Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [1]
America was at war when he'd opted for the Peace Corps. He was assigned to a village in Bihar. After two years, forty pounds lighter, immune to diseases that would flatten most villagers, fluent in dialects no white man had ever mastered, instead of going back to America he'd embarked on a countrywide study of Raj-era houses and public buildings. Of course we didn't know this during the years we were his students; we were an incurious lot. Everything he learned in those years he'd gathered by tramping through villages and the long-ignored small towns in the mofussils, where children who'd never seen a white man would jab their fingers into his pale, dusty arms. He was always alone and traveled like a poor villager by bus and on foot, carrying his few belongings in a cloth bundle. The energy! The love! In those first three years in India he completed the work of a lifetime.
When we knew him, he was living monklike on a teacher's modest salary, funding his forays into the hinterland by moonlighting as a private English-language tutor, American or British. By the time our lives intersected his, he had acquired a scooter and taping equipment. He went to villages and recorded long litanies of anecdotal history, family memories verging on fantasy, and, especially, local songs. He scoured ancient, abandoned temples. He discovered and catalogued shards of terra-cotta sculptures. He tried, and failed, to interest us in his eccentric history of modern India.
Of course, not all the houses he investigated were crumbling shells, and not all their inhabitants were humble village folk. Some of the houses, and their owners, were survivors of another era, shuttered off from modern India. A few of the houses—dilapidated these days—had been glorious mansions, bearing Raj-era names taken from British literature. Some of their contents were of museum quality.
Classic Indian Architecture: Public and Private (photos and sketches by the author) is a guided tour of those great public buildings and stately colonial residences from Calcutta through the Punjab, down the coast to Bombay, through Goa, and then to the South. Only a newcomer to India could have the eyes, the energy, and the devotion to swallow our country whole and regurgitate its remains with all the love of a mother penguin feeding her chick. Thirty-odd years ago, our teacher, then twenty-three years old, had presented himself at the front door of an 1840s mansion with a rolled-up scroll—the original floor plans—and asked the owner, then a fiftyish widow, if he could date the various additions to the mansion and catalogue its contents. In its 1840s configuration, before the piling on of late-Victorian turrets and towers, the widow's home had set a standard for Anglo-Indian architecture.
The widow had been flattered by the attention from a dashing young foreigner. The eventual beneficiary of that flattery would be one of Mr. Champion's students.
What did we give him? What do we owe him? Every developing country has its subsociety of resident aliens—refugees from affluence, freelance idealists, autodidacts collecting odd bits of "exotic" knowledge. Ours was trapped by beauty, love, spirituality, guilt, the prison of his own self-righteousness—and couldn't leave. He thrived on hardship while we pursued professional success and material comfort.
For whatever sinister or innocent reason, every now and then he conferred special attention on a young man or woman. "You will carry on," he would