Black and White: The "Anglo-Indian" Identity in Recent English Fiction

By Bryan Peppin

Bryan was born into an "Anglo-Indian" family in 1952. His schooling was completed in 1968, exclusively in "Anglo-Indian" schools, which, up to that point in time at least, were identifiably "Anglo-Indian". Growing up with an "us/them" attitude, the issue was not a real problem until early research work in the field of British Fiction on India brought to Bryan's notice the unchanging negative profiling of the "Anglo-Indian" in books on the theme.
Full-fledged research on the "Anglo-Indian" identity ( which culminated in a PhD from the University of Madras in 2010) threw up the picture of a minimal human species that combined the worst traits of East and West. Since Kipling's refrain was so blindly accepted in the nineteenth century, and most of the twentieth century, writers--both Indian and Western--blatantly vilified the "Anglo-Indian", in life as in fiction.
This book is an attempt to set down an accurate record, by examining some of the latest (and not so new) books on the exclusive subject. It also calls to account the horrendous and often unforgivable errors made by some writers and many critics.
Today, more than ever before, "Anglo-Indians" are completely at home, in India, as well as in other parts of the English-speaking world. It is hoped that, in time, a clearer, more humane picture of the real "Anglo-Indian" will emerge, as it must, when understanding erases the dark images of the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Sep 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477218006

Bryan Peppin

Bryan was born into an "Anglo-Indian" family in 1952. His schooling was completed in 1968, exclusively in "Anglo-Indian" schools, which, up to that point in time at least, were identifiably "Anglo-Indian". Growing up with an "us/them" attitude, the issue was not a real problem until early research work in the field of British Fiction on India brought to Bryan's notice the unchanging negative profiling of the "Anglo-Indian" in books on the theme. Full-fledged research on the "Anglo-Indian" identity ( which culminated in a PhD from the University of Madras in 2010) threw up the picture of a minimal human species that combined the worst traits of East and West. Since Kipling's refrain was so blindly accepted in the nineteenth century, and most of the twentieth century, writers--both Indian and Western--blatantly vilified the "Anglo-Indian", in life as in fiction. This book is an attempt to set down an accurate record, by examining some of the latest (and not so new) books on the exclusive subject. It also calls to account the horrendous and often unforgivable errors made by some writers and many critics. Today, more than ever before, "Anglo-Indians" are completely at home, in India, as well as in other parts of the English-speaking world. It is hoped that, in time, a clearer, more humane picture of the real "Anglo-Indian" will emerge, as it must, when understanding erases the dark images of the past.

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© 2012 Bryan Peppin. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 7/9/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-1798-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-1799-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-1800-6 (e)

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

Note

Chapter One  The Insider

Chapter Two  The Inside Outsider

Chapter Three  The Outside Insider

Chapter Four  The Outsider

Chapter Five  The Critics

Chapter Six  Conclusion

Select Bibliography

Preface

A great part of this book formed the bulk of my Doctoral dissertation. I was awarded the PhD in March 2010, and have been mulling the idea, from that time onwards, of transforming the dissertation into a regular book. Before she passed away, my Guru and former research supervisor, the late Dr Meenakshi Mukherjee, encouraged me to pursue this course, noting that my work was path-breaking, as well as academically unorthodox. I never was, and never will be, a high-brow intellectual, but that is because I want to be different, I want to be readable, I want to be interesting and, at the same time, have all my facts accurate and verifiable.

While writing the dissertation I adopted a strident, angry tone, quite justifiable, it seemed to me—but not to my Research Supervisor, the affable but intellectually demanding Dr K S Purushottaman, and so I had to soften and filter all that for the sake of academic propriety. I have tried, in this book, to bring back some of the earlier hard-hitting style.

I hope that you, my reader, will be satisfied with the end product. The journey began 32 years ago, when I embarked upon a study of British author Paul Scott’s masterpiece, The Raj Quartet. It still continues, and the voice of the Anglo-Indian is now becoming increasingly audible. It is a voice that still expresses anger, and anguish, and sometimes apathy, but there is still hope.

This is the hope that this book wishes to inspire.

I wish to acknowledge my thanks and gratitude to the University of Madras, Chennai, India, for giving me the permission to turn my research work into a regular book.

