by Lionel Caplan

In this article Lional Caplan examines the mind set that led to the immigration of the Anglo-Indians from a transnational perspective. He emphasises that the process of moving across cultures or globalisation is not new and discusses how the Anglo-Indians were one of the early results of the globalisation process. .

Introduction

Of late, the idea of 'a transnational anthropology' (Appadurai 1991) has taken root. We are urged to evolve a 'new kind of ethnography, one that departs from the localizing strategies of traditional ethnography' (ibid.:196). All manner of groups and movements are now 'deterritorialized', requiring us to foreground 'traveling' as a cultural practice (Clifford 1992), and to theorize such globalizing processes which produce transnational or 'third cultures' oriented beyond national boundaries (Featherstone 1990:6).

Transnationalism is obviously an idea whose time has come. But, as Hall observes, '...we suffer increasingly from a process of historical amnesia in which we think that because we are thinking about an idea it has only just started' (1991a:20). Globalisation, I need hardly say, is far from a new phenomenon. Populations have long been mobile, interconnected and interdependent; their histories interwoven. Indeed, for Frank (1969), Wallerstein (1979), Wolf (1982) and others, the global, as Friedman (1994:3) puts it, 'is the true state of affairs' and the 'only adequate framework' for analysis, at least since the rise of the first commercial civilizations. More relevant for the present discussion, flows of population, armies, goods and capital brought profound disruptions of people's relation to place (Lavie and Swedenburg 1996:8-9).

In this paper I suggest that the globalising process commonly referred to as colonialism produced transnational communities from its very inception. The people I want to examine - Eurasians or Anglo-Indians as they later came to be called - belong to that category of 'hybrid' groups which resulted from 'colonial desire' (Young 1995) - the sexual liaisons, formal and informal, between European colonial males and native females, encouraged, among other things, by the official restriction of access to the colonies by European women (Stoler 1989). Such intermediate communities were variously seen as bulwarks of colonial elites, or as lurking threats to their power. In consequence, they were subject to a 'frequently shifting set of criteria that allowed them privilege at certain historical moments and pointedly excluded them at others' (ibid.:154).

Nonetheless, while many of these populations were deliberately removed from positions of influence in the course of the colonial period, they continued to stress their paternal (European) ancestry alongside the denial or downgrading of maternal (local) links, and to insist on their close biological, social and cultural ties with the colonial rulers, in spite of practising more or less creolised lifeways. In other words, they can be seen as transnationals not by virtue of migration across political boundaries, but through experiencing profound displacement in terms of belonging: by residing in one location but adjudging themselves only at home in another. It is what Gupta and Ferguson presumably mean by 'an imagined state of being or moral location' (1992:10). Before examining this kind of colonial transnationalism, however, I want to look briefly at the contemporary variety, more familiar to us as transmigration across international borders. To begin, as it were, at the end.

The Emergence of an Anglo-Indian Community

Anglo-Indians are descended from a medley of different national and racial categories. There has been a Portuguese presence in various parts of India (especially on the western side) and on the Coromandel coast in what is now Madras (where I have conducted fieldwork) since the sixteenth century, giving rise over time to a substantial mixed-race population. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, moreover, British officers and officials employed by the East India Company were much less concerned than were their nineteenth-century successors about maintaining social distance between themselves and the local populace; the majority are reckoned to have maintained local paramours. According to Cohn, in the 'heyday of nabobism' (the mid- to late-eighteenth century), 'many Englishmen lived with Indian women and had families by Indian wives and mistresses. Some ... completely adopted a Mughal-Indian style of life' (Cohn 1987:425; see also Spear 1932; Wilkinson 1976).

Indeed, like many such early colonists, they 'produced a quotidien world in which the dominant cultural influence was native' (Stoler 1989:154). With the rapid increase in the numbers of ordinary British soldiers in India from the latter part of the eighteenth century both the size and social balance of this mixed-race population changed. Hawes argues that 'the overwhelming majority of Eurasian children born to the British at that time were fathered by "poor whites"' (1993:44).

