Adrian Mayer interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 15th September 2017

0:05:11 Born within earshot of London Zoo in Cumberland Terrace, Regents Park, in December 1922; I'm a first generation immigrant; my father came from Mannheim, Germany; his father was a hop merchant and was the first person to sell German hops to Guinness in Dublin, and he died in his early fifties of diabetes before the discovery of insulin; my father came here in 1896 to work in a maternal uncle's firm, a Seligman, a family with wide interests in Britain and America; he started off at the bottom his first job being to undo the parcels that came into the office so that the string could be used again; when he was in Mannheim he was something of a child prodigy as a pianist; there was a lot of music in Mannheim in those days and one of the family myths, that must be true, was that when Brahms came to visit the city there was a contest between the little boys as to who would play for the great man; my father came second because his feet couldn't reach the pedals; Brahms is said to have taken him on his knee and said, "There, there little man. Next time you will play"; he naturalized himself in 1905 and lived for the rest of his life here; the firm he started working for traded in non-ferrous metals; he worked his way up and must have been quite good at it so that when the war came and he tried to enlist he was put in a reserved occupation as they imported nickel, lead and stuff for making munitions; in 1917 this was lifted and he joined a regiment which consisted of anyone with a German name; there were bakers and butchers British born young men who might not speak German were recruited, and people like my father; it was the 31st Middlesex Regiment and was known as the Kaiser’s Own; they were sent to the North Weald to dig ditches and things like that; one day he was working fairly near the railway line and all his friends from the Stock Exchange were looking from the carriage and waving to him on their way to the City; he continued with his musical interest; he got the local Commandant of the R.A.F. station there to transport his piano out so he could have trios and quartets in the camp because a lot of people there were like him; he met my mother at a concert in London - probably AWOL at the time; she was the daughter of a civil servant who rose to be Chief Accountant at the War Office; her mother came from Ireland and he was from Kent; in her late teens she more or less ran away from home and became a singer; she sang for the Carl Rosa Opera Company; she didn't have a very big voice but sang the supporting role; later she became a lieder singer; so we were a musical household; my parents entertained foreign musicians when they came to London; my father's best friend was Artur Schnabel, the pianist, who used to stay with us; that was the setup for the later development of the children's concerts which he started in 1923 which became a whole movement; there were concerts for children in 23 or 24 centres, from Tyne Side to Plymouth; they were called Robert Mayer Concerts for Children; they had Malcolm Sargent who was very personable and dynamic as conductor, who explained the pieces to the children before they were played; there was no compromise; for instance, they played a movement of a Mozart concerto and didn't pander or try to popularise it at all, and the children accepted it

7:40:05 My father was an organizer, a net-worker, but with great difficulty did he get this movement started because there wasn't much music in the schools in those days; somehow he had to enthuse the heads, the music teachers, and then the County Councils and education authorities to send deputations from the schools to these concerts; there was a series of five or six in each season; he called himself a Tolstoyan; I don't think he ever went to a synagogue, and I don't think my grandfather did either; my mother I think was in a way a deeper musician than he was; she couldn't live without music, and she was a much more emotional person; I think my father left the upbringing of the kids to her; I had a brother and a sister; she became very interested in the whole Suffragette movement and was a Suffragette here, and also with the Irish renaissance; I think the opera company went to Dublin in about 1910, so she met J.M. Synge, Jack Yeats, W. B. Yeats, Maude Gonne, and all these people; it must have been a very exciting time to be in Dublin in those days

9:54:00 My first clear memory is of the 1926 General Strike because, living in Regents Park, we had no traffic, no buses, but they must have had buses parked up near the Zoo ready for volunteers to drive; I remember looking out of the window and seeing these buses pass us; buses in those days were private; the biggest company was the General Bus Company which was red, which is why the colour remained when it was nationalized; Thomas Tilling, another company, was mauve, I think, and there were lots of others; of course, the tickets were different; they were called pirate buses and we boys wanted to travel on anything that wasn't red; so looking out of the window and seeing these buses of different colours going past is the memory I have; I also have a vague earlier memory of having an apple peeled for me but my memories of the past are not very detailed

