Anxieties, Real and Imagined

The original Star Trek series (1966-1969) is popularly remembered for its progressive stance (at the time) on race as borne out by casting choices and vision of a future where ethnic and racial conflicts no longer plague humanity. Scholars, however, have challenged this characterization, arguing that it tended to marginalize most non-white actors who appeared on it, consigning even its regular non-white cast members, Nichelle Nichols and George Takei, to more one-dimensional roles.¹ The show occasionally speculated on the history of late twentieth century Earth and, in doing so, commented in a more direct way on the racial attitudes of 1960s America. One episode which tried to fill in the gap between the viewers’ present and the Enterprise’s future was “Space Seed,” which aired on February 16, 1967.² The episode introduced one of the Star Trek’s most memorable villains, Khan Noonien Singh (portrayed by Mexican-born actor Ricardo Montalbán), and through him provided a rare window onto American attitudes toward a group that few Americans had direct experience with: people of Indian origin.³

Discovered floating in a state of suspended animation on a long-forgotten twentieth century ship by the Enterprise crew, Khan served as a fictional representation of an Indian man at a time when people from India had little presence within American popular culture.⁴ He also was a product of selective breeding and a domineering maniac who was, in the words of Enterprise first officer Spock, “absolute ruler of more than a quarter of your world. From Asia through the Middle East” during a late twentieth century conflict in the show’s universe known to the Enterprise crew as the “Eugenics Wars.”⁵ In the late 1960s American media depicted Indians as desperately poor and disastrously fecund. American observers feared India’s economic growth would never outpace its population growth, or at least not fast enough for socialism and communism to lose their appeal. Marking twenty years of India’s independence from colonial rule, the New York Times editorialized on the country’s “dismal anniversary,” tarnished by its “lag in progress.” A “runaway population” threatened Indian democracy. In the opinion of the Times, India’s political freedom could only be secured by restricting reproduction.⁶

The Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich speaking at the University of San Diego in the early 1970s (Wikimedia Commons).

A year after “Space Seed” aired, entomologist Paul R. Ehrlich turned to India for the opening example of the consequences of uncontrolled reproduction in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. Ehrlich claimed to have come to a visceral understanding of the need to rein in human reproduction on “one stinking hot night in Delhi” as he returned to his hotel in a taxi. Ehrlich’s description of the scene in Delhi is more or less an enumeration of common activities he witnessed Indian people engaging in. Still, he wrote that the sight of so many human beings caused him to understand the need for population control “emotionally.”⁷ Several years later, in response to West Pakistan’s genocidal crackdown on Bengali-majority East Pakistan, pop music royalty including George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, and Eric Clapton, gathered in New York in August 1971 to raise money for the benefit of Bengali refugees. The Concert for Bangladesh also spawned a successful live album, the cover of which bore an image of an emaciated brown child with a bowl of food.⁸ Making Khan a product of and advocate for selective breeding – the ultimate form of population control – Star Trek showcased the familiar American association of India and uncontrolled human reproduction, just negating it.

Musicians George Harrison and Eric Clapton playing at the Concert for Bangladesh (Wikimedia Commons).

In addition, Khan embodied a few characteristics inherited from British colonial stereotypes, particularly the concept of “martial races.”⁹ In the eyes of British observers, these warlike Indians possessed admirable qualities off the battlefield as well. In 1933, late in the colonial era, George MacMunn, a British military officer and prolific writer on India, referred to the martial races as the “virile races.”¹⁰ Star Trek fully illustrated the sexual potential in the martial race concept hinted at by MacMunn. In “Space Seed,” the Enterprise’s staff historian Marla McGivers, played by Madlyn Rhue, speculated that Khan was “probably a Sikh. They were the most fantastic warriors.” Later, in McGivers’s chamber, we see a half-finished painting of a stern, turbaned man cuing Khan to pursue her. Once Spock determined Khan’s identity, Captain Kirk praised the erstwhile dictator and his fellow enhanced humans as “…supermen in a sense. Stronger, braver, certainly more ambitious, more daring.” When challenged by Spock, Kirk admits that “we humans have a streak of barbarism in us. Appalling, but there, nevertheless.”¹¹ Khan’s warlike primitivism and sexual magnetism made him an emblem of humanity’s dark past as well as almost irresistibly appealing.

