NY Times Article: Anglo Indians Fading & India’s Obsession With Whiteness!
Fadeout for a Culture That’s Neither Indian Nor British
Sybil Martyr, a retired schoolteacher, lives in Calcutta with other elderly Anglo-Indians. Both of her grandfathers were Scottish.
By MIAN RIDGE
Published: August 14, 2010
CALCUTTA — Entering the crumbling mansion of the Lawrence D’Souza Old Age Home here is a visit to a vanishing world.
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Times Topics: India | Great Britain
Breakfast tea from a cup and saucer, Agatha Christie murder mysteries and Mills & Boon romances, a weekly visit from the hairdresser, who sets a dowager’s delicate hair in a 1940s-style wave. Sometimes, a tailor comes to make the old-style garments beloved by Anglo-Indian women of a certain age. Floral tea dresses, for example.
“On Sundays, we listen to jive, although we don’t dance much anymore,” Sybil Martyr, a 96-year-old retired schoolteacher, said with a crisp English accent.
“We’re museum pieces,” she said.
The definition has varied over time, but under the Indian Constitution the term Anglo-Indian means an Indian citizen whose paternal line can be traced to Europe. Both of Mrs. Martyr’s grandfathers were Scots.
Like most Anglo-Indian women of her generation, she has lived all her life in India and has never been to Britain. But she converses only in English. At school, she said, she learned a little Latin and French and enough “kitchen Bengali” to speak to servants.
Before 1947, when the British left India, Anglo-Indians — also known at the time as half-castes, blacky-whites and eight annas (there were 16 annas in a rupee, the official currency of India) — formed a distinct community of 300,000 to 500,000 people. Most were employed in the railroads and other government services, and many lived in railroad towns built for them by the British, where their distinctive culture, neither Indian nor British, flourished.
But today that culture is fading fast, with Mrs. Martyr’s generation perhaps its last torchbearers.
No one is certain how many Anglo-Indians live in India today; they were last counted in a census in 1941. Intermarriage and successive waves of emigration after Indian independence are thought to have reduced their number to 150,000 at most, said Robyn Andrews, a social anthropologist at Massey University in New Zealand.
The children and grandchildren of those who stayed have become increasingly assimilated, marrying Indians without European ancestors and adopting local languages.
The president of India appoints two Anglo-Indian members of Parliament each session to ensure that the tiny community has political representation. The culture lives on, somewhat, in Anglo-Indian dishes like country chicken, a tangy dish seasoned with garlic and ginger, and pepper water, a spicy tomato-chili sauce, ladled on rice with meat on the side.
Barry O’Brien, an Anglo-Indian lawmaker in West Bengal’s State Assembly, said most Anglo-Indians were Christians, but he acknowledged that there were no longer enough of them to fill their own churches. He said the distinct Anglo-Indian lifestyle, so faithfully adhered to by people like Mrs. Martyr, would probably not outlive them.
“It’s going to be gone, completely, within a few years, and with it, a unique memory of the British in India,” Mr. O’Brien said.
The culture dates to the late 18th century, when British employees of the East India Company began to marry Indian women in substantial numbers and have children. By the late 19th century, as more British women migrated to India, cross-cultural marriages dwindled. But by then, Anglo-Indians had achieved a privileged, if curious, place in Indian life.
Though their lifestyles were more British than Indian, Anglo-Indians rarely mixed with Britons as equals. The British generally looked down on Anglo-Indians, who tended to consider themselves superior to Indians.
Some confusion persists among Anglo-Indians about what it means to be British. When asked what food she likes, Mrs. Martyr replied: “Oh, English, like you eat in England — curries and cutlets. And some Indian food, like dal.”
In some respects, Anglo-Indians tended to be socially progressive, Mr. O’Brien said. By the early 20th century, he said, many Anglo-Indian women worked outside the home, at a time when few middle-class Indian women did. They established an English-language education system, financed by the British, and a vast network of social clubs.
“All the Indians wanted to be Anglo-Indian,” said Malcolm Booth, 83, the honorary general secretary of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association. Portraits of dark-eyed, pale-skinned men in suits hung on the walls of his Delhi office, where, dressed in 1950s-style paisley-patterned suspenders, he sipped tea.
