In their 2025 article for the Review of International Studies (VOL.51, Issue 2), Vineet Thakur and Ladhu Ram Choudhary revisit a disturbing yet revealing episode in India’s postcolonial history. Titled “How a Nazi Occupied India’s First Chair in International Relations”, the article documents how Curt Max Prüfer, a former Nazi diplomat, was appointed to the first professorship in International Relations in independent India.
Prüfer’s arrival in 1948, the authors argue, was not a mere anomaly or historical curiosity. Rather, it exposed the uneasy compromises and ideological blind spots that often marked the institutional architecture of newly decolonised States. His recruitment was facilitated by anti-colonial networks, particularly those associated with Subhas Chandra Bose and A.C.N. Nambiar, and legitimised by Indian diplomats eager to acquire international “expertise.” Accepting Prüfer’s self-crafted narrative as a Nazi dissenter, Indian officials enlisted him to train the country’s first generation of diplomats and later appointed him to Delhi University.
Thakur and Choudhary position this episode within a broader critique of disciplinary historiography. Rather than tracing IR’s growth through paradigmatic evolution or intellectual traditions, they adopt a genealogical approach concerned not with how Prüfer shaped the discipline but with the “conditions of possibility” that made his appointment plausible. For them, the story of IR in India is not one of smooth adaptation, but one of “adhocism, turf wars, and bureaucratic compulsions.” IR, in this context, was not a clearly bounded academic field but an elastic term encompassing colonial administration, diplomacy, military strategy, and anthropology.
Drawing from rich archival detail, the authors show how newly independent India, in its pursuit of global legitimacy and institutional capacity, often prioritised technical qualifications and foreign validation over ethical scrutiny. The figure of the ‘expert’, especially one with European training, was deeply seductive for a postcolonial state seeking to assert itself on the world stage.
This episode also reminds us that postcolonial state-making was shaped as much by improvisation and bureaucratic urgency as by ideological clarity. The making of IR in India, the article suggests, was not guided by any clear vision of what the discipline should be, but rather emerged through a patchwork of decisions shaped by institutional constraints, political friendships, and the imperatives of nation-building.
Their analysis contributes to growing efforts to provincialize IR by exposing the discipline’s silences, erasures, and complicities. As they note, every discipline constructs its own origin myths, but some are shaped more by cock-ups than conspiracies. By excavating one such moment, they offer a sobering reminder: not all intellectual legacies begin in virtue.
