Image and Narrative contributed by Jonathan Charles Cracknell, London, UK

Just as India was heading towards Independence in 1947, people were celebrating the End of the World War II and this picture was photographed at New years Eve in the real capital of British India, Calcutta (West Bengal). My maternal grandfather, Peter sits here with a fez on his head, and next to him is my grandmother Anna. She was of mixed heritage –  of Kashmiri and German Jewish descent. Sitting next to her is my mother and her then boyfriend, a British soldier, on leave from his posting in Malaya (now Malaysia). It was earlier in the same year that the British Military Administration in Malaya had been replaced by its own, the Malayan union.

The hotel, then known as the Great Eastern Hotel where this image was taken is now called the Lalit Great Eastern Hotel. An extremely popular place, the colonial era hotel was originally established as a confectionary shop and then grew into a grand and plush hotel in the early 1840s, a time when Calcutta was the top seat of the East India Company. The hotel had a 100 rooms, and claimed to be second oldest of the British Empire and India’s first luxury hotel. It was also well known for its extravagant and delicious french cuisine, and served snacks and a whisky peg or two, similar to a drive-by service, to horse drawn carriages. Referred to as “the Jewel of the East” and the “Savoy of the East” in its heyday, Great Eastern Hotel hosted several notable persons visiting the city including I am told, Queen Elizabeth II, the well-known author Mark Twain & musician Dave Brubeck. The hotel’s repute and value declined later during the Naxalite Era of West Bengal and was only recently reopened, now as a heritage property, by its new owners in 2013.

My mother’s father was worked with the Railways in Lahore (now in Pakistan) to which they would return to face the horrors of Indo/Pak Partition. But for the time being that seemed a long way off. This was the “New” India everyone was celebrating, not the Victorian dream of the memsahibs. A new comprehension and understanding of Indian culture and the world, was in the making, and this time, it was to be without the tired old prejudices of yesteryear. It was a time of great optimism and home and even back home in the UK people imagined a new world of equality, which would be reflected in the British election soon to come, when Winston Churchill was defeated by a Labour majority.

My father Aubrey Cracknell, too was brought up in Lahore. His father Charles Edwin Cracknell was a  soldier in the British Army. After the Boer War ended in the early 20th century, he was shipped out to the Indian subcontinent, to Rawalpindi (now Pakistan) on the North West Frontier. It was here that Charles, my grandfather, met and married my grandmother, several years younger to him,  and they had a son, Aubrey, my father, in the Cantonments.

When my father was only eight years old, Charles, my grandfather was wounded on a train from Peshawar, the city of the Frontier (Pak-Afghan Border) to Jalalabad (eastern Afghanistan). Hit by an Afghan sniper and wounded in the lung, he was hospitalised in Rawalpindi but died of pneumonia and other complications. He is now buried in the British cemetery in Rawalpindi which lies neglected and all the graves have fallen to ruin. My Grandmother left the cantonments and moved to Lahore where my father grew up.

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