Introduction for East of Empire

Introduction

In the spring of 1939, as the wheels of European diplomacy began careening off the rails, the Indian National Congress (INC) played host to a delegation of Egyptian statesmen on a tour of the subcontinent. While these honored guests were being received by Gandhi in Delhi, two envoys of the All-India Muslim League were shuttling across the capitals of Europe in an increasingly desperate bid to drum up support for the embattled Arabs of Palestine. Within weeks, a leading Indian feminist had arrived in Cairo, where she stayed at the home of a legendary Egyptian activist for women’s rights. The envoys of the Muslim League landed back in Egypt around the same time; there they worked alongside Arab ministers and heads of state in a last-ditch effort to convince the Palestinian leadership to accept a new British offer. While all of this was going on, the former (and future) Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa al-Nahas received a letter from his friend and ally Jawaharlal Nehru in India. It proposed new strategies for bringing their political movements into closer alignment, toward the shared goals of democracy and independence from Britain.¹

These events—crisscrossing the seaways, rail lines, and telegraph poles between Bombay, Cairo, London, Beirut, Milan, Geneva, Tripuri, and New Delhi—all took place within a span of about ten weeks, but they were decades in the making. East of Empire is about those decades: a brief but significant chapter in the much longer history of interaction and exchange between the peoples of the Arabic-speaking world and South Asia.² Our story takes place in the interval separating two world wars, during the twilight years of European empire, as alternative visions for the future gained traction and momentum. The men and women who populate these pages moved in the shadows of a gathering storm that would irrevocably transform their lives and the world around them. They also moved, wrote, and thought between what we now tend to think of as discrete regions: Egypt and the Middle East, India and South Asia, Britain and Europe.

In the immediate aftermath of World War I, the British Empire faced a rising tide of nationalist and anticolonial fervor across its empire, from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia;³ but the epicenter of this upheaval lay in the geographic space connecting Egypt to India. These challenges from within the empire were coupled with an increasingly menacing international geostrategic environment, as authoritarian and expansionist powers emerged on the European continent and in the Pacific. Against this fraught international landscape, East of Empire explores the threads connecting Arabs to South Asians: artists, clerics, poets, and diplomats; journalists and activists; statesmen and spies.

Theses transregional relationships took place, as May Hawas has phrased it, “through the grids” of late empire.⁴ They have long remained underreported and underappreciated, in part because they can be glimpsed in the historical record only in fragmentary ways, as if by the light of a flickering lamp. Taken together, however, they illuminate the rapid changes then underway across the British Empire and expand our understanding of the development, in the era immediately preceding decolonization, of complementary and competing visions for the future of the Middle East, South Asia, and the broader extra-European world.

The connections that existed between these places had much to do with the context and shared experience of British imperialism; yet by 1919, empire was only one in a multiplying set of axes tying Egypt to India, the Middle East to South Asia, and all of these places to Europe. At the very center of the map lay one city: Cairo. While the plot of this drama will whisk us from the grand hotels of Mayfair to Delhi’s garden city, the Egyptian capital—the City Victorious, as its name translates into English—is in many ways the star of the show.

During the interwar years, Cairo emerged as a truly global metropole. It was the center of a burgeoning Arab diplomatic bloc and the seat of a bid to revive the Islamic Caliphate,⁵ the headquarters of a powerful feminist movement,⁶ and the acknowledged “jugular vein” of British imperial defense planning. The Suez Canal (and increasingly, Egyptian airfields) served as the vital artery connecting Britain to its Asian and Pacific colonies⁷—a fact of which officials in Delhi and Simla were forever having to remind their less globally minded colleagues in London.⁸ By the 1920s, Cairo also boasted the most developed free press and media sectors the Arabic-speaking world had ever seen. Its newspapers, publishing houses, radio, and recording industries catered to diverse readerships and listening audiences that spanned North Africa, the Middle East, and much of the Asian continent. The Muslim press in India, as in Singapore and Malaya, relied on Cairo for news and commentary. Musicians from throughout the Arab-Islamic world came there to record, while students from as far away as China and Japan were enrolled in its prestigious universities.⁹ Partly for these reasons, the Egyptian capital became an epicenter of interwar anticolonialism and a host of related isms, among them pan-Islamism, Arab nationalism, feminism, and Easternism (on which, more in a minute). Thus what happened in Cairo mattered not only to Egyptians and Arabs but also to a whole host of actors in other parts of the world, from the English Channel to the Bay of Bengal and even further afield.

