UNDERSTANDING INDIA
Barr, Stringfellow
Understanding India INDIA AFIRE, by Clare and Harris Wofford. John Day Company. 343 pp. $4. Reviewed by Stringfellow Barr AFTER pondering for weeks why this book is such fast, exciting reading, I...
...It has the humility that all human beings exhibit when they are really learning...
...This book is a narrative of where they went, whom they talked to, what they learned...
...It is clear that they made themselves welcome to the Indians they met, not in the dreadful sense of the idiom as brash American tourists so often do, but quite literally...
...it is at this moment desperately important to read it...
...Not that the Woffords are naive...
...In short, we Americans are learning...
...that they were, was largely of their own doing...
...In short, not only is this book readable and exciting...
...We denounce Nehru for a fellow-traveler, for leading his people towards Moscow, when a direct look at "his people" would suggest to us that if Nehru fails to lead left pretty fast, he is unlikely to remain in a position to lead anywhere...
...Reviewed by Stringfellow Barr AFTER pondering for weeks why this book is such fast, exciting reading, I conclude that one reason is the youth of its authors...
...And this achievement qualifies them to make the reader welcome, to allow him to penetrate India, to stop talking nonsense about "teeming millions," and look our Indian neighbors in the face...
...Harris and Clare Wofford returned from India deeply convinced that India's hope lies with the Socialist Party and that the practical alternative for India is to go where China went...
...But we will learn much faster if we let people like the Woffords help us to feel Asia, to see it, smell it...
...They were welcomed...
...There has never been a time in my memory that more desperately needed clear sight and over-simplication...
...It is this direct look at Nehru's people that India Afire so brilliantly presents us...
...Our failure has been that we could not imagine to ourselves the massive misery of our Asian neighbors, or what they are really saying, or what they are determined to do...
...It is, I think, now clear that if we Americans would stop looking under the bed for Russians long enough to get up off our stomachs and look in the faces of the Indian people—a fifth of the world's population—we and they between us would very quickly find a way out of the mess all men are in...
...It is free of travelers' chit-chat or postcard pictures...
...The result is one of the most important books yet written about contemporary India...
...Harris and Clare Wofford are young, and youth sees clearly what it sees, and over-simplifies...
...But I find it hard to imagine a couple past thirty seeing the complexity that is India with the candor and courage the Woffords took on their pilgrimage...
...taste it...
...Two young Americans chose to go to India, to wander up and down it, to talk to everybody from Nehru to the lowliest peasants, to share the life around them, to listen hard and lovingly, and to report what they heard and saw...
...And these writers make the reader learn with them...
...We would then face tough problems, but we would know which problems were most worth facing...
...If we Americans are ever to get a workable Asian policy, we will get it, 1 think, not from cold-war cliches about our "leadership of the free peoples" but from such direct looks into the intimate lives of Asians as India Afire can give us...
...That conclusion aligns them with the growing group of Americans, including Justice William O. Douglas, who have declared for the Asian Revolution, who want our government not merely to stop playing King Canute and making political bed-fellows of every reactionary Asian group that will denounce Communism, but to cooperate loyally with the peoples of Asia in their determined effort to overthrow the most intolerable economic oppression...
...Our failure to date has not been that we love injustice or oppression...
Vol. 15 • September 1951 • No. 9
