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There is almost no information about Anna Harriett Edwards’s early years. Without public records, a biographer can usually turn to personal records. But Anna herself has been the greatest obstacle to discovering anything of her personal history. She threw away or destroyed any records, family letters , or souvenirs and replaced them with lies. When she was quite old in Canada , and pressed by her grandchildren to provide them with a record of her adventurous life, Anna did write that infamous narrative about her earlier times. This brief story included the claim that she and her older sister, Eliza, were born and grew up in Wales, educated there when their parents sailed away to India, and sent to Bombay when Anna was fifteen and Eliza was sixteen, to live with their mother and stepfather, whom they had never met. The portrait is of two genteelly educated white British sisters who arrived in India only when they had completed their schooling and reached marriageable age. It was all fake, of course. Just as were Anna’s follow-up claims that her father was a Major Crawford, aide-de-camp to Sir James Macintosh, and that he died nobly outside Lahore, “cut to pieces by Sikhs who lay in wait for him,” and that her mother was from a notable Welsh family with the distinctively English name of Edwards. These are “facts” that the official East India Company records disprove.The same records also disprove the crucial centerpiece of Anna’s narrative, the single most important “fact,” which Anna’s inventions did not explicitly say but were all designed to claim, that Anna and Eliza Julia were of fully British descent and born in Britain. What was Anna Harriett Edwards’s childhood really like? The children in the Donohoe household, Eliza, Anna Harriett, John, Ellen, and William, though considered by British visitors to be “not of a colour to introduce to the world” (Sherwood, 309), enjoyed a fine life. They grew up in an extensive 42 four Daughter of the Deccan social—virtually a communal—world. From the moment that the two girls were born behind the sacking at one end of a barracks, their lives were spent among large numbers of people. Among the lower social levels of the people connected to the Company in British India, there was little sense of a nuclear family as we understand it today. Most families were what we now call blended, because one spouse or another died all the time and the remaining spouse usually remarried, and often the maternal relatives were there as well. Fort children ran around in packs.They played together, watched drills together , and, when suppertime came, ate at their fire or at someone else’s. When it was time to sleep, they often lay down with a wrap or a ground cloth in piles like puppies. Often near the tents were the animals as well, “camels, together with elephants or buffaloes” (Waterfield, 25). The privacy we strive for so relentlessly today would have been considered a sign of dementia in the cantonments of the Bombay presidency. In camp life, people lived together in that crowded noisy world with an ease we can no longer understand. Anna and her family belonged to the army community and also to the closely knit community of mixed-race Anglo-Indians. The community consisted of natives of the Bombay presidency, but with a communal pride in their cultural inclusiveness and rich heritage, combining ancestors of many races but with a predominance of Indian, British, and Portuguese. Visiting British, ignorant of the ways of the Company, frequently referred to them with scorn as “half-castes” or sometimes used the somewhat more respectful term “Eurasians.” But in the Bombay presidency, the AngloIndians were a mutually supportive and politically active community. They were proud of their mixed heritage, regarding themselves as a superior combination of different peoples and cultures. The Donohoe family was a welcome addition. In many a family like the Donohoes, the two groups, the soldiers and the Anglo-Indians, intertwined. Anna was raised in a multicultural community of extraordinary richness and integration, full of peoples of many and mixed races, and many languages. The living quarters and sanitary conditions were poor. But the social conditions were not. Anna played with the children of Christians and Muslims and Hindus; kids whose fathers her father worked with, or whose mothers her mother shopped the bazaar stalls with, and visited with, and made a few rupees...

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