Men belonging to other European communities (e.g. Armenian, Dutch, French, Flemish, Prussian, Spanish and Italian) also found their way to major cities of the sub-continent (including Madras) and, like the Portuguese and British, established liaisons with local women, or with the offspring of previous Euro-Indian unions. Anglo-Indians thus stem from a diversity of European forebears on the paternal side and - we have to assume, since the literature is almost totally silent on the topic - from an even greater heterogeneity of Indian antecedents on the maternal side. In time, despite their disparate ancestry, they came to be recognized (but not always or uniformly to recognize themselves, as I point out below) as a community of Anglo-Indians. Its population numbered perhaps a quarter of a million at the time of India's Independence. Anglo-Indians estimate that half that population has since gone abroad.

Anglo-Indians as Transmigrants

There has been emigration to the West almost since the emergence of an Anglo-Indian community. Until the end of the eighteenth century the Anglo-Indian sons of British officers were sometimes sent to Britain to be educated, and many of them simply 'passed' into local society. By the middle of the nineteenth century there were organised attempts to send unemployed artisans to parts of the British empire. The Athenaeum, a Madras newspaper, occasionally reported the successes of the Madras Emigration Society in placing Anglo-Indians in Australia as compositors, shepherds, watchmakers, blacksmiths, domestic servants, etc (see also Helweg 1991:10). Some Anglo-Indian schools, such as Dr Graham's in Kalimpong, also attempted to arrange placements abroad for their young men (see Minto 1974).

By the end of the nineteenth century, according to one report in The Anglo-Indian, journal of the Anglo-Indian Association of Southern India, (28.3.1918), there were 'many hundreds of Eurasians earning a comfortable living in London', and in 1923 an Anglo-Indian Association was formed in the UK. But the numbers involved in all such movements were small; it was not until the end of the Raj that large-scale emigration began. Gist quotes unofficial estimates of 50,000 for the number who left the country in the three decades following Independence, which represented approximately one-fifth of the immediate post-war Anglo-Indian population in India (1975:41). Probably more than half went to Britain. One woman I met recalled that when she started school in 1955 'most of the senior boys and girls were going away to England. They were the first lot that went away. Many people had opted at the time of separation [Independence] to take British passports, and they went off'.

With the introduction of legislation in the 1960s and early 1970s designed to reduce drastically the numbers of immigrants entering Britain from Asia and Africa, Anglo-Indians turned increasingly to Australia, which began to abandon its Whites-only policy in 1967, and by 1972 had ceased to discriminate against prospective settlers on the basis of ancestry or nationality (see Inglis et al 1992:1). Immigration from India increased rapidly from this period and according to Helweg Anglo-Indians, at least for a time, were 'given priority', on the basis of 'their Christian identity and British-like values and behavioural patterns' (1991:30). While figures for the extent of Anglo-Indian migration vary considerably, by the mid-70s Australia had certainly displaced the United Kingdom as the main focus of Anglo-Indian emigration, and continues to do so until today. Their growing association with Australia has given rise in some quarters, especially on College campuses in Madras, to a new slang term for Anglo-Indians - 'dings' or 'dingos'. Anglo-Indians have also settled in New Zealand, Canada and (in far fewer numbers) the USA, and continue to find their way to Britain.

The issue of emigration looms large in the consciousness of Anglo-Indians in India, and most of the people I met broached the topic in one form or another during the course of our conversations. Only those at the lower end of the class hierarchy, since they lack the requisite occupational skills and the resources required for emigration abroad (application fees, fares, etc.) or the kin links abroad to help underwrite these expenses, do not entertain any possibility of leaving. Increasingly, too, the highly successful minority of Anglo-Indians who have benefited noticeably from educational and economic opportunities in post-Independence India (denied to members of their community in the past), are less inclined to contemplate emigration, although most are in a position to do so if they want to.

