Mixed Race Studies

Historicising Whiteness: From the Case of Late Colonial India

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
Volume 2, Number 1 (2006) Whiteness and the Horizons of Race

Satoshi Mizutani

It has been a while since critical race and whiteness studies have disseminated the now-familiar notion that whiteness is not a given but a social construct. The idea, however, is yet to be fully explored, with many untouched areas and methodologies of potential importance. This paper is a humble attempt to make a contribution to the field from the perspective of colonial history. Drawing on a historical case study on British Indian society from the late nineteenth century onwards, it firstly focuses on the oft-neglected social world of white colonials of ‘respectable’ standing, enquiring what defined their whiteness and under what material conditions it was to be acquired. This is to be followed by an examination of how these whites differentiated themselves from, and in turn controlled the lives of, the so-called ‘domiciled’ population, members of which were of white descent, permanently based in India, often impoverished and frequently (if not always) racially mixed. Such a two-level approach to the people of white descent is to reveal that the colonial invention of whiteness depended both on the securing of a ‘bourgeois’ social milieu for middle-class whites and on the vigilant control of the impoverished domiciled. The paper shows the complex ways in which the insidiously unsound nature of such a construction of whiteness repeatedly posed a political challenge to the colonial racial order. The case of colonial India may be taken as a vivid example of how whiteness may come charged with inevitable self contradictions and ambiguities, and with those counter-measures that seek to contain the socio-political unrest resulting there from.

Read the entire article here.

Black Mom + Indian Dad = Search for Identity

Ebony Magazine
2012-12-17

Sharda Sekaran

Sharda Sekaran can’t deny her East Indian roots, but she can’t find them either

It was my senior year of college. I sat at the end of a long oval table in a meeting room in one of the academic buildings. Surrounding me on either side were professors from different departments. Some of them I’d taken classes from, but most I had not. They were interviewing me for a fellowship for which I’d been nominated. It was a very selective process, and only three other students from my school were up for it.

I’m generally okay speaking under pressure in front of a group, but I was absolutely terrified. The professors asked my about my identity—my understanding of who I am and where I came from. I felt paralyzed by fear, and stumbled like a desperate entertainer trying to keep the audience on her side.

I could see the crestfallen face of a religion professor whom I knew wanted to like me. She watched helplessly as I spewed out one badly composed thought after another. I knew what I was saying was complete junk. I tried to distract them with academic buzzwords: “dichotomy,” “paradox,” “equilibrium,” “organic…” Nothing. All I conveyed about my identity was that I had no clue about it.

It was my own fault. The fellowship was based on self-discovery through theme-related travel for a year. The subject was meant to be of personal significance, but maybe I’d taken it too far. My topic was the gaping hole of my family grief—a search for the missing half of my cultural ancestry.

My proposal was to examine my hybrid African-American/Indian identity by studying the impact of Bollywood on the Indian Diaspora (my personal connection being, my father’s from India and my mother is African-American). I’d go to countries with Creole Indian/African mixed populations to observe how popular cinema impacted people’s idea of what makes them “Indian.”

I thought it was a good idea for a project; so did a lot of others. Thus, I found myself at the end of that table of professors. But when the panel asked me questions about Indian culture, basic things that any person with an Indian family should know, I drew blanks.

I might have saved myself by admitting that I had no relationship with my Indian-born father. He abandoned our family when I was a toddler and left me without a dad or any ties to his family. All I inherited was an Indian name and physical features that could belong in South Asia. My family history had ambiguity, but also enough clues about my origins to constantly leave me answering questions and explaining a story that’s sensitive as a wound whenever I’m forced to recount it…

Read the entire article here.

