How Mulk Raj Anand and WEB Du Bois found common ground at a moment of anti-imperialist solidarity

One of the most enduring photographs from the first Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent in 1958 shows two men standing side by side, both in suits and carrying walking sticks. One is the Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand. The other is 90-year-old WEB Du Bois, whose passport had been confiscated by the US government just three years earlier, preventing him from attending the Bandung Conference that inspired this gathering.

The photograph captures a moment that would have seemed unlikely only a few years earlier. Du Bois, one of the most influential American intellectuals of the 20th century, had spent decades challenging colonialism and racism. As the Cold War intensified, his views increasingly brought him into conflict with the US government, and in 1951, it indicted him as an “unregistered agent” of a foreign power. Although he was eventually acquitted, his passport was not restored in time for him to travel to Indonesia for the 1955 Bandung Conference.

Bandung brought together leaders and representatives from nations across Asia and Africa, including Indonesian President Sukarno, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The conference became a defining moment in the rise of developing nations, with participants calling for political cooperation, economic independence and resistance to colonial domination.

Among the ideas discussed at Bandung was the need for greater cooperation between writers from Asia and Africa. While the conference itself emphasised non-alignment during the Cold War, the Soviet Union quickly embraced the writers’ initiative. Moscow, which had positioned itself as a supporter of anti-colonial struggles in Africa, based its claim to hosting the conference on the fact that a large part of the USSR was in Asia.

In 1958, when the Soviet Union did host the first Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent, it gave Du Bois a chance to finally participate in the kind of gathering he had hoped to attend three years earlier. Despite his strained relationship with Washington, he was granted permission to travel to the USSR.

Du Bois accepted the invitation enthusiastically and arrived in Tashkent, where he joined writers from across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Among them was Anand, whose novels Coolie and Untouchable had introduced readers in the West to the struggles of India’s poor and marginalised communities.

For Du Bois, the conference must have carried some personal significance. He had followed India’s independence movement and had even published a novel in 1928 about the relationship between an African American medical student and the daughter of an Indian maharaja. The book, which is believed to be among his favourites, explored themes of racial solidarity and love among oppressed communities.

Its protagonist, Matthew Townes, encounters Princess Kautilya at a Berlin cafe among a group of people from India, China, Arabia and Egypt. They discuss the discrimination they face because of their race and nationality. Three decades later, Du Bois found himself in Tashkent discussing many of the same questions with writers from the very same countries and regions.

Delhi roots

The idea of gathering writers from Asia and Africa took shape in New Delhi in December 1956, when more than 250 writers from 14 countries gathered for the Asian Writers Conference. Inaugurated by Nehru, the meeting brought together some of the most prominent literary figures of the developing world, including Mulk Raj Anand, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Krishan Chander.

The writers discussed solidarity among countries emerging from colonial rule and debated the role literature should play in reflecting political struggles. The gathering provided the foundation for a broader Afro-Asian literary movement, one that would eventually find its first major expression in Tashkent.

The Soviet Union, under Nikita Khrushchev, was among the supporters of the initiative. After Khrushchev’s 19-day visit to India in 1955, the Soviet leader secured Nehru’s backing to host the first Afro-Asian Writers Conference.

The Soviet authorities selected Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, as the venue and scheduled the conference for the first week of October 1958.

Writing in Monthly Review, Rossen Djagalov, an associate professor at New York University, described the conference as “the literary front of the Soviet Union’s return to the colonial question after a two-decade-long lapse”. He argued that the choice of Tashkent had its intended effect. “By all accounts, Tashkent impressed visitors with its mixture of Western modernity and familiar ‘eastern-ness’ – an effect carefully curated by the Soviet hosts who sought to make it a showcase city for Third World delegations,” Djagalov wrote.

The USSR Writers’ Union was responsible for organising the event and preparations were extensive. Writers from 37 African and Asian countries, along with delegates from 13 countries in Europe and the Americas, were invited to the Uzbek capital. The Soviet authorities also encouraged writers from the Union’s republics to participate, with particular attention given to writers from Central Asian republics such as Uzbek poet Gʻafur Gʻulom and Kazakh writer Mukhtar Auezov.

