The Man Who Brought Apples to India

In the last century, during India’s journey towards freedom and its momentous struggle against
the setting sun of a belligerent empire saw the coming alive of great souls like Mahatma Gandhi,
Vivekanand, Tilak, Aurobindo and others. The magnetism of these people and their supreme yet
selfless desire to attain simple goals attracted others from different parts of the world. These
visitors were so fascinated with the idea of India that their destiny, life and work became
indistinguishable from this soil. Satyanand Stokes was one such person.

When the scion of a wealthy Philadelphia business family, 21 year old Samuel Evans Stokes
arrived in India in 1904 to work at a leprosy home near Solan (a small place near Shimla) little
did he know that he would never go back. Samuel was the son of an engineer-businessman of
Quaker antecedents from Philadelphia. His father was better known for his work on elevator
technology. Young Samuel wasn’t keen to follow his father into business and so, after finishing
his studies at Yale, he decided to serve mankind, and set sail for India.

He began work as a missionary at a relief camp in earthquake-hit Kangra. In 1910, he bought an

abandoned tea garden and got married to Agnes Benjamin, a Rajput Christian, at Barubagh in
Kotgarh, which had become his home. Samuel gradually began to be enamoured and impacted
by Indian metaphysical thought.

During his days at the Kotgarh church, young Samuel came in contact with Sadhus on the
Hindustan-Tibet road on their way to Kailash Mansarovar. While the priest of the church was
finely robed and lived a luxurious life, the simplicity of these Sadhus set him thinking about
Hinduism. He joined them, learnt Sanskrit, deliberated upon meanings of eastern and western
thought, and penned down his philosophy of life in a book entitled Satyakam. In 1932, under
Arya Samaj, he converted to Hinduism.

Samuel Evans became Satyanand.

Satyanand built a temple in Thanedar in 1937 called the Paramjyoti Mandir or the Temple of
Eternal light. He wanted it to be a storybook in wood and stone. Years later, in another century,
it stands as his legacy. On its walls are verses from the Gita and the Upanishads, reading which
give the seeker strength to bear his sorrows and help reach his goal.

Satyanand was a man with a continuous drive for innovation and excellence. Initially, he began
conventional farming, and grew wheat and barley like everyone else at Barubagh. He also grew
vegetables, including peas, beans, lima beans, pumpkins and cabbages. He wrote about those
days, "I, sometimes when loosening up the soil around plants, feel as if I were arranging their
bedclothes and tucking them in like babies, up to the chin."

Satyanand slowly became a local boy, no different from the others. He lived the life of the local
farmers in Kotgarh. He even sat down and relaxed with a hookah, and immersed himself in the
goings on of local life. Though he had culturally adapted himself to be like them, his questioning
mind would not accept the local farming methods. He realised that at these heights, conventional
crops yielded a small return that was barely sufficient enough for sustenance, and did not
generate the cash they needed to pay the land revenue. The result however was that the
farmers in Kotgarh remained impoverished. People living in the lower reaches of the hills earned
more money, had larger cultivable lands and therefore didn’t wish to associate with their
impoverished brethren up in the hills. They would even refuse to give their daughters’ hand in
marriage with these hilly people.

Though he began by cultivating wheat and barley, Satyanand found that the land and the climate
suited apple cultivation best.

Captain R C Scot of the British army had brought apples to the Kullu valley in 1870. These
apples, the Newton Pippin and the Cox’s Orange Pippin were the English sour apples that were
not popular because of their taste. To meet the demand of the Indian market, sweet apples were
being imported from Japan.

