Eric Stracey talks about his book ‘Growing up in Anglo India’
“If as a little boy in the 1920s, I had been asked what I was, I would have said, ‘English’.” In Growing up in Anglo India (EastWest) Eric Stracey, 80, writes about an elusive 400-year-old community. Sometimes reviled, often used, rarely admired, the Anglo-Indians are a people who perhaps got as close to immortality as they ever would with Ismail Merchant’s Cotton Mary.
“Cheap novelists and scriptwriters have often found in the Anglo-Indians ground for sensationalism,” says Stracey. Stracey’s writing is a nostalgic, picturesque, sometimes brutally honest journey through the times, places and achievements that characterised the lives of his parents and 11 siblings.
“There was the realisation that we were an unusual lot and that our story called for some kind of record,” he says. “Another reason was that Bangalore and the conditions prevailing there when I was growing up in the cantonment – the best of weather, pure air, clean water, fine schools, a moral climate and cheap living – have changed beyond recognition. Unfortunately for the worse.”
Stracey migrated to Australia for “family reasons” in 1980. During a retirement marked by “boredom and low spirits”, his writing flourished. He updated his first, unpublished novel Odd Man In – memoirs of his years in the police service, which climaxed when be became director general of police, Tamil Nadu, in 1979.
Growing up in Anglo India is in a sense a literary tribute to his people: “Among our proudest qualities are our sense of loyalty and steadfastness. We stuck to our post and did our duty when others faltered.” It is no wonder then that cities as far afield as Calcutta and Bangalore have their own mini-legends about Anglo-Indian police officers like Stracey.
And despite great distances, this father of two sons, Mike, 52, and John, 54, is as close as he ever was to his community. So while he writes with regret that a lack of financial resources has led to conditions among the Anglo-Indians “going downhill”, he might take consolation in the fact that he will always be remembered for knowing well and writing truly of a time when it was otherwise.
source: http://www.indiatoday.intoday.in / Indiatoday.in / Home> Society & The Arts> Books / by Sonia Faleiro / September 04th, 2014