The election of Kamala Harris as the first South Asian American Vice President of the United States has expanded interest in the long history of connections between the United States and South Asia. Harris joins an impressive roster of Indian American politicians—a roster that spans the political spectrum from conservative Republican governors like Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal to progressive Democratic members of congress like Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal. It would be a mistake to see the growing political prominence of the South Asian American community as a clear marker of the unity or visibility of that community. Indeed, questions of identity and authenticity mark many of the most prominent Indian American politicians—including Harris, Haley, and Jindal. What it means to be South Asian American—or Indian American—has long been bound up with complex and ever-shifting boundaries of race, nation, and religion. Those boundaries were in turn linked to larger and longer histories of mutual perception, multifaceted entanglements and concrete interactions between the United States and South Asia.

For decades, the historiography on modern South Asia has been tethered to the signposts of Empire and the nation-state as its recurrent referents. Even as postcolonial theory, Subaltern studies and feminist theory sought to expand the intellectual terrain, the dominance of the nation-Empire dyad has continued more or less unabated. The gradual waning of the Cold War, concurrent with the rise of Global History, has, however, brought into sharper focus the methodological limitations and shortcomings of both Imperial history and Area Studies. This edited volume offers a fresh approach to the intellectual, cultural, economic and literary histories that have “entangled” the United States of America and the Indian subcontinent. After global history had been initially dominated by transregional comparisons and the study of (unilateral) long-distance transfers, the more dynamic and process-oriented concept of “entanglement” became increasingly prominent in the field from the late 1990s onwards, producing myriad studies on the “back and forth of people ideas and things across boundaries”. The shift toward interactive “transnational” histories at times risked an uncritical celebration of connections and entanglements of various kinds, as if such histories could themselves usher in a new and more just way of looking at the human past. A “breathless sense of freedom,” to use the words of historian Paul Kramer, tinged even many of the richest transnational histories.