A Life to Remember: An Autobiography

By Balawant Shankar Joshi

A Life to Remember

This amazingly detailed memoir spans three continents and nearly a century of the life of Balawant Joshi. In it he recalls a journey beginning in a small village in southern India and ending in the southern United States. The son of a poor but brilliant school teacher and linguist, Joshi relates his beginnings at school, moving through hard-fought successes to the completion of the highest levels of education at Cambridge. Throughout the journey and for all his life, a philosophy of peace, regard for his fellow man, and an attitude of determination regardless of the pitfalls of life shine through his modest writing. Joshi expands on his long career in experimenting with plants and Natural Products for synthesis and use in pharmaceuticals in India, Switzerland, and the United States. He writes of family, weddings, and celebrations in India, and travels to many countries. He recalls a small but dangerous role he played in the fight for independence of India from Great Britain. Retired many years ago and living in Georgia, he loses his beloved wife, finds productive activity in a Natural Products, learns painting, and finds new friends and companionship throughout his senior years. Joshi is a great example for all of a life well lived and a love for humanity and a mind still keen and full of stories at the age of ninety.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503549289

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Copyright © 2015 by Balawant Shankar Joshi.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015903426

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Rev. date: 04/21/2015

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Contents

Acknowledgement

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1 Early Memories

Chapter 2 Dada and Family Members

Chapter 3 Settling in Sadhankere

Chapter 4 Primary School (1930–1934)

Chapter 5 High School Education (1935–1941)

Chapter 6 College Education (1941–1945)

Chapter 7 Bombay University Department of Chemical Technology (BUDCT) (1945–1953)

Chapter 8 Cambridge University (1953–1955)

Chapter 9 University of Chicago (1955–1957)

Chapter 10 Return to India

Chapter 11 CIBA Research Centre, Bombay

Chapter 12 Retirement and the University of Georgia

Epilogue The Cosmic Dance

Glossary

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About the Author

Bal Joshi was born in Jamkhandi India and did his school and college education in Dharwad. After completion of the degree in science he carried out post-graduate studies at the BUDCT (now ICT, Mumbai). He continued research work under the guidance of Professor K. Venkataraman for the Ph. D (Tech) (1951) and his thesis concerned with Anthraquinone Colouring Matters. In 1953 he proceeded to the King’s College Cambridge, England and worked with Professor Sir Alexander (later Lord) Todd (Nobel Prize, 1957). He was awarded the Ph. D. degree in chemistry (1955). He carried out research work for two years (1955-1957) at the Institute of Organic Chemistry, University of Chicago on free radical chemistry and at the National Chemical Laboratory Poona (1957-1961) on anthraquinone dyes and the coloring matters of sticklac. His major contributions have been on the chemical constituents of medicinal plants, and Research on Ayurvedic medicines, work carried out at the CIBA Research Centre, Bombay during 20 years. The research work was published in refereed international journals. He was awarded the Sc.D. degree of Cambridge University. He was elected as Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and Maharashtra Academy of Sciences.

He immigrated to the United States (1982) and was a Research Associate at the Institute for Natural Products Research University of Georgia until he retired in 2000. He has over 200 publications to his credit.

At an early age he was fascinated by the beauty of the forests, the tropical flora, lakes, ocean colors, and the blue skies. After his retirement he was seeking a hobby and has been doing acrylic and pastel paintings.

Acknowledgement

I thank Julie Horne for reading parts of the manuscript and making useful suggestions and Manohar Saindane for the formulae drawings.

The bronze statue of Nataraja on the cover page was a gift to Dada and is now with Sandhya Joshi in Minneapolis.

Dedication

In loving memory of Dada, Ayi and Prabha

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Footprints in the Sand

(Acrylic painting by the author)

I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord… Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was one only. .. I said to the Lord, You promised me Lord, that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of footprints.. Lord replied, The years when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, is when I carried you."

For a full version of the Footprints in the Sand, please see¹

(Mary Stevenson, 1936)

Prologue

On many days when I go to bed and am unable to sleep at night or in the middle of the night after waking up, I do the following: try to recount the travels I have made, the people I have met, the enormous changes that have taken place in recent years, the titles, the list of my publications, and the coauthors. Very soon, in about ten minutes I am fast asleep. I consider that this way preferable to taking sleeping pills.

