We Homes Chaps

Directed by Kesang Tseten

This film documents a school reunion held at the centenary celebration of the founding of Dr. Graham's Homes, a school in northern Indian town of Kalimpong, near the border with Bhutan and Sikkim. John Anderson Graham, a Scots missionary who traveled to India in 1889, founded his boarding school for "destitute and abandoned Anglo-Indian children" in 1900. Graham was appalled by the condition in which he found children in the tea-growing regions of northern India, in particular the children who were offspring of the women who labored on the tea plantations and (male) British tea-planters who were not allowed to marry until they became managers. Later the school also began to take in disadvantaged children of other backgrounds, among then Lushai, Nepali, Naga, Assamese, and Tibetan children. The film maker and several others interviewed in the film are children of Tibetan refugees.