SAGAR
SAGAR
South Asia Graduate Research Journal
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Sponsored by the
Center for Asian Studies
University of Texas at Austin
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Editorial Advisory Board
Editorial Board
Editorial Committee
(All members from The University of Texas at Austin)
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Sagar is published biannually in the spring and fall. The editor is responsible
for the final selection of the content of the journal and reserves the right to reject any material deemed inappropriate for publication. Articles presented in the journal do not represent the views of either the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin or the Sagar editors. Responsibility for the opinions expressed and the
accuracy of facts published in articles and reviews rests solely with the individual authors.
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Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identites
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As we approach the turn of the millennium, we encounter daily those who
traverse an evermore bewildering variety of borders. The cultural dynamics of
such deterritorialization are resilient, potentially transformative, and
endlessly fascinating as people shift and adapt to new landscapes in the global
world. Caught in this global flow, South Asians are people for whom the
realities of place and imagination have become increasingly blurred.
This edition of Sagar focuses on the landscapes where South Asians imagine
their lives. It questions the localizing strategies of traditional area
studies by presenting scholarship that is not so resolutely localizing. The
complex, overlapping, and disjunctive order that increasingly characterizes the
South Asian experience calls for scholarship that stresses both life's
negotiations and contestations in all their complexity. In this edition,
Sagar's contributors trace peoples and objects as they slip in and through the
many subtly changing landscapes of the global world. Their efforts not only
illuminate how a world on the move affects small geo-cultural spaces, but also
how these small spaces help us understand a world on the move.
Matthew A. Cook, Editor
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This paper seeks to create space for a group of under-acknowledged (and
over-exploited) immigrants in New York City: South Asian taxi drivers. Struck
by the contrast between their large numbers--who doesn't have an Indian cabby
story?--and the sense (from talking to a few) that most are advanced
degree-holders driving only temporarily, I set out to discover a bit more about
the history of the community. Located in the cracks between a national history
of discriminatory legislation and a diasporic narrative of success, the story
of South Asian taxi drivers works defiantly against the grain.
The first naturalization law, ratified in 1790, provided citizenship rights
for all "free white persons." In 1870, the law was amended to include the
naturalization of people of African nativity and descent. Throughout the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, free white persons, primarily from
northern and western Europe, entered the country in large numbers and became
citizens.
Asians, however, were not as well-received. The first "Orientals" to
immigrate to the United States were Chinese laborers who came to California
during the gold rush of the 1850's. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese
began immigrating. The first few years of the twentieth century saw Indians,
mostly Punjabi Sikhs who had arrived by boat in Western Canada, crossing the
loosely guarded border into Washington state. And by 1908, Indians were
arriving directly into San Francisco's port. These Asian immigrants, the
"Chinks," the "Japs," and the "ragheads"--as the turbaned Sikhs were
derogatorily called--were not eligible for citizenship.
When the United States began passing laws actively restricting immigration,
Asians were the first to be shut out. As a result of successful lobbying by
west coast unions that resented competition from Chinese labor, the Congress
passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 prohibiting the entrance of all
Chinese immigrants. In 1917, the west coast labor lobby triumphed again, this
time with the creation of the "Asiatic Barred Zone," which banned immigration
from all Asian countries except Japan. And in 1924, Japanese immigration was
halted. These laws not only prohibited further immigration from Asia, they also
formally denied citizenship to Asians living in the United States.
In 1924, the United States passed the Johnson-Reed Act, also known as the
Permanent National Origins Quota Act. As its name suggests, this law
established a series of quota laws targeted to (1) restrict the immigration of
southern and eastern Europeans and (2) favor northern and western Europeans:
"Quotas were set in proportion of the size of each country's contribution to
the total population of the United States in 1920 (1890 became the base year in
1927), and a limit of 115,000 was imposed for all countries outside the western
hemisphere."[1] As the northern and
western Europeans were the earliest to immigrate in large numbers, their quotas
were highest.
In the 1940's, recognizing the political salience of its image of freedom and
accommodation, the United States began opening its borders. The booming war
economy had eased fears of unemployment and the bigoted aspects of West coast
trade unionism that those fears engendered.[2] In 1943, to reward its wartime ally and demonstrate the
generosity of American democracy, an annual quota of 105 Chinese persons was
permitted to enter the country with naturalization rights. In 1946, India was
given an annual quota of 100 persons.
In 1952, the U.S. passed the McCarran-Walter Act, increasing the total annual
Asian immigration quota to 2000 persons, and establishing preferences for visa
allocation. Interestingly, this law recognized as Indian any person of Indian
ancestry coming from any country. Thus, a citizen of Britain whose
grandparents came from India, would fall under the Asian Indian quota.
Finally, in 1965, the United States passed the landmark Hart-Celler Act,
abolishing nation-of-origin restrictions. Effective June 30, 1968, immigration
and naturalization exclusion on the basis of race, sex, or nationality was
prohibited.
Under the Hart-Celler Act, new immigration criteria was based on kinship ties,
refugee status, and "needed skills." Between 1820 and 1960, 34.5 million
Europeans immigrated to the U.S., while only one million Asians--mostly Chinese
and Japanese--immigrated. An unintended, unanticipated, and highly evident
effect of Hart-Celler was the burgeoning of Asian immigration.
Literature on South Asian immigration to the United States pays short shrift
to pre-1965 immigrants, namely the Punjabi Sikhs who settled on the West coast
in the early twentieth century. Indeed, one would think that the inclusion of
India in the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone was mere coincidence were it not for the
work of Bruce La Brack and Joan Jensen, whose book, Passage from India,
traces the struggles and successes of early South Asian immigrants.[3]
In the early 1900's, Indians came to the Pacific Northwest from Canada to work
in lumber mills and logging camps.[4] As
they moved down into California, they began working in mills, farms, and
railroad construction. Though their numbers were small, there were violent
racial incidents that directly targeted them--"anti-Hindoo" violence--in
Washington, California, and Alaska. Indians were included on the list of
enemies of California's Asiatic Exclusion League, formed in 1907. By 1908,
when a boat from India docked at San Francisco, the front page of the San
Francisco Call displayed a photograph of a group of turbaned Sikhs. The
headline read: "The Hindoo Invasion."
South Asian immigrants have a history of legal controversy regarding racial
classification. This confusion of classification had implications for
naturalization rights. The slippage between racial and skin color categories
was problematic for the citizenship status of Indians in the early twentieth
century. Because Indians were classified with Chinese and Japanese as
Orientals, of the "mongoloid race," they were denied the citizenship rights
accorded only to "free white persons." However, the courts had been
interchangeably using the terms "white" and "caucasian," making room for the
Indian argument that while their skin color was brown, they were in fact
caucasian, and thus deserved citizenship rights.
In 1920, when Bhagat Singh Thind, a United States World War I army veteran,
was denied citizenship, he sued. In 1923, the Supreme Court ruled in U.S.
vs. Bhagat Singh Thind that "white" and "caucasian" were not synonymous in
the eyes of the "common man," and that, "free white persons were words
of common speech, words to be interpreted in accordance not with science but
rather with the understanding of the `common man.' And according to the common
man white was not synonymous with caucasian."[5] Between 1923 and 1926, the INS sought to revoke the
naturalization certificates of seventy Indians. The issue of the racial
classification of Indians had not, however, been resolved.
In direct contradiction of the federal stance of the 1920's, and until 1977,
the U.S. government (including the U.S. Census Bureau) formally classified
South Asians as caucasian/white. The 1970 Census questionnaire provided the
following categories for self-identification: White/Caucasian, Negro (or
Black), Indian (American), Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Korean,
Other. In 1974, the Association of Indians in America (AIA) began negotiating
with federal agencies for classification of South Asians as a separate
category, and more specifically for recognition as a minority group eligible
for federal protection against discrimination.[6] A February 18, 1975, memo distributed to staff of the
Office of Federal Contract Compliance, a federal agency devoted to minority
group rights, specifically included among minority groups "Blacks,
Spanish-surnamed Americans, American Indians, and Asian Americans (or
Orientals)," and specifically excluded Pakistanis and Indians. In 1977, AIA
won the first stage of the battle, with federal acknowledgment of the category
"Asian Indian," which appeared on the 1980 Census questionnaire.
In the 1980's, 46% of the yearly 600,000 immigrants entering the United States
were from Asia. New York City became home to between 15% and 20% of these
immigrants each year after 1965. Many South Asians have specifically
designated New York City as their port of entry. The 1980 Census shows that
the northeast had proportionally more Indians than any other major Asian
nationality, 46,708 of whom lived in New York City.[7]
Between 1870-1965, a total of 16,013 Indians immigrated to the United States.
In the first decade following the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, 96,735
Indians immigrated. For the most part, these new Indian immigrants entered
under the needed skills preference of the 1965 law. In 1975, 93% of Indian
immigrants were either professional workers or their spouses and children.[8] In 1980, the U.S. Census Bureau claimed
that the 361,351 Indians living in the United States formed the most highly
educated, skilled, and paid group among new immigrants.[9] As Jensen notes: "The second wave of Indian immigration
was thus much different from the first, when workers had crowded the ships."[10] By the 1980's, 25,000 Indians were
immigrating to the United States each year, and among immigrant groups, they
were among the quickest to naturalize.[11]
Very limited research has been done on South Asians in the United States. The
CLIO electronic catalog in the Columbia Library system has only thirty books
classified under the subject "East Indian Americans," the proper subject search
line according to Columbia's South Asian librarian, David Magier. To put that
number in context: the subject "Chinese Americans" draws 191 entries; "Japanese
Americans" 293 entries; "Korean Americans" 57 entries; "Asian Americans" 225
entries; "Mexican Americans" 655 entries; "Hispanic Americans" 499 entries;
"West Indian Americans" 9 entries; "Afro Americans" over 5000 entries; "Irish
Americans" 141 entries; "Italian Americans" 205 entries; "German Americans" 200
entries; and finally, "European Americans" recommends a new search under "wasps
persons."
The stories that books on South Asian immigration tell are one: the theme is
success. The common narrative goes something like this. The Hart-Celler Act
contributed to the "brain drain" from South Asia, funneling the passage of the
economically and educationally advantaged. Indians in America are described as
a well-trained professional elite, representing large numbers of doctors,
engineers, and scientists. Of the post-1965 "new immigrant groups" (including
Indians, Chinese, Koreans, Dominicans, and Mexicans), the 1980 Census indicated
that Indians had the highest mean family income, above even that of native-born
Americans (different from Native Americans).
In his 1977-78 survey of 345 Indians residing in New York City, Parmatma Saran
found that 84% of them were college-educated (far above the 15% of
college-educated Americans), more than 50% had received advanced degrees, and
75% held jobs as engineers and healthcare professionals before coming to the
United States. Saran states:
Indian immigrants in the New York area have achieved occupational positions
that demand high levels of educational achievement . . . this places them among
the more affluent segments of American society.[12]
In addition to Saran's work, many fieldwork studies, including Maxine Fisher's
The Indians of New York City and Arthur and Usha Helweg's An
Immigrant Success Story, provide in detail the experiences of middle-class
South Asian immigrants in the New York metropolitan area.
To a non-New Yorker, these narratives offer convincing evidence of a
remarkably successful immigrant group. However, one need spend very little
time in New York City to encounter working-class South Asians that contradict
this fantasy scenario. On my daily morning errands, I pick up a newspaper from
the neighborhood newsstand, operated by a South Asian man, and buy fruit from
the South Asian greengrocer next door. If I decide to travel by taxi to one of
the myriad Indian restaurants lining East 6th Street between
1st and 2nd Avenues, my chances of being picked up by a
South Asian driver are 50%. In my neighborhood, the only tamasha
rivaling the evening gathering of South Asian taxi drivers at the gas station
on Lafayette and Broadway, is the morning crowd of South Asian food vendors
filling their carts with roasted chestnuts or ice-cream, depending on the
season, at Nice Ice on Bowery and Bond. Why are these communities neglected in
the literature? Might this be a third wave of immigrants?