This writing is a brief story of my life. I hope that it might be of interest to read about the conditions of life about ninety years back in India. The present day life is so crowded and busy that there is hardly any time to sit and read about the past. This is the life of an ordinary man coming from poor circumstances in India but with great expectations from parents having limited means. I have seen tremendous and unbelievable changes that have taken place in the short span of ninety years of my life. The way we think has also gone through a sea change. The cell phone of today like i-phone or its equivalent has hundreds of applications. It not only serves to make and receive calls to any part of the world, but it can send and receive e-mails, messages, documents, purchase and read e-books, magazines, newspapers, change the font for comfortable reading, listen to the radio stations, listen to music, store and record music. It can take excellent photographs and edit them. It shows weather conditions all over the world and has a built in GPS (global positioning system). It can store your contacts, with addresses and telephone numbers. It keeps track of your daily appointments and wake you at appointed times. The Smartphone has become an indispensible tool for the modern man.

The child born today in a middle-class family in India takes for granted the existence of paved roads, running water, electricity, radio, television, telephone, movies, buses, cars, and aero planes. If the person is suitably educated there are a wide variety of jobs available. When I was growing up in the 1930s, none of these could even be dreamt of. Travel to Western countries was possible only for the superrich. There was no indigenous manufacturing of paper, pencils, pens, typewriters, blades, cosmetics, clothes, watches, and radios that are readily available today. Almost all these were imported, and I remember when someone came from abroad in the 1960s and 1980s, the customs officer will eye greedily, if you had brought a few more common items like razors or ball pens. Most of the electronics were imported by paying a heavy duty. There was restriction on the import of gold. In India, the custom of buying gold or golden ornaments especially on festive occasions led to smuggling of gold from Dubai and Middle Eastern countries. The wristwatches were mostly smuggled. I remember the first Favre-Leuba watch I got when I entered the fifth standard in school; it was one brought from Goa.

There were no buses, auto rickshaws or taxis in Dharwad. The only public transport was the horse-driven tanga. One had to walk, go on a cycle, or send a postcard by mail to send any message. There were no telephones, and when we wanted to convey some urgent message to someone away from home, one had to go to the post office and send a short telegram. This was sent by Morse code. Short messages used to be sent by telegrams when someone passed an examination, to confirm an arrangement, to settle a marriage, or when someone died. Today cell phones are carried by even the vegetable vendors and the schoolchildren.

Audio equipment like radios, walkmans, cassette recorders, and CD players, or TVs was not made in India. These technological developments in manufacturing have taken place only in the past fifteen or twenty years. Pharmaceuticals and cars were imported from England, United States of America, or European countries.

I want to pen down some of my thoughts and reminiscences. Sometimes my daughters and the grandchildren ask me about my early childhood, friends, and experiences, etc.; I thought that this writing might be of some help to them or others interested in knowing about life and the living conditions in India hundred years back.

My father (Dada) was a supporter of the Congress party and was a follower of Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings. Many of his friends like Bindumadhav Burli, Betgeri Krishnasharma, Mudaveedu Krishnarao, and Rangarao Divakar were arrested and sent to jail, and D. R. Bendre was under house arrest in Mugad, a small village near Dharwad. I was about ten years old and the fear always used to worry me as to what will happen to us if father was arrested and jailed. It made me very sad and I used to cry in my bed.

I did not understand as to why India had become such a poor nation filled with beggars and created slaves of our own people. What could be the reason for this deplorable condition of our people? Is it our caste system, our religious beliefs, or the weakness of our past kings who could not protect their land? I read about the past history of India and tried to find reasons for the downfall of the great Indian civilization.

India was one of the wealthiest countries on the planet in the olden times. Its wealth came from the precious stones like rubies, emeralds, pearls, sapphires, diamonds, and other gems. It had great rivers bringing water from the Himalayas, fertile land, sunny climate, and commerce with other parts of the world. India was much advanced in knowledge compared to the European countries. It was natural that the wealth and culture of India were a temptation for the foreign invaders to settle in India. The earliest conquerors became as much part of the country as the people of India.

