Railway Clubs were the most racially integrated meeting places in India. While, to quote Rudyard Kipling, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, there was one group where they did meet, the largely unfortunate Anglo-Indians. In the early East India Company days many European men were entranced by the Moghul and Hindu civilizations and, being single, took Indian wives, frequently beautiful widows who otherwise would have been left to wither on the vine. Their offspring, inevitably wealthy and often beautiful, were brought up without stigma; rather the opposite. By the time of Twain’s visit the more interesting, freethinking Europeans had been replaced by stuffier, less imaginative men—and their wives—and affairs between well-born Europeans and Indians were taboo. An Anglo-Indian at the Railway Club that night was more likely to have been the result of a liaison between a British squaddy and an Indian prostitute—and as a result not readily acceptable to either side. Nevertheless they were fiercely racist against the “wog” natives themselves and equally obsequious to the whites. They would only speak English, made the Indian railways their cause and were invaluable as drivers, engineers and junior managers; every major terminus and junction had its “railway colony” of Anglo-Indians. What few privileges their tint gave the twilight Eurasians were lost at Independence and most have now emigrated throughout the Commonwealth—anecdotally at least, largely to Canada.
(The Indian Equator)