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‘This Foul Substance Is Media Watch

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Sealy’s The Trotter-nama

Merin Simi Raj1

Abstract
This article demonstrates how, through various acts of remembrance and
recovery, The Trotter-nama makes it possible to challenge as well as subvert
dominant historiographical constructions about the Anglo-Indian past and their
lived experiences. Thus it argues that the interconnectedness of memory, history
and fiction could initiate newer possibilities towards reclaiming identities that are
historiographically silenced, forgotten or elided.

Keywords
Anglo-Indian identities, colonialism, experientiality, historiography, miscegenation,
miscommunicated memories, transnational identities

Introduction
This article attempts to foreground the connections between memory, history and
fiction through a close and critical reading of Allan Sealy’s 1988 novel The
Trotter-Nama: A Chronicle, a re-telling of the seven-generation history of an
Anglo-Indian family narrated through the recollections of an individual.
Examining literary fiction as a site of convergence where cultural memory and
history seamlessly interact and alter each other, this article showcases how an
alternate historiographical and lived reality of an almost forgotten community is
reconstructed. Drawing from the discussions on history and fiction in the domain
of memory studies, this study looks at remembrances, in both public and private

1Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, Tamil
Nadu, India

Corresponding author:
Merin Simi Raj, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology
Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600036, India.
E-mail: merin@iitm.ac.in
2 Media Watch

realms, as selective and affective reconstructions of a history which is otherwise

no longer accessible or at best rendered illegitimate or invisible. The theoretical
framework of memory studies, a ‘nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary and
centerless enterprise’ (Olick & Robbins, 1998, p. 106), seems to be an appropriate
tool to productively engage with the effusive hyphenated Anglo-Indian narrative
history, which heavily relies on remembrances and remembered versions.
The Trotter-nama, in this article, is approached as a memory-narrative that
chronicles the transnational and intergenerational history of the Anglo-Indian
community from the eighteenth century onward, against the backdrop of French
and British colonialism. The Trotter-nama, the first-ever ‘nama’ to be written in
English, is also the only narrative work that recounts seven generations of Anglo-
Indian life, carefully attending to the affective and metonymic markers of
transnational genealogy and identity which were never documented but had to be
remembered and even reconstructed from collective and individual memory. This
article reads Trotter-nama as ‘historiographic metafiction’ and uses the concepts
of ‘travelling memory’ (Erll, 2011) and alternative modernities to historical
Anglo-Indianness as well as engage with some of the methodological lapses and
lacunae in presenting Anglo-Indian histories.
Sealy’s monumental work, dedicated to ‘the other Anglo-Indians’ and ‘that
protean people’, with an exhortation in the Prologue to ‘take up the grey man’s
burden’ (Sealy, 1990, Prologue) is crafted as a memory-narrative comfortably
inhabiting the space between historical fiction and roman à clef. Presented as a
seven-generation history of the Anglo-Indian community, particularly the Trotter
family, fiction is used as a tool to subvert and challenge historiography in its form
and practices. Conceived as a ‘nama’ as well as a ‘chronicle’, thereby integrating the
Eastern and Western traditions of storytelling and historicising, The Trotter-Nama
draws on medieval as well as colonial archetypes and myths to frame the seven-
generation epic of a community which Sealy deemed as the ‘first modern Indians’
(Muthiah & MacLure, 2013, p. 7). Situating itself among the Mughal and Persian
epics, the Akbar-Nama, the Shah-Nama, the Babar-nama, the Sikandar-nama and
the Ni’mat-Nama, this novel is a postmodern melange of history, literature and art.
This chronicle unfolds itself from the eighteenth century onward, along with the
progression and consolidation of British colonialism. In Sealy’s words,

The nama falls into your lap, as it were, first, the Baburnama, and then the Akbarnama
and the Ain-i-Akbari.… They give you more scope to look this way and that. I had
so much material, and I needed a big bag. The nama was full of room. It gave me
liberty and amplitude. (Dutta, 2020)

Thus, claiming a Marquezian tradition with an undeniably Indian flavour, Sealy

experiments generously with magical realism while also differently chronicling
colonial history with a distinct postmodern playfulness and ambivalence that
seems most appropriate for capturing the fragmented, dispersed and diasporic
Anglo-Indian history and identity. The Trotter-nama weaves in the Indian and the
European at multiple levels, in terms of genre, historical contexts and modes of
historicising, drawing attention to the formative history of miscegenation.
Raj 3

