Intercolonial Public: Protest and Print across India and Korea, c. 1910-1947

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, several non-violent protests erupted across the world. From the Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 in India, the 1919 revolution in Egypt, May Fourth Movement in China, to the March First Manse Movement in Seoul in 1919, men, women, the elderly and youths from various parts of the world marched on the streets to overthrow imperial oppression and fight for national self-determination. Rather than studying these forms of protests within a national or transimperial framework, this project excavates how non-violent anticolonial protests were viewed across the colonies of different empires. To this end, it brings together two colonies of two different empires that underwent parallel processes of decolonization—India and Korea. Although Indian and Korean anticolonial actors shared similar political aspirations and methods to challenge the British and Japanese empires respectively, their interaction mostly took an intellectual form. They debated the events and ideas unfolding across borders and incorporated them into their own assessment of anticolonial tactics, modalities, and world politics. This project uncovers these intercolonial references by examining how Indian thinkers and activists saw Korean Manse movement and how Korean thinkers and activists analyzed the Indian Satyagraha movements. Given that both Korean and Indian anticolonialists took their political campaigns to multiple locations ranging from Germany, China, France, USA, Japan, and Mexico, the project will draw upon newspapers, pamphlets, letters, and diaries written in several languages. Consolidating the history of decolonization, global intellectual history, and trans-Asian history, this project will lay the foundation for a new approach to understanding the global anti-colonial moment of the early twentieth century.