For the majority, however, and especially those belonging to the struggling lower middle or artisan class, the hope of leaving India to re-start life in the West has touched and continues to touch their lives in a variety of significant ways. Their explanations for wanting to emigrate, their determination to join the outflow, and reactions to being thwarted, alongside a stress on 'abroad' as the only suitable place for Anglo-Indians, amounts to what I have elsewhere termed a 'culture of emigration' (Caplan 1995). Moreover, as native English-speakers, Christians, and carriers of what they regard as a European outlook and way of life, they consider themselves infinitely better qualified, culturally, than the other communities of South Asians who have found their way to the West. One Anglo-Indian, whose application for a visa to emigrate had been denied, remarked in the course of a discussion about emigration, 'You British seem ready to accommodate all the foreigners in your country, but your own kind you ignore' (my emphasis).

Here I summarise briefly a few of the principal features of this exodus, and suggest how it differs from transmigrations reported elsewhere in the literature. Since I have not conducted a study on transmigrants, the perspective I offer is necessarily based on my research in Madras.

A) Anglo-Indians do not fit easily into either the category of urban, highly educated and professionally skilled 'new migrants', or the rural, uneducated and industrially unskilled who comprised the 'old migrants' (Helweg 1991). Those who have left have tended to be from the struggling 'artisan' class - moderately skilled technicians, mechanics, nurses, secretaries and the like. This can hardly be categorised as a 'brain drain'.

B) They are permanent emigrants, not part of a cyclical movement of labour. Nor is it a migration based on remittances: those who remain behind are the recipients of no more than modest and sporadic financial assistance. For those emigrants who can afford it, the expectation is that they will 'take up' siblings in India, and together they will eventually bring over the parents, although a variety of circumstances outside the control of emigrants may prevent the realization of this chain migration model. Some authors have tended to stress the neglect of close relatives in India by Anglo-Indians who have gone away (see Gaikwad 1967; Younger 1987). Without denying such occurrences, these failings have to be seen in the context of a large-scale movement of population, entirely organized and financed by informal Anglo-Indian kinship networks. Such an enterprise could only succeed where there are strong and close family ties. But the links which exist do not amount to a 'continuous circulation of people, money, goods and information' such that the various settlements 'constitute a single community spread across a variety of sites' (Rouse 1991:15, quoted in Basch et al 1993:29).

C) Basch et al note how political leaders in the countries of origin 'seek to convince transmigrants that they have continuing political, economic and social responsibilities [towards] the "home" country' (1993:52). Hence, transmigrants 'find themselves confronted with and engaged in the nation building processes of two or more nation states' (ibid.:22). While the Indian government seeks to encourage NRI (Non-Resident Indian) participation in its development plans, and there are reports that NRIs are increasingly involved (and, in a more sinister development, have financed various oppositional/extremist political movements), Anglo-Indian settlers abroad have been absent from all such projects. The idea that 'deterritorialization creates exaggerated and intensified senses of ... attachment to politics in the home state' (Appadurai 1991:193) simply does not reflect the Anglo-Indian experience. This is not only because they are too few and economically not in a position to become so entangled, but, more importantly, regard their migration to Britain and other English-speaking 'Christian' countries as a cultural fulfillment (Gist 1975:47). Therefore, while they may be categorised officially in their countries of settlement alongside other Indians, they do not think of themselves as such (ibid.:47). Although the research on Anglo-Indian populations abroad has hardly begun, what seems evident is that, for the most part, they do not see (and, as I show below, have never seen) India as 'home'.

The links with India that do survive are largely confined to the personal domain, through maintaining relationships with close kin, old school friends and teachers, or religious mentors. Thus, Anglo-Indian philanthropists in Madras, when attempting to raise money abroad for their charitable activities, are clear that they can only succeed by drawing on such personal ties; the idea of a general appeal to the overseas 'Indian' or even Anglo-Indian community is not seriously entertained (Caplan, in press).

To understand the meaning for Anglo-Indians of this post-Independence or contemporary transmigration, it is necessary to examine the dynamics of Anglo-Indian identification in the colonial period. My argument, in a nutshell, is that they imagined and portrayed themselves, not without ample reason, as 'transnationals'.

