Posted by SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
Sep 10th, 2011 |
At a time when America appears lost, and its leadership continues its reckless bid for global supremacy, it is interesting to recall the story of the only American who participated in India’s freedom struggle and was imprisoned by the British-Indian government. He gave up Western clothes and donned home-spun Khadi dress.
A highly impressed Mahatma Gandhi wrote in his Young India: “No Indian is giving such battle to the (British-Indian) Government as Mr. Samuel Evans Stokes Jr. He has veritably become the guide, philosopher and friend of the hill men.”
Born into a famous American Quaker family (and son of a Philadelphia millionaire), Samuel Evans Stokes Jr. made India his home when he was only 21. He turned into a political activist. Stokes is also credited with the introduction of “American Delicious variety” of apples in Shimla Hills, which resulted in many significant social and economic changes in the region.
On Stokes’ arrest 17 years after his arrival in India, Mahatma Gandhi wrote: “That he (Stokes) should feel with and, like an Indian, share his sorrows and throw himself into the (freedom) struggle, has proved too much for the (British-Indian) government. To leave him free to criticize the government was intolerable, so his white skin has proved no protection for him…”
Stokes’ portrait adorns the walls of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library at New Delhi (a building where India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru lived), but few people outside India’s northern State of Himachal Pradesh are aware about the legacy of this great man.
Better known by his Indian name “Satyanand” Stokes, he arrived in India in 1904. Kotgarh in Shimla Hills, overlooking Satluj river, became his new home. It was the last outpost of the British Empire, situated on the Hindustan-Tibet mule track. Rudyard Kipling described the area as “The Mistress of The Hills”, and based one of his stories “Lispeth” on Kotgarh. Stokes soon became the most loved and respected member of this area.
Stokes’ journey to India began on January 9, 1904, when he boarded the old Haverford at Philadelphia, writes his granddaughter, Asha Sharma, in her book An American in Gandhi’s India. “Little did he know this would be a journey of no return. His destination was Subathu, a small town in Shimla Hills, to work in a leper home.
“Among the crowds of friends and relatives assembled to bid goodbye to ‘Sam’ were his father, Samuel Evans Stokes, Sr., engineer, holder of numerous patents, successful businessman, pioneer of elevators in America, and founder and proprietor of Stokes and Parish Machines Company in Philadelphia; his mother Florence Spencer Stokes, a devout Christian, devoted mother, an American proud of her heritage and family values: his brother Spencer,20; and sisters Anna, 19; and Florence, 14.”
After a short stay in England where he met leading personalities working among leprosy patients in India, Stokes began his India journey aboard “Olympia” in February 1904 and headed towards Shimla Hills. He travelled extensively in Punjab to learn about leprosy work there. Although he himself came as a missionary to spread Christianity, he was soon disillusioned by the work and lifestyle of the missionaries, and differences arose.
The story of how a “Sahib” Stokes became a “Sadhu” (ascetic mendicant) Stokes is equally fascinating … He grew a beard, wore a saffron choga (a loose cloth) and hemp slippers on his feet. His austere belongings were a blanket, lota, and a degchi to cook food and eat in. Stokes’ family was distraught to get the news of his new life. But more distraught were the Christian missionaries in and around Kotgarh.
Kotgarh was one of the few small pockets in hill areas of north India directly under British rule, surrounded by big Princely hill states (including my hometown – the Princely state of Nahan or Sirmaur). The British forces, invited by local hill Rajas and Maharajas to help repulse the attack from Gurkha army from Nepal, reached Kotgarh in 1814. In such small areas as Kotgarh, the British Political Agent to Hill States, Captain Charles Pratt Kennedy, wanted to help spread Christianity to win the loyalty of the locals.
Stokes arrived in Kotgarh at a time when local missionaries were tearing their hair because they could not make much headway
in conversion work. A handful of converted people were declared outcastes by the locals. With his sadhu’s attire and a different attitude, Stokes was welcomed by high caste families, including Rajputs and Brahmins.
Stokes’ granddaughter Asha Sharma, who studied at Columbia University, gives a detailed and fascinating account of this legendary American-turned-Indian’s journey … from his childhood in America to his role as a leading member of Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent freedom movement in India; from his ascetic life to his marriage to a local girl; from his pioneering work in treating leprosy patients to bringing about a horticulture revolution in hilly northern India.
Where do I fit into this narrative? My association with Kotgarh began when I was in school. I would visit my aunt in Kotgarh during my school/college summer holidays, providing much relief from the dust and heat of Delhi. My aunt was married into a local Rajput family who were leading apple growers in the area.
