Melvyn Brown met Alistair McGowan

When An Anglo-Indian Author met an Anglo-Indian Actor

Image taken from the video of “Who Do You Think You Are?”

As a young man, my father Melvyn Brown, was a writer and a performer. Dad would tell children stories in schools in Calcutta, as well as on the All-India Radio, and he came to be known as “The Storyteller”. Dad also performed on stage with a number of hilarious comedy sketches, as a young man, during the days of “The Band Wagon”, which I never saw, but my father would tell me about those variety shows in Calcutta, during the 1960s and 1970s.

Over the years, my Dad, Melvyn Brown, came to be known as the Chronicler of the Anglo-Indian community in India and abroad, having written a number of books, articles and lectured on the mixed-race community in India. The Anglo-Indian an ethnic minority community was created in 1600, when the British East India Company came to India for trade. The Anglo-Indian community came about when British and European men inter-married or had affairs with Indian women, their progeny came to be known as Anglo-Indians or Eurasians or as Half-Caste, over the past 400 years.

My father, Melvyn Brown, was contacted in 2007 by the BBC for an interview with Alistair McGowan, a popular British comedian, for the BBC genealogical program, “Who Do You Think You Are?”, where popular celebrities try to trace their roots.