11:35:05 My first school was a Montessori school; then I went to a Prep school which ran on the Dalton Plan where you were responsible for planning your own work; you had a chart and had to fill up all the spaces for all the subjects, but you could decide how you did it, which subjects you did first, the one's you liked or didn't, so it was much more flexible than a form system; it was a boarding school in Surrey called Abinger Hill; I haven't kept up with anyone from there; I had one or two good friends and it worked out well; I was, of course, homesick for a few days before I went back, but I think maybe everyone was, but once there it was O.K.; I was not bullied though one or two people were, heavy teasing is how one would call it, nothing like the cyber bullying you read about now where people's confidence is completely shattered by anonymous tweets; I learnt Latin from the age of eight, Greek from the age of ten; I should mention that my first language was French; my nanny - in those days you had nannies - was French; I should have asked my mother more about this as I don't know how long she was there, but she must have been there over the time that I learnt to speak; when she left I suppose there was an English nanny, so for six months or more I spoke a language that was half English and half French and no one could understand me at all; later I must have decided I was an English boy; I used to go to France from about 1925-6 with my parents and I refused to speak French because I was a little English boy; there are some atavistic words of French that ring a deep bell from my earliest consciousness, and I love speaking it and am very fond of France

15:24:20 I was not good at games; I went to Public school, to Bryanston, which again was off-beat; the system of working was the same with these charts where you decide when you do any subject; there I was an oarsman; I love rowing and they have a river there; they have bumping races and so on, and that was my sport; at first I was a cox and when I grew older I was a stroke, but I was never in the top rank; I liked the school; we had a remarkable headmaster, Thorold Coade, a very exceptional person; he gave people a lot of responsibility for themselves; I don't think I was a prefect as I'm not a great leader in that sort of way; my parents gave me one of the first so-called noiseless typewriters, and myself, Michael Howard the historian, and two or three others, organized a newspaper; it was called the 'Abinger News' or something; we had a debating society and reported on the debates; of hobbies, I collected the usual cigarette cards and stamps; I'm not a collector; if I go somewhere I have to buy presents to take home but I don't collect for myself; sometimes that is a shame as I've been to places where there were lovely things one could have bought; on the other hand there is always a problem; in Rajasthan in the early fifties, people were cutting out miniatures from manuscript books and selling them; somehow I took a principled stand that if I took them they would cut out some more; actually the result was the same and now when I see these paintings that I could have had they would have been rather nice on my walls; when I was in Fiji we were offered a whale's tooth which has great ritual significance; they were being sold for tourism but we refused it; we were exposed to other cultures; when we went as a family driving through France in an old Morris Cowley in 1926-7, on roads that were curved so we were always trying to keep on the crown of the road, staying in small hotels; when we got to our destination at a place called Cavalaire - quite near St Tropez which in those days was just a fishing village - we made friends with a French family; if we were swimming and they came, we had to shake hands under water, one of the cultural differences I recall.

