Anglo-Indian Identity: Past and Present,

in India and the Diaspora Robyn

Andrews
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/anglo-indian-identity-past-and-present-in-india-and-th
e-diaspora-robyn-andrews/
Anglo-Indian Identity
Past and Present,
in India and the Diaspora
Edited by
Robyn Andrews · Merin Simi Raj
Anglo-Indian Identity
 Robyn Andrews • Merin Simi Raj
Editors

Anglo-Indian Identity
Past and Present, in India and the Diaspora
Editors
Robyn Andrews Merin Simi Raj
Social Anthropology Programme Department of Humanities and Social
Massey University Sciences
Palmerston North, New Zealand Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Chennai, India

ISBN 978-3-030-64457-4    ISBN 978-3-030-64458-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64458-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
­institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Image of the ‘Anglo-Indian flag’ courtesy of Uther Charlton-Stevens

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge our gratitude for the invaluable contribution of

numerous Anglo-Indians who participated in the research presented in
this volume. In addition, we thank the contributing authors, without
whom there would be no book!
We are immensely grateful to Indian Institute of Technology Madras
(IIT Madras or IITM), for the Exploratory Research Grant sponsored by
the Centre for Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research (IC&SR)
which offered a generous funding towards the conduct of two International
Conferences on Anglo-Indian Studies (August 2017 and August 2018).
The support offered by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
and the Office of International and Alumni Relations IIT Madras is also
duly acknowledged with much gratitude. We thank Dr Avishek Parui, the
Faculty Coordinator (with Dr Merin Simi Raj) of Memory Studies
Research Network at IIT Madras, for organising a series of follow-up
events on Anglo-Indian Studies, featuring Dr Uther Charlton-Stevens, Dr
Robyn Andrews and the Anglo-Indian writer Keith Butler as main speak-
ers, thereby generating a larger interest in Anglo-Indian studies among
the student community in IIT Madras as well as in the academic fraternity
in Chennai.
We also note the support of two other organisations that contributed to
the IITM conferences in various ways: Anglo-Ink, Chennai and New
Zealand India Research Institute (NZIRI).
I, Merin, sincerely acknowledge and thank everyone who were part of
this journey in more ways than one. I particularly thank Harry McLure of
Anglo-Ink who introduced me to the Anglo-Indian community in

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Chennai, the interactions with whom I value academically as well person-

ally. I owe much to my parents and my brother for their invaluable sup-
port. I fondly acknowledge Priyanka and little Mishuk for being there, just
a call away. I thank Joe, for the genuine involvement, practical guidance
and much else. I am thankful for Paul and Rechu, for their honest, endless
excitement towards everything I do, all the time. I thank the Almighty, for
His unfailing presence.
I, Robyn, am most appreciative of the research leave and funds granted
by Massey University, New Zealand, and for the Asia New Zealand
Foundation Research Grant which enabled my research in New Zealand.
I acknowledge the valuable critiques and suggestions from Anglo-Indian
studies colleagues and look forward to future collaborations and opportu-
nities to get together. I thank friends and family, especially my daughters
for their consistent interest in my projects, and Keith for his enthusiastic
encouragement with this endeavour and for so much more.
We acknowledge anonymous reviewers of the manuscript and various
chapters, and in some cases, the original publishers for their permission to
republish some work here. They are also acknowledged, where relevant,
by individual chapter authors.
We are grateful to the editorial staff at Palgrave Macmillan for their
assistance and professionalism.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Merin Simi Raj and Robyn Andrews

Part I Identities: Historical  15

2 The Politics of Representation: Identity, Community and

Anglo-Indian Associations in South Asia 17
Nagorao Zapate

3 Which Eurasians May Speak? Elite Politics, the Lower

Classes and Contested Eurasian Identity 37
Brent Howitt Otto

4 The End of Greater Anglo-India: Partitioned Anglo

Identities in Burma and Pakistan 63
Uther Charlton-Stevens

Part II Identities in Contemporary India 109

5 Is the Anglo-Indian ‘Identity Crisis’ a Myth?111

Robyn Andrews

vii
viii Contents

6 Citizenship, Legitimacy, and Identity: Kolkata Anglo-

Indian Experiences131
Robyn Andrews

Part III Diasporic Identities 153

7 Immigration Rhetoric and Public Discourse in the

Construction of Anglo-Indian Identity in Britain155
Rochelle Almeida

8 Anglo-Indians of New Zealand: Colour and the Social

Construction of Identity177
Robyn Andrews

9 The Dilemma of Anglo-Indian Identity in Pakistan205

Dorothy McMenamin

10 From Asansol to Sydney: Terry Morris, Microhistory and

Hybrid Identity231
Arindam Das

Part IV Gendered Identities 251

11 The Personal Can Be Political: Deconstructing

Representations of Anglo-Indians253
Dolores Chew

12 Anglo-Indian Women in Teaching: The Interplay of

Gender, Profession, Community Identities and Religiosity279
Jyothsna Latha Belliappa and Sanchia deSouza

13 A Queer Encounter with Anglo-Indians: Some Thoughts

on National (Non)Belonging303
Carolyn D’Cruz
 Contents  ix

Part V Identities in the Arts: Literature, Film and

Performance 321

14 Identity and Homing Desire: Anglo-Indian Literary

Perspectives323
Shyamasri Maji

15 ‘Not Knowing for How Much Longer’: Requiem for the

Living as an Act of Cultural Recovery of the Paranki
Community in Kerala343
Merin Simi Raj and Avishek Parui

16 Daivathinte Vikruthikal: Homelessness and Fragmented

Identities of Indo-French Families in Mahé, Post-1954371
Sreya Ann Oommen

17 Mixed Feelings: Autoethnography, Affect and Anglo-

Indian Creative Practice391
Glenn D’Cruz

18 Fictionalised Identities: Remodelling Anglo-Indians409

Jade Furness

Index427
 Notes on Contributors

Rochelle Almeida a postcolonial literary specialist, is Professor of the

Humanities in Global Liberal Studies at New York University. She is the
author of Originality and Imitation: Indianness in the Novels of Kamala
Markandaya (2000), The Politics of Mourning: Grief-Management in
Cross-Cultural Fiction (2004) and Britain’s Anglo-Indians: The Invisibility
of Assimilation (2017) and co-editor of Global Secularisms in a Post-­
Secular Age (2016), Curtain Call: Anglo-Indian Reflections (2016), an
individually edited anthology Goa: A Post-Colonial Society Between Cultures
(2018) and a fictional memoir The Year the World Was Mine (2019).
Almeida was a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellow in Bombay.
Robyn Andrews is a senior lecturer in the Social Anthropology
Programme at Massey University, New Zealand. Her PhD, Being Anglo-­
Indian: Practices and Stories from Calcutta (2005), was the first of a num-
ber of Anglo-Indian studies projects she has been involved with in India
and the diaspora. She published Christmas in Calcutta: Anglo-Indian
Stories and Essays (2014) and writes articles and book chapters for both
academic and community publications. With Brent H. Otto, she co-edits
the International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies.
Jyothsna Latha Belliappa is a faculty member of the School of New
Humanities and Design at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and
Technology, Bengaluru, India. She has previously published on teachers
and teaching, the information technology industry, identity and on the
interaction between work and personal life. Her book Gender, Class and
Reflexive Modernity in India (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 2013) discusses

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

how women employed in Bengaluru’s IT industry create a sense of self by

drawing on multiple discourses prevalent within contemporary India.
Uther Charlton-Stevens is professor at the Institute of World Economy
and Finance, Volgograd State University, Russia, a fellow of the Royal
Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and the author of Anglo-­
Indians and Minority Politics in South Asia: Race, Boundary Making and
Communal Nationalism (2018). His second book, Anglo-India and the
End of Empire, is under contract with Hurst Publishers. Charlton-Stevens
completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford on ‘Decolonising
Anglo-Indians: Strategies for a Mixed-Race Community in Late Colonial
India During the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, under the supervi-
sion of Judith Brown and Francis Robinson.
Dolores Chew is a research associate of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute
of Concordia University. She was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and
now lives in Montreal, Canada. She is a member of the faculty at
Marianopolis College where she teaches History and Humanities and
where she is also the Liberal Arts Program Coordinator. She is on the
editorial boards of the International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies
and of Labour, Capital and Society/Travail, and capital et société. She
assisted in the establishment of the Derozio Anglo-Indian Research
Collection at Central Library, University of Calcutta.
Carolyn D’Cruz is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Sexuality and Diversity
Studies at La Trobe University, Australia. She is author of Identity Politics
in Deconstruction: Calculating with the Incalculable (2016) and Democracy
in Difference: Debating Key Terms in Gender, Sexuality, Race and
Identity (2020).
Glenn D’Cruz is Associate Professor of Art and Performance in the
School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Australia.
His most recent books include Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis (2018) and
Teaching Postdramatic Theatre: Anxieties, Aporias and Dispositions
(Palgrave, 2018). He has been a visiting scholar at the Australian
National University (2005) and City University New York (2018).
His creative work has been performed and/or exhibited at Federation
Square, Melbourne, the RMIT Gallery, Walker Street Gallery,
Federation Hall, VCA and the Gertrude Street Gallery in Melbourne.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Arindam Das is an associate professor in the School of Business, Alliance

University, Bangalore, India. While pursuing his PhD in Australian
Aboriginal Studies, he was a recipient of the Australia India Council
Australian Studies Fellowship in 2010–2011. His interests lie with cultural
studies, semiotics, postcolonial studies, cultural and organisational
communication, consumer culture studies and critical marketing. He
has contributed to internationally acclaimed journals like the Journal
of Postcolonial Writing and Journal of the European Association for Studies
of Australia. He is co-editing a special issue on ‘Pandemics and Consumer
Well-being’ in The Journal of Consumer Affairs.
Sanchia deSouza is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the
University of Toronto. Her dissertation examines urban development,
food supply and human-animal relationships through a history of milk in
Bombay, 1890–1970.
Jade Furness is a retired academic librarian from New Zealand. Her ini-
tial research interest in Anglo-Indian writer Allan Sealy’s fiction stemmed,
in part, from the exploration into her own great grandmother’s Anglo-­
Indian lineage. Furness holds a Master of Arts degree in English from
Massey University, New Zealand (2012). Her thesis Where the Postmodern
Meets the Postcolonial: Allan Sealy’s Fiction After The Trotter-nama exam-
ined Sealy’s novels: Hero, The Everest Hotel, The Brainfever Bird and
Red. Her research essay, ‘The Forms and Functions of Hybridity in
Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-nama’, was published in 2012 in the
International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies.
Shyamasri Maji is an assistant professor in the Department of English at
Durgapur Women’s College (affiliated to Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol),
West Bengal, India. She holds a PhD in English from the University
of Burdwan (India). The title of her doctoral thesis is Anxiety of
Representation in Select Anglo-Indian Writers. Areas of her research
interest include diasporic studies, postcolonial literature and the
Anglo-Indian community. She is the recipient of Independent
Research Fellowship 2018–2019 at Satyajit Ray Film and Television
Institute, Kolkata.
Dorothy Mcmenamin PhD, is from the Department of History & Art
History, University of Otago, New Zealand. Her doctoral thesis explored
Anglo-Indian lives in Pakistan (2019) and MA thesis from University of
Canterbury generated Leprosy and Stigma in the South Pacific (2011). As
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

a freelance oral historian, writings included Raj Days to Downunder:

