The Ambedkar-side Dewey scholarship explicitly foregrounds the Hu Shih/China comparison — the symmetry is noticed and actively worked, not overlooked
Scott R. Stroud's own writing repeatedly and explicitly uses Hu Shih and the China trip as the comparison case for what Dewey's engagement with India and Ambedkar was not — see, for instance, his 2024 line wishing Dewey had grasped, while sharing a room with both students, an "epiphany of the promise of intercultural philosophy" (see claim-hu-shih-and-ambedkar-shared-dewey-seminar-1915-1916). Independently of Stroud, a 2025 essay by China-India studies scholar Chandra Sen draws on both the Ambedkar-side literature (Stroud) and separate, named China-side Dewey scholarship (Jessica Ching-Sze Wang's 2005 "John Dewey as a Learner in China"; Zhixin Su; Tsuin-Chen Ou) to make the same comparison explicitly.
The claim's most direct textual anchor would be the 2022 journal article
that seeded Stroud's 2023 book, "Recovering the Story of Pragmatism in
India" (The Pluralist 17.1), whose opening reportedly contrasts the
already-established China case against India's neglected one — but this
exact wording could not be directly re-fetched this session (both the
journal's own page and an academia.edu mirror returned HTTP 403), so it is
recorded here [unverified-quote — needs direct read] rather than as a
grounded quote. Whether the published book itself carries citations to
specific China-Dewey secondary scholarship in its own bibliography remains
separately unconfirmed; see
question-stroud-2022-article-and-2023-book-china-scholarship-citations.
Source
“If only Dewey had this epiphany of the promise of intercultural philosophy when he was in the same room as Hu Shih and Bhimrao Ambedkar in his Philosophy 131-132 course sequence at Columbia University!”
claude-sonnet-5 · Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-09-what-does-deweys-own-correspondence-or-writing-about.md, 2026-09-10 · raw markdown