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My dissertation reconstructs Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), modern India's foremost poet-philosopher and the first non-European recipient of the Nobel Prize, as a political thinker. Shirking simple binaries such as East and West, empire and nation, or poetry and politics, the objective is to recover the critical and creative ideas of an original thinker who was shaped by the complicated impulses of his times. Departing from the liberal and anticolonial frames of reading him, I take as my entry point Tagore's strident critique of nationalism not only in relation to denunciation of mechanical organization of political life but also to posit front and centre his felt urgency to reimagine the modern subject. The purpose of my dissertation is not to search for politics in Tagore but to consider how he rethought and remade the premises and presuppositions that constitute the definition of the political itself. Since colonization barred representational politics, literature, philosophy, religion, and education - subjects that are central in Tagore's corpus - emerged as sites for political thinking. My dissertation conceptually interprets the ideas of sovereignty, freedom, law and universality that Tagore reappraised through these fields. Above all, I show how Tagore far from embodying the individualism of the heroic artist reimagined art and creation as the basis of modern subjectivity. Not an anti-colonialist figure in any easy sense of the expression, decolonization to Tagore also meant thwarting the familiar route of nationalism. In an interesting reversal, Tagore read in the colonial enterprise the dissolution of the imperial logic and the ensuing primacy of the nation which he defined as a corporatist entity bullishly pursuing political and commercial ends with no care for individual and social differences among its constituents. Liberation from British rule while replicating its nationalist biases would have meant very little. Tagore therefore proposed a theory of freedom that exceeded the negative impetus of emancipation from oppression. It was premised on creation as the positive basis of action and involved a collective dimension of living together with differences. Tagore's key experiment in this regard was the establishment of a school and a university that animated freedom both in the making of the individual self and a collective subjectivity.

This doctoral thesis investigates the history of modern Indian political thought in part through its significance for German fascism. It differs from other works on 'global fascism' in that it decentres 'fascism' as a concept but traces themes that emerge in its global context: the idea of 'the people', race, caste, and sovereign spaces. The point of departure is India's emergence into a new geopolitical imaginary in interwar Germany, which drew the German geopolitician Karl Haushofer (1869-1946) to the Indian sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949). Sarkar welcomed the three totalitarianisms for countering internationalism, socialism, and pacifism that eradicated the very foundation of national sovereignty in antagonism or 'dualism'. He developed a potentially limitless notion of 'the popular' or 'the people', which exceeded liberal democracy and centred on the Nazi Volk state. Next, I uncover how the 'father' of Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966), conceptualised a Hindu 'race' as grounded in impurity, miscegenation, and women. Savarkar problematised the Hindus' historical loss of the power of caste to transform outsiders into blood-relations. Reactivating exogamy, he called for Hindu males to imprint their race on Muslim women by conversion-cum-marriage and rape. India's political language of 'caste' became formative for National Socialism itself, as well-known figures like Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), Richard Walther Darré (1895-1953), and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) showcase. Kaste structured the contradictory aims of National Socialism: while nationalism required the purging of 'caste', racism required the resurrection of an aristocratic and imperial 'caste' of Aryan warriors. The last chapter returns to Indian spatial conceptions. It particularly sheds light on Hindutva's re-constitution after the creation of geopolitical dualism with the Partition in 1947. Deendayal Upadhyaya's (1916-1968) 'Integral Humanism' made post-independent Hindutva for the first time synonymous with neo-Vedantic (non-dualistic) Hinduism, which he weaponised to assimilate the dualism of Pakistan. This thesis contributes to modern Indian and German history, the historiographies of race, space, and internationalism, and seeks to further theoretical discussions in global history, global intellectual history, and political thought.

