International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies
The International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies publishes scholarship relevant to the Anglo-Indian experience that draws on current theory to understand that experience, interrogates literature and other types of media depicting Anglo-Indians, and engages with contemporary and historical issues for Anglo-Indians in India and the diaspora. We also welcome and encourage comparative scholarship which places the Anglo-Indian experience in dialogue with that of other social groups. Submissions are to be made by email to our Editorial Assistant who manages the blind review process: IJAIStudies@gmail.com. ISSN: 1327-1652
Published online with the institutional support of Massey University, Palmerston North, NE
Copyright is owned by the Author of the article, review, or other written pieces appearing in the International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and private study only. The material may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the Author.
Anglo-Indian Lives in the North West c. 1930-1947
EXCERPT FROM: McMenamin, Dorothy (2023). Anglo-Indian Lives in Pakistan: Interrogating Religion and Culture through the lens of Oral Histories. Lahore, Pakistan: Vanguard Publishers. AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article is predominantly a chapter extracted from a wider research project published as Anglo-Indian Lives in Pakistan. The focus here is on the North West region commencing with the spread of the British Raj into the provinces of Punjab and Sind from c.1930 to Independence in 1947. Anglo-Indians in this region, called Pakistan since 1947, lived amongst a predominantly Muslim population compared to those in India within a majority Hindu milieu. The wider project proposed that this religio/cultural difference laid the foundations for the acceptance of mixed race Anglo-Indian families transferred into the region by the British, as compared with British and European males who arrived earlier in India and liaised with local women. Furthermore the geographic terrain of the North West contained the two main mountain passes from Central Asia into India, inducing tolerant attitudes towards outsiders which, in turn, contributed to the higher status enjoyed by Anglo-Indians in Pakistan. To assist in understanding this article, a section from an earlier chapter of the wider project has been inserted at the beginning up until page 14 delineating the differing mentalities of Hindus and Muslims. This insertion explains fundamental attitudes within Hinduism and the entrenched cultural implications of caste in social life, particularly in relation to marriage practices, as opposed to Islamic practices which do not derive from caste heirarchies. Dorothy McMenamin (née DOYLE), PhD, is an independent researcher affiliated with the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, and the University of Otago, Dunedin, both in New Zealand. She was born and schooled in Pakistan. In her teens she emigrated to England, subsequently to Australia and then New Zealand. She specialized in world religions and South Asian history. She has published three books, Raj Days to Downunder (2010), Leprosy and Stigma in the South Pacific (2011) and Anglo-Indian Lives in Pakistan (2023). She is married with four children. Dorothy may be reached by email at: dorothysbookshop@gmail.com
Copyright (c) 2026 Dorothy McMenamin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cultural Assimilation and Shifting Identities: The Anglo-Indian Community in Post- Independence Darjeeling
The Anglo-Indian community in Darjeeling reflects a distinctive process of assimilation, in which patterns of belonging and social participation have evolved through interaction with local communities within the historical context of colonial rule and postcolonial nationhood. Anglo-Indians in Darjeeling have been found to integrate elements of Nepali and Hindu traditions to conform to the local culture while they also maintain their faith in Christianity as well as other distinctively Anglo-Indian traits. With this as the backdrop, this research article traces changing identity and cultural assimilation of the Anglo-Indian community in Darjeeling. Based on ethnographic interviews and participant observation conducted between November 2022 and December 2024, this research analyses how Anglo-Indians have navigated their identity in the context of interfaith relationships, regional influences, and evolving sociopolitical dynamics. The study identifies decline among non-mainstream identities within Darjeeling. The paper recognizes the Anglo-Indian community in Darjeeling as unique, situating it in the wider context of the post-colonial shift towards the stronger assertion of regional and linguistic cultural dominance in India, as against both ethnic distinctiveness on the one hand or national uniformity on the other. Despite their decreasing number, Anglo-Indians still contribute to India's multicultural landscape.
