Tag: Landour

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Editorial

Changes, Ruskin, Snakes and Frogs…

Summer, Dune in Zeeland by Piet Mondrain (1872 – 1944)
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets (1941) by TS Eliot

If we look back in time, we have a better life than that of our ancestors. Though conflicts rage and climate change is a reality that we all dread, it can safely be said, we have progressed beyond the imagination of those who lived a hundred years ago. The fact that some books from the past still reverberate with echoes of what the present holds says much for the outliers or authors who could think out of the box. Despite this complex intermingling of ideas and times, perhaps the world will change more now than before. We do not know anything for sure though experts are always predicting a future that for most of us remains unknown. What we can present is our own estimate of what can be and a definite assertion of what is. Truth as such is a matter of perception. That complicates it further. However, one of the changes that is definitely here to stay is climate change and our changing environment. Given that this is the month that homes World Environment Day, we have a smattering of writings that revolve around nature and also the human spirit that defies age.

We have featured a writer who revels in nature and is an ageless voice that bridges multiple cultures, Ruskin Bond. As he turned ninety-two last month, he published multiple new books. We have an excerpt from one of them, Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond, a brilliant collection of snapshots of his interactions with nature over time — be it frogs, snakes or just trees. Some of the vignettes are humorous and some, as all classics are, thought provoking. Bond puts into words how he chose to work in Landour (a small town in Himalayas) and continued to write from there for sixty years. He talks of the spell the mountains cast on him, “I like to think that I have become a part of this Magic Mountain; that by living here for so long, I can claim a relationship with the trees, wild flowers, even the rocks that are an integral part of this landscape.”  The other book excerpt is a contrast to Bond’s, a non-fiction called Burnout Highway by Anmol Diddan. It explores the collective suffering of stress at work where achievements distance humans from nature and a fulfilling life and urges readers to be open to changes.

Somdatta Mandal discusses Bond’s Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond and concludes: “It [the book] is a collector’s delight and also one to be gifted and recommended for anyone who loves to read about Ruskin Bond’s deep and lifelong love for the Himalayas. Bond’s poetic prose can hardly be imitated…”

In keeping with the theme of environment, Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Stephen Alter’s The Fragrance of Rain: A Brief History of the Monsoon. He tells us: “The Fragrance of Rain is much more than a history of weather. It is a meditation on nature, culture, memory, and belonging… Like the season it celebrates, the book is refreshing, nourishing, and lingering in its impact…” While Rakhi Dalal expresses her delight with Shyam Manohar’s The Cold War of Sadanand Borse, a novella translated from Marathi by Jerry Pinto, Meenakshi Malhotra revels in Giti Chandra’s debut book of poems, Setting Traps for Light.

The June poetry section also homes a poem on monsoon by Aardhra Chandran. Anne Whitehouse takes us to Egypt with her vivid words. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri has shared a series of poems in memory of his late father. We have more from Snehaprava Das, George Freek, Pramod Rastogi, SR Inciardi, John Grey, Heera Unnithan and Jim Bellamy. Ryan Quinn Flanagan’s lines do bring a smile to the lips while Rhys Hughes writes of census of centaurs! Erik Kennedy, a migrant poet from New Zealand, shares his poetry and also his views in a candid interview with Keith Lyons.

In translations, Professor Fakrul Alam has captured the flavours of Nazrul’s Bengali lyrics, which also echo of the rainy season or monsoons. Isa Kamari brings to us more of his Malay poems in English and Ihlwha Choi shares a rendering of his Korean poem, ‘Dragonfly 2’, into English. One of Tagore’s poems from Balaka (Flight of the Cranes, 1916) has found its way into this issue after being translated. We also have a touching Balochi story around social gaps from the late Abdul Qayum Sarbazi, brought to us in English by Fazal Baloch.

Hughes has continued sharing his short fables, which are absurd but also, comical! A sensitive story about the natural world mingled with Maori concepts by Keiran Martin seems so much in sync with the oceans while Jeena R Papaadi has woven a strange narrative located in a land that only one man could visit. Plamen Vasilev shares a human-interest story set in Europe and Rabiya Rehman takes us to Lahore in quest of a missing destination! Naramsetti Umamaheswararao’s narrative takes us back to a village that opted for trees, thus enriching the environmental lore in this issue.

We have a real life heart rending story from a young girl in our Pandies Corner, written and related by Deeksha Vats, based on the story told by a victim of familial violations and violence.

