Ravi with Werner Bischof in New York, Continued …

Continuing from the previous post –

I read the following letter from Werner Bischof to Henri Cartier-Bresson in a book by Russell Miller, “Magnum, Fifty Years at the Front Line of History.”  —

Pittsburgh Jan. 9, 1954

“This week, an old friend of mine from Tokyo saw me at Fifth Ave. He returned lately from his post as an analyst in the army and was very depressed at the development of the States since he left four years ago. But what is it that makes it so different? Very superficial, I call it the “assembly line” – everywhere this depressing, anti-individual feeling, this automatic way of living, of thinking.

“There is only one great thing which is exceptional: the science, the research, the preservation of art. But these people, with few exceptions are foreigners, are French, are Germans, or are so strongly bound to our way of thinking that it seems to me they are like an oasis in a desert of stupidly vegetating creatures guided by a … good or brutal thinking government. [We …] overrule human and [turn things so] that everyone in the “assembly line” is convinced it must be right. I do not know if it is so, because I know the Far East and will forever be closer to their philosophy … it is the emptiness of daily life, the dryness of human relations which Thomas Wolfe describes in his book ‘There is No Way Back.’

“Yes, there is no way back, the developing of industries, of the robot, can only go on, go on and destroy. Truly intelligent people will be [drawn in by] this monster and there is no hope to survive …  The tragedy is that very few people have time, or take the time to think about that. It is also paralyzing to see it, and please forgive me if I am not coming back with the record you expect. I am soon going on my great trip.”                                                                                    Yours, Werner

A response from me to Werner’s letter would take hours and hours of time, pages and pages of writing and to what end? There is no objective reporting of facts in the letter. It is Werner Bischof’s feelings and who am I to argue with that. He seems to equate America with the “assembly line,” etc. Is he writing solely about America or about industrial societies everywhere?

The word “robot” in Bischof’s letter surprised me. It could be a reference to Karel Čapek’s 1921 science fiction play R.U.R.,Rossum’s Universal Robots, in which human looking creatures were manufactured to labor in a factory. Robots acted automatically, mindlessly, without volition. The play became famous and was translated into thirty languages. An interesting sidenote: in Czech a robotnik is a peasant or serf. Robota means “drudgery” or “servitude.”

Another comment on words – Thomas Wolfe’s novel is not titled “There Is No Way Back.” The title is “You Can’t Go Home Again.” Perhaps the letter was written in French and translated into English. The two titles have very different meanings.  … …  I am tempted to continue with comments, but that would take me away from writing about Ravi, which is what I must do. One day I will write about being an American in the expatriate life of my generation. It was not always a comfortable identity to carry.

Except for two vivid vignettes that have remained with me over the decades, Ravi’s and my time with Werner and Rosellina has faded into a blur. I do remember, though, feeling that Werner did not approve of me. This was unexpected. Ravi and I were a popular couple. People on campus and even in the town generally more than approved of us; they went out of their way to be friendly, invited us into their homes and to all sorts of social gatherings. Now that I know Bischof’s perspective on America I think he did not see me; he saw an American who fit a stereotype. It did not help, I suppose, that we were staying in the home of an American businessman. I do not remember any particular conversation with Rosellina but have the impression that she was pleasant with me.

Ravi must have noticed Bischof’s attitude toward me. He had a way of sensing the reactions of people around him and adjusting his behavior accordingly. It was a talent that served him well; he was the consummate diplomat. I believe now that he caught Werner’s dislike of America and American culture and chose not to think about it, certainly not to analyze and discuss it. To do so would have raised a serious dilemma for him. Ravi had left India with no good prospects for a career. Americans in Bombay in a beautiful small American library awarded him a scholarship at an excellent university on a lovely campus where he was accepted and valued by Americans. He was living in an orderly society with a functioning government, where even the very poor lived in a degree of comfort and security unimaginable in India. He had not yet considered changing his citizenship but his wife was American. His identity was in flux and now the guru he idolized was in subtle and not so subtle ways denigrating who and what he was becoming. I was not aware of this at the time. For me, what Bischof said and did was interesting, but without emotional significance. Ravi must have felt differently. As I wrote in the previous post, after we left New York Ravi seldom talked about our time there and in later years he became impatient with me when I asked him about his work with Bischof. Typical for him and his way of handling conflict, he never mentioned Werner’s take on America.

Ravi viewed American society and culture from within the system, not from a European artist’s perspective. His Ph.D. was in Political Science, specializing in international law and political geography but his course in Constitutional Law with a nationally known expert fascinated him. He followed national politics (but not local politics), and of course, taught courses on American government. It was not until we had been married for five years that he took U.S. citizenship and did it with full knowledge and commitment as an American. He assimilated. In the 1960s, for example, he actively opposed the Vietnam War as a speaker at teach-ins on several campuses because be believed the war was contrary to American values and interests. Where, as a man of two cultures, did his basic identity lie? Having lived for decades as an expatriate complicated the issue for him. See here my writing on this in Where Does an Expatriate Go to Retire? and here and here and here on later reflection.

My memories of the Bischofs in New York —

The Lindy Hop

One is of the four of us going to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. It was a Black dance hall but Whites were accepted. Do read about it here.

I am grateful to Bischof for taking us there. It would not have occurred to any of our American friends, White or Black, to go to the Savoy Ballroom.

We were seated at a table somewhat away from the dance floor but soon two young men came over and asked Rosellina and me to dance. Neither Ravi nor Werner objected but she declined. With the great music I could hardly sit still. I loved to dance. On campus Ravi and I went to the International Club dances, mostly with Latin music. That was nice, but here at the Savoy it was the Lindy I had danced since I was a kid. (although the Savoy Ballroom style was unique. I called my style the jitterbug.)  I was so happy to be out on the floor again with guys who danced as I had for years, only better. I danced with one fellow, another, returned to the table and then two more came to ask. I accepted and Rosellina did not. A third time the young man who asked Rosellina was clearly annoyed when she turned him down. He spoke sharply and Rosellina stood up. She was eight months pregnant. It was a wonderful funny moment and she was wonderful and beautiful. Ravi and Werner continued talking. I danced and enjoyed it all enormously. (I’ve often thought about the baby who would not see his father.) I have a vague memory of Ravi and me taking an elevated train that night to Rachel’s neighborhood but it could have been at another time.

The news of Bischof’s death the following May made everyone who knew him terribly sad. He was a great artist and a fine, compassionate person. One last brilliant photograph —

On the Road to Cuzco

My second vignette involves an apartment I recall as being owned by Joan Miró and having an original Calder hanging from the ceiling. I found this photo, which confirms that the apartment existed.

Werner and Rosallina and the Calder photographed by Peter Ablly

We were there in the afternoon. I remember the time because of a small incident. Werner noticed an antique coffee grinder and asked what in the world anyone would do with such an object. I answered that if the owner were American he would make a lamp out of it. This amused Werner and I felt that at last he saw me as a person. I regret having no memories of Ravi’s conversations with Werner or what else we did together. That, and driving around in a peculiar automobile, was it.

We have this poster of a Joan Miró painting in our house. I bought it decades ago in the Centre Pompideau.

Read Full Post »

Ravi with Werner Bischof in New York

Our first time in New York City was for me an extraordinary experience but Ravi took it all in stride, even the unexpected meeting with Werner Bischof.  It was the 1953 Christmas break from school. We were in New York because a fellow student (I will call her Rachel) had invited us to drive, in her car, from our Wisconsin campus to the city and stay there with her and her family. We were six, at least, in the car, sharing expenses. My most vivid memory of that long drive along the Pennsylvania Turnpike is being pushed into a corner of the back seat and the guys telling me I was small and didn’t need much space. We drove straight through. Ravi sat up front with Rachel and the alternative driver. She was a real politico, active even in state level politics, and Ravi was the expert on matters political. In truth, Rachel was more Ravi’s friend than mine and I was invited as his wife more than as myself. Having worked nearly full-time as a waitress when an undergrad and busy with my teaching assistantship and tutoring for the athletic department, politics were hardly my primary interest. The other students in the car lived in New York and were with us because this was an agreeable, cheap and convenient way to get home and then back to school.

Coming into Manhattan, my first time in a metropolis, I was dazzled. Rachel drove around, dropping off the fellows, continuing on through a quiet neighborhood of huge houses and turned into a driveway where a handsome man was standing, waiting at the front door. “Daddy!”  Rachel was very wealthy. From my earliest days at the university I had made friends with students from New York, most of them Jewish. I had no idea of what their family incomes would have been. It was not something I thought about. It did not occur to me to ask how their families could have afforded their undergraduate colleges, then the out-of-state tuition at our university, their nice clothes and apartments around the campus. I doubt, though, that the others’ families were as comfortably situated as Rachel’s. She had done little or nothing to make us aware of her wealth. I noted that we shared the gasoline cost of driving, as if we were all equal. For her, it had to have been a symbolic, not a monetary matter. I have no idea if the others in the car realized the difference between her and them.

