‘Mixed Feelings’: A Review of the Jadu House: Intimate Histories of Anglo-India by Laura Roychowdhury (London: Random House, 2000)

Abstract

What matter who’s speaking? It may strike some of you as odd that I’ve opened a review about The Jadu House, a book that claims to tell the ‘forgotten’ story of Anglo-Indians, with a quote from Sammuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. However, the Beckett citation, famously cited by Michel Foucault in his seminal essay, ‘What is an Author?’ is pertinent to the major questions raised by Roychowdhury’s book. Does it matter whether a Cambridge-educated Englishwoman tells the story of the Anglo-Indians of Kharagphur? Should the Kharagphur Anglo-Indians tell their own story? Is it possible for these people, or any subjugated people, to tell their own story? These are not easy questions to answer, and I don’t intend to resolve them in this review. However, the politics of speaking, writing and re-writing haunt The Jadu House. And I shall return these questions throughout this article. But why is the book titled The Jadu House? In colonial Kharagphur, the local Masonic Lodge was commonly called a ‘Jadu House’. The Masons supposedly communicated through secret, arcane codes, and Roychowdhury contends that colonial India was saturated with a set of equally mysterious behavioural codes — ‘this behaviour means you are British, that means you are a Muslim or Hindu or Christian’ (p.222).