Copyright (c) 2026 Brian Gomes, Shilpita Gine, Joyce Adelene Kempe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Hybrid Identity as a Strategy for Survival: The Anglo-Indian Experience in Ruskin Bond's A Flight of Pigeons
The novella, A Flight of Pigeons (1978) by Ruskin Bond tries to explore the survival and in-betweenness of an Anglo-Indian family, the Labadoors, during the Uprising of 1857. This paper tries to discuss how the mixed-race identity of the Labadoors becomes both a survival mechanism and an agent of constant dislocation and relocation, pushing them into what Homi Bhabha theorises as "third space". This paper also tries to tell how this novella does not fall into the oeuvre of the traditional Mutiny Novel. A close reading of the text suggests how this novella differs from the initial novels on the Uprising of 1857. Moreover, the novella presents before the readers a nuanced and layered portrayal of colonial India, where survival depended on siding with those who wielded power. Keywords: hybridity, third space, Anglo-Indians, mutiny novel
Copyright (c) 2026 Ajeet Singh Parihar, Sarvajit Mukerji https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
We welcome you to the second of two general issues for 2025. We are pleased to feature two up and coming literary scholars in the field of Anglo-Indian Studies, Ajeet Singh Parihar and Sarvajit Mukerji, who turn their critical attention to the work of Ruskin Bond. They are joined by scholars whose work is already familiar to the journal’s readers: Brian Gomes and Dorothy McMenamin. Brian Gomes, joined by Shilpita Gine and Joyce Kempe, present their contemporary ethnographic account of Anglo-Indians in the hill district of Darjeeling. Dorothy McMenamin (nee Doyle) offers a slightly reconfigured chapter from her recent book, Anglo-Indian Lives in Pakistan (2023). These three articles pertain to a diversity of geographical and geopolitical settings and academic disciplines, each offering a unique and valuable contribution to Anglo-Indian Studies scholarship.
Copyright (c) 2026 Robyn Andrews, Brent Otto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Anglo-Indian Religion Research Report on Survey Results
A total of 515[i] Anglo-Indians of all ages, from India and all around the world, responded to the survey that we ran from early December 2012 until the end of April 2013. It provides a revealing overview of the place of religion in the lives of Anglo-Indians. In what follows, we will outline the methods we used, the demographic data we obtained, and some of the most interesting and significant findings. [i] Of the 515 that were started 454 were completed in full.
Copyright (c) 2025 Brent Otto, Robyn Andrews https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
We’re Not What You Think: Contesting Stereotypes and Negotiating Belonging in The Lives of Anglo-Indians in Odisha
This article, ‘We’re Not What You Think: Contesting Stereotypes and Negotiating Belonging in the Lives of Anglo-Indians in Odisha’, explores how members of the Anglo-Indian community in Odisha challenge enduring stereotypes and negotiate a sense of belonging in contemporary India. While dominant narratives—shaped by colonial legacies, media portrayals, and scholarly generalizations—often homogenize the Anglo-Indian identity, this study offers a grounded, region-specific counter-narrative. Drawing on the works of Glenn D’Cruz, Dorothy McMenamin, and Megan Stuart Mills, as well as oral histories and ethnographic fieldwork in towns such as Jatni, Cuttack, and Bhubaneswar, the article examines how Anglo-Indians in Odisha resist reductive labels through professional employment contributions, cultural rootedness, and everyday acts of resilience. By interrogating the production of stereotypes in scholarship and media, and foregrounding lived experiences of otherness and inclusion, this article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of Anglo-Indian identity and belonging in postcolonial India.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lyndon Thomas, Dr. Sthitaprajna https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Posters At The Arch: A Tradition of Protest, Conscience, and Humour in Odisha’s Railway Colony
This narrative explores the unique and largely forgotten tradition of ‘posters’ within the Anglo-Indian community of Odisha – a creative practice that blended humour, protest and communal conscience in equal measure. Emerging in a pre-digital age, these anonymously drawn and handwritten posters served as sharp, witty commentaries on local behaviours, relationships, and social dynamics. Positioned prominently on the arch of the Sacred Heart Church or its adjoining walls, they became both a source of amusement and a mirror reflecting the values – and contradictions – of a tightly knit society. At the heart of this tradition was an anonymous figure affectionately known as the “Poster Man,” whose clever illustrations and well-timed captions gently called out gossip, age-gap romances, and questionable conduct, all while maintaining a tone of mischief rather than malice. Drawing on oral history interviews with senior members of the community, this study documents how these posters – recalled through detailed anecdotes – functioned as a form of satire, subtle protest, and moral reflection. While they occasionally provoked discomfort or embarrassment, they also sparked dialogue, fostered introspection, and reinforced communal bonds. This work is not only a nostalgic account of a colourful chapter in local history, but also a tribute to the Anglo-Indian community’s resilience, creativity, and capacity for self-critique. Ultimately, it serves as a meditation on how small acts of anonymous dissent can engage a community’s conscience and leave lasting cultural imprints.
Personal Names of Hyderabad Anglo-Indians: Ethnicity, European Names, and Resistance to Nativising Tendencies
This study investigates how personal names of Hyderabad Anglo-Indians constitute an important aspect of their ethnic identity. A combination of judgment and random sampling was employed to elicit the data on Anglo-Indian names.[i] Their names were taken from three decades, the 1950s, 1980s, and 2000s, to arrive at the naming styles across the variables of age and gender. The data was collected from the registers of different schools located in Secunderabad, within Greater Hyderabad. In common parlance, the placenames, Secunderabad and Hyderabad are used synonymously. Additionally, the study also investigated the motivation to give Anglo-Indian names to community members, elicited through structured interviews conducted with fifteen community members. The study showed that their first names (for example, Gavin, Evelyn) clearly aligned with the naming customs of the European and English-speaking world. I suggest that this is an example of projecting a distinct identity that is British or western in style. This aspect of their identity, communicated through personal names, diverges from other Indian Christian communities (such as Telugu Catholics) who give local names to their children. [i] Judgment sampling is employed when researchers pre-decide the social variables to be correlated with language, whereas random sampling is a method of data collection in which every community member has an equal chance of being selected for study.
