ABSTRACT
My Encounter with Scotland Began Long Before I Came to Live in Edinburgh. I had accompanied my geographer parents to London in the 1960s where my father was a Commonwealth Scholar at the London School of Economics (LSE) and my mother had an LSE scholarship. It was at LSE that my parents met the geographer, Arthur Geddes, the son of the conservation architect and town planner, Patrick Geddes. Patrick Geddes had been a friend of Rabindranath Tagore when he was in India between 1915 and 1923, invited by the latter to draw up plans for his International University, Visva-Bharati at Shantiniketan, which Geddes did. 2 Arthur Geddes taught at Rabindranath’s institution for two years and was very close to the poet, whom he called ‘Gurudev’. 3 Arthur Geddes spoke to my parents in perfect Bengali. Later on, when I did my Master’s degree in English at Jadavpur University in Calcutta (now Kolkata), my professor and head of department was another Scot, Professor Kitty Scoular Datta. Arthur Geddes taught at Edinburgh University while Kitty Datta had graduated with Honours in English from the same University.
