India in the World: 1500 to the Present 1032494646, 9781032494647

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction
Section 1 Movement of Peoples, Things, and Ideas
1 Servile Labor in India in a Global Context, 1500–1900
2 Woven, Mined, Milled, and Packed: The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023
3 The News of 1857: The Indian Uprising and Belize during Yucatán’s Caste War
Section 2 State Repression and Transnational Resistance
4 ‘Would You Deprive Him of Toddy?’: Singapore’s English-Language Press, and the Racialization of Alcohol Consumption by Indians, 1900–1960
5 Conspiracy in Meerut: A Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933
6 Nonviolence and Nonalignment: Indian Foreign Policy and the American Civil Rights Movement, 1936–1964
Section 3 Decolonization and Afro-Asian Solidarities
7 Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend: Gandhian Legacies Outside the Subcontinent
8 To the Students: Education for Nonviolence in the World
9 A Bombay Periodical, Indian Non-Alignment & Afro-Asian Internationalism
Index

Citation preview

India in the World

If we look back at world history in the past five hundred years, it is evident that Indian ideas, peoples, and goods helped drive world connections. From the quest to reach the Indies that drove Iberian rulers to fund costly expeditions that ultimately connected the Old World with the Americas to Gandhi’s creed of nonviolence that created transnational resistance movements, India has been crucial to world history. In what ways have the movement of goods, people, and ideas from India served to connect the world? Conversely, how has India’s global history shaped the many boundaries and inequalities that have divided the world despite— and at times because of—the transnational connections often lumped together under the aegis of globalization? Through its emphasis on both linkages and boundaries, India in the World examines the range of connections between India and the world in a truly global perspective. Rajeshwari Dutt is Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi. Her research examines race in Latin American and British Imperial history. Her latest book is Empire on Edge: The British Struggle for Order in Belize during Yucatán’s Caste War, 1847–1901 (2020). Nico Slate is Professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. His research examines struggles against racism and imperialism in the United States and India. His most recent book is Brothers: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Race (2023).

Routledge Studies in Modern History

Tourism in Natural and Agricultural Ecosystems in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Martino Lorenzo Fagnani and Luciano Maffi The Making of a World Order Global Historical Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles Edited by Albert Wu and Stephen W. Sawyer Beach Soccer Histories Lee McGowan, Elizabeth Ellison and Michele Lastella The Creation of Kazakh National Identity The Relationship with Russia, 1900–2015 Dmitry Shlapentokh Chinese Revolution in Practice From Movement to the State Guo Wu Sixty Years of Service in Africa The U.S. Peace Corps in Cameroon Julius A. Amin India in the World 1500 to the Present Edited by Rajeshwari Dutt and Nico Slate

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-inModern-History/book-series/MODHIST

India in the World 1500 to the Present

Edited by Rajeshwari Dutt and Nico Slate

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Rajeshwari Dutt and Nico Slate; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Rajeshwari Dutt and Nico Slate to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dutt, Rajeshwari, 1981– editor, author. | Slate, Nico (Professor of history), editor, author. Title: India in the world : 1500 to the present / edited by Rajeshwari Dutt and Nico Slate. Description: New York : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge studies in modern history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023023548 (print) | LCCN 2023023549 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032494647 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032494654 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003393962 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: India—Foreign relations. Classification: LCC DS445 .I56 2024 (print) | LCC DS445 (ebook) | DDC 327.54—dc23/eng/20230603 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023548 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023549 ISBN: 978-1-032-49464-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-49465-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-39396-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003393962 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

List of Contributors Introduction SECTION 1

vii 1

Movement of Peoples, Things, and Ideas

17

1

19

Servile Labor in India in a Global Context, 1500–1900 TITAS CHAKRABORTY

2

Woven, Mined, Milled, and Packed: The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023

33

BENJAMIN SIEGEL

3

The News of 1857: The Indian Uprising and Belize during Yucatán’s Caste War

55

RAJESHWARI DUTT

SECTION 2

State Repression and Transnational Resistance 4

‘Would You Deprive Him of Toddy?’: Singapore’s English-Language Press, and the Racialization of Alcohol Consumption by Indians, 1900–1960 ALEXANDRA T. SUNDARSINGH

75

77

vi Contents 5

Conspiracy in Meerut: A Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933

94

MICHELE LOURO

6

Nonviolence and Nonalignment: Indian Foreign Policy and the American Civil Rights Movement, 1936–1964

116

NICO SLATE

SECTION 3

Decolonization and Afro-Asian Solidarities 7

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend: Gandhian Legacies Outside the Subcontinent

139 141

TRISHULA R. PATEL

8

To the Students: Education for Nonviolence in the World

165

DAVID S. BUSCH

9

A Bombay Periodical, Indian Non-Alignment & Afro-Asian Internationalism

185

SWAPNA KONA NAYUDU

Index211

Contributors

David S. Busch teaches at Cuyahoga Community College (Cleveland, Ohio), where he directs the Mandel Youth Humanities Academy. Busch is a modern intellectual and social historian whose research primarily focuses on the relationship between democracy and education. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, which examines activism as a contested mode of study in higher education. His research has appeared in Diplomatic History, History of Education Quarterly, and Current Research in Digital History. www. davidsbusch.com Titas Chakraborty is an assistant professor of History at Duke Kunshan University. She is a historian of slavery, labor, gender, and migration specifically studying seventeenth- to nineteenth-century South Asia. Her current book project is A Colonial Rule over Labor: Hired Workers, Mobility and the Rise of the East India Company State in Bengal, 1650–1817. Rajeshwari Dutt is Associate Professor of History at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi. Her research examines race in Latin American and British Imperial history. She has published journal articles in The Americas, Ethnohistory, Hispanic American Historical Review, and World History Connected. She is the author of two academic books: Maya Caciques in Early National Yucatán (Oklahoma University Press, 2017) and Empire on Edge: The British Struggle for Order in Belize during Yucatán’s Caste War, 1847–1901 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She is currently working on a book that examines the transatlantic quest for the Nicaragua Canal in the nineteenth century. Michele L. Louro is a professor of History at Salem State University. She holds a PhD in History from Temple University and specializes in global history with particular attention to modern South Asia. Her first book, Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2018), is set between the world wars and recovers the debates, introduces the personalities, and reveals the ideas that seeded

viii Contributors Jawaharlal Nehru’s political vision for India and the wider world. Her second book, The League against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives, is a co-edited volume on the global history of anticolonialism in the twentieth century. Her latest project is funded by the U.S. Fulbright program and traces the global history of the Meerut Conspiracy Case, 1929–1934. Swapna Kona Nayudu is Lecturer of Global Affairs, Yale-NUS College, Singapore. She is also Associate at the Harvard University Asia Center and Associate at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and is member of the Advisory Board, Harvard University Association for Global Political Thought. Swapna earned her PhD in War Studies from King’s College London, University of London. Swapna’s work is most centrally focused on the politically transformative nature of war. To that end, her research interests are in, and she teaches courses in International Relations, International History, Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, the Cold War in the Third World, UN Peacekeeping, and Security Studies. Swapna’s first book, under review, is interdisciplinary and draws on and contributes to new directions in the historical study of international relations through a focus on diplomacy, foreign policy, and the Cold War in Asia. Trishula R. Patel is an assistant professor of African and South Asian history at the University of Denver. She has a BA and an MA in history from the University of Pennsylvania, an MS in journalism from Columbia University, and a PhD in history from Georgetown University. She is a scholar of race and segregation in Southern Africa, South Asian diasporas in Africa, and British colonialism. Her current book project focuses on the history of Indians in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Benjamin Siegel is a historian of modern economic life and politics, agriculture, and the environment, with a geographic focus on South Asia and its entanglements with the wider world. His first book, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press, 2018), interrogated the ways in which questions of food and scarcity structured Indian citizens’ understanding of welfare and citizenship since independence. Professor Siegel’s current book project, A Transnational History of the United States Opioid Crisis, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. He is working on three interlinked future projects: a short history of tangible and intangible resources in modern India, a global history of South Asian development, and a project on traffic, roads, and automobiles in the region. Nico Slate is Professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. His research examines struggles against racism and imperialism in the United States and India. His most recent book is Brothers: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Race (Temple University Press, 2023). He is currently at work on The Art of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and the Making of Modern

Contributors  ix India, which is forthcoming with HarperCollins India and the University of Pittsburgh Press. His current research project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, examines the role of education in the American civil rights movement. Alexandra T. Sundarsingh is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include indenture, global South Asian culture and identity, gender and sexuality, and food and drink. She is currently at work on her dissertation, tentatively titled “Unravelling Indenture in the Indian Ocean World, 1815–1925,” which focuses on the way that the expansion of Indian indenture to Southeast Asia gives us a window through which to examine the ways that indenture as a system borrowed and learned from imperial uses of Atlantic slavery, local understandings of debt bondage, Caribbean experiences of and changing notions of family, gender, and community to adapt the system to a new geography with very different political and cultural dynamics than the Atlantic world, and centuries of cross cultural contact. The inconsistent and often contradictory results help us understand evolving ideas of freedom, “Indian” identity, and gender and the family.

Introduction

Many Worlds, Many Indias In January 2021, Kamala Harris became the Vice President of the United States. In October 2022, Rishi Sunak became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Harris and Sunak both embody the breadth and diversity of the Indian diaspora— as well as the challenge of defining who and what is Indian. If we look—as some Indian news reporters have—to Harris’ Indian origins to understand the life and significance of the Vice President, we risk ignoring her embeddedness in the multiracial neighborhoods of Berkeley where she grew up listening to her Indian mother singing along to gospel music. On the other hand, emphasizing her life in the United States without acknowledging her pride in her Indian roots or the inspiration she derived from her grandfather, P. V. Gopalan, would also be telling an incomplete story.1 Similarly, Sunak’s story is as much about the grit and determination of two generations of Indian immigrants who moved from India to Africa and finally the United Kingdom, as it is about Sunak’s commitment to the community of Richmond as MP and his peculiar mixture of “instinct and method” that according to his biographer Michael Ashcroft is behind his meteoric “rise.”2 As both life stories make clear, even telling the story of just one Indian family in the diaspora requires doing more than following the flow of people from India across the world. We must also explore how India has changed—and how what it means to be “Indian” has changed—as a result of transnational and global histories. To ask questions about the history of India in the world is to ask questions about global history and about the plurality and unity of India itself.1 For the last thirty years historians have grappled with how to talk about the global dimensions of the Indian experience. Trained in academic institutions wedded to disciplinary divides between South Asian history (or South Asian Area Studies) and World History, many historians of India have tended to focus inward. Since the 1990s, however, scholars of the Indian Ocean region and scholars of social movements, diaspora, and imperialism have been actively involved in breaching the barriers to a more connected history of India and the world. Our present volume attempts to connect this burgeoning literature and DOI: 10.4324/9781003393962-1

2 Introduction to provide a new framework for future conversations about India’s role in the transnational and global histories that have shaped the modern world. History has long been defined by the nation-state. In the words of the historian Sven Beckert, “History as an academic discipline grew up along-side the nationstate and became one of its principal ideological pillars.”3 Prior to the 1980s and 1990s, the study of history was mainly focused on the nation-state. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, a “social” and “cultural” turn opened the avenue for extending historical analysis to newer non-state actors: minorities, women, different ethnicities, nonelite, and popular culture. However, despite the benefits of these new approaches, these shifts still operated within the “larger framework of national history.”4 Historical writings generally followed the framework of histories of nations or regions such as European history, U.S. history, East Asian history, and the like. Even histories that purported to have a more international focus remained reliant on the methods and historiography of traditional nationcentric histories. Comparative and diplomatic history encouraged historians to look beyond their national borders, but in practice remained oriented toward national histories. As Akire Iriye writes, “most studies of US foreign relations remained mono-archival, based entirely on English-language sources. Even books and articles on Cold War history tended to be written without reference to Russian, not to mention Chinese and other language material.”5 The field of international history which emerged in the 1970s continued to give prominence to “Great Power” history and studies of imperialism remained oriented toward geopolitical relations that were predicated on the question of nation-state.6 The terms “transnational” and “global” made their appearances in various academic platforms from around the 1980s. Not surprisingly, much of this new emphasis on “connections” was a result of broader political changes, notably, the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. As Paul Kramer writes, the “imaginary” of a world divided between “free capitalist” and “unfree communist domains” had been foundational to the American worldview. According to Kramer: This imaginary had been anchored by the material and metaphorical walls and barricades at the militarized frontiers between “West” and “East”; where these fell, permitting the mobility of capital, goods, policies, ideas and migrants (or some of them), it seemed to call for a radical rethinking of historical processes and the spaces within which they unfolded.7 Isaac Kamola notes a proliferation of departments, programs, journals, conferences, and even job profiles, related to the topic of “globalization” beginning in the 1990s.8 The trends that characterized this period, including the rise of international trade and economic institutions, digitalization, mass migration, and terrorism, all pointed to a narrative of global connections, epitomized ironically, in one of the most important turning points of recent history, 9/11. One of the

Introduction  3 paradoxical aspects of globalization became its “Matrix”-like quality: critiques of globalization posed alternative globalizations (such as “globalization from below”) as solutions, creating a tautology of sorts.9 As Arjun Appadurai has pointed out, historians immediately entered the scene in an attempt to historicize globalization.10 World History as it developed in the U.S. academia was mainly a teaching field and in the context of globalization many older “Western Civ.” courses were replaced by World History courses to cater to the new academic emphasis on global connections. According to Patrick Manning the slogan “Teach first, study later” characterized the way World History as a field operated prior to the 1990s.11 World History courses found their way into every level of education from public schools to community colleges, from state universities to liberal arts institutions. Yet there were real obstacles on the path to meaningful research. Most senior scholars who produced “World History” books had been trained in narrow regional specializations, and there was little institutional support for aspiring scholars who wanted to reframe narratives of history in a global framework. The 1990s were critical to recasting World History as a research field in addition to being a teaching field. The period saw the establishment of graduate programs, conferences, academic journals—including The Journal of World History—and special book series on World History in leading academic presses.12 Still, few scholars identified themselves as “global” or “world” historians, and historical studies of globalization in the 1990s were often wedded to binaries—domination vs. resistance; local vs. global—and, despite their ambitions to be “global,” were mostly nation-centric.13 Transnational history appeared to mitigate such a binary view of history through its focus on circulation. The special feature of an AHR Conversation published in the journal in December 2006 saw six senior scholars—C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed—lay down the case for transnational history. According to Isabel Hofmeyr, “The claim of transnational methods is not simply that historical processes are made in different places but that they are constructed in the movement between places, sites, and regions.”14 By focusing on “flows” rather than any binary vision of globalization, transnational history also offered to recover the complex history of the Global South in contrast to histories of globalization that tended to view the South through the binary of development/underdevelopment. Similarly, while globalization tended to offer an overly optimistic view of the world through its emphasis on commonalities and unified agendas across the globe, transnational history addressed the issues of inequalities and hierarchies. Thus, according to Wendy Kozol, “[Transnational feminist] activists articulate social justice claims through their understanding of the inequalities between First and Third World women’s experiences and resources.”15 Transnational history’s focus on interactions had positive benefits for the studies of migrations and diasporas, allowing historians to examine the impact of migration on both sending and

4 Introduction receiving countries.16 Despite its many benefits, however, transnational history had two significant limitations. First, prior to the nineteenth century, transnational history had little meaning since the preponderance of nation-states is a phenomenon mainly associated with the nineteenth century and onwards. Prior to the 1850s, empires, city-states, and diasporas were better frames of analysis. Second, even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the model of nation-state was not universal, particularly in the non-West. Scholars of South Asia responded in various ways to these intellectual fermentations of the 1980s and 1990s. While still mainly radiating out of U.S. academic institutions, the world or global studies framework began to attract scholars based in other countries. This crucial decade also marked the beginning of a wave of scholarship that examined South Asia from a Global Studies framework by using the Indian Ocean perspective beginning with pioneers such as Sanjay Subrahmanyam and K. N. Chaudhari.17 Beginning with Edward Said’s seminal work, Orientalism [1978], the decades of the 1980s and 1990s saw the development of the field of “postcolonial studies” in the U.S. academia. Indeed, as Henry Schwarz writes, the “disciplinary impulse powering the field [of postcolonial studies] has arisen most strongly in the United States, while the most prominent contributors to it have originated elsewhere.” With its emphasis on the “asymmetric” relationship between the West and non-West, colonizers and colonized, postcolonial studies added to the anti-Eurocentric thrust in global history which had characterized the period since the 1990s.18 By the end of the decade, with its epicenter among Indian historians, Subaltern Studies scholarship questioned the Eurocentric narrative of history with Dipesh Chakrabarty issuing a clarion call to “Provincialize Europe.”19 In the last twenty years, as “global” and “transnational” history has grown in prominence, scholars of South Asia have built a repertoire of innovative ways to talk about India’s connections with the world. In 2006, Sugata Bose argued for an intermediate level of historical analysis between levels of nation and globe and posited the Indian Ocean as “an interregional arena of political, economic and cultural interaction.”20 For Bose the deep histories of cultural and economic interactions on oceans and seas provided a more meaningful framework than the geopolitical entities of the Area Studies approach that was itself a result of colonial and postcolonial knowledge production. In 2013, Sunil Amrith also looked toward the open seas for ways to challenge the firm regional boundaries ingrained in Area Studies. Amrith pointed to the Bay of Bengal as a connected region that challenged the artificial separation of South Asian and Southeast Asian history. For Amrith, the Bay, which was more internally integrated than the Indian Ocean as a whole, was a diverse and cosmopolitan region.21 Cosmopolitanism also emerged as a way of telling the stories of connections in the western Indian Ocean as in Nile Green’s study of mid-nineteenth century Bombay.22 Scholars of the Indian Ocean also increasingly connected the histories of the Indian subcontinent and the continent of Africa. Arguing for a reorientation of

Introduction  5 imperial history to examine the horizontal connections among colonies rather than the vertical connection between colony and metropole, Thomas Metcalf’s study of the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean illuminated not only the transformations in India but also in East Africa.23 Other scholars such as Mrinalini Sinha used the lens of gender to unpack the relation between colony and metropole while Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy argued for extending analytical focus to the networks that connected colonies to each other as well Britain.24 These thrusts and interventions on the part of South Asian historians also pointed to some serious limitations of global and transnational history as fields through which to illuminate the experience of the “Global South.” Firstly, the phenomenon of globalization which had been so germane in the proliferation of “global studies” pedagogy and research was itself mainly a “northern epistemology”25 shaped by Western experiences and Western intellectual traditions.26 Thus, experiences of “commonality” and “connectedness” were not universal in the period following the 1980s. Rather, the motors of globalization drew deep wedges between peoples and communities in the developing world. Large multinational companies could tout the reach of their products only because of the “race to the bottom” which made it cheaper and cheaper to mass-produce goods for global sale in the impoverished South. Loss of livelihood, forced migration, and environmental degradation—all pointed to the falseness of the promise of globalization in the non-West. Neither did globalization bring about any true equality in the West. Rather, the requirements of globalization have often deepened inequalities within countries, even those in the “developed” world. As Felix Germain writes, First, the forces of globalization encourage the political leadership to make choices that are not in agreement with the interests of the racially underrepresented groups. Second, in addition to the economics of globalization, whether in Bolivia, South Africa, or the United States, the different layers of White cultural hegemony continue to cover the nation and structure social relations.27 A global history centered around “connections,” therefore, fails to account for the fissures and fragmentation that have been part of the story of globalization, particularly, in the non-West. Transnational history, similarly, presents limitations for historical research on formerly colonized regions. The emphasis in much of transnational history on what Christopher Bayly terms “foundational approaches” (such as the state, the economy or ideology) threaten to “flatten” out the complexity of historical change.28 According to Patricia Clavin, “Transnational history may seek to highlight universal axes of exchange involving communication, trade, gifts and alliance, but the role of power, one of the primary concerns of the ‘old’ international history, in shaping these relationships is frequently underplayed.”29 Moreover,

6 Introduction there is a real danger in transnational history of documenting movement rather than change. Similarly, the histories of borderlands and intermedial spaces risk being overlooked. A global history of South Asia must wrestle with these limitations and work through a paradigm that incorporates the history of fragmentation within a global history framework and combines it with a sensitivity to the changes wrought through the movement of peoples, goods, and ideas that have been illuminated through transnational history. What is needed is an outward orientation in South Asian history that reflects the reality of global linkages while at the same time conceding that connections have often piggy-backed on hierarchization and isolation for various communities. Our argument in this volume is that the global nature of South Asia was transformative both for itself and the world it interacted with. Recent trends in scholarship and publication in the field of Global South Asia in this direction suggest that the community of South Asian historians is already moving to fill this gap and our hope is that the current volume will be an important contribution to this burgeoning conversation. Studies of the Indian diaspora have traditionally been one strand of historical work that has provided an outward orientation in South Asian history. In particular, there exists a rich literature on Indian indentured servitude in the nineteenth century that has highlighted the experience of migrants.30 In recent years, fresh forays into studies of diaspora have illuminated new ways of approaching global history. Arguing that much of the Indian Ocean history has focused on it as an Indian space without fully engaging with the African experience of the region, Sana Aiyar has shed light on the formation of diasporic consciousness in the duality that migrants occupy through their belongingness in both the original and the adoptive homelands.31 Shobana Shankar in her recent book has highlighted how race and racialization have united but also divided Africans and Indians.32 Vivek Bald, examining Bengali Muslims in Harlem paints an alternative picture of assimilation, highlighting ways in which these migrants became embedded in neighborhoods of color in ways that challenge deeply held beliefs about South Asian migration into the United States.33 Radica Sahase has illuminated the global and transcontinental impact of the abolition of Indian indentureship.34 Neilesh Bose’s recently edited volume South Asian Migrations in Global History captures the salience of both place and movement in migration studies and points to the fact that the processes associated with South Asian migration “not only occurred in but also shaped significant portions of the modern world.”35 Several scholars interested in colonialism, nationalism, and the post-Independence Indian state have also begun to emphasize the importance of going beyond an “India-centric” view of these processes. Kris Manjapra has shown how intellectual encounters between Germany and India during the British Raj must emphasize how both parties used these encounters to challenge British imperialism.36 Michele Louro has underscored that international and national histories have

Introduction  7 become increasingly viewed as rivals and has argued instead for a deeper appreciation of the interplay between them through an examination of the figure of Jawaharlal Nehru.37 Ali Raza has located colonial India within the broader world of communist internationalism.38 While much of the recent work on India’s transnational connections has been carried out by historians trained as South Asianists, there are also notable works by historians from outside this field who have contributed to our understanding of these linkages. Paul McGarr for instance uses international relations and diplomatic history to illuminate Anglo-American engagement with South Asia during the Cold War.39 Others such as Daniel Immerwahr have looked at India’s role in “community development” and the rise of international NGOs.40 Then there are the classic works on the commodities that connected the world including India, such as Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton and books such as Colleen Taylor Sen’s history of curry and Helen Saberi’s book on tea.41 Besides these scholarly volumes, leading academic publishing houses have initiated book series that reflect an updated approach to the field of Global South Asia and notable journals have initiated special issues around this topic.42 One of the major challenges of a transnational or global history of India is the question of emphasis. A largely Indian orientation tends to foreground a story of transformation of India while a World History emphasis builds a storyline of India’s interactions with the world. What this volume aims to offer is a storyline of India’s global connections that equally emphasizes the points of origin and destination. The essays in this volume look at the impact of global developments on India but they also emphasize how Indian ideas, people, and things interacted with the social, cultural, and material worlds of receiving societies in ways that were mutually transformative. The essays in this volume propose a bold reformulation of Global South Asia, one that looks not simply at connections but at transformations in both the sending and receiving societies. Moreover, we argue that part of the legacy of India’s relationship to the outside world has been in creating connections among other parts of the world and other peoples. From the quest to reach the Indies that drove Iberian rulers to fund costly expeditions that ultimately connected the Old World with the Americas to Gandhi’s creed of nonviolence that created transnational resistance movements to the global languages of yoga and Ayurveda—India has been a catalyst in global connections. This is not to say that India was the most crucial factor in world connections. Such a stance would be as erroneous as the Eurocentric perspective of history which this work challenges. Rather, it is hoped that this volume will provide an example of the far-reaching impact of individual geopolitical entities in creating global linkages and will spur further work in this direction. The periodization framing the volume also serves to underline the focus on world connections. A work that places India squarely within the World History framework, Marc Jason Gilbert’s South Asia in World History follows the chronological periodization of South Asian history.43 However, Gilbert’s emphasis is primarily

8 Introduction on internal developments within India resulting from global connections. Our proposed volume instead focuses on world connections and the chronological period of 1500-present allows us to examine India’s role in various global historical processes in a way that challenges a Eurocentric narrative. A further conceptual underpinning of this volume is our examination of boundaries that thrived alongside global linkages. How—we ask—has India’s global history shaped the many boundaries and inequalities that have divided the world despite—and at times because of—the transnational connections often lumped together under the aegis of globalization? Paul Kramer has critiqued the “breathless sense of freedom” that defines many transnational histories and Lara Putnam has defined transnational history as “seeing connections across borders and taking seriously both the connections and the borders.”44 By emphasizing both linkages and boundaries we aim to balance the narrative of World History without short circuiting the very real experiences of schisms and differences that have characterized the history of transnational and transcultural interactions. Such balance is especially necessary when examining the history of South Asia, given the fact that the very idea of South Asia conceals the profound ruptures of partition. It is for good reason that Indrani Chatterjee has suggested the impossibility of “connected histories across spaces shaped by war and the partitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”45 It is out of respect for the impossibility of seamlessly “connected histories” that we decided in this introduction to refer both to India and to South Asia. Our intention is not to elide the difference between these terms, nor to obscure the distinct histories of the different contemporary nation-states that have come to be lumped together under the aegis of South Asia. On the contrary, we chose to use the word “India” in the title of this volume in part out of methodological humility. Given that those chapters in this volume that examine histories after 1947 do so with a focus on India, it would seem presumptuous to suggest that the volume speaks to all of South Asia. By contrast, consider the last two chapters of Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal’s Modern South Asia, chapters that engage the histories of several South Asian countries, making clear that the term “South Asia” must not become a synonym for India. On the other hand, it would be equally misguided to suggest that Indian history can be neatly distinguished from South Asian history—particularly when the volume in question begins, as does this volume, centuries before 1947. The idea of India has never been contained by narrow territorial boundaries. As Bose and Jalal write in the introduction to their synthesis, “The very idea of India, and not just its wealth and wisdom, has been the site of fierce historical contestation.” We use South Asia and South Asian in this introduction, as do many of the contributors to this volume, in an effort to trouble any narrow definitions of India or of its history.46 Many of the chapters in this volume also trouble narrow definitions of other national histories. Indeed, one of the contributions of this volume is to explore the way global history often moves through the margins of defined geopolitical

Introduction  9 spaces. In this way, the global history of India can be understood as, at times, a trans-subaltern history. This is not to suggest easy solidarities among the “wretched of the earth,” or to overlook the ways in which national hierarchies of privilege and power were often strengthened by global forces. On the contrary, it is important to note the way in which the history of India in the World was always political in the broad sense of power contested from the smallest community to the largest state.47 While many of the recent developments in South Asian Global Studies is exciting and promising it is important to confront the significant lack of historians based in South Asia producing such works. In part, this is a structural, deep-rooted problem beginning with lack of funding for expensive overseas trips which need to be carried out for such transnational research. A second is a relative lack of training in non-Indian history and foreign languages at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In many cases it is scholars trained in Modern Languages who can engage in any realistic way with transnational history that requires reading of foreign (non-English) primary material. In contrast, Indian scholars based in the United States or other countries with better research funding are simply in the right place at the right time as far as producing transnational research is concerned. What needs to change? How do we ensure more parity in terms of where knowledge about India and Indians is produced? How should this reflect in broader commitments that academic communities and even national governments make in this direction? These are questions we can’t answer here but our hope with this volume is to convey the vital importance of paying attention to the global dimensions of the Indian experience—not just as a way to understand the past, but more critically, to take informed actions in the present.

*** In the first section of India in the World, Titas Chakrabarty, Benjamin Siegel, and Rajeshwari Dutt examine the implication of the global movement of peoples, things, and ideas on both India and the outside world. While Chakrabarty and Siegel take a long view of this history and chart this movement over several centuries, Dutt assumes a micro-historical approach that examines the impact of a single (but significant) year in Indian history. All three authors underline both the tangible and intangible connections forged because of these movements (even Siegel’s discussion on tangible goods points to the hidden or obscured ways in which Indian things connected the world). Chakrabarty examines the history of institutions and practice of servile labor between 1500 and 1900. Pointing to the movement of European ideas of servility to India, she demonstrates how this intangible movement gave way to the bodily movement of people from India who were forced into coerced labor in the Indian Ocean. Not only so, but the new forms of servile labor also transformed indigenous social relations, particularly, along the lines of jati/caste. Chakrabarty highlights the ways in which movements of ideas and people from

10 Introduction India and the world intersected creating novel forms of governance. Thus, she examines how the East India Company drew on ideas of abolition and servility in Europe, the Atlantic World, and India to create a ‘just’ English rule of law in India. Chakrabarty’s work highlights how imperial connectedness was predicated on marginalization and hierarchization. While Chakrabarty highlights the movement of ideas and people, Siegel shows the embedded nature of Indian goods within global consumption. Spanning an ambitious scope of time—from the early modern to the contemporary period—Siegel highlights the different Indian commodities that have linked India to the outside world through time. Siegel argues that Indian commodities have crucially shaped people’s health, sustenance, pleasure, mobility, and tastes in ways that are both “showy” (like diamonds or textiles) and “hidden” (like guar gum or jute). Surprisingly, Siegel argues that the most important impact of Indian goods has been those which are essential but of low value. The long history of the movement of Indian goods to the outside world suggests the quotidian ways in which Indian things have colored the experiences of people globally. Addressing the current COVID-19 pandemic, Siegel suggests that it highlights both the opportunities as well as the fragility of Indian industry, particularly, pharmaceuticals. Finally, Siegel’s work suggests that the movement of “things” had definite impact on people—both in terms of rural labor in India and in shaping lifestyles of people around the world. While Chakrabarty and Siegel look at the movement of peoples, things, and ideas over the longue duree, Dutt focuses on a single moment—the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny to show how news and ideas from India reached and impacted the farthest corners of the globe. Using a micro-historical method, she zooms in on the Mexico-Belize border region where a bloody conflict is underway—the Caste War. By examining how the news of the 1857 mutiny colors the conflict in this border region and allows Maya ethnic resistance to British imperial power, the chapter illuminates how the two subcontinents of India and Latin America were connected under the broader dynamics of Empire in the nineteenth century. While discussion of movement of people—especially indentured labor and disbanded sepoys—underlines that this relation between India and Latin America was also corporeal and tangible, the focus of the essay on the impact of the news of the mutiny suggests the intangible (yet, still powerful) ways in which ideas moved out of India into the farthest reaches of the British empire with clear, physical consequences. In the second section, Alexandra Sundarsingh, Michele Louro, and Nico Slate address how the movement of Indian people, ideas, and things gave rise to official anxieties and concomitant state regulation and repression, as well as expansive solidarities of resistance. While Sundarsingh highlights state attempts at controlling morality, both Louro’s piece and the chapter by Slate illustrate how global connections led to political challenges to the state. All three essays

Introduction  11 suggest that despite official regulations, the webs of connection enabling these movements thrived alongside divisions and segregations. Focusing on the “vice” of alcoholism, Sundarsingh is interested in the state’s moral policing in the context of the Indian diasporic community of Singapore. She points to the racialized discourse around alcohol consumption and highlights the continuities between colonial and post-Independence Singaporean state’s racialized view of Indian migrants as agents of disorder. In this context, the alcohol consumed by laboring Indian migrants known as “toddy” acquired a distinctive racial and class identity. Sundarsingh thus points to the racialization of objects where beer is hailed in Singapore as a symbol of industrial success, while toddy is identified with moral dissolution. Sundarsingh shows how segregation of the city into ethnic enclaves allowed the state to monitor sites of “vices” identified with specific ethnic groups. Yet, the incompleteness of state control expressed itself in Indian riots and resistance, the latest of which was in 2013. As Sundarsingh’s chapter suggests the experience of the Indian diaspora in Singapore was marked both by boundaries and linkages in a setting where a multiethnic culture thrived alongside segregated urban areas and state policing. Louro continues the discussion of state repression but in the context of political disorder. She examines the Meerut Conspiracy Case, where Indian prisoners were held by the British colonial government on suspicions of communist leanings. She shows how protests against the actions of the colonial state in the Meerut case assumed global dimensions. With protests in major cities across the world from New York to Shanghai and high-profile support for the prisoners from proponents of civil liberties such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Roger Baldwin, the Meerut Conspiracy case became an international phenomenon. Louro’s chapter traces the global dimensions of the trial both in relation to imperial and anti-communist designs for the case, as well as the global demands for the release of the Meerut prisoners. Louro demonstrates how the Meerut case impacted not just colonial India but also debates over anti- imperialism, communism, and anti-communism worldwide. Louro’s chapter underlines the solidarity and connections that thrived alongside, and in spite of, state repression and resulted in global challenges to the status quo. Histories of South Asia are often bounded both in space and time, with the borders of the subcontinent rigidified by fealty to certain key dates: 1947 being perhaps the most prominent. By following the global history of India across the border of 1947 through the lens of nonalignment, the chapter authored by Nico Slate links an expansive geography to an equally expansive chronology. In the decades after partition, Indian foreign policy was dominated by the vision of Jawaharlal Nehru and, in particular, by Nehru’s commitment to nonalignment. Most scholarship on nonalignment is transnational, at least to the degree that any study of foreign policy must look beyond the borders of the nation-state. Yet, as Nico Slate argues, while many studies have traced the ideological origins of nonalignment within India, less work has been done on the impact of

12 Introduction Indian nonalignment beyond the borders of India. By exploring the relationship between nonalignment and nonviolence, and by locating that relationship within the context of the Cold War, Slate explores the impact of Indian foreign policy on the American civil rights movement. He argues that both Nehru and his critics—particularly socialists like J. B. Kripalani and Rammanohar Lohia— contributed to yoking nonalignment to nonviolence in a way that advanced the struggle against American racism. In the final section of the volume, Trishula Patel, David Busch, and Swapna Kona Nayudu build on the way Louro and Slate examine solidarities of resistance by exploring the transnational legacy of creeds of Gandhian nonviolence and Nehruvian nonalignment. These chapters are not limited to explorations of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru’s own peregrinations, nor are they bounded by traditional approaches to the legacy of these founding figures of India’s postcolonial vision. Each of these essays tracks the surprising connections and disconnections that mark India’s relationship to the politics of anticolonial and antiracist resistance beyond South Asia. These essays also point to one of the most important legacies of India’s connections with the world— forging solidarities and connections among other places and peoples. Patel and Busch’s chapters focus—in part or in full—on the range of Gandhian legacies in Southern and Eastern Africa, the region of the world that, after India and perhaps the United Kingdom, had the largest impact on Gandhi himself. Biographies of Gandhi routinely explore his many years in South Africa. Yet previous scholarship has insufficiently explored the African legacy of Gandhi. By attending to the myths and legends that surrounded Gandhi during his time in South Africa and beyond, Trishula Patel locates Gandhi’s legacy in larger histories that extend well beyond the bounds of Gandhi’s own African sojourn. Patel traces the history of Gandhi’s legacy in Zimbabwe arguing that the interpretation of Gandhi’s legacy by local Indians in Zimbabwe suggests that the mythology of the Mahatma remains more important for diasporic identity politics and imaginations than the actual reality of Mohandas’ work on the continent. In his chapter, David Busch connects South Africa to the United States, while examining how students interpreted Gandhian nonviolence in relation to fundamental questions surrounding education and the educational dimensions of social movements. Busch focuses on two student movements that drew inspiration from Gandhi. First, he examines the Gandhian repertoire deployed by Pauli Murray and other African American students at Howard University as they attacked (nonviolently) racial segregation in the American capital. Second, he uncovers the activism and thinking of Zainap Asvat, Ahmed Kathrada, and other students who participated in the Transvaal Passive Resistance campaign in South Africa from 1946 to 1948. By tracking Gandhi’s impact on Murray, Asvat, and Kathrada, Busch maps the spread of nonviolence across the borders of nations and of higher learning.

Introduction  13 In her chapter, Swapna Kona Nayudu explores the relationship between nonalignment and Afro-Indian solidarity through a close study of the periodical United Asia, which was published in Bombay from 1948 to 1974. By exploring how the diverse contributors to United Asia linked nonalignment to Third Worldism and the Global South, Kona Nayudu reframes nonalignment in relation to Afro-Asian solidarity. Her piece begins with a careful assessment of existing scholarship on nonalignment. From that historiographical foundation, she is able to make clear how her study of United Asia offers a fresh assessment of nonalignment, Indian foreign policy, and Afro-Asian internationalism. This book aims to be transnational not just in terms of its subject matter but also in terms of the voices it represents. Thus, this volume includes essays by scholars based in India, the United States, and China whose research spans from Africa to the United States, from South Asia to Southeast Asia, and from the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean. Our editorial collaboration—Rajeshwari Dutt is an Indian historian who studies Latin America and Nico Slate is an American historian who studies India—embodies the spirit of this transnational volume. Notes 1 Kamala Harris, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey (New York: Penguin, 2020); Nico Slate, “The Other Kamala: Kamala Harris and the History of South Asian America,” Tides Magazine, February 25, 2019, South Asian American Digital Archive, https://www.saada.org/tides/article/the-other-kamala. 2 Michael Ashcroft, Going for Broke: The Rise of Rishi Sunak (London: Biteback Publishing, 2020). 3 Christopher A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol and Patricia Seed, “On Transnational History,” AHR Conversation, American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1446. 4 Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3–4. 5 Ibid., 6. 6 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987); William Woodruff, The Struggle for World Power 1500–1980 (London: Macmillan, 1982). 7 Paul Kramer, “How Did the World Become Global? Transnational History, Beyond Connection,” Reviews in American History 49, no. 1 (2021): 119. 8 Isaac Kamola, Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 3. 9 The historian Robert Marks makes a similar comparison between the “Matrix” and Eurocentrism. Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 9. 10 Arjun Appadurai, “Globalization and the Rush to History,” Global Perspectives 1, no. 1 (2020). 11 Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 76.

14 Introduction 12 For a detailed discussion of these developments see: Patrick Manning, Navigating World History. 13 Bayly et al., “On Transnational History,” 1451; Iriye, 10. 14 Bayly et al., “On Transnational History,” 1444. 15 Ibid., 1445. 16 Ibid., 1443. 17 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500– 1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Kirti Narayan Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 18 Jurgen Kocka, “Global History: Opportunities, Dangers, Recent Trends,” Culture and History Digital Journal 1, no. 1 (2012): 3. 19 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 20 Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 6. 21 Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 22 Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the Western Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 23 Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860– 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 24 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ in the late 19th Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006). 25 Boaventura De Sousa Santos (ed.), Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (New York: Verso, 2007); Kamola, x. 26 Kamola, x. 27 Felix Germain, ““Presidents of Color,” Globalization, and Social Inequality,” Journal of Black Studies 40, no. 3 (2010): 447. 28 C. A. Bayly et al., “On Transnational History,” 1449. 29 Patricia Clavin, “Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in Global, Transnational and International Contexts,” European History Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010): 626. 30 See for instance: Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Clare Anderson, “Convicts and Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 1 (2009): 93–109; Marina Carter, Voices from Indenture: Experiences of Indian Migrants in the British Empire (London: Leicester University Press, 1996); Ashutosh Kumar, Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 31 Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). 32 Shobana Shankar, Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India, and the Spectre of Race (London: Hurst, 2021). 33 Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 34 Radica Sahase, Why Should We Be Called ‘Coolies’? The End of Indian Indentured Labour (New York: Routledge, 2020).

Introduction  15 35 Neilesh Bose, South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labour, Law, and Wayward Lives (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 21. 36 Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 37 Michele L. Louro, Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 38 Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Also see Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah (eds.), The Internationalist Moment; South Asia, Worlds, and World Views 1917–39 (New Delhi: Sage, 2015). 39 Paul M. McGarr, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 40 Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). 41 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Colleen Taylor Sen, Curry: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2009); Helen Saberi, Tea: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2010). 42 Such as the Crispin Bated edited Cambridge University Press book series entitled: Global South Asians and Routledge’s Indian Migrations book series. See also, the special edition of Journal of World History 32, no. 1 (2021) and Harald Fischer-Tïné, “Marrying Global History with South Asian History: Potential and Limits of Global Microhistory in a Regional Inflection,” Comparativ 29, no. 2 (2019): 52–77. 43 Marc Jason Gilbert, South Asia in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For a recent volume focused on “entanglements” between South Asia and the United States, see Harald Fischer-Tiné and Nico Slate (eds.), The United States and South Asia from the Age of Empire to Decolonization: A History of Entanglements (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2022). 44 Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” The American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (April 2016): 377–402, 384; Paul Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (December 2011): 1348–1391. Also see Marc A. Hertzman, “The Promise and Challenge of Transnational History,” A Contra Corriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America 7, no. 1 (2009): 305–315; C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol and Patricia Seed, “On Transnational History,” AHR Conversation, American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1441–1464; Rebecca J. Scott, “Small-Scale Dynamics of Large-Scale Processes,” American Historical Review 105, no. 2 (2000): 472–479. 45 Indrani Chatterjee, “Connected Histories and the Dream of Decolonial History,” South Asia 41, no. 1 (2018): 69–86. Also see Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 46 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2011), 1. Also see Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). 47 On the political, see Manu Goswami and Mrinalini Sinha, Political Imaginaries: Rethinking India’s Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

Section 1

Movement of Peoples, Things, and Ideas

1

Servile Labor in India in a Global Context, 1500–1900 Titas Chakraborty

By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Indian subcontinent emerged as the foremost repository for arguably the cheapest labor in the world, the eponymous coolie. The figure of the coolie lacked any specificity, as coolies could perform a whole range of work that their employers and the state perceived as unskilled. As Gopalan Balachandran has observed, these variegated laboring peoples could only become unified in the figure of the coolie through “legal, penal, social debt or other forms of coercion.”1 Whether in the euphemism of indentured coolie work as a “new system of slavery” or in empirical evidence revealing the discursive, institutional, and imaginative associations between convict transportation and indentured servitude, generations of historians have affirmed the coterminous nature of coercion and coolie labor.2 In almost all these works, India’s prominence in the global circuits of forced and servile labor begins in the nineteenth century, as India became the most important possession of the British empire. But, as this essay will show, from the sixteenth century India had been progressively imbricated within a complex network of movement of un-free peoples spanning Europe, the Indian Ocean world, the African continent, and the Americas as a result of multiple forms of European empire-building in Asia. Even though the Portuguese, Dutch, and English empires—the empires discussed in this essay—had different forms of interaction with Indian society, they had all turned the Indian subcontinent into a node for their mobilization of convicts, slaves, and forced labor deployed in making the infrastructure of empire or “public works.” Buying and selling slaves existed within indigenous societies in India, and slaves were critical pillars within the institutions of household, military, and the court. Slaves performed a whole host of services—not merely labor—and were assigned a range of social statuses. Indigenous demands for slaves created certain pockets of slave trading in Asia. But it was only with the coming of European empire builders in Asia, from the sixteenth century onwards, that a pan-Indian Ocean maritime network of slave trading emerged. Moreover, in the European settlements, slaves were ubiquitously bought and sold for purposes of work, often considered unskilled, and most labored in DOI: 10.4324/9781003393962-3

20  Titas Chakraborty households, state-owned and managed facilities, such as shipyards, and in commercial agriculture. Unlike slavery, convict labor was an entirely unknown form of social relation in much of Asia. Besides, workers mobilized for public works, even when they received a hire, shared many similarities with convict labor in their conditions of coercion and unfreedom. Unfree relations of work, especially in the “public works” under English colonial rule borrowed heavily from notions of service as it existed for at least four centuries in England. This association between European practices and Indian forms of unfree labor was largely forgotten in the nineteenth century amidst British abolitionist politics in the world, when abolitionist freedom was culturally associated with the English evangelical, and utilitarian ethos, and thus servility became specific to Indian social relations. The colonial state, it appeared, at best, alleviated servile labor, and at worst, utilized and intensified it for its own imperial needs. There remained no room to ponder over the three century-long coercive relations in the subcontinent of European provenance. The Indian subcontinent’s earliest tryst with the forced movement of people was not as a sender of cheap labor but as a receiver. Convicts formed the backbone of the Portuguese empire in Asia, with its headquarters in Goa. Portugal was the first country in Europe to use convicts as a resource for building state and society in sparsely populated parts of the home country as well as its empire in Asia and the Americas. Few men and women went to the gallows, for their labor was an asset to the state. Consequently, in Asia, convicts provided essential military labor, especially in the years when Portugal was embroiled in fierce competition with its emerging political and economic rival in Europe and Asia, the Dutch Republic, between 1598 and 1663. While the Portuguese empire in Asia was a mere conglomeration of maritime settlements strewn across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, the military needs were not small. Each year the Portuguese crown decreed convicts to be sent to various outposts in Asia. When the need arose, the Crown also adjusted sentences of the convicts to accommodate their labor needs. Thus in 1669 when Goa needed more soldiers, the Portuguese crown revised the sentences of ten convicts bound for Brazil, cutting the serving time to half but reassigning them to Goa. As Goa received important jurisdictions of the High Court and the Tribunal of the Inquisition in 1544 and 1560 respectively, it generated Portuguese Asia’s own stream of convict labor. A typical sentence for minor crimes in these courts entailed a year of exile in Diu, and serious crimes such as murder deserved two years in Ceylon and unpardonable crimes such as treason, heresy, and sodomy resulted in long sentences in Timor. As convicts filled the barracks of Portuguese Asia, its headquarters in Western India emerged as an important junction in this global movement of unfree people.3 As it knitted a transcontinental network of convicts centering Goa, the Portuguese empire pivoted the Indian subcontinent as an important unit in its global

Servile Labor in India in a Global Context, 1500–1900  21 slave trade. Goa, an impressive city by the late sixteenth century became the converging point of slave traffic from the African continent, especially Mozambique, and other parts of the Indian subcontinent, especially Bengal. One estimate from 1635 shows that each household in Goa owned at least two slaves. Most of the slaves coming from the Indian subcontinent performed menial tasks which the aristocracy and the workers organized in guilds would not perform. African slaves from time to time found themselves conscripted in the military, taking up arms as the Portuguese state got ever more embroiled in conflict with their Dutch adversary in the Indian Ocean theater of war. Even as Luiz de Camoes waxed eloquent of “the lofty deeds of arms and actions glorious” of the heroes, the Lusiads, such as Francisco de Almeida, the first Viceroy of Goa, and Afonso de Albuquerque, conqueror of Malacca, African slaves and convicts from Portugal and Goa manned the armies, winning wars of conquest and defending the empire.4 Wars in Asian lands reached a fever pitch in the years of the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crown (1580–1640), a period which also saw Portuguese merchants moving slaves as far east to the markets of Manila. Many of the “Chino” slaves in Spanish Americas, bought in Manila, had their origins in South Asia, especially Bengal. Thanks to Portuguese-controlled Malacca, merchants could undertake long voyages to the far east with their human cargo, using Malacca as a transshipment point. If convict migration had brought together India with Portugal and the Indian Ocean world, the Portuguese slave trade had expanded this contact to include the African continent and the Americas by the seventeenth century.5 The arch-rival of the Portuguese empire, the Dutch East India Company, had founded its own empire by the second decade of the seventeenth century on the backs of slaves primarily brought from the Indian subcontinent. As the VOC founded its headquarters, Batavia, in the island of Java and nutmeg plantations in Banda and Amboina in the 1620s, they relied almost exclusively on the company’s shipment of slaves from the Malabar, Coromandel, and Bengal. It was only from the 1670s that the VOC could source substantial numbers of slaves from around the Indonesian archipelago. By then the population of Batavia had grown to 27,000 people of which half were slaves. Slaves from the Indian subcontinent went to the other major settlements of the VOC, Ceylon, and the Cape. These settlements continued to receive slaves from the Indian subcontinent well into the eighteenth century, via the networks of private trade of VOC officials. The VOC presence in the Indian subcontinent was substantial along the coastlines, and in all the settlements, European households owned slaves. These people came from other parts of the Indian Ocean littoral as private property of various VOC officials and changed hands as part of private trade. Nonetheless, the VOC notarial offices kept oversight of these private transactions, allowing us to reconstruct along with other extant documents the role of the Indian littoral in constituting the 660,000-1.1 million strong slaveholding of the VOC empire in Asia.6

22  Titas Chakraborty Apart from slaves and convicts, Europeans drawn from the lowest rungs of society and often working on contracts provided the bulwark of the Portuguese and VOC empires. Many single Portuguese men arrived in Asia as volunteers. Leaving aside these fortune seekers, most single men were conscripts in the military. With the VOC empire the greatest numbers of rank-and-file European contract workers arrived in Asia and India as sailors and soldiers. The seventeenth-century thinker and the progenitor of political economy, William Petty, praised the Dutch Republic’s solution to the ever-growing military needs for the wars in Europe and in Asia—instead of wholesale conscription of its own population, the Dutch state hired men from Scotland, England, and the German states for a pittance. Indeed, as Jan Lucassen has shown, the demography of “European” sailors and soldiers alone made the VOC a “multinational corporation.” The VOC sent 220,000 soldiers from Europe to Asia after the 1700s. In the period between 1745 and 1765, VOC sent 28,000 soldiers yearly to Asia. An equally large number of European sailors—over 3,000 each year for the period between 1690 and 1790—came to Asia as part of the VOC’s intercontinental crew. There was a vast chasm separating these workers from the higher-level officials and merchants of the VOC. Ever suspicious of the loyalty of these servicemen, the VOC merchants were always afraid that these people would run away from work leaving the empire in a disarray. For instance, a VOC statute from 1685 prevented movement of all VOC sailors and soldiers at night in its chief settlement in Bengal, Chinsurah, in order to prevent desertion. On first violation, the offender had to pay a fine of Rs. 6; on the second, he faced court proceedings. Such laws were created only to be broken. Lawbreaking European sailors and soldiers created a steady stream of convicts for the VOC empire in Asia.7 The VOC settlements in India contributed to the burgeoning numbers of convicts who were moved across the breadth of the Dutch empire in the Indian Ocean world, to prop the extensive public works in the major Dutch settlements. Runaway sailors and soldiers in Dutch settlements in India were often sentenced to banishment in Batavia to labor anywhere between three and twenty-five years. For example, in 1795, six deserters were apprehended and kept in custody on the ship Dieren, anchored near Calcutta, in “chains and manacle” to be sent to Batavia to labor in the public works.8 In Batavia convicts found themselves in the chain gang quarter or the chain gang’s bay part of the artisanal quarter, where many of the VOC’s slaves from the Indian subcontinent resided and worked. Moreover, banishment came with a term of hard labor in public works, a punishment also meted out to errant slaves, corvee laborers and sailors and soldiers. Thus, convicts, even Europeans, often found themselves laboring alongside slaves in construction and repair of roads, bridges, canals, and company buildings. The Islands, Edam and Onrust, just off the coast of Batavia became penal settlements. Convicted soldiers were primarily sent to Edam to work in the rope factory as well as doing carpentry, logging, and other woodwork. For convicted sailors,

Servile Labor in India in a Global Context, 1500–1900  23 the destination was Onrust, where they labored in the shipyard. Unlike the Portuguese empire, the VOC did not risk arming their slaves and convicts, instead deploying them to labor for “productive” purposes of the empire.9 The English East India Company (EIC) and the British empire followed in these footsteps. In its enormous empire-building drive from the late eighteenth century, the EIC relied heavily on convicts. Slavery remained marginal in this scheme. Although EIC settlements were intricately entwined in slave trading with Dutch and French settlements, the company’s slave trade from India was never substantial. Most of its slaves destined for its settlements in the Indonesian archipelago were sourced from Eastern and Central Africa. Thus, the abolition of slave trading from their possessions in India to any foreign land in 1788 had little financial consequence to the company. Yet, the measure was an enormously important political move, for the EIC used this legal measure to sabotage the financial interests of its archrivals, the Dutch and the French East India companies. These companies relied heavily on slaves from Bengal as an important source of servile labor in their colonies in Asia. Especially for the French empire, the slaves from Bengal labored in the newly founded plantations in the Mascarenes islands in Western Indian Ocean. A year after dealing this blow to its mercantile rivals the EIC initiated convict transport from Bengal to its settlements in Southeast Asia. Convicts from British-held India in the next century traveled to Amboina, Bengkulu, Burma, Strait settlement, Penang, Singapore, Malacca, Mauritius, and the exclusive penal settlement of the Andaman Islands. Indian convicts performed a wide array of work, from being personal servants to European officers to menial workers in big infrastructure construction projects. Work assignments in penal colonies reflected hierarchy within both the colonial society and the penal system. Eurasians with their racial privilege were exempted from hard labor. Well-behaved convicts too availed of this opportunity as well as access to paid work, whereas, sixth-class “incorrigibles” worked in chain gangs in public works. Indian convicts bulked the ranks of unfree labor migrants in the Indian Ocean region. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, in places such as Mauritius, such Indian convicts labored alongside privately and governmentowned slaves, liberated Africans, corvee labor, and locally convicted prisoners to build the citadel in the capital Port Louis. They symbolized Indian Ocean migration as one of centuries-old calcification of unfree labor.10 Within the Indian subcontinent, public works of the early-colonial state demanded a wide range of forced labor, of which convicts comprised only one section. The early company state’s preoccupation with public works was ultimately related to the goals of the garrison state, conquering as much of the subcontinent as possible. This drive manifested amongst other things the thousands of miles of road building so as to ensure the free and easy movement of the EIC infantry. Special orders from the Commander-in-Chief or the Governor General of the EIC state in India through 1810, 1815, 1818, and 1819 repeatedly emphasized the need for the police and the military to coordinate in order to mobilize as

24  Titas Chakraborty many coolies as possible for the public works.11 Police force regularly supplied captive labor for the military. Sometimes the onus of supplying this labor fell on the shoulders of zamindars who found it difficult to recruit labor without force even with promises of revenue remission. Ruthless exaction of labor is memorialized in songs that people in western districts of Bengal sing even today: Leaving their ploughs in the fields The peasant ran As hundreds of recruiters came to exact beggar In the month of Chaitra they caught whoever they could Tied them up and forced them to work on the roads They caned them while they worked Until evening they worked without food In the evening the Bakshi measured out the ration Scarfing down the food the thirsty ones ran to the river Their thirst quenched they slept Curled up in the dust.12 Work and resting conditions were worse for the convicts who labored in chain gangs during the day and at night slept chained to others. Even during serious illnesses such as cholera, the sick remained chained to the healthy. Military engineers preferred incarcerated workers to pressed corvee labor as convict labor supply precluded the uncertainty of working with reluctant corvee labor pressed for state service. Each engineer supervised around 1000 to 3000 prisoners. In the road between Delhi and Allahabad alone 4,686 prisoners distributed in 15 chain gangs labored. Public works conjoined seamlessly an array of forced labor within British India to convict labor across the carceral archipelago in the Indian Ocean world.13 European-controlled slavery, slave trading, and convict transportation had a profound impact on Indian society. Portuguese, Dutch, and English imperial networks relied upon indigenous hierarchies in structuring the slave trade and convict migration, but, in turn, also transformed them. Localized caste or jati divisions made an imprint on the slave trade. As manumissions documents from Portuguese Goa, between 1682 and 1760 reveal, caste status of the slaves was extant even when they were stepping out of their enslaved status.14 Generally, untouchability determined the enslaveability of people. Slave sale documents from eighteenth-century Malabar reveal that local caste hierarchy grafted on the slave trader-enslaved relationship. The majority of people sold into slavery in Dutch Cochin came from untouchable castes such as Parayar, Pulaya, Chegava, while many of the local intermediary merchants were Nairs, the ruling caste in Malabar.15 In certain places, European imperial administration modified or added to the local assortment of caste relations. Thus, in Ceylon, the

Servile Labor in India in a Global Context, 1500–1900  25 VOC designated certain praedial castes associated with commercial production of cinnamon as “slave castes.”16 Caste and the loss thereof amplified the experience of punishment through convict transportation. For higher caste convicts, transportation via sea was a loss of caste status—the “black water” of the sea resulted in collective living inimical to the dharma of caste observations. Chain gangs linked bodies of men belonging to different castes, further intensifying the experience of defilement. Convicts often performed purifying rituals upon reaching the penal settlements. Such anxieties about loss of caste also ran high in jails within the Indian subcontinent. Common fear was forcible conversion to Christianity and consumption of tabooed food such as beef. Over time, new discourses on normative caste behavior emerged, such as, the belief that the ships were like temples of Jagannath where no one could lose caste status even after consuming polluted food.17 Alongside the evolution of caste relations, the Indian littoral also became a crucible of new communities, such as the Portuguese and Free Christian community in Bengal, which had its origins in slave trading and slavery in the region. By the late sixteenth century, much of the Bay of Bengal region had become a refuge for a Portuguese population—many of whom were deserting convicts— variously referred to in Portuguese sources as renegades, pirates, and mercenaries. While they maintained intermittent connections with the headquarters of the Portuguese empire in Asia, they developed important political roots in the region. Many joined indigenous armies as mercenaries and became influential vassals of the local rulers with substantial lands. Their strongholds were in Chittagong, Dianga, and the island of Sandwip in the far eastern Bengal delta, which became slave markets for the Arakanese kings, as well as for the VOC. These mercenaries apart from winning wars for the Arakanese kings gathered slaves sold in the Arakanese capital Mrauk U. The Arakanese king developed a close yet tenuous relationship with these mercenaries.18 The Augustinian missionaries worked with this unruly Portuguese community. As early as in 1637 purebred Portuguese were a tiny minority within the community while mixed-race Portuguese were five times their number. Baptismal records of the Church of the Holy Rosary in Calcutta reveal that of all the 487 converts all were of local origins; some converts were over twenty years of age. Yet all bore Lusophone names. While Christianity cemented this variegated Lusophone population, the moral authority of the Augustinian church was never strong.19 The men of this community became the face of slave raiders in the region. In the ballads from the Eastern deltas of Bengal, one finds the figure of the “harmad” or pirates who sailed the proverbial “armadas,” alluding to the Portuguese. As one ballad describes the Harmads: They do not care for their lives; they are a set of desperate people and in naval fight they show unflinching courage and tact.20

26  Titas Chakraborty The Portuguese slave traders in these descriptions were not the rich merchants that seventeenth-century Venetian traveler Niccolao Manucci encountered in Hugli, but a ragtag army of marauders.21 Impoverished Portuguese men and women as local slave traders also come up in the notarial records of the VOC in the eighteenth century. For instance, a Portuguese woman from Calcutta sold her slave at Chinsurah, the VOC headquarters, for 70 arcot rupees in 1753 which “saved her from poverty.”22 The Portuguese community as Christians of mixed origin also enabled manumitted slaves to enter into their ranks. Often slaves who had turned to Christianity and possessed names such as Nathalia Peres, Rosa de Rosario, and sometimes who had already nurtured a family while enslaved, could easily enter into this community after manumission. Forced migrants, especially slaves, who came to the Indian subcontinent had manifold trajectories of moving out of slavery and integrating themselves into the local subaltern population. Acts of resistance in early eighteenth-century company settlements provide an important window into the ways in which migrants drawn from the lowest rungs of society found their niche in societies within the subcontinent. In their tortuous path to freedom, these enslaved and uprooted people revealed the porosity of indigenous social relations going beyond the rigidities of caste and community. These escape stories reframe our understanding of India and Indian Ocean interactions, often studied through the exchange between indigenous merchants and courts with merchants, monks, saints, and scholars from different parts of Asia and Europe. While for a generation of historians of Indian Ocean interactions these mobilities were testimonies to Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism, new scholarship has increasingly cast doubts over the usefulness of “cosmopolitanism” as a concept in interpreting such relationships. Forced migrants do not find any place in this historiography. Yet, the culture of resistance that these slaves instituted drew on various repositories of knowledge, constantly forging a bridge between their conditions of unfreedom and the unknown but free life in the societies where they found themselves enslaved. They made connections with the freed men and women and the enslaved drawing on commonalities of ethno-linguistic backgrounds, or even the shared experience of slavery. Quick to think on their feet they familiarized themselves with different political and legal jurisdictions, and laws of the land, such as the criminal offense in Mughal India of enslaving Muslim subjects by European traders; runaway slaves often converted to Islam. For example, in July 1729, two runaway slaves of a VOC merchant, Anjou van Mandhaar and Jaget van Bali along with their co-plotter, a freed man named Tambi van Makassar, converted to Islam and gained protection from Mughal imperial officials in Bengal against their recapture by the VOC officials.23 They also interacted with local non-slave laboring populations, in order to plan their escapes. Sometimes they utilized magic and medicinal knowledge that they carried from their places of origin to foment rebellion against their masters. The manifold strategies of freeing oneself

Servile Labor in India in a Global Context, 1500–1900  27 demonstrate the pluri-cultural subaltern milieu of littoral India where the enslaved lived in the words of Stuart Hall, “a life in translation.”24 English notions of service, fortified through practice and state intervention over centuries, structured coerced labor for public service in India. At the heart of service for public works was coercion of any men that the state deemed fit. Such understandings of service one finds in the proclamation of the earliest labor legislation in Britain, the 1349 Ordinance of Laborers: That each man and woman (homo et femina) of our realm of England – of whatever condition, free or bond; able in body; under 60 years of age; not living by trade; nor exercising a particular craft; nor having assets with which to live or land to cultivate; nor serving another – shall be bound to serve anyone who requires his/her services, as long as the service is appropriate to his/her estate.25 A special kind of hired labor, “service,” had mainly put to work young men and women as laboring dependents in rural households contracted for a year typically with a remuneration consisting of room and board and often a small cash hire. The presence of the state in coercing people to work was conspicuous in several aspects—the centralized state and not village-level government officials forcefully put to work unoccupied men and women, fixed wage rates, and safeguarded contracts against any forms of breach. The central government institution, Justices of Peace, became expressly important in enforcing compulsory service and defending contracts. At the level of villages, parish constables were the agents of Justices of Peace dealing with complaints against breach of contract. The Justices of Peace held Quarter Sessions where cases that parish constable could not resolve were tried. Moreover, the annual session of the Justices of Peace became “hiring fairs” when the state ensured that no men or women remained “masterless,” i.e., they were assigned to households as laboring hands and that contracts were made between employers and servants abiding by the stipulations of the statutes.26 In the four centuries leading up to the early nineteenth century England had witnessed proliferation of such statutes which repeatedly articulated men and women as laboring bodies who ought to be attached to a master and the state ensured that they fulfilled these roles. Unfreedom, foundational to English customs and laws defining patriarchal control over servants, could only be secured through state intervention. In the English translation of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, “slaves” in the original Greek text transformed into “servants.”27 The classical philosophical text became extremely popular amongst the rising middle class in eighteenth-century England who saw in it a manual for designing and disciplining the household, the key to a productive and thrifty life. Patriarchal control over servants became a central

28  Titas Chakraborty part of such management. Hervet’s 1532 translation which became a runaway hit seeing at least six editions in the next few decades prescribed appropriate measures to discipline absconding servants who stole form their masters thus: I take here a pece of Dracons lawes, and here a pece af Solons, and so endeuour my selfe to bringe my seruantes to folowe iustice. For me thinketh that these men haue made many lawes to teche men iustice. For they haue wrytten, that he muste be punysshed that steleth, and he that robbeth muste be put in prison and put to dethe.28 Patriarchal and pastoral control over servants could always use the help of the state in order to instill a sense of “justice and rightfulnes (sic).” Daniel Defoe echoed such symbiotic relationships between masters and the state in governing servants in the early eighteenth century when he suggested that a master who was unwilling to send his errant servants before the Justices of Peace should be heavily fined. The nexus of the state and the masters ensured that servants faced harsh discipline. Italian visitors to eighteenth-century England and English visitors to eighteenth-century Italian states were consistent in their observations that though Italian servants did not enjoy as high a wage as their English counterparts they did not face severe punishments or experienced exceptionally hierarchical, yet impersonalized relationship with their masters even while living within their masters’ families. The servant was reduced to a “child,” an alienated and self-effacing member of the master’s family, unable to maintain his/her own familial relationships.29 Thralldom was thus the primary attribute of service in eighteenth-century England. Yet, in the early nineteenth century, amidst the metropolitan furor against slavery in the British empire, colonial authorities located servility in India within the cultural life of the colonized population, ignoring the English and European imprint on Indian social relations. Charles Grant, the famous evangelist and antislavery activist of the Clapham sect, who was instrumental in the EIC government’s decision to open the doors to missionaries in British India, remarked that amongst the followers of Hindu religion “the understanding is chained and kept in perpetual imprisonment…Every avenue which might lead to emancipation strongly guarded.” Hindu women lived in “slavish subjection by the men,” and the four-tiered varna system had made the Sudras “a servile class” whose “sole assigned duty is to serve the other three.” Thus, religion made India into a slavish society including its new and old forms of unfree labor. The anti-slavery press in Britain considered Indian labor relations far different from the plantation slavery in the Caribbean and mostly benign, and importantly a creation of the Indians. The scandal of the British state and capital-induced slavery did not exist in India as it did in the West Indies. Thus, abolitionist Zachary Macaulay observed, “between the slavery of the East and West, that of the latter we ourselves are the

Servile Labor in India in a Global Context, 1500–1900  29 sole authors, and are chargeable, therefore, with its whole guilt and turpitude. In the East, whatever slavery exists we found there; we did not ourselves create it.” This rhetoric and self-perception of the British state vis-à-vis servitude in the Indian subcontinent resulted in a complete amnesia and denial of British influence and European-induced slavery, slave trade, and other forms of coerced labor in the Indian subcontinent. This denial perpetuated even when the colonial legal system was transforming slavery in the subcontinent in fundamental ways. For instance, the first governor General of EIC-ruled India, Warren Hastings overturned the judgment of indigenous Muslim legal experts (maulvis) on several cases regarding assault on slaves. Whereas the maulvis charged all such assaulters whether the master of slaves or not, with a fine. Hastings following British notions of master–slave relations and property laws removed the fines for the assaulters who were masters of the victims and condemned assaulters who were not masters of the slave victims to death. The underlying perception was that masters could physically assault slaves to discipline them, but assaulting slaves of another person tantamounted to the violation of the property of another individual, a capital crime in Britain. The colonial state thus introduced the notion of slave as absolute property, an idea absent in indigenous society. These changes and silences surrounding them had wide-ranging implications on how coerced relationships evolved in the Indian subcontinent and how they were remembered.30 As the EIC poised itself simultaneously as a successor of the Mughal state and the beacon of English justice in India, it actively interpreted several longstanding social relationships in the mold of “Indian slavery.” As early as in 1774, following orders from the first Governor General Warren Hastings, the Provincial Council at Patna issued a declaration that identified “kahaars,” a caste group of palanquin bearers as slaves. Yet, the European companies had been hiring kahaars for a money wage for over a century. In 1711, a wakil or a native court intermediary of the VOC wrote to the Director in Hugli from Rajmahal about his concerns regarding obtaining and retaining transport men in the middle of the rainy season. He could hire a few, including four kahaars for a considerable sum, aware that “without spending, nothing can be obtained in the rain.” Cautious to retain their services, the wakil “satisfied” the kahaars, everyday specially “attending” to them.31 The European companies thus encountered kahaars as precious hired workers, and, as solicitous employers, were well aware of the kahaar’s ability to pull out their services voluntarily. Yet, later in the same century, the EIC categorized them as slaves. The dissonance in the experience and the categorization was not fully lost in the 1774 declaration—the council remarked that despite being slaves, “they were allowed to intermarry and labor for themselves at their own discretion.”32 Contradictions notwithstanding kahaars became slaves in official eyes, while convict labor or coerced labor on the public works never approximated slavery.