Copyright (c) 2025 Smita Joseph https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
We welcome you to the pages of the first of two general issues of the Journal for this calendar year. This issue contains three articles and a research report. The articles span different historical moments, subcultures of Anglo-Indian lived experiences, and apply a variety of disciplines in their analysis. They feature two different geographic and cultural spaces, urban Hyderabad and semi-rural Odisha. The final piece is a research report for a project that attempted to span the entire Community, in India and the diaspora, in all its demographic diversity. Smita Joseph, Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics at the English and foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, writes about her research on the patterns of Anglo-Indian name-giving to their children in the Hyderabad area. Her analysis reveals patterns by gender and era (1950s, 1980s, and the 2000s) by which she argues that Anglo-Indian naming is a crucial site of marking ethnic identity and differentiation from other Christian ethnicities in the region. The next two articles are set in Odisha and written by local residents, Anglo-Indian Assistant Professor Lyndon Thomas, and Associate Professor Sth Sthitaprajna, both at Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (SOA), Deemed-to-be University, Bhubaneswar. Their articles constitute a welcome break in the relative silence in scholarship on the Community in Odisha. Their first article is an entertaining account and analysis of a phenomenon that became a tradition in the Kurda Road community from 1979 to the early 1990s, whereby public ‘posters’ were anonymously created and posted in the archway outside the local Catholic church. The posters served as a means of giving quite personal social commentary on individuals or organisations. Their article describes a number of the most notable posters, discusses the social impacts, and traces the history of the first and second ‘Poster Man’. Thomas and Sthitaprajna’s second article contends with stereotyping of Anglo-Indians in Odisha. They engaging the work of Glenn D’Cruz, Dorothy McMenamin and Megan Mills on stereotypes, to discuss how Anglo-Indian lived experiences in Odisha measure up. Drawing on their ethnographic research and Thomas’s own experience, they argue that the population in Odisha present a contrast to these stereotypes. The final piece is a report on a survey carried out by us, Brent Howitt Otto and Robyn Andrews (bios below), from late 2012 to early 2013. The survey was part of a larger Anglo-Indian Religion Research project, which we undertook to better, and more systematically, understand the role of religion in lives of Anglo-Indians both in India and in the diaspora. The report outlines the methods we used, as well as the results obtained, some of which were unexpected, such as the percentage of Christians who were Catholics and how this varied depending on whether or not respondents resided in India or the diaspora. This report was made available on the research project’s dedicated website for a limited time following the survey’s conclusion, but it has not until now been published permanently. We trust you will appreciate these varied articles, as well as the research that went into them. As always, we encourage our readers to promote the journal among their scholarly colleagues and friends.
Copyright (c) 2025 Robyn Andrews, Brent Otto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"We're Not East Indians; We're Bleddy Anglo-Indians" Reflections on Glenn D'Cruz's "A Passage from India: Anglo-Indians in Victoria" (2004)
Glenn D’Cruz’s video, A Passage from India, consisted of interviews (mainly of Anglo-Indians from my hometown of Kolkata[i]) along with archival material “connected with the hazards and bureaucratic frustrations of immigrating to Australia during and shortly after the dismantling of the so-called White Australia Policy” (D'Cruz, 2023, p. 5). Using A Passage from India as a touchstone for my observation that Anglo-Indians probably never learned Anglo-Indian History as “the one detail that lights up the page”, I review the culture of migration in Kolkata of that time.[ii] I explore how such a profound deficit within the psyche of Anglo-Indians may have manifested and transacted itself in obvious and subtle ways into the procrustean[iii] Australian immigration policies of the 70s by posing several interconnected questions I have been pondering for several year now: What is the evidence for the premise that Anglo-Indians probably never learned their history? What were the possible effects on Anglo-Indians of such a profound scholastic neglect, and how did that play out with the procrustean Australian immigration policies? Is there a possible historic and foundational link between Anglo-Indian’s not knowing their history, and the self-fashioning of Anglo-Indians as a model Australian immigrant group, that is, “the poster children for the twenty-first century globalization” (D’Cruz, 2017, p. 202)? Whilst A Passage from India is a central reference point for the essay, the video also prompts autobiographical comments, and general observations including some based on my Immigration dossier from The National Archives of Australia, to advance the narrative. [i] Kolkata used to be called Calcutta [ii] Applications made by Anglo-Indians in Calcutta alone increased from 400 in 1965 to over 3,000 in 1968 (NAA: A446/182, 60/66167) as cited in Blunt, A. (2000, p.9). [iii] Procrustean means being marked by arbitrary, often ruthless, disregard of individual differences or special circumstances.