According to Jade Furness, ‘Set within the colonial and postcolonial discourses of
India, The Trotter-nama is a magical realist polemic that blends fact and fiction,
the literal and the figurative to produce an Anglo-Indian mythology that is
accessible to us all’ (Furness, 2021, p. 415). Foregrounding the Anglo-Indian
heritage through a novel that spans seven generations, 300 years, and over 500
pages, Sealy arguably ‘offers the most comprehensive account to date of how the
Anglo-Indian community has lived and what they have felt’ (Crane, 2008, p. 151)
through acts of remembrances and memory practices. This experientiality makes
the novel an appropriate site for exploring memory, history and modernity
questions.
The transnational, hyphenated and hybrid identities of Eurasian communities
(‘Anglo-Indians’ since 1935 as per Article 366(2) of the Indian Constitution) have
been the subject of many debates in mixed-race discourses since the sixteenth
century through variegated colonial experiences featuring the Portuguese, the
Dutch and the French, followed by the British. Used as a hyphenated adjective,
the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ packs into it not just English and Indian but European
elements including the Portuguese, French and Dutch that have come into contact
with the Indian subcontinent from the sixteenth century onwards. The Constitution
of India officially recognises and defines ‘Anglo-Indian’ as an individual whose
father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of
European descent but who is domiciled within the territory of India and is or was
born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein and not established
there for temporary purposes only. Thus, by definition, the origins of the Anglo-
Indian community date back to the pre-British era, suggesting a very diverse
colonial lineage that may be traced to the presence of Portuguese, Dutch, French
and Danish travellers traders and administrators in the subcontinent. Muthiah and
MacLure’s socio-cultural history on the Anglo-Indians, The Anglo-Indians: A
500-year History, locates 1498 as the year that marked the birth of ‘a new
international community’ (Muthiah & MacLure, 2013, p. 32), thereby highlighting
their transnational lineage.
There were always contentions and anxieties about texts that mapped and
narrated Anglo-Indian history from the early twentieth century onward. Amidst
the discourses on various postcolonial modern identities, which were being
fashioned from the early twentieth century onwards, the markers of modernity,
belonging and identity of the Anglo-Indian community had often got eclipsed, and
even elided, from historiographical representations. Frank Anthony, who
championed the community's political cause, asserted that the Anglo-Indians have
been ‘one of the most misrepresented people in the former British empire’ (quoted
in D’Cruz, 2006, p. 13). At the same time, the ‘Eurasian’, ‘half-caste’ figure of the
Anglo-Indian fascinated writers and artists as an exotic mixed-race entity leading
to the production of novels, films, plays and documentaries which (mis)represented
the community by associating them with alcoholism and sexual promiscuity.
Works such as Bhowani Junction (1956), a novel by John Masters which was later
made into a film; Cotton Mary (1999), a film directed by Ismail Merchant; Last
Dance at Dum Dum (1999), a novel by Ayub Khan Din; Bow Barracks Forever
(2004), a film directed by Anjan Dutt, to name a few, had drawn critical as well as
4 Media Watch