Rachel’s house was a mansion. I felt ill at ease in the unfamiliar luxury, and moreover, the presence of servants, all of them Black, unsettled me. I wanted to talk with them but could not strike the right attitude for the situation. It was all out of kilter for me. (See here about race, Ravi and me) Rachel continued talking and behaving with Ravi and me as she had on campus. Nevertheless, I felt, and undoubtedly was, socially awkward. Ravi carried on as if nothing were unusual for him. He had grown up in the elite sector of his society, and although after moving to Bombay his immediate family was merely well-off, members of his extended family had both high income and generations of privilege and status behind them. He was perfectly comfortable in Rachel’s home.

Eventually, much later, I learned to deal with class and wealth differences in my social universe and to accept the fact of servants in a home. Ravi, on the few occasions when he noticed and remarked on it, could not understand why having a servant in the home was so difficult for me. I think it has to do with wanting equality for all and the complexities that entails. He grew up in households where servants were part of the natural scene, an essential aspect of family life. I became particularly aware of this in our final years together. See here.

Ravi and I went to parties in Greenwich Village, among students. I liked that. Ravi wanted to see the Magnum Photo office and we went looking for it. My memories are a little hazy and if anyone were to challenge them I would accept and rethink. I remember, for example, that while we were in the office a young man brought in a photograph he had taken of his wife gazing in adoration at a bare-bottomed infant while a cat watches them both. He had previously taken a photo of her in a long gown, head on pillow, lying on the bed and looking across her pregnant belly at a cute, perky kitten that is looking at her. The two photos are in The Family of Man book of 1955 and I assume the young man was Elliot Erwitt.

Ravi discovered that Werner Bischof was in town and that he would meet with us.

We spent one or two days with Werner and Rosellina, his wife. I think it had to be two days because I have that much worth of memories. Werner had a car that I remember as being very odd, of a sort I had never seen before. In later years I thought it might have been a Land Rover but cannot know for certain. I rode in Land Rovers and Jeeps in India, Turkey and Indonesia when going to the villages with project officials. I read that Werner drove from New York to Mexico City with Rosellina and then continued on alone, flying to Panama, Santiago de Chile and Lima. On the other hand, from a book by Russell Miller, “Magnum, Fifty Years at the Front Line of History,” Bischof wrote to Robert Capa that he was planning as his next photographic project an expedition along the Pan American Highway into South America. He wanted to get as far as possible from civilization. If driving the Highway were his goal, a Land Rover would have been the right automobile for it.

In May 1953 Bischof had written to Capa that he would be in Paris but eager to leave for South America and needed assignments to pay for the expedition. The following September he sailed on the Liberté from Le Havre to New York. He met the NY Magnum staff and found assignments. He covered the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Panama Canal for Life magazine and flew to Vancouver for Fortune magazine. His most lucrative job was for Standard Oil, to photograph the highway construction underway across the country. The company had hired a Magnum photographer before, for pictures of their worldwide pumping of petroleum. I have an idea that the company might be lobbying Congress for the Federal Aid-Highway Act (it passed in 1956) and intended to use Bischof’s pictures as part of their presentation. If so, this time they chose the wrong photographer.

Chicago 1953

San Francisco 1953

Bischof’s images of America are unlike those he took anywhere else. His one sympathetic portrait is of a woman jazz singer, Black. The photograph of a White executive at his desk is brutal. Even the giant of architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, looks less than grand in Bischof’s view of him.

The photo below and the traffic scene above are the only photographs of Chicago I could find. They are realistic. I despair at America’s dependence on the automobile and what it has done to our central cities and public transportation. Only now do we have the beginning of a national health care system that is as just, efficient and affective as those of France and other Western European countries. I have seen, however, other aspects of Chicago. My children and I lived for four years in Evanston, a solidly middle-class town on the lake at the northern edge of Chicago. My son and I both went to the University of Chicago and I worked in the city for a year. I loved its architecture, museums, lively theatre and the intellectual life. Friends from elsewhere came for the jazz music. In the 1950s Black people were moving up from Mississippi and Alabama, creating a large ghetto that I would later come to know. Well-intended public housing projects that would become crime-ridden hell holes were being established but mostly Chicago had evolved into a city of pleasant middle- and working-class neighborhoods. My children were involved in Chicago politics and fascinated by the dynamic political culture.

Chicago 1953

In the one photograph of nature I found — Is the reflection of trees in the lake surrounded by an algae bloom?  Algae blooms were then and remain a serious problem for the country’s waterways.

Boston 1953

I like the composition, texture and color of this photo. And the irony. According to the title, it is in Georgia.

Georgia 1954

In his book, “Werner Bischof, Photography: Men and Movements,” the author, Niklaus Flüeler, wrote that the United States came as a shock to Bischof, that New York terrified and crippled him. Flüeler quotes Manuel Gasser,  “Bischof took but few photographs in the United States, and the existing pictures show streets, railroad crossings, concrete, forbidding façades, and a Manhattan filled with smoke and fumes. He could glean nothing from the ugliness and brutality of the country, and he seemed unable to perceive its beauty. … The impression which New York made on Werner Bischof could have been foreseen: to a man so closely bound to nature and the subtlest impulses of the human spirit, the steel and concrete monsters of Manhattan could only have seemed terrifying and unnatural …” and on about “… man as a prisoner and trapped animal trying desperately to break out of its cage of tangled steel wires.”

Construction worker New York City 1953

or – “… The anamorphotic reflections of the strict, rigid form of a skyscraper in the polish of a car, for example, takes on the appearance of a symbol of a section of modern life.”

These are writers attributing ideas and attitudes to Bischof. In a letter to Cartier-Bresson he expresses in his own words a more complex, but not necessarily contradictory, perspective on America. I have been thinking about it.

As I read and reflected on Bischof’s view of America I recalled an incident with Ravi in 1980 or ’81. For some months I had been regularly browsing in the delightful Artcurial bookstore on Ave. Matignon in Paris (I was working nearby on a research project) and came across Marco Bischof’s book on his father. While leafing through its pages I noticed a line indicating that Marco lacked detailed information about Werner’s 1952 travels in India. I was confused about the dates involved and thought maybe Ravi had been with Bischof in ’52. That evening I suggested to Ravi that we buy the book and that he write a letter to Marco. He brushed aside everything I said. He seemed annoyed and when I asked why he turned away. I knew from experience that any further effort on my part to probe the matter would be useless. He did not even bother to explain that by 1952 he had already left India for America. I have written elsewhere (here and here in this post, toward the end) about an unwillingness in Ravi’s family to discuss personal, interpersonal and emotional issues. They conflated it with gossip and self-indulgence. I do not know if this is cultural, a difference between Indian and American, but I do think that with an American I would have pressed for an explanation and even argued about it, something Ravi and I rarely did. Unfortunately.

This past year of exploring Ravi’s childhood has taught me things about him I was unaware of during our marriage of fifty-seven years at his death in 2010. I have a new perspective, am better informed and now understand him as the foreign student and immigrant he was in 1953, struggling under that placid exterior with ambivalent feelings about the changes taking place in his life and his identity.

I may have discovered something new about Ravi as I read about Bischof in America and rethink those two days with him and Rosellina. I will write next about Ravi’s and my adventures with Werner and Rosellina. It was fun and interesting.

Read Full Post »

Witnessing the Bihar Famine with Werner Bishof

Ravi resisted talking with me about his time in Bihar and I can understand why. He was young, twenty years old, and inexperienced in any matter other than attending school. He was with Werner Bischof, a European, an artist and an extraordinarily attractive individual with a strong personality. I cannot know for certain Ravi’s response to Bischof photographing the famine but my years with Indians’ vs. foreigners’ perceptions of poverty in India gives me some insight into how he may have thought and felt.

Ravi had never before been in a village. He had grown up in an affluent modern family in the modern sector of major cities and attended school with children of other affluent families. In Benares, when they went into the countryside it was to Sarnath in the Ford Papaji had purchased in Calcutta. The servants, craftsmen and tradesmen who served the family were poor and mostly illiterate but not poverty-stricken and hungry. I doubt that Ravi and his brothers noticed the poverty of people on the streets and in the marketplace. Seeing it can upset someone from Europe and be invisible to an Indian. In 1985 in Paris a cousin from Bombay who was visiting with us picked up a newspaper and pointed to the photograph of an emaciated man sleeping on a train station platform in India. He asked, rhetorically and considerably annoyed, why they have to print such a bad image of India. We explained how extreme and striking India’s poverty appears to an outsider, and he was surprised. It was the first time he had heard this. (In 1948 a Canadian student remarked that for most White Americans Negroes are invisible, my first time hearing, and being aware, of this American reality.) The stories Ravi told me about his time in Bihar had to do not with the villagers but with the exotic foreigner and recording for him the place, time and technical details of each photograph.

