Esmat Elhalaby, Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization (Oakland: University of California Press, 2025)

Parting Gifts of Empire (henceforth PGE) explores the history of anti-colonial thought as it flowed between Palestine and India in the heyday of mid-twentieth century decolonization. We can return to this history today only with a sense of the acute limitations of South-South solidarity. Amid India’s response to the genocide in Gaza and the invasion of Ukraine, it is evident that neither an enduring anti-colonial outlook nor a capacious nationalism were necessary outcomes of decolonization. Nor yet can there be any illusions about the benevolence of the international order, with the twenty first century fast racking up its own list of globe-spanning horrors to rival the twentieth. New visions for the global order are urgent. PGE joins a growing list of works that return to supposedly superseded forms of twentieth-century internationalism in search of resources of hope and solidarity.¹ Elhalaby’s contribution, however, is more circumspect, a tone well captured in the final sentence of his introduction: “Lessons, and warnings, abound” (27).

Elhalaby has had criticisms of existing postcolonial approaches to history and the need for a sharper and clearer anti-colonialism to avoid appropriation by non-Western chauvinist projects.² PGE offers three defining features of anti-colonial thought: First, “a realization… that imperial knowledge is a lie” (22). Second, a “constructivist project to build a new world” (23) through often novel and autonomous institutions. Third, a willingness to identify knowledge production with “a political and social project” (24), often in the face of dismissal by Western scholars. For Elhalaby, then, studying anti-colonial thought needs, a “social history of ideas”(4); one in which the decolonization of the mind is a central concern, but where ideas must be conjoined with an understanding of the material projects in which they were embedded. This sets Elhalaby’s project apart from those for which postcolonial thought is measured by its distance from “Western” or “modern” ideas. As PGE points out, this latter approach leads to peculiarities like viewing Sayyid Qutb’s Social Justice in Iran as a key work in anti-colonial thought. Attention to the circumstances of its distribution, however, would reveal that it was promoted by the highest levels of the American Cold War establishment and Saudi Aramco.

PGE’s five chapters trace the circulation of ideas about and between the Arab world and India from the early 20^th century to the 1970s. Knowledge about South and West Asia in this period moved from being produced in the disciplinary protocols of “Orientalism” to those of “Area Studies”. Each chapter is built around a few key figures. Those from the Arab world (especially Egypt and Lebanon) dominate the narrative with complementary individuals and organizations from India in four chapters, while the final chapter reverses this pattern. Uniting these figures, are two concerns – Palestine and India. Palestine, in this work, then, is consciously approached from the outside in. For Elhalaby, this proud history of broad and principled solidarity with Palestine in the global South is important in itself but also because it has generated ideas well beyond Palestine.

The first chapter, ‘Empire’, follows Wadi al-Bustani (1886-1953), a Palestinian-Lebanese Maronite poet, translator, lawyer and activist, known as one of the earliest analyzers of the dangers of the Balfour declaration. Early in his career, though, Bustani eagerly imbibed the disciplinary protocols and approaches of Orientalist scholars at the very heart of Empire. His travels within Empire and experiences of anti-colonial ideas through these travels, moved him to find a very different set of connections. During his time in India from 1914-16, he met Nobel Laureate writer Rabindranath Tagore and became his first translator into Arabic. Soon after leaving India, his stay in colonial Palestine rapidly made him a critic of British colonialism. The political outlook he articulated harked back to an Ottoman ecumenical culture and forward to Arab nationalism, in particular through its emphasis on cross-religious solidarity and Arab identity. Bustani continued projects of translating South Asian texts into Arabic in parallel to this activism. Empire created the possibility of connections between figures like Bustani and Tagore: prejudices and misconceptions were products of an Imperial milieu. But, PGE suggests, their understanding of the violence of Empire meant that they did something that producers of colonial knowledge never did – they hunted for more liberatory connections in each other’s literary and cultural oeuvres.

