Mixed Race Studies

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.’”…

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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.

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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…

Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India: Changing Concepts of Hybridity Across Empires

Routledge
2012-02-29
208 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-50429-4

Adrian Carton
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney, Australia

This book traces changing concepts of mixed-race identity in early colonial India by contrasting Portuguese, British and French colonial spaces. Starting in the sixteenth century, the author shows 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 central core of 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, the book considers the impact of changing political structures on mixed-race communities. With its emphasis on specificity, it situates current and past debates on the mixed-race experience and the politics of whiteness in broader historical and global contexts.

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

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Portuguese Legacies
3. Race and Reform
4. Contested Colonialisms
5. French Complexions
6. Race and Fraternity
7. Conclusion

The Meaning of White: Race, Class, and the ‘Domiciled Community’ in British India 1858-1930

Oxford University Press
January 2012
288 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199697700; ISBN10: 0199697701

Satoshi Mizutani

From 1858 to 1930 the concept of whiteness in British India was complex and contradictory. Under the Raj, the spread of racial ideologies was pervasive, but whiteness was never taken as self-evident. It was constantly called into question and its boundaries were disciplined and policed through socio-cultural and institutional practices.

Only those whites with social status, cultural refinement, and the right level of education were able to command the respect and awe of colonized subjects. Among those who straddled the boundaries of whiteness were the ‘domiciled community’, made up of mixed-descent ‘Eurasians’ and racially unmixed ‘Domiciled Europeans’, both of whom lived in India on a permanent basis. Members of this community, or those who were categorized as such under the Raj, unwittingly rendered the meaning of whiteness ambiguous in fundamental ways.

The colonial authorities quickly identified the domiciled community as a particularly malign source of political instability and social disorder, and were constantly urged to furnish various institutional measures—predominantly philanthropic and educational by character—that specifically targeted its degraded conditions. The Meaning of White reveals the precise ways in which the existence of this community was identified as a problem (the ‘Eurasian Question’) and examines the deeper historical meanings of this categorization. Dr Mizutani demystifies the ideology of whiteness, situating it within the concrete social realities of colonial history.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. British prestige and fears of colonial degeneration
• 2. The origins and emergence of the ‘domiciled community’
• 3. The ‘Eurasian Question’: the domiciled poor and urban social control
• 4. ‘European schools’: illiteracy, unemployment, and educational uplifting
• 5. Towards a solution to the Eurasian Question: child removal and juvenile emigration
• 6. Disputing the domiciliary divide: civil-service employment and the claim for equivalence
• 7. Conclusion: Race, class, and the contours of whiteness in late British India

Anglo-Indian Nostalgia: Longing for India as Homeland

Rhizomes Postgraduate Conference
Rhizomes: Re-visioning Boundaries Conference
The School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
2006-02-24 through 2006-02-25

Alzena D’Costa
Curtin University of Technology

This paper argues that the ‘nostalgia’ that the Anglo-Indian community exhibits in the telling of its (hi)stories can be seen as functioning to (re)claim India as homeland. The Anglo-Indians are the Indian-European minority community of India whose origins and history is inextricably interwoven with the politics of colonial India. Within the framework of post-independence Indian thought, the Community has been alienated from embodying the national identity and is made to feel unhomely.

In his book Long-distance Nationalism, Zlatko Skrbiŝ defines nostalgia as ‘a painful condition related to the homeland (Gr. nostos means ‘to return home’ and algia, ‘a painful condition’ (41). Roberta Rubenstein, in her book Home Matters, also describes nostalgia as a temporal separation (4). The recent nostalgic writings produced by the Anglo-Indian community remember, idealise and pine for the colonial past – a time when the Anglo-Indian community felt a sense of belonging in India. Some historians claim that nostalgia is ‘perhaps the most dangerous … of all the ways of using history’ because it glosses ‘over the past’s iniquities and indignities’. However, Rubenstein points out that nostalgia can also ‘fix’ the past and recover it in ‘narrative terms’ (6). With this insight, I will argue that via nostalgic writing the Anglo-Indian community can revisit, and hence reclaim, India as home.

