c.      Looking Up, Looking Down, Looking Around

Money and status affect looking up and looking down. This is also something I learned as an Anglo-Indian boy in India.

I would hear my father talking about some of his fellow engine drivers who had superior status as covenanted hands. They had been hired in England and were paid on a scale above that which was paid Anglo-Indians. My dad resented them: he said they were mostly very poorly educated and did not deserve the extra money and the home leave to which they were entitled by contract. Even more, he was irked by the false assumption of superiority based on being British. Feeling the British heel made him anti-British in some ways; for example, he backed the Australians in Test matches. My cricket scrap book was full of clippings and pictures of Bradman and the Aussie teams of the 30' s.

At boarding school it was evident that the single Indian on the teaching staff was discriminated against. The British born staff and some of the Anglo-Indian staff with British qualifications had the best houses, with nice gardens. Anglo-Indians with Indian qualifications the next best, and the Munshi (teacher), a poky house with a very small lot and in proximity closer to the servants' lines than to the houses of other staff.

The servants' lines were three rows of attached rooms situated some distance above the main school building, a stiff descent or ascent on a rough stony path was used by the servants to get to and from work. The units had a front cooking/eating/living room and a back bedroom. The servants' quarters were out-of-bounds to boys, along with our girls' school, other schools in the town, and the Kurseong railway station. A few senior boys would enter the servants' lines in darkness to buy food by pre-arrangement. This was not only to risk being caught out-of-bounds by teaching staff or school prefects, it was to take the much greater chance of being spotted by the contractor for the school tuck shop, who had quarters in the servant's lines and whose livelihood was affected when customers for tuck went to others. Saturday was pocket money day, the money handed out by a staff member whose job it was, and on that day the tuck shop, which was a room in the school, was a favourite place to be. One Saturday the routine was broken amid much excitement. A Chinese worker in a restaurant in town set up a portable cooking facility on "Green Plain", an area at one end of the school, just outside the school wall. There was a great demand for the chow mein the Chinaman produced.  The school tuck shop contractor was incensed and complained. It was the first and last time genuine Chinese food was served at the school.  

In 1937 I believe five Brits, two Anglos with British qualifications, and a dozen or so Anglos with Indian qualifications made up the teaching staff. Since the Hindi teacher taught the same pupils and prepared them for the same examinations, the discrimination in housing was rank colonialism. It could be inferred the munshi's remuneration followed the same pattern. No wonder the Anglo-Indian schoolboys treated the munshi as something of a joke and acted up in Hindi lessons. When he entered a classroom to begin a lesson, the boys of the middle school would stand - as they did for all masters and visitors and chorused Good morning bulshi. The munshi would return the greeting grudgingly, aware something was not right but not sure what.

As if to salve his conscience, the Head Master was particularly hard on students against whom the munshi had a complaint, invariably for misbehaviour in class, where boys would leave their desks with impunity or be cheeky to the munshi or ignore his repeated instructions. Or the Head might have observed boys misbehaving in Hindi class as he walked past the classroom. Not that the Head was an unpleasant person, quite the contrary; but in later years I wondered why the teachers I admired never mentioned the colonial system in which we all lived. Ironically, yet sincerely, some of the non-Indian staff referred to the Hindi teacher as "our beloved munshi."

There were very few Indian students at Victoria School,  four or  five day scholars and an even smaller number of Nepalese as boarders. One name that comes to mind was Ta-ming. The Nepalese lads got on well with Anglo-Indians and the Indian day boys fitted in also. In later years, after my time, Indian and Anglo-Indian boarders mixed freely as equals and as friends, but in 1937 two Indian boarders who came to the school were treated as aliens. They were Bengali boys, brothers. They huddled together like animals thrust among a different species. Both boys were overweight and flabby and therefore looked on with amusement. When they turned up for showers in little shorts among the nude Anglo-Indians, the derision was open. Mercifully for the boys they stayed at the school scarcely a week. As far as I could see, which I admit was not very far, the boys had not been made welcome by staff or students. My guess would be the brothers asked their parents to get them out of the school as soon as possible. The boys had every right to be enrolled as boarders of course, and the parents perhaps made a point of exercising that right; if so, it turned out to be a painful ordeal for their sons.

