5. On Anglo-Indians

Here's a bit of general background on my obscure ethnic group, the Anglo-Indians.

This is a photograph of me at my first home in Erode, South India.

‘To understand one life, you have to swallow the world,’ wrote Salman Rushdie, and this is especially true for migrants. Like it or not, the migrant’s life is shaped by large historical events. There are usually political or economic reasons for uprooting one’s life, and subjecting oneself to the slings and arrows that come with displacement. I blame the British Empire’s demise, and its chaotic withdrawal from India, for my particular form of displacement, which makes it difficult for me to lay claim to any single homeland, or place. Technically, I’m a mixed-race Anglo-India, a tiny minority community born of the colonial encounter between Europe and India. The literal progeny of colonial desire, it is little wonder that Anglo-Indians have serious ‘mummy and daddy’ issues. Rejected by Mother India and barely tolerated by the class and race conscious British, Anglo-Indians are orphans. You might call them midnight’s orphans, for on August 15, 1947 at the stroke of midnight, a British act of parliament created the nation of state of India, and simultaneously consigned Anglo-Indians to the dustbin of history.
They, we, I became an historical footnote, a curious relic of a once proud and mighty empire. Feeling like second-class citizens in the land of their birth, most Anglo-Indians fled India. Most went to the UK, but many others made new lives in Australia, Canada and the USA. By the early nineteen sixties, my father’s family had mostly settled in London. My maternal relatives stayed put, delaying the decision to migrate until the 1970s by which time the British had closed its borders to Anglo-Indians. Lucky for them, that Australia had finally dismantled the infamous ‘White Australia Policy’. Not so lucky for me. I was born in Madras, but left for London as an infant (I was nine months old when I left India). As far as I was concerned, I was British even though the colour of my skin, and the racist epithets I endured on a daily basis told me that this was a heavily contested identity. No matter. I was to be uprooted, and transported to the other side of the world because my mother’s family procrastinated about getting out of India. I didn’t fully understand the reasons for this monumental move until many years later. I didn’t want to move. Well, that’s not entirely true.
Migration is an adventure. At least that’s how it seemed to me when I was 11 years old. I approached the big move with a mixture of excited anticipation and grief. The boundaries of my world were narrow in London. School excursions aside, I lived most of my life in a very small patch of the great city — it was a predominantly gray and drab landscape. Rows of monolithic terraced houses, some still scarred from the aftermath of Nazi bombs, provided the grim background to my childhood. The impoverished environment was nevertheless home. I was part of a close-knit community comprised of cousins, eccentric aunts and uncles, as well as school friends. These people were important to me, and the prospect of leaving them behind filled me with dread. As a child, I had no say in the matter of migration, I was powerless to prevent the inevitable. No amount of screaming and crying could change things. I packed my meager possessions and scooped up some British soil, put it in a jar, carrying it as a kind of talisman to my new home in Perth, Western Australia.

4. Music.

The tension between me and my father, and the gap between his aspirations and mine are best expressed through our musical tastes. The film will contain perhaps three musical interludes that dramatize this particular aspect of our relationship. A possible opening scene might include me playing a faux Indian raga on an electric guitar. I'd like to set this scene in a theatre space populated with Indian ornaments and rugs. I'd be dressed in Indian clothes while performing the fauz raga. The following text might accompany or follow the musical performance, which may also include representations of Anglo-Indians in Indian films (see the image on this page).

This is a still from the film, Julie, a Bollywood film about Anglo-Indians

‘What sort of music do Pakis like?’

The question hit me like an electric bolt. Zap, Pow, Kazowie! My cheeks burned, my eyes watered, and my head started to spin. I looked down at my feet, while I tried to quickly formulate some kind of a response. First, I wasn’t a ‘Paki’ — I was born in India, and my parents told me I was an Anglo-Indian. I wasn’t entirely sure what an Anglo-Indian was, but I knew Anglo-Indians weren’t Pakis.

My tormentor continued.

‘Do you like that sitar stuff?

Fuck no! I watched Top of the Pops. I listened to Bowie and Bolan, and if my parents weren’t so fucking uptight I’d be wearing satin flares, eyeliner and glitter in my hair.  In my mind, I was already a glam rocker. In my mind, I looked just like every other kid in my shitty East London classroom.

I tried to set the record straight, but my tongue felt like a thick slab of expansive, uncooperative flesh. I stuttered, I stammered, and I mumbled. Eventually, I produced a sound resembling the word ‘No’.

I can no longer remember exactly when this event occurred, but the visceral experience of humiliation still inhabits my body. I think this was the first time in my life that I realized that my ‘phonotypical’ differences automatically excluded me from certain activities, and precluded me from constructing certain kinds of identities. I could never be a ‘Starman’ not even in my mind’s eye.

