Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India: Changing Concepts of Hybridity Across Empires (Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories) [1 ed.] 0415504295, 9780415504294

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Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India

Focusing on Portuguese, British and French colonial spaces, this book traces changing concepts of mixed-race identity in early colonial India. Starting in the sixteenth century, it discusses how the emergence of race was always shaped by affiliations based on religion, class, national identity, gender and citizenship across empires. In the context of increasing British power, the book looks at the AngloFrench tensions of the eighteenth century to consider the relationship between modernity and race-making. Arguing that different forms of modernity produced divergent categories of hybridity, it considers the impact of changing political structures on mixed-race communities. With its emphasis on specificity, the book situates current and past debates on the mixed-race experience and the politics of whiteness in broader historical and global contexts. By contributing to the understanding of race-making as an aspect of colonial governance, the book illuminates some margins of colonial India that are often lost in the shadows of the British regime. It is of interest to academics of world history, postcolonial studies, South Asian imperial history and critical mixed-race studies. Adrian Carton is at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.

Intersections: colonial and postcolonial histories Edited by Gyanendra Pandey Emory University, USA Editorial Advisory Board: Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University/Calcutta; Michael Fisher, Oberlin College; Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania; David Hardiman, University of Warwick; Ruby Lal, Emory University and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University/Bangalore. This series is concerned with three kinds of intersections (or conversations): first, across cultures and regions, an interaction that postcolonial studies have emphasized in their foregrounding of the multiple sites and multidirectional traffic involved in the making of the modern; second, across time, the conversation between a mutually constitutive past and present that occurs in different times and places; and thirdly, between colonial and postcolonial histories, which as theoretical positions have very different perspectives on the first two ‘intersections’ and the questions of intellectual enquiry and expression implied in them. These three kinds of conversations are critical to the making of any present and any history. Thus the new series provides a forum for extending our understanding of core issues of human society and its self-representation over the centuries. While focusing on Asia, the series is open to studies of other parts of the world that are sensitive to cross-cultural, cross-chronological and crosscolonial perspectives. The series invites submissions for single-authored and edited books by young as well as established scholars that challenge the limitations of inherited disciplinary, chronological and geographical boundaries, even when they focus on a single, well-bounded territory or period. 1. Subaltern Citizens and their Histories Investigations from India and the USA Edited by Gyanendra Pandey 2. Subalternity and Religion The prehistory of Dalit Empowerment in South Asia Milind Wakankar 3. Communalism and Globalization in South Asia and its Diaspora Edited by Deana Heath and Chandana Mathur 4. Subalternity and Difference Investigations from the north and the south Edited by Gyanendra Pandey 5. Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India Changing concepts of hybridity across empires Adrian Carton

Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India Changing concepts of hybridity across empires

Adrian Carton

First published 2012 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Adrian Carton The right of Adrian Carton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Carton, Adrian. Mixed-race and modernity in colonial India : changing concepts of hybridity across empires / Adrian Carton. p. cm. – (Intersections : colonial and postcolonial histories; 5) “Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada”–T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Racially-mixed people–India–History. 2. Racially-mixed people–Race identity–India–History. 3. India–Race relations. 4. India–Social conditions. 5. Cultural fusion–India–History. 6. Social change–India– History. 7. India–Colonialization. 8. Portugal–Colonies–Asia–History. 9. Great Britain–Colonies–Asia–History. 10. France–Colonies–Asia– History. I. Title. DS430.C33 2012 305.8’050054–dc23 2011043430 ISBN: 978-0-415-50429-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-12102-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

Preface

vi

Introduction

1

1

Portuguese legacies

11

2

Race and reform

28

3

Contested colonialisms

45

4

French complexions

63

5

Race and citizenship

80

Conclusion

95

Notes Bibliography Index

99 118 138

Preface

Coming from a multiracial family in an era of transnational migration and globalization is hardly a unique experience in the contemporary world where cultural complexity is both acknowledged and generally celebrated. In many ways, we are all products of multiple histories and origins and find meaning in our lives through our habitation of the critical intersections between cultures. But what it means to be mixed-race could have refreshed relevance in cosmopolitan communities where new generations now face older categorical questions and revived dilemmas about the meanings of hybridity and cultural difference that might benefit from the perspective of historical hindsight. From my own experience, to be labelled mixedrace seems to change according to where one happens to be, but its meaning is shaped by the gaze of the definer and the cultural context of the definition. The term seems to be arbitrarily applied in an altogether haphazard fashion and to have no intrinsic meaning in and of itself. The question of why some people are called ‘mixed’ but others are not is still a relevant one despite being self-evident. It speaks to the absurdity of racial classification but also to its contingencies, vulnerabilities and variations over time. What we could call the contested politics of whiteness can still be personally experienced in multicultural societies as a kind of categorical homelessness where one yearns for the badge of cultural heritage in the face of such shifting perceptions and boundaries. Despite the promises of multiculturalism and global citizenship, national categories still continue to shape and define who we are in everyday situations, However, being ‘British’ says little about the complexity of my own mixed-race experience or the violences, gaps and myths of the imperial past that give this category so many contested meanings.1 Added to this are the various ways in which mixed-race cultural memory can be tied to the imperial politics of race where shame, substitution and fantasy play various parts. In many families where interracial relationships were not acknowledged, one becomes aware of the childhood stories told to conceal the social stigma of illegitimacy or the fact that entire generations appear to be missing. The absence of birth records and marriage certificates from a colonial era where many relationships were not recognized

Preface vii adds another layer of contention. Colonial pasts in particular often become narratives cloaked in intrigue where the yearning for respectability and lineage often conceals the reality of erasure. As Laura Bear has courageously suggested, the Eurasian family past is recovered through an encounter with the violent dynamics of colonialism itself and the ways in which the desire for traceable origins shapes this eternal quest for pedigree, legitimacy and belonging.2 In this way, blind alleys and inconclusive routes about promised ancestors are romanticized or they end up being false hopes or people that you are not biologically related to. Echoing some indigenous family histories in other parts of the world, retrieving the mixedrace experience from the past can be overwhelmingly bewildering and painful. Children could be born out of wedlock, they could be looked after by relatives other than their parents, they could be taken from their families altogether, names were often anglicized, ‘native’ mothers were abandoned or excluded, white fathers were either missing or deleted. As Ashis Nandy remarked nearly 30 years ago, the experience of imperialism creates a memory marked by trauma and loss for those who were constituted by it.3 What some observers might inaccurately call an ‘identity crisis’, where multiracial pasts are considered to be implicitly fractured and unsalvageable, is for many people a daily battle to navigate around the conflicting categories of the present as well as the minefield of the past. Due to these tensions, what it means to be mixed-race can be fraught with difficulty both as a term and as an experience. It can often be a traumatic and unpredictable terrain for analysis that some might choose to simply avoid. In recent times, however, there has been a shift towards more empowering and positive portrayals of the mixed-race past that associate it not with imperial loss but with the recovery of multicultural diversity and complex notions of difference. No more than a cursory glance at a range of issues from contemporary popular culture to multicultural policy and US presidential biography suggests that an era of globalization and intercultural dialogue has ushered in a new pride about the multiracial experience. The term mixed-race itself has also been given official legitimacy in the last decade or so in countries such as the UK and US where such a category exists in population censuses and personal data forms, which require an optional declaration and recognition of ethnic origin.4 On the margins of essentialist categories based on national or racial origin, people of mixed origins were often required to make a clear-cut choice about being ‘black’ or ‘white’ or ‘Asian’ when those categories themselves did not have any meaning for the individuals concerned. The new mixed-race age is often celebrated as one of liberation against a reactionary past where racial mixing was often stigmatized as socially taboo or disreputable. As a result of this change, interracial romances and transnational lives have figured prominently in both literary and historical genres where

viii

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hybridity has become not only fashionable but symptomatic of new interdisciplinary approaches to studies of global identity. From a more critical perspective, the sudden rush to celebrate multiraciality might also be construed as gestural and superficial in terms of the current cultural and economic landscape. Notions of mixing, mélange and créolization are very much part of the vocabulary of advanced capitalist societies where this new celebration of hybridity challenges racial essentialism but risks being purely decorative. For example, some commentators have remarked skeptically on the recent and popular circulation of images of mixed-race people in advertising and the media as the new models of cosmopolitan fusion. In her work on hybridity and visual images, for example, Julie Matthews demonstrates how Eurasians have become the exotic ‘poster children of globalization’.5 A tendency to idealize hybridity could be premature and cosmetic in view of the deep social cleavages existing within current globalized economies, where the consumption of cultural fusion is more often a marker of social privilege than an indicator of racial equality. Looking at this double-edged knife, there might to be a tension between the recognition of mixed-race identity as a form of what Gyanendra Pandey has called ‘subaltern citizenship’,6 and the fact that hybrid subjectivity has also become something of a synonym for the benefits of a globalized culture. This tension between mixed-race identity as a subaltern category that needs to be reclaimed from the margins and mixed-race identity as a synonym for cosmopolitanism makes it an often vexed subject for social and cultural analysis. The aim of this book is not a nostalgic look at hybridity through the lens of contemporary globalization, nor is it an account of the tragedy and trauma of the mixed-race experience. It aims to trace some of the different concepts of hybridity that emerged across different imperial spaces in India as a way to consider the fragility and precariousness of racial categorization. It goes back to earlier periods of empire building from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries to look at the ways in which mixed categories were only meaningful in specific situational contexts. In this sense, it wants to see our contemporary angst about hybridity in globalized societies through the lens of past articulations. This sort of approach seems timely since the model of hybridity that has become part of the vernacular of our increasingly more diverse societies often lacks detailed contextualization or an awareness of alternative ways of marking cultural difference that might call into question the legitimacy of ‘race’ itself. Due to a variety of factors, this book has taken too long to emerge and its journey has been circuitous to say the least. Many debts have been made along the way and space is too short here to list every single gesture of assistance, support and interest because there have been so many. The project started its early life as a PhD dissertation, completed in 2002, which was made possible through the generosity of travelling

Preface

ix

scholarships and grants given to me by the Department of History at the University of Sydney. I am very grateful for this support, without which the original research could never have been done. Above all, I want to thank Jim Masselos for his guidance as the principal supervisor of the original project. I am very grateful for his patience, calm scholarly direction and extraordinarily broad historical expertise. My dissertation examiners also provided invaluable peer advice and constructive comments. Thanks to Robert Aldrich, Judith Brown and Dipesh Chakrabarty for gently prompting me to think differently about some of the material. Thanks also to Tim Allender, Jill Barnes, Alison Bashford, Saliha Belmessous, Marina Bollinger, the late Iain Cameron, Frances Clarke, Clare Corbould, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Stephen Garton, Judith Keene, Cindy McCreery, Ali Moore, Tony Moore, Kirsten McKenzie, Dirk Moses, Soumyendra Mukherjee, Geoff Oddie, Stephen Robertson, Penny Russell, Glenda Sluga, Yuri Takahashi, Elise Tipton and Anne Vidal whose ideas, interest and feedback were always generous and stimulating. This project has also accrued other significant institutional debts. At Macquarie University, I learnt a great deal about historiography, global frameworks and the influence of postcolonial and feminist scholarship largely due to the influence and input of Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Jill Roe, Mary Spongberg and Angela Woollacott. Thanks also to Michelle Arrow, Robyn Dowling, Peter Edwell, Andrew Gillett, Bridget GriffenFoley, Mark Hearn, Trevor McLaughlin, George Parsons, Carroll Pursell, Kalpana Ram, Michael Roberts, Christie Slade, Karin Speedy, Hsu-Ming Teo and Duncan Waterson for their feedback and interest at various points. I felt especially invigorated by the collegial and engaging conversations that I had with Alison Holland and Goldie Osuri about the construction of racial difference. Engaging with indigenous studies and cultural studies helped me to think through my own work from different critical perspectives. I was also very lucky to receive the benefits of an innovative and interdisciplinary environment at UWS, where much research is shaped by questions pertaining to the nature of globalization, transnational identity and intercultural dialogue. Thanks to Kay Anderson, James Avarnitakis, Mridula Chakraborty, Chris Fleming, Emilian Kavalski, Magdalena Kavalski-Zolkos, Nikolas Kompridis, Dave McInness, Brett Neilsen, Greg Noble, Cristina Rocha, Tim Rowse, Judith Snodgrass and Anna Yeatman, for creating an environment for thinking about cultural complexity in new and interesting ways. Above all, however, heartfelt thanks to Ien Ang who took an early interest in my topic and encouraged me to take a critically interdisciplinary approach to it. I felt privileged to have had the opportunity to talk with her about some aspects of this research. Thanks to all the generous colleagues and teachers who spent the time to read earlier drafts of articles, responded to conference or colloquium

x

Preface

papers or offered inspiration, constructive feedback and intellectual encouragement along the way: Robert Aldrich, Tony Ballantyne, Alison Blunt, Ian Britain, Barbara Brookes, Lawrence Brown, Elizabeth Buettner, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Nilanjana Deb, Jean Deloche, Fritz Edelmayer, Penny Edwards, Kat Ellinghaus, Harald Fischer-Tiné, Debjani Ganguli, Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase, Margarete Grandner, Tapati Gupta, Marilyn Lake, Jean-Marie Lafont, Vera Mackie, Rochona Majumdar, Pat Manning, Adam McKeown, Donna Merwick, Rila Mukherjee, Ajit Neogy, Miles Ogborn, Anjali Roy, Mizutani Satoshi, Chips Sowerwine, Patrick Wolfe and Angela Woollacott. Pat Grimshaw taught so many of us about the significance of changing historical concepts with an enormous amount of insight, passion and energy. Her lectures and classes remain a source of inspiration for an entire generation who studied undergraduate history at the University of Melbourne, who, like me, were deeply touched and enriched by the experience. I am especially grateful to Routledge for their support and encouragement of this project and special thanks to Dorothea Schaefter and Jillian Morrison for their assistance and professional support during the editorial process. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their advice and comments and to the Intersections series editor Gyanendra Pandey for his expertise and guidance. I have attempted to address all of their points but take responsibility for any that I may have overlooked. I have also been fortunate to have had the time and the opportunity to test some of the research for this book and I am grateful for the permission to reproduce some of the material: ‘Hanging On British Coat-tails: Women’s Pleas, Cultural Difference and Liminal Worlds’, in History Australia 1, no. 2, 2004, 229–44. Copyright 2004 by the Australian Historical Association. Used with the permission of History Australia on behalf of the AHA. ‘Faire and Well-Formed: Portuguese Eurasian Women and Symbolic Whiteness in Early Colonial India’, in A. Burton and T. Ballantyne (eds), Moving Subjects: Mobility, Intimacy and Gender in a Global Age of Empire, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, pp. 281–309. Copyright 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with the permission of the University of Illinois Press. ‘Shades of Fraternity: Créolization and the Making of Citizenship in French India, 1790–92’, in French Historical Studies 31, no. 4, Fall 2008, 581–607. Copyright 2003 by the Society of French Historical Studies. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Duke University Press. Thanks to my friends and family for putting up with the silent burden of an unfinished project interrupted by so many distractions and other challenging personal circumstances where I was fortunate to receive much support. I want to take the opportunity to thank Jodie Butler, San Chatterjee, David Cooper, Lorraine Desai, Neal Drinnan, Lee Dunbar, Jessica Lopez, Efrem Manaffrey, Marg Pirotta, Nayantara Pothen, Pauline

Preface xi Rajaraman, Bernie Riordan, Gabi Rosenstreich, Sue Sacker, Lorraine Shannon, Peter Stephens, Peter Sternhell, Jane Wallace and Meryl Wilson for reasons that they know well. Sometimes there is a level of gratitude so great that words don’t seem to be adequate. I thank Andrew for being there. This book is dedicated to you with much love and appreciation.

Introduction

Maria Texeira was a widow who lived in the town of Chandernagore, a small French colony about 24 miles from Calcutta on the banks of the Hooghly river. She first emerges in the colonial archives of Bengal in the late 1770s where her letters act as a window into the world of those who did not fit neatly within national, cultural and racial categories. Her deceased husband was the former notary of the settlement, a high-ranking French colonial official who was the chief registrar responsible for all deeds and testaments. She identified as a Catholic woman, loyal to the French flag and by all accounts she was independently wealthy before marriage. Living in la ville blanche, or the white town, she was a descendant of previous generations of interracial relationships between local women and the Portuguese settlers who started to make Bengal their home in the early 1500s. When French men established this outpost in 1673, they arrived to find Portuguese Eurasian women already living in the area and, in the absence of large numbers of accompanying white women from France, these women became preferred Catholic wives. As a French subject, she enjoyed the relatively privileged status as a European woman in colonial society despite never having been to Europe. The American Revolutionary War seems a world away from the life of Maria Texeira but it was interwoven with it as part of a wider frame. In the context of late eighteenth-century global history, Peter Marshall argues that the decline of British power in America and the making of the British Empire in India were intimately entangled. They were interconnected events that are better understood as part of the same analytical field.1 The Declaration of American Independence in 1776 and the formal recognition of the United States by the British in 1783 occurs in the same period as the formal consolidation of British territorial sovereignty in India with the Regulating Act of 1773 and the India Act of 1784.2 In early 1778, France entered the American War on the side of the revolutionaries, thus initiating another global stand-off between the two powers. As a French subject, Maria Texeria was caught up in this web of seemingly distant connections since Chandernagore was occupied by the British during times of Anglo-French war, leading to the imprisonment or

2

Introduction

expulsion of able-bodied Frenchmen and the seizure of French trade and communications. It was during one of these periods of occupation that Maria wrote two protest letters, dated 1 October 1779 and 29 May 1780, addressed to the British authorities at Calcutta. She explained how the loss of her husband had caused her to be in a state of distress with no independent support to care for her four-year-old son. In her letter, she expressed her gratitude to the British for allowing her to remain in the town of her birth, but asserted that she should also be entitled to financial support on the same basis as that given to other European widows.3 The subtext of her plea spoke to an inherent clash of perceptions since she went to great pains to explain that she was a European and not a ‘native’ woman. Drawing on concepts of social justice, clemency and benevolence, she called on the British to grant her a pension because she was a political and economic hostage in her own home due to the circumstances of war. The letters of Maria Texeira were part of a wave of similar pleas from widows and stranded women who spoke out against their plight in occupied Chandernagore. Hanging on the coat-tails of this far-flung remnant of the French Empire in Asia, and yet dependent on the mercy of British generosity to survive, these letters speak of cultural identities and of political experiences that seem to go against the grain of singular and monolithic historical interpretations of imperialism with their revelation of transnational lives and complicated loyalties. The distinction between European and ‘native’ was indefinite and often fuzzy in a setting that was further blurred by the fact that the French themselves were often under British imperial subjection. In reality, colonial categories were highly complex due to these political circumstances where the boundaries of race, culture and nation did not map neatly into binary frameworks. Cultural historians have often considered the lens of the individual life narrative to look at these kinds of imperial tensions through the relationship between biography, geographical mobility and global history.4 This work does not follow this particular approach but, instead, treats these letters as a discursive window into the complex landscape of globalization, racial hybridity and inter-imperial relations. This gives us the context for understanding the marking of race according to what Ann Stoler has called different ‘grids of intelligibility’.5 While Stoler looks at these different grids according to axes of class, gender and citizenship from a transnational perspective, it might also be interesting to consider how far religion also played a significant role in the early modern period and how these different grids were often operating across empires in the same geographical location.6 In contrast to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, late eighteenthcentury colonial India is an often neglected place for considering the construction and marking of racial difference. Kenneth Ballhatchet and Peter Robb’s pathbreaking work on processes of racialization in south Asia set the scene for new research on the production of racial difference as a function

Introduction

3

of imperial ideology, on the one hand, and the existence of racial ideas as a function of caste ideology on the other.7 This work is located in the former canon and the scope of this research is concerned with the production of racial difference in European settlements in colonial India and its relationship to structures of colonial governance. However, it is a response to the call for more research on the longue durée shifts and developments in the production of race in earlier phases of imperialism.8 This work rises to the challenge but from a different angle. Much recent scholarship has stressed the global circulation of meanings of race and, indeed, the sweeping transnational connections between them.9 Much less has been said about the global divergences that differentiate meanings of race and how these were uneven, entangled and contingent. The aim of this book is to consider the imperial differences between these meanings of race as well as their connections. More significantly, perhaps, it wishes to do so by thinking through a relationship between these differences and specific expressions of modernity. This is particularly relevant in the south Asian context. At the crossroads of dramatic changes in the struggle for world power in the period after the Peace of Paris in 1763,10 India was a site of intense political struggle where notions of modernity were inextricably interwoven with the project of imperial expansion.11 The decades that followed comprised of enormous change on a global scale: the American and French revolutions, the establishment of European settlement in Australia and the consolidation of British territorial sovereignty in India. In this global context, military and economic expansion created the conditions for more modern forms of imperialistic enterprise where the symbols and practices of Western modernity were selectively transplanted, reinterpreted and refashioned in settings far from where they were originally intended to have relevance. While the notion of a universal project of European modernity is unsustainable, the question of what replaces this monolithic and Eurocentric model is far from resolved. Forms of modernity were also independently forged in Asia outside of European influence, as Janet Abu-Lughod amongst others has convincingly argued.12 In the European context, modernity has different expressions and contested epochs with no ideal form but a range of plural possibilities, which often makes rigorous analysis difficult. This study is interested in those expressions of modernity that emerged as a result of early colonial interventions and how the project of imperialism and the project of modernity were mutually implicated. In this spirit, Dipesh Chakrabarty has urged historians to write into the history of modernity ‘the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it’.13 As a modest contribution to that pursuit, this book wants to expand upon the notion of modernity by emphasizing that there were competing imperial projects at play within colonial India itself and each had its own internal ambiguities and tensions.14 This is also a call to look at the different histories that encode these different

4

Introduction

imperial projects. Indeed, as Surabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube have pointed out, we ‘have seen vigorous challenges to univocal conceptions of universal history under the terms of modernity’.15 These scholarly insights might also enable historians to think through how imperial projects and their forms of governance were underscored by different expressions of modernity that were not part of a universal historical narrative. Overseas colonies were often laboratories where new social categories and political structures were produced by colonial realities rather than by metropolitan orders.16 In this way, cultural and historical difference shaped the ways in which modern European institutions and concepts were actively renegotiated and contested from below by ordinary people in the colonies, whose actions were motivated by local conditions. As a result, one of the primary aims of transnational historians and historians of the ‘new imperial history’ has been, in the words of Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, ‘to demarcate the boundaries of the colonizers’.17 In the context of early colonial India, this is particularly apt since there were competing imperial projects at play – Portuguese, Dutch, French, English and Danish – whose forms of governance varied widely from strictly commercial enterprise to serious territorial sovereignty. Merely to ‘demarcate’, however, does not seem enough without thinking through how these specific sovereignties spoke to different philosophies of modernity. Mixed-race identity sits at the interface of this vital intersection between global imperial relations and modernity, where the notion of cultural difference and the idea of race were in a constant state of dialogue. In her critique of hybrid identity in contemporary Western society, Ien Ang has argued that globalization facilitates a profound hybridization of cultures where the notion of difference is radically recontextualized.18 Looking to the period from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, this insight on the cultural condition of the present also has relevance for the past, since what Timothy Mitchell calls ‘modern forms of self-hood’19 emerged in colonial situations where the boundaries of what it meant to be European were remapped in ways that were different to the construction of European identity in the metropole. As Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah Thomas argue, globalization cannot be fully grasped unless there is a ‘deep understanding of the historically specific and dynamic ways in which race has both constituted and been constituted by global transformations’.20 Having established these connections, this work still faces the enduring problem of terminology and classification. Is mixed-race an appropriate notion to use? Something of a philosophical misnomer, the term is a problematic one for historians since it reifies and privileges the very concept it seeks to undo. Clumsy, awkward and often anachronistic, the term tends to assume the a priori existence of race as a natural given rather than as a process of discursive construction. In fact, the term has the potential to re-naturalize racial difference and reinstate it as a primary identifier. Alternatively, by undermining any notion of pure or fixed notions of race,

Introduction

5

the term mixed-race can also be seen to offer a vision of transcendence that signifies the impossibility of fixed categories. Jayne Ifekwunigwe argues that although the French idea of métissage de-privileges the notion of race as a primary identifier (and is arguably a better term to use), the term mixed-race still offers a descriptive designation that is widely understood largely due to its widespread use in the English vernacular where it has become part of everyday cultural discourse.21 David Parker and Miri Song also stress that the term mixed-race is now widely recognized as part of the vocabulary of social policy where the needs of multiracial families are being addressed on a practical level.22 As part of a growing body of work in critical mixed-race studies, this book retains the term for this reason but for stylistic consistency and convenience, inverted commas are not used every time the terms ‘race’ or ‘mixed-race’ appear. It should be assumed that there is an implicit rejection of race as a term of human analytical differentiation, and a corresponding urgency in this study to demonstrate its arbitrariness and contingency. Echoing some of the thoughts presented in the preface, the historical question might alternatively become ‘how does one become a mixed-race subject when all human beings are ultimately the product of the mixing of cultures, races and national origins?’ If one becomes mixed-race, then under what conditions does this occur? The idea of mixed-race identity as a process of construction is central to questions such as these and they inevitably lead to a discussion about the significance of the very term ‘hybridity’ and its relevance to this study. As a notion employed to convey the process of racial mixing, hybridity has its own vexed past but it has been re-appropriated by postcolonial critics in the last 20 years or so to become a useful, if not controversial, term of cultural analysis. It offers an alternative to fixed notions of race based on natural difference and proposes instead a model of ‘in betweeness’, which seems apt for thinking through the complexities of the multiracial experience. As Robert Young argues, the term hybridity always ‘suggests the impossibility of essentialism’.23 However, the term has also been universalized in recent years and applied to a wide variety of situations across disciplines to become a somewhat vague and generic term for all forms of fusion and mixing.24 In this sense, there are significant ways in which a model of hybridity – developed in a cultural theory milieu – invites revision for a historical study such as this one. In his now classical formulation of hybridity, Homi Bhabha suggests that the notion of a ‘third space’ offers a way to conceive of cultural phenomena and cultural categories as having no primordial unity or fixity.25 Like culture, race is always in a state of liminal mixedness and flux where mixed-race individuals inhabit the shaded intersections of a metaphorical Venn diagram. One of the shortcomings of this model, as Suki Ali notes, is that not all mixed-race individuals inhabit this idealized area but their experiences are multi-faceted and multidimensional depending on the weight of other forms of difference.26 There is

6

Introduction

also a tendency with this model to fall back into a cultural and racial binarism that seems self-referential. Another limitation is that such a notion can potentially cut across time and space without attention to specific circumstances or the ways in which interracial relationships are actually recorded in the archives.27 As a result the concept of the ‘third space’ can seem naive and, in the words of Kathryne Mitchell, such a notion of hybridity can purport to be beyond the ‘situated practices of place’ and the ‘lived experience of history’.28 Getting history back into a situated model of hybridity therefore seems like an important mission in a study that needs to understand how the language of mixedness was articulated in different colonial situations. Perhaps one of the most anxious concerns of colonial authorities was the presence of a racially mixed population where the distinction between colonizer and colonized was often unclear and ambiguous. Mixed-race populations in colonial societies were often marginal in real terms, but they were discursively far more important in stimulating historical processes than their numbers might suggest. In particular, fears about the impact of inter-racial marriage to the constitution of a unified European subject in isolated colonial outposts often led to panic about moral decay and degeneration, but it was also tolerated and even encouraged depending on the place of race in specific cosmologies of cultural difference. But the key question remains, how was the term mixed-race understood, if at all, across different imperial cultures? In the context of colonial India, this question is often eclipsed due to the fact that in the annals of imperial historiography hybridity is more often seen only through the lens of British imperial historiography. This seems curious since Kenneth Ballhatchet remarked as early as 1980 that the position of the Eurasians in British India ‘was inferior to that of their counterparts in territories under the rule of other colonial powers’.29 The history of mixed-race relationships and the emergence of a Eurasian community in British India can be seen in the existing historiography as having three broad streams. The first is the history of what came to be known as the Anglo-Indian community.30 This historical trajectory is concerned with the emergence of a distinctive British Eurasian community in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as portrayed by scholars such as Christopher Hawes, and the ways in which British patriarchal descent framed the subsequent development of a mixed-race community in the twentieth century and beyond.31 The genre of community history has also made a significant contribution to the historical reclamation of the Anglo-Indians, seeing them as a traumatized minority in British India who were not fully accepted by the British due to their Indian origin and skin colour, yet their survival rested on British patronage.32 The emergence of the Eurasian as an ontological category in British India came to represent not only a fragile status determined by political expediency but also a precarious existence that was subject to often dramatic exclusions.

