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Erin M.B. O'Halloran, "East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World Between the Wars" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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C
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and non fiction authors working in around and about the Asia Pacific region. Between the first and second World wars, activists across the British Empire began to think about what their homes might look like as independent nations rather than as colonies subject to the control of London. Sometimes these thinkers found refuge and common cause in others elsewhere in the Empire, such as those in India and Egypt. As Eleanor Hallorand explores in her book east of Egypt, India and the World between the Wars, India was the jewel in the British Empire's crown, Egypt was the strategic artery that connected Britain's eastern possessions with the Metropole. Erin, in her book, explores how Indian and Egyptian thinkers were inspired by each other through the aftermath of the First World War, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Palestinian question, and the onset of the Second World War. Aaron is the Marie Sklodowska Curie European Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. So, Aaron, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about your book east of Egypt, India and the World between the Wars. Maybe. First question, why did you want to write about this particular part of the world? Why write about Egypt, India, and the connections between them, kind of what made this region during this time period ripe for study?
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D
Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a great question. I guess there's several levels of the answer. There's a personal response, which is that when I got the idea for the project, I was living in the Middle east and traveling a lot in India, and it struck me that these two places were way more organically connected to one another than I had been sort of taught or educated to think about. And I wanted to understand why that was the case. So there was a personal curiosity. But also, as somebody who was trained in the history of empire, particularly in the Middle East, I was really fascinated by the connections between different parts of the British Empire. And Egypt and India were both British colonies going through processes of, you know, kind of national awakening and decolonization around the same time. So that was the initial impetus behind the project. I just wanted to understand what the material connections between these places were, what the tangible connections between them were. And I didn't, you know, when I went looking for sources, I didn't find very much in terms of, you know, secondary literature. So that was. That was the reason why I decided that I should probably go do a PhD on the subject.
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C
So, I mean, we've covered kind of the politics of India and British India a lot on the show, so I might spend a bit less time on that. But we've not covered Egypt, I think, at all. So over this time period, we're talking about what was the status of Egypt kind of within the British Empire, how was the government constituted? How was it governed? How was it ruled by Britain? Like, what was Egypt's place in the empire?
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D
Yeah, sure. So, I mean, there's a really good reason that you haven't spoken about Egypt much on your show. It's that Egypt isn't part of Asia. So fair enough, you know, fair Play to you. And this is actually something that comes up a lot in the book, that Egypt is very close to the Asian continent. It's just across several bodies of water from what is technically Asia. For example, the Levant region, which we're talking about Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, you know, this is all part of what we technically constitute, you know, as Asia. But Egypt is on the African continent. It's very culturally connected to these places. It's very geographically and historically connected to them, but it's its own sort of thing. And during the period in question, it was part of the British Empire, was a crucially important part of the British Empire, in part as a result of this geographical location, as a sort of bridge between the Mediterranean and the Asian continent. Britain controlled the Suez Canal as a result of its position in Egypt. And that was vital given that the Suez Canal was the waterway connecting Britain to its empire in Asia Pacific region. So, so the way that Egypt was governed in the period that I'm looking at is quite complex actually, because it has both the British High Commissioner, so it is under British tutelage. It is formally after 1914, a protectorate. For a number of years prior to 1914, it's what's called a veiled protectorate. So it's an unofficial situation of protectorate. So it's, it's operating within a British imperial framework and it's under British control, but it also has its own royal family, its own monarchy. And after 1922, there's also an Egyptian parliament. The first elections are in 1924. So it's a democratically elected Egyptian parliament with a largely nationalist, you know, parliamentarians running the show there. So you have essentially three different sources of power within the Egyptian system during most of the 1920s and 30s. You have the parliament, you have the palace, the Egyptian king and his coterie, and you have the British imperial authority as well.
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C
So maybe kind of then, then, then on the other end of the political spectrum, I mean, how, you know, why and how were Egyptian and Indian anti colonial leaders connected? I mean, to what extent did they see, you know, resisting, resisting imperialism as kind of a shared cause between their, between their two place between their two countries?
