In the aftermath of partition, a familiar complaint:
"India Embassy Calls Reports to U.S. on Rioting One-Sided"
"American reporters are largely concentrated about Delhi (in India)... therefore the picture they give is a one-sided one"
"I do not say that what they report is not true. But if you don't tell what is happening in West Punjab (in Pakistan), then the picture is out of focus"
"Mr. Sen said that many American newspapers 'are not printing dispatches from India which give the other side of the picture.'
"While disturbances in the Punjab hold public attention in this country, wide progress which is being made in the evolution of India's political constitution passes unnoticed"
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A profile of Jinnah by Phillips Talbot, the erstwhile American ambassador to Greece turned journalist:
"One-Man Crusade Split India"
"Jinnah, Regarded by His Opponents as Unyielding Tyrant, Secured Separate Moslem State After 12-Year Fight"
"For Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the decision to carve a separate Moslem state out of India, approved here by the Moslem League Council, is a completely personal triumph"
"If chaos and disruption should result, the Moslem League president may have won a pyrrhic victory. Yet it will be his and his alone, whatever comes of it"
"The impending partition of India provides a subject for close scrutiny by policy-makers in Washington, who are concerned over the change which the creation of Hindustan and Pakistan will work on big power relationships throughout the world"
"Hitherto India has not possessed any independent influence in world affairs, although the frequent conflicts between the Hindu and Moslem communities and between each of them and Britain have had reverberations in other parts of the world"
An interesting article found in the Romanul American (a Soviet-aligned publication for Romanian Americans based out of Detroit), published on August 30, 1947 on "India's Sham Liberation"
"A great deception is being prepared in Downing Street. Throughout the whole world is being trumpeted the news that on the 15th of August 1947 freedom is being granted to India--after having been under the dominion of Great Britain for some three centuries"
"Without a full knowledge of the facts surrounding this decision it is possible that many people will really believe that a revolution has come about in the attitude of Britain towards the colonial and oppressed people of the British Empire"
“But one of the central decisions of the Nehru government was on this question: even though it sometimes did not abrogate its reformistic programmes, it decided to give them a bureaucratic rather than a mobilizational form”
“For the Congress leadership, clearly, the political task after assuming power was to demobilize its own movement, not to radicalize it further.”
"A heathen Hindoo by the name of Bipin Chandra Pal addressed the Moral Education Society of Chicago the other day as follows: 'I am not ashamed of appearing before you as a heathen.'"
"'Heathen means one who is not a Christian, and I am not ashamed of confessing that I am not a Christian. If I had any doubt on the subject when I left India, my two years' residence in Christian England and Christian American have removed every bit of doubt'"
"I am prouder than ever of being a heathen, as distinguished from being a Christian.'"
"Well, there is very little difference between a heathen and a Christian, if the latter does not keep God's commandments.'"
One way to think about this is to see "South Asianism" as a debased desi version of the "negritude" movement that emerged among Francophone African intellectuals in the metropole in the early-mid 20th century. 1/n
Negritude (or "blackness") was an aesthetic and literary movement that blossomed across the African diaspora, from Paris, to Harlem and the Caribbean. However, despite its lofty goal of resisting colonial domination, it was fundamentally constrained politically. 2/n
Although early votaries came from different countries, they were bound in the metropole by their shared disdain for colonial dominance and--critically-- the homogenizing effect of French racism towards Africans. 3/n