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| A Manifesto for McCluskiegunge |
A Death in
the Ganj, Konkana Sen Sharma’s debut as a director, is on Amazon Prime. It’s
worth watching.
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Featuring Mukul Sharma's iconic
blue Ambassador |
It’s worth the
time purely as a 70s nostalgia trip. The film is
based on a short story by Konkana’s father Mukul Sharma - the the MS behind the Mind Sport column that used to appear in the Illustrated Weekly of India.
It is
about the Anglo-Indian community, like 36 Chowringhee Lane, Konkana’s mother
Aparna Sen’s debut as a director (which remains the best movie ever made about
Anglo-Indians).
It prominently features a blue Ambassador, which is based on a
blue Ambassador that Mukul Sharma owned during Konkana’s childhood.
It involves
an endless vacation where there is absolutely nothing to do except spend time
with family members, and unspecified people who are sort of like family
members, whether you want their company or not. Twenty first century
vacations somehow don’t have those vast vacant spaces.
But to me
the most interesting thing about the movie is the setting – McCluskieganj – the
settlement on the Chota Nagpur plateau which was meant to be a homeland for Anglo-Indians. The narrative arc of Death in the Ganj parallels the death of
McCluskieganj itself.
The
Anglo-Indians are (roughly) the children of British colonial officers who
served in India and their Indian women. They were proud of their British roots,
their (relatively) fair skin, and generally adopted their father’s names, religion
and language.
Through the
Raj, the Anglo-Indians remained a privileged class in Indian society. For
example, an Anglo-Indian in the Indian Railways was paid more than a
native officer of the same rank, but less than a white Britisher. They remained
faithful to the Crown through the tumult of India’s freedom struggle. In their own
eyes, they were “domiciled Europeans and 100% British”.
However, as
the prospect of Indian independence became ever more plausible, and as the
prospect of lakhs of Anglo-Indians being warmly welcomed “home” to England
became ever less plausible, some amount of soul searching was perhaps
inevitable.
Mr Ernest
Timothy McCluskie of Park Street, Calcutta, a successful property broker and a
member of the Bengal Legislative Council, responded to this historical moment by dreaming
up McCluskiegunge. He found a land parcel of 10,000 acres that was watered by
the Damodar and Jagriti Rivers and was connected by train to Calcutta. He leased
this land in perpetuity from the Raja of Ratu, named this development after
himself, and invited Anglo-Indians from across India to buy property here.
Mr
McCluskie’s vision was much bigger than just a property deal.
McCluskiegunge was packaged as a clarion call to heroic adventure (see advert/ manifesto above), an exhortation to
vigorous Anglo-Indian youth to shed their lethargy and bring civilization to
the virgin forests of Chota Nagpur, sort of like American pioneers or Zionist
kibbutzim. This could be read as a sacred duty, as McCluskiegunge was a “mulk”
for Anglo-Indians, a promised land of their own.
If “mulk” is
a self-consciously Urdu word (Hyderabad was ruled by the Nizam ul Mulk), the McCluskiegunge
advert/ manifesto even more explicitly references Pakistan, “We see in McCluskiegunge
the beginnings of what the Moslems call Pakistan but we call Anglo-India. A
place in India where we can foregather and mix freely.”
And for a
while, this dream worked. For a while, the forests of Chota Nagpur became Chota England. Spacious bungalows, tiger hunting, afternoon tea parties, ballroom
dancing, piano music – McCluskiegunge had it all, everything the Anglo-Indians
wanted, everything except jobs. There never was a reason why the kind of jobs
vigorous young Anglo-Indians might want to do would migrate to The Ganj, and in
the absence of those vital jobs, the Ganj went into a spiral of decline. Like
Salman Rushdie’s Peccavistan, McCluskiegunge was incompletely
imagined.
By the 70s it
already was a quixotic museum piece, a parable about the dangers of putting
ethnic purity above just-rub-along pragmatism. Today, with only twenty odd Anglo-Indian families left in The Ganj, it’s not clear if its unique Anglo-Indian
flavour will even live on.
There is
something distinctly illiberal about the idea of a “mulk” for Anglo-Indians, a pure
ethnically clean homeland for a chosen people, far away from the cheek-by-jowl diversity
and chaos of India’s great cities. So why does Konkana Sen Sharma, a strident
liberal, show The Ganj in sympathetic light?
It feels a
bit like Joan Baez singing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”.
Once an idea
is completely defeated, the idea and its champions acquire a sepia-toned sweetness. Liberals respond to the underdog, or the tragic-loser
status that the defeated now have, rather than the ideas the underdogs once
championed.
This is a
dangerous and slippery slope. Ideas have a life of their own. I’m sure Joan
Baez never imagined that white supremacists waving the Confederate flag would
storm the US Capitol in the twenty first century.
So, is that
likely to happen in India? Are the contemporary avatars of Mr Ernest Timothy
McCluskie going to rise up and demand the creation/ restoration of their “mulk”?
Probably
not. Because so many of them have emigrated.
Frank Anthony (who shares a name with India’s most celebrated Anglo-Indian
parliamentarian) estimates that about 50% of the Anglo-Indian population have
emigrated to Canada, Australia or England. Compare that to the ~15% emigration
rates from Goa and the ~100% emigration rates of the Keralite Jews.
The remaining 50% are still very much here, embedded
in every major Indian city, contributing to the tapestry of Indian life, but
very far away from The Ganj that hasn’t quite died yet but is clearly fading
away.