Beginning in the 1920s, Cairo, like many colonial cities, underwent a series of major societal, cultural, and political transformations, catalyzed by higher levels of education and literacy, shifting gender norms, increased trade and geopolitical interconnectivity, and the soaring popularity of press and new media—particularly the borderless, instantaneous, and visceral transmissions of broadcast radio.¹⁰ As more and more Egyptians from diverse backgrounds and social classes were empowered to participate in the public life of their country, the discourse surrounding what it meant to be patriotic, modern, and right-thinking—a man or woman “of the times”—began to change.¹¹ Among the most prominent and well-documented results of this transition was a shift, between the 1920s and 1930s, toward a specifically Arab and Islamic identity;¹² but the expanding reach of media and education also contributed to the empowerment of women,¹³ emerging class consciousness among workers,¹⁴ radical new trends in art and literature,¹⁵ and growing awareness of and identification with other Eastern countries: countries that were perceived as sharing an authentic cultural affinity with Egypt, though they were not necessarily Arab or Muslim. This included a strong identification, among a diverse cross section of Egyptian political thinkers and activists, with India and its anticolonial independence movement.¹⁶ Simultaneously, Indian poets, anticolonial nationalists, women’s rights activists, and pan-Islamists became increasingly interested and involved in the cultural, religious, and political developments taking place in the Middle East; and so they too found their way to Cairo. Among historians, a debate has emerged about how to explain this apparent cross-pollination and what to call it. In this book, the affinity that tied together a broad cross section of Indians, Egyptians, and other Arabs throughout the interwar period is described as Easternism.

Many historians writing about this period have picked up Easternism for closer inspection—only to place it swiftly back down again. They argue that it is too vague, amorphous, and internally contradictory to be of much use as an analytical category.¹⁷ They are not wrong. Between the 1920s and 1940s, there were multiple (perhaps even countless) visions of the East in circulation. To sketch only some of the most prominent variations, there was the East of Orientalists—foreign, exotic, and “other”;¹⁸ the Anticolonial East—a geography of allies in the battle against foreign domination;¹⁹ the Spiritual East—often juxtaposed against the Materialist West;²⁰ the Islamic East—a region populated largely (though never exclusively) by Muslims;²¹ the Cosmopolitan East—a rich tapestry of cultures bound together by commerce and ideational exchange;²² and the Strategic East—a geopolitical bloc or bulwark that might counter other constellations of power.²³

It is important to underscore that none of these concepts were mutually exclusive; rather proponents of Easternism tended to connect several typologies together into a personally appealing hybrid. Thus in his memoirs, the Aga Khan revisited his long-cherished dream of an Eastern bloc of Muslim nations, serving as both a moral compass to the world and a healthy check on the power of Europe and the United States.²⁴ For the Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi, the East was unapologetically anticolonial; in the pages of her magazine, l’Egyptienne, it was frequently ancient and exotic; but it was also, crucially, a stage upon which women from many cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds would together forge the future in their image.

Given the dizzying array of potential Easts, it was never what academics would call a “coherent” political or intellectual project; this did not prevent it from being a highly prominent feature of both political discourse and political action in Egypt, India, and the broader Arab-Asian region throughout the interwar period. Easternism was, moreover, an intellectual, literary, artistic, and pop-culture phenomenon—employing what were at times stereotypical portrayals of “ancient” or “exotic” lands that excited Indian and Egyptian imaginations no less than European ones.²⁵ As we will find at a conference held in Jerusalem in 1931, pan-Islamic activities could be Easternist, for the East could be construed as a predominantly Muslim space, just as pan-Asianists in Japan imagined it as an essentially Buddhist one—and just as both looked to and embraced Hindu figures like Gandhi and Tagore as “authentically Eastern” regardless.²⁶