As I bring to the foreground one large group of non-professional South Asian
immigrants in New York City, taxi drivers, I will work towards resolving these
questions .
Yellow taxicabs are a defining feature of the New York City landscape. The
City is home to 45,266 licensed taxi drivers and 12,187 yellow medallion
taxicabs.[14] (A medallion is a metal
license bolted to a cab's hood that makes the car official.) Taxicabs are a
$1.5 billion industry, supporting 30% of public transportation in Manhattan.
In 1991, the average cab traveled 58,200 miles and generated $82,000 in
revenues (including tips). The average shift was 10 hours, during which a
driver took 30 trips to service 40 passengers. The average net income of a
taxi driver in 1991 was $22,000.
Taxi driving careers tend to be short. In 1991, 25% of first-year drivers
failed to renew their licenses, as did 21% of second-year drivers and 17% of
third-year drivers. Most drivers exit the industry within four years of
becoming licensed. Low pay and crime are the primary reasons for the high
turnover rates of new drivers. According to the National Institute
for Occupational Safety and Health's (an arm of the Department of Health and
Human Services) June 1996 report, entitled Violence in the Workplace: Risk
Factors and Prevention Strategies, taxi driving is the most
life-threatening job in America. Taxicab drivers have the highest risk of
workplace homicides of any occupational group, nearly forty times the national
average and more than three times the rate of liquor stores, which had the next
highest rate. In 1994, eighty-six taxi drivers were killed. Homicide rates for
taxicab drivers and security guards were one and a half times higher during the
early 1990's than they had been during 1983-89. Taxicab services had the
highest rate of work-
related
homicide during the 3-
year
period 1990-92 (41.4/100,000). This rate was nearly sixty times the national
average rate of work-
related
homicides (0.70/100,000).
In 1992, 90% of new drivers were immigrants, as were over 80% of all
licensed drivers. Of the new applicants in 1991, 37% were college graduates,
while 59% had received some college education. Furthermore, 70% of these
applicants had recently worked in a low-skilled job, and 9.5% of them in
professional jobs. The median age of all drivers was 39 and the median age of
new drivers was 32.
Next to English, the most common first languages among the 2,500 immigrant
applicants in 1991 were Urdu (15.7%), Punjabi (12.7%), Arabic (11.1%), and
Bengali (10.6%). (English, of course, is most common language because it is
spoken by the Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian drivers who numerically
dominate the industry.) In 1991, 43% of all applicants for licenses were born
in South Asia (21% Pakistani, 11% Indian, and 11% Bangladeshi), a sharp
increase from the 10% in 1984. In that same time period, U.S. born applicants
dropped from 26% to 10.5%. Most drivers do not drive full-
time,
and some don't drive at all in a given year. There are approximately 16,000
licensed South Asian taxi drivers (43% of the total 40,000 licenses), and
around 5,000 (43% of the 12,000 full-timers) full-time South Asian drivers.
The taxi industry, too, is tied up in America's botched history of South Asian
racial classification. In 1984, when applying for licenses, drivers were asked
to indicate their race/ethnicity. The choices given were: white, black,
Indian, Asian, Hispanic. As a result, the TLC was surprised to find their
drivers to be 34% white, 27% black, 15% Indian, 12% Asian, 11% Hispanic,
because: "The Indian category, originally meant to refer to Native Americans,
[was] selected by most drivers born in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, as
well as some drivers born in northeastern Africa." Recognizing the
impossibility of a New York City workforce composed of 15% Native Americans,
the questionnaire was amended in 1992 to include the category Asian Indian.
Each year since the 1980's, more Pakistanis and Bangladeshis applied for taxi
driver licenses than arrive from Pakistan or Bangladesh. Half of all new
applicants have lived in the U.S. for six years or more before applying for a
taxi driver's license, and 73% of them know someone who drives a cab.
In 1992, the Lease Driver's Coalition (LDC) was formed under the auspices of
the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) in order "to bring together
predominantly South Asian yellow cab drivers to fight for civil rights and
combat the oppressive conditions they face from garage owners, the TLC, and the
NYC police."[15] According to the LDC,
and the many drivers interviewed in Vivek Bald's documentary "Taxi-Vala/An
Autobiography," life on the streets is far bleaker than is depicted in the
NYC Taxicab Fact Book. Contrary to the TLC statistics, drivers work
many more hours than are documented, often 12-hour days, 6 or 7 days a week,
netting $50 on a good day. Each day, drivers face unsafe working
conditions, racial discrimination, and police brutality. And while the police
are quick to issue moving and parking violations, they drag their feet in
responding to crimes against drivers, often turning drivers' complaints into
opportunities to enact their own racist brutality.
For example, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on January 17, 1995, a Pakistani driver
was assaulted by two officers against whom he had recently filed a complaint.
According to the driver, the officers yelled: "The U.S. is a country only for
white people! You Paks--you're not allowed to drive in our patrol area! You
sand niggers have to go back to Pakistan."[16] On May 26, 1994, Saleem Osman, co-founder of the LDC,
came to mediate a dispute between a motorist and a Pakistani cab driver. He
was arrested by the police, and told: "Go back to your own country. There's no
black mayor in New York anymore--so you better watch out."[17] In October 1993, after three cabbies had been found
dead in a twenty-four hour period, the LDC organized a massive protest. In a
rare and tremendous demonstration of solidarity, cabbies drove down the streets
of lower Manhattan, shouting, "WE WANT JUSTICE." The third driver's body had
been found by another driver, more than forty-eight hours after the murder,
slumped over the wheel of his car on the side of the highway, the meter still
running, without even a violation ticket. How, one driver from
"Taxi-Vala" wondered, had the violation-manic police failed to ticket this
vehicle--much less discover the body!--sitting on the open road in a car that
had been reported missing days earlier?
The LDC is highly critical of the TLC, claiming they have done little to
protect the livelihood or lives of its drivers. The NYC Taxi Drivers Union,
which was formed in 1966, has also been ineffective in securing benefits and
improving working conditions for drivers. One reason for this is that since
1979, when the union acquiesced to the leasing system that exists today, the
union's organizing power has weakened. Medallions are now disparately spread
among large and small garages, some unionized and some not. Currently, there
are approximately 1600 unionized medallions and exactly 12,187 medallions in
total (a number limited by New York law). While the average driver,
working over-time and under duress makes an annual salary of $19,000, owners
make on average $1000 per cab per week. The cap on the number of medallions
has driven their price up to $250,000.
The LDC has faced similar organizing obstacles. According to ethnic niche
theory, niches minimize one of union's biggest obstacles: ethnic rivalry.[18] However, Bhairavi Desai, Head
Organizer at the LDC, notes that the biggest obstacle inhibiting solidarity
among taxi drivers is the job itself. Most South Asian drivers are ashamed of
their job, are unwilling to accept it as their lot in the land of opportunity,
and do not rally around a worker identity. Johanna Lessinger remarks: "Indians
holding such low status jobs are often deeply ashamed of their lack of success.
Their shame is often intensified by the very high aspirations with which they
arrived in the U.S. as well as by the proud self-image of Indian immigrants as
a group."[19]
How can the tale of a singularly successful and professional immigrant group
stand in light of the evidence of a growing number of non-professional South
Asian workers in New York City? The most frequently cited works on South
Asians in New York City (e.g., Fisher's and Saran's books) make no
mention of taxi drivers or of other non-professional groups.[20] The TLC notes a marked increase in South Asian drivers
between 1984 and 1991. Is the evidence growing faster than the literature, the
bulk of which was published before the mid-1980's? Has a new immigration wave
not yet been researched or documented? Do the aspirations and background of
this new group bear any relationship to the post-1965 educated elite
professionals?
The immigration profile of South Asians has been changing, and in the 1990's
we are beginning to find some scant documentation. Published in 1991, David
Reimers' article, "Recent Third World Immigration to New York City, 1945-1986:
An Overview," cites the newsstand work dominated by Indians and Pakistanis,
indicating a glimmer of academic recognition for working-class South Asians in
New York City.[21] Roger Daniels'
Coming to America notes that in 1980, while the median income of a
full-time Indian worker (the highest among Asian Americans at $18,707) was
almost $2,000 higher than that of the next highest Asian American (Japanese),
7.4% of Indian families were below the poverty level, as opposed to 4.2% of
Japanese families.[22] Daniels states:
"Characteristically, the more recent immigrants were less well off. Those who
immigrated after 1975 earned much less--about $11,000 per full-time worker--and
more than one post-1975 family in ten was in poverty."
It is important to remember that the Taxicab Fact Book states that
most new immigrant applicants have been in the U.S. for six years or more,
indicating, perhaps, the failure of other opportunities. Most South Asian cab
drivers have been in the States for some time before they enter the industry,
which they do with a high rate of education and a high rate of previous
employment in low-skilled jobs. They tend to leave the industry within four
years of entry, as new South Asians drivers continue to apply for licenses.
Thus, it seems safe to say that while taxi driving does appear to be a stopover
on some longer journey, the South Asian immigrants who enter the taxi industry
probably do have different class backgrounds from the doctors and engineers of
the late 1960's.
Roger Waldinger claims that one factor which explains New York City
immigrants' success at capturing low-skilled employment sectors is that their
social origins predispose them to take jobs native New Yorkers would not
accept.[23] This theory does not seem to
apply to South Asian taxi drivers--they are not driving because it is better
than work they could find at home. Rather, it appears they are driving
temporarily because they came here with unrealistic expectations of
boundless opportunities and are unable to find work suited to their education
and skills. So how have these thousands of disappointed laborers been pushed
out of sight?
Johanna Lessinger's ethnography, From the Ganges to the Hudson: Indian
Immigrants to New York City, comments upon the South Asian community's
denial of its poor: "There is considerable debate among Indian immigrants
themselves about who these people are and how they came to be here. Successful
immigrants tend to regard these less successful fellow immigrants as something
of an embarrassment to a group proud of its wealth and success."[24] Lessinger contends that Indian immigrants have
subscribed to the myth of their own success, obscuring the poverty,
discrimination, and racism that affect South Asians in the United States:
"These stories of less successful Indian immigrants tend to undermine a common
view of Indians as exceptional immigrants who have somehow bypassed periods of
economic hardship, psychic pain, or the shock of adjusting to a new society . .
. . Although most Indians settle into a prosperous middle-class professional
life within a decade of arrival, a certain number of Indian immigrants never
find the dreamed-of professional job and remain members of the American working
of lower-middle classes."[25]
On Wednesday, May 13, 1998, New York City's 45,266 yellow cab drivers went on strike, blasting into the public eye in protest of Mayor Rudy Giuliani's
proposal for new "safety rules." The Mayor's proposal, a response to the 41%
increase in the number of accidents involving all taxis (yellow cabs, car
services, and liveries) between 1990 and 1996, includes mandatory drug and
alcohol testing for new cabbies, heightened penalties for driving infractions,
and higher liability insurance requirements.[26] These rules come in the heyday of a discipline-crazy
mayor, who has made a name for himself by creating a quasi-police state bent
upon cutting crime and cleaning the city's streets by implementing such dubious
measures as $55 tickets for jaywalking in a city characterized by its teeming
pedestrians.