Anglo-Indian Voices from Anglo India to New Zealand (2010, 2019).
She is a founding member and past vice-president of the New Zealand
South Asia Centre, University of Canterbury, where she lectured on Indian
history intermittently between 1998 and 2019. She was born in Pakistan,
migrated, and lives in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Sreya Ann Oommen is a PhD scholar at the Department of English,
Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India. Her work centres
on Island Studies, Memory and Culture, Malayalam Literature, Film
Adaptations, and Eco Literature. Her research currently focuses on the
articulation of islandness in literatures from and about islands, with special
attention to the ways in which the placeness of island spaces affects the
narratives.
Brent Howitt Otto is a PhD candidate in South Asian History at the
University of California, Berkeley. His research centres on Anglo-Indian
migration and diaspora and ritual and community in South Indian eccle-
sial history. At Berkeley Otto has taught Indian history, global history and
the history of religion. He is published in two Anglo-Indian Studies
volumes, the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, and elsewhere on
religion in the lives of Anglo-Indians stemming from collaborative
research with Robyn Andrews. He co-edits the International Journal
of Anglo-Indian Studies.
Avishek Parui (PhD, Durham, UK) is Assistant Professor of English at
the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and associate fellow of the UK
Higher Education Academy. He is Faculty Coordinator, Memory
Studies Research Network IIT Madras along with Merin Simi Raj.
He has researched and published widely on memory studies, modern-
ism, masculinity studies and medical humanities. He is the author of
Postmodern Literatures (2018) and is contracted with Rowman &
Littlefield for his second book titled Culture and the Literary: Matter,
Metaphor, Memory. He is the Principal Investigator of an exploratory
research project titled ‘Sleepless Cities: An Interdisciplinary Research in
Urban Studies, Brain Science, and Medical Humanities’.
Merin Simi Raj (PhD, IIT Bombay) is Assistant Professor of English at
the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Faculty Coordinator,
Memory Studies Research Network IIT Madras along with Avishek Parui.
Her research interests include memory studies, historiography and moder-
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

nity studies and digital humanities. She was the Principal Investigator of
an exploratory research project titled ‘A Transnational Narrative History
of the Anglo-Indian Community in India and the Diaspora’. She has
received training in digital humanities (Text Encoding Initiative (TEI),
data curation and linked data) from the Centre for Digital Scholarship and
Digital Humanities, University of Oxford.
Nagorao Zapate holds a PhD in Modern Indian History from the
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was a junior research fellow
of Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi. His thesis centred
around the consumption patterns and socio-cultural transformation in
Colonial Maharashtra. His areas of interest are the political economy
and socio-cultural history of Modern India.
 List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 ‘The Anglo-Indian Force, 1916’, Cover illustration.

(Robbie 1919) 66
Fig. 4.2 The Friis Browne Family—varied complexions among sisters.
(Courtesy of Rebecca Calderon) 75
Fig. 4.3 Map of the 88 branches of Gidney’s Association across the
Indian Empire in 1929, including four affiliated Burma
branches (Anglo-Indian Review, November 1929, p. 22) 88
Fig. 4.4 Henry Gidney (middle) leaving Buckingham Palace after an
audience with the King following the third Round Table
Conference93
Fig. 4.5 Members of the Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India), Peshawar,
1942. Anthony complained to Lady Wavell that although ‘80%
of those women were Anglo-Indians … [and] barely 15%
British people … all the upper ranks were only British’ (MSS
EUR R193/1, Anthony, 1987–1988). The small proportion
who came from other Indian communities generally opted for
the sari variant of the WAC(I) uniform. (Photo courtesy
of Charles Harvey, with additional thanks to Dorothy
McMenamin)97

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Merin Simi Raj and Robyn Andrews

Starting Points
In early August 2017, we, Merin Simi Raj and Robyn Andrews, convened
an Anglo-Indian Studies conference at the Indian Institute of Technology
Madras (IITM). We planned for a three-day event; so as to ensure enough
interest, our call for papers was broad. The response was overwhelming,
not just from academics but also from journalists, writers and independent
researchers who were interested in the stories, scholarship and lives of the
Anglo-Indian community. Receiving over two hundred abstracts, we had
underestimated the number of scholars working in the area and created for
ourselves the daunting task of selecting just thirty papers from this large
pool. Building upon the success of this conference, and thanks to the sup-
port offered once again from IIT Madras, we organised another event the

M. S. Raj (*)
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology
Madras, Chennai, India
e-mail: merin@iitm.ac.in
R. Andrews
Social Anthropology Programme, Massey University,
Palmerston North, New Zealand
e-mail: R.Andrews@massey.ac.nz

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
R. Andrews, M. S. Raj (eds.), Anglo-Indian Identity,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64458-1_1
2 M. S. RAJ AND R. ANDREWS

following year, this time with a much more focussed call. It was still con-
siderably oversubscribed.
The first Anglo-Indian conference opened up a series of discussions on
what constitutes Anglo-Indianness and what is at stake when particular
variables are seen as markers of Anglo-Indian identity. For instance, there
were a few Anglo-Indian attendees who maintained that being a native
speaker of English was a requisite, in alignment with the current All India
Anglo-Indian Association (AIAIA) definition as well as Frank Anthony’s
arguments from pre-Independence days. Against this overdetermining
language-marker of identity, there were counter arguments particularly
from Anglo-Indians from Kerala based on the Constitution’s definition,
which does not designate English as the required mother tongue of Anglo-­
Indians. While discussing the question ‘Who is an Anglo-Indian?’ the
positions even of ‘insiders’ to the community were sometimes so radically
different and distinct that the non-homogenous identity of the commu-
nity came to the fore. By the end of that first conference, and reinforced
in the second, all interpretations appeared to point to heterogeneity,
underlining the complexity and mutability of the Anglo-Indian identity,
which emerged as plural, polyphonic and discursive in quality. This
brought the ontological and experiential categories of Anglo-Indian-ness
under scrutiny in challenging and productive ways.
While the transnational nature of the identity as well as the history of
the Anglo-Indians were always talked about in scholarship, the conference
discussions also foregrounded the need to look into local histories, micro-­
narratives and individual stories, much of which was not available or suf-
ficiently documented in the extant scholarship on Anglo-Indians. The
range of texts, sites and archives that were explored in the conference
papers and discussions was also fascinating and convinced us of the need
for an interdisciplinary volume that would focus on Anglo-Indian identity
through the disciplines of literature, history and anthropology, and the
lenses of diaspora, nation, region, gender and class. The conferences initi-
ated such a conversation about identity, and this volume seeks to extend it
and widen its circle of scholarly participants.
The idea for a book, with an identity focus, thus begun to take shape,
conditioned by our concern that the Anglo-Indians and their stories
should be presented from a nuanced perspective and not straightjacketed
by particular definitions, disciplines, narratives, genres and theories. The
interdisciplinary nature of this venture led us to invite scholars working in
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

the area of Anglo-Indian Studies to make their contributions. In the end

the following set of eighteen chapters is a combination of contributions
from IIT Madras conference attendees, as well as some others by invitation.

The Question of Identity

As editors of this book we first approached the question of Anglo-Indian
identity as ‘outsiders’ to the community and with the training of two dif-
ferent disciplines: Anthropology and Literary Studies. In multiple ways
this convergence of disciplines was particularly enabling, helping us to
push past disciplinary boundaries while engaging with the Anglo-Indian
community and also with scholarship that has emerged only very recently,
for instance, Memory Studies and Gender Studies that draw on related
theoretical frames such as Affect Theory and Material Engagement
Theory. This volume includes contributions from different disciplines in
the humanities and social sciences. In addition to discussions arising at the
conferences, the broader scholarship on Anglo-Indians features too, across
a range of research frames: what it means to be an Anglo-Indian in India
as well as in other parts of the world; how gender impacts on an experience
of being Anglo-Indian; representations of the community and individual
members in media such as literature and film; how their history informs
the ways Anglo-Indians view themselves and are viewed by others.
In constructing this volume, we are also aware of the many ‘outliers’,
the knowledge networks on this subject that lie outside of the conven-
tional academic frames; for example, drawing on as well as appearing as
photographs, letters and memoirs, which are being curated by indepen-
dent researchers and well-wishers from the community as well as outside
of it. We believe this engagement with such material is also contributing
valuably to scholarly understanding of Anglo-Indian identity, giving it
more experiential qualities, which often offer more complex and nuanced
perspectives.
The term ‘identity’ carries an ambiguity which enhances the project at
hand. Etymologically, it can be traced to the Latin word idem meaning
‘the same’ or the ‘quality of being identical’ and is defined in dictionaries
as ‘a distinguishing character or personality of an individual’, but this
essentially highlights a set of qualities that sets a person or a group apart
from others. Thus, ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ are both implied by the
term identity, simultaneously demonstrating the problematic and the pos-
sibility inherent in the term. An aim of this volume is also to celebrate the
sameness and differences of many Anglo-Indian identities.
4 M. S. RAJ AND R. ANDREWS

This leads us to the official definition of Anglo-Indians as a constitu-

tionally recognised community of mixed descent with a history of close to
five hundred years. As per the Constitution of India Article 366(2), ‘an
Anglo Indian means a person whose father or any of whose other male
progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is
domiciled within the territory of India and is or was born within such ter-
ritory of parents habitually resident therein and not established there for
temporary purposes only’. This definition does not always sit conveniently
with the popular and cultural definitions of Anglo-Indians where other
variables such as language, lifestyle and even regional locations play a role
in determining ‘Anglo-Indianness’. Further, the patrilineal clause in the
definition complicates this identity, as chapters in this book elaborate upon
and respond to in critical and sensitive ways.
The conferences and subsequent interactions also foregrounded the
gaps and challenges in pursuing Anglo-Indian Studies. Given that there is
a growing number of students interested in researching the community in
India and the diaspora, a volume like this offers a road map for navigating
through this otherwise vast and diverse history of a community whose
identity often tends to be seen as homogenous, and thereby more suscep-
tible to stereotypical representations. They are also an easy target of those
who conflate mixed descent with uncertainty about their own identity,
purporting that Anglo-Indians have some sort of ‘identity crisis’, even
after centuries of Anglo-Indians being a distinct and recognised commu-
nity in their own right. In the diaspora, on the other hand, they are rela-
tively unknown or even ‘invisible’ as Rochelle Almeida and others purport
(Almeida, Bonnerjee, Andrews). At the same time there are also Anglo-­
Indian communities, particularly of non-British descent, with Dutch,
French and Portuguese ancestors whose history, lives and stories continue
to be relegated to the margins of the dominant organisational, cultural
and political understanding of Anglo-Indian identity.

The Current State of Scholarship

This interdisciplinary and transnational approach towards understanding
Anglo-Indians in India and the diaspora is particularly significant in the
contemporary period when Anglo-Indians are variously identified as, on
the one hand, victims of the post-colonial condition, ‘midnight’s orphans’,
as Glenn D’Cruz famously stated in his book of the same title (2006), and
on the other hand, as the first ‘modern Indians’ (Sealy 2007), well
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

positioned to take advantage of their considerable capitals, including their

(mostly) English language competency, access to excellent educational
facilities and urban lifestyle.
Anglo-Indian Studies is flourishing from a sound base of existing schol-
arship. As this collection demonstrates, the current focus on Anglo-Indian
Studies is global. This continues the trend of international interest, with
significant earlier scholars from the UK, the US, New Zealand, Australia,
Canada and India writing on diasporic issues, nationalism, citizenship,
post-coloniality, minority politics and assimilation, among others. The
scholarship has also produced very detailed ethnographic accounts focus-
ing on particular Anglo-Indian locations such as the railway colonies, and
on cities such as Kolkata and Chennai, thereby providing a local flavour to
global scholarship. This list is expanding with a growing interest in the
community, its narratives and its various sites and texts, from considerable
numbers of students in India and abroad.
In addition, the International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies, co-­
edited by Robyn Andrews and Brent H. Otto, also showcases ongoing
research on the community from different disciplinary perspectives.
Founded in 1996 it was the first, and is still the only, journal dedicated to
Anglo-Indian Studies. As such it is a significant platform and resource for
students and researchers. Another milestone for Anglo-Indian Studies
scholarship was the inauguration of the Derozio Anglo-Indian Research
Collection at the University of Calcutta in 2013. It is in the context of
these endeavours that we take this opportunity to suggest that this schol-
arly volume will initiate discussions towards the inclusion of Anglo-Indian
Studies in university syllabi, thereby introducing students to this emergent
and distinct domain.