Around 2,500 books from Asia and Africa were available at the conference in Russian, English and the languages of participating countries. A month before the gathering, Druzhba Narodov (People’s Friendship), the magazine of the USSR Writers’ Union, devoted an entire issue to the conference, publishing works by writers from 40 participating nations.

When the delegates arrived in Tashkent, they represented a cross-section of the literary movements of the era. Among those attending were Faiz, Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, Senegalese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembène, Angolan politician and poet Mário Pinto de Andrade, and Chinese writers Mao Dun and Zhu Yang.

Yet the delegate who drew the greatest attention was Du Bois.

During the conference, 90-year-old Du Bois delivered a speech titled “I Am African. I Am American”, in which he spoke about world peace, Afro-Asian solidarity and the importance of newly independent nations charting their own paths rather than depending on former colonial powers.

For Anand, the conference was a special milestone. “The euphoria of the gathering is unforgettable,” he wrote later in a letter in January 1982. “For the first time in history, the creative writers of the countries, newly liberated from the Yoke of imperialism, met.”

For him, the significance of Tashkent lay not only in its political message but also in the diversity of voices gathered in one place. “All the colours could be seen, the beautiful black ebony, the sunbaked brown, the heightened pink, the yellow ivory – of faces, radiating new energies,” he wrote. “And, for a whole week, the finest minds discussed the problems of new beginnings, in expressions of the heart, and the minds of peoples, who had not freely been able to enter world literature.”

Anand believed the writers who had participated in anti-colonial struggles were giving “words to the silent mouths of hitherto unknown peoples” across Asia and Africa. He also praised the Soviet Union for organising the conference and presenting what he saw as an example of how nations could transform their cultural landscape. “We had the example of the talented sons and daughters of the Russian people, who had been neglected before the revolution, but who had built up vital literature in one or two generations,” he wrote.

Western pushback

Yet the enthusiasm surrounding Tashkent was not shared everywhere. In the West, the conference was viewed through the lens of the Cold War and the press interpreted the gathering as an extension of Soviet influence.

News agencies such as Reuters published brief reports noting that participants had passed a resolution urging writers to “protest against colonialism and exploitation”. But broader coverage was often sceptical.

In November 1958, the New York Daily News described the conference as a “big Red propaganda clambake” held “somewhere in the wastes of Russia”. It cited a report in the National Guardian to report that Unesco had contributed $6,000 for the event.

Journalist OM Green similarly criticised the conference in a column published in several American newspapers. Displeased by the New China News Agency’s coverage, he objected to what he saw as praise for the Soviet role in opposing colonialism while ignoring Moscow’s own control over Central Asia. “Three pages are given to a survey of a recent international writers’ conference at Tashkent presenting all the speeches made there as a unanimous denunciation of colonialism (an ironic circumstance since Soviet Uzbekistan, of which Tashkent is the capital, is where Moscow’s rule is that of a dominating colonial power),” he wrote.

Some newspapers also published a photograph of a smiling Khrushchev meeting writers who visited Moscow after the conference. A caption described the gathering as “Literary Night at the Kremlin”.

Amid this political framing, Du Bois’s presence at Tashkent received little attention in much of the Western media. By then, he had long been portrayed by sections of the American establishment as an enemy and a communist sympathiser. One of the few mentions came from The Worker, a newspaper established by socialists and labour unions, which published a letter from the Tashkent Pen Club describing the conference and Du Bois’s participation.

At the conference, “we got acquainted with writers and poets,” wrote Hairulla Ismatullov, the 21-year-old president of the club. “Among them was an American writer, Mr. Du Bois. He was glad to know that Uzbek students study English and they are eager to correspond with American youth.”

Three years after the Tashkent conference, Du Bois, then 93, moved to Accra, Ghana, at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, a close ally of Nehru and a leading figure of African nationalism. He spent the final years of his life in Ghana as a symbol of the anti-colonial movement. Mulk Raj Anand lived until the age of 98, passing away in 2004.

The photograph of the two writers in Tashkent, now preserved in the archives of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, remains a reminder of a brief moment when literature became a meeting place for struggles that stretched across continents.

Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His latest book, Colombo: Port of Call, has been published by Penguin Random House.