Empire as a Way of Life (C.L.R. James, 1933)

Some nineteenth-century governors of Trinidad, John or Arthur or some such.
All them served the British elsewhere in Africa or Asia before or after their West Indian careers. 

Into this community comes the Englishman to govern, fortified (sometimes) by university degrees; and of late years by a wide experience in dealing with primitive peoples in Africa. 

His antecedents have not been helpful. Bourgeois at home, he has found himself after a few weeks at sea suddenly exalted into membership of a ruling class. Empire to him and most of his type, formerly but a word, becomes on his advent to the colonies a phrase charged with responsibilities, but bearing in its train the most delightful privileges, beneficial to his material well-being and flattering to his pride. Being an Englishman and accustomed to think well of himself, in this new position he soon develops a powerful conviction of his own importance in the scheme of things and it does not take him long to convince himself not only that he can do his work well—which to do him justice, he quite often does— but that for many generations to come none but he and his type can ever hope to do the work they are doing. 

On his arrival in the West Indies he experiences a shock. Here is a thoroughly civilised community, wearing the same clothes that he does, speaking no other language but his own, with its best men as good as, and only too often, better than himself. What is the effect on the colonial Englishman when he recognises, as he has to recognise, the quality of those over whom he is placed in authority? Men have to justify themselves, and he falls heavily back on the “ability of the Anglo- Saxon to govern,” “the trusteeship of the mother country until such time” (always in the distant future) “as these colonies can stand by themselves,” etc., etc. He owes his place to a system, and the system thereby becomes sacred. Blackstone did not worship the corrupt pre- Reform constitution as the Colonial Office official worships the system of Crown Colony Government. 

“Patriotism,” says Johnson, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” It is the first resort of the colonial Englishman. How he leaps to attention at the first bars of “God Save the King”! Empire Day, King’s Birthday, days not so much neglected in England as ignored, give to his thirsty spirit an opportunity to sing the praises of the British Empire and of England, his own country, as its centre. Never does he seem to remember that the native place of the majority of those to whom he addresses his wearisome panegyrics is not England, but the colony in which they were born, in which they live, and in which they will in all probability die. 

This excessive and vocal patriotism in the colonial Englishman is but the natural smoke of intensified fires burning within. That snobbishness which is so marked a characteristic of the Englishman at home, in the colonies develops into a morbid desire for the respect and homage of those over whom he rules. Uneasily conscious of the moral insecurity of his position, he is further handicapped by finding himself an aristocrat without having been trained as one. His nose for what he considers derogatory to his dignity becomes keener than a bloodhound’s, which leads him into the most frightful solecisms.

In Grenada in 1931 there was a very orderly demonstration by all classes of the community against a decision of the Governor. One man who with his family had been invited to Government House for some social function took part in it. The Governor cancelled the invitation, but informed him that the cancellation did not apply to his wife and daughter who could come if they wanted to. 

It is not surprising that the famous English tolerance leaves him almost entirely. At home he was distinguished for the liberality and freedom of his views. Hampden, Chatham, Dunning and Fox, Magna Carta and Bill of Rights, these are the persons and things (however misconceived) which Englishmen, undemonstrative as they are, write and speak of with a subdued but conscious pride. It is no accident, the Whig tradition in English historical writing. But in the colonies any man who speaks for his country, any man who dares to question the authority of those who rule over him, any man who tries to do for his own people what Englishmen are so proud that other Englishmen have done for theirs, immediately becomes in the eyes of the colonial Englishman a dangerous person, a wild revolutionary, a man with no respect for law and order, a self-seeker actuated by the lowest motives, a reptile to be crushed at the first opportunity. What at home is the greatest virtue becomes in the colonies the greatest crime. 

The colonial Englishman it is fair to say retains some of the admirable characteristics which distinguish his race at home, but he is in a false position. Each succeeding year sees local men pressing him on every side, men whom he knows are under no illusions as to why he holds the places he does. Pressure reduces him to dodging and shifting. Thus it is that even of that honesty which is so well-recognised a characteristic of the English people,— but I shall let an Englishman speak: “It is difficult,” says Mr. Somervell, the historian, “for white races to preserve their moral standards in their dealings with races they regard as inferior.” Should Englishmen of fine sensibility stray into the Colonial Service they find themselves drawn inevitably into the circle of their colleagues and soon discover that for them to do otherwise than the Romans would be equivalent to joining a body of outsiders against their own. Thus it is that in the colonies, to quote an English official in the West Indies, “such large and intelligent classes of Englishmen come to have opinions so diff erent from those for which the nation has ever been renowned at home.”

