Post-colonial domesticity amid diaspora: home and family in the lives of two English sisters from India.

Through oral history, this essay explores the meanings of home and family in the memories and experiences of two sisters, Josephine and Judy Beck, who are part of the post-imperial British diaspora. Testifying to the persistence of empire as a force in the lives of those who were children during the years of decolonization, their stories resonate with some of the most compelling of contemporary historical themes. They illustrate ways in which colonialism has remained seamlessly woven into the British national experience. (1) Illuminating distinctive elements of an "imperial social formation" transcending colony and metropolis, their recollections describe both the restrictions imperialism has placed upon them and the creative possibilities it has offered. (2) The ways in which Josephine and Judy remember their colonial youth and assess its impact on their choices in life draw upon gender and ethnicity to create a sense of history, place, and personal connections integrating--to use ideas developed by John Gillis--the families they live with and those they live by. (3) In constructing an empire of memory and imagination, the women link the circumstances of their lives with larger, global events. Articulating a distinct relationship between public politics and private events, their recollections explain a historical experience in which family and nation are juxtaposed in a singular, problematic sense of feminine belonging.

Josephine and Judy grew up with their brother Tim in the 1940s and 1950s in an English family in Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province. Their father William had worked as a police official under the British, and he and his wife Marjorie chose to stay on in Pakistan after Partition and independence in 1947. (4) While the Becks' experiences and attitudes are, in many ways, representative of those of many ordinary English families in the late colonial period, age, gender and geography set the sisters apart from the most-frequently studied subjects. (5) Born into a British imperial community that was rapidly disappearing, Josephine and Judy belong to a younger cohort than most end-of-the Raj memoirists. (6) While the sisters' narratives reflect their colonial upbringing, their recollections transcend the genre of late-twentieth-century Raj nostalgia and imperialist apologia. (7) They articulate a sense of liminality particular to their generation and an identification with home, family and community typical of female oral history narrators. (8) Both women recall realizing that they and their family were unlikely to remain permanently in Pakistan, but neither felt "comfortable" in England--to use Josephine's word--where they felt like foreigners when they visited in 1948 and 1958. Their options, even more than those of their parents' generation, were limited by the end of the British Empire in India and constrained by the prevailing social prescriptions glorifying marriage and stay-at-home motherhood for young middle-class women in the late 1950s and early 1960s. (9) In different ways, however, each sister has chosen a marriage allowing her to adapt aspects of what Josephine recalled with pleasure as a "colonial childhood" to an adult life built upon an internationalized, post-imperial sense of home, family and domesticity in which personal relationships and geographical mobility have remained central. (10)

The Becks' memories of what became Pakistan also illuminate a neglected yet thematically distinctive region. Underrepresented in the colonial archival record, which is richest for the Bengal, Madras, and Bombay presidencies, the North West Frontier and Baluchistan were among the most militarized of the provinces and therefore particularly valuable settings for studying colonial violence, which continues to grip scholars as a principal theme of imperial rule. (11) Threats of violence figure prominently in the sisters' stories, providing a central trope through which, ironically, they articulate a retrospective sense of belonging and assert the value of their upbringing.

As Josephine and Judy juxtapose family memories with specific, violent political events, they relate the political to the personal, the particular to the global. In so doing, they infuse their private experiences with public meaning and historical significance. Most notably, Josephine vividly recalls encounters with Pakistani youths critical of British policy during the Suez Crisis of 1956, and Judy dramatically remembers the anxious days she spent in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In our interviews, Josephine and Judy told stories about specific social interactions that personalize these political events and the broader developments of decolonization and Americanization that they reflect. At the same time, both women legitimate Britain's imperial foreign policy through reference to earlier violence, such as the Mutiny-Rebellion of 1857 and the massacres at Partition. Josephine in particular expressed her fascination with the nineteenth-century insurrection, seeing within it a precedent for something she feared and understood--having someone who had been a friend become an enemy. (12) Casting traumatic events and difficult encounters with Pakistanis or Iranians within a broad historical context, therefore, allows the Becks to achieve in retrospect a sense of control over their lives that may have eluded them at the time. Like most British memoirists of the late colonial period, particularly those who are women, Josephine and Judy establish continuity with their family's history in ways that authenticate the British presence in South Asia. Their oral histories reflect a familiar pattern whereby British autobiographers "deployed the stories of their individual experiences in India to validate not only their own lives, but the role of the British empire in India as well." (13)

Similarly, the notion of a colonial childhood, idealized as a time of mobility and safety, provides a particular way of linking the biographical and the historical. (14) In Josephine and Judy's recollections, their youth offers a way of understanding the end of the empire through narratives of their own development as individuals. (15) Both women stress the positive influence of their upbringing, the ways in which it empowered and educated them. Using language that echoes Commonwealth rhetoric about mutual understanding and friendship among a "family" of nations (which from their perspective includes the United States), the sisters credit their colonial upbringing with instilling within them a liberal tolerance for diversity and equality, while struggling to engage with the unequal legacy of imperialism among its members.

