The United States of India South Asian Translations of America, 1905-1974.

Abstract

This dissertation examines an understudied history of the Indian encounter with America. Drawing from an archive of ethnographies, histories, and cultural criticism written by Indian travelers who came to the U.S. in the years preceding wide-scale migration, my research describes how the U.S. was a site for rich analogical thinking and for the examination of questions of race, caste, nationhood, and empire. Indian nationalists in the early 20th century found ways of interpreting America's anti-British revolution as a symbolic model for Swaraj, even as they later perceived in the nation's colonial project in the Pacific something akin to the East India Company. Likewise, the country's history of racial inequality and class struggle would turn up throughout Indian representations of the U.S., as analogues to both the caste and colonial question. These narratives of American nationhood offered a lens through which to see Indian society anew, and today allow us to consider the global meanings of America circulating beyond the national borders of the U.S. in the 20th century.

The study covers three broad periods in the 20th century which witnessed shifts in the cultural and political meaning of the United States in relation to the Indian subcontinent: the emergence of anticolonial Indian nationalism within the United States (1914-1928), the formation of the global Third World subject against the backdrop of World War II and the Cold War (1944-1955), and the explosion of subaltern political movements worldwide, including the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. and the concurrent development of Dalit politics in India (1963-74). Overall, what this study attempts is to consider the way in which the dominant narratives and ideologies of the United States were engaged with the emergent political discourses of 20th century South Asia – namely nationhood, anti-colonialism, and caste reform. This largely forgotten history of South Asian and U.S. contact, thus offers a critical lens to consider the politics of comparison and translation that were so central to 20th century anti-colonial and postcolonial projects, and to reconsider the terms of South Asian American history itself.