‘What d’you mean?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t you just some white guy born in India?’ He looked me up and down, stating the obvious with grin: ‘This coming from a UK-based ‘Indian’ with a la-di-dah accent?’ He explained in simplified terms: an Anglo-Indian was person of mixed European and Indian blood, and an equally mixed cultural heritage.

Knowing a few things about cultural mixing myself, we were soon engaged in a light-hearted conversation on the commonalities between our two communities. He told me that his mother often had a few things to say whenever a young Anglo-Indian married out of the community. ‘That man married an Indian!’ she had exclaimed of her friend’s son defection. I imagined an aghast Chennai-based Hyacinth Bouquet and was smirking away to myself when I recalled my own mother’s voice telling me the same thing in reverse. ‘What if your Anglo-Indian daughter married my British-Indian son?’ ‘That would confuse the parents’ he replied, adding ‘We could throw a British-Indian-Anglo-Indian-What-Not-Wedding for our children.’

His perception of the UK seemed to be altogether more romantic than my own. He told me how his family loved England but I smiled uneasily when he mentioned they’d never set foot in the country. I began to tell him about gun crime, low literacy rates and the racism we minority communities had faced over the years, but then again…hadn’t I had a rather warped image of India myself? ‘Okay’ I confessed. ‘Beat this - until the age of eleven I had thought of all Indians as…well…Hindu vegetarians.’ He shook his head in disdain. No no no, he couldn’t beat that one, he said.

When back in the UK during a bout of post-India blues, I Googled ‘Anglo-Indians’ to find out more. I discovered that the birth of the community was largely a phenomenon of the Raj. Britishers were encouraged to take Indian brides, and after the building of the Suez, brought many of their wives over to settle in India. What resulted was a community of mixed blood Indians whose first language was English and whose culture was orientated to the West. They even had their own way of speaking English: a dialect they called Chi Chi.

Anglo-Indians lived well under the guardianship of the Raj but after 1947 they were treated with contempt: whereas in pre-Independence India, they had received promotions, those self-same jobs were snatched from them and allocated to ‘pure-blooded’ Indians. (By contrast, it could be argued that modern-day Anglo-Indians have a link to Western culture from birth and this affords them with a degree of privilege and power).

During 1950s and 1960s many Anglo-Indians departed for countries such as the US, Canada, Australia and the UK. They didn’t much miss their ‘Indianness’ and wholeheartedly embraced the culture of their host nations. However, Indian culture did leave an aftertaste with the Anglo-Indian diaspora. For example, the average Anglo-Indian Christmas meal insisted upon Indian spices. ‘A well-spiced Christmas dinner? Too cool!’ I thought to myself. ‘That’s like when mum puts jeera in pasta sauce to make it “taste better.” ’

Of course, there are great differences between the Anglo-Indians and contemporary Western-Asians like us. Today, the Anglo-Indian community in India comprises of circa 200,000 to 400, 000 compared to 2.33 million British-Indians in the UK. What differentiates British-Indians from Anglo-Indians the most is that they are only just reclaiming their status as a community with a shared sense of culture and global identity: British-Indians haven’t felt the same sense of communal identity crisis. Whereas previously the assumption had been that Anglo-Indians would disappear as they married Indians or moved overseas, the global Anglo-Indian community has become more confident, helped along by the internet.

I still think there’s cause for me to feel a sense of kinship with my Anglo-Indian compadre. We both have our roots tangled up with the Raj and we’re both part of a contemporary global movement of people. As Anglo-Indian Canadian stand-up Russell Peters puts it, ‘The whole world’s mixing. There’s nothing you can do about it!’ With the Indian population growing at a staggering rate, ‘Sooner or later, we’re gonna hump you.’

Priya Rathod