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Excerpt • Temple University Press Introduction An Indian in Washington India and America are located on opposite sides of the earth; therefore it is natural for America to think that we walk upside down, and for us to think that Americans walk upside down. —Pandita Ramabai, The Peoples of the United States (1889) The Sufferance of the Foreigner n late September 1905, the Indian nationalist Lajpat Rai had gathered with a group of tourists in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, when a guide directed Itheir attention to the works of art surrounding them. Plastered on the ceil- ing was The Apotheosis of Washington, a fresco featuring the first U.S. presi- dent on a celestial throne, flanked on each side by figures from classical Greco-Roman and nouveau American mythology (Figure I.1). Just below, The Frieze of American History encircled the rotunda with its selective time- line, and at eye level were enormous neoclassical canvases depicting scenes from the American Revolution and the conquest of the Americas. From ceil- ing to floor, the artwork of the Capitol presented a set of interwoven images that moved seamlessly from the mythological to the historical, containing within it, it would seem, a visual argument: The United States was the heir apparent of Western empire. At the dawn of the new century, as America extended its imperial reach across the globe, who would have thought to see otherwise? In Washington, DC, during a three-week tour of the East Coast, Lajpat Rai discussed his visit in an editorial for the Panjabee, an English-language weekly based out of Lahore. The Capitol was indeed a “picture [that] tells volumes of history,” he told his readers, but Rai paid little attention to its classical influences and imperial overtures.1 Instead, he called attention to the images of the British, who, by the turn of the century, were viewed more as American allies than as historical adversaries. Throughout his editorial, 2 | IntroductionExcerpt • Temple University Press Figure i.1 Detail from The Apotheosis of Washington (1865). (Architect of the Capitol) Rai added details and subtle quips that emphasized that American indepen- dence was an act of opposition against the very same British from whom India was currently wresting its freedom. When describing John Trumbull’s painting Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, Rai cast George Washington with a kind of personal defiance (“Washington declines to accept overtures from Lord Cornwallis”), knowing that readers of the Panjabee would remember the latter as governor-general of India rather than as a redcoat general in the American Revolution. Rai appended the title of Trumbull’s Surrender of General Burgoyne with the note “by the British,” as if to make the sides of the battle unmistakably clear.2 He especially relished that, for the British, the Capitol was full of “humiliating themes.” When the tour guide pointed out that the floor beneath the party’s feet was “paved by beautiful tiles imported from England” and that “it was a matter of great satisfaction that the only English material used for [. .] this national edifice was one which was always Excerpt • Temple University PressIntroduction | 3 underfoot,” Rai noted that the audience, barring the few Englishmen in at- tendance, erupted into cheers.3 By the end of his tour, however, Rai’s mood had changed. When he trav- eled down the Potomac to George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, his prose grew more maudlin and he confessed that the “visit saddened [him].”4 He remembered the plight of India under British rule and described his shame at remaining a colonial subject while in the home of Atlantic patriots: Reader! Can I tell you what thoughts arose in my mind in the course of my itinerary through Washington and what feelings and sentiments were born and stifled in the course of two brief days I stayed in this city. No! I cannot. I dare not. Bonded slave as I am, how can I give utterance or thoughts which though noble in themselves cannot be uttered with freedom and impunity in the land of the mighty Aryans—in the land of Pratap and Shivaji—in the land which is mine by birth and by birth of my forefathers but where I now live only by the sufferance of the foreigner.5 Rai’s address to the reader turned what may have first appeared as dispas- sionate description into overwrought testimony. His “itinerary through Washington” provided an occasion to voice a form of Indian nationalism that reflected his and, by proxy, his readers’ status as colonized subjects. But critically, in his editorial, Rai’s Indian imaginary was viewed through the lens of American history: George Washington rubbed shoulders with figures from India’s past, while the British appeared as a common enemy of liberty in both the New World and Old. To walk through the hallways of American history was to confront the “feelings and sentiments” of being an Indian on the cusp of the twentieth century—not only to bear the indignity of remaining colonized but also to imagine the “freedom and impunity” that could come with national sovereignty. I begin with this moment in Rai’s itinerary less for the merits of his comparison and more because it captures how expatriate Indians who came to the United States in the early twentieth century engaged in deeply self-reflex- ive ways of seeing. For figures such as Rai, the social and historical landscape of America acted as a reflective surface that provided glimpses of recognition and comparison—a means of seeing oneself in the transnational other. But if “reflection” describes the mirror image returned to a viewer, then “refraction” describes the distorted and often transformed image that appears when glancing from “a comparative angle of vision.”6 From the vantage point of the U.S. capital, Rai glimpsed the Indian anticolonial cause through what I call a “transnational refraction,” a political optic and discursive strategy that allowed him to reframe his cause from the local to the international, from a single nationalist struggle into the latest episode in a string of liberal revolu- 4 | IntroductionExcerpt • Temple University Press tions that included the United States. Through such refractions, the walls of the Capitol and Mount Vernon provided a prism that opened up analogies, encouraged new interpretive frames, and offered ways to imagine how American history could shed light on an anticolonial Indian future. While transnational refractions were generative to Rai’s anticolonial imaginary, they also led to distortions, which obscured as often as they re- vealed. To give one example, while Rai spent time in DC, scenes of the U.S. colonization of Native American lands also appeared in his peripheral vision, suggesting unseemly comparisons that did not map so neatly onto his Indian–American analogy. He had observed the recurring “pathos”-filled images of Native Americans throughout the National Mall, noting “a pio- neer in desperate conflict with a savage” painted in the portico and a “de- jected chieftain and Indian (Red) mother” etched in the Frieze.7 Yet Rai abstained from evoking the obvious comparison between British colonialism in India and settler colonialism in the Americas, even if the appellative twins of Indians and “Indians (Red)” shared the common narrative of soci- eties subjugated by the European outsider. The reflections and distortions that emerged from Lajpat Rai’s refracted encounter with the United States—the analogies he saw and the ones he did not—raise a series of questions: What did it mean for an Indian nationalist to compare his cause to the conservative revolution of white settlers? What was the effect of describing India as a “land of Aryans” when such a word conjured different racial connotations in the United States? How did his al- lusions to religiously Hindu figures Pratap Singh and Shivaji expose his communal, rather than secular, vision of Indian nationhood? The comparisons Rai articulated and the details he fixated on reveal as much about his image of America as they do about his image of India. But comparisons— whether used as sustained analogies or fleeting metaphors—are often -un predictable, slipping easily into directions unintended by their writer. When Rai described himself as a “bonded slave,” for instance, how could his readers not also draw a link to the history of African Americans, who had gained emancipation only one generation earlier? In 1905, the stories of Native American dispossession, of Black inequality—and more broadly, the histo- ries of race in the United States—continued to lurk in his periphery, never fully erased, always threatening to unsettle Rai’s tidy Indian–American analogy of national, anticolonial revolution. The very presence of, and dis- crimination against, Indians (or Hindus, as they were called) in the United States disrupted the analogies that Rai so readily sought.8 After Rai returned to the United States in November 1914, where he re- sided in exile for the four years that marked World War I, he eventually came to understand America differently, reckoning with the issues of race, im- migration, and empire head-on. As he worked for the cause of Indian in- Excerpt • Temple University PressIntroduction | 5 dependence from an office in Manhattan, Rai developed a network of friend- ships and acquaintances with American liberals and radicals, through whom he began to understand the complexities of life for immigrants, the working classes, and racialized communities in the United States. For the Americans who formed alliances with Rai and other Indian expatriates, this engage- ment with the Indian cause led to their own transnational refractions, dra- matically shifting their perspective.

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