Abstract

In April 1921, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri was appointed as India’s representative to the Imperial Conference in London. His secretary was a young Indian Civil Service officer, G.S. Bajpai. Over the course of the next two years, the two Indians travelled together as India’s diplomatic representatives to London, Geneva, Washington, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The young Bajpai and his ‘chief’ developed a loving bond that was to remain strong for the rest of their lives. These travels, as I will show, were very crucial to the making of India’s pre-eminent diplomat in the interwar years, Sastri, and the country’s foremost foreign policy bureaucrat at independence, Bajpai. But the afterlives of these journeys were also to manifest beyond their personal/political lives. These two years were formative to the making of Indian diplomacy in general and to India’s response on the questions of race and the commonwealth in particular. This essay will follow Sastri and Bajpai as they travel together as ‘diplomats’ and map the ways in which they came to ‘learn’ the conduct, expectations and execution of diplomacy.

摘要

1921年4月，VS Srinivasa Sastri被任命为伦敦帝国会议的印度代表。他的秘书是年轻的印度公务员GS Bajpai。在接下来的两年中，这两名印度人作为印度外交代表一起前往伦敦，日内瓦，华盛顿，澳大利亚，新西兰和加拿大。年轻的Bajpai和他的“酋长”建立了一种爱心的纽带，在他们的一生中都将保持强大。正如我将显示的那样，这些旅行对于两次世界大战期间印度杰出的外交官萨斯特里（Sastri）以及该国独立时最重要的外交政策官Bajpai的建立至关重要。但是，这些旅程的来世也要超越他们的个人/政治生活。两年来对印度总体上的外交形成了影响，也对印度在种族，特别是英联邦问题上的回应形成了影响。本文将跟随Sastri和Bajpai作为“外交官”一起旅行，并勾勒出他们如何“学习”外交的行为，期望和执行的方式。