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D
Yeah, so this is definitely one of sort of the crucial facts that I'm trying to put more in the spotlight with this book is the extent to which Egyptians and Indians understood their nationalist movements within their own countries as part of a shared project of liberation from colonial rule. And part of the reason behind this is a coincidence of timing that at the end of the First World War, we See massive popular uprisings in both India and Egypt around the same time point in time beginning in March of 1919. Now this isn't a total coincidence because the protests are direct kind of responses to the negotiations then underway in Paris between the great powers dividing up the conquered territories of the globe, including crucially, the Ottoman Empire. So these ongoing negotiations which involve an incredible number of countries and which I'm sure many of your listeners would already be familiar with, they have major imp, of course, for India and for other parts of Asia, China for example, but also in Egypt, it's the spark of a major popular uprising becomes known as the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. This means that the uprisings taking place in Egypt and India are in the global headlines at the same time. This is very importantly the moment where Mahatma Gandhi steps onto the world stage as the leader of the Satyagraha movement in India. And that means that the leaders of the Egyptian uprising become quite familiar with what's happening in India and with this, this very popular leader. So the awareness, the mutual kind of regard begins as a result of these popular uprisings. Now they have pre existed, I'm not suggesting that they've never heard of one another prior to that, but this is really the crucial moment where it enters, let's say the popular consciousness as opposed to simply the, you know, the awareness of, let's say those elites that have studied in Europe and the UK and have, you know, had their own sort of like friendships develop or collegial relationships develop with other students or other activists who are present in European capitals. It's 1919 where it enters the popular consciousness and where India and Egypt sort of come onto each other's radar to a different extent.
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C
Well, let's, I mean, you mentioned kind of the end of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. I mean, how does that kind of affect these kind of movements in Egypt and India?
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D
Yeah, so in India it results in the Satyagraha movement led by Gandhi, but also simultaneously and in conjunction it results in the Khilafat movement which is sort of the Muslim corollary of the Congress campaign led by Gandhi. And the two movements are allied throughout the period from 1990, 1920 up until 1922 when Gandhi calls off Satyagraha as a result of an incident of violence. But between those two years, the, the Khilafat Congress campaign results in the sort of the, it's a high watermark of Hindu Muslim collaboration in the nationalist cause during the interwar years. And it, it briefly threatens to really challenge British authority in on the subcontinent. It results in the resignation of Edwin Montague, who is the Secretary of State for India, who sides essentially with the protesters. And the crucial issue from the Khilafat perspective, perspective from the, from the Muslim perspective is the carving up of the Ottoman Empire that is taking place during the peace negotiations that the great powers are arbitrating at the time. So it's the carve up of the Ottoman lands, including the heartlands of Islam in Arabia and the Middle east, which really incense Indian Muslims in part because of pledges that were made to Indian soldiers during, like in the context of World War I. So when World War I breaks out and the Ottoman Empire enters the war on the side of the Central Powers, this is the German Austro Hungarian alliance that is facing Britain, France and Russia. The British government promises its Indian subjects that they will, in the course of prosecuting this war, protect Muslim holy sites and hold them inviolate and essentially respect Muslim sensibilities about these holy sites. But after the war ends, and we've got to remember that more than a million Indians participated In World War I, after this war ends, these same regions of the world are being carved up and, and essentially colonized by Britain and France under the new mandates system that's sort of enshrined within League of Nations. And this causes great offense to Indian Muslims as you know, it, it also, it, it does in other places, but it's, it's really Indian Muslims who are sort of the most, like, let's say, who, who have the, the, the most intense popular uprising or campaign as a result. And this has a lot of important knock on effects which I talk about in the book in terms of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the Khilafat or caliphate that the Ottoman Empire also represents. So with the dissolution of the caliphate in 1924, questions arise across the sort of Muslim majority parts of the world about what will replace it, where will the new center of gravity of Islam reside? And is it possible that this caliphate will be reconstituted in another place, whether in Cairo or in Mecca or somewhere else? So this is a question that animates Muslims and Arab nationalists across the Middle east as well as India. And it's in the conferences around this subject that Indian Muslims start to build closer personal relationships with their Arab counterparts, including a lot of Egyptian and Palestinian activists. So this is sort of the beginning of the story that I want to tell about, you know, kind of the confluence or the intersection of various branches of Arab and Islamic nationalism across the Middle east and South Asia.
