McKim Marriott interviewed by Kalman Applbaum and Ingrid Jordt 14th June 2008

0:09:07 Father was the Dean of the Medical School at Washington University, a biochemist who became a paediatrician; he was a researcher; he took me hiking, canoeing, and swimming, and was himself a horseback rider; he was the first doctor in Yellowstone Park when it was still an army post; he died when I was twelve; mother's father was the Dean of Architecture at Washington, also an actor, poet and Latin scholar; he travelled a lot in Europe to gather architectural ideas; so I had the arts on one side and science on the other; they were, in a sense, displaced persons in St Louis as they were both from the East Coast; my mother was from the New York area and father from Baltimore; in moving to St Louis which they did fairly early, they thought of it as going to the frontier and bringing culture to the Mid-West; there were not many paved roads at the time; I met a lot of doctors, artists, all kinds of people there; my father was appointed to the University of California when I was twelve where he became the Dean of the Medical School at San Francisco; so I had a good deal of academic exposure at Berkeley, but then he died; that interrupted my education; I got back to St Louis a year later, having missed most of the sciences that I should have had in high school; the school was of a liberal persuasion and suggested I followed the arts; did French and some Latin, painting, music and history; did not have to do chemistry or very much math, which I regretted; I ran a couple of the school magazines and wrote a lot; got a National Scholarship to Harvard and arrived there just as Pearl Harbour was struck by the Japanese (1941); I was seventeen so wasn't drafted immediately; eighteen year olds were drafted which made the freshman class rather small; I had taken my father's lead and done some horseback riding in the Rockies and had taken up youth hostelling; I was eager to go to Europe but with Hitler there I couldn't do that so settled for bicycle riding in the United States; I loved being in rural areas and it was possible then to bicycle round a large part of the country without worrying about too many automobiles; I used all my vacations for touring; ultimately went through  fourteen States and several parts of Canada with a friend, in my teens; I also drew a lot of landscapes; it generally oriented me to rural living; I continued that as far as possible in College; I had intended to go into anthropology and had chosen Harvard because there was some undergraduate anthropology there in the person of Clyde Kluckhohn; he was actually in Washington D.C. where he had gone as an advisor on how to deal with nations and cultures psychologies etc.; College said I had to do something useful so studied German for a year as well as the usual things taught in the first year; Clyde was not there, decided to do a major in art history; next suggestion was that I could go into the artillery but would possibly need more math or, as an art student, could paint camouflage on tanks; that did not thrill me too much; then said there was a programme in Japanese and there was a need for translators; my intention had been, apart from going to Europe was to go to China; I had spent a lot of time at the St Louis Art Museum which had a pretty good collection of ancient bronzes and also calligraphy; I really thought I would like to be an anthropological sinologist; Harvard's Chinese library collection was intriguing, but the thought of being useful in Japanese was also attractive; took that up on a super-intensive course taught by an old White Russian named Serge Elisseeff [Sergei Eliseyeff] who was a wonderful character; he had lived for years in Japan; I found Japanese quite easy; then Clyde came back and I had practically all my courses with him; I think I had five different courses and he was my tutor, so I saw him practically every day for a year; it was great as I got an inside view and all his personal opinions as well as the courses

11:34:03 I volunteered for early induction into the military, but they didn't really want any more people; I had thought they would send me to Washington where I would do more Japanese, but they sent me on infantry training; I became an instructor for a while; after a year I got back to Japanese at Stanford then Washington D.C.; after another year of that they said they needed volunteers to go to Kunming to help Chiang Kai-shek defend China against the Japanese; through my interest in China had got caught up in the Sino-Japanese hostilities; I liked the idea of helping to oppose the Japanese takeover of China; so, aged twenty, I stepped forward as a volunteer; went on a troop ship to India via the Antarctic Ocean south of Australia to avoid the Japanese; aged twenty-one I stepped ashore in Bombay; thought they would send me through India to Assam and over the hump into China; I spent a couple of months in Indian army camps trying to drive a British Land Rover which was entirely new to me; did all sorts of military things; I don't think I was well cut out for that life but I didn't mind living in a tent; having got to Calcutta, I was told that I was not being sent to Kunming as Chiang Kai-shek was retreating; instead, because at Almora in the Himalayas we could receive Japanese radio messages, I was sent to New Delhi and worked in a little postal station in the middle of Connaught Circus; it was a secret thing and I worked at night as I wanted to use the daylight hours to see something of India; that was all British Empire and Churchill didn't want Americans in India; of course he had to have them as we had to tend the airplanes, so there were Americans there in all kinds of guises, operating secretly from each other with little idea of what was going on; I was translating Japanese radio messages in the little post office which were written down in pencil by sleepy Indian radio operators, with lots of mistakes, so it was pretty much garbage stuff; we had to translate these into Chinese telegraphic code, using a code book, and correct all the mistakes they had made; that was not easy as you did not know it was a mistake until you translated it; messy work, but that is what I did on my eight hour shift for six months until the Japanese surrendered; we had a little victory parade; at that point I had no rifle; as Churchill had not wanted Americans there we were not supposed to fraternize with Indians; of course it was impossible to be there and not do so; we had Indian servants, but we were not supposed to learn any Indian languages, although some did use the servants as an opportunity to study Hindi; I spent my time going around and looking at things, sketching people and places around Delhi, which was interesting because of its history; we had very few books so I was relying very largely on my eyes; I was fascinated by the villages nearby that I could see when I travelled around by bike; I could see mud walls with villages behind them and, as a would-be anthropologist, was very curious about what was going on there; realized I had to learn a lot more and resolved to try and come back and do that

