“The African Problem Is a World Problem”: (Dis)locating Race in Late Colonial Indian Intellectual Thought

How elite Indian intellectuals conceptualized "race" in late British India remains undertheorized. In this essay, I demonstrate how Indian intellectuals invoked racial solidarities in strategically ambiguous and hierarchical ways, either in a comparative mode with caste, imperialism, and shared oppression or as difference to be transcended by a humanist cosmopolitanism. Empirically, I argue through a close reading of anti-imperialist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay's political essays "The People of Africa" and "The Awakening of Asia" that ideas of civilizational hierarchies, imperial notions of time and progress, and notions of "geopolitical tutelage" toward Africa underpin assumed progressive Afro-Asian solidarities in the pre-Bandung era.