The Future in Retrospect

Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.

MOTHER INDIA. By Katherine Mayo. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927.

THE pictures that flash into a man's mind when he thinks of a foreign country or its people spring from an enormous variety of experiences--a movie or a song, a book read in childhood, a cartoon caricature, a painting or a college lecture, a travel poster or a newspaper feature story. For a generation or more, an American's mental image of France was quite closely tied to the Mademoiselle from Armentières. In the 1930s, in a certain block in New York City, to call a boy English was to call him a dandified sissy and invite what followed. There are millions of people throughout the world who, to the day they die, will see jackboots when they hear the word "Germany." A couple of years ago, a British moving picture director thought of the perfect way to make sure his audience immediately identified a well-dressed young woman as an American. Naturally, he had her snapping bubble gum when she came on-screen.

These flashing images, these quickly recognizable symbols or caricatures, obviously have a great deal to do with the attitude of a man or a country toward another country or its people. Even in this Era of the American Tourist, they are important, because it is easy and wonderfully comforting to find in a country what before you ever bought your ticket you were quite sure existed.

All this has to do with the American image of a country about which Americans seem to be thinking more than they have in the past--India. The political images of India are usually on the unpleasant side: Nehru sitting on a fence or shaking a finger in self-righteous lecture. The Indian Army occupying Kashmir in opposition to Pakistan (mental image: turbaned soldier standing shoulder to shoulder with a G.I.). V. K. Krishna Menon, ruffle-haired and sharp-featured, leaning into a microphone and saying something at least faintly nasty. Happy Russian leaders standing garlanded before hundreds of thousands of cheering Indians. But it is a fair guess that these political images of India occur in the minds of Americans a lot less frequently than the dramatic and usually horrible mental portraits that often can be traced back to, or at least symbolized by, a book published 30 years ago and detested in India to this day...