Two leagues, one front? The India league and the league against imperialism in the British left, 1927-1937

Reeves, Mark

Abstract

V.K. Krishna Menon always made people angry. When he left southern India in 1924, coming to England under the auspices of his mentor Annie Besant’s Theosophist and Indian Home Rule movement, Menon disappointed his father by not becoming a lawyer and returning to Kerala to take over the family practice. Moreover, he disappointed Besant by not remaining true to the Theosophist or Home Rule faiths, and instead charted his own path with various intellectuals on the British Left, especially Harold Laski. He would eventually frustrate even those new leftist friends: first by his conservatism and gradualism, and then by his radicalism, adopted in the mid-1930s. His personal prickliness did not help: as even his allies noted, he created “round himself an atmosphere of suspicion and intrigue.” Alan Lawson, who photographed Krishna Menon along with Jawaharlal Nehru on a visit to the front in Spain in 1938, had a more generous explanation. Owing to his vegetarianism, he could rarely find anything to eat. Whatever the reason, the same year, Indira Nehru (later Gandhi) identified the problem: “There are so many groups and parties here, and Krishna is not popular with any of them.”

• Publication Date: 2020
• Deposit Date: Feb 21, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 21, 2023
• Publisher: Leiden University Press
• Pages: 283-308
• Book Title: The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives
• Chapter Number: 11
• ISBN: 9789087283414
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10464314
• Publisher URL: https://www.lup.nl/publications/history/global-history/the-league-against-imperialism/