Children of Colonialism

Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World

Lionel Caplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781859735312
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000180916
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Among the legacies of the colonial encounter are any number of contemporary 'mixed-race' populations, descendants of the offspring of sexual unions involving European men (colonial officials, traders, etc.) and local women. These groups invite serious scholarly attention because they not only challenge notions of a rigid divide between colonizer and colonized, but beg a host of questions about continuities and transformations in the postcolonial world. This book concerns one such group, the Eurasians of India, or Anglo-Indians as they came to be designated. Caplan presents an historicized ethnography of their contemporary lives as these relate both to the colonial past and to conditions in the present. In particular, he forcefully shows that features which theorists associate with the postcolonial present — blurred boundaries, multiple identities, creolized cultures — have been part of the colonial past as well. Presenting a powerful argument against theoretically essentialized notions of culture, hybridity and postcoloniality, this book is a much-needed contribution to recent debates in cultural studies, literary theory, anthropology, sociology as well as historical studies of colonialism, 'mixed-race' populations and cosmopolitan identities.

1 Introduction

I’ll tell you the facts. The Anglo-Indians were the maharajahs in India. Indians used to call us dorai and missi-ama, terms of respect. Now, it’s changed. What they are telling us is that when the British were here you all came under their banner, they looked after you. But the British left us in the lurch, so we are not able to lead the lives we led then, when we were well-off. That time, everything was for the Anglo-Indians. Now we are destitute.

The community is changing. There is a definite upgrading from the Tommy [colonial] days to now. The Tommy days were the negative days of the AngloIndian community, not the golden days.

Of late, scholars in a range of social science and humanistic disciplines have been pondering the attributes of postcoloniality. This book engages with these debates by considering the predicament of ‘hybrid’, ‘metis’ or ‘mestizo’ populations, enduring legacies of the colonial encounter which fostered sexual relations between European men and local women. It considers the case of the Eurasians of India, or Anglo-Indians as they came to be designated, who are descendants of such unions, and still identified as a mixed-race and culturally composite community. Focusing on that part of the population resident in the south Indian city of Madras (recently renamed Chennai), it offers an historicized ethnography of their contemporary lives as these relate both to the colonial past and to conditions in the postcolonial present.

Colonial Sex and the Creation of a Mixed-race Population

Numerous British officers, soldiers and civilians in the service of the East India Company and later the Government of India, as well as many other men who, in the course of the colonial period, came to trade or seek employment in various subordinate sectors of the economy, established domestic relationships with Indian women. Understandably, Anglo-Indian writers have tended to stress the propriety and legitimacy of the unions: some have credited the East India Company’s ‘deliberate policy of avowedly encouraging inter-marriages’ between their employees and local females, with ‘officially [bringing] the Anglo-Indian community into existence’ (Anthony 1969: 12). Others have suggested that Christian missionaries were instrumental in promoting matrimonial links. Bower (1939: 108) writes:

Well over a century ago a paternal European ancestor of mine married a mission girl, who was a daughter of this land, and so, of almost all my community in the past, and of me it cannot be said that we are ‘sprung unwarranted by priest or book or marriage line’.

While many undoubtedly did marry, the majority are reckoned by most Western historians to have entered less formal unions, especially during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is sometimes attributed to the fact that, for much of this period, European women were denied access to the colonies and that most of these men could not in any case afford to marry the European women who did manage to reach the subcontinent (Ghosh 1970: 68-70; Stoler 1989: 139). Moreover, married men were often excluded from recruitment to positions in colonial administration and business, further contributing to the European gender imbalance and encouraging liaisons with local women (Ibid.)

Whatever the reasons, in India, as in many areas of the colonial world where European men found themselves sexually isolated, the local mistress became a ‘recognised institution’ (Dodwell 1926: 206-9; see also Wilkinson 1976: 118). Many of these relationships would probably be best described as ‘concubinage’, although it has to be said that such a term provides a Euro-American gloss on a domestic association which may very well have been regarded as in most senses legitimate by local women themselves (see MacMillan 1988:122). Even then, as Staler points out, the term - normally understood in the West as cohabitation - suggests a greater degree of autonomy than most such women really enjoyed (1991: 59). It inadequately conveys the status and power differential between the individuals concerned.

Hyam has drawn attention to the importance of male sexuality in British imperial endeavours (1986; 1990), indeed, so much so that he has been accused of offering a ‘sexual theory of British imperialism’ (Berger 1988: 83). But even while stressing the ‘sexual opportunities’ available to European males in the colonies, including India, Hyam is seen to ignore the unequal power relations obtaining between the men seeking such opportunities and the women providing them (Berger 1988: 84; see also Staler 1995: 175).¹

In Madras, which forms the locus of the present study, many of these relationships were quite evidently exploitative. Wheeler notes that in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, during the governorship of Joseph Collet at Fort St George (1717-1720), ‘the English at Madras possessed slaves in considerable numbers. Many kept slave girls...’ (1878: 118— 19), and Major Bevan, a contemporary observer of early nineteenthcentury Madras, remarked that ‘mistresses ... are often sold to their masters by needy relatives’ (1839: 18-19). As elsewhere in India, the partnership frequently remained on a ‘master-servant basis’ (Hawes 1996: 8). Others were housekeepers, and one contemporary witness reports that in some regiments British soldiers were encouraged to form liaisons with local women who lived with and ‘act[ed] as servants to the men’ (Mrs Sherwood, quoted in Dyson 1978: 89). In addition, native women attached to military personnel who were transferred back home were usually assigned to the soldiers belonging to regiments which came out as replacements (Hawes 1996: 14). Many of these women were therefore drawn into such relationships more out of necessity than choice, and the tie remained an unequal one.

