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Show EDWARD G. LUEDERS among the Indians? ru EDW: Oh, I certainly did in India! When we left in 1946 partition was alr ady 1, 2 underway. It was pre-partitioned in the final discrimination of Pakistan by the s paration between the Hindu and Muslim populations. But, there was a lot of (a nice word would be) unrest. It was revolutionary times there, and we were carried from Barrackpore through the city to the King George docks, where the troopships were waiting. In canvascovered four-by-four, six-by-six, trucks, and were pelted. We drove through mobs in the streets of Calcutta. Pelted with rocks, and I don't know what else, as we went, sitting inside of like a cocoon, wondering if we'd make it to the ship! They were very rough times, and so that sense of what was happening in India is what was upon us. We got out in the nick of time, because it continued, as you know, for quite a while. It continues to this day into the current unsettled, rival Pakistani and Indian countries, and the possibility of war. That division in India was always tenuous, and at that point, was explosive. So I was very much aware - not in an academic way - that we were right on the spot, this was a split country. India was Hindu, but it was also Muslim! There was a sense that Hinduism was alien and strange but Muslims weren't, that they were somehow more western then the Hindus. So we had split affinities to them. We were there as the guests of India, and India absorbed a heterogeneous population, but the whole history of India - some of which I was aware of- that went back for a long time, with the Moguls, the Mogul empires. It was a very difficult, indigenous kind of warfare, and enmity, that 50 |
