Emissaries of Swadeshi. Bengali Internationalists in Inter-war Italy

Several distinguished Bengali intellectuals visited Italy in the inter-war period as part of their activities aimed at promoting India’s subjectivity on the international stage. In their engagement with cultural and political life in the Old Continent, they acted as representatives of India’s aspirations on the international scene, as well as of the specific region to which they belonged. This chapter will identify the unique features that made this phase of the Bengal-Italy dialogue significant for both sides by exploring the landscape of ideas and aspirations which informed the cultural projects Bengali intellectuals, and particularly Kalidas Nag, Rabindranath Tagore and Surendranath Dasgupta, had embarked on with regard to educational cooperation and intellectual engagement, as well as the aims and means of Italy’s support to such projects. The fundamental assumption of the study is that these ideas and aspirations had been formulated and developed in Bengal in the wake of the Swadeshi movement at the beginning of the 20th century, and intrinsically combined the national and the international perspectives.