This book tells the story of Indian, Burmese, and Indonesian socialists who fleshed out radical imaginaries of regional and global change in hotels and hill stations, commissioning risky flights and organising cantankerous conferences to do so in a rapidly globalising age – the 1950s. These activists took the achievement of independence in their countries to presage systemic political shifts in favour of egalitarianism and democracy which it fell to them to expedite.
The work documents a distinctive passage in the history of world socialism and asks scholars to look afresh at the multifaceted agendas that animated actors in what was an experimentative as much as an ideological decade. South and Southeast Asian non-state actors forged internationalisms which moved them, and contemporaries, even as political possibilities narrowed amid climates of Cold War cynicism. These anti-imperial visions merit further historical study if the entwinement of past with present is to be fully appreciated.