← New Books Network
New Books Network
Swapna Kona Nayudu, "The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
00:28:37
Loading summary
Transcript27 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Swapna Kona Neidu about her book titled the Nehru An International History of Indian Non Alignment, published internationally by Cambridge University Press in 2025 and crucially published in South Asia by Juggernaut Books, which is a really important publication piece because it means that if one is a stud or teacher in South Asia, you can actually get this book at a much more accessible price, which is really useful because this book is going to help, I think, with a lot of understandings of what is going on with Indian foreign policy in the 20th century. There's obviously a lot of interest in terms of Indian non alignment thought and politics and what this means for India's international and diplomatic history. This is a big subject and obviously India was involved in a lot of things that happened in the 20th century, right? We've got the Korean War, the Suez crisis, the Hungarian Revolution, the Congo crisis, and what was India's involvement with all of this? Why was India involved? What were the ideas behind it? We've thankfully moved beyond only looking, for instance, at the ideology of countries like the Soviet Union or the US or the uk and this book really Helps us do that. Getting into some cool archives to figure out what was going on in in India politics and what that meant for other places. So clearly we have a lot to discuss. Swapna, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:40]
C
Thank you so much, Madanda, for having me here today.
- [02:43]
B
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:48]
C
Sure. Thank you so much. I'm Swapna Kunanaaido. I'm an academic at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. I was trained in history, international relations and war studies for the most part. In England and the Narrow Years is my first book that is largely based on my doctoral thesis.
- [03:06]
B
Got it. Well, it's definitely a strong start from a book publication point of view. Do you want to tell us more about why you chose this topic to write a book about?
- [03:15]
C
Sure. So a lot of the book is a sort of synthesis of questions that I was carrying with me in my mind for a long time, but didn't find answers to in the literature that I was referencing for from subfields within international relations, but also related disciplines such as global history, that in my mind had very distinctive preoccupations that weren't quite satisfying the need to look at India's external affairs in a certain way. The primary driver for the book was to ask why do we know so little of a concept that has been so central to the way that India operates in the world since Indian independence, of course, but also before Indian independence, everyone knows the term non alignment. Not everyone approves of it, but those who do and those who don't both have very little to say about it in any sort of substantive way. What is non alignment? How do we define it as an intellectual concept, but also what do we know of its history as a political project? This is the sort of leitmotif of the book, so to say.
- [04:26]
B
Yeah, that's really helpful to lay out for our foundations and makes a lot of sense. Right. The fact that we don't have answers to those questions before this book is kind of wild. Right. Of course we should have questions to that, given, as you said, how much non alignment is still very much talked about. So are there any other questions we want to lay out on the table or are those kind of the key ones for our discussion?
- [04:50]
C
I think that that is the key question. Of course, there are questions that are sort of offshoots to that question. So one of the ones that comes up very often is how non alignment is different from neutrality, for instance, which has A more sort of European First World War kind of context. And so a lot of the book also deals with kind of wading through the weeds of. Of what non alignment is not. Right. So a lot of the introduction of the book is a process of elimination in a certain way because not only has non alignment been understood very poorly, it's also been misunderstood quite a bit. And so, yeah, so the starting sort of chapters of the book really sort of deal with that.
- [05:38]
B
Yeah, that's helpful to kind of clarify. Right. One must define something for what it is and for what it's not. Both of those pieces are really key. Yeah. All right, so we've got this then.
- [05:47]
C
Focus.
- [05:47]
B
Focus on non alignment and kind of investigating, excavating in some sense, you know, amongst all the rhetoric, like what is actually going on here. And there's obviously loads of ways this could be approached. But the title of your book, the Nehru Years. Right, like that tells us very specifically who we're focusing on. Why?
- [06:04]
C
Well, the short and factual answer is to say that Nehru was prime minister and foreign minister for the first 17 years of independent India. So he's the natural figure that one would focus on for a study of India's approach to the world. But this answer becomes sort of mired in questions of agency. You know, you end up having discussions about who else was important to India's rise in the world. Also counterfactuals such as who would have been probably more profitable for India in the world, you know, who would have probably secured better bargains for India at the un, so on and so forth. These arguments, to me at least, were rather endless and uninteresting. There's an orthodoxy from both supporters and detractors of Nehru that can be quite inescapable. So it was actually more than it may seem on the face of it, a challenge to sort of revisit that period and not de center Nehru the person. So have him very much at the center of the book. And in that sense, it is quite a formalistic approach, but also not do a biography. So as the title, you know, as we unpack the title a little bit, it's the Nehru Years. So it's in some ways, of course, the history of the man while he was in office, but also it's as much a history of the years themselves. Right. We tend to sort of define them through the person of Nehru because he was in office for so long and he was so formative to the way that a lot of these concepts that I deal with in the book emerged, but also for instance, it's a history of the United nations in a certain way, which, you know, which we'll come to. I don't want to get ahead of myself, but we'll come to it later. But yeah, so it's not a biography, but it very much deals with centering Nehru as a figure pivotal to understanding India's approach to the world.