Her husband, Govind Ram Bhalaik’s two sisters were married to Prem Chand Stokes and Pritam Chand Stokes, sons of Samuel Evans “Satyanand” Stokes. Hence the children of Prem and Pritam, the third-generation Stokes, were my contemporaries and, in a way, my second cousins. These families are highly talented and we used to have spirited discussions, and wonderful pahari food, at their home “Harmony Hall”, named after their ancestral home in America.
I would often walk from Bhareri Estate, my aunt’s house (a spacious and elegant colonial mansion that once belonged to the British Political Agent during the East India Company rule), to the Stokes house at Thanedhar, a few kilometres away – with apple orchards on both sides of the road. The temple built by Stokes, after his conversion to Hinduism, overlooks the rolling hills around and has shlokas written on the walls.
Almost all among the third-generation male members of the Stokes’ immediate family have returned to America. But many of them do return to the land of their legendary grandfather who left all the luxury in America to work among the poorest of the poor … and sincerely believed in the dignity of human life and freedom.
THE TRIBUNE | Saturday, September 19, 1998
The man behind the success story of Kotgarh
By Pamela Kanwar
WALK into an apple orchard, small or large, in the upper hills between July and October, and the conversation inevitably veers around the ‘season’. Whther it is good, bad, or indifferent, whether there are gains or losses, whether the prices are soaring or have crashed. The ‘season’ is the period during which the apples are picked, sorted, graded, packed, dispatched to the market and finally sold. It has meant a whole year’s wait and marks the culmination of the multifarious activities of manuring, pruning and spraying. Most of these bear the stamp of the practices introduced by Satyanand Stokes.
Stokes introduced both apples and the culture of growing apples as a commercial crop for small farms at heights above 6000 ft in Himachal Pradesh. Working with his own hands, he pruned the trees, and introduced the practice of meticulously grading apples, according to their size, colour and quality before packing them for the market. It benefited farmers who had marginal, unirrigated lands where they grew a single crop of wheat or barley.
“If I can find anything which will yield the farmers here a larger crop per acre, I shall be doing the people a real service,” Satyanand Stokes wrote on the eve of a visit to the USA. He selected several varieties of fruits — apple, cherry, pear, apricot, etc. — for trial in Kotgarh.
Ten years later, once the grafted seedling had turned to fruit-bearing trees, the field experiments yielded results. Of all the imported varieties, the Delicious apple, Red and Golden, patented by the Stark Brothers, were the most productive.
Samuel Evans Stokes, (1882-1946), was the son of a wealthy Philadelphian engineer-businessman of Quaker antecedents, well-known for his contribution to the elevator technology. Young Samuel was not interested in following his father into business, and at 22 gave up his studies at the University of Yale, and opted to serve mankind. He set for sail to India and arrived at the leper home in Sabathu in 1905. He was sent for relief work to Kangra , then devastated by a severe earthquake. Thereafter, he came to the Christian Mission House at Kotgarh.
In 1910, he bought a dere lict tea garden, got married and made Barubagh in Kotgarh his home. But Stokes was of a reflective and enquiring mind and although he described himself as a “lover of Christ” he could not shut his mind to Indian metaphysical thought. He learnt Sanskrit, studied eastern and western thought, and expounded his philosophy of life in a book entitled Satyakam. In 1932, under the aegis of Arya Samaj, he became a Hindu, and converted from Samuel Evans to Satyanand.
Initially, Stokes took to conventional farming, and grew wheat and barley at Barubagh, (derived from the fact that on the level land (bagh) he, could grow a bhar of wheat). In addition, he planted vegetables, including peas, beans, lima beans, pumpkins and cabbages. “I, sometimes when loosening up the soil around plants, feel as if I were arranging their bedclothes and tucking them in like babies, up to the chin.”
He identified with the local farmers of the Kotgarh area, adopted their lifestyle and relaxed in the evenig with a hookah. He also realised that at the upper hieghts conventional crops yielded a small return, barely enough to sustain peasants, and absolutely inadequate to generate the cash they needed to pay the land revenue.
Kotgarh’s first encounter under colonial adminstration was one of unmitigated impoverishment. The Kotgarh people attributed it to begar, forced labour, which they had to serve on the Hindustan-Tibet Road. Roads like the Hindustan-Tibet road served to distance rather than link rural villages to new urban centres.
