The Cultural Cold War and the Global South

Sites of Contest and Communitas

Kerry Bystrom, Monica Popescu, Katherine Zien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000399479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire moderne

This volume investigates the cultural sites where the global Cold War played out. It brings to view unpredictable encounters that arose as writers, artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals from or aligned with the Third World navigated the ideological and material constraints set by superpowers and emerging regional powers. Often these encounters generated communitas and solidarity, while at times they fed old and new conflicts. Pushing forward recent scholarship that tracks the Cold War in the Global South and draws on postcolonial approaches, our contributors use archival, secondary, and ethnographic sources to trace the afterlives and memories of key figures and to explore meetings that performed cultural diplomacy.

Our focus on sites of encounter or exchange underscores the situated, interpersonal, and embodied dimensions through which much of the cultural Cold War was experienced. While the global conflict divided citizens along ideological fault lines, it also linked people through circulating media—novels, film, posters, journals, and theatre—and multinational conferences that brought artists, intellectuals, and political activists together. Such contacts introduced new axes of solidarity and hierarchies of exclusion. Examining these connections and disjunctures, this new and necessary mapping of the cultural Cold War highlights under-addressed locations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Part I

Literary and Cultural Conferences and Meetings

1 Cultural Bandung or Writerly Cold War? Revisiting the 1956 Asian Writers’ Conference from an India-China Perspective

Yan Jia

Introduction

The first Asian Writers’ Conference (AWC) took place in Delhi on December 23–28, 1956. Attended by nearly 275 delegates from 17 Asian countries, 150 or more from India alone, for the first time in modern history the AWC brought together Asian writers in face-to-face exchanges.¹ The sheer fact that such a transnational cultural event organized by Asians for Asians could take place in the capital of an independent Asian country cannot be overemphasized.

The Delhi AWC took place a year and a half after the Bandung Conference (April 1955). Despite the difference in geographical scale, the AWC was closely related to Bandung both at the practical and conceptual levels. It can be viewed as a unique occasion that simultaneously featured “nostalgia for Bandung” and “nostalgia at Bandung,” to use Duncan Yoon’s (2018) terms.

On the one hand, inspired by and nostalgic for the “feeling of political possibility” (Lee 2010, 15) presented through Bandung’s solidarity-building project, the AWC’s organizers and participants aimed at re-enacting this “feeling” through cultural approaches. According to Mulk Raj Anand—noted Indian English writer and the AWC’s general secretary—the idea of organizing the conference was essentially his response to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s call in Bandung to reinforce inter-Asian cultural exchange. At the AWC, writers constantly referred to the political principles of “Panchsheel” (the Sanskrit term for “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence”), a key outcome of the Bandung Conference, as applicable to developing relations among Asian writers. Anand, for example, suggested in his address that participants should accept a kind of “Panch Shila [sic] in cultural matters”: “That is to say we may accept a variety of ways of living, thinking, and feeling, while at the same time we agree to coexist without any attempt to exert pressure on each other” (Cohen 1956).

On the other hand, the AWC was permeated by the same kind of “nostalgia” present at the Bandung Conference, that is a more or less “idealistic invocation” of the linkages between participating countries in the precolonial period (Yoon 2018, 26). At Bandung, a subcommittee on culture was held, which emphasized the civilizational greatness and spiritual foundations shared by Afro-Asian cultures as well as the imperative to renew old connections between these cultures (Yoon 2018, 27–30). The AWC gave fuller and deeper expressions for these emphases by dedicating much of its agenda to reassessing the ancient traditions of different parts of Asia, rediscovering their cultural linkages, and re-examining how these linkages had been severed by Western imperialism.² The idea was to present “Asia” as an age-old space of cultural contact that could and should be revived in the modern world.

The Indian host was particularly captivated by this nostalgia for past splendor because it helped reimagine India’s central status in the cultural life of Asia. As Anand persuaded Nehru, the AWC could offer a long-awaited forum for Asian intellectuals, who “had not met for more than a thousand years, after the last Buddhist Conference in the sixth century A.D. under Harsha” (Anand 1993, 183).³ Although Anand does not detail what specifically made Nehru accept the proposal to organize the AWC in Delhi, it is clear that the conference fit well into Nehru’s plan to represent India as a “core state” in Asian and African countries, and himself as a “region-builder,” a plan that had been in practice since the 1947 Asian Relations Conference (Singh 2011).