The empire had provided an expansive terrain upon which Josephine and Judy's family defined themselves. The rhetoric of imperial-British nationalism and the institutions of colonial control had offered their parents opportunities that their daughters' generation could not duplicate. Both William and Marjorie came from families with long histories of residence in territories subject to British power and therefore part of an imagined "Greater Britain" characterized in the mid-twentieth century as much by an assumption of British prestige in "non-settler" colonies as by solidarity among English-speaking, white populations. (16) However, except for a few months' leave, neither Marjorie nor William lived in England until they retired to Sussex in the early 1970s. William had been born and brought up in India, where his ancestors had come early in the nineteenth century. Marjorie had family in East Africa and spent the first seven years of her life in Egypt, moving to India when her widowed mother Helen married an officer in the Indian Army in the early 1920s. In the years before Partition, both William and Marjorie enjoyed the tremendous mobility within India characteristic of the British colonial middle-class. Each studied at boarding schools in the Himalayas (Bishop Cotton's in Simla and Wellesley in Naini Tal, respectively) and lived with their families in places as diverse as the United Provinces, Bengal, Burma and, finally, Baluchistan, where they met and spent the first fifteen years of their marriage. Even after Partition, when they found themselves on the Pakistani side of the border, they had relations who remained in Delhi and Bombay and continued to think in terms of a single "India." (17)

Both economic considerations and personal aspirations shaped the decision to stay on. Still in his early forties in 1947, William was too young to retire, and he had the opportunity to continue his career in the police under the new Pakistani government. After the 1948 furlough in England, during which Tim was born, William returned to pursue his career in the police, with postings in Quetta and Loralai, in rural Baluchistan. In the mid 1950s, under pressure from Pakistani officers seeking to replace the remaining British men, he retired early from the police and found security work through the Foreign Office with the British Deputy High Commission in Peshawar. When the job ended in 1958, the family once again returned to England for a few months, but William soon accepted another similar position across the Afghan border from Peshawar in Kabul. During many of these years, Marjorie also worked, first as a WAC-I in Quetta during World War II and later as a secretary in Peshawar and Kabul. She and William finally retired in 1971 to a semi-detached, mock-Tudor house inherited from her mother in Patcham, a village on the edge of suburban Brighton. In so doing, the couple had completed a pattern of overseas service and metropolitan retirement consistent with that of earlier generations of middle-class Britons whose livelihoods depended upon working in the empire.

As Josephine reflects, "If my mother didn't live in the house in Brighton, I would have no reason to go to Brighton, because the heart of it all is in that house. It always has been. My grandmother lived there, all my children, if they think of England, they think of that house. It's just a simple, little house, but that was England to them." For five generations since the 1930s, this dwelling has embodied family and country. It sheltered the girls' grandparents for the duration of World War II, becoming for Marjorie a symbol of Britain under siege and her family in peril, particularly after a stray bomb fell less than a block away. The house was also the destination for Josephine, Judy and their father on their first trip ever "Home" to England after the war, and more recently, Marjorie's widowed sisters Daphne and then Dorothy came to live there. The home in the heart of southern England provides a particular sense of belonging that unites family and nation. It is the one place, across time, connecting everyone in the family. The older generations, whose semi-public households in India included servants and were often maintained in official cantonments, have experienced a more private, family-centered domestic realm for the first time. Similarly, the younger generations who have never been to Pakistan are at home in Patcham, where King George IV's mock-Indian Brighton Pavilion lies only a short bus ride away, situating the house that is England firmly in a post-colonial landscape.

Despite the shared identification with the family home, Josephine and Judy have struggled with more ambiguous feelings of national belonging and greater ambivalence about British colonialism than either their parents' generation or that of their own children. England seems empty by comparison with the Pakistan of their youth, functioning in their memories primarily as a metaphor of home. The empire, by contrast, despite its violence and instability, endures as the most meaningful manifestation of Englishness in their lives. Yet as the empire has evaporated and Pakistanis have been erasing many of the vestiges of British imperialism in their country, the Beck sisters recognize being, to use Josephine's phrase, "a remnant of something." The reflection suggests ways in which some present memories have been constructed at a distance from the past, while also capturing a sense of powerlessness that gripped young women whose options were limited by historical forces beyond their control. They were caught in an uncomfortable disjuncture between individual youth and imperial decline, although subsequently Josephine and Judy have reworked remnants of their colonial upbringing to recreate new ideas of home and belonging.

As children, the sisters regarded Pakistan as the place where they belonged, although they knew it was not their country, and they were not Pakistanis. They emulated the adults in referring to England as "Home," but they felt like outsiders during the visits in 1948 and 1958, describing themselves as foreigners and even as Indians. Returning to Quetta in 1949 was "returning home," in Josephine's view. Their parents self-identified as "English" or "British," reconciling their lives in Asia within an imperial-British nationality that eluded Josephine and Judy as members of a post-colonial generation. Instead, as children and adolescents, the sisters felt more ambiguous about where they belonged, negotiating a more problematical intersection between Britishness and Anglo-Indianness, which in the twentieth century described mixed European and Asian parentage.

Being British or Anglo-Indian in the late-colonial period depended upon class, culture and occupation as much as ancestry, although people typically characterized the boundary in racial terms defined by skin color. (18) The sisters remember their grandmother being concerned that if they became too tan, the brown-eyed girls might be mistaken for Anglo-Indians. Similarly, according to Josephine, when she and her friends met to play outside, their ayahs would sit together comparing the racial appearance of their charges. The servants of the whitest-looking children took the greatest pride in their employment. In Josephine's recollections, a girl's skin tone could be as significant as her father's job in determining her status.

