Anglo-India and the End of Empire

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs on 2022-09-12 16:14Z by Steven

Anglo-India and the End of Empire

Hurst Publishers
September 2022
370 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781787383128

Uther Charlton-Stevens, Fellow
Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland

A startling new history of a community’s struggle to be heard as Empire waned in India, with echoes for all those of mixed heritage.

The standard image of the Raj is of an aloof, pampered and prejudiced British elite lording it over an oppressed and hostile Indian subject population. Like most caricatures, this obscures as much truth as it reveals. The British had not always been so aloof. The earlier, more cosmopolitan period of East India Company rule saw abundant ‘interracial’ sex and occasional marriage, alongside greater cultural openness and exchange. The result was a large and growing ‘mixed-race’ community, known by the early twentieth century as Anglo-Indians.

Notwithstanding its faults, Empire could never have been maintained without the active, sometimes enthusiastic, support of many colonial subjects. These included Indian elites, professionals, civil servants, businesspeople and minority groups of all kinds, who flourished under the patronage of the imperial state, and could be used in a ‘divide and rule’ strategy to prolong colonial rule. Independence was profoundly unsettling to those destined to become minorities in the new nation, and the Anglo-Indians were no exception.

This refreshing account looks at the dramatic end of British rule in India through Anglo-Indian eyes, a perspective that is neither colonial apologia nor nationalist polemic. Its history resonates strikingly with the complex identity debates of the twenty-first century.

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