Ranen Sinha

Ranen (Ron) Sinha

An interesting person we met during our first year is Ranen Sinha, whom we met through Rubena and Sapan Sinha (not related).  He came to Winnipeg long before we did and so I went to meet him and his wife Luella a few weeks ago.  Luella gave me some notes written by him and herself these appear as direct quotes. 

Ranendra Nath Sinha was born on January 30, 1930 in Purbadhala, a village in the district of Mymensingh that lies in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas, in what is now Bangladesh. 

“We lived in a joint family group with several small nuclear family units. Members of a family unit including father, mother, children and grandparents, lived under one roof.  As zamindars the families collectively owned large landed property with the right to collect crops and taxes from the farmer-tenants.  These family units lived in separate houses with corrugated tin roofs, wooden walls and mud or cement floors and shared a common kitchen, temples and parlors and administrative offices.  Swimming was a daily activity that we enjoyed.  We had two large ponds and a large lake (Rajdhala Bill, area bout 2 square miles) and everyone took their bath there and swam with much pleasure.   Our village had no automobile.  Bullock carts, horses and elephants and palanquins were the main modes of transportation.  

We children used to have great fun swinging behind a bullock cart and travelling to the other end of the village without the knowledge of the dozing cart driver plying his good on the village's sole unpaved highway."

Ranen’s father was a lawyer. Ranen had three sisters, two older, one younger.  At partition, the family lost everything, and fled to Calcutta where his uncle was a doctor in the army.

 “He was a colonel in the British army, who had studied in Switzerland and became medical director of R G Kar Hospital in Calcutta where he was located when the family went to live with him.”

  

Ranen did his Ph.D. in Entomology at Kansas State Univesity. and a post doc. in Montreal. He  came to Winnipeg in 1957 with a job in hand at the Federal Dept of Agriculture.  His specialization was in storage of grain, and he has written two books on the subject. 

Among other awards, in 1985, Ranen was awarded the Gold Medal from the Entomological Society of Canada in recognition of his pioneering research on pests of stored grain and the complex interactions that are involved in stored-grain spoilage.

He got married in the summer of 1963 to Luella Griffith.  Luella was born in Rathwell, Manitoba and grew up on a farm. 

Luella said,  “I trained in a hospital setting, then worked in several country hospitals... came to Winnipeg as a student nurse for taking  nursing courses at the University of Manitoba. The Sociology professor suggested that the India Day celebrations being planned by the India Students Association would be a good way to experience something of another culture.” 

She had seen the event advertised, featuring Ruby Sinha’s dance, and was attracted by that and so attended. She met Ranen there and they were married six months later.  They lived in Clark Towers, on a cross street between Stradbrook and River near Donald – it has another name now.

They spent a year in Kyoto, Japan 1966-67 and from there went to India on Luella’s first visit.   On their return to Winnipeg, they bought their present house on Queenston St.

Ranen was Honorary Prof at the U of Manitoba and had graduates and post-docs working with him.  

His main passion was Yoga, and in the 1970s, he was the first yoga instructor in Winnipeg to give regular courses, both at the U of M and at schools, mainly for adult edcuation classes.  He taught himself, studying from books and finally writing a text book that he used in his classes. Ranen was not the first yoga teacher in Wiinipeg  but the first to incorporate Hindu philosophy as an essential component with the Hatha Yoga exercises.

Luella remembers being at the first organized meeting that discussed the formation of Hindu Society, and also how Thawani Towers was regularly used for weekend prayers and pujas. 

Ranen and Luella have three children, two daughters and a son.  Luella returned to work after the children were somewhat grown and she completed her Master of Arts.  She worked until 2002, after which she set up her own practice in Energy connections – a therapy for understanding one’s relationships.