30  Titas Chakraborty The EIC officialdom of the nineteenth century distanced itself from Portuguese and Dutch colonial rule in South Asia—the political forces who according to EIC state officials were responsible for European-controlled slave trade and slavery in India—while simultaneously differentiating itself from so-called Indian relations of servility and subordination. This double differentiation, on the one hand, obscured the EIC’s complicity in slave trading and slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and on the other, fundamentally sequestered convict labor and coerced labor for public works from slave labor. Such differentiation also isolated nineteenth-century British rule in India from its long social and cultural antecedents of forced labor in Europe and European outposts in Asia going as far back as in the fourteenth century. Notes 1 Gopalan Balachandran, “Making Coolies, (Un) Making Workers: “Globalizing” Labour in the Late-19th and Early-20th Centuries,” Journal of Historical Sociology 24, no. 3 (2011): 268. 2 Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour, Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); Clare Anderson, “Convicts and Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 1 (2009), 93–109. 3 Timothy Coates, “Portuguese Empire, 1100–1942,” in Clare Anderson (ed.). A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 37–64 4 The Lusiad of Luiz de Camoes, translated by T. Livingston Mitchell (London: T.W. Boone, 1854), 4. 5 Teotonio R. de Souza, “Manumission of Slaves in Goa during 1682 and 1760 as Found in Codex 860,” in Kiran Kamal Prasad and Jean-Pierre Angenot (eds.). The African Diaspora in Asia (Bangalore: Jana Jagriti Prakashana, 2008), 167–181; Anne Pescatello, “The African Presence in Portuguese Asia,” Journal of Asian History 11, no. 1 (1977), 26–48; Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–70. 6 Matthias van Rossum, Bram van den Hout, Alexander geelen and Merve Tosun (eds.), Testimonies of Enslavement (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 2–3; Titas Chakraborty, “Slave Trading and Slave Resistance in the Indian Ocean World: The Case of Early Eighteenth Century Bengal,” Slavery and Abolition 40, no. 4 (2019): 706–736; Susan Abeyasekere, Jakarta: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 19–20; Markus Vink, ““The World’s Oldest Trade”: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (2003): 131–177. 7 Timothy Coates, “Runaway and Deserters in Early Modern Portuguese Empire: The Examples of Sao Tome Island, South Asia and Southern Portugal,” in Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty and Matthias van Rossum (eds.). A Global History of Runaways (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 27; Jan Lucassen, “A Multinational and Its Labor Force: The Dutch East India Company, 1595–1795,” International Labor and Working Class History 66 (2004): 12–29; Geoffrey. V. Scammell, “European Seafaring In Asia, 1500–1750,” South Asia: Journal of South

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Asian Studies 19 (1996): 28; Femme Gaastra, “Soldiers and Merchants: Aspects of Migration from Europe to Asia in Dutch East India Company in the Eighteenth Century,” in Wim Klooster (ed.). Migration, Trade and Slavery in an Expanding World: Essays in Honor of Pieter Emmer (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 101–102; VOC1378, ff1281v-1282r. VOC 8737 fol. 121. James Fox, ““For Good and Sufficient Reason”: An examination of Early Dutch East India Company Ordinances on Slaves and Slavery,” in Anthony Reid (ed.). Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in South East Asia (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 249–251; Matthias van Rossum, “The Dutch East India Company in Asia, 1595–1811,” in Clare Anderson (ed.).. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 157–181. Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 177–184; Clare Anderson, “British Indian Empire, 1789– 1939,” in Clare Anderson (ed.). A Global History of Convicts. General Orders by Commander-in-Chief, National Archives, New Delhi, 1818, 1819. Sukumar Sen, Bangla Sahityer Itihaas, vol. 2. Chitra Joshi, “Public Works and Questions of Unfree Labour,” in Alessandro Stanziani (ed.). Labour, Coercion and Economic Growth in Eurasia, 17th-20th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 277. Teotonio R. de Souza, “Manumission of Slaves,” 175. Linda Mbeki and Matthias van Rossum, “Private Slave Trade in the Dutch Indian Ocean World: A Study into the Networks and Backgrounds of the Slavers and the Enslaved in South Asia and South Africa,” Slavery & Abolition 38 (2017): 105–107. Alicia Schrikker and Kate Ekama, “Through the Lens of Slavery: Dutch Sri Lanka in the Eighteenth Century,” in Zoltan Biederman and Alan Strathern (ed.). Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History (London: UCL Press, 2017), 178–193. Clare Anderson, ‘Convicts and Coolies,’ 102. Timothy Coates, “Runaway and Deserters,” 31 JJA campos, History of the Portuguese in Bengal (Calcutta: Butterworth and Company, 1919), 85. Titas Chakraborty, “The Household Workers of the East India Company Ports of PreColonial Bengal,” International Review of Social History 64: 27 (2019): 8. Dineschandra Sen, Eastern Bengal Ballads, Vol. IV, Part 1 (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1932), 44. Niccolao Manucci, Storia do Mogor, translated William Irvine, Vol. II (London: John Murray, 1907), 92. Tamil Nadu State Archives. Digitized by Nationaal Archief. Accessed through http:// www.gahetna.nl/collectie/archief/ead/index/zoekterm/tamil%20nadu%20state%20 archive/aantal/20/eadid/1.11.06.11#c01:2. Hereafter 1.11.06.11), box no. 1715, scan no. 560. VOC 8762, part 1, 95–97. Stuart Hall, “Cosmopolitanism, Globalization and the Diaspora: Stuart Hall in conversation with Pnina Webner,” in Pnina Webner (eds.). Anthropology and New Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 347; Chakraborty, “Slave Trading and Slave Resistance.” Judith Bennett, “Compulsory Service in Late Medieval England,” Past and Present 109 (2010): 9. Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 60–61.

32  Titas Chakraborty 27 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, translated and edited by Sarah Pomeroy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 81. 28 Xenophon’s Treatise on the Householde, translated by Gentian Hervet (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1532), 58. 29 Raffaela Sarti, “‘The Purgatory of Servants’ (In)Subordination, Wages, Gender and Marital Status of Servants in England and Italy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 4 (2015): 347–372. 30 Andrea Major, Slavery, Abolition and Empire in India 1772–1843 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 254, 294; Indrani Chatterjee, “Gender, Slavery and Law,” 211. 31 VOC 8743, 59–60. 32 Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 143.

2

Woven, Mined, Milled, and Packed The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023 Benjamin Siegel

Introduction This is an essay about Indian things and the way they have moved from the Indian subcontinent to people and markets far away. It follows some of these things from the sixteenth century to the present day, but Indian things have moved around the world long before that point, and naturally, we can only touch on some of these things, while excluding many important others. It will try to suggest some truths about Indian things, and the centrality of these things to many people’s health, pleasure, sustenance, mobility, and senses of taste and fashion. And it will work to show how the demand for these Indian things altered lives and livelihoods on the Indian subcontinent in obvious and somewhat less obvious ways. Before thinking about those things, we’ll try to picture some of the Indian things near us. You may be reading this essay in India, but you may be reading it somewhere else. If you are in India—or Pakistan, or Bangladesh, to which many of this essay’s themes apply—picture yourself somewhere else in the world, perhaps in a place that you have been to, or to which you one day wish to travel. You might be reading this essay in a book made from dead trees, but you might also be reading it on a screen. You are most certainly sitting somewhere as you read it: your room, in a hostel or dorm, in a coffee shop or on a bus or train. And around you are a great many things. Before you continue, ask yourself: which of these things are Indian things? You may not have to search very far at all. The shirt on your back may be an Indian thing, stitched in India—or stitched somewhere else but made of cotton which grew in Indian soil. On a desk or table near you may be a cup of tea, which was most likely picked in India’s south or east. If you are a coffee drinker, the odds are less of your beverage being an Indian thing, though it may be one if your tastes are very refined, and you are drinking a “monsooned Malabar” roast, or if your tastes are more humble, and you have mixed yourself a Nescafé. If there is a bedspread or tablecloth within view, this, too, may be an Indian thing. The curtains, chairs, cutlery, bathmats, cabinets, and carpets you DOI: 10.4324/9781003393962-4

34  Benjamin Siegel purchased at Ikea or Target or Marks and Spencer or Carrefour may be Indian things. Somewhere in this room you may have a container of antibiotics or a bottle of medication: these, too, may be Indian things. If you are in a city, outside the room you are in you may hear the roar of traffic: the cars outside buzz with Indian parts, and the noise itself may be dampened by Indian rubber. Some Indian things are expensive and glamorous. You might wear a piece of jewelry made of silver, adorned with a diamond: some of these rare materials may come from Indian mines. Other Indian things are cheap and pedestrian. The manhole covers that separate street from sewer may be forged in India, and the waste that flows beneath it has been leavened by fiber supplements made of the husks of an Indian desert shrub. Certain Indian things are destined to be eaten. Consumers in the Middle East clamor for Indian long-grain basmati rice, while African consumers seek out shorter varieties. Indian pulses make their way to China, Algeria, the Gulf, and the United States, while fish and crustaceans caught by Indian trawlers or raised in Indian ponds are sent to similar destinations preserved in refrigerated containers. These, too, are Indian things. (Occasionally, things that appear to be Indian things are not Indian things by origin: hing, the sticky resin collected from the asafoetida plant’s roots, is consumed almost entirely in India, yet is grown exclusively in Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.)1 What India makes and how it makes it has long attracted the attention of insiders and outsiders. Even before India’s nationalist economists like Romesh Chunder Dutt and Dadabhai Naoroji chronicled the economic costs of British rule and tallied it in material want, Karl Marx was formulating his critique of capital on India’s production of goods and its capacities to produce new goods in the future.2 And over the last decade, the nature of the commodity itself has become the site of an unexpectedly fierce debate about the nature of global capitalism in modern South Asia. For some historians of the Indian subcontinent, and those interested in global processes as they touched and inflected South Asian lives and livelihood, the raw commodity has been an instrument of domination: particularly in the nineteenth century, commodity markets worldwide helped to reinscribe regimes of coerced peasant labor and debt bondage. Yet other recent work speaks back powerfully against the “abstract universality” of capitalism’s expanding purview.3 C. A. Bayly’s late work suggested the ways in which consumption could serve, for subaltern communities, as a means of accessing particular forms of modernity, even as their labor was conscripted into the production of export commodities.4 And peasant producers in India, as elsewhere in Asia and in Africa and Latin America, all renegotiated the terms of their integration into global economic systems and processes. Here, we will talk about Indian things not in terms of the theory that underwrite, but in terms of their material travels in the modern world, and how these travels ricochet back and inflect the lives and livelihoods of Indian people themselves.

The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023  35 Indian Commodities in the Early Modern World The story of European’s search for Indian spices has been frequently told and nearly as frequently mistold. The British East India Company entered into the Asian trade alongside the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French, though found that other actors—particularly the Dutch—had been quicker to establish spice plantations to cater to Europeans’ growing appetite. Turning to India as a second-best entrepôt, the Company was soon doing a brisk trade, from Surat and other ports, in cotton cloth. Some of these textiles were meant for hanging, while others came to clothe European bodies.5 Consumers in Britain and Europe, as well as in Indian Ocean and Red Sea Ports differentiated between white muslin, dyed and printed calicoes, and painted chintz. Consumers in the latter group clamored for patterns that featured Asian flowers and small animals, usually set against dark backgrounds; European consumers, by contrast, eschewed these styles for flowers attached to green springs and printed on lighter backgrounds, while insisting that they be printed on the whole length of each piece of fabric, rather than meeting irregularly in the middle. Here, European and Indian Ocean world consumers were availing themselves of the work of India’s booming community of weavers.6 Indian cloth had been circulated in massive quantities beginning in the 1400s: the Italian merchant Lodovico de Varthema noted that Khambat, in present-day Gujarat, was the primary source of silk and cotton in Persia, Turkey, Syria, Arabia, Africa, and India; so, too, did Indian textiles also move to Malacca and Southeast Asia. But by the seventeenth century, Indian cotton was becoming a truly global consumer commodity. Indian weavers would draw upon expanding networks of merchant capital to produce cotton and spin and weave it into high-quality textiles. Weavers owned their own tools and worked independently, but in consort with the merchants, traders, and lenders who connected them to world markets. Indian cloth was essential to Britain’s consolidation of economic control on the Indian subcontinent, particularly after the Dutch East India Company doubled down upon their control of the pepper and spice trade from Bantam, Sumatra, and the Malabar coast.7 And it became more proportionately important to Britain with the realization that the cotton produced in America was of markedly poorer quality.8 Yet India’s textiles were not the only offering that Europeans hoped to move from the subcontinent to new markets. Indian baubles, crafts, instruments, and vessels were central to the consolidation of Britain’s economic power and its expanding global political purview. Indian umbrellas, sculpted birds, statues, shoes, vested, spouted water-pourers, pelts and stuffed animals, and other objects were circulated around the world as objets d’art, both symbolic representations of expanding British power and also the material makings of what has been described as “an empire of goods and the supposed good of empire.”9 Yet not all Indian things were as comfortable or as appealing as the East India Company’s bolts of fabric or its showy trinkets. Throughout the seventeenth and

36  Benjamin Siegel eighteenth centuries, ships sailed from India to European ports with their bellies full of damp and muddy saltpeter, occasionally packed into bags but mostly shoveled on raw for use as ballast.10 Saltpeter had been used in India since antiquity as a poisonous smoke in wartime, and in Europe, it had been used to cure meats. But saltpeter’s explosive quality led to advances in pyrotechnic technology, and eventually, the widespread European production of gunpowder, made from a mix of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal. Saltpeter deposits in Poland had provided the majority of the European supply, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, declining exports led the new European joint-stock ventures operating to enter into the Asian trade. The first, tentative Portuguese imports were quickly eclipsed by the work of the Dutch East India Company hauling saltpeter to Europe. But it was the British East India Company that began to import the chemical in major quantities to Europe. British imports began in 1626, picked up after the English Civil War, and then skyrocketed after the 1720s. Initially, Indian saltpeter came to Europe from Gujarat, Ajmer, and the Coromandel Coast. But by the 1650s, the discovery of deposits in Bihar led to a reorientation of the Indian trade. Maunds upon maunds of “Bengal” saltpeter was shipped down the Hooghly River and onwards to Europe. This export had a secondary financial advantage: beyond the cash earned for the saltpeter itself, it could be used as ballast for ships and would thus obviate the need for iron or lead. Indian producers differentiated between three different types of saltpeter: kalmi or dobara-cabessa saltpeter, which was refined, dobara saltpeter which had been boiled twice, and katcha, or raw saltpeter. Only the former two types made it in bags and as a slurry on ships bound for Europe. Indian laborers would boil and refine raw saltpeter in earthenware, and later copper, vats, before loading it into boat holds. The stench of saltpeter, sulfurous and frequently likened to raw sewage, was described by sailors as “the smell of the ship,” and it wafted upwards to the upper decks even through the layered tons of coffee and calico fabrics. Colonial Commodities Under the aegis of the East India Company, and then the British Crown, colonial India offered the world materials to clothe, pack, dye, and drug. Bodies around the world were clad in Indian cloth and adored with Indian color, their senses dulled with Indian narcotics, and fed with foodstuffs packed in Indian fibers. Some of these commodities were substances that only grew in India, or grew particularly well under Indian climactic conditions or in given Indian labor regimes. Others were not endemic to India, but rather vied for space in global markets tied together by bonds of commerce and politics. Cotton exemplified the last sort of commodity.11 The fibrous boll wrapped around a Gossypium seed is likely native to South Asia, with the world’s oldest samples being found at the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh. But nothing precludes its

The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023  37 growth in other temperate regions, and cotton processing technology, prior to the invention of the gin, spread rapidly from India to other parts of Asia.12 This meant that cotton could be produced in Ming China, Japan, and Ottoman Turkey, across Iraq and down into Bamako, and of course, in the American South. But raw cotton itself was a decidedly local thing: while occasionally it was plied down the Ganges or the Yangtze across long distances, or up into the highland areas of the Aztec empire, its bulk and weight meant that it was rarely carried in raw form across long distances. Most cotton, until the nineteenth century, was spun and woven within miles of its cultivation. All this would change, however, in the nineteenth century, when cotton began to move, packed and compressed, across long distances—a development synonymous with the making of the classical colonial economy itself. Alongside developments in technology came developments in marketing and economics. Bombay’s cotton grew linked by price to Liverpool markets in the early nineteenth century, while companies like Switzerland’s Volkart Brothers helped to spread the practice of shipping raw cotton from India and then exporting finished textiles back to it.13 Fueled by the American civil war and the decline of the American South’s “competitive advantage” in the horrific form of enslaved African labor, India’s raw cotton exports boomed. Merchants sent seeds, cotton gins, and presses from Manchester to the Indian countryside, while lobbying for the expansion of the railways to move product more quickly.14 Merchants and traders reaped handsome rewards for the crushed bolls they sent overseas, while weavers suffered, with somewhere around four or five million of them pushed out of agriculture.15 The influx of European piece-goods into India, cheaper and finer though certainly more fragile than Indian wares, fueled the rise of economic nationalism and the Swadeshi movement. But so, too, did it inspire Indian industrialists to leverage cheap, skilled labor and access to capital to build homegrown mills in Gujarat, Bombay, and elsewhere.16 The rise of a class of mill owners helped fund the work of the Indian National Congress, even as it wedded the party to a fundamentally conservative vision of Indian politics. Opium played a similar role in consolidating Indian wealth, but only after it fueled the rise of a trans-Asian imperial drug trade.17 It was Indian poppy, scraped and scored into opium gum by field laborers, which underwrote the rapid expansion of British commercial interests across the Indian subcontinent. The colonial system of cultivation was variegated, at first: districts like the Benares opium mahals were managed directly by an East India Company Agency, while in Bihar Indian compradors were employed, instead. While Indian producers and traders continued to ship opium from ports like Bombay and Bharuch to ports across Western Asia, the East India Company’s creation of a “Malwa Agency” for the purchase of opium there was intended to encourage native traders to shutter their export routes. In spite of this, Indian merchants beyond the direct authority of the Company continued to smuggle opium overseas, subverting British authority and growing rich in the process.

38  Benjamin Siegel Indian opium became known the world over and emerged as the “brand” of choice in Asian ports, sold alongside tea, pepper, gambier, copra, and tin. Its prices were recorded assiduously in the new commercial papers, and two wars were fought in its name. By many accounts, Indian opium was the lynchpin of empire itself: in the middle of the nineteenth century, the crop provided up to 15 percent of the British Indian government’s income and accounted for nearly a third of its total trade. A handful of intermediary groups—Chettiar traders, Marwari Maheshwaris, Khoja Currimbhoys, certain Parsi families, and Sindhi investors—saw their coffers swell for their investments in opium, but others courted bankruptcy when their investments were timed poorly against the expansion of Chinese opium crops in the 1840s. It is China, of course, to whom Indian opium was marketed and peddled, but it is India’s rural wage laborers who suffer in cultivating it: family farmers of peasant cultivators grew, scored, scraped, and collected the sticky latex of the poppy, but the work was arduous and paid poorly. Nonetheless, well into the twentieth century, opium gum was still being scraped off green capsules across northern India. Prohibitionists had landed a coup in 1878 with the passage of an Opium Act aimed at further limiting Indian cultivation and use, but the Royal Commission which came seven years later continued to extoll its benefits to imperial coffers. By the first decades of the twentieth century, India’s supply of opium was being winched off, while being thrust into the center of nationalist and international politics. While prohibitionists took aim at Indian opium as a deleterious drug with no redemptive qualities, princely rulers looked to opium as a harmless pastime and a possible source of state revenue in any post-colonial settlement. Nonetheless, Indian opium exports decreased throughout the first decade of the twentieth century; by 1935, with the official end of non-medicinal opium exports, Indian opium was only flowing to Nepal, East Africa, Burma, and Aden to fulfill old contracts, as well as to the remaining French and Portuguese settlements in India. Indian opium dulled the world’s pain and numbed its senses, but its indigo gave the world color and condemned its producers to tragic indenture. Indigo— a low-lying bush with sheaves of violet flowers—may or may not have been an Indian thing by its origins. Its name, from the Greek, suggests the belief that it came from the subcontinent.18 But the plant and its brilliant blue dye were grown and produced across the world, harvested by different labor regimes and systems in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, South America, and the American South. Indigo was traded in regional arenas in the medieval and early modern world, but in the sixteenth century, it became a truly global commodity, traded across increasingly long distant routes by Indian, Armenian, Persian, Levantine, and Italian merchants. And from the early nineteenth century, the world of Indigo was increasingly rooted in colonial Bengal. This relocation was not through any inherent environmental quality. Bengal had some ecological particularities that put it at a disadvantage when compared

The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023  39 with cultivation in the Philippines, Java, Egypt and Senegal, South and Central America, the Caribbean, and South Carolina—all major sources of the plant and its dye. The Bengali variant of the crop, Indigofera tinctoria, was grown in low-lying plots that flooded each year, meaning that planters needed to resow the crop each year, as opposed to the several years’ yields enjoyed elsewhere. This might well have condemned the Bengali variant to a marginal commodity on the world stage. But other sources of indigo, a massively labor-intensive crop, began to fade at the turn of the nineteenth century. Guatemala’s industry was a victim of changing colonial political contexts, and Haiti’s indigo was pushed aside by slave revolts and the rise of coffee. North America’s once-promising indigo crop became too costly on account of soil exhaustion and the expense of importing slaves. But a new plantation system in Bengal, and the establishment of colonial factories in 1778–1779, prompted a boom for indigo there, ably assisted by the import of new scientific methods of cultivation from the West Indies, in particular.19 Once seen as a third-rate product, Bengal’s indigo was seen as the global standard by the last years of the eighteenth century. Bengal’s agriculture and economy were transformed by the rise of indigo. “Agency houses” in Calcutta drew in investors and capital from around Europe, leading to profits for merchants but also speculation, booms, and busts.20 Indigo was integral to Bengal’s preeminence within the rising British empire and the consolidation of law and property regimes on the Indian subcontinent.21 So, too, did indigo cultivation become one of the most potent sites by which peasants rose up in resistance against British rule: indigo was a miserable crop whose cultivation meant human misery, and this resistance proved integral to new understandings among the Bengali bhadralok of the costs and ravages of colonialism.22 As the twentieth century dawned, indigo cultivation was delivered a shock by the advent of cheap, pure synthetic indigo from Germany. Much was invested in the indigo economy, and India’s planter elites worked hard to protect their capital against this ingress, leveraging new scientific discoveries to render natural indigo more appealing.23 If indigo cut a brief and brilliant swath across the world, Indian jute took a lower profile as it plied similar routes. The word “jute,” and certainly the talk, stalky plant made mostly of strong cellulose and lignin, is unfamiliar to many outside of India. Yet few have not heard of burlap, gunny, or hessian, the strong, rough fabric once used to move goods of all manner across the world. From its rise in the middle of the nineteenth century, the world’s jute was wholly cultivated in the alluvial soil of the Bengal delta. Its leaves were and are occasionally used as a rough soup, but primarily, the plant is used for industrial production. The stem and outer skin of the plant are bundled together, and run through water; afterward, women and children step in to strip down the green matter from the plant, revealing the corded fibers within. Britain had, prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, packed its wares in Russian flax and hemp.24 But the Crimean War interrupted the steady supply of

40  Benjamin Siegel these fibers, and Scottish manufacturers were quick to pivot to jute from Bengal, repurposing machinery to handle the new fiber. A new system coalesced around jute: smallholders used household and hired labor to grow and process the fiber on small plots. They shipped this jute to Calcutta and then to jute mills further up the Hooghly River; the excess went to mills in Britain, Europe, and North America. In turn, jute was used to package grains, sugar, cement, coffee, and all manner of basic commodities. Jute acreage in Bengal skyrocketed, and many peasants prospered. But by World War I, crops were failing, the delta was flooding, epidemics had broken out, and jute began to lose its standing in the global marketplace. The arrival of new synthetic fibers, cardboard, and the aluminum shipping container all conspired to turn a profitable crop into a marker of immiseration. Independent Indian Things Independent India’s bureaucrats and politicians fantasized about making things that were solid, beautiful, and functional, while reducing the need and desire to import their foreign counterparts. Hindustan Machine Tools was incorporated in India in 1953 as a state-owned machinery company. It produced tractors and die-casting material, but its most iconic offering was the Janata, a slim and minimalist hand-wound wristwatch billed as a fashionable offering to India’s urban processional classes. Its classic aesthetic dovetailed neatly with the svelte curves of the Hindustan Ambassador, these “borrowed” from the chassis of the British Morris Oxford series III sedan. These objects—engineered on the cheap but with immense pride in national engineering—fueled the notion that India might one day produce all manner of modern things in proper Swadeshi, or national, factories. Yet what India actually produced and exported in this period was more humble fare.25 Measured by earnings, India’s biggest offering to the world continued to be jute, accounting for somewhere between a fourth to little under a half of all exports. Cotton fabrics and vegetable oils helped make up a substantive but lesser proportion of India’s earnings, alongside a basket of tropical commodities: coffee, cashews, and spices. Iron ore, manganese ore, and mica earned a bit for India, as well. But some Indian things circulated in new and evocative ways in this formative moment. Tea was not, of course, a new export for India. British and Indian planters and managers had long sold tea to global customers as the consummate colonial product, marketing it as the fruit of a tamed jungle that had been neatly manicured into legible gardens and factories.26 A healthy export economy had precluded the development of a domestic market: at the turn of the twentieth century, it was easier to send tea to Europe than it was to the inner Indian hinterland. Indian tea manufacturers had occasionally attempted to sell tea to the Indian consumer, giving away free cups of prepared tea and selling “one pice”

The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023  41 paper packets of broken tea that would be unsellable internationally. By the 1930s, nearly 90 percent of India’s tea was going overseas, and only a small fraction of India’s population had ever tasted the beverage. Domestic consumption was given its first real fillip by “the great tea campaign” of the Second World War when those earlier domestic marketing strategies were piloted in India en masse. Yet still, at independence, more than 70 percent of India’s tea crop, the largest in the world, was headed overseas. Decolonization, independence, and partition, however, had thrown the industry into crisis. India’s prime tea-growing land was severed in two, with Sylhet and Tripura now in East Pakistan and Assam, Cachar, Darjeeling, and the Terai and the Dooars in India. Indian planters and British planters who stayed on worried about the geographically precarious position of their “gardens.” But perhaps more worrying were the global fluctuations in tea prices, pegged to European demand and the vagaries of British rationing, but also competition from Ceylon. And tea cultivation was dogged by pervasive violence in its gardens, tied to a vestigial Anglo-Indian world of plantation commerce.27 The Indian tea world was in transition in the 1950s. British planters working in India were feeling increasingly uncomfortable in a post-colonial nation. While their large estates, huge earners of foreign exchange, were exempted from land reform laws putting ceilings on holdings, a newly reconstituted Tea Board of India pressured many foreign owners from 1953 onwards to sell off their estates to native families. At the same time, Indian consumers were being “taught” to drink tea through posters and advertisements which reassured them of the “swadeshi” nature of the beverage. (Indian tea marketers also unsuccessfully tried to teach Indian consumers the “correct” way to make tea, working to push larger amounts of the leaf instead of the treacly, milky preparation that most Indians preferred and continue to prefer.) But exports remained the order of the day, reaching a peak of 230 million kilos annually in the 1950s. Most Indian tea went to Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East. And Indian producers managed to eke out a greater profit through the widespread adaptation of the so-called “crush, tear, curl” process.28 Invented at the Amgoorie Tea Garden in Assam in the 1930s, the CTC process would revolutionize tea processing: leaves are passed through toothed rollers which curl the shards into small pellets, as opposed to the traditional strips. The process flattened taste but reduced to a significant degree the amount of manual labor required. CTC allowed India to meet global demand in the 1950s, but these exports dropped precipitously as global tea-drinking slowed, and Indian consumers purchased lower-grade, “cutting chai” suited to domestic preparation. Independent India’s exporters also placed their hopes on another leaf. Indian tobacco had also been a marginal commodity on the global market.29 Virginia tobacco and Turkish tobacco had long filled the world’s cigarettes and pipes, but Britain, too, had cultivated tobacco within the empire. India had long beckoned to British manufacturers as a potential growing site: it had been an early adopter

42  Benjamin Siegel of the New World crop, and traveled often praised the quality of Indian tobacco, particularly from its southwest coast. But manufacturers eventually decided that Indian tobacco was not well-suited to European tastes, and a new colony, Rhodesia, helped propel the growth of “Empire Tobacco,” with poor soil that could nonetheless grow reasonable leaf. Representatives of Rhodesian tobacco fended off the efforts of Indian growers to enter into the British tobacco market, alleging that the Indian product was inferior in taste and quality. But Indian manufacturers, particularly in Guntur, had been working to grow popular, American varieties of tobacco and curing them to acceptable British standards. And as British consumers moved toward cigarette smoking over pipes, even “lesser” tobacco was newly palatable. All these worried American manufacturers, anxious about the arrival of new competition on the scene. Yet Indian tobacco, in independence, proved a less explosive crop than its trajectories in the 1940s might have suggested. As the 1940s progressed, Indian tobacco was increasingly shipped overseas. But British purchasers weaned themselves off the product in the 1950s, and Nehruvian India found itself shipping tobacco to the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and Japan—primarily markets that had reason to embrace a cheaper, less refined product.30 Indian tobacco, rooted in Guntur, was controlled by a patchwork organization of small auctioneers and traders, and if significant in the aggregate, the industry never coalesced into the foreign exchange earner that Indian businessmen had hoped it would become. There was another export commodity upon which Indian statesmen placed their hopes and aspirations, but which never squared in the export balance sheets. Rare earth minerals were not discovered in India, nor were elements like monazite only found on the subcontinent.31 But the discovery of lanthanide elements in Southwestern India at the turn of the twentieth century kicked off decades of wrangling over these rare earth minerals, leading to a major political tussle in the decade after independence. Rare earth minerals had been identified abstractly in the late nineteenth century—the nominal “rare” did not correlate to frequency, but rather their position in the last group of the periodic table. But rare earth minerals first came into industrial use in the late nineteenth century, when the chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach discovered that monazite could be used to manufacture gas mantles, whose intensely bright white glow presaged the invention of the gas-mantle lamp, which would light up urban streets across the world. One major deposit of monazite, as it happens, was to be found on the beaches of Travancore state, in between Kollam and Nagercoil, where monazite beach sands beckoned to British prospectors. A German mining company was given an initial lease to these sands, before two British companies took over production, capitalizing upon a growing demand for raw monazite to process into thorium nitrate. Travancore’s beach sands might well have faded into obscurity. Electricity and electric light quickly replaced gas lighting in cities, and the demand for

The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023  43 monazite precipitously dropped. But another use for this rare earth mineral soon grew compelling to prospectors. Thorium’s radioactive properties had been discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, but after 1946, it was known to be a possible nuclear fuel, and nuclear powers were growing interested in monazite as a precursor to this element. C. P. Ramaswamy Aiyar, the Diwan of Travancore, viewed the state’s monazite as its prestige good. Tea, rubber, coffee, copra, and coconut oil would provide a good tropical basket—but it would be monazite, in demand by many European powers, but above all the United States, that might help make Travancore an independent constitutional monarchy like Belgium or Thailand. Seeking to prove the importance of their exports, Travancore’s administrators embargoed the export of rare earth minerals, causing Chicago’s Lindsay Light Company, the most important global processor of thorium for lighting, to threaten “to turn off the lights” in India by blocking all thorium exports to it. American administrators, convinced of the importance of monazite, considered supporting Travancore’s independence. British administrators, after Hiroshima, were negotiating directly with Travancore’s leaders to export monazite to the United Kingdom. But at independence, Jawaharlal Nehru entered into the fold. Convinced by physicist Homi Bhabha of the importance of rare minerals as a state resource, thorium was recast, after the passage of the Indian Atomic Energy Act of 1948, as a vital Indian commodity. Travancore was incorporated within the Indian union, and monazite and thorium entered into the purview of national planning. Soon afterward, India’s strategic monazite supply was thrust into the political limelight, as American diplomats sought to dangle out food aid in exchange for access to the rare earth mineral. Nehru objected, declaring that he would give the United States any strategic materials except for those which might be used for nuclear weapons development. And monazite, rather than contributing to India’s foreign exchange earnings, continued to be treated as a commodity for domestic use alone. Under the purview of the state-owned Indian Rare Earths, Kerala’s monazite sands were processed at home for India’s atomic energy program, and ever since the Atomic Energy Act of 1962, even questions about monazite mining are forbidden to be asked in parliament. Making in India in the Twenty-First Century Indian politicians and businessmen in the present-day dream of important Indian things. They fantasize about cars and computers, and gleaming industrial machinery thrumming with life and the promise of riches. Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” scheme touts all that can be produced in India, from electronics to automobile components to solar cells and satellites. But while India has pockets of industrial capacity that allowed it to nearly reach the moon—the boxy Chandrayaan-2 satellite’s crash-landing was a failure of software, not hardware—it struggles to produce goods at a truly global standard, and Indian entrepreneurs wonder how they might close a growing gap with neighboring

44  Benjamin Siegel China. Indian bureaucrats dream of high-end manufacturing—the gold standard remains the idea of a silicon chip—but make do with less glamorous exports.32 Some of these exports are not merely unglamorous, but fully hidden. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal to an ascendant Hindu right hinged to some degree on his promise of protection to India’s bovine population. Yet in 2015, India emerged as the world’s largest exporter of beef, in spite of an expanding ban on the slaughter of cows, bulls, and bullocks.33 India’s bovines—nearly 2.4 million tons that year—overtook basmati rice as the country’s largest-value agricultural export. And exporters shirked a widening legal challenge by exporting “carabeef”—the meat of the water buffalo which, if not quite the stuff of sirloin and rib-eyes, holds wide appeal on grounds of price for countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines. American, Japanese, and Korean beef-eaters, relatively discerning in their tastes in meat, bought little of India’s offerings, fearful of outbreaks of Foot and Mouth Disease and wary of buffalo’s decidedly gamey tinge. But carabeef had been given a fillip by the UPA government’s “Salvaging and Rearing of Male Buffalo Calves” scheme, which sent useless male calves to the abattoir, as well as private investments in the meat processing industry, and an agreement with China which permitted the direct export of meat. (Russia, too, certified a number of Indian plants for exports, but did a quick volte-face on sanitation and disease.) These efforts helped India edge out Brazil’s two million tons of steaks and chuck for the global market. Indians themselves, while increasing their consumption of poultry, fish, and mutton, enjoyed relatively tiny amounts of carabeef, to the tune of around two kilograms a person annually. American beef-watchers—among the most astute observers and voracious observers, next to their Argentinian and Brazilian counterparts—watched Indian exports soar with interest.34 On the main, they were unconcerned: Indian carabeef seemed to be mostly produced from culled and non-productive dairy animals, and their slaughter weights, a good metric of quality, were generally low. Furthermore, most carabeef leaving India was exported as raw, deboned chunks—a product mostly unappealing to consumers and better suited to institutional cooking or commercial processing. But the USDA suggested that savvy Indian processors could work to boost their output and quality and solidify market dominance in middle-income countries, beating out American “high-end” exports on dinner tables around the world. As the decade progressed, certain trendlines became clear. India’s largest markets became clustered in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.35 Vietnam became a clearinghouse for Indian carabeef, but this meat rarely made its way into phos and beef salads: instead, Chinese brokers used the port of Haiphong to ferry illicit carabeef into China when Chinese regulators closed the legal routes. The other promising market was the Middle East and broader Muslim world’s voluminous desire for halal beef.36 Indian packers were happy to rotate slaughter boxes toward the qibla, the direction of Mecca, and to fell the cow in a single

The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023  45 cut. But global halal standards, different in Turkey, the UAE, and Malaysia, made this export route even more logistically (and theologically) challenging. A market closer to home beckoned, as well: Bangladesh’s appetite for beef came to underwrite the widespread movement of live cattle across its riverine borders, with Zebu cows and bulls moved en masse across Assam’s border chars, or small islands whose terrain shifts with the seasonal current. The specter of foul play, too, tainted India’s export business.37 In and beyond India’s “cow belt,” a spate of police investigations revealed cow meat being passed off as buffalo meat. Police seizures in 2018 led to the shipment of bovine carcasses to the National Forensic Science Laboratory, where they were revealed to be cows instead of buffalo. Two Delhi-based companies were caught up in the public outcry against cow slaughter and charged with the illicit export of cow meat. Dynamics like these revealed the liminal and uncertain nature of bovine meat in modern India: a “residual business,” informal and rarely planned, living at the margins of the more regulated dairy industry, and stymied by “structural definiteness and vulnerabilities” keeping Indian producers from greater returns.38 So, too, are these exports bound up in the volatility of the world market. When China cracked down on the illicit imports of carabeef in the wake of an African Swine Fever scare in pork imports, Indian producers felt the pinch of a “world price floor” product plunging to new lows.39 Other exports also begin on Indian farms but end up not on plates but in wells. Exemplary here is the unassuming guar bean (Cyamopsis tetragonoloba), a tiny green legume whose center of agricultural productivity is in the arid regions of Rajasthan. Guar, until the 2010s, was a decidedly unromantic crop, whose pods, too hard for human consumption, were primarily used for cattle feed. A gum made from its pulverized seeds found wide use in industrial food production: guar gum thickens ice creams and milkshakes, gives extra heft to bread, pasta, and sausages, and plumps up lipsticks and other cosmetics. Yet sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century, it occurred to enterprising energy researchers that that same thickening property could be used to thicken water. Mixed with sand and a grab bag of other chemicals, guar gum “proppant” proved a crucial ingredient in the rapid expansion of hydraulic fracturing, or fracturing, wherein shale rock is cracked open to release deep reserves of oil and gas. This new guar slurry could move sideways through broken rocks—and proved an unexpected miracle crop for the Indian farmers who were cultivating it. The boom began around 2011 when oil and gas prospectors began flushing close to nine metric tons of guar gum down each new well.40 Overnight, prices in Rajasthan spiked. The CEO of Halliburton, the world’s leader in the practice decried by environmentalists, declared guar “the fastest-moving commodity price that I have ever seen,” and a West Texas entrepreneur declared that the “whole world got caught not ever thinking they would need as much guar as they do now.” Rajasthani farmers, for their party, simply called it “black gold,” marveling at the ten-fold increase in Jodhpur market prices. Guar farmers could

46  Benjamin Siegel eke out 300,000 rupees (around 5,400 dollars) from five acres of sandy soil, and with new profits, they purchased tractors, SUVs, and underwrote expensive weddings. Others took trips to Europe and plunged new wealth into gold and silver. One Indian company, headquartered in Sri Ganganagar near the Punjab border, worked to pump up output, predicting the mushrooming of an industry from 2 billion dollars in 2012 to 200 billion by 2020.41 When the futures market was briefly suspended by the central government in the wake of an underwhelming monsoon, Vikas WSP underwrote farmers’ rallies, distributed seeds, and convinced cotton farmers to switch to guar instead. And convinced by the promise of even greater profits, they built two new plants and offered contracts to farmers promising 800 dollars’ return per acre, regardless of crop yields.42 India’s guar exports made up 85 percent of the world’s total, and American producers were anxious over a crop whose prices were nothing if not volatile, wavering between 20,000 rupees and 320,000 rupees per metric ton.43 So, too, were energy producers in Russia, Canada, Argentina, and China, beginning fracking operations of their own. Before long, producers were working to develop alternatives. Planters began trying crops in Texas, whose hot climate mirrored Rajasthan’s. And two companies, toward the end of 2012, piloted synthetic substitutes for guar slurry: Halliburton’s “PermStim” and Schlumberger’s “HiWay” products were both pitched as cheap and reliable substitutes for an uncertain Indian agricultural product. Indian producers scrambled to keep up, increasing the acreage of guar gum planted across Rajasthan. The prices remained attractive at first: India earned close to five billion dollars from guar in the first quarter of 2013, making it India’s top agricultural export, and farmers continued to luxuriate in high prices. The guar seed and guar gum futures markets were resumed.44 But as Indian farmers toiled in the fields, fracking companies began making use of the new synthetics on the market. By the end of 2014, guar prices were plummeting.45 The guar “bubble,” the Financial Times averred, “seems well and truly over, and the introduction of new synthetic substitutes suggests that another one is unlikely to happen again.”46 Yet Indian commodities have outlived their obituaries before, and guar was not as quick to disappear from the market as that bearish prediction made out. When the newly elected United States President, Donald Trump, stoked up oil drilling in 2017, and OPEC cut its own crude oil production, guar was back in demand.47 If business analysts called this “rebalancing,” Indian farmers were no doubt happy for the revival of their unexpectedly lucrative cash crop, if worried about another sudden crash. Indian producers also take things from other countries and render them Indian by processing them at home—if it’s impossible to “make in India,” one might transform in India instead. Like most of the world’s diamonds, the rocks which fuel India’s diamond industry come from places like the Jwaneng diamond mine in Botswana, the Catoca mine in Angola, and the Aikhal diamond

The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023  47 mine in Russia. (India’s own diamond mines are mostly defunct: the Kollur Mine, the celebrated trove of the Golconda Sultanate, which likely produced the Hope Diamond and the Koh-i-Noor, was exhausted by the late nineteenth century. Hopes of untapped mines surface regularly—in early 2020 the stateowned mining company, NMDC, took over the abandoned Bunder deposits in Madhya Pradesh—but these generally vanish as quickly as they surface.)48 Yet the rough diamonds extracted from these mines are imported to India from hubs in Africa, Dubai, and Belgium. In India, 4.64 million people cut and polish these gems—mostly in factories and workshops around Surat, Gujarat, and send them out around the world.49 But this simple story belies its twists and turns. Some diamonds arrive in India only to be exported quickly thereafter without any polishing: Indian diamantaires, weighing the cheap cost of Indian skilled labor against freight charges and the cost of doing business in India, export unprocessed diamonds to their own processing facilities in Africa, Russia, and China.50 Yet in recent years, the Indian diamond industry has fallen into unexpected decline, with rough imports and manufacturing all tanking. The Covid-19 pandemic and declining demand from Hong Kong and China cut further into demand from India.51 By the middle of 2020, exports had picked up again, but production costs were high, labor was scarce owing to lockdowns, and Surat diamantaires found themselves sitting on a massive, 2.3 billion dollar trove of stock.52 And as Indo-Chinese tensions soared over the same period, those same exporters looked anxiously to new markets, hoping that rising demand in places like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand would make up for falling Chinese demand.53 This uncertain future for a vibrant industry dashed hopes which had soared only a few years earlier.54 Indian diamantaires had mostly revealed in the corporatization of their industry, bringing new organizational logic to what had once been a chaotic, informal industry. These same diamantaires had forged linkages with Indian marketers, and new Indian designers had been working to create strong domestic demand among consumers who had once preferred silver and gold.55 But market, biological, and geopolitical forces have conspired, as of this essay’s writing, to stymie the hopes of those who turned rough diamonds into things of luxury. If diamonds adorn necks and fingers, other Indian products meet less showy fates, condemned instead to be swallowed, injected, absorbed, or inhaled. There are two steps in making a drug. First, vats of chemicals are titrated and processed into active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), which are the stuff of drugs themselves. Then, companies take “excipients”—fillers, stabilizers, binders, coatings, and preservatives—and blend them with APIs to produce tablets, capsules, creams, injectables, and inhalers. It’s that second process, “formulations production,” that has given India its most important export industry—one that dates back several decades before independence. In the 1920s, Khwaja Abdul Hamied’s conversations with Mohandas Gandhi led to his studies of chemistry

48  Benjamin Siegel overseas, and the founding in 1935 of Cipla, India’s first home-grown pharmaceutical company. Cipla’s modest production of bulk drugs and birth control pills, and the entire Indian pharmaceutical industry, was given a fillip by the passage of the 1970 Indian Patents Act, which prohibited the copying of pharmaceutical manufacturing processes, but allowed the copying of an existing molecule by different means. India’s creative chemists were galvanized by this law, and Cipla soon began exporting generic formulations to Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Before long, other, and occasionally less salubrious companies had joined in, including the upstart Ranbaxy, and as laws in the United States and Europe were prised open, these emerged as major markets for Indian drugs.56 By 2010, India had emerged as the number one global exporter of generic drugs, exporting to 200 countries around the world. Most of this medicine went to the United States and Europe, and a smaller amount to Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa.57 And thanks to the efforts of Cipla and others, India had also come to be known as the “pharmacy of the developing world,” supplying most of the world’s essential medicines, vaccines, and antiretrovirals.58 Indian companies have worked to develop new markets and new manufacturing capacities: Latin America, in particular, has become a major destination for Indian pharmaceuticals, and the governments of Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina have successfully encouraged Indian companies to set up manufacturing units in order to put pressure on local manufacturers to up their quality and lower their prices. Yet in spite of a spate of scandals, India’s most lucrative markets are those in the United States and Europe, which gobble up India’s drugs across categories, and have given special regulatory benefits to speed their arrival. And pharmaceuticals are the one area where India continues to edge out China in exports in nearly every market, with nearly $20 billion dollars in revenue predicted for 2020.59 Yet Indian pharmaceuticals are a fragile commodity. Most precarious is the source of India’s APIs—which nearly all come from China. India’s industry is fragmented into over 10,000 companies, most overshadowed by the country’s pharmaceutical behemoths. Regulatory and financial pressures in developed countries are all cutting into profits.60 And the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic both gave Indian producers optimism and showed the fragility of the industry. In the wake of the coronavirus, India’s regulatory bodies, worried about their own access to Chinese APIs restricted the export of 26 major pharmaceutical ingredients and the medicines made from them, including acetaminophen, tinidazole, erythromycin, progesterone, and vitamin B12. American regulators warned that they were running critically low on one, unnamed medicine, while European regulators reached out to New Delhi to beg for a reappraisal.61 The year’s events stoked new reflection among Indian producers, looking toward the future. Indian pharmaceutical companies began to reconsider their strategy of importing active pharmaceutical ingredients, newly aware of what a supply

The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023  49 chain stock might do to their bottom line. And it also stoked a frenzy of new drug development efforts in India. Already, India’s Serum Institute is the world’s largest producer of vaccines by volume, producing 1.5 billion doses of vaccine a year for diseases like diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus: the hopes that India itself might develop a vaccine prompted Indian manufacturers to think big and boldly about running clinical trials at home.62 Conclusion Contemporary India has staked much on its ability to produce things, suturing the dreams of national development to the country’s productive capacity and its ability to woo capital from global investors. “Make in India,” the campaign launched in 2014 to build India’s manufacturing center, was only the latest instantiation of a process dating back to India’s liberalization—or perhaps even the late colonial economy itself.63 But India—big, populous, and industrious—has long offered its wares to the world, and cultivators, weavers, farmers, miners, butchers, manufacturers, and others, have been transformed for these connections. People, too, have been turned into things in the Indian context. There is, of course, the business-speak of “human capital” and the power of large populations—particularly in the realm of household consumption, where smallscale purchasing power multiplied by more than a billion offers the possibility of lucrative returns. But so, too, has there been the specter of Indian labor coerced or forcibly induced to produce goods or services, from the voyages of indenture that brought Indian labor to Fiji and Guyana, to the networks of capital and kin which underwrite contemporary garment production on the subcontinent.64 Much of the “Make in India” campaign and related efforts make an implicit appeal to the abundance of labor available for exploitation in India, even if these appeals are perhaps less explicit than those made in, say, the Chinese context. This notion aside, we can say a few things about Indian things. The first is to underscore the ordinariness of most Indian commodities. While some Indian things are showy—diamonds, for instance, or India’s celebrated textiles—mostly, these Indian things have been humble, hidden, or obscured in other things. The guar gum breaking apart shale, the tea diluted by milk, the jute used to package, wrap, and ship are decidedly unromantic commodities: essential but low value. Occasionally, an Indian thing is made to be a glamorous thing, from the baubles which flooded European markets in the seventeenth century to Amrut, the prize-winning Indian whisky much in demand by overseas consumers. But the mundane nature of Indian commodities is frequently their most notable attribute. Equally distinctly, there is often a fantasy that India’s things will pave the way to better outcomes: mostly, there is the fantasy that India’s agricultural exports or its uniquely potent commodities—opium or monazite, for instance, will underwrite speedy industrialization, or serve as the fuel for a renewed and transformed economy. These hopes rarely materialize: if occasionally the source of great

50  Benjamin Siegel riches, Indian things are more often the fodder for boom and bust cycles. Indian producers are locked into a commodity, produce it to the exclusion of other fare, and enjoy quick returns—only to find that a synthetic thing or a substitute thing can eradicate that profit in a flash. Sometimes the materiality of Indian things becomes important in these cycles: the strength of jute or the potent dull of opium. Yet sometimes it is a particular labor regime that anchors these cycles: the fast manufacturing capacity of Indian pharmaceutical firms, for instance. Recognizing a commodity as an Indian thing does not require reconfiguring an entire relationship with that thing. The shirt made in the Thanjavur workshop, the tea grown in Darjeeling, the antibiotic manufactured in a Himalayan pharmaceutical plant will continue to warm, invigorate, and cure. Yet to recognize an Indian thing as such is to recognize the networks of labor, ecology, and political economy which suture producer and consumer. These networks have been made and unmade over the last several centuries, but now, as centuries ago, these Indian things remain essential to the economic life and daily rhythms of humans, continents away from the Indian subcontinent. Notes 1 Aparna Alluri, “Asafoetida: The Smelly Spice India Loves but Never Grew,” BBC News, October 21, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54617077. 2 See, for instance, Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” NewYork Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853, https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/ works/1853/07/22.htm. 3 Noteworthy among a number of recent interventions is Tariq Omar Ali, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Ali offers a cogent historiography of commodity scholarship on 5–8 and passim. 4 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 5 Jonathan Eacott, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600– 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 38, 144. 6 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 2015), 30, 31. 7 Eacott, Selling Empire, 58–59. 8 Ibid., 66. 9 Ibid., passim. See also Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850. (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). 10 Susil Chaudhuri, “Saltpetre Trade and Industry in Bengal Subah, 1650–1720,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 34 (1973): 263–270; James W. Frey, “The Indian Saltpeter Trade, the Military Revolution, and the Rise of Britain as a Global Superpower,” The Historian 71, no. 3 (September 1, 2009): 507–554; and R. Balasubramaniam, “Saltpetre Manufacture and Marketing in Medieval India,” Indian Journal of History of Science 4 (2005): 663–672. 11 On Indian cotton, see Beckert, Cotton; and Meena Menon, A Frayed History: The Journey of Cotton in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). 12 Beckert, Cotton, 16.

The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023  51 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22

23 24

25

Ibid., 201–243. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 330–333. Ibid., 409–419. From a literature on opium too large to summarize here, see David Owen, British Opium Policy in China and India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934); Carl Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–1950 (London: Routledge, 1999); Hans Derks, History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, ca. 1600–1950 (Leiden: Brill, 2012). On opium as a financial resource for colonial and Indian actors, see Tan Chung, “The Britain-China-India Trade Triangle (1771–1840),” Indian Economic and Social History Review 11, no. 4 (1974): 411–431; John F. Richards, “The Indian Empire and Peasant Production of Opium in the Nineteenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 1 (1981): 59–82; and Amar Farooqui, Smuggling as Subversion: Colonialism, Indian Merchants, and the Politics of Opium, 1790–1843 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 1998). On Malwa opium specifically, see also Muhammad Faisal Abdullah, “Trade and Cultivation of Opium in Malwa and Rajasthan during 1750–1900,” Ph.D. dissertation, Aligarh, Aligarh Muslim University, 2008. More recent interventions on Indian opium’s cultivation and trade include Amar Farooqui, “Colonialism and Competing Addictions: Morphine Content as Historical Factor,” Social Scientist 32, no. 5/6 (May 2004): 21–31; Amar Farooqui, “The Global Career of Indian Opium and Local Destinies,” Almanack, no. 14 (December 2016): 52–73; Gunnel Cederlöf, “Poor Man’s Crop: Evading Opium Monopoly,” Modern Asian Studies 53: 2 (October 3, 2018): 1–27; and Rolf Bauer, The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Willem van Schendel, “The Asianization of Indigo: Rapid Change in a Global Trade around 1800,” in Peter Boomgaard, Henk Schulte Nordholt and Dick Kooiman (eds.). Linking Destinies: Trade, Towns, and Kin in Asian History (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2018), 29–49. Prakash Kumar, “Planters and Naturalists: Transnational Knowledge on Colonial Indigo Plantations in South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 3 (2014): 720–753. Tirthankar Roy, “Trading Firms in Colonial India,” Business History Review 88, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 9–42. Tirthankar Roy, “Indigo and Law in Colonial India,” The Economic History Review 64, no. S1 (2011): 60–75. See, from a large body of work, Amiya Rao and B. G. Rao, The Blue Devil: Indigo and Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Pierre-Paul Darrac and Willem van Schendel, Global Blue: Indigo and Espionage in Colonial Bengal (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2006). Prakash Kumar, “Plantation Science: Improving Natural Indigo in Colonial India, 1860–1913,” The British Journal for the History of Science 40, no. 4 (December 2007): 537–565. Ali, A Local History of Global Capital. The literature on jute beyond Ali’s work is remarkably limited; see, exceptionally, Tara Sethia, “The Rise of the Jute Manufacturing Industry in Colonial India: A Global Perspective,” Journal of World History 7, no. 1 (1996): 71–99. See also Jim Tomlinson, “Supplying ‘Juteopolis’: Dundee and Bengal Jute, c.1850–1914,” Commodities of Empire Working Paper 31, 2020, https:// commoditiesofempire.org.uk/publications/working-papers/working-paper-31/. Jagdish N. Bhagwati and Thirukodikaval Nilakanta Srinivasan, “Export Policy and Performance, 1951–66,” in India, Foreign Trade Regimes and Economic Development 6 (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1975), 53–75.

52  Benjamin Siegel 26 Philip Lutgendorf, “Making Tea in India: Chai, Capitalism, Culture,” Thesis Eleven 113, no. 1 (December 1, 2012): 11–31; Erika Diane Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 27 See also, Piya Chatterjee, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 28 “India’s Tea Exports Are Out of Step with World Demand,” World Tea News (blog), November 19, 2018, https://worldteanews.com/market-trends-data-and-insights/ indias-tea-exports-are-out-of-step-with-world-demand. 29 See Cheri Kuncheria, “The Remaking of Indian Tobacco: Science, Business, and the Cultivator, 1871–1948,” Ph.D. dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2019; and Cheri J. Kuncheria, “An Empire of Smoke: Indian Tobacco and the Making of an Imperial Commodity in Interwar Britain,” draft paper, 2020. 30 Nata Duvvury, “Commercial Capital and Agrarian Relations: A Study of Guntur Tobacco Economy,” Economic and Political Weekly 21, no. 30 (1986): PE46–57. 31 Itty Abraham, “Rare Earths: The Cold War in the Annals of Travancore,” in Gabrielle Hecht (ed.). Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 101–123; Sarath Pillai, “Fragmenting the Nation: Divisible Sovereignty and Travancore’s Quest for Federal Independence,” Law and History Review 34, no. 3 (August 2016): 743–782; Julie Michelle Klinger, “A Historical Geography of Rare Earth Elements: From Discovery to the Atomic Age,” The Extractive Industries and Society 2, no. 3 (August 1, 2015): 572–580. See also Jayita Sarkar, “‘Wean Them Away from French Tutelage’: Franco-Indian Nuclear Relations and Anglo-American Anxieties during the Early Cold War, 1948–1952,” Cold War History 15, no. 3 (July 3, 2015): 375–394. 32 Samiksha Goel, “Is Semiconductor Manufacturing in India an Unworkable Project?,” July 20, 2020, https://www.deccanherald.com/business/is-semiconductor-manufacturingin-india-an-unworkable-project-863338.html. 33 Rishi Iyengar, “India Is World’s Top Beef Exporter Despite Cow-Slaughter Ban,” Time, April 23, 2015, https://time.com/3833931/india-beef-exports-rise-ban-buffalo-meat/; Jyotika Sod, “India Emerges as Largest Buffalo Meat Exporter,” DownToEarth, August 17, 2015, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/india-emerges-as-largest-buffalomeat-exporter-44869. 34 Maurice Landes, “From Where the Buffalo Roam: India’s Beef Exports,” A Report from the Economic Research Service (United States Department of Agriculture, June 2016). 35 “Where Indian Buffalo Meat Exports Go,” Indian Express (blog),April 12, 2017, https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/where-indian-buffalo-meat-exports-go-4609512/. 36 Syed Ameen Kader, “India’s Carabeef Exporters Grapple with Multiple Halal Certifications,” Salaam Gateway, July 23, 2017, https://www.salaamgateway.com/story/ indias-carabeef-exporters-grapple-with-multiple-halal-certifications. 37 Raghav Ohri, “Cow Meat Going out of India as Carabeef, Police Investigation On,” Economic Times, March 20, 2018, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/ politics-and-nation/cow-meat-going-out-of-india-as-carabeef-police-investigationon/articleshow/63374600.cms. 38 Dwaipayan Bardhan et al., “Value Chain Analysis of Buffalo Meat (Carabeef) in India,” Agricultural Economics Research Review 32 (2019): 149, https://doi.org/10.5958 /0974-0279.2019.00024.7. 39 Shan Goodwin, “Carabeef Exports Plunge as China Tightens Border Control,” Farm Online, February 7, 2019, http://www.farmonline.com.au/story/5893044/carabeefexports-plunge-as-china-tightens-border-control/. 40 Selam Gebrekidan and Meenakshi Sharma, “Shale Energy Triggers Bean Rush in India,” Reuters, May 28, 2012.