A former railroad engineer, Mr. Booth defines Anglo-Indian more strictly than the Constitution does. He regards Goans with Portuguese and French ancestry as pretenders, even though the constitutional definition, once used to ensure job quotas and other privileges for Anglo-Indians, accepts any European ancestry on the father’s side.
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Times Topics: India | Great Britain
Along with educational and social benefits, Anglo-Indians received preferential pay during British rule, according to Mr. Booth. In the 1940s, he said, a British train engineer earned around 300 rupees a month, while an Anglo-Indian would earn 200 and an Indian 100.
The demise of the British Raj was a shock from which the Anglo-Indian community took decades to recover. Many of the better off and more highly skilled left for new lives overseas. Those who stayed lost the privileges to which they had become accustomed. Government financing for separate Anglo-Indian schools, for instance, stopped in 1961.
After hiring quotas for Anglo-Indians were abolished, their inability to speak Hindi and other Indian languages took a toll on their employment opportunities.
The poverty and isolation that resulted still haunt Anglo-Indian retirement homes like Mrs. Martyr’s, an atmospheric, once-grand building whose residents are far from affluent, paying $65 a month to live there.
Today, though, the fortunes of younger Anglo-Indians are generally rising, Mr. O’Brien said. Their English skills and what Ms. Andrews, the anthropologist, describes as their “Western bearing” make them attractive employees for multinationals and Indian outsourcing companies.
“You go for a job interview in a multinational with a name like O’Brien, and, well, it all flows pretty easily for our children these days,” Mr. O’Brien said.
Samuel Moses, a recruitment consultant with Catalyst Consulting Services, an employment agency in Calcutta, agreed. “It’s their fluency in English that makes it easy for them to get positions in multinationals and customer care positions in call centers,” he said.
Greg Francis, a 30-year-old Anglo-Indian from Calcutta, where his forefathers worked on the railroads, works for I.B.M.’s call center division in Gurgaon, a high-rise satellite city on Delhi’s edge where many multinationals have their headquarters where he trains Indians on dealing with Westerners. “They need to learn a lot,” he said.
His life is good, he said, but he could not shake the idea that his people’s best days were in the past.
“I feel kind of homesick for those old times,” he said, “although I never knew them.”
Toronto Sun Article: Should Canada Follow Australia & Send The Tamils Back To Sri Lanka?
End refugee free-for-all
Build off-shore processing centre before allowing them into Canada
By EZRA LEVANT, QMI Agency
Last Updated: August 15, 2010 2:00am
Great news for health care!
The Victoria General Hospital is reopening a whole ward that had been shut down. They’re even contemplating dusting off an extra emergency department. No more waiting lists in that B.C. city!
Just joking.
The VGH is indeed doing all of that, but it’s not for mere Canadians.
It’s for a ship of 490 Tamils from Sri Lanka who decided they’d like to move to Canada, but don’t want to bother asking us first, or waiting in line like everyone else.
Reports from the ship say there was an outbreak of tuberculosis.
It’s a safe bet the B.C. department of health didn’t set aside millions of dollars in their budget for that Third World disease.
No problem — just take it away from MRIs or cataract surgeries. No one will notice, and if they do, let’s just call them racist.
Question: If a Canadian waiting for surgery were to get on that boat, could he jump to the front of the health-care line, too? Or is that privilege only for non-citizens, non-taxpayers?
The ship, the MV Sun Sea, was not originally destined for Canada. We’re an awfully long journey from Sri Lanka, an island country just off the tip of India.
No, they were en route to Australia, but changed course when their captain decided Australia’s navy would intercept the ship and turn it away. Canada, internationally known as a soft touch with generous welfare and free health care, was the obvious alternative.
Question: If Australia’s left-wing Labour government is willing to defend its shores, why is our right-wing Conservative government unwilling to do so?
Our navy didn’t stop the Tamils. We escorted them in, like ushers at the theatre.
Sri Lanka is not a nice place to live, in part because of the 30-year civil war waged against it by the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist organization.
More than 80,000 people have been killed in that war, but in May 2009 the Sri Lankan army finally crushed the Tamil stronghold on the island and killed its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran.
Still, terrorists continue to organize and fundraise, especially in Toronto where 200,000 Tamils live.
