The Legal Question of Being an "Anglo-Indian": Race, Identity, and Law in Colonial India

Of late, increasing attention has focused on (mainly male) constructions of women in colonial India. On the one side, it has been noted how European women were frequently held responsible and disparaged for upsetting the comparatively relaxed relationships existing between British (especially males) and Indians (especially females) up to the late eighteenth century. Seen as the staunchest upholders (if not the keenest advocates) of racial distinctions which evolved in the course of the nineteenth century, European women were vilified for elaborating (if not actually creating) social and cultural hierarchies which led to a widening of the distance between colonizer and colonized. At the same time, they were stereotyped as frivolous, vain, snobbish and selfish (Barr 1976: 197; 1989: 1; Brownfoot 1984: 186). Indeed, Gartrell suggests that ‘few women have been described so negatively as the British memsahibs’ (1984: 165). In drawing attention to these portrayals, a number of writers have recently pointed out, in mitigation, that the memsahibs were simply reproducing official British attitudes, were themselves proud symbols of British power, and subjects of a strict patriarchal culture within European circles (see Barr 1989: 5; Bharucha 1994: 88–9).

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The law of Hobson-Jobson

English Today ◽

10.1017/s0266078409000108 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 25 (1) ◽

pp. 60-64 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Susan Purcell

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

British Empire ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Colonial India ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

The Law ◽

Anglo Indian

ABSTRACTYule and Burnell's 1886 Anglo-Indian dictionary still fascinates and informs today. It is not the finest of Salman Rushdie's writings, but this is the first paragraph of his essay Hobson-Jobson (italics in original):“The British Empire, many pundits now agree, descended like a juggernaut upon the barbicans of the East, in search of loot. The moguls of the raj went in palanquins, smoking cheroots, to sup toddy or sherbet on the verandahs of the gymkhana club, while the memsahibs fretted about the thugs in bandannas and dungarees who roamed the night like pariahs, plotting ghoulish deeds.” (Rushdie, 1992:81)Rushdie points out that the italicised words all appear in the celebrated dictionary Hobson-Jobson: a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive by Henry Yule & A.C. Burnell, first published in 1886.This gem of a dictionary gives definitions and origins of words in common use by the British in colonial India in the late nineteenth century. Some of the entries won't be a surprise to readers – we all know that raj, mogul and memsahib are Indian words. But there are many words with their origins in Hindustani, Bengali, Sanskrit or other Indian or Eastern languages, whose origin is perhaps not quite so well known.

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Anglo-Indian Schools of Hindu Law

Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198852377.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 158-207

Author(s):

Christopher T. Fleming

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

East India Company ◽

Colonial Era ◽

Colonial India ◽

Indian Schools ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

English Translations ◽

Civil Courts ◽

Anglo Indian

This chapter turns to the British encounter with traditional Sanskrit learning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and traces the construction of schools of Hindu Law in colonial India between 1772 and 1864. The chapter examines three digests of Sanskrit Dharmaśāstra that were compiled at the behest of the East India Company and whose English translations were utilized by British jurists the Ṣadr Dīwānī ‘Adālats (colonial civil courts): the Vivādārṇavasetu (translated in 1776 as A Code of Gentoo Laws), the Vivādabhaṅgārṇava (translated in 1795–6 as A Digest on Contracts and Succession), and the Dharmaśāstrasamgraha (which likely served as an impetus for Henry Colebrooke’s Two Treatises). Furthermore, it argues that these colonial-era Dharmaśāstra digests articulate discernible schools of jurisprudential thought regarding ownership and inheritance that frame themselves using the regional terminology of the early modern Dharmaśāstrins whose work is examined in Chapters 2 and 3 of this book. The treatises do this by recapitulating and by enhancing the eastern and southern scales of Dharmaśāstra texts that developed originally in Navadvīpa and Vārāṇasī in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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Between ‘Savage Man’ and ‘Most Faithful Englishman’ Manteo and the Early Anglo-Indian Exchange, 1584–1590

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115300044545 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 24 (2) ◽

pp. 146-169 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Michael Leroy Oberg

Keyword(s):

North Carolina ◽

Chesapeake Bay ◽

One Year ◽

Anglo Indian

In August of 1587 Manteo, an Indian from Croatoan Island, joined a group of English settlers in an attack on the native village of Dasemunkepeuc, located on the coast of present-day North Carolina. These colonists, amongst whom Manteo lived, had landed on Roanoke Island less than a month before, dumped there by a pilot more interested in hunting Spanish prize ships than in carrying colonists to their intended place of settlement along the Chesapeake Bay. The colonists had hoped to re-establish peaceful relations with area natives, and for that reason they relied upon Manteo to act as an interpreter, broker, and intercultural diplomat. The legacy of Anglo-Indian bitterness remaining from Ralph Lane's military settlement, however, which had hastily abandoned the island one year before, was too great for Manteo to overcome. The settlers found themselves that summer in the midst of hostile Indians.

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