A Passage to India and Beyond
In 1992 a friend invited me to travel with her to India. We would be there for the month of August, after the monsoon season but still at a very hot time. India is the most foreign place you can visit, she said, that will be accessible to you through English. I was just short of fifty and had never ventured beyond a narrow circle of Western European countries. To have gone many times to England, France, Italy, and Switzerland and dipped into Germany, Ireland, and Spain, to know good French, fair Italian and German, and a smattering of Spanish had seemed broad enough to confer cosmopolitan credentials. But I also knew my experience was limited—the word we were beginning to use was “Eurocentric.” There was the whole rest of the world to reckon with, and my friend, who taught Asian Studies at a nearby college, seemed a good person with whom to begin this reckoning. She had lived in Delhi and Calcutta and done field work in Bengali villages; she knew India well and would be an astute guide.
I had no way of knowing I was on the brink of a phase of experience that would extend over the next twenty years and lead me to unexpected new places both through travel and in my reading and teaching. If I think of my life in stages, I can see that just as my attachment to the struggles of the orphan once gave way to fascination with the freedoms of the new woman and the scope of the artist, so now like the immigrants I would soon be teaching about in my courses, I was about to exchange roots for “routes”—the title of anthropologist James Clifford’s 1997 work as he explores “traveling in dwelling, dwelling in traveling,” no longer opposing concepts in a world on the move. Through friendships and accidents of family (my son married a Frenchwoman), I would travel twice to India as well as a number of other non-Western countries, teach a semester at a university in Paris, and embrace in my reading and teaching the postcolonial broadening of the field of English literature.
In 1992 all of this lay ahead. I was excited at the prospect of going to India, but I was also afraid, and not just because this distant and unknown land would most likely prove too hot, too poor, too polluted, too upsetting to my somewhat delicate stomach to make traveling there an easy trip. For all the places I had been to, I was not someone who easily encountered the unfamiliar. It’s not that I considered staying home. My mother’s daughter, I had been taught to say yes to opportunity. “Step into the tennis ball; don’t back away from it,” my mother had repeatedly exhorted. When someone asks you to do something, say yes, and then figure out how to do it. And at all costs, keep your doubts to yourself.
It’s not a bad way to live. I had said yes, for example, when offered the teaching job in 1971 at the University of Hawaii, even though it was so far from my life and friends in New York. And however hard my time there, those three years in Hawaii, in which I taught students from many different Asian countries, opened my world a little more. I had said yes again when offered the job of Dean of Students at Bowdoin, even though I hadn’t the slightest notion of what it meant to be a college administrator. The prospect of the job gave me nightmares, but I took it anyway. Over twelve years I had a succession of dean’s positions, enjoying the challenges of the work though without ever feeling this was quite my true vocation. Still, always I went forward, always dismissing reservations, trying to step into the tennis ball.
But if Hawaii had seemed far away from my New York vantage point, India seemed even farther. Anticipating our trip, I had the sensation of a kind of freefall. It was similar to the way I had felt as I child when I was afraid that the road ahead, as we wound along the curves of the Pacific Coast Highway, wouldn’t be there if I couldn’t see it. I had loved plunging into the winding streets of European cities, but always with a sense of how I could get back to the main artery: the Seine or the Tiber, the Ramblas or the Brompton Road; always knowing where the subway stops were and where I was in relation to some home base. Going to India seemed like venturing beyond where I could see the road ahead; it seemed like going behind the length of any lifeline. On the level of a very primal fear, I worried how I could go so far away and still make it home again.
To give myself courage and prepare for the trip, I started a program of reading. Books would show me where I was going and make it more palpable to me that I would get there and back. I read histories of India, ancient and modern, books on Hinduism and Islam, travel books—one wonderful one, Arrow of the Blue Skinned God, recounts a modern traveler’s journey tracing the route of Rama in the ancient epic the
