Egypt and the Indian Horizon (1860s–1960s)

Egypt and India have occasionally been the subject of joint study, either due to their shared colonial history, at least between 1882 and 1936 for Egypt or due to their affiliation with the non-aligned movement from 1955 (Khan, 2011). However, the colonial experience and nationalist struggles do not fully capture the nature of Egypt’s relations with India during the “age of steam and print” (1850–1930) and the subsequent three decades (Gelvin & Green, 2014). The project which I am undertaking as a research fellow at the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology (Ifao) aims to explore, from a multidimensional perspective, the place of India in Egypt from the 1860s to the death of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964.

Research Question

Over nearly a century of intellectual, religious, diplomatic, and economic history, Egyptian reformers, scholars, religious figures, travellers, statesmen, and journalists constructed a discourse on these “Others,” oscillating between fascination and condescension. At times depicted as a compelling double, a backward nation, or a sister in arms and martyrdom, India functioned as a comparative mirror, or what I call a distorting mirror, whose reflections served as (anti-)models for the moral rejuvenation of the Egyptian nation, self-justification, and self-awareness. This project investigates the history of an Egyptian orientalist gaze toward India, extending well beyond the form of orientalism Egypt developed towards its Arab neighbours in the 1930s (Gershoni & Jankowski, 1995). By engaging with Hindu and Muslim India and examining their characteristics, Egyptians modelled a way of narrating their own history and national destiny, in which rhetoric of fraternity served a problematic notion of authenticity.

The project situates these exchanges within the broader history of South-South relations beyond the strict Non-Aligned Movement period, asking how Egyptian orientalist knowledge production intersected with anti-colonial solidarity and the formation of development ideologies in the Third World.

1. An ‘Oriental’ Link

I first examine the “Oriental link” that Egyptian intellectuals believed connected them to their Indian Muslim counterparts. It analyses the place of India in Egyptian public opinion and readership over more than a century and seeks to explain the contradictory references to it. Special attention will be given to the religious dimension of Egypt’s relations with India, first concerning Muslim populations, then the Hindu majority. Beyond merely noting the importance of religious exchanges between the two regions—both human and textual—I investigate how these interactions contributed to the formulation of an “Egyptian” or “national” Islam and a specific cultural identity; in other words, how the Indian argument nourished internal political and religious debate. Ultimately, this is a question of the role of Islam in defining Egyptian identity between 1860 and 1960, using India as a mirror.

See: “Al-Azhar to India (1936-1937): Arab ‘Orientalism’ and the Formation of National Islams”.

2. Egyptian Knowledge on India

The second component focuses on the knowledge produced about India in Egypt and interrogates the scholarly aspect of this Egyptian Orientalism in the sense of a reflexive reformism (Roussillon, 2005). First, it requires an examination of its methods and agents: Egyptian travels to India and their accounts, encounters with Indian visitors, and the publication of “Oriental” manuals in geography and sociology contributed to the elaboration of a scholarly, albeit ambiguous, discourse on these two countries. I will then analyse the content of this knowledge: which themes were privileged (the concept of “caste,” for example)? How precise was the information gathered on India? Which regions were most studied or visited, and why? Considering the gradual constitution of knowledge about India highlights a reversal that began in 1947. India became a privileged partner in technical cooperation for the social and economic development of Nasser’s Egypt and in scientific innovations to adapt international statistical measures to national contexts: Egyptian statisticians trained at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta, and Pitambar Pant (d. 1973), Director of the Indian National Planning Department and Nehru’s first personal secretary, was among the closest collaborators of the Cairo National Planning Institute.

See: “New Perspectives on South Asian and Middle Eastern Connections in the 20th Century”.

3. India as a Laboratory for Government Techniques and Planning

The final component focuses on Egyptian–Indian diplomatic relations, considered from the perspective of Khedivial, monarchical, and then republican Egypt. In the mid-1860s, Egypt faced the “Raj Empire” directly (Blyth, 2003), meaning the Indian sphere of influence in East Africa and the Middle East. Within this vast British-controlled zone, whose reach expanded after the First World War with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Khedivial state maintained political, military, and economic relations with the Raj and its satellites, despite restrictions on its prerogatives until 1936 (Indian troops on the Canal). I will first examine how the Khedivial state perceived the so-called “Indianisation” of its administration by the British between 1882 and 1922, and how it handled commercial relations with the Raj through the dual interface of Suez and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Examining the long history of these diplomatic exchanges between the Egyptian state and various political actors of the Raj, institutionalised by independence, allows a re-evaluation of Egypt’s recent history. Nasser and Nehru’s policy of neutrality must be understood as a transformation of long-standing relations that have previously been studied only through colonial sources. This component also contributes to the historiographical debate on the influence of colonial experience on political structures in the Middle East. Contrary to the “postcolonial” hypothesis, which emphasised the predominance of colonial theories and instruments in newly independent Arab regimes (Mitchell, 2002), historical observation reveals the plurality of governance techniques employed and the essential role of interwar Arab monarchies in establishing a national tradition of governance (El Shakry, 2007; Mestyán, 2023).

Sources

The project draws on Egyptian institutional reports, scientific publications, periodical press, Indian national and institutional archives, as well as collections from the International Labour Organization.