- [08:01]
B
Again, it's about defining what is and what isn't the focus. And it's so interesting that you mentioned kind of that it's. Those are such almost centrifugal forces, like, it's hard to avoid getting caught up in the rhetoric rather than the actual archival fact or writing a biography when sort of the focus, as you said, is a bit different. And I'm glad you've mentioned the UN history element of it, because that is definitely something we're going to talk more about. But before we get there, in some sense, it's almost the implementation of a lot of these ideas. Let's talk a little bit more about these ideas of non alignment. Obviously, Nehru is a really key part of it, but he is taking ideas from some other people too, to kind of understand what this is going to actually mean for India. So can you tell us a little bit more about kind of what, why and how and what Nehru is sort of putting together to create these ideas of non alignment?
- [08:51]
C
Yes, certainly. So the genesis of non alignment as an idea is quite interesting for two reasons. First, because we know so little of where it came from, we also don't know much of how this phrase was first adopted. Right. So how it gained currency. And what this does is it leads to multiple origin myths. Right. So you have all these conversations about who first came up with non alignment, similar to what I said about sort of the person of Nehru and his legacy and so on and so forth. I find these sorts of arguments are not very useful in understanding India's role in the world. Second, and that's where Tagore and Gandhi come in. Even though the concept is associated with Nehru, and I do that in the book, users of non alignment in the Indian context always sort of presuppose in quotes, Nehruvian non alignment. Right. An intellectual history of the terms debut on the world stage leads us in very interesting ways to Tagore and Gandhi as lineage figures for Nehru. So to condense the long argument at the start of the book, I'll say that from Tagore, Nehru gets a vision of India that is geographically quite diffuse, an abstract view of the world, India's place in it, and to use Tagore's phrase, this idea of India is a deeply cosmopolitan one. So this idea that communities exist beyond nations and states and borders and the Indian state's primordial need to sort of enact solidarity, to form coalitions, to engage with a world larger than its immediate concerns, particularly territorial concerns, that is a very Tagorean conviction. Tagore's only sort of allowance to politics, which he's always somewhat anxious about politics and being political. So the only allowance that he makes is that politics can be redeemed if it is fashioned on cultural humanism. So I have a section sort of in one of the, in one of the prefacing chapters of the book that, that that is titled is Politics Ultimately Doomed? And a lot of that has to sort of do with kind of Tagore's anxieties around politics and how he sees India emerge from those sorts of challenges and issues. Gandhi, on the other hand, has a grim view of the state as a mechanism of evil. He's more forgiving of politics than is Tagore, of course, but no, not so if it culminates in the formation of the state. Yet of course in many ways he's the master of mediatory politics, having successfully mediated a conflict in which he as a person in whom India almost came to be personified, negotiated for India and to a great extent emerged victorious. That sort of negotiatory stance is at the core of non aligned practice. Diplomatically understood. Non alignment is neutrality plus mediation. So Nehruvian non alignment is an internationalist political project built through extended engagement with the un. And the UN comes up here again, but also through a statist vision of how the world would operate. As you know, decolonization of the 50s and 60s unfolded. So the state is very much at the core of the non aligned project during the Nehru years. Now both Tagore and Gandhi are of course known for their views on colonialism, but those views not only inform their political agitation but also in their view colonialism sort of constitutes an assault on the very soul of those colonized and the soul of the nation too. So Nehruvian non alignment is built on all these elements, cosmopolitanist thinking, mediatory politics and a living, breathing feeling politics that is built on what India is beyond its borders. So as I've shown in the book, the materiality of this is fascinating because mediation becomes diplomacy, conflict resolution becomes peacekeeping and cosmopolitanism becomes internationalism. So Nehru's political thought is pivotal because it brings together influences gleaned from Tagore and Gandhi, but also many others. Of course, Nehru schools himself in the history of anti imperial agitation in ways that make him in my view, much more revolutionary than he is now considered. So my contention in the book is that therefore non alignment is critical and incendiary, not liberal and certainly not pacifist in a sort of passive way.
