'Land of our mothers': Home, identity, and nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India, 1919-1947

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 54, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 49-72

  Blunt, Alison ^a  

^a QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0042749774     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: 14774569     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/54.1.49     Document Type: Article

References (103)

1. Herbert Stark, Hostages to India, Calcutta, pp. 140-1.
2. Reading Collection, Mss Eur E238/55A (III), pp. 619-632: Memorandum submitted to the Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform by Lt. Col. Sir Henry Gidney. In 1919 Gidney was elected President of the Anglo-Indian Empire League, which subsequently merged with different associations to become the Anglo-Indian and Domiciled European Association, All-India and Burma, in 1926, and was renamed the All-India Anglo-Indian Association in 1942. These Associations trace their roots back to the Eurasian and Anglo-Indian Association, which was founded in 1876.
3. Review, January 1939.
4. See John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, New Haven, 1999, for more on masculinity and domesticity.
5. Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge, 1994;
6. Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History, Cambridge, 1992;
7. Anna Davin, 'Imperialism and Motherhood', History Workshop Journal 5, 1978, pp. 9-65.
8. Nupur Chaudhuri, 'Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain', in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, Bloomington, 1992;
9. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, New York, 1995;
10. Alison Blunt, 'Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886-1925', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, pp. 421-40, 1999.
11. Alison Blunt, 'Spatial Stories under Siege', Gender, Place and Culture 7, pp. 229-46, 2000;
12. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham NC, 1995;
13. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: the Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text, Minneapolis, 1993;
14. Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction, Cambridge, 1996.
15. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, New Delhi, 1993, pp. 132-3.
16. Also see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, 2000
17. and Ranajt Guha, 'Not at Home in Empire', Critical Inquiry 23, pp. 482-93.
18. Joanne Arnott, 'Speak out, for example', in, Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women, ed. Carol Camper, Toronto, 1994, pp. 264-8:266.
19. Jayne Ifekwunigwe, Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of 'Race, ' Nation and Gender, London, 1999, pp. xiv-v.
20. Velina Hasu Houston, 'Home', in Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home, ed. C. Wiley and F. Barnes, New York, 1996, pp. 276, 278.
21. Government of India Act, 1935; emphasis added.
22. Christopher Hawes, Poor Relations: the Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773-1833, Richmond, 1996.
23. Also see Lionel Caplan, Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Post-Colonial World (Oxford, 2001), for a historical and anthropological study of the Anglo-Indian community in India.
24. Frank Anthony, Britain's Betrayal in India: the Story of the Anglo-Indian Community, Bombay, 1969.
25. See Glenn D'Cruz, 'Representing Anglo-Indians: a Genealogical Study', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1999, for more on Anglo-Indian stereotypes.
26. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, p. 20;
27. also see Salman Rushdie, 'Outside the Whale', in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91, London, 1991 and Chaudhuri and Strobel, Western Women and Imperialism.
28. Guardian, 10 March 2000; Indian: Anglo-Indian: the Newsletter, April 2000.
29. Geoffrey Moorhouse, India Britannica, London, 1983, pp. 144, 189.
30. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: the British Experience, Manchester, 1990, pp. 16-17, 117.
31. Coralie Younger, Anglo-Indians: Neglected Children of the Raj, New Delhi, 1987.
32. Reginald Maher, These are the Anglo-Indians, Calcutta, 1962, p. 43.
33. Anthony, Britain's Betrayal, pp. xi, ii-iii.
34. Also see Laura Roychowdhury, The Jadu House: Intimate Histories of Anglo-India, London, 2000, which is a memoir that interweaves the encounters of its white British author with Anglo-Indians for her doctoral research with her own relationship with, and eventual marriage to, a Bengali man. This book has been criticized by a number of Anglo-Indians for dwelling on 'intimate histories' of inter-racial sex.
35. In a speech to the Central Legislative Assembly, New Delhi, in March 1945, for example, Anthony criticized the 'false, lurid, pornographic writing' of Beverley Nichols, whose book Verdict on India included a chapter on Anglo-Indians (Anthony, quoted in N. G. Jog, Judge or Judas?, Bombay, 1945, p. 201;
36. Beverley Nichols, Verdict on India, London, 1944).
37. John Masters, Bhowani Junction, London, 1954. For more on the novel, and in particular the significance of the club within it
38. see Alan Johnson, 'Club Members? Reading John Masters's Bhowani Junction' Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35, 2000, pp. 3-26.
39. Anthony (Britain's Betrayal, p. iii) writes that the authors of what he terms 'near-pornography' were often 'in fact Anglo-Indian but masquerading as British', and Masters's own Anglo-Indian origins are explored in John Clay, John Masters: a Regimented Life, London, 1992.
