Cold war cosmopolitanism: the education of santha rama rau in the age of bandung, 1945-1954

Radical History Review

Volumn 95, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 149-172

  Burton, Antoinette ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950272998     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2006-95-149     Document Type: Review

References (81)

1. Linda H. Peterson, ed., The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Expository Prose (New York: Norton, 1996), 1321.
2. Santha Rama Rau, Gifts of Passage (New York: Harper, 1961).
3. For an extended discussion of the promontory, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
4. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
5. In this essay I use the term Asia self-consciously, and somewhat narrowly, in its Nehruvian sense: that is, to refer to South and East Asian countries without including West Asia and the predominantly Muslim territories of the Middle East, Israel, and Afghanistan. Thanks to Mansour Bonakdarian for helping me to clarify this geographical ambit.
6. See Judith Butler, "Universality in Culture," in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 45-52.
7. Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, An Inheritance (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 152-54.
8. See Santha Rama Rau, Home to India (New York: Harper, 1945), 28-29.
9. Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 277.
10. Rama Rau, Home to India, 4, 5.
11. This is not to say that male writers have not also done this. See my Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. 6.
12. Rama Rau, Home to India, 1.
13. Talking about her experience of writing Home to India some twenty-five years later, Rama Rau had a very different take on it; see The Cooking of India (New York: Time-Life Books, 1969), 6-7.
14. See Orville Prescott, "Books of the Times," New York Times, May 23, 1945;
15. Aabelle Mallett, "The Reorientation of an Anglo-Indian," New York Times, June 3, 1945;
16. Elizabeth McSherry, "East Meets West," Hartford Courier, June 4, 1961.
17. Santha Rama Rau, East of Home (New York: Harper, 1950), 3.
18. For a complex and variegated account of how race played into the India-Japan, British-U.S. axes during World War II, see Gerald Horne, Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004). Thanks to David Roediger for this citation.
19. Rama Rau, East of Home, 6.
20. William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (1958; New York: Norton, 1999).
21. In fact, as Santha Rama Rau told me when I interviewed her in 2004, the Harris character was an amalgam of many Americans, journalists included, whom she met while touring Asia.
22. Rama Rau, East of Home, 75.
23. See Klein, Cold War Orientalism, and, for the Euro-American scene, Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
24. A. Martin Wainwright calls India a "Third Force" in post-1945/post-1947 politics; see his Inheritance of Empire: Britain, India, and the Balance of Power in Asia, 1938-1955 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), esp. 123.
25. I am grateful to Augusto Espiritu for pressing this comparison on me. For a wonderfully evocative narrative of this performative cosmopolitanism on the part of Nehru and Chou En-lai, see Carlos P. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956).
26. Neloufer de Mel, Women and the Nation's Narrative: Gender and Nationalism in Twentieth Century Sri Lanka (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2001). This emphasis on lateralism is also taken up by Elleke Boehmer in her Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920: Resistance in Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5-10. Thanks to Minnie Sinha for drawing my attention to this.
27. Rama Rau, East of Home, 56.
28. Ibid., 303.
29. The quote comes from Mrinalini Sinha, private correspondence, February 2005. See also Shiro Okamoto, The Man Who Saved Kabuki: Faubion Bowers and Theatre Censorship in Occupied Japan, trans. and adapt. Samuel L. Leiter (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001).
30. Rama Rau, East of Home, 300.
31. I am grateful to Mrinalini Sinha for encouraging me to see this point.
32. See Iqbal Singh, Between Two Fires: Towards an Understanding of Jawaharlal Nehru's Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1992), 1:33-51.
33. Jawaharlal Nehru, "Our Foreign Policy," in his Independence and After: A Collection of Speeches, 1946-1949 (New York: John Day, 1950), 24.
34. See also Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History (New York: John Day, 1942), and his India and the World (London: George Allen Unwin, 1936). As Singh suggests, Nehru did not by any means invent this "tryst with Asia"; not only did his contemporaries (like Das) propose institutionalizing India's relationships with other states in Asia but there was a tradition of travel to and engagement with China and Japan, for example, reaching back to Rabindranath Tagore and before. See, for example, Hira Lal Seth, ed., Tagore on China and Japan (Lahore: Tagore Memorial Publications, n.d.), and Rabindranath Tagore, Japanayatri (Kalikata: Bisvabharati, 1962).