Although these memories center on the pre-independence period, when British prestige was higher than in the 1950s, the colonial premium on whiteness intersected with the preference for lighter skin among Indian and Pakistani elites. In northern, predominantly Muslim territories such as Baluchistan, fairer complexions suggested Mughal ancestry, much revered, for example, in the princely state of Kalat. The particular ways in which color was imagined in racial terms could, however, differ substantially among Europeans and Asians. Marjorie recalls attending a wedding in Kalat dressed in black stockings. Fashionable by western standards, her choice of hosiery mystified the Pakistani guests who challenged her for making her legs appear dark skinned.

As the concern with establishing visual racial boundaries suggests, the social distinctions between Pakistanis, Anglo-Indians and "domiciled Europeans," as the census termed permanent resident Britons, became particularly ambiguous for those of Josephine and Judy's generation. The sisters readily acknowledge that they were more fully immersed in an Anglo-Indian culture than their parents or grandparents, largely because so many British people had left for Britain in 1947. Most of their schoolmates at Saint Denys boarding school in Murree were elite Anglo-Indians or Pakistanis who, as the 1950s progressed, moved away from the Anglicization embraced earlier by their parents and increasingly identified as Pakistani. Josephine and Judy are also proud of their friendships with the children of Anglo-Indian and Pakistani servants and friends of their parents, pleased that they could sometimes pass as Anglo-Indians among their peers, and pointing out that not all British parents were as tolerant as their own. Judy in particular remembered

  We had a Pakistani great friend of my father's that we called Uncle
  Ahmed, who had actually grown up with my father, and his wife, who
  was Auntie Eliya. We didn't call many people "auntie" and "uncle,"
  but we called them our uncle and auntie, and their daughter Jumila,
  who married the Khan of Kalat.

Despite their anti-racism and liberalism as adults, however, Josephine and Judy now resist identification as Anglo-Indians. For example, Josephine characterized her accent as more Anglo-Indian than her mother's more "metropolitan" British accent, but she contradicted her husband Charles' complimentary characterization of her as "more Anglo-Indian than British." In this context, Josephine asserted her Englishness, though elsewhere in our interviews she distanced herself from it, expressing her "loyalty" to the United States, where she has lived most of her life. Her upbringing, and specifically her identification with her family, seems to be what made her English--not a sense of racial whiteness or belonging to the country itself.

The sisters' childhood identification with Anglo-Indians, and even with Pakistanis, characterize their first memories of England. For example, each remembers her surprise at seeing white men doing menial jobs, but both are anxious to dispel criticisms that their surprise was racist. Judy remembers their train pulling into Liverpool Street Station.

  Jo and I were both amazed, and me in particular, that the porters on
  the station were English. I found that very difficult. I couldn't
  understand why they weren't Indian, why they weren't Pakistani,
  because I had never actually seen anybody European serving. It had
  always been Pakistanis--not that I thought of them as people who only
  served, but they were the only people who ever served as bearers or
  cooks or porters, and so I found it very peculiar in England that
  these people were actually English [laughter]. I expected them to be
  Indian or Pakistani for some reason, not African or anything else,
  but Indian or Pakistani, and I found that very strange that they
  weren't.

While avoiding a simple binary view of race that would equate Indians and Africans within a larger category of "blacks" or "nonwhites," in such memories Judy conflates "Indian-ness" and "Pakistani-ness," reflecting her colonial upbringing and highlighting a visible racial gulf between South Asians and Europeans.

Further demonstrating the contingency of ethnic identities and the problematic location of "home," the sisters' recollections of their initial interactions with schoolmates in England develop distinctions between the categories "English," "foreigner," and "Indian" or "Pakistani." In this context, Judy and Josephine became "Indians" and even "foreigners," contradicting Commonwealth idealism about harmony, friendship and a common British heritage among the family of nations. Judy remembers her introduction to Vardean, a girls' grammar school in Brighton:

  I found school in England extremely difficult. Everything was very
  different, because I had led a completely different life, and
  although we'd had English girls in our school in Pakistan, there
  weren't as many foreigners in England, very few, and very few
  Pakistanis or Indians. And so of course, when they found that I was,
  had come, from India; I got a lot of taunting. They used to chant
  "She's the girl from India," and they thought it was all very
  strange. They'd ask me questions like "Did my mother live in a tree?
  And was she black?" Now with television and with so many people in
  this country, that's gone, but in those days it was very rare to have
  been away in India.

As children, the sisters welcomed the family's return to Pakistan in 1949. As the 1950s progressed, however, they recognized that it was becoming, to use Josephine's phrase, "not my place anymore." They faced the challenge of carving out a future without the benefit of the imperial institutions taken for granted by their parent's generation. In this setting, middle-class femininity and domesticity emerged as their primary identity, inflecting other forms of belonging, including nationality.

Josephine, who was born in 1938 and is the elder of the two sisters, trained to become a teacher. She taught for a year in the late 1950s, first in Karachi and then in Peshawar. She also worked briefly in Peshawar as a radio announcer, reading the news in English. Despite the lack of enthusiasm of some family members, she became engaged temporarily to a Pakistani military pilot. While such a commitment would have enabled her to remain in the country that still felt more like home than any other, and although her fiance's class background was comparable to her own, over time the marriage would have taken her away from the privileged cosmopolitanism of her family's social milieu, eroding Josephine's status as a European and curtailing her independence as a woman. During our interviews, Josephine spoke to me at length about some of her former school friends, most of them Anglo-Indians. The majority married Pakistani men. By her account, many of the marriages turned out unfortunately, with the women disappearing into purdah, deferring to their husbands and mothers-in-laws, and losing their previous Anglo-Indian identities in new Pakistani ones. Being unmarried and supporting oneself through a traditionally-feminized occupation did not offer a brighter future, as Josephine explained when she recounted to me the tragic fate of a particular friend who became an air stewardess on Pakistan International Airlines and then perished in a crash. By telling these stories about other women, Josephine contextualized her own life, indirectly presenting the options she may believe she had as a young woman.

