Copyright 2018 Debojoy Chanda
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Copyright 2018 Debojoy Chanda RACIALIZING WHITE RESIDUES: SEDITIOUS ANGLO-INDIANS AND OTHERS BY DEBOJOY CHANDA DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Anustup Basu, Chair Associate Professor Susan Koshy Associate Professor Manisha Basu Associate Professor James Hansen ii ABSTRACT My dissertation interrogates the discursive residues of the notorious colonially instituted Anglo-Indian question in decolonized India. To problematize these residues, I structure my dissertation as a fragmented genealogy of default colonial and post-colonial perceptions of Anglo-Indians as sexually and racially ‘fallen.’ Via this piecemeal genealogy, I ultimately argue that Anglo-Indians inhabit what Anglo-Indian anti-racism activist Cedric Dover would call mongrel bodies. These bodies, given their infinite and indeterminate racial intermixture, are in a state of continual flux, thus defying reduction to a question in firmly delineable terms of race. Complicating the Anglo-Indian question further, I read into some figurations of ‘fallen’ Anglo-Indians from the genealogy, retrieving traces of acts by which these figurations protested their condensation into a racial question. As I show, these figurations did so by performing the intermixed character of their mongrel bodies at levels that included biopolitics, law, gender, citizenship, literature, censorship, and language. Examining these performances of intermixture, I suggest that in the final reckoning, the unavoidable factor of racial indeterminacy should be perceived as straddling not only Anglo-Indians but all groups. The end of the decolonized Indian nation-state, I accordingly gesture, is to recognize mongrelism as an inevitable phenomenon— one that fractures closed categories of race and community. This phenomenon thus engenders a coming community of mongrels that rejects reduction into otherness in terms of ‘fallenness.’ Demonstrating the beginnings that shaped Anglo-Indians along the lines of sexual and racial fallenness, I discuss the colonial delineation of the Anglo-Indian question through readings of texts by American sociologist Edward Reuter, Anglo-Indian philanthropist Kenneth Wallace, and Cedric Dover. In doing so, I demonstrate how, after 1857, the discourse of fallenness helped imperialist historiographers and novelists such as George Dodd, George Trevelyan, James Grant, iii and Philip Meadows Taylor demarcate Anglo-Indians as a threat to English governance in India. The irony to this claim, as Anglo-Indian ‘prostitute’ Amelia Horne insinuates in her 1913 memoirs, is that ‘English’ becomes a mixed racial and governmental category in a colony. When the Anglo-Indian question spills over into decolonized India, it brings with it figurations of Anglo-Indian women ranging from prostitutes reminiscent of Horne, to prestigious teachers of English literature and the English language. I contend that in its emphasis on prestige, this spectrum intermixes and fractures discourses of Anglo-Indian fallenness. I argue this point through examinations of post-1947 texts by Bangla novelists Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay and Narendranath Mitra, Indian cartoonist Mario Miranda, Bangla filmmaker Aparna Sen, and Indian cabaret dancer Miss Shefali. The problem to the colonial-era prestige associated with English literature and the English language, I assert, is that the English literary canon paradoxically helped frame Anglo-Indians in terms of the discourses of fallenness I speak of, thus subjecting its Anglo-Indian readers to self-alienation. The end of the English canon, though, sees an Anglo- Indian authorial voice emerging into self-recognition through its calculated dilution of the sanctity of the canon. I outline this process of self-recognition through readings of texts by Aubrey Menen and Ruskin Bond, both of who were racially intermixed at multiple levels. In the final reckoning, as I discuss, Anglo-Indians constitute neither a monolithic race nor a monolithic community. There are in fact multiple Anglo-Indian communities, with their internal configurations of race and sex constantly changing. I outline this point through a reading of a 2012 televised documentary by Dhiraj Singh and a 2015 novel by Indian journalist Vikas Kumar Jha. My claim paves the way for recognizing indefinite racial and sexual intermixture as defining not only Anglo-Indian bodies but all bodies, rendering the Indian nation-state a uniform space of mongrels and mongrelism rather than that of a ‘good’ racial majority and its others. iv To My Parents Durgadas Chanda and Sumita Chanda v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: TALES OF MONGRELISM: FICTIONS OF