Traffic of ideas between India and America / edited by Robert M. Crunden

In February, 1984, a group of Indian and American intellectuals met for a seminar at the American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad, on the traffic of ideas between their two countries.

The participants minutely analyzed the impact of American news services on the Indian media; the social science theories of the West and their presuppositions about tradition, modernity, agricultural revival and industrialization; the film Gandhi and its political impact in America; Indian film and drama and the role of American ideas in them; American perceptions of Indian literature and art through Tagore and Coomaraswamy; the American impact on Indian education, from children's comics to the semester system; and the American impact on Indian law and the Constitution. This book reproduces the major part of the seminar, including revised papers and some of the taped discussions that followed.

Participants disagreed on many things, but did reach tentative conclusions. Neither country is well-informed about the other in basic ways, and the customary propaganda stressing the parallels between the colonial and the democratic heritages of the two countries is largely misleading. Indians often misapply Marxist categories to America, while Americans indulge in Orientalist clichés about India, both approaches failing to illuminate anything important. Much of the contact between the two countries has been that of donor and recipient: whether in agriculture or in education. This sort of relationship is an unequl and unfortunate one, and the results have often aggravated rather than solved problems.

This book offers exploratory studies of the vital areas of cross-influences between the two countries, and is, therefore, invaluable for both academics and general readers concerned with the deeper and more abiding aspects of Indo-American relation.