Atul Bhardwaj
February 28, 2015
http://www.epw.in/strategic-affairs/mask-and-masculinity-indian-strategy.html
For two centuries and more the Anglo-Saxon world has convinced India that its interests are best catered to under their protective gaze. Will India be able to break out of this hegemony?
Atul Bhardwaj (atul.beret@gmail.com) is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi.
Almost one hundred years before Katharine Mayo’s Mother India began shaping American perceptions of India, a “grand romantic melodrama” called The Cataract of the Ganges!, influenced the American debate on India. The play by William T Moncrieff was “one of the hits of the 1824 New York theatre” (Rotter 1994: 518). It depicted the Indian malaise of communalism, corruption, casteism, gender discrimination and of course, the virtues of colonialism.
The drama is set against the backdrop of a battle between the Muslim emperor Akbar and the Hindu king Jam Saheb. During the war, Jam Saheb leaves his young son Zamine (Land) in the custody of an Englishman, Jack Robinson and his kingdom in the hands of a Brahmin high priest named Mokarra (scoundrel).
Mokarra betrays Jam Saheb and colludes with Akbar. He arranges a marriage between Zamine and Akbar’s daughter in exchange of a province for himself. Jack Robinson informs Jam Saheb about the dubious deal. Zamine’s marriage is prevented when Jam Saheb reveals that Zamine is actually a girl who was disguised as a boy to save her from infanticide. Mokarra is infuriated and declares his king an outcast for defying the divine law that ordained all girls be killed at birth. Jam Saheb now has two options, either to sacrifice his daughter at the altar of Brahma or allow Mokarra to make Zamine his “love slave.”
Jam Saheb agrees to the latter. At this stage the British intervene to save Zamine. Sensing the British onslaught, Mokarra takes the girl towards a cataract to murder her. At this critical juncture, the British officer Mordaunt (military advisor to Jam Saheb) enters the scene, delivers an inspiring speech against “female infanticide and Brahminical tyranny” and makes Mokarra’s men see reason. Mokarra’s plan is foiled, Jam Saheb’s army reaches the waterfall and Zamine is saved.
Andrew J Rotter in his essay, Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947–1964, analysing the underlying theme of the drama says that Hindu–Muslim disunity is an integral part of life in India and that the effeminate Hindu men need White man’s intelligence network and strategic mind to save them from the clutches of Muslims.
Incidentally, not only the American mind but also Indian strategic thought lie embedded within this broad framework that conflates India’s interest with that of Hindu religion and considers Islam to be its main enemy that has to be tackled with the help of the West and Israel.
The first quarter of 19th century was also the time when Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s reform movement was underway in India. Therefore, the play attacks the Brahminical order and its mistreatment of women as an internal malaise afflicting Indian society. The idea was to inform the colonised that it needed the White coloniser for both its external security and internal cleansing.
Mayo’s 1927 Mother India vividly described how Indian society was steeped in squalor, sloth and sex. Mayo’s primary agenda was to place Indians in the category of “less civilized races,” and to depict emasculated Indian men incapable of holding “the reins of Government” (Teed 2003: 37). One cannot deny that the images of filthy India created by Mother India are also reinforced by the more recent Slumdog Millionaire.
Both, book and the play, were a part of the “oriental discourse,” defined by Edward Said as the “cultural enterprises” of the British empire that aimed to rattle the established power structure of the natives, incept a sense of guilt and puncture their pride. The purpose was to engage the natives in cooperating with their colonial master to correct this image.
These British imperial discourses were inherited and imbibed by the Americans who became the predominant Western power in South Asia after the British exit in 1947. Many of the British intelligence networks in the subcontinent were acquired by the Americans. For example, in the mid-1940s Gandhi’s personal physician, B C Roy was in touch with the OSS (Office of the Strategic Services, the predecessor of the present-day Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)). Roy invited the OSS to the Simla Conference of 1945 (Aldrich 1998: 153).
The British created images of a peace-loving, effeminate but cunning Hindu and a warrior Muslim belonging to the martial race. This perfectly matched the post-war American strategy in South Asia that expected the Hindu Brahmin to indulge in the rhetoric of peace and socialism and the martial mullah to be their mercenary.
Nehru vs Mao
The post-war strategic game in Asia presented India as a moral (not military) counterpoise to Mao’s China. Nehru’s role was to keep the newly independent Afro–Asian stock from going completely communist. From the very beginning the American strategy was to guide China from the Second World to the First World. The game was to prevent Mao from assuming the leadership of the “Third World” and making the world order tri-polar.
