Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home

Domicile and Diaspora

RGS-IBG Book Series The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Book Series provides a forum for scholarly monographs and edited collections of academic papers at the leading edge of research in human and physical geography. The volumes are intended to make significant contributions to the field in which they lie, and to be written in a manner accessible to the wider community of academic geographers. Some volumes will disseminate current geographical research reported at conferences or sessions convened by Research Groups of the Society. Some will be edited or authored by scholars from beyond the UK. All are designed to have an international readership and to both reflect and stimulate the best current research within geography. The books will stand out in terms of: . . . .

the quality of research their contribution to their research field their likelihood to stimulate other research being scholarly but accessible.

For series guides go to www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/rgsibg.pdf Published

Forthcoming

Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home Alison Blunt

Living Through Decline: Surviving in the Places of the Post-Industrial Economy Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson

Geographies and Moralities Roger Lee and David M. Smith

The Geomorphology of Upland Peat Martin Evans and Jeff Warburton

Military Geographies Rachel Woodward

Publics and the City Kurt Iveson

A New Deal for Transport? Edited by Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw

Driving Spaces Peter Merriman

Geographies of British Modernity Edited by David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short

Geochemical Sediments and Landscapes David Nash and Susan McLaren

Lost Geographies of Power John Allen Globalizing South China Carolyn L. Cartier Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain in the Last 1000 Years Edited by David L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee

Fieldwork Simon Naylor Natural Resources in Eastern Europe Chad Staddon Putting Workfare in Place Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel After the Three Italies: Wealth, Inequality and Industrial Change Mick Dunford and Lidia Greco

Domicile and Diaspora Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home Alison Blunt

ß 2005 by Alison Blunt b l a ck w e l l p u b l is hi n g 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Alison Blunt to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2005 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blunt, Alison. Domicile and diaspora : Anglo-Indian women and the spatial politics of home / Alison Blunt. p. cm. — (RGS-IBG book series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-0054-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4051-0054-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-0055-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4051-0055-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Women, Anglo-Indian—History—20th century. 2. Women, Anglo-Indian—Social conditions—20th century. 3. Anglo-Indians—Race identity. 4. Anglo-Indians—Ethnic identity. 5. Anglo-Indians—Migrations— History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series. DS432.A55B58 2005 305.48’891411—dc22 2004024919 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10/12 plantin by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed and bound in India by Replika Press, Pvt. Ltd, India The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com

For Mark

Contents

1

2

3

List of Figures

x

Series Editors’ Preface

xi

Acknowledgements

xii

Domicile and Diaspora An Introduction

1

Domicile Diaspora Home, Memory and Nostalgia Methodology Chapter Outline

5 10 12 16 21

At Home in British India: Imperial Domesticity and National Identity

23

Imperial Domesticity Nationalist Domesticity Domicile and Domesticity ‘Land of Our Mothers’ Home, Identity and Nationality Conclusions

24 27 30 41 43 50

Home, Community and Nation: Domesticating Identity and Embodying Modernity

52

Domesticating Identity Embodying Modernity

52 59

viii

C O NT E N T S

Domestic Transgression Home, Community and Nation Conclusions

4 Colonization and Settlement: Anglo-Indian Homelands Homelands and Settlements Anglo-Indian Colonization and Settlement Colonizing McCluskieganj Anglo-Indian Home-Making Dreams of the Future McCluskieganj Today Conclusions

5 Independence and Decolonization: Anglo-Indian Resettlement in Britain Migration and Resettlement Britishness, Whiteness and Mixed Descent Documenting Paternity and Recolonizing Identity Unsettled Domesticity Embodied Identities and the Limits of Familiarity Conclusions

6 Mixed Descent, Migration and Multiculturalism: Anglo-Indians in Australia since 1947 Anglo-Indians in White Australia HMAS Manoora Anglo-Indian Migration in the wake of HMAS Manoora From ‘Race’ to ‘Culture’ From White Australia to Multiculturalism Anglo-Indians in Multicultural Australia Conclusions

7 At Home in Independent India: Post-Imperial Domesticity and National Identity Staying on in India Nationality and Community Anglo-Indian Women in Independent India

65 69 70

72 74 78 82 90 96 98 102

105 106 113 118 124 130 137

139 142 147 148 152 161 164 172

175 176 179 185

C O N TE N T S

Dress Home and Work Marriage Conclusions

8

ix 185 189 192 200

Domicile and Diaspora: Conclusions

203

Appendix 1

Archival Sources

211

Appendix 2

Interviews and Focus Groups

215

Notes

219

Bibliography

260

Index

278

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7

Map of the Indian subcontinent Loreto St Agnes, Lucknow Dow Hill School, Kurseong Dow Hill girls, homeward bound, 1950 Tiled Busti in Entally, Calcutta Scene in Entally, Calcutta ‘Women in the WAC(I) enjoying ‘‘time off’’ between lectures, 1944’ ‘A group of happy WAC(I) women in the lounge of their mess’ An Anglo-Indian wedding in Lucknow in the early 1940s Cover illustration of the Colonization Observer, April 1934 McCluskieganj as mooluk and ‘home, sweet home’ McCluskieganj as mooluk The ‘grit’ of pioneers at McCluskieganj Images of women at McCluskieganj A bungalow at McCluskieganj today A ruined bungalow at McCluskieganj The arrival of HMAS Manoora at Fremantle, Western Australia, 15 August 1947 Anglo-Indians on board HMAS Manoora An Anglo-Indian family on board HMAS Manoora Anglo-Indians on board HMAS Manoora Selection of the May Queen at the Lucknow Club The crowning of the May Queen at the Lucknow Club, 1957, by the wife of the principal of La Martiniere Boys’ School The Australian Anglo-Indian Association Cultural Centre, Padbury, Western Australia

2 20 21 22 37 38 63 64 66 85 88 89 92 95 99 100 140 141 142 143 157 158 169

Series Editors’ Preface

The RGS/IBG Book series publishes the highest quality of research and scholarship across the broad disciplinary spectrum of geography. Addressing the vibrant agenda of theoretical debates and issues that characterize the contemporary discipline, contributions will provide a synthesis of research, teaching, theory and practice that both reflects and stimulates cutting edge research. The Series seeks to engage an international readership through the provision of scholarly, vivid and accessible texts. Nick Henry and Jon Sadler RGS-IBG Book Series Editors

Acknowledgements

This book represents the culmination of a research project that began in 1998. My preliminary research was funded by grants from the University of Southampton and an HSBC grant from the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers. The main research was funded from 1999 to 2001 by the Economic and Social Research Council (R000 222 826). This was followed by a sabbatical funded by Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL), and a period of research leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, which enabled me to complete this book. The British Academy funded me to present a paper at the conference on ‘Who are the Anglo-Indians?’ in Melbourne in 2002. I am very grateful for the funding that made my research possible, particularly through funding research leave and research visits to India and Australia, and to employ Samantha Cann, Alison Millard and Jane Parry to transcribe often lengthy interviews and focus group discussions, which they did with great skill and care. My research visits to India and Australia were made all the more enjoyable by staying with friends. Alison Barrett and Aslam Pirzada, Robyn Dowling and Garry Barrett, and Natalie Jamieson and Drew Boucher were all wonderful hosts and made me feel at home in New Delhi, Sydney and Melbourne. I would also like to thank my brother, David Blunt, for visiting me in India. Throughout my research, I have had the great pleasure and privilege to meet many Anglo-Indians both near to and far from home, and to experience the warmth and the hospitality of the community at first hand. I am particularly grateful to Grace and Dereyck Pereira for their friendship, help and inspiration. Grace also kindly gave me permission to reproduce two of her photographs in the book. I would also like to thank the Victoria and Dow Hill Association members whom I have met in India, Britain and Australia, particularly for welcoming me to the annual school reunions in

A CK N O W L E DG E ME N T S

xiii

London since 1998. Many former pupils and former and current teachers at the La Martiniere schools in Lucknow and Calcutta, and at Loreto St Agnes in Lucknow and Loreto Entally in Calcutta, as well as the officers and members of many different associations, have also been extremely helpful in my research. The archival research for this book was largely based at the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library and the National Archives in London; the National Archives of Australia in Canberra; and the archives of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association (AIAIA) in New Delhi. I am particularly grateful to Neil O’Brien (President) and Malcolm Booth (Secretary) of the AIAIA for allowing me to read copies of the Anglo-Indian Review. P.T. Nair in Calcutta very generously made copies of his newspaper archive and found me rare copies of books by Frank Anthony and Cedric Dover. In McCluskieganj, Alfred and Dorothy de Rozario not only let me read and photocopy rare copies of the Colonization Observer and brochures published by the Colonization Society of India, but also welcomed me to stay with them. In addition to all of the interviewees who made my research possible, Barbara Pinto and Sydney Rebeiro in New Delhi, Ram Advani and Nasir Abid in Lucknow, Lionel and Christa Moss in Whitefield, and Melvyn Brown, Philomena Eaton, Sister Maria and Sister Marisa in Calcutta all provided invaluable help during my research. I learnt a great deal from meeting Denise Coelho in London and Reginald Maher in Perth, both of whom have sadly since passed away. I have greatly benefited from the interest and encouragement that I have received from a wide range of other researchers who have studied the Anglo-Indian community, including Lionel Caplan, Geraldine Charles, Christopher Hawes, Lisa Hewins, Ann Lobo and Susan Lynn in the UK; Kuntala Lahiri Dutt, Ronnie Johnson and Vinisha Nero in India; Keith Butler, Adrian Carton, Glen D’Cruz, Adrian Gilbert, Erica Lewin and Michael Ludgrove in Australia; Robyn Andrews and Dorothy McMenamin in New Zealand; and Bert Payne and Blair Williams in the United States. As well as working at the University of Southampton and at QMUL, I was also a visiting academic at University College London, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, and Melbourne University during the course of my research for this book. I have presented my work at conferences and seminars in Australia, Britain, India, Norway and the United States, and am grateful for the questions and discussion that have helped me to develop my ideas. Closer to home, the ‘Culture, Space and Power’ research group and the students taking my course ‘Geographies of Home’ at QMUL have inspired and helped me throughout my research. I would like to acknowledge Felicity and Belinda Jones for giving me permission to reproduce the wonderful photograph on the cover. I am also grateful to Rudy D’Silva from Lucknow for allowing me to reproduce

xiv

A C K N OW L ED G E ME N T S

copies of his father’s photographs; and to the British Library, the Imperial War Museum and Screensound Australia for permission to reproduce other images. Particular thanks to Ed Oliver at QMUL for drawing Figure 1.1 and for scanning the other images. Stuart Corbridge, Nick Henry, Shompa Lahiri and Grace Pereira read the entire manuscript and provided very important and helpful suggestions. I have also appreciated the friendly encouragement of Angela Cohen at Blackwell and the superb editing of Justin Dyer. Catherine Nash, Catrı´ona Nı´ Laoire, Richard Phillips, David Pinder and a number of anonymous referees have also read and commented on parts of this book that have been published elsewhere. I gratefully acknowledge permission to include revised passages from the following papers: A. Blunt (2002) ‘ ‘‘Land of our Mothers’’: home, identity and nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India’, History Workshop Journal 54: 49–72, by permission of Oxford University Press; A. Blunt (2003) ‘Collective memory and productive nostalgia: Anglo-Indian home-making at McCluskieganj’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21: 717–738, by permission of Pion Limited, London; and A. Blunt (2003) ‘Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain’, International Journal of Population Geography 9: 281–294. Copyright John Wiley and Sons Limited. Reproduced with permission. Nicky Hicks, Richard Phillips, David Pinder, Juliet Rowson, Elaine Sharland and Jane Wills have provided invaluable support and friendship throughout my research. Other friends, family and colleagues have also inspired and supported me, including Morag Bell, Michaela Benzeval, Penny Blunt, Jim Chapman, Amanda Claremont, Felix Driver, Stella Edridge, Martin Evans, Georgina Gowans, Derek Gregory, Shompa Lahiri, Roger Lee, Catherine Nash, Miles Ogborn and Ann Varley. Finally, I would like to thank those who represent home for me: Mark Ryan and my parents, Cecily and Peter Blunt, for their love and support.

Chapter One

Domicile and Diaspora: An Introduction

The photograph on the cover of this book was taken in February 1948, six months after Indian Independence and the Partition of India and Pakistan. It was taken outside a bungalow in a railway colony near Chittagong in what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh (see Figure 1.1). It is a photograph of an Anglo-Indian girl, Felicity, with her ayah’s daughter,1 both dressed up in saris made from a pair of old curtains, and it was taken by Felicity’s father, who worked on the railways. In many ways, this photograph could be viewed as a classic representation of British domesticity in India, forming part of a long tradition of British families posing with their servants and reproducing an empire within as well as beyond the home.2 But this photograph differs in three main ways. First, it was taken after Independence, when many of the British elite had left India. For those who remained, either waiting for a passage home or, in fewer cases, ‘staying on’,3 family photographs could now less easily represent imperial domesticity and an empire within the home. Second, although the Bengali girl looks far less confident than two-year-old Felicity, they appear more similar than different in other ways. The Bengali girl is standing further back, with her hand to her face, and returns a far less assured gaze to her mother’s employer. But both girls are dressed up in the same way, both are holding dolls, and both have been playing together. Finally, unlike photographs of British domesticity in India, Felicity is an Anglo-Indian rather than a British girl. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ referred to the British in India, and is still sometimes used in this way.4 But since the Indian Census of 1911, the term has referred to a domiciled community of mixed descent, who were formerly known as Eurasian, country-born or half-caste. Anglo-Indians form one of the largest and oldest communities of mixed descent in the world, and continue to live in

2

DOMICILE AND DIASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

Figure 1.1

Map of the Indian subcontinent

India as well as across a wider diaspora, particularly in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. Descended from the children of European men and Indian women, usually born in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,5 Anglo-Indians are English-speaking, Christian and culturally more European than Indian. Before Independence in 1947, the spatial politics of home for Anglo-Indians were shaped by imaginative geographies of both Europe (particularly Britain) and India as home. Although Anglo-Indians were ‘country-born’ and domiciled in India, many imagined Britain as home and identified with British life even as they were largely excluded from it. In many ways, Anglo-Indians imagined themselves as part of an imperial diaspora in British India. Indian nationalism and policies of Indianization gave a new political urgency to AngloIndian ideas about home and identity. Some Anglo-Indians who did not feel at home in India settled in a homeland called McCluskieganj, whereas

DOMICILE AND DIASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

3

many more migrated after Independence. In 1947, there were roughly 300,000 Anglo-Indians in India and, against the advice of Anglo-Indian leaders, at least 50,000 had migrated by 1970, half of whom resettled in Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s.6 The second main wave of migration was to Australia in the late 1960s and 1970s once White Australia migration policies had become less restrictive. In the 1935 Government of India Act, Anglo-Indians were defined in relation to Europeans in terms of their paternal ancestry and domicile: An Anglo-Indian is a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is a native of India. A European is a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent and who is not a native of India.7

Whereas Anglo-Indians and Europeans shared European paternal descent, Anglo-Indians were born in India and would, before Independence, and unlike most Europeans, expect to die there. Although written out of this definition, the maternal line of descent for Anglo-Indians usually included an Indian woman, often as far back as the eighteenth century. This gendered and geographical definition of what it meant to be an Anglo-Indian formed the basis for the definition that has been part of the Indian Constitution since 1950.8 Since 2002, the date that the legal definition was adopted in 1935 has been designated ‘World Anglo-Indian Day’, which is celebrated by community functions held in India and across the wider diaspora. The legal definition is important in personal as well as official terms as it informs how many Anglo-Indians understand and explain their identity and community. For example, a teacher who grew up in Lahore before Independence and now lives in Lucknow told me about her family background by explaining the origins of the Anglo-Indian community: I shall start from approximately three hundred years ago. The British came out to India and stayed there. Now some of them married. Well, there’s no such thing as an Anglo-Indian that they married, they actually married the Indian girls. So the British and that Indian lady started up a line of AngloIndians. By the time my grandfathers came out, which was two hundred years after that, one came with the Welsh regiment and one came with the Irish regiment . . . there was a line of Anglo-Indian ladies. . . . They married a mixture of Anglo-Indians. Therefore we Anglo-Indians are a different strata. . . . I think I have two-thirds British blood in me, and one-third Indian, hence the way I dress, the way I speak, the way I live.







4

DOMICILE AND DIASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

In 1951, three years after the photograph on the cover was taken, Felicity moved to Britain with her parents and older sister, Grace. Felicity lost both her knowledge of Hindi and her Anglo-Indian accent, and grew up as her family’s ‘foreign child’. This description comes from a 2001 album entitled Panchpuran by the folk-singer Bill Jones, who is Felicity’s daughter Belinda. The album includes the same photograph of Felicity and her friend on the inside cover. The word panchpuran is Hindi for five spices and, according to Belinda, describes not only her music but also her family. As she says, ‘my mum’s family are Anglo-Indian and came to England in 1951, and my dad was born and bred in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands’. In the title track, the word ‘is used to mean many different things all mixed together’. The a capella song describes, through her Aunty Grace’s eyes, ‘the trials of adjusting to life in a country which is not your homeland’.9 This book is about the spatial politics of home for Anglo-Indian women like Felicity and Grace, both in India and across a wider diaspora. I explore the intersections of home and identity for Anglo-Indians in the fifty years before and after Independence, both domiciled in India and resident in Britain and Australia. I consider the ways in which Anglo-Indian women have felt both at home and not at home in India, Britain and Australia, and the ways in which they have embodied and domesticated personal and collective memories and identities of mixed descent. I also investigate the ways in which such memories and identities have been politically mobilized and resisted through depictions of Anglo-Indian women and through the imaginative and material spaces of home. Domicile and Diaspora considers the spatial politics of home in relation to imperialism, nationalism, decolonization and multiculturalism, and seeks to extend feminist and postcolonial ideas about mobile and located homes and identities in relation to critical ‘mixed race’ studies. This book is part of a wider attempt not only to explore material and imaginative homes as key locations for theorizing identity, but also to write the home and domesticity into grand narratives of modernity, imperialism and nationalism.10 Moving beyond binaries such as public and private space and imaginative geographies of ‘self’ and ‘other’, I investigate the power-laden interplay of home and identity in terms of spatial politics. This term refers to home as a contested site shaped by different axes of power and over a range of scales. Mobilizing identity beyond an individual sense of self, and geographies of home within, but also beyond, the household, I focus on their collective and political inscription over space and time and on their contested embodiment by women. To do so, I explore the spatial politics of home on three intersecting scales. On a household scale I discuss social reproduction, material culture, domesticity and everyday life, particularly focusing on the ways in which Anglo-Indian domesticity has been influenced by both European

DOMICILE AND DIASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

5

and Indian ideas of home. I also explore the ways in which an identification with Britain and/or India as home was reproduced on a domestic scale, and the roles of Anglo-Indian women, particularly as wives and mothers, in fashioning a distinctively Anglo-Indian domesticity. On a national scale, I am interested in the intersections between home, identity and nationality and the ways in which Anglo-Indians identified with Britain and/or India as home both before and after Independence and how this was embodied by women and both domesticated and resisted within the home. I also explore the political mobilization of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, ideas about Anglo-Indians as a homeless community within the country of their birth, and the foundation and promotion of homelands for AngloIndian colonization and settlement. Finally, on a diasporic scale I chart transnational geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indians in Britain and Australia, reflecting the two main waves of migration by Anglo-Indians after Independence. I explore the implications not only of Independence but also the 1948 British Nationality Act and the White Australia Policy on Anglo-Indian migration, and the ways in which an Anglo-Indian identity has become more visible in the context of official multiculturalism.

Domicile The term ‘domicile’ invokes geographies of home, settlement and residence, and is both conceptually and empirically significant for this book. One of the main arguments of this book concerns the critical connections between home and identity, whereby a sense of self, place and belonging are shaped, articulated and contested through geographies of home on scales from the domestic to the diasporic. But, more than this, the term ‘domicile’ is particularly apt for studying Anglo-Indians, who formed a large part of the ‘domiciled community’ in India. Unlike the ‘heavenborn’ British elite, who usually returned home on their retirement, the ‘country-born’ domiciled community consisted of people of European descent who were permanent residents in India.11 The home has begun to attract an increasing amount of critical attention across the humanities and social sciences.12 As a space of belonging and alienation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear, the home is charged with meanings, emotions, experiences and relationships that lie at the heart of human life. Studies of home as a space of lived experience and imagination range from a focus on everyday life and social relations to domestic form and design, and material, visual and literary cultures of home. Moving beyond the separation between public and private spheres, current studies of home often investigate mobile geographies of dwelling, the political significance of domesticity, intimacy and privacy, and the ways in which

6

DOMICILE AND DIASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

ideas and lived experiences of home invoke a sense of place, belonging or alienation that is intimately tied to a sense of self. Such geographies of home traverse scales from the domestic to the global, mobilizing the home far beyond a fixed, bounded and confining location. Studies of home on a domestic scale include work on housing, household structure, domestic divisions of labour, paid domestic work, material cultures of home and homelessness. On a national scale, ideas about home have been studied in relation to debates about citizenship, nationalist politics, indigeneity and multiculturalism. Beyond national borders, research on diasporic, transnational and global geographies includes studies of different domestic forms, multiple places of belonging, cultural geographies of home and memory, and global patterns of domestic labour. A key feature of research on home has been the ways in which it is not only located within but also travels across these different scales,13 as shown by research on the political significance of domesticity in anti-colonial nationalism,14 the bungalow and the highrise as transnational domestic forms,15 and the transnational employment of domestic workers.16 Domicile and Diaspora explores how the spatial politics of home are mobilized on different, coexisting scales and over material and imaginative terrains. Another key theme within recent research on home is an interest in the critical connections between home and identity, whereby ideas of home invoke a sense of place and displacement, belonging and alienation, inclusion and exclusion, that is not only intimately tied to a sense of self but also reflects the importance of intimacy.17 An interest in home and identity within geography can be traced back to the work of a number of humanistic geographers writing in the 1970s and 1980s who celebrated the home as a site of authentic meaning, value and experience, imbued with nostalgic memories and the love of a particular place.18 But, as Gillian Rose argues, humanistic geographers largely failed to analyse the home as a gendered space shaped by different and unequal relations of power, and as a place that might be dangerous, violent, alienating and unhappy rather than loving and secure.19 More recent research has addressed the spatial politics of home and identity in more critical and contextual ways, redressing not only the ‘suppression of home’, but also apolitical celebrations of home. In metaphorical terms, images of home form part of a wider spatial lexicon that has become important in theorizing identity, and are often closely tied to ideas about the politics of location and an attempt to situate both knowledge and identity.20 Through life stories and through archival, textual and ethnographic research, feminist and postcolonial critiques have been particularly important in tracing and traversing the metaphorical and material meanings of home. Feminist postcolonial work has investigated the contested sites of home and domesticity as critically important not only in the social

DOMICILE AND DIASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

7

reproduction of nation and empire, but also in revealing the interplay of power relations that both underpinned and undermined such processes of social reproduction. Important themes within this work include the domestication of imperial subjects, particularly as servants, housewives, mothers and children; the material cultures of domesticity, both in the metropolis and in the wider empire; and the home as a site of inclusion, exclusion and contestation, both at times of conflict and in the more everyday practice of imperial rule.21 Other research has explored the importance of the home and domesticity in shaping anti-imperial nationalist politics, particularly through the roles of women both within and beyond the home.22 Such studies challenge the masculinist knowledge that either ignores the home completely or overlooks the power relations that exist within it. Alongside the work of many black feminists who have rewritten home as a site of creativity, subjectivity and resistance,23 such studies also challenge a white, liberal feminism that has understood the home primarily as a site of oppression for women. Rather than see home as a solely gendered space, usually embodied by women, such writings also reveal domestic inclusions, exclusions and inequalities in terms of class, age, sexuality and ‘race’.24 Ideas about home and identity are a recurrent theme in work on, and by, people of mixed descent. Alongside a wide literature on ‘interracial’ partnering, parenting, fostering and adoption,25 there is a growing literature on home and identity that extends beyond domestic life and family relationships to explore a wider sense of place and belonging. According to Joanne Arnott, ‘possibly the most difficult issue for people of mixed heritage is that of belonging’:26 of finding a place to call home. In a book entitled Scattered Belongings, Jayne Ifekwunigwe writes that ‘In the de/territorialized places, which ‘‘mixed race’’ cartographers map, the idea of ‘‘home’’ has, by definition, multilayered, multitextual and contradictory meanings.’27 Such complex and multiple mappings of home often reveal a sense of identity and belonging as simultaneously personal and transnational, as shown by feminist autobiographical writings on the plural concurrence of homes and identities. For example, Velina Hasu Houston writes that ‘As an Amerasian who is native Japanese, Blackfoot Indian, and African American, I am without the luxury of state (‘‘home’’). . . . Home is sanctuary from the world, but it is not found in one physical place or in a particular community.’28 In recent years, particularly in the United States, many people have claimed and asserted their place within a wide and diverse community of mixed race, both exploring and celebrating their racialized identities through discussions, organizations and websites.29 Unlike Houston’s essay and other life writings about the personal uniqueness of mixed descent that cannot be traced to a ‘particular community’,30 and unlike the political mobilization of diverse collectivities of mixed race, my focus on

8

DOMICILE AND DIASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

Anglo-Indians reveals the complex mappings of home and identity for one particular community of mixed descent. Drawing on interviews with self-identified women of ‘mixed race’ in Toronto, Minelle Mahtani argues that the term is used in different ways as a ‘linguistic home’ that can create ‘new geographies of inclusion’.31 Mahtani critiques popular discourses that are characterized by ‘a relentless negativity’ in their portrayal of ‘mixed race’ individuals as out of place or with no place to call home.32 In similar terms, Jill Olumide writes that ‘one of the salient features of the social construction of mixed race has been its characterisation as a marginal, detached and confused state in which individuals so designated are condemned to wander in search of belonging and acceptance’.33 As Olumide continues, the social construction of ‘mixed race’ usually depicts it ‘as an inherently problematic, confused and isolated state’, or as a state that is celebrated, also in problematic ways, as ‘a paradigm of [racial] harmony’.34 For both Mahtani and Olumide, it is important to challenge such stereotypically negative and positive views, partly by studying individuals of ‘mixed race’ in their own terms and partly by analysing ‘the mixed race condition’ in context. Exploring both personal and collective memories and identities of mixed descent, this book investigates the spatial politics of home for Anglo-Indians in social, cultural and political context. Moving beyond solely metaphorical images of being in and out of place, at home and not at home, I study the materialities and social relations of everyday domestic life and their wider political significance in relation to imperialism, nationalism, decolonization and multiculturalism. I am particularly interested in the ways in which material and metaphorical geographies of home have been mobilized and resisted both in political debates and in everyday life. By exploring the spatial politics of home and identity in ways that articulate both mobility and displacement alongside location and positionality, the book is part of a wider attempt to explore the spatialized production of knowledge. In feminist theory, for example, Susan Stanford Friedman charts the contours of what she terms ‘locational feminism’, and explores different discourses of positionality that characterize the spatialized production of knowledge. ‘Situational approaches’ are, for Friedman, an important part of these wider discourses of positionality. Not only do such approaches ‘assume that identity resists fixity, but they particularly stress how it shifts fluidly from setting to setting’, whereby ‘[e]ach situation presumes a certain setting as site for the interplay of different axes of power and powerlessness’.35 I explore geographies of home on domestic, national and diasporic scales as critical and contested settings for the production and reproduction of Anglo-Indian identities. Throughout the book, I use the term ‘mixed descent’ rather than ‘mixed race’. This is to reflect the inheritance and ancestry shared by

DOMICILE AND DIASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

9

Anglo-Indians that often dates back to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and which spans ‘race’, ethnicity and nationality. As George MacMunn wrote in 1934, the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ includes all those persons of mixed European and Indian parentage, whether as the result of direct union of persons of the two races or by the union of those already of mixed descent. Its source is a wide one, and may descend from the union, regular or irregular, of members of the official class, civil and military, with Indian women of high or lowly birth, or may have its origin in the marriage of retired European soldiers with the women of the country. In the last few generations, the community principally marries within itself or with those of pure European origin, in place of augmentation by the direct union of persons of European or Indian races.36

In other words, the mixed descent of most Anglo-Indians dates back several centuries, like other me´tis groups that emerged elsewhere under imperial or colonial rule.37 In the early years of the East India Company, British men were encouraged to marry Indian women, and – like Dutch and Portuguese men – were often given financial incentives to do so.38 But from the 1790s, a series of social, administrative and military regulations distanced British rulers from their Indian and Anglo-Indian subjects. Following the uprising in SaintDomingue (later named Haiti) in 1791,39 British rulers began to fear a similar insurrection in India. While Anglo-Indians had previously been seen as providing a strategic buffer between rulers and ruled, their loyalty was now a source of concern. The regulations that distanced British rulers from Indian and Anglo-Indian subjects were reflected by domestic anxieties that centred on intermarriage and miscegenation and were in part allayed by the growing number of British women who travelled to India from the early nineteenth century. The order prohibiting women from travelling to India was rescinded when the Charter of the East India Company was renewed in 1833, and, two years later, the opening of the overland route to India considerably reduced the journey time.40 In the mid-eighteenth century, an estimated 90 per cent of British men in India were married to Indians or Anglo-Indians, but, by the mid-nineteenth century, intermarriage had virtually ceased.41 In the words of Frank Anthony, who led the Anglo-Indian community in India from 1942 until his death in 1993, the community became increasingly endogamous, resulting in ‘distinctive racial-cumlinguistic-cum-cultural’ characteristics that included ‘certain common customs, manners and cultural affinities, with the supreme bond of English as their mother-tongue’.42 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, in part because of their loyalty to the British during the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, Anglo-Indian men were employed in certain jobs that were protected under British rule. These jobs were usually at an intermediate level of

10

DOMICILE AND D IASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

seniority – often positioned on a hierarchy between British and Indian men – and were particularly concentrated on the railways, in the Posts and Telegraphs Department, and in the Customs and Excise services. Anglo-Indian women were often employed as nurses, teachers and office workers, particularly from the early twentieth century onwards. Reflecting the loyalty and service of Anglo-Indians to the government and administration of British India, Reginald Maher, an Anglo-Indian journalist and commentator, wrote that ‘almost the entire community from its cradle to its grave was born, lived and died for one thing – service to the Crown’.43

Diaspora The term ‘diaspora’ is inherently geographical, implying a scattering of people over space and transnational connections between people and places. Geography clearly lies at the heart of diaspora both as a concept and as lived experience,44 encompassing the contested interplay of place, home, culture and identity through migration and resettlement. While geography is clearly central to understanding diaspora both in theory and in practice, ideas about diaspora also raise important questions about space and place. The entanglements of ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, for example,45 invoke different geographies of diaspora, which are often articulated through different geographies of home.46 While the term ‘roots’ might imply an original homeland from which people have scattered, and to which they might seek to return, the term ‘routes’ complicates such ideas by focusing on more mobile and transcultural geographies of home. Rather than view place, home, culture and identity as located and bounded – and geography as little more than territory – an emphasis on ‘routes’ suggests their more mobile, and often deterritorialized, intersections over space and time. And yet, such mobility does not preclude what Avtar Brah terms ‘a homing desire’. As she writes, ‘the concept of diaspora offers a critique of discourses of fixed origins while taking account of a homing desire, as distinct from a desire for a ‘‘homeland’’. This distinction is important, not least because not all diasporas sustain an ideology of ‘‘return’’.’47 This book is about the ‘homing desire’ of Anglo-Indians living in an imperial diaspora in British India and in a decolonized diaspora in Britain, Australia and India after Independence in 1947. Brah argues that her ideas about diaspora space are part of a broader process of ‘theoretical creolization’, which represents ‘a point of confluence and intersectionality where insights emerging from these fields inhere in the production of analytical frames capable of addressing multiple, intersecting, axes of differentiation’.48 Closely connected to such ideas about theoretical creolization, notions of hybridity have been important in recent work on mobile and

D O MI C I L E AN D D I A S P O R A : A N I N T R O D U CT I ON

11

multiple identities, cultures and ideas of home, usually in the context of migration, diaspora, transnationality and globalization.49 Homi Bhabha’s influential work charts the hybrid subject as split and mobile, located in a contradictory and ambivalent ‘third space’ that disrupts the binary opposition between ‘self’ and ‘other’. ‘Third space’ is an in-between space, where hierarchies between cultures, colonizers and colonized become destabilized. Travelling into ‘third space’ may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture.50

And yet, as Katharyne Mitchell explains, ‘without context, this ‘‘inbetween’’ space risks becoming a mobile reactionary space, rather than a travelling site of resistance’.51 Hybridity – and mobile theorizing more generally – is not necessarily politically progressive. While the ‘hype of hybridity’ disrupts essentialist, authentic and apparently stable notions of culture, home and identity, it continues to invoke racial divisions that underpinned colonial discourse often without interrogating such divisions in colonial and postcolonial context.52 Although metaphorical references to hybridity abound, material histories and geographies of mixed descent remain largely absent from postcolonial theorizing and diaspora studies. At the same time, ideas about hybrid cultures and identities are often critiqued within the growing field of ‘mixed race’ studies. For David Parker and Miri Song, ‘the over-exuberant deployment of a notion like hybridity can connote an uncomfortable claiming of heterosis, the inherent biological superiority of ‘‘mixed race’’ ’.53 An uncritical celebration of hybridity also implies a problematic notion of racial ‘purity’ prior to mixing, and often overlooks ‘the specific power relations and historical influences’ shaping interracial intimacy over space and time.54 Unlike the abstractions of hybridity in theory, this book explores the material histories and geographies of mixed descent within a particular community. Brah’s emphasis on theoretical ‘creolization’ reflects, in part, her attempt to distinguish between diaspora as a concept and the specificities of different historical and contemporary diasporas. And yet, as I argue, the ‘specific maps and histories’55 of an Anglo-Indian diaspora raise important questions for theorizing diaspora space and its contested terrains of home, identity and culture. Anglo-Indians form a very small part of a much larger and diverse South Asian diaspora, which dates from the forced movement of indentured

12

DOMICILE AND D IASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

labourers from the 1830s and now includes up to 17 million people worldwide.56 Throughout this book, I consider diaspora space as both gendered and racialized. As many studies have shown, ‘feminizing the diaspora’57 is important both in terms of studying the migration of women and in the domestic symbols often used to represent resettlement. The feminization of the diaspora is often understood through a focus on feminized spaces of home, as shown by research that ranges from the diasporic employment of women as domestic workers to imaginative geographies of home and identity for women living in diasporic spaces.58 Although this book focuses on Anglo-Indian women and the spatial politics of home, I also explore masculine spaces of domicile and diaspora in both imaginative and material terms. Anglo-Indian women were seen to embody western modernity both within and beyond the home, but the ‘homing desire’ of Anglo-Indians often invoked ideas of imperial masculinity through the figure of a European (and often British) forefather. I argue that the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was both manifested and erased by a collective memory of an imperial forefather who influenced home-making in the following contexts: on a domestic scale; through a national identification with Britain as fatherland; in attempts to establish independent homelands; and in the migration of Anglo-Indians after Independence. Unlike studies of gender and diaspora that explore the symbolic importance of feminized spaces of home, I explore the ways in which memories of a masculine imperial inheritance were both symbolically and materially important for AngloIndians. As a central part of this, I consider the intersections of material and imaginative geographies of diaspora by interpreting memories and experiences of migration and resettlement alongside an analysis of how the British Nationality Act of 1948 and the White Australia Policy from 1901 to the mid-1960s affected the migration of a distinct community of mixed descent.

Home, Memory and Nostalgia Personal and collective memories are an important theme throughout this book. I explore the ways in which personal and collective memories of mixed descent have been manifested, erased and refigured through narratives of home and identity on domestic, national and diasporic scales. As such, this book contributes to the recent critical interest in the spatiality of memory and nostalgia across the humanities and social sciences.59 Work on memory often revolves around writing spatial histories that invoke, but also extend far beyond, spaces of home. Ideas about personal memory are closely tied to debates about identity and attempts to situate knowledge, and are reflected not only in the content, but also in the form, of a diverse

D O MI C I L E AN D D I A S P O R A : A N I N T R O D U CT I ON

13

range of autobiographical writings.60 Memory, home and identity have also been recurrent themes in work on, and by, people of mixed descent.61 Most of this work has explored diverse stories of personal memory and heritage, locating and identifying the self in relation to a genealogy rooted in different places and cultures.62 Rather than focus on individual memories of home and identity, and the diverse genealogical geographies that they invoke, this book addresses their collective and political implications for a particular community of mixed descent. Studies of collective memory are also concerned with space and identity, but on a shared, and often public, scale rather than through personal, and often private, experiences and memoirs. Particular sites and landscapes of memory have been analysed in relation to nation, empire and heritage, often in terms of home, belonging and contested authenticity.63 Collective landscapes of memory have also been explored on a diasporic scale, as shown by Anne-Marie Fortier’s study of Italian e´migre´ culture in London.64 In her discussion of ritual, tradition and performativity, Fortier describes St Peter’s Italian Church in Clerkenwell, central London as ‘a place of re-membering. It is a place of collective memory, in which elements of the past are cobbled together to mould a communal body of belonging. It is a place where individual lives, present and past, are called upon to inhabit the present space, to ‘‘member’’ it.’65 Fortier shows that collective memory not only binds individuals into a wider community, but also traverses the past and present, and a sense of place, home and belonging, that are rooted both in Italy and Britain. While Fortier examines acts and images of ‘re-membering’ in gendered terms, which are embodied by women as ‘both moving and fixed figures of identity and change’,66 I explore the interplay of gendered and racialized ‘re-membering’ for Anglo-Indians, which was embodied in different ways by men and women. Unlike other studies of collective memory that explore public sites and landscapes, I consider collective memory within the imaginative and material spaces of home. Whereas sites of memory often invoke, but also extend far beyond, spaces of home, nostalgia invokes home in its very meaning. The term ‘nostalgia’ is derived from the Greek nostos for return home, and algos for pain, and implies homesickness and a yearning for home.67 In Europe from the late seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, nostalgia was understood as a physical illness, but has since come to represent a state of mind.68 However, by the late 1980s, ‘even the pleasures of nostalgia [had] faded from memory’.69 According to David Lowenthal, ‘Nostalgia today is less often prized as precious memory or dismissed as diverting jest. Instead it is a topic of embarrassment and a term of abuse. Diatribe upon diatribe denounce it as reactionary, regressive, ridiculous.’70 Lowenthal explains and critiques this antipathy towards nostalgia in terms of its commercialization and inauthenticity; its pervasive influence in the media; and its elitist

14

DOMICILE AND D IASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

and reactionary politics. But, as he argues, ‘The left no less than the right espouses nostalgia,’ and ‘it is wrong to imagine that there exists some nonnostalgic reading of the past that is by contrast ‘‘honest’’ or authentically ‘‘true’’ ’.71 Whereas the sites and landscapes of memory inform spatial narratives of the past and present, a nostalgic desire for home has come to represent a wider ‘desire for desire’.72 As an imagined point of origin and return, home becomes a temporal signifier that implies a longing for an imagined and unattainable past. In her discussion of feminist fiction, for example, Roberta Rubenstein writes that nostalgia encompasses something more than a yearning for literal places or actual individuals. While homesickness refers to a spatial/geographical separation, nostalgia more accurately refers to a temporal one. Even if one is able to return to the literal edifice where s/he grew up, one can never truly return to the original home of childhood, since it exists mostly as a place in the imagination.73

Unlike the sites and landscapes of memory that are located and refigured in the past and present, the spaces of home invoked by nostalgia remain more elusive and distant. As Stewart puts it, ‘Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience.’74 It seems to me that an antipathy towards nostalgia reflects a more pervasive and long-established ‘suppression of home’, whereby spaces of home are located in the past rather than the present, in imaginative rather than material terms, and as points of imagined authenticity rather than as lived experience. Rather than perpetuate an antipathy towards nostalgia, which works in part by suppressing the home, I interpret the homing desire of Anglo-Indians in relation to a productive nostalgia. Rather than focus on nostalgia as ‘the desire for desire’, I refocus on nostalgia as the desire for home. At the same time, rather than view this desire as apolitical or confining, I explore its liberatory potential for Anglo-Indians in political debates about the future and status of the community, the attempt to establish an independent homeland before Independence, and the migration of Anglo-Indians to Britain and Australia since Independence. I also explore a longing for home that was embodied and enacted in practice rather than solely in narrative or imagination, and I argue that a nostalgic desire for home, and its enactment in practice, is oriented towards the present and the future as well as the past. Rather than signal loss, mourning and the impossibility of return, I am interested in the political mobilization of the past in relation to the present and future status and identity of the

D O MI C I L E AN D D I A S P O R A : A N I N T R O D U CT I ON

15

Anglo-Indian community both in India and across a wider diaspora.75 Finally, I consider the spatiality of home in both proximate and more distant terms. Rather than focus on the temporality of home as a site of origin, authenticity and an unattainable past, I consider the multiple and transnational spaces of home for Anglo-Indians both before and after Independence. Underpinning my interest in the spatial politics of home, identity, memory and nostalgia is the attempt to challenge two stereotypical depictions of Anglo-Indians that persist today. The first locates Anglo-Indians within a broader nostalgia for the British Raj and represents them as ‘tragic figure[s] of British colonialism’,76 anxiously enacting an idea of Britain as home, ridiculed by the British for doing so, and ultimately out of place in both British and independent India. As a recent embodiment of such tainted nostalgia, the character ‘Cotton Mary’ in the eponymous Merchant Ivory film77 is a nurse employed to care for the baby of a British couple living in Kerala in the 1950s. In the immediate aftermath of Independence, Mary still yearns to be identified as a British memsahib, insinuates her way into the British home, and imagines Britain itself as home. Viewing AngloIndians as nostalgic for British rule and for an idea of Britain as home has two main effects. First, such portrayals perpetuate an imperialist discourse of Anglo-Indians defined, and defining themselves, purely in relation to the British and to an idea of Britain as home, which neglects their more complex attachments to Britain and India. Second, such portrayals consign AngloIndians to an imperial niche in perpetuity, rendering their lives in independent India, and across a wider diaspora, both invisible and unheard. But even as imperialist representations may continue to marginalize and to objectify Anglo-Indians, they also inspire resistance at the very sites of such marginalization and objectification. After protests at its derogatory portrayal of Anglo-Indians, Cotton Mary was banned in West Bengal and Kerala.78 Closely connected to the cultural revival of Raj nostalgia, the second stereotypical representation of Anglo-Indians objectifies women by focusing on their appearance and assumed sensuality. Geoffrey Moorhouse not only describes Anglo-Indians as ‘quite the saddest result of British imperialism’, but also writes that most Anglo-Indian women ‘were very goodlooking indeed; as though the chemical processes of assorted generations had compensated the outcaste by gradually purging her line of all coarseness until total refinement was reached’.79 In his study of imperialism and sexuality – a study that tellingly castigates feminist research as ‘fairly primitive and exploratory’ and as ‘sour and immature’ – Ronald Hyam concurs that ‘Anglo-Indian women were frequently of outstanding beauty.’80 Such stereotypical representations of the beauty of Anglo-Indian women, alongside sexualized discourses of moral laxity and licentiousness, continue to exoticize Anglo-Indian women as objects of interracial desire,

16

DOMICILE AND D IASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

perpetuating masculinist and imperial fantasies of a hybrid ‘other’. In many imperial histories and novels, such images of Anglo-Indian women invoke assumptions about past interracial sex and its progeny, who were, and still sometimes are, assumed to be illegitimate.81 Many Anglo-Indians have sought to dispel this ‘slur of illegitimacy’.82 Frank Anthony writes, for example, that ‘The origin and growth of the Community have been along quite formal and legitimate lines’ and, while praising Anglo-Indian women for their ‘striking beauty’, condemns ‘penny-shovelling exercises in nearpornography’ that sexualize them.83 In contrast, I seek to understand how and why Anglo-Indian women both embodied and transgressed an ideal of feminized domesticity through their lives both within and beyond the home. I am interested in the ways that women were, and are, centrally important in political debates about the future and status of the community both before and since Independence, and their roles in establishing and maintaining Anglo-Indian homes and identities in the wider diaspora.84

Methodology The research for this book combined historical and contemporary qualitative research in a transnational, comparative framework. One of the methodological aims and challenges of the book has been to bring historical and contemporary research together, and to interweave personal with more public accounts. My archival research in India, Britain and Australia involved the analysis of parliamentary papers, particularly concerning AngloIndian petitions and other representations to the British Government before Independence; the report of the Calcutta Domiciled Community Enquiry Committee (1918–19); and official letters and other documents concerning the impact of the British Nationality Act, 1948, and the White Australia Policy, on Anglo-Indians seeking to migrate from India.85 I also studied the journals of various associations, particularly the Anglo-Indian Review (the monthly journal of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association) and the Colonization Observer (the monthly journal of the Colonization Society of India). In addition to the analysis of archival and other documentary sources, I also conducted 92 semi-structured interviews and 13 focus groups with a total of 180 Anglo-Indian women and men born before and after Independence.86 I talked to officers of Anglo-Indian associations and, in India, members of Legislative Assemblies and two former MPs; AngloIndian women who attended, taught or teach in one of seven girls’ schools; Anglo-Indians who live, or lived, in key enclaves or settlements; and members of nine Anglo-Indian associations in India, Australia and Britain. Some interviews focused on the past and present status of the community, while others were more personal, telling stories about growing up in India

D O MI C I L E AN D D I A S P O R A : A N I N T R O D U CT I ON

17

and what it felt like either to remain domiciled or to migrate to Britain or Australia. I interviewed Anglo-Indians from two main generations: those who remember life in India before Independence, many of whom migrated to Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s; and those who were born just before or soon after Independence, many of whom migrated to Australia in the late 1960s and 1970s. I quote extensively from these interviews, particularly in the chapters on the spatial politics of home for Anglo-Indians in India, Britain and Australia since Independence. Although many of my interviewees gave me permission to use their names, I have decided to maintain confidentiality throughout, partly because the open nature of interviews involved the discussion of personal and sometimes painful memories, and partly because many interviewees told me about other people’s lives as well as their own. Oral history interviews were particularly appropriate for my research, for three main reasons.87 First, until recently, the history of the community has remained a largely ‘hidden history’, in part because of imperial prejudice and in part because of the ambiguity of the term ‘Anglo-Indian’, which originally referred to the British in India. Anglo-Indians have European surnames, and it is often hard to identify them within archival and other documentary source material. Second, like many other feminist researchers who employ oral history and other life story interviews, I wanted to challenge the stereotypical objectification of Anglo-Indian women by learning about their lives in their own words.88 Third, I wanted to ask about personal stories and memories, and about everyday life and the home. As Perks and Thomson explain, such interviews document ‘particular aspects of historical experience which tend to be missing from other sources, such as personal relations, domestic work or family life, and they have resonated with the subjective or personal meanings of lived experience’.89 Through my focus on the home on domestic to diasporic scales, and through tracing personal memories and experiences of domicile and migration, I was interested in the spatial histories of everyday life for Anglo-Indian women that revolved around ideas and lived experiences of home. The home is the thread that weaves my historical and contemporary research together, reflecting the ways in which the home is invested with memories and nostalgia for the past, alongside lived experiences in the present and future dreams and fears. As Derrida famously observed, the very idea of the archive is bound up with an idea of home. As he writes, the word ‘archive’ comes from the Greek arkheion: ‘initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates. . . . It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place. The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently, marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret.’90 The archive, like the home, is a place of

18

DOMICILE AND D IASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

inclusion and exclusion, of imagination as well as materiality, and a place located on thresholds between the past, present and future. As Harriet Bradley observes, the public and private spaces and records of the archive have become inverted. Whereas Derrida described the domiciliation of public records in a private space, Bradley writes that ‘As the archive develops and adopts the familiar institutional forms of modernity . . . the original relationship seems inverted: details about private lives are found in what have become public spaces.’91 In her study of the writings by three Indian women, either in or about India in the 1930s, Antoinette Burton traces the ways in which memories of home are used ‘to claim a place in history at the intersection of the private and the public, the personal and the political, the national and the postcolonial’.92 Two of the questions that motivate Burton’s study are particularly relevant for my research on Anglo-Indian women and the spatial politics of home. First, ‘Can private memories of home serve as evidence of political history?’ and, second, ‘given women’s vexed relationship to the kinds of history that archives typically house, what does it mean to say that home can and should be seen not simply as a dwelling-place for women’s memory but as one of the foundations of history – history conceived of, that is, as a narrative, a practice, and a site of desire?’93 In contrast to Burton, I am studying narratives of home in public and official archives rather than in historical texts written by Anglo-Indian women themselves, partly because I am interested in the central place of the home, and its contested embodiment by women, in political debates about the future and status of the Anglo-Indian community, and partly because few historical texts by Anglo-Indian women exist. Alongside my analysis of the imaginative and material geographies of home in archival and other documentary sources, I have interviewed Anglo-Indian women and men in India, Britain and Australia about their lives before and after Independence, creating an oral history archive of personal and collective memories. From the outset, my main methodological concern was how to reflect the diasporic connections between Anglo-Indians. At first, I hoped to interview members of the same families who lived in India, Britain and Australia, but most of the letters I wrote did not receive a reply, and I soon realized that some families had lost touch after migrating, and that interviewing family members in different places – and often in very different socio-economic positions – would raise many difficult and sensitive issues. Instead, I studied the diasporic connections between Anglo-Indians in two other ways. First, I interviewed past and present residents of particular places in India, concentrating on Calcutta, Lucknow, McCluskieganj and, to a lesser extent, Bangalore, Whitefield, New Delhi and Ranchi (see Figure 1.1). Both Calcutta and Lucknow were important historical centres for Anglo-Indians and still have Anglo-Indian enclaves, schools and residential homes for

D O MI C I L E AN D D I A S P O R A : A N I N T R O D U CT I ON

19

older community members. McCluskieganj was established in 1933 as a homeland for Anglo-Indians in the rural east Indian state of Bihar, and is forty miles from Ranchi, where I also interviewed a number of AngloIndian teachers. Bangalore was the location for the first international reunion of Anglo-Indians to be held in India, which took place in 1998, in the fiftieth anniversary year of Independence. Bangalore is also fifteen miles from Whitefield, which was established as an Anglo-Indian settlement in 1882, and where I interviewed a number of current residents. Although the Anglo-Indian population in the capital remains small, the headquarters of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association moved from Calcutta to New Delhi in 1941. Second, as already mentioned, I interviewed women who attended, taught or teach at particular girls’ schools. The schools that Anglo-Indians attended and taught at before Independence were very often modelled on British public schools. Pupils sat junior and senior Cambridge examinations, usually learnt French as their second language, and were taught European, and particularly British, rather than Indian history and literature. Schools, like homes, were important sites for forging an Anglo-Indian identity and culture that was more western than Indian.94 Moreover, many schools attended by Anglo-Indians provide a diasporic focus for the community today through associations, newsletters, websites and reunions in Britain, Australia and elsewhere. I selected particular schools to reflect socio-economic differences within the Anglo-Indian community and the influences of both Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism: the La Martiniere girls’ schools in Calcutta and Lucknow; one Loreto Convent school in each city, which were established to educate poor and orphaned Anglo-Indians; and Dow Hill School in Kurseong, near Darjeeling, in the lower Himalayas of northern West Bengal, which was a government-funded school that educated Anglo-Indian girls from Calcutta and the daughters of railway workers posted throughout northern India (Figures 1.2 and 1.3). The boys’ and girls’ La Martiniere schools were founded by the bequest of Claude Martin, a Frenchman who had worked for the East India Company, was a confidant of the Nawab of Avadh, the Mughal ruler of the princely state, and had died in Lucknow in 1800. He left his fortune to fund schools to educate children in ‘the English language and religion’.95 The girls’ school in Calcutta opened in 1840 and the girls’ school in Lucknow opened in 1860, and, until 1935, the schools only educated Europeans and Anglo-Indians.96 Unlike the non-denominational foundation of the La Martiniere schools, Loreto Convent schools throughout India were founded to educate Roman Catholic girls of all classes. A group of twelve Irish Loreto nuns, with an average age of eighteen, arrived in Calcutta in 1841. They were the first European nuns to travel to northern India, and a number of Irish Loreto nuns continue to teach at

20

DOMICILE AND D IASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

Figure 1.2

Loreto St Agnes, Lucknow

the schools that were established in India from the 1840s. Loreto Entally in Calcutta and Loreto St Agnes in Lucknow were founded in 1845 and 1904 to educate poor and orphaned Anglo-Indian girls. As a historian of the Loreto Order in India writes, ‘In the free schools and orphanages, the majority of the children were Anglo-Indians, in Loreto House [the Mother House in Calcutta] and the fee-paying schools, a minority.’97 Finally, Dow Hill School is one amongst many Himalayan and other ‘hill schools’ that Anglo-Indian girls attended (see Figure 1.4).98 I selected Dow Hill for a number of reasons. First, Dow Hill, along with Victoria boys’ school, was founded in the late nineteenth century, and so fitted the time-scale of my research very well. Second, the Victoria and Dow Hill Association (VADHA) is an active society. Annual reunions have been held in London since 1957 and are today attended by up to seventy former pupils. Reunions and other gatherings are held in India, Australia and Canada, most recently celebrating the 125th anniversary of the founding of the schools in Kurseong. As well as interviewing many former Dow Hill pupils in Britain and Australia, I have also attended annual VADHA reunions in London since 1998. Third, and most importantly, I met Grace Pereira, who is Felicity’s older sister, and the Secretary of VADHA, at the start of my research. Grace attended Dow Hill from the age of five for nine months each year until she and her family left the subcontinent in 1951. Grace had

D O MI C I L E AN D D I A S P O R A : A N I N T R O D U CT I ON

Figure 1.3

21

Dow Hill School, Kurseong (Reproduced courtesy of Grace Pereira)

been friends since university with one of my mother’s friends, and wrote her undergraduate dissertation on the Anglo-Indian community. Grace, and her husband Dereyck, soon became good friends and have been a great help and inspiration in my research.

Chapter Outline Unlike imperialist depictions of the pervasive futility of Anglo-Indians desiring Britain as home and feeling out of place in India, I argue that Anglo-Indians had more complex attachments to both India and Britain before Independence. By studying the spatial politics of home for AngloIndians in India, Britain and Australia since Independence, I also consider their lives in the present as well as the past, and both domiciled and across a wider diaspora. Domicile and Diaspora begins by considering the place of Anglo-Indians both at home and not at home in British India, focusing on national and imperial discourses of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland (Chapter 2), the ways in which such discourses were reproduced and resisted on a domestic scale (Chapter 3), and the mobilization of such discourses in the attempt to establish an Anglo-Indian homeland at McCluskieganj in the east Indian state of Bihar from 1933 (Chapter 4).

22

DOMICILE AND D IASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

Figure 1.4

Dow Hill girls, homeward bound, 1950 (reproduced courtesy of Grace Pereira)

I then turn to the two main migratory flows after Independence: first, to Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s and the implications of the British Nationality Act of 1948 (Chapter 5), and, second, to Australia in the mid1960s and 1970s and the transition from the White Australia Policy to official multiculturalism (Chapter 6). Whilst many studies explore home and identity over diverse diasporic spaces, fewer focus on the effects of migration on those people who remain domiciled. This book ends by considering the place of the Anglo-Indian community who remained domiciled in independent India (Chapter 7).

Chapter Two

At Home in British India: Imperial Domesticity and National Identity

We weren’t homeless because we were born in India, it is our country, and I loved India. But . . . we wouldn’t have been there without British rule. . . . Our ancestors were European. Because of them we were there and because of them we were in no-man’s land. We were ‘hostages to India’. (Deborah)1 The Anglo-Indians, as a community, were neither Indian nor British and even though you were born and lived in India, you felt like you were an outsider in a foreign country. (Robert)

These two quotations reflect the complexities of home and belonging for Anglo-Indians in India. Deborah attended Dow Hill School in the 1930s and migrated to Britain in 1956, whilst Robert grew up in McCluskieganj in the 1950s and migrated to Australia in 1969. From two different generations, and reflecting the two main migrations of Anglo-Indians after Independence, their memories of life in India – of feeling both in and out of place, and of living as both insiders and outsiders – resonate with each other and with the memories of many other Anglo-Indians. Born and domiciled in India, many Anglo-Indians nonetheless felt out of place, living ‘in no-man’s land’, as ‘hostages to India’ and as outsiders ‘in a foreign country’. This chapter explores the spatial politics of home and identity for AngloIndians in India in the fifty years before Independence. It situates their contested geographies of domicile and belonging within wider debates about imperial and nationalist domesticity that revolve around the political significance of the home and the lives of women both within and beyond it. I argue that domestic spaces, embodied by Anglo-Indian women and by memories of an imperial forefather, were shaped by, and also helped to shape, wider political discourses of home, identity and nationality. Tracing the ways in which personal and collective memories of their ancestors

24

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

influenced Anglo-Indian home-making, I argue that the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was both manifested and erased by their dual identification with Britain as fatherland and India as motherland. The symbolic and material importance of both women and the home has become increasingly important in studies of nation and empire. Whereas other studies usually focus on either imperial or nationalist domesticity, Anglo-Indian women and homes were positioned within wider discourses of both imperial and nationalist domesticity. This paradoxical positioning underpinned a widespread feeling of being both at home and not at home in India. I begin by discussing Anglo-Indian homes as sites of imperial anxiety by focusing on the findings of two enquiries into the domiciled community in Calcutta in 1891–2 and 1918–19. The concern with appropriate housing for Anglo-Indians was tied to racialized discourses about morality and domesticity. I then turn to the ways in which a sense of national identity for Anglo-Indians was embodied in gendered and racialized forms that reflected and reproduced their dual affiliation to both Britain and India as home. Community claims for a legitimate heritage were articulated through images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and such claims were closely tied to political attempts to gain a legitimate stake in national life. Focusing on public debates about home, identity and nationality between the Montague Chelmsford Report of 1919, which extended policies of Indianization in government employment and political representation, to Independence in 1947, I examine how Anglo-Indian political discourse shifted from loyalty to the fatherland to a closer and more conscious identification with India as ‘land of our mothers’.

Imperial Domesticity Across a range of disciplines and contexts, recent research has begun to pay more critical attention to the symbolic and material importance of the home in shaping and reproducing the ideologies, everyday practices and material cultures of both imperial power and nationalist resistance. Rather than view the home as a private space that remains separate and distinct from the public world of politics, a diverse body of work has shown that the home itself is intensely political, both in its internal relationships and intimacies, and through its interfaces with the wider world.2 Studies of imperial and nationalist domesticity show the home to be a site of inclusion and exclusion, reproduction and contestation, regulation and transgression, confinement and freedom. In their lives both within and beyond the politically charged spaces of home, women have domesticated imperial and nationalist politics in similarly diverse, and often paradoxical, ways. The symbolic and material importance of the home in fashioning both nation

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

25

and empire has often been embodied by women, particularly as wives and mothers. Some studies of gender and imperialism focus on domestic transgression, charting the imperial freedom and adventure thought to lie beyond domestic and metropolitan confinement. In their studies of imperial masculinity, for example, John Tosh explores the ‘flight from domesticity’ for British men in the nineteenth century, and Richard Phillips analyses the imperial spaces of adventure far from home in children’s fiction.3 The spatial extent of the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enabled British women, as well as men, to travel more widely than ever before. Some of these women travelled independently and shared in imperial power away from the feminized domesticity of life at home.4 Others left home as domestic workers, often under the auspices of various emigration societies that organized colonial settlement for unmarried women.5 But most British women who travelled in the empire did so to set up homes both with and for their families, either on a permanent basis in settler colonies such as Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand,6 or on a more temporary basis in countries such as India. Whereas some studies of white women and imperialism have focused on domestic transgression through travel, exploration and adventure, an increasing range of work has considered imperial home-making by white women and, to a far lesser extent, white men.7 The domestic lives of British women were intimately shaped by imperial politics both in the metropolis and in the wider empire. For example, maternity and consumption were regarded as domestic responsibilities of national and imperial importance. Anna Davin has revealed the extent to which imperial politics influenced practices and representations of motherhood in Victorian Britain.8 The promotion of public health, hygiene and domestic education tied domestic reproduction explicitly to national and imperial ideas about racial purity and strength. In similar terms, Anne McClintock writes: ‘Controlling women’s sexuality, exalting maternity and breeding a virile race of empire-builders were widely perceived as the paramount means for controlling the health and wealth of the male imperial body politic.’9 Elsewhere, McClintock and others have shown that the growth of commodity consumption during the nineteenth century also reflected and reproduced imperial domesticity, as shown by the material cultures of textiles and food, and through their promotion and display in early advertising and department stores. Imperial exhibitions were another important site of spectacle and display, and not only represented the products of the British Empire to British subjects at home, but were also used to encourage imperial settlement.10 Both through the domestication of imperial subjects, and through the rise of imperial consumption, British homes and the domestic lives of British women were clearly influenced by imperial politics. But the translation of domestic discourses over imperial space was a contested process,

26

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

as shown by the ambivalent place of British women and British homes in imperial India. Most imperial commentators agreed that the presence of British wives and mothers in India – known as memsahibs11 – was necessary for the reproduction of legitimate imperial rulers as well as the social, moral and domestic values legitimating imperial rule. But some imperial commentators claimed that their presence had led to separate spheres of exclusively British social and domestic life that provoked racial antagonisms between rulers and ruled, and ultimately contributed to the decline of the British Empire. As Wilfred Scawen Blunt wrote in 1885, the Englishwoman in India during the last thirty years has been the cause of half the bitter feelings there between race and race. It was her presence at Cawnpore and Lucknow that pointed the sword of revenge after the Mutiny, and it is her constantly increasing influence now that widens the gulf of illfeeling and makes amalgamation daily more impossible.12

The severity of the threat posed to British rule in India by the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857–8 was most graphically depicted by the fate of British women and children and by images of domestic defilement, particularly at Cawnpore.13 Middle-class British women who survived the five-month siege of Lucknow experienced the severity of the conflict most acutely on a domestic scale. As the diaries written by six of these women attest, they had to do domestic work for the first time when most of their Indian servants escaped from the Residency at the start of the siege.14 In his history of the uprising, John Kaye wrote that ‘our women were not dishonoured, save that they were made to feel their servitude’.15 British homes in India, and the roles of British women as wives and mothers, were politically significant and contested. Mary Procida describes the ‘politicized imperial home’, and writes: ‘The most private and intimate spaces of the colonizers were themselves colonized by the demands of empire.’16 Memsahibs played an important role in reproducing imperial rule on a household scale, as shown by their management of Indian servants and their anxieties about raising British children in India. This role has been interpreted in two main ways. First, a number of studies have charted the spaces of home and empire as gendered and racially exclusive. Thomas Metcalfe, for example, argues that ‘gender and the colonial order’ depended on maintaining separate spheres for men and women: The everyday life of the British in India, with women for the most part secluded, though . . . by no means inactive, in darkened bungalows, and with men engaged in the work of empire in court and camp, reinforced the distinctions between home and the world, and between the private and the public, which lay at the heart of the British domestic ideology.17

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

27

To interpret imperial domesticity in terms of separate spheres not only neglects the ways in which imperial homes were themselves sites of imperial power, but also overlooks the wider political importance of the home, and the domestic roles of women, in other contexts too. In contrast, the second approach to understanding imperial domesticity focuses on the exercise of imperial power within the home. By studying sources as diverse as household guides for British women in India, memoirs, oral histories, literature and family photographs, this approach investigates ‘empires within the home’, which were largely managed and regulated by women.18 Whilst recognizing that British and Indian homes were spatially separate, the exercise of imperial power on a domestic scale mainly involved the employment and management of Indian servants. Compounds were racially demarcated to house Indian servants and their families at a distance from the bungalow where British officials usually lived.19 This racial distancing reproduced on a household scale the racial distancing of British cantonments and civil lines from the ‘native’ city. And yet such distancing was transcended on a daily basis as Indian servants worked within British homes. In the most famous household guide about imperial domesticity, which was first published in 1888, Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner wrote that a British home in India should represent That unit of civilisation where father and children, master and servant, employer and employed, can learn their several duties. When all is said and done also, herein lies the natural outlet for most of the talent peculiar to women. . . . We do not wish to advocate an unholy haughtiness; but an Indian household can no more be governed peacefully, without dignity and prestige, than an Indian Empire.20

Not only were the domestic roles of British women underpinned by, rather than separate from, imperial power, but also the feminine talent, dignity and prestige displayed within the home were likened to the successful exercise of imperial rule. British women in India thus embodied and enacted roles that were simultaneously domestic and imperial.

Nationalist Domesticity The home and the domestic roles of women were also important in the anti-imperial nationalist struggle. Although women have always been central to national identity and politics, their involvement has often been seen as more symbolic than actual. As Bronwen Walter explains, women in national narratives are often

28

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

confined to the world of metaphor rather than active participation, [and to] forms of representation that confirm their disempowerment. The trope of the family is widespread in the figuring of national narratives – homeland, motherland, fatherland, daughters and sons of the nation. This imagery serves to naturalise a social hierarchy within an apparent unity of interests so that its gendered formation is unquestioned.21

And yet, in the context of anti-imperial nationalism, both women and the home were politically important in material as well as symbolic terms. Ghassan Hage describes homely belonging as the most common of nationalist discourses, whereby national subjects identify with a homeland that is a ‘bountiful and fulfilling . . . secure, pleasing, and gratifying space’. The site of homely belonging is most commonly imagined through the nation as motherland because ‘all the qualities that are valued in the homeland are those that are normally (that is, within patriarchal discourse) associated with mothering: protection, warmth, emotional and nutritional security’.22 The figure of the mother is symbolically central to national identity and nationalist discourse, and national subjects are positioned in relation to the maternal nation as children, particularly as sons. In contrast to the homely space of the motherland, Hage argues that images of a fatherland correspond to the ordered and empowered spaces of governmental and sovereign belonging. Shaped more by law and order than by homeliness, the subjects of the fatherland represent a collective will rather than embodied individuals. As Hage explains, ‘the subjects of the motherland are corporeal subjects who can enjoy the nation emotionally and sensually. . . . The subjects of the fatherland, on the other hand, are not corporeal for it is precisely the fusion of all individual bodily subjects that constitutes the fatherland into a wilful communal or territorial body existing as a governmental and a sovereign international subject.’ Although ‘the father seems to exist as a shadow even in the fatherland’ and is more likely to be remembered as a more distant forefather,23 the motherland is often embodied as a maternal subject such as Mother India, Mother Ireland or Mother Russia.24 Such a national maternal subject is, in turn, often closely tied to imaginings of nature and landscape as female and embodied by iconic figures of both real and imagined women. Gendered as female and embodying the nation as home, Bharat Mata – Mother India – was one of the central symbols of anti-imperial nationalism in India and has been an important force in the rise of Hindu nationalism since the 1980s. Both then and now, Bharat Mata is imagined as a divine and political force able to unify the diversity of India and to inspire her children to loyalty and liberation who is embodied both in terms of natural grandeur and as a Hindu motherland to be liberated from invaders, foreign rule and other territorial, political and spiritual claims. In the context of

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

29

anti-imperial nationalism in the 1930s, for example, Mother India was revered as A Soul and a personality, a goddess Power who has a mission to fulfil in the world. . . . Four hundred millions of her sons and daughters have heard in their hearts her call and no power on earth can any longer keep them down from their resurgence. A new India is in process of creation which will be a greater embodiment of her life and an incarnation of her ancient will and purpose.25

More recently, the rise of Hindu nationalism since the 1980s, particularly in the form of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its sister organization, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), has witnessed the revived politicization of Bharat Mata. The destruction of the Babari Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992 ‘was part of a wider attempt to imagine and reclaim an undivided India’:26 an undivided India imagined and reclaimed as a Hindu motherland. As Stuart Corbridge explains, ‘By confronting Islam in Ayodhya, the BJPVHP could present itself as the saviour of Mother India: a Mother that had been raped by the Muslims and the British . . . , and whose honour could only be restored by men and women who resisted the ‘‘emasculation of the Hindu Community’’.’27 Rather than represent women and the home as solely symbolic in their importance, the reconstitution of middle-class femininity and domesticity has played a critical role in nationalist politics in practice. Exploring the imaginative and material contours of home for middle-class Bengalis, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee show the importance of domestic space and social relations in forging nationalist politics.28 Chatterjee, for example, argues that middle-class Bengali homes, the place of women within them, and anxieties about the westernization of women and domesticity were all vitally important in shaping the spiritual domain of anticolonial nationalism. As he writes, ‘it was the home that became the principal site of the struggle through which the hegemonic construct of the new nationalist patriarchy had to be normalized’.29 And yet Chatterjee’s influential work arguably ‘reproduces the domestication of women’, because, as Stephen Legg writes, ‘While the emergence of a new patriarchy is in evidence, in assuming its success female agency is immediately curtailed, as is the project of conceiving an adequately gendered subaltern subject.’30 A wide range of other research has explored women’s agency in anti-imperial nationalist politics. In her discussion of the Indian motherland, for example, Suruchi Thapar-Bjo¨rkert writes that ‘women were seen as agents of national progress and esteem, in the same ways as their mythical counterparts’.31 Albeit with very different objectives and characteristics, nationalist homes – like imperial homes in the empire and the

30

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

metropolis – were politically significant. As Thapar-Bjo¨rkert writes, ‘Not only were the public/private boundaries blurred, the domestic arena became an important site for the steady politicisation of women’s consciousness.’32 New constructions of femininity and motherhood helped in this process of politicization, and the domestic domain itself became an important site in the nationalist struggle.33 In anti-imperial nationalist politics, the home and the nation were imagined in ways that resisted rather than repeated westernization. As Chatterjee argues, nationalist visions of home and nation were embodied by Bengali women and their domestic roles, which were fashioned as distinct not only from the stereotypical British memsahib but also from AngloIndian women. As he writes, ‘Perhaps the most extreme object of contempt for the nationalist is the stereotype of the Anglo-Indian tynas [snob] – Westernized and common at the same time.’34 Seeking to challenge such persistent stereotypes of Anglo-Indians, this chapter examines the ways in which mixed descent complicated the imaginative and material intersections of home, nation and empire. The home and domestic roles of women were politically significant in Anglo-Indian debates about identity and nationality in the years before Independence. The politically charged spaces of home and their embodiment by women played a central role in debates about the future and status of the community. Anglo-Indian women and homes were positioned within broader discourses of both imperial and nationalist domesticity, which reflected the paradoxical positioning of the community at home and not at home in British India.

