The Anglo-Indians: A 500-Year History

By S. Muthiah & Harry MacLure

For over 500 years, since the Portuguese put down their roots in India c. 1500, the Anglo-Indians, a community of mixed heritage has been called by various names, some of them rather derogatory. Between 1911 and 1935, the Anglo-Indians evolved as a well-defined community recognized by the Government of India. The first part of The Anglo-Indian traces their history. Today, about two-thirds of the community has settled overseas. In India, the other third is progressing as never before. Together, as in the past, they are proving to be achievers and significant contributors wherever they are and against all odds. Some of those significant contributions they have made are a substantial part of the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Niyogi
• Release date: Oct 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9789381523766

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Parliament

PART I

Harry MacLure and Richard O’Connor who have teamed with me on this book are Anglo-Indians. I am not. Making many a person who’d heard I was working on this pictorial history of the Anglo-Indian community wonder what my connection with it is.

In the first instance, the European period in South India, particularly the British era, is a special interest of mine and of which I’ve written much. Very much part of that post-1498 history is the Anglo-Indian story. But my connections with the Anglo-Indians are very much more personal than that.

As far back as I can remember, I was taught by a Mrs. Smith from Madras. I learnt the three Rs, my English and table manners from her. To all in the family, she was ‘Nanny’, reflecting Indian society of the 1930s when affluent Indian families demonstrated their Westernisation or their affinity to the Raj by having their children brought up or taught by British, European or Anglo-Indian governesses. For years afterwards, I kept in touch with ‘Nanny’, calling on her whenever I was in Madras; she would always be helping at her son-in-law’s pharmacy in Vepery, Wilfred Pereira’s.

When I joined Kindergarten in Colombo, a Mrs. Sanger from Bangalore entered the family to look after my sisters till they joined school. Meanwhile, in school, I caught up with glamorous Miss Mavis Sansoni. Petite, lively, and, as I was later to discover, heavily rouged. More motherly but sterner was Mrs. de Kretser. The two Kindergarten teachers were Burghers, the Ceylon equivalent of the Anglo-Indian. The Burghers were to be part of my daily life in the school years that followed. That was a Colombo where in its ‘public schools’ Sinhalese, Tamils, Burghers and Moors scarcely recognised ethnic diversity, were bound together by English and the ‘old school tie’, and spent time in each other’s homes, interdining, as the anthropologists would say,

and socialising.

The next three years were to be spent at Montfort School in the Shevaroy Hills of South India and at Lawrence College, Ghora Gali, near Murree, the hill station of the then undivided Punjab. In both, the Indian student strength was less than ten per cent; the rest was Anglo-Indian. The six years that followed were in the U.S., discovering that the Negroes, as they were then called (‘Black’ was to become correct usage only some years later), had as mixed-blooded a heritage as any Anglo-Indian or Burgher and ranged in colour from the palest café au lait to ebony. They were as out of place on the American campuses of the 1940s as the handful of foreign students. More significantly from the point of view of the background to this book, they shared many of the characteristics, uncertainties and concerns of the Anglo-Indian and the Burgher.

Back in Colombo, I was once again among the Burghers. The Times of Ceylon’s editorial staff was a third Burgher and its press room was half Burgher. And finding me a bachelor, more often than not at a loose end, almost every one of them wanted me home for a meal or a party. Thus, for nearly the first forty years of my life, I spent much time with those of a mixed ethnic heritage.

In Madras, from the late 1960s, the Anglo-Indian connection diminished considerably. There were just three or four Anglo-Indians in the large printing and publishing house I managed, working as printers or editorial and secretarial staff. Much later, I caught up with Dr. Beatrix D’Souza, m.p. and Professor of English, and through her a few members of the Anglo-Indian community like Harry and Richard.

In the years that followed, I met several Burgher colleagues in the U.K. whenever I visited that country and, then, from the new Millennium, others in Australia when one of my daughters settled there. There, I spent time with many of them in Canberra, Melbourne or Sydney, going down memory lane and remembering what a great team we were at The Times. In these cities, I also got the opportunity to meet several Anglo-Indians at one gathering or another.

By then the ‘British in South India’ period had me in thrall and one aspect of that history was discovering the moving story of a community in search of itself. The community of people of mixed ethnic heritage, those whom Kumari Jayawardena, the eminent Sri Lankan social scientist, now calls the Euro-Asians, is one I’ve been in fairly close touch with longer than most of its members alive today. Some of those insights the decades have provided and what the history books and archives tell me are what you will find in the pages that follow. They will, I hope, present a vibrant community that’s had more than its share of ups and downs and NOT be seen as an epitaph to what many in the community feel is a vanishing tribe.

