The Hindu : Front Page : Santha Rama Rau is dead

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Santha Rama Rau is dead

Bruce Weber

She wrote of India’s landscape and psyche

Santha Rama Rau, an India-born, Western-educated journalist whose work helped demystify the Indian subcontinent for American readers in the decades after the Second World War and India’s Independence, died on Tuesday in Amenia, New York State. She was 86.

Ms. Rama Rau wrote novels and adapted the E.M. Forster novel A Passage to India for the stage, but she was largely a travel writer, a chronicler of journeys in Asia, Africa and the former Soviet Union for publications such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, Holiday and The New York Times Magazine. Many of her stories, written with stylish simplicity in the first person, were collected as books that read almost as autobiography. The titles included East of Home (1950), View to the Southeast (1957) and My Russian Journey (1959). She wrote an autobiography, Gifts of Passage (1961), that reads almost like a travelogue.

Her best known works were about her home country, including This Is India (1953), a tour through the Indian landscape and the Indian psyche, and a Time-Life cookbook, The Cooking of India (1970).

Vasanthi Rama Rau was born in what was then Madras on January 24, 1923. Her father, Sir Benegal Rama Rau, was a high-ranking civil servant in India’s finance department who later became ambassador to Japan and to the United States. Her mother, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, was a crusader for women’s reproductive rights and a founder of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

When Santha was a girl, her father was stationed in England. It was a trip back to India at 16, with her mother and her sister, Premila, that inspired her first book, Home to India. It was published in 1945, shortly after she graduated from Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Though a youthful book, it established the voice of an educated discoverer — observant, amused, self-deprecating, instructive without being pedantic — that would characterise her work even when she matured.

After her 1977 marriage to Gurdon Wattles, a legal officer at the United Nations, she was known in her private life as Santha Rama Rau Wattles. He died in 1995. A previous marriage, to Faubion Bowers, a linguist and writer who was an expert on Kabuki, the stylised classical theatre of Japan, ended in divorce. Both marriages afforded her the opportunity to travel widely. “They had a vagabond type of existence,” her son, Bowers, said of his parents, though he acknowledged they were affluent vagabonds.

In addition to her son, who lives in Arizona, she is survived by four stepchildren and four stepgrandchildren.

Ms. Rama Rau’s adaptation of A Passage to India, Forster’s 1924 novel about the impact of colonialism on the British and the Indians, was endorsed by Forster himself. It played successfully on the West End in London, ran for 109 performances on Broadway in 1962 and was used by the director David Lean as source material for his eponymous 1984 film. Her work on it was central to what she understood to be her responsibility, her family said — namely to explain herself and India to a world that was curious about both. — © 2009 The New York Times News Service

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