Leaving India: Carina Robinson’s Passport
Old passports are valuable family history records because they preserve much more than a person’s identity. They record where a person was living when the passport was issued, how they described themselves, and often where they travelled afterwards. My mother’s passport is important for another reason. It was issued in Calcutta on 28 June 1947, only a few weeks before British rule in India came to an end.
The passport itself is an ordinary British Indian passport. The cover bears the Royal Arms above the words British Indian Passport and Indian Empire. Inside, it requests, in the name of the Governor-General of India, that the bearer be allowed to travel freely and receive assistance if required. When it was issued these were simply the standard words used in British Indian passports. Within a few months they had become obsolete.¹
My mother, Carina, was born in Rangoon in 1906, when Burma formed part of British India. She married in India and spent most of her life there. By the time this passport was issued she had a husband and family, and there was nothing unusual about applying for a passport. Many British subjects living in India needed one for overseas travel.
What makes the document unusual today is its date.
During the weeks after it was issued, the constitutional structure of British India disappeared. On 15 August 1947 India and Pakistan became independent Dominions under the Indian Independence Act. British Indian passports ceased to be issued and were gradually replaced by the passports of the new governments.²
Our family did not leave immediately. We remained in India until 1948. When the time came, we travelled from Calcutta across northern and central India to Bombay, where we boarded the P&O liner Stratheden for Australia.
That railway journey was itself part of the family’s history. My father had spent much of his working life on the railways of India. Like many railway families, we had lived in railway communities whose members often moved from one part of the country to another as work required. The journey to Bombay was therefore not simply a means of reaching the ship. It was the last stage of a life that had been closely connected with the Indian railway system.
Bombay had long been one of the principal ports linking India with Britain and the rest of the Empire. For generations it had been the arrival point for soldiers, civil servants, railway employees and merchants beginning their service in India. In 1948 it became our point of departure.
The passport accompanied that journey. Like all passports it accumulated evidence of its use in the form of official stamps, visas and endorsements. Those marks are now part of its historical value. They provide evidence of movements that can often be supplemented from passenger lists, shipping records and newspaper reports.
For family historians this is one of the principal strengths of old passports. They combine official information with the practical record of travel. A birth certificate records a single event. A passport records a period of a person’s life.
My father’s passport, issued in Naini Tal in 1924, records the beginning of his adult working life in India. My mother’s passport records the family’s departure nearly a quarter of a century later. Read together, the two documents mark the beginning and the end of our family’s life in British India.
Neither passport was created as an historical document. Both were issued to meet an immediate practical need. Time has given them a different significance. They now preserve a record not only of two individual lives, but also of the wider history of the British Empire during its final decades in India.
For that reason they deserve to be read carefully. Every endorsement, every visa and every place of issue may provide another clue to an ancestor’s life. Just as importantly, they remind us that family history is often inseparable from the larger history through which families lived.