Henry Scholberg

Henry Cedric Scholberg (May 29, 1921 – August 4, 2012) was director and librarian of the Ames Library of South Asia at the University of Minnesota. His works include bibliographies on Indian encyclopedias, on manuals and gazetteers of India, and on the Portuguese in India. He also authored other scholarly works, plays and novels, as well as his own memoirs.

Life

India Henry Cedric Scholberg was born in Darjeeling, British India, on May 29, 1921 and grew up speaking Hindi before he could speak English. Bearing the same first name as his father, Henry Caesar Scholberg, he was known as Cedric from childhood until the 1950s. His parents were patriotic Methodist missionaries from the United States, working at a time of considerable turmoil during the campaign for Indian independence. His childhood experiences, and in particular the acts of Mahatma Gandhi, influenced his pacifist tendencies: Todd Tucker says that as a child Scholberg "personally witnessed how nonviolent tactics could bring about concrete political change. The experience would stay with him his entire life."

Scholberg attended Woodstock School, a Presbyterian boarding school in Mussoorie that commonly took the children of missionaries. He found it to be a miserable experience at times. In a naive gesture, reflecting the commonplace antipathy towards British governance in India and despite his pacifism, he was among a group of schoolboys who executed the Nazi salute on being told by their headmaster of the beginnings of World War II; Germany was opposed to Britain and that was sufficient justification in their minds.

As an objector, Scholberg was ordered to join the Civilian Public Service (CPS), through which he became one of the test subjects in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment from 1944. This was his first experience of the University of Minnesota, having previously had CPS postings in a conservation camp at Lagro, Indiana, and a mental institution in Maryland. He saw the Experiment as a relief from his work in mental health, which was increasingly giving him concern about his own mental state, and as a sacrifice befitting that being made by those of his countrymen who were engaged in the war. When he underwent a psychological assessment for acceptance on the Experiment, based on the then new Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory method, it was determined that he had psychotic tendencies, including depression, hypochondria and hysteria. He became one of the 36 selected test subjects. Another was Jasper "Jay" Garner, who by chance happened to have been at Woodstock School with Scholberg as an eight-year-old.

Scholberg enrolled in graduate-level courses to learn French while he was involved in the year-long experiment, having soon exhausted the possibilities of the beginners' classes that were offered by a fellow test subject, the Princeton University graduate Sam Legg. During the course of the experiment, his weight dropped from to .

Works

Academic Scholberg said of researching archives and living abroad in the pursuit of academic knowledge that "If you're not enjoying it, you are not doing it right." He traveled to over 40 countries, often with his family, and had extended periods of residence in India (1964 and 1976) and Paris (1967 and 1969).

Scholberg's Bibliographie des Français dans l'Inde was published in 1973 by the Historical Society of Pondicherry. His co-author was Emmanuel Divien. In 1982, Promilla published a bibliography of Goa and the Portuguese in India, being the collaborative work of Scholberg, Archana Kakodker, and Carmo Azevedo. This represented eight years' of work, identified sources in over 80 locations, in numerous languages, and included unpublished doctoral theses and material dating as far back as the 16th century. More than of travel was necessary for its compilation. John Villiers noted in a review that Scholberg had already demonstrated "ample evidence of his abilities as a bibliographer" and that this bibliography included various papers written by experts on aspects of Indo-Portuguese historiography.

Scholberg's work on India encyclopedias – The Encyclopedias of India – was published by Promilla in 1986 and was described by a reviewer, Ruth Bowden, as an "encyclopedia of encyclopedias". It detailed 47 such works, produced between around the tenth-century AD and the 20th century. These comprised various languages, including one in Assamese, six in Bengali, three in Gujarati, four in Hindi, three in Kannada, four in Malayalam, six in Marathi, five in Oriya, one in Punjabi, six in Sanskrit, two in Tamil, four in Telugu, and two in Urdu.

In addition to the above, Scholberg's academic works include:

(two volumes)

He also wrote reviews and articles for scholarly journals such as the Journal of Asian Studies.

Fiction Works of fiction by Scholberg include:

Memoirs