Profile of Achla Eccles
May 12, 2020
The invitation came on the back of a postcard, addressed to Achla Chib residing at Girton College at Cambridge University. In simple handwritten letters it read “Please come for drinks on George’s birthday, February 22, 1959, 6pm.” For many Americans Feb. 22 is one of those touchstone dates - federal workers get the day off and banks and schools are closed. But for Achla Chib, my grandmother, neither the name ‘George’ nor the date held any significance to her.
America was such a foreign concept for Chib to grasp. She was born in India, and didn’t know much else outside of her Indian roots. “In those days we hadn’t ever thought of America because nobody knew anything about America. The British ruled over India for more than 200 years. So, growing up we only studied British history and all the books we read were written by British authors.” So Cambridge, England was the only place she had her sights set on to continue her educational career. It was through chance encounters, unfamiliar incidents, and her own curiosity that would encourage her to deviate from the traditional Indian lifestyle and not return to India after she finished her studies in England, but rather continue her journey to make a new life for herself away from home in America.
Born in Lahore, India in 1937, Chib grew up in what was considered a fairly “westernized” home. It was a fusion of different cultures, ideas, and beliefs. For the most part, her family spoke English in addition to Hindi, with her parents frequently speaking Punjabi to one another. The girls in the family dressed in traditional Indian style clothing - salwar kameez, composed of loose-fitting trousers with narrow hems above the ankles and a loose, knee-length tunic with long sleeves often consisting of decorative patterns or embroidery, and sarees. Ninety-nine percent of the time they ate Indian food, dhal, keema, rogan josh, to name a few, but they did occasionally indulge in roast chicken or lamb chops for dinner or sausages for breakfast. “Most Hindus are vegetarians, particularly the women. So, the fact that we ate all types of meat; lamb, chicken, and beef, was uncommon,” recounts Chib.
Her family lived a comfortable life. “When I was growing up, we had very little cash, I mean, we weren't poor or anything, but we certainly were not rich,” Chib states. Not poor, yes, but definitely part of the privileged. Like most other middle-class Indian families, they had two or three servants that tended to the laundry, cooking, driving, and cleaning among other things. Although they maintained a pretty typical Indian lifestyle, the way in which she was raised was unusual in comparison to other Indian families.
Women in India are expected to take part in arranged marriages organized by their parents. Even with that being the case, obtaining an education was important as it made the women seem “more marriageable,” but once they were married off women were not encouraged to do much more than that declared Chib. Nonetheless, those were not the ideologies instilled in my grandmother growing up.
Her father, Som Nath, worked as a National Program Director for the national radio station, All India Radio, before moving to the Ministry of Tourism as Director General of Tourism, and her mother, Savitri, tried her hand at teaching, but didn’t quite like it enough to continue. Both were influential in her educational aspirations despite the occasional mornings in which her mother wouldn’t wake her up to go to school because she felt school was tiring and her children deserved a “break.” “I was really angry when she let us sleep in and miss the bus, I mean I thoroughly liked going to school,” claims my grandmother. Her father, too, was someone she looked up to, “he was very knowledgeable. He knew history, knew literature, philosophy, and he read a great deal. My father was always talking about politics and telling us about what was going on. So, when I was growing up, reading and politics were principal discussions at the table.”
Generally, in India, women were not invited or even encouraged to participate in scholarly discussions. So, having this male figure, in a society that naturally devalues women, that openly emphasized education as critical for her was significant and something that stuck with my grandmother, not only through her childhood years, but carried on into her young adult life.
Being the eldest of three and the ringleader of their mischief growing up, Chib had the opportunity to accompany her father to business meetings, different places within India, and meet many new people, although her younger brother, Ranjit, likes to attribute it to the fact that “she was our father’s favorite.” But what really made her idolize her father was that he had spent time in Cambridge, England to finish his studies before moving back to India with Savitri where they would start and raise their family and that was something she always thought of doing.
“I can probably only send one child” was what my grandmother was told when she finished college in India and decided she didn’t want to continue with her master’s degree in history there, but preferred to attend Cambridge University like her father. He may have had a big position at work, but money was tight and frugal. While it was never something said in their family, it was this unspoken truth that boys were more important. So, if one child would be going to Cambridge it would be her brother in the future.
Chib was used to feeling like she didn’t get a fair deal. When she was hired as a journalist at the Times of India and The Statesmen, she was the only woman in the room. She conducted and published interviews only to be given no byline but reduced to a ‘staff reporter’ and even when there was hard hitting news, Mr.Crossland, her boss, would assign her to interview leopards and lion cubs. After years of feeling like a conspicuous outsider, Chib and her parents made the decision to send her to Cambridge to fulfill her educational aspirations.
A young Indian woman at the age of 20 leaving home to go out of the country for the first time, let alone by herself, was unheard of. When recounting stories about her college friends and their future plans, Chib acknowledges that “none of them really left the country. They all stayed in India to do their Masters in English or History, join the Indian Foreign Service, or became a librarian of sorts, all except for me.” Her intellect and perseverance are what got her to Cambridge and, what’s more, stay even when things were not as expected.
