Surviving Through the Socio-Political Negotiations: The Anglo-Indian Community of 21st Century

Paper Abstract: South Asian history is based on exclusion. Recent efforts have been undertaken to associate exclusions and marginality studies in post-modernist parlance. Similarly, the voice of the marginal community has remained suppressed for years and little has been done to bring them to focus. Attention needs to be drawn to communities whose participation, representation and voices are being eliminated and are being pushed towards marginality. One such community is the Anglo-Indian community of Kolkata. Anglo-Indians have been recognised as a minority community by the Indian constitution since the post-independent period. However, the 'Anglo-Indian identity' has been a constant evolvement since the eighteenth century and still continues to be so. Throughout the 70 years of independence, the Anglo-Indian community have created an identity for themselves, and under the current political scenario of India (Rise of aggressive Hinduism), the community have been again thrown into a new set of negotiations for social and political identity through forced discrimination.
The paper argues how minority communities have been drawn to exclusion without their political participation and representation in the Indian constitution and their voice being curbed down. The paper, through historical and ethnographic research, would look into the current socio-political scenario of the Anglo-Indian community and whether the community under the present political regime feels threatened and insecure ? it would further look into the different ways through which the community tries to express their socio-political views in the society despite their marginality.