Introduction

7

Other studies turn towards a pre-Raj era where relationships across the racial divide between British men and Indian women were common and apparently attracted little social and racial prejudice. The second trend might be called the genre of interracial romance. William Dalrymple has argued that interracial liaisons in the upper levels of both British and Indian society were based on a sense of shared elite status that largely outweighed the concern for racial difference at certain moments. This approach can be construed as a celebration of cosmopolitanism and a presumed pre-racial past.33 The third approach sees the significant postcolonial and feminist approaches of Indrani Chatterjee and Durba Ghosh who both argue in different ways against any nostalgic depiction of inter-racial harmony.34 They both bring to our attention the complex and often unequal power relations that underscored such unions. For example, Chatterjee reminds us that many interracial relationships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not intimate but exploitative. ‘Native’ women were often treated as sexual objects, as concubines or as temporary wives who could be exchanged as commodities.35 Nevertheless, Indian women were not merely passive players and the objects of exploitation. In her analysis, Ghosh calls into question the stereotype of the passive ‘native woman’ in relationships with British men and questions their invisibility. She sheds new light on the historiography of interracial sexuality by resurrecting the ‘native’ partners of British men as active historical actors in their own right who were pivotal in the building of empire and the reconstruction of the colonial family.36 While these narratives take very different approaches, many historians have often presented a critique of hybridity in colonial India as the sovereign preserve of British imperialism. Sometimes applied as a universal descriptive category across time periods and colonial spaces, the term Anglo-Indian reflects this restrictive view where other forms of hybridity are often lost in the shadows of the British experience. This work revisits this earlier preRaj period but it does so to historicize hybridity in early colonial India in a wider frame where other imperialisms may have been eclipsed by a narrative of British triumphalism.37 It also aims to differ from the rich and significant histories of the British Eurasian community by considering the experience of mixed-race populations under other European imperial powers. This is to return to the central thesis about the significance of multiple modernities. During the period of early modern globalization, different expressions of modernity were produced in multiple imperial sites and often under contingent historical conditions. What has often been understated in many transnational perspectives on the making of race is that globalizations were multiple, messy and uneven. Different imperial projects were in contest with each other, inevitably producing contested racial categorizations. The existence of terms such as mestiço, métis, Eurasian and topas in India speaks to contested notions of hybridity depending on language, nation and imperial location.38

8

Introduction

The French presence in India is a significant but surprisingly neglected part of the conversation about hybridity despite its entanglement with British imperial manoeuvres.39 British reactions and policies were often articulated in reaction to the French, thus creating the impetus for the eventual pursuit of territorial sovereignty. Built on the legacy of AngloFrench rivalry, the sudden rise of British territorial expansion was in many respects a knee-jerk reaction to real or imagined French motives. While France abandoned any formal policy of securing an empire in India after 1760, British imperial policy was framed in the global context of Anglo-French competition for markets and resources. French colonies were nevertheless a feature of the Indian landscape throughout the British period but they also outlasted the Raj with the final de jure French withdrawal from independent India not completed until 1962.40 Yet, French colonialism in India has not received the same measure of scholarly attention as British colonialism despite its enduring presence and historical significance. While they were often discounted as lost causes or as antiquated curiosities, the five French settlements on the subcontinent were considered to be political threats to British colonial security in times of Anglo-French conflict, and they continued to be strategic satellites of French influence thereafter. More recently, some historians have successfully adopted the methodological tools of whiteness studies to critically analyse colonial identity as a situated process that is both contested and fragile.41 These new directions have enabled scholars to see the process of racialization itself as a site of historical struggle where, in the words of Kay Anderson, ‘situated accounts of its negotiations’42 can reveal both specificity and contingency. In 1932, the historian Percival Spear commented rather boldly that the French in India had an altogether more relaxed and tolerant attitude towards the status of mixed-race populations to the point where colour was less of an issue in the French settlements than it was in the British settlements.43 Was there such a clear-cut divergence between British and French perceptions of mixed-race people in India at this critical juncture in the emergence of imperial modernity? This book does not purport to answer this question definitively but rather to think through how whiteness was perceived across empires where Eurasians were subjected to conflicting and often contradictory classifications.44 In the words of Joseph Pugliese, it hopes to offer a more ‘historically situated’ and ‘discursively embodied’ account of what whiteness actually means across different geopolitical locations.45 While Europe’s classical period of modernity might be considered the Age of Revolutions, it might possibly be short sighted to see this as the only period in which colonialism constituted new forms of modern subjectivity. Felicity Nussbaum has already reminded us to consider a longue durée perspective on the eighteenth century, which stretches conventional timelines of modernity.46 In her research on colonial Peru, Irene Silverblatt observes that colonialism’s governing principles were launched onto the world scene during the first wave of European expansion in the sixteenth century,

Introduction

9

heralded by Spanish and Portuguese incursions.47 This book also goes back much further than the eighteenth century to demonstrate the role of religion in the making of modern colonial subjects. In Chapter 1, the construction of mixed-race identity under Portuguese imperialism in the period of the sixteenth century is considered for this reason. During this period of early globalization, the transformative potential of Catholic conversion to produce allied subjects meant that religious distinctions were powerful markers of cultural difference. The moral acceptance of interracial marriage was highly dependent on faith and the adoption of a Christian identity. Subsequent relationships between Portuguese Eurasian women and English settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also provide examples of the significant role of religion in the construction of symbolic whiteness. Chapter 2 looks more closely at the emergence of race in British India and how this affected the treatment and categorization of Eurasians. For the British, the reform of the East India Company and the formal acquisition of political sovereignty was a defining moment in the staging of a particular strain of imperial modernity. The subsequent emergence of the British colonial state marks the development of regulated structures of local governance. It is in this broader political context that race emerges as a significant modus operandi of imperial power, where the physical and social separation of ‘natives’ from Europeans was underscored by three main ideological processes that accompanied the formal acquisition of sovereignty: the justification of imperial occupation due to the evils of ‘native despotism’, the racialization of the East India Company hierarchy through the concept of ‘public virtue’ and the eventual exclusion of Eurasians from the public sphere. In Chapter 3, the French presence in India is introduced as a vital part of this historical landscape. I look at the political, economic and philosophical cornerstones of the French presence to get some sense of the similarities with, and the differences from, British imperial motives. The seemingly insignificant settlement of Chandernagore in Bengal became an important strategic stronghold for the French and, indeed, for the Franco-Indian alliance that was to eventually lose to the East India Company at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The settlement took on great symbolic importance as a site around which the global politics of the Anglo-French wars dovetailed with the formal acquisition of British political sovereignty. Through trade embargoes, diplomatic interferences, and the destruction of perceived armaments, Chandernagore continued to be regarded as an enduring threat. In political terms, the French had an altogether different philosophical attitude towards India and their imperial role. In this sense, there developed a divergent form of modernity in French India under the ancien régime that was at odds with the modernity of racialized reform in British India. This had implications for the construction of identity as illustrated in Chapter 4 where I look at the various meanings of whiteness and cultural difference in Chandernagore. While the emergence of the Eurasian

10

Introduction

community in British India has dominated our historical understanding of the mixed-race experience, what was the status of the métis and other mixed-race populations in French settlements? Using population records and other primary records, I consider how access to capital, identification with the Catholic church, gender and patriarchal attachments to French fathers determined the ways in which whiteness was claimed by racially ambiguous groups. On the surface, a seemingly different syntax and grammar of cultural difference operated in French India compared to the increasing racialization of the colonial state in British India. While religion, gender and social class framed the ways in which cultural differences between white and black were made intelligible, race also emerged at critical moments to override those other distinctions in often ambiguous and unclear ways. A more pronounced marking of race in French India came with the arrival of a rather more dramatic expression of modernity. The effect of the French revolution at home led to an intense debate about the definition of citizenship in the colonies where French subjects were often of mixedracial origins. While the British approach to the management of mixed-race populations arose through the formal acquisition of political sovereignty, French approaches to race arose through the question of citizenship eligibility. At a critical juncture where Eurasians in British India were regarded as ‘natives’, and lost their status as Europeans, I look at the parallel status of the métis in French India in relation to their eligibility for citizenship. This also includes looking at the particular struggles of the topas community to reveal how they fared compared to the métis. As revealed in their petition of 1790, the discrimination faced by the topas community acts, in many ways, as a watershed moment in this analysis since it reveals a clear change in the definition of what it meant to be white. It is the hope that these chapters might provide a multi-layered and situational perspective on the relationship between mixed-race identity and modernity. While this is not a biographical study of the life of Maria Texeira or an attempt to trace the impact of her extraordinary petitions, it is a study that takes inspiration from the historical and cultural space that she inhabited in eighteenth-century India. It aims to unpack the various narratives that make her situation invite closer historical contextualization. In this way, this introductory scenario can be seen as an intersection where different colonial histories were in conversation with each other, and where unstable and divergent categorizations of race spoke to changing concepts of hybridity in the past. These might provide some background to thinking about the changing face of our increasingly more complex and cosmopolitan societies in the present.

1

Portuguese legacies

In The Lusiad, Luis de Camoens describes how the Greek gods helped the Portuguese to acquire their Indian colonies in a spectacular narrative that was a combination of myth, legend and travel account. Published in Lisbon in 1572 and regarded as one of the great works of Portuguese literature, overseas conquests figure prominently in this literary epic since global exploration and the possession of new lands had become, by this time, intimately intertwined with national self-esteem.1 The so-called ‘age of discovery’ at the end of the fifteenth century transformed European spatial perspectives with the opening of the Atlantic ocean and new maritime routes to Asia, bringing Europe in closer proximity to formerly distant and lucrative commercial networks.2 The establishment of a direct maritime link between Portugal and India saw the permanent settlement of Portuguese soldiers, merchants and clerics with the colonization of Goa in 1510. This age of exploration and colonization inevitably led to the publication of travel mythologies that attempted to convey to a transfixed European public the ‘discovery’ of new lands, peoples and fauna. In this work, where human differences emerge as a source of fear and curiosity, the subject of interracial relationships between Portuguese men and Indian women is given a vivid and surreal illustration. He tells the story of ‘An Indian Woman married to a Portuguese [who] was delivered at Bardes of a Monster with Two Heads and Teeth, the Ears Like a Monkey, on the forehead an Excrescency of Flesh like a Horn, the Legs sojoyned they looked like one, leaping out of the Midwife’s hands, it seized a Black [sic] and bit out a piece of her flesh’.3 The mixed-race child of such a union is deliberately portrayed by de Camoens as a threatening semi-demonic monster. This fantastic and grotesque image of bestial horror was deployed to give the impression that straying beyond the racial contours of the European body was tantamount to transgressing the biological border of the human species. It is an image anchored in the fear of unknown human differences that were outside of recognized taxonomies. These semi-demonic images of mixed-race children were more likely to be literary devices designed to tantalize and to entertain a market hungry for tales of the strange and the exotic rather than reflections of moral repugnance.

12

Portuguese legacies

Far-off foreign lands were often depicted as landscapes populated by dragons, monsters and semi-human hybrids where the borders of what it meant to be ‘human’ were being challenged by exploration to the very edges of known human consciousness to discover people who were mythical in their perceived strangeness. As Stephen Greenblatt has famously suggested, gross exaggerations of otherness were an integral part of the traveller’s repertoire during this era of exploration.4 Designed to arouse the wonder and awe of finding new peoples and customs, images of monstrosity served to draw a boundary between civilization and internal safety on the one hand and barbarism and external danger on the other.5 Of course, there was something deliberately ‘barbaric’ about this graphic description, which served to position de Camoens and the Portuguese colonizers as the bearers of Christian modernity in these new savage, morally rapacious and disordered environments. This mock fantasy of outrage about the horrors of miscegenation, however, stood in contrast to the realities of everyday colonial life. Interracial relationships were not spectacular or debauched but common and necessary. As in other colonial outposts, European men formed sexual relationships with local women as part of the culture of permanent settlement. If anything de Camoens’ literary fantasy also speaks to a symbolic world where gender and sexuality act as metaphors for the act of colonization. Men who conquered the land saw it as their natural right to conquer the flora, fauna and people on it and this was inevitably extended to what was perceived as the natural right to sexual conquest. The imperial canon in numerous global contexts provides us with ample evidence to suggest that the European male encounter with new lands was often made culturally intelligible as a sexual encounter with an indigenous woman. In a patriarchal world supported in principle by church and state, territorial possession and sexual possession were the twin prerogatives of imperial male power. Interracial relationships were also important for the mission of the Catholic Church and the spiritual aims of colonization. This merging of transcontinental exploration with interracial sexuality was the inevitable political corollary of economic conquest, since marriage with ‘native women’ necessitated the important objective of Catholic conversion. In India, as in Brazil and places such as Mozambique and Angola, interracial unions were sanctioned by the Portuguese state and church in the early period of imperial conquest, where commercial sustainability and social survival relied heavily on forming alliances with local people who could act as intermediaries, interpreters and cultural brokers.6 The sexual politics of interracial liaison building in the private sphere were, therefore, as politically important as the military and economic manoeuvring in the public sphere.7 Echoing the North American context, where the sites of interracial sexual intimacy were strategically important levers for the consolidation of colonial governance, this ‘middle ground’ of Portuguese India was, to use Richard White’s term, far from savage and monstrous.8

Portuguese legacies

13

The establishment of permanent colonies in India by Portuguese men and the general absence of European women meant that interracial sexual relationships were commonplace. Portuguese women tended to be discouraged from accompanying men to India due to the length of the voyage, the high mortality rates in transit, the subsequent danger of disease and the harshness of the climate after arrival. Few white Portuguese women went out to India compared to men.9 There were habitual attempts by the Portuguese authorities to provide assisted passages for female orphans and other single women to address the imbalanced gender ratio in Goa throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the overall numbers have been the subject of much scholarly debate. The research conducted by the historian Germano Correia in the 1940s and 1950s claims that more white women left Portugal for the Indian colonies than has previously been acknowledged, but his population estimates taken from the Goan censuses are generally race blind and they assume that all Portuguese females were originally from Portugal or else that they were the children of white Portuguese women.10 It is far more likely that the numbers of white Portuguese women coming to India directly from Portugal in this period were never more than a few thousand even with the support of assisted passages.11 Considering that the Portuguese tended to perceive overseas exploration, military conquest and ecclesiastical mission as different elements of a common endeavour, the men who ventured out to India from Portugal were either priests, men in the service of the King or unmarried soldiers. Early European observers in the sixteenth century, such as the Dutch traveller Jan Huygen van Linschoten, often commented on the patriarchal structure of colonial Goa and confirmed the negligible numbers of white women in the Portuguese settlements.12 Historians Michael Pearson and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have emphasized that marriages between Portuguese settlers and Indian women were actively promoted as a tool of colonization from the earliest days of the viceroyalty of Goa.13 As Michael Pearson notes, the population figures for Goa in 1540 reveal the existence of the mixed-race children of Portuguese men and converted Indian women who were beginning to refashion the cultural and racial fabric of colonial Portuguese society.14 Marriages between Portuguese men and Indian women were regulated by the Catholic Church within the moral and political frameworks of early modern colonization. Apart from clear advantages for the church, marriage was also a lucrative proposition for incoming male settlers from Portugal. Men who married and settled in Goa, known as casados, were exempt from military duties, their civilian status giving them the freedom to devote their time to family life. Most of the ‘native’ women who entered into unions with the Portuguese in Goa were usually drawn from marginal groups such as widows and bailhadeiras or Nautch-girls, and they were also more likely to have converted to Catholicism as a means of improving their social status.

14

Portuguese legacies

The making of new Catholic subjects was seen to be one of the core objectives of overseas expansion. As the bearer of European modernity, Christian culture offered converts not only entry to a new world of colonial entitlements, education and quasiEuropean status but to a new spiritual order where they were transformed into new symbolic bodies that set them apart from their former selves. In the context of early colonial Spanish America, Jorge Cañares Esguerra explains this further. He notes that Catholic conversion did not simply imply the removal and transfer of an indigenous soul from one spiritual universe to another. While the transformation of the soul was at the core of the idea of Christianization, the principle of acculturation was seen to literally transform the body through a process of corporeal modification.15 While Eguerra argues that the belief in this concept started to wane by the early seventeenth century in Mexico, the idea that Christianization produced modern bodies acted as a powerful symbol of acculturation in Portuguese India where it acted to provide some of the moral legitimacy for interracial marriages. Due to these reasons, there appears to be no formal social taboo against the idea of interracial marriages in the early sixteenth century. Under the direction of the Portuguese colonial governor, Afonso de Albuquerque, marriages between Portuguese men and Indian women were encouraged for two principal reasons. One was to deter men from entering into casual sexual relationships with ‘native’ women, where the appearance of large numbers of illegitimate Eurasian children was an embarrassment to the church and potential evidence of its lack of moral influence. The other was to actively increase the numbers of Catholic subjects to strengthen the political constituency of the Portuguese presence in an era of intense European competition for the East India trade. While voluntary love matches and genuine unions between Portuguese men and ‘native’ women existed independently of official policy, there were also more coercive methods of supporting this dual strategy. Writing in 1512, Albuquerque himself commented that many interracial marriages in Goa were the products of forced conversions rather than unions of choice or love. ‘I married in Goa an honest woman and good looking to a Joao Cerveira, a good man: the latter died and she married again’, and he adds that ‘another man who is now dead fell in love with this woman, he bribed the friar, and he severed the marriage, and had her placed in the house of a man where the deceased used to do what he liked with her. As that man died, the friar at once married her to another man’.16 As a commentary on the ways in which ‘native’ women could often be treated as sexual commodities that were exchanged between Portuguese men, his description speaks of their dehumanization and exploitation. The seventeenth-century historian, Faria y Sousa, concurs with the observation that the encouragement of interracial marriages by Albuquerque did not assume that the European men knew or recognized the

Portuguese legacies

15

women who were to be their wives, even on the wedding night itself. ‘He married some Portugueses to Women of the Country, giving them in Portion, Lands, Houses, or Employment, the better to secure his Colony’, he observes. However, on ‘one Night that some of these Weddings were celebrated, the Brides were so mixt and confounded together among the People, that some of the Bridegrooms went to Bed to those that belonged to others, and next morning, finding the Mistake, they changed them, each taking his own, and all equal as to point of honour. This gave the more occasion to some Gentlemen to ridicule the care of Albuquerque’.17 The manner in which mixed-race children were categorized in sixteenth and seventeenth century Portuguese India is ambiguous. On the one hand, they are represented in population censuses as Catholic Portuguese subjects and treated as European Christians. On the other hand, they are marked out for special attention due to their physical appearance, as shade or colour emerges to take a classifying role alongside that of religious affiliation but in often inconsistent ways.18 While there is increasing emphasis on the importance of the body and the significance of colour in corporeal descriptions of Portuguese Eurasians by the late sixteenth century, the deployment of colour symbolism was often meant to convey similarities to Europeans as well as differences from them. The writings of Dutch traveller Jan Huygen van Linschoten confirm that by 1586 the subject of racial mixing was important enough to warrant a separate chapter in his Discours of Voyages. The twenty-ninth chapter of this work, titled ‘Of the Customes of the Portingales, and such as issued from them, called Mestiços, or half-countrimen, as well of Goa, as of all the Oriental Countries’, provides the contemporary reader with a fascinating account of the representation of Eurasians in the late sixteenth-century imagination. He confirms that ‘the Portingales in India are many of them marryed with the naturall borne women of the countrie’, and adds that ‘the children proceeding of them are called Mestiços, that is half-countrimen’. Unlike orientalist representations of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which emphasize the enduring difference between the European observer and the exotic East, van Linschoten is more concerned with the intrinsic sameness of the mestiços whom he perceives as alluring curiosities. He comments on the ways in which the everyday practices of Eurasians in Goa were so similar to Europeans with his descriptions of the clothes they wore, their prayers before meals, their strict observance of Catholic ritual and descriptions of their houses in the European quarters of the white town. More strikingly, van Linschoten remarks that ‘these Mestiços are commonlie of yellowish colour, not withstanding there are manie women among them who are faire and well-formed’.19 Portuguese Eurasian women are given special attention for their sexual attractiveness and pleasing demeanour to European men. The adjectives ‘faire’ and ‘well-formed’ infer that Portuguese women are depicted in this text as exotic spectacles, their ‘yellowish colour’

16

Portuguese legacies

conferring upon them a virtue that was not incompatible with their status as European wives and mothers, and their bodies enter into circulation as sexual commodities for a metropolitan European male audience. The fact that European men perceived the attractiveness of Eurasian women through their fairness meant that they were accorded a cultural status that made them both sexually available and sexually desirable in the cosmology of European notions of beauty. Eurasian women emerge as the acceptable bearers of an aesthetic colonial whiteness, which is strangely similar to that of European women as it is also irreducibly different. While van Linschoten is struck by the fairness of Eurasian women, the perceptions of mestiços by European travellers to Portuguese India were not consistent. Thirty-three years later, the journals of François Pyrard de Laval, a French traveller to Goa, reveal a different representation based on skin shade, where domicile and colour start to emerge as distinguishing factors. The second part of the 1619 edition to Pyrard’s voyage memoirs, for example, contains a compelling description of the internal hierarchies operating within the white Portuguese community. He notes that ‘there is a great difference of honour between them: because the most esteemed are those who have come from Portugal, who are called Portuguese of Portugal’, but lower down the social scale are ‘those born in India of a Portuguese father and mother, and are called Castiri, that is to say of their caste and stock, the least esteemed are those bred of a Portuguese father or mother and Indians, who are called Metices, that is to say Métifs’.20 It is clear from this description that Portuguese men born and raised in the Indian environment are distinguished from Portuguese men from Portugal. That is to say there emerges a notion of degraded or ‘lapsed’ whiteness where countryborn Europeans possessed less cultural capital than those born in Portugal. In this emerging taxonomy of whiteness, mixed-race communities are considered to be the ‘least esteemed’ of the three groups due to the combination of their Indian descent and domicile. There is a fair amount of contradiction in these accounts, but what they reveal is the indefinite and contingent role of skin colour in relation to other markers of cultural difference. While mestiços were less revered than country-born Europeans, it is also evident from Laval’s observations that mestiços are still considered to be integral members of the European community due to the fact that they were Catholic, possessed Portuguese names and lived in European quarters. In the absence of significant numbers of white women, the cultural notion of being Portuguese was far more culturally elastic than it was in Portugal. Furthermore, these representations are highly gendered, where the sexualisation of Eurasian women makes them whiter in the eyes of European male observers. Portuguese Eurasian women were admired and courted by European men of all nationalities not only for their symbolic whiteness, but also for their ability to perform the role of Christian mothers of their children where religious identities were preserved from one generation to the next.

