Agnes Smedley and the Friends for the Freedom of India: A Transnational History of Anticolonialism

The newly renamed Prime Minister’s Museum and Library (PMML), formerly known as the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), in New Delhi, has been the primary repository for the archival record of India’s anticolonial movement and home to the institutional papers of the All-India Congress Committee and All-India Trade Union Congress, among others. Buried within this substantial cache of archival documents is a small collection of papers from an American woman named Agnes Smedley, dating back to 1919. Smedley was a writer, journalist and activist who collaborated with South Asians such as Lajpat Rai, M. N. Roy, Tarak Nath Das and Virendranath Chattopadhyay for the cause of India’s freedom from British colonial rule. Her small collection of papers in Delhi includes correspondence with Indian revolutionaries and her work in establishing the Friends for the Freedom of India (FFI), a transnational organization linking India’s freedom struggle with sympathetic activists based in the USA. This article examines the significance of Smedley’s FFI as a conduit between India’s freedom struggle and global anticolonialism, underscoring an important and oft-neglected transnational dimension of anticolonial histories of South Asia.