e.      Divisions at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta

It was 1942, the year of the QUIT INDIA Movement. Some of my classmates were missing from lectures; they had been arrested by the police while demonstrating in the streets. Anglo-Indians were involved on the British side: the police sergeants were Anglo-lndians, the railwaymen, including my dad, who was a driver on the E.I.R., kept trains running with help of military escorts, in spite of the call to strike from the Indian Congress Party.

One Indian classmate I thought of more than others was the one who sat beside me in our science lectures. Our roll numbers were consecutive, which is how we came to have adjacent seats. He showed me some newspaper clippings of himself. It turned out he was a champion table tennis player, of all-India calibre. No Anglo-Indian boy in the college had anywhere near his skill. One of the cuttings quoted a well-known European player, who commented that this lad was the best prospect he had come across during his touring team's visit to India. The separation of Indian and Anglo-Indian students at the college, except for members of representative college teams, did not allow for fraternizing. Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, I do not remember the name of this boy.

St. Xavier's College, in the heart of posh British Calcutta, was seemingly removed from the turmoil in Calcutta outside these privileged boundaries.  The excited discussions concerning Indian political independence among Indian students never included Anglo- Indians. One of the subjects I was studying was History and I recognised with regret that history was being made in that very time and place and by my college mates, but not by me.

One day, because of pressure from Indian students and as part of the Quit India protest, the College was closed. Those Anglo-Indians who lived in the Christian Hostel on the College premises were summoned by a pass-it-along message system, to meet the Indian students on the college playing field, so I joined. There was no leader that I could see, but the Anglo-Indians walked in a bunch to the playing field, where a large crowd of Indian students were gathered. This meeting was likely a compromise between Indian students and the college authorities. The college as well as the staff and the Anglo-Indian students were being targeted. With the Indian students was Father Verstraaten, one of the Belgian Jesuit priests and the Rector of the College. He was pleading for understanding and peace when one hot-headed Anglo-Indian boy named Joseph Shipman exclaimed loudly, "There are about 30 of us and hundreds of them. Let them choose an equal number to us and we will have a fair fight."

Shipman was looking for a fight. Actually, he wasn't a Hostel resident but had somehow got to the scene of anticipated action. I might add that several Indians gathered there were not from St. Xavier's and might not have even been students, but were there for a fight. Shipman was not representative of the Anglo-Indians in the group, who had no inclination to go to war, but there was a common anti-Indian and pro-British sentiment that bound them. Neither, it became evident, were the "brought-in" elements representative of the St Xavier's students.

While Father Verstraaten was telling the hothead Shipman to be quiet, there was an angry restlessness in the crowd. Verstraaten managed to pacify them, upon which the Hostel boys went back, still in a group, still unmolested, though a few provocative gestures were made by some of both groups. Quite clearly Indians and Anglo-Indians were hostile to one another and yet there had been a willingness to meet and in that meeting there had been no violence.

A week or so later I witnessed a much smaller confrontation at the College and this time there was bloodshed. Four or five Bengali boys were arguing with one of three Anglo-Indian students, when the Anglo-Indian, Ernie Rawlin, threw out a challenge to the Bengalis. Both the Indians and the Anglo-Indian boys were in one of the lectures I attended. One of the Bengalis braver than the others stepped forward and received several blows to the face. Blood from his nose formed a large patch on his white shirt. Clearly the Indian boy had no idea of how to use his fists, or how to avoid blows delivered in boxing style, still he pressed forward until he could grapple, and wrestled the Anglo-Indian to the ground, not doing him an injury but preserving his own dignity. When lectures resumed there was some antagonistic talk among the Indian lads, the subject of which was Rawlin, who was also the recipient of many hostile stares and glances, and who acted as though he invited physical encounter with any Indian anywhere. It was an expression of contempt as much as it was a declaration of hostility. Rawlin, by the way, joined the RAF in India during WWII.

There was clearly on-going bad blood between Indians and Anglo-Indians. It showed up occasionally in football matches. In one game an Indian lad and an Anglo-Indian named Osborne had a dust-up. In the encounter and in reply to a punch from Osborne, the Indian boy closed with him, sensibly taking away Osborne's punching range. While clutching and wrestling, the Indian boy bit Osborne's chest, a form of fighting Anglo-Indians considered ridiculous. One of the Anglo-Indian spectators called out, "Too bad you can't bite him back, Ozzie; it's Friday." Osborne was Roman Catholic, to whom eating meat was to be avoided on Fridays. This was a Protestant joke.

Differences between Catholics and Protestants showed where a Catholic School and a Protestant school were in the same locality Mostly the rivalry was confined to sports, but sometimes fights between individuals would come after the games, but brawls were extremely rare.

The Catholic-Protestant animosity was in the denominational institutions themselves. One year the Anglo-Indian boys of the Christian Hostel at St.Xavier's decided to forego trophies to the winners of their six-a-side football league, donating the money instead to Dr.Graham's Homes in Kalimpong. In the 40's, as they had been since their inception, the Homes were mainly there to educate the children of British tea-planters and Indian women. St. Xavier's was Catholic, the Kalimpong Homes Protestant. A notice was posted concerning the charitable donation to the Kalimpong Homes. Within a very short time the notice was removed by Fr.Dandoy, S.J., the Hostel Superintendent.

On the other hand, during the Midnapore famine of the same period of time which brought large numbers of starving refugees to Calcutta, the boys of the Hostel joined as one in setting up a relief fund and in accepting the poor quality of the food served in their refectory.

Unfortunately there was no discussion on Indian Independence between Indian and Anglo-Indian students at St. Xavier's. I did overhear one political discussion between an Anglo-Indian, Ronnie Leeming, and an Indian classmate, in which the merits of Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi were debated, Leeming declaring the superiority of Churchill. This dispute remained verbal, both boys sensibly believing in words more than fists.

Anglo-Indian schools, Catholic or Protestant, shared a critical opinion of Indian religions, particularly Hinduism. Such religious-racial hatreds, as one Holocaust survivor said of certain Jewish persecutors in Europe, come with mothers' milk. In my experience, Anglo-Indians, with a minority of exceptions, insist on the term "Christian" in defining their identity. One would have expected therefore that Anglo-Indians would have merged with Indian Christians, but that was not so. The separation connotation of the term, in an Indian context, was predominant, and was part of Indian - Anglo-Indian animosity and confrontation. It was the mental counterpart of the physical ghettoization that characterized railway towns like Jhajha.

St. Xavier's, both the school and college departments, were much in demand and there were long waiting lists for admission, almost all from Indians. The college avoided religious controversy and put no religious obligations on the student body. Many Indian students held their Jesuit professors in high regard. Open division among their students, such as occurred during the QUIT INDIA movement was the exception.