Exploring railway life with Margaret (Part I)

It gives me great pleasure to announce that we have with us today no less a person than Margaret Deefholts, the well-known Anglo-Indian writer.
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Margaret Deefholts lives in Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver, B.C. Of Anglo-Indian parentage, she was born and grew up in India, and has many cherished memories of life as a “child of the Indian Railways”. Immigrating to Canada with her family in 1977, she began her writing career in 1994 and has won many Canadian magazine short fiction awards since then.
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While several of her stories are set in India and explore the lives and cultural diversity of its people, she also writes about the dichotomies that confront first and second generation Indo-Canadians who live in Surrey and Vancouver. Her article on “Rohinton Mistry’s Bombay” was included in an international publication Literary Trips: Following in the Footsteps of Fame.
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She is the author of Haunting India (CTR Publications), and has co-edited two more CTR books, Voices on the Verandah (with Sylvia Staub) and The Way We W
ere (with Glenn Deefholts). CTR (Calcutta Tiljallah Relief Inc.) uses the gross sales proceeds from its Anglo-Indian literary publications to assist impoverished Anglo Indians in India.
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Ms. Deefholts’ is also a well published professional free lance travel writer and editor, and her journeys through Canada, Britain, Europe, Australia and India, have been published in B.C. Magazines and community newspapers in Canada and abroad. Tourism Malaysia honoured her with the “Best Foreign Travel Writer” award in 2003.
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She is a member of the national organisation, Travel Media of Canada (TMAC) and founding member/Past President of the B.C. Association of Travel Writers. She is also a long-standing member of the Federation of British.Columbia Writers.
.So, then, how does this all fit into Railways of the Raj? It does, and in a splendid way! What makes Margaret so special for us is that her book ‘Haunting India’ has a chapter called ‘Railway Life in Anglo-India’, and Ms. Deefholts has very kindly authorized reproduction of the text here. Very generous, and we can never thank her enough. The book itself is a charity project and full details will be found on the following page:
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http://www.margaretdeefholts.com/hauntingindiacontents.html
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So here we go . Thank you Margaret for a top class contribution, you have shown what true generosity can be at its best !!
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     RAILWAY LIFE IN ANGLO-INDIA       
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Part I : Introduction
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Although many things have changed in modern India, Britain’s legacy to the country in terms of institutions such as a parliamentary form of democracy, the judicial system, the civil service, the postal infrastructure and last, but far from least, the Indian Railways, have endured for over half a century.
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Up to the time of India’s Independence, the Railways offered the Anglo-Indian Community preferential employment in the upper and lower subordinate cadres. As a result, during the first half of the 20th century, the majority of guards, drivers, firemen, loco-foremen and line maintenance staff—were Anglo-Indians who took enormous pride in their gleaming iron horses. They ran their trains with split-second punctuality, and even during the turmoil of the Quit India Movement, were resolute in their determination to keep the railways functioning in the teeth of demonstrations, processions and blockades. Without their unquestioning loyalty, the entire railway system would have been seriously crippled, if not completely paralyzed.
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Part II: Social Activities
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Before most of the Anglo-Indians left India in the years following Independence, the Railway Institute was the focal point of social activity. Every Railway Institute had an Entertainment Committee which organized and ran whist drives, housie (bingo) nights, dances, amateur theatricals, costume parties, tin-and-bottle badminton tournaments and sports day events.
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The Officers’ Club had their own functions, but these tended to be more staid and formal than the boisterous goings-on at the Railway Institute. During the war years, many of the up-country divisions (such as Allahabad, where I lived as a child) opened the Railway Institute doors to homesick British Tommies and American GIs. It was almost a foregone conclusion that by the end of a dance there would be fisticuffs between the Anglo-Indian young bucks who jealously guarded their very attractive sisters or fiancées from the attention of soldiers, who may have been bored and sex starved but were also hungry for the chance to merely twirl around the dance floor with a pretty girl, and enjoy chatting to her in a common language.
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Christmas (“Burra Din”—or “big day”) was an event which was eagerly anticipated by the Railway colony Anglo-Indians. For weeks beforehand, the Railway Institute Committee were drawing up plans for :
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The children’s Christmas Tree function. A carol-singing session would be followed by a tea-time spread of striped barley-sugar sticks, home-made fudge, biscuits, a slice of cake, a glass of fizzy lemonade and always, always an orange. The evening culminated with the arrival of Santa, a bit sweaty under his red “fur” trimmed coat, and the distribution of gifts (wrapped and tagged by parents) to a crowd of breathlessly eager children.
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The children’s Christmas Tree festivities were tied in with an adult-and-children’s sports day event. An essential part of the afternoon’s entertainment included egg and spoon races, obstacle courses and three legged races. Kids were treated to a “lucky dip” from a small sack yielding plastic toys or a bon-bon.
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The Christmas Fete—a Jumble Sale of home-made pickles, jams, cakes, hand-knitted woollies, embroidered table linen, a raffle for a Christmas hamper, and the chance to try your luck at guessing the weight of a bright pink frosted cake.
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A Christmas “Tableau”—a theatrical production involving a blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked baby doll filling in as Jesus, and an assortment of aspiring thespians in the roles of Mary, Joseph, Inn-keeper, Shepherds, Angels and Wise Men.
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A fancy dress ball usually took place in the weeks preceding Christmas, and the New Year’s Eve gala was a stellar event with the women resplendent in their darzi (tailor) made gowns, and the men togged up in suits and ties. Railway employees received free passes on trains, so it wasn’t uncommon for several nearby railway communities to band together at one of the larger Institutes—in which case arrangements would be made for a special “bogey” to be attached to a train and parked on a station siding, thereby providing transport and accommodation for visitors.
