Mixed Race Studies

Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule

Ohio State University Press
May 2010
161 pages
6×9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8142-1126-7
CD ISBN: 978-0-8142-9224-2

Shuchi Kapila, Associate Professor of English
Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa

Even though Edward Said’s Orientalism inspired several generations of scholars to study the English novel’s close involvement with colonialism, they have not considered how English novels themselves were radically altered by colonialism. In Educating Seeta, Shuchi Kapila argues that the paradoxes of indirect rule in British India were negotiated in “family romances” which encoded political struggle in the language of domestic and familial civility. A mixture of domestic ideology and liberal politics, these are Anglo-Indian romances, written by British colonials who lived in India during a period of indirect colonial rule. Instead of providing neat conclusions and smooth narratives, they become a record of the limits of liberal colonialism. They thus offer an important supplement to Victorian novels, extend the study of nineteenth-century domestic ideology, and offer a new perspective on colonial culture. Kapila demonstrates that popular writing about India and, by implication, other colonies is an important supplement to the high Victorian novel and indispensable to our understanding of nineteenth-century English literature and culture. Her nuanced study of British writing about indirect rule in India will reshape our understanding of Victorian domestic ideologies, class formation, and gender politics.

Read the introduction here.

…Educating Seeta makes the case that representations of such interracial relationships in the tropes of domestic fiction create a fantasy of liberal colonial rule in nineteenth-century British India. British colonials in India were preoccupied with appearing as a benevolent, civilizing power to their British and colonial subjects. They produced a vast archive of writing, which includes memoirs, official and private correspondence, and histories, in which they confronted their anxieties about their motives for colonial rule. I expand the definition of “family romance” to include not only interracial love between an English man and an Indian woman, but also political conflict represented as domestic drama featuring Indian women who appear in many roles: as widowed queens who act like recalcitrant daughters; as wives who bring domestic felicity but also usurp the English household; as heroic and rebellious natives; and as compliant and educable subjects. I argue that these seemingly disparate representations of Indian women all have the structure of a family romance, a romance that portrays the permutations of interracial domesticity as a political allegory of indirect colonial rule. This Anglo-Indian family romance—as I will call it here—thus becomes a particularly appropriate literary narrative that enables British writers to justify colonial rule as positive, educative, and benevolent. Two concepts, thus, become central to this study: first, that domestic fiction provides the tropes in which liberal British fantasies about India are represented, and second, that the presence of Indian women signals sites of crises in these fantasies…

…The death of the Indian woman in many of these romances, signaling that interracial love is not socially viable, is an instance of such narrative failure. For instance, in Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters, Zora dies early, setting the English hero, Jim Douglas, free to love an Englishwoman. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, for instance in the Orientalist idealization of the Indian woman in Maud Diver’s Lilamani, in which interracial marriage between Neville Sinclair and Lilamani heralds a new understanding between cultures with the ultimate goal of “civilizing” other cultures into European ways of life. Even Kipling, that canonized recorder of Anglo-Indian life, was unable to give us a full-length study of an interracial relationship. In most of his short stories, such relationships are unconsummated and end tragically.  Anglo-Indian romancers also seem reluctant to represent mixedrace children. When they do enter the picture, they are depicted with the same fear and horror that greeted miscegenation among white and black populations in nineteenth-century America. Despite these narrative failures, however, Anglo-Indian romancers do make a foray into imagining mixed households and interracial marriages. They execute a variety of formal explorations, which often surprise readers into confronting unorthodox outcomes about the possibilities of mixed race sociality…

…Until the recent wave of colonial cultural studies, most historians ignored interracial romances between European colonizers and native women as a marginal and colorful byproduct of colonialism that did not teach us much about colonial society. One reason for this neglect could be that interracial love, and its corollary, the possibility of miscegenation, while it has always existed in colonial societies, has also been proscribed in official ideologies of most such societies. In the case of colonial India particularly, the absence of discussion about interracial relationships could be because such relationships were visible largely in the last two decades of the eighteenth century…

…A second kind of nineteenth-century interracial romance is usually in the high Orientalist mode and does not dwell on either the contribution of the Indian companions to the creation of a syncretic upper-class culture, the role of such alliances in the acquisition and management of political power, or the process by which they were justified in private and political circles. Such exercises in Orientalist fiction include Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary: an Indian Tale (1811), Maud Diver’s Lilamani (1911), and Philip Meadows Taylor’s Seeta (1872). The women in these novels, melancholy, “idealized,” exotic beauties who represent not only the glories of Hindu culture but also its repressive aspects, are rescued by Englishmen. The attempt to match two glorious civilizations flounders when the inevitable racial differences are confronted. Maud Diver’s trilogy, of which Lilamani is the first part, is unusual in taking the story through many generations. Most such interracial stories come to an unhappy end before their authors confront the question of mixed
children…

