In February 1914, Sudhindra Bose appeared before a congressional committee in Washington DC to depose about a burning question of the time: the “Hindu labour immigration” to the United States.
Bose had recently begun teaching political science at the State University of Iowa and was the president of the Hindusthan Association, a collective of Indians studying in the US. He took his place before the committee armed with copious facts. He was articulate, persuasive and, unlike the other Indian representative chosen to speak that day before the congressional committee, fluent in English.
To the panel headed by John Burnett of Alabama, Bose began with a frank admission:
“I have often been asked why the Hindus come to the country at all. I wish to say that the Hindus come to this country precisely for the same reason as the millions that come to this country from other countries. To us America is another name for opportunity. We come here to this country because of the opportunities we have for social uplift , intellectual betterment, and economical advancement…I came to this country as a laborer and if I had been in any other country I would not have had the opportunity of education that I have received in this country.”
He insisted that the US was not, contrary to sensationalist media reports, facing an “Hindu invasion”. There were only about 4,900 “Hindus” in the vast country, most of whom worked as unskilled labour in the farms of California. No threat could be posed by them to skilled jobs in the US.
Bose’s argument in essence was that Hindus, a word used interchangeably at the time with Indians, were unlike the Chinese and Japanese, the other Asian groups whose immigration had fuelled raging xenophobia in the US. Indians, he said, were Aryans and Caucasians, which made them white, a categorisation that allowed their naturalisation as per a 1790 law. Most Hindus, Bose said, were keen to learn English, ready to assimilate, “clean in their habits” and not of “ill-health” and, thus, unlikely to be a public charge.
However impassioned, Bose’s arguments did not convince the Congress. Based on the hearings, it passed the 1917 Immigration Act (or the Barred Zone Act), severely restricting the entry of Asians besides making immigrants take literacy tests and pay an entry fee or a “head tax”.
Bose’s own personal fortunes fared better – at least in the end. In a ruling in 1917, an Iowa court upheld his naturalisation petition on the same grounds as the arguments he once made before the Congress. But six years later, in February 1923, the US Supreme Court pronounced that Asians were “not free, not white” in the Bhagat Singh Thind case, in effect stripping Bose and other Indians of their US citizenship. Bose was enraged by the judgement since it branded all Indians with the mark of “racial inferiority”, he wrote.
Four years later, he regained US citizenship when a federal court of appeals ruled in his favour on a “technicality of a law”. It stated that Bose’s first application for citizenship in 1917 had been made in “good faith” and that the government had not challenged it on the grounds of race.
That decision was a big relief for Bose. As a non-citizen with limited rights and privileges, he said, it was hard to live in any place. An American citizenship secured him a place in the world. “[I am] a citizen of the world,” he said, “merely a spectator trying to occupy a front seat and see the show, and the United States affords the best show I have seen yet.”
Outstanding student
Sudhindra Bose was born on December 3, 1883, in Dhaka to Dwarka Nath Bose and Sarojini Devi. He studied at various institutions in Dhaka and Comilla, including Comilla Victoria College, before arriving in Philadelphia in 1904 as a poor sailor at the age of 21.
His early years in the United States were tough, he told the Cedar Rapids Outlook decades later. There were job stints on a farm, an orchard and at the department store Wanamaker’s, where he earned $7 a week. Survival was difficult. He described having only a dollar and facing “a dunning landlady” and “gnawing hunger” with only “his imperfect knowledge of the American language”. But even in the face of tribulations, he continued to aspire.
From the East Coast, he moved first to Missouri, where he studied at Park College, and then to Urbana-Champaign in Illinois, where he attained degrees in literature at the University of Illinois. (His master’s thesis on the Sunday Newspaper in the US appeared in book form.) It was in Iowa, though, that he found his academic métier and a mentor in Benjamin Shambaugh, who headed the department of political science.
Shambaugh described Bose as an outstanding student. In 1913, while Bose was Shambaugh’s research student, he was made “instructor” of a new course called Oriental Politics and Civilization. He had “every requisite of an excellent teacher,” Shambaugh said. “He was witty, diligent in research, an exceptional lecturer and orator with good command of English, and he had a pleasing personality. His ideals were of the highest, and he unselfishly proposed to give his all for the students.”
Apart from teaching, Bose excelled at making connections. He was a founding member of the Hindusthan Association (a body of Indian students on US campuses), a president of the Cosmopolitan Club (a forum of international students on US campuses) and a national vice-president of the American Association of Cosmopolitan clubs. As the US government and courts decided on the vexatious issue of Indian immigration and naturalisation, he appealed to members of the Cosmopolitan clubs to speak up for inclusion and live up to the motto “Above all nations is humanity”.
In September 1927, the same year he regained his naturalised status, Bose married Anne Zimmerman, a Swiss-born teacher of French who knew five languages.
All his life, he wrote extensively and prolifically. Besides publishing four books between 1916 and 1934, he wrote frequently for various publications such as The Hawk Eye, Des Moines Register, The Scientific Monthly, The Hindusthanee Student, as well as for the Modern Review, published from Calcutta.
In his book Fifteen Years in America (1920), Bose shared thoughts on things he had witnessed during his travels around the country: the politics, the universities, the rural schools, the library system, the freedoms its women enjoyed, and the quality of everyday life.
There is a passage in the book on segregation in the southern states, which Bose described as a “social war” where the whites insisted that the coloured population be “kept in its place” through “painfully elaborate” means when necessary. He wrote:
“Every railroad has separate white waiting rooms and colored waiting rooms, white cars and black cars which are called ‘Jim Crow cars.’ Every trolley car line has white seats and ‘darky’ seats. Every theater has an African section quite apart from the American. The list of these invidious distinctions may be multiplied indefinitely… it is interesting to observe that when one starts down the hill of racial prejudice, he never knows when to stop.”
Bose was an eloquent speaker and well-regarded on the lecture circuit. In his talks, he tried to explain India to his audience, the unjust and exploitative ways of British rule, the high taxes and trade imbalances that sustained the Empire, and the demands for self-governance.
East and West
Bose died in 1946, a year before India’s independence, something he had longed for and passionately championed. If there was one consistent theme in his writings and work, it was the artificiality of borders and how nationalism and patriotism divided nations and peoples. He connected the fierce competition fostered by nationalism to fortunes made by the munitions industry – a matter on which he wrote presciently – and insisted that ties of brotherhood mattered more.
He quoted Tagore, who spoke about the “cult of nationalism” on his US tour in 1917: “Western nationalism is a perfected mechanical device for the promotion of material success and welfare of those persons composing the nation. It puts forth its tentacles into other people who are of ‘no nation,’ such as the Chinese and the Indian, and sucks their hearts dry. This nationalism is the process of turning a whole people to self-interest and selfishness.”
Jawaharlal Nehru, whom Bose met on a visit to India in 1931, voiced similar sentiments, which were quoted by Bose in an article for the Des Moines Register: “Civilization has had enough of narrow nationalism and gropes toward a wider cooperation and interdependence… So long as there is domination of one country by another and exploitation of one class by another, there will always be attempts to subvert the existing order and no stable equilibrium can endure.”
These words echoed what Bose had always believed in, especially since 1913, when he began teaching in Iowa and got associated with the Cosmopolitan Club. “The east and west will one day meet face to face, lay aside all prejudice, and shake hands on a common platform of humanity,” he wrote in the Des Moines Register.
