in history from the University of Oxford. Uther spent his childhood in colonial Hong Kong. Born in Ferozepore, his Anglo-Indian father grew up in Bangalore before migrating to England.
Charlton-Stevens applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Anglo-India and the End of Empire, and reported the following:
From page 99:Follow Uther Charlton-Stevens on Twitter.Anglo-Indians had no doubt expected that the confirmation of their eligibility to serve in the British Army would continue, and that, failing this, their earmarked jobs on the railways would be awaiting their return. Instead, the AIF [Anglo-Indian Force] was permanently disbanded. No alternative routes for continued service in the British Army or British Indian Army were substituted; nor were serious efforts made to assist Anglo-Indian veterans resuming civil or railway employment. It is not a stretch to imagine Anglo-Indians feeling betrayed by the lack of recompense or lasting recognition for ‘the acknowledged good services rendered by Anglo-Indian units in the [First World] War’.In terms of briskly telling the reader what the book is about, it is remarkable how well the Page 99 Test works for Anglo-India. Every discussion of Anglo-Indians, past and present, has always had to begin with an explanation that they are a community of mixed European and Indian descent originating from the centuries long European and British imperial and trading presence in the Subcontinent. By page 99 the reader would of course have already encountered this almost compulsory preamble, so it is unsurprising that it is not restated here. However, it is made clear that Anglo-Indians are perceived as being ‘racially mixed’ and we get an excellent sense of their middling position in the social and racial pecking order of the Raj. That we learn this through the prism of nursing is particularly apposite, because nursing was the most common profession for Anglo-Indian women and the book’s most noteworthy female character, after Merle Oberon (on the cover), was Irene Green, an Anglo-Indian nurse who served in Bombay as well as the Raj’s North-West Frontier Province. Page 99 provides a good sense of the discrimination Green would have faced from British nursing sisters, but fails to get to another crucial theme of the book – racial ‘passing’ – which helped individuals like Green and Oberon to transgress the socioracial hierarchy of colonial British society.
[Henry] Gidney would later recall the plight of the large cohort of ‘Anglo-Indian nurses… [who had] freely enlisted in the British Army… The moment the War was over the door was closed and they were demobbed. To-day the rules prevent an Anglo-Indian nurse being employed by the British Army.’ Paul Scott’s fiction describes how ‘“the rulers of the roost” in civilian hospitals were Queen Alexandra nurses sent from Britain: “You should see the airs some of the QAs give themselves. At home they’d simply be ordinary ward nurses… Here they rank as sisters… [and] are[n’t] supposed to do anything menial. That’s all left to the poor little Anglo-Indian girls.”’
Generally, as [Elizabeth] Buettner highlights, colonial British women were less likely to work than their metropolitan counterparts. While many careers deemed suitable ‘for unmarried middle-class women had slowly shed some of… [their] stigma in Britain’, such as ‘teaching, nursing, working in… department stores, and as typists and receptionists’, in India these were associated with ‘the racially mixed’. Nursing was one of the few careers that British women, generally from less ‘pukka’ families, pursued in India during peacetime. By 1923 Gidney was arguing ‘that the recruitment of hospital nurses from England for British Station Hospitals is unnecessary, and… should be stopped on the ground that sufficient nurses’ could be obtained in India.
The leadership of Henry Gidney is also spotlighted, and despite the importance of his successor, Frank Anthony, Gidney’s story from the 1920s until his death in 1942 is at the core of the political history told by the book. It is the combination of the social and the political and the interaction between the two which is indispensable to understanding the Anglo-Indian dilemma during the long-drawn-out British retreat from empire. Chronologically, the book’s title is most likely to evoke the aftermath of the Second World War and the tumultuous events that brought on the blood-stained partition of India alongside independence in 1947 and subsequent wrangling over what should be in the Indian Constitution. However, page 99 throws us down in 1918-1923, the immediate period following the First World War, the importance of which tends to be underplayed in recent histories, but which was really the crucible of so many strains of Indian politics, as much for the emergence of a new kind of anticolonial nationalist movement as for the growth of communal politics for Anglo-Indians and other minority communities.
--Marshal Zeringue
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