In my blog I have often used the following quote from Naipaul’s book ‘An Area of Darkness’ in referring to the Anglo-Indian community that played a large part in my schooling:
It is an undiminishing absurdity; and it is only slowly that one formulates what was sensed from the first day; this is a mimicry not of England, a real country, but of the fairy-tale land of Anglo-India, of clubs and sahibs and syces and bearers. It is as if an entire society had fallen for the casual confidence of a trickster. Casual because the trickster had gone away, losing interest in his joke, but leaving the Anglo-Indians flocking to the churches of Calcutta on a Sunday morning to assert an alien faith more or less abandoned in its country of origin….Leaving ‘civil lines’, ‘cantonments’, leaving people ‘going off to the hills’; magic words now fully possessed, now spoken as of right, in what is now at last Indian Anglo-India, where smartness can be found in the cosy proletarian trivialities of Women’s Own and the Daily Mirror, and where Mrs. Hauksbee, a Millamant of the suburbs, is still the arbiter of elegance.
Considering the fact that I left school decades ago, I feel that an explanation of the passage will enhance one’s understanding of just what I went through. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971, was knighted in 1990 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. I can identify with Naipaul completely. He was of Indian origin from Trinidad and I am of Indian origin from Kenya. Both of us kept our Hindu names, in the case of Naipaul, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul and in my case Jitu Savani. I felt the repercussions of the unrealistic lifestyle the Anglo-Indians had embraced, so wonderfully described by Naipaul.
Summary of the Passage:
In this passage from An Area of Darkness, V.S. Naipaul offers a biting critique of how segments of post-independence Indian society, particularly those touched by colonial culture, continue to perform Britishness as a kind of social theatre. Long after the British Empire’s departure, these rituals—afternoon teas, churchgoing, club memberships, and colonial terminology—persist not as a living culture but as hollow mimicry. It’s not contemporary Britain being emulated, but a mythologized version of colonial England, a kind of fantasy empire that never truly existed outside its exoticized performance in India.
Naipaul sees this mimicry as tragicomic—a cultural joke played by the British colonizers who have since moved on, leaving their former subjects entranced by a dream that has lost all context and vitality. These habits and social codes have become so internalized that Indians now claim them “as of right,” unaware or unwilling to acknowledge their irrelevance in a modern, independent nation.
The Role of Hauksbee and Millamant:
The references to Mrs. Hauksbee and Millamant add a sharp literary twist to Naipaul’s critique:
- Mrs. Hauksbee is a character from Rudyard Kipling’s colonial short stories (Plain tales from the Hills), known for her wit, manipulation, and prominence in Anglo-Indian social circles. In Kipling’s world, she embodies the fashionable, powerful woman navigating the colonial elite’s politics and gossip. By referencing her as “an arbiter of elegance in Indian suburbs,” Naipaul mocks the continued reverence for outdated colonial models of sophistication. It’s absurd, he suggests, that a fictional relic of Empire now guides suburban Indian notions of taste.
- Millamant is a character from William Congreve’s 18th-century play The Way of the World—a refined, witty heroine from the world of Restoration comedy. Her presence alongside Mrs. Hauksbee creates an ironic contrast: where Millamant belongs to a distinctly British literary aristocracy, Hauksbee is part of the colonial fantasy exported to India. Naipaul implies that Indian society clumsily fuses these disparate icons into a patchwork identity—neither fully British nor authentically Indian, but suspended in a kind of theatrical mimicry. Note from Jitu: Restoration refers to the restoration of the monarchy in England. Before that, for 11 years England was under the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell.
Naipaul isn’t just criticizing these individuals for their tastes—he’s diagnosing a broader postcolonial condition. The lingering embrace of colonial symbols is not just nostalgia, but a failure to imagine a new cultural identity. What remains is a society imitating an imitation, clinging to aesthetic and social markers that have long since lost meaning even in their place of origin.
Characters like Millamant and Mrs. Hauksbee, with their wit, independence, and social finesse, became enduring symbols of a refined identity that many Anglo-Indians admired and emulated. Even after the British left India in 1947, the Anglo-Indian community clung to the values and lifestyles of the Raj, often maintaining an imagined sense of Britishness. However, this fantasy grew increasingly out of step with reality. Once numbering around 350,000 at Independence, the Anglo-Indian population has since declined to under 50,000, due largely to migration to countries like Australia, Canada, and the UK—often into low-wage, low-skill jobs. The elegant, self-assured world that characters like Millamant and Mrs. Hauksbee represent came to symbolize not only cultural aspiration but also a kind of displacement, as the community struggled to reconcile its identity with a rapidly changing world.
Anglo-Indian Mac (see many Pages critiquing and many mentions in the Blog), who had a devastating and enduring effect on my life, failed to recognise the changing world. He should have! His own brother Ken migrated to Canada, he would have noticed that Lovedale staff Harold Victor Prince and his wife Magdalene migrated to Canada in 1967, 11 years after Mac had joined the school; he would have known that one of his wards, a character called Whitbread migrated to Australia. His community was collapsing all around him yet he carried on his lifestyle of visiting the Lawley Institute every single day, leaving his wards in the care and custody of 16 and 17 year old thugs. That had a devastating effect on my ability to meet the objective my father spent a colossal sum of money in achieving, namely an Indian education. For while Mac was away enjoying himself, torture and theft was what his thugs indulged in!
Readers may be interested in knowing that between the 1950s and mid 1960s, there were 170,000 Indians in Kenya, my country of origin, of whom there were 10000 or fewer what we called Goans. Goans were of Portuguese-Indian mix. Included in that number were Anglo-Indians, Goans and Anglo-Indians being undistinguishable. As in India, they held subordinate Government positions such as telegraphists and clerks. Whenever there was an Indian movie showing a Western dance scene, the real Indians would be amused to watch Goan ladies with pencil thin legs perform. The real Indians would, in a derogatory manner shout ‘Govlee, Govlee’ ! Mac was partly of Portuguese stock (his mother was Braganza). The Indians in Kenya never held a high opinion of the community as none of them were businessmen and none of them were what we would call ‘combative’. That community never ever mixed with the wider Indian community, they were all Christian and they had their own Institutes, rather like the Anglo-Indians had their own Institutes in India. Perhaps the greatest irony of my being sent to India and ending up with Mac as my housemaster is that a Mac type could easily have been hired by my father in Kenya for a pittance to give me a home based education.
Pages critiquing Mac:
Mac – Wilfred Joseph McMahon- Introduction
Mac – Wilfred Joseph McMahon – Origin and Early Years
Mac – Wilfred Joseph McMahon – The Stalwart Who Never Was
Mac – Wilfred Joseph McMahon – Post Lovedale Years