The Mixed Race of India

Sacramento Daily Union
Volume 84, Number 71
1892-11-11
page 4, column 3
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

Eurasia has no boundaries. It lies, a varying social fact, all over India, thick in the great cities, thickest in Calcutta, where the conditions of climate and bread-wining are most suitable; where, moreover, Eurasian charities are most numerous. Wherever Europeans have come aud gone, these people have sprung up in weedy testimony of them—these people who do not go, who have received somewhat in the feeble inheritance of their blood that makes it possible for them to live and die in India. Nothing will ever exterminate Eurasia; it clings to the sun and the soil, and is marvelously propagative within its own borders. There is no remote chance of its ever being reabsorbed by either of its original elements; the prejudices of both Europeans and natives are tar too vigorous to permit of much intermarriage with a jat of people who are neither the one nor the other. Occasionally an up-country planter, predestined to a remote and “jungly” existence, comes down to Calcutta and draws his bride from the upper circles of Eurasia—this not so often now as formerly. Occasionally, too, a young shopman with the red of Scotland fresh in his cheeks is carried off by his landlady’s daughter; while Tommy Atkins fall a comparatively easy prey. The sight of a native with a half-caste wife is much rarer, for there Eurasian as well as native antipathy comes into operation. The whole conscious inclination of Eurasian life, in habits, tastes, religion, and, most of all in ambition, is toward the European and away from the native standards. —Popular Science Monthly.

Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India: Trials of an Interracial Family

Cambridge University Press
November 2011
286 pages
6 b/w illus. 3 maps
228 x 152 mm; 0.51kg
Hardback ISBN: 9781107012615
Adobe eBook ISBN: 9781139181242
Mobipocket eBook: ISBN:9781139184861

Chandra Mallampalli, Associate Professor of History
Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California

How did British rule in India transform persons from lower social classes? Could Indians from such classes rise in the world by marrying Europeans and embracing their religion and customs? This book explores such questions by examining the intriguing story of an interracial family who lived in southern India in the mid-nineteenth century. The family, which consisted of two untouchable brothers, both of whom married Eurasian women, became wealthy as distillers in the local community. When one brother died, a dispute arose between his wife and brother over family assets, which resulted in a landmark court case, Abraham v. Abraham. It is this case which is at the center of this book, and which Chandra Mallampalli uses to examine the lives of those involved and, by extension, of those – 271 witnesses in all – who testified. In its multilayered approach, the book sheds light not only on interracial marriage, class, religious allegiance, and gender, but also on the British encounter with Indian society. It shows that far from being products of a “civilizing mission” who embraced the ways of Englishmen, the Abrahams were ultimately – when faced with the strictures of the colonial legal system – obliged to contend with hierarchy and racial difference.

Features

• A singular court case from the nineteenth century is at the heart of this intriguing book on race and hierarchy in colonial India
• A rich and engaging multi-layered approach which interrogates legal documents and interviews with witnesses to unveil social history of the period
• For students and scholars of colonial India, and legal and social historians

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Remembering family
• 2. Embodying ‘Dora-hood’: the brothers and their business
• 3. A crisis of trust: sedition and the sale of arms in Kurnool
• 4. Letters from Cambridge
• 5. The path to litigation
• 6. Litigating gender and race: Charlotte sues at Bellary
• 7. Francis appeals: the case for continuity
• 8. Choice, identity, and law: the decision of London’s Privy Council.

“Representing” Anglo-Indians: A Genealogical Study

University of Melbourne
1999
350 pages

Glenn D’Cruz, Senior Lecturer
School of Communication and Creative Arts
Deakin University, Australia

Thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of English with Cultural Studies

The ‘mixed-race’ Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) community was born of the European colonisation of India some four hundred years ago. This dissertation examines how historians, writers, colonial administrators, social scientists and immigration officials represented Anglo-Indians between 1850 and 1998. Traditionally, Anglo-Indians have sought to correct perceived distortions or misrepresentations of their community by disputing the accuracy of deprecatory stereotypes produced by ‘prejudicial’ writers. While the need to contest disparaging representations is not in dispute here, the present study finds its own point of departure by questioning the possibility of (re)presenting an undistorted Anglo-Indian identity.

The dissertation functions at three levels. First, it examines the construction of Anglo-Indian stereotypes in various discursive practices, offering a critique of the knowledges and images produced within specific literary and non-literary texts. Second, it retrieves the ‘buried’ texts of the Anglo-Indian community, which have been ‘disqualified’ by official discourses. Third, drawing on postcolonialism and poststructuralism, it mounts a practical argument against mimeticism or image analysis by demonstrating how complex discursive and ideological currents mediate stereotypical representations. More specifically, it enumerates the ‘conditions of possibility’ for the production of Anglo-Indian stereotypes, arguing that such figures are historically variable and internally contradictory. Using Foucault’s genealogical method as a starting point, the dissertation examines (mis)representations of Anglo-Indians as they meet and disperse within an interactive network of power/knowledge relations.

