Pleasant Encounters — Memories from India

While I am still absorbing what I learned about Benares and deciding (it is not easy) how to write my final essay about Ravi growing up in Benares, I offer a few random thoughts.

I found this photo in a box of a hundred or more photographs I will eventually put into an album, or in some sort of order. The picture brings back pleasant memories.

An Invitation for Afternoon Tea

Sadly, although I remember the family I have forgotten their names and even the city. Could it have been in Lucknow? I think it was in 1983. Ravi and I traveled across India that year and we spent a day or two in a number of cities to see the sights. Here, as we were browsing through shops and watching the street venders, this gentleman engaged Ravi in conversation, then invited us in for tea. I will go through our letter collection and see if I wrote to one of the children about the incident. Ravi took the photo of the family as I sat with the grandmother and child. What a nice setting. When visiting family in Lucknow during the winter, a niece and I sat on the rooftop to be warmed by the sun while we carried on our long conversations.

Usually, on the way back to Paris from a consultancy in Indonesia, I stopped over in India to visit family. On one occasion, having booked my flight as Jakarta, Singapore, Madras, Bangalore and on to Paris, I discovered while making the connection in Singapore that we would land in Madras in the afternoon and the flight to Bangalore was the next morning. Uh oh. I would need to find a hotel for the night in Madras. In the airport I was sitting next to an Indian fellow, and of course, we began chatting. He was on his way home from a business meeting. I told him about my work and Ravi’s family, and since he was from Madras, asked him to recommend a hotel for me. On the plane we sat near one another and I repeated my request and received a vague reply. When we were landing I asked again and he asked me if I would care to stay with his family. This time I was vague, until I saw the family coming to meet him at the airport gate. I stayed with this lovely family and the mother made idlis for me because it is one of my favorite foods. In the evening the daughter showed me the neighborhood shopping street and a small temple. I slept in a room they kept for guests and in the morning a cousin took me to the airport. We corresponded for a while. In our frequent moving I lost their letters but keep the memory of them and their cheerful generosity toward me.

I truly enjoyed being in India. Like everyone of means I was aware of the poverty, but I went into health care hoping the work I did would be useful for ordinary people. I liked Ravi’s family, the colleagues with whom I worked and the open, noisy, bustling public scene. One particular mode of conversation amused me. A woman, a total stranger I had just encountered, would look at me curiously, watching my face, ask me if I were married, my husband’s name, how many children I had, were my father and mother still living, and on and on, possibly for more information because Ravi’s name did not place him neatly within the social order. Papaji had given up his caste name for an unfamiliar name. In America, when strangers meet the one question usually asked is for occupation, “What do you do?” and/or “What does your husband do?” That and the person’s manner of speaking gives an idea of social class and is generally enough information to make everyone feel they have placed one another in the scheme of things. Signs of ethnic background, such as name and physical features, may be of interest, as perhaps is a person’s regional origin, especially if there is a North/South difference, but these are secondary. Any indication of African descent is primary and critical. (see here) One of the things I liked about living abroad was that the local society’s class and caste system had little or no meaning for me. I may have known it intellectually but not emotionally. I was free to regard everyone I met as an individual and present myself simply as a well-meaning foreigner. Gender issues sometimes got in the way, but that is another story.

These women were Auxillary Nurse Midwives in a rural maternal/child care program that I was analyzing for an international organization. They were skillful, brave, kind women working in difficult circumstance and I admired them. One spoke English and the others had her ask me all the basic questions they needed to know about me. Finally, they asked the critical question: What is your caste? I responded that they and I are health care workers, so my caste is the same as their caste. This may not have made sense to them but it did to me.

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Returning to Benares – Part V

Benares as I saw it in 1977 and in ’83 makes more sense to me now. I wish I had known then even a fraction of what I have learned in the past few weeks about the city in the time when Ravi was a child there. I would have seen and understood more, both about him and about this amazing historic city.

I wrote in Returning to Benares Part I here about our first trip to India. That was in 1963. In 1977, our second time in India, we came from Paris, where Ravi had been living for five years and was established as an haute fonctionnaire in an international organization. I had been in Paris for a year, having spent four years in the States with our son and daughter while they finished high school and began university. Aziz had done his Bachelor’s in Istanbul, at Roberts College, and came to the States in ’74 for his MBA. I also went to school, for an MBA in hospital/health services. By 1976, all three of the children were in university and I joined Ravi in Paris, set up a home for us and began exploring the ways in which I could work in public health.

As I set to thinking about our 1977 travels in India, it puzzled me that my memories were limited to four specific locations. I recalled that we visited in Delhi and saw the Taj Mahal, were in Benares for several days and stayed in Bangalore with the family. Why nothing else? I searched through family letters, photographs, old passports and retrieved the answer from Ravi’s collection of our airline tickets. We had traveled through India by air. I was on my way to Indonesia for my first consultancy with an international organization, to report on a family planning program in Bali, and booked my flight on Air India to Delhi, Varanasi, Bangalore, Madras, then on to Singapore and Jakarta. Ravi took Iraqi Airways, Paris, Delhi, Paris, with a stopover in Baghdad each way. On the way over, the Baghdad airport was out of drinking water, but most of the passengers were oil well workers well supplied with whiskey who barely noticed the inconvenience. Within India, Ravi’s tickets were written by Indian Airlines. Although I was unaware of it at the time, we were fortunate to be traveling in November, the best season for visiting India.

In Delhi we stayed with Munni and Harisingh. He was with the Ministry of Agriculture. (Our 1963 visit with them in Baroda is described here.) While there, Ravi hired a car, a Hindustan Ambassador, for us to see the Taj Mahal.

A Rajasthani Boy

Ambassador Taxis at the Railway Junction

I remember the car because it was nice but not very comfortable and the driver never let off using the horn. We would have asked him to stop but the sharp beeps and long loud blasts seemed so much a part of his driving that we thought it wise not to distract him. I regret not having photographed the driver, a handsome young man smartly dressed in slacks, shirt and a jacket, topped off with a perfectly wrapped red turban. I think he was from Rajasthan. A decade or so later I worked in a village program administered from Jaipur and was properly impressed with the men’s headwear and their proud appearance. The Rajasthani boy embodies that spirit.  On the postage stamp at the end of Photographing the Observatory at Jaipur here is another picture of a Rajasthani boy.

And the Taj Mahal! I can say only that I was stunned by its beauty, as with no other sight in my travels.

Contemporary Benares

In Benares we stayed in a hotel I cannot recall in any detail, so it must have been the usual modern sort of hotel and in the cantonment area that looked like any other city, or I would have remembered it. I do remember Ravi telling a boy, a porter, that he had grown up in Benares and this was his first time back. The boy spontaneously reached down and touched Ravi’s feet, as respect for an elder on his arrival home. In the dining room the waiter told me, when Ravi had left the table for some reason, that my husband talked Hindi very good, almost like an Indian. Had Ravi been away that long? He certainly had not been away long enough to forget how to bargain. When he hired a rickshaw to take us around town he feigned disbelief at the price the man stated and haggled long enough to halve the amount. At the end of the day he gave the man more than double what he had agreed to pay. He just wanted to establish the principle that he was not a tourist.

Ravi sought out the beloved house he and Ajit, his brother, had described for me with such affection and nostalgia. (The house is described here and here.) It was in Bhelupura, in the area of the Maharaja of Vizianagram palace. I understand now why the house was not in the English bungalow style. It had been built for an elite traditional family, the sort who would live away from the streets of Benares in a grand house surrounded by the servants’ humbler dwellings.

a view of the veranda

Ravi was shocked when we came to the house. He saw it broken, crumbling, falling apart, and the land surrounding it overgrown, untended, no longer in any way resembling his childhood garden.

