A Drop that Created Ripples
This is the story of a boy of eighteen, who had fled from a small village of West Bengal in India and immigrated to the United States to save himself from police persecution and later became the first Asian to receive the prestigious Newbery Medal for Children’s Literature, awarded by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association.
Dhan Gopal Mukerji was born on 6 July 1890 to Kissori and Bhuban (Goswami) Mukerji in a village near Calcutta. When he was about ten years old, Mukerji went to study at Scottish Church Collegiate School and thereafter at the University of Calcutta. It was at this university, that he began associating with his elder brother Jadu Gopal Mukerji's friends. Jadu Gopal at that time was actively participating in Nationalist activities and Mukerji came in contact with the ideas of the Bengal resistance. In 1923 tragedy befell the Mukerji family when Jadu Gopal was jailed without trial. Fearing Dhan Gopal’s arrest, his father sent him to Japan, to study. As a boy of 18, amidst foreign people and exposed to an alien language, Mukerji suffered an immense identity crisis; and although initially captivated by the Industrial progress in Japan, he quickly became disillusioned by the atrocities committed by factory owners on the assembly line workers. He fled again, and this time he sailed from Japan to the US, the land of opportunities, or so he had heard.
America at this time was not as welcoming to immigrants as it is today. Mukerji enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley but his anxieties started to enhance when he saw how the white society bitterly disapproved of the Hispanic Latin immigrants, but at the same time thrived economically on illegal Mexican workers. Thus Mukerji was utterly disillusioned by “the West”. He saw in this world of the moderns, absolute hollowness. In Caste and Outcast Mukerji describes the first few painful months in his newly adopted home:
“I sought out a Hindu student, who told me to go and get a job…Dish-washing, taking care of the house- anything. Go and ring the bell of every house until you find a job.” So I went on ringing door bell after door bell. From each opening door came a “No thank you,” in tones running the whole scale from the snarl of a tiger to the smile of a lady.”
It is a wonder then, how this unfortunate exile became the author of several books like Caste and Outcast, My Brother’s Face and The Face of Silence, which was chosen by the League of Nations as one of the best forty books of 1926 and was also selected for the International Library of Geneva. In 1927 Mukerji published his most famous book, Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon, which won the 1928 Newbery Medal. It must have taken Mukerji a lot of perseverance, love for his homeland and a strong desire of staying true to his identity as a South Asian American, to succeed recurrently in bringing his homeland alive in front of the Western audiences, in his numerous writings and speeches. And when he died at the young age of forty six, this is what Elizabeth Seeger wrote about him for The Horn Book in 1937, the year following Mukerji’s death:
“He brought with him the lore and the religion of India…Whatever attraction or affinity brought him to America and kept him here, where his spirit often suffered, the West gained immeasurably by his coming, and India cannot have lost by having so eloquent an interpreter among us.”
During his lifetime, Mukerji’s influence on American artists and literary circles was substantial. He maintained close associations with writers and prominent figures from around the world; including the American philosophers Will and Ariel Durant, the French Nobel winner Rolland and the influential Indian politician and statesman Jawaharlal Nehru. Mukerji’s frequent peripatetic speaking tours around the United States introduced South Asian philosophical and religious views to America and also to other western countries. Eastern ideas had already appeared on Western shores via Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and other transcendentalists, and more so with Swami Vivekananda’s Chicago visit in 1893. Yet it is through Mukerji that renowned writers of the West like Romain Rolland and Henry Miller got acquainted and became fascinated with Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda; and today there are prominent devotees who, had it not been for their study of Henry Miller, would never have discovered Sri Ramakrishna.
Mukerji wanted the West to find redemption and release from what he believed was a brutal, materialistic existence by discovering the spiritual wisdom of the East. He encouraged the activities of the small circles of Hindu adherents in America, while encouraging support for the welfare of his homeland, like an aid that he had tried to raise for the mission of education taken up by Tagore at Shantiniketan.
Leading American figures including writers such as Witter Bynner at Harvard, Arthur Upham Pope, a scholar of Persian art at the University of California and other eminent personalities were regular associates of the Mukerji couple. Amongst Mukerji’s closest friends was also Roger Baldwin, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. A political radical, Mukerji in America socialized with leftists, anarchists, free thinkers and fellow exiles, like M.N.Roy, whom he met in Palo Alto and introduced to New York society; it is also said that it was Mukerji who suggested the pseudonym “Manabendra” to Roy.
Mukerji was the first successful South Asian writer in the United States, who gradually gained recognition throughout the West. Yet he has for long been neglected and deprived of his due importance and people know very little about this prolific writer. I became interested in Mukerji not only because his works initiated the writing of prose and poetry by South Asian exiles in America but also because his works are an excellent source of social history of the South Asian immigrants of the time. And as the South Asian community keeps progressing in professional and academic settings in America, it only becomes increasingly pertinent for us to search for those drops in times past, that have created today’s ripples of robust cross cultural intellectual wealth. With this article, I also pay my tribute to all those South Asian brothers and sisters who over the past fifty years have helped us form our roots in our adopted homes abroad, in other significant ways.
***I sincerely thank Neetha Mahadevan, for reviewing this article, which won the first position in the 2011 NetIP North America Conference contest: Drops. Ripples. Waves.
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