The end of British rule in India and the task of building a new nation was as much an endeavour to forge new forms of knowledge as it was about inaugurating processes and institutions to establish a democratic republic. The Nehruvian drive to centralized planning, the inauguration of a range of developmental projects with foreign assistance especially from the United States, and the tensions and fissures of a new democratic polity have come to constitute some of the key characteristics of this moment in postcolonial India. The decades after formal independence saw the Indian state make significant investments to establish new institutes of higher learning and research to assist in the process of planning and in the larger project of building a new nation. The thrust towards ‘scientific industrialism’ and a belief in the crucial role of science for development meant an inordinate focus on the development of scientific research institutions in this period. Nevertheless, the new Indian state was also aware of the need to reimagine the socio-cultural ethos of an ancient civilization. In this vein, the humanities and social sciences were actively engaged in drawing the contours of and directing the trajectory of the ‘human sciences’ since the mid-twentieth century. Social science also became a crucial tool to gauge the realities and irregularities of developmental projects and to determine the extent to which the possibilities of postcolonial imaginations could draw flight or needed to be tempered.

Echoing a global tendency among Christian and secular organisations that became discernible shortly before the First World War, the largely US-led and financed Indian Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) launched a separate Boys’ Department in the first decade of the twentieth century. It gradually widened the scope of its activities in order to attract young males aged ten to seventeen. This trend gained further momentum during the interwar period, when boys’ work became increasingly popular not only in North America, but in various ideological and political quarters all over the globe. In the South Asian YMCA branches, it reached the peak of its influence in the two decades preceding the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947.

In this chapter, I will first reconstruct the wider transnational trends that led to the new focus on boys. I will then flesh out the genesis and specificities of the Indian Y's boys’ work schemes. In this context, I introduce the two main pillars of the association's secular program for boys, namely ‘physical work’ and camping and scouting, and discuss their ambivalent relationship with Indian nationalism. This analysis of these “adult-sponsored children's leisure activities” places particular emphasis on the way YMCA boy experts oscillated between an idiom of universalism and the impact of cultural and racial stereotyping.

Abstract Scholarship on development in Nehru's India, and US participation in these projects, has focused largely on agriculture and the emergence of the Green Revolution, population control, or on various schemes for village uplift. Nehruvian-era interest in “traditional” handicrafts has been largely ignored, positioned as, either a concession to Gandhian cottage industry, or as an effort to delineate the ancient roots of the new nation. Yet, handicrafts were also an important realm of employment and were seen as valuable export for India in the 1950s and early 1960s. Unlike agriculture, handicraft development offered a realm where women actors could carve out significant roles. This essay focuses on the Indo-American alliances that built the Central Cottage Industries Emporium in New Delhi, in a centre of a global handicraft trade.

Keywords: development, handicraft, India, Kamaladevi, Rockefeller, women

In the first decade after independence, the Government of India issued two postage stamps depicting subjects, which, though separated geographically by merely 75 miles in West Bengal, seemed at first look to embody alternative visions of postcolonial India. The first stamp, featuring the first fertilizer factory built by the Indian government at Sindri, stood clearly as a tribute to industrialization and the Nehruvian state's commitment to rapid economic development. The second celebrated the “Bankura horse,” a terracotta sculpture produced by potters of Panchmura village of West Bengal’s, Bankura district for over 300 hundred years (see Figure 10.1). In the early 1950s, renowned independence activist, feminist, social reformer, and handicrafts advocate Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay “discovered” the Bankura horses while researching crafts and publicized it as an embodiment of India's ancient and enduring tradition of artistry and craftsmanship. Yet, even though the horse entered the new National Craft Museum in New Delhi, versions of it—sometimes recreated in brass instead of clay—appeared for sale at the Central Cottage Industries Emporium in the heart of New Delhi's premier shopping district. In the early 1950s, Kamaladevi's organization, the Indian Cooperative Union (ICU), reinvented the government-owned handicrafts and textiles emporium on Connaught Place as India's largest department store, a central site for Indo-American cultural exchanges, and a critical depot for the export of Indian handicrafts to foreign markets, especially the United States. Wildly popular with customers, the Bankura horse became the store's official logo, instantly recognizable and legible to thousands of elite Indians and international tourists.

The itinerant nationalist and anti-colonial activist Taraknath Das (1884–1958) remains a relatively understudied figure in the history of India as well as the history of the United States of America. Given his centrality to the Ghadar movement, his education in the USA, and his role in inter-war anti-colonial movements, his life serves as a window into entangled histories of race and citizenship between the United States of America and colonial India in the late colonial era. Seen alongside other “expatriate patriots” such as Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) and Shyamji Krishnavarma (1857–1930), Das appears as a central figure in North American history of overseas Indian nationalism in the early to mid-twentieth century. Building upon legal and cultural histories of South Asian histories in the United States of America, this chapter advances conversations in legal history on citizenship and race by focusing on the specific history of Das’ applications for citizenship in the early twentieth century. After a brief expose of life in the USA from his entry in 1906 to 1925, I discuss his three applications for citizenship, resulting in his final receipt of it in 1914. Additionally, I briefly examine the rise of the Taraknath Das Foundation, showcasing his life at the crossroads of US and Indian histories. Das’ life story shows the lived experience of citizenship at the crossroads between Indian anti-colonial nationalism and Asian exclusion in the early twentieth century.

