A great deal of scholarship has presented versions of the racial and cultural divide between colonizer and colonized. Little was written, however, about Anglo-Indians. As mixed race people of British and Indian heritage, they occupied a unique position during the British Raj in South Asia. After Independence, their presence on the Indian sub-continent disrupted the prevailing meanings of cultural hybridity. Those bred by travel and intercultural contact zones of which much has been written in literary studies was challenged to include the biological mixing of the races, originally encouraged by the eighteen-century Bengal Brahmins such as Warren Hastings but later disavowed as demographic pressures began to build and the growing influence of Victorian theories of race branded mixed-race people as half-caste. Early novels and literary scholarship considered the fate of Anglo-Indians in India as in-between people, doubly ostracized. But beyond the pale of the Raj, Anglo-Indians extended their territory through aggressive immigration to the UK and Australia facing the complex cultural geographies of encounter.
My paper suggests that current fiction from writers who have themselves straddled the cultural divide through migration from India to the West seems to have come to terms quite comfortably with such issues as mutability and miscegenation. In tracing the history of novels about Anglo-Indians in general and in comparing, in particular, G.V. Desani’s literary innovations in All About H. Haterr with David MacMahon’s reversal towards tradition in Vegemite Vindaloo, my paper will propose that Anglo-Indian diasporic settlers in the West are no longer troubled by issues of in-betweenness and non-belonging or the complicity involved in the creation and prevalence of racial stereotyping.