Anglo-Indian Women: A Narrative of Matriarchy in a Global Diaspora

Abstract

This research conducted in Spring 2016 involved Anglo-Indian women living in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The women answered five questions invoking a frame of reference, which referred them all back to India before and after 1947, the year of Indian Independence. The majority of the women emigrated in a family group. The majority of Anglo-Indians emigrated because a man who was the breadwinner of the family made a decision to leave India. In 1990, I conducted my doctoral research in India. I interviewed face-to-face over 600 Anglo-Indian women and men. Among the respondents I interviewed Anglo-Indian women who were members of a Scheduled Tribe in Shillong, the State of Meghalaya. These women had Anglo-Saxon surnames tucked between their Khasi first names and surnames. They are descendants of Khasi tribal women who married English, Welsh and Scottish colonialists. I also conducted face-to-face interviews with Anglo-Indian women in Cochin, Kerala who described themselves as Other Backward Classes. They are descendants of Nair women who also converted to Christianity and married Portuguese military men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These women had Portuguese surnames. Both groups of women are matriarchal and owned property. After 1947, these matriarchal women and their families did not emigrate from India. I pursue the argument that Anglo-Indian women who are the respondents in this 2016 research; living in a global diaspora have managed and renegotiated their roles in a patriarchal system. They have substituted it for a matriarchal system by substantially padding their diasporic space with education and property ownership.