The Hands Off Ethiopia campaign, racial solidarities and intercolonial antifascism in South Asia (1935-36)

Abstract

The transnational campaign against the Italian invasion of the Ethiopian Empire (1936-36) has been widely acknowledged as a turning point for antiracist and anticolonial political organizing in the African continent and diaspora. This article seeks to reconstruct the South Asian participation in the Hands Off Ethiopia protests, to expand historical knowledge of the early-twentieth-century development of Afro-Asian solidarity ties as well as the intersection of anti-Fascist and anticolonial struggles. It examines the institutional responses to the invasion on the part of the Indian Legislative Assembly, and a series of demonstrations, local meetings and boycotts whose implications reverberated in the local and international press as well as in the concerns of British colonial authorities. As will be argued, this mobilization was fueled by feelings of racial solidarity, anti-imperialist analyses, anti-caste critiques, scriptural interpretations and religious universalisms.