Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

Leela Gandhi has posited "friendship' as the lost trope in anti-colonial thought,"² exploring the associations and relationships of a number of anti-colonial metropolitan intellectual activists and radicals around the turn of the twentieth century. Such relationships could disrupt rigid binaries between colonisers and colonised, and in particular lead colonisers to start to critically evaluate white hegemony and their own imperial positions and to enter into dialogue with those whom their nation had colonised. Such affective relationships across boundaries of "race," religion and culture had the potential to create what Manjapra terms "cosmopolitan thought zones," which could arise from "conversations across lines of difference, between disparate socio-cultural, political and linguistic groups, that provisionally created shared public worlds."³ With Clare Midgley and Fiona Paisley we have recently explored these issues in Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire.⁴

While in this special issue, "The Cosmo-politics of Friendship in Imperial Contact Zones 1870 – 1950", the focus is upon white westerners and South Asians, chiefly Indians, Nico Slate has explored south-south relationships in his study of friendship and collaboration and solidarity between African-American activists and Indian anti-colonialists.⁵ Clare Midgley has also advanced the notion of "cosmotopia" or a utopian cosmopolitan space "where people from different national, ethnic, and religious backgrounds—in this case, Bengali and British, Hindu and Christian—found common ground and worked together across the racialised boundaries of the coloniser-colonised divide."⁶

The term "cosmopolitanism" is associated in the western post-Enlightenment canon with the antithesis of national belonging. However, as Manjapra and Bose argue, such an understanding is Eurocentric rather than definitive. Taking a broader, non-western centric historical lens, a plurality of meanings, experiences and perspectives emerge that challenge the binary of nation/world and the, often negative, connotations of cosmopolitanism as ungrounded in national or cultural identity. Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali polymath, rejected this Eurocentric notion of cosmopolitanism. Certainly, his friendships with western imperial subjects such as the Anglican priest Charles Freer Andrews or the writer Edward Thompson did not mean the abandonment of his own culture and values.⁷ Indeed, as Gopal has argued, the challenge of the resisting colonial subject was crucial to the development of any dialogue across racial, religious, cultural and political boundaries.⁸ Gopal posits the notion of "reverse tutelage" where the coloniser learns from the colonised.

Christian missionaries and humanitarians motivated by Christian values saw themselves as inspired by friendship and kindly feelings as they sought to rescue lost bodies and souls in imperial locations. While many missionary practices and policies were pervaded by notions of Christian and white superiority and moral rightness, the Christian universalism they espoused deemed all equal in Christ. However, the operationalisation of Christian universalism was variegated and many could pay lip service to it while maintaining and fiercely defending white hegemony and British power in India. The entwining of the Anglo-American Protestant missionary movement with white racism and colonial authority was challenged at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 when the Indian cleric, Azariah, called for missionaries to be friends working with Indian Christians rather than fathers who controlled and dominated.⁹

Charles Freer Andrews, whose friendships with Gandhi and Tagore constitute an important element in the literature on cross-cultural friendship between representatives of the colonial ruling elite and the colonised, advocated that recruits to the Indian mission field should have a "sincere and whole-hearted personal friendship… with at least one fellow-Christian communicant of 'another race.'"¹⁰ Andrews valued his own friendship with the Indian Christian, S.K. Rudra, which "fostered his evolving sympathy with the 'new progressive life of India.'"¹¹ Looking at Christianity through the eyes of Indians, in India and South Africa revealed to him the "Sahib church," strongly allied to the white race and its continued domination. As he learnt more of Hinduism through his relationships with Gandhi and Tagore and of Islam through his friend, Zaka Ullah,¹² Andrews was able to move towards a "Spiritual Cosmopolitanism."

The notion that religion is...