Portuguese legacies

17

The Portuguese legacy in colonial India also framed the politics of colonial knowledge and the ways in which mixed-race categories entered other imperial languages such as English and French. According to HobsonJobson, the dictionary of Anglo-Indian words, the term mestizo (from mestiço) is in common English usage by 1588 to describe an individual who was ‘halfe an Indian, and halfe a Portugall’.21 The early English and French terms for Portuguese Eurasians retained the Portuguese linguistic derivation. In the English Factories in India, William Foster notes the use of the term mestezaies in the late 1630s.22 In the same work, in 1647, he also observes that the Portuguese Eurasians of St Thomé were referred to as ‘these ill-nurtered musteezes or mungrells’.23 What is also intriguing is the fact that the very term ‘Portuguese’ remains ambiguous and elusive in several European travel narratives where it is a highly elastic term not exclusively related to national characteristics alone. In 1676, the French explorer François Bernier wrote in his historical travelogue of Mughal India of encountering dark-skinned people dressed in European clothes who called themselves Portuguese but who were either ‘Natives or Mesticks’.24 Likewise, the seventeenth-century French traveller to India Jean-Baptiste Tavernier claimed that he saw many Portuguese working in the hospitals of the Mughal court who were most probably mixed-race descendants rather than white settlers from Portugal.25 This elasticity is also noted in the early English accounts. For example, in the 1670s, Streynsham Master stresses that the term Portuguez could refer to any individual with a Portuguese name and that it was used by the English to describe the existing Europeanized population, whether white, Eurasian or Indian, who identified with Portuguese culture and had recognizable Portuguese names. The term black Portuguez, however, referred to a particular community of Portuguese-speaking Catholics who were predominantly of Indian origin and known as the topas.26 But the distinction between mestiços and the topas is often hard to distinguish in these narratives because of the ambiguous manner in which the general term black Portuguez is applied. In an entry dated 15 December 1676, for instance, he refers to ‘Nicola De Parteca, a black Portuguez, farming the Salt trade of this place’27 when describing the impact of Portuguese trade on the economy of Bengal. It continues to remain unclear whether this individual was mestiço or topas since the distinction is not explicitly made. In fact, English language descriptions of people who were called ‘Portuguese’ remained flexible and elastic well into the eighteenth century. For example, Portuguese Eurasians and topas were also employed by the armies of the East India Company in the capacity of soldiers, sentinels or drummers. An abstract of the East India Company’s garrison at Fort William for 1746, for example, reveals that there were 426 personnel including 259 Europeans and 41 ‘black Portuguez’.28 In the muster rolls for 1745, names such as Fereza, Fernandes, Gomez, da Costa, Rodrigues and de Rozario are found in the list under the heading European, and names such as de Rozario, de Cruz, Cardoza and

18

Portuguese legacies

Fernandes are also found under the heading ‘black Portuguez’.29 My point is that although there was a clear racial demarcation in English records between the Portuguese employees who were considered to be European and those who were considered to be ‘native’, those who were mixed-race were not identified separately and could have ostensibly straddled both groups or been included in either of the above muster rolls. Apart from these, there are also other terms and social categories that were in common usage to describe ‘foreigners’ that derive from Portuguese words. These perhaps referred exclusively to white European foreigners at first but were applied to all Christianized groups over time. Arthur Pringle notes that in the last decades of the seventeenth century ‘the Portuguese, whether of Europe or Brazil are at Goa called indifferently Frangues or Fringuins or Reinoes’.30 The first two of these names is quite clearly derived from the word feringhee, or ‘foreigner’, while the third is the Portuguese term for a Portuguese-born man who lives in the colonies. Originally meant to describe a European foreigner, the term feringhee became universal shorthand to refer to numerous other groups who were classed as ‘foreigners’ in a more general sense. In his journals, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier also uses the term franguis interchangeably with fringuis but it generally has the same meaning. For example, when discussing the good relations between the Dutch and the Mughal authorities, he refers to ‘some Dutchmen and in general all of the Franguis’.31 François Bernier uses the term in his depictions of Mughal society to refer to ‘the Christians of Europe, who are call’d Franguis’.32 Eventually, the term seems to have evolved into a woolly description for European foreigners, Europeanized groups including the topas, and even Indian Christians who dressed in the European style and adopted European names. What becomes clear is the lack of a separate social category by which Eurasians existed as a distinctive mixed-race community in colonial discourses such as these. Although the early English settlers describe Portuguese Eurasians with terms such as musteez, mustee and mustezas, these appear to be loose external descriptions that had no fixed meaning for the subjects themselves. What it meant to be mixed-race in these early modern traveller’s accounts appears to be contentious since there was little community consciousness or sense of Eurasian self-identification. It is more likely that Eurasians found themselves in social categories that were not obviously racial in the modern sense of that term. It was more probable that individuals of mixed Portuguese and Indian origin were absorbed into existing social categories such as European, Catholic, black Portuguez, Fringy and Portuguese. These were wider cultural categories based on religion, cultural outlook and political affiliation, which comprised of Europeans, Eurasians and Indian Christians. The term ‘Portuguese’ itself continued to be linguistically ambiguous in vernacular English well into the nineteenth century, and it was eventually considered to be a general description for Eurasians who came from many different cultural origins. In 1801, for example, the evangelical

Portuguese legacies

19

Protestant missionary William Carey wrote tellingly of the use of this term in his survey of the different Christian communities in India. He observed that in various European settlements in colonial India that the children of ‘English, French, Dutch and Danes, by native women, are all called Portuguese’.33 The emergence of Portuguese Eurasian and other hybridized groups such as the topas was not only a product of sixteenth and seventeenth century colonial Goa. Portuguese settlements across India (most notably in Gujarat, the south of India and Bengal) were the precursors to later European settlements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These comprised of cosmopolitan populations where the notion of whiteness was already transformed by interracial relationships before the arrival of later waves of European men.34 The establishment of Dutch, French, English and Danish trading companies saw the arrival of more single European men in these settlements who found Portuguese Eurasian women to be very much a part of local communities. For example, in Thomas Bowrey’s geographical account of Bengal in the 1670s, he refers to the feminine nouns ‘Portuguezas and Mustezas’35 when describing the populations of the old Portuguese settlements of Hughli and Chittagong. These are references to communities of Portuguese Eurasian women who were an established part of the Christian community before the arrival of Englishmen into these places. In his description of late seventeenth-century Pondicherry, Robert Challe notes that the first French settlers were forming relationships with ‘les filles portugaises’.36 These Portuguese girls, however, were not white Portuguese women from Portugal, but either the mixed-race descendants of a previous generation of relationships between Portuguese traders and Indian women or, indeed, Christian free women of colour, who are also called les topassines in some French primary accounts.37 Another factor underscoring the relationship between these newer European male arrivals and Portuguese Eurasian women was the latter’s ability not only to act as intermediaries, but their ability to speak Portuguese, which was considered to be the global language of European commerce in the early modern colonial period. For example, Protestant ministers who were sent out from England in 1710 were equipped with Portuguese versions of the Bible in order to further their chances of proselytization amongst the heathens and Catholic Eurasians.38 By 1712, the East India Company in London instructed that every religious minister who was sent out to Bengal should learn both the native language and Portuguese within a year of arrival so as to ‘enable them to instruct the Gentoos that shall be servants or slaves of the Company’s, or Agents in the Protestant Religion’.39 Furthermore, Portuguese was still the preferred European language of trade in India at the beginning of the eighteenth century.40 It transcended national and racial distinctions to become a common lingua franca for all European communities and those who considered themselves to be European. Early Dutch traders, for example, were as likely

20

Portuguese legacies

to converse in Portuguese as were Portuguese Eurasians or Indians who had either converted to Catholicism or lived in areas of significant Portuguese influence.41 While it was official policy to initially deter women from making the voyage to India in the early years of the English settlements, imperial historian Arnold Wright notes that there were nevertheless a very small number of Englishwomen at Surat in the early seventeenth century.42 The gender imbalance of the early English settlements was a source of consternation to Company officials in London who pondered the social and moral implications of having increasing numbers of single, young men arrive as traders or officials with no family structure to support them. The Court Minutes of the East India Company dated 1677 reveal that 15 soldiers were allowed into the service of the East India Company at Fort St George and 50 soldiers at Bombay. More significantly, the Company announced that ‘twenty-five young unmarried women to be permitted to take passage for India free of charge, they to be of meane condition and good fame, fitt to make wives for the soldiers there, five to be sent to the Fort, the rest to Bombay’. Despite official discouragement, there was an early awareness of the benefits of promoting free female emigration as a way of preventing immoral behaviour amongst the men. Whether it be interracial sex with local ‘native’ women, homosexuality, drinking or gambling, these moral vices were seen to be fundamental threats to the consolidation of a disciplined work ethic governed by moral rules. The minutes also make it clear that this directive was based on the condition that ‘the women bring good certificates of their civil and good behaviour, otherwise not be remitted their passage out’.43 From an early stage, English women were expected to perform the role of moral guardians to ensure social stability in these maledominated settlements, but the scheme proved to be too expensive to sustain on a regular basis. The East India Company initially discouraged white men from forming relationships with ‘native’ women because of broader moral concerns. The regulation of male sexuality by the Company was an intrinsic part of an overall strategy to restrict forms of social and moral behavior that might be a distraction from commercial activities. In trading stations or ‘factories’ such as the one in Hooghly in Bengal, young male factors lived in austere and frugally furnished buildings where rigid routines were implemented to foster moral values that encouraged thrift, hard work and sobriety. The ‘factors’ in these places were required to observe six moral orders that were issued by the East India Company to advance ‘the Glory of God’ and ‘the Honour of the English Nation’. This comprised of compulsory public prayers every day with penalties for infringement ranging from fines to imprisonment.44 The moral regulation of Company officials, traders and soldiers also took the form of punishments for swearing, quarrelling, fighting and other forms of perceived lapses in moral rectitude. This was designed to direct male energies toward the sole purpose of trade and away

Portuguese legacies

21

from pleasure, gambling or drinking. Inevitably, this also included punishments for ‘Adultery, Fornication, Uncleanness or any such crime’,45 and a curfew on travelling into the ‘native’ areas at night when men might meet venture out to meet local women for sexual intercourse.46 The reasons given for early Company prohibitions on interracial marriage are often varied and contradictory but most are grounded in economic concerns. The Company sought to protect itself from being financially responsible for the unions, or else discouraged casual interracial relationships out of wedlock to prevent the birth of illegitimate Eurasian children who might become a financial burden. In the same vein, knowing that many Indian women who had entered into relationships with soldiers in the past were young and were likely to outlive their English husbands, the directors of the Company feared that it would be besieged with requests from widows relying on patronage for social support in the event of the death of their English husbands in service. Looking at everyday life in Fort St George in the 1670s, however, it appears that there is also some inconsistency in regard to the Company’s policy on interracial relationships. In her popular commentaries on life in the colonies, Mrs Frank Penny noted that because relationships out of wedlock were so common between soldiers and ‘native’ women, the Company needed to amend its prohibition and encourage respectable alliances. This was particularly urgent since those in the lower ranks of the Company’s service and rank-and-file soldiers could not afford to support a European wife and children in India. In this sense, a new economic logic arose in this vein to encourage these relationships on the premise that Indian or Eurasian wives ‘could be better maintained on the pay of the soldier than English women’.47 There is also evidence to suggest that interracial unions could also be supported on climatic grounds to encourage the growth of the Protestant community. John Fryer, an Englishman travelling through India in the 1670s, supported interracial relationships on the basis that the children born of such unions were better adapted to survive in the hotter climate, compared to European children who were not environmentally attune to the weather. While ‘the Company have sent out English women’ to propagate their Indian settlements, Fryer claims that ‘they beget a sickly Generation; and as the Dutch well observe, those thrive better that come of a European father and Indian mother’. This justification for supporting interracial unions is grounded in classical humoral theory where the mixed-race body is perceived to be more physically predisposed to the hotter Indian climate. Likewise, Fryer suggests that ‘native’ women make better mothers and nurses on account of the purity of their breast milk since they ‘abhor all heady liquors’.48 On the other hand, he castigates European women in the colonies for not refraining from the consumption of alcohol during pregnancy ‘which inflames the Blood, and spoils the Blood, and spoils the Milk in these Hot Countries, as Aristotle long ago declared’. One can see in Fryer’s humoral logic some idealized depictions of ‘native women’ as

22

Portuguese legacies

beacons of purity and ‘nature’ in an environment that was considered to have a degenerative effect on European women. Fryer clearly has no moral objection to interracial relationships. On the contrary, he supports them on the assumption that ‘native’ women can safeguard the survival of future generations of children fathered by Englishmen due to their natural disposition to thrive in the Indian climate. The general tolerance of interracial marriage in early colonial English settlements could therefore be justified on moral, economic and climatic grounds, but the issue of religion provided the cultural framework by which mixed-race identity was understood. The cultural and political role of religion in the conceptualization of hybridity before the formal consolidation of British sovereignty has often been downplayed in imperial historiography, when it provides the key to understanding cultural difference in context. This can be seen in the ways in which a relationship between a Portuguese Eurasian woman and an Englishman brought the issue of religious sectarianism into public debates about interracial marriage. Many of the Englishmen at Fort St George in the 1660s found wives amongst the Portuguese Eurasian women from St Thome. The common practice of Protestant Englishmen and Portuguese Eurasian women forming relationships was the cause of great alarm, because the children of these unions could be baptized as Catholics. A protest letter from the Protestant minister William Isaacson seems to sum up much of the fear surrounding the implications of these relationships in the eyes of Protestant authorities, where the risk of political sabotage was never far from the surface. He accuses two French Catholic friars living in the settlement of baptizing the children of Englishmen and Portuguese Eurasian women as Catholics. In this revealing document, he presents a colourful narrative of political intrigue where these Catholic friars have gone ‘to Englishmen’s houses, when they have bin upon their duty in the Fort, whose wives are newly delivered, to Baptize young infants, pretending them to be very weake’.49 This depiction of French Catholic friars secretly entering the houses of Englishmen to baptize their children as Catholics, with the consent of their Portuguese Eurasian mothers, strikes at the heart of this anxiety where sectarian distinctions had great symbolic meaning in a wider political context. Such was the threat that such a proposition posed to the consolidation and sustainability of English authority that the private lives of Company officials, soldiers and other employees became a source of public concern and scrutiny. In August 1660, the East India Company sent a letter to its agents in Bengal and at Fort St George in response to requests from Protestants to have these two French Catholic friars expelled from the town. It was feared that they would use their authority to influence the sizeable community of Portuguese Eurasian women to form a cooperative alliance with them in the event of war. ‘If you cannot live without the mustezas’, the letter urges, ‘there must be a submission at present’. However, if their associations with the French friars are such that the situation interferes with

Portuguese legacies

23

the Company’s trade or poses a risk to the security of the fort or the town, then they ‘are to be dismissed [from the] the town and their church converted into a place for more true worship’.50 The fear of having the Eurasian children of Englishmen baptized as Catholics had a wider global meaning in the eyes of colonial authorities who saw this situation through the lens of Anglo-French conflict and potential sabotage. The Company warned that if the settlement was under threat of a potential French attack due to this association, then the natural response would be to expel Portuguese Eurasian women from the settlement, and have their place of worship subsequently converted into a Protestant church. By 1687, a different tactic was adopted by the East India Company in order to regulate the moral behaviour of its young, male employees, but it was also related to these same paranoid fears about Catholic intentions. On 8 April of that year, an extraordinary decree was issued by the East India Company at Fort St George, which encouraged the marriages of English soldiers to ‘native women’. The edict states that: ‘the marriage of our soldiers to the native women of Fort St George formerly recommended to you is a matter of such consequence to posterity, that we shall be content to encourage it’. Some historians, such as Ronald Hyam, have rushed to interpret this order as the officially sanctioned establishment of a mixed-race community in India, but this seems to be too narrow an interpretation.51 The edict deserves more detailed historical contextualization since it was issued with certain important qualifications that reveal the religious anxieties of the day. The Company was prepared to sanction such unions ‘with some expense’ by rewarding ‘the mother of any Child, that shall be hereafter be born, of any such future marriages, upon the day the Child is Christened, if you think this small encouragement will increase the number of such marriages’.52 The moral aim was to encourage regulated sexual relationships between Company employees and ‘native’ women as a way to reduce the visible numbers of illegitimate Eurasian children in Fort St George. This was intended to discourage white men from having casual sexual relationships with ‘native’ women, and to encourage them to form stable marriages with the blessing of the church. It was also a response to the threat posed by the potential increase in Catholic subjects and the impact this might have on the security of the English settlements in the face of a French attack. Marriages to Portuguese Eurasian Catholic women were discouraged for fear of the spread of the Popish threat, while marriages to Indian women were encouraged if the wife and her children were Protestants. Therefore, in the syntax of seventeenth-century ideas of cultural difference, a ‘mixed marriage’ could ostensibly be one between a Protestant and Catholic. In these sectarian terms, this meant that a marriage between a Protestant Englishman and a Catholic Portuguese Eurasian woman was considered to be dangerous, while one formed between a Protestant Englishman and a converted Protestant ‘native’ woman was less so because sectarian lines had

24

Portuguese legacies

not been crossed.53 Despite the financial inducements offered to women to have their children baptized in the Protestant religion, English authorities continued to regard Portuguese Eurasian women with suspicion well into the eighteenth century. The anxiety about Catholicism, however, was more than likely a fear about the religion of future generations of Englishmen and the political influence of their Catholic mothers who might have pro-French tendencies. It spoke to the political relevance of religious distinctions in the making of colonial whiteness, where the fear of potential disloyalty to a Protestant nation engulfed by the Catholic menace in Europe was transported to the sexual politics of interracial marriage in colonial India. In this sense, the concern with whiteness was mediated by the larger framework of Protestant–Catholic relations, where Portuguese Eurasian women in India found themselves at a significant yet often underrated intersection in imperial politics. The existence of Portuguese Eurasian women in English settlements gave a human dimension to the threat that Catholicism continued to pose to a Protestant imperial identity. Possible collusion between them and the Catholic French, due to their shared religious persuasions, was always on the minds of colonial administrators who recognized the dire consequences of sectarian treason. In 1757, the East India Company protested to the Court of Directors in London about the inconvenience experienced ‘from the siege of Calcutta from the prodigious number of Portuguese women who were admitted for Security into the Fort, the very little or no service which that Race of People are to the Settlement’, and warned that in the event of a war with France ‘we had reason to suppose they would refuse to take up Arms against an Enemy of their Own Religion, should we be attacked’. In the prospect of an Anglo-French war, the Company questioned their political loyalty. Regarded as a security threat, the Company was prepared ‘to interdict the publick Exercise of the Roman Catholick religion, and to forbid the Residence of Their Priests in Our Bounds’.54 The question of the religious loyalties of Eurasian children continued to be a source of consternation to colonial authorities well after this. In the context of continuing Anglo-French conflict, the fact that these children could potentially be brought up as Catholics was considered to be a danger to the emerging colonial state. This is demonstrated in a letter written in 1778 by Richard Wilson, the surgeon of Trichipoly. In it, he proposes to establish an institution for the future education of members of this ‘vagrant Race’ whom might make a valuable contribution to the cause of Protestant imperialism. He writes that he has often ‘reflected that surely there could be no great Difficulty in this Land of Generosity to lay down some national Scheme by which those Orphans might be converted into a Protestant Colony of usefull subjects and industrious Members of Society’. Wilson suggests that if Eurasian orphans were ‘formed into an active, bold and Usefull Body of People’, then they would strengthen ‘the Hands of

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Dominion with a Colony of Subjects attached to the British Nation by Consanguinity, Religion, Gratitude, Language and Manners’.55 If things were left as they were, he warned that Eurasian children offered ‘real advantages’ to ‘our enemies’. Wilson’s plan for the orphanage was therefore based on the fear that if Eurasian children were not made into useful Protestant subjects, they would be natural allies of the French and could potentially undermine the Company’s aggressive pursuit of land and commerce, and, ultimately, threaten the security of its administration. Nine years later, an official East India Company dispatch from Fort St George to London also identifies the Portuguese Eurasian community as a potential security risk in the event of a war with France. It explains how Catholics ‘form a considerable part of the population of this coast and it is said amount in the whole to about 100,000 souls. Of these, we have nearly 17,000 within the walls and about the environs of Madras’. Because of the presence of such a strong Catholic community ‘it must therefore be of great consequence to this Government to attach such a considerable body of people to our Interest by every tie by which society is held together, but unfortunately for us some difficulties occur in forming the strongest of all ties, that of Interest and Religion’. While it was permissible to allow them ‘free exercise of their own faith’ and to afford ‘them every protection and support which good and faithful subjects deserve’, the Company offers a caution by warning that by ‘an early attention to these circumstances, it is to be hoped our rivals will not possess superior influence over them on account of their being in the same communion’.56 If being ‘in the same communion’ as the French made Portuguese Eurasian women a political threat to English identity then their position as the mothers of white children was made more acceptable by their conversion to Protestantism. Indeed, this was the main route to social and political respectability for Portuguese Eurasian women who were attached to English men and loyal to the East India Company flag. To take their place as the wives of Englishmen and the mothers of Eurasian children under the East India Company, conversion to Protestantism ensured their political allegiance as well as the identity of future generations. By the eighteenth century, the influence of Portuguese Eurasian and ‘native’ women, who converted through their marriages with Englishmen, becomes apparent when one looks at a specific sample of Protestant marriage extracts from St John’s church in Calcutta for the period 1713 to 1800.57 This sample of some 2,371 marriage records provides a testimony of the shifting racial dynamics of Protestant identity in eighteenth-century colonial India, and it reveals the changing patterns of hybridity within these relationships. European men were marrying ‘native women’ at an increasing rate as the century wore on, reaching a peak by the 1750s when the number of ‘native’ wives was roughly equal to the number of European wives.58 This pattern changed after about 1770 when the numbers of interracial marriages began to decline and the numbers of European wives began to

26

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rise markedly again. What has been less appreciated is the continuing influence of Portuguese Eurasian women in the reconstruction of the British family in the St John’s sample. In contrast to the sharp decrease in the numbers of ‘native’ women marrying Protestant men as the century wore on, the marriage entries for this entire period of the eighteenth century reveal that the number of Portuguese Eurasian wives remains remarkably consistent at between 10 and 20 per cent of all female partners in marriages from 1713 to 1800. From these anonymous statistics in the colonial marriage registers where Eurasian and ‘native’ women have been largely effaced from the historical record, encoded in an impersonal way to make them hardly visible at all, a link can be made between the legacy of Portuguese imperialism and the reconstitution of whiteness in British India in a way that recognizes their presence, role and contribution. If one of the aims of this study is to scrape away at the surface of Anglocentric representations of hybridity to discover antecedents, then these statistical archives can recuperate, in the words of Ann Stoler, ‘colonial subjects as agents who made and make choices and critiques of their own’.59 In this sense, Portuguese Eurasian women were significant historical agents in the reconstitution of what it meant to be ‘British’ in future generations. Their choices to be ‘in the same communion’ as their Protestant partners shaped the development of a homespun and créolized whiteness, which inevitably changed the cultural complexion of British identity. The Christianization process that started with the first Portuguese encounters on the subcontinent in the sixteenth century created new hybrid communities who were distinguished from ‘natives’ on the basis of their spiritual and corporeal transformation. While their status was not the same as European Christians, with skin pigmentation and notions of colour recorded by contemporary observers as emerging factors that began to distinguish them, their lives were transformed by their membership of Christian congregations where they had entered a different symbolic world. Compared to Muslims and Hindus, who were outside the cosmos of whiteness, Portuguese Eurasians and other hybrid communities identified as acculturated members of a wider European constituency, not only through their religious practices but through their language, clothing and political sympathies. In looking at both the dynamic and legacy of the Portuguese imperial encounter, there are some interesting insights to ponder in the wider quest to historicize mixed-race identity. In the language of early modern notions of cultural difference, the term itself had little resonance where religion and global geo-politics provided the context for the reconstruction of whiteness. This earlier period is a significant one to consider in view of the fundamental role of religion and the place of Catholic– Protestant conflict in the production of cultural difference. In this sense, religion and gender were important axes upon which later notions of race found their political expression and cultural meaning. As the embodied

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human agents of modernity in this earlier period, Portuguese Eurasian women were therefore instrumental figures in the negotiation of whiteness. Their experience and legacy speaks to these contested and intertwined imperial histories, and it also sets the scene for looking at later British and French conceptions of racial hybridity in the eighteenth century as new forms of political modernity began to challenge the authority of religion.

