly the case that Aruna’s support of the Soviet Union was unshakeable, based on the conviction that it was the only force that could feasibly challenge capitalism and imperialism in a global sense. However, there were also more specific considerations linked to the Indian context. After several years of independence, Aruna now argued that Nehru had played a crucial role in negating the threat of the reactionary Right and it is likely that Aruna had been shaken by Nehru’s desire, made public in 1958, to retire from office.Footnote 70 In addition, the arrival of new parties such as the economically right-leaning Swatantra party and the Hindu nationalist Jana Sangh had raised fears of a right-wing resurgence.Footnote 71 Aruna’s promotion of CPI-Congress unity, then, not was not simply a passive response to Khrushchev’s Third World policy but a reaction to specific domestic anxieties.
Whatever the domestic motivation, Link promoted an undisguised pro-Soviet stance, including favourable articles on the Soviet leadership and its achievements. In taking this line, Link intervened in wider domestic debates about India’s place in the global order now that independence had been achieved. Under Nehru, India sought to assume leadership of the global struggle “for the liberty of suppressed peoples everywhere” and was a leading proponent of Afro-Asian solidarity, most famously, at the Bandung Conference (1955).Footnote 72 Through roles such as the Directorship of the Institute for Afro-Asian and World Affairs, Aruna was part of a vast field of below-state Afro-Asianism that flourished in the decolonising world during the Cold War. Entwined with the issue of Afro-Asianism was the question of Cold War alignment. In its Nehruvian iteration, Afro-Asian solidarity was linked to a policy of non-alignment – a commitment to remain on friendly terms with both Superpowers but beholden to none. For Nehru, JP Narayan and others who subscribed to this policy, non-alignment was both ideological and pragmatic as it helped maintain the hard won anti-colonial goal of national sovereignty and recognised Soviet imperial ambitions while sustaining a broad diplomatic base for much-needed development aid.Footnote 73 In contrast to the Nehruvian/JP formulation, Aruna’s brand of Afro-Asianism was aligned to the Soviet Union. In the face of American economic expansion, Aruna argued, non-alignment was “escapist and ridiculous castles-in-the-air” thinking that offered “an invitation to American and satellite capitalisms to exploit Asian people.”Footnote 74 Of the two Cold War powers, it was, to her mind, the Soviet Union that condemned imperialism and through Cominform appeared to signal support for anti-colonial aspirations worldwide.Footnote 75
American military intervention in Korea and Vietnam, in targeting fellow Asia territories, provided further grist for Soviet-aligned Afro-Asianism and inspired Aruna’s transnational peace activism. Opponents dismissed peace movements as “Soviet Fronts” that served only to advance the diplomatic and ideological goals of the Soviet Union.Footnote 76 But while it is indeed the case that Afro-Asian peace organisations were subject to interference from Moscow, their function cannot be flattened to their role in Cold War propaganda campaigns.Footnote 77 Animated by a range of local motivations, including Gandhian ideals on non-violence, memories of wartime famine, and horror at nuclear weapons (not to mention self-preservation), peace initiatives in India held widespread appeal. They were also strongly infused with a sense of anti-colonial solidarity. The resolutions of the All-India Peace Convention held in Bombay in May 1951, which included a diverse array of Congress members and cultural figures as well as communists, reflected the concern in India that colonial violence in Malaya and Vietnam meant that “war is not merely a threat, but a grim reality.”Footnote 78 These were themes Aruna would later take up in Link and through fundraising work for the All-India Peace Council during the Vietnam War, for which she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.Footnote 79
Entangled with Aruna’s international peace activism was her work for the NFWI, an organisation she helped establish in 1954.Footnote 80 Envisaged by its founders as a radical alternative to the AIWC, the NFIW was aligned to the CPI. However, in reality the two women’s organisations had a shared heritage and similar social programmes. As a former AIWC member who was prominent in the NFIW (another was the CPI parliamentarian, Hajrah Begum) Aruna was an embodiment of this connection.Footnote 81 Since the 1930s the AIWC had sought to promote social reform as an intrinsic part of actualising the independent nation. This derived from a specific critique of colonialism that held the colonial state responsible for allying with conservative elements in Indian society to perpetuate customary practices that oppressed women.Footnote 82 In 1946, the AIWC drafted the ‘Indian Women’s Charter,’ a comprehensive programme of rights and duties that laid the foundations of the postcolonial women’s movement. The NFIW adopted this programme and combined it with a commitment to the ongoing “struggle of our toiling people for democracy, secularism, socialism and peace.”Footnote 83 Peace was not a new priority for the All-India women’s movement; peace-making had featured in AIWC resolutions as an integral part of its social reform agenda since the 1930s. The novelty of the NFIW, then, lay in its political alignment to the CPI and, internationally, as we shall see, its connection to Soviet-oriented networks.