Our non-fiction section homes Larry Su’s essay on how his life took him from a rural mud cave in Shaanxi province to the glamour of Chicago. Reflecting on the changes he has experienced on his rare visits to his original homeland, Su muses on the cultural and socio-economic gaps he has observed between the two places. Charudutta Panigrahi – as if in direct opposition — shares similarities between two diverse geographies.

Suzanne Kamata explores a custom which may not be that eco-friendly in her column from Japan. Jun A. Alindogan brings home the impact of climate disasters while dwelling on blessings with his narrative about a narrow escape from the Typhoon Ondoy (2009). While Meredith Stephen writes of sailing to Timor Sea with photographs by Alan Noble, Farouk Gulsara takes us on a cycling adventure around the mountains of Titiwangsa. In another musing, he also explores the idea of good and evil in a sardonic tone while Sai Abhinay Penna dwells on the grandeur and vastness of the universe over his morning jog. Gowher Bhat writes of a man for whom age seems to be just a number as he publishes his debut book at 93! One wonders at the frequency of such occurrences — we have writings about two authors above ninety in the June issue. In contrast, Devraj Singh Kalsi brings in mortal fears while writing of visiting doctors with a soupçon of humour – some of it directed at himself. 

Perhaps, laughter is really the best medicine to keep well! Ruskin Bond makes us laugh and writes of nature in a way that touches hearts and makes us forget the contrasting glitzy world, where we suffer stress and burnout. Our environment makes a difference, doesn’t it?

With that we wrap up our June issue. Huge thanks to our fabulous team, especially Sohana Manzoor for her wonderful artwork. To all our contributors, heartfelt thanks — we are because you are. And gratitude to our readers who make it worth our while to write and publish here.

We will next meet you during the monsoon months of South Asia though, near the equator, it rains almost every day and, in the Southern Hemisphere, it will be peak winter!

Happy reading!

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

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Review

Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title:  Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons from the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond

Author: Ruskin Bond

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Recently Ruskin Bond turned ninety-two and from the various interviews he has been giving, one finds a single word that recurs in different forms in his interaction with his interviewers and that is ‘solitude.’ The recently published non-fiction book titled Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond, captures this solitude and his deep, lifelong love for the Himalayas. It is a gentle, meditative reflection on the changing seasons, nature, and the quiet rhythms of daily life in Landour and Mussoorie, a place that he himself states to be his home for the last sixty-one years.  He had moved to Mussoorie in the early 1960s to write full time. In the ‘Introduction’ he tells us about how he moved into a cottage called Maplewood Lodge after renting a room from a lady called Ms. Bean and settled for good in these hills. The old and isolated cottage was tucked away in the shadow of a hill, but it brought him close to nature and helped him develop a rapport with it in all seasons. The open window of the small living room exposed him to the forest outside that seemed full of possibilities and the birdsong.

The book is not a novel or a continuous narrative; rather, it is a collection of vignettes, journal entries, and remembered moments.  It allows readers to experience the mountains exactly as Bond does, observing the nuances of the landscape over the course of five distinct seasons. Most of the entries are very brief, the lengthier ones are hardly more than a page in length, but through them Bond manages to give his readers his very close observations of the place as he experiences it through the five different seasons of the year. He divides the book into six parts, and the last part is called ‘The Eternal Season’. Each section begins with a suitable prologue borrowed from the Australian traveller John Lang’s mid-nineteenth century travelogue Wanderings in India (1869), a book which Bond had retrieved from oblivion and edited for the benefit of future readers.

Bond organises his observations into a seasonal framework, detailing the subtle shifts in his environment. In the first section ‘Spring’ we get detailed description of how the first tender leaves appear, bringing a sense of tentative warmth and new beginnings. Through his very perceptive and minute observations, we get visual images of the small birds that arrive to bathe and drink in the little pool beneath the walnut tree, water beetles and tiny fish that lurk in the shallows of the pool. The different varieties of birds that he has observed include two delicate little willow warblers, the whistling thrush, the wild ducks, eagles that fly high on the mountain, the cheeky mynah birds meeting under the eaves of the roof, and sparrows that flutter in and out of the room at will. Spring comes with its varieties of flowers with splashes of colour and Bond rightly describes how “the infection of spring spread simultaneously through the world of nature, and made them one”. The honeybees and butterflies also add to the beauty of the place and as he rightfully states, they do not recognise any “man-made border”.