20:32:23 At Bryanston, my House Master I suppose was an influence on me, but more so was the Headmaster, this man Coade; there were very few rules, it was up to you, and you were responsible for yourself and for the community; if you did something really bad, instead of the uniform pale blue shirt you had to wear a white one but there was no beating or fagging; it was a new school which started in around 1928; Stowe was another school I think likewise founded in the interwar period, and there were one or two others which were non-traditional in that sort of way; of subjects, I liked geography very much and that was my best subject; I was a bit naughty with my French because since I knew it by ear I didn't learn all the rules; when it came to an exam paper I tended to fly by whether it sounded all right or not; later I learnt German too, dropped Greek but kept on Latin for "Little Go"; in fact I went to college in America; my brother was American and he was at Harvard; I went over at the end of the summer term to see the country with him and was there when war was declared in 1939; so I stayed on and went to St John's College at Annapolis in Maryland; there again it was an off-beat education, a liberal arts college, which they don't have here; it was based on a wide variety of books - texts really; you learnt some natural science, you started with Euclid and ended with Lobachevsky, so from Euclidean to non-Euclidean; you had a different language each year, then philosophers, historians and so on; it was a wide, non-specialized education; in America you would say it was a degree in Liberal Studies, the quadrivium and the trivium; then I came back here; my mother ran the religious side of the family and she went steadily lower church from being a non-conformist, until she ended up with the Quakers; so I was brought up in these years as a Quaker; when I came back here I joined the Friends Ambulance Unit which was the Quaker ambulance unit which had actually started in the first war - this was in 1943; we were given training, worked on wards, and I had three months in an operating theatre, laying out trays for surgeons and counting the swabs so that bodies were not sewn up before all had been removed; that was extremely interesting as it was in St James's Hospital, Balham, where the senior surgeon was doing the first gastrectomies on the stomach; nowadays they put a camera down your oesophagus to inspect ulcers; in those days you put the tube down and there was someone who made a little water colour, so that the surgeon could see dead tissue and how much to cut out; then we had to learn to drive an HGV; then we were attached to an RAMC unit which itself formed part of the Fourth Armoured Division up in Northumbria; there we learnt to put up field stations in the middle of the night and this sort of thing; in 1944 we were all getting ready for 'D' Day and all of a sudden I got a letter to say I was going to India; so I went and spent two years there; the Friends Ambulance Unit there was not doing that sort of medical work but doing relief and rehabilitation; first I was in Bengal; the famine proper had finished but there was a big programme of drug distribution still and the effect of the famine was still visible; we distributed the first sulphur drugs which had just come onto the market and things like Hexylresorcinol ; I was based in Calcutta, and my job was to go around the districts, going to hospitals and looking at the books to see whether the place was ship-shape; you couldn't really tell how much of the stuff was going to the black market, but just someone coming and asking for the books was some sort of a brake; I did that for several months in the very beautiful country of East Bengal, now Bangladesh; there were very few roads in those days and you used river boats which stopped every two or three miles; then in south India, in Kerala in the old Madras Presidency there was a milk distribution programme for the children, the weaker section of society; I took over from somebody and did it for about eight months from my base in Kozhikode (then Calicut); then I came back to Calcutta and worked in the centre we had there; people were very afraid of famines because of the Bengal history, and in 1946 there was a similar fear in south India because of food shortages; they sent me down to Madras and, with the Government, set up a programme which took in the ten deficit districts of the Presidency; I think we were giving milk and multi-vitamins to about 1,500,000 children; we were importing it from the States so it had to be landed, put on trains, and taken up and distributed; while this was in process I got hold of a jeep and went out to all the sub-districts and met the Tehsildars, to apprise them of the scheme; if you met someone he would remember it; if it was just an order on a piece of paper, it could be overlooked; I similarly met the district Collectors; then once the stuff had started rolling out, by then I had two helpers, we toured around and inspected; so I got to know South India very well; it was very beautiful in those days; I kept a diary and two years ago one of my Indian "nieces" in Bombay suggested we go down to South India; she had a hand-loom factory there and we drove around some of the districts where I had been; there was a huge difference and I wondered why; very obvious, as in those days the road was gravel so it was the same colour as the fields; there were no advertisements, and almost no houses between towns and villages; and your maximum average speed was 30 mph; so you looked at nature and my diaries of full of the changing colour of the soil, all sorts of natural features which nowadays you don't notice as you whiz between one place and another, with petrol stations at every corner; I never learnt any language as everyone spoke English whom I was talking to; I learnt a little Bengali and so on but it wasn't like fieldwork