At St. Xavier's College, Calcutta, to which I went after boarding school, the students were almost all Indian, and Anglo-Indians were a negligible minority. The teaching staff were either Jesuit priests, Belgians and a scattering of other European nationals, and included a few Anglo-Indians. There were also some Anglo-Indian and Indian professors who were not members of the Jesuit order.  Anglo-Indian and Indian students played on the same college sports teams and competed with each other in inter-mural games and in track and field, but outside sports there was little integration.

Of the two Bengali lecturers to whom I was assigned, one was up to criticizing English and Anglo-Indian behaviours. He sneered at the custom of blowing the nose and keeping the effluent in a pocket, a comment which was a hit with the Indian students, who laughed at the Anglos sitting uncomfortably among them. It was getting a bit of their own back.

My attitude to Indians changed in college, as though I had gone quickly from boy to man. How could it not? Indians were the top students and among the best cricket players. The college hockey team, however, which played in the First Division of the Calcutta League, was composed wholly of Anglo-Indians. I presume Indian schools, at least in Bengal, did not encourage field hockey in the way their Anglo-Indian counterparts did.

A good deal of "looking around" happened during the school holidays. While I was still at boarding school I was part of a school group that visited villages near Barisal, East Bengal, now Bangladesh. Here the children had games in which no kind of ball was used; any ball used regularly, and therefore having to be replaced regularly, was a luxury they could not afford. They played team games like kabbadi and pursuit or "catch" games, some of which were quite complicated.

Another holiday, our cook went into the government hospital in Burdwan to have cataracts removed. I went to the hospital to visit him and took his son and my frequent companion with me. Teni Borchi had a khuttia (rope bed) in a ward jammed with khuttias.  Edging between beds, Sabindwa and I made our way to Teni, who rose to greet us. For the first time ever I saw our cook without a head covering and was surprised to see he had a thin tuft of hair some six inches long - a tikkia - on an otherwise short-cropped head. The room was a male ward and for the brief time I was there, I was part of Indian domestic life, hospital style. I'm not sure how differences in caste were dealt with in that ward. Teni was a dosad and a house servant and came from a village near Dhanbad, whose inhabitants were occupied in agriculture.

Sabindwa, the son, was with me the day I passed within a few feet of Mahatma Gandhi. We were on our way to the Wheeler Book Store on Burdwan railway platform. From the station's overhead bridge I could see a train standing at the down-platform, on its way to Howrah and Calcutta. Sabindwa and I came down the stairs, my arm around his shoulders. And there was Gandhi, peering over his steel-rimmed specs, giving us a long look, the book in his hand temporarily set aside. An Anglo-Indian - Indian affection openly displayed was an uncommon sight.

I might say that in most Anglo-Indian families the Indians physically and emotionally nearest to them were their servants. Anglo-Indian mothers entrusted ayahs  (women governesses - sort of) with the care of their children. Those children learned Hindi from their ayahs from the cradle. Ayahs put their charges to bed with the Nini baba nini / makhan roti chini lullaby (sleep, baby, sleep / butter, bread, sugar). Is it there that Anglo-Indian sing-song speech originates? It is an accent one Anglo-Indian instantly recognizes in another and which baffles non- community members, who guess the accent might be South African, Welsh (English), or West Indian or simply British colonial.

Anglo-Indians disavowing their ethnicity go to lengths to lose that accent. Brits in India would be mortified to be thought to have what they referred to as a chi chi accent.  Our cook was the servant most dear to our family. When I was six and my sisters only four and two, my mother left home, having decided she would not live with my father, and the cook and an ayah were our keepers while our father was at work. The cook lived in, unlike the ayah, so he was most with us. Even before my mother left, the cook was special. He promised to make me as strong as Hoot Gibson- a cinema cowboy hero whom I much admired - by feeding me lohar ki bakri (iron goat) and he nicknamed me pyjama phut sahib, when I appeared in torn pajamas; it was a name that stuck in the family for a while. My mother told one of my sisters "don't kiss the dirty cook," to which she replied, "but I love the dirty cook."

When my sisters and I started school, going off to the hills by train, the cook would present each of us with a silver rupee. Three rupees was one tenth of his monthly wage. He probably borrowed the money, which was always returned to him by my father, not without gratitude for the cook's caring. And the cook's caring was, I think, an Indian form of loyal service, even to patronizing masters.

