The Fundamental Rights Resolution: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Cosmopolitanism in an Interwar Moment

Kama Maclean’s article responds to the analytical threads offered by Partha Chatterjee’s “Nationalism, Internationalism, and Cosmopolitanism: Some Observations from Modern Indian History” by focusing closely on the dynamics leading to the passing of the Fundamental Rights resolution by the Indian National Congress at Karachi in 1931. A key moment in anticolonial thought, the resolution was many things: an uneasy fusion of ideologies to assuage a range of divergent political interests; a maneuver to prevent another split of the nationalist movement into radical and moderate factions; a gesture toward performing statehood; and a multiauthored but significant imagining of what an independent India might look like. An ostensibly nationalist document, the resolution—elements of which remain in the statement of rights in the Indian Constitution—demonstrates the influence of leftist internationalism and liberal cosmopolitan concerns in utopian interwar imaginings.