Two centuries on, researchers and writers continue to come to India to "study" the community. Those who spend a few weeks here write an article; if they hang on for six months, they write a book; if they reside in India for several years, they write nothing-the Anglo-Indian is not easily understood.
Laura Roychowdhury, a social anthropologist and historian, selected Anglo-Indians and the railways for her dissertation at the University of Michigan. This book is not her dissertation, but the story of her endeavours to look at the community through contemporary eyes, interwoven with episodes of the author's sojourn. She became emotionally attached to her guide, a Bengali college student from Calcutta whom she eventually marries. The romance runs parallel to the evocative tales and incidents that surrounded her study of Anglo-Indians.
The British cuckoo laid its egg in the nest of its Empire. Class-ridden and colour-conscious, it betrayed its progeny and looked down its imperial beak at the new breed. Roychowdhury detects the selfishness and snobbery of the Raj as quickly as she notices the Bengali foibles of yearning for a fair bride. In the end, she is accused by her Bengali landlady of having become "too Anglo-Indian from all your researches".
The author sets up prototypes from Anglo-Indians in Calcutta-primarily from the nearby railway colony of Kharagpur. Therein lies the limitation of her work. A motley array of characters live in a twilight zone under the shadow of the Jadu house (Masonic lodge) where occult absurdities pass for reality. Why do foreign researchers insist on talking to people over fifty who remember the Raj with nostalgia and gratitude or bitterness and confusion? Any Anglo-Indian below forty living in this country has not a tug of a single heartstring towards England. But the new, young Anglo-Indian is never researched!
There were few clues to the real life of the Anglo-Indians in Calcutta's National Library. British memos and reports callously reduced Anglo-Indians to a "type"-anonymous case-studies of the "degeneration produced by cross-breeding". The author turns to Indian nationalistic documents expecting to find a more sympathetic attitude, but uncovers the same old story of the "best and worst qualities of both civilisations". She tries to avoid a search for painful family secrets, endeavouring instead to seek out new paths in the road to Anglo-India.
She discovers that Anglo-Indians even had arranged marriages and did not just seek out bed partners, that many Anglo-Indian girls dreaded marrying illiterate European railwaymen, preferring Anglo-Indians, which doesn't fit stereotyped Indian or British notions of Anglo-Indian girls desperate to marry up into white pedigree.
In a brief historical appendix, the author states, "Until 1786 the East India Company encouraged the union of local officers and Indian women. It granted five rupees per month for the upkeep of children born to British soldiers from these relationships." The fact is that a deliberate policy of avowedly encouraging inter-marriage was first put into words by the Directors of the East India Company on April 8, 1678.
As a result, the Anglo-Indian community was officially brought into existence. It remains the only minority of mixed European descent to survive in Asia as a recognised entity, a position it would never have attained if it had not contributed so positively to post-Independent India.
