India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s

302 Pages·2017·3.22 MB·English

by  Anupama Arora

THE NEW URBAN ATLANTIC
INDIA IN THE
AMERICAN IMAGINARY,
1780s–1880s
EDITED BY ANUPAMA ARORA
AND RAJENDER KAUR
The New Urban Atlantic
Series Editor
Elizabeth Fay
University of Massachusetts Boston
Cambridge
MA, USA
The early modern period was witness to an incipient process of transcultur-
ation through exploration, mercantilism, colonization, and migration that
set into motion a process of globalization that continues today. The pur-
pose of this series is to bring together a cultural studies approach - which
freely and unapologetically crosses disciplinary, theoretical, and political
boundaries - with early modern texts and artefacts that bear the traces of
transculturalization and globalization in order to deepen our understand-
ing of sites of exchange between and within early modern culture(s). This
process can be studied on a large as well as on a small scale, and this new
series is dedicated to both. Possible topics of interest include, but are not
limited to: texts dealing with mercantilism, travel, exploration, immigra-
tion, foreigners, enabling technologies (such as ship-building and naviga-
tional instrumentation), mathematics, science, rhetoric, art, architecture,
intellectual history, religion, race, sexuality, and gender.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14425
Anupama Arora · Rajender Kaur
Editors
India in the
American Imaginary,
1780s–1880s
Editors
Anupama Arora Rajender Kaur
University of Massachusetts William Paterson University of
Dartmouth New Jersey
North Dartmouth, MA, USA Wayne, NJ, USA
The New Urban Atlantic
ISBN 978-3-319-62333-7 ISBN 978-3-319-62334-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62334-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948280
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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Cover image: Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Mrs. Frank L. Babbott, Jr., 1941
Printed on acid-free paper
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Anupama Arora would like to dedicate this book to her parents,
Sudarshan Arora and Akshey Kumar
Rajender Kaur would like to dedicate this book to her parents,
Kulwant Kaur and (late) Wg. Cdr. Prabhu Singh
F
oreword
Anyone studying the literary, artistic, political, and economic culture
of the long nineteenth century cannot help but note the intimacies
between the USA and India triangulated by Britain, arguably the most
dominant colonial power of the period. The settler colonies of North
America had been Britain’s most valuable possessions, relinquished only
after a protracted and bloody war; India was to be, in the words of the
Raj nostalgia British TV series, the “jewel in the crown.” The loss of the
North American colonies was to be compensated by the consolidation
of empire in India. British recognition of the USA as a nation in 1783
coincided with an almost immediate shift in colonial policy in Britain’s
Asian colony, from the settler mercantilism of the East India Company
to forms of direct government rule and an overseeing of the company,
a governance that would last till the Indian war of independence (popu-
larly known as the Indian Mutiny) in 1857. Historical actors converge:
Charles Cornwallis surrenders to George Washington in Yorktown in
1781, becomes the Governor-General of India, and, having learned from
his American defeat, now uses native allies to defeat the indomitable
Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1791, forcing the latter to sign a treaty ceding
vast tracts of land to the East India Company. And in an almost uncanny
reverberation of subaltern resistance, 1857 in India is followed by John
Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. The colonial histories of the
two nations seem to mirror each other.
Of course, as Arora and Kaur point out, most Anglo-Americans
did not think of themselves as the colonized brethren of Indians but
vii
viii FOREWORD
rather as settler colonials, different from the British, yet even more so
from Indians. The idea of empire moving West, culminating in North
America, had been recorded by travelers even prior to the Revolutionary
War, and by the early nineteenth century John Adams would note with
fascination the “ancient” history of this idea. Anglo-Americans could
thus see India as a disturbing hotbed of revolt, a lesson in colonial gov-
ernance, and, in Orientalist fashion, a land of barbaric practices like sati
and also a source of ancient wisdom. Suffice it to say that the immediacy
and intensity of Indo-U.S. colonial entanglements and the fact that the
most sustained challenge to Western colonialism since the Haitian rev-
olution occurred in midcentury in India suggest that the subcontinent
should figure prominently in American studies. However, this has simply
not been the case. Despite the superb beginnings of U.S. empire studies
in the 1970s and 1980s with works like Slotkin’s Regeneration Through
Violence and Drinnon’s Facing West, which focused on settler colonialism
and native Indians, and the moves in the 1990s to examine the workings
of U.S. overseas colonization starting in 1898, only in the last decade
have full-length studies devoted to Indo-U.S. encounters emerged.
In U.S. Orientalisms I argued that all U.S. cultural encounters with
different “Orients” in the long nineteenth century were inflected by
colonial and imperial histories and that it was inadequate to think of
American imaginings of these Orients in purely spiritual, philosophical,
or symbolic terms. This is particularly the case with the Indian subconti-
nent, which shared with the North American colonies both British colo-
nialism and the suppression of people of color. India in the American
Imaginary explores the rich and complex movement of people, goods,
policies, and ideas generated by these colonial entanglements. It includes
essays about the movement of people—merchants, missionaries, and
tourists travel to India and write about their experiences, British colo-
nial officials from India like Thomas Law who bring their mixed-race
