Books: The Wild Dogs Are Close

AN AMERICAN IN INDIA (277 pp.)—Sounders Redding — Bobbs -Merrill ($3.50).

Saunders Redding, 48, is a good-looking Negro professor of English at Hampton Institute (Va.), one of the nation’s best Negro colleges. One spring day in 1952, the phone rang in his office and a voice said: “This is the State Department. Would you be available for a temporary foreign assignment?” Professor Redding was available; the assignment was India. That summer he traveled 25,000 miles through India, lecturing on America to tens of thousands of curious and often hostile students and professors.

On the plane going over, Redding vowed to tell the unvarnished truth about America. Returning, he has told the startling truth about India in a clean, calm book. Author Redding’s dismaying conclusion is that Indian democracy, never firm, is in deadly danger of Communist subversion. Some may think Redding exaggerates, but a world that scoffed at similar warnings from China and Indo-China might do well to take this one seriously.

Urge to Defend. As a Negro (“dozens of Indians told me that I was ‘one of them’ because I looked like a Madrasi . . .”), Professor Redding could penetrate layers of Indian life that are closed to white men. It was his job to speak up for America, and he did so; but India’s universities made him suffer for it. Because of his color, he was urged to heap abuse on all white men, and particularly on white Americans. When he spoke, instead, of improving race relations in the U.S., his hot-eyed young listeners denounced him as a hireling of “American imperialism.” The American found this ironic, for India’s rectitudinous liberals were as intolerantly racist in their attitude toward white men as Daniel Malan is in his dealings with the blacks.

On campus after campus, Redding found that hatred of America is an unwritten part of the curriculum. Hecklers bombarded him: “America carries on germ warfare . . . America’s gifts are false gifts . . . Americans Go Home.” As evidence of American “sex madness,” students in Bombay produced fake pictures of coeds being stripped by American college boys —a farfetched reference to the spring fever “panty raids” of 1952. In Poona the students had been shown newsreel films of U.S. infantrymen threatening a parade of workers, but, as Redding quickly pointed out, it was 20 years out of date. The workers were the bonus marchers who descended on Washington in 1932.

“Until I came to India,” Redding says, “I had no idea that there was in me so great an urge to defend America . . . Communism meant little more than inter esting reading in the newspapers . . .” In India he met the enemy face to face—in Assam villages, where “even the small children gathered with their elders … to chorus Jai to the Red flag”; in Hyderabad, where scarcely a day goes by without a Brahman being assassinated by the “Red revolutionists”; in Calcutta, where the hammer and sickle is nailed to a wall of the seamen’s union; in the frontier city of Darjeeling, where Tibetan Communists “squeeze across the border now and then.” Soviet propaganda was everywhere, blanketing the bookshops, nudging Hollywood aside in the movie theaters. In one frontier district, Redding reports, the local garrison was marched, by squads, to see the Soviet film The Fall of Berlin, in which not one scene suggests that Americans participated in the defeat of the Nazis.

Nehru Is the Culprit. The U.S. is active, too. Mickey Spillane’s paperback epics can be bought in most bookstores. Copies of Living America, a USIS house organ with “beautiful illustrations … of Americans participating in the good things of democratic life . . .” can be found in magazine racks of Indian aircraft and in university reading rooms, where one Indian in 20,000 can see them and be impressed. Redding’s verdict: the Communists are winning the propaganda battle.

One reason why they are winning lies in India’s poverty and ignorance. Another reason is racial: after centuries of white colonialism, the brown man and the yellow man are still moving away from the West. Yet, in Professor Redding’s view, the No. i culprit is Nehru-style neutralism. Convinced of their moral superiority, India’s intellectuals are too busy supporting “a posture of national rectitude, neutrality and innocence” to pay any attention to the Communist danger. Tyrants won’t attack us, is their attitude. We’re too good and kind.

An American in India warns that the attack has already begun. Redding likens the Reds to the wild dogs that “run in packs all over India.” Waiting for Redding’s plane to depart, one of his companions was startled by a bloodcurdling sound in the night. The book ends:

” ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they’re wild dogs . . .’

‘Bold, aren’t they—so close to the city?’

‘Yes, they’re bold,’ I said.”