A Forgotten Ambassador in Cairo, page 20
A party to celebrate Kahlil’s forty-sixth birthday in 1929 had Syud and Sarojini Naidu amongst a gathering of some of the prominent writers and poets of the day. Sarojini was visiting the United States at this time, and she wrote excitedly to her daughter, Leilamani, from New York on 5 January 1929, “I heard of a very dear old friend whom I hadn’t seen for 14 years…a very wonderful and mysterious Polish musician, Naadine Lysak. So I…flew down acres of road to find her. It was like a marvelous New Year’s gift to me to find the friend of long ago in such a strange fashion! And the delight was a party at the house of a lovely woman who translates Greek poetry, Alma Reed: it was a gathering of international admirers of the Syrian poet Kahlil Gibran, to celebrate his birthday and the jubilee of his literary life. 40,000 Syrians in New York are holding a special festival tomorrow to crown him with a triple crown and chant his praises in Arabic. He read some of his English poems but the rest were recited or declaimed by an American woman with a gift for such interpretation: and as she read, the poet was so deeply moved by the beauty and sorrow of his own verse that the tears streamed down his face and he held my hand seeking understanding…It was a great experience. Genius is the divinest beauty in the universe.”23 When Kahlil died in April 1931 as a result of unrestrained drinking, Syud was one of those who spoke at a gathering to pay tribute to the poet.
With Govil’s literary pursuits being stymied by the closure of his magazine, he followed his other passion of being an inventor. He attained a modicum of fame for his design of the printing equipment to print the Devanagari alphabet on the Linotype machine. He worked with the Mergenthaler Linotype Company and obtained a patent for the design in 1937. In 1939, he was even able to sell a couple of these machines during his visit to India. Annette accompanied Govil on his visit to India and died there in 1942 due to malaria and heart failure. Govil was interned in India by the British in 1939 for his sympathy towards the nationalist cause and released in 1947. He returned to New York City soon after and then worked with Intertype Corporation of Brooklyn and IBM to adapt the Devanagari script for the typewriter. During his last days, he lived in Brooklyn, Rockland County, and at the Jacques Marchais Centre of Tibetan Art in Richmond, Staten Island. He died at the age of 57 on 3 July 1956 at Bombay due to cerebral thrombosis while on a visit to India. 24
Curiously, sometime in 1956 (during Govil’s visit to Bombay), a question was asked in the Upper House of the Indian Parliament of the Minister of Commerce and Industry, “Will the Minister be pleased to state whether Government are aware that Shri Hari G Govil has given a successful demonstration in Bombay and other places of the working of the Intertype Devnagri Photosetter, a machine invented by him in which matter can be simultaneously be printed both in Hindi and English without using any type. If so, whether Government have obtained any information about this machine and whether it is proposed to make any efforts for the procurement or manufacture of the said machine?” The minister replied that he had no knowledge about this.25 And with that, Hari Govind Govil was forgotten in his country of birth.
20
British Propaganda
(1924–32)
SYUD HOSSAIN’S DEVOTION to the Mahatma stopped well short of emulating his lifestyle. As Muzumdar says, “Austerity and Hossain never went together. He enjoyed living in style and always made the most favourable impression.” Not for Syud was Gandhi’s ascetic diet of goat’s milk and almonds; his fidelity to his drink and a fondness for chicken was a standard refrain amongst his friends, to which Syud’s response was, “Saints and I do not get along together”.1 His nomadic lifestyle necessitated flitting from one hotel room to the next, and a permanent home was thus a superfluous accoutrement in his life. The only time he had a relatively stable abode in a New York hotel was during his editorship of The New Orient. While this was a convenient way to live, it was nevertheless an expensive lifestyle to maintain, especially with Syud’s penchant for classy digs like the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. His lecture tours funded his indulgence during the initial years but over time he began to feel the pinch on his purse and found himself debating on his future. An April 1925 note from British Intelligence in New York to the India Office in London makes a curious observation; “Hose [Sir J. Walter Hose] may be interested in knowing that Syud Hossain is thinking of going back to India this year. His agent says that he is finding it difficult to get engagements sufficient to make in worth while for him to stay.”2 A quick and rough analysis from historical newspapers on the number of talks that Syud Hossain gave do show a decline in 1925 as compared to the previous year, but this can be attributed to the initial novelty of a new speaker, as in subsequent years the numbers keep steady with occasional peaks and troughs.
