Introduction

Summary

The marginalization of Black Americans due to White supremacy and the oppression of Indians under British colonialism featured inescapable similarities. At the turn of the twentieth century, these parallels led Indian and Black nationalists, intellectuals, and activists to share their experiences and engage in dialogues toward improving the social status of their people. Specifically, Black internationalists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, and Paul Robeson studied the Indian independence movement and came to regard India as a template in the fight against White supremacy in the United States (US). Ultimately, they came together in their desire to overthrow the structures that subjugated them. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some Indians and Americans exchanged ideas about race, caste, and class, creating lasting cultural connections.

In this book, I explore the foundational cultural and political connections between India and the US between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries by focusing on a small select group of Indians and Americans and their ideas on race, caste, and class. Several key figures of the time, on both sides, attempted to assess whether the Black experience in the US mirrored caste, colonialism, or racial discrimination in India. Both Indians and Americans studied race, caste, and class dynamics outside their own countries in order to learn what they could apply to their own struggles. This study spans from the start of the twentieth century when W. E. B. Du Bois notably declared at the first Pan African Conference in 1900 that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” until the immediate aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

In a June 2021 seminar, historian Dwaipayan Sen noted that although alliances between oppressed groups are interesting and worthy of discussion, he queried whether any meaningful social change can be accomplished by race and caste solidarities between Americans and Indians. Sen argued that since Black American and Dalit struggles are local issues that exist within separate nation states, it is doubtful that that Black and Dalit alliances possess a transnational impact.