Thus while conceding the obvious validity of intellectual critiques of Easternism, I have nevertheless found it an impossible term to part with, for the simple reason that an amazing cross section of Egyptians and Indians from radically different cultural and intellectual backgrounds have articulated their affinity as peoples of the Sharq, Orient, or East. In doing so, they claimed to belong to something larger than nation, language, religion, or ethnicity, while simultaneously embracing aspects of many of these identities. Acknowledging the broad sweep that Easternism sought to embrace, some authors have argued that when people spoke about the East, what they were actually gesturing toward was an ecumenical space of anticolonial solidarity that stood in opposition to Western imperialism.²⁷ Again there is a great deal of truth in this—Easternism certainly was anticolonial, if not all then at least most of the time—and yet this was still, as I have tried to elucidate, only one of its many registers. I have not felt justified in reducing Easternism to its anticolonial politics, given that “the East” clearly evoked both more and less than an alliance against empire for many of the people who wrote and spoke and moved about it over the course of many years.

There were Easts—a great many Easts—that were imagined, and then there was the East that was to some extent built. This book is not an intellectual history of Easternism (although fortunately for us all, rigorous scholarly work of this kind is underway).²⁸ Instead Easternism here serves as an admittedly untidy “way in” to the equally untidy web of real-world connections that bound together two culturally, linguistically, and geographically distinct countries—Egypt and India—between World Wars I and II. The many competing ideas and ideologies that swirled around these relations—British imperialism, nationalism and feminism, anticolonialism and pan-Islam, socialism and Easternism—frequently merged, overlapped, or clashed. They are all vital instruments for making sense of the action; but, I hasten to add, they are not, in and of themselves, the point.

In considering the influence, competition, and confluence of ideas like empire, nation, pan-Islam, feminism, socialism, anticolonialism, and the East over the course of two and a half decades, my aim is not to delineate the frontiers between these ideas or otherwise parse one from the other. As we will see (and as we no doubt know from our own experiences), complex worldviews were frequently recast in alternating registers and vocabularies, as circumstances or audiences might require (in some ways comparable to what we might now call code-switching). Thus the Abyssinian Crisis (subject of chapter 4) inspired widespread expressions of racialized anticolonial solidarity with the Christian African kingdom of Ethiopia; within a year, the outbreak of a revolt against the British administration in Palestine (subject of chapters 5 and 6) prompted many of the same people to discover the depths of their common bonds as Arabs or Muslims.

There were those—the poet Muhammad Iqbal, the feminists Huda Shaarawi and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and of course the Hindu universalist Mohandas K. Gandhi—whose ideas and ideals were more fixed. They were, and are, exceptional instances of activist philosophers, informed more by the content of their principles than the vagaries of the world around them; yet as we will see, even Gandhi was forced to bend before the gale-force winds of change that engulfed the globe during World War II.

By contrast, the pragmatists—those willing to equivocate for the sake of political expediency, or indeed survival—were legion.²⁹ Trying to pin down the fixed content of their worldviews is, as one of my anonymous reviewers helpfully offered, “like nailing jelly to a wall.” What is apparent is that in the highly charged context of the mid-1930s and early 1940s, almost any political stance or ideological commitment involved some level of internal contradiction. Thus prioritizing anticolonial or Arab nationalist commitments seems to have resulted not infrequently in collusion with Fascist Italy, whose own colonial exploits and oppression of Muslims were infamous. Similarly Indian and Arab nationalists who felt antifascism was paramount found themselves in the unlikely position of siding with the British Empire in its war against Hitler. On a handful of issues, notably the escalating crisis in British Mandate Palestine, the interests and priorities of many actors converged across a broad Easternist spectrum; on others, like the competing political currents of liberal empire and fascist totalitarianism, they parted like the Red Sea.