Syud most likely was not allowed to go to India. As far back in April 1922, correspondence within London’s India Office regarding passport control for India mentions that, “The passport office presumably has the M.I.5. Black List of Indians, and this doubtless is referred to before visas are granted. If the applicant’s name appears in such list no passport should be given without reference to you.”3 Syud’s name most probably figured on that list since. An updated list of “Indian Extremists in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Panama” of January 1928 explicitly contains his name along with those of Bhagat Singh Thind, Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, Sudhindranath Bose, Taraknath Das, Sailendra Nath Ghose, Hiramba Lal Gupta, Hari Govind Govil, Pandurang Khankhoji, Mahendra Pratap, and Evelyn Roy.4 In the 1930s the names of Muzumdar and Anup Singh were also added to the list.
In India, the exuberance that prevailed between 1920 and 1922, when Gandhi launched his non-cooperation movement, was ebbing. Gandhi, though sentenced for six years imprisonment in 1922, was released prematurely on 5 February 1924 due to his ill health, having spent a shade less than two years in prison. The political scene was in a bit of a quagmire. Internal dissentions within the INC by those opposed to boycotting the legislatures, resulted in a breakaway group forming the Swaraj party led by C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru. The Khilafat movement had lost steam when Kemal Ataturk abolished the Caliphate and assumed secular power in Turkey in 1924. This had the predictable effect of the temporary bonhomie between Muslims and Hindus fostered by Gandhi quickly unravelling, and communal disturbances between the two communities increasing in frequency and violence. Jinnah, who had left the INC in 1920, was becoming more active in the Muslim League, and the League now demanded thirty-three per cent representation for Muslims in the Central Legislature and retention of separate electorates for Muslims. The British were pleased at the fissures developing between the two communities, and Lord Irwin, the viceroy*, smugly wrote that, “…the Muslims were after all our best friends.”5 The stage was being set for an eventual partition of the country.
Despite these setbacks in India, Syud Hossain and his fellow activists, now joined by influential American supporters of India’s freedom such as religious leaders Rev. John Holmes and J.T. Sutherland, academics I.F. Stone and Walter Lippmann, luminaries Pearl Buck, Will Durant and Clare Booth Luce, as well as Congressman Emanuel Celler continued the anti-British tirade through their speeches, meetings, debates and writings.6 Though the extent of the reach of these activists was arguably minimal in a vast country like the United States, the British were nonetheless alarmed at the mounting impact these activists had in influential circles. The British government asked its consulates in the United States to keep a close watch and report on the activities of the Indian sympathisers. Although an admirer of Islamic culture and traditions, Syud’s staunchly secular credentials and his unwavering support for, and articulation of Gandhi’s call for communal brotherhood made him a special target in Britain’s eyes.
During and after his editorship of The New Orient, he continued with his blitz of lecture tours. A favourite topic of his was “Eastern and Western Ideals—A Comparison and Contrast” in which the overriding theme was that Eastern civilisation pre-dated Western civilisation by many millennia and that “China, Persia, India and Arabia had done more for civilization than any other race”. This was an oblique attack on the “white man’s burden” school of thought that was propagated by Britain and other colonial powers to justify their continued colonial involvement under the pretence that the East needed the benign civilising hand of the West. While Syud castigated Britain’s colonialism, he praised America’s colonisation of the Philippines, perhaps not wanting to antagonise his core constituency in the United States. Clearly worried over this sort of a heretical attack on its existential foundations by Syud and other Indians in America, the British Empire tried to counter this by having their own propagandists undercut these arguments. The most notorious of these was Katherine Mayo, a white supremacist American historian and writer, who held rabid views against black emancipation, non-white immigration into the U.S.A., and the independence of Philippines.
