THE first time I ever set foot off the small island of Sri Lanka was as a young woman just fresh out of university. I was dying to travel but in those days young women did not take off with a backpack to tour the world unescorted. I finally convinced my parents to let me join a pilgrim group (some of whom were their friends) who were on a tour of the Buddhist sites in India. So with three other college friends we set out on our pilgrimage!

The memory of that first day, arriving in the early morning at a mist covered grey railway station somewhere between Madras and Calcutta and being greeted by vendors of hot chai and women selling yards and yards of the most exquisite garlands of roses and jasmine, hits me as I now write, with the same intensity as it did that morning, and I feel I can almost smell the fragrance. My friends and I, coming from the staid world of ‘Protestant’ Buddhist Sri Lanka, where women never wore flowers in their hair except occasionally at a wedding, were enthralled. We promptly wreathed ourselves in fragrant garlands and from that point on, footloose and fancy-free, set out to savour the romance of India. In spite of gruelling train journeys, interminable delays in overcrowded stations, jostled by hundreds of other pilgrims from all over the world, the romance and excitement never palled, even though two of us four ended up with hepatitis on our return!

Many years and many visits later, when Gananath was invited to spend a year in Delhi as the Rajni Kothari chair at CSDS, my old excitement resurfaced. There was nothing I could wish for more than to spend several months in India. Much older now and less energetic, I still wished to savour its sites and sights, not as a two week tourist but at a leisured pace. Here was my chance. I tried desperately to persuade my husband to accept the offer, but he was in the middle of working on a manuscript and did not want to take time off. My once in a lifetime chance seemed to have slipped by. Then an old friend, T.N. (Loki) Madan, a member of the Board at CSDS called one morning and said, ‘Gananath you don’t have to do any teaching; just give one or two public lectures and you can if you wish, spend the rest of your time on your manuscript.’ That did it. Gananath agreed.

 

Our long stay at CSDS was for me a high point in my travelling life. Not only were we provided with a lovely spacious three bedroom modern apartment within walking distance of CSDS, but the warm and willing help of Jayasree and the staff at CSDS saw to all our creature comforts. If the TV didn’t work or the washing machine broke down, someone came and fixed it – not necessarily immediately, but it got done. I dislike cooking so I asked if they could find someone to cook lunch and Rama turned up each day to make the most delicious vegetarian meals. She spoke no English and I spoke no Hindi, but we had long conversations and I slowly managed to get the gist of what was being said.

Then one day I had to go out, Gananath was home and walked into the kitchen to get something. Rama who was no doubt bored with no one to talk to, exploded into a long discussion with my husband. Gananath was so alarmed thinking she had some problem she was desperately trying to communicate that he hurriedly called a mutual friend who lived close by to come and see what the problem was. Ein Lal turned up only to find that there was no problem. Rama was just trying to make conversation and chatting as she did with me! One of my most touching memories of that time was when we were leaving and I was saying goodbye, Rama pulled off the bangles on her hand and very gently put them on mine. They were bright red and gold and I had them on for months until, afraid the glass might break, I now keep them in my jewellery box.

 

So much for the creature comforts. For me the most valuable part of our stay in Delhi was that I had the time and the space to work, undisturbed by the involvement of running a house-hold, the extended family commitments of weddings, funerals, ritual ceremonies to attend, bureaucratic hassles to unravel, and the million other events that clutter my life when I am in Sri Lanka. Here I could work undisturbed. We each had a study (a luxury I do not have in our one bedroom Manhattan apartment), and both of us got a significant amount of work done.

We would work through the morning; lunch would be steaming hot and home-cooked by Rama, Gananath would take his siesta, but I would work into the afternoons because by evening I knew there were a million other attractions that Delhi in the winter offered – dance and music recitals, theatre, lectures, festivals, exhibitions of art and fabulous crafts and I was determined to have my fill of them. My friend, the film maker Ein, who lived round the corner, would fill me in on what was happening, where, and when, and by five in the evening the two of us were often heading out in the crush of Delhi’s rush hour traffic undaunted by the knowledge that a relatively short distance might take an hour!