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C
How important? So Tagore goes to Egypt in 1926. How important was that visit? And what connections did Tagore make when he was there?
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D
So Tagore's visit to Egypt is. It's actually the second time that he technically travels to. To Egypt, but the first time he's a very young man, so he comes back as an established poet and really a bit of a superstar both in India and in Europe by that point in time, because he has won the Nobel Prize for literature. So he travels to Alexandria first. Alexandria is the heart of the British colonial community, let's say in Egypt, it's the commercial port on the Mediterranean. So naturally there's quite a bit of European activity in Alexandria, but there's also an important Indian merchant community that's resident in Alexandria. So this is his first port of call and he's introduced by the sort of leader of the British community, the unofficial head of the British community in Alexandria. It's a packed auditorium and, you know, he's very well received and there's glowing reports in the press, you know, lots of adulation. What's important, I think, is that he then travels to Cairo. And in Cairo he's claimed by the Egyptian nationalists. So whereas when he. When he lands in Alexandria, he's really feted as a cultural figure celebrated in the west. When he's in Cairo, his hosts, the venue, the people who introduce him are all Arabic speakers, nationalist figures associated with the grand universities as well as parliamentarians who are very excited to have a poet from another part of the East. And so this is kind of an interesting dual role that figures like Tagore and indeed Gandhi play in the Egyptian setting as legible and exciting and interesting from a Western cultural perspective, as well as someone or people who are authentically Eastern. And this, I won't call it a dichotomy, but this hybrid identity that some Indian figures, including Gandhi and Tagore, sort of play in an Egyptian context is something that I am kind of at pains to explore and understand of what the intersection of east and west looks like and how different people imagine these. These, you know, these cultures or these identities as either opposed to one another or as in compensation, in dialogue with one another or as something that's, you know, sort of part of a continuity.
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C
So let's, let's kind of continue to kind of move through the history, you know, kind of another, like, big event that happens is Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. And so how does that kind of shock event drive change in India and in Egypt?
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D
Yeah, so this is Mussolini's invasion and eventual annexation of the independent kingdom of Ethiopia beginning in 1935. So the most important thing to start, like the most important starting premise of this, is that both Italy and Ethiopia, at the time this annexation occurs, are members of the League of Nations, which is ostensibly an organization whose members are not supposed to invade or go to war with one another. There's already precedence of this code being broken, particularly in the case of East Asia, where Japan has by this point begun to, you know, has. Has launched a war against China and is occupying parts of Chinese territory. But in this case, we have a really blatant example of a European power invading an African independent kingdom that is meant to enjoy protection as a full member state of the League of Nations under international law. So it's a moment that the international community is really looking to the enforcers of international law at this point in time, chief among them Britain, and expecting Britain to act to prevent the breach or the violation of international law by Italy. And that doesn't happen. So my chapter about the invasion of Abyssinia is about how this failure to uphold the rights of a. Of an African state are perceived in other parts of the non Western or colonized world. And I look at the kind of all of the different shades of opinion in both the Indian and the Arab context, as well as looking actually at some of the opinions within mandate Palestine at the time, like Zionist opinion about what's going on in Ethiopia or Abyssinia, as it is at that point in time often known in Europe. And I find this chapter really crucial, like, to understanding what then happens later during the second world War where we see bifurcations of opinion within India and across the Middle east about what the. Essentially what side they should be on in a conflict between liberal empire, Britain and France and fascist authoritarianism. In this case, we're talking about Germany and Italy. There's a precursor or a sort of a premonition of that bifurcation that takes place over Abyssinia, where some, many, I would say, probably actually like. It's quite clear it's the majority of opinion in the Egyptian and Indian contexts sides quite firmly with the Ethiopians against Italy. And there's enormous Italian propaganda at the time in these places that's trying to present Italy as somehow a friend