“Islam”, the second chapter, offers a contrasting mode of solidarity – one rooted in the ambitions of globalizing religions. Elhalaby tells two stories about limitations here. The first relates to the treatment of a Christian from Syria – Paul Dimishky – in a missionary enterprise that was enmeshed in empire and keen to counter pan-Islamism. The missionary enterprise was acutely aware that converting Muslims in India required a knowledge of the Quran and familiarity with Arabic. Dimishky brought all these things, and an eagerness to work in India. His Christian will to prosyletize, however, proved weaker than colonial racial hierarchies, with his European colleagues seeing him as a “difficult” individual and eventually lobbying to have him sent back to Syria. The complementary narrative in this chapter relates to pan-Islamism in the 1930s. The 1924 abolition of the Caliphate by Turkey left in its wake squabbles over whether the title might continue to be a basis for a pan-Islamic movement and, if it were, who might become the Caliph. The Egyptian monarch was one such hopeful and, in 1934, the newly elevated rector of the famous mosque and seminary of Al-Azhar was a key player in conceptualizing this Egyptian claim. In that year, too, the pre-eminent Dalit activist in India B.R. Ambedkar announced that, in view of the caste system’s centrality to Hinduism, he would convert to another religion before he died. Ostensibly inspired by this declaration, Al-Azhar sent a delegation to India to investigate the possibility of winning Dalit converts to Islam. The final report of the delegation, however, offered an unsubstantiated denigration of Indian Islamic cultures and the suggestion that the solution lay in a sectarian unification behind Egyptian claims to the Caliphate. For Elhalaby, both the global Christianity counterposed to pan-Islam and pan-Islamism proved to be dead ends in anti-colonial solidarity since these weren’t projects interested in the actual texture of the lives of South Asians.

The ambitions of the Indian National Congress (INC) to articulate a new internationalism are the focus of the next two chapters. Chapter three takes up the effort to build a pan-Asian politics. Here, too, PGE points to the limitations of an Islam-centric international solidarity and contrasts it with the greater potential of a more independent and secular pan-Asian vision. The operative contrast in this chapter is between the March 1947 pan-Asian conference called by the INC and the 1969 founding conference of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) which eventually became the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The former conference saw thin participation from Arab countries, partly in response to calls for a boycott by the Muslim League, and the extension of an invitation to a delegation from Hebrew University. In PGE’s account, investigating this 1947 conference beyond the well-known organizational hiccups yields telling details. For one, the conference served as the start of a cycle of Afro-Asian solidarity that was to lead to the Bandung conference. For another, it saw a feisty exchange on the question of Palestine. The Palestinian side of that exchange was articulated by members of the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU) delegation who punctured any attempt by Hebrew University to present Israeli colonialism as an “old Asian people” returning to their “Asian motherland” (89). In turn, EFU’s intervention had older solidaristic roots. Two years previously, the EFU delegation’s presence at the All-India Women’s Conference had been pivotal to the passage of that body’s resolution in support of Palestine. Elhalaby points out, also, that pan-Asian and non-aligned conferences after this one excluded Israeli participation with the aim of building a deeper and more thoroughgoing solidarity with Palestine among decolonizing nations. In contrast, the OIC’s founding conference in 1969, which did take up the cause of Palestine, situated that call within a broader appeal that ignored the Global South to address the governments of France, UK, US and Soviet Union. This represented a decisive scaling back of political ambitions and a stance taken in alignment with global power and in opposition to the world decolonizing people (at their best) had hoped to create.

The fourth chapter, “Non-Alignment”, carries forward the narrative of INC’s support for a new internationalism. The central figure in this chapter is the Lebanese scholar-diplomat Clovis Maksoud. Maksoud’s career was spent building up the causes of Arab socialism and “positive nonalignment” in close conjunction with the Indian experience. There were more conventionally diplomatic aspects to this role, of course, but PGE devotes particular attention to Maksoud’s efforts to create a “rich center of Indo-Arab contact” in Delhi. In particular, the Arab League’s ambitious journal – Al Arab – which brought discussions of Arab literature, culture and history to an Indian audience. This included an eclectic selection of cultural production ongoing in Arabic: translations of the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Kama Boullata’s manifesto for “A Revolutionary Arab Art”, and an introduction to Ibn Rushd. Elhalaby points out that the conviction that wide-ranging and cutting-edge cultural exchange might lay the basis for deeper regional bonds was shared by Indian diplomats like K.M. Panikkar whose role in establishing the Indian government’s Arabic magazine Sawt al-Sharq resulted in a similarly fertile and sophisticated cultural engagement with the Arab world. Maksoud’s formulation of the broader aim of these efforts – “[to] know each other through each other and not through others” (121) – seems almost perfectly tailored to the kind of anti-colonial knowledge formation Elhalaby would like to see flourish. Indeed, PGE suggests, Maksoud’s “epistemological vision” of non-alignment, as a slow intermingling of thought which might lead to a deeper humanist synthesis, leaves behind an unfinished agenda.