To a large extent Josephine's experiences reflect the re-domestication of middle-class women in post-World War II western societies. As decolonization transformed Raj-era ethnic categories, undermining the prestige both of Anglo-Indians and Britons, shoring up gender role boundaries may have provided an alternative source of apparent stability and social belonging within a community undergoing rapid change. Even when recollecting dramatic public events and confrontations, such as those surrounding Suez, Josephine presents them in personal terms that rely upon the gendered social conventions of her community. For example:

  In Pakistan at the time I was growing up, the issues that were
  important and that involved us in sometimes unpleasant ways in the
  'fifties were the Suez Crisis and--well any issue through the Middle
  East [which] they would take on as a) a Muslim issue and b) a
  colonial issue.
  We knew a couple of tense moments when Britain bombed the canal. In
  fact, during that time, we had gone shopping. We had a small Fiat
  station wagon, and my father was driving, and my grandmother, my
  brother and I were in the car, when we turned a corner smack into a
  mob. Absolutely into a mob. They had overturned a car in front of us.
  We never saw who was in the car. We never knew who had been in the
  car. There wasn't anyone in it at the time. They'd pulled some people
  off bicycles, Anglo-Indian people, etcetera, and we came straight
  around into this mob of people who stopped the car, hit on the
  windows and on the top of the car and were trying to push at it. They
  lay down in front of the car to stop us. And my father opened the
  window a little bit and he said, "I'm just giving you warning that
  I'm driving at you." And he did. He just revved up the engine, and he
  drove at them, and they leapt up. And we got through it, but it was
  very, very frightening. [We were] surrounded by very angry looking
  faces. They would have done it if they could have. They had obviously
  overturned another car. Then they came around collecting money for
  the Suez crisis, at one point, during those days somewhere, and then
  it was all over.
  On the other hand, you could meet somebody who might even have been
  in that mob, and you met him on the street or in somebody's home, and
  he was just as kind as he could be. It wasn't an individual thing; it
  was a mob thing. It was everybody getting together.
  At the same time, I was acting in a Shakespearean play. There was an
  English professor at the university, a Miss Harbottle, who was very
  dramatic, and she actually put on Shakespeare all the time, so I was
  involved with that for a while. A lot of Pakistanis, well mostly
  Pakistanis, some English people, and we were doing Twelfth Night at
  that time. I had a very good friend, a Pakistani friend, and I was
  teaching him to ballroom dance on the sidelines, while we were
  waiting to go on. And then another friend said: "Don't teach him to
  dance. He was out there stoning your High Commission today." And he
  said: "Don't worry about it. That was my morning work. I don't hold
  it against you." And he didn't. That was the thing.
  He didn't, and I didn't hold it against him. He was out doing what he
  thought he had to do. He was a university student at the time, and
  they were mostly the ones who were demonstrating anyway.
  Years later when my parents were in Afghanistan and drove down into
  Peshawar one day, my father almost ran over a man, and it turned out
  to be this guy. He was so pleased to see them and wanted to know how
  I was doing and all the rest of it, years later. So that was the kind
  of thing.
  I also ran into another mob. I was driving my grandmother, and we ran
  into this mob of students. In Twelfth Night I was playing the part of
  Viola. It was actually on at that time; we were doing the play
  publicly. One fellow peeked into the window, and he shouted to the
  crowd: "It's Viola!" and the crowd just parted, I drove through with
  everybody waving to me. That's the way it was. So I was Viola, and I
  drove right through. (19)

Josephine's account of events in Peshawar in the autumn of 1956 is consistent with the official report of Deputy High Commissioner F.A.K. Harrison to his superiors. There were violent demonstrations, but apparently no serious attacks on Britons. (20) It would therefore appear that the protesters who encircled the car did not intend to harm the Becks, although the anxious family had no reason to know this, and Josephine's memories reflect the utter dependence of the British community. She personalizes the encounters, imagining power in the past that she and her family most likely did not feel nor possess at the time. In the first instance, she credits her father with their escape to safety. She praises his display of calm authority and outward fearlessness, which he had developed through his years in the colonial police. (21) Similarly, Josephine attributes the safe outcome of the second incident to the personal connection established between herself and the student who had seen her act in Twelfth Night. Not only does he recognize her, but he knows the English play. Significantly, however, Josephine responded more passively than her father had. She understands that her passage to safety depended on the will of the student, not her own actions under pressure. He had recognized her, but she did not know him. On the one hand she benefited from chivalry and the colonial privilege that made her recognizable, but on the other hand, the man controlled the situation. Both he and the friend with whom Josephine danced during the play rehearsals enjoyed greater freedom, as males and as Pakistani students, able to move between the western enclave, the university "contact zone," and the wider city of Peshawar. (22)