of colonized peoples, or in particular Mussolini, as a defender of Islam or a friend to Muslims. And most people, most commentators reject this out of hand because it's so obvious that in fact, Italy represents a European power that is, you know, in the process of actively occupying and colonizing a brother non western state. So I kind of see the Abyssinian crisis as something that really brings together a lot of elements of what we might call the east or an alliance of colored people or people of color that are all really in solidarity over this issue. And there are strikes, there are protests. People go to volunteer in Ethiopia as medics or ambulance drivers. They raise funds for relief for the Ethiopians who are suffering under Italian bombardment and poison gas attacks. And this is sort of the vast majority of opinion. But there is also crucially an important, small but important minority in both India and in the Middle east that sees in Italy's invasion a crack within the west that benefits enemies of Britain. And for these anti colonials, as they would call themselves, they see Italy as an important enemy of their enemy that could be their friend. Right. So this is the beginning of a dynamic that is essentially that wedge becomes bigger over the course of the late 1930s and into the early 1940s. So that we see a lot of the figures that in 1935 are willing to essentially cheer on or support the Italian invasion because of how it is fracturing the, the order of international society that has been set up by liberal empire and because it challenges British domination in the region. They see that as something that ultimately can help them. A lot of those same figures by 1941, 42 are resident in Nazi Germany, are residents in Berlin and have become the anti colonial allies of the Nazi regime because again, they see World War II as a venue that's going to break Britain's hold over the Middle east and South Asia. And anything that accomplishes that from their perspective is a good thing. And simultaneously, a lot of the people that side with The Ethiopians in 1935 are in the context of World War II, asked to make, you know, incredibly difficult decisions between their, their opposition, staunch opposition to fascism, their complete and total rejection of Nazi ideology and fascist ideology, and their anti colonial and nationalist commitment to ending, you know, British imperial control of their territory. So I look in detail at how figures like Nehru and Gandhi in India and the Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Al Nahas, and Egyptian activists and feminists, as well as some Palestinian activists and figures, how they all grapple with first the Abyssinian crisis and then with the growing sort of menace of fascism and Nazism on the European continent.
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C
So we'll come back to World War II in a second and actually maybe back to the specific historical question in a second. But before I do that, I mean your book does cover some of like some of the cultural connections and Also talks about kind of, I think, I think the rise of kind of connections between women in India and Egypt. And I wonder if you want to talk a bit more about those, maybe some of these cultural connections or these other connections that might get, you know, left by the wayside if we keep talking about like international politics.
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D
Totally. Yeah. So I think what's really crucial for potential readers to understand is that I'm at pains to not silo or sideline these dimensions of the question and to treat them as something other than international politics. Instead. This is very much, I would say, a big tent book that is looking at the grand sweep of history and the grand sweep of international politics during this period in time and uses talking about feminist movements, uses talking about art and poetry as other ways into getting at these crucial kind of political and social dynamics that, you know, that are much more kind of familiar, let's say, if you're used to reading histories of World War II or military histories or, you know, diplomatic histories in general. So I talk a lot about the role of feminist movements in India and Egypt during the 20s and 30s, the growing sort of friendship between various feminist leaders as they start to see their own movements as, as really connected. And there's, there's several factors that play into this. One of them is that they, they meet, generally speaking, initially, at least, at feminist conferences that are being held in Europe. And the Egyptian and Indian representatives initially are the only women coming from non Western or non white countries. And so they naturally seek out each other's company and compare their experience as colonized peoples. Right. Living under colonial regimes. As time goes on, they are able to mobilize more of their sisters from other parts of the region. And there's a high water mark that's really reached in 1935 with a big conference that's held in Istanbul that the luminaries of the Western feminist movements attend alongside more, you know, more sisters from the east than ever before. And