Organizing for Science: The Making of an Industrial Research Laboratory. Shiv Visvanathan

The United States and South Asia from the Age of Empire to Decolonization

“…Instead, he aligns notions of expansion and dominion with the development or release of the soul-which, in the poem's last lines, "farther, farther, farther sail[s]" into eastern seas, as Whitman adopts and extends a longstanding western tradition of looking eastward for enlightenment and spiritual repose, even as one simultaneously seeks profit or adventure. 5 India, meanwhile, serves for Whitman and for many of his American readers as a metaphor for extremity itself (in terms of heat, luxury, poverty, brutality, and so on) and as the site of the western subject's striving, even as it evokes the past and the exotic-India's shores, Whitman writes, are "aged fierce enigmas," mired in a centuries-old resistance to temporal change. 6 If Whitman's poem stands as a monument to imperial optimism, a lesser-known American conversation on India, which took place nearly fifteen years earlier, evinced considerably more ambivalence.…”

“…4 one notable exception is the work of Heather Curtis who has looked at the fundraising of the New York-based Christian Herald who channelled money and grain to missionaries in India. 5 Whereas Curtis contextualized such fundraising primarily in relation to the history of the United States, this chapter takes as its starting point the interconnectedness of the histories of South Asia and the United States, and seeks to identify how this interconnectedness further intensified during the famines.…”

“…Most obviously, the medico-sociological American discourse of 'boyology' shaped contemporary manuals designed for social workers and educators as well as the practical programs targeted at South Asian youngsters. 5 This quasi-scientific approach to working with young adolescents was seen as more advanced than imperial schemes, because it supposedly fostered the boys' capacity for 'self-government' and democracy. This purported superiority of American methods brought new responsibilities.…”

“…4 Cutting against such enthusiasm, Indrani Chatterjee has argued for the impossibility of "connected histories across spaces shaped by war and the partitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries," and Kris Manjapra has reminded us that entanglements, albeit implying "some degree of interdependence", can also be highly asymmetrical, because they "exist within larger systems of power, discourse and economy". 5 It is important to keep these caveats in mind when looking at the multifaceted exchanges between North America and South Asia that are under scrutiny in this book.…”

“…Subaltern scholar Clare Anderson suggests that categories of race at this time in the British empire were fluid, culturally contingent against broader politics of difference, and "not simply grounded in 'birth', 'blood', or 'colour'." 5 Writing about race and the development of blackface minstrels in the British empire at the time, Richard Waterhouse proposes that audiences conflated "West Indian and African Negroes [sic] as well as the Indians into one inclusive category of inferiority … [t] hey were all savage, infantile and incompetent." 6 Colonialism is in many respects a relationship of domination and difference, or of domination and subordination, and the social construction of race-sometimes fluid and contingent, and sometimes rigid and essentialized-constituted a key marker of social position.…”