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176 DOI: 10.7330/9780874218930.c10 Ten Long Ago and Far Away Another Passage to India A merging of forces in 1979 brought Rosan and me—while we were still very much folklorists teaching at LSU—to the pub in Youghal on the west coast of Ireland and to the stories which a kind reader may remember from chapter 1. We took on what we called the “sahib project” because we were intrigued theoretically by the sorts of folklore an elite group would have and by the idea of studying a folk group in past time. Rosan, from her interests in ethnicity and group identity, was fascinated by the possibilities of looking at a new sort of group. And so we set out to talk to retired colonial administrators and soldiers about a society in which they had spent large parts of their lives but that no longer existed except in memory and the stories that capture memory. We chose India in part because I had lived in post-colonial India and, as an alien Westerner, I certainly had wondered about how earlier generations of alien Westerners had lived there and coped with the experience. But I would not entirely discount the toy-soldier factor or the romantic cinematic and literary factors. Beginning around 1950 I became enthralled with the little metal toy soldiers, made primarily by England’s W. Britain, that flooded American toy stores, which sometimes lined them up in vast armies. Hollow-cast, light, and decorated in an array of uniforms, their exotic color and élan charmed me while their solid American-made equivalents, heavy and combat-ready, tended toward drabness. The British figures came in sets in wonderful, usually bright red boxes—like getting department store Christmas wrap every day. I managed to acquire a great variety of regiments from across a dwindling British Empire: mounted troopers with great yellow tunics from Skinner’s Horse, some sort of Bengal Lancers, fez-wearing Anglo-Egyptian Long Ago and Far Away 177 cavalry. A panoply of toy empire—ironically at a time when the real thing was in quick postwar decline. And I was certainly aware of Kipling, perhaps more from films like Kim than from books, and boys adventure fiction set in imperial landscapes. Although films about British exploits in India were a rather minor genre compared to Westerns or gangster movies, I saw a small but steady stream of them: sahibs putting down inconvenient native revolts, stalking tigers on foot, wandering through bazaars full of snake charmers and holy men reclining on the usual beds of nails. India stuck with me as a place where unflappable white men found strange destinies, or at least hung out at palatial clubs or in sophisticated hotel bars—in either case, under gently twirling ceiling fans—imbibing both cocktails and the steamy atmosphere (of course, maybe that was Hong Kong or Singapore; in popular culture, the empire conveniently blended together like a suave cocktail). I suppose that on some level, I wanted to see such people close up, though in reality they had Gone Home. We got to London in 1979 in the dead of winter, reasoning that as we moved toward spring the cold British weather could only improve. We headquartered in Mecklenburgh Square at London House, since called Goodenough College, although it was not at all a college in the conventional sense: a superb location near the foot of Lamb’s Conduit—one of those neighborhood streets with pubs, greengrocers, and an ironmonger—which still give parts of London the feel of a village. A footpath—our own secret passageway—led from Mecklenburgh Square behind Coram’s Fields—a vast children’s playground—over to Brunswick Square, or we could cut through St. George’s Gardens, a former churchyard made into a park that still held old gravestones poking up here and there, advertising the deceased among the benches and flower beds. London House itself, along with its companion , William Goodenough House, had been set up to accommodate overseas grad students and medical interns, plus a few older scholars and researchers like us, and to provide to such poor, benighted people an approximation of English college life: a quad, chaplains and chapels, a dining hall with portraits and long, carved tables and chairs, a bar, a library, TV rooms, tennis courts in the square. It provided, in all, a splendid, self-contained life within walking distance of the British Museum, the National Theatre, and Sadler’s Wells. From...

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