The family in the Benares house, 1977

The family living there was pleased to meet and talk with Ravi, and we spent some time with them. They let us look around and we could see that the parts of the house they occupied were kept neat and clean. Piles of shiny metal lay on the hard packed ground around the house, delivered by a man from a local factory. It was sheet metal stamped with machine parts for everyone in the household, young and old alike, to work on, cutting out the useful parts and stacking them, putting aside the scrap metal. The factory man returned, took it all away, paid the parents and brought more metal sheets to be worked on. I wonder how the scale hanging in the veranda played a part in their work and payment. The family looked fine and they could afford to send their teen-aged daughter on to high school. I noticed a bicycle leaning against the house.

Ravi and I went next to the ghats. I described in a previous post our walking through the old market behind the ghats and the extraordinary cloth market. At the ghats Ravi engaged a man with a boat who made his living taking tourists onto the river. We went out with him and they fell into a long, easy discussion in Hindi. Much of it, from the occasional translations Ravi gave me, was about the boatman and his life. I watched the river, the people, the buildings, all without grasping what was happening.

Ravi arranged for a car to drive us to Sarnath. That was a special day, in many regards, and I will write about it separately.

In 1983 I was again on my way to Indonesia and Ravi again accompanied me through India. We visited family in Allahabad, delightful individuals in a city I thought very attractive, and as a gift for Ravi, a cousin and his wife drove us to Benares for a daylong visit. I checked on a map and now realize the highway we took from Allahabad to Benares follows a part of the Grand Trunk Road. If only I had known.

In Turkey, when in the countryside, there were occasions when I learned from a friend I was walking on the stones of a Roman road or seeing remnants of the Silk Road, especially of caravan sarais, the inns at one-day travel distances along the way where merchants could stay the night with their wares and stable their camels, bullocks, donkeys, horses. Sadly, while in India I missed seeing the great Road — and much else.

In 1983, as with many highways elsewhere, this highway entered this city in a poverty stricken area. I can still see and feel it and have to push aside the image when thinking about Benares, but that is the case with thinking about India anywhere and something to be discussed in another context.

Ravi knew the house in Bhelupura would have long since disappeared and wanted this time to look for his first house, the one in the cantonment. I have a general idea of where it was located. On Papaji’s earliest letter head is printed Chhannulal’s Garden, Chaukaghat, Benares Cantt., just south of the railway and Varuna River, near, I think, the Sampurnanand Sanscrit University with the handsome Cambridge University Gothic style building. More likely, the address Didai used on her letters, Laksha Road, probably north of the Cantonment Station, was that of the house.

Ravi could have been no older than five when the family moved from this house but he remembered it. The balcony reminded him of his cousin, Kamla, later my friend, then seven years old, organizing the children to stage plays for the adults as their audience.

the door to Papaji’s study

We went through a gate to the courtyard for Ravi to see the door to Papaji’s office but what he most noticed was the deteriorated state of the wall. (I noticed the distinctive lintel.) I suggested we look for someone to talk with and go inside but he shook his head and we returned to the street.

The first house in Benares

On hearing children’s voices Ravi stopped, looked up and said nothing. He said nothing for quite a while and then not about the houses. I think it not wise to return to a house one once loved.

I know from reading Papji’s collection of letters that he and Didai had two great concerns for their children — health and schooling. I cannot know how or why they chose their two houses in Benares but do notice that each is near a school that their boys would be attending. (The girls were the last born of seven siblings.)

The first house was near the St. Mary’s Convent School that opened in 1932 and by 1983 was considerably expanded and refurbished.

Ravi visiting his earliest school

Ravi had called it his Montessori school, taught by Austrian nuns, whom he admired. Their language impressed him; German words stayed with him into adulthood. In the school he watched Christian church services as he watched Hindu ceremonies around the home, observing but not participating.

The second house had been near the Central Hindu Boys School, in Bhelupura, and just north of the Benares Hindu University. The school was founded in 1898 by Annie Besant, a truly remarkable woman, and it became the nucleus for Banaras Hindu University. We drove to the school. Ravi walked hesitantly onto the grounds, wondering what to do next, when a student approached him. They talked and Ravi left feeling content.

Alumnus and student on the grounds of Ravi’s collège

The cousin’s wife is Christian. I think this photograph is of a church in the cantonment but cannot be certain; we took the photo that day and in Benares. For some reason I am in the photo, holding a black closed umbrella. A picture of the cantonment’s earliest church, St. Mary’s, is in Returning to Benares Part III. here

It did not occur to Ravi to show us the Benares Hindu University. I doubt he had any contact at all with the university, even though Papaji had attended it and was close to a number of men attached to it as an institution. Ravi became serious about a Ph.D. and academia in 1954, in the States, after he realized how difficult it would be to have a career and earn a living in India. Ravi’s students admired and respected him and he enjoyed teaching, but it was not his calling. I once believed teaching in a university was my calling, at least until my expatriate wifehood eased me away from it. Ravi, after twenty years as a professor, left the university for a large international organization where he could make better use of his talents as a diplomat, as a public speaker and as someone who spoke six or more languages, four of them fluently. I missed the academic life, but he did not. I would have loved to go on the BHU campus, bike along its tree-shaded streets, venture inside the bright, delightful Indo-Gothic buildings for a peek at the classrooms and maybe chat up a professor.  I wrote about the university before, here. For a ride through the campus on a motorbike — here.

Next, I will describe our day in Sarnath, ten kilometers from Benares, after I explore a story Ravi told me long ago about a midnight walk in a Benares cemetery.

I keep thinking about having ridden, unawares, on the historic Grand Trunk Road. A few images here from its history —

The Grand Trunk Road, Ambala Cantonment under the British Raj

The Grand Trunk Road as a trade route

Near Nagpur, ca 1900

The Mughal Lashkari Khan Caravan Sarai in Punjab

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Returning to Benares — Part IV

I continue exploring the Benares cantonment, the part of the city where the family lived when Ravi was a small child. By the time he was six or seven they had moved to the grand house in Belapura, (described here and here), closer to the city, but he remembered the first house and took me there to see it. From a map of Benares drawn in 1924 we can see a bit more of the places in the cantonment where Ravi’s parents, Papaji and Didai, would have have walked, shopped, maybe visited.

Benares Cantonment 1924

I think the orange and green colors on the map indicate, respectively, Indian and European. The blue areas show tanks and other water resources.

A Calcutta railway staion 1940s

Primary for boy Ravi would have been the train station. He loved trains and certainly would have known the station in every detail. I can see him sitting there, watching the trains come and go, checking on them in the official book of train schedules Papaji had acquired for him.  I have no picture of the Benares train station but it would have been similar to this one in Calcutta during the 1940s. (As a boy, our son, Arun, collected and read airline schedules. Our daughter, Manisha, is a member of the National Association of Railroad Passengers.)

The train to Bombay 1940s

The train shown here would have been similar to the one taken by the family when they moved to Bombay in 1944.

On the larger 1924 map of Benares, shown below, we see the Oude and Rohilkhand railway from Lucknow to the cantonment had been extended around Benares to the Raj Ghat part of the cantonment and on the Dufferin Bridge across the Ganges to the Mughal Sarai railway junction. The cantonment railway is discussed here, with the map. The Kashi station at Raj Ghat had been built.  Benares was linked by rail to Calcutta, and in the other direction, to Allahabad and on to Delhi or to Bombay.

