Saturday, August 15, 2015

Staying behind, sailing away.

 India 1960s. A new nation had entered the inevitable troubled teens in her young life. There was expectation and there was fear. There was desire and there was doubt. There were people looking ahead and there were people looking behind. Yes, at opposite ends of the spectrum of every human emotion conceivable, there were two communities:Indians galvanised by freedom;  Anglo-Indians chained by uncertainty.
The Anglo-Indian was worried. His place in the social hierarchy was now a questionable one. This was a new India. Not the one that he was so used to. Not the one he was born in, not the one in which he grew up, not the one in which he worked. In fact, the last aspect mentioned was of dear concern, especially to the bread winner of the family. You see, in quite a few cases, his junior had been promoted just over him.
Conversations at dinner tables, railway institutes and work places were peppered with doubt and uncertainty. Will we now be marginalised? What is going to happen to us? Should we go away or stay behind? Once again, the final question was traded in conversation more often than not. Should we return, to England, the then motherland, to the anglophone nations of Canada or Australia; or should we stay behind, a citizen of India, the new motherland.
The doubt was certain, the fear palpable.  You see, some angloindians were losing jobs, some were overtly sneered at in varying places of social contact, some were mocked for their conversational and written inability with varying local vernaculars.
When India attained independence its political geography mostly constituted of its people divided into local States based on one criterion: language. The Tamils had Tamil Nadu, the Bengali had West Bengal, the Malayalee had Kerala: just a few examples to illustrate the point. The Anglo-Indian, though, had English! And he was scattered all over the country. You could find him at the foothills of the Himalayas, in the backwaters of Kerala, in the conclaves of Lucknow, in the coffee houses of Calcutta, at railways stations. In; well, at every railway station that existed at that time! Could he be placed in a state of his own? Anglo India, perhaps? There were, apparently, talks of giving the community the option of the Andaman Islands, but that fizzled out. So, the doubt lingered, the fear festered and the uncertainty grew.
Yet, there were some within the community who felt more at ease with the status quo. The railways needed the Anglo-Indian to man its trains, monitor its stations and look after their engines, schools across the country needed their teachers, offices preferred their services and communication skills, and sports, their athletes, especially the hockey players. These people were more secure and their future seemed brighter. Why go away; we'd rather stay behind!
And it was this topic that was bandied about in every household across the sub-continent. A tug of war. Go away to the motherland; stay in the land of our birth!
This is where the general ramblings end and the writer's personal narrative begins. For, you see, he is an Anglo-Indian whose own family had played out the trauma of that decade mentioned in the opening sentence.
On a warm August evening, walking across a pleasant London garden, the writer put in a call to a number he had never dialed before. "Hello, may I speak with Mrs Jacobs? I believe she is my grandmother's sister. In this day and age of prank calls, one can assume that the receiver was apoplectic. I quietly cut the call to a few expletives that shall not be repeated here.
Eventually, though, I got to meet Mrs Jacobs, now an octogenarian, Auntie Noreen to me. She had left Flora, her sister and my grandmother, over five decades ago!  My grandmother had died when I was a wee lad of four, so i did not know much of her. Auntie Noreen regaled me with stories of their childhood, and in exchange I told her about the India she last saw: Madras then, Chennai now! Flora had stayed behind, Noreen had sailed away!
I thought back in black and white: family disbanded. I looked across the dining table and smiled: family reunited!
Another sister had sailed away too, Auntie Bina, with her husband Denzil, now a widower. My young family and I met up with him in another part of London two weeks later. The most remarkable aspect of this meeting was this: a conversation about Moore Market, his old school, his house in St Thomas Mount and so on. He was trying to recall the Madras of his youth; I was telling him, in turn, of the Chennai I was familiar with. And, I had scarcely made mention of my railway rides to college, when he rattled off the names of every railway station between Madras Beach and Tambaram .
Gobsmacked, I smiled and asked him why then did he leave it all behind. "I was ignored of a promotion that was supposed to be mine" was the reply.
Introspective, I wondered why both my grandfathers had stayed behind in India with their wives. As we trundled our way home on the tube from Tooting to The Oval, I looked at my reflection in the window and smiled. Norman Charles White and Joseph Eugene Renaux were railwaymen, both of them. Perhaps many of the railwaymen stayed behind, secure enough to nurture another generation of railwaymen from the community. Those less secure about their prospects led to the diaspora .
It was after these two meetings, which have had a great impact on me, that I reflected on the partition. No, not the historical separation of two new nations whose relationship is news fodder for perpetuity, but the more personal one: the partition of the Anglo -Indian family; of sisters leaving each other, of brothers breaking away; of one half of a family sailing away with trepidation to a new life; of the other half hanging on stoically to familiar faces and places. It was the story of my own family! A family I grew up with; a family of whom only stories were told.
Born in 1976, India would be my home for nearly 22 years. A voracious reader, I often saw the western world through the pens of diverse writers, from Enid Blyton to Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie to Jeffrey Archer. Did my experiences, vicarious as they were, make me feel bitter that my family had not sailed about to small picket fences and rolling gardens, and all things fantastic?
Not in the least! While I have seen much of this world, I will always remain Anglo-Indian - and, Indian - at heart. Yes, I have often had strangers puzzled about my name and nationality combined: Alister Renaux is just not Indian, they say! But, trust me, reader, I am Indian who visits family in Mumbai, Chennai and Kerala every year from my abode in Zambia. I can still speak passable Tamil on my return every year, I wear a lungi in the evenings, and I visit Kerala because my Malayalee wife has family there! Of course, there is the Anglo-iIndian as well: Bryan Adams, Charley Pride and Jim Revees entertain me on my way to work every morning;  coconut rice and ball curry makes for a nice Sunday lunch; ballroom dancing whenever we have a dance at school; and the eternal love for a good old railway journey.
In this day and age, when internet technologies like Facebook and whatsapp have brought people closer, families are reuniting. You no longer have to sail away; you can jet in and out. Which is what my parents, Robert and Dawn are presently doing. They flew into London two weeks ago; they fly out to India tomorrow. Yes, reunion balls are now being held in the UK, Canada, Australia and India, bringing old friends together and getting families reunited. They did not travel,for a ball; they went for a wedding in London. This has given them the opportunity to meet Auntie Noreen, now a nonagenarian, as well as cousins they had never met before. The cousins sat back and spoke of their own children and grandchildren!  The ones that sailed away spoke of mutual interests to the ones that jetted in.
Tomorrow, on 68 years from the day the British left India, two Indian visitors leave Britain. Having seen family that sailed away, they now fly back to the motherland.
This article, therefore, on India’s Independence Day, is a tribute to the India I know and grew up in; and to the Anglo-Indian family all across the world. To those who sailed away, and those who stayed behind, to those lucky enough to have had the opportunity to meet again or even for the first time, to those who are still apart for diverse reasons. To the nation I grew up in and the community whose legacy I am determined to etch on the pages of history. Jai hind and cheers, Anglo-India!