Lin Yutang, the Chinese scholar wrote India was China’s teacher in religion, imaginative literature, and the world’s teacher in trigonometry, quadratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson and probably also old Aesop and François Voltaire had a positive view of Hinduism and said, Everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges. The Unitarian minister, J. T. Sunderland, president of the India Information Bureau of America wrote in the Atlantic magazine in 1908 an article The New Nationalism in India, an indictment of British rule in India. He described Britain as an oppressive drain on the wealth of India, as crushing a potentially competent civilization and holding its people in a condition of starvation and illiteracy. He asked, Are there peoples whom it is just to rule without their consent? Is justice one thing in England and Canada and another in India? India had a glorious past during the Indus Valley (Harappa Mohenjo Daro) Civilizations in 2600 BC. The Mauryan empire (200 BC–AD 325), the Gupta empire (AD 320–455), the Harsha empire (AD 606–647), the Chola empire in South India (AD 850–1290) were the culturally and economically prosperous periods in Indian history. Sanskrit is the mother of all the European languages; the world’s first university was established in Taxila (Takshashila) 600 BC. Sushruta is the father of surgery (600 BC), Charaka established Ayurveda in the first century, and Aryabhata invented the numbering system. Bhaskaracharya calculated the time taken by the earth to orbit the sun (twelfth century), and algebra, trigonometry, and calculus were invented in India (eleventh century).

Although economically prosperous, India had become politically disunited in the twelfth century and there was no patriotism among the rulers. The society was buried in the caste system which choked initiative. Hindus had come to believe that they were the supreme religion in the world and no one could attack them. Legend is told that the Peshwas covered their fortress with cloth that was sanctified by the priests so that the enemy could not enter their fort. A long period of peace and prosperity made the Indian people complacent. They also had lost contact with what was happening in the outside world. Hindus had no chance of protecting themselves against the crusading zeal of the Muslims. They failed to unite against the foreign invader having better weaponry.

India was a rich nation plundered by many invasions during a period of 1,300 years. The incursions started by the Central Asians, the Muslims, and finally by the British. India was invaded by Turks and Persians several times in AD 600, with an ambition to spread Islam and to loot the treasures of this land. The Slave Dynasty from Turkistan (AD 1206–1290), the Khilji Dynasty (AD 1290–1320), the Tughlaq Dynasty (AD 1320–1413), and the Lodhi Dynasty (AD 1451–1526) all ruled North India until the beginning of the Mughal Dynasty. Even when the Mughals were ruling, there were seventeen expeditions by Mahmud Ghazni (AD 1000) and seven invasions by Muhammad Ghori (AD 1100). In these invasions millions of Hindus were converted to Islam and more than twenty million people were slaughtered. Mahmud Ghazni destroyed hundreds of Hindu temples and looted tons of gold and jewels from the idols. One of the most profitable loot for Ghazni was the destruction and rape of the Somnath temple. The Mughal kings who ruled in India from AD 1527–1862 were not plunderers like the previous Islamic invaders. They settled in India and enriched the art and culture of the country, although a number of Hindus were converted to Islam. However, the Mughals did not get assimilated with the indigenous population unlike the immigrants in earlier periods. ²

India became part of the British rule in India for about 350 years from AD 1600–1947. The East India Company ruled the entire India for almost 150 years (AD 1612–1757) from England, a remote distance of about five thousand miles. Instead of waging a war against the large number of princely states, they signed a treaty with them. They assured that they would protect their lands against any invasions. The princes felt a false sense of security but lost their independence. The British maintained a large army at the expense of the princely states. There were more than 550 small and large princely states that had entered a treaty of mutual cooperation. Some states like Hyderabad were larger than England and Scotland combined, and the Nizam of Hyderabad was the richest king in the world. He had inherited enormous wealth at the end of the downfall of the Mughal Empire. The Nizam had his own army, the railway, university, mint, and currency. It is said that the Nizam had more than seventy-five mistresses, hundred illegitimate sons, and he employed a large staff just to dust the palace chandeliers.

Unlike Mahmud Ghazni and Muhammad Ghori who openly plundered India, the British diplomacy was cunning in its rule and in short they ruined India and the backbone of the nation. Only about twenty thousand British ruled over three hundred million people of India. Forty percent of Indi’s wealth was spent on the army. The British used Indian Army to fight foreign wars like the war in South Africa and the World Wars I and II. Lord Curzon said, As long as we rule India, we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it, we shall straightaway drop to a third rate power. In 1910, the military had 1.5 million soldiers and during World War II, the number of army personnel was 2.5 million.

