Recent studies of the Cold War like Rossen Djagalov’s From Internationalism to Postcolonialism (2020) and Monica Popescu’s At Penpoint (2020) have expanded the conceptual frameworks for understanding Second and Third World interactions by highlighting how the domain of culture became ideologically polarized in peripheral locales of the literary world system during this period. While South Asia was a key site of what is now known as the “cultural Cold War”, scholarly engagement with literary and visual cultural worlds of South Asia remains limited. Keya Ganguly’s Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray (2010); The Form of Ideology and Ideology of Form (2022) edited by Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini; and Gregory Goulding’s Cold War Genres (2024) are some of the few examples of such scholarly engagement. This roundtable seeks to address such limited scholarship by assembling a group of scholars to deliberate on literary and cultural configurations of Second and Third World interactions in South Asia. Specifically, it aims to understand how such interactions conditioned the form and content of literature in both Anglophone and vernacular circles through a comparative approach. Together, the panelists will trace circuits of translation, transmission, and circulation in these interactions to provide the audience access to a totalizing vision of “world literature”.

Sandeep Banerjee will begin the panel by mapping the transnational literary commons that stretched across, and shaped the literary and cultural exchanges between, the Second and Third Worlds through much of the twentieth century. Critical scholarship on the cultures of global communism have only recently begun to address this oversight with scholars calling this transnational space the “Soviet Republic of Letters” (Djagalov 2020) or the “Leftist Literary Commons” (Clark 2021). Taking inspiration from, while extending the insights of these studies, Sandeep contends that this transnational space was, foremost, a locus of creative appropriation and transformation in literature, culture, theory, and praxis that is best understood as the Communist Translation Zone (CTZ).

Using the framework of translation zone, Srimati Ghosal will deliberate on the development of an aesthetic of social realism in the cultural sphere of South Asia specifically through the form of the magazine. Using the transnational Afro-Asian magazine, Lotus, as a case study, Ghosal argues that while the literary output by South Asian writers in this magazine have been studied for their political content, very little attention has been given to the formal particularities of the magazine. For example, the “study” section in Lotus offered a perspective on the real-time creation of a literary aesthetic worldview that facilitated a collective imagination of Second-Third world solidarities. Ghosal shows how such formal specificities allowed the magazine to decenter the figure of canonized authors, poets, and literary groups celebrated in these geographies for revolutionizing and modernizing their literary traditions, and re-situate them as interconnected nodes of a trans-local network.

Finally, Vikrant Dadawala will provide a retrospective meditation on the many decades of Indo-Soviet cultural encounters described in the vast corpus of poems, travelogues, and fiction that emerged from the journeys of Indian muhajireen, revolutionaries, and writers. Working primarily with texts in Hindi or in translation, Dadawala outlines the contours of an epic encounter unfolding over three waves or stages. The first set of journeys from colonial India to the Soviet Union took place in the interwar period involving a difficult passage across the Hindu Kush mountains. The second wave of travel writing was powered by the unreal speed of the jet turbine engine, that flew the citizens of a newly independent nation to the “showcase cities” of the Third World in Central Asia. In sharp contrast to the first two sets of curated tours, the third, and final set of journeys were marked by confusion, loneliness and in the worst cases, by something close to aphasia.

In conclusion, I will show how the Cold War provided an occasion for a re-vitalization of the realism-modernism debate in 1930s Germany (Aesthetics and Politics) around the form committed art should take. By invoking an interaction between two South Asian communist ideologues – Samar Sen and Saroj Dutta – I will demonstrate how a local instantiation of the Sino-Soviet split played out in the political as well as cultural spheres of South Asia. While Samar Sen underlined the importance of autonomy of art and development of a cultural front as a prolonged process, Saroj Dutta emphasized on the urgency of a vanguardist cultural front ready to give the clarion call for revolutionary action. Their contrasting worldviews attest to alternate forms of Second and Third World interactions.