Book Review – Mrs D’Silva’s Detective Instincts and The Shaitan of Calcutta

By:  Glen Peters

A super enjoyable read. Filled with nostalgia for those Anglo-Indian’s who loved to travel on trains, manually drawn rickshaws, and over-burdened trams. Reminiscent of “old Calcutta”. The author, Glen Peters is an Anglo-Indian, born in Allahabad and immigrated to the United Kingdom in the 1960’s. He spent his childhood in a Railway colony close to Calcutta. His recollections of the places, sights, sounds and smells bring the City to life in the telling of this story. Joan D’Silva is a young widow, she has a 10 year-old son Errol, and is the main provider for her small family. Joan lives in Calcutta, and teaches at Don Bosco’s Catholic school. The story begins with an enjoyable picnic at the shrine of Our Lady by the Hooghly near Bandle. Many of us will happily recall our Anglo-Indian picnics – rowdy, social, the singalongs, and of course the delicious food. This is the background for the horrific find made by Errol. It is the body of a young woman lying by the river bank. The victim is identified as Agnes Lal a former pupil at Don Bosco’s. She was married to Xavier Lal, a much older very unpleasant individual. The marriage had been arranged by the Nuns at Don Bosco’s, who were ignorant to the fact that Lal was homosexual. Agnes’s 2 devoted and concerned friends Philomena Thomas and Anil Sen ask Joan to help find out what happened to their friend. In the interim however, Thomas James, GKW’s factory manager is murdered during a riot and the police arrest Anil Sen and extract a signed confession from him to the crime. Joan and Philip, her close friend get involved in the investigation, while Dutta, (the culprit behind the name “shaitan”,) encourages his followers to create havoc in Calcutta. Dutta is the self-proclaimed leader of the Workers’ Revolutionary Movement. Glen Peters spins an artful tale. Enjoyment on every page, as you read about the social gatherings, the many delectable foods, the servants interchanging pleasantries with their employers. Close your eyes and your are “there”. Do not be fooled, however, because below the surface the “real Calcutta” breaks through. Overpowering with murder, thievery, prostitution, police brutality and the unending, horrendous poverty all assail the senses. The great divide of the Indian class system becomes too great for the reader to comprehend at times. Memorable individuals portraying their intelligence, and weaknesses. I loved the “believableness” in the characters. And, if you have forgotten your Anglo-Indian words, there is a glossary at the back. There are some terrific recipes on the front and back covers of the book. I must admit I tried the mouth-watering Lucknow Biryani. Mrs. D’Silva is certainly a memorable character and I personally hope that Glen Peters will continue with her in books to come. This is an India I recall from my childhood and it was wonderful to return there.

Contributed by Lynette (Lynne) Rebeiro

English medium by Kishore Singh

Anglo-Indians are vanishing as a community. Prakash and Sealy try to rescue them from oblivion with an exhibition and a book.

For two years Dileep Prakash “travelled everywhere except McCluskieGanj” — which as everyone knows is an Anglo-Indian stronghold and railway colony “that has been done to death by others before me” — photo-archiving the members of these “first modern Indians”, according to writer Irwin Allan Sealy.

“It was shocking to me,” says Prakash — whose wife June née Davy is Anglo-Indian — “how fast the Anglo-Indians were assimilating with the other Indian communities. “They had a distinctiveness that is disappearing,” he explains.

What was the more irksome was that the Anglo-Indians had been given an image, courtesy of Bollywood, that bordered on the negative. The vamps were always Mona and Lily, the cretinous villains were Peter and Mogambo, they had permissive lives, smoked and drank.

“What’s worse,” Prakash is clearly hurt to the core, “even their cuisine, which is so exceptional, is rapidly declining,” cribbing that even in the 15 years since their marriage, his wife’s own culinary skills have more often than not made way for a more pan-Indian menu.

The decline of the Anglo-Indians may be difficult to arrest, but Prakash was clear he could at least begin to archive their presence, and so set about a two-year yatra, travelling north to south and east to west, winning over their confidence and getting them to pose for his camera.

Even in this short period, members of the community, many of them old “but still fit, and fond of dressing up”, have since died, lending an urgency to Prakash’s work.

Last evening, some of those pictures of the thousand-odd people he has photographed went up at the Photoink gallery in New Delhi, and simultaneously a book with an essay by Sealy (whose earlier works include The Trotter-Nama, The Everest Hotel and Red) was launched at the event. Sealy writes with sensitivity of their separateness from the very beginning.