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Apart from functions at the Railway Institute, Anglo-Indian railway communities celebrated Christmas in their own inimitable fashion. The lead up to the big day, involved a special trip by one or more members of the Community to the nearest city—in my experience, Calcutta—where, armed with a shopping list for themselves and friends, they would troop off to the New Market to buy dress material and trimmings (for the house tailor to work with on a bungalow verandah), toys for the children, a selection of dried fruit and nuts, as well as barley sugar (striped candy), marzipan, and a Christmas pudding from one of the Calcutta confectioners like Nahums, Flurys or Trincas.
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Christmas cake making was a ritual. In mid November or early December, the family (often three generations) would gather around the dining table washing, pitting and de-stemming raisins and sultanas, and chopping candied peel into slivers, all of which would be laid out under a net canopy to dry in the sun for a day, and then soaked in rum or brandy. The ingredients would be hand mixed—flour, semolina, butter, eggs, powdered cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, nuts and fruit, (plus other closely guarded secret ingredients!)—and poured into half a dozen round cake tins. Since most railway families didn’t own large ovens, the cake batter would be taken off to the local bakery to cook for a few hours until it had risen and browned to rich fruity perfection.
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Preparing traditional Christmas sweets were also part of the excitement of the Season. “Kul-kul” dough strips were laboriously rolled on fork tines (or a comb) into small curler-like confections, deep fried and then stored away in large tins. Pink coconut toffee, chocolate fudge, cookies, cashew nut toffee and home made marzipan were all part of every railway Anglo-Indian household’s Christmas fare, and offered to family and friends throughout Christmas week.
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During the days leading up to December 25th, families were also busy setting out freshly washed and ironed curtains, lace antimacassars, and placing miniature mangers with china figurines in one section of the living room. Family members would sit down to a session of fashioning yards of paper chains—usually green and red kite paper sheets cut, looped and pasted (with flour or boiled rice paste) to festoon the ceiling and doorways—and since no evergreen pines dot the Indian plains, a feathery leafed cryptomarian bough would be inserted into a gumla (clay planter) and decorated with cotton strips (“snow”), crepe-paper, tinsel and cut out silver paper stars and angels.
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Christmas Eve culminated at either Midnight Mass or a Watch Night service in one or more of the churches outlying the boundaries of the Railway colony. Christmas Day was a social time within the colony, with friends and neighbours dropping in to wish each other, and then returning home for a festive lunch - after which replete with chicken curry and pilau rice, everyone retired to bed under the whirring punkah (fan) for an afternoon siesta. Visitors dropped in again in the evening to sip on home made wine, milk punch or stronger libations. Christmas dinner was an elaborate affair—often Duck a la Orange, a green salad, crisp-coated roast potatoes, and peas—and as a finale, a rich Christmas pudding topped with brandy butter or rum sauce.
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Easter was usually a quieter festival, and the activities of the Institute over Lent were relatively subdued. Easter Sunday church service over, most railway families enjoyed a celebratory lunch, while children broke open their hollow chocolate or marzipan Easter eggs (bought from a local confectionery shop, or ordered specially from Calcutta) to nibble on the silver-paper wrapped chocolates or toffees nestled inside.
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As a Community, the Anglo-Indians needed little or no excuse to whoop it up, and since everyone knew everyone else in the Railway colony, occasions such as birthdays, First Holy Communions, and weddings were celebrated with gusto. Funerals were sombre affairs, but again almost the entire Railway Anglo-Indian community could be counted on to attend the service for one of its departed members.
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In the cooler winter months, there were organized picnics (sometimes by moonlight) and as shikar (hunting) was a popular sport, shooting parties would take off to the surrounding marshlands to bag duck, partridge and snipe. On big game shoots, overnight camps would be set up, and beaters (groups of local villagers) would “beat” the jungle with drums, sticks and noisy shouts, to funnel wild boar, deer, panther or tiger towards machaan platforms where hunters lay in wait.
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For the most part, the Railway Anglo-Indians shared a sense of camaraderie and fellowship both at work and play. But as in all small, tightly-knit communities, the colony was also a hotbed of gossip, subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) social one-upmanship, and political maneuvering. Tempers flared, small jealousies smoldered and petty resentments sometimes led to heated arguments—although this rarely caused serious repercussions since more often than not, one party or the other was, in the usual course, transferred to another station!
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Part III: Personal Reminiscences
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Leon Deefholts:
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My husband Leon’s background encompasses a fairly typical example of a railway family living in small towns in north Bengal in the ‘30s and ‘40’s. His father was a Permanent Way Inspector—today labeled as “Class C”, but then known as “Class III”—senior subordinate position. A PWI had a specific jurisdiction and a crew of maintenance staff under his supervision and his primary job was to ensure that line tracks were properly repaired and maintained. This included not only rail replacements but the condition of every nut and bolt, sleepers (ties), fish plates, ballast and grade standards. He reported to the appropriate sub-divisional officer.
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The family lived in typically comfortable and well maintained bungalows assigned to Class III senior subordinates. On the salary of a senior subordinate in those days it was possible to afford domestic help—a cook, an ayah for the children, a sweeper, dhobi (washerman) and a mali (gardener), the last usually a railway employee assigned to maintain several railway bungalow compounds.
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Because of frequent transfers, often to very small railway stations, the two older boys were packed off to Goethals Memorial school in Kurseong (run by the Christian Brothers) and, for about three years during the war, to St. Edmunds College Shillong, while the girls were boarders at Loreto Convent in Darjeeling. Boarding schools in the hills were expensive, but the Railways recognizing the absence of educational facilities in many smaller up-country locations, subsidized school fees and expenses for the children of subordinate and senior subordinate employees. The youngest child, Keith, born shortly before his father’s retirement, went to St. Vincent’s School in Asansol.
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Leon and his older brother Colin (as well as both their younger sisters) lived, from the age of five to sixteen in the regimented world of boarding school routine. The only time spent with their family in the Railway colony was over the 3-month winter vacation.
