Harking Back: Lahore, Irish Anglo-Indians and our common plight.

Byline: Majid Sheikh

It was Rudyard Kipling's novel 'Kim' that got me thinking that in our youth there was a collection of 12 houses, all in one compound on Masson Road, that all had Anglo-Indian residents, an off-shoot of the Empire. Come to think of it they all had Irish names.

Unlike most old Anglo-Indian families of Lahore who had Portuguese names like D'Silva, D'Souza, Almeda, De Mello, D'Oliveria and so forth, but then the fair-skinned Anglo-Indians had names like O'Brien, O'Sullivan, O'Neill, O'Reilly, Burke and such surnames. In our school, St. Anthony's High School on Lawrence Road (Lawrence was Irish too) our teachers, known as brothers - all Irish priests - were O'Keely, O'Leary, O'Keefe and such names. All these names in their own right have a history to them, but my interest in this piece is about the Irish and the Indian sub-continent.

Ireland and the Indian sub-continent, both under British rule, had one thing in common. Both suffered extreme famines and both shared exceptional poverty. That is why Kipling's 'Kim' character in the book was born Kimball O'Hara: 'a poor white of the very poorest' to an exceptionally poor Irish nursemaid of Lahore, a virtual slave who died of cholera, and an Irish army sergeant who, so the writer claims, was naturally inclined to strong drink and opium, and who died as 'all poor whites in India do, penniless'.

These lines made me feel for my Irish-origin friends and neighbours of years gone by. To me they are as much Pakistani as we are, but only, slowly, they began to disappear, heading for Australia, or the USA or the United Kingdom. The common factor for both in the early 19th century was the famines that left million starving to death in both countries. The only historian of note who has tackled this connection was the late Sir Chris Bayly of Cambridge. His research showed that in Victorian India more Irishmen came to Bengal than the Scots, who led in the jute and tea trade.

But most interesting, from our point of view was that of the British soldiers who joined the army of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the number of Irish outnumbered others. The Sikh ruler termed them as 'maathay gooray' or poor whites, but they still had a colourful character by the name of Gordana Khan, real name Alexander Gordon, an Irishman with alleged Scottish extraction (though never proved) who moved to America during the Great Famine and then returned to Ireland and then headed towards Punjab. He allegedly saved the...

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