A Forgotten Ambassador in Cairo, page 23
In perhaps as restitution for the decade of relative isolation that Syud Hossain had spent in academia, the next few years would see him being catapulted back into the maelstrom of India’s freedom movement.
23
J.J. Singh and the India League of America
(1937)
LALA LAJPAT RAI was the first Indian nationalist of note who spent a number of years in the United States (1914–19) actively engaging with the American public through his countrywide speaking tours. Though he was seen as an extremist in India vis-à-vis the Moderates, Lajpat Rai’s approach in America was essentially what would be described as Gandhian; he abjured violence, he advocated constitutional methods, he was antagonistic towards fascism, and he abhorred revolutionary intrigues. His aim was to evoke support from the American public towards the campaign for Indian Home Rule, and to win back the sympathy for local Indians that had declined due to the hostile publicity engendered by the Hindu-German Conspiracy Case. With the help of J.T. Sunderland, Dr N.S. Hardikar, and K.D. Shastri, Lajpat Rai established the India Home Rule League of America in October 1917, and started a monthly publication, Young India, in January 1918 with their offices at 1400, Broadway in New York City.1 But with Lajpat Rai returning to India in February 1920, and Hardikar following him in 1921, both the organisation and the publication lost their momentum, and the League gradually degenerated into a forum for desultory India-related conversations at the Ceylon India Inn.
It took another two decades, and a Sikh from North-West Punjab to transform the moribund organisation into an effective lobbying vehicle for the Indians in America. That Sikh was a six-foot, strapping young man with an infectious enthusiasm named Jagjit Singh. Sirdar J.J. Singh or J.J., as he became popularly known, was born on 5 October 1897 at Rawalpindi (in present-day Pakistan) to Sardar Rup Singh, a mid-level bureaucrat of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) in British India who rose to the highest level possible in those days for an Indian, and retired as an Extra-Assistant Commissioner, an executive role with a quasi-judicial function. While studying at the Lahore Commercial College, J.J. came under the influence of Gandhi and took part in demonstrations against British rule. He quit college, joined the INC, became an elected member of the Punjab Provincial Congress, and then, at the age of twenty-four, became the youngest of the three hundred members of the All India Congress Committee (A.I.C.C.). He seems to have met Gandhi briefly at this time.2
J.J.’s activities with the freedom struggle were cut short when Gandhi abruptly called off the non-cooperation movement due to the violence at Chauri Chaura in February 1922, when twenty-two policemen were killed in mob violence. Finding himself with nothing else to do, he went to London in 1924 to study law at the Inner Temple. Coincidentally, at the same time the British Empire Exhibition was being held at Wembley Park (the site of the present Wembley Stadium) between April and October 1924. This was a trade exhibition of Britain and her colonies to stimulate trade amongst and beyond them. J.J. set aside his law career plans and opened a stall at the exhibition displaying Indian silks, handloom cloth, and other Indian wares. This was a resounding success and J.J. made a handsome profit of $20,000 over the course of the first six months and another $80,000 over the next season. His success got him an invitation from an agent for the Philadelphia Sesqui-Centennial show to set up shop in the Philadelphia Exposition. J.J. complied, but the undertaking resulted in a huge loss for him. Not one to give up in the face of adversity, he opened a wholesale import house on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1927, and this enterprise did so well that he was able to recoup all his losses within three years.3
The good times, however, spluttered with the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s that forced J.J. to let go of his staff and become his own traveling salesman, trying to sell his wares by lugging his heavy sample case from state to state. He nonetheless turned this setback into an opportunity to integrate himself into American society; he got rid of his turban, cut his hair, and plunged into New York’s cosmopolitan and bohemian life of parties, theatre, nightclubs and dancing, thus gaining a reputation as an exotic personable bachelor whose presence at a party was de rigueur to embellish the event. As someone described him, “J.J. is one of the handful of Indians who have managed to rise out of their skins.”4 J.J. thoroughly enjoyed this life of a playboy for a few years till a drastic change came upon him owing to a visit to India in 1937. Among the people he met on his visit was Jawaharlal Nehru, whose autobiography so deeply impressed J.J. that he became determined to do something towards India’s fight for independence. Nehru and a few others advised him that he could best contribute by setting up an organisation to boost trade between the two countries.5