33:46:00 At the end of 1946 I got a job as assistant to the Secretary General of the Institute of Pacific Relations; this was an outfit based in New York but was international; the British part of it was Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs; they were having a conference in September 1947 on the future of the Pacific region; Bill Holland was a New Zealander, a very affable person who needed an assistant and appointed me; he said that we would meet in Manila but I should go via Bangkok and see who was there who could give a paper; in those days when I was told I was going to Siam it was like I was going to the moon because no one went to places like that; it was really exciting; nowadays when you arrive at Bangkok the terminal is exactly the same as the one you have left; I went there in one of the flying boats which was linking London and Sydney; it took seven days since they had the same crew as there was only one a week, so they flew between 8am and 4pm, had tea then a nice rest; we started off on the Hooghly then landed on the Irrawaddy and had some lunch; then we landed at Bangkok and the crew went off for a decent evening; I next went to Hong Kong and looked at the universities in Guangzhou, Canton as it was then, staying on Xiamen Island which was a foreign concession; sturdy houses, rather like St John's Wood, a leafy place; later they had built an enormous hotel there when I went in 1985; then I went to Manila and met Holland; then we went to Shanghai but he had to go home as there was crisis in the organization; I carried on to Beijing; this was 1947 so the war was still going on in China; we had to fly as the Communists were between Shanghai and Nanking and Beijing, so there was no other way; Shanghai was a disturbed place and I don't know how the soldiers were paid because there was rampant inflation; if you really had to take some kind of sum of money out you took a suitcase, literally, to the bank; it was under the Kuomintang and the soldiers would just get on a bus and push the people out; we were riding on the bus and were pushed out too; there was great poverty; on the other hand the smell of the soup which pavement sellers sold was so good; when I got to Beijing we had several feasts with twenty, twenty-five, courses or so; Beijing was still a city where they closed the gates every evening so the Communists couldn't get in; the first thing I did - this was February-March - was to go to the street of the silk vendors and get myself a long gown as it was pretty cold; my diary shows that I went from there to Tientsin (now called something else) and saw the universities there, and coming back you came across flat land and what you saw of Beijing was the Temple of Heaven and you see the mountain with the Tibetan Monastery; that was the total silhouette, there were no high buildings at all; it meant that the Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven were part of the city; I went into the Forbidden City, it was free, and it had all the beautiful works of art which I then later had to go to Taiwan to see; they were all organic parts of the city; now I would imagine they are like some cities that we know where they just stand up as special places; I can't remember the poverty in Beijing; when I had done all the interviewing I had a couple of weeks before travelling back to San Francisco on a troop ship; we had a Friends' Ambulance Unit in China and during the war it had been transporting relief supplies along the Burma Road; then they started a rehabilitation centre in Honan so I thought I would go and have a look at the countryside; it was hair-raising as I didn't know a word of Chinese; from Nanking you had to go north on a railway to a place called Suzhou where you joined the Belgian-built railway which went to the west; I arrived in Suzhou at about ten o'clock at night not knowing where to stay; I was put in a hotel which was absolute bedlam as it turned out to be a bawdy house; the whole night there were fights between the clients and the ladies; I got away at dawn and went to the station and there was an old boy who spoke some French so somehow I managed to get a ticket; it was a disturbed time and the stations were little fortresses; the Communists were only 30-40 miles away to the north; in the village (where the Friends Ambulance had a team) having seen Indian villages, they didn't look as poor; if you have someone in padded clothes he doesn't look as poor to us as someone in a dhoti; we ate manto, that steamed stuff, very simple of course; there were some Friends from England and I stayed there for five or six days; so I did see a little bit of China before going back to the States where I worked in the office in New York; I then came back to England and worked at Chatham House to organize this conference; it was held at Stratford which was quite difficult because of transport problems at the end of 1947; this was where I met an anthropologist, Cyril Belshaw, who was representing New Zealand; later, I told him that I was learning Hindi at SOAS but finding just learning the language and nothing about the culture, unsatisfactory; he said I should come down to the LSE and meet Raymond Firth and he might suggest something; I went and Raymond was very affable and asked what seminars I would like to go to; there was a seminar on cultural change which looked interesting; I went to it and it was the famous Malinowski seminar; after two or three weeks Raymond asked me how I was getting on; I said it sounded very interesting but I couldn't understand much of it; he laughed and said he thought I should start at the beginning, so I registered for the Diploma

