ABSTRACT
On the third floor of the Ohio Union building at Ohio State University (OSU) is an exhibit called ‘Buckeye Brilliance’, featuring murals, photo galleries, and information about alumni ‘whose innovations and achievements have changed the world’. 1 Among chemists, educators, artists and economists, sits the political leader Jayaprakash Narayan, widely known as JP, who was active in struggles against colonial and postcolonial inequalities in India from the 1930s to the 1970s. It is a bit jarring to see JP displayed on the Ohio Union wall. Images of a simply dressed man preaching self-reliance and nonviolence lie in tension with the highly corporatized, mall-like atmosphere of this building, the public face of a university entrenched in Big Ten college athletics. Digging deeper, we find greater degrees of irony. It is not just that ‘Buckeye Brilliance’ portrays JP as a mere acolyte of M K Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, or that in emphasizing a linear transition in JP’s thought from ‘violence’ to ‘nonviolence’ it tames his radicalism and complexity. The paradox lies in the fact that by failing to even mention the word ‘socialism’, an idea that JP sought to define for most of his life, the display ignores the fact that it was precisely during his time at Ohio State that JP deepened his intellectual and activist commitments to revolutionary Marxism. The greatest potential contribution of the OSU display, then, is undercut by the narrative it provides. For by informing passers-by and scholars of JP’s presence in Columbus, Ohio in the late 1920s, ‘Buckeye Brilliance’ offers to disrupt history-as-usual, inviting us to rethink our notions of the US Midwest, of Indian anticolonial activists, and of the interwar period itself. Whom did JP meet in Columbus? What was his experience as an immigrant in a country mired in Jim Crow segregation and anti-Asian racism? How did JP’s time in the US, between the impressionable ages of 20 and 27, shape his ideas and practices in India?