Many of the working class English kids in my neighborhood (Plaistow, E13) had a particularly low tolerance for Pakis. I lived in East London during the time of the National Front. A time when ‘Paki’ bashing was the favorite pastime of Skinheads, and a time marked by incendiary speeches made by the overtly racist conservative politician, Enoch Powell. These people did not make fine distinctions between different groups of brown skinned people from the subcontinent.  Indians, Paki’s, Bengalis, Ugandan Asians, Anglo-Indians, we were all fucking ‘Pakis’ to them.

So, what music do Paki’s like?

3. Old Technology

My father loved to record family life. He took a large number of 35mm stills and also sporadically documented our family activities on cine film and audio tape. I want to make these recording mechanisms part of the film's mise-en-scene. I'd like to record them in action, so to speak. I still have his cine camera and 8mm projector, his reel-to-reel tape recorder and 35mm camera. I'd like to use the film negatives, and reversal film stock in some way. Anyway, the text below, may or may not be useful in helping to flesh out the place of these objects in the film, but it does convey my thoughts on the place of old technology in contemporary culture.

The Elizabethan Popular 200 tape recorder is about 50 years old. It was made in Romford, Essex, and was, apparently, a popular item. It enabled ordinary people to record sound in fairly high fidelity on a shoestring budget. My father bought one of these machines sometime in the mid 1960s, and used it as a device to play commercially recorded music, and also to tape the audio from TV broadcasts, and sporadically record the voices of his family.

The tape recorder was once part of a network of related accessories: reel-to-reel tapes, valves, microphones and so forth. It was possible to buy these items easily, for the machine was owned by thousands, possibly millions of people. Today, they are relics, available in junk shops and sometimes on eBay. The machine is esoteric. It no longer possesses widespread utility. It’s very existence is of a different order. We might say, with the philosopher Heidegger, that it’s existence was once ready-to-hand whereas today it’s present-at-hand, an object of abstract contemplation rather than something with an everyday utility. A lot of my father’s technological,possessions now belong to this category of present-at-hand. His 8mm cine projector, and his 35mm film camera, for example, were,once worldly items, common, useful, contemporary. Today, for me, they are primarily objects that facilitate an encounter with the past, and with the world of my childhood. These old, dusty, broken down machines created the family archive, and allow me to tell my story in a variety of media, but the machines themselves demand close inspection. Old technology has a different way of being in the world. In some ways they are like old people who no longer feel that they are part of any social or political network. As we age our sense of belonging in the world begins to diminish, and fade. We cease to be as useful as we were in our blooming days of youth. We increasingly become objects of contemplation, objects of scholarly inspection, curios in a junk shop full of detritus.

2. Aspirations

The film tells the story of my father life, and his quest for personal and professional 'respectability'. I intend to use his 8mm films, photographs, medical records and other sundry bits of ephemera (including his unsuccessful job applications, x-ray scans and his 'alphabetical maxims' to illustrate my performance —some of these items appear below).


My father never gave up his quest for a clerical job. He scanned the job advertisements in the newspapers regularly and methodically, and applied for many jobs without success. For reasons I will never fully understand, he decided to keep a record of his rejection records. Letter after letter, written in the impersonal prose favoured by bureaucrats, summarily dismiss my father’s applications. I wonder why he preserved these humiliating reminders of his inability to occupy the clerical position he so desperately sought. He wasn’t especially well educated, and, by his own admission, struggled to complete high school. He had to be coached to pass the compulsory confirmation exam for postal clerks in London, and his Australian public service exam results were unspectacular, indicating that he did not possess the aptitude for the career he desired so much. I wonder what his application letters were like?
There’s so much I will never know about my father, but these rejection letters tell a story that sheds some light on his private struggles. Driving home from work one rainy evening in 1979 my father had a car accident on Railway Parade, Bayswater. He lost control of his car on a bridge, the car rolled, coming to rest on its roof. My father managed to crawl out of the vehicle’s passenger side window. He survived with a few minor bruises, and suffered from a mild dose of shock. Since he was on his way back from work, he was entitled to claim workers compensation for an injury sustained while on duty. He claimed that the accident had damaged his back, and this made it difficult for him to continue his duties as a bus conductor. I suspect he may have been hoping that his employer would have no choice but to give him the elusive desk job he coveted since his arrival in Australia. He submitted him self to various medical examinations in an attempt to prove that he was unfit for his current position, which required some degree of physical dexterity. The medical reports failed to find any direct link between the accident and my father’s back injury. One report did note that he was slightly obese and unfit, though.

