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

ongoing

INTERCOL investigates a moment of mass mobilisation at the start of the twentieth century when several non-violent protests erupted across the world. Like in contemporary demonstrations, people marched on the streets to fight for a shared idea of justice, which, for the early twentieth century demonstrators, targeted empires and colonialism. Rather than studying these mass protests within a national framework, INTERCOL excavates how non-violent anti-colonial protests were viewed across the colonies. To this end, it brings together two colonies of two different empires that underwent parallel processes of decolonisation—India and Korea. Although Indian and Korean anti-colonial actors shared similar political aspirations and methods to challenge the British and Japanese empires respectively, their interaction mostly took an intellectual form rather than physical organisation of an alliance. They debated the events and ideas unfolding across borders and incorporated them into their own assessment of anti-colonial tactics and world politics. INTERCOL uncovers these intercolonial references by examining the receptions of the Korean Manse movement in India and the Indian Satyagraha movement in Korea. By bringing to the surface the heterogeneity of intercolonial references expressed in Hindi, Korean, and English newspapers, political pamphlets, and letters of historical actors, INTERCOL lays the foundation for a new interdisciplinary subfield—intercolonial public—that offers a new approach to understanding the global anti-colonial moment in the early twentieth century. The twenty-four months of the fellowship will be dedicated to outlining the parameters of an intercolonial public, testing the benefits and limits of intercoloniality as method, and applying the implication of INTERCOL to contemporary debates on democracy in Asia, where India and Korea are increasingly growing closer.