The Global Destinies of Indian Commodities, 1500–2023  53 41 Mallika Kapur, “The Little Green Bean in Big Fracking Demand,” CNN, September 10, 2012, https://www.cnn.com/2012/09/09/world/asia/india-guar-bean-fracking/index.html. 42 Gardiner Harris, “In Tiny Bean, India’s Dirt-Poor Farmers Strike Gas-Drilling Gold,” The New York Times, July 16, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/world/ asia/fracking-in-us-lifts-guar-farmers-in-india.html. 43 Jennifer Parker, “How a Little Indian Bean Impacts US Fracking,” CNBC.Com, October 8, 2012, https://www.cnbc.com/id/49263899. 44 Meenakshi Sharma, “India to Raise 2013 Output of Fracking Ingredient Guar Gum,” Reuters, May 29, 2013, https://www.reuters.com/article/india-guar-idUSL3N0D21I120130529. 45 D. John Samuel Raja, “America’s Shale Gas Boom Brought Rajasthan Farmers a Fortune, but Now It Is Being Taken Away,” Quartz, September 1, 2014, https://qz.com/258292/ how-americas-shale-gas-boom-brought-rajasthan-farmers-a-fortune-and-whyit-is-being-taken-away/. 46 Emiko Terazono, “Lower Fracking Demand Hits Guar Bean Farmers,” Financial Times, January 20, 2015. 47 Sutanuka Ghoshal, “Indian Guar Gum on a High as US Steps up Drilling,” Economic Times, February 17, 2017, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/commodities/news/indian-guar-gum-on-a-high-as-us-steps-up-drilling/articleshow/57201625. cms?from=mdr. On changing guar demand, see N. Manjunatha, H. Lokesha and J. B. Deshmanya, “Structural Changes in the Performance of Gum Guar in India,” Indian Journal of Agricultural Research 52, no. 3 (April 17, 2018): 336–338, https://doi. org/10.18805/IJARe.A-4827. 48 Neha Dasgupta and Mayank Bhardwaj, “Exclusive: India’s NMDC Lined up to Mine Multibillion-Dollar Diamond Deposit,” Reuters, January 10, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-mining-exclusive-idUSKBN1Z91TB. 49 “Gems and Jewellery Industry in India,” India Brand Equity Foundation, October 21, 2020, https://www.ibef.org/industry/gems-jewellery-india.aspx. 50 Sangeetha G., “India’s Rough Diamond Exports Rise,” The Asian Age, April 20, 2019, sec. In Other News. https://www.asianage.com/business/in-other-news/200419/indiasrough-diamond-exports-rise.html. 51 “Can the Indian Diamond Industry Survive the Current Crisis?” March 2, 2020, https://www.rough-polished.com/en/analytics/116490.html. 52 Vinay Umarji, “Surat Diamond Exports Resume but a $2 Billion Inventory Headache Remains,” Business Standard India, May 4, 2020, https://www.business-standard.com/ article/markets/diamond-exports-resume-but-industry-still-seating-on-over-2-bninventory-120050400462_1.html; Rajendra Jadhav, “India’s Exports of Gems, Jewellery Slump 38% in July - Trade Council,” Reuters, August 13, 2020, https://www. reuters.com/article/india-gems-jewellery-exports-idUSL4N2FF2KA. 53 Sutanuka Ghosal, “Indian Diamond Exporters Looking beyond China amid Increasing Border Tensions,” Economic Times, September 6, 2020, https://economictimes. indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/border-tension-with-china-makingindian-diamond-exporters-worried/articleshow/77960591.cms?from=mdr. 54 Sanjana Parikh, “Why Has India’s Exports Hit an All Time Low? How Can India Get Back Up?,” Diamond World, December 2019, https://www.magzter.com/ article/Fashion/Diamond-World/Why-has-Indias-exports-hit-an-all-time-low-HowCan-India-Get-Back-Up. 55 Jennifer Parker, “Why Are Indians Suddenly Buying Diamonds?” CNBC.com, October 8, 2012, https://www.cnbc.com/id/49263174. 56 Katherine Eban, Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom (New York: Ecco, 2019), 69–80.

54  Benjamin Siegel 57 Nageshwar Patnaik, “India: India Tops Exporting Generic Medicines,” The Economic Times, March 7, 2010, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreigntrade/india-tops-exporting-generic-medicines/articleshow/5655014.cms?from=mdr. 58 “Examples of the Importance of India as the ‘Pharmacy of the Developing World,’” Médecins Sans Frontières Access Campaign, 2007, https://msfaccess.org/examplesimportance-india-pharmacy-developing-world. 59 R. Viswanathan, “The World Is Looking for Affordable Drugs – and India Needs to Keep Delivering,” The Wire (blog), May 9, 2017, https://thewire.in/economy/pharmaceuticaldrugs-exports-india. 60 Julian Issa, “The World’s Pharmacy: India’s Generic Drug Industry,” Global Business Reports, February 12, 2020, https://www.gbreports.com/article/the-worlds-pharmacyindias-generic-drug-industry. 61 Neha Dasgupta and Chris Thomas, “Global Supplier India Curbs Drug Exports as Coronavirus Fears Grow,” Reuters, March 3, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/ us-health-coronavirus-india-idUSKBN20Q0ZZ; Neha Dasgupta and Ludwig Burger, “Europe ‘panicking’ over India’s Pharmaceutical Export Curbs: Industry Group,” Reuters, March 4, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-indiadrugs-idUSKBN20R1MD; Vindu Goel, “As Coronavirus Disrupts Factories, India Curbs Exports of Key Drugs,” The New York Times, March 6, 2020, sec. Business, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/business/coronavirus-india-drugs.html. 62 Rory Horner, “The World Needs Pharmaceuticals from China and India to Beat COVID-19,” Down to Earth, May 25, 2020, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/ science-technology/the-world-needs-pharmaceuticals-from-china-and-india-to-beatcovid-19–71354; Aaheli Ahmed, Debashis Chakraborty and Ranajoy Bhattacharyya, “The Recent Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic: A Review of Issues for Indian Pharmaceutical Exports,” Foreign Trade Review 55, no. 3 (August 1, 2020): 418–435, https://doi. org/10.1177/0015732520926329; Jovana Marković, “Indian Pharma Industry: Contribution to Global Health,” Diplomacy&Commerce (blog), August 14, 2020, http://www. diplomacyandcommerce.rs/indian-pharma-industry-contribution-to-global-health/. 63 See Ravinder Kaur, Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2020); and Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 64 On the latter, see Sharad Chari, Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004).

3

The News of 1857 The Indian Uprising and Belize during Yucatán’s Caste War1 Rajeshwari Dutt

The story of connections between India and Latin America through history is probably one of the most understudied and unexplored areas within the broad literature of Global South Asia. And, yet there is a long history of links both real and intangible between the two great subcontinents. The story of the modern world connections takes the discovery of the Americas as a critical turning point. Yet, we tend to forget that it was the conquistadores’ search for the Indies that resulted in the fervent voyages of exploration. And there have been other more tangible markers of connection: the “China Poblana,” M. N. Roy (the Bengali nationalist who founded the Mexican Communist Party in 1919), Tagore and Ocampo. Yet, beyond these cults of personalities there has been little in the way of charting historic connections between India and Latin America. The literature on the migration of Indian indentured servants to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century is perhaps the only real narrative that gives precedence to historical processes (rather than personalities) in the story of India-Latin America connections. Yet perhaps there is another way to talk about linkages: one that goes beyond personalities or the movement of people between the two subcontinents and envisions the two subcontinents as connected within the larger dynamic of empire in the nineteenth century. And it is to this kind of historical connection that I gesture through a discussion of the Indian Uprising of 1857, popularly known as the Sepoy Mutiny. The Indian Uprising of 1857 was not just one of the great turning points in Indian history. It also marked a significant moment when developments in India were relayed across newly fangled telegraph lines to become headline news across newspapers in disparate parts of the British empire and even beyond. Scholars have recognized the global impact of the 1857 uprising and the farreaching changes that resulted in the demographics and governance of core areas of the British Caribbean that imported Indian indentured laborers. Yet, the impact of the uprising on frontier and peripheral areas of the British empire particularly in the circum-Caribbean and Latin America remains largely unexplored. Focusing on the case of Belize, a marginal British settlement in Central America in the mid-nineteenth century, this chapter argues that the 1857 uprising impacted the DOI: 10.4324/9781003393962-5

56  Rajeshwari Dutt way British officials perceived and responded to the frontier violence that characterized the Belize-Mexico border region during the mid-nineteenth century.2 While the Sepoy Mutiny inspired fear and even paranoia of subversive elements, it also provided unique opportunities for neglected, marginal British settlements such as Belize.3 Thus, British officials in Belize who faced distinct challenges to governance in a peripheral outpost of empire used the empire-wide paranoia in the wake of the Mutiny to press for their demands for more imperial aid and recognition. This chapter also suggests that even the most unlikely players—in the case of northern Belize, this included the indigenous Maya of Southeast Mexico—looked to developments in India to inform their actions vis-à-vis British settlements such as Belize. While the impact of the uprising has been explored in the contexts of Britain, continental Europe and even some core British Caribbean sites such as Jamaica and British Guiana, there is no extant work that has considered how the uprising played out in Latin America. By showing how Belize, a peripheral British settlement in Central America, experienced developments in India this chapter attempts to make some effort toward filling this gap and to add to the growing literature on the global dimensions of the 1857 uprising.4 Wedged between the British and Hispanic worlds, Belize’s response mirrored the responses in the British Caribbean and reflected broader Central American dynamics. More broadly speaking, a discussion of the global repercussions of the 1857 uprising signals to the fact that the dynamics of empire linked both the subcontinents of India and Latin America in the nineteenth century. The impact of the news of the Sepoy Mutiny on the frontier violence at the Mexico-Belize border testifies to the intangible but powerful ways in which ideas moved from India to even the remotest corners of the British empire with physical, tangible consequences. News of the Mutiny in the Caribbean and Latin America According to Peter Putnis, the Indian uprising of 1857 was one of the first “global media events.”5 Facilitated by steamship mail services and telegraph lines, news of the mutiny traveled to major hubs around the world such as New York, Melbourne and London, from where they were further distributed to other locations.6 While the first signs of the mutiny could be discerned in Bengal in January 1857, the real hair-raising action would start in May 1857 with Meerut where the Native Infantry reportedly carried out an indiscriminate slaughter of British officers, their wives and children. The mutiny would rapidly spread throughout north India and toward the east in Calcutta creating global headlines from the summer of 1857 onwards. As Putnis argues, reports across the English-speaking world shared certain characteristics including emphases on native atrocities on women and children. Part of the reason for this was that major English newspapers around the world relied on first-hand accounts published in English-language Indian newspapers that inevitably represented the perceptions—and fears—of the colonial community.7 An examination of newspaper reports from various

The News of 1857  57 parts of the Caribbean and Latin America suggests that the mutiny figured as an important news topic in the region and though these newspapers also echoed similar sentiments—especially in the British Caribbean—some newspaper reports also highlighted criticism of British policies. From the outset, the uprising became a daily fare in newspapers across the farthest reaches of the British Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. In Bermuda, a British colony with a population of around 10,000 people in 1857, the Bermuda Royal Gazette regularly published accounts of developments in India.8 Sourcing its news from newspapers such as The London Times—and even, sometimes, directly from India—that reached Bermuda aboard steamships through Halifax, the Royal Gazette presented itself as a staunch supporter of British policies in India. On 25 August 1857, the Gazette published a piece from The London Times that cautiously forecasted British victory: The pacification of India and restoration of British reputation must indeed be a work of time. But with the enemy unable to take the field, or even to hold any place of strength, with 20,000 English on their way to India, with the Europeans who are there gradually concentrating into something like an army, and the English families placed in safety, the Governor General might calmly pursue his policy of disarming and disbanding the sepoy levies.9 The Gazette also relayed graphic accounts of atrocities perpetrated by native rebels. The Gazette of 1 September 1857 carried an excerpt from The London Times which informed the reader: We cannot print these narratives—they are too foul for publication. We should have to speak of families murdered in cold blood,--and murder was mercy!— of the violation of English ladies in the presence of their husbands, of their parents, of their children—and then, but not till then, of their assassination.10 In Antigua, a sugar-growing colony in the West Indies, news of the mutiny reached a captive audience. The Antigua Weekly Register of 20 October 1857 reported the developments in various parts of India including Delhi, Lucknow and Dinapore commenting that news from India “will be of more interest to our readers than anything of our own local matters.”11 At St. Kitts, the St. Christopher Advertiser kept islanders apprised of the course the mutiny was taking in India adding in commentary that reflected the racial stereotyping that characterized representations of Indians in the British media such as in this description of an off-duty sepoy: …the same individual, when off duty, swaggering through the bazaar in his snow white kurta and dhotee… carefully plaited down the front so as to exhibit its coloured silk border, with muslin cap jauntily stuck on his well-oiled

58  Rajeshwari Dutt locks very much on one side, and carrying a rod of polished iron for a walking stick, looking a thorough rake and bully, but one, it is to be hoped, whose race is pretty nearly run.12 While newspapers across the British Caribbean reflected the standpoint of the British media, examination of some Spanish language newspapers from Latin America portrays a somewhat different take on the mutiny. Like the British Caribbean newspapers, the Latin American newspapers also related the major engagements of the mutiny to an eager audience. Thus the El Comercio of Lima, Peru informed its readers on 25 July 1857: “The insurrection will have triumphed in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay [my translation].”13 Yet unlike its Caribbean counterparts, El Comercio highlighted British failure in India and attributed it to the policies of the British government: “They ignored the hatred that was professed by all classes of people, from the unfortunate outcast to the millionaire [my translation].”14 In the same article El Comercio compared India with England averring that: “While Europe was in darkness, and its inhabitants were covered in skin in the forests, the Indians possessed a literature, raised gigantic monuments and dressed in rich fabrics [my translation].” Countering the British representation of sepoy violence against British women and children, El Comercio criticized British retaliation against Indians: “it is neither just nor humane to retaliate against all [my translation].”15 Similarly, on 12 October 1857 the Mexican newspaper El Siglo XIX published a letter from London that reported British setbacks in India but attributed it among other things to the ineptitude and mismanagement of British officials in India. Describing British failure in India, El Siglo averred that for Britain the loss of India would be a “thousand times more terrible than [the loss] of its American possessions. Its scepter of empire would fall from its hands and its prestige vanish like smoke.” [my translation].16 The pessimistic note of reports in Latin American newspapers that emphasized British failure in India can be seen as part of the broader perception of the mutiny in the Americas. As Mark Hall notes, “the sensationalist and sporadic nature of information coming to America about the mutiny easily lent itself to an interpretation of events in India which emphasized the gloomiest prospects for the future of the British Empire.”17 No doubt rivalry with British interests in Latin America (as well as the inherited rivalry between Old World powers Britain and Spain) may have also contributed to the more critical stance assumed by these newspapers. Belize and the Question of Sepoys Belize in the mid-nineteenth century was a meager colony of 30,000 people in an Empire that boasted a population of over 300 million. An outpost of Empire, it was a backwater compared to the core Caribbean plantation economies such as Jamaica, Trinidad or Barbados. Yet, I would argue that understanding the

The News of 1857  59 impact of the mutiny on this region holds important insights into how developments in India played out across the diverse array of cultures and geographies that made up the British empire in the nineteenth century. Poised between Latin American republics and the British Caribbean, Belize offers a unique glimpse at how the mutiny effected borderlands between distinct imperial and sovereign domains. Wedged between Mexico and Guatemala and facing the Caribbean coast, Belize was unusual in being the only formal British possession in continental Central America in the nineteenth century. The dynamics of being a British colony sharing disputed borders with its Latin American neighbors fundamentally altered its demographic, ethnic and political make-up during the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the largely indigenous Maya uprising known as the Caste War that plagued Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula from 1847 to 1901. Unlike other British Caribbean possessions that were predicated on plantation economies, the main export commodity produced by Belize well into the nineteenth century was timber—first logwood and then, mahogany. While slavery undergirded the extraction of timber in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the unique situation of Belize—with its porous borders that facilitated slave flight into neighboring Hispanic territories—may have provided slaves with a greater degree of agency than core island plantation economies like Barbados or Jamaica. The abolition of slavery in 1833 and the end of apprenticeship in 1838 represented a blow to the small minority of white settler elite who had heretofore been the main force in local government. By the 1840s power had devolved mainly in the hands of the superintendent who was the representative of the British crown in Belize. Although still a settlement, Belize by the 1850s “had become a colony all but in name.”18 While already a multi-racial society comprised of whites, creoles and blacks in the 1840s, Belize would undergo further demographic shift after the outbreak of the Caste War which would cause Maya and Hispanic refugees from neighboring Yucatán to stream into the settlement. The influx of these refugees would also alter the economics of the settlement as the newcomers would start the production of sugar and other agricultural products. By 1861, the settlers would argue for greater recognition from the British government, and by 1862 Belize achieved the status of a colony. In August 1857, the Mayor of London, Thomas Q. Finnis set up the India Relief Fund which was meant to provide pecuniary support to Britons and loyal natives who had lost property, family members or income as a result of the uprising.19 Although originating in London, the Fund became a powerful instrument for rallying support across the British empire. Finnis appealed directly to administrators in the British Caribbean to support the relief efforts. Thus, in October 1857, he wrote to the Governor of Trinidad requesting him to “originate immediate measures for obtaining congregational and general subscriptions.”20 Although Belize did not become a formal colony until 1862, it was not overlooked

60  Rajeshwari Dutt in this quest for raising funds. In October 1857, Finnis wrote to the superintendent of Belize, Frederick Seymour, We cannot doubt that our fellow subjects over whom your influence extends as the representative of the British government, must sympathize most deeply with the fallen and the bereaved; and that they will feel with us the binding obligation under which, as a nation, we are laid, to alleviate their afflictions and to compensate their wrongs.21 In fact, the efforts to raise money for this fund extended to Latin America as well. Thus, the 26 December 1857 issue of the Diario de Avisos of Caracas, Venezuela published a letter from Finnis to the British charge d’affaires in Caracas, Richard Bingham requesting him to obtain subscriptions to the fund in Venezuela.22 A more contentious issue in Belize was regarding the importation of sepoys into the settlement as labor. Until the nineteenth century the mainstay of the Belizean economy had been the export of valuable timber. The Industrial Revolution in Britain, for instance, had galvanized the export of mahogany that was used for building railway carriages. The agricultural turn of the Belizean economy, however, can be traced to the migration of Yucatecan refugees into the settlement in the context of the Caste War. Leaving their milpas and haciendas behind in Mexico, many of these refugees sought to rebuild their lives in the northern border towns of Belize by engaging in the production of sugarcane and other crops. Towns like Corozal and Orange Walk along the northern border soon became transformed into Hispanic-majority areas that boasted large sugar plantations. By 1870 Belize was exporting over three million pounds of sugar.23 While the refugees from Yucatán had introduced the production of sugar to the settlement, over time it was the wealthy Belizean elite who together with partnership firms assumed control over the sugar economy. The northern border towns remained caught in the crossfire between rival Maya groups and Hispanic and Maya residents of these towns often fled across the Hondo at the first sign of trouble thus creating periodic labor shortages at the plantations. Given that slavery had been abolished in the 1830s, the lack of a reliable labor force proved to be a persistent problem in the settlement. It is in this context that we must seek to understand Belize’s position regarding the importation of sepoys from India to work as laborers in the northern border towns. From the onset of the mutiny, British officials weighed various options for disposing of disarmed sepoys, particularly those who had not joined the mutineers. The powerful lobby of West India planters in London, the West India Committee led by Scott Cave sent letters to colonial governors to promote the importation of sepoys as labor into the West Indian colonies. The response across the Caribbean was not uniform. In Trinidad, The Port of Spain Gazette optimistically predicted:

The News of 1857  61 we have not the slightest hesitation in asking that these Santhals and misguided sepoys should be sent here because we know that when they find that industry and quiet are sure roads to competence and independence they will pursue them…24 Demerara and St. Lucia also agreed to import disbanded soldiers.25 Other colonies such as Jamaica vacillated: here the Board of Immigration initially passed a resolution to import ex-sepoys and their families that was later withdrawn by the House of Assembly.26 Still others resisted any kind of importation of ex-sepoys. In Guyana, for instance, the newspaper The Creole expressed fears of its population of the possible threat that could be presented by the immigrants: And what is likely to be the effects of scattering 10,000 of these sepoys among coolies already located here? Men, it must be remembered, used to arms—smarting under defeat—expatriated for their misdeeds, yet ‘fighting their battles over again’ to their countrymen and pouring into their willing ears tales of Cawnpore, Meerut, Delhi etc. Is it not likely that many of the men will thirst for revenge?27 In Belize, Superintendent Seymour received numerous requests for the importation of ex-sepoys and finally placed the matter in the settlement’s House of Assembly where a resolution to import them was passed by a majority. Thus, Seymour informed Scott Cave, “the people of this settlement have through their representatives expressed a desire to receive one thousand of the mutineers.”28 Of course, given that the main legislative body, the Legislative Assembly was comprised of landowners and merchants the desire to import mutineers emanated from the plantation owners rather than the common “people.” At the same time, Seymour himself remained deeply conflicted on the topic expressing to the Governor of Jamaica that “his own personal feelings were hostile to the project.”29 This division in opinion in the settlement reflected the broader dissonance between colonial officialdom and the wealthy landowning elite. In 1870, the Legislative Assembly would be replaced by a Legislative Council that provided much greater power to the superintendent. However, the contest between the colonial government and the landowning elite would continue to characterize politics in Belize throughout much of the rest of the nineteenth century. Although the Parliament approved 1,000 sepoys to be sent to Belize, the census of Belize reveals a much smaller and more gradual increase in the number of East Indian immigrants. The census of 1861 enumerated only 9 “coolies” all of whom lived in the northern district bordering the Hondo River. Ten years later in 1871 that number remained low: only 10 people in Belize originated from India. According to Sharon Strom and Frederick Weaver, “the silence in official records suggests that if they [ex-sepoys and their families] did arrive, most became

62  Rajeshwari Dutt independent farmers and fishers rather than indentured workers available for employment by the large landowners.”30 In 1872 difficulties in obtaining agricultural labor again motivated a renewed demand for Indian indentured laborers. Thus, on 16 January 1872, Robert Harley the Administrator and Lieutenant Colonel at Belize spoke at the opening of the Legislative Council: The decreasing labour of the Colony owing to the competition of Foreign Markets, had become a matter for serious attention and will naturally suggest to your consideration the best means of replacing it. I have in the meantime, upon the application of the leading Planters and Proprietors and those representing them, recommended to the Secretary of State that an immigration of 500 Coolies be permitted from India, which I hope will meet with your approval.31 In fact in 1872 Toledo District paid labor contractors in Jamaica to bring in indentured Indians for working on their sugarcane fields.32 By the end of the nineteenth century, Indians also appeared in greater numbers in official censuses. By 1891, the census recorded 291 people born in the “East Indies.”33 While the actual number of ex-sepoys who finally migrated to Belize must have been quite low, still the discussion around the immigration of Indians through the years suggests that Belize shared some of the same responses and concerns as the rest of the British Caribbean despite being a very peripheral part of the British empire. The Mutiny and the Caste War While Belize shared some of the same responses as other British Caribbean colonies, its location in Central America and particularly, the fact that it shared disputed borders with Mexico also gave rise to some unique situations as a result of the Indian mutiny. The decades after the independence of Spanish American states were a time of turmoil and internecine conflict in Mexico and Central America. Mexico oscillated between first liberals and conservatives and then federalists and centralists. The nineteenth century was also marked by ethnic conflict in many regions of Latin America as liberal elite viewed indigenous populations as obstacles to progress and modernization.34 The Yucatán peninsula in Mexico’s southeast saw a long and bloody contest between mostly indigenous Maya and the Mexican state that lasted for over half a century from 1847 to 1901. The only great ancient Mesoamerican people to have survived Spanish colonialism, Mayas were the clear majority in Yucatán comprising 80 percent of the region’s population at the beginning of the nineteenth century.35 Nonindigenous people, known in Yucatán simply as vecinos were mostly Spanishspeaking whites or mixed-race (mestizos). While some lived in the southeast, the majority were concentrated in the old colonial centers of the northwest of Yucatán. The increasing cultivation of sugar in the southeast, however, attracted

The News of 1857  63 Hispanic landowners leading to pressure on indigenous land and becoming a trigger point for what would be called the Caste War (from the Spanish “casta” meaning lineage or race). While scholars have debated the factors that led to the all-out conflict between the Maya of southeast Yucatán and the Mexican state, what is indisputable is that this war irrevocably altered Belize in the nineteenth century. The Rio Hondo formed the natural fluvial boundary between Mexico and Belize. However, disagreement over which branch of the Hondo was the true boundary led to disputes over the border. Being a river, the Hondo did not just act as a boundary but also in many ways connected Belize and southeastern Mexico. A contraband route linked Yucatan and Belize through the town of Bacalar. Belize also received food products and even poultry from its northern neighbor. The connection between Yucatán and Belize became particularly significant during the Caste War. Merchants at the northern border traded arms and ammunition to the insurgents. This resulted in Mexican misgivings toward the British government in Belize which was accused of turning a blind eye to the illegal trade. The British government sought to maintain a neutral stance offering asylum to both Maya and Hispanic refugees who fled Yucatán. Matters were complicated by the divisions within the Maya. In 1853, one branch of the Maya turned pacíficos making peace with Mexico. Maya rebels who held out established their capital in Santa Cruz and became known as the Santa Cruz Maya. Northern Belize became caught in the crossfire between the rival Maya groups.36 At the beginning of the Caste War in 1847, the British government in Belize did not regard the Maya as much of a threat to the settlement. However, with the influx of refugees from Yucatán and the demographic transformation that occurred in the northern district, migrants—both Maya and Hispanic—increasingly came under the scanner. While the agricultural potential of the newcomers was welcomed by both the colonial government and the local planters, by 1856 rumors of incendiarism perpetrated by immigrants in the northern towns caused unease. The fear that politically motivated Hispanic immigrants might provoke Santa Cruz retaliations and create trouble in the northern towns worried the then Superintendent of Belize, Frederick Seymour. It was in these circumstances that two separate developments coincided: a Santa Cruz siege of Bacalar and the uprising of sepoys in India. Although by the early 1850s, Yucatecan forces had gained the upper hand against Maya rebels, the year 1857 marked a significant moment when the tide of war again reversed. In September 1857, the Santa Cruz Maya descended on the Mexican town of Tekax, brutally massacring its Hispanic residents. News that the rebels were heading to the Belize border with their spoils from Tekax unnerved the Hispanic immigrants who predominated the northern border towns such as Corozal and Orange Walk. Ultimately, however, the visit of the Santa Cruz proved to be a trading mission to acquire gunpowder from the merchants at the border. Still the vulnerability of the settlement to incursions from outside unsettled Seymour who wrote to Governor Darling of Jamaica that

64  Rajeshwari Dutt it is not a pleasant state of affairs to have large bodies of wild Indians penetrating into the very heart of our territory to carry off barrels of gunpowder by the score and to see the majority of settlers retreating before them…37 By 1857, Belizean loggers were also beginning to face interference by the pacífico group of Maya known as the Chichanhá Maya who made extortionate demands on mahogany cutters on the Hondo. Matters were complicated by the rivalry between the Chichanhá and the Santa Cruz Maya. The Santa Cruz Maya suspected that the Hispanics of the Belizean border towns were surreptitiously allied to the pacíficos while the latter resented what they felt to be British sympathy for the Santa Cruz and particularly, the Belizean role in supplying the Santa Cruz with arms and ammunitions. Describing the singular nature of developments in 1857, Seymour wrote: “it is only within the latter part of 1857, that the war has broken out with the ferocious intensity which characterized it in 1848 and 1849.”38 Matters were about to worsen, however. A miraculous Maya speaking cross that spoke to the Santa Cruz (it is believed that this was accomplished through ventriloquism) and promised them victory provided a religious fervor to rebel actions. In January 1858, the Santa Cruz brought the Speaking Cross with them to Pucté outside the Bacalar garrison where the force of 1,500 indigenous men established a camp. However, when Belizean forces led by Captain Anderson arrived at Pucté on 9 February 1858 they found the camp abandoned and assumed that the Maya had retreated to their capital of Chan Santa Cruz.39 This erroneous assumption proved costly. On the night of 21 February, the rebels fell on Bacalar, taking it in less than an hour. This was a signal moment as Bacalar represented the last post between Mexico and Belize. Immediately, Seymour was flooded with desperate messages from Hispanics in Bacalar and in the northern border towns detailing the atrocities committed by the rebels on their relatives and friends and begging Seymour to intervene.40 Seymour acquiesced, sending a letter via Captain Anderson to the Santa Cruz chief Benancio Puc asking him to spare the lives of his captives. But before the letter could reach its destination, matters were complicated by the news that Mr. Blake a propertied resident of northern Belize had gone to the Bacalar in a bid to ransom the captives. Leaving three English friends as hostages at Bacalar, Blake returned to Corozal to get the money and gunpowder the Santa Cruz had demanded for releasing the captives. It is in Blake’s return visit to Bacalar that we can assess the far-reaching effect of the 1857 Indian uprising. At about the same time that Blake was making his way back from Corozal to Bacalar, Captain Anderson was also on his way to the Santa Cruz to deliver Seymour’s letter. The two parties met on the Hondo on 1 March and then paddled together on their boats to the lagoon of Bacalar. Learning that Blake had brought money with him but not gunpowder, the Maya treated Anderson and Blake coldly. Seymour’s letter was received by a Santa Cruz chief to be translated to Maya and then placed before Benancio Puc. While the two

The News of 1857  65 Englishmen were given hammocks for sleeping, the stench of corpses strewn on side streets unnerved them. Ghastlier still was evidence of recent massacres especially of Hispanic women. Anderson noted that the majority of the corpses were female, and an Indian explained, what might have easily been guessed—the cause of the deep nail scratches about the neck and other parts of the body; marks which were visible not only on the dead.41 Evidence of rape was also discernable in the women prisoners one of whom, a fourteen-year-old Hispanic girl with a scarred neck requested the Englishmen to entreat with the Maya to release her. While Anderson waited anxiously for Puc’s response to the letter, a growing sense of unease filled the camp. At sunset Blake had an unpleasant argument with the Santa Cruz chiefs about his inability to bring gunpowder. Since the beginning of the Caste War, the Santa Cruz had professed friendship toward the English in Belize even to the point of offering to place their territory under British protection in 1848.42 The reason for the sudden unpleasantness of the rebels toward two Englishmen from Belize soon became apparent. Seymour noted the recollections of Anderson of the fateful evening: A little before sunset Mr. Blake came with some alarm to inquire if it was true that General Windham had been beaten in India, for the Chiefs said so, and that the power of England was no longer to be feared.43 That night all the Maya sang in front of their “idol,” the Speaking Cross amidst the sounds of drums and bugles.44 Around midnight the “oracle” of the Speaking Cross spoke in a “squeaking voice” demanding more money as ransom from the British. Rejecting Blake’s pleas, the Cross announced, “let the prisoners be killed.” The Santa Cruz then dragged the prisoners including women and children away and executed them. The next day the Englishmen were finally allowed to return to Belize including Blake who was “excited almost to insanity” by the brutality he had witnessed at Bacalar. As the news of the events of Bacalar began to circulate among colonial officials, a troubling aspect of the encounter assumed center stage. Seymour traced Santa Cruz’s hostile behavior to their perception of events in India, writing to Darling: “And what was the reason the Santa Cruz people assigned for their disrespect? Merely that they did not think we dared resent it. We had been beaten in India, and our power was gone.”45 From Jamaica, Governor Darling wrote to Vice-Admiral Sir Houston Stewart, The atrocities which have marked the course of the mutiny in India, appear to have been closely imitated by the Native Indians of Central America… I entertain this opinion more strongly because of the independent tone which these savages have assumed and their remonstrances of the British authorities

66  Rajeshwari Dutt appear to be to some extent committed with a knowledge of passing events in India. The Chiefs alluded to the reverse sustained by General Windham at the Battle of Cawnpore, affirming that he had been ‘beaten’ and that the power ‘of England was no longer to be feared.’46 The mutiny in India also appeared crucial to understanding the unusual behavior of the Santa Cruz Maya who had hitherto maintained a stance of friendship toward the English settlement which supplied many of the needs of the rebel Maya including arms and ammunition. The Santa Cruz chiefs’ allusion to the battle of Cawnpore reflected the dissemination of news from India in all parts of Latin America including the remote rebel hideout of Chan Santa Cruz. The siege of Cawnpore (or Kanpur) was one of the watershed events of the 1857 uprising in India. In the summer of 1857 Cawnpore was besieged by rebel forces under Nana Sahib. The siege was followed by a massacre of British women and children that provoked retaliatory violence by British troops on sepoys and even civilians in the town. The battle cry of ‘Remember Cawnpore’ became a rallying call for British soldiers for the remainder of the mutiny. In July 1857, British troops under Major General Henry Havelock recaptured Cawnpore but left soon after to relieve Lucknow leaving Brigadier Charles Windham to hold the town with a detachment of about 1,500 men. Meanwhile a contingent of Gwalior mutineers under Tantia Tope tried to regain Cawnpore. Windham suffered a major defeat as his troops retreated in face of Tope’s forces. Finally, the rebels were defeated by British troops led by General Colin Campbell in what became known as the Second Battle of Cawnpore. The news of the battle and the reverses suffered by Windham soon made it into the newspapers in the Americas. The Evening Star of Washington D.C. for instance, reported on 25 January 1858: On the 27th November an affair took place near Cawnpore, between Gen. Windham’s division and the Gwalior mutineers, in which the British troops retreated, with the total loss of the tents of the 61st, the 82nd and 88th regiments, 3000 in number, which were entirely burnt by the enemy. By February, the news had traveled to Latin America. For instance, on 10 February 1858, the Diario de Avisos of Caracas, Venezuela carried the following news: “The contingent of Gwalior…advanced from Calpee toward Cawnpore and was attacked in its transit by General Windham at the head of 2000 soldiers. It was completely defeated [my translation].”47 It is a testament to the reach of global news in an era before any kind of global news network that one of the most unlikely audiences of the news of the mutiny—an indigenous Maya rebel group in the borderlands of empire could look to India for inspiration to defy the British. In the immediate aftermath of the Bacalar massacre, British colonial officials responded in two main ways to the challenges posed by the Caste War. The

The News of 1857  67 first was by pushing for more defensive aid from the imperial government. The second was taking more stringent measures in Belize against immigrants whose loyalty to the British government was suspect. As a peripheral British settlement, Belize received minimal defensive aid from the imperial government which was embroiled in costly wars in other parts of the empire. In addition, the Legislative Assembly comprised of landowners and merchants was reluctant to raise taxes on their constituents to fund defense needs of the settlement. The Bacalar episode and, the fear that the Santa Cruz would emulate mutineers in India led to immediate discussions on the need to amplify the defense of the settlement. The imminent threat posed by the Santa Cruz was toward the northern border towns such as Corozal and Orange Walk which were home to large Hispanic refugee populations from Yucatán. On 13 March 1858, Seymour dispatched a garrison from Belize town to protect Corozal. However, writing to Governor Darling on 17 March, Seymour pointed to the need for a grander response: I state that the power of the British government to protect this settlement is called in question by the Indians [i.e. Santa Cruz Maya], that it is of the utmost importance that a demonstration on a larger scale be made.48 In addition to ground troops, Seymour also requested that the government in Jamaica send a ship-of-war and a steam gunboat to Belize. Governor Darling concurred with Seymour, writing to him: the allusion by the chiefs to passing events in our East Indian territories and the contempt which they are stated to have expressed themselves with regard to our National power and influence, all lead me.… not only to concur in the view which you express of the expediency of a demonstration of Naval and Military Force but also to consider that until tranquility is restored in the immediate neighborhood of our Frontier, our augmentation off the Garrison of the settlement is both desirable and prudent.49 On Darling’s orders a frigate with 130 officers and men headed to Belize to provide reinforcements to the troops in the northern border.50 By May 1858, Seymour reported that the measures for bolstering defense of the settlement had had a desired effect, writing to Darling that following the display of force “English messengers are received with much civility at Bacalar, and the Indian officer in command says he ‘does not know how they could have treated the English so badly.’”51 In fact by May, the Santa Cruz seemed chastened and Seymour received intelligence that the Maya planned to issue an apology to the British government in Belize.52 Rather by the summer of 1858, it was the Yucatecan Hispanic residents of the border towns who increasingly became objects of British suspicion. During the Bacalar episode, the Santa Cruz Maya had pointed to Hispanic immigrants as a cause of their ire toward the British. They particularly blamed the

68  Rajeshwari Dutt Belizean government for harboring Manuel Perdomo the commander of Bacalar garrison who had escaped to Corozal after Bacalar had fallen to the Santa Cruz Maya and for failing to punish Luciano Dzuc, the Chichanhá leader for invading Santa Cruz territory in 1856. Despite his misgivings about the Santa Cruz, Seymour too felt that the root cause of the unpleasantness with the Santa Cruz Maya had been machinations of politically motivated Hispanics in Belize who had made common cause with the pacificos and remained loyal to the Mexican government. Seymour worried that if and when troops departed from Corozal, the Hispanic residents would go to the Mexican side to seek vengeance against the Santa Cruz for the massacred Hispanic prisoners at Bacalar.53 Seymour was also vexed by the presence of Perdomo and his lieutenant Mariano Trejo—“a noted enemy of the settlement”—in Corozal.54 Hearing the news that Perdomo had tried to incite refugee Mexican soldiers to attack a Maya outpost in Cayo Obispo (Chetumal), Seymour took more drastic actions. In March 1858, Seymour issued an Act for the Removal of Aliens to be in effect for a year designed “for the removal of persons who shall seek to embroil us in disputes with which we have nothing to do, by making our territory a base for operations against neighboring states.”55 There is little doubt that the Act was specifically aimed against Hispanic immigrants to Belize. Episodes of incendiarism with one occurring in September 1858 in Belize town that suggested Hispanic agency, did little to quell the mutual suspicion between the immigrants and the Belizean government.56 If anything, following the Bacalar episode, the Belizean government became increasingly vigilant about the loyalty of its Hispanic subjects. Understanding Belizean Response Why did the Bacalar episode evoke such a fierce response from colonial authorities in Belize and Jamaica? After all, border troubles were an expected hazard in the Belizean northern frontier. I would argue that the answer is two-prong with both ends predicated on how the mutiny was interpreted in Latin America and the Caribbean. Firstly, the uprising of 1857 created a sense of fear, uncertainty, even paranoia, in the British Caribbean and circum-Caribbean particularly regarding the loyalties of its colonial subjects. Jill Bender in her study of the effects of the 1857 uprising across the British empire, including Jamaica, notes: Although the threat of pan-imperial resistance movements is difficult to assess, the fear of such movements permeates the archives…. Although such fears did not always have direct political impact, the sustained debate surrounding these concerns reveals an empire that perceived itself to be under threat from within…. The Indian “Mutiny” sparked lasting fear.57 The increased surveillance of Hispanic immigrants in northern Belize, thus, must be seen within this broader empire-wide fear of colonial unrest. The violence

The News of 1857  69 of the 1857 uprising also fed into, what Shaswati Mazumdar describes as the “‘civilization versus barbarism’ dichotomy.”58 Time and again, British officials described the Santa Cruz Maya as a “savage” race. The Bacalar massacre and the brutality of the Santa Cruz on women and children mirrored the senseless violence of mutineers and atrocities on British women and children that figured so prominently in newspapers across the Caribbean. Indeed, following the Bacalar episode we do see a shift in how British officials responded to Santa Cruz threats. While the policy of the Belizean government up to 1857 had been to put up with “rough handling” by the Maya rather than “plunge the settlement into war,” following the Bacalar episode Seymour and Darling rallied to put up a military and naval demonstration to cower the Santa Cruz.59 Indeed, across empire the years following the 1857 uprising saw colonial officials cracking down on subjects who were perceived to be insubordinate. Jill Bender finds evidence of colonial officials in Jamaica drawing on the British aggressive response to mutiny in India to justify military repression of the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion.60 Elsewhere, in British Guiana, Alapatt has pointed to ways in which the colonial government scapegoated ex-sepoys for coolie unrest on sugar estates.61 Secondly, the 1857 uprising provided an opportunity for colonial governments across the Caribbean to press for their demands. According to Christopher Taylor, following slave emancipation, “as the profitability of the West Indian colonies declined, British capital and British imperial attention shifted from the West Indies to more remunerative sites within empire, such as India, or to sites beyond it, such as Cuba and Brazil.”62 Taylor’s thesis of an “empire of neglect” helps us understand the reactions of the colonial governments in the Caribbean to the news of the 1857 uprising in India. The year 1857 saw a hike in the price of sugar in the world market and a concomitant need for indentured labor on Caribbean plantations. As Carter and Bates point out, “all over the empire, schemes to import rebel sepoys were exercising the minds of local British officials and settlers.”63 Although there is no reliable data of how many ex-sepoys migrated to the Caribbean, undoubtedly the period following the 1857 uprising saw an upsurge of coolie migration. While in Belize as well landed interests tried to cash in on the situation to argue for importation of ex-sepoys, the Belizean colonial government also used the situation in India for asking for more imperial aid. Defense of the settlement had long been a bone of contention between the colonial government in Belize and the metropolitan imperial government. Seymour’s pleas to Governor Darling for more naval and military aid must be seen in the context of persistent imperial neglect of Belize’s defense needs. And here the 1857 Mutiny provided an effective justification for calling on more imperial help as can be seen by Darling’s prompt response in dispatching a frigate for Belize. Ultimately, however, the gains would be short-lived and the rest of the nineteenth century would see a familiar struggle between Belize and London over metropolitan aid for the settlement’s defense needs particularly in the context of the region’s raging Caste War.

70  Rajeshwari Dutt Conclusion Before ending this discussion of the effects of 1857 Uprising on the YucatanBelize border, I want to draw your attention to another frontier region of Central America. Mosquito Shore is a narrow strip of land along the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. The region was part of British informal empire in Latin America in the nineteenth century during which time it achieved some prominence as a potential site for a trans-isthmian canal connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. Yet there is hardly a region in Latin America that is more remote from concerns in India, being a peripheral frontier zone even within Nicaragua. In the year 1849, Britain and Nicaragua were locked in a contest over the port town of San Juan (known by the British as Greytown) which was located on the possible canal route. In communicating the hostility of the Nicaraguan government toward British interests on the Shore, the consul-general on the Shore, in August 1849 William Dougal Christie sent several clippings of Nicaraguan newspaper reports to British Foreign Secretary Viscount Palmerston. These included an excerpt that read: In India also there has been a great rising against the English: they have manned about 4000; and the whole country is united in proclaiming its independence. The inhabitants of Asia following the example of North America endeavour to throw off the English yoke: in Nicaragua we are exposed by the folly and wickedness of some persons to surrendering ourselves to the English. What a contrast! What a disgrace!64 Christie used this excerpt to underline the “present feeling of the Nicaraguan government towards the English” and consequently their unconciliatory attitude over Greytown. The uprising in India described in the Nicaraguan newspaper likely refers to the Battle of Chillianwala which was one of the bloodiest engagements of the Second Anglo-Sikh War. What this instance shows is the awareness in Central America of developments in British India and how these often served as an incentive for actions against British power in the region. The case of peripheral outposts of the empire such as Belize, and even Mosquito Shore, show the ways in which developments in India relayed through the news colored the lives of people in even the margins of Central America—whether they were indigenous combatants such as the soldiers of the Santa Cruz Maya or high-ranking colonial officials such as Seymour or Christie. It also suggests that looking at India-Latin America connections from the vantage point of imperial concerns in both subcontinents can be a fruitful avenue for further research as we attempt to place India in the World. Notes 1 Some quotations used in this chapter have previously appeared in Rajeshwari Dutt, Empire on Edge: The British Struggle for Order in Belize during Yucatan’s Caste War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Reprinted here with permission of

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4

5 6

Cambridge University Press. Empire on Edge also contains my brief, initial exploration of the role of the Indian Uprising on the Caste War (Dutt, Empire on Edge, 61–62). Belize here refers to the entire area within the present-day boundaries. The region was known as the Settlement in the Bay of Honduras until the mid-nineteenth century after which it was called British Honduras till 1973. While I tend to use both “Indian uprising” and “Sepoy Mutiny” to talk about the events of 1857, there is a broader debate upon the usage of these terms with the former a preferred term for current historical research. Despite the contested nature of the term “mutiny” to describe the events, I retain it here because this was often how it was portrayed in the media in the Caribbean and Latin America. While the historical literature around the 1857 uprising is largely “indo-centric,” in the past two decades there has been a significant effort to acknowledge the global dimensions of the uprising not only within the historical discipline but also broadly in cultural studies including literature. The Crispin Bates edited series Mutiny at the Margins which resulted from an AHRC project is an important resource for scholars seeking to understand the global implications of the uprising. Volume 3: Global Perspectives of the series includes essays by Peter Putnis and Deep Kanta Lahiri Chowdhury which underline the impact of technology such as printing and the telegraph on the global transmission of the news of the mutiny [Marina Carter and Crispin Bates eds., Mutiny at the Margins, vol. 3: Global Perspectives, New Delhi: Sage, 2013]. Other essays in the volume also point to transnational perspectives of the mutiny including in Russia, France, Ireland and Germany. In addition, Volume 7: Documents of the Indian Uprising has a useful section on “Global Reactions” [Marina Carter and Crispin Bates eds., Mutiny at the Margins, vol. 7: Documents of the Indian Uprising, New Delhi: Sage, 2017] Crispin Bates and Marina Carter have also attempted to connect the uprising with changing patterns of coolie migration in the 1850s and 1860s. Scholars such as Gautam Chakrabarty and Christopher Herbert have explored the impact of the mutiny on British imagination and popular culture [Gautam Chakrabarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity – The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008]. In her edited volume Insurgent Sepoys, Shaswati Mazumdar has attempted to address the question of how the uprising was perceived on continental Europe [Shaswati Mazumdar, Insurgent Sepoys: Europe Views the Revolt of 1857, New Delhi: Routledge, 2011]. Side by side with these interventions, there is a growing body of literature that examines the impact of 1857 across the British empire. Donovan Williams has examined the uprising in the context of the Cape Colony where he argues it served to influence ideas of “black consciousness” [Donovan Williams, ‘The Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the Cape Colony’, Historia 32, no. 1 (May 1987): 55–69, and 32, 2, September 1987, pp. 56–67]. George Alapatt suggests that fears stirred by the mutiny were used for blaming ex-sepoys during riots in British Guiana [George K. Alapatt, “The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857: Indian Indentured Labour and Plantation Politics in British Guiana,” Journal of Indian History, 59 (1981): 295–314]. Jill Bender has explored the impact of the uprising on colonial governance in four distinct colonial sites: Ireland, New Zealand, Jamaica and southern Africa [Jill Bender, The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016]. Peter Putnis, “The Indian Insurgency of 1857 as a Global Media Event,” in IAMCR 25th Conference Proceedings, Canberra: Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra, 2007, 185–190. Peter Putnis, “International Press and the Indian Uprising,” in Marina Carter and Crispin Bates (eds.). Mutiny at the Margins, Vol. 3: Global Perspectives (New Delhi: Sage, 2013), 15.

72  Rajeshwari Dutt 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Putnis, “International Press and the Indian Uprising”. Population in Bermuda Blue Book for 1857. British Online Archives. “From the London Times, July 23” in Bermuda Royal Gazette, Hamilton, 25.8.1857. “Postscript” in Bermuda Royal Gazette, Hamilton, 1.9.1857. “The steamer” in Antigua Weekly Register, St. John’s, 20.10.1857. “Bengal Sepoys off duty” in Saint Christopher Advertiser, St. Christopher, 27.4.1858. “Europa” in El Comercio, Lima, 25.7.1857. “Los ingleses en la India” in El Comercio, Lima, 17.3.1858. Ibid. “Noticias extrangeras” in El Siglo XIX, Mexico City, 12.10.1857. Mark Hall, “Fenians, Sepoys and the Financial Panic of 1857,” in Martina Carter and Crispin Bates (eds.). Mutiny at the Margins, Vol 3: Global Perspectives (New Delhi: Sage, 2013), 87–97. O. Nigel Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society: Belize from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 190. Jill Bender, The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 37–38; Bates and Carter, Mutiny at the Margins vol. 7, 229. Bates and Carter, Mutiny at the Margins vol. 7, 230. Thomas Finnis to Frederick Seymour, “Fund for the Relief of the Sufferers of the Mutiny”. Belize Archives and Records Service (hereafter, BARS) R-Record 58, October 1857. Diario de Avisos, Caracas, 26.12.1857. Statistical Appendix Table A.10, “Export Data by Country,” in Victor BulmerThomas (ed.). The Economic History of the Caribbean since the Napoleonic Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Bates and Carter, vol. 7, 215. “Dominica—Sepoy Labour” in Antigua Weekly Register, St. John’s, 1.12.1857. “Extracts from the minutes of a meeting of the Board of Commissioners of Immigration.” Jamaica, 4.9.1857, National Archives, Kew (hereafter, TNA) Colonial Office records (hereafter, CO) 137/334. Governor Darling to Henry Labocheur, Jamaica, 10.12.1857, CO 137/335. “Not a Sepoy” in The Creole, Guyana, 17.11.1857. Reproduced in Marina Carter and Crispin Bates eds., Mutiny at the Margins, vol. 7, 216. Frederick Seymour to Scott Cave, BARS, R Record 57, 16.2.1858. Superintendent to Governor, Jamaica in Sir John Alder Burdon, Archives of British Honduras Volume 3 (London: Sifton, Piraed and CO., 1935), 17.2.1858, p. 201. Sharon Hartman Strom and Frederick Stirton Weaver, Confederates in the Tropics: Charles Swett’s Travelogues of 1868 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2011), 29. Speech of Robert William Harley at the opening of the Legislative Council. BARS, Honduras Gazette, 20 January 1872. Strom and Weaver, 101. Census in British Honduras Blue Book for 1891, British Online Archives. Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Terry Rugeley, Maya Wars: Ethnographic Accounts from Nineteenth Century Yucatán (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 8. For a detailed examination of the Caste War’s impact on Belize see: Dutt, Empire on Edge (2020). Frederick Seymour to Governor Darling, 17.2.1858, TNA, CO 123/96. Ibid.

The News of 1857  73 39 Don Dumond, The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 223. 40 Frederick Seymour to Governor Darling, 13.3.1858, TNA, CO 123/96. 41 Ibid. 42 Dutt, Empire on Edge, 33. 43 Frederick Seymour to Governor Darling, 13.3.1858, TNA, CO 123/96. 44 Ibid. 45 Frederick Seymour to Governor Darling, 17.5.1858, TNA, CO 123/96. 46 Governor Darling to Sir H. Stewart, 24.3.1858, TNA, CO 123/96. 47 “Noticias del paquete” in Diario de Avisos, Caracas, 10.2.1858. 48 Frederick Seymour to Governor Darling, 17.3.1858, TNA, CO 123/96. 49 Governor Darling to Frederick Seymour, 27.3.1858, TNA, CO 123/96. 50 Sir H. Stewart to Governor Darling, 24.3.1858, TNA, CO 123/96. 51 Frederick Seymour to Governor Darling, 17.5.1858, TNA, CO 123/96. 52 Frederick Seymour to Governor Darling, 3.5.1858, TNA, CO 123/96. 53 Frederick Seymour to Governor Darling, 17.5.1858, TNA, CO 123/96. 54 Ibid. 55 Frederick Seymour to Governor Darling, 13.3.1858, TNA, CO 123/96. 56 Frederick Seymour to Governor Darling, 17.9.1858, TNA, CO 123/97. 57 Jill Bender, The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire, 26. 58 Shaswati Mazumdar, Insurgent Sepoys, 11. 59 Dutt, Empire on Edge, 56. 60 Jill Bender, The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire, 135. 61 Geoge K. Alapatt, “The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857”. 62 Christopher Taylor, Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), Kindle e-book location 126. 63 Crispin Bates and Marina Carter, “Empire and Locality: A Global Dimension to the 1857 Indian Uprising,” Journal of Global History 5:1 (2010), 63. 64 William Dougal Christie to Viscount Palmerston, 8.8.1849, TNA, FO [Foreign Office] 53/20.

Section 2

State Repression and Transnational Resistance

4

‘Would You Deprive Him of Toddy?’ Singapore’s English-Language Press, and the Racialization of Alcohol Consumption by Indians, 1900–1960 Alexandra T. Sundarsingh

Introduction Around 9:20 pm on 8 December 2013, a 33-year-old South Indian construction worker was accidentally struck and killed by a bus in Singapore’s Little India neighbourhood that was ferrying migrant workers back to their dormitories. Over the next two hours, police cars were burnt, and a mob of several hundred people, many intoxicated, rioted in anger at the event. It was reported as only the second riot in the island nation’s independent history, the other having been in 1969.1 In the aftermath of the riots, twenty-five men were charged, all of them migrant workers from India; a further fifty-seven were repatriated.2 The riot also gave rise to a series of new regulations regarding alcohol consumption in Singapore that restricted its consumption and sale in the Little India and Geylang neighbourhoods.3 A report from the Singaporean government on the issue would later attribute much of the anger and chaos of the mob to ‘cultural’ factors such as a “desire for ‘street justice’” and the idea that in Tamil Nadu in particular, there is a subculture of “clashing with the police.”4 While the report went on to clarify that these actions were representative of a small minority of migrant workers, and not the broader population of South Asians or South Asian workers in Singapore, the report also goes out of its way to state in no uncertain terms that the riots were not the result of lingering discontent over racism or poor living and working conditions. Instead, the violence was attributed to a sense of loss at a countryman’s death and drunkenness.5 While the treatment of the riots in the government report is conclusive and simple, both foreign and domestic media outlets pointed out the omissions and flaws in the narrative presented by the government report. Writing for Quartz, Lily Kuo pointed out that the significant regulation of public drinking following the riots, in a country with quite a limited per capita rate of alcohol consumption, was actually aimed at foreign workers congregating for recreation in Little India (Indian workers) and in Geylang (Chinese workers) DOI: 10.4324/9781003393962-7

78  Alexandra T. Sundarsingh in particular.6 Significant evidence to this effect was the fact that the regulation also applied to workers’ dormitories, classifying them as public spaces as well despite their location quite far from the majority of Singapore’s highly trafficked areas.7 While the regulation was discussed in terms of its novelty and necessity due to the 2013 riots, the idea that South Asians are a volatile foreign population, prone to violence when they drink, and sensitive to hurts suffered by their countrymen echoes the rhetoric of the English-language press in Singapore’s colonial period. Throughout the early 1900s, the English press in Singapore described the perceived dangers of ‘Indians’ drinking toddy – a fermented palm liquor. The papers described toddy as the source of much if not all of Indian social ills in the colony, ignoring the working and living conditions of Indians on the island’s rubber plantations. In this paper, I trace the development of this racialized discourse around vice, and specifically drinking alcohol, as it was applied to Singapore’s South Asian population.8 In doing so, the events of 2013 and the position of the South Asian labour diaspora on the island come into perspective as the echo of a colonial discourse that did not die with Singapore’s independence. Significantly, this paper marks a break from previous literature on ‘Indian’ identity and drinking in its focus on the urban element of this discourse as represented through press about labourers in Singapore as opposed to on plantations, and its focus on the cultivation of an image of violent, volatile ‘Indian’ masculinity that is defined so much by class and race that other South Asians strive to distance themselves from it even in the present. The ‘Indian’ Labour Diaspora in the Indian Ocean Migration abroad for work is not a new concept in South Asia. Within the Indian Ocean world this article is concerned with, South Asian migration has been nearly a historical constant, from the great seafaring Chola Empire to contemporary populations of migrant labour in call centres and construction sites across the region. However, beginning around the 1850s the push of European empires into Asia, combined with the colonial drive for new agricultural frontiers to feed their centres pushed a huge wave of migration within Asia.9 Many of the migrants to Malaya came from the Tamil regions of South India, and though circular migration for trade during the monsoon seasons had long connected these regions, the sheer size of the migration was novel.10 These migrants brought with them not only their language, but food, religious traditions, cultural practices, and the knowledge of everything that had pushed them to move; for some, migration was fuelled by dire conditions of famine, drought, or unrest at home, while for others it simply offered the possibility of a better life than what they had despite the hardship of the journey.11 This was not the only migration of (South) Asians for labour. From the 1830s through the 1920s, millions of South Asian and Chinese migrants left the subcontinent and

‘Would You Deprive Him of Toddy?’   79 China for destinations in the Caribbean, South Africa, Mauritius, and Fiji under the system of indenture that the British developed to replace the labour formerly provided on plantations by enslaved people. This group is not always included in accounts of the South Asian diaspora because despite the trauma of their passage and the inability of most of them to return to their birthplace, their departure is often seen to be voluntary; the same is true for the South Asians recruited to work in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka.12 Critically, the South Asian diaspora in Southeast Asia is often set apart from those in the Caribbean or South and East Africa or Fiji.13 Their longstanding ties to the region complicate historians’ understanding of their position as ‘migrants’; they do not fit the classic definition of a diaspora forced from its home and bound to a new land, nor did they always permanently remain in the location they moved to. Their position as migrants is not obviously one of foreignness. India’s wealth and her commercial migrants made South Asia a driving force for global trade in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal alike, with South Asian sailors, merchants, clerics, bankers, and military forces crossing the waves for hundreds of years before European expansion into the region.14 Later, labourers and merchants were joined in the port cities of the Indian Ocean world by ‘lascars,’ a term used by the British government to describe the South Asian sailors they employed under restrictive terms on British sailing and steamships.15 To their numbers were added ‘free’ passenger ‘Indians’ who had purchased their journeys themselves, hawkers selling food or textiles, and clerics spreading the many faiths of the Indian Ocean world.16 As the British expanded their power in the region, first through the East India Company, and eventually through direct colonization, South Asians also appeared in Southeast Asia as labourers working as part of a punishment for a criminal sentence. Not just Australia, but Singapore, Mauritius, the Andaman Islands, Penang, Arakan, Malacca, and the Tenasserim Coast all received ships holding convicts throughout the 1840s and 1850s; the colonization of the Andamans was completed by sending a ship of individuals who had ‘mutinied’ against the British in 1857 and a substantial amount of the infrastructure in Singapore was constructed using the labour of those sentenced to serve their prison term abroad.17 The desire to find newer and more sources of labour for colonial plantations would only further fuel these waves of migration. Race and the Regulation of Vice Essential to the functioning of the colonial state in Singapore, and across the British Empire, was the idea that the right regulations could both harness and maximize the productivity of its imported labouring populations. One way in which this manifested during British rule was the full or partial legalization of the consumption of controlled substances such as opium and alcohol so that the empire might profit off of their sale and taxation. Indeed, the sale and taxation of opium were one of the primary means by which the British funded their

80  Alexandra T. Sundarsingh colonial activities in the region in the 1800s, with Singapore serving as both a local market for opium and an administrative base for the drug trade.18 Critically, the profitable sale of drugs requires a porous legal regime that seeks not to eliminate their use, but to create and decide the appropriate circumstances for their consumption, particularly in terms of spaces in which consumption is (dis) allowed. As a consequence, categories of people are also created; there are those who abide by the norms and laws about consumption and those who do not. In colonial Singapore, fears about inappropriate consumption were heavily tied to ideas of what would make a productive citizen of empire and were encouraged and enforced by a highly racialized idea of citizenship premised on the notion that a productive citizen works for the economic benefit of empire, often without question.19 It is in this context that Indians consuming alcohol were scrutinized for the potential disruptive effects that could have on the colonial economy. Three fundamental questions have guided the legislation in Singapore about who a ‘good’ consumer of alcohol is over time: what, when, and where do they drink? Each of these questions is tied to shifting ideas about public space, racial identities, and consumption that grow out of colonial discourses about public health and addiction. The bulk of the discourse around alcohol consumption has been focused on associated pressure points in Singapore’s development: the opium industry that plagued and fuelled British colonial enterprises in South and Southeast Asia, and migration and labour in the colony of Singapore. These continue to reverberate into the present moment, through public discourse about South Asian labourers in Singapore post-independence. In this paper, I interpret public discourse in the English-language press about fear over Indians drinking in public spaces, and government policy responses to those circumstances, paying special attention to the changing discourse around alcohol consumption as it pertains to the specific times and places in which people consume the drink, in order to illustrate that the emergent legislation targets not only the body of the working class Indian, but also the areas in which Indian identity and community are performed and the emphasis placed on the way they are performed by men. The result is a stereotype of the male Indian worker as volatile and dangerous in a way that is augmented by alcohol consumption, which has had a long life in local press. Specifically, I analyze the way that media and legislation converge to consolidate the view, originating in British colonial administrators’ and planters’ impressions of Tamil workers, that the violence and disorder often reported to accompany or follow the consumption of alcohol by Indian workers in general was simply a surfacing of a dormant or innate aspect of their nature. While much of the current literature has focused on the way that toddy was represented as a public health concern for rural workers, I follow the narrative into the city, bridging the spaces to analyze the transformation of the public health narrative through the period of government consolidation of toddy shops. Furthermore, I compare the narratives about the disorder of recreational spaces

‘Would You Deprive Him of Toddy?’   81 like the toddy shop to those that accompanied the formation of primarily Indian living spaces in the city, and those about the way that rural workers’ living spaces influenced their behaviour as well. In this paper then, I attempt to bridge the literature about the rural and urban Tamil workers’ communities and to integrate the large body of work from historical geographers that discusses the changing circumstances of ethnic segregation in neighbourhood formation and housing policy since the colonial period. Finally, while there is a considerable body of literature on the way that class and occupation functioned to define colonial views of racial identities,20 this paper seeks instead to examine how those identities were shaped by the consumption choices of the relevant populations, and consequently how substances like opium and toddy acquired gender, racial, and class identities by their association with different peoples. Singapore and the Drug Trade Claimed by the British in 1819, Singapore – which had been intended to serve as an administrative and free trade entrepot for the British, with all of the benefits of a colony and none of the headache of administrative costs – soon became a bustling hub of trade, including of opium.21 British management of the island entrepot followed a long precolonial history of the place already existing as a trade hub; the village of Temasek that preceded modern Singapore was one of the tributaries to the empire of Majapahit.22 As a port of free trade, Singapore was meant to help recover debts incurred by British colonial undertakings in India. However, the entire operation soon became quite dependent on the profit derived from semi-legalizing and taxing opium consumption amongst Chinese migrant labourers. Chinese merchants, long present in the island’s markets, came to dominate the city’s commerce, and by 1867, composed a full two-thirds of the population.23 Many Chinese migrants also came to work in the plantations of Malaya, using Singapore as a stopover.24 Others migrated to Singapore directly, working in the gambier and opium plantations from which the island drew the bulk of its profits, or even became ‘rickshaw coolies’ pulling people and burdens to and from the ports as the merchant class went about their dealings.25 This class of young men with money and limited free time proved a natural market for opium. Indeed, the indebtedness of Chinese labourers to the opium industry was a critical part of the industry being profitable, as the costs of paying for labour found their way back into the system through company stores, rent for the living space, and other such costs. Young men working on the plantations would often spend a portion of their income on opium and smoke it to have something to do with their spare time. The drug was sold at such a high margin of profit that it left very little money for them to send home, consequently either elongating their term of service or resulting in the men having a relative come to take their place – a pattern known as ‘chain migration.’26