- [13:26]
B
So this is really interesting to unpack these different strands because for instance, for me reading this book, I'm not an expert on internal Indian politics, but I am pretty decent on UN 20th century history. And this conceptualization of Indian non aligned policy makes what India actually does make so much more sense. Right. Because if one does think of non alignment as pacifism, that doesn't really track with what India actually does. And yet this version of it and tracing out the kind of different lineages is much more coherent with what Indian foreign policy actually is. So let's talk a little bit about some of those policy decisions and involvements, for instance in the Korean War or Hungary or Suez or the Congo.
- [14:14]
C
Yes, exactly. No, that's exactly right, Miranda. It doesn't actually make sense to. If you look at, you know, some of the writing about India in this period has talked about India in quotes punching above its weight, right? And so a lot of, a lot of that sort of Indian action taking in this period doesn't make sense if you don't understand the sort of intellectual drive behind it. You know, Nehru famously said that the, the problem of peace was the problem of empire. And so you see that a lot of this sort of aiding decolonization and the use of peacekeeping to sort of keep these new nation states, help them keep their sovereignty. A lot of this sort of comes with all this intellectual legacy, which is quite interesting to unpack. Before I say anything directly about sort of Korea or the Congo, let me just say something as a way of prefacing the case studies in the book. Our imagination of the Cold War world is often limited by national narratives and sort of locked into them. The framing of this project lies in examining the relationship between war and knowledge about war, which we can illuminate through talking about the four conflicts that I talk about in the book. So a lot of it is sort of about moving beyond these national narratives and thinking quite sort of theoretically and deeply about war from an Indian point of view. The other thing is that we don't quite grasp that the worldview of Afro Asian states was already quite expansive even in the 1940s. I think some of this is hard to grasp because a lot of these states perhaps weren't independent yet, weren't independent nation states yet were still dealing with anti colonial struggles of their own. So we don't understand the sort of, you know, anti colonial internationalist vision that they had for other states other than themselves. So India's involvement in the winding down of the Korean War stems from that sort of internationalism. Non alignment made mediation possible for India. India became a neutral consensus candidate because neither bloc had secured Indian allegiance. The more India mediated, the more missions it became involved in. And through senior military leaders sent to peacekeeping missions to lead them to senior diplomats. Seconded to the UN to form sort of doctrine and strategy on conflict ridden areas. And through its presence in the major capitals of the world, India was poised to take on a more global role when less than five years after its own independence, it was called upon to assist with diffusing the situation in Korea. Indian participation in the Korean War is an excellent first case study. It lays sort of the groundwork for the other case studies, but also explains India's external affairs to a very large extent. So it's a really interesting case study. In the book I discuss how Nehru sort of attempted to disconnect the international relations of Asia and of India from the narrative of war prevalent at the time between the superpowers. India's involvement through the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea, the United Nations Commission on Korea, the 60 Parachute Field Ambulance, the Custodian force of India and the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission all point to India's substantial contribution as part of this political project of restoring normal conditions in Korea, especially given that these were all unarmed forces. But also in the chapter on Korea we discuss again the sort of lineage that runs from Tagore through Nehru through sort of developing these ideas of Asian, of India in Asia. In 1956, which is the next case study, a chapter in which I discussed this West Canal crisis and the Hungarian revolution. Indian diplomatic efforts try to recover lost ground on two problems. They successfully using the UN as an instrumental for political action in the case of Egypt and attempting the same to some extent in the case of Hungary on Suez. India's contribution to the United Nations Emergency Force, the first one, marks a new phase in sort of Indian development of peacekeeping and India's involvement with the un. But it's also quite important because, and it's rather a departure from the Korean War as well because this is the first time that we have India considering arms supply to both Egypt and Hungary. So I became deeply interested in these sorts of developments as they were new. Only three years earlier in Korea, Nehru had declared that India would not send troops abroad then that they would not be armed and then again that India would not send the actual arms. So you have a sort of, you know, you can see a sort of dissolution of that position from Korea to 1956. Already by 1916, the Congo crisis, all these positions had been abandoned, making it a key moment when India became directly involved in war, even if only through peacekeeping. So Indian involvement in armed peacekeeping or the use of force in foreign territories now became a question that India was going to consider on a case by case basis, as opposed to the outright rejection of these sorts of ideas that India had talked about about 10 years prior. Some conceptual weaknesses in non alignment also come to be exposed through the Congo crisis. So it was evident that certain aspects of non alignment had to be revised and recast, particularly in relation to drawing overly only from the experiences of Asia. This was the first sort of undertaking that India had in Africa in any sort of substantial way. And you see that non alignment becomes stretched thin and probably exposed as maybe an overly Asian concept or concept more suited to Asian contexts. One of the reasons that India was approached to mediate the crisis in the Congo in the first place was its non line status, as I mentioned earlier, as well as a resulting position of significance within the Afro Asian bloc. However, by the end of the mission, India was unpopular with international partners such as the us, The Soviet Union, even Ghana and Egypt were not happy with India for not having formed a coalition with either of them. Along with the peacekeeping force of the Suez Canal crisis, the peacekeeping mission in Congo proved to be the start of India's long tradition of contributing to UN peacekeeping. So these missions in various ways have this kind of, you know, layered aspect to them where you see on one level there's issues with conceptualization and doctrine on the one hand, but on the other hand you have the actual sort of tactical successes of the missions. So I would say that ultimately, due to an inadequate grappling with questions of race, for instance, Nehru chose to treat an African situation somewhat in the same vein as he would have an Asian one. And this turned out to be a deeply flawed move for nonline India. So in terms of understanding this intellectually as related to concepts such as politics, security, war and violence, the original doctoral thesis on which this book was based called these the Critique, Discourse and Practice of Security. And so that's what happens, that's what you see with each of these case study chapters. You begin looking at non alignment as a deeply critical stance, as adopting a deeply critical stance, and then slowly it sort of lapses into what looks at that point as an inevitable practice. Of securitized politics.
