The O'Briens of India and Pakistan

Thoughts on Independence Day

Each year, on August 15, I find myself thinking of my great-grandmother – my father’s paternal grand-mother, Nellie Bella, as she was named when born into a well-to-do Bengali Christian family. She lived at various times in Jalpaiguri, Dharamtalla and finally in Jamir Lane (Ballygunge) where she built what was to be our family home and formed part of my earliest memories. She died in 1969, when I was a small schoolboy. Yet even by then she had come to represent an influential figure for me – the familiar matriarch, caring but firm, who taught the three of us, my brothers and me, to speak Bengali.

To my young mind, Nellie Bella O’Brien, as she became on marrying a second-generation Irish settler (Anglo-Indian) in India – symbolized history. She was a walking, talking monument of history. To my innocent eyes, she seemed to stand for Mother India: a venerable and iconic figure who shed a silent tear in August 1947 when one country became two nations, and a composite society was split forever.

Nellie Bella cried in August 1947, she cried every day from 1947 to 1969. She cried for the line in the sand that Partition drew. She cried for Patrick, her first-born, her beloved son who stayed on in Peshawar and later in Lahore.

The narrative of Partition has been written in terms of the subcontinent’s Hindus and Muslims. Christians have had only a small role. Anglo-Indians – the community I belong to and which makes up a minuscule section of India’s Christians – have had just a walk-on part.

Yet Partition had a dramatic impact on my extended family. My paternal grandfather, Amos – Nellie’s second son – was one of three brothers. The eldest of them, Patrick, was  a civil servant who worked in Peshawar and Lahore, and served as personal assistant to Sir Olaf Caroe, governor of the Northwest Frontier Province and later Sir George Cunningham. Much of the rest of the family was in Kolkata, including my grandfather.

One day, without quite realizing its implications, these wings of the O’Brien family became citizens of separate countries. Within months India and Pakistan were at war. Patrick, the son who had stayed on in Pakistan, had a large family – one of his daughters married a fighter pilot, who stayed on in the Indian Air Force. His brother, also a fighter pilot, opted for the Pakistani Air Force.

II

Imagine Nellie’s plight, and that of her granddaughter in India – my father’s cousin. Night after night she stayed up, I’ve been told, wondering if her husband would come home or if her brother in-law, was safe – or if these two men, comrades and brothers in the same air force till only a few weeks earlier, would battle each other in the eerie anonymity of the skies.

Thankfully neither died in that war, but a distance emerged.  Father and daughter, sister and sister, cousin and cousin, my Indian grandfather and his Pakistani brother, Nellie and Patrick – they lost touch.

My brothers and I grew up in a very different environment. We were the only Christian family in a middle-class, predominantly Bengali-Hindu neighbourhood in Kolkata, living, in one of those ironies that make India just so captivating, in a lane named after a Muslim. We lived in the house Nellie had built in 1938. She was  widowed early, left with three sons to bring up and bravely took up the study of medicine. Her training as a doctor – she was among the earliest women to enter medical college in Bengal – came in useful and she established a fulfilling practice, the earnings from which financed the house which became our family home.

In the mid-1940s, during the Great Calcutta Killings and the pre-Partition riots, she would walk down by the railway lines, from Sealdah to Ballygunge, tending to the injured. She was never harmed, not by Hindus and not by Muslims. The stethoscope around her neck established her credentials; the determined walk established her purpose. She would not be stopped, she would not be moved.

Nellie Bella O’Brien died at the ripe old age of 78 in 1969. She was surrounded and mourned by her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. All of Jamir Lane, it seemed, turned out for her funeral.  She wasn’t just my father’s grandmother, she was everybody’s. The only one missing was Patrick, the son the mother had not seen for 23 years.

III

Time passed. In 1984, my brother Andy, then a sports journalist, travelled to Karachi for hockey’s Champions Trophy. He was determined to trace the lost O’Briens of Pakistan.  Eventually he found them and renewed contact. My father’s uncle Patrick was dead, but the rest of the family was still there and greeted their Indian cousin very warmly.  They continued to refer to the Jamir Lane residence in Kolkata as “home”.  Nellie was a legend for her grandchildren there as well.

Nevertheless there were sobering realities.  Most of the men of my father’s generation migrated to England or Canada, the women had converted to Islam.

Andy came home and told us the strange and somber story of the Muslim Anglo-Indian clan – or maybe it should be the Muslim Irish-Bengali clan – of Lahore and Karachi. We sat in silence, still digesting it. I thought of our life in India, the freedom to go to church, the freedom to pratise my faith, the freedom to be myself, the freedom that my country gave its minorities. I’ve never felt prouder of being an Indian.

I think about my cousins in Pakistan now and then. Would they be able to join a mainstream political movement, as I was so willingly accepted as part of Mamata Banerjee’s struggle? Would they find opportunity to go to Parliament as regular politicians?

I was fortunate, I guess. I was fortunate Nellie encouraged me to learn Bengali and help to be part of the para Saraswati Puja – “It’s a celebration of wisdom and learning” – and integrate with my larger community. I was fortunate India, and Bengal, allowed me to do this without making unfair demands on me. I was fortunate to have been nurtured by India’s Nellie – and Nellie’s India.

