Few communities can have been so consistently maligned as that of India’s Anglo-Indians. Novelists of the British Raj habitually portrayed the Anglo-Indian male as a parasitical non-entity and his womenfolk as flighty vamps whose chi-chi accents and faux fashionable frocks were designed to entrap any pure-bred Englishman who came their way. John Masters was one of the worst offenders — until, that is, he discovered that he was himself Anglo-Indian; his own antecedents having included an Indian great-grandmother. To India’s British rulers the Anglo-Indians were often an embarrassment and sometimes a threat. Intermarrying with them meant absorbing their ‘imperfections’ and so ‘debasing succeeding generations of Englishmen,’ thought the East India Company’s directors in 1786. “The most rapidly accumulating evil in Bengal,” wrote Lord Valentia 20 years later, “is the increase in half-caste children.” He feared that what he called ‘this tribe’ was becoming so numerous as to swamp their pure-bred British brethren. “I have no hesitation in saying that the evil ought to be stopped…,” he harrumphed.
It was not just the British who looked down on their mixed-race half-brothers. Caste-conscious Indians felt much the same. While despising Anglo-Indians as, literally, ‘outcastes’, they resented their presumed superiority and especially their preferential access to jobs in the police and the railways, itself a concession prompted by the Company’s eventually declining to enrol them in its armed forces other than as ‘fifers, drummers, bandsmen and farriers’. Martially-minded Indians in their hundreds of thousands might serve in the ranks but Anglo-Indians might not. The native might be trusted; the half-native must be shunned. As S. Muthiah puts it in his refreshingly fair-minded survey, “that persons of mixed descent would inherit the worst characteristics of both races was a view held by many on both sides of the racial divide even to recent times.”
Defining any community in terms of its bloodline ought now to be considered politically incorrect and no more scientific than defining people in terms of their blood group, say, or their skull shape or skin colour. Yet, 200 years ago it was common practice. I blame the horse. In an age when the quadruped was king of the road and bloodstock won battles, expert opinion ordained an equine hierarchy: the Thoroughbred excelled in every respect, the cross-breed, though inferior, had its uses, and the miscegenated mule was an abomination, as sterile as it was unmanageable. Application of the same logic to other livestock, especially dogs, and, so, by extension to people, underwrote all manner of assumptions about propriety, caste and class. Yet as every horse-fancier well knew, the Thoroughbred was not pure-bred. It was itself the product of cross-breeding, indeed a dazzlingly successful example of Anglo-Asiatic cross-breeding.
Muthiah is at pains to point out that the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ is anyway a misnomer. The ‘Anglo’ didn’t mean just English and the ‘Indian’ didn’t mean just natives of India. In the 17th century, most of those disparaged as ‘half-castes’, ‘half-and-halves’ or ‘eight annas’ (i.e. half the rupee) were in fact Luso-Asians, the progeny of Portuguese males and Indian, Sri Lankan or Malay females. In India they were also known as ‘topazes’ and for a time featured prominently in the armed forces of Indian rulers as well as the East India Companies. Their names — Pereira, D’Souza, de Mello — linger on in today’s Anglo-Indian community, as do those of the Dutch, French and British merchant-adventurers who followed them to the East and whose progeny might be known as ‘East Indians’ or ‘Indo-Britons’. Muthiah is tempted to call them all Euro-Asians and occasionally does so. Meanwhile, the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ remained reserved exclusively for those ‘twice-born’ Britons who, while proud to have no Indian blood whatsoever, presumed to rule the subcontinent. Only in 1911 did these patriarchs discard the Anglo-Indian tag and apply it instead to all of mixed blood whose progenitors included a male of European descent in the male line.
Further refinement of the term came with the transfer of power and India’s 1950 adoption of a new constitution. Anglo-Indians had now to be born of parents resident in the Republic of India and to be normally resident there themselves. As such they qualify as members of a community now officially recognised as one of India’s six minorities, the others being Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsees and the so-called Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Except for the Anglo-Indians and the last, all these are defined by their religion. Only the Anglo-Indians are defined by their bloodline.
Muthiah introduces a rider to all this that makes a lot more sense. In popular perception, it is now culture rather than nurture that distinguishes Anglo-Indians. Most are Christian, nearly all boast an English education, they prefer Western dress and they marry within the community. They are also exceptionally gregarious, insists Muthiah. They stick together, like to party and take inordinate pride in traditions that combine Indian ingredients with British conventions. Not every reader will warm to the idea of their ‘Butler cuisine’. Its promise of mulligatawny soup, fish cutlets, cabbage foogath (a spicy sauerkraut) and ‘bread pudding’, ie bread-and-butter pudding (the author provides recipes for all of them), followed by a communal sing-song and a conga round the premises could prove testing in the pre-monsoon months.
But Muthiah, while not himself Anglo-Indian, is charmed by them all. Christmas, he says, lasts a month. Baptisms, weddings and funerals call for feminine frills and slick suiting; guitar skills are highly prized, whatever the occasion; and, perhaps surprisingly, cricket is less popular than hockey. In fact, Muthiah makes the point that the Anglo-Indian way of life is not far removed from that to which the youth of an again ‘Shining India’ currently aspires. Likewise Allan Sealy, author of the delightful Trotter-nama and Everest Hotel, hails his fellow Anglo-Indians as ‘the first modern Indians’. With their fluent English, their fusion food and frequent parties they may be setting the trend.
Lest anyone suppose that the community has not been pulling its weight, Muthiah and his informants devote the entire second half of the book to a copiously illustrated roll-call of distinguished Anglo-Indians. Here lurk many surprises, Cliff Richard for one, Boris Karloff for another, with Merle Oberon and a doubtful Vivien Leigh leading a veritable chorus line of Anglo-Indian beauties crowned Miss India, Miss World or both. Historical figures like James Skinner of Skinner’s Horse and Hyder Jung Hearsey belie the idea that Anglo-Indians showed no military aptitude, while among engineers and educators the community has had no rival. More surprising to a non-Indian is the disproportionate contribution made by their descendants to India’s post-British profile. The Air Force appears to have exercised the greatest attraction with more fighter aces and air vice-marshals, it would seem than even the Sikhs can boast.
“We have never had the know-how or the aggression to challenge the stereotypes that reduced our men and women to figures of derision,” writes Dr. Beatrix D’ Souza in the book’s foreword. Maybe; but traducing the Anglo-Indian community should now be a thing of the past. With ferret-like research and genial pen, Muthiah has set the record straight.
John Keay is a well-known English journalist and author.
The Anglo-Indians: A 500-year History;S. Muthiah & Harry MacLure, Niyogi Books, Rs.350.