I would also like to thank my friends and well-wishers (including a large number of my students), for without their … little, nameless, unremembered, acts/ Of kindness and of love, this book would never have come into being.

Introduction

Beatrice D’Souza PhD

Ex-MLA Government of Tamilnadu

Ex-MP Government of India

An Anglo-Indian himself, Bryan Oliver Peppin is a skilful and convincing apologist for his community. The mixed race community is a product of the encounter between European colonizers and Indian women since the 16th century. The Anglo-Indian was comfortable in his own skin, and accepted his mixed-blood heritage, until he began to see himself as others saw him. In a society structured on caste, he was considered a half-caste. The culture and lifestyle of the Anglo-Indians, a happy mixture of the East and the West, was still a rarity. Our fellow-Indians may be forgiven for not wholly understanding the new Indian community.

The colonizers themselves, the creators of mixed-race peoples—the mulattos, the mestizos or matzos, and the Anglo-Indians, believed in the purity of race theory; the purity brigade as the author calls them. In India they looked upon their creation not as a virile new breed, but as country-born, indicating its mixed-blood status. The community was judged by the unproven theory that mixed-blood conferred on the individual an exoticism that in itself was dehumanizing.

Early British writers preferred not to test this theory. In their writing they demonstrated that mixed-blood conferred on the Anglo-Indian woman a beauty that was linked to moral depravity. By the same yardstick, the Anglo-Indian man was seen as good-looking and emasculated. Indian writers, whom the author calls Inside Outsiders, with their first-hand knowledge of the history of this new Indian community, cannot be forgiven for slavishly aping the Outsider writers and accepting and using their stereotypes. Truth was sacrificed, as exoticism sells books.

Nirad Chaudhuri states in The Continent of Circe that any group which produced no literature of its own could never amount to anything. Since Independence the community, coming into its own, has been prolific in literature produced in India and the Anglo-Indian Diaspora. They are the Insiders. Allan Sealy, one of India’s celebrated novelists, in The Trotter-Nama, is unapologetically Anglo-Indian. For once the Anglo-Indian is the protagonist and takes center stage. Sealy, with other writers of the erstwhile Empire, have effectively written back, resolving once and for all, the Black/White conflict in colonial literature.

For today’s reader, terms like half-breed are no longer politically correct. Looking at the Anglo-Indian through the prism of multi-culturalism, the author sees a modern community born centuries before its time, and therefore misunderstood and denigrated. In his scholarly analysis of the stereotypes that had hitherto defined the character of the Anglo-Indian, the author puts to rest centuries of misconception arising from prejudice.

This book is as necessary as it is valuable, and should be of considerable interest, not only to the casual reader, but also primarily to the research scholar. It is a notable contribution to the large body of existing literature on the Anglo-Indian community.

FOREWORD

VP Anvar Sadath PhD

Post-Graduate and Research Department of English

The New College Chennai 600 014 India

Issues pertaining to the ethnic identity and culture of the Anglo-Indian Community in India have been one of the thematic orientations in the English writings published during and after the Colonial encounter in India. These representations of Anglo-Indians include fictional works, and critical and other non-fiction prose writings, by the members of the community, the British, and the Indo-Anglian (for want of a better term) writers. Most of these representations of the Anglo-Indians as an ethnicity apparently derived their initial inspiration from the community’s complex origin and hybrid status, and therefore they looked at the members of the community as orphans of colonialism, thus considering them as people with a not-so-impressive racial standing. However, there were also attempts, by writers belonging to the community, to clarify inaccuracy and prejudice in the fictional and non-fictional representational variants of the community. The present book is to be looked at as part of such an attempt, to explore the extent to which misrepresentation has been pursued in different forms of writing on the subject of the Anglo-Indian.

