case study on Anglo Indian community
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The Indian Constitution recognises Anglo Indians as a citizen of mixed Indian and European descent (paternal side). Between the 18th and 20th centuries, the term described Britons in India. But the term was formalised in the Census 1911. Anglo Indians were for the first time officially recognised as a specific community by the British. The Government of India Act, 1935 identified Anglo Indians as “a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is a native of India.”
The Constitutional Assembly kept the operating part and the community was listed as a minority in the Indian Constitution in 1950. Now, the community is largely urban, traces roots to early contact between Europe and India, as back as 1498 during the time the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama came on Indian shores for the first time. The government of India estimates the community to be around 1,00,000-1,50,000.
Anglo Indians, 70 years of independence, Vasco da Gama
The picture shows the departure of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama from Lisbon to India in 1497. Anglo Indians can trace their origins as back as 1498 when Vasco da Gama came on Indian shores for the first time. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
In post-independence India, a generation of Anglo Indians left Indian shores against the advice of their community leaders writes Alison Blunt in Domicile and Diaspora:Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home.
Robyn Andrews, after speaking to migrant Anglo Indians in UK, Canada and Australia, concluded in his study Quitting India: The Culture of Migration that the reasons migration varied from search for employment, insecurity and one group even said it was a glamorous thing to do.
His study theorised that “fears of reprisals and insecurity about their future in India led to three major waves of migration from the sub-continent”. The first wave of migration came just after 1947. The second wave was in the early sixties during the time there was a push for Hindi to be made the national language which reduced chances of employment. The third wave came in the 1970s and is called by most sociologists as the ‘family reunion wave’