Meanwhile, Haridas Muzumdar, after teaching at the University of Wisconsin for a few months, returned to India in December 1929 where he too met Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru at Lahore, at which Congress Session the resolution for Purna Swaraj was passed. He stayed at Gandhi’s ashram from January to March 1930 and was one of the first eighty participants in the Salt March to Dandi. After Gandhi’s imprisonment in early May, Muzumdar wanted to court arrest himself but was advised by Motilal Nehru to get back to the United States and continue his work there. Muzumdar returned to New York, and set up an office in the same building as The Nation at 20 Vesey Street, later called the Garrison Building.* Between 1930 and 1932, he published four pamphlets as part of the India Today and Tomorrow series, all of which were banned in India due to their anti-British content. Muzumdar’s office became a hub for Indians and Indian activists and was known as “India’s unofficial consulate”. Over the next decade and a half, Muzumdar spent his time as an itinerant speaker giving lectures throughout the United States on Gandhi and India’s freedom struggle, in much the same vein as Syud Hossain. One of the highlights of his activities was reading out India’s Declaration of Independence on 26 January 1931 at the Independence Hall in Philadelphia, an event that got wide publicity in the American press. A few months later, Muzumdar met Gandhi at the Second Round Table Conference in London in September 1931.6
It was in the 1930s that two other Indian nationalists, Anup Singh and Krishnalal Shridharani, made their home in New York. Anup Singh Dhillon was born on 5 March 1903 in Jhapal village of the Lyallpur district of the Punjab to his Sikh father, Sardar Jai Singh Dhillon. Anup had his early education in Punjab. While still a student in college, he got married to Iqbal Kaur in July 1921, and the two had a daughter named Balbir Kaur.7 In what was almost a rite of passage with the students of the time, Anup got involved in the Indian freedom movement, fled the country as a political fugitive, and landed in San Francisco in February 1922, albeit without his family. He initially enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley and later did his Master’s in Political Science from the University of Kansas. Thereafter, he completed his Ph.D. from Harvard University, moved to New York, and thence to Washington D.C. Right from the time when he was a student he took a keen interest in the problems of Indians, especially those on the West Coast, and became the President of the Sikh League on the Pacific Coast as well as the President of the Hindustan Pacific Association in Southern California. He also had tenuous links with the Gadar Party, and, unsurprisingly, came under the watch of British Intelligence, which promptly added his name to the list of Indian extremists.
Anup then returned to India for a few months in 1935 and came back to the United States in the spring of 1936. This was when he met Haridas Muzumdar in New York, beginning a friendship that would last his lifetime. Anup had written an article on Gandhi, and on Muzumdar’s advice, Anup got it published by Asia Magazine, whose editor, Richard Walsh, was also the head of the John Day Publishing Company. (Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel Prize winning author, was Walsh’s wife.) Walsh and Anup struck a good equation, and the former asked Anup to write a monograph on Nehru (published in 1939 as Nehru: The Rising Star of India) as a prelude to Nehru’s autobiography that Walsh was going to publish in 1941 under the title Toward Freedom.8 His book, his regularly published articles, and his well-attended public speaking engagements on India and her issues firmly established Anup Singh’s credentials as an influential Indian nationalist in America.
Krishnalal Shridharani was born in Umrala near Bhavnagar in the state of Gujarat on 16 September 1911. After completing his schooling in nearby towns, he too, like Muzumdar, participated in Gandhi’s Dandi Salt March of 1930. He was arrested and sentenced to a few months in jail. He then joined Rabindranath Tagore in Shantiniketan near Calcutta and graduated from there in 1933. He went to the United States in 1934 and completed his Master’s in Sociology and Economics from New York University in 1935, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1940. His doctoral dissertation, War Without Violence (1939) and his later book, My India, My America (1941) were extremely well received.9 As Muzumdar says of his fellow Indian activists, “While Hossain, Anup and I looked upon ourselves as crusaders for India’s freedom first and as professional lecturers or writers second, Krishnalal looked upon himself as a professional writer or lecturer first and as a crusader for India’s freedom second. This is not to minimize the services rendered by Dr. Shridharani. Indeed, I am inclined to the view that his My India, My America did more toward promoting a better understanding of India than ton loads of propaganda literature.”10
New York City of the 1930s thus provided the setting for this new generation of highly educated and intellectually sophisticated Indian activists to take over the baton from their predecessors. As Muzumdar continues, “While Syud Hossain, Anup Singh, Shridharani and I had been doing significant work on behalf of India in our individual capacities, it seemed to me in the mid-thirties that an organized effort to promote India’s cause might be in order.” And so, a group of Indians in New York, after several rounds of preliminary meetings at the Ceylon India Inn, called for a big gathering of Indians who lived in and around New York City. The event was held at Caravan Hall on East 59th street*, sometime towards the end of 1937.11 The India League of America (ILA) was resurrected with the aim of being an American version of the India League of England (headed by V.K. Krishna Menon), and with the object of promoting “the interests of our people in America in every way” and of sponsoring “a publication designed to promote closer contacts between our community abroad and India by reporting and appraising significant happenings in both lands.”