In the name of progress, the British started the postal service and built the railway system in India. There were two main objectives for building of Indian Railways. One was to lower the cost of transporting raw cotton from India and to transport British-made cotton textiles to Indian markets. The second important purpose was to be able to quickly transport the military when needed. The routes of the railways were influenced by the locations of the military centers. When the railways were planned, transportation of people was of last importance. The Indian railways were conceived, constructed, and managed by private companies incorporated in Britain. More than 90 percent of the shareholders who made huge profits were British. The introduction of teaching English was not to spread education but to create a class of elites who would be intermediary between the rulers and the ruled. In 1905, out of the 1,000 ICS (India Civil Service) administrators, 5 percent were Indians and the remaining were British. They had been educated in the best schools in England. In 1947, the year of Indian independence, they permitted about three hundred Indians in the thousand civil servants. They made use of the local talent in every part of the administration and managed to use Indians to rule over their own people. In 1940, the population of India which comprised of the present Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, and Ceylon was 330 million and today it is about 1.25 billion.

The British rulers destroyed the indigenous textile industry by exporting the cotton grown in India to UK and selling the cloth made in Manchester to the Indians. They had no intention to develop any industries in India, and Indians lagged behind in the industrial revolution that was taking place in Europe. Dhaka in Bengal was the center producing the world famous muslin cloth that was exported to many countries. It is said that the muslin was so fine that a nine-yard sari could pass though a small ring. To stop manufacture and export of the finest cloth, they cut off the fingers of the workers so that they could not weave anymore. Peasants and thousands of landless laborers of Champaran, Bihar, were forced by the European planters to cultivate indigo plant (Indigofera tinctoria) and cash crops like sugarcane, instead of food crops needed for their survival. When indigo was synthesized by Adolph von Baeyer in Germany, the market for Indigo was unprofitable and the indigo cultivation came to an end. M. K. Gandhi had returned to India in 1915, and his attention was drawn to the sad plight of the indigo cultivators in Bihar. He went to Champaran along with Rajendra Prasad and started his first Satyagraha movement (noncooperation) in 1917 on behalf of the landless laborers. The dispute between the landless and the British was settled and for his nonviolent agitation, Gandhi was then named Mahatma.

During the rule of the British Raj from 1769 to 1947, more than fourteen large-scale famines occurred in India killing more than sixty million people. The Indian agriculture depends on the monsoon rains but the administrative apathy and poor transport were the major reasons of the starvation deaths in India. The major famines were the Bengal famine in 1770, and the famine in Hyderabad and South India in 1792 took the lives of more than twenty million people. When the famine broke out in Madras (now Chennai) in 1876, Lord Lytton, the governor-general and viceroy of India believed that the market forces will take care of the starving Indians. The great famine of Bengal in 1943–1944 took the lives of over 3.5 million people. These famines could have been prevented by import of food grains from other parts of India.³ I am writing about these details for highlighting the changed conditions of India in hundred years. I hope that the reader will excuse me if there are any errors.

Chapter 1

Early Memories

Jamkhandi

Birth

I was born on December 28, 1924, in Jamkhandi, the eldest child of Parvatibai (nee Sonutai Karandikar) and Shankarrao Joshi. Jamkhandi was a small princely state in Bijapur district of northern Karnataka. The state was ruled by the Patwardhan family and it is about seventy-five miles from Dharwad. It was customary in those days for the wife to be sent to the father-in-law or other elderly member of the wife’s family in the second trimester of pregnancy. My father (Dada) sent Parvati to Jamkhandi at the appropriate time for my birth, for the birth of my sister Vimal, and for the youngest brother, Madhu’s birth. In my mother’s (Ayi’s) house, a very dark room without any windows except one door to the kitchen and the other to the adjacent middle room was specially kept for delivery of the newborn.

The delivery was invariably done by a midwife (Dai). In those days there was no alternative than to have a natural birth at home with the aid of a Dai. The mother could enjoy the privacy of her home and not worry about some administrative protocol or rules of a hospital. The biggest advantage of having birth at home is that you will have a natural childbirth. Your wishes will be met and the midwife will not try to speed up your birth. The disadvantage is that there is absolutely no help in case of an emergency and there may be loss of life at the time of birth.

