Discovery of India

AMBASSADOR'S REPORT (415 pp.) --Chester Bowles--Harper ($4).

When Fair Dealer Chester Bowles, onetime ad-agency tycoon, onetime OPA administrator and ex-governor of Connecticut, asked Harry Truman for the ambassadorship to India, he let himself in for some unexpected complications. Spending their first night on Indian soil, Bowles, his wife and their three younger children huddled together in one room of Bombay's Taj Mahal Hotel, awed and made uncomfortable by the five barn-sized rooms of the viceroy suite, in which their attendants had distributed them. Bowles faced his first formal call on President Rajendra

Prasad with his cutaway and striped pants still in transit from the U.S. The honor of U.S. protocol was saved only by the fact that the obliging Italian ambassador happened to have the same suit size.

But the new U.S. ambassador did have a clear idea about what he wanted to do in his new job. "An ambassador's job," writes Bowles, "is no longer the relatively simple one of carrying out the policy of his government on a high level ... As I see it. his job is also to reach the people and give them some understanding of the objectives and policies of the United States. And it is his job, too, to help work out programs of economic cooperation which would strengthen democracy in the country of his assignment."

After 18 months on duty, Bowles left India in March 1953, confident that the Indians, at least, thought he had done this job exceptionally well. Bowles, in turn, liked the Indians. His book, while it offers some useful comment on the day-to-day hustle of a modern U.S. ambassador, is primarily the well-told story of an intelligent American's discovery of India. There are not many like it, for Bowles is able to admire the Indians with honest enthusiasm, without splattering his readers with over-generous portions of sacred Ganges water. He can also give the Indians their lumps for obvious shortcomings--among other things, for the "almost pathologic dominance of nationalism" in their thinking.

Russia & Uncle Fitzgerald. At home in New Delhi, the Bowles family took to India with enthusiasm. They studied Hindi, and Bowles organized language classes for the embassy staff. The children went to Indian schools, and the girls threw away their bobby-sox for flowing local costumes. Cynthia, aged 16, did public-health work with Indian nursing students and spent her vacations in Indian villages. When Bowles was recalled, she stayed behind to finish her first-year studies at the Santiniketan Indian college.

In his public life, the ambassador found the Indians not quite so ready to take to him. The newly independent Indians were ready to impugn U.S. motives and policies even before Bowles was able to explain them. The worst side of racial discrimination in the U.S. was worked into daily, throbbing headlines by the sensational Indian press and often by the more responsible papers. At every meeting he addressed, Bowles waited for his chance to explain the inevitable question: "What about the discrimination against American Negroes?"

Bowles did what he could to answer all objections personally. He logged 60,000 miles traveling through the different states of India, and he never passed up a chance to address an Indian group, from Marxist students to movie actresses. When the embassy got out a series of pamphlets explaining U.S. policies in simple terms, old Adman Bowles, for 13 years a partner in Manhattan's Benton & Bowles, could not resist writing three of them himself. On the economic front, he put teeth in the Point Four program of technical and agricultural assistance, concentrating on work at local levels. Like Gandhi, Bowles came to believe that the long-term hope of India lies in improving the lot of its farming villagers.

Wherever he went, Bowles found himself fighting a defensive battle against the smooth-running propaganda machines of both Russia and Communist China, which supplement the activities of India's well-watched but potentially dangerous Communists. He had a hard time matching the opposition's propaganda output (representing an expenditure ten times the amount of all USIS appropriations). The city of Trivandrum, in the heart of a strong Communist area, had its bookstores packed with cheap Marxist literature. Before Bowles set up a USIS station there, the only piece of American reading material to be found was a copy of Uncle Fitzgerald's Bedtime Stories. Democracy & Madan. As part of his mission, Bowles did some spare-time digging in Indian history and literature--enough, at least, to spice his conversation with apt quotations from Hindu proverbs of the Sanskrit scriptures. His historical research strengthened his faith in the Indians, especially what he learned about the modern phenomenon of Gandhi and his non-violence movement. Writes Bowles: "Gandhi's revolt had not only overthrown an empire, but had laid the foundations, in the mind and habits of the people, for democracy."

To ex-Ambassador Bowles, the democracy of the Indian government is the greatest ally of the U.S. in Asia, whether or not its foreign policy makes immediate formal commitment against the Communists. Democratic India is the direct rival of Communist China. He quotes approvingly an Indian statesman's remark: "Our ability through democracy to surpass, or at least equal, China's development under a dictatorship will determine our ability to survive as a free nation, and if we fail, Asia goes, too."

Just before the Bowleses left India, they were gratified to learn that they had taught their Indian hosts a personalized bit of democracy at home. When they arrived, Madan, the untouchable sweeper, got the worst menial jobs in the house from the other servants, who were contemptuous of his low caste. Mrs. Bowles, by doing some of Madan's jobs herself, had worked hard to disabuse the others of their old caste prejudice. When the Bowles family said goodbye to their servants, it was Madan, the untouchable sweeper, who, with the others' approval, spoke the farewells for the group.

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