Rani Sircar, Strains in a Minor Key: A Celebration of Sixty Years in Calcutta, Kolkata: Gangchil, 2014, published this year, would be of interest to those who still remember the Raj, or are the descendants of people who do (or did), or are in general interested in cultures the world does not get to hear of. It shows what happened to that colonial world and its inhabitants after independence. It can be had directly from the publishers Gangchil (<gangchil.books@gmail.com>) or from a bookseller in Lucknow, Ram Advani, who is experienced taking foreign money without bank fees etc. being involved <radvanilko@gmail.com>
Dear Mr Shepherd,
Thank you for your kind email, in response to my message via Ruth Shepherd. When my Mother's first book was published (Dancing Round the Maypole), Pat Venner - patinmex, as I knew her - was very interested. I was looking for her current email to tell her about my Mother's new (and last) one (given tat she is 86 and failing). I saw Pat's obituary on your blog - and noted that you were in Lucknow, so thought you and Ruth Shepherd might be related. so took a punt and asked, and was wrong, but she did know you. --- Congratulations, by the way on that quotation from Churchill on politicians with sweet words and crooked hearts on the horizon (I do not like Churchill on India or Indians in general, but he seems to have been something of a prophet in this regard).
Thank you for looking up the review of my Mother's first book - it's now out of print, but I've put the blurb for the new one, Strains in a Minor Key, and reviewers' comments on the old one at the bottom of this letter, in case you - or your friends - are interested. The first book was all-India during the Raj, this one is Calcutta post-Independence, but lots on minority communities - ours ("Native Christian"), yours and others. Feel free to pass it on. You might actually want to flick through the AI bits of Mother's second book - there might be things in it that would interest you. Ruth has a copy at Mr Advani's bookshop.
During our correspondence, Pat told me that she was a direct descendant of our family heroine Mrs Routleff of the cookery book, which my Mother analysed, and Pat sent me a photocopy of an incribed title page from Mrs R to a granddaughter "Stumps", so it was a nice thing to have. Pat also sent me her recipe for a North Indian ersatz mulligatawny with channa dal rather than coconut milk, and I am glad I have that memento of her. Ruth said, when I told her of this "Never cooked mulligatawny with coconut milk. Yes, the roasted channa ground into a fine powder and then mixed with water to a thin paste and then put into the curry just 10 minutes before taking it off the fire....that was my mum's recipe." And my Mother had gone into the whole business of mulligatawny north and south in detail in that first book. Food words are VERY difficult in India: the same thing has different names in different places and even in the same place, and different things have the same name... and then the UK and the US get everything wrong for their inventions that they use appropriated names for (e.g. korma).
Anyhow, so I wrote to Naomi Kolet to condole re Pat Venner, but got no answer. My main reason for writing to you was to ask you to pass on my condolences to whoever the most appropriate person is.
I was also going to ask Naomi Kolet, had she written back, for the recipe for the Calcutta Jewish chicken curry that was a feature of my childhood, if she knew it. Our then cook refused to divulge the secret of it, and it wnt with him...
Pat also said that apart from one Diana Biswas, she had schoolteacher aunts, too - in Canada - who knew a whole heap of AI nursery rhymes and such, which she was going to ask them to give me. If Pat is gone, I suppose this means the aunts have gone too? Do you know? Do you know of anyone - Pat-related or otherwise, in Canada, Lucknow or anywhere else, who would know this sort of thing? "Eleven jokes a-riding, a-riding, a-riding" etc. etc.
The other thing I am looking for is (a) specifically: in Reginald Maher's 1960s book on Anglo-Indians, he mentions an Anglo-Indian poet who wrote two books of poetry, but who never got anywhere because of his race but he does not mention his name and gives no clue. If I had the name I could start running after the books to see if they are any good.
(b) generally - ANY refs that you may know of on AIs in fiction (not Masters andBhowani Junction, but the sort of thing the world does not usually know of). After much searching in my old age, I found one from my childhood written by an Englishwoman, and her niece confirmed that yes, I had the street right and the family itself had it wrong...
(c) a contact for the lady MLA/MP from Madras who wrote in the Indian Railway Centenary of a "padre curry" made with whisky, from a 1930s recipe book: I want a photocopy of the recipe book. I DID email the lady, but got no answer.
I am "sort of" "passing for" AI here in Canberra - belong to the AI society etc., the nearest thing here to my own community. I have written three small non-scholarly articles on the subject.
I hope the above does not overwhelm you. I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards,
Sanjay
Rani Sircar's books
Given that there are many groups of marginalised silent minority women, I though you might be interested in the following two items, since books published in India often get but little exposure in the world beyond, largely because information does not get disseminated in or beyond India as easily or as automatically as one might think, even in our globalised age. But there are some who might find that information of interest, and it does no harm to pass it around. If totally outside your area of interest, please just disregard it...
Rani Sircar, Strains in a Minor Key: A Celebration of Sixty Years in Calcutta, Kolkata: Gangchil, 2014, published this year, would be of interest to those who still remember the Raj, or are the descendants of people who do (or did), or are in general interested in cultures the world does not get to hear of. It shows what happened to that colonial world and its inhabitants after independence. It can be had directly from the publishers Gangchil (<gangchil.books@gmail.com>) or from a bookseller in Lucknow, Ram Advani, who is experienced taking foreign money without bank fees etc. being involved <radvanilko@gmail.com>
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
From: george shepherd <georgeshepherdlkw@gmail.com>
To: ssircar1@yahoo.com.au
Sent: Thursday, 15 May 2014 7:19 PM
Subject: Dancing Around the Maypole
May 15, 2014
I'm contacting you following a message to me from Ruth Shepherd.
I read the review of your mother's book before contacting you. The book must be interesting!
How can I help you?
Waiting for your reply.
Regards
George Shepherd
Lucknow