This book owes much to:

Harry MacLure and his team at Anglos In The Wind, a quarterly journal that over the last fifteen years has done much to link a community now spread around the world;

Richard O’Connor of Indian Customs who sheds officialdom with his uniform and adopts scholarship at one end of the scale and emceeing concerts with blazing guitars at the other;

The numerous Anglo-Indian authors round the world who over the last couple of decades have begun to tell the story of their community and its members, adding to what others had written a few generations ago;

Dr. Beatrix D’Souza who has written a perceptive and candid Foreword to the book;

All those who have contributed the photographs that have enriched this volume and who are individually acknowledged with the pictures;

V. Srinivasan, Pushpa Dhanavandan and Krishna Prasad, G. Shankar and the rest of the team at PACE systems graphic communications, Chennai, who have provided all the secretarial assistance I needed to put this book together;

And Bikash D. Niyogi of Niyogi Books, New Delhi, who commissioned this work and who has ensured its excellent production.

ChennaiS. MUTHIAH

During the 9th Anglo-Indian Reunion, held in Kolkotta, in January 2013, Anglo-Indian identity received further recognition when ‘The Derozio Anglo-Indian Research Collection’ was inaugurated in the Central Library of the University of Calcutta. (Photo: AITW)

Who are the Anglo-Indians?

Till 1911, ‘Anglo-Indian’ was the term used by the British to describe themselves, Anglo-Celtics for the most part, who spent most of their lives in India in the civil and military services, and who held senior positions in government departments, or spent years in the country as merchants and professionals, traders and planters. They were men like Thomas Munro, ‘Boy’ Malcolm and Charles Metcalfe, on the one hand, and William Jones, Colin Mackenzie and William Lambton, on the other. Many, like Munro and Lambton, died during a lifetime of service in India and lie buried here. Some, like David Ochterlony and William Fraser, lived like Indian princes, with opulent harems in tow. Others, like William Kirkpatrick, married into well-to-do Indian families. Still others, like that pioneering Madras merchant Thomas Parry, had an Indian bibi, or mistress, wherever he had a home. And, of course, there were the many who were faithful to their British or European wives, like Warren Hastings to his ‘Maid Marian’ and Robert Clive to his Margaret Maskelyne. The essence of the description was that though the pre-1911 Anglo-Indian was British, he spent most, if not all, of his working life in India, loyal to Britain but committed to governing or developing India, in the process losing some of his Britishness and gaining some Indianness.

It was in the 1911 census that the government of Lord Hardinge officially termed those of mixed blood, children born of European fathers and Indian mothers and children born of their offspring, as ‘Anglo-Indians’. Till then they had been called—ignoring such derogatory terms as ‘half caste’, ‘half-and-half’ and ‘eight annas’—Eurasians (a term they thought disparaging, though it was well accepted in Singapore, Malaya and Hong Kong), Indo-Britons, and what was, curiously, for long commonly used, East Indians.

What was proclaimed by executive order was included in the Government of India Act of 1919 which described Anglo-Indians as follows:

"Every person, being a British subject and resident in British India, of

(a) European descent in the male line…

(b) Mixed Asiatic descent, whose father, grandfather or remote ancestor in the male line was born in the continent of Europe, Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa or the United States of America, and who is not entered in the European electoral roll."

This was further amplified in the Act of 1935 and, later, repeated in the 1949 Constitution of India. In the Constitution, Article 366(2) states:

An Anglo-Indian means a person whose father or any other of whose male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is domiciled within the territories of India and is or was born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein and not established there for temporary purposes only.

A careful look at that definition of one community¹ in India enshrined in the Constitution makes several long-debated issues clearer.

Firstly, to be considered Anglo-Indian, a person must descend from a European forefather, NOT from a European maternal line. The child of an Indian father habitually resident in India and a European mother is NOT Anglo-Indian; he or she is ‘Indian’. On the other hand, the child of an Anglo-Indian father habitually resident in India and a mother who is Anglo-Indian or not is an Anglo-Indian.

