The Bandung Conference of 1955 – it’s hard to think of another event on which so much ink has been spilled in exchange for such little knowledge. Ten years after the Conference, the Indian diplomat GH Jansen lamented that much of what we know of Bandung is based on what people think happened at this conference rather than what actually happened there.
In 2014, the political scientist Robert Vitalis reconfirmed Jansen’s hypothesis in a blistering critique of the Bandung scholarship which, he showed, romanticises the Conference without adequately historicising it.
Ironically, the most famous Third World conference (or what is now called the “Global South”) lacks a proper archival history of its own. In fact, the last time someone drew on the full set of conference proceedings to write about it was in 1955, when the American scholar George M Kahin was given access to them for a mere 12 hours.
My aim here is to reveal snippets from the archival traces of this conference and provide a flavour of the goings on through a fleeting glimpse into the mind of one of the chief protagonists of this conference: Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. I rely on an unusual historical artifact: Nehru’s note pad from the conference....
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