The office of the ILA was established at 17 East 48th Street, New York and was to “serve as a clearing house for the problems confronting our people” and would “endeavour to supply authentic information about India”. Active membership was open to all Indians, and Associate membership to all friends of India. Those elected as the founding members of the executive board of the ILA were: Nibahu Ram Checker (N.R. Checker) as the President, A. Chowdry and B.V. Mukherji as Vice Presidents, Haridas Muzumdar and Anup Singh as Secretaries, and M. Chowdry and K. Rahman as Treasurers.* The activities of the ILA during 1938 were hardly scintillating; they included a dinner on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, a meeting honouring Yusuf Meherally (during his visit to the U.S.A. as head of the Indian Delegation to the World Youth Congress), a public meeting to rally support to send relief to districts in India recently devastated by floods, and a dinner in honour of Dr Anup Singh on his return from a lecture trip to Canada.12 The plans to bring out a monthly bulletin and issue periodical press releases, however, could not immediately fructify due to Muzumdar’s long absence from New York on his speaking engagements.
After J.J. Singh returned to New York from India, he formed the India Chamber of Commerce of America (ICCA) in the early summer of 1938, with himself as the President, Magan S. Dave, Sajan Singh Sarna and Hari Govil as Vice Presidents, and Haridas Muzumdar as General Secretary.** N.R. Checker was also one of the founding members of the ICCA. At a meeting of the Chamber held in June 1938, J.J. announced that one of the objects of the ICCA was to “modernize” the Anglo-American Commerce Treaty of 1915.13 The timing of the formation of the ICCA, whether by design or accident, coincided with the appointment H.S. Malik in 1938 as the Government of India’s first Trade Commissioner to the United States and Canada to boost commerce between India and the other two countries.
Sardar Hardit Singh Malik (1894–1985) was born in Rawalpindi (in present day Pakistan) to an affluent Sikh family. He attended the Balliol College at Oxford University and thereafter joined the Royal Air Force, being the first Indian to receive a commission in the R.A.F. in WWI. As a fighter pilot he saw action in France and Italy, and was credited with shooting down two enemy planes. A keen cricketer and golfer, Malik represented Sussex in first class cricket (between 1914 and 1930), and Oxford University in golf. After the war, he joined the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and held numerous positions in the senior bureaucracy of the country before being posted to America. Malik arrived in New York on 4 July 1938 on the Queen Mary accompanied by his wife, Prakash Kaur, and his two children, to assume charge. The newspapers gave wide coverage to the appointment of this tall, handsome Sikh to the new position, noting that he possessed sixty turbans and had “the most beautiful golf swing in the world”. Malik, during his next five years in the United States, played golf with the legends of his time such as Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, and Frank Stafaci.14 His diplomatic status, accoutred by a convivial demeanour, an Oxford pedigree, and ribbons of a decorated war hero, ensured Malik’s presence amongst America’s rich, influential and the powerful. Malik and J.J., both of them Sikhs hailing from Rawalpindi, most certainly would have known each other from their early years, and J.J. did not fail to capitalise on his friendship with Malik to further his commercial interests.15 The growth in J.J.’s business enabled him to move his store, India Arts and Crafts, to its new premises at 14, East 56th Street, as well as his home to a richly furnished two-room suite in the river-facing Beaux Arts Apartments on East 44th Street.16
The British Consulate in New York, in a disparaging view of the ICCA, wrote in one of its regular reports that, “This Chamber of Commerce hardly merits consideration as a genuine business association since none of the Indians concerned is in any sense representative of the more important lines of trade between India and the U.S.A., e.g. jute, burlap, hides and skins, shellac, etc…The real object of this organisation is probably to ensure official contact with Mr. H.S. Malik, the new Indian Government Trade Commissioner who has recently arrived in the United States, and to attempt to influence the latter. Its members are associated with the Hindustan Society of New York and the ILA, both of which are anti-British political organisations.”17
J.J. found that “the dull commercial dickering involved” in the ICCA “failed to satisfy his now resurgent revolutionary spirit” and he become a member of the ILA in 1939.18 Resigning from the Chamber after completion of his term in 1939, he decided to devote more attention to the League to promote India’s cause through his public life. Muzumdar too resigned his position as the General Secretary, citing his busy speaking schedule, and Magan Dave took over from J.J. as the President of the Chamber. J.J. believed that the ILA could be a vastly more effective forum to plead India’s cause but found the present leadership of the League unwilling to listen to his vision of what could be done. This resulted in a great deal of friction between J.J. and N.R. Checker, the President of the ILA.
