Mixed Race Studies

Anglo-Indians: Is their culture dying out?

BBC News Magazine
2013-01-03

Kris Griffiths

A product of the British Empire, with a mixture of Western and Indian names, customs and complexions, 2,000 Anglo-Indians are to attend a reunion in Calcutta. But their communities in both the UK and the subcontinent are disappearing, writes Anglo-Indian Kris Griffiths.

Southall in west London is home to Britain’s first pub accepting rupees, railway station signs in English and Punjabi, and main thoroughfares alive all year with street food stalls, colourful saris and Bhangra music.

It’s my hometown, where I spent my first 20 years among the country’s most concentrated population of Indians, but as one of the minority 10% white British inhabitants. Indeed, I was the only white person on my avenue in the years before I left.

My mother is Anglo-Indian, raised in Jamshedpur, near Calcutta, before moving eventually to London’s own “Little India”. After she married a Welshman, I and my siblings were born fair with blue eyes.

We are symptomatic of the biggest problem facing the global Anglo-Indian community – it is dying out. In the UK and the Commonwealth, it is losing its “Indianness”, while back home in India its “Anglo” element is fading…

…The definition of Anglo-Indian has become looser in recent decades. It can now denote any mixed British-Indian parentage, but for many its primary meaning refers to people of longstanding mixed lineage, dating back up to 300 years into the subcontinent’s colonial past.

In the 18th Century, the British East India Company followed previous Dutch and Portuguese settlers in encouraging employees to marry native women and plant roots. The company would even pay a sum for every child born of these cross-cultural unions.

By the late 19th Century, however, after the Suez Canal’s construction had made the long journey shorter, British women were arriving in greater numbers, mixed marriages dwindled and their offspring came to be stigmatised by many Indians as “Kutcha-Butcha” (half-baked bread).

When the British finally departed in 1947 they left behind a Westernised mixed-race subpopulation about 300,000-strong who weren’t necessarily glad to see them leave…

Read the entire article here.

At school I was called a half-caste. Today I’m proud: As census reveals over a million Britons were born to inter-racial relationships, one woman’s moving story

The Daily Mail
2012-12-11

Tanith Carey

Whenever the moment comes when I have to choose the box on the Census that asks me to describe my national identity, my hand hovers over which one to tick.

With my fair hair, pale skin and green eyes, I certainly look like I should be picking the category that says ‘White/British’.

But by putting my mark in that square, I would not be doing justice to all that I am.

Like more than one million people in Britain, according to data from the 2011 Census released yesterday, I am a member of the fastest-growing population group in this country: those born to parents in inter-racial relationships.

Jubilation over the successes this summer of Olympic athletes such as Jessica Ennis —  the daughter of a Jamaican father and a white British mother — has shown how far we have come in embracing such a large mixed-raced population.

When talking race, people are very quick to talk about the negatives — discrimination and the difficulties of integration, to name but two.

But let’s not forget how tolerant Britain is as a nation, and how inclusive we have become in the space of just a few decades.

As the granddaughter of an Indian entrepreneur who was at the forefront of this transformation, I can testify to just how far we have.

When I was a child growing up in the Seventies, it was not uncommon to be called a ‘half-caste’.

Sometimes the phrase was used to try to pigeon-hole me when I was asked about my slightly more exotic origins.  At the time, the term ‘half-caste’ implied that because you were the sum of two halves, you amounted to nothing much.

It was used as the worst of all insults…

Read the entire article here.

The Melanin Millennium: Skin Color as 21st Century International Discourse

Springer
2013
348 pages
32 illustrations
Hardcover ISBN 978-94-007-4607-7
eBook ISBN: 978-94-007-4608-4
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-4608-4

Edited by:

Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work
Michigan State University

• Addresses the issue of skin color in a worldwide context
• Discusses the introduction of new forms of visual media and their effect on skin color discrimination
• Touches up on the issue of skin bleaching and the Bleaching Syndrome

In the aftermath of the 60s “Black is Beautiful” movement and publication of The Color Complex almost thirty years later the issue of skin color has mushroomed onto the world stage of social science. Such visibility has inspired publication of the Melanin Millennium for insuring that the discourse on skin color meet the highest standards of accuracy and objective investigation.