there's, so there's, there's a lot of talk, I guess, about the, the affinity between these movements, the growing affinity between them, and also the growing sort of discord within the broader feminist collective over international politics as the, as the anti colonial movements in the east gain momentum, gain steam. And what we end up with is a situation where the Indian and Egyptian delegates at a conference in Copenhagen in 1939 actually stage a walkout because by that point they are feeling so kind of abandoned by their white feminist sisters, so out of sight, step with the priorities of those movements that they, they see no other choice than to kind of, you know, register their displeasure and withdraw from, from this, this conference. This dynamic isn't about, you know, women actually. This dynamic is something that's almost sort of pervasive by 1939, where we see the priorities and the prerogatives of, of people in colonized countries. Their demand for self determination and to be taken seriously as equal partners is coming up against the very different sort of priorities within the west that is then on the verge of World War II, and as a result sees its own crises, its own sort of dynamics within their own societies as far more threatening, as far more urgent. Right. And has kind of lost sight of the project of liberty for all, let's say. So it's a really interesting parallel to our own times, I think, where we have segments of society that are extremely mobilized about events going on in the non Western world. We can think of lots of examples, I'm sure, but Palestine is the one that this conference in 1939 falls apart on. And that's very much a subject that is, you know, animating a similar level of discord within international fora and even within, you know, domestic context in Western countries as well. And, and I see those dynamics as really telling that we're not actually in a different place than we were in 1939. We're, we're rehearsing a lot of the same, a lot of the same dynamics as, as, as those from colonized environments or those who are living under occupation or those who are, you know, in the midst of struggles for basic rights, come up against the, the sense that we have in Western countries that our own domestic societies are under threat from internal divisions, from, you know, threats to our, to our democratic system, et cetera, and that these external issues are like less important or not a priority in the same way. So that's one of the, that's one of the ways that like the feminist issue, let's say, plays into a discussion of a much broader political dynamic. Simultaneously, I talk a lot artists and poets, and I use poetry as a way into the mindsets of the period to understand how people were making sense of, of, of the events that they were living through and you know, to kind of give voice to different perspectives along the political spectrum. And I, I write a lot about surrealist artists in Cairo. This is, you know, I'm, I'm riff thing off of the work of amazing art historians who laid the foundations for this piece. But what I'm doing with my discussion of the, of the collectives, the surrealist Collectives and the poets who are, you know, operating in Egypt and India at this time is to try and illustrate the countervailing forces that were fighting really hard in this period to keep a humanist ethic alive amidst growing threats from fascism, authoritarianism, nationalism, and militarism. So it's very easy when we talk about the 30s in particular, I think, to create monoliths out of societies and to present them as sort of, you know, one main current or one main trend in social thinking. And art is a really helpful way of thinking, of. Of presenting the. The incredible richness and diversity of opinions and perspectives that are vying for attention and, you know, and capturing people's imaginations at the same time. So, again, I see a parallel to our own society where in the midst of growing, you know, threats from the far right and authoritarianism, et cetera, we're also seeing some of the most incredible cultural and artistic production coming from a really diverse range of voices. And it's an important reminder that all of these things exist simultaneously in society, and they are expressing really radically different visions of the present world as well as the potential future. So I think that it's really helpful for me to be able to tap into artistic and cultural production as a way of presenting to readers, you know, the latent futures that were sort of embedded within this. This period of time that. That seemed exciting and, you know, very engaging to people living through that era that they. That they imagined maybe as being just as possible or just as real as the, you know, as the descent into war that we're actually mapping.
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C
So let's kind of maybe go back to kind of some of these political questions. So one of the things that happens there during this period is the Palestinian question, which then later becomes the Israel question. How does the question of what to do about Palestine kind of affect relations with the British in both Egypt and in India?
