Editorial

Abstract

This issue opens the twenty-second volume of the journal in the twenty-sixth year since its founding. It is fitting that this issue opens with an article addressing one of the more momentous matters in quite a few years to face the Anglo-Indians living in India: the amendment to the Constitution of India removing the guaranteed representation of the community through nominated seats in the Lok Sabha as well as the legislative assemblies of states where a significant proportion of Anglo-Indians resided. Vishwajeet Deshmukh and Ketayun Mistry of the National Law University explore the legal background of Anglo-Indian nominated seats, the arguments for the Government’s revocation of the nominated seats, as well some of the ways in which the Government and the Anglo-Indian community could arrive at a possible alternative to ensure a representative voice of the Community is heard.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of literary production about or authored by Anglo-Indians, in the form of novels, short stories, and various prose and poetic forms of life-writing. Upamanyu Sengupta uses a recent autobiography by Trevor Taylor entitled The Deaf of Elvis and the Last of the Anglo-Indians: An Autobiography(2021) as a window into the identity of Anglo-Indians in diaspora, as well as the particular and unique trajectory of the life of the author himself. In his essay, Sengupta asks: To what degree can or should first-person autobiographical accounts, such as this one, be taken to portray a whole community or, perhaps, a generational and geographic subset of it? For whom and for what purpose is life-writing undertaken in the first place?

Penelope Mendonça and her father, Anthony Mendonça, together offer us a review of a recent collected volume, Anglo-Indian Identity: Past and Present, in India and the Diaspora (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). They approached the book creatively, reading it together and conversing about each of the chapters, which address diverse Anglo-Indian identities over time and space, in light of their own reflection on the anchors of their own self-understandings.