Josephine's time as a single, young adult living with her family in Peshawar did not last long. As she puts it: "And then I got married, in the good old tradition of the 'fifties." In 1958, at the age of twenty, she married Charles, an American physicist ten years her senior who was teaching through the Fulbright program at Peshawar University. However, in contrast to the experience of her childhood friends for whom early marriage spelled the loss of independence, Josephine's decision to marry and move permanently to the United States allowed her to preserve more of her own identity, even though it took her away from both Pakistan and Britain. Josephine's choice was opportune, yet daring--conventional, yet rebellious. On the one hand, Charles was an outsider. He offered escape from the double impossibility of staying on in Pakistan or succumbing to a seemingly inevitable move to Britain, where her parents expected to settle once William's contract at the High Commission was concluded later that year. Charles was a foreigner and, as Josephine learned, he is Jewish, which made him especially foreign in Pakistan, where nationhood depended almost exclusively on an Islamic identity, and anti-Semitism was not uncommon. (23) By marrying him, Josephine agreed to move thousands of miles from her family, to Washington, D.C., where Charles was on the faculty of Georgetown University. Practical considerations shaped her decision to obtain American citizenship, ensuring that she and her children, the first of whom was born in 1959, would travel on the same passport so that the family would not be separated when crossing borders. (24)

In some ways, Josephine's choice appears to have taken her life in a radically different direction, but initially the marriage provided a way of reproducing familiar colonial patterns of her upbringing. In Peshawar, Charles moved in the same social circles as Josephine's family; they were all members of the relatively close-knit Anglo-American diplomatic and academic community. (25) Charles also impressed Josephine, who found his enthusiasm for Pakistan "refreshing." Unlike many Britons and North Americans who came to work in Peshawar in the 1950s, Charles diligently studied Urdu and gamely immersed himself in "authentic" Pakistani experiences, unafraid to venture into unfamiliar places outside the rarefied Anglo-American enclave. His altruistic ambition to help develop the physics department at the new Peshawar University also resonated with Josephine, who acknowledges having accepted without question at that time the benevolent paternalism associated with her father's work supervising "his" policemen. (26) The Americanization of the western presence in Pakistan, personified by Charles, fit within a post-colonial understanding of international relations in which Cold War American imperialism was eclipsing British colonialism. The remnants of the British Raj in India were fading away, but the new, American world power offered an alternative. Josephine and her mother praise Charles' youthful optimism and industriousness at Peshawar University, but Marjorie observes that the Americans were naive and easily taken advantage of by their Pakistani employees, students and servants. Echoing the sentiments of Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who famously likened the American-British relationship to that between the classical Greeks and the Romans, the United States was a young and energetic but unsophisticated power, unlike the older, wiser and more pragmatic British Empire. The Pakistanis Marjorie knew liked the Americans, she remembered, but they did not respect them as they respected the British. The Americans had, and still have now, she believes, something to learn from the British about the limitations of being a world power.

On a more personal level, the family also accommodated Josephine's move to the United States within the framework of her family and of the empire. Marjorie recalls that at the time of his marriage, Charles apologized to her and William for taking their daughter so far away. They hastened to reassure him that they were used to living far apart, reminding him that as children Josephine and Judy had boarded nine months of the year away from their parents at school in Murree and that the family had been separated for years at a time from retired grandparents in Brighton and Delhi.

After several years in Washington, Charles and Josephine settled permanently in New Mexico. Josephine encouraged her husband to accept a university position in Albuquerque, where the arid mountain landscape and expansive space reminded her of her childhood home in Quetta. In Marjorie's words, "going back to Albuquerque was rather like going back to Quetta." Josephine reflects that on summer evenings in her New Mexico backyard, she can close her eyes and breathe the air, drawing in the scent of the same flowers she smelled in her family's garden at Quetta. (27) Similarly, home movie images of the family visiting Taos Indian pueblo are virtually indistinguishable from footage of picnics near the Khyber Pass, the adobe dwellings and brown-skinned inhabitants of one seemingly interchangeable in these visual texts with those of the other. (28) The same social construction of space in the British Empire, which had mobilized white Europeans across vast distances inhabited by diverse indigenous peoples in a multiplicity of countries, allowed the Becks to feel at home in a similar, American landscape. (29)

Judy, who was born in 1943 in Quetta, also pursued a marriage that allowed her to recreate elements of her youth. In contrast to Josephine, who settled in an American state visually resembling Pakistan, Judy embraced a different kind of mobility by choosing a marriage that has allowed her to spend much of her life abroad in expatriate western communities that socially resembled those of her youth. She recalls:

  I finished school here [in England], and then took a secretarial
  training, and then I went out to Afghanistan and worked there for
  USAid for two years, and then I went to the States. We came to
  England and my brother died, and then I was just going on a holiday
  to the States with Jo, [and] my mother wouldn't hear of me coming
  back. So I stayed on with Jo in the States and got a job with the
  Royal Navy, and worked with the Polaris [missile] team in Washington.
  And then we just decided that perhaps if I went back to Afghanistan
  it would improve my mother, because she was very heartbroken after my
  brother died. She never asked me to come back, but Jo and I between
  us decided that perhaps if I went home, having someone young in the
  house again would perk her up, which it did. So I went back to
  Afghanistan and then worked with the American Embassy in the consular
  section for about two years and then decided I wanted to work in
  England, so I came back to England and worked for a few months with a
  publishing firm and then met Robin at the mess in Aldershot.

