14 saturday, 22 December 2012 communities More indian than indians Stephan Bayley “We were shunned by the British and the Indian Community and yet we took both their names and are called Anglo-Indians,” explained Peter Fanthome MLA for the Anglo-Indian Community. They were created to help the British Raj to control the large population of Indians, and inter marriages were encouraged and you were rewarded five rupees for every child born to them and unlike the popular opinion they were not illegitimate children. It was a strategy to increase manpower of the British and also cut down expenses of bringing British women to India. Time progressed and the precious Anglo-Indian soldiers that won many wars for the British in India started being shunned. If you were born dark skinned you were considered an Indian and as they put it a nigger, but soon the fair skinned Anglo-Indians were also shooed after the arrival of British women by the late 18th century.Time passed and eventually the British left but many British and other foreign communities decided to stay back. “It was my father’s love for the country which could never make him leave,” said a proud Joan Yeoward, who along with her father were the few British that could not leave the beautiful country. “Anglo-Indians are the only community that is defined by law in this country under Article 366 section 2 An Anglo Indian means a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is domiciled within the territory of India and is or was born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein and not established there for temporary purposes only. This was mainly because we were not a religious community but a linguistic community. We were different because of our language accent and European style of clothing and food,” Peter Fanthome elaborated. “We are more Indian than an Indian will ever be. May it be the armed forces where nearly 20 per cent of all Anglo-Indians make it a career; in fact the current Air Chief Marshal Norman Anil Kumar Browne is also an Anglo-Indian” Peter Fanthome proudly told The Lucknow Tribune. May it be martyrs for the country or bringing Olympic glory they have seen it and done it and as Fanthome believes it makes them more Indian than any other Indian.Over the years the community has grown but with only 250 members in Lucknow it is a marginal growth. “The size may have shrunk but the parties have increased,” says Mike Anthenous, who also believes that the parties have increased because the city’s party circuit has grown. From the May Queen Ball to the New Year’s Ball a tradition celebrated in the AngloIndian community is now celebrated by the town. “The types of dance’s and food really differentiate it. And it has been preserved by the community; we are quite old fashioned this way,” says Patrick Filose, a first generation Anglo-Indian. The waltz, cha-cha-cha and the tango are one of the favourites of the community and it really blows you away when you see people in their 70s burning up the dance floor. One of the major differences that you see in the community is the freedom among women and at any age, “You cannot and should not tell somebody how to behave or dress you don’t own them why differentiate between man and woman,” feels Patrick, father of two girls, who believes in it very strongly. When you come to an Anglo-Indian home be prepared for wine and all forms of alcohol. Some food so unique that it may get your stomach in a twist. From delicious Rose Cookies, Kul-Kuls and Rum Bread Pudding and cake crumb pudding that gets your tongue smacking. To the little out of the ordinary salt meat, brain curry, tongue roast and meat loaf. And to wash all this down you have your wines made from ginger, grapes or beetroot it’s a never ending treat. There is one thing that most if not all Anglo-Indians will eat is Yellow rice and Badword curry, which is yellow pullav rice cooked in chicken broth and then served with meat balls. With most of them in the education sector, Christmas becomes a big- huge party because everybody has winter vacations. From relatives coming back to their motherland from all over the globe the party starts from the 20th and will finish on the 5th or 6th.“We can never forget this land its soil runs in our veins,” Christopher Roderick’s on returning to India to join the festivity. Lucknow’s Jewish connection Dr. Navras Jaat Aafreedi W hat is perhaps not so well known is that Lucknow has quite a few Jewish connections, old as well as new. During the British Raj there was an English Jew who mastered Urdu, wrote poetry in Urdu under a pseudonym, Farasu. The other three Jews from Lucknow’s past include a moneylender, a jeweler and a watchmaker. The moneylender was Charles Isaacs. He traded at army stations and sold goods on credit to army officers, which also include Major General Claude Martin, founder of the premier educational institutions called La Martiniere in Lucknow, Kolkata and Lyons in France. Isaacs was formerly a barrack master sergeant at Berhampur cantonment. In 1786 he defrauded a number of Indian merchants who retaliated by seizing his Lucknow house, godown and shop. That spelled the end of Isaacs. Shalom ben Aaron ben Obadiah ha Cohen was court jeweler to Sadaat Ali Khan II, Nawab of Lucknow after he left Kolkata in September 1812. The diary left by Cohen is a precious source of information. Cohen was born in Aleppo in 1762 in the 5,000 strong Jewish minority of Syria. Cohen records: I left Aleppo for Baghdad by mail coach, accompanied by Rabbi Aaron Beracha. The reason for his emigration to India is not clear, but it could be a plague that spread in the Jewish quarter of his native town Aleppo in 1787. His parents might have succumbed to the catastrophe and the horror of this dreadful scourge might have driven