Apart from the ILA, there were a few other smaller organisations claiming to represent Indians, and not all of them cooperated with one another despite having similar goals. Kamala Devi Chattopadhyaya*, an associate of Gandhi and a prominent member of the INC, who was on a lecture tour of the United States from November 1939 through September 1941 noticed the strain in the relationship between the members of the various organisations which prompted her to assert that “the Indians in the U.S.A were ‘a queer lot’ and always squabbling with each other and that the ILA was a ‘partisan affair’ from which she advised Krishna Menon to keep his India League clear; she implied that it was impossible to get any Indian organisation going on in New York which would not become a racket run primarily for private gain.” Due to her influence, and partly perhaps on Malik’s intervention, the ILA was reorganised in the elections held in 1940, with Hemendra K. Rakhit as President, Mirza Jaffer as Treasurer, Anup Singh as the Director of the Research Bureau, and with the rest of the committee consisting of J.J. Singh, Mrs Hilda Wierum Boulter and a few others. The more important office bearers of the ILA were all friends of J.J. who now “expressed himself as a keen supporter of the new President and intended to do all in his power to further the aims of the League”.19
The manner in which J.J. took control of the India League is colourfully described by Robert Shaplen in his profile of J.J. Singh that appeared in The New Yorker of 24 March 1951, titled “One Man Lobby”, which was evidently J.J.’s own romanticised version of the events: “J.J. appeared one night in 1939 at one of the sleepy, sporadic meetings in New York of the India League, then an organization of Ceylon India Inn intellectuals, whose active membership had dwindled to twelve. Singh listened to the expression of lofty thoughts for a while and then proposed that the League pay less attention to culture and philosophy and more to politics and propaganda. He also proposed that the League abandon its policy of restricting its membership to Indians and that it set about corralling some prominent American members. The intellectuals, regarding Singh as a shallow fellow who had never known his Bhagavad Gita and who was at best a sparkling social phenomenon, looked upon his proposal to sell Indian nationalism by methods similar to those he employed to sell saris as fantastically gross.”20
Nonetheless, J.J.’s heretical outburst seems to have struck a favourable chord amongst many of them, and the new core team consisting of J.J., Anup Singh, and Hemendra Rakhit now revamped the organisation and set about giving it a dynamic purpose. A Research Bureau of India League was set up to bring out informative papers on India and this was headed by Anup Singh, assisted by Madame Boulter and H.K. Rakhit. A monthly four-page bulletin called India Today was also launched in April 1940 under the editorship of Anup Singh. In the elections held in 1941, H.K. Rakhit continued as the President while J.J. Singh was elected Treasurer. In an attempt at reconciliation, N.R. Checker became a member of the Executive Committee and of the Research Bureau. In a further change to the organisation, the membership of the League was expanded; Americans were invited to become members as well as to serve on the Executive Board. Despite objections from some of the more conservative members of the ILA, J.J. was determined to get influential Americans into the League recognising the significance of their presence for the enhanced visibility of the organisation. The financial position of the ILA too began to improve, due as much to the infusion of J.J.’s own funds into the organisation as to his ability to garner donations from supporters.
