ABSTRACT
Controversies surrounding the definition of the term “Anglo-Indian” are as old as the community itself, the first Anglo-Indian in recorded history having been born in India the year after the East India Company arrived on the sub-continent (1600). The sexual encounters that spawned this ethnic group were followed by cultural ones, none more complex or varied than those that arose when migration and relocation extended its geographical boundaries. For the purpose of this essay I have used the term as referring to the human progeny of Britain’s colonization of India. 1 Borrowing from the title of Salman Rushdie’s novel, Glen D’Cruz, an Anglo-Indian scholar in Australia, calls Anglo-Indians “Midnight’s Orphans” in his book Anglo-Indians in Post-Colonial Literature. He alleges that Anglo-Indians felt like orphans after Indian Independence in 1947—abandoned, on the one hand, by the British to whom they had always looked for protection, and rejected, on the other, by their fellow Indians who regarded their mixed racial heritage with suspicion and their loyalty to the new republic with skepticism.
