Kalimpong Kids

In 2007 I visited Dr Graham’s Homes in Kalimpong, in the Darjeeling district of northeast India. It was a life-changing visit. I learnt that my grandmother was a resident of the Homes for 15 years, before being sent to New Zealand as part of an organised emigration scheme.

My grandmother, Lorna Peters, was born on a tea plantation in Assam in 1902. Like most of the children sent to Dr Graham’s Homes, her father was a British planter and her mother was a South Asian tea worker. Her uncertain future as a mixed-race child in India made her part of the ‘Anglo-Indian problem’ of the era.

Dr John Graham was a Scottish Presbyterian missionary who took it upon himself to provide a solution to the tea planters’ dilemma, opening a residential school to house, educate and raise these children until they reached working age, when they would be sent to settler colonies as domestic servants and farm workers. From this unusual starting point, they were expected to forget the past, forget India and their birth families, and make the most of their ‘golden opportunity’.

Lorna did make the best of her situation, and, like many of the Kalimpong Kids, she turned away from her past, never speaking of it, even to her own children. And so it was that I uncovered this lost heritage in 2007. Two years later, with personal letters from her Kalimpong file, I wrote an Honours dissertation based on my family story entitled ‘Letters from Kalimpong: A Tea-Planter’s Journey Towards Home with his Anglo-Indian Children’.

In 2011 I embarked on a PhD examining the scheme at large using material from archives in Scotland, Kalimpong and New Zealand, along with descendant interviews. By the time I completed the thesis in 2014, I had met over 100 descendants around New Zealand, and I have continued to engage with this growing community. I published a revised version of the thesis with Bloomsbury Academic in 2017, and a visual history using photographs sourced from families all over New Zealand in 2020, entitled Kalimpong Kids: The New Zealand Story, in pictures (Otago University Press).

For more information about this project, please see my Kalimpong Kids website.

Photograph: Woodburn Cottage group, c.1916, Dr Graham’s Homes, Kalimpong. Lorna Peters standing on right, with hand on hip.