Two incidents during school holidays stand out in great clarity. For the first I was in Lucknow. visiting friends of my father's and resting with a hired bike beside me on a grassy knoll overlooking a street that led to the Secretariat Buildings. My attention was drawn to a commotion approaching in my direction, the noise of a hooting crowd of Indians closely following three drunk Tommies (English soldiers) who were weaving and staggering erratically. At short intervals one and then the other of the Tommies would make an ineffectual run at the mob, which would scatter and then regroup, with increased laughing and jeering. There seemed to be no real danger because there was no chance the Tommies would catch an Indian. Suddenly a babu (clerk) on a bicycle came through and one of the Tommies grabbed the handlebar. The babu was forced to dismount. I expected the Tommy would strike him. Instead, the babu demanded to know why he had been stopped. The mob closed in, now menacing. The danger was suddenly all the other way. I felt I should go to the assistance of the outnumbered three, though what I could do I had no idea. I did not have to act. The babu scolded the mob, who began to disperse as the result of his harangue, mounted his bike and rode off. The babu's courage was an example of how one brave, cool-headed man, who refuses to be bullied, can control a mob.

The second incident at about the same time in my life occurred in a village area near the railway town of Jhajha. Having been a cadet at boarding school and having learned to use the standard .303 army rifle, my father thought I could manage the 12 gauge double-barrel shotgun. Actually, he had overestimated my ability because I did not know the shotgun had one hair trigger and that was the one I pressed as I was bringing up the barrel and squeezing to feel the "first" pressure which would have been on the rifle. I had a shock when the gun went off. Anyway, I was out in paddy fields after pigeons, shotgun and a pillow case for the pigeons at the ready. I skirted a village whose inhabitants going about their daily business were aware of me, I having announced my presence by a couple of blasts from the gun.  The adults of the village ignored me, imperturbable in the knowledge that me and my gun amounted to nothing. A single chokra (urchin) however seemed impressed; in ragged shorts and soiled and torn undershirt he followed me at what I took to be an admiring distance. At a dip in the field the boy beckoned to me to join him, which I did a little disdainfully. He scrabbled in the mud with his fingers and pulled out a live fish right there, in the middle of miles of countryside. It was like witnessing the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and yet, every boy in that village could have performed it, knowing as they did that such hollows fill up in the monsoon and the mud there remains moist or wet throughout the year, enabling fish with gills adapted to those conditions to live there. Thoroughly humbled, I went back to the pigeons. Was this a meeting of East and West, of primitive and so-called progress? 

Ours was indeed a privileged life at boarding school: bearers to prepare and serve meals and to keep the place clean, school durzis (tailors) to care for clothes and school mochis (cobblers) for shoes; the boarders had but to study and play games and knock about with pals. Anglo-Indian boarding school boys were trained in the unwritten curriculum of the schools: be loyal to the institution, lead the Indians whom you "command" from the front, avoid conflicts with those in charge. In other words, learn to act like a European colonialist.

Having completed a degree at St.Xavier's in Calcutta, I went to Shillong in the Khasi Hills for teacher training, to St.Edmund's, operated by Irish Christian Brothers. The Khasis are a matriarchal society in which women are pivotal in clan identity and women alone, I was told, inherit clan land and property. Khasi women had a confident bearing I had not seen before in Indian women. The Khasi partners of British tea planters, occasionally as legally married wives but mostly as mistresses, passed on to their Anglo-Khasi offspring the Khasi values. For this reason, the Anglo-Khasis had a much better understanding of the vernacular (the Khasi language, which, I was surprised to learn, was related to the language of the Khmers of Cambodia) and were far more integrated into the indigenous population than the average Anglo-Indian. That was an eye opener, but of course, Anglo-Indians, as separate from Anglo-Khasis, in their blinkered way thought such integration infra dig.

I went for my first interview for employment to Gladstone-Wylie, a British firm in Calcutta. This was in 1947. My interviewer had a son in a boarding school in Darjeeling. It was a starting point of conversation for us. Apparently the interviewer was British because he let me know there was a ceiling for "native born" or Indian domiciled young men like me. The office in which the interview took place overlooked busy, elite, in those days very British, Clive Street. The thought flitted through my mind that I should heave the man who devalued me and all Anglo-Indians through the window. Envy? Looking up? Quite possibly. When I came to read of the commercial activities of this particular company and others like it, Gillanders Arbuthnot for instance, in sending indentured labourers to the plantations of the West Indies, in slave reminiscent conditions, I was glad I had walked out of Gladstone-Wylie with the conviction I would never work there.

