I am in the midst of a three-week journey throughout northern India. I am with nine other professors from liberal arts colleges across the United States and we are visiting sites of religious, cultural, and historical significance.
The objective of the program sponsored by ASIANetwork and funded by the Mellon Foundation is for us to incorporate what we learn and experience into our classrooms. I am currently in Varanasi, the city along the River Ganges.
I am very far from home, but am constantly making connections with upcountry South Carolina.
Varanasi is in the northeastern part of India, and is the closest our group will be to Shamshernagar, a town which hosted an American and British air base during World War II.
As part of the Upcountry History Museum’s World War II Oral History Project, my students and I interviewed Greenville native Harold Gallivan, who was stationed at Shamshernagar during the war. From the base, he flew the C-109, which was essentially a B-24 that had been converted to haul nearly 3,000 gallons of high-octane aviation gasoline.
The plane became known as the “C- one oh boom” because of the spectacular explosion that would occur upon crash landing. He and other Allied pilots and crew were here to fly high altitude aerial supply missions over the Himalayan Mountains (an often perilous endeavor they called “flying the Hump”) to deliver fuel into China to thwart the westward expansion of the Japanese. Their efforts in the China-Burma-India theater of World War II are some of the most under recognized of the war.
During my travels, I am also mindful that, at home, the Fourth of July is approaching. Last week, a historian at a university in Delhi said to our group, “You Americans were smart to throw off the British when you did.”
Others have said to us, “you got rid of the British and then they came over here to bother us!” The historian in me cringes a bit at this chronology and oversimplification but the point of these statements is clear.
India gained independence from Great Britain in 1947, during an era of post-World War II decolonization. Many of the former European colonial powerhouses simply could not manage to rebuild their infrastructure and economies in the aftermath of the war and maintain their colonies abroad. Furthermore, the efforts of Mahatma Gandhi, widely considered the father of independent India, and others cannot be underestimated.
In India, the influence of the former colonial presence remains.
In the US, we are much further removed from this phase of our history. We tend, and especially in South Carolina, to focus more on the Civil War, a conflict that fractured our country less than a century after we gained independence.
We all know that the opening shots of the Civil War were fired off the coast of our state. Less known, however, is the fact that many conflicts from the American Revolution were fought in South Carolina. Several of those sites have been preserved and are maintained by the National Park Service.
Within a two hour’s drive from Greenville are Kings Mountain and Cowpens, two important battles of the Southern Campaign of the American Revolution.
Throughout the colonies, British General Charles Cornwallis tried aggressively to recruit loyalists to the British crown; his efforts were challenged by Rev. Richard Furman, who traveled throughout South Carolina and the South recruiting patriots. Furman, for whom Furman University is named, was eloquent and successful in his efforts, and allegedly Cornwallis placed a price of one thousand pounds on Furman’s head.
British loyalists were defeated at King’s Mountain, and months later, some of Cornwallis’ troops were defeated at Cowpens. Soon thereafter, Cornwallis surrendered to General George Washington near Yorktown. In 1782, he returned to England as part of an exchange for Henry Laurens, for whom Laurens County is named.
Four years later, Cornwallis received another extremely significant appointment from King George III. He was named Governor General of India, where for the next several years he proceeded to “bother” others who would remain firmly entrenched in the vast British Empire long after the American Revolution.
Cornwallis’ legacy in India and throughout the empire is extensive, and includes a Hindu college he founded in 1791 here in Varanasi.
Travelling throughout India has certainly provided new perspective, not only on the fact that American patriots declared our independence 235 years ago, but that veterans such as Harold Gallivan and so many others have and continue to travel to the far corners of the world to maintain it.
Happy Fourth of July!
