Anglo-Indian reunions: secular pilgrimages?

Abstract

The Anglo-Indian diaspora is a result of the accelerated migration of Anglo-Indians from India to (mainly) Commonwealth countries after India gained independence from Britain in 1947. This article examines the World Anglo-Indian reunions that are now held every 3 years in one or another of the diaspora cities in which they have made their homes. It interrogates what it is about these week-long events that bring thousands of Anglo-Indians to them, concluding that the answer hinges on the ability for attendees to feel Anglo-Indian at a sensory, experiential level, for the duration of each reunion. It further claims that reunions can be productively understood as pilgrimages in that they renew the attendees sense of belonging to a community, in ways that can be understood in terms of Turner's notion of ‘communitas’.

Keywords:

• Anglo-Indian
• diaspora
• reunion
• pilgrimage
• ritual
• communitas

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Anglo-Indian reunion attendees who always made me feel welcome in their midst, and for their time and interest in my research. I also note my appreciation of the editor's and reviewers' comments and suggestions.

Notes

In this article, I use Kolkata, the new city name, although ‘Calcutta’ is the name that many of my research participants continue to use. I retain ‘Calcutta’ in quotes from participants.

I use this term as an etic category, rather than suggesting that there is some sort of ‘essential’ Anglo-Indian world.

This is based on talking to, reading blogs, and emailing Anglo-Indians about this experience.

The Anglo-Indian sense of marginality, both in India and the diaspora has been written about extensively (for example by Gist and Wright 1973, Lewin 2002, Blunt 2005, Lionel Lumb 2008, MacDonald-D'Costa 2009).

Such activities include the remarkable number of books published in the last 15 years by Anglo-Indians and non-Anglo-Indians about the community, for example, the series of anthologies published by the Anglo-Indian headed CTR Inc. (Deefholts and Deefholts 2006, 2010, Lionel Lumb 2008).

Borofsky (2006) describes public anthropology thus:

Public anthropology demonstrates the ability of anthropology and anthropologists to effectively address problems beyond the discipline – illuminating the larger social issues of our times as well as encouraging broad, public conversations about them with the explicit goal of fostering social change. It affirms our responsibility, as scholars and citizens, to meaningfully contribute to communities beyond the academy – both local and global – that make the study of anthropology possible.

More and more middle-class, English-medium educated Indians are also identifying as ‘western’ nowadays but Anglo-Indians are distinct in that their paternal forebears were European.

Even though it turned out that their fears were mainly unfounded; in fact, the post-Independence government provided incentives for Anglo-Indians to stay in India. These took the form of allocations of jobs in the government services, educational advantages, which gave support and independence to their schools, and Anglo-Indian representation in state and national government. With the exception of the job allocations these incentives are still in place today. So for all they were assured of employment, representation, and an Anglo-Indian education system, there was a steady migratory stream out of India.

There are difficulties obtaining exact numbers of Anglo-Indians residing in India, as they have not been counted separately in the census since 1951. Even when they were counted in the census, the population statistics were questionably low (Anthony 1969, Andrews 2005, McMenamin 2006). There has, however, been a concerted effort to carry out a census in West Bengal over November 2010 to February 2011 period. Results from this research are pending.

The 2nd August was nominated because it was the day of the year in 1911 that Anglo-Indians were first officially defined by the Indian government.

This idea was taken up and Anglo-Indians held the first of these yearly celebrations on 2nd August in 2002, in Indian and diasporic cities with organised associations of Anglo-Indians.

The Perth reunion was held over 8 days.

This is Hindi for ‘a crazy sports meeting’.

For more details about Anglo-Indian practice of Christianity see Andrews (2010).

At the Melbourne and Toronto reunions, there have been events which focused on ways of assisting disadvantaged Anglo-Indians in India, but these were run outside the official programme.

In India, what is known as a cutlet is a small, flattened ball of minced meat, breadcrumb-coated and fried, that in the west is more likely to be called a pattie.

Several months later, I met up with him and his cousin in London where they invited me to attend a family party. It was a large family gathering with Anglo-Indian food and great dancing – it could easily have been transplanted to Kolkata. His mum said he had always loved to dance and preferred these evenings to ‘clubbing’.

Following the work of Brubaker and Cooper (2000), the idea of ‘being Anglo-Indian’ might even be best seen as a number of processes in action, rather than as a thing called ‘identity’. But this discussion is beyond the scope of this article.

Blunt, in writing about Anglo-Indians and McCluskieganj uses this term to represent a longing for home that was embodied and enacted in practice rather than solely in the imagination, and a longing that was oriented towards the future as well as towards the past and to a sense of place that was both proximate and distant. (Blunt, 2003, pp. 718–719)

This regret was voiced at various events including the Melbourne symposium.

‘Imagined’ in Anderson's sense of never knowing all members of the community so having to use one's imagination in order to conceive of the group membership (Anderson 1991).

See Cassity (2011) who addresses the ways in which diasporic Anglo-Indians write about their sense of displacement and not being able to enact their Anglo-Indianness, through food.