Gertrude Emerson’s family line had several notable personalities, including the great American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson, the founder of the Transcendentalist Movement in the nineteenth century America, that had significant influence in the New England region on the American East Coast. Gertrude was born in 1890 at Lake Forest, Illinois where her father was a University Professor of Classical Languages and Archaeology. He later joined the Cornell University and Gertrude’s childhood was spent there. Prof. Emerson, however, spent long periods in Europe in building up his archaeological collections, something he did for several American Universities. The family often went with him to Greece and Turkey on these expeditions. As a result, Gertrude grew up in the atmosphere permeated with the classical Greco-Roman culture. Her father regaled the children with stories from the Trojan War, the history of the Roman Empire and the Crusades. When Gertrude was fifteen her father was appointed the curator of the Art Institute of Chicago, the same venue where, about adecade before, Swami Vivekananda had delivered his famous ‘Chicago Lectures’ in September 1893 (including his most famous short address starting ‘Sister and Brothers of America’ delivered on 11th September.) Gertrude attended the University of Chicago and specialised in English literature.
Right from her younger days, the adventurist in Gertrude had a marked proclivity towards making decisions thought to be rather unconventional. After her university education in 1912, she took up a job in Japan at a time when hardly any American women fancied living in the Orient. She taught English at a Japanese School and wrote articles for American publications on various facets of Japanese culture. She studied Japanese drama and was interested in the intricate Japanese art of floral arrangement. She also gathered substantial knowledge about the Japanese craft of woodcut printing and had built good collection of that herself.
For her return journey to America she chose not to go through the Pacific but opted for the longest route possible via China, Singapore, Europe and finally sailing through the Atlantic reached New York. She had exactly ten cents left when she disembarked, and even the ship services of disembarkment and luggage collections etc had to be paid by her brother who had come to receive her.
Following her return, for a brief period she taught English at the University of Chicago and wrote on Noh drama – a Japanese theatrical form developed in the fourteenth century, and also translated miniature verses from Japanese to English.
But soon after, in 1915, the attraction for the Orient again beckoned her and she went to China and Japan as a special writer for the New York Times, meeting people from all social classes – from statesmen and scholars to factory-workers and peasants. That was the time when trouble was brewing between China and Japan, and China just got saved from the fate of almost getting reduced to a vassal state of Japan.
Gertrude’s first love of living an explorer’s life soon made her to give up the routine career of a university teacher and join the journal ‘Asia’ founded by Willard Straight, where she was offered the role of the Associate Editor in 1919. She would thereafter live a life of an explorer and write about her varied experiences from distant lands. She did surveys in the jungles of South America. She took walking trips for months through Philippines, Sumatra, and into the Malay country. She travelled the interiors of the African continent, disembarking at Port Sudan, travelling to Khartoum, studying the meeting of the White Nile and Blue Nile there. She then sailed the Nile downstream towards the north to Egypt, visiting Cairo, studying the ancient civilization, visting the Pyramids and savouring the beauties of the Nile delta.
On a later tour in 1925-26, she travelled through Turkey, visiting Istanbul and Ankara, Damascus in Syria, Tripoli and Beirut in Lebanon, and moving through the Arabian deserts in caravans. She visited Baghdad, Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz (the town of great Persian poets Shadi and Hafiz.) She saw the ruins of Persepolis, locally known as Takht-e-Jamshit – the capital of the Achaemenid Empire where once ruled their legendary kings Darius and Xerxes, descendants of Cyrus the Great. This once great town was first brought down from its glory by the Alexander’s campaign. In Tehran she saw one of the models of the original ‘Peacock Throne’ (Takhte-e-Tavus) plundered from Delhi and marvelled at its splendour. All this while she often journeyed in second-class compartments in trains, an enterprise which even male Europeans, let alone women, seldom hazarded. She lived in ordinary, often dingy, inns and motels (sometimes preferring to sleep in the open and airy verandahs to smelly rooms) and ate whatever came her way. Often she was stuck in situations where was nobody understood a word of hers – at that time she primarily spoke English and French. She wanted to reach India through the mountainous passes of the Afghan country, but weather and other reasons of permit etc rendered that impossible. So from the Persian port town of Bushehr, she, being true to her nature, took the longest voyage to Bombay in a ship that stopped at all minor ports too.
