Mixed Race Studies

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.

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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

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…

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