Travels in Anglo-India.
Anglo-India is the imaginary and actual terrain in which India and Britain have forged and fought over their relationship for the past two hundred years. A mixed race community, the result of licit and illicit liaisons between the lower classes of British India and Indian women, the story of the Anglo-Indians throws a very different light on the Raj experience from that usually told in memoirs or popular historical accounts.
The taint of outcase status still remains even in contemporary India. At the centre of the story is the railway colony at Kharagpur in West Bengal. Designed by the British to be an English village in an Indian landscape, it has become a ghetto where Anglo-Indians protest against the erosion of these two nations' complex and intimate relationship.
Through retelling their stories, Laura Roychowdhury unsettles our received ideas about the fixed boundaries of race, culture and nationality, and Kharagpur becomes a microcosm of untold, secret colonial histories as well as offering a possible way of re-evaluating the notion of identity. But this is also the highly personal story of the author herself, who arrived in India a married British woman, only to fall in love with her Bengali research assistant, whom she has since married.