35. Nehru, Independence and After, 250.
36. Singh, Between Two Fires, 268-96.
37. Santha Rama Rau, "Life Goes on Under Mau Mau's Shadow," New York Times Magazine, July 19, 1953, 10.
38. Santha Rama Rau, "The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta," Reporter, March 16, 1954, 12-23.
39. "Kenya to Fight Terrorism," New York Times, September 2, 1952;
40. Native Terrorists Raid a Kenya Mission," New York Times, September 13, 1952.
41. "Desecration Laid to Kenyan Terrorists," New York Times, September 17, 1952;
42. The Mau Mau," New York Times, September 18, 1952;
43. L. Sulzberger, "Kenya Crisis Mirrors Africa's Changing Face: Mau Mau Terror Is Primitive Answer to a White Man's Civilization Which has Ousted Ancient Trial Customs," New York Times, December 28, 1952.
44. See James H. Merriweather, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 124-49.
45. See Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005);
46. David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: Norton, 2005).
47. Rama Rau, "The Trial," 18.
48. Ibid., 12.
49. Horne, Race War!
50. Brent Hayes Edwards, "The Shadow of Shadows," positions 11 (2003): 11-49.
51. See, for example, Antoinette Burton, "Tongues Untied: Lord Salisbury's 'Black Man' and the Boundaries of Imperial Democracy," Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (2000): 632-59;
52. Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
53. and Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon, 2001).
54. Rama Rau, "Life Goes On," 11.
55. For a recent fictional account of these tensions, see M. G. Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (New York: Knopf, 2004). Thanks to Shefali Chandra for putting this in my hands.
56. For an analysis of Nehru's reception in the United States in this period, see Andrew J. Rotter, "Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947-1964," Journal of American History 81 (1994): 535.
57. See also his Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947-64 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
58. Rama Rau, "The Trial," 15.
59. Rama Rau, "Life Goes On," 10.
60. Ibid., 12.
61. Rama Rau, "The Trial," 23. In an interview with Rama Rau, Pritt told her that "the biggest stumbling block in legal forms to most of the Africans" was the laws of evidence, emphasizing their incapacity to understand the difference between direct evidence and hearsay (21). Given the well-known legal training of Gandhi, this is another site of implicit contrast between Indian nationalism and African capacity.
62. Ibid., 23.
63. Indian Council for Africa, Nehru and Africa: Extracts from Jawaharlal Nehru's Speeches on Africa, 1946-1963 (New Delhi: Indian Council for Africa, 1964), 39-40.
64. See also Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet, 1946), 421. Africa appears only four times in the index of the book, with Asia registering easily five times as many.
65. Indian Council for Africa, Nehru and Africa, 1-25.
66. Singh, Between Two Fires, 289.
67. See James Ferguson, "Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after Development," in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 171, 175.
68. Rama Rau, "The Trial," 12.
69. For the Stern Gang, see Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics, and Terror, 1940-1949 (London: Frank Cass, 1995); for postwar violence against African Americans, see Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 57-67. I am grateful to Kristin Hoganson for the latter reference.
70. See, for example, "Native Terrorists Raid," 2.
71. See Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-colonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997);
72. Brenda Gaye Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
73. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000);
74. and Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
75. Frenise A. Logan, "Racism and Indian-U.S. Relations, 1947-1953: Views in the Indian Press," Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985): 71-79.
76. Caren Kaplan, "Hillary Rodham Clinton's Orient: Cosmopolitan Travel and Global Feminist Subjects," Meridians 2 (2001): 236.
77. For a similar reading of very different feminist subjects, see Farish Noor, "Innocents Abroad: The Erasure of the Question of Race and Power in Contemporary Feminist and 'Nostalgic' Travelogues," South East Asia Research 5 (1997): 57-88. I am grateful to Gerry Forbes for the latter reference.
78. Louisa Schein, "Gender and Internal Orientalism in China," in Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, ed. Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 388, 401.
79. Malini Johar Schueller. "Articulations of African-Americanism in South Asian Postcolonial Theory," Cultural Critique 55 (2003): 35-62. I am grateful to Dave Roediger for this citation.
80. Elleke Boehmer, "East Is East and South Is South: The Cases of Sarojini Naidu and Arundhati Roy," Women: A Cultural Review 2 (2000): 67.
81. For a series of reflections on the fate of postcolonialism as a discourse and a practice, as well as on its entanglement with globalization, see Ania Loomba et al., Postcolonial Studies and Beyond.