A compendium of Anglo Indian community

'Expanding like the petals of young flowers

I watch the gentle opening of your minds.'

Derozio, the little maestro, wrote these lines almost two hundred years ago for his students who were barely younger than him. Well over a century later, eminent writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri concluded that the community could boast of only one Anglo-Indian of merit—Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. He also wrote the community off, as he often did, by claiming that any group which produced no literature of its own could never amount to anything.

Chaudhuri, writing from a myopic perspective, had not taken into consideration the fact that Anglo-Indians literally didn't know whether they were coming or going through the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Barring exceptions like Stark, Dover, Kenneth Wallace, and a handful of others, 'writing' must have been the last thing on their minds. Finding their feet and jobs, fighting wars and an identity crisis, were top priority. Also, it appears that he jumped the gun again: though it took its time, the 'literature of its own', came, well before Mr Chaudhuri passed on in 1999. First in a trickle, then a ripple, then a wave. Now, there's a tsunami building up out there. Expanding like petals, you too can watch the gentle opening of minds and read the lines being written…and what's between them. So much so that Ruskin Bond said not so long ago, 'Anglo-Indians have found their voice and it is sweet.' Bond should know—he has been writing over the last seventy-two years about everything from trains to trees, mice to mountains, tigers forever to tigers for dinner, and from the eyes of an eagle to the flight of pigeons, Rusty to Ranji, uncles, aunts, and elephants. They have captured his imagination as he has captured them… in words so simple, stories so real, themes so Indian, a feel so Anglo-Indian: 'I know the world's a crowded place, And elephants do take up space, But if it makes a difference, Lord, I'd gladly share my room and board.'

Before I introduce you to the new VoA, Voice of Anglo-Indians, allow me to turn the clock back. In 1926, Herbert Stark wrote Hostages to India or The Life Story of the Anglo-Indian Race. The book tells the story of four centuries in under a hundred pages. The American literary critic William Zinsser listed 'the four basic premises of writing' as 'clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity'. Stark is blessed with all four. There's proof of this in another book of his—The Call of the Blood: Anglo-Indians and the Sepoy Mutiny (1932).

Reginald Maher, a journalist with The Statesman, Calcutta, who moved to Perth after retiring, wrote These Are the Anglo-Indians in 1962. This was the first published work on the community post-Independence. It's a small book with a big heart, from a writer and leader in the thick of it between the 1930s and the 1960s. When the questions of identity, loyalty, and the future of his community were swinging like a pendulum in the dark, Maher, a Lilliputan-Derozio, shed the light of hope and optimism, cautioned by streaks of ground reality.

For the argumentative reader, the community has produced books such as Cimmerii: Or Eurasians and Their Future (1929) and Half Caste (1937), both by Cedric Dover. 'Cimmerii' refers to an ancient people of Europe, who Homer describes in his Odyssey 'as living in perpetual darkness'; Dover challenges the racist attack on Eurasians by Europeans in India while highlighting the achievements of the community. In Half Caste, he continues to thrash the myth of purity of race, arguing that since there were no 'full-castes', how could there be 'half-castes'? The zoologist turned anthropologist may have been condemned by his critics as irreverent, even crass, but a shooting from the hip, genius-maverick is how I would describe him.

Frank Anthony's Britain's Betrayal in India: The Story of the Anglo-Indian Community, published in 1969, was the first attempt to write the story of the community in greater detail, especially about the decades just before and after Independence. While some are critical of the writer's obsession with the word 'I', and many feel he has deliberately overlooked the contribution made by those he fell out with, a clear majority second the opinion of the Asian Telegraph: 'A historical masterpiece and a much-cited book.' It has also touched the lives of many in the community who refer to it as a book that every Anglo-Indian family should have a copy of.

Other works of non-fiction include Dr Gloria Jean Moore's The Anglo Indian Vision (1986). Besides being the first book on the community written by a woman, it was also the first work based largely on oral history. A skilled raconteur, Moore retells the captivating stories of hundreds of gifted raconteurs from a community bursting at the seams with them.

Other important books include Alison Blunt's essential study of the Anglo-Indian diaspora in Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home (2005); Dr Evelyn Abel's The Anglo-Indian Community: Survival in India (1988); Dorothy Dady's Scattered Seeds: The Diaspora of the Anglo-Indians (2007), which begins as 'a personal journey' in search of roots and identity and is replete with marvellous photographs and anecdotes. S. Muthiah and Harry Maclure's The Anglo-Indians: A 500-Year History (2013) is warm, welcoming, and well researched. Recently added to the bookshelf of the serious reader is Anglo-Indians and Minority Politics in South Asia: Race, Boundary Making and Communal Nationalism (2018) by U. E. Charlton-Stevens. The author, of Anglo-Indian heritage and proud of it, has produced a scholarly work that has gone into far greater detail on the intriguing political scenario of the community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than any other.

Unforgettably, Irwin Allan Sealy's genre-bending work of fiction, The Trotter-Nama, thrives on satire that takes you to dizzying heights in a hot air balloon and drops you, suddenly, like a hot brick. So, if you want to think, ponder, smile, laugh, be informed, and entertained, trace the comic-tragic story of seven generations of the Trotters that took off way back in 1799. It is a flamboyant comic chronicle; an Alice in Anglo-Land; a farcical masterpiece; and a novel that is, in my humble opinion, ahead of its time. If you're there too, you'll have a blast reading it. If you're not, read it anyway. Who knows, you may get there.

The 'most Anglo-Indian writer' I have read is Lionel Lumb, who was a journalist with The Statesman in Calcutta, then Reuters and BBC in London, and finally with the

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, before teaching journalism in Carleton University, Ottawa. He says, 'I am sure there are many Anglo-Indians who recall with delight sitting on the verandah enjoying the cool evening in the gathering dusk while the grown-ups yarned away. Master storytellers all, in that pre-television age.

They knew how to include fine detail, embellish their tales with great characters, humour, and flights of fancy, and build to a rattling good finish.'

(Excerpted with permission from Barry O' Brien's The Anglo Indians; published by Aleph Book Company)