C.L.R. James, The Case for West-Indian Self Government (London: Hogarth Press, 1932), 10-12. PDF.

Disaster Areas

            

Above Vietnam

            So area studies has been a disaster area in many ways. 

— Eqbal Ahmad, "Knowledge, Place, and Power: A Critique of Globalization,” in Ali Mirsepassi, Amrita Basu and Frederick Weaver eds. Localizing Knowledge Ìn a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003). 

"Bill Brown of Boston," West Africa, no. 1929, February 13, 1954, p. 125; no. 1930, February 20, 1954, p. 166. The anonymous "American Correspondent" of this biographical article notes that Dr. Brown lectured at Howard University. During the war he entered the State Department where he eventually succeeded Ralph Bunche as chief of the African Section of the Office of Strategic Affairs. He later headed the African Research Branch of the State Department. Brown left the Department of State in 1953 when the Ford Foundation offered him an appointment as consultant, involving a study trip to Europe and Africa. Upon his return from Africa, he accepted the post at Boston University. The Program at the start was entirely supported by Boston University, "but it is hoped that they will be supplemented by foundation grants." The Ford Foundation in November, 1954, made a substantial grant to the Program. One of the Program's faculty members is already engaged in a study of African students in the United States under the auspices of the Program and with partial financial support from the Twentieth Century Fund. American Sociological Review, XIX, 1954, p. 604. "The Anonymous Correspondent'' adds the following: "It is somewhat surprising to see in a sedate street in Boston, a pleasant New England (U. S. A.) town, an office housing an 'African Research and Studies Program'' Vaguely one feels that there can be little connection with far off Africa. But America is very conscious of her lack of knowledge of other continents. Her sudden emergence as the leading world power made her realize this and everywhere there are springing up groups concerned with areas very remote, both culturally and geographically, from America. So Boston University decided to establish an African Research and Study Program...." This "little connection with far off Africa" goes back, of course, a long way, to colonial times and the slave trade. This basis of New England colonial development has been amply documented. Less known, however, is the direct relationship of New England not only to the slave trade encompassing primarily West Africa, but also that of commercial relations with East Africa. To this day the dining room of the main hotel in Salem is called the "Zanzibar Room."

— Jerome S. Rauch, "Area Institute Programs and African Studies,” The Journal of Negro Education, 1955 p. 418-419, note 49. 

The late Jerome Rauch’s experiences during the 1950s illustrate the sort of troubles that befell anthropologists who critiqued disciplinary connections to the national security state. Rauch’s experiences are worth recounting, first, to acknowledge that there are many more victims of McCarthyism than could ever be established through a search of archives or record systems and, second, to stress how the fears of McCarthyism repressed the development of specific voices.

In the late 1940s Rauch began studying anthropology at Columbia University where he undertook fieldwork in the Mortlock Islands (aaanb 1947 1[2]:16). Rauch took graduate courses with Kardiner, Strong, Benedict,Wagley, Weltfish, and Steward. He was active in the Columbia chapter of the American Veterans Committee, the Henry Wallace campaign, and the campus Marxist Club (Julie Rauch to Price 7/7/01). Things went well for Rauch until 1955 when he published an essay in the Journal of Negro Education, titled ‘‘Area Institute Programs and African Studies.’’ This article developed a sophisticated, radical critique of the social sciences’ ties with governmental agencies. Rauch critically analyzed how increased funding for area study centers caused these centers to think in specific ways and to ask questions with applications to the military and diplomatic interests of the Cold War. With frankness and detail Rauch argued that relationships between funding patrons and client anthropologists ‘‘transformed academic research into applied science, and reconfigured social research into ideology’’ (Rauch to Price 2/22/01). Rauch observed that there was a ‘‘configuration of government and business interest[s]’’ that could be seen in the mixture of governmental policy agencies (e.g., State Department, Foreign Service Institute, etc.), intelligence agencies (e.g., Office of Intelligence Research, Office of Naval Intelligence, etc.), military (e.g., National War College, U.S. Air Force, etc.), private foundations (e.g.,Viking Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, etc.), and private industry (e.g., Standard Oil, etc.) directing research funding opportunities and research agendas for anthropology (Rauch 1955:415–16).