Anglo-Indians as Colonial Transnationals

Despite early official toleration if not encouragement of an Anglo-Indian presence in India to support the activities of the English (Ballhatchet 1980:96-97), the accommodations which had characterized relations between British personnel and the Anglo-Indian population they had helped to create began to change perceptibly towards the end of the eighteenth century. A series of measures introduced by the East India Company and the British government severely restricted and diminished Anglo-Indian employment opportunities. Contemporaneously, changing attitudes to colonial peoples - fostered by the growing influence of the Evangelicals and the flowering of European racist philosophy - created a heightened awareness among colonial British of racial distinctions between themselves and their Anglo-Indian (as well as Indian) subjects.

By the 1830s, there was an increasingly rigid divide between them, with the latter subject to increasing social exclusion by the British elite. Moreover, with the rise in the numbers of women arriving in India from Britain, a migration encouraged, it has been argued, mainly to police the growing racial divide (Stoler 1991:64-67), unions between British men within the dominant group and either Indian or Anglo-Indian women was officially discouraged and considerably reduced. Miscegenation aroused increasing hostility and opposition within the governing classes, and hybrid populations in India, as elsewhere in the colonial world, came to be regarded as a danger to the European community (Stoler 1989:147). In the first half of the nineteenth century Anglo-Indians were thus progressively demeaned both in terms of their economic position and their inferior hybrid qualities. This attitude was reflected in English-language fiction about India, much of it written by colonial Europeans (see Greenberger 1969; Naik 1994; Narayanan 1986).

Anglo-Indians discourses of identity

Paradoxically, despite both official and unofficial British attempts to distance and disown them, for much of the colonial period Anglo-Indians were encouraged to identify themselves as British. For one thing, although marriage and concubinage with local women were officially discouraged in the course of the nineteenth century, such unions continued to occur, especially involving British soldiers and Anglo-Indian women, validating Anglo-Indian beliefs in kinship with the British. Frank Anthony, president of the (Delhi-based) All-India Anglo-Indian Association in the post-World War II period, and a chronicler of the community's fortunes, even refers to such marriages between Anglo-Indians and British as 'endogamous' (1969:8).

Various institutional arrangements also fostered the idea that Anglo-Indians were British and shared their culture. Thus, a common language was thought to reinforce the bond. Despite the community's diverse backgrounds, it soon adopted English as its first language, although there is evidence that a significant proportion of Anglo-Indians - those resident in the neighbourhoods of the poor - spoke it little or not at all. (1) Yet it was the only language taught in the free schools and 'orphanages' established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for increasing numbers of destitute and abandoned Anglo-Indian children, as it was in the 'European' schools most Anglo-Indians attended from the mid-nineteenth century (D'Souza 1976). (2) When the majority of these institutions were, in 1932, incorporated into the Anglo-Indian school system, the language emphasis remained much the same.

The policy towards Indian languages in all these schools was, at best, one of benign neglect which both reflected and perpetuated attitudes in the wider Anglo-Indian community. Sen, writing about Anglo-Indians in Calcutta, remarks that the 'desire ... to learn the local language has been lacking among them' (1988:251). Similarly, Bayer notes how in the past Anglo-Indians in Mysore 'did not take the existence [of the local language] into account' (1986:114; see also Bhattacharya 1968:169). In the view of some, this school language policy was largely responsible for many of the community's later difficulties (Lobo 1994:16). In a letter to The Anglo-Indian, journal of the Anglo-Indian Association of South India (April, 1931), one young woman expressed dismay that she was not given the option to learn Tamil in her Anglo-Indian school, and this had proved a 'barrier to relations with other Indians'. (3)

In addition to their English language policy, the curriculum in these schools was based on that formulated in the UK and little attempt was made to relate it to the Indian environment. Many of these establishments - especially the boarding schools situated in hill stations - imported at least some of their teachers from Britain. Children were thus persuaded to think that their heritage was in the West, urged to 'be loyal to Britain' and 'taught to live as British boys and girls' (Minto 1974:67). (4) They were compelled to wear European clothing, which 'marked them out as members of British society' (Hawes 1993:113).

