A brief footnote about my grandfather, Rev. Donald E. Rugh,

Nana Don,

A man who arranged meetings between dignitaries and Gandhi,

A man who was one of the first Americans to greet the Dalai Lama after his escape from Tibet in 1957

A man who received the first shipments of surplus American wheat under the Indo-American Agreement for famine relief.

A man responsible for getting Kazakh refugees fleeing communist China out of Kashmir to Turkey so that Nehru could continue to broker peace between China and Japan.

A man who was so effective in India that he was accused of being an agent for the CIA.

This is also a man who never bothered to learn the language of a country he served for almost 4 decades.

This is also a man who originally wanted to serve as a missionary to Africa, but was told India was the area of most need. So he simply went there instead.

I’m sure my Nana Don saw himself as a career pragmatist, lending a hand because he had the means and the backing to do so. He was not an evangelist in the classic missionary sense, unless you consider equal access to education and drinking water to be a religion.

Dr. Rev. Don E. Rugh impressed his international colleagues as a plain-spoken, straight-shooter who actually got the job done in a sometimes hostile climate.

But his lasting legacy to those who attended his schools, grew up in his leprosy colony, ate the surplus grain he distributed, benefitted from the livestock he helped bring into the country has never been assessed and is certainly outside the purview of this project.

The history of post-war American involvement in India may not be as drenched in white-supremacist pageantry as the British Raj, but the Americans’ entrance into the country -

- both with and without the help of flickering British power, in addition to the direct invitations by Nehru, Kaur and others -

- is a complex narrative that has not received significant attention, in part, because it is not as interesting visually: The British built glorious cities based on Mughal architecture, the Americans distributed burlap sacks of grain and repaired B-24’s behind walls.

This is because the misty-eyed, white-skinned romantic in search of the sublime had no place in post-war America’s anti-Communist plan of action.

In that respect, my grandfather was the ideal, missionary nation-builder. He was definitely someone who wouldn’t do as the English Romantics did and fall in love with India as she lays across his lap in miniature.

But he would agree with the Romantics that, as for what India needs most, well, we in the West know best.