Throughout the 1920s and deep into the 1930s, a multiplicity of heterodox Eastern visions flowed in and out of alignment with one another as headlines changed, alliances evolved, and priorities shifted. With the onset of war in Europe in 1939, however, the stakes of these ideological differences began to spike. Subjected to the unrelenting pressure of war, the many strands of Easternism splintered, putting paid to the more fluid and open-ended possibilities that had animated preceding decades. In their stead emerged postwar ideologies with sharper edges, hardened national frontiers, and—following years of globally cataclysmic violence—little faith in the pacifist and humanist ideals of a bygone era. This almost chemical transformation is the background against which votes affirmed the partitions of India and Palestine in 1947, unleashing torrents of interpersonal violence and ethnic cleansing, which we have yet to staunch almost eighty years on. This, then, is the story I wish to tell: how a multiplicity of visions of a transnational, fluid, and heterodox East informed the interwar politics and diplomacy of India and Egypt—and under what conditions these visions gave way to militant nationalism, territorial partition, and large-scale ethnic cleansing across both the Middle East and South Asia.

Within this overarching narrative there are many smaller (but, I hope readers will agree, no less fascinating) stories: about the personal connections and ideational affinities forged between poets, feminists, artists, and politicians; the Khilafat crisis in India and its intra-Arab fallout; the anticolonial outrage and propaganda war that defined the Abyssinian Crisis (and presaged the dynamics of World War II); and how Indian Muslims and Eastern women fought to internationalize the Palestinian cause. I also revisit some of the more famous (and infamous) incidents from the national historiographies of Egypt, India-Pakistan, and Palestine-Israel, revealing transnational aspects and entanglements between them that have long remained obscure.³⁰

The result is a political history, but one that takes a very broad view of the political—touching on art, poetry, religion, and the power of ideas as well as grassroots activism, interparty rivalries, military strategy, and conference diplomacy. I aim to give the reader something of the texture of the times and places we are moving through, and to trace not the deterministic influence of one factor over others but the constellation of mutually informing forces at work in complex colonial societies undergoing truly momentous, world-changing transition.³¹

This may seem like a quibble, but it is one of the key reasons why the hazy cultural and geographic boundaries of Easternism are so indispensable to making sense of Egyptian-Indian ties and why, by comparison, Pan-Asianism is a term of very limited utility for understanding what Egyptians thought they had in common with Indians. Reversing the question, Pan-Asianism holds more explanatory power for Indians, who tended to view Egypt as an appendage—albeit an important one—to India’s natural Asian sphere of action and influence. In this conception, Egypt was a far western edge of Pan-Asia; especially for Nehru and Congress, the Egyptians were their chosen plus-ones to the continental party.³⁴ Turning to representatives of the All-India Muslim League working to forge ties with Egyptian and other Arab politicians, their perceived affinity was unambiguous: Muslims everywhere were conceived as part of the global umma, or community of believers. In this, the Muslim League’s leadership placed a great deal of stock as not only a spiritual bond but a basis for common political action.³⁵ This was to be a source of much friction and misunderstanding, for on the whole, Egyptian and Arab nationalists did not share Indian Muslims’ enthusiasm for pan-Islam; even Egyptian clerics motivated enough to send a delegation to the subcontinent managed to offend their hosts.³⁶ Hopefully this goes some way to illustrating that, as with many lovers, Egyptians and Indians engaged in shared admiration, cultural and political activities in the 1920s and 1930s did not necessarily see one another as they were but rather as they hoped to see themselves.³⁷

In interrogating the kaleidoscopic element of this mutual gaze and its many implications for South Asian and Middle Eastern politics, this book breaks new ground, while also extending a line of inquiry initiated by Noor Khan’s Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire, which appeared in 2011. Since then, it has remained the only book-length academic study on relations between Egyptians and Indians during the interwar years;³⁸ naturally it has profoundly influenced the present work.

Temporally, Khan begins her story in the late nineteenth century and concludes in 1939 (roughly twice the length of time dealt with here). Her book traces the links between secular nationalist currents and individuals who, by the 1920s, formed the core of the Indian National Congress and Egyptian Wafd parties. Khan’s focus is exclusively on the Egyptian side of the narrative, in particular the influence of Gandhi, Nehru, and Congress on the nationalist politics of the Wafd.

