Q. What prompted you to publish these very personal letters to your parents as a book?
A. Well, they were both personal and not personal. They were indeed addressed “to Mommy and Daddy,” and contained a lot of personal material, particularly my own feelings and emotional reactions to being in a foreign land for the first time, but they also contained pages of descriptions of places I visited and people I met. There are stories I heard and such matters that constituted a kind of field notes––indeed, they were the only record I kept of that year––all material that I thought might be of more general interest. In particular, they painted a picture of rural India in those early days of Independence that was strikingly different from the India of today.
Q. You talk about how you had a smooth experience with the Indian bureaucracy in your earliest days in Calcutta, be it at the bank or the airport. How did you manage it?
A. My native American impatience with the delays of Indian bureaucracy prompted me to try to understand why everything took so long. I decided that it was because so many of the people I met in official situations were simply humanly curious about me, as apparently they had met very few, if any, young American women. And so we just talked together for a while, and I found out as much about their lives as they found out about mine. The time passed very happily and then we disposed of our official business quite quickly.
Q. What were the things that amused you most as an American girl studying in India?
A. I was always most amused by the wonderful stories that people told, particularly the Bengali folk stories and the hilarious Punjabi stories that my friend Chanchal told me. And I was fascinated, and amused,
by the ways that people expressed Bengali, thoughts that were phrased so very differently in English. I was amused by my own foolish errors in trying to speak Bengali, which often had my Bengali friends in stitches.
Q. The book explores several friendships you nurtured in India especially with Mishtuni Roy and Chanchal. How much would you say these friendships allowed you to understand the cultural
and socio-political milieu of a young independent India?
A. Those friendships with Mishtuni and Chanchal were the key to my entire time in India. First of all, they befriended me and kept me from going on making stupid mistakes about basic aspects of life in India; they taught me the ropes. And then, as we soon became good friends, they helped me to see how intelligent young women felt so differently from me about so many of the things I myself cared about––religion, politics, social life, education, families, and so much else.
Q. While reading those letters, what did the 81-year-old Indologist living in New York think about the 22-year-old woman in Shantiniketan?
A.Well, the 81-year-old woman was often amused and frequently quite ashamed of the mistakes that the 22-year-old girl made. The 22-year-old was terribly naïve about Indian politics and had a very muddled idea of Indian history particularly, but not only about Mughal history, and she was confused and bewildered by the poverty that she saw in Calcutta. At 22, I even misconstrued some of the myths that I came across and wrote down, messing up a number of details that I did finally correct, when I wrote about those myths in my academic books in later years. And I made so many social gaffs! I mistook a glass of bhang lassi for a milkshake and asked for a second helping and, as a result, unexpectedly became quite stoned.
Q. What kind of emotions did you go through while sifting through those letters?
A. First of all, I was so grateful to my mother for preserving them; if I had had them, I know I would have lost them. Then I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting they were, and quite moved by the memories of my old friends there. I laughed at the silly jokes and became quite homesick for Shantiniketan. And finally I thought that perhaps other people, too, would enjoy reading them.
Q. You have written several books on India and have attracted controversy for some of your critical work. Have you become more careful about what you write about India?
A.On the contrary, now that I am retired and can’t be fired, and I’m too old and infirm to travel to India anyway, and now that the world of Hindutva has infected not only India but the United States, I worry that my students in America will not be able to get or keep jobs, or get visas to study in India, or get their books published if they speak out about politically sensitive subjects. So it is all the more important that I speak out, as being, in a sense, so old that I am out of the game.
Q.You last visited India in 2010. What do you miss most about the country?
I miss the countryside, more than the cities. I miss the lush coasts of Kerala and the fabulous deserts of Rajasthan. And I miss the architecture, the temples and the mosques, and the great rivers, and the excitement of the great religious festivals. I keep in touch with my friends through Zoom, and sometimes they visit me here, so I don’t miss them so much as I miss the feeling of the tropical air, and the wonderful smells, the excitement of the monsoon and the sounds of the night.