Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India by Nico Slate (review)

Tempting as it is to begin with Forster's "only connect," I'll begin instead with Mira Nair's 1991 film Mississippi Masala in which Sarita Chaudhuri and Denzel Washington are cast as star-crossed interracial lovers in the contemporary American South. Neither family knows how to understand the relationship and the lovers are ultimately driven out of the state. To add to the racial conflicts between the minorities the Indians have recently come to the U.S. after having been ousted from their multi-generational home in Uganda by Idi Amin. Indians in the U.S. are often held up as model minorities (in rotation with Koreans and Chinese) and are offered as an example to African Americans of the rewards of hard work, family values, and the unquestionable fairness of American society.

Nico Slate's book, Colored Cosmopolitanism, is a welcome contribution to an area that has been paid scant attention. Slate joins a handful of researchers and writers to explore the connections between African-Americans and Indians. Vijay Prashad's sociological study The Karma of Brown Folk, and Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt's study of Howard Thurman's meetings with Gandhi (Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence), immediately come to mind.

Slate's understanding of the post-Indian Independence relationship between African-Americans and Indians engaged in the struggle against the oppression faced by both peoples can be nicely summed up as "Colored cosmopolitans opposed racism without fully abandoning the claims of race" (162). The sentence could also stand for much of the dynamic between the two groups over the past century. As one might suppose a great deal of the interaction between the two groups began and continued with religious affiliations and connections. Thurman, Carroll, and later Martin Luther King looked to a more capacious and radical Christianity while Vivekan and later Gandhi looked to a reformed Hinduism in which to ground the call for compassion and justice.

Slate concentrates on the central figures of Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Gandhi, and Chattopadhyaya and brings in others as needed. One wishes for more on the lives and experiences of those named as the writers of editorials and pamphlets, and gets the feeling that they could sustain monographs themselves, but Slate keeps his central argument in focus and lets the lives slide by, understandable yet frustrating.

The bedrock of the collaborative relationship and fellow feeling between African Americans and Indians is that the color line separated both from the full privileges, rights, and responsibilities of free people. Over the course of the past century and more, however, forces have continued to tear at that basic understanding. Indians in late nineteenth-century and first half of twentieth-century America faced with the oppressive and prejudicial laws and attitudes applied to all non-Anglos frequently sought to distance themselves from African Americans and have themselves categorized as white. African Americans frequently saw in India not race but caste as the equivalent of the color line.

Slate's strength is in going to the records, the newspapers, pamphlets, journals, and letters and showing the complexity of the shared struggle. By following Gandhi, for example, as he appears to make hypocritical statements about the importance of race and caste, Slate shows an activist coming to a more mature understanding as he corresponds with Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Cedric Drover, and a number of other African American and Indian activists. As importantly, Slate shows how the early work of Gandhi, Kamala Chattopadhyaya, Nehru, Thurman, and Carroll led to the nonviolent civil rights work of Martin Luther King.

Slate usefully offers "racial diplomacy" and "colored cosmopolitanism" as two ends of a continuum that various thinkers have occupied over the years. Racial diplomats seek to forge transnational alliances but keep racial identities firmly in place; whereas, colored cosmopolitans look to move beyond racial identifications...