Book name- WANDERERS, ADVENTURERS, MISSIONARIES: EARLY AMERICANS IN INDIA
Author-Anuradha Kumar
Published by-Speaking Tiger
Price- Rs 599
It isn’t often that we think about America’s association with India when we look back at the colonial pasts across the globe. So Anuradha Kumar’s book evokes curiosity. Who were these wanderers, adventurers, and missionaries? Why did they want to come to India? What is this collection all about? The answer is quite simple, as Kumar suggests in the Introduction: “The ‘wanderers were not ‘state actors’… 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… or by the need to do something good and enobling.”
Kumar chronicles the lives of over 30 people, including families such as the Alters and the Brewsters, in her quest to shed light on some known, and many unknown, figures in history who had travelled to India between 1700 (when America was a British colony) and the 1950s (when it became a globally powerful nation). The profiles follow a specific structure where the author begins with an interesting hook and follows it up with their childhood and the course of their journey to India which, in many cases, included a brief interaction with M.K. Gandhi and his ashram. These Americans, with British forefathers, looked at India as an exotic place: “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.”
The book features the cultural interaction of such men as Frederic Tudor, Nathaniel Higginson, Edwin Lord Weeks, Satyanand Stokes, Herman Perry, among others, but it is the women who take the spotlight, be it Fanny Bullock Workman who “set her first altitude record for women by climbing the 21,000 feet Kosur Gunje” in the Karakoram range in 1899, or Arley Munson who matched “her visits to places [Rudyard] Kipling had set his stories and characters in.”
In the standout “Medical Missionaries” section, Kumar brings forth the contributions of Emma Brainerd-Ryder, Clara Swain, Ida Sophia Scudder (picture), and Munson in providing healthcare facilities to India’s young child-brides. This section is filled with interesting anecdotes about healthcare providers and their patients’ lives. The solidarity among these women, who collaborated on occasion to build hospitals in various parts of India, including Scudder’s Christian Medical College in Vellore after Swain built the first hospital (in Asia) for women and children in Bareilly, is engrossing.
Despite the monotonous narrative and the clichéd Occidental view of the Orient, the book serves as a good starting point for anyone looking to explore this niche further. Kumar pieces together the lives of these Americans through thorough research and provides the reader with many resources, including books written by these travellers, for further exploration.