Katherine Mayo (1867–1949) visited India in 1926 and wrote a book of her observations titled Mother India in 1927. It came to be known only later that she went there at the British government’s behest and her entire expenses for the trip had been borne by the Government of India. The book was a bestseller (it went through twenty prints in a little over a year), not least because it reinforced the prevailing majoritarian view of India being a country plagued by the caste system, debased by poverty, dominated by superstition, infested with diseases, and complicit in subjugating its women. Despite her avowal to avoid any generalisation about India, Mayo did precisely that by saying, “Inertia, helplessness, lack of initiative and originality, lack of staying power and of sustained loyalties, sterility of enthusiasm, weakness of life-vigour itself—all are traits that truly characterize the Indian not only of today but of long-past history.”7 She reserved her choicest criticism for the Indian male, laying the blame on his sexual excesses for the root of India’s problems. Mayo followed up on her book by embarking on lecture tours across the United States, spouting the same inanities she had written to hugely receptive audiences. Indians were outraged by the book, and Gandhi wrote an article titled, “Drain Inspector’s Report”, denouncing the book and the author. Gandhi, whose appellation to the book became more famous than the book itself, noted that, “This book is cleverly and powerfully written. The carefully chosen quotations give it the appearance of a truthful book. But the impression it leaves on my mind is, that it is the report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon, or to give a graphic description of the stench exuded by the opened drains. If Miss Mayo had confessed that she had gone to India merely to open out and examine the drains of India, there would perhaps be little to complain about her compilation. But she says in effect with a certain amount of triumph, ‘The drains are India’.”8
Mayo’s work spawned a whole cottage industry of writings refuting her observations and conclusions. Among those were, Father India by Ranga Iyer, Mother India by Dilip Singh Saund, A Son of Mother India Answers by Dhan Gopal Mukerji, and Uncle Sham by K.L. Gauba. While Shridharani indicates that Syud engaged in a live debate with Mayo, there are others (Kamala Nimbkar) who assert that he was prevented from doing so. A well-known journalist of India, Durga Das, writes, “Syud Hossain did more than anyone else to sell India and Gandhi to Americans. Placed by popular polls among the three top platform speakers in the U.S. he demolished the British case at every public debate in which he participated. He was reported to have challenged Katherine Mayo, the author of Mother India, to a debate, but that worthy lady flinched from the encounter. A Briton who took Syud Hossain up on her behalf was easily worsted.”9 A frequent question that was asked of Syud during his talks in 1928 was his opinion on Mother India to which he replied, “…in no uncertain terms it was a propagandist book written by an irresponsible winter tourist with no real knowledge or understanding of Indian customs and institutions. The book had been condemned as sensational and mischievous, not only by Indian leaders like Tagore and Gandhi, but by leading English statesmen and educationists who have a first-hand knowledge of India”.10
Such insidious propaganda by the British continued when, in Chicago of May 1930, Hossain engaged a British official, George Young, in a debate on the topic, “Is British Rule in India a Failure?” The exchange of letters between Godfrey Haggard (the British Consulate General), Julian Arnold, and Angus Fletcher (Director of The British Library of Information in New York) reveal the grudging admiration they had for Syud. Haggard says to Fletcher, “The Young-Hossain debate was a bad show. Hossain made an excellent speech and captivated all the women by his manner. Young’s delivery and manner were unfortunate; his acquaintance with the facts was purely academic and second-hand. The audience sided with Hossain…Hossain is doing us a lot of harm here…”11 Terming Syud an “Agitator”, Arnold writes to Haggard, “I attended his address to the Council of Foreign Relations at the Palmer House on the 10th May. On that occasion Mr. Hossain delivered a bitter and fearful denunciation of the British and all their ways in India. He is richly endowed with the two essentials of a good speaker, viz. grace in diction and fire in expression. He presents his facts (not always too accurate) with clarity. He is excellent in irony. And he knows when to give a loose rein to his vindictiveness. Quite apart from the truth or untruth of his message such a man is bound to stir the emotions of his audience. He needs a strong speaker to oppose him. Mr. George Young cannot be so described. He lacks everything requisite—voice, suavity, earnestness, picturesqness, intimate knowledge of every phase of India’s complexity, and vehemence. He went down on 10th May before Mr. Hossain like a house built of cards.”12 Sweet indeed is praise from an adversary!
