"...More Than Academic Interest...": Early 20th Century African American Educational Debates and Indian Anticolonialism

• In Event: Centering Black Agendas in the Historiography of Black Education: Decoupling Agency From Whiteness

Abstract

“I am confident,” wrote the renowned Indian anticolonialist Lala Lajpat Rai in his lengthy 1916 volume The United States of America, “that the ideas of the [American] Negro leaders on education and their application of them in solving the difficulties which face them in their racial struggle, would be of more than academic interest to Indian patriots and nationalists.” Despite the vague and generalized title, Rai’s book is largely devoted to a very specific set of concerns related to race and education – issues Rai addresses sometimes as separate topics, and sometimes concurrently with a particular attention to “Negro education.” Lajpat Rai was not unique in his intense focus on race and education. While issues of racialization were clearly fundamental to the anticolonial movements of Rai’s era, matters of education were also of central importance to many Indian anticolonialists; and, in seeking to imagine forms of education conducive to national liberation and decolonization, many of these Indian activists turned to African American thought.
This paper discusses Lala Lajpat Rai’s The United States of America, not as a summary of one individual’s views, but as metonymic of Indian anticolonial educational concerns during the early decades of the twentieth century. Lajpat Rai’s 1916 text emerged from an already-existing set of collective concerns, and it articulated inter-related issues around race and education that would appear with increasing frequency in Indian anticolonial discourse in the years and decades following its publication. My discussion highlights the profound influence of African American educators, schools, and scholars upon Indian anticolonial educational thought during these decades. Indian anticolonialists’ enthusiastic interest in African American education can be understood within the context of what Nico Slate (2012) refers to as “colored cosmopolitanism,” a term indexing a host of transnational and trans-imperial political alliances and cultural affiliations between interlocking networks of African American and Asian Indian activists and intellectuals during the first half of the twentieth century.
In discussing Indian anticolonialists’ interest in African American educational thought, I necessarily engage the so-called “Washington-Du Bois debate.” While U.S. education histories traditionally pose the Washingtonian and Du Boisian projects as mutually exclusive and incompatible, sometimes with extensive reference to the personal animus between the two men, Rai’s work exemplifies the ways in which Indian anticolonialists, though aware of the conflict between Washington and Du Bois, frequently adopted ideas from both of these figures. Indian anticolonialists selectively took up the ideas they perceived as applicable to their own political struggles, while leaving aside other ideas – such as Washington’s well-known accomodationist stance with regards to segregation – that they did not find useful. I argue that the layered and nuanced nature of South Asian conversations around the issues historically glossed as “the Washington-Du Bois debate” in fact reflects the complexity of African American educational thought during the early decades of the twentieth century – a complexity that is elided in historical narratives that present early twentieth century African American deliberations regarding the values of university education and vocational training in simple binary terms.

Author

• Malathi Michelle Iyengar, College of San Mateo