20 Jan 2015
Appearances are deceptive. A white American President will be received next Sunday by a white Asian President. Superficially however, it’s a coincidence that an American President’s first visit as chief guest at a Republic Day parade is taking place while the American ambassador in New Delhi is also what white Americans would call coloured. But there all resemblance ends. Barack Obama is the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother. Richard Rahul Verma, his ambassador, is the son of a Punjabi who was the first literate person in his family but taught English at the University of Pittsburgh for 40 years. Both testify to the grand success of the American Dream.
Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, paid tribute the other day to this realised ideal. The first Indian-American (a term he rejects) governor of an American state, he said he didn’t believe in hyphenated identities. “My parents came in search of the American Dream, and they caught it. To them, America was not so much a place, it was an idea. My dad and mom told my brother and me that we came to America to be Americans. Not Indian-Americans, simply Americans.”
Far be it from me to decry their ambition. But I cannot help but wonder if white Americans see Mr Jindal (or Mr Verma or even their President) as quite the full-blooded all-American guy of Mr Jindal’s self-view. I am not saying they don’t, but I just wonder. It’s not something of which I have direct knowledge and must therefore fall back on the views and experiences of others who are fortunate or unfortunate enough to find themselves straddling two or more ethnicities.
For Amar Bose, who was born in Philadelphia in 1930 and whose sound system is a household name worldwide, “the big problem was colour, pure and simple.” No Philadelphia restaurant would serve him. He “couldn’t rent a house.” Sikhs were called “ragheads.” The black American writer, James Baldwin, says he would never know when he had to wait for a lift whether the white liftman was genuinely busy or discriminating against him.
In another instance, N.B. Bonarjee, who was brought up in England and went to an English public school and Oxford before joining the Indian Civil Service, records that he had first applied to dozens of schools in England but they were not clamouring for his services. One of the English headmasters eventually told a common friend that he would certainly have called Bonarjee for an interview had he been English.
Things may have changed but only recently I was talking to a British diplomat who asked me about “the Asian guy who was sent to Kolkata.” He meant Sanjay Wadhwani, who was born in the city of a Sindhi father and British mother but was whisked off as a child to London where he grew up an Englishman until Her Britannic Majesty sent him back to Kolkata as very capable deputy high commissioner. He is now British ambassador in, I think, Kyrgyzstan.
But, clearly, not all Brits regarded Mr Wadhwani as a pukka Brit even though he was the Queen’s accredited representative. Sad to say, neither did the old guard of Calcutta Society. It didn’t matter to them whether or not he was of mixed blood. But he was of immigrant stock and that was a disqualification to start with. What was infinitely worse was that he wasn’t “pure” English. There were murmurs that Her Majesty’s Government had obviously downgraded Kolkata not to send us a thoroughbred Englishman, if such a creature exists.
Britain’s first full-blown Asian-origin envoy, Sylhet-born Anwar Bokth Choudhury, high commissioner to Bangladesh, also had to contend with a similar mix of smugness, snobbishness and stupidity. Mr Choudhury’s appointment prompted a senior Bangladeshi diplomat to mock he had obviously passed the Tebbit test, meaning the jibe by a Conservative politician, Norman Tebbit, that Britons of South Asian origin who cheered India or Pakistan during cricket matches with England weren’t really loyal Britons.
The Bangladeshi didn’t know that anticipating sneers, Mr Choudhury, whom his British colleagues regard as one of the brightest and best in their service, had taken the bull by the horns. Asked who he would support when England played Bangladesh, he replied boldly, “Since I am a representative of Her Majesty’s Government, I will support England. My priority is serving HMG.” The murmurs persisted. Some in Dhaka thought Mr Choudhury stuck up because he didn’t speak any Bengali, only English. Others hinted he dared not lapse into Bengali in case the Sylheti dialect came flooding out.
The world has moved on since 1949 when a conference of American foreign service officials in New Delhi recommended that as many black diplomats as possible should be posted here. As Larry Wilson, the American consul in Bombay, “a big, genial-looking café-au-lait-coloured Negro”, whispered awestruck to Saunders Redding, a black writer on a state department lecture tour, “Man, we’re dealing with coloured people in a coloured country!” It was a novel situation that Westerners, especially American blacks, interpreted in terms of their own experience with little comprehension of the nuanced attitude to race and roots in a land whose ancient caste system varna means colour.
Now, America’s own experience may be regarded as even more novel. The claim by many analysts that in thinking and responses Mr Obama is really white suggests that Disraeli’s belief that race is the ultimate reality still holds true. As for Indians, like Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh immigrant who unsuccessfully petitioned for citizenship claiming to be “a descendant of the Aryans of India, belonging to the Caucasian race (and, therefore) white...” we know we’re white. White will therefore meet white next Sunday, never mind about appearances.
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