Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India

Changing Concepts of Hybridity Across Empires

Adrian Carton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415504294
• eBook ISBN: 9781136325014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'India e dell'Asia meridionale

Focusing on Portuguese, British and French colonial spaces, this book traces changing concepts of mixed-race identity in early colonial India. Starting in the sixteenth century, it discusses how the emergence of race was always shaped by affiliations based on religion, class, national identity, gender and citizenship across empires.

In the context of increasing British power, the book looks at the Anglo-French tensions of the eighteenth century to consider the relationship between modernity and race-making. Arguing that different forms of modernity produced divergent categories of hybridity, it considers the impact of changing political structures on mixed-race communities. With its emphasis on specificity, the book situates current and past debates on the mixed-race experience and the politics of whiteness in broader historical and global contexts.

By contributing to the understanding of race-making as an aspect of colonial governance, the book illuminates some margins of colonial India that are often lost in the shadows of the British regime. It is of interest to academics of world history, postcolonial studies, South Asian imperial history and critical mixed-race studies.

1 Portuguese legacies

In The Lusiad, Luis de Camoens describes how the Greek gods helped the Portuguese to acquire their Indian colonies in a spectacular narrative that was a combination of myth, legend and travel account. Published in Lisbon in 1572 and regarded as one of the great works of Portuguese literature, overseas conquests figure prominently in this literary epic since global exploration and the possession of new lands had become, by this time, intimately intertwined with national self-esteem.¹ The so-called ‘age of discovery’ at the end of the fifteenth century transformed European spatial perspectives with the opening of the Atlantic ocean and new maritime routes to Asia, bringing Europe in closer proximity to formerly distant and lucrative commercial networks.² The establishment of a direct maritime link between Portugal and India saw the permanent settlement of Portuguese soldiers, merchants and clerics with the colonization of Goa in 1510. This age of exploration and colonization inevitably led to the publication of travel mythologies that attempted to convey to a transfixed European public the ‘discovery’ of new lands, peoples and fauna.

In this work, where human differences emerge as a source of fear and curiosity, the subject of interracial relationships between Portuguese men and Indian women is given a vivid and surreal illustration. He tells the story of ‘An Indian Woman married to a Portuguese [who] was delivered at Bardes of a Monster with Two Heads and Teeth, the Ears Like a Monkey, on the forehead an Excrescency of Flesh like a Horn, the Legs sojoyned they looked like one, leaping out of the Midwife’s hands, it seized a Black [sic] and bit out a piece of her flesh’.³ The mixed-race child of such a union is deliberately portrayed by de Camoens as a threatening semi-demonic monster. This fantastic and grotesque image of bestial horror was deployed to give the impression that straying beyond the racial contours of the European body was tantamount to transgressing the biological border of the human species. It is an image anchored in the fear of unknown human differences that were outside of recognized taxonomies.

These semi-demonic images of mixed-race children were more likely to be literary devices designed to tantalize and to entertain a market hungry for tales of the strange and the exotic rather than reflections of moral repugnance. Far-off foreign lands were often depicted as landscapes populated by dragons, monsters and semi-human hybrids where the borders of what it meant to be ‘human’ were being challenged by exploration to the very edges of known human consciousness to discover people who were mythical in their perceived strangeness. As Stephen Greenblatt has famously suggested, gross exaggerations of otherness were an integral part of the traveller’s repertoire during this era of exploration.⁴ Designed to arouse the wonder and awe of finding new peoples and customs, images of monstrosity served to draw a boundary between civilization and internal safety on the one hand and barbarism and external danger on the other.⁵

Of course, there was something deliberately ‘barbaric’ about this graphic description, which served to position de Camoens and the Portuguese colonizers as the bearers of Christian modernity in these new savage, morally rapacious and disordered environments. This mock fantasy of outrage about the horrors of miscegenation, however, stood in contrast to the realities of everyday colonial life. Interracial relationships were not spectacular or debauched but common and necessary. As in other colonial outposts, European men formed sexual relationships with local women as part of the culture of permanent settlement. If anything de Camoens’ literary fantasy also speaks to a symbolic world where gender and sexuality act as metaphors for the act of colonization. Men who conquered the land saw it as their natural right to conquer the flora, fauna and people on it and this was inevitably extended to what was perceived as the natural right to sexual conquest. The imperial canon in numerous global contexts provides us with ample evidence to suggest that the European male encounter with new lands was often made culturally intelligible as a sexual encounter with an indigenous woman. In a patriarchal world supported in principle by church and state, territorial possession and sexual possession were the twin prerogatives of imperial male power.