Among the very few critical writings available for Indian readers on the Anglo-Indian community in general and representation of the Anglo-Indian community in literature in particular, this book apparently has a unique stature as one that emanates from the lived experience of Anglo-Indianness of its author, and as one that identifies the fallacious notions and images that flood the representations of the Anglo-Indian character. Although the book is a piece of literary criticism, the conclusions drawn by the writer apparently have their base in his self-conscious examination and investigation into his own community, particularly with a view to see how it has been watched by or stared at by its stakeholders from within and without. Although, as the title clearly indicates, the book deals with the Anglo-Indian identity in English fiction, its focus is partially on unleashing spirited attacks on the reprehensible elements that work behind the portrayals of the members of the community. Moreover, the writer as an insider sets certain things right, openly challenging the stereotypes haunting the community right from early years of its existence in India.

The scope of this book is very wide in that it covers or rather critiques representation of the Anglo-Indian community by the European (read British) writers, writers belonging to the community, other Indo-Anglian writers, and the critics who analyzed all the aforementioned categories. The strategy adopted by Professor Peppin is to distinctively estimate how each of these different sets of writers approached the community, and evaluate these presentations using the touchstone of the writer’s own perception of Anglo-Indianness on the one hand, and documented critical and historical evidence from academicians and intellectuals on the other. Thus this book combines academic enquiry with personal evaluation of the Anglo- Indian question.

Although there exists a kind of undeclared consensus among historians and writers on the factors that contributed to the origin and development of the Anglo-Indian community in India during the early phases of colonialism, the various portrayals of the members of the community that came out in the post-colonial phase of India’s history are characterized by the dissemination of a cluster of negative stereotypes and traits that are ascribed to be akin to the community’s culture or tradition. However, most of these portrayals or representations carry indicators of the dominant groups’ dismissal of the Anglo-Indian identity as an unwelcome offshoot of certain historical eventualities, and thus ascribing the fallacious ways of the community as naturally related to its complex origin. The stereotypes are often linked to the perceived morality in the East and the West in the sense that the moral standards expected from an Anglo-Indian are on par with the western ones, or worse still, a vulgar adaptation of those. In other words, the Anglo-Indian women, for instance, are considered capable of enthralling lascivious male onlookers; and this goes to the extent that a person who fares poorly in these traditional roles is looked at as even less Anglo-Indian. The image of the eternal seductress embodied in the representation of the Anglo-Indian woman, thus, is an example of the way the members of the community are stereotyped.

While accepting the fact that one finds disfigured or even blatantly unreal images of the Anglo-Indian in different cultural artifacts, one needs to know where to look for authentic images which might be used to counter the stereotypes. In fact, Professor Peppin’s book shows the types of images, the stereotype and the authentic, by juxtaposing the construction of Anglo-Indian image across fictional writing. He lauds the efforts made by masters like Allan Sealy, Asokamithran, and Ruskin Bond in saving the members of the community from the stereotypes surrounding their identity, while unleashing powerful onslaughts on the lapses in writers like Michael Korda and Laura Roychowdhury. It is probably the objective of countering the ideology working behind the construction of Anglo-Indian otherness that works behind Professor Peppin’s previous (literary) works. In both Double or Quits, a collection of short plays, and No Accident, a novel, he presents Anglo-Indian characters apparently in ways he want them to be presented by other writers as well. In all his works, including the present one, Professor Peppin invokes the image of ‘Black and White’, suggesting that the whole history of the unholy alliance between the Occident and the Orient perceptibly resulted in the birth, the development, and the myriad negative representations of the community; it is obvious that the writer painted the covers of Double or Quits and No Accident in black and white.

Note

An Anglo-Indian is a human being.

An Anglo-Indian is an Indian. This means that only a citizen of India can really be identified as an Anglo-Indian. Members of the community who have migrated to other countries and those who have changed their nationalities cannot—theoretically at least—be identified as Anglo-Indians.

The Anglo-Indian is the only pan-Indian citizen. Other citizens of India are more often categorized using linguistic or territorial labels.

The history of the Anglo-Indian is not dissimilar to that of most other indigenous races.

The Anglo-Indian community was brought into being—the usual explanation being miscegenation—and then abandoned, or at least marginalized to the point of silence, until free India gave it wings.

Myth, more than history, lays the blame for the birth of the Anglo-Indian on the Indian (female) side, but the truth may never be established. Because of this, the stereotype continues to prevail.

The All India Anglo-Indian Association defines an Anglo-Indian as a person of Indian origin having a European ancestor in the male line. This definition is not gender-equal, but it continues to be accepted.