Domicile and Domesticity Although Anglo-Indians were domiciled in India, many felt a closer affinity to the West, as reflected by their culture, language, religion, home life, dress and education. Writing in 1930, Lt Col Baptist claimed that the main cause of ‘the Eurasian problem’ was that ‘In upbringing, mentality, mode of life, they strive to be British; it is their inheritance’,35 and that such an inheritance was expensive to maintain. In central Calcutta, for example, Kenneth Wallace described Anglo-Indians as both rooted and yet out of place: ‘Among much that is Indian, much that is degrading squalor in this region, will be noticed houses that appear to strive for a European atmosphere in their Indian environment. In this particular they typify their occupants who, rooted in Indian soil, yet look forlornly towards the West – the Mecca of their hopes and desires.’36 Wallace described Anglo-Indians in racialized terms: Almost all are swarthy of complexion, some more, some less; some fair, as fairness is understood in India; others dark, as darkness is understood in

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

31

India. In short, there are some who might pass easily for Europeans and others who would be indistinguishable from Indians, while between these extremes of dark and fair there are many shades fading into each other.37

Unlike the homes of British officials in cantonments, civil lines and suburbs that were located at a distance from Indian homes, Wallace describes AngloIndian homes as rooted in India and located ‘among much that is Indian’ rather than separate from it. But Wallace also points to the European aspirations of Anglo-Indians, ironically describing the ‘West’ as their ‘Mecca’. In this section I explore imperial anxieties about the Anglo-Indian community that revolved around poverty and degeneracy, which in turn reflected wider concerns about the very existence of a domiciled community and were most clearly articulated in debates about housing. Following the suppression of the ‘Mutiny’ in 1858 and the transfer of power from the East India Company to the British Crown, a Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement was appointed to examine the prospects of permanent British settlement in India.38 Permanent settlement was deemed impracticable due to the climate, the lack of land and the large Indian population. As Laura Gbah Bear writes, the report of the Select Committee was ‘shot through with anxious questions about the potential of the Indian climate to dissolve British colonizers and their modernizing projects into sterile or ‘‘Indianized’’ progeny’.39 Several witnesses called by the Committee argued that it would prove impossible to raise a third generation of British colonists and settlers on the plains of India because they would become mentally and physically degenerate. Imperial discourses of degeneracy were explicitly spatial, whereby ‘certain races in certain places were seen to be originally, naturally and inevitably degenerate’.40 But, as Stoler argues, such discourses applied not only to colonized ‘others’ but also to those among the colonizers constructed as ‘other’ because of their class, sexual or other differences from the official elite. As she writes, ‘Notions of degeneracy registered dissension among Europeans and basic uncertainties about who would be granted that privileged status’ and represented a ‘ ‘‘mobile’’ discourse of empire that designated eligibility for citizenship, class membership, and gendered assignments to race’.41 Permanent settlement in India was thought to expose British settlers to the risk of degeneracy because of the climate and its effects on mental and physical health, the physical and social environment, and fears of miscegenation between British men and Indian or Anglo-Indian women. In British India, imperial discourses of degeneracy were spatially distinct between the ‘hills’ and the ‘plains’, and not only led to the development of hill stations from the 1860s onwards, but also legitimated the seasonal residence of British women within them.42 As Major General Tremenheere told the Committee in 1858, ‘I think you could not reckon upon raising a population

32

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

in the plains from the European soldier with any success whatever. By keeping them in the plains they grow up generally lanky, degenerate looking men.’43 Robert Baikie – a doctor who had spent seventeen years in India – was asked whether it was possible for Europeans to be raised on the plains of India without degenerating and answered, ‘Decidedly not in the plains; my belief is, that they would die out in the third generation.’44 Captain Ouchterlony was similarly adamant. As he said, ‘even if children were reared to maturity, their constitutions would be enfeebled, and their ‘‘Saxon energy’’ impaired, and I believe that their progeny resulting from the intermarriages of colonists would be found deteriorated in all English or European attributes’.45 Although many Anglo-Indian schools were established in hill stations, particularly in the lower Himalayas,46 most of the community lived in the ‘plains’ throughout the year, either moving between different railway colonies every few years, or living on a more permanent basis in cities such as Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Bangalore and Lucknow. Anglo-Indians formed a largely urban community, reflecting an early policy of the East India Company, which prohibited its servants settling down on the land in India. Anglo-Indians and Europeans who were under the protection of the East India Company were warned that they would forfeit any claim for protection of their person and property if they lived beyond a ten mile radius of the head-quarters of the British garrison.47

Anglo-Indian housing was a key site in wider debates about identity, nationality, and imperial responsibility. Housing became a particular site of imperial anxiety, not only because it made Anglo-Indian poverty visible – and as a starkly visible contrast to imperial domesticity – but also because it disrupted the racial distancing that underpinned colonial urbanism. These anxieties were particularly acute in large cities such as Calcutta. Both the official Pauperism Enquiry (1891-2), and the non-official Calcutta Domiciled Community Enquiry Committee (1918-19), investigated poverty amongst the city’s domiciled community.48 Reporting in 1920, the second committee concluded that the most significant problem facing the community was housing, and it mobilized discourses of domestic degeneracy and degradation to convey the severity of the problem. Calcutta was, after London, the second largest city in the British Empire and was, until 1911, the capital of British India.49 Calcutta was the largest and most permanent site of residence for the domiciled community, which numbered 20,022 in the 1911 Census.50 Their residence was concentrated in certain parts of the central city, particularly within a rough square bounded by Chowringhee Road to the west, Park Street to the south,

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

33

Dharumtallah Street to the north, and Circular Road to the east, and within certain neighbourhoods such as Entally, Howrah and Kidderpore.51 Even though New Delhi became the capital of India in 1911, the national office of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association did not leave Calcutta until 1941 and no more than several thousand Anglo-Indians lived in the new capital.52 Calcutta (along with the other two East India Company presidency towns, Bombay and Madras) was an important port and commercial centre, and retained the head offices of many British companies in India, often beyond Independence. Calcutta also remained the intellectual and political heart of the Anglo-Indian community, as shown by its history of political petitioning and organization, the activities and publications of the Calcutta Study Circle in the 1940s,53 and the regular newspaper column written by one of its members, Reginald Maher, in the Statesman.54 Calcutta was also the location of the head office of the Colonization Society of India, which established an Anglo-Indian homeland at McCluskieganj in 1933, as discussed in Chapter 4. At a time when Calcutta was the capital of British India, the Pauperism Enquiry of 1891–2 was appointed by the Government of Bengal ‘to enquire into the extent and nature of the poverty and destitution which prevail in the town of Calcutta among Europeans and Eurasians’.55 In contrast, the Calcutta Domiciled Enquiry Committee of 1918–19, ‘while possessing the sympathy and support of Government’, was non-official and ‘endeavoured to collect information on the situation of the Community as a whole and not merely the indigent section.’56 But despite the wider focus of the second committee, its report and recommendations concentrated on the difficulties faced by poor Anglo-Indians. As the 1918–19 Committee explained, ‘we have drawn no distinction between persons born in India of European parents and brought up in India, and persons of mixed blood’.57 Using the terms ‘Anglo-Indian’ and ‘domiciled’ in a largely interchangeable way, the report located people of mixed descent within a wider ‘community of Britishness’.58 Within the context of British India, the mere existence of poverty within the domiciled community challenged the connections between Britishness, its assumed whiteness, and imperial privilege. Although there is a wide and growing literature that interrogates whiteness, much of it develops from ‘an unacknowledged equation of whiteness with various forms of privilege’.59 In contrast, studies of white poverty in racially segregated societies such as South Africa and the United States60 and studies of white Irish identities61 trace class, gendered, national and regional distinctions that complicate the assumed privilege of whiteness. As Jamie Winders has shown in the context of white poverty in the nineteenth-century American South, ‘Poor white Southerners directly challenged, through their mere existence, unspoken connections between a white identity and economic privilege’, and he describes them as ‘walking paradoxes’ through their

34

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

embodiment of both whiteness and poverty.62 Reflecting both imperial prejudice and paternalism, Anglo-Indians were likewise represented as ‘walking paradoxes’ by identifying with the British elite in India, even as many of them lived in poverty with other Indians. The Pauperism Enquiry of 1891-2 concluded that ‘there is a very excessive amount of destitution among Indo-Europeans in Calcutta’, and the Government confirmed that 7.97 per cent of Europeans and 22.3 per cent of ‘Eurasians’ were in receipt of charitable relief. The Enquiry identified the main causes of destitution as ‘the competition of Indians, indiscipline and other analogous defects, [and] insufficient organization of charitable relief’,63 and it recommended improved education, greater opportunities for employment on the railways, the formation of an Indo-European regiment, the better organization of charitable relief, and the migration of orphans to Australia. In addition, the Enquiry recommended that ‘No effort should be spared to make the education of girls as practical as possible, so as to qualify them as Nurses, Shop Assistants, Teachers, Domestic Servants, and such other avocations for which there might be a demand.’64 The Government responded to some, but not all, of these recommendations, and the main effect of the Enquiry proved to be the reorganization of the District Charitable Society in Calcutta. In its report of 1920, the second enquiry noted the ‘disappointing results’ of the Pauperism Enquiry, and speculated that ‘the civic conscience [today] . . . is more sensitive than in 1892 . . . and has been greatly stimulated by the tragic happenings of four years of war, with the result that the demonstration of the need for assisting a comparatively poor community is likely to command a response not to be looked for in days gone by’.65 The 1918–19 Committee distinguished three classes within the domiciled community: a small, well-educated upper class that needed no assistance; a ‘potentially efficient’ middle class, which needed better education and affordable housing; and, finally, ‘a lower class merging into Indian Christians, unemployable in any responsible position and unable to compete with Indians in manual labour’.66 Overall, the Report described the community as poor, and proposed that the European community should initiate remedial efforts, partly because of ‘its responsibility for the existence of the community’.67 The Committee and its various subcommittees were composed of men, and some women, who identified themselves as European rather than as members of the domiciled community.68 A sense of European responsibility for the domiciled community is a prominent theme throughout the report. The Secretary noted that this responsibility was direct (‘because the arrival of Europeans in India originated the Anglo-Indian community’), indirect (‘because a sense of humanity demands that Anglo-Indians should be given a chance to rise from the slough of despond in which they are sunk’) and self-interested

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

35

(because ‘a really efficient indigenous community would be of the greatest use to employers in their commercial and industrial undertakings’).69 This paternalistic responsibility was also seen to correspond to particular European attributes, which included ‘the enterprise, the money, and the brains which are the special characteristics of the home-born European community’.70 Although both shared European paternal descent, clear distinctions were thus drawn between the domiciled and the ‘home-born European community’. Spanning education, employment, health and physique, crime and drunkenness, and available means of relief, the 1920 report concluded that poor-quality and expensive housing was the main problem facing AngloIndians in Calcutta.71 The quality of housing and domestic life was seen as fundamentally important in fostering mental, physical and moral health and well-being. As the report stated, ‘The first and main object in the establishment of good social conditions for any community must be in a satisfactory home life, for, without this, deterioration, mental, moral and physical, is not only probable but inevitable.’ The sub-committee on health and physique identified poor housing as the main cause of poor health and moral degradation, reporting that ‘Immorality, due to overcrowding’ and the ‘Want of care and discipline in homes’ were common among poorer sections of the community. But the poorest Anglo-Indians were described as barely human: ‘The remainder of the community live below the poverty line and herd together like animals in unspeakably filthy, undrained slums, Indians and Anglo-Indians living side by side in mud and bamboo huts, but the former are able to retain reasonable cleanliness and self-respect, while Anglo-Indians of this class sink to a lamentable depth of degradation.’72 The area of central Calcutta known as Bow Bazar had ‘long been proverbial for its over-crowding and insanitary conditions’, and was described as one area of particular concern. It was essential, according to the Enquiry, ‘in the cause of humanity and for the credit of the Christian community, to purge [such areas] clean’. As the report continued, ‘No language can be too strong to describe these conditions or the necessity for removing such pernicious plague spots, where vice and filth predominate and children are to-day being born inevitably damned to disease and degradation.’73 While such discourses of dirt, disease and degradation were often used to distinguish the ‘native city’ from European civil lines, cantonments and suburbs,74 the Enquiry mobilized such discourses to describe poverty within the Anglo-Indian community. Doing so complicated the racialized distance between British and Indian residence that underpinned colonial urbanism and was most graphically seen in the distinction between ‘White’ and ‘Black Towns’ in cities like Calcutta and Madras.75 Although AngloIndians lived in particular streets and neighbourhoods in central parts of Calcutta, they resided in much closer proximity to other Indians (who, in

36

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

central Calcutta, were often Muslim) than to the British elite, particularly in the poorest bhustee or slum areas. As seven photographs in the report show (including Figures 2.1 and 2.2), their western dress identified AngloIndians living in such areas. Both the visibility of Anglo-Indian poverty through their residence in slums and overcrowded tenement buildings, and their social relations and practices of everyday life, were interpreted in ways that reproduced racialized discourses of morality and domesticity. The sub-committee on health and physique regarded Indians as better adapted to living in poor conditions, reporting that ‘The poor Indian with only one room in a bustie never troubles about a bed to lie on, or a private secluded corner to bathe in, neither does he trouble about eating meals in privacy, but can sleep, wash and eat on the doorstep or on the public highway.’ But Anglo-Indians were described as desiring privacy from their Indian counterparts, which in turn resulted in overcrowding and ill-health. The sub-committee reported that ‘During the hot weather the squares, streets, gullies and doorsteps are occupied by sleeping Indians enjoying the coolness of an open sky and fresh air, while Anglo-Indians are compelled by custom and for the sake of privacy to seal themselves up behind closed shutters.’ The risks of overcrowding were seen in terms of moral as well as physical health and wellbeing. As the report continues, In many cases lads and girls of 14 to 18 years of age are sleeping in the same hut, with the inevitable result that the girl is ruined morally and physically at an early age. Many early marriages are simply the result of over-crowding among young people and, as a consequence, we have succeeding generations of weaklings, diseased and weak-minded poverty-stricken people.76

In addition to the risks of moral and physical degeneracy thought to be posed by overcrowded housing, the food eaten by Anglo-Indians – which was a distinctive mixture of western and Indian cuisine – was also the object of particular concern: ‘The Sub-Committee drew attention to the practice amongst members of the community of consuming highly spiced curries and the like instead of plain wholesome food. In view of the tendencies which seem to have a special hold on the young of both sexes in India the use of spiced food appears extremely unwise.’ Such ‘tendencies’ were seen in stark contrast to British virility and energy. According to the Secretary of the report, ‘It must be admitted regretfully that the climate of India and its social environment are calculated to prevent permanently the development of qualities as virile and energetic as those we associate with persons born in the harder climate of the West.’ Anglo-Indian domesticity – and the very idea of domicile in India – were represented by the British as both a site and a source of degeneracy and degradation.77

Figure 2.1 Tiled Busti in Entally, Calcutta (Anon. (1920) Report of the Calcutta Domiciled Enquiry Committee, 1918—19. Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Press, p. 68. By permission of the British Library)

Figure 2.2 Scene in Entally, Calcutta (Anon. (1920) Report of the Calcutta Domiciled Enquiry Committee, 1918—19. Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Press, p. 68. By permission of the British Library)

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

39

Similar discourses of moral and physical decline were also current in philanthropic work within British cities. Often described as a form of internal colonialism, whereby social reformers travelled to ‘the heart of darkness’ by visiting, working and sometimes living in the poorest parts of cities, such discourses were shaped by, and also helped to reinforce, class distinctions. But within Calcutta and other Indian cities, poverty amongst the lower classes of the Anglo-Indian community was interpreted in racialized as well as class terms that revolved around domicile and domesticity. In 1937, the Archdeacon of Bombay wrote that ‘Poverty in the East End of London is bad enough. Its hardships in an Indian city for people of even modified Western habits and mental outlook are indescribable. The dangers of slum life in an oriental city for the children, particularly the girls of such a community, can scarcely be imagined by people who have never lived in the East.’78 Most significantly, both in the report and elsewhere, Anglo-Indians were criticized for aspiring to a European way of life in India that lay beyond their financial means, in part because they were domiciled in India and were employed on lower salaries than their European counterparts.79 The sub-committee on housing reported that poor Anglo-Indians occupied a paradoxical position, aspiring to a middle-class, imperial British way of life in India whilst living in poverty. In similar terms, the sub-committee on education reported that ‘success in life for a member of the Domiciled Community’ implied ‘the ability to command a living wage for persons with European habits and manner of life’, and criticized what it identified as Anglo-Indian prejudice towards manual labour. It was particularly important, according to the report, to bring up ‘both boys and girls to recognise the essential dignity of labour. The employment of Indian servants and a fear of losing caste must be held mainly responsible for the unwillingness of so many of the Anglo-Indians to use their hands.’ Unlike class distinctions in Britain that were rooted in different forms of labour, the report suggested that even poor AngloIndians resisted manual work because of racial prejudice, a sense of caste superiority and ignorance of the ‘dignity of labour’, which arose, in part, from employing Indian servants.80 This echoed the arguments put forward by R.E. Cully in a book published in 1910 which criticized the ‘false pride’ of Anglo-Indians and saw it as largely rooted in their employment of Indian servants. Writing as ‘one of the community’, Cully described the ‘great evil of employing Indian native servants’ because ‘the part they have hitherto played in the domestic economy of Eurasian households has been and still is the source of much of all the corruption among our children as it is also of moral weakness, backwardness and inactivity among the adult members’. Cully’s main argument was that middle- or lower-class Anglo-Indians could only afford to employ ‘the lowest of the Hindu community known as pariahs: being, as in the majority of cases they are heathen, they are

40

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

naturally superstitious, immoral, given to cheating, lying, drinking and vice of every description, and are therefore utterly untrustworthy’. While the employment and management of Indian servants underpinned British ‘empires in the home’, the employment of Indian servants by Anglo-Indians was seen as partly responsible for fostering unrealistic aspirations to British domestic life in India. Cully’s solution was for Anglo-Indians – both male and female – ‘to perform their own household duties themselves’.81 The sub-committee on housing made two main recommendations: that a ‘self-supporting suburban colony’ should be established for Anglo-Indians with moderate incomes, probably in Howrah or Entally; and that tenement dwellings should be built to house ‘the poorest class in the Bow Bazar area’.82 Another sub-committee focused on hostel accommodation to house Anglo-Indians who had moved to Calcutta to work.83 Members of the sub-committee visited five hostels, which accommodated 144 AngloIndians, and included the YWCA Hostel and the St Thomas’ Home for Girls. Hostels were seen as particularly important in fostering the security and moral welfare of young Anglo-Indian women, who were thought to be vulnerable in cities such as Calcutta. According to Mrs Monahan, one of the members of the sub-committee, ‘these girls often leave school at a very early age – sixteen or seventeen years or even younger – and have to face many dangers in a city like Calcutta’. The report also stated that ‘It is not necessary for us to emphasise the dangers attendant upon residence in Calcutta in the case of apprentice girls and young women away from home life. These dangers . . . have increased in consequence of the war, and cannot be ignored.’84 Most women on the sub-committee argued that the security and moral welfare of young Anglo-Indian women could only be achieved if hostel superintendents were women from Britain rather than from the domiciled community. Miss Moinet expressed this view most strongly: I am thoroughly in favour of an English lady being in charge, or in any case not an Anglo-Indian, for the following reasons: (a) The standards of a good Englishwoman morally, artistically and mentally, are higher than those of an Anglo-Indian, and if an Englishwoman really lives with the girls, eats with them, and shares their lives, you really do get a big hold over the girls and are able to influence them. (b) An Anglo-Indian finds it very hard to dispense even justice and not to have favourites. This has been shown again and again.85

Miss Moinet was also critical of the young Anglo-Indian women who lived in hostels, particularly in terms of their moral standing. As she continued, Anglo-Indian girls of the poorer class are generally untidy and wasteful. . . . the girls lack public spirit and shirk responsibility. . . . The Superintendent should always know where a girl has gone and with whom. The opposite sex has a great attraction for the Anglo-Indian girls and there is great danger of her

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

41

going wrong unless safeguarded. . . . The want of a strong sense of modesty should be guarded against.86

For Miss Moinet and most of the other women on the sub-committee, appointing a British woman as hostel superintendent was the only way to foster an appropriately moral femininity and domesticity for Anglo-Indian women. The only woman to express a different opinion was Mrs Hechle, who argued that hostel superintendence and other social work in Calcutta should ‘be undertaken whenever possible by capable women of the Domiciled Community. Many of these women are in need of paid work, which makes it all the more desirable to try and employ them.’ But the report dismissed her opinion by stating that ‘we do not think there should be any confusion between the question of obtaining employment for women of the Domiciled Community and the necessity of obtaining the best type of wardens possible for a hostel’, and concluded that ‘it is upon the personality of the warden more than anything else that the success of a hostel must depend. Where character and example are of such importance, we feel it is essential that for hostels for either sex the wardens should be from Home.’87 As this makes plain, desirable ‘character’ and ‘example’ were associated with Britishness. Employing British women as wardens of hostels for young Anglo-Indian women in Calcutta was seen as the main way to foster feminine propriety and domestic respectability, both of which were thought to be at risk through domicile in India.

’Land of Our Mothers’ The report of the 1918–19 Enquiry identified the housing conditions of poor Anglo-Indians, the fact that they lived alongside poor Indians, and ideas about feminine propriety and domestic respectability as central markers that distinguished the ‘home-born’ from the domiciled community. At the very outset, the report acknowledged the ‘adverse criticism from the members of the [domiciled] community. . . . We know that, already, the enquiry is by some regarded as an impertinence.’88 In this section, I turn to focus on debates about home, identity and nationality within the Anglo-Indian community itself. Whereas the official enquiry of 1891–2 and the non-official enquiry of 1918–19 focused on poverty and poor housing, debates among middle-class Anglo-Indians concentrated on the political status and future of the community, both of which were articulated through very different representations of home and femininity.

42

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

My title for this section comes from a book by Herbert Stark called Hostages to India, which was published in 1926. The book ends with a postscript that considers the uncertain position of Anglo-Indians in the 1920s in the context of Indianization and the struggle for independence. Stressing the continued loyalty and affiliation of Anglo-Indians to their European – and, specifically, English – forefathers, Stark also describes their attachment to India: If England is the land of our fathers, India is the land of our 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.89

England is imagined at a distance as an inspiring source of memory, heritage, tradition and veneration, whilst India is imagined in more immediate terms as the site of daily life, present meaning and the location of home. Although Anglo-Indians might have a dual affinity with Britain and India, Stark claims their British ancestry and heritage as paramount and questions the very idea of India as home. As he asks: ‘when full measure of self-government is given to India, what will be the fate of our descendants and kinsmen in that land?’ And ‘O England! Who are these if not thy sons?’ The significance of these questions extended far beyond Stark’s book. The postscript was quoted at length by Henry Gidney, president of the Anglo-Indian and Domiciled European Association, to conclude his Memorandum to the Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform in 1933. Seeking to protect their reserved jobs and political representation, Gidney stressed the dual loyalty of Anglo-Indians to both Britain and India: We represent in our very bodies a synthesis of India and Britain as no other people do or can do, a fusion of East and West. . . . Moreover, we are the sons of the soil, a people whose roots are deep, not only in the soil, history and traditions of India, where we live, work and die in the pursuit of our daily avocations, but in the soil and history of this great country – England . . . ; a community devoted to India – our Motherland – and anxious for her advancement, but it must be admitted under sore suspicion because of our unflinching loyalty and devotion to our Fatherland – England.90

Reflecting in 1939 on Stark’s words and their use by Gidney, journalist and member of the Calcutta Study Circle Reginald Maher wrote in the Anglo-Indian Review that neither the historian nor the politician forget that India is the motherland – the land that has nursed and reared the Anglo-Indian. . . . The Anglo-Indian of today knows and loves India as a motherland. . . . England is being

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

43

forgotten with its attractive ‘white’ population; St Paul’s and the quiet English country lane are fading. Small wonder – they were inherited pictures at the best. It is significant that the Anglo-Indian now speaks of going to England and not of going home as his father did before him.91

The dual identification of home for Anglo-Indians was articulated through images of India as motherland and Britain as fatherland. Anglo-Indian images of India as motherland in the years before Independence were fundamentally different from the images of Bharat Mata – Mother India – invoked by anti-imperial nationalists. Rather than represent a Hindu vision of a united India, Anglo-Indian images of the motherland sought to identify the national loyalty of a small, Christian minority. Crucially, Anglo-Indian images of India as motherland existed alongside images of Britain as fatherland, encapsulating a dual sense of home, identity and nationality that was both separate and conjoined. This dual affiliation served both to manifest and to erase a collective memory of mixed descent.

Home, Identity and Nationality During his leadership of the Anglo-Indian community from 1919 until his death in 1942, Henry Gidney stressed Anglo-Indian ties to Britain as fatherland, emphasized economic rather than political concerns in the face of Indianization, and gained some concessions from the British Government in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1925, he led a deputation to London to petition Lord Birkenhead, Secretary of State for India. Gidney sought to clarify the ‘anomalous position’ of Anglo-Indians, occupying a ‘trinity of existence’ represented by the three terms used to describe them. The term ‘Anglo-Indian’ was used for social purposes and to differentiate the community from Europeans and Indians; for military and defence purposes, however, the term changed to ‘European British Subjects’; and for occupational purposes, Anglo-Indians were termed ‘Statutory Natives of India’.92 According to Gidney, the existence of these three terms represented a broader tension between the identification of Anglo-Indians with both East and West and a deep uncertainty about their future place and status in India.93 These three terms also led Anglo-Indians to be classified in different ways because of racial prejudice. As a member of the deputation explained: I think it would be best if we stood as a distinct community as Anglo-Indians, because as Anglo-Indians we would have the lighter and the darker boys together. . . . If you have two brothers employed on the railway, sometimes the fair one will be employed as a European and the darker one as a

44

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

Statutory Native of India, and the latter will not get the same privileges as the former.94

Echoing the different experiences of two Anglo-Indian brothers, Norman, an Anglo-Indian who works for the community, told me that being of mixed race, you get all sorts of throw-backs. I have one son who’s apparently darker-skinned. My second son passes off as a European, blond, blue eyes. Of course he’s very fair, but in the old days, even brothers didn’t acclaim each other. . . . It did divide families. But I’m going back to preIndependence days, and just about the Independence time.

For Deborah, a former Dow Hill pupil who migrated to Britain in 1956, There are six different shades of colour in an Anglo-Indian family. And it often happened that those who could pass off as non-Indian and totally white [did so]. What happens in the next generation is a big question mark because it can skip a couple of generations and come out, and it does. But if you’re going to live a lie, you must live with the consequences of it. And my family have never lived with any lies, we are proud of what we are. . . . The colour of my skin doesn’t matter to me. It’s my attitude towards other people, it’s my education, it’s my tolerance, it’s my understanding. And I think when you’re mixed up like that it’s easier to be tolerant, it’s easier to be understanding. And from that point of view, I’m happy I’m international.

Similarly calling for tolerance both within and between families, Reginald Maher wrote in a pamphlet published by the Calcutta Study Circle in 1945 that ‘I have been shocked by fathers and mothers who have condemned their daughters to bitter spinsterhood because of sheer colour prejudice; I have been shocked by mothers who have shown favour, and sown hatred, because of the lighter shade in a child’s skin or a trace of the ‘‘Nordic’’ in the hair.’95 Agreeing that ‘colour is the raison d’eˆtre of the differences of treatment we receive’, Gidney sought to secure recognition of a distinct Anglo-Indian community that was more closely aligned with Britain than India. To this end, he stressed Anglo-Indian links to Britain and sought to secure recognition of Anglo-Indians as permanent British settlers rather than as Statutory Natives of India.96 In response to the deputation, the Anglo-Indian community came to be recognized as culturally and socially distinct, but as part of the Indian nation. As Birkenhead put it in 1925, ‘the community as a whole has no future outside India, and . . . its best interests will in the long run be served by throwing in its lot, generally speaking, with the Indian peoples.’97 The formal response to the deputation came three years later,

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

45

and stated that ‘The members of the Anglo-Indian community have a permanent stake in India and in no other country.’98 In his representations to the Indian Statutory Commission of 1928 – the Simon Commission – Gidney argued that, as members of one of the minority communities of India, Anglo-Indians had ‘special claims to consideration on the ground that they are not only permanently domiciled in India, but are connected with Britain by blood, religion, language, habits, and customs, and have similar standards of living and education’.99 Arguing that the community’s difficulties were primarily economic rather than political due to increased competition for employment, Gidney described ‘our full sympathy with the progressive realisation of self-government on well measured lines for India within the Empire’.100 As in 1925, he stressed loyalty to Britain and the British Empire rather than to an independent India, and his representations resulted in various measures to protect Anglo-Indian interests in the services, education and politics. But in contrast, by the time of the Round Table Conferences of 1930–1, Gidney began to describe a dual affinity to both Britain and India, which revealed the early stages of a broader shift in ideas of Britain and India as home. Speaking at the Round Table Conference in London in 1930, Gidney said that ‘My people and I are Indians, but Indians whose roots are deep not only in the soil and traditions of India, but in the soil and history of this country where we are meeting today. We are a synthesis of India and Britain as no other people are or can be.’101 In a significant shift from claiming a distinct identity as permanent British settlers in India, Gidney now argued that the Anglo-Indian community was both British and Indian in origin, and that it could act as a unique and a strategic bridge between both nations. Rather than seek a future in Britain or elsewhere in the British Empire, Gidney for the first time stressed that the future for Anglo-Indians lay in India. And yet he imagined the future of both the Anglo-Indian community and India itself as securely located within the British Empire. As he argued in the Minorities Sub-Committee in 1930, Whatever may be the future of India, the Anglo-Indian community is, for better or for worse, an indissoluble part of that future. We are an Indian community: we are the sons of the soil. . . . We accept the implications of our Indian nationality and we look forward to a glorious future for our mother country . . . [but] in our politics there is one fixed star from which no considerations of communal or personal advancement or benefits will ever make us deviate and that is our inexpugnable loyalty to the Crown of England.102

Describing his dual affinity as a son of both Britain and India, Gidney concluded that ‘By law, by residence, by environment and circumstances,

46

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

I am an Indian. But by blood I belong also to Britain. For me, therefore, there is no antagonism between India and Britain. They are both my countries.’ By articulating such a dual affinity through images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, Gidney sought to embody the imperial bond between the two countries, to make this imperial bond personal and familial in its constitution and implications, and to chart an identity that was distinctive in its duality. References to Britain as fatherland and India as motherland became increasingly prominent in Anglo-Indian journals and political debates over the course of the 1930s. But such images were contested. In 1939, for example, Reginald Maher described three main generational differences.103 Whereas an older generation ‘looks yearningly towards England, calls that land of a forefather’s home and feels a grouse against Providence if he cannot retire there’, middle-aged Anglo-Indians recognized that ‘if England is a home it is sufficiently distant to be out of reach and the fatherland is more a step-fatherland than the ‘‘home’’ he was taught to believe in’. In contrast, the young Anglo-Indian ‘realises he is no white man’, feels betrayed by policies of Indianization, and ‘feels India to be his motherland, is proud of her and loves her’. Reflecting the difficulties of such a change of allegiance, N.G. Jog described ‘the journey from Father Britain, who has disowned them, to Mother India, whom they disowned so long, full of doubts and difficulties, heart-burning and even frustration.’104 Whilst some Anglo-Indians sought to establish independent colonies in places such as Whitefield, McCluskieganj and the Andaman Islands, and whilst others sought to migrate elsewhere in the British Empire, Anglo-Indian leaders such as Gidney and Anthony increasingly sought to bolster a national identification with India as motherland. A number of letters and articles published in the Anglo-Indian Review in the late 1930s and early 1940s reflected the difficulties of persuading many Anglo-Indians to imagine India rather than Britain as home. A correspondent from Bombay wrote that Anglo-Indians should learn the meaning of ‘Motherland’: It is instilled into [Anglo-Indians] at a very early age, that they are to serve God, the King and the Country; boy-scouts and girl-guides are made to swear it; but the country they are taught to serve is the country from which their forefathers originated. A very sound idea if the children, grand-children or great grand-children are going back to that country, but not for those who have made India their Home, not for a while, but for ever. Let us abnegate this false presumption before it is too late, serve the Empire undoubtedly, but the Motherland first and serve it as a community. And to those who still say India is not their motherland, I say, ‘leave the country’.105

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

47

Although Anglo-Indian leaders were conscious of the political expediency of identifying India as motherland and other Indians as siblings, many Anglo-Indians resisted both of these identifications and continued to imagine Britain rather than India as home. As an Anglo-Indian man who works for the community in New Delhi told me, ‘largely the Anglo-Indians who were at the lower and the middle levels, invariably thought of England [as home], Britannia as the paragon of everything, it was always that way. Indians were always the natives. It was a bad thing really, very bad . . . a mental closeting.’ Three other Anglo-Indian men – from Lucknow, Whitefield and Calcutta – describe the pre-Independence emphasis on an ‘Anglo’ rather than an ‘Indian’ identity: They associated themselves with the fact that they are more British than we are Indian. Though you are Anglo-Indian, you will still think the Anglo part more than the Indian part. So you felt you were more Anglo. We gradually as a community, whether it was deliberate or whether it just came from circumstances, I don’t know, but everything that was British was good and everything that was Indian was not so good. There was a tendency in pre-Independence days to consider oneself more the Anglo part of it rather than the Indian part, and many people considered Britain as a kind of home.

Deborah explained that the ‘Anglo’ part of her identity was most influential as she had been brought up with an ‘Anglo ethos’ that encompassed language, religion and education: We had the English language, we had the English religion, we read all the English books, Shakespeare and so on. . . . We were brought up on the English side. . . . If you had a bit of that Anglo in you, from the point of [view of ] the English language, the English religion, the English education, the mothertongue being English, you got sort of some preferential treatment. So there was an advantage to being Anglo. But, on the other hand, we lost out on the Indian side. And there were quite a few losses there I think.

This identification with Britain rather than India as home was reflected in cultural life, as shown by an article in the Review published in 1944: We can, most of us, read Shakespeare; but how many of us can read an Urdu newspaper? We can listen with pleasure to, or perhaps even play, a Beethoven Sonata; but how many of us can listen to Indian Music without laughing at it or saying ‘It is just noise?’ . . . Our failure to appreciate the culture of our land, expressed in music or any other medium, is due to a false set of values, which

48

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

finds anything Western perfect and anything Eastern beneath one’s notice. It is an attitude that is stronger in the Anglo-Indian than it is in the European. This turning away from Eastern culture is stronger in Anglo-Indians because the urge to like and appreciate it is stronger.

The author of this article argued that Anglo-Indians should create a culture and identity of their own, distinctive in its blend of East and West, and not venerating one at the expense of the other: ‘This can only be done by steeping ourselves in both Western and Eastern ideas. It is not a question of repressing the ‘‘Anglo’’ in us but a question of releasing the ‘‘Indian’’, and making something different, something truly Anglo-Indian.’106 The increasing identification of India as motherland not only revolved around questions of culture and identity, but also around images of the land itself as home. According to Maher, inherited images of British landscapes were being replaced by lived experiences of India as home: ‘Gone are the old views of the old English cottage and the quiet woods. They are taking their rightful place in the records of idealistic inheritances while the broad paddyfields, the majestic Himalayas, the mighty rivers, the nullahs and jungles of India are the realities of home.’107 Encouraging Anglo-Indians to accept India as home, the Parsi journalist Frene Talyarkhan wrote in 1946 that It is never too late to realise that you are part and parcel of this country. Whom do you hope to fool when you speak of ‘going home’?! Your ‘Home’ is here – it is in the suburbs of our big cities, it is in Jhansi, in Igatpuri, it is perhaps in the drabness of a Byculla street: it can be anywhere, but it is here in India and not across the seas. Don’t court ridicule by talking of ‘the lovely downs of England’, the downs of Ooty would be more appropriate. Look around you Anglo-India, learn something about your own country for a change; acquaint yourself with its culture, its history and its pulse of today. You too can play your part as a proud citizen of India. You may have to lose face but you will gain self-respect.108

Despite Gidney’s loyalty to the British in India, the Cripps Mission in 1942 denied Anglo-Indian representation in the proposed Constituent Assembly and rejected claims for employment and political safeguards, both of which were seen as key elements of Britain’s ‘betrayal’ of AngloIndians. Following Gidney’s death that same year, Frank Anthony increasingly stressed Anglo-Indian ties to India as motherland and emphasized political more than economic concerns that reflected the growing certainty that Indian self-government would soon be achieved. Under his leadership, Anglo-Indians were increasingly identified as a ‘nationalist minority’, seeking citizenship in the new India. After its rejection by the Cripps Mission, Anthony decided that ‘the Community could no longer stand on two stools. It could no longer express a political dichotomy’,109 and he began

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

49

to negotiate with Indian as well as British leaders. Whilst valuing the cultural distinctiveness of Anglo-Indians, Anthony sought to identify his community as Indian by nationality. As he said in his presidential address to the All-India Anglo-Indian Association in 1947, neither dress nor language form any preconditions of patriotism, [and] we yield as a community to no one in our love for this country and in our desire to promote her real greatness. Equally, we yield to no one in our claims to complete equality as citizens and as natives of this country. Equally, we intend to cling and cling tenaciously to our form of dress, to English which is our mother tongue and to everything which we regard and hold dear as representing our way of life.110

According to my informant Norman, Anthony preached a new gospel. . . . The thing that upset him a great deal was the sort of attitude of superiority, racial superiority, of the British. . . . He said that India is the only place which is home, and he also said we would keep our language, our culture, our way of life, our customs. And yet we must be Indian. . . . This fresh thinking from Anthony and other Anglo-Indian leaders made the leaders of the new India, many of whom were quite naturally hostile or not wanting to have anything to do with this community, [decide] to not only accept the Anglo-Indians into the community but even involve them in the drafting of the constitution.

In a Memorandum submitted to the British Cabinet Mission in 1946, Anthony described the growth of nationalism as ‘a remarkable change in the mentality of the average Anglo-Indian. . . . While in 1919 he resented being identified with Indians, today he resents being lumped with the Europeans in the eyes of his fellow nationals. The Anglo-Indians have proved themselves ready to take their place in the front rank of Indian Nationalism.’111 Despite Anthony’s arguments for political representation and despite the recommendations of the Sapru Conciliation Committee (endorsed by the Congress Party), the Cabinet Mission, like the Cripps Mission four years earlier, proposed that the Anglo-Indian community should be excluded from the Constituent Assembly and from the Interim Government. Following this rebuttal, Anthony met Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhai Patel to discuss the uncertain position and future of the Anglo-Indian community, and ‘secured from the leaders of India specific recognition of the Community’s place as one of the important, politically recognised minorities in India’.112 Following recommendations by the Congress Party, the Anglo-Indian community came to hold three seats on the Constituent Assembly and achieved official recognition in the Indian Constitution of 1950. Anthony criticized the ‘consistent attempts [by the

50

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA

British Government] to destroy the future of the community in this country’, while expressing ‘a deep debt of thanks to the Congress leaders for their generous recognition of the rights of the community’.113 According to an editorial in the Anglo-Indian Review, ‘The British who owed to us a great deal gave us nothing, while Congress who owed us nothing have given us a great deal’, and, as Maher put it, Indian leaders ‘extended the hand of kinship’.114 Reflecting on his achievements as leader of his community, and explaining his loyalty to the Congress Party in Independent India, Anthony wrote that ‘It would be correct to say that the Anglo-Indians are the only minority of European descent to survive in Asia as a recognised entity.’115 To this day, the Anglo-Indian community retains two nominated seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, as well as nominated seats in several legislative assemblies in states such as West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka.

Conclusions Anglo-Indians felt both at home and not at home in British India. Situating my research in relation to broader debates about imperial and nationalist domesticity, this chapter has introduced the spatial politics of home and identity for Anglo-Indians before Independence in two main contexts: an official and a non-official enquiry into the domiciled community in Calcutta conducted by British residents; and debates about home, identity and nationality within the Anglo-Indian community itself. The findings of the two enquiries reveal Anglo-Indian housing and the very idea of domicile in India as sites of imperial anxiety that were shaped by intertwined ideas about gender, ‘race’, class and sexuality. The second enquiry identified a number of key markers that distinguished the ‘home-born’ from the domiciled community, including the overcrowded and unhealthy housing of poor Anglo-Indians and the fact that they lived alongside poor Indians. Discourses of degeneration run throughout the report, invoking earlier debates about whether permanent British settlement in India was practicable or desirable, and often revolving around anxieties about feminine propriety and domestic respectability. Anglo-Indian homes were sites of imperial anxiety, not only because they were seen to represent the moral and physical decay widely associated with permanent domicile in India, but also because they disrupted a colonial urbanism predicated on spatial, racial and domestic distinctions between rulers and ruled. In contrast, debates about home, identity and nationality among middle-class Anglo-Indians concentrated on the political status and future of the community, both of which were articulated through very different representations of the home and femininity. Before Independence,

AT HOME IN B RITISH INDIA

51

Anglo-Indians had complex attachments to both India and Britain as home, as shown by the political mobilization of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland by Gidney and Anthony and by articles in the AngloIndian Review. By describing Anglo-Indians as ‘hostages’ to India in the title of his book, Herbert Stark implied not only that they were powerless and held against their will, but also that their fate ultimately remained a British responsibility. But by the 1930s and 1940s, Gidney and Anthony increasingly sought to identify the national loyalty of Anglo-Indians to India rather than Britain and, following Britain’s ‘betrayal’ of the community, the most significant political concessions were granted by the Indian National Congress Party. The mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was both manifested and erased in debates about the future and status of the community. Images of India as an Anglo-Indian motherland coexisted with images of Britain as fatherland, shaping ideas of home, identity and nationality that were distinctive in their duality and echoed community claims not only for a legitimate heritage but also for a legitimate stake in national life. Whilst an imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, an Indian maternal ancestor was usually erased and refigured as Mother India. The next chapter moves from a national to a domestic scale to consider the ways in which a public political shift from identifying with Britain as fatherland to India as motherland was both reproduced and resisted within Anglo-Indian homes. In addition, I explore the ways in which Anglo-Indian women were seen as both politically crucial and yet dangerously transgressive as they domesticated identity and embodied western modernity.

Chapter Three

Home, Community and Nation: Domesticating Identity and Embodying Modernity

Imaginative geographies of both Britain as fatherland and India as motherland underpinned the imperial nationalism of Anglo-Indians. Moving from a national to a domestic scale, this chapter considers the ways in which geographies of homely belonging for Anglo-Indians were shaped by ideas about an embodied fatherland. Whilst the heritage and memory of an imperial forefather shaped Anglo-Indian domestic life, an Indian maternal ancestor was more likely to be refigured as Mother India. At the same time, Anglo-Indian women – particularly mothers – were seen to play a crucial political role in the future of their community. This role was located primarily within the home, but its significance extended far beyond it, as Anglo-Indian women were encouraged to use their domestic influence for the benefit of the community at large. I consider the ways in which a public political shift from identifying with Britain as fatherland to India as motherland was both reproduced and contested within Anglo-Indian homes. The home and the lives of women both within and beyond it were seen as both politically crucial and dangerously transgressive in imagining the place of the community within the ‘new India’.

Domesticating Identity In 1941, an article by an anonymous European woman was reprinted in the Anglo-Indian Review. Its author was highly critical of The startling and unbelievable fact that people born and reared in India with partly Indian blood in their veins and Indian soil as their backgrounds have not only no affinity towards their homeland, but actually look down on it. A monstrous, a ghastly state of affairs. . . . Where is the home of Anglo-Indians?

HO M E, C O MM U NI T Y A N D NA T I ON

53

Are there really still many among them who, with eyes deliberately shut to realism, call the ‘West’ their home?1

She blamed Anglo-Indian domestic life and education for cultivating a sense of Europe as home, and for breeding ignorance of Indian history and culture. She was particularly scornful of Anglo-Indian attempts to recreate Western life and culture: ‘They know Jazz music but no Mozart; oilprints but no Raphael; pseudo-European furniture but no beauty in their homes.’ In reply, B.D. Leadon, the journalist and President of the Delhi branch of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association, criticized her ‘unjustified indictment’ of the community and wrote that ‘there is a tendency among offspring of mixed parentage . . . to emphasise one side of their ancestry, while suppressing, or even repudiating, the other’.2 Because the British were powerful empire-builders and Indians were subjected to their rule, Leadon argued that the ‘Anglo’ rather than the ‘Indian’ would predominate in terms of culture and identity. In response to the anonymous author’s ‘slanderous assertions’ about Anglo-Indian homes, he wrote that The Anglo-Indian community on the whole can be compared to the middle classes and lower middle classes of Europe, and generally speaking show the same, and in some cases better, taste than their European prototypes in furnishing and decorating their homes. An Oriental touch may be lent by an occasional brass or carved Kashmir table, but those are the things Europeans particularly yearn for.3

Unlike other Christians in India, the European ancestry of Anglo-Indians – reflected by cultural markers such as language, dress and eating habits – continued to shape a distinctive community identity that was bound to Europe, and particularly Britain, as home. Although Anglo-Indians were of a lower social status and poorer than the British elite in India, everyday life in an Anglo-Indian home was much closer to British than Indian domesticity. Middle-class Anglo-Indian women read many of the same household guides as British memsahibs, and, as already noted, employed Indian servants to cook and clean. Meals in both British and Anglo-Indian homes combined a distinctive mixture of western and Indian food, and were eaten with cutlery rather than by hand, and sitting at a table rather than on the floor. Whereas the 1918–19 Enquiry criticized Anglo-Indians for eating ‘highly spiced curries and the like instead of plain wholesome food’,4 eating practices were a central way in which Anglo-Indians distinguished themselves as different from, and as more western than, Indians from other communities. As Paul Connerton explains, eating habits and other bodily practices are an important component of collective – in his terms, ‘social’ – memory.5 Food and the

54

H OM E , C O MM U N I T Y A N D NA TI O N

social and cultural practices of cooking and eating are important in charting and maintaining a collective memory and identity, both within particular places and across wider diasporas.6 Food preparation and consumption also reveal a great deal about gender and family relations as well as cultural identity, and the kitchen itself has attracted an increasing range of critical work in terms both of its design and of the everyday practices that take place within it.7 Within the domestic sphere, food was a central way for Anglo-Indians to foster and reproduce an identity that was distinctive from both the British and Indians from other communities. Explaining how their home life differed from Indian home life before Independence, many of my interviewees focused on what, and how, they ate. For Susannah, a former Loreto pupil in Lucknow, food eaten by Anglo-Indians represented ‘a culture of its own’, as if ‘an English culture had been ordered into an Indian society. . . . Anglo-Indian cookery was different to the English cookery. It was a mixture.’ Anglo-Indians usually ate curry and rice at lunch but a western-style breakfast, tea and ‘side dish’ in the evening. As a teacher in Ranchi told me, ‘we picked up the traits of . . . cakes for tea and crumpets [and] we also picked up the spicy curries for lunch’. For example, a ‘masala steak’ represents the hybridity of Anglo-Indian cuisine. As an officer of an Anglo-Indian association in Sydney told me, ‘A steak is British and masala [is Indian], to give it a bit of difference. So that became the culture of the community too . . . made up dishes that suited both tastes.’8 Anglo-Indians also described their eating practices as different from their Indian counterparts. Mary, a retired teacher in Lucknow, told me, ‘I won’t sit down to a meal without serviettes, and I cannot eat with my hands, I cannot. I’ve been brought up that way’, and as Frances, who grew up in McCluskieganj and now lives in Calcutta, explains, ‘we sit at the table, we eat properly with the spoon, fork, knife and all the table manners and things like that’. This emphasis on domestic propriety – on eating ‘properly’ – underpins what are regarded as clear domestic differences between Anglo-Indians and other Indians. Not only would AngloIndians eat beef, unlike Hindus, and pork, unlike Muslims, but their eating practices also marked them as different and as more western than other Indians. According to Susannah and to Ruth, who teaches at a Loreto school: Hindus eat differently . . . they eat with their hands, they eat only with one hand, not with the other. But Anglo-Indians have kept up their knives and forks and spoons, and . . . their proper things, food on the table and all that sort of thing. (Susannah) The Anglo-Indian home is very different from an Indian home. I cannot sit on the floor. But if you go to an Indian home, it’s all carpets and everyone sits on

HO M E, C O MM U NI T Y A N D NA T I ON

55

the floor. . . . I hate saying these things because people think I’m prejudiced, but . . . it’s still your way of bringing up. (Ruth)

For Anglo-Indians, their ‘way of bringing up’ reflected a masculine, middle-class, imperial heritage that was more closely aligned to British than Indian domesticity. The imperial masculinity of Anglo-Indian domestic life has been explained in three main ways. First, British men sought to re-create familiar homes in India. As Owen Snell wrote in 1944, ‘From the very beginning the Anglo-Indian home was established on the English pattern and the English language, manners and customs predominated. This was only inevitable. The Englishman in exile tried to recapture and establish the environment to which he was accustomed and which he missed so much. It was for him a home away from home.’9 Clearly there was no single ‘English pattern’ of domesticity, but, as discussed in Chapter 2, Anglo-Indians aspired to reproduce the domestic life of the middle-class, imperial elite in British India. Second, many Anglo-Indian writers have argued that an Indian woman would be ostracized from her own community if she married a European man, particularly if she was a Hindu or Muslim rather than a Christian. As Reginald Maher explains, ‘A mixed marriage where a Hindu bride wedded a Christian resulted, because of the caste system, in an ostracism of the woman, her family and children. Those children grew up and deprived as they were of affection and assured of hatred from the maternal side returned the compliment aided and abetted by the European father.’10 Third, by seeking to re-create middle-class, European domestic life in India, Anglo-Indians sought to identify themselves more with their powerful paternal ancestry than with their subjugated Indian maternal ancestry. As Kenneth Wallace wrote in 1930, ‘A natural desire to be on the side of the dominating people gave rise to a pride in European descent and at the same time fostered a prejudice against Indian descent, the cue being taken from the ruling people.’11 Whilst many Europeans in India mocked Anglo-Indian attempts to emulate an idea of Britain as home, many Anglo-Indians saw themselves as superior to other Indians because of their European ancestry. According to Maher, ‘the further the Anglo-Indian went from the European stock, the greater became his need for appearances. The result was that he was obliged to live and dress less and less like his countrymen. The hookah which was to be found in many an Anglo-Indian home two generations back, is not to be found now.’12 Brian, who works for the community in Calcutta, explains that Anglo-Indian homes were influenced [by] both, but more British than Indian. . . . [Indian] women always had a lower voice at that time, nor were they prepared to influence the men with their style of Indian living and all. So what happens is that 80 to 85 per

56

H OM E , C O MM U N I T Y A N D NA TI O N

cent of the families that kept coming through were more British. It just happens that their mother or grandmother was an Indian, or that before that they belonged to some village, they have villagers who are their relatives, you see? But the influence of that village has no place in an Anglo-Indian home.

Rather than identify their Indian compatriots as ‘kinsmen’, many AngloIndians saw them primarily as servants. Just as British imperial domesticity reproduced ‘empires in the home’, Anglo-Indian relations with their Indian servants underpinned wider processes of differentiation both within and beyond the domestic sphere. As an article in the Anglo-Indian Review stated in 1943, ‘The average Anglo-Indian must not draw his inference of Indian life from the servants or lower class. He must realise that the upper strata of Indians live at a level of social and cultural refinement which it would be difficult to find even in England.’13 But, as one of the very few AngloIndian men to join the Indian Civil Service in the 1930s told me: The average Anglo-Indian family . . . had never met cultivated, educated Indians. They had their servants, they had the tradesman, they had shopkeepers, but in [all but] one in a hundred cases, would never remember a well-educated Indian sitting in their front room and talking to them. So at the back of their minds, their picture of an Indian was of a lower class. Maybe, had they accepted integration earlier and mixed freely, they would have realized there was really no difference between him and us.

In similar terms, Joan, a former Dow Hill pupil who migrated to Britain in 1947, remembers that The Indians with whom you would have mixed, they were not in your social class. . . . The others, you probably felt, wrongly I’m sure, that they were not your equals, or maybe you just didn’t have anything in common with them. So you didn’t really mix. . . . You never questioned how wrong it was that you lived in a country that you said was not really your country, [and] you never mixed with the people of that country.

Servants occupied an ambivalent position, ‘both valued and feared’14 within the home. James Clifford suggests that servants were the ‘domesticated outsiders of the bourgeois imagination’,15 implying that the presence of servants of a lower class helped to reaffirm the bourgeois identity not only of the home but also of the family whom they served. In similar terms, Indian servants can be seen as the domesticated outsiders of a British and AngloIndian imperial imagination. Like British memsahibs, Anglo-Indian women were most directly responsible for the management of their servants. Also like memsahibs, many Anglo-Indian women spoke ‘kitchen’ Hindi to their servants. A distinction was drawn between this simplified form of language

HO M E, C O MM U NI T Y A N D NA T I ON

57

that was sufficient for household management, and the more fluent and polite language for communicating with educated Indians beyond the home. Speaking English as their first language was an important way for AngloIndians to identify with the British rather than other Indians. But even though Anglo-Indians spoke English as their first language, their distinctive accent – known in disparaging terms as a ‘chi-chi’ or ‘dirty’ accent – identified them as domiciled in India rather than born in Britain. According to an officer of an Anglo-Indian association in Perth, ‘you put an Anglo-Indian in a room and he can be as fair as everybody else and . . . as soon as he opens his mouth he is an Anglo-Indian, because there is . . . an accent there which maybe we don’t realize because we talk together a lot, but outsiders will pick it up straightaway.’ In an article by Sir Percival Phillips published in the Daily Mail in 1931, and reprinted in the Anglo-Indian Review, this accent was characterized by ‘the clipped, sing-song cadence of the native-born’,16 which was often likened to a Welsh accent. Frank Anthony criticized the idea of a ‘chi-chi’ accent as an ignorant generalization: ‘It is like saying that the British Nation has a Cockney accent. Accent in the Community varies from stratum to stratum and also from North to South.’ But, as Anthony continued, he felt at home when he visited Wales: ‘I thought they were Anglo-Indians: they thought that I was Welsh. I do not know whether their accent was like mine or mine like theirs. The accent of the Anglo-Indians has an intonation very much like that of the Welsh.’17 For Phillips, a distinctive accent represented ‘the indelible stamp of Anglo-India’ and was one of the reasons why British children were sent to Britain for their education from an early age. Racialized anxieties about raising British children in India often revolved around whether Indian, British or Anglo-Indian women should be employed to care for young children. Just as Indian wet-nurses were often thought to pose a threat to the assumed racial purity of British babies, Anglo-Indian nannies were also often thought to pose a threat because of their accent. According to a household guide written in 1923, ‘the Eurasian accent is very infectious and small children quickly adopt it’.18 As Elinor Tollinton wrote in a memoir about growing up as a British child in India in the early twentieth century, That we should grow up having adopted the particular chi-chi accent of the people who had lived a long time in India, was a particular dread of my Mother, so we enjoyed frequent changes of nurse. It was even arranged that Norcy [an architect who lived with them] would go to the station to meet the new nanny armed with [a month’s pay], a box of chocolates, magazines, and the return fare; if on alighting her first words were spoken in the dreaded accent Norcy would arrange her return by the next train.19

The English language spoken by Anglo-Indians often included Hindi, Urdu and Bengali words and idioms,20 but, before Independence, it was

58

H OM E , C O MM U N I T Y A N D NA TI O N

more common for Anglo-Indians to learn French rather than an Indian language at school. Learning a rudimentary form of Hindi, Urdu or Bengali was an important way to domesticate difference between themselves and their servants. Frances remembers that her mother ‘used to speak [Hindi] but not very well. . . . It was what they called a kitchen Hindi, just enough to talk to the servants about what to prepare and things like that. But they couldn’t read or write or anything like that.’ Mary, who grew up in Lahore in the 1920s and 1930s in a household with five servants, describes her use of language as follows: I think in English, talk in English. I don’t despise the Hindi language, I despise myself for not mastering it. I learnt French as my second language in school. . . . An Anglo-Indian is one who can speak the English language correctly. They can be black, white, pink or green, but if he can speak properly [he is an Anglo-Indian]. . . . I talk kitchen Hindi, all wrong. If anyone wants to laugh, they come and listen. I should have picked it up, I’m a little ashamed of that.

Although young Anglo-Indian children might learn to be fluent in an Indian language from their ayah, they usually lost this fluency when they went to school. As Teresa, a former Dow Hill pupil, told me: ‘I was totally bilingual until I went to school because of my ayah. . . . The minute I hit school, away went [my] Hindi. All I needed to say was to the servant ‘‘Bring me a slice of bread’’ or ‘‘Will you run my bath?’’ to the ayah or whatever.’ And yet, as she continued, ‘the amazing thing is when I talk a lot in my sleep, I speak good Hindi. It’s in the subconscious.’ But in everyday life, as two other Dow Hill pupils remember, ‘kitchen Hindi’ was more widely spoken than a fluent and polite version of the language: you would speak Hindustani to the servants, and that was more or less basic Hindustani. You didn’t hold conversations. It would only be to your servants, what they had to do, what food they had to buy, what they had to cook, you know, the dishes that you wanted. . . . You only knew enough Hindustani for giving orders. ( Joan) we spoke Hindustani. Not fluent Hindustani, not polite Hindustani, we couldn’t have spoken to a socially-equal Indian family with our type of Hindustani, it was a servants’ Hindustani. . . . We used to say tum – ‘you’ – ‘you’ve done something wrong, you’ve done something wrong’. In polite society it’s aap. Things like that which we didn’t know and we didn’t care about because we’d never had cause or need to use that kind of polite Hindustani. So there was contact with Indians, but as master and servant. (Deborah)

By fashioning their homes and domesticity as more European than Indian, Anglo-Indians domesticated a series of racial and class differences

HO M E, C O MM U NI T Y A N D NA T I ON

59

between themselves, the British and other Indians. Although Anglo-Indian leaders increasingly sought to describe their community as Indian by nationality, many Anglo-Indians contested this in their everyday, domestic life. Whereas the memory of a British forefather continued to exert influence in the home and in political debates, the memory of an Indian maternal ancestor was superseded by images of India as motherland and by the domestic roles of Anglo-Indian women.

Embodying Modernity Anglo-Indian women were at the forefront of debates about the future and status of the community in the years before Independence, with many commentators stressing their political importance within the home.21 This was an attempt not only to domesticate Anglo-Indian women, particularly during and after the Second World War, but also to domesticate a new national identity. As Clifford Hicks put it in 1940, ‘Woman was not merely meant for the home, she was meant also for the nation. . . . If the character of the Community is to be rebuilt the homes of its people must be rebuilt, and the rebuilding of the home is the special work of the women.’ Similarly stressing the domestic and community responsibilities of women, Frank Anthony argued that ‘The part to be played and the role to be occupied by any community in the life of a nation are ultimately determined by the attitude and the activities of its women.’22 In their lives within and beyond the home, Anglo-Indian women were depicted as both admirably emancipated and yet dangerously transgressive. In 1932, an article in the Anglo-Indian Review stated that ‘it is truly said that the emancipation of India lies in the freedom and upliftment of her women folk, and we have no hesitation in saying the same applies to the AngloIndian and Domiciled European community’.23 But, more than this, Anglo-Indian women were seen not only as more emancipated than other women in India, but also as largely responsible for the emancipation of other Indian women. As an Anglo-Indian man living in Whitefield told me, before Independence the lives of Anglo-Indian women were as different from other Indian women ‘as the life of an English woman and an Indian woman’ because of differences in dress, food, religion and the fact that ‘Anglo-Indian men hardly ever met educated Indian women’. As Norman puts it, ‘the Anglo-Indian woman was first perhaps to be emancipated’ in India. Anglo-Indian women were seen, and saw themselves, as embodying a distinctively western modernity by wearing western dress, by working beyond the home, and by their ability to mix socially with men, to choose whom to marry, and to live in a nuclear rather than in a joint family after marriage.

60

H OM E , C O MM U N I T Y A N D NA TI O N

Before Independence, Anglo-Indian women were visibly different from other Indian women because they wore western dress. As Frances remembers, ‘at my grandfather’s time, it was unheard of to put on a sari and walk about the house . . . the servants were the ones that wore the saris, not us.’ For a number of commentators, the distinctiveness of western dress for Anglo-Indians was central to their collective identity, just as other styles of dress identified other Indian communities. According to an article published in the Anglo-Indian Review in 1946, ‘In India the Sikh maintains his traditional form of dress and a distinctive mode of dressing his hair, the Pathan his baggy pyjamas and embroidered waistcoat, the Muslim his sherwani and the Anglo-Indian will maintain his own traditional form of dress. It is a right that no one can deny us.’24 By early 1947, the anonymous author of a pamphlet published by the Calcutta Study Circle used western dress to embody the uncertainty facing the Anglo-Indian community as Independence drew near: ‘There is a sense of change, there is a sense of danger, there is a sense of insecurity. . . . Some feel that a complete change, almost literally from head to toe, is necessary. Our collars and ties must be discarded, the frock, as far as the community is concerned, must quit India.’25 Anglo-Indian women identified themselves as western and emancipated not only through their dress, but also through their paid employment. From the late nineteenth century, Anglo-Indian women had worked as nurses, teachers and in the commercial world as secretaries, telephone operators and stenographers. Most Anglo-Indian women were educated and trained in India, but some travelled to Britain for this purpose. In 1929, for example, the Anglo-Indian Review reported that Phoebe Nierses had passed the final examination of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries in London and that Eunice Gomez had had a ‘brilliant scholastic career’, graduating from Oxford University. Both women were the first AngloIndians to achieve such success in Britain.26 For an Anglo-Indian woman in Bangalore who was involved in organizing the international reunion in 1998, ‘the Indian lady was never allowed to work. Now they have seen us, they are coming out,’ and, according to Norman, Anglo-Indian women, unlike British or other Indian women, ‘became the first working women in the country’. This picture is somewhat inaccurate, in that low-caste Indian women worked as servants and manual workers, whilst highly educated, professional Indian women had begun to work as doctors, lawyers, social reformers and teachers from the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Anglo-Indian women were the first to be employed in large numbers as nurses, secretaries and stenographers, work for which they were seen as particularly well suited. As Norman continues, Memsahibs stayed at home and had thousands of servants. The nonAnglo-Indian, the others, it was against caste to go out. Bad girls went out

HO M E, C O MM U NI T Y A N D NA T I ON

61

to work, good girls stayed at home. . . . Now it’s against caste to handle excreta, corpses, this, that and the other. So who’s going to do this? The Anglo-Indian. Then they were the first people to enter the new commercial world as stenographers, telephone operators, all these new developments that came into India. The Anglo-Indian women . . . became a very integral part of the commercial establishments of the British.

Before Independence, the majority of nurses in India were Anglo-Indian. An article in the Anglo-Indian Review reported in 1937 that this was ‘because of their special aptitude for the kind of work the profession involves. Women of other Indian communities have hitherto turned up their noses at the profession, partly because of religion and sentimental objections and partly due to their past traditions and social customs.’27 Anglo-Indian nurses were likened to Florence Nightingale. According to an article in the Anglo-Indian Review in 1939, ‘The Lady of the Lamp raised the lamp in the Crimea. The Anglo-Indian woman has raised it in India permitting its lustre to fall on every caste and creed. She has eradicated the prejudicial opprobium and held the lamp high until today the Indian woman sees the beacon to a high and noble profession.’28 In his history of the community, Frank Anthony wrote that, Free from caste and communal inhibitions, Anglo-Indian women have made a contribution to India’s nursing services that was unique: 80% of India’s nursing services, military and civilian, right up to Independence was drawn from the Anglo-Indian Community. In peace and in war they served India selflessly. They set standards which were comparable with the highest to be found in the most advanced western countries.29

At the same time, Anglo-Indian women also enjoyed greater freedom and success in their paid employment in British and other western companies than did many Anglo-Indian men, who remained largely dependent on by now limited British patronage in government services. As an article in the Anglo-Indian Review put it in 1932, ‘Our men seem to be intoxicated with apathy and indifference – the result of a sense of economic pseudo-security coupled with an indifference born of employment in the past India, fast disappearing from the visions of all except Anglo-Indians.’30 In contrast to this increasingly vulnerable employment situation among male AngloIndians, demand for Anglo-Indian women was buoyant. By 1939, the Bengal Provincial Branch of the Anglo-Indian and Domiciled European Association had opened a Women’s Employment Bureau in Calcutta to find work for stenographers, typists, telephone operators and nurses.31 During the Second World War, many Anglo-Indians served as members of the Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India). Anglo-Indian women featured prominently in promotional photographs for the WAC(I). Alongside a

62

H OM E , C O MM U N I T Y A N D NA TI O N

few other Indian women wearing saris, it is notable that the majority of women depicted in these promotional photographs were members of the domiciled community, identifiable by their short skirts and because they are sometimes shown smoking (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). As Frank Anthony told the governing body of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association in 1946, ‘The contribution of Anglo-Indian women to the war effort is without comparison in India. It is worthy of very special note and consideration that Anglo-Indian women have contributed more to the war effort than all the women of all the other communities in India, put together.’32 Remembering Anglo-Indian women like his mother who belonged to the WAC(I), Brian told me that It was the woman . . . who was fighting for recognition. . . . ‘Look, I am here . . . I am an Anglo-Indian. I have big dreams. I am like you. Like the English, like the Europeans.’ She was trying to radiate that you see, ‘Come to my home and see my home, I’m like you . . . love me, accept me. See I want a better life. Things around me are not good. I’m living in a country where there’s no discipline, where there’s no order, where there’s absolute chaos.’

The prominence of Anglo-Indian women in paid employment was attributed in part to their ability to work alongside men. Through their ability to mix with men both socially and at work, and through their ability to choose whom to marry, Anglo-Indian women were seen and saw themselves as more western and more emancipated than other Indian women. As Mary remembers, ‘when we used to go to dances when I was young . . . the Indian women had not come out as much as they’ve come out now. . . . they never went to dances. . . . I don’t think I remember seeing anybody, they were all English people.’ Comparing the lives of AngloIndian women with other Indian women, many interviewees described their freedom to socialize, their equality with men both before and after marriage, and the fact that their marriages were for love rather than arranged by their parents. As the following examples show, the social and spatial freedom for Anglo-Indian women before Independence is remembered in stark contrast to the assumed domestic confinement of other Indian women: It’s very difficult to live in a Hindu house, because they have very strange ideas, you know, where you have to be subservient to the man you marry. And we were not like that, we’re equal. And if my husband and I walk out, we walk side by side. But you’ll invariably see an Indian woman walking half a step behind her husband, you won’t see them walking together. And they’re like lords of the manor, they have to be catered to for every whim and fancy, and that’s against our grain. (Mary)

HO M E, C O MM U NI T Y A N D NA T I ON

63

Figure 3.1 ’Women in the WAC(I) enjoying ’’time off’’ between lectures, 1944’. (Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London, IND. 3590) the Indian women at that period of time, not today, but that period of time . . . were very reserved, shy. They never ventured out, they never looked you straight in the eye. Their men kept them at home, in their place. (Brian)

64

H OM E , C O MM U N I T Y A N D NA TI O N

Figure 3.2 ’A group of happy WAC(I) women in the lounge of their mess’ (Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London, IND. 2190) we have always been independent, and the men in our community have sort of looked up to us and we have not been treated like say a chattel or something, like other Indian women have been, or just be in the home and do the domestic chores and things like that. We are equal, on an equal footing with our men, whereas in the Indian homes – of course now it’s changing – but it was not really like that, the Indian women were always considered a little lower than their menfolk. (Margaret)

Many Anglo-Indians told me that their close family relationships and, in particular, their respect for parents and other older relatives was ‘an Indian trait which has wiped off or washed off’ on the community. But in other ways, Anglo-Indian family life was seen as more different than similar to family life in other Indian communities. For example, Anglo-Indian women would not be expected to live in a joint family after marriage. As an Anglo-Indian woman in Lucknow explained, ‘when Indians marry . . . once the girl gets married she doesn’t belong to her parents and to her family at all, she belongs to her husband’s side. The birth parents have nothing more to do with her when she gets married.’ According to Frances and her husband Leonard, before Independence, people lived in joint families. . . . And they didn’t allow their womenfolk to go out and work. (Frances)

HO M E, C O MM U NI T Y A N D NA T I ON

65

Their parents arranged everything, they just got married, accepted whatever the parents say, but now it’s not like that. (Leonard)

Unlike Indian joint families when the oldest son and his wife would care for his parents, it was more usual for Anglo-Indian daughters to take this role. So, for example, Angela, an Anglo-Indian nurse from Lucknow, told me that [Anglo-Indian women] are very attached to our homes, to our parents. I think the women have too much awe for their parents, and then the boys, the boys can marry [and] then go off with their wives. And it’s the opposite in the Hindu family, the boys bring their wives to their homes and look after them. . . . one [good thing is] that we don’t have to get married . . . no-one tells us ‘Well you have to get married.’ So I didn’t get married. And I think my whole life, I have really looked after my parents and done a lot for them.

The ability to choose whom to marry represented an important element of western modernity and freedom for many Anglo-Indian women (see Figure 3.3 for a western-style wedding). But for others, the ability to remain unmarried was similarly remembered as an example of personal and collective emancipation. Not only did Anglo-Indian women often take on the main responsibility in caring for their parents, but they also worked for the benefit of their siblings too. Patricia, who works for the community in Calcutta, told me that You find that for Anglo-Indians, it’s the girls who look after the family. In my own family I was the eldest and . . . my mother wanted me to go to college, but I knew how hard my parents were struggling, it wasn’t easy for them. They were both working, my father was in a government job that didn’t pay very much and my mother was a stenographer, and there were three children to see through school. I was determined that my two brothers were going to get to college and were going to get the best because I didn’t want them growing up like other boys. . . . so I didn’t go to college and I started working [as a secretary] from the age of 16.

Domestic Transgression All three of these markers of difference – dress, work and relationships with men – were embodied by Anglo-Indian women as more western and more emancipated than other Indian women. They are also prominent themes in the novel Bhowani Junction by John Masters, which was published in 1954, made into a Hollywood film two years later, and remains the best known fictional depiction of Anglo-Indians.33 Bhowani Junction is set in a railway colony in 1946 and centres on home and identity and its contested

66

H OM E , C O MM U N I T Y A N D NA TI O N

Figure 3.3 An Anglo-Indian wedding in Lucknow in the early 1940s (Photograph by A. D’Silva. Reproduced courtesy of R. D’Silva) embodiment by women in the year before Independence. Different characters narrate the novel, which revolves around Victoria Jones, who has recently returned home from service in the WAC(I) in New Delhi. Her relationships with three men – an Anglo-Indian railwayman, the Sikh son of a nationalist mother, and a British Colonel – embody her, and her community’s, divided loyalties to Britain and to India and their uncertain future in relation to both places. As Patrick Taylor, the Anglo-Indian railwayman, says: ‘we couldn’t go Home. We couldn’t become English because we were half Indian. We couldn’t become Indian, because we were half English. We could only stay where we were and be what we were.’34 Domiciled in an Indian railway junction, the Anglo-Indian community also lives at a junction of home, identity and nationality. In Victoria Jones’ words: Searching for home, I had not found home – only Home and a house. . . . Home was where the English came from and went back to, though I never could. Home was where they did not have a city and a cantonment in every big town, so that the officers could laugh themselves sick at an Anglo-Indian who talked about how he was going ‘Home to Southampton Cantonment.’ Our house was Number 4 Collett Road, a bungalow sitting on a tired piece of land belonging to a country which Pater and everyone who lived in the house repudiated.35

Although the emancipation of Anglo-Indian women like Victoria Jones appeared on one level to embody the western modernity of the community,

HO M E, C O MM U NI T Y A N D NA T I ON

67

their domestic transgression was also a cause for concern. Frank Anthony berated Anglo-Indian women for their harmful influence: ‘our women have retarded the development of the community. No community can rise above the standards set by its womenfolk . . . [and] our ladies have held the community back. . . . You have been a reactionary force in Anglo-Indian homes. You have taught your sons and daughters to look away from the community’36 by looking to Britain rather than India as home. Whilst, on the one hand, Anglo-Indian women in the WAC(I) were praised for their national and imperial pride and duty, both they, and those women who stayed at home, were also criticized for living in a world of illusion that was based on the possibility of marrying a European or American soldier and leaving India. As an article in the Anglo-Indian Review put it during the Second World War, ‘The unprecedented number of European troops has released a fever of Europeanisation and complete disregard of what the future will produce. It is our girls and women perhaps who will suffer the most bitter disillusionment in the aftermath of the war.’37 More immediately, an editorial published in 1944 warned of ‘a communal menace’, both in terms of children being born to unmarried Anglo-Indian women and in terms of the spread of venereal disease within the community. Both elements of this ‘communal menace’ were attributed to the presence of American soldiers in India: We know . . . that a large number of illegitimate children have been born to Anglo-Indian girls in Delhi. We also know that the putative paternity of these children is almost invariably American. . . . Their mothers are for the most part employed in the WAC(I). . . . Knowledgeable persons place the incidence of venereal disease, in the American Army in India, at anything between 50 and 60 per cent. It is known that the American authorities supply their officers and men with appliances and products which can only encourage them to sexual promiscuity.38

By 1944, the United States Army authorities had banned the marriage of American soldiers to British subjects in India.39 An anonymous article in the Review criticized ‘Scores of A.I. [Anglo-Indian] girls [who] are continuing to make fools of themselves by parading about cafes and dance halls having a good fling with these trans-Atlantic Buddies who cannot marry them, and do not propose. . . . Leave the Yanks severely alone. British boys are better and A.I. boys best of all as husbands and fathers.’40 Mary told me that it was ‘all right’ for an Anglo-Indian woman to marry a British soldier, ‘but many of those soldiers let those girls down. And it was absolutely taboo, it wasn’t heard of, that an Anglo-Indian would marry an Indian boy.’41 She told me about her own experience of being let down. She had been engaged to a Scottish teacher in the 1940s, but

68

H OM E , C O MM U N I T Y A N D NA TI O N

that engagement broke, and maybe it was because he had no ambition at all, and he used to drink and I’m terrified for people who drink. And his only ambition was to take over his father’s pub. . . . And at that time I was so violently, rapturously, stupidly in love, that I was ready to stand behind the bar and mop the dirt and that. Imagine my doing that! . . . when he went, my marriage broke, I read a letter from his mother. He purposely left it I think, because it was with odds and ends that he left. And I opened it and read it: ‘Don’t you come back with any black lady from India.’ Oh! I was so horrified. I said ‘Probably she’s a blessed washerwoman over there, pouring over the Pears and all.’ And I said, ‘The highly educated people that we are too.’ What ignorance. It was very bad. The only thing you can do is ride out the time.

Another Anglo-Indian woman in Lucknow told me about a friend of hers who married an Englishman in the late 1940s and ‘went off over there’: ‘He went first and then she followed up. And I believe when she went there, she found that he was already married and he said ‘‘This is the coloured help that I’ve sent for.’’ ’ Despite such painful stories, Charles, a teacher in Lucknow, told me that ‘having an affair with a British officer was a kind of passport . . . it might have been a method to go to greener pastures. Also, if your Anglo-Indian men are so pathetic, you look for a better male.’ In similar terms, Brian told me that Anglo-Indian women went to ‘dancehalls, bars, cheap places, because there was no other way of coming up in life. Now she was a lucky girl if in a bar, or a restaurant, she came across a well-to-do European or Englishman. And then her life changed, and then she became a lady.’ Betty Loch, a British woman who employed a ‘charming’ Anglo-Indian to look after her three children in India, remembered desparingly attempting to make her take some thought for her own future. It was no good – any little money she had, she ‘invested’ in pink satin dancing shoes or lipstick hoping to attract a husband out of the fast thinning ranks of British soldiers all on their way out of India. She had not succeeded by the time I left India.42

Writing in the Anglo-Indian Review in 1940, Clifford Hicks lamented the fate of Anglo-Indian women who looked to a home beyond India by seeking to marry an Englishman: During her school days and perhaps even for a couple of years later, India is not so bad and there is no place like home, while she does not even notice that her parents are dark and old fashioned. But things suddenly change when an Englishman takes notice of her or when one of that peculiar species, the fair Anglo-Indian boy-friend who apes the Englishman appears on the scenes. India almost instantly becomes perfectly horrid and the Indians the most ill-mannered, untrustworthy, the dirtiest people on earth. Life at home

HO M E, C O MM U NI T Y A N D NA T I ON

69

becomes dull and drab, her parents always misunderstand and are unduly suspicious. . . . Eventually her Englishman’s furlough comes round and in the sunset with the red sails of that furlough-ship there fades the hopes of that marriage, for which she had sacrificed everything. Did I say everything? Made lonely by a set of false values, despising her own Community, out of place at home and lacking in an experimental knowledge of religion, she has nothing before her but the cruel alternative of acting the role she wrote for herself.43

Hicks’ thinly veiled remarks invoke the spectre of interracial sex and illegitimacy that stereotypically identified Anglo-Indian women as more licentious than other European and Indian women. The possibilities of escaping a predetermined role of moral decay and alienation – a role apparently scripted for individual women and for the community as a whole – appear to depend on Anglo-Indian women accepting India as home. As he concluded, ‘the changing situation of India will demand some definite readjustment on the part of the Anglo-Indian girl if the Community is to be held together in the future’.

Home, Community and Nation A number of wartime articles in the Anglo-Indian Review argued that the rightful place of Anglo-Indian women was in the home rather than in paid employment and were also critical of their neglect of domestic duties in favour of more frivolous pursuits. An editorial entitled ‘Back to the home’ called for ‘the post-war period to be one of concentration on the home front. Let [women] work unceasingly to bring up children of the very best physical, moral and intellectual fibre’, and an article entitled ‘Home sweet home’ argued that women should take greater personal domestic responsibility: The dance hall, the picture-palace, and even the wellworn pavement holds more charm for the married lady of to-day than the old time hearth of selfcreating fascination. The curse of Anglo-India is the retinue of cheap service in the shape of incompetent, ignorant servants who have created the indifference in the hearts of housewives and the sad result is seen in neglected children who are so often left to these irresponsible non-Christians whose standard of morality is so poor.44

The home was depicted as a moral and religious repository not only of health and happiness, but also of community responsibility and political security. The domestic roles of Anglo-Indian women acquired national significance beyond the home. As noted in 1944 by an article entitled ‘Wake up Anglo-Indian women!’, ‘the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world and

70

H OM E , C O MM U N I T Y A N D NA TI O N

we mothers must unite together for the mutual benefit of our helpless children. . . . Unless we mothers of 1944 wake up to our own gross shortcomings, we shall be the direct cause of the emasculation of our men folk.’ In similar terms, other articles told Anglo-Indian women that ‘the salvation of the community is in your hands,’ and advised them to ‘Limit the Cinema and the Dance hall and take to the kitchen and the sewing machine.’45 Such commentators argued that Anglo-Indian homes should be sites of self-help at a time of economic stringency and political uncertainty. As E.W. Blanchette wrote in 1947, Unless we place more value in our home life and give our girls their rightful place there is a poor chance for the Community, particularly as our boys will not be able to afford expensive and useless wives. Until therefore, the wives prove a helpmate in the pioneering in new fields by our young men we will not be able to keep pace with the rapidly changing conditions under which our Community will be required to live in the New India.46

At the same time, Anglo-Indian women were also encouraged to domesticate politics by bringing them home to their families and by ensuring the place of Anglo-Indian homes and domestic life within the new, independent India. In 1940, Henrietta Wise wrote that ‘the responsibility is spread from Legislate Assemblies to our homes, from the agenda of special sessions to the conversations of everyday, from Round Table Conferences to conferences around the dining table, and from elected representatives to you and me’.47 Finally, an article published in 1944 about Edna Herd, the only female member of the Governing Body of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association,48 summarized the political importance of motherhood and domesticity: She feels that the women of the community should be deeply conscious of the responsibility for the future of the community which lies in their hands, their own future, the future of their children and their children’s children. A future holding great promise, which the community have it in them to realise by combining those qualities, which have made their Western forefathers so successful in our times, with the timeless wisdom and understanding of their Indian heritage which made a civilisation when their Western ancestors were savages and still has a great future before it.49

Conclusions Before Independence, Anglo-Indian homes and the domestic roles of women reproduced an imperial nationalism that reflected an attachment to both Britain and India as home. Anglo-Indian women – particularly

HO M E, C O MM U NI T Y A N D NA T I ON

71

mothers – were seen to play a crucial political role within the home, and domestic life was imagined as intensely political in its influence and implications. This political recognition of both women and the home was an attempt to domesticate Anglo-Indian women, but also to domesticate a new national identity that regarded India more than Britain as home. And yet, rather than merely serve as a site of social reproduction of a new national identity, Anglo-Indian homes were important sites of imperial resistance. Although leaders such as Gidney and Anthony increasingly sought to describe their community as Indian by nationality and even as nationalist in its interests, the home life of Anglo-Indians remained more British than Indian and many Anglo-Indians continued to imagine Britain rather than India as home. In contrast to the objectification of Anglo-Indian women that persists in imperial histories and fiction, debates about the future and status of the community in the years before Independence reveal their crucial political role and the political significance of the home and domestic life. Unlike other Indian women and unlike Anglo-Indian men, Anglo-Indian women were described, and described themselves, as emancipated subjects whose influence extended far beyond the home in shaping community and national politics. But although their emancipation was heralded as evidence of European modernity and freedom, it was also seen to transgress the limits of acceptable feminine behaviour by evoking the spectre of interracial sex and illegitimacy that continued to haunt the community. Many commentators stressed the political importance of both women and the home, but did so not only to domesticate a new national identity but also to domesticate Anglo-Indian women, particularly during and after the Second World War. In the next chapter, I continue to investigate the spatial politics of home for Anglo-Indians in the 1930s and 1940s. Turning to the attempt to establish an Anglo-Indian homeland at McCluskiganj in rural Bihar, I explore the ways in which imaginative and material geographies of home were mobilized on both domestic and national scales, and how they were gendered in distinctive ways for male and female settlers. I argue that colonization and settlement at McCluskieganj both manifested and refigured a collective memory of mixed descent for Anglo-Indians seeking to feel at home in British India.