But while the link between empire and sexuality continues to engage students of colonialism, what needs to be appreciated is that these relationships, whether formal or informal, consensual or exploitative, resulted in the birth of children, and in the emergence of a hybrid or métis population.² As Nabar points out, Anglo-Indians ‘concretised’ the encounter between British and Indian; they were, after all, its inevitable ‘end-product’ (1994: 12). Moreover, this mixed-race group in time forgot the character of the original unions - or suppressed their memory - as it evolved and asserted an inclusive identity of its own.

According to Williamson, the great majority of women ‘domicilated’ by European men in India were either ‘Musulmans’ or ‘half-casts [of] Portugueze extraction’ (1810: 413). The latter would almost certainly have been the case in Madras, where there was a large community of Portuguese (see below). In a letter written from ‘Pondamalee’ near Madras, a British captain in the 73rd Regiment of Highlanders reported, with some pique, that ‘Portuguese wenches’ are among the women whom European officers and civilians ‘take much delight in supporting as kept mistresses’ (Munro 1789: 51).³ In time, men belonging to other European nationalities (e.g. Armenian, Dutch, French, Flemish, Prussian, Spanish and Italian) also found their way to south India in a variety of capacities so that, according to the Census of 1881 (p.54), by the latter part of the nineteenth century, ‘Europeans of other than British nationality’ formed just over ten per cent of the total European population of the Madras Presidency. Like the Portuguese and British, they established relations with local women, or, more commonly as time passed, with the descendants of previous Euro-Indian unions.

The Colonial Science of Racial Hybrids

The métis population which these unions produced was, on the whole, accepted as part of an early official understanding that they would support the activities of the English (Ballhatchet 1980: 96-7). However, the accommodations which had characterized relations between British personnel and the Anglo-Indian population they had helped to create began to change perceptibly towards the end of the eighteenth century, due in no small measure to the elaboration of race theory in Europe and its increasing ‘scientificization’ during the following century (see Young 1995), in the course of which race came largely to organize the ‘grammar of difference’ (Stoler 1995: 41). This created a heightened awareness within European ruling circles of racial distinctions between themselves and their colonial subjects. Much theorizing centred on the dangers of miscegenation and the infertility, degradation or moral weakness of racial hybrids. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century Dr Robert Knox, one of the pioneers of race theory, argued that human hybrids were not viable, so that ‘separation [between the races] and purity [of race] were the sole alternative to extinction’ (Biddiss 1976: 248). When it became evident that the miscegenated offspring of inter-racial unions were not only viable but fecund, rhetorics focused mainly on their character defects. Those who violated established racial categories produced offspring who were seen as flawed, tainted and degenerate (Stoler 1995: 50), a ‘raceless chaos’ (Young 1995: 25).

These ideas which had evolved in Europe could not help but influence attitudes to and policies toward inter-racial sex and its mestizo products in the colonies. In south Asia, certainly, miscegenation aroused increasing hostility and opposition within the governing classes, and hybrid populations came to be regarded as a danger to the European community. McGilvray reports a ‘prevailing repugnance toward racial or cultural hybridization in nineteenth century Ceylon, which led to vehement abuse against Portuguese Burghers’ (1982: 245; see also Roberts et al. 1989: 12, 26). Boxer, too, finds that the correspondence of successive viceroys of Goa was ‘full of complaints against the real or alleged physical and moral inferiority of mesticos’ (1963: 71). Similar attitudes were prevalent in British India (see Bayly 1995; Robb 1995). Anglo-Indians came to be regarded not only as inferior, but as combining the worst qualities of both founding races (see Spear 1932: 61; Younger 1987:114). Sir Richard Burton’s comment that ‘[n]either British nor Portuguese India ever produced a half-caste at all deserving of being ranked in the typical order of man’ was but an extreme expression of a general view (quoted in Dyson 1978: 298; Naidis 1963; 417).

