Women's Internationalism(s) and Afro-Asian Networks:
Cultural politics and Cold War in India
Tamalika Roy
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This project explores women’s internationalism(s) during the Cold War by particularly focusing on Indian wormen's Afro-Asian solidarity networks. Engaging with one particular organisation, Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), it delves into how women from Asia and Africa shaped the organisation and how especially Indian actors utilised it as a platform to both shape their internationalist visions and craft the women’s rights movement in India.
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Research
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The project explores Afro-Asianism and its manifestations in the Indian context by particularly focussing on women's role in forging Afro-Asian solidarity networks. It traces the lives of Indian women, who held important posts in the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). First founded in Paris in 1945, the WIDF was banned in France and moved to East Berlin in 1951. By closely following the trajectories of the organization's Indian members, the project engages with their activism in their own country, in such international organisations, and the networks they formed with women from the Global South. ​
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Image: Cover page, Soviet Nari (Soviet Woman) Magazine, 1968, Issue 10, 1968, https://www.ebay.ph/itm/394362819884
My study explores how these women, while negotiating local and global issues of marginalisation, exploitation and inequality, were also performing a new worldview of internationalism(s), cosmopolitanism(s) and solidarities through protests, conferences, meetings and celebrations. It delves into how women’s societal roles as mothers, workers and citizens were being reimagined in an anti-war, anti imperialist and anti-racial worldview. At the same time, it will also uncover the limits and afterlives of these solidarities to see if, then how, international solidarity translated into local practice.
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Image: Cover page, Afro-Asian Bulletin, Issue 11-12, Nov-Dec 1961,
P.C. Joshi Archives, New Delhi
Archives​
Besides biographical interviews, the project relies on research in the following archives:
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Collections of the Institute of Social History (IISG), Amsterdam
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P.C. Joshi Archives, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
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National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW) Archives, New Delhi
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Communist Party of India (CPI) Archives, New Delhi and Kolkata
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Collections at the Prime Ministers' Museum and Library, New Delhi​
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Women of the Whole World, WIDF Magazine, Issue 2, 1989, Private Collections Malobika Chattopadhyay, Kolkata
Articles in CRAFTE Working Paper Series
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International Institute of Social History (IISG) Archives, Amsterdam
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Political Subjectivity and Revolutionary Motherhood
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