'Between Power and 'Purdah': The White Woman in British India, 1858-1900' in 'The Indian Economic and Social History Review' (original) (raw)
Doctoral Thesis, 2012
Anglo-Indians, a designation acquired in the 1911 Indian Census, had previously been known as Eurasians, East Indians, Indo-Britons and half-castes. ‘Anglo-Indian’ had previously denoted, and among some scholars continues to denote, Britons long resident in India. We will define Anglo-Indians as a particular mixed race Indo-European population arising out of the European trading and imperial presence in India, and one of several constructed categories by which transient Britons sought to demarcate racial difference within the Raj’s socio-racial hierarchy. Anglo-Indians were placed in an intermediary (and differentially remunerated) position between Indians and Domiciled Europeans (another category excluded from fully ‘white’ status), who in turn were placed below imported British superiors. The domiciled community (of Anglo-Indians and Domiciled Europeans, treated as a single socio-economic class by Britons) were relied upon as loyal buttressing agents of British rule who could be deployed to help run the Raj’s strategically sensitive transport and communication infrastructure, and who were made as a term of their service to serve in auxiliary military forces which could help to ensure the internal security of the Raj and respond to strikes, civil disobedience or crises arising from international conflict. The thesis reveals how calls for Indianisation of state and railway employment by Indian nationalists in the assemblies inaugurated by the 1919 Government of India Act threatened, through opening up their reserved intermediary positions to competitive entry and examination by Indians, to undermine the economic base of domiciled employment. Anglo-Indian leaders responded with varying strategies. Foremost was the definition of Anglo-Indians as an Indian minority community which demanded political representation through successive phases of constitutional change and statutory safeguards for their existing employment. This study explores various strategies including: deployment of multiple identities; widespread racial passing by individuals and families; agricultural colonisation schemes; and calls for individual, familial or collective migration.
Anglo-Indian Women: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
2010
Cheryl Shivan's article that follows the historical Anglo-Indian trajectory and concludes with a question about the role of Anglo-Indian women in the future. She questions whether Anglo-Indians are doing enough, why are they content to preserve the status quo. Should they be demanding that constitutionally Anglo-Indian mothers be recognized as furthering the lineage of the community, to increase its numbers and prevent it's disappearance into the communities they sprang from, is a question she asks. Cheryl focuses on the aspects of Anglo-Indian women's historical participation in the community with scholarly honesty.
Kit Marek de Thurveton Hildyard Trinity College This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy Word count: 17,008 2 Declaration This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text. Both the hard copies and electronic version of the submitted work have identical content. The thesis does not exceed the word limit. Bibliography 56 4 Female migration to India: femininity, gender, race, religion, nationalism, and internationalism, 1879-1947 Introduction 'The British Empire always seemed a very masculine enterprise,' Philippa Levine writes, 'a series of far-flung sites dominated by white men dressed stiffly in sporting and hunting clothes, or ornate official regalia.' 1 If the British empire was masculine, it was, however, not male, being inhabited by hundreds of thousands of women, as Mary Procida has pointed out. 2 Four of these womenand their associates and collaboratorsare the focus of this essay. Helena
“All Races are Mixed Races:” Of Anglo-Indians and British Aryans
2018
In this article, I situate Anglo-Indian anti-racism activist Cedric Dover’s thoughts against the backdrop of travelling discourses of Aryanism as manifested from the nineteenth century onward. Depicting the constructions of prejudices by British and German Orientalist philology against figures born of intermixture, I show how British appropriations of Aryanism disturbingly helped disenfranchise Anglo-Indians in colonial India, as Dover suggests in his work. Discussing how Dover uses his anti-racist oeuvre to problematize philology and, by extension, eugenics, I delineate Dover’s arrival at the realization that race as a category needs to be abjured. The repudiation of race, states Dover, is necessary because all bodies—including those of British and Anglo-Indian alike—are born of indeterminate intermixture. I show how Dover uses this conclusion to conceptualize a transnational coming community of the intermixed—a community in which Anglo-Indians may participate to write back agains...