Rauch directly experienced negative consequences for his analysis of the ‘‘subordination of area research to government and business policy’’ (1955: 415). After publishing this critique, Rauch was given a Cold War cold shoulder by many in Columbia’s anthropology department. Decades later he recalled that after publishing his impolite study he was taken aside by ‘‘Julian Steward, [who] told me that I was unemployable, and trying to face reality, I enrolled in library school’’ (Rauch to Price 12/13/00). 

Rauch was not bitter about this unwanted career change. He lived a productive life outside of anthropology working with W. E. B. Du Bois on the Council on African American Affairs, researching the history of the Caribbean slave trade, assisting the Maryland Legislative Black Caucus, and working as an applications programmer at the Oncology Institute of Johns Hopkins Hospital (Rauch to Price 12/13/00). But the culling of Rauch from anthropology not only curtailed the development of his line of critical research, it limited the audience who would encounter his critique and it sent a message to other anthropologists that such frank analyses could detrimentally affect one’s career.

David H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham: Duke, 2004), 346-347.

… the Ford Foundation, in close consultation with the CIA, helped to shape postwar area studies and important collaborative research in modernization studies and comparative politics that were later mediated through well known Social Science Research Council projects (ones that were required reading when I was a graduate student in the late 1960s).  According to Christopher Simpson's study of declassified materials, however, this interweaving of foundations, universities, and state agencies (mainly in intelligence and the military) extended to the social sciences as a whole: "For years, government money .. . not always publicly acknowledged as such—made up more than 75 per cent of the annual budgets of institutions such as Paul Lazarsfeld's Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, Hadley Cantril's Institute for International Social Programs at Princeton, Ithiel de Sola Pool's CENIS [the Center for International Studies, earlier known as CIS] program at MIT, and others." Official sources in 1952 reported that "fully 96 per cent of all reported [government] funding for social sciences at that time was drawn from the U.S. military." My own work in postwar U.S. archives over the past two decades has taught me how many books central to the political science profession in the 1950s and 1960s emerged first as internal classified government studies. 

Bruce Cumings, “Boundary Displacement: Area studies and International Studies During and After the Cold War,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29 (1997), 15.

Above Iraq

Such a shifting in the focus of history can only be regarded as a long process. It would require an intensive effort for making available to the historian the type of historical information needed for these studies: literary sources, manuscripts and documents (many of them still buried in remote libraries), the study of folk traditions, physical objects, field studies, etc. It would also require the development of the necessary academic infrastructure in the countries concerned, for experience has shown that where the study of societies with living cultural traditions is concerned, the perception of its ethos and inter-connections requires a very long period of training for persons not born and reared within it. Even the development of “area studies” in many of the Western countries can play only a limited role in this process. For one, many of the area studies programmes in these countries have a heavy presentist bias, being dependent for their finances upon government and/or private foundations, and geared to fulfill certain political or business purposes. Secondly, within these countries, area studies are often considered peripheral to the study of history by the university departments. In consequence, they sometimes fail to attract the right type of student or researcher, thereby further strengthening the ethnocentric bias in history. To an extent area studies programmes have tended to perpetuate the notion that Afro-Asian countries are “patients” in the field of history, and that the history written by the historians of the area are somehow inferior, being tainted by the “nationalist” bias, whereas it is presumed that the writings of historians from metropolitan countries, i.e. the former colonising powers would be free from the “Imperialist” bias. This tendency to attempt to continue the colonial situation in the field of history in the name of the centre and the periphery is bound to have harmful repercussions.

Satish Chandra, "A Note On the Decentring of History and Apprehension By All People of Their History," Diogenes 20:77 (1972), 103.