Drivers argue that they are already unfairly targeted by the police and by the
myriad of existing city laws, and that these new measures are racially and
xenophobically motivated. Vijay Bali, leader of the United Yellow Cab Drivers
Association, questions: "Thousands will lose their licenses, and who will
replace them? I ask you: Is this being done because the driver today is
basically a minority person? Is this because of bad publicity and politics and
a city that has a bull's eye on the driver's back? Has the taxi driver been
made an object of hate?"[27] Drivers
claim that they have no problem with the implementation of new laws. What they
object to is their exclusion from the legislative process and the system which
indiscriminately revokes their livelihood for reasons big and small. Drivers
plead for representation in the drafting of new regulations, and for the voice
which they have historically been denied.
This paper is a preliminary inroad into a much needed field of research.
Students of the diaspora must do a better job than the ethnographers of
yesteryear in recognizing the implications of class differences and other
intra-community fault-lines. Factors which have shaped the manifold
marginalization of South Asian taxi drivers include not only a changed job
market, the absence of workplace rights, and a hostile police force, but also
their erasure from the immigrant community and its singular narrative of
success. Currently, drivers are taking their protest to the streets, demanding
recognition and rights in a society built on the rhetoric of freedom and
justice for all. The voice they seek is a voice denied by not only by the
American legal establishment, but by their fellow immigrants who continue to
deny their presence. As one young South Asian journalist, candidly commented:
"this is a group of South Asians whom most of us middle class desis
prefer not to recognize!"[28]
__________________________________________
To a large extent, we define our humanness by our use of language. Language
is a funnel through which we filter our perceptions of the physical world, our
cognitive processes, and our emotional responses. While language may not
strictly shape or define thought, it guides our humanness and acts as the
principal mode through which we express and mediate our creative and learning
energies.[29] As such, it is the vehicle
by which we express different segments of our reality and function within
different segments of our society.
All human cultures develop language as a means of expressing social context
and development. Historically, societies have used the encoding and decoding
of language as a tool to define and manipulate social status (both overtly and
convertly). Ethnolinguistic populations that "float" within the "mainstream"
frequently do not share patterns of behavior or patterns for
behavior with the dominant culture.[30]
Neither is there a shared usage that determines a "standard for ways of
thinking, feeling, acting, and judging which are learned from and shared by a
group of people."[31]
Large and dispersed ethnolinguistic minority populations (Spanish speakers,
for example) have opportunities to have their native languages validated.[32] Educational reforms and programs
respond eventually to community pressures brought about by the needs of a large
ethnolinguistic community. But immigrants who come into new social milieus
from cultures without strong linguistic support communities may find themselves
even further alienated than the predominating ethnolinguistic subcultures.
They become what I would term an "embedded" ethnolinguistic minority
population. Such immigrants exist within the larger ethnolinguistic subculture
(which, in turn, functions within the majority-language culture), but without
the political "clout" to affect school policy vis-a-vis programs or curriculum.
The students of embedded ethnolinguistic minority populations may frequently
feel too little cultural validation. Without any kind of community to relate
to, or derive social or political reaffirmation from, they may find themselves
on an educational journey without maps.[33]
In this paper, I hope to examine how Riva's language usage mediated her
connection (or lack of connection) to her peers in school. I will explore some
theoretical frameworks for analyzing Riva's jeopardized linguistic situation.
I will take the position that Riva's linguistic situation affected her social
development to such an extent that she had difficulty sharing either patterns
of behavior or sharing patterns for behavior.[34] I will conclude that Riva was prone to being
misunderstood and manipulated by those who could code and decode language more
effectively than Riva.
Riva's language learning was not additive;[35] target languages (L2) for Riva were not supported and
developed in parallel with her home language (L1). Riva is what might be
termed a sequential multilingual--or what I would term a simultaneous "reduced
lingual." I do not use this last term flippantly and hope to expand my
meaning throughout this paper. Riva's history illustrates that defining L1 for
Riva remains a confused issue--one which has had serious academic consequences.
She and her family represent an example of migrations increasingly common in
this age of globilization.[36] Such
migration patterns--mixed with the rapid flow of transportation and media
images--create a new order of instability in contemporary images of
subjectivity.[37] These mixtures form a
potential plethora of self images, physical and psychological breaks in social
identity. These social ruptures reflect linguistic dislocation; the linguistic
dislocations also reflect social ruptures.
Her father is what is termed bania in Hindi.[38] This mercantile caste designation would most certainly
have meant that he would have known Indian English (a distinct dialect) and
used it in his work life. Nonetheless, he spoke Hindi, as well as the
colloquial Hindustani, and Konkani at home. When Riva was a small child, her
mother spoke Kannada (a Dravidian, non Indo-European language) to her. During
Riva's L1 acquisition period, she had four L1 language inputs in her
home environment.
This language mix was further compounded by the introduction of Portuguese
early in Riva's life. Goa was originally colonized by the Portuguese in the
16th century,[39] and Riva's father and
mother both had roots in Portuguese language and culture, as well as Hindi,
Kannada, and Konkani. This European language was absorbed further into Riva's
life by Goa's Portuguese culture and the fact that her family went to live with
distant relatives in Portugal when Riva was barely two. When Riva was almost
four, her family moved to Tanzania where she was exposed to Kiswahili among her
playmates. When she was almost six, her family moved to Fiji were she attended
primary school. Throughout this multiple-nation sojourn, Riva went back to
India and Portugal for months at a time, losing valuable schooling in the
process and processing multiple linguistic imputs at critical stages of
language development.[40] Her family
continued to use Kannada, Hindi, Hindustani, and Konkani in the home. (If any
major L1 could be determined for Riva, it would most likely be Hindi since that
language alone enjoyed the status of official usage and literacy as well as
continued home usage from the time Riva was born.)
When Riva was almost twelve, her family came to the United States, where her
father works as a travel agent and her mother works at Walmart. Her older
brother, who lives with the family, is married to a Fijian woman who also lives
in the household (a one-bedroom apartment in an ethnically mixed, lower working
class neighborhood in Maryland). Her older brother works sporadically as a
security guard and his Fijian wife is unemployed. There is no extended family
or Indian community with a similar background in the area to provide support
systems.
In addition to a disrupted school and family life, Riva suffered from malaria
at age four and sustained kidney damage. The counselor at her current school
reported that Riva had been classified as LD and LEP, was currently in LD and
ESL classes, was socially non-involved with peers and seemed to have special
problems relating to female classmates. Her teacher reported that Riva could
not control her behavior in class, exhibited either a flat affect,
inappropriate outbursts of verbalizations, or infantilized behavior. The
teacher reported that Riva indicates that her father and brother both drink
heavily and that her sister-in-law hates Riva and beats up on her. (This
statement has never been substantiated by school or social welfare workers.)
Neither parent had ever visited the school on parent evening or responded to
the school's requests for a parent-teacher conference.
I have offered this rather extensive personal history to give background
information and clarify factors which may have complicated Riva's problem with
language learning and acquisition.
It is not uncommon for South Asians to move freely between Hindi, local
dialects and English.[41] There is also
a long tradition of English among the educated classes and English writing
usually presents no special problems, even though the high Hindi Devanagari
script differs significantly from English script. There are eighteen officially
recognized languages on the Indian subcontinent. Since the days of the British
Raj, it has been common for speakers of Hindi to have at least a working
knowledge of Indian English. English has had an indirect influence on many
subcontinent languages and there are English loan-words.[42]
Yet Indian English differs from American English in many significant ways and
Riva's English-language production was limited to some extent by interference
with Hindi. For example, there is a distinction between English and Hindi
vowels. Aspirated and unaspirated sounds are clearly distinguished in Hindi
and there are no alveolar sounds. Instead, dentals are made with the blade of
the tongue behind the teeth and with retroflexes were the tip of the tongue
curls back behind the alveolar ridge.[43]
Since Hindi has tenser articulation, Riva produces English with her vowels
further back in the mouth. This tenser articulation leads her to lose some
vowel distinction. There is no aspiration on voiceless consonants, and
alveolar consonants sound like English retroflex consonants. The diphthong is
transformed so that Riva pronounces English words like "made" as "mede."
Fricative consonants become aspirated dentals and unaspirated, so that for
Riva "them" becomes "dem."
Ending and beginning consonant clusters are fairly "wide" in English.[44] In Hindi, however, beginning
two-segment clusters get prefixed by /i/ so that for Riva "street" becomes
"istreet." Alternately, Riva breaks her beginning consonant clusters by the
insertion of a short vowel and "free" becomes "faree," and slow becomes
"salow."[45] (Whether this is a function
of interference or her particular idiosyncratic usage is unclear.) Riva breaks
her final consonant clusters or omits the consonant altogether, so that "film"
is pronounced as "filam," and "toast" is pronounced as "toos." Riva also
places a schwa on the end of many of her words ending in /l/ or /n/. (Again,
this may simply be a product of an idiosyncratic schwa usage.)
Hindi has only one sound area for some phonemes, which produced some comical
difficulties for Riva between the words "wet" and "vet."[46] Hindi is also a phonetically spelled language and Riva
was often over-faithful to the written form. She would always pronounce the
final /r/, silent /h/, and /ed/ endings, as written and pronounce the /s/ of a
plural even after a voiced consonant.
All of the above linguistic features led Riva to produce a sing-songy type of
English that her classmates found annoying and ridiculous. The prosody of
English is time-stressed, heavily marked, and not predicable.[47] Hindi, on the other hand, is syllable-stressed.
Stress is secondary to rhythm and rhythm is based on the arrangement of short
and long syllables.[48] Consequently,
word stress is weakly realized and always predicable. This feature led Riva to
frequently stress incorrectly the beginning syllable of a word. Since Hindi
has a weak (almost nonexistent) stress pattern, the contrast between similar
nouns and verbs (for example, re'cord and re cord') was lost
on Riva. All of these language features caused Riva to produce an English that
was ridiculed by her classmates (many of whom were from working-class
African-American families, who had developed their own variations from the
"standard" English.)
Riva had another significant problem with intonation that caused her no end of
trouble among her classmates. In Hindi, raised pitch, rather than heavier
articulation, is used to indicate emphasis. Additionally interrogatives are
produced with a raised pitch, followed by a fall in intonation. Original tense
is maintained after past reporting verbs,[49] so that a sentence like "He asked if we were going to
the movies" became the more preemptive, abrupt and rude (to the
English-language ear) "He asked that we are going to the movies."
Compounding this intonation feature was the fact that Hindi speakers use the
future tense instead of the present tense to express conditionals.[50] (For example, "If he will come, then
we may go.") Since there are no modal equivalents in Hindi,[51] polite requests utilizing "will" and "may" became
problematic for Riva. "Will you please do this for me?" became "You will
kindly do this for me" and "Can I go now?" became "I can go now." What Riva
perceived (linguistically) as a polite request was being received as a
preemptive and rude command by her classmates. This linguistic feature did not
endear her to any of her classmates and was frequently misinterpreted by her
teachers as well.
Grammatically, Hindi is a more inflected language. Like English, Hindi
expresses nouns in both singular and plural. However unlike English, it also
differentiates between masculine and feminine nouns.[52] The fact that Riva didn't have to worry about this in
English was one of the few "bright spots" that she expressed about English.
Unlike English, Hindi lacks linguistic markers for comparative and superlative
adjectives (an interesting concept in a society based originally on a strict
caste system) and has no corresponding word class for English articles.[53] This caused problems for Riva, since
she only used the word "one" for the indefinite equivalent and completely
omitted the word "the" when she wanted to express a definite article concept.
In Hindi, verbs are placed at the end of the sentence and Riva frequently
misplaced her verbs in English sentences. The word "do" is not used in
questions and Riva would often say things like, "When we go out to eat, we want
to eat Indian food." Since she produced the aforementioned commanding
intonation and omitted the word "do," her classmates frequently thought that
she was insisting on her own way, instead of simply inquiring whether they
would like to eat at an Indian restaurant ("When we go out to eat, do we want
to eat Indian food?").