Girls in Patna 1951

As I wrote earlier, when Bischof and Ravi arrived in Patna they were met by a local civil servant. Bischof’s photos of Patna that I have seen are all about the famine and none about this historic city. The only photographs of people in Patna are the two here. I included a painting of 19^th century Patna in the previous post.

Patna 1951

Bischof photographed the unloading of grain at the Golghar, a granary built by the East India Company after the famine of 1770 that killed nearly ten million people in Bihar and Bengal. The grain to be stored in the Golghar was intended for the British Army, not for the people. The architect designed the staircase as a spiral so that coolies carrying grain-bags up one flight could unload them through a hole in the top and descend by an alternate spiral staircase. Unfortunately, he also designed the granary doors to open inward, so the interior was never filled.

Golghar in Patna 1888

Unloading grain in Patna at the Golghar 1951

From Patna, Bischof and Ravi proceeded to Darbhanga and the guesthouse where they would stay. (see here)  From there they went into the villages, their jeep stirring up clouds of dust from the dry soil. Bischof was caught up in the misery of the people, but as an artist, he saw and appreciated their folk art.

Bischof gives a terrible account in his letters of what he saw. “An old man collapses in front of me. His eyes are crazed. He touches my shoes and looks heavenward. He has not eaten a bite in three days. Two of his family have already died … … The middle-aged have the greatest reserves of strength and are for the most part employed in relief work. Many of the inhabitants do not have the 12 annas (then about thirteen cents) they need to buy the weekly ration of grain. …”  Drought had struck the land. Wells and the rivers had run dry. People died of starvation and their bodies lay on the ground. When grain finally did arrive, the survivors without money begged for food, but free food was not forthcoming. Bischof noted that the government could not afford to give everyone free food. Perhaps the list is for some who will benefit.

Reading the list for food

I have been thinking about this photograph and trying to remember when I first saw it and Ravi telling me that Bischof was taken aback by the boys running after them in the jeep and he, Ravi, had explained that the running was boys being curious, nothing more. That rang true to me. Whenever we went into a village, boys running in packs surrounded us, chattering and fussing until an older man came and shooed them away. The picture is in the book, Werner Bischof, Photography: Men and Movements, American Photographic Book Publishing Co. Garden City, NY, 1976, that Ravi bought and that has fallen apart after all these years. I searched for the photograph and read the caption: “A consignment of corn arrives in a village in the province of Bihar, 1951.” The copy is larger than the one here and I can see the figures at the back more clearly. The taller individual to the right is wearing a dress. This indicates to me it is a girl. (A woman would be in sari.) Figures further back may be women. They may be running for food or it may have been as Ravi recalled it, that they were running to see the foreigner, perhaps in expectation that he had something for them.

Ravi also told me that cows in the villages ran away from Bischof. He explained the reason being that Bischof was a meat-eater and he smelled strange to the cows. Hmmm. Ravi ate meat, but only occasionally, a fact included here but without the additional information that his grandmother, who lived with them, greatly disapproved of it. The family, by caste, was Hindu and vegetarian but had broken with tradition. Given the differences, and importance, of diet between castes in Indian culture, Ravi would have noted whether a person he met did or did not eat meat. He told me that Sikhs eat meat, and he greatly admired his Sikh uncle. Bischof was European, admirable and very agreeable.

On May 6, 1951, In one of Bischof letters — “Capa wrote me a great letter: ‘Bischof, you have to relax now!’  … Imagine, Illustrated is publishing the ‘Famine’ story on seven pages and Match has bought it, too. I still have so much to see and say about India – even if the international market is glutted with Indian material. … We must return here in winter. …”  For photographs taken on their return visit in South India, see here.

Ravi returned by train to Bombay. On June 21 he left for the States. Bischof left from Calcutta for Japan on June 29, after photographing in Jamshedpur (see here) and on the Damodar Valley Dam construction site.

They would meet again in New York City in December 1953. Rosellina was with Werner and I was with Ravi.

Before leaving Patna, I return to my original awareness of this poorest region of India and of it having been the land where the nation’s great civilizations originated  (See here) During the 5^th century BCE, Patna/Pataliputra was the capital city of the Magadha kingdom. It was the capital and primary place of learning and fine art under the Mauryan Empire (322 to 185 BCE) and the Gupta Empire (320 to 550 CE). In the 16^th century it came under the Moguls. In the 17^th century the East India Company established a factory trading post in the city, followed in 1858 by the British Raj, who then ruled Patna. Because of its rich agricultural hinterland and being situated at the confluence of the Ganges with other rivers, all flowing down to an ocean port, Patna was naturally a seat of government and a center for national and international trade. However, when the railway and motor vehicles replaced ships on rivers as the dominant means of transport, the city lost much of its economic base.

Patna Museum

In the early 20^th century British buildings were Indo-Saracenic in style. One is now a museum and its most famous holding is the statue of Yakshi, an ancient female nature-spirit shown with a tree. She is a fertility symbol and a caretaker of nature who appears in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist literature. I include here my favorite Yakshi. I first saw her in an exhibit at the Paris Grand Palais in 1986.

Yakshi 11th century CE Madhya Pradesh

The torso of the yakshi as fertility goddess, now in the Boston Museum of Art, is from the Great Stupa at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, ca 25 BCE. It is near Bhopal, central India. This is the Sunga Empire, following the Mauryan Empire and the great Ashoka.

Yakshi, Great Stupa at Sanchi

The apsara is a female spirit of the clouds and waters in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. She is shown here in an exaggerated tribhanga pose of the Bharatnatyam dance.  (The tri refers to three turns of the body, the tri being an original Indo-European cognate for three.) This apsara is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The map is for locating Bihar, Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

Apsara Uttar Pradesh 12th century

Indian States

Read Full Post »

Ravi and Werner Bischof on Their Way to Patna

It was the end of April, 1951. Werner Bischoff, from Magnum Photos, was in Bombay, and having completed his assignment for an article there, had decided to stay on in India, this time with Life magazine, to bring the world’s attention through his photographs to a terrible, devastating famine in eastern India. As I wrote here, Ravi was uniquely qualified to serve as Werner’s assistant, to travel with him, to help him fulfill his mission. However, by the time I was ready to write about it, many decades later, Ravi could tell me very little of their adventure. He had fallen into dementia. I reconstructed their route to and through Bihar from memories recovered during his lucid moments and from photos Werner took along the way, an exercise that incidentally led into my discovering something of the history of India, of Bihar and of such famines.

We know from Bischof’s letters to Rosellina that the poverty he saw on the streets of Bombay shocked and dismayed him. In 1945 he had photographed the misery of post-war Europe but it was as nothing compared with the never-ending wretchedness of the poor in India. Accounts of people starving in Bihar further disturbed him and he became convinced that a  photographic report of the famine was needed to alert the public. He decided to act. He read and informed himself about the economy and the lives of common people. He wrote in his diary: “On Monday I start working on the famine story — not an easy task because the government doesn’t like having this documented. In the long run I don’t think anyone can overlook these images of hunger, that people can ignore all my pictures — no, definitely not. And even if only a vague impression remains, in time this will create a basis that will help people distinguish between what is good and what is objectionable.”

Many of Bischof’s photos of the Bihar famine, too disturbing to include here and dwell on, are still current. One, of a mother with a child in her arms, prompted a letter from Edward Steichen, then curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who assured Bischof that his photos would force the politicians to act.

Steichen was right. President Truman, on February 12, had already asked Congress to pass a bill sending wheat to India. On May 28, Life magazine carried an article with Bischof’s photographs, “Famine in Bihar Province, Horrible Photos of Starving People.” Shipments of wheat from the States had been coming into the Calcutta harbor but after June 15, with the bill finally passed and was signed by Truman, the number of shipments increased and the terms of payment were eased. It was an historic agreement between the two governments.

Howrah Mail

Bischof and Ravi would have taken the Howrah Express from Bombay to Calcutta. It passed by, not through, Patna. I do not know where, or if, they stayed in Calcutta. The only Bischof photographs I have seen that were taken in Calcutta are of the docks. From there they must have gone directly to Patna, as described below.  On reaching Patna, Bischof took photos and they continued on to Darbhanga, where a place in the government guesthouse had been arranged for them. I know the guesthouses because I stayed in them on a number of occasions. They had been built by the British to accommodate officials traveling into the countryside on duty, and after Independence the Indian government kept them in place where hotels were not available.

