Description
Set in the wider intellectual context of Indian literary figure Rabindranath Tagore’s and Japanese intellectuals’ ideas of pan-Asianism emerging in the 1920s, in this paper, I ask how elite Indian women mobilized and articulated normative and political imaginaries of Asia as a moral grounding for their anti-imperial politics in the 1910s-30s. The paper specifically asks what forms of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism characterized ‘south-south’ solidarity among Asian women using the case of the short-lived but highly successful All-Asian women’s Conference (that took place in Lahore in 1930). Using archival reports from this conference, in this paper, I develop and expand on the term ‘moral geographies of Asia’ using ideas propounded by elite Indian women thinkers as a part of a larger collective of women from across West, South, and South-East Asia, which combined a ‘self-Orientalist’ morality and prevailing pan-Asianist and anti-imperial geographical and cultural imaginaries of world politics. Through this, we can discern larger patterns of the complex, ambivalent, and politically strategic ways in which ‘Asian solidarities’ among women were historically constructed.
