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American social worker in India From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Irene Mott Bose (18 September 1899 – 22 December 1974), known socially as Mrs. Vivian Bose, was an American-born social worker and writer based in India, and the wife of Indian Supreme Court justice Vivian Bose.
Irene Mott Bose | |
---|---|
Born | Irene Mott 18 September 1899 Wooster, Ohio |
Died | 22 December 1974 75) Nagpur, India | (aged
Spouse | Vivian Bose |
Parent | John Mott |
Irene Mott was born in Wooster, Ohio, the daughter of John R. Mott and Leila Ada White Mott. Her father, a Christian pastor and writer, won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1946; her mother was a teacher.[1] Her older brother, John Livingstone Mott, received the Kaisar-i‐Hind silver medal in 1931, for his work with the YMCA in India.[2] Her younger brother, Frederick Dodge Mott, worked in healthcare planning in Canada, and was Canada's representative to the World Health Organization.[3]
Irene Mott graduated from Vassar College in 1922, with further studies in public health and health education at Harvard University and Columbia University.[4]
Soon after graduating from college, Mott went to India to work with her brother, who was a missionary among cotton mill workers.[5] She helped establish a school and a small hospital,[6] and set up a training program for social workers in Nagpur.[7][8] She and her husband made an anthropological study of a nomadic group, the Rabari people of Kutch, from 1969 to 1973.[9]
Bose wrote two children's books about India, The Monkey Tree (1956)[10] and Totaram: The Story of a Village Boy in India Today (1933).[11] An excerpt of Totaram was included in an American school reader, Roads to Everywhere (1961), as "When Totaram Washed the Elephant."[12] She donated some of her father's papers to the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge,[13] where her papers were also, eventually, archived.[14]
Mott married judge Vivian Bose in 1930.[15] They had a son, Christopher, and a daughter, Leila. When Christopher was a toddler, the Boses traveled as a family by car, with her sister and his sister, from India to Albania.[16] She died in 1974, aged 75 years.[4] In 2006, a collection of her letters and diaries was published as An American Memsahib in India: The Letters and Diaries of Irene Mott Bose 1920-1951.[17] There are 13 folders of photographs and other materials related to Irene and Vivian Bose's studies of the Rabari people in the Walter Fairservis Papers at Penn Libraries.[9]
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