Held as symbolic of a “resurgent Asia,” the Delhi AWC was imbued with high hopes of contributing to the region’s cultural decolonization and self-determination. To this end, the conference statement highlighted three modes of cooperation—“the acquisition of knowledge of one another’s country,” “mutual cultural exchange,” and “exchange of information” (Cohen 1956, 11), which derived directly from the recommendations made by Bandung’s subcommittee on culture (Yoon 2018, 29). However, despite its pronounced genealogical links with Bandung, the AWC did not project “Asia” in terms of political reconfiguration. The gist of the writers’ solidarity the AWC set out to establish was the renewal and reproduction of cultural exchanges and mutual understanding, rather than a political alliance based on anti-colonialism or any other ideological formation.

Looking beyond the official rhetoric, this chapter intends to offer a more historically grounded and critically engaged understanding of the 1956 Delhi AWC by focusing on how the conference actually unfolded and what it in fact meant to Asian writers of different nationalities, political stances, and literary outlooks. Drawing on underexplored materials ranging from public archives to private accounts, this chapter shows that far from a cultural application of the “Panchsheel” utopia, the Delhi AWC was in fact a “site of contest” influenced quite significantly by Cold War tensions. This manifested not only as conflict along political lines but also as competition between modernist and socialist realist aesthetic systems promoted respectively by the United States and the Soviet Union.

This study of the 1956 AWC enriches the growing scholarship about post-war Third World writers’ movement, which have tended to present the 1958 Tashkent Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference (AAWC) as the movement’s decisive start (Djagalov 2011; Halim 2012; Yoon 2014; Yoon 2015), by bringing into focus a key early conference. Examining the Delhi AWC not only reveals India’s crucial role in initiating the format of the post-war Third World writers’ conference but also reconstructs the genealogy of the Afro-Asian writers’ movement before its formal institutionalization into the permanent bureau (established immediately after the Tashkent conference) and its split in the 1960s due to the breakup of Sino-Soviet relations.

Methodologically, this chapter investigates the AWC from what I call an “India-China perspective,” which compares the two delegations’ engagement with the event and also considers the contacts—dialogues and debates—between them. I have chosen India and China not only because they can generate a fuller picture of the AWC by holding together a host angle and a guest one, but also because, more generally, they represent two different methods of engaging with Third Worldist cultural projects in the Cold War period. Comparing the different ways in which Chinese and Indian writers, as well as Indian writers of various kinds, participated in the AWC shows that although Third World literary solidarity was established with supra-nationality as its defining feature, this solidarity was in fact destabilized by vastly differing national and subnational situations, such as political structure, cultural climate, and foreign policy. Such a perspective, which is at once transnational, national, and subnational, activates a more nuanced approach to study the cultural Cold War in the Global South.

Cold War Politics at Play

Unlike the Bandung Conference, in which state leaders took the initiative, the AWC was essentially a non-official event organized by and for writers. Nehru’s involvement in the AWC was limited and mostly symbolic: he received the international members of the preparatory committee and showed up at the closing ceremony but did not play an explicit role in drafting the conference agenda, selecting Indian delegates or choosing the conveners. With this limited state intervention, the organizers of the AWC and some of the noted figures who lent endorsement hoped to keep the conference at a distance from political issues and Cold War politics in particular. For Anand, as he told a Chinese cultural delegation that visited India in early 1956, India was an “appropriate” place to hold the first AWC precisely because of its “neutral position” in the current world divided by the Cold War (Yan 1956, 42). However, a careful survey of the declarations and debates emerging from the Delhi AWC shows that the cultural Cold War significantly influenced the AWC not so much in the form of direct interference from the two superpowers,⁴ but rather as competing political-cultural value systems embodied by the Asian writers themselves.