One issue on which the NFWI campaigned alongside AIWC figures was the Hindu Code Bills, a series of legislative proposals that sought to regulate marriage practices, unequal family inheritance customs, and other personal laws that were deemed disadvantageous to women. Aruna, an inheritor of the Brahmo Samaj and AIWC social reform traditions, was a strong critic of the “outmoded pseudo-religious edicts” the Hindu Code Bills sought to reform.Footnote 84 However, the NFWI’s work was also focused on direct social reform work and Aruna was active in establishing women’s literacy centres and maternity services in urban slums to “help bridge the large gap between laws on the statute book and the realities on the ground.”Footnote 85 For Aruna, these activities linked the pre-independence era to the postcolonial period and the national to the global. They drew both on her experience of social reform work in the 1930s and echoed mass literacy campaigns being conducted by communists elsewhere during the Cold War.Footnote 86 While being integral to the project of nation-building they were also part of a universal vision of progress, a field in which she imagined Indian women taking an international leadership role. In pursuit of this vision, she urged NFIW members to “be in the vanguard of progress” in solidarity with “women of our own soil and with those in every part of the world with all who share our ideals.”Footnote 87
Internationally, the NFIW was connected to Soviet-oriented women’s networks through the WIDF, of which it was one of the largest Third World affiliate organisations. The WIDF was founded in Paris in 1945 as a leftist alternative to the conservative and liberal organisations that had dominated the international women’s movement before the Second World War. From 1948 onwards it increasingly sought to incorporate Third World women’s organisations, both in order to fulfil its universalist claim to represent “women of the whole world” and as a means of soft diplomacy. Despite its location in Europe, the WIDF enabled Third World women to build what Elisabeth Armstrong has to referred to as “a solidarity of possibility.”Footnote 88 One example of this is the NFWI member Hajrah Begum’s trip to Egypt as part of a WIDF mission to examine the impact of the British naval bombardment of Port Said during the Suez conflict. Although the delegation was mainly made up of European women, Begum used the visit to assert Third World expertise and solidarity based on the shared Egyptian-Indian experience of imperialism. Reporting on her visit, she celebrated that “Asian-African friendship is no longer a dream, it is a reality … in the streets of Cairo, in Port Said and in Delhi.”Footnote 89
Like the peace organisations, the WIDF was subject to accusations of functioning as a “Soviet Front” organisation.Footnote 90 It is certainly true that the WIDF served Soviet diplomatic ambitions. However, it also enabled women from Third World countries to advance their own aspirations.Footnote 91 For Aruna, the WIDF offered a forum for promoting Afro-Asian solidarity during the Vietnam War. In 1965, the year she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, Aruna, wrote a feature length piece for the WIDF’s magazine, Women of the Whole World, appealing “for peace, for militant agitation against imperialist and neocolonialist moves and maneuvers for reinvigorating the entire women’s movement.”Footnote 92 The same year, the WIDF began publishing a bulletin from its headquarters in East Berlin that collated reports of women’s Vietnam solidarity activities from across its international network of women’s organisations.Footnote 93 This offered the NFWI a platform for publicising its work in organising protests, medical donations, and petitions which, while very much serving Soviet soft diplomacy objectives also brought Indian anti-Vietnam War perspectives to the wider world. Counterintuitively, Aruna’s international activities, which undermined the state policy of non-alignment, may actually have been another means of strengthening Nehru’s hand. It is increasingly clear that Indian non-state level connections to the Soviet Union played an important diplomatic role in masking an actual imbalance in India’s international relations in favour of the Western bloc. This, in turn, enabled the Nehruvian state to claim non-alignment while actually being disproportionally aligned to the West.Footnote 94 Aruna’s various interactions with Soviet peace networks and the WIDF can be seen as part of this phenomenon.