Ravi said the guesthouse where he and Bischof stayed in Darbhanga had eight rooms and was staffed with servants. I assume breakfast and dinner were served; they were in two of the guesthouses where I stayed. He said Bischof rented a car and they went to the villages from there. On the basis of my own experience, I think Bischof’s car would have been a Land Rover or a Jeep supplied by the local government. In this photo taken in a Darbhanga village from inside what I think is the District Inspector’s jeep, Bischof was sitting beside the driver.

Bischof wrote about the complications of moving the wheat inland to the villages. It was unloaded at Calcutta docks, put into sacks (see photo here) and onto the train. “Every day twelve hundred tons of grain … … reach Mokameh, the harbor station sixty miles from Patna. There, since there is no bridge across the Ganges between Calcutta and Benares, four hundred miles upriver, the sacks of grain are slowly and laboriously reloaded onto railroad cars, which in turn are shipped on barges across the Ganges River. It seemed to me the people were starving more quickly than the grain can reach them.”

What a bizarre scene. What was happening at Mokameh?  To understand, one needs to look at the railways that were built by and for the British.  First – the map.

The East Indian Railway began in the 1850s in the Calcutta Howrah train station. The rail line’s first destination was a town in the region, Bardhaman, to bring back coal being mined in its hinterland. The steam engines that ran British factories, ships and locomotives required coal, in large quantities. In 1861 the railroad was extended north to Bhagalpur on the Ganges, a major center for trade and silk fabric, then followed the south bank of the river to Patna, Benares, Allahabad and north to Agra and New Delhi.

Building railway bridges on this route posed a problem for the Railway Company; materials for construction were lacking. Apparently, stone was unavailable. Brick proved impractical because the local clay was not suitable and bricks were too heavy for shipping in sufficient numbers.  Instead, ironwork had to be imported from England, all the way around the Cape of Good Hope until the Suez Canal was completed in 1869. In 1862, an iron railway bridge was built at Arras, across the Sone, (Ara on the map below) a tributary of the Ganges. Benares, where Ravi grew up, is on the left bank only of the Ganges, so the Company established the train station on the right bank, at Mughalsarai, across the river from Benares. Allahabad is a sacred, historic city at the confluence of the Ganges and the Jamuna Rivers. In 1866, the Naini Bridge was constructed in Allahabad to carry trains across the Jamuna River. Benares did get its railway bridge; in 1887, the double-decker Dufferin Bridge spanned the Ganges from the Mughalsarai station into the city. (In this tracing of the East Indian Railway line, I omitted a loop east from Bhagalpur to Sahebganj, an interesting British city on the southern bank of the Ganges.)

In an excellent article by Arun Jee, we learn that the ghat (a built river bank) in a number of cities and towns along the Ganges had been developed for shipment of cargo and passengers across the river. For example, in 1864, when the first through train from Howrah to Delhi arrived in Allahabad, two years before the Naini Bridge was built, the Company had infrastructure to ferry the coaches on boats across the river.

The Mokameh Ghat on the right/south bank of the Ganges was particularly developed, with a complex of buildings and functions: a railway station, a large warehouse for storing goods, various port facilities, ships and barges, every day carrying thousands of tons of cargo and many passengers across the river to and from Simaria Ghat.  British officials lived there in a British colony, running the system, hiring Indians, training them, managing a full staff as well as a large number of laborers, involving themselves in the lives of their men.

And why was the infrastructure at Mokamah Ghat greater than at other Ghats? Because across the river, at Samaria Ghat, there was the terminal for another railroad. This one was meter gauge, while the East Indian Railway used broad gauge. The railway cars Bischof saw would have been meter gauge wagons from Simaria Ghat that had arrived at Mokameh Ghat by barge, filled with goods to be transferred to the main railway. They had been emptied, refilled with wheat from the main line wagons and loaded again onto barges to be returned to Simaria Ghat and onward north to the famine plagued area. Years later, in 1960, a rail and road bridge at the site made all these facilities obsolete.

Bischof was not the only person to write about Mokameh Ghat being overwhelmed by demands on it during a famine crisis. In her book on the Bengal famine of 1896-97, Malabika Chakrabarti mentions congestion at the Mokameh railway Ghat as one of the reasons why grain supplies failed to reach the needy.

This map shows Mokameh and Simaria and the location of Darbhanga, north of Patna, where Ravi followed Bischof into the field and where Bischof’s humanitarian, politically powerful photographs were taken. And — a bit more about the railways built by private interests, colonials and wealthy Indians, for their businesses and commerce. Note Samastipur —

Simaria Ghat and Mokameh Ghat 1951

To the south of the river are the cities (all of them fascinating) the East Indian Railway passed through, and in a few instances, created. To the east is Bhagalpur, mentioned above. Munger and Munger Sub-District are unique.

Munger Fort

The Munger Sub-District is Jamalpur, where in 1862 the East Indian Railway Company founded a full-fledged railway workshop, repairing and eventually building locomotives. Munger was known, and important, for its centuries-long history of manufacturing guns.

Back to the second map — The Company ran the East Indian Railway through Dharhara, to Mokameh and continued on to Patna. At Khagaul the Company constructed a major railway junction. Further west Ara on the Sone River is shown, where the first railway bridge was built. Mughalsarai and Benares are west of the map.

Darbhanga Maharaja’s Palace

On the map, note the cities north of the Ganges River. Darbhanga is where Bischof and Ravi stayed in a government guesthouse and drove out to the surrounding villages.

The Maharaja of Darbhanga

It is an ancient, mythical city. Ravi recalled Darbhanga as a Princely State but legally it was the enormous estate of a very wealthy zamindar with the title of Maharaja granted in the 19^th century by the East India Company. (A zamindar was essentially a tax farmer who collected wealth from the farmers and craftsmen on his land, paid some to the ruler and kept the rest for his family.) Before 1857, when the British government took over direct rule of India, the East India Company ruled where it chose to do so, with armies, given the right by a Royal charter received from Queen Elizabeth in 1600. The Company was a business that traded in basic commodities such as cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, saltpeter, tea and opium. Shares of the company were owned by wealthy merchants and aristocrats.

The Maharaja needed a fort for defense.  And the ghat on the city’s river was an additional site for his aristocratic lifestyle. He also kept a palace on the Benares ghats.

Darbhanga Ghat

Darbhanga Fort

Muzaffarpur, a city situated on the frontier of North-Eastern India and a cross-roads of Hindu and Islamic cultures, was an important administrative center for the British. The region is agriculturally varied and productive. (although not so picturesque)  The city had sugar mills, textile mills and among its other industries, the production of railway cars, or wagons, probably for the meter gauge lines.

Samastipur is at the center of the region and presently Samastipur District is one of the poorest in India. Why? Under the British the city of Samastipur was the train junction for the railroad up from Simaria Ghat and two lines branching north, one to Darbhanga and the other to Muzaffarpur. It was also the industrial site where cash crops harvested from the area’s fertile soil were processed for export and profit. The sugar mills, jute mills, paper mills, tobacco processing, and cotton mills in other cities created wealth not for the farmers but for the mill owners, most of them foreign, at least foreign to the District. I think about the agricultural land, owned or controlled by a zamindar, being used to grow newly introduced cash crops to feed the mills, about the wealth not being shared with the farmers, about food for ordinary people not being grown, harvested and then a portion set aside and stored, as it had been in previous times, against the inevitable periodic poor harvests, droughts and floods. In everything I read about this part of India, the great fertility of the soil and the vast mineral resources are mentioned. Famine can be caused by action, or non-action, in the political realm as well as by nature.

Ravi told me he and Bischof took a steam-powered three-story ferryboat from Calcutta and a local civil servant met them in Patna at the boat. I used rural ferryboats in Indonesia but never saw such a one. Ravi’s Alzheimer’s had already set in when he said this. Nevertheless, I must record it and hope for validation one day.

It was in Patna that Bischof began his photographing of the famine. That is next.

Patna 19th Century

Read Full Post »

Thoughts on the Hindi Film “Udaan”

I recently rented a DVD of “Udaan”, (see here) largely out of curiosity. The fact that it was recognized in the 2010 Cannes Film Festival and won other awards added interest, but mainly I wanted to see the movie because it was filmed in Jamshedpur, an industrial city near Calcutta. Werner Bischof had photographed Jamshedpur in 1951, between his photographing the Bihar famine and leaving from Calcutta for Tokyo. Ravi may still have been with him but I think not. I think he had returned to Bombay. He never talked with me about seeing Jamshedpur and Ajit, his brother, at the time just entering an engineering university, remembers no mention by Ravi of Jamshedpur. A visit to such an important industrial town founded by a man as famous as Jamshedji Nausserwanji Tata would not have gone unnoted in the family.

