Global Maoist optics among diaspora: The Indian Workers' Association during India's food 'crisis', 1965-69

Abstract

This article considers the Indian Workers’ Association (Great Britain) [hereafter IWA]’s responses to food scarcities in India during the late 1960s. It reveals Maoist optics informed IWA critiques, departing from coexistent appraisals articulated in leftist circles in India. In doing so, the article demonstrates the relevance of worldviews, idioms and paradigms emanating from global conjunctures beyond places of origin among diaspora. IWA luminaries were embedded in revolutionary anti-colonial networks shaped by decolonization and the global Cold War, and bestowed substance upon Maoism in these contexts. Ultimately, this informed IWA perceptions of causes and solutions to the food ‘crisis’: in their characterizations of reliance on external aid as indicative of post-1947 India’s semi-colonial status; in portrayals of Soviet ‘social imperialism’ in India during the Sino-Soviet Split; or in demands for radical land reform based on a selective rendering of the Chinese model, which downplayed the consequences of the ‘Great Leap Forward’