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Leon remembers the thrill of accompanying his father on shikar trips or riding along with him on his trolley as he undertook line inspection tours. He recalls the gaiety of Christmas festivities, and shopping trips to Calcutta. He also remembers how involved his father was in the organization of social events at the Railway Institute, and the spontaneous hospitality extended to visitors (whether family, friends, or total strangers) who stayed and boarded with the family from time to time.
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Margaret Deefholts (nee Penn-Anthony):.
Not all Railway posts were reserved for Anglo-Indians. The upper echelons of the administration were made up of British officers, Indian officers and a sprinkling of Anglo-Indians—my father among them. The requirements were stringent: a University post graduate degree and a competitive all-India entrance examination modeled after the Indian Civil Service pattern.
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After obtaining his Master’s degree, my father sat for the I.R.A.S. (Indian Railway Administrative Service) examination and was then admitted to the ranks of the Class I Officer cadre with all its attendant privileges. While most Anglo-Indians had post graduate degrees in civil, mechanical or electrical engineering, my Dad was an accountant.
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During the early years of my father’s career we lived in railway stations such as Dinapur and Asansol. As a four year old, my recollections are fuzzy, but my memory is aided by photographs of bungalows with deep verandahs, long drive-ways, flower bordered lawns, badminton courts and servants’ quarters. As Dad moved up the hierarchy from Assistant Divisional Accounts Officer, to Divisional Accounts Officer, we lived in larger railway stations: Allahabad, Jamalpur and Chittaranjan.
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Later in his career when he was Assistant Financial Advisor, and then as Department Head, with the cumbersome, title of “Financial Advisor and Chief Accounts Officer” he was responsible for what seemed like a small army of lesser employees at Regional Headquarters (Madras, Gauhati and Bombay). Heads of Departments received extra perks and our entourage of domestic servants included a railway employed house peon (he ran errands and did light housework such as dusting and tidying up) and a mali to maintain the garden. Other domestics hired privately by us, included a cook, a bearer (to wait at table), an ayah (to look after my sister and myself, wash and iron our clothes), a washerman (who also lived on the premises in the servants’ quarters) and a sweeper, whose family living quarters, for caste reasons stood a little way off from the ones occupied by the cook, bearer etc.
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During the tumultuous years in the mid-forties, just prior to Independence, a vague memory hovers in my mind’s eye of being shepherded one afternoon into a heavily guarded Railway Institute building (or perhaps it was the Officers’ Club) along with other women and children as Dinapur lay along the route of Gandhi’s salt march and it was feared that there could be violent demonstrations. Nothing untoward happened, however, and it all seemed rather like a rather tranquil afternoon soiree, nibbling on egg and cucumber sandwiches and mutton patties while the servants hovered in the background and served up endless cups of tea. A little more unnerving was the discovery of a cache of firearms concealed under a culvert fronting the entrance gate to our bungalow in Jamalpur in ‘47.

(Continued below)

Exploring railway life with Margaret (Part II)

RAILWAY LIFE IN ANGLO-INDIA
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Continued from previous post
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Social Life:
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Neither of my parents had the slightest interest in attending Institute dances as they wouldn’t have known the difference between a fox-trot and a quick-step. Nor did they frequent the Officers’ Club, except to participate in inter-railway court tournaments, my father being a keen tennis and badminton player.
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When Independence was imminent and the long scarring line of partition was drawn up between India and West Pakistan, Dad—by then a relatively senior Accounts Officer—was sent to the non-family station of Jullunder to oversee the whole business of dividing up all the railway assets lying along the soon-to-be border between the two countries.
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Meanwhile my mother, myself and my toddler sister lived in Allahabad where my maternal grandparents had retired. This was the first time I recall attending the Railway Institute where my grandparents, my aunt, my mother and I, had been invited to join in housie (bingo) evenings whist drives and to various other social events, which took place over that Christmas season in ’46.
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This was something of an eye-opener for me. As kids we were ‘seen and not heard’ at home. When my parents entertained, my sister and I spent the evening in our nursery with the ayah, playing with our dolls, or colouring books and crayons, had an early dinner and after doing a polite round of wishing the adults ‘good night’, we were sent off to bed by 8 o’clock.
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The Institute, by contrast seemed to have kids swarming all over the place—and nobody seemed to mind if they stayed up until after midnight. Youngsters ran and slid along the French-chalked dance floor, babies sat on their grandmothers’ laps and toddlers were fussed over by friends and families. A wind-up gramophone blared above the din and confusion, and the music was lively and rhythmic. A bit different from listening to Chopin nocturnes on our gramophone at home. “Light” music (as distinguished from “classical” music) in my parents’ lexicon consisted of Irving Berlin tunes, music hall favorites, or vocals by Deanna Durbin, Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy. The music at the Institute was much more catchy—and everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time jitterbugging and Lambeth-walking around the floor!
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It was not until many years later, when my sister and I were in our teens living in the Perambur Railway colony in the suburbs of Madras, that we again saw the inside of a Railway Institute at a dance. By then both of us had learned to jive, fox trot, samba and waltz, and enjoyed it all immensely—and my father had mellowed sufficiently to allow us to listen to pop music on Radio Ceylon (provided the volume was low!). Railway Institute dances weren’t restricted to just railway employees and it was not considered improper to accept an invitation onto the floor by a complete stranger. Etiquette, however, demanded that a partner escort a lady back to her seat and thank her formally after the dance was over.
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It couldn’t have been much fun for my parents to accompany my sister and myself to these Railway Institute dances, bur they did so as dutiful chaperons. If a date materialized as a result of a meeting at a dance, the young man was expected to come over to our home and make perhaps fifteen minutes of polite conversation with my parents before whisking my sister or myself off to the movies—preferably a Sunday afternoon matinee but in any event, never later than the 6.30 p.m. show.