On the map are areas of green along the railway. These probably indicate where the British who run the rail system lived. They were responsible for this lifeline of the East India Company and later the British Raj.

It is surprising not to see the Grand Trunk Road running south along the railway, as it does on all other maps. Papaji’s office was near Queen’s College.

Queen’s College, now the Samypurnanand Sanskrit University, had its beginnings in 1791 with an East India Company man who gained permission, and funding, from the East India Company Director General in Calcutta to establish an institution in Benares for the study of Sanscrit literature, taught by an Indian professor. (How many EIC men came to India for profit and became enamored of the culture!)  The present building was constructed between 1847-52 in the Cambridge University Gothic style with its façade made of stone from Chunar, a famous quarry on the Ganges southwest of Benares. Inscriptions in Sanscrit are engraved in the stone.

In 1924 the residential area where Ravi’s family lived, north of the railway station, had not yet been built, nor was the school he attended. The Sadar Bazar was central to the cantonment, run by Indian merchants, and probably still there in the 1930s. It may have been where Didai shopped. Neither Papaji nor Ravi mentioned the British soldiers or the barracks to me. I wonder if they were gone by the 1930s. I note that there is no hospital near the barracks. Historical records indicate one in three reported Army illnesses were venereal diseases. Indian prostitutes were licensed for the cantonments, regularly medically examined, and if infected, required to undergo hospital in-patient treatment. If they refused such treatment, they could be imprisoned. And the cantonment had a jail. None of these measures were applied to infected men.

Nandesar Kohti, the grand residence of the Maharaja of Benares (discussed in Returning to Benares Part III) was a prominent feature of the cantonment. A post office had been established, a bank opened and hotels built. In the prime residential area north of the Varuna, the elite members of the cantonment had their Club. In a 1901 Handbook of Benares by Rev. Arthur Parker, London Missionary Society, he wrote “The Cantonment, or European Quarter, lies west of the city, where the whitewashed bungalows of the foreign residents may be seen embowered in trees and each set in its own compound.” And “ … fine mettaled roads which run from the cantonment to the very heart of the city … the water-works which supply filtered water pumped up from the river … though the smokestack of the pumping station at the southern end of the ghats hardly add to the beauty of the scene … The city is a great emporium of trade, especially in grain and native foodstuffs generally. From the rich plains that surround the city vast quantities of wheat and rice, millet and lentils, as well as unrefined sugar pour into the bazaars for sale … and the manufactures of Benares famous in India … …”              ‘

The District Courts and the Civil Court were located nearby. I noted previously that in the 1880s the Magistrate represented Benares for the Director General of Calcutta, thus making him the cantonment’s senior official. I expect, from what I read, District Courts dealt primarily with cases in the villages. In the city, it would have been with cases concerning rents and taxes and the collection thereof. A civil court handles non-criminal legal matters, those of private individuals or entities suing one another for money or other types of compensation. In a culture with different legal traditions for Hindus and Muslims and different by region and caste, that must have been a complex matter.

A Colonial Court in India

I include this photograph of an engraving printed in an old calendar because I find it interesting. A primary function of the ruler in any society is dispensing justice. We see here the British colonial officer, like a feudal overlord, supervising a rural court within his District. Papaji hated this picture and I can understand his resentment of the foreigner so casually exercising authority over Indians.

South Benares 1924

Toward the city were the Edward’s Hospital (on the cantonment map) and Victoria Park, initiatives from the British Raj. A post office and telegraph office were also in the city residential area behind the ghats.

Benares Town Hall

Papaji often used the telegraph office. I wonder whether he used the city or the cantonment postal office. The Municipal Offices and Town Hall for the city are shown on what seem like small white areas, as if neutral between the two colors.

The presence of religious groups is impressive. My first thought on seeing a Lunatic Asylum was the possibility that one of the religious organizations ran it. We see a London Mission High School and a London Mission compound near Queen’s College.

In the Sigra area of Benares the Church Mission Society was running the large Victoria Hospital complex. The CMS also had churches, schools and an orphanage in Benares, perhaps located in the green spaces inside Benares city. The Jay Narayan School was part of the Mission.  Through the decades, the Maharaja of Vizianagram, ruler of the princely state of Vizianagram in Andhara Pradesh, played a considerable role in Benares affairs. One Maharaja contributed to the building of the Town Hall. The Vizianagram princely family estate was in Belapura, at the edge of the city, on the Durgakund Road, north of the Asi River. The Durga Kund Temple stands at the intersection of that road and the Ramnagar Road that continues southeast, borders the Banaras Hindu University compound, and leads to the pontoon bridge across the Ganges to Ramnagar. The Palace Fortress of the Maharaja of Benares is in Ramnagar. The Banaras Hindu University campus is not shown on the map. It is south of the Asi River, established only a few years before the map was made. It played a large, though indirect, role in Ravi’s life.

Benares 1924

 

The green areas on the map around the Vizianagram palace inform us that British, as well as Indian, families lived there. This was the locale of Ravi’s family’s second family house.

Next – Onward to the intersection, geographical, social and psychological, of India and British Colonial that was the context of Ravi’s young life and influenced him as a person.

But before I leave my observations on the history of Benares, I quote again from Rev. Arthur Parker’s book on the history of India. Indian culture engaged this learned gentleman beyond his goal of converting Indians to his own religion. He admired the art and “… the gorgeous and massive specimens of Mohammedan architecture …” and loved Benares, his “… city of wonders …”

“The traveller who approaches Benares by railway from Calcutta may obtain from the carriage window one of the finest views possible of the city. As the train nears the great bridge that spans the broad bosom of the Ganges, the buildings on the northern side come slowly into view, and gradually grow on the sight till, stretched along the top of the lofty bank, and looking down into the rippling waters, the city is seen like a queen sitting on her throne, with her spires and minarets standing clear out against the brilliant blue of the eastern sky, and the stone stairways of the ghats running out below into the sacred stream, surely one the most imposing and impressive sights in all India.”

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Returning to Benares Part III

In the 1930s and ’40s, when Ravi’s family lived in Benares, there was the city and there was the cantonment, and the family lived between them. There was also the Benares Hindu University, an institution that deeply influenced Papaji’s thinking and the family’s lifestyle. I described the Benares of Ravi’s childhood in terms I understand — its residences, streets, markets and transportation. Now to the cantonment, beginning with a question: Why were the British there? Why did they establish their military and civil lines (which I translate as English town) four miles or so inland from Benares?

The answer is, of course: the East India Company. As an American learning Indian history I outlined for myself the phenomenon and continue to fill in details here and there. — The East India Company received a Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth in 1600 to carry on trade throughout the world. From 1707 on it was a joint-stock company with shares owned by wealthy merchants and aristocrats. It was a business, a powerful Company that traded in basic commodities from India, including cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, saltpeter for gunpowder, tea and opium. It bought goods at very low cost in India and sold at high prices in Britain and elsewhere. The Company had its own private armies to protect its trading privileges and infrastructure, doing battle and usually winning, first with Portuguese and Dutch competitors and then with rulers of the Moghul Empire and the Maratha Kingdom. From the mid-1700s onward it consolidated its rule in India, with the right to administer and collect revenues from the lands it controlled, as well as to profit from trade and manufacture. It established mints in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay — and until 1830 in Benares. In 1857, Indian soldiers across the country rose in rebellion, with widespread civic support, resulting in the dissolution of the East India Company. The Crown took over, reorganized the army, the financial system, the administration, and as the new British Raj, ruled India directly. The Rebellion was the beginning of the interregional nationalistic movement that culminated in an independent India, achieved by Papaji’s generation. Papaji knew a number of the leaders personally but was supporting a large family and could not join actively in the independence movement.

