Midnight’s Orphans—Impressions of McCluskieganj

The year was 1984. I used to teach in Burdwan University in those days. I had just submitted my doctoral thesis, and, that monsoon I went with my little son on an unplanned vacation. It was quite an aimless trip in the Chota Nagpur areas of Bihar, as the state was still called. The forest-clad undulating land dotted with tribal villages and barren hillocks kept us enchanted, and so the days turned into weeks and eventually months as we would find out. We stayed on at a place only if the name was pretty or unusual. And indeed, what beautiful names these were—Patratu, Palamau, Mahua Milan! Having spent my life in a small town in West Bengal and the cramped metropolis of Calcutta, with only occasional forays into touristic places, the junglescape seemed extraordinary. And then, one sultry afternoon, a crowded passenger train brought us to a tiny little red-brick station without a platform that said: McCluskiegunge. Finding a place with such an intriguing hybrid name—a mix of an English name with a Hindi suffix gunge was quite unexpected in its curious mixture of the indigenous and the exotic. The name was a strange imposition, for the railway signboard also said, in small letters, ‘Lapra,’ indicating perhaps, its ‘native’ past and present. I was fascinated at once, and jumped out onto the platform.

Amidst the usual crowd and chatter of a railway platform, what struck me as unusual was the presence of a woman, her skin tanned from daily exposure to the sun, her hair cut short and the skirt lifted up much like a dhoti, squatting in  Indian style, selling some tidbits that I do not rec­all now. Although it was still the 1980s, and some of the vestiges of the Raj could still be det­ected in the odd lanes and bylanes of Calcutta, Kitty Texeira, as I came to know her name was, stood out in the crowd as midnight’s orphan. My interest piqued further when someone remarked that evening: “this place used to be called ‘Chotabilet’ (Little England).” And true enough, as I explored more, the colonial style bungalows, red-tiled cottages and large fruit orchards that lay unkempt presented a charismatic appearance. It was as if they had been imported from a different place and time, and indeed a tiny Anglo-world that was transplanted onto an idyllic rural Indian countryside. The place still bore a distinctive stamp of its English origins yet was confusingly still very native Indian in its surroundings. In no way could it be described as just another rural settlement that dotted the terrain.

The people who lived in those beautiful little homes seemed at first different and strange to me, coming from a middle-class Bengali background, but they became friendly as I got to know them. One of them was the septuagenarian president of the Anglo-Indian Association, Mr Stanley Potter, whose library was soon to bec­ome a goldmine of information. It was not long before I started reading, like a mesmerised person, the piles of old journals scooped up for me from the dusty basement of his home. The journal was The Observer, the mouthpiece of The Colonization Society that was established by Mr E T McCluskie, a businessman from Calcutta in the early 1930s, trying to found an Anglo-India. The pages of the journals were beg­inning to turn brown and brittle but they still amply conveyed the hopes and aspirations of a group of people of whom I had never had a conscious perception. Every decaying page of those old journals made me more curious to find out why Anglo-Indians thought of themselves as a betrayed people, and what they did to prove that they too can dream big.

That 1984 trip of mine resulted in the book, In Search of a Homeland: Anglo-Indians and McCluskiegunge published in 1990 that was later turned into a documentary film of the same name by the BBC in 1992. The subject of this book, however, is neither the history of the Anglo-Indian community nor that of McCluskiegunge itself as a place. It is the story of the struggles of a group of unfortunate people and their extraordinary ability to live life more fully and creatively than their external circumstances seemed to have allowed. It also tells the story of the dramatic failure of a grand design to create a homeland for those who lived unloved, and the gradual decay of a beautiful place, and its ultimate oblivion even from the psyche of the very people who had conceived it.

Over the years since the first visit, I went back to McCluskiegunge several times, sometimes alone but often with my son, only to find the community of Anglo-Indians shrinking further every time. Yet it still retains some of the traces of the bustling commune that it once was, resembling the images of a broken dream that still lingers on in the mind in that strange half-awake, half-asleep state. It is still a beautiful place but one that has gone to seed, died as all utopias perish. If McCluskiegunge is dead today, it is because of the dream that was lost. There is no reliable public utility service, the power goes off frequently and the roads are empty and dark at night.

And now, the coal mines are encroaching into the undulating, forested terrain. They are gradually eating into those neglected orchards, bungalows and the broken roads that stood for the neglected lives and the broken dreams of the Anglo-Indian community in India, and very soon this important part of India’s history, a missing link between the colonised ‘natives’ and the British colonisers, will be bulldozed away.

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt is a human geographer, writer and author of in search for a homeland: Anglo-Indians and Mccluskiegunge