This chapter explores the networks and internationalism of Tagore-associate and Greater India Society (GIS) co-founder Kalidas Nag (1892-1966). In the historiography on Indian interwar internationalism, Nag remains a side-character operating in the shadow of Tagore and has elicited considerably less attention than his more famous contemporaries, such as Subhas Chandra Bose and M.N. Roy, who each have inspired a voluminous literature. Yet Nag was arguably one of the most widely travelled and well-connected Indian intellectuals of his generation. Moving with equal poise in international scholarly, Orientalist, and literary circles, Nag was, unlike Roy and Bose, not a political activist engaged in an all-out assault against the British Raj. Instead, he was a “university personality” and tireless institution builder who subtly attacked the Raj in the realm of knowledge by establishing rapport with scholars and writers across the globe. His dazzling and ever-expanding itinerary was, quite literally, “unbound” and covered all continents. Steering clear of extreme political positions that would jeopardize his freedom of movement, Nag acted as a savvy “go-between” and used his considerable domestic and global network to organize the Greater India movement. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the GIS radically and lastingly reconfigured the narration of India's ancient past by spreading a popular awareness of its historical role as Asia's cultural and spiritual fount.

Nag's interwar trajectory and travels bring into focus a range of networks and geographies that are rarely studied in relation to Indian internationalism.