What this Work Offers

Presenting the work from Anglo-Indian as well as non-Anglo-Indian per-
spectives, this work offers a critical approach to Anglo-Indian identity
from a range of geographical and temporal perspectives. In a unique way,
this work situates itself as an intermediary, facilitating interdisciplinary as
well as transnational approaches to Anglo-Indian Studies, on which the
future of this promising field also rests. As a volume it is multi-disciplinary
and theoretically rich in ways not easily accomplished in a single authored
work, or even an edited work from a single discipline. This is evident in the
range of disciplines drawn on as well as the intersection of various studies
6 M. S. RAJ AND R. ANDREWS

and theoretical frameworks, including Microhistory, Whiteness Studies’,

Memory Studies, Theatre Studies and Gender Studies. This volume
explores the question of identity of Anglo-Indians of British, French and
Portuguese descent as well as from different diasporic locations such as
New Zealand, Britain, Australia, Pakistan and Burma among others.
Identity is examined as being representative, performative, affective and
experiential through different interpretative frameworks as well as
methodologies.

Organisation and Overview of the Book

The book comprises five sections exploring identity issues, in particular,
temporal, geographic, thematic and formal contexts: historical, contem-
porary India, the diaspora, through a gender lens and in the arts——litera-
ture, film and stage. Of course, some chapters overspill the sections to
which they have been assigned. For example, three chapters (by Maji,
D’Cruz, and Furness) are in the last section on the arts but also illuminate
aspects of what it means to be an Anglo-Indian living in the diaspora.
While Chew’s chapter is situated in the section on gendered identities, it
includes a comprehensive review of gendered accounts in the literary arts.
Otto’s chapter, in the historical section, constructs a history of the Anglo-­
Indian self-fashioning of group identity by zeroing in on a revelatory liter-
ary product, an early-nineteenth-century poem.

Identities: Historically
The first section examines Anglo-Indian identity in India over the last two
centuries, up to mid-twentieth century. The chapters in this section draw
from archival historical research, including some barely known records,
letters, news reports, a poem, interviews and early community publica-
tions. The authors use these to narrate the ebbs and flows of being in and
out of favour with prevailing authorities, according to shifting political
power, all of which impacted Anglo-Indian identity. The areas explored
include political organisation, who among Anglo-Indians were allowed to
speak on behalf of the community, and the difference geographic location
made to the experience of being Anglo-Indian.
Nagorao Zapate, opens this section with his chapter ‘The Politics of
Representation: Identity, Community and Anglo-Indian Associations in
South Asia’, drawing on census reports, government orders, official
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

reports, newspapers and archived copies of the All India Anglo-Indian

Association’s publication, The Review. Through these he documents the
dynamics and strategies various groups employed to safeguard the socio-­
economic and cultural interests of Anglo-Indians and gain political repre-
sentation in colonial and post-colonial India.
The next chapter, by Brent Howitt Otto, employs a poem, The Eurasian
Anthem, published anonymously in 1826, to examine the articulation of
Anglo-Indian identity in its historical context. He raises questions about
the subaltern and elite voices embedded or implied in the poem to under-
stand who was positioned to speak for Anglo-Indians. The apparent con-
testation of Anglo-Indian identity as well as who has the power to represent
it, of which the poem is an early example, Otto demonstrates are neuralgic
points of contention which continue to evolve right up to Indian
Independence.
In his chapter Uther Charlton-Stevens charts the evolution of ‘Anglo’
identities across the Indian Empire. He explores attempts to forge a single
cohesive group and political organisation in order to face the challenges of
Indianisation and Burmanisation of Anglo-Indian employment. He
describes the differences between ethnic Anglo-Indians and Anglo-­
Burmans and between their closely intertwined politics through war, dis-
placement and consecutive partitions that tore asunder the broader
imaginative space of Anglo-India, and pushed political leaders to attempt
to shift and reformulate their constituents’ identities to meet the challenge
of rising divergent nationalisms in Burma, India and Pakistan. As he con-
cludes, these early Anglo identities and the implications of two processes
of bifurcation provide a crucial basis for understanding subsequent diver-
gent evolutions of Anglo-Indian identity in different diasporic settings.

Identities in Contemporary India

From the historical we move to the contemporary situation in India. Both
chapters in this section are authored by Robyn Andrews, an anthropolo-
gist with two decades of research experience with Anglo-Indians, mostly
in Kolkata which these chapters reflect. Just as there is no monolithic
‘Indian’ identity, the same must be said of Anglo-Indians. As such, in this
section, particular issues are examined rather than seeking to reveal the
myriad of ways to be Anglo-Indian, and what that means in contempo-
rary India.
8 M. S. RAJ AND R. ANDREWS

In her first chapter in this section, Andrews questions the notion of an

Anglo-Indian ‘identity crisis’ noting that it has become something of a
cliché in writings about Anglo-Indians. She claims this notion has been
foisted on Anglo-Indians from outsiders who themselves too easily
embrace the concept as they do not understand how Anglo-Indians under-
stand themselves. So, the identity problem is theirs, rather than Anglo-­
Indians’. She builds an argument that Anglo-Indians identify securely as
Anglo-Indian, living comfortably ‘with the hyphen’, rather than feeling
compelled to either side of it.
In her second chapter Andrews raises questions about the place of
Anglo-Indians in the modern Indian nation, and therefore the interplay
between their nationality and identity. She draws on Anthony’s claim that
they are ‘Anglo-Indian by community and Indian by nationality’(Anthony
1969), as well as India’s constitutionally enshrined secularism, to argue
that they have every right to identify as both, but asks, do they feel this?
Do they feel both Anglo-Indian and Indian? In the last decade, she notes
that various events, from changes in government to demonetisation, may
have eroded their sense of national identification. She draws on two case
studies to exemplify the ways in which Anglo-Indians can be, and have
been, ‘successful’ in maintaining their identity as both Indian and Anglo-­
Indian. This chapter was written prior to January 2020 when Anglo-­
Indian political representation was officially removed, but a trajectory was
already clear.

Diasporic Identities
In the section focussed on diasporic Anglo-Indians the chapters present
investigations into life for Anglo-Indians in, respectively, the United
Kingdom, New Zealand, Pakistan and Australia. There are clear themes
across these chapters such as Anglo-Indians not being visible to the major-
ity populations, assimilation, discrimination, and the maintenance of tradi-
tions. The relative concentration of Anglo-Indians in a place helps
determine how able they are to get together and ‘be’ Anglo-Indian in
their new homes. The impact of local immigration policies is seen in sev-
eral chapters to play a part, both in whether they can immigrate in the first
place, and then in their experiences as the policies reflect and are influ-
enced by social attitudes towards newcomers.
Beginning with the United Kingdom, Rochelle Almeida’s chapter
draws on interviews with UK-resident Anglo-Indians to examine the
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

historical experiences of Britain’s Anglo-Indians within the context of

wide-ranging and at times hostile rhetoric in relation to immigrants. She
charts changes to immigration policy over the period from Indian
Independence when Anglo-Indians arrived in large numbers until recent
times. In comparison with other migrant groups, she argues, that for all
their challenges, Anglo-Indians have fared well. Their associations and
clubs demonstrate that they are able to practice being Anglo-Indians at
least when they spend time together in these institutionalised public ways.
Robyn Andrews finds that one of the unique features of Anglo-Indians
in New Zealand is their misidentification as Māori, New Zealand’s indig-
enous people. Based on a Whiteness Studies framework, Andrews argues
in this chapter that many of their experiences of identity, and more broadly,
are due to them being ‘not quite white’. The relatively small numbers of
Anglo-Indians in New Zealand mean that they have fewer opportunities
to spend time together but their profile appears to be rising, which may
change their degree of social organisation.
Dorothy McMenamin takes us back to the subcontinent, to Pakistan,
where she was born and has conducted research on the Anglo-Indian
community there. They are not identified by that nomenclature for rea-
sons which she addresses. Their experiences post-Independence,
McMenamin argues, have been quite different to those in India and gen-
erally positive. As an historian, she traces the emergence of this relatively
new nation, how it changed over the first few decades and the ways in
which Anglo-Indians who were already living there were affected. There is
almost nothing written of Pakistani Anglo-Indians, so McMenamin breaks
new ground through her work.
Arindam Das writes of Terry Morris, an Anglo-Indian from Asansol,
India, who migrated to Australia where he has become a well-known song
writer and performer. Drawing on microhistory methodology, he traces
Morris’s personal trajectory in tandem with that of the wider population
of Anglo-Indians in Australia. Morris has identified at different times as
Anglo-Indian, Indian and Australian, mirroring the varied narratives of
identity in which Anglo-Indians participate.

Gendered Identities
The next section, subtitled gendered identities, includes explorations of
the impact of gender in this community, although this is not the only lens
called upon. Of the three chapters, one explores nationalism and how it
10 M. S. RAJ AND R. ANDREWS

intersects with gendered identity. Another focusses squarely on the effect

being Anglo-Indian has on a group of women in the teaching profession.
The third draws on experience of being of a minority gender to tease out
what it means to be a member of the ethnic minority community of
Anglo-Indians.
Dolores Chew, an Anglo-Indian scholar and activist, has written on
patriarchy, colonialism and nationalism and draws on an insider’s gen-
dered experience. In her chapter she highlights stereotypes assigned to
members of the community, tracing the sexual objectification of women
and emasculation of men as persistent tropes in literature from Raj times
to the post-colonial times. She argues that the lens of nationalism and the
concept of the nation contribute a great deal to understanding how Anglo-­
Indians have been situated and represented in the past as well as today.
In the chapter by Jyothsna Belliappa and Sanchia deSouza the authors
write of Anglo-Indian female teachers in Bangalore, arguing that their
gendered, community and religious identity gives them cultural capital
deployable into a range of educational employment opportunities. They
argue that while they have a degree of agency and are sought after due to
the recognition of their talents and work ethic, they can encounter obsta-
cles to well-remunerated employment both in Anglo-Indian schools and
in others’ schools, for varying reasons which they explore.
To examine certain Anglo-Indian identity concerns in her chapter Carol
D’Cruz recalls her early sense of ‘unbelonging’ as an Anglo-Indian in
Britain and Australia, in tandem with her recent experience of an Anglo-­
Indian World Reunion in India. In her methodologically ground-breaking
chapter she achieves this by looking to ‘gender non-conforming identities’
in order to broaden discussions about Anglo-Indians as ‘culturally non-­
conforming Indian subjects’. By drawing on LGBTIQA+ (Queer) schol-
arship and bringing them into dialogue with Anglo-Indian apprehensions
and concerns, she frames a new way of looking at Anglo-Indian identity,
especially in India.

