“And so, from hour to hour We ripe and ripe, And then from hour to hour We rot and rot, And thereby hangs a tale”

-- From As You Like It by William Shakespeare.

McCluskieganj began as a fairy tale idea that pronto went awry. It was conceived in the 1930s by the Calcutta-based Anglo-Indian named Timothy Ernest McCluskie, whose father was an Irish railwayman and mother a Brahmin outcast from Benares.

The first Anglo-Indians were noticed during the beginning of the British Raj in India. They were people of mixed race. Early European settlers were mostly men, many of them needed women, and the only available women were Indian. The offsprings of these inter-racial conjugations were christened Anglo-Indians. They were tolerated at first, the girls even prized as brides to be taken to England. Late in the eighteenth century, however, as the mulatto revolt in the French colony of Haiti toppled its rulers, the imperial attitude towards the Anglo-Indians changed significantly. The British government began to treat them as a race apart, to shun them, and to exclude them from government jobs.

At the dawn of the twentieth century every railway town in India had its thriving Anglo-Indian community. They were fun-loving people having a style and language that betrayed their English origins. But the community was at the crossroads; neither the British nor the Indians quite liked them. Indians generally found their habits and pretensions laughable and, being more caste and class conscious than the British, their ancestry impure.

Here stepped forward Mr T. E. McCluskie. He rightly sensed the feeling of insecurity among the Anglo-Indians, especially when many government jobs slipped out from them and went to the native Indians. McCluskie and his ilk propounded a new solution: race-pride. So, if the Anglo-Indians were an independent race, won't they also be a nation? And if they were a nation, won't they need a homeland? Yes they would, but where?

McCluskie persuaded the Raja of Chota Nagpur to lease him 10,000 acres of land adjacent to a railway station - then called Lapra - on the newly built Barkakana loop line. A cooperative society was formed through which Anglo-Indians could buy plots there and make themselves shareholders. The response was heartening and Anglo-Indians across the subcontinent bought shares. The foundation ceremony was organised with much fanfare in November 1934. A crowd of 300 was present and it was decided by popular vote that Lapra would henceforth be known as McCluskiegunje, in honour of 'Old Mac'.

Situated 60-odd kilometres from Ranchi, McCluskieganj had everything that made it the 'Chota London'. The climate was excellent with breezes reminiscent of Darjeeling. The land was fertile where almost anything could be grown - fruits, tea, vegetables. Cattle, pigs and poultry could all be reared here. McCluskieganj was, and still is, a rural idyll.

The place was indeed the Promised Land of the Anglo-Indians. Destiny willed otherwise, though. Two years after selling the dream of a 'mooluk',  McCluskie died in 1935. The new settlement had attracted just over 250 Anglo-Indian families and only 6800 acres of land could be sold. Certain basic drawbacks of the place began to take their toll: lack of water, viral fever, difficulties in growing and marketing crops and non-arrival of express trains on the loop line. And then there was racial despair.

After the British quit India many of the families emigrated but many of those who remained became one more kind of Indian or Adivasi. Kitty Texeria was McCluskieganj's one famous memsahib whom Ian Jack, the footloose editor of Granta, memorably described as a “browner version of one of Russell Flint's dancing gypsies”. He found Kitty at the station “hawking little oranges to passangers who passed money out through the bars on the carriage windows, and then, in the long gaps between trains, helped some tribal men to brew country liquor in a drum at the foot of the signal post”. Meeting characters like Kitty, her mother Mrs Texeria, Mrs Tip-Top, et al,  Ian Jack concluded: “McCluskieganj is a chastening place to think about race”.

Kitty's penury has been widely equated with McCluskieganj's eventual decline, turning her into a symbol of a community's degeneration. Hindi writer-journalist Vikas Kumar Jha has authored a wonderful book of stories titled 'McCluskieganj' (Rajkamal Prakashan, 2010) where many real-life characters including Kitty Texeria have been described poignantly and the  idyllic ambience captured perfectly.

Making a breezy tourist trip to McCluskieganj just after reading the eponymous book, I could well recognise quite a few locations and genuinely feel the void created by the absence of characters so charmingly portrayed by Ian Jack in his 1991 piece.

(The review has been done by Ajay K Singh, who is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand. Singh is a bibliophile having a voracious appetite for reading)