b.      The Mysterious Indian in Anglo-Indian Families: Through a Glass Darkly

Anglo-Indians tended to hide the Indian presence in their bloodlines in a form of psychological self-amputation. Sometimes the hiding of facts turned into a denial of facts; both were damaging, and the damage did not stop with the pretenders, but was passed on to the children and grandchildren. Deprived of knowing what their roots were, to that extent these children were rendered rootless, or worse, they were surprised and embarrassed in later life to account for the behaviour of their parents or grandparents.

In many instances the hiding was less from deception than embarrassment: more often than not Anglo-Indians knew they were Anglo-Indians but did not know who their Indian ancestors were. It was awkward for Anglo-Indians to admit this ignorance. There were of course exceptions; that is, there were those who readily revealed they were of mixed parentage. Also, there were Anglo-Indians who resented the implications of being labelled "mixed" and preserved some dignity by denial or evasion.

There was, indeed, an inherent contradiction in admitting to be Anglo-Indian but not admitting to the Indian part. Sometimes the term "Anglo-Indian" was avoided altogether and terms such as "Eurasian" or "country born" were used instead. Terms which could be used as derogatory labels for Anglo-Indians, such as "half-caste", "half breed", "chee chee", "mulatto" or "hybrid" roused Anglo-Indian ire and were more likely to get angry rather than rational responses. Such labels were invariably used as put-downs and conveyed the cruelty and prejudice and possibly the insecurity of their users. The fact is Anglo-Indians had married Anglo-Indians or Europeans for generations and, in the colonial political scene, in which power lay with the non-Indian element, Indian ancestors were neglected and conveniently or otherwise forgotten. It may be assumed that some offspring of early Europeans and Indians were the result of bought bazaar couplings, soldiers visiting brothels. Such offspring would be brought up by their mothers and would be Indian until absorbed by the Anglo-Indian community and culture, perhaps in schools for Anglo-Indians run by various religious denominations. Kim, in Kipling's novel, would appear to have had such a past. Children do not raise themselves. Those bazaar mothers were mothers: they do not merit obliteration or obloquy. But of course the social stigma the mothers carried would be another reason for the forgetting of these particular Indian mothers. British and Indian vilification of Anglo-Indians as a community sprung from lowcaste or lowborn "bazaar women", fraught with illegitimacy, was never true of the community, and it does not matter greatly even if it were true. 

The marginal position of Anglo-Indians in India during the British Raj meant that they were socially ostracized by both British and Indian, and exposed to the jibes of both. They were more angered than wounded by the insults of the Indians and more wounded than angered by the insults of the British. A wounded animal will either attack or seek escape, and since Anglo-Indians could hardly do the first, many resorted to the second. The community in general sought escape. Many spoke of their families as having "spent time in India", usually in circumstances they claimed to be moneyed or prestigious. The fairer ones chose to pass as British, the darker ones as Mediterranean. Far fewer Anglo-Indians were able to get away with these disguises in India, where such camouflages would not have worked, for in true Indian style, friends and neighbours would know everyone's family background and history. So in India other fabrications were invented to explain away a dark skin; for example the one that when he or she was a baby, the baby was oiled with mustard oil and left out in the sun for medical reasons, and this resulted in darkened pigment. The marriage partners of Anglo-Indians, early or latter day, whether European, Indian, or Anglo-Indian, could be a valued support or be a hindrance to establishing identity and maintaining integrity.

In and of themselves, the attempts at concealing the Indian in the Anglo-Indian could be considered the venial results of a minor flaw of character; but it could become a crippling one, enmeshing one in the proverbial tangled web. This realization led many Anglo-Indians to cast off a pseudo-white or false European identity and live in their own skins. It was for the sake of their pride - and there were several reasons why Anglo-Indians could be proud of the significant achievements of the Anglo-Indian community in India - or for the sake of their children - helping their children to be strong and not weak. Or it could be a determination to hold up their heads in all company.

Many Anglo-Indian families had a fanciful family tale to account for the Indian presence in their ancestries; some family members treated the tale with a pinch of salt, while some were, or pretended to be, believers. These tales were usually of the genre of the "romantic rescue" in which a generous European male saves a distraught and persecuted (often nobly born) Indian female from suttee or from designing and unscrupulous relatives over matters of inherited wealth or invidious intrigues of jealousy and persecution.

Unfortunately there is no story of an Indian connection on my father's side, though there is a rumour that Grandfather O'Rourke, a British soldier, married a Kelly, who was Anglo-Burmese, so here there is a mysterious Burman instead of a mysterious Indian - same thing. But there is such a story from my mother's side.

I had my family story from my Aunt Annie. She was my mother's sister and older than my mother by two years. As a child, next to my mother, I loved Aunt Annie more than any other woman. She was an impulsively warm person and a wonderful teller of stories. One year, when my mother and Annie were in Oak Grove boarding school, they listened to a fellow-student describe the beautiful doll she had received for Christmas. Annie, not to be outdone by anyone, surprised my mother by declaring the two of them were given exquisite three-foot dolls for Christmas. When asked where these dolls were, Annie lamented the dolls had been made of wax and had been accidentally left in the sun, where they had melted. It seems the cover of being spoiled by the sun was an Anglo- Indian standby.

