The following is an essay that the politician and social worker Krishna Bose wrote in 2019. Bose passed away in 2020, at the age of 89. Her son, Sumantra, sent the hitherto unpublished piece to The Wire, days after Donald Trump was elected again to the White House.
I have visited the United States many times over the past six decades, and quite often since the 1980s. But the visit in autumn 2018, as the leaves turned and ‘Fall’ arrived, was a special one. It was exactly 60 years after I had first set foot in America, in September 1958! I arrived at the same airport as then, Boston’s Logan airport. When the immigration officer asked the purpose of my visit, I replied it was to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of my first trip to the United States. He started laughing and stamped my passport.
Back in the late 1950s, and still in my twenties, I arrived in America – then a distant and unknown land for almost all Indians –accompanying my husband, Dr. Sisir Kumar Bose. A paediatrician by profession, he had received advanced training in London, Sheffield, Vienna and Bern after completing his medical studies in Calcutta. Then, a couple of years into our marriage, Sisir received a Rockefeller Fellowship to study paediatric radiology – at the time an unknown field in India – at Harvard Medical School and Boston’s famous children’s hospital. That was how we came to be in the United States. We lived in Boston for the next 15 months, until December 1959.
I had literally no idea what to expect. To my pleasant surprise, I encountered cordiality, warmth and friendliness. This was partly due to my being an exotic creature. The Americans were fascinated by the sari. I was frequently accosted on the streets and questioned about my attire. Do you just slip it over your head? Gasps of wonder greeted the revelation that the garment was six yards long, but took only a couple of minutes to put on if you knew how to do it.
The other reason for the welcoming acceptance I experienced was that we inhabited a rather rarefied social circle, and that was the environment in which our everyday interactions mostly occurred. The Boston children’s hospital was led by Charles Janeway, a legendary doctor who became known over time as ‘physician to the world’s children’ because of his work in poor, developing countries – including India. Dr Neuhauser, the head of paediatric radiology, was very charismatic. We lived in an apartment on Huntington Avenue, opposite the graceful Harvard Medical School building. The children’s hospital was a quick walk away on Longwood Avenue. Sisir worked with colleagues who were brilliant at their work and sophisticated in their manners, and we mingled freely with their families.
This may sound odd today but I was really impressed that these Americans treated us as equals. I was born and grew up under colonial rule and we had been independent for just a decade when I arrived in the United States. My generation associated whites –meaning the British – with racist arrogance and contempt or worse towards Indians.
In America, I met white people whose attitude towards us was open and friendly. Even strangers were quite different from the stuffy, stuck-up English we were used to. When I strolled the streets of Boston with my toddler son, people would smile and make remarks like: “Isn’t he cute!” Unlike England, America was a child-friendly society. The first time we received an invitation to dinner, I declined, saying that I had a small child who could not be left alone at home. The hosts reacted: “We are not afraid of children! We have four!”
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Very unusually, I had grown up in a family which had an American member. My maternal grandfather, Lalit Mohan Roy, was a prominent landowner in the eastern part of Bengal (now Bangladesh). Although a zamindar, he was a staunch nationalist and refused to send his sons to Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, he sent one of my mother’s brothers to Harvard, and another to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
My MIT-educated uncle returned to India in the early 1930s with an American wife called Anna, a Polish Catholic by background. When I was little, Aunt Anna told me that she was from an area called ‘New England,’ where the weather could be very cold. I also picked up a smattering of American English from her: Americans responded to ‘thank you’ with ‘you are welcome’ (not ‘don’t mention it,’ as in British English) and they said ‘I don’t buy this’ when they disagreed with something. I ended up living in Aunt Anna’s New England in 1958-59, and loving it.
The late 1950s was an idyllic period for Americans of privileged status, and to many Trump-supporting Americans today it represents an almost mythical golden era. The United States had emerged after 1945 as a global superpower and the epicentre of the Western world. Its economy was booming and dynamic. Prosperity and stability seemingly reigned.
This was a decade before the black civil rights movement, the protests against the Vietnam War, and the rise of feminism brought the ‘golden epoch’ to a bitter, chaotic end. The arrival of large numbers of Spanish-speaking and other non-Caucasian immigrants was in the future. It was a White America, and more specifically a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) America, in which even non-WASP whites such as Jewish and Catholic Americans struggled in mainly working-class occupations.
The enduring appeal of Donald Trump’s politics lies – in large part – in a powerfully felt nostalgic craving for that America. Trump himself grew up and attained adulthood in the golden epoch. Making America great again requires turning the clock back.
Even my cocooned existence among the Bostonian elite could not shield me from sociopolitical realities. At the far end of Huntington Avenue, a lone black family moved into a house. Several white children who lived on the street came to play most days with my toddler son. One day, I noticed two black children from that house come over rather diffidently and join the bunch. The next day, one of the slightly older white children – Helen, she was eight or nine – said to me: “Mrs. Bose, don’t let Boo [my son] mix with them.” When I asked why, she replied earnestly: “They are not nice people.”
A few days later, I saw all of them happily playing. “What are you playing?” I asked Helen. Helen promptly replied: “We are playing House.” Helen was the mother and Ricky, the black boy, was the father while the little two-year-old from India was their son.
The innocence of children was, alas, not mirrored among many adults. One of the affluent Bostonian women who befriended me was a Mrs Chisholm. She was prominent in a women’s organisation called Daughters of the American Revolution. Membership of this group – whose motto remains ‘God, Home, and Country’ as it was when I encountered it – is limited to women whose male ancestors are said to have played a role in the founding of the United States of America in the late 18th century.
I was sometimes invited to meetings of the DAR chapter (branch) in Boston. Large chauffeur-driven convertibles would appear at our address to pick me up. The gatherings ended with the assembly singing the American national anthem, their right forearm and hand placed diagonally across the chest. In conversations with me, Mrs Chisholm constantly used the N-word to refer to black Americans, whom she despised. In fairness to her, that was the term used in the United States for African-Americans at the time.
In the 21st century, the underwhelming two-term presidency of a man with a Kenyan father and a white American mother clearly did not put this troubled past to rest. Instead, we have seen the resurgence of longing for the imaginary American paradise – a paradise lost from the late 1960s onward. This is at the root of the Trump phenomenon. The nostalgia for that mythologised golden epoch is the essence of MAGA – ‘Make America Great Again!’
Krishna Bose is a writer, professor and three-time Lok Sabha MP.