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Although all this occurred a decade after Independence, little had changed in the interim, as Leon confirms that this was also customary (if not mandatory) in the up-country railway colonies where he recalls his older sister Joan, being courted by young hopefuls. Perhaps the only difference between those years and the mid-1950s was that it would have been unseemly ten years earlier for a woman to sip anything stronger than a glass or two of lemon and port, or an occasional shandy (beer and lemonade) at an Institute dance, whereas by the time my sister and I were old enough to legally down a gin and lime, no-one batted an eyelid.
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Considering the sheltered lives my sister and I led, brought up in an almost Edwardian environment—as were the daughters of other Anglo-Indian friends—I am constantly amazed at the portrayal of Anglo-Indian women as floozies in books and movies. Undoubtedly there were Anglo-Indian call girls in large cities such as Calcutta and Bombay, but they weren’t typical of the vast majority of Anglo-Indian women who led ordinary conventional lives as students, nurses, teachers, secretaries, wives and mothers.
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In our early twenties, as secretaries in Bombay in the ‘60s, we mixed with groups of young folks, some of them Anglo-Indian, others Goan, Punjabi, Gujarati, Maharashtrian, or Parsee. We had parties, we went to nightclubs and jam sessions, we flirted, joked and laughed; we smoked the occasional cigarette and drank in moderation. We weren’t priggish, but we weren’t promiscuous either. None of us were involved with drugs or interested in Bacchanalian revels. Most of us had ‘steady’ boy friends or fiancés. And we weren’t the exception; we were the rule.
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Transfers:
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In the early years of his career, my father was subject to frequent transfers—sometimes as often as two or three times a year. It meant packing up the entire household.
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My mother eventually worked this down to a fine art, getting everything completed in three days flat. She personally packed all the china and glassware, wrapping each item in paper and cushioning it in nests of straw, (not so much as a single cup was chipped in a total of 25 transfers across the length and breadth of India), fitted our library of books into packing cases, packed clothes and linen, and supervised the crating all our heavy furniture (including enormous wooden wardrobes with beveled full-length mirrors) as they were padded with quilting and securely tied with rope and then stitched into jute gunny coverings! The piano had a specially built crate all to itself.
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This done, my father would then direct a gang of coolies as they loaded up a goods wagon with all our household possessions. Some transfers involved trans-shipping all this paraphernalia from a broad gauge wagon to a meter-gauge one, en-route. It was not something my father enjoyed, particularly in the searing days of May and June, or the drenching monsoon months, and he tended to grow increasingly irascible as operations proceeded. At the other end, the whole process went into reverse, and unpacking and settling up a new bungalow, hiring a set of domestics (our cook and ayah, however, accompanied us) and generally getting comfortable again, must have been a daunting task for my mother.
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Schools:
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Despite these frequent moves, and unlike Leon’s folks, my family didn’t send my sister and myself up to boarding schools .in the hills. As a result we hop-scotched between educational establishments and, by the time I eventually graduated with my Senior Cambridge High School Certificate, I’d attended twelve different schools (three of them as a boarder) and made fifteen changes having gone to some schools more than once on being re-transferred back to a previous station. By the time my sister started kindergarten, the frequency of Dad’s transfers had abated somewhat, so she only went to about half-a-dozen different schools scattered through Howrah, Calcutta, Nagpur, Madras and Gauhati.
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Travelling by Rail:
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Probably the most delightful part of railway life for me as a child (apart from the fun of exploring yet another new bungalow and town) was the unmitigated thrill of travelling on the rails. And we did a great deal of this right through the ‘40s and ‘50s, until we eventually moved to Bombay in the ‘60s. Dad sometimes took us “on line” (during our school holidays) when he went on tour to one of the outlying stations within his jurisdiction.
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As a junior officer, he had an Officers’ Carriage—a capacious four berth compartment with an attached kitchen and an alcove with two tiered sleeping berths for our cook and bearer. My mother would pack a large wicker tiffin (food) hamper with bread, butter, eggs, jam, tea, sugar and condensed milk tins, and the cook would be dispatched to the local market each day for fresh meat, vegetables and fruit, while the O.C. stood parked on an off-platform siding. Remembering the sound of the wheels clacking over the points, the jog and sway of the carriage, the smell and prickle of coal dust on skin and scalp (this was in the days before diesel engines) and the taste of hardboiled eggs (smeared with sooty fingerprints!), still evokes a feeling of wistful nostalgia.
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When my father became a Department Head, the Officers’ Carriage was replaced by an Officers’ Saloon—a 3-bedroom bogey with a wash basin in each bedroom, a private toilet and shower, a kitchen and pantry with a fridge, a dining area with a fold-away table, and a lounge with comfortably upholstered sofas and curtains framing the windows. Sometimes, though not always, the saloon was air conditioned rather than fan-cooled.
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Indian railway first class carriages until the ‘60s were self-contained four berth compartments with their own attached toilets. These have all now disappeared and been replaced by relatively cramped four berth cubicles leading off a long corridor, with common toilets situated at each end. When on holiday, we traveled in those roomy first class compartments, (rather than in officers’ carriages or saloons) but although my mother still packed a snack food hamper, we didn’t have a cook or bearer accompanying us. Our meals—breakfast, lunch and dinner—were catered from either the railway restaurant car (now non-existent) or from railway catering establishments at junction stations. A meal order would be telegraphed down the line, and delivered at the next major train stop. Dining room contractors such as Kellners (north India) produced excellent meals, and their caramel custard was legendary!
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When it was necessary to stay overnight before making a train connection, we were accommodated at the Railway Officers restrooms at the station. In those days they were impeccably clean, (although the rooms smelt of phenol swabbed floors!) and the Railway station dining rooms had heavy cutlery, and crockery/glassware embossed with the insignia of the Indian Railways. The bearers (waiters) wore starched white jackets, and their belts and turbans were surmounted by a badge or buckle with the Indian Railways logo.
