Soviet books, geopolitical imagination and eclectic solidarities in India

This chapter analyses the aesthetic reception of Soviet children’s fiction, literary classics, and Soviet popular science publications in India, in an attempt to understand how readers experienced (and now remember) these books that were distributed with the aim of increasing awareness and also mobilising sympathy for the Soviets. This chapter goes further to unpack how readers, through those memory narratives, also articulate their understanding of geopolitics during the Cold War. The sentiment of solidarity that Soviet book readers in India profess as a result of getting to know Soviet worlds and finding them resonant comprises many elements, of which this chapter considers two: (1) The opening up of a world and (2) ideological convergence. The solidarity imagined is not necessarily one that is based on “agreement” or a unanimity of views, but one based on the increasing intelligibility of Soviet society through its books and informed by a prevailing public sentiment of “friendly ties”. Further, Indian readers routinely imagine Soviet literature in conjunction with books from elsewhere, thus rejecting the ideological binaries of Soviet and Western Cold War discourse in their narratives and conveying instead the eclectic solidarities of their political universe during those years.