THE STORY OF A SELF-WILLED LADY

LOUISE OUWERKERK IN INDIA

Completing your study but finding no job: the problem sounds
disturbingly familiar, but it is not only a present-day
problem. It also happened to Louise Ouwerkerk, born in England
of Dutch parents who attained an MA degree in economics from
Cambridge in 1925. It was a bad time for employment-seekers
and it grew steadily worse. One day she saw an advertisement
inviting applications for a professorship in economy and
history at the Maharaja's Women's College in Trivandrum. This
College was founded by the Maharaja of Travancore, a
semi-autonomous princely state on the south-western tip of
India and Trivandrum was its capital. Louise applied, got the
appointment, and sailed for India in 1929.

By Dick Kooiman

For several years I have been exploring the history of this
part of India, working my way through a huge pile of Residency
records produced by the local representative of the British
Paramount Power. During one of these study periods in London I
happened to come across the Ouwerkerk Papers which had
recently been transferred to the Oriental and India Office
Collections. These papers contained the correspondence,
diaries, and files of Louise who had died in 1989. They also
included an unpublished manuscript entitled 'No Elephants for
the Maharaja', describing Travancore politics when she was
teaching at the College and later the local University
(1929-1939).

I jumped for joy when I found this manuscript. Louise dwells
extensively on the rise of political movements and their fight
with the maharaja's government for greater participation in
the state's administration. The fierce rivalry between Hindus,
Muslims, and Christians led to a pillarized political system
and strong feelings of communalism. Social groups were
mobilized for political ends by a selective appeal to
community symbols with religion as the major identity marker.
It perfectly suited my own interest in the relationship
between religion, power and development and my first thought
was to squeeze the last drop of information out of this source
for my own research. Gradually, however, I became convinced
that this manuscript deserved to see the light of day as a
publication in its own right.

IDEALIST AND ACTIVIST
Why publish a text after so many years? Louise wrote 'No
Elephants for the Maharaja' long before Independence and could
not benefit from the many studies about communalism and
Travancore history that have appeared since then. Moreover,
the manuscript is not conspicuous for theoretical or
comparative analysis and breathes an air of parochialism with
its strong emphasis on local events. Finally, the organization
of the text and bibliography leaves much to be desired.
However, the great value of the manuscript is its strong
narrative, written by a woman with an independent mind who was
an eye-witness to most of the events she describes. Louise was
both an idealist and an activist. As a student she was
actively involved in the ecumenical movement and international
student federation. Aboard ship she caused an upheaval by
dancing with the one and only Indian. Most of the women "cut
me dead", she wrote to her mother, and the worthy memsahibs
warned her "You wait till you get out East, then you will
understand the colour bar". But Louise did not care a damn
about what people said and went her own way. She reminds me
strongly of Adela Quested, one of the key figures in Forster's
famous novel A Passage to India. Uninhibited by any prejudice
she wanted "to meet the real Indian".
In Trivandrum she soon found herself at the centre of a wide
social network. She was closely acquainted with the few
British officers on the spot and talked politics with the men
at the Club, whereas the other women knitted their brows over
their needlework. She went to the cinema with the Resident,
dined with the local missionaries, and was kind enough to
entertain European planters at her home when they came down
from the hills for an occasional visit to the city. But she
also maintained many-sided contacts with Indians and that made
her a special case.

She had strained relations with her Indian colleagues,
especially after she became head of a department with mainly
male teachers senior to her in age. But among the students,
whom she visited at home, she was popular. She spent much time
studying local villages but was also a frequent visitor to the
royal palace where she played tennis with the maharaja. She
had intensive dealings with the dewan, the renowned Sir
C.P.Ramaswamy Aiyar, for whom she felt a mixture of admiration
("the perfect dinner partner") and hate ("the power-hungry
autocrat"). Nowhere you will find such vivid and colourful
descriptions of the dewan and other local politicians as in
this manuscript of Louise who knew them intimately and
observed their activities keenly. 

In the end it was the same dewan who banned her from the
state. The reason was that Louise had thrown herself into
politics. True to her student convictions, she tried to bring
the leaders of different communities together and unite them
behind a common programme for a more responsible form of
government. She founded a Communal Harmony Group, which later
changed to the Travancore State Congress. From her personal
files I gather that her involvement in that Party was much
greater than she is willing to acknowledge in her manuscript.
These political ventures, however, brought her into conflict
with the dewan who sought to retain his power by an astute
policy of divide-and-rule. When she was on leave in Europe in
1939, she received a letter from the Travancore Government
telling her that she was dismissed from service. She returned
to India but only after Independence was she permitted to
return to Travancore.

UNDER HEAVEN ONE FAMILY
I was kindly received by her surviving sister Miss Petronella
Ouwerkerk who lives in Banstead, Surrey. She is over ninety
years of age and still speaks a nice word of Dutch over a
glass of sherry. She was pleasantly surprised by my interest
in her sister's manuscript and after some hesitation allowed
me to change the chapterization, amend the bibliography, and
add an introduction and a few notes.

As the text is especially of interest to Indian readers, I was
happy to find an Indian publisher. I take it that there are
still many people living in this part of India who have
personally known Louise. M.M.Thomas, a founding father of the
World Council of Churches and honourary doctor of Leiden
University, was one of her students. Last year the book
appeared in print. In spite of her own active involvement, she
has succeeded in keeping that critical distance which makes
reading her history both entertaining and rewarding. I regard
this publication as a late tribute to a fine woman with an
independent and difficult character who - judging from her
diaries - often felt very lonely, but always remained true to
her lofty ideal of "Under Heaven One Family".


Louise Ouwerkerk, No Elephants for the Maharaja: social and
political change in the Princely State of Travancore
(1921-1939), edited with an introduction by Dick Kooiman, New
Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1994, 306 pp. with map and
plates.

Distributing agents: M/s Jaya Books, 240 B Kentish Town Road,
London NW5 1DD, UK and South Asia Books, Box No. 502,
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