Beyond British Horizons: The Anglo Indians

She grew up in a railway colony in Ratlam, in India, cocooned in an idyllic, insulated world, attending a European Anglo Indian Railways school. A trip to Bombay for higher studies, introduced her to her first Indian communist, a Hindu girl of 12, whose father an Indian Navy commander almost got court martialled because he hoisted the Indian flag a bit too soon on the day of India’s independence, which was still under British regime, for a few hours more. And yet for Joyce Mitchell, it was Mrs. Kirby, a fair skinned Anglo Indian married to a British man visiting India, who held the key to Nirvana.

“Mrs. Kirby would say..Ah the fish mongers, the fish lying on MARBLE slabs! Sitting there wide eyed I would think, as an Indian I’m never going to get to heaven, but the closest I could get to it was if I could get to England!” Joyce says she was chosen as a companion for Mrs. Kirby’s daughter and the Kirbys who were returning to England asked her parents to send Joyce, who was 18 years old then, with them. Her parents couldn’t afford the fare but a kindly uncle paid for her to go “on the oldest ship that ever sailed the Indian sea.” She reached England and wanted to go right back. ‘ I stood there in strange tweed clothes, a hat and garters, clutching 2 leather suitcases waiting for someone to carry my bags, till a porter told me I had to do it myself. Mrs. Kirby whose family was never accepted as British, but remained the inferior country cousins, was relegated to cooking the most horrible food for us, something she never did in India, and I wondered what was I thinking wanting to come here?” After the initial teething trouble, however Joyce says going to school and working in England taught her to become independent and confident. When she came back, her parents were aghast at her new English accent. “ They were still the same, it was I who had changed, but in a strange way I went to Britain and rediscovered my Indianness.” Joyce later joined Air India and enjoyed traveling all over the world before marrying and settling down in the US.

Blair Williams, who worked for the Railways before migrating to the US, says the first 17-18 years of his life were very Anglo Indian where he had no idea whatsoever about India, Indian culture, or other Indian communities. Williams went to Anglo Indian schools, an Anglo Indian college and lived in areas where he was surrounded by Anglo Indians.”I lived in a fairly isolated, almost lopsided, distorted world.”

It was when he got through the Civil Services exam and joined the Indian Railways that the wheel literally came a full circle. ‘There were no Anglo Indians in the civil services. I can’t tell you how mercilessly I was ragged. I had a terrible accent, I couldn’t speak the Indian language and made many linguistic blunders. Every one kept ribbing me. Fortunately I was good at sports otherwise I would have had no redeeming quality in the eyes of the Indians working with me! They also thought I could handle labor. Things were very tough during the early 70s with the naxalite movement at its height, and they even killed my foreman, but I managed to do well and win the loyalty of my men.” Four years later, Williams was a different man altogether. “I was totally immersed in the Indian culture, my best friends were Indians. For the next 15 years on the railways I mixed only with Indian officers.”

Blair’s wife Ellen comes from a family where one of her grandfather’s brothers came to India and married into Muslim Royalty.” This was authenticated when the Queen visited us.” Ellen’s grandfather was an accomplished Urdu poet. ‘I can speak fluent Urdu, and never thought of myself as anything but Indian,” says Ellen.

The phrase Anglo Indian was initially concocted to describe Englishmen who returned from their stay in India, during the British regime, but by the 20th century the word had taken on a new spin. It was now being used to describe a community of 500,000 spawned from the 17th century onwards as a result of unions between European colonists, and Indian women.

The Anglo Indians saw themselves as English; the English however shunned them because they weren’t purebreds. The community was given some leeway for the Englishness of their blood line through reserved government jobs in the Railways, Posts and Telegraphs, customs and Police. The top brass was always British but the Anglo Indians managed to net most of the supervisory posts.

Authors Sylvia Staub and Margaret Deefholts are both children of Anglo Indians who worked for the Indian Railways, and lived in an Anglo Indian world. Both have retained a deep sentimental attachment to India. They say growing up in India was idyllic and they wouldn’t exchange those memories for anything in the world. Margaret says post independence there were subdued rumbles insinuating that the British have left, so why don’t Anglo Indians go home as well. “Now when I look back, there were comments like why don’t you get out of India? You are not Indian, You don’t speak the language, you don’t know much about Indian culture, but home for us was India.”