82  Alexandra T. Sundarsingh At once an escape and a trap, opium served as a recreational activity for hardworking labourers who found themselves confined to the farms that they worked on, while its provisional legality (only legally consumable by Chinese workers for a period of time)27 meant that the colony could profit off the drug quite handsomely, regardless of the risks. Opium’s role in the recreational activities of young male labourers produced substantial concern amongst the island’s colonial administrators; though the opium business was profitable, it was taken as a sign of the degeneracy and danger of the Chinese population.28 Legislation around opium consumption created a sharp delineation between Chinese and European citizens. The strict ban on the consumption or sale of opium (as well as gambling, drinking, or prostitution) in the European area of town physically marked the spaces in which the city’s non-white residents were (literally) at home as spaces of both moral and literal corruption and dirtiness.29 While the original justifications for ethnic segregation in Singapore may have been based on vocations, vice could be just as easily labelled as belonging in certain (ethnic) quarters, and subsequently, policed.30 The idea that the particular vices that required policing might be innate to certain populations would later be at the heart of European suggestions that some groups ought to be closely monitored through legislation, even down to the way their homes and shops were constructed.31 Legislation such as this can be seen in terms of its capacity to create chronotopes, slices of space and time represented through linguistic (and in this case legal) forms.32 The key to the legislation of opium consumption in British Malaya and Singapore specifically is not simply its legalization for consumption by racialized bodies. What is historically significant is the way that the legal segregation of the city into ethnic enclaves produced spaces assumed to be natural sites of consumption of opium because of the racialized identities of the occupants. The migration of opium lounges from the European part of town to the Chinese quarter came at the same time that the British produced legal restrictions that in practice apply only within a certain space (Chinatown) and time (evenings, or workers’ time off) in the city, as opposed to applying uniformly. Indian Migration and Spatial Segregation in Singapore The history of ‘Indian’ labour in Singapore was also a multi-stream process. While some ‘Indians’ arrived in Singapore as part of a merchant class with a long history of travelling and selling fabrics, spices, and other desirable commodities in the Indian Ocean region, as many as 20,000 of the early Indian settlers of colonized Singapore were transported there as convict labourers from British India.33 With the Department of Public Works and Convict Department run by the same administrative divisions, penal labour formed the backbone of the public works projects undertaken as the British further organized and developed their hold on the island colony.34 A cheap source of labour for the British,

‘Would You Deprive Him of Toddy?’   83 penal labour also conveniently removed political dissidents in British India from the sites in which they might cause the most danger to the imperial regime. As such, the practice was considered a severe punishment amongst convicts themselves, socially isolating them by planting them in unfamiliar territory in a location where they were the ethnic minority and highly dependent on the favour of the British, whose laws reinforced the cultural stigma of transportation.35 This, as well as the use of transportation as a punishment specifically for antiBritish rebels, directly linked the presence of South Asians in the colony with political dissidence and potentially even violence. This association extended to all migrant workers, including later waves of Indian migrants working on rubber plantations as well. Regardless of origin or timing of arrival, increasingly from the founding of the Straits Settlements in 1826, Indian labourers were kept physically separate from the rest of the population as a result of living in dormitories on the estates, not unlike the physical segregation of convict labourers in the jail. This social segregation was further enforced by the spatial organization of the colony. The jail was located in the middle of the European section of town, which itself was the physical barrier between the Malay and Chinese areas of the city.36 In fact, the spatial organization of Singapore, each ethnic group with its own spatial enclave, was the perfection of British experiments in using the geography of colonial cities to control the movement and political organization of the inhabitants, tested in cities including Madras, Penang, and Malacca.37 However, imported penal labour posed a threat to this model, as the jail was located within the European part of the city. While other sources of danger and contamination were located outside of the European quarter – the racetrack, the asylum, the cemeteries – the presence of the jail marked a blurring of the boundaries and rules about segregation that could not be explained away except to say that the criminal elements in society were seen to require more close observation by the state.38 Following the dominant model of penal reform in Europe at the time, the British put Indian convicts to work clearing marshland, and building roads, churches, and government edifices, assuming that a convict through labour was reformed and could become a better citizen.39 Those classed as less dangerous criminals were sometimes allowed to work for wages (either as servants or in other capacities) that could be used to buy property following their sentence, making Singapore a potentially desirable location to serve out a prison sentence, if a socially isolating location as well because it offered some possibility of social mobility alongside the prison sentence.40 The consequence of racializing and associating crime and migrant labour in this way was the creation of a system that stigmatized outdoor and construction work as being the exclusive province of criminals and foreigners and something that a European or a ‘good’ non-European member of society would never be seen doing. Though its form has shifted over time, Singaporean ‘citizenship’ has been constructed in opposition to the idea of the foreigner whose labour helped

84  Alexandra T. Sundarsingh to build the nation.41 Productive labour is seen as mercantile or commercial, and labour in construction or as a housekeeper thereby contributes less value to the state. In addition, the importation of immigrants to perform the more physically laborious tasks was not in itself unique, but the introduction of the criminal dimension had corollary effects on the linking of ‘foreign’ elements with criminality.42 Given the tendency of the exiled political dissidents to be male, this also drew a direct link between being a ‘foreigner,’ being a South Asian man, and doing manual labour. Racialized notions of migrants’ capacity for labour were built into the fabric of Singapore’s social structure, heightened by the separation of labour by racial and ethnic groupings, and by the geographic separation of these groups, paralleling European traditions of having cities divided by profession and of segregating cities by race. Space and the Racialization of Toddy in the English-Language Press, 1900–1960

While the workers of the opium plantations lived close to or on the plantations, far from the seat of political power, their opium consumption became the concern of colonial authorities in two scenarios: when they consumed opium and were consequently less ‘productive,’ and when their consumption of opium was done in the spaces of the colonial city designed to be orderly. For the same reasons in the early 1900s, colonial concern was piqued by the consumption of toddy amongst Indian migrant workers, especially on plantations, but its use required more effort to mark it as foreign since other forms of alcohol (such as beer) were considered familiar and even healthy by Europeans at the time. Though the consumption of toddy, a sweet palm liquor, was something that originated in India, it was readily available on estates in Singapore and was consumed regularly by workers – much like the opium use of Chinese workers that was such a concern at the time.43 In either circumstance toddy consumption lurked as a spectre of foreignness and potential violence precisely because it altered the desired order of the spaces in which it was consumed. Crucially, what defined the danger of toddy in the press was the way it produced disorder in those who consumed it: violence and absenteeism on the plantation disrupted productivity, and unruly behaviour in the predominantly Indian areas of the city disrupted the (racially segregated) order colonial officials wished to impose. Eventually, this discourse – present across the empire – would cement in the colonial imagination the idea that male Indian workers possessed a violent and volatile nature, dormant and simmering, but brought to the surface by alcohol consumption.44 Space was crucial in defining the danger of the illicit substances such as opium in colonial Singapore. Though de jure racial segregation of living quarters was not a factor in Singapore, scholars have noted that a de facto segregation existed, evidenced by plans Stamford Raffles drew up dividing the city into European, Chinese, and ‘Chulia’ or ‘Kling’ (names for the South Indian

‘Would You Deprive Him of Toddy?’   85 merchant population) quarters and by later accumulation of ethnic communities along roughly the same lines.45 Given European assumptions about the rest of the population’s vice and hygiene, it is unsurprising that the atmosphere of those areas of Singapore was often assumed to be the possible impetus for the consumption of illicit substances; sex, crime, and drugs often mixed in the headlines.46 Significantly, opium (though legally used by Europeans as well as other groups) was condemned regardless of the location in which it was consumed, and efforts were made to distance the European population from the sites of consumption. Since it was believed to be addictive and damaging, physical distance could be used to lessen the temptation. This spatial partitioning produced a dynamic in which the conviction that colonized populations of Chinese workers were natural consumers was reinforced precisely because it was in their living quarters of the city that the most dangerous “underground opium smoking saloons” were located.47 However, the consumption of opium by workers in rural settings was also common; workers in mines were often trapped in a cycle of debt where they were indebted to opium sellers, food stores, and other corporate holdings of the mine they worked for.48 The use of opium occurred in or near the workers’ domestic spaces since the mines were isolated from urban areas. Thus, the physical conflation of home, work, and illicit recreation served to villainize the consumer through proximity if not directly through consumption of the drug. This discourse of naturalized consumption – the association of particular populations with specific vices and substances – was often deployed not just in the case of opium, but also in discussions about toddy consumption across the Straits Settlements as well. Several scholars have noted that racialized assumptions of vice played a strong role in the way the British legislated perceived vices such as alcohol, opium, and sex work.49 British familiarity with toddy consumption by Tamil workers was first formed in the Madras Presidency, such that the widespread use by Tamil workers in the Straits Settlements would have come as no surprise. The rise of teetotalling and temperance movements in the Madras Presidency meant that while it was seen as an emblematically Tamil substance, there was also a widespread notion of its danger, and there had been attempts to have workers consume less intoxicating beverages such as tea and coffee instead.50 Toddy accompanied labourers to the plantations in Malaya, where planters observed it as a necessity for their workers’ efficient and continued functioning, and profited handsomely from running the shops where it was sold. Compared to opium however, toddy was not as easy to categorize as a strict vice. Given that alcohol was not as foreign to European societies as opium had been, a distinction had to be drawn between toddy and other, more familiar types of alcohol. At the peak of the moral panic over toddy consumption, The Straits Times, a prominent Singaporean newspaper, lauded the opening of a major brewery which has since become the home of Singapore’s famous Tiger Beer.51 Even as early as 1904 however, dialogue in the colony was centred on the healthfulness, ‘good qualities’ and ‘glories’ of beer, and impediments to its availability in

86  Alexandra T. Sundarsingh the Straits Settlements include the “increased cost of freight on European brews” as well as securing “the co-operation of the Spirit Farmers” local to the area.52 The latter, providing a cheaper alternative to imported beer, would be required if beer was to be available and provide the 50 percent profit margins expected. Toddy was a cost-efficient and readily available form of recreation; the trees to tap for toddy existed near workers’ homes on rural plantations, and toddy was less dangerous than samsu and less expensive than imported European beer.53 Yet, like beer, there was an element of racialized association between toddy and Tamil workers that was often trotted out as justification for the continued sale of the beverage, even in the face of deleterious effects on state revenue when planters were granted private licenses for estate toddy shops. Remarking on the situation of monopoly licenses for estate toddy shops and their competition with public toddy shops in Singapore, one planter reinforced this supposedly naturalistic relationship, saying that “the Tamil drank toddy before the English or the Scots drank whisky.”54 While beer, a familiar beverage for the English, was being hailed as an important part of the nation’s industrial success, toddy was being framed as a social ill and even a danger to public health in ways that mirrored the public health discourse that had occurred over the ‘gin craze’ in England in the 1700s.55 Public panic over the supposedly wasteful spending of labourers on the drink was paired with moralizing assumptions about the capacity for Indian labourers to overindulge and become drunk and made frequent appearances in papers at the time.56 Headlines such as “Toddy and Murder”57 ran with some frequency, and in the 1920s and 1930s, debate raged about the moral qualities of the estate workers, with toddy as the emblem of moral dissolution and disreputable activity; though some questioned the degree to which the drink could be held more responsible than any other substance,58 others called it a new opium.59 The scientific or medical supposition that toddy was a necessity for the healthy and efficient labour of workers was commonly acknowledged by even the staunchest prohibitionists,60 but said to be in direct tension with the disorder produced. The idea of toddy as food was said to be directly correlated with its freshness, the nutritional content that made it a dependable source of fuel for workers declining precipitously as it was allowed to ferment.61 Headlines in the newspapers highlight the consumption of toddy and the violence that followed as an aberration in otherwise productive workers and note that toddy harmed the women and children on plantations, and a strong majority of articles seem to note the violence as occurring between men.62 Toddy was painted as distracting the male ‘Indian’ worker from providing for his family, something that he was assumed to be responsible for by British standards as well as their understanding of South Asian culture. What is notable is that scant attention is paid to the cramped circumstances of living, the physical intensity of the labour, or the violence of plantation life throughout the Straits Settlements as a possible cause of the problems instead of the beverage. One notable murder

‘Would You Deprive Him of Toddy?’   87 on a plantation in 1935 reported in the Malaya Tribune notes that the accused was drinking at home “in his room, which was next to the room occupied by witness and deceased” and got into the argument that preceded the murder after being overheard speaking to his wife; the report pays far more attention to the consumption of local alcohols by both parties, noting that the accused ‘smelt of samsu’ (a distilled spirit often described as a more dangerous Chinese counterpoint to toddy) and writing in a prominent subheading that the parties ‘drank toddy,’ more than to the lack of privacy that played a role in the altercation.63 Similar conditions existed on plantations across Singapore as well, despite the island’s small size. The image of toddy as a source of violence and disorder was repeatedly and specifically tied to the poor migrant workers who were its primary consumers through conceptions of their supposedly violent nature as brought out by the drink as well as the locales of its consumption as opposed to any scientific notions about toddy’s intoxicant qualities. Unlike beer and other beverages which were quite a bit more expensive at the time, and as a result were served in cleaner and more publicly acceptable settings to a wealthier and more European clientele, toddy was sold directly on the estate and consumed in dormitories, sold in disreputable ‘toddy shops’ on plantations, or sold and consumed in public spaces in the case of urban toddy shops.64 As a result, commentators conflated the disreputable, disorderly and public nature of the sites of consumption with the character of the consumers, much in the same way as they had with opium. Given the violence associated with toddy consumption and drunkenness on the plantation, officials intended urban drinking, controlled and licensed by the government and confined to the space of the toddy shop alone, to be an improvement. By the 1930s, the colonial government had entirely taken over toddy sales. Consumers could only drink toddy in government-run shops, meaning that the relative privacy of consuming toddy in cramped living spaces was no longer available. The government attempted to impose some degree of order and cleanliness on the spaces by moving consumption within urban spaces but patrons’ recollections of toddy shops as crowded and serving even as “a market where fish and vegetables were sold” suggest that concentrating them in more populous locales did little to curb their chaotic atmosphere.65 In fact, the activities around toddy shops only served to further racialize the beverage’s consumption and cement its image as the cause of violence and disorder in the Indian community. Toddy shops were staffed primarily by Tamil servers, and the shops or their nearby environs offered the sale of complementary foods such as kajang (fried peanuts) or curries that served to make the toddy industry a source of income for more than just shop owners.66 In fact the idea that mess and chaos were at least partially attributable to women selling food to patrons seems to have possibly been an outgrowth of a ban on selling food or giving it out in the establishments for free.67 Ideas such as these reinforced the view that the shops were not just a source of violence and moral dissolution, but also of possible physical disorder

88  Alexandra T. Sundarsingh as well, in the form of illnesses such as cholera or food-borne illness. In the eyes of officials, the shops seemed to draw the entire community towards them, creating a multitude of problems the colonial administration had not prepared for. Newspapers at the time warned that the excessive consumption of alcoholic drinks, ‘including samsu and toddy’ was to be avoided as a precaution against contracting cholera.68 No example of European spirits is offered. Oral histories such as those by Pakirisamy and those by former patrons of Singaporean toddy shops confirm the impression of a lack of proper hygiene and sanitation as well as crowded venues.69 The lack of standardization seems to have been such that it was still worth a few lines in the paper when toddy shops in Singapore got benches and mugs in 1952.70 The general impression conveyed by press clippings is that toddy shops and their surroundings, and by extension the patrons of such spaces, were the site of uncleanliness both moral and physical no matter their location. Notably, the press saw the colonial government relocating toddy shops within the city as somewhat of a change; having shops so close to living quarters on plantations had been seen to be the cause of many workers’ heavy drinking.71 However by the late 1940s, the idea that Indian workers were simply unable to abstain from drink seems to have gained some currency in local thought. Consequently, one solution offered by critics was a wholesale legislative ban on selling alcohol to ‘Indian’ labourers.72 Importantly, by this time, it was the mere fact of ‘Indian’ bodies consuming alcohol that was seen to be the problem, not toddy alone. It was no longer an issue of a foreign spirit corrupting already dangerous foreign men. Instead, it became an assumption that being ‘Indian’ meant that alcohol made a person, but especially a man, more dangerous than he already was. The practice of locating violence as internal to and innate in ‘Indians,’ brought out by the consumption of alcohol, would resurface in the rhetoric around the 2013 Little India Riots; subsequent liquor legislation disallowing consumption in spaces such as Indian workers’ dorms and denoting Little India as a site of concern and disorder carries in it echoes and assumptions of discourse and legislation about Indian workers and alcohol consumption from Singapore’s recent past. The conviction that drinking and alcohol-fuelled violence must be endemic to Singapore’s South Asian community returns us to the assumptions made about toddy and its effects represented in the press of the colonial period. While initially, legislation and rhetoric around toddy seemed to mimic the ideas that had circulated about opium, eventually there emerged in the colonial press a consensus on toddy’s effects specific to the Tamil workers who were its primary makers and consumers. On the plantation, toddy’s disorderly effects were primarily the violence and lack of productivity it engendered in male workers. While little mention is made in the English-language press of the time of toddy’s effects on women and children except to say that male workers’ spending would have harmful effects on the health of the family, reports of violence often cite the close

‘Would You Deprive Him of Toddy?’   89 proximity of toddy shops to workers’ homes, and demonstrate that those homes were often so crowded as to offer little respite or privacy from other workers, or from the after-effects of fights that followed workers home from the toddy shop. In the city though, the reports seem to focus primarily on the uncleanliness of the surroundings in which toddy was consumed. Now that toddy consumption was occurring in view of a non-South Asian public more often, it was not just morally corrupting, but dirty as well. While oral histories cite the inner environment of the toddy shop (i.e. toddy’s social existence), the English-language press focuses almost exclusively on the behaviour of consumers once outside the shop. By the time the colonial period was drawing to a close, Singapore’s colonial government was floating legislative solutions that included everything from the full prohibition of toddy to the simple prohibition of the sale of alcohol to ‘Indian’ workers. This latter suggestion demonstrates the extent to which colonial administrators and governing figures assumed that violent behaviour was an inevitable part of the character of ‘Indian’ labourers simply brought to the surface by their consumption of alcohol. While toddy has since disappeared from the city, these racial stereotypes about Indian workers continue to exist, surfacing again in response to the Little India Riots only a few years ago.73 Conclusions While the December 2013 riots may have seemed to some an isolated incident without precedent, an analysis of the legislation around public drinking and the gathering of migrant workers from South Asia demonstrates that the colonial state legislated the public consumption of alcohol with the idea of constant threat to its organization of space in mind. In particular, the colonial state saw public drinking as potentially damaging because of who drinks on Singapore’s streets; the desire to make labour in the city invisible is deeply connected to the state’s history of policing labour, as well as to the racialized and gendered history of penal labour and its marginalization in the historical narratives constructed by the government about the state and its citizens as seen in its tourism planning. Singapore’s urban geography was set in place by a colonial regime bent on segregating people in order that the administration might better manage their dissent and profit from their labour, and the inherited state apparatus of independent Singapore continues to do so with the same ends in mind. Though Singapore has adopted an official policy of racial harmony, that policy is largely wish-fulfilment, contingent on citizen cooperation, and constructed with a racialized view of deviance and dangerous behaviour at its core. By framing the living spaces and recreational activity of migrant workers as deviant through the specific geographical application of the Liquor Control Act, the current administration demonstrates that the definition of ‘citizen’ in Singapore continues to be defined by colonial conceptions of belonging, productivity, and foreignness.

90  Alexandra T. Sundarsingh Notes 1 Ashleigh Nghiem, “Singapore Bus Death Triggers Riot,” BBC News, December 9, 2013, sec. Asia, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-25294918. 2 Yan Liang Lim andWalter Sim, “Little India Riot: OneYear Later –The NightThat Changed Singapore,” Text, The Straits Times, December 6, 2014, https://www.straitstimes. com/singapore/little-india-riot-one-year-later-the-night-that-changed-singapore. 3 Lim Yan Liang, “New Public Order Law to Take Effect in Little India from Tuesday,” Text, The Straits Times, March 31, 2014, http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/ new-public-order-law-to-take-effect-in-little-india-from-tuesday. 4 Government of Singapore, “Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Little India Riot on 8 December 2013,” August 1, 2014, https://web.archive.org/ web/20140801084224/; http://www.mha.gov.sg/Data/Files/file/Little%20India%20 Riot%20COI%20report%20-%202014-06-27.pdf. 5 Government of Singapore. 6 Lily Kuo, “Singapore’s Ban on Public Drinking Is Really Aimed at Its Low-Paid Foreign Laborers,” Quartz (blog), http://qz.com/329426/singapores-ban-on-publicdrinking-is-really-aimed-at-its-low-paid-foreign-laborers/ (accessed December 15, 2016). 7 Kuo. 8 Throughout the colonial period, and indeed in some cases in the current media landscape, ‘Indian’ is used as a term to represent all South Asians. I do my best in this article to showcase this generalization by putting the term Indian in quotation marks and using the term South Asian in my own commentary unless I have more specific evidence that the subject was from a specific ethnic group or post-independence nation. 9 Sunil S. Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 28–35. 10 Amrith, 30–34. 11 Amrith, 28–35. 12 Sana Aiyar, “Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya, ca. 1930–1950,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 4 (October 2011): 987–1013, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.4.987. While most scholarship on these migrants has focused on or assumed the majority of migrants to be male, several scholars, especially recently have been publishing research that disproves this assumption. See for example, Arunima Datta, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya, Global South Asians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 13 The extent to which indenture is the correct term for the contract labour that flowed to Southeast Asia is still a subject of relatively little emphasis in indenture studies, but readers might start by looking at Datta, Fleeting Agencies. 14 Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 15 Samia Khatun, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 49. 16 For more on the combination of commerce and religion, see: Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), http://myaccess. library.utoronto.ca/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/utoronto/Doc?id=10642232.

‘Would You Deprive Him of Toddy?’   91 17 Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–53 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2000); Anoma Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009). 18 Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade 1750–1950 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 50–53. 19 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003). 20 For an example of this, specifically on the topic of penal labour in the colony, see: Anoma Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009). 21 While many cite 1819 as a founding date for the city, I believe that it’s more accurate to say that this is a point at which it was transformed, colonized, and identified by the British, since there were and had been people living there and using the land for a long time prior to European arrival. 22 Anoma Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 34. 23 Mark Ravinder Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Singapore: A Biography (Singapore: National Museum of Singapore, 2009), 91. 24 Frost and Balasingamchow, 93. 25 Frost and Balasingamchow, 152–153. 26 Frost and Balasingamchow, 93; 152–153. 27 Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade 1750–1950 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 141–142. 28 Chouvy, Opium; Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy, 142. 29 Frost and Balasingamchow, Singapore, 156; Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes, 56–58. 30 Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes, 58. 31 Pieris, 52. 32 Mariana Valverde, Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance (New York: Routledge, 2015). 33 Frost and Balasingamchow, Singapore, 123–126. 34 Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes, 31. 35 Ibid., 18. 36 Ibid., 60. 37 Carl Husemoller Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes, 31. This policy has had a lasting legacy on the racial politics of the region in both Malaysia and Singapore. 38 Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes. 39 Ibid., 96. 40 Ibid., 60. 41 Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes, 96–114; Frost and Balasingamchow, Singapore, 426. 42 Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes, 18. 43 Parameswari Krishnan et al., “The History of Toddy Drinking and Its Effects on Indian Labourers in Colonial Malaya, 1900–1957,” Asian Journal of Social Science 42, no. 3–4 (2014): 321–382, https://doi.org/10.1163/15685314-04203006. 44 This narrative has primarily been commented on in terms of its presence in European correspondence about femicide in communities of indentured labourers. See for

92  Alexandra T. Sundarsingh

45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

example, Brij V. Lal, “Veil of Dishonour: Sexual Jealousy and Suicide on Fiji Plantations,” The Journal of Pacific History 20, no. 3 (1985): 135–155. Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Nightingale, Segregation. Yin Fong Sit, “Girls as Opium Den ‘Lures,’” The Straits Times, April 9, 1950, NL02422, National Library of Singapore. Sit. Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy. Nikhil Menon, “Battling the Bottle: Experiments in Regulating Drink in Late Colonial Madras,” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 52, no. 1 (January 2015): 29–51, https://doi.org/10.1177/0019464614561616; Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy; Philip Howell, “Race, Space and the Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial Hong Kong,” Urban History 31, no. 2 (2004): 229–249, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926804002123. Menon, “Battling the Bottle.” “Our Heritage | Asia Pacific Breweries Singapore,” https://www.apbsingapore.com. sg/our-heritage/ (accessed December 14, 2016); “A Wonderful Achievement,” The Straits Times, September 30, 1932, NL01455, National Library of Singapore. “New Industry for Singapore,” The Straits Times, April 12, 1904, NL00296, National Library of Singapore. Lenore Manderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). “Toddy and Thieves,” The Straits Times, February 19, 1929, NL00575, National Library of Singapore. Tiffany Bergin, Regulating Alcohol around the World: Policy Cocktails (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013); Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy. Bergin, Regulating Alcohol around the World. “Indian Agent on Toddy Habit,” The Straits Times, September 7, 1932, NL01455, National Library of Singapore. “Toddy and Murder,” The Straits Times, April 27, 1929, NL00577, National Library of Singapore. “Toddy and Murder.” “Indians and Toddy,” The Straits Times, October 27, 1945, NL04858, National Library of Singapore. “Tamil Labourer’s Toddy,” Malaya Tribune, May 10, 1929, NL3940, National Library of Singapore. “Toddy as Food,” The Straits Times, January 20, 1940, NL01788, National Library of Singapore. “The Toddy Problem,” The Straits Times, May 10, 1929, NL00623, National Library of Singapore; “Indians and Toddy”; “Toddy and Murder”; “Indian Agent on Toddy Habit.” “Alleged Murder on Estate,” Malaya Tribune, November 16, 1935, NL4049, National Library of Singapore. “I Like a Pint, But—,” The Straits Times, August 12, 1950, NL02503, National Library of Singapore. “Buying Toddy at Black Market Prices,” The Straits Times, October 30, 1972, NL07159, National Library of Singapore. Kunnusamy Kunnusamy s/o Pakirisamy, Communities of Singapore, Interview by Yeo Geok Lee, October 11, 1983, Oral History Centre, http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/

‘Would You Deprive Him of Toddy?’   93

67 68 69 70 71 72 73

oral_history_interviews/record-details/1c06182a-115f-11e3–83d5–0050568939ad? keywords=toddy&keywords-type=all. “A Sip and Snack,” The Straits Times, May 9, 1929, NL00623, National Library of Singapore. “Precautions against Cholera,” Malayan Saturday Post, July 17, 1926, NL2256, National Library of Singapore. Pakirisamy, Communities of Singapore. “Toddy Shops,” The Straits Times, November 11, 1952, NL02633, National Library of Singapore. “Indian Agent on Toddy Habit.” “Beer Instead of Toddy,” The Straits Times, October 29, 1949, NL02498, National Library of Singapore. Reuters, “Singapore Shocked by Worst Riots in Decades, as Migrant Workers Vent Anger,” The Guardian, December 9, 2013, sec. World News, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/singapore-riots-decades-migrant-workers.

5

Conspiracy in Meerut A Global History of Colonial India, 1929–19331 Michele Louro

In October 1929, the British Consulate in Washington, D.C. received a “concerned” letter addressed to the newly elected Prime Minister of Great Britain, Ramsay MacDonald, who incidentally was visiting the U.S. at the time. The letter protested the Meerut Conspiracy Case, a legal trial launched by the raj against suspected communists in India. The letter called for the trial’s dismissal and the immediate release of the political prisoners. Among the signatories were prominent lawyers, clergymen, and activists, including high-profile leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and Roger Baldwin, co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. They concluded that the Meerut case was a “matter of concern not only to India and Great Britain, but to those throughout the world who believe in the principles of civil liberty.”2 The Meerut Conspiracy Case was a “matter of concern” for leftists worldwide. It prompted protests in major cities from New York to Moscow, marking a significant moment for the development of a transnational challenge to empire. Meerut is best situated within a global history of several high-profile trials of the interwar period that became touchstones for anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist protests. Among the other trials that attracted similar international demonstrations were the conviction and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian American anarchists in the U.S. (1927), and the landmark legal cases against the Scottsboro boys in the American Jim Crow south. While the global history and significance of these American trials have been well-documented, a curious silence exists in the case of Meerut.3 The limited scholarship that exists has treated Meerut as a marginal event or anecdotal story to broader histories of Indian communism, trade unionism, or nationalism, while also neglecting its global importance.4 At the same time, Indian colonial histories have been insular and often confined to a local, regional, or national framework. Scholarship on Indian anti-colonialism in particular has remained especially insular, although this is beginning to change.5 This essay seeks to bring together Indian anti-colonial history and interwar internationalism in the 1930s, with a focus on how Meerut shaped and was shaped by the world.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003393962-8

Conspiracy in Meerut: Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933  95 The absence of a global history of the Meerut Conspiracy Case is not coincidental, and instead I argue that the colonial state designed the trial and created a legal archive that sought to erase and criminalize international connections between India and the world. Under directives from the Viceroy and Home Political Department, the prosecution built a case around the construction of a binary between Indian nationalism and internationalism. According to the colonial magistrate, the “communists” on trial intended to “deprive” the king of sovereignty, whereas an Indian nationalist asked “through the usual civil channels with a view perhaps of inducing the British Parliament on behalf of the King to give complete independence to India…”6 Thus, the trial coded Gandhian non-violence and the Indian National Congress (INC) as legal and legitimate anti-colonial protest, while the defendants owed their allegiances to Moscow and therefore represented politics that were external to India and worse, “anti-national.”7 The colonial state’s case in Meerut stood in stark contrast to the realities on the ground in India and across the global politics of the interwar world. India and Indians were significant actors who engaged with the world of the 1920s and 1930s. As the jewel in Britain’s crown, events in the subcontinent were seen as crucial to struggles against imperialism globally. Congressmen like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose forged alliances and contributed to international movements that took up global concerns like the expansion of capitalism, imperialism, fascism, and racism.8 Well-known communists like M. N. Roy, and lesser-known Indian intellectuals and students abroad, frequented international platforms that included but were not limited to the Congresses of the Communist International and the League of Nations. Within India, an unprecedented number of strikes and intensified labor unrest had paralyzed much of the British colony’s industries in the period between 1928 and 1929, followed closely by the Civil Disobedience campaign, the second and more widespread mass anti-colonial movement launched by Gandhi and the INC in early 1930.9 Such Indian political and labor unrest had been a source of serious anxiety for the British raj and were topics covered extensively in the international press. The colonial authorities orchestrating the Meerut case fully recognized the significance of developments in India and its connections to movements for social and political equality globally. For this reason, internationalism itself was on trial at Meerut, and the colonial state sought to isolate and distance Indian anti-colonialism as much as possible from the global movements against imperialism, capitalism, and racism. Lasting nearly three years, with an additional six months of appeals, Meerut was the lengthiest and most expensive legal case in British imperial history. It charged the defendants under 121-A of the Indian Penal Code for engaging in conspiracy to overthrow the sovereignty of the King over India. Of the accused in India, most were active in Bombay, Bengal, and Punjab. Some, although not all, had connections to the communist party. Three, Lester Hutchinson, Ben Bradley,

96  Michele Louro and Phillip Spratt, were British citizens and members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who were working in India. The prosecution introduced no less than 2,617 exhibits as evidence of conspiracy, while the committal order, verdict, and appeals amounted to a staggering 4,226 volumes in the colonial archive, among the largest legal collections of the colonial period housed at the National Archives of India (NAI). The trial ended with the banning of communist parties in India in 1934. The worth of the trial to the British was best summarized by a colonial intelligence officer who argued that Meerut proved unarguably that a “direct” connection existed “between the councils of ‘the mightiest world organisation’ in the Winter Palace at Moscow and the hawker of pamphlets in a tent at a bathing fair on the banks of the Ganges.” From the vantage point of the colonial state, if the British did not eradicate the “communist menace” in India, the rest of Asia would fall under Moscow’s direction and threaten the empire and the world.10 Legal trials in the colonial context were political arenas where power was asserted and contested, and Meerut was no exception. South Asian scholars have documented extensively the many forms of colonial power asserted in the making of colonial law and its applications in various trials. Likewise, Indian nationalists within the INC famously broke laws, courted arrest, and challenged the raj from the courtroom in each of their three major non-violent campaigns.11 By the late 1920s, as Durba Ghosh has shown, the devolution of democratic rights and self-rule for educated elites in India was accompanied by “repressive legislation that attempted to discipline the revolutionary and radical activities of those very same educated elites.”12 In Ghosh’s case, repressive laws targeted revolutionary terrorists in order to silence them and exclude them from democratic reforms meant for moderate and mainstream nationalists in India. The same is true of the Meerut accused, much like the terrorists in Ghosh’s story, who came to be categorized as distinct from nationalists and in fact “anti-national,” while also criminalized as enemies of the colonial state. The threat of radical internationalism, communism especially, far outweighed the threat from mainstream nationalism led by Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. This chapter recounts the history of the Meerut trial in two parts. First, it considers the Meerut case as a seminal moment in colonial state’s attempts to eradicate internationalism from anti-colonial history in India. The prosecution’s case demonstrates the extensive legal maneuvers and tremendous work that went into a highly motivated colonial project. In legally categorizing Indian politics as distinct from international politics, the state reinforced this division between nationalism and internationalism and coded the former as legal and the latter as criminal. It also constructed an archive and historical record of India’s past that maintains those divisions between anti-colonialism and nationalism on one hand, and internationalism and communism on the other. The latter being marginalized in the archive and in histories of Indian anti-colonial history. As I and other historians like Ali Raza, Durba Ghosh, and Kama Maclean have noted, this

Conspiracy in Meerut: Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933  97 was a historical moment of great overlap and collaboration between leftists in India, across the party lines of communism and the Indian National Congress.13 The dismantling of such anti-colonial solidarities was a central imperative of the colonial state in Meerut, which drove a wedge between Congress as authentically national and communism as “anti-national.” Moreover, the colonial objectives and knowledge in Meerut represented international connections as “anti-national” and significantly distanced India from the global politics of the interwar world. Without stronger engagement of events like the trial, historians continue to echo the colonial objectives and knowledge created in spaces like Meerut by neglecting that Indian leftism interfaced with international communism and global leftism in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate.14 In many ways, the entire volume in which this chapter appears is a direct challenge to a much longer historiography of colonial India as external to global forces and politics. I also argue that the colonial prosecution drew upon an older orientalist discourse to cast communism as unsuitable for India because it was an ancient country of peasants steeped in superstition and religion, while modern capitalism and communism were external to Indian tradition. While the British imagined themselves as harbingers of civilization, bringing their capitalist and democratic values to Indian elites, they also began to see their civilizing role as one that protected India from an equally foreign set of ideas about communism emanating from the Soviet Union. By virtue of their race and colonial status, according to the British, Indians were incapable of thinking beyond their locality and nation about global forces like communism or capitalism. Nowhere is this clearer than in a close reading of the Meerut Conspiracy Case. The second aim of this chapter is to draw attention to the international connections that the colonial state worked so hard to disrupt. Surveying the calls to release the Meerut prisoners within global leftist publications, this chapter demonstrates the significance of India and Indians in shaping debates over international communism, anti-imperialism, and anti-racism worldwide. Drawing upon colonial evidence of defense funds sent to the prisoners, as well as publications worldwide, the chapter provides a global history of the Meerut Conspiracy Case and restores its place within world history and alongside other global and well-studied legal trials like the Sacco-Vanzetti and Scottsboro cases in the U.S. Colonial Imperatives and the Civilizing Mission in Meerut The lead prosecutor, Langford James, presented the colonial state’s case against the Meerut prisoners over two weeks in June 1929. The prisoners were rounded up in March and detained for nearly three months while the prosecution rifled through their papers and built a case. Some of the accused had little in common ideologically, and others had limited connections to communism in India or abroad. Although, at least eighteen of the accused were communist party

98  Michele Louro members. What was striking about the trial was the wide net that the prosecutor cast by charging not only the thirty-two defendants in the dock, but also more than sixty-three organizations and individuals abroad. Among these accused were the head of the conspiracy, the Communist International in Moscow, and a disparate constellation of institutions and agents, some with communist credentials and others without. Of the nearly 200 transcript pages of his opening remarks, James concentrated almost exclusively on the actors abroad being tried in absentia.15 James mentioned only four of the thirty-two defendants in the dock by name, while he directly quoted as evidence of conspiracy just one Indian accused, Sohan Singh Josh. Instead, James devoted a grand total of 170 of the 200 transcript pages to evidence in the form of publications, resolutions, and correspondence produced by the Communist International in Moscow and the Communist Party of Great Britain in London. Silent in the transcript were communism, leftism, or trade unionism on its own terms in India and the agency of those Indians sitting in the dock. The conspicuous absence of Indians in the prosecution’s case was by design and built on older, colonial assumptions about India and the world. It echoed the anxieties of an earlier imperial rivalry, known as the “great game,” between Britain and Russia. The spread of communism to India, from the vantage point of Delhi and London, was only the latest manifestation of a longer history of Russian covert advances and territorial ambitions across Asia and especially British India.16 According to James, the conspirators worked covertly to replace “the Government of His Majesty, (King George)” not with an Indian government, but instead with the “Government of Mr. Stalin.”17 The trial also reflected deeply racist assumptions about India and echoed an older civilizing mission proclaimed by Britain since at least the nineteenth century. The justification for empire rested on a belief that the raj sought to “improve” Indian society by introducing British ideals of freedom, democracy, and capitalism. Once fit for self-rule in some imaginary future, the British would turn over the sovereignty of India to those elites they “civilized.” The Bolshevik Revolution and the global red scare in the 1920s amplified British claims to the civilizing mission by connecting colonial rule with the benevolent spread of democracy from metropole to colony, while at the same time preventing the expansion of communism to India. In other words, the British had to protect Indians from international communism and Stalin’s designs for conquest. Importantly, the foundations of both democracy and communism were seen as external to India and Indians, emanating from either Britain or Soviet Russia outward to India.18 Indian elites were to be educated by agents abroad to demonstrate their fitness for self-rule in the mold of Britain or to demonstrate their fitness as a Soviet state within the Soviet Union’s template. In this colonial framework, the political world of Indian anti-colonial activists was limited to the national or local, while internationalism remained the realm of the “more civilized nations” of Europe or the Soviet Union. In other words, Indians were

Conspiracy in Meerut: Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933  99 denied agency in capitalist, democratic, and communist worlds, serving only as proxies for forces and ideas external and foreign to the subcontinent. To define communism, the prosecution presented the canonic texts of the Communist International, referencing in particular the works of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Unchanging and rigid, communism was not a movement but rather a set of ideas about class struggle outlined in dense and impermeable texts, ignoring the movement’s fluidity, diversity in practice, and change overtime. Instead, James read directly from major texts produced by the Comintern and communist leaders to define communist goals: class warfare, destruction of capitalist states, and installation of proletarian dictatorships worldwide. For James, the communist objective remained the “smashing” through violent revolution of existing capitalist and colonial states, particularly targeting the “British Monarchy in England, in India, and in the Dominions.”19 Citing the International Press Correspondence (Inprecor), the flagship publication of the Comintern, James asserted that all communists sought to “smash” Britain’s colonial states, while circulating “anti-British propaganda” and representing the British as communism’s “natural enemy.”20 To follow the lead of communism, the defendants were agreeing to violently overthrow the raj. James also cited extensively Lenin’s “State and Revolution,” and reminded his audience of the ways the revolution in Russia, the Communist Party of Russia, and the Communist International failed to reach Marx’s vision of a stateless and classless communist society. He never missed an opportunity to critique the Russian state, its leadership, and its policies as “pseudo-logical balderdash” and “nonsense.” He argued that the current stage of revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, allows a “tiny minority” in Russia to “ruthlessly” rule over a majority permanently, because the transition to a classless society and the withering of the state in Marxist theory was a “practical impossibility.”21 If Moscow was the head of the conspiracy, its “minions” in the CPGB were central to carrying out the conspiracy in India. As the prosecutor weaved together the colonial state’s argument, he asserted that the means of coopting Indians into the conspiracy was through either the CPGB’s education of Indian students in the metropole or the dispatch of British communists to organize the revolution on ground in India. It is important to note that the only Indians who had agency in the colonial case were the Indian expatriates and exiles abroad who had extensive training in the “Russian model” from their European and Russian counterparts. These were M. N. Roy, C. P. Dutt, Shapurji Saklatvala, and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, all of whom lived abroad as international communists in London, Berlin, or Moscow.22 The emphasis on their agency, rather than the Indian prisoners in the dock, was consistent with the assumption that communism was external to India and only physical and intellectual distance from the colony, alongside extensive training and close proximity to European communists, could transform these Indian revolutionaries into authentic communists. In other words, only the intensive pedagogical experience in Moscow, London, or other European sites, far removed from India, could activate Indian communism.

100  Michele Louro For the prisoners in the dock, their fidelity to communism was a consequence of the paternal tutelage of CPGB agents who were the driving force of India’s communism, trade unionism, and leftism. While the first half of the transcript focused on funds, resolutions, and publications from Moscow, the second half concentrated on Philip Spratt, a CPGB member who traveled to India in 1927 to organize workers. In British legal documents, the official filing of the Meerut Conspiracy Case was known to the raj as “King Emperor vs. Phillip Spratt and Others.”23 It was clear that Spratt was the central figure according to official documents, and the “others” were his Indian colleagues unworthy of being named in the case, which underscored again the narrative of externalizing international communism from colonial India and marginalizing Indian agency. Spratt, and to a lesser extent the other defendants, Bradley and Hutchinson, came to India “preaching the gospel of communism” in order to “poison” the minds of Indians.24 The communist and trade unionist movement in India was credited entirely to the “superintendence of Mr. Spratt,” while nearly all of the documents produced by Indian activists collected for the case were flagged for evidence of “Mr. Spratt’s handwriting,” as the director of all projects and movements connected to the development of Indian communism.25 The Indian defendants simply “re-echoed” the ideas of international communists abroad because the colonial state dismissed the idea that Indians were anything other than accessories to the conspiracy.26 In fact, James argued that communist theory without question applied only to industrialized countries where workers comprised of the masses, while Indian society was an agrarian land of peasants distinct from its internationalist counterparts. In this case, the defendants were reduced to following a foreign ideology of revolution that did not apply to their own society. The colonial state’s case argued extensively that this was the revolutionary tactic and design. The Comintern took a “fatherly interest” in Indian politics for a reason.27 Referencing leaders of the Communist International and agents like Spratt, Bradley, and Hutchinson, James suggested that you put yourself at the head of the national movement say that you want to see India governed by Indians, and all these (sic) time you mean nothing of the sort, you want the dictatorship of the proletariat all over the world and the transitional stage of government under Stalin in Moscow.28 Indian defendants were ridiculed by James for their failure to understand communist doctrine and ideology. In one example, he mocked the Calcutta-based “Peasants and Workers Party,” for the “horrible misnomer” of their group, which demonstrated the “wrong ideology.”29 According to Stalin and Lenin, peasants are “certainly number two” and workers were the primary forces of revolution. James argued that this “misnomer” was only corrected when Spratt arrived and changed the name of the group to “Workers and Peasants Party.” James added that before Spratt’s arrival, the group had included “non-violence” in their

Conspiracy in Meerut: Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933  101 methodology, and Spratt also removed this deviation from doctrine.30 This was one of many instances that privileged the agency of CPGB members in orchestrating the conspiracy and dismissed entirely the activities of Indians as agents in their own communist movement. Spratt and his British communist colleagues were the directors, and the Indian defendants were puppets at best. The Indian defendants stood in sharp contrast to what the British saw as authentically Indian. Early on, James addressed the defendants directly and claimed that their loyalty to Moscow meant: “you do not love your country, you are anticountry, you are anti-God, and you are anti-family.”31 He added that communists are “anti-everything which the normal man considers decent.” In contrast, India was defined by its peasantry who were deeply “conservative.” The Indian peasant, unlike the communist, “loves his home, he loves his country and he loves his God.” The peasant also “attempts to have a little bit of land,” which is not acceptable to communists either. He dwelled extensively on the point that communism was “anti-God.” James represented the “Soviet creed” as set on “destroying the belief in God, whether he be the God of the Christian, the Jew, the Muhammadan or the Buddhist.” If the Soviet “reign of destruction” comes to India, the “God of Hinduism will also have to be destroyed” and rather Indians will be forced to preach the “gospel of anti-God.”32 Thus, communists in India represented a “tiny minority” much like communists in Russia, who attempted to “root out” everything important to the peasant, in this case home, country (read state), and God. In doing so, the trial coded the values of peasants as authentically Indian even when such attributes reflected orientalist assumptions about the colonized as a religious and spiritual other. Moreover, the Meerut case demonstrated the power of colonial knowledge in representing Indian society as essentially different and the British as a force for preserving India’s “traditions” against the threat of communists and other internationalists. Thus, the British legitimated their investment in Meerut by asserting a new civilizing mission in which colonial authorities protected Indian society from Indian communists who sought to spread foreign ideals and challenged “tradition.” The trial also constructed the accused as “anti-national” in relation to mainstream nationalist elites of the Congress. Sifting through volumes of evidence for nearly four months to pluck any disparaging remarks made in Comintern publications about nationalist leaders, James pointed to multiple instances when the accused labeled the INC a “misguided bourgeois body.”33 James named several prominent Congress leaders in the courtroom, who served on the defense committee of the accused, as targets of communists on trial in Meerut: “Pandit Motilal Nehru is regarded by them as a dangerous patriot. His son, Jawaharlal Nehru, is dubbed a tepid reformist. Mr. Subash Chunder Bose is a bourgeois and a somewhat ludicrous careerist. Mr. Gandhi they regard and dislike as a grotesque reactionary.”34 The Comintern’s critiques of bourgeois nationalists in the colonies were widespread by the opening of the trial primarily because of shifts within the communist movement, namely the transition from the united front to

102  Michele Louro the more rigid third period defined by class warfare and Stalinization.35 By 1929, communists were being directed to turn on their former nationalist allies in the colonies who were waging anti-colonial struggles outside the framework of the communist party.36 The colonial construction of internationalism and communism as anti-national only strengthened as the trial progressed. After James’ opening remarks and the presentation of over 2,617 exhibits of evidence over six months, the magistrate committed the case to a trial in January 1930. His committal order left little doubt that the Meerut trial sought to divide international communism from what it meant to be authentically Indian. The magistrate amplified this point in his committal order arguing that the conspirators’ fidelity to internationalism forced them to criticize the values fundamental to Indian national society including religion, caste, and family. He concluded that communists did not share Indian values represented by nationalists: “What ideas the Communist has about the cow I do not know, but it is well known that he has no use for private property, religion, caste, or family, things which are in no way foreign to the ideals of Indian nationalism.”37 He added his own conclusions emblematic of the colonial state imperatives in Meerut: “Nothing can be clearer than that the nationalists and communists having nothing in common and their real aims are diametrically opposed.”38 Returning to James, his final conclusions in his opening remarks underscore the impossibility for Indians in the dock to be international communists. He argued that the prosecution’s case is not concerned with proving whether the defendants were communist party members or with gaging the “extent to which they had graduated in Leninism or in the tactics of the Third International.”39 As his remarks already demonstrated over the course of the preliminary hearings, the Indians on trial were incapable of understanding or adhering to the doctrine of international communism because it was anathema to what it meant to be Indian. The Indian defendants had to be educated by reading communist texts produced in Moscow or learning from European communists. As James asserted, “it is not the orthodoxy of the ideology of any accused as a Bolshevik, that matters, but whether he has imbibed the Bolshevik objective and conspired to put the Bolshevik plan into action.”40 The statement revealed the core assumption of the trial that the conspiracy was an act of “imbibing” and acting on a plan that was external to India and found instead in the impermeable and rigid texts produced by a few communist elites in Moscow, far removed from and indeed inapplicable to an India defined by the raj’s orientalist and racist stereotypes of Indian society. Meerut became a legal space for the erasure of internationalism from nationalist and anti-colonial histories of India. The construction of the binary between Indian nationalism and internationalism was part of the colonial project that sought to distance mainstream nationalists from their more radical counterparts on the left, inspired by international communism. The trial also constructed an archive for India’s past that maintains those divisions between anti-colonialism

Conspiracy in Meerut: Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933  103 and nationalism on one hand, and internationalism and communism on the other. This maneuver was part of a longer history of colonialism in India, as it deployed orientalist and racialized stereotypes about Indian society as religious and backward and therefore incongruent with the most powerful political projects of the interwar world. The Indian political landscape was a tabula rasa to be shaped by outside forces that were never indigenous to the subcontinent. Meerut in the World The Meerut prisoners were significant to global protests across the left in the early 1930s. This chapter began with referencing a “concerned” letter of protest against Meerut signed by leading luminaries of the left in the United States. The letter addressed to Ramsay MacDonald emblemized a consensus across the global left, of communists and non-communists, that protested the trial and demanded the release of the prisoners. A survey of several international congresses, demonstrations, and pamphlets offers a glimpse of the significance of the Meerut prisoners to the world. Such events and publications were primarily created in cities like London, Paris, Moscow, and New York, yet they drew upon the voices and testimonies of the prisoners and other Indian internationalists like M.N. Roy in ways that connected anti-colonialism in India with a wider world of international leftist politics. Thus, the Meerut trial’s impact globally ran counter to colonial imperatives by inspiring rather than restricting international connections between India and the world. As the chief target of the Meerut trial, the Comintern covered the trial in its publications with equally polemic pieces that countered the colonial state and featured the prisoners as symbols of capitalist and imperialist oppression. In one article in 1929, the Communist International situated the trial within a global history of anti-communist oppression that dated back to Marx’s days and specifically the German trial against the Communist League in Cologne in 1852.41 Meerut represented only the latest manifestation of legal repression against the “fighters of the working class” who have been targeted by capitalist states “hundreds of thousands of times.”42 According to the article, the tragedy of the trial is that the leading ranks of the Indian working class have been “torn away from the mass organizations, thrown into cholera and tuberculosis-infected stone jugs, where some of the arrested men have already been reduced to the last degree of physical exhaustion.”43 According to the article, the colonial prosecution’s case laid out by James was an “astonishingly boorish and ignorant, slanderous mess.”44 In the International Press Correspondence, the well-known communist and founder of the Communist Party of India, M. N. Roy, reflected on the situation in India on the eve of the Meerut trial when only a handful of the thirty-two accused had been arrested. Citing the arrest of Spratt, Roy called for workers in Britain to support their counterparts in India because a “better life for an Indian

104  Michele Louro worker will mean a better life for the British worker.”45 Roy called on his fellow communist readers to take up the anti-imperialist cause, for “the promise to help the Indian workers in their struggle for a better life has no meaning unless it is the promise to help India overthrow imperialist domination.”46 Anti-imperialist institutions like the League against Imperialism (LAI) also were instrumental in underscoring the importance of the Meerut case to the wider world of internationalists whose politics challenged capitalist and imperialist oppression. The LAI was established in 1927, based in Berlin and later London, that united communists, socialists, and anti-colonial nationalists in a global movement against imperialism.47 In Frankfurt, Germany, the opening of the Second World Congress of the LAI, taking place in July 1929, highlighted the Meerut Conspiracy Case. Although more communists attended this event than previous LAI meetings, the Frankfurt congress nevertheless provided a space for anti-imperialists who were not communists to participate. Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian representative of the LAI, did not attend, but he sent greetings from India and spoke directly to the importance of the Meerut case, which had listed the LAI as a communist conspirator: “You are doubtless aware that an effort is being made in India to make it appear that the LAI is opposed to the ideas of the National Congress or of free India. I can assure you however that in spite of all this propaganda the National Congress realizes the good work that the League has done and appreciates its association with it.”48 The Frankfurt congress also supported the passage of a resolution that anti-imperialists “stand unconditionally” for the cause of the Meerut accused.49 Delegates also unanimously elected one of the Meerut accused, D. R. Thengdi, to serve as the honorary chairman of the LAI in a symbolic gesture of support for the defendants.50 The epicenter of protests against the case remained in the metropole, while the British section of the LAI amplified the Meerut case. The metropole often became the site from which pressure on the colonial government could be leveraged because politicians at home in Britain could not be imprisoned or silenced as quickly as they were in the more repressive legal and political milieu of the colony. Within the LAI, British leftists worked together, across the communist party divide, to establish the National Defense Committee (NDC) to coordinate demonstrations and fundraising for the defense of the Meerut prisoners. Under the leadership of Reginald Bridgeman, who also ran the British national section of the LAI, the NDC launched protests, published ephemera, and fundraised from 1929 to 1934.51 The group collected by 1932 over £700 for the defendants, produced and disseminated more than 20,000 leaflets, organized widespread demonstrations across Britain and the world, and pushed colleagues to raise the issue in the British parliament and among trade unions.52 In May 1929, the NDC circulated “War on Indian Workers,” a pamphlet arguing that Meerut was a “blow against the whole Indian working class.” It concluded by demanding the withdrawal of the Meerut trial—and pressuring the British Labour Party (LP), Trade Union Council, India Office, and Viceroy to

Conspiracy in Meerut: Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933  105 demand the same.53 Pamphlets like these were circulated throughout Britain to galvanize British trade unions, as well as through Bridgeman’s LAI networks that reached an audience of sixty-three formal affiliated organizations in thirtyfive states or territories worldwide.54 Before the Meerut trial, the British LAI remained an urban anti-imperialist group based in London. However, from 1929 to 1933, it merged with the NDC and reinvented itself as the protector and champion of the Indian working class. This new image and mission enabled it to appeal to a wider support base beyond London and across the communist and socialist divide. Local Leagues cropped up in Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Liverpool, and Glasgow.55 The NDC laid out the importance of the trial for the world in its 1931 pamphlet, “The Prisoners’ Reply.”56 Printed at 2 Gray’s Inn Road in London, Bridgeman’s base for LAI and NDC operations, the pamphlet began by arguing that “the Meerut conspiracy case is not confined to India but has a direct connection with the working class and their struggle in Great Britain.”57 Both the British and Indian workers shared the “same enemy – British imperialism, British capitalists, and the British Government.”58 It made a clarion call for all British workers to “raise his or her voice” and added: “in every mine, factory, or workshop, in every trade union branch and co-op, guild and at every meeting of all working class organisations, the demand should be put for the immediate release of those now incarcerated in Meerut jail until the Government are forced by mass pressure to terminate the greatest ‘class trial’ in the record of British imperialism.”59 Among the highlights of these pamphlets were the excerpts of Meerut’s testimony by the defendants that were reprinted for wider circulation in Britain and through the international networks of the LAI. For example, one pamphlet reprinted the testimony of Dharni Goswami, a trade unionist and member of the Indian Workers’ and Peasants’ Party, a known communist organization in India. Goswami challenged the prosecution’s argument that the defendants were “antinational,” and stated: “I am an internationalist, but that does not prevent me from cooperating with the national movement of the oppressed people against the oppressing Government, against imperialist and for their liberation from it.”60 Another reprinted testimony by R. R. Mitra, secretary of the Bengal Jute Workers’ Union, echoed Goswami’s position by stating that he was an internationalist and supported “complete freedom from British imperialism” as well as “national independence.”61 He argued that it was a “sheer misrepresentation” for the prosecution to call him “anti-national.” Mitra added that “so-called Nationalist leaders” of the INC were “reformists” and did not desire independence, but rather dominion status or “something even less.” In contrast, Mitra and his colleagues in the dock sought to “overthrow” imperialism and claim national independence for India. He asked rather provocatively: “I am therefore entitled to ask who are the better nationalists, we or they (INC)?”62 Importantly, the published excerpts by prisoners may have challenged the prosecution on the grounds of their own credentials as nationalists, yet their

106  Michele Louro testimonies were locked within the colonial binaries of nationalism and antinationalism in India. By pitting the Congress against the accused, despite the fluidity between the two, the colonial state had argued that Congress was authentically national, while those connected to international politics were antinational. Rather than challenging this logic, the prisoners inverted it by arguing that they were more representative and “better nationalists” than their Congress counterparts. In other words, both the colonial state and the accused contended with who was a “better” Indian, Congressmen working for constitutional reforms that were externally derived from the British or communists and trade unionists organizing labor in India under the “Russian model.” Neither side of the debate recognized the significant overlap between nationalist and communist, nor did either entertain the idea that Indian politics could be shaped from the ground up and not derived from British or Soviet models external to India. Ultimately, the binaries of internationalism and nationalism remained intact in the arguments by the colonial state and those who protested the Meerut trial. Beyond Britain, calls for solidarity with the Meerut prisoners resonated across the anti-imperialist and communist worlds. Across the Atlantic, American leftists participated in Meerut protests and fundraising as well. This was not without precedent in American politics. Already by 1929, many Irish Americans and African Americans in the U.S. had raised objections to imperialism, and especially British rule over India, and articulated a common cause between anti-colonialism and their respective struggles.63 International Communism, in particular, facilitated many of the connections between the African diaspora and Asian anticolonial activists in places like New York, London, and Paris.64 In the U.S., demonstrations against British imperialism and the Meerut trial took place at British Consulates in Washington D.C., New York, Cleveland, and St. Louis. All called upon American workers and especially communists to join Indian workers in the global struggle against American capitalism and British imperialism. Many also demanded the release of a known American communist, J. W. Johnstone, imprisoned by the British for traveling to India and attending a meeting of the All-Indian Trade Union Congress.65 In particular, the Cleveland demonstrators produced an especially pointed critique of the British in India. The demonstration was organized by several Cleveland chapters of larger and mainly communist front organizations including the Workers Communist Party, All-American Anti-Imperialist League, International Labor Defense, Trade Union Educational League, and Young Workers Communist League. In a letter to the consulate, the protestors asserted that: “The Indian workers are among the most oppressed in the world,” but that they were making “heroic efforts” to organize against the British. The pamphlet argued that Johnstone arrived in India to help in this process, and the British have imprisoned him as a common “criminal.” In solidarity with not only the imprisoned Johnstone, the letter vowed that American workers will do “everything possible” to help Indian workers in their struggle until they have “driven British imperialism out of India.”66

Conspiracy in Meerut: Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933  107 In Chicago in 1929, protestors called upon American workers to join in solidarity with Indian workers and demand the “unconditional independence of India.”67 Yet, they also articulated a strong belief that American and British imperialism were symbiotically linked in ways that could no longer be distinct, and the demand for Indian independence was interconnected with the call for “complete and immediate independence for all American colonies and semicolonies.” The banners alongside protestors in Chicago read: “Down with Yankee imperialism! Down with British Imperialism! Release the Meerut Prisoners!”68 Other slogans listed on the pamphlet targeted American imperialism in Latin America and especially Nicaragua, where U.S. interventionism had led to full-scale occupation by the 1920s. The literature implicated Wall Street and American capitalists especially: “Down with Wall Street’s Imperialist War against Nicaragua!”69 In the case of Meerut, the International Committee for Political Prisoners (ICPP), the international arm of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in New York was instrumental to the public campaign against the trial in 1929.70 Under the leadership of Roger Baldwin, co-founder of the ACLU and LAI member, the ICPP raised some funds in the U.S., which he sent to Bridgeman and the NDC in London. Critically, through his work on behalf of the Meerut Conspiracy Case, Baldwin maintained a collaborative relationship with Jawaharlal Nehru as well, even from such a great distance. This relationship would inform future projects; in the later 1930s, for instance, Baldwin raised similar funds and launched another publicity campaign to protest the arrest and detainment of M. N. Roy. Once again, Nehru was his contact, and even though the Indian leader had little connection to Roy, he ensured that Baldwin’s funds from the U.S. were put to use in the trial. The British closely monitored the press coverage and flow of funds into colonial India for the cause of the Meerut accused, although they did not prevent financial contributions from arriving in the hands of those who defended Meerut’s political prisoners. The Home Political Department in particular tracked the money trail and frequently engaged in rigorous debate over its permissibility.71 Ironically, as the colonial state sought to disrupt international flows of ideas, funds, and agents to India by launching Meerut, they allowed the flow of financial contributions into the subcontinent from abroad. Colonial officials noted that the foreign funds for the prisoners’ defense should not be held up because the contributions were not sufficient to do “much harm” in “subsidizing communists in India,” while the funds might actually help the colonial state as it had a financial obligation to ensure that accused had access to legal counsel.72 Consensus emerged that properly vetted and monitored flows of funds from communists abroad were permissible if it served the financial interests of the raj. The optics in the metropole and internationally were significant to the raj as well. This is most clear in an exchange over a visa application for J. R. Campbell, member of the CPGB who requested permission to travel to India and legally

108  Michele Louro advise the defense. A robust debate between the Viceroy, the Secretary of India (London), and the Home Political Department took place over the approval of his visa. After significant discussion, the Secretary of State in London consented his approval for Campbell’s visa with “rigorous conditions” that barred him from attending or speaking at any Congress or AITUC meetings. Notably, Campbell did not satisfy the government’s main requirement that travelers to India should have no contact with Soviet Russia for at least five years prior to their departure. London and Delhi were aware that Campbell had been in contact and traveled to Moscow even as late as 1929, the same year as his application. Nevertheless, the Secretary of State ultimately decided that Campbell could travel to India and advise the defendants, as any known communist with “sufficient experience” would not have been able to meet the requirements imposed by the British. As an LP appointee overseeing a case against Indian leftists, the Secretary of State noted with some discomfort in his letter to the Viceroy: “The feeling among the Labour members is very strong against the communists,” and he added that he had “run some risks with them in an effort to be strictly ‘impartial’ and ‘fair’ in providing all the necessary facilities for the defense.”73 While the entire trial was not constructed on the principles of parity and fairness, the optics in the metropole mattered, as did the finances of one of the most expensive legal cases in British imperial history. Already the subject of inquiry, the trial attracted significant attention from the metropole on the costs of the prosecution alone. To allow Campbell passage would force the CPGB to offset some of the colonial state’s costs piling up in the lengthy trial, as well as placate leftists and communists in the metropole who demanded a “fair” trial and representation for the accused. Equally important, the British government, even under the LP, may have had “strong feelings against the communists,” they nevertheless had no legal means to prosecute the CPGB in the metropole. This was not the case in India where the colonial penal code was a repressive instrument of control and power, and this context made possible prosecution to the fullest extent of communism in the colonial context. The demonstrations and protests against Meerut did not go unnoticed by either British or American policymakers. Both amplified their anti-communist efforts in the wake of the trial’s opening sessions and the protests the case engendered. British authorities doubled down on their anti-communist offensive in the early1930s. It is well documented in the colonial archive that the cache of documents seized from the Meerut accused in the trial became the basis of field guide for British intelligence officers working in India and East Asia.74 In fact, an opening chapter in the field guide is appropriately title, “Lessons from Meerut.” The trial’s evidence legitimated their fears of communism’s spread to colonial India and other colonies, facilitating a surge in anti-communist efforts across the empire. In 1934, the raj banned the Communist Party of India, and the British pursued further arrests of communists in Southeast Asia and in the Far East.75

Conspiracy in Meerut: Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933  109 The Meerut case also attracted the attention of the U.S. State Department and opened a new chapter that strengthened already existing ties between American and British surveillance of Indian radicals.76 In March 1931, the American Consulate General in Calcutta drafted two concerned letters to the India Office requesting more information on the “legal position in British India with respect to the admission and deportation of communists” and the “regulation of communist propaganda and other activities.”77 The letter added that the State Department “has expressed a keen interest in the Meerut trial and a desire to have a more complete account of the proceedings and evidence.”78 An internal memo within the Home Political Department in India admitted in their consideration of the American’s request that “no special laws or regulations against communists” existed, although that was precisely one of the objectives of the Meerut trial, the legal criminalization of communism.79 This exchange, however, provides some preliminary evidence of the “keen interest” shared by both the British and Americans on the question of international communism in the early 1930s, long before the Cold War.80 Meerut ultimately became a significant international and transnational cause for those engaged in the global struggle against capitalist and imperialist power in the 1930s, as well as a site for strengthening the anti-communist efforts of the British and Americans. Indeed, events in India were shaping as much as being shaped by international forces and events. In the case of the London-based NDC, Meerut offered a space for communists and non-communists to continue to collaborate and work across party and ideological lines for the cause of a single legal case in a remote city in colonial India. This was tremendously important given the trial coincided with the Comintern’s class warfare tactics of the third period. The trial also brought together the imaginaries of workers in places as distant as Cleveland, Ohio and Meerut, India. Such connections provide a counternarrative to the raj’s argument that internationalism was oppositional or external to India and Indians. Instead, India was interconnected to internationalism, a point that was not lost among colonial state authorities and diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic who worked to disrupt ties that linked communism and anti-colonial resistance in the 1930s. Conclusions The volume in which this essay on the Meerut Conspiracy Case appears is significant as a whole in undoing the British raj’s construction of global and international history as external to the colonial past in India. In the case of the Meerut trial, marginalizing Indian politics from world politics was a key imperative of the raj and its desire to control anti-colonialism in India. A reading of the colonial objectives in the Meerut trial serves as a reminder that the binary construction of nationalism and internationalism, anti-colonialism and communism, as distinct categories, had roots in the colonial repression of connections

110  Michele Louro between India and the interwar world. The colonial project in the 1930s sought to weaken resistance to empire globally by casting communists and internationalists as anti-nationalists in the Indian context. Likewise, the international protests against the trial demonstrate the importance of Indian laborers to the global cause and imaginary of leftists across the interwar world. It is the fluidity of the defendant’s political worlds, as they engaged with local, national, and global politics, that became so troubling to the British and made the Meerut trial possible if not inevitable. This essay offers only a glimpse of the many global dimensions of the Meerut trial. Notably, the defendants themselves, who acted on their own terms in resisting colonial oppression and anti-communist efforts in India, produced alternative narratives that at times connected with international protests and at other times challenged them. Their story requires a more substantial history beyond the scope of this essay. The voices and perspectives of the defendants will add a nuanced understanding to the politics of the 1930s, as internationalism and anti-colonialism intersected in complex ways that we have yet to appreciate as historians. Much of this chapter considers the earliest days of the trial when the prosecution crafted and controlled the narrative of the Meerut trial. As the case progressed, other international forces and events impacted the accused in the dock and the way that the world perceived the Meerut Conspiracy Case. The global depression seemed to demonstrate the failures of capitalism and encouraged those in Meerut to resist the British more aggressively and defiantly. The trial also became a site for debate across the international and Indian left over the Stalinization of the Soviet Union and the Communist International. The sectarianism across the communist movement of this moment became a central element in the final days of the trial as eighteen of the accused turned on the other defendants in the dock and the elite barristers who led their defense. Thus, the trial became a public event that showcased the ways leftists came together to challenge the British Empire in the early days of the trial, as well as the ways interwar international politics divided such solidarities by its conclusion. Notes 1 I want to extend a special thanks to Ali Raza, who has been instrumental in shaping my thinking about the Meerut Conspiracy Case. I also benefited substantially from presenting an early version of this paper at the Harvard International and Global History Seminar. I am grateful for the invitation and comments from Erez Manela and David Armitage, as well as the students and faculty who attended. 2 Letter Addressed to Ramsay MacDonald, October 1929, International Committee for Political Prisoners Papers, copy Roll 5, Box 3, Files 19–23, New York Public Library, New York. 3 Much has been written about the global impact of Sacco and Vanzetti’s case. See Lisa McGirr, “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Global History,” The Journal

Conspiracy in Meerut: Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933  111

4

5

6 7 8

9

of American History 93, no. 4 (2007): 1085–1115. On the global dimensions of the Scottsboro case, see Susan D. Pennybacker, Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). The historiography on the Meerut Conspiracy Case is rather scarce given its importance to the colonial state and Indian trade union history. There are a few classic texts that recount the narrative of the trial, for instance: Pramita Ghosh, The Meerut Conspiracy Case and the Left Wing in India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1978); Devendra Singh, Meerut Conspiracy Case and the Communist Movement in India (Meerut: Research India, 1988); and a chapter on the trial in Abdul Noorani, Indian Political Trials, 1775–1947 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Many of the documents of the trial have been published in Jyoti Basu (ed.). Documents of the Communist Movement in India. Vol. II, Meerut Conspiracy Case (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1997). More recently, a series of essays situating the trial in the internationalist milieu of the late 1920s appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 3 (December 2013): 310–377. Another essential reading includes Susan Pennybacker’s chapter on the Meerut Conspiracy in Susan Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). My first book addressed the narrowness in which we frame histories of Indian nationalism through a study of Jawaharlal Nehru’s internationalism. See Louro, Comrades against Imperialism. Other recent histories also push the complicate histories that privilege Gandhian nationalism and push boundaries of locality and nation in the studies of anti-colonialism in India. See Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts; Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); J. Daniel Elam and Kama Maclean, Revolutionary Lives in South Asia: Acts and Afterlives of Anticolonial Political Action (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); and Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Meerut Conspiracy Case Papers, Committal Order, National Archives of India, New Delhi, 9–10. Langford James, “Opening Address of the Special Public prosecutor before R. Milner White in the Emperor vs. Phillip Spratt and Others,” 12 June 1929 (Meerut: Saraswati Machine Printing Press, 1929), 1. For examples, see Michele Louro, Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2013); Kris Manjapra, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010); and Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). The years after the First World War were significant to internationalizing anticolonialism. See for example, Ali Raza, Franziska Roy & Benjamin Zachariah, editors, The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and Worldviews (Delhi: Sage, 2013); Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Michele Louro, Heather Streets-Salter, Carolien Stolte and Sana TannouryKaram, League against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020). In the case of the U.S. and India, see Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

112  Michele Louro 10 Quotes taken from Ashoke Mukhopadhyay (ed.), India and Communism: Secret British Documents (Revised up to the 1st January 1935 and Compiled in the Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, 1933). Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1997. 11 The Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–1922), the Civil Disobedience Campaign (1930–1934), and the Quit India Movement (1942–1945). 12 Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 34. 13 Louro, Comrades; Raza, Revolutionary Pasts; Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists; and Maclean, A Revolutionary History. 14 An important point has been made in recent scholarship about the failure to historicize and write about ‘failed’ utopian movements like that of the Communist International or Indian leftist politics. We miss a great deal of historical interpretation by dismissing such movements that shaped the milieu of politics in India and the world in the interwar period especially. On international communism, see Brigitte Studer, The Transnational World of the Cominternians (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and in India, Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts. 15 Langford James, “Opening Address of the Special Public prosecutor before R. Milner White in the Emperor vs. Phillip Spratt and Others,” 12 June 1929 (Meerut: Saraswati Machine Printing Press, 1929). 16 Made popular by Rudyard Kipling’s classic novel Kim, the great game has an extensive historiography. For recent examples, see Evgeny Sergeev, The Great Game, 1856–1907: Russo-British Relations in Central and East Asia (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013). 17 James, “Opening Address,” 3. 18 This point on the externality of communism to India is made compellingly in Raza, Revolutionary Pasts. 19 James, “Opening Address,” 20. 20 Ibid., 20–21. 21 James, “Opening Address,” 19. 22 Manabendra Nath (M. N.) Roy (1887–1954) was the most prominent Indian communist who was active in the Communist International. His historiography is extensive. Clemens Palme (C. P.) Dutt (1893–1975) and Shapurji Saklatvala (1874–1936) were influential Indian expatriates in Britain who were vocal communists and involved in the CPGB. Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (1880–1937) was an Indian exile in Berlin who served as international secretary of the League against Imperialism until 1932, when he moved to the Soviet Union and later was executed as part of Stalin’s purges in the mid-1930s. 23 The cover to the bound and reprinted opening address: Langford James, “Opening Address of the Special Public prosecutor before R. Milner White in the Emperor vs. Phillip Spratt and Others,” 12 June 1929 (Meerut: Saraswati Machine Printing Press, 1929). 24 James, “Opening Address,” 144. 25 James, “Opening Address,” 168. 26 Ibid. 27 James, “Opening Address,” 83. 28 James, “Opening Address,” 74. 29 James, “Opening Address,” 99. 30 Ibid. 31 James, “Opening Address,” 3. 32 James, “Opening Address,” 4.