- [22:05]
B
This is a really interesting set of, well, individual case studies, but also because they're all in the same book. Right. We get to do some cool comparative work between them too. So thank you for giving us a sense of how you've chosen them and kind of what the key points are for each of them if we sort of put them together. And of course, with the wider points you've already mentioned in terms of excavating what even is non alignment.
- [22:27]
C
Right.
- [22:27]
B
And those original questions you were asking, what are some of the implications of your research?
- [22:32]
C
So in many ways the book also avoids a restatement of non alignment. Right. I didn't want it to be read as a manifesto of any sort. The. The point of the book is not to reiterate the significance of non alignment or. That's not the only point of the book. It might be a starting point. The project itself was born out of some curiosity and a lot of confusion, which those in the social sciences will recognize as a in quote puzzle. Right. I wanted to provide a sort of serious inquiry into the first two decades of Indian independence, India's role in the world, and consequentially a history of the un. So the great advantage of writing a book widely considered critical was that it's not actually judged as left liberal politics disguised as an academic work. I feel that the real danger for political history these days, particularly if written academically, is that it's always held up to the standard of instinctive preferences or political positioning. Yet, because this is globally an intensely polarized moment, I was surprised at the sort of reception the book received. I have said that ideally I would like the book to be cannibalized by its readers. If you're reading it for the military history and a not really moved by the intellectual story, then that's what the book is to you. But what I was secretly hoping for and what has happened, thankfully, is that the great ambition of these thinkers is slightly more documented than it was previously. In the end, I guess the takeaway from the book is that these people, whether it be Tagore, Gandhi or Nehru, they're not trying these western or transatlantic ideas on for size. These are very much their own ideas. The originality and the scope of their thinking, frankly boggles the mind. In the case of Nehru, one could go even further to say that translating that sort of thinking into state policy is also quite ambitious. So academically, I think the book also shows us how to rethink ways in which Indian history can intersect with global post imperial turns elsewhere it brings security studies in conversation with modern Indian history in conversation with Subaltern Studies, makes a contribution to Cold War studies and international relations theory. I think the story of non alignment is ultimately a story of authenticity in political life. And I hope and I think that there will be more work forthcoming in that direction in the near future.
- [25:03]
B
Is that going to be what your work does next? Is there anything on your desk at the minute that you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [25:11]
C
Sure. So, you know, I should say that I'm also looking at, of course, other people's work and, you know, people are doing very interesting things with this sort of, you know, building on each other's work in that sense. But I myself have two ongoing projects. The first is a history of India's participation in the International Control Commission in Vietnam, which is more broadly also India's involvement in the decolonization of Indochina. I'm quite interested in that project because it's outside of the AGs of the UN. The second is a longer project on anti colonial imagination in Asia with Indian thinkers such as Tagore and Subhash Chandra Bose using Japan and Singapore as sites in which to develop two diametrically opposite ideas of India. The book also delves into how India does Asianism in that early part of the 20th century. So sort of leading up to the 1950s and the period that's understudy in this book, in this first book. So in many ways it will be a prequel to the Nehru years.
- [26:17]
B
Well, that certainly sounds intriguing. Best of luck with the project.
- [26:20]
C
Thank you so much.
- [26:22]
B
While you are working on it, of course listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled the Narrow An International History of Indian Non Alignment, published internationally by Cambridge University Press in 2025 and in the same year by Juggernaut Books, much more affordably in South Asia. So, Swapna, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [26:41]
C
Thank you very much for having me.