Anglo Indians beyond the stereotypes

The Anglo-Indians: A Portrait of a Community

Author: Barry O’Brien

Publisher: Aleph Book Company

Pages: 525 

Price: Rs 999

The Anglo Indians are one of India’s most intriguing and colourful communities. But to those who know them and those who don’t, descriptions of them and their lives are usually couched in stereotypes. It could be of race or language or cultural differences from the speaker’s standpoint.

Here is a wonderful compendium of intense research, stories, interviews, interpretations, anecdotes and insights, which presents the Anglo Indian in a whole new light. The statement is sweeping because the range and coverage of this book is sweeping. It is not just a portrait of a community, it is also an X-ray, CT-scan and ultrasound. It delves deep and comes up with gems and surprises.

I call it a compendium because you can dip into its sections and come out enriched. But it is, in fact, a meticulously researched history of this community which is far more complicated and nuanced than the clumping together of a group of mixed-race people.

Barry O’Brien starts with the arrival of Vasco da Gama, the Portugues eexplorer at Cochin in 1498. And the arrival of the Europeans on Indian shores. The Portuguese, as they settled into India, also began amalgamating into Indian culture and absorbing sections of it. As this progressed, marriage between Portuguese men and Indian women was encouraged. This was a political move to help create a community, which was “loyal to the colonizer, yet comfortable living in the colonies”.

As other Europeans followed the Portuguese, they also followed this policy of “politica dos casamentos” or politics through marriage.

Thus the first Anglo Indians in India were people of privilege. They may not have been on par with “pure” white Europeans but they were an integral part of the ruling classes. As the British took over India and the East India Company ousted most other European nations and limited the Portuguese to Goa, Daman and Diu, the Anglo Indian remained fortunate and treasured.

The Haitian revolution of the late 1790s changed all that. The “coloureds” or “Mulattos” had revolted against the British in Haiti. Could these mixed races not lead revolutions elsewhere? The good times start to dry up and the Anglo Indians find that they are no longer privileged but worse, is looked upon with suspicion.

As O’Brien takes the reader through the history of the Anglo-Indian community, he also takes us through Indian history, but from a specific perspective. This journey also encompasses the questions within the community itself, about who they were, where they came from, what their mixed race entailed and entitled them to. Was it just being from an Indian Mother and a white Father? Was it just about religion and therefore being a Christian? Would they prefer to be called Eurasian or Anglo Indian? If they were Anglo Indian, what about those who had Portuguese or Dutch or French ancestry?

And more than anything else, what was their relationship to India? Throw the mutiny of 1857, the British Empire under the Crown, the freedom movement into the mix and the questions increase exponentially. Each one of those moves wrought chaos into the lives of this tiny community and created untold turmoil.

In case you thought that this is a dry historic tome, perish the thought!

O’Brien has a light hand as he steers you through problems and the search for solutions. We learn how events in the past affect people now. We travel with members of the community as they tried to make lives in what they thought was their “homeland” of Britain or further afield to the extremes of Australia and Canada. How “home” was truly where the heart was. How the Indianness of their mothers asserted itself in food, in longing, in comfort and familiarity.

You also learn how much the community has contributed to India. To Indian politics and political thought — in modern times the intellect and foresight of Frank Anthony shines again and again.

In the areas that we know from our collections of cliches — in the Railways, in sport, in education. In areas we did not think about so much like the Armed Forces. Of writers like Ruskin Bond and I Allan Sealy. Of the many areas where Anglo Indian women were the trailblazers, from Indian cinema to modelling to nursing. Of air hostesses such as Gloria Berry, who went down in that terrible Kashmir Princess crash of 1955, fighting for the safety of the plane and her passengers to the end after a bomb exploded on board. She needs better recognition.

To many, the most familiar part will be of Anglo-Indian food and fun. Those readers who have grown up amongst Anglo-Indians, studied with them may think they know their Mulligatawny from their Vindaloo, their Ball Curry from their meat bhooni. Well, they may learn a little as well here.

One of the best things O’Brien has done is to italicise common Anglo-Indian phrases and usages though his text. This theme serves as a constant reminder of the influence that the Anglo-Indians had on how all of us Indians speak English. It’s also a fun way to test yourself and how much you think you know about India and your use of language.

You could, as I said in the beginning, read this book in chronological order. Or you could dip into the sections that interest you the most, and go back and forth. Whichever method you choose, make sure you devour the whole buffet!