Interracial relationships were also important for the mission of the Catholic Church and the spiritual aims of colonization. This merging of transcontinental exploration with interracial sexuality was the inevitable political corollary of economic conquest, since marriage with ‘native women’ necessitated the important objective of Catholic conversion. In India, as in Brazil and places such as Mozambique and Angola, interracial unions were sanctioned by the Portuguese state and church in the early period of imperial conquest, where commercial sustainability and social survival relied heavily on forming alliances with local people who could act as intermediaries, interpreters and cultural brokers.⁶ The sexual politics of interracial liaison building in the private sphere were, therefore, as politically important as the military and economic manoeuvring in the public sphere.⁷ Echoing the North American context, where the sites of interracial sexual intimacy were strategically important levers for the consolidation of colonial governance, this ‘middle ground’ of Portuguese India was, to use Richard White’s term, far from savage and monstrous.⁸

The establishment of permanent colonies in India by Portuguese men and the general absence of European women meant that interracial sexual relationships were commonplace. Portuguese women tended to be discouraged from accompanying men to India due to the length of the voyage, the high mortality rates in transit, the subsequent danger of disease and the harshness of the climate after arrival. Few white Portuguese women went out to India compared to men.⁹ There were habitual attempts by the Portuguese authorities to provide assisted passages for female orphans and other single women to address the imbalanced gender ratio in Goa throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the overall numbers have been the subject of much scholarly debate. The research conducted by the historian Germano Correia in the 1940s and 1950s claims that more white women left Portugal for the Indian colonies than has previously been acknowledged, but his population estimates taken from the Goan censuses are generally race blind and they assume that all Portuguese females were originally from Portugal or else that they were the children of white Portuguese women.¹⁰ It is far more likely that the numbers of white Portuguese women coming to India directly from Portugal in this period were never more than a few thousand even with the support of assisted passages.¹¹

Considering that the Portuguese tended to perceive overseas exploration, military conquest and ecclesiastical mission as different elements of a common endeavour, the men who ventured out to India from Portugal were either priests, men in the service of the King or unmarried soldiers. Early European observers in the sixteenth century, such as the Dutch traveller Jan Huygen van Linschoten, often commented on the patriarchal structure of colonial Goa and confirmed the negligible numbers of white women in the Portuguese settlements.¹² Historians Michael Pearson and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have emphasized that marriages between Portuguese settlers and Indian women were actively promoted as a tool of colonization from the earliest days of the viceroyalty of Goa.¹³ As Michael Pearson notes, the population figures for Goa in 1540 reveal the existence of the mixed-race children of Portuguese men and converted Indian women who were beginning to refashion the cultural and racial fabric of colonial Portuguese society.¹⁴

Marriages between Portuguese men and Indian women were regulated by the Catholic Church within the moral and political frameworks of early modern colonization. Apart from clear advantages for the church, marriage was also a lucrative proposition for incoming male settlers from Portugal. Men who married and settled in Goa, known as casados, were exempt from military duties, their civilian status giving them the freedom to devote their time to family life. Most of the ‘native’ women who entered into unions with the Portuguese in Goa were usually drawn from marginal groups such as widows and bailhadeiras or Nautch-girls, and they were also more likely to have converted to Catholicism as a means of improving their social status. The making of new Catholic subjects was seen to be one of the core objectives of overseas expansion.

As the bearer of European modernity, Christian culture offered converts not only entry to a new world of colonial entitlements, education and quasi-European status but to a new spiritual order where they were transformed into new symbolic bodies that set them apart from their former selves. In the context of early colonial Spanish America, Jorge Cañares Esguerra explains this further. He notes that Catholic conversion did not simply imply the removal and transfer of an indigenous soul from one spiritual universe to another. While the transformation of the soul was at the core of the idea of Christianization, the principle of acculturation was seen to literally transform the body through a process of corporeal modification.¹⁵ While Eguerra argues that the belief in this concept started to wane by the early seventeenth century in Mexico, the idea that Christianization produced modern bodies acted as a powerful symbol of acculturation in Portuguese India where it acted to provide some of the moral legitimacy for interracial marriages.

Due to these reasons, there appears to be no formal social taboo against the idea of interracial marriages in the early sixteenth century. Under the direction of the Portuguese colonial governor, Afonso de Albuquerque, marriages between Portuguese men and Indian women were encouraged for two principal reasons. One was to deter men from entering into casual sexual relationships with ‘native’ women, where the appearance of large numbers of illegitimate Eurasian children was an embarrassment to the church and potential evidence of its lack of moral influence. The other was to actively increase the numbers of Catholic subjects to strengthen the political constituency of the Portuguese presence in an era of intense European competition for the East India trade. While voluntary love matches and genuine unions between Portuguese men and ‘native’ women existed independently of official policy, there were also more coercive methods of supporting this dual strategy. Writing in 1512, Albuquerque himself commented that many interracial marriages in Goa were the products of forced conversions rather than unions of choice or love. ‘I married in Goa an honest woman and good looking to a Joao Cerveira, a good man: the latter died and she married again’, and he adds that ‘another man who is now dead fell in love with this woman, he bribed the friar, and he severed the marriage, and had her placed in the house of a man where the deceased used to do what he liked with her. As that man died, the friar at once married her to another man’.¹⁶ As a commentary on the ways in which ‘native’ women could often be treated as sexual commodities that were exchanged between Portuguese men, his description speaks of their dehumanization and exploitation.

