The Anglo-Indianness of Geoffrey Firmin: Deracination in Under the Volcano

Whereas Indian culture predated British colonialism in India (1600-1947) by six millennia, Anglo-Indian and Eurasian cultures were concurrent with colonialism and have survived it. The first British colonisers, men in the British East India Company which ‘expected that its servants would lead a celibate life' (Hawes 2), often ignored this stricture and entered into marriages and similar sexual relationships with Indian women. Their children were the progenitors of the Anglo- Indian community (the first Anglo-Indians were born in 1601), for which the racialised subject formation of hybridity is the marker. Anglo-Indians have always been a minority or marginal community in India, largely outside the caste system, as the word half-caste, which originally signified women who married outside their castes, suggests (Moore 170). In the post-independence period especially, this minority or marginal position has become attenuated because of the Anglo- Indian Diaspora. Within India, the ‘life span of the Anglo-Indian community will depend in large measure on two strong bulwarks of the community that have sustained it through the most difficult periods of its history, namely its educational institutions and its organised structure under a strong leadership' (Abel 186