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Anglo Indians like J R Barrow couldn't parlay Bengali culture

A sweet, piping voiced colleague reminded me of Bobby from the railway children. In fact she told me a story which shows she actually was Bobby.

She had been travelling from Calcutta to Delhi. He mother sent her when she was 14 with her little 8 year old brother. But with warnings that as they went past one part of the journey, they shouldn't look out of the window, because there were bandits. But "Bobby" did look out and saw the bandits stealing money from people who had got off the train. So, in character, she rolled down the window and shouted at them to stop it immediately. Of course they just laughed.

So she threatened to call a policeman and they laughed again, because the policemen got their cut from the robberies. Of course they boarded the train, probably to assault her, she was firey and beautiful child with long black hair. Quickly she locked the sturdy door of the compartment of her train and they banged and banged at it. The train pulled off, but still they didn't get off and shouted horrible things to her through the door. Her little brother was thinking how was he going to defend his sister but after about four stops they got off and the guard came and knocked at the door to tell the children. When they got to their aunty's in Delhi their aunty phoned her mom. What did you think you were doing sending the children to Delhi on their own.

And I can only echo the sentiments of the aunty.

But this colleague who I only met briefly, told me she was a Northern Indian Christian, there are a lot of them. They are at the Lambeth conference at the moment. And she is doing a very interesting Phd. It's on J.R.Barrow the President of Presidency College during the civil disobediance period, a Briton who had to balance between the nationalists and the colonial authorities, and even so, earned the respect of his Indian academic collegues. This was during the Bengal cultural renaissance with people like Pramatha Chowdhury, Surendranath Dasgupta, Indira Devi Chowdhurani, Santa Sen, Nirmal Kumari Mahalanabish, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanabish, Rani Chanda, Atul Chandra Gupta, Samarendra Nath Tagore, Upendra Nath Gangopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore and Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay

http://banglapedia.org/HT/P_0263.HTM

The gist of her Phd was that the Anglo Indians were never allowed to assimilate. In order to assimilate they first had to become more soluble to Indian culture. In order to find their home in India they had to revalidate Indian culture and take part in the Bengali rennaisance; so that they could lose themselves in it. This entailed a cultural conflict with the empire, because, of course, Indian culture was devalued by the empire. So these Anglo Indians, born Indian, did their best to translate the Vedas and hob nobbed with Bengali intellectuals and learned Sanskrit - they were concerned with making Britain see the value, the intrinsic value of Indian culture without "nativising it". And of course the colonialists couldn't do this. We read about them in Paul Scott's the Jewel in the Crown, because to value Indian culture meant to lose control.

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