A short walk from the shore, the bus stopped in a dusty lot, where my father waved us over to a massive tree on the perimeter. “This has been here since I was a boy,” he said happily, patting its trunk like the back of an old friend. “Isn’t it a beauty?”
It was a banyan—elegant and intricate, India’s national tree, the mystical strangler that starts life as a fig seed. Like Spanish moss, it’s an air plant that germinates in the crevices of other trees and grows without need of soil. It can wrap itself so completely around its host that its limbs become indistinguishable from the tree underneath, as my father’s banyan had. Aerial roots hung down and gripped the earth wherever they touched the ground, creating the illusion that it had not one trunk but many. To many it’s a sacred tree—to Hindus, to Buddhists, and to Paul Simon, who sang about sleeping on its leaves in “Spirit Voices.” Maybe it was the jet lag, but the song came back to me as I watched my father taking in the tree’s splay of branches, considering the parallels between banyans and rootless people—our people—and whether our roots were more like those of the tree hidden underneath.
Dad walked us through his memories as we strolled towards the beach, pointing out the stretch of sand where he used to play as a boy, and in the distance, Napier Street, where he was born. He gestured to an open lot where young boys were playing cricket, remembering it as the parade ground where the British held their military drills. People used to say treasures were buried under that field, he said, and as a child he had always imagined that under his feet were trunks of gold and jewels the Portuguese and Dutch had stashed away.
It was the Portuguese who built the first European settlement in India, here at Fort Kochi. Fed up with the Arab monopoly over the spice trade, Portugal’s King Manuel I sent Vasco da Gama to chart an all-sea route to India. He sailed around the bottom of Africa and back up again, reaching Malabar in 1498. He stopped north of Cochin, at the seaport of Calicut, bearing fabrics and washbasins for the local Zamorin ruler. But the gifts had all the allure of wilted flowers for the diamond-frosted Hindu king of Calicut, who kept servants dressed in silk and spittoons of solid gold. It took a second expedition and a string of bloody battles with Arab Muslims before the Portuguese gained a foothold, thanks largely to the Raja of Cochin, who was no fan of the Zamorin. It was the Raja who gave the Portuguese permission to build a factory in Cochin in 1500. Five years later, they were running the place.
But it’s not the Portuguese influence that dazzles along the shore at Fort Kochi. As we neared the beach, the giant Chinese fishing nets came into full view, filling the horizon, a majestic row of cantilevered contraptions. Silhouetted by the sunset, they looked like giant stick insects with arms of teak and bamboo extended out over the water, suspending massive nets in midair. Locals call them cheenavala, and they have lined the coast for more than six hundred years. It takes at least five or six men to operate one, using an ingenious old system of ropes and stones as counterbalances to lower and lift the nets. Even as the fishermen stood around smoking and looking bored, there was something biblical in the simple, ancient art of it. Empty nets dipped gently down into the harbour’s dark waters and rose slowly to deliver silvery thrashing mounds of pomfret, red snapper, prawns the size of a grown man’s fist.
The nets, like the juggler, are something of a mystery. Some stories suggest they arrived with Chinese spice traders in the fourteenth century. Others say that China’s famous eunuch mariner Zheng He introduced them a century later. I wondered if my great-grandfather had ever seen them, and if they had reminded him of home.
We stopped on the far side of the nets to take it all in. A soft breeze whispered off the water. My father’s parents had met on this beach: Albert Abraham, a newly trained telegrapher from the Nilgiri Hills and Ena deCouto, from a long-established local family. My father’s cousin Ralph Pereira, who produced a leather-bound volume on the deCouto history in Cochin, wrote that Ena’s maternal grandfather used to buy fish from these nets on his way home from morning Mass. Often he would stop at his daughter’s home to toss a fresh catch through her front door and keep right on going. Sometimes he had his cooks whip the fish into a curry he served to the poor, under a tarpaulin he pitched in his yard. I never realized until that evening just how close my father’s family had lived to the harbour—witness to its colonial comings and goings, the birthplace of four hundred years of imperialism and, I suppose, our Eurasian ancestry.
