A famed Dutch diplomat’s forgotten Indian tryst

India had changed. After spending ten days perusing the antiquarian bookshops of Kolkata, Robert Hans van Gulik arrived by train in New Delhi with his Chinese wife, Shui Shifang, on February 17, 1952. Dutch diplomat, orientalist, and author, van Gulik had been appointed as a Counsellor at the Dutch Embassy. He had been in New Delhi before, during WW2, where he had been an advisor to the centre for anti-Japanese psychological warfare, headed by the supremely talented spy, journalist, and author Peter Fleming, elder brother to Ian Fleming of James Bond fame. Now, unhappily, he was going to be working for the Dutch Ambassador Anton Winkelman, whom he thought uncultured – Winkelman was first and foremost a businessman – and with whom he had very divergent ideas about how a diplomat should conduct themselves. Gifted in almost every respect, van Gulik had always been in the habit, wherever posted, of dispensing with his diplomatic work through the morning, playing billiards and perusing local bookshops for rare and exotic tomes in the afternoons, and working hard on his many intellectual pursuits at home during the evenings.

He now also found the Indian government officials with whom he was required to interact, tiresome and irritating, having little time for their criticism of Dutch policies toward the Netherland’s former and remaining possessions in Indonesia – a subject close to van Gulik’s heart having spent his childhood in Batavia. In hindsight, we can say that these officials were just looking for their post-colonial voices. But at the time van Gulik was having none of it and believed that no one of any interest worked in New Delhi, that all the best Indian scholars and artists resided in Varanasi, Chennai, and Kolkata.

Continuing in the practice he had perfected in posts in Japan and China of avoiding diplomatic work wherever possible, in New Delhi he continued to seek out those people who could aid him in his artistic and scholarly pursuits. His best friend was British, the eccentric Sir Hilary Waddington, attached to the Archaeological Survey in India. He mixed with Chinese scholars, refugees from Mao’s China, he and his wife taking every opportunity to dress up in Chinese clothes. Soon to be world-famous for his Judge Dee mysteries, van Gulik also found a Professor Chang Li-Chai to help him translate his latest mystery into Chinese. And, having studied Sanskrit at university – his doctorate had been on the horse cult in China and Japan and its origins in India and Tibet – he socialised with eminent Sanskrit scholars, such as Professor Raghu Vira and Doctor Lokesh Chandra, who encouraged him to write a history of Sanskrit studies in China and Japan.

Van Gulik had little time for modern China – even if he understood the political forces consuming China very well. During his posting to Chongqing (1943-46), the wartime capital of China, he had immersed himself in the traditional arts and literature of China. These days most remembered in academic circles for his book on the sexual culture of China – a subject studiously avoided by ‘serious’ academics at the time – he also penned works on the Chinese lute, Chinese imperial law, and the gibbon. He was especially interested in the propagation of Buddhism from India to China in the first centuries of the Common Era and the importance of the Siddham script as a vehicle for this propagation. Having little interest in India or its languages, Chinese Buddhist monks utilised Siddham script as a basis for the pronunciation of mantras, Chinese not suitable for writing the sounds of Sanskrit. The usage of Siddham eventually spread all over East Asia. Van Gulik’s history, Siddham: An Essay on the History of Sanskrit Studies in China and Japan, was published in 1956. Though it is not the most remembered of van Gulik’s works, and his conclusions are contested, this essay is still cited to this very day.

Suffering eye problems, van Gulik left India in September 1953 to seek medical attention back in the Netherlands, never to return. His friends, Professor Vira and Doctor Chandra, would both go on to have political careers. Sadly, Professor Vira died before his time in a car accident, but Doctor Chandra is still with us today, at the venerable age of 97.

(The author is a novelist and retired investigator with an abiding passion for Chinese history)