The vignettes of summer have details of long, insect-filled, sun-drenched days that invite slow walks and quiet afternoons. Summer for Bond “was never entirely solitary”. As he sat in the window seat in his cottage and spent his mornings turning out stories, poems, essays, children’s tales and anything that came to his mind, he looked out upon a sociable gathering of trees that provided a recreation ground for different kinds of birds too. Very evocative descriptions of the mangoes, lichis as the fruits of summer and also the ice cream are drawn from his memories. He writes how as a boy he was engulfed in loneliness, and as a man in solitude. On some mornings when he carried his small table, chair and typewriter outside on to the knoll below one of the oaks, the different birds helped him with his punctuation. For his reflective and descriptive writing, he looked into the distance, at the purple hills merging with the azure sky; or examined a fallen leaf as it spiralled down from the tree and settled on the typewriter keys. The summer sun bathes everything with clear, warm light and the camera-eye of the narrator records everything to the minutest detail. He tells us about other prolific writers who were busy writing their books during this period while he produced not so much as a paragraph.

The monsoon is a defining feature of the hills, bringing mist, heavy downpours, and the lush abundance of the forest. “The first monsoon rain always felt like a beginning,” writes Bond and how this season is one of the most beautiful times of the year in the Himalayas. As the forest dripped and it rang with birdsong, Bond found it always worthwhile tramping through the forest above the stream to feast his eyes on the foliage that sprang up in tropical profusion. He tells us how the rains also heralded some seasonal visitors like leopards and several thousand leeches, and snakes as well as insects like grasshoppers, crickets and cicadas who produced different kinds of music.

When autumn arrives, burnished light, ripening fruit, and a golden hue take over the landscape and according to Bond it is the best time of the year in the hills. Now more than any other time of the year, the wildflowers come into their own and it is the best time for taking long walks. An atmosphere of peace and harmony descends on the hillside, and Bond watches the spectacular sunset as its faint glow spreads across the whitewashed walls of the ageing cottage, as though a part of that spectacular sunset has been left behind only for them. This season also occasionally brings in bears who come to the village to eat pumpkins, flying foxes sweeping across the roads and leopards circling the houses along with dogs. The cool, uplifting autumn breeze always stirred him to the marrow and Bond thought it to be the best aphrodisiac in the world.

Winter brings with it old silences, snow-laden trees, and the beauty of the serene Himalayan peaks against a clear blue sky. During Christmas when it was bitterly cold outside, the blazing wood fire in an old-fashioned fireplace made him enjoy the experience. Again, one day, after being cooped up in his room for several days, he set out for an enjoyable tramp outside in the snow-covered countryside with hardly anyone on the way. He also reminiscences about his school days when he took the train ride from his boarding school in Shimla to come to Dehradun and find occasional snowfall there. He also remembered the first time it snowed in Maplewood. From the windows he could see, up at the top of the hill, the deodars clothed in a mantle of white. “It was a fairyland: everything still and silent.”

The eight selected entries for the last section titled ‘The Eternal Season’ describe the quiet renewal that begins where all endings meet. Here Bond reflects on renewal and the passage of time across sixty years of living in the mountains, examining how the landscape remains wondrous despite changing times. All through his life he says he had been plodding along, singing his song, telling his tales in his own unhurried way and it didn’t matter if he hadn’t managed to get to the top of the mountain. He had lived his life at his own gentle pace and his long walk had brought its own sweet rewards; buttercups and butterflies along the way. He had been observing the natural world—along forest paths, during walks, storms, solitary afternoons, and shared silences.

Thoughtful, attentive and reflective, he offers the seasons not as events to be marked, but as a way of living in time.  In the penultimate entry he states: “In spite of all indications to the contrary, I have survived – as a writer, as an individual, as a breadwinner, as a lover of beauty. So many failure and setbacks along the way; but I suppose my inner stubbornness saw me through… And here I am, ninety-one, my own person, determined to live and love till my last breath.”

This aesthetically produced hard-bound book is not to be read chronologically from beginning to end but can be opened by the reader at leisure from whichever page or season he feels like, and he can go back to it again and again. It is a collector’s delight and also one to be gifted and recommended for anyone who loves to read about Ruskin Bond’s deep and lifelong love for the Himalayas. Bond’s poetic prose can hardly be imitated and some of the spontaneous poems that abound in the collection speak immensely of his ability to cross over genres of prose and poetry with utmost ease. The black and white interior illustrations that abound in the book also add extra charm and help the less-perceptive reader gain better understanding of the particular image or scenery that Bond talks about. One is also fascinated by his exquisite sense of subtle humour, that includes the ability to even laugh at oneself.

