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I am of mixed race -  Anglo-Indian.  I have not come across very many representations of Anglo-Indians in the media but when I do come across them they are often very negative.  In cultural productions Anglo-Indians are usually the bad guys – we have a strong tendency to be represented as whores or traitors.  At very least we are always represented as liars. 

 (The Anglo-Indian background that I refer to is not the same as the people who are of mixed English and Indian parents and have been born in England (or other parts of the world) since independence.  These people tend not to have the same level of condemnation in popular culture.  A famous representative of this group is Hanif Kureshi, author of My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, the Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album.  I was a teenager when I first came across Hanif Kureshi's work and I loved him because he was the closest I had ever come to finding positive examples of Anglo-Indians.) 

 But I digress, the Anglo Indian people that I come from are the ones from India.  We are the one's that arrived 9 months after the whites.  We are an obvious product of imperialism.  In the economic and social structure of the Raj we were in the middle but not spoken of.  We were the "Railway Caste" – those that oversaw the railways.  We were policemen and schoolteachers and newspaper writers.  We were the middle class. We were deeply implicated in the maintenance of  Empire.

 We pretended to be as white as we could get away with.  We always had Anglo names and finding an Indian name in an Anglo-Indian family was almost unheard of.  What's more we became our own ethnic group Anglo-Indians married other Anglo-Indians until it became impossible to say how English or how Indian any person was.  We were horribly racist, an appalling internalised racism – to this day my grandmother nags me not to go outside without long sleeves because I’ll get a tan and be 'black'.  Anglo-Indians of course also practised the externalised racism as well – Anglo-Indians looked down on Indians.

There are very few representations of Anglo-Indians in the media or cultural productions.  Many productions will often have babies of mixed race born to their characters e.g. The Jewel in the Crown and the Far Pavilions both represent inter-racial relationships that result in children but we don't see those children grow up.   Below are descriptions of the few full grown Anglo-Indians that I remember. 

In the mini-series The Far Pavilions Rupert Everett played an Anglo-Indian who was pretending to be white.  He committed suicide when he was found out.

There was a mini-series called Queenie.  A fictionalised account of the life of Merle Oberon.  The main character was an Anglo-Indian who lied constantly about her race.  Who employed her own (indian looking) mother as her maid and mistreated her.  Who lived her entire life in fear of being found out and as a result became a total bitch.  This aspect was apparently accurately based on Merle Oberon. 

 There was Cliff Richard – my grandmother knew his mother in India.  His family were Anglo-Indian.  Cliff’s official biography claims that while large parts of his family were Anglo-Indian he himself had two white biological parents and had only been brought up by Anglo-Indians.  Yeah right (sarcasm). 

 Finally and most complicatedly – Kim Philby  When Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963 the British establishment was at a loss for how to explain how he could have become a traitor.  They had managed to explain Burgess and McLean to themselves by saying they were homosexual and therefore "not quite one of us".  But Philby was demonstrably and obviously straight.  So they hunted around for another reason and mixed race is what they came up with.  There argument went like this – Philby was born in India, Philby’s mother was also born in India and she had no known English family.  She also had dark brown hair and dark brown eyes.  That’s really all the evidence that they had but it was enough for some of them Philby was a traitor because he was Anglo-Indian.  This version of the story is not common and died out, I think, before the end of the 1960s but the story was told.  I came across it during my fascination with the Cambridge spies phase.  I actually want it to be true.  I love Philby and would like to share an ethnic background with him.  Given the way Anglo-Indians lie about race it could almost be true.   

I have said all these awful things about Anglo-Indian above and they are all true.  But I don't hate being an Anglo-Indian.  My father is English so maybe I should call myself an Anglo-Anglo-Indian.  If I have kids they will probably have a white father and I think at that point they can no longer claim to be Anglo-Indian.  But I am reasonably proud of my background.  There are some quite nasty evils in it and it is quite likely there are even nastier bits that have not been told as part of family lore.  However, at the same time some of my ancestors were amazing.  One of my great aunts was a nurse – she had to fight her family because they considered it a 'dirty' occupation.  My grandmother survived being brought up in an orphanage for the 'children of tea planters' (for which it is safe to read 'for the bastards of tea planters.')  She made it to university, became a teacher, married, had my mother, was widowed, emigrated to Britain, and was a non-white single mother in the 1950s and 60s. I am proud of her. 

The badness that occurs in Anglo-Indian culture is a result of the evils of imperialism.  Anglo-Indian people are simply trying to best navigate the effects of those evils. Unfortunately,some of them become very nasty themselves in the process.   The fact that it is still difficult to find positive representations of Anglo-Indians in popular culture is also a legacy of imperialism.  Anglo-Indians by definition complicate the dichotomy of imperialism - they  are both  the conquered and the conqueror. 

This post has been about my family and Anglo-Indians in western media.  I strongly suspect that there are other Anglo-indian sub-cultures out there.  I have only written about the ones I know.     
 

The post below contains a lot of swearing.  This is largely because racism makes me very very angry and I didn't feel like editing it out.  This was a difficult post to write.  That is why I am finally posting it on the last day of IBARW.   I have also written a squee post about Julian Bashir and if I have the mental energy before the end of IBARW I might write a post about my personal experience of race.

• a continuation of the anti-racist and anti-fascist metaphor that was one of the interesting things in book 5.  House-elves, goblins centaurs etc. As well as some discussion of why the Ministry falls into fascist tendencies so easily and some sort of political development to help prevent this happening in future. 
  
• some sort of settling of the Draco storyline.  Draco annoyed me from book 3- 6  because it seemed obvious to me that he was being set up as a mirror for Harry in thematic terms but he wasn't being developed.  Then book 6 happened and finally all that set up got some payoff.  However, I would like his storyline finished off.  Specifically I would like to see some fallout from the whole climactic scene of book six in relation to how it affects Draco.
  
• I hope that Hermione and Ginny are well served in the final book and that Hermione in particular gets to have some sort of fulfilling future.   Ginny , while I do like her, is a bit of a love interest and may die in order to create motivation for her boyfriend and brother.  I don't want this to happen but I can see that it would be perfectly reasonable in literary terms.  
• I can't think of any others at the moment. 
  

• I think that Sirius is most like Jessica partly because he has the best politics and partly because he RAN AWAY.  
  
• I think that Narcissa is probably Diana, she may be Debo but most likely Diana.  I think this at least partially because Lucius Malfoy reads very strongly as Oswald Mosely (fascist aristocrat with a much more powerful, less aristocratic and clearly evil ally/superior).
  
• I think Regulus is is either Unity or more likely Tom Mitford (this depends on how he develops in book 7) He is Unity if his belief in Voldmeort is ideological but regretted at the end.  He is Tom if he was just stupidly caught up in a fad. 
  
• I think that Bellatrix is more strongly Unity because of her profound ideological commitment to Voldemort. 
  
• This means that Andromeda is Pam or Debo - either makes sense Debo in the sense of settled and married and largely ignoring politics or Pam in a similar sense but with the added married a Muggle as a metaphor for retiring to rural life.