Barry O’Brien’s book maps evolution of Anglo-Indian community

Hugh and Colleen Gantzer

THIS is an engagingly written book which is likely to become a classic. The author of ‘The Anglo-Indians: A Portrait of a Community’, Barry O’Brien, heads the All-India Anglo-Indian Association. He divides the book into four sections, presumably for easy reference, but his effort is spoilt by a terrible Index. We must also point out a sentence in the first chapter, which is no longer valid. The first Anglo-Indians were not born “shortly after the Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama set foot on the shores of India”. Those people would have spoken Portuguese. Today’s Anglo-Indians must speak English as their mother tongue as decreed in the cases won by Frank Anthony and Nani Palkhivala.

According to Article 366 (2) of our Constitution, an Anglo-Indian is defined by his or her paternal European lineage. In the cases won by Anthony and Palkhivala, there is an additional requirement. To lineage has been added language. An Anglo-Indian’s mother tongue must be English. As English is the mother tongue of an Indian community, English is an Indian language, the contention is.

By fighting for the retention of English in our land, the community has preserved a cultural heritage which has given Indian citizens an edge over more powerful nations such as China and Russia. The so-called “English-medium” schools have grown all across India and English has become the aspirational language of the humblest citizen and not the exclusive privilege of the rich and powerful.

English is more than a language. It is also a passport to international mores and manners and so the most popular English-medium schools are those run by Anglo-Indians. Realising that students and their guardians wanted more than fluency in the lingua franca of the world, Anthony set up the Frank Anthony Public Schools. The success of the FAPS encouraged Anglo-Indian teachers to start running their own educational institutions.

O’Brien devotes a great deal of attention to Anglo-Indian education because in the reserved jobs in the Railways, Posts and Telegraphs, Customs and police, the British had offered on-the-job learning to young Anglo-Indians in place of a formal education. When these so-called ‘reserved jobs’ were abolished after Independence, many Anglo-Indian youth found themselves under-qualified in the job market and migrated to English-speaking countries. However, the success of our diaspora made us realise that though we were unqualified in India, our main strength in settling abroad was our mother tongue.

The author says very perceptively that “the community had emerged mostly from professional soldiers”. This could account for its zest, loyalty and teamwork, qualities in great demand in sports and the defence services.

Having said that, however, there is a third field in which the community has played a mind-blowing role: women’s empowerment. O’Brien rightly says, “With Independence came the uncertainty of whether she could continue to wear a dress to work, work alongside her male colleagues, interact in the only language she knew and live her life the only way she knew. The answer came quick and without a fuss: of course she could. That is, if she could continue to handle or ignore what other people thought or said about her. She did, quite easily. Today, almost every girl in urban India aspires to go out and work, many of them with the support and encouragement of their husbands and in-laws.”

According to the Women in Business 2021 report by global accounting firm Grant Thornton, India ranks third in the world for women working in senior management positions. Anglo-Indian women, who brought about this tsunami in social attitudes, are only half of this miniscule community. In spite of our small numbers, some movers and shakers of other communities are so apprehensive of Anglo-Indians that they have, conveniently, dropped our identity from census records. This in spite of Anglo-Indians being the only community identified in the Constitution. Barry O’Brien makes the unstated point that his community is the transforming leaven in Indian society.