Ravi grew up in Benares when the cantonment was a British community but different from the Bangalore cantonment where he had stayed with his mother’s family and gone to school for one year. In a series of essays, beginning here, I described the family in Bangalore and the large, complex Bangalore cantonment. The Benares cantonment was smaller and simpler. Its sole raison d’etre had to be controlling Benares for the riches to be taken by the party ruling it. Benares is a holy city, a place of temples and holy sites that draws to it a multitude of pilgrims in all times of the year, people who come to pray, to stay and to die there. Benares is also where, at Raj Ghat, the Grand Trunk Road from Kabul to Chittagong intersects with the Ganges River, the major highway of north India until British built railways replaced ships and boats as the dominant means of transport. Benares was a center for trade and commerce and where pilgrims’ spending could be taxed. Moreover, Benares craftsmen, especially the weavers, produced beautiful products from which British merchants gained very high profit in Europe.

Contemporary Benares

The second map is of the cantonment and was drawn by James Prinsep in 1822.

Benares Cantonnment 1822

I cannot find a clearer picture of Prinsep’s map of the cantonment but can point out a few features. Most likely, the original name of the area was closer to Sikrour than to Secrole but the British usually anglicized names and words and their version became standard. I do not know the original meaning of Sikrour, but it is referred to as a suburb. Most likely it had been a village with a zamindar collecting revenue from it, ruled over by the Nawabs of Awadh (or Oudh), who had the East India Company as their chief ally. In 1737 the Nawab of Awadh built a mint in Benares and struck coins in the name of the Moghal emperor. After the critical Battle of Buxar, 1764, a battle that the Company army won, and after the Company seized Benares and in effect ruled the land, the Nawab moved his mint to Lucknow.

Beginning in the 1790s, the East India Company laid out Secrole around the Varuna River, north of the Great Trunk Road. (In 1872 the Oudh & Rohilkund Company railway from Lucknow followed the Road on the north of the Ganges but not where it crossed the river.) In a census Prinsep took for the East India Company he listed 73 houses in the British bungalow mode, of brick and stone, located primarily in the residential area north of the Varuna River. One bungalow survived to house the Varanasi Cantonment Board.

 

Bungalow in Barrackpore

 

 

Official’s Bungalow in Barrackpore

The Mess in Barrackpore

The other bungalows and a mess are from Barrackpore Cantonment near Calcutta. It was the first cantonment, built in 1772, and is being preserved by Barrackpore City as a tourist site of historical interest. Click on photos to enlarge.

Bungalows from the Bangalore cantonment are wonderful. I have pictures of them here.

Indians lived in and around Secrole. Farmers had to have been in the area and Indians as servants and service people would have lived close to the British homes and other establishments. Prinsep counted over 2600 tamped earth houses and they would have been Indian.

In Secrole, as in Benares, to adapt to the heat, houses were built with the roof as a living space. In Returning to Benares Part II, here, Prinsep’s drawing of houses along the street and the photograph of Benares rooftops show this accommodation to the climate. Contemporary photographs show that some of the pleasant, and cooler, atmosphere of the cantonment’s wide tree-lined streets and parks with greenery has been preserved.

Benares Cantonment Board

On the Secrole map, a road runs from the corner of what seems like a large compound north of the river, across the river by bridge, down, around and through The Parade, a large open field for the military to use.

At the Parade grounds the rows of heavy lines probably indicate barracks for the British soldiers. On today’s map of the area is a locale called Brigadier’s Residence and I wonder if it matches a rounded V-shaped place above the barracks on the Secrole map, to the left. I read in an account of the 1857 Rebellion in Benares that Indian soldiers lived in huts, not the barracks, and they carried muskets, while British soldiers manned guns that shot the deadly “grape.” Other buildings and compounds for the military were stables, places for a blacksmith, wheelwright and other crafts, a mess for British soldiers (Indian men cooked separately for themselves), a hospital and related buildings. Jail is the one word I can read. It is north of the river, on the east.

Back to the Secrole map, the Mint, either built or taken over by the East India Company in 1795, is, I think, the heavy small square with a mark inside, to the left of the road. Across the road from the Mint was a large compound with structures of some sort. Compounds to the left of the Mint may be for the Treasury, where Company money was kept; then St. Mary’s Church toward the river; then the Court of Justice.

Benares St.Mary’s Church by Susan Elaine Penn-Berkeley in 2009

St. Mary’s Church, dating from 1810, still stands on an eleven-acre lot and is probably the oldest Protestant Church in North India outside Calcutta.

Through time, shops and stores and businesses of all sorts, such as tailoring and dress-making, selling household goods, were built and lined a number of streets. They probably included housing on a second floor.

The remnants of a cantonment street

Benares Cantonment Cemetary

The cemetery is, I think, near the barracks and at the lower end of the stream running south on the west from the Varuna River and ending in the parade grounds. The stream and a Cemetery Road are on the map of today’s Varanasi. I previously quoted the essays Reverend James Kennedy wrote while a preacher in the cantonment in the 1840s. Today’s cantonment area has a Kennedy Road.

Looking again at the Mint and the compound down the road from it –

Benares Nadesar Palace

Currently, a Palace that once stood in that location is a luxury hotel in Nadesar Park. A building called Mint House seems to be part of the complex. The Palace may have been on the grounds before the East India Company took over Secrole. It may have been a royal residence ceded to the East India Company by the Nawab of Awadh.

The drawing is from a small book with the title: Vizier Ali Khan or the Massacre at Benares, A Chapter in British Indian History, 1871.

The Benares Cantonment Palace in 1799

A long, dramatic and detailed story is written about Mr. Davis, the Magistrate of Benares, representative of the Governor-General of Bengal in Calcutta, who was residing in the Palace that stood opposite the Mint House. In January, 1799, Wazir Ali, the royal heir of the Nawab of Awadh, and his men attacked Mr. Davis in an attempt to drive him from the Palace. The Magistrate successfully defended himself and his family. A spiral staircase to the roof is featured in the tale and it still exists in the building. The Palace disappeared from history until after 1822, when Prinsep refurbished it and the Mint House. The Maharaja Prabhu Narain Singh, ruler of the Princely State of Benares, during his rule between 1889-1931, took over the Palace as his city residence, and with great pomp and splendor, used it for entertaining his guests. The first visitors of note were the then Prince and Princess of Wales, who later became King George V and Queen Mary. He continued playing host to royalty and the famous from many countries.

To remind us of the times, this is a drawing by William Prinsep, one of James Prinsep’s brothers. Enlarge to see the details.

Arrival of a civil servant in Calcutta, by William Prinsep 1822

Next – the cantonment and the city of Benares.

