Ever heard Elvis Presley’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’ coming by means of like a shot within the nonetheless summer time evening out of your pocket radio whilst you lay below a mosquito internet on a bungalow garden, the air heady with frangipani? When the names of those that had requested the tune — Peter and Paul D’Souza, Tricia and Lorraine Fletcher – had been introduced, you had been inextricably linked to the vastly liked, however slowly vanishing world of Anglo-India.

Ladies Badminton Club, Khurda Railway Colony, Orissa. (From left) Pamela Power, Mrs Power, Anne Lovery, Eleanor Power, Iona James, Winnie Betreen, Sybil Tapsell and Dorothy Doll.
| Photo Credit:
Special association / Courtesy: Vivian Lovery

A human legacy of European colonialism in India, the time period Anglo-Indian has modified to now denote individuals of blended lineage courting again to a time when European powers moved from commerce to conquest and intermarried with the natives. “A people”, because the Anglo-Indian novelist Allan Sealy wrote, “who spoke their father’s tongue and ate their mother’s salt.”

The group that thrived below the British was left in a twilight zone after they exited in 1947. Over the previous 75 years, Anglo-Indians have migrated in droves, principally to Commonwealth international locations, and are actually principally remembered solely in sepia pictures and the reminiscences of these whose lives that they had touched.

It is to assist the new-age Indian interact with this group that the Centre for Memory Studies (CMS) at Indian Institute of Technology – Madras has arrange Memory Bytes at DakshinaChitra.

Avishek Parui and Merin Simi Raj, Associate Professors within the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and school coordinators on the Centre for Memory Studies
| Photo Credit:
R Ravindran

The exhibition is spearheaded by Avishek Parui and Merin Simi Raj, Associate Professors within the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and school coordinators at CMS, who between them train topics as assorted as masculinity research and digital humanities.

“This exhibition emerges from the research done at CMS, which is a MHRD-funded project. Parui had earlier worked on a seed grant that examined Anglo-Indian Identities in Fiction and Popular Culture, while I pursued an exploratory research project, A Transnational Narrative History of the Anglo-Indian Community. The first part of the exhibition was conceived and curated at the 2022 annual international CMS conference, Memory in a Digital Age,” says Merin.

Parui provides, “We have been curating documents, photographs, and various archival material from 2019. The technical and digital aspects of the exhibition were put together in collaboration with tech-company Vizara. The AR-based technology culminating in MemoryBytes took five months.”

The assortment attracts from contributions by a few of the main lights of the Anglo-Indian group akin to Harry MacLure (Anglo-Ink, Chennai), Eugenie Pinto (former Principal, Queen Mary’s College, Chennai), Cheryl-Ann Shivan (Principal, Kasthurba College for Women, Puducherry), Bridget White Kumar (cookbook creator and culinary historian, Bengaluru) and researchers at CMS.

The black-and-white pictures flip the highlight away from the stressed populace of our occasions to linger on a extra languid tempo of life. Anglo-Indians manned the Railways and performed a big half in schooling, Posts and Telegraph, airways, the army, sports activities and leisure. The show briefly discusses their place in our Constitution, and outstanding names in the neighborhood akin to Sir Henry Gidney, ophthalmologist who based the All India Anglo-Indian Association in 1926, authors Sealy and Ruskin Bond, legendary cinematographer Marcus Bartley, political chief Beatrix D’Souza, sports activities stars Leslie Claudius and Roger Binny, educationist Frank Anthony and actor Merle Oberon.

A farewell gathering at Railway Institute, Guntakal. Fondly known as Inster by Anglo-Indians, the Institute, a hub of joyful gatherings was venues for goodbyes because the group members left to settle overseas.
| Photo Credit:
Special association / Courtesy: Roy Baker

Yesterday as soon as extra

It is, nevertheless, the glut of uncommon photos that crowds the opposite partitions of the small gallery that appears a tenderly written love letter. A gaggle of girls stands in a present of various vogue from the Sixties sporting cinched waists, pencil skirts, saris and blouses with Peter Pan collars, wing collars and frocks in checks. Company secretaries, fondly known as Girl Fridays by their company bosses, sort away at their desks, hair completely coiffed. The girls of the badminton membership at Khurda with names akin to Sybil Tapsell and Dorothy Doll, now confined to photograph captions, loosen up after a recreation. The Women’s Auxiliary Corps had Anglo-Indian girls who donned khaki and contributed to the Allied trigger in the course of the Second World War. There are photos of dishes that are actually relegated to dak bungalows and gymkhanas – Devil’s chutney, coconut rice and ball curry, and railway mutton. Also, of weddings with three-tiered muffins, homes with lace curtains and gramophones, and steam engines pushed by Anglo-Indians to locations which have fallen off the map like McCluskieganj. Music and dance had been an Anglo-Indian staple – Tiruchi’s well-known Gaylords band strikes a pose whereas the Railway institutes that had been as soon as the place for all issues joyous grew to become the venues for fond farewells as many migrated throughout the globe — an image from Guntakal exhibits the group earlier than everybody discovered new houses.

The multi-tiered marriage ceremony cake is the centre-piece of the Anglo-Indian marriage ceremony reception.
| Photo Credit:
R Ravindran / Courtesy: Harry MacLure

“We have photographs dating to the early 1900s, featuring baptism records and marriage registrations, and also one of the gold medal-winning Indian field hockey team at the 1928 Olympics that had nine Anglo-Indians. Some recent pictures, like that of the iconic wedding march, show how some rituals are preserved and celebrated,” says Merin.

The app brings alive the timeline of the group’s migration on the world map, starting with the arrival of the Portuguese in 1498 to the Malabar coast and ending with the diaspora settling overseas. It additionally brings alive Harry MacLure’s sketches in Anglo-Indian lingo.

MemoryBytes app animates Harry Maclure’s sketches of the group
| Photo Credit:
R Ravindran

The exhibition occupies one room — too small to include the contributions of this vibrant group, now dwelling a lifetime of gentility fraying on the edges. There is scope for extra, particularly the query of their future as they combine extra into the populace. But for now, the exhibition is an affectionate tribute to the Anglo-Indian’s place within the Indian cultural world.  

Memory Bytes is on until January 31 at Varija Gallery, DakshinaChitra, Muttukadu, ECR. For particulars, e-mail memorystudies@smail.iitm.ac.in