Ron Forbes who is currently President & CEO of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, in Canada was born in Calcutta and says that the affluent Indians had a similar life style as that of the Anglo Indians. ‘ We spoke English, went to theater and classical music concerts. So what we shared was really an international culture and not Indian or British as such.” Forbes says while he didn’t want to put his identity in the slot of Indian or Anglo Indian, he felt more comfortable relating to Indians, and calling himself an Indian. Forbes left for England, armed with an MBA degree rose rapidly in banking and lived in England for 20 years before moving to Canada.

Forbes says the ironic thing was that the British in England behaved very differently from the British in India. “The British in India would go to the clubs and dance and party every evening. In England they barely managed to go out once a month.” Forbes says he always said that he was Indian, when asked in England. He would then get questions, “ Why is your name Forbes? Why do you speak English in that accent, which is unlike any other Indian accent?” Forbes said he never saw any nostalgia for Anglo Indians among the Indians he met in Britain, nor any attention from the British. The Anglo Indians too were trying their hardest to assimilate and more concerned with making it than touting their Anglo Indianness to the British. It was the same with Anglo Indians who chose to remain in India.

After the Indian independence, the British quit India and Pakistan, leaving behind their country cousins, at the mercy of the local governments. Many Anglo Indians panicked and migrated to England, Australia, Canada, and US from the 1950s onwards, to seek a better life. Some chose to stay back in India and Pakistan.

Lionel Lumb was born in Lahore and says the family was very happy in Pakistan before moving to Calcutta in 1949 due to his father’s business interests when he was about 11. Lumb says while he had many Indian friends he doesn’t recall any of them coming over to his house for dinner or a party, perhaps due to their religious beliefs, though he never sensed any bias. Some of his relatives stayed back in Pakistan and one uncle went on to become a Brigadier General fighting two wars against India. “ I think it was gut wrenching for him to see the very soldiers who had escorted him to safety during partition to the other side, being taken prisoners of war and he was now the enemy.”

Life in Calcutta was idyllic, for the large Anglo Indian community, and Indians from the upper crust of society attended school and college with Lumb and socialized with him regularly. Marriages outside the community were frowned upon, says Lumb, who became a journalist, and married an Anglo Indian in 1963. At that time several Anglo Indians were doing well in mercantile houses, customs and other areas and the Anglo Indian women were always in great demand for nursing, teaching, secretarial and executive assistant posts. The men, he adds had a harder time post independence because the reserved posts no longer existed and most of them did not pursue higher studies, even though they graduated from St. Xavier’s which is still ranked among the top three schools in India.

After independence, most Anglo Indian men did not have any influential connections to get them through the door with big corporations. The top jobs went to well educated, well connected Indians while the Anglo Indian men ended up with the crumbs-a clerical or junior management position. “Several Anglo Indian men started migrating to Canada and later to Australia, although color played a part in how the Anglo Indians were treated both in India and abroad,” says Lumb. “My fair skinned cousins were allowed to swim in the Calcutta swimming club that had a “Whites Only” policy. I could not go in because I’m brown skinned. Australia opened its doors to immigrants from all over the world, waiving its “ Whites Only” only policy in 1967, but before that when quite a few Anglo Indians including my aunt and her family went to Australia, only the white skinned Anglo Indians were allowed to immigrate”.

Lumb was doing very well in Calcutta but had begun to wonder how India would be when his young son grew up. “I knew the Anglo Indians had started doing well, abroad. In Australia for instance the Anglo Indians spoke better English than many other immigrants and had western habits, so they didn’t find it hard getting work.” Lumb chose to migrate to England because of his journalistic background and dreams of working on Fleet Street. He first joined Reuters and then the BBC on his way to the top, but on a personal level the migration to England was a terrible disappointment. “We just loved the warmth and hospitality and the sweetness of India. To end up in this cold damp country where you never got past talking to people over a garden fence or the front door was tough to get used to. Our neighbor once told my wife we had more friends and relatives visit us in the one year we had been there than she had in the 15 years that she had been living there. I called the front parlor of most English homes the mausoleum or the funeral parlor. It was well furnished and immaculately kept but there were never any visitors to enjoy it. It was a hard transition from the joyous and cheery, social interactions in India to becoming part of a community that was in the habit of turning inward socially and living within its own self imposed walls.”

Lumb and his family moved to Canada in 1973 after racism reared its ugly head. The Tory MP Enoch Powell’s anti immigrant speech blaming everything that was wrong in Britain on the immigrants was the starting point and as soon as Lumb moved, there were race riots in Britain. “I know of several Anglo Indian families who moved to Britain first and shared my disappointment with it. We felt, who wants to be in an old country with old ways that still doesn’t understand that the days of the empire and white supremacy have ended.” Lumb says moving to Canada was the best thing they did. “For all it’s cold weather Canada is an exceedingly warm hearted country. Our three children blossomed , and had a much better social life here. They also learnt to be confident and proud of their brown skins. They had been heckled in England.”