In the weeks before we left Canada, I spent time at Toronto’s reference library reading about the history of India’s Eurasians. Most of what I knew, or thought I knew, had come by way of those kitchen chronicles—a history seen only through the grime of memory’s window. I had always assumed that my Eurasian ancestors in India were the accidental by-products of imperialism—lonely white men in a land of brown women, slips of the colonial condom. But this was only half true. They were in many cases deliberate products of policies the Europeans enacted to further their aims, right back to the first fleets from Portugal.
On his second day in Kerala, da Gama described Indian women as being, “as a rule, ugly and small of stature” and Lisbon initially shipped spinsters to south India as it did sacks of chili peppers. But Portugal soon saw the benefits of a local bride. Its merchants wanted India’s spices and its missionaries wanted India’s souls; they pushed intermarriage as the perfect strategy. Indian women had to convert to marry Portuguese men and the children born of their unions would be raised Roman Catholic. Over time, whatever ties these children had to their mother’s Indian roots slowly washed away, like so many footprints along the shore. As the Indo-Portuguese population swelled, so did Portugal’s colonial coffers.
The spice trade had made Lisbon the richest city in Europe by the seventeenth century, and everyone wanted a cut. In 1663, with the help of the Zamorin, the Dutch ousted Portugal from the west coast of Malabar. A decade later the French began building a colony at Pondicherry, on the east coast. And all the while, the British were steadily expanding.
India had always been a political patchwork of kingdoms and colonies run by local rajas or sultans and whatever foreign powers had earned their favour. But Britain managed to gain the indulgence of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, son of Akbar the Great, the monarch of northern and central India and ruler of seventy million subjects. As one historian put it, next to him, Queen Elizabeth seemed like the mayor of a quaint hamlet. The British envoys laid more than washbasins at his feet, and in return, Jahangir was generous. He gave the first English sea captain he met the most beautiful girl in his harem (with a harem of eight hundred, he had a few to spare). Within a century the British had built factories, forts and settlements from Surat to Calcutta, turfed out the Dutch and made the royal-chartered East India Company the world’s largest corporation. Men from all over the British Isles came to join the ranks of the Company’s private army.
With a mantra of “trade, not territory,” the British originally had no intention of building permanent colonies in India as it had in North America. They meddled in local politics only insofar as it served their financial interests. But eventually those interests included Indian women. After all, few English ladies were willing to make the long, hard voyage to the subcontinent. Those who did had to be wined and dined, and the soldiers wining and dining them had to be properly dressed—an expense the Company resented. Local liaisons were cheaper and far less trouble. Many English soldiers already had a local wife or lover, or both, a mistress or concubine gifted to them by the raja they served. The East India Company came to see these domestic affairs as a prime opportunity to literally grow itself a loyal population.
Like the Portuguese, the British began encouraging their men to marry Indian woman and to have children—the more the better. As a remarkable incentive, they offered money for the undertaking. In 1687, from its headquarters in Madras, the East India Company announced it would pay in gold—a minted pagoda—for any child born of a marriage between an Indian woman and a soldier of the Company. That was the e
quivalent of about five rupees at the time, a sum that reportedly grew to fifteen silver rupees per child. Some historians cast the scheme as Britain’s attempt to legitimize the immoral affairs of its troops. Some Anglo-Indians have regarded it as proof the Brits once considered them such prized offspring that they rewarded parents for their birth. But whatever it was, the baby bonus really amounted to a crude experiment in social and genetic engineering: payment for a hybrid people designed to form a buffer between rulers and the ruled.
Everything went swimmingly at first. Anglo-Indians had the same advantages and social status as their English fathers. They were raised to be just like them, with English customs, English clothes, English religion, an English education provided at special English schools in India or, often, back in England. And of course they were fluent only in their father tongue, learning just enough “kitchen Hindi” to scold the servants. But like any unchecked experiment, it eventually ran amok.