The best known of Bischof’s photographs of Jamshedpur for Magnum Photos are —

Employees on their way to work 1951

Woman on a railroad 1951

I wondered if the Tatas had created a company town in the tradition of 19^th and early 20^th century European industrialists (see here). I wondered what they had established for the workers in their factories. The European and American paternalistic-minded industrialists provided their workers with decent housing and transportation, a town with a sewage system, water system, shops for buying food and necessities, schools, parks, an aesthetically pleasing environment. In many of the company towns in later years things went wrong between owner and workers but much was right about the better towns.

Udaan is an excellent film in most regards — the casting just right, the acting excellent, the photography good. At one point I thought it needed a bit of cutting but was never bored. It is a good story well told and the physical setting is relevant. The many views of Jamshedpur recreation areas, gardens and roads show it to be an attractive, well-planned town. We see managerial level housing and factory workplaces and offices. I would like to have seen more of the workers and their lives but this is, after all, a movie and not a documentary. Jamshedpur city has come a long way from the 1951 town.

Jamshedpur workers 1951

Tata Engineering and Locomotive Works 1951

Opening the cargo door Jamshedpur 1951

Lunchtime in Jamshedpur 1951

The movie opens with Rohan, a seventeen year old boy, being expelled from the Bishop Cotton Boarding School  that has been home to him for eight years, possibly since when his mother died. He goes to live in Jamshedpur with the father he barely knows and discovers a five-year-old half-brother, Arjun, a second motherless boy, living there, too. The father is cold, severe, authoritarian and harsh with both boys. Rohan is a talented poet and novelist. (I would have liked to understand the poems in Hindi.) One is convinced the boy has talent and will succeed as a writer. The father denigrates writing and forbids Rohan to even think of a career in writing. He insists that Rohan enroll in an engineering school and has him working in the steel mill as a manual laborer. The scenes on the factory floor are authentic and interesting. The father’s brother also works in Jamshedpur and lives in the town with his wife in a comfortable, tastefully decorated middle-class home.

Central to the Udaan story are the personalities of the father and his younger brother/uncle to Rohan. As an American, I have to think hard to make sense of the men. Surely, clues are given in the movie of their family origin by region and caste but I could not catch them. The brothers had attended the very expensive and prestigious Bishop Cotton Boarding School, so had to have come from a wealthy and well connected family. Aziz, the boy (now in his 60s) who joined our family in Mogadiscio in 1964, watched the movie with me. His family and community are North Indian, townspeople, traditional and socially conservative, for centuries traders across the Indian Ocean. He found the Udaan father plausible but could not imagine the son striking him, as Rohan does at one point, and he remarked on the near absence of women in the film. In Ravi’s families, all of them professional urban upper middle-class, social life for the men centered on the family. Husband and wife moved socially as a couple, rather than as is usual in many cultures where women are in the house and men in male settings outside the home. I know and read of other Indian communities, including the Rajputs in “Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary: a Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India.” Perhaps those family patterns, plus the British boarding school, could produce a man like the father in the film and find him perfectly normal. The brother/uncle has a wife but she is pictured only twice and briefly, once when being affectionate with Arjun. The father will not hire a woman to care for Arjun. He will not allow his brother to raise Arjun; instead, he insults the brother for not having fathered a child. He criticizes Rohan for his pursuit of effeminate activities, like literature; for his soft good looks; for still being a virgin;  for not being what he considers manly; because Rohan’s mother preferred their son over him. He puts Rohan to a nasty daily test of physical strength that will, ironically, be his own undoing in the game of male dominance.

Jamshedpur town is the setting in which a man with the father’s personality can function and prosper. Even his acting out traditional family roles fits the top-down structure of corporate management. He insists on the older brother having total authority and the younger must accept. In the larger society family members might have stepped in to support the kinder brother and soften the father’s unreasonable behavior, but the company town is designed around the logic of industry and that suits the father. He is an engineer and a manager, efficient, hardworking, fair to his subordinates, entrepreneurial in developing contracts with other businesses to promote the company. He has no interests that conflict with his work. In his private life he uses his income rationally, to invest, as in useful types of schooling, and to save. He treats his sons with the same definition of fairness; he fulfills his obligations and when, in his thinking, he has made a mistake he apologizes. His apartment is furnished sparingly, with no decoration of any sort. His one indulgence is whiskey. The upper middle-class and elite sector Indian families I knew many decades ago had adopted the British pattern of drinking but in a context of sociability.

For the father, alcohol is his one comfort. He drinks alone. When drinking with his brother he gets drunk and acts out his anger. At this point family comes in handy; his brother, and then Rohan, get him home safely. Eventually he realizes he is lonely and needs a wife. In a culture where a man need not court a woman to gain a wife, his lack of social skills poses no barrier to an easy and quick marriage. The woman he chooses to organize his private life does not look to me to be of the wealthy, high level social class he came from and she brings with her an instant family, a daughter and a mother. I read that Bishop Cotton School boys in classes 3 to 8 live in a dormitory, over 30 of them together, under the care and supervision of a woman, the Matron. From class IX the boys move up to the Main School and are under the control and supervision of their male House Masters, Captains and Prefects. Is a Matron the father’s image of a woman he can live with? Not being Indian, I may have missed something here and would like an analysis. Naturally, I am interested in the women’s roles.

Rohan and Arjun long for the tenderness of a mother and because of the father their one kinswoman, their aunt, is unavailable to them. Arjun has become a naughty boy. I am struck by the lack of a town institution outside the family to substitute for the mother. I had no mother growing up, only my father, his father and his father’s wife. It was during the Great Depression, before government welfare programs, but public schools were everywhere as a community institution. I remember with deep gratitude the teachers who, knowing I had no mother, gave me special attention. In the film, Rohan and Arjun are sent to school emotionally starved and when they misbehave in innocent childish ways they are rejected, expelled. In the beginning of the film, we have a hint that Rohan’s boarding school master knew he was failing the boy but in the local school no one expresses any warmth at all for the troubled and lonely Arjun.

Which brings me to their British style boarding school, where all the teachers and all the staff are men and the larger function of the school traditionally was, maybe still is, to socialize boys into their roles as rulers of the nation. The boys grow up in isolation from anyone different from themselves, are prepared educationally and in social style for success and often are high achievers, have contact with and can bond with highly placed men out there who attended their and other elite schools. They are a privileged class.

On the other hand, there is a psychological cost. It cannot be good for a small child, even an older child, to be left in the care of total strangers as if this were a normal and good situation. It is frightening, traumatic for a child, and has life-long consequences.  To me, what Rohan tells his father at the end of the movie rings true. (Counter opinion is available here.)

The final scene of Udaan is in homage to the magnificent Satyajit Ray and to the final scene in the third film of The Apu Trilogy. I have memorized The Apu Trilogy and can see Apu and Kajal and Rohan and Arjun, all of them walking together into a good future.

This gives me an excuse to add the Apu Triology posters. These are among my most favorite films. The Trilogy is about Apu as a small boy in the village, a child in Benares and a young man in Calcutta. Maybe I will write one day about what I see and love in these films. The music is by Ravi Shankar. The photo in the first poster is by Satyajit Ray and was shown in the 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, The Family of Man.

Pather Panchali

Aparajito

Satyajit Ray’s drawing for the set on The World of Apu shows another aspect of his artistry. He was also a talented musician.

Apu’s room in Calcutta, sketch by Satyajit Ray

Read Full Post »

Werner Bischof Photographs the Observatory at Jaipur

Yesterday Ravi’s brother, Ajit, told me something that brought a new perspective to my thinking about Ravi as Werner Bischof’s assistant. It also raised once again a question that has been bothering me since I began tracing Bischof’s time in India and when and where Ravi was with him. The question is — When did Bischof photograph the Observatory in Jaipur?

Observatory in Jaipur

Jaipur Observatory

These are Bischof’s pictures of the Jaipur Observatory.

As you can see here the observatory has since been restored as an historic site. It would have been unpainted and not in such good repair when Bischof and Ravi were there.

The first date I found for Bischof’s Observatory photos was 1952 but that seemed strange. When in 1952 would he have gone to Jaipur, and if so, how would he have traveled to the city? From his published letters and diaries we know that on June 29-30, 1951 he flew from Calcutta to Tokyo and lived in Japan with Rosellina, his wife, for at least a year while working as a photojournalist in Korea and Indo China. In a 1951 letter he had written that he wanted to return to India, and with her.

Courtyard of the Meiji Temple, Tokyo 1951

Bischof’s many photographs of postwar Japan have been published in book form as a beautiful visual documentary. He captures the architecture, the land and the spirit of the people.

In 1952 Bischof and (I think) Rosellina were in South India, where he took photos in two Tamil Nadu cities, Madras and Madurai, and in Trivandrum, a city in Kerala state.

Madurai, Tamil Nadu

Trivandrum Pavillion 1952

The Kathakali Dance School

Kathakali Dance with Demons

The Kathakali Dance audience

For the Kathakali dance, see here.

