REGARDING BARRIE MORRISON
On an afternoon in the first week of October 1968, I returned to my apartment 1203 at 24 Peabody Terrace, Cambridge, MA 02138, to find my phone ringing. I had just met my Harvard adviser, Professor Daniel H.H. Ingalls, regarding the first chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation. I was elated as I returned to the apartment, because Ingalls had told me that I did not need to show him the rest of the dissertation chapter by chapter –– that I should give him a complete typescript when it was ready. As I unlocked the door and entered the apartment, still floating in the air (that is, I was floating in the air, not the apartment), I picked up the receiver and said a rather loud, irritation-showing ‘hello’. The voice at the other end was barely audible, especially so because some renovation work was going on outside the apartment. The noises of hammering and cutting were close to ear-shattering. I had to shout at least twice, “Sorry, I cannot hear you. Could you speak a little louder?” Finally, I could hear the words spoken in a soft, deep voice, “This is Professor Barrie Morrison, calling from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. We have a position in Sanskrit open, and your name has been suggested for it by Professor Ingalls. Are you interested in the position?” I had considerable difficulty in relating the words to what was going on in my head. I had met Ingalls barely fifteen minutes earlier. He had mentioned nothing about my job prospects. We had only very generally discussed the job issue some months earlier
But the unexpectedness of Barrie’s call was the least of my difficulties. I did not know where Vancouver was and what the University of British Columbia was beyond being a university. Concealing my confusion and ignorance as much as I could, I told Barrie, “Right now, there is too much noise outside. I will call you this evening or early tomorrow” and somehow took down his phone number. The first thing I did thereafter was to return to Widener Library in Harvard Yard. I rushed to the Reference Room and went through the atlases neatly arranged on a bookshelf (there was no Google in those days; few foreign graduate students could afford to buy even a local map). When one of the maps led me to ‘Vancouver,’ I remembered that I had read two or three lines on Vancouver in my grade 9 geography book, praising the place as one of the world’s most naturally gifted ports.
The next thing for me to do was to call Professor Ingalls. After I told him what I had heard from Barrie, he exclaimed, “Oh, Ashok, I had written a long letter for you after receiving an inquiry from the University of British Columbia and forgotten to tell you about it! Sorry.” Next came my question, “Should I show interest in the position?” Ingalls’ response was a short sentence more powerful than I wished to hear, “You would be a fool not to show interest!” Ingalls’ well-honed sense of English style rarely allowed him to use two exclamatory sentences in a row, but I had obviouly made him utter them.
Next day, when I conveyed to Barrie that I was interested in the position, he asked me if I would come to Vancouver for an interview. I replied, “Spending three to four days for an interview will be a hardship for me. I am determined to finish the first draft of my dissertation before the end of the year. I do not wish to be in a position in which I have to apply for an extension of my fellowship.” There was also another reason that my Indian sense of cultured behavior would not let me reveal to Barrie. In the India of my experience up to that point, the applicants bore the cost of appearing for interviews. As a graduate student, half of whose annual fellowship of $3,500 went back to Harvard in the form of fees, I did not have the money to pay for any Boston-Vancouver-Boston travel. The possibility that my travel would be paid for by UBC did not occur to me. On the other hand, Barrie had no reason to imagine that I was so ignorant of the North American university system as not to realize that travel for the purpose of appearing for an interview would be paid for by the short-listing university. He then asked me if I could come to Toronto. He and a past head of the department, William L. Holland, were soon going to be in Toronto for a meeting. I could be interviewed there. I said ‘yes,’ with some worry about financing in my mind. We decided to meet in Toronto in the evening of Thursday, October 24th.
(About a week before this meeting I received Barrie’s letter of 11 October 1968 and was relieved to read at the end of this letter: “Be sure to preserve receipts for all your expenses, for then we will be able to satisfy the accountant and arrange for you to be recompensed.” By that time it was too late to change the arrangement that had been made. Sometimes a prosaic, business-like sentence is as relaxing as an entire poetic composition!)
The 24th October evening meeting in Windsor Arms Hotel, Toronto, was the first time I saw Barrie in person. While he and Bill Holland were enjoying a simple dinner (and I was sipping a beer), I was asked a number of questions that revealed the breadth of their knowledge and interests. However, the questioning was never aggressive or meant to test if the young scholar in front had the feet of clay. It was natural, gentle and unassuming. I now experienced directly the person who, on the phone, seemed to be so much aware of cultural differences and sensitivities.
(Looking back, I feel that I would not have been selected if I had been interviewed the way candidates were normally interviewed in the Department of Asian Studies in later years: a teaching demonstration, a research presentation, meetings with individual faculty members, meeting with the head, meeting with the dean, meetings with student representatives, graduate students and faculty members as a whole. Group. At least one of these would have been fatal for me. While I did experience the truth of ‘ignorance is bliss’ through my responses to Barrie, I was lucky in having him as my principal interviewer)
Biographers, even when they write biographies showering praise, usually include one or two negative observations about their subject to convey that they looked at the subject objectively or to indicate that he/she was a human being after all. I hope that, if and when Barrie’s biography is written, his role in getting my appointed at UBC will not be the ground for making a negative observation.