Conclusion
For a long time, the historiography of Indian anti-colonialism was punctuated by the year 1947, a seemingly natural cut-off in the periodisation of decolonisation. By contrast, Aruna’s career demonstrates that for those who lived through it, independence was experienced more as a way-marker on the road than a point of arrival. As a Congress activist with revolutionary ambitions, Aruna was bound to aspire to more than self-determination and she arrived at the moment of independence as an inheritor of a long anti-colonial traditional with an established set of objectives. It is not difficult to reconcile Aruna the pre-independence ‘freedom fighter’ with the postcolonial radical she became. Having led labour strikes and agrarian protests during the ‘transfer of power’ period, Aruna retained a commitment to leftist ideals in a broad sense which she combined with a return to her pre-independence work for women’s emancipation. At the same time, Aruna’s opposition to imperialism drew on long-held critiques of powerful foreign influence and anti-colonial notions of self-determination, however paradoxical that appeared to opponents who criticised her loyalty to the Soviet Union. Similarly, Afro-Asianism reflected a wider expression of Third World solidarity based on the shared experience of colonialism and aspirations of global equality. The consistency of these broad anti-colonial principles in Aruna’s career provides a crucial reminder that Indian engagements with the rest of the world after independence were driven by deep-rooted anti-colonial ideals, however neatly they seemingly reflect a bi-polar Cold War narrative.
Although anti-colonial continuity was a feature of Aruna’s career, her politics and allegiances after independence reflect a dynamic engagement with evolving debates about the future of Indian society and the international role it should play. Initially this included a period of serious engagement with Marxist theory, through which she arrived at the CPI as the vanguard party of the proletariat. Over time, this position changed again as she came to promote a Congress-Left alliance as the best means of realising her socio-economic goals. This coincided with a retreat from the CPI towards a series of journalistic and associational endeavours in both domestic and international arenas.
One persistent theme underpinning Aruna’s career after 1947 was alignment to the Soviet Union, which Aruna deemed an imperative in the face of American imperialist ambitions. In view of this it would be easy to portray her, straightforwardly, as a creature of the Cold War. However, a more nuanced analysis is that in promoting Indian perspectives through her work in Soviet-aligned networks, Aruna’s international career actively shaped Cold War agendas rather than vice versa. As such, her career illustrates the claim made by Prakash & Adelman, amongst others, that the post-Second World War international order was shaped not just by Cold War structures of power but also by the aspirations of activists from the Third World who engaged with them.Footnote 95
Alignment to the Soviet Union was a core area of disagreement between Aruna and her former socialist colleagues. From the socialists’ point of view, this was not simply a matter of Marxist theory or anti-imperialist principle, as Aruna saw it, but a fundamental question of democratic rights. For JP Narayan and his allies, the re-ordering of society should not come about at the expense of civil liberties, while Aruna was willing to overlook authoritarianism in the name of revolutionary change. These differences were ideological and, in Aruna’s case, perhaps even reflected a temperamental inclination connected to her celebrated identity as a “freedom fighter.” In the early postcolonial decades, Aruna never displayed an interest in constitutional matters, while her socialist compatriots sought to establish democratic socialism and warned of the autocratic dangers of the centralised state. This was a distinction that came to a head in 1975 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi instituted the Emergency, suspending civil liberties and imprisoning opponents, amongst other authoritarian measures. JP Narayan was the Prime Minister’s leading opponent during this time. Aruna, meanwhile, was loyal to Indira and, on the matter of political repression, remained silent.
Acknowledgements
This article began life as a paper at the workshop ‘Decolonization’s Discontents’, co-hosted by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. The author is grateful to the workshop conveners, Elisabeth Leake and Erez Manela, for the opportunity and thanks them for their support and feedback in the development of the article. The author thanks participants of the workshop, in particular Raphaëlle Khan, for comments on the original workshop paper and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of the article.
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