Conspiracy in Meerut: Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933  113 33 James, “Opening Address,” 1. 34 James, “Opening Address,” 1–2. 35 For a history of international communism, see Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). 36 See Raza, Revolutionary Pasts; and Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India: 1919–1943: Dialectics of a Real and Possible History (Bakhrahat: Seribaan, 2006). The classic text on Indian communism is Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). 37 Committal Order, 26. 38 Committal Order, 71. 39 James, “Opening Address,” 181. 40 Ibid. 41 “Trial of Indian Revolutionaries,” by S. The Communist International 6, no. 20 (1929): 781–790, copy archived in Meerut Conspiracy Case papers, P. C. Joshi Archives on Contemporary History, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. 42 Ibid., 781. 43 Ibid., 781–782. 44 Ibid., 782. 45 Manabendra Nath (M. N.) Roy, “Persecution of the Labour Movement in India,” Inprecorr 8, no. 6 (February 1929): 139–140. MCC Papers, P. C. Joshi Archives New Delhi, India. 46 Ibid., 140. 47 For a comprehensive history, see Louro, Streets-Salter, Stolte, and Tannoury-Karam, League against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives. For a history of LAI and its ties to the Communist International, see also Fredrik Petersson’s many essays on the LAI and his book, Willi Münzenberg, the League against Imperialism, and the Comintern, 1925–1933, 2 volumes (Lewiston: Queenston Press, 2013). 48 Nehru to the LAI secretariat, 26 June 1929, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, edited by Sarvepalli Gopal (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1972), Vol. 3, 308. 49 Message to Meerut Prisoners, Copy in Comintern Archive, Russian State Archives for Social and Political History, Moscow, Russia. Citations are from the digital copies houses at the Library of Congress, European Reading Room, Washington, DC (here after RGASPI), File 542/1/87/3. 50 Dhondhi Raj Thengdi was a Bombay-based trade unionist charged in the Meerut Conspiracy Case. Thengdi served on the executive council of AITUC until his arrest, and he had been named as a delegate to the Second World Congress of the LAI scheduled for July 1929. He was imprisoned in the initial roundup in March 1929. 51 Reginald Bridgeman was a former British diplomat and onetime LP member. He worked on various anti-imperialist, anti-fascist and peace projects in Britain throughout the interwar years. From his office, he managed the international secretariat for the LAI (1932–1937) and the British national section of the LAI (1927–1937). He also ran the National Defense Committee for the duration of the Meerut trial. For the history of his role in both, see Louro, Comrades against Imperialism, Chapter five; Mark Reeves, “Two Leagues, One Front? The India League and the League Against Imperialism in the British Left, 1927–1937,” in League against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives. You can also find references to this group in several works on British anti-imperialism. See, Nicholas Owen, The British Left and India: Metropolitan AntiImperialism, 1885–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and more recently

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52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64

65 66

Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso Books, 2019). Report of the League against Imperialism and for National Independence (British Section), February 3, 1933, copy in P&J(S) 179 (1933), 25–28, Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) Files, 1912–1950 Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, Micro-film edition (Leiden: IDC Publishers, 2000). (hereafter IPI). “War on Indian Workers,” published by the League against Imperialism British Section, copy in the Comintern Archive, RGASPI papers, File 542/1/31/25. See League against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives, introduction. Reginald Bridgeman, “Secretary’s Report” in Report of the National Conference of the League Against Imperialism (British Section), February 1931 (London: League Against Imperialism, 1931), Bridgeman Papers. The Prisoners’ Reply: Meerut 1931,” (pamphlet), Copy archived in Meerut Conspiracy Case papers, P. C. Joshi Archives on Contemporary History, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. The Prisoner’s Reply, cover page. Ibid. Ibid. The Prisoner’s Reply, 10. The Prisoner’s Reply, 26. The Prisoner’s Reply, 27. On Irish American claims to solidarity between Irish and Indian anti-colonialism, see Jyoti Atwal and Eunan O’Halpin (eds.), India, Ireland and Anti-Imperial Struggle: Remembering the Connaught Rangers Mutiny, 1920 (Delhi: Aakar, 2021); and Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). There is an extensive literature on African American engagement with India’s struggle for independence. Much of the earlier works on African American’s connections with Indian anti-colonialism focus on the figure of Gandhi and his influence over Martin Luther King, Jr. For examples, see a classic text by an Indian specialist, Dennis Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); or another by an American specialist, Sudarshan Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). Recent scholarship has extended the focus beyond Gandhi and examined lesser-known connections between African Americans and Indians before the Second World War. See, Gerald C. Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); and Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). There is some exciting and innovative scholarship seeking to bring together histories of black internationalism and anti-imperialism in Asia within a broadly defined framework of international communism. For examples, see Mikan Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917– 1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Susan D. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Shadow of Shadows,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11, no. 1 (2003): 11–49. For a history of the Johnstone affair, see Michele Louro, “The Johnstone Affair and Anti-Communism in Interwar India,” Special Section on “Anti-communism in Transnational Perspective,” Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 1 (2018): 38–60. Copy of Pamphlet sent by Chicago Consulate to British Embassy in Washington DC, January 13, 1928. L/P&J/12/279, 34–35, IPI Files.

Conspiracy in Meerut: Global History of Colonial India, 1929–1933  115 67 “Radicals Stage Demonstration on Michigan Ave.,” Chicago Tribune, January 13, 1929, 20. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 For Baldwin’s papers on the Meerut Conspiracy Case, which are extensive, see the Roll 5, Box 3, Files 19–23, International Committee for Political Prisoners Papers, New York Public Library. 71 See Home Political Files, National Archives of India, New Delhi, India. Most of these files have been digitized and are available at https://www.abhilekh-patal.in/ jspui/. 72 Home Political Department, 1930, File No. 21/IX, National Archives of India, New Delhi, India. 73 Secretary of State for India (London) to Viceroy (Simla), 28 November 1929, NAI, Home Political Department, File No. 63-KW. 74 The field guided is reprinted in its entirety here: Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay (ed.), India and Communism: Secret British Documents (Revised up to the 1st January 1935 and Compiled in the Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, 1933). (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1997). 75 See Ashok Kumar Mukhopadhyay (ed.), India and Communism: Secret British Documents (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1997). A key example of the amplification of anti-communism after the Meerut Conspiracy Case is the Noules Affair in Shanghai. See, Heather Streets-Salter, “The Noulens Affair in East and Southeast Asia,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 21, no. 4 (2014): 394–414. 76 For a history of transatlantic surveillance connections and the Ghadar movement, see Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also, Markku Ruotsila, British and American Anticommunism before the Cold War (Portland: Frank Cass, 2001). Of note also is the Special Section on “Anti-communism in Transnational Perspective,” Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 1 (2018). 77 Letter, American Consulate General (Calcutta) to Secretary of the Government of India, 24 May 1931, Copies in the Horst Kruger Archive, ZMO (Berlin), File 388-1, Box 54. 78 Ibid. 79 Copies in the Horst Kruger Archive, ZMO (Berlin), File 388-1, Box 54. 80 There are many Cold War histories on the struggle against communism. For American and British efforts in Cold War India, see Robert McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

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Nonviolence and Nonalignment Indian Foreign Policy and the American Civil Rights Movement, 1936–1964 Nico Slate

On March 9, 1959, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reimagined India’s foreign policy in a speech broadcast via All India Radio. He began by offering the expected paeans to nonviolence. Throughout his visit to India, the “American Gandhi” had repeatedly linked himself to the legacy of the Mahatma. When that legacy concerned the struggle against American racism, Indian audiences were overwhelmingly supportive. King ventured into trickier terrain when he suggested that nonviolence should guide India’s foreign policy. “It may be that just as India had to take the lead and show the world that national independence could be achieved nonviolently,” he declared, “so India may have to take the lead and call for universal disarmament.” Calling for disarmament was not itself especially radical. Given the unlikeliness that other nations would accept such a call, most statements in support of disarmament were nothing more than utopian hot air. King did more, however, than encourage a fantasy of world peace. He challenged Indian leaders to take action regardless of the military policies of other countries. “If no other nation will join her immediately,” he suggested, “India may declare itself for disarmament unilaterally.”1 Given India’s fraught relations with two heavily armed neighbors—Pakistan and China—it would be easy to dismiss King’s comments as hopelessly idealistic. Indian foreign policy under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru has, however, often been presented as an idealistic extension of a Gandhian commitment to nonviolence. According to the veteran diplomat, T. N. Kaul, “the concept of nonviolence of Gandhi was translated to the international field by Nehru who pleaded for world disarmament in the UN from 1954 onwards.” Nehru himself linked nonviolence to one of the signature elements of Indian foreign policy: nonalignment. “We had been conditioned for 30 years by Mahatma Gandhi and his gospel of peace,” he wrote in 1963 in an article for Foreign Affairs. It was their commitment to Gandhian nonviolence, Nehru explained, that made Indian leaders “determined to cultivate friendly and coöperative relations with all countries and to devote ourselves to the economic and social progress of India without getting entangled in national or international conflicts.” Nehru’s connection between nonviolence and nonalignment would be echoed by both advocates and DOI: 10.4324/9781003393962-9

Nonviolence and Nonalignment  117 critics of Indian foreign policy. According to historian Ramachandra Guha, even members of opposing parties saw in nonalignment “a creative application of Gandhian principles in world affairs.”2 Many scholars have discarded the idea that nonalignment was primarily a product of Gandhian nonviolence. Indeed, many have questioned whether nonalignment was a coherent policy at all. According to historian Jayanta Kumar Ray, nonalignment was “an enormous heap of waste, full of nebulous notions, illicit generalisations, self-flattering myths and shibboleths of hero-worship.” Ray rejected the idea that Indian foreign policy was an extension of nonviolence. The political scientist Rahul Sagar similarly dismissed the idea that the ends of Nehru’s foreign policy were “‘idealistic,’ focused on anti-imperialism and world peace, and the means were ‘principled,’ in the form of non-alignment and non-violence.” Not all scholars have rejected the idea that nonalignment was principled. The political scientist Sumit Ganguly has argued that nonalignment reflected Nehru’s “deep-seated beliefs about global order.” The scholar Priya Chacko has located nonalignment within “an international politics of friendship which also bears the influence of Gandhian and Buddhist thought.” Was nonalignment a principled policy inspired by a moral commitment to nonviolence? Or was it a “nebulous” mixture of “self-flattering myths”? Debates concerning the relationship between nonviolence and nonalignment have tended to focus on the origins of Nehruvian foreign policy. King’s speech, and the larger history of Afro-Indian solidarity, offers an opportunity to reframe the debate by focusing on the impact of Indian foreign policy and of nonalignment in particular. Even if it was primarily a public relations gambit from the perspective of Indian diplomacy, the link between nonalignment and nonviolence played an important role in shaping the results of that diplomacy—nowhere more so than in relation to the American civil rights movement.3 It was in the struggle against white supremacy that nonalignment and nonviolence were linked most effectively. American civil rights activists used Gandhian tactics to create crises that threatened America’s claim to be the champion of the free world. From the vantage point of Washington, America’s reputation mattered relatively little in countries aligned with either the Soviet Union or the US; their loyalties were already decided. But India’s nonalignment, coupled with the long history of Indian solidarity with African American struggles, meant that civil rights crises threatened to turn India away from the United States. At least, that was the argument made by civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King, an argument that depended on a direct link between Gandhian nonviolence and nonalignment. Analyzing the racial dimensions of Indian foreign policy flips the direction in which most scholars have approached the relationship between nonviolence and nonalignment. Rather than probing the influence of nonviolence on nonalignment, this chapter examines the impact of nonalignment on the transnational spread and efficacy of nonviolence— particularly within the American civil rights movement.4

118  Nico Slate There is now a vast literature on the transnational dimensions of the long African American freedom struggle. Historians have debated the degree to which Cold War dynamics gave civil rights activists leverage over American powerbrokers who worried about the damage racism was causing to America’s reputation abroad. We also have a nuanced portrayal of the ways that antiCommunism constrained and limited the movement. What remains to be fully explored are the origins and character of foreign opposition to American racism, particularly within the recently decolonized world. Taking such opposition as a given obscures the complex histories of colorism, racism, and anti-racism in different parts of the world, as well as the pressures that limited the support that leaders of postcolonial nations were willing to offer distant freedom struggles. As the history of nonalignment makes clear, Indian solidarity with African American struggles was both mobilized and constrained within the context of the Cold War.5 While scholarly accounts of nonviolence have understated the importance of diplomacy, histories of Indo-American relations are strangely silent in regard to nonviolence. Scholars such as Carol Anderson, Andrew Rotter, and Brenda Gayle Plummer have examined the role of race in Indo-American relations. Most diplomatic histories view nonviolent civil disobedience as separate from the affairs of state. The relationship between nonviolence and nonalignment offers an opportunity to bring together the transnational and the international, and to rethink how we understand Indian foreign policy.6 The story of nonviolence is often told as a triumph of the transnational. Popular accounts have followed the idea of nonviolence from Gandhi to King and then onwards to Lech Walesa, Desmond Tutu, and other prominent leaders across the globe. While reinforcing the “great man” approach to history, such a borderless narrative obscures the local, national, and international contexts within which ideas of nonviolence were reimagined and repurposed. Even the best histories of nonviolence—histories that go well beyond famous figures like Gandhi and King, and that recognize the complex networks involved in the spread of nonviolence often downplay the political context of foreign affairs. Examining the relationship between nonviolence and nonalignment brings diplomatic history back into the story of nonviolence. And it returns the history of nonviolence to the realm of Indian history. While it is true that nonviolence has a profoundly global lineage, it is also true that the story of nonviolence was repeatedly shaped by histories originating within India—and not just on account of the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi.7 Examining the relationship between nonalignment, nonviolence, and the Cold War reveals an ironic disjuncture in the history of Indian foreign relations. While Nehruvian nonalignment was crucial to the Cold War civil rights nexus, Nehru himself was relatively muted in response to American racism, constrained by the need for American aid and by a newfound respect for national autonomy. Instead, it was Indian opposition figures like J. B. Kripalani and Rammanohar

Nonviolence and Nonalignment  119 Lohia who emerged as the most outspoken and impactful Indian critics of American racism. In 1951, Lohia spent over a month traveling across the United States defending his own vision of nonalignment, while encouraging Americans to take up civil disobedience in the struggle against racism. In 1960, Kripalani and his wife, the Congress leader Sucheta Kripalani, toured the US and spoke with a variety of African American audiences about the power of nonviolence. In 1964, Lohia returned to the US and was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, while attempting to enter a “whites-only” restaurant. It would be easy to contrast the outspoken activism of Kripalani and Lohia with Nehru’s relative reticence on matters of American racism. Yet from the perspective of the American civil rights movement, both the Nehru government and critics like Kripalani and Lohia worked together to link nonviolence and nonalignment in opposition to American racism.8 Nehru and the Color of Nonalignment In 1900, the African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois declared, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” His vision extended across the globe. He defended the rights of the “millions of black men in Africa, America and the Islands of the Sea.” But he also spoke on behalf of “the brown and yellow myriads elsewhere.” Such a global conception of anti-racism appealed to a range of anti-colonial activists, including Jawaharlal Nehru. As a young man, Nehru came to see the Indian struggle for independence as one part of a global fight against white supremacy. In 1936, he mapped “the British upper-class division of the world” as follows: (1) Britain—a long gap, and then (2) the British Dominions (white population only) and America (Anglo-Saxons only, and not dagoes, wops, etc.), (3) Western Europe, (4) Rest of Europe, (5) South America (Latin races), a long gap, and then (6) the brown, yellow and black races of Asia and Africa, all bunched up more or less together. Like many of his contemporaries, Nehru envisioned solidarity among “the brown, yellow and black races.” In 1940, he wrote Du Bois that he was “greatly interested in the future of the American Negroes.” Two years later, he sent a telegram to the Council on African Affairs, an anti-imperial organization led in part by the African American singer, actor, and activist, Paul Robeson. Nehru wrote, “All good wishes for success against fascism, imperialism and establishment of true freedom everywhere. Recognition equal rights, opportunities all races and peoples.” Nehru had met Robeson in London in 1938 and the two men had developed a bond of friendship and admiration. Like Du Bois, Nehru and Robeson were both socialists who linked racism and imperialism to economic exploitation.9

120  Nico Slate Nehru’s solidarity with African American struggles influenced his view of the United States and of Indo-American relations. In August 1945, he told an African American journalist that he supported the “valiant struggle” of African Americans to obtain their “cherished birthright.” He added, “In many ways our problems are kindred.” Nehru was aware that the “problems” of African Americans and Indians were not all “kindred.” While recognizing similarities between racism and imperialism, Nehru also saw a key difference between African American and Indian freedom struggles. African Americans were a distinct minority. By contrast, Indians were the vast majority in India and, by August 1945, were on the cusp of gaining independence. In the last years of the Raj, Nehru began to rethink the geography of Afro-Indian solidarity. Rather than comparing India’s struggle to that of African Americans, he began to frame his solidarity for African American struggles in relation to the diplomatic ties between independent India and the United States. In August 1946, he told another African American journalist that he “often wondered if the people of America realized how much they suffered in the world’s estimation because of their ill-treatment of the Negro.” He declared, “To the Negro people of America I send the greetings of my own people, and my assurance of our sympathy in their cause.” He made a similar promise when, in February 1948, he sent birthday greetings to Du Bois. “India will always remember,” Nehru wrote of Du Bois, “his sympathy during her struggle for freedom.”10 Nehru would find it difficult to live up to such promises. Even before 1947, before he assumed the burdens of leading an independent nation, Nehru constrained his criticism of American racism. He was well aware of the need to court American support in the struggle for independence. At times, Nehru was willing to flatter the self-image many (white) Americans held of their country as a champion of global democracy. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1938, he stated, “Most Americans, bred up in the democratic tradition, sympathize with India’s struggle for freedom.” This was more a statement of hope than of fact and one that required Nehru to ignore the degree to which American racism marred its “democratic tradition.” Ignoring American racism and the history of the US empire in places like Puerto Rico and the Philippines, Nehru wrote that Americans “dislike empire and imperialism and the domination and exploitation of one nation by another.” Nehru was not alone in muting criticism of American racism. Many Indian Americans had for generations tried to use American racial hierarchies in order to advance their own position. In 1942, a prominent Indian American activist wrote Nehru, “In sending the representatives of India to the United States, it may be borne in mind that they should not be of too dark a complexion, because we have the Negro problem in this country.”11 It is unclear what Nehru made of such advice. But his approach to American racism grew even more cautious after Indian independence. Saddled with the trauma of partition and the heavy weight of poverty and other legacies of colonial rule, he worried about alienating either of the world’s major superpowers.

Nonviolence and Nonalignment  121 In January 1947, he sent a revealing note to the first Indian ambassadors to the United States and China. “In the U.S.A. there is the Negro problem,” he stated. “Our sympathies are entirely with the Negroes.” He added, “There is no reason to hide this because that is our basic policy.” But “any conduct which might entangle us or raise difficulties should be avoided.” India “must be friendly” with both the Soviet Union and the United States. Toward that end, representatives of India should “avoid any public expression of opinion which might prove embarrassing or distasteful to the Government or people of the country where they serve.” Nehru left unclear how an Indian diplomat could convey “sympathies” for the African American struggle without embarrassing the American government. Indeed, public condemnation would prove to be one of the most effective ways foreign governments could make real their solidarity with African Americans and the struggle against racism in the United States.12 In 1949, Nehru visited the United States for the first time. The American State Department planned an itinerary that did not include any engagements with African American organizations or audiences. But a “private, off-the-record dinner” was arranged in Manhattan for Nehru to meet with prominent African American leaders. Roy Wilkins, an influential figure in the NAACP, helped organize the event. He wrote Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister and herself a key Indian diplomat, that Nehru might want to use the gathering “to express his concern over the impairment of American prestige throughout Asia, Africa, and the Pacific because of American racial policies.” The invitations to the gathering offered a similar framing. The renowned African American diplomat, Ralph Bunche, signed the invitations. Bunche explained that Nehru had expressed his desire to discuss “the repercussions in Asia of America’s racial practices.” Bunche wrote the guests that Nehru was “concerned that the greatest propaganda weapon of the Communists in their struggle for power throughout Asia has been the news of racial strife in the United States.”13 Nehru’s official tour of the United States ended on November 3. As planned, he remained in the country and, two days later, attended the NAACP-sponsored gathering at the Park Avenue home of a wealthy philanthropist. The meeting was co-chaired by Bunche and the Executive Director of the NAACP, Walter White. In addition to Nehru and Vijayalakshmi Pandit, other participants included Arthur Spingarn, Roy Wilkins, and Louis Wright, all of the NAACP; Robert C. Weaver, a professor at NYU; Mrs. Robert L. Vann, the publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier; Claude Barnett, director of the Associated Negro Press; Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of the National Council of Negro Women; Mordecai Johnson, the President of Howard University; William Hastie, the Governor of the Virgin Islands; Lester Granger, the Director of the National Urban League; and George Weaver of the CIO. The conversation ranged from African American history to contemporary legal struggles. Nehru reiterated his solidarity in the battle against white supremacy, but also explained the limits his official position imposed on that solidarity. According to the Associated Negro

122  Nico Slate Press, Nehru “said he felt it would have been highly improper for him to come into another country, especially on an official visit and venture to criticize the internal policies of that country.”14 Vijayalakshmi Pandit similarly limited her public criticism of American racism. Before Indian independence, she earned the respect of many African American leaders when she refused to speak at Baltimore’s Lyric Theater until it was opened to African Americans. One African American newspaper quoted her stating, “The happiest moments I have spent in America were those when I was at dinner in Harlem. I felt that I was at last with my own.” According to Walter White, Pandit had been warned that “she would injure India’s cause if she identified it with the Negro’s struggle for freedom.” She replied, “I am colored myself and so are my people.” In 1950, by contrast, Du Bois reported that Pandit told a gathering of African American women that “she did not go along wholly with what Negroes in America were saying and trying to do; that she advocated patience and waiting.” According to Du Bois, the audience “felt insulted and cruelly disillusioned.” Du Bois explained the change in Pandit’s approach to American racism as a result of her being “flattered and dined by high officials” in Washington. But Pandit’s increasing caution could also be explained by India’s need for American aid.15 The pressures of diplomacy did not entirely weaken official Indian solidarity with African American struggles. In 1959, the Indian ambassador to the United States, M. C. Chagla, praised Martin Luther King in a speech to 600 cadets at the Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. To celebrate King in Montgomery in 1959 was an act of courage and one that Chagla repeated several times in the years ahead. In April 1960, he denounced racial prejudice as “anachronistic” and “antediluvian.” He made those comments while speaking alongside the president of Howard University, Mordecai Johnson, at Washington’s Cosmos Club. Johnson had for decades studied Gandhian nonviolence, and had repeatedly expressed support for Indian independence. He attended the private gathering with Nehru in 1949 and continued to find ways to bring Gandhian nonviolence into the struggle against American racism. Like Johnson, Chagla saw the sit-ins, which had erupted a few months earlier, as an exciting example of Gandhian nonviolence. At Kansas University, Chagla praised “massive non-violent, non-cooperation” and compared the sit-in movement to the Indian independence struggle.16 Nehru also continued to offer support—if at times muted—for the burgeoning civil rights movement. In December 1956, he expressed his “enthusiasm” at the prospect of meeting Martin Luther King. A few years later, King gifted Nehru a copy of his book, Stride Toward Freedom, in which he wrote, “We hope that as the march to the sea ushered in mass action leading to India’s independence, so our efforts here may become a part of the great liberation movement changing the face of the world.” In January 1959, Nehru thanked King for Stride Toward Freedom and stated that he hoped to meet King in India soon. He added, “I have

Nonviolence and Nonalignment  123 long been interested in the work that you have been doing and, more especially, in the manner of doing it.” In October 1960, while on a visit to New York, Nehru was given a citation celebrating the birthday of Gandhi from civil rights leaders. While accepting the citation, he declared that he was “all for racial equality” and was “proud” and “pleased” that Gandhi’s legacy was helping advance the struggle against racism.17 Nehru, Chagla, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, and other Indian diplomats and officials remained cautious in their response to American racism, but their muted solidarity nevertheless contributed to a growing awareness that American racism was a foreign policy liability. That awareness was especially strong among civil rights activists themselves. In the spring of 1961, one activist stated that attacks on the “freedom riders” made a mockery of American efforts to tell “the people of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the free world in general that we desire to be their friends.” In the summer of 1963, on a bus leaving New York for the March on Washington, a reporter for the Village Voice overhead one protester telling another: “The Negro on this March has to be very glad of the existence of the Soviet Union. This government is so worried about wooing the African and Asian mind that it may even give the Negro what he wants.”18 Beginning in the 1940s, civil rights activists had declared that racism threatened American foreign policy in an age of decolonization. Over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s, that message became a common refrain within the movement. But it was not just civil rights activists who recognized the link between civil rights and American foreign policy. In June 1963, a woman in Dearborn Michigan sent a letter to President John F. Kennedy. She wrote: “The United States stands up to this world and says, ‘Hey World, look at me!! You should fashion your government after mine! We’re a free people and our constitution is for the people, of the people, and by the people.’ And the world looks down on us and says, ‘yes, this is true if your skin happens to be white.’” It remains unclear how many Americans worried about the link between the Cold War and civil rights, but President Kennedy himself offered one of the most iconic statements of that link when he told Americans: We preach freedom around the world and we mean it. And we cherish our freedom here at home. But are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other, that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes, that we have no second-class citizens, except Negroes, that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race except with respect to Negroes? While historians like Mary Dudziak and Tom Borstellman have tracked the impact of the Cold War on the civil rights policies of American powerbrokers, what has remained understudied is the origins of foreign solidarity with African American struggles. Despite the fact that Indian officials muted their opposition to American racism, that opposition still mattered. With that said, if

124  Nico Slate the only international objections to American racism had come from cautious leaders like Nehru, it is unlikely that the Cold War civil rights nexus would have had much impact. Ironically, what endowed Nehruvian nonalignment with greater power—at least in regard to the struggle against American racism—was the fact that the Indian government did not have control over all Indian visitors to the United States. It was Indian opposition figures—and Indian socialists, in particular—who spoke out most boldly against American racism. It was their courage that linked nonviolence and nonalignment and drove independent India’s contribution to the fight against racism.19 A Different Nonalignment In the summer of 1951, Rammanohar Lohia told a gathering of African American students and faculty at Howard University that civil disobedience was “a weapon of universal application.” Since the early 1920s, Americans had contemplated using Gandhian nonviolence in the struggle against American racism. And many Indians—Gandhi included—had proclaimed the universal applicability of nonviolence. Yet Lohia made the case for nonviolence with a boldness that was unheralded in the history of Indo-American relations. “I am not being oblique,” he told his audience at Howard: civil disobedience should “be used on the race question in this country.” “If I were an American,” Lohia declared, “I would explore civil disobedience, by Negroes and Whites.” Many Americans had dismissed the possibility of using civil disobedience given the fact that African Americans were a distinct minority in the United States. Lohia acknowledged that argument and then rejected it. “I know that the Negro is a minority,” he told his audience, “but I believe that if there is an action with courage, there will be a response from other sections of the people, and the minority can be transformed into a majority.”20 Lohia’s boldness distinguished him from the muted support Jawaharlal Nehru offered the African American struggle. The differences between Nehru and Lohia are even more striking given the fact that they had once worked together to strengthen Afro-Indian solidarity and to build ties between African Americans and India’s independence movement. In 1936, Nehru asked Lohia to serve as the secretary of the All India Congress Committee’s Foreign Department. In that position, Lohia wrote W. E. B. Du Bois to establish “the closest relations with our Negro comrades of America.” Lohia and Nehru worked together with other Indian socialists to build ties to African American struggles. In 1938, the “Eurasian” writer Cedric Dover, born and raised in Calcutta, sent Nehru and Lohia some thoughts on “developing further relations with American Negroes.” Dover had spent time in the US and had developed friendships with Du Bois and a variety of other African American intellectuals. It is telling that he directed his materials to Nehru and Lohia—among the two most globally-minded Indian

Nonviolence and Nonalignment  125 radicals in the 1930s and close collaborators in broadening the international facets of the independence movement.21 By 1951, Lohia had become one of the fiercest critics of Nehru’s policies, and he did not mute his views when speaking before American audiences. He loudly denounced Nehru’s policies—both domestic and foreign—and offered his own conception of a “third camp” that was aligned neither with the Soviet Union nor the United States. Rather than confining Gandhian nonviolence to the antiBritish struggle, Lohia made clear that civil disobedience was just as necessary in independent India. Indeed, he had to cancel the first portion of his US tour after he was arrested by Nehru’s government for advocating land reform. But despite his criticisms of Nehru, Lohia’s arguments for the use of civil disobedience were often strengthened by Nehru’s foreign policy. While the two former Congress Socialists had fallen out with each, their efforts dovetailed in ways that magnified the impact of Indian foreign policy on the African American freedom struggle. During his tour of the United States, Lohia linked the possibilities of nonviolence to decolonization and the shifting policies of the Afro-Asian world. At Fisk University, he spoke on “the Awakening of Asia and Africa,” and suggested that decolonization had created new opportunities for freedom struggles throughout the world. He then connected decolonization to nonviolence. He asked Fisk’s president, the African American sociologist Charles Johnson, “Why not a little jail going? Resist some of this injustice directly, and non-violently, and go to prison if required?” Even while linking nonviolence to decolonization, Lohia made clear that gaining nominal independence was not the end of the struggle for freedom. He spoke often of his use of civil disobedience against the Nehru government. At the Highlander Folk School, a radical, racially integrated institution in the hills of Tennessee, Lohia said, There is the usual way to remove injustices, through an election and a change of government every five years. But there is also the way of non-violent direct action, which includes the violation of unjust laws. For instance, we use this way of struggle against our unjust land tenures—what you call sharecropping. By comparing sharecropping to the unequal distribution of land in India, Lohia linked white supremacy to the legacy of colonialism and revealed that even “free” India had yet to live up to its promise of freedom.22 Lohia’s criticism of Nehru’s government was matched by his fierce belief in the power of nonviolence. In Harlem, Lohia connected decolonization and nonviolence and refused to accept the argument that civil disobedience would not work for African Americans. After arguing that cautious anti-racist efforts were “insufficient both for the demands of the world situation closing in, and for the demands of the awakening Negro population in America,” Lohia “outlined some

126  Nico Slate of the techniques of non-violent direct action and urged that peaceful resistance be applied, with American ingenuity, as an essential part of any approach to the racial problem.” His hosts in Harlem were so moved by Lohia that they invited him to come back to talk more about how to use civil disobedience against American racism. Despite a densely packed schedule, Lohia found the time to return to Harlem. He located the power of nonviolence within the shifting geopolitics of the postwar era. According to one observer, Lohia described the opportunity for a creative world role which history was thrusting upon the Negro people in America. By practicing non-violent direct action against segregation, by peacefully violating unjust racial laws wherever they exist, by willingly going to jail, the Negro—and the white who joined him—would thus strengthen the camp of peaceful change throughout the world. While geopolitics could contribute to the African American struggle, the reverse was also true. By stressing the ability of African Americans to contribute to the struggle for world peace, Lohia recognized Black agency and the multidirectional nature of transnational connections.23 Lohia was not alone in connecting decolonization to the struggle against racism. His fellow socialist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay had launched her own protest against American racism during a visit to the United States in 1941. On a train in Louisiana, she refused to leave a white’s only car, and told the ticket collector, “I am a colored woman obviously and it is unnecessary for you to disturb me for I have no intention of moving from here.” Throughout her time in the United States and in subsequent writings, she used transracial conceptions of color to link the struggles of African Americans to those of Indians and other colonized peoples. She encouraged Indian audiences to learn from African American struggles and prophesied that African Americans would benefit from the decolonization of Asia and Africa. Using a global conception of Jim Crow, she wrote: Soon Africa too, will come back, and come into her own, and the dark ones will cease to be the ‘untouchables’ of the world. The international colour line has been challenged and stormed by Asia. No more the colonials will allow themselves to be jim-crowed the world over and their country looted under pseudo-slogans. The Negro problem will only cease when the colourline of imperialism vanishes, when Science becomes the benefactor of man and knowledge his friend, and human respect for each other and for the sanctity of life are observed as the codes of our daily life. Chattopadhyay envisioned a global struggle against “Jim Crow” in all its forms—including caste in India and economic exploitation globally. Like Lohia,

Nonviolence and Nonalignment  127 she connected her anti-imperialism and anti-racism to her socialism. At the root of racism she found “the inevitable alliance between the new industrial kings and the old land monarchs, against the rising democratic forces of the masses.”24 Chattopadhyay and Lohia opposed the intersection of multiple oppressions. A similarly inclusive socialist politics inspired J. B. Kripalani, another prominent opposition figure, to speak out against American racism during a journey to the United States. Like Lohia, Kripalani was an outspoken critic of the Nehru government. What made Kripalani’s opposition politics more complicated, and his trip to the United States even more consequential from the perspective of Indo-American relations, was that he traveled with an equally committed Gandhian who happened to be a prominent political figure in the Congress Party— his wife, Sucheta Kripalani. In 1960, when the Kripalanis arrived in the United States, Sucheta was the general secretary of the Congress Party and an MP from New Delhi, while J.B. led the opposition Praja Socialist Party. The Kripalanis made light of their political differences. When asked by a reporter about their respective political parties, J.B. joked, “Obviously, the Congress Party is in power both at home and abroad.”25 During their time in the United States, the Kripalanis spoke on Indian democracy, international peace, and nonviolence. In Los Angeles, Sucheta addressed a women’s conference on disarmament sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, while J.B. spoke on “India’s Choice: A Challenge to Democracy” at Pasadena’s First Baptist Church. In Michigan, Sucheta spoke at the annual meeting of the MI branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an organization that had long opposed racism at home and imperialism abroad. Like Lohia, the Kripalanis made clear that they understood racism as an impediment to freedom and peace.26 On Friday, June 10, 1960, J.B. gave the main speech at Howard University’s 92nd annual commencement. To some 650 students, including five from India, he declared, “The moral principles which guide the conduct of individuals in the social field must also guide their conduct in the political and international field.” He encouraged his audience to embrace “civil disobedience” and to “suffer for a cause one holds to be just and right.” He explained the necessity of civil disobedience in relation to international affairs and inequalities of power and wealth. “Political power in recent times has come to be concentrated in a few militarily powerful countries,” he stated. “In these countries, too, it is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and groups.” Thus, he linked inequality in international relations to inequality within nations. It was the wealthy elite, he argued, who had “plunged nations into war without the consent of the people.” It was the same wealthy elite that oppressed minorities.27 It remains unclear how the audience of Howard faculty, students, and their families responded to Kripalani’s globally-minded socialism. Several African American newspapers covered Kripalani’s speech, describing him as an “Indian Solon” and “an early associate” of Gandhi who played a key role in “the Gandhi

128  Nico Slate passive resistance movement.” Such ties to Gandhi could be used to soften or obscure Kripalani’s radicalism. Many Americans had come to associate Gandhi primarily with nonviolence rather than the radical anti-colonialism that was equally central to his life. Yet in 1960, particularly within the African American community, Gandhi remained known as a radical opponent of imperialism and white supremacy. Kripalani’s ties to Gandhi were also highlighted by Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard, who introduced Kripalani by urging the assembled students to read the works of Gandhi. “A thousand years from today,” Johnson declared of the Mahatma, “he will challenge the human mind and heart in an unparalleled manner.” It was only a few months earlier that Johnson had spoken alongside M. C. Chagla, the Indian Ambassador, as Chagla denounced racism as “anachronistic” and “antediluvian.” Despite J. B. Kripalani’s status as an opposition figure, the Indian Embassy hosted a special gathering for both Kripalanis, a gathering that included Johnson and other African American advocates of Gandhian nonviolence. The way Kripalani was linked to Gandhi and embraced by the Indian government—despite his oppositional status back in India—enhanced his prominence and the importance of his outspoken criticisms of American racism.28 In addition to meeting with veteran Gandhians like Mordecai Johnson, the Kripalanis met with the most renowned African American advocate of Gandhian nonviolence: Martin Luther King. A year earlier, Sucheta Kripalani had greeted Martin and Coretta Scott King at the airport in Delhi when they arrived for their tour of India. She was then the vice chairman of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, an organization dedicated to safeguarding Gandhi’s legacy. Now, it was the Kings who assumed the role of host. In Atlanta, they welcomed the Kripalanis into their home. Covering the Kripalani’s time with the Kings, one newspaper reported, “They are followers of Mahatma Gandhi and expressed satisfaction at the successful application in the new world of the Gandhi application of civil force through peaceful means.” It remains unclear what the Kripalanis and the Kings discussed in private, but afterward J.B. was quoted in the press that “the application of democracy in race relations should be easy in the United States, which is a democratic country, and a Christian one, familiar with the thinking based on the philosophy of freedom.” His emphasis on “should be” made clear the gap that separated the ideals of American democracy—and of Christianity— from the realities of Jim Crow in the still-segregated South.29 It was fitting that the Kripalanis spent time with Mordecai Johnson and the Kings, given that Johnson was one of the black theologians who inspired King to study Gandhi as a young man. A lineage of Gandhian struggle linked Johnson, the Kings, and the Kripalanis, a lineage that also influenced a younger generation of civil rights activists. The Kripalanis had the opportunity to interact with the students who were, in the summer of 1960, at the forefront of the civil rights struggle. It had only been four months since the sit-in movement swept across the country, led by courageous students who risked their lives to oppose American

Nonviolence and Nonalignment  129 racism. And it had been only a few months since many of the student leaders had gathered to create a new civil rights organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Along with the Kings, the Kripalanis helped lead an SNCC training at Morehouse College. One participant remembered the Kripalanis stressing “how they were absolutely terrified, but did it nonetheless.” Just months after the sit-in movement had galvanized a new phase of the civil rights movement, the Kripalanis found themselves talking with the young people who were driving the movement forward.30 Like the Kripalanis and King, many SNCC activists would develop an international perspective on the struggle against American racism. In October 1960, a few months after the Kripalanis led that workshop at Morehouse, SNCC hosted an important gathering of student activists from across the South. The invitation to the gathering declared that “students must look beyond the South, into the Pentagon, into Europe, and into Russia.” SNCC activists were well aware that the Cold War rendered American racism a public relations disaster. But their global awareness was not merely tactical. Regardless of its potential impact on American government officials, the shifting geopolitics of color inspired civil rights activists to see their efforts as part of a global movement for freedom. In March 1961, an article in the SNCC newsletter declared that the admission of thirteen new Asian and African nations to the United Nations “literally shifted the weight of international authority from white to non-white hands.” Talking with the Kripalanis gave students the opportunity to learn from veteran activists, and to deepen their connections to global struggles against white supremacy and imperialism. The Kripalanis helped provide a global context for American civil rights protests and spoke out publicly in opposition to American racism. But they did not directly create any crises for diplomats in Washington or Delhi. That honor would fall to Rammanohar Lohia, who launched his own satyagraha against Jim Crow when he returned to the US in the spring of 1964.31 Lohia did not plan to be arrested in opposition to racism. But when the opportunity arose, he seized it with characteristic bravado. On May 27, 1964, he was denied service at a restaurant in Jackson, Mississippi. The following day, he returned to the restaurant and tried again to enter. The manager refused and asked him to leave the area. Lohia replied, “I tell you with greatest humility, I am not leaving.” The police arrested him and a white professor at a nearby African American college. In the spring of 1964, the American public had become accustomed to civil rights activists being arrested. But it was unprecedented for an Indian leader, a member of the Indian parliament, to be arrested for protesting Jim Crow. Lohia’s arrest was reported by dozens of newspapers, including southern papers like the Atlanta Constitution and the Nashville Tennessean. The African American press covered the story in detail. While many reporters focused on the potential diplomatic fallout, Lohia redirected attention toward the basic inequity of Jim Crow. “They’re treating me as if I was a foreign dignitary who was badly treated,” he told reporters. “This has nothing to do with the state department or

130  Nico Slate the Indian embassy. I went to Jackson almost as an American.” Yet he knew his identity mattered, and that it could be leveraged to force Americans to confront their hypocrisy. When the State Department apologized, Lohia replied that the apology should go the Statue of Liberty.32 Lohia explained his protest as part of a lifelong commitment to using civil disobedience against injustice of all kinds. “The fact that I had not been arrested in America,” he told reporters, “was something of a blemish on my record.” Like the Kripalanis, Lohia met with student activists who were themselves courting arrest in the struggle for freedom. At Tougaloo College, he spent hours talking with a group of young activists that included the SNCC leader, Bob Moses. Lohia encouraged the student activists to dedicate themselves to a long struggle that would require patient community organizing as well as more dramatic protests. He explained his own commitment to what he called “the seven revolutions,” which included “women’s rights as well as the problems of caste, and colour which had brought him to Mississippi.”33 After his arrest, Lohia called for a thousand white people to “flood areas of Mississippi to protest racial injustice.” He pondered returning to Mississippi to continue participating in the struggle against racism, but ultimately decided to continue with his itinerary. He was well aware that timing was central to the success of any protest. Indeed, he would likely not have been denied serve at that café in Jackson had he arrived a few weeks earlier. Most Southern restaurants would not hesitate to serve an Indian visitor, especially a renowned diplomat. Lohia himself had traveled across rural Tennessee and Alabama in 1951 without problem. Why then was he denied service in Jackson in the spring of 1964? A few days before Lohia arrived in Jackson, Dr. Savithri Chattopadhyay, an Indian professor at Tougaloo, had gone to eat at the same restaurant that would deny service to Lohia. Chattopadhyay had entered the restaurant with a white faculty member and an African American student in order to test the bounds of segregation. To their surprise, all three women had been served. The following day, Jawaharlal Nehru had died. Chattopadhyay and another Indian professor went back to Jackson to send a telegram to India. On their way back to Tougaloo, they were refused service at a different branch of the same restaurant that had only the day before welcomed them. The manager explained that the chain had banned anyone from India in response to the fact that an African American student had been accidentally served after being mistaken for Indian. Unfortunately for the management of the restaurant, they instituted such an unusual extension of Jim Crow, a ban on anyone from India, only a few days before Lohia came to town. Lohia was refused service not because he was mistaken for African American, but because the restaurant management had come to see anyone from India as a threat to Jim Crow.34 It is fitting that it was Nehru’s death that triggered the chain of events that led to Lohia’s arrest. In the words of scholar Daniel Kent-Carrasco, “Both Lohia and Nehru struggled to make socialism in India relevant and attuned to the

Nonviolence and Nonalignment  131 events taking place in a wider international setting. In this sense, for Nehru and Lohia, revolution was a global project.” Lohia had become deeply critical of Nehru’s approach to international politics. But by creating a civil rights crisis, and encouraging African American activists in their own struggles, Lohia helped render Nehru’s nonalignment a more effective instrument of global justice. Conversely, Lohia’s arrest would have mattered less if he had been a representative of a country that was aligned with the United States or the Soviet Union. It was India’s nonalignment that sharpened the impact of Gandhian nonviolence in the struggle against racism. Despite the muted support the Indian government offered African American activists, despite Nehru’s own limitations as an advocate for civil rights at home and abroad, it is hard to imagine a more fitting tribute to Nehru’s legacy than Lohia’s arrest in Jackson, Mississippi.35 Conclusion On December 4, 1956, Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, a Professor at Alabama State College and an early biographer of Martin Luther King, spoke at a mass meeting recognizing the one year anniversary of the start of the Montgomery bus boycott. He connected nonviolence to an expansive globalism via a series of rhetorical questions: Who are the people that are talking about one world, the United States, integration, universal brotherhood? Who are the people that reject violence at a time when men everywhere are sick of war and conflict? Who are the people that have brought Mohandas Ghandi [sic] to the streets of Montgomery? These are indeed ideals and aspirations of the modern world. Defying the borders of race and nation, nonviolence bridged two kinds of integration: racial and international. For Reddick, nonviolence was a harmonizing force that operated on multiple scales, from the local to the national to the international. He was not alone in linking the Montgomery bus boycott to global affairs. At the same gathering, the African American journalist Carl Rowan stated that the people of Asia and Africa could not “save themselves from Communism” unless the United States moved beyond Jim Crow and gave all the people of the world, regardless of their color, “ample reason to believe that they can find equality under the banner of Democracy.” Whereas Reddick envisioned a world beyond borders, Rowan appealed to American nationalism and Cold War patriotism. Yet both figures globalized the civil rights struggle. Both celebrated a new world order defined by decolonization, in which the United States would have to uproot racism if it wanted to gain the support of nonaligned nations like India.36 Helping to undermine American racism constituted an important victory for Indian foreign policy, but nonalignment was not driven by the desire to end racism—whether in the United States or elsewhere. The anti-racist effects of

132  Nico Slate nonalignment should be understood as a happy byproduct of a policy that was crafted from the vantage point of India’s own needs on the global stage and at home. Some historians have argued that nonalignment was driven primarily by domestic considerations. Given the political diversity of India, a country that housed radical communists, statist socialists like Nehru, conservative landowners, and a variety of other political perspectives and interests, nonalignment mirrored on the global scale the kind of flexibility and inclusivity that was needed at home. What has been understudied is the way in which nonalignment itself was empowered by the coming together of different political voices—particularly the voices of Nehruvian diplomats and those socialist critics who had parted ways with Nehru and the Congress. Nehru saw nonalignment as a form of power. In the words of Alyssa Ayres, “Nonalignment with any bloc, in Nehru’s view, had propelled India to a position of trust and influence in the world.” But the power of nonalignment resulted in part from the activism of radical socialists outside Nehru’s government.37 This paper has focused on the way in which Indian foreign policy dovetailed with the activism of Indian opposition figures to link nonalignment and nonviolence. But as the speeches by Reddick and Rowan make evident, African Americans played the leading role in connecting Indian foreign policy to the civil rights movement. These connections were far from instrumental. Indeed, most internationally-minded civil rights activists aimed to connect freedom struggles throughout the world—not solely in order to advance the local movement, but also because of what they saw, in the words of geographer Jake Hodder, as “a fundamentally shared experience of racial injustice.” In the words of historian Vincent J. Intondi, “There was a consistent voice inside the black community making the case that freedom, peace, and colonialism were links in the same chain.” The connection between nonviolence and nonalignment was not just a means to end Jim Crow, but also a way to end violence, poverty, and racism on a global scale.38 King’s speech on All India Radio revealed a gap between India’s foreign policy and the ideals of Gandhi. How could a Gandhian country maintain a large standing army? Yet the history of nonviolence within the American civil rights movement bridged that gap. During his time in Delhi, King discussed the potential for a nonviolent international politics with Nehru. Although he believed in nonviolence between individuals, Nehru argued that one nation could not survive if it embraced nonviolence when facing a violent threat. King remained adamant that world peace and anti-racism were inextricably bound. He would continue to believe in that connection throughout his life. On February 6, 1968, just a few months before he was assassinated, King told an anti-war gathering, It is a wonderful thing to work to integrate lunch counters, public accommodations, and schools. But it would be rather absurd to work to get schools and lunch counters integrated and not be concerned with the survival of a world

Nonviolence and Nonalignment  133 in which to integrate. And I am convinced that these two issues are tied inextricably together and I feel that the people who are working for civil rights are working for peace; I feel that the people working for peace are working for civil rights and justice. Perhaps King’s most powerful statement linking nonviolence domestically and internationally came in a tribute to Gandhi that was published in the Hindustan Times. “If we fail, on an international scale, to follow the Gandhian principle of non-violence,” King wrote, “we may end up destroying ourselves through the misuse of our own instruments. The choice is no longer between violence and non-violence. It is now either non-violence or non-existence.” Notes 1 “Notes for Conversation Between King and Nehru,” and King, “Farewell Statement,” March 9, 1959, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Volume V Threshold of a New Decade, January 1959–December 1960, eds. Clayborne Carson, Tenisha Armstrong, Susan Carson, Adrienne Clay, and Kieran Taylor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 130 and 135–136. 2 Triloki Nath Kaul, India and the New World Order, Volume 1 (New Delhi: Gyan, 2000), 263; Nehru, “Changing India,” Foreign Affairs, April 1963, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1963–04-01/changing-india; A. P. Rana, “The Intellectual Dimensions of India’s Nonalignment,” The Journal of Asian Studies 28, no. 2 (February 1969): 299–312; Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007), 187. 3 Jayanta Kumar Ray, India’s Foreign Relations, 1947–2007 (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2011), 18; Sumit Ganguly, “India’s National Security,” in David M. Malone, C. Raja Mohan and Srinath Raghavan (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 146; Rahul Sagar, “Before Midnight: Views on International Relations, 1857–1947,” in Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy, 74; David M. Malone, Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 154; Priya Chacko, Indian Foreign Policy: The Politics of Postcolonial Identity from 1947 to 2004 (New York: Routledge, 2012), 16; Sumit Ganguly (ed.), Engaging the World: Indian Foreign Policy since 1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Sunil Khilnani, Rajiv Kumar, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Prakash, Nandan Nilekani, Srinath Raghavan, Shyam Saran and Siddharth Varadarajan, NonAlignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the 21st Century (New Delhi: Penguin, 2013). 4 Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). On the cold war civil rights nexus, see James Zeigler, Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2015); Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang (eds.), Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: “Another Side of the Story” (New York: Palgrave, 2009); Robeson Taj Frazier, The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell (eds.), Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Mitchell Lerner, “‘Is it For This We Fought And Bled?’: The Korean War and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” Journal of Military History 82, no. 2 (April 2018):

134  Nico Slate 515–545; Manfred Berg, “Black Civil Rights and Liberal Anticommunism: The NAACP in the Early Cold War,” Journal of American History 94, no. 1 (June 2007): 75–96; Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Azza Salama Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the United States, 1941–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). 5 Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947– 1964 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Also see Rober Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Srinath Raghavan, Fierce Enigmas: A History of the United States in South Asia (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Randall B. Woods, “The Politics of Idealism: Lyndon Johnson, Civil Rights, and Vietnam,” Diplomatic History 31, no. 1 (January 2007), 1–18; Dennis Merrill, Bread and Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development, 1947–1963 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Paul M. McGarr, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University, 1994). 6 Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947– 1964 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Also see Rober Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Srinath Raghavan, Fierce Enigmas: A History of the United States in South Asia (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Randall B. Woods, “The Politics of Idealism: Lyndon Johnson, Civil Rights, and Vietnam,” Diplomatic History 31, no. 1 (January 2007), 1–18; Dennis Merrill, Bread and Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development, 1947–1963 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Paul M. McGarr, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University, 1994). 7 Sean Chabot, Transnational Roots of the Civil Rights Movement: African American Explorations of the Gandhian Repertoire (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012); Sean Scalmer, Gandhi in the West: The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Quinton H. Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman’s Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011); Joseph Kip

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8 9

10

11

12 13

14

15

16

Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Gerald Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Sudarshan Kapur, Raising up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism; Harris Wofford, Lohia and America Meet (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 2010). William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World,” (1900), in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist, 625 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 13; Jawaharlal Nehru, Autobiography: With Musings on Recent Events in India (London: John Lane, 1936), 500; S. Gopal (ed.), The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Volume 11 (New Delhi: Orient Longman Limited, 1982), 397; “Dictated to CTF,” June 19, 1942, “India 1942, June-December,” Box A320, NAACP Papers, United States Library Of Congress (LOC). Also see Muhammad Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah (eds.), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917–39 (New Delhi: Sage, 2016); and Michele Louro, Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Frank E. Bolden, “Nehru Finds India’s Problems Akin to U.S. Negroes’—Bolden,” The Pittsburgh Courier, August 11, 1945, pg. 1; Ralph Izard, “Nehru Sees World Upheaval,” The Chicago Defender, August 31, 1946, pg. 1; Cedric Dover, “Introduces this Number,” in “Special Symposium on the American Negro,” United Asia 5, no. 3 (June 1953), 149. Nehru, “The Unity of India,” Foreign Affairs, January 1938, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/india/1938-01-01/unity-india; JJ Singh to Jawaharlal Nehru, April 10, 1942, JJ Singh Papers, NMML. Also see Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire. Nehru, “Note for Asaf Ali and K.P.S. Menon,” January 22, 1947, K.P.S. Menon Papers, NMML. Roy Wilkins to “Your Excellency,” September 16, 1949; White to Oram, Moon, and Smith, September 16, 1949; Memo from White to Wilkins and Onam, October 7, 1949; and “Draft of Letter,” all in Folder 3, “India League of America, 1949,” Box A 379, NAACP Papers. “Prime Minister Nehru Gets First Hand Briefing on Problem; Dr. Bunche, Walter White Serve As Chairmen of Meeting,” Atlanta Daily World, November 9, 1949, p. 1; Plummer, Rising Wind, 219; “Nehru Presented Life Membership in NAACP,” Atlanta Daily World, November 11, 1949, pg. 2 and “Jawaharlal Nehru Joins the NAACP,” New York Amsterdam News, November 12, 1949, pg. 1. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979), 191–192; and Toki Schalk, “Madame Pandit, Indian Leader, Found Happiest Hour in Harlem,” The Pittsburgh Courier, April 14, 1945, pg. 5; Walter White, “People, Politics and Places,” The Chicago Defender, June 30, 1945, pg. 13; Du Bois, “As the Crow Flies,” Mailed August 5, 1950, Reel 84, DBP. Rosemary Donihi, “Non-Violence Is Best Route Out,” Washington Post, April 28, 1960, Subject File 61, MC Chagla Papers, NMML; “Coexistence Theme Urged by an Envoy,” The Kansas City Star, May 10, 1960, and “Chagla Tells KU Coexistence Best,” Lawrence Daily Journal World, May 10, 1960, Subject File 61, MC Chagla Papers, NMML. “Chagla Assails China for Naked Aggression,” The Hindustan Times, May 11, 1960, Subject File 62, MC Chagla Papers, NMML; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind, 314; Ann Moyer, “Ambassador Notices India, U.S.