2

Race and reform

In 1687, the directors of the East India Company first raised the idea of acquiring revenue from taxation for the purposes of sustaining permanent settlement in India. Their vision of establishing ‘a Politie of civill and military power’ and ‘the foundation of a large, well-grounded sure English dominion in India for all time to come’1 was largely premature and impractical since the rationale of the Company was aimed solely at securing a commercial foothold. Supporting permanent colonies at the expense of shareholders would not be a popular move in an operation that sought to exploit the abundant natural resources of the East Indies. The Company wanted trading relations with the Mughal Empire from the beginning of its activities and initially recognized the sovereignty of the emperor in exchange for a firman, which was a trading permit bestowed upon a foreign commercial entity in the form of an imperial edict. Through its control of both imports and exports, the chief aim of the Company was to extract the maximum amount of profit possible in order to increase the value of its shares in the domestic market.2 Trade remained the strategic priority despite the move of the Company’s main operations from Surat to Bombay and the practical uncertainties caused by the political disintegration of the Mughal Empire. It was not until 1765 when the Company was granted the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa that it actually started to raise and manage taxation revenues, but on behalf of the Mughal emperor to whom the Company now started to nominally represent in its dealings with other powers.3 A combination of fiscal expediency and political opportunism created the conditions for the emergence of a corporate entity that began to command political influence in the internal affairs of local Indian rulers. The grant to the Company of the Northern Sarkars in 1766 effectively meant that the Company was now acting as a territorial sovereign in its own right, not only with revenue-collecting responsibilities but also with new intelligence and information-gathering powers, including the provision of military aid to clients such as the Nizam of Hyderabad.4 How an English joint-stock trading company, founded by a charter granted by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, was transformed from a shareholder-controlled corporation to the paramount territorial sovereign in India is well known but not normally

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considered part of the historical narrative of hybridity. In this chapter I want to demonstrate how this radical transformation in sovereignty was underscored by the idea that political reform would enable modern forms of colonial governance based on benevolence and public virtue. The process of race making was deeply implicated in this transformation, since the loose categorizations of the past did not serve the moral tone of this reform or the kind of modern government that it represented. The grant of the Northern Sarkars initiated a process where the Company traded as a corporate entity in its own right, extending its umbrella of patronage and protection to include co-dependent Indian states such as Oudh.5 It extended its influence southwards during the latter part of the eighteenth century, becoming directly implicated in a series of wars with powerful local powers such as the Marathas, the leaders of Mysore and the Nizam of Hyderabad. The acquisition of Indian territory to Cuttack, linking Bengal with the south, enabled the Company to hold coastal positions on the subcontinent, thus controlling the eastern seaboard. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had entrenched itself as the paramount military and political power in India, and it extended its influence further into the north and northwest and through to the Deccan, carving the country into interconnected satellites of co-dependence. Before 1765, the English had only in their possession the territories surrounding their factories in western and eastern India, including the three presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. By 1818, the East India Company had formidable military, political and economic power when its influence extended to encompass most of the Indian subcontinent excluding the Punjab and Sind. Looking to the beginnings of this transformation in the second half of the eighteenth century, tensions inevitably arose between the Company and the British government in regard to the legitimacy of what was an unauthorized acquisition of territory. There was also the broader political question of a corporation acting in its own right as a sovereign power without the moral legitimacy of government. Officials on the ground who made these decisions were not acting on orders from London but were rather acting on the spot and in reaction to specific local circumstances. This style of freely meddling in the affairs of foreign states to pursue political advantage or personal gain contradicted the Company’s own raison d’être as a strictly commercial entity.6 Opposition to this self-assigned role as a sovereign power was expressed by stockholders through the Court of Proprietors and the Court of Directors in London, who claimed that they had never ‘laid claim to these conquered Territories, either by any formal Resolutions, or by any of the Petitions to Parliament’.7 Despite these objections, the enormous profits being extracted from the India trade made the issue of money a lucrative factor. Parliament eventually turned a blind eye to territorial expansion since the endeavour proved to be a lucrative source of income. From 1767, the management of land

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taxes had become extremely profitable for the British government since the Company was required to lodge an annual payment from the Bengal revenues of £400,000 to the Exchequer in London.8 The physical distance between London and Calcutta, however, and the inability of either the government or the Court of Directors to monitor or directly manage tax collection meant that the management of revenue was conducted by Company servants on the ground and it was subsequently open to abuse. As the normal trading operations of the Company became entangled with revenues from land taxation, the precise sources of income and profit became more difficult to ascertain. The ways in which the Company hierarchy exerted its political influence also became the subject of concern. The stockholders, shipbuilders and politicians, known colloquially as the ‘India interest’ in British financial circles, were intimately connected to members of the British ruling élite. The Court of Proprietors consisted of men who had become wealthy from the India trade, bought stock in the Company and, hence, had the power to elect the Court of Directors. This latter body used its powers of patronage to employ new candidates for service who were already connected to those with vested interests or political links. Through this cycle of patronage, ‘East Indiamen’, as they came to be known, were usually acquainted with each other through a tight circle of social networks, producing a self-perpetuating clique of capitalists and merchants who monopolized the trade in Bengal and set about to destroy any foreign competition.9 As a result, vast amounts of capital were being drained from India and most of it did not find its way to the Company’s stockholders. On the one hand, the low salaries of Company employees encouraged private profiteering and favours in exchange for gifts to supplement their incomes. On the other hand, the negative and often over-hyped stereotype of wealthy ‘nabobs’ returning to England armed with jewels, servants and vast personal fortunes, so vivid in the British cultural imagination of the day, created an enduring image of India as an inexhaustible source of abundance that was ripe for exploitation.10 Integral to both views was a deep sense of European entitlement to the riches of the East, an attitude that framed and nurtured the mentalité of imperialism. So great was the accumulation of private fortune that by 1772 the Company was forced to apply for a substantial loan from the British government to pay off its debts, leading to an internal inquiry through a Parliamentary Select Committee on its financial affairs.11 The result of the Committee’s investigation was a damning verdict on the misappropriation of funds by the Company and calls for government intervention with the passing of Lord North’s Regulating Act in 1773.12 The act was important both in the changes it brought to the structure of the Company and to the relationship between it and the British Parliament. The curtailment of the powers of the Court of Proprietors by raising the amount of stock required to vote, and the new restrictions placed on

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the Court of Directors by not allowing any elected member to hold their seat for more than four years, were the principal internal changes aimed at deterring overt nepotism. The importance of the act itself can be seen in the official subordination of the Company to the sovereignty of Parliament with the appointment of a governor-general by the Crown. The three formerly autonomous presidencies of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay were centralized under the new capital of British India at Calcutta. Decisions once undertaken by Company officials in relation to the declaration of war, the making of peace or the management of land revenues were now the sole provenance of the governor-general. This significant transformation meant that Parliament assumed responsibility for the territories acquired by an autonomous trading company. In essence, the Regulating Act transformed a commercial entity into an apparatus of modern centralized government.13 It ushered in a new form of imperial modernity based on the idea of benevolent protection. Despite this, abuses of the system continued with the governor-generalship of Warren Hastings. A more comprehensive review, resulting in the 1783 Fox Bill, demanded that greater controls be placed on the Company’s activities and that it be made accountable for its misappropriation of capital. Politicians such as Edmund Burke demanded more scrutiny over the Company’s activities, a review of its charter and greater attention to established practices of fair trading. In a speech to Parliament in 1783, Burke advocated the notion of just government and the rule of law against the backdrop of the Company’s unchecked excesses.14 The passing of Pitt’s India Act in 1784 was perceived as a great triumph of just government over the abuses of a wayward and rapacious Company. A Board of Control, appointed by the Crown, would consist of six commissioners, who were authorized to control all affairs relating to revenue collection. Although the Court of Directors retained their patronage in relation to the selection of Company servants, they were required to send copies of all correspondence relating to civil, military and revenue issues to the Board of Control. As the ultimate authority on Indian affairs, the Board was also empowered to establish a Secret Committee for the transmission of correspondence concerning diplomatic relations with any of the Princely States. The powers of the governor-general in Calcutta were enlarged and defined so that this office stood at the executive apex of a vast hierarchy of civil servants.15 This journey to the establishment of a nascent colonial state constituted a profound change in the exercise of power. Believing that the occupation of Indian land and the political control of its peoples were acts of protection and social improvement, the language of moral purity became an integral part of this ‘modern’ technique of governance. Mixed-race populations were not marginal to these processes of state formation and empire building. On the contrary, interracial relationships within British settlements themselves became a source for official consternation and reaction, largely due to the perception that illegitimate Eurasian

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children posed a threat to the moral authority of the emerging colonial state. While Eurasians were formerly incorporated into wider and more elastic cultural categories based on religion, language and political loyalty, and were not a distinct social group, this changed with the formal acquisition of political sovereignty. Within a framework of social reform, the governor-general, Cornwallis, identified ambiguous and hybrid populations as moral dangers that threatened British rule. As a consequence, the political distinction between British subject and ‘native of India’ began to underscore the new practices and structures of government, where mixedrace populations became casualties of these discourses of moral reform. Two broad ideas created a political environment where racial distinctions took centre stage. The first idea was that of an enduring temporal and physical difference between Indians and the British, so that the backwardness of the former and the superiority of the latter was given the appearance of the natural order of things. As a consequence, parliamentary intervention was couched in the language of progressive improvement so that Indians could be saved from the horrors of their own oppressive institutions. The second is the way that the late eighteenth-century notion of ‘public virtue’ provided the ideological framework for cleansing the nascent colonial state of associations with past Company excesses. Both ideas were structured in opposition to the enduring spectre of what the British termed ‘despotism’. That is, the idea that the absolutist state was the apotheosis of tyrannical government and the antithesis of liberty. Only through the protective mechanism of Parliament could the welfare of Indians be guaranteed through the auspices of virtuous government. This idea assumed the superiority of British moral leadership and the innate inability of Indians themselves to govern in their own right. By demonstrating how these two ideas acted to provide legitimacy for the racialization of the Company state, it can be seen how mixed-race populations undermined the logic of virtuous government. As the doctrine of public virtue acted to enforce social and physical difference between Europeans and Indians, Eurasians were perceived to straddle the divide between barbarism and civilization. Reminders of the excessive moral behaviour of Company soldiers, and the living evidence of sexual intimacy between Europeans and Indians, racial mixing became associated with moral degeneration. In this sense, the acquisition of formal political sovereignty in British India animated a process of racial distancing where the fear of ‘native’ influence permeated the outlook of modern colonial governance. In 1790, Governor-General John Shore reflected retrospectively on the territories acquired by the East India Company and the scale of the responsibility of this new dominion. He suggested that the principal reason for the mismanagement of revenue was not the economic self-interest of Company servants, but the gulf that existed between the British and ‘Asiatic’ manners, language, culture and finance. ‘When we consider the

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nature and magnitude of this acquisition, the characters of the people placed under our dominion, their difference of language and dissimilarity of manners’, he surmises, ‘[we] were ignorant of its former constitution and with little practical experience in Asiatic finance’. Shore found it not ‘surprising that we should have fallen into errors; or if any should at this time require correction’.16 That Indian cultures and economic practices were seen as irreducibly different to those of the British was a part of the rhetoric of colonial administrators, who sought to explain the past wrongs of the Company in terms of the evil influences of ‘Asiatic finance’. In this explanation, cultural difference rather than greed created the conditions for the breakdowns in moral judgement. Shore cited the reasons for the inability of the Company to govern effectively as ‘the fault of the Mahommedan governments, where practice is forever in opposition to a theory of morals’.17 The construction of an enduring difference between the immoral East, which was the haven of vice, greed and promiscuity, and the virtuous West, which was the beacon of providence, justice and good governance, was to become part of a philosophical outlook by which parliamentary intervention was eventually justified as an extension of liberty. Shore’s reflections also reveal that the British had little understanding of the land or the people over whom they now exercised power. New technologies of information gathering, such as the more detailed charting of maps, were established to foster this understanding and to equip colonial administrators with the kind of knowledge to enable them to rule effectively. The reconceptualization of Indian land as British space was accompanied by the quest to know the histories, cultures and languages of the subcontinent in order to understand them more intimately, but also to exercise authority over their subjects. Such a quest was achieved largely by constructing a narrative of India’s past and of its peoples in the syntax of eighteenthcentury notions of natural science and historical teleology. This new imperial mission, where the British were no longer mercantilist traders but territorial conquerors, enabled them to harness knowledge for the more strategic purpose of ordering, classifying and categorizing Indian societies and placing them in a schema, where the relationship between ruler and ruled was given the appearance of natural order.18 The wider global context of Anglo-French antipathy and the enduring role of Catholic France in the shaping of British self-perceptions provide a backdrop to the articulation of this new language of cultural and political difference. From the 1770s, a particular political mode of understanding the Mughal state began to appear in the lexicon of British descriptions of Indian political institutions, which was directly inherited from the prevailing British view of French absolutism. Conceptions of Anglo-French difference were not based purely on religion, language and culture but also on divergent philosophies and practices of government. While the British revered their own system of parliamentary democracy where the power of the

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monarchy was regulated and checked through the mechanism of Parliament, the ancien régime in France was abhorred as the polar opposite where the power of the monarchy was absolute. The term ‘despotism’ became synonymous with the decadence and immorality of the French state but it was a term that also found its way into contemporary British denunciations of the Mughal Empire. While Shore’s reflections were expressed in the proceedings of the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company in 1790, they were by then an established feature of the political vernacular. Twenty years earlier, Alexander Dow articulated what was to become a powerful metaphor in contemporary political discourses. In A Dissertation Concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan, he borrows the contemporary idea of despotism and applies it to Indian political institutions, casting the Mughal Empire as oppressive and autocratic in comparison with British parliamentary democracy. According to Dow’s logic, Indians were naturally inclined to tolerate despotic power due to their innate and presupposed disposition towards tyranny. In a narrative that combines eighteenth-century notions of environmental determinism with innate behavioural characteristics, Dow constructs a stereotype of the lazy ‘native’ who ‘thinks the evils of despotism less severe than the labour of being free’.19 In this vision, Indians do not have the energy or the motivation for liberty and accept tyranny as a natural feature of their own political destiny. According to this supposition, not only does ‘indolence and ease’ make Indians more susceptible to despotism but the very nature of their own religious beliefs creates the conditions for their own political bondage. In Islam, according to Dow, was ‘one of the greatest causes which must fix forever the duration of that species of government in the East’.20 In this emerging grammar of difference, the Muslim state is assumed to be the antithesis of good Christian government, making Muslims the ‘absolute enemies to freedom and independence’.21 With these words, Dow is able to suggest that despotic government in Asia produces obedient and docile subjects who ‘are of all nations on earth the most easily conquered and governed’.22 For Dow, what made Indians particularly susceptible to foreign domination was their perceived lack of a regulatory system of law and property inheritance that reflected values of individual self-interest. The apotheosis of political freedom was embodied in the institution of private property where liberty reached its highest expression. In this model of progress, India was constructed as a backward and inferior place without the resources to create its own institutions of political liberty due to the lack of respect for individual freedoms. To observers such as Dow, it was a landscape of political chaos and social disorder. ‘To leave the natives entirely to their own laws, would be to consign them to anarchy and confusion’, he declares. As a remedy to correct this situation, it is ‘absolutely necessary for the peace and prosperity of the country, that the laws of England, in so far as they do not

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oppose prejudices and usages which cannot be relinquished by the natives, should prevail’.23 Dow’s adoption of the term despotism to describe Mughal government also assumed that inherent characteristics of race could be attached to political sensibilities. This view emerges in parliamentary debates on the justification for more control and regulation of British commercial operations. In a speech to the House of Commons in 1772, Robert Clive asserted his belief that ‘Indostan was always an absolute despotic government’. The architect of British power in Bengal also remarked that the tendency toward despotism was the reason for the inability of the Company to govern effectively, due to the fact that Indians were naturally predisposed to absolutist government. ‘The inhabitants, especially in Bengal; in inferior stations, are servile, mean, submissive and humble’, he concluded, while in ‘superior status, they are luxurious, effeminate, tyrannical, treacherous, venal, cruel’.24 Clive’s perception of Indian political institutions was reduced to crude racial stereotypes that served to justify Company sovereignty. While these derogatory stereotypes were discursive devices, designed to explain why despotism could flourish in India, they also served to make the idea of race the modus operandi by which good government could be legitimated.25 Dovetailing with the emergence of racial science and the notion that intellectual capacity, mental faculties and the potential for leadership were qualities attached to physical characteristics such as skull type and skin colour, the ethnological view of race is encoded in Clive’s view of Indian subservience.26 That race emerges at this time to justify the civilizing mission is hardly surprising, but it is mobilized to stage a particular moment in the expression of imperial modernity. It also illuminates the increasing importance of whiteness to the technologies and structures of the emerging British colonial state, where the responsibility of government was predicated on the establishment of distance from both the native despotism of the Mughal state as well as the perceived licentiousness of Company employees. What emerged in eighteenth-century discourses of modern government was a notion of moral behaviour called ‘public virtue’.27 As the embodiment of civic responsibility, public virtue was a set of qualities that underscored the natural right to govern in comparison to the despotism and cruelty of the Mughal Empire. The common perception that Indians would be otherwise subjected to an oppressive and tyrannical form of authority from which they needed to be saved also meant that public virtue became an important justification for colonial intervention. In that sense, the British found both a voice for their own self-assigned cultural superiority as well as a legitimating narrative for the extension of British ideas of justice, property and law to other countries. In a pamphlet dated 1772, Alexander Dalrymple expressed his opinion that colonial occupation in foreign lands could only be justified where values of individual self-restraint in public life had the potential to transform the social landscape. It was the moral duty of the

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state to monitor public officials, to establish standards of public decency, and to root out delinquent and irregular behaviour that was deemed to be morally repugnant. In the words of Dalrymple, ‘foreign dominion can only be preserved by extraordinary efforts of Publick Virtue, which the Administration at home must encourage, at the same time that delinquency is punished with the most rigorous justice’.28 Infused with the spirit of self-discipline, the separation of private life from the goals of public accountability would shape the institutional structure of reform where public virtue became the new mantra of benevolent imperialism. Dalrymple’s idea – that the administration at home should set the moral tone of foreign conquest by example – effectively implied that it was the responsibility of parliament to oversee commercial activities and the exercise of justice in India. Local attempts to rule through the haphazard and corrupt practices of Company officials had clearly failed. The moral tone of public virtue grew more intense after the 1784 India Act and through the period of the governor-generalship of Cornwallis. As illustrated in a letter to the Duke of York in 1787, Cornwallis reflected upon his personal mission in India, which for him was ‘to prevent and correct abuses’ by ‘a constant rule to employ the ablest and honestest of men’.29 By removing Company traders and administrative personnel whom he regarded as ‘miserable subjects’, the objective of Cornwallis was to replace them with men who had not been exposed to the despotic practices of Bengal. This was also extended to the military ranks as well as to the civil and commercial wings of the Company. The armies of the Company took on a new significance not only due to the increase in military activity, fuelled by the real or imagined threat of the French, but also due to substantive changes in the role of the armies themselves. No longer small outfits whose purpose was to defend the interests of an autonomous trading company, the Company’s armies became functioning wings of government whose role became integral to both internal security and territorial expansion. Nevertheless, Cornwallis remarked that the armies were ‘in very bad condition, incomplete in numbers and many of those numbers consisting of foreigners, sailors and invalids’.30 Previous military experience was not considered a prerequisite for appointment and, as a result, largely poor and unskilled men who were desperate to escape class servitude in England were recruited by employment agents who were paid a fee for every procured cadet. By the 1770s, under the nomination of the Court of Directors, the trade in cadets had produced a military culture characterized by its youth and tendency for drinking and gambling but also by its lack of training or education.31 As Cornwallis remarked in 1787, the quality of the recruits procured from Europe ‘are such miserable wretches that I am ashamed to acknowledge them for countrymen’.32 For him, the frequent desertions from the armies as well as their motley composition had deeper moral ramifications for the way that public virtue was maintained. In the Code of Military Standing Regulations of the same year, Cornwallis admitted that

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the large number of desertions from the army were due to ‘the indiscriminate admission of all persons into it’ and he also decreed that only British subjects should be employed as soldiers.33 This idea of public virtue as a moral mission also required a physical separation between colonizers and the colonized. The new concern with race was inextricably interwoven with the pursuit to remove those vices, excesses and extravagances deemed to be associated with the old ways of the Company. In 1772, European tax collection supervisors were appointed by Hastings to replace Indians and only Europeans were appointed to exclusively oversee issues of civil justice. Separate European judges were appointed in 1780. By 1781, a European filled the office of police magistrate in Bengal.34 These changes amounted to a racialization of the colonial public sphere where Indians were demoted or excluded altogether from what Radhika Singha calls ‘judicial and magisterial authority’.35 The exclusion of Indians occurred concurrently with the removal of those old Company networks, which consisted of officials who had ‘gone native’, and who acculturated themselves in the Indian environment, and their replacement with personnel brought out from England who would draw social and physical boundaries between themselves and their Indian subjects.36 The ranks of the Company’s armies also represented social arenas where the racialization of the public sphere seemed particularly urgent to colonial officials. James Capper, a Company colonel, commented in a testimony to the directors in 1784 that one of the gravest fears inside the ranks of the army was the ‘black Commandant’ or ‘Subadar’ who might conspire with the Indian princes on the basis of racial solidarity, and ‘being bribed by an enemy, might easily massacre their European officers and Sergeants, and carry the Batallion over to the Enemy’.37 This fear of Indian disloyalty from within the ranks of the army itself eventually led to the exclusion of Indians from positions of leadership and influence. The composition of European men in the armies was also a source of moral anxiety. The recruitment of young, single men without family attachments in Europe to occupy positions in its ranks saw both an increase in the numbers of casual sexual liaisons with ‘native’ women and a corresponding increase in the numbers of illegitimate Eurasian children attached to military camps. Both Cornwallis and the Court of Directors of the Company frowned upon the high incidence of interracial relationships in military circles, perceiving them to be the visible expression of moral decay.38 Moreover, the armies of the Company comprised of multiracial and cosmopolitan battalions of Europeans of different nationalities, Eurasians, and both low- and highcaste Indians. In his 1763 description of the European armies in India, Robert Orme comments that ‘the European troops in the service of the colonies established in Indostan, never consist entirely of natives of that country to which the colony belongs: on the contrary, one half at least is composed of men of all nations of Europe’. He also reflects on the dangers of cosmopolitanism and the threat that any potential racial disloyalty

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could pose to the security of the British settlements in India. His orientalist stereotypes speak of the British classification of Hindu castes into a hierarchical structure, but they also speak of the political anxiety attached to hybridity in the ranks of the armies, where political loyalties could potentially be ambiguous. He refers explicitly to the presence of the Christian topas troops ‘who call themselves Portuguese, always form part of the garrison: they are a little superior in courage to the lower casts of Indians, and greatly inferior to the higher castes, as well as to the northern Moors of Indostan’.39 The archives of the Bengal army also provide a snapshot of the racial complexity that Orme finds so threatening in the years preceding the India Act of 1784. For example, in the Company’s first brigade in the year 1778, 14 nationalities can be identified in the muster rolls including French, Dutch, German, American, Italian, Polish and Russian personnel.40 It is difficult to ascertain with any accuracy the difference between European and Eurasian officers due to the fact that many Eurasian officers saw themselves as European, or else they were included in the European nationality categories of the Company’s armies. In his exhaustive lists of the officers of the Bengal army, Hodson has a separate category titled ‘Nationality Uncertain’, which may have included Eurasians who could not be placed in any other nationality category.41 When one turns to the actual Bengal muster rolls for 1779, moreover, it is possible to identify evidence of at least some Eurasian influence.42 The general question of whether Eurasians could be accepted as Europeans in the Company’s armies became part of this anxiety about the question of national identification. This seemed all the more urgent and complicated in view of the evidence of Eurasian participation in the armies of the Princely States and in battalions commanded by enemy Frenchmen. The uncertain and shifting political allegiances of the mixed-race population and the fact that it did not act as a cohesive collective voice added to this sense of anxiety. As a consequence, this threat of potential disloyalty overlapped with the racialization of public virtue in ways that began to radically affect Eurasian employment opportunities in the Company’s armies. According to the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, both the civil and military wings of the Company were open to Eurasians before 1791. However, after 1791, the perception of Eurasian allegiance changed dramatically with the entry requirements for Company service becoming more explicitly discriminatory in regard to Eurasian participation. By 1795, the radical reform of the armies and the shaping of the nascent colonial state to reflect the racial dimensions of British privilege saw Eurasians become excluded altogether from military and civil employment in the Company.43 In the context of the acquisition of formal political sovereignty, one of the key effects was the recognition of the mixed-race population as a distinct social group. The consequence of the exclusion of Eurasians from

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public life meant that the private sphere of interracial sexual relationships became synonymous with moral excess, social disorder and possible political disloyalty. As the emerging colonial state was being assembled, the private arena of interracial sexual relationships became a key site for public scrutiny. Crossing the racial divide in an intimate way had become a transgressive act that contradicted the sentiment of public virtue. The reality of racial hybridization in the ranks of the army meant that the categories British subject and ‘native of India’ were difficult to distinguish since these categories were often imagined binary constructions that did not reflect social reality. At the level of everyday life, British society in Bengal comprised of both multinational and multiracial groups. The legacy of ‘native’ and Portuguese Eurasian women in the formation of those who thought of themselves as European meant that to be ‘British’ in the Indian environment was a deeply vexed concept. Boundaries between Indian and British were inextricably intertwined due to the legacy of previous generations of interracial mixing, while the visible presence of Eurasian children in military cantonments was a continuing reminder to the Company that future generations of British subjects could potentially threaten racial boundaries. Whereas cultural difference was once marked by religious denomination, language and political affiliation, the racializing of public virtue saw Eurasian children become the living embodiment of the moral disorder that had the potential to threaten the structure of modern government. On 14 September 1782, an advertisement appeared in The India Gazette calling for officers and surgeons to establish a philanthropic fund to house and educate the Eurasian children of those Company soldiers who had died in battle.44 In the spirit of late eighteenth-century notions of civic paternalism and social responsibility, the plea was a response to the high numbers of Eurasian children in military cantonments but also a reaction to the perceived threat to public virtue. In a letter dated 18 November 1782 to Sir Eyre Coote, commander-in-chief of the British forces in India, a committee comprising of senior army officers proposed a plan for the establishment of a society for the protection of the Eurasian children of deceased Company soldiers and officers.45 Although the motive for the proposal was philanthropic in intention, the proposal itself saw the issue of Eurasian children become the focus of a moral panic where the guardianship of the children became a core political issue. Fathered by British soldiers but brought up by their Indian mothers, often in the confines of army camps or in nearby settlements, the spectre of Eurasian children growing up under the care and protection of ‘native’ women came to represent a late eighteenth-century moral panic. The question as to why there were large numbers of illegitimate Eurasian children in British military cantonments was debated amongst the committee of what became the Bengal orphan society. According to the papers of the society, the increasing numbers of Eurasians were the natural consequence of single young men being far from home, where ‘no less than