A pacifist, “socialistic,” sensitive and emotional Nehru, with a red rose on his lapel was considered to be ideally suited to counter Mao’s appeal among the newly independent countries in Asia and Africa. India’s assigned role did not require her to look macho and martial. This was in sharp contrast to the role assigned to Pakistan that was to be used as an American mercenary force for managing Middle-Eastern oil. This explains the reason for the predominance of the military in Pakistan’s politics and the civilian control of the military in India. The non-martial image of India was reinforced by her defeat in the 1962 war with China.
Indira Gandhi, whom the West considered to be the “best man in India” (Rotter 1994: 541), pulled India out of the peacenik mould by taking the initiative in 1971 to liberate East Pakistan and undertake the peaceful nuclear explosion in 1974. The question is, did Indira Gandhi write her own script? This is important especially, in light of the fact that, although America was supporting Pakistan, yet the American consulate in East Pakistan mutinied against the US state department and provided support to the Mukti Bahini cadre. In August 1971, when the US diatribe against India had peaked at the United Nations and USS Enterprise was preparing to set sail for the Bay of Bengal in an offensive role Ravi Shankar, George Harrison and friends — “among them Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell and Ringo” — were organising the first ever charity pop show at Madison Square, called the “Concert of Bangladesh,” to help refugees fleeing East Pakistan (Lowe 2005).
Reflecting on contemporary events, it is important to ask — is Prime Minister Narendra Modi writing his own foreign policy script or, like Nehru, is he following the American agenda?
Modi is certainly not Nehru. Nehru was a myth maker, weaving the myth of non-alignment to cloak the depth of American penetration of the Indian political economy and her institutions. According to Leonard A Gordon (1997: 104), the 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of American involvement in India.
In 1957 an American journalist commented,
Surprisingly enough, our big asset in India is Prime Minister Nehru. Americans often feel that Nehru is splitting hairs when India should be splitting logs, but he is a working democrat who wants to make midwifed form of socialism work (NAI/MEA 1957: 510).
America had such deep access within the Indian establishment that even their private philanthropic foundations could unilaterally select a government official and send him on a scholarship to America. Protesting against such a trend, Leilamani Naidu, an official of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) lamented in June 1958, that “the Rockefeller as well as the Ford Foundations have unbridled freedom of action in this country (India).” He further brought out that
We have been watching with anxiety the increasing penetration and power of foundations like the Ford, Rockefeller, and Nuffield in governmental spheres, and would welcome the control and regulation of their activities(NAI/MEA 1958: 3).
On the one hand, Nehru had unleashed Krishna Menon to speak against American imperialism and on the other, B K Nehru, his cousin, was set free to entrench himself in the world of international finance at New York. Nehru had the intellectual dexterity to lead a cabinet filled with conservative, pro-American politicians and yet be branded a socialist close to the Soviets. Modi is the first mask-less Prime Minster of India. A true blue conservative, he prides himself as a leader of fundamentalist Hindus and flaunts his connections with big business. In the post-ideological international political arena the mask of non-alignment and the “socialistic” tag have become redundant.
Nehru’s mind was shaped by books; Modi’s persona resembles Bollywood heroism and the “Bachchan mania” of the 1970s and 1980s. So, if Nehru was the romantic hero of India in the 1950s, Modi is the angry young man of the 2010s. If Nehru’s leftist political upbringing pulled him towards peace, Modi’s right-wing ideological moorings militate against India’s image of a meek man disinterested in war.
Masculinity is what America demands from India in the 21st century and that is exactly what Modi is more than willing to offer. The relative decline in the importance of Middle-Eastern oil and shifting of the American focus towards China demands an ally that lends its military humanpower (and demographic dividend) as well as land, for American operations in the Indo–Pacific. This requires India to change her strategic mindset and be willing to sacrifice her young boys and men in “out of area operations” that does not directly impinge on her security.
It is primarily for this reason that President Obama agreed to spend two hours watching the parade on India’s Republic Day. During this visit, Prime Minister Modi explicitly announced the joint Indo–US naval operations in the Asia–Pacific and Indian Ocean regions and the conjoining of India’s “Act East Policy” with the United States’ “Rebalance to Asia.”