Happy Independence Day!

1100 words from Central Hall on 60 years of Parliament

It’s a ritual I’ve grown up with. Every Sunday, wherever I am in the country or the world, I go to church. I try not to miss church, irrespective of whether I’ve been out late on Saturday — a frequent occurrence in my younger years though, alas, not at 50 — or if I’ve come in on an early-morning flight on Sunday (a regular phenomenon in these travel-packed days).

Friends and acquaintances have often asked me why I go to church with such regularity and discipline. I attribute it to my childhood and my upbringing. We are a small family, and like so many other Indian parents — irrespective of religious background — my parents inculcated in their children a strong sense of faith and humility before God.

There was a secular reason too, I suspect. The Anglo-Indian community I belong to is a minuscule minority — actually a minority within a minority. We make up a tiny, decimal point percentage of Indian Christians, who by themselves make up only two per cent of India’s people. Going to church every Sunday was for Anglo-Indians not just a renewal of their covenant with God; it was also the invocation of a sense of community. It is no different for the Muslim who greets his co-religionists after the namaaz at the masjid; or for the Hindu who turns up with his family for the aarti at the local mandir every evening. Even when we pretend to be different, we Indians are actually quite similar.

I digress from my story. On Sunday, May 13, I didn’t go to church. I missed the priest’s sermon, the lesson for the day and the singing of the hymn. Yet, I did it knowingly and willingly and for a special reason. I had a date for the ages, an appointment I was confident I would tell my grandchildren about — a Sunday session called to commemorate Parliament’s 60th anniversary. It was the diamond jubilee of the first sitting of Parliament, on May 13, 1952.

I am a new entrant to Parliament, but an old devotee — and a person whose faith is renewed every day the House is in session. To go to Parliament is to experience the aura and magnificence, the tingling sensation and the deep, profound emotion that one can only experience in a place of worship. Parliament is indeed a place of worship: it is a shrine to the people of India.

Those are not empty words. I cannot adequately describe my first day there as an MP, my first hour, my first moment, just walking in. I’m not trying to prove a point, for there is no point to prove. Even I didn’t expect Parliament to have that impact on me. Nevertheless, when I walked in, when I looked at the array of faces and accoutrements — a sari worn in a particular manner, a turban from a specific region — heard the languages and the buzz around (no, not every parliamentarian speaks TV-studio Hinglish; most live in the real India), I was entranced.

Why? There are three reasons, though only one of them was obvious to me on that first day, and it was a personal thought. I am not the first Anglo-Indian in Parliament. Two seats in the Lok Sabha are reserved for our community. In the past a stalwart such as Frank Anthony, the great legal mind, has been part of Parliament. So have generals and educationists among Anglo-Indians and so was, for a short while, my father Neil ’Brien. Even so, I was — and am — the first Anglo-Indian to be elected to Parliament, albeit elected indirectly to the Rajya Sabha.

This is my achievement but in many ways, and in many greater ways, it is India’s achievement. An Anglo-Indian and a Christian, part of a tiny community that is probably smaller than the Gujarati population of Alaska, was deemed worthy of representing “Maa, Maati, Manush” of West Bengal in Parliament. Here he joined 800 other Indians — business tycoons who drive to Parliament in limousines, and poor, grassroots MPs who trudge up to the parliamentary bus; men from Puducherry and women from Punjab; the MP who brings with him the earthy richness of Kutch and the MP who brings the lush intensity of Kamrup.

We often speak of India’s incredible diversity and its inclusiveness. In Parliament, I have experienced it like never before. The very fact that I am an MP is stirring evidence of that all-embracing warmth of India, and of our democracy. Which other society can make such a claim? Which other democracy would have made place for someone like me, and done it willingly and wholeheartedly?

The second reason became apparent to me in my first week. Parliament is an education, a university from which you can never graduate — for you never stop learning. I have been part of debating teams in school. More seriously, I have been part of studio debates in which I have used arguments and clever lines to take on opponents. Nothing, believe me nothing, compares with Parliament. When M.S. Swaminathan stands up a seat in front of me and talks of the agrarian crisis, the problems of the Indian farmer and the acute scarcity of foodgrain storage facilities, there are no anchors, no ad breaks, no drama — just stubborn facts and grave wisdom.

The reservoirs of knowledge I find myself surrounded by are overwhelming. To listen to a fine exchange between two brilliant lawyers — one representing the treasury benches and the other the Opposition, dissecting the finer points of a proposed law, to hear the story of a village sarpanch who became an MP, is not just a process of education. It is a privilege.

My final reason is, again, a personal confession. There are moments in the House when I just switch off and stop being a participant. I become a spectator, a voyeur, a hungry devotee absorbing all around me. The debates, the exchanges, the earthy humour and at once the rigour, the bitter contest and yet the easy camaraderie, the portraits of giants in Central Hall, the burden of legacy and the privilege of being inside these hallowed rooms: I will ever be grateful for this.

As members of Parliament, we are not owners of its spirit; we are merely caretakers for the next generation. We hold it in trust. Let us ever be conscious of that; let us not let down that trust.