India’s First Diplomat, Vineet Thakur’s newest book, begins with a description that vividly captures the fragility of the protagonist’s early years, in part due to his strained family circumstances, but also because they are set in fin-de-siècle India that is beginning to openly agitate against the British Raj. This sets the scene very well as it turns out that Empire would become a recurring theme in Sastri’s life and his pioneering career, which this book is a biography of. In speaking of the book, Thakur has emphasised the notion of a diplomatic biography, a genre currently sparsely populated in the landscape of India’s international relations writing.1 More often, works written about Indian diplomats are memoirs, and those too are relatively few, therefore highly anticipated by readers of Indian diplomatic history. India’s First Diplomat appeals to a wider audience and will be useful reading for Indian and South African history, International Relations, and Diplomatic Studies, but also for those interested in liberal internationalism emanating from the Global South.

The writing of diplomatic history is, of course, essentially international. In the case of diplomatic biographies, the question is whether the imprint left by the subject has repercussions outside of narrow national confines. In that sense, the history contained in this book is truly global. There can be no overstatement of Sastri’s role in affirming India as an entity in world affairs before Nehruvian internationalism became dominant in the 1930s and thereafter. Thakur gives us the antecedents to the period that has more visibility now due to new writing on India’s historical international relations. In that sense, this book begins at the beginning, charting diplomatic action as a mode of untethering India from an imperial past. Perhaps primarily due to Gandhi’s presence there, India in South Africa is an endless source of fascination for historians of that period – Thakur writes an electrifying history of that tenuous relationship, of the global colour line, excavating how India and Sastri fit into race debates. The book is a compassionate reading of the indignities and fear of being an Indian diplomat in racialized spaces and is illuminating for its insights into emerging Indian versions of non-white nationalism. Thakur deftly tells the story of a non-monolithic racism such as faced by India – how does one represent a nation the imperialists considered „scarcely a nation worthy of representation“ (p. 97) – and that faced by Sastri, including shocked praise at his refined articulation, his „oriental impassiveness“, white approval that there was „nothing offensive about him“ (p. 114).

The book can also be read as Afro-Asian history and resolves to some extent the anxieties put forward by historians about an Indian perspective often decentring an African one.2 This is mainly because the author is critical of his subject’s „not inherently anti-discriminatory“ views on Africans. The duality of Indians as victimised by racist tropes, while themselves employing those tropes to distinguish themselves from Africans of various nationalities is now oft repeated but one still as compelling each time it is written about (p. 232). Once we get past this startling but disappointing hypocrisy, we begin to understand Sastri’s civilizational logic (the idea that India was more capable of civilisation), Sastri’s theories of the British Empire, and how he meant to articulate for the rights of Indians within that imperial vision. This leads us to the heart of the book – a discussion of Shrinivas Sastri’s politics and whether the „apostle of reconciliation“ could ever align with the later day radical agitation of Gandhi, Nehru and others. In reading the book, one returns repeatedly to the question – is all anticolonialism liberal?

All liberalism is certainly not anticolonial, and the bleeding of the British empire into English liberalism is well brought out by Thakur, but there is little on India’s own crisis with liberalism in the 1920s up to independence in 1947. All the elements are present in the book – indeed, Thakur’s exposition of the politics within the Indian National Congress, with the rifts between the moderates and the extremists, lays the foundation for a discussion of the radical internationalism that pioneers like Sastri had not yet made way for. By any measure, it seems that Sastri was unsuited to the divisions within the Congress, which he possibly saw as indicative of positions within a single political party, which could not be extended outwards to all politics. Thakur’s thrilling discussion of Motilal Nehru’s opposition to Sastri’s approach is an invitation to delve deeper into Sastri’s own politics. It would’ve been fascinating to have an exploration of Sastri as a conservative championing a liberal international order that by virtue of being liberal does not preclude India, a British colony – reading Sastri in the vein of C. Rajagopalachari, as opposed to Sastri as a flagrant liberal. The book shies away from recognising fully, and not just in passing, that he was possibly as conservative as he was liberal. It is curious that Thakur invokes Habermas’s communicative rationality to discuss Sastri’s conservative streak – how Sastri married the East and the West is clear, but where he was himself located is confusing. I would have liked to see the biographer underline that categorically but there is a certain sympathy for Sastri here – if his politics is the sum of his project and his position, then Thakur emphasizes the former and doesn’t fully dismount the latter.