Unlike Nehru who was not inclined to compete with Pakistan to prove India’s martial instincts, Modi is more than willing to show that Indian races are more martial than Pakistanis, and that Indian culture is rooted in war and violence. The display of all-women contingents of the armed forces at the 2015 Republic Day parade was directed to create a new image of India in American minds. Besides projecting that India was no longer the land of sati, the symbolism was also to showcase that warrior India had the support of its mothers and wives to plunge their sons and men into war. Modi’s persona and his mannerism are being extensively used to change India’s image in American minds. The Western public is being convinced that India is no longer a reluctant warrior but is fit to be a part of the Western war outfit.
The 21st century grand American strategy does not require India to look militarily distant. However, it also understands a country of India’s size and sensibilities needs to be handled differently than Pakistan. In all its interactions with America, India has to look independent if not an equal. The perceptions of strategic autonomy are created when Obama casts aspersions on India’s commitment to secularism and pokes the ruling right-wing dispensation in New Delhi to vehemently attack America’s record of racism. In the Nehru era, this job was performed by Krishna Menon. In the mid-1950s when Krishna Menon was denouncing US imperialism and creating the myth of Indo–US equality, the Nehru government was standing in front of United States Agency for International Development and World Bank with a begging bowl. More interestingly, the US was training India’s nuclear scientists, selling and leasing heavy water for the Trombay atomic plant at Mumbai. This excessive focus on political disagreements was used to create “the effect of a magician’s distractions: flashy motions drawing the eye one way, while important action takes place elsewhere” (Bassett 2009: 785).
Conclusions
Chiselling your own face to fit into a mask prepared by others can at best be good tactics. Drawing your own image and imprinting it on the minds of others is the art of strategy. Modi appears to be taking India on a new strategic path, destroying old Nehruvian shibboleths. The question that any strategist should ask is whether the image makeover is as per a new indigenous design or is the growing militarisation of India meant to fit the American strategic vision and compulsions? Can India afford to incur expenditure for the satisfaction of being in tow of the US navy in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea?
Nehru’s ability to draw his own picture was curtailed by the fact that post independence, both Indian money and military were kept on a tight leash by the Anglo–American combine. The Indo–British Sterling Agreements imposed restrictions on exchange control and limited India’s dollar export till mid-1950s. The Indian Air Force and the Navy too were commanded by the British till as late as 1957.
Nehru’s pedigree, his right-wing cabinet colleagues and British-bred bureaucracy also took him closer to America. Comparing Nehru with Hamlet, one American newspaper quoted Shakespeare to say:
His greatness weighed his will is not his own;
For he himself is subject to his birth;
He may not as unvalued persons do,
Carve for himself; for on his choice depends
The safety and health of this whole state.1
Fortunately, Prime Minister Modi is far less burdened than Nehru. He has the opportunity to chart his own course rather than follow the American prescription. India is now a mature post-colonial nation, but will she be able to break out of Anglo–Saxon hegemony?
Note
1 During Prime Minister Nehru’s visit to Scandinavia in 1957, The Cleveland (Ohio) Plain Dealer, an American newspaper wrote: “the enigmatic Prime Minister of India, Nehru visiting the land of Hamlet, the gloomy prince, was give not so gloomy a reception by enthusiastic Danes yesterday… What, it might be asked, have Danes in common with Indians?” NAI/MEA/F/48(1)/AMS/57 VOL I, Fortnightly Political Report by Indian ambassador to the US, 1–15 June 1957.
References
Aldrich, Richard J (1998): “American Intelligence and the British Raj: The OSS, the SSU and India, 1942–1947,”Intelligence and National Security, 13:1, pp 132–64.
Bassett, Ross (2009): “Indian Technical Elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and Computing in India and the United States,” Technology and Culture, Volume 50, N0 4, October, pp 783–810.
Gordon, Leonard A (1997): “Wealth Equals Wisdom? The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in India,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol 554, The Role of NGOs: Charity and Empowerment, November, pp 104–16, p 104.
Lowe, Steve (2005): “The Concert of Bangladesh,” Guardian, 21 October, available athttp://www.theguardian.com/culture/2005/oct/21/dvdreviews.shopping (accessed on 12 November 2014).
National Archives of India/Ministry of External Affairs (NAI/MEA) /67(4) /AMS/1958, p 3.
NAI/MEA/F/48(1)/AMS/57 VOL II Fortnightly Political Report of the Indian ambassador to US, 1–15 December 1957.
Rotter, Andrew J (1994): “Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947-1964,” The Journal of American History, Vol 81, No 2, September, pp 518–42.
Teed, Paul (2003): “Race against Memory: Katherine Mayo, Jabez Sunderland, and Indian Independence,” American Studies, 44:1-2, Spring/Summer, pp 35–57.