Chapter Four

Colonization and Settlement: Anglo-Indian Homelands

Writing in the Indian newspaper Sunday Mid-Day in 1992, Vaihayasi Daniel described a place called McCluskieganj in the east Indian state of Bihar.1 Called ‘Chota [little] London’, the article characterized McCluskieganj as a pastoral and nostalgic remnant of the British Raj that remained, despite the title of the piece, far removed from metropolitan modernity. Daniel sets the scene: The silent, gentle Chota Nagpur hills, with sienna-tiled roofs. Cows. Bleating goats. A lazy Sunday morning vegetable haat [market]. Blouse-less bodies balancing awkward loads of wood. A thatched hut selling the potent local brew – hariva – and a few swooned-out Adivasi men stretched out nearby, their minds in a blissful alcoholic blur. And then abruptly – in the middle of nowhere – the distinctive southern Bihari countryside lapses into an absurd time warp. And culture warp. Delicate tea roses. Neatly planted bouganvillea hedges. White picket fences. Tidy English country-style cottages, trimmed with lattice-work, with names that roll off the tongue . . . The Retreat . . . Dunroamin . . . The Hermitage. White-washed churches. A forest of tombstones in solemn graveyards. Wee shops overflowing with warm, sweetsmelling rolls and buns. Bleached faces, neither brown nor white. Quaint accents. McCluskieganj, Bihar, Little Anglo-India, 1500 feet above sea level, 40 miles from Ranchi.2

McCluskieganj appears to be out of place: an uncanny settlement that evokes memories of an imperial past and culture both distant and strange and yet present and domesticated. As Daniel continues, McCluskieganj ‘has a particular exotic status. [It] is the only homeland that Anglo-Indians worldwide can claim as their very own – the leftover of a dream for independence.’ McCluskieganj seems to be exotically different to the rest of Bihar and to the rest of India because it represents a home for

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

73

Anglo-Indians. Anglo-Indians are described as ‘neither brown nor white’ and with ‘quaint accents’, and themselves appear to be out of place. In the previous two chapters I discussed Anglo-Indians as domiciled and yet unsettled in British India, focusing on the politicization of home and its embodiment by Anglo-Indian women. Public political discourses shifted from identifying with Britain as fatherland to a closer affiliation to India as motherland. The collective memory of an imperial forefather played an important part in shaping Anglo-Indian ideas of home on domestic, national and imperial scales, and the domestic roles of Anglo-Indian women were politically important both within and beyond the home. In this chapter I develop these ideas in relation to Anglo-Indian colonization schemes, of which settlement at McCluskieganj is the largest and bestknown example. I explore the mobilization of both imperial nationalism and a homing desire, in practice as well as in the imagination. Rather than concentrate on Anglo-Indians living in cities such as Calcutta or Lucknow, I discuss their settlement in rural Bihar, and show how an Anglo-Indian ‘dream for independence’ was underpinned by a pastoral vision of self-help, peace and prosperity. Locating Anglo-Indian homelands within wider debates about home, nation and empire as gendered and racialized spaces, I show how colonization and settlement at McCluskieganj were embodied differently by Anglo-Indian men and women. In many ways, Anglo-Indian settlement at McCluskieganj enacted a productive nostalgia, whereby a longing for home was embodied in practice, oriented towards the future as well as the past, and shaped by a sense of place that was both proximate and distant. McCluskieganj extends over ten thousand acres and was established in 1933 by the Colonization Society of India (CSI), which had been registered since 1913 to sell shares in land.3 Settlement was promoted through brochures and a monthly journal, the Colonization Observer, which was circulated to all shareholders and settlers,4 and, later, by cine films shown in Calcutta of ‘the Settlers at work, at play, and scenes of the Colony in general’.5 The name of the settlement reflects its dual origins: ‘McCluskie’, after its founder, Ernest Timothy McCluskie, and ganj – also spelt gunj and gunge – from the Hindi word for storehouse or market.6 McCluskie was a land and house agent from Calcutta, and had been a member of the subcommittee on housing in the Calcutta Domiciled Enquiry Committee, 1918-19, and president of the Bengal Provincial Branch of the AngloIndian Association from 1926 to 1931. As The Star of India noted in 1934, ‘He has had much criticism and discouragement, mostly from his own community. All its leaders have not co-operated, but he has been determined to stand or fall by his scheme; this determination has taken him so far. It has seen the colony started.’7 McCluskie visited the settlement only once, and died in 1935. Despite initial criticism from

74

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

the All-India Anglo-Indian Association about the colonization scheme, its president, Henry Gidney, took over as chairman of the CSI after McCluskie’s death. He visited the settlement at least four times, bought land there, and intended to build a house called Gidney Castle, but died before he could do so.8 In the context of the struggle for Indian independence and the Indianization of government services and administration, McCluskieganj was one response to a crisis of Anglo-Indian identity, attracting settlers with the idea of creating a homeland that was located within, but clearly distinct from, the rest of British India. From 1934 to 1939, the membership of the CSI grew from 974 to 1485, while the number of settler families at McCluskieganj increased from 20 to approximately 250.9 Most Anglo-Indian settlers came from Calcutta and from other cities and railway colonies across northern India. At its height in the early 1940s, McCluskieganj was home to about three hundred Anglo-Indian families, but today only about twenty remain. In this chapter, I examine the foundation, promotion and legacy of McCluskieganj as a paradoxical place for a community that saw itself as domiciled but homeless. To do so, I focus on the Colonization Observer, brochures produced in the 1930s to promote settlement, interviews with past and present Anglo-Indian residents, and recent media representations of McCluskieganj. But before turning to Anglo-Indian home-making at McCluskieganj, I begin by situating it in two broader contexts: the material and symbolic importance of homelands and settlements in fostering and preserving other collective identities, both in the past and present; and other colonization and settlement schemes for Anglo-Indians, both within and beyond India.

Homelands and Settlements McCluskieganj is one small example amongst many other settlement schemes and homelands. As Thembisa Waetjen writes, ‘The idea of a homeland is of a place embodying social essences, cultural or historical, that legitimate claims to a natural sovereignty. A homeland is the landscape also of historical memory that offers tangible images of rootedness and grounded community.’10 The idea of a homeland is thus bound up with the politics of place, identity and collective memory. Alongside the evocation of home and landscape, claims to ‘natural sovereignty’ are often closely tied to claims to national sovereignty, as the idea of a homeland is often mapped onto national space. Ideas of both homeland and nation exist materially and imaginatively, and may relate to a place that exists in the present or as a dream, is remembered from the past, or is yet to be created. In diverse contexts, the spaces of home, homeland

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

75

and nation inscribe gendered and racialized geographies of inclusion and exclusion. One of the most significant examples of the national (and nationalist) resonance of the idea of a homeland is represented by the German term Heimat. ‘Historically,’ writes David Morley, ‘the ideas of home and homeland have perhaps been most emphatically intertwined’ in this concept.11 Existing alongside ideas of a German fatherland, Heimat invokes ‘notions of an idealized mother and an idealized feminine’,12 and was used by the National Socialist Party in the 1930s and 1940s to signify an Aryan sovereignty that was based on racial and ethnic exclusivity. But the potent idea of Heimat existed long before the rise of fascism, and has undergone a process of political and cultural rehabilitation since the late 1950s. In his research on artistic depictions of Heimat, Christopher Wickham writes that the term is no longer necessarily bound to an idea of the nation, but rather invokes longing and belonging and serves ‘as a point (or set of points) of reference for individual social identity’. Unlike its earlier incarnations, Wickham writes that ‘for artists of the late twentieth century Heimat is not of the past; it has its place in the process of moving from the present to the future and is constantly under construction; there can be no question of return’.13 Elsewhere, the very idea of a homeland revolves around the possibility of return. As Avtar Brah observes,14 some (but not all) diaspora spaces are fashioned in relation to experiences, memories and ideas about a homeland, and the homing desire for some (but not all) people living in diaspora space is to return.15 Discourses of return, political mobilization and selfdetermination are central features of the transnational connections between homeland and diaspora. Most significantly in relation to the idea of a homeland as a site of diasporic return, the return to Israel – the Promised Land – underpinned the Zionist desire for a Jewish homeland safe from persecution. Jews throughout the world continue to have a ‘right to return’ and to settle in the state of Israel that was established in 1948. And yet this return and settlement have been at the price of Palestinian dispossession and exile, particularly through the establishment of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel/Palestine continues to be a site of acute struggle over the politics of place and identity.16 Homelands are sites of political struggle not only in place, but also across diaspora space. The geopolitical implications of the conflict in Israel/ Palestine clearly extend far beyond the Middle East. Elsewhere, the politics of place and identity in South Asia today are notable for their political mobilization not only at home, but also across a wider diaspora. Crucially, the very idea of the homeland (and ideas of place, territory and nation) is a site of contestation, and underpins movements as diverse as the Tamil nationalist desire to establish a homeland called Eelam in Sri Lanka, the

76

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

Sikh movement for political self-determination through the establishment of Khalistan in Punjab, the longstanding conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, and the revival of Hindu nationalism in India since the early 1980s. According to Brian Keith Axel, a Sikh homeland called Khalistan ‘travels with the mobile imaginary of the Sikh diaspora’, and such diasporic mobility has in fact produced the homeland. As he writes, ‘Diasporic claims to a definitive form of relation between a globally dispersed Sikh people fall into place – and the relations of that people, ‘‘in the diaspora,’’ are traced back to the homeland itself.’17 In their discussion of the rise of the Hindutva movement in the 1920s, and its more recent revival, Chetan Bhatt and Parita Mukta describe a ‘religious diasporic nationalism’ that is mobilized around the desire for an exclusively Hindu homeland. As they write, Hindu nationalist social and political philosophy is predicated on an idea . . . that the Indian state, social formation and civil society be reorganized in a holistic and organic way along exclusively ‘Hindu’ precepts. Muslim and Christian minorities in India should be compelled to live in India under the prescription that India is primarily to be a strong ‘Hindu nation’ to which they must practically demonstrate unconditional obeisance.18

The Hindutva movement is gendered both by images and by the political practices of men and women, and invokes the contested notion ‘that India is the original Aryan homeland’. As Bhatt and Mukta conclude, ‘there are powerful diaspora Hindutva ethnic nationalist discourses of the homeland, and equally powerful Hindutva ethnic nationalist discourses of minorities within both the homeland and in the West’.19 In some places, the state itself has created new homelands. Most infamously, the apartheid state in South Africa established homelands as part of its policy of racial and ethnic segregation. As Thembisa Waetjen writes, ‘Territorial re-tribalization of Africans in bantustans (‘‘homelands’’) gained under apartheid a new and ominous significance, manifested most concretely in the progressive vision and determination to create independent states for Africans based on ethnic membership.’20 Although the apartheid state envisioned an exclusive, white Afrikaner society, it was dependent on cheap black labour. As Waetjen continues, ‘Relocating and reorganizing the African population into ethnic homelands involved limiting mobility, integration and resistance while yet serving the needs of capital through a migrant labour system.’ Following the Urban Areas Acts (1945) and the Group Areas Acts (1951), the Bantu Authorities Acts in the 1950s organized tribal governments in each bantustan. According to Waetjen, the creation of bantustans had two main effects: first, ‘the solidification of a bantustan political elite whose authority was explicitly vested in ethnic

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

77

nationhood’; and, second, mass displacement as 3.5 million South Africans were relocated between 1960 and 1983.21 Today, in post-apartheid South Africa, the Freedom Front aims to establish a new, independent homeland, but this time for Afrikaners. Developing the small Afrikaner settlement, Oriana, ‘the aim is to create, in miniature, an Afrikaans haven which the brave, or foolhardy, believe might one day grow into an Afrikaans homeland’.22 A similar vision of an exclusively white and reactionary rural homeland is the attempt by the far right in Britain to establish an Aryan community in Essex.23 The ideas about colonization, settlement and self-help that underpin attempts to establish white homelands at Oriana and near Chelmsford echo earlier, and much larger scale, examples of white colonization and settlement. The internal colonization of the American West and the establishment of white settler colonies by modern European empires in Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas imposed new forms of settlement that usually displaced indigenous residents. In his discussion of British settlers in the Cape Colony during the nineteenth century, for example, Alan Lester describes a domesticated vision of both landscape and settlement, whereby ‘women’s provision of familiar domestic appearances, of household routine, and of reconciliatory diversions, lay at the heart of the settler community’s reproduction’.24 Colonization and settlement were often closely bound up with gendered and racialized images of the landscape itself. As Annette Kolodny writes in the context of the American frontier, masculinist fantasies of conquest were underpinned by a pastoral yearning for ‘land-as-woman’.25 In contrast, women’s fantasies of colonization and settlement were more domesticated and evoked memories of past homes alongside dreams of future homes. In written accounts of the frontier west, Kolodny argues that At the heart of their western vision was a fantasy of home that, though they did not acknowledge it, harked back to an earlier era. For, as a newly industrializing nation was fast eroding the economic functions of the home and consequently narrowing the scope of women’s activity in general, the domestic novel of western relocation still suggested that the home, and, particularly, women’s traditional role within it, held tangible significance.26

In her discussion of colonization, national identity and the Australian bush, Kay Schaffer also contrasts writings by white men and women. As she writes, ‘The narratives of exploration and settlement and subsequent nationalistic histories fantasise a desire for possession of the earth as a mother or lover, a desired or despised, loved or loathed object’, whereas the ‘feminine landscape frustrates masculine desire’ in the novels by several women writers.27 In the Cape Colony, on the American frontier and in the Australian bush, colonization and settlement were embodied in gendered

78

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

and racialized ways by pioneers, colonists and settlers who enacted, and sometimes transgressed, national and imperial ideals of heroic white masculinity and domestic white femininity. But India never became a settler colony for white British colonists. Unlike the white British ‘heaven-born’ elite, who usually returned home on their retirement, or migrated to white settler colonies in Australia, South or East Africa, the ‘country-born’ domiciled community consisted of permanent, but often rootless, residents. In many ways, the domiciled community lived as an imperial diaspora without a place to call home. Settling at McCluskieganj was described as colonization, and enacted the homing desire of Anglo-Indians who sought to create, rather than return to, a homeland. Like many homelands in other contexts, settlement at McCluskieganj was envisioned as a place for racially exclusive nationbuilding. But, unlike homelands as diverse as Israel, Eelam and Khalistan, the location of McCluskieganj did not reflect a geography of pre-existing, imagined nationhood. Although the location of McCluskieganj was described as ideal for settlement, and the landscape was represented in pastoral terms, the site was chosen for pragmatic reasons rather than because it was a ‘place embodying social essences’ or a ‘landscape . . . of historical memory’.28 Despite its small scale compared to other homelands and settlement schemes, McCluskieganj is significant for two main reasons. First, it represented a ‘dream for independence’ for a community of mixed descent. This dream was enacted in gendered and racialized ways that inscribed and yet erased the collective memory of mixed descent shared by its Anglo-Indian residents. Second, McCluskieganj represented a ‘dream for independence’ that was located within British India and remained loyal to the British Empire, and offered a vision of a homeland and nation that opposed the vision of independence held by anti-imperial nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s. Settlement at McCluskieganj was legitimated through appeals to an imperial paternal heritage, likened to white colonization and settlement in places such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and used to imagine a future for India as a dominion within the British Empire. As such, AngloIndian home-making at McCluskieganj can be understood in terms of an imperial nationalism. And yet settlement at McCluskieganj was also legitimated through an appeal to India as home, which was encapsulated by the Hindi word mooluk. McCluskieganj was thus a paradoxical place, reflecting a homing desire for both Britain and India.

Anglo-Indian Colonization and Settlement McCluskieganj is the largest and best-known example amongst a number of colonization and settlement schemes for Anglo-Indians, both within and

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

79

beyond India. These schemes all involved settling in rural areas and cultivating the land, and were underpinned by goals of self-help and cooperation.29 In a letter to the Anglo-Indian Journal in 1899, R.J. Sharman described farming as ‘ ‘‘the only’’ means of establishing ourselves as a community in this land’. As he continued, In that magic word ‘Home’ lies, I believe, the secret of it all. Now to the Anglo-Indian this word has not the significance it has to our friends who have come across the waters [from Britain]. Certainly many have been able by hard work and careful management to secure a place where they may retire after a day’s labour and be sure to find comfortable and congenial surroundings with hearty welcome, but which carry none of the hallowed associations which cluster round some lowly cottage, it may be, in the West.30

For Sharman, farming offered a way for Anglo-Indians to establish homes and roots in India, like their counterparts in Britain. Settling on the land and living in farms or homesteads would not only help Anglo-Indians to feel more at home in India, but would also give them a greater stake in the country. The immediate spur to Anglo-Indian colonization and settlement schemes was unemployment and increasing competition with other Indians for jobs in the services. In his 1928 Memorandum to the Simon Commission, Gidney wrote that While the Community is mainly urban the increasing pressure of Indianisation makes the exploration of fresh avenues of employment necessary, and settlement on the land should provide a ready solution for many who would otherwise be homeless and destitute. Facilities for agricultural training could be made available for the community so that the maximum benefit could be derived from the land.31

A range of colonization and settlement schemes were proposed, both within and beyond India, and both before and after Gidney’s call for AngloIndians to settle on the land. Settlement schemes for Anglo-Indians included a proposal to reclaim the Sunderbans in the Bay of Bengal in 1786, a proposal to create a state in Ceylon for Eurasians from all British territories in South East Asia in 1810, and a proposal for Anglo-Indians to settle in Van Dieman’s Land, or New South Wales, in 1826.32 Other proposals in the 1820s were put forward by Charles Fenwick and John Ricketts, both of whom sought to secure not only employment but a secure place for Anglo-Indians in India,33 and two short-lived colonies were established. In 1829, the East Indian Colonization Committee of Bombay organized settlement at Phoolshair, near Poona, and the Eurasian Philanthropic Association in Madras organized

80

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

settlement at the Shevaroy Hills near Salem. Both colonies soon failed because of management and financial difficulties. According to Hawes, this failure meant that ‘the hopes that the establishment of large numbers of Eurasians on the land would provide an effective answer to their employment problem were effectively ended, though the dream lived on through into the twentieth century’.34 Alongside McCluskieganj, the other best-known Anglo-Indian colonization scheme was located at Whitefield, which is fifteen miles outside Bangalore in southern India and was named after David White, the founding president of the Eurasian and Anglo-Indian Association of South India. Whitefield was founded in 1882, when 3000 acres of land were donated by the Maharajah of Mysore to the Mysore and Coorg branch of the Eurasian and Anglo-Indian Association of South India, for the establishment of agricultural settlements at Whitefield, Glen Gordon and Sourmond.35 By 1899, about thirty Anglo-Indian families had permanently settled in Whitefield, while a number of others owned houses, worked at the Kolar Gold Field, and visited periodically.36 Planned with inner and outer circular roads, the settlement had a number of imposing houses, as well as a school, post office, Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, and the Waverley Inn to accommodate visitors. The Anglo-Indian Association, Mysore and Coorg, sold a map of Whitefield to publicize settlement, and ‘hoped that many of the members of the Association will purchase copies and hang them up in their drawing-rooms or have them framed, in order that their children and others may become wellacquainted with the only place in India that Anglo-Indians can really call their own.’37 In 1890, Lord Connemara, Governor of Madras, visited Whitefield and observed that the settlement ‘is worthy of support and encouragement’, but also noted that Settlers will never be able to compete with ordinary native ryots [peasants or tenant farmers]; that there is little or no hope that the children of these Settlers will ever make their living on these lands in the absence of capital such as their fathers possessed; and, that the idea of a self-contained European village possessing its own artisans, tradesmen and agriculturalists, independent of outside help, must be abandoned.38

In an anonymous letter to the Anglo-Indian Journal in 1899, a correspondent criticized the disunity among the settlers and the lack of agricultural cultivation, and described Whitefield Colony as a misnomer – for whatever the original design . . . , it is now nothing more than a mere settlement of Civil and Military Pensioners. Mr White imported

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

81

youths from Madras at the start, and endeavoured to work it as a Colony, with European and Eurasian labour, but with discouraging results, for it was found impracticable to carry the idea out – as it seems our people did not ‘take to’ agriculture and the various other callings of a village life readily, so that the whole scheme fell through. Hereafter, perhaps, necessity may drive the Anglo-Indian to the soil, when Whitefield may thrive and flourish as a real live colony.39

Unlike McCluskieganj, the proximity of Whitefield to a major city has seen the settlement grow in recent years. Although the number of Anglo-Indian residents remains small, and most of these residents have retired to Whitefield, many other residents commute to Bangalore to work. Many people visit the settlement, particularly the Brindavan Ashram and college of Sathya Sai Baba and the Ecumenical Christian Centre. A range of other colonization and settlement schemes for Anglo-Indians were proposed beyond India. In a letter to the Bombay Guardian in 1898, Margaret Miles – who had been principal of the Calcutta Methodist Girls’ School – proposed Mexico as ‘a new opening for a colony of energetic Anglo-Indian youth’. She described Mexico as ideal for settlement because of the quality of its climate and land, and because it ‘is a Republic, the President of which is Diaz, a half breed Indian, a grand man and wise ruler’. She was adamant that the colony – ideally comprised of at least two hundred colonists – should be made up of ‘industrious, moral and ambitious [men] – no laggards or spongers’. She described the opportunities for cattle grazing, and how families would live in homesteads, ‘planting groves, gardens, building churches, schoolhouses, roads, and growing rich, independent and powerful’. As Miles noted, ‘I am not engaged in this for money alone, for having lived in India, I know the hopelessness of the Anglo-Indian race, and my heart longs to free you from the bondage of social distinction that binds your people.’40 Another, better known, proposal was for Anglo-Indians to establish a colony on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean (see Figure 1.1). In the 1920s, a party of Anglo-Indians assessed the prospects for settlement, but ‘the band of adventurous young men returned very shortly with a story of insuperable difficulties and failure’. Writing in 1930, Cedric Dover described ‘the Andamans fiasco’, which had failed ‘because its originators knew little of the capacity of the people they sent out as colonists and less of the place – a virgin country, reeking with malaria – to which these unfortunate men were sent’.41 Despite this failure, Snell argued in 1944 that the Andaman Islands were still the ideal place to establish an Anglo-Indian colony. He wrote that ‘The islands are everywhere beautiful and picturesque, the hills being covered with evergreen or deciduous forests’, and described the temperate climate, fertile land and opportunities for fishing,

82

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

agriculture and industry. As he continued, ‘Hardships they will certainly have to face with much expenditure of blood and sweat and tears but when it offers the opportunity of political and economic freedom will it not be worthwhile?’42 Finally, from the 1930s to the 1950s, enquiries were made to the Australian government concerning a proposed settlement of Anglo-Indians in Papua and New Guinea. For example, I. Warde wrote in July 1931 from a railway colony in the Central Provinces to ask for information for prospective settlers. At that time, increasing unemployment resulting from policies of Indianization had prompted discussions about forming one or more colonies in India. Although he had taken a small share in a co-operative society – probably the CSI – he believed that ‘if a colony is formed at all there are better places than India to do it in’. But, as he noted, the Commonwealth Immigration Act – which incorporated what was known as the White Australia Policy – meant that ‘there may be some difficulty about those of the community who are not of pure European parentage. All of them however . . . are loyal subjects of the crown, are efficient members of the Defence Force and European in their style and standard of living.’43 Writing on behalf of the Eurasian Collectivist Party in 1949, R.G. Chetalier proposed a ‘nation-building project’ to be led by Anglo-Indians in New Guinea.44 He described Eurasians as ‘not pure Europeans or even near pure Europeans but on an average of minimum 50/50 of European Male and Asian Female admixture and descent’, and – realizing the limitations imposed by the White Australia Policy – advocated their settlement in New Guinea, ‘outside Australia proper’. But such proposals were rejected. As the Australian Secretary to the Department of Immigration explained, the potential migrant had to meet three conditions: ‘that he is predominantly European in race or descent’; that he is ‘predominantly European in appearance’; and that ‘he must be European in outlook, accustomed to a European way of life and of a type who would be readily absorbed into the Australian community’.45

Colonizing McCluskieganj McCluskieganj was only one among several colonization and settlement schemes for Anglo-Indians, both within and beyond India. Most schemes, apart from Whitefield, were soon abandoned. McCluskie’s scheme was the most ambitious in its scale and scope as it sought to establish an independent Anglo-Indian homeland and nation. Settlement at McCluskieganj was promoted in terms of a nostalgic desire for home that was rooted in both Britain and India and sought to liberate Anglo-Indians both from British patronage and from Indianization. According to Percival Damzen,

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

83

a director of the CSI, in a speech in Simla in September 1938, ‘Site after site was examined and rejected. Even England, Belgium and Switzerland were visited in the vain hope of stumbling over some hidden El Dorado that would help towards the selection of a site.’46 After various failed attempts in other parts of India, in 1933 McCluskie acquired ten thousand acres of land at Lapra on perpetual lease from the Maharajah of Chota Nagpur, located within the British-governed state of Bihar. While it was politically inexpedient for the British government to grant land for an Anglo-Indian settlement, it was also politically inexpedient for McCluskie to purchase land located in an Indian princely state. After his request for free land was refused by the British governments in London, New Delhi and in states including Bengal and Assam, and his offer to pay the market price for two sites in the United Provinces was declined, McCluskie reported that ‘Two Independent Indian States offered us excellent land at most favourable terms but these negotiations had to be dropped for political reasons.’47 Although Lapra was clearly not his first choice, McCluskie promoted it as ideal for settlement: it was located forty miles from the city of Ranchi (see Figure 1.1), which would provide a market for agricultural produce as well as services for settlers; it was also on a railway line, and an overnight journey from Calcutta; the quality of the soil, the flatness of the land and the availability of water made it suitable for agriculture; and its position on the Ranchi Plateau ensured a more temperate climate than elsewhere on the plains of India. In 1934, an article in the Colonization Observer explained the three main aims of McCluskie’s scheme: our Community being the only Homeless one in this vast sub-Continent are, firstly, colonizing with the express object of establishing a Home for itself, secondly, of securing a definite stake in our own Country thereby becoming Indians proper, without losing our identity as Anglo-Indians, and lastly, by getting together we automatically open up fresh avenues of employment for the future generations who will grow up in the Colony, and become practical farmers in due course.48

Explained here and elsewhere, the aims of the CSI were to establish a home for Anglo-Indians, while seeking to gain a stake for Anglo-Indians in India and to play a full part as Indian citizens. As an article in the Colonization Observer put it in 1939, settlement at McCluskieganj sought ‘to build a new Nation and to create a new State’. It continued, McCluskieganj ‘is not merely to be a Colony, not merely a Home. It is to be the birth-place of a new people, a new race, and a new life which will make India proud of her foster sons and daughters who have been sorely neglected in the past.’49

84

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

Anglo-Indian settlement at McCluskieganj was termed ‘colonization’ and represented a paradoxical attempt to create a homeland for Anglo-Indians that was located within, but clearly distinct from, the rest of India. As a present resident explains, ‘Anglo-Indians didn’t have a place to go to at all. They belonged nowhere, neither here nor there. . . . [McCluskie] thought they should have a native place. They wanted to be in a place where they would have their own lifestyle.’ Another resident describes the main aim of the scheme in similar terms: ‘to keep all the Anglo-Indians together from the length and breadth of India where they were scattered, and to have a particular place where all the Anglo-Indians could settle at one place and call it their own’. Settlement was not only seen to foster unity, but also a distinctive Anglo-Indian identity. Although Anglo-Indians might be domiciled in India, their identity, culture and lifestyle were all imagined as western and, more specifically, as British. Another resident remembers that this was the best place for the Anglo-Indians to hibernate themselves. The Anglo-Indians were known as English in those days, so we settled over here. They thought they were in England. They wanted to build houses of the same design and live in the same way, with the same identity, and it was an isolated space. Anglo-Indians didn’t have many places to go to. They wanted a homeland, they wanted a place where they could all live, where they could have their own identity. . . . They found that they had a nice part in India, there was peace and harmony and we were far from the Freedom Movement. . . . It was an escape from the rest of India.

Memories of McCluskieganj as a safe and isolated site of hibernation and escape suggest a yearning for home that was far removed from the rest of India. McCluskieganj was imagined as a place of safety away from the independence movement and from life in large cities such as Calcutta, and as a place of liberation both from British patronage and from increasing competition with Indians for employment. 50 As the cover illustration of the Colonization Observer shows (Figure 4.1), McCluskieganj was idealized as a pastoral and domesticated homeland, displaying well-ordered cultivation, grazing livestock and a sense of peace and tranquillity. As Peter Bishop argues in his study of English national identity and the paintings of John Constable, pastoral landscapes of peace and beauty – and the pastoral genre more widely – represent ‘the aesthetics of nostalgia’.51 As a visitor wrote in a letter published in the Colonization Observer in 1934, a nostalgic desire for home at McCluskieganj was oriented towards the present and the future rather than consigned to an imagined past: [McCluskieganj] is like a beautiful dream, everything your own and in a lovely spot with no dogmatic treatment and no dread of the sack, and, above all, no

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

Figure 4.1

85

Cover illustration of the Colonization Observer, April 1934

streets and drains for latrines and spittoons, no dirty leaves, waste paper and mud chatties to be served in and to trample on of an evening walk, and, lo, no . . . Dewalies, . . . riots, and any fear of Dacoities and Bomb throwing. It would be just splendid: Farming, Commerce, and Industry, Dance Halls and Picture Houses for the money-maker, and all I have to say is, Wake up AngloIndians, and help in NATION-BUILDING.52

Rather than stress the hardships that settlement would entail, other letters from visitors described McCluskieganj as a beautiful, welcoming and homely place. Miss Knyvett-Hoff had visited McCluskieganj from Karachi with her married sister, and wrote to describe ‘the lovely place mapped out and developed as you would have it, and the settlers residing in it as in one large Brotherhood, living in perfect unison . . . The gorgeous scenery, bracing climate, geniality of the officials and settlers and comforts received at their hands are indelibly printed on our minds.’ Mrs Beryl Larkin also described the beautiful scenery and warm welcome at McCluskieganj: ‘Our journey was taken up with the picturesque scenery. Lapra looks pretty with its beautiful view of hills and valleys all clothed in green. . . . Everybody seemed happy to welcome us and contrary to our expectations we felt quite at home.’53 The motto of the CSI was ‘unity and self-help’, both of which were mobilized to achieve independence from British patronage. As an immediate spur to McCluskie’s scheme, the 1930 report of the Simon Commission stated that ‘It would be a great relief to the situation if the community could

86

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

open out for itself a wider range of employment, and depend less completely on government service.’54 The agricultural and industrial employment planned at McCluskieganj would provide new opportunities away from previously protected jobs, particularly on the railways, in the police, and in posts, telegraphs and customs. These new employment opportunities would also inspire a greater recognition of the ‘dignity of labour’. As Gidney said in a speech in May 1938 to Anglo-Indians in Calcutta to promote settlement, ‘Living and working among their own people, the youth of the community will soon get rid of the present unwholesome and inherent aversion to manual labour, so manifest in a large section of the community.’55 Following the 1919 reforms and the 1935 Government of India Act, policies of Indianization meant that job reservations were no longer assured. Although Anglo-Indians were defined as ‘statutory natives of India’ for the purposes of employment, they formed a very small minority whose disproportionate representation in certain fields of work, and at certain, intermediate, levels of seniority, was no longer politically tenable. Gidney estimated that there were fewer than one thousand unemployed AngloIndians in 1921, but that, by 1934, ‘nearly 20,000, or more than one-third of the total able-bodied men of the community, are unemployed – the majority of them homeless and in rags, roaming the streets in quest of food’.56 Anglo-Indian women as well as men were affected by Indianization. Although most nurses were still Anglo-Indian, by the 1930s they worked alongside an increasing number of women from other Indian communities. As one correspondent to the Colonization Observer wrote in 1934: ‘Nursing, once the principal mode of employment for our Girls, is now closing its doors against them, they are Indianizing. . . . Business houses are slamming their doors in our faces, we have nowhere to turn except to Mother Earth, become Farmers and Milkmaids, establish ourselves and tend to create a NATION all our own.’57 McCluskie described his scheme as a way for Anglo-Indians to establish an independent homeland, but did so by appealing to an Indian sense of home. He claimed that ‘The Anglo-Indian Community is the only community in the world who are homeless wanderers in their own country,’58 and described Anglo-Indians as unusual in their homeless state, scattered throughout India and moving frequently between different places. An editorial in 1939 described Anglo-Indians as refugees, and criticized the lack of British support and interest in their position unlike current concern with refugees from Nazi Germany and other European countries: In the Newspapers we read daily of Lord Baldwin’s Fund for the Refugees. Those who have been turned out of Germany and other Nazi and Fascist Countries and we see sympathy of no mean order displayed towards these

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

87

unfortunate people. But is their plight and our position in India any the less difficult and poignant? Are we not being turned out of our jobs: jobs we have held for generations and we are now offered only a quota – a mere 8 1⁄3% of the jobs on the Railways and other All-India Services? Cannot the British realize our position in relation to India in the same degree as they realize the Refugee Question? The answer is NO, because they cannot see our wants and our deprivations. Because we are not of world interest and because our needs are not broadcast by every paper printed in England.59

Unlike many other Indians, Anglo-Indians were neither collectively associated with a particular region, nor individually bound to a home village. In other contexts, Anglo-Indians described themselves as a truly national community: one that existed throughout India, with a national allegiance rather than a regional allegiance to, for example, Bengal or Punjab. But McCluskie’s scheme aimed to locate and develop a bounded homeland for Anglo-Indians to gain a stake in India as a whole. Whilst nation-building was imagined as crucial for the very survival of the Anglo-Indian community at a safe distance from communal conflict and competition, it also sought to emulate an Indian desire for home. As McCluskie wrote in 1935, Every Indian, whatever his station in life, can proudly say he has a piece of land and a hut, which he calls by the sweet word ‘Home’ . . . but, alas, we who are bred and born in this country cannot say we have a home. This, therefore, is the real foundation of our scheme. ‘To help you to have a Home,’ and to feel the joy and pride of possession of a real home of your very own.60

More specifically, this nostalgic desire for home was encapsulated by the Hindi word mooluk, which suggested a place of origin, belonging and authentic identity, and located ‘home, sweet home’ for Anglo-Indians within the Indian motherland (see Figures 4.2 and 4.3). As J.G. Steele wrote in the Colonization Observer in 1938: ‘Going home! What an exhilarating thought, what a realism, what a ‘‘Mooluk’’ ’,61 and as an article expanded in the following year: McCluskieganj is our MOOLUK. It is the one place in the whole of India where we can live like Indians and yet keep our individuality. The days of birth inequalities are past; the present is the time for establishing our undoubted and unchallengeable right to India. It is our Birth-right. There is no question of domiciliary rights; we belong to India and India to us.62

When Sir Maurice Hallett, the Governor of Bihar, visited McCluskieganj in July 1939, Henry Gidney – who, by now, was not only president of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association but also president of the CSI – described the settlement as both an independent Anglo-Indian state and as a mooluk:

88

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

Figure 4.2 1939)

McCluskieganj as mooluk and ’home, sweet home’ (Colonization Observer, March—April

‘Here we have the opportunity to make good, here we have the making of an Anglo-Indian State and here we have the creation and moulding of our mooluk. No more will we look at the map of India and say to ourselves ‘‘Whither shall we go?’’ ’63 Although McCluskieganj was established as

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

Figure 4.3

89

McCluskieganj as mooluk (Colonization Observer, March—April 1939)

somewhere that Anglo-Indians could call home, it remained a paradoxical place: imagined as an Anglo-Indian homeland, equated with an Indian mooluk, and located within British India. Although McCluskieganj was described as a mooluk for Anglo-Indians, its goal of racial exclusivity marked it as separate and distinct from the rest of India. As in many other examples of colonization and settlement, the landscape was usually described as uninhabited. One exception to this was Steele’s 1938 Colonization Observer article, in which he wrote that ‘The aborigines or natives of the surrounding hills are known as Kurukhs or Uraons, with a sprinkling of Santals. These simple folk are very interesting, they are trustworthy to a degree, and are so far unspoiled by contact with education or so-called civilization.’64 Steele’s romantic view of the simple, unspoiled ‘natives’ of Lapra, today known as Adivasis, corresponds to racialized descriptions of indigenous people in India and elsewhere as child-like and primitive. But, far more often, articles in the Colonization Observer focused on the presence of other, non-indigenous Indians. Early settlers and visitors were concerned that a number of Indians, particularly Christians from Goa, were claiming to be Anglo-Indian in order to move to McCluksieganj. An Anglo-Indian from Karachi wrote to the Colonization Observer in 1934 to complain of ‘the menace of intrusions of outsiders posing as Anglo-Indians. . . . Let this evil therefore be stamped out at its very inception by insisting on proofs of European parentage on the father’s

90

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

side.’65 At the same time, although local Indians would be employed as servants and labourers in the early years of settlement, the CSI aimed ultimately to make Anglo-Indians self-sufficient in all areas of work: Indian servants for domestic purposes may be engaged by settlers, who will have to accommodate them in their own grounds. The object, however, is to eliminate Indian servants and Anglo-Indians should be engaged as soon as they are suitably trained and adapted to the routine of the work. Settlers may employ Indian labour to do their cultivation until Anglo-Indian labour is sufficiently skilled to do this class of work.66

By advocating that Anglo-Indians should in time employ other AngloIndians as domestic servants and agricultural labourers, the independence and self-sufficiency sought by the CSI was framed not only in terms of racial exclusivity, but also in terms of establishing and maintaining a class hierarchy among settlers. In the event, Anglo-Indians who settled at McCluskieganj continued to employ Indian servants, replicating the power relations of imperial domesticity on a household scale even as the CSI advocated racial exclusivity. Despite the founding aims of the CSI, McCluskieganj never became an exclusively Anglo-Indian home, homeland and nation.

Anglo-Indian Home-Making A nostalgic desire for home at McCluskieganj was seen as liberating for individual Anglo-Indians and for the community more widely. AngloIndian men and women enacted this nostalgic desire through home-making on both domestic and national scales. A collective memory of home and identity was embodied differently by Anglo-Indian men and women. The first settlers at McCluskieganj were represented as pioneers and as colonizers, taming, naming, charting and domesticating an apparently uninhabited and unknown jungle. By the time of the inauguration ceremony at McCluskieganj in November 1934, the Colonization Observer praised ‘the wonderful spirit of perseverance and determination displayed by Anglo-Indians’ that had transformed the settlement: ‘What was once thick jungle with dense undergrowth is today the beginning of a healthy, well planned and efficiently organised Colony – a concrete example, in more senses than one, of what can be achieved when Anglo-Indians are called upon to fight the economic battle for existence for themselves.’67 The ‘fight’ to gain independence at McCluskieganj was viscerally embodied by images of Anglo-Indian men as hardy pioneers, liberating themselves from the emasculation of British patronage, and striving to colonize part of India just as their European forefathers had colonized the empire. The

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

91

pioneering spirit of adventure required to create an Anglo-Indian homeland was represented in exclusively European terms (see Figure 4.4). So, for example, the CSI’s 1931 brochure The Dawn of a New Era described AngloIndians as ‘not wanting in the spirit of adventure, which is an inherent part of their nature from their father’s side. Grit, backbone and determination are lying dormant in these people because they have not had occasion in the past to bring these good qualities into action having had jobs found for them in the Services.’68 In his May 1938 Calcutta speech, Gidney also described British patronage as emasculating for Anglo-Indian men and for the community as a whole: ‘Lulled in the security of their position in the Services they lost all initiative and their inherent inherited spirit of adventure. They had no reason to believe that they would at any time be displaced from the position they had come to occupy in the Services of the Government.’69 Liberating Anglo-Indian men from fast-disappearing protected jobs, agricultural work at McCluskieganj was described as one vital way for them to fulfil their physical prowess and spirit of adventure, both of which were attributed to their European heritage, and as a way of achieving independence from their servitude to the British. As a letter reprinted from the Times of India put it in 1934, the land offered ‘a simple hard life. But that simple hard life will be the making of the Anglo-Indian if besides being a patriotic son of India he will also be loyal to his religion and to the best traditions of an Imperial race he may well be proud of descending from.’70 Moreover, the cultivation of land at McCluskieganj was described as modern and scientific. As Percival Damzen said in his speech in Simla in 1938, ‘Comparisons are at the best of times odious, but never more than when applied to the Indian ryots’ methods of agriculture and ours. With us the whole question of agricultural development is placed on the same modern scientific footing on which it is established in America and other advanced agricultural countries.’71 Whereas McCluskieganj was described as an Anglo-Indian mooluk, Anglo-Indians were keen to distance themselves from Indian ryots. The masculinity of Anglo-Indian pioneers settling at McCluskieganj was represented not only as European, but also as imperial in its conquest, adventure and hardiness and as modern and scientific in its cultivation of the land. Through their ‘grit and determination’, Anglo-Indian pioneers transformed the landscape by building their own homes across the ten thousand acres of the settlement, as well as Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, a club, a market and a post office near the station. The houses built at McCluskieganj followed the design of colonial bungalows, set in compounds with large rooms and verandahs and separate kitchens and servants’ quarters, and were built either following plans from the CSI or to settlers’ own designs.

92

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

Figure 4.4

The ’grit’ of pioneers at McCluskieganj (Colonization Observer, June 1934)

The Anglo-Indian desire for a homeland was likened to British colonization of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. As the CSI explained to prospective settlers: Pioneering is always hard work, and the opening up of a new territory means the bringing into action the inherent qualities of our forefathers, the British, who have made Australia and Canada what they are today. The real AngloIndian will rise to the occasion and show that he possesses the same grit and backbone as those early pioneers . . . we have found already that they have the brains, the grit, the backbone and the spirit of adventure of our forefathers. Witness our pioneers who have overcome all difficulties and are today established in their own homes, have their own gardens and fields and what is more, have found peace and contentment in their new environments.72

The ‘real’ Anglo-Indian embodied the ‘grit and backbone’ of his pioneer forefathers as he colonized, cultivated and domesticated McCluskieganj. Unlike British India, which was usually a temporary rather than a permanent home for a small number of British residents, McCluskieganj was likened to British settler colonies that by the 1930s had gained Dominion status within the British Empire. In contrast to the anti-colonial nationalist struggle, the CSI stressed Anglo-Indian loyalty to the British Empire, in part by attributing the imperial masculinity of settlement and colonization to a British inheritance. By likening McCluskieganj to settler colonies

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

93

rather than to British imperial rule in India, the CSI also promoted a model for India gaining Dominion status as an independent, self-governing colony that remained loyal to the British Empire. In his speech to Anglo-Indians in Calcutta, Gidney described McCluskieganj as A home for Anglo-Indians under the sun of India, their motherland, – an effort at self-help which will command the respect and admiration of our compatriots, – a colony worthy of the traditions of our forefathers, – a concrete evidence of our affection for the land of our birth, – a memory to the blood of our mothers and grandmothers which runs in our veins.73

But while a collective memory of European paternal descent defined and legitimated Anglo-Indian colonization and settlement at McCluskieganj, the existence of an Indian ancestor on the maternal line – the memory of mothers and grandmothers – was more usually erased. In contrast to the embodied masculinity of European ancestry – the ‘grit and determination’ attributed to imperial forefathers – the line of Indian maternal descent was disembodied in two main ways. First, instead of invoking an Indian ancestor, India itself was described as the motherland and the natural environment was described in maternal terms. But both the natural environment and the Indian motherland had to be brought under Anglo-Indian masculine control through colonization, cultivation and domestication. Second, representations of Anglo-Indian women were crucially important in imagining McCluskieganj as a home, homeland and nation. But more than this, images of Anglo-Indian women as pioneers and as home-makers, sharing in the agricultural labour and home-building of their husbands, fathers and brothers, meant positioning Anglo-Indian women within a collective memory of European colonization. In his 1938 Simla speech, Percival Damzen asked if McCluskieganj is not to be the racial home of our people, where is that home to be? India must appeal to us as our Motherland, and we must appeal to India. . . . The embryo [McCluskieganj] has become a real pulsating force; a force that gathers strength each day of its existence and which will undoubtedly bring McCluskieganj to the fore-front of India’s places of influence and wealth.74

This suggests a close familial bond with the country, with India as motherland nurturing a new life for Anglo-Indians at McCluskieganj. But one main aim of the colonization scheme was to gain a stake in India, suggesting alienation from the motherland and the need to claim and to assert a place of belonging and affiliation. One way of achieving

94

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

a stake in the country was through settlement and agricultural work, both of which involved colonizing, cultivating and domesticating the motherland and the natural environment. As a correspondent to the Colonization Observer put it in 1938, In a few years the jungle will be no more. There will be vast fields of grain, beautiful shady orchards, good roads, tubewells, wells, suitable lighting, shady avenues, flourishing farms, busy farmers, healthy children, thriving cattle, prosperous Dairy and Mixed Farming, Poultry and Goat Farms. There will be Timber Mills, Bottle factories, flour mills, oil mills, Canneries and other industries.75

Transforming the ‘jungle’ in this way involved modernizing and ordering the motherland, and populating it with healthy and prosperous AngloIndian settlers. By the following year, the Colonization Observer also reported the progress of the settlement in terms of the transformation of the landscape from wild jungle to peaceful and well-ordered domesticity: ‘Where before there were thick jungle, and hilly deserted areas, there are now neat little homesteads, nicely laid out Farms, fields in crop, orchards in the making, houses being constructed, with more and more settlers coming in, and an improvement in the life of the place as a whole.’76 The success of McCluskieganj depended on Anglo-Indian home-making on a domestic scale. Family unity was seen as a model for community and national unity, and the CSI sought to attract families as settlers. As its brochure stated, it was ‘the sacred duty of every married man to provide a home for his wife and family and where can better conditions and greater facilities be found than at McCluskieganj?’77 Colonel Leslie, a director of the CSI, saw the settlement as providing an opportunity ‘of asserting your manhood, and womanhood, too, for I know what a great part the women have played in building this colony, not only in the encouragement you have given the men, but in actual manual labour’.78 Five years after the first settlers had arrived, the Colonization Observer claimed that ‘our Pioneer ladies, wives, daughters, and perhaps sweethearts, alone have made the Colony possible’.79 The Woods were one of the first three families to move there and embodied the spirit of adventure and self-help that McCluskie sought to foster. Photographs of Mrs Woods working alongside her husband to build their home appeared in the Colonization Observer and in brochures advertising settlement, and the Woods were described as ‘the right type of settlers . . . and a real example to any who follow them as they are doing everything for themselves’.80 Whilst Anglo-Indian women shared in the manual labour and self-help of their husbands, they were also seen to embody the health, natural beauty and domestic life of McCluskieganj. So, for example, in May 1934, three photographs of women appeared

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

95

alongside the caption ‘These ladies are not afraid of living in the jungle’, with one holding a gun and one holding a child, encompassing the pioneering conditions of early settlement and an ideal of maternal domesticity (Figure 4.5). Two photographs of young Anglo-Indian women feeding cows appeared in 1934 with the following captions: ‘Both the picture of health. Can you want better?’ and ‘It is within the bounds of possibility that

Figure 4.5

Images of women at McCluskieganj (Colonization Observer, May 1934)

96

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

our girls will take to this open air and healthy life if they grow up in the colony; and why not?’ It was possible to represent Anglo-Indian women like Mrs Woods as fearless and hardworking pioneers, and other women sharing in agricultural work, because they were helping to construct Anglo-Indian homes and because this endeavour was explicitly related to European traditions of colonization. While McCluskieganj might be depicted as part of an Indian motherland, however, Indian descent on the maternal line in Anglo-Indian families continued to be erased in favour of European paternal descent. Written and visual images of Anglo-Indian women helped to represent McCluskieganj as natural, healthy and European, far removed from life in cities such as Calcutta and from the perceived lives of Indian women. Once the first homes had been built at McCluskieganj, Anglo-Indian women were positioned within the domestic sphere. By 1938, two pages of the Colonization Observer each month were addressed to women as ‘Hearth to hearth talks’ and later as ‘Eve’s Corner’, advising on domestic matters. As the Colonization Observer stated, ‘a matter of considerable importance to women everywhere, and in particular in our Colony, is the HOME – the kind of house, the size of rooms, furniture and furnishings and oh! A host of other things too numerous to name at once, but which every woman has puzzled over from time to time’; and ‘Home is the place where the spirit of the man is moulded and we are in the best position to see that the characteristics of trust, tolerance and good-fellowship are ingrained in the make-up of our sons and husbands.’81 By 1938, the Colonization Observer reflected that ‘we had taken over Virgin Forests and were trying the almost super-human task of converting these virgin forests into something that would resemble ‘‘Home, Sweet Home’’ ’.82 Whereas the ‘virgin forests’ were seen as part of the Indian motherland, the colonization, cultivation and domestication of the motherland was represented in resolutely European terms. Anglo-Indian women at McCluskieganj came to embody the success of colonization and domestication, enacting a productive nostalgia that located Anglo-Indian homes within a European tradition of colonization.

Dreams of the Future Colonization and settlement at McCluskieganj was not only legitimated by a collective memory of European, imperial descent, but also by visions of an independent future. Like many other colonization and settlement schemes, Anglo-Indian home-making at McCluskieganj was predicated on a new vision of society. This vision was underpinned by ideas about racial exclusivity, the transformation of the landscape, co-operation and self-help, and the agricultural and industrial employment of Anglo-Indians. Writing in

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

97

1937, a correspondent from Calcutta envisioned ‘a landscape of open country life, ploughed fields and new homes’, and described ‘fresh young generations of healthy, robust Anglo-Indians rising from the bosom of Mother Earth, rising up into a future potent with promises of immense possibilities, of a greater and fuller life, of labour and industry and trade, business enterprise, independence and success’.83 Other dreams of the future focused on the creation of an Anglo-Indian nation-state. As Percival Damzen told his audience in Simla in 1938, in a few years’ time, ‘I see the beginning of Anglo-India’, with factories, banks, shops and universities. Although he envisioned McCluskieganj as racially exclusive, he also argued that Anglo-Indians should overcome their inferiority complex towards the British, and their superiority complex towards other Indians, and recognized that ‘We are a race of many complexions but let us at least decide on only one complex, the equality complex.’84 The dream of establishing an Anglo-Indian nation-state at McCluskieganj was imagined most vividly by two futuristic articles in the Colonization Observer. One, written in 1939, was a report of the Founder’s Festival in 1959. In twenty years’ time, Gidney was imagined as president of the ‘selfsufficient and distinct state’, with Gidney Town as its capital and other streets and places – including Hallett Avenue and the Damzen Parade Arena – named after key figures. Written in the late 1930s, when AngloIndians were seeking to establish a separate regiment within the British army, but were unable to do so, it is significant that the military power of the future state is depicted with a detailed description of a military review and fly-past. The state is described as independent and prosperous, with its capital the centre of Anglo-Indian Culture, Learning, Industry and Progress where East and West have met and where a people once down-trodden and despised are now the most respected and independent; where money is not scarce, where all have work, and there is plenty of food, clothes, and everything the human body requires. Where families are all well-provided for and misery is not known.85

Imagining the future over a longer time scale, the other article, published in 1938, was written as an interview with George Duckworth on his 127th birthday in 2038. It imagined the success of McCluskieganj as a modern, independent state: Gradually . . . Anglo-Indians were weaned from the not very abundant breasts of Government Service and gradually that pioneering character which ran in their blood, which had built McCluskiegunge gained the upperhand. Soon Anglo-Indian engineers were building houses, laying sewage systems, planning Sanitary schemes, designing electric power houses, laying town and

98

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

street lighting and town planning. Subsidiary industries naturally started and grew apace into what are now premier manufactories.86

In this vision of the future, McCluskieganj is described as a well-ordered, clean and hygienic settlement, transforming the Indian landscape through cultivation and industrialization, and ensuring independent employment. But, more than this, it was also imagined as politically independent. As the author continued, the ‘village’ of the 1930s had been gradually transformed ‘into the great, compact and thriving autonomous State – the only AngloIndian State – with its proud, busy, prosperous capital – Gidney Town’.87 Alongside the ‘pioneering character’ inherited from an imperial forefather, George Duckworth attributed ‘the rise of the Anglo-Indian Power mainly to the excellent characteristics of head and heart of the women of Anglo-India’. In a direct appeal to Anglo-Indian women in the late 1930s, the article quotes Duckworth reflecting on the success of the settlement: [The community’s] cohesion, the conscious realization of its best self may be attributed to the re-orientation of the outlook of its women-folk. By their awakened consciousness of the danger to their community and to their children and by actively throwing in their whole weight to the promotion of self-consciousess in the community they turned the scales and the pendulum of Indian History. To-day they form an important and integral part in the socio-economic fabric of the Indian polity.88

McCluskieganj Today Despite such dreams of the future, the success of McCluskieganj was shortlived. A number of factors contributed to its decline: McCluskie died in 1935; Anglo-Indians were a largely urban population, with little experience of agricultural work; and there was a lack of other jobs and services such as a school and hospital. But the main reason for its decline was the migration of Anglo-Indians, particularly after Indian Independence in 1947, mainly to Britain, Australia and Canada. Despite attempts by the All-India Anglo-Indian Association to encourage Anglo-Indians to stay in India and to view India as their home, many Anglo-Indians feared discrimination, unemployment and the difficulties of surviving as a small, Christian and English-speaking minority and migrated after Independence. Many families at McCluskieganj left their properties to their servants. Although some of the original bungalows are in a good state of repair, others are now uninhabited and lie in ruins (see Figures 4.6 and 4.7). The CSI was liquidated in 1955 amid charges of embezzlement and fraud.

C O L O NI Z A T I O N A N D SE T T L EM E NT

Figure 4.6

99

A bungalow at McCluskieganj today

Today there are about twenty Anglo-Indian families in McCluskieganj. Some are descendants of the first settlers in the early 1930s, whilst others have more recently retired there, often because land and property are cheaper than elsewhere. The main issues facing Anglo-Indians in McCluskieganj today are security, as it is no longer seen as a safe haven but rather as a dangerous place to live, with robberies particularly on the journey to Ranchi; its isolation, especially its distance from a hospital; a lack of jobs; disunity among Anglo-Indians; and what is seen as a lack of respect from other Indians who live there. In the words of an Anglo-Indian woman who was born at McCluskieganj in the 1940s and has recently moved back: The average Indian over here thinks that if you speak English and you’re fair, you’re a Britisher. . . . we are talking English, we are passing and they’ll say ‘Angrezi, Angrezi’ [English] and it becomes a joke for them. . . . We used to feel quite proud if we were referred to as a Britisher, but now we don’t anymore. . . . You take it as an insult now, not that we have anything against the British at all, nothing at all, but the way they say it.

McCluskieganj has also attracted Bengali settlers and tourists. Several Hindi and Bengali novels and short stories have been set there and describe it in pastoral terms, reminiscent of a distant and exotic age. Once again,

100

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

Figure 4.7

A ruined bungalow at McCluskieganj

McCluskieganj is represented as a clean, peaceful and healthy haven away from urban India, but now for Bengalis rather than Anglo-Indians. McCluskieganj remains a potent site of memory for Anglo-Indian residents and their descendants, both in the settlement, elsewhere in India, and across a wider diaspora. The ‘dream for independence’ put into practice at McCluskieganj is remembered in different ways that range from the dismissal of the settlement as failure and folly, to the celebration of its spirit of self-help and adventure. Three articles published in Indian and Australian newspapers in the 1980s were followed by the publication of a history of the settlement and a British television documentary about it.89 A number of further newspaper articles were published in India, Britain and Australia in the early 1990s,90 and in the fiftieth anniversary year of Indian Independence.91 The titles of most of these newspaper articles report (and repeat) the decline and ultimate failure of McCluskieganj: ‘A dream shattered’, ‘The dying of a dream’, ‘Twilight of India’s forgotten colony’, ‘Midnight’s orphans’ and ‘The homeland that failed’. Like the television documentary and V.K. Jha’s novel McCluskieganj, 92 many of the articles are structured as narratives of return or discovery, portraying the settlement as an uncanny reminder of an imperial past. The current residents of McCluskieganj feature not only in newspaper articles and the documentary, but also as named characters in Jha’s novel. One of the residents who features

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

101

prominently in many of these depictions is Kitty Texeira, who was born in the settlement. Unlike early female settlers like Mrs Woods, who were located within a European tradition of colonization that was both pioneering and domesticated, and unlike other Anglo-Indian residents today who continue to wear western dress, Kitty Texeira is pictured wearing a sari, living in poverty, and selling fruit at the railway station to survive. According to Bobb and Ahmed, she is ‘an eloquent and emaciated symbol of all that went wrong with McCluskieganj’, while publicity for the novel McCluskieganj states that she ‘symbolises a compromise among the contradictions of the Anglo-Indian Community’.93 Rather than objectify Kitty Texeira as a woman who embodies the decline not only of McCluskieganj but also of the Anglo-Indian community more widely, Ian Jack describes her working at the station: ‘she was preparing a basket of oranges for the evening train and joking in Hindi with the brewers of country liquor. She seemed to have made her peace – perhaps not with India, which is too large and complicated an idea, but at least with that small part of it where she was born.’94 In contrast to media depictions of McCluskieganj as a place of decline and failure that cannot escape its imperial past, I want to turn to some examples of recent work that looks instead to the future of the settlement. McCluskieganj has benefited in recent years from development projects initiated by Anglo-Indian politicians. In his negotiations with the Congress Party before and after Independence, Frank Anthony, the president of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association, secured two seats for nominated members of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament in the central government, and for nominated members of various state legislatures, including West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Bihar, which, as noted in Chapter 2, have been retained to this day.95 The late Major General Williams, a nominated member of parliament and Frank Anthony’s successor as president of the AIAIA, allocated government money to fund the restoration of roads and the installation of street lights in McCluskieganj. In 1997, Alfred de Rozario, the Anglo-Indian nominated member of the legislative assembly in the state of Bihar, established a branch of the Don Bosco Academy, Patna, in McCluskieganj, which has provided both education and employment for Anglo-Indian and other residents. Alfred de Rozario’s wife, Dorothy, grew up in McCluskieganj, and they live both there and in Patna. Another Anglo-Indian resident, Captain David Cameron, founded St Andrew’s School in 1985 – which now operates as a hostel for students at the Don Bosco Academy – with the following two aims: ‘to preserve the Anglo-Indian heritage of the colony established for the upliftment of the community by E.T. McCluskie in 1933, and to provide educational facilities for disadvantaged Anglo-Indian children residing in the old settlement

102

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

and the ghettoes of Calcutta and children of other communities wishing to be educated through the medium of English.96 Captain Cameron has also reopened the original hotel that was established by the CSI for visitors to the settlement in the 1930s. Now named the Highland Guest House, the publicity for prospective visitors attributes ‘the lure of McCluskiegunj’ to its heritage and its location, and describes it as a peaceful and picturesque destination: McCluskiegunj is an enchanting hamlet of colonial style bungalows and cottages, farms and orchards, nestled between two Adivasi Villages of Konks and Lapra in the heart of Chota Nagpur Plateau. Surrounded by lush green hills and glades, The Gunj . . . is an ideal sylvan retreat for those with an urge to get away from it all and to relax in the serene atmosphere of unspoilt countryside without forfeiting the comforts of city life.97

In a memoir about the settlement, Captain Cameron describes growing up in the princely state of Hyderabad in the 1930s, and overhearing a heated discussion between his mother and grandfather over the attempt to establish an Anglo-Indian homeland. He vividly remembers ‘visions of adventure and romance of the bold enterprise conjured up by my childish imagination’, and describes his equally vivid memories of his first visit to McCluskieganj: ‘Memories of those balmy evenings, cooled by gentle breezes scented with aroma of the queen-of-the-night bush nearby enjoying the sight of myriads of fire-flies lighting up the branches of a giant eucalyptus tree in the compound remained indelibly printed in my mind ever since.’ When he moved to McCluskieganj after Independence, ‘the atmosphere . . . was still essentially colonial because the 150 families that remained stubbornly retained the life-style and manners of their British ancestors. The Club was still going strong and everyone patronised the whist-drives, dances, tin-and-bottle badminton tournaments, and community picnics which were speedily organised on the slightest provocation.’98 McCluskieganj remains an evocative site of personal and collective memory for Anglo-Indians. And yet, it is not just a site of memory. As Captain Cameron says, ‘Everybody immediately decries the fate of this place. It makes me angry. It is not merely of historic interest. McCluskieganj is alive and kicking. It has a tremendous future.’99

Conclusions Anglo-Indian home-making at McCluskieganj was complex. The CSI and Anglo-Indian settlers sought to gain a stake in India while establishing a clear distance from the rest of the country and aspired to European

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

103

traditions of colonization even though India was imagined as the motherland. Whereas an imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, an Indian maternal ancestor was usually erased and refigured in two main ways: first, as Mother India and as the natural environment, both of which were colonized and domesticated through imperial and masculine strategies of order and control; and, second, by locating Anglo-Indian women settlers within a European, and specifically British, tradition of colonization that was far removed from the lives of Indian women. Anglo-Indian home-making at McCluskieganj enacted a productive nostalgia that was oriented towards the present and future as well as the past, and revealed an attachment to both India and Britain as home. Whilst such a productive nostalgia and its enactment at McCluskieganj were liberating for Anglo-Indian settlers, they remained imperial and exclusionary in nature. Anglo-Indians sought a racially exclusive homeland, although this was never achieved because of their employment of Indian servants. Whilst Anglo-Indians sought independence from British patronage and from policies of Indianization, they, unlike those involved in the anti-imperial nationalist movement, remained loyal to the British Empire. By comparing settlement at McCluskieganj with British settlement in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the CSI not only invoked an imperial heritage of white colonization and settlement, but also provided a model for India to gain Dominion status within the wider empire. And yet the productive nostalgia enacted at McCluskieganj also revealed a yearning for India as well as Britain as home, as shown by the desire to establish an Anglo-Indian mooluk and a stake in their home country. Unlike stereotypical representations of Anglo-Indians imagining Britain as home – and being ridiculed for doing so – the domiciled community had much more complex ties to India. The mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was mapped on to their dual attachment to both Britain and India as home. Colonization and settlement at McCluskieganj enacted the homing desire of many Anglo-Indians who imagined themselves to be living in an imperial diaspora and sought to create, rather than return to, a homeland. Although colonization and settlement at McCluskieganj were often described through images of a British imperial inheritance and an idea of Britain as home, they also invoked a homing desire that was distinctively Indian. In many ways, McCluskieganj represented the imperial nationalism of a community that saw itself as domiciled but homeless in India. In the context of anti-imperial nationalism and the Indianization of government services and administration in the 1930s and 1940s, McCluskieganj was one response to a crisis of Anglo-Indian identity. Even at its height, settlement at McCluskieganj was small-scale. And yet its influence extended far beyond rural Bihar, as Anglo-Indians throughout

104

CO L O N I Z A T I O N A N D S ET T L E ME N T

the subcontinent held shares in the Colonization Society of India and read its monthly journal, the Colonization Observer. McCluskieganj represented a ‘dream for independence’ for a community of mixed descent and offered an alternative vision of a homeland and nation that was opposed to antiimperial nationalism. Such dreams and visions were both gendered and racialized. Whereas the figure of an Indian maternal ancestor was largely displaced by appeals to India itself as motherland and by representing Anglo-Indian women as colonizers and settlers within a European tradition, the figure of a British paternal ancestor embodied a collective imperial heritage that was enacted through the embodied display of grit, determination and hardiness at McCluskieganj. The symbolic importance of a European – and often British – forefather shaped imaginative geographies of home within an imperial diaspora for Anglo-Indians. Despite the establishment of McCluskieganj, and against the advice of Frank Anthony, many Anglo-Indians left India after Independence. In contrast to the small scale of internal migration to colonization and settlement schemes like McCluskieganj, the post-Independence migration to Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s is often described as an ‘exodus’. In the next chapter I explore the reasons why many Anglo-Indians sought to migrate to Britain after Independence and their experiences of resettlement in a nation imagined as the fatherland. Representations of Britain as fatherland, and the collective memory of a European, and often British, forefather, were symbolically important in political debates about home, identity and nationality and in mobilizing and legitimating colonization and settlement at McCluskieganj. And yet such gendered and racialized representations of home, identity and nationality were never solely symbolic. As I discuss in the next chapter, the requirements of the British Nationality Act of 1948 meant that Anglo-Indians had to document the British origins of a paternal ancestor. While the figure of a British forefather was symbolically important in shaping a collective memory and identity that was loyal to British India, imagined a future for India as a dominion within the wider empire, and enacted these ideas through colonization and settlement at McCluskieganj, it proved much harder to document his origins in practice.

Chapter Five

Independence and Decolonization: Anglo-Indian Resettlement in Britain

India was home, British India.1 We couldn’t be ruled by the Indians. We ruled the Indians, but when it came to them ruling us we just left.2

The spatial politics of home for Anglo-Indians in British India were complex, as shown by images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and by Anglo-Indian home-making at McCluskieganj that invoked a collective memory of an imperial forefather alongside ideas about an Indian mooluk. Although many Anglo-Indians felt a loyalty and an attachment to India, they also imagined themselves as part of a European – and often a British – community living within a wider imperial diaspora. Many Anglo-Indians felt at home in British India, but feared discrimination, unemployment and fewer opportunities for their children after Independence. Despite securing some safeguards for the community, and against the advice of Frank Anthony and articles in the Anglo-Indian Review, Anglo-Indians migrated in unprecedented numbers after 1947. As Neil O’Brien, the current president of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association, reflected some fifty years later, ‘The first euphoria of Independence for some was for others the shock of a new era: emigration began in great numbers; it was in fact an exodus.’3 This chapter is situated within wider debates about Britishness, decolonization and migration and draws on both archival and interview material to focus on the Anglo-Indian ‘exodus’ to Britain. It considers the ways in which Indian Independence and Partition in 1947, the British Nationality Act of 1948, and resettlement in the former heart of empire in the late 1940s and 1950s complicated Anglo-Indian ideas about home, identity and nationality. By 1970, Frank Anthony estimated that 50,000 Anglo-Indians had migrated, half of whom had resettled in Britain.4 Some AngloIndians migrated first to Britain and then – up to twenty years later – to

106

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

Australia. Others migrated elsewhere, particularly to Australia in the mid1960s and 1970s, and also to Canada, New Zealand and the United States. More recently and on a temporary basis, a number of Anglo-Indians have also migrated to work in the Gulf States. Whereas an Anglo-Indian imperial diaspora reflected their domicile away from Britain, a decolonized diaspora reflects their ties to a wider ‘British world’5 shaped by imperial expansion and spanning resettlement in the heart of empire and in former white settler colonies. Anglo-Indian ideas of Britain as home were gendered as well as racialized. A ‘homing desire’ for Britain often invoked ideas of imperial masculinity, both through the collective memory of an imperial forefather and by seeking to document a British paternal ancestor in order to be registered as a citizen of the UK-and-Colonies under the British Nationality Act. I explore the difficulties of tracing British paternal ancestry with reference to four hundred pieces of research completed by the Society of Genealogists in London on behalf of Anglo-Indians. Alongside such masculine spaces of diaspora, I also investigate the ways in which the Anglo-Indian diaspora was feminized. Drawing on interviews with AngloIndian women who migrated in the late 1940s and 1950s, I explore how and why the challenges posed by migration and resettlement were often felt most acutely on a domestic scale as they had to shop, cook and clean for the first time. The chapter ends by considering the embodied identities of Anglo-Indians that marked them as both similar and different within a wider community of Britishness, and the ways in which their mixed descent has been suppressed and acknowledged in Britain since Independence.

Migration and Resettlement Migration and resettlement from India to Britain took place before as well as after formal decolonization, and a range of research challenges ‘the myth that the Asian presence in Britain and Europe is a post-war phenomenon’.6 Rozina Visram’s study of ayahs, lascars and princes in Britain shows that Indians have lived in Britain since the early eighteenth century.7 Focusing on one group of residents in Britain, Shompa Lahiri studies Indian students from 1880 to 1930, and traces their encounters across race, class and gender lines with their British peers, landladies, colleagues and various institutions. Indian students in Britain increased in number from 100 in 1880 to 1800 in 1927. As Lahiri argues, this small group of people subsequently exercised ‘a disproportionately large influence on the course of British imperial and South Asian history’.8 Most of them studied law, medicine or for the Indian Civil Service, and the vast majority were male. But a growing number of Indian women also travelled to the heart of empire, both with their families

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

107

and on their own as students and social reformers. As well as studying the metropolitan travels and residence of the male social reformer Behramji Malabari, Antoinette Burton also explores the imperial encounters of two women who travelled from India to Britain in the 1880s and 1890s: Pandita Ramabai, who came to Britain to study medicine but became a social reformer and converted to Christianity; and Cornelia Sorabji, a Christian Parsi who studied law at Oxford University.9 Through her readings of their letters and published accounts, Burton analyses colonial ethnographies written at the heart of empire and argues that ‘Britain itself has historically been an imperial terrain – a site productive not just of imperial policy or attitudes directed outward, but of colonial encounters within. . . . imperial power relations were challenged and remade by colonial subjects not just in the far-flung territories of the empire but more centrally, in the social spaces of ‘‘domestic’’ Victorian imperial culture itself.’10 Both Burton and Lahiri trace the contested spaces of domestic imperial culture whereby Indians resident in Britain felt at home and not at home at the heart of empire. As Burton writes, ‘What Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari all came to understand, through different experiences and with various degrees of critical appreciation, was how elusive the goal of feeling comfortably ‘‘at home’’ as a British colonial subject in domestic imperial culture could be.’11 In many ways, the non-domiciled British also found it difficult to feel at home in domestic imperial culture. Even though they imagined Britain as home while living in India, many British residents found it hard to return. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ‘nabobs’ who had made money in India often returned to live in imperial splendour in Britain, designing houses and gardens that displayed not only their wealth, but also its Indian origins.12 But for the rest of the nineteenth century and until Independence, the non-domiciled British elite in India was largely comprised of officials and officers who, with their British wives, constituted an ‘imperial aristocracy’ living far from their middle-class metropolitan homes.13 Although British military and civilian officers often spent their whole working lives in India, they also travelled home on leave and usually retired there. Unlike Anglo-Indians, British women often returned to give birth, and their children were usually educated in Britain from an early age. According to two Anglo-Indian women who migrated to Britain in 1948 and 1960, the desire to give birth to children in Britain reflected deeper anxieties about being identified as part of the domiciled community: If any one [British] woman was expecting, they wouldn’t let their children be born out in India . . . the woman [went] home. In India, there was this stigma that if you were born in India, you were an Indian.

108

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

Your parents were British so your child would be British. If your child was born in India, your child would be considered Indian. So they’d send their wives back to England or wherever, Ireland or wherever to have their baby.

Although many British women wrote memoirs and novels about their own and imagined lives in India, there are far fewer records about their experiences of repatriation. In her research on the life writings by British women repatriated after prolonged residence in India, Georgina Gowans shows that they ‘discuss[ed] their expectations of repatriation not only in terms of going home, but also in relation to feelings of exile and dispossession’.14 Gowans traces the national and domestic displacements experienced by British women returning after the Second World War and Indian Independence. Although Britain might have been imagined as home at a distance, it was much harder to resettle in practice, particularly at a time of rationing and economic hardship. Britain was also seen as unfamiliar in many ways. Unlike the wide range of handbooks written for British women setting up homes in India, there were no guides specifically written to advise such women on their domestic lives without servants once they returned to Britain. Many members of the ‘imperial aristocracy’ in India lived in ‘genteel poverty’ on their return to Britain, and many felt – particularly at a time of decolonization – that their compatriots were unaware of and uninterested in their lives of imperial service. Like a growing number of Indians and repatriated British men and women, Anglo-Indians travelled to the imperial metropolis before as well as after Independence.15 While it is difficult to identify many Anglo-Indians who settled in Britain,16 a number of prominent Anglo-Indians travelled to London to make political representations to the British government, dating from the first petition presented to parliament by John Ricketts in 1830 to Sir Henry Gidney’s participation in the Round Table Conferences of 1931. Other members of the community founded the London Anglo-Indian Association, which, in 1938, became the London Provincial Branch of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association.17 While many Indian sojourners and residents in Britain were involved in anti-imperial nationalist politics, the representations made on behalf of Anglo-Indians, and the activities of the London Anglo-Indian Association, stressed the community’s loyalty to British imperial rule. Despite proposals for organized migration schemes for Anglo-Indians to resettle in places as diverse as Australia, Mexico and the Andaman Islands (as discussed in Chapter 4), and despite Lord Curzon’s claim in 1900 that ‘Eurasians might be very useful in peopling many blank spaces on the map of the British Empire outside of India, say in South Africa’, most

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

109

Anglo-Indians travelled to Britain until the early 1960s, and did so as individuals and with their families.18 As Teresa told me, ‘a lot [of AngloIndians] saw the writing on the wall and left before Independence. They could see what was happening and what was coming and left.’ But, like the migration of Indians from other communities, an unprecedented number of Anglo-Indians resettled in Britain after Independence and Partition. The migration of Anglo-Indians and other people from the subcontinent in the late 1940s and 1950s differed in several significant ways. Most Anglo-Indians who migrated did so because of Independence, whereas many of their compatriots in the new states of India and Pakistan did so more directly as a result of Partition. Deborah remembered the community as marginalized by both the British and Indians: We were a very important part of the British Raj. And looking back sometimes you feel that they didn’t really treat us very fairly. They used us. We were the buffer between the Indian and the British in the early days, and we continued to be the buffer. And when the time came, the British didn’t want us, the Indians didn’t want us.

As she continued, ‘we were still hostages to India’ because There was no referendum of what we people thought. . . . It was ok for the Indians to get [Independence] but we were left, we were like the trickster between the two. . . . We weren’t asked what our opinion was and what was going to be done for us. . . . we didn’t sit around whining about the fact, we got up and went.

In 1947, Reginald Maher wrote that Independence would have graver and greater implications for the Anglo-Indian than for any other community throughout this country. . . . We are a Community of European descent in the male line, our customs, our education, our language, and our lives have been largely, though it is admitted not entirely, moulded on Western standards. The coming independence does not afford the same direct threat to the ways of life and cultures of the other communities as it does in the case of the Anglo-Indian.19

Later that year a pseudonymous pamphlet published by the Calcutta Study Circle described the ‘mad panic and the grim despair’ amongst AngloIndians as Independence approached. Using imagery of domestic destruction that is strikingly similar to British accounts of the start of the ‘Mutiny’ in 1857,20 the author went on to criticize those who sought to leave their Indian homes, and implied that an ‘exodus’ of Anglo-Indians would have a detrimental effect on the subcontinent:

110

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

When one sees a fire break out in one’s home there is first an appreciation of the danger and then the reaction tends to show one’s calibre. If the man remains in control of himself his next thought is turned to the means by which he can extinguish the outbreak. If he loses control, he flees, leaving his home and belongings to the ravaging flames.21

Some Anglo-Indian women moved to Britain with their British husbands, and many Anglo-Indians who had served in the forces during the Second World War chose to be demobilized in Britain rather than India. Many of them, and other Anglo-Indians who migrated to Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s, feared that decolonization would lead to unemployment, discrimination and exclusion, and many thought that their children would have fewer opportunities in independent India. Anglo-Indians also felt insecure because of the cultural as well as economic implications of Independence, particularly in terms of their language, religion, education, dress and lifestyle. Unlike South Asians from other communities, Anglo-Indians migrated to Britain in part because they thought that they would be moving to a more familiar culture and lifestyle at a time when they felt that both were under threat in India and Pakistan. Reflecting a range of different motives, Deborah told me why she had migrated to Britain with her husband and children in 1956: We had grown up with an English background, a European background in India. India was our country, the land of our birth. But there was a dichotomy all the time. . . . It must be wonderful . . . if you’re English to be born in England, there’s no dichotomy. The only thing you know is the English way of life, the country, the climate, the people, the language, education, everything is English. There we had both, so many things going on. We had a foot in the one camp and a foot in the other camp, which was very disturbing if you really had to sort of work things out as to ‘where do I stand?’ I don’t think I bothered very much about it at that time, because I just knew that I had the English background, I had the English language, I had the English religion, I read English books, I couldn’t speak any other language. . . . I just went along with my daily life. It didn’t worry me until I had children and then I realized that there wasn’t going to be a future for them in India, because India now belonged to the Indians and they were going to do things the way they wanted, which would rule out the British way of life which I’d got used to. So there was no alternative but to do something about it. Either stay and become Indian totally, start wearing saris, learn the language, but it was pretty late at that stage to be doing anything like that. We never had any kind of contact before this, which I always regretted, but that was the way life was in those days. . . . Once I had a family, then I wanted the best for my children and I didn’t think they’d get it out there, certainly they wouldn’t get the education that I’d been used to.

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

111

As a ‘microscopic’ community in India and Pakistan, characterized by its affiliation to the West, many Anglo-Indians felt economically, socially and culturally insecure after British rule ended in India. Some interviewees told me that the position of Anglo-Indian men became particularly difficult at this time. As one said, ‘it wasn’t as easy to get jobs after the British left, the men found it difficult. . . . it might have been easier for us [women] but then we found it difficult to get a job when [we] came [to Britain].’ When British rule ended, Anglo-Indian men employed in reserved jobs in government service felt particularly vulnerable. Teresa remembered that ‘when Independence first came about, . . . my father, who was a very diligent, brilliant person, was being bypassed by Indians because he was not an Indian. . . . He was in a good position [on the railways] but could get no further because he was not an Indian.’ As she continued, ‘My father did not plan to ever leave. We would have carried on, we would have gone to Calcutta University and got a degree there and most probably gone into teaching’, but, in the event, ‘my parents felt for everyone’s sake that we should come before my sister started schooling.’ Although Anglo-Indian women faced less competition for work than their male counterparts, their experiences varied between jobs. Many Anglo-Indian women continued to be employed as secretaries in large British and American companies. British and American commercial interests remained important in India – and particularly in cities such as Calcutta – long after decolonization.22 But female teachers often found that their employment prospects became more limited. In the words of Jane, a former Dow Hill pupil who migrated to Britain in 1955, ‘I didn’t stay there long after Independence. . . . our school closed and I was teaching and I couldn’t get a job anywhere else because I didn’t know the Indian language and I had to teach it to get a job, a good job.’ Many Anglo-Indians migrated after Independence because of the economic, social and cultural dislocation that they feared for themselves and, particularly, for their children once the British Raj ended. But, in contrast, as noted above, many Indians from other communities migrated to Britain more directly as a result of Partition rather than Independence.23 Most people who migrated to Britain from the subcontinent in the 1950s were villagers, many of whom faced economic and social disruption after Partition. The large-scale movement of people between India and Pakistan led to rural poverty and increased competition for land.24 At a time of post-war labour shortages in Britain, migrants from India and Pakistan, as well as from the West Indies, Ireland and other European countries such as Poland and Latvia, were usually employed in low-paid and unskilled jobs. According to Avtar Brah, ‘If once the colonies had been a source of cheap raw materials, now they became a source of cheap labour.’25 Whereas many women migrated from the West Indies and Ireland, and many other European women migrated under organized schemes,26 most

112

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

post-war migrants from India and Pakistan were men. As Brah explains, ‘During the early phase of migration there was an underrepresentation of women among the Asian population, as the majority of Asian men had come initially without female relatives.’27 In contrast, Anglo-Indian women as well as men migrated to Britain throughout the 1950s. In a reversal of the usual gendered geography of ‘chain migration’ from the subcontinent, a number of my interviewees told me that they migrated to Britain after their adult daughters, sisters or mothers had done so. Deborah, for example, told me that the original plan was for her to resettle in Britain with her children, while her husband completed the last nine years of his contract with a large British company in India: [This] would have meant every three years he’d come on leave, and during that time then, every fifteen, eighteen months, I’d go out there, taking the children or not taking the children. There was going to be too much of the toing and fro-ing, our married life was not going to be what we intended it to be. We were married to be together. . . . I didn’t influence him, he went out there to stay for the next nine years. And then he came back with us, you know, he was here by July. And he’d worked it out that . . . he’d rather be with his family, rather than be in India and the banker of his family. . . . they wouldn’t know him as a father, they’d know him as a banker. And when he came home, they would be shy with him and awkward and couldn’t converse with him, and he didn’t want that. So he came back, and he was re-employed [in Britain by the same company].

Not only were their motives for migration and its gendered nature different for Anglo-Indians and other migrants from the subcontinent, but so too were their imagined and material geographies of return. As Avtar Brah writes, although the dream of return was usually unfulfilled, most migrants from the subcontinent ‘came primarily with the idea of accumulating sufficient savings and then returning home’.28 But Anglo-Indians who migrated to Britain usually planned to resettle on a permanent basis. Although some of them subsequently moved to live in another country, the majority did not return to India, and did not wish to do so. Rather than view the return to the subcontinent as a central goal of migration, the Anglo-Indian press used stories of return in an attempt to dissuade others from migrating. A number of articles published in the Anglo-Indian Review just before Independence told apocryphal tales of Anglo-Indians who had found it difficult to settle in Britain and had soon returned to India or Pakistan. Rather than perpetuate a positive ‘myth of return’ for Anglo-Indians who left the subcontinent, these articles described their migration and return in terms of shame, indignity and poverty. In May 1947, the Review printed the annual presidential address to the All-India Anglo-Indian Association by Frank Anthony, who told his audience that

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

113

I know that many people who have gone from India to England have found conditions appalling. Many of these people have returned. . . . These people have gone there in the hope of finding some imaginary haven and after spending much of their life’s savings have come back with their resources emasculated. They are going to be a liability to the Community.29

The following month, an article by Neville Angus described the shame of Anglo-Indians who had left India. He called himself a ‘returned prodigal’ and warned other Anglo-Indian families who sought to ‘desert’ to Britain: We belonged to that lowest category of Anglo-Indian family – once. The type that through sheer cowardice, deserts homeland, community, friends, and leaves for a foreign land, popularly known as ‘that little home in the west’. The type that having made ‘their whack’ by making use of their birthright, reject it, and go to a foreign land to squander it all. We found that wretched little home in the west not quite what we expected it to be. . . . We were cowards once, now we are prodigals. Pride gone, money gone, caste gone, with a small chance of doing something worthwhile which will give us back our caste. . . . Our fathers pioneered an old India, may they help us to pioneer a New India.30

However, although Angus describes Britain as a ‘foreign land’, and refers to India as his ‘homeland’, many other Anglo-Indians wanted to become British rather than Indian or Pakistani citizens after Independence and believed that they would feel more at home in Britain than independent India or Pakistan.

Britishness, Whiteness and Mixed Descent Although many other imperial and colonial subjects imagined Britain as the ‘motherland’, Anglo-Indians imagined Britain as the ‘fatherland’, embodied by the collective memory of an imperial forefather, as discussed in Chapter 2. As a community of mixed descent, often identifying both India and Britain as home, Anglo-Indians constituted a distinctive community that identified itself, in part, as British. In this section I consider the ways in which an understanding of Britishness was bound up with ideas of whiteness and argue that Anglo-Indians occupied an ambivalent position within a wider ‘British world’ because of their mixed descent. Although they note that whiteness was ‘a dominant element’, Bridge and Fedorowich argue that the British world ‘was not exclusively white’ as ‘People from many ethnic backgrounds (both white and non-white) eagerly adopted British identity and were accepted to varying degrees as part of the British world, within the white Dominions, elsewhere in the empire, and to some extent even outside it.’31 The British world was clearly differentiated rather

114

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

than homogeneous. Whilst the British Nationality Act of 1948 maintained a wide definition of British subjecthood across the empire and commonwealth, countries such as Australia, by contrast, exercised restrictive immigration policies that sought to prevent the migration of non-white subjects. Anglo-Indians – like many other British subjects in the empire and commonwealth – faced a ‘colour bar’ that existed to varying degrees in different places. One of the main features of articles on migration in the Anglo-Indian Review was the recognition of a ‘colour bar’, and its implications for a community of mixed descent. At the same time as many Anglo-Indians were concerned that a number of Indian Christians sought to identify themselves as Anglo-Indian, the AngloIndian Review reported in 1934 that the racialized boundaries between Anglo-Indians and the British could sometimes be transgressed: ‘It has . . . been very largely possible for the light skinned Anglo-Indian to slip through the barrier of restrictions fencing him in. If he went to England and talked of ‘‘Home’’, more often than not he found a place among the ‘heaven-born’ and succeeded in throwing off the fetters which shackled his darker-hued Anglo-Indian brothers.’32 Other commentators were more critical of those Anglo-Indians who denied their mixed descent by ‘passing’33 as white and British. Writing in 1939, for example, J.A.H. Bower described A menace that is no new phenomenon in Anglo-India, and presages badly for its future – the exodus of prosperous Anglo-Indians from the country; and the neutral attitude they adopt in keeping aloof from the Eurasian Associations of the East and the Anglo-Indian Association in London. There are about ten thousand Anglo-Indians thus skulking: a ‘wasteful exodus of the albescent across the colour line’. With many, if the colour of their skin allows it, there is a deliberate tendency to merge into the European community and eventually – as many have already done – make their homes in England.34

Both examples show that fair-skinned Anglo-Indians could more easily identify Britain as home, and could affiliate themselves with the ‘heavenborn’ British rather than the ‘country-born’ domiciled community. But Anglo-Indians were a community of mixed descent and a ‘colour bar’ existed in the white Dominions and, to a lesser extent, in Britain. Whereas Anglo-Indians could identify with a non-domiciled Britishness in India, it was often harder to identify with a domiciled Britishness when they migrated both before and after Independence. Most commentators saw the ‘colour bar’ in Britain and the Dominions as the main obstacle to migration. In December 1939, for example, the AngloIndian Review stated that ‘The colour bar is the outstanding weakness of Britain’s colonial policy’, and that ‘We for our part do not favour emigration of Anglo-Indians to any Colony particularly if such emigration is to be on

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

115

sufferance.’35 This article was written in response to the news that the Government of New Zealand had recently decided not to give permits to Anglo-Indians to migrate there, despite a recent visit by Dr John Anderson Graham, who ‘expressed the view that New Zealand was almost the only Colony where colour did not play any part and that, in his opinion, it was the most suitable place for Anglo-Indians to emigrate’.36 Dr Graham was a Church of Scotland missionary who had established a residential school – the St Andrew’s Colonial Homes, known since his death as Dr Graham’s Homes – at Kalimpong near Darjeeling in 1900 for poor and sometimes orphaned European and Anglo-Indian children.37 Many of the children at the Homes were the first-generation Anglo-Indian children of British planters and Indian or Nepali women. In many ways, Dr Graham’s Homes were modelled on Dr Barnardo’s homes for children in Britain. Like Dr Barnardo, Dr Graham thought that organized migration to the white settler colonies, particularly Australia and New Zealand, would provide employment opportunities for Anglo-Indian children. Colonial migration was a central part of Dr Graham’s vision. As the Anglo-Indian Journal reported in 1900, The environment, physical, mental and moral, of the poor European and many of the Eurasian, children of India is such as to seriously hamper them in the race of life, and the conviction has been gradually growing that the only real hope of permanent amelioration lies in Emigration, and the provision of a more wholesome environment in the Colonies of North America, South Africa or Oceania. It is not too much to expect that what Dr Barnardo and other philanthropists have done for the waifs of Britain may be done with equal success for European and Eurasian children of India. It is, however, impracticable to send those children direct to the Colonies, and it is proposed to fit [the Homes] for their new and very different surroundings.38

Kalimpong was seen as an ideal site for the Homes because of its climate and its isolation. Such isolation meant that the children could be ‘kept away from any injurious native influence, and [could be] trained on thoroughly home lines. The true dignity of manual labour will be taught by precept and example, and for this purpose [and, unlike other Anglo-Indian boarding schools,] no native servants will be kept.’39 But, unlike the largely white British children who migrated from Dr Barnardo’s Homes, Anglo-Indian children were often unable to do so because of the ‘colour bar’. As an article in the Anglo-Indian Review put it in 1944, Anglo-Indians were unable to express themselves ‘as a normal British colonial people, who should be permitted to emigrate to other parts of the British Empire, and assisted in so doing’.40 Anglo-Indians could not migrate like ‘normal British colonial people’ because of their mixed descent. As Owen Snell put it in 1944, ‘Anglo-Indians, who are all gradations from chocolate to pink, will

116

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

have to unnecessarily endure all the prejudices associated with [the colour bar].’41 In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Anglo-Indian Review included several articles that suggested that those Anglo-Indians who felt out of place in India and denied their attachment to the motherland should migrate.42 But, by 1947, many articles condemned those who did so as morally weak, defeatist and unaware of the ‘colour bar’ that they would face in Britain and the white Dominions. In his presidential address to the AllIndia Anglo-Indian Association published in May 1947, Frank Anthony stated that ‘if an Anglo-Indian can fit in anywhere by heritage, by his traditions, by his upbringing, by his environment, he can fit best into this country. A large proportion of the Community is coloured. They would not be accepted in any of the Dominions. I do not believe that they would be accepted in England.’43 A letter from Sydney Middleton published in the same month condemned those Anglo-Indians who sought to migrate as morally weak and emasculated: ‘The Emigrationist Policy followed by emasculated sections of the community, the cowards lacking moral courage, the wolves in sheep’s clothing are to be deplored, and will soon be found out and return like Prodigal Sons.’44 Similarly couched in terms of moral weakness, a November 1947 editorial entitled ‘Stop this emigration nonsense: real opportunities for the first time’ invoked the British paternal descent of Anglo-Indians: It is a reason for shame and reproach that there are some members of the Community who for sheer moral cowardice are difficult to equal. If they had any real pride in their British descent they would at least try and emulate the stolidity and freedom from panic of the British people. These Anglo-Indians, the overwhelming majority of whom have never been outside of the country, talk glibly of emigrating to England or Australia or even Brazil. They forget that the whole world is troubled. Where will they run to in the event of an atomic war, which seems increasingly certain in which Britain is involved? They forget that two-thirds of the Community is coloured. That even the lime-complexioned Anglo-Indian is classified as a black man even in England which is the least prejudiced country in the commonwealth. . . . Over sixty per cent of the Community is coloured. No one but a criminal lunatic can talk of uprooting the whole Community and sending it to a white country where the majority would be treated like pariahs on the score of their colour.45

This article not only criticized those Anglo-Indians who forgot their mixed descent and imagined themselves as white, but also condemned them as unworthy of their British descent and ignorant of unrest elsewhere in the world beyond India. The public advice given by Frank Anthony and the Anglo-Indian press was that the community should remain domiciled in India.46 Such advice

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

117

reflected the shift in political discourse under Anthony’s leadership, whereby he described his community as Indian rather than British, and as increasingly loyal to the motherland rather than the fatherland. Rather than consign the community to memories of an imperial past, Anthony saw present and future opportunities in independent India that were closely tied to their roots in, and loyalty to, the nation. As an editorial in the AngloIndian Review put it in November 1947, ‘India is at the threshold of her greatness. The Anglo-Indian still occupies a key position. Let everyone of us regard it as a duty and a privilege to help India in this great adventure.’47 Anthony and the All-India Anglo-Indian Association sought to foster pride in an Anglo-Indian identity that celebrated rather than denied its loyal attachment to India. In 1944, for example, an article published in the Anglo-Indian Review described the memories that shaped the community in relation to India itself rather than India under British rule: India is in his [the Anglo-Indian’s] blood, in the colour of his skin, in his habits. It is in his palate and his emotions. The curry and rice we’d miss so badly and the red rhododendrons on the sweeping slopes of the himalayas in spring. India means a great deal to him. The memory of Rura the cook who served two generations of the family. The memory of clanking wheels and crashing hammers in a railway workshop. The memory of a hot summer, and rain in your face, rain swishing down on the dusty sunbaked road. Memories sad and gay, recent or stretching over a century, memories of heat on a summer’s day, and love in the soft black sweetness of a summer’s night. Memories, and hopes for the future, with the memories that endear us to the land outnumbering the others. If there is an Anglo-Indian who has not got such memories and affections, I haven’t met him.48

Charting a new national loyalty to India, an article published in 1946 in the Anglo-Indian Review was entitled ‘Why quit India?’ and described Anglo-Indian roots in India that supported their national loyalty to the motherland: Anglo-Indians generally belong essentially to India, their mother country, which has been their home since the birth of the community. The paternal identity of Anglo-Indians with Britain or their distant British ancestors has obscured itself in the dim past, several generations ago. Their interests lie solely in this country where they have been born, bred and where they will rest their bones; no less bones of Indians than the bones of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, etc. This being so, Anglo-Indians are not non-Indians and belong to India in every way. . . . Anglo-Indians, with their inherent instinct of steadfast loyalty, will become the same support and bulwark to the Government under India as they have been to the Government under Britain. There can be no other course with a singularly peaceful and law-abiding community.49

118

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

Despite such claims that Anglo-Indians belonged in India and would serve an independent government as loyally as they had served an imperial government, many Anglo-Indians left the subcontinent soon after Independence. Although this article viewed British paternal ancestry as lost in the ‘dim past’, and Anglo-Indian loyalty to the Indian motherland as paramount, the figure of a British paternal ancestor became increasingly prominent under the requirements of the British Nationality Act.

Documenting Paternity and Recolonizing Identity The British Nationality Act of 1948 was, according to Ian Baucom, ‘the last major piece of legislation that sought to assert the global dimensions of Britishness’.50 Passed under Clement Attlee’s Labour Government in response to the establishment of Canadian citizenship in 1946, the Act meant that ‘British subjecthood was to be acquired in future only as a consequence of citizenship of a member state of the Commonwealth’.51 Kathleen Paul writes that the Act was an attempt to shore up British imperial power at a time of decolonization, and ‘succeeded in satisfying the varying expressions of nationalism throughout the Commonwealth while preserving the common status of British subjecthood’.52 Nevertheless, according to her, the experiences of different ‘communities of Britishness’ migrating to Britain show that, despite such claims for commonality, British subjecthood was differentiated and white Britishness was privileged. Although the Act ‘created the conditions that facilitated a mass migration of New Commonwealth citizens to the United Kingdom’ and ‘was the legal framework within which multicultural Britain emerged’, Randall Hansen argues that neither of these consequences was anticipated in 1948.53 The Act restated the situation that existed prior to 1948 and was passed at a time when large-scale migration from the empire and commonwealth seemed unlikely. But the arrival of the Empire Windrush from Jamaica in June 1948 at the very time that the British Nationality Act was passing through parliament ‘sparked a crisis within the Labour Government which . . . highlighted the existence of competing communities of Britishness and revealed the ideal of a single universal British national identity to be nothing more than a fac¸ade’.54 Unlike the familial imagery used to describe the ties between white British residents of the metropolis and the old Dominions, and the potential Britishness of European refugees and Irish migrants, non-white British subjects were seen as less likely to assimilate into a domiciled Britishness, in part because of racial prejudice against intermarriage and miscegenation.55 Although the Act maintained British subjecthood across the empire and commonwealth, its racialized differentiation became starkly apparent when non-white British subjects migrated

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

119

to Britain. As Spencer writes, ‘within two years of the extravaganza of imperial sentiment that flowed during the debate on the Nationality Act, its authors were discussing whether and how the right to emigrate to Britain as exercised by black British subjects could be legally curtailed’.56 This legal curtailment was put in place by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, which limited the right of entry because all Commonwealth citizens seeking employment in Britain had to qualify for an employment voucher.57 In this section I consider the tensions between domiciled and nondomiciled Britishness by discussing Anglo-Indian attempts to claim British nationality under the 1948 Act. The British Nationality Act was passed between Indian Independence and Partition in 1947 and the declaration of India and Pakistan as republics in 1949 and 1951. In both New Delhi and Karachi, the offices of the UK High Commissioners established a record of those citizens who, under the Act, became citizens of the UK-and-Colonies. Although all British subjects were entitled to live in Britain, acquiring UK-and-Colonies citizenship meant that Anglo-Indians could apply to the UK High Commissions rather than the Indian or Pakistan Governments for documents that would enable them to migrate. First-generation (and some other) members of the domiciled community could be automatically included on the High Commissioner’s Record, but those who were the second or third generation to be born in India usually had to apply to be included on the Record by registration. Moreover, the Record classified people into four racial groups: British Europeans, British Colonials, Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Pakistanis. The first two categories included people with not less than 75 per cent British or Colonial descent. As explained by M.H.B. Lethbridge, the Assistant Legal Adviser in the Office of the UK High Commissioner in New Delhi, racial classification ‘had been introduced in order that British Europeans might be given priority of protection in the event of emergency, as it was feared that otherwise they might be overwhelmed by crowds of Anglo-Indians. For this reason, it could not be made public.’58 The UK High Commissioner in Pakistan estimated that between 60 and 70 per cent of the 5528 citizens of the UK-and-Colonies automatically included on his Record were ‘of pure European descent’, but that 70 per cent of the 1016 people admitted by registration were of mixed descent.59 The total number of Anglo-Indians who applied for registration remained small, whether because they wanted to remain domiciled in India or Pakistan, were unaware of the deadline, or knew that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to fulfil the requirements. Moreover, an article published in the Anglo-Indian Review in November 1948 advised Anglo-Indians not to apply for registration because it anticipated that citizens of India would share common citizenship with people in other Dominions. The article warned Anglo-Indians that ‘As soon as any person registers himself under

120

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

this Nationality Act, and is accepted, he will immediately divest himself of Indian citizenship. That will mean that the Indian Government will have the right, immediately, to dismiss him from employment and to deprive him of all citizenship rights in this country.’60 The UK High Commission in New Delhi decided that ‘no useful purpose would be served by attempting to contradict what [the article] says. We appreciate that it has a bias on the side of Anglo-Indians remaining in India, but we think that to be no bad thing.’61 Of the total number of people who applied to be included on the High Commissioners’ Record by registration, 75 per cent in India and 62 per cent in Pakistan did so under Section 12(6).62 This meant that AngloIndians had until 31 December 1949 to provide documentary evidence of a paternal ancestor who had been born within the current limits of the UKand-Colonies. Applicants also had to intend to reside in the UK or a colony, and had to have a close connection with the UK. Applications submitted but without sufficient evidence by the end of 1949 were kept open pending proof.63 As Lethbridge wrote, ‘uncertified copies of birth and marriage certificates, entries in family Bibles etc., etc.’, were not accepted as documentary proof of ‘an ancestor in the male line (however remote) born or naturalised in territory now comprised in the UK and Colonies’.64 Section 12(6) accounted for 69 per cent of the 4567 successful applications for registration in India and Pakistan, but it also accounted for 85 per cent of the 2130 unsuccessful applications.65 While the memory and heritage of a British forefather was important in shaping Anglo-Indian identities in India and their attachment to Britain as the fatherland, it was more difficult for many Anglo-Indians to provide certified documentary evidence that could prove his origins. The difficulties facing many Anglo-Indians in documenting their British paternal ancestry are shown by four hundred pieces of research completed by the Society of Genealogists in London.66 Whereas the records of births, marriages and deaths held at Somerset House in London dated from the beginning of Civil Registration in 1837, the records held in the collections of the Society of Genealogists date from an earlier period and were often the most useful ones for Anglo-Indians seeking to document their British paternal ancestry. The Society also ‘had access to a large collection of records dealing with families which have been domiciled in India’.67 The Society charged a nominal fee of one guinea for research in connection with the British Nationality Act, no matter how long it took to complete, compared with its usual charge of two guineas per day. Whereas research carried out by the Society was usually restricted to its own collections, the Society extended its field of research to include records at Somerset House, the Commonwealth Relations Office and the Public Record Office for Anglo-Indians seeking to document their British paternal ancestry.68 As

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

121

the Society explained, it ‘decided to assist to the best of its ability all those who through no fault of their own ran a risk of losing their British Nationality’.69 Much of the research was completed by the Society’s honorary librarian, Lieutenant-Colonel H.K. Percy-Smith, who had a particular interest in ‘the descendants of families who have been connected with India’ and who, by December 1949, was working ‘twelve hours a day seven days a week’70 on this research. The work of the Society was publicized to Anglo-Indians in newspaper articles and by the UK High Commissions in India and Pakistan, and, in exceptional circumstances, the Society also entered into correspondence with the UK High Commission in New Delhi about particular cases.71 As Lethbridge wrote in 1949 to the Society, ‘Your researches have been of the greatest assistance to a large number of applicants who could not otherwise establish their claim to citizenship or to registration, and I have advised many to seek [your] help.’72 Letters from members of the domiciled community in India and Pakistan show both frustration and a sense of urgency about the need to prove British descent. As these letters reveal, members of the domiciled community (many of whom were Anglo-Indian) identified themselves as British and were concerned at losing this status and being regarded as ‘foreign’. Writing from Lahore in 1949, N.A. Roe complained that ‘In order to establish UK citizenship, I find myself under the invidious necessity of proving that I am not an Indian, because my father and I happened to be born in India.’73 Another correspondent from Lahore described the difficulties of living in Pakistan. Not only was it far from easy to send money out of the country, but Being in Pakistan, India does not think it worthwhile replying unless they can gain something by it, so we are rather at a deadlock. The Archives Office in Delhi may be able to give some information about my grandfather, but then again they won’t reply, and it’s like asking for a permit to the Moon to get there now, and then probably when they discover you are from Pakistan, they just won’t help.74

Many correspondents were concerned to establish their UK-and-Colonies citizenship so that they could remain British rather than Indian or Pakistani citizens. Writing from Dehra Dun in 1949, Ross McMullen explained that he was contacting the Society because he had read in a local newspaper ‘that you are helping many Britishers from becoming ‘‘Foreigners’’ by reason of their having been born in India. . . . I am not Indian either in colour, appearance, descent or outlook.’75 In similar terms, Edward Passanah wrote from Naini Tal that By birth, education, religion, and style of living I am English, and have always been recognised as such. It is very hard that now, since the British

122

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

Government has given up India, I cannot be registered as a British Citizen and claim the rights and privileges of one, simply because I haven’t got the records to prove it. India was conquered and ruled for over 150 years, by the help of our ancestors. All my people have worked for the British Government and contributed to establishing its rule in India. It is a very small concession that I am asking for in return.76

Reflecting the loyalty and service of his family to the British in India, Passanah wrote that his grandfather had been killed in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, and that the records of his father’s family had been destroyed at the same time. Writing from Darjeeling in 1950, Stella Hunter also asserted her British rather than ‘foreign’ identity and expressed her frustration: It is not understood by me why all this Tamasha is necessary, having been a British Citizen all my life!! But I suppose, this now being a foreign Country, certain conditions necessitate all this particular action!! It is ironical that foreigners because they are the wives of Britishers have no difficulties. Quite a number of Toms, Dicks and Harries seem to be UK Citizens now!! One planter has married a nepalese cooly – I suppose she is too!77

Hunter’s use of the Hindi word tamasha, which in this context means ‘performance or fuss’, shows that the English language spoken by the domiciled community often included Hindi and Bengali words, even if they were not fluent in either language. In her letter, Hunter reasserts her Britishness in contrast to those ‘foreigners’ who had married British men, and, by citing the example of a ‘nepalese cooly’, expresses her indignation in terms of class as well as racial difference. One effect of the British Nationality Act was to recolonize an AngloIndian identity as British. This differed from the legal definition of what it meant to be an Anglo-Indian as it appeared in both the Government of India Act of 1935 and the Indian Constitution of 1950, in which Anglo-Indians were defined by their domicile in India and by their European – rather than necessarily British – paternal ancestry. Many Anglo-Indians were descended from French, Dutch, Portuguese and Irish men, reflecting the much longer and more complex imperial history of India before the British Raj. According to Deborah, We weren’t all Anglo-British Indians. There were Dutch Indians, there were French Indians, mixtures of Dutch and Indian. . . . Originally there would be, we’ll say a Dutchman married to an Indian or living with an Indian, having a child by her, or a Frenchman ditto, so their child would be French-Indian or Dutch-Indian. . . . Eventually there were so many nationalities mixed up that it became a misnomer to call them Anglo-Indians. . . . Mixtures were marrying

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

123

into other mixtures. . . . I can’t call myself one thing or the other. I’m now international. My nationality has gone beyond the boundaries of one country or two countries.

In many cases, Anglo-Indian applicants trying to trace the origins of a British paternal ancestor received a regretful admission from the Society of Genealogists that it was unable, as it put it, ‘to assist you more in your problem’.78 In relation both to its records, and to the requirements of the British Nationality Act, it was also impossible for the Society to help those with a Portuguese, Dutch, French or German paternal ancestor. As it explained to a correspondent of German descent, ‘We are afraid that there is no evidence to justify the presumption that persons enlisting in the East India Company’s Service were necessarily British subjects.’79 Even though the Society was better able to help Anglo-Indians to trace their Irish ancestry,80 the terms of the British Nationality Act meant that these people could not be included on the High Commissioners’ record of British citizens as Ireland was no longer part of the UK-and-Colonies. Once the deadline for registration under Section 12(6) had passed on 31 December 1949, there were continued representations by Anglo-Indians to become citizens of the UK-and-Colonies. Although the Office of the High Commissioner in New Delhi favoured the extension of the deadline for those people of Irish descent and naturalized British subjects, it also wanted to limit the registration of Anglo-Indians under Section 12(6). A letter written to the Commonwealth Relations Office in March 1950 stated that ‘we should refrain from offering Anglo-Indians a further opportunity to apply for registration’. As the letter continued, Already a large number [of Anglo-Indians], probably most of those who are likely to make good residents of the United Kingdom, have been accepted. As for the remainder, our information is that the better type of Anglo-Indian is settling down quite satisfactorily in India. The less satisfactory Anglo-Indians are now beginning to find that life is less comfortable for them in the new circumstances of independent India, and a great number of them are hoping to secure assisted passages to England. They realise that for this they must first acquire United Kingdom citizenship, and not infrequently we receive applications by the same post from the same person both for United Kingdom citizenship and for an assisted passage.81

Later in 1950, the UK High Commissioner in New Delhi described a number of anomalies under the British Nationality Act, including ‘the acceptance of extremely dark Anglo-Indians as UK citizens, and the rejection of pure Europeans who have been unable to satisfy me as to their descent in the male line’.82 Reflecting not only racialized prejudices about the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians compared to ‘pure Europeans’, but

124

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

also class prejudices about ‘less satisfactory Anglo-Indians’, the Office of the High Commissioner argued that government policy should be ‘to encourage [Anglo-Indians] to accept their status as Indian citizens and to throw in their lot wholeheartedly with the new India’.83

Unsettled Domesticity Writing in a pamphlet published by the Calcutta Study Circle in 1946, Reginald Maher argued that ‘going Indian’ meant ‘primarily a realisation of the fact that the Anglo-Indian is an Indian. . . . if he is not an Indian, what is he, what nationality can he claim?’ As he continued, the realization of Indian citizenship should lead to ‘the very necessary interest in things Indian, for a man who is to live in a house very naturally seeks to learn things about that house unless he is a dope and cooks in the bedroom, sleeps where he should dine, and dines in the tub’.84 Through his use of domestic imagery, Maher argued that Anglo-Indians should acknowledge their Indian nationality and citizenship. But many Anglo-Indians did not see themselves as Indian and did not feel at home in independent India. In this section I show how national geographies of home were articulated and recast on domestic and diasporic scales as Anglo-Indian women settled in Britain. Unlike many other people who migrated to Britain, Anglo-Indians thought that they would be settling in a more familiar culture and lifestyle than they anticipated in independent India. But their domestic life on resettlement proved to be unfamiliar in many ways, particularly in terms of the small size of houses, domestic work without servants, and different traditions of hospitality. The domestic challenges of resettlement were felt most acutely by women, particularly in terms of learning how to shop, cook and clean for the first time. Remembering how they met such domestic challenges provides an important narrative of survival and success for Anglo-Indian women in Britain today. The spatial politics of home for Anglo-Indian women were recast on a domestic scale as they migrated from an imperial diaspora in British India to a decolonized diaspora in Britain after Independence. A range of recent research has shown how diasporic and other transnational geographies of home are experienced, performed and reworked on a domestic scale. Studies of domestic architecture and design have charted the transnational geographies of particular domestic forms, such as the bungalow and the highrise, and have shown how residential accommodation is built and refashioned to reflect diasporic cultures and identities.85 Within the home, research on material cultures, consumption and everyday life has traced domestic hybridities in diasporic space and the roles of women in fostering cultural memories and identities.86 Delineating the social, cultural

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

125

and economic intersections that lie at the heart of transnational geographies, other research has explored how the home, family and domestic work have been reconstituted within the global economy.87 In addition to studies of the reworkings of home and family for the mobile elite, a wide range of research explores the migration of female domestic workers. Domestic work was also a significant factor that shaped diasporic geographies of home for AngloIndian women. But, unlike those women who migrate as domestic workers, Anglo-Indian women left their servants in India. Not only were Anglo-Indian women travelling to the heart of empire at a time of decolonization, but they were also travelling away from imperial domesticity. Most Anglo-Indians who migrated to Britain settled in London, often in south London suburbs such as Thornton Heath, Wimbledon and Croydon. As Teresa explains, ‘you come to people you know’. Although her family initially lived in the North-West of England, close to other family members, she told me that ‘I knew that the minute I finished my degree, London was where I was heading and Wimbledon in particular. I have always felt the need to recharge the batteries, to be with my own kind. . . . I came to live with friends and then all my family followed.’ Along with the cold, grey weather, and their surprise at seeing white British people sweeping the streets and doing other manual work, many AngloIndian women told me that their first impressions of Britain were the small size of the houses. Particularly for those who had lived in spacious bungalows in railway colonies and on the coalfields, British homes were small and confining. Two Anglo-Indian women who migrated to Britain in the 1950s remembered their shock at seeing terraced houses for the first time: Coming through from Tilbury to London, I thought what have we come to? Because all we saw were chimney pots and these houses, terrace after terrace after terrace. People can’t be living in these homes. And they were. I was surprised that people lived in those sort of homes because we were so accustomed to living in these big houses. . . . When I went to my sister’s house, she was living in a terraced house in Thornton Heath. . . . I went in the front door and . . . I went up the steps, and I thought, oh I suppose it goes along there, I suppose it extends there, and I said how do you get to the other rooms, and she said this is all there is. Shocked. (Catherine) Everyone lived in terraced houses. I’d never seen a terraced house, they looked like they were servants’ quarters. I said, are there people living there? And she said, oh yes, they were people’s houses. I was horrified. And the toilets . . . I had never seen a house that never had a toilet before. I couldn’t believe they were outside! (Dow Hill focus group)

Just as the small, confining accommodation in Britain seemed like ‘servants’ quarters’ to Anglo-Indians migrating from the subcontinent,

126

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

Anglo-Indians also had to do domestic work in Britain that would have been done by servants in India. As a former Dow Hill pupil explained, ‘when I came to England, I was an ayah, I was a bearer, I was a sweeper, I was everything!’88 The difficulties of adjusting to domestic life in Britain were described by the Anglo-Indian press in an attempt to dissuade members of the community from leaving India. In the Calcutta Study Circle pamphlet cited above, Reginald Maher advised Anglo-Indian husbands and fathers who hoped to migrate to Britain to give their servants a month’s leave and ‘get the family down to the household chores’: Get your bath water, your chota hazri [breakfast] and the many things you need before work. Then set out, leaving your wife to the washing, getting the kids dressed and off to school. When you get home in the evening start contributing your share to the new life, it would very probably be in the form of grumbling. If kindly disposed, pick up the broom and do a spot of sweeping, wash-up after dinner, forget about the dhobi work [laundry] into which your experiment has involved your wife and so to bed. Before, however, you surrender to the by now welcome arms of Morpheus consider the fact that the day just ended is a life just begun, consider seriously that day in and day out normally that is going to be your routine and particularly that of your family. Incidentally, their views may be interesting. And if after a month or so the Anglo-Indian family of average means thinks it would be entering utopia through the gates of emigration goodbye but not, we hope, au revoir.89

Even though Anglo-Indians identified their culture and domestic lives as more western than Indian, Maher warned them that everyday life in Britain would be very different to what they were used to. These domestic differences were echoed by a letter published in the Anglo-Indian Review in 1947 by a woman who sought to return from Britain to India because she could not adjust to life as a British housewife and had found the climate, both meteorological and emotional, intolerably cold: I have tried to do my duty as a British Housewife but I cannot bear any part of life in England, the work, the absolute starvation, and the terrible climate – I am ill with it and feel I shall really go mad with it all, if I have to live here much longer. I long for the glorious sun-shine of India and for the warmth of the friendship of the people to whom I belong, as compared with the cold aloofness of the English people. The past three years have been a nightmare to me. . . . I have shed many bitter tears and begged my husband to return to India and try to get a civilian job there, but he does not approve of life in India, and thinks a British woman should do all her own work, though he was happy enough when we were there. I feel I cannot bear this life any longer.90

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

127

As this description of the hardships of life in the metropolis suggests, the challenges of settling in Britain were felt particularly acutely on a domestic scale. Catherine, a teacher who migrated to Britain in 1957, also remembers the traumatic adjustment of having to do ‘all her own work’. As she put it, Our homes [in India] were run on British lines. What we do here today in England is exactly what we did in India, except that we have to do five jobs instead of just me teaching perhaps. I often used to tell [my husband], oh I think we’ll go back to India, and he said no, there’s no going back, we’ve burnt our boats. Because you know all those five jobs were done by servants, all in one household.

Combining domestic work and paid employment was particularly difficult for Anglo-Indian women in Britain. As a former Dow Hill pupil explains, It was a bit of a shock, because when you were working in India, the car comes to the house, takes you to work most times, or . . . you’d go by rickshaw. . . . You finished at five, you went home, you’d have a bath, you had a cook who would cook the meal, you had someone who’d clean the house, you had an ayah who looked after the baby. So you went home, you had a shower, had your meal, you went out to play badminton, you went to parties, so we didn’t really do any work, domestic work, as such. When you come here and then you’ve got to walk to the station and then walk from the station to work . . . and then come home, pick up your child, go and cook and meal, clean the house. It was a big, big difference.

Despite broad similarities of culture and lifestyle for Anglo-Indians in Britain and India, whereby homes in both places ‘were run on British lines’ and Britain was imagined as a more familiar place than independent India or Pakistan, this unfamiliar necessity of doing domestic work constituted a significant difference that unsettled ideas of Britain as home. In 1960, a memorandum prepared by the Office of the UK High Commissioner in New Delhi noted that ‘It is no more difficult for AngloIndian Indian citizens to rough it to [sic] the United Kingdom (or elsewhere in the Commonwealth) than it is for illiterate peasants from the Punjab.’ But, as a reader commented in the margin, ‘I doubt this. Many AngloIndians in India are used to and dependent upon servants.’91 As such, the domestic difficulties of resettlement were experienced most directly by women, particularly if they lived at a distance from other female friends and family. As the following examples show, like the repatriated British and like middle-class Indian and Pakistani migrants, Anglo-Indian women who came to Britain as adults in the 1950s had to learn new domestic skills:

128

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

The adjustment was doing things yourself, like washing clothes and ironing and cooking and that sort of thing. . . . [learning to cook] was awful. We pretended we weren’t hungry. . . . We used to be frightened to go into the kitchen. ( Jane) I’d never fried an egg. When it spattered me in the pan I just sort of ran away in fright. . . . We had rented accommodation off an old widower man, so he wasn’t able to teach me, he didn’t have a wife around who was going to help me, I just had to learn on my own. . . . I fed my family, nobody got food poisoning, no-one died of starvation. (Deborah) Shopping was a shock. . . . I had never been to a shop to order meat or anything. . . . I’d go to the butcher and I had to point and say can I have that as I didn’t know what it was. . . . We didn’t know what was lamb and what was beef ! (Dow Hill focus group)

For Teresa, who migrated when she was still at school in 1951, domestic work became a point of tension between herself and her mother and came to represent her unhappiness at leaving India: We had become the coolie class here . . . I used to [tell] my mother ‘I will not clean the toilet. No way. And I’m not going to wash up. I’ll make my bed because I made it in school [in India], so I’ll do it here, but I’m not going to do these things. You brought me to England, you do them.’

A number of Anglo-Indian women who migrated to Britain as adults narrated their successful resettlement in domestic terms. Whereas several women told me that British residents in India had warned them that they would find it hard to resettle, they recounted overcoming the hardships of dislocation and resettlement with pride. As Deborah recounts, I came here when I was in my 30s. I’d never done any washing or cleaning or ironing or anything in India and had servants, and yet I’d left to . . . make my life over here and be very happy here and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. And I think there’s a lot of courage that’s gone into that, to leave all that you had in India. I mean the British coming back, the English coming back, had their families here. We had nobody, we had to start right again, from scratch. . . . I remember being told by people, Englishmen, in the company where my husband worked [in India], oh, we would find it very difficult. You know, ‘What are you going there for? You won’t be able to cope.’ And I resented that, and I’d love to meet people and say ‘Come and see how I have coped.’ . . . I don’t regret a bit of it. I always look back on it and think, ‘Well what a clever girl,’ you know, I coped. But when you’re young you can cope with anything I think, if you’ve a will to . . . I wasn’t going to be beaten.

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

129

A few Anglo-Indians brought an Indian servant with them when they migrated to Britain. Jane told me that a married friend had brought her bearer when she migrated: ‘He would cook the meal for them, and serve them, he’d put on his turban, he’d serve them at table, and when he’d washed up and cleaned, he’d go and sit on the floor in the kitchen and eat his food. And she was so sad about all that, she sent him back again, he was too unhappy here.’ But more often, Anglo-Indian women in Britain remember their sadness at leaving their servants behind. As Catherine and Jane explained: Catherine: We never really spoke to them on a social level, because, you know, our backgrounds were different. Jane: And yet when we were all coming away from India, it was really so sad to leave them. I was crying, and I put my arms around him, that sort of thing, it was very sad. They were part of the family, but they knew their place, and we just let it be like that. Catherine: They became part of the family . . . one generation after another, you know. And in the school, one generation would hand over to the next and the next. . . . And they felt secure, because the British were there giving them things, jobs.

Locating their Indian servants within such familial discourses of loyalty and security continued to invoke imperial domesticity even after Independence.92 A number of Anglo-Indian women told me not only about their sadness at saying goodbye to their servants, but also their servants’ regret that they were leaving. This perceived regret was bound up with the idea that Indian servants preferred to work for Anglo-Indians or the British rather than other Indians. Jane told me that ‘they didn’t like the idea of the Indians being their bosses’, while another interviewee said that ‘the people who suffered the most when we came away were the servants because there was nothing for them to do. . . . those that were employed by their own kind got a very hard life. . . . they wouldn’t like to work with them if they had a choice.’ Other Anglo-Indian women, remembering their home lives in India, regretted the way that their servants were treated. According to Gloria Jean Moore, many Anglo-Indians ‘only realised the hardships of servants’ lives when they themselves had to wash, sweep, iron and cook in colder climates overseas’.93 As Deborah and Teresa remember: There was contact with the Indians, but as master and servant. But we were good masters, good mistresses, we were kind, we were not as kind as we could have been I suppose, we were not as thoughtful as we could have been. (Deborah)

130

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

What was sad was seeing with hindsight how the servants were regarded and how the Indians were regarded altogether, as second-class citizens, a secondclass race. The Anglo-Indians were definitely a cut above them. Never mind that the Indians thought of the Anglo-Indians as chi-chi, which is the word for dirty. (Teresa)

Embodied Identities and the Limits of Familiarity Writing in 1954, seven years after Independence, R. Pearson described British snobbery towards Anglo-Indians, which became particularly acute ‘when a member of the Eurasian community attempted to pass beyond the limits of familiarity which might be allowed him’. Such ‘limits of familiarity’ set by the British were often breached when Anglo-Indians imagined Britain as home: One Eurasian tells how, travelling to England by sea, he became excessively weary of the journey, and turning to the Ship’s Mate . . . he asked: ‘How long do you think, Sir, it will be before we get home?’ ‘Get HOME! Mr Middlerace, get HOME?’ the mate returned for an answer, strongly emphasising the word ‘home’; ‘I reckon we should make land by about midday tomorrow.’ When the next day the ship arrived at the island of St Helena, Mr Middlerace’s trunks were ready packed, and on being informed that the ship had arrived at Portsmouth he promptly disembarked – to the intense amusement of the English passengers and the crew, and to his own surprise that an English port should employ so many dark-skinned porters on the quay!94

British disdain towards Anglo-Indian ideas of Britain as home was clearly racialized, as made plain by the snide references to ‘Mr Middlerace’ and by the cruel amusement shared by the ‘English passengers and crew’ at his expense. Often exposing deeper anxieties and prejudice about miscegenation, such racialized snobbery reflected British attempts to maintain clear boundaries between themselves and Anglo-Indians. In this section I consider the ways in which the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians has been suppressed and manifested in Britain since Independence. I explore embodied identities in terms of racialization, accent, body language and dress, which have marked Anglo-Indians both as similar and different, and as familiar and unfamiliar, in their ‘strange encounters’ with a wider community of domiciled Britishness. Following Sara Ahmed, I interpret the recognition and misrecognition of Anglo-Indians in terms of proximity and distance.95 By discussing some of the ‘strange encounters’ between Anglo-Indians and the domiciled British, I explore how AngloIndians were regarded as paradoxically familiar and unfamiliar in a range of embodied ways, and also how Anglo-Indians identified themselves as both

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

131

at home and not at home in Britain. Such encounters articulated British ignorance and prejudice not only about the Anglo-Indian community – and about many other former imperial and colonial subjects – but also about British imperialism more widely. In her analysis of ‘embodied others in post-coloniality’, Ahmed considers ‘the complexity of the relationship between histories of colonialism and contemporary modes of encounter’.96 I argue that the resettlement of Anglo-Indians in Britain reveals a collective memory and forgetting about previous imperial encounters. Living away from India, and living in the former heart of empire, many Anglo-Indians sought to distance themselves from their Indian roots by ‘passing’ as British. But, at the same time, many others came to recognize their Anglo-Indian identity, sometimes for the first time. Moreover, living in Britain enabled a number of Anglo-Indians to develop a deeper knowledge and appreciation of Indian history and culture than the racialized hierarchies of imperial India had allowed. The metropolitan encounters of Anglo-Indians charted new geographies of home, identity and nationality both in proximate terms between themselves, the domiciled British and Britain as home, but also in more distant terms between themselves and a remembered and imagined India. Many Anglo-Indians who migrated to Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s told me about British attempts to locate their origins. Like many other people of mixed descent, Anglo-Indians were subject to enquiries about where they were from as employers, colleagues and neighbours in Britain tried to fix identities that seemed paradoxical and uncanny in terms of their familiarity and difference. Such encounters were often articulated through questions and assumptions about language, accent, education and appearance. As a former Dow Hill pupil remembers, ‘It was very difficult to get a job here . . . because they heard our accents and they knew we were foreign and probably couldn’t speak English. . . . . Hearing my [Portuguese] name and saying I was from Pakistan, they didn’t want to know.’ Moreover, the educational qualifications of Anglo-Indians were often not recognized, even though the Senior Cambridge examinations sat in most Anglo-Indian schools were set and marked in Britain, and even though many AngloIndian women worked as secretaries in British and American companies both before and after Independence. One interviewee told me that she applied for a secretarial job with the State Bank of India when she first arrived in Britain, but was told that ‘we don’t take on anybody but English’. Another remembered that she was not appointed to a secretarial job because she had not worked in Britain before, even though she had worked for British and American companies in India. Both women, like many people who migrated to Britain from South Asia in the post-war period, found their first jobs in factories. As Teresa told me, it was easier for the younger generation to adapt to different sorts of employment. Whilst they,

132

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

particularly Anglo-Indian men, were often unable to get jobs in India after Independence, they got jobs straightaway [in Britain]. They didn’t care, and nobody cared, that you worked in a factory. You wouldn’t have worked in a factory in India, but you worked in a factory here and you were darned glad you had a job. It didn’t matter what it was for the youngsters, this was the land of milk and honey. . . . For the older generation who, having done their stint in India and were doing so well, to have to then come here and start at the bottom all over again or pick up a different line which went nowhere anyway [was much more difficult].

Moving from a senior position on the Indian railways, the only job that Teresa’s father was offered in Britain was as a porter: ‘He never took it. Nobody who came from India in those days [had] their qualifications recognized. No way could they get jobs here on a par. . . . My brother-in-law, who was a triple degree graduate from Calcutta University, whose papers were all from Cambridge . . . all he got was a ticket clerk job on the railway.’ Both in terms of their birthplace and their appearance, many AngloIndians were assumed to be Indian or Pakistani. Their mixed descent and, more specifically, their European ancestry, ways of living and educational qualifications were usually overlooked. As Deborah explains, If they came from Pakistan, they were called Pakistanis; they were not Pakistanis. They were called Indians, but they were not Indians, because most people didn’t understand what an Anglo-Indian is. I mean if you go to France, the Frenchmen are not all blue-eyed and white-skinned, some of them are dark. The Portuguese, some of them are dark, dark-skinned and light-skinned, it’s who they’ve mixed with . . . who they’ve intermarried with. . . . Italians can be very dark-skinned and light-skinned.

Although many Anglo-Indians had documented their British paternal ancestry under the requirements of the British Nationality Act – and many others had tried but failed to do so – they were often assumed to be Indian or Pakistani once they had left the subcontinent. Anglo-Indians were frequently asked where and when they learnt English, and when they started to wear western dress. As a former Dow Hill pupil remembers, ‘When we first came over, when we started work, [a] girl said ‘‘How quickly you learnt English, when did you learn English?’’ . . . And what else did they want to know? ‘‘When did you start wearing frocks?’’ ’ Another Dow Hill pupil told me that people asked her ‘all the time’ where she was from: ‘ ‘‘How and why do you speak English so well?’’ And I said, ‘‘Oh, because I was educated in India, not England!’’ You know, it used to be a joke.’ When I asked if her enquirers knew what it meant to be an Anglo-Indian, she replied, ‘No, they

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

133

had no idea, so you were Indian. You were a ‘‘wog’’ and all that.’ More recently, an Anglo-Indian woman, who migrated from the Kolar Gold Fields near Bangalore to join her daughter in Britain in the 1990s, told me that British ignorance about Anglo-Indians reflected a much wider ignorance about British imperialism. She narrated an encounter with a white British man soon after she moved to Britain: I said, ‘I’m from India.’ He said ‘How come you speak such good English?’ I said, ‘Well English is my mother tongue. I dress like the English dress, I eat . . . the same food, maybe a little more rice and curry, but otherwise we eat the same food. We eat, we sit at tables and eat from plates, and use cutlery and crockery.’ . . . Everything is so English . . . but we haven’t got that accent, you see? We don’t have the accent, the English accent. . . . I said, ‘Well, haven’t you heard of the British Empire or anything?’ I said, ‘Haven’t you heard? You didn’t rule it from here, you ruled it from there, and we are what you left behind.’

A similar encounter, but this time narrated by the white, British enquirer, was described by Rod Liddle writing in The Guardian in 2002. He wrote about being on a train with two elderly men. One of the men ‘spoke with a slight inflection I couldn’t quite place; was it Welsh, I wondered?’ The man replied ‘What accent? It’s just normal, isn’t it?’ Later, when they were alone, the other man told Liddle that asking about his friend’s accent had ‘hit a bit of a nerve’ because ‘he’s Indian, isn’t he?’ After reflecting on what he calls the ‘unthinking, generationally determined racism’ of the two men, who say that they wouldn’t live in the East End of London now that ‘it’s full of Asians’, Liddle concludes that ‘if you looked a lot closer at his face you could see, just about, that, indeed, he was [Indian]. But old age had made the difference almost imperceptible.’97 It is quite probable that the man whom Liddle met on the train was Anglo-Indian, marked as different from a white British identity, and seen as difficult to place – at least by Liddle – because of his accent. Located within a long tradition of ‘passing’ as white and British, many Anglo-Indians suppressed or denied that they were from India or Pakistan when they resettled in Britain. A former Dow Hill pupil told me that ‘Some girls lied . . . they couldn’t get jobs so they lied, they worked here, they worked there, nothing like Pakistan or India was mentioned and they got jobs.’ Another interviewee remembered talking to two women who worked in the same company in the City of London, whom she assumed to be Anglo-Indian: We all used to meet in the toilets . . . and they’d talk to me and they’d know I’m Anglo-Indian, they’d know when [I opened my] mouth! And one day, there were three of us in the toilets, and . . . I said, ‘Are you girls from India or

134

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

Pakistan?’ And they said ‘No’ and I said ‘Oh.’ One girl was quite dark and she said ‘Oh, we’ve just come back from a holiday in Italy’ and I said ‘If you want to be like that.’98

Teresa told me that many Anglo-Indians found their identity ‘too difficult to explain . . . too time consuming, too convoluted really’ and that ‘a lot of Anglo-Indians don’t say they are [Anglo-Indian], especially the fair ones’. As she continued, A lot [of Anglo-Indians] have said to me, ‘Why do you say you are an AngloIndian?’ I say ‘Because I am.’ I open my mouth and you can’t mistake it. I could get round it . . . I could say I’m Welsh or whatever, but why should I? I am what I am and other people say, ‘Well if you’ve got a British passport’ – which is what I came on, because we were able to prove that we have got 75 per cent European ancestry, we got British passports from out there. [They say] ‘You are British if you’ve got a British passport, you have lived here all these years, and why do you say you are still Anglo-Indian?’ I suppose it is because your childhood does have such a very big influence on your life and it is one’s inborn nature and if you are the type that settles easily and [can] change and adapt to your surroundings like a chameleon then you’re ok. I don’t.

Coming to Britain as a teenager made Teresa realize the distinctiveness of her identity: I came to England and was instantly aware of the difference in speech, the difference in ethos, the difference in manners, and the difference in daily running of one’s life. That was what really made me realize that I was an Anglo-Indian. I hadn’t thought about it before. . . . I didn’t really know anything about Cockneys or anybody [British] who wasn’t erudite and wellspoken in India, so I was quite surprised when I came here. But it made me realize that I wasn’t English and it has been reinforced throughout the forty whatever years I have lived here. There are basic differences in our ethos; maybe a hang-up from the Victorian era, and also that we have in some ways atrophied since coming here.

For Teresa, such everyday differences are both embodied and domesticated. For example, she told me that what counted as polite behaviour in India was interpreted as insolent in Britain: ‘If the teacher is telling you off in India, you drop your eyes . . . We were told constantly [in Britain] ‘‘Look at me when I’m speaking to you’’ and that [to me] is very rude; that is very challenging, that is really not done. You drop your eyelids if somebody is telling you off.’ Traditions of hospitality were also very different: We keep ‘open house’. . . . [Anglo-Indians] will make time, you can sort of turn up and stay for as long as [you] want and you’ll never be thrown

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

135

out. . . . when I came to England I was asked to go for tea from 4 o’clock to 6 o’clock and yet [when] all my friends came to my house, the English friends I made, it was just wonderful that they could come at any time and stay for as long as they wanted, and they knew they’d be fed and made welcome.

Many of my interviewees agreed that such warm, open and less rigid traditions of hospitality were, and are, unlikely to be reciprocated, ‘however well you know English people’. Beyond the home, a number of AngloIndian women told me that they felt isolated and lonely compared to life in India. For a former Dow Hill pupil who migrated to Britain and then later moved to Australia, the thing that I noticed first of all when I went to England was that you walked down the street and there was nobody you knew. In Calcutta if you walk down the street, or went into the New Market, you knew everybody, everybody knew you, the shopkeepers knew you. . . . [In England] you didn’t know anybody, you were so isolated. You’d come to a different culture, a different country. It was just awful.

Whereas some Anglo-Indians sought to ‘pass’ as white and British, others, like Teresa, acknowledged their mixed descent for the first time when they resettled in Britain: We used to be told to wear a hat, because every shade counts. A lot of girls used to envy me and my blonde hair and blue eyes and fair skin and conversely I wanted to have black hair. . . . I didn’t really realize which AngloIndians were coloured though until I came to England and then remet them, and I thought, I didn’t know you were so dark! It hadn’t registered, although I was aware that this went on in India.

Teresa recognized that she had not suffered prejudice since leaving India, both because of her ‘fair skin’ and because she completed her school and university education in Britain: ‘There are lots of Anglo-Indians to this day who really have no time for the English, and they say to me, ‘‘Oh, it’s alright for you, you have a white skin, you haven’t met prejudice.’’ I also finished my education here, my qualifications are all English, I haven’t had anything that stood in my way academically.’ Describing the 1991 Census, Teresa told me that many ‘Anglo-Indians actually put themselves down as Anglo-Indians and not as English or as Indian . . . I ticked ‘‘white’’, [my Anglo-Indian husband] didn’t, we both ticked ‘‘India’’ [place of birth], we both ticked ‘‘other’’, and then on the back we wrote ‘‘Anglo-Indian.’’ ’99 Not only did some Anglo-Indians acknowledge their distinctive identity for the first time away from India, but they also learnt more about Indian culture in Britain than they had done in India. Living at a distance from the

136

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

imperial hierarchies that positioned the domiciled community as a ‘buffer’ between the British and other Indians, many Anglo-Indian women told me that they had come to learn more about, and to appreciate, Indian culture and ways of life after they had migrated. For two former Dow Hill pupils, What is in a way tragic is that Anglo-Indians know little or nothing about Indian culture, literature, religions. What I know I have learnt since coming here. (Teresa) We grew up not really knowing the Indian, and looking back now over the years, since I’ve been living in England, I think that we lost out. We didn’t get to know the Indians, we didn’t mix with them, we didn’t get to know their religion. I mean people in this country, you know, are delighted when they’re invited to an Indian wedding, you know, to see what the ceremonies are like, and what the dress is like, and what the sort of prayers are like, and the food. . . . We never got the chance to do that in India, it was not done, it was taboo. We had grown up with the English side or the European side of our ancestry, always drawn to that side, for whatever reasons, and we were not encouraged to sort of see the other side. (Deborah)

As an example of learning about India from a distance, Joan told me that she had borrowed and then bought a sari in Britain. She had worn a sari once in India, when she was working in Delhi during the Second World War and living at the YWCA. She remembered dressing up with other women at the YWCA because a group of American servicemen wanted to take photographs to send home. Since moving to Britain in 1947, and marrying a British man whom she met in Delhi, Joan had borrowed a sari on several occasions to wear at functions on ‘women of the world’ organized by the Women’s Institute. On one occasion, she recounted visiting a shop nearby run by an Indian woman: I went to her and I said about wanting a sari, so she said, ‘Come to the flat tomorrow night, and I’ll show you.’ And she showed me three or four saris and said try them on, one after the other, and they were beautiful. They were her wedding saris. Apparently, she said, the husband’s family has to give the wife, I think it’s uneven numbers, five saris, and the wife-to-be, her family has to give him a suit. . . . She said, ‘Take them back, show your husband.’ Now she’d never seen me before really. ‘Take them back, show them to your husband, and you can use the one you want.’ . . . She showed me how to put it on, she gave me a diagram, and I wore the sari.

Realizing that she could not borrow a sari every time she wanted to wear one for a WI function, Joan soon afterwards bought her own. As she continued:

I N DE P E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L ON I Z A TI O N

137

When we were going on holiday, I was trying to pack things, and I said to [my husband], ‘What on earth shall I wear? What shall I take for the evening?’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you take your sari?’ So we packed the sari, and I put it on one night, and we went out . . . I said good evening to [the waitress] and goodbye. And [my husband] said, ‘Did you hear what she said to you? . . . She said ‘Good night duchess.’ [husband – ‘Princess’]. Duchess was it, or princess, something like that. And then I was asked to demonstrate to a WI how to put on a sari, and someone else was doing a cookery demonstration. And so I put on the sari, showed them how to do it, which was a bit daft because we had an Indian lady amongst the members and she could have done it much better! And so I ended up by saying, ‘If I can look like a princess, or a duchess, or whatever it was, in a sari, can you imagine what it does for anybody else who puts it on?’ It does, it completely changes you.

Borrowing, buying and wearing a sari was an important way for Joan not only to learn about Indian culture from other Indians – and to visit an Indian woman at home – but also to teach other women about India. And yet a desire to establish proximity whilst retaining a distance from India became evident when she told me that a British friend at church had asked, ‘Were you married in a sari?’ In reply, she said, ‘ ‘‘I’ve never worn a sari.’’ . . . That was ignorance. It wasn’t meant unkindly, it was just a query.’ Moreover, even though Joan dressed up in a sari on special occasions, this did not extend to events where other Anglo-Indians would be present. As she observed, ‘None of our people wear a sari to the [school] reunion, you see. None of us,’ to which her husband replied, ‘You wear normal dress, don’t you? The sort of dress you would normally wear.’

Conclusions The ‘homing desire’ of Anglo-Indians in British India and in Britain after Independence reflects complex and contested geographies of home, identity and diaspora. The mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was mapped on to their dual attachments to Britain as fatherland and India as motherland. But such attachments were more than just symbolic. Anglo-Indians and other members of the domiciled community had to document the British origins of a paternal ancestor to claim citizenship under the British Nationality Act of 1948. However, the origins of a British forefather, a figure so symbolically significant in shaping a collective memory and identity that was loyal to British India, proved much harder to document in practice. Nevertheless, although decolonization made it more difficult for AngloIndians to identify themselves within a wider ‘community of Britishness’, the British Nationality Act in many ways led to a recolonization of identity by emphasizing British rather than wider European paternal ancestry. But

138

I N D EP E N D EN C E AN D D EC O L O NI Z A T I O N

such national geographies of home were recast on domestic and diasporic scales as Anglo-Indian women resettled in Britain. Anglo-Indians thought that they would be settling in a more familiar culture and lifestyle than they anticipated in independent India, but their domestic life on resettlement was unfamiliar in many ways, unsettling notions of Britain as home. The domestic challenges of resettlement were felt most acutely by women, and provide an important narrative of survival and success for Anglo-Indian women in Britain today. The residential concentration of Anglo-Indians in south London suburbs such as Wimbledon, Croydon and Thornton Heath continues today, and the South London Anglo-Indian Association was established in 2002. Despite this new association, and the work of the United Kingdom Anglo-Indian Association, which run an Educational Trust Fund for students in India, other associations ceased to exist in the 1990s and the community is in many ways less organized and visible than it is in India or Australia. The main community networks in Britain today comprise school associations and genealogical societies. Such networks are prominent for two main reasons. First, most Anglo-Indians who migrated to Britain did so soon after Independence, and many who are now actively involved in the community left India either while they were still at, or had recently left, school. At the same time, many Anglo-Indians attended boarding schools such as Dow Hill for up to nine months of the year at a time, and their parents often moved frequently, particularly between railway colonies. For many Anglo-Indians, school was the most permanent home they knew in India, and memories of life in India are thus intimately bound up with memories of their early education. Second, the renewed importance of genealogical research today binds family and imperial memories of home among a generation of Anglo-Indians that has recently retired. Unlike the research conducted in order to meet the requirements of the British Nationality Act in 1948, today this is undertaken for personal interest and fostered through magazines such as The Indiaman and organizations such as the Families in British India Society.100 Unlike the British Nationality Act of 1948, which maintained a wide definition of British subjecthood across the empire and commonwealth and was passed at a time when large-scale migration to Britain seemed unlikely, the White Australia Policy was passed to restrict the migration of non-white subjects. In the next chapter, I turn to focus on the migration of AngloIndians to Australia in 1947 and in the 1960s and 1970s, exploring the contested politics of whiteness and the visibility of the community in Australia today.

Chapter Six

Mixed Descent, Migration and Multiculturalism: Anglo-Indians in Australia since 1947

On 15 August 1947, the date of Indian Independence, HMAS Manoora reached Western Australia with more than 700 Anglo-Indians on board. In the same year that Australia began to admit refugees from Europe, the troopship Manoora had been refitted to evacuate Australians and Europeans from India. As the Labor Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, put it: ‘use of ‘‘Manoora’’ should be confined to Australians and to British people of pure European descent’.1 In the publicity surrounding its arrival, Australia was described as a free, democratic and peaceful home, in contrast to the instability and communal conflict of India. The day after the Manoora reached Fremantle, the West Australian newspaper described India as ‘a home of violence and strife’, in contrast to homes in Australia, ‘where people can live in freedom and peace’.2 A two-minute newsreel about the ship’s arrival described the passengers as people who ‘have come to our country knowing that hard work and a democratic way of life will pay dividends in terms of happiness and security’.3 In 1947, at the height of the White Australia Policy, such ideas about national freedom and democracy, and about peace, happiness and security, were inseparably bound up with notions of racial purity.4 And yet, despite Calwell’s instructions, the majority of passengers on the Manoora were Anglo-Indians of mixed descent, and, as such, were out of place in White Australia.5 After its opening shots of the ship arriving at Fremantle (Figure 6.1), the newsreel focused on women and family groups (Figures 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4). Continuing a long tradition of imperial photography, the uncannily still images of Anglo-Indians on the newsreel appear to record, scrutinize and fix their appearance.6 On the day after the Manoora’s arrival, the West Australian newspaper reported that Anglo-Indians were both racially and culturally different to the wider Australian community:

140

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

Figure 6.1 The arrival of HMAS Manoora at Fremantle, Western Australia, 15 August 1947 (Westralian News 24 Newsreel 20632: ’Migrants’ arrival’, August 1947. From the collection of Screensound Australia, The National Screen and Sound Archive) The majority of the immigrants aboard . . . were Anglo-Indians who, in the words of an Australian aboard the ship, were ‘between the Moslems and the Hindus, and did not know where they would stand when India and Pakistan received their Independence’. Surprise that some of those aboard the vessel were granted entry into Australia was expressed by this man and by others, and it was remarked that their mode of life and habits generally would have to be greatly improved if they were to fit successfully into an Australian community.7

Although up to 7000 Indians, mainly Punjabis, lived in Australia by the beginning of the twentieth century, the Immigration Restriction Act passed in 1901 meant that ‘migration from India virtually stopped for half a century’.8 The unanticipated arrival of Anglo-Indians on the Manoora prompted increasingly stringent policies to create and to maintain a ‘White Australia’, and few more people migrated from the subcontinent until these policies became less restrictive in the mid-1960s. By the 1970s, however, Australia had become the main destination for Anglo-Indians leaving India.9 At a time when British immigration policies had become increasingly restrictive, and when a ‘second wave’ of Anglo-Indians sought to leave India, a growing number of Anglo-Indians resettled in Australia,

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

141

Figure 6.2 Anglo-Indians on board HMAS Manoora (Westralian News 24 Newsreel 20632: ’Migrants’ arrival’, August 1947. From the collection of Screensound Australia, The National Screen and Sound Archive) particularly in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. According to the 1996 Census, there are an estimated 36,500 Anglo-Indians in Australia,10 and they form one of the largest communities of mixed descent within the country. Unlike the ‘microscopic’ size of the community in India, Anglo-Indians account for a significant proportion of the diverse Indian-born population in Australia today, which is estimated at 110,000.11 In this chapter I begin by exploring the contested politics of whiteness and the ambivalent place of Anglo-Indians in ‘White’ Australia. I trace the ways in which the White Australia Policy restricted the immigration of people of mixed descent before Independence and until the mid-1960s, and the internal contradictions revealed by the migration and resettlement of some Anglo-Indians over the same period. I argue that gendered and racialized discourses of home, family and nation that underpinned the White Australia Policy were both exposed and challenged by the migration of Anglo-Indians. By studying the impact of key policy changes, I argue that ideas about ‘race’ came to be superseded by ideas about ‘culture’ in assessing the suitability of migrants of mixed descent. I reflect on the resonance of these notions today by exploring the spatial politics of home and identity for Anglo-Indians in multicultural Australia.12 Following

142

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

Figure 6.3 An Anglo-Indian family on board HMAS Manoora (Westralian News 24 Newsreel 20632: ’Migrants’ arrival’, August 1947. From the collection of Screensound Australia, The National Screen and Sound Archive) Sneja Gunew’s work on the colonial hauntings that inflect ‘situated multiculturalisms’ in different contexts today,13 I argue that the migration of Anglo-Indians both during and after the implementation of the White Australia Policy reveals a shift from ‘race’ to ‘culture’ in discourses of home, nation and belonging. I explore the ways in which Anglo-Indians are positioned in relation to a broader Anglo-Celtic settler population and how their mixed descent and memories of India are both manifested and challenged in multicultural Australia today.

Anglo-Indians in White Australia The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was the first major law passed by the new Australian federal parliament and laid the foundations of what came to be widely known as the White Australia Policy. Before 1901, immigration policies had mainly restricted the number of Chinese people working in the gold fields. After 1901, both the Chinese and Pacific Islanders working in the Queensland sugar industry were restricted and, after the Second World War, immigration policies restricted the entry of non-whites more generally.14 Although explained publicly in economic and

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

143

Figure 6.4 Anglo-Indians on board HMAS Manoora (Westralian News 24 Newsreel 20632: ’Migrants’ arrival’, August 1947. From the collection of Screensound Australia, The National Screen and Sound Archive) social terms, the policy was rooted in ideas about white superiority. Miscegenation was seen as a significant threat to the idealized whiteness of this new nation, as shown by one politician who described ‘the noble ideal of a White Australia – a snow-white Australia. . . . Let it be pure and spotless.’15 Such goals of homogeneity and assimilation underpinned domestic as well as immigration policies. For the first fifty years of the twentieth century, the ‘stolen generation’ of children of part Aboriginal and part white descent were forcibly removed from their families to be raised in residential homes, mission schools and white families.16 In this section I consider the migration of Anglo-Indians to White Australia before the arrival of HMAS Manoora. Many commentators writing about the future of the Anglo-Indian community recognized that Australia had the most racially restrictive immigration policy in the British commonwealth. Writing in 1930, Ethel Shepard, Head Deaconess of St Hilda’s Society in Lahore, described Anglo-Indians as ‘a marooned people’ in British India.17 In response to calls for migration, she questioned ‘What country will have them? Even if they were acceptable in Canada, their upbringing in a sub-tropical country and their heritage of eastern blood will render them unfit to cope with the rigours of colonial life. Australia will not, of course look at them.’ She went on to recount the story of an

144

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

Irishman who worked on the Indian railways. He had bought land in Australia and planned to retire there with his family. But, He had married an Anglo-Indian wife, whose two daughters, of course, inherited her colour. When – his wife being dead – he felt the time had come to retire to his land in Australia, he found himself unable to do so. The authorities were willing enough to allow him a passage, but he must leave his motherless girls behind in India. This of course he could not do, and eventually fell ill and died in Singapore, hoping vainly to the last that some way might be found by which he could realize his dreams. The two girls are still working as poorly-paid typists in Singapore; the little property in Australia, which as yet they have not been able to dispose of, being of course useless to them.18

Whereas Shepard described the Anglo-Indian community as marooned in India, she depicts these orphaned ‘girls’ as doubly marooned in Singapore, living midway between their past home and family life in India and an unattainable home and family life in Australia. Despite the ‘colour bar’ that many Anglo-Indians faced as they sought to migrate, Australia occupied a central place within a collective imperial imagination that revolved around colonization and settlement and, as shown in Chapter 4, dates back to a proposal in 1826 for an Anglo-Indian settlement in Van Dieman’s Land, or New South Wales. As also noted in that chapter, over a century later, a number of Anglo-Indians made enquiries to the Australian government from the 1930s to the 1950s concerning proposed settlements in Papua and New Guinea. At the same time, Anglo-Indian homemaking at McCluskieganj was likened to British colonization and settlement in Australia and other settler colonies. Although colonization and settlement in Australia was a longstanding and potent feature of an Anglo-Indian imperial imagination, however, it proved much harder for Anglo-Indians to migrate in practice. As an editorial in the Anglo-Indian Review put it in November 1947, what the Anglo-Indian can ‘do in Australia, with its avowed White Australia Policy, can better be imagined than described’.19 In April 1947, it was estimated that 1400 people travelled from India to Australia per year but, by September, there were 2000 applications per month from Anglo-Indians alone.20 At this time, to resettle in Australia, Anglo-Indians had to be ‘clearly more than 50% European and from appearance and conversation . . . could reasonably be regarded as predominantly European’.21 If a man was ‘fully eligible for admission’, but married to an Indian woman, she would remain ineligible. If he was married to an Anglo-Indian, his wife would have to satisfy the authorities that she was clearly more than 50 per cent European and was ‘predominantly European’ in appearance and way of life, like other Anglo-Indian applicants.22 Unlike the requirement for Anglo-Indians to document a British paternal ancestor to be registered under the British Nationality Act, the White Australia

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

145

Policy was concerned with European descent more widely and did not specify paternal or maternal ancestry. Even though the Policy specified a wider European ancestry – which reflected the European rather than necessarily British paternal ancestry of many Anglo-Indians – it also focused on appearance, unlike the British Nationality Act. Whereas many white and non-white people could claim British subjecthood under the British Nationality Act, those seeking to migrate to Australia had to be classified as predominantly ‘European’ in appearance. Even if an AngloIndian could document that he or she was more than 50 per cent European by descent, European identity was equated with whiteness and he or she could still be classified as ‘non-European’. From early 1947, officials in the Australian Immigration Department were becoming increasingly anxious that the racialized basis of Australia’s migration policy would be exposed. This anxiety often centred on the migration of Anglo-Indians to Australia and, in particular, the possibility of Anglo-Indians being granted passports to travel, but then being turned away on arrival because of their mixed descent.23 Mr Peters from the Department of Immigration visited New Delhi in March 1947 to discuss the migration of Anglo-Indians. In a memorandum written soon before his visit, he restated the position regarding applications from Anglo-Indians: ‘The broad lines followed in the past were that persons who had more than fifty percent of European blood could be classed as Europeans, but if fifty percent or less, they would be classed as non-Europeans and therefore not eligible for admission into Australia for permanent residence, even though of British nationality.’24 A clear distinction was drawn between British nationality and ‘European blood’. Although an Anglo-Indian might be of British nationality, if he or she were of less than fifty per cent ‘European blood’, he or she would be unable to resettle in Australia. Whereas many Anglo-Indians sought to resettle in Britain under the British Nationality Act of 1948, many others were identified racially as ‘non-European’ and were thus unable to migrate to Australia. But it was often difficult to assess whether an Anglo-Indian was predominantly European in origin, ‘as some who are more than fifty percent Asiatic are of lighter complexion than those who are more than fifty percent European. Where an interview is possible, however, an Officer could form a fairly good idea whether the applicant is predominantly European in appearance and way of living’.25 By the 1940s, the difficulties of dealing with applications from Anglo-Indians had increased since passport offices in India were increasingly under the control of Indian officials. As Peters put it, ‘It would be awkward to ask an Indian Officer to settle on behalf of this Department the question whether or not an applicant for passport is predominantly European.’26 Peters reported that the appearance of several Anglo-Indians who had arrived in Australia that year had caused them to be ‘noted at Fremantle for

146

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

further examination at Sydney’. Although they were eventually permitted to land, ‘the temporary hold-up and uncertainty no doubt caused some of these people to write immediately to friends in India with the result that exaggerated impressions of our restrictions have been created’.27 In order to avoid a situation whereby the entry of an Anglo-Indian to Australia might ‘be challenged or restricted on arrival merely on account of his complexion’, with the associated risk of publicity in the Indian press or parliament, Peters recommended that all applications from Anglo-Indians for passport facilities for travel to Australia should be referred to the Office of the High Commissioner in New Delhi or to the offices of the Australian Trade Commissioners in Bombay and Calcutta. A special form was drafted, ‘as the passport application form did not contain sufficient information to enable one to judge the racial origin of the applicant’.28 The form included a question about ‘family origin’ by country and by race, both for the parents and for the maternal and paternal grandparents of the applicant. The form noted under ‘Race’ that ‘If wholly European state ‘‘European’’; otherwise ‘‘Indian’’, ‘‘3/4 Indian’’, ‘‘1/2 Indian’’, ‘‘1/4 Indian’’, or other race, as the case may be.’ Applicants also had to submit two photographs and some would also be called for interview to assess their ‘racial origin’.29 At the same time that the Department of Immigration was seeking to restrict the migration of Anglo-Indians to Australia, it also sought to facilitate the migration of British men and women from India. As an article in the West Australian newspaper reported in April 1947, ‘In its quest for migrants of Anglo-Saxon stock Australia stands to gain a good deal from any practicable scheme to bring British people to our shores from India.’30 The article publicised Arthur Calwell’s scheme to evacuate up to 4000 British residents from the subcontinent. As it continued, To all these people and their families Australia offers a climate much superior to Britain’s, an abundance of food, a wide range of educational facilities and, in comparison with India, political serenity. . . . British people coming from India would become citizens of a British dominion which is anxiously looking to the Mother Country for more citizens.31

Whereas the Department of Immigration welcomed white British migrants from India of ‘Anglo-Saxon stock,’ it sought to restrict the migration of Anglo-Indians of mixed descent. Immigration officials were not only concerned with adverse publicity about the racialized basis of the White Australia Policy in the Indian press and parliament, but also with adverse publicity in Australia that this racialized basis was being undermined. For example, a letter forwarded to the Department of Immigration by an Australian living in New Delhi was bitterly critical of the admission of Anglo-Indians to a supposedly White Australia. This letter was written by

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

147

a passenger on board the SS Mulbera, which had left Bombay for Australia on 31 March 1947. It expressed the correspondent’s surprise and anger that most of the other 160 passengers were Anglo-Indian: The passengers on the ship have been a shock – the ship’s officers say the immigration authorities in Australia are going to get a jolt. You can count the white faces on your hands. . . . [Most] are all Anglo-Indians, all going to settle in Australia. Priority apparently means nothing. When we think of all our friends and people we know of who have been waiting for a passage, we just boil. You cannot move on deck for blackie-white children, you cannot walk around the deck after dinner because they never go to bed until 11 o’clock, even the littlest ones. How all these people have got passages is amazing, when the few Englishmen on board have had to fight by fair means or foul – it is amazing. Anyway the officers seem to think that something will be done after this effort. White Australia! It seems a farce.32

HMAS Manoora In 1947, Calwell sanctioned the use of HMAS Manoora to evacuate Australians and British residents from India.33 This widely publicized scheme sought to evacuate people of ‘Anglo-Saxon stock’ from communal unrest in India to the peace and security of Australia. According to Sir Iven Mackay, the Australian High Commissioner in New Delhi, there was no ‘immediate crisis’ in India, but ‘a state of emergency’ existed and ‘the number of Australians and British personnel awaiting transport to Australia now runs into many hundreds and even thousands’.34 As he continued, ‘Most of these people are accustomed to conditions in India and they are not in a state of panic . . . [t]hey are, nevertheless, living in a state of extreme tension’, and he urged that every effort should be made to provide extra shipping, particularly for women and children.35 Despite early plans for the Manoora to make two journeys from India to Australia, in the event it conveyed only 736 out of a maximum number of 900 passengers on its single voyage from Bombay to Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney.36 The conditions on board the troopship were austere, with 80 passengers able to sleep in 14-person dormitories, but the rest accommodated in four tier bunks on troop decks.37 Partly in response to such conditions, many Australians and British residents preferred to wait for a later passage. As an article in the Australian Daily Telegraph explained, the ‘Manoora’s troopship accommodation and lack of comfort and privacy have frightened off hundreds of migrants [particularly those travelling with young or elderly relatives] who have been waiting for years to reach Australia’.38 An article published in the Melbourne Herald in July 1947 was entitled ‘No migrant flood likely from India: British are losing fear

148

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

for future’, and reported that the position of most Europeans in India would be likely to remain unchanged after Independence. Because of this, it continued, ‘the majority have now decided to wait until better facilities are available on ordinary commercial shipping lines’.39 A press statement issued by the Department of Immigration in May 1947 stated that ‘first preference would be given to Australians, particularly women and children. Remaining passages would be given to UK persons in India who wanted to come to Australia to settle.’ The application form included a statement that ‘I am Australian/English by birth, and am of full European descent’, and notified applicants that ‘an officer of the Australian Department of Immigration would be sent to India to supervise the embarkation of passengers at Bombay’.40 Despite these stipulations, the majority of passengers to arrive at Fremantle on 15 August 1947 were Anglo-Indians of mixed descent. All passengers were permitted to land, despite the White Australia Policy and despite rumours in India that many Anglo-Indians who had left on the Manoora ‘were rejected on arrival in Australia and are being returned in that vessel’.41 Not only would it have been politically embarrassing for Calwell if the well-publicized evacuation ship should return to Australia virtually empty, but it would also have been politically inexpedient to turn non-white migrants away at Fremantle, which would amount to a public admission of racist immigration policies.42

Anglo-Indian Migration in the Wake of HMAS Manoora As already noted, the arrival of more than 700 Anglo-Indians on HMAS Manoora led to increasingly restrictive Australian migration policies. In early September, a report investigated how, despite Calwell’s instructions for passengers to be Australians or ‘British people of pure European descent’, so many Anglo-Indians had been permitted to embark at Bombay. The report noted that migration officers had been unable to interview all potential passengers, and that, in most cases, they had had to rely on statements made by passengers on their application forms. As the report continued, ‘The Migration Officers reported to the High Commissioner at the time of embarkation that despite their efforts a number of AngloIndians were on board. The High Commissioner immediately reported this to Canberra,’ and concluded that ‘It is clear that the High Commissioner at no stage gave approval to the embarkation of Anglo-Indians, but that their embarkation was entirely the result of either difficulties, on which we have as yet no information, or inadequate arrangements at Bombay, the only point at which reliable supervision could be exercised.’43 The arrival of Anglo-Indians on the Manoora had implications for the use of other ships to evacuate British people from India to Australia. For example, the British

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

149

government proposed the use of SS Asturias in late 1947. The Australian Department of Immigration set down a number of conditions, including one that excluded Anglo-Indians as potential migrants: No Eurasians, either as individuals, or as dependants, will be included amongst evacuees on ‘Asturias’ from India. (While our immigration policy permits admission of Eurasians who are predominantly of European descent, Government is not anxious to encourage this type of migrant and is definitely not prepared [to] include them in party for whom special arrangements as regards accommodation etc. have to be provided).44

But, ‘[f]ollowing urgent and strong personal representations from the Secretary of State, Commonwealth Relations’, Calwell agreed to accept Anglo-Indians travelling on the Asturias if they were the wives or children of British subjects of full European descent and if the wives and children were ‘predominantly of European race (i.e. more than 50%)’.45 The arrival of Anglo-Indians on the Manoora also had longer-term implications for the implementation of the White Australia Policy. In the wake of the ship’s arrival, migration officers in India considered the difficulties of assessing the suitability – and, specifically, the assimilability – of AngloIndian migrants. Assimilation in Australia was only thought possible if Anglo-Indians could prove a line of predominantly European descent and if they were seen to be white both in photographs and at interview. As John Dempsey wrote from the Australian High Commission in New Delhi, ‘It is impossible satisfactorily to assess eligibility by correspondence and personal screening is essential if suitable types are to be obtained.’46 But in practice both of these requirements revealed the internal contradictions at the heart of the White Australia Policy. Whereas most Anglo-Indians could not produce documentary evidence to prove their European origin, their claims could equally not be disproved. Moreover, whereas one Anglo-Indian might be seen as white and an eligible migrant, other family members might be rejected. As Dempsey wrote in August 1947, The Department is placed in the invidious position of accepting one person today on his claims to predominantly European origin, supported by his appearance, and rejecting an application by his brother tomorrow because of the interviewing officer’s doubt of his assimilability, which is obviously illogical. Further, the degree of apparent Asiatic blood differs so markedly in a family that selection on this basis means either rejection of the acceptable members or acceptance of the non-acceptable.47

The rejection of non-white Anglo-Indians exposed the racialized basis of the White Australia Policy. As the Minister for External Affairs put it in September 1947,

150

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

The official defence of our present Immigration Policy is that it is based on economic and social grounds, not on racial grounds. It is impossible to justify this defence in excluding educated and fully westernised Anglo-Indians, whose only failing is that they are somewhat dark in complexion and also that they are unable to produce documentary evidence of their predominantly European ancestry.48

In response to the difficulties of implementing such racist policies, the Department of External Affairs proposed that ‘assimilability’ should not be judged by appearance alone, but should give equal weight to other factors such as ‘initiative, personality, education, specialised skill [and] economic independence’, and that ‘a solemn affirmation or formal affidavit’ would provide sufficient evidence of European descent.49 The author of this memorandum was sympathetic to the ‘extremely desperate plight’ of the Anglo-Indian community in India: Indeed it is difficult to see what future (economic, social, educational, etc) it can look forward to. It has its poorer types, no less than any other community; but it also has its share of extremely good types. I feel that the latter would tend to preponderate amongst those who had the initiative and the means to pull up their roots and migrate overseas.50

But Calwell rejected these proposals and, in 1949, ruled that applications from Anglo-Indians and other potential migrants of mixed descent should be automatically rejected. In a memorandum to the Department of External Affairs, Heyes wrote that ‘The Minister [for Immigration] holds the view that such persons are not suitable as settlers in Australia and it is his desire that those wishing to make their homes in this country be not granted facilities to do so, even though they are predominantly of European extraction and in appearance.’51 The requirements for migrating to Australia were tightened in June 1949, whereby (i) An applicant must produce evidence that he is predominantly European in race or descent. (ii) He must be predominantly European in appearance. (iii) He must be European in outlook, accustomed to a European way of life and of a type who could be readily absorbed into an Australian community. Failure to comply with all three requirements renders an applicant ineligible for admission to Australia.52

By 1950, Anglo-Indians were required to provide documentary evidence of at least 75 per cent European ancestry, to be ‘fully European in upbringing and outlook’, and to be ‘European rather than non-European in appearance’. The decision to change the requirement from at least 50 per cent to 75 per cent European descent was explained in terms of the need for

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

151

clarity and consistency. Unlike earlier references to cases where ‘fully eligible’ men had married Indian or Anglo-Indian women, the case that was cited as an example of the lack of clarity and consistency in the implementation of current policy concerned an Australian ‘girl’ married to a man of mixed descent. As the paper noted, the Dutch ex-serviceman ‘is reported by the Australian Embassy in Java to be of 75% European blood, fully European in outlook. It is also reported that he is of rather dark complexion and his appearance is said to be ‘‘typically Eurasian’’.’ Although he was 75 per cent European by descent, his non-European appearance would make him ineligible under the new, tighter restrictions. As the paper concluded, the Department of Immigration was unambiguous in its desire to restrict the entry of Anglo-Indians and other people of mixed descent: ‘Persons of mixed blood coming from tropical countries do not on the whole prove a very desirable type of migrant and Australia would suffer no loss if the conditions governing their entry were to further limit the numbers admitted.’53 The White Australia Policy reached its most restrictive height for AngloIndians in the early 1950s. The mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was seen to threaten the idealized whiteness of the Australian nation, and the whiteness of Australian homes and families that underpinned such racialized ideals of nationhood. Concerns about the working of racialized migration policies in practice were particularly acute in relation to family differences, both in terms of discerning the ‘eligibility’ of Anglo-Indian wives of ‘fully eligible’ men, and in terms of differences within Anglo-Indian families, whereby some applicants were seen to be predominantly European in appearance and way of life, whereas other applicants from the same family were not. Although the Department of Immigration did not specify why Anglo-Indians ‘did not prove a very desirable type of migrant’, it is likely that this opinion reflected anxieties about marriage and miscegenation that were seen to threaten and to undermine White Australia. Such anxieties remain implicit in the official archives, but they are clearly articulated in more personal terms by an Australian mother concerned about the future of her family. After reading about its work in Good Housekeeping, she wrote a letter from Western Australia to the Society of Genealogists in London in November 1950 about ‘a matter which is causing me grave concern’: As you will know many Anglo-Indians have now made their homes in Australia. My only daughter has formed a deep attachment for a youth [whose father is Anglo-Indian]. I have been told that the boy’s mother is also Anglo-Indian and I am most anxious to ascertain if this is so, as I feel that if both parents are Anglo-Indians my daughter’s marriage with this boy could cause misery and suffering to her and to her future children. . . . my daughter has a theoretical knowledge of the implications of such a union but she holds

152

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

firmly to the belief that the mother has no mixed blood. I feel that the only way I can deter her from taking a step which may cause suffering is to endeavour to trace the genealogy of the boy’s parents. Any assistance or advice you could give would be greatly appreciated.54

This letter was written at a time when the Society of Genealogists was actively helping Anglo-Indians to document their paternal ancestry and thus claim British nationality, as discussed in Chapter 5. In reply, the Society stressed the difficulties of proving ‘pure European blood’: such a fact is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prove, since so many families have the blood of many foreign nations in their veins, and although one might be able to state, for instance, that the eight great-grandparents were all from England, this does not rule out the possibility that one or more of these great-grandparents might have a partially Asiatic strain in their ancestry. It is well known that numbers of the best families in England have slightly mixed blood, being descended from men who served in the East India Company. Our experience is that environment and upbringing are more important factors than purity of a particular strain of blood in deciding the suitability of a marriage.55

Despite its reservations, the Society was nonetheless prepared to undertake the genealogical research requested and asked for more information. However, it was to receive no further correspondence on the matter.

From ’Race’ to ’Culture’ The policy adopted in 1950 remained in place until 1957, when the requirement for documentary proof of European descent came to be superseded by European identity in terms of culture and appearance. Applicants of mixed descent had to meet the following criteria from 1957: (i) their appearance must be such as to satisfy the officer that they are of 75% or more European descent and that they will have no difficulty in being accepted as Europeans in Australia; (ii) they must be fully European in upbringing, outlook, mode of dress and of way of living; (iii) in cases where it becomes known, eg by the applicant’s own statement, that one of the applicant’s parents is fully non-European, his ability to satisfy conditions (i) and (ii) shall not entitle him to admission.56

In practice, however, there was uncertainty about what constituted European appearance. In May 1957, a memorandum from the Australian High Commission in Karachi to the Department of External Affairs asked for clarification about ‘how the term ‘‘European’’ should be interpreted. Is it

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

153

sufficient that applicants would pass as Southern Europeans, e.g. Cypriots or Maltese?’57 In response, Heyes wrote that use of the term ‘European’ in the amended criteria ‘should be accepted as referring to the normal type of European migrant and the normal type of Australian which members of the Australian community usually encounter and against whom critical comparisons will be made. It does not include Southern Europeans whose skin pigmentation (and features) can provide extreme examples of the meaning of the [term] European.’58 Migration officers decided whether AngloIndians could pass as ‘normal Europeans’ who could be easily assimilated alongside ‘normal Australians’. In both cases, the ‘normality’ of Europeans and Australians was defined by their whiteness, echoing Richard Dyer’s claim that ‘White domination is reproduced by the way that white people colonise the definition of normal.’59 As an example of how this policy worked in practice, A.L. Nutt, the Acting Secretary for Immigration, wrote to the Minister for Immigration in 1957 about the request for two Anglo-Indian sisters in their forties to take up teaching posts in Australia. One of the sisters was described as having ‘quite a pleasing personality, she is dark skinned and speaks with a most noticeable Anglo-Indian accent. I should not be prepared to accept her as a migrant. . . . I have some fears that school children might not accept her on her own valuation as a European.’ According to the Australian Government Trade Commissioner in Calcutta, the other sister ‘was definitely Anglo-Indian. While her features were European her complexion was darker than would appear from the photograph attached to her application.’60 Nutt recommended that both sisters be admitted under exemption for a limited period as they were seen to be too ‘dark skinned’ to be acceptable as permanent residents in White Australia. The new criteria for eligibility adopted in 1957 remained in place until 1964, when Hubert Opperman, the Liberal Minister for Immigration, proposed that appearance and origin should not outweigh other factors in assessing ‘suitability for settlement’.61 Opperman wrote that ‘The existence of the 75% rule, which is now generally known, is frequently used to criticise the mixed race policy as being both unreal and based on discrimination on ground of race and colour.’ He proposed a number of modifications that would remove the major basis of this criticism and would admit people of mixed descent in situations where (a)

humanitarian considerations, involving close family relative or hardship on grounds of discrimination, are present; or (b) the applicant has special knowledge, experience or qualifications useful to Australia; or (c) the applicant has the ability to make a contribution to Australia’s economic, social and cultural progress.62

154

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

Each migrant had to show ‘by appearance, education, upbringing, outlook, mode of dress and way of living, that he is capable of ready integration into the Australian community’,63 although ‘no overriding importance’ was to be attached to appearance.64 Opperman’s proposals were accepted by the Cabinet in September 1964. A circular detailing the new policy was issued to overseas posts the following month and stated that ‘the 75% rule has been abolished everywhere’. This circular explained the new policy in relation to wider changes in immigration policy, whereby ‘family relationship, capacity to integrate and ability to make a worthwhile contribution to the development of Australia are basic elements’.65 Although appearance was still a factor in considering applications ‘in the sense that it is relevant to the capacity of the applicant readily to integrate into the Australian community, and the need to maintain the predominantly European character of the Australian population’, it was only one of a number of factors to consider.66 The circular advised that in future ‘there should be no reference in terms of percentage to the non-European origin of the applicant. In describing appearance, this will be covered sufficiently by the use of such phrases as ‘‘predominantly European in appearance,’’ ‘‘essentially non-European in appearance,’’ ‘‘more European than otherwise (or vice versa)’’ ’.67 Ideas about ‘normal European’ origin and appearance began to give way to a broader sense of European culture that encompassed ‘education, upbringing, outlook, mode of dress and way of living’,68 and was no longer seen as exclusively white. There was, as a result, a dramatic increase of migrants of mixed descent. According to Kenneth Rivett of the Immigration Reform Group in Melbourne, by 1971 there were 33,000 ‘part-Europeans’ in Australia, with an additional 6000 arriving each year.69 Applications made by Anglo-Indians in Calcutta alone increased from 400 in 1965 to over 3000 in 1968.70 Meanwhile, the Anglo-Indian population of West Bengal, which had risen by 7000 between 1951 and 1961, then remained static at 39,000 for the following decade, suggesting increased rates of migration. Another indicator of this trend was the sharp decline in membership of the Calcutta branch of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association from 1495 in 1966 to just 350 in 1972, attributable in large part to emigration.71 At the same time that the White Australia Policy was becoming less restrictive, many Anglo-Indians were becoming increasingly anxious to leave the subcontinent. Life for many Anglo-Indians in India had continued largely unaltered in the late 1940s and 1950s, despite the profoundly unsettling effect of migration on those who remained domiciled after Independence, and despite concern about the economic, cultural and political future and status of the community. With the coming of the 1960s, however, this was to change. In 1960, the end of job reservations led to increased competition for men seeking employment. The controversial

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

155

imposition of Hindi as the official national language in 1963 led many Anglo-Indians to fear discrimination, unemployment and exclusion, and political unrest in the form of Naxalite and anti-English demonstrations, communal riots in 1964, and the wars between India and Pakistan in 1965 and 1971 made Anglo-Indians and other minority communities feel unsafe and insecure.72 In addition, the death of Jawaharlal Nehru and the 1967 general elections led to ‘a fresh spate of exodus’.73 As the well-known Anglo-Indian broadcaster Melville de Mellow wrote in 1970, the death of Nehru had left Anglo-Indians politically bereft: For them Jawaharlal Nehru became a father figure. To them Nehru was India. He was her courage, her resolution. . . . He was the champion of the minorities. As long as he was at the helm, the Anglo-Indian felt secure. When Nehru passed away, Anglo-Indians were orphaned. For them something more than a leader had passed away. The benevolent protector who was the invisible guest of every Anglo-Indian table had gone forever.74

The rise of coalition governments in a number of states, often dominated by Hindu revivalist groups, led to greater insecurity for Anglo-Indians and other minority communities in the late 1960s. As Frank Anthony wrote in 1969, ‘These revivalists talk of a ‘‘Hindu Rashtra’’ and a pan-Hindu culture. Even at the highest official level, there is often loose talk of integration in the sense of assimilation. In a polity which is made up of a bewilderingly diverse, multi-linguistic, multi-religious and multi-ethnic mosaic to talk of integration in the sense of assimilation is dangerous nonsense.’75 Many Anglo-Indians migrated to Australia from the mid-1960s to the 1970s because they feared discrimination, increased competition for work and a lack of opportunities for their children. The fear of discrimination and cultural assimilation that had motivated many Anglo-Indians to leave soon after Independence became more acute in the 1960s. As Anthony wrote, ‘The constant tirades against English and the repeated attempts, overt or covert, to drive it out of the Country, inevitably had a reaction on the Community whose mother-tongue is English. The Anglo-Indians feel, quite rightly, that if English is driven out, they can have no place or future in the Country.’76 Other anxieties about the future of the community in India were embodied by Anglo-Indian women and revolved around dress and harassment. A former Loreto pupil called Elaine remembered working as a secretary in Calcutta alongside an increasing number of other Indian women soon before she migrated to Australia in 1969. As she told me, ‘You can see if you’re dressed in a sari you’ll get that job, if you’re not, you won’t get that job, because we used to dress in dresses. But then it came to a stage where we had to dress in saris. . . . My father hated it, you know, to see us

156

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

dressing as an Indian.’ She also remembered facing harassment as an Anglo-Indian woman: It was coming to a stage where we were not getting any respect from the Indians, they would call us names like . . . ‘mixed’ and names like that . . . [they tried] to touch us, but they wouldn’t touch their own women, like the Bengali girls and all you know, but as soon as they saw an Anglo-Indian they used to try [to touch us]. . . . The Indian boys, they always wanted to touch you, and I got into a few fights by hitting them with my bag.

For an Anglo-Indian woman who migrated with her family in 1965, ‘The reasons we moved was because there were two girls only, only my sister and myself, and Dad thought, if anything happened to him, it would leave . . . three women defenceless.’ Finally, Geraldine, who migrated in 1974 and lives in Perth, explained that We did find a change in the . . . mid to late 60s towards Anglo-Indians, and we thought it would be better to come out here because it was going to be very hard to give up your identity, give up your culture . . . learn another language so that we can read the bus signs, read the street signs, get jobs. . . . we were discriminated against, and it was made quite obvious that if you went for a job and an Indian went for the job, the Indian will get the job, not the AngloIndian. It was becoming obvious at the time, unless you were quite willing to change your identity. . . . My auntie got into a sari . . . she started wearing saris, and we found that quite foreign. It was difficult to accept initially . . . only the servants wore saris, not the Anglo-Indians. And she was one of the few that got into saris because she realized that she can’t go far at work unless she did so. . . . we realized our children [would] never go far at all there.

Whilst political decolonization led to the ‘exodus’ of many Anglo-Indians to Britain soon after Independence, commercial decolonization in the 1960s, particularly by British and American companies in cities like Calcutta, contributed to the later ‘exodus’ to Australia. For Robert, who grew up in McCluskieganj in the 1950s and migrated to Western Australia in 1969, The Anglo-Indian people were sort of being pushed aside by the Indian people. The British still had a lot of their people in senior positions in companies and they used to look after the Anglo-Indian people, you know, you had a fair chance then. But when the British were actually pushed out of India, which was roundabout that time, the mid-1960s, late 1960s, a lot of the British were leaving India, going back to England and they were really handing back over to the Indians and then the Anglo-Indians were left over, you know. ‘You’re a part of the British rule, or British Raj, of India, and we really don’t want you all anymore. We’re going to put our own people in to do the

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

157

jobs that you all are doing now,’ and it didn’t matter whether you had the qualifications or not, the Indians would be promoted over you in jobs and, from our point of view anyway, that is about the time that the Anglo-Indians decided to move out. A lot of them who could then left India.

As well as changes at work in the 1960s, social life for Anglo-Indians also began to change. For example, social life at the Lucknow Club, located in central Lucknow at one end of Lawrence Terrace, where many AngloIndians used to live, continued in many ways unchanged after Independence, as shown by Figures 6.5 and 6.6. But by the late 1960s, an increasing number of men from other Indian communities had started coming to dances, but did not bring their wives with them. As an Anglo-Indian woman in Lucknow remembers, ‘We would dance with those who knew how to dance. But these people, their idea was to just get hold of a woman and, you know, whisk and whirl, try to cuddle or something like that. So we sat [out].’ Many Anglo-Indians ‘didn’t like it, no. Because, ok, our idea was, you want to join in and dance? Bring your wife, bring your girlfriend, bring your womenfolk. Why should you dance with us and us not dance with your people?’ Although Frank Anthony still publicly advised Anglo-Indians not to leave India, he did so in less vitriolic ways than in the late 1940s. In his

Figure 6.5 Selection of the May Queen at the Lucknow Club (Photograph by A. D’Silva. Reproduced courtesy of R. D’Silva)

158

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

Figure 6.6 The crowning of the May Queen at the Lucknow Club, 1957, by the wife of the principal of La Martiniere Boys’ School (Photograph by A. D’Silva. Reproduced courtesy of R. D’Silva) presidential address to the All-India Anglo-Indian Association in 1970, he told his audience that ‘If you are going to be a coolie here or a labourer, then it is better for you to be a coolie in any European country’ because of the dignity of labour and the ability to earn a living wage. But, as he continued, ‘If you have any education, if you have any capacity, if you have any reasonably comfortable standards, then I believe that it is an act of psychological self-mutilation for you to uproot yourself and go to a foreign

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

159

country, however much you may deceive yourselves.’ Closer to home, he told his audience that his brother had migrated to Britain: ‘he came back but he had a typical Anglo-Indian wife that thought she would look like a European under the less fierce sun in Britain. So he has gone back again.’ He warned his audience that they would face discrimination and prejudice outside India, describing ‘the indignities of race and colour to which you are bound to be exposed in any of these so-called white or even off-white countries’. Like earlier migrants who had imagined Britain as home, by 1970 many Anglo-Indians called Australia home, but Anthony maintained that they were deceiving themselves: In which country as an Anglo-Indian can you be respected? You go to Australia and talk about it as home. The not very educated or cultured Australians will tell you what they think about you. Mr Peterson [a member of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association] went and according to his assessment, which he gave me, not a single Anglo-Indian he met in Australia is not homesick. I said it is natural. India is the only country which can and does mean home for us.77

Although the relaxation of the White Australia Policy in 1964 made it possible for more Anglo-Indians to migrate to Australia, applicants of mixed descent continued to be ineligible for assisted passages. From 1947 until the mid-1970s, more than one million British people migrated to Australia, most of whom travelled as part of the assisted passage migration scheme.78 At a time when white British people were encouraged to migrate to Australia on £10 passages, Anglo-Indians, other people of mixed descent and nonEuropeans remained ineligible for such assistance. As the Department of Immigration stated in 1964, ‘unless applicants are wholly of European race they should not be granted assisted passages [and] where a family is involved and one parent and the children are partly non-European, all members of the family are to be refused assisted passages.’79 For example, a married couple in Britain had applied for assisted passages to Australia in 1965, but the wife – a qualified typist and telex operator – was AngloIndian. As M. Rockley from the Department of Immigration wrote: [She] was born in India of parents also born in India but claims descent through a grandparent and great grandparents born in Portugal. However, no documentary evidence could be produced to substantiate this claim. . . . The Selection Officer commented that [her] appearance immediately suggested non-European, Indian ancestry. The colour of her skin was not particularly dark but darker than shown in the attached photograph. Her facial features did not suggest Southern European admixture, as she has full elongated lips and broad nose base. She was well dressed and well spoken and appeared fully European in her way of life. At the interview she mentioned that she suffered no

160

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

discrimination in the UK. In view of [her] mixed race . . . it is recommended that neither she nor her husband be granted assisted passages to this country but no objection be made to their travelling here at their own expense.80

Unlike migrants from Britain and elsewhere in Europe who travelled to Australia on assisted passages and stayed in hostel accommodation on their arrival, Anglo-Indians paid their own fare, were only allowed to take a maximum of $7–$8 per person out of India because of currency regulations, and had to find their own accommodation with friends, family or through the Catholic Migration Office.81 Alan migrated in 1969 and told me that it cost him a year’s salary to pay for two passages to Australia, in stark contrast to ‘lots of Europeans [who] were getting free passages plus hostel accommodation initially’. For Pauline, a former Loreto pupil who migrated in the same year, the £10 passages for British migrants ‘probably would be one of the chips on the shoulders of Australians that AngloIndians always had.’ As she continued, Whatever we had, or whatever we got, we fought hard for it, and you could say you earned it, you know. You got no favours. You didn’t ask for any favours, and you got none. . . . None of my aunts got any assisted passages to England. . . . I remember going to Bombay to see them off. They all paid full passages from India to England, no assisted passages. When we came to Australia, no assisted passages. You asked to come, and we accepted the fare.

Although the Indian government had restricted the amount of money that migrants could take out of the country, a number of Anglo-Indians paid for other people’s passages, or gave money to the Australian Christian Brothers in India, and were then reimbursed once they had resettled in Australia. Anglo-Indians now live in all states in Australia, but many initially settled in Perth because it was the first port of call, and thus the cheapest destination from the Indian subcontinent. An officer of the Australian Anglo-Indian Association in Perth told me that the other main reason why many Anglo-Indians settled in Western Australia was because of the work of Father Foley, a Roman Catholic priest at the Catholic Migration Office, who helped many people to find accommodation:82 In those days in order to come to Australia you needed to have an assurance of accommodation, and many of the migrants because they didn’t have family, they had no way of proving that they would have accommodation. [Father Foley] provided a great deal of assistance to Anglo-Indians . . . he set up arrangements for migrating Anglo-Indians, he just did it. So there were a number of Anglo-Indian families that liked to come to Australia. Their migration was conditional to them securing accommodation so they wrote

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

161

to Father Foley in those days – he became Archbishop later on – and he arranged their accommodation, so they came to Perth.

Sophia, who lived in McCluskieganj in the late 1940s and migrated with her husband and five children to Perth in 1967, had been sponsored by Father Foley. As she told me, He was a wonderful man. How he looked after us. He would come every weekend to see that we had warm clothes, blankets, food on the table. . . . we had to write to him and give him our recommendations from the priests and the [Christian] Brothers [in India]. He read that and then he told the Minister of whatever it is that, yes, these people are to be sponsored.

This family had been advised to leave India by the Irish Christian Brothers, who had close links with the Australian Christian Brothers. Sophia told me that after Independence and partition, ‘Australia had this ‘‘keep Australia white’’ policy, they were not taking people in. . . . Suddenly they opened the doors, and the Brothers knew about it but we didn’t.’ In recognition of his work for Anglo-Indians migrating to Australia, Father Foley was presented with a certificate by the Australian Anglo-Indian Association in Perth. As an officer of the Association told me, ‘We had a particular celebration and we invited him here and he was in the community among all our members and we presented that certificate. . . . I think he was overwhelmed by the fact that we recognized and we paid tribute to him, the tremendous job he’d done for our community.’

From White Australia to Multiculturalism In the early 1970s, Anglo-Indians who had migrated to Australia became central figures in debates about a ‘multi-racial’ society. In a television interview in May 1972, the Liberal Minister for Customs, Don Chipp, argued that Australia should become ‘the only true multi-racial country in the world’.83 Although the Labor Party supported Chipp’s statement as ‘timely’, Arthur Calwell, the former Leader of the Labor Party – and Minister for Immigration from 1945 to 1949 – was ‘shocked and appalled’. Aged 75, and retiring later that year, he condemned the idea of a multiracial society, claiming that nobody wanted ‘a chocolate-colored Australia’. As he continued, ‘A multi-racial society is a polyglot nation, and what red-blooded Australian wants to see this happen? The black tragedy of Britain must not be repeated here.’84 Whereas the Liberal Party sought to distance itself from Chipp’s statement, however, the Labor Party sought

162

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

to distance itself from Calwell’s vision of a white Australia. According to K.E. Enderby, a Labor member of parliament, ‘A multi-racial Australia is inevitable and Australians have a unique opportunity to bring this about gradually in a peaceful way so that racial harmony exists.’85 In his vitriolic attack on the idea of Australia as a multi-racial society, Calwell described the inner suburb of Highgate in Perth as an ‘Indian ghetto in the west’ and as the ‘Durban of Australia’. Calwell described the residents as living in a state of poverty and wilfully irresponsible overpopulation: ‘Men and women with ten children go there. They live on the smell of an oily rag and breed like flies.’86 In satirical response, an article by Piers Akerman in The Australian began by describing Highgate as a place of exotic otherness and touristic spectacle embodied by women: ‘Jump aboard the bus for a tour of the bazaars of Highgate: see Little India, watch as colorful sari-clad Indian women barter their home-made clothes for food. Just like Bombay, Calcutta or Durban’s Indian quarter.’ But the author immediately subverted this depiction by describing Highgate as more similar to than different from other Australian suburbs: ‘Highgate . . . is no different from any other low-income suburb anywhere in Australia except that the migrant faces are not Lebanese, Turkish, Greek or Italian. They are largely Anglo-Indian, Anglo-Burmese or Ceylonese.’ The article reported that since 1969, 5500 people of mixed descent had settled in Western Australia out of a total 67,500 new migrants. As Akerman explained, Anglo-Indians settled in Highgate – just as many Anglo-Indians in Melbourne initially settled in St Kilda – because rental accommodation was affordable, and because there were good transport connections to the central city. In contrast to Calwell’s prejudice against the Anglo-Indian community, which is likely to have stemmed from the migration of Anglo-Indians on HMAS Manoora in 1947, Akerman described the community as more capable of integrating into Australia than many Europeans and non-Europeans. Despite the initial hardships of resettlement, Akerman wrote that as soon as Anglo-Indians found employment, they started to save money in order to rent, buy or build property in other suburbs. He told a ‘story of successful integration’ by the Conquo family from Calcutta, who had migrated to Australia in 1970: For eight weeks Mr Conquo could not get work because of widespread unemployment. He does not feel that he was discriminated against. He and his family stayed with another Anglo-Indian family and lived on a very tight budget. His first job was as a laborer. ‘We are grateful to the Government for allowing us to enter Australia and now we shall utilise every opportunity the country presents,’ Mr Conquo said. Now the Conquo family lives in a $26-a-week house at Rivervale, Mr Conquo works as a $74-a week accounts clerk and his wife is the secretary

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

163

to the managing director of a hardware supply firm. Their friends are Europeans and Eurasians.

Mr Conquo and his family were described as successful migrants because of their gratitude and aspirations, their family life in the suburbs, their employment, and their friendship with ‘Europeans and Eurasians’. Most notably, Mrs Conquo’s work as a secretary provided a stark contrast to the ‘colorful sari-clad Indian women’ bartering clothes for food who embodied an exotic otherness in the article’s opening paragraph. The Conquos – and other Anglo-Indian families – were also described as living at a clear distance from the suburbs near the university, where ‘large numbers of Colombo Plan students and other Asians temporarily in Australia are obvious’. In contrast to the concentration of Asians in suburbs such as Nedlands and Crawley, and to the presence of Aboriginal people ‘in greater relative numbers than in any other capital except perhaps Brisbane’, Anglo-Indians were ‘hard to find’.87 This article represented Anglo-Indians not only as better able to integrate than other Indians, but also as better able to integrate than many European migrants. As Mr J. Poole-Johnson from the West Australian branch of the Immigration Department explained, ‘many of the Eurasians who come here have greater skills and a greater command of the English language than many of the assisted migrants from southern European countries’.88 This view was echoed by Mr J. Huelin, the president of the Good Neighbour Council, who had personally sponsored several Anglo-Indian migrants: I do think that Mr Calwell would change his mind if he could possibly meet some of the people who have settled here. Society will adjust. We have no problem here now – probably less than the prejudice which was shown toward the Europeans, the Balts, Poles, Slavs and others which was so strong before people became used to them.89

The idea that Anglo-Indians could successfully integrate into Australian life and culture, despite their mixed descent, was echoed in a letter to The Australian written by Rex Dougherty from New South Wales. Describing himself as ‘one of the many ‘‘chocolate-colored’’ Anglo-Indians about whom there seems to be so much said and written in the Press recently’, Dougherty had migrated to Australia in 1969. He claimed that AngloIndians were able to integrate easily into an Australian way of life because of their shared language, culture and sense of humour, and that they were often better able to integrate than some ‘white or Celtic people, whose cultural background is unlike that of ‘‘red-blooded’’ Australians.’ As he continued, ‘Some of these people will be unable, and indeed sometimes

164

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

unwilling, to adapt to the new environment. An Anglo-Indian, on the other hand, no matter what his color, slips almost unnoticed into the community because of his cultural background.’90 For Dougherty, the cultural affiliation between Australians and Anglo-Indians superceded racialized differences, and was embodied by the figure of ‘a good bloke’: today, the ‘red-blooded’ Australian doesn’t give a rat’s whisker where his next-door neighbor came from, or what the colour of his skin is, provided that he’s a good bloke! And that good bloke only becomes one if he speaks his language, drinks his beer, and in turn accepts him for what he is! In other words, enjoys the same way of life.91

Dougherty claimed that Anglo-Indians were not only better able to integrate into Australian life and culture than non-English-speaking migrants, but also that they were better able to do so than many English-speaking migrants. But despite his claim that Anglo-Indians were accepted by their ‘red-blooded Australian’ neighbours, they were still regarded in racialized terms that served to reify the idealized whiteness of Australia: ‘It’s not uncommon for my closest mates to greet me with a ‘‘How’re yer goin’ you black bastard’ and people unfamiliar with OUR way of life would mistake that for gross indecency instead of a sign of endearment!’92 For Dougherty to identify himself as a ‘good bloke’ and as a ‘red-blooded Australian’ meant interpreting the racial prejudice of some of his ‘closest mates’ as a sign of humour, familiarity and affection, and meant affiliating himself to a national identity that continued to idealize whiteness. As Frank Anthony put it in his presidential address to the All-India Anglo-Indian Association in 1970, many Anglo-Indians who had migrated faced racial prejudice and discrimination, and accepted ‘every form of insult, every form of indignity’, because of a ‘psychological distortion in the community’. For Anthony, this ‘psychological distortion’ meant that ‘You think that if you admit to anything of not being accepted, if you admit to being humiliated, you are confessing that you are not acceptable in a white society.’93

Anglo-Indians in Multicultural Australia As the White Australia Policy became less restrictive from the mid-1960s, ideas about whiteness as a cultural marker came to supersede ideas about whiteness as a racial marker and an increasing number of Anglo-Indians migrated to Australia because they were seen as culturally European. A new emphasis on a European way of life, outlook, upbringing and mode of dress

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

165

began to lay the foundations of official multiculturalism that replaced the White Australia Policy from the early 1970s but was still largely concerned to maintain the ‘predominantly European character of the Australian population’.94 Although Calwell vilified the Anglo-Indian community in his opposition to a multi-racial Australia, other commentators praised their successful integration. And yet such ideas about integration were informed by the continued pre-eminence of a European, and often a specifically Anglo-Celtic, culture that was assumed to be white. Like most European migrants, Anglo-Indians were Christian and their lifestyle was largely western. But, unlike many European migrants and more recent migrants from South East Asia,95 Anglo-Indians spoke English as their mother tongue and could thereby identify more specifically with Anglo-Celtic settlers and their descendants.96 The ambivalent place of Anglo-Indians in multicultural Australia reflects broader debates about the contested nature of European, Asian, and Australian identities, and about the normalization of whiteness, particularly in relation to the hegemonic power of an Anglo-Celtic Australia and concerns about its demise in the face of migration and multiculturalism. Ghassan Hage provides a powerful critique of the ‘fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society’, where whiteness remains dominant in both cultural and racial terms in multicultural Australia. Hage uses the term ‘White’ rather than ‘Anglo’ because the latter category ‘could not account for the many non-Anglos who relate to, and define themselves through, the ‘‘White nation’’ fantasy’.97 In her analysis of stranger fetishism, Sara Ahmed broadly supports Hage’s argument ‘that multicultural tolerance and monocultural intolerance are structured around a similar fantasy of the national subject who alone is afforded the will to define who should and should not inhabit the nation space’. But she argues that neither multiculturalism nor monoculturalism solely involves white supremacy, but rather each involves complex differentiations ‘between those stranger others who have already entered the nation space’.98 Building on this, I am focusing on the spatial politics of home and the complex interplay of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ for a community of mixed descent that resettled from one part of the former British empire to a former white settler colony. Anglo-Indians could migrate to Australia from the mid-1960s because they were seen as culturally European, but when they arrived they were often perceived as Indian. Many Anglo-Indians suffered racial prejudice and, more generally, in the words of Martin, who migrated to Australia in 1973, ‘they take you for the country you were born in. . . . Despite our background, if we were born in India we were complete Indians.’ As his wife Vivian continued, there is a stigma about being born in India, ‘and if the colour of the skin is dark, it gets worse’. She remembered one occasion when Martin picked up their daughter from primary school:

166

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

All of a sudden [our daughter] spotted one of her . . . classmates, so she said . . . ‘Come and meet my dad.’ . . . When this girl was introduced to [my husband], she said . . . ‘I didn’t know you had a black daddy,’ but this never worried [our daughter]. So when she went back to school, this girl was telling her other friends, you know, ‘[She’s] got a black daddy.’ In India you grow up altogether with everyone, no matter how fair or how dark, and it never strikes you that you are different.

Martin told me that ‘It’s like you have to be black to know what black means. . . . A lot of people say ‘‘Oh, don’t worry about it, don’t worry,’’ but that’s not the point, you know? I’ve come to the stage where it does worry me to bits whereas it never used to worry me.’ Like many Anglo-Indians who migrated to Britain, those who migrated to Australia faced many questions about their identity and origins, which were often articulated in relation to their ability to speak English, their distinctive accent and their appearance. For Lesley, a former Loreto pupil who migrated to Western Australia in 1970, When I went for [secretarial] jobs, having come from India, they were really taken aback that I could read, write and speak the language properly. It was so much so when I went for an interview, one time, the boss asked me . . . ‘Can you read, write and understand English properly?’ So I said ‘Oh yes’ and then he dictated a letter to me and when it was typed back, you know, he was absolutely shocked. . . . It was difficult to know where we’d originated from and where we came from. They would always think I was everything else but from India! . . . I was Italian, I was Burmese, I was anything else but from India.

Lesley told me that when she took her wedding photographs to work, one colleague was surprised that she went to the church by car rather than riding an elephant: I turned around and told her . . . ‘You all go on kangaroos!’ . . . It is amazing, you know, they still think that there you always ride [elephants], you lived in huts and wore saris, and they never think of the Anglo-Indians, they don’t know, they always say, ‘What is an Anglo-Indian?’ [and I reply] ‘It is a person brought up in India, but of foreign ancestry.’

For Geraldine, I never asked the questions [about Australia] that we were asked [about India]. Even when I was in India I knew that they wouldn’t have kangaroos hopping in their backyard, and hopping across the road, I just knew that. Yet they would think that we would have elephants crossing the road and things like that. And they can’t believe that we have cars. Our way of life was very

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

167

much as it is here, and that’s what I can’t understand. How come we were able to understand and not sort of exaggerate what it could be like here?

When Geraldine goes shopping with her Australian-born daughter, ‘automatically, because they’ve seen [my] dark face’, people assume that her daughter needs to translate for her. As she continues, ‘I’ve been here thirty years and they just look at me and they start to talk very slowly so I can understand what they are saying. We get that a lot, they sort of cut out the words you wouldn’t know, and then they look at you, sort of, ‘‘Do you understand what I’m trying to say?’’’ As her daughter Sarah puts it, ‘You were discriminated against in both countries that you lived in, one for being too light, and one for being too dark.’ Distinguishing themselves from other Indians and from non-Englishspeaking migrants, many Anglo-Indians stress their successful assimilation and emphasize their ‘Anglo’ identity, while at the same time asserting a distinctive and visible Anglo-Indian identity in the context of multiculturalism. Many Anglo-Indians saw it as neither possible nor desirable to assimilate in independent India. For Geraldine, ‘if we had to stay [in India] then we would have had to make the best of it, and assimilate and lose our identity’. In contrast, Anglo-Indian assimilation in Australia meant identifying with the dominant white, western culture and feeling more at home. For many Anglo-Indians, Australia felt more like home than independent India, ‘partly because it more resembled the tradition that we grew up in, that we came from, [which] we knew we couldn’t continue to have in India or could never have in India’. As an officer of the Australian AngloIndian Association in Perth explains, ‘When the Anglo-Indians first came to Australia, it was very easy for them to integrate and assimilate into the community and into society where the social norms, the culture was very akin to the way they lived. The Anglo-Indians’ mother tongue is English, the lifestyle is western, the religion is Christian. . . . Men wear suits, women wear dresses.’ Unlike life in an Anglo-Indian enclave in India – for example in a railway colony or in central parts of many cities – many see Australia as offering greater spatial and social freedom to integrate into a familiar culture, and see their ability to do so as different from migrants of non-English-speaking backgrounds. For Elaine, ‘We are not like the Chinese, Vietnamese, Greeks or Italians or whatever, where they sort of tend to congregate in one particular area and the whole thing sort of revolves around that area.’ As explained by a participant in a focus group discussion at the Australian Anglo-Indian Association in Perth, [Anglo-Indians] identified so easily, because they integrated so easily – opposed to say the Italians or the Greeks, who had their own community

168

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

centres, but they came unable to speak the language and therefore they tended to assemble together and live in that community and therefore they perpetuated their club atmosphere, and their own community atmosphere. Anglo-Indians didn’t need to do that because they assimilated so easily into the community, so there wasn’t that need at that time.

Another participant explained the ability of Anglo-Indians to assimilate into a culturally white and western Australian way of life in embodied terms: Let’s look at us sitting together now. If other than the colours of some of our skins, but the way we talk and the way we respond to each other, we don’t stand out, we are all equal. If you get a man with a turban walking in, immediately you focus and you say, well, he’s different because he is wearing that turban. . . . When the Anglo-Indians started coming here in their numbers in the early days, they just melded into the community very easily because their living styles and their lifestyles were so similar. . . . They didn’t stand out to the degree that somebody else would stand out because of a language difference, or because of difference in attire or the physiognomy was different. . . . If you had somebody with an oriental appearance walking into a room filled with people of non-oriental [appearance], then that person would stand out. With the Anglo-Indians that didn’t happen.

In other words, although Anglo-Indians were of mixed descent, they were identified as culturally similar to the white, western majority of AngloCeltic descent in Australia and as much more familiar than people of other Indian communities who might not speak English and might dress in different ways. Not only did immigration policies aim to foster assimilation into a nation that was idealized as white and western, but many Anglo-Indians also saw themselves as more fully able to assimilate in Australia than in independent India. But, since the late 1980s, ideas about Anglo-Indian assimilation have coexisted with an increasingly visible community identity. The Australian Anglo-Indian Association was founded in Perth in 1988, hosted an international reunion for Anglo-Indians in 1995, and opened the only Anglo-Indian cultural centre in the world in 1998 (Figure 6.7). There is also a weekly Anglo-Indian programme on multicultural radio in Perth, and other Anglo-Indian clubs and associations in Victoria, New South Wales and Canberra. In Melbourne, there is a residential home for elderly AngloIndians, and throughout Australia there are regular social events to raise funds for Anglo-Indians in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies is an electronic journal run by Adrian Gilbert in Melbourne,99 who also jointly convened an international conference on ‘Who are the Anglo-Indians?’ in August 2002. The most

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

169

Figure 6.7 The Australian Anglo-Indian Association Cultural Centre, Padbury, Western Australia (Photograph from the opening ceremony programme, 1998) recent international Anglo-Indian reunion was held in Melbourne in January 2004. Officers and members of a wide range of Anglo-Indian associations attribute the resurgence of interest in their collective identity since the late 1980s in part to the visibility of other minority communities. This has taken shape in the context of a broader policy shift from assimilation and integration to the recognition and celebration of cultural difference within a programme of official multiculturalism and government funding for cultural associations and projects. As an officer of the Australian AngloIndian Association in Perth told me, multicultural policies in Australia aim to foster different cultures whereby people ‘feel comfortable in the country as well as . . . not sort of squash[ing] their identity and their culture’. Such policies are underpinned by economic as well as cultural imperatives: ‘If a government understands the social norms and cultures of different communities, and . . . really acknowledges that, then you get those people as migrants to Australia feeling more comfortable, participating more freely, expanding their own interests, and in that way then contributing more effectively for the good of the country.’ The social events and other activities that take place in the Anglo-Indian cultural centre in Perth provide

170

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

a space to foster and to express pride in a community identity that is rooted in shared memories of life in the Indian subcontinent. Although many Anglo-Indians identified themselves as able to assimilate into a familiar western culture in Australia, an officer of the Australian Anglo-Indian Association told me that she used to identify herself as Indian rather than Anglo-Indian, but that the Association has helped her to express her true identity: I always used to say I was Indian, I never ever said I was anything other than Indian because I have a great love for India and all of those things. . . . After people ask you the first couple of questions . . . nothing fits, you’re not an Indian, you don’t fit, it is all wrong. So eventually you’re going to have to say, ‘Yes, I don’t wear Indian saris or whatever, no I speak English, no I’m something else,’ so when you’ve finished it all, then you are an AngloIndian. . . . I think we are suddenly saying, ‘Yes, we are Anglo-Indians, ok, we are not something else or we have to apologize for who we are, we are just happy to say we are Anglo-Indians.’ . . . We are all starting to be proud of who we are. And I think that’s the thing that . . . our Association has done quite a lot here. . . . Whilst the older people are always looking back, which is fair enough, we are trying to create that pride in our culture and I think giving ourselves something to be proud about, and throwing out old clothes and calling ourselves who we are.

For another officer of the Association, Anglo-Indians are ‘proud [of the cultural centre], extremely proud of it, and I think this is what’s brought out more people to become Anglo-Indian’. For some Anglo-Indians, this collective pride is inseparably bound up with their mixed descent. As expressed to me by Ann, who moved to Australia in 1963 to be with her fiance´, We are a very proud race . . . I don’t mean personally proud, [a] conceited person, not that kind of pride, but a proud race and community because we were so advantaged, we had the best of the British and the best of the Indians. . . . We are not insipid in our metabolism, in our human structure. We had a bit of the Indian blood in us, and a bit of the English blood in us, we had a mixture of temperaments and maybe that’s where the pride came from, the British pride or, I don’t know, well it could even be the Indian pride. . . . But I’d say it would be more the Rule Britannia pride, you know, Britannia rules the waves. And so we leaned more to an England, to a Britain. It was like our real parents as against foster parents. And I feel proud that the mixture of the races is an ingredient for easy assimilation as well.

The resurgence of interest in what it means to be an Anglo-Indian was fostered not only by seeing other cultural groups maintaining and celebrating a collective identity, but also by the recognition that assimilation and

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

171

integration posed a threat to the future of an Anglo-Indian community in Australia as well as in India. As an officer of the Association explains, I think there was a fear that if we didn’t create these resurgences, if we didn’t express solidarity in numbers and in belief more than anything else, then we would assimilate and integrate into the bigger cultures, because we are a minority group in any country and we would be washed away in the greater culture and the Anglo-Indians would be lost forever. . . . We have a very, very high rate of intermarriage in the community, very high. . . . it is because we mix so easily in terms of the way we are.

Although many Anglo-Indians believe that intermarriage with other Australians will lead to the disappearance of the community, others see it as important for the future of a multi-racial Australia. As Ann told me, I think the mixed blood of any nationality, like the multicultural is now in Australia, will breed a very strong race in the future. . . . The more they mix the Vietnamese with Australian or Chinese with Australian or Yugoslavs, the Serbs with Australian, the Anglo-Indian with Australian, and the AngloIndian with all those other multinational, cultural people, it is going to be a different, stronger race.

Yet, even though the Anglo-Indian community is increasingly visible in multicultural Australia, many Anglo-Indians find it difficult to explain their identity, and frustrating that they need to do so. For Geraldine, Even today it’s just very difficult to explain what an Anglo-Indian is, because I think they can’t believe that your ancestors could have been British. So we have to explain in detail how we could be Anglo-Indians and of course we haven’t got the documents to prove it to them, so they’re quite hesitant to accept it. But most people ask us, ‘Oh, you’re from India, where’s the spot on your head?’ . . . you say you’re Anglo-Indian and you followed the western way of life, and not the Indian. You lived in India, but you didn’t live like an Indian. . . . What I can’t understand is we’ve been here, Anglo-Indians in Australia, for at least thirty years, if not more . . . Why don’t they know about us? Why do they find it so difficult to understand who we are?

As Geraldine continues, the difficulties of explaining and understanding an Anglo-Indian identity only emerged after she had migrated to Australia: I didn’t need to question it, or find out what an Anglo-Indian was, or where we came from, because it was so natural. . . . We grew up with all the AngloIndians in India, we were not different, none of us questioned it, and we just took it for granted and . . . [it was] only when we came here that [such questions were asked]. . . . I don’t blame people for it, because some of us

172

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

don’t look fully Indian, and some of us don’t look fully British, so, yes, they are confused, of course they must ask. But the sad part of it is we didn’t ask the questions in India, so we don’t have the answers. And we are finding it difficult to establish ourselves and explain who we are.

Geraldine told me that ‘I think the word ‘‘Anglo’’ defines us.’ But claiming British paternal ancestry leads other people to question her identity further, as though we are trying to hang onto something we are not. We are genuine people, we are genuine Anglo-Indians. . . . We are not fakes, that’s what they think we are . . . the moment you say it is an intermarriage of British and Indian. . . . ‘If you’ve got British in you, why don’t you look like a British person?’ . . . I can only prove it so far, but if you try to explain that there’s the raised eyebrows because they can’t figure that out. And . . . they’ve got to make it dirty. They don’t believe that it was a genuine marriage. . . . It makes you feel a bit disgusted.

Geraldine’s Australian-born daughter Sarah told me that ‘I’ve worked out the ‘‘Anglo’’ bit in me, now I’ve just got to work out the Indian.’ And yet, she feels ‘very defensive about using the ‘‘Anglo’’. . . . I think a lot of people I know think I’m using ‘‘Anglo’’ just to be seen as better – white superiority.’ Born after the end of the White Australia Policy, and growing up in multicultural Australia, Sarah explained the difficulties of understanding and locating her Anglo-Indian identity: [Our culture and identity are] borrowed from two places, and nothing is ours. We don’t have our own country, there’s no country called Anglo-India. We don’t have our own flag, we don’t have our own dress – it’s borrowed from the British. We don’t have our own food – that’s borrowed from the Indians. We don’t have our own language – that’s borrowed from the British. So we’re just bits of everything, and then when you get someone like me that’s living in a whole other country . . . it’s not really recognized as a true identity. So what I’ve felt like is, being Anglo-Indian is like a check box kind of thing, you have a survey and you choose A, B, C, D or, being Anglo-Indian, you choose ‘‘other’’, so I just feel like we’re not A, B, C, D, we’re just ‘‘other’’. . . . we’re just pushed into another little box that’s not named.

And yet, for Sarah, multicultural Australia provides the space to articulate an Anglo-Indian identity: ‘We have our own culture now, we don’t need to be seen as a bit of British and a bit of Indian, because we are our own.’

Conclusions The arrival of HMAS Manoora on the date of Indian Independence had much more than merely symbolic significance. In the Westralian newsreel

M I X E D DE S C EN T , MI GR ATI O N A N D MU L T I CU L T U R A L I S M

173

and in several newspapers, Indian Independence was brought home to Australians by the arrival of the converted troopship, bearing evacuees to a nation that was imagined as free, democratic and peaceful, and a nation that was also imagined as white.100 But the arrival of Anglo-Indians instead of Australians or British people of ‘pure European descent’ disrupted this fantasy of whiteness and prompted increasingly restrictive immigration policies based on racial exclusivity. Whilst the 23 Polish refugees who travelled alongside more than 700 Anglo-Indians on board the Manoora were among the first of many ‘Displaced Persons’ to enter Australia from 1947 to 1953, very few Anglo-Indians were able to follow those on the Manoora until the restrictions of the White Australia Policy began to be lifted in the mid-1960s. At this time, the internal contradictions revealed by admitting people of mixed descent, the difficulties of implementing racially exclusive policies, and the tensions between the Departments of Immigration and External Affairs all contributed to the demise of the White Australia Policy. Most significantly for Anglo-Indians, the policy shifted from interpreting ‘European’ identity in racial to cultural terms. The previous emphasis on appearance, and the need to document European descent, came to be replaced by an emphasis on European culture and way of life. An increasing number of Anglo-Indians migrated to Australia in the 1960s and 1970s because they were seen as culturally European since they spoke English as their mother tongue, wore western dress, and their domestic life was more western than Indian. Such cultural similarities came to supersede the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians in identifying them as able to assimilate and integrate into Australia at a time when the White Australia Policy was being replaced by official multiculturalism. And yet, rather than representing a clear break with various forms of the White Australia Policy, official multiculturalism from the early 1970s in many ways built on their foundations, as shown by a continued emphasis on the suitability of European rather than Asian migrants. Anglo-Indians were able to migrate in greater numbers from the mid-1960s because they were regarded as culturally European, but they were positioned in materially different ways from white, British migrants, who were eligible for assisted passages and hostel accommodation on their arrival. Moreover, even though AngloIndians were able to migrate to Australia because they were seen as culturally European, they were often identified as Indian once they resettled. In both White and multicultural Australia, Anglo-Indians have occupied a complex and ambivalent place because of their mixed descent and their Indian origins. Many Anglo-Indians who migrated to Australia in the 1960s and 1970s stressed their ability to assimilate into a western culture that was more familiar than life in independent India and referred to this ability to distinguish themselves from non-European and non-English-speaking migrants. But, since the late 1980s, there has been a growing desire to

174

MIXED D ESCENT, M IGRATION AND MULTICULT URALISM

foster and to celebrate a distinctive Anglo-Indian identity. Following the example of other communities, a number of Anglo-Indian associations and projects have received government funding in the context of official multiculturalism. In contrast to the genealogical societies and school reunions that remain the most significant networks for Anglo-Indians in Britain today, a wide range of clubs and associations in Australia make the community more visible. And yet many Anglo-Indians find it frustrating not only that there continues to be a lack of understanding about their identity, but also that their identity is difficult to explain. Such difficulties revolve around the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians and, in particular, the ‘Anglo’ component of their identities in the context of Anglo-Celtic settlement and contested belonging in Australia. The migration of Anglo-Indians to Australia unsettles the assumed hegemony not only of ‘White’ Australia, but also of white fantasies of nationhood in multicultural Australia. Through their European and Indian heritage, Anglo-Indians in many ways embody the contested identification of Australians and the idea of Australian nationhood in relation to both Europe and Asia.

Chapter Seven

At Home in Independent India: Post-Imperial Domesticity and National Identity

In January 1998, the Fourth International Reunion of Anglo-Indians was held in Bangalore in south India. Alongside a proliferation of national associations, newsletters and websites, international reunions have been held since 1989 and represent a recent resurgence of interest in what it means to be an Anglo-Indian. The locations of these international reunions – in London, Toronto and Perth before 1998, and, since then, in Auckland (2001) and Melbourne (2004) – map an Anglo-Indian diaspora bound by British imperial history. The first reunion in India was timed to fall in the fiftieth anniversary year of Independence and was described as a homecoming. But, despite its celebration of return and its theme of ‘unity and integration’, demonstrations were held outside a five-star hotel by some Anglo-Indians resident in Bangalore who could not afford the registration fee. These demonstrations raised questions about who could celebrate a community identity, memory and homecoming, and posed a stark contrast between the poverty of many Anglo-Indians in India and the relative affluence of those who had migrated. Such encounters between resident and non-resident Anglo-Indians reflect ‘the entanglement, the intertwining of the genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘‘staying put’’ ’,1 and reveal the contested geographies of domicile and diaspora. This chapter focuses on the spatial politics of home for Anglo-Indians who remained domiciled in India after Independence. While much research has focused on home and identity in diverse diasporic communities, far less has studied the effects of migration on those people who remained at home.2 I examine the ways in which Anglo-Indians have felt both at home and not at home in India since Independence, and how such national geographies of belonging and identification with the motherland have been embodied by women and both reproduced and resisted on a domestic scale. I begin by considering the reasons why most Anglo-Indians remained

176

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

in India after Independence, whether by choice or by necessity, and the effect of large-scale migration on those who remained domiciled. Even after formal decolonization, a contested British paternalism towards the community persisted in the 1950s and life arguably remained more similar than different for domiciled Anglo-Indians until the 1960s. I draw on interviews with Anglo-Indians from two generations – those who remember life before Independence, and who belong to the same generation as many AngloIndians who migrated to Britain in the 1940s and 1950s; and those born just before or soon after Independence, and who belong to the same generation as many Anglo-Indians who migrated to Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. I then explore the ways in which three key markers of difference that domesticated identity and embodied western modernity in the years before Independence – dress, work beyond the home, and relationships between men and women – have been recast for Anglo-Indian women from these two generations. Anglo-Indian women are still seen as central for the future and status of the community, just as they were in the years before Independence. But younger women now often wear Indian dress and marry Indians from other communities, reversing some of the key markers of difference that used to identify Anglo-Indians as more western than other Indians.

Staying on in India For many Anglo-Indians, the transfer of power at Independence made their position in the new states of India and Pakistan uncertain. But up to 250,000 of the community remained in the Indian subcontinent after 1947, either by choice or by necessity.3 Deborah, who migrated to Britain in 1956, explains that Anglo-Indians remained domiciled for a number of reasons: Those who felt that they had a future in India, maybe they were at the top of their careers and they decided, well, there’s not time to move now. They were going to get big pensions and provident funds and whatever. Maybe people who didn’t have any family, or didn’t intend to have any family, and it wasn’t going to affect the next generation. They were going to live out their lives with good money and pensions and servants and all the facilities that we’ve had all along, that we were used to and they weren’t prepared to give up. . . . Those were the sort of people, or those who didn’t have the money to come. Who wanted to come, but just didn’t have enough saved for their fares, for their passages. Didn’t have qualifications, maybe, to get a job over here. . . . Those who had family that they couldn’t leave, elderly parents maybe whom they couldn’t afford to bring [with them].

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

177

Many Anglo-Indians wanted to migrate but were unable to do so. Simon, who works for the community in New Delhi, estimates that ‘80 per cent of Anglo-Indians who stayed on were those who couldn’t afford to go out. Only 20 per cent of them stayed on by choice.’ Most of his family migrated to Britain in 1949, and he remembers heated discussions between his parents and his uncle and aunt, who ‘kept pressing my mum and dad to also go along to England. And my mum and dad wanting to stay, they were very happy here.’ For Mary, a retired teacher in Lucknow, ‘most of the Anglo-Indians ran as though the devil was at their heel [after Independence]. . . . They’ve done very well where they have been. I have no regrets about staying. Probably if I had children I would have wanted to get out.’ Although she has no regrets about remaining in India, she remembers being upset when so many Anglo-Indians left the country: ‘I said, ‘‘Why are they running from here?’’ Maybe they were not socially established like my husband and I were. Not so very grandly established, but comfortably so. . . . They had to look after their children’s future, because it became very Hindi-ized.’ Many Anglo-Indians migrated because they saw a better future for their children in Britain or Australia. But many other AngloIndians remained domiciled in India because of other family ties. For example, Charles, also a Lucknow teacher, told me that his father chose to be demobilized from the army in India rather than Britain after the Second World War because ‘he had his mother in India, his family in India. And he would be with family. Their country didn’t become important. Others may have chosen to stay behind because they might have brushed up with British snobbery, and therefore you would not like to see yourself as a second-class citizen.’ Drawing on questionnaires completed in Bangalore, Jhansi and Bilaspur from 1959 to 1961, V.R. Gaikwad argued that the ‘suddenness’ of Independence created deep stresses and strains in the community. It was left to face a series of extremely complex problems of emotional, psychological and cultural adjustment. . . . The heavy exodus in the transitional period increased the feeling of insecurity in the minds of those who could not possibly leave the country. Those who wanted to live in this country were also left considerably disturbed.4

Brian remembers that large-scale migration after 1947 had ‘a disheartening effect on those who stayed. They sort of felt like, we have been left behind . . . because we are poor, because we could not get a ticket.’ Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Leonard, a teacher in Calcutta, recalls that ‘we heard that [many of our classmates] were going to the UK, or they were going off to Australia, some place or the other. And I asked them, ‘‘Why are

178

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

you leaving?’’ They said ‘‘There’s nothing left for us.’’ That was that feeling of being isolated, being left alone here.’ Also growing up after Independence, David, another teacher in Lucknow, told me that It was not very happy when I was growing up. People felt that they were going to be discriminated against and they were running away . . . there was a mass exodus to England, Australia, Canada. . . . they felt that things were very insecure. Fortunately I belonged to a family which didn’t contribute to that, and I’m not unhappy that I never left. . . . My father retired in the early 1970s, and decided to stay here because at that time . . . we didn’t even think of going away. Basically, we are not the typical AngloIndians . . . we are comfortable in the country, we’re very happy here, and we didn’t really have any anxiety over any particular thing, so we didn’t ever want to rush off.

But, in contrast, an Anglo-Indian nurse in Lucknow regrets remaining in India. She remembers that ‘in those days when we said we’d stay, it was different, we had everything. I mean we didn’t see a bleak future . . . we thought that we would live comfortably here, we had servants here, we had everything. . . . Ever since our people started going away, things have changed.’ Many Anglo-Indians who remained domiciled after Independence talk in terms of loss and regret, but also in terms of adjustment and survival. According to Susannah, a former Loreto pupil who lives in central Lucknow, one consequence of migration was that ‘the culture got diluted. . . . the Anglo-Indians left because they didn’t want to make India their home. If the same people who left, if they had remained here, there’d still be a community today. Anglo-Indians would have been a tremendous force.’ Echoing this view, Margaret, who, like Brian, works for the community in Calcutta, believes that ‘Naturally, the cream disappeared from this society. And if they were here in India today, it would have been a far better country, definitely.’ As a teacher at Loreto St Agnes in Lucknow told me, It was sad, because people you grew up with, and you mixed and you were happy with [migrated]. That may be natural in any community, in any race, any part of the world, you know, people start separating. Separation is always a sad thing. But, you know, life goes on. And you just have to go along with it and be brave. . . . You adjust when you meet your challenges, I think. You have to keep adjusting.

On both personal and collective scales, the large-scale migration of AngloIndians was profoundly unsettling for those who remained in India. In the words of Norman, who works for the community in Calcutta,

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

179

In the beginning there was a lot of reluctance among people who couldn’t go, for financial reasons or maybe certain problems of emigration, many of them . . . lived here, dreaming a dream which will never ever come [true]. But that’s gone now . . . the minute you go on dreaming about this, you’re ignoring your life here, you don’t want to better yourself here.

In similar terms, Brian explains that for a long time . . . people were very depressed, very frustrated, not very keen on even looking for jobs. It was as if once they’d seen that it was in the air for so long, and then those with their families who had been lucky enough to get through and who had gone away, were always sending help, assistance for living . . . that was a bad time . . . they were earning well abroad, and to them it was tuppence to send a few hundred or a thousand [rupees]. But that sort of knocked the wind out of the community here. They sort of felt ‘Ah, I’m getting enough money for my roof above my head and for food and all of that.’

Nationality and Community In this section I consider the extent to which Anglo-Indians who remained domiciled after Independence have come to identify India as home and themselves as Indian.5 Drawing on interviews with Anglo-Indians born before and after Independence, I explore the ways in which a dual identification with Britain as fatherland and India as motherland has come to be recast as a dual identification as Anglo-Indian by community and Indian by nationality. I address the ways in which the politics of identity and community are articulated through gendered and racialized geographies of home on both domestic and national scales. Although many Anglo-Indians claim a distinctive community identity, and feel at home alongside other Indian communities, many see this distinctive identity as under threat, and the very future of the community as doubtful. Just as debates about the uncertain future of the community were embodied by women and their lives within and beyond the home in British India, current debates about the status and existence of the community in independent India are also embodied by Anglo-Indian women. Although Anglo-Indian leaders such as Gidney and Anthony sought to identify the community as Indian before Independence, and to stress its loyalty and attachment to the motherland as home, many Anglo-Indians continued to identify with Britain rather than India as home after Independence. Brian told me that, for the first thirty years or so after Independence, ‘there [was] no question of identifying India as home. It was some sort of a virus in the minds of the community that said, ‘‘No, you have to

180

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

leave, you have to go, wherever it may be.’’ . . . And so that question of India as home . . . no-one ever thought of it that way.’ But when migration became more difficult, Anglo-Indians began to think of India as home as ‘there [was] no other alternative.’ As he continued, Most Anglo-Indians are now looking for peace within their hearts, accepting the truth that they belong here after all . . . If they talk about ‘I’m going home,’ as they would, in the early years . . . after Independence, that was a very common phrase with Anglo-Indians, ‘We’re going home.’ Ok, fine, you can go home, but this is also home, this is your motherland.

An Anglo-Indian man in Bangalore critiqued a sense of ‘false pride’ whereby some members of the community always refer to their other brothers and sisters, the other Indians, they refer to them as ‘all those Indians’. They never consider themselves Indian. And the Anglo-Indians always tell me . . . ‘My neighbours are Indians.’ I say, ‘What are you? You’re a damn Indian too, be proud of it. Be proud of your motherland, not of your fatherland. Your fatherland, they ditched you. They betrayed you . . . it’s your mother that has given you shelter.’ . . . Slowly they are accepting . . . the reality that this is their country, and slowly their dreams of going to their so-called dream country, England or Australia [are fading].

Other Anglo-Indians identify a broad difference between those who migrated and those who remained domiciled in terms of their identification of India as home. For David, who was born in 1945, I think most Anglo-Indians think of India as home . . . there was a time when people in the community did not think of it as home. Those who have remained, of course they did. And those who didn’t, went abroad. . . . I think that’s the basic difference. I mean why would one have stayed? Because one felt that one was safe, one was home.

Many Anglo-Indians born before and after Independence have come to identify themselves as Indian by nationality and Anglo-Indian by community, reflecting a loyalty and attachment to India whilst maintaining a distinctive community identity. The following examples show how a distinctive community identity continues to reflect western culture and traditions even as Anglo-Indians increasingly identify themselves as Indian: I’m very proud of my heritage . . . I feel that I’m very enriched by the two cultures that are within me, more than two cultures actually. . . . I’m proud to be an Anglo-Indian, I’m very happy to be an Anglo-Indian. At the same time, remembering that I’m first an Indian, first an Indian. (Margaret)

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

181

We are all Indian by nationality. But by community, we are AngloIndian. . . . we will not lose our identity. We will remain Anglo-Indian. I accept the fact that I’m an Indian by nationality, but don’t ask me to change my lifestyle. (Brian) To me, being an Anglo-Indian, . . . I feel that I have my own special identity, different from just being, you know, an Indian. I am an Indian first of all, and then an Anglo-Indian, that’s the way I feel. But being an Anglo-Indian is special because they’re so few of us and we have to be together. We have our own sort of culture, our own ways and traditions which are different from the rest of India. (Helen)

Some of my interviewees identified generational differences between those who remember life before Independence and those born just before or since Independence. Charles, who was born after Independence, told me that his parents belonged to a ‘generation of transition’, whereas he belonged to a ‘generation of integration’. The younger, post-Independence generation is more likely to have friends from other Indian communities, to speak an Indian language more fluently, and to wear Indian as well as western dress. In the words of Barbara, who works for the community in Calcutta and remembers British India, Anglo-Indians are seeing the importance of being Indian. You are AngloIndian as a community, but you are Indian as a national. And they are now seeing the importance of this. . . . It is quite a change. They will never get away from their western style of living . . . but they are accepting the Indian into their lives, they are accepting the fact that they are now Indian. That they are an Anglo-Indian community, but they are an Indian citizen. . . . People of my era . . . have mostly left the country . . . it is the younger generation that are now left. But it is the younger generation that are now accepting.

For Carol, who was born after Independence and lives in Lucknow, there’s a definite identity problem with [the older] generation. We are slightly more adjusted to the Indians . . . because we are working, we have to integrate with Indians, we have to relate with them. . . . But [the older generation] still [has] this identity problem . . . they keep themselves a little apart and they have a lot of prejudices, that’s what I’ve noticed. They’re still living in the Raj as it were, and we are not, because we didn’t see the Raj . . . our generation is not maladjusted, we can feel at one with them. We’re more Indian.

A number of interviewees told me that these generational differences resulted in points of tension between themselves and their parents, particularly in terms of having friends from other Indian communities, wearing Indian dress, and enjoying Indian music and films. Trevor, a teacher in

182

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

Ranchi, told me that his parents’ generation came into contact with other Indians as servants, whereas he had other Indian friends at school: ‘It was very traumatic because you had to explain to your parents. . . . When you’re with your Anglo-Indian friends you become an Anglo-Indian . . . and when you’re not, you try to be as Indian as you can.’ As an example of how these tensions were played out within the home, Patricia, who works for the community in Calcutta, told me about her neighbours: There is an Anglo-Indian family next door and the young girl she’s married now and gone to Canada. She knew Bengali well because she learnt it in school, so every Sunday evening we used to have a Bengali film on TV, and I never used to bother to put it on, but she had it on one Sunday I remember, and I heard her father shout at her ‘Oh put that damn thing off, can’t understand a word of it, what are you playing this for?’ and she said ‘Oh because you don’t understand it I must put it off, I understand it very well, it is a very nice movie.’ And I thought to myself – generation gap.

Despite such broad generational differences, Anglo-Indians born both before and after Independence recounted the tensions of their dual identity as Indian by nationality and Anglo-Indian by community. For Mary, who remembers British India, ‘My thoughts are all English. I don’t care for anything Indian. But I’m not unpatriotic, I’m here, I’m an Indian national . . . I have friends among the Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis.’ Also identifying her national loyalty to India, but the distinctiveness of her identity as Anglo-Indian rather than Indian, Ruth, a teacher in Calcutta, explained that To be an Anglo-Indian, for me, is that I’m not a pure Indian. I’m not allIndian, though my loyalties have come from there, I’m loyal to my country, I’m loyal to everything it holds. But I don’t feel that I’m a pure Indian . . . because to be an Indian you have to be either a Hindu or a Muslim, then you’re an Indian. . . . English is our language, our mother tongue. And we have been brought up in a fairly western way. And therefore even though I’m born in India, some of the customs are alien to me and some I cannot take to . . . the pure Indian customs. . . . We have a different way . . . in our manners, in our etiquette. . . . touching the feet and touching the head, and now that’s alien to me and I never let anyone touch my feet. . . . And their toilet ways. Their toilet behaviour’s very different. Very, very different. . . . It’s just the upbringing . . . you are like a foreigner when it comes to certain habits.

This quotation charts a series of differences between being Anglo-Indian and Indian that span language, certain embodied customs and practices, and the assumption that Indians are Hindu or Muslim but not Christian. For Ruth, such differences mean that although she might be loyal to India

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

183

as her country of origin and domicile, she does not identify herself as Indian. As she continues, I may be prejudiced against the Indians. I’m more British. I feel more at one with them, than with the Indian, because of the . . . unfair treatment that I have received, that my people have received. . . . They [other Indians] feel that they’re not related to us, that we were a mixed breed and that we didn’t belong to the British so we didn’t belong to the Indians.

Although identifying himself as part of a post-Independence ‘generation of integration’, Charles recounted the contradictions and complexities of his dual identity: At one level you want to completely integrate, and at the other level, you know, you’re absolutely different. . . . It’s such a contradiction, precisely because it is a hybrid. You see this is not a foreign community that has been planted, I mean it’s not a hothouse plant or something which has been put down in alien soil. This is the product of two communities . . . but . . . [it’s] psychologically and socially schizophrenic. Because you’re constantly shuffling identities. . . . You are all the time shuffling identities.

For him, an Anglo-Indian community identity is like belonging to a club: ‘You are Indian because you are Indian, period. Then you can be an AngloIndian and dress in a tie and suit when you want your club life, when you want to get among like-minded people, people who talk the same language.’ For some Anglo-Indians born both before and after Independence, the distinctiveness of an Anglo-Indian community identity is not at odds with a wider Indian identity, but is rather a central part of claiming an Indian identity. They identify India as a nation that comprises many diverse community identities rather than a singular homogeneous identity: What’s the connection between a Kashmiri and a Keraline? They’re different in language, they’re different in religion, they’re different in colour, they’re different in customs, they’re different in their way of life, all sorts of things. But they’re both Indians. Because India is a sort of a mixture of so many groups of people . . . the Anglo-Indians are a very small part of this thing, but whatever, it’s part of this great mosaic that is the Indian nation. (Norman) We have a Bengali community, we have the Sindi community, there are so many communities in India, there aren’t just Indians in India, the Bengalis are Indian, the Sindis are Indian, the Punjabis are Indian . . . we are a community . . . you are an Indian subject, you belong to India. But you [also] belong to the Anglo-Indian community. ( Valerie)

184

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

Today in India people don’t say they’re Indian, they say ‘I’m a Punjabi’, ‘I’m a Tamilan’, ‘I’m Parsi’, ‘I’m Bengali’, they don’t say ‘Indian’. Well, we had an argument once in the office and I said I was an Anglo-Indian and they said ‘You shouldn’t say you’re an Anglo-Indian.’ [I said] ‘But if I ask you who you are do you say you’re an Indian? You say you’re a Bengali’ . . . I said the AngloIndian is a true Indian because you go north, south, east or west, the AngloIndian has merged himself with the culture of that state. . . . ‘Everywhere,’ I said, ‘we have amalgamated very well.’ . . . ‘We are true Indians.’ (Patricia)

And yet, a number of Anglo-Indians pointed to the revival of Hindu nationalism, tied to claims for a Hindu motherland, which has made Anglo-Indians and other minority communities increasingly insecure. As Norman told me, ‘Indianness is not the monopoly of any single community, no one can say that ‘‘I am Indian and others are not’’, although people are trying to politicize this and say, ‘‘If you don’t belong to the Hindu faith, then you’re not Indian’’, which [is] totally illogical.’ In recent years, many Anglo-Indians have come to identify with other Christians in India to a greater extent than before. For Susannah, ‘where we are being discriminated against now, is as a Christian . . . all these persecutions that have suddenly come upon us, we have never heard of these things before, and they’re pretty frightening. I mean they are attacking the nuns, they are attacking the priests, so they are attacking you as a Christian group, not really as an Anglo-Indian.’ A number of Anglo-Indians told me that even though they identify themselves as Indian by nationality, they are regarded as foreign by other Indians because of their appearance. For example, Mary commented that ‘whenever I go abroad and I’m standing in the line for Indian nationals, they tell me, ‘‘Madam, you’re standing in the wrong line.’’ ‘‘Where do you want me to stand?’’ . . . Then they look at me and they wonder, you know. I say, ‘‘No, no. I’m an Indian national.’’ ’6 Mary also told me that she is often charged more on a bicycle rickshaw than other Indians, ‘because I’m wearing a frock’. As she tells the rickshaw men, ‘I’m not English, you just mind your business, I belong here, I belong to this nation.’ They think, you see, I’m rather fair compared with the normal run of people that are here . . . and I talk very English, and I dress like, as you see [in western dress]. . . . very few people go round in skirts and frocks and all now.

Margaret, who was born in 1945, also told me that she is often seen as foreign, and charged more in taxis as a result: If you’re a little fair and all that, you’ll stand out . . . so naturally they think you’re a foreigner. I have the problem and I know Hindi and all that, and yet I’m not really 100 per cent accepted, and I feel very bad about it, you know. So if I call my taxi, I have to pay extra, if I go somewhere else I have to pay

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

185

extra. . . . I don’t like it, and I keep telling them, ‘Why are you doing this to me? I’ve not come from abroad, I’m an Indian.’ . . . So the colour is a little bind between our relationship. And that is why to learn the language is so important.

Anglo-Indian Women in Independent India Like the depiction of Victoria Jones in Bhowani Junction (see Chapter 3), a well-known and more recent fictional depiction of the Anglo-Indian community also centres on a female protagonist. The main character in the 1981 film 36 Chowringhee Lane, directed by Aparna Sen, is Violet Stoneham, an unmarried Anglo-Indian teacher who remained domiciled after Independence and lives in central Calcutta.7 The film explores the struggle over space at the domestic and national level through Miss Stoneham’s friendship with a young Bengali couple. Whereas her apartment becomes a site for the couple to be intimate and alone, the film ends by showing her exclusion from their home and social world. In both Bhowani Junction and 36 Chowringhee Lane, Anglo-Indian women embody the contested spaces of home, community and nation as they are both in place and out of place in British and independent India. Many Anglo-Indians see their distinctive identity as under threat, and the very future of their community as doubtful. Just as debates about the uncertain future of the community were embodied by women in British India, current debates about the status and existence of the community in independent India are embodied by Anglo-Indian women and their lives both within and beyond the home. Two key areas of change and concern are dress and intermarriage, both of which are more significant in the lives of AngloIndian women than men. Whereas most Anglo-Indian men continue to wear western dress, and western dress has been ‘the working clothes’ for many other Indian men since long before Independence, many AngloIndian women now wear Indian dress. They are still more likely than their male counterparts to marry outside the community, but now marry other Indians rather than Europeans or Americans. Anglo-Indian women are also seen, and see themselves, as more successful in education and employment than many Anglo-Indian men. Their paid employment beyond the home is also regarded as a central reason why many Anglo-Indian women now wear Indian dress and marry men from other Indian communities.

Dress Since the mid-1960s, and particularly over the last twenty years, an increasing number of Anglo-Indian women who remained domiciled after

186

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

Independence have begun to wear Indian dress.8 Younger women increasingly wear the shalwar-kameez (a long tunic worn with loose-fitting trousers) and the sari, particularly in the public spaces of work and at social events attended by Indians from other communities. Older Anglo-Indian women, however, often continue to wear western dress. According to Frances, who grew up in McCluskieganj and lives in Calcutta, ‘In my grandfather’s time, it was unheard of to put on a sari and walk about the house . . . the servants were the ones that wore the saris, not us.’ Two Anglo-Indian women who remember life before Independence explain why they wear western dress: I couldn’t get into a shalwar-kameez because I would feel awkward in it because I’ve been brought up wearing the western clothes, by a western style of living. At the age of 72 I cannot change. . . . I enjoy Indian culture . . . but my mode of living, my style of living, is still the style that I was brought up with. (Barbara) Some of our girls have imbibed Indian dress. It’s a pretty dress, it’s a beautiful [dress], I don’t despise it. But I was asked once, ‘Why don’t you get into a sari?’ I said, ‘Why should I? It’s not my mode of dress.’ I wouldn’t feel comfortable in it. I feel very comfortable looking at others in it. But I myself don’t think I could ever do it. (Mary)

Younger Anglo-Indian women, by contrast, feel less discomfort, and their wearing of Indian dress reflects a desire to integrate and to be accepted, to be able to move about more freely and comfortably, and to avoid sexual harassment. As explained by Helen, who works for the community in Calcutta: I think it’s just a matter of need really . . . when I was first in Calcutta, first married and many years ago, I could go around with a dress or with a skirt and blouse and not attract much attention. But now the way things are going, you know, if you dress like that, you sort of stick out. . . . I feel like I’m more accepted if I go [to work] in a shalwar-kameez. And also it’s very comfortable to wear, so that helps, so that’s why I use it more and more. . . . I do wear western clothes as well. But as I say, when I go [to work] or I go to a gathering where there would be mostly Indians, then I would wear a sari.

In similar terms, Susannah explains that the younger generation started to wear Indian dress for reasons of safety and in order to be accepted as the same rather than different from other Indians. In her words, younger women wanted to identify with the rest of them, which was a good thing.. . . . If I go out in a dress I get stared at, they all look or they laugh, or they say, ‘The old lady, she’s got a dress on.’ You stand out like a sore thumb. So you begin to

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

187

feel awkward yourself. . . . The idea I think is that they should not be the object of ridicule or things like that . . . it’s just a matter of safety.

