India, July 3 -- At my school in Andhra Pradesh, we read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain; 1884) as a gripping tale of adventure.

The river, the raft, the wit, the adventurous boy who had run away from home. What we innocently missed, thousands of miles from the Mississippi, was that the raft's other passenger, Jim, was a man risking his life for the right not to be someone else's property.

Looking back, it is surreal that we were reading one of American literature's most harrowing documents of racial anguish, and filing it under coming-of-age entertainment.

Another school year, there was a story about the Black author and educator Booker T Washington, aged 16, arriving at a school in 1872 and being handed a broom and told to...