Stories of Our Lives

Memory, History, Narrative

By Frank de Caro

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2013 Frank de Caro
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-893-0

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………viiBe Sure to Read This First: A Preface………………………………..ix1 The Golden-Haired Maiden………………………………………….12 7002 Ridge………………………………………………………163 Foreigners Arrive………………………………………………..264 The Lake………………………………………………………..425 Beyond 7002……………………………………………………..676 Becoming the East Village…………………………………………907 Tinkly Temple Bells………………………………………………1138 Life in a Cornfield………………………………………………1429 Mexico………………………………………………………….15210 Long Ago and Far Away: Another Passage to India…………………….17611 Katrina: We Leave, We Return, Stories Abound……………………….198Contexts and Meanings: A Brief Afterword……………………………..210About the Author…………………………………………………..215

CHAPTER 1

The Golden-Haired Maiden

It is 1979 and I am sitting in a pub in Youghal, County Cork, Ireland,with six other people, five of whom have personal connections to an imperialpast. Our informal conversation quickly turns to the subject aboutwhich I have come to interview one of them, though I will wind up tapingfour out of the five later and will hear their stories.

At the bus station in Waterford yesterday evening the stage was set fororal performance. We tell the station agent where we’re going, and he lookscompletely puzzled, as though we have asked for a bus that goes to Moscowor San Francisco. Then he realizes that we have merely been mispronouncingthe name of our destination. We are not going to U-gall, as we havebeen saying, but rather to someplace more like Yawl. This linguistic confusionand its resolution sets him off on a lengthy paean to the joys of being abus conductor, of announcing destinations, of pointing out to his riders—especiallyany tourists aboard—the sights being passed. “Oh, ’tis grand,” hesays repeatedly, “’tis grand.” His lilting tones stoke our stereotypes of theIrish love of elaborate, musical speech and remind us of the Irish fame forverbal art, though the conductor on our journey the next day turns out tobe more taciturn.

The stage should be set, too, for the post-colonial. Ireland has, after all,been called Britain’s original colony. And it gained independence early—in1921, well before the spate of post–World War II British colonial departuresthat began with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947.

But we have not come to Ireland to encounter grand oral performances,but rather the prosaic, everyday speech of interviews. And though we arevery much interested in the colonial, there is nothing “post” about the colonialwe seek. Nor, for that matter, is the Irish context directly involved.We stopped in Ireland on the route of a larger project that will also takeus through England and Scotland that requires talking to British men andwomen who lived and worked in imperial India before independence—ascolonial administrators, soldiers, businesspeople, and in other capacities.My interest is in part personal and comes out of my Fulbright grant in Indiain the 1960s, an experience that made me curious about earlier generationsof Western sojourners on the subcontinent, who certainly left their markupon the cultural landscape in various ways.

But my fellow interviewer and I are both folklorists, and our currentproject is also part of an interest in the expanding conception of the parametersof folklore, of seeing folklore as something possessed and communicatedby virtually all human groups—not just “peasants” or “the commonpeople” or “country folk,” not just wizened mountaineers and star-crossedDelta bluesmen. Although our purpose here has a connection to oral history,we see our endeavor as folkloristic and ethnographic, as an exercise inwhat Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux once called “the study of cultureat a distance.” The distance is temporal as well as spatial, for the subcultureof our focus no longer exists either in situ or the present time because thecolonialists of India mostly came “Home” to the British Isles when theirworld in Asia ceased to exist. We want to know what sort of folklore existedin that world and, in passing, see something about the lore of a politicallyand socially elite group. To mention the various purposes of this project,however, merely provides a sort of prologue and—though the stories of thesahibs will play an important role here—this project on Anglo-India is butone focus of this book. Rather, the book is intended as a meditation on theimportance and value of narratives, oral narratives especially and personalnarratives in particular—by which I mean the structured and repeated storiesthat virtually all of us tell about our lives and the events and forces(personal, historical, and cultural) that have shaped our lives. In doing so, Imean to draw upon both research and stories of significance to me personallyor other people I’ve known. Such stories form us and communicatewho we are and constitute parts of larger narratives such as life historiesand social epics. In the past I think folklorists have performed a singularservice to the study of history and culture by repeatedly calling attention tosuch “humbler” narratives, though I also hope to suggest more about themeanings these stories possess in our repertoires of narratives while placingsome into contexts as part of my personal and family repertoire, necessarilyagainst the backdrop of memory and memoir.

We sit in the pub—a rather upscale one—and eat tasty fish sandwichesmade on excellent rolls with Ian, the informant we have come to see; hiswife, Davida; her brother-in-law, Howard; and Howard’s brother, Arthur;as well as Davida’s sister (and Howard’s wife), Marian (Arthur has nevermarried). All three men belonged to the small, elite Indian Civil Service, orICS, the corps which provided imperial India with its key administrators. Iam particularly struck by a story Arthur tells, about what happened to himafter he left India following Partition (we have learned that our informantsseldom speak of the independence of India and Pakistan, but rather referencethe partition of one entity into two nations as the culminating eventof the British Raj). Arthur’s story went something like this (we had no taperecorder at our pub lunch, so I am re-creating it here):

“Well, I had gone on to Egypt when I left India [Arthur said]. I wasmaking my way south. I thought that perhaps I would reach Kenya, yousee, and might try coffee farming there. But when I reached the cataractsof the Nile, I ran into an English chap and he said to me, ‘I say, aren’t youwearing a Marlborough tie?’ And I said I was. Marlborough was my oldpublic school.

“And he asked, ‘Were you at Marlborough?’

“‘Yes, of course,’ I said, or something of the sort.

“‘Why, so was I,’ he said, and we chatted a bit about Marlborough andthe people we might have known in common, though we had been there atrather different times.

“‘Well, what are you doing now?’ he finally asked.

“I told him I had left India and was heading for Kenya and might trycoffee farming, but he had another idea, you see.

“‘I’m in the Uganda Judicial Service,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come toUganda and join the Judicial Service?’

“And so that’s just what I did.”

It is the quintessential old school tie story. In the middle of Africa—stillvery much a colonial place, though India has become something else—he isliterally wearing a tie. This itself is a rather extraordinary fact, and by it hisidentity is recognized as an alumnus of an elite “public school,” and hence,not only as someone with an important link to the man he has run into butas someone suitably qualified—even without further inquiry—to assume animportant position as a judge in African colonial courts.

It is a story about an encounter full of assumptions about the characterand abilities of someone who attended a certain kind of school and whothus is a member of a certain class, and about the rightness of his takinga position in which he will judge the affairs of inferior, colonized people.It is also a story that reveals what a small world we deal with in our interviews—thisworld of the British upper classes whose members assumeda certain right to govern others. Its inhabitants have all gone to the sameschools, wear the same ties, encounter each other in far-flung if unlikelyplaces, trust each other, make assumptions about each other, and take careof each other’s interests.

In reality, Arthur’s significant ICS experience might also have enteredinto any consideration of him as a suitable candidate for this new career. Butthe story does not take that into account, but rather focuses on the smallnessof the (imperial) world, class solidarity, and the one-of-us-ness that unifiedcertain phases of the British colonial endeavor. Arthur seldom expressedthese ideas directly in the course of our interviews, yet they were certainlyrevealed in his story of the beginnings of his second colonial career. Indeed,the narratives embedded in our larger interviews often revealed much, andmuch that was never stated directly, suggesting the revelatory power of oralnarratives as people encode into their stories, even the most “simple” ones,what they might not otherwise say.

The great importance of stories in human communication has beenrecognized increasingly by contemporary scholarship. Those who engagein narratology—from whatever academic disciplines they may come—havewritten repeatedly of the great significance of story in human cultures.Cognitive scientist Mark Turner, for example, goes so far as to saythat “story … is the fundamental instrument of thought,” while linguistCharlotte Linde calls narrative “perhaps the most basic of all discourseunits.” Turner and Linde are referring, of course, to stories of all sorts,and narratology has given particular attention to the grand narratives ofliterature, film, and historical writing. Yet folklorists deserve special creditfor having looked at the most humble stories, at the folktales and legends ofpeople often socially marginalized. But in recent years they have also givenclose attention to the most everyday stories, the personal narratives thatpeople tell about themselves in and sometimes about ordinary situations.Folklorists are not the only ones to study such narratives (one thinks, forexample, of the pioneering work of William Labov), but they have taken tothese stories with a particular appreciation for them and a particular intensityof interest. Certainly in the larger scheme of things such narratives areeasily ignored. Yet frequently they provide telling insights into worldviewand cultural attitudes and assumptions so that our attention to them canbe very rewarding from the standpoint of cultural understanding. As I havesaid, my Anglo-Indian informants’ personal narratives often pointed tounderlying ideas that they seldom—if ever—addressed directly. They didprovide what Clifford Geertz calls “hindsight accounts of the connectednessof things”—accounts that were often less self-conscious and less deliberatelyconstructed than other, direct statements, but which made important connectionsas the narrators looked at their colonial lives in retrospect, tellingstories that obviously had personal meanings for them that also seemed tocomment on larger themes and issues.

