“Dear Anglos leaving India, Where you running off to men? Where? England? You going back home? Go, you buggers, go! Go see. Then you’ll come to know,” wrote Keith St Clair Butler in The Secret Vindaloo. And what did the Anglo-Indians migrating to the UK see? As a relative of creator Barry O’Brien places it, “Not only were the streets of London not paved with gold, it was also too bloody cold!”

O’Brien’s e-book The Anglo-Indians: A Portrait of a Community brings collectively such various — and entertaining — voices to seize the neighborhood’s historical past, tradition, and trajectory. While the Constitution of India defines an Anglo-Indian as an Indian citizen and resident of European descent from the daddy’s aspect, many argue that the identification attracts from tradition, language, and lifestyle moderately than simply lineage. That’s maybe why O’Brien devotes a big chunk of the e-book’s 500 pages to those elements, leading to meditations on linguistic and temperamental quirks, migration, and kinship.

He paints a holistic image of a neighborhood whose depictions in standard tradition are sometimes enmeshed in stereotypes. The creator rues the fixed characterisation of Anglo-Indian women as unwed moms in yesteryear movies, akin to Julie (1975). Even although Indian cinema has modified significantly, the stereotype has not: Monica, O My Darling, launched in 2022, replicates that drained trope.

O’Brien’s incisive exploration yields pleasant anecdotes, akin to a lady writing in his “autograph book”: “My heart is like a cabbage / Broken into two / The leaves I give to others / The heart I keep for you.” Lists akin to “Ten things you are most likely to find in an Anglo-Indian home”, “Ten toilet euphemisms… used in the privacy of our homes!”, and “The three best-sounding names of dishes” have a wealth of ethnographic particulars.

The e-book’s first two sections tracing the neighborhood’s 500-year historical past are equally insightful. It delves into how the British discriminated in opposition to Anglo-Indians after biracial folks in Haiti led a revolt in opposition to French colonists within the late 18th century. O’Brien speculates that the British would have most likely did not suppress the 1857 revolt with out Anglo-Indian assist. The neighborhood’s sacrifices throughout World War 2 additionally stay shrouded because the British drafted them as ‘Europeans’. Eurasians couldn’t apply to many roles after an 1882 decision restricted the time period “natives” to these of “pure Asiatic origin”. Neither did they obtain the advantages Europeans did, leading to poverty and unemployment.

While The Anglo-Indians talks extensively about neighborhood luminaries such because the lawyer and parliamentarian Frank Anthony, and Henry Gidney, an ophthalmologist and neighborhood chief, it additionally touches on lesser-known figures like Gloria Berry and Francesca Hart. Berry, an air hostess, obtained the Ashoka Chakra posthumously, turning into the primary lady to obtain the award. Hart ranked third within the 1994 Femina Miss India, behind Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai. However, there’s not a lot details about her within the e-book or elsewhere.

While the e-book’s delights are aplenty, they’re typically ensconced in reams of banality. The first two sections are crisp, although they sometimes get bogged in historic trivialities. In the subsequent two sections, issues go awry. Many essays are a litany of names, particulars, and anecdotes with out a sliver of attract. Take the chapter Serving the Community (1876–Present). It has a paragraph devoted to the totally different names of the Anglo-Indian Association of Southern India over the many years and below which act it was included. Such trivia may have simply been excised or relegated to the appendices, of which the e-book has many.

The surfeit of data is probably not a difficulty if the reader had been to treat The Anglo-Indians as partly a reference e-book. She may dip into it to study in regards to the sundry neighborhood associations that O’Brien dedicates 15 pages to, if she had been so inclined. These chapters’ sole redeeming function is that they are often skipped since every dwells on one subject moderately than including as much as a bigger narrative.

Besides, O’Brien’s characterisation of “Anglo-Indian traits” is misplaced. He quotes a handful of situations of people exhibiting a sure high quality after which extends that to the entire neighborhood. He repeats this sample to reveal that Anglo-Indians are beneficiant, god-fearing, pleasant, “house-proud”, brave, and luxuriate in “wholesome entertainment and having fun”, music, dancing, and going to the films — as if these had been exceptional revelations or distinctive to only one neighborhood.

The proof to buttress these contentions will be as confounding. Consider the road: “Sushmita, a leading doctor whom I call an ‘almost-activist’, admires the community for the natural way it treats women as equals, without making a hue and cry about it.” Why ought to a reader care what a random physician has to say about how the neighborhood treats ladies? What is “natural” about that manner? Who makes a hue and cry about this stuff that their absence is so exceptional? I want O’Brien had injected educational rigour into these sections and drawn upon various sources moderately than quoting whimsically or stating the apparent.

These tracts may need been readable if that they had been pruned or organised in a extra cogent method, for O’Brien will be an attractive author. His joie de vivre and breadth of imaginative and prescient typically shine by means of his prose, particularly within the introduction, the place he weaves a conversational fashion, Anglo-Indianisms, and lists to make a compelling case for why one ought to learn the e-book.

In O’Brien’s recounting of the Anglo-Indian lifestyle, I discovered insights concerning cultural confluences, what we lose and acquire with cultural assimilation, and identification markers within the homogenising bulwark of globalisation. The e-book marshals proof for the way the blending of communities and cultures advantages everybody.

And even because it dwells on one neighborhood, it places into query notions of racial and cultural purity. As O’Brien says, “I don’t for a moment think of myself as being of mixed-race. I belong to one race — the Anglo-Indian race — which happens to be of mixed-race, like most other races of the world.” And if this engenders considerations about identification, O’Brien has the proper riposte: “You can only find your roots in one place — under you.”

Syed Saad Ahmed is a author and communications skilled.