“The first births across the land would have been fraught but novel events. As the novelty wore off, practicalities would have arisen: who would pay for the child’s keep? What would he wear? Might the father be persuaded to acknowledge the child? … But very likely the father had disappeared, moved on with his regiment, or his ship, or his convoy, and every so often in the streets of any city there might appear this startling cuckoo, a fair-skinned child in native clothes.”

He imagines a generation passing by, the East India Company taking such interest as it could in their welfare. “They eat with knives and forks, not always a diet the father or the mother would approve; they wear hats. They study and play and quarrel in the foreign tongue.”

This hybrid created a new order, the men working as clerks for the Company, the women finding willing suitors within the ranks of European men forced into uneasy bachelorhood. And so came about a community, “next to but apart from the Europeans” called, in the early years, East Indians.

Later, the East Indians would marry their own kind, creating a new caste that, unlike the rest of their countrymen “do not favour sons or lament daughters or stigmatize widows” and “are largely educated”.

“If in manners and morals the latest Indians modelled themselves scrupulously on the English,” writes Sealy, “it was an imitation not craven or servile but occasioned willy nilly by the vacuum into which a new thing falls.”

And in choosing to ally themselves with Europeans they merely chose what other Indians are happy to repeat today, the more modern cultural overlapping of Europe and Asia.

“So when they spoke of Home they were not being ridiculous; the country they had never seen was the source of all that they valued deeply, while in the only language they spoke, the word India was itself still foreign. Their very persons, their lived experience, domesticated both worlds — and embodied the worlds they stood for. They were foreign and yet native, native and yet foreign, and in that vexed identity lay their double fate.”

This lot then were the Anglo-Indians for which reservations within the colony following 1857 brought them the assurance of middle level jobs in the post and telegraph services, customs and police and on the network of canals, and in a network of “English medium” schools that allowed Indians to learn “Wordsworth under a mofussil sky”, though they have unfortunately remained, almost now to the end “the objects of prejudice” as they once were of protection.

Prakash fears the Anglo-Indian community’s assimilation could be complete by 2020. If indeed if it does happen — then, or anytime soon after — his portraits of the last survivors of a community distinguished more by its dignity than its alienness, would have served their purpose.

Heritage bungalow in tourist hub high & dry

CHANDRAJIT MUKHERJEE

Ranchi, April 9: With the rise in extremism in McCluskiegunj area, Ushanjali — a bungalow — has turned into a deserted place. The once famous guesthouse known for its sprawling rooms, prestigious library and good hospitality lies desolate today. There are two caretakers but they do not get the chance to attend any tourist. Instead they try to keep the guesthouse clean and tidy. Built inside the jungle at McCluskiegunj, which overlooks the main road connecting the hamlet to the highway, the guest house was built by one B.N. Ganguly, a retired government employee now based in Ranchi, in the 90s. The guesthouse has seven fully furnished rooms, including a dormitory. The structure is done up in a typical English cottage style with slanting roofs. A fireplace and large rooms inside the house also hint at the British style of housing. But what sets this guesthouse apart from the rest is the library, which has a good collection of books. Tourists enjoyed being in the midst of nature and at the same time have pure milk products, sweets, cakes and other delicacies as the guesthouse boasted of a dairy and bakery. “Ushanjali had more than half a dozen Australian cows and our bakery was famous at that time,” Ganguly said. The guesthouse is now looked after by Iftkar Hussain, a resident of the area. Hussain said McCluskiegunj was a colony of Anglo-Indians and a lot of people from Britain used to come in those days to this place. Now things have changed as people are afraid of extremist attacks. Hussain also said the guesthouse had 10 dogs of good pedigree once, but with Ganguly losing interest due to low turn out of guests, the bungalow has lost its charm. “We wait here everyday with the hope that some guest would turn up so that we can take care of them and make their stay memorable, but unfortunately we do not get to see any,” he rued. Sandeep Razdaan, a resident of the area, said people do not come here anymore. “The place is very calm, serene and beautiful but outsiders do not come to this place out of fear,” Razdaan said. Hussain said British settlers created McCluskiegunj after purchasing the land from Ratu Maharaja. After 1947, some of the Englishmen left the place while others stayed on and married the residents of the area, forming an Anglo-Indian community in this part of the country. As time passed and with lack of opportunities only a handful of Anglo-Indians stay here now.