children and come to settle in the fledgling North American nation, and
Hindus like George DeGrasse who emigrate to the USA and cast their
lot with African Americans. At the same time, the collection also points
to the sustained interest of American writers in the turbulence of Indian
political events, particularly 1857, and the fascination with Orientalist
aesthetic depictions of Indian royalty.
India in the American Imaginary routes the movement of bodies,
artifacts, and discourses through the vectors of colonialism and imperial-
ism. This routing is of central importance as disciplines in the humanities
FOREWORD ix
and American studies in particular reject the boundedness of nation and
chart their trajectories through paradigms of “globalism” and “transna-
tionalism.” I maintain a healthy skepticism toward these terms, which
have interestingly entered the parlance of American studies contempo-
raneously with theories of globalization. Like current theories of globali-
zation that privilege Deleuzian smooth spaces over the striated, there is
a danger that transnational or global American studies can replicate the
erasures of globalization theory and simply chart flows unmoored from
the processes of colonialism and imperialism. If there are intimacies
between continents, it is important to remember, as Lisa Lowe has so
powerfully shown, that these intimacies are routed through colonialism,
slavery, and indentured labor. In foregrounding the histories of British
colonial officers, immigrant laborers from India, American missionar-
ies going to India, and the imaginative renditions of “the mutiny” in
American literature during a formative period of the nation’s founding,
this collection makes an exciting contribution not only to postnational or
transnational American studies but to the project of postcolonial critique.
I would also argue that this postcolonial critique of the nation’s early cul-
ture is particularly relevant to the present moment when capitalist India
is being celebrated for its surplus of software skills, call center person-
nel, a consumerist middle class, and for producing model immigrants
for the USA. Such imaginings point to an elision of neocolonial histo-
ries, unequal economic structures, and the racialized legacies of colo-
nial immigration history, which continue to impinge on the present and
make possible the “surplus” of cheap labor for the USA. While Western
historicism abjures this haunting from the past in favor of a teleological
narrative, the postcolonial must necessarily embrace it.
If a major object of postcolonial critique has been, as Robert Young
suggests, to reconsider history and culture from the point of view of
those who have suffered the effects of colonialism and imperialism, it is
vital to question and put under pressure the ideologies of nationhood
under the aegis of which colonial ventures are justified if not carried out.
All colonial powers have thought of themselves as exceptional. French
discussions about granting citizenship to Algerians were premised on
the exceptional and superior nature of French culture; Japanese concep-
tions of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity sphere assumed the central
and dominant position of Japan because of the exceptional destiny and
character of the Japanese people. Both are based upon singular ideas of
nation and an erasure of difference, discord, and dissension.
x FOREWORD
If ideas of American exceptionalism have involved a denial of colonial
conquest and a deeply ingrained oxymoronic logic of imperial democ-
racy—made memorable in McKinley’s description of his unwillingness
to take over the Philippines, which came to the USA as “a gift from the
gods” or in Jefferson’s memorable articulation “empire for liberty”—a
critique of this exceptionalism involves demonstrating its cracks, fissures,
and fault lines, in other words messing up its exceptional nature. The
essays in this collection undertake just such a messing up in several ways:
by revealing the imperial investments of writers engaging with Indian
politics and art, by demonstrating how dignitaries like Thomas Law used
their experiences in India to address questions of slavery and settler colo-
nialism in the USA, by suggesting how Melville’s cosmopolitan rendition
of Asia as a space of competing and divergent religions implicitly called
for such possibilities in the USA, and how mediations on caste and social
reform in India reflected divergent ideas about the nation. At the same
time, the collection points to the complexities generated by colonial and
imperial entanglements. The colonial project produced multiple trajecto-
ries of desire (of both attraction and repulsion) and produced different
kinds of knowledge, hence the materialist cosmopolitanism of a Melville
and a sentimental routing of empire by Cummins, the fear of native revolt
and the fascination with the aesthetics of royalty representations in India.
I also want to suggest that this collection points to fruitful directions
in Asian-American studies, a discipline that has seen multiple debates
about the national and transnational objects of its study. While I don’t
think Asian studies and Asian American studies can or should be col-
lapsed, the lines between the two have been productively challenged,
and the colonial and imperial circuits between the USA and Asia have
energized scholarship in Asian American studies. More to the point, the
flow of peoples between the USA and India explored in this collection
certainly promises a rich area of study. For instance, George DeGrasse
(discussed in the chapter “Considered a Citizen of the United States”),
the illegitimate son of a French functionary and listed as “Hindu,” an
interpellation that gestures to his Indian cultural (if not racial) origins,
is arguably Asian American. DeGrasse presents a fascinating study of
Asian American racialization, agency, and of Asian American and African
American solidarity in a period that has scarcely figured in the field.
Similarly, the analysis of the lives of Thomas Law’s mixed-race sons—also
Asian American—in the chapter “The Empire Comes Home” reveals the
intriguing intersections between colonialism, imperialism, migration, and