The Dark Foreigner with the Great Big Dog: Jayasurya Naidu in Germany, 1922-1934
Jayasurya Naidu (b. 1899) was the eldest child of Sarojini Naidu, the acclaimed poet and leader of the Indian National Congress. Carrying the onerous burden of high expectations, he travelled to Scotland in 1921 to study medicine, much like his father did, but unexpectedly shifted to Berlin. Influen...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Univ.
2022
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| In: |
Nidān
Year: 2022, Volume: 7, Issue: 1, Pages: 115-131 |
| Further subjects: | B
Anticolonialism
B A.C.N. Nambiar B Virendranath Chattopadhyaya B Transnationalism B League against Imperialism B 1920s Berlin |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | Jayasurya Naidu (b. 1899) was the eldest child of Sarojini Naidu, the acclaimed poet and leader of the Indian National Congress. Carrying the onerous burden of high expectations, he travelled to Scotland in 1921 to study medicine, much like his father did, but unexpectedly shifted to Berlin. Influenced early on by the radical anti-colonialism of his mother’s brother, the (in)famous Virendranath Chattopadhyaya or Chatto, Jayasurya veered away from the path his illustrious parents had hoped he would continue on. His rebellious, mercurial personality was complicated by his many troubles—psychological and otherwise. Of a melancholic and often depressive nature, Jayasurya was highly sensitive to the inequities and hardships he witnessed. His family was constantly worried as to his condition and the course of his actions and much to their displeasure, Jayasurya discontinued his medical studies in Germany and became increasingly entangled with Comintern-backed politics of the League Against Imperialism (LAI) in the late 1920s. His correspondence with his family, an ‘affective archive’, reveals great insights into a unique phase of anticolonial politics through the intersection of his personal and political trajectories, enmeshed and entangled as they inevitably are. His life in Germany, from 1922 to 1934, as seen primarily through his correspondence with his siblings and sparse archival documentation, appears as an idiosyncratic narrative thread in a broader, complex tapestry of transnational anti-colonialism and entangled histories. A largely ignored figure, Jayasurya Naidu’s life in Germany, as a medical student, researcher, and as a confused, homesick anti-colonial political activist, adds very interesting and illuminating textures to the network of Berlin Indians in the interwar period. |
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| ISSN: | 2414-8636 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Nidān
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.58125/nidan.2022.1 |