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Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a retired Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

Click here to read the book excerpt.

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Excerpt

Scenes from the Magic Mountain by Ruskin Bond

 

Title: Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond

Author: Ruskin Bond

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Introduction

Sixty-one years ago, almost to the month, I made the highland of Mussoorie in the Garhwal foothills my home. It was a sunny afternoon, and by my side was a gentle-faced elderly lady—a bit of a loner by circumstance, like me. I had mentioned in passing that I wanted to shift from Delhi, where I had been living somewhat unhappily for a couple of years, and she was showing me the vacant upper floor of her home—an old, isolated cottage at the edge of a forest of oak and maple, green, red and gold. You couldn’t see the Himalayas, or the Doon Valley below, for the cottage was tucked away in the shadow of a hill. But it was spring and when I opened the window of the small living room, the forest seemed to rush upon me, as if in welcome. And from the deep ravine rose the sweet, haunting call of the Himalayan whistling thrush. That decided it for me—the forest, which seemed full of possibilities, and the birdsong. I moved into the cottage—it was called Maplewood Lodge—and settled for good in these hills.

I was still young, and in my romantic frame of mind, I was susceptible to magic casements opening wide. I decided I would make a window-seat and lie there on a summer’s day, writing lyric poetry…But long before that could happen I was opening tins of sardines and sharing them with Miss Bean, the elderly lady who continued to live in the rooms below me. It was a solidarity of the indigent! I went away from the hills at times, but returned as soon as possible, and when I had to leave Maplewood, I rented other homes, each one old and modest, but always with a view.

Once you have lived with the mountains, you can never leave. You belong to them.

Sometimes it is hard to believe that I have been up here all these years—sixty summers and monsoons and winters, and the short autumns and even shorter Himalayan springs (there is no real spring in the plains). When I look back, it seems like yesterday when I first came up with my meagre belongings and a head full of dreams. I like to think that I have become a part of this Magic Mountain; that by living here for so long, I can claim a relationship with the trees, wild flowers, even the rocks that are an integral part of this landscape. I am too old now to walk among the noble oaks and deodars and the ancient pines, but I feel their presence at all times. The wind brings me their words of wisdom and encouragement when my spirits are low, and their benediction when I give of myself freely in love and friendship. They have seen these hills change and yet remain the same through countless seasons—renewing and healing themselves and all the life that lives upon and within them.

p. 52-53

Maplewood Lodge, Mussoorie.

The summer of 1963.

The forest is still silent, until the cicadas start tuning up for their performance. On cue, like a conductor, a bird perched high in the branches of a spruce tree begins its chant. Umeew—umeew!

The forest begins to pulse with the hypnotic buzzing of the cicadas.

Big white ox-eye daisies grow on the hillside. The sorrel—almora grass—has turned red. I sit in my garden, contemplating my old Olympia typewriter. Still writing stories, still trying to sell them.

As a boy, loneliness. As a man, solitude.

And loneliness was not of my seeking. The solitude I sought. And found.

I am to spend many summers in this cottage. Mornings in the sun, evenings in the shadows.

Some mornings, I carry my small table, chair and typewriter out on to the knoll below one of the oaks and take a little help from the babblers and bulbuls that flit in and out of the canopies of leaves. White-hooded babblers; yellow-bottomed bulbuls. Never still for a moment, they help me with my punctuation.

For dialogue I depend more on the crickets, cicadas and grasshoppers who keep up a regular exchange, debating the issues of the day. But for reflective and descriptive writing I look into the distance, at the purple hills merging with the azure sky; or I examine a fallen leaf as it spirals down from the tree and settles on the typewriter keys. The summer sun bathes everything with clear, warm light. Somewhere high up on the hills, cows are grazing. I don’t see them, but I hear the bells tied around their neck.

I write in leisure. There is no hurry.

p. 125

Maplewood. Early October, and the hill slopes are showing off their post-monsoon foliage in a variety of hues: dahlias gone wild in shades of mauve, magenta and startling red; tall cosmos swaying in the breeze; wild geranium tucked away among the ferns; asters flourishing on retaining walls; and bronzed chrysanthemums vying for attention with massive marigolds. On the knoll, the grass is just beginning to turn October yellow. The first clouds approaching winter cover the sky. The trees are very still. The birds are silent. Only a cricket keeps singing on the oak tree. Gardens both natural and man-made are at their best in the brief autumn before Diwali.