The final chapter of PGE is a study of West Asian Area studies in Indian academic institutions. If orientalism was imperial knowledge production of the era of European empire, area studies enacted a characteristically American shift in perspective. It de-emphasized languages and classical texts and, in their place, installed a more utilitarian and positivistic social scientific production of knowledge geared towards predicting future outcomes. Together with a funding structure that relied on philanthropic foundations, this area studies paradigm quickly became hegemonic in the Cold War world. With decolonization proceeding in parallel, newly independent nations enacted a variety of relationships to this project. The domestic context for area studies in India was, however, more specific. Triple crises relating to the partition of India and Pakistan, persisting communal violence, and the exodus of Muslims from India, meant that there were difficulties in finding the requisite expertise. The field was also freighted with a hope that, when established, West Asian studies might contribute to deeper inter-faith understanding within India. Elhalaby traces the establishment in 1955 of the Institute for Islamic Studies at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), and the Indian School of International Studies (ISIS), both primarily focused on West Asia. For a while at least, Elhalaby points out, these centers nurtured an expertise distinct from the broader Area Studies tradition: through an interest in the Indo-Arab past, through work that drew on Indo-Arab “idioms of friendship, understanding and solidarity” (160). While never entirely separated from the broader imperial and social-scientistic outlook of the field, area studies in India in the age of decolonization offered a distinct variant.

By far the most striking contribution of Elhalaby’s work is the excavation of a range of new archives. In particular, the range of Arabic periodicals and reports offer a valuable and unique window on South Asian history. Together with the significance of the region in post-colonial institution-building efforts that Elhalaby sketches, this points to the significance of the vantage afforded from these journals. While this reviewer is not as familiar with the range of source materials typically used in histories of the Arab countries, it is likely that many of the materials PGE employs from Indian archives offer novel and consequential perspectives on West Asian history. In this regard, it is easy to advocate for others to follow Elhalaby’s lead..

Elhalaby’s call to recognize the significance of the record of solidaristic efforts he chronicles in PGE is also well-taken. As he points out there is an abiding importance to fighting for and around the ideas first generated during this early postcolonial moment. Even as he does so, Elhalaby does sound the caution about simple celebrations of “post-colonial” ideas or, even more, “global connections”. As Elhalaby himself points out in PGE, method is no replacement for substantive ideas and a moral compass. We arrive at the moral compass he might favor, however, only through implication. He is bracingly strident about projects he views as being in the spirit of anti-colonial thought (Egyptian feminism, cultural translation between cultures, positive non-alignment) and those that he feels aren’t (missionary enterprises, religion-state enmeshments, American power structures in the Cold War). A sharper articulation of what guides his choice to include in one camp or the other would have been very welcome and might have productively sharpened his framework for anti-colonial thought.

A final methodological quibble to viewing this work as a social history of ideas. Elhalaby’s approach falls between two methodological stools in the history of ideas. His characteristic move through ideas is not to reconstruct a zone of discursive contest in the manner of the Cambridge School. Nor does Elhalaby consistently discuss material conditions as shaping the content of ideas, as might be typical of a more Marxist approach. His approach, instead, is to trace a broad history of institutions and people and to juxtapose their ideas (Bustani and Tagore, Maksoud and Panikkar, Dimishky and the Al-Azhar delegation, Aleem and Agwani). One is left wanting more attention to connections – logical or institutional. What, for example, were the explicit or implicit approaches to translation that Bustani was contesting in his work? Alternatively, there could be a productive way to follow the question of the Lebanese peasants who asked the pro-non-alignment Lebanese parliamentarian Ali Bazzi: “The [US] Point Four [program] gives us aid, so why doesn’t the Third Force?” (113).  Did the inability to offer more material connections force the project of epistemological non-alignment onto the terrain of largely high-cultural exchanges? Are these signs of deep engagement or relatively shallow implantation? The addition of these connections might, perhaps, yield an answer to a question that hangs over the projects Elhalaby champions – why did these positive visions fade? Perhaps this would make for a larger or different project, perhaps it would draw our attention away too quickly from the visons themselves?

PGE is about Palestine “from the outside in” (12-16). One meaning of this phrase is in its choice of scholars and activists – largely non-Palestinians who identify with the Palestinian cause from a range of vantage points – personal experience, pan-Arab sentiment or feminist solidarity. In spotlighting the engagement of such scholars with India, and the reciprocal engagement coming from India, PGE reorients the search for global connections away from pathways that run through Europe and shows us alternative routes to global solidarity. If the Palestinian cause is one touchstone for any truly anti-colonial vision, PGE also reminds us that the project of building a more just global order is a crucial correlate, and one to which the scholarly community has something important to contribute.

Anish Vanaik is Clinical Associate Professor, John Martinson Honors College, Purdue University