It was one of those comfortable warm winter afternoons in her flat in Karnani Mansion on Free School Street in Calcutta when I was in my early teens and when there was nothing particular to do that Aunt Annie told her two children and me the fanciful tale of our family history. Her father, and my grandfather, the Canadian Thomas Moore, was in some jungli (wild) part of the country with a gang of workmen under his supervision, laying railway track, when a very young girl wandered into their camp, lost and weeping. My grandfather had his workmen care for the child and somehow, years later, he married her. All the gaps in the story were never explained, but there was indeed enough fact to give the story credibility: Grandfather Moore had been indeed a Permanent Way Inspector (P. W .I.) on the East Indian Railway; Grandmother Moore was indeed Indian and was many years younger than her husband.

Aunt Annie filled in the answer to the question of how the little girl came to be lost. A mother-in-law wanted to be rid of her and had a servant take her to a mela (fair) and lose her. This is folk-tale and fairy-tale stuff, but certainly possible in an Indian society reputed to be cruel to women. The marriage was real enough; it produced ten children and there is a record of the marriage in the India Office in London, England: Thomas Moore "of advanced age" married to Elizabeth, "daughter of Sookram Singh of the village of Harihar Chatta". The marriage record was searched by the son of my mother's brother, Ben. The son was then a London policeman, who made a handwritten copy which I have seen.  The difference in ages of my maternal grandparents can be deduced from the inscriptions on their graves: Thomas died in 1904 at the age of 74, Elizabeth in 1924 at the age of 64. They are buried side by side in the family cemetery in Karmatar, Bihar, India. Grandfather died a few months before my mother was born, making her a posthumous child. Grandmother died when I was two years old.

I have no recollections of my grandmother Moore, but she took care of me on those occasions when my mother visited her at her family home with her firstborn child. It seems I had a way of burrowing into grandma with my head and she would playfully hand me over to my mother, saying "Here, take your little bull." One of my cousins, two years older than me, said one of her earliest memories is of our grandmother's burial. She said it was raining hard. When I went to Karmatar in 1976 I took some Canadian flower seeds to plant at my grandfather's grave. The ground was too hard, so I planted the seeds in pots at the Homestead, Grandmother's home, in the very flower pots she had had on the outside front veranda. Alas, Canadian seeds did not fare well in the Karmatar heat.

How Thomas Moore and Elizabeth actually came together is unknown and made somewhat puzzling by Moore knowing no Hindi and Elizabeth having little or no English, Thomas's only language. My mother said my grandmother used to pronounce "smash" as "msash". Did Thomas choose his wife-to-be from an orphanage run by Christian missionaries? In those days Europeans had a lot of pull and he was clearly European by appearance, though he was Canadian by birth and had arrived in India via Australia, where he had been gold prospecting. The best corroborating evidence for Thomas Moore's Canadian citizenship came from an unexpected source. When one of my cousins was required by American authorities in India to produce proof of her European forbears - this was to gain permission to marry an American G.I. during WW II - the son of a Reverend Byers wrote an affidavit in which the younger Byers put it on record that his father had known Thomas Moore well over a period of several years and the father had told the younger Byers, who at the time of the affidavit was a railway official stationed in Mokamah Ghat, Bihar, that Moore was a Canadian by report and European by appearance.

It is hearsay from my mother that her mother was Methodist and that she had donated the organ to the Methodist Chapel in the city of Asanol, Bengal. Perhaps it was the influence of Rev Byers that led Harry, one of Thomas and Elizabeth's sons, to decide to enter a seminary, a desire never fulfilled because Harry drowned in Asansol at the age of 17 or 18. My grandfather Moore did not give his wife the sad news until he returned to Karmatar from the funeral. I looked for Harry's grave in an Asansol cemetery in 1976, but could not locate it. There was no cemetery record and the inscriptions on some of the gravestones were undecipherable. Also, I learned later there are two cemeteries in Asansol and I might have been in the wrong one.

Grandfather Moore's Australian connection had its own sequel. According to my mother, upon her father's death a young Australian came to the Homestead in Karmatar to determine if he had any rights to his father's property. He had none, the property being legally in his wife's name and possession. The story sounds implausible, like so much of the Moore saga, and yet with an aura of strange but true.

There is an even more mysterious sequence of events attached to Grandmother Moore's origin. First there is the marriage record in which she is identified as the daughter of Sookram Singh of the village of Harihar Chatta. The village happens to be near Sonepur, the site of a famous annual mela (fair). Then there is the story my mother told me: when she was a young girl living at home in Karmatar a man from her mother's original village would arrive occasionally and set himself up beside the well in front of her mother's house and he and her mother would talk to each other at a distance in an up-country Hindustani. Apparently this man had spent years trying to find the lost daughter of Sookram Singh, by order of the father. Why the discussion at a distance? To preserve the man's caste. That's the story; the facts are unknown.

These Anglo-Indian stories are the stuff of "Kim" and “The Far Pavilions", exotic as "The Arabian Nights", and entertaining too. Perhaps my Aunt Annie was a literary descendant of Scheherazade. Indian mothers of Anglo-Indians, likely generations ago, are dimly perceived, but they are real. They may not be faces in the Anglo-Indian picture, but they are presences which ought to be recognized.