A Community Fighting To Survive

KOLKATA: ‘Uncle’ and ‘Aunty’ have replaced ‘Sahib’ and ‘Memsahib’ and drivers or rickshaw-pullers no longer refer to the children as Babalog or Missibabas. Para boys no longer rush forward to help ‘Rosy Ma’am’ down from the rickshaw for the simple reason that the Rosy Ma’ams are no longer their first teachers in neighbourhood schools. Things have certainly changed for the Anglo-Indian community in Kolkata. There are an estimated 17,000-18,000 Anglo-Indian families living in the city today. Nearly 50-55% of them survive on allowances sent by family members who have migrated to other countries. With job opportunities drying up and the community too proud to seek reservation, there is a steady trickle of youngsters to other commonwealth countries. What worked to their advantage immediately after Independence, turned out to be their undoing in later years.

“Despite a fear psychosis setting in immediately after Independence, the community did pretty well for the first 20-25 years. Though the majority of the migration took place during this period, jobs were easily available here as the Anglo-Indians knew better spoken English than others. Naturally, there was a tendency to opt out of school and seek jobs. Tragedy struck after this when there was a mad rush for graduation among all other communities. Most young Anglo-Indians were high-school dropouts. Despite good spoken English, they stood no chance in job interviews where graduate candidates were present,” says chronicler Melvyn Brown, who runs a research bureau on the community.

Things are changing now with the youth being encouraged to study. Organisations like the Calcutta Anglo Indian Services Society are doing quite well, Brown says. “They are providing night shelters, helping youngsters find jobs and urging them not to give up. Many youngsters are today studying at home and clearing their exams through open schools and universities,” Brown adds.

Former MP Paul Mantosh admits that there is a sense of alienation among the older generation. “Many of them want to migrate. The others are, however, very much a part of the mainstream. The youngsters are graduating and even pursuing post-graduation. As a result, they are getting good jobs,” he says.

President in chief of the Anglo-Indian Association Neil O’Brien says that the community has integrated very well with others. Though there is no reservation of jobs in the public sector, new opportunities are opening up in private companies.

Social anthropologist professor Robyn Andrews from New Zealand has conducted a recent study on the city’s Anglo-Indian community. In Kolkata now to participate in a conference, she feels that the Anglo-Indians will be able to maintain their distinct culture in the years to come.

“The community is picking up in the education front and will continue to contribute towards development of the country. There is a strong emphasis now to get admissions to good schools and colleges. The community is culturally distinct and will continue to remain so. Even the poorest among them is westernised in view and behaviour,” she says.

Brown thinks that the community will do better, once a different level of thinking evolves. “One cannot continue to live in the past. Leaders will have to come up, who will work towards uplift of the community,” he feels.

Present state of the Community

The present community Constitutional guarantees of the rights of communities and religious and linguistic minorities permit Anglo-Indians to maintain their own schools and to use English as the medium of instruction. In order to encourage the integration of the community into the larger society, the government stipulates that a certain percentage of the student body come from other Indian communities. There is no evident official discrimination against Anglo-Indians in terms of current government employment but it’s widely perceived that their disinclination to master local languages does not help their employment chances in modern India. Anglo-Indians distinguished themselves in the military. Air Vice-Marshal Maurice Barker was India’s first Anglo-Indian Air Marshal. At least seven other Anglo-Indians subsequently reached that post, a notable achievement for a small community. Countless numbers of others have been decorated for military achievements. Air Marshal M.S.D. Wollen is often considered the man who won India’s 1971 war fighting alongside Bangladesh.  Anglo-Indians made similarly significant contributions to the Indian Navy and Army. Another field Anglo-Indians dominated was education. The most respected matriculation qualification in India, the ICSE, was started and built by some of the community’s best known educationists including Frank Anthony, who served as its president, and A.E.T. Barrow who served as its secretary for the better part of half a century. Most Anglo-Indians, even those without much formal education, find that gaining employment in schools is fairly easy because of their fluency in English. Several charities have been set up abroad to help the less fortunate in the community in India. Foremost among these is CTR (Calcutta Tiljallah Relief – based in the USA), which has instituted a senior pension scheme, and, provides monthly pensions to over 300 seniors. CTR also provides education to over 200 needy children. Today, there are an estimated 200,000-400,000 Anglo-Indians living in India, most of whom are based in the cities of Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, and Mumbai. Anglo-Indians also live in Kochi, Chennai, Goa, Lucknow, Agra, and in some towns of West Bengal. Most of the Anglo-Indians overseas are concentrated in Britain, Australia, Canada, USA, and New Zealand. Of the nearly million or so and their descendants who have emigrated from India, some are settled in Asia including Pakistan and Myanmar, and also in European countries like Switzerland, Germany, and France. The community in Myanmar frequently intermarried with the local Anglo-Burmese community but both communities suffered from adverse discrimination since Burma’s military took over the government in the 1960’s.