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19 20 21 22

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28

29 30

Likeness,” The Daily Nebraskan, April 19, 1960, Subject File 61, and “Present Is ‘Decade of African Freedom’—Indian Ambassador,” The Lincoln Star, Wednesday April 20, 1960, Subject File 62, MC Chagla Papers, NMML. Dorothy M. Steere to King, January 5, 1957 and Homer Jack to King, December 27, 1956, in King Papers III: 496 and 498; King Papers 5: 107–108; “Nehru ‘Pleased’ by Sit-In Movement,” New York Amsterdam News, October 15, 1960, p. 8. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 37–38; “SNCC Wires President Kennedy,” Student Voice, April–May 1961, 1; From Marlene Nadle, “The View from the Front of the Bus,” The Village Voice, September 5, 1963, in reporting 2, page 4. Taeku Lee, Mobilizing Public Opinion, 169. Also see Dudziak and Borstellman. Wofford, Lohia and America Meet, 37–39. Rammanohar Lohia to Du Bois, July 20, 1936, Reel 45, Du Bois Papers; Dover to Nehru, Reel 48, Du Bois Papers. Wofford, Lohia and America Meet, 7–8, 10–11, 13, 17–18, 27. On Highlander, see Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Stephen A. Schneider, You Can’t Padlock an Idea: Rhetorical Education at the Highlander Folk School, 1932–1961 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014); John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 1932–1962 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988); Frank Adams with Myles Horton, Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander (Winston-Salem: Blair, 1975). Wofford, Lohia and America Meet, 49, 66–67. Nico Slate, “‘I am a colored woman’: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya in the United States, 1939–41,” Contemporary South Asia 17, no. 1 (March 2009): 7–19; Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, America: The Land of Superlatives (Bombay: Phonix Publications, 1946), 189, 70, 113–141, 144–145, 177, 192–204, 209. “Husband, Wife, in Opposing Parties, Team Up in Indian Parliament,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1960. “Husband, Wife, in Opposing Parties, Team Up in Indian Parliament,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1960; “She’ll Discuss Village Life in India,” Detroit Free Press, April 25, 1960. Carol Johnson, “The Campus Beat,” The Chicago Defender, June 4, 1960; “650 To Get Degrees: Indian Legislator To Be Howard’s Finals Speaker,” New Journal and Guide, Norfolk, Va., June 4, 1960; “Indian Solon Decries World Double Standard,” The Chicago Defender, June 18, 1960; Edward Peeks, “Indian Leader Cites Rules for Peace to Howard Grads,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 25, 1960. Carol Johnson, “The Campus Beat,” The Chicago Defender, June 4, 1960; “650 To Get Degrees: Indian Legislator To Be Howard’s Finals Speaker,” New Journal and Guide, Norfolk, Va., June 4, 1960; “Indian Solon Decries World Double Standard,” The Chicago Defender, June 18, 1960; Edward Peeks, “Indian Leader Cites Rules for Peace to Howard Grads,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 25, 1960; Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 239; David Gale to Acharya Kripalani, May 16, 1960, in “Tour of the USA,” Subject File 66, Sucheta Kripalani Papers, NMML. “Wife Gives Him Two Votes,” Washington Post, April 18, 1960, Subject File 61, MC Chagla Papers, NMML. “Negro Minister Visited by Leaders in India,” The Baltimore Sun, June 14, 1960; Shridhar Telkar, “Ovation Greets Dr. King as Plane Arrives at New Delhi,” Baltimore Afro-American, Febrary 28, 1959. Email correspondence from Jaswant Krishnayya and Ahmed Meer to the author. On the history of SNCC, see Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream

Nonviolence and Nonalignment  137

31 32

33

34 35 36

37

38

for a New America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Carson, In Struggle. Carson, In Struggle, 27–28, 37–38; Student Voice, March 1961, 1. “Mississippi Oust Indian Politician From a Cafeteria,” The New York Times, May 29, 1964; “U.S. Plans an Apology,” New York Times, May 29, 1964; “Jackson, Mississippi, Hit by Indian Socialist,” The New York Times, May 30, 1964; Edwin King, “Lohia and the American Civil Rights Movement,” Gandhi Marg 59 (1971): 270–277; “Color Arrest Pleases Man from India,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 3, 1964; “World News,” The Minneapolis Star, May 29, 1964; “New York City School Integration Given Big Boost,” Detroit Free Press, May 29, 1964; “Indian Shuns Bias Apology,” Chicago Tribune, May 30, 1964; “Police Intervene in Jackson: Cafeteria Bars India Socialist,” The Nashville Tennessean, May 29, 1964; “Dixie Cafe Spurns India Party Chief,” The Atlanta Constitution, May 29, 1964; “Cafeteria Bars India Political Leader,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, May 29, 1964; “India M.P. Refused at Cafeteria,” The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, May 29, 1964; “Service Denied to India Visitor,” St. Petersburg Times, May 29, 1964; Michael Smith, “Cafe Denies Service to India Leader,” The Arizona Republic, May 29, 1964; “Indian Says Southern Cafe Refused Him,” The Austin Statesman, May 28, 1964; “India Socialist Leader Taken from U.S. Cafe,” Globe and Mail, Toronto, May 29, 1964; “Indian Spurns U.S. Apology,” The Nashville Tennessean, May 30, 1964; “Color Arrest Pleases Man from India,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 3, 1964; “India’s Political Leader Rejects Apology for Bias,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 13, 1964. Edwin King, “Lohia and the American Civil Rights Movement,” and Interview with Ed King. Friday July 17, 2009; “Color Arrest Pleases Man from India,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 3, 1964; “India’s Political Leader Rejects Apology for Bias,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 13, 1964. Campbell, Civil Rights Chronicle, 218–219. Daniel Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle Over Meanings: Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia and the Trajectories of Socialism in Early Independent India,” Global Intellectual History 2, no. 3 (2017): 383. Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, “The Montgomery Movement – An Historian’s View,” “Montgomery Improvement Association, Institutes, 1956–1960,” “F.O.R. Race Relations, Locales & Individuals,” Series E, SCPC; Nelson Cole, “Novelist Says Non-Violence, Boycott Aided Negro Cause,” Montgomery Advertiser, December 6, 1956, “Montgomery Improvement Association, Institutes, 1956–1960,” “F.O.R. Race Relations, Locales & Individuals,” Series E, SCPC. Alyssa Ayres, Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 46; A. Appadorai, The Domestic Roots of India’s Foreign Policy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981); Walter K. Andersen, “The Domestic Roots of Indian Foreign Policy,” Asian Affairs: An American Review 10, no. 3 (Fall, 1983): 45–53. Jake Hodder, “Toward a Geography of Black Internationalism: Bayard Rustin, Nonviolence, and the Promise of Africa,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 106, no. 6 (2016): 1360–1377; Vincent J. Intondi, African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).

Section 3

Decolonization and Afro-Asian Solidarities

7

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend Gandhian Legacies Outside the Subcontinent Trishula R. Patel

Inside a storage room of the Indian embassy in Harare, Zimbabwe, once lay a statue of Mahatma Gandhi. In 2014, the embassy sought approval from the Harare City Council to erect the statue in the Harare Gardens in the city’s central business district.1 In the meantime, the Hindu Society of Harare asked the embassy if the statue could be donated to them instead, to be put up in their premises located in the neighborhood of Ridgeview, where it would be honored during ceremonies held annually to celebrate Gandhi Jayanti, or Gandhi’s birthday. The Islamic Society agreed, in writing, to the proposal. But the Indian embassy denied the Hindu Society’s request, arguing that the statue should be erected in a public space, and not on the grounds of a private religious organization.2 According to the Indian Ambassador Masakui, the request was forwarded to the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in New Delhi, but received no response – presumably, according to the ambassador, because India is officially a secular state, and would not agree to have Gandhi’s statue erected on the grounds of a private Hindu organization. The embassy then proposed that the Zimbabwean government put up the statue in its proposed Gandhi Convention Center, which would serve as the administrative center in Mount Hampden, the original destination of Rhodesian Pioneer Column located eleven miles outside the city of Harare.3 In 2022, the statue was finally given a place outside the mandir on the Hindu Society’s premises. But contestations over the cooption of Gandhi’s identity did not end here. In June 2022, the Embassy of India pressured the Hindu Society into renaming Anson Road as Mahatma Gandhi Road, the street on which the society’s premises were located. In recent years, several notable streets in Zimbabwe’s cities had been renamed from their colonial origins to reflect nationalist histories and Afro-Asian engagements, ranging from Mnangagwa Road to Mao Zedong Road. The Ministry of Local Government in Harare agreed that the street could be renamed if at least 100 residents signed a petition agreeing to the change.4 The petition was sent out, but was mostly signed by newer Indian migrants to Zimbabwe who did not live in Ridgeview, the neighborhood where local Indian families had lived since the 1960s. Many families who had lived in DOI: 10.4324/9781003393962-11

142  Trishula R. Patel Ridgeview for decades and who were now second- and third-generation Zimbabweans objected to the renaming of the road, seeing this as a decision foisted on them by the Indian embassy and one which was out of sync with anti-Gandhi sentiments spreading across the rest of the continent. As of December 2022, the debate over the renaming of the street continued. The story of the statue and the street reflects the nature of Gandhi’s legacy outside the continent – as well as its limitations. While the Hindu community in Harare battled for the statue’s erection and its visibility in an African political and geographical landscape, the twenty-first century has simultaneously seen calls in countries across the continent for the removal of statues of the Mahatma, a movement initiated by the “Rhodes Must Fall” student protests which called into question Gandhi’s more racist writings and his loyalty to imperial institutions during his time as a lawyer in South Africa. This essay considers Gandhi’s legacy outside of India, and in a country he never visited – that of Zimbabwe, once known as Southern Rhodesia, and then Rhodesia. While the history of Gandhi’s time in South Africa, as well the role of Gandhian ideologies in the nationalist politics of the African National Congress, has been well documented, his legacy outside South Africa on the African continent has not been analyzed in as much depth. For diasporic communities of South Asian origin in Africa, however, Gandhi serves as a symbol of their specifically Indian cultural identity, linking them to the nationalist movement of a country that they left many generations before. This essay traces the history of Gandhi’s legacy in Zimbabwe, from rumors of his representations to London on behalf of an Indian trader, to the progress of his ashes after his death through the city of Salisbury, to the invocation of the politics of satyagraha by the Indian members of the African nationalist movement. This chapter argues that the interpretation of Gandhi’s legacy by local Indians in Zimbabwe suggests that the mythology of the Mahatma remains more important for diasporic imaginations and identity politics than the actual reality of Mohandas’ work on the continent or his ideological contributions to the Indian nationalist movement. Gandhi was both an element of the colonial experience as well as invoked as part of resistance against imperialism in southern Africa. Historians of Indian politics and nationalism in South Africa have explored the ways in which African nationalist politics coopted Gandhi’s writings, teachings, and symbolism. This chapter argues that invocations of Gandhi in places without a large Indian influence or separate Indian political movement have relied on hazier, vaguer translations of ideas such as ahimsa and satyagraha founded on surface-level narratives and oral traditions of Gandhi, rather than based on an in-depth reading of Gandhi’s experiences, writings, and ideologies. Narratives told about Gandhi by ordinary people living in Rhodesia, and then Zimbabwe, have taken on elements of storytelling traditions passed down from generation to generation, often based on a factual element of Gandhi’s life that is then manipulated or deployed to recount a larger message about their lives. For Indians in Zimbabwe,

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend  143 Gandhi was used to locate themselves both as colonial subjects and postcolonial citizens, with ties to both southern Africa as well as imagined Indian homeland. Invoking Gandhi became a way for them to claim belonging to different identities and citizenships, for which the mythology of the Mahatma was more malleable than the actual life of Mohandas the man. The African Gandhi In 1893, a 23-year-old lawyer left Bombay and set sail for South Africa. The young Mohandas Gandhi has since earned a reputation as “the most prominent of diasporic lawyers,” and his work in South Africa would be raised by South African Indians as well as Indian nationalists on the subcontinent as evidence of their anticolonial efforts on the part of all oppressed peoples across the global south.5 The story of Gandhi being kicked off a train in Pietermaritzburg after purchasing a first-class ticket has taken on almost mythical qualities, with retroactive narratives emphasizing Gandhi’s decision after the incident to champion the cause of all colonized peoples after facing this and similar acts of racial discrimination. According to some biographers of Gandhi’s time in South Africa, his views shifted in South Africa from seeking accommodation for Indians within the framework of the British Empire to resistance against the colonial project altogether, an ideology he took with him upon his return to India in 1914. Before he left, Gandhi negotiated what came to be known as the Gandhi-Smuts Agreement of 1914 with Afrikaner leader Jan Smuts, or the “Indian Relief Bill,” a piece of legislation that ameliorated the effects of previous discriminatory policies, including the Asiatic Registration Act of 1908, which aimed to register all Indians living in the territory, as well as restrict their immigration rights. The “African Gandhi,” according to Ramachandra Guha, was critical to the evolution of the “Indian Gandhi,” an early example of transoceanic “diasporic nationalism.”6 But these hagiographic accounts of Gandhi’s time in Africa gloss over the limitations of his “nationalism” and his explicitly pro-imperial sentiments and actions. Scholars more critical of Gandhi have taken on what Meera Venkatachalam has called an “Afrocentric perspective” rooted in Atlantic histories, replacing the lens of Afro-Asian solidarity invoked by Indian Ocean narratives and the Bandung moment of Third World collaborations.7 Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, in challenging the “myth of the Mahatma,” argue that “Gandhi was seeking quality of a special sort: limited integration into white South African society,” a form of activism which ignored centuries of African dispossession and was informed by a “conservative defense of class, race and caste privilege” which upheld the claims of an Indian merchant class of passenger migrants rather than an older community of indentured laborers and their descendants.8 In seeking parity for literate, propertied Indians with white South Africans, Gandhi helped this class disassociate themselves from the attributes of indentured labor

144  Trishula R. Patel communities.9 Rather than morphing into an anticolonial figure on African soil, South African Indian historians in particular have recently begun to argue that the limited nature of his activism in Africa would translate to the patriarchal and casteist politics of the Indian National Congress. The class politics of Gandhi’s work were also translated into larger local Indian efforts to prevent their classification as “blacks.” Zimbabwean author Panashe Chigumadzi reads the “train moment” as a “scene of historic anti-Blackness,” a moment which Gandhi used not only to call for Indian parity with white society, but to deliberately extract Indians from the definition of “natives.”10 But the tales of Gandhi in Africa have since been subsumed into postcolonial mythologies of the liberation struggle in South Africa, with Gandhi and Mandela evoked as a symbol of the partnership between brown and black, a larger cooption of Gandhi into anticolonial politics across the globe. As in India, nationalist historiography has “left virtually no space for the interrogation of narrative strategies by which a people get constructed into a nation.”11 The reality of his work as a lawyer, articulated in his writings during his time in South Africa, however, exists beneath the surface of the glorification of the Bandung moment of Afro-Asian anticolonial solidarity, which Indian Ocean scholars have recently begun to criticize for its romanticization of collaboration between Indian and African nationalisms at the expense of the realities of friction between African and Indian communities. Antoinette Burton in particular frames this tension through the hierarchical positioning of “brown over black,” with Indian nationalism conscripting “Africa” as the lowest tier in a “hierarchy of civilizations” in the creation of a racialized and superior identity in the postcolonial world – a hierarchy which diasporic politics both maintained and disrupted, but one which Gandhi as an individual ultimately upheld by seeking a place for middle-class Indians within white society in South Africa.12 Part of the mythology of the Mahatma stems from analyses of his later writings, in which he “tidied up” his more racist reflections on Africans, “effectively rewriting his own history” through works such as his autobiography and Hind Swaraj.13 His later writings essentially displaced his earlier work in South Africa, and rather than this evolution forming the basis for stories about Gandhi passed down over the generations in southern Africa, it was the symbolism of his later life that became the essential element of these narratives. As Guha points out, most biographers gloss over Gandhi’s time in South Africa, and when they do, they read his later politics onto his time in South Africa.14 Histories of Gandhi have formed part of the four scholarly schools of historiography of India: the colonial/Cambridge school; the nationalist school; the Marxist school; and the subaltern school; with the latter two considering Gandhi’s legacy beyond the framework of the colonial state and the Indian National Congress in the formation of class and caste consciousness.15 The intersection of South Asian historiography with scholarship on the diaspora further embedded Gandhi within colonial and nationalist frameworks, however, with the first studies of Indian

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend  145 migrant communities in Africa separated from specific and local contexts. These works took a comparative stance and were heavily driven by theory, focusing on the links diaspora communities kept with a subcontinental homeland.16 In recent decades, the use of Indian Ocean as methodology has opened a space for consideration of these narratives beyond the framework of the nation-state, considering the ways in which both national and transnational affiliations intersected.17 Within the subfield of the South Asian diaspora in Africa, Africanists, rather than South Asianists or transregional historians, are now considering the histories of these populations, marking a transition from a focus on an Indian homeland to that of the critical ways in which minority diaspora populations have been a part of the fabric of African history.18 As a result, the national and the transnational experience are no longer seen as mutually exclusive in the daily lives and claims of ordinary people. Despite Gandhi’s earlier racist writings, his legacy beyond India thus provides a forum to explore the ramifications of his later global anticolonialism for peoples facing oppression across the world, considering how his views evolved over time and were used as the basis for calls for racial equality.19 Nico Slate in particular has challenged scholars to analyze how historical agents deployed terms of solidarity across racial divides, even as they oversimplified the differences between one another. The analytical lens of “colored cosmopolitanism” allows scholars to historically examine rhetorical expressions of solidarity that did not always simultaneously translate to harmonious interpersonal relationships between different groups.20 This particular essay uses the methodology of “Gandhi as an idea,” drawing from the work of South Asianist scholars such as Shahid Amin, to explore the intersection of quotidian and ideological diasporic imaginings of Gandhi with colonial and nationalist narratives, which became a critical part of the identity and class politics of the Hindu migrant community of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. As Amin does, I write Gandhi’s presence in Africa as an event that took place in the early twentieth century, but extend imaginings of his legacy “as a metaphor gathering significances outside this time frame” through the stories about him told by ordinary people as a way of giving meaning to their daily lives as colonial subjects on African soil.21 In Rhodesia, the people who told stories of Gandhi predated and settled beyond the timeframe of his work in South Africa. Africa had become a “New World” for struggling Gujarati peasants voluntarily migrating to seek a new future in an old land, including to Southern Rhodesia, where rumors about the discovery of gold enticed prospective migrants. Indian migrants came from both the east, via Mozambique, and from the south, via South Africa. Indians never made up more than two percent of the country’s population. Early colonial racial categories included Indians as part of the “Asiatic” population, which was defined in general terms as including anyone who came from the Asian continent. Many of these families never returned to India, a distant homeland that over the years became more symbolic than real. Their lives on the ground became a critical thread that

146  Trishula R. Patel wove through the fabric of Rhodesian and Zimbabwean history, both collaborators with and resistors to the colonial project at different times and in different places; settlers who claimed colonizing rights of imperial citizenship, but also colonized subjects from another imperial space facing discrimination in another colony, complicating the traditional divide between colonizers and colonized. Gandhi became a thread that wove through stories of their time in Rhodesia as it transitioned into Zimbabwe that justified Indian settlement and their claims to belonging, both with colonial frameworks as well as the nationalist movement which created the postcolonial state. The Stretcher-Bearer of Empire The first alleged Indian trader in Southern Rhodesia was a Gujarati man by the name of Bhimjee Naik. He first arrived at the port city of Beira at the age of 17 in 1896 and began work as a clerk for the Beira and Mashonaland Railway Company in the Portuguese territory of Mozambique. He began to follow the construction of the railway eastwards, setting up a little trading stand in the village of Machaze province administered by the Mozambique Company. By 1899, the Beira railroad had expanded toward the territory controlled by the British South Africa Company.22 According to legend, Bhimjee became the first “pioneer” from the east to settle in what would become the colony of Southern Rhodesia, sometime at the turn of the century. He established a small store in the border town of Umtali, a layover on the railway line toward the town of Fort Salisbury. In the no man’s land between the artificial boundaries established by the European settlers and companies, Bhimjee imported goods from the Portuguese territory to trade with the Africans who lived in the surrounding areas of the mountains of the Eastern Highlands.23 Dozens more would follow in Bhimjee’s wake in the years that followed, Gujarati men who would become traders and vital middlemen in the colonial economy. The presence of these Indian traders and their families disrupted the implementation of colonial racial hierarchies that set Indians as middlemen between white settlers and the majority African population through their claims to rights of imperial citizenship. Local Indians in Southern Rhodesia used their “pioneer narratives” of migration and settlement to highlight their colonial origins and therefore their rights of mobility and citizenship across imperial spaces. As Indians faced increasing restrictions against Asian migrants in the settler colonial world, from Canada to New Zealand, rights of mobility and imperial origins became critical to local campaigns of advocacy against immigration legislation. The first generation of migrants highlighted their colonial roots and “humble beginnings” in the stories they told their children as motivation for their desire to work hard and be good citizens in a new land. These narratives provide the historical content of factual elements of the migration process, which are invisible in the bureaucratic documentation of the colonial archives. At the same

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend  147 time, these oral histories, conducted almost a century after the original journeys, have taken on an almost mythical nature, blurring the distinction between the methodology of oral histories and the telling of oral traditions of genealogical descent passed down over the decades, the transmission of these stories “communal and continuous” yet also filtered by the experiences of the last storytellers in the chain and their desires to justify their settlement in a foreign land as well as simultaneously emphasize colonial origins and imperial rights.24 In Southern Rhodesia, the “pioneer narratives” of Indians recounted in the decades after their settlement connected them and their ancestors to a larger regional network of Indian political activism and mobility. The legend of Gandhi became critical to these narratives, with the first “pioneers” and their descendants including stories of alleged meetings with Gandhi by migrants during their passage from South Africa to Southern Rhodesia, or claims that Gandhi made representations on the part of local Indians experiencing discrimination in Southern Rhodesia to the House of Lords in England and even more fantastically, to Queen Victoria herself. Gandhi, as a Gujarati, became centered in these diasporic connections to a Gujarati homeland through a celebration of the success of a Gujarati man both within and beyond India.25 Indians in Southern Rhodesia thus drew from Gandhi’s use of an imperial framework to define their own rights, and in so doing, connected themselves ideologically and retroactively to Gandhi’s time in South Africa, even though he never spent any time in the land north of the Limpopo River.26 In oral histories, Gandhi bapu appeared as an almost mythical and benevolent genie, one who aided or inspired the Indian migrant along their journey to a new land and the prospects for a brighter future. While most migrants who came from the east via Bombay and Mozambique were of Gujarati origin, another group of Indian migrants came from South Africa in the early years of the twentieth century, descendants of indentured laborer families or earlier migrants who first worked in the Natal before repatriating northwards. One of these migrants was a man by the name of Frank Dominic Francis, who had been born in 1895 in Pietermaritzburg. His grandfather had been stationed with the Indian forces of the British army in Johannesburg during the Boer Wars, and his grandmother later joined him along with a two-month-old son, Francis’ father. In 1913, Frank Dominic Francis began working as a barman in a hotel in Durban, around the same time he claims to have joined the “passive resistance with M. K. Gandhi” with a group of other “young chaps” who attended a meeting where they signed up to travel to the nearby town of Newcastle to attend a rally hosted by Gandhi. According to Francis, he met Gandhi at the meeting and eventually joined the larger strikes organized by Gandhi in the area, known later as the 1913 Natal Indian Strike.27 The meeting he referred to took place on 13 October 1913, where Gandhi spoke to striking miners and organized a march of protesters to take place the next month across the border to the Transvaal. About 20,000 Indian workers took part in the strike, which paralyzed the Natal economy. The

148  Trishula R. Patel result was the famous Gandhi-Smuts compromise of 1914, which protected the rights of Indian workers and reversed some of the more discriminatory legislation aimed at Asians in South Africa.28 Francis, who joined in the march, was arrested for illegally crossing the border into the Transvaal, and spent three months in jail, according to his oral history conducted in 1968. While his narrative is grounded in the events that timeline Gandhi’s most notable moments in South Africa, there are elements of exaggeration that served retroactively to present Francis as part of a larger history of a battle for rights of imperial citizenship. His extremely detailed narrative is one of the many stories that have given life to the otherwise faceless protestors of grander narratives of Gandhi’s work. After his release from prison, Francis claimed to have been invited to Gandhi’s home, where he was received by his son, Ramdas Gandhi, who allegedly told Francis and the other men with whom he had been detained that he “hoped you’ll be in harmony and work for the justice of the poor Indians working in this part of the world.” The rest of Francis’ oral history details the rest of his time in Durban during the onset of the First World War, where he spotted German submarines off the coast in the Indian Ocean and eventually obtained a job at the Meikles Hotel in Salisbury, where he settled for the rest of his years and was involved in the local Indian politics of the time led by Bhimjee Naik.29 His participation in Gandhi’s campaigns of passive resistance, however, forms a significant element of his narrative, with his life growing up in South Africa and his time after in Southern Rhodesia simply serving as bookends to his alleged interactions with the Mahatma. While his story has not yet been verified in a traditional archive, the details he provided in his oral history suggest the centrality of Gandhi to his conceptions of a life lived under colonial discrimination, a way of explaining the Indian experience as well as the history of community resistance. The generation after him in Southern Rhodesia continued the tradition of telling stories of meetings with Gandhi during the migration process, such as Kishore Gokal’s Gujarati grandfather who, after allegedly being deported for entering South Africa illegally, took Mohandas Gandhi’s advice to a group of deportees in Durban to travel instead to Beira and reenter South Africa that way. While his grandfather decided at that point to remain in Southern Rhodesia after making it to Umtali, the town located at the border of Mozambique and Southern Rhodesia, these alleged meetings with Gandhi highlighted larger connections with networks of diasporic mobility and constructed kinship with fellow migrants across the region.30 Gandhi’s legacy as an advocate for Indian rights extended beyond the migration process to the larger politics of imperial citizenship taking place in Southern Rhodesia during the first decades of Indian settlement, and his story in South Africa was linked to a local incident of violence which took place in 1898 in Umtali, one which Indians would pass down to future generations as being a watershed moment in Indian claims of equal rights of settlement. Bhimjee Naik’s

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend  149 businesses eventually expanded across the railway line from Beira to Salisbury. He was the first recorded Indian to obtain a trading license from the BSAC in Umtali in 1898.31 But his expansion, and the growing presence of men like him, met with the resistance of white Rhodesians. In January 1899, a mob of about 150 white men attacked several Indian stores in the town, including that of Naik. The police were able to clear the group, but the ringleaders were identified as police officers and justices of the peace, who later resigned from their posts stating that they could not support governmental protection of the “Banyans.”32 The incident was brought up in several oral histories as the earliest example of the discrimination faced by Indians. While the focus of these tales is on Bhimjee Naik, who allegedly sent the Queen a telegram after the incident and was provided with mounted police as protection as a result, Gandhi also features as a supporting character to the cause being championed by Naik.33 In a version of the tale that cannot be corroborated, Gandhi took the issue of white refusal to grant Indian trading licenses to the House of Commons, and “it was ultimately decided that the Indians, as British subjects, could not be refused a license.”34 “We keep hearing what Gandhi did in South Africa,” said former Zimbabwean High Court Judge Ahamed Ebrahim. “He played a part here too.”35 In these retellings, Gandhi became a part of the description of memorable events such as this one that were passed down from generation to generation by traditions of storytelling which linked Indian activism in Africa to the larger process of nationalism on the subcontinent.36 In these imaginings, Gandhi was presented as the champion of Indian rights everywhere. But in reality, Gandhi did not have the power to represent Indians in the way that the community in Rhodesia believed he did. He did, in fact, write a letter concerning the Umtali incident, but it was sent to the Times of India in Bombay rather than to the House of Commons in London, where he connected violence by white settlers in Durban to events in Southern Rhodesia after receiving a letter himself penned by Bhimjee Naik and other Indians informing him of their struggles. In the letter to the Times, Gandhi called for an official statement of denunciation against the violence being faced by Indians in both territories: The authorities seem to have rendered assistance to the Indians, but, in my humble opinion, nothing less than an emphatic declaration from the Colonial Office to the effect that the white settlers in British South Africa cannot with impunity interfere with the liberty of the British Indian settlers, in addition to adequate punishment to the wrong-doers, will meet the case. It will be noticed that Justices of the Peace and other prominent Europeans took part in the violence. The omission on the part of Mr. Chamberlain to take any notice of the unlawful proceedings of the Durban mob in 1897 has, I am afraid, led the white settlers to think that they can do anything they like with the Indians.37

150  Trishula R. Patel Like other lawyers and political activists, Gandhi was constrained by the times he lived in. He could write to places and to people where he would be taken seriously or given attention, such as a newspaper in India, but a letter to the Queen, as many believed Bhimjee Naik to have penned, would most likely not have resulted in much direct action – nor could Gandhi on command magically appear before the House of Lords in London at the same time that he was resident in Durban. Rather than being the mythical champion that diasporic Indians imagined him to have been before his return to India, Gandhi was simply part of a larger network of Indian elites who were literate and could organize collective action or initiate petitions that, when sent to connections in the India Office or local government, could then be used to advocate for the amelioration of conditions for Indians, such as was the case with the removal of 1908 Asiatic Ordinances in both South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.38 At the same time, the politics of Indian communities in different colonial spaces remained largely separate, and there is no evidence of direct intervention on the part of Indians in the Transvaal or Natal in Rhodesian Indian politics beyond the single letter penned by Gandhi.39 Beyond that letter, there is no other evidence to suggest that Gandhi took on the cause of Rhodesian Indians, or wrote anything further about them. But the local Indian community in Zimbabwe continue to link their history to that of Gandhi’s as a way of connecting their narratives to a larger history of mobility, settlement, and citizenship that legitimized their presence and their rights of migration and residence outside the subcontinent. Father of the Nation In 1914, Gandhi returned to India. He spent the rest of his life immersed in the politics of the Indian National Congress, and his time in India as the “Father of the Nation” is the most documented period of his life. But as India moved toward independence from Empire, Southern Rhodesia was becoming more firmly enmeshed within an imperial framework even as it was granted self-governing status as a crown colony in 1923. This move gave more power to the white settler minority while simultaneously restricting external affairs and discriminatory legislation to continued control from London – unlike South Africa, which became a full dominion in 1931, complicating timelines of postcoloniality across imperial spaces. But with the granting of Indian independence in 1947, diasporic Indians began to turn to the success of the Indian nationalist movement as a source of inspiration for their own local campaigns for equal rights in Southern Rhodesia, shifting from politicking within the framework of Empire to utilizing an independent Indian identity instead as the basis for their claims.40 Even after Gandhi’s death in 1948, his legacy as an idol of Indian independence was translated by the claiming of connections with the Mahatma as part of constructed diasporic linkages to the subcontinental nationalist movement while still remaining colonized subjects overseas.

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend  151 The first generation of Indians born in Africa began to move beyond their imperial origins, creating a space for themselves in Southern Rhodesia’s urban spaces as traders with an Indian cultural identity now linked to an independent subcontinent, rather than one that was part of a dissolving British Empire. They began to move out of Indian trading zones, relocating to traditionally European suburbs, and advocated for their own educational, cultural, and religious institutions. But after 1947, the communalism which had fractured Indian politics and created two separate nations was reflected in divisions between Hindus and Muslims. As the futures of their children came into question, upper-caste Hindu patriarchs wished to maintain the caste-based structures of endogamy which had been upheld in India, while Muslim men in particular were more willing to marry local Coloured and African women.41 Hindu patriarchal conceptions of community and morality became part of a limited form of cultural nationalism, with Gandhi coopted as a specifically Hindu idol in Southern Rhodesia. He was manifested as a part of a Hindu religion, and his Gujarati identity was invoked as part of the need to maintain the cultural institutions that were central to a diasporic Hindu community. Gandhi’s deep dedication to upholding the tenets of Hinduism became a way of celebrating a partitioned Indian independence even as he had opposed the split between India and Pakistan and the sectarian nature of Indian nationalist politics in his final decades. Even as the “spatial imagination of India” grew in a postcolonial framework, the “identity of the Indian as a Hindu has grown narrower.”42 Gandhi, unknowingly, became a part of that constriction of an Indian, and a specifically Hindu, identity outside the subcontinent. Even as he was centered as a critical part of the religious and nationalist identity of local Hindu communities, the only time Gandhi ever actually visited Southern Rhodesia was in death. In accordance with Hindu death rites, he was cremated. While most of his ashes were scattered at the Triveni Sangam, the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna, and Saraswati rivers, some of his ashes were secretly kept aside for distribution amongst his friends and family, for ceremonies in India, and for internment in places across the world where the Indian diaspora resided. On 2 July 1948, these ashes arrived in Beira, on their way to their final resting spot in the Natal. All Indian businesses shut for the day, “and the whole Indian population, whether nationals of Pakistan or India, whether Mohammedan or Hindu, and a number of Europeans, too” were at the dock when the ship carrying the ashes docked. Hindus were dressed in white, wearing Congress caps to receive the urn, and were taken to Beira’s Hindu community center for display before they were due to move on.43 The ashes were taken to various stops along the way to South Africa, including to Salisbury at some point in 1948, revealed in a photo of members of the Salisbury Hindoo Society and the Gujarati School posing with the ashes.44 His ashes were not taken to the Islamic Society premises. In death, the Mahatma as an idea became a symbol of the “possibility of an inversion of the power relations deemed inviolable.”45 For Indians in Southern Rhodesia, Hindu and Muslim alike, Gandhi’s identity as a Gujarati provided the backing power for them to fight for their own rights under

152  Trishula R. Patel

Figure 7.1 Members of the Hindoo Society posing with the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi, Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, 1948, HSA CURE0004

colonial rule after the independence of their homeland. Having his ashes pass through Salisbury would have been of great symbolic significance – but it was one that ended up being coopted by the Hindu community for private religious death ceremonies to the exclusion of the city’s Muslim migrants. Just as Gandhi became an Indian icon separate from Pakistani notions of identity and nationalism, so was his legacy as an ancestor with roots in Africa designated solely a Hindu one in Southern Rhodesia. The celebration of Gandhi was thus linked specifically with the celebration of Indian independence – while the effects of Partition and Pakistani independence remained an unspoken element of this selective identification of the Indian diaspora to a postcolonial and divided subcontinent, complicating the notion of a singular homeland to which members of the Indian diaspora could retain allegiance.46 Partition and the existence of Pakistan became part of a selective diasporic amnesia in remembering the nation, “specified events which would fit awkwardly, even seriously inconvenience, the neatly woven pattern.”47 Hindus and Muslims had already created their own separate religious and educational institutions, and Hindus in particular invoked ideas of “purity” as a way to maintain control over their women and children, based on their readings of Gandhi as

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend  153 a religious persona who upheld the core tenets of Hinduism.48 The two religious communities celebrated independence separately on 15 August 1947 in Salisbury, and Gandhi’s origins as a Gujarati meant that he stood “among the Gujarati Hindus of Central Africa as the pure Hindu ideal incarnate...infinitely more real than any of the shadowy supernaturals of the traditional pantheon. Pictures of Gandhi are found in every house. And while he is not literally worshiped... attitudes towards him are nonetheless specifically religious,” wrote Floyd and Lilian Dotson in their anthropological study of Indians in Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland conducted in the late 1960s. One informant even told them that, “I believe in Gandhi even more than in Lord Krishna,” with his preaching on change and accommodation in India recalled as a way to emphasize the modernity and forward-looking nature of Hinduism as a core part of an Indian nationalist identity.49 Gandhi’s identity as a nationalist also revealed contestations between whites and Indians, as well as between Hindus and Muslims, over his symbolic significance for different groups of people in spaces that remained under some form of colonial control. Selective readings of stories about Gandhi were once again used to perform not just a selective Hindu identity, but Indians as a whole as either “civilized” or “uncivilized.” Gandhi was coopted as part of contestations in particular over urban spaces in Southern Rhodesia, where white residents in the 1940s and 1950s expressed fears over what they perceived as Indian “encroachment” into their spaces, as Indian traders began to accumulate wealth and bought properties outside of the business district in more affluent and segregated neighborhoods. The story of Gandhi being kicked off a train was evoked on both sides of the debate in a series of letters to the editor of the Rhodesia Herald between August and September 1950. One letter from a white resident used the tale as an example of the Indian “nuisance” in African colonial spaces: Mahatma Gandhi, as a passenger on a Natal North Coast train, was travelling in a first-class compartment (European). He was requested to move out into compartments specially reserved for Indians, first and second class, and no different from European compartments. He refused and was insolent. Finally the ticket examiner pulled him out and put him off at Verulam. Using a great deal of abusive language, he finally vowed he would have his revenge on all Europeans. From then on he took up the cudgels against the European races... It is time Rhodesians woke up and realised what they are heading for. Take a leaf out of Natal’s book, and have some of these people for neighbors... [at the] Town House after 5 pm on Sunday or on Monday mornings...Indian children lean on the steps of the Town House, of which they make a playground. Orange and banana skins and dirty papers are strewn everywhere. That is the experience Europeans had in Natal. Durban had to appeal to the police and take drastic measures before they could stop this nuisance. It was

154  Trishula R. Patel quite a common thing to see Indians parked with their families on the edges of pavements.50 But another white resident of the city, whose letters to the editor about Gandhi’s history had incited responses such as that above of the “Old Durban Resident,” instead evoked the heroic nature of Gandhi’s actions on the train that were often recalled by Indian residents in their pioneer narratives which retroactively highlighted Indians as the champions against colonialism and discrimination: Gandhi was in fact both taken off the train and kicked down the steps. And what he vowed was not so much revenge on all Europeans, but that he would free his own people from the colour bar. He was against oppression of any sort – he worked in favor of the untouchables in India. I am sure Gandhi never used abusive language. I unhesitatingly reply that I would have absolutely no objection whatever to having anybody put into my compartment, whether Black, White or Yellow, provided that they knew how to conduct themselves.51 Through the story of Gandhi, Indians were cast through this viewpoint as “civilized” citizens, where the privileged and elite classes could be considered good enough to live in white society. Indians living in urban spaces in Southern Rhodesia relied on these tropes depicting them as “good imperial citizens” as they began to move from their homes behind or above their trading stores into white suburbs, even as they faced resistance from those who saw Gandhi and his ilk as a “nuisance.” Gandhi and the story of his being thrown off a train thus served as both an example of colonial resistance and disruption to performed and constructed standards of social etiquette that established white power, as well as a victim of a humiliating experience of racial etiquette that was a part of the “structural violence of society that constrained people’s life chances.”52 In 1968, British journalist Kingsley Martin wrote an op-ed for the Rhodesia Herald which questioned Gandhi’s legacy of sainthood, suggesting that he was a wily politician who used his asceticism and imprisonment as a public forum to attract more followers, and that it would be a mistake to exaggerate the influence of non-violence in the attainment of Indian independence.53 In so doing, colonialist writers such as Martin questioned the hagiographic way in which Gandhi was remembered not only in India, but in the diaspora as well. Significantly for Rhodesia’s future, questions like this complicated the cooption of satyagraha and Gandhian ideologies by the African nationalist parties in the country who were challenging the foundations of white rule and the idea that non-whites like Gandhi, articulated by those such as “Old Durban Resident,” had no place in civilized society.

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend  155 Brown Over Black When Yusuf Adam’s father was ten years old, he joined Gandhi and refused to buy salt. “Salt and fabric were the preserve of the British,” Adam said. “But Gandhi said no, we’re going to go to the sea and make our own salt.” Adam’s son joined his father in Southern Rhodesia in 1922, but that imagining of a core nationalist identity by those who had followed Gandhi was transplanted across the Indian Ocean to African soil across communal lines. Gandhi was evoked in the daily actions of the Indian diaspora, such as that of Adam’s friend and neighbor, Hari Patel, who “all the time wore this kadhi, he never wore any other fabric.”54 Gandhi’s actual ideology during his time in South Africa was predicated on the idea that “only two civilizations mattered: the European and the Indian.” But as Mark Ravinder Frost argues, “this does not mean there were not other avenues down which research” into an Indian Ocean “political cosmopolitanism that became the basis for regular trust-building engagements with the ‘Other’” could be conducted.55 While Gandhi’s nationalism was limited, and his work in South Africa was confined to finding a space for Indians within the constructs of Empire rather than shattering the oppressive barriers to African participation in governance and society, his legacy has since been coopted by African nationalist movements as a forum of connection to a larger anticolonial network as well as for a way of collaborating with Indian diasporic political units in African countries. In the 1960s, African nationalism against the Rhodesian state intensified. Southern Rhodesia had been part of a Federation of British territories along with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland from 1953 onward. But in 1964, Zambia and Malawi gained independence, while Southern Rhodesia transitioned to becoming known as Rhodesia and its government declared a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965. Indians became members of African nationalist parties, including the National Democratic Party, which eventually was reformed as the Zimbabwe Africa People’s Union. Indian political and social participation transitioned from the first migrants claiming rights as citizens of empire, to taking on a more cultural form of nationalism founded in a pride of Indian independence, to using India’s postcolonial status as a way to find solidarity with Africans seeking similar freedoms from colonial rule. But Indian participation was limited to individual participation in resistance against the white minority state. In histories of countries like Kenya and South Africa, Indians can be treated as a discrete unit of analysis because they were so politically active, and in many cases formed their own political parties that became a part of national civil discourse. In Rhodesia, on the other hand, Indians for the most part were not politically active. When they did participate, their nationalism was submerged into African forms of resistance, and Gandhi provided a common ideological thread for their collaboration. Jon Soske has argued that the writings of Indian leaders such as Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were central to the alliance between the African

156  Trishula R. Patel National Congress and the Indian National Congress in South Africa, at the same time that the “depth of the racial divisions between Indians and Africans were far more intractable.”56 In Rhodesia, Gandhi was not portrayed in the postcolonial era as a symbol of multiracial racial harmony in the same way that he was in South Africa, where contemporary “Salt Marches,” “Peace Marches,” and Satyagraha Awards present spectacles of harmonious multiracialism where “Gandhi merges into Albert Luthuli into Nelson Mandela and the seamless thread of African and Indian holding hands across the boundaries of race is seen as if they have marched together through the twentieth century into the present.”57 For the Zimbabwean nationalist movement, however, Gandhi simply provided one thread of political ideology that was interwoven with the policies of one section of the nationalist movement, allowing nonracial Indian political participation at the same time that it kept Indians and Africans socially distant – in many ways, a more realistic cooption of Gandhi’s actual beliefs and political activities. The resurrection of Gandhi as a central element of a political Indian identity kept Indians and Africans socially distant. Rather than Gandhi and the Indian independence movement being central to African political thought, as Soske argues was the case in South Africa, concepts such as ahimsa and satyagraha were not taken on as central ideologies. Instead, Gandhi’s vision of a world beyond colonialism presented an alternative goal to which to aspire and one which required removing the domination of the white minority state in favor of black majority rule. Gandhi’s writings and beliefs served less as an ideological and theoretical framework of resistance, and more as a way for Indian individuals to find solidarity with their African comrades through participation in African political parties. These men, primarily located in the southern city of Bulawayo, had become members of ZAPU. Indian participation in the nationalist movement was critical to the quotidian activities of the nationalist movement in the city, acts of resistance that were subsumed within the larger story of African nationalist politics as part of an active attempt on the part of both brown and black peoples to stress the inclusion of these Indian nationalists rather than being framed as intersections of separate Indian forms of nationalism. The Zimbabwean nationalist movement was largely driven by the socialist principles embodied in the Afro-Asian world during the Cold War, informing visions for postcolonial economic policy and political institutions. In August 1963, several ZAPU leaders decided to split off and form their own party, the Zimbabwe African National Union. Most of its operations were conducted from exile as both parties eventually moved toward more coordinated and consistent military attacks against the Rhodesian government, leading to a guerrilla war between African cadres and Rhodesian forces. Nationalist historiography in Zimbabwe tends to focus on the ethnic and ideological split between ZAPU and the split-off faction of the Zimbabwe Africa National Union, or ZANU, which took place in 1963, with the former embodying Soviet principles of Marxist-Leninist revolution, and the latter taking on a Maoist orientation aimed at rallying the rural peasantry. Indian involvement in

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend  157 the nationalist movement, and with ZAPU in particular, however, reveals that another key difference between the two parties was the ability of ZAPU to include both ideas and people beyond indigenous imaginings of self-rule in postcolonial Zimbabwe. ZANU was more focused on a Pan-Africanist ideology, and therefore on the connections made between African nationalists and the civil rights movement in an Atlantic framework. ZAPU engaged with local Indians through the lens of Indian Oceanic solidarities, more aligned with the politics of the African National Congress in South Africa and its alliance with the South African Indian National Congress. “That was distinctive about ZAPU,” according to Austin, who was a lawyer for the party as well as a member. “It was launched in a way which consistently emphasized its nonracial quality.”58 Gandhi became a key thread of imagined anticolonialism that Indian members of ZAPU used to imagine a stake for themselves in a postcolonial Zimbabwe. Because of their business contracts, Indian traders who were members of ZAPU were essential not only for the collection of funds, but also for the organization of items such as cars and bank accounts, and for providing shelter to those who were in hiding. More openly, Indian businessmen played another intermediary role as recruiters of their customers to the party. But rather than this collaboration being based on vague principles of color-blind “non-racialism,” it was very much color conscious – and the “way of life” associated with Indians and their cultural heritage from a foreign land that had earned its own independence was coopted by and subsumed under African forms of political and militant resistance to forge networks between the primarily urban-based party and the dissidence of urban workers to the freedom fighters in the “bush.” ZAPU more than ZANU was influenced by the ideas of the Indian National Congress from the years leading up to India’s independence, and although this was not a key feature of the party’s ideology, its Indian members served as a symbol of a greater transnational resistance to white rule and the remnants of the colonial project. Through both small, daily acts of resistance, and participation in larger protests and recruiting, the nationalist movement, and ZAPU in particular, was able to take on a nonracial political stance, though not on as large a scale as the multiracial politics of the ANC in South Africa, which was allied formally with the South African Indian National Congress, or in Kenya, where the East African Indian Congress, where it cooperated with the Kenya African Union before its dissolution in 1962.59 But because there was no formal Indian political party in Rhodesia, nor as large a population, the Indians who joined the nationalist movement did so almost seamlessly, with Afro-Indian collaboration not being characterized by the same frictions that took place between the often divergent political goals of separate African and Indian parties in other countries on the continent. An imagined version of an anticolonial Gandhi where the principles of non-violence were transferrable across time and space became the specter evoked to explain Indian participation in the Zimbabwean nationalist movement. Older Indian members

158  Trishula R. Patel of ZAPU brought with them an awareness of the participation of their fathers and grandfathers in the Indian nationalist movement under Gandhi. Ramanbhai Naik, a Bulawayo member of ZAPU, was said to have “a solid grounding in Gandhianism and the principles of non-violence,” which was used to explain his leadership in the Indian community as well as his participation in the nationalist movement.60 They were cast as “followers of a non-violence mindset,” an imagining which erased the transition to a more violent strategy of targeted militant tactics, escalating the guerrilla war between the state and nationalists as white minority rule became further entrenched in the 1970s.61 The “way of life” which defined the Indian presence in Rhodesia was not a hindrance to political collaboration. Both Indian and African political elites stressed that Afro-Indian collaboration did not have to mean social or domestic intimacy.62 In postcolonial African countries, Indians were often criticized for not “allowing” their daughters or sisters to marry African men.63 This rhetoric reflected colonial-era patriarchal anxieties not only on the part of Indian elites, but Africans as well, who saw interracial intimacies as transgressions against the social and racial/ethnic orders that upheld boundaries to which women in their respective communities were meant to conform.64 The leadership of ZAPU, however, reframed these debates to argue that a fight for political equality did not have to mean social parity between communities that the racial hierarchies of the colonial order had stratified. Instead, they argued, both groups had a right to protect their social and domestic orders, but a duty to overthrow the colonial order which kept Africans and Indians separate. This “public friendship” between the African and Indian men of the LOTUS group thus brought politically-minded activists together without having to deal with the underlying conflicts over miscegenation which might otherwise have kept them at odds.65 The symbolism of Gandhi’s fight to overthrow imperialism became a way for them to find political connections, while being able to sidestep the thorny issue of social integration. Beyond local Indian participation in nationalist politics, an overseas Indian presence also used Gandhi as a means to claim solidarity with the principles of anticolonialism against white minority rule. Nehru in particular strategically used India’s image outside the continent through perceptions of an anticolonial Gandhi to construct his version of moralistic diplomacy, based on the idea that India, as the first to break away from the constraints of colonialism, should now lead the way for others, a combination of strategic politic with moral rhetoric.66 The writings of Gandhi formed a critical part of this projection of a moralistic foreign policy onto the rest of the decolonizing world, and to construct shared links of Afro-Asian resistance to the imperial project. In the three Central African territories, for example, the writings and biographies of Gandhi and Nehru were often translated into local languages by Indian commissions and distributed for free in African communities and were eventually banned by the Federal government.67

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend  159 Indian publications produced on the subcontinent, and then distributed by the Indian high commission, which had been established in Salisbury in 1953, used Gandhi’s time in Africa as an example of India’s transnational presence and role as the leader of the decolonizing world. In 1961, a publication called the Africa Quarterly reproduced Gandhi’s writings in 1946 which focused on continued white minority rule in South Africa, where he blamed the colonial state for pitting Eastern and Western cultures against one another, and articulated what he considered a “real moral bond between Asiatics and Africans” which would continue to grow and evolve against the forces of evil in the world. “On India rests the burden of pointing the way to all the exploited races,” wrote Gandhi. “India will become a torch-bearer to the oppressed and exploited races” through a “wider bend to our struggle.”68 The next year, the publication printed tributes from African politicians, including Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, and Kenneth Kaunda to Gandhi. Kenyatta wrote that “Mahatma Gandhi’s inspiration shall always be the guiding star for all those seeking to maintain peace and freedom in all parts of the world,” while Mboya wrote that “his life, dedication and service constitute the strongest pillars on which nationalists have leaned, and inspiration on which to draw during out struggle.”69 An article remembering Gandhi’s time in South Africa in that same edition of the journal argued that Gandhi’s exclusion of Africans from Indian passive resistance campaigns was that “the indigenous peoples were not at that struggle sufficiently wakened or disciplined,” and “to draw them into the struggle would have amounted to exploiting them for selfish ends.” Continuing the rewriting of his own history that Gandhi himself instigated in his later reflections, this particular Indian writer retroactively extended Gandhi’s anticolonialism to his time in South Africa, reaffirming the idea that Gandhi and India were leaders in the African struggle against oppression.70 But just as Gandhi’s campaigns of passive resistance in South Africa had been predicated on the Aryan-Indic idea that Indians were civilizationally superior to Africans, so did the idea that his anticolonialism provided an example for the rest of the decolonizing world rest on the premise that Indians were “ahead” of Africans in their path toward postcolonial modernity. Indian colonial elites were “steeped” in a Western ideologies regarding civilization; rather than dismantling the idea of civilization altogether, Indian foreign policy rooted in the expansion of Gandhian ideologies and Nehruvian policies transplanted pre-1947 ideas about India’s sub-imperial role in Africa to its postcolonial situating in global civilizational hierarchies through their relocation of Asian civilizations in universal hierarchies, “seeking to make it preeminent rather than subordinate.”71 Central to India’s ideology of “civilizational exceptionalism” was “the hierarchization of societies” on a global scale, in which India and its representatives saw themselves as leaders of a global revolution against colonialism and Western domination.72 Indian support for African nationalist parties was ultimately limited to rhetoric from afar through the forum of the United

160  Trishula R. Patel Nations and the Commonwealth, structures founded on legacies of colonialism and Western hegemony, while actual material support came from China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War years. Nor did most local Indians in Rhodesia participate en masse in the nationalist movement, calling into question their retroactive claiming of Gandhi as part of their own role in the country’s liberation struggle, represented by the few who had been critical to the movement. Local Indian insularity from social and political integration with an African majority was ultimately part of India’s larger superiority complex which was articulated in the construction of a postcolonial nation based on a precolonial civilization, a key element of its foreign policy that saw Africans at the beginning stages of political development, rather than as equal partners in a global form of anticolonialism.73 Conclusion The rewriting of Gandhi’s early beliefs and writings regarding what he saw as the limitations of African political and social development could not erase the limitations of his actual work on the continent, with his conceptualization of “brown over black” transferred to a postcolonial Indian leadership predicated on the idea that Indians were civilizationally superior to their African counterparts. In the twenty-first century, this has led to calls across the African continent for the removal of Gandhi statues for their celebration and reinforcement of imperial structures of anti-blackness. But in present-day Zimbabwe, Gandhi’s statue has been resurrected from the shadows of a storage room. On Gandhi’s birthday every year in October, the Hindu Society of Harare organize a Gandhi Walk commemorating his Salt March to Dandi as a way of “symbolising the route to self-reliance in the pursuit of freedom in a peaceful and non-violent manner” which “urged Indians to become self-relient [sic] and thus challenged the colonial dominance over their lives.”74 The annual walk usually begins at the Aumkar Mandir located in the predominantly Indian neighborhood of Ridgeview, but in 2019, it began at Robert Mugabe Square located near the central business district as part of an attempt to open up the activities of the Hindu Society and the legacies of Gandhi to the larger public. Even as the limitations to the legend of Gandhi are becoming clearer, he remains central to the evolution of a diasporic Indian identity attempting to find belonging in postcolonial African countries, such as Zimbabwe. The diasporic cooptions of Gandhian legacies remain a useful lens in both history and historiography, calling into question the limitations of nationalist politics in the subcontinent and beyond, and suggesting a need for more factual disentanglement of the teachings of the Mahatma from the actual life of Mohandas as a way of learning not only from the stories of his anticolonial successes, but from the complicated and sometimes problematic realities of his lived experiences.

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend  161 Notes 1 “Zimbabwe: India Seeks to Erect Gandhi Statue in Harare Gardens,” The Herald, November 13, 2014; https://allafrica.com/stories/201411130940.html (accessed 1 July 2020). 2 Nutan Naik, secretary of the Hindoo Society of Harare’s executive committee, Whatsapp conversation, July 7, 2020. 3 Information from Indian Ambassador R. Masakui and Rohit Patel from the executive committee of the Hindoo Society of Harare curated by Dr. Hasu Patel and sent via email, July 9, 2020. 4 Email from Hindu Society, Harare to members on 21 June 2022. Author is a member of the society. 5 Rohit De, “South Asian Legal Traditions,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. James D. Wright, 2, no. 23 (2015): 58–62. 6 Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India (Allen Lane: London, 2013), 12. 7 Neilesh Bose, “India and Africa in Parallax: In Conversation with Renu Modi, Shobana Shankar, and Meera Venkatachalam,” Borderlines, June 15, 2021. 8 Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), Chapter 1. 9 Ibid., Kindle e-book location 713. 10 Panashe Chigumadzi, “Who is Afraid of Race?” Boston Review, March 11, 2021, http://bostonreview.net/race/panashe-chigumadzi-who-afraid-race (accessed 25 March 2021). 11 Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2. 12 Antoinette Burton, Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 10–11. Burton highlights in particular Gandhi’s invocation of the term “kaffir” in his writings, his distance from African political leaders, and the communalist nature of his campaign of satyagraha in the Transvaal, part of a larger Indian communal politics which subordinated Africans to Indians. 13 Desai and Vahed, The South African Gandhi, Kindle e-book version location 256; Mohandas Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (London: Penguin Books, 1948); Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1938). 14 Guha, Gandhi Before India, 8. 15 See for example Shahid Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2,” in Gayatri Spivak and Ranajit Guha (eds.). Selected Subaltern Studies, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1–61. 16 See for example the essays collected in works such as Colin Clarke, Ceri Peach and Steven Vertovec (eds.), South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Susan Koshy and Rajagopalan Radakrishnan (eds.), Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 17 Isabel Hofmeyr, “The Complicating Sea: Indian Ocean as Method,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 3 (2012): 584–590. 18 Recent examples include James Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012); Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); Jon Soske, Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017).

162  Trishula R. Patel 19 Nico Slate, “Why Gandhi’s Legacy of Nonviolent Resistance to White Supremacy is Still Relevant – and Essential,” Scroll.in, June 28, 2020, https://scroll.in/ article/965870/why-gandhis-legacy-of-nonviolent-resistance-to-white-supremacyis-still-relevant-and-essential (accessed 15 April 2020). 20 Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 2. An example of the complexities that existed across transnational spaces and ideologies in the struggle against racism and imperialism can be seen in Slate’s research on the daily experiences of African American soldiers stationed in India during World War II, where they faced hostility from both local Indians as well as segregation in white spaces of socialization, even as African American intellectuals in Harlem were deploying the language of the Quit India movement in their own campaigns for civil rights (Chapter 5). 21 Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory, 3. 22 “Rao Bahadur Bhimjee R. Naik Family,” The South African Indian Who’s Who, 1939, 281, Hindoo Society Archives, Harare (hereafter referred to as HSA), PION0005–06. 23 N. J. Patel, one of Naik’s former employees, interview by Dr. Hasu H. Patel, Harare, 11 September 1968. 24 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 30. 25 Achut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth, The Shaping of Modern Gujarat: Plurality, Hindutva and Beyond (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2005), 193. 26 Ashwin Desai et al., Blacks in Whites: A Century of Cricket Struggles in KwaZuluNatal (Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2002), 33. 27 Frank Dominic Francis, interview by Dr. Hasu Patel, Harare, 18 September 1968. 28 “Gandhi and the Passive Resistance Campaign 1904–1914,” South African History Online, https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/gandhi-and-passive-resistance-campaign1907–1914 (accessed 22 March 2021). 29 Frank Dominic Francis, interview. 30 Kishore Gokal, interview, 25 September 2018. 31 The South African Indian Who’s Who, 281. 32 Details of initial incident reported in letter from G. O. Robertson, Acting Resident Magistrate to the Resident Commissioner, Salisbury on 17 January 1899, National Archives of Zimbabwe, Harare (hereafter referred to as NAZ), S1428/23. 33 J. B. Patel, interview by Dilip Chouhan, Harare, unknown date, HSA HIS0008. 34 The South African Indian Who’s Who (1939), 281, HSA PION0005–06. 35 Justice Ahamed Ebrahim, interview, 14 March 2018. 36 Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory, 2. 37 Letter from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Durban to the Editor of the Times of India, Bombay, 11 March 1899, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. II (1899), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Collected_Works_of_Mahatma_Gandhi/ Volume_II/1899#Indian_Traders_in_Rhodesia_(11–3–1899), (accessed 23 March 2021). The “Durban case” he refers to took place in 1897, when white residents of the town East London protested against an increased presence of Indians in the town. 38 In 1908, Naik penned a petition on behalf of 182 other Indian residents to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London regarding the Asiatics Ordinance. See petition of the British Indian population of Southern Rhodesia to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, London on 10 July 1908, National Archives of the United Kingdom, Richmond (hereafter referred to as NAUK), DO 119/523. Copy of the Asiatics Ordinance 1908, which was similar to legislation passed in South Africa at the same time, located in Minutes of the Proceedings of the Legislative Council and Ordinances,

Mohandas the Man, Mahatma the Legend  163

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59

60

NAZ. While the ordinance was initially passed by the local government, it was later disallowed by the power of imperial disallowance in London. Ali Kalshekar, “1908 Asiatics Ordinance in Perspective,” Henderson Seminar, University of Rhodesia (1974), 27. Trishula Patel, “Played Out on the Edges of the Cricket Boundary: The History of an Indian Cricket Team in Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, 1934–1955,” Journal of Southern African Studies 45, no. 3 (2019): 465–483. Trishula Patel, “Becoming Zimbabwean: A History of Indians in Rhodesia, 1890– 1980,” Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University, 2021, Chapter 3. Shobana Shankar, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 174. “Gandhi’s Relics Arrive at Beira,” The Rhodesia Herald, July 2, 1948, Madison Newspaper Room, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter referred to as LoC), microfilm collection 646. Photo showing members of the Salisbury Hindoo Society posting with the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, HSA CURE0004. Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma,” 312. Gretchen Heuberger, “Transnational belonging: the effects of the independence and partition of India on the Indo-African Diaspora,” Columbia Undergraduate Journal of South Asian Studies 1, no. 2 (2010): 87. Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory, 2. Patel, “Becoming Zimbabwean,” Chapter 3. Floyd Dotson and Lillian Dotson, The Indian Minority of Zambia, Rhodesia, and Malawi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 103–104. Letter from Old Durban Resident to the Editor, The Rhodesia Herald, 24 August 1950, NAZ. Letter from G.S. to the Editor, The Rhodesia Herald, 1 September 1950, NAZ. Allison Shutt, Manners Make a Nation: Racial Etiquette in Southern Rhodesia, 1910–1963 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 2. Kingsley Martin, “Was Gandhi Saint or Fox? Britain Found He Could Be Either,” The Rhodesia Herald, November 8, 1968, LoC microfilm collection 646. Yusuf Adam, interview by author, Harare, 17 May 2018. Mark Ravinder Frost, “In Search of Cosmopolitan Discourse: A Historical Journey across the Indian Ocean from Singapore to South Africa, 1870–1920,” in Pamila Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson (eds.), Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2010), 87–89. Jon Soske, “‘Wash Me Black Again’: African Nationalism, the Indian Diaspora, and Kwa-Zulu Natal, 1944–1960,” PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2009, 5. Desai and Vahed, The South African Gandhi, Kindle e-book location 302. Reg Austin, former lawyer and member of ZAPU, interview, 2 June 2020. The ANC in South Africa in particular practiced multiracialism, allowing only African members from 1912 until 1969 but participating in a wider alliance with other racial political parties. ZAPU, on the other hand, was nonracial in that it allowed the membership and direct participation of non-Africans. See “A Lesson in the ANC’s History of Multiracialism and Non-Racialism,” The Daily Vox, March 3, 2016, https://www.thedailyvox.co.za/anc-multiracialism-nonracialism-history/ (accessed 4 March 2021). Quote from Don Naik, another member of ZAPU, in Ramanbhai Naik’s biography, compiled by his family on his 75th birthday, 5; copy of book held by Ranjit Naik in London.

