An initial ‘onboarding’ period at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice occurred, during which the Fellow liaised remotely with the Netaji Institute for Asian Studies in Kolkata on the organisation of the research plan; research missions to archival collections on modern India within the UK were also held in this period. Training on various research aspects, and in the Italian language, was also undertaken to prime the Fellow for both the Outgoing and Return phases of research.
In India, the Netaji Institue, though it had stood in at short notice to provide hosting environment, provided it a stimulating and well-fitted home, with a highly relevant intellectual focus and encouraging research community. Most of the research remained focused on Mumbai and Maharashtra, a challenge for the project, met by research missions to archives and higher education institutions there. More positively, the Kolkata base broadened the intellectual network and range of perspectives brought to bear on the project. Jadavpur University, and The Goethe-Institut, Kolkata, in particular, provided stimulating events and networking opportunities. In Maharashtra, the Fellow used the Maharashtra State archives extensively, as well as private collections, in Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur; and much archival work, involving period newspapers, private papers and institutional collections, was done at the (since renamed) Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi.
During the return phase, Missions to Germany were undertaken to enhance the Fellow’s scholarly network and to share ideas on research questions relating to fascism, Nazism, and the radical right, and also to present his research: the Freie Universität Berlin and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München were key venues for this.
A workshop was co-organised on ‘Populist Nationalism as a Global Phenomenon’ at the University of Oxford in July 2023, where the Fellow was joined by scholars from the university as well as from the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, Missouri. This was a great success, and fed into the much larger, final event of the Fellowship, a two-day international conference at Ca’ Foscari in May 2024 on the same theme, subtitled ‘Echoes of the Long Twentieth Century’, with scholars from institutions in seven different countries. A book proposal for an edited volume from this conference is under consideration now, which will include the Fellow’s own analysis of the long-term trajectories of populism in relation to Hindu nationalism, throughout the period.
The Fellow was able to redevelop and extend an existing body of research to produce the first major published output on Maharashtra’s political and intellectual history, an intellectual biography entitled ‘The Thought of Bal Gangadhar Tilak’ (Oxford University Press 2024), which speaks to the project’s objectives strongly in examining the attachment of Tilak’s memory, and the meanings of this, to the ‘Hindutva movement’ of the 1920s.
