Author. In a long career as a journalist, travel writer, and novelist, she sought to make the readers of her native India and adopted America familiar with each other's lands. Raised in a family of wealth and position, she was sent to England for education, then graduated from Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, with honors in 1944. In 1945, she produced "Home to India", her first published work, which dealt with an earlier return to India while her diplomat father was stationed in England. While living in Japan with her parents, she met her first husband, Faubion Bowers (divorced 1966), and moved to New York, where she became a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, and a frequent contributor to "The New Yorker", "Harper's", "Holiday", "The New York Times Magazine", and various international periodicals. Her most noted works were to be "This is India" (1953), "My Russian Journey" (1959), and an Indian cookbook that she produced for Time-Life in 1970. In 1960, Rama Rau did a much acclaimed stage adaptation of E.M. Forester's 1924 classic "A Passage to India" which had long runs in London's West End, and on Broadway. Her 1961 autobiography, "Gifts of Passage" is really more a travelogue. Her second husband, Gurdon Wattles (deceased 1995) worked for the United Nations, and she was to spend many years essentially as a wealthy vagabond, writing of what she saw. Of her work she said: "Our job - those of us lucky enough to have lived in these two countries - is to interpret them to one another".
Author. In a long career as a journalist, travel writer, and novelist, she sought to make the readers of her native India and adopted America familiar with each other's lands. Raised in a family of wealth and position, she was sent to England for education, then graduated from Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, with honors in 1944. In 1945, she produced "Home to India", her first published work, which dealt with an earlier return to India while her diplomat father was stationed in England. While living in Japan with her parents, she met her first husband, Faubion Bowers (divorced 1966), and moved to New York, where she became a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, and a frequent contributor to "The New Yorker", "Harper's", "Holiday", "The New York Times Magazine", and various international periodicals. Her most noted works were to be "This is India" (1953), "My Russian Journey" (1959), and an Indian cookbook that she produced for Time-Life in 1970. In 1960, Rama Rau did a much acclaimed stage adaptation of E.M. Forester's 1924 classic "A Passage to India" which had long runs in London's West End, and on Broadway. Her 1961 autobiography, "Gifts of Passage" is really more a travelogue. Her second husband, Gurdon Wattles (deceased 1995) worked for the United Nations, and she was to spend many years essentially as a wealthy vagabond, writing of what she saw. Of her work she said: "Our job - those of us lucky enough to have lived in these two countries - is to interpret them to one another".
Bio by: Bob Hufford
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