AN ANGLO-INDIAN GRIEVANCE

Southland Times, Issue 662, 26 April 1867, Page 3

AN ANGLO-INDIAN GRIEVANCE

(From the Saturday Beview.) Lest the mere mention of an AngloIndian grievance should scare the general reader, who would probably as soon meet a bear robbed of her whelps as an AngloIndian Colonel with a case against the Horse Guards, let us hasten to state that we are not , about to touch upon offreckonings, half-batta, supersession, or the bonus system. These grievances are indeed interesting enough in their proper time and place, and Lord Cranborne must have known very little about the difficulties of carrying on conversation in India, or he would never have thought of abolishing them. An Anglo-Indian officer without a grievance is as unnatural an object as a white Othello. But the grievance we are about to discuss affects, not a special class' of Anglo-Indians, but the whole body and their oppressors are not their natural enemy, the HorseGuards, but their natural friend, near kinsman, and. : dear ally, the British nation. Everybody now-a-days has connections, or else knows a friend /who has connections, somewhere in India, and therefore, everybody is in a position to practise the oppression which, on behalf of the injured Anglo-Indian, we deprecate. With all his oriental vices and odious eccentricities *— for which see Burke, and the light literature of the last century, passim— the Anglo-ludian is quite as much of " a man and brother," as the Jamaica negro, and, it is in the earnest hope of inducing a philanthropic public to regard the former with something like the sympathy so readily bestowed on the latter, that we now bring his wrongs before the world. We want to know why on earth it is that an Anglo-Indian, when he goes into English society, should never be allowed to get rid of Indian associations, or to forget for a moment that there is that great and awful gulf, the overland route, between him and all his fellow-guesbs. An Englishman may live ten years in Germany, or Italy, or France, and become almost a foreigner in his modes of thought and_ action, yet, ... when he returns to his native land, no one— except that most objectionable, I?ut happily limited, class, the self-improving people— will insist upon looking at him incessantly through Erench, German, or Italian spectacles. He is not stuffed with saver-kraut, or drenched with oil, or suspected of an unnatural, un-English craving for frogs. If Continental affairs happen to turn up for discussion, he is no i doubt specially appealed to as ai* authority ; but still it is not, in ordinary conversation, thought necessary to approach him— as you approach a timid or vicious- looking horse, with propitiatory oats — with a question about SchleswigHolstein or the last new Allocution of the Pope. He is, ih fact, allowed quietly to drop his Continental associations, and to relapse into his pristine status as an ordinary beef-eating, beer-drinking, weatherdiscussing Englishman. Very different is the lot of the wretched Anglo-Indian. He takes India with him everywhere, reversing the proverb about caelum non anvmwm. We remember once trying to < pose an old lady who dealt in spirits—we mean table-rapping spirits*— by asking her how it was that her clients of a better class consented to exchange all the joys, conversational andmusical, of theirpresent abode for the apparently meagre and monotonous gratification of scratching a deal table in one of the dirty back streets of London. She was, however, quite equal to the occasion. " They carries their 'eavens with them,'' was > a reply to cope with, which satisfactorily required a more distinct conception of a future state of celestial bliss than is in these days vouchsafed to most men. And, in like manner, the AngloIndian wanderer carries everywhere his Indian heaven with him, though a heaven he does not perhaps always consider it. He is, for instance, connected with curry in the British mind as firmly as a Frenchman with frogs, If he goes to stop with a friend in the country, the hostess apologizes elaborately for having no curry to set before him, or worse still, graciously prepares, as a pleasant surprise for him, a sickly compound, looking very much like rice and chicken in the last stage of jaundice, which she hopes he will like, and upon which he is expected to fall quite gluttonously. At heavy dinners, in thoughtful consideration of his conversational inferiority, great pains are to select for him a lady who, having a grandson in India, will take an interest in his favorite topicß, but who cannot be made to understand that residence at Delhi does not necessarily involve an intimate knowledge of all that goes on at Madras, She speedily arrives at the conclusion that he is sulky, or very stupid, or else an impostor who has net er don© tho overland route except at

the Haymarket Theatre. Obliging neighbors who rush to the rescue, at the "awful pauses" which naturally result, all feel it their duty to bring their remarks within easy reach of his,comprehension by giving them the proper Oriental tinge. Everything that comes on the table is dramatically treated -from a supposed Anglo-Indian point of view, and j as if to the semi-barbarous stranger it] were "one of ' the curiosities of Western civilization. His fellow-guests j are charmed and relieved to hear! that he gets butter in India, having been under the impression that the Koran for- 1 bade the Hindoos to milk a cow, and quite envy him his fresh enjoyment of the untropical luxury of ice ; that is to say, they would envy him if it were possible for an Anglo-Indian ever to feel hot enough in his country to find ice really refreshing. He is strongly suspected of a would-be English affectation if he complains of heat under an August sun, or is hot grateful for a blazing fire in his bedroom whenever the thermometer is below seventy. Another very common British illusion about the Aoiglo-Indian— more flattering than the rest, perhaps, but none the less dangerous to his comfort and peace of mind— is the idea that he is invariably rich, or either well-to-do, and that, if he is a bachelor, he either wants, or ought to want, a wife. Indeed, if an Anglo-Indian bachelor comes home for only a few months, his friends all seem to take it for granted, as a matter of course, that he has come home expressly to marry, and vie with each other in throwing in his way some " sweet girl who would exactly suit him." He is suddenly alarmed to find that the flirtation with country cousins which used, before he left England, to be recognised on both sides as a perfectly safe and legitimate method of killing time, and keeping the lady's hand in for. really eligible game, has now become too perilous to be exactly pleasant. Why, indeed, he should be looked upon as worth " bagging," he cannot, perhaps, for the life of him, understand. But still there are unmistakeable symptoms tin the social atmosphere — a suspicious something in little famtty-dinners, to which, before his departure for India, no wellregulated mother of a family dreamed of asking him — that betoken N danger. He feels with a sigh that, though still, he may, be, a poor man, he has somehow lost the poor man's privilege of dancing half a dozen times with the same young •lady, and going after each dance into the balcony, without the slightest risk of being asked by -.any sane man or woman as to his intentions.