This strategy not only accounts for the emergence of pejorative stereotypes, but encourages the articulation of Anglo-Indian identities in their diversity. This contrasts with the impractical compulsion, articulated by Anglo-Indian image critics, to build a homogeneous community.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Contents
• Acknowledegments
• Introduction
• 1 (Mis)representing Anglo-Indian History
• 2 ‘Pangs of Nature and Taints of Blood’: The Anglo-Indian ‘Stereotype’ in Raj Literature
• 3 Sexual Relations, Colonial Governmentality and Anglo-Indian Stereotypes
• 4 Imperial Power and Regimes of Truth: Racial Science and Anglo-Indian Stereotypes
• 5 ‘Poor Relations’: Social Science and ‘The Eurasian Problem’
• 6 Ambivalent Stereotypes: Kipling, Rushdie, Chandra and Sealy
• 7 ‘The Good Australians’: Multiculturalism and the Anglo-Indian Diaspora
• 8 Conclusion: ‘Bringing it All Back Home’
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Being Anglo-Indian: Practices and Stories from Calcutta

Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
2005
263 pages

Robyn Andrews, Lecturer, Social Anthropology Programme
Massey University

A thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology at Massey University

This thesis is an ethnography of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta. All ethnographies are accounts arising out of the experience of a particular kind of encounter between the people being written about and the person doing the writing. This thesis, amongst other things, reflects my changing views of how that experience should be recounted. I begin by outlining briefly who Anglo-Indians are, a topic which in itself alerts one to complexities of trying to get an ethnographic grip on a shifting subject. I then look at some crucial elements that are necessary for an “understanding” of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta: the work that has already been done in relation to Anglo-Indians, the urban context of the lives of my research participants and I discuss the methodological issues that I had to deal with in constructing this account.

In the second part of my thesis I explore some crucial elements of the lives of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta: the place of Christianity in their lives, education not just as an aspect of socialisation but as part of their very being and, finally, the public rituals that now give them another way of giving expression to new forms of Anglo-Indian becoming.

In all of my work I was driven by a desire to keep close to the experience of the people themselves and I have tried to write a “peopled” ethnography. This ambition is most fully realised in the final part of my thesis where I recount the lives of three key participants.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Representations of colonial intimacy in Anglo-Indian narratives

Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
2009
272 pages

Nandini Sengupta

This dissertation examines nineteenth-century manifestations of colonial intimacy in a range of texts produced by Anglo-Indians, capturing their colonial experience from the 1830s to the 1880s. Through these texts, I examine the ideological implications of interracial intimacy in a range of relationships that were established between the Indians and British in the ‘contact zone.’ The first two chapters examine the letters of Emily Eden and Fanny Parks to probe British women’s experience of India. I argue that the women forge an alternative space of intimacy that defies the notion that Anglo-Indian women remained on the periphery of Indian space as female ethnographers using their pen and pencil to engage in the act of colonial appropriation. Instead, such intimacies and attachments produce an alternative knowledge about India that expand our understanding of colonial interactions. In the third chapter, I read Philip Taylor’s novel Seeta (1872), which recuperates the events of the Sepoy Uprising of 1857. Taylor composes a story of interracial love and marriage between an English administrator and a Hindu widow. Probing the manifestations and ideological import of the sexual and emotional affinities for colonial relations in the moment of the Uprising, I argue that the interracial intimacy in the novel ultimately translates itself into an exercise of punishing the recalcitrant Indian man by embracing the compliant, loyal Indian woman. The final chapter continues the examination of interracial heterosexual intimacy through a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories contained in the volume Plain Tales from the Hills. In particular, I probe his delineations of interracial heterosexual intimacy between various officers of empire and socially marginalized Indian women belonging to different ethnic communities of India to construct an argument about the operations of class in colonial India.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Illustrative Material
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The British Woman Traveler in India: Diplomatic Intimacy and Hetero-Social Bonding in Emily Eden’s Up the Country
• Chapter Two: The British Woman Traveler in India: Cultural Intimacy and Interracial Kinship in Fanny Parks’s Wanderings of a Pilgrim In Search of the Picturesque
• Chapter Three: Interracial Love, Marriage and Female Friendship in Philip Meadows Taylor’s Seeta
• Chapter Four: “Behind the Wooden Gate”: Rudyard’s Kipling’s Stories of Love and Betrayal
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Curriculum Vita
• List of Illustrative Material
  • Page 50: Map of India in 1836
  • Page 89: Frontispiece from Fanny Parks’s Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque
• Acknowledgements

