At a time when Americans held odd ideas about India, a poet set the record straight

The United States is an extremely popular destination for Indian students today, no matter how strong the dollar gets. But a century ago, few people from India had the American dream.

Back in the early 1930s, Indian students preferred to go to Britain, Germany and Japan, in that order, staying away from the US because of a combination of distance, high living costs and unfriendly immigration. In 1934, one enterprising 22-year-old decided to buck this trend: Krishnalal Shridharani.

Born in what is now Bhavnagar district, Shridharani, who was a prolific poet, short story writer and playwright, moved to the United States to join a master’s programme in sociology and economics at New York University. He was a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranth Tagore.

“Only the adventurous and a few strays among Indian students ever think of coming to the United States,” Shridharani wrote in his book My India, My America. “They are ones who either do not need or do not want a governmental appointment upon their return to India. Or they belong to that small species of self-reliant Indian students who are eager to learn new industries and new professions and who intend to embark upon private enterprises, instead of becoming cogs in an already well-geared governmental setup. They must be at least of a pioneer type, and not after the safety of the middle road.”

Shridharani had no intention to permanently settle down in America. Raised in Gujarat, he enthusiastically joined the Indian independence movement while studying at Gujarat Vidyapith. “I used to go to Gandhi’s ashrama almost every evening to attend prayers and to meet visitors of whom there was an unending procession,” he wrote.

In 1930, he participated in the Dandi March and was arrested for “defying the Salt Act” and sentenced to three months in jail. A year later, he enrolled at Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, where he met his “American gurus”: James Pratt of Williams College, who taught ethics, and Boyd Tucker, an English instructor. It was at Santiniketan that Shridharani got the idea of pursuing higher education in the United States. His plan became a reality when a recommendation letter from Tagore secured him a scholarship from the maharaja of the princely state of Bhavnagar.

He left for New York in 1934.

A new world

“It was a hot May afternoon in 1934 when my boat began to take me farther and farther away from my near relatives and dear friends, who stood huddled on the Ballard Pier,” Shridharani wrote. “I kept gazing at them as long as I could, and then retired to my cabin. The steward came to remove the heaps of flowers that covered the floor, and even the thought of new adventures could not prevent tears from filling my eyes.”

The ship took the usual route via Aden and the Suez Canal, going on to Europe and then finally the Big Apple. It was a long journey that took several weeks.

From the time of his arrival, Shridharani said he was captivated by the American atmosphere. “When I came over here on June 13, 1934, aboard the Majestic, I had the proverbial ‘hollow eyes and sunken cheeks’ of the Indian male – a man of twenty-two whom no one ever expected to smile,” he wrote.

At that time there were only about 4,000 Indians in the country, most of whom had come before the 1917 Immigration Act stopped arrivals from “barred zones” such as India. “Half of the ‘four thousand’ are the California Singhs, a group of sturdy Sikhs who have distinguished themselves as honest-to-goodness farmers,” Shridharani said. “The other half consists of Alis and Khans who live in the great industrial centres of the East.”

A minuscule number of students, professionals and businessmen from India were exempt from the 1917 Act. These people formed a tiny and well-connected Indian community in New York. “There are about a hundred Indians in this more fortunate periphery of the Hindu community of the United States – a community which changes constantly,” Shridharani wrote, using the words Hindu and Indian interchangeably. “Shahs come and Dases go – and each new arrival is met at the boat by at least one or two from this group.”

The Indians would meet at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan named Bombay Moon, which, in the words of Shridharani, had the odour of “frying kebab and Bombay Duck”.

There were no caste divisions among the Indians in New York at the time. Among its pillars were Romesh Roy, an importer, and the owner of Bombay Moon who Shridharani did not name. Shridharani said this owner and Roy would “fraternise with great democracy in organisations devoted to the welfare of Indians” in the US. “The importer will not hesitate to take his wife in her delicate saris to the Bombay Moon, and the proprietor probably will let his wife cross its portals to chat with her,” he wrote.

The few Indian students in New York would go everywhere and observe and taste everything, wrote Shridharani. “And after they have been here a while, they drink more and more freely of the exhilarating American atmosphere, and loosen one tentacle after another from their Indian connections in the country,” he said.

Stereotypes about India

The American popular imagination was filled with strange ideas about India at the time. Louis Bromfield, an American writer and conservationist, wrote in the introduction of My India, My America that “more rubbish has been thought, spoken and written about India than about any country in the world”.

