The Anglo-Indian community has been most visible in the schools and offices of Calcutta. During the colonial age, viewed by the colonizers either as bulwarks of the colonial elites, or as lurking threats to their power, they were subject to a ‘frequently shifting set of criteria that allowed them privilege at certain historical moments and pointedly excluded them at others’. Scholars have argued that, with the growth of ‘scientific racism’ in nineteenth century Europe, a transformation occurred in the relationships between the British rulers and the Anglo-Indians – ‘the “hybrid” became a trope for moral failure and degeneration, and led to the increasingly negative evaluation and status abasement of Anglo-Indians by British elites in India’. The introduction of technologically modern areas of occupation like the railways and telegraph in India gave the Anglo-Indians a specific social niche of their own. Many of them found jobs in these industries which were entirely new and therefore, unlike almost all other professions practised in India, had no caste identified with it. Their awareness ‘of themselves as distinct from the surrounding Indian population, with a common language (English) and a common religion (Christianity), as well as other shared cultural attributes’ encouraged them to keep themselves to the central parts of the city, where the schools and churches were. In recent years, though, the rising real estate prices have compelled them to move to outlying suburbs of the city, like the Andul and Metiabruz areas.