For example, during our interview with Howard and his wife, Marian,she recounted the following story (which was recorded and is quoted here asa precise transcription), which centers on her father, also an ICS man; thesetting is a family holiday in Kashmir:

We just spent our time on the water. Beautiful lakes. We learned how toswim there …

But there was, curiously enough, over there a myth [that] there … wassomething that dwelt in the lake, a female who used to attract people, and,you know, Daddy was practically drowned under our very eyes … Hewas turning most peculiar, and it was this thing, this goddess if youlike … was asking for him. And it was only that we were out in the boatand the mangi—that’s the head sort of boatman over there—he threw outhis … paddle, and Daddy was able to grasp, get hold of it, and we rescuedhim. And, you know, he’d never go out again like that because he said heused to feel drawn towards the water, and it was quite the usual thing,apparently, that this … It had to claim a victim or two. And you’d neverthink on these beautiful, calm lakes surrounded by hills and mountainsthat anything like that could happen.

Although our informants discussed quite openly some of the dangers oflife in India—sometimes making light of them—this story suggests hiddendangers and fears they did not discuss. The danger here is not somethingspecific and concrete, like disease or a marauding tiger, but rather somethingvirtually unrecognized by the educated Western belief system, andwhich suggests a dread of unknown forces that might suddenly destroy theEuropean. The setting is a hill station, one supposedly among the safest forEuropeans because it was away from the heat and dust and teeming Indianmasses on the plains at lower altitudes and because the cool climate duringthe hot-weather season would seem more familiar and congenial to nativesof England and Scotland. Yet the protagonist is practically sucked to hisdeath nonetheless. The “goddess” perpetrator may be “demon” India herself,which both attracts and frightens the British, and the story can certainlybe seen as reflecting a generalized fear of the consequences of the Britishpresence here—a fear that logically would have been quite real, if perhapssuppressed, and indeed one that was never brought up to us in the responsesto our many questions. The story also suggests a certain assimilation ofIndian folk beliefs, something virtually never touched on in other aspects ofthe interviews, though our questions tried to probe the connections betweenBritish and Indian on the cultural level.

I have included these two sahib stories here partly because I just likethem. I grew up, an American in New York City, with the idea of theBritish Empire as not only unimaginably vast and sprawling—such thatan Englishman might shift from one part to another with seemingly littleeffort—but also as being run by an elite; and Arthur’s shift to Africa andhis encounter there reinforced my conceptions. Like many of us, I admitto a certain fondness for the macabre and the supposed nearness of supernaturalforces, and the story of the Kashmir lake appeals to just that. ButI also recognize thematic concerns in both stories that demonstrate howstories can communicate. That possibility for communication is not onlyfound in stories from the other side of the world but from far more homeyones, such as those that many families maintain to pass on the familial pastand familial values. Rather, as my retired Anglo-Indian sahibs partly spokeof their past experience through stories, so did the members of my familypartly remember the collective familial past through passed-down oralnarratives; and certainly those stories I heard for much of my life had a farmore pronounced effect upon me than did stories I recorded years later,even if both kinds could be understood as conveying meaning. Unlike thegenerically personal narratives just given, my family’s stories are more communal—likethe traditional tales folklorists have historically most comfortablystudied, a similitude that Mody Boatright recognized as “family saga.”Nonetheless, I see a relationship between them and personal narratives inthat both kinds of stories sort of fly under the radar in that they are transmittedso informally and are ubiquitous but seldom collected or publishedas such. Because they are common within particular personal and familialcontexts, non-folklorists tend to pay them little attention, though in factthey can tell us a great deal.

My family (I will discuss only stories of my mother’s “side” in this chapter)has a number of stories, but a particular group of them—all involvingmy great-grandparents Charley and Annie Brown “out West”—haveenjoyed particular popularity among my relatives who, I think, see them asparticularly significant.
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