विभूतिमूर्ति

THREE EMINENT MEN

My grief is unfathomable. I was recently in US and I felt deeply aggrieved for three of my most revered friends in US - 'philosopher and guide' as all three were to me'. They were : Lakshmeshwar Dayal. ex-Chief Secretary, Bihar, who had been living in US (Florida) with his son for the past decade or so. And the two others were, Dr Walter Hauser of the University of Virginia, and Dr Stanley Wolpert of the University of California, Los Angeles; both eminent historians and Professors Emeritus till their last days in the universities they served. Here I remember them in this joint obituary tribute in the order of their passing away.

LAKSHMESHWAR DAYAL

1925- 2017

Lakshmeshwar Dayal passed away on 15 Nov, 2017 in Florida. He was known to me since the early 90s in Patna when I joined a Magadh University college there. But seven or eight years before his death,he had shifted finally to US in Florida, because all his three children had settled in US. With LD, I had long phone chats almost every evening which I recorded, with his permission, in which he narrated his reminiscences of his past personal life and his experiences of a long and distinguished life in government service in India. The idea was to compile them into a coherent small semi-autobiographical book in due course.

He implored me many times to visit him in Florida where he was spending the last few years of his life in almost bed-ridden illness. His insistence had grown, particularly, since my grandson, Anuneet Krishna, was now studying in US at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and I was thinking of visiting him there in near future. But, alas, that was not to be, because LD’s condition suddenly started deteriorating and he passed away in Nov, 2017. He was in his early 90s when he breathed his last. A few months later when a memorial service was held in Patna, I recited a poem as my tribute to his memory. Here I give some bits from that long poem.

My words fail me

When I need them most

When I want them

To speak for my feelings –

Feelings that have stayed with me

For the past many months

Feelings I can hardly share -

Sad feelings of good times ….

When you are not there
Even on the other side of time
When my words stand on this side
With fingers crossed -
Baffled, perplexed, disoriented
With their voice lost
Because the listener
Who used to hear them
From across the oceans
And the vast continents
With evening on one side
And morning on the other
And the earth rolling

Forever on its eternal axis
To conjoin the two together

My words have all their syllables
And all their sound and echo
Only no voice to articulate
Because the listener who lay
On the other side of time
Has suddenly fallen silent….

He had been an eloquent
Man of letters and words
Often gilded with high poetry –

Shakespeare, Keats,Tennyson

Even Kalidas, Tagore and Nirala

Ghalib and Vidyapati and all the rest

Of the finest in literature
A great raconteur with a rich fund

Of fascinating anecdotes
Pulled out of the hazy past

Like pigeons from his old hat
Of academia and governance

Late in every evening

After his morning breakfast

He would come by my side

Reminiscing about his past….

The story he narrated with zest

And verve, a gripping tale

Of struggle and achievement

Reminding me of the Ancient Mariner

Holding the Wedding Guest in thrall

“Who cannot choose but hear” of

The ship in peril and the albatross

Round the sailor’s neck.

That story needs to be told

Rich as it is in wealth of experience

And wisdom and compassion

Someday that story will

Have to be told in full, or, perhaps,

It will narrate itself in all its fullness

Someday the teller will come alive

In his own words, spoken and audible

Let’s wait for that day, for that

Voice to be alive again

Let’s wait for that enthralling story…

DR STANLEY WOLPERT

1927 - 2019

Dr Stanley Wolpert, I missed meeting only by a few weeks when at last I arrived in Los Angeles to attend my grandson, Anuneet Krishna’s graduation ceremony (MS in Elec. Engg)  on 9 May, 2019 at the University of Southern California. He had passed away only a few weeks before, on 19 February. Later, on June 4, my grandson drove me to the Department of Asian History at USC where I presented a copy of my book on Dr Rajendra Prasad, as my tribute to his cherished memory. Dr Wolpert had enthused me so warmly when earlier, as I had  just started writing my biography and sent him a few chapters for his preview, he had written me a very encouraging letter. When I learnt more about his academic career, I was simply struck by the coincidence of our service spans as university teachers being exactly identical. We both joined university teaching in 1959 and retired in 1999. And when I read his books in LA – his biographies of Nehru and Gandhi, and his first novel on Gandhi’s assassination ‘Nine Hours to Rama’ that had been banned for time in India during Nehru’s period, I felt a deeper bond with him, because his approach to contemporary Indian history, particularly of the Indian freedom movement, was strikingly compatible with my own as I had dealt with it in my biography of Dr Rajendra Prasad.

I have already written an obituary tribute for Dr Wolpert in the previous post on this blog. (Just click back to Older Posts on this blog), and I intend to write again on all three of my friends – philosophers and  real guides as they proved themselves for me, in some detail, and individually, some time in future. Here, then I reminisce for a while about the third of these eminent friends, Dr Walter Hauser.

PROF. WALTER HAUSER
1927-2019

Prof. Walter Hauser, Professor of Modern History, University of Virginia, world authority on peasant movement in Bihar, India, passed away, after a prolonged illness, on 30 May in Charlottesville, while I was still in US, in Los Angeles; though I could not, possibly, have travelled  across US, all the way to Charlottesville in Virginia to see him in his grave illness. Also I was not aware of his serious illness when I was in LA. In fact, I had been  rather quite out of touch with him for the last few years.

