Conflicting images

Conflicting Images: India and the United States deals with the perceptions Americans hold of India and Indians, and Indians hold of the United States and Americans.

When India became independent more than forty years ago, American opinion supported decolonization, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were widely admired in the United States, and the common expectation was that close links would bind the world's two largest democracies. Belying these early expectations, relations between the United States and India have been marked by recurrent strains and tensions as the two nations have pursued their distinctive, and often conflicting, security interests. Underlying and supplementing these obvious sources of conflict are wide differences in religion and culture.

In Conflicting Images, thirteen leading scholars and intellectuals from the United States and India explore the different facets of this conflict in interests and images. Selig Harrison and M. S. Venkataramani deal with diplomatic relations; Peter Galbraith and N. Ram review the conflict over India's attempt to develop nuclear capabilities. Diana Eck describes how the positive response of some Americans to Indian religion has aroused the fears and suspicions of other Americans; Lloyd Rudolph discusses American responses to Mahatma Gandhi from the time he came into American consciousness in the 1920s; Veena Das explores the image of Indian women among American missionaries and journalists and how that has affected American views of India; T. N. Madan analyzes how American anthropologists