Eighteen months after Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez canal, Rameshwari Nehru, a veteran of Indian social and political activism, rose to a lectern in the spacious auditorium of the University of Cairo to open the first official conference of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO). She was seventy-three years of age, and it is easy to imagine that the journey to Cairo had not been an easy one. But it was a journey on familiar terrain. Rameshwari Nehru had first visited Egypt in 1932 and spent time in Cairo and the surrounding countryside on her way to a tour of Europe which included a speech at the League of Nations in Geneva. On this second visit, there was much she recognised, but she found the “climate and colour” to be different now. It was “refreshing to be able to breathe the fresh air of freedom” now that the Egyptian people had “accepted the challenge of their time” and won independence.

At the conference, Rameshwari Nehru was also surrounded by familiar people. The Indian delegation in Cairo consisted chiefly of her own activist network, despite the fact that it counted different generations among its members. Perin Chandra for instance, was her junior by several decades, but had been her partner in an effort to join the communist and non-communist women’s movements in the Punjab during the Second World War. In a similar vein, Tehminabai Dhage and Rameshwari were some twenty-five years apart in age, but they were connected through their social work with children’s institutions.

Just eleven days before the Bandung Conference, a conference was convened in New Delhi that should be considered its unofficial counterpart. In sharp contrast to Bandung, which was not open to the public, the nongovernmental nature of the Delhi conference enabled thousands of people to attend. Officially known as the Conference of Asian Countries on the Relaxation of International Tension (CRIT), it was heavily influenced by the growing peace movement of the early Cold War years. Over the next five years, the Delhi gathering’s success in terms of attendance, media coverage, and interest from writers, poets and artists, gave rise to a set of additional conferences across Africa and Asia. It was also instrumental in the formation of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), which was formally established in Cairo in December 1957 with support from the Egyptian government. Several founders of AAPSO had attended the Delhi conference in 1955, and would populate AAPSO committees for years to come.

There is good reason to soften the boundaries between the ‘official’ and ‘non-official’ Bandungs somewhat. The unofficial ‘Bandungs’, particularly Delhi and Cairo, handled their publicity so well that media and other observers had difficulty distinguishing between them, suggesting that – to a contemporary eye at least – they were not so dissimilar as events centered on promoting decolonization and combating old and new forms of imperialism. Too narrow a view of the Bandung Moment, therefore, obscures crucial Afro-Asian interactions.

Introduction

The chapters in this volume were first presented at a joint IIAS-ISEAS international conference entitled Asia-Europe Encounters: Intellectual and cultural exchanges 1900-1950, which was held at the Museum of Asian Civilizations in Singapore. The conference attracted a particularly interesting mix of scholars – junior and senior academics, from universities across the globe, whose research covered the length and breadth of Europe and Asia. The present collection of essays builds on the results of this conference. The editors hope to have succeeded in maintaining the diversity that made the conference so dynamic. This volume therefore contains chapters by leading researchers in the field as well as early-career scholars, and covers a range of countries from India and Sri Lanka to China, Japan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Germany, and France.

The conference had been convened to explore the intellectual and cultural flows between Asia and Europe that occurred during, and were formative of, the political and social changes over the first half of the twentieth century. As the original call for papers stated, the first half of the twentieth century saw some of the most intense political and social changes experienced thus far in world history. Shiraishi Takashi's coinage of the 1910s and 1920s as an ‘age in motion’ in Southeast Asia might be extended as a reference to Asia-Europe relations during the half-century more generally. It was an age in which high imperialism began to unravel and global power shifted. The period around 1950 marked the ending of one age of Asia-Europe interactions and the beginning of another.

This volume explores the intellectual and cultural flows between Asia and Europe during the momentous political and social changes of the first half of the twentieth century. More specifically, it situates those flows in a context of an increased mobility of artists, writers, educators, and missionaries, as well as an increasingly global consciousness among those who worked or wrote from home. While cultural and intellectual exchange in the larger area of Eurasia was by no means a new phenomenon, it was in the first half of the twentieth century that these interactions were marked by an unprecedented increase in transnational traffic and in the development of cosmopolitan subjects, resulting in new collocations of ideas and cross-cultural influences.