Political humanitarianism in the 1930s: Indian aid for Republican Spain

Abstract

This article examines Indian humanitarian help for Republican victims during the Spanish Civil War. It focuses in particular on aid initiatives by the Indian national movement, which were embedded in the larger quest for independence from British colonial rule. By creating their own humanitarian programme in favour of Republican Spain, Indian nationalists dissociated themselves from Britain's foreign policy and tried to orchestrate a politics of moral superiority for themselves. The article also explores Indian participation in transnational networks of Left solidarity. Established to generate political and humanitarian support for Republican Spain, Indian actors concurrently utilised these networks to enhance their status in the international community and to advance their own end of an independent state.

Transnational History: A New Paradigm for Anti-Fascist Studies?

“…(This was a tendency that, paradoxically, did not alienate anticolonial activists such as Jawaharlal Nehru, for whom anti-fascism and particularly humanitarian aid to the Spanish Republic had an instrumental value as a way of displaying India as 'a country that was ready for independence'). 34 Predictably, transnational history confirms that anti-fascism emerged and grew as a transnational movement, a movement that conceptualised fascism as an international menace and, as Braskén here points out, made efforts to fight it across national lines both out of conviction and out of an awareness of the publicity advantages of such an approach. Anti-fascists, like their nineteenth-century forerunners in the democratic and workers' movements, were keenly aware of the transnational character of political, economic, social and cultural trends in the modern world, even if they could adopt both cosmopolitan and nationalist identities as did the ethno-nationalist émigrés and the 'imperial' anti-fascists studied here by Núñez Seixas and Buchanan.…”

A Barcelona stage designer in colonial India: Catalan travellers, transimperial mobility and the British Raj in Spain, c. 1908

“…For some of these examples, see Díaz-Esteve (2022);Elizalde (2011Elizalde ( , 2016;Moisand and Segura-Garcia (2022), and Permanyer-Ugartemendia (2014).16 DonateSánchez (2007) andFramke (2016). 17Luengo and Dalmau (2018: 444).18 Junyent (1981: 5-10) and Plou Anadón (2016).19 Beltrán Catalán (2020: 387).20 Cerarols Ramírez (2008: 198-228).…”