New Book on Anglo-Indians Wins High Praise

By Rudy Otter

During the British Raj in India a new community was spawned by the union of white settler men and Indian women. Called Anglo-Indians, they aligned themselves to the British,and when freedom-hungry Indians mounted their frenzied “Quit India” campaigns, the Anglo-Indians assumed they too had to leave and go “home” to Britain, a home they had never seen.

From India’s Independence in 1947 until the 1960s, some 50,000 Anglo-Indians migrated to England, confident they would be welcomed in their faraway paradise.

What transpired after they reached those chilly shores is the subject of “Britain’s Anglo-Indians”, an absorbing and highly acclaimed book by Mumbai-born Rochelle Almeida, a clinical professor of global cultures in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University. She charts the plight of this community from its earliest beginnings, evidenced by many pages of bibliography.

Making several visits to Britain from her Connecticut home, the author interviewed hundreds of Anglo-Indians who, under the cloak of anonymity, felt free to speak their minds on the prejudices and injustices they experienced in their early days, facing such insults as: “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” and landlords and employers freely practising racial discrimination by denying them rented accommodation and jobs, respectively. However, after several teeth-gritting years, all worked out well for them, even better than expected, on every front. As one first-generation Anglo-Indian migrant journalist commented: “Life is so very different and wonderful from what it was when we first arrived here…with our bizarre misconceptions, culture clashes, sensitivities and chips on our shoulders the size of the Taj Mahal. We are now more mature and happier than we have ever been.”

The irony is that neither the authorities of Independent India, nor the departing British, had wanted them to leave India, as Almeida discovered. This is an informative and highly readable hardback, meticulously researched by the author who is also an international journalist. (Published in 2017 by Lexington Books, USA (www.rowman.com), price US$100, ISBN 978-1-4985-4588-4.

Speaking to this magazine, Rochelle Almeida said she wrote \\\”Britain\\\’s Anglo-Indians\\\” following the publication of her second book, \\\”The Politics of Mourning\\\” in 2005. \\\”I was on the look-out for a new research project,\\\” she said. Around this time she met Blair Williams, an Anglo-Indian friend from New Jersey who\\\’d founded a charity organisation, Calcutta Tiljalah Relief, to help that city\\\’s destitute Anglo-Indian widows, and set up CTR Publishing to boost fundraising, producing paperbacks by and about Anglo-Indians for sale internationally.

Williams knew Almeida was a freelance writer and urged her to submit essays for publication in his books. She said: \\\”This was probably the first attempt at rallying Anglo-Indians around the world towards a common cause. It made me aware of the Anglo-Indian global diaspora and I became intrigued by the community.\\\” She had grown up in Mumbai with many Anglo-Indian school-mates, and those \\\”fond memories\\\” spurred her to probe the now widely-dispersed community.

\\\”Simultaneously,\\\” she said, \\\”I became aware of a book by the London-based sociologist Lionel Caplan entitled Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Post-Colonial World.\\\” Caplan, whom she got to know well, had been in Chennai interviewing Anglo-Indians who’d never left India. His field-work as an ethnographer was aimed at finding out how Anglo-Indians who resisted the temptation to migrate had fared in India. \\\”His book inspired me to find out how Anglo-Indians who had migrated to the UK soon after India’s Independence had fared there.\\\”

Rochelle refers to them as the \\\”First Wave\\\”, subsequent waves of Anglo-Indians migrating to Australia and New Zealand. She secured funding from New York University, where she is a Professor of South Asian Studies, and spent a year in the UK doing field research comprising face-to-face interviews with Anglo-Indian migrants of all ages. \\\”I had always nurtured the dream of living for a prolonged period in the UK—as I am an unabashed Anglophile–and this project provide me with a reason to do so.\\\”

As an academic, she also needed to make the manuscript attractive to an academic publishing house. She said: \\\”I see scholars and students of migration and diasporic studies using it as a reference source. But its language is also accessible enough that the general reader with an interest in the Anglo-Indian community will find much of interest in it.\\\” She is right. Her book has been universally praised by reviewers for everything from its “in-depth research” to its “lively and fluent style.”

She also got involved in research at the UK\\\’s National Archives in Kew, as well as the British Library, and the Senate House Library of the University of London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

\\\”Finding a publisher took me two years as the bigger scholarly presses were unwilling to publish a book on Anglo-Indians who are unknown to the general public because of their very ‘invisibility’ in the UK and the rest of the world. It is exactly what I discuss at great length in my book, which I sub-titled ‘The Invisibility of Assimilation’. \\\”

She added: \\\”The most enjoyable aspect was meeting elderly Anglo-Indians who, for the most part, took me fondly to their hearts. I was delighted to find that, despite decades of living in the UK, they had not lost their essentially Indian traditions of hospitality. Many of them served me full Indian home-cooked meals in their kitchens, several picked me up from local railway stations and dropped me back, others invited me to parties in their homes so that I could meet their Anglo-Indian friends and relatives. I found them to be outgoing, jolly and blessed with a sense of humour. They shared stories, photographs, letters, official documents and meals with me as they let me into their personal and private lives. I found them, their lives and their stories endlessly fascinating.\\\”

Researching and writing this book also brought Rochelle into contact with people like the English film actress Diana Quick, who went to Pakistan to seek out her Anglo-Indian relatives. “I also had the opportunity to meet the respected Oxford scholar Judith Brown at Brasenose College. She gave me freely of her time and advice. I met British sociologists working in similar areas who invited me to lecture on my book at prestigious universities such as Oxford and Cambridge and the University of London. These were wonderful experiences that made my work extremely fulfilling.\\\”

Rochelle said: \\\”I would like readers to understand how much of a sacrifice first wave Anglo-Indian settlers made in relinquishing their ties to India, how much discomfort and hardship they tolerated in Britain so that their children and grandchildren could enjoy stable, relatively comfortable financial conditions. They compromised their job expectations and lived in run-down neighbourhoods on frugal budgets. They had left India with an average of 3 pounds in their pockets—their entire life savings–and most of them earned no more than 8 shillings a week in the early years—out of which they spent 3 shillings a week on rent. Yet, none of them gave up on their dreams—they merely adjusted them or postponed them. I want readers to know how laudable it was that those settlers stuck it out in the face of terrible odds when they were deprived of jobs and the kind of accommodation that they desired.\\\”

\\\”I want readers to understand that although Anglo-Indians might not have found the kind of economic success that subsequent South Asians in the UK such as the Gujaratis and Punjabis achieved, in a sense, they paved the way for later flows of South Asians from the Indian sub-continent and East Africa who no longer had to face unsavoury aspects of racism and class prejudice in Britain..\\\”

She added: “I owe everything to my husband and our daughter who supported me fully in the research and writing of this book.\\\” For more details of Rochelle Almeida’s books, articles and academic achievements go to her website:http://liberalstudies.nyu.edu/about/faculty/rochelle-almeida/html

Rudy Otter, a UK-based Anglo-Indian writer and first-generation immigrant, is D&D’s longest-serving UK correspondent.