The seventeenth-century historian, Faria y Sousa, concurs with the observation that the encouragement of interracial marriages by Albuquerque did not assume that the European men knew or recognized the women who were to be their wives, even on the wedding night itself. ‘He married some Portugueses to Women of the Country, giving them in Portion, Lands, Houses, or Employment, the better to secure his Colony’, he observes. However, on ‘one Night that some of these Weddings were celebrated, the Brides were so mixt and confounded together among the People, that some of the Bridegrooms went to Bed to those that belonged to others, and next morning, finding the Mistake, they changed them, each taking his own, and all equal as to point of honour. This gave the more occasion to some Gentlemen to ridicule the care of Albuquerque’.¹⁷

The manner in which mixed-race children were categorized in sixteenth and seventeenth century Portuguese India is ambiguous. On the one hand, they are represented in population censuses as Catholic Portuguese subjects and treated as European Christians. On the other hand, they are marked out for special attention due to their physical appearance, as shade or colour emerges to take a classifying role alongside that of religious affiliation but in often inconsistent ways.¹⁸ While there is increasing emphasis on the importance of the body and the significance of colour in corporeal descriptions of Portuguese Eurasians by the late sixteenth century, the deployment of colour symbolism was often meant to convey similarities to Europeans as well as differences from them. The writings of Dutch traveller Jan Huygen van Linschoten confirm that by 1586 the subject of racial mixing was important enough to warrant a separate chapter in his Discours of Voyages. The twenty-ninth chapter of this work, titled ‘Of the Customes of the Portingales, and such as issued from them, called Mestiços, or half-countrimen, as well of Goa, as of all the Oriental Countries’, provides the contemporary reader with a fascinating account of the representation of Eurasians in the late sixteenth-century imagination.

He confirms that ‘the Portingales in India are many of them marryed with the naturall borne women of the countrie’, and adds that ‘the children proceeding of them are called Mestiços, that is half-countrimen’. Unlike orientalist representations of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which emphasize the enduring difference between the European observer and the exotic East, van Linschoten is more concerned with the intrinsic sameness of the mestiços whom he perceives as alluring curiosities. He comments on the ways in which the everyday practices of Eurasians in Goa were so similar to Europeans with his descriptions of the clothes they wore, their prayers before meals, their strict observance of Catholic ritual and descriptions of their houses in the European quarters of the white town. More strikingly, van Linschoten remarks that ‘these Mestiços are commonlie of yellowish colour, not withstanding there are manie women among them who are faire and well-formed’.¹⁹ Portuguese Eurasian women are given special attention for their sexual attractiveness and pleasing demeanour to European men. The adjectives ‘faire’ and ‘well-formed’ infer that Portuguese women are depicted in this text as exotic spectacles, their ‘yellowish colour’ conferring upon them a virtue that was not incompatible with their status as European wives and mothers, and their bodies enter into circulation as sexual commodities for a metropolitan European male audience. The fact that European men perceived the attractiveness of Eurasian women through their fairness meant that they were accorded a cultural status that made them both sexually available and sexually desirable in the cosmology of European notions of beauty. Eurasian women emerge as the acceptable bearers of an aesthetic colonial whiteness, which is strangely similar to that of European women as it is also irreducibly different.

While van Linschoten is struck by the fairness of Eurasian women, the perceptions of mestiços by European travellers to Portuguese India were not consistent. Thirty-three years later, the journals of François Pyrard de Laval, a French traveller to Goa, reveal a different representation based on skin shade, where domicile and colour start to emerge as distinguishing factors. The second part of the 1619 edition to Pyrard’s voyage memoirs, for example, contains a compelling description of the internal hierarchies operating within the white Portuguese community. He notes that ‘there is a great difference of honour between them: because the most esteemed are those who have come from Portugal, who are called Portuguese of Portugal’, but lower down the social scale are ‘those born in India of a Portuguese father and mother, and are called Castiri, that is to say of their caste and stock, the least esteemed are those bred of a Portuguese father or mother and Indians, who are called Metices, that is to say Métifs’.²⁰ It is clear from this description that Portuguese men born and raised in the Indian environment are distinguished from Portuguese men from Portugal. That is to say there emerges a notion of degraded or ‘lapsed’ whiteness where country-born Europeans possessed less cultural capital than those born in Portugal. In this emerging taxonomy of whiteness, mixed-race communities are considered to be the ‘least esteemed’ of the three groups due to the combination of their Indian descent and domicile.

There is a fair amount of contradiction in these accounts, but what they reveal is the indefinite and contingent role of skin colour in relation to other markers of cultural difference. While mestiços were less revered than country-born Europeans, it is al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Portuguese legacies
• 2 Race and reform
• 3 Contested colonialisms
• 4 French complexions
• 5 Race and citizenship
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index