Identities in the Arts: Literature, Film

and Performance

The last section comprises a set of five chapters which focus on Anglo-­
Indian identities in the arts: literature, film and performance. Anglo-­
Indian representation in literature and film has been, at least tangentially,
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

addressed in some other chapters in other sections, for example, Dolores

Chew looks at how women in particular, but also men, are depicted in fic-
tion in ways that reinforce existing stereotypes. What is distinct about the
chapters in this section is that each focuses on a particular work, or very
small set of works, rather than offering a survey, to look at an aspect of
identity: homing desire of diasporic Anglo-Indians in one case, the little-­
known Anglo-Indians of Kerala’s Paranki community in another and
Anglo-Indians of Mahé in a third. The last two chapters might be read as
identity quests through the arts, with autoethnographic identity and non-­
narrative performance highlighted in one, and in the last, family identity
sought through contemporary Anglo-Indian literature read against per-
sonal family history. These last two chapters also highlight a theme of
Anglo-Indians in the diaspora seeking to understand more about their
own and their families’ history and cultural identity.
Shyamasri Maji examines identity and the desire for a ‘home’ through
fictional accounts of Patricia McGready-Buffardi (2004), Jimmy Pyke
(2014) and Keith Butler (2014). The authors are Anglo-Indians with the
experience of living in India but who now live in the diaspora. Their main
protagonists are also Anglo-Indian migrants engaging in what it means to
be a diasporic Anglo-Indian. The works are set from the later colonial
period through until contemporary times, and geographically, from India
to the UK and Australia. Maji productively examines the diasporic litera-
ture through Avtar Brah’s (1996) framework, developed in analysing the
problematic of identity for Britain’s non-white migrants and their dis-
course around ‘homeland’ versus home.
The focus of Merin Simi Raj and Avishek Parui’s chapter is the little-­
known community of Parankis of Kerala, illuminated through the novella
Requiem for the Living (2013) originally written in Malayalam by Johny
Miranda. Introducing the idea of ‘identity-consumption’ as key to the
remembered events from personal and collective memory, the authors
demonstrate how this intergenerational tale of mixed-race identity and
assimilation calls for a more nuanced and diverse understanding of Anglo-­
Indianness as well as a re-mapping of scholarship on Anglo-Indian studies.
Through historiographic study and the theoretical frames of Memory
Studies, this chapter foregrounds the politics of forgetting and re-­
appropriation in complex cultural contexts, pointing to the politics of
privilege entangled with the discursive and material markers even within a
supposedly minority identity.
12 M. S. RAJ AND R. ANDREWS

Continuing with the theme of revealing more about the little-known

identity of particular Anglo-Indian groups is Sreya Oommen’s chapter on
the mixed descent Indo-French group of Mahé. She examines the book
Daivathinte Vikruthikal (originally published in 1989) by M. Mukundan
(2002) and film adaptation by Lenin Rajendran (1992) revealing the his-
tory, challenges and stereotyping of this miniscule sub-community, within
a minority community. The book and film are set in India, after the French
have left the subcontinent, and demonstrate experiences typical for other
Anglo-Indian groups. Mahé’s community are Christians, often misidenti-
fied and their history and culture misunderstood. This results in feeling
excluded and dejected.
Glenn D’Cruz’s chapter is in two parts, each demonstrating the value
of non-text art forms to comment on Anglo-Indian identity and culture.
The first part describes Rhett D’Costa’s 2019 participatory artwork,
‘Masala Mix’ and makes the case for it being an exemplary form of creative
practice research skilfully employing autoethnography to address ques-
tions of belonging and identity. The second, also drawing on autoethno-
graphic methodologies, provides an account of D’Cruz’s own creative
process with reference to a multimedia performance, Vanitas, where he
takes a set of objects to think about what life might have been like for his
father, an Anglo-Indian who left India with his family just after
Independence.
The last chapter in this collection, by Jade Furness, centralises two ele-
ments: the author’s quest for knowledge and understanding of her family’s
history, and through this, a detailed and nuanced reading of two of I. Allan
Sealy’s fictional works, The Trotternama (Sealy 1988) and The Everest
Hotel (Sealy 1998). The novels provide the author with convincing ver-
sions of her own family’s history in India, pre and post Indian Independence.
She articulates her gratitude for this, saying that as she had known very
little about her family in India and that ‘Sealy’s writing allowed me to
access the possible fates and fortunes of my great grandmother and her
Anglo-Indian family in India, that have otherwise been unrecoverable’.
We are delighted to present this set of chapters on diverse aspects of
Anglo-Indian identity approached from a number of disciplinary angles.
As the title of the book describes, some chapters focus on the past, others
on the present and, geographically, range from India to the diaspora.
Showcasing this set of interdisciplinary works, we believe this volume will
lead the way in stimulating further interest in this rich arena of study.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

References
Anthony, F. (1969). Britain’s Betrayal in India. Mumbai: Allied Publishers.
Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London:
Routledge.
Butler, K. (2014). The Secret Vindaloo. Auckland: Bay Road Media.
D’Cruz, G. (2006). Midnight’s Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post-colonial Literature
(Vol. one). Bern: Peter Lang.
McGready-Buffardi, P. (2004). Hearts Divided in the Raj. Indiana: Author House.
Miranda, J. (2013). Requiem for the Living (S. Jose, Trans.): OUP.
Mukundan, M. (2002). God’s Mischief (P. Jayakumar, Trans.): Penguin Books.
Pyke, J. (2014). The Tea Planter’s Son: An Anglo-Indian Life. Bloomington:
Partridge.
Rajendran, L. (Writer). (1992). Daivathinte Vikruthikal [God’s Mischief]. In
S. M. Arts (Producer).
Sealy, I. A. (1988). The Trotternama: A Chronicle. New York: Alfred Knopf.
Sealy, I. A. (1998). The Everest Hotel: A Calendar. Anchor Fiction.
 PART I

Identities: Historical
 CHAPTER 2

The Politics of Representation: Identity,

Community and Anglo-Indian Associations
in South Asia

Nagorao Zapate

Introduction
The discovery of a maritime route to South Asia in the last decade of the
fifteenth century opened new avenues of wealth for European countries.
It began a new era of extensive trade and commerce between Europe and
South Asia. After a few generations of trade and political expansion, a
number of those involved entered into more or less permanent marriage
relationships with local women; offspring of these mixed marriages proved
extremely useful for Europe to consolidate its territories in India. The
offspring of such mixed marriages were in a special position and tended to
form self-conscious communities; the largest, the best organised and the
most interesting is the community in India variously known as East Indian,
Eurasian or Anglo-Indian (Hedin, 1934; Snell 1944, p. 8; Gaikwad 1967,
p. 14). The term ‘Eurasian’, later ‘Anglo-Indian’, refers to persons of
mixed European-Indian ancestry who belong to a group recognised by

N. Zapate (*)
Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Switzerland AG 2021
R. Andrews, M. S. Raj (eds.), Anglo-Indian Identity,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64458-1_2
18 N. ZAPATE

the Constitution of India as a distinct minority in India. While the Anglo-­

Indian community owes its genesis to the advent of Europeans in India, it
was the appearance of the British in India that the real history of the
Anglo-Indian begins and a community having a common language, reli-
gion, culture, lifestyle, manners and customs emerged (Snell 1944, p. 8).
Anglo-Indians were concentrated in those areas where the most British
contacts had occurred. In the most significant cities, Delhi, Calcutta,
Bombay, Madras and Bangalore, two-thirds of all the Anglo-Indians lived,
while most of the additional one-third lived in states such as Kerala and
Pondicherry, as well as Shimla, Darjeeling, Kalimpong and other cities of
the hills region1 (Cressey 1935). Anglo-Indians are predominantly city
dwellers, and their life and problems have an urban setting.
This chapter examines the group dynamics of the Anglo-Indian people
in terms of the politics of representation, particularly with regard to the
genesis, organisational structure, functions and effectiveness of the All
India Anglo-Indian Association and other such groups that pursue the
socio-economic and cultural interests of Anglo-Indians. It also assesses the
role and performance of various Anglo-Indian associations in articulating
an Anglo-Indian identity and safeguarding the interests of the community
in colonial and post-colonial India. This study is based on historical and
archival sources, including census reports, government orders, official
reports and newspapers, which provide valuable information about the
Anglo-Indian community.

Community Consciousness
and Anglo-Indian Associations

The necessity of promoting a community consciousness within the frame-

work of a social organisation was first realised in the early nineteenth cen-
tury. In this regard, prominent Anglo-Indians in Calcutta formed various
organisations, namely, the Parental Academic Institution (1823), the East
India Club (1825), the Calcutta Apprenticing Society (1827) and the
Commercial and Patriotic Association (1828), to represent the interests
and concerns of Anglo-Indians to the government, to educate their chil-
dren and to promote employment in public services2 (Anderson 2011,

1
Hutton, J.H. (1933). Census of India, 1931, vol. I-India, Part II-Imperial Tables.
Manager of Publications, Delhi, pp. 562–569. (National Archives of India, New Delhi).
2
Bengal Act III of 1914 (The Doveton Trust Act of 1914), p. 487.
 2 THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION: IDENTITY, COMMUNITY… 19

p. 17; Graham 1934; Gaikwad 1967, p. 25; Castellas 2008, p. 77). The
formation of social organisations was a conscious effort among Anglo-­
Indians to organise themselves to achieve solidarity and a more articulate
voice in matters concerning their welfare. The Anglo-Indians involved
were convinced that they must themselves find a practical solution for the
betterment of their economic condition (Gaikwad 1967, pp. 75–76;
Castellas 2008, pp. 75–76).
Following the Revolt of 1857, the British turned more and more
towards the Anglo-Indian community to fill strategic, but intermediary,
positions in public services. Anglo-Indians were given preferential treat-
ment in recruitment in the railways, posts and telegraphs, and customs
(Gist and Wright 1973, p. 8; Snell 1944, pp. 14–15; Blunt 2015,
pp. 9–10). The government opened employment opportunities to the
community to secure the Company’s interests as the British were aware
that they could count on the community’s support in crucial times. In the
post-1857 period, the railway service was the only arena in which govern-
ment used Anglo-Indians explicitly as an intermediary class. In the posts,
telegraphs and customs department, Anglo-Indians had already ceased to
be local agents of the British Government (Mizutani 2011, p. 62). Many
Anglo-Indians were unemployed at this time, as a result of which their
economic condition generally remained backwards. In 1879, Lord Lytton
(1876–1880) established the Statutory Civil Service, a native branch of
the civil service to increase employment in government services. Anglo-­
Indians benefitted from employment in this service, evidenced by the
report of the Public Service Commission which stated that the Statutory
Civil Service had a large concentration of Anglo-Indians.3
In the late nineteenth century, there was an increasing demand for gov-
ernment employment by educated Indians, as a result the government
introduced a series of reforms. In Section 6 of the Government of India
Act 1870 and the resolution dated 11 November 1882, the government
stated that the term ‘natives’ were to apply to persons of ‘pure Asiatic
origin’.4 This meant that positions in the subordinate grade formerly held