controversial attention from the Anglo-Indian community in India and the

diaspora. Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981) celebrates families
with ‘dubious genealogies’ and ‘mongrel ancestries” (D’Cruz, 2003, pp. 110–111)
with the narrator-protagonist Saleem Sinai, who is dramatically switched at birth,
being an Anglo-Indian; however, the circumstances leading to his birth forces him
to conceal his Anglo-Indian identity and foreground only how he is handcuffed to
the nation’s history as a legitimate citizen. As Mijares puts it, ‘Midnight’s
Children’s greatest offence, in the view of the Trotter-nama, is the erasure of the
history of the Anglo-Indians from its biologically Eurasian narrator’s claim to be
representing the history of all of India’ (Mijares, 2003, p. 6). This premise serves
as a caveat in this essay, historiographically and literarily, positioning Trotter-
nama as an outsider and outlier.
Sealy’s The Trotter-nama, in this context, may be read as an intervention that
challenges the stereotypes and biases inherent in most portraits of Anglo-Indian
lives and histories. The reimagining in The Trotter-nama is radically different
from Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, enabling a personalised form of re-telling of
a history that had otherwise relegated the Anglo-Indian community to the fringes.
It could be attributed to Sealy's insider knowledge due to his Anglo-Indian origins.
Besides, Anglo-Indian narratives have always ‘signalled a departure from the
postcolonial modes of accessing as well as framing identity’ (Raj & Parui, 2021b,
p. 15). Sealy’s narrative, for such historiographic and thematic reasons, needs to
be approached metaphorically, as well as he has mapped the lesser-known aspects
of colonial and postcolonial histories into the private lives of the Trotter clan. For
instance, Sealy devotes a substantial section to the event of 1857 Mutiny rewriting
the event with an Anglo-Indian hero, thus staking a claim in the nation’s history.
Sealy’s nama essentially does not try to sanitise or romanticise the lives of Anglo-
Indians; instead, it celebrates their status as modern, diasporic and global Indians
while adopting narrative strategies that help present even their flaws with
legitimacy and dignity. The narratorial voice keeps shifting across a range of
historical, fictional and even surreal realms, as Sealy recreates and straddles
worlds from the French colonial period in India, Victorian age, Mughal age, and
nineteenth-century colonial India. There is, thus, a fantastic cross-fertilisation
(Dutta, 1990) at the level of history, identity and language.
While the novel received national and international attention, receiving the
Sahitya Akademi Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s Award, the work
remained on the fringes of literary-critical historiography due to its unconventional
narrative techniques and less familiar Anglo-Indian tropes. Nevertheless, it
challenged the expectations of postcolonial fiction by moving away from the
centrality of British colonisation followed by the over-arching nation-narration;
perhaps, for the same reason, it received unfavourable reviews from fellow Indian
English writers such as Bharati Mukherjee, who described the novel as a ‘tiresome’
narrative in which ‘the Trotter family gets lost’ (Mukherjee, 1988). However, the
novel seemed to have been prophetically aware of such responses and had already
described itself as ‘a Raj novel went wrong’ written about ‘a strange sad monadic
people’ who ‘fantasise about the past’ and ‘improvise grand pedigrees’ (Sealy,
1988, p. 560).
Raj 5

The novel begins with a disjointed prologue conveniently intruded by Eugene,

the Seventh Trotter, who introduces himself and the exotic minority community
he belongs to as ‘past masters in the art of forgetting’. Eugene Trotter, who forges
miniatures for a living adds,
I used to be a writer but in the old East India Company sense of clerk. All Anglos
were writers until the railways came, almost all. Soldiers and teachers too—we’re
still that, though there aren’t very many of us left. Maybe a hundred thousand,
maybe two, counting bazar-side Anglos. The Sikhs are two per cent of the Indian
population—well, we’re two per cent of that. (Sealy, 1988, p. 14)

This cryptic and almost cynical description covers the range of occupations and
positions that the Anglo-Indians most typically held under the colonial
administration and their marginalised status vis-a-vis other minority communities
(D’Cruz, 2006).
In the maps and family tree provided at the outset of the novel, the seven
generations are labelled as legend, chivalry, romance, prose, history, decadence,
diaspora and new promise, thus tracing a trajectory that loosely defines the
emergence and evolution of the Anglo-Indian community. The map shows a
detailed layout of Sans Souci, the massive Trotter family estate by the Ganges in
Nakhlau, an anagram of Lakhnau (Lucknow), where the novel is set. Justin
Aloysius Trottoire, whose death marks the beginning of this ‘nama’, is presented
as a French artillery expert and soldier in the East India Company army who falls
out of a hot-air balloon, in a typical magical realist fashion, to his bizarre death
while aerially surveying Sans Souci. The Great Trotter, whose gravestone is left
symbolically incomplete with the inscription ‘Justin Trotter who’, lived a very
French life in India and acquired immense wealth and many wives before his
death. Mik, his illegitimate and unrecognised son, grows up nameless and serves
in the army before joining a Maratha prince when the mixed-race soldiers are
denied their ranks and positions. Mik, who earns the name ‘Gypsy Trotter’, is
often described as the Indo-Anglian fictional counterpart of Joseph Conrad’s Kim
owing to his mixed genealogy and his antithetical position with the Empire. Justin
Trotter and his illegitimate son Mik are atypical characters that embody
postmodern parody. Linda Hutcheon’s conceptualisation of ‘historiographic
metafiction’ is useful to problematise the representation of the Anglo-Indian
historical situation in India and the diaspora. In the tradition of ‘historiographical
metafiction’, the Trotter descendants cleverly challenge the received historical
truths and knowledge while suggesting the possibility of alternative histories that
have possibly been forgotten, suppressed, or overwritten. For instance, Justin
Trotter’s actions simultaneously mirror and subvert popular conceptions of the
religious tolerance of Mughal emperors Babar and Akbar and parody the life of
the French adventurer Claude Martin who established Anglo-Indian schools in
India. Mik, whose name is a palindrome of Kim, parodies and critiques colonial
narratives by travelling with a lama and offering radical commentaries on Hindu
deities and subaltern classes as well as Anglo-Indian and Indo-Briton identities
(McNamara, 2015).
6 Media Watch

