The Connection with India

Sandy Grant | Wednesday April 5, 2017 17:08

My interest in this topic is not new but it was most definitely strengthened by the recent news that India had established a new 150 bed hospital in Francistown and had carried out 500 cataract operations in Serowe at the end of last year.

In all probability my initial interest in India stemmed from conversations with Naomi Mitchison and from comments by her about India.

In addition Naomi wrote regularly for Kutlwano in the 1960s and 1970s and I had thought that there she had several time argued that this country had so much to be gained from India. However, I can now find only one such article, ‘Aid from India’ published in February 1966. In the last few days though I have gone back to Naomi’s 1991 book, Mucking Around sub-titled Five Continents Over Fifty Years which includes a fascinating chapter, ‘Indian Friends and Places’. In this she describes her two visits there, the first when she stayed with her son, Professor Denny Mitchison in Madras who was setting up the laboratory side of the tripartite scheme for chemotherapy of tuberculosis  and in Calcutta with her brother Jack.

Now Jack, otherwise JBS Haldane  (1892 –1964) was, also courtesy of Wikipedia, a British-born Indian scientist known for his work in the study of physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and in mathematics, where he made innovative contributions to the fields of statistics and biostatistics.

He was the son of the equally famous John Scott Haldane and was a professed socialist, Marxist, atheist, and humanist whose political dissent led him to leave England in 1956 and live in India, becoming a naturalised Indian citizen in 1961. Seemingly Naomi had previously met Jawaharlal Nehru. She describes one of these visits :

‘I had walked around the garden of the Prime Minister’s house with Jawaharlal Nehru. We had, I suppose, talked politics though simply being with him was always a great happiness in itself. Then we went to see his pandas. He bent over, stroking them; I tried to do the same, but they didn’t like me.

‘Wait’, he said and spoke to them. Then it was all right; I was properly introduced and allowed to touch. One of then recently had a night out, ‘and had’; he said, I thought approvingly, ‘bitten a policeman’.

My own connection with India came with a visit there in 1968 where I clearly recollect meeting one of the Ghandis at some formal gathering although I am not sure which one!

Despite this, my visit was given its proper sense of proportion by an article about me in the Free Press Bulletin, Bombay which reported that I had come from ‘Batsuwana a tiny copper mine country sandwiched between Rodesia and South Africa.’ Clearly, that particular reporter had never previously heard of the place! Or even Rodesia!