In the Clear Light of Day
Part XXVIII
The Classroom
I enrolled in the University of Arizona as a senior. I had only two semesters to go
until graduation. UA had a Department of Oriental Studies and I very much
wanted to join it. However, between my time at Schiller College, The George
Washington University, and the University of Maine, I had acquired three years
of college credits. I declared my history major at Farmington. Thus boxed in, my
alternatives were limited. I joined the history department at UA with a minor in
religion. I compensated by focusing almost exclusively on Asian history, with
classes in the history of Afghanistan, China, Japan, India, and Pakistan. For my
religion minor, I took courses on Hinduism, Western mysticism, and other
courses cross-listed as religion and philosophy.
It was great to be at a big university with lots of options. As usual, I particularly
enjoyed interacting with the professors. Despite the size of the University of
Arizona (40,000 students), as a senior my classes were small. The only other big
University that I had attended was The George Washington University (GW).
This was a unique situation, however, as GW is an unusual “urban” school
without a formal campus. The students just walked on the sidewalk between
classes. Despite the size of GW, I had a personal relationship with Dr. Hiltebeitel.
Otherwise, my involvement with GW was limited.
I quickly discovered at UA that as a senior, I only had interaction with the
History, Oriental Studies, Religion and Philosophy departments. The rest of the
university was just scenery, pretty buildings that lined the mall. Thousands of
students hung out at the mall and crowded the campus during the day,
particularly when classes were changing, but I nothing to do with them. My
interactions were confined to the few students in my classes and the few
professors who taught my classes.
In my academic career I had the best of both worlds. I attended small schools for
my freshman and sophomore years and missed the enormous freshman classes
that big state universities are notorious for. My freshman classes averaged
around 10 students and were always taught by a professor. I never took classes
taught by teaching assistants.
Demonstrated competence in a foreign language was required for graduation. I
told the admissions office that my foreign language was German and that I had
lived and studied in Germany. They told me to schedule an evaluation
appointment with the German Department. I conversed in German for some
time with one of the professors, a native speaker from Germany. He told me that
I made some grammatical errors, but my fluency was fine and signed a document
waiving my language requirement.
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At UA I also started a pattern of taking a full course load during the year and
supplementing that with attendance at both summer school sessions. This
allowed me to earn lots of credits quickly. The summer sessions were very
intense. The university crammed an entire semester into a six-week program.
We attended class every day and were given lots of reading and other homework
at night. For example for an English class on the novel, we to read an entire
novel every night and came to class prepared to discuss it in the morning. I
purchased over 20 novels as my textbooks for that course.
This schedule was fine with me. Tucson is quite dead during the summer. The
campus is very quiet with only summer sessions going on. Most students go
away for the summer. My parents lived in Germany and I had nowhere else to
go. I had no money for vacations. Many people from elsewhere cannot stand the
heat of Arizona summers and must be out of town from when the heat starts in
earnest in May until the monsoons are in full swing in late August. I did not mind
the heat and enjoyed the peace and quiet.
Nothing was more gratifying for me than to focus on a complex and difficult
subject and to master it. I appreciated the challenge and viewed the peace and
quiet of the summers as a particular opportunity to master difficult material.
Tucson is surrounded by wide-open spaces. Later, when I started driving, I
drove out into the countryside around Tucson to study. I found shady spots
under trees in isolated areas with no one in sight. I sat under trees and studied
intensely for hours. On other occasions I went into the closet to study
particularly difficult passages.
Of course there was always the library. The UA library is very large (over seven
million volumes) housed in six floors. The library was open 24 hours per day. I
enjoyed spending time there. The libarary still used the card catalog and there
was no online studying. I still relied on books and journals for all my
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information. If I needed a book not in the library, I used “interlibrary loan” to get
it from elsewhere. Sometimes the process took weeks.
There were always students in the library. We had large contingents of foreign
students from all over the world. The three biggest groups were from the Middle
East (mostly Arabs), East Asia (mostly Japanese), and South Asia (mostly Indian).