Cold War politics can be found to be working on three different levels in the AWC. First of all, it impacted the selection and representation of Indian delegates. While the AWC enabled the first national-level gathering of Indian writers after Independence, it also mapped the divisions of India’s literary field onto an international scene. In addition to linguistic division caused by India’s multilingualism, the ideological division was particularly strong in the 1950s. The pro-Soviet, pro-China Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) and the pro-U.S., anti-communist Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom (ICCF) operated simultaneously at the two ends of the country’s ideological spectrum.⁵ Instead of being handpicked by a particular institution, Indian delegates to the AWC were selected by a temporarily formed steering committee comprising noted literary figures from divergent schools of thought, with the view to guaranteeing the widest representation of Indian writers. Included in the committee were progressive authors like Anand and Sajjad Zaheer (card-carrying communist), as well as anti-communist writers. The anti-communists included those affiliated with the ruling Congress Party,⁶ such as Banarsidas Chaturvedi and Ramdhari Singh “Dinkar,” and writers associated with the ICCF, such as Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan “Agyeya” and Prabhakar Padhye.

What complicated the AWC most was the challenge anti-communist writers and progressive/communist Indian writers frequently presented to one another. Three days before the conference five Indian members of the committee—Dinkar, Jainendra, Agyeya, Padhye, and Krishnalal Shridharani—issued a joint statement, expressing their misgivings: “the conference is inspired and controlled by persons of a particular political persuasion” (“Renewed Split” 1956, 9). The statement was clearly directed at the communist presence at the conference. In response, Anand repeatedly insisted that “red domination” was impossible because “there were only two communist writers among the Indian delegates,” and he was not to be blamed if communist countries sent communist writers (“Renewed Split” 1956, 9). Agyeya and Padhye may have criticized the communists too strongly, leading the ICCF journal Quest to comment that “they played a useful role inasmuch as they kept the conference politically neutral, but their anger and interruptions had a strictly limited, functional urgency” (Anant 1957, 45). A counterattack took place at the Indian Writers’ Convention organized on the eve of the AWC, where progressive Hindi and Urdu writers associated with the PWA like Ali Sardar Jafri, Bhairav Prasad Gupta, and Surendra Balupuri contended that the steering committee should be disqualified from selecting Indian delegates because the committee itself “was not a representative body of the writers” (“Settlement Reached” 1956, 9). Balupuri and Amrit Rai even insisted that Agyeya be excluded from the committee. In addition, progressive writers scrapped a proposed list of Hindi delegates because they alleged that the proposed candidates “were more representative of the Indian Council for Cultural Freedom than of Hindi literature” (Cohen 1956).

The second aspect of the AWC that was permeated with Cold War politics concerned the invitation of delegates from communist countries, and China in particular. The above-mentioned statement about “red domination” was very likely triggered by the selection of Chinese delegates. The five signatories to the statement suggested that five writers including Lin Yutang, who wrote in Chinese language but lived outside mainland China, should be invited to the conference. The proposal, however, was objected to by the Chinese representatives on the secretariat, and Anand and Zaheer, the two leftist Indian members on the secretariat, may have seconded this objection. Ideological division aside, this controversy effectively reveals the gap between “Chinese literature” as formulated by the PRC’s cultural authorities and that imagined by Indian writers, especially the liberals. It is understandable that Lin Yutang, who had been twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature (1940; 1950), may have been much more well-known in India than some of the PRC’s mainstream authors writing about land reform. However, he was labeled a “reactionary comprador bourgeois writer” under Maoist cultural ideology and his name was politically taboo. The Indian proposal had challenged the PRC’s officially sanctioned version of Chinese literature from which the entire category that would be later known as “Sinophone” was excluded.

Finally, Cold War cultural politics found expression at the AWC in the panel discussion, and the most controversial topic was “the freedom of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Cultural Cold War and the Global South: Sites of Contest and Communitas
• Part I: Literary and Cultural Conferences and Meetings
• Part II: Networks and Festivals of Visual Art and Cinema
• Part III: Literature and Print Culture Itineraries
• Part IV: Spectacular Performances
• Afterword: Juan Orrantia
• Index