FOUR INDIAS
Childhood India: ALLAHABAD AND LANDOUR
When I was a boy I lived in a high ceilinged large house in Allahabad where my father was Principal of the Allahabad Agricultural Institute. But since Allahabad and all of the vast plain of North India became very hot in March and blistering hot by May and didn’t cool off until November, the Americans who could, like the British before them escaped to the cool of the lower Himalayas, to Landour, a hillside within the British hill town of Mussoorie. This is where the American missionary boarding school that I and my brother attended was in a campus of red roofed buildings on a steep hillside. Missionary children from all over north India and countries beyond attended Woodstock with classes from kindergarten through high school. During the hottest time of the year my mother would escape the heat and take us out of boarding for three months. We lived in a Presbyterian mission cottage called Tehri View. The rest of the school year my brother and I were in boarding. We saw our mother about six months of the year and our father for three months during the winter three month school vacation.
So my experience of both Allahabad and Landour was as a child growing up and discovering and exploring the world. This India was seen through the eyes of a child and when I return to these places I am returning to my childhood and the way I was opening up to the world around me.
FAMILY INDIA: DELHI
When I left India at 16, not expecting to return because India was months away in those days, the memories of Allahabad and Landour stayed with me. I spent two years in the Army, met Kathe in Germany and married her, spent too long in graduate school, taught at Warren Wilson, and finally got a grant to study India at the University of Pennsylvania. I was not really interested in academic India but sat through three years and then finally, in 1971, got a grant to study in India for a year. I had been away 17 years and had always yearned to be immersed in the sensuality of India, the flavors and sights and hubbub and intensity of India which I remembered from boyhood. For six months my family and I, Susie 4, Tom 6, lived in an apartment in Delhi and had a marvelous time. I studied, some, and Kathe learned Hindi and became a potter at Minni Singh’s pottery, turning a stone wheel under the shade of need trees. The children went to the German school and learned fluent German. Kathe and I had lots of free time and explored the bazaars and wide streets of Delhi. This is the Delhi that I am coming back to.
STUDENT TRAVEL INDIA: GUJURAT
When I returned to Warren Wilson College to teach until retirement I wanted to share the sensuality of India, and the way it can dislocate your life, in a couple of ways. I found ways to share Indian experiences with school children through creating an Indian village on campus for a year, but most of all through taking groups of students for two to four months to Sri Lanka and India which I did again and again, usually with Susie as my co-leader. And the place in India where we had homestays and experienced Gandhian village development was in Gujurat through my friend and mentor Hasmukh Patel. This experience was through the eyes of students. This India is colorful tribal India in a dry desert area.
RETIREMENT INDIA: VARANASI
When traveling around North India with students we would spend a few days in Varanasi on the bank of the Ganges and delight in the narrow, colorful lanes of Varanasi, almost untouched by modern India. But it was after retirement that Susie and I, and later Todd, would settle in Assi Ghat at the upper end of the ghats and stay for a month. Every second year for 15 years except for the pandemic we would spend a month in Assi Ghat. Susie would work on an art project and I would take photographs and then pass them out to the people I took photographs of.
So now at 85 when I look back I can see that I have not only experienced four different Indias but that I have done this at four different times in my life. And each of these experiences is seen through the filter of the person I was at that time. When I come back to Landour I am seeing through the eyes of a child, I look at Delhi through the filter of family life, when I experience Gujurat it is as the active exploration of a teacher and when I respond to Assi Ghat it is through the eyes and perspective of an old man.
Each place we have visited on this trip has taken me to a different time in my life and a different perspective on India. I am not only revisiting India I am reliving the stages of my life and seeing them juxtaposed against each other.
And here in Landour as Susie and Todd take walks and ride around on the motor scooter that Todd rented for $5 a day I have been trying to unravel why Landour has had such a hold on me all of my life and brought me back here again and again.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 