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nine tenths of the Company’s servants abroad being, of necessity, unable to enter into matrimonial connections of a suitable kind’. Unable to marry white women from within their own social class, their sexual relationships with Indian women were tolerated because it ‘would be equally fruitless and unjust to attempt, in any shape, to lay a restraint upon a sort of commerce which, though it may not be entirely defensible, is obviously rendered unavoidable by the very nature of our establishments in India’.46 Despite the army’s toleration and even encouragement of interracial relationships as a ‘necessary evil’, not all contemporary observers shared this view. Innes Munro, for example, declared moral outrage at the idea that ‘there are also the kind of ladies which European officers and civilians take such delight in supporting as mistresses; some gentlemen, of a singular (and I think unnatural) taste, preferring them for white women’.47 The fact that some Englishmen preferred to form relationships with ‘native’ women as a matter of personal choice was, for Munro, an affront to social order. In this sense, the social status of Indian women who were sexually attached to British military men was also bound up in ‘the kind of ladies’ they were perceived to be. They were often demonized as immoral influences and thereby deemed to be unfit mothers of Eurasian children. However, not all Eurasian children in British Bengal were born in the army camps, nor did they all constitute a vast social underclass without male patronage. There were also upper class British men in Calcutta who had sexual relationships with Indian women and who fathered Eurasian children, such as the lawyer William Hickey, where the emotional bonds were longstanding and genuine.48 While often sincere, however, these relationships did not have the same social status or acceptance as European marriages.49 The Indian companion was both housekeeper and sexual partner but not legal wife. In fact, in this kind of relationship, the boundary between servant and sexual partner was often blurred. As Indrani Chatterjee poignantly notes, the status of Indian women who co-habitated with European men remained obscure in the 1770s and 1780s; the distinction between housekeeper, servant, slave and concubine was not always clearly demarcated in a social milieu where the mothers of Eurasian children could very well have had little social role outside that of sexual property.50 This perception of Indian female partners of British men – whether lower class or upper class – as casual sexual partners meant that paternal right was assumed as a natural right of colonial possession. As ‘natives of India’, the Indian female sexual partners of British men were not considered to be the bona fide protectors of Eurasian children. However, Indian mothers did often fight to keep mixed-race children, and they defended their entitlement to be the legitimate guardians and protectors of their own children despite the ideology of paternal entitlement. On 29 November 1783, the India Gazette reported a case where an Indian mother refused to hand over her three Eurasian children to the Orphan Society after the death of their British father. The article reported that ‘three

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children of the late Lt. Andrew Stewart who were admitted on the foundation of the Orphan Society in April last, and were sent with their Mother in a return Budgerow from Berhampore to Calcutta in May, with an intention of being delivered over to the Managers of the Society’, but because they did not arrive in Calcutta as scheduled ‘there is some reason to apprehend that the Mother has secretted [sic] the Children’. Treated as an absconded criminal, a reward was offered if the woman could be found and her children transferred to the custodianship of the Orphan Society: ‘this is to give notice, that any Person or Persons giving information where the Children may be found, will, on their being recovered, be handsomely rewarded by the Managers of the Society. … the Mother of the Children comes from Patcoom in Pachet’.51 This newspaper article reveals how the private arena of interracial relationships mirrored colonial power relations in the public sphere. The very use of the word ‘orphan’ to describe these mixed-race children who may have had a living Indian mother, and the plan to build an orphanage to house and instruct them in the virtues of British education, religion and law, illuminates the patriarchal entitlement of white men over Indian women for custody of their children. The aim of the Committee’s scheme was to devise educational strategies that would provide the avenues by which Eurasian children could become useful British subjects. Although some children may have been genuine orphans with neither father nor mother, and some who were fatherless may have been rejected by their Indian mothers, the evidence seems to suggest that they were forcibly removed from their Indian mothers by the managers of the newly operating Orphan Society. This displacement would bring about the very progressive transformation that sustained the logic of saving ‘natives’ from the degradation of their own religious practices and cultural institutions. The argument that justified the appropriation of Indian land and the consolidation of the colonial state as acts of public virtue found an expression in the space of the orphanage and in the control of Eurasian children.52 According to the regulations of the proposed Orphan Society, ‘legitimate children may remain with their mothers until they arrive at the age of five years’, after which boys must be removed and sent to the orphanage while girls were permitted to remain with their mothers if ‘management deem them well qualified to superintend their education’.53 However, as most of the Eurasian children of army officers were not born within the institution of marriage, their illegitimacy was seen to justify the taking of both boys and girls at a young age and their immediate removal. The proposal states that boys would remain there until the age of 15 and girls until the age of 14. Trained in domestic skills, cooking and needlework, the girls were deemed to be appropriate wives for young army officers who were stationed in Bengal permanently, and, in the absence of large numbers of single, English female settlers, provided the means to reproduce the British population.

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For Eurasian boys, their role was to provide labour for the lower echelons of the colonial administration or to perform petty military roles. They were to enter British colonial society in positions that reflected both the rank of their fathers in the military hierarchy as well as their assumed subordination to the white establishment that was being assembled around them. The by-laws of the new Orphan Society proposed to ‘provide for several of the sons of the non-commissioned and privates by sending them to sea, or placing them, with the approbation of government, in the pilot service’, or else, to ‘be admitted into the service of the company, as drummers and fifers, as often as convenient’.54 In 1786, the Calcutta Gazette declared to its British readers that that the function of the proposed Orphan Society was to transform Eurasian children from being ‘a disgrace to the English name’ to ‘become useful members of the State’.55 This transformation into useful subjects also involved the participation in a scheme where Eurasian boys would be sent to England to further their education and to settle there or return to India to take up positions under Company patronage. The scheme was not new. Before this time, many Eurasians from India and mixed-race children from the West Indies were sent to England by European fathers with the income and the patronage to support them. Innes Munro commented that ‘if you were only to examine all the seminaries in Britain for the education of youth, it would be found that nearly one out of ten in the numbers they contain is of that description’.56 Because the ‘West India and North American colonies have produced children of the same complection [sic], who, being educated in England, have neither proved chargeable to society, nor disgraceful to the human species’, declared the managers of the Orphan Society, ‘we might thence infer, on behalf of the Orphans whose cause we are engaged in, that possibly Nature may be no less liberal of her gifts to these; who, if suffered to visit the Mother Country, may not become more hurtful, or more burdensome to it, than their brethren of the New World’.57 In other words, because there had been no previous demonstration against the mixed-race children of the West Indies and North American colonies being educated in English seminaries, the proposed managers of the orphan society concluded that British Eurasian children from India should be allowed to travel to England in the same way as mixed-race children were sent from the West Indies and North America on the basis of having the same complexion. There were also arguments against the sending of Eurasian children to England that were based on political considerations. It is plausible that the presence of illegitimate Eurasian children of British army officers in England would send out the wrong signals to the government in light of the excesses of the Company, which led to the eventual passing of the India Act. Evidence of a culture of moral licentiousness was precisely the ammunition needed by Burke and the opponents of the Company to further illustrate the plunder and rapacity of its officials.

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In terms of the Company’s own interests, the sending of Eurasian children to England for education, and their return to useful civil and military positions in India, would have had a potentially detrimental effect on the workings of patronage that secured positions to those contacts and alliances of the directors. It was well known that the appointment of writers and cadets could be procured by purchase and favour, and the directors acquired considerable capital in the appointment process.58 By 1793, such ‘abuses … in the disposal of their Patronage’ were confronted by requiring directors to take an oath to not directly or indirectly accept or take any perquisite, emolument, fee, present or reward … for in respect of the appointment of any person or persons to any place or office in the gift or appointment of the said Company’.59 Protection of Company patronage may well have been a consideration in mind before these rules were put into place. Despite these political arguments, there were also deeper moral concerns that began to surface concerning the acceptability of interracial relationships. The proposal was also seen to encourage ‘certain immoralities of conduct’60 where interracial relationships embodied the very notion of moral danger. The proposers of the orphan society indicated in their own words that the visible signs of such immorality would be considered ‘a measure of dangerous tendency’61 by the Court of Directors, which, in a milieu of radical reform, was attempting to radically improve the credibility of the East India Company in the public imagination. In essence, race started to emerge as the mechanism by which imperial modernity was expressed through the project of moral reform. Skin colour surfaced in political discourses as the marker of difference that separated British subjects from ‘natives of India’ in order for public virtue and the mission of moral reform to have meaning. As a result, Eurasians were found to be in an ambiguous situation and the mixed-race population emerged as a political danger. It is clear that a racial distinction between European and Eurasian was drawn by the Court of Directors in 1786 before there was any consciousness amongst British Eurasians themselves of belonging to a separate community. In other words, it was an imposed classification rather than a conscious self-categorization. A separate racial category surfaces in the discourses concerning the welfare and education of Eurasian children, which marks a change in the conception of hybridity. Whereas members of the British community could be loosely defined in terms of Protestantism, loyalty to the British flag through service in the armies, marriage to a European man or, indeed, through the cultural attachment to British values, racial origin starts to emerges more strongly as a marker of difference. The emergence of the mixed-race community in this context was a product of local political circumstances but it was also set in a wider global frame. In not insignificant ways, global Anglo-French relations on the subcontinent continued to play their part in understanding why the mixed-race population was targeted as a political danger. The aftermath of the French

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revolution also had implications since the rising power of métis and mulatto communities in French colonies in a post-revolutionary context was a source of anxiety for British imperial administrators. In particular, Anglo-Indian historians, such as Herbert Stark and Frank Anthony, have suggested that the lesson of the Saint-Domingue revolts against French rule may have been another reason for the exclusion and discrimination of Eurasians in India.62 Stark and Anthony perhaps overstate the role of the Saint-Domingue revolution in the shaping of anti-Eurasian sentiment in British India, since the actions that led to the exclusion of Eurasians occurred in Bengal before that event. However, Saint-Domingue acted as a powerful symbol. The mulattoled slave rebellions that shook the French-controlled colony, leading to the Haiti revolution and the establishment of independent black rule, reminded imperial architects across the world of the vulnerabilities of European rule in societies if large mixed-race populations were socially and politically empowered with considerable economic status. This sentiment was particularly poignant in the report of George Mountnorris, the Viscount Valentia, who arrived in India in 1803. ‘In every country where this intermediate cast has been permitted to rise, it has ultimately tended to the ruin of that country. Spanish America and St. Domingo are examples of this fact’, he surmised. The potential conditions for Eurasian resistance were as ripe in India as they had been in Saint-Domingue. He commented that the greatest fear to the security of British interests in India did not come from the Hindu or Muslim communities but from the potentially rebellious ‘intermediate caste’ of Eurasians since their ‘increase in India is beyond calculation; and though possibly there may be nothing to fear from the sloth of the Hindus, and the rapidly declining consequence of the Mussulmauns, yet it may be justly apprehended that this tribe may hereafter become too powerful to control’.63 The haunting image of Saint-Domingue acted to justify rather than to anticipate the exclusion of Eurasians from the civil and military wings of the East India Company. Yet, its symbolism struck at the heart of this emerging British imperial consciousness not only in terms of the fear of racial hybridity, but also in terms of the French associations that SaintDomingue evoked in the British imagination. The political philosophy of the rebellion was anchored in reactions to the French revolution, where free people of colour who were treated as honorary whites demanded the same status and civil rights as Europeans. While the emergence of binary difference in British India was underscored by the pursuit of public virtue in a localized context, the consequences of French attitudes towards the status of mixed-race people in other French colonies was never too far from the surface of British anxieties in India.

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Pays français perdu sur les rives de Gange Distant de plus de deux mille lieues de Paris Mille milles anglais loin de Pondichéry Notre Chandernagor est un pays étrange. (A lost French country on the banks of the Ganges More than two thousand leagues from Paris A thousand English miles far from Pondicherry Our Chandernagore is a strange place.)1

In this short poem published in the Revue Historique de l’Inde française in 1918, Henri Théron shows how the settlement of Chandernagore emerged as something of an alluring curiosity in the French colonial imagination. Evoking sentimental images of timelessness and physical isolation, the place is depicted rather nostalgically as a lost remnant of a bygone era. According to a report on the state of the French settlements in Asia, Chandernagore was originally a small and insignificant village with a few European houses surrounding a basic factory at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but within 40 years it was transformed into a thriving and prosperous colony inhabited by more than 25,000 people.2 Between 1731 and 1741, when Dupleix was the governor of Chandernagore, the colony benefited from a boom in trade due, in part, to its unique position where it connected the lucrative Bengal trade to Pondicherry, the Indian ocean settlements, China, Southeast Asia and France. This meant that the French were well positioned at Chandernagore to tap into global trade networks that were outside the ambit of British influence and to create independent channels of influence.3 The colony grew in stature as a result of its newly found prosperity, which enabled the construction of a new fort, warehouses, roads, public buildings, sailing vessels and a protective moat around the town. By 1744, it had become the most prominent and well-resourced colonial settlement in Bengal, whose commercial success predated that of the British at Calcutta. Whatever prosperity and fame Chandernagore had attained in the French imagination in the distant past, it was soon to be lost since its fate was

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largely entangled with the rise and consolidation of British sovereignty. According to George Malleson, an English officer and historian who published a book on the French in India in the late nineteenth century, the capture of Chandernagore in 1757 was a watershed moment in the ascendancy of the East India Company.4 The alliance between the French and the nawab of Bengal against the East India Company’s armies meant that Chandernagore was perceived as the great thorn in the side of British interests as well as being a disturbingly close refuge for political dissenters, marginalized Catholics and army deserters. While the power of the French in real terms was small, the reality of having a French colony so close to the centre of British power in Bengal had wider global implications. In 1758, the Annual Register in London reported that British hegemony could not be achieved in Bengal ‘until they had broken the French power in this province, which they had greater fear to dread, small as it was, than all the armies of the Nabob’.5 It was with some sense of celebration and awe that Robert Clive wrote to the Court of Directors in 1757 ‘to congratulate your Honours on the taking of Chandernagore, the Destruction of this Flourishing Colony will I am persuaded be attended with many signal advantages to the Trade of the East India Company’.6 The fort was completely razed to the ground and buildings and armament were burnt or destroyed. Clive’s armies were ordered to capture all trading operations and local residents were treated as prisoners of war. The destruction or occupation of Chandernagore and the seizure of commerce seemed to set the pattern for the routine mistreatment of the settlement and its population as the eighteenth century progressed. After the first British occupation (1761–65), it was returned as a shadow of its former self and was described emotively by the Comte du Modave, who visited Bengal in 1773, as a ‘sad image of crumbling ruins and deserted streets’ with only a ‘sad and profound silence affirming its present misery as much as recalling the memory of its eclipsed splendour’.7 Many of its principal residents fled to the Danish colony of Serampore while some French soldiers joined the armies of the Indian powers and could be found in the service of the Marathas or in the court of the Mughal emperor at Delhi.8 The tragic deterioration of the settlement continued to attract the attention of French writers such as the colonial official, Yvon, who commented in 1789 that while Chandernagore still possessed ‘well-aligned streets with beautiful houses, some still existing’, it was for the most part in ruins and ‘the most miserable of all the settlements on the Ganges’.9 The history of the French settlements in India is entangled with the politics of the Anglo-French wars and their effect on political relations with the British. Yet, it is also the history of another form of imperial modernity with its own genealogy, philosophy and rationale that arose out of specific circumstances. The Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, granted the French a firman to trade in India in 1666 after Louis XIV sent two ambassadors to both the Persian and Mughal courts. By 1671, the French had established

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a factory at Surat and transferred their commercial centre to western India from Madagascar.10 While no less than six different variants of the French East India Company existed in the period from 1604 to 1785, Colbert’s La Compagnie des Indes Orientales was the model that came to oversee commercial operations on the subcontinent.11 The French East India Company set up operations in Pondicherry in the south in 1673 and this small Tamil town eventually became the chief French settlement. Chandernagore was therefore the most isolated of the French colonies or comptoirs with the other four (Pondicherry, Yanam, Karaikal and Mahé) located in the south of the subcontinent. After ten years as the governor of Chandernagore, Joseph François Dupleix became governor of Pondicherry in 1742. He set about building on the extraordinary commercial success of the Bengal settlement that led the English to view the French as a serious rival to their trading enterprise.12 Sustained Anglo-French conflict in Europe both aggravated and inflamed this commercial competition. The War of Austrian Succession in 1744 led directly to a battle between English and French forces off the coast of the southern Coromandel and the eventual capture of Madras by the French in 1746. The reciprocal occupation of Pondicherry by the British saw the commencement of a tit-for-tat pattern develop during periods of AngloFrench conflict in Europe, where French settlements in India became political pawns in a global game of reprisal and revenge. Pondicherry was returned to the French in 1749, and while official policy discouraged any form of political intervention in the affairs of the Indian states, Dupleix was secretly devising a new strategy to strengthen French influence and secure commercial ties. His plan was to transform the French presence from one of pure trading enterprise to that of serious territorial contender. Following the death of the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1748, his technique for doing this was not to invade and conquer, but to become indirectly involved in the internal politics of his southern Indian neighbours to influence military and political decisions. Dupleix perfected this technique of the ‘subsidiary alliance’, which effectively meant that French political influence was exercised over substantial territories by giving Indian rulers military support and providing them with foreign policy advice and access to European intelligence networks. The armies of Haider Ali in Mysore were strengthened by French military leadership.13 General de Bussy was installed as the power behind the Nizam of Hyderabad to further what he termed the ‘reciprocal interests of the Indians and the French.14 By 1750, Dupleix became the unofficial titular ruler of the Carnatic by building networks of patronage and mutual obligation, where French military and intelligence-gathering capabilities were exchanged with Indian rulers for trading privileges and access to indigenous power brokers. The English East India Company reacted to Dupleix’s manoeuvres with a combination of fear and envy, which was exacerbated by continuing conflict in Europe and a general sense that British commercial interests were

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threatened by French relations with the Princely States. The Company gathered its own allies and successfully defended Arcot against attack while simultaneously placing sanctions on French trade, communications and personal movements. Driven by a historical legacy of bitter enmity, India became a place where the drama of global war was played out. On their part, the French presented themselves not as rivals with the British for territorial conquests, but as victims of aggressive Company practices. They often saw in their own situation an opportunity to claim a moral connection with Indians based on their shared experience of a common oppressor. For example, in 1752, Dupleix wrote to the Governor of Fort St David to complain of recent East India Company conduct in its pursuit of territory and its domination of trade. He pointed out the moral disregard the Company had for its own soldiers and the ways in which their actions contravened acceptable military conduct. In this passionate letter, Dupleix noted to the governor that the British cared neither for the welfare of the local inhabitants or their own troops since ‘the misery of the people raises no compassion in your breasts. On the contrary, you seek to increase it. Neither have you any greater concern for the considerable loss of men these troubles have occasioned to the State of England’. In this emotive vision, Dupleix commented that the French and the rulers of the Princely States, whom he lauded, were the twin objects of past and present Company aggression: ‘What pretences will not you, Sir, and your Predecessors make use of with your Superiors to support your Conduct both in respect to Us and to those Lords of the Indias?’15 In suggesting such a connection, Dupleix spells out his vision of shared grievances between the French and the Princely States was part romantic propaganda and part genuine political sympathy with local Indian rulers in their struggle against East India Company incursions. In its public and secret correspondence, the Company did not hide a profound mistrust of French intentions, seeing their self-assigned role of protecting Indian interests as a convenient smokescreen to mask their true imperial ambitions. When the French lodged a request to ‘secure Subsistences’ to strengthen their settlements in 1754, the Secret Committee of the East India Company immediately raised questions in regard to their real motives. It was translated as a possible attempt to strengthen their military and territorial presence. The committee remarked that ‘the word – Subsistence, is so very vague, that the Committee cannot figure to themselves to what extent it may be carried’ and asked the inevitable question: ‘Do they mean Territories sufficient to subsist or maintain great Armies, or do they mean only sufficient to supply Provisions for a few?’16 For the East India Company, the extension of French commercial interests and the benign policy of befriending local rulers was nothing but a clever ploy designed to hide the real goal of acquiring political influence to gain the strategic advantage. In fact, the Court of Directors in London believed that Dupleix’s real intention was not to protect Indian interests but to conquer the whole of the subcontinent by infiltrating and controlling

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networks that would act to destabilize British interests. In a letter from the directors to the British government in November 1754, they expressed the fear that Dupleix’s strategy of building subsidiary alliances would eventually lead to French domination of the India trade and eventual political control. They noted that the ‘French are daily growing in power’ and with Dupleix at the helm ‘the Company’s Settlements and Trade upon the Coast of Coromandel must be entirely in the hands of the French and could subsist only during their pleasure’.17 This fear of subterranean French efforts to build an empire in India was not just a source of concern for the Company but it was also a concern for the French government, for whom the grandiose visions of Dupleix often undermined official policy. His interference in the internal politics of the Indian powers and his longer term vision of a French Empire in India indicated that neither his strategy nor his actions were consistent with the desires of leaders in Paris. Dupleix’s eventual recall to France in 1754 and the end of his career in India illustrated the position of Versailles in relation to attempts by overseas administrators who wanted to build political empires without the legitimacy to do so. While the end of the Dupleix era confirmed that the French had not the will, capital or energy for empire building on the subcontinent, the Indian Ocean area was strategically important for French trade and it remained a significant battleground for influence, especially after the commencement of the Seven Years’ War in 1756. In that year, the Secret Committee of the East India Company conceded that the new circumstances of the war in Europe meant that their commercial operations were now more susceptible to possible French schemes for control of the Indian Ocean trade routes. The Committee advised that without military and financial reinforcements, the French could gain the upper hand and control the entire Indian Ocean trading network, thereby potentially jeopardizing the security of the Company’s interests. It recommended the Company ‘furnish an expense sufficient to encounter that of the French Nation’ who ‘take all Occasions to send Ships and Forces and Warlike Stores to the East Indies’. The warning of the intelligence document was that unless the British reinforce its naval presence, ‘all the Company’s Settlements must fall an easy prey to the French, whereby, and by the Superior Force in the Indian Seas they will secure the Whole Trade and Navigation thereof to themselves’.18 Historians generally agree that by the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, the French had lost the imperial race in India. A series of events led to the decline of French power: the defeat of the military alliance between the Nawab and French forces at the Battle of Plassey in 1757; the defeat of French forces by the British at the Battle of Wandiwash in 1760; and the terms of the Peace of Paris where Britain emerged as a global superpower at the expense of French interests. What was the effect of global events on a French settlement such as Chandernagore? Are there ways in which a closer look at Anglo-French relations during this period might shed light on

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the cleavages and contradictions in the politics of whiteness? I want to address these questions by considering how the settlement and its inhabitants fared after 1763 when the British gained the upper hand in Bengal. By looking more closely at the Anglo-French conflict from the perspective of human actors on the ground, any notion of a stable or monolithic European colonial presence is critically challenged by considering the perspective of another imperial power that was often subjugated by British administrators. Through trade obstructions, disputes concerning armaments and the treatment of French civilians and prisoners, the human dimensions of this subjugation in periods of occupation and Anglo-French war are revealing. Like other Europeans, the French were in India to compete for a share of the lucrative East India trade. At the end of the Seven Years’ War, they were therefore eager to re-establish the terms of their agreements with the Indian powers to revitalize their lost commercial position. Access to goods such as silk, cotton and saltpetre was not only important for the survival of Chandernagore and the French settlements, it provided a chance to stimulate international trade at a time when the French treasury was shattered due to the negative effects of war expenditure. Jean Law de Lauriston, who assumed control of the French settlements in 1765, wrote a report on the state of the French settlements in 1767 in which he confirmed that Bengal continued to be the most lucrative source of revenue for the French East Company. Without it, the French would have to abandon their trading operations in India altogether and, perhaps, concentrate on the smaller and less accessible China trade.19 Despite the theoretical restitution of trading rights after 1763, the British continued to obstruct the activities of the other European trading companies as part of a wider campaign for a complete commercial monopoly. In a letter to the directors-general of the French Company in Paris in 1767, Chevalier revealed the scale of this campaign when he accused the administration at Calcutta of attempting to destroy French trading activities. He called the British at Calcutta ‘an enemy nation who no longer even permits us to breathe the air of the Ganges’ and ‘by the difficulties with which she oppresses us, the annoyances, violences and vexations that she exercises, we feel it impossible to continue with advantage’.20 In further correspondence to Paris in 1768, Chevalier complained that the situation in Bengal was dire. It revealed the extent of the isolation of Chandernagore, which he felt was in a double bind, having been neglected by the French government on the one hand and subjected to intense restrictions by the East India Company on the other. The British were attempting to starve the settlement into submission by placing an economic embargo on its trade operations, and he revealed how restrictions were placed on all the most lucrative French commodities. Saltpetre, the natural ingredient of gunpowder, and bought in vast quantities by the French to fuel their ammunition power, was an obvious target due to its

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critical importance and value. The British gained a monopoly over its production but agreed to sell limited quantities back to the French at between 80 and 100 per cent profit. Similar conditions were placed on the production and trade of salt and the popular alcoholic beverage arrack.21 With the production of cotton, Chevalier reported that in order to gain the advantage ‘the British utilise all the tyranny and violence imaginable’.22 He cited examples such as the prevention of cotton sales from Indian manufacturers and the obstruction of Indian weavers from being employed in the service of French employers. By controlling the goods coming in and out of the outlying French trading stations (or loges) in rural Bengal, the Company was able to prevent the flow of capital back into Chandernagore. For example, the British and the French both had factories competing for the same resources in the town of Patna, which was the centre of the production of opium. According to Chevalier, the importance of this profitable commodity to the British was such that the French factory at Patna was attacked by British soldiers as early as 1767, in an incident in which the ‘loge was crushed and burnt’ and ‘several of our soldiers have been killed’.23 In 1769, Chevalier wrote an even stronger letter of protest to the East India Company in Calcutta in regard to the obstructions placed on French commerce. He outlined his views on British efforts to monopolize the Bengal trade where ‘all kinds of persecutions, violences and obstructions’ are used against all competing European companies but with a particular severity reserved for the French.24 The location of Chandernagore on the river Hooghly also meant that French trading vessels were obliged to pass through Calcutta on the southbound route to the Bay of Bengal or to pass Hooghly on the northbound route. Inevitably, this meant that British customs officials could intercept and inspect French trading vessels at Calcutta or Hooghly and impose customs duties as the boats crossed the British border. Such actions often led to the confiscation of goods and the indefinite internment of French pilots and their vessels. As revealed in the Secret Department papers of the East India Company, there were also examples of pilots being charged higher amounts of customs duty at the Hooghly customs house by British officials. In 1777, French private traders were charged 4 per cent duty on all goods that went through the Hooghly customs house while all other private traders from other European countries were charged 2.5 per cent. This practice of imposing higher customs duties at Hooghly meant that French pilots were often compelled to buy expensive merchandise from the British in order to transport goods northwards, but the practice could also be found on the southbound route. According to François Heliès, a senior French naval officer at Chandernagore, pilots were forced to buy goods at terms of sale dictated by the customs officers at Calcutta so that they could pass freely on their way out to the Bay of Bengal.25 Through inflated prices or bribes, French trade was either controlled or restricted or, else, higher customs tariffs were imposed to inhibit profits being made on the international market.

