The "Sisterhood Arrangement": Race, Citizenship, and U.S. Involvement in the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

• In Event: 75.042 - MTCC Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 75.042-1 - Producing Disciplined State Subjects: Intersectional Analyses of Race and Citizenship

Abstract

My paper examines the international partnership between the University of Illinois (UI) and the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur (IIT-KGP) during the 1950s. Brokered by the U.S. State Department, this educational partnership – referred to in official documents as the “sisterhood arrangement” – exemplifies the Department’s use of international education for aligning the Third World in the Cold War. My analysis brings the archives of the “sisterhood arrangement” into conversation with historical scholarship on racial image-management within U.S. Cold War strategy (Borstelman 2001; Dudziak 2000, 2004). This juxtaposition spotlights the imbrications of race and education within the crosscutting ideological and material projects of Indian postcolonial nation-building and U.S. Cold War empire-building as they clashed and converged in the 1950s.

IIT-Kharagpur, postcolonial India’s first engineering college, was opened in 1951 inside a giant prison. Possessed of grand plans for harnessing scientific and technological education to create solutions for the nation’s suffering masses, but with no facilities for housing such education, Indian policymakers decided to use the infamous Hijli Detention Camp – a massive prison where Indian activists had been confined and tortured during the British era – as a campus. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru referenced this ironic history in his convocation address to the first IIT-KGP graduating class: “Here in the place of that Hijli Detention Camp stands this fine monument of India to-day representing India’s urges, India’s future in the making.” Nehru’s language evoked and reinforced an affective atmosphere in which notions of education and technology were entangled with feelings of hope, acts of solidarity, and beliefs about the future of the new nation. For the postcolonial Indian middle classes, the performance of ideal citizenship revolved around participation in science, technology, and education; hence, IIT-KGP was tasked not only with training technology professionals, but with shaping exemplary postcolonial citizens.

For white middle-class Americans during the 1950s, ideal citizenship involved doing one’s part to help win the Cold War. The UI/IIT-KGP sisterhood emerged from an acute understanding of, as John Foster Dulles put it, “the important role which education plays in international affairs” – particularly in terms of promoting Third World alignment. Hence, the UI professors who accepted posts at IIT-KGP were also performing ideal citizenship. Of course, all of these performances of citizenship – Indian postcolonial citizenship, U.S. Cold War citizenship – took place on a field that was always-already racialized. My research illuminates the interconnectedness of new educational arrangements and old racial systems at this key historical juncture of U.S. and Indian political trajectories by: (1) demonstrating the centrality of international education within U.S. strategic plans for Third World alignment; (2) revealing the presence of racial image-management activities embedded directly within the UI/IIT-KGP sisterhood; and (3) discussing the role of racialized gender in structuring the daily operations of the sisterhood. As my analysis demonstrates, the UI/IIT-KGP sisterhood relationship is an illuminating prism for examining the entanglements of race, geopolitics, and education in a Cold War world.

Author

• Malathi Michelle Iyengar, University of California - San Diego