Lakshmi Singh (84), an orchardist, recalls, “My father, carried baggage and brought his cows to the Thanedhar rest house so that touring officials could be supplied with fresh milk.”
At 2 annas a day, villagers were hauled up to serve as begar coolies along the Hindustan-Tibet Road. They were meant to carry baggage and other sundries. They were also expected to provide fresh milk to the touring officials, shikaris, holiday trippers and the men accompanying them.
Stokes was sensitive to the political changes sweeping across the country, especially after the Jallianwala Bagh shootout of 1919 by General Dyer. Addressing himself to the problem of the exaction of begar from villagers, he articulated and mobilised the growing disaffection to a non-violent protest.
His efforts merged with the Non-cooperation Movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi with whom he was in constant touch. Inspired by the Mahatma, he began to wear khadi, and made a bonfire of his western clothes. He was convicted for his nationalist activities and, in 1922, imprisoned in Lahore jail for six months. Begar was abolished from Shimla district because of his efforts.
Apple had always been grown in the hills. The varieties popular in England were introduced by the British in Kulu and the Mission House in Kotgarh. The favoured varieties were Cox’s Belnheim Orange, Newton and Russet that tended to be tart and sour. The American Starking Delicious varieties were red and sweet.
Starking Delicious underwent mutation in the Indian milieu. In 1925, many people overlooked the significance of the imported seb varieties. And not all shared Stokes’ punctilious concern about patented plants.
Satyanand Stokes, was close to American national hero Johnny Appleseed, who sowed apple plants grown from seeds collected at cider presses in the early 19th century America. By the early 20th century, however, America had entered the age of commercial cropping and patents for grafted varieties. Stokes in field trials had selected the newly patented Delicious variety of apples from the Stark Brothers.
In 1925, at the cost of a dollar a plant, Stokes imported and distributed the nursery plants free to the farmers who had ordered them. Stokes also adapted the American practices of grading, packing, and marketing. During the early years, each apple was wrapped in a green tissue paper, and each box was stamped “Kotgarh Apples”. “I am working to make Kotgarh the headquarters of this fruit for India”, he wrote in 1926, in order to increase “the prosperity of this locality.”
Today’s orchards bear the impress of Stokes’ efforts to standardise the quality and size of the apples sent to the market.
Enter a godown during the apple season, and one has to pick one’s way across different heaps of apples! Almost every family member is working in the godown, usually on the ground floor of the house or a shed a little away from the house. Some one is emptying out the apples from the kilta, conical basket, in which the fruit is brought from trees to the godown. Someone else is sorting the quality of the fruit. If it is pockmarked by hail stones, has beak-marks where a hungry bird has savoured the fruit, or has been licked out of shape by an aphid, it is set aside in one heap. It would be packed into gunny bags and sold either to the itinerant contractor from where it finds way to the rehri markets of North India, or to juice factories.
The rest of the fruit is then further graded. If the apple has a uniform colour and perfect shape, it is graded AA. The remaining less endowed apples are graded A or B.
The apples are also graded according to their sizes by machine or manually. The apple is held in one hand, and depending on the number of fingers used to encircle it, the size is determined. Four fingers means the apple is “extra-large, three fingers “large”, two “medium”, one “small” Smaller than that that are pittu. Every apple is placed in its respective heap. Each has a market where it secures the best price.
When trucks are being loaded with the packed crates of fruit, the work can continue till wee hours. But then that is all part of the “season” for the orchardist and his family.
Stokes believed in the ethics of manual farm work. He personally pruned apple trees. His family, including his wife, joined in the work of picking, sorting, grading and packing. He wanted to insist in his children, “the dignity of manual labour”.
Double standards are so much a part of today’s leader — the village school for village children, and the public school for one’s own. Stokes, on the other hand, set up a school both for his seven children and for the 30 children of the village in 1925. The apple business in the initial years, met the expenses of his school. Stokes insisted that every child, including his own, should work for 45 minutes in the orchard.
As the village children at Kotgarh learnt the ‘three Rs,’ they also imbibed the techniques of modern farming. Over a generation, many of the unlettered, small and marginal peasant farmers forced to work as begaris transformed into literate orchardists, skilled at picking and grading fruit, adept in the techiques of manuring, spraying and pruning and learning to cope with the wily arhtiya in the market.
It was this generation of farmers which transformed the economy of the area. “Apple has changed the minds of the villagers of Kotgarh and neighbouring places of Thanedhar to a great extent. There was a time when all these people were in abject poverty and depended for foodgrains on the people of the lower valleys”, mused an old teacher from Kirti village. “We were hesitant to marry our daughters to them, but the position has reversed”.
