ETD

• anticolonialism
• antimperialism
• diplomacy
• Indian political thought
• Jawaharlal Nehru
• non-alignment

This thesis reconstructs the formation of Jawaharlal Nehru's international thought from the 1920s to the early 1960s, reading it as an exercise in political translation between incompatible vocabularies: British imperialism, Indian nationalism, socialist internationalism, postcolonial non-alignment. Nehru emerges less as an abstract theorist of the Third World than as a situated translator forced to render communicable traditions that shared neither premises nor language.
The work moves in three stages. The first chapter locates the origins of Nehru's global thought in the municipal and journalistic practice of Allahabad, rather than in Britain or interwar Europe. The second follows him through transnational anti-colonial networks — Brussels 1927, the League Against Imperialism, the 1938 Egyptian journey and his dialogue with Mustafa al-Nahhas — toward the formation of a «third vocabulary». The third addresses the test of power: the capture of the translator by the postcolonial state apparatus, the diplomatic trials of Moscow, Vienna and Belgrade in 1955, and the epistemic limits of comparative development through P.C. Mahalanobis's 1957 mission to China.
The thesis draws on unpublished or under-used sources — the Nehru Papers (PMML, New Delhi), the Mahalanobis archives (ISI, Kolkata), the Kreisky-Archiv and Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (Vienna) — and proposes a framework, non-alignment as translation rather than doctrine, extendable beyond the Indian case.