Collective Memory and Productive Nostalgia: Anglo-Indian Homemaking at McCluskieganj

Abstract

Memory and nostalgia have attracted an increasing amount of critical interest in recent years. Whereas sites of memory often invoke, but also extend far beyond, spaces of home, nostalgia invokes home in its very meaning. And yet, whereas spatial narratives explore the sites and landscapes of memory, nostalgia is usually described in temporal terms rather than in spatial terms and is understood as a wider “desire for desire” [Stewart S, 1993 On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press, Durham, NC), page 23] rather than as a desire for home. In this paper I show how memory and nostalgia informed the establishment and promotion of an Anglo-Indian homeland called McCluskieganj in Bihar in the 1930s. Homemaking at McCluskieganj was enacted in gendered and racialized ways that inscribed and yet erased the collective memory of mixed descent shared by its Anglo-Indian residents. Whereas an imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, an Indian maternal ancestor was more usually refigured as Mother India. In this paper I examine Anglo-Indian homemaking at McCluskieganj in terms of productive nostalgia. First, rather than a nostalgic desire for home being apolitical or confining, settlement at McCluskieganj showed its liberatory potential for Anglo-Indians. Second, rather than focus on nostalgia solely in narrative or the imagination, I show that productive nostalgia implies its embodiment and enactment in practice. Third, rather than nostalgia being seen in terms of loss, mourning, and the impossibility of return, productive nostalgia is oriented towards the present and the future as well as towards the past. Fourth, rather than focus on the temporality of home as a site of origin and an unattainable past, I show how productive nostalgia refocuses on the desire for both proximate homes and more distant homes. Anglo-Indian homemaking at McCluskieganj enacted a productive nostalgia that was oriented towards the present and future as well as towards the past, and revealed an attachment to both India and Britain as home.