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For me, no return trip to India is complete without a train journey, even though the engines are diesel and the wheels no longer beat to the rhythm of our ayah’s chant of “Chay-chay paisa, chal-Calcutta…” (six-six paise, go Calcutta!) and breakfast now comes pre-packaged in a soggy cardboard box containing equally an equally soggy “amlet” and leathery “toas”. Gone forever too, is beef curry with fluffy scented rice—and also vanished, alas, is the best caramel custard in the universe!
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Daily Routine:
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Like the majority of railway wives of her generation, my mother never sought employment outside the home. She was at the kernel of our family life, organizing household routine, supervising the servants, planning meals and managing domestic expenses.
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After breakfast my father would cycle off to office, we would be dispatched to school, and my mother would settle down to taking the khansamah’s (cook’s) bazaar hissab, (accounts) and doling out provisions from the pantry cupboard for the day’s meals—scoops of rice, flour, sugar, ghee (cooking medium) and spices. Those were the years before we acquired a fridge, so the doodh wallah (milkman) with his cow in tow would arrive in the early morning and the animal would be milked, under the watchful eye of our bungalow peon to ensure that the frothy milk was not diluted with water in its passage between udder and milk can! A little later the butter man arrived, and six little pats (measured in “chattacks”) of butter would be stored in earthenware saucers filled with cold water.
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Sometimes John Chinaman (as all itinerant Chinese box-wallahs were labeled in that less politically correct world) would cycle up our driveway mid-morning, and lay out his goods on the verandah for inspection: embroidered doilies, table-cloths, appliqued blouses, skirts, rompers and dragon embossed dressing gowns. As the morning sun rose higher, the fruit and vegetable wallahs yodeled their presence as they walked door to door. The neighborhood baker too, dropped by our bungalow, lowering the tin box he carried on his head, to reveal fresh baked biscuits and sponge cakes.
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While the servants swept, dusted and cleaned the bungalow rooms each morning, my mother wrote letters, read, embroidered, knitted, and tackled her mending kitty—a bag filled with socks that needed darning, shirts with missing buttons and hemlines that either required lowering or raising depending upon the style of the day.
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By mid-morning the sun threw hard slabs of light across the verandah and the cane chiks (slatted blinds) would be lowered to keep out the glare. My father would come in from the office, hang his solar topee (pith helmet) on the hat stand and join my mother for a curry-and-rice lunch. Lunch over, he usually lay down for a short forty-winks before returning to work.
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The afternoons were somnolescent, lazy with chitter of mynah-birds in the trees, and the occasional whoop of a langoor monkey. We, my younger sister and I back from school in the late afternoon, would join my mother, a little bleary-eyed after her siesta and still in her dressing gown, as she sipped her tea at the dining table. My sister and I meanwhile compared our white milk moustaches and relished slices of bread and butter slathered with apricot IXL jam (imported from Australia).
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After tea, the ayah hustled us off to the bathroom, where buckets of blended hot and cold water stood on the stone-flagged floor. Scrubbed clean, powdered liberally, and adorned in ironed cotton dresses, ribbons drawn into bows, sitting like butterflies on our hair, white socks and shoes, we were ready for our evening visit to the park.
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By the time we returned home from these outings, my parents—also freshly bathed and changed—would have set off for their evening stroll (they did this every day of their married life!) and my sister and I would settle down to piano practice or homework. As young children we had an early supper and were tucked into bed no later than 8 o’clock. Routine was relaxed on weekends—we had lunch, tea and dinner as a family—and bedtime was pushed back to 9 o’clock.
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In the blistering months of April and May, when even the fan in our bedrooms did nothing to alleviate the furnace-like heat, we slept outside on the lawns. Our beds, light khattiyas (nivar canvas strips strung on wooden frames), would be set up under mosquito nets. The mattresses were light cotton rezais, (quilts) but although it was marginally cooler outdoors, the sheets and pillow cases still felt as though a hot iron had just been run across them.. The croak of frogs, shrilling of crickets, the bark of a dog, the distant yowl of a jackal, the whistle of a train, the low rumble of carriages along the nearby railway lines, and the steady tap-tap-tap of the chowkidar’s lathi (watchman’s stick) as he did his nightly rounds—all of this still echoes down the corridors of memory.
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Looking back to those early years of railway life, it seems to me that despite the upheavals that India was going through at the time, the days were unhurried and tranquil. Our household routine went on as usual; the servants were gentle, kindly and respectful, We were part of a gracious life style—much of it born out of an Anglo-Indian tradition that had endured for three centuries.
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But of course, this became an anachronism in Independent India. As Anglo-Indian up-country railway employees left in droves for England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S., their Indian replacements gave the railway colony an entirely different ethos—one which was more fitting to Indian sensibilities. We, as a family chose to “stay on”, largely because of the obvious privileges of my father’s position in the Indian Railways. I am grateful he made that choice as it gave me the opportunity of stepping across the threshold of Raj into an India I would never have known otherwise in terms of its astonishing cultural diversity.
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In the early 60s we moved from Assam to Bombay, catapulted from an idyllic, if sequestered environment, into a seething and sophisticated cosmopolitan city. The change brought with it a fresh set of priorities as my sister and I started work and made new friends. We continued to live with my parents in an Officers’ Railway Colony (Badhwar Park) until we each married and moved into an entirely different phase of our lives.
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Today my parents have passed on, and my sister and I have been in Canada for over 25 years. Yet a part of us still remains in the hot, dusty plains of India and wraith-like dodges in and out of the shadows of that long vanished era of Railway life in the mid-1900s.
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(Reprinted with kind permission of the author from “Haunting India” by Margaret Deefholts, CTR Publications.)