Judy was living with a cousin whose husband was a major when she met Robin, whom she married in 1967 at the age of twenty-four. Robin left the army after several years and for the last three decades he has worked for defense or security-related companies, dividing their time between England and postings in India, Iraq, Oman, the Philippines and, most dramatically, Iran at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Despite maintaining a house in suburban Hertfordshire, leased out during their stints abroad, Judy maintains that

  I always had, I have to say, from both my parents, the attitude "home
  is where you hang your hat up." They never made a big fuss of where
  things were particularly "Home." They always said, well wherever you
  were together was home, and I think I've also tried to do that for my
  children, taking them abroad. I will take all my ornaments and
  pictures and things like that with me abroad, and make whatever
  house I go into as much as home as I can. And I think partly I did
  that so that you didn't get this feeling that you were just in a
  place waiting to leave it. You made wherever you went [home], because
  you knew that was going to be your life, traveling. Every two years
  or three years your husband was going to go somewhere else. You have
  to make that place home for that time, and I think that partly helped
  in not feeling strange when you went somewhere else, adapting to it.

  I think Jo would have not liked the social side of the life I had to
  lead. We've mostly been connected to an embassy, so we've had to do a
  lot of entertaining. We've had to go to a lot of parties and things,
  which can be very superficial, but that's been part of the life, and
  we've had to do it. And I don't think that would appeal to everybody.
  I certainly don't think it would appeal to Josephine. Jo's never been
  a person who liked to go to a lot of things. I don't mean theatres
  and things, but I mean a lot of parties and things like that, which
  is part of being abroad, particularly in Robin's jobs, which were
  usually in sales. That's part of the job, social occasions where
  you're meeting a lot of the local people that you're dealing with,
  and therefore you have to go to them. You do get tired of it, and you
  do get tired of seeing the same people and going to one party after
  another, and there's a lot of it, but it's part of the job. And you
  just think, well I've got to do it because it's part of his job. So
  yes, it's different.

In her interviews with me, Judy frequently used the word "abroad," inflecting it with a range of nuanced meanings that capture the ambiguity of her sense of home. She describes herself as having lived most of her life abroad, crediting her upbringing with preparing her for her travels as an adult. Although she distinguishes between the pre-Partition generation in India, her own childhood in Pakistan, and Robin's postings in Asia since the mid 1970s, Judy uses the same word to describe all these experiences. Significantly, however, she rejects the term as an inappropriate description of West Germany where Robin was stationed in the early 1970s. The British Army did categorize such European deployments as "home postings," but Judy's characterization transcends this official description. "Abroad" seems to be a word that captures the distant, predominantly arid landscapes, "Oriental" cultures, and late-colonial politics of Asia. The word lacks resonance when applied to a European country with white natives and Cold War politics dominated by American rather than British leadership.

While Judy's mobility across British expatriate communities abroad contrasts with Josephine's settlement in the American West, Judy shares with her sister a way of contextualizing her own life through descriptions of other women. While living in New Delhi in the middle 1980s, she took her sons to Simla, to see Bishop Cotton's School, where their grandfather William had been a student in the 1920s. During their visit, they met some elderly Britons who had stayed on in reduced circumstances. Judy recalled: "One old lady was living in her garage, and the servant had moved into her house.... He did sort of look after her, but she never saw daylight. She stayed in that garage and was bedridden." Although "the other Brits found it distressing,... they would have been unhappy back in England. They would only have known a life abroad." In this context, "abroad" seems to mean India, or the Empire.

Elsewhere, Judy remarks that "all the years we've lived abroad now have been quite different to those that I lived there as a child," and "life today abroad is very different to life when we were children abroad." Although this usage of the term acknowledges the fading of the Empire since her youth, it also suggests a pseudo-colonial attitude towards the countries she has lived in as an adult. Such rhetoric is independent of whether or not the country is, like India, part of her family's--and Britain's imperial--history. Judy's recollections of her last weeks in Iran as the revolution began are informed by her family's experiences earlier in Pakistan. Soon before her father's retirement from the police in the mid 1950s, when he was posted in rural Loralai, he had received anonymous death threats against his wife and children. As Judy and Josephine present the story, the threats came to nothing because of William's refusal to be intimidated and because of the personal loyalty of some of his Pakistani subordinates. (30) By contrast, in 1979, Judy and Robin fled from their Tehran apartment after two telephone callers accused Robin of being a CIA agent and threatened to kill their sons if the family did not leave Iran. They relocated for a few weeks before flying to London, during which time an Iranian driver from Robin's company, International Military Services, continued to escort Judy shopping and to take her with her sons to and from school. (31) She remembered:

  He was a very pro-Khomeini man, but he'd been with the company and he
  always used to say to me, as long as you're with me, nobody will ever
  touch you.... I always felt safe with him.... He did look after me
  till the bitter end. There's always somebody good.

Recollections of this unnamed Iranian man echo familiar, paternalistic language used by many Europeans to describe their relationships with colonial subordinates, but they also underscore the vulnerability of expatriate westerners in the midst of revolution. Judy's intention seems to have been to personalize the conflict in Iran, creating a narrative of friendship that legitimizes the family's presence in Iran and empowers her to speak.

In the context of the sisters' complete oral narratives, their memories suggest broader patterns about how personal relationships and private experiences have structured the significance and meaning of empire for post-imperial generations. While traditionally-gendered domestic relationships and family identity have been central for Josephine and Judy, their private lives have literally been internationalized in the way they link these familial sources of meaning to larger, historical developments and national homes. In describing her only trip back to Pakistan, in the mid 1990s, Josephine reflected: "I didn't feel an outsider in all the years that I lived there up right up until the time I was married until this last visit. Then I felt I was a foreigner there. And that was sad. There was something distressing about that, as if I had been kicked out of the family in some way."