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Returning to Benares Part II

For some reason, I found writing about Benares difficult and kept thinking if only Ravi were here he would help me. Fretting over my writer’s block, I went to his collection of books on India and browsed, looking for I did not know what. We had hauled these books, along with hundreds and hundreds, thousands, of others, with us from one home to another, across countries and continents. Two he had brought from India in 1951, one by Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, 1946, with the price paid, 11 rupees, and Ravi’s tiny signature on the page inside the cover, and the other The Armies of India, Painted by Major A C Lovett, Text by Major GF MacMunn DSO, London 1911, with beautifully painted pictures of soldiers and their uniforms. The surprise for me was finding Diana L. Eck’s Banaras, City of Light, 1983. Ravi had written his name inside the cover, as he always did, in the upper right-hand corner, and knowing his handwriting, I would say it was from his last years. This and the three bookmarks suggest he was reading and thinking about his past.

Eck begins Chapter 8, titled City of the Good Life, “There is a special spirit among people who call themselves Banarsis, whether they are rickshaw-pullers, merchants in the market, or old aristocracy. They call it masti (joie de vivre), mauj (delight, festivity), and phakkarpan (carefreeness). … It is the enjoyment of life without ostentation. … … It is an ambience of urbanity, good living, and culture, all of which comes to be synonymous with the word Banarsi.” Chapter 9 is titled City of Death and Liberation. In both chapters Eck elaborates on the enormously complex concepts of Hinduism and relates them to the physical Benares, to the Zones of the Sacred City.

This is daunting. I acquire information about Benares, trying to see it through Ravi’s eyes, as with the other two cities, Bangalore and Bombay, where he spent his childhood, and instead discover that Benares is not a city like other cities. Every thing, every part of Benares is suffused with meaning, symbolic of a sacred person or event in the Hindu past; Benares must be regarded, like Jerusalem and Mecca, differently from other cities. Nevertheless, I want to know how child Ravi saw Benares. He was old enough, thirteen, before the family left for Bombay to have walked in the city. Given his preferences when we traveled, he for a café to sit and read the guidebook and I for the casbah shops and oddities, I suspect the narrow streets of Benares were places he tolerated rather than enjoyed. I doubt that he went often to the ghats. His grandmother did, and participated in rituals lead by the Brahmins. Perhaps a servant accompanied her, but not Ravi. Activities in temples and on the streets did not appeal to him as an adult; they would hardly have appealed to him as a teenager. He had been taught little to nothing of Hinduism in the home and his formal education took place in English medium schools. Still, Benares was an expression of his culture. He need not have believed the religious stories literally for the underlying messages to resonate with him. He occasionally said things to me I thought odd, such as telling me I should live in the moment. I thought I did but must have in a way that he felt was missing a certain indefinable something. I wonder how he would have expressed the thought in Hindi.

So, here I am, reading and thinking about Benares. I feel Ravi in the room, just out of sight. He was used to my research projects, in the States, in Somalia, in Turkey, my studying an ethnic community in another part of the city. Later, with the children grown and my doing consultancies in health care, I was off to other countries. He accepted this. He took his vacation time to come with me for a while when I worked in India, in Turkey, in the States. He could not manage to visit me in Indonesia but had hoped to travel there one day to see where I had been. I can imagine him now watching patiently while I explore Benares. This time, though, he could have explained things for me. I am feeling lonely.

What do I want to know about Benares? – A simple picture of the city – the economic base, residences, streets, markets, transportation, education. With one exception, I could find nothing about how the city was governed.

I cannot even begin to outline the history of Benares; it is too ancient and too complex. For a quick summary see.

My first thought on seeing pictures of the city ghats was that they must have resulted from long occupancy of the site. Until quite recent centuries a city, a dense urban settlement, rose through time above the level of the land around it. Were the Benares ghat steps built to reach the present high level of a city that was originally not much higher than the land at the shore of the river? And how can such an ancient city still be in that location? Ancient cities beside a river, and most began riverside, have been either lost to inundation or isolated onto dry land as the river inevitably shifted course through time.

I searched and discovered here that “… The nature and the character of the banks of the Ganga river has made the position of Varanasi so stable and enviable that it is among the few cities of the world which show little shifting in its site. The city proper is built on a high ridge of kankar (lime concretion) that forms the left bank of the Ganga for a distance of 5km, being quite above normal flood level. But it does flood. In the past there were small rivers and ponds between the Varuna and the Ganges. …” (the limestone, “kankar”, contains clay and hardens with water into cement.) The steps and the city’s present height above the river result from a combination of the site’s permanent base plus the more usual effects of a city’s long occupancy in one location. I discussed this usual process in another context, when writing about the history of Paris. See here.

Contemporary Benares

I also wondered why Benares has no traces of a city wall from the past. (City walls fascinate me. I’ve written about this, especially for Paris, here.) Many Indian cities had forts and were walled. In the 1840s, James Kennedy, a minister of the London Missionary Society based in the cantonment, lived in Benares and traveled in the countryside with his family, mostly as a diversion, as something interesting for them to do. He noted that farmers in the area surrounded their villages with tamped earth walls for protection against thieves and bands of armed men. (I prefer “tamped earth wall” to “mud wall,” his phrase, because tamped earth realistically represents the process of building and maintaining a wall.) Ancient Benares, capital of the mighty Kashi kingdom in the 8th to the 6th centuries BCE, was, according to legend, surrounded by a wall. The city sat high above the rivers, on the Raj Ghat Plateau where the Varana River flows into the Ganges. Archeological excavations there revealed evidence of a 9th century BCE city wall. By the end of the 12th century CE, Muslim invaders had destroyed all traces of a wall. However, the Raj Ghat plateau is known as the Raj Ghat Fort because at the time of the Indian Rebellion in 1857 it was, indeed, heavily fortified. Today’s walled Ramnagar Fort across the Ganges is the Maharaja’s residence.

Beginning in the 1200s, armies of the Delhi-based Muslim Sultanates periodically razed Benares. Its temples were destroyed and mosques were built. Emperor Akbar and his son Jahangir in the mid 1500s promoted religious harmony but under Aurangzeb (1618 -1707) Benares’ temples were definitively leveled. Quoting from City of Light: “During the 18th century, Banares had to be substantially rebuilt. The city which had sheltered the rebel Maharata hero, Shivaji, in his challenge to Mughal power, now became the recipient of the gratitude, the wealth and the energy of the Maharatas. … Temples were rebuilt and ghats were constructed. … Lakes, ponds and streams were drained. … The Deshashvamedha-Luxa road was built running west from the river toward the cantonment railway station. … The north-south artery called Chauk cleared through the business district.” The Marathata builders continued the Mughal architectural style, influenced by earlier styles from other regions of India.

Dusaswumedh Ghat by James Prinsep 1834

Deshashvamedha Ghat is the main ghat.  James Prinsep  was a talented artist and architect. In his drawings he preserved much of the history of Benares and he contributed to urban planning in both Benares and Calcutta.

The great mosque at Panchaganga Ghat, as drawn from the north near Trilochana Ghat by Captain Robert Elliot, Views in India, 1853

We have a copy of this drawing framed and hanging on the staircase wall of our house. I bought it decades ago in a Paris shop of antique maps and prints. It shows the gate across a road into Benares, and the remnants of a wall. One of the  two men standing together is armed. He is (I think) wearing a fez, carrying a shield and holding a spear, most likely a policeman or a guard at the gate. The other man has something with him. A musket? It occurred to me, because of his hat, that he might be a sailor. Is the man sitting on the seawall smoking a hookah? A woman is approaching the gate, carrying something on her head. The boats on the river — Boatsmen kept their boats nearby, at Raj Ghat, to take people up the river and ferry them across the river. Reverend Kennedy wrote that sailing the Ganges took great skill and knowledge of the river.

The Trilochana Ghat was about where the Prahlad Ghat is on the map above.

