After four days in McCluskieganj, the fountain I wanted to see had remained elusive. No one I’d met had a clue. This fountain, from what I’d heard, had an inscription marking the founding of the town of McCluskieganj. Somehow, leaving the town without seeing its symbolic birth certificate felt incomplete.
Giving up, I headed towards the station to take my train back to Kolkata. On the way, I stopped to look at an old bungalow, and asked the people there if they knew anything about the fountain. A hosteller pointed to “an old tap” in one corner of the compound. There it was. Undergrowth fringed a cemented platform of this “old tap”. A bowl in its centre held dead leaves and bird droppings. Its sprinkler was dry. No water had sprung from it in decades.
63-year-old Judy Mendonca came to McCluskieganj when she was 4 and now runs a hostel
Near the platform’s base, an old marble plaque told me what I needed to see. The fading inscription announced that the fountain commemorated the founding of the settlement by Ernest Timothy McCluskie in 1934. Today, with only about 20 Anglo-Indian families remaining of the 350-odd that once lived here, the fountain’s decrepitude mirrors the fate of a faded dream.
McCluskieganj lies 70km from Ranchi in Jharkhand. Here, when the eyes travel away from hilltops swarming with clouds, from rivulets born again with the rain, and from wet-green leaves luminescent under soft sunbeams, and when the eyes droop shut to the lullaby of the night train’s soft rumbling, the mind inevitably gravitates toward the brooding remains of Ernest Timothy McCluskie’s ambitions and hopes.
McCluskie was a Calcutta-based real estate and insurance agent in the early 20th century. He belonged to the Anglo-Indian community, a class which because of its mixed Indo-British and European parentage wanted to, but couldn’t quite fit into either Indian or British society.
To India’s British rulers, the Anglo-Indians “represented no more than the shaming evidence of sexual transgression by the lower ranks”, writes author
Ian Jack in his book,
Mofussil Junction. Being no less conscious of caste and class than the British, Indians found Anglo-Indians’ habits and ancestry deeply impure, Jack continues.
The plaque and fountain that were erected in 1934 to honour the founder of McCluskieganj
McCluskie founded the Colonization Society of India Ltd in 1933 in Calcutta (now Kolkata) as a club with the implicit charter of establishing an Anglo-Indian refuge, where their racial insecurities would finally be allayed and their pride restored.
That refuge was McCluskieganj. Soon, Anglo-Indians from all over India bought land and settled here, lured by the prospects of ample fertile agricultural land, animal husbandry, rail and road connections and, of course, the dream that this would be their promised land.
For over three decades, McCluskieganj was a beacon of Anglo-Indian culture in the heart of the Chota-Nagpur plateau’s tribal belt. But McCluskieganj still stood in the middle of nowhere. Soon its lack of education infrastructure, job potential, internal bickering within the community, and dislocation from the urban highlife began to sour the residents’ dreams. Most families began to depart for a livelier future in Indian cities or abroad from the 1940s onwards. By the late 1970s, less than 30 families remained. The once ubiquitous sounds of pianos and boar-hunting rifles gradually fell silent.
The era of the British log (folk), as Anglo-Indians are often referred to, is a conversation starter at local eateries. The parties, music, ballroom dances, hunting, mahogany furniture, fear of the white sahibs, uppity airs and rumours of illicit affairs from the days when the town was called “chhota London”, are smattered across conversations. Many of these tales often seem like the result of a game of Chinese whispers running across decades.
There is also no escaping the sheer physicality of the past, embodied by the 100-odd sprawling bungalows that have survived from their Anglo-Indian high noon. Along the town’s tree-lined main road, some bungalows are rickety skeletons, with only crumbling outlines remaining. Some others are dolled-up in new paint and often turned into students’ hostels.
McCluskieganj has been renewing itself since the Don Bosco Academy school opened here in 1997, prompting the opening of other English-medium schools. Many Anglo Indians have found jobs as teaching or administrative staff in the schools. Some have opened their own schools and student hostels.
I stayed at one such bungalow, a forested property atop a mountain ridge. There I awoke every morning to bird calls and sights of rain-drenched lushness. Twice owned by Anglo-Indians, this bungalow was willed to a long-term servant, who sold it to a Bengali who then sold it to a Jharkhandi, its current owner. Absentee local owners use some bungalows as storehouses for mangoes from nearby groves.
Many bungalows have stories attached. A deserted bungalow near the Damodar river was taken over by Adivasis, before the London-based grandson of the Anglo-Indian owner saw a documentary film and returned to occupy the bungalow. It is said that repeated extortion demands from Maoist insurgents and hostile villagers forced him out soon.
Pigeons greeted me at another bungalow, now a fertilizer storage facility. Another bungalow carries the inevitable narrative of a gown-wearing, fair-skinned apparition, ostensibly after a murder beside the family well.
After a 2-hour trek through a dense forest, I reached the site of what is known as the Minaz bungalow. This deserted bungalow was captured by Maoist insurgents some years back and handed over to local villagers, who stripped every brick off it. I looked on at what was the barest hint of a home.
Like Ian Jack in Mofussil Junction, I then succumbed to the temptation of meeting Kitty Texeira, the memwho had broken a rigid if unspoken Anglo-Indian commandment by marrying a tribal man. She now sells oranges at the railway station and brews the intoxicant mahua, and speaks the local language as eloquently as she speaks English. The 63-year-old appeared at the door of her derelict bungalow to meet me. Tall and shrunken, her carelessly-wrapped sari and loosely-worn blouse wasn’t enough to hide her shoulder bones that stuck out. Didn’t she want to leave McCluskieganj? “There is no money, and why should I? I was born here, my family is buried here too,” she said with a throw of her arm, which encompassed within its span the woods, the hills, the river and the grounds in front of her bungalow.
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Thanks to Alan Lane who pointed out that the above story was part of a book by Paul Harris which Alan had just purchased -called Dreams of a Homeland and is for sale by going to this-www.gomorefilms.com/Dreams_of_a_homeland/Order_a_Copy
Alan was very complimentary and scanned the Book Cover for me to show below
In the meantime the Editor will be in touch with Paul to see what help we can be
Below is the Cover of the Book