Anglo-Indian people are a distinct Indian minority community of mixed-race British and Indian ancestry.Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989)"Anglo-Indian", Dictionary.com. During the colonial period their ancestry was defined by British paternal and Indian maternal heritage; in the period subsequent to the British Raj, the term Anglo-Indian has also encompassed other European and Indian ancestries. Anglo-Indians' first language is English. In the nineteenth century, various designations such as Eurasian or Indo-Briton were used to describe this community, while Anglo-Indian was primarily used for white Britons in India. Since 1911, Anglo-Indian has been used primarily for mixed race individuals with paternal British and Indian maternal ancestry while white Britons living in India were classed separately as European.
The All India Anglo-Indian Association, founded in 1926, has long represented the interests of this ethnic group; it holds that Anglo-Indians are unique in that they are Christians, speak English as their mother tongue, and have a historical link to both the British Isles and the Indian sub-continent.
Starting with the arrival of the East India Company, people of mixed British and Indian descent originated from children born to unions between British fathers and Indian mothers from the 17th century onwards. This new ethnic group formed a small yet significant portion of the population and became well represented in certain administrative roles. Anglo-Indians were mostly isolated and faced discrimination both British and Indian society, and over time formed a distinct group. Their documented numbers dwindled from roughly 300,000 at the time of independence in 1947 to about 125,000–150,000 in modern-day India due to emigration as well as assimilation. During much of the time that Britain ruled India (the Raj), British-Indian relationships faced stigma, which meant that the ethnicity of some Anglo-Indians was undocumented or identified incorrectly. As such, many have adapted to local communities in India or emigrated to the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, the United States, South Africa and New Zealand.
Similar communities can also be seen in other parts of the world, although in smaller numbers, such as Anglo-Burmese in Myanmar and Burghers in Sri Lanka.
Demographics + Anglo-Indian Population in India from 1951 to 2011 Rao, M.S.A. "Anglo-Indian Communities and their Social Assimilation in India", 2003. Fernandes, Clifford. "The Anglo-Indian Experience: From Colonial to Post-Colonial India", 1995. Jaffrelot, Christophe. "The India-Pakistan Conflict: An Overview", 2002. Year Population 1951 296,364 1961 227,267 1971 173,128 1981 145,340 1991 106,270 2001 78,512 2011 56,394 The population of the Anglo-Indian community has decreased due to emigration to the west or integration into the broader Indian community. In 2023, Clive Van Buerle of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association governing body estimated, based on membership, that there were approximately 350,000–400,000 Anglo-Indians in India.
History The first use of "Anglo-Indian" was to describe all Britons who lived in India. People of mixed British and Indian descent were referred to as "Eurasians". "Anglo-Indians" now primarily refer to the latter group. The community originated soon after 1639 when the British East India Company established a settlement in Madras. The community identified itself with and was accepted by the British until 1791, when Anglo-Indians were excluded from positions of authority in the civil, military and marine services in the East India Company. During the Indian rebellion of 1857, Anglo-Indians were employed in large numbers in the strategic services of the railways, the postal and telegraph services, and customs. In 1919, the Anglo-Indian community was given one reserved seat in the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi.
Creation During the East India Company's rule in India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was common for British officers and soldiers to take local wives and start families, owing to an initial lack of British women in India. Looking at the records of wills from the early 1780s, a third of all British men in India named their Indian wives and children as their inheritors. By the mid-19th century, there were around 40,000 British soldiers, but fewer than 2,000 British officials were present in India. By then, the Suez Canal was opened and many British women came to India in quick transit.
Before the British Raj, the Company, with some reluctance, endorsed a policy of local marriage for its soldiers. The board of directors wrote in 1688 to its Council at Fort St. George: "Induce by all meanes you can invent our Souldiers (sic) to marry with the Native women, because it will be impossible to get ordinary young women, as we have before directed, to pay their own passages, although Gentlewomen sufficient do offer themselves." Until 1741, a special payment was made to each soldier who had his child baptised as a Protestant. The concern in London was that if the soldiers at Fort St. George lived with or married the many Portuguese women there the children would be brought up as Roman Catholics rather than Protestants. The Company's officials on the ground were less worried about the religious issue, but more concerned that soldiers should be married "to prevent wickedness". Married soldiers with family ties were thought more likely to be better behaved than bachelors.
The British military population in India grew rapidly from a few hundred soldiers in the mid-18th century to 18,000 in the Royal and Company armies of 1790, though this figure includes native Indian sepoys, who made up the vast majority of the military during the company rule and crown rule in India. During this time the records of cohabitation and last testaments show that at least a third of all British men in India married an Indian woman or left their inheritance to their Anglo-Indian children. There were also many second generation British officers who were born and raised in India, such as Lieutenant-Colonel James Kirkpatrick who was born in Madras in 1764, wore Mughal style clothing, and spoke Tamil as a first language. Left with a strong affinity for the cultural practices of their childhood homeland, many although nominally Christian would adopt local Hindu and Muslim customs such as shunning pork, beef, and even becoming vegetarians. Kirkpatrick would even go on to converting to Islam in order to marry a Sayyida noblewoman named Khair-un-Nissa in 1800, having two children together, and assimilating into the Hyderabadi elite. Other officials such as William Fraser would similarly assimilate themselves into local Indian culture, even patronizing artists and poets such as Ghalib, and going on to have dozens of children with many women, both Hindu and Muslim. Notable children of these unions such as James Skinner, also named Sikandar Sahib, the son of a Scottish Company officer and an Indian noblewoman of the Bhojpur region, would go on to serve prominent roles in the Maratha Army and later Bengal Army where he raised his own regiment called Skinner's Horse.
Many children were born to unofficial partnerships: 54% of the children baptised at St. John's, Calcutta between 1767 and 1782 were Anglo-Indian and illegitimate. British women of good social standing were scarce; in 1785 surgeon John Stewart wrote to his brother from Cawnpore: "Many of the women here are mere adventuresses from Milliners shops on Ludgate Hill and some even from Covent Garden and Old Drury [well known areas of prostitution in late 18th century London]. They possess neither sentiment nor education, and are so intoxicated by their sudden elevation, that a sensible man can only regard them with indignation and outrage."
The reforming zeal of Governor-General Lord Cornwallis had ensured that by the 1780s, the opportunities for Company servants to make a fortune through trade had gone forever. Most had to live on their Company salaries and few could afford to support a wife. Company officers were paid less than their counterparts in the British Army and promotion might take twice as long, perhaps 25 years to reach the rank of Major in the Company compared to between 12 and 17 years in the Royal Army; and in the Bengal Army in 1784, there were only four Colonels amongst 931 officers. Few young officers in either army managed to avoid debt. It might have cost approximately £50 a year (Rs 24 to Rs 40 a month) to provide for the wants of an Indian companion and her attendants, compared with £600 to support a British wife with any degree of public style. 83 of 217 wills in Bengal between 1780 and 1785 contained bequests either to Indian companions or their natural children, who were the offspring of high and low in British society, and gentlemen of wealth often left substantial bequests and annuities to their Indian partners and children. When Major Thomas Naylor in 1782 bequeathed to his companion Muckmul Patna Rs 4000, a bungalow and a garden at Berhampore, a hackery, bullocks, her jewels, clothes, and all their male and female slaves, he treated her as he might a wife. Where they could, gentlemen sent their Anglo-Indian daughters to the ladies' seminaries in Presidency towns and to England to be 'finished'; and when they returned, they were married off to fellow officers. Some daughters of senior officers became substantial heiresses whose wealth was a marked marital attraction, but many more daughters of impoverished officers, raised in military orphanages after the deaths of their fathers, hoped only to find a suitable husband at the monthly public dances. Save in very few cases, when British men returned home, the Indian companion and any children stayed in India: British soldiers were not permitted to bring them, and many officers and civil servants feared the social and cultural consequences.
Neglect Originally, under Regulation VIII of 1813, Anglo-Indians were excluded from the British legal system and in Bengal became subject to the rule of Islamic law outside Calcutta, and yet found themselves without any caste or status amongst those who were to judge them. This coincided with the Company officially allowing Christian missionaries into India; and evangelical organisations and popular writers of the time like Mary Sherwood routinely blamed the alleged moral shortcomings or personality defects of the growing Anglo-Indian population upon the Indian mother rather than the European father. There was growing disapproval of marriages amongst the Company elite and Anglo-Indian women. The public dances for the female wards of the Upper Military Academy, Calcutta, which had been attended so eagerly fifty years earlier had been discontinued by the 1830s. Public argument against marriages to Indian and Anglo-Indian women skirted the question of race and focused on their social consequences: they did not mix well in British society, lacked education, were reluctant to leave India when their men retired, and - probably most important of all - would handicap the career of an ambitious husband. By 1830, the proportion of illegitimate births registered in the Bengal Presidency had fallen to 10%, and British wills in Bengal in 1830-2 record less than one in four bequests to Indian women and their children compared with almost two in five fifty years earlier. For all the social disapproval, however, officers and Company servants continued to marry Anglo-Indian girls, and it was thought that in Calcutta alone there were more than 500 marriageable Anglo-Indian girls in the 1820s, compared to 250 Englishwomen in the whole of Bengal.