ABSTRACT
Anglo-Indians include both nabobs and sahibs, with many of the latter coming from families whose several generations had been in Company or government service in India. For Anglo-Indians, the ayah was the centrepiece of domesticity in the colony, but is not to be mixed up with the 'ammah', the native servant employed as a wet nurse for the British children in Anglo-Indian households. Children and descendants of European-Indian liaisons, called Eurasians and later Anglo-Indians. The District Collector and Magistrate was a prominent character in Anglo-Indian fiction. The chief disadvantage lay in the fact that the lads, brought up in Anglo-Indian families, and among Indian associations, from an early age, looked upon India as their birth-right. The Anglo-Indian dictionary, Hobson-Jobson, defined the devadasi as the 'slave-girl of the Gods' from the Hindi word. Hobson-Jobson was subtitled 'A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive', and proved to be more than a dictionary.