Sylvia Staub says she regrets that the Anglo Indians were caught in the middle, when it came to the British and India. “I am very sentimental about India. The British were snobs who looked down upon us and because we as a community were dependent on the Brits for our daily living we ended up having very little to do with the Indians. I blame the British for the great divisions they created between the Indians and the Anglo Indians, something I have always regretted.”

When partition happened her family found out that the Hindus were going to attack cottages of their Muslim employees some of whom had been with the family for 2-3 generations. Her uncle, a prominent member of the community, made the Muslim women dress in his wife’s clothes and personally drove the family to the train station and saw to it that they left safely. Sylvia says she first worked for the Indian High commission in England before moving to the US, but kept her Indian passport and was always proud to share the fact that she came from India.

Margaret Deefholts says her extended family moved to Canada, because they wanted to be together and she felt her kids had a better chance of eking out a living abroad if for some reason they were unable to go to college. They didn’t migrate to England because she never felt England was home. “I speak only for myself but I think the British in India were insufferable and I had no respect for them.”

The Anglo Indians have made a mark in many fields globally since India gained independence. Singer Engelbert Humpherdinck, authors Rudyard Kipling, Ruskin Bond, cricketer Roger Binny, actresses Vivian Leigh and Merle Oberon, media legend Melville Demellow, Hockey star Leslie Claudius, tennis ace Leander Paes and soldier & Governor of Bengal Robert Clive are all Anglo Indians. There are Anglo Indians today who are outstanding politicians, sportsmen, writers, highly decorated soldiers, business entrepreneurs all over the world.

Even the ones that stayed behind have adjusted, and risen to high ranks in all walks of life though about 25 percent of those living in India are struggling financially and need help with housing, education and maintaining the elderly. The younger generation has assimilated into the mainstream while being aware of their Anglo Indian roots but not obsessing too much about it. From the 1940s and 50s when 90 percent of Anglo Indians reportedly married within the Anglo Indian community, the numbers dropped to a little over 50 percent in the 1990s. Today Anglo Indians over the age of 50 are trying to return to their roots, to shatter myths and negative stereotyping about the Anglo Indians that has become rooted in history over time and coaxing the younger generation to help them preserve their heritage.

Blair Williams, founder of CTR, a non profit organization that supports needy Anglo Indians in India (http://www.blairrw.org) says that when he looks at the 50 plus years of independence, and the recorded history, all he sees are biased writings by Europeans and Indian authors about the Anglo Indians. Academic literature has also failed to record the contribution and sense of community the Anglo Indians exhibited in times of need. Again there was no literature on the community by Anglo Indians themselves.

“I realized that if we did not do anything to rectify this, then history will continue to remember the Anglo Indians in a lop-sided way. The women would be perceived as less ethnic and more sexually promiscuous than Indian women, and the men as alcoholic wastrels who did nothing except party.”

Sylvia Staub says most Anglo Indian women lived a very protected life. When she went to England to work for the Indian High commission, a Bengali woman had to take her under her wing because of her naiveté about so many things, and show her the ropes. It was the same with Margaret Deefholts and Joyce Mitchell, who were brought up to be self confident but were not promiscuous in any way. ‘There are promiscuous women in every culture,” says Sylvia Staub, ‘ Just because Anglo Indian women were more outgoing and fun loving, and worked unlike many of their Indian counterparts didn’t mean they were of loose character.’ “But that kind of gossipy look at the Anglo Indians was what made for a juicy story!, laughs Margaret Deefholts and adds, “ On a serious note I think Anglo Indian girls were very beautiful and dated and went out. In that particular era that was regarded as not genteel by Indians. Today the Indian women have changed so much and become even more liberal and no one bats an eye.’

The Anglo Indian men too, adds Blair, were not alcoholic party animals. A lot of them held highly responsible posts, and post independence, after struggling for a few years, most Anglo Indian men realized that they had to go for higher education and work harder if they had to do well against Indian men in India. By the 1980s they had done just that, and learnt the language as well. Today they have merged well in the Indian mainstream and excelled in so many diverse fields along with their women. “Even in those days my little town of 80,000 had international hockey players, an Anglo Indian woman had been to Wimbledon, among other things,” says Sylvia.

