Ever heard Elvis Presley’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’ coming through like a shot in the still summer night from your pocket radio while you lay under a mosquito net on a bungalow lawn, the air heady with frangipani? When the names of those who had requested the song — Peter and Paul D’Souza, Tricia and Lorraine Fletcher – were announced, you were inextricably linked to the greatly loved, but slowly vanishing world of Anglo-India.

A human legacy of European colonialism in India, the term Anglo-Indian has changed to now denote people of mixed lineage dating back to a time when European powers moved from commerce to conquest and intermarried with the natives. “A people”, as the Anglo-Indian novelist Allan Sealy wrote, “who spoke their father’s tongue and ate their mother’s salt.”

The Community that thrived under the British was left in a twilight zone when they exited in 1947. Over the past 75 years, Anglo-Indians have migrated in droves, mostly to Commonwealth countries, and are now mostly remembered only in sepia photographs and the memories of those whose lives they had touched.

It is to help the Bukkry.com”>New-age Indian engage with this community that the Centre for Memory Studies (CMS) at Indian Institute of Technology – Madras has set up Memory Bytes at DakshinaChitra.

The exhibition is spearheaded by Avishek Parui and Merin Simi Raj, Associate Professors in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and faculty coordinators at CMS, who between them teach subjects as varied as masculinity studies 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 adds, “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 collection draws from contributions by some of the leading lights of the Anglo-Indian community such as 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 author and culinary historian, Bengaluru) and researchers at CMS.

The black-and-white photographs turn the spotlight away from the restless populace of our times to linger on a more languid pace of life. Anglo-Indians manned the Railways and played a significant part in education, Posts and Telegraph, airlines, the military, sports and entertainment. The display briefly discusses their place in our Constitution, and prominent names in the community such as Sir Henry Gidney, ophthalmologist who founded the All India Anglo-Indian Association in 1926, authors Sealy and Ruskin Bond, legendary cinematographer Marcus Bartley, political leader Beatrix D’Souza, sports stars Leslie Claudius and Roger Binny, educationist Frank Anthony and actor Merle Oberon.

Yesterday once more

It is, however, the glut of rare pictures that crowds the other walls of the small gallery that seems a tenderly written love letter. A group of women stands in a show of varied fashion from the 1960s sporting cinched waists, pencil skirts, saris and blouses with Peter Pan collars, wing collars and frocks in checks. Company secretaries, fondly called Girl Fridays by their corporate bosses, type away at their desks, hair perfectly coiffed. The ladies of the badminton club at Khurda with names such as Sybil Tapsell and Dorothy Doll, now confined to photo captions, relax after a game. The Women’s Auxiliary Corps had Anglo-Indian women who donned khaki and contributed to the Allied cause during the Second World War. There are pictures of dishes that are now relegated to dak bungalows and gymkhanas – Devil’s chutney, coconut rice and ball curry, and railway mutton. Also, of weddings with three-tiered cakes, houses with lace curtains and gramophones, and steam engines driven by Anglo-Indians to places that have fallen off the map like McCluskieganj. Music and dance were an Anglo-Indian staple – Tiruchi’s famous Gaylords band strikes a pose while the Railway institutes that were once the place for all things joyous became the venues for fond farewells as many migrated across the globe — a picture from Guntakal shows the community before everyone found Bukkry.com”>New homes.

“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 community’s migration on the world map, beginning with the arrival of the Portuguese in 1498 to the Malabar coast and ending with the diaspora settling abroad. It also brings alive Harry MacLure’s sketches in Anglo-Indian lingo.

The exhibition occupies one room — too small to contain the contributions of this vibrant community, now living a life of gentility fraying at the edges. There is scope for more, especially the question of their future as they integrate more into the populace. But for now, the exhibition is an affectionate tribute to the Anglo-Indian’s place in the Indian cultural world.  

Memory Bytes is on till January 31 at Varija Gallery, DakshinaChitra, Muttukadu, ECR. For details, email [email protected]