As well as marking Anglo-Indians as different from other Indians, western dress is sometimes thought to represent western licentiousness. For example, Claire told me that other Indians say ‘ ‘‘Oh, an Anglo-Indian, she only wears dresses.’’ They project you in such a way, ok, we wear dresses, ‘‘They only dance, they only drink, they only smoke.’’ ’ Echoing this description, Charles explains that many Anglo-Indian women now wear Indian dress because ‘You don’t want to stand out as a sore thumb. You don’t want to be identified by the short-skirt-wearing woman, because if you’re wearing short skirts that means you eat meat, smoke cigarettes, and sleep with other women’s husbands.’ Some Anglo-Indian women have to wear Indian dress at work.9 This varies between employers, as shown by the following discussion between two women who work for the community in Bangalore: Julia: Some offices insist on your wearing shalwar-kameez or the sari . . . we can wear pants, you know, but because of the environment you have all Indians . . . and they start gazing at you. Claire: Like in our company, it’s very open, of course we’re not allowed to wear miniskirts or strap blouses, and all that, but otherwise we can wear short skirts, decent clothes, it is very open, but I’ve heard about other places where you’re not even allowed to wear long skirts. . . . When you’re travelling, you would prefer to have on a shalwar. Julia: It’s to be comfortable, you can sit anyway. Claire: To avoid eve-teasing also. I would have worn a skirt to work today but because I knew I was coming here and I was going to be late, I prefer to wear trousers. . . . There is a company that doesn’t allow you to wear skirts, it’s a computer company . . . and they’re still so narrow-minded like, they’re so vulgar, you know if you wear a skirt they openly make fun of you. In my company that doesn’t happen. . . . it’s a very modern environment.

In contrast to ideas about Anglo-Indian women enjoying a greater degree of social and spatial freedom and mobility compared to women from other Indian communities, Indian dress has now come to represent a greater ability to move both freely and safely. Carol, who grew up in post-Independence Lucknow, remembered an unpleasant incident on a train when someone spat on my face. . . . I just felt that he deliberately spat on my face. . . . I was wearing a skirt that day. . . . I was called kalangrez, which means ‘black-English’ . . . I was called that on a train. And just because I was being free and all and with my cousins, boys, and I was talking, they resented that.

188

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

Carol, who is self-employed, told me how and why she came to wear Indian dress at work: When I first opened the [beauty] salon, I used to normally wear skirts and blouses and dresses, and it was quite hard for me to display my legs and walk around. So then I switched about three years ago, just for my own safety. . . . My father didn’t like me to wear Indian outfits . . . he had this thing in his head also that he wanted me to identify with Anglo-Indians, a western culture.. . . . I first started wearing the clothes when I was in college for the very first time. It was more like a fancy dress for me. But now I wear it out of necessity. . . . Even though I’m wearing [shalwar-kameez] I’m not comfortable . . . I don’t like to wear it, I don’t feel comfortable, I don’t feel like I’m being myself. Until I can put on my jeans, I feel that I’m looking different . . . you just dress like an Indian and behave like an Indian and the world accepts it.

Anglo-Indian women across the social spectrum have begun to wear Indian dress. Women working in offices, schools, hotels and beauty salons, and poor women who live in slums, increasingly wear Indian dress for comfort, safety and freedom from harassment. Describing members of the Anglo-Indian community who live in slums such as Tiljallah in Calcutta, Patricia, who works for the community in the city, told me that wearing Indian dress has become a matter of survival. Not only is it cheaper to wear Indian dress, but because our girls are living in the slums, they have to dress like the people around them. They can’t help it, they have to survive, it’s a case of survival, so they have to dress like that. . . . and because they’re poor, the way they wear their sari is not elegant. If I wear a sari, you really will know that it’s not my dress, because I’m dressed up, put it that way. But for them, they wear the sari . . . the way the women in the slums wear it because they have to work, so even though they are Anglo-Indian – when they talk you can make out that they are, the English is good – they will still look like the other people in the slums.10

Unlike the photographs included in the 1920 Report of the Calcutta Domiciled Community Enquiry Committee, in which poor residents of slums were identifiable as members of the domiciled community because of their western dress (Figures 2.1 and 2.2), poor Anglo-Indian women now increasingly dress like their neighbours from other Indian communities. Some welfare organizations actively encourage such women to wear Indian dress. For example, an Anglo-Indian organization in Bangalore provides clothes for 150 poor families up to twice a year. As one of the organizers told me,

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

189

We give every Anglo-Indian, one woman in a family, a sari. Saris are traditionally Indian dress. We want them to wear that . . . Saris are the sign of an Indian. Sari is also . . . more decent when compared with the dress. And compared to the Anglo-Indian dressing, it used to be short skirts. The Indian sari is more modest. When you wear a sari you’ll get respect from all sections of society.

Although the dress of Anglo-Indian women born since Independence is increasingly Indianized, the dress of young middle-class women from other communities has become increasingly westernized in recent years, largely as a result of English-language education, the popularity of Englishlanguage media and music, particularly Star TV, and wider processes of cultural and economic globalization and westernization. According to Barbara, who lives in Calcutta and remembers life before Independence, The Indian girl is very westernized in the way that she is dressing now. . . . she likes her slacks, she likes her tops, really short skirts. The Indian today wears European clothes. . . . It’s quite a reversal . . . it is because they are now being educated in an English-speaking school. They are seeing the western world in their education, which they never saw before. . . . It’s more accepted. It’s a nice thing, it is a very good thing, because it keeps communities much closer together, you know? There’s more acceptance right around.

Another Anglo-Indian woman in Calcutta told me that young Indian women who wear western dress are usually wealthier than their AngloIndian counterparts. Most significantly, they are able to travel by car rather than public transport, and are thereby protected from the harassment many Anglo-Indian women fear as they travel to and from work.

Home and work Continuing the long tradition of work beyond the home, Anglo-Indian women since Independence, and particularly since the 1960s, have been seen as more successful in both education and employment than AngloIndian men. Helen told me that Anglo-Indian women are more innovative than their male counterparts: They take the initiative in things, you know, more than the men, and I think that helps to keep us together also. . . . In the case of the Indian home, the man has always been the breadwinner, and the wife has been the home-maker, stays at home and does the chores and looks after the children and all. But the situation seems to be reversed with the Anglo-Indian home, it’s the woman who is the breadwinner mostly . . . , who brings in the money and goes out to

190

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

work. Men, by and large, they do work, but . . . even if the man has a job it’s usually not as well-paid as the wife, and so they [are] always looked up to, and therefore take the lead in everything.

Since the end of job reservations for Anglo-Indians in the 1960s, increased competition for employment has made it harder for men to secure work. As Helen continues, one legacy of job reservations has been that young men were less likely to remain in education than young women, although this is now beginning to change: The women I think earlier realized the need for [education], and most of them have educated themselves and done well, and so they hold better positions, they get better jobs. . . . Now that we don’t have reservations anymore, I think our young men have realized . . . that they have to study and they have to be educated. . . . It’s so competitive. . . . I think now the situation is changing slightly, more and more young men are doing well.

In similar terms, a focus group discussion in Bangalore also highlighted the legacy of job reservations on the differential success of Anglo-Indian men and women in employment: Elizabeth: The girls earn more, are doing better, because secretaries are paid very well now [in] all the multinational companies . . . Julia: Anglo-Indian women are more enterprising and they are more hardworking now compared with the boys. I’ve noticed that Anglo-Indian girls are very hardworking, very enterprising, and they want to do well. . . . A lot of the Anglo-Indian men, I don’t understand why, but they don’t have that inclination to do well. There are some of them who are very enterprising but there are many of them who are not at all. . . . Claire: For many years in the railways and in so many places they had that quota, job reservation, so now they think it’s their right to, they think even if they don’t study they’re going to get that job.

Other interviewees noted that Anglo-Indian men faced greater competition for jobs than their female counterparts. As a community leader in Bangalore explains The number of girls coming out for employment from the Indian community, from the non-Anglo-Indian Indian communities, are a small number, so the competition level is much less, it’s not so keen. But the man has to compete with everybody for every job on the market. Every man has to work. Indian society is a male-dominated society. So the ladies have much less competition. Plus we have a beautiful capacity of English as our mother tongue, and we fit into any organizations because till now, English is still the commercial language, not only in India, but all over the world. . . . [women] fit into offices

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

191

straightaway. The Anglo-Indian girl, let’s say, has got certain social graces, a certain etiquette and behavioural patterns. . . . they’ve done very well as secretaries, through the country.

In the years before Independence, paid employment for women, particularly as secretaries, stenographers, teachers and nurses, was often seen to embody their modernity and independence, in contrast to the more domestic lives of many women from other Indian communities. Since Independence, the number of Anglo-Indian women working as nurses and teachers has fallen, but they continue to work in offices and also in the growing hospitality industry. Their western lifestyle is seen to make them ideally suited to work in multinational companies. As Patricia explains, ‘If you join a multinational company, we can portray ourselves as well, better than anybody else, so they do take us on . . . when foreign people come . . . they come for business and all that . . . you are able to speak, you are able to dress well, present yourself well . . . it’s a good thing, people do appreciate that.’ In contrast to women from other Indian communities, Anglo-Indian women are felt to have a greater ability to mix socially and at work with men, and to have a greater freedom to travel beyond the home and family. As Patricia told me, We were more open. When you worked as a secretary, they wanted you to go to the airport with papers to meet somebody, or to meet some customers, to go to the hotel to make arrangements for a conference, you just went out and did it. The Indian woman was a bit shy, a bit backward, and socially she’s not so up to it, whereas we’re more forward in that way. I worked in the oil fields in Assam for six years, and I used to come down with my boss for board meetings, and I used to travel with him from Calcutta to Delhi. An Indian woman wouldn’t do that, her family would object.

Not only are Anglo-Indian women seen to be at an advantage at work compared to other Indian women, but they are also often more successful in paid employment than Anglo-Indian men, largely because they face less competition. Margaret told me that ‘girls are more confident. Anglo-Indian girls from childhood, the little girls are more confident, more showy, you know, than the boys . . . The boys tend to be very shy, like there’s a chip on their shoulder for the boys.’ But rather than attribute this confidence to their European paternal ancestry and their embodiment of western modernity, Margaret attributes it to their Indian maternal ancestry: Sometimes I think maybe it’s from the Indian side of us. Because if you look at our Indian women, they were women, like, ok, they never went out to work in an office and all that, but they were the bosses in their own little homes, while their husbands went to work. The women controlled the family . . . the

192

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

Indian woman controlled the family, especially in the joint family. It was the eldest son’s wife who controlled the whole joint family. So I think we have inherited something of that . . . Indianness in us. . . . Of course our homes are different from the local Indians’, but you know, that initiative and the responsibility to family, and the thoughtfulness, and the big heart that an Indian woman normally has; all that has come to us through our Indian parent I think.

As Margaret continued, many marriages break up because of the imbalance of gender roles at home and work. Even though Anglo-Indian women are often the breadwinners for their families, they also remain responsible for running the home. As she explained, there is a vicious circle whereby many men are less successful than their wives at work, and their sons subsequently drop out of school: Mostly our womenfolk are working. So women go to work in the morning and they hope that their husbands will take their kids to school. Their husbands are playing cards in the house, their husbands have gone out to friends. The kids are neglected in the house. So when the wife comes back from work and she realizes that the kids haven’t gone to school, there’s a fight . . . and that’s how marriages break up. . . . She can’t be a breadwinner and at the same time run the home. So that was the reason why many of the womenfolk left their husbands. Because they were not contributing to building up the family. . . . The womenfolk had to change their roles, they had to be the breadwinners. . . . But if he was not playing his [domestic] role, then how could the wife manage, you know? So that was happening left, right and centre in Calcutta. That’s why our children were not going to school. . . . Girls went to school but it was the boys who played up, you know . . . the menfolk never bothered to be strict with their sons. So that’s how this vicious circle of boys falling out of school and all that continued.

Marriage In a study of marriage among Anglo-Indians in Lucknow in the late 1960s, Shiva Kumar Gupta wrote that ‘Nothing shows more the stability of a community than the stability of its marital relationship. It is of great social significance that a mixed, viable community like the Anglo-Indians has shown such fixity of its marital mores and patterns.’11 Gupta identified the distinctive features of an Anglo-Indian marriage, which included: the Christian sacrament of marriage; the role of ‘courtship and dating’ in leading to ‘love marriages’, agreed by the couple itself with minimal parental involvement; the lack of a dowry; and the ideal of living within a nuclear rather than a joint family after marriage. The ability of women and

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

193

men to socialize together from an early age, and their ability to choose whom to marry, underpinned the distinctive nature of an Anglo-Indian marriage, whereby ‘Romantic love and ‘‘falling in love’’ are the expressions which are considered essential for a successful marriage.’12 According to Gupta, Their religion still controls their marital patterns. ‘Love’ (however defined) is the motivating force among them which leads two people to marry. The responsibility for mate selection rests very largely upon the individuals concerned, and many parents have at best only an advisory role. . . . . Very often young men and women of 14 or 15 years of age start moving and mixing freely with members of the opposite sex in their age group. It gives them good opportunity to understand each other and play the courtship, if they so prefer. This is approved by the community; it is in fact considered an essential part of their social life to be quite intimate with each other before they decide to step in for marriage.13

Although identifying the continuity of Anglo-Indian traditions in relation to marriage, Gupta also wrote that the community was facing a dilemma: ‘clinging to the old traditions, customs and dress of their English progenitors, [Anglo-Indians] are in a state of dilemma: to learn or not to learn the Indian way of living’.14 He wrote that the majority of Anglo-Indians married within their community, but ‘quite a few people of the community, mostly girls, do take their life mates outside the community – no matter be they Christian or not’.15 Since the 1960s, an increasing number of Anglo-Indians have begun to marry Indians from other communities.16 Based on a survey of marriage statistics in six Catholic parishes and three Anglican parishes in Calcutta, and an Anglican parish in Ootacamund, Blair Williams argues that AngloIndians were largely endogamous in the 1940s and 1950s, with over 90 per cent of marriages within the community or with Europeans. This began to change from the 1960s, when 21 per cent of Anglo-Indians in the parishes surveyed married outside the community. Rising by about 10 per cent each decade, this figure increased to 54 per cent in the 1990s. Williams attributes increasing rates of intermarriage to two main factors: first, high rates of migration, particularly as Anglo-Indians migrated to Australia in the 1960s and 1970s; and, second, the ‘change of culture of the Anglo-Indian youth’, whereby the generation aged under 30 ‘has more non-Anglo-Indian friends, more often speak a local language, and feel there is no advantage in being Anglo-Indian today’.17 From initial hostility and disapproval, there is now a greater degree of acceptance of such marriages amongst both Anglo-Indians and other Indians.18 As Helen explains,

194

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

A few years ago we wouldn’t have dreamt of [marrying other Indians], certainly our parents wouldn’t have allowed us to marry [other Indians]. The Anglo-Indians sort of looked down on the Indians. . . . There was no need for that, but they did. And [to] marry an Indian, you know, it was something terrible, so parents certainly wouldn’t have allowed it, but now parents also are realizing [that] the security and the safety of the daughter is better, so they’re not that much against it.

As Helen suggests, patterns of intermarriage are gendered, with more Anglo-Indian women than men marrying Indians from other communities. Such gendered patterns exist for two main reasons. First, a number of interviewees explained that intermarriage had increased as the AngloIndian community became increasingly dispersed in cities such as Calcutta, Lucknow and Bangalore. Continuing the long tradition of social mixing between women and men, Margaret told me that we normally marry within the locality we are staying. . . . Now they settle down with other communities also, the Hindu community, the Muslim community or whatever. So naturally these boys and girls grow up together, and our girls are, I think, in a sense they are quite fast or they are quite sociable. They tend to make friends with the boys in the locality. So when they grow up they don’t hesitate to get married to those same boys that they played with or went to school with.

Second, many interviewees told me that Anglo-Indian women have been more successful in education and employment than their male counterparts, and, as a result, they marry men from other Indian communities ‘who were of their calibre, their standing educationally and job-wise’ (Margaret). Helen asks women who have married men from other Indian communities why they did so, and told me that ‘they feel that, you know, our Anglo-Indian boys, they don’t do much, and they can’t get somebody who’s financially secure’. In similar terms, Trevor explains that they began marrying out of the community into respectable Indian homes, as far as possible, because they found that the girls particularly got a better deal in a lot of ways. If they married Anglo-Indians, they would . . . marry a musician maybe or someone who’d be down-and-out a few years later. And rather than that, marry them into some kind of family where they’ll at least be better off for the rest of their lives.

For Brian, who has arranged marriages for members of his community in Calcutta since 1990, ‘our boys are not up to that standard. They don’t have good jobs, they can’t flash money, they are themselves struggling to try and make something.’ Both in the commercial world of work and for

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

195

Anglo-Indians living in slums such as Tiljallah, Anglo-Indian men are regarded as less successful than their female counterparts and men from other Indian communities. As Brian continues, he tries to include women from Tiljallah in his marriage bureau, but faces objections from their parents: ‘Our Anglo-Indian boys don’t earn enough. Where is a good Anglo-Indian boy?’ And although I try to convince and persuade them, it never works. Whereas what works is the reality they are living with. There’s the butcher’s son, who had come with a wallet full of three-rupee notes, and he has a motorbike, or that fellow’s son has a car, you know, that picks her up from that bhustee area and takes her out, brings her back in the night and leaves her there. . . . So flashing money there works with the parent, or giving gifts to the parents, the parents will let their daughter go out with anyone.

Although acknowledging that intermarriage is accepted to a far greater extent than a generation ago, many Anglo-Indians voice concerns about intermarriage that centre on questions of home and identity, and the ability to maintain a distinctive Anglo-Indian culture. The ability to foster and to maintain a distinctive Anglo-Indian identity and culture is largely seen to depend on Anglo-Indian mothers and their domestic influence. As Brian puts it, ‘If we lose our girls we lose our community.’ He continues that the importance of Anglo-Indians marrying within rather than beyond the community is bound up with maintaining the distinctiveness of AngloIndian home and family life: ‘the same way of thinking, the same way of upbringing, the same style of living. You see an Anglo-Indian home is very semi-British. It’s not totally Indian, it’s Anglo-Indian. It’s something like a Hobson–Jobson,19 you know, an Anglo-Indian word . . . our lifestyle is so different.’ For him, the distinctive qualities of an Anglo-Indian upbringing are embodied by the mother: Having an Anglo-Indian woman as a mother as you were growing up as a child, it’s a unique experience, it’s a unique experience. Because she has the wealth of all that learning behind her, you know, that sort of instinctive knowledge . . . reading and writing and poetry and songs . . . the love of music, and it’s such a different culture altogether.

There are different interpretations as to the ability of Anglo-Indian women to raise their children as Anglo-Indian from within marriages to men from other communities. A number of interviewees told me that Anglo-Indian women continued to be the dominant influence on lifestyle and raising children within the home after marrying out. For Margaret,

196

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

If an Indian boy gets a promising young Anglo-Indian girl, he is very lucky. Why? Because he maintains his Indianness as an Indian male. At the same time, his wife is going to bring up the kids in a very westernized and modern way, so that family has the better of both worlds. Very often these Indian boys go in for good Anglo-Indian girls because they want to better their community.

For other interviewees, the recognition that many other Indian homes are becoming increasingly westernized has made it possible for Anglo-Indians to maintain their distinctive identity after marrying out of the community. Susannah and her husband Roger told me that their children had both married Punjabis, but, as Roger put it, ‘they are so westernized. They are more westernized than we are.’ Susannah continued, ‘They have been brought up [amongst] the tea planters. So they have worked with the British tea planters. So they maintain a very good house, and their lifestyle is [more western] . . . you know, with all the proper sense of cutlery and crockery and things.’ Similarly, Norman told me that one of his sons had married a high-caste Bengali who maintains her religion, ‘but she’s very western in her ways’. Because the constitutional definition of what it means to be an AngloIndian rests on paternal European ancestry, the children of Anglo-Indian women who marry other Indian men are not officially seen as AngloIndian, and are usually unable to receive financial support from various charities and schools. Patricia contrasted the children raised by a Bengali mother who are identified as Anglo-Indian because of their paternal descent, and the children raised by an Anglo-Indian mother who cannot be identified as Anglo-Indian because of intermarriage: Say there’s an Anglo-Indian gentleman, say his name is Mr Smith, but he marries a Miss Das. Ok. Now Miss Das is from a Bengali background, so what happens? She brings up her children in a Bengali culture, the food they eat, the way they eat, the way they dress, and at home she obviously speaks Bengali to them because that after all is her mother tongue. They go to an English medium school, but they are very good at speaking Bengali and Hindi, they’re bilingual and everything like that. But if you look at those children, especially the way they dress and all that, you would not say that child was an Anglo-Indian child, because the mother, naturally, she dresses the child according to her background. . . . Now, an Anglo-Indian girl, she marries say a Mr Das. Ok. He goes to work and he’s not bothered with what’s going on in the house. She’s the one who teaches the children how to eat with their spoon and fork, how to sit at table, and she dresses them Western-style, she speaks to them in English. . . . So that child might have the name of Das but that child is very Anglo-Indian.

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

197

In other words, the children of Anglo-Indian Mrs Das would be brought up as culturally more Anglo-Indian than the children of Bengali Mrs Smith, although they would not be legally recognized as Anglo-Indian. An AngloIndian in Bangalore told me that she was engaged to a man ‘who’s halfAnglo-Indian and half-Indian . . . he’s been brought up the Anglo-Indian way even though his father is Indian . . . he may have an Indian name but he’s been brought up that way’. Surnames continue to be seen as key markers of an Anglo-Indian identity, reflecting European paternal ancestry and making it both difficult and undesireable to challenge the constitutional definition of who counts as an Anglo-Indian. Even if it was legally straightforward to do so, an Anglo-Indian man in Calcutta told me that to change the gendered definition of what it means to be an Anglo-Indian would result in ‘confusion in trying to keep our place in history’. Agreeing that a European surname is an important part of being an Anglo-Indian, a community leader in Bangalore said, You can call it gender discrimination, whatever you like, but that’s it. I think it’s a good thing also, because the Anglo-Indian names are very clearly understood. They’re Portuguese names or Spanish or French, Dutch, English. Now if we had Indian names coming in, it would be very difficult to distinguish the Anglo-Indian from the non-Anglo-Indian, and the community’s little, what should I say, identity will be lost.

Similarly, Margaret agrees that, even though intermarriage between Anglo-Indian women and men from other Indian communities is increasing, and the Anglo-Indian community is consequently decreasing, the constitutional definition should remain the same: ‘I don’t think it should change. Because if it changes, what will happen? Then everybody becomes an Anglo-Indian. So where do you draw the line then when it comes to a community?’ In practice, however, some Anglo-Indian women who have had children with men from other Indian communities give their children European surnames. As Patricia told me, Many come to us. We know that their fathers are Muslims or Hindus, but the mother, because sometimes they marry, sometimes they don’t marry, if you live in the slums . . . but to safeguard her children and to get them baptized – because unless you get a baptism certificate, you can’t go into a Christian school – . . . she gives her maiden name, which is an Anglo-Indian name, and she does bring up those children as best as she can as Anglo-Indian, but we know for a fact that the father was never an Anglo-Indian.

Although many interviewees told me that Anglo-Indian women can maintain their cultural identity after marrying into another Indian

198

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

community, others told me that they lose their cultural identity and cannot raise their children as Anglo-Indian. Echoing embodied memories of an imperial forefather and his domestic influence, Indian men from other communities are seen to be dominant both within and beyond the home after marriage. In the words of Barbara and Trevor, I feel very sad, because invariably the girl has to give way. For instance, if she marries a Muslim, she has to become a Muslim, the children are Muslims. She loses her identity. Whereas if an Anglo-Indian man marries an Indian woman, again the woman loses her identity. (Barbara) As soon as an Anglo-Indian girl has married into a non-Anglo-Indian family, she’ll have to Indianize herself . . . of all those who have married, I can’t think of any one of them who had been able to maintain her status as an AngloIndian. She has to forget it. (Trevor)

For Patricia, the most difficult challenges facing women who marry men from other communities relate to living within a joint family and in a non-Christian household: When you marry a non-Christian in India, you marry into a joint family, all joint families, so you’ve got to live with mothers-in-law, fathers-in-law, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law. And if you are not used to the food, their customs (they have very respectful customs). . . . But if you’re not used to [them], it takes a long time for you to adjust. It’s bad enough you’re adjusting to a husband, but when you have to adjust to your mother-in-law and your father-in-law, there are a lot of problems, and what happens is, you have mother-in-law trouble.

According to Patricia, such ‘mother-in-law trouble’ usually revolves around religion, as an Anglo-Indian daughter-in-law often finds it difficult to attend church once they have married into a non-Christian family: Then they want you to join in the puja [Hindu religious ritual] they have in the house, you know. Frictions start, and the husband says ‘Why can’t you do this and why can’t you . . . ’ with the result, marriage breaks up. If the marriage doesn’t break up, then the girl has to go the boy’s way. And what does that mean? It means her whole identity is submerged. And it’s sad because when the children grow up they grow up with no religion. The mother cannot teach the children her religion because they’re not allowed to practise it. . . . So the child grows up with no religion, so therefore they have no moral values, they don’t know anything, they haven’t been taught. It’s a difficult situation.

Also addressing the difficulties faced by marrying into ‘a non-Christian, non-Anglo-Indian household,’ Simon listed the three main consequences

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

199

of intermarriage, particularly by women: ‘One, a total surrender of identity. Two, a gradual diminishing of culture. And three, all tradition lost and finished. So where’s the space and where’s the culture, where’s the identity?’ Trevor and his wife Emma told me that they hope that their two sons would marry Anglo-Indian women so that their lifestyle, culture and identity could be maintained within the home: If I want [one of my sons] to marry an Anglo-Indian girl, personally speaking it wouldn’t be from the Anglo-Indian point of view, like, ‘I want you to marry an Anglo-Indian girl because you’re an Anglo-Indian.’ And he must, you know, keep the Anglo-Indians’ lineage. . . . It would be more [to do with the lifestyle], yes, you’ll probably get a girl who’ll fit in. I’ve got two sons, I’ve always wanted a daughter, and maybe if we get a daughter-in-law we’ll be able to have some sort of the enjoyment that a daughter brings into a family. (Trevor) I would like my children to marry an Anglo-Indian because, well if they got married into an Indian family, their cultures are totally different, and there would be a problem there. So we have seen that among our friends also who have got married, it doesn’t always click. So the mixed marriages bring a lot of problems. . . . It’s not going to be easy because there are hardly any AngloIndians left. (Emma)

In contrast, an Anglo-Indian in Whitefield whose son married a woman from a small Indian community told me that his daughter-in-law’s father was more concerned than he was about their marriage: [He said] ‘We mustn’t dilute the blood and so forth.’ That happens all the time. Except that as far as the Anglo-Indian is concerned, it has happened already. They were there because it happened. . . . if you’re talking about keeping the bloodline pure, what are your credentials, your own credentials? That is what made me and my father and our family conscious of the absurdity of any kind of barrier like this between Anglo-Indians and somebody else.

Like this interviewee, many Anglo-Indians welcome the change in attitudes towards intermarriage, which reflect a broader decline of prejudice against Indians from other communities. For example, David told me that in earlier generations, ‘you became an outcast if you married out of the community, it was quite horrible’, even though Anglo-Indians are themselves descended from a relationship between a European man and an Indian woman. In his terms, this attitude reflected a wider prejudice whereby ‘I reject this part of myself and I only accept this part of myself.’ Another teacher in Lucknow welcomed increasing rates of intermarriage as they would result in further integration between Anglo-Indians and other

200

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

Indians. But, in contrast, other Anglo-Indians are concerned that the increasing number of intermarriages, particularly between Anglo-Indian women and men from other Indian communities, would result in the decline and ultimate disappearance of the community. As Brian told me, Another generation and they will not know what an Anglo-Indian is . . . AngloIndians may be non-entities, an extinct race. And before that happens we have to try and do something to rejuvenate the pride of the community. . . . I don’t want assimilation. . . . Assimilation is going on all over the world, but right here where we are only few in numbers, a microscopic community, someone has to save the race.

The very existence of arranged marriages for Anglo-Indians reverses one of the key tenets of an Anglo-Indian modernity, and a distinctive community identity, which was embodied by women. Alongside the marriage bureau in Calcutta, which has arranged marriages for up to thirty couples since it was founded in 1990, other interviewees told me about more informal introductions within the community, both domiciled in India and across the wider diaspora. For example, Brian told me that ‘I have found that many of our community who go abroad cannot really adjust, you see, with a girl or a boy who’s abroad, because their way of thinking, their attitudes, you know, it’s all so different. I mean it’s not Anglo-Indian.’ Informal introductions are important, particularly for Anglo-Indian men seeking wives from within the community, as Claire and Elizabeth explain: Claire: I’ve noticed a lot of Anglo-Indian boys who are coming down to India to get married to Anglo-Indian girls. . . . Elizabeth: Two of our friends also, two brothers, they migrated to Australia . . . they came here, and it was arranged, they met Anglo-Indian girls. They tend to get scared of the foreigners, people that may not be very family-oriented. . . . when somebody comes from Australia looking for an Anglo-Indian girl, they would say ok, if you can meet them, they get friendly, love grows later. I don’t say no. It happens here. . . . They have a long engagement, they get to know somebody. . . . Earlier it used to be love and things like that, but now in recent years there are quite a few arranged [marriages] Claire: Because the community was closer . . . you had a . . . better chance of meeting people and a better chance of getting together also. Now we’re scattered.

Conclusions Most Anglo-Indians remained domiciled after Independence, whether by choice or by necessity. Although the ‘exodus’ of Anglo-Indians to Britain in

A T H O ME IN I N DE P E N D EN T I N D I A

201

the late 1940s and 1950s was profoundly unsettling for those who remained, life in India arguably continued to be more similar than different until the 1960s. In that decade, the end of job reservations for men, the declaration of Hindi as the national language of India, and political unrest made many Anglo-Indians feel out of place. From the mid-1960s, an increasing number of Anglo-Indians left the subcontinent, but now more often travelled to Australia rather than to Britain. For many AngloIndians who remained domiciled in India, a dual identification with Britain as fatherland and India as motherland has come to be recast as a dual identification as Anglo-Indian by community and Indian by nationality. Current debates about the status and existence of the community are embodied by Anglo-Indian women, and revolve around their marriages to men from other Indian communities and their ability to raise their children as Anglo-Indian. Drawing on interviews with the pre-Independence ‘generation of transition’ and the post-Independence ‘generation of integration’, I explored the ways in which three key markers of difference that were embodied by women before 1947 have been recast since then. Anglo-Indian women are still seen as central for the future and status of the community, but younger women now often wear Indian dress and marry Indians from other communities, reversing some of the embodied differences that used to identify the community as more western than other Indians. The community that has remained domiciled in India after Independence tends not to have fared so well as those who migrated. This disparity between the domiciled and diasporic communities was highlighted by the demonstrations that greeted the ‘homecoming’ of Anglo-Indian communities at the 1998 Bangalore reunion. However, there is a support network catering to the domiciled Anglo-Indian community. Alongside the AllIndia Anglo-Indian Association, there are also a number of other national and local organizations in India today that concentrate on its educational and social welfare needs. As well as transnational family links across the wider Anglo-Indian diaspora, there are important philanthropic links, as shown by the fundraising activities of organizations such as the Calcutta Tiljallah Relief Fund (CTR), which is run by Blair Williams and is based in the United States, with branches in the UK, Australia and Canada. CTR provides monthly pensions for almost 250 poor, elderly Anglo-Indians in Calcutta, Madras and Bangalore, and also sponsors the education of Anglo-Indian children, including 35 girls who are studying at Loreto Entally.20 Residential homes for elderly Anglo-Indians include the Tollygunge Homes and the Lawrence D’Souza Homes in Calcutta and the Dorothy Crosthwaite Homes in Lucknow.21 More recently, the Calcutta Anglo-Indian Service Society opened a night shelter in central Calcutta for homeless Anglo-Indians in 2001, as well as a Self-Employment

202

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

Centre. Whereas the Anglo-Indian community is far less visible in central Calcutta and Lucknow than before the ‘exodus’ and before the dispersal of the community to outer parts of both cities, these institutional homes provide new sites of Anglo-Indian domesticity in India today.

Chapter Eight

Domicile and Diaspora: Conclusions

We began to feel a pride again in our community. For a long time we felt battered, with everybody leaving. Those who were left behind felt lost, [with] no identity, but now we feel we have an identity. We have an important part to play, we are proud of our background, nothing to be ashamed of, we’ve contributed to India a great deal . . . so we’re lifting our heads again, proud of the community. (Patricia)

Many Anglo-Indians, both domiciled in India, like Patricia, and resident across a wider diaspora, have shared in a recently revitalized interest and pride in their community and its identity, culture and history. This interest in what it means to be an Anglo-Indian, and pride in acknowledging this identity, has manifested itself in a variety of ways: school and international reunions and community events marking World Anglo-Indian Day; a wide range of societies and websites for Anglo-Indians; fundraising and welfare work to help poor Anglo-Indians in the subcontinent; and a growing number of publications including academic studies, life stories and two electronic journals.1 In each case, personal and collective memories of life in India are mobilized through networks that connect Anglo-Indians who remained in India and those who migrated after Independence. This book has explored the intersections of home and identity for AngloIndians in the fifty years before and after Independence, both domiciled in India and resident in Britain and Australia. By tracing the spatial politics of home over domestic, national and diasporic scales, and their material and imaginative entanglements across such scales, I have explored the ways in which Anglo-Indian women have felt both at home and not at home whilst domiciled in India and resident in a decolonized diaspora. Both before and after Independence, and in India, Britain and Australia, Anglo-Indian women have embodied and domesticated personal and collective memories

204

DO M I C I L E A N D DI A S P OR A : CO N C LU S I O N S

and identities of mixed descent. Ideas about home, identity and mixed descent have been mobilized in political debates about the future and status of the community, and have also been reproduced, and at times resisted, in everyday, domestic life. In both cases, Anglo-Indian women remain central figures in such political debates through their lives and influence within and beyond the home, particularly as wives and mothers. Unlike stereotypical and imperialist depictions of Anglo-Indians yearning for Britain as home, I have argued that the community had more complex attachments to both India and Britain before Independence. Many imagined themselves to be living in an imperial diaspora, away from Europe and specifically Britain, and scattered throughout the Indian subcontinent. Although Anglo-Indians made up a large part of the ‘country-born’, domiciled community in British India, they often saw themselves as rootless. The 1918–19 enquiry into the domiciled community in Calcutta identified Anglo-Indian homes as sites of imperial anxiety, not only because they reflected largely unattainable aspirations to a middleclass, European way of life, but also because the housing of poor Anglo-Indians was seen to represent the moral and physical degeneration widely associated with permanent domicile in India. In contrast, debates about home, identity and nationality among middle-class Anglo-Indians focused on the political status and future of the community. The leadership of Gidney and Anthony witnessed a public shift from loyalty to Britain as fatherland to India as motherland in the 1930s and 1940s. At the same time, some Anglo-Indians who felt rootless and out of place in India sought to establish an independent homeland at McCluskieganj. Colonization and settlement was promoted not only by appealing to a distinctively British pastoral idyll and to embodied memories of an imperial forefather, but also by seeking to claim a stake in British India by creating a mooluk for the community. The spatial politics of home and identity for Anglo-Indians were embodied in contested ways by women in their lives within and beyond the home. The anxieties articulated about housing and about permanent domicile in India in the 1918–19 enquiry revolved, in part, around anxieties about feminine propriety and domestic respectability by contrasting the assumed character of British and Anglo-Indian women. In contrast, AngloIndian women were seen, and saw themselves, as embodying a distinctively western modernity in debates about the future and status of the community. This modernity spanned their dress, their paid employment beyond the home, and their ability to mix socially with men, to choose whom to marry, and to live in a nuclear rather than a joint family after marriage. Two of these embodied differences have since been reversed in independent India, in that younger Anglo-Indian women now increasingly wear Indian dress and marry men from other Indian communities.

D O MI CI L E AN D D I A S P O R A : C O N CL U S I O N S

205

Anglo-Indian women featured prominently in brochures and in the Colonization Observer, which encouraged Anglo-Indians to buy shares in the Colonization Society of India and to settle at McCluskieganj. Although the collective memory of an imperial forefather was mobilized to encourage settlement at McCluskieganj, the collective memory of an Indian maternal ancestor was usually erased and refigured as Mother India and as the natural environment, and by describing Anglo-Indian women as pioneers and settlers within a European, and specifically British, tradition of colonization. Such depictions of Anglo-Indian women, and their political mobilization in debates about the uncertain future of the community, served to distance them not only from other Indian women but also from a collective memory of an Indian maternal ancestor. Anglo-Indian women came to embody the western modernity of their community before Independence because of their assumed equality and emancipation. And yet this status also caused anxiety by potentially transgressing the limits of acceptable feminine behaviour and by evoking the spectre of interracial sex and illegitimacy that haunted the community. Many commentators stressed the political importance of women, particularly through their domestic influence, which extended far beyond the household. Such commentators did so not only to domesticate a new national identity that was loyal to India as motherland, but also to domesticate Anglo-Indian women, particularly during and after the Second World War. Both before and since Independence, and on both domestic and national scales, the home has been a politicized and contested site for claiming and articulating an Anglo-Indian identity, culture and sense of place and belonging. For many Anglo-Indians who remained domiciled in India after Independence, a dual identification with Britain as fatherland and India as motherland has come to be recast as a dual identification as AngloIndian by community and Indian by nationality. Through their recognition of India as a nation that comprises many diverse communities rather than a single homogeneous identity, many Anglo-Indians see their community identity as a central part of claiming their Indian nationality. However, the ability to foster a distinctive Anglo-Indian identity faces two main challenges in India today: first, the rise of Hindu nationalism and the increased vulnerability of minority communities; and, second, the unprecedented rate of intermarriage between Anglo-Indian women and men from other Indian communities. As well as investigating the spatial politics of home for Anglo-Indian women in India in the fifty years before and after Independence, this book has also focused on their migration to Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s and to Australia, particularly in the late 1960s and 1970s. Against the public advice of leaders such as Frank Anthony, at least 50,000

206

DO M I C I L E A N D DI A S P OR A : CO N C LU S I O N S

Anglo-Indians migrated between 1947 and 1970 because they feared discrimination, unemployment and fewer opportunities for their children in independent India. The two main waves of migration reflect an AngloIndian diaspora bound by British imperial history, spanning resettlement not only in the former heart of empire but also in a former British settler colony. Both Britain and Australia occupied a central part of an Anglo-Indian imperial imagination. Britain was imagined as the fatherland, and many Anglo-Indians thought of it as home. The colonization and settlement of Australia and other British settler colonies were frequently invoked to encourage Anglo-Indians to move to McCluskieganj. Moreover, a number of Anglo-Indians wrote to the Australian government from the 1930s to the 1950s suggesting that members of the community would be ideal settlers for the Australian-governed territory of Papua and New Guinea. Although Britain and Australia occupied a central place in an AngloIndian imperial imagination, migration to both places was difficult in practice. Whilst the collective memory of a European, and usually British, forefather was important in shaping Anglo-Indian domestic life and in promoting colonization and settlement at McCluskieganj, it was often difficult to prove his origins to meet the requirements of the British Nationality Act of 1948. The White Australia Policy, which existed in various forms from 1901 to the mid-1960s, made it even harder for Anglo-Indians to resettle in Australia. Moreover, Anglo-Indians occupied a complex position within a wider ‘community of Britishness’ because of their mixed descent, and they were also positioned in materially very different ways to the white British migrants who traveled to Australia on assisted passages. In both the Australian and British cases, I explored the implications of such legislation for the migration of a distinct community of mixed descent and traced the racialized and gendered geographies of resettlement. Unlike the British Nationality Act, the White Australia Policy was concerned with European rather than specifically British descent, and did not specify paternal or maternal ancestry. But the White Australia Policy, unlike the British Nationality Act, focused on appearance as well as genealogy, and represented the most restrictive form of the ‘colour bar’ that existed to varying degrees across ‘the British world’. The unanticipated arrival of more than 700 Anglo-Indians on board HMAS Manoora at Fremantle on the date of Indian Independence resulted in even more rigid restrictions. These restrictions finally began to be lifted in the 1960s, in the same decade that many more Anglo-Indians sought to leave India because of the changing domestic situation. At a time when migration to Britain was becoming increasingly difficult, Australia became the main destination for those who not only wanted, but also could afford, to migrate. Although Anglo-Indians believed that they would be settling in a more familiar culture and lifestyle in Britain and Australia than in independent

D O MI CI L E AN D D I A S P O R A : C O N CL U S I O N S

207

India, their experiences of migration were often profoundly unsettling. Domestic life was unfamiliar in many ways. The domestic challenges of resettlement, particularly at a time of rationing and economic hardship in post-war Britain, were felt most acutely by women, who, having often formerly employed several Indian servants, now had to learn how to shop, cook and clean for the first time. Remembering how they met such challenges provides an important narrative of survival and success for Anglo-Indian women in Britain today. In both Britain and Australia, Anglo-Indians were seen by British and Australian residents as uncannily familiar and unfamiliar. Whilst Anglo-Indians spoke English as their mother tongue, they did so with a distinctive accent. Whilst they were Christian and wore western dress, they were part of a community of mixed descent and their origins were often hard to place. Some AngloIndians denied their roots in the subcontinent, but many others acknowledged their identity for the first time and have learnt more about the culture and history of India from a distance than would have been possible at home or at school in British India. Many Anglo-Indians who left India after Independence have returned to visit. Whilst many revisit their homes and schools, many others travel to different places for the first time, particularly to Agra to visit the Taj Mahal. Other Anglo-Indians in Britain and Australia have chosen never to return, preferring to keep their memories of life in India intact. Whilst I met a number of Anglo-Indians in India who had visited their families and friends in the wider diaspora, many cannot afford to do so and some have found it difficult to be granted a visa as it was feared that they would attempt to stay permanently. Although this book has focused on one, small community, it has been informed by, and seeks to inform, research that extends far beyond this particular focus. My research is part of a much wider attempt to study geographies of home in relation to imperialism, nationalism, decolonization, migration and multiculturalism, and to chart the critical interplay of home and identity. Throughout the book, I have traced imaginative geographies and lived experiences of home in relation to spatial politics. This term refers to the home as a contested site that is shaped by, and situated in relation to, different axes of power that are mobilized and resisted across a range of scales. I have explored the spatial politics of home in a range of forms and contexts, on multiple and co-existing scales, and over material and imaginative terrains. Crucially, I have argued that material and imaginative geographies of home are intimately bound together, and are politically significant in relation to the internal intimacies of home and to their connections with the wider world. British concerns about the material conditions of Anglo-Indian housing in imperial Calcutta, for example, were inseparably bound up with racialized, gendered and sexualized ideas about morality, privacy and the

208

DO M I C I L E A N D DI A S P OR A : CO N C LU S I O N S

perceived risks of degeneracy resulting from permanent domicile in India. Through their everyday, domestic life, Anglo-Indians distinguished themselves from other Indian communities through, for example, their food and eating practices, the material cultures of home, the roles of women, and the structure of the family and household. The political shift from loyalty to Britain as fatherland to India as motherland in the years before Independence was both reproduced but also resisted on a domestic scale, as the social relations and material cultures of home continued to reflect a masculine imperial heritage that was characterized by a western, middle-class modernity. Such material geographies were intimately bound up with imaginative geographies of feeling at home and not at home. The spatial politics of home were, and are, embodied in contested ways by Anglo-Indian women, particularly as wives and mothers. But the spatial politics of home for Anglo-Indians were, and are, also shaped by the collective memory of an imperial forefather, and by the lived experiences of Anglo-Indian men. There is considerable scope for further research on geographies of home, domesticity and masculinity both within and far beyond the Anglo-Indian community. Throughout the book, I have explored the ways in which the home is an important site of personal and collective memory and forgetting. Rather than dismiss nostalgia generally, or Raj nostalgia more specifically, I have argued for a more critical engagement with nostalgia as the desire for home. I have interpreted the homing desire for Anglo-Indians in relation to a productive nostalgia that is not only embodied and enacted in practice rather than solely in narrative or imagination, but is also oriented towards the present and future as well as the past. Rather than view the home in solely temporal terms as a site of origin, authenticity and an unattainable past, I have considered the multiple and transnational spaces of home for Anglo-Indians across imperial and decolonized diasporas. A critical engagement with memory, forgetting and nostalgia should be central concerns of a postcolonial geography. Postcolonial geographical work has become increasingly concerned with the present as well as the past, encompassing the study of decolonization, independence, migration, diaspora and ‘the colonial present’2 in addition to the analysis of colonial discourse through various forms of colonial representation. Work in this field that engages with the present as well as the past has the potential to intervene in current debates about geopolitics, migration, citizenship, ‘race’ and nationality,3 and raises methodological as well as conceptual challenges as, for example, interviews and ethnographic research are conducted and interrogated alongside texts, images and archives. Some of the main challenges that I have faced in writing this book have been its historical, contemporary and transnational scope, and my attempt to interweave personal with more public accounts. Rather than draw on archival sources

D O MI CI L E AN D D I A S P O R A : C O N CL U S I O N S

209

in some chapters and on interviews in others,4 I have tried to write a more intertextual account that illuminates public debates with personal reflections, and situates personal memories and experiences in relation to similar, shared and sometimes collective memories and experiences. In contrast to the wide currency of hybridity in postcolonial theorizing, this book has focused on the materialities of mixed descent in more substantive than abstract terms. The material histories and geographies of mixed descent remain largely absent from postcolonial and diaspora studies, whilst ideas about hybrid cultures and identities are often critiqued within the growing field of ‘mixed race’ studies. In this book I have attempted to re-materialize ideas about hybridity through my focus on a particular community of mixed descent. One theme that has emerged throughout the book has been the significance of duality, particularly in relation to ideas about Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and contemporary identifications as Indian by nationality and Anglo-Indian by community. I have explored the complex attachments of Anglo-Indians to India, Britain and Australia as home, and have traced the material implications of mixed descent for domicile, migration and resettlement. Ideas about hybridity should be situated and analysed in context, and should engage directly not only with the ‘messiness of . . . race politics’,5 but also with the complex interplay of such politics with ideas about identity, culture and nationality. Home and identity have been important themes in work on, and by, people of mixed descent. Such work critiques metaphorical ideas not only about hybridity, but also about home. Like Mahtani and Olumide,6 I have challenged stereotypically negative portrayals of people of mixed descent as out of place or with no place to call home. But, unlike these authors, I have focused on the materialities and social relations of everyday domestic life and their wider political significance for a particular community of mixed descent. Although I describe Anglo-Indians as a distinct community of mixed descent, this community, like all others, is differentiated rather than homogeneous, with its own inclusions, exclusions and inequalities. I have concentrated on the gendered and racialized spaces of domicile and diaspora, but I have also explored the ways in which these spaces were, and are, inflected by class and age. The spatial politics of home for AngloIndians both before and after Independence have been shaped by an ideal of the nuclear family and the assumed heterosexuality that it represents. I have paid particular attention to discourses about appropriate femininity, the roles of women as wives and mothers, the ways in which family structure distinguished Anglo-Indians from other Indians, and the changing patterns of marriage within the community. There is clearly scope for further research on mixed descent, sexuality and masculinity. Moreover, there is also scope for further comparative research, both between Anglo-Indians

210

DO M I C I L E A N D DI A S P OR A : CO N C LU S I O N S

and other communities of mixed descent, and between Anglo-Indians and other small minorities in India, such as the Parsi community. The recent and unprecedented interest in what it means to be AngloIndian exists alongside – and is no doubt charged in part by – the recognition that a distinctive community identity might soon disappear. In India, rates of intermarriage, particularly between Anglo-Indian women and men from other Indian communities, have significantly increased in recent years. For Anglo-Indians in the wider diaspora, the experiences and memories of life in India for those who migrated are not directly shared by their children.7 But such experiences and memories are finding new forms of expression, as shown by the proliferation of publications and websites, and by Bill Jones’ song ‘Panchpuran.’ As I discussed in Chapter 1, Bill – Belinda’s – mother Felicity is the Anglo-Indian girl on the cover of this book. Felicity left the subcontinent in 1951, three years after the photograph was taken, and grew up in Britain as her family’s ‘foreign child’, with few memories of life in India. But her older sister Grace remembers life in India vividly and fondly, and the song was inspired by her memories. Domicile and diaspora are intimately intertwined through the complex and entangled ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ of home, identity, memory and belonging. The spatial politics of home for Anglo-Indian women like Felicity and Grace are clearly rooted, but not bounded, in place.

Appendix 1

Archival and Other Documentary Sources

INDIA

New Delhi The Anglo-Indian Review (latterly The Review). Monthly journal of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association, 1928 to present, published in Calcutta 1928 to 1941 and in New Delhi 1941 to present. Held in the archives of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association, New Delhi.

Calcutta Anglo-Indian: The Newsletter. Published monthly in Calcutta since 1990 and edited by Melvyn Brown. P.T. Nair collection of newspaper articles about Anglo-Indians in Calcutta from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, courtesy of P.T. Nair, Calcutta.

McCluskieganj The Colonization Observer Monthly journal of the Colonization Society of India, published from 1933 in Calcutta. Held in the private archive of Alfred de Rozario, McCluskieganj. Two brochures produced by the CSI: ‘The dawn of a new era’ (1931; reprinted in CO, July 1934, pp. 15-31); and ‘McCluskiegunge: on the Ranchi Plateau’ (1935). Held in the private archive of Alfred de Rozario, McCluskieganj. St Andrew’s Hostel Prospectus, PO McCluskieganj, Dist. Ranchi 829208. Highland Guest House Brochure, PO McCluskieganj, Dist. Ranchi 829208.

212

APPEND IX 1

BRITAIN

Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London Birkenhead Collection, Mss Eur D703/42: Proceedings at a Deputation from the Anglo-Indian Community to the Secretary of State for India, 30 July 1925. Reading Collection, Mss Eur E238/55A (III), pp. 619–632. Memorandum submitted to the Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform by Lt. Col. Sir Henry Gidney. Simon Collection, Mss Eur F77/106: Memorandum submitted on behalf of the Anglo-Indian and Domiciled European Community of India for the consideration of the Chairman and Members of the Indian Statutory Commission, from Lt. Col. Sir Henry Gidney, 25 June 1928; letter from Hon. Mr H.G. Haig, Secretary to the Government of India, to Gidney, 11 September 1928. Tollinton Papers, Mss. Eur D1197. P/W 588: Memorandum relative to the Deputation of the Anglo-Indian and Domiciled Community of India and Burma to the Rt. Hon. The Secretary of State for India, 30 July 1925. Anglo-Indian Journal Monthly journal of the Eurasian and Anglo-Indian Association of Western India, published in Bombay, 1897–1901.

National Archives, London DO 35/3541

Dominions Office and Commonwealth Relations Office: original correspondence. British Nationality and status of aliens, British Nationality Act 1948 and its effect on Europeans naturalized in India and Pakistan, 1951–2.

DO 35/6163

Dominions Office and Commonwealth Relations Office: original correspondence. Plight of Anglo-Indians in Pakistan and India. Nationality and General Department, General 1954–8.

DO 35/6437

Dominions Office and Commonwealth Relations Office: original correspondence. Issue of passports to British subjects without UK citizenship. Nationality and General Department: Nationality 1952–5.

DO 142/396

Commonwealth Relations Office: India: Registered Files. British Nationality Act, Political Department, 1948–50.

DO 196/76

Commonwealth Relations Office and Commonwealth Office: South Asia Department: Registered Files (SEA Series). Anglo-Indians; sub series India 1960.

APPENDI X 1

FO 372/7104

213

Foreign Office: Treaty Department and successors. General correspondence from 1906. Report on the working of the British Nationality Act, 1948, in India and Pakistan: amendments of British Nationality regulations.

Parliamentary Papers Four Reports from the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (India), 1857–9. Official Reports: Parliamentary Debates: Lords, 1957–8, Volume 206; 5 November–19 December.

The Society of Genealogists, London Two boxes of research correspondence comprising 400 cases and notes relating to work in 1949 and 1950 for Anglo-Indians seeking to prove their nationality for the purposes of the British Nationality Act, 1948.

Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge British women in India: replies to questionnaires compiled by Mrs Mary Thatcher: E. Battye, A. Baylis and B. Loch.

AUSTRALIA

National Archives of Australia, ACT NAA: A 436/1, 1949/5/18

India – Emigration of British Subjects to Australia ship Manoora (2 cm folios)

NAA: A 436/1, 1949/5/6773

India – Emigration of British Subjects to Australia – Policy (2 cm folios)

NAA: A 446/158, 1970/95021

Admission of Persons of Mixed Descent (Race) – Part 1 (3 cm)

NAA: A 446/182, 1960/66167

Admission of Anglo-Indians Part 1

NAA: A 518/1, CH822/1

Immigration – Policy – Admission of Eurasians in to the Territory (0.25 cm)

NAA: A 518/1, T822/1

New Guinea - Admission of Anglo-Indians

NAA: A 1068/7, IC47/3/190

Landing Permits: British Migrants from India

NAA: A 1068/7, IC47/31/29

Immigration – Anglo-Indian Migration (14 pages)

214

APPEND IX 1

NAA: A 1068/7, IC47/46/1

India – Evacuation of British Europeans from India. HMAS MANOORA

NAA: A 1068/7, M47/9/2/5

India – Relations with Australia – Immigration (approx. 250 pages)

NAA: A 1838/1, 169/10/8/2

India – Relations with Australia – Migration of Anglo-Indians

NAA: A 5827/1, 1166190, Volume 13 /AGENDUM 406

The Policy for the Admission of Persons of Mixed-Race. DECISION 481, 1964.

Appendix 2

Interviews and Focus Groups

INTERVIEWS Ninety-two semi-structured interviews were conducted from September 1998 to August 2003 in India, Britain and Australia, with Anglo-Indian men and women in at least one of the following categories:

Officers of Anglo-Indian and school associations, and others working for the community, including: The All-India Anglo-Indian Association (AIAIA), New Delhi The Anglo-Indian Development Association, New Delhi The Anglo-Indian Guild, Bangalore The All-India Progressive Anglo-Indian Social, Cultural, Educational and Economic Welfare Association, Bangalore The Calcutta Anglo-Indian Service Society, Calcutta The East India Charitable Trust, Calcutta Two Anglo-Indian ex-MPs, West Bengal Four Anglo-Indian MLAs (Members of Legislative Assemblies) for the states of West Bengal, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar The Australian Anglo-Indian Association, Perth, Western Australia The Federation of Indian Associations of Victoria The Anglo-Indian Australasian Association, Melbourne The Old Martinians Association, Perth The Victoria and Dow Hill Association, London The South London Anglo-Indian Association

Members of Anglo-Indian associations, including: The All-India Anglo-Indian Association: New Delhi, Calcutta and McCluskieganj The Anglo-Indian Guild, Bangalore

216

APPEND IX 2

The Australian Anglo-Indian Association, Perth The Old Martinians Association, Perth The Victoria and Dow Hill Association: Perth, Sydney and London

Anglo-Indian women who attended, taught or teach at the following schools: Dow Hill School, Kurseong La Martiniere Girls’ Schools, Lucknow and Calcutta Loreto St Agnes, Lucknow Loreto Entally, Calcutta

Anglo-Indians who live, or lived, in key Anglo-Indian settlements, including: Lawrence Terrace, Maqbara and other central parts of Lucknow Central parts of Calcutta such as Park Street, Ripon Street, Elliott Road, Free School Street and Bowbazaar McCluskieganj, Bihar Whitefield, Karnataka

FOCUS GROUPS Thirteen focus groups were held with Anglo-Indian men and women from September 1998 to December 2002 with: Members of the Anglo-Indian Guild, Bangalore Committee members of the Calcutta branch of the AIAIA Members of the Calcutta branch of the AIAIA Teachers at Loreto St Agnes, Lucknow Teachers at Welland Gouldsmith School, Calcutta Committee members of the Australian Anglo-Indian Association, Perth Former Dow Hill School pupils (and Victoria and Dow Hill Association members) in Perth, Sydney and London Former Dow Hill School pupils (and VADHA members) and residents of the Kolar Gold Field, London Former La Martiniere School pupils (and Old Martinians Association members) in Perth Present residents of McCluskieganj Past residents of McCluskieganj, Perth

INTERVIEWEES Interviewees are identified by pseudonyms. To maintain confidentiality within a small and very well networked community, the details provided below are

APPENDI X 2

217

necessarily brief. Those who ‘work for the community’ are officers and active members of Anglo-Indian associations or work independently in community education and social welfare. Alan Angela Ann Barbara Brian Carol Catherine Charles Claire David Deborah Elaine Elizabeth Emma Frances Geraldine Helen Jane Joan Julia Leonard Lesley Margaret Martin Mary Norman Patricia Pauline Robert Roger Ruth Sarah Simon

migrated to Australia in 1969 and lives in Sydney. Married to Elaine nurse in Lucknow migrated to Australia in 1963 to marry her Australian fiance´. Lives in Sydney works for the community in Calcutta works for the community in Calcutta former Loreto School pupil who lives in Lucknow former Dow Hill pupil who migrated to Britain in 1957 teacher in Lucknow works for the community in Bangalore teacher in Lucknow former Dow Hill pupil who migrated to Britain in 1956 former Loreto School pupil who migrated to Australia in 1969. Married to Alan works for the community in Bangalore member of AIAIA in Ranchi. Married to Trevor grew up in McCluskieganj and lives in Calcutta. Married to Leonard former Loreto School pupil who migrated to Australia in 1974 and lives in Perth. Mother of Sarah works for the community in Calcutta former Dow Hill pupil who migrated to Britain in 1955 former Dow Hill pupil who migrated to Britain in 1947 works for the community in Bangalore teacher in Calcutta. Married to Frances former Loreto School pupil who migrated to Western Australia in 1970 works for the community in Calcutta migrated to Australia in 1973 and lives in Sydney. Married to Vivian retired teacher in Lucknow, who grew up in Lahore works for the community in Calcutta works for the community in Calcutta former Loreto School pupil who migrated to Western Australia in 1969. Married to Robert grew up in McCluskieganj in the 1950s and migrated to Western Australia in 1969. Married to Pauline lives in central Lucknow. Married to Susannah teacher in Calcutta born in Australia. Daughter of Geraldine works for the community in New Delhi

218

APPEND IX 2

Sophia Susannah Teresa Trevor Valerie Vivian

lived in McCluskieganj in the late 1940s and migrated with her husband and children to Western Australia in 1967 former Loreto pupil who lives in central Lucknow. Married to Roger former Dow Hill pupil who migrated to Britain in 1951 Member of AIAIA and teacher in Ranchi. Married to Emma works for the community in Lucknow former Loreto pupil who migrated to Australia in 1973 and lives in Sydney. Married to Martin

Notes

CHAPTER 1

DOMICILE AND DIASPORA: AN INTRODUCTION

1 An ayah cared for young children and also served as a lady’s maid, and was often the only female servant employed within a household. 2 The term ‘empire in the home’ comes from R.M. George (1994) ‘Homes in the empire, empires in the home’, Cultural Critique 15: 95–127. For more on imperial photography, see J. Schwartz and J. Ryan (eds) Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, London: I.B. Tauris; J. Ryan (1997) Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and A.L. Stoler (2002) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley: University of California Press. 3 For a fictional account of ‘staying on’, see the final novel in the Raj Quartet by Paul Scott: P. Scott (1989) Staying On, London: Pan. 4 See, for example, P. Roy (1998) Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India, New Delhi: Vistaar Publications. Roy writes that ‘Kipling is particularly revulsed by the ‘‘half-caste,’’ the Eurasian (known in postcolonial India as Anglo-Indian!) who is neither flesh nor fowl.’ Roy describes ‘the AngloIndian’ as ‘the India-raised white man’ (p. 87). Similarly sharing the assumption that the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ changed its meaning only after Independence, Rosemary Marangoly George writes that ‘After Independence, in India, the term signifies those Indians who claim some proportion of English, Portuguese or other European blood.’ R.M. George (1996) The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 215. In other contexts, the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ is used to refer to wider connections between Britain and India. See, for example, S. Lahiri (2000) Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880–1930, London: Frank Cass. 5 C. Hawes (1996) Poor Relations: the Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833, Richmond: Curzon; G.J. Moore (1986a) The Anglo-Indian Vision, Melbourne: AE Press. For a recent account of the marriage between James Kirkpatrick, the British representative at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, to Khair un-Nissa in 1801, see W. Dalrymple (2003) White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, London: Flamingo. For

220

6

7 8

9 10

11 12

NO TES T O PP. 3—5

recent studies of the Anglo-Indian community, see E. Abel (1988) The AngloIndian Community: Survival in India, Delhi: Chanakya Publications; L. Bear (1998) ‘Traveling modernity: capitalism, community and nation in the colonial governance of the Indian railways’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan; L. Caplan (2001) Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World, Oxford: Berg; G. D’Cruz (1999) ‘ ‘‘Representing’’ Anglo-Indians: a genealogical study’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne; G.J. Moore (2001) Anglo-Indians: the Best of Both Worlds, Melbourne: privately published; and C. Younger (1987) Anglo-Indians: Neglected Children of the Raj, Delhi: BR Publishing Corporation. Also see A. Blunt (2002) ‘ ‘‘Land of our mothers’’: home, identity and nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India’, History Workshop Journal 54: 49–72; A. Blunt (2003a) ‘Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain’, International Journal of Population Geography 9: 281–294; and A. Blunt (2003b) ‘Collective memory and productive nostalgia: Anglo-Indian home-making at McCluskieganj’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21: 717–738. Bert Payne has compiled an extensive bibliography of research on the Anglo-Indian community, which can be viewed at www.Anglo-Indians.com. This estimate is from the Anglo-Indian leader Frank Anthony and quoted in M. de Mellow (1970) ‘Petals on the Ganga’, The Review, September/October. Other estimates are higher. According to Roy Dean Wright in 1970, some Anglo-Indian leaders estimated that half of the community had migrated. R.D. Wright (1970) ‘Marginal man in transition: a study of the Anglo-Indian community of India’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Missouri, Columbia. Also see N.P. Gist and R.D. Wright (1973) Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially Mixed Minority in India, Leiden: Brill. Anglo-Indian Review, July 1939. Article 366 (2) of the Indian Constitution reads: ‘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 territory of parents habitually resident therein and not established there for temporary purposes only.’ Quoted in F. Anthony (1969) Britain’s Betrayal in India: the Story of the Anglo-Indian Community, Bombay: Allied Publishers, p. 5. B. Jones (2001) Panchpuran, Brick Wall Music. For more information on Bill Jones and this CD, visit www.brickwallmusic.com. See, for example, George (1996) op. cit.; J. Giles (2004) The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity, Oxford: Berg; Johnson, L. (1996) ‘As housewives we are worms: women, modernity and the home question’, Cultural Studies 10: 449–446; C. Reed (ed.) (1996) Not at Home: the Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson; Stoler (2002) op. cit. For more on the domiciled community, see R.K. Renford (1987) The NonOfficial British in India to 1920, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Including I. Bryden and J. Floyd (eds) (1999) Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior, Manchester: Manchester University Press;

N O TE S T O P P . 6—7

13 14

15

16

17

18

19 20

21

221

T. Chapman and J. Hockey (eds) (1999) Ideal Homes: Social Change and Domestic Life, London: Routledge; I. Cieraad (ed.) (1999) At Home: an Anthropology of Domestic Space, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press; R.M. George (ed.) (1998) Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, Boulder, CO: Westview Press; D. Miller (ed.) (2001) Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, Oxford: Berg. S. Marston (2000) ‘The social construction of scale’, Progress in Human Geography 24: 219–242. D. Chakrabarty (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press; and P. Chatterjee (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. J.M. Jacobs (2002) ‘The global domestic: the highrise (once again) reconsidered’, paper presented in the ESRC Transforming London seminar series, 24 October; and A. King (1984) The Bungalow: the Production of a Global Culture, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. G. Pratt (1997) ‘Stereotypes and ambivalence: the construction of domestic workers in Vancouver, British Columbia’, Gender, Place and Culture 4: 159– 178; G. Pratt (1999) ‘From registered nurse to registered nanny: discursive geographies of Filipina domestic workers in Vancouver, BC’, Economic Geography 75: 215–236; B.S.A. Yeoh and S. Huang, S. (2000) ‘ ‘‘Home’’ and ‘‘away’’: foreign domestic workers and negotiations of diasporic identity in Singapore’, Women’s Studies International Forum 23: 413–429. See G. Bachelard (1994) The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas, Boston: Beacon Press, first published in 1958, on the intimate places of home; and Stoler (2002) op. cit. for more on imperial domesticity and intimacy. D. Porteous (1976) ‘Home: the territorial core’, Geographical Review 66: 383– 390; E. Relph (1976) Place and Placenessness, London: Pion; D. Seamon (1979) A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter, London: Croom Helm; Y.-F. Tuan (1977) Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience, London: Edward Arnold. G. Rose (1993) Feminism and Geography: the Limits of Geographical Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity. G. Pratt (1998) ‘Geographic metaphors in feminist theory’, in S.H. Aiken, A. Brigham, S.A. Marston and P. Waterstone (eds) Making Worlds: Gender, Metaphor, Materiality, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, pp. 13–30, and G. Pratt (2004) Working Feminism, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. As Pratt (1998: 21) warns, ‘when geography is treated only as a metaphor, it is deadened in a way that obscures the mutual constitution of place and identities’. Including A. Blunt (1999) ‘Imperial geographies of home: British domesticity in India, 1886–1925’, Transactions 24: 421–440; A. Blunt (2000a) ‘Embodying war: British women and domestic defilement in the Indian ‘‘Mutiny’’, 1857–8’, Journal of Historical Geography 26: 403–428; R.M. George (1996) op. cit.; A. McClintock (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York: Routledge; A. Stoler (1995) Race and the Education

222

22

23

24

25

26 27 28

29

30

31

NO TES T O PP. 7—8

of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Stoler (2002) op. cit. See, for example, Chakrabarty (2000) op. cit.; Chatterjee (1993) op. cit; S. Legg (2003) ‘Gendered politics and nationalised homes: women and the anti-colonial struggle in Delhi, 1940–1947’, Gender, Place and Culture 10: 7–28; and S. Thapar-Bjo¨rkert. (1997) ‘The domestic sphere as a political site: a study of women in the Indian nationalist movement’, Women’s Studies International Forum 20: 493–504. b. hooks (1990) ‘Homeplace: a site of resistance’, in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Boston: South End Press, pp. 41–50; B. Thompson and S. Tyagi (eds) (1996) Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity, New York: Routledge; and A. Walker (1984) In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, London: The Women’s Press. Also see J. Tosh (1999) A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, London: Routledge, for more on masculinity and domesticity. Including I. Gaber and J. Aldridge (eds) (1994) In the Best Interests of the Child: Culture, Identity and Transracial Adoption, London: Free Association Books; R. Kennedy (2002) Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, New York: Pantheon Books; M. Root (2001) Love’s Revolution: Interracial Marriage, Philadelphia: Temple University Press; B. Tizard and A. Phoenix (2002) Black, White, or Mixed Race? Race and Racism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage, New York: Routledge; and R. Wright, S. Houston, M. Ellis, S. Holloway and M. Hudson (2003) ‘Crossing racial lines: geographies of mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States’, Progress in Human Geography 27: 457–474. J. Arnott (1994) ‘Speak out, for example’, in C. Camper (ed.) Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women, Toronto: Sister Vision, pp. 264–268, p. 266. J. Ifekwunigwe (1999) Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of ‘Race’, Nation and Gender, London: Routledge, pp. xiv–xv. V.H. Houston (1996) ‘Home’, in C. Wiley and F. Barnes (eds) Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home, New York: Garland Publishing, pp. 276–282, pp. 276, 278. Minelle Mahtani, for example, lists multiracial support groups in the United States that include ‘Interracial Family Support Network’, ‘Association of Multiethnic Americans’, ‘Harmony’ and ‘Prism’. M. Mahtani (2002a) ‘What’s in a name? Exploring the employment of ‘‘mixed race’’ as an identification’, Ethnicities 2: 469–490. Also see J. Spencer (1997) The New Colored People, New York: New York University Press. For more on the rise of life writings on mixed descent, see P. Spickard (2001) ‘The subject is mixed race: the boom in biracial biography’, in D. Parker and M. Song (eds) Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’, London: Pluto Press, pp. 76–98. For other examples of such life writings, see contributions to Camper (1994) op. cit., and Thompson and Tyagi (1996) op. cit. Mahtani (2002a) op. cit., p. 487. Also see M. Mahtani (2001) ‘ ‘‘I’m a blonde-haired, blue-eyed black girl’’: mapping mobile paradoxical spaces

N O TE S T O P P . 8—9

32 33 34

35 36

37

223

among multiethnic women in Toronto, Canada’, in Parker and Song, op. cit., pp. 173–190; M. Mahtani (2002b) ‘Tricking the border guards: performing race’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20: 425–440. An important theme in work on mixed descent revolves around the problems of talking in these terms at all, whereby classifications such as ‘mixed race’, ‘interracial’ and ‘biracial’ all risk reifying ‘race’ and implying an idea of racial purity against which others are defined as different. See, for example, S. Ali (2004) Mixed Race, Post-Race: New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices, Oxford: Berg; Parker and Song (2001) Rethinking Mixed Race, op. cit.; M. Root (ed.) (1996) The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier, London: Sage; N. Zack (1995) Race and Mixed Race, Philadelphia: Temple University Press; and N. Zack (ed.) (1995) American Mixed Race: the Culture of Microdiversity, London: Rowman and Littlefield. Mahtani (2002a) op. cit., p. 470. J. Olumide (2002) Raiding the Gene Pool: the Social Construction of Mixed Race, London: Pluto Press, p. 5. Ibid., pp. 9, 12. As Alibhai-Brown and Montague put it, increasingly critical work is challenging widely held views that ‘Interracial relationships, it seems, are a problem (the racist view), have unspeakable problems (the liberal view), or, more optimistically, provide a pretty coffee-coloured solution for all the world’s problems.’ Y. Alibhai-Brown and A. Montague (1992) The Colour of Love: Mixed Race Relationships, London: Virago, p. 2. Olumide argues that the problematic nature of the mixed race condition is usually seen to lie within the group itself rather than the wider social context. She uses the term ‘mixed race condition’ not to identify the universality of experience, but to investigate patterns that emerge across different contexts. S.S. Friedman (1998) Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 23. G. MacMunn (1934) The Living India: Its Romance and Realities, London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., pp. 153–154. A number of authors trace the AngloIndian origins of aristocratic and well-known families, including Anthony (1969) op. cit. and Moore (1986a) op. cit. There are also clearly ‘first generation’ Anglo-Indians. For examples of life writings by such Anglo-Indians, see J. Gavin (1997) Out of India: An AngloIndian Childhood, London: Pavilion Books and E. Lyons (2000) Bitter Sweet Truth, Hurstville, NSW: Parker Pattinson Publishing. For more on other me´tis groups and the historical, social and political contexts in which they emerged, see S. Bost (2003) Mulattas and Mestizas, 1850–2000: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, Athens: University of Georgia Press; J. Buscaglia-Salgado (2003) Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; C. Dover (1937) Half-Caste, London: Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd; Z. Erasmus (2001) Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, Cape Town: Kwela Publishers; Stoler (2002) op. cit.; F. Verge`s (1999) Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Me´tissage, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; and O. White (1999) Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, Oxford: Clarendon.

224 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46

47 48

49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

NO T E S T O PP. 9—12

Anthony (1969) op. cit.; Hawes (1996) op. cit.; Moore (1986a) op. cit. H. Stark (1926) Hostages to India, Calcutta: Calcutta Fine Arts Cottage; Anthony (1969) op. cit. Dover (1937) op. cit. K. Ballhatchet (1980) Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Anthony (1969) op. cit., p. 8. R. Maher (1962) These are the Anglo-Indians, Calcutta: Swallow Press. Reprinted in Perth, Western Australia, 1995. A. Brah (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London: Routledge. J. Clifford (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; P. Gilroy (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso. Also see C. Dwyer (2002) ‘ ‘‘Where are you from?’’ Young British Muslim women and the making of ‘‘home’’ ’, in A. Blunt and McEwan (eds) Postcolonial Geographies, London: Continuum, pp. 184–199. Brah (1996) op. cit., p. 16. Ibid., p. 210. See M. Sheller (2003) ‘Creolization in discourses of global culture’, in S. Ahmed, C. Castan˜eda, A.-M. Fortier and M. Sheller (eds) Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, Oxford: Berg, pp. 273–294 for a discussion of the genealogy of the term ‘creolization’, and the particular historical and social contexts within which it emerged in the Caribbean. See, for example, N. Papastergiadis (2000) The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity, Cambridge: Polity, and P. Werbner (1997) ‘Introduction: the dialectics of cultural hybridity’, in P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds) Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, London: Zed Books, pp. 1–26. H. Bhabha (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, p. 38. K. Mitchell (1997) ‘Different diasporas and the hype of hybridity’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15: 533–553, p. 534. R. Young (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London: Routledge. D. Parker and M. Song (2001) ‘Introduction: rethinking ‘‘mixed race’’ ’, in Parker and Song, op. cit., pp. 1–22, p. 9. Ibid. A.-M. Fortier (2000) Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity, Oxford: Berg, p. 17. G. Singh (2003) ‘Introduction’, in B. Parekh, G. Singh and S. Vertovec (eds) Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora, London: Routledge, pp. 1–12. Other studies of the South Asian diaspora include R. Ballard (1994) Desh Pardesh: the South Asian Presence in Britain, London: C. Hurst; C. Bates (ed.) (2001) Community, Empire and Migration: South Asians in Diaspora, Basingstoke: Palgrave; P. Bhachu (1985) Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain, London: Tavistock. P. Bilimoria (1996) The Hindus and Sikhs in Australia,

N O T E S TO PP . 12—13

57 58

59

60

61 62 63

64

65 66 67 68

225

Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service; R.S. Gabbi (1998) Sikhs in Australia, Melbourne: Aristoc Press; S. Nasta (2002) Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave; C. Petievich (ed.) (1999) The Expanding Landscape: South Asians and the Disapora, New Delhi: Manohar; and S. Vertovec (2000) The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns, London: Routledge. B. Walter (2001) Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women, London: Routledge, p. 11. Studies of women living in the South Asian diaspora include Brah (1996) op. cit.; C. Dwyer (2000) ‘Negotiating diasporic identities: young British South Asian Muslim women’, Women’s Studies International Forum 23: 475–486; Dwyer (2002) op. cit.; M. Khatwa (2004) ‘Life journeys: narratives of Hindu mothers and daughters in British homes’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Queen Mary, University of London; N. Puwar and P. Raghuram (eds) (2003) South Asian Women in the Diaspora, Oxford: Berg; and A. Rayaprol (1997) Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian Diaspora, Delhi: Oxford University Press. For studies of women living in other diasporic communities, see Fortier (2000) op. cit.; Walter (2001) op. cit.; and W. Webster (1998) Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity, 1945–1964, London: UCL Press. See, for example, Blunt (2003b) op. cit.; S. Boym (2001) The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books; K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (eds) (2003a) The Politics of Memory, London: Routledge; K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (eds) (2003b) Regimes of Memory, London: Routledge. For a review essay on these books, see S. Legg (2004) ‘Memory and nostalgia’, Cultural Geographies 11: 99–107. Including E. Said (1999) Out of Place: a Memoir, London: Granta. Also see I. Baucom (1999) Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Camper (1994) op. cit.; Ifekwunigwe (1999) op. cit. For more on genealogy, identity and place, see C. Nash (2002) ‘Genealogical identities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20: 27–52. N. Johnson (1995) ‘Cast in stone: monuments, geography and nationalism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13: 51–65; D. Kennedy (1996) The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj, Berkeley: University of California Press; D. Matless (1998) Landscape and Englishness, London: Reaktion. A.-M. Fortier (1999) ‘Re-membering places and the performance of belonging(s)’, Theory, Culture and Society 16: 41–64; Fortier (2000) op. cit. For more on diasporic memories of home and identity, see Brah (1996) op. cit. and K. Ganguly (1992) ‘Migrant identities: personal memory and the construction of selfhood’, Cultural Studies 6: 27–50. Fortier (1999) op. cit., p. 59. Ibid., p. 57. I. Chambers (1990) Border Dialogues, London: Routledge. R. Rubenstein (2001) Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction, New York: Palgrave; C. Shaw and M. Case

226

69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84

NO T E S T O PP. 13—16

(eds) (1989) The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, Manchester: Manchester University Press. D. Lowenthal (1989) ‘Nostalgia tells it like it wasn’t’, in Shaw and Case op. cit., pp. 18–32, p. 18. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., pp. 27, 30. S. Stewart (1993) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 23. Rubenstein (2001) op. cit., p. 4. Also see G. Greene (1991) ‘Feminist fiction and the uses of memory’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16: 290–321. Stewart (1993) op. cit., p. 23. Also see A. Vidler (1992) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. For an analysis of nostalgia in the context of avant-garde critiques of spectacle in Paris, see D. Pinder (2000) ‘ ‘‘Old Paris is no more’’: geographies of spectacle and anti-spectacle’, Antipode 32: 357–386. Pinder writes that, for Guy Debord, ‘nostalgia does not represent a longing to return to the past’, but rather inspired a different vision of Paris, p. 375. J. Sharpe (1993) Allegories of Empire: the Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 20. For more on Raj nostalgia, see A. Burton (2001) ‘India, Inc? Nostalgia, memory and the empire of things’, in S. Ward (ed.) British Culture and the End of Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 217–232; S. Rushdie (1992a) ‘Outside the whale’, in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–91, London: Granta Books, pp. 87–101; and B. Schwarz (1994) ‘Memories of empire’, in A. Bammer (ed.) Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 156–171. Cotton Mary (2000), directed by Ismail Merchant and Madhur Jaffrey. The Guardian, 10 March 2000; Anglo-Indian: The Newsletter, April 2000. G. Moorhouse (1983) India Britannica, London: Harvill Press, pp. 144, 189. R. Hyam (1990) Empire and Sexuality: the British Experience, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 16–17, 117. Younger (1987) op. cit. Maher (1962) op. cit., p. 43. Anthony (1969) op. cit., pp. xi, ii–iii. Also see L. Roychowdhury (2000) The Jadu House: Intimate Histories of Anglo-India, London: Doubleday, which is a memoir that interweaves the encounters of its white British author with AngloIndians for her doctoral research with her own relationship with, and eventual marriage to, a Bengali man. This book has been criticized by a number of Anglo-Indians for dwelling on such ‘intimate histories’ of interracial sex. For two recent, contrasting studies of Anglo-Indian women, see L. Caplan (2000) ‘Iconographies of Anglo-Indian women: gender constructs and contrasts in a changing society’, Modern Asian Studies 34: 863–892; and E. Lewin (2002) ‘Anglo-Indian women in Western Australia: past, present and future identities’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Edith Cowan University, Perth. Caplan studies discourses about Anglo-Indian women in India, both before and after Independence, whereas Lewin focuses on the complex identities of

N O T E S TO PP . 16—20

85 86 87

88

89 90 91

92 93 94

95 96 97 98

227

Anglo-Indian women who have resettled in Australia. Unlike Caplan and Lewin, this book investigates the spatial politics of home for Anglo-Indian women resident in India, Britain and Australia. See Appendix 1 for a complete list of archival sources. See Appendix 2 for further details of interviews and focus groups. For more on oral history interviews, see A. Blunt (2003c) ‘Home and identity: life stories in text and in person’, in A. Blunt, P. Gruffudd, J. May, M. Ogborn and D. Pinder (eds) Cultural Geography in Practice, London: Arnold, pp. 71– 90; R. Perks and A. Thomson (eds) (1998) The Oral History Reader, London: Routledge; P. Thomson (2000) The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 3rd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. For more on oral history and feminist research, see S.B. Gluck and D. Patai (eds) (1991) Women’s Words: the Feminist Practice of Oral History, New York: Routledge, and for other examples of geographical work on women’s life stories, see D. Mackay (2002) ‘Negotiating positionings: exchanging life stories in research interviews’, in P. Moss (ed.) Feminist Geography in Practice: Research and Methods, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 187–199; and R. Nagar (1997) ‘Exploring methodological borderlands through oral narratives’, in J.P. Jones, H.J. Nast and S.M. Roberts (eds) Thresholds in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, Representation, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 203–224. Perks and Thomson (1998) op. cit., p. ix. J. Derrida (1995) Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression, translated by Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 2–3. H. Bradley (1999) ‘The seductions of the archive: voices lost and found’, History of the Human Sciences 12: 107–122, p. 110. Also see C. Hobbs (2001) ‘The character of personal archives: reflections on the value of records of individuals’, Archivaria 52: 126–135; S. McKemmish (1996) ‘Evidence of me . . . ’, Archives and Manuscripts: The Journal of the Australian Society of Archivists 24: 28–45; and R.A. Pollard (2001) ‘The appraisal of personal papers: a critical literature review’, Archivaria 52: 136–150. A. Burton (2003) Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 4. Ibid., p. 4. For more on Anglo-Indian education, see A. Lobo (1994) ‘A comparative study of educational disadvantage in India within the Anglo-Indian community: a historical and contemporary analysis’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Institute of Education, University of London. C. Mitra (1987) Constant Glory: La Martiniere Saga, 1836–1986, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, p. 31. Ibid. Martin’s bequest also funded a La Martiniere school in Lyons, France. M. Mother Colmcille (1968) First the Blade: History of the IBVM (Loreto) in India, 1841–1962, Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay. For more on Himalayan hill schools, see H.I. Craig (1996) Under the Old School Topee, Rickmansworth: Hazel Innes Craig. For more on the history of Dow Hill, see D. Coelho (1986) Orchids and Algebra: the Story of Dow Hill School, Hornchurch: K.B. Mainstone Publications.

