The Liberal Internationalism of V.S. Srinivasa Sastri
This project is a biography of the diplomatic life of V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and situates his life and work in the 1920s within the politics of liberal internationalism.
Project Description
V.S. Srinivasa Sastri (1869-1946) is a little-studied figure in India’s political history. And, even lesser attention is paid to him as a thinker and practitioner of international politics. As India’s roving ambassador for much of the 1920s, he campaigned for the rights of Indians in the British Empire. In doing this, he foregrounded ‘racial discrimination’ as a key problem for the Wilsonian liberalism of the 1920s. This project touches on the specific as well as general nodes of interwar liberal internationalism, drawing out their connections and linkages, and by placing an individual at the centre of its constant re-formulations attempts a more rounded and global view of liberal internationalism.
Selected Publications
1) Thakur, V (2018) Postscripts on Independence: Foreign Policy Discourses in India and South Africa, Oxford University Press.
2) Thakur, V (2017) Jan Smuts and the Indian Question, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu Natal Press.
3) Thakur, V (2017) ‘Liberal, Liminal and Lost: India’s first diplomats and the narrative of foreign policy’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 45 (2): 232-258.