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Abstract
Unlike those who grew up in railway towns, the majority of Indians would have a hard time locating towns with quaint names on the Indian map that signified adventure, romance and the Raj. Kharagpur is one such colonial railway town whose history has been overwritten by one of the ‘temples’ of the postcolonial nation state, the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. But Kharagpur, about 110 km away from Kolkata, is remembered as home in Anglo-Indian memory and finds a mention in histories and fiction dealing with the Anglo-Indian community. Senior residents of Kharagpur corroborate these memories of a vibrant Anglo-Indian community thriving in Kharagpur until the early 1960s when the exodus began. Little remains of that remembered past in the Anglo-Indian neighbourhoods where about 200 Anglo-Indian individuals struggle to resettle in the new constitutional and social space comprising independent India. Yet, the nostalgia of the Kharagpur diasporas produces it as an idyllic colonial outpost with a quintessential Raj lifestyle. Through examining the narratives and oral histories of the Kharagpur diaspora, this article complicates the way that the remembered railway town is produced as home by the community displaced by the new dynamics of power in independent India.
Notes
The term Anglo-Indians has had a contentious history and is used to refer both to those who have mixed Indian and European ancestry and to people of European descent born or living in India (Beuttner Citation2000). Coined in 1919 to displace the terms ‘Eurasian’ or ‘half-caste’ that were earlier used to refer to people of mixed descent, it was formalized through Section 366 (2) of the 1935 Government of India Act in which it refers to ‘a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is domiciled within the territory of India and is or was born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein and not established there for temporary purposes only’ (Blunt Citation2005, p. 3). It is interesting that my research participants, particularly those of the older generation, identified themselves as Anglo-Indians while talking to me but emphasized their Irish or British ancestry when I was accompanied by my white friends foregrounding the tensions related to ancestry that Bear, Blunt and others have unpacked (Bear Citation1994, Beuttner Citation2000, Blunt Citation2003). Laura Bear's anthropological study Lines of the Nation (Citation2007a) and fiction Jadu House (Citation2000) are both set in Kharagpur.
With modernization and urbanization, attachment to the physicality of place might have diminished or even ruptured, but the ancestral village or region continues to be appropriated as an imaginary construct even in urban Indian self-constitutions.
Dorothy McMenamin also compares the British attempt to maintain standards, ‘which paralleled, “keeping-up-with”, Brahmin standards of purity and pollution’ (Citation2001, p. 118).
In the overwriting of the legendary history of the Kharageswar temple by that of the port town of Hijli, the traces of both the Hindu and Islamic kingdom are equally visible.
The signification of traditional sites in these buried layers of the palimpsest, Hindu and Islamic, have been erased in public memory through their being re-scripted over time by the railway town's imperial history and Kharagpur, like other twentieth or twenty-first century Indian towns, has grown in a haphazard fashion.
Since Nailer's website was removed after 2005, the same information is available on that of the KDU.
While Nailer had to wind up his website after 2005, Baxter's silence after 2008 makes one wonder if her website also met the same fate.
Bear's point about ‘the centrality of conjugal couples in forming the nature of kinship and origins within households’ is particularly relevant here (Citation2007a, p. 167).
An Indian Railway employee who served in the Railways before Independence recalls that the Railway Line divided the Railway Colony from the Gole Bazaar Railway quarters and surrounding villages where Indian employees were housed and that Indians were, as a rule, forbidden to enter the Railway Colony except when accompanied by white or Anglo-Indian colleagues. In view of the ban on Indians entering the segregated space, many older residents recall the excitement when they were finally able to ‘trespass’ into spaces they had heard about but not seen. With the IIT Campus, the Army Base at Salua and the Air Force Base at Kalaikunda developed on the southern side of the Railway Colony, the colony has become one of the main approach routes to the Kharagpur Railway station.
Mr London passed away a year later but Mrs London continues to live in the same house.
In India, addressing a person as Uncle is a mark of respect and is the address used to refer to persons senior in age.
Vivian Wolfe passed away in 2009. I would like to thank her for sharing her memories with me and for introducing me to the Anglo-Indian community in Kharagpur.
The industrial space of Kharagpur, as Bear points out, is not imagined as home by these residents (Citation2007b, p. 44).
Like Clarence's son Leo in Bear's book, who attempted to assimilate into the dominant Bengali Hindu culture, many of my younger research participants insisted that they loved dressing up in Indian clothes, loved Bengali food and mixed with Hindu friends (Bear Citation2007a, Citation2007b, p. 1680; personal communication, 2006).