Stokes’ efforts virtually forklifted the economy from subsistent farming to modern commercial cropping of fruit in the upper hills. He adapted the American practices of production and marketing, but unlike America where the fruit is grown in multi-hectare farms, it was suitably adapted into a crop for marginal, small as well as large farms. Today it is not unusual for farmers of small orchards, to pick, pack and dispatch their own crop to the market, and then work in larger neighbouring farms.
The development of the temperate heights transformed the economy of the people with unirrigated lands. The success story of Kotgarh was to be replicated in most other parts of the temperate ridges.
Apple has become the dominant crop in the temperate heights above 6000 ft. At present, about one-eighth of the total cultivated area of Himachal Pradesh is under apple cultivation, and much of it is concentrated in Shimla district. The cultivated area has increased to over 78,000 hectares, with an annual average production of 15 million boxes, and higher whenever weather conditions are ideal.
2010 September 6
by Prakash
Having earned the fame as “Apple State”, Himachal Pradesh is poised to claim the distinction of being a fruit state not only in the country but worldwide. But very few people really know how apple came in India and whose effort have provided us with the sweet and delicious apple we eat now days. Samual Evan Stokes was the person who introduced apple crop in the hills around Shimla.
Samual came to India with a doctor couple -Mr and Mrs Carleton – who were working with the Leprosy Mission of India. He wanted to work for mission in India For his decision he faced a lot of opposition from his family because he was heir to the family’s prosperous business of elevators. But young Stokes was determined and his family relented to let him follow his heart and Samuel landed in Bombay on the February 26, 1904. His voluntary work with the Leprosy Mission started in Sabatoo (what was then Punjab). But the extreme weather conditions forced Samual to take rest at Kotgarh church and recuperate. There, he explored the surrounding hills and the trail that was the old Hindustan-Tibet road. And soon he found himself in love with nature. He decided to spend rest of his life at Thanedar, called the “Mistress of the Northern Hills” by Rudyard Kipling. l He married a Rajput-Christian woman called Agnes on September 12, 1912
Though Captain R C Scot of the British army had introduced the Newton Pippin, King of Pippin and the Cox’s Orange Pippin apples to the Kullu valley in 1870, but they were strains of the English sour apples that were not popular because of their taste. During those days, sweet apples were imported from Japan to meet the demand of the Indian market.
It was during a visit to America in 1915 that Samuel Stokes heard about the new strain of apples patented by the Stark Brothers nursery in Louisiana called the Red Delicious. He bought a few saplings and planted them at his Barobagh orchard in Thanedar in the winter of 1916. Five years later his mother sent him a consignment of saplings of the Stark Brothers Golden Delicious Apples as a Christmas gift. The first apples bore fruit a few years later and were sold in 1926.
They were an instant hit. The divinely sweet taste and the inviting colour had the Indian market going crazy over them. Their popularity even spurred locals into planting Apples, rather than their usual crops of potato and plums. Soon the demand for the Kotgarh apples sky-rocketed and orchards cropped up all over the valley of what is today’s Himachal Pradesh, to meet this demand.
It is from these first few saplings that the sweet delicious Apples of Shimla and the Golden Delicious of Kinnaur became popular and Himachal Pradesh grew to become one of the largest producers of the fruit.
Kotgarh valley is famous for its world class quality apples. The apple cultivation of the place was initiated by Satyanand Stokes who was an American missionary.
Samuel Evans Stokes, an American Missionary landed in Kotgarh in 1904 as a young man of 22 to spread the message of Christ and also with the objective of helping the hill people. He worked at the leper home in the Shimla hills of Himachal Pradesh for two years. Then becoming disillusioned with the missionary way of life, he severed links with missionary organisations and became a sort of a hermit, giving up all material comforts and living for some time in a cave.
Samuel Evans Stokes was involved with the spreading of Christianity however the beauty and the culture of Kotgarh had an effect on him and he converted to Hinduism and took a Hindu name Satyanand Stokes and made Barobag his abode. He found the climate and soil conclusive to apple cultivation (the apple production was at its peak in America) and in 1919 he planted trees on his 200 acres and they began bearing apples in 1925.The natives took to growing apples soon and today it has spread all over the Shimla hills. The Apple boom in Kotgarh improved the economy of the place.
He is the only American to have served in the All-India Congress Committee of the Indian National Congress. He passed away on 14 May 1946, having spent more than 43 years of his life in the country which he had come to change but which changed him instead.
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