Bromfield explained the reasons for this. “India has been exploited for nearly two hundred years by all sorts of individuals and organisations, from the East India Company to Madame Blavatsky and Katherine Mayo,” he wrote. “All kinds of people from fortune tellers to politicians and missionaries have made sizable fortunes of one kind or another presenting India to the world in the fashion that suited their ends.”

Americans were also deeply influenced by the way British students and professionals depicted the Empire and its occupation of India. In fact, one of the reasons Shridharani wrote the book was to show a more accurate picture of India to Americans.

As a student, Shridharani regularly debated Britons and Americans on the colonisation of India. “Rising like a trout to the fly, like a fireman who hears the five-alarm bell, I could not remain indifferent to any opportunity to present our side,” he wrote.

On one occasion an American asked him, “Wouldn’t you rather have railroads and electricity, municipal hygiene and public-school systems, than a mediaeval existence under your own rule?”

Shridharani responded, “Personally I am not hypnotised by the empty word ‘independence’. And yet I am for it because I feel that under our own rule, that is, under a government that has the people’s interest at heart, we will have more of the things you ascribe to the British rule.” He reminded his interlocutor that a country like Japan did not need British colonisers to become modernised.

Cultural shocks

As can be expected, the United States presented a few cultural shocks to the Indian student.

Some of his early interactions with Americans bordered on the comical. When Shridharani met a fellow student named June, he asked her whether there wasn’t a month with the same name. She responded by asking if there wasn’t a god named Krishna. “Both gambits were correct, of course, and we then attacked our food in silence for a few minutes, particularly I, who thought she had gone pretty far, since I would never ask an American about Saint Peter, for example, or Moses,” Shridharani said.

Among the things that shook him was the American cafeteria with its tray-pushers, troughs of food and cold meats.

“To a high caste Hindu from Gujarat an assortment of sliced meat is about as appealing as an array of sliced babies,” he wrote. “At home we can live and die without ever having seen it. On shipboard, I looked the other way when my neighbours dissected it, but here it lay revealing the actual contours of the original animal, with fat hanging on it, and bones protruding. I took my handkerchief – which released a faint fragrance of sandalwood – from my pocket and I put it to the nose.”

Shridharani finally came to grips with meat several months later on New Year’s Day when he ate it by accident.

Education system

After studying in Visva-Bharati, where the students, teachers and staff knew each other well, Shridharani was unsettled by what he called the “uniformly impersonal character” of the American educational system. During his enrollment at Columbia University, where he did his MS and PhD, he was instructed “to fill out five different schedules on five different cards. And how I laboured over them. I even had to write down the name of my mother’s father on each of those five blanks.”

He lamented that, unlike in Santiniketan, there was no personal connection in the American educational system. “It was natural, then, for me to feel strange, a nameless but numbered item in a huge academic mill; I was not accustomed to regulated and spiritless teacher-student relationships,” he said.

Still, on the whole, he seemed to enjoy the student experience. “Another feature of education in the United States that interested me was the free discussion between professors and students,” he wrote. “I found an equality of status between the teachers and their classes in exchange of questions and answers and in informal argument; there were even cases in which students who made a habit of out-talking their professors were tolerated.”

Shridharani noticed other differences from the British and Indian education systems – the absence of textbooks, for one. “The entire British system of education in India is ruled by the tradition of textbook parrotry,” he wrote. “The textbook system simply does not encourage general reading or give a general comprehension of a subject.”

The examination system too was different. “In India, examinations are given to find out what the student does not know, while in America they are used to discover what he knows,” Shridharani said. “Examiners in India seem to take sadistic pleasure in failing their students, and in many instances the examiner who scuttles the most students is considered the best of the lot.”

For all these reasons and others, the British rulers in India tried to discourage young people from studying in the United States. “The American system of learning is given poor marks by the British not only because the temptation to do this is so great, but also because they think that Indian students trained in American universities are ‘spoiled beyond repair’ for British rule in India,” Shridharani wrote.

He said he wanted to “investigate” the “dangerous” ideas of the “American Way”. “Moreover, my imagination has led me to a point where I could see a day coming when American education would be held far above British training – even in India,” he said, in prophetic words.

A prolific writer before he moved to the US, Shridharani was known in Gujarat for his historical, social and children’s plays. Apart from these, he had written a novel while in jail and a collection of poems. In 1938, he published a book in English titled War Without Violence, which became popular among African-American leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.

Krishnalal Shridharani moved back to India just before the country attained independence. He continued writing books and articles for Indian and international publications until his untimely death at the age of 48 in 1960.

Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His Twitter handle is @ajaykamalakaran.