Louis Fischer and India, 1947–1964: Gandhi’s Disciple, Nehru’s Bête Noire?
This article focuses on the shift in the attitude of the liberal American journalist Louis Fischer to India. It contrasts Fischer’s admiration of Mahatma Gandhi and his support for Indian independence, expressed vociferously and prolifically in the period 1942-47, with Fischer’s criticisms and eventual opposition to the personality and foreign policy of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister. Going beyond Fischer’s reputation as a “friend of India” earned through his works on Gandhi and his efforts for Indian independence, thus far considered as the only important prisms to study his views on India, this treatment of Fischer situates his criticism of Nehru within his personal development as an anti-communist in the late 1940s and 1950s. This shift in Fischer’s attitude from Gandhi to Nehru provides an interesting personal sidelight to the intergovernmental relations between India and America in that period.
J. J. Singh and the India League of America, 1945-1959: Pressing at the Margins of the Cold War Consensus
WHEN JAGJIT (J.J.) SINGH, who had lived in the United States since 1926 and ran a successful import business in Manhattan specializing in Indian textiles, decided to return to his native India in 1959, he received accolades more appropriate for a retiring long-term diplomat than for a successful immigrant entrepreneur. “U.S. Loses ‘Envoy’ to Call of India,” read the news story in the New York Times on January 18, and an editorial in that newspaper a month later declared that “J.J.—as he is affectionately known to thousands of Americans—. . . has been singularly successful in presenting the cause of his people to this country.” The mayor of New York City invited J.J., who had been the president of the India League of America (ILA) for almost two decades, since 1941, to a farewell luncheon; tributes to his work and to the work of the ILA arrived from important political figures, including liberals and radicals such as Brooklyn Democratic U.S. representative Emanuel Celler, Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, and Socialist Party standard-bearer Norman Thomas, and conservatives such as Vice President Richard Nixon, Republican U.S. Senator Karl Mundt, and publisher Henry Luce. The ambassador of India to the U.S., M. C. Chagla, at the last public meeting of the ILA—the organization disbanded with J.J.’s departure from the country—called its longtime president “a great unofficial Ambassador of India to this country.” Chagla added that future ambassadors from India would miss J.J.’s advice about American politics and culture and would miss the ability to use the ILA as a platform to reach the American public and policy makers. J.J., whom the Times called “the life and soul of the India League,” had been flatteringly portrayed in a New Yorker profile in 1951 as a “One Man Lobby,” and a later profile of this “long-familiar figure on Manhattan’s upper East Side” declared that he had “charmed the American political and social world” in the 1940s and 1950s. But J.J. and the ILA, even as they worked to build friendship between the U.S. and India, retained a critical edge toward U.S. policy. In J.J.’s last public speech before returning to India,
Comparative studies of α-Lactalbumin and lysozyme: Echidna lysozyme
Summaryα-Lactalbumin is a modifier protein for galactosyl transferase in the biosynthesis of lactose and lysozyme catalyses the cleavage of β(1–4) glycosidic linkages. It is now generally believed that α-lactalbumin and lysozyme have diverged from a common ancestor. Comparative studies of these proteins from several species are reported here.The presence of lactose and lactose synthetase activity is shown in mature milk samples from a variety of placental mammals (eutheria) and a pouch bearing mammal (marsupialia). The isolation of the α-lactalbumins involved and their properties are compared.The position is different in the milk samples of monotremes. The α-lactalbumin, lactose and lactose synthetase activity levels in the two platypus samples studied are very low. The levels of lactose and lactose synthetase activity in some echidna(Tachyglossus aculeatus) samples are low, but appreciable in others. No α-lactalbumin is present. The lysozyme activity is appreciable, some samples containing a different lysozyme from that present in others. One of these (designated echidna lysozyme I) is capable of lactose synthetase modifier activity in the presence of bovine “A protein”.The properties of this lysozyme are compared with those of lysozymes and α-lactalbumins from a variety of species and their significance is discussed.