Khan’s study remains invaluable, and our ideas converge in many places; one where they part company is her use of the term anti-imperial to describe Congress-Wafd ties. Khan usefully distinguishes anti-imperialism, which she defines as a principled rejection of empire in all its guises, from anticolonialism, by which she means opposition to the domination of one’s own country by a colonial power.³⁹ While readily accepting this distinction, I am less convinced this term can be uncritically applied to the Wafd, given its role in advancing a mainstream nationalist demand for Egyptian control over the Sudan throughout the interwar years. As Eve Troutt Powell and Rami Ginat have demonstrated, belief in Egypt’s civilizational superiority and “natural right” to the Sudan was widespread, integral to Wafdist nationalism, and persisted into the 1950s.⁴⁰ Indeed, one of Mustafa al-Nahas’s key breakthroughs in negotiations with the British, reflected in the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (discussed in chapter 4), was the return of Egyptian soldiers and colonists to the Sudan. For these reasons Wafd leaders like Nahas and his predecessor, Saad Zaghlul, do not strike me as clear-cut anti-imperialists; the term anticolonial as defined by Khan seems perfectly apt. In the case of the Wafd (and in almost all others), I prefer anticolonial, as leaving the question of consistency in principles conspicuously open.

More broadly and again in contrast to the framing of Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire, this book faithfully reflects my profound skepticism of the nation-state as the inevitable or even the best available receptacle for anticolonial aspirations post-1919.⁴¹ In what follows I take seriously the “religious connections and vague assertions of Easternism” Khan passed over, ⁴² and the space they opened for alternative imaginaries of a more peaceful, prosperous, and equal world—a world depicted as lying somewhere east of existing systems of empire. These political imaginaries and projects were far more persistent than they are normally given credit for: it was not until the crises of the war years that the futures they projected were definitively foreclosed. For this reason my “interwar” narrative extends beyond 1939 and into the 1940s, to more fully account for their eclipse.

A final key distinction of the present volume is the extent to which it situates the discussion of interwar Egyptian-Indian relations within broader regional and transnational contexts (the “world” alluded to in the book’s subtitle). The result is a study that, although ostensibly about Egypt and India, devotes significant attention to events elsewhere, from Paris and London to Ankara and Addis Ababa, and—in almost every chapter—the deepening crisis in Egypt’s neighbor, Palestine. To me these events form the essential background (and in the case of Palestine, increasingly the foreground) of Egyptian-Indian relations; the more I read and thought and wrote, the more inextricably they seemed bound. It is perhaps fitting that in writing a book that engages with fluid, “borderless” imaginaries of the East, the narrative itself ultimately proved impossible to contain within national frontiers.

Part 2, “Capital of the East,” opens with the 1935 Abyssinian Crisis and closes in 1938, in the middle of the Arab Revolt in Palestine. During this brief period Cairo catapulted to greater prominence as both a strategic lynchpin of the British Empire and an Arab, Islamic, and anticolonial metropole. The chapters primarily draw on state and press archives, diaries, and correspondence to consider reactions to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and the anti-British uprising in Palestine, and how each event gave rise to differing constellations, vocabularies, and fault lines of Eastern solidarity. These crises also spurred elaborate propaganda campaigns and debates over antifascism versus anticolonial solidarity in Egypt and India—both of which would later reemerge as decisive factors during World War II.

Part 3, “Ambassadors of the East,” brings archives into conversation with personal histories and memoirs to present a series of interlocking stories about formal and informal Indian-Arab diplomacy in the years immediately preceding World War II. These chapters trace the engagement of Muslim Leaguers, Congressmen, and a Congress feminist with their Egyptian and Arab counterparts as they maneuvered between domestic agendas, the ongoing crisis in Palestine, and the looming war in Europe. Though they found causes for skepticism in their appraisals of Egyptian nationalists, Indians repeatedly overcame this reluctance, in part due to the symbolic significance they ascribed to an Eastern alliance with a prominent Arab-Muslim country. The potential depth of that alliance is glimpsed in the joint action of Egyptian and Indian feminists during an international conference in the fated summer of 1939.

