The "Sisterhood Arrangement": Postcolonial Dreams, Cold War Racial Politics, and US Involvement in the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur

Abstract

This essay examines the 1950s State Department–brokered "sisterhood arrangement," or "sisterhood relationship," between the University of Illinois and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. I bring the archives of the "sisterhood" into conversation with historical scholarship on the importance of racial image-management to US Cold War strategy. In doing so, my analysis spotlights the imbrications of race and education within the crosscutting forces of Indian postcolonial nation-building and US Cold War empire-building as they clashed and converged in the 1950s. I illuminate the interconnected operations of new educational projects and old racial systems at this key historical juncture of US and Indian political trajectories by (1) demonstrating the centrality of international education partnerships to US strategic plans for Third World alignment; (2) revealing the presence of racial image-management activities embedded in the sisterhood relationship; and (3) discussing the role of racialized gender in structuring the daily operations of the sisterhood relationship. Overall, this analysis spotlights the "sisterhood" as an illuminating prism for examining the entanglements of race, geopolitics, and education in a Cold War world.