A diverged family converges at Harvard Law

Havard Law School News
2012-10-10

Audrey Kunycky

A chance encounter, a discovery of kin on opposite sides of the world

It wasn’t inevitable that Harvard Law School graduate students Erum Khalid Sattar and Rebecca Zaman would meet so soon, or even at all. Sattar has been at the law school for three years, pursuing a doctorate in juridical science (S.J.D.); Zaman arrived in August to begin a year of study for a master’s in law (LL.M.). Sattar is from Pakistan, and studied law in London; Zaman grew up, earned her law degree and completed a judicial clerkship in Australia. Then again, they’re about the same height, with the same dark brown hair, and that might not be just a coincidence.

In August, a few days into LL.M. Orientation, the two women shook hands and said hello at a Graduate Program reception. “If we hadn’t been wearing nametags, what happened next might never have happened,” says Zaman. Sattar’s large, expressive eyes are glittering, but she wants Zaman to tell the story, because she tells it better.

My surname is Zaman, and it’s a very unusual surname for a white-appearing Australian to have,” explains Zaman. “So when they saw my nametag, a lot of the Indians, Pakistanis and Middle Easterners asked how I could have this name. When I met Erum, it was very similar.  So I said, ‘Oh! My father’s father is a Muslim Indian from Hyderabad.’ And Erum said, ‘Oh, what a coincidence. My family was from Hyderabad, before they moved to Karachi after the partition.’ And she laughed, and said, ‘Maybe we’re related.’ We both laughed, and I said, ‘Maybe. It’s a strange story.’”…

Read the entire article here.

Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels

History of Intellectual Culture
Volume 4, Number 1 (2004)
ISSN 1492-7810

Hsu-Ming Teo, Senior Lecturer and Head of Modern History
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

This article examines Anglo-Indian romance novels written by British women during the period of the Raj. It argues that these love stories were symptomatic of British fantasies of colonial India and served as a forum to explore interracial relations as well as experimenting with the modern femininity of the New Woman. With the achievement of Indian independence in 1947, British interest in India as a locus for romance rapidly declined, thus demonstrating that these novels were never concerned with India but with British lives and British colonialism.

Read the article here in HTML or PDF format.

Cultural versus Social Marginality: The Anglo-Indian Case

Phylon (1960-)
Volume 28, Number 4 (4th Quarter, 1967)
pages 361-375

Noel P. Gist

Human history has been replete with examples of peoples destined to exist on the margin of two or more cultures. One of these marginal peoples is the Anglo-Indian community in India. This community, whose history goes back to the earliest arrivals in India of Europeans, first the Portuguese, later the Dutch and French, and finally the British, represents a racial blending resulting from conventional or unconventional unions between European men and Indian women.

In her history of the Eurasian (Anglo-Indian) group in India, Goodrich argues convincingly that a community consciousness, based upon ethnic similarities, emerged only after the British dealt categorically, not just individually, with persons of mixed European and Indian ancestry. As objects of fluctuating and inconsistent policies of acceptance and rejection, the Anglo-Indians eventually developed a protective psychological armor through a growing sense of community solidarity. By the middle of the eighteenth century they had come to think of themselves as a community apart.

This community identification has persisted to the present, though its strength has varied from one historic period to another, and indeed from one individual to another. For most Anglo-Indians the community provides a psychological and social refuge in a society that has never fully accepted them. Many are proud to be identified with the community and as dedicated members work diligently for the common weal. But there are others who apparently take little pride in being Anglo-Indians and who try to conceal their ethnic identity if it is considered a handicap.

Perhaps the first sociologist to deal conceptually with marginality was Robert E. Park, whose ideas were later elaborated and systematized by Everett Stonequist. In the initial formulation of the theory of…