The black and white of racism

The black and white of racism

Sunanda K Datta-RayUpdated: Saturday, June 01, 2019, 12:31 AM IST
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When the Imperial Legislative Assembly was discussing Indian Civil Service appointments in 1934, a Congressman, Sundara Sastri Satyamurti, asked about qualifications for a particular post. “White colour” called out another Indian member, prompting a third member to ask if colour was indeed a consideration. The foreign secretary, H. A. Metcalfe, replied promptly, “Not as far as I am aware”.

No one believed him, of course. Race and religion have always been history’s prime movers, especially in India. But the relevance of the two is also so fervently denied in India that it isn’t at all surprising that an American politician of Indian descent should doggedly refuse to admit the existence of such creatures as Indian Americans, African Americans and Irish Americans. Bobby Jindal, who announced on June 24 that he is a candidate for the White House, carries the ideal of uniformity so far as to insist there is no difference between rich Americans and poor Americans.

Be that as it may, most commentators interpreted the Louisiana Governor’s remarks about America’s supposed ethnic uniformity to mean he is distancing himself from his Indian past. They see it like his conversion to Roman Catholicism. If only they had known that he is being more Indian than ever. What comes to mind is the claim of  Bhagat Singh Thind, the Punjabi immigrant who served with the American forces in the First World War and made history in 1923 by petitioning (unsuccessfully) for citizenship on the grounds that he was “a descendant of the Aryans of India, belonging to the Caucasian race (and, therefore) white …” The US supreme court didn’t question his claim to be Aryan or Caucasian but held that Aryans and Caucasians were not white in the sense in which the term was commonly understood.

Americans could not grasp the complex and conscious attitude to race and colour in a land that calls its caste system varna. Loy Henderson, the second US ambassador to India, warned the state department that Jawaharlal Nehru was “constitutionally unhappy” unless he was leading a global union of coloured people. A few months later, a conference of American Foreign Service officials recommended that as many black diplomats as possible should be posted to India. They did not realise Thind was articulating a deeply-held Indian belief. The prevailing American attitude was captured by Saunders Redding, a black writer whom the state department sent on a lecture tour of India. The US Consul General in Bombay, Larry Wilson, “a big, genial looking café-au-lait coloured Negro”, told him, “Man, we’re dealing with coloured people in a coloured country!”

Nehru would have been pained by that description although he listed in An Autobiography, how the British upper classes divided the world. Britain was followed, after a long gap, by the whites of the old dominions and by Anglo-Saxon Americans, “not dagoes, wops, etc.” Then came the Western Europeans, the rest of Europe, Latin South Americans and, after another long gap, “the brown, yellow and black races of Asia and Africa, all bunched up more or less together.” Nehru commented ruefully at the end, “How far we, of the last of these classes, are from the heights where our rulers live!”

One suspects this stratification was forgotten by the time Nehru was India’s ruler and courted by the world. The underlying Indian assumption of being European reasserted itself. It never left Thind whose lawyers argued that being high caste, he had revulsion to marrying an Indian woman of the “lower race” who was not Aryan and Caucasian. “The high-caste Hindu regards the aboriginal Indian Mongoloid in the same manner as the American regards the Negro, speaking from a matrimonial standpoint”.

All this must have mystified Americans. Yet, the mob attack last September on three African students at Delhi’s Rajiv Chowk metro station didn’t take place in a vacuum. In the 1950s, Portugal, with an axe to grind over Goa, complained to the United Nations that African students were jeered at as hubshi in the streets of Bombay. It was reported last year that Delhi’s former Law Minister, Somnath Bharti, was charged with harassing African women when he led a vigilante mob into their homes in South Delhi. A few months earlier, Nigeria’s High Commissioner complained after ministers in Goa accused Nigerians living there of being drug dealers and “a cancer” and subjected them to violent attacks and racist abuse. An African was murdered by a local drugs gang.

“There is no doubt about it. Indians are racist and the irony is we are not aware of it and hence no sensitisation and acceptance”, Professor Zubair Meenia of Delhi’s Jamia Milia University was quoted as saying. “We have a history of racism. In north India, people from the north-east and south India are treated differently and in some cases racially. We have been marginalising people from African countries to assert ourselves and show our racial superiority.”

Despite being a Rhodes Scholar, Mr Jindal doesn’t appear to be particularly well-informed about the social and political history of either of his two countries. He may not know that Rabindranath Tagore declared bitterly after a brush with immigration officials at San Francisco that Christ Himself would be refused admission to the US “because, first of all, He would not have the necessary money and secondly He would be an Asiatic”. “The big problem was colour, pure and simple,” recalled Amar Bose, born in Philadelphia in 1930, whose sound system is a household name all over the world. “There wasn’t a restaurant in Philadelphia where I could be served. In those days you couldn’t even rent a house.” Sikhs were called “ragheads”.

There were only 196 Indian immigrants between 1820 and 1870 when the number rose to 586. Six thousand labourers went to the west coast between 1898 and 1914. Political refugees, stalwarts of the Ghadar party, increased their ranks. It was not until 1965 that explicit national discrimination was abolished to attract scientists and engineers to develop an economy that the Vietnam War had galvanized. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society needed third world doctors.

Another Punjabi like Mr Jindal, Dalip Singh Saund, who flew into Calcutta on a December day in 1957- his first visit to India in 38 years – was an outstanding symbol of success. He became an American citizen in 1949, was elected a county judge in 1953, and to Congress on the Democratic ticket three years later.  It was a remarkable achievement for he won from a normally Republican district, defeating a famous woman flier married to a wealthy industrialist. Unusual for a novice, Saund was at once included in the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

With “white colour” no longer an essential, Mr Jindal may be destined to go even farther. But if he would follow in Barack Obama’s footsteps, he would be well advised to emulate the wisdom and humanism of the first black American President.

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