By imagining their lives through such metaphors, Josephine and Judy simultaneously cope with the sense of loss of the country that is "not [their] place anymore" and the need to explain their upbringing to younger generations critical of imperialism. Each asserts an idealistic vision of historical events by personalizing their experiences. Even frightening times such as the Suez Crisis or the Iranian Revolution, which are associated with imperial decline and threats to their homes abroad, can be reinterpreted as moments of friendship between individuals within a larger international family of nations.

Department of History

Bowling Green, KY 42101

ENDNOTES

1. Robert Colls has been at the forefront of scholarship on British national identities, co-editing the first volume on the subject as well as authoring the most recent major study. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880-1920 (London, 1986), and Robert Colls, The Identity of England (London, 2002). For analysis of the interconnections between the national and the imperial, see Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World 1600-1850 (London, 2002), Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2002), and Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago, 2002). For the Post-World War II era and the ways in which the empire came "home" in unexpected ways, see the work of Wendy Webster, especially Imagining Home: Gender, 'Race' and National Identity, 1945-64 (London, 1998).

2. Mrinalini Sinha is a leader of scholarship "bringing the metropole and the colony together within an 'imperial social formation' ... while recogniz[ing] simultaneously the specificities of their separate imperial locations." "Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India" Journal of British Studies 40:4 (2000): 491. The phrase first appeared in her book Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly Englishman' and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995).

3. See John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (New York, 1996), especially the Introduction. This essay has also been shaped by my understanding of Gillis's ideas about childhood and about the relationship between European, American, and world history. See also his Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations 1770-Present (New York, 1974), and "A View from the Outside and a Vision of Global Social History" Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 23:2 (1997): 223-38, especially the section on Diasporas, Borderlands and Creoles.

4. This article is based on interviews conducted with members of the Beck family. Josephine Beck Beckel and her husband Charles Beckel were first interviewed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in July 2000. I met with her sister Judy Beck Field and their mother Marjorie Drummond Beck in England in 2001. I have also consulted photographs, home movies and personal papers held by the family. William Beck died at the age of 80 in 1986. Tim Beck fought several major illnesses throughout his life, including kidney disease, and he died at the age of 16 in 1964.

5. Since the 1970s, oral historians in Britain have developed a significant archive of interviews done with British men and women who lived through the closing years of the Raj. Most of this material is now part of the Oriental and India Office Collection of the British Library, London (OIOC) MSS.Eur.R & T/76-133, British in India Oral Archives. Some of the interviews are subdivided by occupation or sex of the narrators, e.g. the Indian Police Recordings. Virtually all the informants are a generation or more older than the Beck sisters, and a disproportionate number of them are males of very elite status, e.g. members of the viceroy's staff or senior administrators and army officers.

6. Most British autobiographies and oral histories of the final years of the Raj halt their accounts in 1947, as do most historians and British archives. For example, virtually all the holdings of the Oriental and India Office Collection of the British Library and the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge are for the pre-1947 period. This is true not only of the India Office Records but of most manuscript collections and even oral histories and solicited autobiographical material produced since decolonization. E.g., the British in India Oral Archive at the BL and British Women in India Questionnaires at Cambridge.

7. Renato Rosaldo was among the first to address this phenomenon in "Imperialist Nostalgia," Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 107-22.

8. As Caroline Daley has noted, most oral history has had a gendered form, as "female and male narrators constructed themselves and their histories within a dominant gendered ideology." Women tend to tell stories about relationships and community while men tend to create narratives with themselves as active agents. This pattern appears consistent whether or not the women were home-loving or the men heroic. "'He Would Know, but I Just Have a Feeling': Gender and Oral History," Women's History Review 7:3 (1998): 345. The literature on gender and oral history is quite substantial. See, e.g., Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai eds., Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (London, 1991), and Susan Armitage et al. eds., Women's Oral History (Lincoln, 2002).

9. John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York, 1985). See Part III: The Era of Mandatory Marriage, 1850-1960.

10. Cf. Mary Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947 (Manchester, 2002), Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Richmond, 1998), and Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History (Oxford, 2003).

11. For a discussion of the distinctly coercive politics of the northwestern Indian empire, see Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (New York, 1998), ch. 2. Susan Pedersen addresses the need for further analysis of colonial violence in "Introduction: Claims to Belong," Journal of British Studies 40:4 (October 2001): 451. Special issue on "At Home in the Empire."

12. Cf. Nicoletta Gullace, "Friends, Aliens, and Enemies: Fictive Communities and the Lusitania Riots of 1915" in this issue.

13. Mary A. Procida, "'The Greater Part of My Life Has Been Spent in India': Autobiography and the Crisis of Empire in the Twentieth Century," Biography 25:1 (2002): 131.

14. Josephine likened her childhood to that depicted in Elspeth Huxley's memoir of early twentieth-century Africa, Flame Trees of Thika (London, 1959).

15. Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780-1930 (Cambridge, 1995). E.g., "'history' help[ed] create the idea of interiority," 4, and "the idea of childhood, came to be commonly used to express the depths of the historicity within individuals," 12.