Interestingly, in each generation, the Trotter descendants embody and parody

familiar and recognisable figures in medieval and colonial historiography to
demonstrate how the Anglo-Indian community is caught in the conflict between
colonial rule and nationalism. Charles Trotter, the son of Mik, breaks the Trotter
family’s military tradition to become a painter. Thomas Henry the Middle Trotter,
modelled on Henry Derozio, reclaims the military honour and tradition when he
receives the Victoria Cross during the 1857 mutiny. Peter Augustine, the lapsed
Trotter and Eustace, the Fore-Trotter, are followed by the seventh and the chosen
Trotter, Eugene, the narrator of the Trotter-nama. The narrative ends on a symbolic
note, with Eugene Trotter misplacing the chronicle, leaving his origins and
identity incomplete and irrecoverable; the genealogy of the Trotters is shown to be
a mixture of truth and myth at the end, reflecting the Anglo-Indian predicament.
The novel delves deeper into the lives of each Trotter; through a graphic detailing
of their relationships, occupations and eccentricities, it shows the various ways in
which dominant narratives of colonialism and nationalism have eclipsed the
Anglo-Indians. It may thus be argued that the vast genealogy is largely a robust
narrative strategy that Sealy offers to present the history of a community that is
otherwise seen as discontinuous and splintered vis-à-vis the more organised
telling of the colonial/postcolonial history. The Eurasians, whose identities were
always hyphenated and even assimilated to the point of invisibility in the pre-
British colonial decades, were left with little access to formal historiographical
articulations or traditions even in the postcolonial decades. The heavy narrative
investment in The Trotter-nama into the reconstruction of a pre-national past
becomes imminent in reclaiming Anglo-Indian history as it was during those early
decades that their identity was not restricted to that of a minority.
Given the 500-year history of the Anglo-Indian community, which traverses
through multiple colonial histories, it is important to read the lived experiences of
the community away from the typical notions of postcoloniality where British
imperialism assumes dominance for apparent reasons. In The Trotter-name, the
history of the Trotters begins in the eighteenth century with the Frenchman Justin
Aloysius Trotter, who, as well as his descendants, are constantly negotiating their
fraught relationship with the adopted homeland. Sealy carefully portrays the
making of the Anglo-Indian community by gradually constructing the history of
the East India Company and the British empire in India, paying attention to the
details of the many inter-marriages, the setting up of railways, the formation of
clubhouses, the fascination with hill stations, and the making of maps, ice and
even Indian English. He further accentuates the historicity of the narrative with
broad strokes from Indian history—the decline of the Mughal empire, the arrival
of the British followed by the dominance of the Company and the Crown, the
1857 Mutiny, the emergence of the Indian National Congress, the event of
Independence, and finally the contemporary globalised world with flights and
cinema. The novel uses irony and humour to reimagine a legacy of race and
ethnicity as well as reject the discourse of legitimacy while wondering, ‘can we
here and now and once and for all abandon the fetishism of the Original?’
(Sealy, 1988, p. 453).
Raj 7