Jaipur is in northwest India, a very long distance from the tip of South India and not easily accessible from there, especially in those years. Click on and enlarge the map.

Railways of India 1909

The railway system had not changed much between 1909 and the early 1950s. Everyone traveled by rail.  The train from Madras, on the east coast, goes south to Madurai (and Tanjore and its art) and turns west and south to Trevandrum. To find Jaipur, go to Bombay, on the west coast, and follow the train line up along the coast, past Baroda to Ahmadabad and turn northeast to Jaipur and beyond to Delhi.

Bischof’s Jaipur observatory photographs I copied from on-line have different dates on them. The titles on two or three have them as 1952, others as 1951. One has December 1952. If that were accurate, I would imagine that Bischof, and maybe Rosellina with him, flew into Delhi and visited Jaipur from there. If so, why are there not more photos of Jaipur or of other cities in north India? That seems curious. This is a land of photogenic people, magnificent Mogul architecture, dramatic landscapes, colorful cultural features.

I know approximately when Bischof was in Bombay and have seen many, if not most, of his Bombay photos that are available to the public. Ravi told me where Bischof’s apartment was located and he talked about having met the dancer, Anjali Hora. Two years later, in 1953, when we were first married, Ravi talked about Bischof as a person and about the photographs in Bihar, but this was sixty years ago and I have no written record of what he said. (More recently, I did deliberately “interview” Ravi but it was a bit late for capturing many memories.)

I do remember, however, Ravi speaking of the Jaipur observatory and seeing it with him when we visited Jaipur as tourists. It was smaller than I had expected. When I worked in Jaipur in the early 1990s, staying in the city and going out to the villages, no one ever, not once, mentioned the Observatory to me and I did not think to ask.

Ajit told me yesterday that Ravi brought Bischof home to the apartment in Byculla to meet the family. They thought him good-looking and they liked him very much. Ajit was fascinated with the camera (was it a Leica?) and Bischof let him examine it. When the pretty eight-year old Jyotsna came into the room carrying a tray of tea and biscuits for them Bischof asked for permission to photograph her. Ajit has a mental image of Bischof and especially of him taking a picture of his sister but cannot remember when the visit took place. He thought it had to be at the end of Ravi’s time with Bischof because the two were so at ease with one another, as if they were friends who had shared many experiences together. But it could not have been at the end of their work together in Bihar because Bischof left India from Calcutta in June. Ravi had already taken the train back to Bombay, although the date of his departure and from which train station remain a mystery.

I have an idea of how the Jaipur photographs may have happened, an idea substantiated only by my imagination. I see Bischof in Bombay hiring Ravi after becoming aware of the Bihar famine (described here); he would need an interpreter if he were to travel outside the city where he could easily move about using English. He would have had to make a series of time-consuming arrangements for going to Bihar, arrangements such as Magnum Photos persuading Life magazine to support it; contacting government authorities for permission, reluctantly given, to take and publish pictures of the famine relief operation; getting accommodations in government guesthouses for him and his assistant. (Hotels were not easily available for ordinary travelers.) This would have been in April 1951. Perhaps Bischof mentioned to Ravi having heard of the Jaipur observatory. Knowing Ravi, I believe he would have suggested they go to see it while they had this slack time and he knew how to do it conveniently. He was totally knowledgeable about the Indian railways. Papaji had acquired for him the official book of train schedules, which he studied, memorizing the trains and the routes. If Bischof agreed, Ravi would have arranged a trip for them, from Bombay to Jaipur and back, before setting off to Bihar.

Floating Shells 1936

The observatory photographs remind me of Bischof’s earlier, purely artistic work, like his surrealistic Sea Shells, before the Bihar reporting turned him toward photojournalism.  He wrote to Rosellina from Calcutta, “Today and here I see no justification for my journey unless I am completely committed to the present and to the problems of our time.”

I realize all this fretting about when the observatory photographs were taken is irrelevant to appreciating Bischof’s great photography. Still, I puzzle over it. This was part of Ravi’s history. I feel so sad that he is not here to tell me what really happened.

I must finish with a postage stamp. Ravi would like it. He collected stamps as a child and I became a collector, hooked on it by the Thursday stamp market on Ave. Gabriel behind the Champs Élysées in Paris.

Read Full Post »

Preface to Ravi in Bihar with Werner Bischof – Part Two

This is not the Part Two for my previous post, “Preface to Ravi in Bihar with Werner Bischof — Part One,” I originally planned. I had intended to write a brief description of where and how Ravi’s India began. How naïve of me. India is ancient, huge and incredibly complex. In Part One I gave a very brief description of the Indus River valley civilization that rose ca 3300 BCE, was in decline by 1300 BCE, of the Neolithic in India, and of the Iron Age societies that advanced through the Indus-Ganges plain and eventually, after lasting more than a thousand years, gave rise to the Ganges valley Mauryan and Gupta empires that spread throughout what was to become India. How could I possibly grasp all this and write an account, necessarily brief, of what I had expected to learn in a week or two! Here I am, a month later, and not ready to continue.

So I’ve come to my senses and given up; detailing India’s history, no matter how rich and fascinating, is not really relevant to understanding my husband’s individual, personal background.

Returning to Ravi and his experiences with Bischof – Ravi remembered the trip to Bihar. They stopped in the Calcutta harbor for Bischof to photograph men unloading wheat sent from America for famine relief.

When I mentioned Calcutta to Ravi he recalled the violence between Hindus and Muslims that preceded the 1947 Partition of Bengal into West Bengal and Bangladesh, and he spoke sadly of the killing that continued. When reminded of being with Bischof in Calcutta, 1951, he recalled Bengal’s State elections taking place at that time. Fourteen national parties participated, including a strong Communist presence, but the Congress Party won. Ravi followed political events in newspapers and listening to BBC on shortwave radio. He loved the radio. When we had our first apartment home, two babies and his brother, Tej, living with us, he bought a large second-hand shortwave radio with glass tubes and situated it in one of our brick and board bookcases. He fussed for hours at a time with the knobs to find barely hearable news reports in the BBC British accent and broadcasts of music we could have heard much better on AM radio. Shortwave sound was crackly, scratchy, tinny but it came from halfway around the world, which made Ravi happy and amused me as I watched him. I think now that he was reconstructing a bit of their Benares home in our American student apartment I previously described.

Next – Ravi’s memories of his trip east with Bischof to Jamshedpur, a factory location then in Bihar State and now in Jharkhand State, to Calcutta and on to villages outside Patna, Bihar’s ancient capital city on the Ganges River.

I add Bischof’s photograph of the woman because it reminds me of being at a construction site in Delhi in the 1980s and watching women carry materials in this manner up and down the bamboo-built scaffolding while children played or sat waiting below while their mothers labored for a few coins.

1951 Worker on the Damodar Valley Dam

Werner Bischof by Bernard Moosbrugger

Read Full Post »

Preface to Ravi in Bihar with Werner Bischof – Part I

The thought of going to Bihar did not thrill Ravi. Going as Werner Bischof’s assistant, yes, but Bihar? In the days when Azheimer’s was stealing Ravi’s past from him and I was retrieving as much of it as possible, I asked him about his time with Bischof. He had recollections and I took notes, including, “Ravi said he has no interest in Bihar.”

I knew nothing about Bihar and set myself to reading and thinking before writing about Ravi’s memories of being there with Bischof. As a consequence, Ravi’s statement astonishes me. It is as if I said, “I have no interest in Rome and Athens.” Western civilization began with the Roman Empire. When I first walked through Rome and visited its monuments I felt as if I were returning to my ancestral home. From Rome the Church and the State together created cities in Europe for commerce, crafts, law, literacy, wonderful architecture and the arts. In Paris I could see and touch that history. In Turkey I visited Mary’s shrine and the ruins of Ephesus where St. Paul evangelized. Outside a Turkish village, I followed a stone path that had once been a Roman road. One is in awe when touching history. Why did Ravi feel nothing when visiting Bihar, the land where his civilization began? Because he had not been raised as a Hindu, not engaged daily in the rituals of India’s religious tradition? Because his and his parent’s generations focused solely on independence from Great Britain? Bihar should have fascinated Ravi. It fascinates me, despite the current unfortunate circumstances of its people.

Bihar is, and was when Ravi visited it, the most poverty stricken area of India, the most under-developed state in India. Infrastructure is poor. Nearly 90% of the population is rural. Landholdings are small and fragmented. Population density is the nation’s highest and its population growth rate is one of the highest. It has the country’s lowest literacy rates. Fifty percent of the population over 15 years of age is illiterate. The under-five mortality rate is 84.8 per 1,000 births (India’s is 56, in a developed economy it is 5) and 56% of children are underweight. Measures of health show women in poor health. When statistics in a population show fewer females than males it indicates that girls are less valued and receive less care. The sex ratio for Bihar is 916 females per 1,000 males, lower even than India’s overall average of 940 per 1,000 males. However, the child sex-ratio of the state at 933 girls to 1,000 boy babies is better than the national average of 914. Perhaps fewer Bihari women can afford the obstetric sonogram and abortion-of-female-fetus services that are easily available throughout India.