Young suggests that the European fear of miscegenation could be related to the notion that without a clear hierarchy of races, ‘civilization would, in a literal as well as a technical sense, collapse’ (1995: 95). In the latter part of the nineteenth century, therefore, ‘the onus of British colonial policy came to be focussed on an effort to prevent mixing between the British and their subject peoples’ (Ibid.: 164). In the Indian context, this official discouragement extended to relations with AngloIndians. Thus, inter-racial unions and their miscegenated offspring surfaced regularly, if not very prominently, in the official consciousness. Moreover, these attitudes were reflected in English-language fiction about India, much of it written by colonial Europeans (see D’Cruz 1999; Greenberger 1969; Naik 1994; Narayanan 1986). Like so many other metis populations in the colonies, Anglo-Indians were deemed a ‘dangerous conduit of moral contamination and political subversion’ (Cooper and Stoler 1997: 24).⁴

But if colonialism ‘provided racism with a new and extremely virulent impetus’ (Breman 1990: 5), the demands of colonial rule sometimes generated policies which mitigated and even contradicted these racial proscriptions. To take only one example, following the 1857 Bengal army uprising, security concerns led, among other things, to the construction of additional cantonment cities around the country, linked by the most modem forms of communication into a new ‘geography of command’ (Khilnani 1998: 117). Arising from these developments, Anglo-Indians - though sharing the opprobrium attached to mixed-race groups, and despite their previous exclusion from many military and civil situations (see Chapter 2) - were granted special ‘privileges’ in employment on the railways and telegraphs, which favoured them over other Indians, and had profound effects on the subsequent course of Anglo-Indian history. Colonial projects, in other words, were by no means all of a kind, but generated a diversity of practices and stratagems.

Then again, Anglo-Indians, no less than other sections of the Indian population, were never passive objects on which colonial rulers simply inscribed their racial ideas. However much inter-racial unions came officially to be frowned upon, they continued to occur. Until the very end of the colonial period many Anglo-Indian women had relationships with and children by (mainly subaltern) European males, while numerous Anglo-Indian males from poor families sought out or were sought out by Indian women from similarly depressed backgrounds. In the context of everyday colonial life, therefore, official discourses on race and miscegenation were frequently contradicted, ignored or subverted.

Anglo-Indians and the Blurring of Categorical Divides

In both life and fiction Anglo-Indians have been and even today continue to be profusely, not to say extravagantly stereotyped: vulgar, conceited, ill-bred, lacking intelligence, promiscuous (if women) and work-shy (if men), more British than the British themselves, relics of and nostalgic for the Raj - are only a few of the images purveyed.⁵ Such negative stereotypes are not countered by presenting more positive portraits - the tactic of what D’Cruz calls the ‘image critics’ - as if ‘a true, unblemished, uncorrupted identity exists’ (1999: 319). Rather, these ‘arrested, fixated forms of representation’ - as Bhabha refers to colonial stereotypes (1994: 75) - need to be understood in their social and political contexts, and to be set against the rich variety and diversity of Anglo-India’s cultural repertoire, as these evolved in the course of Britain’s imperial rule and have been transformed with India’s move from colony to independent nation.

Despite the abundant, essentialized attentions they received in popular discourses, fictional literature and official documents Anglo-Indians with a few recent notable exceptions (e.g. Hawes 1996) - are hardly present at all in histories of modem India. Perhaps - and this is only speculation - historians would argue that Anglo-Indians were demographically and politically too insignificant to warrant serious attention. Notwithstanding recent attempts to ‘revisit the colonial record, push at the edges, unsettle the calmness with which colonial categories and knowledges were instituted as the facts of history’ (Prakash 1995: 6), this uncanny silence continues to surround the place of Anglo-Indians in the recent annals of India.

Anthropologists, for their part, have been no less neglectful of this group. Again, I can only assume that in seeking out the exotic - a not uncommon practice in the south Asian context (Inden 1990) - AngloIndians have been considered not sufficiently ‘other’ to attract the ethnographer’s attention.⁶

Métis populations like the Anglo-Indians invite serious scholarly attention because, among other things, they blurred the divide between colonizer and colonized, questioning the very efficacy of these labels and challenging carefully wrought images of a ‘Manichean world of high colonialism’ (Cooper and Staler 1997: 8; see also Thomas 1994: 2, 187; Tsing 1993: 17; Young 1990: 151). A starkly bi-polar approach to colonialism, which presents colonizers and colonized as virtually homogeneous and exclusive categories, has recently given way to an acknowledgement that each was not only internally diverse, but that they were ‘mutually shaped in intimate engagement, attraction, and opposition’ (Cooper and Staler 1997: viii). The work of scholars such as Staler and Taylor among Europeans and Indo-Europeans in the colonial Dutch East Indies not only underlines the impossibility of viewing rulers and ruled as universal and undifferentiated categories, but - through the prism of the mestizo category - marks an important step away from treating Europeans and colonizers as synonymous (Cooper and Staler 1997; Staler 1989, 1991, 1995; Taylor 1983).⁷

In India, too, as Frykenberg has pointed out, the British ‘were never ... ever all of a piece’ (n.d.: 47). There were significant class divisions among them, which aped and even caricatured h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Anglo-Indians in Madras
• 3 Guarding Boundaries - Crossing Boundaries
• 4 Paradoxes of Belonging
• 5 The Spirit of Emigration
• 6 Close Families and Matrifocal Households
• 7 The Practice of Culture
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index