While all of these differences between Hindi, Indian English, and American
English may seem minor individually, when taken en toto, they produced
profound ramifications for Riva scholastically and socially.
Because she came into class a few weeks after the start of the term, the
teacher had her sit in a seat at the back of the room that had not been
assigned. This position accentuated her lack of classroom integration. At
first, the class would laugh at her numerous and frequently inappropriate
questions. No one spoke to her in any manner that vaguely resembled
friendship.
Riva ate up all the attention she could get. She sat in the back of the room
next to some Latino and African-American males, who she "pretended" were
bothering her. While she got along, for the most part, with the boys in her
class, she particularly did not like the Latino boys, who she derided for
"talking to her in that foreign language." Even though Riva's English language
production was poorer than the Latino boys in all domains--speaking, reading
and writing--Riva perceived of herself as a "better" speaker of English than
the Latino boys, who spoke that "foreign" language. This dislocation from
reality frequently characterized many of Riva's language encounters.
Riva's problems were further exacerbated by teachers, counselors and peers who
assumed that because she was Indian, she "of course, had to speak English."
Everyone was totally unaware of the linguistic puzzle that Riva had to unravel
and rewrap daily. In a very real sense, Riva operated in a subtractive
bilingual situation since L2 (English) learning was impeding cognitive
development in L1 (Hindi), and Hindi usage was becoming lost entirely.[54] This situation is particularly
critical for Riva because recent educational research indicates that continued
cognitive development in L1 enhances L2 academic performance.[55] For Riva, L1 development was so confused and
dislocated that it muted L2 academic development to less than a whimper.
Her teacher decided to institute a "constructivist" approach in the classroom,
using more peer group work and having students work constructively on projects.
Riva generally did not appreciate mutual collaboration on projects and did not
express concern about helping others. For Riva, the constructivist process did
not involve her collaboration with peers on group work. Nonetheless,
she had no difficulty utilizing her peer's inputs in order to further her own
linguistic, cognitive, and academic understanding. She compared this new
constructivist technique with a multiple choice test. When four different
people explained a problem in four different ways, Riva felt that she had more
linguistic choice for understanding. Initially, her motivation was purely
instrumental, i.e., getting through class. When linguistic inputs
increased as a result of the new constructivist intervention, her motivation
became more integrative.[56] Riva now
had to "teach" as well as learn and her motivation for linguistic expression
became more purposeful.
Researchers have concluded that L2 learners need 5-7 years of L2 input,[59] coupled with continued L1 cognitive
development in order to achieve proficiency in the context-reduced and
cognitively demanding environment of academic language.[60] Proficiency in basic survival/socially-contextualized
English (L2) skills can be achieved in 2-3 years.[61] Basic L2 proficiency skills are not highly correlated,
however, with the context-reduced language skills required for academic
performance.[62] Given this research
information, it is understandable that Riva was having difficulty with the
cognitively demanding aspects of school language.
While there were important parallels between Riva's individual language
acquisitions, each language acquisition differed in personal characteristics
and the conditions under which it was learned.[63] Riva was always learning a new language, while
processing multiple home languages. She was always learning in both formal and
informal settings. The linguistic expectations that school demanded were at
odds with Riva's actual linguistic production capabilities. While she was
expected to function academically in English (L2), Riva also needed extensive
cognitive support in Hindi (L1). Riva did not receive L1 cognitive
development from either her home environment or any larger ethnolinguistic
support community. The linguistic hopscotch that Riva had to perform daily in
an L1 vacuum left her feeling psychologically a "little off center."
There was also a high degree of language mixing from age two through six. In
fact, by the age of six, Riva was processing and producing so many different
languages--Kannada, Hindi, Hindustani, Konkani, Portuguese, Kiswahili, Indian
English, Fijian--that she frequently (according to her mother) could not
differentiate the different sounds in the various languages, confused the
vocabulary and grammar regularly and was still mixing languages freely by age
six. At age twelve, Riva still engaged in prefabricated routines and language
chunking when learning new English language concepts.
Unlike studies of bilinguals,[64] which
examined language mixing of simultaneous bilinguals, Riva needed to guess more
often at what the interlocutor was saying because the language kept changing
and the language message was frequently difficult and confused. Additionally,
both these studies dealt with preschool simultaneous bilinguals and Riva was
just reaching puberty--maturational constraints on her language production were
already beginning to be in place.[65]
One of the problems in evaluating Riva's linguistic situation is that very few
studies exist that deal with translingual children who function in fractured
and dislocated multilingual situations. Riva's story raises questions about
how multicultural children with a number of different cultural and linguistic
inputs integrate into a specific dominant cultures and languages. One common
reaction is, "somehow it will all work out." It is clear that, for some
students, it does not "work out." While the ideals of multiculturalism may
appear attractive, serious problems that children may have due to multiple
cultural and linguistic displacements have been underestimated by linguists,
educators, and researchers alike.
Riva's metalinguistic awareness caused her some degree of nervousness,[66] rather than providing her with what
W.F. Leopold would view as a precocious understanding and manipulation of
symbols.[67] As a result of this obvious
nervousness, Riva frequently received modified linguistic input from her
teachers in the form of simplified structures (i.e., "teachertalk").
Riva also depended heavily on paralinguistic cues, which she often
misinterpreted because of the changing cultural milieus she had experienced as
a child. Gestures, body language, and facial expressions which were
appropriate to one culture were frequently misunderstood and got her into
trouble when she had to function in another culture. Riva's language mixing
and interference problems were not just bi-directional,[68] they were multi-directional!
At the outset of learning a new language, Riva would focus intently on one
aspect of learning, i.e., pronunciation, or grammar, or writing, and
then tried to transfer each newly-learned operation to the new language
structures that she was acquiring so that each new language segment would
become automatic.[69] Riva constructed
internal representations of the language patterns she was focusing on and
created "mental pictures" of the target language she was functioning in at the
moment.[70] But since her initial L1 was
not clearly in place in early childhood, it remained unclear to her which L1
structures she was actually transferring, and since her target language kept
changing before learning was complete, it was unclear which target language
"mental pictures" she was creating!
According to Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis,[71] there are two ways to approach communicative language
instruction. A second language learner can learn a language either
through a conscious pattern of study and attention to linguistic forms in
formal classes or can acquire a language through a meaningful
interaction in an L2 system which is intuitive and leads to natural, fluent
communication.
Riva repeatedly tried both methods with minimal success. While she has
linguistically became minimally functional, she, thus far, has been
unable to become fully expressive, either in terms of her verbal
competency or literacy. She cannot function at grade level in any subject in
any language.
This situation may be due to the fact that her frequent moves and linguistic
dislocations have not afforded her enough time to stress language forms or
learn the rules of language in a predictable, ordered fashion.[72] Linguistic input has, for Riva, frequently been
significantly more complex than Krashen's Comprehensive Input Hypothesis
presupposes (i.e., "slightly beyond" her abilities),[73] and neither comprehension nor learning has had the
opportunity to develop fully.
Just as children need linguistic inputs "slightly beyond" their capabilities,
they also need adult guidance in order to develop beyond their current
capabilities.[74] At home, Riva received
little interaction with adults. Both her parents and older brother worked
evening hours and her sister-in-law rarely spoke to Riva, except to yell at
her. (In my interviews with Riva's family, it was clear that her sister-in-law
did not like Riva very much and was happiest when she didn't have to
interact with her on any level.)
At school, Riva's teachers often engaged in a similar shunning behavior since
her frequently inappropriate behavior was annoying to them and disrupted
classroom routine. When Riva was "behaving," her flat affect simply made her
"invisible" to her teachers. (During the several months I observed Riva, I
rarely saw her positively reinforced by any of her teachers!)
It would seem that, for Riva, there have been sufficient environmental
factors--moving, disruptions in language learning and schooling, family
stresses, peer interaction problems, serious medical problems, etc.--that have
screened out comprehensible language inputs. Riva was frequently stressed,
angry, anxious, self-conscious, or bored. In Krashen terms, Riva's "affective
filter" was always up.[75] Since she
had not experienced any real academic or social success in any language, she
exhibited a very low-level of motivation. Even the "constructivist" classroom
intervention instituted by her teacher failed to produce lasting results for
Riva.
Crucial components for language acquisition were not consistently present in
Riva's environment. Since she interacted little with her peers in any
meaningful way, she had little opportunity to develop a linguistic social
process through L2 peer interaction. Even though Riva was in a social setting
conducive to natural linguistic interaction, she failed to interact. Her
cognitive processes were not strengthened at home and, at school, her intense
"affective filter" restricted stimulation of her thinking process.[76]
Riva expressed little awareness that she even needed to learn or
acquire American English in order to function effectively in the United
States.[77] She also saw little reason
to complete high school, yet maintained that she wanted to be a police officer
when she grew up. When her teacher tried to talk to her about the necessity of
education in order to obtain this goal, Riva blankly replied, "Then I do
something else or go someplace else." It would seem that generally, for Riva,
there was little clearly-defined integrative or instrumental motivation going
on.[78] If one situation wasn't working
out, she would just pick up and move elsewhere.
Among caste-like minorities both the identity system and the cultural frame of
reference are in opposition to those of the dominant group. Caste-like
minorities, furthermore, tend to equate school culture with dominant-group
culture, so that the cultural frame of the school is also in opposition to that
of the minorities. [They] view schooling as a one-way acculturation or
assimilation process . . . . There is, therefore, the possibility of conscious
or unconscious opposition and an "affective dissonance" toward learning in
school or "acting White." The dilemma for . . . [a] caste-like minority
student is that he or she has to choose between academic "success in the White
way" and being a member of his or her own group.[81]
Riva did not share a cultural framework with any of the "caste-like" or
"immigrant minorities" within her school. While many of these children were
able to separate those aspects of the school culture which facilitated academic
success, and learned to conform to them in ways considered essential for school
success within general white American culture,[82] Riva had no such reference point. She had no stable
"group" to be a member of.
Within Riva's school community, there was, quite literally, no one "like her,"
no one with whom she could identify; she never experienced any solidarity with
the "oppositional cultural frame of reference" experienced by caste-like
minorities.[83]
On the surface, Riva does not precisely fit Ogbu's definition of a "caste-like
minority" (i.e., groups incorporated into a society against their will
who have been exploited and depreciated through slavery or colonization), but
rather, fits the definition of an "immigrant minority," (i.e., those who
choose to leave their original environment, presumingly to enter a more
self-advantageous social realm).[84]
On a deeper level, however, I would like to suggest that Riva, as the child of
a frequently immigrating diaspora family, more precisely fits Ogbu's definition
of a caste-like minority. She was, in fact, a "caste-like" minority within a
"caste-like" minority, bereft of effective family interaction, community
resources, or any immediate support-community whatsoever. She operated almost
constantly in a personal condition of affective dislocation. This situation
was mirrored within the minority subculture of affective dislocation in which
Riva was a "nested." This minority subculture was, in turn, operating within
the structures of the dominant white school community. Riva was, thus,
multiply removed from an understanding of what it took to "make it" in school
or the larger society.
For many of Riva's peers, "homelife" behaviors and languages were reinforced
in school texts and special "ethnic" programs. They were able to integrate
perspectives of behavior and language appropriate to "school life" because the
posture of their home community validated "home life" behaviors and languages.
Riva, on the other hand, had no dynamic, interconnected culture on which to
rely and so, appeared to be a "cultural dope" to both her ethnolinguistic and
dominant-culture peers and teachers.[85]
Riva was unable to develop a "cultural repertoire"[86] of identification since her experiences and existence
as translingual and transcultural left her with no stable
community to use as a resource for her development, no validation of her
experiences, and no positive acknowledgment of her linguistic or cultural
difference.