Copyright (c) 2025 Keith St. Clair Butler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The ‘Twist’ in the Transcultural Adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Play The Glass Menagerie (1944) into Shyamaprasad’s Film Akale (2004)
The award-winning Malayalam film Akale (2004), directed by Shyamaprasad, exemplifies the transformative power of transcultural adaptation, adding a distinctive twist to The Glass Menagerie (1944), the memory play by Tennessee Williams, a luminary in American literature. The twist in Akale (2004) lies in i) its cultural adaptation to the fading stereotyped Anglo-Indian community of Kerala metaphorically symbolised as ‘glass menageries’, and ii) the stylistic shift from ‘telling’ their story to ‘showing’ or representing them on the big screen. While both texts delve into human tragedy, the cultural and cinematic adaptation explores layers of reinterpretation, shaped by and resonating with the socio-cultural and historical contexts of mid-20th-century America, in the case of The Glass Menagerie (1944) and that of the 21st-century Kerala in Akale (2004). Drawing from Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, this study posits that Shyamaprasad’s creative process goes beyond mere replication; instead, it establishes a site of intercultural dialogue. By reimagining Williams’s work for a new cultural and temporal setting, the film highlights the universality and adaptability of the art of storytelling. Keywords: Anglo-Indians, transcultural adaptation, twist, human tragedy, stereotype
Copyright (c) 2024 Sreelakshmi KV, Nina Caldeira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reading the Memories in Glenn D’cruz’s Film Vanitas (2022)
Vanitas, a documentary film by Glenn D’Cruz, a Melbourne based Anglo-Indian, is a tribute to his late father Antonie Joseph ‘Anto’ D’Cruz. It falls into the corpus of Anglo-Indian works dealing with colonial nostalgia and postcolonial identity. One of the striking features of this film is its thematic focus on presenting a father-son narrative, wherein Glenn narrates his father Anto D’Cruz hardships and disillusionments as an Anglo-Indian immigrant in London in the 1960s and thereafter in Australia where he died in 1983. This film is an experimental cultural text that uses animation technology, old photographs and select objects of the dead father to present a memory narrative. This article examines their significance through a close reading of the film. Keywords: colonial nostalgia, transgenerational memory, collective memory, hauntology, memorabilia, mourning
Copyright (c) 2024 Shyamasri Maji https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Unearthing Anglo-Indian Roots: A Personal Journey
History comprises countless individual stories which, taken together, allow the historian to make generalisations and paint an overall picture of particular aspects of periods in history. Through the pursuit of their family histories, genealogists can contribute to validating or questioning those generalisations. At the same time, those generalisations can help genealogists appreciate and further develop their understanding of the story of individual ancestors, suggesting avenues of research that otherwise might have never been pursued. So it was for me. A chance discovery that one branch of my family tree included an Indian forebear led me not just on a quest to identify who they were, but also to understand the society in which they and their descendants lived, the particular challenges they faced, and the ways in which they navigated these obstacles. For other people of Anglo-Indian descent seeking to understand their heritage, my pathway to unearthing my Anglo-Indian roots could suggest options to explore in their own search. In addition, the features of early 19thcentury British Indian society that my search exposed, and how these impacted on people with Indian forebears, may resonate with their own ancestors’ experience.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sean Kelly https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
We are delighted to be publishing the second issue of the year 2024, in which we include further publications first presented in shorter form as papers at the Research Workshop in conjunction with the 12th International Anglo-Indian Reunion in Canberra. As noted in the first journal issue of the year the International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies convened this workshop, as it has done over the last four reunions, and shall again in 2026 in Kochi. This second general issue of 2024 contains two articles that began as papers presented in Canberra. The first of these articles is by Sean Kelly, entitled: “Unearthing Anglo-Indian Roots: A Personal Journey”, and documents his story of searching for and revealing the extent of his Anglo-Indian roots. As well as being the intriguing description of his own personal journey and what he discovered, it serves as a model for genealogical and historical research for other Anglo-Indians interested in discovering their own roots. The second article, also presented at the reunion workshop, is from Shyamasri Maji, and examines Glenn D’Cruz’s film, Vanitas, a documentary film created by D’Cruz as a tribute to his late father. In the article, titled “Reading the Memories in Glenn D’Cruz’s film Vanitas (2022)”, Maji examines the film through a range of theoretical lenses and argues the story D’Cruz tells can be seen as a metaphor for many in the community: that their displacement after migration creates a collective memory that haunts those involved and their progeny who are affected by it. Maji’s close reading of the film draws attention to the way the story is so effectively told: through the use of objects, animation technology and narrative. Submitted independently, outside of the workshop, the next article is a critical examination of a Malayalam film, Akale, that takes up themes of representation of Anglo-Indians in regional Indian cinema. Sreelakshmi KV and Nina Caldeira’s article is titled, “The ‘Twist’ in the Transcultural Adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Play The Glass Menagerie (1944) into Shyamaprasad’s Film Akale (2004)”, which accurately conveys the focus of their work. They examine the adaptation from play to screen, note the location of the plot moving from the US to Kerala, and an Anglo-Indian family in Akale replaces the American protagonists of The Glass Menagerie. Their critical analysis of this adaptation includes an examination of how the family are creatively portrayed as Anglo-Indian in ways that both challenge and reinforce various stereotypes. We encourage our readers to promote the journal among their scholarly colleagues and friends.