Bhowani Junction : The Novel

The Hotel Faletti in Lahore, now undergoing a major renovation, had until recently a suite called the ‘Ava Gardner Suite’. For the lucky few who stayed in Room 55 of the hotel it must be an experience of unparalleled charm and nostalgia, with a large monochrome portrait of Ava Gardner smiling down from the wall, as though saying “Oh hello! I too stayed here a long while ago…” The legendary Hollywood actress who passed away in 1990 had indeed been here, for, over fifty years ago, when John Masters’ Bhowani Junction was being made into a film, the cast had stayed at the Faletti. Much of the shooting was done in and around Lahore, and after filming was over and the crew had departed, the hotel proudly named the room where the leading actress stayed, the ‘Ava Gardner Suite.’
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Bhowani Junction, released in cinemascope in 1956 had Ava Gardner, Stewart Granger, Bill Travers and Francis Mathews in the leading role, and is based on a screenplay that roughly runs parallel to the original plot of the novel. Masters was a lieutenant colonel in the British Indian Army who retired in 1948 and settled in the US devoting the rest of his time to writing. Bhowani Junction, first published in 1954, is set in the final tumultuous years of the Raj and presents an authentic picture of the tensions and conflicts, particularly amongst the Anglo-Indian community, that accompanied Britain’s withdrawal from the subcontinent.
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Masters has written a thundering fine novel with a swift moving narrative that carries the reader through drama, suspense, romance and nostalgia. The story is often quoted as being the only work of its kind that evokes forgotten images of India’s steam age. Masters had done his homework well; his portrayal of railway detail is both accurate and well observed. Travel writer Bill Aitken observes: “For the most genuine railway flavour of India’s steam age, John Masters’ novel of Anglo-Indian life ‘Bhowani Junction’ is unlikely to be bettered. He gives you the authentic clangour of the bucking footplate as the crew, amidst prodigious sweat, rhythmically perform their parts. His characters are as recognizable as Forster’s.”
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Clearly, Aitken had chapter twenty eight in mind when he spoke these words, where Victoria and Colonel Savage accompany Mr Jones on the footplate of a locomotive, hitching a ride from Bhowani to Shahpur. The story, as a matter of fact, is a blend of two distinct ways of life – army and railway life, and focuses on the outcome when the military steps in to provide railway protection to a sensitive, riot torn district at a time when independence was becoming a certainty. And set against this backdrop of violence and unrest is a pretty, young Anglo-Indian lady, who finding that life is narrow and confined, reaches out to three men in turn, an Anglo-Indian, a Sikh, and an English colonel, searching for identity, fulfillment and romance, eventually realizing the utter folly of trying to be anything other than what she actually is—an Anglo-Indian.
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THE PLOT
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India 1946. The scene is a crowded town set amidst the dusty plains of India called Bhowani. The war is over, there is change in the air. Ordnance depots around the country were closing down with tonnes of explosives, now rendered superfluous, being carried in trains to the coast where they are loaded into ships and drowned in deep waters. Many a Tommy had sighed with relief as he sat playing cards with his chums in a crowded troop train, dreaming of the voyage that would take him home, far from the sweltering heat of the Indian plains.
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Patrick Taylor, District Traffic Superintendent on the Delhi Deccan Railway is standing in the sun debating whether to step into Victoria’s home. He is in love with her; she’s tall, beautiful, and like him, an Anglo-Indian. Her father, Mr Jones, is a senior railway driver; he has known the family for years, and believes Victoria loves him too. He steps into the home to find that Victoria has changed a good deal: four years of service as a Subaltern in the WAC(I) in Delhi seem to have opened up new pastures for her. Life in the railway colony, in contrast, seems to be hopelessly dull and outfashioned and she's all set to explore the world on terms of her own.
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They kiss each other and plan to leave together for a picnic when news comes that Patrick is needed at the station. A goods train has derailed at Pathoda, so leaving his office in charge of his assistant Ranjit Singh Kasel, Patrick hurries to the site of the accident carrying Victoria along on his Norton. At Pathoda, the breakdown train from Bhowani has arrived, the engine of the goods train standing a little way off with its wheels digging into ballast.
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Back in Bhowani, the derailment is a cause for concern to the administration, and on his return from Pathoda, Patrick is summoned by Govindaswami, the Collector of the District, but no one has the slightest idea who’s behind the mischief, and Govindaswami lets him off asking him to keep an eye on anyone suspicious.
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Shortly afterwards, Patrick Taylor and Victoria accompanied by others arrive at Bhowani station to receive Sir Meredith Sullivan, the Anglo-Indian leader. Sir Meredith is going to stop over at Bhowani to discuss with his people the future of St Thomas’ School, an Anglo-Indian school in Gondwara which is facing a threat of closure. The man steps down from the train and is given a warm welcome. Arriving by the same train are two Englishmen—a Colonel Rodney Savage who commands the Thirteenth Gurkha Rifles, and his Adjutant, Lieutenant Graham Macaulay who have arrived in Bhowani for security and railway protection duties. Patrick is summoned and Savage tells him of his battalion which is shortly going to arrive in two or more troop trains. The men have begun to act superior and Patrick is in no mood to oblige. He tries to act tough, quoting railway rules and regulations, but finds that he is no match for Savage, who with typical conceit and arrogance persuades Patrick to receive his trains in the yard, while dictating orders to the Sikh assistant, Ranjit Kasel. No one dares raise a voice against Savage now. Finding that Victoria had been with the WAC(I), he even arranges a telegram to be sent from the WAC(I) Directorate in Delhi ordering her to assume charge as a Special Liaison Officer between the railway and the army. Patrick and Victoria find themselves in a fix—they know they are going to have to work with a man who is ‘hard, conceited, cocksure and insulting.’
