This thesis offers a detailed analysis of the representation of Anglo-Indian people in colonial and postcolonial anglophone literature from 1885 to the end of the twentieth century. The Introduction outlines the argument of the thesis and sets out the key theoretical concepts. It then considers the varied definitions and usage of the term ‘Anglo-Indian’, the significance of the development of ideas and theories about ‘race’ in the nineteenth century, and provides a full literature review. Chapter 1 focuses on the novels Miss Stuart’s Legacy (1893) and On the Face of the Waters (1896) by Flora Annie Steel (1847-1929). In Chapter 2 I examine Rudyard Kipling’s (1865-1936) short stories ‘Kidnapped’ and ‘His Chance in Life’ (1887). Chapter 3 considers Candles in the Wind (1909), Lilamani (1911) and Far to Seek (1921) by Maud Diver (1867-1945). Steel and Diver depict Anglo-Indians in a more nuanced and potentially disruptive way than Kipling. In Chapter 4 I explore Rumer Godden’s (1907-1998) novels The Lady and the Unicorn (1937) and The Peacock Spring (1975), and Chapter 5 moves on to look at Bhowani Junction (1954) by John Masters (1914-1983). These two chapters focus on literary representations of Anglo-Indian people in the decades before and after Indian Independence, a time of identity crisis for the community, as they navigated their position in the new political and social situation. In Chapter 6 I consider I. Allan Sealy’s (1951- ) The Trotter-Nama (1988), an example of Anglo-Indian self-representation. The concluding chapter examines Manorama Mathai’s previously overlooked novella, Mulligatawny Soup (1993). Throughout my focus has been on writing by female authors whose voices have not always been heard; their writings are examined alongside works by canonical male writers. The thesis is organised chronologically, moving from British writers, who lived at times in India, and often represented Anglo-Indians as an ‘Other’, to writers who are themselves of Anglo-Indian heritage, and consciously created literary representations of their community.
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The novels under discussion fall into a range of genre conventions, with the genres of the thesis’s primary texts being: the imperial romance; the colonial middlebrow novel; the historical novel; the magical realist novel and the social realist novel. Romance as a literary genre is defined, ‘following Ramsdell (1999), as “a love story in which the central focus is on the development and satisfactory resolution of the love relationship between the two main characters, written in such a way as to provide the reader with some degree of vicarious emotional participation in the courtship process”’. Imperial romance is one of the various sub-genres of the Romance category, and the term ‘encapsulates a complex group of fictions appearing in Britain between the 1880s and 1920s, which were devoted to narrating adventure in colonial settings’. This was a period of time when Britain’s power and economic status was in decline and anxiety about this was one of the contributing factors to a renewed interest in and ‘nostalgia for the “romantic quest”’ (p. 406). In the imperial romance novels by Steel and Diver that I examine in Part 1 of the thesis the adventure and romance plots are set in British India. (14)
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