45:07:09 The teachers for the Diploma included Nadel, Leach, Audrey Richards; Nadel I worked with in Canberra afterwards; he was quite strict and turned out to be fairly severe in Canberra, unlike Australians who tend to be easy-going; Leach taught me primitive technology which doesn't allow for flights of fancy; I think he also taught me about fieldwork; one thing he didn't say was don't lose you field notes - poor chap had lost his; Richards was all African and I hadn't been to Africa; Audrey wasn't inspiring, but then she was talking about age sets etc., things that didn't interest me very much; I don't recall her talking about her nutritional work; Raymond was the best lecturer; I was interested and very motivated to get the Diploma though I didn't think I would become an academic at all; Ian Hogbin came to the seminar and we must have talked, and later Raymond mentioned me and Hogbin said that if I wanted to study Indians I should go to Fiji; this was after I had applied for a Horniman scholarship and went to see J.H. Hutton who was in Cambridge; he was the only person that I have met who actually had a nightcap on; he must have had 'flu or something, and was sitting in bed; he had a goatee beard; I had an idea of going back to Kerala as I knew it a bit; he said I should study the Mukkuvas, fishermen down on the beach; I had an idea of going to the Laccadives because one of my friends was the sub-divisional officer and had to go there once a year; Hutton said no, that I should study the Mukkuvas; I did not like the idea of living on a beach with the constant smell of drying fish; luckily Harry Powell got the grant to go to the Trobriands; then Raymond came up with this idea of Fiji; this was for a doctorate, and I did it under Raymond because though the ANU gave me the scholarship there weren't any professors in Canberra at that time; Nadel had not come out; in fact, by then I was married and we got out to Canberra and the ANU was just a single wool shed; at one end was the Vice-Chancellor and at the other end was the Bursar; I had a couple of months in the Mitchell Library going through the colonial papers, the Fiji Papers, but the first few days we spent in Canberra; when we were leaving, Copeland, who was Vice-Chancellor, asked Bill Hamilton how much they should give me for living expenses; they thought of a figure which was generous; I don't think they realised how frugally one does live in the field; my study was to be on how the society worked; the Indians came out on a ten-year indenture, five years of which they spent working in a barracks working for the sugar mill company; after that they were given a plot of land if they wanted to stay and worked as peasant farmers, contracted to sell their cane to the Australian company mill - a big company called The Colonial Sugar Refining Company which had the monopoly; they were mainly recruited from Hindi speaking areas in eastern U.P., which has always been a very poor area, and Bihar, and about a quarter from the South; so there were some Tamil speakers; they were of different castes; recruiters might pick up runaway people at railway stations etc., who were told there was a job in a place called Fiji, taken to Calcutta and put on ships; on the ship you couldn't have caste distinctions; when they reached Fiji they were put into lines, again caste was not a criterion, but when they stayed on - as most of them did - what kind of society would they create; that was basically what I wanted to study; what I found was that there was very little institutional organization; the only hard and fast one was the gang of cane cutters; there were no divisions into villages, no centres in villages; I had been in Malabar which has non-nuclear settlement, but here every house was on its little patch of cane, with maybe a store at the crossroads; there was a tendency for cultural groups to gather in their own areas but there was no formal organization - no panchayat or things like that; there was no intermarriage as such, and if there was it was kept secret; the only institution was the cane-cutting gang; that took in 75% of the homesteads; the cane-cutting gang had a sardar who was recognised by the company and the company had an overseer in each sector who ran the thing, and ran it very well; he was very paternalistic; he told them what seed to put in and the number of rattoon years; then the cutting was done and the cane loaded on to a little portable railway which came from the mill; so the mill organized the harvest, so that when the cane came from the land it didn't spend any time losing sugar content; so it was a very efficient organization; I think it was about nine tons of cane to one ton of sugar.

57:40:19 Out there my head was full of lineage and clan structures, the Nuer and so on, but these just didn't fit; the only thing I could do was to look at informal groups because there weren't any formal groups apart from the cane harvesting gang; instead there were factions which interacted over various issues; , so I studied them as well as the articulation of the settlement, how news went from one place to another and social ties evolved; this led into my work on quasi-groups and networks; I had an idea of pushing this further because after I had done a village study, which showed that caste was really kinship if you looked at it from the point of internal organization which was in the region, that is the marriage area, and the external was in the village with the smaller group; you would think it would be the other way round; I did that study in the fifties; in the sixties I went to the county town, which had been the princely capital where E.M.Forster's Maharaja lived; I reckoned that at that time there were village studies just coming out, and there were studies of cities and so on, but there was nothing about a small market town; at that time the district town totalled 30-35,000, now it's 350,000; I saw it as the focus of three interlocking spheres; one was the hierarchy of the local government, where under Nehru village councils had been started, then circles of villages made the next tier, then a district-wide elected body of villagers; so this was a village hierarchy in which of course some of the villagers were really good politicians; interlocking with that was the political party organization which covered the town and the whole district; the third was the municipality where these political parties leaders fought it out in elections; so the three spheres interlocked in this district town; I had the idea of writing a book about this in terms of the kinds of action sets which were formed drawing from these three spheres and the kinds of factions that existed; a nice idea but I never carried it out because when I got back at the end of 1960-61, Philip Mason at the Institute of Race Relations asked me to write a book on the history of the Fiji Indians; it seemed to me that that was a very necessary thing to do because they were discriminated against and no one liked them in Fiji, and many people didn’t think they had much of a history; I wrote that book which took most of 1961-62 as I had to go to all the colonial records and so on to set the record straight; that was published in 1963; the next year Fürer-Haimendorf was always avid to get people out into the field because he liked going to the field so much himself I think; he said I should go to Pakistan to look at the possibilities for fieldwork there which sounded very interesting; so I had six months in Pakistan visiting ten different districts, finding the sort of things that could be researched; the last week I was there I got a letter inviting me to be the editor of the new 'Man', so I got waylaid; after that I was six years on the SSRC which took a lot of time, so I never got back to the study of interlocking spheres, but the data are in an archive I have as I have the field notes and journal and so on