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The first of the troop trains carrying Gurkhas arrives a few days later, and Patrick and Victoria are in the yard for its reception where Mr Jones, Victoria’s father, is chatting away easily with Colonel Savage. Macaulay with his dull eyes and red lips and wet moustache is around, and Patrick has found him eyeing Victoria with a lewd stare. Just then a telegram arrives—RAF had been flying rail patrol and had spotted some men moving suspiciously near Dabgaon on the line. Savage orders a motor trolley, and taking along Patrick and a few Gurkhas, the party sets out to comb the area, while Victoria, Ranjit and Macaulay are to remain in the station Traffic Office awaiting further orders. The party searches the area around Dabgaon, and Patrick suspects that K P Roy, a dreaded terrorist, is on the prowl, but the search proves fruitless. They return late in the night to find Ranjit and Victoria in the Traffic Office sitting in a daze: during their absence, Macaulay had tried to rape Victoria while Ranjit was away having his dinner below in the station refreshment room.
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Meanwhile a railway strike is brewing over an issue concerning the working of goods trains. Anglo-Indian drivers were, until then, excused from working on shunting and van trains where a separate running room for them wasn’t provided. This meant an extra load of work for Indian drivers, and the Union of Railway Workers of India had pressed the demand that running rooms be made common to all communities, a proposal which the railway board found far from attractive.
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Colonel Savage is in Mr Jones’ home partying when news of the strike comes. He rushes with Victoria to the battalion offices where a report has arrived telling of a goods train carrying explosives and ammunition being looted near Malra. A guard has recently been shot at a level crossing near Bhowani, and to make matters worse, Surabhai, a local politician, is leading a large crowd towards the station to protest against the supposed killings of sailors in the RIN mutiny. Govindaswami, Savage and Victoria reach the station with a platoon of military men and find Surabhai and his volunteers lying on the line obstructing the passage of a troop train driven by Jones. Prompted by a comment by Govindaswami, Savage comes up with an idea—he orders his Gurkhas to line up at the edge of the platform, unbutton their pants, and pass water on the protestors stretched on the track below. Jones opens his regulator and steam hisses below the cylinders. The men hastily rise, defeated, humiliated and filthy, and the troop train gathers speed and is out on the line towards the south.
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The whole affair is a sickening one—the lathis, the blood, the broken bangles and torn clothes strewn around—and Victoria finds herself reeling with nausea and disgust. Later when railwaymen on strike had assembled at a street square, Savage had subdued them as efficiently using his 'methods', sending them back to work at bayonet-point. The Colonel is a cruel bully, she thinks, and tells him so.
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The turning point in the story comes when Victoria is returning home one night after a day’s work in the Traffic Office. Tension is mounting in the city even at this hour, and a procession can be heard chanting away in the distance as it marches along the streets. Macaulay had earlier apologized to Victoria for his advances, and feeling somewhat unnerved by the simmering unrest in the city, she reluctantly accepts his offer to escort her back. On their way through the yard, Macaulay, unable to restrain himself, again molests her, and a scuffle ensues during which Victoria picks up a fishplate and strikes him a blow on the head. Sensing something might have gone foul, Ranjit hurries out of the Traffic Office and appears on the scene, and when he sees Macaulay’s lifeless form, he knows what has taken place. He drags the corpse under a wagon and takes Victoria to his home where his mother, Sirdarni Kasel looks upon the girl with sympathy, and employs a local acquaintance named Ghanshyam to dispose Macaulay’s body. Though dressed in a loin cloth, Ghanshyam seems intelligent enough; he even thinks up of an alibi for Victoria should the police question her about her whereabouts during the night. Victoria now learns to dress in a saree. She finds she is a welcome guest in the home and the Sirdarni takes her under her wing seeing in her a prospective wife for her son.
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Victoria now finds time to think about the men in her life. Colonel Savage has shown himself to be arrogant, conceited, a cruel bully, while Macaulay gave her the creeps. She had always admired the English, imagining herself to be more English than she really was. When Macaulay tried to rape her, he broke that chain. Patrick claimed that he loved her, but often acted in a stupid and unreasonable manner. While the second had tried to molest her, the latter often sought her mouth in a lingering kiss. Ranjit was refreshingly different—he was a fine, clean young man who seemed to adore her in his own quiet way. Now she begins to spend time with Ranjit. She goes to the pictures with him dressing up in a saree. Ranjit has proved to be a courteous young man who’s in love with her, and Victoria promises to marry him.
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Soon afterwards Macaulay’s body is discovered under a dungheap in the town with a ‘Quit India’ sign on it. Govindaswami shows Victoria a picture of K P Roy, the terrorist who is believed to be the mastermind behind the unrest. Victoria instantly notices a striking resemblance to Ghanshyam but keeps the knowledge to herself. The Collector now orders a search for the ammunition stolen at Malra and when they reach Ranjit’s house they discover a fishplate with blood stains on it. The Sirdarni is questioned and later arrested as she has refused to comment.
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Victoria has been going steady with Ranjit for some time but seems put off by his dependence on his mother. He is constantly making reference to her and if they ever marry they will be sharing the home with her in all likelihood. Becoming an Indian is not as simple as she had imagined and her friendship with the Sikh has been drawing unfavourable comment from those around her. The girl has somehow brought herself to accept these handicaps but there is yet another pressing demand – Ranjit wishes her to become a Sikh like himself. She prepares herself for the ordeal but the Gurudwara proves terrifying for the Anglo-Indian girl who runs away in fright. She hastens to the station where she is joined by Colonel Savage, and the two hitch a ride with Mr Jones on the footplate of an engine, getting off at a midway halt to board a first class carriage. Mr Jones was pleased that his daughter had broken off with the sikh, and so too is Savage. She stretches herself in the compartment and Savage offers her drinks and cigarettes. She confides to him the events that led to that fateful night when she struck down Macaulay in the yard. She tells him how difficult it was trying to pretend she was an Indian. The Colonel listens patiently, and Victoria is overwhelmed with a sense of relief after she has got it all out. That Savage admires her beauty she never had the slightest doubt, but now there is something in his manner which tells her that everything will turn out well as long as he is in charge. Being in the compartment together has brought them close to each other and as the train rattles on through the darkness they stretch themselves on a bunk and make love.