Copyright (c) 2024 Robyn Andrews, Brent Otto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Difference, Disadvantage and the Anglo-Indian Engagement with Affirmative Action
Debates triggered by the end of legislative nomination of Anglo-Indian representatives in 2019 can be traced back to the founding moments of the Indian Republic. The Anglo-Indian representatives Frank Anthony and Stanley Henry Prater presented before the constituent assembly contrasting views of securing rights-based guarantees for their community. While Anthony foregrounded the community’s position as exceptional, and its privilege symbolic of an aspirational modernity, Prater adopted a more needs-based rhetoric. He stressed the disadvantages that faced the Anglo-Indians, sought to dispel the stereotypes about their perceived privilege, and tried allying their demands with those of the other marginalised groups. Eventually, Anthony’s viewpoint got more traction among all the members and prevailed. I show how these differing rhetorical stances impacted not just the nature of the safeguards subsequently made available to the community and their gradual withdrawal, but also the nature and scope of affirmative action measures more generally.
Copyright (c) 2024 Upamanyu Sengupta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reservations Need to Continue for Anglo-Indians: The Community’s Troubles were Highlighted in a 2013 Report
The following invited opinion piece, by three Anglo-Indian Studies scholars, appeared on 17 December 2019 in The Hindu, in response to the Government’s move the previous month to revoke reservations for Anglo-Indian MPs and MLAs. It is republished here with permission from Srinivasan Ramani, Deputy National Editor of The Hindu, granted on 8 November 2024. The authors’ original title was “Anglo-Indian Reserved Seats Still Very Much Needed” but The Hindu gave it the headline below. It may still be read online at: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/reservations-need-to-continue-for-anglo-indians/article30323462.ece
Copyright (c) 2024 Robyn Andrews, Uther Charlton-Stevens, Dolores Chew https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Solidarity of Anglo-Indians is Still the Question
In this essay I address the efforts by Anglo-Indians to build solidarity and strength as a community, both historically and in recent times. The question of Anglo-Indian solidarity is especially relevant currently, as the last five years have brought a legal challenge to the Community’s recognition, representation and benefits as a minority in modern India. This is not the first challenge faced by the community; for such contestations of rights for the mixed-race Anglo-Indians dates back to prescriptive rulings of the East India Company in the late eighteenth century. The present moment is critical, however, and a topic to which I can speak particularly because of my history of leadership of Anglo-Indian organisation for many years and having served in recent years as a nominated Member of Parliament representing Anglo-Indian interests. In this article I argue that a persistent problem of Anglo-Indians has been the community’s disunity and failure to make good use of opportunities for solidarity that have both been provided legally and have been created by the initiatives by Anglo-Indians themselves, over many generations. Besides sharing my insights into past failures and triumphs, I sketch out the community’s response to the Constitutional amendment in 2020 which removed Anglo-Indian representation in Parliament and State Legislative Assemblies, and suggest a way forward to provide for the good of the Community.
Copyright (c) 2024 Charles Dias https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Use of Slang as a Linguistic Resource in the Creation of an Anglo-Indian Identity: The Case of Hyderabad Anglo-Indians
This study investigates how the Anglo-Indian community in Hyderabad uses slang, an ethno-linguistic artifact, to express their unique identity. A combination of interview and survey techniques was employed to elicit the data on slang. The data on slang were obtained through interviews, but the application of a t test (p < .001) on data collected from Anglo-Indians and their neighboring community, obtained through a survey, validated the usage of slang as an Anglo-Indian code. English-based slang (such as, plug, rubbermouth, fire off) and contact-induced borrowing from colloquial Telugu and Tamil (including, jao, pulling the jao, catching crows) combine to form Anglo-Indian slang. The study suggests that one of the strategies by which the community conveys its distinctive identity vis-à-vis English, and the regional second-language users of English, is through the integration of linguistic material from various sources into Anglo-Indian English. The study suggests that the Anglo-Indian community maintains distinct identities through the usage of slang or hybrid English.
