Introduction

I am an Anglo-Indian by birth, a person of mixed race, born and bred in India before Independence. My mother had a Canadian father and an Indian mother. My paternal grandfather was a British soldier, and my paternal grandmother was, it is thought, Anglo- Burmese. I was born in a Calcutta hospital in 1923. I lived in Anglo-Indian railway towns on the old East Indian Railway (E.I.R.) through my school and college years. The towns where I lived longest were Burdwan in Bengal and Jhajha in Bihar.

My maternal grandparents' property in Karmatar, Sonthal Parganas, Bihar, remains in our family at the time of this writing (2001). I spent time there off and on while I was in India and have been back twice since emigrating in 1948. My schooling was in Anglo-Indian boarding schools: a few months in Bishop Westcott, Nancoom (near Ranchi, Bihar), six years in Oak Grove School, Jharipani (near Mussoorie, U.P.), and four years in Victoria School, Kurseong (near Darjeeling, in the northern part of West Bengal). I had four years at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta, and one year at St. Edmund's College, Shillong (Assam). I am using the place names as I knew them at the times I was there.

Odd though it may sound, it was only in my college years that I had my first broad contact with Indians, from whom Anglo-Indians took pains to distinguish themselves. The abrasive reality of the Quit India movement in 1942 formed a turning point in my attitude to Indians. I sympathized with the Indian demand for independence; I grew to admire Mahatma Gandhi; nearer home I admired the political activities of my classmates, some of whom were arrested for their part in demonstrations.

In 1948 I joined the Anglo-Indian Diaspora, when I emigrated to England at the age of 25. From the time I was faced with the obvious fact that I was not English, I determined to embrace my Anglo-Indian ethnicity. In doing so, I was anticipating what I was to read later in the writings of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who when he was Prime Minister of Canada, said," one must respect one's own cultural identity before one can respect the cultural identity of others." In these memoirs I write as an Anglo-Indian of my time, place and class. The members of that community are my flock, my herd, my tribe. I do not presume to represent the community in general. In a colour-conscious world, where discrimination by pigment is common, and in a community in which that pigmentation runs from white to black, no one person, and no person of any one shade, can speak for the entire spectrum of the community. My own skin colouring may be described as noticeably tan, the sort that prompts comments like "You've caught the sun," or "You must have been down south." I think of my skin as off-white, a creamy-brown with a squeeze of lemon.

Not that these memoirs are about racial discrimination in relation to the social status of Anglo-Indians. They are primarily a statement I leave to my children. Nonetheless, while presenting myself, my family and my people to my children, I am also setting up an "Anglo-Indian exhibit," as it were, in the knowledge that my experience belongs to a time now definitively passed away, with few to record commonplace vignettes of Anglo- Indian life. My children were all Canadian born. Only two of the nine visited India and got to know a little of my background. As they grew to adulthood, I felt the urge to tell them about myself, particularly as an Anglo-Indian, prompted in part by their own enquiries. I had written bits and pieces over the years, one of the bits an address I made at the International Symposium of Anglo-Indians held in Toronto on July 19, 1992, an easy date for me to remember because it was my dad's birthday. In my address I made a reference to the "makhan roti chini" accent of Anglo-Indians. A newsletter which mentioned this reference reached a Mr. Sanjay Sircar in Canberra, Australia, who wrote asking for other comments I might have on the subject of Anglo-Indian language usage. Sanjay and I entered into correspondence. Though he had a very Indian name, Sanjay seemed to know a great deal about Anglo-Indian culture and to care a great deal about recording it - more indeed, than many Anglo-Indians themselves, who, in the past in India, when it was not convenient to reflect too closely on Anglo-Indian identity, or in the diaspora today, when people for the most part are getting on with making new and prosperous lives for themselves, generally turned their faces from their Anglo-Indianism. He turned out to be an expatriate Indian in Australia, of the Anglicized English-speaking Indian Christian community, a longtime scholar of things marginal (like Children's Literature and Folklore.) His letters brought back memories of my haunts in Calcutta and he encouraged me to take up my memoirs more seriously.

So, ironically enough, my mentor in this undertaking is a brown Indian, one of those whom we Anglo-Indians kept at arms' length. Sanjay has urged me and other Anglo- Indians to preserve or at least record Anglo-Indian experiences in India and the lands to which they emigrated. He has been my guide in trying to keep my Indian references accurate, to keep my writing as free as possible from infelicities, and to steer me towards anecdote rather than commentary. I have tried to make the most of the help he has given me, and hope I have not fallen too far short of his expectations.

The memoirs have a loose organization. There are four locations: India, England, the U.S.A. and Canada. The India Sections are divided into topics, some of which overlap; for instance, "Entertainment" would occur in "Railway Colonies" and "Education". Anglo-Indian attitudes in India are explicitly or implicitly spread throughout. The overall effect may be like that of a landscape painting in which disparate activities, including personal affairs, are depicted in the details.