In a cruel twist of fate, the MTT did redeploy my father, but not in a clerical role. My father ended his life as night watchmen at the Mirrabooka bus station. This job was difficult, and I’m sure it took a toll on his health. He was forced to work late shifts. He would usually leave for work close to midnight, and return home at breakfast time. Given his age, and physical condition, this was probably the worst sort of work for a man like him. The insurance company paid him a small sum of money to compensate for his new job’s lower salary, but the new job was a disaster. His sleeping patterns became erratic, and he was operating in a daze most of the time. He never got used to sleeping during daylight hours, and his lack of quality sleep took a toll on his health. He put on more weight, and became sullen and depressed, at least this is what his doctor’s report says.

Amongst his papers is letter, which indicates that he wanted to prove that his back pain was no longer an impediment to working as a conductor. So, towards the very end of his life he attempted to get his old job back, a job he detested. I was oblivious to his struggle and depression, although I was on the receiving end of his irrational tirades often. I was a young adult; enjoy a newfound sense of autonomy from my parents, and immersing myself in university life. Of course, my carefree lifestyle was predicated on my parents’ hard work and sacrifice. I thought my father a bad-tempered old man, and there’s little doubt in my mind that we were on bad terms when he died.

While sorting through his papers I came across X-rays of his back. I stared at the images of my father’s bones. They reminded me of the skeleton from the Batavia wreck in the Fremantle museum. This is what we are in the end— a pile of bones given temporary life. My father died in his sleep. His death was not as violent as the unknown victim of the Batavia museum, yet I can’t help feeling my father was also a victim of violence and injustice. He was a different kind of boat person, but Australia, for all it gave him — a large quarter acre block of land with a house loved, wide open spaces, blue skies, a fecund garden, a games room, a personal bar, and the relentless, scorching heat — destroyed him, too. He never achieved the station and modest status of a clerical worker. He toiled on the buses, under the sky in all weather, and finally in the dark. With a radio for company, and a flashlight his only tool of trade, he kept watch over the quiet bus station in the wee small hours of the morning, devoid of human company. He toiled until his heart gave out on 5 March 1985. He was 53 years old.

His insurance claim was still active when he died, and his case wasn’t resolved until 1986. My mother received $2000 compensation, and The MTT took no responsibility for my father’s death. On the medical evidence, it seems that they didn’t have a case to answer. My father was not a healthy man. He was obese, and didn’t take care of himself. He just assumed that his body would continue to serve him without any care or maintenance. He was tightly wound, and his was a quiet desperation. A desperation he attempted to conceal from his family to some degree. I’m not surprised he was diagnosed with depression. His goal to be a ‘respectable’ clerk was modest, but his failure to secure a job with a modicum of status destroyed. He didn’t suffer a fatal fell swoop to the head, and even though he died in his sleep, his death was no less violent. He slipped away, slowly, silently, a broken man.

1. I Hate Suits

  
This opening scene will be accompanied by a montage of still images of me in suits. I have at least 15 images that will work, and I imagine we can cut between these images and a recording of my live presentation, which will be a spontaneous, 'off the cuff' version of the text below.

I HATE suits. I don’t mean executives and administrators. I actually hate suits, I think I got my first suit at the age of seven. I remember my father taking me to a tailor somewhere in East London who poked, prodded and measured me up for a hideous costume that made me look like a subcontinental version of Little Lord Fauntleroy. My father, on the other hand, had a thing about suits, and fabrics defined our relationship and drove a wedge between us that remained in place until the day he died. My father was an Anglo-Indian, and Anglo-Indians of his generation loved suits. So, in order to understand my almost pathological hatred of suits you need to know something about Anglo-Indians.





Anglo-Indians are the smallest, and possibly oddest, minority group in India. They are the literal progeny of European colonization, and often stereotyped as being ‘more British than the British’ because they practice Christianity, speak English as their first language and generally adopt British social customs. Today, Anglo-Indians are mostly a diasporic community living in the United Kingdom, North America and Australia. When the British left India in 1947 many Anglo-Indians left with them believing they had no future in the new republic. My father left India in 1963, first for the UK, and then some years later for Australia.
It’s not easy being an Anglo-Indian in Australia, particularly if you look like an Indian and behave like an Australian. People are generally curious about the disparity between your appearance and your culture, and often ask questions like: Where are you really from? Where did you learn to speak such good English? Why can’t you speak ‘Indian’?
My father was a man of principles, and he derived his sense of values from a somewhat odd and diverse collection of aphorisms and maxims. One of his favourites was ‘clothes maketh the man.’ Accordingly, my relationship with him was defined, in many ways, by our radically divergent views on sartorial elegance. Our differences of opinion on this matter resulted in countless arguments, characterized by histrionic displays of anger and disgust, particularly during my adolescence and early adult years. I never understood my father’s obsession with clothes, and his insistence that I should always look ‘smart’, until after his death. At fourteen, visits to the menswear sections of department stores filled me with dread. The hairdresser’s technologies of choice–the scissors and the electric clippers–also held special terrors for my adolescent self. I wanted to be a longhaired hippie, and get around in ‘Californian’ jeans (a monstrous grey mutation of blue jeans) and desert boots with tractor treads–two essential components of social acceptability at John Forrest Senior High School circa 1977. With the assistance of his ‘barber’ and ‘tailor, my father thwarted this ambition until I flew the family coop.

