Benjamin Zachariah
Paul Robeson, Travelling Ideas, Migrating Songs
Reflexions on Lingering Internationalisms
My talk explores the historical contexts of Robeson’s itineraries across the world, with some of Paul Robeson’s Indian circles, which were actually circles made in London and concerned with Spain, the Comintern, and anti-fascism, at the centre. These circles included the future Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the ‘Eurasian’ and future Civil Rights activist Cedric Dover. Robeson never made it to India, though he was scheduled to perform there in 1961, but his music was sung in translation in Bengali, songs were composed about him, and his 60th birthday was celebrated in three Indian cities in 1958. The paper also discusses the music of the Popular Front, in India, and then in India after independence.
Benjamin Zachariah is a member of the Einstein Forum research staff. He completed his undergraduate degree in history, philosophy and literature at Presidency College, Calcutta, and his PhD in history from Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught for many years at Sheffield University, was Professor of History in Calcutta and Halle, and has held previous senior research fellowships at the University of Trier, the Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, among other places. His research interests include the politics of historical knowledge, historical theory and historiography, global fascism, transnational revolutionary networks, nationalisms, and memory. Zachariah is the author of Nehru (2004), Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930–1950 (2005), Playing the Nation Game: The Ambiguities of Nationalism in India (2011, 2016; revised edition Nation Games 2020), and After the Last Post: The Lives of Indian Historiography in India (2019; South Asia edition 2023). He is co-editor of The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views 1917–1939 (2015), and of What’s Left of Marxism: Historiography and the Possibility of Thinking with Marxian Themes and Concepts (2020; paperback 2022).