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Abstract
Third Worldism, Afro-Asianism, nonalignment, and their associated projects were not simply diplomatic agendas on the international stage; they were cultural and epistemological projects tied to smaller, older geographies of significance. Beyond the politicians' conferences, whether at Bandung (1955), Belgrade (1961), or Cairo (1964), events that receive the bulk of scholarly interest in nonalignment's trajectory and significance, nonalignment occurred at a different scale. Scrutinizing nonalignment's intellectual history can reveal forms of knowledge that can be salvaged from nonalignment's irretrievable political past. Rather than simply recounting the events of nonalignment—the grand accumulation of solidarity, the limits of which were subsequently revealed—it may be prudent to bring our attention to the ideas of nonalignment. To account for the content and conditions of nonaligned thought, this article narrates a history of Arab and Indian intellectuals thinking together in the second half of the twentieth century. The author focuses principally on the work of the Lebanese scholar-diplomat Clovis Maksoud (1926–2016), the most articulate Arab theorist of positive neutrality and nonalignment.

This article focuses on the Chouf-born poet, lawyer and translator Wadiʿ al-Bustani (1888–1954), who called himself a "Lebanese Palestinian," as he moves from Beirut, to Cairo, Hudaydah, Bombay, Transvaal, and finally Haifa. The first to translate Tagore into Arabic after a visit to his Santiniketan in 1916, Bustani spent his life annotating and translating into Arabic the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and Kalidasa's Shakuntala . Alongside his self-professed and self-funded philological project, Bustani was one of the most important poets and lawyers in British Mandate Palestine, inspiring protest with his verse and litigating against colonial land policies. By focusing on Bustani's relation to British imperial culture, his political commitments in Palestine, and the contours of his indological project, this article uncovers a new history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame, long hidden in the many narrations of orientalism's travel and Palestine's colonization.