The second important point is the emphasis of the male line being European and NOT British. Thus, in the Indian context, this would mean that the descendants of Portuguese, Dutch, French and British forefathers would all be considered Anglo-Indians. Further, the armies of all these major powers in colonial India as well as those of Indian potentates included up to the late 18th century, thousands of mercenaries from Sweden to Sicily, Spain to Russia and even men of European descent from North America and Australia. If these soldiers, like Thomas, Raymond, and Reinhardt, among the legendary ones—and there were also numerous others who worked in the trading posts of the major powers in India—had put down roots in India, their children too would be Anglo-Indian. But the children born abroad of Anglo-Indians now settled overseas and who have become citizens there are NOT Anglo-Indian. They are persons of Indian origin and Anglo-Indian heritage but are British, Australian, Canadian or whatever, depending on the country they now call ‘Home’.

It should also be noted that the 1911 definition covered those of European descent settled in the subcontinent from Baluchistan to Burma, Kashmir to Cape Comorin. In 1935, Burma was no longer a part of India and Anglo-Burman became preferred usage there. And under the 1949 definition in the Indian Constitution, those of European descent living in Pakistan (and, later, Bangladesh) would not be considered Anglo-Indian, their habitual domicile excluding them from the definition. In any event, there is hardly anyone left of European descent in Pakistan or Bangladesh these days.

This stress on male European lineage is responsible for the fact that Anglo-Indian surnames can be traced to almost every country in Europe. Besides Portuguese and Dutch names like Madeiros and D’Souza, van Geyzel and van Hefton, and Anglo-Celtic names like Smith, Jones, O’Brien and Macdonald, Anglo-Indians include among their numbers La Fontaine (French) and Schmidt (German), Reghelini (Italian) and Micetich (Croatian), Muhldorff (Danish) and Lopez (Spanish), to give just a sampling.

Geraldine Charles, settled in the U.K., says Susan Harvey was the great granddaughter of Mootamah aka Sarah and I am the great granddaughter of Susan which makes me the great great great great granddaughter of Mootamah. Charles is one of the few of Anglo-Indian descent who has spent time on tracing the maternal Indian ancestor—and recorded it in this picture. (Photo: Geraldine Charles)

Given this background, a more correct description of those of mixed descent would be Euro-Indians, a term I will use from time to time in these pages. In fact, taking into consideration descent from either the male or the female European lines, and the spread of the mixed community from the Indian subcontinent to the Philippines, leading Sri Lankan social scientist Kumari Jayawardena prefers the term Euro-Asian. Indeed, Kumari Jayawardena’s focus on the female line is something few Anglo-Indians share.

Herbert Stark of the Indian Educational Service and the Bengal Legislative Council, one of the early leaders and documenters of the community, stated in 1936, If Europe is the land of our fathers, India is the land of our mothers. Strangely, few Anglo-Indians show any interest in the maternal line. Geraldine Charles, Trustee of the Families in British India Society, is one of the few who traces her own ancestry to a 1788 marriage of Robert Harvey to a Sarah (Mootamah),

an Indian, on one side and, on the other, to a James Bradbury who was married to a Catharine Williams (an Anglo-Indian). Willam Dalrymple, the well-known author, is another who mentions by name an Indian forebear in the maternal line.

The Harvey family c. 1894 in Madras. Mootamah married Robert Harvey in November 1788 and descended from them are the two men standing (John and Alexander Harvey) and their two sisters on the right, Grace and Susan Harvey. Their mother Anne Edwina Harvey is seated centre. Next to Susan on the floor is her fiancée Robert Johnson. (Photo: Geraldine Charles)

The Bradbury family c.1896 in Bellary where William Henry Bradbury (centre in picture) was Prison Superintendent. Bradbury married an Anglo-Indian from Bangalore, Catharine Williams, and their son Herbert (Bertie), seated extreme right on the floor, was the grandfather of Geraldine Charles. (Photo: Geraldine Charles)

Anglo-Indians tracing lineage through old church records will find male forebears marrying brides with no names recorded or just a Christian name such as Mary. In the former case, the bride had, usually, NOT converted to Christianity, like the wife of Job Charnock, the founder of Calcutta, or, as in the latter instance, if she had converted to Christianity, only the baptismal name was recorded, her family having washed its hands off both her and the proceedings. But if a European name like Catharine Williams was recorded, there was no way of knowing whether she was Anglo-Indian or ‘pure’ European. Which is why you can still find an occasional family, like a prominent one that I know, that claims to remain ‘pure’ European after 200 and more years in India. The forefather in this family, stated to be European, was an orphan who spent most of his early years in a Christian orphanage that hosted both European and Anglo-Indian orphans² and trained them for middle level supervisory work or as skilled artisans. For a family descended from such a background, and given the comparatively low numbers of ‘pure’ Europeans in such services at the time, it would have been well-nigh impossible for the family to have remained ‘pure’ over 200 years.