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D
Yeah, so it ends up being one of the biggest sort of leitmotifs of the book. And I will say this was not my initial intention. It was simply unavoidable in the archives. Right. As soon as I got into the archives and I was doing the actual work, I think I was probably about two years into the PhD and I remember going back to my supervisor, the brilliant historian Margaret McMillan, and saying to her, oh, my God, I've made a huge mistake. This project is actually about Palestine. Like, there's no way to talk about Egypt and India in the 20s and 30s, 30s as two parts of the British Empire without talking about the big elephant in the room between them, which is the British Mandate in Palestine, that's like the third piece of the puzzle, right? And absolutely essential to understanding how the relations between these two countries develop over the course of the 30s. And ultimately, as I was to discover, really, really essential to understanding how we even arrive at the partition of India, Pakistan. You can't, you people have been telling the story of India, Pakistan's partition for decades without talking about the role of Palestine within it. And that's, I think, one of the major correctives that my book is able to offer is how essential it is to understand the role of, you know, the Palestine question and the way that it was being handled and the way it was being debated and all of the activism and activity that was generated around the Palestine question at this point in time. How essential a piece of the story that is to the eventual partition of India, Pakistan in 1947. So to talk about, you asked about the British Empire's sort of role in all this. Now, obviously the British are in charge of all three of these places. One of the things that I found was that within the British Imperial historiography, there's a general sort of acknowledgment almost, you know, almost an assumption that's latent in a lot of the British Imperial historiography that naturally there's many different branches of the Empire, there's many different offices, and so inevitably they're at odds with one another. Inevitably they all have different priorities and they're all at each other's throats half the time because we're talking about offices that are full of men with egos and, you know, prerogatives and a sense that they probably know better than everybody else. So we end up with turf battles over the various parts of the empire as a result. But within the various national historiographies of the post colonial world, within, let's say, the Arab or Middle Eastern historiography, within the Indian historiography, this insight is lost to a great extent much of the time. And you end up with stories of, you know, the, the battle against the British, as if the British were monolithic, just as within the British Imperial historiography, they tend to talk about Egyptians in monolithic terms or Palestinians in monolithic terms. Right. So one of the things that I was trying to do in my account of this period is to give, give back the, the nuance and the complexity and the, the, the, the devilish sort of infighting going on within the British imperial structure over Palestine. And what you see during the 30s is an almost paralyzing deadlock between the various offices involved because they all have diametrically opposed opinions about what Britain ought to do within the Foreign Office, that it has its agents all across the Middle east, all across the Arabic speaking world. You know, the agents in those places are writing home to London saying, listen, we've got to get out of Palestine and we've got to stop it with this, with this colonial project. We have to stop allowing unfettered European immigration to Palestine because it's ruining our relationships with all of the surrounding countries. So the Foreign Office ends up in a place where it's quite opposed to the continuation of the Balfour Declaration's mandate to encourage and facilitate Jewish immigration from Europe to Palestine. And simultaneously the Colonial Office, which is directly responsible for the colony, the mandate in Palestine is really hostile to the Foreign Office getting involved and it sees this as really none of the Foreign Office's business. The India Office meanwhile, has a grave concern over what's taking place in Palestine because of the way that it's affecting domestic politics in India because of course there's this massive Muslim, Indian, kind of very powerful and very large Indian Muslim contingent in India that is lobbying its representatives and governors and the Viceroy saying, you know, this policy taking place in Palestine is unjust and it's against the interests of Muslims there who make up the vast majority of the population. And therefore the India Office tends to side with the Foreign Office against the Colonial Office. What ends up happening is essentially a tennis match between all of the different factions essentially trying to influence cabinet and cabinet going back and forth over whether or not it is supportive of the continuation of the British Mandate, whether Palestine should be partitioned into Jewish and Arab halves, whether whether Britain should pull out, whether it should stop Jewish immigration entirely. And there's, you know, essentially a change in British policy almost every six to eight months it seems over the course of the, the 1930s that, you know, really complicates the process of, of governing the territory and certainly results in all kinds of unintended consequences in terms of Britain's relations with other parts of the Middle east region as well as its, its relations with its Indian subjects. So by 1938, this has the, the matter has become such a crisis as a result of, you know, growing violence in Palestine. There's a massive uprising, a peasants uprising that takes place against the continuation of the, of British rule and the, and, and Jewish immigration to Palestine. And this, this is exacerbated of course by the situation in Europe where by 1938, you know, antisemitism is rampant not only within Germany, but also in many other countries. So we have