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An American living India's history
Published on Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 15:00, Updated on Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 15:09 in Lifestyle » Books section
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New Delhi: In India's 60th year of independence, there is no shortage of books and reflections on change in the nation. But An American Witness to Partition is certainly one with a difference, coming as it does through the eyes of 92-year-old American, Phillips Talbot, who has been observing the changing faces of India ever since he had been sent here in 1939.
Published by SAGE, the book comprises of Talbot's dispatches to his boss, the director of the New York-based Institute of Current World Affairs. Many of the letters mark turning points in India's history.
Talbot recollects how he flew to New Delhi on the afternoon of August 14, 1947.
"We were here for the midnight occasion and we were there in the hall when the event occurred. We heard Nehru's famous speech and we heard the surprising sound of the conch shell," he recounts. "We saw huge crowds. Next day the flag-raising had planned for 25,000 people and hundreds of thousands showed up."
Two years later, Talbot was in the US, when Nehru and Indira Gandhi travelled to Chicago.
"Chicago was the only place I saw Nehru wearing a fedora," he says, with a chuckle.
Six decades since that time, it is the same India that Talbot has come back to, and has brought his family back to several times, but of course, much has changed.
His daughter Nancy says, "I first started coming here when I was a small child in 1956-57. Obviously in that time, I have seen many changes."
Her father recounts his reaction when he first witnessed India's urban boom.
"When I went to Gurgaon, I saw an India I had never seen before, construction, rapid development, dynamic entrepreneurism," he says.
The Talbots have not just witnessed India's history being made but have lived it.
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