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Under the Peace of Paris in 1763, England returned to France the occupied Indian possessions on the provision that they did not possess armaments, fortifications or large garrisons of troops. The logic of forced demilitarization was to prevent the French colonies from being used to launch a future attack against the British as part of a policy of revenge for their losses or, indeed, as part of an alliance with the Indian powers. According to Law de Lauriston, the French were only able to retain 25 French soldiers, 300 sepoys, three European officers and 20 pieces of canon for the sole purpose of protecting French commerce.26 While armaments were deemed necessary to protect capital and goods, they were considered to be provocative if employed for the purposes of defence. In 1767, the construction of a ditch around Chandernagore by the French generated intense political tension between the two powers due to the underlying suspicion concerning its real use. Despite the Peace of Paris, the ‘ditch incident’ became a symbolic battle for the control of colonial sovereignty, and it demonstrated the extent of the suspicion and enmity between two imperial powers caught in a stalemate. According to the minutes of the Conseil Supérieur, the intention of the ditch was to defend Chandernagore from both military and environmental threats, considering that the settlement was so far inland from the mouth of the Ganges. It was left unprotected in the case of invasion and open to the annual monsoon deluge.27 As news of the construction of the ditch reached Calcutta, the British reacted with panic, seeing the ditch as a potentially hostile act of rearmament, and, indeed, as an attempt to build fortifications. Although Chevalier insisted that the ditch was nothing more than a ‘simple canal’, the British authorities at Calcutta wrote in protest that a ‘ditch and rampart around the town of Chandernagore’ was ‘more calculated for the purposes of a defence than to serve as a drain’.28 In the fear that the construction masked a secret plan to attack Calcutta in the spirit of revenge for the French losses in the Seven Years’ War, the British authorities sent their own chief engineer to survey the building of the ditch, to report on its potential use and to measure its dimensions. In an elaborate and highly detailed report, the chief engineer at Calcutta, Colonel Campbell, confirmed that the measurements of the ditch far exceeded those of a simple canal. The report concluded that the ditch was an armament that contravened the terms of the treaty and needed to be destroyed.29 Since the French refused to submit to these demands, the East India Company concluded that these were the beginnings of a much larger fortification where it had ‘the strongest suspicions that they [the French] expect a considerable body of forces in India, so we deemed it a duty incumbent upon [us], to take early measure for defeating any hostile intentions they might entertain against these Provinces’.30 The correspondence over the ditch affair between Chevalier and Harry Verelst, governor of Bengal, reveals how the quarrel about the use of a ditch drew on deep historical and political animosities between the two powers.

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‘Let truth speak, your designs are not against our ditch’, exclaimed Chevalier, ‘but your great motive is that of Jealousy, which for a long time past, has actuated you against all nations in general, and ours in particular’.31 East India Company troops were subsequently sent to fill in the ditch and destroy any prospect of it being used for military purposes. Chevalier was quick to point out the relative power disparity between the two European nations when he declared that ‘you have troops, but we have none to oppose them. You are Masters of everything, and we of nothing’. Chevalier’s reaction to the filling of the ditch was to declare that the incident reflected a much stronger desire not only to control the French colony and isolate its inhabitants but to drive the French out of Bengal completely.32 The subsequent squabble over the use of a simple ditch may seem a trivial and mundane event, unrelated to the central questions of hybridity and modernity, but it speaks to both in terms of providing a political context. It emerges as a spatial metaphor for the control of political sovereignty in Chandernagore as much as it underscores the differences between British and French conceptions of imperial modernity. It was a site over which Anglo-French power relations on the world stage were played out in a seemingly marginal colonial context. These spatial politics on a local level in Bengal reflected the larger scale of the French concessions under the Peace of Paris, but they also reveal the growing dominance of the East India Company as the paramount territorial sovereign in the years preceding the formal consolidation of British rule. Enmeshed in these political machinations, the French in India found themselves in a subordinate and paradoxical position as ‘colonized colonizers’, and this status was only exacerbated under formal occupation where they were treated as prisoners of war. The start of the second British occupation in 1778 saw the arrest and imprisonment of French pilots as another strategy by which the British could monopolize trade on the waterways, keeping this vital maritime route free from possible European competition. Normally based at Chandernagore, pilots were separated from their families and interned in the Calcutta gaol, stimulating protests in regard to their social condition and political status. In a letter written to Warren Hastings, the pilots Puget, Chenneaux and Lercy requested that they should be returned to their respective families in the colony who ‘will be the securities for our conduct and we shall be all our lives with as much respect as gratitude’.33 Chevalier describes the plight of one French pilot, Puget, in a letter to Warren Hastings, who ‘has at Chandernagore a young wife, big with child and grieved with chagrin and disquietudes, she is constantly crying and her situation leaves room to fear a miscarriage’.34 While keen to illustrate the suffering of women and children in the settlement, Chevalier was using this incident as emotional propaganda to present the French as besieged victims. The representation of the British occupation as the gendered defilement of French domestic space was intended to strike a chord with his British adversary.

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Some imprisoned pilots were released in September 1778 and allowed to return to their families at Chandernagore, ‘and there be detained under a sufficient guard to prevent their escape’.35 This meant that the pilots were required to take an oath of allegiance to the British sovereign as part of the release condition, with a clause stipulating that they would not be required to take up arms against their own nation. Furthermore, they were also prevented from moving southwards beyond the vicinity of Calcutta to stop them fleeing to Pondicherry or seeking employment in those Princely States that were sympathetic to French partisans. Release from prison allowed the pilots to return to their families, only to be restricted from relocating to others places in India in search of work. Pilots received a modest subsidy on which to live, but this was not enough to cover the basic costs of food and shelter. In a letter to Hastings, Padet, a pilot interned at Chandernagore, complained of his ‘inability to provide for the most pressing necessities of life, either for myself or my family’.36 The French who resided permanently at Chandernagore as merchants, writers or officials also felt the political and economic effects of the occupation. All private property was seized in 1778 and sold ‘to any purchasers except subjects of France’,37 while the East India Company repossessed all public property such as government buildings, official residences, public works and warehouses. Likewise, all merchandise and provisions found in the warehouses of merchants or in the hulks of French sailing vessels were transferred to Company ownership. In November 1778, the British issued an order expelling all able-bodied French subjects from Bengal by 1 December of the same year. Chevalier’s prognosis in 1769 about the ditch incident being a political ploy designed to eventually oust the French from Bengal seemed to ring true in French ears. Such was the extent of British fears of French military action that all able-bodied men who had the potential of engaging in armed combat were forcibly removed by boat to the Isle de France or, like Chevalier himself, were taken to England under guard where they would be treated as prisoners of war. Others were imprisoned indefinitely in the Calcutta gaol and interrogated for their knowledge of French intelligence networks. Further letters were written by French prisoners to Hastings in 1779 complaining of Company mistreatment. These complaints are illuminating for demonstrating how the category ‘French’ was itself ambiguous and racially hybrid. Implicit in their reasons to remain in Chandernagore was a sense of cultural attachment. Men who may have been born in Bengal were both confused and perplexed by their newly assigned political status as enemy subjects of a country that some had never even visited. Also implicit in these expressions of belonging were the men’s intimate attachments to their ‘native’ partners and their established families. Typical of these expressions, Jean des Marchais protested that he should be able to stay in Bengal due to the fact that all his close relatives were in India and that his wife was Indian. A ship’s officer, referred to as

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Desolminehac, wrote in his petition that he was born in India and ‘out of this Country has the least resource’. Hence, he wished to remain with his ‘native’ wife and their newborn son in Chandernagore. Likewise, Monsieur Foquet de Champineac described himself as ‘a native with an aged mother, who has no means of existing, but from the fruits of his industry’. The resident surgeon at Chandernagore, Monsieur Aubert, petitioned to remain in the country as he ‘was married to a native of Chandernagore, has two children and a mother to support who, if he is obliged to leave, must remain without subsistence’.38 While considered to be enemy aliens by the British, these sources confirm the many ways in which interracial relationships shaped the feeling of belonging for these Frenchmen. They declared that their concept of home was framed by their attachment to their Indian families, and, indeed, by their own sense of physical and emotional distance from France. Adding to this chorus of protest from Frenchmen about their rights of abode are the petitions of single, widowed or abandoned women who were left fending for themselves after the occupation. The British did not specifically target French women in Chandernagore, nor were they considered a security risk when the settlement became occupied by the East India Company. They were largely immune from imprisonment or expulsion due to the fact that only able-bodied Frenchmen were considered to be enemies of the state since they had the potential to take up arms or to join the ranks of enemy states who were against British interests. When men were imprisoned or expelled, women and children were left behind in Chandernagore to fend for themselves without an independent income or other sources of support. Under British captivity, French women were nevertheless able to articulate their pleas for financial assistance and compensation in the language of civic obligation. Arguing that the Company state in Calcutta had a responsibility to protect the social welfare of stranded women, the ideology of paternalism was drawn upon to argue for social support. Writing to the governor-general in 1778, the wife of Chevalier was one of the first to voice her demands for social welfare and to protest against the looting of her home and the arrest of her husband. Like her husband, she was able to present the British occupation in gendered terms and presents herself as an injured mother of hungry children. She describes her predicament of being ‘abandoned in a time of trouble with two children, one whereof at the breast’, and personally confesses that she ‘could never have thought that it had been possible to add further to the affliction of a wife and of a tender mother already too disconsolate’.39 Her privileged status as the wife of the French governor, and a member of the ruling class, meant that Madame Chevalier herself was protected by the occupiers. Warren Hastings himself intervened to restore her property and other belongings and accorded her a personal guard for protection ‘out of respect for the rank and character of Mrs. Chevalier’.40 Madame Chevalier’s

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emotive appeal to the paternal sensibilities of the nascent British colonial state encouraged Hastings to review the social plight of women and children in the French settlement. In June 1779, the Company made its first payments to 14 French widows. However, the entitlement to financial support was based on the status and rank of the deceased husband rather than on the social situation and relative need of the female recipient. The women included in the ‘List of French Widows at Chandernagore’ comprised only those women who had been married to high-ranking French officials.41 In 1781, 13 women from Chandernagore who were not in receipt of support wrote a collective letter to the Bengal Council calling for recognition of their plight, financial support and the release of imprisoned men from the gaol. They outline their personal conditions and social plight, and ask the British to acknowledge the ‘excess of grief with which we have been impressed, since our husbands have been forced from us, for no crime, or even trivial misdemeanour whatever’. The women argue for the ‘necessary assistance to the support of ourselves and our families’ to alleviate their ‘terrible situation which cannot fail at becoming more distressing by its continuation’.42 The letter came from a diverse group of women who considered themselves to be ‘French’ either by birth or else through their marriages to Frenchmen. Bound together by this loyalty and, indeed, their Catholic faith, country-born women who may have been ‘native’ or Portuguese Eurasian claimed the same entitlements. What it meant to be French was determined, as we shall see in the next chapter, by the personal possession of capital and property, by claiming rank through marriage to a man of European status, or through the identification with European origin in the case of mixed-race women. As these cases were assessed, there was confusion in regard to who had the right to be categorized as ‘French’ and who did not, revealing a divergence in British and French perceptions of cultural identity. The council decided to provide pensions to French women in Chandernagore based on British categories of rank, which were determined by racial descent and the prestige of whiteness, thereby judging entitlement through the lens of their own preconceptions. Those women born in France and who had highranking husbands were awarded 50 rupees per month and listed as ‘first class’. A ‘second class’ list of worthy recipients was awarded either 15, ten or eight rupees per month depending on their husband’s relative position in the French colonial hierarchy, but also depending on their racial background. Relative social status and perceived racial origin were factors that shaped the support outcomes for French women under British occupation. In this reckoning, not all women were equal nor, indeed, were they equally eligible for financial support. The human dimensions of Anglo-French antagonism in Bengal reveal the extent of the differences between them. French civilians in towns such as Chandernagore were privileged by virtue of being Europeans in the Indian environment and occupiers of Indian land, but they were also the victims of

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British imperial aggression. While sharing a desire to profit from the East India trade with an entitlement to occupy Indian land, they nevertheless occupied a very different political, cultural and economic status in terms of their own situation. These mixed messages in relation to cultural and political status reflected the reality of French life under British occupation as much as they represented a historically situated conception of hybrid identity that was not wholly understood by British officials. It is in this sense that what it meant to be French in India was underscored by the global context of the Anglo-French conflict as well as by a different philosophical and political conception of their role in India. The humiliating losses suffered by the French under the Peace of Paris meant that a different path was taken in the wake of assessing their commercial and political role in India. As a result of losing large tracts of their overseas empire, they directed their energies towards rebuilding a shattered domestic economy and restoring national self-esteem rather than bearing the expense of maintaining unprofitable colonies. While part economic rationalism, the relative French disinterest in their Indian colonies was also the result of practical circumstance and the tyranny of distance. In a period where the British continued to dominate trade while imposing sanctions on French commerce, the comptoirs were captured and occupied by the British during the war only to be returned to the French in a dilapidated state. The history of the French East India Company’s operations and fortunes also offers a contrast to that of the English East India Company. Whereas the latter became powerful through the mantle of territorial sovereignty, the French Company’s official role was to trade rather than to conquer. However, intense competition from other European trading companies as well as internal financial difficulties meant that it struggled to keep afloat. So considerable was the deterioration in commerce that the French East India Company ran at a huge debt, eventually forcing the liquidation of the Company in 1769.43 The establishment of a royal administration in 1770 meant that the French colonies in India were subject to the French Crown and came under the jurisdiction of the Marine Ministry in Versailles. Perhaps as a result of this state of affairs, this loose federation of French administrations was becoming increasingly more neglected due to the ramifications of the Peace of Paris and the economic importance of the more lucrative sugar plantation colonies in the Caribbean. Moreover, the comptoirs were small and relatively unimportant outposts in the global scheme of French interests, and they did not possess the same measure of political significance compared to their British counterparts.44 The low political and economic status of the Indian comptoirs became more pronounced after 1785 when a royal edict amalgamated them into one governing unit under the authority of the governor-general who was installed at Port Louis on the Isle de France. In real terms, this meant that Pondicherry lost its status as the capital of French India and was effectively demoted. It now reported to

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the colonial administration in the Indian Ocean, which was considered to be strategically far more important. While not interested in restoring the comptoirs to their former glory, or pursuing an empire for themselves, French efforts were nevertheless directed towards an altogether different political agenda. In 1783, the French government sent an official expedition to India, under the command of Bussy, not to build their own empire but with royal instructions from the French king to ‘declare to the Princes of the country that His Majesty will restore to the original owners the conquests which may be made from his enemies, and that his only object is to weaken the power of the English in India and to establish and preserve an equilibrium which will assure to these princes the peaceful possession of their states’.45 Hence, only a year before the India Act of 1784 came into effect, the French government was willing to stand with the Princely States against the East India Company to restore Indian sovereignty. The French threat was therefore not a figment of the British imagination or a manifestation of political paranoia. While often allegorical, it was given concrete expression through an official policy of revanche, which also served to encourage the anti-Company activities of individual Frenchmen who volunteered in the service of the Princely States. During periods of British occupation, several mercenaries, adventurers and soldiers fled from the French settlements to the courts of the Indian princes, where they advised the ‘native armies’, led battalions and participated in orchestrated campaigns of revenge for the losses incurred under the Seven Years’ War.46 In an important revision to the idea of a monolithic European colonial presence, these circumstances signal a more complex understanding of the nature of imperialism on the subcontinent, where French sympathies and activities in India need to be seen against a wider global context of Anglo-French conflict. In this sense, the French emerge as ambivalent political players who acted in the role of both colonizers and colonized. In the service of Hyderabad, the French general Bussy trained the Nizam’s military units with the assistance of French troops and artillery. Raymond, Lallée and Aumont would also play significant roles in the Hyderabad armies.47 De Boigne rose to the forefront of the Maratha brigades under Scindia, influenced the military policy of that state and trained four other French commanders who became legendary figures as military leaders against the British: Perron, Baours, Pedron and Rohan. Haider Ali employed the French commanders Pimoran and Lally to lead the Mysore armies, while Chevalier Dudrenc was put in charge of the military forces of Holkar, Scindia’s Maratha rival. Rulers of Indian states who openly resisted the Company’s aggressive policy of territorial expansion also began to foster French political alliances. Tipu Sultan, the son of Haider Ali, sent embassies to Paris and later to the Isle de France in the Indian Ocean, requesting military assistance in the event of a British invasion of Mysore.48 In 1789, the attack by Tipu on

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Travancore, a British ally, brought the British into direct confrontation with the troops of Mysore. The pro-French sympathies of this state are made more explicit in a letter from Wellesley, the governor-general, to the Secret Committee of the Court of Directors in 1799. In it he reveals that Tipu was secretly assisting the French in their designs to take over the Portuguese possessions in India.49 In an attempt to undermine the longstanding AngloPortuguese friendship treaty, the French aimed to foster a new Catholic alliance aimed at preventing the British from using Portuguese settlements as military and intelligence bases. The revelation of the plan inevitably led to the British fortification and possession of Goa, Daman and Diu in 1801. In correspondence from the governor of Bombay to the governor-general of Goa, the British declared that it was their duty to ‘secure the possessions in India of the Crown of Portugal from becoming a prey to French usurpation’.50 The active involvement of individual Frenchmen in the affairs of the Princely States therefore created anxieties for the British in relation to strategic alliance building, and it exposed their vulnerabilities in relation to maintaining security. In view of these anxieties and weaknesses, any threat of retaliation for the losses incurred by the French after the Peace of Paris represented a very real danger for the British. Politically motivated by the spirit of revenge, French support for the Indian powers against British occupation was also grounded in a prerevolutionary philosophical context, where colonialism itself was being subjected to critical scrutiny and often detailed deliberation. The salons of the philosophes in Paris provided the social arenas for the dissemination of anti-colonial ideas that were part of a broader critique of the ancien régime and its lack of moral and fiscal accountability. While British thinkers such as Dow were providing intellectual justifications for the legitimacy of imperial occupation in India, French thinkers such as the Abbé Raynal were arguing for the active intervention of French adventurers, soldiers and military commanders in the affairs of the Princely States in a bold attempt to oust the British. His famous and widely read collection, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les Deux Indes, first published in 1770, urged the French to be ‘the deliverers of Indostan’ so that they can become ‘the idols of the princes and peoples of Asia’ in their struggle for self-determination.51 Motivated in part by the scale of the indignities suffered by the French under the terms of the treaty, Raynal’s endorsement of a broader FrancoIndian alliance is also aimed at securing the restoration and protection of those French trading rights that were habitually rescinded and subsequently ignored under British occupation. For Raynal, the ancien régime had stunted the growth of democracy through slavery and colonialism as well as through the domestic concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. For him, and for other prerevolutionary thinkers, many aspects of colonialism were but external expressions of the internal decadence, moral decay and greed that had come

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to represent the absolutist state. As a result, only republicanism could deliver individual freedoms to those in France as well as to those in the colonies. Raynal believed that the excesses of colonial exploitation had the potential to undermine France’s wealth and to erode the potential for liberty. To be sure, the real purpose of overseas trade for Europeans should be a just and moderate prosperity, which was doomed to failure ‘should an inordinate ambition prompt them to plunder, ravage and oppress’.52 His survey of European imperial encounters in both of the Indies is therefore a statement about past excesses and personal greed, where exploitation and indifference towards the indigenous inhabitants would lead inevitably to moral degeneration and the abuse of political power. Raynal employs the example of the Portuguese in India to demonstrate his case. He states that a ‘mixture of avarice, debauchery, cruelty and devotion prevailed everywhere in their manners’, and accords their downfall in India to their lack of restraint and their effeminacy.53 He also cites the case of the British in India who misused their right to trade by becoming rulers in their own right and by amassing great personal wealth at the expense of justice. Raynal’s point was not about abandoning colonialism per se but that it was the moral duty of the French to offer an alternative vision of what universal benefits colonialism could provide as part of a wider campaign of political radicalism. In his denouncement of English policy in India, his point was that the French should adopt an altogether different approach to the protection of liberty. They could offer to act as enlightened colonizers. While idealist in sentiment, it offered a potentially subversive alternative to the aggressive territorial policies of the English while also promising to loosen tightly controlled trade monopolies that kept other European powers as well as the ‘native princes’ at a disadvantage. Views such as those of Raynal were also part of a philosophical milieu that offered a divergent and yet complex perspective of Indian society and culture at this point in time. Published in Geneva in 1773, Voltaire’s Fragments sur l’Inde is perhaps the most obvious example of this genre. A synthesis of travellers’ stories, missionary accounts and other miscellaneous sources, Voltaire does concur with some of the negative stereotypes of India that we find in other eighteenth century writers such as Alexander Dow. He saw in Hindu practices, for example, a ‘most contemptible superstition’ that involved idol worship and customs such as sati or the practice of widows throwing themselves on the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands. These he reduced to an irrational ‘fanaticism’.54 However, he also reveals a deep respect and awe for what he saw as some of the most remarkable customs of the Hindus, noting the purity and strict abstinence of the Brahmin priests and the general charity given to both men and animals.55 Voltaire puts forward the argument that India possesses one of humankind’s most ancient civilizations, where the arts of learning and philosophy far surpass those of Europe.56 In his reflections, he also offers an alternative, if not idealized, reversal of some of the precepts underscoring the notion of

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‘oriental despotism’ by suggesting that Indians are superior to Europeans in terms of their own qualities of virtue. He remarks bitterly that ‘we have destroyed their country; we have flattened it with our blood. We have demonstrated how much we surpass them in courage and wickedness, and how much we are inferiors in wisdom’.57 For many of the philosophes, this glorification of India’s ancient past was often a tactic by which to denounce the decadence of the ancien régime while arguing for a new form of modernity that was about self-purification. India figures in these commentaries not as a backward society in need of improvement and moral reform, but as a noble and sophisticated culture that the West could learn from for the purposes of moral improvement and regeneration. Enlightenment philosophers were also keen to expose the central contradiction that existed between a theory of the universal rights of the individual on the one hand and denying those very rights to colonized peoples on the other. For other thinkers, arguments against colonialism were couched in economic terms. That is, colonialism was seen to obstruct rather than to stimulate free commerce between nations. In his last written state paper as comptroller-general of France in 1776, Turgot wrote that ‘all the mother-countries will be forced to abandon all empire over their colonies’58 so that nations formerly under foreign occupation should have the right to engage in independent trade agreements with other nations on an equal basis. He also argued that the subjection of other lands to the laws of European powers was unjust and that colonies should make their own laws and be treated instead as ‘allied provinces’ of former imperial powers rather than be ruled by them directly.59 This contest between different versions of imperial modernity, perhaps first anticipated in the divergent views of Dow and Raynal, became more pronounced after the revolution, when the differences between British and French social and political systems were both animated and polarized. After 1789, the fundamental values of the French Revolution represented a philosophical threat to existing notions of British liberty, which were anchored in the sanctity of private property and the moral authority of Parliament. The defence of private property and the civilizing mission of Parliament were also the cornerstones of East India Company reform and constituted the foundation of the emerging colonial state. Revolutionary ideas of the French persuasion could be interpreted as a moral and political threat to the establishment of British colonial authority. While idealistic and often propagandistic, French revolutionary ideas threatened to challenge existing power relations between Indians and Europeans and destabilize the colonial status quo. In a minute dated 1800, the governor-general, Wellesley, was deeply perturbed by the dangers posed by the dissemination of revolutionary ideas amongst East India Company employees. He warned that the ‘erroneous principles of the same dangerous tendency had reached the minds of some individuals in the civil and military service of the Company in India’.60

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Ideas that threatened to compromise the obedience and discipline of Company ranks or else challenge an innate belief in the inferiority of the native inhabitants were considered to be a risk to the security of the British colonial state. The circulation of revolutionary literature amongst English soldiers meant that ‘political and religious principles had been in some degree unsettled as a consequence of the exposure to these ideas.61 For, in Wellesley’s mind, that ‘dangerous tendency’ was a radical political philosophy that threatened to influence the impressionable young minds of the Company ranks with ideas about liberty, equality and fraternity. Such ideas were deemed to be potentially seditious if soldiers or civil servants started to question the fairness of legitimacy of their colonizing missions. What we see happening in the course of the eighteenth century is the eventual consolidation of British imperialism at the expense of French and other European colonial ventures. Rather than remaining bystanders in the making of empire on the subcontinent, the French presence was entangled in the future course of British rule because the global situation fed into, and provided a context for, the volatile nature of Anglo-French relations. As Jeremy Whiteman has previously noted, the political situation on the subcontinent was one of the classical impediments to global Anglo-French rapprochement.62 In this sense, the French remained a persistent danger to global British interests. This could be expressed as the fear of French reprisal and revenge for the losses suffered under the Peace of Paris, but also through the anxiety about the potential influence of Catholicism, or philosophical attitudes towards revolution and colonialism. As the French were forced to chart a different path as colonizers, so too did they develop a different conception of imperial modernity in India. The French position was irreducibly different to that of the British in India in these last decades of the eighteenth century, when the East India Company’s power was being harnessed by Parliament as part of the formal consolidation of political sovereignty. While the French had abandoned any policy of empire building of their own, and their settlements were virtually hostages to the British in times of outright war, their symbolic presence loomed large in the British imagination due to their policy of revanche and their close associations with the Princely States with whom they fostered close ties. Their lack of real political power was counterbalanced by their potential to undermine British interests through tactical alliance building. Debates and reflections on the moral legitimacy of colonialism itself and the place of India in the French worldview only acted to provide a more sympathetic reading of Indian society and culture. This was reflected in the forging of social and political relationships that seemed less racialized than the parallel British case where Eurasians were being actively distanced from public life, and where mixed-race relationships were seen as moral threats to boundaries. Under these political conditions, as the next chapter will explore, concepts of hybridity in the French colonies were not underscored with the same measure of danger or anxiety.

