This celebration of life in Calcutta over sixty years covers the period from just after Independence to the present. In this postcolonial milieu, an old British mansion, a landmark on the main street of Chowringhee, crumbles into a slum, newly constructed suburbs rise, customs and mores change and a world soon to fade from living memory is gradually transformed.
A variegated and colourful cast populates this world: stayers-on, Anglo-Indian schoolmistresses, Jewish colleagues, Indian Christian parsons, aristocratic zemindars, filmstars, the various smart sets, the American diplomatic enclave, dowagers, the new rich, ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs, manservants and maidservants and providers of services with a smile.
The writer perceives place and people with a sharp eye as she teaches in her spinsterhood, whirls through the daily merry-go-round of married domestic life --- mends things and invents kanthas --- and faces widowhood in an old peoples’ home. Against the background of the place, to the music of memory the people move as, with wit and grace, Rani Sircar sings of her life and times in Calcutta.
This is Sircar’s second autobiographical/sociological account of Anglicised Indian and minority-community urban life, a companion volume to her Dancing Round the Maypole: Growing Out of British India (2003). There might be nothing else quite like these two insider accounts of life in India by one who moves effortlessly through diverse social spheres, some almost sealed off from each other and some relatively inaccessible to outsiders.
Rani Sircar. Dancing Round the Maypole. Rupa, New Delhi, 2003.
A set of lighthearted, thought-provoking vignettes from the past. It holds up a mirror to a vanished milieu, that of a particular sort of anglicised Indian family, which was proudly Indian, proudly Christian and both directly influenced by and resisting the British customs of undivided India. This milieu took cultural hybridity unselfconsciously for granted. Indian schoolgirls learnt traditional English songs without realising at the time the incongruities in what they were learning. With anglicisation came inevitable conflicts --- for example, whether an Indian child joining the Bluebirds (the junior Girl Guides) should take an oath swearing loyalty to the English King. Images of school, home, and social life in pukka Colombo, fun-loving Lahore and changing Madras, of holidays across the country, flow by from before Independence till after 1947. Then we see the still largely white mercantile society of early post-Independence Clive Street, Calcutta, and the emerging breed of brown sahibs and the maintenance of the rarefied hothouse ambience of pomp and circumstance, which had traditionally marked British commercial life in Calcutta. But sola topi-ed sahibs and memsahibs, elaborate visiting-card rituals, club life and the hard-drinking tea-planters of Assam (a full chapter devoted to them) vanish, and the ways of the early brown sahibs are succeeded by a new sort of cultural mixture in India.
Dancing Round the Maypole is now apparently out of print in India, but there are secondhand copies to be had per courtesy of the internet.
In 2003, two posters on the Raj India-list on rootsweb on the internet wrote in on it. One said: "I am reading a wonderful book to my Grandmother at the moment and wondered if it would be OK to tell the list about it. The Book is: DANCING ROUND THE MAYPOLE: GROWING OUT OF BRITISH INDIA By Rani Sircar. Publishers Rupa & Co ISBN: 8129101068. Mark Tully gave a good review of it which can still be seen online at The Telegraph - Calcutta : Opinion... This book has brought back a lot of memories to my Grandmother that I hadn't heard her tell us before and I feel sure that other people on the list would enjoy it as much as we have."
Another, with "no commercial interest" in book or bookseller, called it one of two "very enjoyable, light hearted memoirs which I feel sure at least some listers will enjoy as much as I did" .
An internet review said, "I came across a fascinating memoir a few years ago Rani Sircar, Dancing Round the Maypole: Growing out of British India (2003), who came from an Indian Christian family which very unusually was originally Brahmin. Also interesting on north-south cultural differences within India." See <frumiousb.dreamwidth.org/387026.html>
Dr Lesley Hall, scholar in "middle-brow" work, said of it "A lovely book, full of fascinating details of, insights into, and reflections on, a lost culture. There's a whole chapter on 'Anglo-Indian' cookery, as well as plenty of other mentions of food and foodways in the complex culture/s she grew up in. Unfortunately, so far, to the best of my knowledge, it's only been published in India, but available viawww.bookfinder.com." See www.lesleyahall.net/prvrdgnf.htm"
Critics said:
Through “Colombo, Chennai, Lahore”, “on a Kiplingesque journey” exploring one of the “dimensions to the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised”: its “transactional aspect”; “a simultaneous absorption of and resistance to all that the British in India stood for”. “Complementary to…Kipling, Forster and Paul Scott”, this book breaks with the foreign “Raj nostalgia” which “Indian readers have had an overdose of”. What “Allen Sealy [Trotter-Nama] and Aparna Sen [36, Chowringhee Lane]” did for Anglo-Indians, “Rani Sircar can do…for the Indian Christians.c- Purabi Panwar, The Business Standard
“This book will be important for historians”, “giving them an insight into important but insufficiently studied communities”, “important for Calcutta too”. Sircar “says she reminisces…because her memories have ‘perhaps a certain curiosity value’. They are worth more than that.”- Mark Tully, The Telegraph
“Light-hearted and enjoyable”, it “reminded me of Rudyard Kipling’s stories”, but suffused “with compassion and sensitivity”, moving “between the white, brown and tanned lives…” These “sharp-eyed recollections of cultural tensions…should be enjoyed by all with fine indiscrimination.”- Lynne Rebeiro, Anglo-Indians in Touch (Canada)
“Various cultures and sub-cultures are portrayed in this mosaic, images of school, home and social life…evocative,…clever, funny, nostalgic and elegantly contoured….”- SLM, Chowkidar, BACSA (UK)
“I was struck again by the quality of [Rani Sircar’s] writing”. Her narrative “has a discursive element, besides the richness and depth to grasp reality in its many dimensions,” which “integrate its fragments” into a “coherent flow”. Along with her “strong, principled and rather unusual” parents, her “account of boxwallah society” with “a ring of authenticity”, a “bonus is always her prose!”- Hiranmay Karlekar, The Pioneer
“Times and ways of life long gone” —Sircar “capture[s] it all.” - The Indian Express.
“A time of significant political transition” “but also the “joie de vivre of a bygone era.” - The Statesman.
“A time that had plenty of colour,…Sircar succeeds in bringing it alive.”- The Times of India
"Sights, smells and sounds of a colonial India, of bioscope, butlers and bakhsheesh,…of brown sahibs and white mems” come in “fables fruity and nutty like Indian Christian Christmas-cake, or tart-y and tangy like mulligatawny. … The answer is…perhaps, in another round of maypole dancing!” - Bhavana Pankaj, The Tribune