1:03:22:00 After my time in Fiji the Australians were kind enough to give me a fellowship on the basis of the Fiji stuff, and that is when I did the Indian village study, so that was with Australian money; I was in Canberra when Nadel died at the beginning of 1956; Haimendorf was building up the department at SOAS and had already got Colin Rosser and Freddy Bailey; he asked me if I wanted to come to London and I thought it was probably a good idea; Christoph was a very engaging person; as a departmental head, on the one hand he was a very good academic politician; people underestimated him I think, but after all he had been in the Nizam's Government as an advisor, and you had to look after your interests there I should think; he was really good at keeping the department afloat and expanding it; on the other hand I think he was a facilitator; if you wanted to go to the field he would do his best to get you there; he was never didactic about what should be done, it was left up to you; so he had a very light hand in that way; his ethnography is a little old-fashioned, I suppose, but is very thorough; the Gond stuff - I have never seen his notebooks but I would have thought he was pretty thorough; I took the book 'Notes and Queries' the first time so that I wouldn't miss anything out; I'm not very good at assessing films but he was an explorer; he was one of the explorer-scholars in that line; the opening up of Nepal absolutely suited him fine; he was the first person up into Mustang, and I daresay he knew how to work the aristocracy in Kathmandu and so on; in a way people under-rated him I think; I remember Dor Bahadur Bista at SOAS but I don't think he gave any papers there; John Middleton was there, so was Phil Gulliver, Abner Cohen - the Department finally got to cover more or less all the fields; Woody Watson covered China and then went to Harvard; I haven't really kept in touch for thirty years now, and the place has changed so much now, it is so large; when I went to SOAS there were no undergraduates at all for my first two or three years; I think they started with Abdullah Bujra and David Parkin; I think all the lecturing was done at the LSE; the examining was done with the Examiners Board for three colleges, so we were very late on in the undergraduate field

1:08:38:10 At one time, because I was interested in things like factions and quasi-groups I suppose then I gravitated to consider the nature of social actions, Parsons coming from Weber; finally, you get on to is action rational or not, and you can't really tell what goes on in the brain; I then got on to kingship - this was another thing which I suppose diverted me from writing about quasi-groups; Forster's Maharajah's son whom I knew for many years, and whom I interviewed several times about what kind of a king he thought he was and how he felt about it; he suggested I go and interview people who still remembered those days and actually created kings, and that if I didn't do it then it would be too late; in 1982 I spent several months in Maharashtra and Rajasthan, and later in south India, interviewing all the people who had been involved in either the secular or religious part of making these rulers kings; I interviewed them on tape and then transcribed it all, then I digitised it, so it's about 300-400 pages of digitised material; they are quite interesting to read though there is a lot of duplication of course but you find when you are in one State or another a whole lot of idiosyncratic ways of interpreting things, so that it is actually more interesting than I thought it would be; I couldn't keep all the tapes as I was travelling round with a bedding roll, so I transcribed them in the evening; those in English I transcribed literally, those in Hindi I translated as I went along, so an approximation but I wasn't doing textual analysis; in some ways it is not academic fieldwork because there you can go back and check, whereas here I would leave one place and go on to another, so I learnt some more in place B but couldn't go back to place A and see if that applied there; but it was better than nothing

1:12:40:11 Before I went to the village that I have been interested in which was in Forster's Maharajah's State, I went to see Forster; I don't think he had much to say as he hadn't been to many villages; the only thing I remember was that I used the word viable, which he picked up as a neologism which he didn't approve of; I took part twice in the ritual of the Birth of Krishna which is the climax to the 'Passage to India' ritual, which he must talk about in the 'Hill of Devi' sometime, and that was great fun; you played around as Krishna as a baby and went to the Palace for eight days and sang hymns in honour of Krishna, you were there at the birth, you took Krishna through the town and put the town of Gokul in the lake, more or less as Forster describes it; in those days - this was in the fifties - there was enough of the old Dewas army, the camels and elephants were still there, to make quite a nice procession as it went through this little town; then after the procession His Highness would invite us to have a peg or two and unwind