The ‘pure’ European settler was called a ‘Domiciled European’, a description that lingered on with diehards till well into the 20th century and was more likely a person who was truly so only in the latter half of the 19th century. But by the definitions of 1911, 1919, 1935 and 1949, no matter how ‘pure’ the line, the family would be Anglo-Indian. In the defining statement there is no mention at all of female lineage; all that it states is descent from a European male progenitor who was domiciled in India and whose progeny habitually lives in India. That makes the family I mentioned earlier clearly Anglo-Indian in terms of the Indian Constitution.

In sum, then, in terms of the official definition, an Anglo-Indian is a person descended from a European male line whose family is permanently resident in India. This reflects the general Anglo-Indian sentiment that it was immaterial who the first mother in the family was.

In the eyes of the general public, however, Anglo-Indians are of mixed descent, born of relationships in or out of wedlock between European males and Indian women and have, through this union of two different ethnicities, developed into a distinct community in India. The Anglo-Indians themselves today, while accepting that historical concept, see themselves as having in practice grown through marriage with their own, marrying less and less outside the community (till recent times), and nurturing an identifiably distinct subculture in India.

A Christian upringing from childhood and a deep commitment to religion from childhood to death is a characteristic of the Anglo-Indians. Here Anglo-Indian children in Jolarpet are seen after their First Holy Communion in the 1950s. (Photo: AITW)

That subculture offers another generally accepted picture of the community. The Anglo-Indian is a person with a European forefather, whose native tongue is English, who is educated and who is a Christian (Protestant or Roman Catholic). Generally an urban resident, the Anglo-Indian dresses in Western fashion (though in recent years more and more Anglo-Indian women wear Indian clothes, particularly to work) and keeps a home strongly influenced by the West in aesthetics, furnishing and table practices, with spoons, forks and knives used while eating. Anglo-Indian cuisine offers both Western and Indian dishes, but each tweaked by the seasoning of the other cuisine; the Indian element will, however, vary, being dependent on which part of India the homemaker learnt cooking in.

Pilgrimages are another feature of the Anglo-Indian commitment to Christianity. Here, Anglo-Indian pilgrims take Our Lady of Mount Carmel in procession during the Annual Feast in Covelong to where they go on pilgrimage from the Madras area. (Photo: AITW)

Western clothes were another identifier of the community, particularly of the women who till recently favoured dresses or frocks, as they were called, in the early 1940s when this picture was taken at the Lillooah Railway Colony. (Photo: AITW)

Eating with spoons, forks and knives has been very much part of Anglo-Indian culture as seen in this family dinner in Calcutta. (Photo: Cynthia Clark)

Virtually every home has a tradition of popular Western and church song and music, many own a piano and today’s youth favour guitars and harmonicas. A corollary is learning Western (ballroom) dancing from a young age, foxtrots, waltzes and jive the favoured forms. This, together with a more informal relationship with parents, has long led to an ease in conversation and a greater inter-mingling of the sexes. In conservative Indian eyes, this enjoyment of song and dance has long been seen as promiscuity in the women and a lack of serious focus in the men. The British view was not very different. These views were magnified when many Anglo-Indian women were seen on the arms of American soldiers and British officers in Indian cities during World War II—the Bhowani Junction view. Which is a rather biased view, given that a couple of the greatest virtues of the community, especially in its erstwhile ‘colonies’³, were the strong family ties and equally strong ties with their churches. Curiously, much of what has been said in this paragraph (except religion and the War years) is descriptive also of the post-Millennium young Indian! There is a Westernisation of much of India taking place, the growth of the Europeanised Indian!

Whether it’s a young teenagers’ party, a wedding or a family get-together at home, music and dance are what Anglo-Indians enjoy greatly from childhood. (Photos: AITW and wedding photograph from Elaine Roach)

A part of this subculture, however, has, sadly, been for years an Anglo-Indian divide over colour and origin. Anglo-Indians can range from fair of skin colour and blonde of hair to near black in skin pigmentation and with crinkly black hair. It is not unusual for skin colour to vary sharply even in the same family—often confusing immigration officers from

Reviews for The Anglo-Indians

[Diana Maurice · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent coverage about Eurasians and their contributions as a community in India.