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PIEBALD TRIŚAŃKU : THE EURASIAN IN ANGLO-INDIAN FICTION 197

A recurrent motif in Anglo-Indian Helion is the outsize inferiority complex of the Eurasian, and how it operates in moments of crisis, either luming him into an errant coward or making him an arrogant fool. Patrick Taylor in Bhowani Junction is one of the most evocative portraits of the Eurasian with a strong inferiority complex. He has, as Savage shrewdly observes, ‘ten thumbs and a soul like a boiled ham.’⁵⁰ Always extremely uncomfortable in the company of Savage, a Britisher, Taylor himself confesses, ‘I was much bigger than he was, but I never remembered it, not even (the) first time.’⁵¹ In the same novel, Victoria goes to bed with Jonny Talbert, the Englishman who (with his British sense of fair-play) has madę it abundanlly elear before the event that his inlentions are hardly honourable; she then comments: ‘He thought that because he was a British officer, and I was a chee-ehee girl, I’d anything. And... he was right. Slowly, slowly, I did feel I had to do it.’⁵² Emie Maber, the Eurasian youlh in Roger Cleeve’s The Toad beneath the Skin, invariably panics in moments of danger, as for instance, when he encounters a snake, and when he is asked to jump down from a tree. In Alice Perrin’s The Stronger Claim, Paul Vereker, the Eurasian, ‘doomed by his disparate racial ingredients', runs away during a riot and is killed by the crowd; while dying, he invokes ‘his gods in Hinustani.’⁵³ (This is the opposite of what happens in Kipling's well-known short story, ‘His Chance in Life', where, in a crisis, the European element in the blood of D'Cruse, the Eurasian, makes him bchave like a hero - but then, the magical ąualities of even a single drop of European blood were for Kipling a Revealed Truth, which had no exceptions.) At his worst, the Eurasian could be utterly vi!lanish. One is therefore hardly surpriscd to find Patricia Wenlworth making Nanasahib Peshwa's nephew, Raosaheb (a true blue Maharashrian Brahmin in real life) a Eurasian, when she Hnds it necessary to provide another villain in addition to that good old black whipping boy, Nanasahib, in her Muliny novel, The DeviTs Wind.

Condemned to wear his peculiar piebald hair-shirt all his life, the sensitive Eurasian in Anglo-Indian fiction is sometimes naturally obsessed with a strong dealh-wish, like Len, the protagonist in Jon Godden’s The City and the Wave. Len is oppressed by a strange conviction that the Coastal city in which he lives is doomed to be wiped out one day by a huge tidal wave — a cataclysm with obviously symbolic overtones. The painful choice, according to him is between remaining a despised minorily (after Indian Independence) and getting submerged in the Indian mainstream; and sińce either choice is unpalatable, he concludes sadly : ‘Perhaps it would be better if we were gradually to die out and vanish from the scene.’⁵⁴

The Eurasian thus cuts, on the whole a very sorry figurę in Anglo-Indian fiction. But at least one major Anglo-Indian novelist does look at the question from an unconventional angle and tries to give the poor half-caste his due, though the orlhodox view of the Eurasian is equally well-represented in her