Catherine Ann Jones understands India perhaps better than many Indians do. Seeing the country in all its light and darkness, the American author-dramatist lays bare its starkest truths in her new book released this month, East & West: Stories of India (Pippa Rann Books, INR 599).
The 15 short stories, written with spectacular simplicity tinged with clear-sighted compassion and love, are a charming play of polarities, uniting the material and spiritual aspects of India, its ancient past and fast-paced present, and the opposite world views of East and West.
Drawn from Jones’s own rich and varied experiences as an acclaimed actor on Broadway, successful playwright, screenwriter, educator, and wife of one of India’s literary greats Raja Rao, the stories draw you in as you turn the pages, taking you deep into the heart of India replete with idiosyncrasies and superstitions juxtaposed with a constant striving for enlightenment.
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Jones lived in Tokyo and Sendai in Japan in her early childhood. This phase of her life left her “with strong imprints which I write about in my memoir, Buddha and the Dancing Girl: A Creative Life,” she shares with me over email.
Then she moved to Dallas, Texas. “My ancestors hail from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and England and came to Virginia in America in 1646,” she says. Her family traces its ancestry to Davy Crockett, the 19th-century folk hero, frontiersman and politician. “This inspired me when I wrote Calamity Jane as a play then a musical about the Wild West,” she says. It went on to win several awards and accolades, and had several productions.
Even as a young girl, Jones loved the classics – from Ophelia in Hamlet, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, to Anna in Anna Karenina. “From the age of nine, I would write little plays and produce them in our neighbourhood. Then I wrote poetry from age seven until my early twenties,” she shares. She studied theology in first year in university then switched to theatre.
Jones played major roles in over 55 plays on and off Broadway, including in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Patriots, about Thomas Jefferson and his daughter Patsy. After the run of the play, PBS Television chose it for their Great Performances series to air on national television. “However,” Jones says, “I felt that the desire to act had ended.”
For three months, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do next. Then she was invited to a friend’s wedding just outside of New York City for a weekend. “I met an astrologer who was also a guest at the wedding and he offered to do my chart. Without knowing anything about me, he told me he saw the acting in my chart but that I would succeed even more through writing,” she narrates.
Around that time, Jones was cast in an off-Broadway production as Virginia Woolf, and started reading all her books and her biography. “Even after the play closed, I was still fixated on Virginia Woolf and sat down and wrote my first full-length play entitled Virginia (the title was later changed to On the Edge). This was before her letters and diary were published. Later, when her books came out, I found that she had actually said or written several of the lines I’d made up! Somehow, I intuited this,” she shares.
The play won a National Endowment for the Arts, which provided Jones an income for the next year. “So this confirmed for me the new direction,” she says of her career switch from acting to writing.
She went on to write several more plays performed in and out of New York, screenplays for television, and scripts for Hollywood films over the next couple of decades. Eleven of her plays, including The Women of Cedar Creek and Freud’s Oracle, won multiple awards.
She also wrote several books and memoirs, some of which are used in writing programmes in schools, including New York University. “My interest in spirituality led me to write spiritual themes and I found that ‘angels’ was a good metaphor for this,” she says, referencing the popular television series Touched by an Angel and the Disney film Unlikely Angel starring Dolly Parton.
Jones visited India for the first time in her early twenties. “My first impression was the strong feeling that I had lived in India before, probably a past life. Varanasi was a powerful and, in some ways, shocking experience. Beggars who mutilate their own children by cutting off a hand in order to earn more alms. The burning pyres along the Ganges as holy men sat meditating. The largest mansion on the Ghats owned by the man who sold firewood for the pyres. And yet the overwhelming spiritual atmosphere permeating it all,” she says. She draws upon this experience in a story called ‘The Ashram’ in the new anthology.
Jones was still young when she met Raja Rao, a literary stalwart from India then teaching in the philosophy department at the University of Texas, who was decades older than her. His writings had a spiritual dimension that deeply influenced her. “I would offer feedback to his work and help him. He did like best my play, Calamity Jane,” shares Jones.
The couple were married for over 20 years and had a son, who was born in Texas and spent a few early years in India with his parents, mostly in Kerala. Jones has many wonderful memories of India from those years.
“To begin with, I had no idea how well-known my husband was until we went to India. So, this was a surprise,” she says, adding that her best memories are from the time she stayed with her guru – whom she calls the Householder Sage – and his family in Kerala. “I had had a recurring dream from the age of seven to my early twenties. When I first saw my Guru, I recognised Him from the dream. The same person,” she says.
Another notable memory for Jones is meeting India’s then prime minister. “I had tea with Mrs [Indira] Gandhi whom my husband had known for many years. He had also known her father, Jawaharlal Nehru,” she says. The episode became the seed for one of the stories in East & West titled ‘Tea with Mrs Gandhi’.
Jones’s relationship with India went beyond marriage and spirituality. She was invited to teach a masterclass in acting at the National School of Drama in New Delhi, and was also a Fulbright Research Scholar to India studying shamanism.
She narrates: “During my Fulbright year in India, I had the idea to write short stories set in India. However, I only wrote one, Rukmini’s God, which was published in London in Poetry London Delhi.” Later, a Kashmiri friend in New York – who had studied at St. Stephens College in Delhi – shared Jones’s story with his former university pal.
The next thing she knew, Jones says, “Prabhu Guptara wrote to me asking if I would write 14 more stories for a collection. Of course, I accepted and the timing was perfect. I had always meant to write more stories of India and now due to the pandemic – when I could not go as usual each year to India – India came to me. The stories are fictional but most have a seed from my own direct experience in India. As Albert Camus wrote, fiction is the lie authors use to tell the truth.”
The stories in the book are evocative and also esoteric in many ways. There are references to many things only Indians – or even specifically those from the region that the story is set in – would understand. These observations not only highlight India’s beauty and knowledge but also its intrinsic discrimination. “Every country has its shadow,” as Jones said in an interview to psychologist and educator Dianne Skafte.
I ask her how she gained such in-depth knowledge of local lore, symbolism and folk wisdom from India. “I’m so pleased you felt this from the stories. I love India. It is my spiritual home. And there is no doubt that there have been past lives in India. I suppose the depth aspect came from my Guru and the study of Advaita Vedanta,” she replies.
Jones now spends a large part of her time as an educator. She has taught at The New School University in NYC, University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the Esalen and Omega Institutes, and many venues abroad.
Based in Ojai, California, she leads writing and personal-growth workshops titled ‘The Way of Story’, ‘Heal Your Self with Writing’, and ‘Writing Your Memoir’ throughout the US, Europe, Middle East and Asia. Over 60,000 have subscribed to her six online courses so far. She hopes to revisit India in late 2024 or early 2025.
As she writes in the book’s preface, “India is a vast and complex country and one that can change a life, containing the highest mystical experiences side by side with the lowest dregs of humanity… The sublime mythology of this incredible and complex culture so permeates the personal that myth often becomes reality – and reality, myth.”
East & West: Stories of India by Catherine Ann Jones is distributed in India by Penguin Random House
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