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Abstract
Ramnath Biswas (1894–1955) independently travelled around the world on a bicycle between 1931 and 1940. His travelogues about Africa and the US reveal Biswas to be an active supporter of the nascent transnational civil rights movement. This article connects his endeavours to achieve social justice for African, African American and Asian people with the phenomenon of ‘coloured cosmopolitanism’. Biswas’ observations—in particular, his portrayal of racial dynamics between Indians and Africans—are striking. Exploring Biswas’ narratives from a micro-historical perspective allows us to envision an alternative history of solidarity between non-white (‘oshwet’) people and to place his journey at the intersection of Indian Ocean Studies and studies of transnational civil rights activities during the inter-War period.
Acknowledgements
I sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and observations which helped me to anchor my work on the relevant critical ground. The books they suggested were of immense help. I thank the editor, Dr. Kama Maclean, profusely for giving me the opportunity to revise and resubmit and for kindly allowing me an extension for revising the article. She has edited my article with extreme care, has suggested online resources in this difficult time and has been extremely kind and supported me in every way. I also thank my PhD thesis supervisors, Dr. Rajeshwari Dutt (Associate Professor, SHSS, IIT Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, India) and Dr. Pinaki De (Associate Professor, Department of English, Raja Peary Mohan College, Uttarpara, Hooghly, West Bengal, India) for constantly guiding me through the article with their valuable feedback and inspiration. I express heartfelt gratitude to the staff of the Uttarpara Joykrishna Public Library, Hooghly, West Bengal, India, for their earnest support in this difficult time in helping me consult the primary sources required for my article. I thank Swagata Das Mukhopadhyay, Pranabesh Chakraborty and Anup Roy of the library for their huge help and support. I also thank Sarbajit Mitra for extending his kind help from the UK for consulting sources preserved in the British Library, London. I sincerely acknowledge the help and support of Avishek Banerjee in revising the language of this essay and of Purba Chakraborty, Arman Das and Soumya Banerjee for helping me find secondary sources for the research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Ramnath Biswas, Aajker America (America Today) (Kolkata: Paryatak Prakashana Bhavan, 1945): 15. All translations of the Bengali sources used in the article are mine.
2. Other known Bengali globetrotters of this period who composed travelogues were Jaminimohan Ghosh, Bimal Mukherjee and Kshitishchandra Banerjee.
3. On his first tour, Biswas travelled from Singapore to Malaya, Thailand, Indochina, China, Korea and Japan. From Japan he sailed to Canada; on being denied entry there, he returned to Singapore in 1933. In the same year, he started his second tour to Myanmar, other parts of India, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and almost all of Europe. His final world tour was to Africa and the US during 1938–40, which is the focus of this essay: see Prasadranjan Roy, ‘Editor’s Note’, in Ramnath Biswas, Andhakarer Africa (Africa: The Land of Darkness), ed. Prasadranjan Roy (Kolkata: Rhito Prakashan, 2018): 13–14.
4. During this period, at many places in the world, including the US, Indians, irrespective of religion, were generally denoted as ‘Hindu’. Although Biswas never explains it clearly, it can be safely deduced—considering the fact that he declared himself to be a non-believer in any institutionalised religion—that he didn’t carry the insignia for identifying himself as a person of the Hindu religious faith: see Abhishek Basu, ‘Performing Other-Wise: “Death-Defying” China as Seen by Ramnath Biswas’, in China Report 43, no. 4 (2007): 485–99, where the author views Biswas’ badge ‘Hindu-Yangsi-Sai-Kai (Hindu World Traveller)’ in China as an effort on Biswas’ part to present himself as belonging to the suffering mass, conferring on him the right to get involved and act.
5. Biswas wrote 30 travelogues and nine other books—novels, and on history and geography—based on his travel experiences.
6. Although most of the sources suggest that Biswas travelled between 1938 and 1940, Biswas himself informs us in one of his periodical articles that he reached Mombasa in November 1937: see Ramnath Biswas, ‘Africa Bhramaner Bhumika (Introduction to My Travel to Africa)’, in Prabartak (Jaishthya/May–June 1942): 97–102, South Asia Archive (henceforth, SAA), accessed April 23, 2021, http://www.southasiaarchive.com/Content/sarf.120218/231678/010.
7. Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012): 2.
8. Ibid., 3.
9. See Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi before India (Gurgaon: Penguin, 2017); and Judith Margaret Brown and Martin Prozesky, Gandhi and South Africa: Perspectives and Prospects (Natal: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 1996).
10. See Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism.
11. Sean Chabot, Transnational Roots of the Civil Rights Movement: African-American Explorations of the Gandhian Repertoire (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2012).
12. Sarah Azaransky, This Worldwide Struggle: Religion and the International Roots of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017): 2.
13. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge for Racial Equality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 5; see also Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
14. Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of Transnationalism for the Global South—Literary and Cultural Perspectives’, in Social Dynamics 33, no. 2 (2007): 3–4.
15. Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
16. Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009): 31; see also Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, ed., Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
17. See Trish Nicholson, Passionate Travellers: Around the World on 21 Incredible Journeys in History (Leicester: Matador, 2019).
18. See Basu, ‘Performing Other-Wise’.
19. See, among many others, Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 2003); Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (New York: Guilford Press, 1994); and Ketaki Kushari Dyson, A Various Universe: A Study of the Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent 1765–1856 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).
20. Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Laskars and Princes: The Story of Indians in Britain 1700–1947 (London: Routledge, 2015).
21. See Tabish Khair et al., ed., Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Nabil Matar, Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); and Hamid Dabashi, Reversing the Colonial Gaze: Persian Travelers Abroad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
22. See, for example, Mushirul Hasan, ed., Exploring the West: Three Travel Narratives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Simonti Sen, Travels to Europe: Self and Other in Bengali Travel Narratives, 1870–1910 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005); Suryakanthi Tripathi, Radha Chakravarty and Nivedita Ray, ed., Tagore the Eternal Seeker: Footprints of a World Traveller (New Delhi: Vij Books India, 2015); Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Oakland: University of California Press, 1998); and Javed Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
23. Antoinette Burton, Brown over Black: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2012); D.D.T. Jabavu, In India and East Africa / E-Indiya nase East Africa: A Travelogue in IsiXhosa and English, ed. Tina Steiner et al., trans. Cecil W. Manona (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2020).
24. Gaurav G. Desai, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India and the Afrasian Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Chapters entitled ‘Through Indian Eyes: Travel and the Performance of Ethnicity’ and ‘Commerce as Romance: Mehta, Madhavani, Manji’ focus on ordinary Indian entrepreneurs on their trip to Africa.
25. Jon Soske, Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017); see also Shannon Walsh and Jon Soske, ed., Ties that Blind: Race and Politics of Friendship in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016).
26. Gerhard Maré, Declassified: Moving beyond the Dead-End of Race in South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2014).
27. I follow scholars such as Nico Slate, but also Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed in my usage of the word ‘coloured’ and ‘black’ to denote non-white people and indigenous Africans, respectively: see Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
28. Ramnath Biswas, ‘Introduction’, in Duranta Dakshin Africa (Swirling South Africa) (Kolkata: Bhattacharya Sons, 1949): paras. 3–5.
29. The village is now in present-day Bangladesh.
30. Jugantar, a popular contemporary Bengali daily, reported that Biswas was born in 1893: see ‘Paroloke Bhuparyatak Ramnath Biswas (Ramnath Biswas, the Globetrotter, Breathes His Last)’, in Jugantar, November 2, 1955, South Asia Open Archives (henceforth, SAOA), accessed April 23, 2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/saoa.crl.27587183.
31. See Shyamsundar Basu, Ramnather Prithibi (The World of Ramnath) (Kolkata: De Book Store, 1997), for a detailed biography of Biswas.
32. See Sumit Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), for a history of these militant nationalist organisations.
33. Basu, Ramnather Prithibi, 21. A similar point has also been made in Roy, ‘Editor’s Note’, 11.
34. Basu, Ramnather Prithibi, 19.
35. Roy, ‘Editor’s Note’, 12.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 12; see also Basu, Ramnather Prithibi, 23.
38. Bibekananda Mukhopadhyay, ‘Ramnath Biswas’, Jugantar, November 3, 1955, 4, SAOA, accessed April 23, 2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/saoa.crl.275871834.
