Satyananda Stokes
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Satyananda Stokes (16 August 1882 - 14 May 1946) was an American who moved to India and adopted it as his own country. Stokes' given name was Samuel Evans Stokes, Jr., and he came to India in 1904 to work at a leper colony in the Simla Hills run by Dr. Marcus Carleton at Subathu at the age of twenty-two. A true iconoclast, he did this against his parents’ wishes. He had not completed his education, nor acquired any real-world skill and rejected the chance to run the Stokes and Parish Machine Company set up by his father. As a deeply religious Quaker, he became sort of a Christian sannyasi until meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury and forming an order of Franciscan Friars and dedicated his early years living in poverty and aiding the diseased and dying. However, his membership in this wandering brotherhood of monks lasted only two years.
He converted to Hinduism in 1932 and married a local Pahari lady, Agnes, and gave up his life of poverty, and transformed the economy of Himachal Pradesh by introducing the American Delicious variety of apple trees in the Simla Hills of Himachal Pradesh near the Himalayas. Thousands of farmers began copying him and orchards sprang up all over the state, reinvigorating the economy.
Stokes had always had a strong sense of social justice and later became active in India's freedom struggle for independence from Great Britain. He was jailed for sedition in 1921, becoming the only American to become a political prisoner of Great Britain in the freedom struggle.
He died on 14 May 1946 after an extended illness shortly before India's Independence.
[edit] Further reading
- An American In Khadi: The Definitive Biography of Satyananda Stokes by Asha Sharma (ISBN 0-14-028509-1)
- A Quaker who joined freedom struggle at Tribune India
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