This volume addresses the issue of skin color in a worldwide context. A virtual visit to countries that have witnessed a huge rise in the use of skin whitening products and facial feature surgeries aiming for a more Caucasian-like appearance will be taken into account. The book also addresses the question of whether using the laws has helped to redress injustices of skin color discrimination, or only further promoted recognition of its divisiveness among people of color and Whites.

The Melanin Millennium has to do with now and the future. In the 20th century science including eugenics was given to and dominated by discussions of race category. Heretofore there remain social scientists and other relative to the issue of skin color loyal to race discourse. However in their interpretation and analysis of social phenomena the world has moved on. Thus while race dominated the 20th century the 21st century will emerge as a global community dominated by skin color and making it the melanin millennium.

Contents

• Preface
• Chapter 1. The Bleaching Syndrome: Western Civilization vis-à-vis Inferiorized People of Color; Ronald E. Hall
• Chapter 2. The Historical and Cultural Influences of Skin Bleaching in Tanzania;  Kelly M. Lewis, Solette Harris, Christina Champ, Willbrord Kalala, Will Jones, Kecia L. Ellick, Justie Huff and Sinead Younge
• Chapter 3. Pathophysiology and Psychopathology of Skin Bleaching and Implicationa of Skin Colour in Africa; A. A. Olowu and O. Ogunlade
• Chapter 4. An Introduction to Japanese Society’s Attitudes Toward Race and Skin Color; Arudou Debito
• Chapter 5. The Inconvenient Truth of India, Caste, and Color Discrimination; Varsha Ayyar and Lalit Khandare
• Chapter 6. Indigeneity on Guahan: Skin Color as a Measure of Decolonization; LisaLinda Natividad
• Chapter 7. A Table of Two Cultures; Eneid Routté-Gómez
• Chapter 8. Where are you From?; Stéphanie Cassilde
• Chapter 9. Social Work Futures: Reflections from the UK on the Demise of Anti-racist Social Work and Emerging Issues in a “Post-Race'” Era; Mekada J. Graham
• Chapter 10. Shades of Conciousness: From Jamaica to the UK; William Henry
• Chapter 11. Fanon Revisited: Race Gender and Colniality vis-à-vis Skin Color; Linda Lane and Hauwa Mahdi
• Chapter 12. Pigment Disorders and Pigment Manipulations; Henk E. Menke
• Chapter 13. Skin Color and Blood Quantum: Getting the Red Out; Deb Bakken and Karen Branden
• Chapter 14. The Impact of Skin Color on Mental and Behavorial Health in African American and Latina Adolescent Girls: A Review of the Literature; Alfiee M. Breland-Noble
• Chapter 15. Characteristics of Color Discrimination Charges Filed with the EEOC; Joni Hersch
• Chapter 16. The Consequences of Colorism; Margaret Hunter
• Chapter 17. Navigating the Color Complex: How Multiracial Individuals Narrate the Elements of Appearance and Dynamics of Color in Twenty-first Century America; Sara McDonough and David L. Brunsma
• Chapter 18. The Fade-Out of Shirley, a Once-Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity; Lorna Roth
• Chapter 19. What Color is Red? Exploring the implications of Phenotype for Native Americans; Hilary N. Weaver
• Chapter 20. From Fair & Lovely to Banho de Lua: Skin Whitening and its Implications in the Multi-ethnic and Multicolored Surinamese Society; Jack Menke
• Chapter 21. Affirmative Action and Racial Identityin Brazil: A Study of the First Quota Graduates at the State University of Rio de Janneiro: Vânia Penha-Lopes
• Index

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