February 28, 2015
http://www.epw.in/strategic-affairs/mask-and-masculinity-indian-strategy.html
For two centuries and more the Anglo-Saxon world has convinced India that its interests are best catered to under their protective gaze. Will India be able to break out of this hegemony?
Atul Bhardwaj (atul.beret@gmail.com) is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi.
Almost one hundred years before Katharine Mayo’s Mother India began shaping American perceptions of India, a “grand romantic melodrama” called The Cataract of the Ganges!, influenced the American debate on India. The play by William T Moncrieff was “one of the hits of the 1824 New York theatre” (Rotter 1994: 518). It depicted the Indian malaise of communalism, corruption, casteism, gender discrimination and of course, the virtues of colonialism.
The drama is set against the backdrop of a battle between the Muslim emperor Akbar and the Hindu king Jam Saheb. During the war, Jam Saheb leaves his young son Zamine (Land) in the custody of an Englishman, Jack Robinson and his kingdom in the hands of a Brahmin high priest named Mokarra (scoundrel).
Mokarra betrays Jam Saheb and colludes with Akbar. He arranges a marriage between Zamine and Akbar’s daughter in exchange of a province for himself. Jack Robinson informs Jam Saheb about the dubious deal. Zamine’s marriage is prevented when Jam Saheb reveals that Zamine is actually a girl who was disguised as a boy to save her from infanticide. Mokarra is infuriated and declares his king an outcast for defying the divine law that ordained all girls be killed at birth. Jam Saheb now has two options, either to sacrifice his daughter at the altar of Brahma or allow Mokarra to make Zamine his “love slave.”
Jam Saheb agrees to the latter. At this stage the British intervene to save Zamine. Sensing the British onslaught, Mokarra takes the girl towards a cataract to murder her. At this critical juncture, the British officer Mordaunt (military advisor to Jam Saheb) enters the scene, delivers an inspiring speech against “female infanticide and Brahminical tyranny” and makes Mokarra’s men see reason. Mokarra’s plan is foiled, Jam Saheb’s army reaches the waterfall and Zamine is saved.
Andrew J Rotter in his essay, Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947–1964, analysing the underlying theme of the drama says that Hindu–Muslim disunity is an integral part of life in India and that the effeminate Hindu men need White man’s intelligence network and strategic mind to save them from the clutches of Muslims.
Incidentally, not only the American mind but also Indian strategic thought lie embedded within this broad framework that conflates India’s interest with that of Hindu religion and considers Islam to be its main enemy that has to be tackled with the help of the West and Israel.
The first quarter of 19th century was also the time when Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s reform movement was underway in India. Therefore, the play attacks the Brahminical order and its mistreatment of women as an internal malaise afflicting Indian society. The idea was to inform the colonised that it needed the White coloniser for both its external security and internal cleansing.
Mayo’s 1927 Mother India vividly described how Indian society was steeped in squalor, sloth and sex. Mayo’s primary agenda was to place Indians in the category of “less civilized races,” and to depict emasculated Indian men incapable of holding “the reins of Government” (Teed 2003: 37). One cannot deny that the images of filthy India created by Mother India are also reinforced by the more recent Slumdog Millionaire.
Both, book and the play, were a part of the “oriental discourse,” defined by Edward Said as the “cultural enterprises” of the British empire that aimed to rattle the established power structure of the natives, incept a sense of guilt and puncture their pride. The purpose was to engage the natives in cooperating with their colonial master to correct this image.
These British imperial discourses were inherited and imbibed by the Americans who became the predominant Western power in South Asia after the British exit in 1947. Many of the British intelligence networks in the subcontinent were acquired by the Americans. For example, in the mid-1940s Gandhi’s personal physician, B C Roy was in touch with the OSS (Office of the Strategic Services, the predecessor of the present-day Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)). Roy invited the OSS to the Simla Conference of 1945 (Aldrich 1998: 153).
The British created images of a peace-loving, effeminate but cunning Hindu and a warrior Muslim belonging to the martial race. This perfectly matched the post-war American strategy in South Asia that expected the Hindu Brahmin to indulge in the rhetoric of peace and socialism and the martial mullah to be their mercenary.
Nehru vs Mao
The post-war strategic game in Asia presented India as a moral (not military) counterpoise to Mao’s China. Nehru’s role was to keep the newly independent Afro–Asian stock from going completely communist. From the very beginning the American strategy was to guide China from the Second World to the First World. The game was to prevent Mao from assuming the leadership of the “Third World” and making the world order tri-polar.
