Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 - Hardcover

Rotter, Andrew J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801434491 ISBN 13: 9780801434495

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Comrades at Odds explores the complicated Cold War relationship between the United States and the newly independent India of Jawaharlal Nehru from a unique perspective―that of culture, broadly defined. In a departure from the usual way of doing diplomatic history, Andrew J. Rotter chose culture as his jumping-off point because, he says, "Like the rest of us, policymakers and diplomats do not shed their values, biases, and assumptions at their office doors. They are creatures of culture, and their attitudes cannot help but shape the policy they make." To define those attitudes, Rotter consults not only government documents and the memoirs of those involved in the events of the day, but also literature, art, and mass media. "An advertisement, a photograph, a cartoon, a film, and a short story," he finds, "tell us in their own ways about relations between nations as surely as a State Department memorandum does."

While expanding knowledge about the creation and implementation of democracy, Rotter carries his analysis across the categories of race, class, gender, religion, and culturally infused practices of governance, strategy, and economics.

Americans saw Indians as superstitious, unclean, treacherous, lazy, and prevaricating. Indians regarded Americans as arrogant, materialistic, uncouth, profane, and violent. Yet, in spite of these stereotypes, Rotter notes the mutual recognition of profound similarities between the two groups; they were indeed "comrades at odds."

About this title

About the Author:

Andrew J. Rotter is Professor of History at Colgate University. His previous books include The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia, from Cornell.

Review:

"A tour de force of U.S. relations with the globe's largest (and nuclear armed) democracy. Rotter uses provocative cultural as well as diplomatic analysis to show how India sees the United States, as well as the prisms through which Americans see Indians - and he does so with wide-ranging research and perspective that, despite the subtitle, takes us back to the 18th-century and into the 21st."

(Walter LaFeber, Noll Professor of History, Cornell University)

"Andrew J. Rotter's important book engages a cultural approach to Indo-American relations and carefully weaves into it the record of diplomacy upon which foreign policy historians usually rely. Pleasurable and imaginative, Rotter's book is a major achievement that few U.S. historians have yet matched."

(Michael S. Sherry, Northwestern University)

"More than a bilateral history of U.S.-Indian relations in the early decades of the Cold War, Comrades at Odds offers a new and exciting way of thinking about international relations as cultural relations. It is a must-read for scholars seeking to expand the horizon of the old diplomatic history."

(Michael J. Hogan, Ohio State University)

"What makes Andrew J. Rotter's approach new and exciting is the way in which he links conventional debates in Cold War diplomatic history―those over strategic raw materials, wheat loans, foreign aid, neutralism, economic development, and so on―to a wide range of cultural and social beliefs. Engrossing, provocative, and persuasive, Comrades at Odds is a very important book on the cutting edge of foreign policy's cultural construction."

(Christian G. Appy, Editor of Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0801434491
• ISBN 13: 9780801434495
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368