Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's current charm offensive of diplomacy with Africa has included visits to four countries in 2016 and hosting the largest ever India-Africa Forum Summit in 2015. There, the PM pledged 50,000 scholarships for African students to enroll at Indian universities, reinvigorating a key Nehruvian developmentalist program of cultural diplomacy. Under the radar of this transoceanic bonhomie, a female Tanzanian student in Bangalore was beaten, stripped, and paraded around by a mob; a Congolese teacher was murdered in Delhi; and a Delhi minister led a midnight police assault to arrest several Ugandan women on unfounded charges of running a prostitution and drug ring. When the African diplomatic corps in India responded with a forceful collective complaint, Modi blithely retweeted his old summit speech declaring India-Africa ties to be robust. Given this context, Antoinette Burton's book is timely, calling for new histories of ‘Afro-Asian solidarity’, which look underneath the heroically masculinist and developmentalist narrative that emerged from transnational anticolonial struggles and culminated at the iconic 1955 non-aligned movement meeting at Bandung.
Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation seeks to make several interventions in postcolonial historiography. In debunking romantic accounts of easy confraternity in India-Africa relationships during the Cold War and beyond, Burton urges scholars to write racial hierarchies (‘brown over black’) into international relations while researching Indians’ and Africans’ obscured social and cultural interactions that she characterizes as ‘tense and tender’. Race, gender, and sexuality become critical registers in this project, leading to the contention that postcolonial Indian identity is formulated with reference to Africa and thus is reliant on sentiments of racial superiority and sexual purity derived from Indian imaginations of Africans and blackness. The author's inspiration for such conclusions lies in an analysis of what she labels ‘friction’ in fiction and non-fiction as read through a politics of unequal citation.
The heart of the book consists of four stand-alone essays each based on a central text: these are impressively disparate and neglected, yet relevant, sources. It opens with Ansuyah Singh's Behold the Earth Mourns (1960) about Indian politics in turbulent 1940s South Africa. Moving the novel out of ‘struggle history’ and ‘heritage history’, Burton shows how African characters act as markers in the story to reveal the racialization and gendering of Indian communal and political identities. This locates African and Indian histories of anti-apartheid struggles in the same frame while not ignoring the fragility of their confraternity, shot through with interracial intimacies and collisions. Chapter Two analyzes a 1965 ethnography and travelogue of decolonizing Africa by a Goanese editor of Times of India, Frank Moraes. Burton picks through the author's racialist observations to position him as representative of a paternalistic Nehruvian state, thereby exploding the fiction of equality in the hyphen between Afro-Asian. His opposite in Burton's book is anti-apartheid activist and historian Phyllis Naidoo, whose sketches of people in Durban's India town are lauded in Chapter Four as a hidden archive of ‘Afrindian’ collaborations and frictions. Perhaps the most compelling text under scrutiny appears in Chapter Three, Chanakya Sen's The Morning After (1973), which tracks the experiences of two Africans on the university scholarship scheme in India. Burton's major arguments shine through in this novel, as the imperial legacy of regimes of racial difference and sexual purity frustrate and delimit attempts at Afro-Asian solidarity. While the students’ failed romances with Indian women lace the novel with social pessimism, on the political front the self-interestedness of India's developmental outreach is unmasked, and Indian elites are portrayed belittling Africans to ratify their sense of civilizational superiority.
Africa in the Indian Imagination is fixated on displacing Bandung as the pre-eminent symbol of Afro-Asian solidarity, a tendency that feels overdrawn given emerging critical historiography on this pinnacle of non-alignment and its general absence in invocations by African and Indian leaders today. Regardless, the book makes powerful theoretical contributions by desegregating Indian and African histories across the postcolonial Indian Ocean region, infusing their study with feminist historical methods, and writing race into geopolitics. An unfortunate limitation is that Indo-African relationships are mostly detailed through an analysis of Indians’ gaze on Africans, rather than a study of their mutual interactions, an omission and structural weakness that the book should have mentioned before its final page. Burton's arguments are consistently sharp, even if at times the conclusions drawn from literary sources seem unconvincing or unrepresentative. Nonetheless, the call for research using alternate archives to study African and Indian frictions and solidarities in the postcolonial age – on political and cultural levels – is important: especially given the shadow creeping over these relations amidst increasing violence against Africans in India, and charges of neocolonial exploitation of African resources by Indian capital colluding with elites on both the continent and subcontinent.