Part 4, “The East at War,” traces a crescendo of wartime shocks, and the multiplying cultural and political fault lines that they both exposed and exacerbated. Against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation of Europe, the Desert War, and Japan’s lightning advance toward India, these chapters document the buckling and ultimately the fragmentation of interwar Easternism amid the immense heat and pressure of war. What ultimately emerged from the wreckage post-1945 was more militant, statist nationalisms—becoming the new political orthodoxy across much of the decolonizing world.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. For now, it’s still 1919. A world war has just ended, and there won’t be another one for years.

Notes

1. The letter appears as an appendix in A.Q. Gouda, Marid min al-Sharq (Cairo, 1950), 50–52.

2. S. Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, 2006); G.F. Hourani and J. Carswell, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Modern Times (Princeton, 1995); S.E. Sidebotham, Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route (Berkeley, 2011).

3. E. Dal Lago, R. Healy, and G. Barry, eds., 1916 in Global Context: An Anti-Imperial Moment (New York, 2018); P. Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (New York, 2019).

4. M. Hawas, “World Literature and the Question of History,” in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. T. D’haen, D. Damrosch, and D. Kadir (London, 2018), 228.

5. I. Gershoni and J. Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, 2002); J. Whidden, Monarchy and Modernity in Egypt: Politics, Islam and Neocolonialism between the Wars (New York, 2013).

6. M. Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, 1995); E.L. Fleischmann, The Nation and Its “New” Women: The Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1920–1948 (Berkeley, 2003).

7. J. Darwin, The Empire Project (Cambridge, 2010); V. Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 (Cambridge, 2013); S. Morewood, The British Defence of Egypt 1935–1940: Conflict and Crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean (London, 2005).

8. R.J. Blyth, The Empire of the Raj: India, Eastern Africa and the Middle East 1858–1947 (Basingstoke, 2003); P. Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundation of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford, 2008), 45–46; B. Westrate, The Arab Bureau: British Policy in the Middle East, 1916–1920 (University Park, 1992), 24–26.

9. A. Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (Oxford, 1995); Z.B.D. Benite, “‘Nine Years in Egypt’: Al-Azhar University and the Arabization of Chinese Islam,” Hagar 8:1 (2008); J.T. Chen, “Re-orientation: The Chinese Azharites between Umma and Third World, 1938–55,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34:1 (2014); R. Cormack, Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt’s Roaring ’20s, (London, 2021); Z. Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, 2011); J. Gelvin and N. Green, eds., Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley, 2013); N. Green, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (New Haven, 2022), 18; E. Rogan, The Arabs: A History (London, 2012), 240.

10. A. Asseraf, Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford, 2019); Z. Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians; S.J. Potter, Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920–1939 (Oxford, 2020); A.L. Stanton, “This Is Jerusalem Calling”: State Radio in Mandate Palestine (Austin, 2013); A.L. Stanton, “Can Imperial Radio Be Transnational? British-Affiliated Arabic Radio Broadcasting in the Interwar Period,” History Compass 18:1 (2020).

11. Accounts of this transformation are heavily indebted to Benedict Anderson, who emphasized the role of print capitalism in the emergence of national consciousness between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; with the advent of commercial radio after World War I, aural media greatly expanded the reach and penetration of ideas formerly carried by print. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). For the Egyptian context, see esp. Z. Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians; on the symbiotic nature of these transformations across colonial cities, see for example P. Kidambi, “Nationalism and the City in Colonial India: Bombay 1890–1940,” Journal of Urban History 38:5 (2012); S.L. Lewis, Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920–1940 (Cambridge, 2016); C.A. Lin, “Nation, Race, and Language: Discussing Transnational Identities in Colonial Singapore circa 1930,” Modern Asian Studies 46:2 (2012); R. Parr, Citizens of Everywhere: Indian Women, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism, 1920–1952 (Cambridge, 2022); S. Rahnama, The Future Is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria (Ithaca, 2022).

12. This is the central argument of Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation.

13. B. Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven, 1997).

14. J. Beinin and Z. Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Cairo, 1998).

15. S. Bardaouil, Egyptian Surrealism: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group (London, 2017).

16. As documented most comprehensively by Noor Khan. N.A.I. Khan, Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire (New York, 2011).