I first met Prof. Hauser in Patna in 1984. He was in India on his university project to study Indian parliamentary elections consequent upon the assassination of Indira Gandhi, in which the Congress (I) under the incumbent PM Rajiv Gandhi had a landslide victory with a tally of 404. I was then teaching in RDDJ College, Munger, and my friend late DP Yadav, Congress MP, had introduced me to Dr Hauser who had come to tour through the Munger parliamentary constituency with me as his interpreter and guide. Wendy Singer was then accompanying him as his research assistant during that Munger visit.

I have vivid memories of going round villages in the Munger parliamentary constituency with him meeting villagers and the different party candidates whom he would interview recording with his small tape recorder and snapping all the time with his Leica camera whatever struck him as relevant, including banners and posters, and I would always act as his interpreter. Once travelling with him from Patna to Munger by taxi, he asked me to locate the roadside house of the brother of Karyanand Sharma at Barahia and there he had a very long interview with the bare-bodied old man in his hut. Always ready with his camera and tape recorder he would ask very pointed questions about the involvement of the peasants in the politics of the times which I would translate for him as interlocutor.

  

He stayed in Munger for several days and lunched and dined on several occasion at my residence in the college campus interacting with my children and my wife. His research assistant, Wendy Singer, who always moved with him, would often take notes for him. On these visits of Dr Hauser to my house,I, too, snapped some photos. Some of these photos can be seen here. These photos were also shown in the slide-show in Charlottesville in his memorial service recently. Some of these coloured photos are of a recent meeting with Dr Hauser's daughter (Sheila) and granddaughter (Rosemary) with Kailash Jha who had come to meet me at my daughter, Punita's house in Patna, in March this year. Kailash also gave me a recently published copy of his book The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha:1929-1942, a book of commendable scholarship exploring in depth the peasant movements in Bihar which had developed parallel, and generally in conflict, with Gandhi’s freedom movement.

These were three gems of scholars and historians of contemporary India -  the two Americans being professional academicians, and the Indian being a top bureaucrat with writerly proclivities. And in this brief blog post written as a combined obituary, I pay my reverent homage to their memory, who left behind precious memories in my life spent in their association.

It is, thus, with deep grief that I mourn the death of these -  my three great friends, whom I missed meeting personally in US due to my delayed visit there, under inevitable circumstances. My grief thus gets manifold!  May their noble souls rest in eternal heavenly peace!

© Text & Photos: Dr BSM Murty

A RELEVANT REJOINDER

This relates to a small unsubtantiated mention in Dr Wolpert's book GANDHI'S PASSION (OUP,2001,p. 246-7) about Gandhi's harbouring a wish which he had expressed to Mountbatten, the outgoing Governor General of independent India, that he could well replace him on that top position, and that when suggested to Nehru he had outright rejected it. When I read this wild suggestion, I mentioned it to a historian friend of mine, a professor of history, for due verification through research. My friend, however, in his hasty judgement, without veryfying the fact posted it on his FB Wall. I immediately posted a clarification regarding this unverified FB post, which instantly elicited several comments of incredulity and even a comment of authentic denial by Dr Yuvraj Deo Prasad, an eminent Indian historian in his own right, and asked my historian friend to delete the questionable  post from his FB Wall so that no further confusion is created, which my friend promptly did. Then I wrote both to Shri Rajmohan Gandhi and Dr Yuvraj Deo for their authentic views which I quote below. First Shri Rajmohan Gandhi:

"In the year 2001, when I met Stanley Wolpert in LA, I confronted him on this suggestion. He had no answer. We should remember that Wolpert was a writer of fiction also. No one else at any stage has recorded or reported the alleged wish. It seems to be a fantasy, an invention. Best. "-- Rajmohan                                                            (email:25/8/19@15.23)

Another rejoinder came in a comment by Dr Yuvrajdeo Prasad, an eminent historian and one time Director of AN Sinha Institute, Patna. He wrote on this issue:

"I haven't read your friend's comments. However, as you are aware of my long and close association with Stanley who used to be my host during my visits to LA and presented a signed copy of the aforesaid book, told me that he won't take up any other South Asian leader after doing Gandhi. The point that you are raising need not be highlighted as his other books on Jinnah, Nehru etc have also been subjected to a lot of controversies for containing erroneous facts. This, however, doesn't undermine his stature as a most prolific and popular South Asian American historians whose classes used to be overcrowded and I had the privilege to address them on a couple of occasions.

I now believe that after these two authentic testimonies the matter is settled once for all that it would be almost sacrilegious to suggest such an impossible idea for one who is iconised as a model of sterling moral values the world over. Nevertheless, Dr Stanley Wolpert's stature as a world-class historian of modern India is hardly dented by such small errors of fact to any significant extent, as my obituary tribute reverently delineates.

[Here I would like also to add an email comment of Sean Doyle, an Australian author friend, just received, in contradiction of  Dr Wolpert's erroneous observation. In that comment he writes: "Murty, I asked a retired Indian history academic friend about Gandhi and his reply was : No, I have never heard of Gandhi wanting to be Gov. Gen. - and it'd be uncharacteristic of him to want such a position.']

I do intend some time in future to write about Dr Wolpert's three biographies of Gandhi, Jinnah and Nehru, and his controversial novel Nine Hours to Rama, on this blog, and having myself recently written and published a biography of Dr Rajendra Prasad (see extracts in Older Posts on this blog), I am fully aware of the hazards of biography writing which is a tract of semi-historical creative writing where even 'Angels Fear to Tread'!