…The book is divided into two parts consisting of two chapters, each of which begins with a historical introduction to the context of interracial romances. The first part includes two chapters: the first studies the epistolary record of an interracial romance between an Englishman, William Linneaus Gardner, and his aristocratic Muslim wife, Mah Munzalool nissa Begum; the second chapter focuses on Bithia Mary Croker’s early twentieth-century romances, which represent interracial relationships at a time when official proscriptions against them were really strong. Both chapters explore British representations of mixed domesticity; the construction of class, racial, and national identity in the mixed household; and the place of the Indian woman in this literary-political domain. By focusing on the mixed household as either a place of intense social negotiation or of a gothic, traumatic discovery, I show that interracial domesticity is a nodal point for the cultural and political negotiations of Britain’s Indian experience. Mixed households contest the values of English domesticity and reconfigure interracial relationships away from the predictable tropes of rescue and discovery to an exploration of how class and social power were acquired by colonial elites…

A cross-cultural marriage is an adventure I’d recommend

The Observer
2009-12-27

Anushka Asthana, Education Correspondent

Mixed-race unions in this country are on the increase, a magical journey that benefits all the families involved

One visit to India and a childhood playing cricket was never going to be quite enough to prepare Toby, a white Englishman who grew up in Oxfordshire, for his marriage. After all, you don’t just marry an Indian woman—you marry her large (and often eccentric) family and all that brings with it.

The realisation began to sink in for Toby at the Hindu part of our wedding, three months ago. He got out of arriving on the back of a white horse, but we persuaded him to go along with the rest of it. That included being dressed up from head to toe, with a red turban with white tassels hanging over his face, embroidered scarf, full-length white coat with gold trimmings and his very own pair of what he called “Aladdin” shoes. He took part in the “baraat“, an Indian tradition in which the groom arrives with family and friends dancing around him.

So there they were: swinging their arms to the bhangra beat of a dhol drum with shell-shocked smiles as they were met by the cheering crowd of “aunties” and “uncles” (not real ones—that is how we address any Indian person above the age of 40) and bending down to have garlands draped around their necks and red marks smeared on their foreheads.

The image of a white British groom at the centre of a mass of ecstatic Indian aunties would once have been a rarity. But research released earlier this year found that one in 10 people in Britain with Indian heritage who is in a relationship has a partner of a different race. The study, by the Institute for Social and Economic Research, found the same was true of half of all Caribbean men, one in five black African men and two out of five Chinese women. The result so far: one in 10 children in Britain is living in a mixed-race family…

Read the entire article here.

American Identities: California Short Stories of Multiple Ancestries

Xlibris Press
2008
263 Pages
ISBN: 1-4363-7705-6 (Trade Paperback 6×9)
ISBN13: 978-1-4363-7705-8 (Trade Paperback 6×9)

Eliud Martínez, Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature
University of California, Riverside

In many parts of the country, especially in California, when one passes by a school or strolls across a college or university campus, it is inescapable to the eye that the American student population looks very different from that before the seventies. Young people today are accustomed to seeing people from many ancestral backgrounds. In classrooms, at schools, colleges and universities; at shopping malls, weddings and other social gatherings, young people are aware that they are living in an increasingly multicultural America.

These then, are the voices and stories of today’s young Americans. Diverse, by turns uplifting, insightful, illuminating and heart-warming or heartbreaking, the stories give us moving portrayals of the young authors and their families, mothers and fathers. Some offer shocking depictions of military brutality and political violence. Others recover family stories and make touching tributes to earlier generations. Some stories help us to see how young people perceive themselves and their identities when they are offspring of mothers and fathers from other lands or of different cultures.

The young writers included in this anthology, or their parents and ancestors, come from Egypt, Ethiopia, Korea, China, Japan, Cambodia, Taiwan, India; from East Los Angeles, El Salvador, Mexico, Honduras, Vietnam, Italy, Denmark, the Philippines, Cuba, and other places. Generational differences are inevitable between immigrant parents and their children, who are either American-born or grow up in America. The differences shape many attitudes to the ancestral cultures, customs, language and ways of life. The stories remind us of why some people came to America, of what they left behind, and what persists in ancestral forms adapted to American ways.

The stories provide telling evidence that collectively, there are many varieties of American identity among children of immigrants and their parents from other lands. These California stories tell of young lives that have been shaped by ancestry, time and place, national background, personal and generational experiences, geography, and by American social and immigrant history, conditions in their ancestral lands and lingering perceptions of race.

Many immigrants come in search of a better life or in pursuit of the American dream. Some Americanized children of immigrants struggle self-consciously to fit in. Their experiences invite dramatic literary expression. In two of the most powerful stories in this anthology, Jan Ballesteros and Thien Hoang exorcise their extreme pain, self-consciousness and struggle for acceptance.
In high school Ballesteros is repeatedly humiliated in his classes by four bullies who ridicule his Filipino appearance and his spoken accent. Extremely vulnerable, Ballesteros is perplexed because the bullies are all half-Filipino. In Hoang’s case, he is self-conscious about the Chinese reflection that looks out at him from the mirror. By writing their stories these two vulnerable young men come to terms with being American, and at the same time with being Filipino and Chinese, respectively.

