“A feeling of suspicion and mutual distrust had always existed between Anglo-Indians and other Indian communities. Anxiety about its future gripped the community who had formally enjoyed British patronage…”
“Anglo-Indians were associated with English cultural patterns, but they never reached a plateau of equality in the English socio-cultural sphere. At the same time, they were never an integral part of the socio-cultural composition of indigenous India and indigenous populations never considered Anglo-Indians to be an integral part of India.”
— Nagorao Zapate,
The Politics of Representation: Identity, Community and
Anglo-Indian Associations in South Asia
Summer of 1997. We’re in the courtyard of the Ballygunge house and Grandpa Basil is handing me envelopes of letters from his brothers and sisters in Middlesex. I’m soaking the envelopes in a mug of water and waiting for the Machin stamps to peel away from the paper. I sit for hours watching the multi-coloured side-profiles of Queen Elizabeth II shimmer and dry in the June sun. My shirtless grandfather is moving in and out of sleep on his maroon easy-chair. The leukoderma on his back, knees, and shins makes him look whiter than he really is—like a dalmatian. He tells me Calcutta is a retropolitan. No matter how many tall buildings they make, how many flyovers they construct, the city will always move at a snail’s pace. ‘Then why don’t you go back to England,’ I ask him. He clips the back of my ear. ‘We’re left back foreigners,’ he says. But nobody in our family looks very white: If anything, we’re all shades of beige, like condensed milk left out in the sun. I tell him the grammatically correct phrase is left behind. He calls me a smart-arse.
We’re in the dimly-lit waiting area of the Park Circus branch of Allahabad Bank in Calcutta. We’re sitting at the far end of the ground floor building; a row of metal benches bolted to the floor. Grandpa Basil hands me the brass triangular token and I spin it on my fingers waiting for the clerk to call our number. It’s pension day and we’re both happy. Grandpa Basil will get to stock up on hooch and I’ll get my fortnightly pocket money of fifteen rupees. Another old man sitting next to us is chewing paan and shaking his legs. In a spurious mixture of Bengali, Hindi, and English, Grandpa Basil turns to him and says, ‘Is it really so hard to save the uncouthness for when you’re back home, you wog?’ The man begins to retort, flecks of maroon paan escape his pursed lips, but before he can get a word out sideways, Grandpa Basil biffs him on the chin. I watch the betel-juice fly out of the man’s mouth, in a graceless arc, and splatter the glass window at the clerk’s counter.
Basil Rosario, browner than he would’ve liked to be, was an Anglo-Indian—a minority community, with Indian and British or European ancestry, that is just 0.015% of India’s population today. He joined what was then known as the Bengal Nagpur Railways, not because of his academic achievements, but as a welterweight boxer. A diesel train driver in the railway town of Kharagpur, he retired and moved to nearby Calcutta in the late 70s, where he struggled to come to terms with India moving away from its colonial past. His fear of the unfamiliar manifested itself as prejudice. Like those of his generation, he was constantly distrustful of anyone who was not Anglo-Indian. As a character in the Anglo-Indian novelist Irwin Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama, says, “What about us… who were neither Indian nor European, who spoke English and ate curries with a spoon.”
