The revelations and discoveries would get more pronounced each time I visited relatives’ homes in Madras [never Chennai for AIs], Kerala, Bangalore or Cal [Short for Calcutta; never Kolkata] for our summer or Christmas breaks. During these holidays, it would be commonplace to hear, “Girl, eat your doll-rice now; there’s ball curry and foogath for dinner.” Such names for a special meatball preparation and a veggie stir-fry sounded oh-so-devious that I often found myself chuckling under my breath.  “Child, was your father also on-line like Uncle Herbie?” I recall being stumped by this query from a family friend after Sunday mass in Madras. ‘Why does she want to know if my father was working on a PC?’ It was my doll-rice moment. I gave her a sheepish nod before scuttling off to safer waters. Later, when I shared this encounter with my older cousins, they informed me that it was a term to represent all those who worked on passenger or goods trains in any capacity. So they were ‘on line’; here, the line represented the railway track. After all, the community has served the Indian Railways in a big way. Railway colonies were known to be home to some of the biggest clusters of AIs.  

There were many such delightful phrases and words that I’d hear on these trips – ‘chokra boy’ was used for a good-for-nothing, ‘slippered’ meant you were getting a thrashing and a motormouth was called ‘rubber gob’. As I familiarised myself with this unique lexicon, it also realised that the community has a cool sense of humour and approached life in the ‘Que Sera Sera’ way.

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But it also opened my eyes to the rampant generalisations; this happy-go-lucky, bindaas attitude had its flipside. It became fodder for mass consumption, as films like Julie and Bow Barracks Forever took the community to the cleaners with skewed portrayals – ‘loose’ or ‘fast’ women, drunken fathers and diehard folk who loved England and were desperate to leave India. Such cinematic representations made it easier to sum up the community about which very little was known. In reality, their contributions, across education, health, the armed forces, literature and the arts, music and sport, in particular, have been exemplary. One would need at least another five columns of Bombaynama to skim the surface.

Thankfully, as the Internet boom reached our shores, the awareness seems to have improved. Over time, more factually correct information became easily accessible; members of the community began to reconnect over social media groups. This sharing, be it nostalgia, music, or recipes, has aided in ensuring that even non-AIs got more conscious about the origins and rich legacy of Anglo Indians. Recently, on August 2, when World Anglo Indian Day was observed, it was heartwarming to witness all kinds of information highways in full flow, as well as virtual get-togethers being held in railway colonies and big cities.
The only thing amiss was probably a song-and-dance session, with a jive set by Elvis Presley or Shakin’ Stevens. I am pretty sure, that too must have happened across homes in India and overseas, followed by a spread of prawn pulao, ball curry and devil fry, and bread pudding for dessert. What’s devil fry? I can almost hear you ask. Find that Anglo-Indian, and you’ll have the answer!

mid-day’s Features Editor Fiona Fernandez relishes the city’s sights, sounds, smells and stones...wherever the ink and the inclination takes her. She tweets @bombayana

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