The independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 was the beginning of a chain of events that ultimately brought about the end of the British Empire around the world, an empire on which it was often said, the sun never set. From Britain’s largest imperial possession, the so-called ‘Jewel in the Crown’, the wave of decolonisation that followed across Africa and Asia would eventually reach the smallest, but not least significant outpost of empire, the Crown Colony of Hong Kong in 1997. While the handover was peaceful, the end of the Raj was accompanied by colossal population movements and violence between various religious communities as a result of the decision to partition the subcontinent and its hasty implementation, which was accompanied by the withdrawal of all remaining British troops. In this sudden and precipitous withdrawal the British left behind significant groups of colonial subjects whom they had worked alongside, who had openly or clandestinely supported colonial rule, or who had been co-opted into the civil and military branches of the imperial state. These included soldiers in the Indian Army, Indian members of the elite Indian Civil Service (ICS), mercantile and business interests and several minority communities who had looked to the British for patronage and protection. Among these Anglo-Indians – people of mixed European and Indian descent who had earlier been known as Eurasians and whom had predominantly looked to Britain as their imagined homeland – faced perhaps the greatest challenge of psychological readjustment and reorientation of their lives and identities.

The Speaker

Uther Charlton-Stevens is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and published his first book, Anglo-Indians and Minority Politics in South Asia, with Routledge, UK, in 2018 for the Royal Asiatic Society Books series. His latest book, Anglo-India and the End of Empire was released in September and December 2022 by Hurst Publishers, UK, and Oxford University Press, USA, with the South Asia rights having been acquired by Harper Collins India. Growing up in Hong Kong, he learned to speak Mandarin Chinese whilst studying at ESF schools. A first degree at Mansfield College, Oxford, was followed by a Master of Science at the London School of Economics and doctoral research at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Supervised by Judith Brown and Francis Robinson, Charlton-Stevens doctoral thesis was entitled ‘Decolonising Anglo-Indians’. Born at an army station in Ferozepore (now Firozpur), Punjab, his Anglo-Indian father’s family were actually from Bangalore (now Bengaluru) in South India, but migrated to Britain in the 1950s. Much of the inspiration for Charlton-Stevens’s research comes from the stories he heard in childhood from his grandmother of her service in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India) during the Second World War, her trip to Kandahar in Afghanistan, and her husband’s close relation, Willoughby Patrick Rosemeyer, a telegraph engineer involved in laying the telegraph wire connecting British India with Lhasa in 1922, whose photographs of Tibet are housed in the Pitt Rivers Museum, and whom, rather exceptionally for a ‘mixed-race’ man of colour, was awarded an MBE in 1934.

PROGRAMME

Date: Tuesday, 17 January 2023

Admission: In Person at Café 8 - $150 for members, $200 for guests /non-members

Walk-in guests are welcome depending on availability. 

Cash payment will be collected at the Reception Desk.

Please prepare the exact amount.

Online – Zoom link is free for members of RASHK and sister societies only. 

Non-members are welcome depending on availability.

Registration: Please email membership@royalasiaticsociety.org.hk  and provide your membership number, if applicable, at the time of registration. 

Registration will be closed at 12 noon on the event date.

Zoom links will be sent before or by 1pm on the event date.