A pacifist, “socialistic,” sensitive and emotional Nehru, with a red rose on his lapel was considered to be ideally suited to counter Mao’s appeal among the newly independent countries in Asia and Africa. India’s assigned role did not require her to look macho and martial. This was in sharp contrast to the role assigned to Pakistan that was to be used as an American mercenary force for managing Middle-Eastern oil. This explains the reason for the predominance of the military in Pakistan’s politics and the civilian control of the military in India. The non-martial image of India was reinforced by her defeat in the 1962 war with China.
Indira Gandhi, whom the West considered to be the “best man in India” (Rotter 1994: 541), pulled India out of the peacenik mould by taking the initiative in 1971 to liberate East Pakistan and undertake the peaceful nuclear explosion in 1974. The question is, did Indira Gandhi write her own script? This is important especially, in light of the fact that, although America was supporting Pakistan, yet the American consulate in East Pakistan mutinied against the US state department and provided support to the Mukti Bahini cadre. In August 1971, when the US diatribe against India had peaked at the United Nations and USS Enterprise was preparing to set sail for the Bay of Bengal in an offensive role Ravi Shankar, George Harrison and friends — “among them Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell and Ringo” — were organising the first ever charity pop show at Madison Square, called the “Concert of Bangladesh,” to help refugees fleeing East Pakistan (Lowe 2005).
Reflecting on contemporary events, it is important to ask — is Prime Minister Narendra Modi writing his own foreign policy script or, like Nehru, is he following the American agenda?
Modi is certainly not Nehru. Nehru was a myth maker, weaving the myth of non-alignment to cloak the depth of American penetration of the Indian political economy and her institutions. According to Leonard A Gordon (1997: 104), the 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of American involvement in India.
In 1957 an American journalist commented,
Surprisingly enough, our big asset in India is Prime Minister Nehru. Americans often feel that Nehru is splitting hairs when India should be splitting logs, but he is a working democrat who wants to make midwifed form of socialism work (NAI/MEA 1957: 510).
America had such deep access within the Indian establishment that even their private philanthropic foundations could unilaterally select a government official and send him on a scholarship to America. Protesting against such a trend, Leilamani Naidu, an official of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) lamented in June 1958, that “the Rockefeller as well as the Ford Foundations have unbridled freedom of action in this country (India).” He further brought out that
We have been watching with anxiety the increasing penetration and power of foundations like the Ford, Rockefeller, and Nuffield in governmental spheres, and would welcome the control and regulation of their activities(NAI/MEA 1958: 3).
On the one hand, Nehru had unleashed Krishna Menon to speak against American imperialism and on the other, B K Nehru, his cousin, was set free to entrench himself in the world of international finance at New York. Nehru had the intellectual dexterity to lead a cabinet filled with conservative, pro-American politicians and yet be branded a socialist close to the Soviets. Modi is the first mask-less Prime Minster of India. A true blue conservative, he prides himself as a leader of fundamentalist Hindus and flaunts his connections with big business. In the post-ideological international political arena the mask of non-alignment and the “socialistic” tag have become redundant.
Nehru’s mind was shaped by books; Modi’s persona resembles Bollywood heroism and the “Bachchan mania” of the 1970s and 1980s. So, if Nehru was the romantic hero of India in the 1950s, Modi is the angry young man of the 2010s. If Nehru’s leftist political upbringing pulled him towards peace, Modi’s right-wing ideological moorings militate against India’s image of a meek man disinterested in war.
Masculinity is what America demands from India in the 21st century and that is exactly what Modi is more than willing to offer. The relative decline in the importance of Middle-Eastern oil and shifting of the American focus towards China demands an ally that lends its military humanpower (and demographic dividend) as well as land, for American operations in the Indo–Pacific. This requires India to change her strategic mindset and be willing to sacrifice her young boys and men in “out of area operations” that does not directly impinge on her security.
It is primarily for this reason that President Obama agreed to spend two hours watching the parade on India’s Republic Day. During this visit, Prime Minister Modi explicitly announced the joint Indo–US naval operations in the Asia–Pacific and Indian Ocean regions and the conjoining of India’s “Act East Policy” with the United States’ “Rebalance to Asia.”