In a very real sense, the school community failed Riva. She "fell between the
cracks" because she was never "bad enough" to warrant social services or
counseling intervention. While Riva's problematic linguistic and academic
situations may be attributable to a myriad of broader issues--inter-group
relations, socio-economic conditions, family dysfunctionality etc.--her more
immediate situation of not having shared patterns of behavior or shared
patterns for behavior could have been ameliorated to some extent if some
adult had taken the time to introduce her to other translingual/transcultural
children that lived outside of her immediate home and school environments.[87] In this sense, the larger
societies--both ethnolinguistic and language/dominant--perpetrated Riva's
dislocation and alienation. To quote Erickson:
Domination and alienation do not simply happen by anonymous workings of
social/structural forces. People do it.[88]
In Riva's case, "people did it."
__________________________________________
After the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill got what he had been hoping for: the United States
officially entered World War II on the side of the Allies. However, this
alliance was accompanied by increased American interest in the status of
Britain's Empire, particularly India. This region, which the United States had
neglected for so long, suddenly became extremely important as the main barrier
between Japanese troops in the East and German forces in the West. While
Britain welcomed American participation in the war effort, it adamantly opposed
American intervention in what it saw as the internal affairs of the British
Empire, and it only tolerated the American presence in India in order to
maintain the alliance. The United States saw Indian independence as an
important goal, but its efforts were limited by the need to maintain British
goodwill. Beneath the facade of solidarity that Britain and the United States
presented to the world lay an underlying conflict over the future of India.
During the years 1942-1943, when American interests in India were represented
by two Personal Representatives of the President, Louis Johnson and William
Phillips, the need to maintain a united front and to promote the interests of
the war shaped the policies of both Britain and the United States. Britain
needed the support of its American ally in the war effort. The United States
had to put aside its idealistic goals of Indian independence in order to
further the greater goal of winning the war and maintaining solidarity with
Britain. World War II and the demands of Allied unity proved to be the
decisive factors in relations between Britain and the United States over the
question of India.
By the beginning of World War II, Britain had grudgingly realized that it
would eventually have to offer India independence and dominion status. Viceroy
Linlithgow presented the "August offer" on August 8, 1940, which made the vague
promise that: "His Majesty's Government would readily assent to the setting
up, after the conclusion of the war, with the least possible delay, of a body
representative of the principal elements in India's national life, in order to
devise the framework of the new constitution."[90] The British government insisted that this independence
must wait until after the war, as it felt that making major changes during such
a time of upheaval would only lead to anarchy and threaten the war effort.
This stance alienated the Indian National Congress, which demanded immediate
independence.
When the United States entered World War II on the side of the Allies, it also
became a central player in the India issue, much to Britain's dismay. Members
of the National Congress felt that they had strong support from the United
States, and they idealistically looked to America as a friend to democracy. As
Nehru wrote in an April 1940 article in "Atlantic:" "India is far from America
. . . but more and more our thoughts go to this great democratic country, which
seems almost alone to keep the torch of democratic freedom alight."[91] While there were some Americans who
supported the movement for Indian independence on principle, for the most part
the country was ignorant of Indian issues, and it had its own prejudices, as
demonstrated by the strict laws against Indian immigration.[92] However, the war made India an important factor in the
Allies' plans due to its strategic location between the armies of the two main
Axis powers. As Viceroy Linlithgow explained to Churchill: "we must have
anxious regard for the continuing soundness of the Indian Army which alone
stands between the Japanese and their ultimate objective which must be a union,
military and economic, with the German Army on the Persian Gulf."[93]
India had the potential to become a major resource for the war effort, due to
its location and large population, but American officials were concerned that
the people's general apathy towards the war effort would hamper any attempt to
mobilize them. The Indians had little incentive to fight, as they would only be
fighting to perpetuate the rule of the British. President Roosevelt expressed
his concern over this situation to Ambassador Winant: "From all I can gather
the British defense will not have sufficiently enthusiastic support from the
people of India themselves."[94] After
his visit to India, Chinese General Chiang Kai-Shek expressed similar concerns
in a telegram forwarded to President Roosevelt: "If the Japanese should know
of the real situation and attack India, they would be virtually unopposed."[95] The United States generally supported
the idea of granting India independence during the war because it was in the
Allies' strategic interests. An independent country would be more likely to
feel that it had something worth fighting for, as the United States Foreign
Relations Committee explained in a meeting with Assistant Secretary of State
Breckinridge Long: "The only way to get the people of India to fight was to
get them to fight for India."[96] The
Senators on this committee felt justified in demanding that Britain listen to
their request, because the United States had given so much assistance to the
British war effort through Lend-Lease agreements and later through direct
involvement.[97]
Regardless of how justified the United States might have felt in asking
Britain to consider granting independence to India for the sake of the war, all
early efforts in this direction were quickly rejected. Churchill wrote in his
memoirs that when Roosevelt broached the topic in their 1941 meeting in
Washington: "I reacted so strongly and at such length that he never raised
it verbally again."[98] Britain
desperately needed the cooperation of the United States in the war effort, but
it was unwilling to budge on the underlying issue of Indian independence.
Instead, it adopted a general policy of making small concessions to American
demands, such as recognizing American officials in India, and by launching a
major propaganda campaign in the United States.
An examination of British correspondence regarding India during the years
1942-43 reveals that Britain was increasingly obsessed with the need to
maintain a positive image in the eyes of the American public but also to
prevent the United States government from getting actively involved in the
debate over India's future. These goals become clear through the British
response to Chiang Kai-shek's visit to India in 1942 to discuss security
issues. Numerous telegrams flew back and forth between Britain and India over
the question of who should be allowed to visit, and how he should be received,
all with the intent of providing a favorable picture of India to the rest of
the world, particularly to Chiang Kai-shek's close ally, the United States.
The Chinese General's concerns over the status of India, as quoted above,
worried British leaders and resulted in their attempting to counteract his
influence in the United States. Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery
expressed these concerns to Viceroy Linlithgow: "The fear of breakdown of
Indian morale is being worked to death by the American press as argument for
the grant of Indian independence without delay . . . . I suggest that
something be done to check these alarmist fantasies at the source."[99] Britain attempted to do this by
sending eloquent spokesmen to the United States to argue on behalf of the
empire in lecture tours and by controlling press releases and propaganda.
President Roosevelt proceeded with caution when dealing with Indian issues.
After Churchill's abrupt response when he brought the issue up during their
meeting in Washington, Roosevelt resorted to less direct means of expression.
In February 1942 he wrote to the American Ambassador to the United Kingdom,
John Winant, asking him to try and find out what Churchill thought about the
state of relations between India and Britain. He added: "I hesitate to send
him a direct message because, in a strict sense, it is not our business."[100] Later on he did bring up the India
issue again with Churchill, but he adopted a cautious tone to avoid insulting
his close ally. He wrote: "I have felt much diffidence in making any
suggestions, and it is a subject which, of course, all of you good people know
far more about than I do."[101] He
continued by offering the historical example of the original American states
under the Articles of Confederation as a possible means of solving the
difficulty of arranging for India's independence. He concluded by writing: "I
hope that whatever you do the move will be made from London and that there
should be no criticism in India that it is being made grudgingly or by
compulsion . . . . It is, strictly speaking, none of my business, except
insofar as it is a part and parcel of the successful fight that you and I are
making."[102] While the superficial tone
of the letter is quite deferential and friendly, underneath it is the message
that the United States is concerned about the situation in India and sees it as
a priority in the war effort.
America's diplomatic presence in India had traditionally been small and
unimportant. Thomas M. Wilson had been serving as U.S. Consul General to India
since 1941 but he had little power and the Viceroy ignored his presence for the
most part.[103] However, the demands of
war forced Britain to give the United States a larger role in Indian issues.
After the fall of Singapore to the Japanese on February 15, 1942, India took on
a new importance to the Allies. The subcontinent was the main obstacle left
that was preventing the Japanese from joining with the Germans in the Middle
East, and it was imperative to the Allied effort that India should not fall.
Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai, the Agent General for India in the United States,
approached numerous state department employees about the possibility of sending
an American mission to India for the purpose of examining India's wartime
production system and offering suggestions on how to increase output so that it
would be better prepared for a possible invasion.[104] Both the British and American governments agreed
that this could be a useful mission, and so the American Technical Mission was
organized under the leadership of Colonel Louis A. Johnson, a former Assistant
Secretary of War.
The purpose of the American Technical Mission was "to make recommendations
after investigation concerning ways and means by which the United States
Government could assist in augmenting India's war production."[105] In a letter to Viceroy Linlithgow, Roosevelt
explained that Johnson had been chosen to head this mission because he "had
broad experience with problems relating to military supply" while serving as
Assistant Secretary of War.[106] While
the purpose of the mission seemed clear, Johnson's role was not. After he
objected to the title of "Commissioner" due to this term's negative
connotations in the American South, the United States government called him
"Personal Representative" of the President. This led to confusion as to what
his new title entailed. The British insisted that the American mission must
not interfere with Indian affairs, and the United States agreed to this, but
popular opinion in India assumed that the title of "Personal Representative"
meant that the United States Government was going to take an active part in
Indian negotiations. The situation was further confused by the fact that
Johnson did not know himself what his role was to be, as is evident in a
conversation that Assistant Secretary of State G. Howland Shaw had with him
before his departure for India:
I told him that I understood he would assume his duties as Special
Representative at New Delhi immediately upon his arrival and that this would
take precedence over his work as Chairman of the Mission. He said this was the
first precise information he had had on this point. He asked me whether I
thought he could do much with the Nationalists in India. I said I thought that
in view of the present situation in India he probably could but that it must be
done with the utmost care.[107]
This statement reveals the American ambiguity as to what the role of the
mission would be in India and the confusion over Johnson's role.
Unfortunately, Johnson took advantage of the vagueness of his mission and used
it to interfere in Indian affairs, which offended the British and created more
tensions in British-American relations.
Johnson arrived in India at one of the most crucial points in the history of
British-Indian relations. His visit coincided with that of Sir Stafford
Cripps, who was sent by the British government to present a plan on the future
of India. Due to India's increasing strategic importance, the British realized
that they needed to get the country mobilized for the war effort. Cripps'
proposal, which promised independence after the war and increased Indian
participation in the government, was meant to rally the Indians to the side of
the Allies. However, the Indian National Congress rejected this offer because
it did not give independence until after the war, and it limited Indian
participation in the defense effort. While Johnson was not officially charged
with acting as a mediator in this dispute, he tried to take on this role and
met with Indian leaders in an attempt to rally support for Cripps' proposal.
He met often with Congress leaders, particularly Nehru, and urged them to
accept Cripps' offer and the war effort. In a report of his conversation with
Nehru, Johnson explained that he had told the Indian leader that:
If he himself were associated with the Peace Conference he would do his best to
see that an India which had wholeheartedly backed the war effort obtained
America's fullest support in attaining her ambitions. But the matter would be
far otherwise, if at that time the American people felt that American blood had
been spilt unnecessarily and the war prolonged by dhilly-dhallying.[108]
In Johnson's eyes, American support for the Indian independence movement rested
on the level of Indian support for the war movement.