The Asian students were particularly studious. It seemed they did not
participate in the flirting, drinking, pot-smoking, and student hijinks indulged in
by the other students, but spent all of their time studying. No matter what time
of the day or night I went to the library, I could always find Asian students
studying there.
My first course was “Western Mysticism.” It was a philosophy course crosslisted with religion and was part of the requirement for my minor. As is the case
in campuses almost everywhere, there was a basic difference in orientation
between the philosophy and religion departments. Western philosophy was
dominated by materialists. They denied the existence of any spiritual concepts
and in the tradition of Bertrand Russell, ridiculed persons with religious beliefs.1
The head of the Religion Department, by contrast was an ordained Catholic
Priest (and well reputed scholar with many highly regarded publications).
My teacher was a graduate student. This was the only time I was taught by a
graduate student. He had an unusual premise for the class. He tried to fit the
concept of mystical experience into a scientific context. It was very useful for me.
We studied research on “out of body experiences,” for example. He put a big
stress on modern physics and such concepts as the “uncertainty principal,” and
the behavior of subatomic particles.
His principal point was that the basic clash between science and religion was a
product of the 19th Century when science began to make great strides and we
needed a new paradigm for the 20th Century. Many 19th Century scientists were
convinced that science would ultimately provide explanations for everything and
that religion would fade away to irrelevancy and disappear. The more dogmatic
materialists derided all religious thinking as mere superstition that could never
survive the challenge from science.
The class emphasized that the far beyond of science has begun to merge with the
far beyond of western mysticism (such as the Sufis for example). While he did
not bridge the gap, he was very thought provoking and provided me with lots to
chew on. Not being a right brain person, I have always found hard sciences to be
a tough slog and physics in particular. For this class I forced myself to read the
hard science assignments and was all the better for it.
I invited my teacher to come to our house on Speedway and hang out with us and
he accepted. This demonstrated how loose things were in Arizona. He spent the
entire afternoon at our pad and my housemates and I had a great time engaging
Russell once spoke of Jesus, “I would have visions too if I lived in the desert for
forty days eating locusts and honey.”
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in all manner of intellectual banter with him. It turned out to be one of those
one-shot deals that never morph into anything else. It was also one of those
deals that turn out OK. Synchronicity again.
My decision to attend the University of Arizona was more than justified by my
exposure to a wonderful group of Asian specialists from different disciplines. I
took a course on East Asian religion taught by a guest professor from Columbia.
He was a top notch scholar who really knew his material. His class was a
wonderful survey of Chinese and Japanese religious and philosophical thinking.
We learned all about Confucious and his impact (immeasurable) on East Asia.
We learned about Lao Tze, who complemented and challenged Confucious with a
mysticism so subtle that it was beyond comprehension.
The Taoist emphasis on allegorical thinking interacted with Buddhism imported
from India to create the Chan Buddhism of China. This, of course, became Zen
Buddhism when it arrived in Japan. This continuim of thought and development
from India, through China and on to Japan was an amazing journey.
Students hung out with this professor in his apartment on Saturday nights. We
shared great music, ate great food, and had great discussions about a lot of great
ideas. This pattern was repeated throughout my time at the University of
Arizona. The classes were small and the professors dedicated. They were laid
back and I found myself hanging out with some of them. Others would become
my mentors, have a profound influence on my life and maintain relationships
that persist into the present day.
This professor, for example introduced me to Gustav Mahler and his music. As a
group, we listened to Mahler’s “Song of the Earth” (Das Lied von der Erde), which
he connected to the influence of East Asian thinking. I later purchased an LP of
this work which emphasized this influence by featuring an East Asian painting
on the cover.
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My professor did a great job of tying East Asian culture, philosophy and religion
together (of course in East Asia philosophy and religion overlap to the extent
that the two are often inseparable).
