Passage to India

My Dad was born in Calcutta, now called Kolkata. His Dad, an English tea trader had shipped East from London where he met my Grandma, an Irish nurse who had a Florence Nightingale aura about her.  She would die young of breast cancer and many decades later my Aunty showed me photographs and told me stories about her which filled a gap in my family knowledge.  My Dad never mentioned his Mum, the pain of loosing a mother so young and being shunted off quickly thereafter to an English boarding school took its toll.  The blight of the English stiff upper lip.

Kolkata circa 1937, Grandpa seated in the middle, Grandma to the right.

Dad would grow up to follow his father into the tea trade, accepting a job in Colombo, Sri Lanka where he and his newly married British wife, my mother, ushered two girls into the world.  I learned early on through a succession of nannies who were fired at regular intervals, and by hanging out in the kitchen, that the staff did not have a great reverence for their employers' children.  One of the kitchen hands used to fix a clothes peg to my ear lobe and make me count to ten, in Sinhalese, before taking it off.  Ow!  Still, I never squealed.

Despite, or because of my early experiences and background I remained sceptical of the benefits colonisation brought to Sri Lanka and India.  I grew up listening to the forthright assertion that British rule was a blessing to third world countries, pulling the poor souls out of chaos and into a promised land of industrialisation and rule-making.  Never mind that they had their own rules and laws. 

In November I visited India for the first time, I was elated to finally visit a country I had heard so much about, and to form my own view of it unfiltered through the lenses of my family's reminiscing.  Arriving in Delhi with only one full day to spare, en route to Northern India I decided against the inevitable tourist frenzy at the Taj Mahal and opted to sightsee Old Delhi instead.  Standing in the courtyard at the Jama Masjid mosque I looked through the arches and saw The Red Fort, a stunning seventeenth century palace built on a scale that would challenge the fertile imaginations of The Game of Thrones producers.  Here was India.  Here too were the British.

Weaving through the traffic and market sellers which separate the Mosque from the Fort, my guide Bhupendra unravelled the long history of the Fort.  As we passed through the outside walls, no longer guarded by crocodiles hidden in the moats, yet requiring bag checks and a quick frisk as we entered, Bhupendra pointed out a number of ugly brick barracks which the British had built inside the Fort after an uprising in 1857.  These buildings were not only out of time, their functional design jarred with the exquisite palaces and gardens inside the Red Fort walls.  Looking at these barracks William Blake's hymn Jerusalem sounded in my ears. Written around the time the East India Company and the British Army were making significant inroads into India, I heard the hymn and rearranged the words: 

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In other people's green and pleasant Lands.

My Grandpa would turn in his grave.

I'm photographed at the Jama Masjid mosque in Delhi, India's largest mosque with a courtyard capable of holding 25,000 people.