She had been a world traveller in the truest sense, often taking dangerous adventures too – boating in a heavily crocodile infested river, travelling in jungles among panthers, spending night in interiors of British Guyana with deadliest South American spider Tarantula on the side of her bed – memoirs of her travels, often documented in ‘Asia’ magazine in form of articles, can match the best of travel and adventure writing ever written.
She had a close friend in Lowell Thomas, the famous American adventure-reporter and travel-writer, who accompanied Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence in his exploits in the Arabian deserts during the First World War, videographing valuable footage of that campaign, and subsequently authoring the celebrated book ‘With Lawrence in Arabia’ published in 1924 – the book which made Col. T.E. Lawrence widely known throughout the world and later, along with Lawrence’s own account ‘Seven Pillars of Freedom’ became the source material for David Lean’s masterly four-hour film ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’
Col. Lawrence was a very shy man and the fame he received had discomfited him so much that he moved his quarters to rather obscure parts of the British countryside and changed his name to Shaw. Gertrude managed to meet him when one evening Lawrence suddenly phoned her and presented himself at 9 pm at the London hotel she was staying. Five feet three inches in height, Lawrence was in reality much different from Peter O’ Toole, the tall actor who played his character in Lean’s film. They talked of Middle East and Lawrence apparently was not happy at the direction geopolitics in the region had evolved since the War and was no more keen to play any role in that region’s diplomacy. Not too many years later, Lawrence passed away in a motorcycle accident at the age of 46 in a southern county of England where he then lived.
Lowell Thomas addressed Gertrude as ‘Miss Marco Polo.’ In 1936 he wrote a fascinating article on Gertrude, who had just started a new life in India, titled ‘Ninety Pounds of Courage’ in which he called her ‘one of the greatest living American women, yet to the multitudes of her own country she remains completely unknown.’
In this flowery tribute, he compared Gertrude to many other highly accomplished and distinguished women he had met :
‘In the long years of wandering up and down the world it has been my good fortune to meet many remarkable and admirable women. I have discussed feminism with Christabel Pankhurst, Carrie Chapman Catt, Jane Adams. I have known great Opera singers – Melba, Schumann-Heink. I have known flyers – Ruth Law and Katherine Stinson and Titayne, the spectacular French aviatric and diplomatic envoy, and Amelia Earhart Putnam. I have vivid recollections of meeting and talking with two women rulers, the late Begum of Bhopal and Queen Mary of England. I would like to remember interesting visits with Maria Montessori, Cornelia Sorabji, the Parsi leader of the emancipation movement for Indian women; Annie Besant at her Theosophical colony in equatorial Hindustan and Gertrude Bell of Baghdad, the remarkable and gallant woman who, perhaps, more than any other one person, held Iraq for England.
‘But there is one woman among these who stands out a little above all of them, because of her combination of unusual qualities. An able executive, a gifted writer, a magnetic public speaker, a scholar, a dauntless traveller, and explorer, a penetrating intelligence at work upon our problems of tomorrow, an interpreter to the East to us who badly need such interpreters, she is a woman whom we should not wait for our children to be proud of. As an American proud of outstanding achievements of American women, I give you – Gertrude Emerson.’
Exploration and love for nature in all its variety went hand in hand for Gertrude. One of her favourite poems ‘Trees’ written by the young American poet Joyce Kilmer, who died in the First World War at age of 31. It went like this :
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast
A tree that looks at God all day.
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer hear
A nest of robins in her hair
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who infinitely lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
At some point Gertrude and some other explorers came together to set up the ‘Society of Women Geographers.’ She was offered the post of Managing Editor of ‘Asia’ but never preferring a desk job to the life of a roving explorer she rejected it and continued her field tours.
Gertrude had first came to India in 1921 after her East Asia travels entering India through Calcutta. She had corresponded with Tagore and also met the Viceroy, Lord Reading, who, did not want her to see a rather bleak picture of the British India during the heyday of the Non-Cooperation Movement, and therefore suggested that she visit the princely states of Rajputana and Mysore to get varied flavours of the subcontinent, which she did. She also visited the Ajanta and Ellora and marvelled at the artworks there. She firmly believed that it is these things that gave an anchoring to the Indian civilization, something it has held on to, notwithstanding the tumults that time presented to the land and its people.