The sun goes down with a lot of fuss. First a fiery red, and then in waves of pink and orange as it slides beneath the small clouds that wander about on the horizon. The brief Autumn twilight of northern India passes like a shadow over the hills, and dusk gives way to darkness. Sometimes, I’ll step outside to watch the sunset, and to see a lamp came on in Miss Bean’s sitting room below mine, followed by the veranda light. An atmosphere of peace and harmony descends on the hillside.

Click here to read the review of the book.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Ruskin Bond has spent a lifetime paying attention to the seasons of the hills—watching their arrivals and departures, their repetitions and small variations, the ways in which they shape both landscape and daily life. He’s written of spring’s first leaves and tentative warmth; the long, insect-filled days of summer; the monsoon’s rain, mist, and abundance; autumn’s burnished light and ripening fruit; winter’s cold silences and snow-laden trees; and finally, the eternal season—the quiet renewal that begins where all endings meet.

In Scenes from the Magic Mountain, he gathers his writings and remembered moments across these six seasons, observing the natural world—along forest paths, during walks, storms, solitary afternoons, and shared silences. Birds and trees, rain and light, houses, animals, neighbours, and memories pass through these pages without hurry.

Thoughtful, attentive and reflective, Scenes from the Magic Mountain offers the seasons not as events to be marked, but as a way of living in time. A companion for slow reading, this is a book to return to across the year, as the seasons turn and return again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli in 1934, and grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, Delhi and Shimla. He is the author of over a hundred books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Among them are The Room on the Roof, A Flight of Pigeons, The Blue Umbrella, A Book of Simple Living, Friends in Wild Places and Lone Fox Dancing. He received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1956, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014.

He lives in Landour, Mussoorie with his adopted family.

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Excerpt

The Wanderers, Lost and Seeking

Title: Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India

Author: Anuradha Kumar

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

INTRODUCTION

The Wanderers, Lost and Seeking

The people you will meet here—the ‘first Americans in India’—were indeed all wanderers. They came, not attached to the intentions of a country, or even protected by it, unlike their peers, the Englishmen who made up the East India Company, and who came to trade backed by a royal charter granted by Elizabeth I in the year 1600.

The wanderers, the first of whom came at a time when the United States of America had not come into being—and their actions, thus, were different from what was ordained as state policy. The ‘wanderers’ were not ‘state actors’ in that sense, but they, men, and some women, came to India, on their own, driven by their own spirit of search. They were brought here by a sense of adventure, or by a wild dream—that of finding something that would make their fortune—gold or inspiration quite like gold—or by the need to do something good and enobling.

But they were in some ways quite lost after they came to India.

Stepping Into a Mosaic

To these wanderers who travelled to Asia between 1700-1950s, India came as a mosaic of many impressions, a spread of colour and many experiences. It offered a field of new sensations compelling them to revise received knowledge. They were intrigued, they saw its contradictions, its strangeness, and how things were very different from the homes they had left behind. In the process, life for these wanderers was made afresh.

They came as traders, adventurers, military men, fortune hunters, seekers of knowledge, storytellers, mystics, those seeking a new career, or who came simply to serve.

To them, India—that looked quite different from what it does now—was a land of adventure. A land to make a fortune in, or to find fame.

It was a mysterious, magical place, one that fuelled the imagination, a land that contained the ancient truths of the universe. Yet it was a place caught in the ‘medieval age’, a place they had been sent to, a matter ‘divinely ordained’—as the missionaries and mystics believed—to save souls.

A place one could write about, for it was as strange as fiction; it was a land that offered inspiration and where one could find new, yet old, wisdom. A place to serve and cure and heal. A land where a new world was possible, or an arena to set the world aright.

The wanderers were awed and overwhelmed, and then, scandalized and shocked in equal measure. Some of what they wrote mirrored each other’s experiences. For example, their surprise at the number of servants that were needed. The astonishing beauty of the temples. The majesty of the Taj Mahal. The artistry produced by craftsmen and artisans, an art passed down generations. The riot of unexpected colour—in the bazaars, in the turbans men wore, and in the forests with ‘exotic’ fauna and flora yet to be named and classified by the new science of taxonomy. Balmy days spent on houseboats—‘doongas’—in Kashmir. The spiciness of the food, the liberal doses of pepper in curries. And then, the sad state of its women, especially the child brides, and the young widows, who had to be ‘saved’. The timeless stubbornness of the caste system. The very unchanging nature of things.

