Problematic spaces, problematic races: Defining 'Europeans' in late colonial India

Women's History Review

Volumn 9, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 277-298

  Buettner, Elizabeth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 2442512150     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612020000200242     Document Type: Review

References (80)

1. Verena Martinez-Alier (1989 reprint edition) Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-century Cuba: a study of racial attitudes and sexual values in a slave society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; first published 1974, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
2. Angela Woollacott (1997) 'All This Is the Empire, I Told Myself: Australian women's voyages 'home' and the articulation of colonial whiteness, American Historical Review, 102, pp. 1003-1029;
3. Ann Laura Stoler (1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the colonial order of things (Durham: Duke University Press);
4. - (1991) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: gender, race, and morality in colonial Asia, in Micaela di Leonardo (Ed.) Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: feminist anthropology in a postmodern era, pp. 55-101 (Berkeley: University of California Press);
5. - (1992) Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, pp. 514-551;
6. - (1989) Rethinking Colonial Categories: European communities and the boundaries of rule, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31, pp. 134-161;
7. Catherine Hall (1992) White, Male and Middle Class: explorations in feminism and history (New York: Routledge);
8. Vron Ware (1992) Beyond the Pale: white women, racism, and history (London: Verso);
9. Richard Dyer (1997) White (London: Routledge);
10. David R. Roediger (1991) The Wages of Whiteness: race and the making of the American working class (London: Verso);
11. Ruth Frankenberg (1993) White Women, Race Matters: the social construction of whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
12. Ruth Frankenberg (1997) Introduction: local whitenesses, localizing whiteness, in Ruth Frankenberg (Ed.) Displacing Whiteness: essays in social and cultural criticism, p. 28 (Durham: Duke University Press).
13. Kenneth Ballhatchet (1980) Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: imperial attitudes and policies and their critics, 1793-1905 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson);
14. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, p. 44;
15. 'Carnal Knowledge', pp. 53, 76, 80-85;
16. 'Rethinking Colonial Categories', p. 148.
17. Robert J. C. Young (1995) Colonial Desire: hybridity in theory, culture and race, pp. 95, 121, 180 (London: Routledge);
18. 'Sexual Affronts', pp. 514, 536;
19. 'Carnal Knowledge', p. 60.
20. On the non-official and less affluent social sectors of the British community, see Raymond K. Renford (1987) The Non-official British in India to 1920 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
21. David Arnold (1979) European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 7, pp. 104-127;
22. - (1983) White Colonization and Labour in Nineteenth-century India, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 9, pp. 133-158;
23. on intermarriage between domiciled Europeans and Eurasians, see Lionel Caplan (1998) Cupid in Colonial and Post-colonial South India: changing 'marriage' practices among Anglo-Indians in Madras, South Asia, 21, pp. 6-7.
24. Laura Gbah Bear (1994) Miscegenations of Modernity: constructing European respectability and race in the Indian railway colony, 1857-1931, Women's History Review, 3, p. 531.
25. Arnold, 'White Colonization', p. 154.
26. John Hartigan, Jr (1997) Unpopular Culture: the case of 'white trash', Cultural Studies, 11, p. 317.
27. J. A. Baines (1893) Census of India, 1891. General Report, p. 178 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode).
28. The supposed tendency for Indian Christians to 'pass' as Anglo-Indians through adopting European dress, names and other 'modes of life' was often criticised by members of the mixed-race or domiciled European community concerned to maximise their affinities to white European culture. See, for example, 'One of the Community' (1910) 'The Euro-Asian' or 'Anglo-Indian': a Burma brochure, p. 2 (Rangoon: Mayles Standish & Co. Ltd. Electric Press).
29. Benedict Anderson (1991 revised edition) Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, pp. 164-166 (London: Verso; first published 1983, London: Verso).
30. See also Bernard S. Cohn (1987) The Census, Social Structure, and Objectification in South Asia, in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, pp. 224-254 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press);
31. Nicholas B. Dirks (1992) Castes of Mind, Representations, 37, pp. 56-78.
32. See J. H. Hutton (1933) Census of India, 1931, vol. I. India. Part I. Report, p. 426 (Delhi: Manager of Publications); emphasis added.
33. Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour, p. xvi.
34. Several works considering 'Anglo-Indian' schools which emphasise their mixed-race character include Austin A. D'Souza (1976) Anglo-Indian Education: a study of its origins and growth in Bengal up to 1960 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press);
35. Noel P. Gist & Roy Dean Wright (1973) Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a racially-mixed minority in India (Leiden: E. J. Brill);
36. Evelyn Abel (1988) The Anglo-Indian Community: survival in India (New Delhi: Chanakya);
37. Bear, 'Miscegenations of Modernity', pp. 541-542.
38. Arnold, 'European Orphans', pp. 105-114.
39. Dane Kennedy (1996) The Magic Mountains: hill stations and the British Raj, pp. 130-146 (Berkeley: University of California Press).
40. See, for example, OIOC, V/24/4432, R. Littlehailes (1929) Progress of Education in India, 1922-27: Ninth Quinquennial Review, vol. 1, p. 226 (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch).
41. Richard Blaker (n.d. [c. 1920s]) Scabby Dichson, pp. 34-35 (London: Hodder & Stoughton). Blaker is mentioned as an 'old boy' of the Bishop Cotton School, Simla in the school magazine. See Archives of the Bishop Cotton School, Simla, The Cottonian, 29 December 1932, p. 7.
