Saturday, July 26, 2008 Anna Leonowens (THE KING AND I governess) once again. BOMBAY ANNA: THE REAL STORY AND REMARKABLE ADVENTURES OF THE KING AND I GOVERNESS By Susan Morgan University of California Press, 274 pages, $25 People reinvent themselves all the time. Chefs become photographers; stock brokers join back-to-the-land communes. But few, except perhaps ex-cons, go to the lengths Anna Leonowens did to obliterate their pasts with their reinvented selves. For five years in the 1860s, Anna Leonowens really did teach the children, in their dozens and dozens, of King Mongkut of Siam. And starting in 1944, she really was the model for the Anna of a bestselling novel, a smash Broadway musical, two popular movies and even a short-lived TV sitcom. But beyond that, who was she really? Certainly not the well-born lady of British birth she claimed to be. Nor, as she told her grandchildren, the daughter of an army officer serving in India who was "cut to pieces by Sikhs who lay in wait for him." Nor the widow of another dashing officer who fell dead at her feet after a tiger hunt. This and much more about her inventions has been known for decades, especially thanks to a debunking 1976 book by W.S. Bristowe. Not known or fully understood, Susan Morgan argues in this fascinating biography, is the scope of what Anna was hiding with her reinvented self. It wasn't a crime, but something nearly as bad in the mid-Victorian empire: a mixed-race heritage. Anna's paternal grandfather, the son of a Methodist minister in England, arrived in India in 1810 as a cadet in the East India Company's army. But gently born women who were English and who would deign even to glance at someone of his low social status essentially did not exist in India. Of necessity, he married an Indian-born Eurasian, and it's a measure of her social status, lower still than her husband's, that even so basic a detail as her name has not survived. It was her existence, or rather what it implied, that Anna Harriett Emma Edwards was so determined to suppress. [snip] http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/books/story.html?id=012f3fc5-fb7e-435d-ba10-355fd8a845ce --- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India