Mixed Race Studies

History and the (Un)making of Identifications in Literary Representations of Anglo-Indians and Goan Catholics

University of British Columbia
September 2000
465 pages

Marian Josephine Gracias

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of English)

This dissertation examines selected literature by and about Anglo-Indians (Eurasians) and Goan Catholics from India and the Indian diaspora, focusing on its preoccupation with the history of these communities as a site of contested identifications. Especially polemical are perceptions (due to communalist stereotypes or internalisation) of Anglo Indians and Goan Catholics as mimic or intermediary communities who ended up capitulating to British and/or Portuguese colonialist structures respectively. Larger issues for both communities in India and in the diaspora also involve questions of racial or cultural hybridity, and the slippage between religion and culture, particularly the linking of conversion to Christianity with colonisation, Westernisation, denationalisation, and non-Indianness.

I argue for a more layered understanding of the concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and resistance in relation to identifications from these communities. By choosing literature set in times of national crisis and historical change (in India, and in East Africa for the Goan diaspora), I have been attentive to the varying ways in which literary characters and narrators confront, project, or elide contradictions of proximity and difference in the production of racial, cultural, and national identity. The main literary texts in the discussion of Anglo- Indian identifications include John Masters’ “Bhowani Junction”, Manorama Mathai’s “Mulligatawny Soup”, Stephen Alter’s “Neglected Lives” and Allan Sealy’s “The Trotter-Nama”. In these texts, I have examined how the narrative opens up or circumscribes the agency and racial identifications of Anglo-Indian characters. As well, I make some references to Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” and selected work by Ruskin Bond. The central literary texts in the discussion of Goan Catholic and diasporic identifications include Lambert Mascarenhas’ “Sorrowing Lies My Land”, Kiran Nagarkar’s “Ravan and Eddie”, João da Veiga Coutinho’s “A Kind of Absence: Life in the Shadow of History”, selected writing by damian lopes, and Peter Nazareth’s “In a Brown Mantle” and “The General is Up”. I also dwell in some detail on selected short stories by Lino Leitão, and Violet Dias Lannoy’s “Pears from the Willow Tree”. I examine the role of Anglo-Indian and Goan Catholic women literary characters, making the case that, for the most part, it is male characters who are given political and narrative complexity in terms of negotiating colonialism and nationalism, and that women characters, when central, are imaged as mediating grounds to advance or block access to male characters who are competing over nationalist and colonialist discourses about race and sexuality. An exception is the poetry of Eunice de Souza where there is critical reflection on the position of Goan Catholic women.