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It is night when the train arrives at Gondwara. Patrick is in Gondwara on business and happens to be at the station at this time, and peering through the glass he finds Victoria lying undressed on a berth beside the Colonel. He enters the carriage in a fury and a brawl ensues, with Patrick threatening to shoot the colonel. They get off the train and Savage finds a telegram awaiting him from Collector Govindaswami asking for his immediate return to Bhowani. One of the reasons why Patrick has fallen in Victoria’s esteem is that he doesn’t act sensibly, often making a fool of himself. Luck doesn’t seem to favour him. This time he has made yet another grave mistake. There has been a good deal of anti-European feeling in Bhowani and as a Lieutenant in the Auxiliary Force India, Patrick Taylor has authorized members of the AFI to carry about arms for personal protection, a move that could lead to an inflammable situation. Savage returns to Bhowani, and lining up the AFI on the parade ground, orders them to deposit all firearms in the ammunition kote. Sir Meredith Sullivan the Anglo-Indian leader is dead, and on Savage’s insistence, Patrick rushes to Bombay to persuade the Presidency Education Trust to allow St Thomas’s School in Gondwara to continue untouched, and finds on his return that he is under a month’s notice of dismissal from the railways for being absent without leave.
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Misfortune after misfortune seems to be piling up on Taylor, and even Colonel Savage is sensible enough to see this. Once when Taylor had thoughtlessly aimed his rifle at two Indian ruffians while on AFI duty at the station, Savage, watching from the window of the Traffic Office, picked up an inkwell and taking aim, he hurled it at Taylor bringing the man down with a wound on his head. Taylor recovered but would always look upon this as a deliberate act on the part of Savage to get him out of the way so that he could have Victoria for himself. Later that day taking Victoria aside, Savage tells her that he intends to apologize to Taylor; he had never intended to make a clod of him. Taylor is a most admirable man really and his intentions are above reproach but as Savage has seen, he seems to have a strong propensity to run into ill-luck all the time.
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Tension is again mounting in Bhowani and a crowd has assembled at the Kucherry demanding the release of the Sirdarni. Victoria and Savage are around when a riot breaks out. Lathis swing, stones are hurled, and Surabhai the Congress leader is killed. Victoria says she has seen someone like K P Roy strike Surabhai. Police are now on the alert and guards have been posted at all avenues leading out of the city. Seeing that escape is impossible, K P Roy steals into Victoria’s home in the night when no one is around, and pointing a pistol makes her accompany him to the line where they halt a goods train and climb into a wagon. Meanwhile Savage has received information that a girl dressed in white was spotted speaking to the driver of a goods train leaving Bhowani. He guesses what has happened and taking Patrick along he rushes in a jeep. The train has halted at a cordon post for a search, and Roy is spotted, but as luck would have it, he makes good his escape and disappears into the nearby jungle.
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Victoria and Savage are now in love and are contemplating marriage. They often find themselves with each other, and with Mr Jones’ permission even go out for a jungle safari together. But unlike Rosemary, her sister, Victoria is an intelligent girl; her visit to the Bhowani European Club in recent days after it had been thrown open to Indians had made it only too plain what kind of reception she could expect from English society. Patrick, for all his clumsiness, was one of her own people. He needed someone to look after him really, and if she married Savage, she would be abandoning him to his fate and therefore, in effect, deserting her own people. When at a railway station party, Patrick tries to lend support to Savage’s orderly who’s carrying champagne glasses, tripping him over so that he falls between two carriages and is crushed underneath a moving train, Victoria is visibly shaken by the thought of what a mess Patrick could get into if left to himself. It was so easy for bystanders to fasten the blame on Taylor, but Savage has seen and he knows Taylor thoroughly well. Later it was he who would recommend Taylor to William Stevenage, helping him find a job as Manager on the Cholaghat Cement Works Railway.
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Patrick is awaiting discharge from the Delhi Deccan Railway when he receives a midnight call from the station. A party of muslim purdah women had boarded a night train at Pipalkhera with second class tickets to Chakraj Nawada, and had mistakenly dropped a gold bangle on the platform engraved with word ‘Kasel’. The stationmaster of Pipalkhera, wishing to return the bangle had phoned Chakraj Nawada station but was told that no such purdah ladies had arrived on the train. There is nothing Patrick can do about this, but after some deliberation, he decides to tell Colonel Savage. To Savage the whole thing is as clear as daylight—Mahatma Gandhi is to pass shortly this way, and K P Roy and his men have boarded the train dressed as women and got off in the Mayni tunnel where the train slows down on a grade. Savage accompanied by Patrick, Victoria, Govindswami, Ranjit Kasel and a battalion of troops drive to the site of the tunnel carrying along wireless sets and other equipment. A search through the Mayni tunnel reveals explosives strapped to the railway track which are deactivated and carried away. K P Roy and his men dressed as Gurkha soldiers shortly appear at the mouth of the tunnel and are shot dead after an exchange of fire.
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This evening’s performance wouldn’t have been possible without Patrick’s intervention. Even the gunshot that brought down Roy was fired by him and Colonel Savage is pleased. “Your luck’s changed, Patrick. Congratulations,” he says. It is 5 o’clock in the morning when they prepare to set off for Bhowani. Victoria has scrambled into the jeep beside Taylor – she is Patrick’s girl once again.
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Ravindra Bhalerao
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Pictures: http://www.moviegoods.com/