This course was a great complement to my earlier reading of Alan Watts and
Deisetz Taitaro Suzuki and helped me make sense of what these great thinkers
were trying to impart. This would not be my last encounter with East Asian
thinking during my tenure at the University of Arizona.
Another great professor was Dr. Ludwig Adamec. He specialized in Afghanistan
at a time when that country was all but ignored. I took a course from him on the
history of Afghanistan that I would refer to again and again in future years. He
provided a succinct picture of the complexity of Afghan society and explanatory
variables to comprehend the problems facing the country. Even though the
Soviet invasion and the succeeding chain of events leading to 9/11 and beyond
had not yet happened, Dr. Adamec predicted great problems for Afghanistan. In
a period when Afghanistan was ignored by academia, I had the good fortune to
attend a school that provided me with a firm foundation in that country’s history
and culture.
My core group of professors were the South Asianists. I worked intensively with
this group in the years ahead. It consisted of: Alfreda Meyers, my Hindi and
South Asian History guru, Anoop Chandola, who took over from Dr. Meyers as
my Hindi teacher, and went on to teach me Sanskrit and Hinduism, Richard
Eaton, an extraordinary scholar who taught me South Asian history, and James
M. Mahar, who taught a spectrum of South Asian anthropology, sociology, and
humanities courses.
My 1974-75 year at the University of Arizona should have been the capstone, as
it signified the end of my undergraduate studies. Instead, it turned out to be only
the beginning. I started a long process with this group of extraordinary teachers.
Dr. Meyers was a specialist in South Asian literature. She concentrated on Urdu
literature. Urdu is now the national language of Pakistan. During the medieval
period and well into the British period, Urdu was the lingua franca of the South
Asian region. Islamic rulers established themselves in much of the subcontinent.
They came primarily from Central Asia and Afghanistan. However, large
numbers of the Islamic arrivals were from Iran and Iranian culture was
considered the epitome of sophistication. Regardless of their native language,
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many Muslim conquerors spoke Persian and recited Persian verse. Shia Muslims
from Iran occupied a powerful place in India’s Islamic society and ruled their
own kingdoms.
These Muslims needed a common language to communicate with their South
Asian subjects and with each other. They devised a “camp language” which
became Urdu, by mixing the nascent Hindi language with Persian (and some
Arabic) vocabulary, and writing the new language in the Persian script. The
Islamic culture of South Asia was very sophisticated, with well developed dance,
music, and literary forms. The Urdu language became the vehicle for poetry and
that poetry was often used as lyrics in musical pieces (ghazal). The recitation of
Urdu poetry and listening to singers perform ghazals in a social setting are
common practices in both India and Pakistan.
The University of Arizona had wisely devised a comprehensive Asian Studies
program to put the University on the map. This Asian curriculum was taught in
the Department of Oriental Studies. The courses were grouped around
geographic areas that included: the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. The
Middle East was divided between the Arab countries, Turkey, and Iran, each with
their own distinctive cultures, religious traditions, and languages. East Asia was
divided between the two dominant states and cultures, Japan and China. For the
South Asianists the big division was between those who studied Pakistan and
India.
Remarkably, the Oriental Studies Department offered a spectrum of language
instruction found in few other places. Students in the department could study,
Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Hindi, Sanskrit, Japanese and Chinese,
depending on their geographic orientation.
As I begin to formulate my course of study, I first opted for India over Pakistan.
This was because my principal orientation was Hinduism and Hindu culture,
thinking and practice. Islam was only a secondary area of interest for me. Once I
had opted for India, this meant that I would study Hindi, the national language of
India.
Hindi is derived from Sanskrit, the language of the Hindu scriptures and a huge
corpus of literature (everything from the Hindu epics, the longest poetic works in
the world, to Meghaduta, the Cloud messenger, a lyric poem combining religious
and secular themes and imagery, to the famous Kama Sutra, the often discussed
but seldom read Indian “sex manual.”) Hindi is written in the same Devanagri
script as Sanskrit and takes much of its vocabulary from the sanskrit language.