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French complexions

Albert Hervey was a British army officer who spent ten years travelling throughout India and commenting widely on social and political affairs. As he toured the south in the 1840s, he wrote of his surprise upon entering Pondicherry for the first time. The vision of the wide grid-patterned streets, the pedestrians walking along the seafront promenade and the imposing whitewashed colonial buildings reminded him of the ambience of any coastal town in the south of France. Seeing everyday life in this French settlement through the cultural filters of the British imperial experience, Hervey felt as if he was somewhere inexplicably displaced. Arousing his curiosity even further was the appearance of the Europeans that he observed in la ville blanche or the ‘white town’. He could not conceal his astonishment at seeing what he calls ‘tawny-faced Frenchmen and their families’1 in the European quarter. This awkward and revealing reference to the métis community of Pondicherry betrays Hervey’s own preconceptions about the place of hybridity through his own frame of reference, where Eurasians in British India were seen through less favourable eyes. His perceptions and expectations about whiteness also speak to the different etymologies and categories of cultural difference operating within another imperial location, where different political conditions gave rise to different complexions. Like Pondicherry, Chandernagore was also divided into ‘white’ and ‘black’ towns to differentiate European residents and colonial officials from those of the majority of the population who were classed as ‘natives’. These colour-coded classifications seem self-evident enough where the spatial politics of imperial power were grafted into the urban landscape resulting in the construction of two divergent worlds. Whereas the la ville noire was situated inland, away from the river, la ville blanche was situated on the banks of the Hooghly river around the main buildings of the Company and the French administration, the docks and the trading warehouses. In 1756, Chandernagore had a total population of 27,856, which comprised of only 444 Europeans who inhabited la ville blanche and 27,412 Indians who inhabited la ville noire.2 The white town comprised of 267 houses for the 444 European residents, while the black town had 6,307 smaller dwellings for the 27,412 Indian residents.3 Europeans therefore comprised a very small

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proportion of Chandernagore’s total population and yet were living in relatively large dwellings with a small ratio of persons per head of household in the wealthier areas near the riverfront close to the main colonial buildings. On a per head basis, they were privileged over Indians both in terms of the physical space they occupied and their proximity to sites of institutional power. The visible and economic distinctions between white and black towns could not be more pronounced. While this crude Manichean division between white and black towns speaks to a racialized demarcation based on colour, this was largely an artificial and arbitrary distinction not as strictly related to race as these terms might obviously suggest. In particular, what was meant by the term ‘white’ in the syntax of eighteenth-century notions of cultural difference in French India requires further elaboration and analysis. Looking back from Hervey’s comments to half a century earlier, the police census of 1789 for Pondicherry confirms that at least a third of the population of la ville blanche were of Indian origin, but it was double this figure in Chandernagore where those of métis and topas origin formed the majority of the ‘European’ population.4 Who was eligible to be classified as a European and who actually resided in la ville blanche are questions whose answers will unravel the meaning of whiteness in the French settlements. It was certainly fixed in some ways to notions of complexion and descent but in other ways it had a wider symbolic meaning. In the words of Charles Mills, ‘whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations’.5 These ‘power relations’ could be expressed in the form of wealth and capital, where investment in the French East India Company yielded certain entitlements for foreigner Europeans. The charter establishing La Compagnie des Indes Orientales in 1664 offered French nationality to foreigners who deposited certain amounts of capital into the treasury of the Company. Article 3 states clearly that French nationality could be acquired with a residency requirement of four months in French territory and a contribution of no less than 3,000 livres.6 Furthermore, Article 4 states that foreigners who contributed between 10,000 and 20,000 livres were able to participate in the General Assembly of the Company and those who donated more than 20,000 livres were qualified to be elected to the board of directors-general of the Company and be accorded ‘the rights of the bourgeoisie in the towns of the kingdom wherever they make their home’.7 Hence, wealthy foreigners could literally purchase French nationality through their financial contributions to the Company. This example speaks to the ways in which wealthy foreign Europeans could acquire French nationality through their commercial dealings with the Company, but it also underscores the way in which social and economic factors play a significant role in determining political entitlements and access to the privileges of whiteness. What it meant to be French in the colonial environment was not always linked to the inherent prerequisite to have French descent, and this general principle will be explored in more detail in the next two chapters

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where religious acculturation, domicile, gender and political affiliation are considered alongside social class. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notions of race and meanings of colour in France and in the overseas French settlements were essentially different from more modern notions of racial classification that were based on lineage or type.8 Emerging from the notion of the ‘French race’, the idea of what it meant to be French was based on questions of cultural, religious and linguistic belonging rather than on a fixed and modern notion of whiteness based on skin colour. While differences between human beings could be marked on the surface of the body, they were more likely to be intelligible through cultural practices and behaviours that united a community against a common enemy. For example, the differences between peasant and bourgeois, between freeman and slave, between Catholic and non-Catholic provided some of the frameworks for understanding how Frenchness was defined and understood. Catholics belonged to the ‘French race’, while anti-Semitic attitudes and practices kept Jews outside the boundaries of the nation.9 In this simplified example, religious divisions were important for the maintenance of the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Catholicism was central to the syntax and language of Frenchness since it provided vital internal and external markers of cultural difference that spoke at once to the question of national belonging as it did to the idea of a holy communion under God. It provided the binding ideology that tied France to its allies but it also provided one of the quintessential national characteristics that set it apart from its rival and enemy across La Manche. Under the ancien régime, loyalty to his Most Christian Majesty the King was a simultaneous loyalty to the Catholic Church and to the spiritual covenant that secured the peace and prosperity of the French nation. Conversely, as Linda Colley has suggested, the symbolic danger of Catholicism acted to consolidate cultural and political identity in Britain in the eighteenth century.10 The French menace was metaphorically encoded as the fear of Popery, which also acted to forge a sense of Protestant nationality both in Britain and in the colonial settlements, where there was intense competition for commercial and political influence. In a pamphlet titled ‘English Humanity No Paradox’, published in 1778, Edward Long goes to some length to chart the qualities that make the British nation so irreducibly different to that of the French. He cites the ‘valour, humanity and good humour’ of the British and ‘that free and admirable Constitution’ that makes the country ‘stand of the first in rank among the various nations of the globe’.11 Although the treatise was designed as a patriotic defence of British liberty, it did so in the context of a familiar literary device. In significant ways, the French were perceived by the British to be a separate race in late eighteenth-century discourses based on their irreducibly different national characteristics, of which being Catholic was primordial.12 Predictably, the spectre of Catholicism was identified as the binding evil

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against which all patriotic Britons were united in their struggle for liberty. Long states that ‘Slavery and Popery are regarded by most of us as indivisible companions; and these two, together with the Pretender, form the triple-headed Bugbear, which our Ministers of State have often brought forward on their political stage, to work upon the fears of the nation’.13 What was the role of Catholicism in the reconstruction of French identity in India and did it produce different complexions? From its proclamation in 1664, the charter of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales declared that the project of Catholic conversion was tied to the establishment of trade and permanent settlement on the subcontinent. The saving of souls and the transformation of ‘native’ bodies were tied to the establishment of commerce. The first article of the charter is illuminating in this respect. It encourages the sending of missionaries in the name of the Company to preach the gospel and to instruct the native people in the fundamental precepts of Roman Catholicism as an integral part of the enterprise. This stood in stark contrast to the British experience, where evangelization was seen to be antithetical to the aims of the East India Company as a mercantile enterprise. In English eyes, commerce and religion were deemed to be separate activities, and Protestant missionaries were not permitted to operate as part of official Company activities until 1810.14 In the French case, religious conversion not only produced new Catholic alliances and new networks by which commercial activity was strengthened in the face of competition by the English and the Dutch; it was integral to the legitimization of sovereignty and was officially sanctioned much earlier. The question of what conversion implied for the converts themselves is much more of a vexed issue. The project of Catholic conversion in the colonies was intimately tied to the process of cultural assimilation or francisation. In her analysis of seventeenth-century colonial policy in French North America, for example, Saliha Belmessous argues that the civilizing project was a precondition to conversion, and hence ‘through baptism, indigenous peoples would then return to life as both Christian and French’.15 In theory, the goal was not only to create new religious subjects, but to also produce new reconstituted French bodies. Article 35 of the Company charter also made this connection between Catholicism and French subjectivity clear, stating that ‘all those who convert to the Catholic faith will be considered for all intents and purposes as natural French subjects for the purposes of determining inheritance, business and other matters, without having to obtain other letters of naturalisation’.16 While the Company was keen to make French subjects out of Catholic converts for the purpose of business and the determination of inherited property, Catholic conversion in French India was a more complicated affair that sat uneasily with the partial continuation of, and prejudice towards, pre-conversion identities and traditions. For example, the French did attract some new converts in Bengal amongst the disenchanted lower Hindu castes,

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but the clergy generally retained caste practices. The stigma of untouchability was upheld alongside the rituals of Roman Catholic worship.17 These new Catholics retained their Hindu status in the eyes of other Hindus and lived as lower-caste fringe dwellers in Chandernagore’s black town. Nor was conversion to Catholicism always a voluntary choice. In these cases, legitimate and illegitimate ‘native’ and métis orphans were baptized in mass ceremonies by Capucin missionaries and given French names as a sign of their new Catholic status. Slaves brought by Frenchmen who arrived from other colonies such as Madagascar, the Isle de France and the Isle de Bourbon were also baptized as part of these ceremonies.18 In 1725, the chaplain of the French company, Montalambert, wrote to the Jesuit fathers in Paris to report on the state and composition of the Catholic communities in Chandernagore. In his letter, he stated that there were ‘15 to 16,000 Roman Catholic Christians, the rest being Hindu or Muslim, or schismatic or heretical’. More interestingly, he differentiates between three classes of Catholics, which he describes as ‘Europeans, métis who are the children of Europeans established here, and native Christians who are either free or slaves’. For Montalambert, an important marker of cultural difference that separated all three groups from the local inhabitants was that ‘all are dressed in the European style’.19 Catholic affiliation was, therefore, a significant marker of an elastic Europeanized identity in Chandernagore that was not based solely on skin colour. The core group of officials, traders and administrators during this early period were white men, as were the Jesuit priests, but Catholicism acted to attract disparate groups of new converts and assimilated Portuguese Eurasians within a wider cultural constituency of French influence. As his letter suggests, converted Christians consciously differentiated themselves from non-Christians through the adoption of European styles of dress, as clothing became another cultural marker associated with the acquisition of symbolic capital and European status. However, Catholics did not worship together in the same congregation. An order issued from the Company dated 11 February 1733 proposed ‘the erection of two parishes in the interior of the territory occupied by the said Company at Chandernagore, one for the French and all others in the service of the said company, and the other for the Bengali Indians and new native Christians only’.20 The Catholics of Chandernagore were split between two churches. As a consequence, the Catholic constituency was now divided into two communities: ‘native Christians’ who had converted and those who were French or ‘others in the service of the said Company’. While this could be construed as a division between ‘native’ and white Catholics, this was not a straightforward binary opposition. While excluding Indian Catholics, the group who were considered to be ‘white Catholics’ also comprised of individuals of Indian origin. Women such as Maria Texeira and other Portuguese Eurasians are the most obvious case to support the point that whiteness in French India was

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not so much a ‘colour’ but a set of symbolic attachments based on religious acculturation, domicile and political or economic attachments. Although Indian in appearance, they were the descendants of previous waves of Portuguese colonization and settlement in the area. The Portuguese establishment and occupation of Hooghly dates back to the 1570s, and the first Augustinian church was built at Bandel in 1599. French traveller Robert Challe notes in his memoirs of 1690 that he observed many indigenous Roman Catholics in Bengal who called themselves Portuguese and who attended the congregations of the long-established Portuguese Catholic Church.21 As discussed in Chapter 1, they constituted a Catholic community that was well established before the arrival of either the English or the French. In French India, however, Portuguese Eurasian women were highly respected rather than feared because of their Catholicism, making them acceptable mothers of future generations of French subjects in the absence of large numbers of women from France. Relationships between Frenchmen and ‘native’ women in the Princely States strengthened political alignments and posed another set of moral concerns for the English East India Company. In his study of the IndoFrench families of Aligarh, for example, Halim argues that ‘none of the European adventurers, to my knowledge, brought their families to India. On the other hand, most of them married Indian wives, Hindus, Muslims or half-castes, born of European fathers’.22 French mercenaries and adventurers lived with their partners in these Indian communities far from the regulations and gaze of the emerging Company state, causing alarm and opprobrium from British military commentators such as Herbert Compton. He remarked that French soldiers in the service of the Indian Princes were ‘dissolute and degraded in their mode of life, forming connections with native women’.23 While Compton may have found the practices of these soldiers degraded from his own moral perspective, interracial liaisons were an accepted part of French colonial life in India as seen at the highest echelons of the administration, where they were not regarded with the same measure of moral opprobrium. In 1741, Dupleix married Jeanne Albert, the daughter of Jacques Théodore Albert and Dona Rose de Castro, in a ceremony at the church of St Louis in Chandernagore.24 Yvonne Gaebelé’s 1934 biography reveals the life of a remarkable woman who easily navigated between European and Indian social and political networks and who acquired high status due to her transformation into Madame Dupleix.25 Known colloquially as ‘Jeanne Begum’, she was an influential statesperson, cultural intermediary and strategist. However, she was also independently wealthy through the inheritance of her mother, Dona Rose, who died in 1756. Her mother’s last will and testament dated 11 July 1749 is a text that provides a window into the privileged status of many ‘Portuguese women’ in eighteenth-century French India. The inventory of bequeathed items included property in the southern quarter of Pondicherry and donations to the Catholic church,

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family and friends. It also included furniture, jewellery and kitchen utensils. Also listed are a number of domestic slaves, three of which were granted their freedom upon her death.26 The fact that many Portuguese women such as Jeanne Albert’s mother were independently wealthy and slave owners has often been underestimated in conventional historical accounts of mixed-race identity in colonial India. This example also offers significant revisions to the stereotype of subservient ‘native’ women who married European men to better their opportunities. In fact, established Portuguese Eurasian women who were independent were in a strong negotiating position when forming marriages with Frenchmen since they were the bearers of a politically respectable Catholic disposition. The marriage of Dupleix to Jeanne Albert is only one famous example of a more established historical trend of Frenchmen marrying local women in these settlements, largely because of their membership to established Catholic communities where there would be no moral objection from the church. In 1690, French traveller Robert Challe noted that there were 200 Frenchmen resident in Pondicherry, most of whom would never return to France, and most of whom had married ‘Portuguese girls, who were not black, but métis or mulatto’.27 A century later, Louis de Grandpré travelled throughout India in 1789 and 1790, and confirmed that in Pondicherry perhaps only two European families were not ‘allied to Indian families’28 through marriage or blood relations. Since the beginning of French settlement on the subcontinent, official policy reveals that marriages were acceptable between European men and ‘women of the country’ as long as both parties were Catholic and that the commander of the Company gave his approval to the alliance. This was stated explicitly in an ordinance issued by the French East India Company to regulate the moral conduct of Company employees in October 1664. It states that ‘no Frenchman will be allowed to marry a native woman unless she is instructed in the Catholic religion, that is Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman, and unless she has received the Holy Sacrament of Baptism, and the Holy Communion, of which he needs to obtain a certificate from the Superiors of the Mission, and unless he has obtained the permission of the commander of the places where he will be established’.29 The requirement for ‘native’ wives to be baptized as Catholics meant that there was often a seeming ambiguity in official attitudes towards interracial marriages but these were, in religious terms, the direct obverse to the sectarian anxiety that also arose in British settlements about the issue. As in British settlements, the tolerance of marriages with ‘native’ women was a matter of practicality but it was also a mechanism of moral regulation to discourage relationships outside of marriage that were perceived to be politically dangerous. Marriages with non-Catholic ‘native’ women were frowned upon to the extent that colonial officials demonstrate great anxiety about their future impact on French identity in the colonies. In 1730, official correspondence between Pondicherry and Chandernagore reveals that the

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male employees of the French Company in Bengal were being urged to ‘marry the daughters of Frenchmen’30 as a matter of preference. Maintaining the respectability of marriages across the racial divide was a core concern for the Company who feared both moral anarchy and the erosion of French values. In 1732, for example, Dupleix did not want chaplains to marry Frenchmen ‘to bastards, or women of the country who were not descended from the French or from the Europeans’.31 This clearly assumed the acceptability of Portuguese Eurasian women as marriage partners for Frenchmen, but the status of ‘native’ Catholic women remained ambiguous and often changed as political expediency dictated. However, what is more certain is the sense of threat and social taboo associated with the marriages of French subjects conducted outside of French Catholic jurisdiction. This can be traced back to Louis XIV’s edict of November 1680, which was designed to prevent Huguenot and Jewish men from marrying French Catholic women. The central philosophy was to protect the mothers of future French subjects from being converted to non-Catholic religions as a matter of national security. In the Indian context, the case of French women – whether they be European or Portuguese Eurasian – going to British colonies to marry Protestant men struck at the heart of these gendered political anxieties about the loss of respectability. In 1772, the practice of Catholic women fleeing French colonies to marry Protestant Englishmen was remarked upon with consternation in the official despatches between the conseils at Pondicherry and Chandernagore. ‘Lately, we have been informed’, stated a letter from the counseil at Chandernagore, ‘that for several years some people have been contracting abusive alliances and, contrary to our laws, have gone to live in foreign colonies’.32 This edict affirms the political fear that was associated with the loss of Catholic French women to Protestant conversion. Not only did this represent a loss of control on behalf of the colonial administration in its endeavour to regulate marriages and keep Catholic women in the settlement as the potential wives of French officials (and potential mothers of new French subjects), but it also reflected the deep fear of political infiltration and espionage through Protestant conversion. An ‘abusive alliance’, as it was termed, was therefore a marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant in much the same way as that union was termed a ‘mixed marriage’ in British India. In Chandernagore itself, such a union was considered a public scandal. Marriages between Protestant foreigners and French women were technically possible but they were permitted with strict conditions attached. The couple needed to commit to permanent residence in French territory, the conversion to Catholicism was mandatory and the taking of an oath of allegiance to the French nation ensured loyalty in times of war. Further written oaths were required that ensured that the children of such a union were brought up in the Catholic faith, that the family would remain within the boundaries of French territory, and that arms would never be taken up against the

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French in times of war. Therefore, loyalty to the Catholic religion could ameliorate the consequences of the ‘abusive alliance’ and prevent French Catholic women from being drawn to Protestant conversion. In this sense, religion was at the heart of the reconstruction of French identity in India and remained tied to the project of imperial modernity well into the eighteenth century. Only a year after the Regulating Act in British India, the ‘Memoire on Marriages between Catholics and Protestants’ in 1774 was a directive that regulated marriage in French India by emphasizing the political significance of building religious alliances. It outlined the regulations by which marriage should be governed within sectarian boundaries and describes unions between Catholics and Protestants as mariages mixtes or mariages mêlés, terms in themselves that might otherwise be associated with mixed-race marriages in the language of later colonial periods.33 The question of who were members of the ‘white’ population of a French settlement such as Chandernagore can be ascertained from shipping records, parish registers and population censuses. The numbers of French residents in the settlement who were actually from France was always small. The journey from France to Bengal via the Cape of Good Hope, Madagascar, the Ile de France and Pondicherry was long, arduous, dangerous and in vessels that were not designed for passengers but were rather containers for the shipment of commodities and bullion. Not only was this a disincentive for new settlers but the low salaries of Company soldiers and officials meant that this largely male-dominated society attracted those for whom migration or temporary residence was often a last resort to flee desperate economic conditions. The men who were recruited into the French armies in India were very young, usually between 16 and 19 years of age, with no family commitments. The pursuit of employment in the Company’s armies attracted partisans, adventurers and petty tradesmen who were recruited mainly from the area around L’Orient in Brittany, which was the main departure port for French East India ships. These employees were themselves casualties of economic hardship who had experienced long periods of permanent unemployment and were, therefore, quite often transient internal migrants. Mostly unmarried with little other option but to sign up for an overseas employment contract to escape poverty, this group also included prisoners. These were recruited from the overcrowded prisons of Paris, Châtelet, Fort-l’Evêque and Bicêtre. The ex-prisoners who came to join the battalions of French troops in India were also overwhelmingly single or, if married, they required the permission of their wives in order to be transported overseas.34 The women who did travel from France to Chandernagore were often respectable women from a completely different socio-economic background to the male settlers. Passenger lists for the vessels making the journey from France to India in the 1770s and 1780s reveal that very few women came to

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Bengal on their own. When women did make the arduous journey, they accompanied male passengers as wives or daughters rather than as single travellers. For example, on Le Duc de Praslin, sailing from L’Orient on 7 October 1770, there were 39 military troops and 11 civilian passengers of whom two were the daughters of passengers on board. On L’Hector, leaving for Bengal on 26 March 1773, there were three French women on board who were the wives of existing passengers plus ‘deux domestiques de M. Dangereux’ and three black female slaves. Le Farges embarked for Pondicherry on 11 June 1778 carrying 309 soldiers and 19 civilian passengers of whom only four were women.35 During the periods of the British occupation of the French settlements in India, passenger traffic from France came to a halt and when it resumed, there was an even fewer number of women in its passenger lists.36 Therefore, the numbers of single white French women coming to Bengal was negligible. In Chandernagore, the number of European women in la ville blanche remained proportionately small after the first British occupation. Out of a total of 293 European inhabitants listed in the population census for 1768, only 68 or 23 per cent of the white town were women.37 Those married to high-ranking colonial officials such as Nicolas, Renault and Sinfray were from France but there were also female settlers from other French territories such as Pondicherry, Isle de Bourbon, Isle de France, Martinique and Madagascar. More numerous than either of these two groups were the Portuguese Eurasian women who were born and raised in Chandernagore and who, in the absence of available single white women from France, formed the main group who provided marriage partners for French men for the remainder of the eighteenth century. The marriage records at the parish of St Louis reveal the reality of the situation. There were 215 European marriages between 1763 and 1800. Of this sample, 122 men or 56 per cent were born in France. This group were mostly from the areas around the northern port cities in Bretagne and Normandy although there was also a scattering of male emigrants in Chandernagore from Paris, Bordeaux, Marseilles and Aix-en-Provence. Although over half the men who entered into matrimonial alliances were born in France, the category European men was itself heterogeneous, reflecting the fact that men of many different nationalities were represented in la ville blanche. It was also a haven for those deserting English and Irish Catholic soldiers in the armies of the East India Company who felt marginalized or alienated by the dominant Protestant British culture of the military hierarchy.38 Twenty-three men or 11 per cent were from other European countries such as England, Holland, Switzerland, Armenia, Russia, Portugal, Germany and Ireland. Furthermore, 25 male partners or 12 per cent were Frenchmen born in India or other overseas settlements such as the Isle de France, the Isle de Bourbon, North America and Africa. Hence, 170 or 79 per cent of all male marriage partners in the white town were considered to be white Europeans.

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Figure 4.1 Racial origin of population of white town of Chandernagore, 1753–1821. Source: ANOM, FM, C2, 115, fols 195–196; FM, C2, 115, fol. 207; DPPC, G/1, 481, fols 3, 99–100, 104–111; EC, Inde, 17, 18, 19, 21.

