Mixed Race Studies

The Anglo-Indians: Aspirations for Whiteness and the Dilemma of Identity

Counterpoints
The Flinders University Online Journal of Interdisciplinary Conference Papers
Volume 3, Number 1 (September 2003)
Flinders University of South Australia

Sheila Pais James
Department of Sociology
Flinders University of S.A.

The Anglo-Indian, as a distinct ethnic identity, was the product of the racialised social hierarchies of British India. Set off from the Indian majority by their claims to British heritage, they were, because of their mixed ancestry, never accorded full status as British. At the end of British rule, their anomalous status was confirmed in certain protections, including employment quotas, enshrined in the Indian constitution. Despite this, the Anglo-Indian community in India declined in the decades after Independence as many chose to leave. Climate, proximity, and its British roots meant that Australia was considered a desirable destination by many. In particular, this paper focuses on the relevance of the study of whiteness in relation to the study of the Anglo-Indians as an ethnic and racial minority. It traces the aspirations for whiteness among these diasporic people in their quest for identity. It explores the dimensions in the constructions of identity and the possibility of identity dilemmas among the Anglo-Indians as transcolonial migrants in a multicultural Australian society.

…The discourse on whiteness as a theoretical notion that attempts to uncover the authority of the invisible is very promising. Studying whiteness delves into the silence or invisibility (Frankenberg, 1993; Dyer, 1997) about whiteness which lets everyone continue to harbour prejudices and misconceptions. This silence, when penetrated, opens channels for the understanding of identity dilemmas among the Anglo-Indians and the identity choices they make vis-à-vis the skin colour of others in similar situations.

By the 19th century, the British separated themselves from the 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’ . Anglo-Indians were of British descent and British subjects; some even claimed to be British to escape prejudice. The British did not however accept such identification. They did not see Anglo-Indians as kinsmen, socially viewing them as ‘half-caste’ members who were morally and intellectually inferior to the sons and daughters of Britain (Varma 1979). The Anglo-Indians tried to counter this by trying to be more like the British. Their campaign to be called ‘Anglo-Indians’ was aimed at establishing a closer link with the British Raj (rule) in contrast to the general term ‘Eurasian’ (Bose, 1979).

Under these circumstances, it was not easy for Anglo-Indians to develop a clear conception of their own identity. Europeans tended to think of them as Indians with some European blood; Indians thought of them as Europeans with some Indian blood. On both the cultural and social level they were alien to many other Indians, though kin to them on the biological level. Many of the prejudices of the British were adopted by the Anglo-Indians towards the Indian people of dark complexion, thus creating rejection of the Anglo-Indians both by the British and other Indian communities. The prejudices against them, real or imagined, or the prejudices that they themselves had against other Indians were an obstacle to both group and individual identity (Gist, 1972, Gist and Wright, 1973)…

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Seven Hours To Burn

Women Make Movies
USA/Canada, 1999
9 minutes
Color/BW, VHS/16mm
Order No. W01699

Shanti Thakur

“A visually expressive personal documentary that explores a family’s history. Filmmaker Thakur mixes richly abstract filmmaking with disturbing archival war footage to narrate the story of her Danish mother’s and Indian father’s experiences. Her mother survives Nazi-occupied Denmark while her father experiences the devastating civil war in India between Hindus and Muslims. Both émigrés to Canada, they meet and marry, linking two parallel wars. Their daughter lyrically turns these two separate histories into a visually rich poem linking past and present in a new singular identity.” Doubletake Documentary Film Festival Catalogue

View the trailer here.

‘Land of our Mothers’: Home, Identity, and Nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India, 1919–1947

History Workshop Journal
Volume 54, Issue 1
pages 49-72
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/54.1.49

Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London

This paper explores the symbolic and material intersections of home, identity and nationality for Anglo-Indians (previously known as ‘Eurasians’) in the period between the Montague Chelmsford Reforms and Indian Independence. Community claims for a legitimate heritage were articulated through images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and were closely tied to political attempts to gain a legitimate stake in national life. The paper examines public debates about home, identity and nationality with reference to the two main Anglo-Indian leaders of the twentieth century, Henry Gidney and Frank Anthony. While a British imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, political debates about home, identity and nationality largely erased the figure of an Indian maternal ancestor and instead focused on Mother India and on the domestic roles of Anglo-Indian women. The political recognition of both women and the home was an attempt not only to domesticate Anglo-Indian women, but also to domesticate a new national identity that regarded India more than Britain as home. But the home life of Anglo-Indians remained more British than Indian and political attempts to foster national loyalty to India as motherland were contested on a domestic scale. The mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was thus both manifested and erased in public debates about the future and status of the community.

