Anglo-Indians and ‘Home’

~ Mulligatawny Soup, by Manorama Mathai ~

A young woman decides to discover more about the Indian father who abandoned her English mother to return to Calcutta. Superficially this might sound like a teenage finding-onself tale, but this is really a story about race. Race and identity in India during and after the Raj, race and identity in England, and interracial hierarchies and relationships.

Mathai (and the narrator) have a sharp wit and deadpan delivery. For example:

My mother had a very poor idea of where [my father] had come from in the first place, so she could hardly, I suppose, be expected to know where he went, especially since he had somehow omitted to tell her that he was actually going.

[…] when I made my unscheduled arrival with, as my grandmother put it, a drop too much coffee and not nearly enough milk. By which she meant that I was not true-blue white.

I suppose my grandmother just did not understand genetics, or that she hoped that as I was born without, you might say, benefit of father, I ought to have been white like everyone else in her family. Which is odd when I come to think of it, because she is quick to talk of things like the nigger in the woodpile, or was, until the Race Relations Act made everyone more careful about what they said, at least out loud. [

The narrator grew up in England with her English relatives and has never been to India. While researching her background, she meets her mirror image: an elderly “Anglo-Indian” woman, Elsie-Nora who had been born and grown up in India.

Anglo-Indian was the term the English in India chose for themselves when they settled down to the serious business of living and ruling someone else’s country. They were very annoyed when the Eurasians began to call themselves Anglo-Indian as well, thus identifying themselves with the ruling class. [..] It caused the native Christians to press hotly for the same status. They saw no reason why they should not share much more than just the imperial religion, which wasn’t half as much fun as festival-rich Hinduism or as egalitarian as Islam. By the time of the First World War the term Anglo-Indian had come to stand for those of mixed race, although back in England it continued to be used to describe the English who lived and worked in India.

At the time of Independence in 1947, there were about 2 million Anglo-Indians in India. Many of them emigrated to English-speaking Commonwealth countries over the next few decades. By 2010 the numbers had dropped to 300,000 – 1 million. [Wikipedia]

Elsie-Nora is of largely Indian ancestry, but has an English ancestor. She is

“not (as she thought it necessary to explain) of English and Indian parentage, but of ‘English origin’ .

The sentence above carries a wealth of implicit information about racial hierarchy, and the nuances are typical of this novel. Racial prejudice abounds throughout: in the casually flung words ‘blackie’, ‘gollywog’, ‘Paki’ thrown at the narrator on English streets, in the Indian families who look down on the Anglo-Indians, in the English suspicion of those of ‘mixed’ blood, and in the Anglo-Indians who consider that their part-European blood, however slight, makes them superior to the Indians around them.

Most of this novel is in Elsie-Nora’s voice, and she is considerably more optimistic and less acerbic than the unnamed narrator. Despite her positive outlook and resilience, the novel makes it clear that the Anglo-Indians were neither welcomed or at home in either England or India.

Mulligatawny Soup has, I discovered, been analyzed in several theses and papers that are available on the internet. This is not just because it was an early Indo-English novel, but, I think, because it stands out as a distinctively original and perceptive piece of writing. Mathai has a sharp eye for the ironies and hypocrisies of all communities.

I re-read this novel twenty-five years after it came out, and was pleased to see how well it stood the test of time. Some of it is a fascinating period piece, worthwhile reading for that reason. And just as the narrator discovers that some of the same prejudices that faced Elsie-Nora in 1930s India also exist in 1980s London, many biases also remain depressingly unchanged in 2018.

This deceptively slim volume belies the strength of its content.

Mulligatawny Soup, by Manorama Mathai. Penguin, 1993