Family, Marriage and Kinship in the Anglo-Indian Community

Abstract

From the 1970s on we begin to discern a marked change among Anglo-Indians: the community started to recognize India as their own country. But the boundary line between ‘we’ and ‘the’ was still maintained, forcing the community to stay within communitarian confines. This should not suggest that the community had set the boundary single-handedly. It was more of a two-way process, in which both the minority and the majority communities (non–Anglo-Indian) participated in colonial and post-colonial times. This boundary is not rigidly placed between the two communities; rather, it has pores that sometimes guarantee an interaction between communities. Such traffic, albeit limited, imparts a measure of dynamism to the community. This has also ensured the formation of marital ties between communities. But intermarriages in the past and even now are not encouraged because the Anglo-Indians fear their extinction as a community as a result. The status of the Anglo-Indian community in India is characterized by stereotypes reinforced by use of words such as tash and mem. The literal connotation of the word tash signifies women who are non-traditional and ‘Westernized’. Such popular notions about Anglo-Indian women embody a value judgment that they are alien and their ways unacceptable. This attitude has a significant impact on the self-perceptions of some individual Anglo-Indians. A close look at their own subjective evaluations suggests that they feel other communities in India denigrate their community in general and their women in particular. When I asked my respondents to identify their subjective understanding of what other Indians think of them, the men and the women of the community expressed their feelings differently. For example, a young Anglo-Indian woman, Sonia (name changed) said her neighbours would pass comments like ‘memsahib’ whenever she crossed them on the street. For her, such remarks were distressing because she knew she would not be recognized as a non-Indian outside India because of her black hair and her nearly black eyes. She did not like the comments passed at her in public. Neither did she like her Anglo-Indian relatives speaking about her black hair and eyes because she knew this made her look Indian. She resented looking more Indian than Anglo-Indian. She told me she always wanted to be like her sister, who was blonde. The multiple patriarchies the women of the community face push them to a margin where they continually fight against both demands—to be an Anglo-Indian and an Indian at the same time.