There were no birth certificates issued by any authority, and in 1982, this caused a lot of difficulty in completing the application form for my green card to the United States. As a rule, a baby born in USA cannot leave the hospital unless it is given a name. The theme of the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, Namesake is based on this topic. A naming ceremony called Namakarana Sanskar ⁴ was conducted in an elaborate form on the eleventh day after my birth. The people who participated in the naming ceremony were my grandparents and a few close relatives and friends. Dada was not present and his parents had passed away. I was dressed in new clothes and after a few rituals, Aji whispered the name in my ear. For three months, Ayi would not be permitted to go out of the house, and she had to be massaged with oil and bathed with hot water and nourished well with Dink (gum) and Aliw (seed called garden cress) ladoo.

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My earliest photo on Ayi’s lap

The House

The houses in Jamkhandi and that part of the country were normally built of thick mud walls and a mud thatched roof, as the average annual rainfall was about twenty-five to thirty inches. Entry to the house was through a thick, heavy door with a small entrance cut out in the main door after entering (Khindi); there was an open space to leave the footwear and to wash the feet before going to the hall. On the left side of the hall was a kitchen dining area, and on the backside was the middle room for storing gunny bags of jowar, dehusked rice, unshelled peanuts, and other farm produce. This room also had a swing (Palna). In the back of the house was a cowshed (Gotha) where cows or buffalos were tied. Close by, a place was reserved for washing daily clothes and utensils and behind this was the latrine (Sandas). The latrine was built at some height so that the human stools can be carried away at ground level from the back side of the latrine by the untouchable class (Dalits) every morning.

Most of the Indian latrines in the earlier years, and even to this day, are squat latrines used by squatting instead of sitting. Water is used to clean, unlike people in the Western countries who use paper. Hands and feet are necessarily washed with ash or smooth earth after coming out of the latrine. Right from my childhood I did not like the obnoxious practice of manual scavenging and hated this tradition. As water was used for cleaning, this left lot of excrement and water that created an obnoxious stink. The scavengers would come every morning to clean the toilet, remove the excreta in a bucket or basket, and use disinfectants like phenyl, but the terrible odor still remained. Although a number of medical benefits have been cited for the squatting toilet, I am unable to squat now and I prefer the Western toilet with a water tap attached as in some of the modern Indian latrines. I always wondered how a four- to five-thousand-years-old Indian civilization had not developed a good sewer system and hygienic latrines. We proudly exhibit the archeological findings of the highly developed housing and drainage systems of the Indus valley civilization. In all Indian small or large towns that I have visited, including Dharwad and Jamkhandi, there are open gutters even to this day sixty-seven years after independence. In our country we still do not have toilets for majority of people both in small villages as well as in big cities like Bombay. As this basic facility is unavailable, a large number of people defecate in the open. It is good news to know that the newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke about this lack of toilets and said that they should build toilets before building temples.

A little distance from the house we had a small lot enclosed by mud walls called daddi where we had a flower garden and also grew vegetables. The place was locked and was used for storing hay, etc. for feeding the cows and buffalos. All houses in the Apte galli (street) where we lived had their own daddis. Every morning my grandmother or the children would go to the daddi and get a variety of flowers: durva (tender grass) and bel (Aegle marmelos) leaves for pooja. In our daddi we had a big tree of bel, bushes of parijat (Nyctanthes arbortristis), and a variety of mogras (Jasmiminium multiflorum), chameli (jasminium aurriculatum), some rose bushes, and a kawath tree (Limonia acidissima). Daddi was also used for drying cow and water buffalo dung (gowri on the wall, later to be used for fuel and for preparing tooth powder (rakhundi). This powder is prepared by finely grinding partly burnt gowri, salt, and camphor.

Ajoba and Aji

My grandfather Hari Gopal Karandikar, Anna for us and Bapurao for all others was born on March 1877 (d. 28.12.1957). He had two brothers, Ramu and Hanamant (later adopted name, Baburao Patwardhan) and six sisters, Bhima, Chandra, Mathura, Tai, Ambu, and Tangu, and four other children had died in infancy. My grandmother Bhagirathibai (Tangu, Aji), was born on April 1884 (d. 7.12.1957). Aji was a kindhearted, simple woman, hardly five feet tall. She had a small build and was a hardworking woman and took care of all the cooking and serving food and taking care of the cattle. She was soft spoken and I have never seen her or Anna get angry or upset any time. Anna was tall and fair-skinned; he suffered from diabetes and passed away within three weeks after Aji’s death. It is coincidental that he died on the same day and month of my birth. Being the eldest son of his father, Anna had the responsibility to take care of the marriages and the deliveries of all his family members. The dark birthing room was