39. Southern Rhodesia became part of Zimbabwe in 1980, while Northern Rhodesia was included in Zambia in 1964.
40. The travelogues about Africa are Andhakarer Africa (Africa: The Land of Darkness, 1950) about Biswas’ travels to Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Nyasaland and Mozambique; Duranta Dakshin Africa (Swirling South Africa, 1949) about his travels to Natal, Transvaal and Cape Colony; and Negro Jatir Nutan Jiban (New Life of the Negroes, 1949) about North and South Rhodesia. My research indicates that Andhakarer Africa was later published under the title Vayonkar Africa (Terrible Africa, date of publication is not known yet). He also wrote another book titled Africa in Pictures: A Pictorial Representation of My Tour Round Africa (1941). The travelogue on America is titled Aajker America (America Today, 1941).
41. The novels are Mau-Mau er Deshe (In the Land of the Mau Mau, 1953), Americar Negro (The Negroes of America, 1952), Sagar Parer Opare (On the Other Side of the Sea, n.d.), Aaguner Aalo (The Light of Fire, 1948), and Hollywood er Atmakatha (The Autobiography of Hollywood, 1949).
42. Basu, ‘Performing Other-Wise’, 487.
43. The term Boer refers to Dutch settlers in Southern African Cape frontiers and their descendants.
44. Biswas, Aajker America, 8.
45. Please refer to the ‘Introduction’ of this article for my use of racial terminology.
46. Biswas, Andhakarer Africa, 11.
47. Biswas, Aajker America, 204.
48. Ibid., 78.
49. Ramnath Biswas, Negro Jatir Nutan Jiban (New Life of the Negroes) (Kolkata: D.M. Library, 1949), p. 95.
50. Ibid.
51. Ramnath Biswas, Duranta Dakshin Africa, 65.
52. Ibid., 105.
53. Ibid., 198–202.
54. See Deborah Gabriel, Layers of Blackness: Colourism in the African Diaspora (London: Imani Media, 2007), where the author projects ‘class distinction based on skin colour’ in the Americas and Europe in both colonial and post-colonial times.
55. Biswas, Andhakarer Africa, 32.
56. Biswas, Negro Jatir Nutan Jiban, 9.
57. Biswas, Andhakarer Africa, 173.
58. Ibid., 77.
59. Biswas, Negro Jatir Nutan Jiban, 147.
60. Biswas, Andhakarer Africa, 31.
61. Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015): 13.
62. Jon Soske, Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017): 13.
63. Desai and Vahed, The South African Gandhi, 22.
64. Biswas, Andhakarer Africa, 35–37.
65. Ibid., 37.
66. Biswas, Negro Jatir Nutan Jiban, 23.
67. Ibid., 47–48.
68. Ibid., 31.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., 87.
71. People of mixed Indian and African descent. Here I refer to both Indians and Africans in marital relationship with each other and their children.
72. Biswas, Negro Jatir Nutan Jiban, 133.
73. Ibid., 71.
74. Ibid., 81.
75. See Aiyar, Indians in Kenya; and Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 165–203.
76. Biswas, Andhakarer Africa, 75.
77. Biswas, Duranta Dakshin Africa, 37, 186.
78. Biswas never mentions the full name of the organisation, but presumably he refers to the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), which was formed in 1921.
79. Formed in 1933 when some members of the Natal Indian Congress (established by Gandhi in 1894) resigned to form a separate organisation.
80. Biswas, Aajker America, 3–4.
81. Maureen J. Tayal, ‘Ideology in Organized Indian Politics, 1880–1948’, African Studies Seminar Paper, no. 2 (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand, 1983), accessed December 12, 2020, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/39668755.pdf.
82. Biswas, Duranta Dakshin Africa, ‘Introduction’, paras. 1–3.
83. Biswas, Duranta Dakshin Africa, 179.
84. Rasik Chandra Bhattacharyya, ‘Colour Bar in South Africa’, in The Weekly Bangashree: A Weekly News Chronicle (1941): 249, SAA, accessed April 23, 2021, http://www.southasiaarchive.com/Content/sarf.120112/210383/008.