The career entry barrier is first and foremost, language. If philologists no longer dominate area programs (then called ‘Oriental studies’, something also pioneered in the United States at the University of Chicago) as they once did, few Japanologists will pay attention to the work of someone who cannot read Japanese. If people in a large region of the world speak the same language—for example, Spanish in most of Latin America—then a Latin American studies programme will include everything south of the Rio Grande. If it is a region like Northeast or Southeast Asia, however, where there is no common language in the past century, ‘area’ will usually mean country. The field of Korean studies makes this generalization clearest: in spite of Korea’s two-millennium-long history of interaction with Japan and China, to be in ‘Korean studies’ is to study Korea and not China or Japan. (When I applied to a Northeast Asia committee for research funding to study the regional political economy, one Japanologist on the committee asked if I were ‘changing my field’.) To study China or Japan is to assume that one need know little or nothing about Korea: my experiences in this regard could easily fill a book, but we need only look at one book, Peter Duus’s Abacus and the Sword, to see the prefatory assumption that because he cannot read Korean, he must limit his study of Japanese imperialism in Korea to Japanese materials. The implicit assumption appears also to be that lack of Korean-language facility maims one in understanding the scholarship of Koreanists done in English, which is the only explanation I can come up with, of why Duus made so little use of the seminal studies of late-nineteenth century Korea by James B. Palais, Key-Hiuk Kim, Martina Deuchler, and others. That is, without climbing over the language barrier one ought not to venture into alien territory—however close (in every sense) it might be. 

Bruce Cumings, “Seeing Like an Area Specialist,” in John D. Kelly, Kurt Jacobsen, Marston H. Morgan, eds., Reconsidering American Power: Pax Americana and the Social Sciences (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020), 92-93. 

Three Quotations from C.L.R. James

C.L.R. James (1946)

"The intellectual loves to show the class struggle acting on other people. He hates like hell for it to be applied to himself." (1941)

"The interpretation of history is a class question." (1943)

"The masses do not learn history, they make it. More accurately, they learn it only when they make it." (1944)

Syllabus: Transnational Asian Thought (2021)

I have been teaching this course for the last few months. The readings could use some tweaks no doubt, and pandemic conditions remain an impediment, but it was fun. This course is a senior-level, discussion based seminar which culminates in a final research project. The "optional" readings below were listed to help guide students to different kinds of readings and topics as they prepared their final projects.The dearth of translated material—especially of twentieth-century Arabic materials—is a major challenge in teaching a course like this, but there is nevertheless a great deal I could have included which I did not. I have simply posted the reading schedule below, leaving out the assignments and the bureaucratic paratext.

The first congress of representatives of the peoples of the East loudly proclaims to the whole world. To the capitalist rulers of Britain: This shall not be! You dogs will not devious the peoples of the east. You, a wretched handful of oppressors, will not reduce to everlasting serfdom hundred of millions of Eastern workers and peasants. You have bitten off too big a piece, more than you can chew, and it will choke you! 

 — Manifesto to the Peoples of the East (1920)

Schedule

Week 1

Introduction: History, the library, the internet 

I. Frameworks and Guides

Week 2

What is Asia? 

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “One Asia, or Many? Reflections From Connected History,” Modern Asian Studies 50:1 (2016), 5-43. 

Rabindranath Tagore, “Asia’s Response to the Call of the New Age,” Modern Review 52:4 (1932), 369-373.

Week 3

What’s the point of Transnational Asian Thought? 

Milinda Banerjee, Decolonize Intellectual History! An Agenda for the Capitalocene https://jhiblog.org/2021/05/19/decolonize-intellectual-history/

Loubna El Amine, "Beyond East and West: A reorientation of political theory through the prism of modernity," Perspectives on Politics (March 2016).

Optional: 

Raymond Williams, “Intellectual” Keywords (1976)

Week 4

Comparison vs. Connection 

C.A. Bayly, “Indian and Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age,” Hanssen and Weiss, Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (2016), 325-350. 

Noor-Aiman Khan, “A Tale of Two Nationalisms,” in Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire (2011), 13-31. 

Optional:

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Global Intellectual History Beyond Hegel or Marx,”  History and Theory 54:1 (2015), 126-137. 

II. The Content and Conditions of Thought

Week 5

Travel and the Limits of Asia 

Selections from Yosano Akiko, Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia: A Feminist Poet from Japan Encounters Prewar China (1928)

Optional:

Selections from: Shibli Nu’mani, Turkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Travelogue (1897) translated by Gregory Maxwell Bruce.

Mariusz Kałczewiak, “Anticolonial Orientalism: Perets Hirshbeyn’s Indian Travelogue,” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (July 2019) https://ingeveb.org/articles/anticolonial-orientalism

Rabindranath Tagore, Journey to Persia and Iraq, 1932

Week 6

Asia Against Europe I

Benoy Sarkar, “The Futurism of Young Asia,” (1918). 

