Yankees in the subcontinent

The Most Dangerous Place 

A History of the United States in Asia

Srinath Raghavan

Penguin Random House

472 pages; Rs 699

Srinath Raghavan’s latest book is a path-breaking survey of the United States’ role in the three countries that have figured most prominently in its South Asia policy — India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Its scope and aims are more ambitious than those of most standard works on the subject. Mr Raghavan examines not only the “high politics” of foreign and defence policy but also the economic, ideological and cultural dimensions of the US role and their impact on the subcontinent. It covers not only the role of the US state but also that of non-state actors — American merchants, missionaries, writers, musicians, agronomists and others who have left an imprint on South Asia. 

The author does full justice to the traditional area of diplomatic history. As one would expect from a historian of his standing, Mr Raghavan’s account of the “high politics” of inter-state relations is thoroughly researched and elegantly presented. The unique appeal of this book, however, lies in the new ground it explores in commercial, cultural and ideological interactions, the activities of non-state actors and the interlinkages between these and US foreign policy. This review, therefore, focuses on the new fields of inquiry explored in the book.

Since its scope extends beyond diplomatic relations, Mr Raghavan’s account begins not with the emergence of India and Pakistan as independent states in 1947 but with US independence in 1776. We read of George Washington’s abortive attempts to open a consulate in Calcutta (Kolkata) in the early years of US independence and of the vicissitudes of Indo-US trade during periods of war and revolution. We learn how American perceptions of South Asia were shaped by the impressions of merchants and missionaries, together with the scholarly works of Sanskritists such as Nordheimer and Whitney, and philosophers like Emerson and Thoreau. 

There is a vignette of Mark Twain’s tour of India in 1896, including his jocular (and unintentionally indecent) message to Kipling: “I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons and escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild buffalos; and you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.”

Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement created a profound impression on American minds. He was Time  magazine’s Man of the Year in 1930. In later decades, he inspired the civil rights movement in America. Martin Luther King Jr described him as the paramount influence on his thought and practice. Mr Raghavan notes the amusing incongruities in the way the Mahatma was depicted in American popular culture as, for instance, in Cole Porter’s musical Anything Goes: “You’re the Top, You’re Mahatma Gandhi/You’re the Top, You’re Napoleon Brandy”.

Jazz offers an interesting case study of the interaction between culture and foreign policy. The US government played an active role in promoting the hugely successful tours of leading jazz musicians to South Asia in the late 1950s and 1960s. “As a popular art stemming from the world of African Americans,” Mr Raghavan observes, “jazz seemed ideally suited both to revise notions of American racism in the decolonised countries and to showcase the vigour and creativity of American democracy.” 

The end of the Cold War and India’s embrace of economic liberalisation produced not only a convergence of strategic and economic interests between India and the US but also a dramatic change in cultural perceptions. The sharp rise in Indian immigration into the United States since the mid-1990s and the professional success of these migrants led to their identification as a “model minority” in the United States. The cultural attitudes of the Indian elite towards the US underwent a parallel transformation as a result of emigration and the increasing flow of Indian students to US universities. Economic liberalisation opened the doors to the spread of American consumer culture in India and the demise of the culture of “conspicuous non-consumption” that had characterised an earlier generation of the Indian political and bureaucratic elite raised on Gandhian or socialist values. “Consumer culture,” Mr Raghavan argues, “helped buttress American hegemony.”

While Mr Raghavan breaks new ground in his exploration of the role of non-state actors, one misses a reference to two Americans who made an immense contribution to South Asia. Norman Borlaug has been justly hailed as the “Father of the Green Revolution” in India and Pakistan. David Lilienthal, former administrator of the Tennessee Valley Authority, conceived a plan for resolving the Indus waters issue between India and Pakistan and persuaded his friend, Eugene Black, president of the World Bank, to finance its implementation. They deserve a place in a work of this genre.

South Asia is commonly viewed as a peripheral area of American concern, an area of lower priority than the adjacent regions of West Asia or South East Asia. Mr Raghavan argues that the “character and workings of this [American] power cannot be understood by focussing on the core terrain in which it operated.  Rather the margin and the periphery provide an oblique and indispensable view of American power, none more so than South Asia.”

This path-breaking book combines high ambition with deep scholarship. It deserves a wide audience.