Perhaps the least-known community in multicultural Australia is holding its first World Day today. Gerry Carman finds out why Anglo-Indians are "more British than the British".
History is replete with instances where the twin
"isms" - racism and ostracism - have been the bane of ethnic and other
minorities. Many people have paid a hefty price simply because of their colour,
religion, race or culture.
Consequently, some people have sought to disguise their true heritage. For example,
many European Jews changed their names to sound more English or German in an
attempt to protect themselves from persecution or abuse.
But in many parts of the world this situation is changing or has changed. Many
people in Australia are "outing" themselves to claim their Aboriginality,
where once they would have hidden it.
One little-known immigrant community in Australia that also carried a stigma
for centuries and actively worked to deny its racially mixed lineage is now
also keen to wear its rich heritage openly and with pride.
The Anglo-Indian community has its roots in colonial India. About 150,000 Anglo-Indians
live in Australia (25,000 are in Victoria), is today celebrating the first World
Anglo-Indian Day.
Anglo-Indians belong to an ethnic group born of marriages between Indians and
European colonists, starting with the Portuguese, who arrived in the subcontinent
in 1498. This continued with the subsequent arrival of the Dutch, French and
British and, over the centuries, the mixing of the bloodlines ranged from perhaps
only one parent, grandparent or great-grandparent being Indian, to every other
conceivable permutation. This, in turn, led to ongoing debate about just who
exactly is an Anglo-Indian.
The class-consciousness and snobbery, which grew from the early 1600s when Britain
began to establish its Raj in India, forced many Anglo-Indians, particularly
those who passed easily as English men and women, to assert their "Britishness"
and spawned the saying "more British than the British".
Gloria Moore, a Melbourne-based author of four books on Anglo-Indians, says
the cruel irony of the British Raj was that it practised a form of apartheid
against Anglo-Indians, yet created the group in its own image to do its handiwork.
Dr Moore was born in India and emigrated with her parents to England in 1948
before moving to Australia in the 1960s.
She says the earliest British powerbrokers in India, the British East India
Company, followed the Portuguese custom of paying a dowry for children from
mixed marriages. The company saw such children as the most practical means of
retaining power in the long-term.
She points to the actor Vivien Leigh who denied her Anglo-Indian heritage because
of the stigma that was attached to it. "Vivien Leigh's mother was a Miss
Yackjee, who assumed a European name for her passport; her grandparents had
definite links of ancestry with India," Dr Moore says.
On the musical front, singer Sir Cliff Richard says he was born in Lucknow,
but little else, while Englebert Humperdinck has always acknowledged that he
is an Anglo-Indian.
It is a conundrum for individuals that spans all walks of life, right up to
Australian governors-general and British prime ministers.
According to research, Anglo-Indians who made their mark in early Australia
include Sir Henry Parkes, who gave his name to a town and observatory in New
South Wales, Colonel William Light, the designer of the city of Adelaide, and
Dr John Coverdale, the medical superintendent at the Port Arthur penal colony
in Tasmania.
They were also the first sizeable group of mixed race people to be allowed into
Australia, 30 years before the White Australia policy was killed off. More than
700 of them arrived at Fremantle in August 1947, just as India was gaining its
independence from Britain.
More contemporary Anglo-Indians include the actor Colin Friels, Senator Christobel
Chamarette and the five Pearce brothers, Cec, Eric, Gordon, Julian and Mel who
all played hockey for Australia, four of them in the 1956 Olympics.
Some others that researchers claim to be Anglo-Indians include the British prime
ministers Lord Liverpool and Ramsay MacDonald, Wing-Commander Guy Gibson, of
Dambusters fame and the actors Merle Oberon, Margaret Lockwood, and Boris Karloff.
Some researchers also claim that the writer Rudyard Kipling and nursing pioneer
Florence Nightingale were also Anglo-Indians.
Mrs Moore says Anglo-Indian immigrants have slotted unobtrusively into their
adopted countries because of their prior disposition to the British way of life.
They speak English in the home, are Christians (mostly Catholic and Anglican),
and have similar values and customs, including a love for the same music, arts
and sports.
Other Anglo-Indian intellectuals don't entirely agree with Dr Moore's portrayal
of Anglo-Indians and continue to grapple with whether or not the community should
cast itself as the "victim" of the Raj. But most have emotionally
and physically moved on. For those who believe in destiny, one reason why Anglo-Indians
have settled so well into Australia might be because, at one time in the last
century, the British considered creating an independent homeland for them on
the Andaman Islands - another penal colony.
The debate still rages about who exactly can be called an Anglo-Indian, making
it impossible to deduce their exact numbers around the world. But one description
of Anglo-Indians that is close to the mark was made 67 years ago by Timothy
McCluskie. He came up with the idea of a homeland for them within India, and
said they were "the only community in the world who are homeless wanderers
in their own country".
Prominent Anglo-Indian, Brian Brooks, said the significance of today's celebration,
for the community, is that it commemorates the day they finally gained formal
recognition as a people. He said the community, which has spread from the Indo-Pakistan
subcontinent to the UK, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand,
considered today a fitting day to be commemorated worldwide because "August
2, 1935, was the day the parliament of India promulgated to formally recognise
the community as Anglo-Indians rather than Eurasians".
World Anglo-Indian Day, an academic conference being held at the Carlton Crest
Hotel on August 10 and a week-long international gathering planned for Melbourne
in January 2004, are all aimed at creating a greater awareness of the community
and its rich history in the hope that more Anglo-Indians will "out"
themselves and take pride in their heritage.