This means that while there can be considerable overlap in the vocabulary of
Hindi and Urdu (and Indians and Pakistanis have little trouble conversing with
each other), the two scripts make them mutually unintelligible when it comes to
reading and writing.
Dr. Meyers specialized in Urdu, Pakistan and literature, but had been pressed
into service to teach Hindi. This language was practically unknown in the United
States, although it has hundreds of millions of native speakers and a huge corpus
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of literature and song. Although the native language of many Indians living in
North India, Hindi is increasingly the lingua franca of the country, as Indians in
other regions learn it in school and it is used as the language of government in
independent India.
Another reason for the spread of the Hindi language is its dominance of the
Indian film industry. This industry has existed since the the release of the first
Hindi language feature film in 1913 (Raja Harischandra). Feature films shot in
Hindi came to dominate Indian popular culture, and this dominance continues
into the present day, despite the introduction of cable television and the internet.
Almost all Hindi films are musicals and the music featured in these films is the
popular music of the South Asian subcontinent. Hindi films are also very popular
in Pakistan and anywhere in the world where people of Indian descent are
members of the Indian diaspora. Although other Indian languages have their
own film industries, the popularity of Hindi language films has encouraged many
non Hindi speaking Indians to pick up the language.
Since Hindi was almost unknown in the USA, and the explosion in commercial,
cultural and political interaction between the United States and India had not yet
begun to take off, our classes were small. I never had more than four students in
any of my Hindi classes. All the students I studied with dropped out after a few
semesters as the work become more difficult. I was the only person to complete
the entire Hindi language program while I was there.
We started by learning to read and write the devanagari alphabet. The alphabet
consists of 42 letters. The language is totally phonetic, so each letter has a
distinct sound and each Hindi word is pronounced exactly as written. Hindi uses
special diacritical marks to write Persian and Arabic words in the devanagari
script. This is because these languages contain sounds (such as the “z” sound
and the “f” sound, that do not exist in Hindi). Technically “pure” Hindi (shudh
Hindi) does not contain loan words from other languages such as Arabic, Persian,
and English. In reality, a university level education conducted totally in Hindi is
required to master shudh Hindi. The vast majority of Indians would have trouble
understanding pure Hindi, or communicating in it. In addition, linguists have
documented that Hindi is divided into thousands of dialects, which change every
twenty kilometers as you travel through the Hindi-speaking region. These
factors mean that most Indians are pragmatically more interested in effective
communication rather than the purity of their spoken language. This means that
Indians commonly use words from Arabic, Persian, and English in everyday
speech. Hindi heavily interlaced with Persian vocabulary is considered
“Hindustani,” rather than Hindi, and can be closer to spoken Urdu than Hindi.
It has become quite fashionable for Indians to mix Hindi and English into a
polyglot called “Hindish” in India. This is not an official language but rather an
unofficial dialect, looked down upon by the media, academia and Hindi teachers,
but persistent nevertheless.
We learned the devanagari alphabet in three days. We learned it much like
schoolchildren learn the roman alphabet in American schools. We wrote out
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each letter and made the sounds. We had to learn some new sounds, like the
“aspirates,” which are consonants that require extra air when spoken. We
practiced aspirates by speaking in front of a burning candle and making sure the
candle flame wobbled whenever we used aspirates. We also learned the
importance of differentiating between long and short vowels, which are given
separate letters in the devanagari script. The meaning of a word is determined
by the vowels used, so this is extremely important in both speaking and writing.
After learning the devanagari alphabet, our textbook stopped using the roman
alphabet. We never saw Hindi words written in the roman alphabet again. Every
Hindi word was only written in Devanagari. We then memorized lists of
vocabulary words, memorized and performed Hindi dialogs in class, and started
on Hindi grammar. Dr. Meyers pointed out that Hindi grammar was not
complicated and could be written without too much difficulty on a postcard.