Even if it is agreed upon regarding the subject of Britain’s Betrayal in India, the truth is that independent India—not England—granted recognition to the Anglo-Indian community. This actually shows that while Britain framed many of the laws regarding equality and humanity, India put the same laws into practice by according full rights and privileges to its latest citizen.

The community is proud to have representation in Parliament and in some State legislatures.

The success story of the Anglo-Indian in modern India is indeed noteworthy. Anglo-Indians today provide sterling examples in most fields of human activity, the more visible ones being education, the armed forces, medical services, sport and—of course—mass transportation—the railways.

This book will examine the way in which the Anglo-Indian character has been portrayed in recent English fiction. It will try to demonstrate that the Anglo-Indian character has been misrepresented over and over again, because the writers of fiction have continued to go with the stereotype.

This is the case with both Indian and foreign writers, though the real Anglo-Indian writers (Allan Sealy and Ruskin Bond, for example) do not discriminate on the basis of birth. Of course, they show that discrimination is still prevalent, but the phenomenon is so common that all societies practice it and decry it at the same time. Novels by Sealy and Bond are the focus of Chapter One, The Insider, for they provide the reader with an inside picture. Though Frank Anthony’s book cannot be looked at as a piece of fiction, it has been included because it describes itself as the story of the Anglo-Indian community.

Chapter Two, The Inside-Outsider, deals with some of the novels on the specific theme that were written by Indians. Though the writers here examined belong to one and the same nation as the Anglo-Indian characters they portray, they tend to regard them as aliens. As a result, these fictional people live in an unreal world, made all the more bleak because of the negative profiling by most of these writers. Mulk Raj Anand and Saros Cowasjee create horrendous portraits of Anglo-Indian women and men, while Malgonkar and Davidar present appetising pictures of younger Anglo-Indian women. Ashokamitran alone shows scant interest in his Anglo-Indian characters, allowing them to participate only when the narrative demands their presence.

In Chapter Three, books by western writers (especially those who had fairly long relationships with India) will be examined. These books, written by The Outside-Insider, profess great love for their kind of India and continue to remain in circulation because they not only provide room for nostalgia, but also reinforce the stereotypical notions that abounded during the Raj. John Masters is the accepted authority on fictional British India, while Paul Scott, M M Kaye and the Godden’s provide their readings of the Anglo-Indian character in their novels.

It is possible that sufficient damage has not already been done by writers who have had living relationships with India. In Chapter Four, The Outsider, the writers try to make the scene even uglier by letting their imaginations run riot. Michael Korda and Laura Roychowdhury provide their readers with sleazy, sordid accounts of Anglo-Indian life, but these are so unearthly that they slide into the realm of pseudo-fantasy.

The Critics have had their say, too. In Chapter Five, some of the work produced on the theme will be examined. Foreign critics have been more insightful, but even they have not been as objective as they could have been. Their Indian counterparts, by and large, have revelled in maligning the Anglo-Indian character, often accepting fictional attributes as indisputable fact. Serious note needs to be taken of the unforgivable errors of these critics, for they have shown little respect for the intellectual acumen of their readers.

In Chapter Six, The Conclusion, the scope for further studies in this area of fiction is indicated. There is also a plea for better understanding, so that the real picture can finally emerge.

Chapter One

The Insider

This Chapter concentrates on the output of Anglo-Indian writers, the real Insiders. If much has been written, very little of it has seen the light of day. Quite a lot can be written about the literary work of Henry Derozio, the Anglo-Indian poet of the nineteenth century, but this book cannot go back so far in time. It is sufficient to say that Derozio was voicing nationalist sentiments long before India started thinking of herself as one nation. And he was a pioneer in the field, to say the least.

Genuine Anglo-Indian writing is a product of the twentieth century, perhaps even of the post-War years. The corpus is still too meagre to constitute a separate genre, but with the Empire still writing back, it is hoped that the repression and suppression of past times will give way to works that address the real condition. For the present, three writers will be examined here, all of them very different in their styles as well as in their intentions.