Outside in the Stereotype: Anglo-Indians' Passage from Community to Singularity
South Asian Review, 2014
Postcolonial India casts itself as a nation-state with a normative "Hindu" identity. This identity sustains itself by othering the racially-mixed Anglo-Indian via a stereotype that represents her as sexually dissolute and racially "impure." This stereotype in fact birthed the Anglo-Indian "community" qua community in mid-nineteenth century India. However, because Indians who had converted to Christianity often passed themselves as racially-mixed Anglo-Indians, I argue that the Indian state's categorization of a monolithic Anglo-Indian "community" defined solely by racial intermixture falls apart. This locates Anglo-Indians, racially mixed or otherwise, as members of an open-ended singularity outside /within statist categories of power/knowledge and by extension outside/within the stereotype. This "outside within" is, however, a space of exception, allowing the epistemic violence of the stereotype to assume new and unpredictable forms.] T he postcolonial Indian nation is essentially a loosely-held melange of communities with apparently self-evident features. After the decolonization of India, the structures of authority constituting the Indian state, by integrating these communities within its bureaucratic structures, tried to unify them into a cohesive national body-one that was dominated by a "normal" majoritarian "Hindu" identity defined against "other" racial and religious minorities' (Chatterjee, Fragments 200-39). I assert that, apart from the Muslim population of India, Anglo-Indians i.e. Indians of part-Indian and part-British blood, were
The Meaning of WhiteRace, Class, and the 'Domiciled Community' in British India 1858-1930
2011
Some years ago, in the midst of a conversation about tourism and travelling, a friend from one of Britain's former colonies remarked how shocked she had been to see 'white people begging' during her first trip abroad to Australia. The comment puzzled me, but my friend explained that she had grown up surrounded by a widespread belief that poverty was a predominantly 'non-white' condition and it was only after leaving her country to travel abroad that she came to realize how inaccurate this idea was.
Historical Development of the Anglo-Indian Community
Article, 2023
The Anglo-Indian community is a legacy of colonialism. Portuguese, Dutch, French, and-most significantly-British people arrived in India through the development of Western trade and rule in the seventeenth century. Almost solely male endeavours were involved in colonialism. When it came to the Europeans in India, thousands of unmarried men were stationed there for years, and many of them formed relationships with native women. European men formed partnerships with native women in the early days, when the sea voyage was long and risky, and European men were forced to settle down for many years. That practice was later labelled as a necessity. During their time in India, Europeans fulfilled various roles, including priests, traders, conquerors, monarchs, and administrators. In addition, they were accountable for the emergence of a multiracial population that came to be known as the Anglo-Indian community. In the course of their history, the people who are now known as Anglo-Indians have been known by a variety of names, including “Eurasians”, “East Indians,” “Half-castes,” “Mixed Blood,” “Country-Borns,” and “Indo-Britons.”
By ANN BAKER COTTRELL Today's Asian-Western Couples are not Anglo-Indians FOR TEN YEARS I have been engaged in the study of contemporary cross-national families. Specifically, I have been interviewing South-Asians married to Westerners and living in India, the United States and Great Britain.' During this period I have been constantly surprised by the confusion about contemporary and historical Asian-Western marriages. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the great differences between Anglo-Indians, the community of descendants of early Indian-Western marriages, and contemporary Asian-Western couples. This paper argues that contemporary Asian-Western couples represent quite a different phenomenon from the early couples because of differences in the nature of social relations during the colonial and contemporary periods and differences in the socioeconomic position of the people intermarrying. They have not experienced the same degree of social marginality as the Anglo-Indians have; thus they are not becoming a community with a sense of identity and shared culture as the Anglo-Indians have done. To demonstrate their differences Anglo-Indians and contemporary Asian-Western couples are compared in terms of: (1) socioeconomic status, (2) social position, (3) cultural orientation, (4) social interaction, and (5) identity and sense of community. Anglo-Indian data are from Gaikwad's 1967 study and from Gist and Wright's 1973 study. Data on contemporary Asian-Western couples are from my own studies in India, 1966; the United States, 1974, and Britain, 1976.8 SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS The Anglo-Indians Both the Indian-Western couples who married as much as four hundred years ago and those marrying today reflect the broader patterns of international mobility. In the early period of contact between Britain and India, the flow of people was one way-British men going to India, first with the British East India Company, later in the colonial administration. Until the end of the eighteenth century intermarriage with Indians was common. In fact, such marriages were often encouraged by the British as a means of developing a loyal population
The Professional Lives of Anglo-Indian Working Women in The Twilight of Empire
2016
This article explores the lives of Anglo-Indian women in employment in the late colonial period. In doing so it emphasises the importance of categories in policing the location of Anglo-Indians within the world of the domiciled and the socio-racial hierarchy of the Raj. The experience of Anglo-Indian women who travelled to Africa and the Middle East before and during World War II, helps to demonstrate how selective identification with Britishness and with India contributed to shaping individual lives and identities. The case of military nurses is particularly foregrounded, based on an interview with Florence Watkins in Jubbulpore in 2010.
