Paradoxes of worldmaking: examining Indian women’s historical international thought c.1920-50

Balaji, Shruti (2024) Paradoxes of worldmaking: examining Indian women’s historical international thought c.1920-50. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Text - Submitted Version Restricted to Repository staff only until 27 September 2026. Download (1MB)

Abstract

This doctoral thesis addresses a significant gap in International Relations (IR) and politics research: the systematic erasure of Third World women as historical political actors and thinkers. This thesis unearths the story of a cohort of elite Indian women political activists, arguing that they curated and built ‘new’ international political knowledge constitutive of epistemic, imaginative, and aspirational worldmaking. Using a postcolonial feminist framework, the thesis puts forward a conceptual tool called the ‘paradoxes of worldmaking’ to examine how elite Indian women engaged with and debated ‘the international’, taking seriously their political agency formed through their encounters with imperialism and patriarchy. The thesis draws on three inductively generated themes of elite Indian women’s international political subjecthood as it plays out in ‘social work’ politics, in anti-imperialist struggles and pan-Asian thought, and in ideas of race and Afro-Asian solidarities. Methodologically, the thesis conducted original multi-sited archival and primary research in India and the UK, bridging both fields of knowledge (historical IR, gender and feminist theory, and global histories of South Asia) and sources of thought (such as women’s organizational reports and periodicals, women’s political speeches and personal papers, and colonial and state records) that are often treated as analytically and politically separate knowledges. The thesis demonstrates how the various iterations of the ‘paradoxes of worldmaking,’ provides a critical, productive framing to analyze how Indian women articulated the ambivalent, strategic, and idealized visions of international political subjecthood that were rooted in hierarchical, situated, and particularistic ideas. This further shows how Indian women’s social, political, and intellectual worlds exceeded textual form and were embedded in the micro-politics of struggle, activism, and ‘service’-oriented work that iteratively shaped their political thinking. The thesis therefore unsettles existing understandings of where and how historical international ideas emerged and were sustained, contributing to a gendered, postcolonial reading of historical international thought.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Shruti Balaji
Library of Congress subject classification:	D History General and Old World > DS Asia H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman J Political Science > JZ International relations
Sets:	Departments > International Relations
Supervisor:	Millar, Katharine M. and Barkawi, Tarak and Bayly, Martin J.
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4745

Actions (login required)

Record administration - authorised staff only