Rich with metafictional allusions and references, The Trotter-nama is intensely

aware of its form and function; the narrator takes up the twin role of a storyteller
and historian who could reimagine and re-create the almost forgotten Anglo-
Indian past. The map and the family chart that provide the intricate genealogy of
the Trotters through their many mixed-race marriages are meant to lend
authenticity and complexity to this remembered past. In that sense, the novel is an
exercise in remembrance vis-à-vis the postcolonial misremembrances and the
empire’s acts of forgetting. In its telling, the narrative becomes a text of
remembrance as well as an act of commemoration; it is useful to recall in this
context Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘On the concept of history’ where he borrows the
Jewish term for ‘remembrance’ to foreground the process of reading history
against the grain as well as to refer to the process of keeping alive the memory of
the victims and the nameless. In similar ways, in Trotter-nama, remembrance is
not just an act that helps retrieve the past but the only available historiographical
strategy for a community whose identity is marred with discourses of erasure,
forgetting and illegitimacy. Ironically, Eugene Trotter, the narrator, attributes
forgetfulness as a core characteristic of Anglo-Indians when he introduces them
as ‘postmasters in the act of forgetting, my people’ (Sealy, 1988, p. 7). This self-
reflexivity is at the core of Anglo-Indian identity. Later in the novel, he also urges
them to forget while musing about ‘Trotter ice’: ‘Forget the past: The past is so
much water running off’.
The questions raised by The Trotter-nama are historical and autobiographical
at the same time; this ambivalence makes the text a perfect site for exploring the
hybrid identity of the Anglo-Indians while also problematising the claims of
official historiography. The Trotter-nama does not labour too hard to create
authentic subjects; as D’Cruz notes, ‘Sealy occupies a liminal space which neither
denigrates nor celebrates the figure of the Anglo-Indian’ (D’Cruz, 2003, p. 35). It
is possible to argue that Trotter-nama operates with an obsessive compulsion to
reimagine and remember the Anglo-Indians differently, with a narrative history
that celebrates a discontinuous and heterogenous tradition between different
colonial encounters while also challenging the notion of the Anglo-Indian being
an unchanging and unrecognised byproduct of colonialism, lending itself to
erasure and stereotyping. At the same time, the novel does not disavow the
contradictions or make dramatic moves to push the Anglo-Indian subject from the
margins to the centre stage; on the contrary, the reference to the ‘Anglo-Indian
remnant’ by Peter Jonquil, the journalist from Manchester towards the end of the
novel actively parodies the existing (mis)conceptions and chooses to leave it
ambiguously open-ended. The historical event of 1857 Mutiny is recreated as a
fable allowing much room for fantasy which arguably facilitates the representation
of history through a mode of enactment that is not delimited by colonial or
postcolonial forms of historicising.
For the same reason, the text gets best described as ‘historiographic metafiction’
and ‘comic epic’ (Mijares, 2017, p. 23), thereby highlighting its deliberate
playfulness. While narrating the extended version of the Mutiny, the novel also
reveals the existence of a ‘third space’ in which the Anglo-Indian is loyal neither
to British administrators nor Indian nationalists; it is in this conflict and
8 Media Watch

ambivalence that the Anglo-Indian identity is shaped. In this hyphenated third

space, there are no anxieties of essentialism; on the contrary, there emerges a
duality of identity that could potentially reject as well as challenge binaries and
polarities.
In the novel, memory is not a static phenomenon; it travels and changes across
generations, dynasties and empires, recreating multiple realities and histories. In
this context, this article draws on Astrid Erll’s notion of ‘travelling memory’,
which she situates within transcultural memory, ‘as the incessant wandering of
carriers, media, contents, forms and practices of memory, their continual “travels”
and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and
political borders’ (Erll, 2011, p. 4). As Erll puts it, ‘Memories do not hold still—
on the contrary, they seem to be constituted first of all through movement’ (Erll,
2011, p. 11). This movement of memory is essential in understanding The Trotter-
nama and the Anglo-Indian history by extension. Interestingly, the novel
consciously draws attention to the process and function of remembering in a
quintessential meta mode. While referring to Justin Trotter’s painting at the outset
of the novel, which is ‘done from memory’, Eugene Trotter wonders, ‘doesn’t
memory thin?’ (Sealy). The tentative and unreliable quality of memory woven
into the narrative almost becomes a commentary on the novel itself. When Marazzi
is reporting to Justin Trotter, he says,

I am faithfully reproducing (or you might say producing) it. Since I was not
present at the time of building (I lay bleeding at Borromini), I am compelled to
rely upon memory. And memory (especially memory of what one has not seen) is
a most coquettish thing; wanton, one might almost say (if one might say). (Sealy,
1988, p. 571)

