This article examines the tension between cosmopolitanism and ressentiment nationalism (i e, the nationalism of existential envy) in the work of Benoy Kumar Sarkar, the pre-eminent Indian social scientist of the decades before Independence. A prolific writer about India's place in the world and the nature of interstate relations, Sarkar was (and is) widely considered an "internationalist" and anti-imperialist. By focusing on Sarkar's fundamentally ambivalent outlook on the rise of a powerful Japan, this article argues that his internationalism and anti-imperialism were both compromised by a particular historical location, which had to do with the gendered concerns of the Indian nationalist elite, and his infatuation with a model of nationhood and power indebted to right-wing European ideologies and political developments.
