The expedition
Lloyd Rudolph, just out of two years as a US Army lieutenant and with a Harvard doctorate on eighteenth-century party politics, and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, also a new Harvard PhD, wanted to study Indian politics less than a decade after independence, and decided the best way to get there was to buy a Land Rover in England and drive. The vehicle was a new model, the 107-inch wheelbase five-door station wagon that seated ten and, Susanne wrote, 'looked like an armored car meant for a battalion': blue-grey, with a white tropical roof set over the ordinary roof. The second seat flattened and the front seat-back laid across the rear benches made a bed each night, after the luggage had been shifted from the back to the front; a Higgins two-burner gas stove sat inside the rear door, and breakfast and supper were laid on folding tables with paper napkins and plastic plates to keep 'a gently civilized routine'. Lloyd shaved each morning in a mirror propped on the spare wheel bolted to the bonnet.
They delayed in England and Germany — the Land Rover was photographed being washed in Germany in July 1956 — and counted Salzburg, which they left on 26 July, as the official start. The road ran by Graz into Yugoslavia on the eve of a Croatian national holiday, down through Serbia and the sheep country of Macedonia to the Greek border, where they drove at night into camouflaged troop columns: Yugoslavia and Greece were mobilising against each other as the Suez crisis broke, and an armed sentry parked them for the night behind his bivouac. Outside Kavala they were arrested for killing a cow that was in fact a horse killed by an Iranian's Volkswagen they had met at the customs; the charge dissolved when the bashed VW drove up. From Alexandroupoli they reached Istanbul on 2 August and Ankara on the 4th, camped by a threshing floor near Sungurlu with twenty farmers watching them brush their teeth by tractor headlight, and went up to the Black Sea at Samsun and along the coast to Trabzon, where American servicemen sent them to sleep beside the barbed wire of a radar station on the mountain above the town. Over the mountains to Erzurum on 6 August, a soldier escorted them forty miles through the training areas towards the Soviet frontier, and on the 7th they crossed into Iran at Maku.
Iran was grueling: dry hills and plains, camels, and on the last sixty miles into Tehran overloaded trucks whose diesel smoke and dust made passing 'disaster' and following 'death'; they gave up in the dark and slept in the desert. In Tehran on 11 August the embassy secretary Hugh Carless told them, laughing, that he had been in the diplomatic car robbed by tribesmen on the Kabul–Peshawar road. By Sabzevar and Mashhad on the 13th they went to Herat, where the consul Robert Schott received them the day before Ashura and a boy from the local Land Rover agent guided them to the road; the Persian mile markers ended and the Afghan desert road from Farah, which nobody drives by day, was taken at night on the 16th. Kandahar on the 17th, Kabul after dark on the 18th, and on 20 August down the Kabul River gorge to the Pakistani border at seven in the evening, where officials gave them green tea, a Pashtun constable with a fixed bayonet, and the blacktop of the Khyber, crossed in half an hour with the guard's heavy boot on Susanne's sandal. At Dean's Hotel in Peshawar, with fans and a six-course dinner, they drank to England and Pakistan. The trip from Salzburg had taken 25 days and 5,114 miles and cost about $300, with another $384 in pre-trip expenses for doing it by car.
They went on to Lahore, New Delhi and Jaipur, where the Land Rover was photographed resting at the Jai Mahal Palace Hotel, and where the Rudolphs made a second home for the rest of their lives. The research begun on that journey produced The Modernity of Tradition (1967) and five decades of work on Indian politics for which the couple received the Padma Bhushan. Their diary, with Lloyd's later annotations, was published in the University of Chicago Magazine in 2013 and, expanded, as Destination India: From London Overland to India and What We Learned There (Oxford University Press, 2014). The Land Rover's registration and eventual fate are not recorded in the diary.