A few days after my father died in 1985, he appeared to me in a dream. I’ve completely forgotten the narrative details of the dream, but the image of my father remains vivid in my memory. Two things about this image have particular significance for me. The first is the expression on his face. His eyes are bloodshot, and tears are running down his cheeks. He looks as though he desperately wants to communicate something, but can’t summon the words to express himself. He is mute, probably rendered speechless by grief. His look is one of sorrow and deep remorse. On reflection, he is obviously trying to say goodbye. More pointedly, though, I think his demeanor expresses his regret about our relationship. Of course, since I am describing an image in my dream the regret is mine, the tears and grief, too (tears and grief that I couldn’t express in real life).

The second striking feature of this apparition is my father’s clothes. He’s dressed in his favourite dark blue blazer with a crest on its right breast pocket. He is also wearing a crisply ironed white shirt complemented by a wide red and white checked tie. His trousers are pressed and his black shoes are brightly polished. He looks exactly like he did on the day he moved with us to Australia from the UK. He must have found it difficult to say goodbye to his extended family then, but he was also manifestly excited by the prospect of moving to a new country and starting a new life, and his dress conveyed this optimism. His choice of dress for this occasion was thoughtful and considered. I’m sure he wanted to leave his family with an image that conveyed his personality and sense of values. His conservative blazer went a long way towards consolidating such an image. Of course, a lot of people are interested in clothes and fashion, but my father’s choice of clothes and the image that his dress sense conveyed had little to do with any desire to appear particularly fashionable. It stemmed from a desire to be accepted as a European.

As I grew older my own sense of fashion became more extreme and deliberately oppositional. Like most cultural trends, punk arrived late in my home town of that time, Perth. Indeed, it was 1984 before I fully embraced the phenomenon. Seduced by its anti-establishment politics and its DIY aesthetic, I gave myself a stylistic makeover in a desperate bid to appear radical and politically sophisticated. I cut my long hair and put a safety pin through my left ear lobe. The punk or post-punk uniform relied heavily on recycled clothes from op-shops, and suits from the 1960s were highly coveted items. My father had an impressive collection of suits from this era in his wardrobe. So, after years of heaping scorn on his formal attire, I found myself regularly borrowing my father’s suit jackets.

A few months before he died, I lost one of his jackets — the one he wore to his mother’s funeral. Of all the items of clothing in his wardrobe, I’d lost the one item that held emotional significance for him. My negligence enraged him, and this act of neglect further soured our relationship, already strained by my increasing enthusiasm for punk and my lack of interest in getting a job. As my previous posts demonstrate, my father hoped I’d become a clerk, a position that signified a high social status among his generation of Anglo-Indians. He even made me sit the public service entrance exam, against my wishes, when I was fifteen. A few years later he got me a job as a sheet metal worker’s assistant because he feared that remaining idle for three months between the end of school and the beginning of university would be bad for my ‘character’. I acquiesced in his wishes mainly because of the prospect of actually earning money for the first time in my life. However, by my early twenties I didn’t really want to do much, and clerical work was not on my agenda.
In my father’s eyes, I was what he called a ‘waster’, someone with no ambition and no prospects. Everything about me upset him. I’d even managed to incorporate a treasured item of his clothing into my ensemble of revolt. He was obviously disappointed with the course of my life, and he died before I could convince him that I wasn’t completely worthless.
I’m still haunted by the image of my father in his dark blue blazer, waving goodbye from the great beyond, embarking on yet another journey. For the record, though, I still hate suits.

Introduction

Each blog entry will, in most cases, provide the resources for a segment in our proposed film: Cruel Optimism and AJ D'Cruz. This title is tentative, and will probably change as the project develops. The film is based on a performative lecture, which was last presented at the 2015 PSi conference held at RMIT. I will post images, text, and annotations, which will hopefully help us structure the film.

This image is from the first iteration of the project performed at the Walker Street Gallery, Dandenong.