Unlike Nehru who was not inclined to compete with Pakistan to prove India’s martial instincts, Modi is more than willing to show that Indian races are more martial than Pakistanis, and that Indian culture is rooted in war and violence. The display of all-women contingents of the armed forces at the 2015 Republic Day parade was directed to create a new image of India in American minds. Besides projecting that India was no longer the land of sati, the symbolism was also to showcase that warrior India had the support of its mothers and wives to plunge their sons and men into war. Modi’s persona and his mannerism are being extensively used to change India’s image in American minds. The Western public is being convinced that India is no longer a reluctant warrior but is fit to be a part of the Western war outfit.
The 21st century grand American strategy does not require India to look militarily distant. However, it also understands a country of India’s size and sensibilities needs to be handled differently than Pakistan. In all its interactions with America, India has to look independent if not an equal. The perceptions of strategic autonomy are created when Obama casts aspersions on India’s commitment to secularism and pokes the ruling right-wing dispensation in New Delhi to vehemently attack America’s record of racism. In the Nehru era, this job was performed by Krishna Menon. In the mid-1950s when Krishna Menon was denouncing US imperialism and creating the myth of Indo–US equality, the Nehru government was standing in front of United States Agency for International Development and World Bank with a begging bowl. More interestingly, the US was training India’s nuclear scientists, selling and leasing heavy water for the Trombay atomic plant at Mumbai. This excessive focus on political disagreements was used to create “the effect of a magician’s distractions: flashy motions drawing the eye one way, while important action takes place elsewhere” (Bassett 2009: 785).
Conclusions
Chiselling your own face to fit into a mask prepared by others can at best be good tactics. Drawing your own image and imprinting it on the minds of others is the art of strategy. Modi appears to be taking India on a new strategic path, destroying old Nehruvian shibboleths. The question that any strategist should ask is whether the image makeover is as per a new indigenous design or is the growing militarisation of India meant to fit the American strategic vision and compulsions? Can India afford to incur expenditure for the satisfaction of being in tow of the US navy in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea?
Nehru’s ability to draw his own picture was curtailed by the fact that post independence, both Indian money and military were kept on a tight leash by the Anglo–American combine. The Indo–British Sterling Agreements imposed restrictions on exchange control and limited India’s dollar export till mid-1950s. The Indian Air Force and the Navy too were commanded by the British till as late as 1957.
Nehru’s pedigree, his right-wing cabinet colleagues and British-bred bureaucracy also took him closer to America. Comparing Nehru with Hamlet, one American newspaper quoted Shakespeare to say:
His greatness weighed his will is not his own;
For he himself is subject to his birth;
He may not as unvalued persons do,
Carve for himself; for on his choice depends
The safety and health of this whole state.1
Fortunately, Prime Minister Modi is far less burdened than Nehru. He has the opportunity to chart his own course rather than follow the American prescription. India is now a mature post-colonial nation, but will she be able to break out of Anglo–Saxon hegemony?
Note
1 During Prime Minister Nehru’s visit to Scandinavia in 1957, The Cleveland (Ohio) Plain Dealer, an American newspaper wrote: “the enigmatic Prime Minister of India, Nehru visiting the land of Hamlet, the gloomy prince, was give not so gloomy a reception by enthusiastic Danes yesterday… What, it might be asked, have Danes in common with Indians?” NAI/MEA/F/48(1)/AMS/57 VOL I, Fortnightly Political Report by Indian ambassador to the US, 1–15 June 1957.
References
Aldrich, Richard J (1998): “American Intelligence and the British Raj: The OSS, the SSU and India, 1942–1947,”Intelligence and National Security, 13:1, pp 132–64.
Bassett, Ross (2009): “Indian Technical Elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and Computing in India and the United States,” Technology and Culture, Volume 50, N0 4, October, pp 783–810.
Gordon, Leonard A (1997): “Wealth Equals Wisdom? The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in India,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol 554, The Role of NGOs: Charity and Empowerment, November, pp 104–16, p 104.
Lowe, Steve (2005): “The Concert of Bangladesh,” Guardian, 21 October, available athttp://www.theguardian.com/culture/2005/oct/21/dvdreviews.shopping (accessed on 12 November 2014).
National Archives of India/Ministry of External Affairs (NAI/MEA) /67(4) /AMS/1958, p 3.
NAI/MEA/F/48(1)/AMS/57 VOL II Fortnightly Political Report of the Indian ambassador to US, 1–15 December 1957.
Rotter, Andrew J (1994): “Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947-1964,” The Journal of American History, Vol 81, No 2, September, pp 518–42.
Teed, Paul (2003): “Race against Memory: Katherine Mayo, Jabez Sunderland, and Indian Independence,” American Studies, 44:1-2, Spring/Summer, pp 35–57.
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