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Santha Rama Rau
‐
Writer and journalist who spent her childhood in England
Other names
Vasanthi Rama Rau
Santha Rama Rau Wattles
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
Location(s)
London
W6 7BS
United Kingdom Weybridge, Surrey
KT13 9EE
United Kingdom
Place of death
US
Date of time spent in Britain
1929–39
About
Born in 1923 to Benegal Rama Rau, a member of the Round Table Conference, financial advisor to the Simon Commission and ambassador, and Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, a pioneer of birth control and President of the All India Women’s Conference, Santha Rama Rau was a journalist, dramaturge and travel writer. She travelled widely throughout her life, moving to England with her family in 1929, when just 6 years old, because of her father’s involvement with the Simon Commission. During the 1930s she attended a Quaker school in Weybridge, Surrey with her older sister, Premila, before moving on to St Paul’s School, London. Her book Gifts of Passage describes the years of her childhood as ‘spent in English schools and in holidays on the Continent’ (p. 23), which underlines the cosmopolitan, elite character of her life. When in London, her parents took in refugees from concentration camps, including Lilian Ulanowsky, a Jewish refugee from Vienna who became guardian for the sisters when their mother went to join their father in South Africa. The family were all in South Africa during the outbreak of the Second World War. Unable to get passage back to England, they decided to return to India, when Santha was 16, to stay with the children’s grandmother. Rama Rau describes returning to India and experiencing nostalgia for Britain in her Home to India, the book which launched her career as a writer and was published when she was just 22 years old.
Rama Rau completed her university education at Wellesley College in the US in 1944, and made her home in New York City from the early 1950s. She married the diplomat Faubion Bowers, an expert on Asian arts and theatre. The two travelled together through South East Asia, Africa and Soviet Russia. They had a son together but later divorced, and Rama Rau went on to marry Gurdon Wallace Wattles in 1970.
In her book on Rama Rau, Antoinette Burton describes ‘the modicum of fame [she] achieved’ as resulting ‘mainly from her success at being recognized as an authority on India on the eve of independence’ (p. 4). To the ‘West’, she offered an ‘insider’s view’ of Indian culture, countering stereotyping and orientalist misrepresentations, especially in This Is India. Her literary achievement that is perhaps best known in Britain is her adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India for the stage, produced on Broadway in 1962 after runs in Oxford and London, which served as the basis of David Lean’s 1985 film of the novel.
E. M. Forster (adapted his A Passage to India for the stage), Sarojini Naidu, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (mother).
Home to India (New York: Harper, 1945)
East of Home (New York: Harper, 1950)
This Is India (New York: Harper, 1954)
A View to the Southeast (New York: Harper Brothers, 1957)
My Russian Journey (New York: Harper, 1959)
A Passage to India: A Play by Santha Rama Rau from the Novel by E. M. Forster (London: Edward Arnold, 1960)
Gifts of Passage (New York: Harper & Row, 1961)
The Cooking of India (New York: Time-Life Books, 1969)
The Adventuress (New York: Dell, 1970)
Burton, Antoinette, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007)
Rama Rau, Dhanvanthi, An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, [1977] 1978)
Santha Rama Rau Papers, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston
In London we could not, of course, help knowing a good deal about what was going on in India. My father, as Deputy High Commissioner for India, was inextricably involved in many of the developments, and conversation at home was full of references to the growing power of the nationalist movement, of the imprisoning of Indian leaders, of Mahatma Gandhi’s revolutionary ideas…We talked about Gandhi, Nehru, Sapru, Rajagopalachari, and countless other names that became great in Indian history in their own time. Some of them were related to our family, many were personal friends. It was a curiously intimate yet distant view of India’s progress.
Meanwhile all around us in Europe, we got a similarly personal though far less exalted view of the events that were shaping our generation. On French beaches we might meet groups of Hitler Youth on some kind of organized walking tour. At school in England we might be asked to support the international youth camps of the League of Nations. Like so many of our friends, we took in refugees from Dachau and other concentration camps until they could find places of their own in London or get a work permit or a visa to America. My sister, with thousands of idealistic people of her age, felt strongly about the Spanish Civil War, and I, deeply impressed by her sentiments, fell in love with a young man I had never met only because he wrote beautiful poetry and was killed in Spain.
All this was, naturally, quite typical of the generation that grew up in Europe between the wars. The only thing that set us apart in our minds was that we would return to India to live, that eventually our loyalties would be tied to a country that was growing daily less familiar.
Santha Rama Rau, Gifts of Passage (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961), pp. 23–4
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
