India's First Diplomat: V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and the Making of Liberal Internationalism

Open lecture by Professor Vineet Thakur, Leiden University.

Abstract

V.S. Srinivasa Sastri was a celebrated Indian politician and diplomat in the early twentieth century. He is now a largely forgotten figure despite being hailed as the ‘very voice of international conscience’. This book rehabilitates Sastri and offers a diplomatic biography of his years as India’s roving ambassador in the 1920s. It examines his involvement in key conferences and agreements, as well as his achievements in advocating for racial equality and securing the rights of Indians both at home and abroad. It also illuminates the darker side of being a native diplomat, including the risk of legitimizing the colonial project and the contradictions of being treated as an equal on the world stage while lacking equality at home. In retrieving the legacy of Sastri, the book shows that liberal internationalism is not the preserve of Western powers and actors – where it too often represents imperialism by other means – but a commitment to social progress fought at multiple sites and by many protagonists.

Speaker bio

Vineet Thakur is a university lecturer at Leiden University, in the Netherlands. He studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and worked at Ambedkar University (Delhi), the University of Johannesburg and SOAS London. He was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Amsterdam, and Smuts Vesting Fellow at Cambridge University. He is the author of V.S. Srinivasa Sastri: A Liberal Life (2023); India’s First Diplomat: V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and the Making of Liberal Internationalism (2021); The Imperial Discipline: Race and the Founding of International Relations (2020 – with Alexander Davis and Peter Vale); South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations (2020 – with Peter Vale; winner of the Francesco Guicciardini Prize for the Best Book in Historical International Relations); Postscripts on Independence: Foreign Policy Discourses in India and South Africa (2018) and Jan Smuts and the Indian Question (2017).