Copyright (c) 2024 Smita Joseph https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In March of 2024 the International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies convened a Research Workshop in conjunction with the 12th International Anglo-Indian Reunion in Canberra. Hosting such events for interdisciplinary scholars to meet and present their research to one another as well as to a lay audience of Anglo-Indians has been a tradition of the Journal for the past four reunions spanning more than a decade. As in the past, some of the papers presented at the Workshop have been expanded by the authors and submitted to the journal for peer review and publishing. While this is a general issue of the journal it contains two articles that began as papers presented in Canberra, both of which address the watershed event for Anglo-Indians in India, Government’s removal of their nominated MPs and MLAs by amendment to the Constitution of India in early 2020. Our first article addresses the way in which language defines ethnic communities and particular subsets of them. Smita Joseph, Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics at The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad studied the slang employed by members of Hyderabad’s Anglo-Indian Community to show how they apply it as a defining feature of their ethnicity and the manner by which they situate themselves in their Indian linguistic and cultural milieu while also maintaining their European ancestry. The second article is by Upamanyu Sengupta, Assistant Professor at the Maharashtra National Law University in Mumbai, entitled ‘Difference, Disadvantage and the Anglo-Indian Engagement with Affirmative Action’. In it he goes back to the legal arguments made in the Constituent Assembly by two Anglo-Indian leaders in favour of creating the reserved, nominated, seats granted to the small and geographically dispersed Anglo-Indian community. He analyses these historic arguments in relation to the recent arguments made by government against the continuation of these reservations which resulted in their revocation. Historian and Anglo-Indian leader from Kerala, Charles Dias, authored the next article which came out of the Workshop in Canberra: ‘Solidarity of Anglo-Indians is Still the Question’. By recounting the history of Anglo-Indian leadership of the community, he concludes that a lack of solidarity among Anglo-Indians, a solidarity which has too often not been cultivated by Anglo-Indian leaders including the nominated MPs and MLAs, has been a weakness that has negatively impacted upon the community’s social and economic fortunes. The Constitutional amendment (2020) that revoked the reserved nominated seats in the Lok Sabha and several state legislative assemblies, could have been avoided, in his view, by greater efforts at Anglo-Indian solidarity and the advantageous use by those who held those seats in serving the community’s pressing needs in critical areas such as housing and education. Finally, related to the articles concerning the Constitutional amendment that ended Anglo-Indian representation in parliament, we republish an opinion piece from scholars printed in The Hindu in December 2019 protesting the Government’s announced intentions in this regard. They argue on national and historic grounds why the preservation of the nominated seats is consistent with the national project to which Anglo-Indians have served. We encourage readers to promote the journal among their scholarly colleagues and friends.
Copyright (c) 2024 Robyn Andrews, Brent Howitt Otto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Voices From Within: Interpreting Australian Anglo-Indians' Responses to Cotton Mary (1999)
This paper undertakes a critical examination of Glenn D’Cruz’s short video Re-Viewing Cotton Mary (2002) through the frameworks of socioeconomic class, gender, and spatiotemporal location. Through an exploration of the reactions and responses from members of the diasporic Australian Anglo-Indian community as they ‘re-view’ Ismail Merchant and Madhur Jaffrey’s Cotton Mary (1999), the study addresses several key questions. Firstly, it seeks to understand the diversity of perspectives among the audience and delves into the reasons behind such diversity. Secondly, the paper investigates major points of concern and contention for viewers, and explores how existing scholarship on Anglo-Indians addresses these points. It probes the convergences and divergences between audience responses and the available academic and journalistic discourse on the film.
Copyright (c) 2024 Priya Alphonsa Mathew https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This special issue of the journal focusses on three short films written and produced by literary and theatre studies scholar, Glenn D’Cruz. Glenn is the author of Midnight’s Orphans (2006), a work that is recognised as a significant contribution to scholarship on Anglo-Indians. He has also produced a number of films which reflect on aspects of Anglo-Indian experience and creative representations about Anglo-Indians. This special issue introduces readers to three of his films, via his own introduction, and offers a critical response from three scholars each of whom engages with one of these films.