him out of Aleppo forever in 1789. He reached Surat, Gujarat in late 1790, but only after a few months went back to Basra, Iraq from where he had set sail to India. It was only in April 1792 that he finally settled down in Surat with two servants, and soon became leader of the 65 Jewish merchants resident in Surat then. In 1797, Cohen set out from Surat, via Mumbai, Cochin and Chennai, for his historic journey to Kolkata. An entry in his diary dated 13th November, 1796, reads: An order came from Calcutta abolishing the monopoly of ships going to Basra, Mocha and Jidda or Jeddah, so that the merchants could bring merchandise on any ship they liked. This may have given Cohen a hint of the bright business prospects in Kolkata, which seemed destined to emerge as a great metropolis, and of the coming decline of Surat. Cohen reached Kolkata on 1st August 1798, and remained there till September 1812, when he moved with his family to Chinsura and later to several other cities, including Lucknow. He was buried in Kolkata in 1836 in the cemetery which was his gift to the Jewish community there, where an inscription marks his grave. In the early 20th century, a Jew called Landau owned a big corner shop in Hazratganj, exactly where Ram Lal and Sons, the cloth and sari shop is located today. Even today there are Jews in Lucknow who have completely Indianised themselves. They have embraced Hinduism and adopted Hindi names likes Bharatmitra, Bhavani, Dayal, Vishwamitra and Holi. The late Hindu mystic Poonjaji, reverentially known as Papaji attracted many Jews to his ashram in Lucknow. They have established in Lucknow a company called Organic India that produces herbal products. In just a few years time it has emerged as a prestigious brand available across India and also abroad. In a 2005 estimate, the township of Malihabad in district Lucknow was found to be the home of a small community of 600 people of Israelite stock, primarily from the Afridi tribe, among the 1200 Pathans there in a total population of 16,850. Famous as the mango capital of India and as the birthplace of a number of great Urdu poets like Josh Malihabadi, Faqeer Muhammad Khan Goya and Anwar Nadeem, the place has lately attracted a lot of international attention for the putative Israelite origins of its 600 Afridi Pathans. There is an age old tradition among certain Pathan tribes, including Afridi, of their having descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Most of the Pathans in the new generation are ignorant of it, but those who are aware insist in making a clear distinction between Israelite and Jewish, and take offense at being connected to Jews, a term which has come to attain a pejorative connotation for them because of the lingering Arab-Israel conflict. They also fear that their being connected to Jews might put their allegiance to Islam in doubt. According to the narrative of the trilogy of Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the twelve tribes of Israel sprang from prophet Jacob’s twelve sons, who later got divided into two kingdoms, Israel and Judea in the ancient land of Canaan in the modern Jewish State of Israel. The modern Jews are believed to have descended from the two southern tribes that lived in Judea and not the ten northern tribes that lived in Israel, which were exiled by the Assyrians and went into oblivion, known to us today as the lost tribes of Israel. Hence, those of the older generation emphasize that even if there is any connection, it should be called Israelite and not Jewish. The often interchangeable use of the two terms by the press has made them suspect the academic attempts to ascertain the historic authenticity of the tradition at research institutes in India and abroad as Zionist conspiracies against Islam, aimed at convincing its bravest followers, the Pathans, of their Israelite roots and then persuading them to convert to Judaism and migrate to Israel. Their DNA samples have been analyzed by geneticists in the UK and Israel, but the results have largely been neutral because of the small sample sizes. The author is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History & Civilization, Gautam Buddha University, Greater NOIDA. He can be reached at aafreedi@gmail.com The City's Jewish Author in Search of Love and Identity! Dr. Navras Jaat Aafreedi Sheila Rohekar is precious because she is the only Jewish writer in the Hindi language. Recipient of the prestigious Yashpal Award for her maiden novel Dinānt (1977), Sheila tells the story of a woman’s search for her identity and love in life. About to publish her third novel, Sheila tackles Jewish life in India. It never occurred to her before that the Jewish society in India would interest people hardly aware of Jews who have been present in their midst for more than two millennia. Born in Pune in 1942 in the Bene Israel community, numerically the largest of the three Jewish communities in India, Rohekar began her literary career in 1968 with the publication of a Hindi story in Dharmayug and a collection of Gujarati short-stories, Lifeline nee Bāhār. Her first Hindi novel, Dinānt (1977), was followed by her second novel, Tavīz, in 2005. It is the story of the developments that take place once Révā, a Hindu woman, marries Anvar, a Muslim. A few years after Anvar’s murder during the communal riots, Reva remarries. Her son from Anvar, Annu, conscious of his mixed parentage, finds acceptance and solace in a radical Hindu activist group as a college student. However, he succumbs to the police bullet he receives while participating in the Ram Jańmbhūmi agitation. During the preparations for his final rites according to the Hindu norms when it is discovered that he was circumcised, his mother is immediately killed by the radicals to avoid complications.