…This paper is about India as ‘land of our mothers’ at a time when questions of home, identity and nationality were bound together in complex and contested ways for Anglo-Indians and other minority communities in India. Through my focus on a distinct community of mixed descent, I examine the ways in which national identity was embodied in gendered and racialized ways that reflected and reproduced a dual affiliation to both Britain and India as home. Community claims for a legitimate heritage were articulated through images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and such claims were closely tied to political attempts to gain a legitimate stake in national life. For this reason, I analyse public debates about home, identity and nationality, drawing on political representations by Anglo-Indian leaders and on articles and letters published in the Anglo-Indian Review. I focus on the period from the Montague Chelmsford Report of 1919, which laid the foundations for Indianization in government employment and political representation, to independence in 1947. This also allows me to contrast the policies of the two main Anglo-Indian leaders of the twentieth century. Henry Gidney led the community from 1919 until his death in 1942, when he was succeeded by Frank Anthony, who served as president of the [All-India Anglo-Indian Association] AIAIA and as a nominated member of parliament representing community interests from 1942 until his death in 1993. Rather than render spaces of home as more symbolic than actual in forging a national identity, I argue that political attempts to foster a greater national loyalty to India as motherland rather than Britain as fatherland were contested on a domestic scale. Anglo-Indian homes continued to be imagined as more British than Indian despite political attempts by Gidney and Anthony to identify the community as a nationalist minority. Rather than explore the home merely as a feminized space, I am interested in how it also came to be shaped by a masculine imperial heritage. While a British imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, political debates about home, identity, and nationality largely erased the figure of an Indian maternal ancestor and instead focused on Mother India and on the present and future political roles of Anglo-Indian women within and beyond the home. While ideas of home and identity were potent sites in shaping ideas of nationality, the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was thus both manifested and erased in public debates about the future and status of the community…

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Anglo-Indians in Hollywood, Bollywood and Arthouse Cinema

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 1 (February 2007)
pages 55-68
DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082939

Glenn D’Cruz, Senior Lecturer of Performance Studies
Deakin University, Australia

Apart from a few disparaging remarks about offensive stereotypes by Anglo-Indian writers and politicians such as Gloria Jean Moore, Frank Anthony and Gillian Hart, critics have paid very little attention to the representation of “mixed-race” Anglo-Indians in the cinema. Drawing on screen theory and recent theories of cinema spectatorship, this essay provides a comparative analysis of how Hollywood, Bollywood and arthouse films represent Anglo-Indians. More specifically, it analyses three paradigmatic films: Bhowani Junction (1956), Julie (1975), and 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981). Combining formal analysis of narrative structure, mise-en-scne and genre with historical analysis, the paper examines the ideological work performed by these texts, which use Anglo-Indians to dramatise specific political conflicts in India such as those generated by the British partition of India in 1947 and the more recent issue of globalisation.

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Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans

Temple University Press
May 1992
352 page
6×9
Paper EAN: 978-1-56639-202-0, ISBN: 1-56639-202-0
Cloth EAN: 978-0-87722-890-5, ISBN: 0-87722-890-6
Electronic Book: EAN: 978-1-43990-364-3

Karen Isaksen Leonard, Professor of Anthropology
University of California, Irvine

This is a study of the flexibility of ethnic identity. In the early twentieth century, men from India’s Punjab province came to California to work on the land. The new immigrants had few chances to marry. There were very few marriageable Indian women, and miscegenation laws and racial prejudice limited their ability to find white Americans. Discovering an unexpected compatibility, Punjabis married women of Mexican descent and these alliances inspired others as the men introduced their bachelor friends to the sisters and friends of their wives. These biethnic families developed an identity as “Hindus” but also as Americans. Karen Leonard has related theories linking state policies and ethnicity to those applied at the level of marriage and family life. Using written sources and numerous interviews, she invokes gender, generation, class, religion, language, and the dramatic political changes of the 1940s in South Asia and the United States to show how individual and group perceptions of ethnic identity have changed among Punjabi Mexican Americans in rural California.

Read chapter 1 here.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Part I: Introduction
  • 1. Exploring Ethnicity
• Part II: The World of the Pioneers
  • 2. Contexts: California and the Punjab
  • 3. Early Days in the Imperial Valley
  • 4. Marriages and Children
  • 5. Male and Female Networks
  • 6. Conflict and Love in the Marriages
• Part III: The Construction of Ethnic Identity
  • 7. Childhood in Rural California
  • 8. The Second Generation Comes of Age
  • 9. Political Change and Ethnic Identity
  • 10. Encounters with the Other
  • 11. Contending Voices
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The Punjabi Mexican American community, the majority of which is localized to Yuba City, California is a distinctive cultural phenomenon holding its roots in a migration pattern that occurred almost a century prior. The first meeting of these cultures occurred in the Imperial Valley in 1907, near the largest irrigation system in the Western hemisphere…

Wikipedia

Books: Eight-Anna Girl

Time Magazine
1954-03-29

Bhowani Junction (394 pp.)—John Masters—Viking

In days gone by, when the sun never set on the British Empire, old India hands toted the white man’s burden, and Rudyard Kipling wrote about it in some 35 volumes of prose and poetry. Now that the burden has been lifted, many an old India hand has little to tote but a stiff upper lip. Not so John Masters, exbrigadier of the Indian army. Bounced out of India by Indian independence, he has bounced right back again, figuratively, at least, with a self-imposed burden of Kiplingesque dimensions. The burden: to write 35 novels about the land of purdah and pukka sahibs, covering the rise and fall of British imperial rule. Bhowani Junction is 39-year-old Author Masters’ fourth, and a Book-of-the-Month-Club choice for April. It covers part of the fall.