On May 28, 1964, Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, a prominent socialist member of the Indian parliament, was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi. His “crime” was attempting to enter a “whites only” restaurant. After the U.S. State Department sent an apology to the Indian Ambassador, Lohia informed reporters that both the State Department and the Indian Embassy “may go to hell.” American leaders should apologize “to the Statue of Liberty and to three billion citizens of the world.” Lohia's math is revealing. Those “three billion citizens,” far more than the population of India, represented all “dark” or “colored” people—terms of racial solidarity pioneered by the African American intellectual and antiracist activist, W.E.B. Du Bois. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Du Bois had articulated a transnational and transracial conception of “colored solidarity.” Lohia embraced such an expansive antiracist politics. When he explained that he courted arrest in Mississippi in order to show his support for the “revolution against color inequality,” Lohia meant not just the American civil rights movement, but related struggles against racism and imperialism throughout the world.

Lohia's transnational understanding of American racism mirrored the global lens with which he viewed Indian politics. Born in Fazibad District in the United Provinces in 1910, Lohia studied in Bombay, Benares, and Calcutta before traveling to Europe to advance his education. After completing his Ph.D. in Berlin, he returned to India in 1933, eager to contribute to the anticolonial struggle. He was soon arrested.

As sites of British imperial state-making and resistance to colonial power, India and the United States have found themselves entangled since the late eighteenth century. To choose a paradigmatic moment, the dumping of East India Company tea into Boston Harbour in 1773 offers a view onto multiple levels of this entanglement. The cargo and the participants—white settlers who adopted a pretended Indigenous “costume” to claim a native identity as “Indians”—reflected the discursive entanglement of the Americas with South Asia in European thought going back to Columbus. Yet, to say that India and the United States have been entangled for centuries raises more interesting questions: what is this unit called “India”? Or “the United States”? What might it mean for such units to be “entangled”? And, crucially, who are the agents of this entanglement? What is being entangled, where does this entanglement happen, and who is doing the entangling?

The chapters in this volume address these questions concretely. Chapters track people-in-motion, things-in-motion, ideas-in-motion, and practices-in-motion, with each line of motion also a vector—vectors carrying magnitude, leaving residue, and creating memory, like so many shoelaces criss-crossed over time and space. This motion went to, from, and within Bombay, Boston, Calcutta, Delhi, Hartford, Hawaii, London, New York, Philadelphia, Rudragar (Pantagar), San Francisco, Tasmania, and countless other places. People, things, ideas, and practices moved representationally through newspapers, theatres, sheet music, colleges, and motion pictures, but all these were transported by train and steamship or communicated by telegraph—for example, the Kansas grain shipped to India in 1897 and 1900, using funds mobilized through the New York Christian Herald, as described by Joanna Simonow in Chapter 4. The specific dependence on these nineteenth-century technologies places the Indo-U.S. entanglement within a certain moment of global history, a moment which enabled the emergence of coherent units to correspond to the labels “India” and the “United States.”

All the movement described in this volume took place in the aftermath of the dawning age of steam from the mid-nineteenth century, when railroads—and then steamships and the telegraph—would accelerate motion across vast space, prompting the consolidation of territories. These holdings were “battered, shaken, and undermined” by the “invincible force” of steam and its technological progeny.

Swami Vivekananda's speech at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago is often seen as the formal introduction of Hinduism and yoga to the general American public, and Vivekananda himself is largely depicted as a lone missionary figure. But Vivekananda was surrounded by fakirs in Chicago. As part of the wider Columbian Exhibition world's fair that hosted the Parliament, there were fakirs called “Hindoo Jugglers” who performed feats of magic, and the Midway Plaisance park was described as no less than “the paradise of fakirs… this throbbing picture of oriental life” since it was filled with salesmen. The magazine Puck crudely mocked Vivekananda's representation of Hinduism at the Parliament with a cartoon of a dark-skinned man holding a scroll that read “fakir.” The term followed Vivekananda for years, even after his death. Upon the completion of his first visit to the United States, he was nominally described as “Hindoo religious fakir” and also attacked as one of many “arrant” and “erratic” domestic religious “fakirs” in the United States who taught “all sorts of follies.” In 1902, Vivekananda was crudely eulogized by a Florida newspaper as a “fakir” who had “figured in a clever little hoax upon the American people.”

On November 17, 1960, Jawaharlal Nehru dedicated India's first agricultural university to the nation at Rudrapur, Nainital district, in what was then the state of Uttar Pradesh. The establishment of Uttar Pradesh Agricultural University was a part and parcel of India's postcolonial project of higher education that sought to cater to the needs of a widespread rural constituency. But as an institution the Uttar Pradesh Agricultural University (or UPAU) came to draw upon several lineages as it was impinged by changing priorities. Its planning and progress in the years after independence were contingent on early postcolonial imaginaries of progress for village India. But these motivations underwent a change in terms of narrowing of focus as nationalist ideals became encumbered by the desires for development in the 1960s. Along the way, UPAU abandoned some of the early founding ideals and embraced others. In particular, the stakeholders primed the institution to play a role in the execution of the “new strategy” in agriculture.”

There were countervailing forces at work that determined the course of UPAU's development from the time it was conceived through the years of its early growth. From 1955, an American team from the University of Illinois was stationed in the state to assist raising UPAU in the image of American land grant colleges. These initial American impulses rooted for maintaining the original spirit and core principles of land grant movement in the United States that stood for bolstering rural life, creating opportunities for rural populace, and taking action for building rural leadership.1 But these impulses had to come to terms with the regional state's priorities in India that sought to implant its own control, method and vision on to the emerging university.