Abstract:

By the beginning of the 1950s, people in China and India saw themselves as embedded in an Asia faced with either accelerated decolonization on one hand or a new wave of foreign subjugation on the other. They proclaimed that their countries and peoples would have to join together in ‘friendship’ to help steer Asia towards a more peaceful future. Despite very different political and economic models in the context of accelerating competition between capitalist and socialist societies, the advocates of Sino-Indian friendship proclaimed that their cooperation would help actualize anti-colonial aspirations and defend against Cold War threats. And yet, in 1962, the project went up in smoke when the two countries went to war. This war was supported by the very people who spent the preceding decades proclaiming friendship’s importance for establishing peace in Asia, and through Asia, the world. Understanding friendship’s rise and fall means treating it as a political project backed by state rhetoric and sponsorship but given life by the myriad activists and organizations that attempted to make sense of their own relationship to narratives of friendship in an Asia at the crossroads between decolonization and the Cold War. Tracing how women’s organizations and activists ‘spoke’ friendship in the 1950s, this talk showcases how supporters of friendship could use it for their own ends. This produced friction just as often as it could produce affection and hardened national identities as much as it contextualized those identities within a larger continental one. Studying Sino-Indian friendship thus helps to understand how Cold War challenges both abetted and undermined new forms of solidarity and connected being ‘Indian’ and ‘Chinese’ with being ‘Asian’ too.

Speaker’s Bio:
Yasser Ali Nasser is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His forthcoming monograph, Just Friends: China, India, and the Promise of Asian Solidarity in the Cold War examines how shared visions of an Asia in crisis in the 1950s helped bring Chinese and Indian activists together in the name of what they called ‘friendship’.