17. Easternism has been placed under the academic microscope a handful of times, most notably by James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni in Redefining the Egyptian Nation. They depict it as a nebulous current of thought distinct from pan-Islam and pan-Arabism, which preceded these ultimately more consequential movements and served as a short-lived conduit toward them in the early 1930s. While I don’t necessarily disagree, in what follows I use Easternism to mean something slightly different. For my purposes, Easternism serves as the umbrella term for perceived connections and affinities between Egypt and India, with plenty of space for territorial nationalisms, pan-Arabism, pan-Asianism, pan-Islam, socialism, anticolonialism, feminism, and other isms to compete and coexist beneath its canopy. Defined in this way, Easternism has a longer and more interesting trajectory, as this book seeks to demonstrate.

18. As first and most indelibly captured by Edward W. Said in Orientalism (New York, 1978).

19. This is the subject of works such as S. Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2015); C. Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York, 2007); T. Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (London, 2020); M.L. Louro, Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge, 2018); P. Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London, 2012); M. Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley, 2011).

20. Emblematic of scholarship on Rabindranath Tagore and Kakuzo Okakura. See R. Barucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (New Delhi, 2006); M.R. Frost, “‘That Great Ocean of Idealism’: Calcutta, the Tagore Circle, and the Idea of Asia, 1900–1920,” in Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social, and Political Perspectives, ed. S. Moorthy and A. Jamal (New York, 2009); I. Shigemi, “Okakura Kakuzo’s Nostalgic Journey to India and the Invention of Asia,” in Nostalgic Journeys: Literary Pilgrimages between Japan and the West, ed. S. Fisher (Vancouver, 2006).

21. C. Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (London, 2017); J.M. Landau, Pan-Islam: History and Politics (New York, 2015). On the growth and significance of Muslim cosmopolitan imaginaries in colonial India, see esp. F. Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (London, 2013); M. Hasan, ed., Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India (New Delhi, 1981); G. Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York, 1982); Y. Saikia, “Hijrat and Azadi in Indian Muslim Imagination and Practice: Connecting Nationalism, Internationalism, and Cosmopolitanism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37:2 (2017).

22. This is particularly evident in popular histories of the ancient and medieval periods; see commentary in Green, How Asia Found Herself, 10–20.

23. I see this framing as equally applicable to conceptions of the British Raj as a semiautonomous Indian Ocean empire, as it is to the nonaligned bloc in the mid-twentieth century. On the former, see Blyth, Empire of the Raj; G. Crouzet, Inventing the Middle East: Britain and the Persian Gulf in the Age of Global Imperialism (Montreal, 2022); J. Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford, 2007). On the latter, see N. Miskovic, H. Fischer-Tiné, and N. Boskovska, eds., The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi-Bandung-Belgrade (London, 2014).

24. A. Khan, World Enough and Time: The Memoirs of Aga Khan (New York, 1954), 181. Not coincidentally, this vision bears a striking resemblance to some of the rhetoric that swirled around the idea of Pakistan in the early 1940s. See V. Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India (Cambridge, 2015).

25. Ahmad Qasim Gouda’s memoir (Marid min al-Sharq, 1950) about his travels in India as a member of the 1939 Wafd embassy is a case in point. Published in 1950, it is replete with fanciful illustrations of snake charmers, elephants, and dancing girls—the publisher’s attempt, perhaps, to liven up Gouda’s account of their many political meetings.

26. On Egyptian Islamists’ admiration for Gandhi, see R.B. Sadeh, “Debating Gandhi in al-Manar during the 1920s and 1930s,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38:3 (2018); N.A.I. Khan, Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration, 114–23; on Tagore and Japan, see my note 20.

27. N.A.I. Khan, Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration, 110; E. Elhalaby, “Empire and Arab Indology,” Modern Intellectual History 19:4 (2022); C. Stolte, “‘The Asiatic Hour’: New Perspectives on the Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, 1947,” in Miskovic et al., Non-Aligned Movement, 75–93.

28. I am immensely grateful to Mattias Olesen for sharing his PhD dissertation with me and look forward to his forthcoming book on interwar Easternism in Egypt. M.G. Olesen, “The Future Is Eastern: Muhammad Lutfi Jum’a (1886–1953) and the Drang nach Osten in Interwar Egypt” (PhD diss., Aarhus University, 2023).

