| Subject: Santha Rama Rau, Wrote of India’s Landscape and Psyche, Dies at 86 |
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died April 21
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Date Posted: Friday, April 24, 2009, 01:17:13am
Santha Rama Rau, an Indian-born, Western-educated journalist whose work helped demystify the Indian subcontinent for American readers in the decades after World War II and India’s independence, died Tuesday in Amenia, N.Y. She was 86 and lived in Amenia, in Dutchess County, and in Manhattan.
The cause was cardiopulmonary failure, said her son, Jai Bowers.
Ms. Rama Rau wrote novels and adapted the E. M. Forster novel “A Passage to India” for the stage, but she was largely a travel writer, a chronicler of journeys in Asia, Africa and the former Soviet Union for publications like The New Yorker, Harper’s, Holiday and The New York Times Magazine. Many of her stories, written with stylish simplicity in the first person, were collected as books that read almost as autobiography. The titles included “East of Home” (1950), “View to the Southeast” (1957) and “My Russian Journey” (1959). She also wrote an autobiography, “Gifts of Passage” (1961), that reads like almost like a travelogue.
“It is a short but extraordinarily dramatic flight,” she wrote in that book, of a trip from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to Kabul, Afghanistan. “The Hindu Kush is the wildest and most forbidding part of the Himalayas, so high that the plane flies between, not over, the mountains, and from the cabin you look up to see the snow-capped, treacherous peaks. Below you is a harsh and bony map of precipitous valleys and rocky ravines — a landscape utterly without comfort, and on too immense a scale to be anything but daunting.”
Her best known works were about her home country, including “This Is India” (1953), a tour through the Indian landscape and the Indian psyche, and a Time-Life cookbook, “The Cooking of India” (1970).
“Our job — those of us lucky to have lived in these two countries — is to interpret them to one another,” she said in an interview with The Wichita Beacon in Kansas after the publication of “This Is India.” “If we can make ourselves — the Indians — real people to the Americans, we shall have done more than our politicians are able to do.”
Vasanthi Rama Rau was born in Madras, India, on Jan 24, 1923. Her father, Sir Benegal Rama Rau, was a high-ranking civil servant in India’s finance department who later became ambassador to Japan and to the United States. Her mother, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, was a crusader for women’s reproductive rights and a founder of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
When Santha was a girl, her father was stationed in England. It was a trip back to India at 16, with her mother and her sister, Premila, that inspired her first book, “Home to India,” published in 1945, shortly after she graduated from Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Though a youthful book, it immediately established the voice of an educated discoverer — observant, amused, self-deprecating, instructive without being pedantic — that would characterize her work even when she matured:
“The first words my grandmother said to me when I returned to Bombay after 10 years’ absence were, ‘My dear child, where in India will we find a husband tall enough for you?’
“ ‘I don’t think I need to worry about that for some time,’ I suggested. ‘I’m only 16.’
“ ‘That’s nearly twice as old as I was on my wedding day.’ ”
After her 1977 marriage to Gurdon Wattles, a legal officer at the United Nations, she was known in her private life as Santha Rama Rau Wattles. He died in 1995. A previous marriage, to Faubion Bowers, a linguist and writer who was an expert on Kabuki, the stylized classical theater of Japan, ended in divorce. Both marriages afforded her the opportunity to travel widely.
“They had a vagabond type of existence,” her son, Mr. Bowers, said of his parents, though he acknowledged they were affluent vagabonds.
In addition to her son, who lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., she is survived by four stepchildren: Stuart Scadron-Wattles of Seattle, Joshua Wattles of Los Angeles, Arabella Wattles Teal of Washington and Katherine Wattles of Athens; a granddaughter; and four stepgrandchildren.
Ms. Rama Rau’s adaptation of “A Passage to India,” Forster’s 1924 novel about the impact of colonialism on both the British and the Indians, was endorsed by Forster himself. It played successfully on the West End in London, ran for 109 performances on Broadway in 1962 and was used by the director David Lean as source material his 1984 film. Her work on it was central to what she understood to be her responsibility, her family said — namely to explain herself and India to a world that was curious about both.
“She was such an unusual person,” said her stepdaughter Ms. Teal, “that there was almost no occasion on which she didn’t attract attention, just by being herself.”
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