That's India: The Memoirs of an Old India Hand

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That's India: Memoirs of an Old India Hand is divided into three parts:

Part I is "The Early Years," as well it should be since it begins at the beginning and ends when I tell of finally finding a place for myself in the world.

Part II is "The Library Years," which recounts the minor triumphs and vicissitudes of being a high school, then a university librarian. But the story doesn't end there. It goes on to take me into retirement. So what's left?.

Part III "That's Write" is not a retelling of a life well-lived, but a series of writings: a conference paper on Voltaire and India, a short story about a couple of Indian kids, then some poems, and, fin- ally, a summation.

Why does one write an autobiography, and why did I write mine? Was it because I wished my dad had written his? He should have. He started out as a farm boy in western Minnesota, the son of Norwegian Lutheran immigrants. He didn't learn to speak English until he went to school at the age of eight, and he ended up as a Methodist missionary in India and the author of his highly praised Concise Grammar of the Hindi Language. Did I write it for myself? Or for my own children - or my grandchildren to whom it is dedicated?

Or did I write it in the hope that someday some- one will read it and possibly gain something of value from it? The Truth - with a capital T is that I love to write, and I believe I have something to say that might be of interest or even of value to a chance reader.

Are you that reader? I hope you find it exciting. Let's face it. Even the life story of a librarian can be exciting-at times.

The author of this book, Henry Scholberg, is a Third World Citizen. Who is a Third World Citizen? This is a person who was born in and grew up in a country other than that of his nationality. Is this person confused about his national identity? Perhaps. Should one feel sorry for such a person? No!

"I am lucky to be a citizen of two countries, India and America," Scholberg says, "and sometimes I don't know which country I love more."

Scholberg was born in Darjeeling in 1921 to American Methodist missionary parents. Between 1921 and 1939 (the year he graduated from a Presbyterian high school in Mussoorie), he lived twelve years in India. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1943. The war was on then, and Scholberg, influenced by the teaching and example of Gandhi, answered the call of con- science and became a conscientious objector.

First, he served as an orderly in a mental hospital and at the end of the war made two trips to Poland as a "sea-going cowboy," helping take American cattle there to replenish the livestock devastation of World War II. Between those two assignments he volunteered as a human guinea pig in a semi-starvation program at the University of Minnesota that lasted forty-eight weeks, during which he lost about forty pounds. The purpose of the project was to find the most efficient way to rehabilitate victims of starvation during the war.

In 1961 after a stint as a newspaperman and earning a couple more degrees, he became Curator of the Ames Library of South Asia at the University of Minnesota, one of the premier collections on India in the world. He retired in 1986. Since then he has devoted much of his time and energy to writing.

HE EXPRESSION "old India hand" cannot be applied to very many people these days, but it can be applied to me.

My connection with India began early in life. I was born there. I grew up there, and of the first eighteen years of my life, twelve were spent there.

When I came home from India at the age of eighteen, I was full of plans to return some day as a Methodist missionary and continue the work my father and mother had been doing for the previous thirty-four years.

However, I suddenly changed the direction of my life, and there was doubt I would ever see my native India again. In my heart I believed I would somehow return, but I never dreamed that India would one day be a very important part of my life.

Why does one write an autobiography? I ask myself that in the privacy of retirement and cannot come up with a sensible, single answer. Lacking a single answer, I will try out several that come to mind.

1. I am not an important person-important in the sense that I ever achieved high office. And I am certainly not as important as Cellini. But importance is a relative matter. Throughout my career at the University of Minnesota where I was director of the Ames Library of South Asia, I always tried to have contradictory attitudes at the same time: how important I was, and how unimportant I was. I was important to my academic colleagues who depended on me for help in their research, but I was unimportant in the total scheme of things.