Less than a hundred years after money was being offered for their birth, Anglo-Indians outnumbered the English in India. The Company suddenly cast them as a potential political threat, as the free mulattoes had turned out to be for Spain and France in the West Indies. Fearing rebellion, the English pondered what India’s half-castes might be capable of, schooled as they were in the ways of their mighty white fathers. But it was a hollow argument. Anglo-Indians enjoyed the same rights as the ruling-class English; they had little to gain from warring against them. They were said to be “more British than the British.” Historians say the truth had more to do with England’s fears of losing out. As more Englishmen returned from India wealthy, more Englishmen lined up to go, believing that they, and their fully English sons, should have dibs on the best jobs, and the Company agreed. The only real threat Anglo-Indians posed was to English opportunities.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Company imposed measures that, according to the Indian scholar V.R. Gaikwad, reduced Anglo-Indians “to political impotence and social degradation.” They were sacked from administrative jobs, discharged from the army ranks and relegated to blacksmithing and beating the drums in military bands. They were forbidden to travel abroad for their education, effectively blocking them from any executive job. With time the policies became more draconian, denying Anglo-Indians the right to own or purchase land or to live more than ten miles outside a company settlement without high-ranking approval. Without land they could never farm, and without travel they could never trade, leaving them to scratch out a living in servitude to English officers or Indian leaders.
Yet despite it all, Anglo-Indians remained fiercely loyal to England, a motherland most had never seen. When Indians first revolted, in the Great Rebellion of 1857, Anglo-Indians fought alongside the British to put them down. When Britain took direct control over India’s governance after the rebellion in 1858, ending the East India Company’s quasi-administration, the Anglo-Indians had proved to be such loyal subjects that the new British Raj rewarded them with their own schools and preferential job opportunities. While Indians had to have a university degree to join the civil service, Anglo-Indians needed only a high school diploma. The policy—in place until 1919—proved to be an ingenious one, creating such a powerful disincentive to higher education that it shackled their futures to the ranks of government middle management.
Anglo-Indians became the officious, reliable pistons of the Raj engine, running its post offices, its customs service, telegraphs, police stations, buses and, most of all, its railways. In the late nineteenth century the Great India Peninsula Railway spread like ivy across the subcontinent. More than half of all Anglo-Indians relied on it for their livelihood, and their lives. They staffed its stations and outposts, as my Papa Freddie eventually did, making their homes in the colonies that sprung up alongside them, tight communities of pretty houses with gardens and gardeners, nannies and cooks.
But even as their economic prospects improved, their social status sank. In the late nineteenth century, the Suez Canal brought English women to India by the boatload, to join husbands or to seek one out, and they brought with them all the class and colour prejudices of the Victorian age. Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton published Hereditary Genius in 1869, the same year the Suez opened, launching the eugenics movement with its notions of racial purity and breeding gifted people like fine racehorses. In British India, Sir Francis’s theories recast the half-castes as the spoiled fruits of a dreadful experiment. Ethnographers even set out with measuring tapes to gather evidence of the scourge, literally sizing up Eurasians as late as 1940.
“In colour the Eurasians afford, as is natural in a mixed race, examples of the entire colour-scale from sooty-black, through sundry shades of brown yellow, to pale white and even, as a very rare exception, florid or rosy,” wrote Edgar Thurston, the prolific curator of the Madras Government Museum, in an 1898 monograph. “The product of alliances between British men and Eurasian women show the least signs of physical degeneration, and possess broader shoulders, hips and hands, greater chest girth, wider forehead, and more muscle as the result of re-vivification of the stock by direct British intervention.…”
High-caste Indians, meanwhile, tended to regard Anglo-Indians and Eurasians as mere lackeys of the British, born of low-caste unions on both sides—too low, in some cases, to even share the same sidewalk. In Cochin, the young deCouto girls used to zigzag along the pavement to throw their Eurasian shadows into the paths of high-caste Brahmins, delighting in the idea that it would force them home to bathe. My father’s cousin Ralph wrote that Cochin must have had the cleanest Brahmins around. To many Indians, the Eurasians were “chota sahibs,” the small bosses—in the worst light they were seen as “bastards of the Raj.”
