Films trade in visual shorthand and stock characters. An evil slinkiness to the dress, a tantalising redness to the lip. A Swaminathan rendered funny by his Tamil accent, a Ms. Braganza leading a convent school choir in a hymn. Movies take liberties with portrayals and stereotypes — a modern young woman is rendered Christian or Parsi to justify a perceived Westernness (even more recent movies, such as 2012’s Cocktail, give their free-spirited heroine a Western name, as if offering a soothing justification to the more orthodox).
Some, perhaps braver, filmmakers have ventured into a more nuanced territory, peering into the worlds of minority communities often relegated to the background of the film universe. Of these, some narratives have centred on the Anglo-Indian community, the increasingly dwindling group of people in India who claim both British and Indian parentage.‘Air of permissiveness’1975’s Julie trades in these visual metaphors. Like many minority depictions, it both describes and circumscribes. Anglo-Indian heroine Julie, portrayed by Lakshmi, is sweet of face, charming of disposition, and short of skirt. Her characterisation is what old-timers would deem everything wrong with “kids these days,” a glimpse at a persistent present prejudice with very traceable roots. Her father is an alcoholic and her family drinks to celebrate occasions. As with all heroines, many flirt with her, but there is an air of permissiveness seemingly explained by her Anglo-Indian identity.
In ‘Julie’, the Anglo-Indian heroine, portrayed by Lakshmi, is sweet of face, charming of disposition, and short of skirt.
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A similar feeling is apparent in Bhowani Junction (1956), a Hollywood adaptation of an eponymous novel that follows the path of Anglo-Indian Victoria Jones (played by Ava Gardner) on the cusp of India’s independence, as she struggles to find a place where she belongs. Multiple slurs (with shocking terms such as chee chee for Anglo-Indians and wog for Indians) pepper the melodramatic storyline, which weaves through a web of romance, intrigue, patriotism, and a (mis)use of the sari to both accentuate the alluring Ava Gardner and her identity crisis. It does make an honest attempt to portray a fraught identity, caught in the cross-fire, but is undercut somewhat by the choice of white actors to play multiple Anglo-Indian and Indian roles. The actor playing town collector Govindaswami — Marne Maitland — is seemingly the only one of Indian heritage with any significant screen time.Different portrayalsComing back to the subcontinent, a more restrained portrayal of post-war Anglo-Indians is found in Aparna Sen’s 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981). Lonely Violet Stoneham is a widowed English teacher, fond of Shakespeare, and quite solitary in 36, Chowringhee Lane in Kolkata, with black cat Toby for company. Her brother Eddie is ailing and in an old-age home, her niece Rosemary has married and relocated to Australia. Companionship and warmth arrive in the form of old student Nandita and her boyfriend Samaresh, but they too, have better things to do than keep an old English teacher company. Violet’s loneliness is not just the product of social exclusion, but her belonging to the Anglo-Indian community throws her plight into stark relief. She is left more alone than she might have been otherwise, more gullible to the charms of a friendly face.Miss Stoneham is portrayed with a neat reserve and restraint by Jennifer Kendal, the British actress who married Shashi Kapoor and founded the Prithvi Theatre, bringing a touch of authenticity to the narrative.ALSO READ:A Death In The Gunj: a discordant calmFollowing deftly in her mother’s footsteps, Konkona Sen Sharma sets A Death in the Gunj (2016), her directorial debut venture, in 1970s McCluskiegunj, an Anglo-Indian town in Jharkhand. The film traces the gradual unravelling of Vikrant Massey’s Shutu, a young student on vacation with his extended family. Here the heritage serves to set the scene, explaining the certain colonial hang-ups among the family, and has an intentional class demarcation effect eerily similar to Parasite. Yet again, a jibe emerges against Kalki Koechlin’s Mimi, with Shutu’s aunt muttering something about her promiscuity and a foreign mother.The most recent and (unintentionally) camp of Anglo-Indian portrayals comes from The Archies (2023), the “nepo-baby-laden” venture set in a fictional, idyllic Anglo-Indian town called Riverdale. Here the choice of an Anglo-Indian setting seems to justify pastel-hued settings and the uncertain Hindi of the main cast, with a smidge of patriotism thrown in to balance what is very clearly nostalgia for a colonial-era aesthetic. The fact that its characters channel South Bombay vibes is also revelatory of some colonial class coding that has seeped into present-day perceptions of the glamorous, the wealthy, and the elite.
An old narrative trickThe use of outsider-ness as a mode to depict purported immorality or lack of integrity is an old narrative trick, and most of these films employ it in some form. That the targets of this narrative feel it keenly is often stressed in the movies, with Julie’s mother wanting to join her son Jimmy in London, Patrick Taylor in Bhowani viewing himself as more aligned with the cause of the British, and even Archie Andrews seeking to study abroad.The linguistic choices are interesting, if not completely representative: they range from a casually thrown-in “man,” or “hoyega” to Miss Stoneham’s crisp, clipped received pronunciation tones, reminiscent of the ghost-of-a-Wren-and-Martin past. It is hard to pin down a uniform Anglo-Indian accent from this sampling, but some cadences are intentionally chosen.Some professional commonalities emerge in a few of the movies too. Julie’s father is an engine driver for the railways, while Victoria’s father and Patrick are employed in the railways too. As revealed in a paper about Bhowani Junction by John Masters (the book on which the movie is based), Anglo-Indians in the British era did have close links with the railways, along with infrastructure elements created by the British.Whether the movies provide a clear picture of an inherently complicated identity is questionable. But indeed, the very idea of who can be described as an Anglo Indian is wavering, a little uncertain. Before Independence, the Government of India Act of 1935 described an Anglo-Indian as a person “whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is a native of India.” This definition was more or less retained when Anglo-Indians were listed as a minority in the Constitution in 1950 and had two seats reserved for the community in the Lok Sabha (this was ended via a constitutional amendment in 2020.) Does this bring within its ambit Portuguese-Indians, French-Indians, and those of British ancestry who stayed back in India? This would cover a wide range of lived experiences far beyond the popular realms etched by Ruskin Bond’s misty Mussoorie tales and William Dalrymple’s White Mughals.
A still from ‘Heat and Dust’.
Other noted films delve into the allied, equally complex equation between British subjects and Indians during colonialism, including several Merchant Ivory productions like Heat and Dust (1983), or A Passage to India (1984). Others touch upon the Indians who benefitted or flourished under the Raj. There is a contemporary current which seeks clean-seamed compartmentalisation into a before and an after, ignoring the presence of a complex interwovenness that cannot be unravelled or forgotten so easily. Sadly, history was never that neat. Films like Julie have dialogues which would not seem out of place today, almost 50 years later. Perhaps a neat tincture of these films is what we really need to placate our colonial hangover. Published – December 27, 2024 01:09 pm IST
