The Spell of the Flying Foxes
by Sylvia Dyer
Penguin India
Almost 65 years after Indian independence was granted in 1947, personal stories from the last Anglo-Indians are steadily fading into history. Yet recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in Anglo-Indian lives, partly driven by newer generations of this community, scattered worldwide now, whose children are fascinated by their creolised ancestral heritage.
Sylvia Dyer, at 83 one of the last community members with near-adult memories of pre-independence India, magically recreates her upbringing on a remote indigo plantation on the Terai, that stretch of flat sub-tropical land that extends northwards from the plains of northern India into Nepal, in her delightful memoir The Spell of the Flying Foxes. Lyrically constructed, this memoir offers a tantalising window into a very different time and place, which falls - only just - within living memory.
Her story is focused around a series of cataclysms, natural, personal and political, interspersed with (mostly) happy stories of childhood. The first major drama, which occurs when Dyer is a young girl, is the devastating Bihar earthquake in 1934. This flattened her family home, and killed more than 30,000 people elsewhere in northern India.
The events surrounding Indian independence, when large individual landholdings such as theirs were compulsorily redistributed as part of agrarian reform and new, very different lives were forged elsewhere, are movingly described. Many Anglo-Indians moved to England, an ancestral homeland most had never even visited. Others chose to remain in India, and somehow create new lives for themselves in radically altered circumstances. The author, twice widowed, was married to Indian Army officers, and now lives in Pune.
Gripping and beautifully written, The Spell of the Flying Foxes would make a rip-roaring Bollywood film. Grasping, scheming extended relatives, a fearsome dacoit (bandit) chieftain who comes to the family's rescue at a critical juncture, natural and human disasters, and the wild beauty of a far-flung part of India - this book has it all.