Ruskin Bond's Desh

Celebrating Root and Defining Identity

Arup Pal

• Publisher: Bloomsbury India
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9789389000016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This book explores the dilemma of Bond's 'two selves' and his existential search for an identity. This exploration, analysed across six chapters, is informed by a variety of postcolonial, historical, informational and critical texts on Bond and Anglo-Indians. Arup Pal focuses on four key literary works of Bond- The Room on the Roof, A Flight of Pigeons, Scenes from a Writer's Life and A Handful of Nuts -from the perspective of the author's developing sense of personal, national and cultural identity. He traces the journey that the author and his protagonists embark on in order to seek and ultimately define their sense of being.

1

The Idea of the Self

Identity, Hyphenation and Problems of Definition

Born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, Ruskin Bond—novelist, memoirist, essayist, short-story writer and poet, now best known for his contribution to children’s literature in India—grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun and Shimla (Simla) before settling in Landour, Mussoorie.¹ When Bond was born to Aubrey Alexander Bond and Edith Clerke in 1934, he was unaware of the colonial rhetoric through which his identity was to be fashioned. Before he fully realised his nationality, he had to negotiate the politically and culturally charged social location of his mixed-racial origin. Although Bond bears within him British blood, he has hardly approached his subject from this perspective.² The curiosity in understanding the nature of reality, which is evident in some of his initial works, is due to an adolescent impulse and sensitivity towards the subject. The expression ‘Anglo-Indian’³ used in this study should not be confused with that of the British residents in India; it is employed to mean a mixed European and Indian identity. This book is also not an attempt to trace postcolonial Anglo-Indian identity in general; nor does it intend to examine the British political agenda behind the hyphenation of mixed-descent. It is focused primarily on Ruskin Bond’s (Anglo-)Indian self and how it fits into the cultural fabric of post-independent India. I trace a slow but certain transition from psychological anxiety experienced by the authorial self in his formative years due to ‘a complex of factors referable to the colonial past’ (Caplan 2001, 11) to a developing consciousness of maturer years. Since Bond’s works are semi-autobiographical, a synonymous shift from the vexation of the double-bind to an understanding as a free Indian national is reflected in his fictional representations. A change of perspective is discernible, where the author’s concern is no longer limited to issues like Anglo-Indian existential angst or debates on the extent of Indianness of an Anglo-Indian.

As a child of rapidly changing times, Bond was brought up with a secular world view. His father never discouraged him to socialise with other Indians outside their community. In fact, he spent the first five years with other children in the princely state of Jamnagar where Aubrey Bond was appointed as a tutor-guardian. It is here that infant Bond was ‘more exposed to Indian culture than the average British child in India’ (Khorana 2003, 8). The aesthetic sense that Ruskin Bond owns came primarily from his father and partially from how he was affected by his surroundings.⁴ Speaking of how environs act as shaping agent, Bond says:

I chose the hills for the purpose of living rather than as a congenial place for writing. The mountains make a man realize just how insignificant he is. At the same time, they allow one to remain an individual instead of being swallowed in the crowd. (2001, x)

In a personal interview, Bond told me⁵ that he hardly remembers any British friend who had been close to his father. However, in The Room of Many Colours, the adolescent authorial identity, whose set of ideas was indirectly shaped by the ruling British, is confused at his father’s intent to return to England—the assumed ‘home’ of Anglo-Indians. The schismatic self of the young Bond now encounters questions about his true belonging: Is not India his native land? Who are Anglo-Indians then? Are they essentially Europeans with some Indian blood, or are their identical roots determined solely by European blood? Are they more ‘Anglo’ than ‘Indian’? Where do they actually belong, or, where is their original ‘home’? Can their ancestral root be dubbed as their motherland? How far is the age-old concept that ‘England is home’ justifiable today? Have their dual-inheritance been fruitful in terms of reinforcing their sociocultural acceptance in India? Or, are they really not Indians?

Indian colonial history recounts that Anglo-Indians are of British (or European) descent and the result of British colonialism in India. However, the British in India often ignored their identity. The disquiet of Anglo-Indians due to the British political agenda in colonial India has long been debated: ‘The British frequently viewed them stereotypically as Indians with some European blood; the Indians often considered them Europeans with some Indian blood’ (Gist and Wright 1973, 152). The British did not favour this minority community because the former wanted to retain their superiority to the latter, while the Anglo-Indians’ constant moral support added to their assistance to the British force in some of the significant political moves against colonised India sowed the seed of mistrust among the ‘natives’ (Muthiah 2013, 40). Such rejection—both by the British and the Indians—engendered an identity trauma that widened the sociocultural schism of Anglo-Indians on the one hand, while on the other, their lifestyle, religion, outlook, practice, dress-code, language and English customs made them socially and culturally alienated from the native Indians. In their study, N.P. Gist and R.D. Wright mention that ‘[t]he prejudices against them, real or imagined, or the prejudices that they themselves may hold against other Indians’, were ‘an obstacle to both group and individual identity’ (ibid., 55). Under such dual reception, they were suspended in a liminal space. This consequently gave rise to a fervent quest for national identity among the Anglo-Indians in post-independent India. Their status is further complicated because, despite their Indian root and nationality, they are often culturally inclined towards the West. Let us see, for instance, how they are received by the Constitution of India. In Article 366, Section 2, they are defined thus:

