East-West Child

ELEPHANT HILL (245 pp.)--Robin White --Harper ($3.50).

When Beth Sumner goes to India from the U.S. to stay with her sister, who is married to an American medical missionary, she walks right into an East-West fracas. Beth finds the gate to the mission compound barred by wire and empty oil drums, with Indian pickets waving slogans --MISSIONARIES GO HOME. Her sister and brother-in-law tell the story behind the commotion. Eight years before, they adopted an unwanted, illegitimate Indian infant and raised him as one of their own family. Now the Indian father, a merchant, is demanding him back, and missionaries and merchants are grappling in a legal battle that dredges up the deepest, ugliest emotions.

The story of this battle is not only the $10,000 Harper Prize Novel of 1959 but something of a prize in itself. Author White was born on an Indian hill station, where his American father was a missionary; as a result, he speaks with the tongues of both Indians and Americans. Elephant Hill's interest and readability come partly from White's clear, simple style and partly from his understanding of just what the conflict means in the minds and hearts of the antagonists.

The missionaries' case is short and plain: they have every moral right, as well as a good legal one, to keep the child. But Author White sympathetically presents the Indian father's case. Alagarsami, the merchant, is not an independent man but an obligated member of a tradition-bound family. Eight years before, he was uninterested in the fruit of his night out with a servant girl; since then his wife has died childless, and Alagarsami must get himself an heir or see his birthright handed to a relative. In his own mind Alagarsami is battling for Mother India herself.

As she scuttles back and forth between her American in-laws and the Indian claimant, sister Beth finds a romantic solution that makes everyone happy--so happy that Elephant Hill's Dickensian climax reads far too untrue to be good. Luckily, this is not the case with a preceding string of incidents that show Author White in his liveliest vein, e.g., an Indian amateur production of Samson and Delilah (featured as Delilah and Simpson, or The Strong Man of Whiskers Reduced by Reason of Passions). Another high point is the long-dreaded moment when the missionaries tell their adopted son the truth about his parentage--and the eight-year-old, instead of fracturing his psyche, exclaims with new-found pride: "I got two Dads!"

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