Samuel Stokes: India’s Johnny Appleseed

- by Raaja Bhasin

In the late 1920s, my father as a small boy took the train from Lahore to Shimla with his uncle, Bihari Lal who had become an admirer and something of a friend to an American who had settled in Kotgarh, one of the poorest pockets in the Shimla tract. Beyond Shimla, the Hindustan Tibet Road as it existed then was adapted only for horses, pack animals and plain old foot-slogging.

It took them three days to get to Kotgarh from Shimla where Bihari Lal was helping the Quaker from Philadelphia, Samuel Evans Stokes set up a school. The journey now takes a couple of hours along a road along which huge lorries cart equipment to Nathpa- Jakhri, one of the largest hydro-electricity projects in the world that is located in the valley of the Satluj river that flows in the valley below.

The journey of Samuel Evans Stokes was a far longer one. It was in the years that my father moved up the dusty path to Kotgarh that the apple plants which Stokes had imported from the United States were taking root. While the school which had taken uncle and nephew there in the first place died quietly without a fuss, the ‘Delicious’ varieties of apple which had been developed by the Stark Brothers of Louisiana went on the transform the economy and much of the landscape.

Today, the apple-based economy of the contiguous villages of Thanedar and Kotgarh have given it one of the highest per-capita incomes in Asia. Around these villages, signs of the time may be there – hoardings that announce the latest cell-phone plan or advertise call-centres and air-hostess training institutes. But while they may be there, they do not dominate the landscape nor do they hustle people off to explain why a CD drive cannot function as a coffee-cup holder to a caller from the American mid-west. If modernity is there, these places still speak of tradition – and as an example, the odds are that you will see most of the women still wearing rejtas, long flowing –almost Victorian – gowns and dhatus, headdresses.

Born on 16th August 1882, the son of a Quaker millionaire from Philadelphia, Stokes arrived in India on 26th February 1904. He was coming to help in a leprosy home that had been established at Subathu in the foothills below Shimla, the ‘summer capital’ of British India. He had barely settled in when in April, 1905 a devastating earthquake rocked the area and nearby Kangra was severely hit.

Entire towns were levelled and things were much worse in the isolated villages. Samuel Stokes moved there to help in whatever way he could. The administration assigned him the work of going from village to village to assess the losses and indemnify the affected persons. Though assured of payment of personal expenses, his conscience could not accept this and he did not take a paisa for this arduous work.

Sapped of strength, from Kangra, Stokes moved to Kotgarh beyond Shimla and to the end of his days, this was to be his home. Long before he built that remarkable house ‘Harmony Hall’ at Thanedar, above Kotgarh – and named after the family home in New Jersey – Stokes, howsoever briefly, even lived in a cave.

Here, he married a local Christian girl, Agnes and worked ceaselessly to uplift the local people from the host of problems that beset them – including the custom of ‘begar’ where labour would be pressed in service for little or no remuneration and often worked under inhuman conditions. He took recourse to ‘passive resistance’ which had been used by his Quaker ancestors in the past for the sake of their ideals.

Backed by the whole of Kotgarh which bravely responded to his call, the government ultimately gave in and the system of ‘begar’ was abolished. Stokes’ action on behalf of the hill people commended him to Mahatma Gandhi who wrote in Young India: “No Indian is giving such battle to the Government as Mr. Stokes. He has veritably become the guide, philosopher and friend of the hill men.”

Soon after the repressive Rowlatt Acts were passed in 1919, Stokes became an active associate of Mahatma Gandhi and was even jailed for his role in India’s struggle for freedom. This gave him the distinction of being the only American to be imprisoned in the cause of India’s freedom.

In 1921, in his booklet National Self-Realisation, Stokes wrote: “Our immediate object is to make the Government of this land representative of the will of the people.” In the same booklet he wrote: “…ultimately Complete Swaraj, independent of the British Empire is the only goal for India.” For another one of Stokes’ booklets, Awakening India, Gandhi Ji wrote the foreword. Characteristically, he sought his own guidance and way with religion and it was in these years that Stokes converted to Hinduism and changed his name to Satyanand.

Harmony Hall, Stokes’ old home, still stands on top of the hill, surrounded by the apple orchards that he first planted. This unusual piece of architecture speaks worlds for the man that built it. This draws from the local style of interlocking horizontal wooden beams packed with dressed stone, and is combined with elements of the ‘western’ architectural experience - high chimney-stacks and large windows; in more ways than one, two entirely different backgrounds that were merged into a single entity.