Professor Manan Desai of University of Michigan’s American Culture faculty in Asian/Pacific Islander American studies, specializes in research on how transnational exchanges between Indian and American intellectuals influenced political discourses of nationhood, race, and caste in South Asia and how these exchanges also provided a new vocabulary for race and class politics in the U.S. More recently, he has begun work on another project, which examines how 20th century popular cultural and middlebrow representations of South Asian Americans shaped understandings of empire and race in the U.S. Since 2010, Prof. Desai has been a member of the Board of Directors of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), where he contributes original archival research, and assists in building digital collections, and serves as an editor and contributor to Tides, the online publication of SAADA. He responded to questions posed by News India Times, on the contributions of Indian-Americans and others to India’s struggle for independence from the British.
How far did America’s war of independence on the one hand and people like Thoreau and Emerson on the other — influence the Indian freedom struggle?
In the early 20th century, several Indian figures often invoked the American Revolution in an effort to connect Americans more viscerally to the cause for Indian Independence. So, for instance, the Gadar Party leader Ram Chandra made this comparison, writing to President Woodrow Wilson that “your own dear country… became a free nation by an act of rebellion against the British.” Similarly, Lala Lajpat Rai (who resided in the U.S. for five years between 1914-1919) drew comparisons between Indian independence and the American Revolution, invoking the shared enemy of the British and the desire for an independent republic. But these comparisons often required willful ignorance — for instance, when Lajpat Rai first traveled to the US in 1907, he would describe the displacement and genocide of Native Americans as tragic, but did not explicitly discuss how America’s status as a settler colony disrupted any sustained comparison to India. I think, for Rai and many others operating at that time, the attempt to frame the independence struggle as analogous to the American Revolution was more of a rhetorical strategy to connect with his audience, who otherwise could not see the relevance of India to their own history.
Thoreau and Emerson, who were important figures of Transcendentalism, were famously influenced by translations of works like the Bhagavad Gita. Both Emerson and Thoreau, in turn, were very influential to Gandhi, particularly Thoreau’s discussion of “civil disobedience,” which was a key concept in Gandhi’s conception of Satyagraha.
In what ways did Indians living in America at that time and others in this country influence or fight for India’s Independence?
The Gadar Party is one of the most powerful examples of the way that Indian migrants in the U.S were involved in the fight for India’s independence. Founded in 1913 and based in San Francisco, the Gadar Party advocated the revolutionary overthrow of the British from India. Its members included laborers (the majority of whom were Punjabi Sikh), students, and other Indian expatriates, including prominent figures like Taraknath Das and M.N. Roy. The Gadar Party published a newspaper, which soon gave the party an international reach, spreading to places like Japan, Hong Kong, Burma, and the Philippines.
The Indian Home Rule League of America was a more moderate political organization involved in the Independence struggle. The group was led by Lajpat Rai in New York City, and advocated for home rule status, demanding more autonomy as a colony within the broader commonwealth of the British Empire. Lajpat Rai, as most people will know, would become an iconic figure in the history of Indian Independence, but many people overlook his formative period during a four year exile between 1914-1919 in the U.S., in which he connected with many influential progressives and tried to gain their support.
Other organizations include the Friends of Freedom for India, and the India League of America, founded by the Punjabi immigrant and businessman J.J. Singh. There’s such a long and impressive list of figures involved in the independence movement, who had spent formative years in the U.S.: Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Taraknath Das, Dada Amir Haider Khan, M.N. Roy, Jayaprakash Narayan, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and Vijayalakshmi Pandit, among many others.
The U.S. took a position opposing British rule in India, but how did this play out in the U.S. and internationally? Did the U.S. support the Gadar Party and other groups? Did something like the Time magazine for Man of the Year for Gandhi in 1930 for instance, reflect popular sentiment?
This is a complicated question, in part, because Washington was not always supportive of Indian Independence. Franklin Delano Rooseve in later years supported Indian independence, but in the decades prior that position was not always the case. The U.S., for instance, did not support the efforts of the Gadar Party, and in fact recent work by the historian Seema Sohi points to the way that the U.S. worked in collusion with the British to surveil Gadar activists along the U.S.-Canada border. Har Dayal, one of the founders of the Gadar Party, was chased out of the U.S., when he was accused of spreading anarchist ideas around the Bay Area. This intensive surveillance famously led to what was called the “Hindu-German Conspiracy trial.” The Gadar Party received support from the German Foreign Office, which had funded an effort to incite an Indian revolt against the British in 1915. The conspiracy was folded by British and US intelligence, and 29 Gadar Party members were convicted in San Francisco.
One of the most important controversies that shaped American opinion on the question of Indian Independence revolved around the publication of the American writer Katherine Mayo’s Mother India in 1927. Mayo’s book was based off a short visit to India, and she made the case against Indian independence by highlighting the backwards-ness of Indian society. The book was a huge best seller, and was famously described by Gandhi as a “drain inspector’s report.” It also galvanized many Indians in the U.S., as well as prominent American thinkers (like the Modernist painter Wyndam Lewis), who responded and criticized the book for its misrepresentations and hypocrisy. Of course, there were many supporters of Mayo’s book too.
Americans seem to know little about how far back Indians were in this country and that several were inspired by the U.S. war of independence against the British. Why is that?
Part of the reason that so few people are aware of these earlier histories might have to do with the fact that they’re not taught in schools, or if they are, they’re seen as a minor footnote in a larger history — this is as true, I think, of U.S. history as South Asian history. But I should also mention that there have been generations of scholars, activists, and individuals who have helped independently research and raise awareness of these histories. I see the work that SAADA (South Asian American Digital Archive) is doing as a continuation of the hard work of these earlier efforts.
Which Americans, black and white, played an important role in supporting groups in the U.S. fighting for India’s Independence and how? How intense or deep was the connection between leaders of the Indian struggle living here and the African American leaders?
For many African American intellectuals — like W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and later, Bayard Rustin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — the Indian independence struggle was an important symbol against the forces of global racism that shaped the 20th century. In fact, the 20th century saw a great deal of exchange between Black and South Asian activists, which continued well after independence in 1947. Ram Manohar Lohia was in contact with important Civil Rights activists in the 1960s, when he visited Mississippi. Writers involved in the Dalit literary movement like M.N. Wankhade, Namdeo Dhasal were influenced by the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. One source that has been particularly great in highlighting these histories is Anirvan Chatterjee’s “Secret History of South Asian and African American Solidarity.”
There were many others in the U.S. who were supportive of Indian independence, including a diverse group of people, from social reformers to “celebrities,” like Margaret Sanger, Upton Sinclair, Agnes Smedley, even Albert Einstein. Another group that supported Indian Independence were many Irish-American groups, who saw direct connections between the British occupation of Ireland and India.
What are the major contributions to the study of Indian-American and other involvement in the U.S. with the struggle for independence in the South Asian Subcontinent?
In recent work, there has been a great deal of research that has been uncovering the complex history of South Asian presence in the U.S. Recent books on the Gadar Party by Seema Sohi and Maia Ramnath have done an amazing job in shedding new light to this history. Other works by Dohra Ahmad, Nayan Shah, Nico Slate, Sujani Reddy, Vivek Bald, and many others, have uncovered and helped illustrate the complexities these early South Asian American histories. And of course, SAADA has made it a priority to help us piece together these histories and make them accessible to as many people as possible.
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