India and America in a Single Garment of Destiny

by Emily Dong

Corretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr in India

All across India, from the lush red South to the cold brown North, the memory of Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian freedom struggle lives on. No matter where in India you travel to or how short you travel for, you will meet Gandhi. The North and South are different in languages, facial features, and colors of the soil, but everywhere you will find what the people have built and upkeep to remember not only Gandhi’s name but also his vision for new India. Before entering Raj Ghat, Gandhi’s final resting place in Delhi, all visitors, whether Indians or Western tourists, must face the words of his talisman etched into stone: 

“Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the most helpless man whom you may have seen and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he be able to gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj or self-rule for the hungry and also spiritually starved millions of our countrymen? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.”

Museums describing his impact on the local area, bhavans where public community events are held around his image, statues of him with the children and poor whom he loved dearly, simple markers, and ashrams–small and large tributes to the Mahatma dot India like dandelions in a field, painting the land as his.

The Indian independence movement remains a defining reference point for places and people. Each city I visited in my brief trip took pride in letting you know that Gandhi once stepped foot there. They were proud to share what their local role in the Indian freedom struggle was. Bihar, a state in the North, is well known as where Buddha found enlightenment and Ashoka the Great first consolidated India. But in the capital city Patna, a modest Gandhi museum that people put together with care and pride, even making life-size models of Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore meeting, makes it a point to declare that it was Bihar where the first Satyagraha took place. It was peasants in Bihar, forced to grow and sell the cash crop indigo to the British Empire at cheap prices, who in 1917 asked Gandhi to come to Chamaparan and help them lead the first successful mass civil disobedience against the colonial government. The Patna museum proudly proclaims that Gandhi said: “It was Champaran that introduced me to India.”

Another seemingly unlikely face can often be seen throughout India alongside Gandhi. This dark face comes from the other side of the world–Martin Luther King Jr. A small bookstore near Raj Ghat, Gandhi’s official memorial in Delhi, solely dedicated to selling books about Gandhi’s teachings also sold books about Martin Luther King Jr.. The museum in Patna began their exhibit on Gandhi by placing large portraits of King next to him. In describing the legacy of Gandhi’s message of nonviolent resistance to free the oppressed, the museum gave two examples: the movement to end nuclear weapons after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Civil Rights Movement in America. It was emotional to see this section of photographs of young Black men and women of America’s last great freedom movement lifted up by this humble museum in India. The museum is small but neat and clean. Bihar itself is known as the poorest state of India. The exhibits are not fancy, poster boards crammed with information, quotes, and photos on the walls of two rooms and covering the building’s exterior walls, but every photo was chosen and included with love and care. The people who put together this museum wanted visitors to know that in America, Black folk waged a great freedom struggle equivalent to the anticolonial national liberation struggle of India and which did justice to Gandhi. Here, halfway around the globe, it is the Indian people who to this day place Martin Luther King Jr. and the ordinary Black men and women of the Black Freedom Movement rightfully in humanity’s grand constellation of freedom fighters. 

I asked myself: How is it that the Indian people are able to see and know King, love and honor him? How is it that the Indian people, who probably have not met an African American, can see and appreciate the courage, spirit of sacrifice, and nobility of the ordinary Black people shown in the photographs, the poor and sharecroppers of the countryside and the determined young men and women who left their universities for the revolutionary struggle?

For the Indian people to see and love Martin Luther King Jr. as they see and love Gandhi, there must be such a thing as the Truth. There must be a universal truth of goodness, justice, and freedom which can be known and made real. India and America have an intertwined historical struggle for freedom, with King applying Gandhi’s philosophy to the struggle for freedom in America. But the ability for India to see, know, and appreciate Black folk who they have never met before shows that there is a human consciousness and philosophy more universal than we sometimes see. There must be a world human consciousness and philosophy that comes from an oppressed people who do not turn their back on the ancient truths of life and existence but synthesize it and transform it in the fires of struggle for national liberation, civilization, and human freedom from the universal evils of white supremacy, war, and poverty. James Baldwin is an African American essayist of American society, but his words could also describe the suffering and human assertions discovered by the world’s anticolonial movements for freedom:

“This past, the Negro’s past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worth of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible–this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering–enough is certainly as good as a feast–but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.”

Baldwin is talking about the development of a new human philosophy made by African Americans who specifically experienced chattel slavery and the disappointments after Emancipation from white supremacy continuing in new systemic forms. Yet in this specific experience of Black folk, the Indian people must have seen a human truth that spoke to their own experience of colonialism and the struggle to achieve freedom. This truth is not only the brutality of white supremacy and the degradation of civilization when people subjugate other human beings, but also the truth that an oppressed people’s struggle for liberation is part of the ultimate fulfillment of mankind to make human beings beloved. In this struggle, people become new human beings capable of creating a new world. 

The fact that the Indian people see and know this truth shows the reality that there is a future for the American people. The American people have a place in the world, ready to embrace us with common dreams of peace and freedom that already linked American freedom fighters W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Martin Luther King Jr. to world humanity. Today, the American people must rejoin world humanity again and break from our ruling elite who have conditioned us to see the world as separate from and in service to us. The American people have yet to completely reciprocate India’s love, because a majority of the American people have not yet learned to see and love each other enough to want to change our society, let alone the world order. While India has poverty that is integrated, where the poor live and work amongst everyone else, America’s poverty is segregated. In India, poverty is a problem that people must see in their daily lives and hold the government and Indian state responsible for alleviating. In America where there remains a lie that every person can “make it” if you try hard enough, poverty is blamed on the individuals who are poor. In a city like Philadelphia, people can choose to never see poverty, because poverty is neatly kept to specific neighborhoods, oftentimes overwhelmingly Black. There is not just poverty, but a distinct Black poverty, where generations of Black folk are kept poor with no chance at individual success offered to all other white and immigrant people. 