increasing numbers of Jews who are fleeing Europe and seeking safe haven, haven. And at this point in time, most western countries, certainly the United States, Canada, Australia, but also the Scandinavian countries, most European countries have very strict limits or no tolerance limits on Jewish migration to their countries. And this means that Palestine is one of the only places that Jews are able to, to migrate to. So this creates an incredible strain on, you know, this, this country that has been governed as a colony for 20 years at this point in time and, and where the, the peasant population is increasingly disenfranchised by the arrival of European migrants. This whole kettle of, you know, the cauldron, I would say this entire cauldron of discontent bubbles over in 1935 and violent peasant uprising begins. The British are brutally suppress it and it creates horrible discord and tension for the British Empire and other parts of its empire, including Egypt, naturally, as well as India. This results in conferences, conference diplomacy, an increasing effort to sort of get the Arab and Muslim world together to defend Palestine from partition or, or full takeover by, you know, by the Jewish community. And this, this whole kind of, this, this awful situation results in increasingly close ties between Indian Muslims and, and Arab activists. So it's in the context of these conferences that Indian Muslims begin to see the changing character of international politics in the late 1930s. And they witness that their claim to, you know, to significance within the British imperial structure that used to be based on their religious identity, their identity as Muslims. Right, their communal identity, that this is no longer holding the water that it used to. And they realize that simultaneously the draw of nationalism, the claims of nationalism are becoming much more viable, much more interesting in the international fora, that this is certainly where most Arab nationalists have fallen. So most of the, most of the parliamentarians and activists that they're meeting from other parts of the Middle east are presenting themselves not as Muslims but as Arabs. And they see the conflicts in Palestine in, in national terms as, as a, you know, as an ethnic or national conflict and not as something that has to do particularly with religion. There are important reasons for this, including that of course, Palestinians were Jews, Muslims and Christians. So to be a Palestinian wasn't necessarily a marker of, of religious identity. But also the Arab nationalists within their own societies are essentially trying to build modern nation states, often in the teeth of a very conservative impulse in society that is coming from the ulema and the, you know, the clerics. So these Arab nationalist forces are increasingly seeing themselves as, you know, secular people, and they want secular societies with parliamentary systems. They don't want religious rule. And so this is. This is perplexing, let's say, to the Muslims coming from India, who's, you know, who have for a long time identified themselves primarily on the basis of religion. And in the context of the 1930s, it's the Palestine question that brings them face to face with this transformation underway within the vocabulary, the lexicon of international society. And in London, they are refused participatory rights or even observation rights at a major conference on Palestine that's taking place between the British government, the Zionist organizations, and the leaders of the Arab states and the delegates on behalf of the Palestinians, negotiators on behalf of the Palestinians. The Indian Muslims refused entry to this conference on the basis that the British government does not want to admit a religious dimension to the problem. They only recognize the national claims being made by the Arabs on one side and the Zionist organizations on the other side. This is incredibly perplexing to the Indian Muslims because the Zionist organizations are, of course, made up of what at the time is called world Jewry. This includes Jews coming from South Africa, from the United States, from territories entirely outside of the British Empire, from Germany, et cetera. And all of these Jews are given a seat at the table as a result of their membership within a collective that's presenting itself not as a religious organization, but as a national organization, a civilization, secular organization. So it's this conference and this experience that gets the Indian Muslim League thinking about, well, could we also present ourselves in this way? Could we as Indian Muslims become a nation? Could we start to present ourselves in the ways that the Zionists are presenting themselves? And would that hold more legitimacy or more viability as a political stance in our negotiations with the British? On that same visit to London is when these delegates of the Indian Muslim League first float the idea with the Secretary of State for India, Lord Sutland, that, well, what if we were to partition India into a Muslim nation alongside an Indian Hindu nation? Would that be a. Would that be an acceptable settlement from the perspective of the British government and the British encourage the Indian Muslim League to proceed along these lines to sort of explore the possibilities inherent within this. Those delegates come home and talk to Jinnah and say, you know, we have to change the way we're talking about ourselves. We have to stop presenting ourselves as a. As a religious community. We have to stop talking about ourselves as a minority religious group. We need to start talking about our community as a nation. And it's within six months of those initial conversations that Jinan makes, his very fateful speech at Lahore in 1940, including the demand for Pakistan and his insistence, his thesis that the Muslims of India are not a minority community or a religious community, they are in fact a nation. So that's a very long answer to your question, but gives hopefully an overview of the significance of Palestine really for relations in South Asia as well as of course for relations within the British Empire and the Middle East.