This insistence on Sastri’s liberalism means that too many inconsistencies or lapses in political judgement are chalked up to him being a liberal. Looking to a contemporary’s estimate, I find the criticism offered by Motilal Nehru illuminating – Nehru Snr. critiques Sastri for vacillating between the two modes in vogue within the Congress, but Sastri escapes this constriction by being a diplomat, an essentially uncommitted position. This is a delightful pièce-de-resistance, which Thakur describes beautifully in the section on Sastri’s appointment as Privy Councillor. This also puts Sastri at odds with the diplomats that came much after his time, during and after independence, and with the other Nehru. Thakur refers to Sastri being called, as early as in 1921, „the very voice of international conscience“ (p. 6), an epithet he presumably accepted. This is in stark contrast with later diplomats like Krishna Menon who rejected any such fetishization – from the 1940s onwards, the onus was always on the other, whether Western or White, to engage with an Indian diplomat as an un-orientalised and pragmatic equal.3

This is perhaps why when we turn to the mutual disregard between Sastri and Jawaharlal Nehru, we see the epoch of absolute decolonisation, and with it, later-day Indian diplomacy, on the anvil. Nehru may have ill-judged Sastri’s contribution to the Indian cause, and Sastri was certainly wrong about Nehru (calling him a „spoilt youth“ who would „collapse like a child’s balloon after Gandhi“) (p. 222), but their differences also signal political genealogies clashing in early twentieth-century India. Indeed, it is true that Gandhi’s repeated endorsement of Sastri points to the special circumstances of the case of Indians in South Africa, but it also speaks to a larger consonance. On race, the men seemed to share a similar dispensation at first – a conservative and self-serving (for Indians) view, legalistic rather than informed by any strictly ethical impulses. This puts Sastri at odds with the Mahatma in their later lives, as Gandhi turns so sharply to an ethical politics, especially with regard to caste, in what Thakur calls Gandhi’s „spiritual anarchism“. Of course, we know well of Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s relationship with Gandhi; in this book, Thakur sheds light on Gokhale’s mentoring of Sastri too. It would be fascinating, in possibly a future project, to read more about how Gandhi diverged from Gokhale’s vision, and how much Sastri stayed true to it, and for how long.

Most writing from the Global South on the history of international relations, represented in various disciplines and sub-disciplines, have to forward claims for their subjects, and their scholarship as being more than merely handmaidens to dominant accounts – in histories of liberal internationalism, this takes the form of segregating subjects from the Wilsonian project. As such, diplomatic histories tend to be, first and foremost, restorative projects. Their primary concern is to recentre the histories they are telling not as fascinating in their foreignness, but essential components of the world order we have inherited and live with today. That is a project of enormous significance, especially as the onslaught from Eurocentric scholarship is relentless. India’s First Diplomat goes well beyond just that rehabilitative mission. By bringing out critiques of Sastri from within his contemporaries – Congress statesmen and India’s leading political thinkers – the book succeeds in decolonising pre-independence Indian diplomacy, thus far, a field too deeply entrenched in India’s colonial past.

Notes:
1 Another recently published work that is notable in this category is the moving elegy, N.S. Vinodh, A Forgotten Ambassador in Cairo. The Life and Times of Syud Hossain, New Delhi 2020.
2 Gerard McCann, Where was the Afro in Afro-Asian solidarity? Africa’s „Bandung moment“ in 1950s Asia, in: Journal of World History 30 (2019), 1–2, pp. 89–123.
3 On another connection between these two epochs, see discussion of Sastri’s friendship with G.S. Bajpai in this book, but also in Vineet Thakur, Travels in Diplomacy: V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and G.S. Bajpai in 1921–1922, in: The International History Review, 2021, pp. 1–18.