There are a lot of parallels between German and Hindi which made it easier for
me to learn the language. For example, German is also a totally phonetic
language. German children (and foreigners learning German) have only to learn
the German alphabet to correctly pronounce all German words. There are no
spelling classes in Germany, because once a child learns the alphabet, he will
never misspell a word. The same is true in Hindi.
Hindi grammar also incorporates many of the same elements found in German
grammar (Sanskrit is the Indo-Aryan language which is the origin of German).
This is especially true regarding sentence structure. In German the verb comes
at the end of the sentence. The same is true in Hindi. Since I was already a
German speaker, I had no problem with this aspect of the grammar. Like
German, Hindi also uses gender. Hindi nouns are either male or female and
adjectives are modified according to gender. Since German also has gender (with
three genders - male, female, and neuter), this was also easy for me to grasp.
Dr. Meyers was my Hindi teacher during my first year at the University of
Arizona. She then left the faculty to join the Foreign Service (Department of
State). After her departure, Dr. Chandola became my Hindi teacher for the rest of
my time at the university.
During this first year, I took Dr. Chandola’s Hinduism course. Dr. Chandola had a
much different perspective than Dr. Hiltebeitel at GW. Dr. Chandola was Hindu
by birth, a member of the Brahmin caste and a practicing Hindu priest. While Dr.
Hiltebeitel stressed the academic study of Hindusim, most particularly an
academic study of the import of the Hindu epics, Dr. Chandola presented
Hinduism as a living tradition. He provided the perspective of the Indian Hindu
who integrated his religion into his daily life. In Dr. Chandola’s class we learned
about basic Hindu concepts, acquired a time line for the religion, looked at the
development of Hinduism over milennia and the many changes that have
occurred, and also studied the Hindu Epics (the Mahabharata and the Ramayana)
and what they mean to Indians. Dr. Chandola, as a religious practitioner, also
provided insight into Hindu ritual practice from the unique point of view of a
Hindu priest.
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Dr. Eaton specialized in medieval Indian history, and most particularly the
period of Muslim rule. He was a thorough scholar with exacting standards. He
helped us exam the interaction between Islam and the indigenous culture of
India. We also looked at the epic interaction between the incoming Muslim
invaders and India’s indigenous inhabitants, which often resulted in the
integration of Muslims into a new polyglot society that was Islamic, but more
South Asian than Middle Eastern.
This study of the medieval period would provide a useful background for my
later study of British colonialism, the period of British rule, the independence
struggle, and the post colonial period. It also provided a foundation for
understanding one of the most crucial questions of modern Indian history, why
did British India break up into multiple countries, and why Indian Muslims
embraced the concept of Pakistan as a homeland for South Asian Muslims.
Dr. Mahar was an anthropologist and one of the first Americans to conduct
anthropological fieldwork in India. He came to India for the first time in the
1950’s when Jawaharlal Nehru was Prime Minister. Nehru had introduced a
comprehensive program of rural development in India. His government selected
villages to serve as rural development models. One of these villages was
Rankhandi in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Nehru wanted the success of his
rural development programs to be broadcast to the outside world.
Americans had traditionally had limited involvement with India, as it was a
British colony and not within the US sphere of influence. In the 19th Century
American mercenaries had taken service with Indian rulers to help train their
armies in western military science and to lead them in battle against the forces of
the ascendant British East India Company, then conquering India. Americans
also imported indigo from India for use in dying textiles made in the U.S. This
trade was centered on the state of Bengal where indigo plants were grown and
processed into indigo dye. For this reason, the United States established its first
consulate in Calcutta to look after the interests of American merchants and
sailors involved in the indigo trade.
During the British period, American dentists also carved out a niche in India and
plied their profession there with the consent of the British authorities. This was
an example of an enterprising professional group finding an occupational niche
and taking maximum advantage of it.
The United States had traditionally undergone periods of evangelical fervour
during which American Christians become determined to spread the Christian
faith to other countries. American evangelicals viewed Hinduism as a
particularly abhorrent and satanic religion and wanted to convert Hindu
heathens and save their souls. This made India a top priority for them. This
trend has continued into the present day.
