In the 1950s and 1960s, conferences were essential in creating notions of solidarity and collective purpose among Asians and Africans, none more so than the high-profile 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung. The Asian Socialist Conference (ASC) met two years prior, in Rangoon in 1953, and a second time in Bombay in 1956. It was the brainchild of socialist leaders from Burma, India, Indonesia, and Japan. Kyaw Zaw Win has argued that the 1953 ASC served as a ‘precursor’ to Bandung, highlighting parallel issues of human rights, anti-colonialism, and Asian–African solidarity that appeared on the agenda of both events.2 Yet there were also key differences in the resolutions of both conferences, primarily in the ASC’s vision of an Asian welfare state and the promotion of equal rights for both women and men. While Bandung adopted some of the most high-profile internationalist resolutions of the ASC, it was also both a break and a parallel project. While the ASC created a forum for transnational democratic socialism in Asia and a neutralist ‘third force’, Bandung took a nationalist trajectory, visibly centred around charismatic male political leaders with populist appeal, including the PRC’s Chou En Lai.

Eighteen months after Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez canal, Rameshwari Nehru, a veteran of Indian social and political activism, rose to a lectern in the spacious auditorium of the University of Cairo to open the first official conference of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO). She was seventy-three years of age, and it is easy to imagine that the journey to Cairo had not been an easy one. But it was a journey on familiar terrain. Rameshwari Nehru had first visited Egypt in 1932 and spent time in Cairo and the surrounding countryside on her way to a tour of Europe which included a speech at the League of Nations in Geneva. On this second visit, there was much she recognised, but she found the “climate and colour” to be different now. It was “refreshing to be able to breathe the fresh air of freedom” now that the Egyptian people had “accepted the challenge of their time” and won independence.

At the conference, Rameshwari Nehru was also surrounded by familiar people. The Indian delegation in Cairo consisted chiefly of her own activist network, despite the fact that it counted different generations among its members. Perin Chandra for instance, was her junior by several decades, but had been her partner in an effort to join the communist and non-communist women’s movements in the Punjab during the Second World War. In a similar vein, Tehminabai Dhage and Rameshwari were some twenty-five years apart in age, but they were connected through their social work with children’s institutions.

In a photograph taken in 1953, Sutan Sjahrir arrives off an airplane in Rangoon and is greeted warmly on the tarmac by Burmese socialist leaders U Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyein, as well as his close friend Ali Algadri, the Arab-Indonesian chargé d’affairs. Sjahrir had, for several months, served as Indonesia’s first Prime Minister, negotiated the country’s independence at the United Nations, and put in place its first constitutional guarantees; but he had been sidelined from power by Sukarno, a political rival since the 1930s. U Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyein, meanwhile, were powerful ministers in the new Burmese government. Along with Ram Manohar Lohia and Asoka Mehta, who had broken away from the Indian National Congress to start their own socialist party, they had together planned a conference dedicated to the cause of Asian socialism. With 200 delegates arriving from as far away as London and Tokyo, they sought to use the Asian Socialist Conference to promote socialism as the path out of the mounting international rivalry between “capitalist democracy” and “totalitarian Communism.”

In the 1950s, Burma was an intellectual hotbed for Afro-Asian socialism and anti-colonial solidarity. Rangoon was, then, one of Southeast Asia’s most cosmopolitan cities, a hub on transcontinental air routes. It hosted visits from the Moscow and San Francisco Ballet, Chinese intellectuals, Philippine artists, Japanese performance troupes, and Yugoslav musicians. It was also the first country in post-colonial Asia or Africa to be ruled by a nominally Socialist Party.