Abstract:

Sudhindra Bose, Taraknath Das, Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Haridas Muzumdar, and Krishnalal Shridharani came to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding the limited resources available in the United States to Asian immigrants, including those from India, these individuals successfully pursued higher education and enjoyed considerable success, even public visibility, in their lives. As nationalist intellectuals--writers and academics--they wrote extensively on the freedom movement in India, western imperialism including British colonization of India, their place in American society, as well on Indian and American culture.

Being expatriates, their interpretation of events in India and in the United States were marked by their transnational vision and cross-cultural experiences in both these countries. Their memoirs projected America both as a land of democracy, and simultaneously a place where their attempts at becoming a part of American society was always a negotiated one colored by an awareness of their position as racialized minorities and foreigners coming from a colonized nation. Admiration for America remained balanced by doubts regarding her anti-colonial stance and occasional heart rending personal accounts of being an "outcast."

Despite their considerable intellectual and political contributions, these intellectuals and their works have however largely been ignored by most scholars barring a few. While historiography on Indians in America in the first half of the twentieth century can be said to be relatively limited in general, a particular blind sight on the part of scholars can be seen with regards to the period roughly stretching from the 1920s-1940s, the highpoint of most of these intellectuals' careers. Through a close reading of texts, published and unpublished, articles, letters, and documents written by these intellectuals, as well as a survey of the limited secondary resources available on them, this dissertation seeks to highlight the lives and writings of these intellectuals as revealing compelling perspectives on long distance nationalism, biculturalism, as well as the importance of diasporic experiences in the shaping of identity. More specifically, it underscores their diasporic and transnational outlook in three different contexts--nationalism, race relations, and culture and identity.