The Indian Diary of Vera Luboshinsky narrates the life of Vera and Mark Luboshinsky in India and at the princely state of Bhopal, during the 1940s. The Diary is a unique and completely unknown text to the anglophone world: a rich primary source for historians of India's princely states, providing an unusual depiction of the royal family, their acquaintances, and associates, and more generally, of the life of Indians and foreigners in India during the Second World War.
With literary flair, Vera describes not only her life in India, but also her intimate relationship with the Begum and the British residents of Bhopal, as well as her encounters with well-known people like Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Fatima Jinnah, Anandamayi Ma, and Paul Brunton.
The Diary also offers an extremely rare Eastern European female voice in late colonial India: a voice that both submits to and transgresses the orientalist moods of its time.
Vera Luboshinsky (1897-1978) was a Russian writer, and wife of a nobleman, Mark Luboshinsky. Emigration to Czechoslovakia after the Bolshevik coup and Mark's subsequent friendship with Hamidullah Khan, the Nawab of Bhopal, gave Vera the chance to live in one of India's most prominent princely states from 1938 to 1945. After returning from India to Czechoslovakia, Vera and Mark lived under another Communist power takeover. Vera's life ended in obscurity with no hope of returning to her earlier fortune.
DUSAN DEÁK is Associate Professor at the Department of Comparative Religion, Comenius University in Bratislava. His research focuses on the social and religious history of Western India, and on the reception of Indian ideas and practices in Central Europe.
ROWENNA BALDWIN obtained her PhD in Sociology in 2011 from the University of Warwick. Her thesis focused on patriotic education in Russia and she has spent time teaching and researching there. Since 2016, Rowenna has been training in the field of documentary filmmaking and now works as an independent filmmaker.
Mark Luboshinsky was lured to Bhopal by the Nawab of Bhopal after the Nawab's visit to Piestany Spa, where Mark was the respected controller of guests. However, Bhopal was a stark contrast to Piestany at the time with the spectre of political and social change hanging like the sword of Damocles over its head. Escaping this scourge could have been the main reason for Mark and Vera accepting the Nawab's offer of moving to Bhopal where Mark was made responsible for hosting the Nawab's guests and maintaining the guest houses.
Mark was given one of the comfortable guest houses where he and Vera settled into their temporary home. Bhopal-with its jungles and beautiful lakes-appeared to be a calm and serene place for the couple.
Mark and Vera were most particularly welcomed by the urbane Begum of Bhopal, my grandmother. They would, almost daily, walk over to her side of the palace and share coffee and petits fours with the Begum, who welcomed this cultured European couple into her home. It was here on my daily visits to pay my respects to my grandmother that I got to know them.
Invariably, I would find my grandmother, Begum Maimoona Sultan- or 'Nunun' as we called her affectionately-sitting sipping coffee on the veranda with Mark and Vera in attendance. Nunun would smoke Balkan Sobranie cigarettes that came in various colours and emitted a lovely aroma of Balkan tobacco. It was obvious that Nunun preferred the company of this cultured couple to the gossiping local ladies that she avoided. So, it was at these mid-morning coffee meetings that I would often encounter Vera and Mark.
They were a very considerate couple, always kind to us children and invariably acting as civilized elders to us and companions to my grand- mother. Mark was tall, balding, and a quiet, efficient controller of the guest houses. Vera had grey hair and a ready smile.
Writings on India penned by non-Indian authors who share personal experiences abound and have their own rich history. From ancient Greek, Chinese, Persian, and Arab to many modern Western accounts of different styles and sizes and written with different purposes, the testimonies of how foreign visitors saw, imagined, and experienced India and its people and cultures historically construct her image. Although the intertextual layers of what has been written bind these writings to certain stereotypical narratives, each individual effort to describe meaningfully their experienced reality has its own quality and documents the construction process. Historically amongst Europeans, capturing India in words was for a considerable period a male domain. However, from around the seventeenth century and increasing in quantity from the nineteenth century, female experiences can be observed, with their voices reflecting a plurality of perceptions.
There exists a prolific academic body of work on European women and their texts narrating their Indian experiences. It shows that women's writings on India were hardly uniform, having different formats, such as private letters home, journals, periodical articles, novels, travelogues, memoirs, or household manuals. Not all of their authors were littérateurs, many being self-made documentarists of their Indian lives and travels, whereas others used the printed text as an opportunity to proselytize and teach. Most of the women authors discussed in the academic texts were of British origin, which necessarily links the debate on their writings to the social constraints and advantages brought by the British colonial social setting, its political goals and social norms. Contrary to earlier and rather monolithic representations of British women in India under the overarching category of memsahib, it has been argued that while writing under different historical conditions and in different times, these women authors represent socially, individually, and authorially a multifarious group who were linked not only by their Western origin and social status. Their involvement in social reform, missionary activities, or the promulgation of Victorian moral standards certainly displayed some degree of the colonial claim to superiority, but also provided evidence that they were not cut off from the world of Indians, in which they actively en- gaged and which they shaped. Furthermore, what underlies many of the academic accounts related to women's texts on experiencing and living in India is an attempt to recover the voices of women authors and revisit the proverbially male narratives of power, race, and colonial superiority.
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