“[A]n Anglo-Indian” means 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 [. . . .] (155)

This (‘gender-biased’) definition often turns out to be a riddle considering their obvious/partial Indian origin. In addition, since the colonial history of India has made the Anglo-Indian a politicised identity, the Anglo-Indian communal distinctiveness has been conditioned and misinterpreted by innumerable reasons. One must remember that the British policy in colonial India encouraged European men to marry native women. Those who had come to serve in India, naturally, built liaisons with their maids or with other Indian women. This strengthened the British disregard of them. In other words, the British took this opportunity to tag them as ‘half-caste’. Although the Anglo-Indians are of ‘European descent in the male line of mixed European and Indian blood’ (Anthony 1969, 3), they have been considered by-products of a British imperial policy to rule India better. By the 19th century, to their befuddlement, the British categorised fairer and wealthier mixed-blood people as ‘Anglo-Indian’ and darker ones as ‘Eurasians’ (James 2003, 52). It was since the 1911 census, after Lord Hardinge’s act (Moore 1996, 51), that the term ‘Eurasians’ was modified as Anglo-Indians, while their underlying dilemma for identity continued to exist for an unspecific extent of time.

The liminality of Anglo-Indians started deteriorating in the 1940s, especially towards the end of the decade. Blair Williams, an Anglo-Indian scholar, registers this in his study of the community:

Throughout their history they tried to assimilate into the English mainstream, but the English rejected them. The Anglo-Indians (on the other hand) did not accept their Indian heritage, tending to look down on Indians of other communities. This approach of theirs caused Indian communities to resent them and in turn, isolated them from the rest of India. And so the Community lived for over two hundred years of British rule not being accepted by either the British or the Indians. (Muthiah and MacLure 2013, 102–03)

Such an idea of segregation is echoed in literature too. In 1978, noted novelist Stephen Alter published his first novel Neglected Lives on the ageing and isolated Anglo-Indian community in a fictional hill town of Debrakot. The narrative tone is elegiac and sensitive. We are introduced to Theodore Augden, a narrator of mixed-descent, commenting on his community’s predicament of the 1940s:

Partition, 1947, the English let India slip out of their hands and it broke in two. It was a period of allegiance and hatred. Pride was the emotion of the time and everyone felt kinship to their own race, their own religion, their own families. The politicians were pulled apart, the army was severed, and sides had to be taken.

For us it was a period of confusion; the English abandoned us, not that they had really ever cared who we were or what happened to us. (2008, 42)

Debrakot can be sensed in the insularity of the European community of Dehradun in Ruskin Bond’s The Room on the Roof (1956), but one also notices a dissimilar perspective in narrative treatment. Whereas Alter’s tale seems to have immersed into the mixed-blood dilemma in an isolated terrain; Bond’s narrative (discussed in Chapter 3), seems to depart from the ‘ageing Anglo-Indian community’.

Written in the context of the 1940s, with socioeconomic insecurity looming large among the community, Patrick Taylor, one of the three narrators and an Anglo-Indian railwayman in John Masters’s 1954 novel Bhowani Junction, sighs: ‘[W]e couldn’t go Home. We couldn’t become English, because we were half Indian. We couldn’t become Indian, because we were half English. We could only stay where we were and be what we were’ (27–28). Masters’ Anglo-Indian characters could not see India other than an alien sky, which appears as a constant reminder to underpin their inability to find a home in the subcontinent and to overcome racial identification. They were torn apart trying to decide which group between Indian and British was their own. Their search for an ideal abode, where the liberating sense of seeing themselves as a Western-inclined identity in a relatable geographical boundary, met with an unfulfilling outcome. While commenting on the preceding decade, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt informs us that ‘[t]he impending departure of the British from India generated a sense of betrayal and insecurity’ in the 1930s among the Anglo-Indians who then must look for new ways for survival and depend less on the government (2013, n.pag.). Even when they were given legal citizenship of India, facilitating their presence in the job market by the 1935 Act, Indian ‘natives’ continued to treat them as British subjects with respect to education and internal security. This induced the idea for a separate homeland. Their utopian search for a home, however, was no longer possible because England or any other European country could hardly substitute their concept of home—an idea without neglecting one’s emotional space. They, however, managed to buy about 10,000 acres of land in 1933 near Ranchi (now in Jharkhand) in Chotanagpur under the leadership of E.T. McCluskie. McCluskieganj shortly came alive with a distinctive lifestyle of the Anglo-Indian settlers, but it was with the demise of their leader that this utopian concept failed miserably.