Today, the American people have never been closer in their situations. We materially and psychologically have paid the high costs of a ruling elite mad on war and domination that is no longer sustainable. The American people suffer from poverty, unstable employment or unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, suicide, cycles of incarceration, distrust and cynicism, and social alienation. We need to reclaim King and our revolutionary inheritance to believe there is a better future, a struggle for which will urge us to take responsibility for ourselves, each other, and the reconfiguration of society.

Like the Indian people, the American people were forever transformed by the Black Freedom Movement. It was King and the Black Freedom Movement who connected the American people and our democratic struggle to the people all over the world also demanding freedom, peace, and democracy. However, King’s memory has been deliberately erased and watered down by the American state. In India, the phrase “All India” is everywhere – All India Radio, All India Memorials, All India Women’s Conference, All India Institutes and Colleges. “All India” is a concept from the Indian freedom movement describing achieving freedom in substance, not only liberation from the British Empire but also achieving the freedom of individual human beings from poverty. “All India” describes a common vision for a brighter future for all Indians that united the people in struggle. The vision is a powerful force, because it is a confidence that there is a new, better society possible, and the people can fight to win it. 

The Black Freedom Movement in America was the last people’s struggle in the country to create an “All America” bound by a common moral demand for the end of war, racism, and poverty which required individuals to see each other, take personal responsibility, and change as people - thus to create a new nation which would be the last white nation. The ruling elite had to assassinate King to behead the movement and the possibilities of a real democracy by and for the people. Manipulation through education, academia, media, and popular culture makes us believe we are more divided than we are. White and Black poor across America are more similar than ever in their circumstances, their anger toward the ruling elite, their apathy toward politicians, and the way they respond in electoral elections. 

Now is the right time for us all to reclaim the powerful history and visions of our revolutionary struggles which already connect us to each other across the world. The memory of our struggle for freedom in America, only 60 years old, can clarify where we the American people are on the clock of the world, not what the ruling elite thinks. When all that we know in America has lost its legitimacy and is in the process of crumbling, the American people must find each other and make our way toward a new future. 

While old systems fall, we need a vision for a society with new social, economic, and civilizational relationships. Where will we find that vision? We can find it not only in King but also in the music, poetry, philosophy, and art sung by the generations of Black people who gave us King, from W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Frederick Douglass, and James Baldwin to Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye, Jacob Lawrence, August Wilson, and Sun Ra. It is these revolutionary thinkers and artists, not Marxism-Leninism or bourgeois liberalism, who provide a worldview which makes it possible for the American people to understand India and her potentiality. They and their ideas, music, art, and poetry not only explain the revolutionary potential that comes from the collision of the strivings of Black folk against the reality of an unjust society in America. They also make you ready to see the reality of the suffering of the poor, but also their humor, ways of greeting friends, songs, devotion to gods, and the beauty of their lives. They connect us to peoples from India to Gaza, who we may never meet face to face, but who we must love as our own dear brothers and sisters.

My own trip to India, I thought that I would be able to understand India’s complex past, present, and future because I am Chinese and Asian. But as I saw the tributes to Gandhi and King and met the Indian people who made the tributes, I realized that I could begin to see India and her immense potential because I am an American who knows and loves Martin Luther King, his sacrifice and revolutionary leadership in an incomplete democratic struggle in America, and the revolutionary movement of courageous ordinary people he led which injected the American people with a demand for peace–something we should not take for granted today.

It is not that we have not taken Marx, Lenin, or the bourgeois liberal thinkers of democracy seriously enough, but actually we have not taken Gandhi, King, Tagore, and Baldwin seriously enough–or the people they spoke about and their philosophic and artistic expressions of democracy. From this beauty, these strivings, and this struggle to overcome daily and collective suffering does a people’s movement arise for a new world. They provide us with the values of our new civilization, definitions of beauty, and the music our children should hear and make. This vision not only can imbue the American people with the courage and faith to release themselves from worn-out chains of whiteness, but also already connect us to world humanity in India, Africa, Asia, and everywhere people seek a better future for humanity.

Around the world, we share the common revolutionary task to make the human being beloved as God intended and eradicate the forces of poverty, hunger, racism, imperialism, and war which threaten her flowering in this incomplete modern era of human history. 

The task of all who call themselves revolutionaries is to rededicate themselves, like Gandhi’s talisman says, to know the people, the lowest of the low. To know their suffering, resilience, and democratic capacity so we may show with confidence in these times that there is a future and a truth to be honored, and we share it around the world.

If we let them, the people of India, Africa, and Asia can renew our confidence in a revolutionary future. We may not see the path toward our future in America, but India, like a mirror, reminds us we have a shared future, one that is wrapped in a single garment of destiny. We have received a gift from two Mahatmas, Mahatma Gandhi and Mahatma King.

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Emily Dong is a peace activist, an organizer of the Year of James Baldwin 2024, and member of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation. She lives in Philadelphia.