When Queen Elizabeth bestowed an honorary knighthood on General Colin Powell, his first thought was that he would have been "Sir Colin" and his wife "Lady Powell" if his family had remained in Jamaica. Then he knew he would not have been knighted at all as a Jamaican. If his family had migrated to Britain, he might have ended up as a sergeant. Only the US could make him army chief.
That story acquires special meaning now that another Afro-American with an even more internationally complex ancestry stands a good chance of making it to an even higher level than the former secretary of state. As American analysts debate the substance and symbol of a black man in the White House, I wonder how India will respond to President Barack Obama. The campaign has already made clear this is no simple matter. While Obama, born of a Kenyan father and white mother and brought up in Indonesia and Hawaii, enjoys unprecedented support among whites, an opinion poll announced at the end of last year that he was trailing Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points among blacks. Some of them felt that an Ivy League man (he attended Columbia and Harvard) who did not rise through the ranks of black politics and lost the race for a Chicago Congressional seat to a former Black Panther called Bobby Rush was not "black enough" for them. A South Carolina newspaper quoted Jesse Jackson saying he was "acting like he's white".
It is in India's interest to court any American president. But a Democrat incumbent will start with the handicap of being regarded as longer on rhetoric than action. Hillary Clinton might have been able to overcome that hurdle after the diligence with which the Clintons have courted India since her husband's second term, but an Obama might have to pay for his party's proliferation concerns combined with the huge goodwill that George W. Bush has built up here.
Of course, Obama will be hailed as heir to a great liberal tradition as Roosevelt's New Deal and Jack Kennedy's grace and goodwill are recalled. Indians will bend over backwards to treat him as whiter than white. But serious anxieties about doing business with a Democrat administration are bound to be laced into the hyperbole. Similarly, the muffled drawing room whispers and the confidential policy planning discussions in South Block may tell a different story. Kolkata's US consulate once had a black visa officer who was not at all happy with his Indian experience.
Much may depend on how the US really regards India. When I was researching my book on India-US relations, I found state department records of a black American official who visited India on the eve of independence exclaiming in surprise that this would be an independent coloured nation and that the US should adjust its foreign policy accordingly. The proposal that followed could have had calamitous results, for that man suggested that the US should send only black American diplomats to India. Clearly, he didn't understand at all that Indians are not unlike the feuding Reds and Blacks in Evelyn Waugh's Abyssinian civil war novel, Scoop, who were both black but fancied themselves as white. That illusion persists even though Loy Henderson, one of the earliest American ambassadors in New Delhi, thought Jawaharlal Nehru was embarked on a coloured crusade against the Western (read white) world.
Folk usage perpetuates racism which has ancient roots in the waves of Central Asian conquest that overwhelmed this country. A small personal example will suffice. My father's favourite term of chastisement if I did something clumsy or stupid was "Ujbog" which I later recognised as the Bengali pronunciation for Uzbek. Even later
