Ursula Graham Bower

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Ursula Violet Graham Bower MBE , later known as UVG Betts (born May 15, 1914 in Wiltshire , England ; † November 12, 1988 ) was one of the first anthropologists in the Naga Hills , where she spent the period from 1937 to 1946 and from 1942 to 1945 participated in the guerrilla war of the British against the Japanese troops in Burma .

Life

Bower was the daughter of John Graham Bower (1886-1940), a commander in the Royal Navy . She attended the Roedean School ; the Great Depression and her parents' aversion to women's education prevented her from attending the University of Oxford . After her father remarried in 1932, Bower became the stepdaughter of children's author Barbara Euphan Todd . That year Bower traveled to Canada .

Bower's first visit to British India was in 1937 with a school friend. Her mother had hoped that Bower would find a nice man to marry on this trip, but Bower took a liking to the Naga Hills and its people instead. In 1939 she returned to India to "fiddle around with a few cameras and do some medical work, maybe write a book". She spent several years as an anthropologist among the Naga . During this time she took more than 1000 photographs documenting the life of the local tribes. These images were later used in a study.

When the Second World War started, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Corps (India) . At this time she enjoyed the friendship and trust of the Naga chiefs, and when an attack on India threatened after the invasion of the Japanese army in Burma in 1942, the leadership of the V Force Bower, from the Naga known to her, assigned a group of scouts to comb the jungle for the Japanese. Bower managed to mobilize the Naga against the Japanese, and she made herself their commander. Initially, the 150 naga led by her roamed through a mountainous jungle area of ​​around 2000 square kilometers. Bower's Force , as their unit was eventually called, expanded and eventually came under the British 14th Army. Bower's Naga unit was so effective that the Japanese put a bounty on Bower. She also became the main character in a US comic called Jungle Queen . Bower preferred a Sten Gun as a weapon and carried two of them with him on her forays.

At their orders, guards were posted on the main and secondary paths through the jungle and a warning system was set up. Thousands of civilians, deserters, escaped or ransomed prisoners of war were led from Burma to India via these paths. Bower also commanded ambush attacks on Japanese search parties. On April 24, 1945, she was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire for her achievements in Burma. As early as 1944, Bower had received the Lawrence Memorial Medal named after TE Lawrence for her anthropological work among the Naga .

Bower did not complete any formal anthropological training, but her photos, films and monographs on the Naga and the Apatani earned her recognition in this subject alongside her friends JP Mills, Bill Archer and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf . She later earned a Masters of Arts and received a PhD in anthropology from the University of London in 1950 .

While serving in the V Force, she met Lt. Col Frederick Nicholson Betts , whom she married in May 1945. In 1948 the couple returned to Europe. The couple later went to Kenya for a while , where they ran a coffee plantation. The marriage resulted in two daughters. Bower's academic papers are now in the Center of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge .

Radio plays

Two radio plays produced by BBC Radio 4 , The Naga Queen by John Horsley Denton and The Butterfly Hunt by Mathew Solon, are based on the lives of Ursula Bower and her husband FN Betts.

Works

  • Ursula Graham Bower. 1950. Naga Path London, John Murray.
  • Ursula Graham Bower. 1950. Drums Behind The Hill , New York, Morrow.
  • Ursula Graham Bower. 1953. The Hidden Land London, John Murray.

supporting documents

  1. ^ A b c Time Magazine , January 1, 1945. Ursula and the Naked Nagas .
  2. ↑ a b c d Bernard A. Cook: "Women and War": A Historical Encyclopedia from Antiquity to the Present . Volume 1, ABC-CLIO Ltd, 2006, ISBN 1851097708 , p. 76.
  3. ↑ Tarr, Michael Aram & Stuart H. Blackburn: Through the eye of time: photographs of Arunachal Pradesh, 1859-2006: tribal cultures in the eastern Himalayas. . Brill Academic, 2008, ISBN 9789004165229 .
  4. ↑ a b Keane, Fergal, Road of Bones: The Siege Of Kohima 1944. The Epic Story Of The Last Great Stand Of Empire , Harper Press (2010) ISBN 0007132409 .
  5. ↑ Jungle Queen , True Comics, No. 46 (winter 1945).
  6. ^ London Gazette  (Supplement). No. 37047, HMSO, London, April 24, 1945, p. 2166 ( PDF , accessed July 23, 2010, English).
  7. ↑ "Miss Ursula Graham Bower" ( Memento of the original from June 13, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Royal Society for Asian Affairs . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rsaa.org.uk
  8. ^ "Recipients of the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal" . TE Lawrence Studies .
  9. ↑ "BETTS, MRS, UVG" ( Memento of the original from April 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Index of the Center of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bower, Ursula Graham
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ursula, Violet Graham Bower (full name); Betts, UVG
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH May 15, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiltshire , England
DATE OF DEATH November 12, 1988