But with the war over, life in Sri Lanka has improved — so much so that the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees says the security situation there is “greatly improved,” and countries of the world should no longer presume someone fleeing Sri Lanka is a genuine refugee.
Question: Why are we pretending these Tamils are refugees, when even the bleeding hearts at the UN don’t?
Let’s ask Gurbax Singh Malhi, a Liberal MP who spoke at a Tamil Tiger rally on Parliament Hill last March, surrounded by the terrorist group’s flags and portraits of Prabhakaran.
“You’re here today for a great cause,” he said. “I am helping you guys, I’m behind you because you’re fighting for the right cause.”
Question: What cause was Malhi referring to? The terrorist war in Sri Lanka? Or the cause of 200,000 Toronto Tamils voting for Malhi’s party?
Let’s do what Australia does. They have a small island 2,600 km off the coast of Perth. It’s actually closer to other countries, like Indonesia.
Australia built an 800-bed holding centre on the island. It’s not a prison, but it’s not a resort either.
When ships full of gatecrashers are caught, they’re steered to Christmas Island, which is not considered Australian soil from an immigration point of view.
They wait there until their refugee claims are processed — and are kicked out if they’re bogus. No living it up in the big city, no disappearing into a 200,000 person diaspora.
Let’s build a Christmas Island. We can do it on one of our remote islands off the West Coast, maybe in the Queen Charlottes.
Food and medicine, immigration officials and CSIS — and no legal rights to anything more, not even to vote for Mr. Malhi.
ezra.levant@sunmedia.ca
Globe & Mail Article: Canada Can’t Turn Away The Tamils Due To Canadian Charter Of Rights & International Law!
Lorne Waldman and Audrey Macklin
From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail Published on Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2010 5:00AM
The arrival of the Sun Sea in British Columbia, just months after the Ocean Lady, has brought calls for legislative changes to allow the federal government to intercept and turn away future ships. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews wisely rejected this proposal, which would be contrary to our obligations under international law and the Charter of Rights.
Asylum seekers on boats is not a new phenomenon. In 1939, the St. Louis, filled with hundreds of refugees fleeing the Nazis, was turned away from Canada. At the time, the government tried to discredit the passengers as frauds and economic opportunists, and warned that, if the St. Louis were permitted to dock, more Jews in Europe might follow. The “line must be drawn somewhere,” and it was drawn at zero. Many of the people on board subsequently perished in the death camps.
In 1969, Canada signed the Refugee Convention and undertook not to return refugees if they had a valid fear of persecution. This obligation is part of our law. Once asylum seekers reach our territorial waters and are in Canada, they cannot be sent back to another country unless their claims for protection have been denied.
From the St. Louis onward, every new boat is accompanied by denunciation of the passengers as frauds and dire warnings of future “waves.” Yet, two boats – one filled with Tamils and the other with Sikhs – arrived in the 1980s followed by four boats with Chinese in the 1990s, and the sky did not fall in. All were given due process without creating havoc. Some were found to be refugees, some not. Other countries, including Australia and the United States, receive far more sea-borne migrants than Canada, and far more irregular migrants in general.
But what of turning the boats away before they enter our waters? Various human-rights bodies all have held that interdiction on the high seas is illegal under international law. Both the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights agree that asylum seekers’ right to life require they have their claim determined in a fair process, not on the high seas.
Moreover, such a regime would run afoul of our Charter. Our Supreme Court has held that Canada cannot be directly or indirectly complicit in torture or other human-rights violations. By turning away boats without fairly determining whether those on board would be at risk, we would be violating refugees’ right to life and security of the person.
If turning away boats is not the answer, what can Canada do? First, Canada can accept the fact that the arrival of boats waxes and wanes according to factors disconnected from Canada’s refugee policies. In the case of the Chinese migrants in the late 1990s, the flow stopped because the economic conditions that drove them to leave improved. Today, Tamils seek asylum because of the conflict in Sri Lanka and its ongoing aftermath. Since the Sri Lankan government proclaimed that it won the civil war, it’s done nothing to redress the Tamils’ legitimate demands. Instead, it has continued a campaign of intimidation and persecution that has produced a mass exodus from the country. Canada must join with others to press Sri Lanka to negotiate in good faith with the Tamil minority. Without real peace, the flow of Tamil refugee claimants will continue.
