This chapter examines the goals and activities of the Calcutta-based Greater India Society (GIS). Building on Kalidas Nag and P.C. Bagchi’s study-sojourn in Paris and research trips to Leiden, the GIS became, in the mid-1920s, the South Asian node in the transimperial knowledge network of ‘Greater India’. The GIS set new terms for the writing of Indian history and popularized the notion of India as Asia’s civilizational fount and cultural linchpin, not only in Bengal but across the subcontinent. The Greater India movement endorsed a pedagogical mission to rectify the ‘splendid isolation’ myth, an important trope in British colonial histories of the subcontinent, and postulated India as a shaper of world history no less than the West and a prominent trading power, colonizer and civilizer in the Asian sphere. When the European powers gradually started losing grip on their colonies, the notion of ‘Greater India’ allowed Indian intellectuals to imagine an empire of their own. Although it was located in the distant past, it served the purposes of the present and the research paradigm of Greater India energized, in the Indian context, anti-colonial and nationalist agendas.

This chapter reconstructs how Tagore and Nag’s agenda for a global humanism, inspired by the template of Greater India, was put to the test at Visva-Bharati university, a space closely monitored by the colonial authorities as a potential breeding ground for sedition. Tagore’s peculiar blend of Orientalism and internationalism resonated with an international group of intellectuals, including Romain Rolland, Carlo Formichi, Sylvain Lévi and Yone Noguchi, but ultimately lost traction amidst the ideological turmoil and political developments that marked the 1920s and 30s. As Tagore’s controversial visit to Fascist Italy painfully revealed, a vision of world order premised on the cooperation of cultural ambassadors from the East and West sharing the same humanist ideals, became increasingly untenable. Furthermore, the Indian exceptionalism and cultural essentialism that energized Tagore’s vision turned out to be unpalatable for figures such as Lévi, who supported the GIS but dismissed any notion of an Eastern mission to ‘redeem the West’. Japan’s geopolitical ascendency altered the East for good and shattered the dream of a united Asian front inspired by the legacies of ‘Greater India’.

The introduction outlines, in broad brushstrokes, the different dimensions of the scholarly and nationalist quest to find India in Asia. In the 1920s and 1930s, Rabindranath Tagore and Greater India Society (GIS) members such as Kalidas Nag and Suniti Kumar Chatterjee toured Southeast Asia to look for ancient India’s Hindu-Buddhist cultural and artistic legacies abroad. But although this quest focused on Java, Bali and Cambodia, the GIS also charted India’s historical influence and cultural imprints in Central and East Asia, as well as Europe, the Pacific world and Indian Ocean realm. Drawing on the travelogues of GIS members and figures loosely affiliated with the society such as the Bengali sannyasin Swami Sadananda, this introduction explores the interwar politics of Greater India. It is argued that the Greater India movement’s quest to rewrite ancient history reconfigured the “idea of India” and became central to anti-colonial, nationalist and internationalist political agendas. Finally, the introduction reflects on the language dynamics of the knowledge networks of Greater India, and outlines the main methodological and historiographical stakes of the book.