Then there were the friends – old and new – and as so many of us know in our part of the Asian world, it does not take long for new friends to become warm, fast ‘old’ friends. So Rashmi and Bharat, our immediate neighbours, introduced us to Delhi’s flower market. It was a Sunday ritual with them and we became part of that ritual. We would go early to the flower market, walk or rather wade through mountains of flowers and scents, fill the car with our joint purchases, and then they would take us to a breakfast of upama and dosai and other South Indian delicacies at a restaurant close by. That flower market is another indelible memory like the rose garlands of our first morning in India.

 

Lectures and social events at CSDS were always exciting and welcoming. I could attend any lecture I was interested in, without the slightest feeling of it being an intrusion. That I think was due to Rajeev Bhargava’s inclusive warmth and generous hospitality. Again, he and Tani were new friends who soon became old friends.

February was Gananath’s 80th birthday and I said, ‘Shall we celebrate and ask a few friends for dinner?’ I should by now have known the answer. No, he wanted no such celebration. But I decided eighty years was a long life and deserved a celebration so I conspired with our old and new, now close, friends to surprise him with a small party. Food had to be ordered from outside or he would have wondered what it was all about. With Tani and Uma’s expertise that problem was soon solved, all ordered and carefully timed. Loki and Uma turned up, as if for a casual visit. Gananath was in his sarong and chatting, but as Rajeev and others started turning up with birthday greetings, he felt he had to dress in more formal attire and rushed in to change.

That was yet another memorable evening enjoyed by the once reluctant birthday ‘person’, as much as by the rest of us. In the conviviality of the evening a glass broke and I have this picture of Ashis, Rajeev and Loki, three distinguished professors, crawling on all fours, carefully, with scholarly expertise, examining the carpet inch by inch for minute pieces of glass!

 

My wanderlust was satisfied by the many trips we (or sometimes only I) took. Had ‘Barkis been willing’ as Dicken’s Pegotty would say, we could have toured all of India – North, South, East and West – as the Rajni Kothari Chair encouraged travel lectures in different parts of the country. But Gananath would not (could not bear to) be away from his manuscript for too long. I did, however, and got to see a lot. Bhopal, Sanchi, Bhubaneshwar, Konarak, Bombay, Pune, Cochin, Trivandrum, Jaipur, Udaipur, and the far reaches of Rajasthan – all places I had long wished to visit but which I would never have got to see if not for this once in a lifetime bonanza of spending seven exciting months at CSDS. The excitement and romance of that land in all its wonder and variety, so close, and yet so different, had not waned in over fifty years!

[Gananath Obeyesekere, Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Princeton University, has the following to add] Perhaps the best way to remember and commemorate my stay at CSDS is simply to quote a few words from the preface to my book, The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience, wherein I say that: One of the more memorable events in my long intellectual career was when I was invited to take up the Rajni Kothari Chair at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi in October 2008, which effectively allowed me to do whatever I wanted in the way of research and writing. That spell (in both senses of the word) permitted me to put the finishing touches to my critique of Euro-rationality in which many of us were nurtured but also to begin work on my next project on rethinking Sri Lankan history and culture.

I have been at many ‘think tanks’, sunk in them as it were, but CSDS was especially meaningful to me because it also gave me the chance to re-establish relationships with Indian intellectuals whom I have known for many years and engage in new friendships both at CSDS and in the larger academic world of Delhi. I loved the place. And I must also mention the spacious apartment that the Centre provided such that my wife and I could wander into the forest outside in the early dawn, before the famed Delhi smog threatened to smother us, and enjoy the spaces of silence that I celebrate in my book. The smog clearly indicated that the world is not a perfect place, but CSDS could hardly be blamed for the discontents of our frail modernity! Such discomforts are rewarded by long spells of cool weather and amply compensated for by the marvellous cultural life of the city which surely is another bonus for us visiting intellectuals.

 

Nevertheless, the smog reminds me of another imperfection, namely, that my wife and I would love to visit Delhi and CSDS more often and participate in its intellectual life, easy enough to do from Colombo where we live for much of the year. But, alas, it is near impossible to get a long-term visa to India unless one is a business person, and that excludes those of us whose business is research and writing. Surely, South Asian scholars working in the SAARC area ought to have some special privileges that their respective governments can work out to the benefit of us all. In my view such privileges ought to be available to scholars and thinkers irrespective of their nation of origin.