228

NO T E S T O PP. 23—5

CHAPTER 2

AT HOME IN BRITISH INDIA: IMPERIAL DOMESTICITY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

1 The phrase ‘hostages to India’ comes from Stark (1926) op. cit., which I discuss more fully in the section ‘Land of Our Mothers’ below. All names are pseudonyms. See Appendix 1 for details about interviewees. 2 For more on the significance of public and private spheres in feminist history and politics, see L. Davidoff (2003) ‘Gender and the ‘‘Great Divide’’: public and private in British gender history’, Journal of Women’s History 15: 11–27, and A. Vickery (1993) ‘Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history’, Historical Journal 36: 383–414. 3 J. Tosh (1995) ‘Imperial masculinity and the flight from domesticity, 1880– 1914’, in T.P. Foley, L. Pilkington, S. Ryder and E. Tilley (eds) Gender and Colonialism, Galway: Galway University Press, pp. 72–85; and R. Phillips (1997) Mapping Men and Empire: a Geography of Adventure, London: Routledge. 4 One figure who has attracted a great deal of critical interest is Mary Kingsley, a British woman who travelled to West Africa in the 1890s and wrote two books about her experiences. When she returned to Britain she was repositioned in terms of feminized domesticity, but also acted as a political lobbyist. See A. Blunt (1994) Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa, New York: Guilford. 5 R.S. Kranidis (1999) The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects, New York: St Martin’s; and J.C. Myers (2001) ‘Performing the voyage out: Victorian female emigration and the class dynamics of displacement’, Victorian Literature and Culture 29: 129–146. 6 A. Lester (2001) Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa, London: Routledge; and K. Schaffer (1988) Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clear parallels exist with work on the domestic roles of white women as ‘pioneers’ in the American West. 7 See, for example, Blunt (1999) op. cit.; D. David (1999) ‘Imperial chintz: domesticity and empire’, Victorian Literature and Culture 27: 569–577; George (1996) op. cit.; M. Procida (2002) Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947, Manchester: Manchester University Press; Sharpe (1993) op. cit.; and V. Ware (1992) Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History, New York: Verso. 8 A. Davin (1978) ‘Imperialism and motherhood’, History Workshop Journal 5: 9–65. 9 McClintock (1995) op. cit., p. 47. 10 See, for example, N. Chaudhuri (1992) ‘Shawls, curry and rice in Victorian Britain’, in N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel (eds) Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 231–246; T. Richards, (1990) The Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914, London: Verso; D.S. Ryan (1997) ‘The empire at home: the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition and the imperial suburb’, Imperial Cities

N O T ES T O PP. 26—9

11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25 26

27

229

Project Working Paper 6, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London; and S. Zlotnick (1995) ‘Domesticating imperialism: curry and cookbooks in Victorian England’, Frontiers: a Journal of Women’s Studies 16: 51–68. This term originated in the Bengal Presidency from ‘madam-sahib’ and came to be used in British colonies throughout Asia and Africa. N. Chaudhuri (1988) ‘Memsahibs and motherhood in nineteenth-century colonial India’, Victorian Studies 31: 517–535. W.S. Blunt (1885) Ideas about India, London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., p. 47. Blunt (2000a) op. cit. Blunt (2000b) ‘Spatial stories under siege: British women writing from Lucknow in 1857’, Gender, Place and Culture 7: 229–246. J.W. Kaye (1876) A History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857–58, London: W.H. Allen, p. 354. Also see Sharpe (1993) op. cit. and P. Tuson (1998) ‘Mutiny narratives and the imperial feminine: European women’s accounts of the rebellion in India in 1857’, Women’s Studies International Forum 21: 291–303. Procida (2002) op. cit., p. 56. Also see George (1996) op. cit. T. Metcalf (1994) Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 93–94. George (1996) op. cit. For more on the regulation of colonial intimacy in the Dutch East Indies, see Stoler (1995) and Stoler (2002) op. cit. For more on the cultural history of the bungalow, see King (1984) op. cit. F.A. Steel and G. Gardiner (1907) The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 5th edition, London: Heinemann, pp. 7, 9. B. Walter (1995) ‘Irishness, gender and place’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13: 35–50, p. 37. G. Hage (1996) ‘The spatial imaginary of national practices: dwellingdomesticating/being-exterminating’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14: 463–486, p. 473. Ibid., pp. 478, 476. P. Blickle (2002) Heimat: a Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, Rochester, NY: Camden House. Also see L. Lyons (1996) ‘Feminist articulations of the nation: the ‘‘dirty’’ women of Armagh and the discourse of Mother Ireland’, Genders 24: 110–149; and S. Thapar-Bjo¨rkert and L. Ryan (2002) ‘Mother India/Mother Ireland: comparative gendered dialogues of colonialism and nationalism in the early 20th century’, Women’s Studies International Forum 25: 301–313. A. Ray (1935) Mother India, Calcutta: Gita Prachar Karyalaya, pp. 1–3. S. Corbridge (1999) ‘ ‘‘The militarization of all Hindudom?’’ The Bharatiya Janata Party, the bomb, and the political spaces of Hindu nationalism’, Economy and Society 28: 222–255, p. 234. Ibid., p. 235. Also see T. Sarkar (1998) ‘Orthodoxy, cultural nationalism, and Hindutva violence: an overview of the gender ideology of the Hindu Right’, in

230

28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39

40 41 42

43

44 45

46

NO T E S T O PP. 29—32

R.R. Pierson and N. Chaudhuri (eds) Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 166–181. Chakrabarty (2000) op. cit.; P. Chatterjee (1989) ‘The nationalist resolution of the women’s question’, in K. Sangari and S. Vaid (eds) Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, New Delhi: Kali for Women, pp. 233–253, and Chatterjee (1993) op. cit. Chatterjee (1993) op. cit., p. 133. Legg (2003) op. cit., p. 12. Also see H. Bannerji (2000) ‘Projects of hegemony: towards a critique of Subaltern Studies, ‘‘Resolution of the Women’s Question’’ ’, Economic and Political Weekly 35, 11 March: 902–920; and K. Visweswaran (1996) ‘Small speeches, subaltern gender: nationalist ideology and its historiography’, in A. Shahid and D. Chakrabarty (eds) Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Vol. 9, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 83–125. Thapar-Bjo¨rkert (1997) op. cit, p. 496. Ibid., p. 494. Legg (2003) op. cit. Ibid., p. 132. K.E. Wallace (1930) The Eurasian Problem Constructively Approached, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., p. iv. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 4. Four Reports from the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (India), 1857–1859. The East India Company had maintained strict controls on the number of British people living in India to ensure the security of its commercial monopoly. See D. Arnold (1983) ‘White colonization and labour in nineteenth-century India’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 11: 133–158. L. Bear (1994) ‘Miscegenations of modernity: constructing European respectability and race in the Indian railway colony, 1857–1931’, Women’s History Review 3: 531–548, p. 536. McClintock (1995) op. cit., p. 49. Stoler (1995) op. cit., p. 32. Kennedy (1996) op. cit.; J. Kenny (1995) ‘Climate, race and imperial authority: the symbolic landscape of the British hill station in India’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85: 694–714. Evidence from Major General G.B. Tremenheere, 15 April 1858, Four Reports from the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (India), 1857–1859, 12. Evidence from R. Baikie, 22 April 1858, Four Reports from the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (India), 1857–1859, 54. Evidence from Captain J. Ouchterlony, 10 June 1858, Four Reports from the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (India), 1857–1859, 2. Captain Ouchterlony had lived in India from 1834 until 1857 and had served in the Corps of Engineers in the Madras Presidency. Craig (1996) op. cit.

N O T ES T O PP. 32—4

231

47 Speech by Sir Henry Gidney, 30 May 1938, Calcutta, reported in the Colonization Observer, June 1938, VII, 2, p. 11. The Colonization Observer is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. 48 Parallels exist with the Commission of Investigation into the Poor White Problem conducted by the US-based Carnegie Corporation in South Africa in the late 1920s, which came to be known as the ‘Poor White Study’. See M. Bell (2002) ‘Inquiries as postcolonial devices: the Carnegie Corporation and poverty in South Africa’, in Blunt and McEwan op. cit., pp. 64–82. 49 Since 2000, Calcutta has been known as Kolkata. I am referring to ‘Calcutta’ throughout because my research spans the period roughly fifty years before and after Independence. 50 The 1911 Census was the first to use the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ to designate the community formerly known as ‘Eurasian’. The Census recorded 15,258 Anglo-Indians, and 4,764 domiciled Europeans, which made the domiciled community as a whole amount to 20,022. However, as noted in Chapter 1, it is difficult to estimate the size of the community because a number of other Indian Christians called themselves Anglo-Indian, and many more AngloIndians probably called themselves European. 51 Wallace (1930) op. cit. 52 Wright (1970) op. cit. 53 The Calcutta Study Circle also organized the Anglo-Indian Book Club, which published seventy-two pamphlets in the ‘Clarion Series’ from 1944 to 1947. Authors included Reginald Maher, Ronald Aviet, Wilson DeRoze and a number of anonymous authors. The pamphlets were published bi-monthly, and cost four annas. According to the Book Club, ‘These pamphlets flow out a steady stream, a real stream of life blood for the man who has the will to survive. . . . They deal with all and every aspect of the Anglo-Indian problem, with sociology, history, economics, education and all that concerns you as an Anglo-Indian and all it is your duty to know as an Anglo-Indian.’ Anon. (1946) For You and Yours, Calcutta: Anglo-Indian Book Club, p. 4. 54 Maher wrote his newspaper articles under the penname ‘D’Laniger’, which was his first name spelt backwards. 55 Anon. (1920) Report of the Calcutta Domiciled Community Enquiry Committee, 1918–19, Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Press, p. 52. 56 Ibid., p. 1. 57 Ibid., p. 4. 58 K. Paul (2001) ‘Communities of Britishness: migration in the last gasp of empire’, in S. Ward (ed.) British Culture and the End of Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 180–199. 59 J. Winders (2003) ‘White in all the wrong places: white rural poverty in the postbellum US South’, Cultural Geographies 10: 45–63, p. 45. 60 Bell (2002) op. cit.; Winders (2003) op. cit.; M. Wray and A. Newitz (eds) (1997) White Trash: Race and Class in America, New York: Routledge. 61 Walter (2001) op. cit. 62 Winders (2003) op. cit. 63 Anon. (1920) op. cit., p. 53.

232 64 65 66 67 68

69

70 71

72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79

NO T E S T O PP. 34—9

Anon. (1920) op. cit., p. 54. Ibid., pp. 42, 1–2. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid. In the public meeting held at the Dalhousie Institute in Calcutta on 29 July 1918 to establish the Committee, there was some discussion about whether to include ‘ladies’ and ‘an Anglo-Indian gentleman’. Whilst the sub-committees on hostels, education, and health and physique included women, the extent to which Anglo-Indians were directly represented remains unclear. Although an Anglo-Indian man, Mr Small, was added to the Committee at the meeting, he is not named in the report and there is no explanation for his absence, as there is for other original members who either died or returned to Britain. Ernest McCluskie, who founded the Colonization Society of India, which promoted colonization and settlement at McCluskieganj from 1933 (see Chapter 4), was a member of the sub-committee on housing. Anon. (1920) op. cit., pp. 42–43. British paternal responsibility, both for the origins and the welfare of the Anglo-Indian community, was also a recurrent theme in other contexts. See J.A.H. Bower (1939) Ambition Mocked Our Useful Toil: Autobiographical Sketches and Musings on Anglo-Indian Problems, Madras: J.A.H. Bower, pp. 104–105, for further examples. Anon. (1920) op. cit., p. 2. Also see H.W.B. Moreno (1917) Anglo-Indians and the Housing Problem, Calcutta: H.W.B. Moreno; and H.P.K. Skipton (1921) New India and the Anglo-Indian: the Need of the Moment, The Indian Church Aid Association: London. Moreno was a member of the 1918–19 Committee. Other commentators regarded debt or usury as the main problem facing Anglo-Indians. See R.E. Cully (1910) The Euro-Asian or Anglo-Indian: a Burma Brochure by One of the Community, Rangoon: R.E. Cully; and H. Nevil-Chambers (1913) Usury, and Its relation to Anglo-Indian Poverty, read before the Social Study Society of Calcutta, August 1913, Calcutta: Edinburgh Press. Anon. (1920) op. cit., pp. 6, 23–24, 141. Ibid., pp. 7, 141. Some of the housing in Bow Bazar was in flats originally built as barracks. This part of Calcutta is the subject of a 2004 English-language film directed by Anjan Dutt, entitled Bow Barracks Forever. Anglo-Indian: The Newsletter, 14: 2, February 2004. See, for example, V. Oldenburg (1984) The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856– 1877, Princeton: Princeton University Press. S. Kumar (2002) ‘The evolution of spatial ordering in colonial Madras’, in Blunt and McEwan op. cit., pp. 85–98. Anon. (1920) op. cit., p. 142. Ibid., pp. 24, 43. W. Ashley-Brown, quoted in Bower (1939) op. cit., p. 79. In 1912, P.W. Woolley wrote that ‘an imported European commands a better price because he is a better man,’ equating character with domicile. P.W. Woolley (1912) Some Problems of the Domiciled Community, paper read before the Social Study Society of Calcutta, July 1912, Calcutta: Edinburgh Press, p. 5.

N O T E S TO PP . 39—46

80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92

93 94 95 96 97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104

233

Anon. (1920) op. cit., pp. 8, 13. Cully (1910) op. cit., pp. 54–55. Anon. (1920) op. cit., pp.78–79. This sub-committee also recommended that steps should ‘be taken to establish a settlement in Southern Calcutta to deal with hostels as a part of its activities’ (ibid., p. vi). By the early twentieth century, work at Toynbee Hall in East London and Hull-House in Chicago had inspired a worldwide settlement movement, whereby social reformers lived as well as worked in poor urban neighbourhoods. There is no evidence that an Anglo-Indian settlement was established in Calcutta. Anon. (1920) op. cit., pp. 201, 202, 206. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., pp. 203, 204. Ibid., p. 1. Stark (1926) op. cit., pp. 140–141. Also see C. Dover (1929) Cimmerii? Or Eurasians and Their Future, Calcutta: The Modern Art Press. Reading Collection, Mss Eur E238/55A (III), pp. 619–632. Memorandum submitted to the Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform by Lt Col. Sir Henry Gidney. Anglo-Indian Review, January 1939. P/W 588: Memorandum relative to the Deputation of the Anglo-Indian and Domiciled Community of India and Burma to the Rt Hon. The Secretary of State for India, 30 July 1925. Also see Rt Hon. Lord Olivier (1925) ‘AngloIndians and their communal claims’, The Contemporary Review, April: 423–431, which focuses on the 1925 Memorandum. Birkenhead Collection, Mss Eur D703/42: Proceedings at a Deputation from the Anglo-Indian Community to the Secretary of State for India, 30 July 1925. C. Griffiths, Birkenhead Collection, Mss Eur D703/42. R. Maher (1945) The Children’s Page, Clarion Series No. 29, Calcutta: Calcutta Anglo-Indian Study Circle. Birkenhead Collection, Mss Eur D703/42. Ibid. Simon Collection, Mss Eur F77/106: letter from Hon. Mr H.G. Haig, Secretary to the Government of India, to Gidney, 11 September 1928. Simon Collection, Mss Eur F77/106: Memorandum submitted on behalf of the Anglo-Indian and Domiciled European Community of India for the consideration of the Chairman and Members of the Indian Statutory Commission, from Gidney, 25 June 1928. Ibid. Anglo-Indian Review, April 1931. Ibid. Anglo-Indian Review, May 1939. N. G. Jog (1945) Judge or Judas? Bombay: Thacker and Co., p. 195. Also see Bower (1939) op. cit.; and O. Snell (1944) Anglo-Indians and Their Future, Bombay: Thacker and Co.

234 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

NO T E S T O PP. 46—56

Anglo-Indian Review, March 1939. Anglo-Indian Review, October 1944. Anglo-Indian Review, May 1939. ‘Nullah’ refers to a ravine or gully. Anglo-Indian Review, October 1946. ‘Ooty’ refers to the hill station Ootacamund in south India. Anthony (1969) op. cit., p. 150. Anglo-Indian Review, May 1947. Anglo-Indian Review, March 1946. Anthony (1969) op. cit., p. 187. Anglo-Indian Review, October 1946. Anglo-Indian Review, November 1947; Maher (1962) op. cit., p. 100. Anthony (1969) op. cit., p. viii.

CHAPTER 3 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

HOME, COMMUNITY AND NATION: DOMESTICATING IDENTITY AND EMBODYING MODERNITY

Anglo-Indian Review, May 1941. Anglo-Indian Review, July 1941. Anglo-Indian Review, September 1941. Anon. (1920) op. cit., p. 24. (See p. 36 above.) P. Connerton (1989) How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. I. Cook, P. Crang and M. Thorpe (1999) ‘Eating into Britishness: multicultural imaginaries and the identity politics of food’, in S. Roseneil and J. Seymour (eds) Practising Identities: Power and Resistance, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 223–248; I. Cook, P. Crang and M. Thorpe (2000) ‘Regions to be cheerful: geographies of culinary authenticity’, in I. Cook, D. Crouch, S. Naylor and J. Ryan (eds) Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns: Perspectives on Cultural Geography, Harlow: Longman, pp. 109–139; I. Cook and M. Harrison (2003) ‘Cross over food: re-materializing postcolonial geographies’, Transactions 28: 296–317. J. Floyd (2004) ‘Coming out of the kitchen: texts, contexts and debates’, Cultural Geographies 11: 61–72; M. Llewellyn (2004) ‘Designed by women and designing women: gender, planning and the geographies of the kitchen in Britain, 1917–1946’, Cultural Geographies 11: 42–60. See P. Brown (1998) Anglo-Indian Food and Customs, New Delhi: Penguin Books, for more on Anglo-Indian cuisine. Snell (1944) op. cit., p. 10. Anglo-Indian Review, May 1939. Wallace (1930) op. cit., p. 14. R. Maher (undated; probably 1947) Being Indian, Clarion Series No. 72, Calcutta: Calcutta Anglo-Indian Study Circle, p. 3. Anglo-Indian Review, December 1943. M. Foucault (1990) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, translated by R. Hurley, New York: Vintage Books, p. 46.

N O T E S TO PP . 56—61

235

15 J. Clifford (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 4. 16 P. Phillips (1931) ‘Chi-chi’, Daily Mail, reprinted in The Anglo-Indian Review, November 1931, p. 34. 17 Anthony (1969) op. cit., pp. 373–374. 18 K. Platt (1923) The Home and Health in India and the Tropical Colonies, London: Bailliere, Tindall and Co., p. 137. 19 Tollinton Papers, Mss Eur D1197, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library. Other British women were happy to employ Anglo-Indian nannies for their children. Evelyn Battye remembered her nannies as ‘marvellous and devoted children’s nurses, even more valuable than the faithful ayahs, as they gave the children their first lessons’. Audrey Baylis employed an Anglo-Indian nanny for eleven years, met many of her friends and relations, and returned to India three times to visit her once she and her family had returned to Britain. E. Battye and A. Baylis, ‘British Women in India: Replies to Questionnaires’, compiled by Mary Thatcher, Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. 20 Clearly the English language spoken both in and beyond Britain today also includes many words that originated in India. See H. Yule and A.C. Burnell (1996) [first published 1886] Hobson–Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary. Ware, Herts: Wordsworth Editions; and S. Rushdie (1992b) ‘Hobson–Jobson’, in Imaginary Homelands, op. cit., pp. 81–83. 21 This contrasts with Caplan’s argument that there was ‘no public counterdiscourse’ from within the community in opposition to negative British discourses about Anglo-Indian women. Caplan (2000) op. cit., p. 874. 22 Anglo-Indian Review, May 1940 and March 1943. 23 Anglo-Indian Review, July 1932. 24 Anglo-Indian Review, August 1946. 25 ‘Query’ (1947) ? Clarion Series No. 57, Calcutta: Calcutta Anglo-Indian Study Circle. 26 Anglo-Indian Review, September 1929. Other Indian women had graduated from British universities long before this. See A. Burton (1998) At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain, Berkeley: University of California Press, and Lahiri (2000) op. cit. 27 Anglo-Indian Review, September 1937. 28 Anglo-Indian Review, July 1939. 29 Anthony (1969) op. cit., pp. x–xi. An editorial on ‘Our nurses’ in the AngloIndian Review, March 1944, stated that ‘True to the ideals of service and adventure, which have characterised the Community, the call for duty overseas and in active areas found the Anglo-Indian women alone in answering this call. India can never adequately express or repay her debt to the womanhood of the Community for their wonderful and unequalled record of service in the different departments of nursing.’ As the editorial continued, by merely publishing the names of distinguished Anglo-Indians, credit for their service usually went to Europeans. 30 Anglo-Indian Review, July 1932.

236 31 32

33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

NO T E S T O PP. 61—7

Anglo-Indian Review, June 1939. F. Anthony (1946), memorandum submitted to the meeting of the Governing Body of the AIAIA, 7 April 1946, printed in Anglo-Indian Review, March 1946; p. 4. J. Masters (1983) [first published 1954] Bhowani Junction, London: Sphere Books. For more on the novel, and in particular the significance of the club within it, see A. Johnson (2000) ‘Club members? Reading John Masters’s Bhowani Junction’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35: 3–26. Frank Anthony and many other Anglo-Indians were, and are, very critical of the novel, particularly for its portrayal of Victoria Jones’ relationships with three men. Anthony wrote that the authors of what he termed ‘near-pornography’ were often ‘in fact Anglo-Indian but masquerading as British’. Anthony (1969) op. cit., p. iii. Masters’ own Anglo-Indian origins are explored in J. Clay (1992) John Masters: a Regimented Life, London: Michael Joseph. Anthony used his political influence with the Congress Party to ensure that no filming took place in India and, as a result, it was made in Pakistan. The novel and the film end differently. Whereas in the novel Victoria Jones remains in India, likely to marry Patrick Taylor, she chooses the British Colonel over Taylor in the film. This change was made to appeal to the western audience of a Hollywood film, because the British Colonel offered a future for Victoria Jones away from India and the Anglo-Indian community. Masters (1983) op. cit., pp. 27–28. Ibid., p. 144. Anglo-Indian Review, October 1943. Anglo-Indian Review, December 1943. Anglo-Indian Review, September 1944. Ibid. Anglo-Indian Review, December 1944: ‘Wake up Anglo-Indian women!’ by ‘Disgusted’. Anglo-Indian women were able to marry British soldiers, but often complained ‘that Officers commanding the Units to which their husbands were attached, refuse to bring them on the married strength of the Unit and to grant them housing accommodation’. Anglo-Indian Review, October 1941. Gidney wrote to the British Commander-in-Chief ‘pointing out the injustice of the treatment accorded to our womenfolk’. Writing in 1930, Ethel Shepard, Head Deaconess of St Hilda’s Society, Lahore, noted that ‘Englishmen now rarely marry Indian women. Far more frequently it is an Indian student who, having gone to England or America to complete his studies in law, medicine, or whatever career he has chosen, brings back an English or (rarely) an American wife.’ E. Shepard (1930) A Marooned People (the Anglo-Indian Community), London: The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, p. 9. In 1934, George MacMunn lamented a ‘new Anglo-Indian problem’, which was ‘the tendency of the present day for English and American women, especially English, to marry Indians, both Hindu and Moslem’. MacMunn (1934) op. cit. pp. 158, 160. For more on Indian students in Britain, and anxieties about their relationships with British women, see Lahiri (2000) op. cit.

N O T E S TO PP . 68—73

237

42 B. Loch, ‘British Women in India: Replies to Questionnaires,’ compiled by Mary Thatcher, Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. 43 Anglo-Indian Review, May 1940. 44 Anglo-Indian Review, February and May 1944. 45 Anglo-Indian Review, December 1944 and October 1946. 46 Anglo-Indian Review, October 1947. 47 Anglo-Indian Review, May 1940. 48 Although Edna Herd was the only female member of the Governing Body of the AIAIA in 1944, she was not its first female member. Ellen West, who died in 1938, was the first Anglo-Indian female Member of the Legislative Assembly. As well as serving as MLA in Bengal, Ellen West joined the Council of the AIAIA in 1925 and served as its Honorary General Secretary for two years before her death. As Henry Gidney wrote, ‘she was an industrious and indefatigable worker and the present consolidated position of the Association and the community throughout India is in no small measure due to her indefatigable labours’ (Colonization Observer, May 1938, VII, 1, p. 1). 49 Anglo-Indian Review, February 1944.

CHAPTER 4

COLONIZATION AND SETTLEMENT: ANGLO-INDIAN HOMELANDS

1 Since 2000, Bihar has been divided into two states. The northern part of the state is now called Bihar and the southern part of the state, where McCluskieganj is located, is now called Jharkhand. My research at McCluskieganj was conducted before the state was divided, and is largely about the historical origins of the settlement. I therefore refer to Bihar throughout this chapter. 2 V. Daniel (1992) ‘Chota London’, Sunday Mid-Day 29 March. I am grateful to Mr Miller, a resident of McCluskieganj, for lending me a copy of this and two other newspaper articles. 3 See K.L. Dutt (1990) In Search of a Homeland: Anglo-Indians and McCluskiegunge, Calcutta: Minerva, for further details. 4 Two brochures were produced by the CSI: The Dawn of a New Era (1931; reprinted in Colonization Observer [hereafter CO], July 1934, pp. 15–31; hereafter CSI, 1934), and McCluskiegunge: on the Ranchi Plateau (1935; hereafter CSI, 1935). I am very grateful to Alfred de Rozario for letting me read his rare copies of these brochures and the Colonization Observer. 5 CO, June 1938, VII, 2, p. 11. This article reports a ‘mass meeting of AngloIndians in Calcutta’ on 30 May 1938, which was addressed by Sir Henry Gidney, at which cine films were shown. These films were probably made by Gidney himself. When he visited McCluskieganj for the Founder’s Week celebrations in 1939, the CO reported that ‘Sir Henry Gidney is a very keen Cine photographer and he very obligingly brought his projector and collection of films . . . for the occasion.’ CO, March–April 1939, VII, 11, p. 14. 6 I. Jack (1991) ‘The homeland that failed’, The Independent Magazine, 23 February, pp. 30–8; reprinted as ‘ ‘‘Back home’’ is where the heart is’, Indian Express Magazine, 24 March. McCluskieganj is widely known as ‘the ganj’ by

238

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18

19 20 21 22 23

24

NO T E S T O PP. 73—7

past and present residents. Other potential names were more anglicized and included McCluskie’s Valley, McCluskieshire, Macsfield, MacValley, Blessington and Aidelands (the last begins with the acronym for ‘Anglo-Indian and Domiciled European’). CO, January 1934, II, 9; CO February 1934, II, 10. The Star of India, 7 November 1934; reprinted in CO, December 1934, VIII, 8. CO, March–April 1939, VII, 11. Ibid.; CO, June 1938, VII, 2. T. Waetjen (1999) ‘The ‘‘home’’ in homeland: gender, national space, and Inkatha’s politics of ethnicity’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22: 653–678, p. 654. Also see H. Naficy (ed.) (1999) Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, New York: Routledge. D. Morley (2000) Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity, London: Routledge, p. 32. Blickle (2002) op. cit., p. ix. C.J. Wickham (1999) Constructing Heimat in Post-War Germany: Longing and Belonging, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, p. 10. Brah (1996) op. cit. Similar arguments can be made about the relationships between exile and homeland. See J.D. Peters (1999) ‘Exile, nomadism, and diaspora: the stakes of mobility in the western canon’, in Naficy, op. cit., pp. 17–41. As Peters writes, ‘Exile suggests pining for home; diaspora suggests networks among compatriots. Exile may be solitary, but diaspora is always collective. Diaspora suggests real or imagined relationships among scattered fellows . . . ’, p. 20. D. Gregory (2004) The Colonial Present, Oxford: Blackwell; E. Said (1994) The Politics of Dispossession, London: Vintage. B.K. Axel (2001) The Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh ‘Diaspora’, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 199. Also see D.S. Tatla (1999) The Sikh Diaspora: the Search for Statehood, London: UCL Press. C. Bhatt and P. Mukta (2000) ‘Hindutva in the West: mapping the antinomies of diaspora nationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 23: 407–441, p. 408. This paper is the introduction to a special issue on Hindu nationalism in the South Asian diaspora. Ibid., pp. 434, 438. Waetjen (1999) op. cit., p. 657. Ibid., p. 658. C. Hope (2003) ‘Great white hope’, The Guardian, 6 May, G2. N. Ryan (2003) Homeland: into a World of Hate, Edinburgh: Mainstream. It is important to note that rural communes and colonization schemes are not always politically reactionary, as shown by anarchist colonies such as Whiteway established in Britain in the nineteenth century and other rural utopian visions. See C. Osman (1992/3) ‘Whiteway: the anarchist arcadia’, Diggers and Dreamers, 92/3: 62–70, and A. Blunt and J. Wills (2000) Dissident Geographies: an Introduction to Radical Ideas and Practice, Harlow: Pearson. Lester (2001) op. cit., p. 73.

N O T E S TO PP . 77—81

239

25 A. Kolodny (1975) The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 153–154. For more on gendered and sexualized depictions of landscape, see Rose (1993) op. cit. 26 A. Kolodny (1984) The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontier, 1630–1860, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, p. 165. 27 Schaffer (1988) op. cit., p. 107. 28 Waetjen (1999) op. cit., p. 654. 29 Parallels could also be drawn with other examples of rural resettlement including model villages, anarchist colonies in places such as Whiteway in Britain (see Osman (1992/3) op. cit.), and the Garden City movement. 30 Letter from R.J. Sharman to The Anglo-Indian Journal, October 1899, II, 10, p. 8. 31 Simon Collection, Mss Eur F77/106, OIOC: 29. 32 Hawes (1996) op. cit. 33 Ibid. Fenwick set out his detailed proposals for the establishment of farming communities in C.A. Fenwick (1828) Essays on the Colonization of Hindoostan by East Indians, Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press. Ricketts proposed that a Commercial and Patriotic Association should be formed in Bengal. See Hawes (1996) op. cit., pp. 117–120. 34 Hawes (1996), p. 120. 35 Mysore State is now Karnataka State. Until 1893, the Eurasian and AngloIndian Association of South India loaned money to its branch Association in Mysore and Coorg to assist in the foundation of Whitefield. For more on Whitefield, see S. Lee (ed.) (1882) Guide to the Eurasian and Anglo-Indian Villages, Proposed to be Established in the Province of Mysore, with Maps and Drawings and Handbook of Industries and Pursuits, Suited to the Eurasian and Anglo-Indian Community, Madras: The Eurasian Industrial Press. Also see J.D. Rees (1891) Narratives of Tours in India made by His Excellency Lord Connemara, G.C.I.E., Governor of Madras, 1886–1890, Madras: The Government Press. Thanks to Michael Ludgrove for these references. For an account of Whitefield from its foundation until the 1980s, see S. John (1986) Whitefield, Unpublished document; the Ecumenical Christian Centre, Whitefield. 36 Letter to the Madras Mail, reprinted in The Anglo-Indian Journal, August 1899, II, 8, pp. 8–9. 37 Ibid., p. 9. In similar terms, a history of Whitefield written by Mr Peck in the early twentieth century described it as ‘the only settlement in India that European and Eurasians can call their own’. Peck’s writings have been reprinted by Ronnie Johnson on his website at www.geocities.com/Athens/2960/ whitefld.htm. Thanks to Ronnie Johnson, and to Lionel and Christa Moss, for giving me copies of Mr Peck’s writings. 38 Ibid. 39 The Anglo-Indian Journal, November 1899, II, 11, p. 8. Also see an anonymous letter written by ‘FACT’ in reply to HT, which was printed in The Anglo-Indian Journal, January 1900, III, 1, and challenged the accuracy of the former letter and argued that the terms ‘colony’ and ‘settlement’ were interchangeable.

240 40 41 42 43

44

45

46

47 48 49 50

51

NO T E S T O PP. 81—4

Letter from Margaret Miles to the Bombay Guardian, reprinted in The AngloIndian Journal, October 1898, I, 13. C. Dover (1930) ‘Appendix A: The need for a comparative statistical survey of the community’, in Wallace, op. cit., p. 121. Snell (1944) op. cit., pp. 34, 36, 38. Letter from I. Warde, 15 July 1931, to the Overseas Settlement Department, Dominions Office, Commonwealth Government of Australia. Also see the letter written by R.W. Cahoon from Lucknow on 14 July 1932, to the Prime Minister’s Department, Commonwealth Government of Australia. Both letters are held in the National Archives of Australia (NAA) A 518/1, T822/1. Letter from R.G. Chatelier, 15 April 1949, Calcutta, to the Hon. A.A. Calwell, Minister for Immigration and Information, Department of External Affairs, Commonwealth Government of Australia. NAA: A 518/1, CH822/1. Chatelier also wrote to the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, in 1956 to request ‘the establishment of a separate state or national homeland of its own in British New Guinea’. He described the position of Anglo-Indians in the subcontinent as ‘hopeless’, and wrote that ‘It is therefore imperative that we as a separate community and linguistic unit should be provided with a national homeland of our own in British New Guinea under a ten year plan sponsored by India, Pakistan, Australia and Britain.’ Letter from R.G. Chatelier to Sir Anthony Eden, 16 June 1956. DO 35/6163. National Archives, London. I have found no other references to the Eurasian Collectivist Party beyond these letters. In February 1950, a letter from L.R Le Lievre in Cremorne to the Australian Minister for External Affairs suggested that Indian Christians, Sikhs and Anglo-Indians should populate New Guinea: ‘The idea is to populate New Guinea with people who are able to endure the climate and who are sympathetic towards the British way of life, and who would be able to help us hold that land and future fortunes north of Australia.’ NAA: A 518/1, T822/1. Letter from T.H.E. Heyes, Secretary, Department of Immigration, to the Secretary, Department of External Territories, Commonwealth Government of Australia, 30 June 1949. NAA: A 518/1, CH822/1. The White Australia Policy and Anglo-Indian migration to Australia after Independence are discussed in Chapter 6. ‘Speech on ‘‘Anglo-Indian colonization’’ by Percival R. Damzen, delivered at the Kineally Hall, Simla’, CO, October 1938, VII, 6, pp. 1–4, p. 1. By 1939, Damzen was the Director-in-Charge of the CSI, and had direct control of the management of the Head Office in Calcutta and the Colony Office in McCluskieganj. CO, March–April 1939, VII, 11, p. 51. CSI 1934, p. 20. CO, May 1934, III, 1. CO, March–April 1939, VII, 11, p. 48. An editorial in the CO in 1939 also described McCluskieganj as a place of peace and security away from a potential invasion of India during the Second World War. ‘Colonization’, CO, October 1939, VIII, 6, p. 2. P. Bishop (1995) An Archetypal Constable: National Identity and the Geography of Nostalgia, London: Athlone, p. 57.

N O T E S TO PP . 85—98

241

52 Letter from E. McGowan, Asansol, CO, February 1934, II, 10. 53 CO, May 1934, III, 1; CO, September 1934, III, 5. 54 Simon Report on the Anglo-Indian Community, Vol. 1 pp. 42–45, published on 22 June 1930 and reprinted in CSI, 1934, pp. 23–25, and quoted in CSI, 1935. The quotation comes from CSI, 1934, p. 25. 55 ‘Sir Henry Gidney’s speech at a mass meeting of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta, 30 May 1938’, CO, June 1938, VII, 2, pp. 11–14, p. 13. 56 H. Gidney (1934) ‘The future of the Anglo-Indian community’, The Asiatic Review, 30, 101: 27–42, p. 36. 57 Letter from Oswin Montaut, Bhusaval, CO, January 1934, II, 9. 58 CSI, 1935. 59 ‘History repeats itself’, CO, June 1939, VIII, 2, p. 1. 60 CSI, 1935. 61 J.G. Steele, ‘Life in McCluskiegunge’, CO, December 1938, VI, 8, p. 15. 62 ‘The proof of the pudding’, CO, March–April 1939, VII, 11, pp. 3–4. 63 ‘Address to Sir Maurice Hallett by Henry Gidney’, CO, July–August 1939, VIII, 3 and 4, p. 2. 64 See note 61 above. 65 Anonymous letter from Karachi, CO, February 1934, II, 10. 66 CSI, 1934, p. 28. 67 CO, November 1934, III, 7. 68 CSI, 1934, p. 22. 69 ‘Sir Henry Gidney’s speech’ (see note 55), p. 11. 70 Letter to the Times of India from W. Ashley Brown, Chaplain of Poona and Acting Archdeacon of Bombay, 22 May 1934, CO, June 1934 III, 2. 71 ‘Speech on ‘‘Anglo-Indian colonization’’ ’ (see note 46), p. 2. 72 CSI, 1935. 73 ‘Sir Henry Gidney’s speech’ (see note 55), p. 14. 74 ‘Speech on ‘‘Anglo-Indian colonization’’ ’ (see note 46), p. 1. 75 Letter from Henry G. Stewart, Jhansi, CO, June 1938 VII, 2, pp. 22–23, p. 22. 76 CO, March–April 1939, VII, 11, p. 47. 77 CSI, 1935. 78 CO, December 1934, II, 8. Article reprinted from the Statesman, 6 November 1934. 79 ‘An early settler: Stewart’s farm, Konka’, by the Bystander, CO, February 1938, VI, 10, pp. 10–11, p. 11. 80 CO, February 1934, II, 10. 81 ‘Hearth to hearth talks, for our women readers!’ by Kay, CO, July 1938, VII, 3, p. 24; ‘Eve’s Corner’, by Lizzie, CO, December 1939, VIII, 8, p. 16. 82 ‘Internal co-operation’, CO, November 1938, VII, 7, pp. 1–3, p. 2. 83 Article by S.D. from Calcutta, 1937, CO, January 1938, VI, 9, p.18. 84 ‘Speech on ‘‘Anglo-Indian colonization’’ ’ (see note 46), p. 3. 85 ‘McCluskiegunge celebrations 1959: Anglo-Indian state remembers founder right royally’, CO, February 1939, VII, 10, pp. 1–2. 86 ‘Oldest living man? McCluskiegunge resident celebrates 127th birthday: a century’s recollections’, CO, June 1938, VII, 2, pp. 14–15, p. 14.

242 87 88 89

90 91

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

NO T E S T O PP. 98—107

‘Oldest living man? McCluskiegunge resident celebrates 127th birthday: a century’s recollections’, CO, June 1938, VII, 2, pp. 14–15, p. 15. Ibid. M. Sharma (1980) ‘McCluskie and the ‘‘Gunj’’ that failed’, Sunday, 7 December; R. Gupta (1982) ‘Leftover of Raj seeks identity’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February; S. Menon (1988) ‘McCluskieganj – a dream shattered’, The Times of India, 27 August; Dutt (1990) op. cit.; A. Stevenson (director) (1993) McCluskieganj, London: Granada Television. D. Bobb and F. Ahmed (1991) ‘McCluskieganj: the dying of a dream’, India Today, October; Daniel (1992) op.cit; Jack (1991) op. cit. S. Goldenberg (1997) ‘Twilight of India’s forgotten colony’, The Guardian, 5 July; J. Zubrzycki (1997) ‘Midnight’s orphans’, The Weekend Review, 9–10 August. V.K. Jha (1999) McCluskieganj, translated by Shruti Shukla, Patna: Srishti Prakashan. Bobb and Ahmed (1991) op. cit. Jack (1991) op. cit. Anthony (1969) op. cit. St Andrew’s Hostel Prospectus, PO McCluskieganj, Dist. Ranchi 829208. Highland Guest House Brochure, PO McCluskieganj, Dist. Ranchi 829208. D. Cameron (1998), unpublished memoir about McCluskieganj. I am grateful to Captain Cameron for letting me read his memoir. Quoted in Daniel (1992) op. cit.

CHAPTER 5

INDEPENDENCE AND DECOLONIZATION: ANGLO-INDIAN RESETTLEMENT IN BRITAIN

1 G.J. Moore (1986b) The Lotus and the Rose: an Anglo-Indian Story, Melbourne: River Seine Publications, p. 135. 2 Dow Hill and Kolar Gold Field focus group, London. 3 Anglo-Indian Review, November/December 1998 and January 1999. Many of my interviewees also described post-Independence migration by Anglo-Indians as an ‘exodus’. 4 de Mellow (1970) op. cit. 5 C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich (2003) ‘Mapping the British world’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31: 1–15. This is the introduction to a special issue entitled ‘The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity’. 6 Lahiri (2000) op. cit., p. xii. 7 R. Visram (1986) Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: the History of Indians in Britain, 1700–1947, London: Pluto. 8 Lahiri (2000) op. cit., p. xi. 9 Burton (1998) op. cit; I. Grewal (1996) Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 10 Burton (1998) op. cit., p. 1. 11 Ibid., p. 6. As Burton and Lahiri both note, Indians travelled much more widely in the British Empire, and did so on a forced as well as a voluntary

NO T E S T O PP. 107—11

12 13 14 15 16

17

18

19

20 21 22 23

24

243

basis. Large numbers of Indians migrated to the West Indies, East and South Africa and South East Asia as indentured labourers. M. Edwardes (1991) The Nabobs at Home, London: Constable. The term ‘nabob’ comes from ‘nawab’, which refers to an Indian Muslim prince. The term ‘imperial aristocracy’ is from B. Anderson (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. G. Gowans (2001) ‘Gender, imperialism and domesticity: British women repatriated from India, 1940–47’, Gender, Place and Culture 8: 255–269, p. 257. By 1930, Kenneth Wallace estimated that 5000 Anglo-Indians had settled in Britain. Wallace (1930) op. cit. Antoinette Burton describes the ‘Eurasian’ population of Victorian Britain as ‘even more statistically elusive’ than the Indian population. As one exception, she describes an Anglo-Indian photojournalist, Olive Christian Malvery, whose ‘canny manipulations of images of the Indian, the Jew, and the Cockney suggest how precarious these identity categories could be and how contingent their production was on recognition by an urban middle-class audience’. Burton (1998) op. cit., p. 29. Also see J.R. Walkowitz (1998–9) ‘The Indian woman, the flower girl and the Jew: photojournalism in Edwardian London’, Victorian Studies 42: 3–46. The first organized political representation on behalf of Anglo-Indians was the East Indians’ Petition presented to the British parliament in 1830 by John Ricketts on behalf of the community in Calcutta, and was followed by a second petition in 1832. See Hawes (1996) op. cit. for more on Ricketts and the 1830 petition. Later deputations included those led by Dr James Wallace in 1897; by Herbert Stark in 1923; and by Henry Gidney in 1925 and 1931. Also see Bower (1939) op. cit. The quotation from Lord Curzon comes from his speech in reply to the Deputation of the Imperial Anglo-Indian Association, Calcutta, 24 March 1900, reported in The Anglo-Indian Journal, March 1900. The main migration scheme that progressed beyond a proposal was organized by Dr Graham for Anglo-Indian children educated at the St Andrew’s Colonial Homes in Kalimpong, which I discuss below. R. Maher (1947) June’ 48, Clarion Series No. 68, Calcutta: Calcutta AngloIndian Study Circle, p. 3. The title refers to the anticipated date of independence at the time that the pamphlet was written. Blunt (2000a) op. cit. Spen (1947) The Fundamental Issue, Clarion Series No. 69, Calcutta: Calcutta Anglo-Indian Study Circle, p. 1. Many British and American companies withdrew or downsized in the mid-1960s. Partition was clearly itself a direct result of Independence. Frank Anthony estimated that 95 per cent of Anglo-Indians remained in India after Partition, and that there were about 8000 in Pakistan (5000 in Punjab, 2000 in Sind and 1000 in East Bengal). Anthony (1969) op. cit., p. 202. S. Lahiri (2001) ‘South Asians in post-imperial Britain: decolonisation and imperial legacy’, in S. Ward (ed.) British Culture and the End of Empire,

244

25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

NO T E S T O PP. 111—16

Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 200–216. Also see Ballard (1994); R. Ballard (2003) ‘The South Asian presence in Britain and its transnational connections’, in Parekh et al., op. cit., pp. 197–222; and Brah (1996) op. cit. Brah (1996) op. cit., p. 21. See, for example, L. McDowell (2003) ‘The particularities of place: geographies of gendered moral responsibililities among Latvian migrant workers in 1950s Britain’, Transactions 28: 19–34; L. McDowell (2004) ‘Narratives of family, community and waged work: Latvian European Volunteer worker women in post-war Britain’, Women’s History Review 13: 23–56. Brah (1996) op. cit., p.24. Ibid., p. 24. Anglo-Indian Review, May 1947. Anglo-Indian Review, June 1947. Bridge and Fedorowich (2003) op. cit., p. 3. Anglo-Indian Review, October 1934. There is a wide literature on racial ‘passing’. See, for example, A. Piper (1992) ‘Passing for white, passing for black’, Transition 58: 4–32; V. Smith (1994) ‘Reading the intersection of race and gender in narratives of passing’, Diacritics 24: 43–57; W. Sollors (1997) Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: a Thematic Analysis of Interracial Literature, New York: Oxford University Press; C.-A. Tyler (1994) ‘Passing: narcissism, identity, and difference’, Differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6: 212–248; G. Wald (2000) Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bower (1939) op. cit., pp. 124–5. Bower is quoting Dover (1937) op. cit., p. 38. Anglo-Indian Review, December 1939. Ibid. Also see Bower (1939) op. cit. J.R. Minto (1974) Graham of Kalimpong, Edinburgh: William Blackwood. For more on Dr Graham’s Homes today, visit www.drgrahamshomes.co.uk. Anglo-Indian Journal, July 1900. Ibid. Anglo-Indian Review, February 1944. For more on black children brought up in Dr Barnardo’s homes, see C. Bressey (2002) ‘Forgotten histories: three stories of black girls from Barnardo’s Victorian archive’, Women’s History Review 11: 351–374. Snell (1944) op. cit., pp. 38–39. Anglo-Indian Review, March 1939 and May 1944. Anglo-Indian Review, May 1947. Ibid. Anglo-Indian Review, November 1947. However, several of my interviewees told me that Frank Anthony privately encouraged individual Anglo-Indians to migrate. One interpretation of Anthony’s desire to dissuade the community from migrating in large numbers was that it would erode his political influence. This influence extended far beyond

NO T E S T O PP. 117—19

47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58

245

community politics, as he was a member of the central legislature since 1942, one of the first two nominated Anglo-Indian MPs until his death in 1993, was a strong supporter of the Congress Party, and acted as Indira Gandhi’s barrister. In 1967, he declined an offer from the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, to serve as Governor of the Punjab. Doing so, according to de Mellow, ‘demonstrated his utter selflessness and single-minded devotion and dedication to the service and welfare of his community’. Anthony also founded the All-India Anglo-Indian Education Society, which runs four schools named after him. de Mellow (1970) op. cit. Anglo-Indian Review, November 1947. Anglo-Indian Review, October 1944. Anglo-Indian Review, September 1946. Baucom (1999) op. cit., p. 9. The extent to which the British Nationality Act was racialized is the subject of debate. See, for example, R. Hansen (2000) Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press; K. Paul (1997) Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; and I. Spencer (1997) British Immigration Policy since 1939: the Making of Multi-Racial Britain, London: Routledge. A. Dummett and A. Nicol (1990) Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law, London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p. 134. Paul (1997) op. cit., p. 17. Hansen (2000) op. cit., p. 35. Paul (2001) op. cit., p. 187. Ibid. I. Spencer (1997) op. cit., p. 55. R. Kershaw and M. Pearsall (2000) Immigrants and Aliens: a Guide to Sources on UK Immigration and Citizenship, London: Public Record Office. Later Acts imposed further restrictions on immigration. In 1968, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act required potential migrants to prove that they, their parents or grandparents had been born in the UK. In 1971, the Immigration Act required Commonwealth citizens – like citizens of other countries – to have prospective employers in order to come to the UK for employment. These restrictions made it increasingly difficult for Anglo-Indians – and many other people – to migrate to Britain. A revised Immigration Act in 1973 enabled those people with at least one British-born grandparent to migrate to Britain, and Labour’s Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, ‘estimated that there are at least one million Anglo-Indians presently restricted who will have right of free entry.’ Daily Mirror 26 January 1973, quoted in G. Stewart (1973) ‘Some Anglo-Indians may feel happy’, Hindustan Standard, 23 March. This is a considerable over-estimate of how many Anglo-Indians were descended from one British-born grandparent. Most Anglo-Indians migrated to Australia in the mid-1960s and 1970s rather than to Britain. M.H.B. Lethbridge (1950) Working of the British Nationality Act in India. This was a 29-page report compiled for the Office of the UK High Commissioner, New Delhi. FO 372/7104, p. 4.

246 59

60 61

62

63

64 65

66

67

68 69 70

71

NO T E S T O PP. 119—21

Letter from the British High Commissioner, Karachi, to the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, 28 March 1951. DO 35/3541, National Archives, London. The 5528 people automatically included on his Record were made up of 2559 men, 1676 women and 1293 children. By December 1950, the Record of the High Commissioner in New Delhi included 33,580 people as UK citizens. Letter from Sir Archibald Nye, UK High Commissioner, to P.C. Gordon-Walker, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, 28 December 1950. FO 372/7104; Report on the working of the British Nationality Act, 1948, in India. Lethbridge’s report (see note 58) was included with this letter. Anglo-Indian Review, November 1948. Letter from J.W.D. Locker, Office of the UK High Commissioner, New Delhi, to F.H. Cleobury, Commonwealth Relations Office, London, 4 February 1949. DO 142/396. National Archives, London. Lethbridge noted that ‘the great majority of Anglo-Indians, who have no interests outside this country, have followed the good advice given them by their leaders, and have not applied for registration.’ Lethbridge’s report (see note 58), p. 18. DO 35/3541, National Archives, London. Statutory Registration of Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies under the British Nationality Act, 1948. Summary of position at 31.12.50; and Supplementary Report on the working of the British Nationality Act, 1948, in India. DO 35/6163, National Archives, London, 1953. Dominions Office and Commonwealth Relations Office: original correspondence; plight of Anglo-Indians in Pakistan and India. Nationality and General Department, General 1954–8. Ibid. DO 35/3541 (see note 62). Applications under Section 12(6) included the minor children of the applicant, so the number of people in each case exceeded the number of applications. In Pakistan, the 662 successful applications accounted for 1016 people, and the 324 unsuccessful applications accounted for 702 people. For more on the significance of genealogical records for Anglo-Indians, see L. Bear (2001) ‘Public genealogies: documents, bodies and nations in Anglo-Indian railway family histories’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 35: 355–388. Letters from the Society of Genealogists to Mrs E Davies, Calcutta, 14 November 1949. Box 1/107; and to Florence Ortiger, Farnborough, Hants., 26 September 1949. Box 1/148. Letter from the Society of Genealogists to Dorothy Gilby, Karachi, 23 May 1950. Box 2/332. Letter from the Society of Genealogists to Mrs Zoe Andrews, Calcutta, 9 November 1949. Letter from the Society of Genealogists to M.H.B. Lethbridge, 5 December 1949. Box 1/417; letter from the Society of Genealogists to W.F. Coombs, 4 August 1949. Box 1/56. See Box 1/417, for correspondence between the Society of Genealogists and the UK High Commission in New Delhi.

N O T E S TO PP . 121—6

247

72 Letter from M.H.B. Lethbridge to the Society of Genealogists, 11 November 1949. 73 Letter from N.A. Roe to the Society of Genealogists, 5 August 1949. Box 1/92. 74 Letter from Mrs D. Merritt-Webb to the Society of Genealogists, 21 October 1949. Box 1/104. Another correspondent from Pakistan, Mrs G.M. Fraser, wrote on 13 September 1949 that ‘with the division of India, we must now leave and find a new home in our ‘‘Forbears’’ [sic] country’. Box 1/146. 75 Letter from Ross McMullen to the Society of Genealogists, 8 September 1949. Box 1/141. 76 Letter from Edward Passanah to the Society of Genealogists, 24 September 1949. Box 1/161. 77 Letter from Stella Hunter to the Society of Genealogists, 6 April 1950. Box 2/ 244. 78 Letter from the Society of Genealogists to F.W. Smith, Kharagpur, 14 November 1949. Box 1/152. 79 Letter from the Society of Genealogists to C.V. Schunker, Calcutta, 1 May 1950. Box 2/213. 80 Although civil registration in Ireland only began in 1864, and many Irish genealogical records were destroyed when the Four Courts in Dublin were blown up in the Anglo-Irish War in 1922. Letter from Society of Genealogists to C.M. Probett, Calcutta, 4 October 1949. Box 1/162. 81 Letter written on behalf of D.M. Cleary, Office of the UK High Commissioner, New Delhi, to B. Cockram, Commonwealth Relations Office, 1 March 1950. DO 142/396, National Archives, London. 82 Letter from Nye to Gordon-Walker (see note 59). 83 Letter from Cleary to Cockram (see note 81). 84 R. Maher (1946) Going Indian, Clarion Series No. 28, Calcutta: Calcutta Anglo-Indian Study Circle, pp. 9–11. 85 S. Cairns (ed.) (2004) Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy, London: Routledge; King (1984) op. cit.; K. Mitchell (2004) ‘Conflicting landscapes of dwelling and democracy in Canada’, in Cairns, op. cit., pp. 142–164. 86 Miller (2001) op. cit.; S. Thompson (1994) ‘Suburbs of opportunity: the power of home for migrant women’, in K. Gibson and S. Watson (eds) Metropolis Now: Planning and the Urban in Contemporary Australia, Leichhardt, NSW: Pluto Press, pp. 33–45; D. Tolia-Kelly (2004) ‘Locating processes of identification: studying the precipitates of re-memory through artefacts in the British Asian home’, Transactions 29: 314–329. 87 Including A. Ong (1999) Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 88 In my interviews, domestic work was seen as primarily the responsibility of women, and the domestic challenges of setting up homes in Britain impacted most directly on them. This is not to imply, however, that domestic work is, or should be, seen as women’s work; rather, it recognizes the gendered inequalities that persist in both paid and unpaid domestic work. For more on gendered, domestic divisions of labour, see S. Bowlby, S. Gregory and

248

89 90 91

92

93 94

95

96 97 98

NO T E S T O PP. 126—34

L. McKie (1997) ‘Doing home: patriarchy, caring and space’, Women’s Studies International Forum 20: 343–350; T. Chapman (1999) ‘ ‘‘You’ve got him well trained’’: the negotiation of roles in the domestic sphere’, in Chapman and Hockey, op. cit., pp. 163–180; and A. Doucet (1995) ‘Gender equality and gender differences in household work and parenting’, Women’s Studies International Forum 18: 271–284. Maher (1946) op. cit., pp. 3–4. Anglo-Indian Review, July 1947. ‘A memorandum on Anglo-Indians’, sent from the Office of the High Commissioner, New Delhi, to the Commonwealth Relations Office, 5 July 1960. DO 196/76. National Archives, London. As Antoinette Burton writes, the experiences and opinions of servants themselves are usually ‘unstoried’ in the archives, and ‘no archive, however antagonistic, fails to inscribe power – even and especially the power of some women over their social subordinates, both male and female’. Burton (2003) op. cit., pp. 17–18. Also see ‘Memory-work in Java’ by Ann Laura Stoler, with Karen Strassler, in Stoler (2002) op. cit. Moore (1986b), p. 122. R. Pearson (1954) Eastern Interlude: a Social History of the European Community in Calcutta, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., p. 229. Also see B. Nichols (1944) Verdict on India, London: Jonathan Cape and, in critical response, Jog (1945) op. cit. and Anthony (1969) op. cit. The name ‘Middlerace’ has early antecedents. John Ricketts, the Anglo-Indian leader who presented the East Indians’ Petition to the British parliament in 1830, was described as ‘Middlerace’ and mocked as ‘tongue-tied, gauche, and [for mistaking] the liveried doorman at the Company’s offices in London for the Chairman of the Company’. Hawes (1996) op. cit., p. 140. Hawes is citing ‘Confessions of an Eurasian’, in Anglo-India; Social, Moral and Political; Being a Collection of Papers from the Asiatic Journal I, London: W.H. Allen, pp. 395–402. The term ‘strange encounters’ is from S. Ahmed (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, London: Routledge. Also see S. Lahiri (2003) ‘Performing identity: colonial migrants, passing and mimicry between the wars’, Cultural Geographies 10: 408–423. Ahmed (2000) op. cit., p. 14. R. Liddle (2002) ‘An age-old prejudice’, The Guardian, G2, 29 October. Other interviewees told me about Anglo-Indians who claimed southern European descent. For example, one interviewee told me that her cousin had married an American, and always told him that her colour was through her Spanish grandmother. She didn’t have a Spanish grandmother obviously. She only told her son a few years ago . . . He had no idea that we were Anglo-Indian. As far as he was concerned, yes, his mother was born in India, she had an English father and a grandmother who had been Spanish.

NO T E S T O PP. 135—41

249

99 For more on the classification of ‘mixed race’ in the British census and other official statistics, see C. Owen (2001) ‘ ‘‘Mixed race’’ in official statistics’, in Parker and Song, op. cit., pp. 134–153. 100 For more information, visit www.indiaman.com and www.fibis.org.

CHAPTER 6 MIXED DESCENT, MIGRATION AND MULTICULTURALISM: ANGLO-INDIANS IN AUSTRALIA SINCE 1947 1 Cablegram from Calwell, Minister for Immigration, to Sir Iven Mackay, Australian High Commissioner in New Delhi, 26 May 1947: NAA: A 436/1, 1949/5/6773. 2 Anon. (1947) ‘Migrants arrive: Manoora contingent at Fremantle’, West Australian, 16 August. 3 Newsreel, ‘Immigrants’ Arrival’, Westralian News, 15 August 1947. 4 J. Jupp (1998) Immigration, 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press; H.I. London (1970) Non-White Immigration and the ‘White Australia Policy’, New York: New York University Press; A.C. Palfreeman (1967) The Administration of the White Australia Policy, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. 5 Twenty-three Poles also travelled to Australia on HMAS Manoora, as discussed more fully in note 42 below. NAA: A 436/1, 1949/5/18: India – Emigration of British Subjects to Australia, Ship Manoora, Part II. 6 For more on imperial photography, see J. Ryan (1997) op. cit. and Schwartz and Ryan (2003) op. cit. 7 West Australian, 16 August 1947: ‘Migrants arrive: Manoora contingent at Fremantle’. 8 C. Voight-Graf (2003) ‘Indians at home in the Antipodes: migrating with PhDs, bytes or kava in their bags’, in Parekh et al. op. cit., pp. 142–164, p. 146. Also see M.M. de Lepervanche (1984) Indians in a White Australia: an Account of Race, Class and Indian Immigration to Eastern Australia, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin. 9 Many Anglo-Indians also migrated to Canada, particularly in the 1950s. I am focusing on the two main migration flows to Britain and to Australia. 10 Newsletter of the Anglo-Indian Association of Canberra (1998). As Joe Bailey writes, this figure represents ‘those people born in India, with Christianity as their religion and English as their mother tongue’. 11 Voight-Graf (2003) op. cit. According to Voight-Graf, there are more than 200,000 Indians in Australia today, of whom 110,000 were born in India, 60,000 were born in Australia, 40,000 are Indo-Fijian ‘twice migrants’, and 15,000 are Indians and their offspring born in different countries. For more on the diverse Indian diaspora in Australia, see S.P. Awasthi and A. Chandra (1994) ‘Migration from India to Australia’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 3: 393–409; Bilimoria (1996) op.cit; de Lepervanche (1984) op. cit.; and Gabbi (1998) op. cit. 12 For two other studies of Anglo-Indians in Australia, see A. Gilbert (1996) ‘The Anglo-Indians in Australia, from unsuccessful caste members to attaining

250

13

14

15 16

17

NO T E S T O PP. 142—3

immigrants: an examination of Anglo-Indian labour force performance and their life perceptions’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Monash University, Melbourne; E. Lewin (2002) ‘Anglo-Indian women in Western Australia: past, present and future identities’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Edith Cowan University, Perth. Both of these theses focus on Anglo-Indians after their resettlement in Australia, and do not address the migration of Anglo-Indians under the White Australia Policy in any detail. S. Gunew (2004) Haunted Nations: the Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms, London: Routledge. For more on Australian multiculturalism, see Ahmed (2000) op. cit.; I. Ang and J. Stratton (1998) ‘Multiculturalism in crisis: the new politics of race and national identity in Australia’, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 2: 22–41; S. Gunew (1994) Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press; G. Hage (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Annandale: Pluto Press; E. Vasta and S. Castles (eds) (1996) The Teeth are Smiling: the Persistence of Racism in Multicultural Australia, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. For more on white settler identity and belonging in Australia, see M. Dixson (1999) The Imaginary Australian: Anglo-Celts and Identity – 1788 to the Present, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press; P. Read (2000) Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. J. Collins (1988) Migrant Hands in a Distant Land: Australia’s Post-War Immigration, Sydney: Pluto Press; R. Fincher (1987) ‘Gender, age and ethnicity in immigration for an Australian nation’, Environment and Planning A 29: 217–236; B. Murphy (1993) The Other Australia: Experiences of Migration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quoted in London (1970) op. cit., p. 12. Commonwealth of Australia (1997) Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Children from their Families, Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia; R, MacDonald (1995) Between Two Worlds: the Commonwealth Government and the Removal of Aboriginal Children of Part-Descent in the Northern Territory, Alice Springs: IAD Press. Also see H. Gooder and J.M. Jacobs (2002) ‘Belonging and non-belonging: the apology in a reconciling nation’, in Blunt and McEwan op. cit., pp. 200–213. Shepard (1930) op. cit. Deborah remembered that her mother had strongly objected to the description of Anglo-Indians as ‘a marooned people’. She told me that a writer called Pearl Buck had described Anglo-Indians waiting for a ship that would never sail, we were going to be sort of like marooned in India. . . . We were neither one side or the other . . . [we had] a foot in both camps, and we were now going to be abandoned in India, and we were hoping that the British would bring us back to England, or take us to Australia. . . . And [my mother] resented this very much. . . . She wrote to Pearl Buck . . . saying well this was totally incorrect, that we would make our own way, we’d never ask for any favours.

N O T E S TO PP . 144—7

18 19 20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33

34

251

The Australian Department of Immigration described the use of HMAS Manoora to evacuate ‘Australians and others marooned in India’. Memorandum from Heyes to External Affairs, 26 May 1947; NAA: A 436/1, 1949/5/6773. Shepard (1930) op. cit., pp. 21–22. Anglo-Indian Review, November 1947. Memorandum from CT Moodie (Official Secretary, Office of the High Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Australia in India) to the Secretary, Department of External Affairs, Canberra, 10 April 1947: NAA: A 1068/7, IC47/46/1; 17 September 1947: A 1838/1, 169/10/8/2. This clearly meant that anyone with one Indian parent was unable to migrate to Australia. Anglo-Indians: question of passport facilities; notes of interview with Mr C.B. Duke, Joint Secretary, and Mr A.K. Sen, Assistant Secretary, Department of External Affairs, Government of India, New Delhi, 20 March 1947. The notes were dated 24 March 1947. NAA: A 1068/7, M47/9/2/5. See, for example, ‘Anglo-Indians: question of passport facilities’, 24 March 1947: NAA: A 1068/7, M47/9/2/5. At this stage, in all references to such marriages, the possibility of a ‘fully eligible’ woman marrying an Indian or an Anglo-Indian man was not considered. Moodie to Heydon, External Affairs, 1 February 1947: NAA: A 1068/7 M47/9/ 2/5. Memorandum on Anglo-Indians by Peters, Department of Immigration, 6 March 1947: NAA: A 446/182, 1960/66167. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Anglo-Indians: question of passport facilities (see note 21). This form was revised in August 1947. NAA: A 1068/7, IC47/31/29. West Australian, 14 April 1947. This newspaper article is in the National Archives of Australia NAA: A 436/1, 49/5/6773. Ibid. An extract from a letter written by a passenger on SS Mulbera to an Australian in Delhi was included by Moodie to the Department of External Affairs, 1 May 1947: NAA: A 1068/7, IC47/3/190. Also see an article in The Argus, 10 June 1947, which was filed by the Department of Immigration. NAA: A 436/1, 1949/5/6773. Calwell was closely involved in this scheme, and many of the arrangements were made through personal communications between himself and Sir Iven Mackay, Australian High Commissioner in New Delhi. See their correspondence in NAA: A 436/1, 1949/5/18 and A 1068/7, IC47/46/1. An article in the Melbourne Herald estimated that there were no more than 500 Australians in India, ‘a large proportion of whom are missionaries or teachers at missionary schools’. It also estimated that there were 40,000 members of the British Army who would leave India soon after Independence, 9000 British members of the Indian Army, who would remain there, and about 80,000 ‘Britishers and their families . . . in commercial activities’. K. Cairns (1947), ‘No migrant flood likely from India’, Melbourne Herald, 24

252

35

36

37 38 39 40

41

42

43

44

NO T E S T O PP. 147—9

July. This article was filed by the Department of Immigration: NAA: A436/1 1949/5/18. Minute by Iven G Mackay, Australian High Commissioner in New Delhi, 25 March 1947, ‘on the proposal of the Minister for Immigration to evacuate European refugees from India in the event of an emergency.’ NAA: A 1068/7, IC47/46/1. Although the Manoora had the capacity for 1280 passengers, Calwell’s scheme advertised 900 places. 257 passengers planned to disembark at Fremantle, 222 at Sydney (with some travelling on to Brisbane), 163 at Melbourne, and 94 at Adelaide. Press release issued by the Department of Immigration, 6 August 1947. NAA: A 436/1, 1949/5/18. Cablegram from Calwell to Mackay, 27 May 1947; NAA: A 1068/7, IC47/46/1. Daily Telegraph, 25 June 1947. This article was filed by the Department of Immigration: NAA: A 436/1, 1949/5/18. Cairns (1947) op. cit. 30 May 1947: NAA: A 436/1, 1949/5/6773: press statement ‘Shipping for Australians in India’. The use of HMAS Manoora was reported in Indian and Australian newspapers. 2 September 1947: anonymous note prepared ‘for the Minister’ entitled ‘Manoora’: NAA: A 1068/7, IC47/46/1. Cablegram from office of the Australian High Commissioner, New Delhi, to Department of Immigration, 8 September 1947: NAA: A 1068/7, IC47/46/1. These rumours were strongly denied: ‘There is no foundation for rumour that Anglo-Indians on MANOORA were rejected on arrival and are being returned in that vessel. Cannot understand why such a rumour started and any statements of this kind are entirely without fact.’ NAA: A 446/182, 1960/66167. See, for example, a cablegram from Calwell to Mackay, 21 July 1947, in which he wrote, ‘I am particularly anxious to ensure that Manoora shall not leave India with empty berths and leave to your discretion to allocate to suitable Polish men, women and children accommodation remaining when requirements for British subjects are fully satisfied.’ One week later, Calwell reiterated that it was ‘most important Manoora should sail with full complement. All berths must be filled. Strongly urge this be achieved by liberal selection of Polish men, women, children.’ 26 July 1947, NAA: A 436/1, 1949/5/18. Despite an initial proposal to accept up to 300 Polish men to work for the Tasmanian Hydro Electric Commission, in the event only 23 Poles travelled on the Manoora. All of these passengers disembarked at Fremantle and were received and cared for by the Catholic Episcopal Migration and Welfare Association. NAA: A 436/1, 1949/5/18: India – Emigration of British Subjects to Australia, Ship Manoora, Part II. Report on ‘Manoora’ written ‘For the Minister’, 2 September 1947: NAA: A 1068/7, IC47/46/1. In contrast to this official account, an Anglo-Indian woman whose sister travelled to Australia on the Manoora told me that ‘the High Commissioner in Delhi, he was a very nice man. He was just letting them in, that’s how we came here.’ Cablegram from Department of Immigration to Australian High Commissioner, New Delhi, 16 December 1947: NAA: A 1068/7, IC47/46/1.

NO T E S T O PP. 149—52

253

45 Cablegram from Department of Immigration to Australian High Commissioner, New Delhi, 31 December 1947: NAA: A 1068/7, 1947/46/1. 46 Cablegram from Dempsey to Peters, 17 September 1947: NAA: A 1838/1, 169/10/8/2. 47 Memorandum from John Dempsey, office of the Australian High Commissioner, New Delhi, to the Department of Immigration, Canberra, 28 August 1947: NAA: A 446/182, 1960/66167. 48 Memorandum from JLA, External Affairs, 26 September 1947: NAA: A 1838/ 1, 169/10/8/2. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Memorandum from Heyes, Immigration, to Secretary, External Affairs, 20 January 1949: NAA: A 446/182, 1960/66167. This ruling was to be kept ‘strictly secret’. 52 Letter from Heyes to Lt. Col. N.W.W. Johnstone, Australian Migration Officer, Office of the High Commissioner in New Delhi, 9 June 1949: NAA: A 446/ 182, 1960/66167. 53 Department of Immigration: paper on the conditions governing the admission of persons of mixed blood to Australia, 20 September 1950. NAA: A 446/158, 1970/95021. This paper also noted the recent increase in number of applications from people of mixed descent: ‘The fact that large numbers of Dutch and American soldiers, who were partly coloured, served in Australia during the war and that political changes occurred in Asian countries which made the position of Eurasians living there less secure than formerly, led to a very big increase of applications by partly coloured persons for permission to settle in Australia.’ 54 Letter to the Society of Genealogists, 12 November 1950. Society of Genealogists, Box 2/458. In contrast, a letter written by an Australian War Widow to the Australian Prime Minister in 1961 was concerned to establish whether her Anglo-Indian daughter-in-law could migrate to Australia. Her son had married in Britain, but now sought to return home. As the Private Secretary to the Prime Minister noted, ‘As she does not wish her son or his wife to be hurt, she is making these enquiries confidentially. If they should prove fruitless, she can tell her son and he would never make application for his wife.’ In reply, P.R. Heydon from the Department of Immigration wrote that his wife would be eligible to enter Australia for permanent residence, although she would have to apply for Australian citizenship after she had done so. Letter from Miss L.H. Craig, Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, to the Department of Immigration, 22 November 1961; reply from P.R. Heydon, Department of Immigration, 21 February 1962: NAA: A 446/182, 1960/66167. 55 Letter from the Society of Genealogists, 8 December 1950. Society of Genealogists, Box 2/458. 56 Memorandum from Heyes, Department of Immigration, to the Minister of Immigration: ‘Criteria of eligibility for persons of mixed race’. 21 March 1957: NAA: A 446/158, 1970/95021. These criteria were circulated to all Australian consulates in May 1957.

254 57

58 59 60 61 62 63

64

65

66

67 68

69 70

71 72

NO T E S T O PP. 153—5

Memorandum from G.C. Lewis, third Secretary, Australian High Commission, Karachi, to the Secretary, Department of External Affairs, 18 May 1957: NAA: A 446/158, 1970/95021. Lewis also noted that it was difficult and expensive for applicants from East Pakistan to travel with their families to Karachi for an interview. Memorandum from Heyes, Department of Immigration, to Secretary, Department of External Affairs, 13 December 1957: NAA: A 446/158, 1970/95021. R. Dyer (1988) ‘White’, Screen 29: 44–64, p. 45. Letter from A.L. Nutt, Acting Secretary for Immigration, to Minister for Immigration, undated 1957: NAA: 1446/158, 1970/95021. Paper for Cabinet by Hubert Opperman, 1 September 1964: NAA: A 5827/1, 1166190, Volume 13/AGENDUM 406. Ibid. Cabinet Minute: Decision No. 481: Submission No. 406: The Policy for the Admission of Persons of Mixed-Race: NAA: A 5827/1, 1166190, Volume 13/ AGENDUM 406. Department of Immigration, Circular: rules for the admission to Australia, as settlers, of persons of mixed race, 1 October 1965: NAA: A 446/158, 1970/ 95021. Instruction to overseas posts: policy for the admission of persons of mixed race, from the Department of Immigration, 29 October 1964: NAA: A 446/158, 1970/95021. Although many restrictions of the White Australia Policy were eased in the mid-1960s, it was not until 1973 that the ‘racial criterion in immigration policy’ was abolished and replaced with a skills-based selection criterion. B. York (1996) ‘From assimilation to multiculturalism: Australian experience, 1945–1989’, Studies in Australian Ethnic History 14: Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies, Australian National University. This circular also distinguished between applications from people of mixed descent who might be facing hardship and discrimination (from, for example, India, Ceylon, Burma, Mauritius and the Seychelles) and those who were not (from, for example, the UK as a result of migration from the West Indies, from the Netherlands where there had been considerable resettlement from the Netherlands East Indies and ‘elsewhere generally as the result of inter-marriage or extra-marital unions’). Instruction to overseas posts (see note 65). Ibid. The wording remained the same as Opperman’s original proposal to the Cabinet decision on 1 and 15 September 1964: NAA: A 5827/1, 1166190, Volume 13/AGENDUM 406. K. Rivett (1975) Australia and the Non-White Migrant, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, p. 204. Memorandum from N.L. Harris, Trade Commissioner, Calcutta, to Secretary, Department of Trade and Industry, Canberra, 13 December 1968: NAA: A 446/182, 1960/66167. A. Ganguli (1973) ‘The Anglo-Indians: the Thames or the Ganges?’, Statesman (Calcutta), 6 October. P.T. Nair Collection. Anthony (1969) op. cit.