In the episode featuring the infant boy with limited vocabulary without adjectives
and verbs, it is noted that ‘inside the bullet head a phenomenal memory was
stirring’, suggesting the involuntary and organic ways memory operates. Towards
the end of the novel, there is a reference to artists who are ‘compelled to work
from memory’. In these instances, the memory becomes a practice and even a
substitute for the unavailable or inaccessible real, which is carried and transmitted
across space and time, beyond boundaries.
The past, as Erll notes, is condensed into ‘mnemonic forms’ or ‘memory
figures’ with a ‘powerful transgenerational tenacity’ (Erll, 2011, p. 4). Trotter-
nama as a memory-narrative seems to fit in as a text that facilitates memory travel
through mnemonic markers, including paintings, sculptures and architecture,
which refer to the act of writing itself. The miniature paintings of the Mughal
period, the repeated references to English painters Henry Salt, William Hodges,
Samuel Davis, Thomas Daniell and Jones Barker, and Eugene’s forged miniatures
simultaneously acknowledge and debunk historical validity. The architecture and
sculpture, including the view of Sans Souci the readers are offered at the beginning
of the novel, may be read as attempts to provide a three-dimensional, spherical
view of the stories and lives being chronicled in this narration. In addition, there
are maps, diagrams, family trees, diary entries, actual historical documents, lyrics
of popular film songs, might-have-been memoirs, and even extracts from scientific
Raj 9

and philosophical documents. This is indeed a ‘mixed bag’, importing the

apparatuses from various disciplines and historiographies. As the novel states,
‘What is this India? Is it not a thousand shifting surfaces which enamour the
newcomer and then swallow him up’ (Sealy, 1988, p. 312).
The spirit of celebratory hybridity, which Rushdie popularised in his
postcolonial-postmodern fiction, finds interesting departures in Sealy’s re-telling;
it is most visible in Sans Souci as ‘home’, as the foundational space, with no other
fixities in terms of geographical or political spaces. In that sense, there is no
notion of homeland either—real or imaginary—only the monstrously huge space
of Sans Souci, which is domestic and political at the same time. The structure of
Sans Souci, in addition to being sprawling, is inconclusive and eclectic with
impossible elements of origin and construction. This impossibility as well as
chaos is evident in the passage which refers to the people who arrived in Sans
Souci to participate in the project of its construction:

[T]here came on foot, by boat, by yak, and on horseback, rock-breakers from Cape
Cormorin, tilers from Peiping, earth-movers from Cooch Behar, dome-dressers
from Petersburgh, gypsy blacksmiths from the Thar desert, spirit-levellers from
Isphahan, a plinth-master from Tibet, rampart-setters from Benin, a Scottish mason,
plasterers from Cochin–China, steeplejacks from Hradcany, master-builders from
Ellora and Elephanta, stylites from Memphis and Corinth, Malayan dog-men,
terracers from Macchu Picchu, and strawmen and thatchers from the surrounding
villages. (Sealy, 1988, 341)

The architecture in The Trotter-nama is thus palimpsestic. It is a structure that

lends itself to being written over, thus leaving behind the vestiges of many
individuals and traditions across generations. Sans Souci’s is a constantly changing
structure, undergoing a continuous process of mutation even when it is being
constructed. It has no meaning or attribute and works like a machine with multiple
functions. There is a construction and expansion of memory through the external
and specific information provided about the architecture. This exotic spatialisation
echoes the Anglo-Indian histories which are always written over. This detached
and almost mythical rendering of a past is essential to the identity-formation of a
community as ‘myth is a story one tells oneself to orient oneself in the world; it is
a truth of a higher order, which is not simply true but in addition makes normative
claims and possesses a formative power’ (Assmann, 2011, p. 76).
There is no pure place of origin that the Trotters seem to desire with nostalgia
or aspiration. Sans Souci becomes the homeland as well as the diaspora and
emerges as that space where hybridity is acknowledged and celebrated; it is
founded and defined as a third space, neither imperial nor national. Justin Trotter
or his descendants, thus, do not try to fit themselves into templates that are
identifiable as predominantly imperialist or nationalist. The architecture of Sans
Souci, as Weimann puts it, ‘is neatly continuous with the identity construction the
Great Trotter envisages for himself and his kind’ (Wiemann, 2008, p. 201). The
novel is overtly conscious of this privilege as well as limitation and notes, ‘Justin
… decided that he could never, however hard he tried, turn Indian (any more than
he could revert to a European), and that it was best if he were reconciled to the fact
10 Media Watch