Chib was unaccustomed to the climate in England with it being foggy and cold in the winter and rainy and cloudy in the summer. She missed the Delhi heat and the summers where her family would go to the mountains to escape “to heaven” with the sweet citrus smell from the pine trees and clear fresh air. Moreover, she disliked the English food. “It was really horrid. We had powdered eggs made into scrambled eggs and on Fridays a kind of white fish sitting in a yellow liquid, covered in a pink sauce. Grey peas and boiled potatoes and cabbage, all tasteless stuff. I missed Indian food. The only bearable meal was Sunday roast. That was nice.” Even in the midst of a sense of homesickness and dislike for her new life, Chib developed strong relationships with other Cambridge students who came from all over - Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, and Nigeria to mention a few. “I think they thought of me as someone unusual and they kind of liked that, but that doesn’t disregard the fact that they didn’t know much about India,” she states about her new found friends. In addition, she viewed many of her British classmates as naive. “The thing about the ordinary British that was so annoying was how ignorant they were about India. They ruled over us for more than 200 years, but didn’t know anything except that it was poor (of course since they stole everything) and would ask questions like did people live in trees - truly - and what did we eat other than “curry’” What changed, she says, is her chance meeting with an American, Peter Eccles. She didn’t know it then, but Peter would affect the direction of her life.
She was sitting with her American friend Mary Ann when this tall, slender brown-skinned man approached them. He introduced himself as Peter and started talking animatedly to Mary Ann as they were both American. Chib acknowledges that she wouldn’t have thought more about the young man and this abrupt meeting except for the fact that he kept turning up in her history lectures and frequently sat a row behind her; disorganized and always needing a pen or paper to take notes. Coming from India, Chib rarely had the opportunity to meet any Americans let alone African Americans. “I didn't know anybody who was black until I got to Cambridge and met Peter,” she exclaims. “All I knew about being black in America was what I had read in the newspapers about their treatment in the southern states of the U.S. I had seen pictures of children trying to go to school with mobs around them and dogs and hoses being used against them as they marched for the right to vote.” Her lack of knowledge heightened her curiosity to who this man was along with their first date being at an American cemetery for soldiers killed in World War II. It was there, surrounded by all those names, he claimed to have felt more like an American than he did at home.
Moments like this intrigued Chib as he was different from other guys she met. He was well traveled, part of the Quaker society, and an intellectual which was much better than she could say for Indian men who were “all tied to their mothers and completely and totally hopeless.” As time progressed they spent more time together and met for the occasional coffee or lunch where they discussed their separate future plans.
Chib’s plan was quite simple. Finish getting her degree at Cambridge and then return home to India where she would work for a newspaper as a journalist. As she likes to say, “If Peter hadn't thrown a wrench in the works, then I would have gone home.” Peter encouraged her to think about going to America for a year and to pursue a graduate degree instead of going straight home. He thought it would be a good idea for her to see what the U.S. was like, but when she thought about her parents’ reaction to that idea, she knew it was a non-starter. “We were a very close family. I was very attached to my parents and they were very attached to me,” says Chib. So when her father wrote to her saying that although it was awfully far, he didn’t believe in emotional blackmail or preventing her from being happy. My grandmother now reflects about how, “if somebody says no to something, it is easy to disobey and say yes. But if somebody says it is your decision, you make up your mind, it makes it very hard.”
One year later, in 1960, Chib would make the difficult decision to go to the United States after finishing her Master’s degree in Cambridge as she didn’t see many opportunities back home and was very much interested in Peter. “I thought that it might lead to us getting married, but I wasn't one hundred percent sure because America was so different and plus, what did I know about him and America? Nothing. I mean, I only knew what he was telling me, right?”
Challenging many of the traditions she was born into, Chib went to New York not knowing anyone besides Peter and would work at the Indian Mission to the United Nations. A year later, in 1961, she and Peter would get married before moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts where Peter would finish law school at Harvard Law School and she would do the job her mom didn’t particularly take to - teaching. Never before had she taught, let alone in America, so when she received the call from Beaver Country Day School asking if she had taught history before and would be able to be a long-term substitute teacher, she lied and said yes. Fifty years later that lie turned out to be her calling as she and Peter moved back to New York with their two children where she had a very successful career as a history teacher.
In all stages of her life she has tackled uncertainty, risk, and opportunity with grace and humility. My grandmother's authority as the ringleader of the siblings was relinquished as neither of her younger siblings dared think about living permanently in England or America. “No, nobody wants to leave their own country when they're well off. Unless they are, you know, not doing well or something like that. They were comfortable. They were well settled. They had, you know, a good life.” Ranjit, her brother, when asked about his choice to remain in India, answered, “I’ve got a home and two servants. I have everything I need. Why would I give all that up to come here and be cleaning my own toilets and running around doing my own grocery shopping and washing my clothes in the local laundromat?” Something my grandmother was willing to do.
Now retired, my grandmother remains as active as ever seeing shows, assisting as a docent at various museums, participating in book clubs, doing yoga and keeping up with old friends. It has been twenty four years since the sudden death of her husband; the man who challenged her preconceived notions of what her life could be. She took a chance that led to a liberating and fulfilling life. It can be heavy talking about her late husband as she gets choked up and teary eyed, but she tells me she instead chooses to find the humor they shared and jokes that “the one thing I wish I knew when I was younger was to not get married.”