Ruskin Bond has written a great deal; a few of his novellas feature Anglo-Indian protagonists, but he writes for the love of it, not because he is particularly interested in the special theme. His compilation, The Complete Short Stories and Novels (1996) has two stories that follow the fortunes of Rusty, the Anglo-Indian protagonist—The Room on the Roof, and Vagrants in the Valley. There are traces of autobiography in these books, especially the parts where Rusty foresees a literary career for himself. Both these novellas do not dwell on the Anglo-Indian condition very much, yet both celebrate the sameness-with-difference that Rusty comes to experience when the real India is unravelled. There is a laid-back, languid feeling in Bond’s prose; an expression of delicate fragility that gives these two novellas an ethereal quality that is fascinating.

I Allan Sealy, who gained international recognition for The Trotter-Nama (1988; 1999), uses the narrative technique of ancient Indian story-tellers to weave a saga that encompasses the history of the unique human species that is now identified as Anglo-Indian. This mock-epic in prose is one of the earliest to trace the antecedents of a particular Anglo-Indian family to its nitty-gritty beginnings—without shame and without acrimony. It is a story of changes of fortune and even though the novel ends on a desultory, perhaps decadent, note (as far as the Trotter family is concerned), it is open-ended about the future.

Frank Anthony, long-time leader of the microscopic community and one of its representatives in the Indian Parliament, wrote Britain’s Betrayal in India: The Story of the Anglo-Indian Community (1969) for reasons that could well have been political; it could as well have been written to set the record straight, at least from an Anglo-Indian perspective, if not a personal one. The book is factual enough, in spite of the attempt to project the Anglo-Indian as one of the nation’s greater sons. In a land of such diversity, it is not shameful to admit feelings of guilt, antipathy, and otherness. But these negatives are more than compensated for by the unifying spirit of national identity, to which most Indians, including Anglo-Indians, subscribe. That the Anglo-Indian has had more than his share of the limelight is everywhere to be seen—in terms of language and dress, public service and private enterprise, to name a few areas. Only in fiction and in the critical appreciation of such fiction does the stereotype still prevail. And some mind-sets never change—mostly for the wrong reasons.

Sealy is an Anglo-Indian writer who is quite different from Ruskin Bond. Where Bond prefers a small, compact setting for his limited number of characters to play out their parts, Sealy prefers wide-screen panorama. Where Bond allows his reader to fill in the blanks in his novellas, Sealy controls the script from beginning to end. Where Bond selects one character and tells his story, Sealy records the life-histories of entire generations. And where Bond exhibits a quiet reticence, Sealy brandishes eloquence and gregariousness. Though Frank Anthony’s book is sub-titled The Story of the Anglo-Indian Community, it is hardly a story; it is, more precisely, a closely-researched document about the Anglo-Indian community and some of its better-known members.

A closer look at the style of these three writers will indicate that the past is not an issue. There is confidence in the words of all three, even though they achieve this differently. While Bond glosses over the accidental or deliberate mixing up of races and tries to find a blend that is greater than the two individual strains, Sealy lays bare all the facts in his fiction—one party cannot be held responsible; neither can the product of such a liaison be made the scapegoat. Anthony would like the blame to be put on British shoulders, since their fickleness (with regard to policy) created the problem in the first place. All three decry the double standards of the original transgressors, Anthony stridently, Sealy satirically, and Bond soberly.

In an almost five-hundred-page-long narrative, Frank Anthony traces the history of the small but scattered Anglo-Indian community, one of the few minority groups that has political recognition in the country. Though he is bitter about the betrayal of the community by imperial Britain, Anthony is consistently confident that the future of the community lies with India. His belief in the great democratic spirit that still is the corner-stone of Indian polity has been vindicated by the continuing support for the Community. And Anglo-Indians continue to thrive in the land of opportunity that modern India has become. This again was a belief that Anthony held dear: that only in the country of one’s birth can the individual reach the very top of his profession.

It is well known that history is often distorted. Indian history has suffered a similar fate, over and over again. There is no denying the fact that Anglo-Indian sympathies were, up to the end of World War II at least, by and large, jingoistically pro-British. Frank Anthony does not hesitate to accept this bitter truth; he does not try to justify it, either. Even today there are the few who still want to go Home to England, if not to some