In 1945, one year after Santha Rama Rau had graduated from Wellesley College, the first Indian student to be admitted there, she was already a celebrity author with a best seller and had earned a berth in Current Biography. She was the privileged daughter of distinguished parents—her father, Sir Benegal Rama Rau, was a high level government official and diplomat for British India. Her mother, Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, was an activist for women’s rights in India, including raising the age of marriage and birth control. Born in India as Vasanthi, shortened to Santha, Rama Rau and her sister lived as children in several countries where their father was posted. She was educated in English schools before arriving in the United States in 1941 for her college education, which coincided with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II. During her vacations, she was employed as a writer by the Office of War Information.

Rama Rau's first book, published in 1945, was Home to India, an autobiographical novel in which she explores through her leading character her own Indian roots and Asian identity. “That book,” she later said, “began with my return from boarding school in England [age sixteen] and with my grandmother wondering despairingly wherever in India she would find a man tall enough to marry me” [she was five feet eight]. Two years after her college graduation and a stay in India, she accompanied her father to Occupied Japan, where he served as head of newly independent India’s liaison mission (technically, there were no embassies or legations in Occupied Japan). As a diplomat's daughter, she quickly became a member of Tokyo’s younger set, or jet set, and had access to all sorts of interesting people—Japanese, Asian, European, and American. After her mother arrived to reclaim the role of host, she traveled with friends in Southeast Asia. Meantime, her father was appointed ambassador to the United States. Her second book, East of Home, published in 1950, retold the Japan experience and her travels in Asia. Rama Rau’s subsequent life was lived outside of India, much of it in New York City and environs.

In Japan, she met her first husband, Faubion Bowers, a native of Oklahoma and a prewar student of the pianist-composer, Aleksandr Scriabin, at the Julliard School of Music and of Kabuki drama as a foreign student in Tokyo, 1940-41. During the war, he was a member of the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service stationed in Australia. Bowers had begun the Occupation as a major and aide-de-camp in General MacArthur's headquarters and returned to civilian life in 1947 as a theatrical censor in the Occupation's Civil Censorship Detachment. The two were married from 1951 to 1966 and had one son, Jai Bowers. Both were prolific authors of books and articles in the 1950s based on their love of theater and the arts. Her works include: This is India (1954), Remember the House (1956), View of the Southeast (1957), My Russian Journey (1959), and Gifts of Passage (1961). In 1960, with the author's permission, she wrote a successful stage play based on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. This, in turn, was adapted for British television in the 1970s and later served as a play and book for a 1984 film. One of her last works is a beautifully illustrated book, The Cooking of India, with photographs by Eliot Elisofon and published by Time-Life Books in 1969 as part of a series on foods of the world. By then, she and Faubion Bowers had divorced and she married Gurdon Wattles. In 1971, Wellesley College honored her with an Alumnae Achievement Award, the same honor bestowed upon Senator Hillary Rodman Clinton in 2003.

Site Ed. note: As an undergraduate student, I was so much impressed by Rama Rau’s first novel that I kept track of her later work for several years and read most of her publications. A novel I had overlooked, The Enchantress (1970), was brought to my attention recently by the student intern for his site, a great find since it begins with a revisit to Occupied Japan and features a Philippine national, a young woman caught in wartime Japan who “escapes” Tokyo in 1947, returns to Manila, and ends up in Shanghai. The Forster novel, Passage to India, set in colonial India, 1924, was one of my favorite works as a graduate student. Perhaps, I sensed in some of the views expressed by its British characters something of what was later to be called “Orientalism” by Edward Said. My generation of graduate students was eager to avoid projecting Japan and East Asia as exotic. Although I had entered Columbia University, following a postgraduate year in London, to begin serious study of Japan, Forster's two contrasting leading female characters showed me the joys and perils of being a so-called expert on a foreign culture. I saw the initial New York run of the play, 1960, and much later saw the impressive film, 1984, directed by David Lean (nominated for academy award as best director) and staring Judy Davis and Peggy Ashcroft (winner of Academy Award for best supporting actress). Also, I came to know Faubion Bowers quite well and first interviewed him at Kennedy Center, 1984, for an oral history project while he was accompanying a troupe of Kabuki actors on an American tour. I met him later at a conference on the arts in Occupied Japan at the MacArthur Memorial Archives, Norfolk, Virginia, and interviewed him again in New York not long before his death in 1999.