More so than in Ballesteros and Hoang’s case a heightened consciousness of color and the desire to look American leads the Vietnamese mother in Kim Bui’s story—“Asian Eyes Westernized”—to change the shape of her eyes surgically. Ironically, the young author points out, the woman who in Vietnam used to work in the sun daily, here In America, she avoids being out in the sun, and resorts to skin whiteners. Kim Bui is struck by her mother’s advice to be proud of being Vietnamese, but to look American. In their stories Megan E. Chao, Chariya Heang, and Neha Pandey highlight their views of young womanhood in America when parents observe or desire to observe the tradition of arranged marriages. Conflicting points of view and parental cultural norms affect young women. Moving self-portrayals, characterized by thoughtful introspection and injections of irony and humor, attest to their dilemmas.

The Stories in this anthology are important for American education, I believe, so that young people can see themselves in these portrayals. In addition to the moving value of the stories the storytelling is of a high caliber. The storytelling is based on knowledge of ancestral traditions and customs, languages, cultural and social history, geography, family memorabilia, immigration documents, old photographs and family correspondence, materials and family stories that have been passed down from generation to generation. In addition to these sources, the young authors interviewed mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles and grandparents, and in some cases in languages other than English, all to the young writers’ credit…. [T]he titles of the stories tellingly identify major themes, experiences, and issues that invited and received dramatic literary expression. These stories are valuable repositories of human experiences shared by many young people today. These then, are the stories and voices of young Americans. One may safely predict that the experiences of which these young people have written so candidly, and in many cases eloquently, will resonate with other people and invite thoughtful self-awareness and self-understanding, a deeper appreciation for the richness of the many immigrant cultures of America, and an enhanced understanding of people of multiple ancestries.

And according to the prospectus…

The decades of the 1960s and 1970s ushered in a productive, illuminating and prolific body of scholarly research and creative expression in all the arts. Much of that enterprise was devoted to the most admirable task of historiography—the reinterpretation of the past and the rewriting of American history.

These stories add artistic dimensions to American social and immigrant history, and complement the scholarly research and literary expression of individual groups. The subject matter, the themes, cultural issues and the very human drama of young lives, as depicted in these stories, are timely. Also, because many of the stories address the longing to belong, which historically, was denied to some American groups in the past, they illustrate how emotionally complex the task continues to be for vulnerable young people from many countries…. In the case of U.S. minority groups—as African Americans, Chicanos, Asian- and Native Americans were once designated—that past denial resulted in the retroactive recovery of our rich intellectual and cultural histories, creative and artistic roots, our arts, heritages and ancestries.

Imaginative and creative expression in the arts dramatizes scholarship in history and the social sciences…. Personal, emotional, direct and down to earth, these stories drive home the psychological and emotional impact of feeling different with a directness and immediacy that scholarly works can only approximate. As such, the anthology also complements numerous scholarly works about bi-racial, multi-racial and mixed-race people.

To read an excerpt, click here.

Rethinking inclusion and exclusion: the question of mixed-race presence in late colonial India

University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History
Issue Five
2002
pp. 1-22

Satoshi Mizutani

This article examines the ambivalent meanings of mixed-race presence in late colonial India (from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries). In doing so it contributes insights for pursuing the theme of inclusion and exclusion in the historiography of imperialism and colonialism. Studies on the imperial politics of inclusion and exclusion have not fully explicated the complex intersections between colonial exclusion and the metropolitan bourgeois hierarchy. We still tend, rather habitually, to mould our analytic categories, according to the coloniser/colonised dichotomy. This is not at all to imply that the analytic and empirical weight of this dichotomy should be downplayed: rather, it means that the coloniser/colonised axis itself stands in need of being re-considered.

The post-Independent historiography of colonial India has attended to the internal ordering of the colonised society, so as to evaluate the correlation between colonialist exclusion and nationalist inclusion, and to research the multiplicities of racial, class, gender and caste subordination under imperialism. In contrast, less attention has been paid to the internal configuration of the coloniser’s society. As Ann Stoler has pointed out, studies of colonial societies have long tended to assume white communities and colonisers as an abstract force, comprising a seamless homogeneity of bureaucratic and commercial agents. But it is possible, as this paper will show, to challenge this conventional view in ways that address the important imbrications of ‘racial’, class and gender identities.

This paper assesses the imperial significance of mixed-race identity in order to show that the imperial formation of ‘whiteness’ was predicated on the metropolitan order of class as well as the bipolar conceptualisation of racial difference. It will seek to demonstrate how the heterogeneous subjects of British society (men, women, middle or working classes, children, as well as ‘mixed bloods’) were differentially included in, or excluded from, the imperial body politic. Pointing to this internal differentiation, however, should not be taken as an end in itself.  Rather, it should be done as a step to show how the internal hierarchies of British society had repercussions on external relations with the colonised. In other words, the analysis of the internal composition of the coloniser’s society in this paper will not be intended as a way of replacing the coloniser/colonised dichotomy, but, on the contrary, will be meant as a means precisely to re-consider it from another vantage point…

Read the entire article here.