What We Think of America

Ramachandra Guha — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 12:35:56 EST

At a garden party in Calcutta sometime in the late Fifties, a football kicked by the host's son broke a whisky bottle. Fragments of glass entered the exposed arm of the Consul General of the United States of America, who was taken to the hospital to be stitched up. As he went off, the biologist J. B. S. Haldane broke an embarrassed silence with this comment: 'A little Bengali communist has successfully attacked an American imperialist.'

By the time I moved to Calcutta twenty years later, a communist government had come to power in Bengal. One of its first acts was to name the street on which the US Consulate stood after Ho Chi Minh. Otherwise too the intellectual climate was suffused with hostility to America. Our heroes were Marx and Mao, and, moving on, writers who had taken our side in the Cold War, such as Jean Paul Sartre and Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez.

I became a member of the local British Council, but would not enter the library of the United States Information Service. Then my wife got a scholarship to Yale, and I reluctantly followed. I reached New Haven on a Friday, and was introduced to the Dean of the School where I was to teach. On Sunday I was taking a walk through the campus when I saw the Dean park his car, take a large carton out of the boot, and carry it across the road to the School and up three flights to his office.

That sight of the boss as his own coolie was a body blow to my anti-Americanism. My father and grandfather had both been heads of Indian research laboratories; any material they took to work or back--even a slim file with a single piece of paper in it--would be placed in the car by one flunkey and carried inside by another. (Doubtless the Warden of an Oxford College can likewise call upon a willing porter.) Over the years, I have often been struck by the dignity of labour in America, by the ease with which high-ranking Americans carry their own loads, fix their own fences, and mow their own lawns. This, it seems to me, is part of a wider absence of caste or class distinctions. Indian intellectuals have tended to downplay these American achievements: the respect for the individual, the remarkable social mobility, the searching scrutiny to which public officials and state agencies are subjected. They see only the imperial power, the exploiter and the bully, the invader of faraway lands and the manipulator of international organizations to serve the interests of the American economy. The Gulf War, as one friend of mine put it, was undertaken 'in defence of the American way of driving'.

On the world stage America is not a pretty sight. Even between its various wars of adventure, its arrogance is on continuous display. The United States has disregarded strictures passed on it by the International Court of Justice, and defaulted on its financial obligations to the United Nations. It has violated the global climate change treaty, and the global biodiversity treaty. It has not signed the agreement to abolish the production of landmines. The only international treaties it signs and honours are those it can both draft and impose on other countries, such as the agreement on Intellectual Property Rights.

The truth about America is that it is at once deeply democratic and instinctively imperialist. This curious coexistence of contrary values is certainly exceptional in the history of the world. Other democratic countries, such as Sweden or Norway at the present time, are not imperialist. Scandinavian countries honour their international obligations, and (unlike the Americans) generously support social welfare programmes in the poorer parts of the world. Other imperialist countries, such as France and Great Britain in the past, were not properly democratic. In the heyday of European expansion men without property and all women did not have the vote. Even after suffrage was extended British governments were run by an oligarchy. The imagination boggles at the thought of a Ken Starr examining the sexual and other peccadilloes of a Benjamin Disraeli.

Historically, anti-Americanism in India was shaped by an aesthetic distaste for America's greatest gift--the making of money. When Jawaharlal Nehru first visited the United States in 1949, as Prime Minister of a free India, he was given a banquet in New York where the host told him: 'Mr Neroo, there are fifty billion dollars sitting around this table...' Naturally, the Brahmin schooled by British socialists was less than impressed.

Within India, the austere socialism of Nehru's day has now been replaced by the swaggering buoyancy of consumer capitalism. In cultural terms, America, rather than Britain, has become the locus of Indian emulation. Politically, too, the countries are closer than ever before. Yet the new enchantment with America--which is perhaps most manifest amongst politically minded Hindus--seems to have as shallow a foundation as the older disgust. Subliminally, but sometimes also on the surface, it is premised on the belief that America and its ally Israel have taken a tough line with the Muslims. (They take no nonsense from the Palestinians, as we should take no nonsense from the Pakistanis.) The prosperous Indian community in America models itself on the Jewish diaspora, whose influence it hopes one day to equal, and even exceed.

The current admiration for the United States has all to do with power. Strategic thinkers in New Delhi have little time for America's experiments with transparency of governance; they ask only that it recognize India as the 'natural' leader of this part of the world--as, in fact, the United States of South Asia. That it already is. Like its new-found political mentor, India is more reliably democratic than the other countries of South Asia; at the same time, it seeks to bully and dominate them. At least in the short term, the prestige attached to the term 'democracy' in the post Cold War (and post September 11) world will make India even more insolent in its dealings with its neighbours. Echoing a famous President of Mexico, King Gyanendra might well say: 'Poor Nepal! So far from God, so near to the Republic of India.'

Desicritics Author: Ramachandra Guha

What We Think of America