The Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and the Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures present:
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“Transposing the ‘Great Game’ to the Sphere of
Culture: Soviet-Indian Cultural Interactions
in the 1920s”
A lecture by
Katerina Clark
Professor of Comparative Literature and of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University
Friday, October 25, 4:30 P.M.
Monroe Hall 118
Open to faculty, students & the public
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After the Bolshevik Revolution the (British) Indian government reinforced its border security in the northwest,
making it virtually impossible for Soviet agents to penetrate, and the emir of Afghanistan refused to allow Moscowbacked Indian revolutionaries passage through his country. In consequence, the long-standing British-Russian
rivalry over South Asia (the ‘Great Game’) was largely redirected on the Soviet side to the sphere of culture: the AllUnion Society for Cultural Links with Abroad (VOKS) launched a campaign to establish contacts with, and send
materials to, Indian institutions, in defiance of censorship and the police; the theories of Aryanism, which in most
versions supported Indo-British cultural links, were challenged by the Japhetic theories of Nikolai Marr, and
Rabindranath Tagore was repeatedly invited to the Soviet Union, a visit that finally took place in 1930. After 1928
when supervision of the Indian communist movement was handed over to the Communist party of Great Britain, a
three-way pattern emerged whereby, under the patronage of British Communist and Comintern officials such as
Ralph Fox, Indian Leftist writers such as Mulk Raj Anand formed Moscow-aligned all-Indian cultural
organizations and began to publish in the Soviet Union.
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For questions, please contact Anna Kromin ([email protected])
CREEES Website: http://www.virginia.edu/creees