Canada can also discourage any non-genuine claimants by ensuring timely, fair decisions in their refugee claims, followed by the prompt return of failed claimants. Parliament has already acted to amend the refugee procedure to provide for timely decisions, but the procedures will not come into effect until 2011. Assuming the system is resourced and staffed in a way that enables it to operate fairly and efficiently, this will act as another deterrent against fraudulent claims.
Canada receives about 30,000 claimants each year. Five hundred Tamils represent only 2 per cent of the annual intake. The rest arrive by plane or overland, so don’t elicit the same moral panic as people on boats. Although the system has experienced delays in recent times, it has managed to provide a reasonably fair determination. Failed claimants are being deported each year in record numbers. All this to say, that with a just and efficient determination system, we will be able to deal with asylum seekers arriving by boat or otherwise. And the best way – indeed, the only way – to stop any future boats from Sri Lanka is by solving the problems in Sri Lanka.
Globe & Mail Article: Canadian Government Say They Will Stop Illegal Migrants From Immigrating To Canada!
Marten Youssef
Vancouver — Globe and Mail Update Published on Saturday, Aug. 14, 2010 10:39PM EDT Last updated on Sunday, Aug. 15, 2010 4:01PM EDT
Ottawa is vowing to curb illegal immigration by stopping asylum seekers before they set sail for Canada, as border officials in B.C. scramble to process hundreds of migrants who arrived aboard the MV Sun Sea.
Canadian intelligence should identify these ships before they leave their ports of origin, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said in an interview Saturday, about 36 hours after nearly 500 illegal migrants were intercepted off the B.C. coast and brought to CFB Esquimalt.
“That, I believe, should be the real focus, rather than trying to deal with them after the fact.”
Hours after the Thai-registered Sun Sea arrived on Friday, Mr. Toews said Canadian officials suspect the vessel is part of a human-smuggling operation run by the the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, though he offered no evidence to support this claim.
Mr. Toews, who contends other human smugglers are watching Canada’s response closely, reiterated his concern on Saturday.
“The evidence … suggests that it is the work of the Tamil Tigers, or LTTE,” Mr. Toews said, though he didn’t cite the source of the information.
The LTTE, known as the Tamil Tigers, is a banned terrorist organization and separatist group that lost a 26-year civil war in Sri Lanka last year. Minority Tamils, however, say they are persecuted by the Sri Lankan government.
The Canada Border Service Agency, whose team continues to inspect the MV Sun Sea with the RCMP, said the vessel was outfitted with sleeping quarters and a sanitation system. It was also stocked with food, including rice, dried fish and juice containers.
“It was relatively clean and organized. A system had been developed to dispose of waste and garbage. There were sleeping quarters onboard with hammocks,” spokesman Rob Johnston said at a news conference.
Mr. Toews said the system was further evidence of a smuggling operation.
“The Sun Sea was modified in order to make this trip and maximize the number of persons, and of course the resulting profit,” he told the Globe.
As of Saturday afternoon, border agents had processed more than 450 of the 490 migrants believed to be on board. More than 350 were men, 50 were women and 50 were children.
Some of the children were taken into the province’s care, along with their mothers. Mr. Johnston declined to provide details.
“We do our best to not separate families,” he said. “However, there may be circumstances where that’s not possible to maintain. I can’t go into any further detail than that.”
Some asylum seekers have already been transferred to the province’s correctional branch and transported to detention facilities, Mr. Johnston said. Two Vancouver-area jails have been set up to accommodate them.
Mr. Toews also confirmed the MV Sun Sea’s route on Saturday, saying the vessel travelled between the Philippines and Japan on its route to British Columbia.
He said reports that it travelled around Central America were false, and he said the ship didn’t attempt to enter Australia, as other reports suggested.
Last year, a ship carrying Tamil migrants arrived in B.C. All 76 Sri Lankan Tamils aboard the Ocean Lady, which arrived in October, were released after 60 days in detention, and all now await refugee hearings. Not one was declared ineligible to make a claim, despite expert testimony that the ship’s captain was a well-known Tamil Tiger
Gayblackcanada 