- [48:23]
C
Well, I mean, so you've kind of gone through this whole kind of research project now and kind of exploring all these different connections in all these different ways. I mean, how does that kind of change your view of, of, of how kind of anti imperialist movements kind of grew kind of, whether in general or within the British Empire. And in terms of, like in, in terms of, of the connections between regions, you know, connections between the, to use that term, you know, the quote unquote, Global South. Well, I guess it wasn't quite the Global south at the, that time, but now that you've kind of gone through this research project, I mean, how has your view of these things changed?
- [49:03]
D
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I think I appreciate you making a reference to the Global south because in my book I'm talking a lot about a very expansive east. And one of the contentions that I end up with is that this east becomes what we subsequently call the Global south, right? They use the vocabulary of the East. The nationalists that I'm researching use the word east or char or Orient or whatever. They use that word in the way that people would, you know, by the 70s be talking about the south, right, The Global south or the third world in the late 50s and early 60s like that, that, so there's almost in the sense a shifting of geographical center of gravity that moves from east to, to Third World to South to you know, developing nations or I don't even know, like, where are we now? I think now we're in, we, we talk about, we talk about, you know, the, the, the non white world increasingly. We talk about the non Western or non white world. And I think that vocabulary will continue to shift. Right. I think we're going to continue to come up with new ways that feel like it's articulating this same power imbalance, this same kind of dynamic of colonizer, colonized, which in the period that I'm researching tends to be articulated as the East. And so I guess, like, how, how has it changed the way that I think about it, I think the main thing is the fluidity that's what really strikes me about these movements is how, how fluid they are in terms of their, their self definition, what they find like the prioritization of different goals. And this is something that I'm kind of at pains to track in the book, is how we move from quite broad, fluid, you know, horizon less imaginations of a postcolonial order that are going to be based on real multilateralism and universal humanist values, et cetera. How we move from that, you know, admittedly, extremely, extremely idealistic big tent to what I see happening during the late 30s and World War II, which is the fragment, fragmentation of all of these movements, the splintering of them into mutually hostile factions. And that's again something that we see replay throughout the history of the 20th century and beyond, right? And that we're still watching happen in our own times. How there's not one left and there's not one global south, there's many. And that there's an enormous amount of mutual recrimination taking place between these factions. But there are moments where they seem to kind of come back together and imagine themselves as part of something broader, something bigger. And then there's moments of fragmentation. So I think it's this, this understanding of it as always in flux, as non linear, and that the alliances change, priorities change, usually in result of, you know, in response to context. So that as the global environment changes, as the headlines change, as the stakes either become higher or lower, we see real metamorphoses taking place in the DNA of these movements. And so I think that that kind of, that fluidity or that transience is the number one thing that stands out to me.
- [53:07]
C
So with that, I think that's a great place to end our conversation with Aaron o', Halloran, author of east of Egypt, India and the World between the Wars. Two final questions for you, Erin. First of all, where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work? And what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be?
- [53:30]
D
So in terms of finding my work, if you Google my name, Erin M for Mother, b for Barbara O', Halloran, it's quite a mouthful, but erinmbohalleran.com, my website has all of my material up and I try to post any media interviews or articles that I author there as well. And in terms of what's next, I'm currently finishing my second book, which is called Guernica Orientale. And this is a book about the painting and the attack. Guernica. So the attack on the Basque town in 1937 in the context of the Spanish Civil War, the painting that Picasso almost immediately created in response. And how these two sort of events, one, you know, very one, one, one military, one artistic, sit kind of at the intersection of a conversation about colonial violence in the Middle East, North Africa that spans 100 years, from 1911, when the first bomb is thrown out of an airplane in Libya, all the way up to the current colonial aerial attacks on civilians that are taking place in the Middle east in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. So that's what I'm currently working on.
- [54:49]
C
So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon, on Twitter at Nick R I Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to Asia review of books.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter at bookreviewsasia. That's reviewsplural and you can find many more authors, new books Notebook and new booksnowberg.com we're on my favorite podcast apps, Apple Podcasts. Spotify. Rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends, of course, any of those writing in, around and about Asia. Stay tuned for more coming up on the show. But before then, Aaron, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [55:24]
D
Thanks for having me. Sam.