Beyond Bandung and Belgrade: Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi, A Forgotten Indian Voice for World Peace

ABSTRACT Dr. Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi (1907–1966) was an Indian polymath best known for his intellectual contributions in a dizzyingly wide range of fields: mathematics, statistics, genetics, numismatics, history, and literature. His enduring reputation seems to have been posthumously sealed as the father of Marxist historiography in India. What has received scant scholarly attention, however, is his role as a key voice of the Indian peace movement after Independence and a crucial liaison between Indian peace activists and the Soviet‐aligned world peace movement in the 1950s. Kosambi's politics, characterized both by his association with the undivided Communist Party of India and his arm's‐length collaboration with the Government of India, afforded him a unique semi‐official, fellow‐traveling position to argue for nuclear disarmament and protest wars of aggression. This paper would argue that he consciously refused to be co‐opted by either post‐colonial nationalism or conformist international communism to advance an Asia‐centric perspective on world peace that has now been largely occluded from mainstream accounts of post‐war pacifism. This paper would also argue that by leveraging a now‐forgotten infrastructure of transnational peace advocacy and interlocking circuits of activism at the local and national levels, Kosambi effectively foregrounded and vernacularized his own ideas of world peace premised on principled non‐interventionism. Through a close reading of his extant essays, reports, speeches, and correspondence throughout the 1950s, I would posit that Kosambi's vision for world peace was imbued with a third‐world internationalist sensibility that squarely located the roots of warfare in world hunger and structures of imperialism. In so doing, he went far beyond the Afro‐Asian promise of the Bandung Conference (1955) when it came to arguing for what is now called ‘South–South solidarity.’ I further contend that, through his dutiful and maverick peace activism (prior to disillusionment in the 1960s) and increasingly radical critique of nuclear energy, Kosambi also anticipated several talking points of the Non‐Aligned Movement, especially those that would only come to the fore in the Belgrade Summit (1961).