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Eurasian Women as Tawa’if Singers and Recording Artists: Entertainment and Identity-making in Colonial India

African and Asian Studies
Volume 8, Issue 3 (2009)
pages 268-287
DOI: 10.1163/156921009X458118

Shweta Sachdeva Jha, Assistant Professor of English
Miranda House, University College for Women, University of Delhi

Scholarship on Eurasians has often addressed issues of migration, collective identity and debates around home. Women performers however do not find themselves discussed in these histories of Eurasian peoples in India. This paper aims to account for individual agency in shaping one’s identity within the meta-narratives of collective identity of migrant peoples. I focus on two Eurasian women entertainers in the colonial cities of Benares and Calcutta who chose to forget their mixed-race past to fashion successful careers using new identities as tawa’if singers and actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This, I shall argue, was possible within the wider context of emergent colonial modernities in colonial India. By choosing micro-level case histories of these celebrity entertainers, I want to argue for including popular culture as an arena of identity-making within histories of migration and gender. To engage with popular culture, I shall extend our perception of historical ‘archive’ to include a varied set of materials such as biographical anecdotes, discographies, songbooks, and address the fields of poetry, music and history. Through this project I hope to rethink ideas of gender, culture and agency within wider debates of migration and identity-making.

Am I that Race? Punjabi Mexicans and Hybrid Subjectivity, or How To Do Theory So That It Doesn’t Do You

Hastings Women’s Law Journal
Volume 21, Number 2 (Summer 2010)
page 311-332

Falguni A. Sheth, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory
Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts

I. INTRODUCTION
 
This paper explores the conceptual and racial status of “Punjabi Mexicans” at the turn of the twentieth century. I refer primarily to marriages between East Indian men and Mexican or Mexican-American women on the West Coast and in the Southwestern United States. The scant information available about these alliances has been uncovered by several historians and an anthropologist.  In that literature, this group appears to be a “given,” i.e., it is portrayed as a coherent identity that emerges from a simple set of circumstances.  Yet, it is anything but a given; its existence and its collective and individual consciousness is created out of a complex nexus of legal, political, social, and natural environments that spurred the migration of East Indian men and Mexican women from their homelands and to their adopted lands. I am interested in examining the collective consciousness of individuals who are located in the same moment, but who are living in distinct but overlapping contexts. The structural sources – laws, institutions, explicit and implicit prohibitions, cultural trends, and economic interests – converge to give this population its subjectivity. By subjectivity, I refer to the complex existence of human beings, whose self-understanding is found in the nexus of historical, political, and social circumstances; juridical and social institutions such as laws and government; as well as in their creativity and imagination in negotiating and resisting those circumstances in order to survive or flourish. In other words, as Michel Foucault says, “There are two …

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Anglo-Indian legacy slowly disappears in remote forest

The Brunei Times
2011-12-20

Ammu Kannampilly
Mccluskieganj, India

As India inched towards independence, hundreds of mixed-race Anglo-Indians feared for their future and retreated to a self-styled homeland in a thickly forested part of the country.

Ernest McCluskie, an Indian of Scottish descent established McCluskieganj in what is now the eastern state of Jharkhand, hoping to attract Anglo-Indians anxious about the impending demise of the British empire.

Nearly 80 years on, the few colonial bungalows still standing are in disrepair, the local economy survives on the back of a single school, and McCluskieganj’s ageing residents say the “chhotta England” (little England) they grew up in has vanished forever.

Anglo-Indians prospered under British rule with access to good jobs in the railways, armed forces or as customs officers…

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The Anglo-Indian Community

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 40, Number 2 (September, 1934)
pages 165-179

Elmer L. Hedin
Halcyon, California

Of the several half-caste croups in Asia, the largest and most self-conscious is the Anglo-Indian Community. It numbers perhaps two hundred thousand persons who maintain themselves precariously on the outskirts of British-Indian officialdom, employed for the most part in clerical and other minor positions under the government. The life of the Anglo-Indian is one protracted struggle for status, occupational and social, and in that struggle he seems to be losing ground. Despised by both British and Indians, he may well be submerged in the turmoil of the present, trampled under by the march of India’s millions toward nationalism.

With the discovery of a sea route to eastern Asia in the last decade of the fifteenth century there began a new era of intimate and exten sive trade relationships between the nations of Europe and those of the Far East. The first European traders belonged to a world in many respects more tolerant than the present one, a world in which race prejudice was almost unknown. Consequently, more often than not they entered into more or less permanent marriage relationships with native women, a custom which resulted, after a few generations of trade and political expansion, in the presence of considerable numbers of half-castes. Such half-castes were in a special position and tended to form self-conscious communities, the largest, the best organized, and the most interesting of which is that community in India variously known as East Indian, Eurasian, or Anglo-Indian.

Some fifteen hundred years before Christ, India was conquered by a people speaking an Aryan language and allied to the present Europeans in blood. Later there were invasions of Greeks, Parthians, and Arabs. As a consequence, there was a not inconsiderable intermixture of invaders’ blood with that of the already hybrid population they found, fought with, and often ruled. But these mixtures took place so long ago that it is not easy to tell what proportion of white and what proportion of dark blood there is in any native of India. Furthermore, it has been and is customary for Europeans to think of all Indians as “colored” without regard to their possible…

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