Over the weekend, Bruce Wallace reports in the LAT that The Story of Little Black Sambo is back on the best-seller list in Japan. Sambo entered the American lexicon as a racist caricature a long while before the publication of LBS in America in 1900, but the book, unfortunately, has come to symbolize the controversy over the name and history since the '60s.

Helen Bannerman, the wife of a Scotsman serving in India, wrote the book for her two daughters, while on a two-day journey. LBS was published in London in 1899. She had illustrated the book herself with water-color images of big eyed, skinny kids and bengali tigers. There are the obvious Indian references [Bazaar and Ghee] while the story also has some overtones of Indian folklores - the greedy tiger is a common motif.

Wallace asks in the article,"It has never been definitively explained why artists opted for African characters to illustrate a story set in India"? I don't have any definitive explanation. But, as Bannerman herself illustrated the book and as Indians/Africans were usually polled together in imperial imagination [one need only look at the illustrations in Cambridge History of India or note that Indians are routinely called 'niggers'], I can posit that Sambo was drawn as the archetypal"native". Obviously, the American publishers localized the story from India and the universal native to the South and the plantation negro.

The charges of racism against the readers of the book in Japan [or in South Asia where I read the book] are quite curious in that respect. With no local context of"sambo" or"blackface", can we simply assume that American racism is as universal as American ideals? I am sure that others will disagree.