This talk explores how the League of Nations’ International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) and its Indian members framed, contested and negotiated the role of colonised nations in a broader framework of universal science/knowledge. Instituted in 1922 as one of the first global institutions trying to bring about an integrated world knowledge system and its place in broader visions of universal standards of scientific knowledge, the ICIC is often considered a prototype of intellectual and scientific internationalism, which in later decades paved the way for the creation of UNESCO. With humanists and classicists like Henri Bergson and Gilbert Murray at its helm and eminent natural scientists like Albert Einstein and Marie Curie representing their national scientific realms in an international institution, the committee strived to create a ‘new order’ of a common language and a universal scientific temperament conducive to what they thought as the role of knowledge in the internationalist world order. The committee’s universalist ambition of having an integrationist scientific language for both humanistic and natural sciences was therefore interspersed with the political conditions of racialised (thus non-universal) and colonial hierarchies. Although the ICIC did have a global ambition, in the first decade (1922–1931) of the committee’s activities, the ICIC only had two members from a colonised country – two Bengali men from British India, namely Devendra Nath Bannerjea and Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose.
Empirically situating these British Indian members of the ICIC as the primary case study, my research conceptually foregrounds the inherent tensions between universalism, imagined civilizational boundaries and knowledge hierarchies that were symptomatic of liberal internationalist projects in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing from colonial surveillance records, correspondences and biographical details of the Indian members of the committee over the course of the first two decades of the ICIC, I show how they used the notion of academic sovereignty of intellectual cooperation in the face of the lack of political sovereignty of a colonised nation. Especially taking into account the discussions around the formation of ‘national committees’ and what those ‘national committees’ meant to the larger project of ‘international cooperation,’ I contextualise the oscillation between certain fundamental conceptual categories at play – anti-colonial nationalism and its specific position vis-à-vis imperial/metropolitan/global circulation of knowledge.
Empirically situating these British Indian members of the ICIC as the primary case study, my research conceptually foregrounds the inherent tensions between universalism, imagined civilizational boundaries and knowledge hierarchies that were symptomatic of liberal internationalist projects in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing from colonial surveillance records, correspondences and biographical details of the Indian members of the committee over the course of the first two decades of the ICIC, I show how they used the notion of academic sovereignty of intellectual cooperation in the face of the lack of political sovereignty of a colonised nation. Especially taking into account the discussions around the formation of ‘national committees’ and what those ‘national committees’ meant to the larger project of ‘international cooperation,’ I contextualise the oscillation between certain fundamental conceptual categories at play – anti-colonial nationalism and its specific position vis-à-vis imperial/metropolitan/global circulation of knowledge.