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BOOKS
AUTHORSPEAK
SUSAN BEAN
Yankee Indian
America's
fascination with India began 215 years ago when mariners in small merchant
vessels voyaged from ports along the east coast to the faraway land. The
experience of the first Americans in India are now documented with illustrations
by Susan Bean in Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters
with India in the Age of Sail (Mapin).
 An
anthropologist and curator of Asian, Oceanic and African art at the Peabody
Essex Museum at Salem, Massachusetts, Bean's tryst with India began nearly
30 years ago. While at Columbia University, curiosity spurred Bean to
travel to a village near Bangalore to wrap up her doctoral research on
anthropology-the subject she taught thereafter for almost a decade at
Yale University. But Peabody Museum beckoned the Boston native "mainly
because of its old relationship with India".
The museum was founded in 1799 by seafarers
who were among the first Americans to sail to Calcutta and Surat. "The
surviving mariners brought back several material embodiments from India
to sell," says Bean. "They also brought back curiosity."
Some jotted down their thoughts in journals while others wrote letters
to their families in America. "I was fascinated by the way American
ideas about India developed," she says. "These ideas were sort
of a reflection about these sailors' thoughts about their very own republic."
In short, Yankee India is the American image of India.
It is, however, not the Peabody curator's debut
book. She has written about Karnataka from her dissertation. And her last
book, Timeless Visions, was a catalogue of the museum's Indian collection
of renowned art collectors Chester and Davida Herwitz. "In two years,
ours will be the only museum in the US that will have contemporary Indian
art on display on a permanent basis," she says.
Needless to say, India is always on Bean's mind.
She visits the country a couple of times a year. "I like India for
its diversity," she says. "There is a tremendous variety of
places, people, languages, art, history. I have always enjoyed India for
that. It makes America look very bland."
-Nitish S. Rele
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