164  Trishula R. Patel 61 Vijay Mehta, Chairman of the Bulawayo Hindu Society, interview, 28 November 2019. Unlike what Amin describes as the “lie of the self-image of Indian nationalism,” Zimbabwean nationalist narratives do not erase the violence of the struggle, but rather cast it as a necessary war to win back the land from a white settler government and minority. Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory, 1–2. 62 Patel, “Becoming Zimbabwean,” Chapter 6. 63 This rhetoric was present in many African countries as antagonism against Indians rose after independence. One example in postcolonial Zimbabwe came from a ZANU-PF politician who called for the expulsion of Indians, as had been done en masse in Uganda in previous decades. Farayi Machamire, “Zanu PF provincial commissar wants Indians expelled,” The Daily News, February 20, 2017. 64 Jon Soske, “Navigating Difference: Gender, Miscegenation and Indian Domestic Space in Twentieth-Century Durban,” in Pamila Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson (eds.). Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2010), 197–219. 65 Soske, Internal Frontiers, 162. 66 Vineet Thakur, “The ‘Hardy’ Annual: A History of India’s First UN Resolution,” India Review 16, no. 4 (2017): 401–429. 67 See correspondence in “Undesirable Publications – Nyasaland,” 1953, NAUK CO 968/357. 68 Excerpts from M. K. Gandhi, Harijan, 24 February 1946, reproduced as “Mahatma Gandhi on Freedom in Africa,” Africa Quarterly: Journal of the Indian Council for Africa (Indian Centre for Africa, 1961), 5–7, NAZ S|AF308. 69 “Africa Remembers Gandhiji,” Africa Quarterly: Journal of the Indian Council for Africa (Indian Centre for Africa, 1962), 75–77, NAZ S|AF308. 70 Pyarelal, “Gandhiji and the African Question,” Africa Quarterly: Journal of the Indian Council for Africa (Indian Centre for Africa, 1962), 83, NAZ S|AF308. 71 Abraham Itty, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 96. 72 Priya Chacko, Indian Foreign Policy: The Politics of Postcolonial Identity from 1947 to 2004 (London: Routledge, 2012), 4–9. 73 Ibid., 4. 74 Pamphlet from Gandhi Walk, 5 October 2003, Harare, HSA CURE0023.

8

To the Students Education for Nonviolence in the World David S. Busch

This chapter charts out a new framework to the study of “India in the World” by exploring how college students interpreted Mohandas Gandhi’s satyagraha in the context of their higher education pursuits. What I seek to highlight is not an exhaustive overview of students who read, studied, and applied Gandhian nonviolence as a political theory, although that did happen. Rather, I focus on college students’ interpretations of their experiences in nonviolent direct action in relation to their academic pursuits. The first part focuses on the varied exchanges between Gandhi and Indian students like V. S. Dublish in light of Gandhi’s appeal to boycott British universities in the 1920s and 1930s. The other two sections explore the movement of nonviolence across campus borders, analyzing how students understood their experiments in nonviolence within their particular institutional and national contexts. This chapter links India’s Freedom Struggle to the application of nonviolent civil disobedience by Pauli Murray and other students at Howard University in the United States during the early 1940s and Zainap Asvat, Ahmed Kathrada, and other students who participated in the Transvaal Passive Resistance campaign in South Africa from 1946 to 1948. Despite the geographical distance of their campuses and temporal gaps in the years they enrolled as students, Dublish, Murray, Asvat, and Kathrada’s academic pursuits were intimately linked by another educational interest: Gandhi’s satyagraha in India. Indeed, the social position of being a “student” as well as the cultural and pedagogical flexibility of nonviolence served as an important but overlooked nexus for the development of anti-colonial and colored solidarity across India, South Africa, and the United States in the twentieth century.1 Just as importantly, what emerged among students was an interpretation of nonviolence as a distinct educational project that reconfigured questions about higher education, the pursuit of knowledge, and the public purpose of the university in the world.2 Of course, the interpretations of nonviolence as a distinct mode of study and their implications for higher education were as varied as the students and movements themselves. Indian students, like V. S. Dublish, initially embraced nonviolence as an alternative form of education by boycotting Meerut College. But, as Dublish engaged more deeply in the freedom struggle as a nationalist project, he DOI: 10.4324/9781003393962-12

166  David S. Busch interpreted nonviolence more narrowly as a political tactic separate from educational pursuits. The shift in Dublish’s thinking forecasted the different ways that students interpreted the educational meaning of nonviolence outside of India. Some students, like Pauli Murray, saw nonviolent direct action and her academic pursuits at Howard University as complementary intellectual endeavors and contained the seeds of a new model of civic education in the United States. Others, especially Kathrada, saw nonviolence and other forms of civil disobedience associated with the Transvaal Passive Resistance in South Africa as separate from his academic pursuits. Kathrada interpreted nonviolent direct action in South Africa as an extra-curricular commitment. Kathrada’s interpretation and his work organizing among students around the world foreshadowed the political evolution of post-World War II student activism in India and around the world that embraced nonviolence as a political tactic rather than as a philosophy. In India, the United States, and South Africa, students interpreted the experience of nonviolent direct action as an emancipatory form of education, even as they disagreed about the relationship between nonviolence and western institutions of higher education. The Double Meaning of Noncooperation Like many young Indians, V. S. Dublish’s educational pursuits, from primary school to higher education, were deeply shaped by Christian missions and, increasingly so, British colonial interests. Dublish graduated from Church Mission School, a Christian-run school, before enrolling at Meerut College. The curriculum at Meerut College was influenced by the educational and colonial outlook of Thomas Babington Macaulay. “I believe,” Macaulay famously wrote in his Minute on Indian Education, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England.3 Unsurprisingly so, much of Dublish’s education was informed by British history and Christian moral instruction – an emphasis that made Dublish’s education a central component of Britain’s political project in India. But that did not mean students like Dublish were inherently against their English education for the ways it was linked to the British colonial project. Indeed, many students of Dublish’s generation recognized the fact that key leaders in India’s liberation struggle, with Gandhi being one of them, had been educated in England.4 Just as importantly, students also recognized that Gandhi’s own experiences as a law student were made possible by a British-supported student network that exposed him to different educational contexts and content. Many students of Dublish’s

To the Students: Education for Nonviolence in the World  167 generation ultimately believed that English education in India was a mixed evil, at once serving British interest and holding the potential for political liberation. Gandhi, however, was not convinced by the argument that English education was a mixed evil; indeed, he went so far to argue that it was an “unmitigated evil.”5 In the 1920s, when Dublish was a college student, Gandhi consistently critiqued the British western system of education in speeches, articles for Young India, and letters to students. Most of Gandhi’s criticism centered on two intersecting issues: that instruction was in English, not the vernacular of India, and the motivating design of the system of education was to serve British administrative and colonial interests. In both ways, he challenged the very idea that instruction in English and British history and thus exposure to western ideas of democracy was vital to the liberation struggle. “Of all the superstitions that affect India,” he wrote, “none is so great as that a knowledge of the English language is necessary for imbibing ideas of liberty and developing accuracy of thought.”6 Gandhi’s critique of English education that emerged in the first part of the 1920s was thus largely motivated by the national project of swaraj – that the source of national liberation required a commitment to the study of Indian languages, culture, and history. Gandhi began to write extensively about English education as he experimented with the idea of noncooperation in India. In response to the Rowlett Bills in 1919 and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, Gandhi called for a one-day strike across India. In the Meerut region, where Meerut College was located, students took on prominent roles in organizing the strike, with V. S. Dublish serving as a key leader in mobilizing businesses and communities to support the effort. Thus, when Gandhi visited Meerut College a year later to support the Khalifat movement, two key elements of Gandhi’s thinking converged: his critique of English education and the increasing effectiveness of noncooperation. In a public meeting with Meerut students, Gandhi emphasized the need for students to commit to satyagraha. During his meeting with the students, Gandhi noted that Meerut students seemed committed to the movement and the idea of noncooperation, but did nothing other than shout slogans of freedom and liberation. When asked what Meerut students and graduates should do, he called on students to commit to constructive service. “If the members [of Meerut College] would get out and lend a helping hand to clean up the city, literally and morally,” he explained, “they would be doing a great work.”7 Gandhi’s speech to Meerut students, in particular his appeal for students to “get out,” proved prescient. The one-day strike in 1919 convinced Gandhi and the Indian National Congress that there was enough support across India for a large-scale boycott. In early April 1920, only a few months after Gandhi’s visit to Meerut, Gandhi and the Nation Party called for a week-long boycott that laid the groundwork for what became the Noncooperation Movement. The Noncooperation Movement called for the boycott of not only councils and courts associated with the British colonial infrastructure, but also the colleges. This included

168  David S. Busch Meerut College. Responding to the call, V. S. Dublish and his fellow student Bhagwati Sahai, organized a large-scale boycott of the college. They justified “dropping out” based on the college’s association with the British government. “Since this College receives grant-in-aid from the Government, I take it to be my highest duty,” wrote Sahai, “to severe [sic] all connections with this institution.”8 Dublish also argued that he could not continue his educational pursuits at Meerut because the college’s association with the British government also linked the institution and one’s educational pursuits with those killed by British colonial forces. Their efforts had an immense impact on the British-supported college. In 1915, the college student population at Meerut was 443; by 1922, when the movement was suspended, the enrollment dwindled to 218.9 But the effectiveness of the boycott was not simply in the decrease of Indian students enrolled in British colleges and universities like Meerut. The increased participation of students like Sahai and Dublish also transformed how they interpreted higher education in the context of the liberation struggle. Both Sahai and Dublish realized that in boycotting Meerut College what they sacrificed was the opportunity to move up financially and socially within the British political and economic system. They did not, however, believe they sacrificed their higher education pursuits. Rather, Sahai and Dublish came to understand that they enrolled in a different university, one that was directly relevant to India’s freedom struggle. In a letter to their peers at Banaras Hindu University, they interpreted the liberation movement as a distinct mode of study that contrasted with their education at Meerut. “We fully realise the uselessness and baneful effects of the present system of education,” they explained, “and wish you every success in your educational work that is to be carried on independent and national lines.”10 Efforts by students like Dublish and the critical role they played also impacted Gandhi’s thinking on higher education. Prior to the movement, Gandhi’s critique of the British system of higher education focused on English instruction and content. In this way, it’s easy to read Gandhi’s critique of British higher education as a conflict between national pedagogies. And, at some level, the epistemological conflict did center around conflicting national interests and worldviews.11 This becomes especially clear when Gandhi discussed and promoted the formation of Indian universities. The whole system of British higher education in India, he argued, was designed to “turn out clerks and others who would assist the alien government to carry on its rule.” In contrast, he wrote, the aim of the new institutions was to develop new citizens “determined to end the alien rule.”12 But, like the students, he came to see the problem of the British system of higher education beyond just the content of courses and the ways the institutions were designed to serve the British colonial system. Dropping out of British universities, Gandhi believed, enabled students to engage in a different mode of study, one that Gandhi defined in terms of nonviolent direct action. As he explained, “Expansion of the mind will come from hard experience, not necessarily in the college or the schoolroom.” Indeed, he continued, “when

To the Students: Education for Nonviolence in the World  169 some of us deny ourselves and ours the so-called higher education, we shall find the true means of giving and receiving a really high education.”13 Gandhi thus learned a key lesson from young student activists like Dublish, Sahai, and others at Meerut College: widespread participation of students in the noncooperation movement made clear that the political project of liberation was also inherently educational. This is not to suggest that Gandhi and student activists agreed on the educational significance of noncooperation and nonviolent action. In the aftermath of the noncooperation movement, what emerged in the correspondences between Gandhi and college students across India was an expansive dialogue about the political and moral meaning of higher education in light of Gandhi’s ideas of satyagraha and the liberation struggle more broadly. The exchanges about education and students’ role in the freedom struggle centered on the two sides of satyagraha: civil disobedience and service. Both Gandhi and student activists agreed in the necessity of civil disobedience. But there were also nuances to students and Gandhi’s thinking. Despite the widespread participation in the movement, many Indian students still maintained that western educational pursuits were valuable to the political struggle. Gandhi maintained that if students participated in civil disobedience, they should fully boycott the British university. To do so, he argued, was to fully commit as a satyagrahi. Many Indian students maintained that their scholarly pursuits, even in British universities, were not at odds with their nonviolent commitments in the liberation struggle. The correspondence between students, university principals, and Gandhi in the late 1920s revealed the experimental nature of Gandhi’s thinking about civil disobedience in higher education. In response to a student who appealed for financial aid to continue his studies at a British-supported university, Gandhi argued that the student’s willingness to commit to the struggle also meant that the student had to deal with its consequences. “So long as educational institutions remain under the patronage of the Government,” Gandhi explained in justifying his refusal to support the student, “they will be, as they must be, used for the support of the Government, and the students or the teachers who support antiGovernment popular measures, must count the cost and take the risk of being dismissed.”14 He worried that in separating civil disobedience and educational pursuits, students would interpret nonviolence strictly as a political tactic, rather than as a distinct philosophy and life commitment. At the same time, Gandhi also supported students’ acts of civil disobedience within British universities when it concerned the content of the coursework or the failure of teachers and administrators to support the freedom struggle. When a college principal asked Gandhi to discourage students’ use of civil disobedience and political activism, Gandhi wrote, “I think it is their clear duty to take a leading part in the political movement of their country.”15 Gandhi thus argued that civil disobedience was a key element of a students’ education, but only insofar that it was connected to a larger commitment to nonviolence as a philosophy.

170  David S. Busch Where Gandhi and students increasingly diverged was around the relationship between civil disobedience and constructive service. The latter, for Gandhi, was vital for students’ development as satyagrahis. The student strike at Gujarat College in Ahmedabad, Gandhi wrote, demonstrated the strength and courage of the student movement. But, he empathized, students would “feel it [their strength] more if they will do some constructive work.” Too often, Gandhi worried, that his philosophy of nonviolence would be marginalized if students only associated civil disobedience with political appeals of nationalism. Civil disobedience without constructive service, Gandhi told students, was incomplete. “There is no limit to the number who should take part in working the constructive programme,” Gandhi explained, “I regard this the most useful and effective part of the movement for independence, without which civil resistance will cease to be civil and, therefore utterly useless.”16 Indeed, what became most concerning for Gandhi was students’ increasing association of civil disobedience with partisan politics in the All India Student Federation (AISF), where students split between nationalists and communists. The split of the AISF demonstrated the evolution of student activism within India since the noncooperation movement. At the height of the noncooperation movement, students like V. S. Dublish not only boycotted Meerut College and served time in prison at Bareili, but also engaged in constructive service by forming a Swadeshi store that served India’s poor. Like many of the key leaders at Meerut College, Dublish personified a satyagrahi. He also helped form the AISF. But when Gandhi declared an immediate stop to the noncooperation movement in light of the Chauri Chaura incident, it dismayed students like Dublish who increasingly rejected nonviolence as a philosophy. As the split in the AISF made clear, many turned to the political appeals of communism. Dublish himself remained a nationalist, but became a member of the Hindustan Republican Army. The partisan turn within AISF shaped student activism in the 1940s and increasingly so in post-liberation India. But that did not mean that the understanding of satyagraha as a mode of education disappeared with the new generation of student activists. Indeed, Gandhi’s appeal to combine civil disobedience and constructive service persisted in correspondences with Indian students. In 1940, a college student wrote to Gandhi about his willingness to join the independence struggle. But the student was worried. If he were to participate in the civil disobedience struggle, it would not only affect his education, but may also lead his father to lose his job. Another college student from a Missionary college in India also wrote to Gandhi in the same year. The student explained that the school refused to offer any material related to India’s culture or desire for independence. The principal told the student that if the school offered such opportunities, it would also mean official recognition and support of India’s independence movement. Gandhi had two different responses to each of these letters. In the first, he told the student not to take part in civil disobedience, but did encourage the student to volunteer with the

To the Students: Education for Nonviolence in the World  171 constructive program that provided literacy tutoring and other services. Gandhi told the second student that he supported the student body’s effort to strike. He believed that professors and teachers had an obligation to “identify themselves with [student] activities and aspirations so long as they are not unhealthy or immoral.”17 His two responses were not at odds, but reflected how Gandhi saw the relationship between his political strategy and view on education. The independence struggle required both civil resistance and a program that supported the needs of Indians. Likewise, the goal of education needed to be completely free of colonial interests and serve a social purpose that supported India’s political struggle for freedom. In India, Gandhi and a new generation of student activists maintained an ongoing dialogue about the place and educational meaning of satyagraha in higher education. Just as significantly, the political appeals and experiences of students in India’s freedom struggle also began to spread to other college campuses around the world as Indian students participated in international organizations as representatives of the AISF and enroll in colleges in the United States and Europe. Of course, as the political evolution of the AISF makes clear, not all Indian student representatives advocated for Gandhian ideas of satyagrahi education. But, some did. In both ways, whether detailing the freedom struggle or interpreting Gandhian education, Indian student politics offered a new political vision for their peers around the world. In the process, students in places like the United States and South Africa, two countries where key leaders were inspired by India’s freedom struggle and the use of nonviolence, also began to read Gandhi’s ideas of nonviolence and raise a similar set of questions in the context of their education: What purpose and for whom do higher education institutions serve? The Civic Potential of Nonviolence In 1940, Pauli Murray, a young law student at Howard University, attended a “World Youth Credo” sponsored by the International Student Service (ISS). Started in Geneva, Switzerland, the ISS was a Protestant organization that helped mobilize relief for students after World War I and continued as a nonpartisan organization in the 1930s, working to facilitate international student connections. At the 1940 Conference, representatives came from not only the United States, but also from India and countries across Africa. A central topic of focus was the rights of minorities in the United States and the freedom struggle in India. As students noted in their report, “the issue of equal rights for the American Negro minority and the question of Indian freedom provoked some of the most significant discussions during the sessions.”18 Indeed, in the early 1940s, many young Black Americans like Murray were politically fascinated by India’s freedom struggle and its potential relevance in the United States.19 This was not Murray’s only exposure to India’s political struggle either. Prior to law school, Murray participated in the Harlem Ashram, a community started

172  David S. Busch by Jay Holmes Smith and committed to the study of Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence.20 As a member of the Harlem Ashram, a key text that shaped Murray’s understanding of Gandhian nonviolence was Krishnalal Shridharani’s War Without Violence. Shridharani’s War Without Violence also became the text for American activists who joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Shridharani was a veteran of the India’s freedom struggle, having actively participated in the Salt March. For American readers, the short book spoke intimately about the experimental nature of nonviolence within India’s freedom struggle and provided a digestible introduction to the philosophy. “The main structure of my thesis,” Shridharani explained in his introduction, “is founded on my own experience. In the pages that follow are woven the analysis and rationale of my own actions and reactions, attitudes and thoughts pertaining to Satyagraha during the last decade.”21 While there had been a range of scholarly books published in the United States on Gandhi and India’s freedom struggle, Shridharani’s text offered a first-person account that demystified Gandhi’s ideas of nonviolence. As Shridharani made clear in his introduction, the purpose of the book was to offer an overview of Gandhian nonviolence “whose appeal is not based on the traditional ‘mysticism of the Orient’ but on a very matter-of-fact pragmatism.”22 The purpose Shridharani’s book was to offer a practical picture of Gandhian nonviolence for audience of Americans. But, for Murray, the significance of Shridharani’s text in the United States was not just its first-person perspective and pragmatic emphasis; it was also the fact that Shridharani was a student when he participated in the Salt March and enrolled as a graduate student at Colombia University when he wrote the book. Shridharani also underscored his social position as a student, emphasizing early in his book that he was a college student when he participated in India’s freedom struggle. He also made sure to use the correct reference for American readers. “When I was what American collegians call a sophomore, and without so much as a by-your-leave from home,” Shridharani wrote, “I marched to the sea with Gandhi and the ‘first watch’ to break the Salt Law.”23 Just as significantly, Shridharani also used western scholarly language of social science to both add legitimacy to his experience while also ensuring it was translatable to American readers like Murray. In reading “books and treatises written by scholars of many lands, including, of course, India” had enabled Shridharani “to reinforce many of his deductions” and use quotations from the sources over his own, both as a way to ensure “the dissertation’s objectivity.”24 Indeed, Shridharani personified a particular type of Indian student that emerged from the freedom struggle: one who balanced a commitment to satyagraha and remained steadfast in his western scholarly pursuits. Like many of his peers in India, when Shridharani finished high school, he had to choose between a British-sponsored university or a nationalist college. He chose the latter and attended Gujarati Vidyapith, the university started by Gandhi. As a student, Shridharani critiqued the new nationalist university. “I did not particularly enjoy

To the Students: Education for Nonviolence in the World  173 attending the classes which I found dull and unduly serious as we pondered the fate of India,” Shridharani noted in his memoir, My India, My America.25 At the same time, Gujarati Vidyapith was also closely associated with Gandhi’s ashram. After class, Shridharani regularly participated in meetings, where he had “the exciting opportunity of observing the inner circle at close range,” referring to the key leaders of the movement including Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi.26 In 1930, as Gandhi prepared for the Salt March, the Ashram meetings transformed from an extracurricular pursuit to a central education activity. Or, put another way, Shridharani fully participated in satyagraha education when enrolled in Gujarati Vidyapith. Shridharani’s positions as a student – as a skeptic of nationalist universities, as a satyagrahi on the salt march, and as a young scholar at Columbia University – thus shaped how Murray translated Gandhi’s ideas at Howard University.27 For Shridharani, the education of a satyagrahi and the education of a western scholar were not inherently at odds. Rather, his book suggests that the combination of the two offered the potential for something altogether different. That is, at least, what Murray concluded from her reading of Shridharani’s book and, more significantly, her experiments with Gandhian nonviolence as a student at Howard University. Murray was not an instant convert of Gandhian nonviolence, especially in terms of its political relevance in the context of the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States. Murray’s thinking evolved as she engaged in different elements of nonviolence training. In comparing the social and political contexts of the United States and India, Murray initially concluded that nonviolence only worked because Indians were in the majority. As a minority in the United States, the political strength of nonviolence seemed limited. Murray arrived at this conclusion through an intellectual exercise: drawing out a chart that compared the populations of India and the United States.28 Her mindset shifted in early 1940, when riding a bus with her friend, Adelene McBean. Both refused to move to the back of the bus when told so by the driver. The act provided Murray with her first true lesson in satyagraha. As she explained to her friends, “We did not plan our arrest intentionally. The situation developed and, having developed, we applied what we knew of satyagraha on the spot.” Murray also admitted that her knowledge of satyagraha was also limited, writing in her memoirs that they had “no experience in the Gandhian method.”29 What becomes clear to Murray – both her initial skepticism and her application of nonviolence – was that nonviolence education required an experiential component. Murray learned that Gandhian nonviolence was not a rigid philosophy that could be easily taught through lectures and readings. Rather, it was a series of experiences that required consistent evaluation and reinvention. Murray thus embraced Gandhian nonviolence as Shridharani envisioned: as a pragmatic and experimental method of inquiry that fit within the American context. This was not her only experiment with nonviolence either. At Howard University, where Murray

174  David S. Busch enrolled as a Law student, she worked with Ruth Powell, Angela Jones, Marianne Musgrave, and Erma McLamore, four undergraduate students from Howard University to coordinate a direct-action campaign at local restaurants in the Washington D.C. area. The group’s efforts over the course of the 1942–1943 academic year led to the desegregation of Thompson’s, a local diner adjacent to campus.30 If Murray’s action on the bus shifted her understanding of Gandhian nonviolence as a political tactic, her nonviolent direct-action efforts with Howard students transformed her understanding of higher education in the United States. She believed that the campaign to desegregate local diners in D.C. offered a new model of student leadership development. In a letter to her mentor and friend Eleanor Roosevelt, she explained that out of the sit-in campaign emerged a “rigid and exacting process of trained leadership.” In particular, she argued, the campaign “taught students that it cannot cut itself off from the community because of is privileged position” and “must place the training [the student] has received at the disposal of these masses.” She also thought that the college campus was an ideal place to develop nonviolence as a mode of education. The proximity of students to one another “would give them opportunity to meet and discuss the problems frequently, to analyze their mistakes, to evaluate their methods, to correct errors and to evolve the technique.” Murray thus went a step further than Shridharani. She thought this iterative process would not only transform Gandhian nonviolence “into a scientific form” but also the American pragmatic tradition. Indeed, she believed it represented a “vital part of the education of minority citizens in a democracy.”31 Despite the perceived success of the sit-ins, Mordecai Johnson and the university told the students to desist from further action. President Johnson and the university were in a difficult position. It couldn’t explicitly support student activism against segregation. If the university did, it threatened the financial well-being of the institution and its charter. President Johnson explained to the students that he supported their activities, but believed that they shouldn’t act as representatives of the university. In his letter to the group, Johnson explained that present policy and regulations of the Board of Trustees of Howard University do not provide authority or approval for an officially recognized student organization, in Howard University, to engage in a program of direct action in the City of Washington for the purpose of accomplishing social reform affecting institutions other than Howard University itself.32 Although Johnson supported the students, he was ultimately constrained: the university could not actively support the students. Johnson’s letter paralleled the dilemmas of those Indian presidents and faculty who also similarly supported Indian student activists during the freedom struggle, but were constrained by their association with a British university. In this light, Johnson told students that he supported their actions, but they could not act as representatives of the university.

To the Students: Education for Nonviolence in the World  175 But the issue did not simply reflect the limits of the institution as a source for social change. In response, Murray and the students created a list of questions that went to the core of the dilemma, both of the university and its educational practices. They asked the faculty that since they were once students who “felt the urge to action on matters which immediately concern them as a minority group,” what would they recommend. They also challenged Johnson, who was a prominent advocate for civil rights and had made militant speeches throughout the country. First, the students asked, is it surprising that his own students are inspired by his speeches? And, second, what is the difference between his speeches and student actions? As a Law student, Murray partly framed it as an issue concerning academic freedom. Murray noted in a letter written under the Howard University Law Student Guild, that Mordecai’s decision was a direct violation of a student’s academic freedom. It is our considered judgment that it is the fundamental purpose of the University to turn students to become functional units in American democracy and that the declared policy of the All-University Council is a repudiation of the purpose and of its duty to the American people and toward academic freedom.33 More significantly, Murray concluded that the university’s responses made apparent two different conceptions of education. The nonviolent actions of Howard students, she wrote in an article titled “Blueprint for First Class Citizenship,” illuminated two competing ideas of university education. There are those that believe that “the dynamics of social change must originate in democratic institutions which form test-tubes of democracy and that must be a realistic relation of one’s activities in the community to one’s studies in the classroom.” But, she also noted, there were “others who believe that education is a static affair and must not be related to the community at large.” “Between these two points of view,” she continued, “Howard University must make a choice.”34 Indeed, for Murray, the decision by the university placed students in a difficult position. Students, she explained, were “caught between our responsibility as potential leaders not to repudiate this leadership we hope we have demonstrated and our responsibilities as members of a University community not to hurt the reputation of the University.”35 In the United States, Murray’s efforts revealed the key differences between the student Gandhian network and the Gandhian network that emerged among Black Christian leaders like Johnson. For Murray, a commitment to nonviolent direct action represented not only an effective political tactic that could transform the Black Freedom Struggle, but also higher education. Johnson, however, believed nonviolence had nothing to do with the latter. He, along with other prominent Gandhian figures at Howard, including Howard Thurman and William Stuart Nelson, interpreted nonviolence strictly in a political sense. “Gandhi

176  David S. Busch is conducting today the most significant religious movement in the world, in his endeavor to inject religion into questions of economics and politics,” Johnson argued. But Johnson’s view was not unique to Mordecai or civil rights leaders in the U.S. Students in South Africa also concluded that it was the movement, not the university, that would bring about liberation. Nonviolence as an Extra-Curricular Activity In the mid-1930s, Kesaveloo Naidoo, an Indian South African, enrolled at Edinburgh College. Her academic pursuits in Scotland reflected the geographical reach of Britain’s academic network. But her educational experiences did not just serve the colonial project. Edinburgh became a haven of transnational student politics. Naidoo described Edinburgh University in the 1930s as a great melee of young people from all parts of the world – every tinge of black, yellow and white; Indians from India, Trinidad, Mauritius, Fiji and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Africans from the vast number of African States as well as Egyptians, Arabs, Chinese and Japanese. Central to Edinburgh’s global student life was India’s freedom struggle. Indeed, Naidoo’s reflections on Edinburgh reveal the ways India’s freedom struggle transformed the British academic network. “Winds from the world blew around me and ideas of justice and injustice, freedom and exploitation began to excite my imagination and awaken my political consciousness,” Naidoo explained, “I was attracted to the firebrands in the college and came to feel a strong affiliation with India.”36 Yusuf Dadoo, an Indian South African and fellow student of Naidoo’s at Edinburgh, personified the political impact of India’s freedom struggle on student life across national borders. In high school, Dadoo studied with P. S. Joshi, an Indian Nationalist and Gandhian. Inspired by Joshi’s teachings on India, Dadoo helped raise funds for the All India Congress. He also participated in a protest led by visiting Indian poet Sarojini Naido against the proposed Class Areas Bill. When Dadoo completed his secondary education in South Africa, he matriculated at Aligarh College in India. At Aligarh, Dadoo befriended Indian South African, Ismail Ahmed Cachalia, whose father participated in the first passive resistance campaign in South Africa. And, before Edinburgh, Dadoo briefly studied at the University of London, where he organized a protest with other Indian students against the Simon Commission. By the time Dadoo reached Edinburgh, then, he engaged with different components of a broad educational network redefined by India’s Freedom Struggle. Returning to South Africa, Dadoo and Naidoo thus brought with them two different educations: a British medical education and a political education in India’s freedom struggle. The combination of the two informed their postgraduate work.

To the Students: Education for Nonviolence in the World  177 Dadoo joined the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC), an organization established during Gandhi’s satyagraha in South Africa. Dadoo, however, was disappointed by the TIC’s political priorities in the early 1940s. The organization, he believed, tended to prioritize and serve the interests of wealthy Indians and political moderates, rather than the working class. The focus made the organization reluctant to engage in nonviolent direct action against the South African government. By 1946, Dadoo and Monty Naicker, a fellow Indian South African medical doctor who also studied at Edinburgh, attained leadership of the TIC. In the process, they organized a Passive Resistance Campaign against the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Bill, or what became known as the “Ghetto Act.” One of the first to participate in the Passive Resistance campaign was Naidoo. At the same time that both Dadoo and Naidoo helped organize and participate in the Passive Resistance Campaign, they also established medical practices to serve Indian communities within South Africa. Dadoo and Naidoo thus resurrected satyagraha within South Africa by combining constructive service with civil disobedience. But in adopting the political strategy of nonviolence did not mean that Dadoo and Naidoo embraced Gandhi’s critique of western education, especially when they appealed to college students to join the struggle. After all, both benefited from their access to colleges like Edinburgh, believing that their western educations equipped them with the necessary skills to provide services to the Indian community in South Africa while also exposing them to different political perspectives of students around the world. Indeed, Dadoo and Naidoo worried that the “Ghetto Act” represented the beginning of a much broader effort to codify segregation not only in real estate and land ownership, but also in education institutions in South Africa. In this way, Dadoo’s appeal to students rested on the assumption that access to western education was vital to the realization of full citizenship in South Africa. Student involvement in the Passive Resistance Campaign thus revealed the ways satyagraha took on different meanings among students within universities around the world. In contrast to Gandhi, who called on students to boycott British and western universities because they did not serve the Indian people, and Pauli Murray in the United States, who interpreted nonviolent direct action as a new model of civic education in the American university, Indian students in South Africa understood their nonviolent activism as separate from their academic pursuits. In this light, student activists pioneered what became the “liberation before education” mantra of the South African liberation struggle.37 A commitment to nonviolent resistance to the Ghetto Act was a necessary political act and sacrifice to ensure their access to education in the future. Indeed, college students underscored the necessity of sacrifice in the Passive Resistance Campaign in South Africa. After his arrest for his participation in the camp-in, Yusuf Rawat, an Indian student who helped form the Transvaal Indian Youth Volunteer Corps, told the court that he was not alone. Rather, Rawat

178  David S. Busch underscored, he was part of “thousands of young men and women who are prepared to count no sacrifice too great in order to achieve their just and rightful citizenship rights in this land of our birth.”38 A report on the campaign demonstrated the extent of student involvement in the movement. In December 1946, only a couple months into the campaign, close to fourteen-hundred individuals had been imprisoned for their participation, of which twelve-hundred were under the age of thirty and had been previously enrolled in college before joining the struggle.39 That students participated in the movement wasn’t a surprise to Rawat either. Students understood the implications of the Ghetto Act because, as Rawat explained, the “measure aimed at destroying the future of the Indian Youth in particular.” This required, as many students came to believe, a commitment to “liberation before education.” But the “liberation before education” mantra – in particular, the implicit contrast between liberation now and education in the future – was also misleading, as many students also recognized that nonviolent direct action and the campaign itself represented a distinct form of education. Zainap Asvat, an Indian South Africa woman, was in her third year of medical school at the University of Witwatersrand when Dadoo and Naicker organized the Transvaal Passive Resistance Campaign.40 Asvat took the year off and traveled to Durban, where she helped set up tents and participate in the camp-in as part of defying the Ghetto Act. Asvat experienced the violent response to the camp-in, when white South Africans violently attacked the tents. Asvat was also arrested for her role, serving in prison for three months. Asvat interpreted her experiences as a distinct form of learning. “I have learnt [sic],” she concluded, “that prison life is a necessary part of one’s education on the battlefield of freedom.”41 Asvat’s interpretation demonstrates the ways students understood their acts of civil disobedience in terms of education. Even as students like Asvat understood her experiences in terms of education, she and others maintained that nonviolence education was separate from their academic pursuits. Indeed, in returning to college, students promoted the idea of nonviolent activism as a form of education, but ultimately one that fell within the realm of the extra-curriculum and student organizations associated with the university. The experiences of Ahmed Kathrada in particular demonstrate the ways students focused their attention on transforming the extra-curricular components of the university and student life in light of their experiences in the Passive Resistance Campaign. From an early age, Kathrada participated in youth politics, most prominently the Young Communist League in South Africa. The Passive Resistance Campaign provided him a different political – and by extension – educational outlet. In the context of the TIC and student life, Kathrada worked with I. C. Meer and other college students to develop a Political Education program for students involved in the Passive Resistance Campaign. The content of the program took on the characteristic of

To the Students: Education for Nonviolence in the World  179 Dadoo and Naidoo’s transnational educational experience, with classes focused on “the conditions of oppressed peoples throughout the world.”42 But the lessons of the education program didn’t just rely upon a shared understanding of conditions and experiences. When Kathrada was imprisoned for his participation in the Passive Resistance Campaign, the experience taught him an important lesson about solidarity, or what he described as “the sense of being one of thousands fighting for justice.”43 In this light, Kathrada prioritized the active component of nonviolent direct action. As he explained to his peers in the African National Congress, “The time for action is now.”44 Kathrada’s emphasis on action served an educational purpose. For Kathrada, nonviolent action was educationally flexible in the ways it could link distinct national liberation struggles to a broader global community of youth activism. Kathrada’s understanding of nonviolent direct action as a source of solidarity took shape in two distinct ways. On college campuses, Kathrada organized a World Youth Festival, where he highlighted the different forms of student-led nonviolent action within Greece, Spain, and China. In doing so, he demonstrated to his South African peers how their commitments to nonviolent action would link them to a larger political community of youth activists. On another level, as the main youth contributor to The Passive Resistor, Kathrada used the publication of the Passive Resistance Campaign to forge direct connections between students in South Africa to those in Indonesia and India. Two letters reprinted by Kathrada demonstrated a key tenant of his understanding of nonviolent direct action. Kathrada reprinted one letter by M. Bondan, the student leader of the Central Committee of Indonesian Independence, who underscored the youth solidarity and the ambidextrous character of youth nonviolent direct action. “We fully realise that your struggles a hard one, and we offer our fraternal greetings and sympathy in the tasks still ahead of you and hope that before long your full independence and rights of citizenship will be achieved,” Bondan wrote in a letter to Kathrada and other Passive Resistors. He also emphasized the ways nonviolent activism and India’s liberation struggle provided a shared language for students. “We send you our greetings and although the language is Indonesian we know too well that the slogan of eternal freedom is well known and understood by all Indian people.”45 Kathrada also helped linked the Passive Resistance Campaign back to India. In 1947, Satyapal Dang, the General Secretary of AISF passed a resolution in support of the Passive Resistance Campaign in South Africa. Kathrada reprinted the letter, which emphasized the distinct linkage between Indians in South Africa and India. The Conference, wrote Dange “particularly greets the Indian youth and students in South Africa who have taken a proud part in the Passive Resistance Movement” and thus “pledges to support the struggle in every possible way.”46 Kathrada’s efforts in the Passive Resistance campaign demonstrate the significance of his role in transforming the extra-curriculum of the postwar university.

180  David S. Busch In 1951, Kathrada enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand. But, the significance of his time at the University of Witwatersrand, as he makes clear in his memoirs, was his involvement in student organizations. At the University of Witwatersrand, Kathrada joined the Students Liberal Association. In his capacity as a member of the Student Liberal Association, Kathrada traveled to the International Union of Students conference in Warsaw, Poland. The trip to Poland was the beginning of a long-term commitment to international student organizing. Between his imprisonment in Durban in 1946 and Robben Island in 1963, Kathrada helped forge a transnational network of student activists committed to tactical aspects of nonviolence. Kathrada developed a discursive and physical network among students devoted to nonviolent direct action and liberation. After Poland, Kathrada lived in Budapest, where joined the World Federation of Democratic Youth and International Union of Students as a representative of South African Students. In both capacities, he also engaged with representatives from the International Student Conference, the new postwar American-sponsored international student organization.47 Both the International Union of Students and the International Student Conference became the key international student organizations that shaped postwar campus life. In 1946, when students gathered in Prague to develop new international student bodies, it was India’s Freedom Struggle that took center stage. A key organizer of the gathering was Vidya Kangua, a representative from the AISF.48 At the gathering, Kangua organized a ceremony to commemorate India’s Freedom Struggle. But the emphasis on India’s freedom struggle was ultimately different. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, Kangua and Kathrada focused more on the political and tactical elements of nonviolence in the context of the extracurriculum and international student organizations, rather than how nonviolence challenged prevailing forms of education associated with western universities. As Kathra and Kangua both make clear, India’s Freedom Struggle and Gandhi’s satyagraha continued to capture the political and educational imagination of students. Indeed, with the postwar expansion of higher education, students did not just enroll in college classes. They also participated in the new international organizations of the extra curriculum reinvented by India’s Freedom Struggle. On India and the “Global Sixties” The chronology of nonviolent education demonstrates the interconnectedness of social movements and education. Notions of nonviolent action gained popularity on college campuses around the world precisely because college students discovered nonviolent action as a different means to learn about the world. The experimental nature of satyagraha enabled students to creatively rethink elements of higher education while also forging political linkages across national borders. Between 1920 and 1950, India’s Freedom Struggle and Gandhi’s satyagraha transformed how students understood their political roles and academic

To the Students: Education for Nonviolence in the World  181 pursuits. Of course, differing perspectives on western higher education forced practical questions about the place of civil disobedience and constructive service in the western university. After all, the political problems of higher education raised by Gandhi and students during India’s freedom struggle were ultimately different in detail and kind from those in the United States and South Africa. What thus emerged across national and campus borders were, so to speak, two parallel conversations. One conversation, deeply shaped by India’s Freedom Struggle and Gandhi’s call to boycott British universities, focused on the ways nonviolence as a form of education represented a direct challenge to western systems of higher education and knowledge. Indeed, students who committed to satyagraha questioned the public purpose of the British university within India and the content of the classroom. Of course, not all Indian students concluded that the western systems of higher education set up within India were inherently miseducative as Gandhi argued. Indeed, as students like Shridharani translated satyagraha into other educational contexts, he attempted to fuse nonviolence and western education. This intellectual and political synthesis influenced how Pauli Murray, a law student in the United States, ultimately translated nonviolence within Howard University, seeing nonviolent action as a vital component of American civic education for Black students. The other conversation among students also adopted nonviolence as a form of education, but one that applied only to the extra-curricular components of higher education. In South Africa, nonviolence provided students, in the sense of Kathrada, a means to act as political agents in ways that traditional student politics did not. In this regard, students focused on nonviolence as a way to transform students’ political roles, rather than their educational pursuits. Interestingly, the understanding of nonviolence among students within the Passive Resistance Campaign in South Africa paralleled those of Howard University’s president Mordecai Johnson, who pushed back against Murray’s argument for nonviolence as a central educational activity. The two conversations thus were ultimately linked by a more critical question: was nonviolence the education of the university or was it an extracurricular affair? By the 1950s, the emphasis on nonviolence as a political and tactical education confined to extra-curricular of student life seems to have outweighed Gandhi’s more radical critique of higher education and his belief that satyagraha was the “best and noblest” education. But, in the postwar period, students still maintained key elements of satyagraha as education, even if limited to the extracurriculum. In the International Student Conference, N. Vignarajah, an Indian student at the College of Agriculture in Poona, India called on his peers around the world to adopt what he defined as “Gandhian education.” “The theory on which this type of education is based,” Vignarajah explained “is that knowledge and understanding develop when direct action is taken on problems.”49 The persistence of satyagraha education prompts a rethinking of nonviolence in postwar student life, which turns out to be, in ways that challenge the literature

182  David S. Busch on global histories of education and student activism. The transnational reach and scale of student activism and the political challenge to western institutes of higher education in the 1960s appear at first glance to be a short burst of a story. But, as this chapter seeks to make clear, that first glance is deceptive. The global scale of student activism in the 1960s is better seen as the climatic phase of an ongoing political transformation of student life and higher education rooted in India’s Freedom Struggle. In the context of India’s Freedom Struggle, students began to reconsider the what and how of their education and political roles. Those experiences spread across campus borders and, in the process, reconceptualized the dictum of “holding onto truth” as not merely a political, but also an educational imperative. How did India’s freedom struggle and Gandhi’s satyagraha continue to inspire students in the 1960s, especially those deeply shaped by the second wave of liberation struggles across Africa? Answers to that question will transform how we think about the global sixties and their institutional legacies around the world. Notes 1 The political connections between the freedom struggles in India, South Africa, and the United States has received extensive scholarly attention. Most of this work has focused on key political leaders in the respective freedom struggles. For more on the shared freedom struggles in India and the United States, see Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); on Gandhi and western political activism, see Sean Scalmer, Gandhi in the West: The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and on Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, see Imraan Coovadia, Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 2 Most work on Gandhi and education has focused on nai talim. Glynn Richards, Gandhi’s Philosophy of Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Simone Holzwarth, “A New Education for ‘Young India’: Exploring Nai Talim from the Perspective of a Connected History,” in Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere (ed.). Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and CrossCultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014). Yet, Gandhi did not see satyagraha as separate from his educational project. As Gandhi explained in Young India, “Satyagraha is the Noblest and Best Education,” Gandhi, Young India, November 3, 1927. 3 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute on Indian Education, H. Sharp (ed.), Bureau of Education. Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781–1839). (Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1920). Reprint. Delhi: National Archives of India, 1965, 107–117. 4 In Gandhi’s writing, there is a noticeable absence of his time at the University of London. Many of Gandhi’s biographers have followed suit. As Vinay Lal has noted, UCL left such little impression on Gandhi that he nowhere mentions it in his own autobiography, which down to the present day remains the most authoritative source of information about Gandhi’s years in London. Gandhi’s most notable biographers, for instance D. G. Tendulkar, Robert Payne, B. R. Nanda, and Geoffrey

To the Students: Education for Nonviolence in the World  183 Ashe, make no mention of University College London, and it is striking that the short chapter on Gandhi’s London years in Nanda’s biography dwells exclusively on Gandhi’s friendships with vegetarians, theosophists, and other dissenters. Lal, Gandhi in London: The Law Student and The “Inner Temple.” UCLA Social Sciences, MANAS. 5 Gandhi, “An Unmitigated Evil,” Young India, April 13, 1921. 6 Gandhi, “English Education,” Young India, April 27, 1921. It’s important to note here that in his early writings to students, Gandhi was not anti-English instruction altogether. In fact, it was in this context that Gandhi articulated one of his more famous quotes on cosmopolitanism. “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown of my feet by any… I would have our young men and young women with literary tastes to learn much of English and other world-languages as they like, and then expect them to give the benefits of their learning to India and to the world, like Bose, a Roy, or a Tagore. But I would not have a singled Indian to forget, neglect or be ashamed of hist mother-tongue or to feel that he or she cannot thinking or express the best thoughts in his or her own vernacular.” Gandhi, “English Learning,” Young India, June 1, 1921. 7 Gandhi used the word “scavenger” to describe this type of work. “Interview to S. W. Clemes,” Young India, February 2, 1920. 8 F. Gilani, The Meerut College Chronicle, Meerut, 1928, p. 32. 9 The Independent, November 25, 1920. 10 As quoted in S. K. Mittal, “The Role of Meerut College in the Freedom Struggle of India,” Social Scientist 7, no. 4 (November 1978): 35–56. 11 For more on national/civilizational pedagogies, see Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, “Towards a Global History of Education: Alternative Strategies,” in Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere (ed.). Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 27‒39. 12 Gandhi, “At the Kashi Vidyapith,” Young India, October 10, 1929. 13 Gandhi, “Sacrifice,” Young India, June 24, 1926. 14 Gandhi, “On their Trial,” Young India, February 16, 1928. 15 Gandhi, “Boycott and Students,” Young India, March 29, 1928. 16 Gandhi, “Students and Political Strikes,” Young India. 17 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, To the Students (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1949), 276–279. 18 “Destroy Racial Supremacy Theory – Student Assembly,” Washington Tribune, September 12, 1940. 19 Recent historical scholarship has brought to light Murray’s critical role in the long civil rights movement. See in particular Sarah Azaransky, The Dream is Freedom: Pauli Murray and American Democratic Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 20 On the Harlem Ashram, see Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism. 21 Krishnalal Shridharani, War Without Violence: A Study of Gandhi’s Method and Its Accomplishments (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1939), 16. 22 Ibid., 13. 23 Ibid., 20. 24 Ibid., 15. 25 Krishnalal Shridharani, My India, My America (New York: Duell Sloan and Pearce, 1941), 30. 26 Ibid.

184  David S. Busch 27 Upon reading the book, Murray corresponded with Shridharani while he was a student at Colombia University. 28 Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 205. 29 Ibid. 30 Flora Bryant Brown, “NAACP Sponsored Sit-ins by Howard University Students in Washington D.C., 1943–44,” The Journal of Negro History 85, no. 4 (Autumn 2000): 274–286. 31 “Draft Letter to President Johnson,” May 1944, folder 395, box 18, Pauli Murray Papers, Schlesinger Library. 32 Letter to Professor Ransom from Mordecai W. Johnson, May 2, 1944, folder 396, box 18, Pauli Murray Papers, Schlesinger Library. 33 Howard University School of Law, Student Support of Committee, May 1, 1944, folder 396, box 18, Pauli Murray Papers, Schlesinger Library. 34 Murray, “Blueprint for First Class Citizenship,” folder 396, box 18, Pauli Murray Papers, Schlesinger Library. 35 Letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, folder 396, box 18, Pauli Murray Papers, Schlesinger Library. 36 Dr Goonam, Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 1991). 37 This mantra is typically associated with South African student activism in the 1970s, but it first took shape in the Passive Resistance Campaign. 38 “Youth Affairs,” The Passive Resister, October 23, 1947. 39 “5 months of struggle: a brief account of the Passive resistance struggle from 13th June to 13th November 1946,” Durban, South Africa: Joint Passive Resistance Council of Natal and Transvaal, 1946. 40 Asvat’s father also participated in Gandhi’s satyagraha in South Africa. 41 “Indian Women Have Won the Admiration of the Freedom-Love World,” 1, no. 15, The Passive Resister. Asvat understood passive resistance as a liberatory form of education, not only for the Indian communities in South Africa, but also for women. Asvat believed that the experience enabled her and other women to develop a sense of civic agency. As she explained, “Our women have awakened to take their rightful place in the fabric of our society and in shaping the destiny not only of ourselves but the generation to come.” Asvat also understood that service was a vital part of education as well. As the Vice President of the Transvaal Youth Volunteer Corps, she met with local Indian South Africans, where she encouraged them to join the struggle while also developing programs that provided financial and welfare support. 42 “Returned Resisters,” The Passive Resister, vol. 1, 16, October 14, 1946. 43 Ahmed Kathrada, No Bread for Mandela: Memoirs of Ahmed Kathrada, Prisoner No. 468/64 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 48. 44 “A.N.C. Youth League Promotes Next Steps: Mbobo Reception,” The Passive Resister, vol. 3, April 23, 1948. 45 “Letters from Indonesia,” The Passive Resister, vol. 2, no. 40, October 9, 1947. 46 “Indian Students Greet Resisters,” The Passive Resister, vol. 2, no. 5, February 7, 1947. 47 Kathrada, No Bread for Mandela. 48 “World Women in Conference,” The Passive Resister, vol. 2, no. 13, April 4, 1947. 49 Letter by N. Vignarajah, College of Agriculture, Poona, India, “Gandhian Education” The Student, vol. 2, no. 12.

9

A Bombay Periodical, Indian Non-Alignment & Afro-Asian Internationalism Swapna Kona Nayudu

This paper is a study of the periodical United Asia, published in Bombay, India, from 1948 to 1974, as a repository of internationalist discourse between Indian and African political spaces. The paper is specifically interested in tracing a history of non-alignment as an idea that travelled between colonised or newly post-colonial spaces, with Bombay as a geographical point of convergence for commentary from within India on non-alignment. The periodical carried essays on non-alignment alongside essays on African and Asian politics, thus creating a sphere replete with themes of Third Worldism, Global South solidarities and India’s non-aligned policy vis-à-vis the Cold War. A study of the periodical presents non-alignment in a new light – that of Afro-Asian solidarity rather than as merely a riposte to big power politics. To tease these connections out, I will first discuss ways in which non-alignment has been written into and out of International Relations and Global History and then, co-locate Indian Afro-Asianism and the critique of non-alignment in the pages of the periodical United Asia. In the conclusion, I will discuss United Asia as embracing Afro-Asian periodical diplomacy and constructing its own template of doing so. In sum, the paper suggests that a sustained study of periodicals such as United Asia could invigorate existing epistemological approaches to the study of a non-aligned Afro-Asian internationalist politics. Writing Non-Alignment In order to look more closely at writings on non-alignment in the pages of United Asia as a point of inflection in India-Africa intellectual connections, it is necessary to contextualise the moves made by the periodical vis-à-vis other literature. In other words, what is the status of non-alignment as a subject of historical international relations? There are two ways in which that question can be answered – first, is to discuss non-alignment as a state-centric concept emanating from the Global South looking to decentre Eurocentric International Relations; and second, to examine non-alignment as an object circulating within political collectives and at political gatherings, particularly at the Asian-African DOI: 10.4324/9781003393962-13

186  Swapna Kona Nayudu conferences of the 1940s and the 1950s. Both these movements illuminate the essentially international nature of the non-aligned conception of world politics but are somewhat antithetical in that one was resolutely state-centric while the other was more accommodative of a decentring of the state. In that sense, one was more Westphalian while the other was rather more cosmopolitan. It is interesting to undertake a survey of non-alignment literature from within these two sometimes overlapping, and at other times, conflicting spaces. From within the International Relations canon, non-alignment is viewed as theoretically weak, even if some studies concede it may have been well-intentioned; from within the Global History literature on Asian-African cooperation, it is mostly absent by name, even though most of the discussion of India’s policies allude to Indian non-alignment expanding into the Non-Aligned Movement via some form of Third Worldism. This paper will suggest that both bodies of work could benefit from paying closer attention to the discussion of non-alignment in Indian periodicals such as United Asia. In International Relations literature, the first strand of writing on non-alignment read it in relation to the power-centric discourse of the Cold War, consequentially treating it as neutralism or neutrality, while disregarding the historical context for the emergence of neutrality, a distinctly legalistic formulation framed within the discourse of war. For almost two decades, writers routinely used non-alignment and neutralism interchangeably and presumably to indicate the same position. This assumption also sparked off debates on the relevance of the non-aligned position in the post-Cold War age.1 Other writings dealing with the differences and similarities between neutralism, neutrality and non-alignment were joined by analyses looking to clarify these positions vis-àvis international politics per se.2 Even others considered the concept in its Asian context, but still abjured the term “non-alignment.”3 From within India, historians in the 1960s treated non-alignment as an approach “supplementary to the one based on power,” and one that “proceeds on the assumption that peace cannot be promoted by creating positions of strength.”4 In later work, non-alignment was discussed vis-à-vis the concept of security dilemmas, as part of a defensive realism, that partially succeeded by disavowing military alliances and achieving strategic autonomy and within a larger conception of balance of power politics, as “essentially improvisational.”5 Most foreign policy accounts of non-alignment begin by identifying India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as the prime architect and practitioner of foreign policy in India around independence; some studies characterise nonalignment as a contending vision for India’s strategic culture, while identifying the 1950s and 1960s as being governed by “unified idealism.”6 A second strand of foreign policy literature refers to non-alignment as part of a “Nehruvian international” vision for India, while yet others are of the view that such a vision was in fact, realist in its assumption that the world is not necessarily friendly to a weak and vulnerable state such as in India, and that national interests must

A Bombay Periodical  187 shape the foreign policy of any state.7 Most interesting for the purposes of this paper is the claim that such visions of international relations are “often elucidated as images or ideals, rather than as conclusions derived from sustained arguments about the nature of international politics.”8 Practitioners have called non-alignment “an unusual phenomenon in world politics that cannot be understood within the confines of the traditional approaches in international politics,” arguing that “its very ambiguity gave it traction and academic respectability.”9 Some sort of consensus presents itself in the view that non-alignment was “an unconventional approach to power politics” that was India’s attempt at “gradually carving out space for an uncommitted world.”10 More sophisticated analysis of non-alignment has investigated the relationship between power and ideology during the Cold War as the context of India’s search for autonomy from both as organising principles, seeing non-alignment as the anti-thesis of bipolarity.11 Newer analyses have contended that non-alignment was informed by the pursuit of an “ethical modernity” and that it was “underpinned by a critique of the hierarchical nature of the emerging post-imperial world order and had as its ultimate goal, a post-sovereign state world community.”12 Other recent work has put forth the argument that Nehru’s vision was to integrate India into the international community in pursuit of the idea of “One World.” Although International Relations studies provide some insight into Indian non-alignment and are invocations to a more comprehensive approach, none of these writings actually attempt to theorise non-alignment beyond saying that it cannot be theorised using existing approaches. It is also interesting to note that studies focussed on the Indian version of non-alignment tend to presuppose certain synonymity between Nehru and non-alignment. Thus, invariably, histories of non-alignment, however long or short, are more often than not, hasty biographies of Nehru, and lean very heavily on the force of his personality to explain inconsistencies or peculiarities within the way the concept took shape. Without doubt, Nehru was the architect of Indian non-alignment and is rightly, most strongly associated with it. Even so, it might be more accurate to say that a variety of influences collected together in his articulations of what he thought non-alignment was or ought to be. Some of these influences came from political philosophy – Gandhi and Tagore had a strong hand; and post-independence, Nehru gathered influences from other international figures and wrote and received colossal amounts of correspondence, especially as it pertained to world politics.13 Yet, this iterative dimension is not systematically studied in International Relations literature at all. Indeed, as far as International Relations goes, non-alignment is inert and impotent. In its preoccupation with both the Cold War, International Relations literature is often concerned with how the Cold War spilled over to the Third World, and how non-alignment as a policy responded to that phenomenon.14 This perspective works chiefly by assuming that the Third World conferred and behaved as one undivided whole, and that on witnessing the “protracted political crisis” in

188  Swapna Kona Nayudu Europe, nationalist leaders became “condemnatory of the course of European politics.”15 This analysis, or lack thereof, of the Third World as a political collective characterises it as anti-Western, neutral and monolithic with the NonAligned Movement as the political expression of that politics of opposition.16 It is much more useful to consider it a counter-hegemonic discourse, located in its anti-colonial, anti-racial, anti-imperialist mandate, best understood as an “organisational history of new countries seeking a voice in the international system.”17 Indeed, at least in the context of Indian political thought, the conceptual foundation of non-alignment is intriguing, particularly in that it moved away from the East-West configuration, recasting the West as the seat of the Empire, the metropole.18 In part, this is because of a shared intellectual heritage with other components of modern Indian political thought, a tradition that placed increasing emphasis on sharpening the image of Asia, Asians and Asianism.19 Even so, it remained nigh impossible to achieve a decisive break from an international order intimately reflective of European history, especially unless a non-aligned politics was coalesced in and around Asian, and by extension, African spaces.20 The various forums and organisations of the United Nations became sites for such collective action but were focussed primarily on diplomatic dividends through state-centric and often, highly securitised discourses.21 Consequently, stepping away from International Relations literature on non-alignment allows for a more exhaustive biography of the idea. After all, non-alignment had many attractions not just for post-colonial states, but also for post-colonial peoples. Prevalent thinking in New Delhi was to view Afro-Asian solidarity as cognate with Indian non-alignment and more so, with the Non-Aligned Movement. Movements for solidarity were a distinct feature of non-alignment as a direct manifestation of resistance to both imperialism and the Cold War. As Nehru himself put it, non-alignment was “freedom of action,” which had been “of service to the cause of world peace” and that “the newly independent states of Asia and Africa” had adopted a similar outlook making non-alignment “an integral part of the international pattern,” particularly in countries that had just emerged from colonial rule.22 In its institutionalised phase, non-alignment expressed itself through, what Abraham calls “a non-racially defined group of countries that took as their starting point the insecurities produced by the Cold War” in ways that rejected the imposition of disjuncture between the global and the local.23 Nonalignment was capable of thinking globality by thinking “the politics of thinking globality.”24 Making this radical move reinvigorated the idea of the Third World, by bringing forth “a common consciousness among the newly independent countries.”25 The “Third World” – an expression whose terms of reference tied it ineluctably to the Cold War – became decolonised as it began to stand for an anti-/post-colonial Afro-Asian collective. Yet, historians of the Cold War pay little heed to this radical ideational break by continuing to ask whether the Third World was “a part of the Cold War or its antithesis.”26 The Third World,

A Bombay Periodical  189 imagined in Cold War terms, continues to remain a residual category, a collection of uncommitted states.27 The conferences organised around Afro-Asian solidarity presented an opportunity for states to move beyond that negatively constituted template to a more assertive space. Indian participation in these conferences on the state level was motivated by Nehru’s perception of what he considered were India’s unique strengths in the international. As Parekh brings out very well, Over the centuries and especially under Gandhi’s leadership, India had acquired special skills in uncovering the common ground and opening up a dialogue between apparently opposite points of view. Nehru thought that a political philosophy based on such a metaphysic was the indispensable basis of world peace.28 These political gatherings became the theatre where this political philosophy would be rolled out and propagated. Organised for the express purpose of accelerating Afro-Asian cooperation, both through the participation of leaders of state, but also through the presence of intellectuals, workers and students, these conferences provided continuity to the transmission of ideas outside of states and elites. Most visible amongst many such political gatherings in that highly charged time period of the late 1940s to the 1960s and thereafter were the Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, 1947; the two Asian Socialist Conferences of Rangoon, 1953 and Bombay, 1956; the conference of the Colombo Powers in Colombo, 1954; the Asian African Conference, Bandung, 1955 and the founding conference for the Afro-Asian People’s Solidary Organisation, New Delhi, 1957. In recent years, a rich historiography has emerged of these sites as politically active beyond state representation.29 The conferences dealt with questions of race, anti-colonialism and great power politics and were, in many ways, critical to nonaligned politics because they were acts of empowerment in themselves. They had been staged in the midst of the Cold War, signalling to the power blocs that security concerns beyond the Cold War did exist and that those concerns could be taken forward by smaller, weaker, Third World states.30 While visions of statehood and nationalism emanating from different epicentres of rising power within the AfroAsian realm competed and co-existed with questions of a new international order at these conferences, the sharpest accent remained on anti-colonialism. The nonaligned position in world politics was most definitely a response to regimes of international security, but it was not limited to just that element.31 Anti-colonialism was a foundational part of non-alignment, the only part of it that was unanimously subscribed to by the countries that attended Afro-Asian conferences. In its entirety, the Indian policy of non-alignment may not have had as wide a purchase at these gatherings, but it is crucial to draw a distinction between other components of that policy and its emphasis on solidarity within the Global South.32

190  Swapna Kona Nayudu In fact, having constantly rejected the preponderance of Cold War terminology in thinking world politics, Nehru had described the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung, beyond being tied to the Cold War both temporally and conceptually, as “part of a great movement of human history.”33 What did that movement entail? And where was it taking place? For Indian political actors, Asia, Africa and a physically undefined non-aligned world represented three sometimes concentric, sometimes overlapping circles within which New Delhi became an ephemeral core. Asia and Asianism is where India encountered this new approach to world politics, perhaps most naturally, being geographically a part of Asia but also already having confronted various complex and conflicting ideas of Asia.34 Furthermore, Japanese imperialism had already prepared Indian political leaders for the not uncomplicated ideas of Asianism.35 In the 1940s and the 1950s, it was at the Asian Relations Conference and at the Bandung Conference that Indians were able to consider what Singh calls “the proposed congruence between specific representations of ‘Indian-ness,’ and ‘Pan-Asianness,’ by other Asian states.”36 Contrary to claims that for Nehru, Indian independence would open the way for “the recovery of a common Asian heritage and not the creation of something new,” Indian international thought broadly was littered with warnings that a common heritage need not imply a shared politics, and Nehru had himself conviction in the idea of Asia beyond civilisational tropes, predicated on the future, not on the past.37 In fact, a significant driver for this conception of an Asian future was a simultaneously racialised and consequently, securitised view of the Second and Third World emanating from the First, which had to be rejected. As bad as it was that a racial context was being imposed on Asians, it was also inferred that this presented a threat of insecurity to the white West. Instances of this depiction can be found in “the 1940s Anglo-American imagery of Stalin as the head of an ‘Asiatic,’ quasi-Yellow Peril” and in American, Australian and Canadian representations of Nehru as “irrational, primitive or effeminate.”38 Canadians saw the Bandung Conference as an “anticolonial battlefield” while Australia, a colonial power itself, responded anxiously to the rise of the non-aligned in Asia.39 Leaders such as Nehru, along with others such as Sukarno and Nkrumah, now occupy an increasingly complicated space in post-colonial histories as having neo-colonial aspirations themselves.40 Yet, in the twenty-year period between the 1940s and the 1960s, white racialist politics was daunting enough for them to convene together and gather power through numerical strength. Thus, even though the Bandung Conference, the most successful iteration of various coalitions in that time period, may today be remembered for its “unstable politics of cross-racial affinity,” it provided then a riposte to the racialised politics thrust upon the AfroAsian sphere from the outside.41 The expansion of India’s Third World internationalism beyond Asianism and into Afro-Asianism culminated in some ways (even though it continued to grow beyond it too) in Indian participation at the Bandung Conference of 1955. As