When I did get work a short time later, it was with the British firm of Minimax Ltd., producers and sellers of fire extinguishers. I got this employment on the strength of an uncle's connection to the manager of the company. During the latter part of the WW II, this uncle had been the commandant of a transit camp for the British Army and had done the manager a favour by arranging for the manager's son to spend some extra days in Calcutta while on his way to a posting farther East. I began in Minimax as a clerk and after six months or so was given a territory as a salesman, visiting mainly tea estates in Assam and Bengal, almost all of them in the charge of British managers.

Although I had qualified as a teacher, and although many Anglo-Indians took up teaching as a career, I knew that my chances of earning good money lay in sales rather than teaching, and in fact I was soon making four or five times the average salary of an Anglo-Indian teacher. As I travelled the tea gardens, I imitated the British and Scot managers shamelessly and tried out their accents on the babus in the plantation offices, where I must have been considered a joke. I was never invited as a guest to any of the Planters' Clubs, though I was permitted to rent a parking space for my car in the Planters' Club in Darjeeling. The managers and assistant managers of the tea estates had large bungalows, often with only one occupant, and he either a bachelor or a man with wife and family at home in the U.K. The tea pickers and tea factory workers lived in rows of houses which might be called coolie lines. I sometimes heard managers complain that the people who lived there were seeking unreasonable wage increases and improved facilities, such as schools and medical clinics.

One estate I called at had a locum (doctor) with an attractive unmarried daughter, recently arrived from England. She talked horses and riding and looked me over as though I were an inferior species. I think that sort of Englishwoman appeared all over India. When I saw the Daphne Manners girl in “The Jewel In The Crown” ( the video version of the Raj Quartet), I could scarcely believe such warm and well-meaning Englishwomen had lived in India. And of course there were such in reality as well as in fiction; it was just I had never met one. They lived in a world not socially accessible to Anglo-Indians.

The Head Master of St. Paul's School in Darjeeling, one of the elite schools in India, Mr. Goddard, whom I met while at the school to inspect the fire extinguishers, was a man with a superior presence and a reputation for a higher morality. The author of “Under the Solar Topee”, in a chapter on St. Paul's School, has unreserved praise for Mr. Goddard and mentions his opinion of some of the Anglo-Indians he had interviewed for teaching positions, whom he characterized as liars and cheats. These he obviously rejected. He may have been right in his assessment of them out of his tough-Christian righteousness, but it would have been more Christian to allow for the marginal, looking up/looking down position in which the Anglo-Indian was placed in India. In saying so, I am pleading my own less than consistent independence and honesty.

I have regretted the deceptions in my early life that go with covering up one's roots, and I have been ashamed of the snobbery and ignorance in looking-down on Indians. It has been a fault I have felt the need to expiate. Moreover, I think it might be so for many Anglo-Indians.

The resentment many Anglo-Indians experienced towards Britishers as a whole, was, I believe, justified. When Britishers said no blame should be attached to those of them who bore no ill will to Indians or Anglo-Indians, and no doubt there were many such, they did not see that their very presence as privileged persons in a colonial system was an offence. When they ascribed immorality to Indians and Anglo-Indians trying to make their way as best they could from the position of inferiors, the moralizing of the Brits was insufferable.

Anglo-Indians had troubles in India, some with the British, some with Indians, and some among themselves. Although Anglo-Indians had a common culture and shared a common vulnerability, by and large the fairer skinned discriminated against their darker kith and kin and there was simultaneously a looking over the shoulder in competition and a scurrying about looking for escape. It made for uncomfortable moments. Yet Anglo-Indians in India were very aware they had a privileged life in a wonderfully entertaining country.

If my experience is a measure to judge by, Anglo-Indians, both those who left India and those who stayed behind, became much more aware of their unique culture and the identity which they shared with other hybrids of East-West in various parts of the world, after India gained Independence.  Be it realized though, all peoples of the world are to some degree hybrids and there is probably no such entity as a “pure” race,  in spite of Nazi propaganda, except maybe the human race, in common with many species, animal and vegetable, though there are greater and lesser ethnic mixes.  In a sense the world’s history is shared just as the planet is shared; moreover, as can be seen everywhere, the mixes are increasing in our own time in leaps and bounds, and the rate of the increase is the cause of a multitude of problems.  Because it is in  the world’s interest, no doubt the problems of difference will be resolved in time, meanwhile, let us hope rationality and tolerance will be the guides.