The History of the Black-Indian Alliance

• Pages: 227-246
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Author: Rohit Tallapragada
• Subject Matter: Derecho Civil

The History of the Black-Indian Alliance

ROHIT TALLAPRAGADA*

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

THE ALLIANCE AND HOW IT FORMED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228

THE ALLIANCE’S INTELLECTUAL EXCHANGE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232

THE ALLIANCE’S FALL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236

THE BLACK-INDIAN AMERICAN ALLIANCE TODAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

THE FUTURE OF THE ALLIANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

INTRODUCTION

Alliances are not permanent. They change with time and evolve with political cir-

cumstance and social need. The discussions and ideas they produce can seem trans-

formative in one era but may be forgotten by the next.

This is what happened to the Black-Indian alliance of the early- and mid-twenti-

eth centuries. It is, largely, a forgotten story in American and world history: an inspir-

ing story of Black civil rights leaders in the United States and Indian independence

leaders corresponding, strategizing, and supporting one another in their freedom

struggles. They saw, in their respective conf‌licts, a common oppression: white-

supremacist colonialism, manifested in the United States by Jim Crow and in India

by the British Raj.

United by this common struggle, f‌igures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Lala Lajpat Rai,

Marcus Garvey, Jawaharlal Nehru, and many others spent decades cultivating and

advancing a radical notion of transnational unity between “colored people.”

1

Together they created a powerful intellectual force that signif‌icantly shaped their re-

spective successful struggles for freedom.

But the alliance has withered since the 1960s. By that time both Black and Indian

leaders had, apparently, won their freedom battles: Jim Crow and British colonialism

* J.D., Georgetown University Law Center, 2024, Notes Editor, Georgetown Journal of Law and Modern

Critical Race Perspectives, 2023-2024. I am so grateful to the hardworking and amazing staff at MCRP for

their edits on my work, which vastly improved this Note. I would also like to thank Professor Sherally

Munshi, whose passion and encouragement were invaluable in guiding my writing. Finally, I would like to

thank my friends and mentors in my personal and professional lives, people from a variety of geographical,

racial, and cultural backgrounds, whose commitment to service and fundamental optimism inspired this

work. © 2023, Rohit Tallapragada.

1. See GERALD HORNE, THE END OF EMPIRES: AFRICAN AMERICANS AND INDIA 3–5, 15 (2008).

227

had been defeated. After those victories came new struggles, ones less easily def‌ined,

and subsequently the alliance, once rich and transformative, faded.

What were the reasons for the rise and fall of this alliance? How did it shape and

advance its participants’ f‌ights for freedom? And could this alliance still have rele-

vance today—is there the potential for it to provide new power, new momentum to

the racial struggles of contemporary America?

These are the questions this paper attempts to answer. It seeks to shine a light on a

radical alliance that today receives little to no attention, between two communities

that most people do not associate with each other. It wonders if the past could be a

guide to the future, and whether the United States’ greatest freedom f‌ighters,

African-Americans, and one of the fastest-growing groups of a rapidly diversifying

America, Indian-Americans, ought to fashion a new alliance for the future of civil

rights in the United States, based on the one forged by their forebearers.

THE ALLIANCE AND HOW IT FORMED

An intellectual and political alliance between Black civil rights leaders and Indian

independence leaders might feel like only a historical footnote today. But at the time,

the alliance not only made perfect sense: it was almost inevitable.

“The greatest color problem in the world is that of India,” wrote W.E.B. Du Bois,

crediting India for being the largest country in the world that was not in control of

its own destiny.

2

Later, Jawaharlal Nehru, a f‌ierce Indian independence leader and

f‌irst Prime Minister of the country, declared that “[t]here is nothing more

terrible . . . than the inf‌inite tragedy of Africa in the past few hundred years. . . .

When I think of it, everything else pales into insignif‌icance. . . . [E]ver since the days

when millions of [Africans’ were carried away in galleys as slaves to America. . . .”

3

There was a deep belief at that time that the two struggles these peoples faced were

really the same. Both were “colored people”

4

who had roots in and connections to

the Global South, f‌ighting against the same colonial system. By the twentieth cen-

tury, Black people in the United States were oppressed not by Europeans, but by

white Americans. Yet the birthplace of that oppression was in the slave trade, the sys-

tematic robbery and abuse of Black bodies by Europeans who, throughout the seven-

teenth and eighteenth centuries, carted them away from the west coast of Africa

5

in,

as Nehru said, “galleys as slaves to America.”

6

It was the descendants of those slave

traders—literally and, in a broader sense, philosophically—who in the f‌irst half of

the twentieth century were oppressing the peoples of India, using their bodies as

2. DOHRA AHMAD, LANDSCAPES OF HOPE: ANTI-COLONIAL UTOPIANISM IN AMERICA 168 (Oxford

University Press, 2009), citing W.E.B. Du Bois, As the Crow Flies, NEW YORK AMSTERDAM NEWS, Feb. 26,

1944, at 10.

3. HORNE, supra note 1, at 4.

4. See NICO SLATE, COLORED COSMOPOLITANISM: THE SHARED STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM IN THE

UNITED STATES AND INDIA, 3–5, 15 (2012).

5. See MICHELLE ALEXANDER, THE NEW JIM CROW: MASS INCARCERATION IN THE AGE OF

COLORBLINDNESS, 22-25 (2012).

6. HORNE, supra note 1, at 4.

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