Bihar is poor but it is also the homeland of India’s founding great civilizations. I look at a map of India, see that Bihar is in the Ganges River valley in the east of India. Patna is and was historically its central city. Ravi’s childhood city, Varanasi/Benares is on the Ganges, as is Allahabad, where Papaji had family.

I have long known about the other historic river, the Indus River in the west of India, now Pakistan.

The Ganges River

The Indus River

One of the first civilizations ever, anywhere in the world, over five thousand years ago, 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE was in the Indus River valley, contemporary with the Egyptian cities along the Nile and the Mesopotamian city-states between the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers. They were the Bronze Age civilizations, all growing wheat and sometime barley in high yielding irrigated fields along a river. Population density increased and cities grew, with rulers and government, a complex division of labor and social classes. Tools and weapons were made of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. Craftsmen turned out beautiful pottery and created statuettes and seals in terracotta. Spindles and bone needles indicate that cotton was spun, woven and sewn for clothing. Extensive trade across and between cities was by boat and probably by oxen-pulled wheeled carts. A form of signs, if not true writing, was used for record keeping.

Mohenjo-Daro and Harrapa are the best known of the Indus Valley cities that archeologists have excavated. I love the dancing girl.

The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro

A Priest-King Statue of Mohenjodaro

Indus Valley Seals

In the heavily forested countryside, preceding and contemporary with the irrigation-based cities along the rivers, people lived in small villages where they grew wheat and other grains and tended sheep, goats and cattle. It was slash and burn agriculture, with the digging stick as their primary implement. (The plow evolved later and slowly.) They had pottery and basketry and probably wove cloth of cotton fiber. In most of the world, in this Neolithic level of technology and social organization, tools and weapons were made of stone, but in the Indus River valley and the northern rivers area, the Neolithic included the use of copper.

The Bronze Age civilizations were based on wheat. Rice was domesticated later, either in the Ganges River valley or the South China Pearl River valley or in both.

As the Bronze Age civilizations faded, another sort of society arose. As early as 1900 BCE, pastoral tribes speaking an Indo-European language appeared in the northern Indus River Valley, in the area of the Khyber Pass and Bolan Pass, and through time they moved east and south. The question of their origin is debated, whether they were a foreign or an indigenous culture, but whoever the Indo-Aryans were and from hence they came, these Iron Age people, their culture and their traditions, became the foundation of Indian society and culture.

The Indo-Aryans made tools, weapons and ornaments from both iron and bronze. They practiced agriculture but were primarily pastoral, counting their wealth in the number of cows owned. With the horse, which had been domesticated on the steppes of Central Asia, and the spoked-wheeled chariot, they were mobile and well organized. No band of foot soldiers could stand against them.  They eventually ruled over the indigenous village farming people with themselves as an elite. They would have been the priests and scholars, the warriors, the traders and the moneylenders of the hierarchical caste system that evolved. At the base of the society were the farmers, most likely original Neolithic villagers with the addition of Aryans mixed in. The Neolithic villagers may also have been the craftsmen making pottery, weaving cloth, producing the practical goods needed for a settled life. Perhaps hunting-gathering bands still living in the forests came into the system as outcaste communities doing the work assigned to an underclass. A vivid image of the Indo-Aryans is of men in chariots, bows drawn, horses charging, riding into battle. They were invincible. They mixed with the local people but their language, their social organization, their culture, and their religion with its central symbol of the spoked wheel, came to dominate over a large geographic area known as Vedic India and was spread in later centuries to all of India and beyond with the Mauryan and Gupta Empires that evolved first in the Ganges valley and later in South India.

Mahabharata Chariot and Archer

The Rigveda, the oldest of their sacred scriptures, was composed between 1700 and 1100 BCE. Their great epic poems, the Mahabarata and the Ramayana, date from 900 to 800 BCE.

Krishna Pulling Arjuna of the Mahabarata 17th century

The Vedas and stories from the Mahabarata and Ramayana integral to the religion were transmitted orally through the centuries and finally preserved in written form during the Gupta Empire, ca. 400 CE.

Vedic India

Sanscrit, an Indo-European language, was the language of the Indo-Aryans. Ravi pointed out to me the similarity, as cognates, between words in Hindi with words I use, such as for teeth, eyes, the number five. The Hindu goddess of wealth is Luxmi, as in luxurious.

The languages of North India are Indo-European, having originated from Sanscrit. The languages of South India are Dravidian, the earliest language of the sub-continent and probably of the Indus Valley civilizations. Note the present-day distribution of Dravidian languages. Communities in Pakistan still speak a Dravidian language. The languages of Iran and Afganistan are Indo-European. The north-south cultural division in India, roughly following the two major language family divisions, Indo-European and Dravidian, is particularly interesting to me because of the differences I found in working with primary care and family planning programs. But more of that later.

Ravi never talked with me about the origin of the culture that was his. I thought continually about what it means to be American; he did not reflect on his identity as an Indian. Or perhaps he did, and I must infer his thinking and feelings from remarks he made that I remember because they seemed so anomalous at the time. In the 1950s and ’60s in the States and in Turkey we had nothing in our environment to remind Ravi of India, no other Indians, no presence of Indian culture. In Mogadiscio the Indian community was Muslim; they spoke English with him and did not remind him of his Hindu identity. When we lived in Paris, however, the people Ravi worked with and who met him casually thought of him as Indian, even though he had been hired as an American, worked with his colleagues as an American, rarely went to India. The only Indian thing about Ravi’s daily life was my cooking Indian food. He told me various Europeans he talked with considered Indian culture spiritually superior, and as far as I could discern, he listened and by implication agreed with them. He enjoyed being regarded as Indian and in a positive light because of it. I saw him as ethical and a kind, moral person – but spiritually superior? Hardly. Besides, I never understood what that meant.

As I read about the Ganges River Valley civilizations I understand something of the Indian history that was relevant to Ravi and his background.  Next in Part II.

Read Full Post »

Ravi, Interpreter and Assistant to Werner Bischof

In 1951 good fortune followed Ravi. He discovered a small American library where he read books on American history and American government and where he took an examination offered there that won him a Fulbright scholarship to an American university. He had to have been among the first students anywhere, let alone India, to receive a Fulbright. In April, Werner Bischof, a well-known photographer, arrived in Bombay. He came as a member of Magnum Photos, an international cooperative based in Paris, to participate in a Magnum project and while in India photographed the famine in Bihar Province for Life magazine. I learned later, however, that Magnum owned the photographs.

The Magnum Photos project was “Generation X.” Each photographer — Robert Capa, David Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, Willian Vandivert and Werner Bischof — was tasked with portraying the 1950s generation in the country he was visiting. They used a common questionnaire in interviewing their young subjects and produced memorable photographs. In 1953 Capa published in two magazines from the project, but the term has been taken over for other generations and Bischof’s photo essays from India and Japan remain the best known.

Bischof’s Indian series of photographs were of a young woman and a young man in Bombay. The lovely Anjali Hora, dressed in sari, was learning and performing Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance. She lived with her parents, father a civil servant and mother a grade school teacher, in a simple small house in Santa Cruz, north Bombay. They were middle class but not affluent enough to afford a refrigerator.

Anjali Hora preparing for a Bharatanatyam performance

Ushakant Ladiwala is shown as a tall, handsome young man dressed western style in shirt and slacks, photographed while talking on the telephone in his office, entering his building, walking on a city street with a friend, carrying what may be a briefcase.

Ushakant Ladiwala in his office

Ushakant playing the sitar

Other photographs were taken in high-ceiling rooms with drapes, curtained windows, Persian rugs on the floor, where Ushakant is dressed in traditional kurta and pajamas, playing the Indian sitar or sitting in meditation before a religious statuette.

Ushakant walking after dark

In one photo he is in kurta-pajama and mojari slippers out walking after dark. Cars, probably of residents in the houses behind them, are parked in a row to his right, and on his left, men are lying in a row on the pavement, most likely the watchmen, chokidars, hired to protect the cars.

Ravi thought Anjali Hora was connected to the film industry. I have no idea if she were. He certainly remembered her. He never mentioned Ladiwala to me. I do not know how Bischof chose these individuals to interview. When I first met Ravi he talked about Bischof but I did not grasp the measure of his work. Europe, India, the world beyond the campus were still unknowns to me. I can recall a few of Ravi’s early comments about his time with Bischof.  Before his Altzheimer’s took over completely I asked him to think back to that time and I wrote down his memories. When we were first married he wanted me to make meusli because that is what Bischof ate. Very strange. I tried, but learning to cook Indian food took precedence.