Toward the end of our meeting at about 10:00 p.m., Barrie said to me, “We have explained to you what our expectations are. Do you have any expectations of us?” Up to that point I had appeared for only one interview and that, too, in India, not in North America, but I had heard several interview stories of friends and acquaintances. In none of them, an interviewee was asked the question Barrie asked me. It showed how his considerate he was. My response was, “I assume UBC will enable me to create a research library in my field.” Barrie said, ‘yes,’ and helped me, whenever he could, in taking the UBC collection from one book in an Indic script to about fifty thousand books in all major scripts of India.
I dwelt on the selection story longer than I would normally have, because it shows the principal features of Barrie’s personality. He was always a considerate and cooperative colleague, making allowance for different cultural practices.
Once the selection was made, Barrie guided me to a funding source within UBC that enabled me to carry out my first ever tour for Sanskrit manuscripts in India.
When I could not change the date of my return to North America, because I had booked a charter flight for my wife and me and no change was possible in the date of the return flight, Barrie held the fort for me for the first week of classes.
After Vidyut and I arrived in Vancouver, he took us around for finding an apartment, sharing with us, like my other valued colleague Peter Harnetty, his first-hand knowledge of Canada and Vancouver, which helped us in years to come.
In this apartment-hunting, as we were coming in Barrie’s car from downtown Vancouver to Kitsilano, I saw a large sign on the other side of the water with the words “False Creek.” I misread the sign as “False Greek” and asked Barrie how there could be such an open slandering of a community in Vancouver. As he was trying to explain to me what the reality was, he could not stop in time from the car in front and hit its fender. The calm with which he got down from his car, the civility with which he exchanged insurance information with the driver of the other car and the silence he maintained about my distracting him while he was driving were exemplary.
His demonstration of these qualities stood me in good stead years later. One wintry morning I was driving into UBC campus. There was snow everywhere but not particularly thick or dangerous on most of the roads. When I was driving on Wesbrook Mall, the car in front of me suddenly decided to turn right on Fairview Avenue. I was not driving fast. I had kept more than a safe distance from the car in front. I tried to brake. I tried to hit the curb, but there was black ice just on that stretch of the road and I could not avoid hitting the fender of the turning car on the right side. As I got down from my car to go to the driver of the car in front, who do you think was the first person to approach from behind? It was Barrie, and his first question to me was “Are you okay?” He was walking on the same road as I was struggling to stope my car. I had no alternative to discussing the matter with the other driver in a calm manner with measured words. The embarrassment I had caused Barrie had been repaid through my embarrassment. I now have one bad deed less to keep track of in my next life!
In the first year or two of my life at UBC, Barrie corrected even the English of my research papers. I still remember that in one place he advised me to use “inaccurate” instead of “incorrect” in reference to a translation a researcher had done. He taught me that the former word was a gentler expression of disapproval or unacceptability than the latter. This little incident was reflective of how he conducted himself during his long association with the Department of Asian Studies.
Once Mr. P.N. Malik, who was a director of the India office of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute in New Delhi for many years, was going to visit Canada for personal reasons. He had frequently gone out of his way to help Canadian scholars in India, regardless of whether they were senior or junior and regardless of whether they sought his help during or outside of his office hours. He wished to see Vancouver. Several of us thought that, in recognition of his service to the Institute that went way beyond the description of his position, he should be invited to Vancouver and a reception should be held in his honor. There was another (not unjustifiable) view that, since he was not on a visit sanctioned by the Institute’s board of directors, we should not spend any university money to bring him to Vancouver, to discuss Institute-related matters with him or to host him. A meeting was called. The general observation that the people in India, despite their limited means, go out of their way, to help foreigners, whereas when an Indian comes to Canada (or the United States for that matter) his/her counterparts almost never change any of their plans or schedules to accommodate the visitors’ needs was hovering in the air but was not being so explicitly articulated. In this uncomfortable situation, the discussion became somewhat heated. A senior colleague who was in favor of making no exceptions to the rules spoke of some members of the other side with the words “unless you are greater fools than I take you to be”. Barrie chastised him only by saying, “No unparliamentary words, please” in a slightly raised voice. Coming from him, it was viewed as a strong rebuke of the user of the harsh phrase. The temperature in the room went down in a few seconds.
My five years as Head of the Department of Asian Studies were also five years of continuous cuts for all UBC departments. As a part of the effort to protect the Department’s interests, I requested Barrie to take over the teaching of a course on Southeast Asia. Somehow this course always drew large enrolments, no matter who taught it, but the upper levels of administration never gave us permanent manpower to teach it. If, as a result, we had stopped teaching the course, we would have lost a significant part of our enrolments and would have been in a weaker position in the eyes of upper-level university administrators. Barrie saw the problem and immediately agreed to teach the course. However, since he was doing this onj short notice, he included a lot of Sri Lanka, of which he was a specialist, in the course content. At the end of the term, he said to me with a twinkle in his eye, “I managed to convince every one in the class that Sri Lanka was a part of Southeast Asia.” It is this self-deprecating twinkle that I will miss, along with several other collegial qualities, in the years to come.
