Dewey's own 1918-1920 letters briefly treated "China and India" as one combined leg of a planned Asia trip, then dropped India

john-deweychinaindiacorrespondencescott-stroudcross-domain-bridge

Before either mentorship's outcome was known, Dewey's own correspondence shows him thinking of China and India together — as geography, not as students. His former student Albert Barnes wrote him in December 1918 urging him not to skip India: "I learned with regret that you are not going to include China and India in the itinerary. There is more really fine art in India than in all the rest of the world put together." Dewey's own reply, as quoted by Stroud from the same correspondence: "We should like to go to China and India," but "Aside from prohibitive expense, this is bad time I think to see India — the espionage is I think too great to make free movement and conversation impossible." In January 1919 Dewey wrote his daughter the family was "going to Japan (China, India, &c)"; by February 1920, writing from China, he told American correspondents "I'd rather come back and go home by India or Russia a few years from now." He never did.

This is the one point at which Dewey's own words come closest to treating China and India as "one project" — but the unit being combined is a travel itinerary, not the two students who would later study under him. Ambedkar's home country appears in these letters only as a place Dewey chose not to visit, never as the country of a specific former student; contrast with Dewey's actual, extended stay in China, which did happen.