A Bombay Periodical  191 rightly pointed out by Shimazu, a study of the Bandung Conference can yield great dividends for the study of “diplomacy as encompassing elements, which are more normatively defined than outcome orientated.”42 Certainly, in the history of Indian diplomacy, this is true primarily due to the intimate relation between the practice of non-alignment, support for decolonisation and the critique of security.43 Shimazu speaks of the unique symbolism of the Bandung Conference, which Lee has called Bandung’s “placement between constituting a moment and representing an era.”44 Although crucial continuities can be found in studies of “The People’s Bandung,” and “Other Bandungs,” Bandung 1955 is fundamentally important for having propelled India into the Afro-Asian space, where from India moved towards the concretisation of the Non-Aligned Movement.45 Even though that move represented a shift from India’s earlier positioning within a racialised politics, Bandung remains temporally wedded to the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement in that it immediately preceded that phase of Indian politics, and indeed, of Indian non-alignment.46 In the literature on India’s participation in and encounters with organised Asianism, Afro-Asianism and the Non-Aligned Movement, India’s non-aligned politics and Indian participation in Afro-Asian solidarity conferences are viewed as incompatible. India is seen as having participated in these conferences despite a non-aligned politics that would eventually force a move away from decolonisation narratives and back to a Cold War outlook on world politics. This is a tangential consequence of decentring the Indian experience as hegemonic (due to India’s aspirations to leadership roles within all organisations), elitist (due to Nehru’s disproportionately visible person at these platforms) and untenable (due to solidarity being overly state-centric in India). In that sense, subalternising histories of Afro-Asianism constrict a fuller reading of Indian non-alignment’s encounters with Afro-Asian politics. It may be more useful to think of Indian non-alignment as repeatedly straining against escapable collective action viewed as some form of alignment. Glimpses from United Asia In the previous section, I have mentioned India’s outlook on Asianism expanding into an Afro-Asian space. By the mid-twentieth century, Indians had carried out robust and varied inquiries into Asianism, its possibilities and its vicissitudes. The same was not true for an Indian understanding of the specificities of Africanist thinking. Broadly, Indian thinking of Africanist politics was confined to two parallel registers – first, was the militaristic outlook that arose from the two world wars, from Indian and African troops fighting alongside each other under a British imperial command.47 This outlook later expanded into a somewhat distinct but related perception of African politics in the context of United Nations peacekeeping.48 From 1947 onwards, New Delhi’s grasp of the multiple transnational relations emerging on the African continent stemmed from a

192  Swapna Kona Nayudu diplomatic view of post-colonial politics. Amongst the many African nations, apart from a historically animated relationship with South Africa, both due to Gandhi’s time in the country but also later because of India’s anti-apartheid politics at the UN, India became diplomatically heavily invested in Ghana, Kenya and in Egypt in the early years, and eventually in Congo, on account of Indian participation in UN peacekeeping there.49 Due to the accent on the militaristic and the diplomatic, Indian observers became mired in their own taxonomy of African politics, with a weak grasp on Africanism and its relation to Africa’s post-colonial spaces. I have suggested elsewhere that not least, this stemmed from a vague and non-committal theorising of the question of race in Africa.50 The tensions inherent in race relations in shared spaces between Africans and Indians may have also contributed to this lack.51 On the whole, Indians engaged with international affairs in India did little to deepen the co-constitution of Indian and African intellectual spaces, drawn from both peoples concomitantly witnessing the formation and rise of Afro-Asianism, and did even less to acknowledge African anxieties of neo-colonialism and asymmetries vis-à-vis the world order, anxieties also widely prevalent in India.52 At the time that Indians and Africans were undertaking what Getachew has called “revolutionary worldmaking,” they were scarcely studying their influence on each other, and consequently on the Afro-Asian movement, even though they had an overwhelming sense of being in it, together.53 United Asia, a periodical published in Bombay, India from 1948 to 1974, attempted to offer a corrective within that space.54 The publication had two main intentions – first, the editors wanted to politicise the Indian experience of the Afro-Asian space not just by enacting Afro-Asianism in the periodical’s pages through odes to solidarity but by focussing on world matters that were critical to Indians, other Asians and Africans alike. Second, the periodical aimed to improve Indian intellectual space outside of the gamut of either colonial or nativist literature. Subtitled “International Magazine of Afro-Asian Affairs,” United Asia approached India’s international relations but also internationalism per se as affiliates of Afro-Asianism. Published out of Bombay, the periodical was at a sufficient distance from New Delhi’s diplomatic view of external affairs and offered writings that were critical of Indian national politics but were also tolerant of India’s post-colonial statism.55 Particularly in its special issues focussed on African politics, the periodical was focussed on a combination of Afro-Asianism and anti-imperialism, thus broadening the scope for an audience, and facilitating an interplay between Indian readers and African issues. Writings in the periodical also often focussed on non-alignment as a shared project for India and the Afro-Asian space, particularly for African states, with an aside for Tito’s Yugoslavia. Read as such, United Asia: International Magazine for Afro-Asian Affairs offers an exciting archive of non-alignment. In one of the very first issues of United Asia, the editors discussed nationalism and communism as “forces of cohesion,” with the caveat that nationalism “tended

A Bombay Periodical  193 to bend inwards in an exclusivist manner” while Soviet communism “tended to spread outwards in a more pronounced internationalism.”56 Indeed, while the editors recognised “Asian protest” as a “composite of those two tendencies, at times overlapping, at times sharply in contrast,” they also traced the development of nationalism and communism into “the tediously interminable game called the cold war,” the US and the USSR motivated by “an anxiety to fill a vacuum” left behind by the withdrawal of imperial rule in Asia.57 From the very outset, the magazine engaged with the Cold War and its effects on Asia. In response to the Cold War superpower dynamic, the editors saw that “the growing influence of the ArabAsian [sp.] block [sp.] is full of possibilities for the good,” calling the Asian Relations Conference held at New Delhi in 1947 the “first great act of cohesion” and were of the opinion that “India’s dogged insistence on an Asian perspective on coldwar [sp.] complications had withstood severe criticism and been generally accepted by fellow Asian nations.”58 In an observation that would not be out of place in political commentary in the twenty-first century, the editors also mentioned “the impact of new China on the rest of Asia” alongside a discussion of developments on the Korean peninsula.59 An essay by S Radhakrishnan, who had just returned from Moscow as India’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union, provides an intellectual history of communism, the pedigree of which, he writes, “can be traced to Plato, the New Testament, Levellers of Cromwell’s day, Ricardo, Adam Smith, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, Lenin.”60 Lester B Pearson, who went on to become Canadian Prime Minister, but was then the Secretary of State for External Affairs, had an essay on Canada’s Asian Policy, outlining what went on to acquire significance as Canada rose to importance in Asia’s external affairs.61 The larger tropes of the Cold War, Afro-Asian cohesion and studies of socialist politics/communism introduced in the first few issues are permanent features in the periodical and reappear in all subsequent issues. Multiple issues of the periodical also deal with the question of Asia and the United Nations, in terms of both representation at the United Nations of Asian countries, but also of Asian issues. Less than a decade after the founding of the United Nations, assessments were already underway of how the United Nations had “acted towards Asia” and how “Asia reacted towards the United Nations,” with the editors suggesting that the “future of the United Nations depends on its Asian valuation.”62 The periodical praised India’s advocacy for Chinese membership of the United Nations, put forth by B N Rau, India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations who had drawn “pointed attention to China’s ‘factness’ [sp.]” ignoring which had “only made UN deliberations unreal.”63 In a subsequent issue, the periodical was even more critical of the United Nations: Never in known history have so many nations looked for so much in an organization and achieved so little, as the small forlorn Lilliputian nations, in this Gulliver’s world of Big Power politics, have sought and lost in the United Nations.64

194  Swapna Kona Nayudu But they also referred to India as “the accredited champion of the small nations” who “through Nehru, has called attention to a state of affairs which might eventually result in such a mass exodus,” warning that the United Nations may have suffered a “dangerous deviation” by which it has “swerved from its original moorings and become gradually a protector of colonialism in an indirect manner.”65 Nehru is quoted extensively through the periodical’s issues, but editorially, there seems to have been a consensus that Nehru’s vision of India’s role as a leader not only in Asian affairs, but in global affairs, was correct, such as in this instance: progressively, people see that within the United Nations things are done far from idealistically or morally, or in terms of the underdog, the smaller nations, or the Asian nations, and so more and more of these people try to find someone else and in their search for someone else who might perhaps give a lead in these matters, almost automatically their eyes turn towards India.66 In another five years, as Indian leadership had run into hostility particularly in the wake of the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, and Nehru had had criticism levelled against him for being pro-Soviet given India’s delayed response to the events of the Hungarian revolution, the periodical carried an essay by M. V. Kamath, a conservative commentator on the “anti-Nehruism” and “anti-Menonism” (referring to western dislike for Krishna Menon) translating into “a latent feeling of hostility towards India.”67 In this way, early commentary from the periodical was already focussed on India’s embrace of a leading role in defining Asianism and acting Asianism politically at the United Nations. The periodical also tied itself to that larger Indian ambition for Asia and for India. Indeed, in a following issue, the editorial note laid it out quite clearly that the periodical’s “aim is simple: to bring about a greater awareness of Asia’s new vital role” and that while it “is wedded to no political platform” and it “has no cause to espouse – except the cause of peace between nations and of their material and moral progress,” it will deal with “all subjects of pre-eminently Asian interest.”68 In this way, the periodical positioned itself in India, with its gaze lifted towards Asia. In line with this stated aim, a previous issue of the magazine had already carried pieces on the containment of communism in South East Asia, the Korean question, Chinese pottery, Ceylon poetry, linguistic issues, contemporary Indonesian literatures and ArabAsia relations.69 This issue was the first to directly begin addressing the topic of non-alignment generally, but also teasing out affiliations built across the nonaligned space in world politics. In a long exposition of the non-aligned position in Tito’s Yugoslavia by Sidney Hertzberg titled “Yugoslavia and India in World Affairs,” the author describes Yugoslavia as belonging ideologically “to the East but politically to the West.”70 The themes introduced in this issue were debated more comprehensively in the following issue, entirely dedicated to essays on

A Bombay Periodical  195 neutralism, most importantly with an essay by K. M. Pannikar, then just rounding up his tenure as India’s Ambassador to China, and on his way to Cairo, as India’s Ambassador to Egypt.71 In fact, non-alignment was a popular theme for the periodical – most issues dealt with the non-aligned Indian policy or international non-alignment in at least one dedicated essay or in conjunction with other international relations problems. Other than those, at least four other entire issues were focussed on non-alignment, spaced out over 1953 (when India participated in the Korean War as part of the United Nations repatriation commissions and a custodian force) and between 1961 and 1963–1964 (when India sent troops to the Congo under a United Nations Peacekeeping Force mission, the ONUC). The 1953 issue has an essay by Ram Manohar Lohia, socialist political leader in India of immense standing, on “Asia and World Order,” in which Lohia forcefully advocates for non-alignment – For an Asian people aware of national and world interests, to join up with either camp is a monstrous perversity. It must reject the claim of the Atlantic camp to represent freedom as much as the Soviet claim to represent anti-imperialism. Asian peoples must not pollute their springboard by adopting the rigid, brutal and conformist policies either of capitalism or of communism…The Asia that can help build up a new civilisation and world order is the Asia of socialism, of peaceful revolution and reconstruction.72 Lohia also calls for deepening Asia-Africa relations – “Asia must help Africa to rise, erect and unbowed, so that the two together may strive for a world order freed from hunger, slavery and war” and calls upon Asian socialism to “forge links with likeminded World movements and forces,” as offering ways forward, distinguished from international communism.73 By 1961, with the simultaneous institutionalisation of non-alignment into the Non-Aligned Movement, public perception in India that Nehru had formed some sort of collective with Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia had acquired currency. In consonance with that view, an issue of the periodical from that year, themed ‘Neutrality in Asia’ carried excerpts from speeches and writings by all three leaders.74 Nehru’s views had been gleaned from speeches delivered in Parliament, at public meetings, and radio and television broadcasts and put together in a collection titled “The Essence of Nonalignment,” emphasising what Nehru had repeatedly said across platforms about the Indian policy – Nonalignment does not mean passivity of mind or action, lack of faith or conviction. It does not mean submission to what we consider evil. It is a positive

196  Swapna Kona Nayudu and dynamic approach to such problems as confront us…Peace can come only if we endeavour to establish a climate of peace.75 The periodical picked up excerpts from both Nasser and Nehru on the real dangers of big power politics playing out in Asia, quoting Nehru: “the idea of thinking that areas in Asia, for instance in West Asia are vacuums which have to be filled by somebody stepping in from outside.”76 Nasser echoed the view in his own speeches, underlining Egypt’s opposition to the Baghdad Pact on the grounds that its main aim was “to increase the influence of the big powers in the Middle East.” Two essays, by Madhu Limaye, a leading socialist thinker of the time, and by R. T. Jangam, a sociologist, both offer considerably bleak assessments of neutrality in nations’ foreign policies. Limaye’s essay began with a review of neutralism in world politics, of the European variety practised by Sweden, Belgium and Switzerland and compared India’s “neutrality of manoeuvre” that “speaks a cosmopolitan language and offers its services as an honest broker in the great power conflict,” coming to the conclusion that India had had no considerable impact on world affairs, asking why India could not “demand a radical reorganization of the United Nations enfranchisement of all subject peoples, abolition of the veto and the international caste system, direct elections to world parliament with weighted representation etc.?”77 While Limaye wrote frequently in the periodical, and usually critically of Nehruvian non-alignment, Jangam lamented the inability of nations to remain neutral in world politics, offering a slightly divergent view. A. M. Halpern, an American international relations commentator with an interest in China and Asia, wrote in the special issue on Beijing’s view of neutralism in foreign policy.78 The 1963 special issue of the periodical began with a long essay calling for a reappraisal of non-alignment in light of the 1962 Sino-Indian war.79 The piece placed non-alignment in the context of Indian foreign policy in light of the changed international situation, talking about how Chinese aggression has challenged the policy of non-alignment and the problem of accepting military aid from the west in light of this aggression. The writer argued that ‘the mere fact of receiving military aid does not prove that India has ceased to be non-aligned. In fact, on the contrary India has succeeded in giving it a new dimension or orientation. The Chinese aggression gave India an opportunity to test its efficacy in war. India has found it useful even in crisis.80 The essays argued for continued non-alignment for India, a rather unpopular view in light of the events of 1962: Nonalignment still should continue to remain a major plank of India’s foreign policy. It is still valid today, though for different reasons...The Chinese aggression has not exerted any special influence on India’s policy. It has only highlighted certain aspects of India’s own policy to itself, and hastened the process of maturation which in normal course would have taken a longer time to become manifest. It enabled India to deepen the content of the original policy. Verily, nonalignment has been found to be as effective in war as it was in peace.81

A Bombay Periodical  197 The following year, the question of the Sino-Indian War and its consequences for Indian foreign policy were taken up by another essay, which discussed Indian non-alignment in conjunction with India’s nuclear policy – “China being what it is and our leaders what they are, India may be forced to abandon its neutrality if our nuclear policy is not changed before.” This piece was highly critical of Nehru – What really has Nehru gained by joining the test banning nuclear club and making India a permanently nonnuclear, weak power exactly at a time when our enemies are increasing their strength and therefore, nourishing more and more hostile designs against us?...By making India a nonnuclear power against an aggressive would be nuclear power what has Indian messiah done? When Taiwan is just outside his door why is Mao travelling all the way to the Himalayan jungles to attack India? The simple answer is that against America’s Chiang Kai Shek, Mao cannot dare, and of Nehru he is not afraid. Is Indian leadership capable of sane, realistic policies?82 Another piece by Josip Djerdja in the same issue discussed non-alignment with regards to socialism against the backdrop of the Belgrade and Cairo conferences.83 A second issue that year picked up these themes – withdrawal of the troops sent to the Congo coincided with the death of Nehru in May 1964, on which occasion the periodical brought out a memorial issue, offering a sympathetic reading of Nehru’s efforts to keep India non-aligned.84 Hugh H Symthe, American diplomat who the following year would become American ambassador in Syria, and was known for his pro-Arab views, wrote an essay titled “Nehru and Indian Foreign Policy” discussing all the failings of non-alignment, while caveating it by saying he did not want to present a pessimistic picture because he understood the milieu in which Nehru was working.85 Two years after Nehru’s death, the periodical published a note eulogising Nehru’s speech at the Belgrade Conference of Non-alignment in 1961 – the editor’s note accompanying the article talks of Nehru speaking “almost like a prophet” when he spoke of mediation to solve world issues with nations “resorting to more and more negotiations and conference tables than to the battlefield.”86 But also in an essay surveying the state of non-alignment in post-Nehru India, the death toll for the Non-Aligned Movement had already been rung by 1966, with the writer of the view that it was unrealistic to expect that the heads of the governments of Yugoslavia, the UAR and India had something unique to contribute to the solution of the world problems today. Their approach to international questions is no more uniform and it is neither possible nor desirable to coordinate their foreign policies.87 In nearly all of the issues of United Asia, Africa featured intermittently in discussions on non-alignment, particularly in terms of India-Egypt relations and in

198  Swapna Kona Nayudu terms of the Afro-Asian caucus at the United Nations.88 As mentioned earlier, the trope that India, as part of Asia, must help Africa overcome problems foisted on the continent by colonialism is scattered through the issue. Indeed, an essay titled “The Tragedy of Africa” asks the largely Indian readership to “accept responsibility for it, all of us, even though we ourselves were not involved,” speaking of the tragedies visited upon the African continent “whether racial or political” and pleading for Asia to help Africa to the best of her ability because “we are sister continents.”89 In a 1961 issue, two essays appeared on the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba’s murder (“Lumumba’s Murderers”) and on the politics of Belgian imperialism and Cold War rivalries in the Congo (“Congo – A NeoColonialist Misadventure”).90 The essays were placed within an issue dedicated to Rabindranath Tagore and his changing views on Asianism – tracing his views on Asia and how they developed into his views on Asianism making the point that it was not “until he visited Burma, Malaya and China in 1924 that he began to speak of Asianism as a more positive concept.”91 Indeed, this sort of invocation of Indian political thought in the context of contemporary African politics was frequent – the issue on Ghana and African Nationalism, a special issue brought out on the occasion of Ghana’s transition from the Gold Coast to Ghana in March 1957, had a foreword excerpted from Kwame Nkrumah’s autobiography. The foreword speaks of Gandhi’s and Nehru’s political approaches. “At first,” writes Nkrumah, I could not understand how Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence could possibly be effective. It seemed to me to be utterly feeble and without hope of success. The solution of the colonial problem, as I saw it at that time, lay in armed rebellion. How is it possible, I asked myself, for a revolution to succeed without arms and ammunition? After months of studying Gandhi’s policy, and watching the effect it had, I began to see that, when backed by a strong political organisation it could be the solution to the colonial problem. In Jawaharlal Nehru’s rise to power I recognized the success of one who pledged to Socialism, was able to interpret Gandhi’s philosophy in practical terms.92 The issue also has an essay by George Padmore.93 There was not much writing on Indian diaspora in Africa, until the 1970s.94 The anti-imperialist politics of the 1950s led to a heated debate in India on the question of India joining the British Commonwealth, with C Rajagopalachari entering into an argument on that very question with Jawaharlal Nehru. United Asia brought out an issue discussing the issue from all perspectives, not least the question of India joining the Commonwealth while advocating for continued decolonisation in Asia and Africa and the difficulties that may arise from this contradictory positioning.95 A trenchant critique is presented by Madhu Limaye in an essay titled “The Commonwealth: New Version of Empire,” in which he presents the view that it had “become fashionable to speak of the Commonwealth bond in

A Bombay Periodical  199 almost mystical terms, not only in the white part of the Commonwealth but also in the coloured, a part which achieved independence only after the war.”96 Hiren Mukherjee, an Indian communist leader and JBS Haldane, an originally British and later Indian, scientist presented opposing views on the question of India and the Commonwealth, while Ellsworth Bunker, the American Ambassador to India took a favourable view.97 The issue came up again in 1961, when TN Kaul, who later became India’s Foreign Secretary, spoke of the Commonwealth as a “community of ideals,” with Nehru himself being quoted in another essay as saying he wanted the world to see that India did not lack faith in herself, and that India was prepared to cooperate even with those with whom she had been fighting in the past; provided the basis of cooperation today was honourable, that it was a free basis, a basis which would lead to the good not only of ourselves, but of the world also.98 The periodical had a decidedly socialist slant, with socialist and communist writers often appearing in the essays and special issues celebrating the 50th anniversary of the USSR October Revolution, twenty years of the founding of the German Democratic Republic, and deepened Indo-Soviet relations post the Tashkent Declaration of 1966.99 The May/June issue of 1964 was a special issue on “New Hungary” speaking of new forms of socialism from within the USSR, along with a lengthy description of the state of Indian communism, calling for a divorce from Chinese or Soviet forms as unsuitable for India – The time has come for the genuine revolutionaries within the CPI to solemnly proclaim that they would be loyal alone to the toiling people of this country and the interests of the Indian revolution, and cease hawking the ‘internationalist’ wares made in Moscow or Peking. They should not expect the Chinese or any other foreign armies to put them in power. Only the revolutionary mass movement here can do that. The question of extraterritoriality has to be buried once for all...This is genuine internationalism; extraterritorial loyalty is bastard internationalism, and must be given up. If this is done, divisions within the ranks of the Indian Left can be overcome, and way paved for the creation of a single united socialist party, intensification of the class struggle and people’s movement and finally, the overthrow of the capitalist bureaucratic order.100 An Indian Periodical Diplomacy Other periodicals in India in a concurrent time period that foregrounded India’s international affairs against Indian political thought and Indian social history were The Modern Review: A Monthly Review and Miscellany, published in Calcutta from 1907 to 1995, the Journal of the Indian Institute of International

200  Swapna Kona Nayudu Affairs published in New Delhi between 1945 and 1947, interestingly then finding continuance as Pakistan Horizon post-independence, The Indian World: A Monthly Review of Indian Politics & Economics, Indian Arts & Industries, Indian History & Literature published at the Cherry Press in Calcutta from 1905 to 1912, Indian Affairs, the journal of the Foreign Department of the Indian National Congress, published in New Delhi from 1948 to 1950, India and World Affairs, published in Calcutta from 1945 to 1947, the Foreign Review, published by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in Delhi from 1942 to 1950, and the India Quarterly, published by the Indian Council of World Affairs, started in 1945 and in circulation to date. It is, thus, amply clear that United Asia did not exist in a vacuum but in fact, was part of a thriving print culture in preindependent and post-independent India. All the periodicals mentioned above (and others) concerned themselves with India’s international affairs, but the inauguration of United Asia coincided with a period in which both Indian independence and Afro-Asian decolonisation had acquired a firmness in Indian political thought, as India had become independent of British rule the previous year, and having been a founding member of the United Nations, had been actively caucusing for issues affecting Asia and Africa since 1945. This led to the vision amongst the Indian public interested in world politics that if Indian independence, which had been a long time coming, had arrived, could Afro-Asian decolonisation be far behind? Nehru’s repeated speeches and writings on both national and international platforms also had a rousing influence on that effect. The Indian periodicals mentioned above had punctuated earlier formative and graduating stages of Indian political thought maturing into the internationalism it came to have by the 1940s, along with the ascendancy of Nehru as a political figure, and his eventual Prime Ministership. Afro-Asianism and Indian non-alignment became highly fused in the internationalism of that era, given India’s dual positioning as post- and anti-colonial. Decolonisation as a slogan acquired greater translatability between Indian, Asian and African contexts not least due to the pioneering work done in these journals. The publications were curated to enhance the readers’ commitment to causes beyond those of nation-building, understandably the foremost preoccupation in a newly independent nation-state. Within the context of Indian print cultures, focussing on this internationalist aspect of periodicals provides two insights – first, it subalternises the study of the Cold War, as we move beyond both the hierarchy of the Big Powers, and print cultures in the Global North on the one hand, and beyond solely relying on the spoken and written words of political leaders such as Nehru on the other; second, it decolonises a reading of Indian political commentary by introducing the idea that not all Indian thinkers were concerned with or responding to issues emanating from an imperial centre, that they were often responding to correctives from other colonies too, leading to the expansion of an inter-colonial and eventually, inter-post-colonial space.

A Bombay Periodical  201 Due to the ascending primacy of Egypt in India’s African imagination, Africanism for Indian intellectuals that had so far in the Gandhi period been embedded in questions of race became conjoined with Arab nationalism to the extent that even new recruits of the Indian Foreign Service were sent to Egypt to study Arabic, and returned with a sense of the importance of Egypt in the geopolitical imaginaries of the Cold War world. In Egypt, Nasser had published The Philosophy of Revolution, speaking of Egypt moving between Arab, African, and Islamic circles, not unlike Nehru’s own three books An Autobiography, Discovery of India & Glimpses of World History that had outlined three forms of being as the self, the nation and the world. In non-aligned Ghana too, Kwame Nkrumah had founded the Accra Evening News. Whether it was the Nahdat Afriqiyah published out of Cairo, or the Lotus Journal published out of Beirut, or the AfroAsian Journalist published out of Jakarta, the non-aligned world had become welded to Afro-Asian print cultures.101 For a politically engaged audience in India, United Asia presented the Indian coordinate to that deep cosmopolitanism. Clearly, United Asia was not linguistically or culturally as transgressive as journals such as Lotus that were multilingual and thus, translocal.102 The selection of topics in the periodical suggests that the editorial scope was to tease out the boundaries of contemporary Indian political thought as internationalist with an avowedly nationalist core, and to do so through complete cooperation with the statist project. Even though the periodical was initially largely persuaded by socialist thinking, it devolved gradually across three decades until it became wholly co-opted by Indian liberal democratic thought. Even so, unpacking the political solidarities expressed in the journal presents a fresh image – that of the difficulties of creating a public discourse around an internationalist non-aligned politics in a nation that had in its very recent past, successfully manifested nationalist thought into political independence. The discursive move from nationalism to internationalism attempted by the periodical is only one half of the United Asia story; the second and more complex process for the periodical’s contributors was to define that internationalism as located in the Global South. This matrix of epistemic moves had the potential to produce new and radical imaginaries. This paper has suggested that the periodical serves up an unexplored source for such a politics. Notes 1 Michael Brecher, The New States of Asia: A Political Analysis (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 226. 2 Samir N. Anabtawi, “Neutralists and Neutralism,” The Journal of Politics 27, no. 2 (1965): 351–361; George Liska “The ‘Third Party’: the Rationale of Nonalignment,” in Laurence W. Martin (ed.). Neutralism and Nonalignment: The New States in World Affairs (New York: Praeger, 1962), 88–89; Peter Lyon, Neutralism (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1964); Khalid I. Babaa and Cecil V. Crabb, “Nonalignment as

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3 4 5

6

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8 9 10 11 12

a Diplomatic and Ideological Credo,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Nonalignment in Foreign Affairs 362 (1965): 8; Hans J. Morgenthau, “Neutrality and Neutralism,” in Dilemmas of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 185–210. Hamilton F. Armstrong, “Neutrality: Varying Tunes,” Foreign Affairs 35, no. 1 (1956): 57–83; Robert A. Scalapino, ““Neutralism” in Asia,” American Political Science Review 48, no. 1 (1954): 49–62. Angadipuram Appadorai, National Interest and India’s Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Kalinga Publications, 1992), 12. John Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 275; John Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 2, no. 2 (1950): 171–201; A. P. Rana, The Imperatives of Nonalignment: A Conceptual Study of India’s Foreign Policy Strategy in the Nehru Period (Delhi: Macmillan, 1976), 322; Girija S. Bajpai, “India and the Balance of Power,” in Charles Henry Alexandrowicz (ed.). The Indian Year Book of International Affairs, vol. 1 (Madras: The Indian Study Group of International Affairs, University of Madras, 1952), 8; Walter Andersen, “The Domestic Roots of Indian Foreign Policy,” Asian Affairs 10, no. 3 (1983): 45–46; Krishnan Srinivasan, Diplomatic Channels (New Delhi: Manohar, 2012), 67. Nehru’s first pronouncement on foreign policy, and the place of what eventually came to be called non-alignment in it was in his speech as Vice-Chairman of the Interim Government on 7 September 1946, the text of which can be found in Jawaharlal Nehru, Speeches, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1967), 23; an even earlier outline proposed by him is from 1927; see Jawaharlal Nehru, “A Foreign Policy for India,” AICC File No 8, 1927, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi, India. For a good survey of how and why Nehru is most closely associated with non-alignment, see Rudra Chaudhuri, “The Limits of Executive Power: Domestic Politics and Alliance Behaviour in Nehru’s India,” India Review 11, no. 2 (2012): 95–115; Sumit Ganguly, “The Genesis of Nonalignment,” in Sumit Ganguly (ed.). India’s Foreign Policy: Retrospect and Prospect (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 110; David Malone, Does the Elephant Dance?: Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 48–49. Kanti Bajpai, introduction to International Relations in India: Theorising the Region and the Nation, eds. Kanti Bajpai and Siddharth Mallavarapu (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009), 4; this typology is also elaborated on in Kanti Bajpai, “Indian Strategic Culture,” in Kanti Bajpai and Harsh Pant (eds.). India’s Foreign Policy: A Reader (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2013), 82–124; Stephen Cohen, “The World View of India’s Strategic Elite,” in Kanti Bajpai and Harsh Pant (eds.). India’s Foreign Policy, 51–81. Rahul Sagar, “State of Mind: What Kind of Power Will India Become?,” International Affairs 85, no. 4 (2009): 801. Yedezad D. Gundevia, Outside the Archives (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1987), vi. Sarvepalli Gopal, “What is Non-alignment?,” India International Centre Quarterly: Role of Non-Alignment in a Changing World 3, no. 3 (1976): 3–7. Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam, “Alternative Security Doctrines,” Security Dialogue 21, no. 1 (1990): 77. Priya Chacko, “The Internationalist Nationalist: Pursuing an Ethical Modernity with Jawaharlal Nehru,” in Robbie Shilliam (ed.). International Relations and NonWestern Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (London & New York: Routledge, 2011), 179.

A Bombay Periodical  203 13 SWJN. 14 Mark A. Lawrence, “The Rise and Fall of Non-Alignment,” in Robert J. McMahon (ed.). The Cold War in the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 139–155. 15 Terence A. Keenleyside, “Prelude to Power: The Meaning of Non-Alliance Before Independence,” Pacific Affairs 53, no. 3 (1980): 464. He extensively quotes Gandhi writing in Indian Opinion, Rajendra Prasad in the Indian Annual Register and Nehru in various statements referring to the potential defensive strength of India’s goodwill towards the world often contrasted to “violence in Europe.” 16 For historical accounts of non-alignment that use this method, see Robert J. McMahon (ed.), The Cold War in the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Robert A. Mortimer, The Third World Coalition in International Politics (New York: Praeger, 1980); Archibald Wickeramaraja Singham and Shirley Hune, Non-Alignment in an Age of Alignments (London: Lawrence Hill, 1986); Peter W. Rodman, More Precious than Peace: The Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World (New York: Scribner’s, 1994); Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson and the Non-Aligned World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 17 See, Itty Abraham, “From Bandung to NAM: Non-Alignment and Indian Foreign Policy, 1947–65,” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 46, no. 2 (2008): 195–219. 18 In International Relations theory this is now being recognised as a useful mode of producing knowledge; see Empire and Order in International Relations and Security Studies (in Robert A. Denemark, ed., The International Studies Encyclopedia, Blackwell Publishing, Blackwell reference online; The International Studies Encyclopedia, Vol. III, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 1360–1379). 19 On civilisation and modernity in India’s encounter with the West, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “From Civilization to Globalization: The ‘West’ as a Shifting Signifier in Indian Modernity,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2012): 138–152; on the shift away from the civilisational trope, see Carolien M. Stolte and Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 1 (2012): 65–92. 20 For a study of this epistemic lockdown, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 336 21 Hanna Jansen, “Soviet “Afro-Asians” in UNESCO: Reorienting World History,” Journal of World History 30, no. 1–2 (June 2019): 193–221; Swapna Kona Nayudu, “The Nehru Years: Indian Non-Alignment as the Critique, Discourse and Practice of Security (1947–1964),” Ph.D. Thesis, King’s College London, 2015. 22 Jawaharlal Nehru, “Changing India,” Foreign Affairs 41, no. 3 (1963): 453–465. 23 Itty Abraham, “From Bandung to NAM: Non-Alignment and Indian Foreign Policy, 1947–65,” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 46, no. 2 (2008): 195–219. For a fascinating account of the negotiation of these spaces, see Angadipuram Appadorai, “Non-Alignment: Some Important Issues,” International Studies 20, no. 3 (1981): 3‒11. 24 Spivak quoted in Himadeep Muppidi, The Politics of the Global (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 23. 25 Westad, The Global Cold War, 2; Triloki N. Kaul, “The Idealist and the Revolutionary,” Nehru Memorial Lecture, London, 1983, https://www.cambridgetrust.org/assets/documents/Lecture_10.pdf (accessed April 4, 2014). 26 Westad, epilogue, 209. 27 As far as military pacts were concerned, even though the Third World and the NonAligned Movement shared basic premises and mutual interests, they were distinct

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30

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in one extremely important way – the members of the Non-Aligned Movement had actively resisted aligning themselves militarily with either camp. As Krishna Menon once put it, ‘a non-aligned nation must be non-aligned with the non-aligned to be truly non-aligned’ – Krishna Menon, quoted in Krishnan Srinivasan, Diplomatic Channels (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2012), 93. Bhikhu Parekh, “Nehru and the National Philosophy of India,” Economic and Political Weekly 26, no. 1/2 (1991): 35–39, 42. See Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte, “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War,” Journal of World History 30, no. 2 (2019) and AfroAsian Networks Research Collective, “Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa,” Radical History Review 131 (2018): 176–182; Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (eds.), Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008); Development 4, no. 2 (2013): 261–288. 7 Kyaw Zaw Win, “The 1953 Asian Socialist Conference in Rangoon: Precursor to the Bandung Conference,” in Derek McDougall and Antonia Finnane (ed.). Bandung 1955: Little Histories (Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2010): 43‒55; Wildan Sena Utama, “From Brussels to Bogor: Contacts, Networks and the History of the Bandung Conference 1955,” Journal of Indonesian Social Sciences and Humanities 6, no. 1 (2016); Conference, TNA. 99 See Cindy Ewing, “The Colombo Powers: Crafting Diplomacy in the Third World and Launching Afro-Asia at Bandung,” Cold War History (2018); 19, no. 1: 1–19; Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte, “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War,” Journal of World History 30, no. 1–2 (June 2019): 1–19; Carolien Stolte, ““The People’s Bandung”: Local Anti-imperialists on an Afro-Asian Stage,” Journal of World History 30, no. 1–2 (June 2019): 125–156; Andrew Phillips, “Beyond Bandung: The 1955 AsianAfrican Conference and Its Legacies for International Order,” Australian Journal of International Affairs, 70, no. 4 (2016): 329–341. N. D. Jayaprakash, “India and the Bandung Conference of 1955 – II,” People’s Democracy – Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) XXIX, 23 (2005), http://archives.peoplesdemocracy.in/2005/0605/06052005_bandung%20conf.htm (accessed October 26, 2014). This conflation may have been caused in part by the Chinese perception of the purpose of the Bandung Conference. See “Report from the Asia Section, Chinese Foreign Ministry, ‘On the Asian-African Conference’,” December 15, 1954, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, PRC FMA 207–00085-17,144–149. Obtained by Amitav Acharya and translated by Yang Shanhou. http://digitalarchive. wilsoncenter.org/document/112442. The Chinese Foreign Ministry reported that Indonesia’s intention to hold the Asian-African Conference was to establish a neutral, third group to counter the US and the Soviet Union. A similar view was held after the Bogor Conference too. See “View of the Asian-African Conference from the Bogor Conference,” 1955, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, PRC FMA 207-00001-03, 7–12. Obtained by Amitav Acharya and translated by Yang Shanhou. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/113181. See Su Lin Lewis, “Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Post-Colonial Freedom, 1952–1956,” Journal of World History 30, no: 1–2 (June 2019): 55–88. Lewis rightly argues in favour of recognising the ‘competing visions of nationalism, and internationalism, that emerged at this time’ but anachronistically dates the debut of non-aligned politics to post-Bandung and confuses it with neutralist foreign policy. See for citations and further evidence of similar arguments, Talbot

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35

36

37

38 39

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C. Imlay, “International Socialism and Decolonization during the 1950s: Competing Rights and the Postcolonial Order,” The American Historical Review 118, no. 4 (2013): 1105–1132. For a similar viewpoint, see Lorenz M. Lüthi, “Non-Alignment, 1946–1965: Its Establishment and Struggle against Afro-Asianism,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 7, no. 2 (2016): 201–223. Nehru quoted in Wildan Sena Utama, “From Brussels to Bogor: Contacts, Networks and the History of the Bandung Conference 1955,” Journal of Indonesian Social Sciences and Humanities (JISSH) 6, no. 1 (2016): 11–24. For a study of the varied conceptions of Asia amongst Indian intellectuals, see John Steadman, The Myth of Asia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 35; for an excellent survey article, Carolien M. Stolte and Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 1 (2012): 65–92. See “Indian Nationalism and Japanese Imperialism,” The Indian Annual Register, 1938, p. 49, quoted in Tansen Sen, “The End of Pan-Asianism? India, China, and the Asian Relations Conference in 1947,” Talk at King’s College London, 10 March 2014. For analyses of this aspect of the Asian Relations Conference, see Angadipuram Appadorai, “The Asian Relations Conference in Perspective,” International Studies 18, no. 3 (1979): 275–285; Amitav Acharya, “Will Asia’s Past Be Its Future?” International Security 28, no. 3 (2003/2004): 149–164. For a fascinating account from an observer present at the conference itself, see John Archibald McCallum, “The Asian Relations Conference,” The Australian Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1947): 13–17. For a study of Nehru’s delineation of Pan-Asian regional identities at the 1947 Asian Relations Conference (ARC) in Delhi and the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, Sinderpal Singh, “From Delhi to Bandung: Nehru, ‘Indian-ness’ and ‘PanAsian-ness,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 51–64. Cindy Ewing, “The Colombo Powers: Crafting Diplomacy in the Third World and Launching Afro-Asia at Bandung,” Cold War History 19, no. 1 (2019): 1–19; For Tagore’s views on Asia, see Rabindranath Tagore, The Essential Tagore, eds. Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty (Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2011), 14; for Gandhi’s views on moving away from civilisational tropes, see Mohandas K. Gandhi, “On Revolutions,” Editorial, Young India, March 1, 1928, 67; For Nehru promoting Asian solidarity with an emphasis on freedom and equality rather than the merging of the continent, see Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Eastern Federation,” 28 October 1940, in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (SWJN), Series 2, Vol. 11 (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Memorial Fund, 1993), 191. Sarah Ellen Graham and Alexander E. Davis, “A “Hindu Mystic” or a “Harrovian Realist”? U.S., Australian, and Canadian Representations of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1947–1964,” Pacific Historical Review 89, no. 2 (2020): 198–231. Asa McKercher, “The Centre Cannot Hold: Canada, Colonialism and the ‘Afro-Asian Bloc’ at the United Nations, 1960–62,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 2 (2014): 330; Christopher Waters, “After decolonization: Australia and the emergence of the non‐aligned movement in Asia, 1954–55,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 12, no. 2 (2001): 153–174; also see Andrew Phillips, “Beyond Bandung: The 1955 Asian-African Conference and Its Legacies for International Order,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 70, no. 4 (2016): 329–341. Robert Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-doong),” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 4, no. 2 (2013): 261–288.

206  Swapna Kona Nayudu 41 Dilip M. Menon, “Bandung Is Back Afro-Asian Affinities,” Radical History Review, no. 119 (Spring 2014). Menon uses this term as a point of departure not as a description. 42 Naoko Shimazu, “Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955,” Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 1 (2014): 225–252. Also see Antonia Finnane, “Bandung as History,” in Bandung 1955, ed. McDougall and Finnane, 1–8; Derek McDougall, “Bandung as Politics,” in ibid., 131–139. See also Seng Tang and Amitav Acharya, “The Normative Relevance of the Bandung Conference for Contemporary Asian and International Order,” in Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 AsianAfrican Conference for the International Order, ed. Tang and Acharya (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008); Jamie Mackie, Bandung 1955: Non-Alignment and Afro-Asian Solidarity (Didier Millet, 2005), 124–128. 43 Swapna Kona Nayudu, “The Nehru Years: Indian Non-Alignment as the Critique, Discourse and Practice of Security (1947–1964),” Ph.D. Thesis, King’s College London, 2015. For study of Indian diplomacy in this period, see Swapna Kona Nayudu, ““India Looks at the World”: The Indian Foreign Service & World Diplomacy,” Diplomatica, May 2020, 100–117. 44 Christopher J. Lee, “At the Rendezvous of Decolonization,” Interventions 11, no. 1 (2009): 89. 45 Carolien Stolte, ““The People’s Bandung”: Local Anti-imperialists on an Afro-Asian Stage,” Journal of World History 30, no. 1–2 (June 2019): 125–156; Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte, “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War,” Journal of World History 30, no. 1–2 (June 2019): 1–19. 46 On the move away from racialised politics, see Itty Abraham, “From Bandung to NAM: Non-alignment and Indian Foreign Policy, 1947–65,” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 46, no. 2 (2008): 195–219. On being wedded to the Nonaligned Movement, see Christopher J. Lee “At the Rendezvous of Decolonization,” Interventions 11, no. 1 (2009): 81–93. 47 See the pioneering work of Tarak Barkawi, David Killingray, Kaushik Roy, and Timothy Parsons regarding the combat experience of African troops in Asia – Tarak Barkawi, Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (London: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 338; Killingray, David. “The Idea of a British Imperial African Army,” Journal of African History 20, no. 3 (1979): 421–436, 433; Kaushik Roy, “Discipline and Morale of the African, British and Indian Army Units in Burma and India during World War II: July 1943 to August 1945,” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 6 (2010): 1255–1282; Timothy Parsons, The African Rank and File: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902– 1964 (Oxford: Heinemann, 1999). 48 Swapna Kona Nayudu, “The Nehru Years: Indian Non-Alignment as the Critique, Discourse and Practice of Security (1947–1964),” Ph.D. Thesis, King’s College London, 2015; ‘Security for Whom?’ 177–217. 49 Major early diplomatic appointments for India were Apa Pant’s posting in Kenya where he gained the confidence of Kenyatta, and Niranjan Singh Gill, an Indian National Army hero’s posting to Ethiopia, given Nehru’s regard for Haile Selassie. On Kenya, see Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). 50 Swapna Kona Nayudu, “The Nehru Years: Indian Non-alignment as the Critique, Discourse and Practice of Security (1947–1964),” Ph.D. Thesis, King’s College London, 2015; ‘Security for Whom?’ 177–217. 51 Gerard McCann, “Where was the Afro in Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa’s ‘Bandung Moment’ in 1950s Asia,” Journal of World History 30, no. 1–2 (June 2019): 89–123. McCann teases out these tensions from the African point of view.

A Bombay Periodical  207 52 James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 53 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 288. 54 United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs had as its Managing Editors G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao, was published in Bombay at the Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 12, Wodehouse Road, Bombay 5, India. TK Mahadevan served as Editor. The periodical was published every even month and priced at Rs. 10, or GBP 1 or USD 3. 55 As Kaviraj suggests, “After all, the independence movement was about the capture of the state” – see Sudipta Kaviraj, “On the Enchantment of the State: Indian Thought on the Role of the State in the Narrative of Modernity,” European Journal of Sociology 46, no. 2 (2005): 285. 56 G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.), United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 4, Issue 1, (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1952), 1. 57 Ibid. This issue also featured essays by Norman Cousins, Harold Isaacs, Lester Pearson, Mulk Raj Anand and Soekarno. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Excerpted from his address at the East West Cultural Symposium, New Delhi, December 1951, S. Radhakrishnan, “Coexistence and the Concept of Man,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 4, Issue 1 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1952), 32–33. 61 Lester B. Pearson, “Canada’s Asian Policy,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 4, Issue 1 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1952), 37. 62 Editorial ‘Asia and the United Nations’ in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 4, Issue 1 (Bombay: InterAsian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1952), 73. 63 Ibid. 64 Editorial in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 4, Issue 3 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1952), 121. 65 Ibid.; Nehru, speaking in the Indian parliament, quoted in ibid. 66 Nehru quoted in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 4, Issue 3 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1952), 132. 67 G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 9, Issue 4, (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1957), 225. On India’s role in the Suez and Hungarian crises, see Swapna Kona Nayudu, The Nehru Years: Indian Non-alignment as the Critique, Discourse and Practice of Security (1947–1964) (Ph.D. Thesis, King’s College London, 2015), “The Fog of War,” 125–176. 68 G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 4, Issue 4, (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1952), Table of Contents, page number not given. 69 Ibid., page number not given. 70 G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 4, Issue 3, (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1952), 127–132.

208  Swapna Kona Nayudu 71 G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 4, Issue 5, (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1952). 72 Ram Manohar Lohia, in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 5, Issue 2 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1953), 100. 73 Ibid., 101 and 103. 74 Quoted in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 13, Issue 3 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1961), 157–164. For excerpts from collected speeches and writings, on Nehru, see pages 157–159. ‘The Essence of Non-alignment,’ on Nasser, see pages 159–162. ‘Elements of International Policy, on Tito, see pages 162–164. ‘Non-alignment’. 75 Jawaharlal Nehru quoted in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 13, Issue 3 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1953), 157–159. 76 Ibid., 157. 77 Madhu Limaye, “Neutrality in Asia: A Revolutionary View Point,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 13, Issue 3 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1961), 174–177. 78 Abraham Meyer Halpern, “The Chinese Communist Line on Neutralism,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 13, Issue 3 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1961), 165–173. 79 Devdutt, “A Reappraisal of Non-alignment,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 15, Issue 11 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1963), 765–778. 80 Ibid., 774. 81 Ibid., 774, emphasis mine. 82 J. A. Naik, “Sino-Soviet Conflict and Indian Policy,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 11, Issue 1 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1964), 31–35. 83 Madhu Limaye, in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 11, Issue 1 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1964), 28–30. 84 G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 16, Issue 5 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1964), Special Number on Nehru. 85 Hugh H Smythe, “Nehru and Indian Foreign Policy,” in ibid., 288–291. 86 Editor’s Note, “Non-alignment: A Rare Phenomenon,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 18, Issue 5 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1966), 221–223. 87 K. P. Karunakaran, “Non-Alignment in Present Situation,” in ibid., 224–227. 88 For a view of India’s evolving diplomatic relations with Egypt, see Apa Pant, A Moment in Time (India: Orient Longman, 1974) and Apan Pant, Undiplomatic Incidents (Bombay: Orient Longman Limited, 1987).

A Bombay Periodical  209 89 “The Tragedy of Africa,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 13, Issue 3 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1961), 158, emphasis mine. 90 For the former, see G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 13, Issue 2 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1961), 127; and for the latter, see pages 134–137.7 91 “Tagore’s View of Asia,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 13, Issue 2 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1961), Tagore Centenary Symposium, 79–81. 92 Special Foreword by Kwame Nkrumah, adapted, with permission from his The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1957), in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 9, Issue 1 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1957) Special Issue on Ghana and African Nationalism, 3. 93 For Pan-Africanist Padmore’s global connections, see Gerard McCann, “Possibility and Peril: Trade Unionism, African Cold War, and the Global Strands of Kenyan Decolonization,” Journal of Social History 53, no. 2 (2019): 348–377. 94 “Indians in Africa,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 22, Issue 6 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1970). 95 See for instance, Tibor Mende, “The Balance Sheet of “Decolonization”,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 10, Issue 1 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1958), 7–12. 96 Madhu Limaye, “The Commonwealth: New Version of Empire,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 9, Issue 4 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1957), 67. 97 Hiren Mukherjee, “‘India and the Commonwealth (I)’ and JBS Haldane ‘India and the Commonwealth (II)’,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 9, Issue 4 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1957), 237–240 and 240 onwards; Ellsworth Bunker, “India and the USA,” in ibid. 261. 98 Triloki Nath Kaul, “The Commonwealth,” in G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 13, Issue 1 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1961), 60, 64–66. 99 G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 19, Issue 5 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1967); G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 21, Issue 5 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1969); G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 22, Issue 6 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1970), 317–319. 100 G. S. Pohekar and U. R. Rao (eds.). United Asia. International Magazine of Asian Affairs. Volume 16, Issue 1 (Bombay: Inter-Asian Publishing House, Western Printers and Publishers, 1964), Special Supplement on New Hungary, 191–194.

210  Swapna Kona Nayudu 101 For a discussion of the Nahdat Afriqiya, see Reem Abou-El-Fadl, “Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity and the 1957 Cairo Conference,” Journal of World History 30, no. 1–2 (June 2019): 157–192; for a discussion of the Lotus Journal, see Hala Halim, “Afro-Asian Third Worldism into Global South: The Case of Lotus Journal,” Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with The Global South, 2017; for a discussion of the Afro-Asian Journalist, see Hong Liu and Taomo Zhou, “Bandung Humanism and a New Understanding of the Global South: An Introduction,” Critical Asian Studies 51, no. 2 (2019): 141–143; for African print culture, see Ruth Bush and Madhu Krishnan, “Print Activism in Twenty-FirstCentury Africa,” Wasafiri 31, no. 4 (2016): 1–2. 102 For a delightful study of Lotus journal’s connections with South Asia, see Sumayya Kassamali, “You Had No Address: Faiz Ahmed Faiz in Beirut,” 01 June 2016, The Caravan Magazine, New Delhi.

Index

1349 Ordinance of Laborers 27 abolitionist politics 20 Act for the Removal of Aliens 68 Aden 38 Afghanistan 34 Africa 34–38; diamonds 47; diaspora 106; medicinal drugs 48; see also AfroIndian solidarity; Gandhi Afro-Indian solidarity 106, 116–133, 141–160, 171–176, 185–201 Agency houses 39 Aikhal diamond mine in Russia 46 Aiyar, C. P. Ramaswamy 43 Ajmer 36 Albuquerque, Afonso de 21 alcohol: beer 84–87; see also toddy Algeria 34 Allahabad 24 Almeida, Francisco de 21 Amboina 21, 23 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 106 American South 37–38 Andaman Islands 23, 79 Angola 46 Antigua Weekly Register 57 APIs 47 Arabia 35, 44 Arabian Sea 79 Arakan 79 Arakanese Kings 25 Argentina 46, 48 Armenian 38 Assam 41

Asvat, Zainap 165 Atomic Energy 43 Australia 79, 190 Bacalar 63–69 Baldwin, Roger 94, 106 Bali, Jaget van 26 Banda 21 Bandung Conference 190–191 Bangladesh 33 Bantam 35 Barbados 58–59 basmati rice 34, 44 Batavia 21–22 Battle of Cawnpore see Indian Uprising of 1857 Battle of Chillianwala 70 Bay of Bengal 4, 25, 79 Belgium 43, 47, 196 Belize 10, 55–70 Benares 37 Bengal 21–26, 38–40, 56, 95 Bengkulu 23 Bermuda 57 Bermuda Royal Gazette 57 Bhadralok see Bengal Bharuch 37 Bihar 37 Blake, Mr. 64–65 Board of Immigration 61 Bombay (Mumbai) 4, 37, 58; see also Afro-Indian solidarity Bose, Subhas Chandra 95, 101 Bovines 44–45 Bradley, Ben 95, 100

212 Index Brazil 20, 48, 69 British East India Company (EIC) 23, 28–30, 35–37, 79 British Guiana 56, 69; see also Guyana British Malaya 82 British tobacco 42 Bunche, Ralph 121 Burma 23, 38, 198 Cachar 41 Calcutta (Kolkata) 22, 25–6, 39–40, 56, 58, 100, 109, 124, 199–200 Calicoes 35 Campbell, Colin 66 Campbell, J.R. 107–108 Canada 46, 146, 193 Captain Anderson 64 Carabeef 44–45 Caracas 60, 66 Caribbean 28, 38–39, 55–69, 79 Carrefour 34 caste 24, 126 Caste War see Indian Uprising of 1857 Cave, Scott 60–61 Cawnpore (Kanpur) see Indian Uprising of 1857 Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 20–24, 41, 176, 194 Chagla, M.C. 122 Chan Santa Cruz Maya 64, 66 Chandrayaan – 2 43 Chattopadhyaya, Virendranath 99 Chattopadhyay, Kamaladevi 126 Chegava 24 Chennai see Madras Central America 55–73 Chettiar traders 38 Chicago’s Lindsay Light Company 43 Chichanha Maya 64, 68 China 34, 37–38, 42, 44–48, 79, 116, 121, 160, 179, 193, 196–198 Chinatown 82 Chinsurah 22, 26 Chintz 35 Chittagong 25 Chola Empire 78 Cholera 24, 88, 103 Christianity 25–26, 128 Chulia 84 Church of the Holy Rosary 25 Cipla 48 Clapham sect 28

Cochin 24 Cold War 123–124, 160, 188–189, 193–194 colored cosmopolitanism see cosmopolitanism communism 94–110, 193, 199 Convict Department 82 convict labor 20, 24, 29–30, 82, 83 coolie 19, 24, 61, 69, 81 Coromandel 21 Coromandel Coast 36 Corozal 60, 64, 67–68 Cosmopolitanism 26, 145 cotton 33, 35, 37, 46 Covid-19 47–48 Crimean War 39 Cuba 69 Dadoo, Yusuf 176 Dang, Satyapal 179 Darling, Charles Henry (Governor of Jamaica) 63, 65, 67, 69 Darjeeling 41, 50 Defoe, Daniel 28 Delhi (New Delhi) 24, 45, 48, 57, 61, 98, 108, 127–129, 132, 141, 188–193, 200 Demerara 61 Department of Public Works 82 Dianga 25 Diario de Avisos 60, 66 Diaspora 78–79, 141–160, 198 Dinapore 57 Diu 20 Du Bois, W.E.B. 94, 119–120, 122, 124 Dubai 47 Dublish, V.S. 165–170 Dutch East India Company 21, 35, 36; see also VOC Dutch Republic 20, 22 Dutt, C.P. 99 Dutt, Romesh Chunder 34 Dzuc, Luciano 68 Edam 22 Egypt 39, 192, 195–197, 201 EIC see British East India Company El Comercio 58 El Siglo XIX 58 Empire Tobacco 42

Index  213 Fiji 49, 79, 176 Finnis, Thomas Q. 59–60 French East India Company 23, 35 French settlements 23, 38

Howard University 121–122, 124, 127, 165–166, 171, 173–175, 181 Hugli 26, 29 Hutchinson, Lester 95, 100

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 95, 101, 116–118, 141–160, 165–182 gender 5, 81, 89 German states see Germany Germany 39, 104 Geylang 77 Ghana 198 Global South 3, 5, 143, 185, 189, 201 Global South Asia 6–7, 55 Globalization 2–3, 5, 8 Goa 20–21, 24 Golconda Sultanate 47 Gopalan, P.V. 1 Gossypium seed 36 Goswami, Dharni 105 Grant, Charles 28 Greytown (San Juan del Norte) 70 guar gum 10, 45–46, 49 Guatemala 39, 59 Gujarat 35–37, 47, 170 Gunpowder 63–65, 36 Guntur 42 Guyana 49, 61 Gwalior 66

indentured laborers 6, 10, 55, 62, 69, 143, 147; see also coolie India Relief Fund 59 Indian Atomic Energy Act of 1948 43 Indian National Congress 95, 106, 176 Indian Ocean 1, 4–6, 9, 19–24, 26, 35, 78–79, 82, 143–145, 148, 155, 157 Indian Patents Act 48 Indian Uprising of 1857 55–70 Indigo 38–39 Indonesia 21, 23, 27, 179, 194 International Committee for Political Prisoners 106 Iron ore 40 Islam 26 Islamic Society 141, 151 Italian travelers 28 Italian merchants 35, 38

Haiti 39 Halifax 57 Halliburton 46, 54 Hamied, Khwaja Abdul 47 Harley, Robert 62 Harris, Kamala 1 Hastings, Warren 29 Havelock, Henry 66 hemp 39 Hervet, Gentian 28 Highlander Folk School 125 Hinduism 101, 151, 153 Hindustan Ambassador 40 Hindustan Machine Tools 40 hing 34 Hondo (river) 60–61, 63–64 Hong Kong 47 Hooghly River 36, 40 Hope Diamond 47 House of Assembly 61

Jamaica 56, 58–59, 61–63, 65, 67–69 James, Langford 97–102 Jangam, R.T. 196 Japan 37, 42 Japanese 44, 176, 190 Java 21, 39 Jodhpur 45 Johnson, Mordecai 121–122, 128, 174–176, 181 Johnstone, J.W. 106 Josh, Sohan Singh 98 Justices of Peace 27–28 Jute 10, 39–40, 49–50, 105 Jwaneng Diamond mine in Botswana 46 Kahaars 29 Kamath, M.V. 194 Kathrada, Ahmed 165–166, 178–181 Kaul, T.N. 116, 199 Kazakhstan 34 Kenyatta, Jomo 159 Kerala 43 Khambat 35 Khoja Currimbhoys 38 King, Martin Luther 116–117, 122, 128, 131

214 Index Kling 84 Koh-i-Noor 47 Kollam 42 Kollur Mine 47 Korea 193–195 Kripalani, J.B. 12, 118–119, 127–128 Kripalani, Sucheta 119, 127–128 Lanthanide 42 Latin America 10, 48, 55–70, 107, 123 League Against Imperialism 104 Levantine merchants 38 Limaye, Madhu 196, 198 Liquor Control Act 89 Little India 77, 88 Little India Riots 88–89 Liverpool 37, 105 Logwood 59 Lohia, Rammanohar 118–119, 124–127, 129–131, 195 London 56, 58–60, 69, 98–99, 103–109, 119, 142, 149–150; University of 176 Lucknow 57, 66 Lusiads 21 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 166 Macaulay, Zachary 28–29 MacDonald, Ramsay 94, 103 Madhya Pradesh 47 Madras 58, 83, 85 Madras Presidency see Madras mahogany 59–60, 64 Majapahit 81 Malabar 21, 24, 33 Malacca 21, 23, 35, 79, 83 Malaya 78, 81–82, 85, 87 Malaysia see Malaya Manchester 37, 105 Mandhaar, Anjou van 26 manganese ore 40 Manila 21 Manjapra, Kris 6 Manucci, Niccolao 26 Marwari Maheshwaris 38 Marx, Karl 34, 99, 103, 144, 193 Mauritius 23, 79, 91, 176 Maya 10, 55–70 Mboya, Tom 159 Meerut Rebellion see Indian Uprising of 1857 Meerut Conspiracy Trial 94–115 Mehrgarh 36

Melbourne 56 mestizos 62 Mexican Communist Party 55 Mexico 55–70 mica 40 Middle East 34, 38, 41, 44, 48, 196 Mitra, R.R. 105 Modi, Narendra 43–44 Mozambique 21, 145–148 Mrauk U 25 Mughal India 26, 29 Mukherjee, Hiren 199 Murray, Pauli 165 muslim see Islam Nagercoil 42 Naidoo, Kesaveloo 176–177 Naik, Bhimjee 146–149 Nairs 24 Nana Sahib 66 Naoroji, Dadabhai 34 Nasser, Gamal Abdul 195 National Defense Committee 104–105 Nehru, Jawaharlal 7, 11–12, 15, 43, 95, 101, 107, 116–127, 130–132, 155–156, 158, 173, 186–190, 194–200 Nehru, Motilal 101 Nepal 38 Nescafe 33 New York 11, 56, 94, 103, 106–107, 123 Nkrumah, Kwame 190, 198, 201 nonalignment 116–133, 185–201 nonviolence 95, 116–133, 142, 156, 165–182 Ocampo 55 Onrust 22–23 OPEC 46 opium 37–38, 49–50, 79–88 Orange Walk 60, 63, 67 Pakistan 33, 41, 116, 151–153, 200 Pandit, Vijayalakshmi 121–122 Parsi 38 Partition 151–153 Penang 23, 79, 83 Perdomo, Manuel 68 Persia 35, 38 Petty, William 22 Philippines 39, 44, 120 Port Louis 23 Portugal 19–26, 35–36, 38, 146

Index  215 Portuguese empire see Portugal Puc, Benancio 64 Pucte 64 Punjab 46, 95 race 116–133, 143–144, 146, 171–176 Radhakrishnan, S. 193 Raffles, Stamford 84–85 Rajasthan 45–46 Ranbaxy 48 Rawat, Yusuf 177–178 Red Sea 35 Reddick, Lawrence Dunbar 131 Rio Hondo 63 Robeson, Paul 119 Roy, M.N. 95, 99, 103–104, 107 Russia 44–47, 98–99, 101, 108, 129; see also USSR Sahai, Bhagwati 168 sailors 22–23, 36, 79 Saklatvala, Shapurji 99 Saltpeter 36 samsu 86–88 San Juan 70 Sandwip 25 Santhals 61 Saudi Arabia 44 Scotland 22, 176 Second World War 41 Senegal 39 Sepoy Mutiny see Indian Uprising of 1857 Seymour, Frederick 60–61, 63–65, 67–70 Shridharani, Krishnalal 172–173 siege of Cawnpore see Indian Uprising of 1857 Singapore 11, 23, 77–89 slavery 19–21, 23–26, 29–30, 39, 59, 69 South Africa 147–148, 165–166, 176–180 South China Sea 20 Soviet Union see USSR Spain 21, 35, 55–73, 179 Spanish Empire see Spain Spratt, Phillip 96, 100, 103–104 Sri Lanka 79, 176 St. Kitts 57 St. Lucia 61 Stewart, Houston 65 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 129 Subaltern Studies 4, 9, 26–27, 34, 144

Sumatra 35 Sunak, Rishi 1 Surat 35, 47 Swadeshi movement 37–41, 170 Switzerland 171, 196 Sylhet 41 Syria 35, 197 Tagore, Rabindranath 55, 183, 187, 198 Tamil Nadu 77–78, 80–81, 85–88 tea 7, 33, 38, 40–41, 43, 49–50, 85 Tekax 63–64 Temasek 81 Thailand 43–44, 47 Third World 185–201 Tiger Beer 85 Tito, Josip Broz 194–195 toddy 77–93 Tope, Tantia 66 Travancore 42–43 Trinidad 58–60, 176 Tripura 41 Trump, Donald 46 Turkey 35, 37, 45 Tutu, Desmond 118 United Asia 185–210 United Kingdom 104–105 United Nations 129, 193–194 United States 94, 106–107, 116–133, 171–176 USSR 95–99, 110, 117, 160, 193, 199 Uzbekistan 34 Varthema, Lodovico de 35 Venezuela 60, 66 Vietnam 44, 47 VOC 21–26, 29 Volkart Brothers 37 Walesa, Lech 118 Welsbach, Carl Auer von 42 West India Committee 60 White, Walter 122 Wilkins, Roy 121 Windham, Charles 65–66 World War I 40, 111, 148, 171 Yugoslavia 194 ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) 156–158 Zimbabwe 141–160