The Lives of Anglo-Indians in India

Queenie by Michael Korda is the story of an Anglo-Indian girl who became a film star and moved to the West. While the story, which begins during the last days of the Raj, is clearly about one woman, and her struggle to make 'it', it also contains fascinating insights into the lives of Anglo-Indians in India, in general.

If the book is to be believed:

The Anglo-Indian community, being a 'people' who were neither completely Indian nor completely English, they were despised by both the Indians and the English. The 'Heaven sent' ICS officers did not, towards the end of the Raj, mingle with Indians, and they didn't live with Indian women. It was only Englishmen who did such things as work in the Railways who had children with Indian women.

The Anglo-Indians had their own special brand of English: the words were English, the inflection Indian. The result was that they sang the language rather than speak it.

Women who were fair might have been able to marry an Englishman and go Home to England -- India was apparently not Home. But there seemed to be little hope for women who were not fair, or for men. And their facial structures, which might have passed as being Welsh at Home, distinguished them as 'wogs' in India.

The English called the Anglo-Indians chee chee, the Anglo-Indians called the Indians wogs. And the all-consuming ambition of an Anglo-Indian was to go Home. The result was that any white man could appear and marry a woman; it didn't matter if he was worth nothing, all that mattered was that he was a pukka sahib.

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After Independence, the Anglo-Indian community was granted a two percent reservation in the Lok Sabha, and although that's always puzzled me, I'd no idea of what life for an Anglo-Indian person would have been like during the fag end of the Raj.