Benares in 1859, by J. Schroeder

The drawing of British families on an outing is another view of the same road. From Rev. Kennedy’s essays I gather that British families came from Calcutta to Benares by boat to the Raj Ghat plateau, a forested and open area, and proceeded from there to the cantonment, where they lived. This part of Benares would have been most to their liking. The men at the seawall may be sailors and we see a second scantily dressed dark-skinned man.

The road has to be the Grand Trunk Road at the point where it comes to the Ganges and boats ferried traffic across to the road at the other quay. On the map above it is the Grand Trunk and Rajghat Road. I write about the Grand Trunk Road here. The railway later followed the course of the Road.

The river and boats in a festival 1880s

For sheer curiosity about the past – This shows Benares before the railroad replaced the river as the region’s great highway; ships and boats were the primary means for transporting goods and travelers. In pre-industrial cities, major buildings and houses of the elite were built at the river, fronting on the river. Usually, temples/churches/mosques were located in the interior, perhaps for protection. An enemy invader was certain to destroy the conquered people’s religious symbols.

I scanned in the picture Diane Eck has in her book of the Panchaganga Ghat on the full moon day of Karttika. It shows housing at the river and an enormous number of people engaged in joyful worship. In this case, “sky lamps” are hung in the evening in little wicker baskets on the tops of tall bamboo poles.

For more pictures of the residential architecture –The Ganges bank here is privately owned and densely built-up; access points are few.

Man Mandir Ghat, Maharaja of Jaipur, Rajput architecture

from the Maharaja’s palace

From Rev. Kennedy’s accounts of Benares —

“Benares is a great commercial as well as religious city. If it ceased to be Hindu, we cannot suppose its commerce would be paralyzed; but as a considerable part of its ordinary trade is dependent on the thousands of pilgrims who resort to it, on the money they expend on food, on gifts to the priests, and on the purchase of articles exposed for sale, great loss would be in the first place incurred. The many artisans now employed in making images of stone and brass would find no purchasers for their goods. In addition to the pecuniary loss which directly and indirectly would fall on all classes, the whole community would feel the glory of Kasee, the Splendid City, had departed, when, stripped of its sacredness, crowds of pilgrims no longer filled its streets, frequented its temples, or bathed at its ghats.”
And —
“The city has two great squares, occupied as market-places, in which goods of every description are exhibited and sold in the Eastern fashion. They present a stirring scene of an afternoon, which is the principal time of business.” I wonder if Ravi’s mother shopped in Benares. Surely, she went to cloth market.

Rev. Kennedy gave us information from a census the British took. They counted 16,023 masonry houses, and 21,551 houses of tamped earth or sun-dried bricks. “I do not wonder at the disappointment felt by some who have been much impressed with the front view of the city, and have then traversed its streets.” He described a typical house, having a flat roof, with small, low rooms entering from one into another and a veranda extending along its front. The best houses would have a view of the river.

Continuing with Rev. Kennedy’s description — The city extended inland about a mile.

A view of the Benares rooftops

The streets behind the ghats were long and narrow, with lofty stone houses on either side. The buildings were of hewn stone and substantial. Each had a narrow doorway opening into a quadrangle around which were apartments for the inhabitants.

Jukaso Hotel, a quadrange in the traditional style

The streets were too narrow for a vehicle and other conveyances passed each other with difficulty. Sun did not shine into the narrower streets and lanes. Where an owner had houses on both sides of the street, a bridge at the roof level linked them.

The Thurtheree Bazar by James Prinsept

Prinsep wrote: “…a street takes an oblique direction, which is indispensable, where cities are built on rivers deviating from their right line, it encounters a succession of projecting corners on either side, leaving spaces to be filled up with chubootras or raised seats; these are let out as stalls to vendors of trinkets, toys and confectionery.” The details of the buildings and people shown here are wonderful.  The man on horseback has his servant carrying a flywhisk.

At the edge of the original Benares the streets were wider and the houses more humble. (In walled pre-industrial cities, poor people lived at the wall, at a distance from the central city, away from where the elite had their houses, but close enough to serve them.) Further inland, on open fields, wealthy families had mansions, each set in a garden but surrounded by streets of the poor.

In 1822 James Prinsep took a census of Benares for the East India Company. Benares had mehales, neighborhoods, with a policing system, the Phatekbandi. Phatek means gate. Prinsep reports that in earlier times the mehale gates were closed at night. Each mehale had a watchman who knew all the houses and circumstances of each family. Additionally, a mehale chumar entered each house at night to take away the trash and waste. Prinsep counted 30,000 houses in Benares, with a population of 180,000. For Secrole and the 16 villages in its vicinity the population was 20,000. Similar castes were grouped into a corporation with a headman, a Kotwal. He kept a list of each person and arranged for gifts at the festivals they held. The city had many Brahmin subcastes and the Kotwal of each kept a list of its Brahmins for the wealthy men who gave them alms.

A city needs a water source. We see in the film Aparajito that water was piped into the building. Historically, Benares had wells, streams flowing down through city and tanks where water was stored. The urban problem was drainage, not the supply of water.

What was the Benaresi lifestyle in the 1930s and early ’40s when Ravi’s family lived in the vicinity? Hints from the past, luxury and workplace —

The Maharaja’s Barge ca 1883

Ideally, houses were built around a courtyard. Craftsmen and artisan shops were located on the ground floor, at the street, and the families, or people renting rooms, lived above the shops. It is likely that this picture of a watchmaker and mechanic training his son in 1880 differed little from such a family fifty years later, in Papji’s lifetime.

On the road to Benares in the 1920s

This photograph, from an interesting blog, shows a mode of transport used by peasant farmers. I have never seen this sort of heavy wheel.

The saris of Benares are famous, incomparable in their beauty and quality. They are the best known Benarsi product, but I could find no paintings or drawings of the weavers, of their looms or their surroundings. (except for the poet, Kabir, shown in a drawing with a primitive loom. Incidentally, he was born Muslim.) I found almost nothing on other crafts, either, such as the metal workers whose brass vases and lamps were so popular in Britain, and nothing on the merchants who kept the economy moving.

Benares was a major center of education and of philosophy; of Ayurveda, the traditional medicine; of yoga and astrology.

Pandit Bapudeva Sastri_(1821-1900) teaching a class in astronomy

The Preacher by James Prinsep

Street scene in Benares 1953, by James Burke

In an article in the New York Review of Books, April 9, 1998, Pankaj Mishra wrote of his four months in Benares in 1988. He stayed “… in the old quarter, in a half-derelict house owned by a Brahmin musician who gave sitar lessons to German and American students. … and … was part of a world of old Benares that was still intact in the late Eighties, and of which the chess games in the alleys, the all-night concerts in temples, the dancing girls at elaborately formal weddings, the gently decadent pleasures of betel leaves and opium formed an essential component. In less than two years, most of this solid-seeming world was to vanish into thin air. The old city was to be scarred by a rash of fast-food outlets, video-game parlors, and boutiques, the most garish symbols of the entrepreneurial energies unleashed by the liberalization of the Indian economy, which would transform Benares in the way they had transformed other sleepy small towns across India.”

This brought to mind scenes and the music and dancing in Satyajit Ray’s great movie Jalsaghar/The Music Room, set in Bengal and filmed in the mid-1950s. Ustad Bismillah Khan, a famed musician from Benares and from a long line of court musicians, is in the movie.  A review here.

