4 - Breaking America

Summary

[E]verything in this country is accomplished through public opinion.

In the early hours of 8 December 1944, an American military transport plane touched down at La Guardia airfield, New York. On board was Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, now a forty-four-year-old Congress activist and former President of the All India Women's Conference (AIWC). Like many nationalist activists in India, she had spent much of Second World War in prison, where, still, twenty-eight months after the Quit India declaration, most of the Congress leadership and thousands of grassroots activists remained. Even in the United States of America – in fact, particularly because she was in the United States – the British imperial machine kept a close eye on her activities. Officially, the purpose of her visit was personal, allowing Pandit, a recent widow, to spend time with her daughters who were studying at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. But the British authorities were sceptical, believing that she would undoubtedly engage in embarrassing propaganda that might encourage American support for Indian independence and undermine the British–American alliance.

Indeed, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit's visit to the United States turned out to be political as well as personal. By now, she was something of a celebrity figure in international liberal circles due, in part, to her prior appointment as a cabinet minister in the United Provinces government. She was also the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru, a figure who had already gained favour in America, including with the Roosevelt administration, which had one eye on extending American influence in Asia. Her tour of the United States drew attention to ‘the India Question’ – an issue she sought to weave into wider debates about democracy in the context of American domestic and foreign policy. This put the British authorities on their guard, and agents operating through the British Embassy in Washington monitored her every move.

Pandit's activities in America were a bridge between women's international activism in the 1930s and the role women would play in India's emergence on the world stage after the Second World War. While her rhetoric, which centred on the theme of freedom, was very much of the wartime moment, it reproduced the cosmopolitan framing adopted by Sarojini Naidu, Amrit Kaur and others that placed colonial freedom in the wider context of the global good.