Another of the defining features of the Anglo-Indian community was that, since the first generation was baptised as Christian - usually as a deliberate attempt to separate the children from their Indian mothers - their descendants professed Christianity, and in all these schools it was the sole religious influence. As these were Christian foundations, many of the teachers were (in the case of Roman Catholic schools) members of religious communities or (in Protestant establishments) clergymen and lay persons 'imbued with missionary zeal' (Minto 1974:66). Children were given instruction in the Christian faith and its rituals were a prominent part of their daily routine (Hawes 1993:109-110). (5) Indeed, Christian moral teachings were seen as the only way to rescue the very large numbers of Anglo-Indian poor from what were regarded as the debilitating effects of living amongst and sharing the life-styles of indigent members of other communities. The Report of the Madras Male and Female Civil Orphan Asylums for 1844-45, noted that

[on first arrival at the school] their morals in many respects did not exceed those of native children, and their habits, which partook of the mixed character of European and native, would have ... degenerated wholly into the latter, if the benefits of Christian instruction had not been offered.

Educational policy thus encouraged a cultural separation between Anglo-India and the bulk of the local population. It was a division initially fostered by the British who, while for most purposes delineating Anglo-Indians as 'Natives of India' (thus denying them access to higher levels of employment and other European privileges), labelled them 'European British Subjects' where defence and security were concerned. By the 1920s more than half the community are estimated to have become dependent in one way or another on employment in the railways. Anglo-Indians not only refrained from joining Indian railway unions and taking part in strikes, but were compelled, as a condition of their employment, to join special railway battalions which were instrumental in repressing these industrial actions (Arnold 1980:252-3). (6) Service in such units was forbidden other Indian railway workers, and reinforced the view that Anglo-Indians had a special affinity with the British.

Notwithstanding their equivocal politico-legal status, their dual ancestry, and a highly creolised culture, Anglo-Indians - or at least those belonging to the articulate elites - declared themselves unambiguously British. Those who spoke for and about the community recognised internal divisions which a letter in The Anglo-Indian (21.3.1917) described as follows:

It seems to us that Anglo-Indian society is divided into three sections: (a) those who are practically European, or approximate the European standard in appearance, manners, customs; (b) those who practically or closely approximate to Indian standard; and (c) those between the two.

The correspondent then suggested that 'class (b) should not be interfered with [since] it is unwise to retard the process of adaptation to the environment'. Anglo-Indian discourse obviously included the first and sought to include the third categories.

When he presented a petition to the British Parliament in 1830 on behalf of the 'East Indians' (Anglo-Indians), John Ricketts insisted that 'those [Anglo-Indians] who have been educated, are entirely European in their habits and feelings, dress and language, and everything else' (1831:54). And this was to become the rhetoric favoured by subsequent Anglo-Indian leaders. According to Hawes, whose study covers the crucial years between 1780 and 1830, the 'predicament' of Anglo-Indians was that 'they sought to belong to the British community, rather than to one another' (1996:74). A century after Ricketts, Sir Henry Gidney, who was President of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association (based in Calcutta) between the wars, insisted that in the nineteenth century '[w]e were looked upon and treated in most matters as British; [the Government] confirmed us in that belief, and taught and encouraged us to regard ourselves not only as the "predominant partner", but as a special bulwark of help to Government in difficult times' (1925:660).

For Herbert Stark, the foremost Anglo-Indian historian, they were '[b]ound to the British by the indissoluble bonds of kinship, interdependence, and the unity of interests' (1936:39). In countless editorials and letters The Anglo-Indian, mouthpiece of the Anglo-Indian Association based in Madras, voiced similar sentiments. Thus, in May, 1917, encouraged, no doubt, by war fever, it insisted that '[F]rom the Mutiny down to the present Anglo-Indians have upheld British prestige and proved themselves worthy of the blood that flows in their veins'. And in its Annual Report for 1919, it declared 'this Anglo-Indian Community has done its share as a British community. It is British in character and will remain British'. In the June, 1926 edition of the journal the outgoing president of the Association, reflecting on developments over the preceding 25 years, insisted that until only recently 'we Anglo-Indians ... regarded ourselves as a branch of the European community'.