85. Biswas, Duranta Dakshin Africa, 145–48.
86. See Jugantar, May 16, 1949, 1, 4–5, SAOA, accessed April 23, 2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/saoa.crl.27583553, for reports on the acceptance of India’s proposal for establishing a committee to examine the racist treatment of Indians in South Africa in the presence of a huge gathering of migrant Indians at the United Nations General Assembly. In addition, an editorial article on racism in South Africa was published in the same issue.
87. Biswas, Duranta Dakshin Africa, 31.
88. Ibid., 14.
89. Biswas, Andhakarer Africa, 140.
90. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 8.
91. Ibid., 10.
92. See Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage, 2014).
93. Biswas, Andhakarer Africa, 59.
94. Ibid., 39–42.
95. Burton, Brown over Black.
96. Ramnath Biswas, ‘Africa Bhramaner Bhumika (Introduction to Travel to Africa)’, Prabartak, (Jaishthya/May–June 1942): 97, SAA, accessed April 23, 2021, http://www.southasiaarchive.com/Content/sarf.120218/231678/010.
97. Biswas, Andhakarer Africa, 133.
98. Biswas, Negro Jatir Nutan Jiban, 64–65.
99. Ibid., 109–12.
100. The stupa might be the remains of a building built in the late fifteenth or sixteenth century during the time of the Maravi empire, probably situated in a village called Manithimba beside Lake Malawi.
101. Biswas, Andhakarer Africa, 142.
102. Biswas, ‘Africa Bhramaner Bhumika’, 102.
103. Tina Steiner, ‘Port as Portals: D.D.T. Jabavu’s Voyage to the World Pacifist Meeting in India’, English Studies in Africa 62, no. 1 (2019): 8–20.
104. Ramnath Biswas, ‘Purba Africa (East Africa)’, Prabasi (Shraban/July–August 1940): 487, SAA, accessed April 23, 2021, http://www.southasiaarchive.com/Content/sarf.120042/206470/012.
105. The anti-caste movements of Jyotiba Phule, the Self-Respect Movement in 1925 led by Periyar, and the Depressed Classes Movement under the leadership of Ambedkar in the 1920s and 1930s were some prominent anti-caste movements against Brahmanic domination in late colonial India. The Congress also acted as a united platform for representing the rights of low-caste and working-class people during the 1930s: see Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution.
106. Biswas, Aajker America, 154.
107. Ibid., 223.
108. Ibid., 153.
109. See Jugantar, March 27, 1940, to April 17, 1940, SAOA, accessed April 23, 2021, https://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=Jugantar&sd=1940%2F03%2F27&ed=1940%2F04%2F17, for reports related to the strikes.
110. See Jugantar, April 16, 1940: 5, SAOA, accessed April 23, 2021, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/saoa.crl.26425217.
111. Biswas, Andhakarer Africa, 135–36.
112. Biswas, Aajker America, 72.
113. Biswas, Andhakarer Africa, 103.
114. See Helen Carr, ‘Modernism and Travel: 1880–1940’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 70–86.
115. Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (New York: Routledge, 2011): 119.
116. Biswas, Negro Jatir Nutan Jiban, 140.
117. Ibid., 132.
118. Basu, Ramnather Prithibi, 53.
119. Biswas, Aajker America, 200.
120. Ibid., 201.
121. Biswas, Aajker America, 11–12.
122. Biswas, Duranta Dakshin Africa, 162.
123. Asheshchandra Basu, ‘Africar Bhison Sarpo, “Mamba” (“Mamba”: The Terrible Snake of Africa)’, Prabasi 35, part 2 (Kartik–Caitra/November 1934–April 1935): 644–45, CrossAsia Repository, accessed April 23, 2021, http://crossasia-repository.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/1000/.
124. Ramnath Biswas, ‘Bhuswargo Rhodesia: Africa (Rhodesia, the Heaven on Earth: Africa)’, Prabartak (Shraban/July–August 1942): 243–47, SAA, accessed April 23, 2021, http://www.southasiaarchive.com/Content/sarf.120218/231680/018.
125. Biswas, Negro Jatir Nutan Jiban, 5.
126. Biswas, Duranta Dakshin Africa, 149.
127. Biswas, Aajker America, 30.