1:14:39:18 My wife was in the field with me; she was a painter, an artist, etching and so on; she had a good life doing that; she came on the tour of all these princely States which we enjoyed; I am a believer in the Hindu idea of the four stages of life; I had my stage as a student, until I finished the time with the ambulance unit; then when I got back to England I got married in 1949 and I started the grihastha (householder) stage, got both my daughters married off, so fulfilled my paternal duties, and that ended on September 30th 1985 when my time in SOAS came to an end; after that, in the third stage you are supposed to go to the forest and start thinking deep thoughts; I didn't do that but I didn't keep on professionally; I had things to finish in the anthropological field like some work on Japanese Imperial succession, but then I took on lecture tours; first I was lecturing with Swan Hellenic and then I made my own tours, which were "off piste" you might say, because there are lots of places in India that people who have seen the other places would like to see; take Benares, everyone goes to Benares on all the tours, but if you go 30-40 miles north-west you get to Jaunpur; after Timur sacked Delhi all the craftsmen left and were refugees and the ruler of Jaunpur suddenly found himself without an overlord, got these people in, and he made three mosques in a style which is found nowhere else, they have great slanting pylons in the front, very magnificent buildings; there is also a Mughal bridge in Jaunpur with places for shops on it; it's not far; if you go the other way along the Grand Trunk Road you only go fifty miles and you get to Sasaram where Sher Shah has his mausoleum, his father first and then him; his father has the Sukha Rauza, the dry mausoleum, and Sher Shah who was the ruler of Hindustan before the Mughals, has the wet mausoleum; it is in the middle of a lake and is a beautiful place; To my mind of the three most beautiful mausolea the first must be the Taj, and the second the mausoleum of Rukn-i-‘Alam in Multan, but the third is definitely Sher Shah’s in Sasaram,, but few go there; it is these sorts of places which I took people to and it was the greatest fun, and I saw hundreds of places which I never would have gone to; so you have a feeling of the country as a whole; the first time I had that feeling really I suppose was in 1945-46 when I was in the ambulance unit when I went to Cape Comorin, Kanyakumari, it was in Travancore State, not in British India at the time; there was simply a headland, no high cliffs, and there was a very old Chola temple, and there were a few rocks, a kind of shoal about half a mile off the coast, and then the Antarctic; there were two buildings there; the Maharaja had a guest house and there was a traveller's bungalow, that was all there was; it was a magic place; standing there one felt the whole weight of this enormous subcontinent bearing down on this tiny point, a very strange feeling; I have only felt it once again and that was when I was in Argentina and went over to Brazil because there are some famous waterfalls called the Iguazu waterfalls, and you go to the Brazilian side to see another aspect of them and that is right at the bottom south-east corner of Brazil; as I stood there I felt the whole of Brazil bearing down on this tiny little spot, the Amazon and all the rest of it, a strange feeling; now Cape Comorin is a Coney Island, a Clacton on sea, everyone goes, foreigners don't go very much because it's not on the usual route, but the villagers go if they are making a tour of India, because it is fairly near a place called Rameshwaram which has a major pilgrimage temple; you get people selling sea-shells etc.; as we all watched the sunset, in front of me there were peasants with saffron turbans and wives with big skirts, looking exactly the same as the people in central India that I knew; I asked where they had come from; from Ujjain district next to where I had lived ; what community are you? They said they were Khatis; I know some Khatis, what village are you from? Extraordinary; my people had married into his village and we had met 1,000 miles away; it could have been Benares, of course, as at these places you get a conflation of villagers, because nowadays such people go around India; they hire a bus and off they go; the fourth stage is sanyas, I’m not about to become a religious mendicant, but now I am down-sizing from a house that I have lived in for sixty years which is quite large and full of detritus from that period, and I am going into a three-room flat; so there will be a lot of detachment from things that I've grown used to living with; I won't become a hermit but I will be more materially detached in a new way of life.