Where relevant, I draw from particular areas of cultural studies, postcolonial and feminist theories (including those dealing with psychoanalysis), and writings about Indian history and nationalism. Writings from these areas offer pertinent insights on ambivalence in the production of subjectivity, and on the construction of Indianness in relation to arguments on colonialism, gender, caste, class, secularism, and the religious right (especially the discourses of Hindutva). While the identifications and identity of Anglo-Indians and Goan Catholics appear in the genre of history, these communities are largely absent or peripheral in the area of literary analysis, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory pertaining to India. Therefore, I hope that a study of these communities will contribute to the discussion of religious and multiracial identifications that is increasingly relevant to the field of postcolonial and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Copy Cat Copy Cat?
• Chapter 1: “A Certain Way of Being There”
  • 1.1 Introduction
  • 1.2 Proximity and Distance: Colonialism and the Construction of Mimic Subjectivity
  • 1.3 Forms of Mimic Subjectivity and the Question of Subversion
  • 1.4 Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Construction of Indianness
• Chapter 2: Negotiating Classifications: Writing an Anglo-Indian History
  • 2.1 Introducing Mixed Race Classifications
  • 2.2 Anglo-Indians and the Discourse of Mixed Races under British Colonialism
  • 2.3 Scientific Racialism and Other Discourses of Mixed Races
  • 2.4 Conclusion: (Dis)placing Anglo-Indian Classifications and Affiliation
• Chapter 3: (By) Passing Stereotypes of Anglo-Indian Identifications in Literature
  • 3.1 Literary Antecedents: Representations of Mixed Race People
  • 3.2 “Species Loyally”: Anglo-Indian Identifications in John Masters’ Bhowani Junction
  • 3.3 Between Homes: Manorama Mathai’s Mulligatawny Soup
  • 3.4 Escaping from History: Stephen Alter’s Neglected Lives
  • 3.5 Interracial Relationships in Bhowani Junction, Mulligatawny Soup and Neglected Lives: Possibilities and Closures
• Chapter 4: Beyond Doom and Gloom: Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama
  • 4.1 Introduction: Alternatives to Stereotypes of Anglo-Indian Identifications
  • 4.2 Contending with “The Grey Man’s Burden”: Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama
• Chapter 5: Writing Identity in Goan History
  • 5.1 Claims in the Writing of Goan History.
  • 5.2 Early History of the Portuguese in India and Goa
  • 5.3 Mixing Trade, Religion, and Race
  • 5.4 Conversion to Christianity and the Practice of Religion Under British and Portuguese Colonialism
  • 5.5 Caste, Conversion, and National Identity in Portuguese Goa and British India
  • 5.6 Placing the Politics of Resistance to Portuguese Rule
  • 5.7 Claiming Goa: Liberation or Invasion?.
  • 5.8 The Impact of Language and Migration in the Construction of Goan Identity Today
  • 5.9 Colonial and Caste Effects in Locating Conversion to Christianity Within Communal and Secular Debates in Contemporary India
• Chapter 6: Identifications in Crisis: Goan Catholics in Literature
  • 6.1 The Question of Goan Identity
  • 6.2 Writing Against Colonialism: Lambert Mascarenhas’ Sorrowing Lies My Land, Lino Leitão’s “The Miracle” and “Armando Rodrigues”
  • 6.3 The Crisis of Leadership: Violet Dias Lannoy’s Pears from the Willow Tree and Lambert Mascarenhas’ A Greater Tragedy
  • 6.4 Interrogating Gender: The Poetry of Eunice de Souza
  • 6.5 Hindus and Catholics: Where Parallel Worlds of Difference Meet in the Horizon of Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie
• Chapter 7: “The Intimate Outsider”: History and Location in Literature from the Goan Catholic Diaspora
  • 7.1 Introductory Issues in Writing Diaspora
  • 7.2 The Search for a Theory of Goan History: João da Veiga Coutinho’s A Kind of Absence: Life in the Shadow of History.
  • 7.3 East African Goan Catholics: Narrating the Third That Walks Between Black and White in Peter Nazareth’s In a Brown Mantle and The General Is Up
  • 7.4 Intermediary Positions and Peter Nazareth’s Narrators
  • 7.5 Navigating Historical Legacies in damian lopes’ Writing
• Chapter 8: Epilogue: The Politics of Engagement
• Works Cited

Read the entire dissertation here.

Midnight’s Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/Colonial Literature

Peter Lang
2006
265 pages
Weight: 0.370 kg, 0.816 lbs
Paperback ISBN: 978-3-03910-848-0
Series: Studies in Asia-Pacific “Mixed Race”

Glenn D’Cruz, Senior Lecturer
School of Communication and Creative Arts
Deakin University, Australia

Anglo-Indians are the human legacy of European colonialism. These descendants of European men and Indian women regularly appear as disconsolate and degenerate figures in colonial and postcolonial literature, much to the chagrin of contemporary Anglo-Indians. Many significant writers, such as Rudyard Kipling, Maud Diver, John Masters, Salman Rushdie and Hari Kunzru, have created Anglo-Indian characters to represent the complex racial, social and political currents of India’s colonial past and postcolonial present.

This book is the first detailed study of Anglo-Indians in literature. Rather than simply dismissing the representation of Anglo-Indians in literary texts as offensive stereotypes, the book identifies the conditions for the emergence of these stereotypes through close readings of key novels, such as Bhowani Junction, Midnight’s Children and The Impressionist. It also examines the work of contemporary Anglo-Indian writers such as Allan Sealy and Christopher Cyrill.

Presenting a persuasive argument against ‘image criticism’, the book underscores the importance of contextualizing literary texts, and makes a timely contribution to debates about ‘mixed race’ identities, minoritarian literature and interculturalism.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Seven Deadly Stereotypes
• Chapter Two: Regulating Bodies: Dangerous ‘Others’ and Colonial Governmentality
• Chapter Three: Beyond the Pale: Imperial Power and Scientific Regimes of Truth
• Chapter Four: The Poor Relation: Social Science and the Production of Anglo-Indian Identity
• Chapter Five: Midnight’s Orphans: Stereotypes in Postcolonial Literature
• Chapter Six: ‘The Good Australians’: Australian Multiculturalism and Anglo-Indian Literature
• Chapter Seven: Conclusion: Bringing it all Back Home
• Bibliography
• Index