After “Space Seed” aired and through reruns, Americans began to meet people from India for the first time. Somewhat like the fictional Khan, many of these real Indians would be “selected for success.”¹² The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (the Hart-Celler Act) allowed Indians to immigrate to the United States in appreciable numbers for the first time in decades – annual Indian immigration to the U.S. increased from a meager 634 individuals in 1964 to nearly 17,000 by 1972 –  but gave preference to migrants who were “members of the professions” or who had “exceptional ability in the sciences or the arts”¹³ (see Figure 1). Indian Americans, recruited from the most privileged ranks of their home country, rapidly surpassed all other groups in terms of educational attainment and income. By 2024 Indian-born executives led major American firms such as Microsoft and Google. The Democratic Party nominated a woman of Indian descent as its presidential candidate. More personally, as the son of an Indian-born physician growing up in a small New York town, excellence and dominance were assumed and expected of me, a burden tempered slightly by also having a white parent.¹⁴ Khan failed to take over the Enterprise in “Space Seed,” but he was given a new planet to conquer.¹⁵ Khan also succeeded in communicating Star Trek’s–and America’s–anxiety about its encounters with India, both real and imagined.

Figure 1. Annual Indian Immigration to the United States, 1964-1974 Source: Annual report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1964-1974 (U.S. Dept. of Labor, Immigration and Naturalization Service)

1. Daniel L. Bernardi, Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Allen Kwan, “Seeking New Civilizations: Race Normativity in the Star Trek Franchise,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 27, no. 1 (2007), 59-70.
2. Star Trek, season 1, episode 22, “Space Seed,” directed by Marc Daniels, written by Gene L. Coon and Carey Wilbur, featuring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Ricardo Montalbán, and Madlyn Rhue, aired February 16, 1967, Paramount, 2009, DVD.
3. Khan made several additional appearances in later media, most notably in Nicholas Meyer’s 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which continued the story begun in “Space Seed” and also starred Montalbán. Khan, portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, also appears in J.J. Abrams’s 2013 film Star Trek: Into Darkness, but in an alternate timeline from the original series and Wrath.
4. Characteristic of the often heavy-handed foreshadowing and symbolism employed by Star Trek, Khan’s ship was called the SS Botany Bay – a reference to the site of James Cook’s first landfall in Australia and location of the first British penal colony in Australia.
5. The original series episode, “Space Seed,” mentions, but provides little detail about, the Eugenics Wars. As was frequently the case in Star Trek, the show’s writers seem to have improvised many of the particulars of this world-historical event. In a conversation on the Enterprise bridge with Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, Spock informs us that the Eugenics Wars took place in the mid-1990s and constituted Earth’s last world war. “A group of ambitious scientists,” apparently tried to “improve the race through selective breeding.” Later in the episode we learn that a group of “young supermen did seize power simultaneously in over forty nations.” Ultimately, these tyrants faced defeat (we are not told exactly how) and fell out of the historical record. Khan and his shipmates, the Enterprise crew discovers, were these exact fugitives.
6. “India’s Dismal Anniversary,” New York Times, August 21, 1967, 30; Ultimately, India’s own leadership reached a similar conclusion and instituted an aggressive family planning campaign that included the forced sterilization of millions of poor men. However, events played out contrary to the Times’s prediction: these drastic population control measures came after Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared an “Emergency” and proceeded to rule by decree in June 1975. The Emergency lasted nearly two years before Gandhi called for new elections in March 1977, restoring the country’s democracy. For an account of India’s Emergency and population control program see Ananth V. Krishna, India Since Independence: Making Sense of Indian Politics (New Delhi: Pearson), 143-180.
7. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 15.
8. George Harrison & Friends, The Concert for Bangladesh, produced by George Harrison and Phil Spector, Apple Records, 1971, album.
9. British colonial rule in India successfully took root in part because the British placed the implements of violence that sustained their empire in the hands of members of India’s customary warrior and mercenary castes, some ethnic groups, and some religious communities such as the Sikhs. In time, British India’s military recruitment practices crystalized into a racial theory which posited that some of India’s peoples were inherently more capable of waging war than others; hence the appellation “martial races.” See: Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2004).
10. George MacMunn, The Martial Races of India (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1933), v.
11. Star Trek, “Space Seed.”
12. Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur, and Nirvikar Singh, The Other One Percent: Indians in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 27-69.
13. An Act to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act, and for other purposes, Public Law 89-236, U.S. Statutes at Large 79 (1965): 913.
14. Anecdotally, some Indians who immigrated to the United States early in the post-1965 period employed metaphors of discovery and conquest to describe their journey. The first of his group of friends from medical school to immigrate to the United States, my father was nicknamed “Columbus” by the later arrivals for his having been the first to “discover” America.
15. Khan and his fellow enhanced humans were ultimately set down on a barren planet, setting the stage for Khan to unleash his titular wrath on Kirk and company in Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan.