THE UNITED STATES AND INDIA 1776-1976 BY M.V. KAMATH [HARDCOVER] OLD BOOK

 This book speaks about 200 year old mutual relations between India and America starting from George Washington . It is a representative book about the international relations between these two countries in the truest sense of the term.

Kamath divides the book into three sections. The first part focuses on the varieties of Indo-American contact from the American Revolution to Indian independence. Dominated by intellectual adventurers and social reformers, the narrative prominently features the likes of Emerson, Thoreau, Ram Roy, Eliot, Vivekananda, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, while giving less attention to figures more concerned with the relative price of cotton, tea, or ice. The middle section leaves the realm of moral absolutes, and concentrates on practical issues of foreign policy and international diplomacy during the second half of the twentieth century. Here Kamath offers a lively and incisive analysis of U.S. presidential politics. George Bush (the elder) earns high marks as the American chief executive “probably most knowledgeable of south Asian affairs” (207). Clinton’s record receives only light scrutiny. The section’s chapter on artistic exchange documents India’s profound impact on high and popular culture in the U.S. Sport, however, remains the one area where Indians and Americans have virtually no contact. In its final section, the book explores the Indian immigrant experience in America. Charting the story from the first indentured laborers of the late eighteenth century to the most recent entrepreneurs of the computer age, Kamath shows how the Indian community in America has creatively faced a wide range of religious, ethnic, social, and economic challenges, including, of course, the ongoing struggle to define the meaning of Indian-American identity.