3
Report of the Public Service Commission (1886–1887), Concept Publishing Co., Delhi,
Reprint (1977), p. 24.
4
Proceeding Nos. 15/16, October 1904, Legislative Department, pp. 3-4; Proceeding
Nos. 118 of 1909, January 1910, Nos. 5/11, Part B, Department of Commerce and
Industry, p. 6. (National Archive of India, New Delhi)
20 N. ZAPATE

by Anglo-Indians would now be closed to them (Castellas 2008,

pp. 84–85). Satoshi Mizutani argues that:

subordinate positions were increasingly taken by educated Indians who

claimed lower wages and who had political justification for increased recruit-
ment. Consequently, except in certain departments such as the Customs and
the Telegraph, the proportion of Anglo-Indian clerks experienced a phe-
nomenal decline. By 1890, the proportion of Anglo-Indian clerkships within
the civil service had declined to 18 per cent from almost a total monopoly
(99 per cent) in 1840. (Mizutani 2011, p. 63)

Over the years, Anglo-Indians felt increasing pressure from competition

with other Indians in areas of employment in public services. As the sense
of growing deprivation gradually increased, the community started look-
ing for survival and defensive strategies to protect their economic and
social future (Sen 2017, p. 162). To this end, the Anglo-Indian commu-
nity began to form organisations in the latter half of the nineteenth cen-
tury (Abel 1988, p. 38; Castellas 2008, p. 85).
One of the first organisations, founded by E.W. Chambers in Bengal,
was the Eurasian and Anglo-Indian Association (also known as the Calcutta
Association) in 1876 (Mizutani 2011, pp. 63–64; The Review, 1976,
p. 70). The main objective of the Association was to alleviate the commu-
nity’s problems, particularly in employment and education. The Association
made several representations to the colonial government drawing its atten-
tion to the problems faced by the Anglo-Indian community (Anthony 1969,
p. 408), but was not successful in its endeavours at least in part because
“dissension within the community prevented many Anglo-Indians from
joining the association” (Abel 1988, p. 41). Nevertheless, during those
inconsistent times, the Association and its leaders guided the Anglo-Indian
community in Calcutta and other parts of Bengal. In Madras, the Anglo-­
Indian and Domiciled European Association of Southern India was formed
by D.S. White in 1879 (Gist and Wright 1973, pp. 97–98). White was
aware of the need for increased unity among Anglo-Indians to redress
their socio-economic problems (Packlanathaj 1997, p. 70).
In 1898, Dr. J.R. Wallace founded the Imperial Anglo-Indian
Association which was, after the death of its founder, revived as the Anglo-­
Indian Empire League (Gaikwad 1967, p. 35; Gist and Wright 1973,
p. 98; Sen 2017, p. 161). As president of the Anglo-Indian Empire
League, John Harold Abbott (1863–1945) became the dominant leader
 2 THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION: IDENTITY, COMMUNITY… 21

of the Anglo-Indian community and played a significant role in bringing

it together into a federation with other Anglo-Indian organisations to
recruit soldiers for World War I (Charlton-Stevens 2018, p. 139). The
loose federation of the League with several regional Anglo-Indian associa-
tions had initially come into being to organise such wartime recruitment.
Despite their cooperation in 1916, the Federal Council of four Anglo-­
Indian Associations and the General Council of the League “each
addressed the Government of India directly independent of other”
(Charlton-Stevens 2018, p. 144). Charlton-Stevens says that Abbott’s
more comprehensive achievement had been to bring about a broader basis
for claims to leadership of an all-India community (Charlton-Stevens
2018, p. 144).
At the Anglo-Indian Empire League’s 1918–19 Annual Conference at
Allahabad, a resolution was passed to change the name of the Empire
League to the ‘Anglo-Indian Association’, at which point there was a sig-
nificant argument about why ‘Domiciled European’ had been left out of
the organisation’s new name, and another resolution was also passed
renaming it ‘the Anglo-Indian & Domiciled European Association’
(Charlton-Stevens 2018, pp. 134–172). A prominent leader of Anglo-­
Indians, Henry Gidney (1873–1942), became its president (Gist and
Wright 1973, p. 98; Sen 2017, p. 161). This Association is considered the
parent organisation of the present All India Anglo-Indian Association, the
most dominant and influential Anglo-Indian organisation in India. The
Memorandum of the Association says: “the Association has been formed
to watch over and protect the interests and promote the welfare of Anglo-­
Indians in India and others associated with them by community of sympa-
thies and interests. The objects of the Association are charitable, educational
and cultural” (Gaikwad 1967, pp. 35–36). The many provincial branches
of the All India Association had more localised concerns and spent a lot of
time organising social and cultural functions.
Since its inception in 1879, the Anglo-Indian Association of Southern
India remained as a separate body and refused to amalgamate with the ‘All
India’ organisation (Gist and Wright 1973, p. 98). In an interview,
E.H.M. Bower explained the differences that arose between the Southern
India Association and the All India Association. When the All India
Association was founded in Calcutta, the Southern India Association was
asked to become a provincial branch. The Southern India Association
declined to be part of the All India Association because “the Anglo-India
Association constitution does not make for provincial unity as each district
22 N. ZAPATE

branch sends its correspondence and remittances direct to the All India
body.”5 The Southern India Association prioritised provincial unity and
did not desire to strengthen the All-India headquarters at the expense of
that unity.6 Instead of amalgamation, the Southern Association wanted a
federation of these two associations, but the All-India Anglo-Indian
Association rejected this proposal (Gaikwad 1967, p. 37). Despite numer-
ous attempts made by the All India Association to persuade the Madras
Association to amalgamate, it remained obdurate and separate.7 It is will-
ing to federate and retain its hitherto autonomous status but draws the
line at any other compromise. In the persistence of this schism, the com-
munity added another sorry link to the spectre of Anglo-Indian disunity
(Snell 1944, pp. 28–29).

Dilemma of Identity
As the freedom movement’s pace increased against British rule, and with
constantly changing socio-political and economic conditions, Anglo-­
Indians became concerned about their positions and future in India
(Hawes 1996; Caplan 2001). In 1923, the Anglo-Indian Association of
Bengal called a meeting at Calcutta to discuss whether “Anglo-Indians
[should] retain their distinctive identity or should … identify themselves
with Indians as far as civil activities are concerned or … [seek to]
Indianise?”8 Henry Gidney, in this meeting, said that he did not doubt
that Anglo-Indians were very “much befogged” as to what the position
was likely to be for the Anglo-Indian community and even about what
they would call themselves. Again, he said “no doubt, everyone presents
there called himself an Anglo-Indian. But had they any right to call them-
selves such?”9 He added that some Anglo-Indian employees of the East
Indian Railway brought to his notice that they were described as East
Indians in the records of the railway, and it was only by common usage
that they were called Anglo-Indians.10 Gidney said that Anglo-Indians
must determine who they were. They were the sons of the soil, neither

5
The Times of India, 13 May, 1937, p. 4.
6
Ibid.
7
The Annual Report of the Anglo-Indian and Domiciled European Association of Southern
India, 1930, p. 6.
8
The Times of India, 15 May, 1923, p. 11.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
 2 THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION: IDENTITY, COMMUNITY… 23

European nor Indian, but ipso facto citizens of the country. He maintained
that Anglo-Indians should not have the slightest hesitation in calling
themselves citizens of India. It was time that the community, while main-
taining its distinctive communal existence, should join hands with other
Indians in the attainment of self-government for India within the British
Empire by constitutional methods.11 The meeting of the Anglo-Indian
community of Calcutta declared that:

the Domiciled community whilst retaining, in its entirety, their communal

identity, look upon themselves as one of the permanent and distinct com-
munities in India; and as much are citizens of India in every respect. We are
desirous of living in peace, harmony and co-operation with the other com-
munities in India and are ready in the future, as in the past, to help India to
attain local self-government within the British Empire on constitu-
tional lines.12

In 1931, the position of Anglo-Indians under the new Constitution was

discussed at length by Henry Gidney, and he urged Anglo-Indians thus:

… the present day conflict between an ever changing [We]st and a never
changing [Ea]st must find the Anglo-Indian ranging himself more and more
alongside the Indian in a constitutional advance to Dominion status. This, I
submit, is the first essential for the future of the Anglo-Indian, otherwise,
India offers no place for the community, but by this I do not mean that he
must sacrifice his communal identity and distinctiveness or that loyalty to
the new India implies disloyalty to Britain. On the contrary, I could not
conceive of a prosperous and well organized and administered India sepa-
rated from England, for each is equally in need of the other’s loyalty and
co-operation, without which neither nation will prosper or advance.13

It was in the 1930s under the leadership of Henry Gidney that Anglo-­
Indians began to turn to Indians for recognition of their special status.
Dual loyalties with priority for England, however, continued. Cursing the
British for letting them down (see, e.g., the title of two important books:
Herbert Stark’s Hostages to India or the Life-Story of the Anglo-Indian
(1926) and Frank Anthony’s Britain’s Betrayal in India: the Story of the

11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
The Times of India, 21 March, 1931, p. 12.
24 N. ZAPATE

Anglo-Indian Community (1969), which themselves tell the stories),

Herbert Stark made an impassioned appeal to the English and the Indians:
“If England is the land of our fathers, India is the land of mothers. If to us
England is a hallowed memory, India is a living verity. If England is the
land of our pilgrimage, India is the land of our homes. If England is dear
as a land of inspiring traditions, India is loved for all that she means to us
in our daily life.”14 Again, Henry Gidney speaking in Bangalore put the
case to his Anglo-Indian fraternity as harshly as he could:

Deny the fact that you are sons and citizens of India, disclaim it, conceal it
in your efforts to ape what you are not, and you will soon be the ‘not
wanted’ at all. The opportunity is yours today to more closely associate
yourselves, from early school life, with the rest of India, to realise that you,
with all other communities, have a right to live in this, your country, and
that you are first and last sons of India … But if there is one thing which you
must completely eradicate from yourselves it is the retention of the ‘superi-
ority’ and ‘inferiority’ complexes; and you should bring about their replace-
ment with a complex of equality.15

The Anglo-Indian community seemed to be caught between a desire to

join in European attitudes of superiority and prejudice towards Indians
and a feeling of rejection by many Indians who considered them ‘other’
because of their Western-oriented culture. Henry Gidney, throughout his
political career, played a significant role in seeking: (a) eradication of the
community’s European attitude of superiority and prejudice against other
Indians, and (b) recognition of the Anglo-Indian community’s asserted
status of belonging on the political map of India.
In this particular period, several books regarding the history and prob-
lems of the community were written and published by Anglo-Indian
authors such as Herbert A. Stark’s Hostages to India (1926), Kenneth.
E. Wallace’s the Eurasian Problem: Constructively Approached (1930),
Cedric Dover’s Cimmerii? or Eurasians and their Future (1929) and Half-­
Caste (1937), C. N. Weston’s Anglo-Indian Revolutionaries of Methodist
Episcopal Church (1938), and J.A.H. Bower’s Ambition Mocked our Useful
Toil (1939), and attempts were also made to foster the conviction in the
minds of people of the community that they ought to regard themselves
as belonging to India and to claim India as their motherland (Maher 1945,

14
The Times of India, 2 November, 1969, p. 17.
15
Ibid.
 2 THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION: IDENTITY, COMMUNITY… 25

p. 50). Alison Blunt argues, “the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was

both manifested and erased by their dual identification with Britain as
fatherland and India as Motherland” (Blunt 2015, p. 24). Alison Blunt
claims that Gidney attempted to shift Anglo-Indian orientation to the
dualistic formula of India as motherland alongside Britain as fatherland
because neither the Anglo-Indian community nor Gidney himself was
ready to renounce an ongoing affiliation to Britain. This was even whilst
Gidney sought to increase their simultaneous identification with India
(Blunt 2015, pp. 42–43). Charlton-Stevens argues that Gidney did not
want to conceive of a binary choice between identification with Britain
and India, rather he wanted to assert both with this formula. He could do
so because he imagined a future for India as always being aligned with
Britain even under a future Dominion Status tied to the British Crown
and within the Empire/Commonwealth. He did not want to consider the
possibility of an Indian Republic which might reject membership in the
Empire/Commonwealth (Charlton-Stevens 2018). Mr. B.G. Kher, Chief
Minister of Bombay Province at the time, said in 1938, at the annual gen-
eral meeting of the Bombay branch of the All India Association:

I would ask your community not to be always casting longing glances at the
West, but to throw yourself heart and soul into the life and movement
around you. This is your motherland. Do not look upon yourselves as aliens
but share the difficulties and the struggle for freedom in which the rest of us
are engaged … (Snell 1944, p. 23).