In The Trotter Nama (1988), Anglo-Indian author Irwin Allan Sealy fictionalises (and historicises) this predicament:

The Hindus wanted theirs, the Muslims wanted theirs, the British were going back to theirs. What about us? [. . .] A place for those who were neither Indian nor European, who spoke English and ate curries with a spoon. [. . .] And yet he too wanted a home. He was only half at home here. Could one have a home that one had never been to, that filled one’s chest with a prickly longing, like the plainsman’s longing for the mountains he had never known? (491–92)

It is indeed that Indian colonial history not only trapped them between British ignorance and Indian nationalist idiom but also widened their anguish. As V.P. Anvar Sadath argues:

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. (quoted in Peppin 2012, xi)

In his study, Bryan Peppin begins his argument with these witty observations to question the stereotyped notions through which an Anglo-Indian is seen as a non-Indian. He states that an Anglo-Indian is essentially an Indian. There are valid reasons behind his claim: first, since Anglo-Indians are quasi-Indian from their maternal connection, they cannot be identified as non-Indians; second, had the origin of their community not been materialised in India, the underlying question regarding their existence and consequent dilemma would hardly have any ground.

In post-independent India, however, Anglo-Indian existence is not limited to the ‘Indian’/‘Anglo-Indian’ binary; rather it is almost indistinguishable from other Indians. Among the Anglo-Indians who are protective to retain their ethnicity are willing to be known as representatives of the community. In contrary, there are people who are reluctant to be identified with communal identity. In this book, I shall be concerned with the second predilection. I would like to study whether Ruskin Bond’s sense of belonging to India makes his politicised identity insignificant, or if his stance critiques any rigid definition of that. In this ongoing section, a contextual reading of Anglo-Indian self-identification and self-definition in post-independent India is addressed.

An Anglo-Indian’s Search for Indianness

Ruskin Bond’s body of works, which can be studied as an enquiry into Anglo-Indian identity, also questions their problematic equation with Indian national identity. To say that Bond’s world is not limited to Anglo-Indian communal expression does not simply suggest any denial of their idea of ‘becoming Indian’. This complication comes from the idea of foreignness embedded in the identity. The concept of foreignness, or what once popularly and often negatively was called firangi, is in fact associated with the word ‘India’, which ‘derived from the Greek name for a river in what is now Pakistan—the Indus’ (Harris 2015, 285). While clarifying his concept ‘becoming Indian’, Jonathan Gil Harris argues for many ‘Indiannesses’ on the basis of the economic, social and cultural, and proposes that the authenticity of Indianness is possible through simultaneous amalgamation of the local and the foreign: ‘the “Indian” is always becoming something new, and is constantly being renegotiated and transformed in a multitude of ways, because of unexpected conversations between local traditions and foreign elements’ (ibid., 286). It is among the many understandings of Indian identity due to multiple border-crossings; I try to explain an Anglo-Indian’s Indian consciousness in terms of wider cultural currents, where the insistence of gliding away from the immediate demarcation of a racially hybrid minority to India’s diversifying possibilities is also true. Bond’s idea of conceptualising the Anglo-Indian consciousness, based on the premise, can be extended with what Ernest Renan once stated: ‘Let us not abandon the fundamental principle that man is a reasonable and moral being, before he is cooped up in such and such a language, before he is a member of such and such a race, before he belongs to such and such a culture’ (1990, 17).

Such understanding of assimilating liberal ideas of oneness was evident in the poetry of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–31), the first national poet of India. It would, therefore, be interesting to see, as we proceed with this present discussion, how Ruskin Bond’s double-inheritance circuitously comments on his root in India. Unlike many noted mixed-blood writers, Derozio and Bond could liberate themselves in their views in understanding India. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), though not of racial mix, but an Anglo-Indian according to colonial connotation, wrote the following in The Ballad of East and West: ‘East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet...’ (27). Although English novelist E.M. Forster (1879–1970) overcame Kipling’s imperialist viewpoint in his 1924 novel A Passage to India, he was stuck in the riddle of the Malabar Caves. In 1954, when Ruskin Bond reverted to India after his brief exile to Britain to establish his literary career with renewed faith, John Masters’s Bhowani Junction, dealing with the Anglo-Indian community’s exodus, was published. In this context, it is indeed not the point of validation whether or to what extent a work of art could represent a community’s desire. Rather, the argument should be advanced with the authorial choice. In his novelistic saga The Trotter Nama, Irwin Allan Sealy feels the urgency to voice the proud existence of an Anglo-Indian communal identity in postcolonial India, as if writing back to the Empire in sarcastic humour. He, however, leaves his tale open-ended. Sealy, who appears to be ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Idea of the Self: Identity, Hyphenation and Problems of Definition
• 2. Desh-Videsh: Scenes as Dialectics of Homecoming
• 3. Intervening the Self: Developing Consciousness of Rusty in The Room on the Roof
• 4. Liberating Motherhood: Mariam Labadoor in A Flight of Pigeons
• 5. Dehra: Return to His Roots in A Handful of Nuts
• 6. ‘The India I Carried with Me’
• Index
• About the Author