Johnson saw himself as having a vital role in the ongoing negotiations
between the Congress and the British. In a report to Washington he wrote: "At
the request of Cripps and Nehru, both absolutely on their own initiative, I
have been acting as go-between since last Sunday. Sir Stafford indicates this
morning as did Nehru yesterday that the fact that they have not already failed
has been due to the efforts of your personal representative"[109] However, the British leaders in India did not
appreciate this interference. Viceroy Linlithgow was particularly disgusted by
Johnson's involvement because he felt that it gave the Indians the impression
that the United States was planning on supporting their demands for
independence. Johnson did not help the situation when he presented a revised
plan to Congress without first consulting the Viceroy. Linlithgow wrote: "The
fact that Johnson had shown it to them made the position all the worse, given
the U.S.A. position in the business. If I were now to differ from the draft,
my position might well be rendered intolerable, as I ran the risk of being held
up to the U.S.A. as the obstacle to a settlement."[110] He was also concerned that Johnson's views might
influence Roosevelt and general American opinion and turn them against the
British.[111] However, Harry Hopkins,
Special Assistant to the President, reassured Churchill that Johnson was acting
on his own and that Roosevelt did not intend for him to get involved in
internal affairs. Churchill passed this message on to Cripps: "Colonel
Johnson is not President Roosevelt's personal representative in any matter
outside the specific mission dealing with Indian munitions and kindred topics
on which he was sent."[112] Hopkins'
discussion with Churchill discredited Johnson and reassured the British that
the United States had no intentions of getting involved in Indian politics.
Johnson returned to the United States in May 1942 due to illness, and much to
the relief of the British, he did not go back to India. The American mission
ended, and the Cripps Mission was a failure, but Johnson's visit had a
long-lasting effect on US-British relations. While Johnson may have had
practical experience with supplies that could have benefited the British, his
personality and his lack of diplomacy ruined any chance that he may have had to
be of use. Indian historian M.S.Venkataramani describes Johnson as "a
flamboyant, back-slapping extrovert" who "frankly confessed that this entire
acquaintance with India had been confined to Rudyard Kipling's Kim and
G.A. Henty's With Clive in India."[113] Johnson's interference and his inexperience with
Indian affairs only confirmed the British view that Americans were generally
ignorant of matters concerning India and wanted to get actively involved in the
debate over India's future. As Linlithgow later wrote to Churchill: "My
experience of peripatetic Americans which is now extensive is that their zeal
in teaching us our business is in inverse ratio to their understanding of even
the most elementary of the problems with which we have to deal."[114] Johnson made the mistake of interfering in
British affairs and aligning himself too closely with the Indian Congress,
particularly Nehru, which alienated him from the British government. The 1942
correspondence between Viceroy Linlithgow and Mr. Amery shows that the British
had absolutely no intention of allowing Johnson or any other American to
interfere with India. They accepted America's military presence and the
technical mission as necessary parts of the war effort, but they drew the line
at direct American involvement in Indian politics. Thus, Johnson's visit to
India made the British cautious about allowing further American representation
in India, and made them even more adamant about insisting that these
representatives must not interfere with Indian politics.
Although Cripps' mission was a failure with the Indian Congress, it did
succeed in turning American opinion in favor of the British for a short while.
The majority of the American press condemned the Congress for rejecting the
proposal, and praised the British for their attempt at solving the conflict.[115] This change in public sentiment
allowed Roosevelt to focus on other issues and leave the question of India to
the British for the moment. India's worth to the Americans rested on its
military value, and during the summer of 1942 the United States government
believed that its interests were best served by allowing the British to keep
control. President Roosevelt expressed these views to Johnson, who was
frantically trying to salvage the Cripps mission in May 1942:
The position in India today is largely military. Therefore any proposal for
settlement has to be weighed from the viewpoint whether if successful, it would
aid the military effort to an important extent and whether, if unsuccessful, it
is likely to hamper that effort . . . . An unsuccessful attempt to solve the
problem along the lines which you suggest would, if we are to judge by the
results of the Cripps mission, further alienate the Indian leaders and parties
from the British and possibly cause disturbances among the various communities.
On balance, therefore, I incline to the view that at the present moment the
risks involved in an unsuccessful effort to solve the problem outweigh the
advantages that might be obtained if a satisfactory solution could be found.[116]
For the moment, American interests were served by preserving the status quo in
India, and the press' support for Britain allowed the government to step back
from the India issue without inspiring a public reaction.
While the Cripps mission may have temporarily quieted the Americans, it
certainly did not appease the Indian Congress. In April 1942 Gandhi formulated
his "Quit India" campaign, which demanded that the British leave India or face
massive civil disobedience. Gandhi explained his views in a letter to Chiang
Kai-shek: "Our proffered help has repeatedly been rejected by the British
Government and the recent failure of the Cripps Mission has left a deep wound
which is still running. Out of that anguish has come the cry for immediate
withdrawal of British power so that India can look after herself."[117] The Working Committee adopted
Gandhi's proposal on July 14 and agreed to submit it to the All-India Congress
Committee for a vote at their next meeting, scheduled for August 7, 1942.
The British government responded to these resolutions by deciding ahead of
time to arrest the leaders of the Congress in the hopes of "nipping in the bud
a movement which, if allowed to develop, would undoubtedly be a cause of the
gravest embarrassment to the conduct of the war in India."[118] British Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee informed
Roosevelt of the government's decision prior to the Congress' vote, and
explained that it was necessary for Britain to take this action to protect the
war effort.[119] The British followed
through with their plan, and the arrest of the Congress leaders resulted in
mass rioting, which Viceroy Linlithgow described as "by far the most serious
rebellion since that of 1857."[120]
The American response to this serious situation reveals the extent to which
Roosevelt supported Churchill and based his policies upon the immediate needs
of the war effort. In response to Chiang Kai-Shek's suggestion that China and
the United States intervene in India, Roosevelt wrote that he was very
interested in promoting independence, but he did not think that they should
intervene unless invited: "I think that you and I can best serve the people of
India at this stage by making no open or public appeal or pronouncement but by
letting the simple fact be known that we stand ready as friends to heed any
appeal for help if that appeal comes from both sides."[121] This policy of strict non-interference is also
evident in a Department of State press release, which stated that the American
forces in India were only there to fight the Axis powers, and that they would
not intervene in India's internal situation.[122] The government's reasoning for this policy was that
its primary concern was the war effort and defense, and it would not get
involved in any situation that might threaten this goal. Assistant Secretary
of State Adolf Berle clearly presented this policy in his discussion with a
member of the India Supply Mission: "I added that our national doctrines here
were in favor of independence . . . but that if it were a question as between
defense and independence for India, we should of course choose defense.
Without defense there would be no independence for India or anyone else."[123]
In addition to the reasons mentioned above, United States policy was dictated
by the larger considerations of the war effort outside of India. During the
spring and summer of 1942, the Axis forces were challenging the Allied war
effort in North Africa, while Churchill was facing political opposition at
home. As Venkataramani explains: "At such a time of personal crisis for his
admired comrade and of military crisis for the Allied Nations, Roosevelt was in
no mood to countenance any suggestion that the United States should exercise
some pressure on Britain over the India issue."[124] Unity among the Allies was of paramount importance,
and all other concerns were secondary.
In the midst of these hard times, Roosevelt was increasingly pressured by the
American press to respond to the British suppression of the Quit India
movement. This same press, which had earlier supported the British efforts at
reconciliation through the Cripps mission and condemned the Indian Congress,
was now in favor of American intervention due to the violence that had erupted.
The British were well aware of this change in public opinion. The British
ambassador to the United States, Viscount Halifax, expressed these concerns in
a note to the Foreign Secretary Mr. Eden: "The Cabinet should realise how
strongly public opinion is moving on these lines and I hope it may be possible
to say or do something to counteract it. Otherwise I fear [the] American
press, which on the whole has stood by us remarkably well in recent Indian
crisis, will rapidly and perhaps completely change its attitude."[125] In the same document Halifax also mentioned that
Harry Hopkins spoke with him about the pressure that Roosevelt was under to
intervene in Indian affairs. The British responded to the changing attitude of
the American press by suggesting that the United States should send a new
representative over to India. Eden suggested that the presence of a
high-ranking American in India could provide a more favorable view of the
British position to the President, since "I am very doubtful whether we can
expect to get the results we want unless the tale is told to the President and
to America by an American."[126]
While the benefits of such a representative were obvious, the British
government was also concerned that the presence of an American official would
lead the United States and the rest of the world to expect him to intervene in
Indian affairs. The British had learned from their experience with Louis
Johnson, and they were determined not to make the same mistake twice. In
defining the role of the representative Eden wrote: "Their main duty as we
conceive it would be to observe and interpret, and we would not like
appointment to go through under any impression that a Legation or an Embassy
could be set up in India."[127] He also
sent Halifax a "wish list" of the qualifications that the British government
would ideally like to see in the new representative: "We would welcome someone
of substance who is an experienced observer, who has the confidence of his
Government and who is ready to tour as much as possible in order to enlarge his
contacts."[128]
Roosevelt chose William Phillips to fill this delicate diplomatic post.
Phillips was an experienced and respected diplomat, who had formerly served as
Ambassador to Italy. He was the complete opposite of Louis Johnson with
respect to personality, experience, and his approach to Indian issues, as
Joseph C. Harsch noted in the "Christian Science Monitor:" "If Colonel Johnson
was the bludgeon approach to the Indian problem, Mr. Phillips is the velvet
glove approach."[129] Phillips was the
perfect man for this formidable mission, and his appointment was approved of by
both the Americans and the British.
Despite widespread approval of Phillips' appointment, it nevertheless inspired
a heated debate over his title and his actual role. The British were not going
to accept the new representative until the United States had clearly stated his
title and responsibilities. They wanted him to have the title of Commissioner
rather than Personal Representative, as Eden explained to Halifax: "If there
is any doubt about this please explain to United States Government that in view
of India's experience of what happened in the case of Louis Johnson, Phillips'
description as President's Personal Representative would greatly increase
danger of belief arising in India that he has a mission of mediation."[130] Phillips' illustrious career and
high position demanded a more respectful title, but the British, particularly
Linlithgow, were concerned that addressing Phillips as "Ambassador" would imply
that the United States was taking an active role in Indian affairs. The two
governments finally agreed that Phillips would have the title of "Personal
representative of the President with personal rank of Ambassador."[131]
While the exact wording of Phillips' title may seem like a trivial matter, it
was actually seen by both sides as an extremely important issue, due to what it
implied about his role in Indian affairs. A large number of documents were
sent back and forth between India, Britain, and the United States over this
issue, and Linlithgow identified it as a "point of real importance."[132] Amery sought to reassure the Viceroy
by writing: "Rank of Ambassador would be personal and would not mean that
Commissioner's post becomes an Embassy even temporarily. . . . This should I
hope ease [the] embarrassment which you contemplate."[133] The debate that developed over this issue
illustrates the extent of Britain's fear that an American representative would
interfere in India, and the delicacy of Phillips' position.
Phillips was in London working for the Office of Strategic Services when he
received the letter asking him to serve as Roosevelt's representative in India.
After accepting the post, he spent two more months in London meeting with
various officials, including Churchill and Cripps, in an attempt to get a grasp
of the situation before his departure. He also received instructions from
Secretary of State Hull concerning his upcoming mission and Roosevelt's
expectations. Hull stated that the U.S. government supported independence for
India as soon as it was practical, but that it was most concerned with
maintaining good relations with both sides in the interest of the war effort:
"The President and I have not become partisans of either Great Britain or India
in the existing exigencies . . . objectionable pressure upon either side would
probably result in no progress but only in exasperation and, in the case of the
British, a possible disturbance of the unity of command and of cooperation both
during and following the war."[134]
Phillips was encouraged to engage both sides in a discussion of a possible
settlement, but Hull strongly stated that he was not to take these discussions
to the point where either side would accuse the United States of intervening.[135] Just like the British, the Americans
learned from the experience of Louis Johnson, and they were determined not to
repeat their mistakes.
