Harald Fischer-Tiné
Indian Overseas Migration and Global Anticolonial Networks, c. 1905-1950: Political Imaginaries, Social Composition and Local Entanglements
This Indo-Swiss research initiative has been designed jointly Prof Harald Fischer Tiné (ETHZ) and Prof Naina Manjrekar (IIT Bombay). It is co-funded by the SNFS in Switzerland and the ICSSR in India.
With a geographical focus on Switzerland and adjacent countries, the project seeks to examine the influence of Indian overseas migration on anti-colonial movements and ideas in the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1900 and 1940 the global migrancy of traders, students, soldiers, sailors, plantation and factory workers became intertwined with an emergent global network of organised anticolonial resistance. The aim of this project is to investigate the role that this geographically dispersed Indian diaspora played in a global struggle against the imperial world order. It will use archival methods to examine the geographical scale, social composition, and political imaginations of the international networks of émigré Asians, which contributed to the movement to end the British Empire in India and beyond.
There are two important gaps in the existing scholarship on the global history of diasporic Indian anticolonialism that this project seeks to address. Firstly, it addresses the overwhelming focus on the imperial metropolises of London and Paris as sites of anticolonial activity and the neglect of other ‘neutral’ spaces as sites of revolutionary activity. In particular by recovering the role of Switzerland, it contributes to our understanding of the global scope of these émigré revolutionary networks in non-imperial spaces. Moreover, this project also aims to integrate Swiss hubs of revolutionary activity like Zürich, Lausanne, and Geneva with neighbouring centres in Germany, Italy, and France by looking at the intersecting movements of political activists both with South Asian students, soldiers, and prisoners of war across this vast region as well as with various sections of their respective host societies. In doing so, the project addresses the second significant gap in the existing scholarship: the absence of non-elite overseas Indian migrants from global political history. Research on the global web has hitherto focused predominantly on individual émigrés who, as a rule, were Western-educated and played prominent public roles. Yet, it has left a significant lacuna: very little is still known about the political worldviews of the multitude of Indians who emigrated for short or long terms—the traders, students, plantation officials and workers, sailors and wartime combatants, coolies, refugees, and prisoners of war who traversed long distances by land or sea to Europe. How did these subaltern migrants perceive—and participate in—the Indian independence struggle? In what ways were their perceptions and actions influenced by factors such as migration, social class, and global encounters? What was the relation between the prominent political individuals which scholars have paid attention to and the so far largely invisible students, the millions of mobile Indian soldiers of the two World Wars, and the sailors working on merchant and naval ships? How did all these groups interact with the institutions and societies of the countries they lived in or passed through? By asking these questions, the project will recover the lost political histories of Indian migrants and their contributions to Indian decolonization and broader anticolonial politics. In order to do so, the project is organized into two dedicated working packages (WPs) which will examine different facets of the Indian anticolonial organizations in Europe. WP 1, (conducted by Dharika Vishwanathan Athray at ETHZ), will focus on Indian students, activists and diplomats in Switzerland and WP 2 (Conducted by Bipasha Ray at IIT-B) on Indian sailors, soldiers, and prisoners of war in central and southern Europe. The combination of these different approaches promises a cross-fertilization of the two PI’s complementary expertise in intellectual history and social history respectively.
Approaching the research questions through these different and equally crucial angles will ensure a thorough, nuanced and comprehensive reconstruction of an important page of global history, South Asian history, and the history of migration and diaspora. Through research visits, shared workshops and conferences bringing together the research and expertise of other international scholars, this project aims to stimulate scholarly interest, debate and publications on a hitherto under-researched area of the relation between overseas mobility/migration and decolonization.
Bumpy Rides to Modernity: A Global History of Cycles and Cycling in South Asia (c. 1870 – 1990)
What happens to mobility technologies when they travel across continents and cultures? This book project seeks to answer this question by exploring the transcultural history of one of the most influential ‘western’ mobility technologies of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the bicycle. The focus is on South Asia, a region that is not only vastly different from the bicycle producing countries of the West in cultural terms, but that received the new technology also in the problematic context of British colonialism. How did this constellation affect the proliferation, adoption and adaptation of two-wheelers on the Indian subcontinent? While the literature on the trajectories and sociology of the bike and of cycling in the Europe and North America is copious and sophisticated, our knowledge of global cycling history is fragmentary and potentially biased, as there exists but very little research on the social and cultural history of the two-wheeler in non-western regions.
The study of the symbolic and material significance of cycles in the Indian subcontinent thus not only helps to fill a glaring research lacuna, but it also complicates popular self-serving narratives that glorify products of Western techno-modernity as benevolent gifts to the so-called ‘Global South’. Situated at the intersection of, inter alia, Global History, South Asian History, STS and Mobility Studies, the first in-depth account of the bicycle and cycling in South Asia can help overcome the monocultural and West-centric biases that still structure the bulk of the research in the history and sociology of individualised mobility and transport.
For analytical purposes, I have identified four pertinent case studies that define the different work-packages of the project. Taken together, they cover almost 120 years of history, beginning with Imperial heyday around 1870 and ending with the onset of economic liberalisation in India around 1990. Each of the four modules addresses at least one umbrella theme or macro-historical development relevant for global and/or regional South Asian history. And each of the work-packages will correspond with a chapter in the planned monograph. Chapters 1 and 4 grapple chiefly with the cycle as a material object and discuss the technological aspects of its spread and usages as well as the broader social and economic dimensions of the novel technology. Chapters 2 and 3, by contrast, focus primarily on the social and cultural history of cycling as a highly individualised transport and mobility practice, as a leisure activity, as a lifestyle choice and as a sport, seeking to explore its multifarious social, cultural and political meanings.
Muscling in on Asia: the Y.M.C.A. in India and Ceylon, c. 1890-1950
The Young Men’s Christian Association (Y.M.C.A.), first founded in London in 1844, became a global organisation within a couple of decades after its inception. Although the first branches appeared in the Indian sub-continent as early as 1857, the organisation only became a significant player in India and Ceylon after 1890, when the presence of American "secretaries" (missionaries) and the flow of US capital thoroughly transformed its modus operandi. By the 1910s the success of ‘the Y’ in South Asia was so spectacular, that the British colonial government sought to cooperate with it in a variety of fields. At the same time, local religious groups, driven by the fear of an impending wave of conversions to Christianity, created their own clones of "the Y". Outfits such as the Young Man’s Hindu Association, the Young Man’s Buddhist Association, The Young Man’s Indian Association etc. copied the programme and most organisational features of the Y.M.C.A. but integrated them in an entirely different religious framework. Within the Christian Y.M.C.A., too, there was a growing ambition to rid the body from its foreign image and create stronger moorings with local society. The project attempts to elucidate these processes of "Americanisation" and "indigenisation" by concentrating on the Y.M.C.A.’s three most successful fields of activity: education and spread of technical skills, physical culture and philanthropic or "rural development" work. It is argued that it was primarily its organisational abilities as well as its efficiency in these three areas, which made the Y.M.C.A. so attractive to various constituencies. As a result, the South Asian branch of the Christian youth association gradually lost its evangelical drive and almost became sort of an "empty form", ready to be used for various, often conflicting political and social agendas.