a.    Belligerent Territorial Attitudes

Jhajha was one of the many small railway towns - stations to Anglo-Indians - in the India of the 1930's.

The town occupied four geographical areas, three of which were the property of the railway authority and the fourth was owned and lived in by non-railway persons. These territorial divisions were in keeping with the ghetto mentality that the caste system and tight-knit community loyalties engendered in India.

Anglo-Indian houses and bungalows were, with some exceptions, clustered in a square, with intersecting roads running at right angles to one another. Indian railway housing, of brick like the Anglo-Indian quarters, were in lines. Of the railway properties two were residential, one housed Anglo-Indians and a minority of Europeans, the other was for Indians; the third was the working heart of the colony, where the loco sheds and workshops were situated and stretched to the railway station. Jhajha was a stop on the main line from Bengal to the Punjab and it was there that locomotives and their crews on the main line long-distance expresses changed. The fourth enclave was non-railway: it was commercial and residential and included the bazaar. Here there was no uniformity of roads and buildings, the houses were mostly crowded and building construction was inferior.

In the non-Anglo-Indian sections there was further division between Hindu and Muslim, the differences generally known but ignored.

Neutral ground existed between the territories: the Railway Hospital stood between the two railway components, serving both populations. The Post Office was a sort of demarcation between the Anglo-Indian quarters and the bazaar. Similarly, between the residential area of non-railway persons and the Anglo-Indian colony was a large maidan,  used for a common grazing area for cattle, with a field for hockey and football, and no doubt for cricket later as this sport grew ever more popular in India. Anglo-Indians visited the bazaar freely, where the life was colourful and unpredictable. I once came across a man receiving medical attention in an open space in the bazaar. His limbs were held by four men who were pulling and turning them in accordance with the instructions of a fifth, who was managing the procedure. I asked what the matter was with the patient and was informed he was having his navel re-set because it was dislocated (nabi okhur gaya). 

Anglo-Indians rarely or never visited the quarters of the Indian employees of the railway. These workers were all in subordinate positions. On one occasion I was standing by a faucet in the hospital compound, waiting among a group of Indians to take a drink.   A man was filling a pan when I happened to move and cast a shadow on his pan. In disgust he threw out the water, saying I had spoiled it. Here was a definite divide, caste but also territorial.

Of course Indians were employed as servants in the homes of Anglo-Indians, but these were considered by Anglo-Indians to be an integral part of the Anglo-Indian quarters, as if the servants were owned in a master/serf relationship.

There were separate schools for railway Indians and Anglo-Indians and the bazaar had its own ramshackle schools, except for children of the better off, and the denominational schools. Such schools were again separated into Hindu and Muslim, patshallas and madrassas. Anglo-Indians in Jhajha unconsciously bore a garrison mentality. Returning home from the Anglo-Indian Railway Institute one evening, I was surprised and angry to see an Indian boy perhaps two years younger than I on the road ahead of me, riding a bicycle. Not only was he in "our" area, he was riding. Indians were expected to walk. I ran beside the boy, hostility in my heart, as far as my front gate. The boy was puzzled by my behaviour. "You want racing me?" he asked with a smile. I made no reply and certainly did not smile in return, just peeled off at my house as though I had performed my watchdog duty and seen a trespasser off the premises. I felt foolish that my attempt at intimidation had been so ineffectual, and guilty because the boy had been so blameless and so completely unaware that his place was supposed to be separate and inferior.

The boy turned out to be the son of a recently appointed doctor to the Railway Hospital, whose father had one of the better bungalows in the Anglo-Indian quarters. The year was about 1936. The winds of change were blowing through Jhajha.

Advance scarcely a dozen years. On a visit to Jhajha I was told there was another Indian doctor in the same bungalow, who was married to an Anglo-Indian woman. Her family was known to me: her father and my father had been fellow engine drivers. Among Anglo-lndians there was some gossip about the girl having married below her and having let the side down and no doubt there was equivalent gossip among Indians. I considered the couple had done well for themselves. I was pleased that in this instance at least the territorial boundaries with which I had gown up had disappeared, and pleased that the union had produced two children, who pointed the way to a different and better future.