With the arrival of independence in 1947, India’s first generation of post-colonial leaders embraced the concept of ‘development’ as a central objective of nation-building and a raison d'être of the post-colonial state. The opportunity of freedom, it was argued, would pave the way for a dramatic process of economic, social and political transformation that would turn India from an impoverished, colonial society into a ‘modern’, prosperous and democratic one. Set against this backdrop, this thesis explores intersections and entanglements between the post-independence pursuit of development and the forms of knowledge produced by post-war American social science. Foregrounding the concept of ‘psychologized development’, the thesis focuses in particular on the ways in which Indian elites – including government officials, intellectuals, industrialists and more – drew on American psychological expertise in the hope of realizing development dreams. With its claims to understand the complex processes that shaped human action (and interaction), I argue, American psychological knowledge promised solutions to the most pressing contemporary problems, from the treatment of ‘communal’ tension to the engagement of rural communities in uplift programmes. Psychology revealed the foundations of effective economic entrepreneurship and the basis of sound industrial leadership. It even explained how new ideas and practices could be ‘diffused’ throughout society. For Indians, psychologized theories of human nature offered knowledge of great utility in the context of plans for rapid societal change. For Americans, they offered tools that would turn India into a model of democratic development in the context of a global Cold War. Using a case study approach, this thesis explores the diverse settings in which Indians and Americans came together to psychologize development. In doing so, it examines both the common themes and the recurring challenges that came with attempts to realize development through social science expertise. The resulting history offers new perspectives not just on the character and complexion of developmentalism in post-colonial India, but also on the forms of cross-border connection that shaped India’s post-1947 transition. The thesis makes novel contributions to a number of historiographical fields, including the history of American social science, the history of Indo-US relations, the history of development and global history.

Despite having roots in 19th century Europe, Marxism had a deep impact on the trajectory of political ideas in the non-European world in the twentieth century. In particular, anti-colonial thinkers engaged productively with Marx’s ideas as part of their struggle against Empire. Yet, little attention has been paid to the displacements and innovations in political thought as a result of this encounter between anti-colonialism and Marxism. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by studying the history of Indian communism, focusing on the first three decades of the communist movement (1921-1950). I claim that this is an ideal time period to interrogate the formation of political ideas in India, since they presented themselves with particular intensity in the midst of an unfolding anti-colonial struggle, and arguably, the birth of the Indian political. The entry of communist ideas into the charged political environment of the 1920s had an impact on the ideological debates within the Indian polity, as well as stamping Indian communism with its own specific historicity. Through a tracing of debates among communist leaders, as well as their non-communist interlocutors, this work seeks to provide a novel lens to consider the relationship between ideas and their historical actualization, or between the universal and its instantiation in the particular. Moreover, the dissertation argues that the radically different socio-political and historical landscapes of Western Europe and colonial India necessitated a confrontation with the stagist view of history dominant in the history of Western Marxism, prompting novel theoretical work on the issue of political temporality. Consequently, the relationship between necessity and volition, central to enlightenment thought, was radically transformed in the colonial world, particularly in terms of its entanglement with the problem of subjective violence. Engagement with such questions not only impacted Indian political thought, but transformed global communism itself, putting into question the concept of an “originary site” for political ideas. Thus, this work intervenes in debates in three distinct registers: Global Intellectual History, Marxist theory and Indian political thought.

This thesis explores the relationship between law, sovereignty and violence in colonial India in the period 1857-1914. From murder, to corporal punishment, to jubilee amnesty, this thesis highlights two gaps within the scholarship of nineteenth-century Indian legal and political history. Firstly, that histories of colonial law have been reluctant to provide a political analysis of the relationship between crime, sovereignty and identity in the everyday. Secondly, the much-noted shift in political discourse from East India Company to British Crown rule in histories of imperial political philosophy has left unexplained the relationship between liberalism, the codification of criminal law, and the production of colonial legal-political subjectivity. This lacuna in scholarship has resulted in the construction of a limited theoretical framework for understanding the underlying politics at play in the histories of crime, law, and punishment. Ultimately this work provides such framework, allowing the writing of law and the act of crime to be brought into histories of political philosophy and colonial sovereignty. As a revisionist history of colonial politics and law the thesis therefore breaks new ground in respect to our broader understandings of colonial sovereignty and politics, the practice of colonial law, and the constitution of the colonial state in India.