NEGRO IN INDIA
Jack, Homer A.
Negro in India The Pitiful and The Proud, by Carl T. Rowan. Random House. 432 pp. $5. Reviewed by Homer A. Jack ROWAN is a young American newspaperman who was selected by our State Department to...
...This is an uneven book which will not make anybody—friends of Asia or friends of America—very happy...
...The Pitiful and the Proud is not a very important book—except to Rowan, for out of his experiences and his evaluation of them, he received a modern political education which may be put to better use as he covers the journalistic scene in Ameri-| ca and, one day perhaps, in Africa...
...He concluded that the questions Asians ask Americans about racism in America are "not asked out of deep concern about the American Negro...
...Rowan is best in describing the problems he uncovered as "a colored brother lost...
...Rowan draws a rambling and inconclusive picture of Nehru, one which he didn't have to leave Minnesota to find...
...Yet he, as many an American in Asia, "never dreamed . . . that he would have the occasion to speak so earnestly, almost desperately, in behalf of his country and what he felt it stood for...
...Rowan was warned that if he made any criticism of India, it would be for him—a Negro—"racial heresy...
...Reviewed by Homer A. Jack ROWAN is a young American newspaperman who was selected by our State Department to make a lecture tour of India...
...He had no special qualifications, except that he is the author of a successful book...
...This volume is a description of his experiences, primarily in India, and in Pakistan, Southeast Asia, and at the Bandung Conference...
...His long chapter on the Asian-African Conference lacks depth and perceptivity...
...Nevertheless, in exasperation Rowan once cried: "God, if there were just one stubborn Southerner of integrity and prestige in politics or public life who would rise up and shout that the South must fall in line with the Twentieth Century freedom march...
...But he was not alone among the journalist corps at Bandung in doing so...
...Rowan was so busy at Bandung following the skirmishes (of the proud) that he forgot to report the battle (for the pitiful...
...Hardly for a single day" was he able to forget that he was a Negro, but he simply "couldn't huy all this 'bond of color' nonsense...
...Included in this volume is a short, and unsatisfactory, interview with Pandit Nehru...
...He was likewise warned that, if he emphasized the misery and poverty of India, he would be denounced as the modern-day Katherine Mayo of the new "Mother India...
...He pulled few punches in describing racism in America, early concluding that "honesty was by far the best policy...
...He paid little attention to these warnings and, for all his eventual disenchantment, he will not be in any great personal jeopardy in Harlem or Hyderabad...
...Basically, Rowan believes, such questions are "an expression of the Asian's concern about himself, of his own quest for status and dignity...
...he approaches the task more like a sportswriter running to the telegraph office with a scoop on a knockout (of Nehru by Kotelawala) than as a sensitive political analyst...
...He was constantly harassed during his lectures by Indian Communists...
...South of Freedom—and a Negro...
Vol. 20 • September 1956 • No. 9