Ravi’s family would have lived in one of the mansions Rev. Kennedy noted. It was outside the Old Town but part of the larger Benares. I wonder if the family servants were from the Old Town. Ravi told me that Ramsingh, the teenage boy servant the children loved, was a village boy, but we do not know that as a certainty. Next – on to the Cantonment, the other part of the larger Benares.

April 3, 2014

A note —

I discovered today online and continued reading for hours a wonderful book. It is authentic, written by a delightful individual:

Kumar, Nita. Friends, Brothers and Informants: Fieldwork Memoirs of Banaras. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6x0nb4g3/

Nita Kumar writes brilliantly of her time doing an ethnosociological study of Banaras. I recalled my own fieldwork experience and recognized in her account so many of my views. Additionally, I saw Banaras through her eyes. Her farewell to her friends, brothers and informants had me in tears.

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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

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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.

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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.

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A Note on Women’s Work in an Indian Home

The following is an addendum to My Husband’s House in Benares Part One, an essay describing Ravi’s childhood house and home, based mostly on stories told and retold over the years, plus wonderful additional details Ajit, his brother, gave me. I asked Ajit for his comments on what I had written and he thought my description of the house accurate, as are the accounts of day-to-day activities but had to correct one statement I made. He said it is not true, as I suggested, that grinding wheat at home was a servant’s job. This is useful to know and I correct my error with real pleasure, partly because it gives me a reason to post the photo of a small brass figurine I bought many decades ago, along with small god figures and temple spoons, at a shop in a Bangalore market.

My lady with the missing handmill, a chakki, is a sweet figure of a woman at work. A careful look tells us that her work is valued and she is valued. The marks and the border on her sari suggest that it is a very nice sari. She has a tikka on her forehead and is wearing jewelry, most likely gold or silver, everywhere – a chain at the hairline, earrings, necklace, bracelets at her wrists, ankle bracelets above her bare feet. The rings on her upper arms may be the border of a blouse or additional bracelets, or both. The painting of a woman similarly posed suggests how my statuette lady of the missing mill may have appeared as a live person. Ajit remembers the chakki with two women working together.

He wrote:“Grinding wheat at home — before a commercial grinding mill was opened near our home — was not necessarily considered a menial job.  I can clearly picture my grandmother (this is going back more that 70 years) and her daughter (my aunt) sitting across from each other and slowly grinding the wheat and having a deep intimate conversation.  It was an occasion for women to socialize.

Two women at the chakki

“The grinding wheel, which was horizontal, had a handle for turning it which was quite long so that two people could hold on to it at the same time and rotate it.  The commercial mill, although it relieved you of the chore of grinding wheat, came with its own set of problems.  You could never be 100% sure that the flour you got back was from the same wheat you brought in.  As I observed on a few occasions, when I went to the mill with Ramsingh, people lined up with their bags of wheat in front of the miller who put it in the grinder and after it went through the grinder he gave back to you a bag of flour.  The wheat was fed into the grinder continuously from one person to another.  On one occasion, I remember my mother being very upset because Ramsingh came home with some flour which was clearly quite inferior and not from our wheat.”

I was puzzled by Ajit’s account of Papaji’s mother at the grinding wheel with her daughter. I asked if maybe he were really remembering his maternal grandmother in Bangalore, where she and her unmarried daughters would have been doing this household task together, rather than his grandmother at home. Most family stories I heard and most family persons I met were from the Bangalore family of his mother, Didai. Papaji’s mother, Bau, lived with the family in Benares, but no one from Papaji’s extended family was on the scene, with two exceptions. One was Papaji’s father, briefly. He came and went two or three times and was hardly noted or remembered. The other person was Kamla, their cousin, two years older than Ravi. She stayed with them for long visits and was vividly remembered for organizing the children to put on plays with the adults as their audience. Papaji writes of this in a letter to Dada.  (I met Kamla in Lucknow in the 1980s and we became friends.) Ajit now tells me that Kamla’s mother, Papaji’s sister, came also, from Allahabad, for visits but he cannot remember her name, which strikes me as significant. He would never forget the names of Didai’s sisters; they were far too much a part of his growing up for that.

From all that I know of family and extended families in India, Ravi’s family’s strong ties with the mother’s extended family, rather than the father’s, is unusual. A girl, and I do mean girl and not woman because she was likely to be in her middle teens, left her family at marriage, arranged, of course, and became a member of her husband’s family. We should take literally that phrase in the marriage ceremony: a father gives his daughter to the groom. I heard, possibly from Papaji, a proverb that raising a daughter is like watering another man’s tree. Whatever you give her, such as an education, benefits another family. A child grew up primarily knowing the father’s immediate and extended families. In the India I know about, a cultural rule was to marry within the caste but outside the local community, so marriage also separated a girl from her mother by distance, although she could return home for her first birth.

My experience with women’s work in India is limited. I know inside the home only of Ravi’s family after 1963 and of a few women colleagues in the 1980s. I never did in India the sort of research that took me into traditional homes, as in Turkey and Indonesia. In those latter settings, particularly in Turkey, I watched women and girls working together and the older woman passing on knowledge and skills to her daughters.  The bonds between them were strong and they managed to maintain ties after the girls left at marriage, possibly because marriage was not necessarily outside the town or village. The woman’s situation in a North Indian traditional joint family household (older couple, sons with wives and children, unmarried daughters) intrinsically diminishes her. It is the men’s house. The men have continuity. The bride arrives as a stranger, works all day with her mother-in-law, a woman she does not know, eventually comes into her own and works with her daughters, who must leave all too soon and be replaced by strangers, the wives of her sons, often each from a different family and a different community. If the woman does not have sons she is in trouble. I am tempted at this point to slide into a discussion of the women’s situation in such a setting but will resist. The point here is that women’s work in a traditional economy was continual, never-ending and the grinding of wheat was one task they could enjoy doing.

From what I know of Didai’s personality, probably she and Bau had few, if any, problems between them. (see here for explanations of the nicknames)  Ravi never spoke of conflict in the family, nor did anyone else, unlike the mother-in-law stories I heard from young Indian women who confided in me. Nevertheless, Bau must have been happy to have her daughter with her again, if only for a visit, sharing work they had done together for years. They would have, as Ajit remembers, sat across from one another, holding the mill handle, turning the stone, pouring in the grains of wheat, talking, laughing and reminiscing.

I cannot resist posting another painting of ladies of the house busy with one of the more agreeable household duties. This is a Persian painting from the 17^th century, from a calendar, showing a variety of occupations in the city and in the countryside. The colorfully dressed young women in a garden under the fruit trees, their hair only lightly covered, are spinning cotton fiber into yarn. I believe this garden is for the house in the background and would have been walled, secluded from men outside the family. In most traditional cultures women spin the yarn and men weave the fabric. A poor woman in the hijab may be a peasant woman preparing a meal for her family over an open fire.

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Ravi in Bangalore Part Four

Bangalore as remembered.

In 1941-’42, as an eleven year old, Ravi lived for a year and went to high school in Bangalore, in the cantonment with his mother’s family, an Indian family comfortably part of a neighborhood designed for and dominated by the British. (described here) He returned to Benares that summer. Papaji wrote to Dada that Ravi had “…come home big and strong looking …” but in the Benares climate soon “… got fever twice …”  In June 1943 Papaji wrote to Dada asking if “… Ravi can be admitted again in his old School at Bangalore in the Junior Cambridge Class. …” and a week later wrote “We have changed our mind and wish him to stay here for the Matrix Examination.” I wonder what happened. Ravi loved St. Joseph’s. The only thing about his schooling in Benares he ever mentioned to me was the nuns being from Austria and speaking German. He thought he had some of their language latent in his memory and on occasions German words and phrases did surface for him to use.

