Twelve days ago, on November 20, Yvette Claire Rosser, breathed her last. She would have been 70 next January. Better known as Ram Rani in Indian circles—a name given to her by her guru, Neem Karoli Baba—Rosser first visited India in 1970. As she told me the story, it was during the heyday of counterculture in the US. The 1967/1968 “revolutions” in Paris, the US and India were very much a part of the ethos of the youth, as were drugs and The Beatles.
Rosser was just 18, a bit of a hippie then. After high school, she and her young boyfriend were wandering in the Himalayas, when the latter suddenly died on her, from no apparent or visible cause. “It was the scariest thing that had ever happened to me,” was how she recalled it, “the man I loved was dying in my arms and I couldn’t do a thing about it.”
Having seen death so close and so inexplicable, that too when so young, Rosser’s perspective on life changed forever. She spent the next four years trying to understand what had happened by praying, meditating, and seeking a guru. She found the latter in Neem Karoli Baba, meeting him in 1973, just before he passed away.
Baba received her at Kainchi Dham, in Uttarakhand, the place where Steve Jobs, Ram Dass and several other famous Americans met him, and which Mark Zuckerberg later visited. It was Baba who gave Rosser both solace and direction, asking her to study further and try to explain the true meaning of Hinduism.
With this in mind, Rosser enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) as an undergraduate. There she met the famous Indian novelist, Raja Rao, who had been invited to teach philosophy at UTA. Raja Rao was somewhat of a legend on campus, with overflowing classes held in large auditoriums. Rosser took her B.A. in Indian Languages and Literatures in the South Asian Department. She also became one of the inner members of Raja Rao’s circle, especially after he married one of her close friends, Susan.
It was Raja Rao who helped her secure admission in the graduate programme of UTA when she was targeted for being “too Hindu”. He wrote a glowing letter of recommendation straight to the dean of the College of Liberal Arts: “Of all the students I have taught at The University of Texas at Austin, which were thousands, Yvette Rosser understood India the best.”
That was December 1992. The same year that the Babri Masjid fell. Rosser faced increasing hostility when she tried to explain or defend Hinduism. As one of the leading South Asian studies professors warned her, she “should never report anything positive” about the Sangh Parivar or she “would never find a job in American academia”. It took over a decade for her PhD dissertation, “Curriculum as Destiny: Forging National Identity in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh”, to be accepted. It was a 600-page study on the anti-India and anti-Hindu indoctrination or slanting in South Asian history textbooks.
During her studies, Rosser discovered that her own experience and understanding of India were very different from what was taught at US universities: “Many scholars who specialise in ‘South Asian Studies’ have a very negative, preconceived notion of the ‘Hindu revivalist movement’ in particular, and strangely enough, towards Hinduism and Indic civilisation in general, especially as ‘Hindu India’ interfaces with modernity in the socio-political realm.”
Very perceptively, she adds, “At conferences at American universities on the religion and history of South Asia, ‘Hindu’ seems to be used mainly as a derogatory term. The modern Hindu cultural-political movement is referenced by its detractors as ‘Hindu Nationalism’, ‘Hindu Chauvinism’, ‘Hindu Fundamentalism’, ‘Right-wing Hinduism’, ‘Hindu Fanaticism’, ‘Obscurantist Hinduism’, ‘Hindu Fascists’, and other pejorative terms. The term ‘Saffron’, the traditional ochre colour of a Hindu holy man’s robes, is used as a retrogressive, pilloried classification, a blanket term inferring all of the above named negative characteristics”. Rosser found herself branded, accused of “cavorting with ‘Hindu-Nazis’” though she clearly saw herself as left of centre, a “Peacenik social activist, wannabe Hippie tree-hugger” and a Gandhian (“Puzzling Dimensions and Theoretical Knots in my Graduate School Research”).
I met Rosser through Raja Rao in 1998 when I was teaching at IIT-Delhi. She was visiting India with her two sons, Jai Hanuman and Amar Josef. Her eldest, Krystina Shakti, I would meet later, when I went to UTA. I felt close to Rosser at once, as if she were an elder sister. She was large, garrulous, funny, irreverent and irrepressible. A very strange sort of academic at first glance being so open, frank and earthy, I began to see how she had a very sharp and clear mind and was widely read. She had spent months researching in Pakistan and Bangladesh but she was utterly without bigotry or hatred for any group of people. Though such an India expert, she never got a tenured position given the prevailing prejudices in the US academy.
During the last decade she spent more and more time in India. I invited her to Raja Rao’s centenary symposium at Jawaharlal Nehru University, which I had organised, in 2008. She arrived late but took over the session, regaling the audience with personal anecdotes and deep insights both into Raja Rao’s works and Advaita Vedanta. I last met her in 2018 in Delhi. We had tea and conversation. Little did I know I would never see her again.
In closing this tribute to her, I can’t help recalling her research travelogues in Pakistan. At the beginning of one, she says, that the “Ideology of Pakistan could be compared to a three-legged stool, supported by the pillars of (1) Islam, (2) the Two-Nation Theory, and (3) the fear of Hindu domination”. Reading her work serves as a warning to us of what we should not become—an inverse, opposite and reactive image of our neighbours. Ram Rani’s work shows us that the closing of the Indian mind is a very real danger. It would be a sad thing indeed if we allowed this to happen.
(Views are personal)
Makarand R Paranjape
Professor of English at JNU
(Tweets @MakrandParanspe)