Anglo Indians

India's Anglo-Indian community – a legacy of British rule on the subcontinent – is fighting for its survival as increasing numbers of their young men and women marry Indian partners.

There are an estimated 500,000 Anglo-Indians throughout the world – including in Britain, Canada, Australia and Pakistan – but in India itself their population has dipped to an estimated 150,000. At the time of India's independence in 1947 there were half a million Anglo-Indians in the country.

The community developed from mixed marriages between British officers, squaddies, tea planters and railway workers and local Indian women in the 19th century. Since then they have developed a unique hybrid culture which carefully preserves a pre-War sense of English identity. This largely Christian community has traditionally centred on some of India's largest cities, including Calcutta, Madras, Bangalore, New Delhi and the Kolar Gold Fields of Karnataka.

Many of its leading figures have thrived in India's armed forces, where the current Air Chief Marshal N. A. K Browne is an Anglo-Indian, and in the country's extensive railways, which they once dominated. The actor Ben Kingsley, entertainers Sir Cliff Richard and Engelburt Humperdink, and the former Olympic athlete Sebastian Coe, are claimed by the community as some of their highest achievers.

Recent DNA tests show that the Duke of Cambridge 'has Indian ancestry'. The Duke of Cambridge may be heir to the throne and born to wealth and privilege, but he is also a member of
racial minority - that he is an Anglo-indian. A geneticist at Edinburgh University has confirmed that DNA tests from members of his family have proved he has an Indian descendent on his mother’s side. Six generations before him, Eliza Kewark, a housekeeper, had a relationship with one of his mother Princess Diana’s ancestors, Thoedore Forbes, and bore him several children, including a daughter, Katherine, in 1812. Ms Kewark has, until now, always been thought to have been an Armenian living in India, where she met Theodore Forbes, a Scottish noble working for the East India Company which then ruled much of India. But DNA testing on saliva samples from William’s relatives by Jim Wilson, a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, and the company Britain’s DNA have established beyond doubt that she was in fact an Indian. The clinching evidence is a rare type of DNA, R30b, found so far in only 14 others, all Indian except for one person, from neighbouring Nepal. Their discovery makes William one of the world’s dwindling number of Anglo-Indians.

Anglo-Indians were discriminated against by the British during the Raj because of racism and many were consigned to work on India’s railways where they continued to work after independence. Many were the result of secret affairs between tea planters and Indian pickers on their estates or relationships between British soldiers and local girls. Because of this they were also discriminated against by many Indians. Their women were often referred to in derogatory terms as ‘Chutney Marys'.

 Now this marginalised community which has lived in the overlap between British and Indian society has a new royal patron.

Leading Indian commentator Swapan Dasgupta said the discovery of Indian DNA in the prince had righted an historical wrong. Most of India’s invaders and occupiers, including the Aryans and the Mughals, had eventually become Indian, except the British. “They came as foreigners but got absorbed. I’m happy the Indian strain remains in the British monarchy. India may have been lost to Britain, but an Indian remains,” he said.

The largest group of European Indians, however, are descendants of British men, generally from the colonial service and the military, and lower-caste Hindu or Muslim women. From some time in the nineteenth century, both the British and the Indian societies rejected the offspring of these unions, and so the Anglo-Indians, as they became known, sought marriage partners among other Anglo Indians. Over time this group developed a number of caste-like features and acquired a special occupational niche in the railroad, postal, and customs services. A number of factors fostered a strong sense of community among Anglo-Indians. The school system focused on English language and culture and was virtually segregated, as were Anglo-Indian social clubs; the group's adherence to Christianity also set members apart from most other Indians; and distinctive manners, diet, dress, and speech contributed to their segregation.

During the independence movement, many Anglo-Indians identified (or were assumed to identify) with British rule, and, therefore, incurred the distrust and hostility of Indian nationalists. Their position at independence was difficult. They felt a loyalty to a British "home" that most had never seen and where they would gain little social acceptance. They felt insecure in an India that put a premium on participation in the independence movement as a prerequisite for important government positions. Some Anglo-Indians left the country in 1947, hoping to make a new life in Britain or elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Nations, such as Australia or Canada. Many of these people returned to India after unsuccessful attempts to find a place in "alien" societies. Most Anglo-Indians, however, opted to stay in India and made whatever adjustments they deemed necessary.

Like the Parsis, the Anglo-Indians are essentially urban dwellers. But  Unlike the Parsis, relatively few have attained high levels of education, amassed great wealth, or achieved more than subordinate government positions. In the 1990s, Anglo-Indians remained scattered throughout the country in the larger cities and those smaller towns serving as railroad junctions and communications centers.