18:42:18 After the Japanese surrendered I was shipped back to Washington by air and told that now I should study Chinese; I suppose I had learnt 5,000 characters but they were not the same in Chinese; as I didn't mind learning another language I went to work in the Signal Corp in Washington D.C.; my instructor, who was a professor from Harvard, got out of uniform; I got out of uniform early because of my six months' service; most of those sitting in Washington did not get out so soon; I then had the choice to go to occupied Japan and work for them or would I re-enlist; I had a couple of months to think about it; I watched a number of Japanese movies and discovered there were at least two hundred American Naval Officers who knew a lot more Japanese than I did because they had had conversational practice; decided I was way behind and would need several more years of training; I came to Chicago at that point because I had had two and a half years at Harvard but needed to get a B.A.; they had a long list of requirements, but Hutchins here in Chicago was offering cut rate degrees for army veterans; they said that I had the equivalent of a B.A. in Japanese and all I would need to do was to take a few comprehensive exams on language, sociology and history; I did those successfully and was told with this B.A. equivalent I could do a Masters degree; I chose to do that; my sister who was nine years older had come to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate and had married a graduate student in anthropology, and he was very enthusiastic

22:00:02 Clyde Kluckhohn a friendly, engaging, passionate sort of person; he would struggle with ideas and had a sense of excitement about them; he was quite orderly and assigned interesting books to read; I would meet him as tutor every second week and he would usually give me two or three books to read before the next session; I was supposed to write papers about them; he was demanding but also very receptive; he became my advisor in my second year and said I should study with Talcott Parsons and get some depth psychology, so I studied with White who was a psychoanalyst; I hated ordinary psychology but liked the deep stuff; I had two courses with Parsons on the American family and the American occupational system; after I got to Chicago, Fred Eggan was the head of the Japanese training programme here and said that I could do Japanese; however I had been in India, and  nobody had worked there except for David Mandelbaum; the British Empire did not want social scientists working there; I had met Geoffrey Gorer during my time in Washington; he asked me what I would like to study in India; I said I was interested in peasants but he said I couldn't do that as they would lie all the time; he said he had originally wanted to work in Bihar but it was politically difficult and the British officials were reluctant to let him in; the villages were really hostile as they saw him as some sort of official who was enquiring into their affairs; I said that maybe we had other ways of operating; in this university there was one retired missionary who had been to India but nobody in the Faculty; they taught no Indian languages except Sanskrit and Pali and they were taught by the Russian literature person who had learnt both in St Petersburg; I did what I could but there was nobody here; Fred Eggan said there was a very good library on India as William Rainey Harper, the Founder of the university, had wanted to do all of the Asian languages; Fred was keen that somebody work on India; so at the beginning, studying courses with Lloyd Warner also community studies with nothing to do, so Fred said just read everything in the library and then go, so I did; I found a few Indian students and another graduate student, Phil Talbot, who was being trained for the State Department; it was felt that more needed to be known, and he had been a Naval Officer in India and had already spent three or four years there; he had lots of interesting connections there and was a great source for me; he knew about the best missionaries, those who had been there a long time and were social-science orientated; I wrote to William Wiser and his wife who had written a book 'Behind Mud Walls'  which was a very useful introduction; so I began collecting names of people and had a huge index finally of people to write to; I wrote letters to everybody asking for their advice on where to work, interesting subjects, and how to do it; I had a lot of help from many people