Today the Anglo Indian community stands tall with outstanding achievements in every field. Blair Williams is being credited by many to have toiled and single-handedly done a tremendous amount of work to revive interest in the Anglo Indian community and its heritage through publishing books about and by the community. The internet has also opened the doors to a huge global Anglo Indian connection. Several websites on the community are now all over cyber space. “ These days when people ask about the community, I don’t waste my breath,” jokes Lionel Lumb, “I just say go the internet and read up.” The older generation has had several reunions, and reveled in eating the Indian curries, reminiscing and using the linguistic jargon they had grown up speaking. Most reunions have been fairly productive. Now the thing that concerns the older generation most is how to get their children excited about their Anglo Indian heritage. From their own personal experiences the interviewees say that some of their children are very curious and interested in who the Anglo Indians are, others just take the fact that they are of mixed heritage in their stride, and go about their business. Blair Williams says though the younger generation has done very well financially, it prefers to give back to the mainstream than their own community. It has been hard to get them excited or involved in preserving their heritage. Older Anglo Indians think their generation is the last of the Anglo Indians. Most Anglo Indians feel the community will be lost forever in assimilation, once the current generations of older Anglo Indians in their 50s and above passes away.

Megan Mills, a Canadian, has done her PhD dissertation on ”Ethnic Myth and Ethnic Survival – The Case of India’s Anglo-Indians (Eurasian) Minority.” Mills has interviewed a broad cross section of Anglo Indians and traveled to India and other countries where the community resides, and says she has been hearing about the community becoming extinct but 400 years have passed and it hasn’t happened.

Younger Anglo-Indians, she says have been drowning in and getting saturated with their parents’ nostalgic memories. Most youngsters, says Mills do that, till they reach a certain age; then wish they’d asked for more. “Yes, the young are different — what else is new? But most communities do not tend to adhere as closely to the way of life brought from India, through generations!” Mills feels younger Anglo Indians abroad will take interest in what’s happening in India if it’s presented to them differently. They need to know the specific problems faced today, and how they could aid the efforts already in place.

“If the same young people abroad are told ’here’s a deserving family in your family’s old town that could use a few bucks and someone to write to the kiddies, or whatever else you can think of’, it will be a different ,’ says Mills. She also emphasizes that the reality is that everyone is marginal to everyone else in South Asia. If one speaks to Indians old enough to remember 1971, or the border wars, one finds they know an awful lot about Anglo-Indians from every walk of life who contributed, in various ways.

Mills adds that she has come across cliques even within the Anglo Indians, a fact confirmed by Anglo Indians themselves, but it seems the value system is remarkably similar across backgrounds and classes. One finds Anglo Indians having very strong family ties, they are usually liked by others around them, and again, seen as part of the social wallpaper, says Mills, and not as the ’freaks’ or romantic castaways, or dinosaurs projected by journalists or academic material.

Mills says what she finds interesting is that some of the people who fret about the future loss of Anglo Indian identity, will in the same breath, go on to report that their daughter is off to nursing school, their son is involved in two Roman Catholic charities, working for Air Canada, and playing cricket on the weekend. Others, branded as being in ’danger of assimilation’ show typical hospitality, attention to their work, strong Christian values, love of Indian cuisine, fondness for friends from India, and love of Anglo Indian get togethers. They may be cliquish but when a worthy cause comes along, every Anglo Indian chips in doing constructive things to help others. So she is not buying into the gloomy stories of a dying breed of these human “left overs’ from the British empire.

Lionel Lumb says while the younger generation is assimilating, he wants history to remember the Anglo Indian legacy as of a people who were able to contribute in large measure to the success of the British empire building, and did not, at the same time lose their close attachment to India. ‘ We were born there and love to go back. As little children we were told some English tales at bedtime by our parents when but then came our ayah who told us lovely Indian stories and somewhere the lines blurred. There isn’t a single Anglo Indian who grew up in that era who doesn’t get confused at some time or the other and wonders ‘Was that the English story or was that the Indian story? When I see an Indian sunset, whether it is on the beaches of Goa or in the mountains of Kulu valley, I know that this is my spiritual home, no matter where I live.

Sylvia Staub puts it aptly: “Our history is important because we have been the largest, most interesting experiment in genetics between the east and the west and have represented the finest of both hemispheres in many ways. We even learnt values like loyalty from the British who preached but never practiced it. From our Indian brethren we learnt kindness, hospitality and a wide open attitude towards religion, because Hinduism is a philosophy, a way of life and open to any one who cares to be a part of it. We are also the only truly global community and there is a lot the current generations can learn from us.”