Editorial

Abstract

We welcome you to the pages of the first of two general issues of the Journal for this calendar year. This issue contains three articles and a research report. The articles span different historical moments, subcultures of Anglo-Indian lived experiences, and apply a variety of disciplines in their analysis. They feature two different geographic and cultural spaces, urban Hyderabad and semi-rural Odisha. The final piece is a research report for a project that attempted to span the entire Community, in India and the diaspora, in all its demographic diversity.

Smita Joseph, Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics at the English and foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, writes about her research on the patterns of Anglo-Indian name-giving to their children in the Hyderabad area. Her analysis reveals patterns by gender and era (1950s, 1980s, and the 2000s) by which she argues that Anglo-Indian naming is a crucial site of marking ethnic identity and differentiation from other Christian ethnicities in the region.

The next two articles are set in Odisha and written by local residents, Anglo-Indian Assistant Professor Lyndon Thomas, and Associate Professor Sth Sthitaprajna, both at Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (SOA), Deemed-to-be University, Bhubaneswar. Their articles constitute a welcome break in the relative silence in scholarship on the Community in Odisha. Their first article is an entertaining account and analysis of a phenomenon that became a tradition in the Kurda Road community from 1979 to the early 1990s, whereby public ‘posters’ were anonymously created and posted in the archway outside the local Catholic church. The posters served as a means of giving quite personal social commentary on individuals or organisations. Their article describes a number of the most notable posters, discusses the social impacts, and traces the history of the first and second ‘Poster Man’.

Thomas and Sthitaprajna’s second article contends with stereotyping of Anglo-Indians in Odisha. They engaging the work of Glenn D’Cruz, Dorothy McMenamin and Megan Mills on stereotypes, to discuss how Anglo-Indian lived experiences in Odisha measure up. Drawing on their ethnographic research and Thomas’s own experience, they argue that the population in Odisha present a contrast to these stereotypes.

The final piece is a report on a survey carried out by us, Brent Howitt Otto and Robyn Andrews (bios below), from late 2012 to early 2013. The survey was part of a larger Anglo-Indian Religion Research project, which we undertook to better, and more systematically, understand the role of religion in lives of Anglo-Indians both in India and in the diaspora. The report outlines the methods we used, as well as the results obtained, some of which were unexpected, such as the percentage of Christians who were Catholics and how this varied depending on whether or not respondents resided in India or the diaspora.  This report was made available on the research project’s dedicated website for a limited time following the survey’s conclusion, but it has not until now been published permanently.

We trust you will appreciate these varied articles, as well as the research that went into them. As always, we encourage our readers to promote the journal among their scholarly colleagues and friends.