32:18:20 Did first fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh in the early 1950's; the work was sponsored by the Social Science Research Council; they had just gone into the foreign studies field for the first time; they started a Foreign Fellowship Area programme and I was the first to get one; this gave me a year and a half and $10,000 - a lot of money that would stretch a bit further; I wrote a proposal which was on what was happening to caste in India with the changes of the new constitution, and how did this look at the village level; I expected to be able to watch the falling apart of the caste system - totally misconceived - but that won the fellowship; by then I had a wife and two children; it was too expensive to travel by air so we went by the only boat we could find, a freighter delivering American pipe to some oil industries in the Middle East; we thought it was going to be Israel but it turned out not to be; we went through Lebanon and Egypt and headed to a place recommended by the Wisers about one hundred and seventy-five miles south-east of  Delhi where they had been working for thirty years; suggested I worked half way between them and Delhi where there was more advanced technology; I called on them though they were about to leave as Wiser was suffering from a terminal illness; went to Lucknow, the State capital, and met the leading sociologists at Lucknow University and got their blessing; went to the Aligarh District capital and found that it was in some turmoil as they had had a large number of refugees after partition; Muslims had been urged to cluster round  the Aligarhi Muslim university which was patronised by the Imperial Government; many of the Nawabs who had built palaces in Aligarh had left for Pakistan at partition, leaving their houses; from the other direction there were lots of Hindus coming in to Aligarh; the trains had been hijacked and hundreds of passengers had been slaughtered, so had those who had been walking; the people around who had done the murders were still there; at that time the tensions were such that the United Nations had set up a programme to study social tensions in India; it was to be headed by Gardner Murphy who was a social psychologist; he was about to start in India before I had gone there and I had met him; he was very eager to have me; I had done a good deal of psychology here at Chicago in the Human Development Committee which Lloyd Warner was attached to; Murphy wanted to study the emotions behind the riots so he wanted to co-opt me into his team working in Aligarh; that was not a comfortable position to be in politically; they had had a riot six months before I arrived there and I as an investigator from abroad, an American and a social scientist, would be something of a threat to the Collector; he had been held responsible for not sending in the police to stop the riot and had let a Muslim athletic instructor get murdered by a mob; naturally he worried about my investigation so I had to steer clear and refuse to become a part of Murphy's team; he had brought in a psychoanalyst who was a refugee from Pakistan named Pasram; he was a wonderful psychoanalyst, a charming man with enormous knowledge, and very broad liberal views; he had been trained in Murphy's own institute in the U.S. and was well acquainted with the Faculty here in Chicago; he was the head of the local team and I spent time with him and learnt a lot from him though I couldn't join him officially; my job was to get into the rural areas; I had brought a jeep with me from the U.S.A. on the freighter, and began touring the rural areas; I needed census statistics and wanted to know what actual villages were like; I visited seventy-five villages and made brief interviews of an hour or two in each; this was again rather upsetting to the local officials; the Collector was having a wedding for his daughter and we had also arrived a couple of months before the annual fair where they had musical performances etc.; I had a tape-recorder and made recordings of a mushahida, a poetry-song contest between duelling poets; the idea of recording this was very attractive to them; they put me on the stage and I recorded these dialogues; this in turn helped my language learning; I began to learn Urdu and Hindi by the Margaret Mead method, of imitating people who then correct you, and pretty soon you are speaking the language; I took these recordings, which were greatly prized, to the Collector's wedding, and that was a great hit; his spies then were collecting reports on my activities in the rural areas, which he was uncertain about; he called me in and asked if there was any reason why he shouldn't throw me out of the District as he had reports that I had been enquiring about his administration; I managed to tough it out but he warned me that he was watching; settling in a village was a bit of a problem and I was thrown out of three of them before managing to do so; I wanted a fairly complex village which had lots of different castes but small enough for me to know everybody; I certainly wanted Brahmins and there were plenty around in that region; I found one village with a lot of Brahmins in it and they even had a regional temple; I went back having been told they had found me a house and they showed me a pig pen; I figured that was not too welcoming; they had looked like a fairly wealthy community but after reading some Gazetteers found that the temple had been built by a local Rajah before the British takeover and the reason why there were so many Brahmins was that they were his funeral priests; such priests take all of the bad stuff along with the dead; they would only marry amongst themselves as they were negatively regarded by other Brahmins; hence they were uncomfortable about me learning too much about them and that was the reason for the pig pen; went to another likely village within a cluster of villages; I had met an office boy who had built a house for a wedding in one of these villages and now wanted to rent it; also met a merchant - a travelling salesman for a lock industry - who spoke English and wanted to meet me; he told of a village where he had a friend, a Muslim doctor, a vaidya, who would probably be glad to have me living there; went there and it seemed a suitable place; I spent a night there with an interpreter who said they were bootleggers and were worried about me bringing the police there, so that didn't work out; then the merchant suggested yet another friend; I liked the village as it had an old mound on top of which was a mud fortress; it was a large village, had a lot of Brahmins and twenty-four castes represented in it; it was perfect; the friend turned out to be the landlord who lived in the castle; he was very friendly because he needed friends; a quarter of the population were Brahmin farmers who were subject to the Jats who had taken over in the seventeenth century during the crumbling of Mughal authority; the Jats had crossed the Jumna River into that area and had taken over; they had been pretty rough on the local Brahmins who had had a Rajput king before; now the Jats took over as rulers and demanded deference which was very irritating for the Brahmins; this remaining Jat landlord still had some land and was eager to have me there; he spoke a little English and had a son in high school; he found a city office boy who had a house to rent in the potters quarter; my neighbours were a cotton carder, a group of potters, a couple of Muslim families; it turned out to be wonderful for studying the dynamics of the village; I moved in alone having left my wife and children in Aligarh city, which had a decent well; in the village, the well was just a hole in the ground; when I moved into this one room house I found eight servants waiting for me who said they all belonged to the house; there was a carpenter, people who would plaster the walls with cow dung, a water carrier, a cleaner, a barber - I was their employer