Constitutional guarantees of the rights of communities and religious and linguistic minorities have  permitted Anglo-Indians to maintain their own schools and to use English as the medium of instruction. There is no official discrimination against Anglo-Indians in terms of current government employment. Indeed a few have risen to high posts; some are high-ranking officers in the military, and a few are judges. In occupational terms, at least, the assimilation of Anglo-Indians into the mainstream of Indian life was well under way by the 1990s. Nevertheless, the group will probably remain socially distinct as long as its members marry only other Anglo-Indians and its European descent. Breakfast tea from a cup and saucer, Agatha Christie murder mysteries and Mills & Boon romances, a weekly visit from the hairdresser, who sets a dowager’s delicate hair in a 1940s-style wave are still part of their lifestyle. Sometimes, a tailor comes to make the old-style garments like floral tea dresses, beloved by Anglo-Indian women of a certain age. The culture lives on, somewhat, in Anglo-Indian dishes like country chicken, a tangy dish seasoned with garlic and ginger, and pepper water, a spicy tomato-chili sauce, ladled on rice with meat on the side.

In some respects, Anglo-Indians tended to be socially progressive. By the early 20th century, many Anglo-Indian women worked outside the home, at a time when few middle-class Indian women did. They established an English-language education system, financed by the British, and a vast network of social clubs. Along with educational and social benefits, Anglo-Indians received preferential pay during British rule. In the 1940s a British train engineer earned around 300 rupees a month, while an Anglo-Indian would earn 200 and an Indian 100.

The demise of the British Raj was a shock from which the Anglo-Indian community took decades to recover. Many of the better off and more highly skilled left for new lives overseas. Those who stayed lost the privileges to which they had become accustomed. Government financing for separate Anglo-Indian schools, for instance, stopped in 1961. After hiring quotas for Anglo-Indians were abolished, their inability to speak Hindi and other Indian languages took a toll on their employment opportunities. Today, though, the fortunes of younger Anglo-Indians are generally rising because of their English skills and what Ms. Andrews, the anthropologist, describes as their “Western bearing” made  them attractive employees for multinationals and Indian outsourcing companies.

“You go for a job interview in a multinational with a name like O’Brien, and, well, it all flows pretty easily for our children these days,” Mr. O’Brien said. “It’s their fluency in English that makes it easy for them to get positions in multinationals and customer care positions in call centers,”.

The term "Anglo-Indian" was first used by Warren Hastings in the eighteenth century to describe both the British in India and their Indian-born children. In the nineteenth century the British in India still separated themselves from coloured people but accepted fairer (and often wealthier) people of dual heritage as "Anglo-Indian". Darker (and usually poorer) people were given the name "Eurasian". Today (apart from literature still alluding to the British who have lived in India for a long time as "Anglo-Indian" the term rightly signifies a world minority who have settled in Canada, New Zealand, the United States of Americas the United Kingdom and Australia. The East India Company directors in the seventeenth century paid one pagoda or gold mohur for each child born to an Indian mother and a European father, as family allowance. Children with British or European fathers and Indian mothers were called "country-born" and included those with Portuguese, Dutch or French fathers. These offspring were amalgamated into the Anglo-Indian community, forming a bulwark for the British Raj, a buffer but also a bridge between rulers and subjects. These Westernised people, their culture inherited from their male ancestors but enriched by the spirit of India, have descended from all classes, from both Indian and European aristocrats, from missionaries and naval men, and from traders and soldiers. By 1750 they outnumbered the often transient British.

The Anglo-Indians, were, however, more "Anglo" than "Indian". Their mother-tongue was English, and so was their religious upbringing, as were their customs and traditions. While most of them married within their own Anglo-Indian circle, there were many who continued to marry expatriate Englishmen. Very few, if any, married Indians. The same rigid social barriers that the British erected between themselves and the Anglo-Indians, also existed to isolate the Anglo-Indians from the vast majority of Indians. Neither the British nor the Anglo-Indians made any attempt at appreciating Indian music, art, dance, literature or drama. The "natives" were seen as idol worshippers, and not particularly clean ones at that, with their habits of blowing their noses, spitting and defecating in public. Not to mention eating with their fingers while sitting cross legged on the ground. The aloofness between themselves and their Indian subjects were of little concern to the British, and even less so now that they were going ‘home’. But the Anglo-Indians, left in a twilight zone of uncertainty, felt a bitter sense of betrayal – and dismay at the fact that Britain made no effort to offer her swarthier sons any hospitality in the land where their forefathers had been born.

But the Anglo-Indian identity is disappearing fast. Those who have found new lives abroad have merged into the mainstream. Other than the nostalgic reminiscences of an older generation (much of it irrelevant to the busy day-to-day concerns of their children and grand-children) their Indian past has all but faded into oblivion. In India, the Community are indistinguishable from their Indian friends and neighbours. The women wear saris or salwar kameez, the kids disco enthusiastically to Hindi film hits and watch Bollywood movies. Although English remains their first language, they speak the local vernacular with ease and fluency. It is a culture known for its good cheer, its generous hospitality and its ideals of keen sportsmanship.

Greg Francis, a 30-year-old Anglo-Indian from Calcutta, where his forefathers worked on the railroads, works for I.B.M.’s call center division in Gurgaon, a high-rise satellite city on Delhi’s edge where many multinationals have their headquarters where he trains Indians on dealing with Westerners said, " he could not shake the idea that his people’s best days were in the past."

“I feel kind of homesick for those old times although I never knew them.”