Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph are professors emeriti of political science at the University of Chicago. They are former Fulbright scholars to India who are married to each other.

We are writing a joint essay about our Fulbright experience in India. Our Fulbright connection goes back quite a way, to 1962-63 when each of us was a Research Scholar and Olive Reddick was the director of the Fullbright Foundation in India. Lloyd was a Visiting Professor at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, in 1970-71; in 1991-92 we were again Research Scholars; and in 1995-96 Susanne held a Fulbright-Hays grant.

Our first Fulbright year in 1962-63 was the most memorable. We lived in New Delhi on Lucknow Road just off Mull Road, a short distance from Delhi University. We imagined we had found a neighborhood far away from American and other foreign residents. We would be immersed in Indian life. Imagine our chagrin when we looked over the wall next door to see Alice and Warren Ilchman. They too had located on Lucknow Road to avoid foreigners and immerse themselves in Indian life. We soon mutually forgave each other and became the best of friends.

Olive Reddick and the staff at 12 Hailey Road were immensely helpful inter alia with finding furniture, a refrigerator, and other household equipment. Our household included Jenny Rudolph who had been born on January 11, 1962. She was about six months old when we arrived in India in early July. We were accompanied by Valerie Gilbert, an English au pair, and Frank Hoeber, Susanne’s younger brother who had been rusticated from Columbia for a year for throwing a fire cracker out of his 13th floor dormitory room. We also engaged the services of Bharat Singh who had been recommended to us as a cook by Bimla Nanda, later Bissell.

John Kenneth Galbraith was the US Ambassador. In mid-October 1962 more or less simultaneously China invaded India and the Cuban missile crisis threatened nuclear war. It was also the year that the new US embassy deigned by Edward Durell Stone opened in Chanakyapuri, the diplomatic enclave that was just beginning to take shape.