british

Getting to know the ‘Bolsheviks’

In the cities of colonial India, caught in the vortex of war-time/post-war scarcity and political repression, how did the colonizers and a segment of their literate middle-class subjects perceive and depict the Bolshevik Revolution through newspaper pages? In the course of November 1917, the colonial world became gradually acquainted with Bolshevism through hostile news networks based in the West. In Kolkata, the former capital of British Empire in India until 1912 and the provincial cap[...]

Three Cyclists from India and Encounters of Empire

 ‘In China, the people did not believe they were Indians, because they were clean-shaven…’ (RGASPI 542/1/5, 68).   The continual mining of the Comintern Archive in Moscow, either by visiting the archive or consulting the online digital archive, furthers our understanding of (as in my case) anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements and experiences in the interwar period. By perceiving these movements as circulations of experience, and, transnational in scope and nature, the documen[...]