Spectral Lives and Stories of Things and Places: A Search for the Anglo-Indian Father in Glenn D'Cruz's Vanitas
This article attempts to unravel D'Cruz's short film, Vanitas(2022), and locate the figure of a spectral Anglo-Indian father inside the cinematic apparatus. Focusing on the lucidity of this technical medium and the diverse genres and cross-references employed by D'Cruz, it states that sometimes in the process of representing generations of trauma and identity crises of individuals, vehicles of representation are themselves overwhelmed and found lacking. D'Cruz's desire to make a film on the volatile subject of memory and guilt with the support of photographs, recorded sounds, and animated fictional constructions is itself an invitation to a dangerously confessional territory that keeps provoking its audience. In my paper, I have tried to investigate these ghostly spaces that are in reality projections of a grieving mind.
Copyright (c) 2024 Asijit Datta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Artist's Introduction - Three Short Films About Anglo-Indians: Re-Viewing Cotton Mary (2002), A Passage from India (2004), Vanitas (2022)
This is Glenn D'Cruz's introduction to this special issue, in which he writes about his own professional and personal background, why he got into film making and the story behind each of the three films about Anglo-Indians which are the subject of analysis in this special issue of the International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies.
Copyright (c) 2024 Glenn D'Cruz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Book Review: The Anglo-Indians: A Portrait of a Community
In this review essay Dolores Chew assesses Barry O'Brien's 2022 book, The Anglo-Indians: A Portrait of a Community.
Copyright (c) 2023 Dolores Chew https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This general issue of the journal comprises two articles and two review essays on recently published books. Each of the articles studies Anglo-Indians in a particular geographic, political and temporal frame. Dorothy McMenamin’s article is based in her extensive study of Anglo-Indians in Pakistan, focusing on the Partition. Lyndon Thomas offers us a window into his current ongoing study of Anglo-Indians in present day Odisha, and some of its preliminary conclusions. The review essays respectively address very significant recent publications: Uther Charlton-Stevens’ Anglo-India and the End of Empire (2022), reviewed by Anjana Banerjee; and, Barry O’Brien’s The Anglo-Indians: A Portrait of a Community (2022), reviewed by Dolores Chew. Dorothy McMenamin’s article, ‘Anglo-Indian Immunity from Partition Violence’ is largely based on one chapter in her recently published book, Anglo-Indian Lives in Pakistan (2023), which emerged from her PhD in history, which aimed to highlight the particular and different experiences of Anglo-Indians in Pakistan compared with India around the Partition and thereafter as both nations emerged. Central to her argument is the unique impact of the socioreligious milieu of Pakistan and India as, respectively, Muslim and Hindu majority states, to the lives of the Christian minority Anglo-Indians. This article focuses on Partition, and provides vivid oral history accounts from Anglo-Indians who lived through Partition but were very rarely victims of the violence. She also includes a number of stories of Anglo-Indian heroism. McMenamin’s work adds a rarely seen dimension within the study of Partition – the experiences of a small minority in the midst of the political turmoil, mass migration and bloodshed. Lyndon Thomas and Sthitaprajna have carried out an ethnographic study of Odisha’s Anglo-Indian community, which has hardly ever attracted any scholarly attention in the past because, perhaps, Anglo-Indians in Odisha have been overshadowed by the cultural centre of gravity of the community in Kolkata just a few hundred kilometres to the north. Now is an apt time for their study, as the community is under cultural strain from diminishing numbers, particularly as railway employment had been their past stronghold but is not any longer. Their ethnography seeks to study the community’s past, its defining cultural anchors and markers of identity, reasons for and principles of change, and the reflections of Anglo-Indians in their own words about the future. In this article, which presents and problematises the community in Odisha, the authors also reveal some of their preliminary conclusions: that Odisha’s Anglo-Indians strongly identify with India as home, while simultaneously feeling distinct from other Indians in some key ways especially tied to their past collective experiences, but which struggle for firm grounding in the present due to changes in occupation, forms of socialising, and the migration out of Odisha for educational and employment opportunities no longer connected to the railways. Last calendar year, 2022, saw the publishing of two important books in the study of Anglo-Indians, and we eagerly publish extended review essays on both of them. One is Uther Charlton-Stevens’ second book, Anglo-Indians and the End of Empire, reviewed by Anjana Banerjee. Unlike Charlton-Stevens’ first book, Anglo-Indians and Minority Politics (2017), which was an academic history based on his doctoral dissertation at Oxford, this latest book targets a popular rather than specialist readership but gives no less a deep dive into Anglo-Indian engagement with politics, theatre and film, the world wars, racial attitudes, Partition and migration in the last decades of the Raj. The other important book of 2022 is The Anglo-Indians: A Portrait of a Community, by Barry O’Brien, current President-in-Chief of the All India Anglo-Indian Association (AIAIA). At over five hundred pages O’Brien aims to tell a comprehensive story of a Community, drawing on both on historical sources and engaging anecdotes gleaned from a life lived at the centre of all things Anglo-Indian, and highlight the perspective of the largest and more than century old extant organisation of Anglo-Indians, the AIAIA. Historian Dolores Chew provides a review essay no less lively than O’Brien’s book.