Change in America

To look at this period—1700-1950—and talk of Americans is somewhat anomalous. For one thing, for the early part of this time, America was a British colony. By the mid-1770s things would change. The United States of America emerged as a new political entity only in 1776.

On the other hand, from the early 18th century onward, the once dominant Mughal Empire was in decline. Aurangzeb, the last powerful ruler of that dynasty, had worn himself and the empire out with his battles in the Deccan and the upsurge of discontent elsewhere that he failed to contain. Even before the Battle of Plassey in 1757 tilted the balance—beginning in the east—in the East India Company’s favour, India was a patchwork of regional rulers, each brimming over with ambition and jostling for power. To adventurers and fortune-seekers—like the ‘wanderers’—who had no master, who came lacking the conqueror’s zeal, but who had their own sense of adventure, such a state of affairs was ideal to make a fortune, to remake a life.

It is thus of little surprise that the first of the wanderers came as part of the East India Company, to associate themselves with it, as ordinary private traders. America at that time, showed the same precarity that characterized India. It was a continent divided up between competing European powers, and to the west of the continent, the different native American groups too had their territories.1

In the next decades, as America extended westward into new frontiers, set its own foundations as a young democracy, some of the wanderers, citizens of a new nation, also faced their own frontiers, as they sailed eastward onto an unknown land.

Most of these early travellers were those who lived on the northeastern seaboard of the American continent, that is, in the port towns of New England that had historic links with England since the early 17th century. These travellers who came all the way from the faraway West to the East were immigrants themselves, children of people who had moved a generation or two ago, a westward journey from Europe to the ‘New World’. The wanderers to India—the South Asian subcontinent—were thus children of wanderers themselves.

(Extracted from Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India by Anuradha Kumar. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2025)

THE BOOK

In 1833, Frederic Tudor, an American businessman, made history when he shipped 180 pounds of ice harvested from Walden Pond in Boston, to Calcutta—this luxury item being much in demand amongst the elites of British India. Tudor was deservedly christened the ‘Ice King’, and soon built a flourishing trade exporting American ice to India.

Others were drawn to the country by less materialistic goals. Like the ‘medical missionaries’ who were deeply concerned with the ‘women’s condition’ in India. Ida Scudder’s efforts in the 1900s resulted in the setting up of the Christian Medical College in Vellore, which continues to save lives till this day; in 1873, ‘Doctor Miss Sahiba’ Clara Swain set up the first hospital for women and children in Asia, in Bareilly, on land donated by the Nawab of Rampur.

There were also those who came to stay. Twenty-two-year-old Samuel Evans Stokes came to Kotgarh in the Himalayan foothills in 1904, embraced Hinduism and became Satyanand Stokes. He revolutionized apple cultivation in the area, now in Himachal Pradesh, by introducing the ‘Red Delicious’ apples of Missouri; today, his descendants still live and work in the region. Likewise, the Alter family. Martha and David Emmet Alter arrived in Mussoorie in 1917, to spend the summer studying at the Landour Language School; in 1941, Emmet became principal of Woodstock School, just around the hillside. Twenty-five years later, his son Robert occupied the same position. Robert’s son Stephen continues to live in Mussoorie, pursuing a successful writing career; his cousin Tom Alter was a much-loved actor in Indian films until he passed away in 2017.

These are just some of the ‘first Americans in India’ who came here, beginning in the 1700s, with different motives and dreams—as adventurers, traders, reformers, writers and artists. All of them, without exception, were fascinated, astonished, moved and, in the end, profoundly changed by their ‘Indian experience’.

Anuradha Kumar’s skilful and well-researched account of these early visitors makes this an important and engrossing book that informs, surprises and amuses in equal measure.

THE AUTHOR

Anuradha Kumar lived in Mumbai for over a decade, where she worked for the Economic and Political Weekly. She now lives in New Jersey in the US, and writes often for Scroll, The India Forum, The Missouri Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, The Common and Maine Literary Review. Two of her essays received ‘notable’ mention in Best American Essays editions of 2023 and 2024.

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