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Abstract
Recent attempts to recalibrate the US-India relationship require a clearer understanding of how this relationship began. To that end, this essay traces the themes characterizing early US-India relations through a rhetorical analysis of Time magazine cover portraits and articles from 1951 to 1962 featuring the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru. Acting as an index of the US administration and partly conveying the attitudes of its editor-in-chief toward India, Time advanced a set of arguments about India's unreliability as a Cold War ally and the essential correctness of the US administration's stance against communist nations and those who eschewed open alignment with the US during the Cold War. Time's coverage formed a narrative arc that admonished India's attempts at friendship with China and Cold War neutrality while vindicating the US cause during this period. I conclude that Cold War themes linger in US news reporting on India, argue for more scholarship on non-Western nations, and suggest that, along with verbal texts, images are rich sources of foreign policy rhetoric.
Acknowledgments
A version of this article was presented at the November 2012 meeting of the National Communication Association. The author would like to thank John Murphy for his advice and support on this project, Cara Finnegan for the graduate seminar which led to this project, and Bill Eadie and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this article.
Notes
Ahimsa, the Hindi word for the avoidance of violence, was a central principle of Mahatma Gandhi's freedom movement.
For a sampling of existing rhetorical work on India, see Yamabhai's examination of Gandhi's non-violence rhetoric, Merriam's discussion of Gandhi's non-verbal persuasion, and Carlson's application of Burke's comic frame to Gandhi's independence movement.
The dragon was one of the most common symbols used to portray China to American audiences in this period. Between 1950 and 1970, one third of Time's covers of China used the image of a dragon to denote China. Since then, China has been depicted by either an image of one of its leaders, or its flag's yellow star.
I do not wish to imply that visual rhetoric scholarship has ignored images of other countries. Hariman and Lucaites's No Caption Needed looked at how photographs of Chinese protestors in Tiananmen Square and victims of napalm attacks in the Vietnam War shaped how the American public talked about specific events such as the US involvement in Vietnam, and how these photographs were appropriated in evaluations of subsequent US military involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hope to contribute to such work in two ways: first, by studying how a series of texts creates a narrative of one country's relationship with another, rather than examining an event captured in a single image. Second, while the visual element is important in this study, I wish to consider it alongside a close reading of textual elements.
Chang found that in the 1950s, when the Communist party's rise to power was freshest and the US's relations with China were at their most volatile, the president referred to China as “Red China” or the “Chinese Communist Regime,” indicating the illegitimacy of the Party's rule and the danger it posed. It was only during rapprochement in the 1970s that US leaders referred to China as the “People's Republic of China,” removing the earlier negative connotations.
For details, see Kux on the “estranged democracies” of India and the US and the complex relations between India, Britain and the US at the onset of World War II.
In 1922, there were just 2,600 Indians in the United States, 2,400 in 1940 and approximately 3,000 in 1950, attributable to the restrictive Immigration Act of 1917 which excluded all Indians as immigrants. It was only in 1946 that Congress restored to Indians the chance to enter the United States as immigrants and become naturalized citizens. However, this opportunity was restricted to 100 Indians a year, so interaction between the American public and Indians remained limited (Isaacs 283, 285).
Isaacs reported in Images of Asia that Mother India was “a sensation in the United States, in Great Britain, and in India. It became the center of a storm that raged for half a dozen years, in the newspapers, the periodical press, and on the lecture platforms in all three countries,” and went through 27 editions (268–69).
Time played heavily into such discourses. In the late 1970s and 80s, postcolonial narratives resisting the cultural hegemony of the West rose to prominence through works such as Edward Said's Orientalism (Citation1978) and Gayathri Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Citation1988). Time, perceiving a slippage in US power, published an editorial in 1981 titled “American Renewal,” touting the US's potential to rescue other nations from themselves. As Spurr noted, “At a moment of crisis in the postcolonial world, Time revive[d] a traditionally American rhetoric of self-affirmation” (119).
Before 1962, India appeared on Life's covers as the setting for other events, such as the Dalai Lama's escape to India (May 4, 1959) or Queen Elizabeth II's visit (February 3, 1961). The specific Life covers mentioned in this essay are available at the links below: The Dalai Lama's escape (1959): http://www.originallifemagazines.com/LIFE-Magazine-May-4-1959-P2673.aspx Queen Elizabeth II's visit (1961): http://www.originallifemagazines.com/LIFE-Magazine-February-3-1961-P1638.aspx; Nehru's funeral (1964): http://www.originallifemagazines.com/LIFE-Magazine-June-5-1964-P1809.aspx.
The 1959 and 1962 cover issues were prefaced by letters from the publisher attesting to Time's expertise on India. Time's New Delhi foreign press corps, declared the letters, “time and again crossed footsteps with Nehru” and “traveled through more of India than most Indian journalists” (“A Letter”).
In 2007, when studying why prominent US news organizations parroted the Bush administration's reasons for the Second Gulf War despite there being other, more plausible explanations, Bennett found that “the U.S. mainstream press has trouble with information that has not passed through some government source for its seal of approval” (4). For more, see Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston.
Luce “not only edited but also censored,” practicing an “advocacy journalism” (Herzstein xiv) to advance his “fervent faith in America's God-ordained global mission in Asia” (1). He “used his vastly successful journalism as a kind of secular pulpit from which he preached the virtues of American engagement in Asia” (1).
An anonymous 1936 article in the Indian magazine Modern Review issued this severe judgment: “Men like Jawaharlal, with all their capacity for great and good work, are unsafe in a democracy. Jawahar has all the makings of a dictator in him—vast popularity, a strong will, ability, hardness, an intolerance for others and a certain contempt for the weak and insufficient. Is it not possible that Jawahar might fancy himself as a Caesar?” Years later, the writer was revealed as Nehru himself. From “India: The Uncertain Bellwether,” 18.
The covers came from Time issues published on May 7, 1951, December 4, 1959, and November 30, 1962. An image of each cover can be accessed at the links below: May 7, 1951: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19510507,00.html; December 4, 1959: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19591214,00.html; November 30, 1962: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19621130,00.html.
While the three Time issues sometimes contained more than one article on India, most were incidental references. To make justifiable claims about the connection between the visual elements of the covers and the arguments in the magazine, I focused my analysis on the cover images and their corresponding article. I examined the covers following an approach outlined by Cara Finnegan in which I analyzed the composition of each image, focusing on content, color, and spatial organization. For more methodological details, see Finnegan. I analyzed the articles using a thematic content analysis in which I identified each article's key arguments and compared these arguments to identify recurrent themes across the three articles.
Ibid., 25. “Hindi Chini bhai bhai” was a cry of solidarity with China that used to be taken up in India's streets prior to China's incursions into Tibet and the Himalayas.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this essay for this helpful insight.