42. On the diversity of European origins within the group which came to comprise the Anglo-Indian community, see Caplan, 'Cupid in Colonial', p. 5.
43. Carlo Ginzburg (1989) Clues: roots of an evidential paradigm, in Clues, Myth, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi & Anne C. Tedeschi, pp. 123-124 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
44. Blaker, Scabby Dichson, p. 81.
45. On parental dislike of 'chi chi' accents and hesitation to send children to school in India because of this 'threat', see Kennedy, Magic Mountains, pp. 141-142;
46. Jon Godden & Rumer Godden (1987 reprint edition) Two under the Indian Sun, p. 63 (New York: Beech Tree Books/William Morrow; first published 1966, London: Macmillan);
47. M. M. Kaye (1990) The Sun in the Morning: my early years in India and England, pp. 194-195 (New York: St Martin's Press);
48. Hazel Innes Craig (1990) Under the Old School Topee, p. vi (London: British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia). The 1904-05 government report cited one commentator who asserted that 'some parents object to the low class of boys found in a certain proportion of Indian schools, and to their nasty accent'.
49. Lynda Mugglestone (1995) 'Talking Proper': the rise of accent as social symbol (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
50. In 1903, 'cheechee' was defined as 'a disparaging term applied to half-castes or Eurasians . Said to be taken from chi (Fie!), A common native (South Indian) interjection of remonstrance or reproof, supposed to be much used by the class in question. The term is, however, perhaps also a kind of onomatopoeia, indicating the mincing pronunciation which often characterizes them'. See Col. Henry Yule & A. C. Burnell (1968 reprint edition), William Crooke (Ed.) Hobson-Jobson: a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, p. 186 (New Delhi: Munshiram Monoharlal; 2nd edn published 1903).
51. Craig, Under the Old School Topee, p. vi.
52. OIOC, V/26/861/1, Committee upon the Condition of Hill Schools for Europeans in Northern India, Volume I: Report (1904), pp. 17-19 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India).
53. At the turn of the century, the government departments men most commonly entered after leaving European schools included the Public Works (both the engineering and accounting divisions), Survey, Police, Opium, Salt, Customs, Telegraph, Postal, subordinate medical service, and the Secretariats. Others found work in the private sector, predominantly on the railways and in commerce, tea, jute, indigo, or mining. See ibid., pp. 14-15, Condition of Hill Schools for Europeans in Northern India, I: Report
54. Mark Naidis (1963) British Attitudes toward the Anglo-Indians, South Atlantic Quarterly, 62, pp. 418-421.
55. Mrinalini Sinha (1995) Colonial Masculinity: the 'manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali' in the late nineteenth century, pp. 105, 127-130 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
56. The 1919 Act also divided responsibility for administration at the provincial level, allowing for increased Indian involvement in areas such as education, public health, public works, and local self-government - precisely the areas where Anglo-Indians and domiciled Europeans had previously enjoyed the most advantages in securing employment. For a brief summary, see Philip Woods (1994) The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (1919): a re-assessment, South Asia, 17, pp. 31-32.
57. OIOC, P/T 592, A. N. Gordon (Ed.) (1914) About the Domiciled Community, pp. 5, 3 (Madras: Addison).
58. See OIOC, P/T 722, the Rev. O. Younghusband (n.d.) The Domiciled Community in India, p. 6 (n.p.), who described how children of Englishmen became domiciled in India when their parents could not afford to send them 'home' and educated them in India instead.
59. evidence given by the Reverend Mother Mary Gonzago, Mother Provincial of the Loreto Order in India, p. 21
60. Archives of Wynberg Allen School, Mussoorie, Prize Day 1937, The Excelsior, I, no. 2, 1937, p. 6;
61. Cambridge and Other Examination Results, The Excelsior, I, no. 4, 1939, p. 42.
62. On musical instruction, see, for example, Archives of Mount Hermon School, Darjeeling (hereafter MHSD), Singing Day, and poem, untitled, The Blue and Gold, I, no. 1, 1924, p. 11;
63. Mount Hermon, School Report, 1929, and Staff for 1929, The Blue and Gold, I, no. 5, 1929, pp. 8, 12, 37;
64. The Staff, The Blue and Gold: Queen's Hill School, I, no. 6, 1931, p. 3.
65. MHSD, Temperance Recitation Contests, The Blue and Gold, 1929, p. 21.
66. Hilde Elsberg, Physical Education, The P.C.K.'s Own, 1945, pp. 12-13.
67. See also Examination Results, The P.C.K.'s Own, 1944, pp. 14-16
68. Stoler, 'Carnal Knowledge', pp. 53, 55, 80-85;
69. Bear, 'Miscegenations of Modernity', pp. 533, 539-540;
70. Benita Parry (1998 second edition) Delusions and Discoveries: India in the British imagination, 1880-1930, p. 85 (London: Verso; first published 1972).
71. On the long-problematic nature of paid employment for 'respectable' women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, see Martha Vicinus (1985) Independent Women: work and community for single women, 1850-1920 (Chicago; University of Chicago Press);
72. Deirdre Beddoe (1989) Back to Home and Duty: women between the wars, 1918-1939 (London: Pandora);
73. Sandra Burman (Ed.) (1979) Fit Work for Women (London: Croom Helm);
74. Angela John (Ed.) (1986) Unequal Opportunities: women's employment in England, 1800-1918 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell);
75. Mary Poovey (1988) Uneven Developments: the ideological work of gender in mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
76. 'Mauser', How to Live in England on a Pension: a guide to public servants abroad and at home, p. 87 (London, 1934).
77. Gist & Wright, Marginality and Identity, pp. 65-66;
78. Naidis, 'British Attitudes', p. 420;
79. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class, p. 138.
80. Rumer Godden (1987) A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep, p. 86 (New York: Quill/William Morrow).