Gifts of Passage

Santha Rama Rau

• Publisher: Restless Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781632060464
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

A vivid, varied account of a globally-minded woman's intriguing adventures and evolving worldview, Santha Rama Rau's "informal" autobiography covers a life defined by almost perpetual motion—from her birth in India to an upbringing in England and South Africa, from her education at Wellesley College in the United States to far-flung travel to China, Japan, Indonesia, Russia, Afghanistan, Kenya, Spain, and beyond.Part memoir, part journalism, Gifts of Passage is at once intimate and expansive. Supplementing the narrative of a wayfarer's return to her roots and portraits of Indian family life, the book provides firsthand accounts of pivotal historical happenings: repression in South Africa, the trial of Jomo Kenyatta, and the early stirrings of Indian democracy.

TWO

It was not until I was sixteen years old that we returned to India. The intervening years had been spent in English schools and in holidays on the Continent, sometimes joining our parents in one or another of the European capitals, sometimes staying quietly on the Brittany coast with French friends of the family. In London we could not, of course, help knowing a good deal about what was going on in India. My father, as Deputy High Commissioner for India, was inextricably involved in many of the developments, and conversation at home was full of references to the growing power of the nationalist movement, of the imprisoning of Indian leaders, of the vast changes that were altering the face and temper of India, of Mahatma Gandhi’s revolutionary ideas—imagine a leader who could tell his people that the only way to fight was not to fight, to convince them and then to make a success of his principle. We talked about Gandhi, Nehru, Sapru, Rajagopalachari, and countless other names that became great in Indian history in their own time. Some of them were related to our family, many were personal friends. It was a curiously intimate yet distant view of India’s progress.

Meanwhile, all around us in Europe, we got a similarly personal though far less exalted view of the events that were shaping our generation. On French beaches we might meet groups of Hitler Youth on some kind of organized walking tour. At school in England we might be asked to support the international youth camps of the League of Nations. Like so many of our friends, we took in refugees from Dachau and other concentration camps until they could find places of their own in London or get a work permit or a visa to America. My sister, with thousands of idealistic people of her age, felt strongly about the Spanish Civil War, and I, deeply impressed by her sentiments, fell in love with a young man I had never met only because he wrote beautiful poetry and was killed in Spain.

All this was, naturally, quite typical of the generation that grew up in Europe between the wars. The only thing that set us apart in our own minds was that we would return to India to live, that eventually our loyalties would be tied to a country that was growing daily less familiar. My mother, more than anyone else, kept this principle in our minds. In her years in England she had plunged, with her usual inexhaustible energy, into committee work of a semisocial, semipolitical nature, arguing, explaining, pestering, persuading any group that would listen to facts about India’s changing position and demands, clearing away, as far as she could, the fog of misunderstandings and semantics, of half-grasped psychology and prejudice, that surrounded the whole question of India in the land of its rulers. She organized her own bands of workers from among the Indian community in London, and hours every day were spent in conferences, discussions of programs and issues, liaisons with British women’s organizations. I sometimes think that the first long words I ever learned in English were “committee meeting” and “emancipation.” I heard them every day at home. To my mother her ten years abroad were a kind of challenging exile. She coped easily with her diplomatic commitments—parties, receptions, remembering the protocol-determined pattern of who should sit next to whom at dinner—worked at expressing her own convictions through her committees and informal groups, but she never had a doubt in her mind that one glorious day we would all return to India to live there for the rest of our lives. Things didn’t turn out quite that way.

The year before the war broke out in Europe, my father was sent, as High Commissioner, to South Africa. Following our usual pattern, my sister and I spent our summer holidays from school in 1939 with our parents. We found out only after we arrived in Capetown that this was our father’s trickiest and most disagreeable assignment. This segment of our education began at the moment when he came to meet us at the ship. My father, who has never, before or since, noticed how we dressed or cared what we wore, suddenly demanded that we change into saris before landing in South Africa. Assuming that we were perhaps to go straight to a party or something and intimidated by his grim expression, we asked no questions but simply took off our ugly English gym tunics and black woolen stockings and rather awkwardly (we hadn’t had much occasion to wear them in England) draped our saris. We soon learned the reason. The segregation policy of South Africa extends to the Indians as well as the Africans. My father wanted no one to think that his daughters might be trying to appear as something they were not.

We soon learned, too, the extent of this prejudice. One afternoon when my sister and I had decided to go to the movies, we phoned our father at his office, hoping that he might be free to join us. Rather cautiously he inquired about exactly which movie we wanted to see and what time we planned to be there. He sounded preoccupied and busy, but said he would try to join us. In fact, we later discovered, he had been so precise about times and places only because he wanted to be sure that we would not, in our saris, be turned away from the theater, for theaters, like restaurants, hotels, bars, wayside inns, clubs, were all forbidden to Indians. We were pleased by the courtesy with which we were received at the movie house, but puzzled by the fact that in a crowded theater all the seats each side of us for an entire row were left vacant. When we asked the reason for this we were told, with embarrassment, that none of the usual patrons would wish to sit with us. It was only because we as daughters of a diplomatic representative were immune from the usual rules that we could enter the auditorium at all. We never went to the movies again in South Africa.

During our months there we toured extensively, through the Cape Province, Natal (where the largest part of the Indian community lives), through the Transvaal and up into the Rhodesias. There was no question about it—South Africa is a magnificent country, full of variety, breathtakingly beautiful, studded with flowers, sights, animals I had never seen before, extraordinary in its scope and grandeur. And I never hope to see it again. My father, in one of his rare moments of quiet bitterness, after we bad driven from Johannesburg to Pretoria along avenues lined with jacaranda trees in full bloom, the clouds of unimaginably blue flowers throwing a light as cool as snow on the road, and had stopped to see the equally unimaginably inhuman conditions of life in the African compounds along the way, remarked, “Of this country that old cliché is really true: ‘Every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.’”

With mingled horror and resignation we heard, that summer, that war had broken out in Europe. Between hearing the blaring announcements on the radio and reading the increasingly sickening headlines in the newspapers, we had to settle the insignificant details of our own lives for the next few weeks... months... years, as it finally turned out. My mother and sister and I were not sorry to leave South Africa, even though my father’s work would keep him there—indeed it almost seemed that my mother’s dream of returning to India to live might, by this world-wide catastrophe, actually come about. In any case, since my sister and I could not, under the circumstances, return to England to finish our education, at least my mother could take us back to India—not just to relearn what we had known before we left but to learn afresh a new country, new conditions and situations and ways of living. A new world.

So much had changed. My mother’s parents were both dead. Three of my cousins and all my uncles were married. Two of my aunts were widowed. The big, busy, much-loved household in Allahabad had dispersed, leaving us with only strong family ties and strong family memories. And all around us the social and political pressures in India were reaching their peak.

One factor that added an element of fantasy to an already unusual situation was that we spent our first months in India with my father’s parents. They were both more orthodox and more rigid in the observance of family rules than the household in Allahabad. They were more formal in the observance of religious ritual—not merely, say, vegetarian, but even concerned about eating eggs because you couldn’t tell until the egg was broken whether it was really unfertilized. Rather than risk taking even embryonic life you didn’t eat eggs at all. Since your fellow feeling with all forms of life included birds, it was better to let the pigeons nest in the rafters of your bedroom than to drive them away and...

Table of contents

• Author’s Note
• ONE
• TWO
• THREE
• FOUR
• FIVE
• SIX
• SEVEN
• EIGHT
• NINE
• About the author