For a brief period in the 19th Century, some within the British East India
company shared the evangelical fervour of their American brethren and worked
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with American missionaries. This came to a halt after the Sepoy revolt of 1857,
which forced the British crown to take over the areas in India conquered by the
British East India Company. After ending Company rule in India, Queen Victoria
proclaimed herself the “empress of India,” and immersed herself in Indian
affairs.
The monarchy blamed Christian missionaries and their accomplices within the
East India Company army for instigating the sepoy revolt by outraging the
sentiments of the Company’s Hindu and Muslim troops (sepoys). The new
monarchical rulers feared that Christian missionaries could turn the Indian
population against the British if allowed to continue their activities. The new
government radically curtailed missionary programs in India and promised the
Indian population the freedom to practice their own religions as they wished
without British interference.
The new government barred foreign missionaries from India. Some Americans
wishing to proselytize in India had to sneak into the country under false
pretences by first going to the Danish colony of Serampore bordering on the
Indian state of Bengal and surreptitiously entering British India. Denmark as a
protestant nation, was sympathetic to the evangelicals and willing to turn a blind
eye to the missionaries as long as they did not stay in Serampore.
This mirrors the current state of affairs in independent India, which has also
drastically curtailed the activities of foreign missionaries (both Christian and
Islamic). American evangelical missionaries determined to convert Indians to
Christianity continue to sneak into India under false pretences to proselytize.
The influence of Americans in India was further curtailed under the socialist
government of Jawharlal Nehru. The United States was virulently antiCommunist during the Nehru years and distrusted his commitment to socialism
and India’s friendly ties to the Soviet Union. Anti-Americanism increased in
India after the United States allied itself with Pakistan in hopes of combatting
Soviet influence in the region.
Dr. Mahar was a doctoral candidate at Cornell University when the Nehru
government established a cooperative agreement with that University. Under
the terms of the agreement Cornell sent a team of American anthropologists to
Rankhandi village to conduct fieldwork. Dr. Mahar was a member of this first
team and subsequent teams that worked in Rankhandi.
His classes made ample use of his fieldwork in India, his residency with Indian
villagers and interaction with them, and his detailed observations of the
intricacies of Indian culture. Dr. Mahar practiced cultural relatavism, meaning
that he was non-judgemental in his approach to his Indian subjects. He
objectively described Indian cultural practices, which in some cases conflicted
with our own cultural attitudes. Americans, for example, have considerable
difficulty with untouchability, and gender and caste discrimination. Dr. Mahar
introduced us to the complex Indian caste system, which anthroplogists consider
the essential defining element of Indian society. We also learned about Indian
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family structure, gender relations and the role of women, and the structure of the
Indian extended family.
Dr. Mahar also taught us about the integrated Indian culture. He described
Indian culture as a unified whole. He did not divide it into precise units. This
was particularly true of Indian religious atittudes and practices. Dr. Mahar’s
subjects in Rankhandi were from the Hindu community and their attitudes and
lifestyles reflected the powerful influence of Hindu practice and culture. Unlike
some other Americans, Dr. Mahar did not romanticize this culture, but
emphasized that it was an everyday part of Indian life. Like any good
anthropologist practicing cultural relativism, he did not try to determine
whether one cultural practice was “better” or “more valid” than another.
Dr. Mahar taught me two distinct blocks of knowledge. I learned about Indian
culture from an anthropological perspective, and I learned about anthropology
as a discipline. I learned how a cultural anthropologist conducts fieldwork,
collects data and analyzes that data to arrive as specific conclusions. I also
learned how to conduct trained observation of a culture and create objective
descriptions of that culture.
I took all of Dr. Mahar’s classes during this first year and became closer to him
than the other professors in the program. He lived in the Sam Hughes
neighborhood, which was just across Speedway boulevard from our house. I
started to go to his house to hang out. His parties on Saturday nights were
attended by a melange of students, faculty members and random people from
Tucson. His wife was a Tucson native from a family with a long history in the city
and he was well connected in the city and very active in Democratic politics. Dr.
