Inside Chennai’s Anglo-Indian heart: The people keeping a vanishing heritage alive

For more than a century now, the row villas of Veteran Lines in Pallavaram — named for the European Artillery Veterans, its first residents — have held out against time and tide. Airplanes swoop low over its gabled eaves as they head for the airport. Sunlight pours in through the slatted windows and a tabby cat sleeps on the scalloped compound wall. 

Some villas still have flagstone floors, cavernous rooms and resident reptiles that have made themselves comfortable in the wood pile behind the cook house. But it is the enduring friendships and languid evenings of music from the old Murphy radio, dance and Christmas toasts that still echo through the verandas as I meet Harry Maclure, Richard O’ Connor and the Peppins, Bryan and Helena, outside their house Erehwon.

A legacy of European colonialism in India, the term Anglo-Indian has changed to now denote people of mixed lineage dating back to a time when European powers moved from commerce to conquest and intermarried with the natives. “A people,” as the Anglo-Indian novelist Allan Sealy wrote, “who spoke their father’s tongue and ate their mother’s salt”.

The community that thrived under the British was left in a twilight zone when they exited in 1947. Over the past 79 years, Anglo-Indians have migrated in droves, mostly to Commonwealth countries, and it is their memory that Harry and Richard have worked to keep alive for two decades now.

“I was raised in Trichnopoly; studied at St John’s Vestry where my mother was a teacher,” says Bryan, who retired as head, department of English Literature, New College, in a clipped accent. “My entire world was Anglo-Indian, I knew little beyond it till I joined college. It drove me to study the Anglo-Indian identity in recent English fiction, question the insider-outsider complex and the stereotyping of the community,” says Bryan, who has written many books, the most recent Forget was released in October, about the world he grew up in. “Today, the community is more Indian than Anglo,” he says, adding that Anglo-Indians have managed to surmount the challenge of the local language with their unique dialect. “Tamil Nadu still boasts the largest number of Anglo-Indians in the country. But, of course, there is a sense of loss about what was once dear and familiar.”

Bryan keeps that world alive through the house he and Helena, a retired Superintendent of Customs and Central Excise, live in. “When we bought this house, there was a sizeable number of Anglo-Indians here. We often went fishing in the rivulet close by,” he says. The shouts of ‘C’mon boy! as generations of young Anglo-Indians dribbled their way to hockey glory have somewhat faded, but events like the recent Monsoon Ball and the upcoming Christmas Ball featuring dances and a festive spread of mutton ball curry and devil’s chutney feels like an excursion back in time.

It is this old-world nostalgia that Harry Maclure, writer-director, founder, Anglo-Ink Books (India’s first Anglo-Indian publishing company) and editor of the magazine Anglos In the Wind that examines issues of the diaspora, brings to light in his work. Harry’s own story has been one of struggle, spurred by the robust optimism that is a hallmark of his community. “My great great-grandfather came from Aberdeen and worked in the Nilgiris tea gardens. He married an Indian lady about 140 years ago and we descended from that stock, growing up in Trichy Junction where my father Richard was a railway engine driver. He moved up the ranks; from cleaner to driver of a steam locomotive that travelled from Trichy to Tanjore, Manamadurai, Manapparai, and so on. I’m the youngest of a large family that moved to Madras when he retired, bidding a fond farewell to the wonderful camaraderie and the 128-year-old Railway Institute where the Christmas Ball was a hoary tradition.”

Harry grew up wanting to study English Literature and become a journalist, but started off as a waiter at the Taj Coromandel at 18. After four years, he traded the steward’s salver for a barman’s strainer and worked in the Maldives before heading back to Madras. His love for books lingered and Harry opened Book Nook, a lending library, with his friend sourcing books from Moore Market. But soon, wanderlust led him to the Gulf and by the late 1980s Harry found himself a job in Kuwait. When the Iraqi invasion triggered the Gulf War, Harry became a penniless refugee in a camp arriving back in India with just his passport, jeans and a pair of slippers. “We touched down in Bombay and the Maharashtra Government gave us 500 rupees to find our way home. It’s a chapter of my life that I don’t think of often but had I not come back I would’ve never found my calling. I started drawing cartoons for a Tamil magazine and it’s around this time that I found Jillian, my wife and childhood friend. It was her uncle, Leslie D’Souza, who asked me ‘why don’t you do something for our community? Maybe, a magazine?’ And for three years, he gave me seed money.” 

AITW, a quarterly magazine, was first published in 1998 (it turned digital post-Covid) and Anglo-Ink Books in 2005. “We used to print around 16,000 copies but now it’s around 700, thanks to its online version. The publication travels across the world, covering Anglo-Indian history and culture, fiction, poetry, interviews, trivia…,” says Harry. 

Many of AITW’s readers inhabit a world where the Anglo element is fading at home, while the Indian element is fading abroad. “Hence, there is a quest to understand and trace one’s ancestry,” says Harry, adding that many from the diaspora want to embark on this journey. 

In this, Harry found a twin soul in Richard O’Connor, Assistant Commissioner, Customs. “I have a job, and then I have my passion,” says Richard, whose great-grandfather, an Irishman, made landfall in India nearly 110 years ago. “I also come from an Anglo-Portuguese background, from a family with a long history of service in the Government, both colonial and Indian. I’m a Madras boy — grew up in the Anglo-Indian haunts of Royapettah and Vepery and now live in St Thomas Mount, which once had a thriving Anglo-Indian community… the air was redolent with the aroma of cutlets and jazz.”

As the schools and homes in the neighbourhood, once flooded with members of the community emptied out, Richard and Harry decided to document the last of Chennai’s Anglo-Indians in their own localities. With Richard as the primary storyteller the series of documentaries moved from Santhome, Royapuram, Vepery, St Thomas Mount, Pallavaram, Perambur, Pudupet, Madhavaram, and more, interviewing a cross-section of people, still living a life of gentility fraying at the edges. The YouTube series that was filmed first in 2016, with encouragement from city chroniclers S Muthiah, Sriram V and Vincent D’Souza is ongoing and Richard hopes to make a coffee table book of it.

“I didn’t spare a thought on my identity for the first 40 years of life because I was still busy trying to get myself on my feet. At work I found myself to be an oddball and I wondered where I stood; I realised how wonderful and generous our culture was. And then I happened to meet Harry. We ended up doing an AITW special on hockey. And that was an opus — the Anglo-Indian was to hockey what the Brazilian is to football. And from there it went on to helping people find lost graves and travelling to McCluskieganj that has its own place in our history. We still hope to do a round-up of the railway colonies, like Jolarpet, which were once peopled by us; there is an urgency as time is running out. Some places like Kolar or Whitefield could’ve been preserved,” says Richard, wistfully.

Not everything is about looking back though. With an active All India Anglo-Indian Association that celebrates its centenary in 2026 and the upcoming world reunion in Kochi, Harry and Richard agree that “the youngsters are doing a great job at preserving the Anglo-Indian way of life. We are not keen on a permanent memorial but maybe a digital space that people interested in us can look up” with Bryan, adding that the Derozio Library in Kolkata does a good job of it. 

Still talking, we walk under the trees creaking with the weight of history to the house of Melanie D’Nazareth where Harry and Richard pose for photos, in a setting much like the sepia pictures at the Peppin’s house. The place of the Anglo-Indian in the Indian cultural world may have changed but the old, weathered house remains a tenderly written love letter to the numerous lives they have touched.