Days gone by for the Anglos in Pakistan
It is hard to believe that Pakistan was once a gentle country.
It is even harder to believe that some of the most wonderful people
lived here. All that seems like a misty memory which has little relevance as
you face the day’s first rude slaps.
A friend passed me an interesting short article about the
Anglo-Indians who lived and worked in what is now India and Pakistan.
The Anglos are long gone swallowed up by the mists of time, driven
out from here to fend for themselves. But in their extinction lies a bigger
tragedy.
The Anglo Indians were fun people. But more than the singular
expertise they brought to the jobs that became traditionally their forte, they
added a swing, vibrancy and a sheer joy of living spirit to our society that in
many ways epitomised the new, fresh spirit that was Pakistan.
That was then.
Now it’s a fading sepia tone picture.
Those of us who grew up with them, watched with considerable
sadness as family after family left this country to go and live in alien
climes. There was nothing left for them. They were wise in retrospect. Look at
our bestiality towards our minorities. But while the Anglo Indians were here,
they gave us a unique gift. The joy of living and of being alive.
The Anglos were a British creation – some say a hideous British
blunder. Although the British Empire at one point held absolute power in over
52 countries there was only one undisputed ‘jewel’ in the royal crown. India.
It was part of their policy to protect this jewel from within as well and so
began a policy of encouraging British males to marry Indian women – Anglo
Indians who would intrinsically be at home with British mannerisms and always
do the ‘pucca’ thing yet be more English than Indian in their thinking, a
defensive ring around British interests and way of life. Many experts believe
that had it not been for them, the British Empire in India would have
collapsed. Ethnically engineered, they were the only micro-minority community
ever to be defined in a country’s constitution and yet the irony was that they
were a race without a country!
The Anglos were no ordinary people. In India and later Pakistan,
they virtually ran the railways, post & telegraph, police, customs, education,
nursing, healthcare, import/export, shipping, tea, coffee & tobacco
plantations, coal mines and gold reserves. Thus Anglos became great teachers,
nurses, priests and doctors and the girls, debonair, confident, skilful became
the best executive secretaries, special assistants and office managers. There
was no one to match them.
But it was their colourful and vibrant approach to everyday life
that was so infectious about them. Like all small communities, they segregated
into enclaves that were all their own. The Anglo-Indians were truly spirited
people, fired with a zest to work and party hard. The boys were typically razor
sharp, cutting deals that would invariably begin with lines like, ‘I say bugga
you know what happened? That bugga Tony, man he screwed me real good, bugga
took my damn cash bugga and disappeared.’ And the reply, ‘You don’t say bugga,’
and ‘I’m tellin’ ya, ask Fernandez man – Tony rogered him too man,’ ‘Say
swear,’ ‘Swear bugga this Tony cat, man he’s somethin’ else,’ and on and on
went the stories. There were always stories.
The Anglos were superb musicians and dancers. The floors (toba,
toba) were full on Saturday nights, Sunday afternoons, jam sessions – and other
handy occasions – sometimes they didn’t even need to have a reason. At the
hangouts, Karachi particularly and Lahore catching up all the time and Sam’s in
Murree, the Anglo Indians could set a floor on fire as they jived,
jitterbugged, rocked & rolled, swung, waltzed or shook sensuously to
Latin-flavoured mind blowing melodies. And it was on the dance floors that you
saw girls who could break your heart with just a look, hair tossing, laughing
their pretty heads off as adept and handsome male escorts took them through the
paces.
The Anglos congregated in special areas within the cities where
they made warm, inviting homes. In Lahore, they were behind The Indus Hotel on
The Mall, in the environs of the railway colony and in residential areas where
family names like D’souzas were as common as Mohammad Iqbals today. In Karachi
names like Preedy Street, Elphi were synonymous with them. Wherever they were -
they were not very affluent, but you were always welcomed with a cold beer, a
quick shot if it was nippy and at Xmas time, the special cakes made to order
with each family guarding its secret recipe passed from generation to
generation. There was the Burt Institute, the Railway Colony to name just two
and then there were the clubs and nightspots. In Karachi there were many and
even more there were the musicians – row upon row who filled these and played
jazz, rock even fusion – or whatever you fancied. The bands grew on trees. The
Strollers, Francisco Boys, The Bugs, The Cossacks, Willie Po and the Boys, The
Incrowd (inspired by that superb hit from Ramsey Lewis and quite the rage
then), The Drifters, The Panthers, The Talisman Set (see their group picture,
faded and blurry and you could mistake them for The Jackson Five), Bloody
What’s the Matter? (Yes there was a group called just that), The Keynotes,
Flintstone, The Fatah Brothers, Captivators and the Saints of Rawalpindi (now
surely replaced by the devils incarnate).
Nightclubs with foreign acts especially in Karachi were the
rage.Agents,artists, con men,musicians, strippers, belly dancers all arrived
and exited at this hustling port city. Jazz legends like Count Basie, Duke
Ellington, Charlie Byrd, Benny Carter, Quincy Jones (who gave Michael Jackson
that memorable beat heard in ‘Billie Jean’ and who was to give MJ some great
musical direction) – they all came here and they loved Karachi and this country
called Pakistan, where there was hardly any crime worth mentioning and nobody
knew how to use bombs leave alone the killer guns. ‘If someone fired a shot in
midair in Golimar,’ muses a gentleman from those days, ‘the word would spread
through Karachi like fire.’ But that was a Karachi that was perhaps just a
million not burgeoning at all ends with an estimated 14 million now. And
although someone recalls that ‘the city was planned differently but grew
differently’, Karachi started to disintegrate before our eyes in the 70s.
The 1972 laws enforced by ZAB to please the fundos broke the spirit
of all of us, particularly the Anglo Indians. Bars, discos, clubs all shut down
in fear. Suddenly hosts of musicians and other artists had no livelihood.
‘Tolerance went up in smoke,’ recalls one sad person. Came 1979 and the evil
Zia and the coup de grace forced the Anglos to escape, migrate anywhere they
could go. They left by the droves, never to come back. The clubs died, the
dance floors uprooted, the many services they offered fell by the wayside. In
driving out this small community, we dug our own graves. We rapidly became
soulless, grey, hypocritical and boring. With them gone, an integral part of
decent civilian life was snuffed out. Guns replaced guitars. The scorched
landscape that we inherited, now mocks us. Laughter has changed to anguish.
Pakistan may be a ‘hard country’, but it is also a barren and desolate land.
One gentleman of the fabled 60s sums it all up in one line: ‘Those days are
gone. They will not come back.’ Quite an epitaph wouldn’t you agree?
The writer is a Lahore-based columnist. Email:
[email protected]
---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
