The idea for this article, like some ones do, began on Reddit. I stumbled upon pictures of someone described as 'elusive'. Considering how much we increasingly value privacy and mystery in a world where all our lives are up for public consumption, I was hooked. There’s a certain magic in anonymity, in slipping through the cracks of history and emerging decades later as an enigma.
For decades, Evelyn 'Iggy' Rose was one such mystery. A woman who graced the back cover of Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs, leaving behind only speculation and a cult following. She was the ultimate ephemeral muse of Swinging London, appearing at the right clubs, with the right people, and disappearing just as quickly as she had arrived. But what made Iggy truly remarkable was not just her Zelig-like presence in the 1960s music scene, but the fact that she spent most of her life actively avoiding any association with where she came from. Her roots — deeply embedded in the hills of Mizoram, India — remained a story she did not wish to tell. And that, perhaps, is the most fascinating part of her legend.
Iggy was born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in 1947, just months after Partition. For years, she let the world believe she was an 'Eskimo' or an 'Inuit', titles given to her almost flippantly in an era where racial ambiguity was exoticised and repackaged as mystique. It was a throwaway comment to an NME photographer that sealed her fate as Iggy the Eskimo — a name that would define her public persona for decades. It was not true, of course, but in a way, it was exactly the story she wanted to tell. The truth, that her mother was a Mizo woman and her father a British army officer, was left buried under layers of reinvention.
Why? Why did she not claim her Mizo heritage, or speak of the land where her family’s chieftains once ruled? Why did she choose obscurity over recognition, self-erasure over cultural nostalgia? The answer lies in the times she lived through. By the late 1960s, identity was both fluid and rigid, and for a woman navigating the world of rock gods, artists, and aristocrats, being an “exotic beauty” was a currency she could trade in. Being an ‘Eskimo’ was a digestible mystery for the London elite. Being a Mizo woman from a politically turbulent region in India was something else entirely.
To understand Iggy’s silence, one must understand Mizoram in the 1960s. The Mizo National Front’s insurgency against the Indian government had led to an era of violence, displacement, and the near-total severance of communication with the outside world. Letters stopped arriving, connections were lost, and families were torn apart. It’s no surprise, then, that when her family fled to England, she chose to distance herself from a past that had already been forcefully erased. She was an immigrant in a world that did not know how to place her, so she chose to become what they could understand — an ethereal, unplaceable muse.
But Iggy was not simply a passive character in the rock ‘n’ roll fairytale of others. She was not just "Syd Barrett’s girlfriend" or “a girl in the background” of legendary photographs. She was, by all accounts, a fiercely independent spirit — one who could have capitalised on her affiliations with Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and the London underground scene, but instead chose to vanish. Even when found in the 2010s, she downplayed her past, saying only that she had left that life behind. When asked about her roots, she gave no real answer. Even in the face of renewed interest, she remained elusive.
And yet, ironically, it was her association with Syd Barrett that eventually led her back to her family. A single line in an obscure fan blog — mentioning that she was of Mizo descent — sparked an investigation among her long-lost relatives in India. The family, who had been searching for her for over six decades, finally found their connection through the unlikeliest of sources: Pink Floyd fandom.
Iggy Rose passed away in 2017, never knowing that a professor in Missouri had written a poem about her, or that across the world, in the hills of Mizoram, her name had resurfaced as a lost daughter of the land. Perhaps she never wanted to be found. Perhaps the freedom she sought was not just from an ordinary life, but from history itself.
The story of Iggy the Eskimo is certainly about a woman who danced at The Cromwellian and posed naked on an album cover. But it’s just as much about self-reinvention. It’s about the things we choose to leave behind, and the strange ways they find us again.
And in the end, it’s a story that belongs just as much to Mizoram as it does to Swinging 1960s London.
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