Current historiography acknowledges the existence of Domiciled Europeans in colonial India, often referring to them as " poor whites " , 1 but the community has not been the focus of any specific research. Domiciled Europeans were those born in India of parents who were of British and/or European descent who had settled permanently in India. 2 They considered themselves part of the British community, who were originally known as Anglo-Indians, as opposed to the racially mixed European and Indian community who were called Eurasians. However, in order to avoid the derogatory stigma associated with Eurasians or " half castes " , those from mixed unions with fair skins began to call themselves Anglo-Indians. 3 By the turn of the century, the term " Anglo-Indian " ceased to apply to the British and those with no Indian blood and, instead, applied to the those from mixed British and Indian unions and their descendants.
Conference Review: 'Bharat Britain: South Asians Making Britain 1870-1950
Dandelion, 2011
THE CONFERENCE 'BHARAT BRITAIN: SOUTH ASIANS MAKING BRITAIN 1870-1950' was a culmination of a three-year interdisciplinary and inter-institutional project 'Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950' (2007 led by Susheila Nasta, Professor of Modern Literature at the Open University. The stated aim of this major conference was to bring together leading scholars, writers, and curators to map the diverse and little-known impact of South Asians on Britain's cultural, political, intellectual, and religious life during this period. Spread over two days across ten presentation panels, three keynotes, two conversation panels, and a concluding roundtable discussion, the conference presented the work and engagements of close to forty scholars and other personalities on this theme.
60-65 BRITISH REPRESENTATION OF INDIANS.pdf
VEDA PUBLICATIONS, 2018
E.M Forster’s A Passage to India portrays a colonial India under British imperialism, before its liberation from the occidental colonial rule. Forster portrays the colonizer’s ideology of superiority of White race and its culture and the constructed inferiority of India and Indians in this novel. A Passage to India like every colonial discourse privileges the Europe and the European as ‘Us’, while the Indians and their culture are presented as inferior and ‘Other’. It highlights the impact of ‘Englishness’ on the indigenous culture and identity. It also exposes the British inherent preconception toward Indians depicting the English characters as awesomely racially prejudiced, priggish, and inhumanly snobbish to the native inhabitants. E.M Forster’s A Passage to India represents the dichotomy between the Indian and British cultural aspects focusing the reciprocal relationship between the British colonies and the Indians in Chandapore and highlighting the contrast between the Indian and the European ideology. Throughout the novel, the barriers of inter-racial friendship in a colonial context are explored vividly posing the question of whether it is possible for an Englishman and an Indian to ever be friends, at least within the context of British colonialism.
'Indian Journal of Gender Studies', Vol. 8, No. 1, January-June, 2001
Current research has rather tended to neglect the print culture of 19th-century British India and its contribution towards the formation of gender ideologies. This article attempts to scrutinise the clamorous voices of the print culture: the newspapers, popular periodicals as well as copious published works, and to unravel the complex and sometimes contradictory web of constructions that ihese built around the gendered colonised.