In February 2023, the US city of Seattle became the first to ban caste discrimination. Later that year in September, California’s legislature passed a law banning caste discrimination to protect the large numbers of people of South Asian origin. Some years earlier, the technology company CISCO was sued as two high-caste managers were alleged to have discriminated against a Dalit engineer by paying him a lower salary. In such a political context, Avinash Hingorani’s book becomes a timely contribution to the links between individuals and groups in the United States and India who were active in organizing against race and caste in the early half of the 20th century.
The book does stand out especially in terms of the activities of notable Indian figures such as Lala Lajpat Rai, Rabindranath Tagore, BR Ambedkar and Taraknath Das, particularly in terms of the time they spent in the US and the links they were able to forge with those fighting racism such as WEB Du Bois, Paul Robeson and Walter White. Hingorani explains how the span of his book begins with 1900 when WEB Du Bois declared at the first Pan African Congress that ‘the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line’, and extends to 1954 with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education judgment in which the US Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional (p. 1). The most immediate reason that seems to have led to the forging of such transnational links between the two countries and their respective struggles was that many in the US felt that the Indian struggle for Independence could act as an example or a template for how British colonialism could be taken on and defeated in the 20th century.
The links themselves were precipitated by the time spent in the US by the Indian figures who have been studied. Lala Lajpat Rai spent a good five years between the years 1914 and 1919 during which time he was to develop a close association with the Harvard educated WEB Du Bois. The correspondence between the two continued even after Rai’s return to India and would of course come to an end with the sad demise of Rai because of a violent police assault during a protest in 1928. Similarly, the poet Rabindranath Tagore made multiple visits to the US during which he was to engage in extensive lecturing. Tagore’s visits seem to have been characterized by caution as he was wary of saying anything in the US that could lead to the British thwarting his future travel plans. Moreover, Tagore was interested during his US tours to raise money for the future Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan, and that aim may have prevented him from speaking more forthrightly.
The most significant of the figures from India who spent time in the US was of course Dr. BR Ambedkar, himself a Dalit and it is his experience that should be the most important in terms of the transnational links that form the focus of this book. Hingorani notes in the introduction of the book that the Indian figures analysed are not caste activists except for Ambedkar. Apart from Ambedkar, all the other Indian figures were from the privileged upper castes who had the opportunity and means to travel to the US. Overall, there remained a distinct lack of understanding of the nuance and complexity of the Indian caste system as far as American activists were concerned, and this may have been on account of the inability to convey with greater poignancy the debilitating effects that the caste system had on those most oppressed by it. Hingorani observes correctly: ‘Black Americans and White liberals primarily spoke with Indians of high-caste status such as Tagore and Rai who often did not present caste in India as a central issue’ (p. 12). Interestingly, racial discrimination in the US was described as a caste system particularly in the South during the Jim Crow era.
As the book progresses, what does emerge from the analysis is the way in which the larger structure of the nation-state in both the US and India impinged adversely on the Dalits in India and Blacks in the US. This resulted in greater adverse encounters with the repressive apparatus of the state, leading to more frequent police detentions and prolonged incarceration. Blacks in the US and Dalits in India are thus more likely to be found serving prison sentences, which reflects the nature of the nation-state that perpetrates racial injustice in the case of the US and caste injustice in the case of India through its very agencies that are institutionally suffused by these forms of discrimination. Hingorani observes that the way the criminal justice system is so completely weighted against Blacks in the US can be considered a form of apartheid. He then goes on to rightly observe that the experience of Blacks in the US must be contextualized as a larger process of the construction of nation-states (p. 153).
The book seems to suggest that the major basis on which anti-race activists in the US and Indian figures living in the US aligned was on the question of British imperialism of which both countries had a shared historical experience. The emphasis on British imperialism seems to detract attention from the fact that the nation-state that would be created with independence from the British and succeed the British imperial state would itself become the vector and purveyor of the two forms of injustice. This happens despite the positioning of Black Americans and Indian struggles as part of a larger global movement for equality. This does seem to be an insight that the varied figures analysed in this book seem to be sufficiently aware of.
Tagore did of course caution against the dangers of nationalism in his 1916 and 1917 lectures, but this clairvoyance on the question of nationalism logically extending into the receptacle of the nation-state seems to be a conclusion that all or most figures in the book could not draw.
One aspect that the book misses is the Dalit Panthers movement, modelled on the US Black Panthers, perhaps because the formation of this group falls outside the span which forms the focus of the book from 1900 to 1954. There is one reference to the Black Panthers on page 152 when American musician Tupac Shakur is mentioned (how his parents were part of the Black Panthers). Finally, one is left wondering whether the most significant hurdle to the forging of transnational links between Black anti-race struggles and Dalit anti-caste struggles was the racial superiority on the side of many upper-caste Indian political figures and their consequent condescension towards the Blacks, with Gandhi’s outright racist attitudes being an obvious instance.
Amir Ali is Assistant Professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.