In September 1943, the Anglo-Indian Study Circle and Book Club were
organised in Calcutta with the “purpose, as set down then and maintained
since … to use our booklets to foster an atmosphere of Anglo-­Indian con-
sciousness in the community and cultivate a knowledge of the Anglo-
Indian past, present and future” (Maher 1945, p. 50). Yet, the Anglo-Indian
Association defined the position of the community in its relations with
other elements of Indian national life. At a Conference of Anglo-Indian
leaders held in New Delhi on 20 March 1942, the following resolution
was adopted vis a vis the community,

The community fully recognizes that, as one of the minorities of India, its
progress and prosperity are indissolubly linked up with the progress and
prosperity of the country and therefore associates and identifies itself fully
and unequivocally with those elements of Indian national life which aim at
26 N. ZAPATE

the constitutional development of India to the status of complete equality

with the Dominions of the British Empire … In view of its origin, religion
and culture this conference determines that the Anglo-Indian community
shall, however, retain its communal identity equally with other groups and
communities who form the elements of Indian national life (Snell 1944,
pp. 22–23).

Thus, the right to preserve a ‘communal identity’ was being used to assert
an ongoing right to maintain the group’s distinctively Western-­oriented
and ‘European’ culture. Frank Anthony (1908–1993), who succeeded
Henry Gidney in 1942 as the leader of the All India Anglo-Indian
Association, looked for opportunities to resolve this dilemma of identity in
the crucial years of the transfer of power. He says,

we are Anglo-Indians by community. Of that fact we have every reason to be

proud. We have forged a history, in many ways notable, of which any much
larger community anywhere in the world could be justifiably proud. Let us
cling and cling, tenaciously, to all that we hold dear, our language, our way
of life and our distinctive culture. But let us always remember that we are
Indians. The community is Indian. It has always been Indian. Above all, it
has an inalienable Indian birthright. The more we love and are loyal to
India, the more will India love and be loyal to us.16

Between 1930 and 1947, Anglo-Indians became increasingly concerned

about their identity and future in Indian society. Most Anglo-Indians felt
that their ties were closer to Great Britain than to India and that they
would have a better future in England; others, including the leadership of
the Association, attempted to make alliances with leaders of the Indian
nationalist movement (Gist and Wright 1973, p. 20). Charlton-Stevens
says, “Anthony understood that the future of Anglo-Indians within India
would depend upon relations with the Indian National Congress Party.
Gidney has spoken of India as motherland and Britain as fatherland;
Anthony would move towards a solitary identification with India based
upon nested identities expressed in his communal nationalist formula:
Anglo-Indian by community, Indian by Nationality” (Charlton-Stevens
2018, p. 229). Anthony’s approach towards India and his “attempt at
burying the term Domiciled European, met even more contestation and
bitter opposition within the community than Gidney’s more cautious

16
The Times of India, 2 November, 1969, p. 17.
 2 THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION: IDENTITY, COMMUNITY… 27

moves to foster identification with India” (Charlton-Stevens 2018,

p. 229).
After Independence in 1947, the Anglo-Indian community was recog-
nised as a distinct minority community of India in the new Constitution
and certain safeguards were guaranteed to it. The Constitution of India,
under Article 366 (2), for example, states that,

an Anglo-Indian means a person whose father or any of whose other male

progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is domi-
ciled within the territory of India and is or was born within such territory of
parents habitually resident therein and not established there for temporary
purposes only.17

These characteristics of the term Anglo-Indian were derived from the

Government of India Act of 1935 and the electoral definitions of constitu-
encies for Provincial Council under the earlier Act of 1919 (Blunt 2015,
p. 3). More than that, the Constitution, in other sections, had recognised
the community’s right for political representation, special guarantees in
the area of education and employment ‘quotas’ in the department of rail-
way, customs, postal and telegraph for 10 years from the commencement
of the Constitution.18 Anglo-Indians were encouraged by the thought
that they had been given such respect which was of no negligible impor-
tance in the Constitution of free India.19 They took particular pride in
being accorded political guarantees, making the community one of only
six politically recognised minorities of India (Anthony 1969, p. I). Anglo-­
Indians had achieved a high point of their minority community rights in
the Act of 1935 as a result of Gidney’s lobbying efforts in London and a
crucial House of Lords amendment to that act, which created rights which
were ultimately declared to be justifiable. The significant achievement of
minority community rights for most communal groups in India came with
the Communal Award of 1932 and its partial embodiment in the 1935
Act. Anglo-Indians were awarded separate electorates in some provincial
seats under the Act of 1935. However, in other provincial seats as well as
the Central Legislative Assembly, they merely had a nominated seat. In
independent India all Anglo-Indian seats, both in the state assembly and

17
The Constitution of India, Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India,
2007, p. 235.
18
The Constitution of India, op. cit, p. 204.
19
The Times of India, 10 October, 1949, p. 7.
28 N. ZAPATE

in the Lok Sabha (House of the People), became nominated seats. The
political representations in Parliament and the State Assemblies for Anglo-­
Indians was another high point of their community rights. The reserva-
tions in employment for Anglo-Indians, another significant achievement
for Anglo-Indians, was also created in the 1935 Act (Charlton-Stevens
2018, pp. 212–213). This represented another success in the ongoing
struggle of Anglo-Indian associations for identity construction and recog-
nition, and the betterment of the community in India.
Anthony himself did not believe that he would succeed in preserving
the already existing rights achieved by Gidney’s efforts. Anthony was sur-
prised by the degree of his own success, although he threatened to resign
from the sub-committee on minorities if these rights were removed. He
managed to preserve them. In the case of reservations only on a tempo-
rary—scheduled to be periodically reduced until removed entirely—basis,
and more surprising was the right of Indian governments to nominate
Anglo-Indian MPs to the Lok Sabha (House of the People)20 and MLAs
to the State Legislative Assemblies.21 It was crucial that Anthony suc-
ceeded in maintaining the partial preservation of colonial-era minority
group rights for Anglo-Indians, but he exceeded this by creating unprec-
edented new rights (Charlton-Stevens 2018, p. 213).
On 9 October 1949 in Calcutta, Frank Anthony said he was aware of
the anxiety that remained in the minds of many members of his commu-
nity. Much of this anxiety was due to ignorance of the generous guaran-
tees given to the community and also of the fundamental rights of the
various communities to preserve their culture. Anglo-Indians at that time
were receiving opportunities which they could not possibly get in any
other country.22 Frank Anthony looked for opportunities to resolve this
sense of insecurity by adjusting the way they saw themselves. Anthony
repeated his call for his community to understand themselves as Indians by
nationality and Anglo-Indians by the community (James 2003, pp. 50–60).
Many Anglo-Indians, however, continued to insist, as reported by

20
Article 331 of the Constitution of India.
21
Article 333 and 334 (b) of the Constitution of India and Substituted by the Constitution
(Seventy-ninth Amendment) Act, 1999, Sec. 2.; In January 2020, the Constitution (126th
Amendment) Bill passed in the Parliament did not renew the provision for the nomination
of Anglo-Indians to Lok Sabha and some state Assemblies.
22
The Times of India, 10 October, 1949, p. 7.
 2 THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION: IDENTITY, COMMUNITY… 29

journalist Khushwant Singh, “Britishers we are. Britishers [we] will always

remain.”23
In the words of Frank Anthony, who led the Anglo-Indian community
in India through his roles as president from 1942 until his death in 1993,
the community became increasingly endogamous, resulting in “distinctive
racial-cum-linguistic-cum-cultural” characteristics that included “certain
common customs, manners and cultural affinities, with the supreme bond
of English as their Mother-tongue” (Anthony 1969, p. 8; Blunt 2015, p. 9).
As reported in The Times of India, the departure of the British left the
community in a state of confusion. The new reality roused a feeling of
insecurity springing from economic helplessness.24 A feeling of suspicion
and mutual distrust had always existed between Anglo-Indians and other
Indian communities. Anxiety about its future gripped the community who
had formally enjoyed British patronage and which had inculcated in the
community a sense of identification with British power. The community
felt that this sense of identification and emotional attitude was out of place
in the newly independent India. During the transfer of power, Anglo-­
Indians were left to decide their own fate and had to grapple with their
lack of identification with the new government and changed mood of the
Indian people. This forced the community to reassess its status in India,25
with the vast majority of Anglo-Indians fearing that they would be persona
non grata in India. This led to the migration of thousands of Anglo-­
Indians to other Commonwealth countries such as Britain, Canada, New
Zealand and Australia, despite the fact that the Indian Constitution
acknowledged them as a distinct minority community. Such large-scale
migration considerably reduced their population in India from 300,152 in
1941 to 111,687 in 1951 (Castellas 2008, pp. 223–224). However, those
who remained received only minimum support from the government
formed after Independence. Although the Indian state had constitution-
ally granted to Anglo-Indians supportive ‘safeguards,’ they were not
always implemented on the ground. Anglo-Indians faced considerable
resistance from many Indian politicians of other communities in India and
were subject to ongoing contestation, including in the courts and even
from the Indian Supreme Court (Charlton-Stevens 2018, pp. 248, 275).
Most of Frank Anthony’s post-Independence career was spent seeking to

23
The Times of India, 2 November, 1969, p. 17.
24
The Times of India, 27 March, 1977, p. 8.
25
The Times of India, 27 March, 1977, p. 8.
30 N. ZAPATE

uphold those constitutional ‘safeguards’ and ‘rights,’ such as the right to

English language education for Anglo-Indians (and for other communi-
ties who sent their children to Anglo-Indian schools and thereby made
those institutions financially viable) (Charlton-Stevens 2018, pp. 227–230).
State governments, in particular, sought to reverse or eliminate many
measures helpful to Anglo-Indians such as funding for Anglo-Indian edu-
cation scheduled to be discontinued after 10 years ending in 1960,26
resulting in further migration of Anglo-Indians mostly to countries such
as Australia and Canada. The second migration of Anglo-Indian families
further depleted the numbers (Castellas 2008, pp. 223–224).
According to the All India Anglo-Indian Association, by 1977, nearly
100,000 Anglo-Indians lived in India and another 75,000 people of mixed
racial ancestry, Portuguese, Dutch and French descendants, commonly
known as Feringhees, lived in south Indian states.27 The Union of the
Anglo-Indian Associations, Kerala, represented a community of mixed
racial ancestry and argue that the so called Feringhees be recognised as
members of the Anglo-Indian community. The All India Anglo-Indian
Association, however, does not recognise them as Anglo-Indians because
they speak in vernacular languages and dialects and not English, the offi-
cial language of the Anglo-Indians according to the AIAIA, but not
detailed in the Constitution28 (Gist and Wright 1973, p. 98). Frank
Anthony stated that,

… without our schools and without our language, English, we cannot be an

Anglo-Indian community. We may be like Feringees of Kerala, who claim to
be originally of Portuguese descent but who have merged with the lowest
stratum of the Indian Christian community, with their mother tongue as
Malayalam (The Review, 1966, p. 39; Gist and Wright 1973, p. 98).

