From Empire to Empire? Writing the Transnational Anglo-Indian Self in Australia

Abstract

This paper situates late modern Anglo-Indian lifeworlds in Australia in a dialogue with the theoretical templates of globalisation and postcolonialism. More particularly it deploys contemporary Anglo-Indian life stories to challenge theoretical positions in the domain of globalisation studies that announce either the demise of postcolonial theory (by suggesting that it has outlived its historical viability) or subsume its varied articulations under the rubric of “globalisation”. Both positions find their voice in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri co-authored Empire (2000). I take up the challenge posed to postcolonialism by Hardt and Negri by asking how they would theorise a mode of hybrid belonging in a globalised world that has a long colonial history of racial and cultural mixing and that is not just a by-product of late capitalism's global generation of difference. Such a mode of belonging is manifest in the Anglo-Indian community now residing in the Anglophone countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK. The Anglo-Indian narratives deployed in this analysis are seen as exemplary in addressing the theoretical links between postcolonialism and globalisation. They also unravel global capital's false rhetoric of an even playing field of ever proliferating difference and mixedness.

Keywords:

• Anglo-Indian
• Postcolonialism
• Globalisation
• Difference

Notes

1. I use the term “Anglo-Indian” in a generic way to connote mixed-race descendants of British, European and Indian cohabitations that include marriage. This is to distinguish it from the other use of the term “Anglo-Indian” fairly common in imperial histories of Britain, that of marking English people who spent a considerable portion of the lives in India in the service of the British empire. Warren Hastings who is recorded as being the first person ever to have used the tern “Anglo-Indian” in the eighteenth century, used it to describe both the British in India and their Indian-born children, who could be, but were not necessarily, mixed-race.

2. “Letter put out by Royce Murphy to help Anglo-Indians in India”, July 2004, Australian Anglo-Indian Association of Brisbane Inc.<http://www.alphalink.com.au/∼agilbert/aitimes1.html>.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Debjani Ganguly

Debjani Ganguly is director of research at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University. She has published in the areas of postcolonial theory, caste and dalit studies, Gandhi and nonviolence, global Anglophone literatures and Indian literary criticism. Her recent publications include Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity: Notes on a Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste (Routledge, 2005)