I can guess by inference from Papaji’s letters why Bangalore was canceled for Ravi. The next letter is dated nine months later, March 1944. Dada is preoccupied with his own family affairs, his business and his concerns about the marriage, and maybe the expense, of Dada’s and Didai’s sister, Munni. So many of the letters in these years are about arranging a marriage – first for Dada, then for each of the brothers, then for Munni, and finally exploring possible matches for Baby, the youngest daughter. Baby was at my wedding, described here. In one letter Papaji, in reference to finding a suitable match for the daughter of a friend, wrote, “ the girl is 15, appearing in Matric this year, is well up in music and is good looking… One family is presenting a boy … aged about 25, in business and son of a Raja. But I have a horror for Rajas and Princes …” In another letter he was annoyed with a woman who brought up the question of caste. He would not have that. In 1990 or so, when Ravi and I were living in Paris, Dada came for a visit. Among the interesting and fun things we did together was visiting his boyhood friend from Bangalore, a wealthy fellow living in a grand house in the 16^th arrondisement of Paris. We spent an afternoon with him and his wife, an elegant lady wearing a beautiful sari. Dada and his friend joked and told stories, and on hearing Munni’s name, our host told us she was the girl all the boys, including him, dreamed of marrying. His wife laughed and said she had heard all this talk about Bangalore many times.

In April 1944 Dada moved his family, consisting of himself, his wife and two little girls, his mother, sisters, and the brothers when home from college, out of the house in the cantonment compound to Basavangudi, a mahalle in south Bangalore. He kept the printing press in the same location on Ulsoor Road. He had begun printing an English-language magazine and may have needed the house as space for his flourishing business. He wrote, “… Both Baby and Munni are having a grand time with their numerous new friends in the locality of Basavangudi. …”

In 1945 Ravi was in Bombay. The family — Papaji, Didai, grandmother and seven children — had moved by train from Benares to Bombay to live in an apartment in the Byculla mahalle. Ravi was admitted to Wilson College immediately, when he was fourteen years old. Beginning college so young did not appear exceptional enough to be remarked upon in Papaji’s letters to Dada.

I doubt that Ravi saw the Basavangudi house before he left Bombay for the U.S. in 1951, but he certainly heard of it in detail. He and I visited the family there in 1963 and a good number of times after that.

The 1924 map helps visualize differences between the cantonment and Basavangudi. (See descriptions here and here.) Ulsoor Road, where Panditji established the press and the family house was located is just south of Halsur Tank. The red line marks the boundary of the cantonment. Basavangudi is south of the Petta, the original Bangalore.

For historians of Bangalore, Basavangudi in the south and Malleswaram in the north are associated with public health measures instituted to combat the deadly plague of 1898. Besides inoculating people and isolating victims of the disease to break the chain of contagion, the municipal government acted to demolish infected housing in densely inhabited areas of the city. The two newly built mahalles had come into the municipality in 1895. The families moving into Basavangudi were Indian civil servants and business people, and after the plague, poorer people subsidized by the government to build on small lots. In both mahalles, broad roads were laid out on a grid pattern. Houses were set on open land, with fresh air circulating through the rooms. Underground sewage lines were still in the future, but a narrow lane ran behind each row of houses for access to maintaining pit latrines in the back yards. Open areas with greenery and gardens provided shade and fresh air. Every home had garden area and wealthy families kept large gardens. The City Municipal Corporation maintained small parks around temples. I read of the Gandhi Bazaar and a handsome Police Station building but do not remember seeing either. I do remember pleasant streets and walking in Lal Bagh Park.

The Basavangudi House

The photo is of Dada, Sita and me in front of the family house in the mid-1980s, some forty years after they had moved in. It is a large house, clearly not in the bungalow style. Dada gardened, favoring his orchids. I was in India on a consultancy and visiting them before returning to Paris. I am holding a suitcase. Dada was over seventy at the time, with extremely high blood pressure. He passed away later that very day.

Lal Bagh Park is a marvel. See the Wikepedia article for the photographs. The father of Tippu Sultan commissioned the park and Tippu completed it, based on the design of Persian gardens under the Mogul Empire. The British added elements to the park and the present government preserves and improves it. In 1944, Dada wrote to Papaji, imploring them to come for the Munni’s wedding. “…in the evening a Reception and Tea Party has been fixed at the Glass House, Lalbagh at which about 750 people are invited. …”

Lal Bagh Glass House and Fountain

Basavangudi has a famous temple with a huge statue of Nandi Bull, the vahana (vehicle) of Lord Shiva. I do not remember this Nandi Bull but did see a smaller one somewhere near Bangalore that appealed to me. Kempe Gowda, founder of Bangalore, had the Bull Temple built in what would have been a village outside Bangalore’s tamped earth walls.

Nandi Bull 2nd Century CE

Belur Temple Statue

In 1963 Dada drove Ravi and me 35 kilometers west of Bangalore to see the T G Halli Dam and reservoir that supplied the city’s water. It was constructed in 1933 and Dada was proud of it. I had grown up seeing photographs and newsreels of the Hoover and other huge dams across wide rivers. Ancient art, not modern constructions, caught my attention but I should have appreciated both. Ravi arranged a bus tour of temples in the area for us and I can still see in my mind’s eye the delightful dancing girls along the frieze of the Belur temple.

For decades a vague memory of an unusual hotel comes to mind when I think of Bangalore, of a hotel that impressed me as being designed for an era when the clientele most likely traveled by train, accompanied by a servant and with clothing and necessities carried in a trunk. As I remember it, we had a suite, a bedroom, dressing room and large, open bathroom with good but old-style plumbing and furnishings. I think it was the West End Hotel, Bangalore’s grandest and famous hotel and we stayed there either in 1963 or ’77. When Ravi and I traveled together, he made the plans, bought the tickets, paid the bills, so I often failed to notice the names of our hotels and the restaurants. Besides, neither are very important to me, so I generally forget them unless I find something in or about the building particularly interesting, which I did in this case. I imagine we could afford the West End Hotel because of the dollar to rupee exchange rate. I wonder how Ravi, as a modestly paid young professor, felt about staying there, in Bangalore’s High Ground. Decades later, in 1995, as an haute functionnaire in an international organization, traveling with our daughter in India and staying in Bangalore with family retired there, they all lunched in the West Hotel dining room and he took this photograph. My photo of an architectural detail is from 1977. I think it is of a West End Hotel roof taken from the balcony of our room.

West End Hotel 1995

I see in Papaji’s letters that Ravi was writing to Dada and that Dada was sending Ravi copies of the magazine he published. I saw one issue in 1953 and was appalled by an article on eugenics. Encouraged by Ravi, I wrote a response, which Dada included in the next issue, but no one commented on my essay or the fact that I had written it. Dada was publishing a good magazine but no one discussed its content. It was a business. The intellectual side seemed not to interest the family. In a 1957 letter Dada wrote about something that truly did interest him: the family. He expressed to Papaji his disapproval of Ravi’s relationship with the family, almost but not quite, in contradiction to his approval of Ravi for his independence and choosing his own wife. After all the five sons left India and settled abroad, Dada was angry with them. He thought they owed it to their parents and their country to return.

For an excellent history of and loving commentary on Bangalore see here —

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