THE DREAM work of America, the modes by which it proceeds, are at once more subtle and insidious. The now somewhat forgotten historian of the American South, David M Potter, was much closer to an understanding of this dream work. As he argued in The People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character, a set of lectures he wrote in 1950, America did indeed have a 'revolutionary message to offer but we have been mistaken in our concept of what that message was. We supposed that our revelation was 'democracy revolutionizing the world,' but in reality it was 'abundance revolutionizing the world'—a message which we did not preach and scarcely understood ourselves, but one which was peculiarly able to preach its own gospel without words'. Perhaps, growing up in India as a teenager, I sensed how the gospel of America insinuated itself into the very fabric of our being. It was the early mid-1970s: India had signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union, and at the school in Delhi which I attended, Springdales, visitors from the Soviet Union frequently showed up at the morning assembly. But even in my middle-class milieu of west Delhi, far from the more anglicised parts of south Delhi which seemed rather elite, Anglo-American culture absolutely predominated. The late afternoons andholidays were given over to pop music and rock and roll; the comic books of Dennis the Menace and Archie; steamy American novels with blondes, Cadillacs, and martinis;news reports on the boxing matches of Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman; and scrutinising the ads for a 'Bullworker'. No sooner did an American picture get released at the movie hall Chanakya, sometimes a few years after it had already had a run in the US, we made a dash for it—even though we got the worst lot of Hollywood, from the lachrymose Love Story to lighter and altogether B-grade comedy-drama flicks such as Butterflies Are Free. It was the same story in Indonesia, where I spent two years in the early 1970s. It is in this devoutly Islamic country that I gorged on television re-runs of I Love Lucy and I Dream of Jeannie—and, most importantly, Bonanza: big sky country, wide expanse, miles and miles of ponderosas, a land of abundance colonising my dreams. That was the story in much of the world and certainly in what these days is called the Global South.

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