The single qualification of language excludes them from being part of the
community. This dispute has led to a long and futile controversy over
whether or not to recognise and include some groups in the south who
assert their membership of the community.
Economic and industrial benefits have generally accrued more to
Anglo-Indians in north India than in south India.29 Even the British did

26
The Constitution of India, op. cit., pp. 204-205.
27
The Times of India, 27 March, 1977, p. 8.
28
The Times of India, 27 March, 1977, p. 8.
29
The Times of India, 27 March, 1977, p. 8.
 2 THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION: IDENTITY, COMMUNITY… 31

not provide the Anglo-Indians in the south with as many opportunities for
advancement because of their strong antipathy towards the descendants of
the Portuguese, Dutch and the French.30 Some of their community lead-
ers in south India have, for several years, been urging the central and state
governments to declare the community to be backward because of their
poor economic condition, but the move is opposed by the All India Anglo-­
Indian Association (Caplan 2001). Despite great social and economic
pressures, Anglo-Indians have always tried to maintain their individuality
as a community along with a certain standard of living. However, this
holds good primarily for the community living in north India.31 Being
designated as a ‘backward community’ implies a social stigma which would
be likely to affect the morale of all Anglo-Indians.32 Anglo-Indians in the
south were, more or less, isolated from the national mainstream because
they comprised diverse groups with different languages and socio-­
economic situations.33 Also, those in the south who were less Anglophone,
divided on linguistic and class lines and had greater proficiency in regional
languages, had better communication with neighbouring Indian commu-
nities than the Anglo-Indians of north India. There were some Anglo-­
Indians in the south, in Bangalore and Madras, for example, who were
culturally, economically, linguistically and otherwise very similar to Anglo-­
Indians in north India. Many of those who claimed membership of the
Anglo-Indian community were rejected in the colonial era on the basis of
being linguistically and culturally rather different, and generally suffering
from lower levels of education, inferior employment or employment pros-
pects, and a lower socio-economic status (Caplan 2001).
The Anglo-Indians, once a vibrant community with a distinct identity,
have had a prominent presence in Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai’s society
since the days of the East India Company. Yet, they are, arguably, a dwin-
dling community today, with perhaps fewer than 100,000 remaining in
India; Kolkata and Mumbai being home to barely 30000 and 500 Anglo-­
Indians, respectively.34 Consequently, the group has suffered from inter-
twined identity and recognition challenges, insecurity about where they

30
Ibid.
31
The Times of India, 27 March, 1977, p. 8.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
34
According to Anglo-Indian MLA Michael Shane Calvert, “The city’s [Kolkata] Anglo-
Indian population ranges between 25,000 and 30,000.” The Times of India, 02 August
2016, p. 17; The Times of India, 3 August, 2002, p. 6.
32 N. ZAPATE

belong and the desire to emigrate.35 Edmund Myall, the president of

Bombay branch of the Association, pointed out that “ours is a dwindling
population.”36 Tina Bopiah,37 who has painted a series on the lifestyle of
the community, said that she “grew up with a feeling of being neither here
or there.”38 According to Sheila Pais James the Anglo-Indians were Indian
by birth, but their cultural orientation towards Britain has purportedly
often made their status confusing to themselves and others (James 2003,
pp. 50–60). Edmund Myall attributes such cultural uncertainties to the
vacuum left behind by the British, “the community was going through an
adjustment period after the British left India.”39 The community is desper-
ately trying to keep alive its traditions while simultaneously assimilating
into the lifestyle of the Indian mainstream. In this regard, Wright notes
that the Anglo-Indian community, throughout its history, made every
effort to define themselves as a distinctive community and maintained its
unique social, cultural and linguistic identities and a very specific lifestyles
and heritage. In the mid-twentieth century, when the members of the
community began to drop because of migration and “a restrictive self-­
definition of group membership,” a point was reached where the social,
cultural and socio-psychological identities could not be so easily main-
tained. However, internationally, members of the community meet in vari-
ous countries, celebrating their identity as Anglo-Indian (Wright 1997,
pp. 43–58; James 2003, pp. 54–55).

Conclusion
The above discussion reveals that one of the major problems the Anglo-­
Indian community has faced throughout history concerns their identity
and recognition, both in terms of community and individually. The Anglo-­
Indian community along with its associations, despite ideological differ-
ences, have waged a prolonged struggle for identity and recognition. It
was not easy for Anglo-Indians to construct their own identity because
Europeans tended to consider them as Indians with some European blood,

35
The Times of India, 02 August 2016, p. 21.
36
The Times of India, 18 September, 1998, p. 5.
37
Tina Bopiah is a famous painter. She is an Anglo-Indian from Kolkata and now lives in
Mumbai. Many of her paintings build on autobiographical themes, but she finds inspiration
in pop culture, news and biblical tales.
38
The Times of India, 18 September, 1998, p. 5.
39
The Times of India, 18 September, 1998, p. 5.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of A mediaeval
burglary
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: A mediaeval burglary

A lecture delivered at the John Rylands Library on the
20th January, 1915

Author: T. F. Tout

Release date: October 28, 2023 [eBook #71975]

Language: English

Original publication: Manchester: The University Press, 1916

Credits: David Wilson and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced
from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A

MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY ***
 A
M E D I A E VA L B U R GL A RY

A LECTURE
DELIVERED AT THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY ON THE
20th JANUARY, 1915

by
T. F. TOUT, M.A., F.B.A.
bishop fraser professor of mediaeval and ecclesiastical history in
the
university of manchester

Reprinted from “The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library”

 October, 1915

MANCHESTER: THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 12 LIME GROVE, OXFORD

ROAD. LONGMANS, GREEN & CO., 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON,
E.C., NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS. BERNARD
QUARITCH, 11 GRAFTON STREET, LONDON, W. MCMXVI
 PUBLISHED FOR THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY AT

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

12 Lime Grove, Oxford Road, Manchester

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

London: 39 Paternoster Row
New York: 443–449 Fourth Avenue and Thirteenth Street
Bombay: 8 Hornby Road
Calcutta: 303 Bowbazar Street
Madras: 167 Mount Street

BERNARD QUARITCH
11 Grafton Street, New Bond Street, London, W.
 A
M E D I A E VA L B U R GL A RY

A LECTURE
DELIVERED AT THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY ON THE
20th JANUARY, 1915

by
T. F. TOUT, M.A., F.B.A.
bishop fraser professor of mediaeval and ecclesiastical history in
the
university of manchester

Reprinted from “The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library”

October, 1915
MANCHESTER: THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 12 LIME GROVE, OXFORD
ROAD. LONGMANS, GREEN & CO., 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON,
E.C., NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS. BERNARD
QUARITCH, 11 GRAFTON STREET, LONDON, W. MCMXVI
 A MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY.1

By T. F. Tout, M.A., F.B.A., Bishop Fraser

Professor of Mediaeval and
Ecclesiastical History in the University
of Manchester.

T HE burglary, about which I have to speak to-night, I did not

discover by ransacking the picturesque and humorous annals
of mediaeval crime. I came across the details of this incident
when seeking for something quite different, for it happened when
I was attempting to investigate the technicalities of the history of
the administrative department known as the king’s Wardrobe. But
so human a story did something to cheer up the weary paths of
Dryasdust, and he hands it on to you in the hope that you will
not find it absolutely wanting in instruction and amusement. Now
my burglary was the burglary of the king’s treasury, or more
precisely, of the treasury of the king’s wardrobe, within the
precincts of the abbey at Westminster. The date of the event was
24 April, 1303. More precisely, according to the chief burglar’s
own account, it was on the evening of that day that the burglar
effected an entrance into the king’s treasury, from which, he tells
us he escaped, with as much booty as he could carry, on the
morning of 26 April. Who had committed the burglary is a
problem which was not quite settled, even by the trials which
followed the offence, though these trials resulted in the hanging
of some half a dozen people at least. But after the hanging of
the half-dozen, it was still maintained in some quarters that the
burglary was committed by one robber only, though charges of
complicity in his guilt were in common fame extended to
something like a hundred individuals. And in this case common
fame was not, I think, at fault.

I wish first of all to explain the meaning of the sentence,

rather cryptic to the generality, in which I spoke of my burglary as
that of the robbery of the treasury of the king’s wardrobe within
Westminster Abbey. For this purpose I must ask you to carry
your minds back to the Westminster of the early years of the
fourteenth century. Westminster was then what Kensington was in
the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, a court suburb, aloof
from the traffic and business of the great city of London. Now the
twin centres of Westminster were the king’s palace and the
adjacent Benedictine Abbey. The rough plan, which I am
permitted to print on the opposite page, will show the close
relation of the two great groups of buildings. It was much closer
in many ways than the relations between the Houses of
Parliament, the modern representative of the old palace, and the
present abbey buildings. If these latter largely remain, despite
many destructive alterations in details, in their ancient site, we
must remember that there was nothing like the broad modern
road that separates the east end of the abbey from Westminster
Hall and the House of Lords. A wall enclosed the royal precincts,
and went westwards to within a few feet of the monks’ infirmary
and the end of St. Margaret’s Church. The still existing access to
the abbey on the east side of the south transept through the
door by which you can still go into “poet’s corner,” having the
chapter house on your left and Henry VII’s chapel on your right,
was the portal by which immediate access to the palace could be
gained through a gate in this wall. The space between the abbey
and the palace wall was occupied by the churchyard of
St. Margaret’s. The parish church—or rather its successor—still
crouches beneath the shade of the neighbouring minster. This
churchyard covered the ground now taken up by Henry VII’s
chapel, which of course was not as yet in existence. In the midst
of this grassy plot stood the chapter house of the monks of
Westminster, with its flying buttresses and its single pillar
supporting its huge vault, then newly erected by the pious zeal of
Henry III.
Plan of Westminster Abbey and Palace.
 Westminster Abbey was founded by Edward the Confessor,
and substantially refounded by Henry III, who had shown
immense care and lavished large sums on a grandiose scheme
for the rebuilding of the great house of religion which contained
the shrine of his favourite saint, in whose honour he had given
his son the name of Edward. The rebuilding went on into the
reign of Edward I, who was not much inferior to his father in his
zeal for the church, and was doubly bound to honour his father’s
wishes and the memory of his own patron saint. In the closing
years of the thirteenth century circumstances compelled Edward I
to desist from this work. The king now found himself dragged into
enormous expenses by the French, Scottish, and Flemish wars.
He was perforce turned from church-building to get men and
money for his wars.
The finances of England under Edward I were less elastic
than under Mr. Lloyd-George, and modern credit and banking
were then in their very infancy. Edward I, though he imposed
taxes which would make the most stalwart militarist of to-day
quiver, soon found himself hopelessly in debt. To meet his
burdens the king constantly employed differentiated taxation, but
the differentiation was calculated by rather a different method
from that in fashion nowadays. It was differentiation according to
status, not according to wealth. The clergy, who were not
expected to fight, were expected to pay more heavily than the
laymen. Let us take as an instance of how things were then
done the taxes levied in 1294 when the fighting country districts
were called upon to pay a tenth of their moveables in taxation,
and the wealthier and more peaceful towns were asked for a
sixth. From the clergy a tax equal, I think, to a modern income
tax of ten shillings in the pound, was demanded, and it is said
that when the dean of St. Paul’s heard of this unprecedented
impost, he fell dead on the spot. If such heroic efforts—I mean
the king’s not the dean’s—were necessary in 1294 at the
beginning of England’s troubles, how much worse things must
have become by 1303, after ten years of storm and stress? By
this date Edward I’s finances were indeed in a bad state.
Historians are only now gradually beginning to realise how
embarrassed the great king was in the last years of his reign,
and how desperate were some of his attempts to fill his
exchequer.
The whole of Edward’s declining years were not equally
strenuous, though his finances steadily grew worse. Before the
end of the old century Edward had got over the worst of his
troubles abroad. He therefore determined to devote himself with
characteristic energy to the conquest of the “rebel” Scots. Since
therefore Scotland now became the king’s chief anxiety, Edward
made his headquarters in the north of England. In those days,
where the king lived there the machinery of government was to
be found. For though England in the thirteenth century had
centralised institutions, those institutions were not centralised in a
local capital. It is true that one English city was immensely more
important than all the rest. London, in the thirteenth as in the
eighteenth century, was, relatively to other towns, even greater
and more important than is the case nowadays. Of course
Edward I’s London to our eyes would be quite a little place, but
at a time when there was, outside London, perhaps no town of
more than 10,000 inhabitants and very few of that population, a
city four or five times that size was something portentous. Yet
this greatness of London was due to its commercial activity, much
more than to the fact that it was the “capital” of the country or its
seat of government. In reality there was no capital in the modern
sense, for the English tradition was that the government should
follow the king. It was only very gradually that the governing
machinery of the land was permanently settled in Westminster or
London. There was, however, already a tendency towards making
the great city, or rather its neighbouring court suburb, a centre of
permanent administrative offices, a capital in the modern sense.
Thus the Court of Common Pleas had been settled in London
since Magna Carta and the Exchequer, that is the department of
finance, had also been fixed there since the reign of Henry II.
These were, however, still the exceptions which proved the rule.
The office of the Chancery—which was not then a law-court, but
the secretarial office of state—followed the king. So also did
certain branches of the administration which depended on the
court, and were intended, first of all, to be the machinery for the
government of the king’s household.
In the middle ages no distinction was made between the king
and the kingdom. If the king had devised a useful machine for
governing his household and estates, he naturally used it for any
other purposes for which he thought it would be useful. We find,
therefore, the court offices of administration and finance working
side by side with the national offices, not only in dealing with
household affairs, but in the actual work of governing the country.