Nguyen Thuong Hien, “Tearful Conversation over the Mulberry Fields and the Sea,” (1912 or 1913)

Optional:

Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review 117:5 ( 2012), pp. 1461-1485

David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 (1980)

Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz, Asian Place, Filipino Nation A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887–1912 (2020)

Week 7

Asia Against Europe II

Rebecca Karl, “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century” American Historical Review Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 1096-1118.

Optional: 

Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui, Beyond Pan-Asianism Connecting China and India, 1840s-1960s (2021)

Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination (2005) 

Sunil Amrith, “Gazing at the Stars,” History Workshop Journal (2008)

Week 8

“Eastern Women” 

Hi-Yen Zhen, “On the Question of Women’s Liberation” and “On Feminist Antimilitarism,” in Liu, Karl, and Ko, eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism 53-71; 167-184.  

Optional: 

Shobna Nijhawan, “International Feminism from an Asian Center: The All-Asian Women’s Conference (Lahore, 1931) as a Transnational Feminist Moment,” Journal of Women's History 29:3 (2017), 12-36. 

Anup Grewal, “Transnational Socialist Imaginary and the Proletarian Woman in China,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.2 (2013): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2218>

Week 9

Asian Communism 

Nergis Ertürk, “Baku Literary Common,” (2014) https://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/baku-literary-common

Selections from Riddel, ed., To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920–First Congress of the Peoples of the East (1993). 

M.P.T. Acharya, “Anarchist Manifesto,” (1926) in We Are Anarchists (2019), edited by Ole Birk Laursen.

Optional:

Ole Birk Laursen, “'I have only One Country, it is the World': Madame Cama, Anticolonialism, and Indian-Russian Revolutionary Networks in Paris, 1907–17,” History Workshop Journal (2021) 

Week 10

Asia Abroad 

Selections from: Har Dayal, Forty-four Months in Germany and Turkey (1920) 

Selections from the newspaper The United States of India https://www.saada.org/browse/source/the-united-states-of-india

Michael Goebel, “Learning and Imparting Lessons in Anti-Imperialism: Students in the Latin Quarter,” in ​​Anti-Imperial Metropolis Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (2015), 116-136. 

Optional: 

Mai Ramnath, Haj to Utopia How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (2011) 

Renisa Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (2018)

Week 11

Asia’s Last Stand? 

G.H. Jansen, “Dawn: The Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, March 1947,”  in Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (1966), 51-75

Optional:

Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54:1 (2012)

Week 12

Presentations

Etel Adnan contra the Kataeb

 

Dear Editor, 

Being a Lebanese whose father was a Moslem and mother a Christian, I feel I can express a few ideas in relation to Mr Saab's article in Forum's December issue.

I cannot explain how Mr Saab states so positively that "Arab nationalism had to have recourse to the most retrograde . . . instrument: Islam." It is unbecoming, to say the least, to call Islam, which is a great religion with a tremendous mystical literature and a great history, "retrograde" because some Moslems might be retrograde. Would Mr Saab accept the accusation that Christianity is backward because some Christians are fanatics? Nowadays, with the free world adopting more and more socialistic measures, the only absolute difference between the communists and us is religion. 

When Mr Saab states "that our immediate survival depends on the eternal duel between Baghdad and Cairo," is he aware that any lasting conflict between the Arab states will only harm all of us and eventually serve only Israel's expansion? 

It does not take "a selection of eight or ten thinkers at a maximum" to save Lebanon, or any other country. There were thousands of them in France who rather helped the country to sink until De Gaulle put some order in the house. And De Gaulle did not turn French Catholics against French Protestants, or did not rely on any "eternal conflict." He spoke of the unity of France, even if France has been composed of Basques, Spaniards, Corsican Italians, Germans of the Frankish invasions, Latins of Julius Caesar and all the immigrants who keep pouring in.

It is not Emmanuel Mounier who is going to save us, although he may be able to influence us for the best. But Mounier takes off from problems or situations which are typically French. If we want to be saved, spiritually as well as materially, we have to find solutions which answer our specifically Middle Eastern situation. And the only inspiration I see is in the message of Love, given by Christ, and the spirit of Charity and Tolerance which characterizes Islam.

 

ETHEL [sic] ADNAN

Instructor in French and the Humanities

Dominican College

San Rafael, California.

Middle East Forum 36:2 (February 1960). Adnan is responding to a deeply chauvinistic article by Edouard Saab "Lebanon and the UAE-Iraq Conflict," Middle East Forum 35:10 (December 1959), 15-17.

