In Search Of A ‘New Home’: Anglo-Indians In The Darjeeling Hills, 1900-1947

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century, most Anglo-Indian, being a Kolkata based community in Bengal, started to move out of the city in search of new employment opportunities. Some of their destinations were the newly established tea gardens of Darjeeling hills and Assam. Mostly they were appointed as managers in the tea estates. The Anglo-Indian community, not being accepted by both the British or Indian society, started to reimagine their identity while settling down in the hills. However, education of their children was turned into a severe problem for them. Some of the Christian missions came forward and opened boarding schools cum ‘home’ for the Anglo-Indian children in the Darjeeling hills. Later these mission schools also became a shelter for the orphan Anglo-Indian children of Kolkata and played an important role in their identity formation. The paper highlights whether these initiatives could able to give a new future to the Anglo-Indian community and if the Anglo-Indian community could able to accept Darjeeling Hills as their ‘new home’. Further, the paper also discusses other nuances, like how did the indigenous people of the hills and the British Raj look at this identity formation, and what kind of new developments started in the hills with the coming of the Anglo-Indians. The paper is based on the archival sources, like newspapers, education, finance and home department report, missionary documents and memoirs.