Phillips' initial contacts with the British were quite successful, and reveal
his skill as a diplomat. Even Viceroy Linlithgow, who had been the most
hesitant of the British officials to allow a new American representative come
to India, gave Phillips a glowing review: "He could not have had a better
press, and it is impossible to imagine a greater contrast to Johnson. He has
admirable manners, is most friendly, and seems to me better really than
anything we could reasonably have hoped for."[136] Phillips proceeded with the caution that the
situation required in setting himself up in India: "As I see it, my job is
first to secure, if possible, respect and confidence, not merely among those at
the top, but as far down the line as I can go. Probably it would be wise to
keep as far removed as possible from political subjects until I have achieved
some success in gaining confidence."[137] Phillips implemented this strategy by receiving
Indian and British leaders representing all points of view, and going on
numerous trips throughout India in an attempt to get a well-rounded picture of
the Indian situation. The Viceroy encouraged these visits as a way for
Phillips to see firsthand how difficult the situation in India really was.[138] Phillips did indeed soon become
familiar with "the terrific problems which face this country," but much to the
chagrin of the British, he did not place all of the blame on the Indians.
Rather, he commented that while in London he had the impression that Britain
was truly prepared to grant independence to India, but in India the British
civil servants held the opposite view: "The British whom I have met seem
unaware of the changing attitude in England and cannot really envisage a free
India fit to govern itself."[139]
Although relations between Phillips and Linlithgow started out well, they soon
became choppy over the issue of Gandhi. Phillips' mission corresponded with
Gandhi's 1943 fast, a crucial episode in British-Indian relations. As stated
above, Phillips set out to meet with all sides of the conflict, but he soon
found that he was unable to meet with Gandhi, a key figure in the Indian
Congress. On February 8, 1943, Phillips asked the Viceroy for permission to
see Gandhi, and his request was promptly denied: "I would tell him at once in
the politest but most definite language that the answer to his request was
No."[140] Linlithgow then informed
Phillips that Gandhi was preparing to begin a fast. While this response
temporarily sealed the issue, it was not the end of the issue for Phillips.
When it became evident that Britain would stand firm in opposition to Gandhi's
demands, Indian public opinion looked towards the United States for support.
Phillips, as the American representative in India, became the focus of
questions concerning America's role. However, at the beginning of his mission
Phillips had been warned not to intervene in Indian affairs. He wrote that:
"When it became evident, as it soon did, that I could not intervene without
instructions and that the President would not intervene with Churchill,
American stock in India fell rapidly."[141] Phillips also had to deal with the frustrated
American press, which faced "severe censorship" from the Indian government.[142] Phillips expressed his frustration
at not being able to act in a letter to Roosevelt: "I feel acutely the fact
that public attention is centered upon me in the hope and even expectation that
I can do something constructive, and yet here I am, quite unable to do anything
but listen to appeals, realizing as I do the importance of not prejudicing my
position with the British authorities."[143] The American government finally listened to
Phillips' demands and gave him permission to express American concerns over
Gandhi's fast to the Viceroy.[144]
Secretary of State Hull also relieved the pressure that Phillips was
experiencing by telling him to tell those who demanded action by the U.S. that
such decisions were being made by government officials at home, and not by the
representative in India.[145]
In mid-February Phillips received a message from Hull requesting that he
return to the United States in late April.[146] As his departure date approached, Phillips decided
that he would ask the Viceroy again if he could visit Gandhi. As he explained
to Roosevelt: "If the record shows that I have never made a serious effort to
obtain the views of the Congress Party from Gandhi, then indeed my future
usefulness here is at an end. For it would be assumed that I have not been
interested in the picture as a whole and have been satisfied to give my
Government a one-sided and incomplete report of the situation."[147] Phillips also requested permission to tell the
Viceroy that the Department of State would like for this visit to be approved,
but the government denied this request. This was a bitter disappointment to
Phillips, but he proceeded to bring the matter up with the Viceroy.[148] Linlithgow refused to allow the
visit, but he did give Phillips permission to state at a press conference that
he had asked to visit Gandhi and been denied by the Indian government. Such a
statement would allow him to publicize his intentions and his efforts to
arrange a meeting with Gandhi and prevent Indian opinion from accusing him of
being one-sided in his investigation. Phillips' experiences in India with
Gandhi's fast further illustrate both Britain's determination to maintain
control of India and prevent the Americans from interfering, and the United
States government's unwillingness to challenge the British position. Phillips
was an able diplomat, yet his ability to be of real use in India was hindered
because he did not receive the strong support of his government, as the above
examples show.
During his trip to India, Phillips came to the conclusion that the United
States should be involved in Indian affairs. He observed the lack of Indian
enthusiasm for the war effort, and the British refusal to budge on Indian
policy. He strongly felt that Britain had a responsibility to try to come to
an agreement with the Indians: "Even though the British should fail again it
is high time that they should make a new effort to improve conditions and to
reestablish confidence among the Indian people that their future independence
is to be granted."[149] He urged
Roosevelt to get involved in India because "in view of our military position in
India we should have a voice in these matters. It is not right for the British
to say `this is none of your business' when we alone presumably will have the
major part to play in the future struggle with Japan."[150] Phillips used the necessities of the war effort as
the rationale for American intervention, while Roosevelt used this argument to
justify non-intervention in India. This was an incredibly radical position for
Phillips, who was considered to be a strong supporter of British policy.
However, his experiences in India convinced him that a settlement was necessary
and that the British were not going to offer one of their own free will.
Phillips never returned to India, but he retained the title of "Personal
Representative" until 1945. He told Roosevelt that he did not want to go back
to India until there was a change in British policy and the possibility that an
agreement might be reached: "I told him that in my opinion I should not return
to Delhi unless the existing political deadlock was broken, that is unless
there was a change of policy on the part of the British."[151] After Phillips' departure, the India issue lost its
immediacy for the US Government. Britain had managed to reign in the National
Congress by arresting its leaders and quieting the Indian press, leaving "a
sullen silence" in India.[152] The
United States' interest in India had always centered on the war effort, and
once Britain proved that it could keep the subcontinent under control, the
Americans were content to focus on more pressing affairs.
In examining American involvement in Indian affairs, Venkataramani writes: "A
country's attitude towards a foreign issue not perceived as affecting its basic
interests may . . . undergo modification only incrementally. Drastic changes
may take place only in extraordinary circumstances when the country's own
interests are seen to be involved in a time of crisis . . . considerations of
immediate national interest assume crucial importance."[153] America's involvement in India and its relations
with Britain closely follow these general observations. From the beginning
American interest was dependent upon the war effort, and its policy was
determined by whatever action promised to be most fruitful in furthering this
end. When the threat of a Japanese invasion was most urgent, the United States
supported Indian independence, but when the greater needs of the war demanded
Allied unity, the country quietly gave in to British pressure. These
considerations affected the missions of both American representatives to India,
and both failed to achieve any change in the Indian situation because their
government was more concerned with the demands and needs of the war. In the
end, the American ideal of independence had to be sacrificed for what it saw as
self-preservation.
The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, Sanjay Subrahmanyam.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, an economic historian who wears many hats, has taken a
detour from his usual course of faithfully producing volumes on early modern
Indian Ocean mercantile history. This new course is not so much a detour, but
a fresh approach: an attempt to bring his area and time period of
expertise--in all of its intricacies--to life through the genre of historical
biography. Vasco da Gama (?1469-1524), the great argonaut and national hero of
Portugal, is the subject of Subrahmanyam's innovative attempt at something like
"total biography." This biography is an apt choice for review in light of this
May's marking the quincentennial of Gama's completion of the first European sea
voyage to India.
Subrahmanyam side-steps prevalent theoretical debates on the legitimacy of
biography as history by admitting his work is "as much about the environment of
Vasco da Gama as it is about the man himself" (p. 22). This said, he plunges
into the formidable task of recreating the historical contexts in which Gama
lived and "discovered." Subrahmanyam, as is his forte, weaves together
descriptions from contemporary material in a staggering number of European
languages, from non-European sources (i.e., Arabic and Persian, and
generally working from translations), and from a growing body of secondary
literature on the time period. This strategy provides a foundational picture
of the economic and political contexts (and to a lesser extent the social and
cultural milieu) wrought by Gama's (in)famous 1497-9 voyage to India.
Subrahmanyam first addresses the Portugal of the Infante Don Henrique (Prince
Henry the Navigator) into which Gama was born. On a wave of anti-Islamic
Christian rhetoric accompanying Iberia's reconquest--under Papal
sponsorship--from the Moors, Portugal engaged in military and economic
expansion in West Africa and the Atlantic region. Between conflicting
attitudes regarding maritime expansion, a lingering crusader mentality, a hope
of discovering Christian allies south of Morocco, fears of long sea journeys,
and attempts to consolidate the lands of Lusitania we find Vasco da
Gama. Gama was a petty noble and a member of the military Order of Santiago.
Both these groups were deeply enmeshed in both Portugal's reconquest and its
religio-military marintine expansion. The complexity and turbulence of early
modern Portugal (a nation with absolutist tendencies, as well as conflicting
attitudes towards expansion and moves toward centralization by royality) is
captured by Subrahmanyam in the figure of Vasco da Gama: a curious man to
continue the enterprise of discovery (nobles had previously not been mariners),
but nonetheless the choice of Gama reflects a Portuguese regime torn by
conflicting interests.
Gama's first Indian voyage provides the narrative (drawn from the manuscript of
an anonymous sailor and supplemented by later chronicles) that Subrahmanyam
augments with analyses of the economic, political and social systems prevalent
in the Indian Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century. Key to this narrative
is the Portuguese belief in a quest for the discovery of eastern Christians
(led by the elusive figure of Prester John) who might be made allies against
the Moors, or Muslims. During this first voyage we find a fixation on
seeking co-religionists (interestingly defined as all people not obviously
Muslim) that surfaced during the stops in East Africa. It was full blown by
the time Gama reached India. This fixation is reflected in Portuguese attempts
to force the Samudri Raja of Calicut (the Hindu ruler of a southwestern Indian
mercantile empire) to exclude the "white Moors," or Arab Muslims, from the
region's flourishing spice trade.
Subrahmanyam's examination of early Portuguese colonial mentality in the
context of Gama's journey is expanded in his analysis of changes wrought upon
the political and economic systems into which our explorer voyaged. The author
clears the ground for the presentation of his vision of a "connected history"
by debunking scholars (André Wink foremost among them) who portray Islam
as virulently monolithic. In doing so, Subrahmanyam turns the tables on these
scholars by analogizing Islam in the western Indian Ocean to Christianity in
the Mediterranean. Finally, he pinpoints the fundamental way in which the
Portuguese made a difference in the Indian Ocean region through the systematic
and expert use of maritime violence. In contrast to India, where organized
force was previously used only on land (with the notable yet isolated exception
of piracy), Gama modified the "rules of the game" by dictating his own terms
(e.g., his demand for the expulsion of "white Moors") and then backing
them up with armed attacks.
Chapters on the second voyage of Gama to India start with his conscious
utilization of the "symbolic capital of his legend" and appointment as admiral.
In this capacity he voyages to India to continue advancing the Portuguese goal
of excluding Arabs from Indian trade, often through brutal means. This
exclusion is perceived as being in the spirit of economic pragmatism and with
an eye on the prosperity of nobles whose trade interests conflict with the
monarchic and messianic interests of Portugal's king Don Manuel. This dispute
concludes with Gama's return to Portugal and Portuguese expansion being placed
in the hands of Afonso de Albuquerque, the king's chosen. Subrahmanyam
emphasizes Gama's reliance during this period on his own legend to retain his
prestige and wealth in Portugal when he had fallen out of political favor.
This part of Subrahmanyam's analysis serves as occasion for inserting a
detailed summary of Don Manuel's reign, and the origins of his messianism and
anti-Moorish crusades (qualities echoed in the policies of Albuquerque). We
see in this section a centralizing monarchical attitude which is coupled with a
renewed attempt to blockade Arab trade routes and to enlist the Christians of
Prester John. Subrahmanyam contrasts such attitudes and actions with those of
the more pragmatic Gama. He insightfully identifies this contrast--reflected
in the differences between Gama and Albuquerque--as the "two poles in the
Portuguese nationalist historiography" (p. 258). Frustratingly, he never
illustrates exactly how these manifest in the historiography itself.
