This volume represents a major contribution to the new field of South Asian intellectual history from a global perspective. It critically examines forms of South Asian cosmopolitanism in the era of anti-colonial agitation. Starting from the assertion that the history of political ideas in South Asia can neither be pictured as the contestation between well-defined 'local' and 'global' epistemes, nor as the battle between 'patriotic' and 'internationalist' perspectives, these essays throw unprecedented light on the intermediate spaces of intellectual encounter and interchange that linked South Asian thinkers to counterparts and conversations worldwide from the late nineteenth century through to independence. By discarding presuppositions about hermetically-sealed local traditions endangered by 'Westernizing' forces, and also by undoing the stubborn tether that ties the study of colonial South Asian thought to the British metropolis alone, the travels of intellectuals that spanned the Indian and Pacific Oceans, from Johannesburg to Tokyo, or the distance from Calcutta to New York, or Bombay to Rome, emerge as significant trajectories for the study of South Asian history within a global horizon. Lateral interactions between colonized groups worldwide, and with other Europes outside Britain and minority Americas constitute a largely unexplored archive for the study of South Asian history.

Age of Entanglement explores patterns of connection linking German and Indian intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the years after the Second World War. Kris Manjapra traces the intersecting ideas and careers of a diverse collection of individuals from South Asia and Central Europe who shared ideas, formed networks, and studied one another’s worlds. Moving beyond well-rehearsed critiques of colonialism towards a new critical approach, this study recasts modern intellectual history in terms of the knotted intellectual itineraries of seeming strangers. ... As Manjapra demonstrates, transnational intellectual encounters are not inherently progressive. From Orientalism and Aryanism to socialism and scientism, German–Indian entanglements were neither necessarily liberal nor conventionally cosmopolitan, often characterized as much by manipulation as by cooperation. Age of Entanglement underscores the connections between German and Indian intellectual history, revealing the characteristics of a global age when the distance separating Europe and Asia seemed, temporarily, to disappear.

This is a work of South Asian intellectual history written from a transnational perspective and based on the life and work of M.N. Roy, one of India's most formidable Marxist intellectuals. Swadeshi revolutionary, co-founder of the Mexican Communist Part, member of the Communist International Presidium, and a major force in the rise of Indian communism, M.N. Roy was a colonial cosmopolitan icon of the interwar years. Exploring the intellectual production of this important thinker, this book traces the historical context of his ideas from 19th-century Bengal to Weimar Germany, through the tumultuous period of world politics in the 1930s and 1940s, and on to post-Independence India. In this book, the author makes a number of valuable theoretical contributions. He argues for the importance of conceiving the 'deterritorial' zones of thought and action through which Indian anti-colonial political thought operated, and advances a new periodisation for Swadeshi on this basis. He also argues against viewing 'international communism' of the 1920s as a single monolith by highlighting the fractures and contestations that influenced colonial politics worldwide. A fresh and insightful perspective on the history of India in the interwar years, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of the modern history of South and East Asia, America, and Europe, and to those interested in anti-colonial struggles, Communist politics and trajectories of Marxist thought in the 20th century.