Along with such declarations, Anglo-Indians frequently spoke of Britain as 'home'. Thus, Gidney welcomed the formation (in 1923) of an Anglo-Indian Association in London, which he felt 'could do much to advise and help young members of the community coming home for education and technical training' (my emphasis). (7) In asserting their British credentials, Anglo-Indian leaders and writers lost no opportunity to emphasize the opposition of the community to being associated with the indigenous people. Kinship with the British precluded Anglo-Indians from 'amalgamating with the natives of the soil or from entering into compacts with them' (Stark 1936:39). Cedric Dover, another prominent Anglo-Indian and the author of several books on the community (much quoted by other Anglo-Indian writers), asserted that the Anglo-Indian 'stubbornly resists the submergence of his identity with the natives of the country, for he is proud of his anglicized customs and remote connection with the ruling race' (1929:42). In November, 1927 The Anglo-Indian printed an article on 'Present-day Jail Life', applauding the fact that Anglo-Indian and European prisoners are kept in a 'clean and commodious' block of cells away from native inmates, but complaining about the 'Magistrates who place Anglo-Indians on an Indian diet'. With the approach of Home Rule, which most Anglo-Indians opposed implacably, the nightmare scenario was, according to an editorial in The Anglo-Indian (7.2.1917)

'that year by year we will lose touch with English traditions, with English social observances, English literature ... and will gradually adopt the social conventions and habits of thought, and become subject to the cramping and degenerating prejudices and inducements of the low Indian environment...'

During the next twenty years, however, for the first time voices were heard within the community urging Anglo-Indians to identify more with India, partly in response to a plea made Indian nationalist leaders, but also partly a realistic assessment of political developments. In early 1926 Gidney stated that Anglo-Indians should 'regard themselves as Indians', which was much commented on by the local press, which noted his 'change of heart'. (8) Others joined the debate and Anglo-Indians began to examine the possibilities for an alternative identification to that which had prevailed to that point. The elites were, understandably, the most vocal proponents for the community's transnational qualities virtually throughout the colonial period. Apart from everything else, they were very much in thrall to the Government, since their employment in the uncovenanted levels of civil administration meant, as Hawes points out, that they were economically and politically dependent on the regime (1993:157).

In contemporary India they are the staunchest defenders of Anglo-India's local character. As the main beneficiaries of post-Independence opportunities for advancement, they are anxious to play down any notion that Anglo-Indians are somehow foreign, not pakka Indians. In these circles Anglo-Indian culture is nowadays seen as not very different from 'general Indian culture'. Most educated and well-placed Anglo-Indians now associate with people at the same class level from a range of backgrounds, and - with them - increasingly participate in a cosmopolitan lifestyle. For most of them the idea that their community for so long considered itself British is faintly ridiculous, and on several occasions I was told a joke about the Anglo-Indian in hospital who, when informed that he needed a blood transfusion, was concerned at the dilution of his 'British blood'.

By contrast, attachment to a European or transnational identity persists within the struggling middle or artisan class, who have found their employment prospects (and that of their children) diminishing in the intensely competitive Indian economy. Many of their difficulties are attributed to an 'Indian culture' in which they do not feel at ease. It is within this segment of the Anglo-Indian population that a culture of emigration and the longing for transmigration is most frequently articulated.

Conclusion

In this paper I have argued that we need to distinguish two kinds of transnationalism, though the distinction cannot be drawn too starkly. The 'contemporary' sort, which arises from large-scale movements of migrants around the globe, and is obviously facilitated by new technologies of communication, calls for multi-locale ethnography and challenges 'traditional' ways of doing fieldwork. It requires anthropology 'to delineate the processes through which transmigrants, living lives stretched across borders, reterritorialize their practices as well as their identities' (Basch et al 1993:34). We must not assume, however, that these processes will be everywhere the same. The need is to allow for the possibility of differences in the ways transmigrants reconstruct their lives, or in the 'transnational circuits' and networks they create, or in the character of the ties retained with their places of origin, etc.