DEGENERACY AND RACIAL INTERMIXTURE, AND EURASIANS IN INDIA……………………………………1 CHAPTER ONE: THE SEXUAL DEGENERACY OF EMPIRE: OBLITERATING THE EURASIAN IN COLONIAL INDIA……………………………………………………………43 CHAPTER TWO: SEXUAL SEDITION AND LEGAL EXCESS: FIGURATIONS OF ANGLO-INDIAN WOMEN AND THEIR CAPITAL FROM THE 1950s TO THE 1980s……………………………………………………………………………………………102 CHAPTER THREE: “I AM NOT, MYSELF, A BRAHMIN:” TOWARD AN ANGLO-INDIAN AUTHORIAL SUBJECTIVITY……………………………………………………………….147 CHAPTER FOUR: “THE ORIGINAL ANGLOS” AND OTHERS: THE ‘GENUINE’ HALF- CASTES OF MCCLUSKIEGANJ……………………………………………………………..214 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………263 1 INTRODUCTION: TALES OF MONGRELISM: FICTIONS OF DEGENERACY AND RACIAL INTERMIXTURE, AND EURASIANS IN INDIA caste: a breed, race,…orig. a ‘pure’ breed - A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language race: the descendants of a common ancestor; family; a breed, or variety - A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language genera: (from…to “generate,” to “produce”), generation, family, race or kind - First Book of Etymology degenerate: (from “genus”): to sink from one’s genus or race; to fall from a nobler state - First Book of Etymology My dissertation’s fundamental topic of inquiry is a racial discourse that the British Government produced in colonial India after 1857, and the post-colonial trajectory and avatars of this discourse. This was a discourse that, drawing upon and transposing Anglo-American associations of mixed race upon Eurasians in India, reductively codified Eurasians as racially, and therefore sexually, degenerate.1 To put it differently, the founding tenet of this codification was that being of ‘mixed’ and not of ‘pure’ European breed, Eurasians in India were tautologically ‘degenerate’ in body and mind. The molding of a Eurasian community along these lines of degeneracy was, I would hazard, significant to inaugurating discourses of racialization in India, the notion of a mixed race being central to categorizations of race overall. In the first part of my dissertation, I discuss how, until the formal decolonization of India, the British Government constructed India’s Eurasians in terms of racial degeneracy, thus 2 constituting Eurasian bodies as a ‘problem.’ ‘Fallen’ despite being partially descended from a previously privileged European stock, these hypersexual bodies of mixed race had to be carved as ‘Indian’ and a ‘problem’ to parallelly sustain conceptions of British racial supremacy in India.2 The heart of the problem, though, was that Eurasians were reluctant to be cast as a problem: being of white stock, they demanded the right to work under the British Government, and to be politically identified as citizens of the British metropole. I argue that the colonial production of Eurasians as ‘half-castes,’ that is, as a mixed race, undoes the attachment of the discourse of degeneracy to their bodies, the color ‘white’ as a signifier of some ‘unmixed’ race being itself a problematic coordinate in that whiteness is actually in a continuous state of flux. As Eurasian anti-racism activist Cedric Dover (1904-61) famously put it in a 1936 article critiquing racial segregation and miscegenation discourse in the United States of America, “The truth is…that there are no half-castes because there are no full-castes” (Know This of Race 31). Inhabiting the colonially produced fictions of racial degeneracy I allude to, Eurasians in India, from 1858, occupied what I term the space of ‘sexual sedition,’ that is, the space of a sexual outlaw as an unnamable hypersexual monstrosity—a monstrosity claimed to threaten colonial governance. The transposition of race upon sexuality indicated by the term is not opposed to the notion of racial degeneracy I speak of: discourses of racial and sexual degeneracy can seamlessly fold into each other.3 Despite, or perhaps precisely because of their molding as hypersexual figures, Eurasians in India functioned as unwilling and unwitting conduits for the conservative gendering of upper-caste Hindu households in Bengal since at least the late- nineteenth century well beyond the inception of decolonized India. In attempting to write back to the fictions of sexual sedition that Eurasians as gendered and sexualized subjects were forced to inhabit, multiple Eurasian authorial voices in the 3 twentieth century found their literary output being censored. This censorship, as I discuss, was, rather ironically, the result of these authors’ texts being deemed ‘seditious’ owing to their apparently overt sexual content. However, the discursive edifice of sexual sedition, as I have indicated previously, cannot but fall apart because the center—racial whiteness—does not hold. Questioning the ‘full-caste’