I remember Ravi telling me that Bischof said the only thing Switzerland ever created was the cuckoo clock. That perspective on a culture and all it implies surprised me, and I am reminded of it again when I view Bischof’s photos of other cultures, particularly the American. Bischof was an artist and that influenced his views on many things. His photography was first an art; photojournalism came later. Always, his photos convey meaning. From published letters he wrote to Rosselina, his wife, one knows he was perceptive, intelligent and compassionate. (Werner Bischof, ICP Library of Photographers, Grossman Publishers, Viking Press, NY 1974)

Ravi did not talk with me about Bischof’s photographs of Bombay and I did not see them myself until recently. The photos tell me that Bischof’s view of the city was different from Ravi’s. He recorded sights Ravi would have considered too ordinary for comment.

Begging on the streets of Bombay

A street vender in Bombay

I have seen but may not show Bischof’s photographs of churches and Christian congregations. I think the photos were taken in Santa Cruz because Bischof, as Ravi told me, stayed in an apartment there and came into the city by train. The community was founded by the Portuguese and the churches reflect its origin. If Bischof had photographed the Mazagaon Catholic churches near Byculla Ravi would have known.

Woman coloring a sari

I had thought originally that Bischof’s primary reason for being in India was to photograph the famine in Bihar province for Life magazine but the urgency of the famine arose while he was in Bombay, not before. He was in Bombay when he decided to cover the famine as a photojournalist, and for that he would need an interpreter and assistant. Ravi told me that Americans in the library recommended him to Bischof. My next question, then, is why Bischof, who was European, would have gone to the American Consulate to find an assistant. Two thoughts come to mind. First, Life magazine was paying for the photographs and the magazine was American. Further, he would be reporting on food relief to Bihar and the U.S. government was the largest contributor to wheat being shipped into the Calcutta port. President Truman had called for and Congress had passed the Indian Emergency Food Act of 1951, a $190 million loan for the Indian government to purchase 2 million tons of grain. Bischof would find the information he needed at the U.S. Consulate in Bombay.

Ravi was with him when Bischof took the photographs in Calcutta, Patna and the Bihar villages. I am not certain about Jamshedpur. Besides acting as interpreter, Ravi was to record the place, time, number of photos, plus technical details about lens setting and such that I did not catch. Next, I will write what I learned from Ravi about his time with Bischof. I believe they got along well. When Ravi and I met Werner and his wife, Rosselina, in New York at Christmas time in 1953, Werner seemed very fond of Ravi.

Read Full Post »

Ravi Meets America in Bombay

Ravi was twenty years old and a university graduate. His application to the Merchant Marine officer corps had been rejected, he had no plans for further schooling and no prospects for employment. What was he to do? He had not modeled himself on his successful and much admired uncles who were building careers in the Indian civil service. He had thought of journalism but that idea went nowhere. Apparently, he never thought of teaching. I believe he found the business world unacceptable because it had not been good to Papaji. He must have felt quite lost. I do not know when or how he found the American library, but he did find it and I can see him sitting at a library table, totally engrossed in a book and perfectly happy. I can see him there because he had entered my world, into one of the best places in my world — the American public library. I love American public libraries.

Ravi’s new library was located near Churchgate Station. His friend and next door neighbor, Sunnu, told me that Ravi had taken him along to the library. He said, “I used to look at the magazines. We used to listen to Voice of America for the comedy shows and music. It was near the downtown on Queen’s Rd.” Queen’s Road, now Maharishi Karve Road, is near to and parallel with Marine Drive. (see the map of South Bombay).

I thought at first that Ravi had discovered one of the United States Information Service libraries but they were established in 1953, two years after he left Bombay. I discovered USIS libraries first in 1963 in Mogadiscio and again in Ankara, in 1968. They were truly American public libraries, two of the 230 Cultural Center libraries in 75 countries around the world, most in developing countries, established and run by the U.S. Information Agency. Each Center was located in the heart of the city and open to the public. It had an open-stack reading room with shelves and shelves of American books and magazines and tables and chairs where one could sit reading for hours in a comfortable and attractive room. Most were lending libraries. (It was said that if a book were not returned, maybe more people were reading it than if it remained on the shelf.) Other services were included, according to the needs of the country. In Mogadiscio and Ankara, they offered English lessons. I took a few classes in Turkish at the Ankara Center. In Mogadiscio, where I was teaching in the Indian school in the mosque, I took my students to the library. I borrowed science books to prepare my lessons and children’s books to read to the boys. They thought “Green Eggs and Ham” the best of all. The staff allowed me to take one of the library’s film projectors home, where I showed documentary films to women from Hamar Wein, the original Mogadiscio, the casbah. For an older woman, it was her first movie and she clung to her daughter’s arm until she felt safe. (I have written in some detail about the cinema in Mogadiscio in those years.)

On one great occasion I cannot resist describing, a marvelous String Quartet from the States was on tour and the Center arranged a concert for us all, for the diplomats and the dignitaries, in a large hall with folding chairs. It was in 1964 or so. Leading up to the event I had encountered Russian women in an Indian shop while they were buying dresses. Talking with an American was not done, so with gestures and smiles I commented on what I thought about each choice, like women shopping together anywhere. They came to the concert looking fine in the new attire, sitting next to their men in the first row, obviously thrilled by the performance. Sadly, they could not join the party given afterwards for the extraordinary musicians.

In Ankara, 1970, the splendid event sponsored by the USIS was a performance by several dancers from the New York City Ballet. My friend, Ülkü, and her husband, Yilmaz, attended it with Ravi and me.

You can read an insightful comment about the USIS libraries here.

The small library that Ravi discovered in 1950 was a predecessor of the USIS libraries. Beginning in World War I, the executive branch of government, in cooperation with the American Library Association, had established libraries in Mexico and Latin America. During WWII, the Office of War Information took over the various governmental information programs and was authorized to “formulate and carry out, through the use of press, radio, motion picture, and other facilities, information programs designed to provide an intelligent understanding, at home and abroad, of the status and process of the war effort and of the war policies, activities, and aims of the U.S. government.” In 1943, the OWI opened a library in London, soon followed by libraries in Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington, Johannesburg, Cairo and — in Bombay. These were reference centers, with information about America intended for use by personnel in U.S. embassies and consulates and by local leaders. The USIS lending library, beloved by me and millions, was established a decade later. Nevertheless, Ravi discovered a small American library, was welcomed in and it changed his life.

A second miracle soon followed. On February 2, 1950, the United States Educational Foundation in India was set up between the two governments to “deepen” and “widen” mutual understanding between the citizens of India and the US through educational and cultural exchanges. Further, a U.S.-India bi-national commission was added to implement for India the Fulbright Programme that Senator Fulbright of the U.S. Congress had initiated.

I do not know how Ravi learned about, applied for, and was granted the Fulbright scholarship. Papaji’s nine letters dated in the1950s through July 1951, when Ravi left for the States, have no mention of him or his activities; they are, as usual, about Papaji and Dada borrowing from and repaying money to one another, about arranging a marriage and about the health of someone in the family, this time Papaji’s mother. My memories of Ravi telling me about the Fulbright include his saying that he particularly liked a book by Merle Curti, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The book may have been “The Growth of American Thought ” first published in 1943. Ravi was also fascinated with the Frontier Thesis of American culture. He memorized a book of American history he borrowed from the library/reference room, which enabled him to answer fully the questions on his examination for the Fulbright. The Americans must have been astonished with his knowledge of their country. He thought they were impressed with the fact that he asked for the University of Wisconsin rather than Harvard or the one or two other universities known abroad.

Library reading room

I digress again and show our university library. It is another wonderland. Big, beautiful, the books catalogued and easily available, students and faculty having access to the book stacks. I loved going into the stacks to find my books and to browse. This is the library Ravi and I used before the new, modern library was built across a court, with a fountain between the two buildings. These are the tables and chairs where we studied. We had our first date here and it is here that I first met a member of his family, the maternal aunt everyone called Baby.

In Bombay in 1950 Ravi was in the right place at the right time with the right background and talents. I am continually impressed with the role that chance plays in our lives. One thinks, “If only I had been there or not there at that time, done this, had not done that, had known about this, thought of that … … my life would be different.” “Good luck” is not a trivial remark when bidding someone farewell. A Turkish friend once told me when we were in one of those rambling discussions that what I consider chance she calls the will of Allah.

Another chance event, or whatever one wishes to call it, during that time brought Ravi to the attention of a famous photographer sent by Life magazine to do a photo essay in Bombay. This did not exactly change Ravi’s future but it certainly enlarged his vision of what it could be.

Read Full Post »