NO T E S T O PP. 155—61

255

73 Ibid., p. 383. 74 de Mellow (1970) op. cit. Many Anglo-Indians told me that the community is largely loyal to the Congress Party, although many also told me that the community as a whole is not known for its interest in party politics. Frank Anthony was closely involved with the Congress Party, and acted as Indira Gandhi’s barrister. Nehru was highly regarded by many Anglo-Indians, in part because of his western education and sympathies. More recently, Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of Rajiv Gandhi, and leader of the Congress Party, was hailed by some as Anglo-Indian because she is domiciled in India and has European paternal ancestry. The vitriolic opposition to Sonia Gandhi from other parties such as the BJP has focused to a great extent on her European birth, and this is widely assumed to be one of the main reasons why she declined the office of Prime Minister after the unexpected victory of Congress in the 2004 elections. 75 Anthony (1969) op. cit., p. 383. 76 Ibid. 77 F. Anthony (1970–1) Presidential address at the AGM of the AIAIA, 1970, The Review, December/January. 78 R. Appleyard, A. Ray and A. Segal (1988) The Ten Pound Immigrants, London: Boxtree; J.A. Hammerton (2001) ‘Ten pound poms revisited: battlers’ tales and British migration to Australia, 1947–1971’, Journal of Australian Studies 68: 86–96; G. Hugo (1995) ‘Migration between Australia and Britain: past and present’, in D. Lowe (ed.) Immigration and Integration: Australia and Britain, London: Menzies Centre for Australian Studies; A. Richardson (1974) British Immigrants and Australia, Canberra: Australian National University Press; and A. Thomson (2003) ‘ ‘‘I live on my memories’’: British return migrants and the possession of the past’, Oral History 31: 55–65. Thomson writes that most of the British immigrants were working-class, and about one quarter of them returned to Britain. 79 Departmental British (UK) Instruction no. 2 from Heydon, Department of Immigration, 11 December 1964: NAA: A 446/18, 1970/95021. 80 Memorandum from M. Rockley, Department of Immigration, to Assistant Secretary, 22 July 1965: NAA: A 446/158, 1970/95021. 81 As explained by Martin, who migrated to Australia in 1973, Those that left straight after Independence . . . the government allowed them to take all the money that they had and most of them all headed for the UK. So they had all their money, you were allowed that, but then the government, they found that the money was emptying out now, as thousands were leaving . . . then they started putting restriction rules. 82 An interviewee in Melbourne told me about the work of Father John Murphy of the Catholic Migration Office in helping Anglo-Indians find accommodation. 83 Don Chipp, quoted in A. Ramsey (1972) ‘Chipp rebuffed in row on multiracial society’, The Australian, 3 May. 84 Arthur Calwell quoted in ibid.

256 85 86

NO T E S T O PP. 162—73

K.E. Enderby, quoted in ibid. Arthur Calwell, quoted in P. Akerman (1972), ‘The new people in the Australian west’, The Australian, 4 May. 87 Ibid. Also see Rivett (1975) op. cit., pp. 205–206. 88 J. Poole-Johnson, quoted in Akerman (1972) op. cit. 89 J. Huelin, quoted in ibid. Other articles criticized Calwell’s xenophobia. Robert Duffield imagined a future ‘Brown Australia’, emerging from ‘a gradual, voluntary, cheerful intermarrying of the races, a sharing and enriching of cultures and languages from which a type of Australian emerged who could truly be called multi-racial’. R. Duffield (1972) ‘Time to get ready for some mixed blood’, The Australian, 5 May. Also see J. Murray (1972) ‘Our national phobia of being submerged’, The Australian, 8 May. 90 R. Dougherty (1972) ‘Fair go for ‘‘chocolate’’ Australians’, letter to The Australian, 9 May. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. Many Anglo-Indians would clearly disagree with Dougherty’s interpretation of this as a ‘sign of endearment’. 93 Anthony (1970–1) op. cit. 94 Instruction to overseas posts (see note 65). 95 S. Brawley (1995) The White Peril: Foreign Relations and Asian Immigration to Australasia and North America, 1919–1978, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press; R. Hassan and G. Tan (1990) ‘Asian migrants in Australia: a socio-economic study’, Immigrants and Minorities 9: 21–45. and C. Inglis, S. Gunasekaran, G. Sullivan and C.-T. Wu (eds) (1992) Asians in Australia: the Dynamics of Migration and Settlement, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. For more on the contested and ambivalent imaginings of Australia located within Asia, see I. Ang (1996) ‘The curse of the smile: ambivalence and the ‘‘Asian’’ woman in Australian multiculturalism’, Feminist Review 52: 36–49; I. Ang and J. Stratton (1998) ‘Asianising Australia: notes toward a critical transnationalism in cultural studies’, Cultural Studies 10: 16–36; S. Schech and J. Haggis (1998) ‘Postcolonialism, identity, and location: being white Australian in Asia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16: 615–629. 96 As discussed above, Anglo-Indians were positioned in materially very different ways from British migrants. The latter usually travelled to Australia on £10 passages, and stayed in hostels on arrival, whereas Anglo-Indians had to pay their own fares and arrange their own accommodation. 97 Hage (1998) op. cit., p. 19. 98 Ahmed (2000) op. cit., pp. 112–113. 99 www.alphalink.com.au/agilbert. 100 HMAS Manoora has been in the news more recently than 1947. Whilst the troopship that Anglo-Indians travelled on in August was decommissioned from the Royal Australian navy in December that year, and sold for scrap metal in 1972 (www.navy.gov.au/spc/history/ships/manoora1.htm), another ship with the same name was commissioned in 1994 (www.navy.gov.au/ships/ manoora). In September 2001, a Norwegian frieghter rescued 433 mainly Afghan and Iraqi asylum seekers from drowning in the Pacific. Denied entry

NO T E S T O PP. 175—92

257

into Australian waters, they were then taken by HMAS Manoora, along with a further 224 asylum seekers, to the island of Naura, where there was a twoweek stand-off as many refused to leave the ship. ‘We will fish for them’, Guardian, 17 September 2001; ‘Refugee issue dominates debate’, Guardian, 8 October 2001. Migration, particularly by refugees and asylum seekers, continues to be a major area of political debate in Australia.

CHAPTER 7

AT HOME IN INDEPENDENT INDIA: POST-IMPERIAL DOMESTICITY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

1 Brah (1996) op. cit., p. 209. 2 Although see Caplan (2001) op. cit., and the project entitled ‘Breaking the silence: staying at home in an emigrant society’, based at the Irish Centre for Migration Studies, University College Cork: migration.ucc.ie/oralarchive/testing/ breaking/index.html. 3 As noted in Chapter 1, this estimate is from Frank Anthony. Other estimates differ. Wright (1970) op.cit. suggests that up to half of the community had migrated by 1970. 4 V.R. Gaikwad (1967) The Anglo-Indians: a Study in the Problems and Processes Involved in Emotional and Cultural Integration, Bombay: Asia Publishing House. 5 For more on the contested ways in which the Anglo-Indian community continued to be the subject of British official concern in the 1950s, see DO 35/ 6163 and DO 35/6437, National Archives, London. 6 As Trevor put it, ‘You are basically, after all, an Indian. Your passport does not say Anglo-Indian, it says very clearly Indian. It’s your community at the very most. . . . They’re not going to issue you with a British passport, they’re not going to get you a job in England. People have to come to terms with that.’ 7 For more on 36 Chowringhee Lane, see K.J. Cassity (2001) ‘Emerging from shadows: the ‘‘unhomed’’ Anglo-Indian of 36 Chowringhee Lane’, International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies 6 (www.alphalink.com.au/agilbert/chowri1.html ). ). Also see The Outhouse, a 1998 film written and directed by Leslie Carvalho, which centres on an Anglo-Indian woman and her family in Bangalore and their relationships with their Bengali landlords. 8 Photographs of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association AGM in December 1966 show a few Anglo-Indian women in saris. The Review, December/January 1966. For more on the politics of Indian dress, see A. Loomba (1997) ‘The long and saggy sari’, Women: a Cultural Review 8: 278–292; and E. Tarlo (1996) Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India. London: Hurst. 9 In contrast, Anglo-Indian teachers at Frank Anthony Public Schools are required to wear western dress. 10 The idea that Anglo-Indian women were now largely indistinguishable from other Indian women was echoed by an interviewee in Bangalore: ‘I don’t think you’ll be able to differentiate between an Anglo-Indian and an Indian girl now, unless you knew their background, their area, you would never know.’ 11 S.K. Gupta (1968) Marriage Among the Anglo-Indians, Lucknow: Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society, Uttar Pradesh, p. ix. The book draws on interviews

258

12

13 14 15 16

17

18

19 20 21

NO T E S T O PP. 193—209

with 40 (out of an estimated 200) Anglo-Indian households in Lucknow conducted in 1966. Ibid., p. 73. As Gupta also noted, ‘Out of the forty cases studied no divorce has been met with, inspite of the fact that it is the romantic love relation which is accepted by the community as the social ideal,’ p. ix. Ibid., pp. xiii, 34. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 39. For an anthropological study of marriage amongst Anglo-Indians in Madras, see Caplan (2001) op. cit. Also see H.M. Billimoria (1991) Attitude of Parsi Women to Marriage, Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House; M. Joseph (1994) Marriage among Indian Christians, Jaipur: Rawat Publications; and J. Sheela (2003) Women’s Marriage in India: Cultural Practices, Age and Mate Selection, New Delhi: Dominant Publishers and Distributors. B.R. Williams (2002) Anglo-Indians: Vanishing Remnants of a Bygone Era. Anglo-Indians in India, North America and the UK in 2000, Madras: Calcutta Tiljallah Relief, Inc., p. 25. For Patricia, ‘In our day it was unthinkable to marry outside the community, not only us, but every community, every community mustn’t marry outside the community. But now, everybody is marrying outside.’ This term means all mixed up. See Yule and Burnell (1996) op. cit. For more information on CTR, visit home.att.net/blairrw/wsb/index.html. The Tollygunge Homes are the subject of a recent documentary by Australian director Maree Delofski: A Calcutta Christmas: Stories of Friendship and Hope (1998), Film Australia Ltd. The portrayal of elderly residents in this film led to fundraising by the community in Australia.

CHAPTER 8

DOMICILE AND DIASPORA: CONCLUSIONS

1 Community websites include: www.anglo-indians.com; www.angloexchange.netfirms.com; and www.alphalink.com.au/agilbert, which publishes the International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies and Anglo-Indian Wallah. 2 Gregory (2004) op. cit.. 3 See Gooder and Jacobs (2002) op. cit.; J.M. Jacobs (1996) Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, London: Routledge; and M. McGuinness (2002) ‘Geographies with a difference? Citizenship and difference in postcolonial urban spaces’, in Blunt and McEwan, op.cit., pp. 99–114, for examples of work that engages with postcolonial geographies of the present. Also see C. McEwan (2003) ‘Material geographies and postcolonialism’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24: 340–355. 4 See, for example, Stoler (2002) op. cit., which draws on archival sources throughout but also includes one chapter (written with Karen Strassler, and entitled ‘Memory-work in Java’) that draws on interviews. 5 P. Jackson and J. Jacobs (1996) ‘Postcolonialism and the politics of race’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14: 1–3, p. 3.

NO T E S T O PP. 209—10

259

6 Mahtani (2002a) op. cit.; Olumide (2002) op. cit. 7 A number of Anglo-Indians in Britain and Australia told me that their grandchildren are more interested than their children in what it means to be an Anglo-Indian.

Bibliography

Abel, E. (1988) The Anglo-Indian Community: Survival in India. Delhi: Chanakya Publications. Ahmed, S. (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge. Ali, S. (2004) Mixed Race, Post-Race: New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices. Oxford: Berg. Alibhai-Brown, Y. and Montague, A. (1992) The Colour of Love: Mixed Race Relationships. London: Virago. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Ang, I. (1996) ‘The curse of the smile: ambivalence and the ‘‘Asian’’ woman in Australian multiculturalism.’ Feminist Review 52: 36–49. Ang, I. and Stratton, J. (1998a) ‘Multiculturalism in crisis: the new politics of race and national identity in Australia.’ Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 2: 22–41. Ang, I. and Stratton, J. (1998b) ‘Asianising Australia: notes toward a critical transnationalism in cultural studies.’ Cultural Studies 10: 16–36. Anon. (1920) Report of the Calcutta Domiciled Community Enquiry Committee, 1918– 19. Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Press. Anon. (1946) For You and Yours. Calcutta: Anglo-Indian Book Club. Anon. (1947) ‘Immigrants’ Arrival.’ Newsreel, Westralian News, 15 August. Anthony, F. (1969) Britain’s Betrayal in India: the Story of the Anglo-Indian Community. Bombay: Allied Publishers. Anthony, F. (1970–1) Presidential address at the AGM of the AIAIA, 1970, The Review, December/January. Appleyard, R., Ray, A. and Segal, A. (1988) The Ten Pound Immigrants. London: Boxtree. Arnold, D. (1983) ‘White colonization and labour in nineteenth-century India.’ The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 11: 133–158. Arnott, J. (1994) ‘Speak out, for example.’ In C. Camper (ed.) Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women. Toronto: Sister Vision, pp. 264–268. Awasthi, S.P. and Chandra, A. (1994) ‘Migration from India to Australia.’ Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 3: 393–409. Axel, B.K. (2001) The Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh ‘Diaspora’. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. First published 1958.

B I B L I O GR A P H Y

261

Ballard, R. (1994) Desh Pardesh: the South Asian Presence in Britain. London: C. Hurst. Ballard, R. (2003) ‘The South Asian presence in Britain and its transnational connections.’ In B. Parekh, G. Singh and S. Vertovec (eds) Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora. London: Routledge, pp. 197–222. Ballhatchet, K. (1980) Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Bannerji, H. (2000) ‘Projects of hegemony; towards a critique of Subaltern Studies, ‘‘Resolution of the Women’s Question’’.’ Economic and Political Weekly 35, 11 March: 902–920. Bates, C. (ed.) (2001) Community, Empire and Migration: South Asians in Diaspora. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Baucom, I. (1999) Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bear, L. (1994) ‘Miscegenations of modernity: constructing European respectability and race in the Indian railway colony, 1857–1931.’ Women’s History Review 3: 531–548. Bear, L. (1998) ‘Traveling modernity: capitalism, community and nation in the colonial governance of the Indian railways.’ Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan. Bear, L. (2001) ‘Public genealogies: documents, bodies and nations in AngloIndian railway family histories.’ Contributions to Indian Sociology 35: 355–388. Bell, M. (2002) ‘Inquiries as postcolonial devices: the Carnegie Corporation and poverty in South Africa.’ In A. Blunt and C. McEwan (eds) Postcolonial Geographies. London: Continuum, pp. 64–82. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bhachu, P. (1985) Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain. London: Tavistock. Bhatt, C. and Mukta, P. (2000) ‘Hindutva in the West: mapping the antinomies of diaspora nationalism.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 23: 407–441. Bilimoria, P. (1996) The Hindus and Sikhs in Australia. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Billimoria, H.M. (1991) Attitude of Parsi Women to Marriage. Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House. Bishop, P. (1995) An Archetypal Constable: National Identity and the Geography of Nostalgia. London: Athlone. Blickle, P. (2002) Heimat: a Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Blunt, A. (1994) Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York: Guilford. Blunt, A. (1999) ‘Imperial geographies of home: British domesticity in India, 1886–1925.’ Transactions 24: 421–440. Blunt, A. (2000a) ‘Embodying war: British women and domestic defilement in the Indian ‘‘Mutiny’’, 1857–8.’ Journal of Historical Geography 26: 403–428. Blunt, A. (2000b) ‘Spatial stories under siege: British women writing from Lucknow in 1857.’ Gender, Place and Culture 7: 229–246.

262

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blunt, A. (2002) ‘ ‘‘Land of our Mothers’’: home, identity and nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India.’ History Workshop Journal 54: 49–72. Blunt, A. (2003a) ‘Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain.’ International Journal of Population Geography 9: 281–294. Blunt, A. (2003b) ‘Collective memory and productive nostalgia: Anglo-Indian home-making at McCluskieganj.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21: 717–738. Blunt, A. (2003c) ‘Home and identity: life stories in text and in person.’ In A. Blunt, P. Gruffudd, J. May, M. Ogborn and D. Pinder (eds) Cultural Geography in Practice. London: Arnold, pp. 71–90. Blunt, A. and McEwan, C. (eds) (2002) Postcolonial Geographies. London: Continuum. Blunt, A. and Wills, J. (2000) Dissident Geographies: an Introduction to Radical Ideas and Practice. Harlow: Pearson. Blunt, W.S. (1885) Ideas about India. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co. Bost, S. (2002) Mulattos and Mestizas, 1850–2000: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Bower, J.A.H. (1939) Ambition Mocked our Useful Toil: Autobiographical Sketches and Musings on Anglo-Indian Problems. Madras: J.A.H. Bower. Bowlby, S., Gregory, S. and McKie, L. (1997) ‘Doing home: patriarchy, caring and space.’ Women’s Studies International Forum 20: 343–350. Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Bradley, H. (1999) ‘The seductions of the archive: voices lost and found.’ History of the Human Sciences 12: 107–122. Brah, A. (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Brawley, S. (1995) The White Peril: Foreign Relations and Asian Immigration to Australasia and North America, 1919–1978. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Bressey, C. (2002) ‘Forgotten histories: three stories of black girls from Barnardo’s Victorian archive.’ Women’s History Review 11: 351–374. Bridge, C. and Fedorowich, K. (2003) ‘Mapping the British world.’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31: 1–15. Brown, P. (1998) Anglo-Indian Food and Customs. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Bryden, I. and Floyd, J. (eds) (1999) Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Burton, A. (1998) At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Burton, A. (2001) ‘India, Inc? Nostalgia, memory and the empire of things.’ In S. Ward (ed.) British Culture and the End of Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 217–232. Burton, A. (2003) Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buscaglia-Salgado, J. (2003) Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cairns, S. (ed.) (2004) Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy. London: Routledge.

B I B L I O GR A P H Y

263

Camper, C. (ed.) (1994) Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women. Toronto: Sister Vision. Caplan, L. (2000) ‘Iconographies of Anglo-Indian women: gender constructs and contrasts in a changing society.’ Modern Asian Studies 34: 863–892. Caplan, L. (2001) Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World. Oxford: Berg. Cassity, K.J. (2001) ‘Emerging from shadows: the ‘‘unhomed’’ Anglo-Indian of 36 Chowringhee Lane.’ International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies 6 (www.alphalink. com.au/~agilbert/chowri~1.html). Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chambers, I. (1990) Border Dialogues. London: Routledge. Chapman, T. (1999) ‘ ‘‘You’ve got him well trained’’: the negotiation of roles in the domestic sphere.’ In T. Chapman and J. Hockey (eds) Ideal Homes: Social Change and Domestic Life. London: Routledge, pp. 163–180. Chapman, T. and Hockey, J. (eds) (1999) Ideal Homes: Social Change and Domestic Life. London: Routledge. Chatterjee, P. (1989) ‘The nationalist resolution of the women’s question.’ In K. Sangari and S. Vaid (eds) Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. New Delhi: Kali for Women, pp. 233–253. Chatterjee, P. (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chaudhuri, N. (1988) ‘Memsahibs and motherhood in nineteenth-century colonial India.’ Victorian Studies 31: 517–535. Chaudhuri, N. (1992) ‘Shawls, curry and rice in Victorian Britain.’ In N. Chaudhuri, and M. Strobel (eds) Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 231–246. Cieraad, I. (ed.) (1999) At Home: an Anthropology of Domestic Space. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Clay, J. (1992) John Masters: a Regimented Life. London: Michael Joseph. Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coelho, D. (1986) Orchids and Algebra: the Story of Dow Hill School. Hornchurch: K.B. Mainstone Publications. Collins, J. (1988) Migrant Hands in a Distant Land: Australia’s Post-War Immigration. Sydney: Pluto Press. Colmcille, M. Mother (1968) First the Blade: History of the IBVM (Loreto) in India, 1841–1962. Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay. Commonwealth of Australia (1997) Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Children from their Families. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

264

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cook, I., Crang, P. and Thorpe, M. (1999) ‘Eating into Britishness: multicultural imaginaries and the identity politics of food.’ In S. Roseneil and J. Seymour (eds) Practising Identities: Power and Resistance. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 223–248. Cook, I., Crang, P. and Thorpe, M. (2000) ‘Regions to be cheerful: geographies of culinary authenticity.’ In I. Cook, D. Crouch, S. Naylor and J. Ryan (eds) Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns: Perspectives on Cultural Geography. Harlow: Longman, pp. 109–139. Cook, I. and Harrison, M. (2003) ‘Cross over food: re-materializing postcolonial geographies.’ Transactions 28: 296–317. Corbridge, S. (1999) ‘ ‘‘The militarization of all Hindudom?’’ The Bharatiya Janata Party, the bomb, and the political spaces of Hindu nationalism.’ Economy and Society 28: 222–255. Craig, H.I. (1996) Under the Old School Topee. Rickmansworth: Hazel Innes Craig. Cully, R.E. (1910) The Euro-Asian or Anglo-Indian: a Burma Brochure by One of the Community. Rangoon: R. E. Culley. D’Cruz, G. (1999) ‘ ‘‘Representing’’ Anglo-Indians: a genealogical study.’ Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne. Dalrymple, W. (2003) White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India. London: Flamingo. David, D. (1999) ‘Imperial chintz: domesticity and empire.’ Victorian Literature and Culture 27: 569–577. Davidoff, L. (2003) ‘Gender and the ‘‘Great Divide’’: public and private in British gender history.’ Journal of Women’s History 15: 11–27. Davin, A. (1978) ‘Imperialism and motherhood.’ History Workshop Journal 5: 9–65. de Lepervanche, M.M. (1984) Indians in a White Australia: an Account of Race, Class and Indian Immigration to Eastern Australia. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin. de Mellow, M. (1970) ‘Petals on the Ganga.’ The Review, September/October. Derrida, J. (1995) Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dixson, M. (1999) The Imaginary Australian: Anglo-Celts and Identity – 1788 to the Present. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Doucet, A. (1995) ‘Gender equality and gender differences in household work and parenting.’ Women’s Studies International Forum 18: 271–284. Dover, C. (1929) Cimmerii? Or Eurasians and Their Future. Calcutta: The Modern Art Press. Dover, C. (1930) ‘Appendix A: The need for a comparative statistical survey of the community.’ In K. Wallace, The Eurasian Problem Constructively Approached. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. Dover, C. (1937) Half-Caste. London: Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd. Dummett, A. and Nicol, A. (1990) Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law. London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Dutt, K. L. (1990) In Search of a Homeland: Anglo-Indians and McCluskiegunge. Calcutta: Minerva. Dwyer, C. (2000) ‘Negotiating diasporic identities: young British South Asian Muslim women.’ Women’s Studies International Forum 23: 475–486.

B I B L I O GR A P H Y

265

Dwyer, C. (2002) ‘ ‘‘Where are you from?’’ Young British Muslim women and the making of ‘‘home’’.’ In A. Blunt and C. McEwan (eds) Postcolonial Geographies. London: Continuum, pp. 184–199. Dyer, R. (1988) ‘White.’ Screen 29: 44–64. Edwardes, M. (1991) The Nabobs at Home. London: Constable. Erasmus, Z. (2001) Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Indians in Cape Town. Cape Town: Kwela Publishers. Fenwick, C.A. (1828) Essays on the Colonization of Hindoostan by East Indians. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press. Fincher, R. (1987) ‘Gender, age and ethnicity in immigration for an Australian nation.’ Environment and Planning A 29: 217–236. Floyd, J. (2004) ‘Coming out of the kitchen: texts, contexts and debates.’ Cultural Geographies 11: 61–72. Fortier, A.-M. (1999) ‘Re-membering places and the performance of belonging(s).’ Theory, Culture and Society 16: 41–64. Fortier, A.-M. (2000) Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity. Oxford: Berg. Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. Translated by R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Friedman, S.S. (1998) Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gabbi, R.S. (1998) Sikhs in Australia. Melbourne: Aristoc Press. Gaber, I. and Aldridge, J. (eds) (1994) In the Best Interests of the Child: Culture, Identity and Transracial Adoption. London: Free Association Books. Gaikwad, V.R. (1967) The Anglo-Indians: a Study in the Problems and Processes Involved in Emotional and Cultural Integration. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Ganguly, K. (1992) ‘Migrant identities: personal memory and the construction of selfhood.’ Cultural Studies 6: 27–50. Gavin, J. (1997) Out of India: an Anglo-Indian Childhood. London: Pavilion Books. George, R.M. (1994) ‘Homes in the empire, empires in the home.’ Cultural Critique 15: 95–127. George, R.M. (1996) The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and TwentiethCentury Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. George, R.M. (ed.) (1998) Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gidney, H. (1934) ‘The future of the Anglo-Indian community.’ The Asiatic Review 30, 101: 27–42. Gilbert, A. (1996) ‘The Anglo-Indians in Australia, from unsuccessful caste members to attaining immigrants: an examination of Anglo-Indian labour force performance and their life perceptions.’ Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Monash University, Melbourne. Giles, J. (2004) The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity. Oxford: Berg. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gist, N.P. and Wright, R.D. (1973) Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially Mixed Minority in India. Leiden: Brill.

266

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gluck, S.B. and Patai, D. (eds) (1991) Women’s Words: the Feminist Practice of Oral History. New York: Routledge. Gooder, H. and Jacobs, J.M. (2002) ‘Belonging and non-belonging: the apology in a reconciling nation.’ In A. Blunt and C. McEwan (eds) Postcolonial Geographies. London: Continuum, pp. 200–213. Gowans, G. (2001) ‘Gender, imperialism and domesticity: British women repatriated from India, 1940–1947.’ Gender, Place and Culture 8: 255–269. Greene, G. (1991) ‘Feminist fiction and the uses of memory.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16: 290–321. Gregory, D. (2004) The Colonial Present. Oxford: Blackwell. Grewal, I. (1996) Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gunew, S. (1994) Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Gunew, S. (2004) Haunted Nations: the Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms. London: Routledge. Gupta, S.K. (1968) Marriage Among the Anglo-Indians. Lucknow: Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society, Uttar Pradesh. Hage, G. (1996) ‘The spatial imaginary of national practices: dwelling-domesticating/being-exterminating.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14: 463– 486. Hage, G. (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Annandale: Pluto Press. Hammerton, J.A. (2001) ‘Ten pound poms revisited: battlers’ tales and British migration to Australia, 1947–1971.’ Journal of Australian Studies 68: 86–96. Hansen, R. (2000) Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hassan, R. and Tan, G. (1990) ‘Asian migrants in Australia: a socio-economic study.’ Immigrants and Minorities 9: 21–45. Hawes, C. (1996) Poor Relations: the Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833. Richmond: Curzon. Hobbs, C. (2001) ‘The character of personal archives: reflections on the value of records of individuals.’ Archivaria 52: 126–135. Hodgkin, K. and Radstone, S. (eds) (2003a) The Politics of Memory. London: Routledge. Hodgkin, K. and Radstone, S. (eds) (2003b) Regimes of Memory. London: Routledge. hooks, b. (1990) ‘Homeplace: a site of resistance.’ In Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, pp. 41–50. Houston, V.H. (1996) ‘Home.’ In C. Wiley and F. Barnes (eds) Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home. New York: Garland Publishing, pp. 276–282. Hugo, G. (1995) ‘Migration between Australia and Britain: past and present.’ In D. Lowe (ed.) Immigration and Integration: Australia and Britain. London: Menzies Centre for Australian Studies.

B I B L I O GR A P H Y

267

Hyam, R. (1990) Empire and Sexuality: the British Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ifekwunigwe, J. (1999) Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of ‘Race’, Nation and Gender. London: Routledge. Inglis, C., Gunasekaran, S., Sullivan, G. and Wu, C.-T. (eds) (1992) Asians in Australia: the Dynamics of Migration and Settlement. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Jackson, P. and Jacobs, J.M. (1996) ‘Postcolonialism and the politics of race.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14: 1–3. Jacobs, J.M. (1996) Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge. Jacobs, J.M. (2002) ‘The global domestic: the highrise (once again) reconsidered.’ Paper presented in the ESRC Transforming London seminar series, 24 October. Jha, V.K. (1999) McCluskieganj. Translated by Shruti Shukla. Patna: Srishti Prakashan. Jog, N.G. (1945) Judge or Judas? Bombay: Thacker and Co. John, S. (1986) Whitefield. Unpublished document. Whitefield: the Ecumenical Christian Centre. Johnson, A. (2000) ‘Club members? Reading John Masters’s Bhowani Junction.’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35: 3–26. Johnson, L. (1996) ‘As housewives we are worms: women, modernity and the home question.’ Cultural Studies 10: 449–446. Johnson, N. (1995) ‘Cast in stone: monuments, geography and nationalism.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13: 51–65. Joseph, M. (1994) Marriage among Indian Christians. Jaipur: Rawat Publications. Jupp, J. (1998) Immigration, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaye, J.W. (1876) A History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857–58. London: W.H. Allen. Kennedy, D. (1996) The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kennedy, R. (2002) Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption. New York: Pantheon Books. Kenny, J. (1995) ‘Climate, race and imperial authority: the symbolic landscape of the British hill station in India.’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85: 694–714. Kershaw, R. and Pearsall, M. (2000) Immigrants and Aliens: a Guide to Sources on UK Immigration and Citizenship. London: Public Record Office. Khatwa, M. (2004) ‘Life journeys: narratives of Hindu mothers and daughters in British homes.’ Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Queen Mary, University of London. King, A. (1984) The Bungalow: the Production of a Global Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kolodny, A. (1975) The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kolodny, A. (1984) The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontier, 1630–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kranidis, R.S. (1999) The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects. New York: St Martin’s.

268

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kumar, S. (2002) ‘The evolution of spatial ordering in colonial Madras.’ In A. Blunt and C. McEwan (eds) Postcolonial Geographies. London: Continuum, pp. 85–98. Lahiri, S. (2000) Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880–1930. London: Frank Cass. Lahiri, S. (2001) ‘South Asians in post-imperial Britain: decolonisation and imperial legacy.’ In S. Ward (ed.) British Culture and the End of Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 200–216. Lahiri, S. (2003) ‘Performing identity: colonial migrants, passing and mimicry between the wars.’ Cultural Geographies 10: 408–423. Lee, S. (ed.) (1882) Guide to the Eurasian and Anglo-Indian Villages, Proposed to be Established in the Province of Mysore, with Maps and Drawings and Handbook of Industries and Pursuits, Suited to the Eurasian and Anglo-Indian Community. Madras: The Eurasian Industrial Press. Legg, S. (2003) ‘Gendered politics and nationalised homes: women and the anticolonial struggle in Delhi, 1940–1947.’ Gender, Place and Culture 10: 7–28. Legg, S. (2004) ‘Memory and nostalgia.’ Cultural Geographies 11: 99–107. Lester, A. (2001) Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain. London: Routledge. Lewin, E. (2002) ‘Anglo-Indian women in Western Australia: past, present and future identities.’ Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Edith Cowan University, Perth. Llewellyn, M. (2004) ‘Designed by women and designing women: gender, planning and the geographies of the kitchen in Britain, 1917–1946.’ Cultural Geographies 11: 42–60. Lobo, A. (1994) ‘A comparative study of educational disadvantage in India within the Anglo-Indian community: a historical and contemporary analysis.’ Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Institute of Education, University of London. London, H.I. (1970) Non-White Immigration and the ‘White Australia Policy’. New York: New York University Press. Loomba, A. (1997) ‘The long and saggy sari.’ Women: a Cultural Review 8: 278–292. Lowenthal, D. (1989) ‘Nostalgia tells it like it wasn’t.’ In C. Shaw and M. Case (eds) The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 18–32. Lyons, E. (2000) Bitter Sweet Truth. Hurstville, NSW: Parker Pattinson Publishing. Lyons, L. (1996) ‘Feminist articulations of the nation: the ‘‘dirty’’ women of Armagh and the discourse of Mother Ireland.’ Genders 24: 110–149. McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. MacDonald, R. (1995) Between Two Worlds: the Commonwealth Government and the Removal of Aboriginal Children of Part-Descent in the Northern Territory. Alice Springs: IAD Press. McDowell, L. (2003) ‘The particularities of place: geographies of gendered moral responsibilities among Latvian migrant workers in 1950s Britain.’ Transactions 28: 19–34.

B I B L I O GR A P H Y

269

McDowell, L. (2004) ‘Narratives of family, community and waged work: Latvian European Volunteer worker women in post-war Britain.’ Women’s History Review 13: 23–56. McEwan, C. (2003) ‘Material geographies and postcolonialism.’ Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24: 340–355. McGuinness, M. (2002) ‘Geographies with a difference? Citizenship and difference in postcolonial urban spaces.’ In A. Blunt and C. McEwan (eds) Postcolonial Geographies. London: Continuum, pp. 99–114. Mackay, D. (2002) ‘Negotiating positionings: exchanging life stories in research interviews.’ In P. Moss (ed.) Feminist Geography in Practice: Research and Methods. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 187–199. McKemmish, S. (1996) ‘Evidence of me . . . ’ Archives and Manuscripts: The Journal of the Australian Society of Archivists 24: 28–45. MacMunn, G. (1934) The Living India: Its Romance and Realities. London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd. Maher, R. (1945) The Children’s Page. Clarion Series No. 29. Calcutta: Calcutta Anglo-Indian Study Circle. Maher, R. (1946) Going Indian. Clarion Series No. 38. Calcutta: Calcutta AngloIndian Study Circle. Maher, R. (1947) June ’48. Clarion Series No. 68. Calcutta: Calcutta Anglo-Indian Study Circle. Maher, R. (undated; probably 1947) Being Indian. Clarion Series No. 72. Calcutta: Calcutta Anglo-Indian Study Circle. Maher, R. (1962) These are the Anglo-Indians. Calcutta: Swallow Press. Reprinted in Perth, Western Australia, 1995. Mahtani, M. (2001) ‘ ‘‘I’m a blonde-haired, blue-eyed black girl:’’ mapping mobile paradoxical spaces among multiethnic women in Toronto, Canada.’ In D. Parker and M. Song (eds) Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’. London: Pluto Press, pp. 173–190. Mahtani, M. (2002a) ‘What’s in a name? Exploring the employment of ‘‘mixed race’’ as an identification.’ Ethnicities 2: 469–490. Mahtani, M. (2002b) ‘Tricking the border guards: performing race.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20: 425–440. Marston, S. (2000) ‘The social construction of scale.’ Progress in Human Geography 24: 219–242. Masters, J. (1983) [first published 1954] Bhowani Junction. London: Sphere Books. Matless, D. (1998) Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion. Metcalf, T. (1994) Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, D. (ed.) (2001) Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Oxford: Berg. Minto, J. R. (1974) Graham of Kalimong. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Mitchell, K. (1997) ‘Different diasporas and the hype of hybridity.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15: 533–553. Mitchell, K. (2004) ‘Conflicting landscapes of dwelling and democracy in Canada.’ In S. Cairns (ed.) Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy. London: Routledge, pp. 142–164.

270

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mitra, C. (1987) Constant Glory: La Martiniere Saga, 1836–1986. Calcutta: Oxford University Press. Moore, G.J. (1986a) The Anglo-Indian Vision. Melbourne: AE Press. Moore, G.J. (1986b) The Lotus and the Rose: an Anglo-Indian Story. Melbourne: River Seine Publications. Moore, G.J. (2001) Anglo-Indians: the Best of Both Worlds. Melbourne: privately published. Moorhouse, G. (1983) India Britannica. London: Harvill Press. Moreno, H.W.B. (1917) Anglo-Indians and the Housing Problem. Calcutta: H.W.B. Moreno. Morley, D. (2000) Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge. Murphy, B. (1993) The Other Australia: Experiences of Migration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myers, J.C. (2001) ‘Performing the voyage out: Victorian female emigration and the class dynamics of displacement.’ Victorian Literature and Culture 29: 129–146. Naficy, H. (ed.) (1999) Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. New York: Routledge. Nagar, R. (1997) ‘Exploring methodological borderlands through oral narratives.’ In J.P. Jones, H.J. Nast and S.M. Roberts (eds) Thresholds in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, Representation. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 203–224. Nash, C. (2002) ‘Genealogical identities.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20: 27–52. Nasta, S. (2002) Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Nevil-Chambers, H. (1913) Usury, and its Relation to Anglo-Indian Poverty. Read before the Social Study Society of Calcutta, August 1913. Calcutta: Edinburgh Press. Nichols, B. (1944) Verdict on India. London: Jonathan Cape. Oldenburg, V. (1984) The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–1877. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Olivier, Lord (1925) ‘Anglo-Indians and their communal claims.’ The Contemporary Review, April: 423–431. Olumide, J. (2002) Raiding the Gene Pool: the Social Construction of Mixed Race. London: Pluto Press. Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Osman, C. (1992/3) ‘Whiteway: the anarchist arcadia.’ Diggers and Dreamers 92/3: 62–70. Owen, C. (2001) ‘ ‘‘Mixed race’’ in official statistics.’ In D. Parker and M. Song (eds) Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’. London: Pluto Press, pp. 134–153. Palfreeman, A. C. (1967) The Administration of the White Australia Policy. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Papastergiadis, N. (2000) The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Cambridge: Polity.

B I B L I O GR A P H Y

271

Parekh, B., Singh, G. and Vertovec, S. (eds) (2003) Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora. London: Routledge. Parker, D. and Song, M. (2001) ‘Introduction: rethinking ‘mixed race.’ In D. Parker and M. Song (eds) Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’. London: Pluto Press, pp. 1–22. Paul, K. (1997) Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Paul, K. (2001) ‘Communities of Britishness: migration in the last gasp of empire.’ In S. Ward (ed.) British Culture and the End of Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 180–199. Pearson, R. (1954) Eastern Interlude: a Social History of the European Community in Calcutta. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. Perks, R. and Thomson, A. (eds) (1998) The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge. Peters, J.D. (1999) ‘Exile, nomadism, and diaspora: the stakes of mobility in the western canon.’ In H. Naficy (ed.) Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. New York: Routledge, pp. 17–41. Petievich, C. (ed.) (1999) The Expanding Landscape: South Asians and the Diaspora. New Delhi: Manohar. Phillips, R. (1997) Mapping Men and Empire: a Geography of Adventure. London: Routledge. Pinder, D. (2000) ‘ ‘‘Old Paris is no more’’: geographies of spectacle and antispectacle.’ Antipode 32: 357–386. Piper, A. (1992) ‘Passing for white, passing for black.’ Transitions 58: 4–32. Platt, K. (1923) The Home and Health in India and the Tropical Colonies. London: Bailliere, Tindall and Co. Pollard, R.A. (2001) ‘The appraisal of personal papers: a critical literature review.’ Archivaria 52: 136–150. Porteous, D. (1976) ‘Home: the territorial core.’ Geographical Review 66: 383–390. Pratt, G. (1997) ‘Stereotypes and ambivalence: the construction of domestic workers in Vancouver, British Columbia.’ Gender, Place and Culture 4: 159–178. Pratt, G. (1998) ‘Geographic metaphors in feminist theory.’ In S.H. Aiken, A. Brigham, S.A. Marston and P. Waterstone (eds) Making Worlds: Gender, Metaphor, Materiality. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, pp. 13–30. Pratt, G. (1999) ‘From registered nurse to registered nanny: discursive geographies of Filipina domestic workers in Vancouver, BC.’ Economic Geography 75: 215–236. Pratt, G. (2004) Working Feminism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Procida, M. (2002) Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Puwar, N. and Raghuram, P. (eds) (2003) South Asian Women in the Diaspora. Oxford: Berg. ‘Query’ (1947) ? Clarion Series No. 57. Calcutta: Calcutta Anglo-Indian Study Circle. Ray, A. (1935) Mother India. Calcutta: Gita Prachar Karyalaya. Rayaprol, A. (1997) Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian Diaspora. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

272

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read, P. (2000) Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reed, C. (ed.) (1996) Not at Home: the Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson. Rees, J.D. (1891) Narratives of Tours in India made by His Excellency Lord Connemara, G.C.I.E., Governor of Madras, 1886–1890. Madras: The Government Press. Relph, E. (1976) Place and Placenessness. London: Pion. Renford, R.K. (1987) The Non-Official British in India to 1920. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Richards, T. (1990) The Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. London: Verso. Richardson, A. (1974) British Immigrants and Australia. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Rivett, K. (1975) Australia and the Non-White Migrant. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Root, M. (ed.) (1996) The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier. London: Sage. Root, M. (2001) Love’s Revolution: Interracial Marriage. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography: the Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity. Roy, P. (1998) Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. New Delhi: Vistaar Publications. Roychowdhury, L. (2000) The Jadu House: Intimate Histories of Anglo-India. London: Doubleday. Rubenstein, R. (2001) Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction. New York: Palgrave. Rushdie, S. (1992a) ‘Outside the whale.’ In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–91. London: Granta Books, pp. 87–101. Rushdie, S. (1992b) ‘Hobson–Jobson.’ In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–91. London: Granta Books, pp. 81–83. Ryan, D.S. (1997) ‘The empire at home: the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition and the imperial suburb.’ Imperial Cities Project Working Paper 6, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London. Ryan, J. (1997) Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ryan, N. (2003) Homeland: into a World of Hate. Edinburgh: Mainstream. Said, E. (1994) The Politics of Dispossession. London: Vintage. Said, E. (1999) Out of Place: a Memoir. London: Granta. Sarkar, T. (1998) ‘Orthodoxy, cultural nationalism, and Hindutva violence: an overview of the gender ideology of the Hindu Right.’ In R.R. Pierson and N. Chaudhuri (eds) Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 166–181. Schaffer, K. (1988) Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

B I B L I O GR A P H Y

273

Schech, S. and Haggis, J. (1998) ‘Postcolonialism, identity, and location: being white Australian in Asia.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16: 615–629. Schwartz, J. and Ryan, J. (eds) Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination. London: I.B. Tauris Schwarz, B. (1994) ‘Memories of empire.’ In A. Bammer (ed.) Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 156–171. Scott, P. (1989) Staying On. London: Pan. Seamon, D. (1979) A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter. London: Croom Helm. Sharpe, J. (1993) Allegories of Empire: the Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shaw, C. and Case, M. (eds) (1989) The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sheela, J. (2003) Women’s Marriage in India: Cultural Practices, Age and Mate Selection. New Delhi: Dominant Publishers and Distributors. Sheller, M. (2003) ‘Creolization in discourses of global culture.’ In S. Ahmed, C. Castan˜eda, A.-M. Fortier and M. Sheller (eds) Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg, pp. 273–294. Shepard, E. (1930) A Marooned People (the Anglo-Indian Community). London: The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Singh, G. (2003) ‘Introduction.’ In B. Parekh, G. Singh and S. Vertovec (eds) Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora. London: Routledge, pp. 1–12. Skipton, H.P.K. (1921) New India and the Anglo-Indian: the Need of the Moment. London: The Indian Church Aid Association. Smith, V. (1994) ‘Reading the intersection of race and gender in narratives of passing.’ Diacritics 24: 43–57. Snell, O. (1944) Anglo-Indians and Their Future. Bombay: Thacker and Co. Sollors, W. (1997) Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: a Thematic Analysis of Interracial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Spen. (1947) The Fundamental Issue. Clarion Series No. 69. Calcutta: Calcutta Anglo-Indian Study Circle. Spencer, I. (1997) British Immigration Policy since 1939: the Making of Multi-Racial Britain. London: Routledge. Spencer, J. (1997) The New Colored People. New York: New York University Press. Spickard, P. (2001) ‘The subject is mixed race: the boom in biracial biography.’ In D. Parker and M. Song (eds) Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’. London: Pluto Press, pp. 76–98. Stark, H. (1926) Hostages to India. Calcutta: Calcutta Fine Arts Cottage. Steel, F.A. and Gardiner, G. (1907) The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook. 5th edition. London: Heinemann. Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stoler, A.L. (1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

274

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stoler, A.L. (2002) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tarlo, E. (1996) Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India. London: Hurst. Tatla, D.S. (1999) The Sikh Diaspora: the Search for Statehood. London: UCL Press. Thapar-Bjo¨rkert, S. (1997) ‘The domestic sphere as a political site: a study of women in the Indian nationalist movement.’ Women’s Studies International Forum 20: 493–504. Thapar-Bjo¨rkert, S. and Ryan, L. (2002) ‘Mother India/Mother Ireland: comparative gendered dialogues of colonialism and nationalism in the early 20th century.’ Women’s Studies International Forum 25: 301–313. Thompson, B. and Tyagi, S. (eds) (1996) Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity. New York: Routledge. Thompson, S. (1994) ‘Suburbs of opportunity: the power of home for migrant women.’ In K. Gibson and S. Watson (eds) Metropolis Now: Planning and the Urban in Contemporary Australia. Leichhardt, NSW: Pluto Press, pp. 33–45. Thomson, A. (2003) ‘ ‘‘I live on my memories’’: British return migrants and the possession of the past.’ Oral History 31: 55–65. Thomson, P. (2000) The Voice of the Past: Oral History. 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tizard, B. and Phoenix, A. (2002) Black, White, or Mixed Race? Race and Racism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage. New York: Routledge. Tolia-Kelly, D. (2004) ‘Locating processes of identification: studying the precipitates of re-memory through artefacts in the British Asian home.’ Transactions 29: 314–329. Tosh, J. (1995) ‘Imperial masculinity and the flight from domesticity, 1880–1914.’ In T.P. Foley, L. Pilkington, S. Ryder and E. Tilley (eds) Gender and Colonialism. Galway: Galway University Press, pp. 72–85. Tosh, J. (1999) A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. London: Routledge. Tuan, Y.-F. (1977) Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. London: Edward Arnold. Tuson, P. (1998) ‘Mutiny narratives and the imperial feminine: European women’s accounts of the rebellion in India in 1857.’ Women’s Studies International Forum 21: 291–303. Tyler, C.-A. (1994) ‘Passing: narcissism, identity, and difference.’ Differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6: 212–248. Vasta, E. and Castles, S. (eds) (1996) The Teeth are Smiling: the Persistence of Racism in Multicultural Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Verge`s, F. (1999) Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Me´tissage. Durham: Duke University Press. Vertovec, S. (2000) The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns. London: Routledge. Vickery, A. (1993) ‘Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history.’ Historical Journal 36: 383–414. Vidler, A. (1992) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

B I B L I O GR A P H Y

275

Visram, R. (1986) Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: the History of Indians in Britain, 1700–1947. London: Pluto. Visweswaran, K. (1996) ‘Small speeches, subaltern gender: nationalist ideology and its historiography.’ In S. Amin and D. Chakrabarty (eds) Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Vol. 9. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 83–125. Voight-Graf, C. (2003) ‘Indians at home in the Antipodes: migrating with Ph.D.s, bytes or kava in their bags.’ In B. Parekh, G. Singh and S. Vertovec (eds) Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora. London: Routledge, pp. 142–164. Waetjen, T. (1999) ‘The ‘‘home’’ in homeland: gender, national space, and Inkatha’s politics of ethnicity.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 22: 653–678. Wald, G. (2000) Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Walker, A. (1984) In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. London: The Women’s Press. Walkowitz, J.R. (1998–9) ‘The Indian woman, the flower girl and the Jew: photojournalism in Edwardian London.’ Victorian Studies 42: 3–46. Wallace, K. (1930) The Eurasian Problem Constructively Approached. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. Walter, B. (1995) ‘Irishness, gender and place.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13: 35–50. Walter, B. (2001) Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge. Ware, V. (1992) Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History. New York: Verso. Webster, W. (1998) Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity, 1945– 1964. London: UCL Press. Werbner, P. (1997) ‘Introduction: the dialectics of cultural hybridity.’ In P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds) Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London: Zed Books, pp. 1–26. White, O. (1999) Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa. Oxford: Clarendon. Wickham, C.J. (1999) Constructing Heimat in Post-War Germany: Longing and Belonging. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press. Williams, B.R. (2002) Anglo-Indians: Vanishing Remnants of a Bygone Era. AngloIndians in India, North America and the UK in 2000. Madras: Calcutta Tiljallah Relief Fund, Inc.. Winders, J. (2003) ‘White in all the wrong places: white rural poverty in the postbellum US South.’ Cultural Geographies 10: 45–63. Woolley, P.W. (1912) Some Problems of the Domiciled Community. Paper read before the Social Study Society of Calcutta, July 1912. Calcutta: Edinburgh Press. Wray, M. and Newitz, A. (eds) (1997) White Trash: Race and Class in America. New York: Routledge. Wright, R., Houston, S., Ellis, M., Holloway, S. and Hudson, M. (2003) ‘Crossing racial lines: geographies of mixed-race parterning and multiraciality in the United States.’ Progress in Human Geography 27: 457–474.

276

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wright, R.D. (1970) ‘Marginal man in transition: a study of the AngloIndian community of India.’ Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Missouri, Columbia. Yeoh, B.S.A. and Huang, S. (2000) ‘ ‘‘Home’’ and ‘‘away’’: foreign domestic workers and negotiations of diasporic identity in Singapore.’ Women’s Studies International Forum 23: 413–429. York, B. (1996) ‘From assimilation to multiculturalism: Australian experience, 1945–1989’, Studies in Australian Ethnic History 14: Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies, Australian National University. Young, R. (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge. Younger, C. (1987) Anglo-Indians: Neglected Children of the Raj. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation. Yule, H. and Burnell, A.C. (1996) [first published 1886] Hobson–Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary. Ware, Herts: Wordsworth Editions. Zack, N. (1995a) Race and Mixed Race. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Zack, N. (ed.) (1995b) American Mixed Race: the Culture of Microdiversity. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Zlotnick, S. (1995) ‘Domesticating imperialism: curry and cookbooks in Victorian England.’ Frontiers: a Journal of Women’s Studies 16: 51–68.

NEWSPAPER ARTICLES Akerman, P. (1972) ‘The new people in the Australian west.’ The Australian, 4 May. Anon. (1947) West Australian, 14 April. Anon. (1947) The Argus, 10 June. Anon. (1947) Daily Telegraph, 25 June. Anon. (1947) ‘Migrants arrive: Manoora contingent at Fremantle.’ West Australian, 16 August. Anon. (2001) ‘We will fish for them.’ Guardian, 17 September. Anon. (2001) ‘Refugee issue dominates debate.’ Guardian, 8 October. Bobb, D. and Ahmed, F. (1991) ‘McCluskieganj: the dying of a dream.’ India Today, October. Cairns, K. (1947) ‘No migrant flood likely from India.’ Melbourne Herald, 24 July. Daniel, V. (1992) ‘Chota London.’ Sunday Mid-Day, 29 March. Dougherty, R. (1972) ‘Fair go for ‘chocolate’ Australians.’ Letter to The Australian, 9 May. Duffield, R. (1972) ‘Time to get ready for some mixed blood.’ The Australian, 5 May. Ganguli, A. (1973) ‘The Anglo-Indians: the Thames or the Ganges?’ Statesman (Calcutta), 6 October. P.T. Nair Collection. Goldenberg, S. (1997) ‘Twilight of India’s forgotten colony.’ The Guardian, 5 July. Gupta, R. (1982) ‘Leftover of Raj seeks identity.’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February. Hope, C. (2003) ‘Great white hope.’ The Guardian, 6 May.

B I B L I O GR A P H Y

277

Jack, I. (1991) ‘The homeland that failed.’ The Independent Magazine, 23 February, pp. 30–38. Reprinted as ‘ ‘‘Back home’’ is where the heart is.’ Indian Express Magazine, 24 March. Liddle, R. (2002) ‘An age-old prejudice.’ The Guardian, G2, 29 October. Menon, S. (1988) ‘McCluskieganj – a dream shattered.’ The Times of India, 27 August. Murray, J. (1972) ‘Our national phobia of being submerged.’ The Australian, 8 May. Phillips, P. (1931) ‘Chi-chi.’ Daily Mail. Reprinted in Anglo-Indian Review, November. Ramsey, A. (1972) ‘Chipp rebuffed in row on multi-racial society.’ The Australian, 3 May. Sharma, M. (1980) ‘McCluskie and the ‘‘Gunj’’ that failed.’ Sunday, 7 December. Stewart, G. (1973) ‘Some Anglo-Indians may feel happy’, Hindustan Standard, 23 March. Zubrzycki, J. (1997) ‘Midnight’s orphans.’ The Weekend Review, 9–10 August.

FILMS AND TELEVISION PROGRAMMES Bhowani Junction (1956) Turner Entertainment Co. Dir.: George Cukor Bow Barracks Forever (2004) Dir.: Anjan Dutt. A Calcutta Christmas (1998) Film Australia. Dir.: Maree Delofski; Prod.: Denise Haslem. Cotton Mary (1999) Universal Studios (a Merchant Ivory Production). Dir.: Ismail Merchant; Prod.: Nayeem Hafizka, Richard Hawley. McCluskieganj (1993). Granada Television. Dir.: A. Stevenson. The Outhouse (1998). Dir. and Prod.: Leslie Carvalho. 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) Film Valas. Dir.: Aparna Sen; Prod.: Shashi Kapoor.

Index

Ahmed, Sara 130–1, 165 Akerman, Piers 162–3 Andaman Islands 46, 81–2, 108 Anglo-Indian(s); see also home(s); migration; women, Anglo-Indian ancestry European 2–3, 9, 34, 42, 45–6, 55, 78, 90, 122–3 British paternal 106, 116, 118, 120–3, 137, 172 imperial forefather 23, 42, 46, 51–2, 55, 59, 73, 90–3, 103–4, 106, 113, 137, 205, 208 Indian maternal ancestor 2–3, 9, 52, 55–6, 59, 93, 103–4, 191–2, 205 Anglo-Indian Book Club 231n; see also Calcutta Study Circle Anglo-Indian Journal 79–80, 115 Anglo-Indian Review 16, 42–3, 46–7, 50–3, 56–7, 59, 60–1, 67–9, 105, 112–17, 119, 126, 144 appearance 30–1, 43–4, 114–15, 123, 153, 184–5 associations All-India Anglo-Indian Association 16, 19, 33, 49, 53, 62, 70, 74, 87, 98, 101, 105, 108, 112, 116, 154, 158–9, 164

Anglo-Indian Association, Mysore and Coorg 80 Anglo-Indian and Domiciled European Association 42, 61 Australian Anglo-Indian Association 160–1, 167–70 Calcutta Anglo-Indian Service Society 201–2 East Indian Colonization Committee, Bombay 79 Eurasian and Anglo-Indian Association of South India 80 Eurasian Collectivist Party 82 Eurasian Philanthropic Association, Madras 79–80 London Anglo-Indian Association 108, 114 South London Anglo-Indian Association 138 United Kingdom Anglo-Indian Association 138 in Australia 162–72; see also Australia; migration; White Australia Policy 144–6, 148–51, 153–4, 159–60, 165 in Britain; see also Britain, British Nationality Act; migration and British Nationality Act (1948) 118–24

INDEX

after Independence 127–8, 130–7 before Independence 108 Britain’s ‘betrayal’ of 48, 51 in British India in Calcutta 30–41 home, identity and nationality 41–52 Christianity 2, 19, 35, 43, 165, 184 class 34 middle class 41 colonization and settlement schemes 78–82, 108, 115; see also McCluskieganj; Whitefield Andaman Islands 46, 81–2, 108 early schemes 79–80 Mexico 81 Papua and New Guinea 82, 144, 240n Van Dieman’s Land 79, 144, 240n community 7–9, 13, 209 identity 179–85 as minority community 45, 49–50 as national community 87 networks in Britain 138 politics 33, 41–51, 255n cultural life 53 definition 1–3, 5, 9, 33, 43, 197, 220n diaspora 2, 10–12, 16, 206 domesticity 36, 39, 53–9, 62–5, 69–70, 106; see also domesticity in Britain 124–30 domestic transgression 65–9 eating practices 53–4 food 36, 53–4, 128 in independent India 189, 192–200 and masculinity 55 dress 155–6, 182, 185–9 Indian 101, 136–7, 185–9 western 36, 49, 60, 62, 101, 132, 155–6, 186–7, 189 education 39 employment 45, 86, 154, 156–7 of men 9, 111, 132, 154, 190

279

job reservations 86 of women 10, 60–2, 111, 127, 131–4, 187, 189–92 nannies 57, 235n nurses 60–1, 86, 235n office work 60–1 Women’s Employment Bureau, Calcutta 61 of Indian servants 39–40; see also servants family 64–5, 195–200 generational differences 181–2 health 36 history 9 and home 2, 8, 12, 16, 21, 42, 52–3, 166–8, 170–2 in Australia 159, 167 in Britain 2, 5, 45–8, 51, 53, 55, 66, 70–1, 106, 114, 130 in India 45–51, 66, 69, 70–1, 79, 98, 117, 179–80, 189, 192–200 at McCluskieganj 78, 83–4, 87–9, 91 as homeless 83, 86 hospitality 134–5 hostel accommodation 40–1 housing in Britain 125 in Calcutta 30–3, 35–6, 39–41, 50, 204, 207 and identity 2–3, 8–9, 16, 130–7 embodied identities 106 in independent India 179–85 national identity 24, 41–50, 52–3, 179–85 Independence, Indian, fears at 110–11 in independent India 110–11, 113, 117, 127, 154–9, 175 identity 179–85 labour attitudes towards manual 39–40 domestic, by Anglo-Indian women in Britain 126–9, 189, 192, 207

280

I N D EX

Anglo-Indian(s) (cont’d ) language 2, 49, 56–8, 122, 132, 165–6 accent 4, 57, 131, 133–4 chi chi 57 Welsh 57 body 134 marriage 62, 64–5, 122–3, 192–200 to American soldiers 67 to British men 67–8 in independent India 192–200 marriage bureau 194–5, 200 intermarriage 193–200 gendered patterns of 194 and mixed descent 1, 3–4, 9, 12, 30, 43, 51, 78, 116, 123, 130–2, 170–2 nationalism 49 as a nationalist minority 48 number of 3 and Partition 243n political representations 49–50, 108, 115 to Lord Birkenhead 43–5 to the Round Table Conferences 45 to the Simon Commission 45 poverty 32, 35–6, 39, 41 racial prejudice towards 43–4, 135, 164–6 railway colonies 32, 65 residential homes 201 reunions, international 19, 175 schools 19–20 social life 157 stereotypes of community 15, 30, 103 of women 15–16, 30 surnames 17, 197 unemployment 79, 86 urban residence 32 visits to India 207 Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India) 61–4, 66–7 World Anglo-Indian Day 3

Anthony, Frank 9, 16, 46, 48–51, 57, 61–2, 67, 71, 101, 104–5, 112–13, 116–17, 155, 157–9, 164, 179, 204–5, 236n, 244–5n, 255n archives 17–18 aristocracy, imperial 107–8 Australia Anglo-Celtic 165, 168, 174 in Anglo-Indian imagination 144 Anglo-Indian migration to 3, 34, 106, 108, 139–61 assimilation 143, 149, 150, 153, 155, 167–8, 174 British migration to 146–7, 159 British settlement in 92, 103 colonization and settlement schemes Papua and New Guinea 82 Van Dieman’s Land 79, 144, 240n as home for Anglo-Indians 159, 167 immigration policies 114, 139–43, 148, 152–4 Commonwealth Immigration Act 82 Immigration Restriction Act 142 White Australia Policy 5, 12, 16, 22, 82, 138–54, 159, 164–5, 172–4, 206 Indians in 140, 249n migrants of mixed descent to 154, 162, 253n, 254n multicultural 165, 168–74 multi-racial 161–4 stolen generation 143 Bangalore 18–19 belonging, homely 28 Bhabha, Homi 11 Bharatiya Janata Party 29 Bhowani Junction 65–6, 185, 236n Bihar 72–3, 83, 237n Bishop, Peter 84 Brah, Avtar 10–11, 75, 111–12 Britain; see also Britishness as fatherland for Anglo-Indians 5, 24, 42–3, 46, 51–2, 73, 105, 113, 120, 137, 204, 208

INDEX

as home for Anglo-Indians 2, 5, 45–8, 51, 53, 55, 66, 70–1, 106, 114, 130 for non-domiciled British 107–8 migration to 3, 104–6, 108–9 British Nationality Act (1948) 5, 12, 16, 22, 104–6, 114, 118–24, 132, 137–8, 144, 206 Britishness 41, 113–14, 118–19, 137; see also Britain British nationality 118–24; see also British Nationality Act British world 113 community of 33, 106, 118, 130 domiciled 118 and whiteness 113 Burton, Antoinette 18, 107 Calcutta 18–19, 30, 32–41, 73, 84, 102, 231n Anglo-Indian residence in 32–3 Bow Bazar 35, 40, 232n Calcutta Domiciled Community Enquiry Committee (1918–19); Report (1920) 16, 32–41, 53, 73, 188, 204, 232n, 233n Calcutta Study Circle 33, 42, 44, 60, 109, 124, 126, 231n Tiljallah 188, 195 Calcutta Tiljallah Relief Fund 201 Calwell, Arthur 139, 146–50, 161–3, 165 Canada 92, 103, 105 caste 39, 61 Catholic Migration Office, Australia 160 census Australian, 1996 141 British, 1991 135 Indian, 1911 1, 32, 231n Chatterjee, Partha 29–30 children Anglo-Indian 195–8 British 26, 57, 107

281

Chipp, Don 161 Christian Brothers Australian 160–1 Irish 161 Christians, Indian 34, 53, 55, 89, 114; see also Anglo-Indian, Christianity citizenship Indian 124 UK-and-Colonies 119–20, 123 classification, racial 119, 146 colonization of American West 77 Anglo-Indian at McCluskieganj 78, 82–90 of Australian bush 77 of Cape Colony 77 Colonization Observer 16, 73–4, 83–4, 86–7, 90, 93–4, 96–7, 104, 205 Colonization Society of India 16, 33, 73–4, 83, 85, 87, 90–3, 98, 102–4, 205 ‘colour bar’ 114–16, 144 Congress Party, Indian National 49–51, 101, 255n Constitution, Indian 3, 49, 122, 196–7, 220n consumption, imperial 25 Corbridge, Stuart 29 Cotton Mary 15 creolization, theoretical 10–11 Damzen, Percival 82–3, 91, 83, 97 degeneracy discourses of 31–2, 50 domestic 32, 36 Derrida, Jacques 17–18 desire homing 10, 12, 14, 75, 78, 103, 106, 137, 208 interracial 15 narratives of 77 nostalgic 14, 82, 84, 87, 90 diaspora 10–12; see also migration Anglo-Indian 2, 10–11, 16, 206 decolonized 124 and exile 238n

282

I N D EX

diaspora (cont’d ) feminization of 12, 106 and geography 10 and home 10, 124–5 and homeland 75–6 imperial 2, 78, 104–5, 124, 204 and masculinity 106 South Asian 11–12, 75 space 12, 75 term 10 disease, venereal 67 domesticity 4–7, 16; see also servants Anglo-Indian 36, 39, 53–9, 62–5, 69–70, 106 in Britain 124–30 domestic transgression 65–9 eating practices 53–4 food 36, 53–4, 128 in independent India 189, 192–200 at McCluskieganj 94–6 and masculinity 55 British 55 imagery, domestic 109–10, 124 imperial 24–7, 32, 129 Indian, Anglo-Indian assumptions about 62–5 nationalist 24, 27–30 work, domestic 25–6, 125, 247n by Anglo-Indian women in Britain 126–9, 189, 192, 207 domicile 5–10 in India 30–6, 39–41, 50, 122 domiciled community 1, 5, 24, 31–2, 39, 40–1, 50, 78, 103, 107, 114, 119, 121, 137, 204 class 34 European responsibility towards 34–5 Dominion(s) old 118 status 92–3 white 114, 116 Dougherty, Rex 163–4 Dover, Cedric 81

Dr Barnardo’s Homes 115 dress for Anglo-Indian women 155–6, 182, 185–9 Indian 101, 136–7, 185–9 western 36, 49, 60, 61, 101, 132, 155–6, 186–7, 189 for Indian women western 189 Dr Graham’s Homes 115 East India Company 9, 31–3 Empire, British 25, 45–6, 78, 92–3 Empire Windrush 118 encounters between resident and non–resident Anglo-Indians 175 imperial 131 metropolitan 131, 133 strange 130–1 Eurasian(s) 1, 34, 79, 82; see also Anglo-Indian, associations Families in British India Society 138 family Anglo-Indian 64–5, 195–200 Hindu 65, 198 joint 64–5, 198 nuclear 209 fatherland Britain as, for Anglo-Indians 5, 24, 42–3, 46, 51–2, 73, 105, 113, 120, 137, 204, 208 in nationalist discourses 28 femininity 29–30, 40–1, 50, 78 Foley, Father 160–1 food, see Anglo-Indian, domesticity Fortier, Anne-Marie 13 Friedman, Susan Stanford 8 Gaikwad, V.R. 177 gender and diaspora 12 and home 6–7 and imperialism 25–6

INDEX

genealogy 13, 138; see also Society of Genealogists geography, postcolonial 208 Gidney, Henry 42–6, 48, 51, 71, 74, 79, 86–7, 93, 97, 108, 179, 204, 237n Gilbert, Adrian 169 Government of India Act (1935) 3, 86, 122 Gowans, Georgina 108 Graham, Dr John Anderson 115 Gupta, Shiva Kumar 192–3 Hage, Ghassan 28, 165 Herd, Edna 70, 237n Hicks, Clifford 68–9 Highgate, Western Australia 162 hill stations 31–2 home(s); see also desire, homing; domesticity; domicile; homeland(s); housing; mooluk Anglo-Indians and 2, 8, 12, 16, 21, 42, 52–3, 166–8, 170–2 in Australia 159, 167 in Britain 2, 5, 45–8, 51, 53, 55, 66, 70–1, 106, 114, 130 in India 45–51, 66, 69, 70–1, 79, 98, 117, 179–80, 189, 192–200 at McCluskieganj 78, 83–4, 87–9, 91 and archives 17–18 British 25–7, 31 and diaspora 10–12, 124–5 for Anglo-Indian women 124–30 and family life 195–200 fantasies of 77 feminist work on 6–7 and homeland 74–8 home-making 12, 25 at McCluskieganj 90–6, 102–3 humanistic geographies of 6 and hybridity 11 and identity 4–8, 13, 209 imperial 24–7

283

Indian 27, 31, 196, 198 Bengali 29–30 and memory 12–13, 18 metaphors of 6, 8 and mixed descent/race 7–8, 209 nationalist 24, 27–30 and nostalgia 13–14 postcolonial work on 6–7 and scale 4–6, 12 spatial politics of 4, 6, 8, 21, 204–5, 207–10 suppression of 6, 14 homeland(s) 2, 4, 10, 28, 74–8; see also McCluskieganj Anglo-Indian 5, 19, 72–3, 113 in Britain 77 Eelam, Sri Lanka 75 Heimat 75 Israel/Palestine 75 Kashmir 76 Khalistan, Punjab 76 and nation 74–5 in South Africa 76–7 housing Anglo-Indian in Britain 125 Anglo-Indian in Calcutta 30–3, 35–6, 39–41, 50, 204, 207 hybridity 10–11, 16, 209 and identity 11 and mixed descent/race 11, 209 identity Anglo-Indian 2–3, 8–9, 16, 130–7 embodied 106 in independent India 179–85 national identity 24, 41–50, 52–3, 179–85 embodied 130–7 and home 4–8, 13, 209 and hybridity 11 and memory collective 13 personal 12–13 and mixed descent/race 7–8 and positionality 8 illegitimacy 16, 67, 69

284

I N D EX

imperialism British in India 7, 9, 15 and gender 25–6 imperial discourse 15 imperial domesticity 24–7, 32, 129 imperial masculinity 25 Independence, Indian 74, 105, 108–11, 118, 173, 179, 181 India; see also Independence, Indian; home(s), Anglo-Indians and home in India British 1–2, 9–10, 18, 26–7, 31, 33, 78, 92 Anglo-Indians in in Calcutta 30–41 home, identity and nationality in 41–51 community identities in 183–4 Independent 15, 110–11 Anglo-Indians in 110–11, 113, 117, 127, 154–9, 175 identity for 179–85 as motherland/Mother India (Bharat Mata) 5, 24, 28, 42–3, 46–8, 51–2, 73, 93, 96, 103 as Republic 119 schools in 19–21, 32 Indiaman, The 138 Indianization 2, 24, 42, 46, 74, 79, 82, 86, 103 Indians in Australia 140, 249n in Britain 106–7 poverty in Calcutta 36 intermarriage; see marriage Jones, Bill, 4, 210 Jones, Victoria 66, 185 Kalimpong 115 Kolodny, Annette 77 labour dignity of 39, 86, 158 domestic 25–6, 125, 247n

by Anglo-Indian women in Britain 126–9, 189, 192, 207 manual Anglo-Indian attitude towards 39–40 and migration 111 Lahiri, Shompa 106–7 landscape 28, 48, 74, 77–8 at McCluskieganj 78, 91, 97, 98 pastoral 84 language and Anglo-Indians 2, 49, 56–8, 122, 132, 165–6 accent 4, 57, 131, 133–4 chi chi 57 Welsh 57 Bengali 57–8 English 2, 57, 155 French 58 Hindi 4, 57–8 ‘kitchen’ 56–8 as national language 155 Hindustani 58 Urdu 57–8 Lapra 83, 89; see also McCluskieganj Lethbridge, M.H.B. 119–21 Liddle, Rod 133 life/autobiographical writings 7, 13 Loreto Order 19–20 Lowenthal, David 13–14 Lucknow 18–19 Lucknow Club 157 McCluskie, Ernest Timothy 73–4, 83–4, 86–7, 101, 232n McCluskieganj 2, 18–19, 21, 33, 46, 71–4, 78, 80–105, 144, 156, 204–6 Adivasis at 72, 89, 102 agricultural work 91–4 aims 83–4 Anglo-Indian independence at 78, 85–6, 90, 100, 103–4, 119 Anglo-Indian men at 90–2 Anglo-Indian nation-building at 78, 82–3, 85–7, 93, 97 Anglo-Indian women at 93–6, 104

INDEX

Bengali settlers and tourists 99–100 class 90 decline 98 development projects 101 domesticity at 94–6 dreams of the future at 96–8 employment at 86 families at 94 goal of racial exclusivity 89–90, 96–7 home-making at 90–6 houses at 91 Indian motherland at 93–4, 96, 103 landscape at 78, 91, 97, 98 letters from visitors 85 location 78, 83 masculinity at 91–2 in the media 100–1 as mooluk 78, 87–9, 91, 103, 105, 204 name, 73, 237–8n promotion of settlement 82–3 purchase of land 83 servants at 90 settlement at 84 as site of memory 100, 102 today 98–102 Maher, Reginald 33, 42–4, 46, 48, 50, 55, 109, 124, 126, 231n Mahtani, Minelle 8, 209 Manoora, HMAS 139–43, 147–8, 162, 173, 206, 252n, 256–7n marriage for Anglo-Indians 62, 64–5, 122–3, 192–200 to American soldiers 67 to British men 67–8 in independent India 192–200 marriage bureau 194–5, 200 intermarriage 193–200 gendered patterns of 194 and East India Company 9 between Indian men and English or American women 236n masculinity 12, 208–9 and Anglo-Indian domesticity 55 imperial 25, 78, 106

285

at McCluskieganj 91–2 Masters, John 65, 236n memory 12–16, 208, 210 collective 12–13, 53–4, 71, 73, 113 of mixed descent 12, 93, 104 and home 12, 18 landscapes/sites of 13–14 McCluskieganj as 100, 102 personal 12–13 memsahib(s) 15, 26, 30, 53, 56, 229n; see also women, British men American 67 Anglo-Indian 61, 68 British 25, 67–8 white 25 methodology 16–21 Mexico 81, 108 migration; see also British Nationality Act; White Australia Policy Anglo-Indian 3, 10–12, 104–5, 177, 205–6 advice against 105, 112–13, 116–17 to Australia 3, 34, 106, 108, 139–61, 206 to Britain 104–6, 108–13, 124, 206 of children 115 impact on 177–9 motives at Independence 110–12 in the 1960s 154–7 organized schemes 108, 115 assisted passages 159–60 Australian policies 114, 139–43, 148, 152–4 White Australia Policy 5, 12, 16, 22, 82, 138–54, 159, 164–5, 172–4, 206 British policies 119, 140, 245n chain migration 112 and ‘colour bar’ 114–16 and diaspora 10–12 and gender 112 return 112, 126 miscegenation 9, 31, 130, 143, 151

286

I N D EX

mixed descent 1, 7–8, 13, 223n; see also mixed race and Anglo-Indians 1, 3–4, 9, 12, 30, 43, 51, 78, 116, 123, 130–2, 170–2 and hybridity 11, 209 and migration to Australia 162 and White Australia Policy 144–6, 148–54, 159–60 mixed race 4, 7–8, 11, 223n; see also mixed descent modernity 12 of agriculture at McCluskieganj 91, 94 embodied by Anglo-Indian women 59–65, 70–1 mooluk, McCluskieganj as 78, 87–9, 91, 103, 105, 204 motherhood 25, 69–70; see also Mother India; motherland Anglo-Indian mothers 195–8 Mother India (Bharat Mata) 28–9, 43, 51–2, 103, 205; see also motherland motherland; see also Mother India Britain as 113 India as for Anglo-Indians 5, 24, 28, 42–3, 46–8, 51–2, 73, 105, 116–18, 137, 204–5, 208 at McCluskieganj 93–4, 96, 103 in nationalist discourses 28 multiculturalism 141–2 in Australia 164–5, 168–74 ‘Mutiny’, Indian 9, 26, 31, 109, 122 nation; see also nationalism; nationality Anglo-Indian at McCluskieganj 78, 82–3, 85–7, 93, 97 Australian 151 space 165 nationalism; see also nation; nationality Anglo-Indians and 49 anti-colonial/imperial 28–30, 84, 103, 108 Hindu 28–9, 76, 155, 184 Imperial 24, 52, 70, 73, 78 nationalist discourses 28 motherland in 28

nationality; see also British Nationality Act; nation; nationalism British 118–24 Indian 124, 179–85, 205 Nehru, Jawaharlal 49, 155 New Delhi 18–19, 33 New Zealand 92, 103, 106, 115 nostalgia 12–16, 208 aesthetics of 84 and home 13, 208 nostalgic desire 14, 82, 84, 87, 90 productive 14, 73, 96, 103, 208 Raj 15, 208 term 13 Olumide, Jill 8, 209 Opperman, Hubert 153–4 Outhouse, The 257n Pakistan 111–13, 119, 121, 127 Panchpuran 4, 210 Partition 105, 109, 111, 119, 243n passing, racial 114, 130, 133–5, 248n Pauperism Enquiry (1891–2) 32–4, 41 Pearson, R. 130 Pereira, Grace 20–1 photographs of Anglo-Indian women at McCluskieganj 94–6 of British imperial domesticity 1 imperial photography 139 positionality 8 poverty Anglo-Indian 31–2, 35–6, 39 genteel 108 for Indians in Calcutta 36 white 33 power 7 imperial 25–7 propriety domestic 54 feminine 40–1, 50 Raj, British 72 nostalgia 15, 208 Ranchi 18–19, 83, 99

INDEX

refugees Anglo-Indians as 86–7 European 139 Polish 173, 252n Ricketts, John 79, 108, 248n scale 4–6, 12 schools 19–20 Dow Hill School 19–20 Victoria and Dow Hill Association 20 La Martiniere 19 Loreto Convent schools 19–20 Loreto Entally 20 Loreto St Agnes 20 memories of 138 Second World War 59, 61, 67, 108, 110 servants Anglo-Indians as 90 in archives 248n Indian 1, 26–7, 39, 53, 56, 58, 69, 125–30 at McCluskieganj 90, 98 settlement Anglo-Indian at McCluskieganj 73–4 in American West 77 in Australia 77 British in Cape Colony 77 in India 31, 50 Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement 31–2 Simon Commission (Indian Statutory Commission) (1928) 45, 79, 85–6 Society of Genealogists 106, 120–1, 123, 151–2 soldiers, American 67 space diaspora 12 homely 28 nation 165 third 11 spheres, separate 26–7 Stark, Herbert 42, 51 stereotypes

287

of Anglo-Indian community 15, 30, 103 women 15–16, 30 of mixed race 8 Thapar-Bjo¨rkert, Suruchi 29–30 36 Chowringhee Lane 185 transgression, domestic 65–9 transnational geographies 124–5 urbanism, colonial 32, 35, 50 Waetjen, Thembisa 74, 76–7 Wallace, Kenneth 30–1, 55 Walter, Bronwen 27–8 West, Ellen 237n White Australia Policy 5, 12, 16, 22, 82, 138–54, 159, 164–5, 172–4, 206 Whitefield 18–19, 46, 80–2 whiteness; see also White Australia Policy in Australia 151, 153, 164–5 and Britishness 113 Williams, Blair 193, 201 Winders, Jamie 33–4 women; see also memsahibs Anglo-Indian 10, 12, 30, 40–1, 51–2, 204–5 in British India in Calcutta 40–1 embodying modernity 59–65, 70–1 domestic roles of 69–70 domestic transgression by 65–9 and domestic work in Britain 126–9, 189, 192, 207 dress 155–6, 182, 185–9 Indian 101, 136–7, 185–9 western 36, 49, 60, 62, 101, 132, 155–6, 186–7, 189 education 189–90 employment 10, 60–2, 111, 127, 131–4, 187, 189–92 as nannies 57, 235n as nurses 60–1, 86, 235n

288

I N D EX

women (cont’d ) office work 60–1 Women’s Employment Bureau, Calcutta 61 equality with men 62, 64 freedom of 62–5 harassment of 155–6, 186–7, 189 in independent India 185–200 at McCluskieganj 93–6, 104 marriage of 192–200 morality of 40–1 mothers 195–8 stereotypes of 15–16, 30 in Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India) 61–4, 66–7

British 9, 25–7, 30, 40–1, 107–8 and diaspora 12–13 and home 25, 28–30 Indian 9, 18, 59, 60–4 Bengali 29–30 in Britain 107 and western dress 189 and mixed race 8 and nationalist politics 27–30 Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India) 61–4, 66–7 work, domestic 25–6, 125, 247n; see also labour; servants by Anglo-Indian women in Britain 126–9, 189, 192, 207