During a visit to America in 1915 Stokes heard about the new strain of apples in Louisiana called
the Red Delicious. He bought a few saplings and planted them at his Barobagh orchard in
Thanedar in the winter of 1916. Five years later his mother sent him a consignment of saplings
of the Stark Brothers Golden Delicious Apples as a Christmas gift. They bore fruits in 1925. They
were a hit with everyone. The scrumptious, crunchy sound of biting into a freshly plucked apple,
delectable juiciness and the alluring red shine had the Indian market going crazy. Their
popularity spurred locals into planting these, rather than their usual crops of potato. He goaded
farmers to cultivate apples and popularised it. Apple orchards began to sprout up in Kotgarh and
soon the culture spread to Shimla and beyond.

Satyanand had to face many hurdles however, before he could establish himself. It also made
him realise that unless he addressed the political imbalances, development in the region was not
possible. He saw that the people were made to serve as coolies (begar) along the Hindustan
Tibet road, which served the local administration’s ulterior purpose of getting cheaper labour to
transport goods. Besides labour, the coolies served milk and tea to officials and tourists.

Satyanand had seen the potential here. He decided to address the social and administrative parts
by adopting definitive political postures. Sensitive to the political changes sweeping across the
country after the Jallianwala Bagh shootout of 1919, he launched a non-violent campaign against
the exaction of begar from villagers.

Inspired by the Non-cooperation Movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi, he became a

nationalist and leapt into the freedom movement. He began to wear khadi and made a bonfire of
his western clothes. He was convicted for his nationalist activities and, in 1922, imprisoned in
Lahore jail for six months. Due to Stokes’ dogged and determined efforts begar was finally
abolished from the Shimla district.

Stokes believed in the ethics of doing one’s own work and "the dignity of manual labour". His
classless American upbringing militated against the obsolete caste practices of India and the
snobbery of the English. He worked on apple cultivation himself and set examples of leadership
as his entire family joined in picking, sorting, grading and packing apples. He wanted to instill in
his children, "the dignity of manual labour".

Satyanand believed that education was the most important path to freedom and hence set up a
school both for his seven children and for the 30 children of the village in 1925. The apple
business, in the beginning, subsidized the school expenses. Stokes insisted that every child in
the school should work for a little while in the orchard.
The village children at Kotgarh, alongwith education, also imbibed the understanding and
techniques of modern farming. Over a generation, the unlettered, small and marginal peasant
farmers forced to work as begaris grew skilled at picking and grading fruit. This progressive
generation of farmers transformed the economy of the area.

During the early years, each apple was wrapped in a green tissue paper, and put in boxes that
were marked "Kotgarh Apples". He wrote in 1926, "I am working to make Kotgarh the
headquarters of this fruit for India, in order to increase the prosperity of this locality." Today’s
orchards bear the signature of Stokes’ efforts to standardise the quality and size of the apples.

Satyanand Stokes helped the economy shift its reliance from subsistence farming to modern
commercial cropping of the fruit. He, through his vision and industry, made the people of the
region realise their true potential. The case of development of Kotgarh subsequently began to be
replicated in many other parts of the temperate ridges. There was a time when people of
Kotgarh lived in abject poverty and depended for food-grains on the people of the lower valley.
That time may have existed a long forgotten time ago, but now the status has been reversed.

Apple has become the dominant crop in these temperate heights. Today, one-eighth of the total
cultivated area of Himachal Pradesh grows apples. The cultivated area has increased to over
78,000 hectares, and the annual average production is over 15 million boxes.

Satyanand was the only Indian freedom fighter of American origin. Ironically when the first
saplings of the Golden Delicious apples arrived from Washington in 1921, his wife Agnes had to
plant them since Satyanand was in jail along with other prominent leaders such as Mahatma
Gandhi and Lala Lajpat Rai.

Today, every village in Kinnaur is electrified and most people here have telephone connections.
Mechanical trolleys that move along cables strung between mountains offer a faster mode of
transport for the produce. Himachal Pradesh is easily the largest producer of apples today in
India. Stokes died on May 14, 1946 but the soul of this son of the soil, who was drawn
irrevocably towards this fascinating land, must surely be at rest - contented, pleased and proud.
Satyanand Stokes lives on.