Basch et al present a 'framework for the study of transnationalism' consisting of four interrelated premises, one of which asserts the virtual inevitability of transmigrant involvement in the political or nation-building processes of both the country of settlement and the 'home' country (ibid.:22). Such a 'premise' emerges from their own fieldwork in the Caribbean, but is not an inevitable aspect of transmigration. Anglo-Indians, for very specific historical reasons, do not view India as 'home', and engagement with their country of origin is limited to personal ties and is sporadic. The shape of Anglo-Indian transmigrant experiences can thus only be understood by reference to the colonial period. Contemporary practices, it seems to me, must be related to the historical contexts in which transmigrating groups evolved. Which brings me to the other kind of transnationalism I have sought to identify.

Stuart Hall remarks that 'People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries; symbolically, we have been there for centuries. I was coming home' (1991b:48). Until very near the end of colonial rule Anglo-Indians were encouraged, by virtue of a whole spectrum of domestic and institutional arrangements put in place by the Raj, to think of themselves as British. Anglo-Indian elites, who spoke for and about them, came to submerge the community's biography - to adopt Veena Das's terminology - in the biography of the colonial state (1995:109-10). Such essentialising of identification denied their mixed ancestry and belied creolised cultural practices (see Friedman 1997:83; Werbner 1997:230). Anglo-Indians thus imagined themselves as transnationals for whom 'home' was elsewhere.

With the approach of self-rule such a vision began to fragment, largely though not entirely along class lines. At Independence many who, like Hall, 'had been there for centuries', emigrated or (as some phrased it) 'returned' to Britain, or to other places where culturally they felt 'at home'. With Independence, the educated and successful began increasingly to associate with and regard themselves as part of a cosmopolitan but Indian ambiance. They see little reason to leave India, though many can now afford to go on visits to foreign places. Those lower down the scale - with only a modicum of education and skills hardly in demand any longer - have experienced real economic difficulties and now arrange much of their lives around the hopes or fantasies of 'abroad'. Such would-be emigrants continue to insist on their European qualifications; they are, like the greater part of the community was in colonial times, transnationals of the mind. The poorest, who most resemble the majority of local people in their cultural practices, have no such dreams.

Notes

(1) In a Report on the Vepery District Free Schools published in the Athenaeum (Madras), March 29, 1853 it was remarked that over 20 per cent of the children were, on entry to the schools, 'totally unacquainted with the English language, and a much larger [proportion] are in the habit of speaking Tamil ordinarily both among themselves and at home. [Their families] are the poorer classes of East Indians [Anglo-Indians]'.

(2) Military orphanages were established in Calcutta and Madras to care for and educate the Anglo-Indian children of British officers and soldiers, while civil asylums dealt with the children of non-military personnel.

(3) In Tamil Nadu (of which Madras is the capital), although Anglo-Indian schools are now compelled to teach Tamil, people (especially young men) often insist that they cannot cope with the high standards demanded and consequently leave school before matriculating. This is usually said to account for their inability to compete in the contemporary employment market.

(4) The founders, administrators and heads of European schools in India were generally Englishmen who modelled these institutions on the public schools with which they were familiar (D'Souza 1976:54).

(5) In a poignant marriage of faith and food, the Madras Military Orphan Asylum, founded in 1789, devised a weekly menu which featured a variety of local rice and curry dishes, but served roast mutton, vegetable and bread for Sunday lunch (Bell 1812).

(6) Memorandum Relative to the Definition of the Anglo-Indian and Domiciled Community of India and Burma to the Rt. Hon. the Secretary of State for India, 30 July, 1925. The petitioners were Sir Henry Gidney and four others. 7 Speech by Sir Henry Gidney in London, reported in The Anglo-Indian, January, 1926.

(8) Madras Mail, quoted in The Anglo-Indian, Feb. 1926

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About the Author: Dr. Lional Caplan is a keen student of the Anglo-Indians and has published a number of papers dealing with them.

This paper was presented at a conference on Transnationalism at the University of Manchester, Department of Social Anthropology. 16-18 May 1997. http://les.man.ac.uk/sa/transnat.htm