Saleem Kidwai (1951 – 2021)

Agha Shahid Ali, Begum Akhtar, and Saleem Kidwai

 

Saleem Kidwai, great carrier of Begum Akktar and Agha Sahid Ali’s legacies, is now gone. Born in Lucknow in 1951, he exemplified its finest literary and artistic traditions. A brave historian and eloquent translator, his work will surely remain widely read and cited for many years to come. It was a great pleasure to meet Professor Kidwai in 2016 when I was studying Urdu in Lucknow, his hospitality appeared to me boundless, and his knowledge humbling. Below I reproduce his incredible account of the infamous raid on Montreal’s Truxx nightclub in 1977. Published in the Bay Area Desi queer magazine Trikone in 2001, it is a moving memoir, tracing both the contours of state violence and the journey of a dislocated intellectual. 

****

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

I was paying for my beer when the Truxx was raided in fall of 1977. That night that changed my life in many ways has now turned into an amusing tale of irony. Now there are gay unions in Canada. But in 1977 there wasn't much.

I was then 26, shy but eager to explore the freedom that Montreal offered. I had arrived the year before to enroll as a graduate student at McGill University. Professionally, I did not need the Ph.D degree. I had been teaching at Delhi University for three years, had tenure, and was therefore entitled to study leave. The powerful don at the University could not understand why I wanted to go to Canada when I could finish my Ph.D in Delhi. I couldn't retort "It's not that. I am gay. I am 24 and have never been to a gay bar. I can't wait to be in one. I want to meet gay people. I want to go to North America to see what gay liberation is about. I want to taste freedom. I want to live without fear."

My discovery of the freedoms of the new free world was slow. The settling down, the homesickness, and my first harsh winter kept me preoccupied. My forays into gay commercial establishments were limited. The handbook that the University had sent me had mentioned the Peel Pub as a place where gays met. I had walked past it a few times trying to look inside before I finally, held my breath, pulled up my parka hood, and walked in. But it was uncomfortable and unfriendly. People were usually in groups who either ignored me or showed a blatant interest that unnerved me.

However, I did make friends outside of the pub and finally was introduced to the Truxx in early '77. I would have been totally intimidated but a friend went with me the first few times. Soon I was walking in without a thought.

Truxx actually included two other establishments, `The Mystique' and the `Rock'n'ball' atop which the Truxx was located. The Mystique, sometimes affectionately nicknamed The Mistake, was a piano bar, and its patrons were derisively referred to as `aunties' by Truxx die-hards. People there were more conservatively dressed while the fashionable ones walked in wearing fur coats. It was a good place for conversation, a place to sit and I liked the cabaret there. The Mystique was busy from Friday nights till the Sunday tea dance. Above it, the Rock'n'ball was a disco. Its dance floor was small and it was too noisy and most of the crowd young and trendy.

The Truxx was bare, unadorned and nearly always packed. A guy on the Gay help line had described the patrons as the `leather-Levis crowd.' The sexual energy in there was palpable. People did not waste time dancing or listening to someone sing. Instead, some struck poses; some displayed their muscles, while others, their leather apparel. I made my first bar-pickup there. The guy had been staring at me unabashedly and though flattered, I was embarrassed and did not know what was expected of me. I did not have to wait long because he walked up to me and put his tongue in my mouth without saying a word. Later, we arranged to meet the next day.

I do not want to suggest that this happened to others or to me on a regular basis at the Truxx. Most of the people, as I recall, left alone after endless hours of leaning against walls or counters.

The three bars were integrated into one by the fire escape, which saw a constant flow of people switching floors. That night, I entered through the Mystique and decided to get a beer before I settled down to waiting to see how the night would unfold. I headed up to Truxx where I always bought my beer because it was a quarter cheaper there. On a small fellowship, I had to count my quarters. I wonder what would have happened if I had tarried at The Mystique. Apparently most of the people at Mystique and many at the Rock'n'ball were allowed to go.

Instead, I happened to be in the place the cops really wanted to bust. Strange lighting suddenly lit up the dark bar. These were the powerful beams from the lights on the helmets of the cops who were dressed in fighting gear. They all had their automatic weapons aimed at waist level, as they rushed in, looking as if they were about to storm a guerilla hideout.