The final historical chapter of Subrahmanyam's book covers Gama's third and
final voyage to India. The demise of the King Don Manuel in Portugal results
in Gama being named the viceroy of Asia, a position through which he sets out
to enact a new agenda. The posture of Portugal is now one of guarding against
rising Ottoman forces in Arab lands to the north. This new Portuguese strategy
was designed to consolidate strong holdings in the Indian Ocean. More
specifically (for Gama at least), this strategy involved wresting control of
the Malabar pepper trade from the Samudri Raja and the Mappila Muslims. This
shift in strategy contrasts with previous attempts to ally with this king and
prevail upon him to oust Arabs from the trade. Gama, for his part, acted
ostensibly in the name of economic pragmatism and hoped to get a better value
on pepper by dealing with Syrian Christians rather than the Mapillas.
Nonetheless, this pragmatic preference for Christians only resulted in the
Portuguese having "quite literally to pay a price for imagined religious
solidarity" (p. 330). Upon Gama's death, there were no real resolutions to
either this Mappila/Syrian Christian question, or the Ottoman threat to
Portuguese ascendancy.
In conclusion, Subrahmanyam (all too briefly) steps back and looks at the pose
Gama strikes for the current observer. As an argonaut in opposition to the
monarchical crusading of Albuquerque, he stands as one of two competing
mythological constructs of the Portuguese in India. However, precisely what
Gama represents is still unclear. The author gives no definitive statement, as
perhaps there can be no simple consensus. Yet Subrahmanyam has certainly
succeeded in painstakingly showing the contexts in which Gama lived. The
political, social, and economic systems between which he negotiated, and the
shifting understandings embedded therein, are given vivid expression (though
the work is decidedly stronger in the portrayal of the nuances of mentality
from the European side [there is only one real incident where an Asian text is
closely analyzed, and that a modern Bengali one]). Perhaps it is too much to
ask that our author go beyond the task of a historical recreation that traces
the changes in a legend foundational to Portuguese national identity. But
without such a discussion, Subrahmanyam's promise of presenting the
career and legend of Vasco da Gama remains only partially fulfilled.
Eric Lewis Beverley
Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, Avtar Brah.
In this collection of previously published and new material, sociologist
Avtar Brah presents an engaging discussion of South Asian diaspora, feminism,
social activism and critical theory. In elaborating the relevance of critical
theory to social activism through empirical (ethnographic) and theoretical
arguments, this book develops a framework for the study of diaspora(s) and
transnational communities. Part of this project is to chart new terrains in
the study of global migration and movement.
Brah's central focus in the ethnographic chapters explores how
nationalism and racism relate to South Asians in Britain. Her writing of the
history of struggle for diasporic South Asians--referred to in Britain as
"Asians" and "Blacks" for various popular, colonial and coalitional
reasons--departs from much conventional diaspora research by foregrounding the
analysis of gender and feminist positioning. By focusing on South Asian women
and Asian youth, Brah describes the complexity of the South Asian diasporic
experience through the categories of race, nation, gender, class, sexuality,
ethnicity, and generation. Using this analytical framework to enter popular
debates of "commonsense" racial representations of South Asians, her argument
makes an important intervention into discourses that perpetuate racism. Brah's
simple, yet cogent, argument is that racism has resulted from histories of
imperialism and colonialism. Her critique of racism is directed at the
political practices and institutions responsible for state policies in
Britain.
In conducting her ethnographic interviews, however, it is unclear how
ethnographic interviews are conducted and how this material should be
interpreted in response to the political location of the author. To what
degree and in what form is Brah's research and political position made clear to
those interviewed, and how does this positioning interact with the kinds of
responses elicited in interviews? This question has important implications for
the interaction of theory and political action in elucidating the critic's role
for the subject/agent. Its answer is a pivotal aspect, in my view, of the
politics of location that Brah endorses. This weakness withstanding, Brah
succeeds in describing a diverse array of experiences and identifications in
the South Asian diaspora in Britain.
Brah's chapters on feminism and difference are the building blocks of
her remaining theoretical framework. As Brah maintains, the articulation of
difference is the essential component of a critical analysis of political
mobilization. As Brah argues, difference is "construed as a social relation
constructed within systems of power underlying structures of class, racism,
gender and sexuality, and so on" (p. 88). Difference is also distinguished
between collective histories and personal experience. The dynamic that Brah
pursues in questioning how the collective and personal can come together.
Differences in histories and relations to power between black and white women
in the feminist struggle in Britain are part of the terrain that Brah explores
in thinking about these issues.
In theorizing political mobilization and the relations of power for
diaspora and transnational communities, Avtar Brah frames an innovative
methodology for this study. Based on the concepts of diaspora, border, and the
politics of location, Brah argues that the struggle over meaning is the
struggle over different modes of being, that is subjectivity and subject
positions. Through this struggle the political is imagined through the
collective. Here the concept of diaspora has its strength as a form of
coalitional politics. Diaspora, understood by Brah in terms of historically
contingent genealogies, offers the insight of historicizing different
trajectories of diaspora(s). Diaspora is then relational to other diasporas
through the creative tension of "home" and "dispersion." This points to the
interaction of communities, relations of power, and the concept of migration as
multiple rather than one-way. Diasporas are "contested cultural and political
terrains where individual and collective memories collide, reassemble and
reconfigure" (193). They are sites of dislocation, trauma and dissonance, but
also potentially sites of new
beginnings.
Although, some of the chapters in the book seem awkwardly written,
especially in the context of particular global, political, and historical
junctures, as a whole, this book is a good response and synthesis to many of
the issues surrounding the study of diaspora. It offers an insightful and
informative history of the South Asian experience in Britain with particular
sensitivity to the underwritten aspect of South Asian women.
Junaid Rana
SUBMISSION AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION
Submissions
Submissions should be no more than 6,250 words (approximately 25 double-spaced
pages) on any topic dealing with South Asia. Please include full footnotes and
bibliographies according to the Chicago Manual of Style (Turabian); do
not use parenthetical references. Contributors are encouraged to submit their
articles either on diskettes or by email. Printed or typewritten articles are
also accepted; 8.5" by 11" paper is preferred. Aut
The University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin
James Brow, Janice Leoshko (Faculty Advisors);
Kamal Adhikary, Anne Alexander, Karline McLain (Staff)
Volume 5* Number 1 * Spring 1998
ARTICLES
Less Successful Than the Next: South Asian Taxi Drivers in New York City
Elizabeth
Kolsky, Columbia University
This paper examines the history of South Asian taxi drivers in New York City against (1) the backdrop of U.S. immigration legislation, (2) communities of
financially more successful South Asian immigrants, and (3) the changing face
of the cab industry. It argues that working class South Asians in New York
City are systematically denied representation in ethnographies that preach
stories of success, and that these drivers have been left to battle alone a
hostile police force and a mayor bent on discipline and punishment. This paper
also argues it is high time to hear working class voices not only in the aisles
of City Hall, but in the family rooms of the middle class
desis who
prefer to ignore them.Riva's Story: A Case of South Asian Linguistic Dislocation
Allen Cook, Joyce Cook, And Matthew Cook, University of Bridgeport and University of Texas
Ethnolinguistic community provides a cognitive base-line for a child's
educational and social development by organizing "patterns
of behavior"
and "pattern for behavior." Riva's is the story of a South Asian child
skirted between several such communities without fully absorbing the codes of
any. This paper analyzes the educational, psychological, social, and emotional
problems she now confronts in a Maryland grade school."India is America's Business:"[89] Britain, the United States, and India 1942-43
Stefanie Ellis, University
of Texas at Austin
The United States was increasingly involved in Indo-British affairs during 1942-43. This paper examines American diplomatic missions by Louis Johnson and William Phillips to British India during these years through oculus of British
and U.S. documents. It argues that the shifting status of the British-American
relationship, with respect to Indian issues, was primarily driven by the
greater needs of Allied forces during the global conflicts of World War
II.
Book Reviews
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco de Gama
by ERIC BEVERLY
by JUNAID RANA
Editor's Note: South Asia at Large
Less Successful Than the Next: South Asian Taxi Drivers in New York City
Elizabeth Kolsky, Columbia University
A Brief History Of U.S. Immigration And Naturalization Law
Focusing On South Asia
South Asians in the United States: A Demographic Profile
South Asians in the United States: A Seamless Success Story?
A Seamless Success Story?: Probing the Profile
A Brief Overview of the Taxicab Industry: The Industry's Point of View[13]
A Brief Insight into the Taxicab Industry: The Drivers' Point of View
Taxi Drivers or Doctors?
Story: A Case of South Asian Linguistic Dislocation
Allen
Cook, Joyce Cook, and Matthew Cook, University
of Bridgeport and University of Texas
Methodology
The story of Riva Dube, a child of the South Asian diaspora, illustrates one
such a journey. Riva is the subject of this analysis, which examines her
language samples and how linguistic interference and other linguistic factors
affected how she was perceived (and misperceived) by her classmates. The paper
is informed by a four-month period of observating and interviewing Riva, her
family, classmates, teachers, school counselor and social welfare caseworker.
Actual school records were not examined because of privacy issues, however;
general test instruments used by the school in order to evaluate Riva as well
as Riva's general score ranges were discussed at length with her teachers and
guidance counselor.Riva's Family and Personal History
Riva is 12 years old and was born in the western Indian state of Goa. Her
family is part of a large South Asian diaspora population. She lived in
Europe, Africa, and Fiji before coming to the United States eight months ago.
Her early childhood education was marked by dislocation, disruption and social
prejudice as an "outsider." Sometimes, her family moved for economic reasons,
other times, for political reasons. Her family was expelled from both Tanzania
and Fiji because of political or social unrest. In the process of these many
moves, Riva returned periodically (for a couple of months at a time) to Goa in
order to live with relatives. Riva's Language and Socio-linguistic History
Riva's School and Peer History
We first encountered Riva in a school setting when a colleague asked me to
meet her. In the few weeks after her family arrived in the United States,
their apartment building burned down, along with most of their belongings. In
the confusion, they managed to find another place to live for a few weeks. One
night, shortly after their apartment was destroyed, Riva was walking along the
street and she met three girls from school. These girls did not like Riva
because they thought that she was "stuck up" and "dumb" (possibly a result of
her linguistic miscuing). For reasons unknown, the girls proceeded to beat her
up. They beat her so seriously, according to the school counselor, that Riva
sustained additional damage to a kidney already weakened from early childhood
malaria.Theoretical Concepts for Riva's Language Development
Riva certainly had absorbed concepts of a universal grammar (or innate LAD) as
a child,[57] especially with her multiple
language inputs. Even though she experienced frequent family and schooling
disruptions, her multiple language acquisition process exhibited the same
non-random, selective process as any average L1 acquisition process.[58] In a very real way, Riva was able to
construct a linguistic awareness and reality for herself that facilitated
(albeit with great difficulty) her frequent movement between linguistic
milieus.
Riva's Experience as an "Outsider"
Immigrant children internalize the social and economic inequities that exist
within their society and the collective identity of their community group and
this awareness significantly affects their approach to school.[79] Children whose families have not entered the
United States of their own volition are viewed as "caste-like minorities"
(Mexican Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Eritreans,
Vietnamese, Hmong, etc.) or "immigrant minorities" (Costa Ricans, Punjabis,
Hondurans, Koreans, etc.):[80]
"India
is America's Business:"[89] Britain, the
United States, and India 1942-43
Stefanie Ellis, University Of Texas At Austin
Book
Reviews
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997. Pp. 400.
The University of Texas at Austin
New
York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. 276.
The University of Texas at Austin