It was into this uncomfortable in-between world that my ancestors were born. Moulded by British policies that forced them to live as tenants, they clustered in city buildings and railway colonies like kids at a summer camp. They spawned their own customs, sports teams and social clubs and found their mates among their own, often at colony dances, where they developed their crush on Johnnie Walker, the unofficial beverage of the British Empire. But they always made it to Sunday morning Mass, and home again for a nice biryani lunch.
Reading about their history made me consider, in a way I never had, the Anglo-Indian identity crisis. It was passed down, as surely as their genetic skein, from the railway colonies to the cold of postwar England and all the way across to Canada, where my grandmother tried, with good intentions on those Sunday afternoons, to pass it on to me. “We’re English.…” “But look at our tans, Nana.” And maybe to some extent she had. Not that I realized it then, but my frustration with India in 1991 was a very old family tradition—to feel connected yet never to belong.
We cracked open the Johnnie Walker in my parents’ room that first night in Kochi, after the beach and a fish curry at the Abad. I talked about the things I’d learned at the library. My father recalled the curse of his dark skin when he was growing up, the pools where he was not allowed to swim, fair-skinned aunts who asked him not to mention that he was related when he went to visit. My mother spoke of the cloistered life she’d lived in the railway colonies, never socializing with the British or stepping inside the houses of Indians. The only Indians who visited their houses were the ones who came to clean them.
Neither of their paternal grandfathers had experienced this, not the Captain and not the juggler. It was their brides—the well-to-do Bridget Meek and the mysterious Mariamal—who had wedded these two very different men to the insulated world of the Eurasians, which is why they stood out among all the others within the melange of our family story.
We woke the next morning even before the muezzin wailed from his perch in the mosque nearby. I called Jade at home, where she was staying with my sister. We’d wanted to bring our daughter, but she was not quite three then, too young to be dragged through archives and up hillsides. Think of all the things she might put in her mouth, our doctor said. She had put h
er arms and legs around me when we said goodbye and whispered in my ear to bring her back an elephant.
Stephen and my father left for a long walk after we hung up. My mother and I, still in our robes, nursed a long pot of coffee in my parents’ room.
“Thank you, Anthony,” my mother said. “It’s nice and hot, yes?”
“Yes, madam, very hot, very fresh,” Anthony replied, his head rolling horizontally in that distinctive South Asian nod as he set down a tray with flowers and biscuits.
My mother looked relaxed, comfortable with the pampering, which took her back to days when a servant appeared every morning with something hot. Her DNA results had arrived before Stephen and I had left home, and as we drained our first cups I pulled them out. They had surprised me when I first read them back in Canada: 68 percent European, 1 percent Native American, 22 percent East Asian. Twenty-two—as though there had recently been a juggler on her side of the family as well. I was skeptical, convinced that the DNAPrint test was simply not precise enough to distinguish Central, East or even South Asian markers from one another.
But that morning, a mere rickshaw ride away from the Chinese nets and the harbour where half the planet had pulled ashore for millennia, the mixture of my mother’s inheritance didn’t seem nearly as strange as it did back home, where time and history are barely toddlers. In India, time seems like the sea—infinite, fluid, people flowing in and out, merging endlessly into one great body. The genome bears it out. The DNA of people in India and from India is a collage of the world, thought to be the most diverse outside of Africa. Who knows, maybe there was a recent East Asian ancestor on my mother’s side as well, perhaps a Chinese silk wallah and a servant girl, a prisoner and a Hindu princess. But with no yarn to wrap around it, as we had with my father’s East Asian tally, we let it go.
The Juggler's Children Page 10