Author Interview by Ananda Dasgupta (Journalist)
“This book has been brewing in me for a very long time,” says Paul Kalra, author of “From Slave to Separate but Equal” “I’ve been reading up on the subject and working at it in spurts for over five years. I finally took some time off and put it all together in the last two, but the essential message of the book has been playing in my mind for almost a decade now.”
It is a message that Kalra has distilled to its essence: “the Civil War was not fought to free the blacks, as a lot of people like to believe … the Civil War was primarily a class war. The blacks were practically inconsequential to the whole scenario. It was a war between Whites to see which class would predominate – the slaveholding, property holding classes of the south or the newly emerging mercantilist property holding classes of the north. For sixty years, the southerners had used the Constitution to control all the levers of power but finally the North, with double the population of the South, could redress the balance. It took a Civil War and half-a-million deaths to do that,” says Kalra. “The only thing that the blacks got out of it was that they stopped being slaves and started being Separate but Unequal”
It is a thesis which will inevitably rankle but Kalra, looks ready for the battle. The distilled knowledge of more than a hundred books on slavery under his belt, an impressive amount of research and 24 months of concentrated work on his book has made him confident of being able to prove his point. “the first thing that they are going to ask is ‘What’s an electrical engineer from India, who has never even taken a course in American history, doing writing a book on slavery in the US?’” he anticipates. His rejoinder is ready. “It’s precisely because I’ve never studied American slavery that I can look at the Civil War with a clear and clean and unprejudiced view. I haven’t been brainwashed into glossing over the class aspect of the war, like all the historians. Nor am I obliged to anybody or any institution for the grants that they hand out. I did this book on my own time and money so I can afford to tell the truth as I see it, as long as I can back it up.
The truth as he sees it is anything but simple: “From Slave to Separate but Equal” is a 200-page narrative which winds its way from Africa to England to colonial America, covers three centuries, cites countless sources and recalls innumerable quotations, dismisses the traditional explanations of the Civil War, demolishes the “myths” surrounding American slavery and its eventual abolition and very firmly, if a little repetitively, insists that not only was the class structure in America responsible for the Civil War, but that the stability of the American economy and society is still, 150 years after the 13th Amendment, underpinned by the class system.
Kalra has woven an intricate structure of statistics, history, legislation, politics and interpretive sociology to support his thesis. And in the process, he has highlighted some little-known but interesting facts: Thomas Jefferson’s mulatto mistress `Black Sal’ bore him several children whom he couldn’t legally accept and tried to get the law changed so that he could. “Can you imagine,” asks Kalra, “Jefferson, one of the fathers of the Constitution, being forced to deny his paternity of his own children just because they were mulattos? This was a direct fallout of the Protestant slavery system.”
By the `Protestant’ slavery system, Kalra means the system of bondage which denied the blacks’ humanity, broke up their families and eventually, because the Negroes were considered on a level with livestock or portable property, prevented society from establishing an infrastructure which could pave the way for their gradual emancipation and integration with mainstream society. `Catholic’ slavery, on the other hand, treated slaves as people who could, at least theoretically, hope for freedom some day. “That is why American slavery was unique,” says Kalra, “totally unlike the kind of slavery practiced in other parts of the world. Even America had a taste of Catholic slavery in Louisiana before that state was bought. But the laws and practices of Protestant slavery swamped the humanity that the French Code Noir granted slaves and by the time the Civil War broke out, even Louisiana had installed an elaborate structure for black repression.”
Kalra approvingly quotes Colonel Mason (“As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities”) and terms propertyless office workers “white wage slaves” because since they have no savings or assets to fall back on, they have no option but to work for whatever wage they can earn in whatever job they can get. “I write what I see,” he explains. “That’s my engineering training coming through.”
He was, in fact, a well-regarded electrical engineer who helped set up subway and mass transit systems in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles and Sao Paulo, Brazil. His employers had awarded him merit awards. Back in India, he had graduated at the top of his class in electrical engineering from the premier Indian Institute of Technology. Migrating to America in 1966, he picked up a MSEE degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology and later, an MBA degree from the University of Pittsburgh.
From 1966 to 1984, he worked with leading transportation companies and consultants in the United States. Throughout, he was observing. Watching. And reaching conclusions.
“When I came to America, like any immigrant, I came here with a dream. I have realized a large part of the dream today. America has been good to me. It has recognized and rewarded by talents. But I was struck by the imbalances in the system, the fact that few blacks seemed to make it. I started reading up on Black history, their subculture, their distinctiveness. This led me to books on the Civil War. And then everything fell into place,” says Kalra.
“I realized that blacks couldn’t rise because they were not allowed to. The stability of the existing system actually needed them to form a permanent underclass,” he declares dispassionately.
In a sense, Paul Kalra’s antenna have always been up: as an Indian, he had been dimly aware of caste untouchability that had existed on the fringes of society. That some people could be born unequal, and forever remain so, had been part of his formative unconsciousness. That memory, he claims, helped him to perceive, identify and analyze the problem. It also, parenthetically, gave him the title of his book. But while there were significant parallels between the two systems, he discovered that there were important differences as well. “Even India’s caste system had really started out as a class system. Over the centuries, mobility got reduced and the whole structure became hereditary. India’s caste system is really an ossified class system, a class system that has frozen in time for all time.” American society is still mobile, however, and that gives Kalra hope. “It is when this mobility ceases – and there are discernible signs of the Blacks settling down as a permanent underclass of segregated citizens- is that you are going towards a social structure like medieval India’s,” he warns.
The engineer turned writer. Back in the US after a short five-year break in India, Kalra embarked on his labor of love. Finally, manuscript ready, the search for an agent began.
“Most of them refused to take me seriously enough to even discuss the book,” Kalra says. “I can’t say I blamed them, given my lack of proper credentials.” In particular, he remembers with amusement an agent who pointed out that even if his conclusions were substantiated with research and logic faultless, he had no right to do such a book “since I was neither white nor black!” Yet another sternly advised him to return to India if he wanted to write about untouchability since “That is where it was.” “There is one question I’m always asked,” says Kalra, “by agents, prospective publishers, by whoever I discuss the book with. And that question is – `are you a Marxist?’ We’re obsessed with pinning labels on people. I’m not a Marxist. And another thing – I’m for property holders. I believe that the strength and the stability of any system derive from the people who actually have a physical stake in the system, people who literally own a piece of the action. I believe America’s salvation lies in increasing property holders in this country from the current 60% to 100%, or near as that as possible.”
How would he go about that? “To know that,” he says, “you’ll have to wait for my next book!”