Mahar was a senior member of the American Civil Liberties Union when it
moved to desegregate Tucson. There are not many black people in Tucson.
Hispanics make up 30 percent of Tucson’s population.2 Tucson also has the 8th
largest Native American population in the United States. This meant that the
civil rights focus in Tucson was on discrimination against these two groups
rather than African Americans.
The white (called “anglos” in Southwest parlance) population of Tucson
implemented a strict system of racial segregation that prohibted hispanics and
native Americans from residing in white neighborhoods, attending white
schools, and excluded these minority groups from political and economic power.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the ACLU successfully
challenged this long entrenched segregation system and forced Tucson to
abandon “redlining” and other discriminatory practices.
Mike was also the faculty advisor to the International Film club. As a devotee of
foreign films, I joined this group right away. This meant that I saw Dr. Mahar in
the classroom and every Friday night, when he showed foreign films. Since Mike
had access to the UA film library, Mike often took films home and showed them
on the wall of his living room during parties. These were usually Indian films.
2
Figures provided by the Pima County Association of Governments
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His favorite was “Helen – Queen of the Nautch Girls (nautch girls are dancing
girls),” a documentary about the long flim career of a Eurasian beauty who
scandalized India by dancing in movies (something no woman of Indian ethnicity
would have been allowed to do since dancing in public was equated with
prostitution).
As I hung out with Mike, I learned that he was a graduate of Reed College in
Oregon, the alma mater of beat poet Gary Snyder. Mike was a close friend of
Snyder’s and through Snyder gained access to the beat’s inner circle and
befriended Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and many other beats. He told me
intimate stories about these legendary personalities and the many parties and
gatherings he attended with them, including the poetry reading in which
Ginsberg read his poem “Howl,” for the first time.
I had a wonderful first year at the University of Arizona. I made “A’s” in all my
courses and graduated with a 4.0 average. I joined the history honor society and
was awarded the “senior scholarship award” for those students with the top
GPA’s. I wanted to join Phi Beta Kappa as well, but the faculty advisor told me
that I did not meet the residency requirements because I was not at UA long
enough.
My parents came to Tucson to see me graduate when I was awarded my BA in
history. The commencement ceremony took place at the McKale Center, the
large arena used for basketball and other sports. I graduated with thousands of
other students. The guy sitting next to me was a lefty activist on campus (I
believe that he was a “Trot” or Trotskyite). He brought his working class
lunchbox to the commencement, had lefty buttons on his robe and planned to
work as an fulltime labor organizer. The commencement speaker was Mo Udall.
The Udalls were one of Arizona’s leading families with a long record of public
service. He was an Arizona Congressmen.
In the lead-up to graduation I decided to follow in the footsteps of the South
Asianists who were my teachers and mentors. My ambition was to earn a PhD in
South Asian studies and teach at the University Level. I took the GRE and passed
and was accepted into the graduate program at the UA Department of Oriental
Studies.
Mike Mahar had become my mentor and advisor. I had originally told him that I
hoped to emulate Alfred Hiltebeitel and become an authority on Hinduism. Mike
talked me out of this path, stating that religion degrees left you unemployable.
He urged me to focus on social science (not just anthropology). With a
background in social science, including international relations, he said, many
more job opportunities would come my way, including working for the US
government. With a religion degree, I would be putting all of my eggs in one
basket and would be forced to look for jobs in academia, which were few and far
between.
I took Mike’s advice. In the graduate program, I would only take courses dealing
with South Asia. I was required to pick a geographic area and a disciplinary
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focus. The South Asia program had three areas of concentration, history,
language and literature, and social science. For my geographic focus, I had
already selected India and started learning the Hindi language. For my
discipline, I selected social science. My degree would be in Oriental Studies
(South Asia, social science).
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