We were ordered by a cop on a megaphone to face the wall, raise our hands and place them on it. We waited while we were thoroughly frisked and insulted by the police. And then charged with being `found ins' in a `bawdy house!'

Then we were sent to an officer who was noting down personal information on a clipboard, and checking IDs. I panicked. One thing I had realized very early about this new, free world was that immigration authorities did not like homosexuals, particularly foreign ones. I was on a student visa, and the idea of deportation made my knees buckle. When my turn came, it took me a long time to tell him how to spell my unfamiliar name. I did not want them to see my student ID so I produced my Social Security card. The man was not content and again I tried to concoct an incomprehensible explanation. I think he mistook my nervousness for inadequate language skills. Fed up with the time I was taking, he decided he had enough on me. In any case it was late and they had 180 odd men to enlist. I went back to my place and put my hands on the wall again. I don't remember how long we stood thus but I do remember that my arms began to ache.

We were then led out into waiting police vans. Crowds had gathered outside the bars, and there were a few flashbulbs and a television camera or two. There were some slogans of protest but more jeering. I could not figure out who was being jeered--the police or us. We were packed in the van as densely as animals meant for slaughter are packed into trucks in India. It was almost impossible to breathe. You had to keep turning your nose to possible passages for fresh air. However, the unrelenting weekend spirit of some people refused to die down. Their banter irritated me at first, but over the endless hours that followed, I realized how valuable and rare a sense of humor was that night.

Our first stop was the downtown police station. Here we queued up to be booked, fingerprinted etc. Then we were herded into cells. Many more than a dozen were locked into a cell with bunk beds for two. The cells were tiny and the commode was almost next to the bunk beds. The beer drunk by most could no longer be retained. The floor was soon splattered with urine and the stench began to get unbearable. Finally, when all were booked, we were packed in the vans and moved again to another detention center.

Thankfully there were no cells here. It was a hall with few chairs. By morning people were beginning to collapse with fatigue and stress and had begun to lie down on the floor, oblivious of the cigarette stubs and dregs of spilt coffee from paper cups spread all over.

More humiliation awaited us. We were told to line up and drop out trousers and underwear and bend over. We waited, bent, as an elderly doctor slowly worked his way down the line, shoving cotton buds into people's rectums, labeling them and putting them away. This I was told was to test us for STDs.

Sometime after mid day we were produced before a magistrate. The end was almost anti-climatic. We pleaded not guilty of `being a found-in a bawdy house,' and were given a date to appear in court.

The blinding sunlight was the first thing I noticed when I stepped out. Some men who told me that a group defense was being planned offered legal help if I wanted. They told me where to get in touch with them.

I hurried back to my apartment and locked myself in and felt I never wanted to leave its safety again. I felt that way for a long time. So much for the freedom that I had come looking for!

For a few days after this I was a mess and totally dysfunctional. I did not appear at school for a week and was severely reprimanded by my language professor. I was mad with worry. I was scared of the trial, of getting convicted, of the publicity and scandal. I worried about the revocation of my visa. I decided that if it came to that, I would leave on my own so as to not get a `deported' stamp on my passport. Even then, how would I face my colleagues and the university authorities? What would I tell my family which had been so supportive--that I had to leave because I was caught in a brothel? How would I explain it to my homosexual friends in India? The truth would drive many of them, already living in fear, deeper into their closets.

I survived that period with the help of gay and straight friends. The legal aid cell of the students union sanctioned 110 dollars for my defense. A friend introduced me to a lawyer friend of his for advice. The lawyer was a successful corporate lawyer, constantly flying between continents, and would normally never have handled a case like this. However, he was so outraged by what I told him that he volunteered to do the case for the $110. He is one of the kindest men I have known.

He suggested I not join the group defense. He advised that we file a suit against the city of Montreal for false arrest, and harassment and demand a million dollar compensation. I said I could not deny under oath that I was gay and so had reservations about pretending ignorance. He clarified the issues. I was charged with being a found-in, not for being gay. "Was that place a bawdy house he asked?" No I said without hesitation "Even if they were to establish that it was a bawdy house, did you know that?" He asked. Again I denied it truthfully. "Then where is the question of lying?" I felt reassured and agreed to the million-dollar suit. He hesitatingly suggested that he would be entitled to 15% of whatever I got. I told him he could keep all of it if he wanted. I just want the pall of fear lifted from my life. We drank to that.