16. The idea of a "Greater Britain" including the white settler colonies of the Atlantic and the antipodes developed in the late nineteenth century. See Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (London, 2002), 246-49.

17. In Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford, 2004), Elizabeth Buettner argues that what defined the elite British community in India, as opposed to the lower-class "domiciled Europeans," was ability to maintain ongoing contacts with the metropolis across the generations through travel "Home" for education and furloughs.

18. Elizabeth Buettner, "Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races: Defining 'Europeans' in Late Colonial India," Women's History Review 9:2 (2000), 277-97. See also Lionel Caplan, Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Post-Colonial World (New York, 2001).

19. Josephine's family likely felt a more personal connection with Suez than did other English people in Pakistan. Marjorie had been born in Ismaili in the Canal Zone.

20. Peshawar Fortnightly Reports, DO 35/5295, The National Archives of the UK, Public Records Office, Kew. See especially Report No. 46 For the Period 31st October-13th November: "The political scene has been entirely dominated by the crisis arising from the Israeli attack on Egypt and the Anglo-French intervention. Public feeling as a whole has been deeply stirred in sympathy for a fellow Muslim nation but the most violent reactions have been among the student body, a section of whom ... staged a demonstration before my office with the intention of breaking in and removing the Union Jack." Harrison also reported that "Very few examples have been reported of personal hostility to the British community, who have generally behaved in Peshawar circumspectly and with discretion."

21. Judy remembers that on another occasion during the Suez Crisis, injured Pakistani protesters received medical attention inside the British Deputy High Commission. According to Judy, her father handed one of the men a brick as he left. Although I have no corroboration of this story, it creates a vivid image simultaneously investing William with courage and humor while appearing to grant him ultimate authority over the protester and his cause.

22. Mary Louise Pratt coined this influential term in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York, 1992), 4-5.

23. Josephine recalls that Charles was advised by officials with the Fulbright exchange not to tell people in Pakistan that he was Jewish.

24. Josephine remembers hastening her wedding in the summer of 1958 so that she could travel to the United States as the wife of a citizen and not have to compete for one of the spots on the Pakistani quota. Immigration problems both within the British Commonwealth and to other countries posed difficulties for many British ex-colonials. Some, such as the novelist John Masters (Night Runners of Bengal and Bhowani Junction), had trouble obtaining a British passport. He also settled in New Mexico, where he found the geography congenial, and became a US citizen. Coincidently, Marjorie remembers that one of her brothers-in-law had served with Masters in World War II. Josephine's US citizenship notwithstanding, she reports that since September 11, 2001 she has been singled out by security officers for extra scrutiny every time she has traveled by air in the United States because her passport notes her place of birth as Quetta, "Pakistan."

25. This Anglo-North American community included families from Britain, Canada, and the United States. Most of the men were academics at Peshawar University or engineers attached to projects such as the Warsak Dam construction. The Americans also flew U-2 spy missions over the Soviet Union from a nearby airbase. See Peshawar Fortnightly Reports.

26. Pakistani higher education was severely compromised following Partition in 1947. Most educational institutions and faculty found themselves on the Indian side of the new border, and Pakistani leaders faced an uphill challenge in recruiting scholars from abroad to build up the newly-created universities. Ghulam Taqi Bangash, "The Establishment and Growth of Peshawar University," Pakistan Journal of History and Culture 11:2 (1990): 23-28, 35-56, and Yousuf Ali Khan, Academics Versus Activists: A History of the University of Peshawar, 1950-88 (Peshawar, 1990).

27. Both Judy and Josephine repeatedly spoke about the garden at their house in Quetta, and Josephine lamented the city's loss of most of its gardens by the mid 1990s, when she last visited there. Quetta's aridity, compounded by a growing water shortage, has made the lush, irrigated gardens of the past unfeasible, but symbolically, the presence--or absence--of gardens seems to be a metaphor for home and belonging. Cf. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London, 1987).

28. My analysis of these visual texts is informed by Jo Spence and Patricia Holland, eds., Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography (London, 1992), and Patricia Holland and Emma Sandon, "Domestic Photographs: Re-viewing Cultural Identity at the End of the Empire," paper presented at the conference on Post-Imperial Britain, The Institute of Historical Research, London, July 9, 2002.

29. Marjorie remembers that William greatly enjoyed visiting their daughter's family in Albuquerque. He could take lengthy, high-speed drives impossible in England but reminiscent of journeys in Pakistan and Afghanistan. At one time he had considered retiring in Australia, which offered a similar sense of space.

30. For background on European officers in the Indian Police, see OIOC, MSS.Eur.F.161, Indian Police Collection, and Sir Percival Griffiths, To Guard My People: The History of the Indian Police (London, 1971). Although not independently verifiable, the story about the threats in Loralai, Pakistan and William's response are not uncharacteristic of police experience in the late colonial period.

31. International Military Services (IMS) is a commercial arms dealership closely linked to the British Ministry of Defence. Since World War II the government has rigorously controlled the export of all arms and related defense equipment. Arms sales have played a significant role in British foreign policy, preserving a semblance of British influence globally in the post-decolonization decades and contributing to the "special relationship" with the United States. In the 1980s, for example, the British arms industry supplied regimes in the Persian Gulf that the American government supported but were inhibited from arming directly by the pro-Israeli and/or human rights lobbies in Congress. Mark Phythian, The Politics of British Arms Sales Since 1964 (Manchester, 2000).

By Malia Formes

Western Kentucky University