Copyright (c) 2023 Brent Otto, Robyn Andrews https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Preliminary Assessment of the Anglo-Indian Community in Odisha through Memories and Lived Experiences
Anglo-Indians are a mixed-race Indian minority community. The word 'Anglo' denotes their mainly British descent, and ‘Indian’ refers to the Indian ancestry of this community. V.R. Gaikwad studied the Anglo-Indian community as a cultural and linguistic minority in July 1959-January 1961 in Bangalore, Jhansi and Bilaspur(Gaikwad, 1967). Subsequent studies on Anglo-Indians have focused on the experiences of Anglo-Indians based in metro cities such as Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai while overlooking Anglo-Indians' historical and geographical presence in small towns and non–metropolitan cities. This anomaly was, to an extent, remedied in a book on Anglo-Indians in smaller towns and cities (Andrews & Gera Roy, 2021). However, there has been no known study on Anglo-Indians (AIs) in Odisha. This article explores social and cultural changes through their lived experiences and attempts to provide a historical perspective on the Community in Odisha and its relationship with the railways. It also touches on the concept of ‘home’ or desh, examining the popular notion of Anglo-Indians not being rooted in India as home, with particular reference to the community in Odisha.
Copyright (c) 2023 Lyndon Thomas, Sthitaprajna https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Anglo-Indian Immunity from Partition Violence
This article is drawn from a wider research project delineating Anglo-Indian lives in Pakistan.* Anglo-Indians in that country reside amongst a predominantly Muslim population, compared to a Hindu majority in Independent India. Exploring this religious-cultural dimension exposed the non-discriminatory attitude of Muslims towards mixed race people, compared to the hierarchical exclusive ideals of caste Hindus. It is argued this difference contributed to the higher social status of Anglo-Indians in Pakistan. A pivotal period of Anglo-Indian lives in newly created Pakistan was partition in August 1947. Inevitably family memories around this momentous time included stories of communal violence witnessed at close hand by Anglo-Indians. Despite providing havens of safety for locals at risk, this research shows that Anglo-Indians were not targeted by the rampant carnage. This immunity from cycles of violence is an important addition to the continuing search for narratives encompassing the complexity of partition events and, importantly, documents the hitherto unrecognized heroism of Anglo-Indians. * This article is adapted from a chapter in the author’s book, Anglo-Indian Lives in Pakistan (2023), which was based on her PhD thesis. A doctoral scholarship enabling this research from the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, is acknowledged and greatly appreciated.
Copyright (c) 2023 Dorothy McMenamin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Book Review: Anglo-India and the End of Empire
In this review essay, Anjana Banerjee assesses a newly published work, Anglo-Indians and the End of Empire (2022) by Uther Charlton-Stevens.
Copyright (c) 2023 Anjana Banerjee https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Making, "Calcutta, I'm Sorry": The Idea, the Process, the Completion
This article highlights the process of taking the germ of an idea inspired by real life and converting it imaginatively into a screen story and eventually as a full-length feature film. It also focuses on the writer-director and his early life in a small railway colony in South India. He grew up watching many movies by illegally entering a touring talkies near his home. He falls in love with the art of cinema and dreams of becoming a filmmaker one day. It took him almost fifty years to make his first film Going Away (2013). His second feature Calcutta, I'm Sorry (2022), a road film / emotional drama, was not easy to put together. He was lucky to find a producer who believed in his script and gave him a free hand to make his vision come alive. Calcutta, I'm Sorry has a big distinction: it is the first Indian film centered around Anglo-Indian characters written and directed by an Anglo-Indian. It is not a story about the Anglo-Indian community per se, but it brings out the essence of being Anglo-Indian and its core theme of redemption will resonate well with anyone from any community.
Copyright (c) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reflecting on Vanitas: Archives, Affects, Ethics
Vanitas is a short film written by Glenn D’Cruz and co-directed by Glenn D’Cruz and Steven Andrew McIntyre with animation art by John Graham. The work premiered at the Revelation Perth International Film Festival and won awards for best director and best Melbourne short film at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. It also received a special mention at the Antenna Documentary Film Festival in Sydney in October 2022. Vanitas explores D’Cruz’s often-fraught relationship with his Anglo-Indian father, Anto, who died in 1985 at the age of 53. This multi-layered work is, on one level, a belated eulogy to Anto D’Cruz, but it is also about the way some Anglo-Indians experienced the sting of racism and thwarted ambition as a consequence of historical and cultural forces that are not always easily apprehended during the messy bustle of everyday life. In this short article, D’Cruz reflects on the film’s creative and collaborative processes. It is important to be aware that while Vanitas is not a work of fiction it is a creative work that uses literary, theatrical, filmic and painterly techniques to tell its story.