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Shopping Ideologies for Independent India? Taraknath Das’s engagement with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2016

Maria Framke
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Abstract

While looking at the world’s politics and ideologies for a vision of the future nation state, India’s anti-British freedom activists and intellectuals remained deeply ambivalent about drawing lessons from Europe’s experience of Fascism and National Socialism. Indian nationalists cautiously admired elements of National Socialist and Fascist ideology and expressed their distress with imperialist expansionism, racism, and anti-Semitism that accompanied the two regimes. This article draws on the exemplary “global biography” of one such Indian internationalist thinker, Taraknath Das, to investigate interwar Indian preoccupation with Fascism and National Socialism in articulating the discursive ground of Indian nationalism.

Keywords

IndiaItalian FascismNational Socialismindependence movementTaraknath Das
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , April 2016 , pp. 55 - 81
Copyright
© 2016 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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Footnotes

*

Maria Framke (Rostock University) is an historian of modern South Asia. She has researched and published on the history of international organizations, imperial and nationalist politics, humanitarianism, and international relations and ideologies in the twentieth century. She would like to thank Harald Fischer-Tiné, Vasudha Bharadwaj, Katharina Schembs, Götz Nordbruch, Harshit Rathi, Anna Mohr, Jonas Kreienbaum, Nitin Sinha and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on different drafts of this article.

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