Anne Blocher "Malika"
"Anne Blocher was the daughter of a Mr. Blocher said to be once a superintendent of police in Calcutta. She adopted the poetical appellation of Malika. She is reputed to be a great beauty and well versed in Indian music. She was an adept in playing the Indian Sitar. She was probably born in England but she spent her life in India.
She new Urdu well and composed verses with ease and fluency. Her poetical preceptor was Moulvi Abdul Ghafoor Nassakh (1834-1889), Deputy Collector in Bengal who was a prolific writer of Urdu verses, the author of dewans and of a famous tazkirah entitled Sakhun Shaura. It is stated that Malika embraced Islam towards the end of her life. No details of her life are available and a few verses quoted in numerous tazkiras are given elsewhere."
European & Indo-European Poets of Urdu & Persian by Ram Babu Saksena (1897-1957)
Anne Blocher must have lived during Queen Victoria's reign. What strikes me is that she (and the other "European & Indo-European Poets of Urdu & Persian") show us a British India very different from the India we read about in E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India" fifty years later when racism separated Indians and British almost completely. Much should be told about the bivi [Indian wives] of Europeans who earned money in India. Many European upper-class families with colonial financial roots would be astonished to know that they have Anglo-Indian half-cousins in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
After 1857 V. H. Schalch was superintendent of Calcutta's police from 1863 to 1866 and later also chairman of the justices of the peace for the town of Calcutta. The Schalch family hails from Schaffhausen. Was Anne's father a Calcutta superintendent of police before 1856? Until 1943 all Calcutta superintendents of police where white.