29. Priya Satia delivered the 2024 Nehru Memorial Lecture at King’s College, London, while I was in the final weeks of revising this manuscript. Her lucid insights into Nehru’s pragmatism, and the ways in which it limited him, helped me articulate what I was struggling to get at in a generation of his political contemporaries.

30. This book is part of a much broader wave of new transnational work on the entanglement of interwar Arab and South Asian histories, many focused on the 1947/48 partitions as connected events. See esp. A. Dubnov and L. Dobson, eds., Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford, 2019); M. Birnbaum, “Entangled Empire: Religion and the Transnational History of Pakistan and Israel,” Millennium 50:2 (2022); Devji, Muslim Zion; V. Kattan and A. Ranjan, eds., The Breakup of India and Palestine: The Causes and Legacies of Partition (Manchester, 2023); P. Sinanoglou, Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of Empire (Chicago, 2019).

31. On Indra’s Net and global history see E.M.B. O’Halloran, “From Imperial History to Global Histories of Empire: Writing in and for the 21st Century,” Past and Present Blog, Past and Present Society, 21 October 2020, https://pastandpresent.org.uk/from-imperial-history-to-global-histories….

32. Mishra, From the Ruins, 1–11; Aydin, Politics of Anti-Westernism, chap. 4.

33. This is revealed in the pathbreaking scholarship of Zvi Ben-Dor Benite and John Chen: Benite, “Nine Years in Egypt”; Chen, “Re-Orientation.”

34. On India’s sphere of influence see Blyth, Empire of the Raj; on Nehru’s pan-Asianism see Louro, Comrades against Imperialism.

35. On the emergence of pan-Islamic discourses as a political response to Western colonialism see Aydin, Idea of the Muslim World, and Mishra, From the Ruins, chap. 2.

36. An Azharite delegation sent to India met with Gandhi and produced a semiofficial report on Muslim life in India, portions of which were reprinted in the press. The contents of the report were deemed patronizing and disparaging toward Indian Muslims, causing some consternation. Dirasat li-Hawal al-Tawa’if wa al-Hayat al-Islamiyya bi al-Hind (Cairo, 1937); “Azhar: Missions to Various Countries,” n.d. FO 141/649.

37. A similar point is made by Green in How Asia Found Herself, 7.

38. An early connection was made in Robert Tignor’s article on the “Indianization” of Egypt’s administration at the hands of British civil servants imported from the raj in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Roger Owen made a similar point about Lord Cromer in 1965 (a subject recently elaborated on and theorized by Aaron Jakes). Several years later Sudha Rao and Zaheer Quraishi offered Indian perspectives on Middle Eastern history, though without engaging transnational methodologies; the first article on Egyptian-Indian nationalist links in the interwar period, by Miloslav Krása, appeared around the same time, in 1973. Together these form the only scholarly works on Egyptian-Indian ties predating Noor Khan’s groundbreaking 2011 book. R.L. Tignor, “Indianization of the Egyptian Administration under British Rule,” American Historical Review 68:3 (1963); R. Owen, “The Influence of Lord Cromer’s Indian Experience on British Policy in Egypt, 1883–1907,” Middle Eastern Affairs 4 (1965); Z.M. Quraishi, Liberal Nationalism in Egypt: Rise and Fall of the Wafd Party (Allahabad, 1970); S.V. Rao, The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Indian View (Delhi, 1972); M. Krása, “Relations between the Indian National Congress and the Wafd Party of Egypt in the Thirties,” Archiv Orientalni 41 (1973); A.G. Jakes, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crisis of Capital (Stanford, 2020).

39. N.A.I. Khan, Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration, 11.

40. R. Ginat, Egypt and the Struggle for Power in Sudan: From World War II to Nasserism (Cambridge, 2017); E.M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley, 2003).

41. My thinking on interwar alternatives to the nation-state owes significant debts to (among others) Bardaouil, Egyptian Surrealism; Devji, Muslim Zion; P. Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Cambridge, MA, 2020).

42. N.A.I. Khan, Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration, 8.