The most important of these household offices was that called

the king’s Wardrobe. Originally the Wardrobe was, of course, the
closet in which the king hung up his clothes, and the staff
belonging to it were the valets and servants whose business it
was to look after them. From this modest beginning the king’s
Wardrobe had become an organised office of government. Its
clerks rivalled the officers of the Exchequer in their dealings with
financial matters, and the officers of the Chancery, in the number
of letters, mandates, orders, and general administrative business
which passed through their hands.

The Wardrobe always “followed the king”. In war time, then, it

was far away from London, at or near the scene of fighting. In
such periods it became the great spending department, while the
Exchequer normally remained at Westminster collecting the
revenue of the country, and forwarding the money to the
Wardrobe which spent it. For five years before 1303 the king had
thrown his chief energies into the conquest of Scotland. Under
these circumstances London and Westminster saw little of him.
Moreover, he found it convenient to have near him in the north
even the sedentary offices of government. Accordingly in 1298
Edward transferred the Exchequer, the law courts, and the
Chancery to York. From 1298, then, to 1303 York, rather than
Westminster, might have been called the capital of England, and
the king’s appearances to the south were few and far between.
The occasion of such visits was generally his desire to get
money, and to make arrangements with his creditors. From such
a short sojourn the king went north in the early months of 1303.
Despite all his efforts it was only in that year that he was really
able to put his main weight into the Scottish war.

When our burglary took place, king, court, and government

offices had been removed to York for over five years. Under
mediaeval conditions the eye of a vigilant task-master was an
essential condition of efficiency. It followed then that during
Edward’s long absence things at Westminster were allowed to
drift into an extraordinary state of confusion and disorder. Affairs
were made worse by the fact that even kings were not always
free to choose their own servants. Thus the king’s palace at
Westminster was in the hands of an hereditary keeper. There
was nothing strange about this. In the middle ages such offices
were frequently held by hereditary right, just as in the East
everybody takes up his father’s business as a matter of religious
duty. Earl Curzon once pointed out to the electors of Oldham that
in India there are still hereditary tailors, who did their work very
well. However this may be with tailors in the East and legislators
in the West, the hereditary keeper of Edward’s palace of
Westminster did not prove to be a very effective custodian of his
master’s property. His name was John Shenche or Senche, and
he held two hereditary offices, that of “keeper of the king’s palace
at Westminster,” and also the keepership of the Fleet prison, in
right of his wife Joan, who had inherited both from her father.
Thus in addition to the keepership of the palace John Shenche
“kept” the king’s prison of the Fleet in the city of London. As a
rule, John and his wife Joan had their habitation in the prison in
the City. John, therefore, employed as his deputy at Westminster
an underling, a certain William of the Palace, who kept, or rather
did not keep, for him the king’s palace at Westminster. However,
early in the year 1303, John left his abode in the City where his
wife remained, and took up his quarters in the palace. Apparently
the prison was not so comfortable a place for an easy-going
officer to live in as the palace. Perhaps, too, the domestic
restraints imposed upon Shenche in the city were burdensome to
him. Certainly gay times now ensued in the deserted palace.
Soon John and William, in the absence of the higher authorities,
seem to have gathered together a band of disreputable boon
companions of both sexes, whose drunken revels and scandalous
misconduct were soon notorious throughout the neighbourhood.
One element in this band of revellers was, I regret to say, a
certain section of the monks of the neighbouring monastery. For
as the absence of the king and the court had left the palace
asleep, as it were, so also had the monastery at Westminster
sunk into a deeper and more scandalous slumber.
The enthusiasm, effort, and excitement which had marked the
period of Henry III’s reconstruction of Westminster Abbey had
now died down. Mediaeval man, though zealous and full of ideas,
was seldom persistent. It is a commonplace of history that when
the first impulse of fervour that attended a new order or a new
foundation had passed away, religious activity was followed by a
strong reaction. The great period of the monastery at Westminster
had been during its reconstitution under Henry III, but that time of
energy had now worked itself out, and the abbey had gone to
sleep. The work of reconstruction had stopped from lack of funds;
the royal favour as well as the royal presence was withdrawn
gradually from the abbey. Moreover, a few years earlier a
disastrous fire devastated the monastic buildings, and only just
spared the chapter house and the abbey church. It looks as if
the monks had to camp out in half-ruined buildings till their home
could be restored. All this naturally relaxed the reins of discipline,
the more so since the abbot, Walter of Wenlock, was an old
man, whose hold on the monks was slight, and some of the chief
officers of the abbey, the obedientiaries, as they were called,
were singularly incompetent or unscrupulous persons. It followed
naturally that many of the fifty monks became slack beyond
ordinary standards of mediaeval slackness. It was both from
obedientiaries and common monks that John Shenche and
William of the Palace secured the companions for their unseemly
revels. There now comes upon the scene a new figure, in fact,
the hero of the burglary, Richard of Pudlicott.

Richard of Pudlicott began life as a clerk, but abandoned his

clergy for the more profitable calling of a wandering trader in
wool, cheese, and butter. England’s economic position in those
days reminds us of the state of things now prevailing in Argentina
or Australia, rather than that in modern industrial England. She
had little to sell abroad save raw materials, especially wool, which
was largely exported to the great clothing towns of Flanders. This
traffic took Pudlicott to Ghent and Bruges in 1298, when Edward
I had allied with the Flemings against the king of France. But his
trading adventures were as unsuccessful as the king’s military
efforts in Flanders. Moreover, after the king’s return to England,
Pudlicott had the ill luck to be among those merchants arrested
as a surety for the debts which Edward had left behind him in
the Low Countries. This unceremonious treatment of an alien ally
is a method of mediaeval frightfulness which may be
recommended to our alien enemies, but Edward’s credit was so
bad that we can hardly blame the Flemings for leaving no stone
unturned to obtain payment of their debts; whether they
succeeded I do not know. Before long Richard escaped from his
Flemish gaol, leaving his property in Flanders in the hands of his
captors. Nursing a grievance against the king, and with dire
poverty facing him, he took lodgings in London, where, like many
bankrupts, he seems to have generally had enough money to
indulge in all the personal gratifications that he had a special
mind to practice. It seems that in the pursuit of his disreputable
pleasures, Pudlicott was brought into contact with John Shenche,
William of the Palace, and the other merrymakers, lay and
ecclesiastical, in the lodge of the king’s palace of Westminster.
He had a specious excuse for haunting Westminster Hall. He was
—he says himself—seeking a remedy in the king’s courts for the
property he had lost in Flanders. How he could find one, when
these courts were at York, I cannot say. But, as we shall see,
many of Pudlicott’s personal statements are difficult to reconcile
with facts. However, Edward himself soon came to Westminster,
but withdrew after a short stay, leaving Pudlicott unpaid.

We have seen how near was the palace to the abbey, and
how the palace keeper’s monastic friends formed a living bridge
between the two. One result of these pleasant social relations
was that the Abbey of Westminster soon became familiar ground
to Pudlicott. One day, when disturbed at the hopelessness of
getting his grievances redressed by the king, he wandered
through the cloisters of the abbey, and noticed with greedy eyes
the rich stores of silver plate carried in and out of the refectory of
the monks, by the servants who were waiting on the brethren at
meals. The happy idea struck him to seek a means to “enable
him to come at the goods which he saw”. Thus the king’s
foundation might, somewhat irregularly, be made to pay the king’s
debts. Pudlicott soon laid his plans accordingly. The very day
after the king left Westminster, Pudlicott found a ladder reared up
against a house near the palace gate. He put this ladder against
one of the windows of the chapter house; he climbed up the
ladder; found a window that opened by means of a cord; opened
the window and swung himself by the same cord into the chapter
house. Thence he made his way to the refectory, and secured a
rich booty of plate which he managed to carry off and sell.

Pudlicott’s success with the monks’ plate did not profit him for
long. Within nine months—and we may believe surely this part of
his not too veracious tale—the proceeds of the sale of the silver
cups and dishes of the abbey had been eaten up. No doubt the
loose life he was living and the revels with the keepers of the
palace involved a constant need for plentiful supplies of ready
cash. Anyhow by the end of 1302 Richard was again destitute,
and looking out for something more to steal. It was, doubtless,
dangerous to rob the monks any more, and perhaps the intimacy
which was now established between him and his monastic boon
companions suggested to Richard a more excellent way of
restoring his fortunes. His plan was now to rob the king’s
treasury, and his success seemed assured since, as he tells us,
he “knew the premises of the abbey, where the treasury was, and
how he might come to it”. How he profited by his knowledge we
shall soon see, but first we must for a moment part company
with Pudlicott’s “confession,” which up to now I have followed
with hesitation. But for the next stage of our story it is plainly
almost the contrary of the truth. Before we can with advantage
explain why we can no longer trust his tale, it would be well for
us to state what this treasury was and how it could be got at.
Let us begin with the word treasury. In the fourteenth century
treasury meant simply a storehouse, or at its narrowest a
storehouse of valuables. To us the “treasury” is the government
department of finance, but under Edward I the state office of
finance was the Exchequer, which, as we saw, was located
normally at Westminster, but since 1298 at York. When at
Westminster the Exchequer had a “treasury” or storehouse there