Stephen P. Huyler is the author of the new memoir Transformed by India: A Life. His other books include Daughters of India. He is also a photographer and curator, and he lives in Camden, Maine.
Q: What inspired you to write Transformed by India, and how would you describe your relationship to the country?
A: Because of my unusual choices in life, many friends and acquaintances had encouraged me to write my memoir for years. I love to write, but my work is about bringing attention to the lives, choices, and creativity of individuals not previously noticed.
My previous books attempt to tell their stories as they want them to be heard. I had never previously been interested in turning the focus on myself.
The lockdown during the pandemic changed the lives of people globally. I could not return to India and, like others, became more introspective. One early morning, without any intention of writing a book, I composed the first two pages verbatim.
They compelled me to continue writing my own story: how and why I first went to India, by myself, overland traveling by local transport from Paris when I was just 19 years old, and how that experience and those that followed transformed me.
Although I am genetically and socially an American, India seeps through my veins. It is a deep part of who I am. For over 50 years, I have attempted as much as possible to subsume my own identity as a tall white American male in order to be present to very different realities.
By nature, I listen deeply and have learned to be quiet and as unobtrusive as I can, respecting and honoring local customs and traditions and allowing people to be themselves.
Over the years, I have grown to feel the pulse that underlies the currents of India. I am fully present there, accepted by the individuals I meet. I let them be themselves and record that in word and photograph.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The book’s title took no effort. It was obvious to me from the memoir’s inception.
I was raised in a small town in mountainous California. Although some of my family and community influences strongly affected my choices to work overseas and open myself to little-seen and often undocumented cultures, I have been changed and transformed since my first night in that country.
How could I not be? So much of what I have experienced is completely different from my Christian American education and physical and social environment. My process of transformation has been constant and remains unending. I am not the same person I was as a teenager before I went to India.
And because I continually chose to follow untrodden paths and work in fields and with subcultures previously unseen by outsiders, I am different from anyone else I know. I guess I am an anomaly, and yet I am content with my choices and my fairly significant productivity.
My life has been about building bridges of communication and understanding between South Asia and the rest of the world, particularly the West. In many ways, I have found success.
Q: The Buddhist scholar Supriya Rai said of the book, “Stephen's approach is a unique blend of academic rigour leavened with a heart of deep empathy and understanding.” What do you think of that description?
A: I made a choice early on to work eccentrically — far away from the center of whatever others have chosen to do. When not in India, I live in a remote part of the US (a small town in midcoast Maine).
As I was determined to pursue a career of independent field research not reliant upon others’ directives, I have never had a full-time job. I need the freedom to be spontaneous in my research and follow leads wherever they may take me.
That choice has allowed me to uncover much that neither the academic nor mainstream researchers and writers have seen or understood.
But my decision to work in singular fields has also meant that I have not had the feedback or camaraderie of colleagues that scholars who work in established universities, institutions, or research centers have.
In consequence, I have been overwhelmed by the large positive response to my life’s work that my memoir has engendered. I did not expect it.
Dr. Rai’s comment speaks of academic rigour, and certainly, it has taken a great deal of self-discipline to do all the things I have done. But that is natural to me. I can’t say that it came without effort, but until Dr. Rai and other critics brought it to my attention, I never thought much about it before. It is just what I do.
She kindly mentions my empathy and understanding. I have been heartened since the book’s release in India this past January to receive 50 reviews in that country, most with similar types of statements.
In this time when Indians express suspicion and antipathy toward foreign scholarship and journalism about their country and cultures, it has been particularly gratifying that critics here repeatedly remark that I do not objectify, romanticize, condescend, or exotify India.
By their many stated opinions, I am forced to recognize that indeed I must indeed express empathy for their country.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: I learned so much about myself while composing this book. Before its conception, I had never before truly considered the entirety of my life and experiences. I am naturally a multitasker. I finish one project while working on the next with perhaps two or three others in the making. I just move on to the next one without really looking back.
I am a natural storyteller, coming from a long line of good storytellers. So, like others, I had many stories up my sleeve that I would remember and recount as the situation might call for it.
But for me, those tales were distinct. Before writing this memoir, I had never thought of them collectively and never considered what else was going on in my life at the same time they took place. This memoir forced me to look at my entire life collectively.
Some years ago, I attended a series of workshops on writing mystery novels. I realized when I had written half of my memoir that I had unconsciously employed some of that learned craft when composing this nonfiction.
Every human being has a myriad of experiences during their lives. My chapters follow a sequential timeline, but I consciously chose those elements that made for the most compelling reading, crafting the book to change from humor to suspense to pathos to tenderness, etc.
Nothing in Transformed by India is fictional, and I hope it is not manipulative, but I’m told that it flows easily and is gripping. That reflects the craft I have learned.
The book is just my life told as honestly as possible, but I hope that it causes readers to pause as they think about their lives, and to learn, as I have learned, to value each person they meet as valuable in and of themselves, no matter what their social or economic strata, their gender or occupation. Our world is richer for acknowledging that we are all worthy of attention.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Currently, I am working hard to promote this book and arrange a lecture tour throughout North America. I do not do things by halves. When I make a presentation, I give it my all, telling stories illustrated by a vibrant collection of photographs intended to dazzle and sometimes startle the viewer.
I began taking photographs in India on my first trip in 1971, when I realized that no visual records existed of many of the arts and subcultures I was experiencing. I studied photography and improved my skills.
During my many decades of travel to document the arts and peoples of virtually every district of the subcontinent, I began to amass an enormous archive of unique images. Often, these images are the only records in existence of communities that are now gone.
I am currently preparing my archives of over 200,000 original images to give to a museum in New Delhi that promises to digitize and make them freely available to the people of India. That will be my biggest legacy. I have a great deal of work to make sure that all the metadata is recorded first.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: My relationship with my wife, Helene, is the mainstay of everything I do. We met when we were each 16. We remain each other’s best friends. We are very different in temperament and interests from one another, but even after 52 years of marriage, I am fascinated by Helene. She has traveled to India with me many times, but her choices are different from mine.
Threaded throughout my memoir is the story of our relationship and how I have grown to embrace her own freedom of expression and opinion, even as she has nourished mine.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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