"Spell of The Flying Foxes" by Sylvia Dyer is the family saga of an Anglo-Indian family encompassing four generations. Although Anglo-Indians, generally speaking, are an urban community but this family lived in a rural plantation estate for successive generations. Champaran in rural Bihar close to the border with Nepal is where the author's great-grandfather arrived from England in the mid 19th century and made fortune as an Indigo planter. A story about lives and times long gone by, a moving account of growing up in British India in the 1930s alongside native Indian peasants and rural folk who worked on the plantations.
Despite this being her first published work, Sylvia Dyer comes across as a charismatic storyteller. Her prose is what I found the most remarkable quality of her writing. For example, her opening sentence "Nobody would ever forget Dhang, though after all these years it seems to me that it never really existed, and was just a long-ago, stretched out dream" pulls the reader in.
Talking about the plot, it is the story of Sylvia's mother Gladys, the protagonist, who navigates tricky matters as Gladys' cousin has his eyes on her large plantation inheritance and uses deceit and trickery to usurp for himself. It is a saga of agony, treachery, affairs, turbulent political times, death and destruction. However, it isn't all gloomy. Sylvia lights up the humour as well through her skillful writing. She, similar to Jim Corbett and Ruskin Bond, displays a very nuanced understanding of the prevalent customs of rural India of those times punctuated by religious and caste considerations.
And the theme is deftly conveyed in the background to the plot. In essence, the author's family saga is also reflective of the lives and travails of the larger Anglo-Indian community in British India with Independence drawing closer.
All the characters are real life which include her family members and natives whom the family knew as servants, friends, acquaintances who lived in the villages in the vicinity of the plantation estate.
A griping personal memoir, this book is highly recommended to get a first account experience of Anglo-Indians of a world long gone as the sun set on the British Raj.
0 Comments