40. Masters, Bhowani Junction, 1954, pp. 27-8.
41. Masters, Bhowani Junction, 1954, p. 144.
42. Ghassan Hage, 'The Spatial Imaginary of National Practices: Dwelling-Domesticating/Being-Exterminating', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14, pp. 463-486: p. 473.
43. Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies, Cambridge, 1999;
44. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer and Patricia Yeager (eds), Nationalisms and Sexualities, New York, 1992;
45. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, London, 1997;
46. Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (eds), Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, Bloomington, 1998.
47. Bronwen Walter, 'Irishness, Gender and Place', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13, 1995, pp. 35-50: p. 37.
48. Hage, 'Spatial Imaginary', p. 478.
49. Hage, 'Spatial Imaginary', p. 476.
50. For more on gendered images of an Irish nation, see Catherine Nash, 'Remapping the Body/Land: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender, and Landscape in Ireland', in Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, ed. Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, New York, 1994;
51. Breda Gray and Louise Ryan, 'The Politics of Irish Identity and the Interconnections between Feminism, Nationhood, and Colonialism', in Nation, Empire, Colony, ed. Pierson and Chaudhuri, pp. 121-38.
52. Anilbaran Ray, Mother India, Calcutta, 1935, pp. 1-3.
53. Images of Mother India were not only important in the nationalist struggle, but also inspired romantic depictions of the Indian landscape by non-Indian subjects. In her controversial book-another condemned by Frank Anthony as 'pornographic' (Anthony, quoted in Jog, Judge or Judas?, p. 201)-American journalist Katherine Mayo described the sunset at the Khyber Pass in 1927: The ghost of a ghost-a thin long veil of blue, floating twice a man's height above the earth. Softly it widens, deepens, till all the air is blue and the tall tree-trunks and the stars themselves show blue behind it. Now comes its breath-a biting tang of smoke-the smoke of all the hearth-fires in all the villages. And this is the hour, this is the incense, this the invocation of Mother India, walking among the tree-trunks in the twilight, veiled in the smoke of the hearth-fires of her children, her hands outstretched in entreaty, blue stars shining in her hair.
54. (Mayo, Mother India, London, 1927, p. 68)
55. For a recent book that includes selections from Mayo's text and a critical commentary, see Mrinalina Sinha (ed.), Selections from 'Mother India', Ann Arbor, 2000.
56. Stuart Corbridge, '"The Militarization of all Hindudom?" The Bharatiya Janata Party, the Bomb, and the Political Spaces of Hindu Nationalism', Economy and Society 28, 1999, pp. 222-55: p. 234.
57. Corbridge, 'Militarization', p. 235;
58. also see Tanika Sarkar, 'Orthodoxy, Cultural Nationalism, and Hindutva Violence: an Overview of the Gender Ideology of the Hindu Right', in Nation, Empire, Colony, ed. Pierson and Chaudhuri, pp. 166-81.
59. I have written elsewhere about the ways in which various colonization schemes sought to create homelands in India for Anglo-Indians that were themselves imagined as nations. See Alison Blunt, 'Home, Identity and Hybridity: Anglo-Indians at McCluskieganj', Working Paper 010409, Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, 2001.
60. P/W 588: Memorandum relative to the Deputation of the Anglo-Indian and Domiciled Community of India and Burma to the Rt Hon. The Secretary of State for India, 30 July 1925.
61. Birkenhead Collection, Mss Eur D703/42: Proceedings at a Deputation from the Anglo-Indian Community to the Secretary of State for India, 30 July 1925.
62. C. Griffiths, Birkenhead Collection, Mss Eur D703/42.
63. Birkenhead Collection, Mss Eur D703/42.
64. Birkenhead Collection, Mss Eur D703/42.
65. Simon Collection, Mss Eur F77/106: Letter from Hon. Mr H. G. Haig, Secretary to the Government of India, to Gidney, 11 September 1928.
66. Simon Collection, Mss Eur F77/106: Memorandum submitted on behalf of the Anglo-Indian and Domiciled European Community of India for the consideration of the Chairman and Members of the Indian Statutory Commission, from Gidney 25 June 1928.
67. Simon Collection, Mss Eur F77/106: Memorandum, 25 June 1928.
68. Review, April 1931.
69. Review, April 1931.
70. Review, May 1939.
71. Jog, Judge or Judas?, p. 195.
72. Also see J. A. H. Bower, Ambition Mocked our Useful Toil: Autobiographical Sketches and Musings on Anglo-Indian Problems, Madras, 1939
73. and Owen Snell, Anglo-Indians and their Future, Bombay, 1944.
74. Review, March 1939.
75. Review, October 1944.
76. Review, May 1939.
77. Review, October 1946.
78. Anthony, Britain's Betrayal, p. 150.
79. Review, May 1947.
80. Review, March 1946.
81. Anthony, Britain's Betrayal, p. 187.
82. Review, October 1946.
83. Review, November 1947;
84. Maher, 1962, p. 100.
85. Anthony, Britain's Betrayal, p. viii.
86. Review, May 1941.
87. Review, July 1941.
88. Review, September 1941.
89. Snell, Anglo-Indians and their Future, p. 10.
90. Review, May 1939.
91. George, Politics of Home.
92. Review, December 1943.
93. Review, May 1940 and March 1943.
94. Review, July 1932.
95. Review, July 1939.
96. Review, October 1943.
97. Review, December 1943.
98. Review, May 1940.
99. Review, February and May 1944.
100. Review, December 1944 and October 1946.
101. Review, October 1947.
102. Review, May 1940 and February 1944.
103. Stark, Hostages to India.