https://madrascourier.com/insight/anglo-indians-a-story-of-hybridity-music-legacy/

This feature in today’s Madras Courier rightly celebrates the legacy of Anglo- Indians in India.

The White Mughals who traded with India before Empire were exploitative and greedy but they were not racist. They enjoyed the Indian way of life, many married local women and most were happy marriages. Their descendants make up the bulk of Anglo Indians.

Olivia Coleman in Who do you think you are?  discovered that she had Anglo Indian ancestry. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bb2dd9

She thought her ancestry was boring and all generations were East Anglian. The reason she didn’t know about the Indian connection was that, after 1857 and Empire, the children of mixed ancestry were branded with stigma. White Supremacy was the way we justified taking over countries. Not only did the Brits look down on Anglo Indians but conservative Indians labelled the entire community as ‘drunks’ who were ‘ready for a shag.’

A few months ago, I met for a chat with a friend from Brazil, whose grandmother was black. As a child, he was made to feel that was shameful. Things began to change with Pele and people with black ancestry began to celebrate it.

One of the reasons I wrote Sculpting the Elephant is because I’m aware of the prejudice in India against marriages outside of caste. Harry and Ramma’s children would be Anglo Indian. The book hasn’t sold well in India and I think that’s part of the reason. That prejudice is deep rooted and needs confronting.

I let Claret Press publish my memoir because white women, like me, who married non-white men when that was regarded by many as shameful, are written out of history.

 

Here is an extract from it,

“When Justin was six months old, there was a knock at the door. The woman introduced herself as a reporter from The Daily Mail. She asked if she could come in. I asked what it was she wanted. She said that she was writing a feature on mixed marriages. She asked, ‘What did your parents think about you marrying an “Indian”?’

The tone and emphasis on ‘Indian’ was a slap to reality. It seemed possible that her aim was not to calm the fears of Daily Mail readers.

I replied, ‘I didn’t marry an Indian. I married Atam.’ She looked none too pleased with my answer and left.

A neighbour showed me her copy of the feature. I was looking at a picture of our friend Graham, a good and kind man, in a turban. Graham had married Parvinder, a Sikh woman, and they’d had a Sikh wedding. In Enoch Powell’s world if you were British, you could enjoy a British style wedding anywhere across the globe, but if you were in the UK and wanted a Sikh wedding then that was somehow a threat that fragmented society! The Daily Mail was mocking this pale-skinned, blond man wearing a turban. Fortunately Graham was comfortable in the Sikh community who embraced him, and his marriage was happy.”

In the UK , mixed marriages like mine are becoming the new normal although not all  Reform loving Brits like it. Compared with many families in 2025, ours is not particularly mixed. Despite that, we have family connections in India, Canada and the USA. A niece has just returned from Uganda where she worked for many years and some of my sister in law, Fopin’s family are in Mauritius. A nephew is working in Australia where my brother Mike lived for ten years and still has many friends. My nephew’s wife is Chinese and their daughter has a British and a Chinese family. That means we are directly connected to five continents. In today’s UK, that is so NORMAL that I fail to understand why little Englanders still exist and have such influence.