Three of Bhowani Junction’s, main characters take turns at telling the story, which hangs on the problems of a group Americans know little about. In India, there are many names for them—Anglo-Indians, Eurasians, half-castes, chee-chees, blacky-whites, eight-annas. Victoria Jones, an eight-anna girl, is “the color of dark ivory.” She is a lush beauty with come-hither eyes and a figure that would make an hourglass seem angular. But in 1946. with the British on their way out of India, Victoria’s problem is acute. (“We couldn’t become English, because we were half Indian. We couldn’t become Indian, because we were half English.”)

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Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain

International Journal of Population Geography
Special Issue: Geographies of Diaspora
Volume 9, Issue 4 (July/August 2003)
pages 281–294
DOI: 10.1002/ijpg.287

Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London

This paper explores geographies of diaspora for Anglo-Indians (formerly known as ‘Eurasians’) through a focus on their ‘homing desire’ in two diaspora spaces: firstly, an imperial diaspora in British India, and secondly, a decolonised diaspora in Britain after independence in 1947. Before independence, although Anglo-Indians were ‘country-born’ and domiciled in India, many imagined Britain as home and identified with British life in India even though they were largely excluded from it. Britain was often imagined as the fatherland, embodied by the memory of a British paternal ancestor, as enacted by settlement at an independent homeland for Anglo-Indians established at McCluskieganj in Bihar in 1933. By 1947, there were about 300,000 Anglo-Indians in India, but a third had migrated by the 1970s. I explore the implications not only of independence but also the British Nationality Act of 1948, which required many Anglo-Indians to prove the British origins of a paternal ancestor. The difficulties of tracing British ancestry are explored with reference to the work of the Society of Genealogists in London on behalf of Anglo-Indians in the subcontinent. Drawing on these records, as well as material from the Anglo-Indian press and interviews with women from one school who migrated after independence, I argue that ideas of Britain as home were intimately bound up with ideas of whiteness. Ideas about an Anglo-Indian diaspora existed long before decolonisation, and the migration of Anglo-Indians under the British Nationality Act led in many ways to a recolonisation of identity. Unlike studies that concentrate on ‘feminising the diaspora’, I argue that the diasporic ‘homing desire’ of Anglo-Indians invoked ideas of imperial masculinity in both imaginative and material terms.

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Fadeout for a Culture That’s Neither Indian Nor British

The New York Times
2010-08-14

Mian Ridge

CALCUTTA — Entering the crumbling mansion of the Lawrence D’Souza Old Age Home here is a visit to a vanishing world.

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. Sometimes, a tailor comes to make the old-style garments beloved by Anglo-Indian women of a certain age. Floral tea dresses, for example.

“On Sundays, we listen to jive, although we don’t dance much anymore,” Sybil Martyr, a 96-year-old retired schoolteacher, said with a crisp English accent.

“We’re museum pieces,” she said.

The definition has varied over time, but under the Indian Constitution the term Anglo-Indian means an Indian citizen whose paternal line can be traced to Europe. Both of Mrs. Martyr’s grandfathers were Scots…

…Before 1947, when the British left India, Anglo-Indians — also known at the time as half-castes, blacky-whites and eight annas (there were 16 annas in a rupee, the official currency of India) — formed a distinct community of 300,000 to 500,000 people. Most were employed in the railroads and other government services, and many lived in railroad towns built for them by the British, where their distinctive culture, neither Indian nor British, flourished…

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Distancing the Proximate Other: Hybridity and Maud Diver’s Candles in the Wind

Twentieth Century Literature
Volume 50, Number 2 (Summer, 2004)
pages 107-140

Loretta M. Mijares

The half-caste out here falls between two stools, that’s the truth.
—Maud Diver, Candles in the Wind

Miscegenation has long been recognized as one of the recurrent tropes of colonial discourse, and recent work has convincingly demonstrated that it was often enlisted in efforts to justify more authoritarian colonial rule. Critics such as Nancy Paxton and Jenny Sharpe have drawn attention to the ubiquitous theme of interracial romance and marriage in domestic fiction written by the British in India, a body of literature previously relegated to the genre of romance and dismissed as what Margaret Stieg calls “sub-literature” (3). While critics have begun to recognize that the focus of this large body of fiction on domestic arrangements expresses anxiety about interracial liaisons and miscegenation, few pay adequate attention either to the historical reality of the Eurasian community in existence during the periods they analyze or to the Eurasian characters in these works of fiction and their particular ideological function. The tendency of literary critics discussing miscegenation to categorize Eurasians and “natives” as equal threats in the domestic sphere is itself evidence of the success of this body of fiction’s strategic response to historical Eurasians: the disconcertingly familiar Eurasian is converted in fiction from proximate other to distant other, thereby relocating the anxiety generated by both the uncanniness of the Eurasian and the material threat this population posed to smooth colonial rule…

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