Syud Hossain’s biggest challenge was in August 1930 when a three-day conference on “India and Nationalism” was held at the Institute of Politics in Williamstown in Northwest Massachusetts. This picturesque locale was the scene of an annual gathering of some of the most distinguished minds in the field of international affairs. The conference was chaired by Lord James Meston (1865–1943), a British civil servant and former Lieutenant Governor of United Provinces and Oudh, who had served in India from 1885 to 1918. He presented the British side of the story. Syud, who was asked to present the Indian case, faced two formidable opponents in Lord Meston and Cornelia Sorabji. Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954) was born as one of eight children to a Parsi father who converted to Christianity and a Christian mother. A brilliant academic career saw her as the first female graduate of Bombay University. She then studied law at Oxford, qualified as a barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, and became India’s first female advocate, practicing in the Calcutta High Court. Her legal career and social reformist activities suffered a terrible blow after 1927 when Mayo, perhaps deliberately, revealed that Cornelia had helped her write her book arranging many meetings with various Indian groups and leaders. What made the situation worse for Cornelia was her support for Mayo and her book, for which she faced a punishing boycott from her friends, associates, and colleagues in India. Cornelia was also an opponent of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement and it was for this reason that the British government enlisted her to speak against Gandhi in a year-long lecture tour in the United States.13 Commenting on the non-cooperation movement and the comparison of Gandhi to Christ, she said that while the latter had advised his followers to walk twelve miles with those who asked them to walk one, Gandhi instead told his followers that if they were asked to walk one mile, they should sit in the middle of the street and not move a step.14
Over three days, Syud in his “fiery address” refuted arguments put forth by Meston and Sorabji for continuation of British rule in India and, among various other points made by him, charged that, “A perpetual falsification of Indian history and vilification of Indian character has been going on. The British writers of historical text books and other official and semi-official propagandists have stressed every phase of India’s decline and every weakening of her age-long social institutions, while carefully suppressing or distorting the achievements of her past and the actualities of her present in the field of culture and civilization. Everything ignoble that could be imputed to her people has been thrown into relief while the credit side of her account has been ignored or minimized. The reason for this sustained misrepresentation, of course, is to provide an alibi for the existence and perpetuation of British rule in India.”15
Syud was a runaway hit with the audience. As Hilda Wierum Boulter later wrote, “Dr. McLaren, Secretary of the Institute, declared that since the Institute had been founded, ‘No speaker had received more applause than Mr. Hossain’. A colourful detail of this affair was that while Lord Meston’s arrival at Williamstown was greeted by a large crowd, his departure was quite solitary, whereas Dr. Hossain, whose reception had been more modest, was escorted to the station, after his three days of speaking, by an exceedingly large and enthusiastic crowd of admirers.”16
Hossain was virtually a lone ranger in this unequal fight against the Empire in 1920s America. Lajpat Rai had returned to India, Har Dayal was in Europe, Taraknath Das was beset with problems of his FFI organisation and had fled to Germany, Muzumdar was busy gathering degrees, Govil was politically disinclined, and the Gadar Party had neither the credibility nor the intellectual wherewithal to confront the British in their patented style of genteel parliamentary debate. While there were certainly a few other Indian activists in the United States as well as visitors from India such as Sarojini Naidu who did speak up for the cause, none sustained it for so long and with such acerbic vigour and panache like Syud Hossain. In the decade known as the Roaring Twenties, the loudest Indian roar that could be heard in America was that of Syud Hossain.
