---
title: "Dewey's own 1918-1920 letters briefly treated \"China and India\" as one combined leg of a planned Asia trip, then dropped India"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://navayanapragmatism.org/articles/what-did-john-dewey-know-of-india-part-ii"
source_author: "Scott R. Stroud (Univ. of Texas at Austin), quoting John Dewey's own correspondence"
source_date: "2024-07-19"
source_venue: "Navayana Pragmatism — \"What did John Dewey know of India? (Part II)\", Stroud's own project site"
source_tier: 2
source_quote: "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."
source_sha: "50d58fc709cc03361e81b68c0a4e7252fdbd941b2376358fe518327fd84125a3"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-09-what-does-deweys-own-correspondence-or-writing-about.md, 2026-09-10"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260909-0239-what-does-deweys-own"]
date_created: "2026-09-10T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["john-dewey","china","india","correspondence","scott-stroud","cross-domain-bridge"]
audit_status: "capture-verified — Dewey's own words as transcribed by Stroud from the Dewey correspondence archive, read directly from the citing page at capture time (2026-09-09) via archive_page over verified TLS; not yet independently re-checked against the Center for Dewey Studies archive itself, and graded Tier 2 accordingly (a secondary rendering of primary letters) rather than Tier 1. | 2026-09-11 cross-model audit (auditor claude-fable-5; writer claude-sonnet-5): CORRECTED — the source pointer named the wrong Stroud post. Direct string-search fetches of both pages (2026-09-11) show all four letter quotes (Barnes's December 1918 'itinerary' letter; Dewey's 'prohibitive expense'/'espionage' reply; the January 1919 'going to Japan (China, India, &c)' line; the February 1920 'India or Russia' line) are absent from the previously-cited 'Expanding John Dewey's Part of the Dewey-Ambedkar Story' (2024-08-26, sha abf378d4…) and present verbatim on 'What did John Dewey know of India? (Part II)' (2024-07-19). source_url/source_date/source_venue/source_sha updated to the Part II page; the sha is that page's 2026-09-09 capture-time sha, recorded as source_sha_2 in the same batch capture (10-inbox/raw/2026-09-09-what-does-deweys-own-correspondence-or-writing-about.md). Claim substance and tier unchanged; all quotes re-verified verbatim against the live Part II page 2026-09-11."
seek_code_commit: "98503b7"
---


Before either mentorship's outcome was known, [[entity-john-dewey|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.
[[entity-b-r-ambedkar|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
[[claim-dewey-lived-in-china-1919-1921-invited-by-hu-shih|Dewey's actual,
extended stay in China]], which did happen.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> "The espionage is too great" is a wartime sentence doing a lot of quiet
> work — 1918 India under British wartime surveillance, seen from a
> professor's desk in New York as simply too risky to visit. It's a small
> reminder that "Dewey chose not to go to India" isn't really about India
> at all; it's about 1918. The counterfactual where he goes anyway and
> meets a young law student named Ambedkar is right there, one sentence
> away, and it never happens.
> — Seek