She had already written to Gandhi who had responded to her, as was his wont, as ‘Dear Friend’ – something he did to all the correspondents he did not know directly, ranging from common folks to world statesmen, even Adolf Hitler. Gandhi had suggested that she come to Delhi but later, due to change in his plans, asked her to see him in Lahore. She met Gandhi at Lala Lajpat Rai’s house in Lahore and visited a Mosque with him where huge crowds had gathered showering flowers on Gandhi. She described how people thronged to touch Gandhi’s feet, sometimes touching hers too. Later, she had the occasion to see him in a less hurried atmosphere of the Sabarmati Ashram.
About Gandhi she said, ‘I felt he was not a man to be tempted cheaply. He sat there like an ascetic deep in contemplation, aloof from the crowd. He never descended to it. His smile breaks around his mouth and passes quickly like a veil, thrown for an instant across a settled melancholy. When he sits spinning he looks like the fifteenth century poet Kabir.’ She also evocatively described the ambience of the morning prayer assembly at Sabarmati Ashram.
India began to captivate her to a much greater extent. Energised from a suggestion given by Tagore, she resolved to spend a year all by herself in 1926-27 in an Indian village after her travel in the Middle East, described above. She had discussed this idea with Gandhi who suggested that she might consider camping in a village in Bihar where the Congress machinery was strong and could act as her support system. But she declined the offer, being intent on completely being on her own in this immersion exercise. She wanted to live as a commoner among the rural masses, and study their ways of life. She chose the village Pachperwa, in Gonda district in eastern United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), bordering Nepal. She first lived in a tent and then built a small cottage for herself.
It was during her sojourn at Pachperwa that Gertrude had to visit Calcutta for a few days for some work. Someone she met suggested that she could use this opportunity to visit the Belur Math and for this purpose introduced her to Boshi Sen saying that he would give a good guided tour of the Math. Actually their paths had once crossed earlier too, in 1923, when Boshi visited the ‘Asia’ office and met the editor, but there was no real conversation between the two. This time it was to be different. Boshi, who had happily taken upon himself this role of a guide to Belur Math many times in the past gladly obliged. They struck a wonderful rapport and Boshi invited her to visit his Almora centre during the summer and also meet Sister Christine. At Almora, the three of them – Sister Christine and Gertrude, would read Swami Vivekananda’s works in the guest room every evening. There was a fireplace mantel to keep them warm.
The past backgrounds and trajectories of Boshi and Gertrude were so different that it seems to be a wonder that they could recognise in each other partners for their future lives. It is said that Sister Christine who had a motherly affection for Boshi was initially apprehensive that he was getting too close to an American woman, a species she was a little suspicious about, even though (or perhaps because) she too came from there! She perhaps thought a simpleton like Boshi would only be discommoded with someone from such a different cultural milieu and temperament. But after knowing Gertrude more closely she blessed her profusely and that sort of sealed their union. But they eventually got married only in 1932. They were both in their forties then – Boshi 45 and Gertrude 42.
Together on a common path
Having completed the stay in Pachpera, and a newly struck friendship with Boshi, Gertrude returned to America in 1928 and continued her work with ‘Asia’ magazine.
In 1928 Boshi went to England and spent time at London University, Strageways laboratory at Cambridge, and the Marine Biological Laboratories at Plymouth. He also published a paper – ‘Permeability of Protoplasmic Membrane’ – in the prestigious Journal of the Royal Society.
From England Boshi went to the United States where he worked at the New York University for two years. His research there focussed on the subject of ‘electric charge of protoplasmic particles in single living cells.’ His work now found increasing notice in the scientific fraternity and drew commendation from scientists like Sir Julian Huxley – the eminent British evolutionist and first Director of the UNESCO, Noble laureate E.D. Adrian, and Robert Chambers, President of the American Society of Zoologists. He met Albert Einstein at the latter’s home on two consecutive days and spent an hour and a quarter with him.