I did not sleep well for days before the first appearance at court, which eventually did not take very long. I had to wait with some ladies who had been picked up the previous night and who were still indiscriminately belligerent towards all. The Judge did not even look at me when my turn came and assigned another date.

Not too many days later, one morning at six while I was still asleep, the buzzer rang. I found two gentlemen who showed me their police badges and walked in. Fear had me wide-awake instantly. They mentioned my complaint and then switched to being inquisitive. Was I gay? There are no gays in India I told them using the official line of the government. They asked me if I had girlfriends and I said yes. Why was I drinking in bar full of only men? In India, I told them, men preferred to drink without women around. In between this trivia, they dropped threats. Their method was practiced, insidious and transparent. They told me what could happen. They could inform the university and my professors. They could inform my family. They were now aware that I was on a student visa and told me that the immigration department would cancel my visa if they found out about the arrest.

Then one of them threw me the bait. They asked me if I wanted the charges against me dropped. I asked how that would be done. They suggested I become a prosecution witness. I agreed, and asked how I could be of help. They wanted me to tell them about the scandalous goings on in the backroom. I said I had seen none. They kept coming back to it and I kept denying it. They finally asked if I would withdraw the complaint. I said no. They left looking very cross.

For the next two hours I waited for a respectable hour to call my lawyer. He told me take a cab and meet him at his office immediately. He was in a rage when I got there. Had I not seen enough American television to know that I should have refused to speak without my lawyer present? And why did I not call him when the police appeared?

Within the next half an hour we walked into the courthouse and into the office of some officer of the justice department. My lawyer let loose a volley of complaints about how his client, an innocent, bright, foreign student, was first arrested on false charges and then harassed by the police. He said that the police henceforth should communicate with his client through him and if this were to be infringed, he would raise the harassment claim to five million dollars. The officer, taken back at demeanor of the lawyer, his seniority and the vehemence of his protest, reassured us that he would look into the matter and that it would not be repeated.

As if to make up for his angry words, my lawyer took me out for a meal where he promised that he would personally go to the highest court on his own to defend me if he had to. I was reassured, and even more, touched by his generosity.

It took me some time to go back to the bars again, particularly the Truxx, which had reopened within a couple of days. But the fear of being busted never receded too far from daily memory.

I made good friends, enjoyed the beautiful city and came to love it. I concentrated on schoolwork, got an M.A, and completed the PhD residency requirements including the Comprehensive Exams. My leave was coming to an end and I was free to complete my dissertation in India and return to defend it. Friends, and a professor who had become a friend, advised me to chuck up the job at home and look for a job in North America. They assumed that as a gay man, that should have been my obvious choice. But that option had turned out to be a dream. As a gay person, I now wanted to live at home.

I had realized that in spite of laws, or their absence, freedom for me meant living my life according to rules I made for myself. I also knew well that it was not going to be easy. If I had to contribute to change, I preferred to do it at home.

The case had gotten nowhere in three years. Very much as in the Indian judicial system, dates were assigned and then reassigned. When I told my lawyer that I planned to leave the country in a few weeks, he pointed out that I would be jumping the personal bail I had given to the court. I asked what I should do because I wanted to return to Canada and defend my dissertation. He explained the law and the remedies clinically. "When you try and enter the country again, the computer will show that you jumped bail. They will arrest you. You have to insist that you be allowed to make a phone call to your lawyer. I will come and you will be out the same day. And yes, you must inform me when you are arriving." Wasn't there a way I could get the court's permission to leave I asked. "The case is buried under countless others. Do you want it dug up? Do you want to go back to the court? And there is very little time." I instantly decided what I had to do. I was going to jump bail and never come back to Canada again.

It was a major decision that I took in an instant. For years I regretted that after all the hard work, I would never get a Ph.D.

The end of this story was inconsequential in some ways. In 1984 a letter arrived bearing a Canadian stamp. I had begun dreading those letters because with increasing frequency they brought frightening and horrible news about friends and acquaintances dying of the new, mysterious cancer. But this letter contained a press clipping about the charges being dropped. My friend wrote that he hoped I would finally put this behind me. I already had. The charges being dropped made little difference to me. My life had taken already taken a different course.

Trikone 16 (2001). My thanks to Shireen Hamza for sharing this with me in 2016 when we were both in Lucknow. At McGill, Kidwai wrote a MA thesis entitled Three Historians of the Delhi Sultanate, which will surely be of interest to some [PDF].