Migrating Ideas from East to West:
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay on the Race Question

This lecture challenges the Eurocentric view that emancipatory ideas such as liberty, equality, and human dignity flowed solely from the West to the non-West. Instead, it argues that intellectual exchange has always been multidirectional and dialogical.

By situating race within colonial modernity and anti-colonial struggle, the lecture foregrounds how Indian nationalist and anti-caste thinking engaged in global debates on race, empire, caste, and liberation, forging transnational solidarities among India, Africa, and the United States. Much of Indian interlocutions on race and imperialism that became part of the global discourse was based on hegemonic perspectives that marginalized gendered traditions of thought. The lecture’s main argument is to recover and highlight the robust yet largely invisible feminist and gendered traditions from India that intervened in debates on imperialism, race, and oppression.

Through the lens of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903-1988), this lecture demonstrates that a neglected feminist tradition fundamentally shaped discourses on race and imperialism in colonial and postcolonial India. Elaborating of Politics of male centric canon, this lecture  contends that this tradition—embodied by Sarojini Naidu, Annie Besant, and Sucheta Kriplani—offers a subversive feminist genealogy. Locating Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay in this subversive tradition, presents her gendered interventions, linking anti-imperialism explicitly to critiques of race, capitalism, and patriarchy, foregrounding gender, an aspect often omitted by mainstream discourse.