Anandita Bajpai

Cordial Cold War examines cultural entanglements, in various forms, between two distant yet interconnected sites of the Cold War—India and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Focusing on theatre performances, film festivals, newsreels, travel literature, radio broadcasting, cartography and art as sites of engagement, the chapters spotlight spaces of interaction that emerged in spite of, and within, the ambits of Cold War constraints. The inter-disciplinary collection sheds light on the variegated nature of translocal cultural entanglements, at work even before the GDR was officially recognized as a sovereign state by India in 1972. By foregrounding the role of actors, their practices and the sites of their entanglement, the contributions show how creative energies were mobilized to forge zones of friendship, mutual interest and envisioned solidarities.

This volume situates actors from the Global South as mutual co-shapers of the cultural Cold War, therein shifting its Euro-American and Soviet epicenters to Non-Aligned India. Going beyond official state channels of international political dialogue, it locates cordiality in the micro-histories and everyday experiences of interpersonal engagements, bringing to focus a hitherto underexplored chapter of India–Germany entanglements.

Untangling the logical, lexical, and semantic patterns of the multiple official speeches of Indian prime ministers, Speaking the Nation gauges how the Indian state has been projected by different governments in different times, in the face of challenges from internal and external actors that put pressure on its leaders to safeguard their status as legitimate elites in power. It analyses how Indian nationhood is consistently reshaped and reaffirmed by invoking its secular ethos and practice, as well as the experience of market liberalization. The book calls for serious engagement with political oratory in India. A close reading of speeches since 1991—from Narasimha Rao to Narendra Modi—captured how, through these crosscutting topics, the prominent 'authors of the nation' and the 'vanguards of the state', speak India into being.

This chapter revisits memories of Radio Berlin International (RBI), the GDR’s foreign broadcasting service, by particularly focussing on its Hindi programme from the perspective of those behind the microphone, that is, its presenters and journalists, as well as those glued to the radio set in India, listeners and listeners' clubs. At the heart of my discussion
are objects, which I call ‘objects of love’, those sent by the radio
station to listeners in India and those sent by listeners to the radio station.
In tracing the trajectories of objects sent to listeners, I show how they
became a means for rendering the GDR present in Indian households.
I first briefly introduce the Cold War contexts that informed the nature
of Indo- GDR entanglements, the setting- up of the Hindi Division of
RBI, the show’s features, which aimed at reaching out to Hindi speakers
in India, and the presenters of the programme. The next section elucidates
how exploring the trajectories of objects can contribute to scholarship
on radio in the Cold War and histories of material culture in the
GDR. In the fourth section, I illustrate how objects and their mobile lives point to parallel and overlapping registers of ‘love’, which they came to embody for the presenters and listeners – love as a strategy, as recognition and distinction, and as solidarity. The final part of the chapter delves into how memories of the radio station are preserved and re- activated in the
interlocutors’ engagement with these objects today and how they serve
as biographical narrational instruments for recounting transnational entangled pasts as well as the biographies of the keepers. The chapter thus
shows how tracing the material movement of objects among actors in
both countries, and their keepers’ intertwined narratives, can contribute
to the sonic history of Indo- GDR entanglements specifically and Cold
War history more generally.

Indien erkannte die DDR erst im Jahre 1972 offiziell an. Allerdings hatten sich so genannten Handelsvertretungen, in Abwesenheit offizieller diplomatischer Beziehungen, bereits seit 1956 als offizielles Sprachrohr der DDR in Indien etabliert. Parallel zur wachsenden Rolle dieser Handelsvertretungen bei der Vertiefung politischer, ökonomischer und kultureller Beziehungen, bildeten sich in ganz Indien zahlreiche Indo-DDR Freundschaftsgesellschaf-ten. Im Betrachtungszeitraum (1952-1972), auf dem Höhepunkt des Kalten Krieges, waren diese Gesellschaften entscheidend daran beteiligt, für bilaterale Beziehungen zu werben und die Frage nach der Anerkennung der DDR als souveränen Staat auf die Tagesordnung zu bringen. Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die Bedeutung dieser Gesellschaften für die Herausbil-dung einer DDR-Präsenz in Indien, ein bis dato weitgehend unerforschtes Thema. Die Freundschaftsgesellschaften waren Treffpunkt für eine ganze Reihe von Akteuren mit über-aus diversem Hintergrund: Diplomaten, Mitarbeiter der Handelsvertretungen, Intellektuelle, Künstler, Schriftsteller und Parlamentarier beider Länder. Diese Akteure wurden im kol-lektiven Kampf für die Anerkennung der DDR in ganz Indien aktiv.
Bei der Darstellung dieser Vorgänge verfolge ich folgende Ziele:

(1.) Die Betonung des rein politischen Charakters der bilateralen Beziehungen, die aber üblicherweise als „Kulturelle Beziehungen” oder „nicht staatliche Beziehungen” definiert wurden, insbesondere im Berli-ner Bundesarchiv, in dem wichtige Quellen zu Indien beherbergt sind. Wie die Analyse im zweiten Teil des Artikels zeigen wird, können die Freundschaftsgesellschaften, die landes-weiten Kampagnen für Anerkennung und die dabei vorgebrachten Argumente nicht unter die Kategorie „Kulturelle Beziehungen” subsumiert werden. Selbst der Begriff „Kulturpolitik“ greift hier zu kurz, betrachtet man die sehr offensiven und direkten Versuche, die Bühne der formalisierten Staatspolitik zu betreten.

(2.) Es soll deutlich werden, dass Indien keinesfalls ein passiver Rezipient oder ein unbetei-ligter Schauplatz der Geopolitik der beiden deutschen Staaten war, sondern ein aktiver Mit-gestalter der gegenseitigen Verbindungen in allen Bereichen. In dieser Hinsicht sind die Freundschaftsgesellschaften vielleicht das Beispiel für Aktivitäten von indischen wie deut-schen Akteuren. Weite Teile der Forschung zu solchen Verflechtungen konzentriert sich unweigerlich darauf, wie Indien eine Bühne für die Politik von DDR und BRD wurde. Die Bedeutung der indischen Akteure wird in den Quellen, die diesem Aufsatz zugrunde liegen, besonders deutlich.

(3.) Ich möchte ferner darlegen, wie der offiziellen Anerkennung im Jahre 1972 zwei Jahr-zehnte Öffentlichkeitsarbeit von Beteiligten aus beiden Ländern vorangingen, die die DDR im Bewusstsein der indischen Bevölkerung verankerten.

This article explores radio’s material legacies by exclusively focussing on the trajectories of radio-objects, which travelled between foreign broadcasting stations and their Indian listeners during the Cold War years. The presence of such objects in listeners’ homesteads/private collections even today and their affective relationship(s) to them can enable us to examine how radio materially permeated the larger social fabric of listeners’ everyday lives, not just through sound but also a plethora of things. Zooming in on gifts, souvenirs, letters, photographs and memorabilia, the article shows how radio-objects enabled Indian listeners to perform difference and distinction locally, to imagine and experience foreign countries through landscape-objects, to establish networks of South-South epistolary exchange, and to ‘see’ both co-listeners and radio hosts through travelling photographs.

This article engages with the shaping of the “New Man” figure in independent India and how this image was morphed and re-shaped by conditions of war and food shortages. It probes into the making of the category of the ideal citizen of a “New India” during Jawaharlal Nehru’s prime ministership. Further, it shows how citizens who were neither soldiers nor farmers, both of whom had been hailed as the iconic heroes of the nation, were called upon by the state to become the “New Men” of India. The first section outlines some of the important co-ordinates of Nehru’s envisioned “New India”, a roadmap for the nation to progress along the lines of economic self-sufficiency, industrialization, higher education and agricultural productivity. The register of growth and postcolonial nation-building was intertwined here with the figure of the ideal citizen, the “New Man” of the state-tutored New India. The article traces how the tropes of scientific temper and expertise, unity in diversity, development through the so-called
“Temples of Modern India” entangled and mutually informed the category of the ideal citizen, as envisioned by the state. The second section points to the gradually changing geo-political contexts. In terms of foreign policy, the Non-Aligned Movement and peaceful coexistence had been hailed as the cornerstones of the Nehruvian consensus. The border dispute between India and China in 1962 altered the vocabulary of mutual non-aggression, which would in turn impact the expectations ascribed to the nation’s
“New Men”. The next section specifically sheds light on the time period between 1962 and 1965, when the overall mood of nationalism was defined by the context of two wars (with China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1965) and acute food grain shortages in several parts of the country. Here I emphasize the merging of all other nation-building registers into the overarching categories of defence and development. A mood of insecurity and the nervousness of the state merges into discourses of vigilance and sacrifice through the second Prime Minister’s famous slogan of “Jai Jawan! Jai Kisan!” (Victory to the Soldier! Victory to the Farmer!).The last section analyses images from two English-language weekly newspaper magazines
– Link and New India during the interim period of the two wars. The objective here is to elucidate how in times of “national crises”, citizens who were neither soldiers nor farmers were called upon to serve the nation and become the “New Men” of India.