An unexpected gift came Boshi’s way during this visit. A lady named Mrs Moore, who had visited his Bosepara laboratory many years back, invited him for lunch and offered him money to buy the Bosepara house which had continued on rent right from the days of Sister Nivedita.
He had also made arrangements to take the ailing Sister Christine to be brought from India for treatment and care in New York City. The Sister was looked after at a city Nursing Home and after each day’s work he would visit his ‘mother’ at the Nursing Home, often joined by Gertrude who too was working in the city. Boshi had taken a room near the Nursing Home for himself.
Boshi wondered at how Sister Christine’s Guru Swami Vivekananda was always, in an invisible manner, guiding his disciple. He once remarked to Gertrude, ‘See how Swamiji takes care of her. It is one of the best nursing homes in New York City. It is run by her friend Mrs LeRoy. She gets all special diet, and there are doctors and nurses at hand day and night, and she doesn’t have to pay a cent! She could never have this care any place else in the world.’
Sister Christine passed away on March 27th 1930. Boshi had her cremated and collected the ash to be taken back to India. Boshi described that at the end her face was illuminated with a divine smile. At that moment Boshi said with tears rolling down his cheeks, ‘Now she has joined Swamiji.’
Boshi and Getrude had decided not to go ahead with their wedding during the time Sister Christine was at the Nursing Home. Even after Christine’s passing away Gertrude had to spend more than her year attending to her elderly parents. Boshi encouraged her to take that up whole-heartedly as her primary duty. And so it was in 1932 Getrude finally came to India and they got married. They had the whole-hearted blessings of Gertrude’s parents.
The civil marriage took place on 2nd November at the American Consulate where the sole witness was Bibhuti Ghosh, Boshi’s friend who had first taken Boshi to Belur Math. The matrimonial alliance was reported by New York Times dated 7th November, 1932. Gertrude Emerson, the inveterate adventurer and explorer, now stationed herself permanently in India, a land that was to be her home for next five decades.
As Gerturde settled at Bosepara, children and local womenfolk curiously hung around to see how an American woman had sailed thousands of miles to live in this ordinary Bengali neighbourhood with their Boshi Sen, who might have seemed completely plain to them till then. One fancies that it would have been quite a puzzle to them.
In India, Gertrude remained the India Correspondent of ‘Asia’ and kept writing articles. She also sought other eminent Indians to contribute to the journal. She had already published her book, ‘The Voiceless India’ in 1930. The book was written in a tone of empathy and understanding and not in a condescending manner.
Tagore, who was the one who had suggested her to stay in an Indian village happily wrote the introduction to the British edition of the book. He wrote:
‘It is a very hard trial for a western woman to have to spend lonely months in an environment where most things conspire to hurt the modern taste and standard of living. The author of this book did not choose the comfortable method of picking up information from behind a lavish bureaucratic hospitality under a revolving electric fan and in an atmosphere of ready-made official opinion. She boldly took upon herself unaided to enter a region of our life all but unexplored by the western tourists. In fact in this adventure of her she followed the examples of the true born travellers of that golden age of travelling when pilgrims across the seas and mountains did not carry with their own mental and physical habits – the barricading aloofness of their own race and culture.
‘She never idealised not even for the sake of literary flourishes any aspects of village life, to which she was so intimately close. She never minimised the primitive crudities of its features, things that were stupid, ungainly, superstitious, or even evil in their moral ugliness, but her narration in all through it runs the gracious touch of the woman, the pure instinct of sympathy which, while it bares and handles the sores is yet tender to them.
‘I feel personally grateful to Miss Emerson for the masterly picture she has drawn of our pathetic village life, so vivid and yet so sober in its colour – the honest colour of truth.’
It was in 1935 that the Sens finally made Almora their permanent home. ‘Kundan House’ where the Sens lived was like any other old dilapidated house in Almora. They had to renovate it considerably for making it their home for next few decades. Boshi also developed a garden which was sort of a miniature Botanical Garden having a wide variety of plants, many of them being rare species. They might have not known at that time that this house was to host some of the most towering figures of twentieth century India and many iconic world figures like Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Nobel Laureate Pearl. S. Buck and a host of other celebrated figures.
▶ Next Chapter: Science in the Hills, for the Entire Country