and became a third thing’ (Sealy, 1988, p. 195). According to Wiemann, in The
Trotter-nama, the domestic is ‘continuous with and reproductive of the larger
frame into which home is inserted’ (Wiemann, 2008, p. 191). Sans Souci, the
Trotter residence, is neither imitative nor original and functions as a space where
myths, histories and identities beyond and outside of imperialist and nationalist
compulsions can emerge. This absence of monolithic markers is at the core of
Anglo-Indian identity and ‘signals the anxiety of appropriation’, which Raj and
Parui define as ‘identity-consumption, whereby the past, as well as the future of a
fledgling community, is strategically selected and designed to be aligned to and
thereby consume a broader identity-narrative and its associated collective
memory’ (Raj & Parui, 2021a, p. 358).
The hyphenated, non-belonging identity of the Anglo-Indian, is articulated
with a sense of longingness through Eustace Trotter’s words when Eugene Trotter
recalls him lamenting,

Home. […] The Hindus wanted theirs, the Muslims wanted theirs, the British were
going back to theirs. What about us? […] Those neither Indian nor European spoke
English and ate curries with a spoon. Like the Muslims carving out their holy Land
of the Pure and the Hindus dreaming of a once and future Aryan homeland. […] So
many purities! And yet he too wanted a home. He was only half at home here.
(Sealy, 1988, p. 491)

This desire for ‘a home’, any home, may be understood through the framework of
‘restorative nostalgia’, which Svetlana Boym defines as an attitude that ‘puts
emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the
memory gaps’ (Boym, 2001, p. 41). This nostalgia is very different from the kind
of postcolonial nostalgia narrativised in texts such as Midnight’s Children; not a
longing for what was once there and lost, but a longing for something which was
never there in the first place. Justin Trotter, in The Trotter-nama, experiences this
as a ‘nostalgia for the future’ (Sealy, 1988, p. 233).
The Trotter-nama is a dynamic narrative site where the postmodern
performances of parody and mimicry are deliberately played out, especially in the
presentation and remembrance of history. Referring to history as a ‘foul substance’,
the past emerges as an object that could be tangibly experienced through olfactory
and gustatory senses. The chronicle is defined as the opposite of history, as
something which ‘has a sequence, never fear, though the gathering was random’
(Sealy), as a ‘record of the past set down with genius and sang-froid’ (Sealy), and
as a spatialisation of time as against history which temporalises spaces. Eugene
Trotter, the narrator who belongs to the modern, contemporary times, also further
qualifies this as a ‘synchronicle’ which presents three ages side by side. There is
also an entire spectrum of the past, present and future.
History, as the title drawn from the novel, suggests, when viewed through the
frameworks of historiographic metafiction and memory studies, emerges as a
‘foul substance’, whose rejection and subversion productively foreground and
reclaim the missing memories that exist outside of it. What makes The Trotter-
nama most interesting is how the narrative straddles the worlds of private and
Raj 11

public remembrances by deliberately locating itself in a space where memory,

history and fiction overlap, thereby deconstructing the discourses of legitimacy
on which most modern systems of knowledge rest. Memory-narratives such as
The Trotter-nama productively problematise the discourses on mixed-race
communities and their private and public (mis)remembrances, unpacking the
notions of identity, belonging and nationality. Celebrating a hyphenated and non-
teleological history fraught with invented truths, conjectures and counterfactual
possibilities, The Trotter-nama asks newer questions about the process of
remembrance that is imperfect as well incomplete. This article, thus, is an attempt
to engage with the complex experiences of miscegenation, miscommunicated
memories and alternative modernities embodied and represented by communities
of mixed-race descent, namely the Anglo-Indians, who have received the least
historiographical and discursive attention in postcolonial scholarship owing to
their hybrid, hyphenated and transnational origins which were also ‘illegitimate’,
and therefore undocumented.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of
this article.

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About the Author

Merin Simi Raj is an Assistant Professor (English) in the Department of Humanities and
Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. She is the
co-investigator of the Centre for Memory Studies (CoE-IoE Project) and co-chairperson of
the Indian Network for Memory Studies (INMS). Her research interests are memory
studies, historiography studies, Anglo-Indian studies, Kerala modernity and digital
humanities.