The social and cultural profile of the group considered to be European women could not have been more different to that of the men described above. Only 14 women or 6 per cent during this period were born in France, while 53 or 25 per cent were white women born in other French colonies. Hence, only 67 out of 215 or 31 per cent of female marriage partners were considered to be white French women. In stark contrast, 143 out of 215 or 67 per cent of the female partners were Portuguese Eurasian or converted ‘native’ women born in Chandernagore or other places in India. Of these 143 women, most had names that indicated Portuguese origin such as ‘Menes’, ‘Du Rosaire’, ‘Carvalho’, ‘Gomez’, ‘Pereira’, ‘De Souza’ or ‘De Cruz’ and were descended from the principal Portuguese Eurasian families in Bengal. With these demographics in mind, Frenchmen were therefore more likely to marry Portuguese Eurasian women and there are also instances of marriages between Frenchmen and converted ‘native’ women. The latter appear in the colonial records under their converted Christian names, such as ‘Marie Louise’, ‘Thomase Collette’, ‘Magdaleine’, ‘Marie Jeanne’ and ‘Rose’. References to their Indian heritage are effaced in the act of conversion, as they become the Catholic wives and

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Table 4.1 European marriages in Chandernagore, 1763–1800, origin of male marriage partners Number

% of total

French Catholics born in France Catholics born in other European countries French Catholics born in Chandernagore or other French colonies Portuguese Eurasians and ‘native’ Catholics born in Chandernagore/other places in India Slaves or origins unknown

122 23 25

56 11 12

30

14

15

7

Total

215

100

Source: ANOM DPPC, EC, Registre 17, 18, 19.

mothers of French subjects.39 These marriage records are also archival traces that speak to the politics of whiteness in ways that reveal the changing complexion of Chandernagore’s white population. While 79 per cent of men in marriages could be classified as white Europeans, 67 per cent of wives were local Portuguese Eurasian and converted ‘native’ women. An important factor that arises when thinking through the dynamics of interracial marriage in Chandernagore is the question of social class compatibility. The term mésalliance was employed to describe the sense of moral transgression felt in colonial society if marriage partners were deemed socially incompatible. It functioned to regulate the idea of respectability, the reproduction of social rank and the protection of capital and property. Eurasian women of suitably high rank, such as the wife of Dupleix, or Maria Texeira, were not considered to be a threat if their class position did not threaten the proper acquisition and transmission of capital and property. Portuguese Eurasian Catholic women who possessed property, money and slaves in their own right were often courted by high-ranking French men as suitable marriage partners since they did not jeopardize or threaten class alliances. From another point of view, their own social rank as European women, as well as their status within the métis and Indian communities, made them strategically lucrative cultural brokers for French colonial officials who relied on networks of cross-cultural dialogue for trade and political relationships with Indian powers. Despite the low numbers of white women from France in the settlement, and the high numbers of Portuguese Eurasians, they were not all rushing to marry white European men by default. The great disparities between income levels in the settlement suggest that a white Frenchman on a poor salary on the lowest rungs of Company service was not considered to be a good marriage choice for a woman of independent financial means. For example, the director-general was paid a salary nearly three times that of the

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Conseilleurs, who were on the next level down in the administrative hierarchy, and five times more than the Sous Marchands.40 The Company incomes revealed in colonial archives suggests that there was a preponderance of low-paid Frenchmen in Chandernagore, employed mostly in the Company’s armies, with little ability to support a wife and family comfortably in the European style. From the records, it is clear that only those senior Company men in highly paid positions could afford to support a respectable European-style marriage with all the status symbols required to demonstrate a particular rank. This might involve the import of furniture and other household goods from France, the purchase of a large property, the possession of slaves and a large number of Indian domestic servants. Indeed, items that well-established Portuguese Eurasian women could provide as part of extensive dowries in their own right. In this sense, independently wealthy Portuguese Eurasian women who were in possession of their own social capital in the Catholic community had more influence in marriage decisions than a less nuanced or malecentred reading of the marriage registers might otherwise uncover. White men did not simply have the free choice to marry any of the available women in the colony, nor did they choose ‘native-born’ Portuguese Eurasian women because of the lack of white women available. Social class mediated the compatibility of the matches in a colonial milieu where established women of rank – whether white or métisse – could afford to choose options and to reject offers. The recensement records, parish registers and tables décennales for Chandernagore for the period from 1753 into the beginning of the nineteenth century are also illuminating because these documents chart the changing racial composition of the settlement’s ‘white’ population if the archive is analysed tactically to recuperate race from the official record. The métis or Eurasian population continued to rise during this period while the small community of French-born white subjects continued to decline quite dramatically. What it meant to be white was reconstituted in Chandernagore in the absence of large numbers of French women from France, where the presence of large numbers of established Portuguese Eurasian women in the settlement had an influential effect on the future course of French identity. It was, indeed, a highly cosmopolitan and hybridized population where the elasticity of Catholic affiliation, the role of Portuguese Eurasian women, and the class structure of the majority of the male settlers were factors that created different shades of symbolic whiteness. In 1752, only 23 per cent of the European population was described as either ‘métis ou topas’. This proportion rose considerably as the eighteenth century progressed, making Chandernagore’s white population a multiracial and hybrid community by the first decades of the nineteenth century. By 1821, there were 1,124 individuals considered to be European in la ville blanche, of which only 59 were white French colonial officials, employees of the Company or French settlers and property owners, while 1,065 of this

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Table 4.2 European marriages in Chandernagore, 1763–1800, origin of female marriage partners Number French Catholics born in France Catholics born in other European countries French Catholics born in Chandernagore or other French colonies Portuguese Eurasians and ‘native’ Catholics born in Chandernagore/other places in India Slaves or origins unknown Total

% of total

14 0 53

6 0 25

143

67

5

2

215

100

Source: ANOM DPPC, EC, Registre 17, 18, 19.

total had some Indian origin. Hence, by the first decades of the nineteenth century the far majority of those living in Chandernagore’s ‘white town’ were métis or topas in origin. Hervey’s perception of the ‘tawny-faced Frenchmen and their families’ he observed in Pondicherry may very well have applied to Chandernagore, where the complexion of the European population changed dramatically over 70 years. As the experience of converted ‘native’ Christians demonstrates, being Catholic alone did not give French subjects the right to access the benefits of symbolic whiteness. While the act of conversion promised corporeal transformation in theory, there were also ambiguous exceptions and anomalies in regard to the politics of acculturation. A significant predicament for French authorities was how to categorize the topas community and where they fitted with existing colonial categories based on religion and culture. The subject of etymological controversy, the word topas was often seen by colonial commentators to have derived from the Hindi word topi, which refers to the hat worn by the men as a marker of their cultural attachment to the European community. This is the definition given in Hobson-Jobson, the classical dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms, which also describes members of the community as ‘dark-skinned or half-caste claimants of Portuguese descent, and Christian profession’.41 In some French accounts, they are also called gens à chapeau or indiens vivant à l’européenne.42 Whatever its correct derivation, the term appears to have been exported to other parts of the Portuguese Empire in southeast Asia, such as Timor, where it was employed in everyday parlance. According to Hans Hägerdal, the term topas was used to describe the ‘black Portuguese’ community who were politically influential in that particular colony by the late seventeenth century.43 Loyal to the Catholic faith, living in the white town, possessing Portuguese names, and dressed in European clothes, the topas in French India consciously marked themselves out as different from what Europeans referred to as ‘natives’ by embracing symbols of acculturation in much the

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same way as they did in British India.44 In the case of the topas, however, the process of francisation was markedly different to that described in other parts of the French Empire. While scholars such as Cornelius Jaenen and Saliha Belmessous have remarked that in the French settlements in North America, francisation was a precondition to conversion, the cultural and religious transformation of the topas was part of an earlier period of Portuguese colonization. Hence, the French did not need to convert the topas: they were a community of Europeanized ‘native’ Catholics already established in India before the arrival of the French. Having a space in the ecclesiastical world of the Catholic Church, their transformation to French subjects was achieved through their adoption of French ways, their loyalty to the French flag and their habitation in the white town of French settlements. The report commissioned by Governor Bellecombe in 1777 on the distribution of the population in the settlement depending on land ownership, Le papier terrier de la ville blanche, reveals that most of the topas families were living in the southern quarter of Pondicherry amongst other European and Eurasian families.45 By 1823, as Achille Bédier and Joseph Cordier’s note in their interpretation of the Pondicherry population census records, there were 461 topas living in the white town (out of a total European population of 787), which indicates that the majority of those who were categorized as European in la ville blanche were, like the parallel situation in Chandernagore, members of hybridized communities of some ‘native’ origin.46 Despite this visible presence in the white town, the question of their spiritual affiliation was more problematic. While they were loyal to the Catholic Church, not all Catholic parishes were welcoming of the topas community largely due to the confusion regarding whether they belonged to the French or to the ‘native’ communions. In Chandernagore, whether the topas could be married in the European parish of St Louis or whether they were to be treated as indigenous Christians was a source of debate and anxiety. From the 1730s, the French Catholic Church in Bengal maintained a social distance from these largely Augustinian Portuguese Catholics who were considered to be more culturally akin to the ‘native’ converts than to the Jesuit and Capucin European and métis population.47 Hence, they saw themselves as European and were attached to the French East India Company, they lived in the white town of French settlements, and they were included in the European population records. Perhaps due to this ambivalence about their true classification, the topas were often the objects of suspicion due to the lack of a precise definition in regard to their racial origins. Susan Bayly comments that they suffered from an image problem in the context of their place in south Indian society since it was generally accepted that they were ‘a “degenerate” and marginalized appendage of the European powers’.48 Bayly’s use of the term ‘degenerate’ seems apt since it was employed so often in contemporary descriptions of the community. This may have been related to their representation as the

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visible reminders of a past era of Portuguese imperialism where they were regarded by some as an ominous symbol of decline. The term was also used widely in France as an expression of contempt for marginalized groups, such as Jews and slaves, who were often depicted as morally debauched and socially incompatible. It was also an idea employed in cultural and racial discourses more generally to imply the opposite of civilization and ideal racial types.49 For example, in 1787, Madame Laurent Prault, who was a wealthy shareholder in the French East India Company, sums up much of this cultural attitude. She described the topas as a ‘degenerate race of Portuguese, or of slaves of Portuguese who became free, who stayed in the country after the decline of their power’. She claimed that they ‘profess to be Christians, speaking a corrupt version of Portuguese’ but they were ‘ignorant, superstitious, lazy and loose in their manners’.50 That the topas were cast in this manner does not seem surprising since there remained considerable suspicion amongst contemporaries in regard to these claims to European status. Writers and travellers remarked that the topas were not completely distinguishable racially from other Indians, since they appeared to have the same or similar traits such as skin and hair colour, except for the characteristic European hat and their Catholic affiliation. As early as 1726, French traveller Sieur Luillier commented on this perplexing ambiguity and wondered whether some of the topas may have had Portuguese origin while others were just indigenous Christians who identified with European dress codes.51 The later writings of the French mercenary, Edouard de Warren, also reveal the common perception that while the topas ‘are indigenes who wear hats’ they ‘have nothing in common with the Europeans apart from items of their clothing and often the Catholic religion’.52 There was therefore a gulf between topas self-perception and the manner in which colonial commentators often dismissed their claims to symbolic whiteness as imitation and opportunism. Whether the topas were of Portuguese origin and could claim legitimate European origin or whether they were aspirational Bengali Catholics from the lower castes attempting to improve their social condition lay at the heart of this doubt. The question of verifiable origins meant that it was difficult to determine the place of the topas in cosmologies of symbolic whiteness. Their perceived lack of racial authenticity or inability in most cases to prove their European origins meant that they shared a lower social status in la ville blanche, compared to the métis community whose claim to whiteness was based on verifiable patrilineal origins. While suffering an image problem, the topas were nevertheless important to the defence of French interests. The strength of their numbers and their attachment to the Company’s battalions meant that they were a very visible part of the French East India Company and vital to its operations. On the eve of the British invasion of Chandernagore in 1757, for example, there were 141 soldats topas compared to 105 European soldiers ready to defend the French settlement.53 Despite their

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historical importance and strategic usefulness, topas soldiers were always positioned on the very lowest levels of the military hierarchy and also paid the lowest incomes. For example, in the mid-eighteenth century, a topas corporal in Chandernagore earned only 40 per cent of the annual salary of a white corporal from France, and a topas soldier at the lowest level earned 50 per cent of the income of a white soldier.54 In the shadows of the British regime was a different experience of colonial race making that was both specific and localized but part of a wider global context. At the same time as the British were actively excluding Eurasians from notions of European subjectivity in their own territories, the position of the Catholic métis in Chandernagore and the other comptoirs could not be starker due to divergent political meanings of hybridity. The different political fortunes, objectives and capabilities of the two colonial projects, perhaps exemplified in times of Anglo-French war when French settlements were occupied, calls for a more situated reading of race that cuts across and within national borders. While these differences in the articulation of mixedrace identity speak of different political projects, the shared experience of the topas community across British and French imperial spaces is a reminder of the emerging significance of race. Despite more inclusive attitudes towards the métis and the powerful influence of social class and religion in the reconstitution of whiteness, the case of the topas community offers another conception of hybridity. In temporal and spatial terms, they were included in, and excluded from, notions of French subjectivity, where they were both inside and outside of the shifting contours of symbolic whiteness. This is demonstrated by their inclusion as Europeans in population censuses as French subjects and their inclusion in parish registers as Catholics, but also by their marginalization from employment in the French colonial administration except in the lower orders of the army. While Catholicism promised acculturation and corporeal modification as ways of becoming European, the anxiety surrounding the origins of the topas meant that the question of their race would return to haunt them when the French Revolution heralded the beginning of a new era of modernity.

5

Race and citizenship

Emerging from the Anglo-French conflicts in eighteenth-century India is an often hidden story of different political structures of colonial governance that shaped different processes of hybridity and determined future destinies. The status of Eurasians in French settlements was, therefore, more secure since they were incorporated into wider European categories regardless of Indian descent, while in British India they were gradually excluded because of it. While Eurasians in British India and the métis in French India occupied different geo-political locations and embodied spaces of whiteness, it would not be accurate to suggest that this demonstrates a clear divergence in the framing of race. Notions of racial hybridity were complex, and the fragile contours of whiteness often changed within imperial spaces themselves as political circumstances altered. The question of the topas community in French India was more vexed than that of the métis, since individuals could not always confirm their ancestry with any degree of certainty and their claims to whiteness were based on an older model of religious conversion, political loyalty and domicile. Before the revolution, the topas were members of la ville blanche but they occupied the margins of a wider and often blurred European constituency. They were conscious to distance themselves from ‘natives’ on the one hand, but were also eager to claim an association with the métis based on their often close family connections and shared membership of a wider Catholic community. The claims of some topas to symbolic whiteness drew on this association, causing tensions to emerge between the two communities as concepts of hybridity were often in conflict with each other. In this chapter, I want to consider the general impact of the French Revolution on these remote French settlements and how a new discourse of imperial modernity emerged to challenge the ancien regime, but also how it posed new problems for the classification of whiteness in French India. What it meant to be white under the ancien régime may have been formerly determined by cultural and religious factors, where Eurasian women were important historical agents but, after the revolution, new forms of subjectivity were increasingly more determined by bloodline, where paternal origin became more significant in the determination of European status.

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While Eurasian men who could confirm their European paternal ancestors through legitimate marriages continued to enjoy the same status as they did before the revolution, a considerable amount of confusion and consternation surrounded the often vulnerable status of the topas community who became the subjects of controversy and scrutiny. Alexandre du Rosaire, Emanuel Ribeyro and Joseph Alfonço were but three of the 25 men who wrote a carefully written complaint to the Colonial Assembly in Pondicherry dated 16 October 1790. This letter was a response to the precarious position of the topas community in relation to new citizenship laws that were introduced in France and in the colonies after the revolution. Alongside other French inhabitants of la ville blanche, they were originally included on the list of active citizens from 2 March but then excluded from the electoral roll without warning in September of that year. Seeing this sudden reversal of fortunes as an act of discrimination based solely on skin colour, their demand was to be readmitted back to the list alongside French and métis men. The topas were mostly employed in the lower ranks of the French East India Company or in domestic service to French traders and colonial officials. Through property inheritance, or through their roles as cultural brokers and intermediaries in the service of the French East India Company, however, a small minority of topas had acquired some measure of wealth and influence. From this minority came these petitioners who asserted the right of the community to be treated as French citizens on the same basis as the métis. During an era where citizenship rights were generally being extended in metropolitan France and the French Empire, the plight of the topas offers an interesting parallel case study of the emerging role of race in the determination of political status. The question of how gens libres de couleur who claimed European status in the colonies would fit with metropolitan notions of citizenship meant that the contours of whiteness were being clarified and renegotiated in colonial settlements such as Pondicherry, where francisation previously provided an avenue for acculturation. As colonial authorities pondered how the relationship between citizenship and race could be applied to free people of colour after the revolution, the status of the topas community became a litmus test. The boundaries of whiteness had clearly shifted along racial lines, indicating that the case of the topas went to the heart of debates about hybridity during shifting political contexts. As news of the French Revolution travelled through the main networks of the French colonial world, to the Caribbean, North America, Africa and the Indian Ocean, administrations in seemingly marginal comptoirs such as Pondicherry and Chandernagore also faced the impact of these dramatic changes in the existing structures of colonial governance. Apart from the administrative dimension, there was also the question of how metropolitan political changes of this magnitude would fit with everyday life in the colonies and how these might affect ordinary people in these diverse and multiracial societies.1 The period from 1784 to 1791 was a period of

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significant transformation for both the British and the French Empires in India. Only six years after the India Act of 1784 transformed the nature of sovereignty in British India, a different set of political changes started to transform the governance of French India. Immanuel Wallerstein has called the French Revolution a ‘world-historical event’ because its impact was far-reaching by creating the conditions for new social and political formations across the world.2 While Wallerstein looks at the diffusion of the revolution as a watershed political event that had global implications, French colonial historians have added to this view by looking more specifically at how political developments in Paris were received and reworked in the colonies by ordinary people from the bottom up. Rather than through a process of top-down political osmosis, colonial subjects could resist and negotiate their relationships with the colonial state, which led to outcomes that were grounded in local circumstances. In many instances, as Antoinette Burton has suggested, this led to colonies becoming robust political arenas where imperial modernity was not being passively absorbed but, on the contrary, being actively recast and reconstituted by local debates and conditions.3 For example, Laurent Dubois comments in the context of 1790s Guadeloupe that such a debate ‘outran the political imagination of the metropole in the transformation – and universalisation – of the idea of rights’.4 In the same vein, Carolyn Fick argues that the debates on citizenship and political rights for free people of colour in Saint-Domingue anticipated these same debates in Paris. These grassroots responses to the revolution in the colonies meant that mulattoes and other free people of colour were instrumental in arguing against the emergence of race as a factor for citizenship eligibility. While French India was also an arena for the negotiation of modernity from the bottom up, the topas petition of French India did not directly shape the debate on the relationship between race and citizenship in Paris in the same way as these better known debates from the slave colonies of the Caribbean. Nevertheless, there was a significant conversation occurring amongst the topas community of Pondicherry, which was occurring in parallel to similar debates in places such as Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe. This conversation was animated by the impact of the revolution on existing colonial categories, where a new relationship evolved between the definition of whiteness and what it meant to be French. In this sense, the topas were highly conscious of parallel domestic and overseas debates concerning the relationship between race and citizenship, enabling them to frame their concerns in a global context. By drawing on analogies between themselves and the status of foreigners in France, and between themselves and the status of other gens de couleur in the colonies, the topas petitioners were able to find the moral precedents to argue that race should not be a barrier to citizenship. Before talking of the petition in depth and thinking through its arguments as a reaction to wider global transformations, it is worth spending some time

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to consider the notion of citizenship in the context of the revolution and domestic French politics. This might give a wider perspective on the exclusionary impulses within the concept itself and how these relate to the position of non-white foreigners within France and to the position of the gens de couleur in the colonies. In theory, the abolition of the ancien régime and its replacement with the National Assembly saw the transfer of political power from the monarchy and the privileged estates to a centralized body of elected citizens. While the revolution’s promise was one of equal political rights, as seen in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the question of who was included in this body meant that there was an innate and unavoidable tension between the rhetoric and the practice of universal equality.5 Thouret’s Report on the Basis of Political Eligibility in 1789 illustrated this well. It formed the framework for subsequent legislation on the qualifications for voting, the criteria for holding office and the eligibility rules for political participation as citizens.6 It also defined the criteria by which the notion of citizenship was to be defined. In that interpretation, the concept of citizenship was never intended to be universally applied since its application was selective from the outset. Women, children and the poor were automatically excluded from membership since the citizen as a political entity was defined as the property-owning male subject.7 Both gender and social class framed the meaning of what it meant to be a subject of the state in formative and fundamental ways. On 29 September 1789, the National Assembly voted to differentiate between different classes of citizenship based on the ability to pay taxes. In this definition, passive citizens enjoyed full civil rights and the protection of French law, but could not vote or be elected for political office on the basis that their contribution of taxation was low. Active citizens, on the other hand, were given the right to vote on the basis that their financial contribution to the state was equivalent to three days’ wages but the right to stand for elections and hold office was reserved for those active citizens with the most economic clout. Thouret’s report also stipulated the economic criteria by which French subjects were entitled to be citizens of the National Assembly. In order to qualify, men had ‘to be French or to have become French’, to have reached the age of 25, and to have resided in their local canton for a minimum of one year. The equivalent of three days’ work was required as the minimum taxation threshold for eligibility. Hence, the concept of citizenship did not confer universal rights on all individuals. The notion of modern citizenship was not a novel invention of the French revolution and nor was it a completely radical break with past tradition. Its evolution can be traced back to the 1570s when the idea of Frenchness as a politico-legal concept was being assembled independently from the classical Catholic model, where new political subjects were constituted via the transformative effects of religious conversion. Catholicism provided the binding cultural ideology linking what Gail Bossenga has called a ‘confessional, corporately-divided, hierarchical intersection of many

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intermediate bodies which were only loosely united through the constitution of the monarchy’.8 In this sense, non-Catholic subjects of the king were considered to be foreigners. For centuries, France’s Jewish population was not regarded as French, and it was excluded from political participation due to a combination of endemic anti-Semitism and suspicion in regard to its true loyalties. In the words of Jeffrey Merrick, Jews in France were ‘regarded as foreigners everywhere, citizens nowhere’.9 Likewise, the Huguenot minority was not entitled to the benefits of citizenship based on their religious persuasion. The eventual recognition of Protestants as French citizens in 1787 was a remarkable leap forward for non-Catholic French subjects under the ancien regime and the decision itself became a useful precedent under which other minorities could claim an equal entitlement.10 In 1790, the Jews of Paris, Alsace and Lorraine petitioned the National Assembly to argue that if Protestants were able to become citizens under the ancien régime, then religion could no longer be considered a factor in the denial of citizenship rights.11 On 27 September 1791, the National Assembly voted to include French Jews as active citizens and to award them the right to participate in the affairs of the state on the same basis as non-Jews.12 That Protestant and Jews were no longer considered to be political aliens within the borders of France meant that both their birthright and domicile were being recognized as factors underscoring entitlement. Despite being born in France, Protestants and Jews were previously considered to be internal aliens, and this formal recognition by the state was also evidence that their old status as ‘foreigners’ had changed. The question of how foreign nationals became French is also pertinent to understanding the ways in which the narrow definitions of citizenship entitlement were widened both before and after the revolution. For example, Peter Sahlins argues that during the period of the Seven Years War in the mid-eighteenth century, a key distinction was made between political citizenship and legal nationality, which effectively enabled foreigners to pass from being outsiders to insiders through the process of naturalization. The distinction between foreigners and citizens was slowly being abandoned in favour of a legal process where one could ‘become French’ by living on French territory for a certain period of time.13 However, as Sahlins argues, this did not simply rest on a strict dichotomy between ius sanguinis (descent) and ius solis (domicile) definitions of French citizenship, but it was applied in a way that drew on both of these two principles. In this sense, the modern notion of French citizenship was shaped by historical forces that drew on the idea that domicile requirements could facilitate the transition to French status, but it also remained tied to descent in certain cases.14 These ‘certain cases’ are directly relevant for assessing the role of race in the determination of citizenship entitlement, since very few citizenship grants to foreigners appear to have been given to ‘indigenous

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peoples of non-European descent’15 in the pre-revolutionary colonial context. This indicates, above all, that the precedent of awarding citizenship rights to Protestants and Jews was not extended to slaves and to colonized peoples on the basis of race, where the evolution of citizenship itself was bound intimately to the politics of whiteness in an era of imperial expansion. While slaves were denied citizenship rights in France and in overseas colonies on the basis that there were not human political subjects, the question of the status of the property-owning free blacks and mulattoes of Saint-Domingue was another matter altogether. Treated as black foreigners living in French territory, the process of naturalization somehow did not apply to them. If white men not born in France could be conferred with the right of citizenship, it was argued, then that right could be extended to mixed-race and property-owning black subjects through the logic of extension. If the principle of domicile in French territory was, indeed, a universal one, then why could it not be applied to non-white communities who may have had French descent or who owned property in the colonies? The famous petitions of the mulattoes of Saint-Domingue to the National Assembly in 1789 were predicated on questions such as these, and they became the blueprint for subsequent petitions and testimonies from aggrieved gens de couleur who thought of themselves as French but who were denied the benefits of full citizenship. It is from this historical tradition and political milieu that the topas wrote their grievances and petitions only a year later, where they drew on past precedent, the status of foreigners in France and gens de couleur in other colonies to argue their case for inclusion. That they should do so from a relatively marginal colonial outpost on the fringes of the French Empire in Asia also speaks of the fundamental, yet often unacknowledged, effects of the revolution on the structures of political sovereignty in French India. In terms of morale, news of the revolution was generally received with hope and relief by the white population of Pondicherry, since their pleas for assistance and support during periods of aggressive British occupation under the ancien régime often fell on deaf ears. Not only were the Indian settlements outside the main ambits of French influence, but they were also peripheral to core foreign policy concerns. Since 1783, the official policy at Versailles had been to restrict funding to the Indian comptoirs in a period of fiscal austerity because of the adverse impact of the AngloFrench wars on the French treasury. Due to the town’s political demotion and diminished importance, news of the revolution was seen as a timely opportunity by the hopeful white inhabitants to address their grievances with a sympathetic new administration.16 Emulating the process of political change in Paris, the French settlers of Pondicherry met in a General Assembly and sent a delegation to the National Assembly in France as a gesture of support for the revolution. A National Committee was established to usurp the governor who offered little resistance and surrendered his

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authority to the revolutionaries. By July 1791, a new political entity governed all the French settlements in India under a single administrative structure. This newly formed Colonial Assembly comprised of 21 members: 15 for Pondicherry, three for Chandernagore and one each for Karaikal, Yanam and Mahé, the other comptoirs. While the revolutionary mood was relatively peaceful in Pondicherry, more colourful and militant responses were witnessed in other French settlements. Under the shadow of the newly established British colonial state in Bengal, Chandernagore became an unlikely theatre for both the symbolism and spectacle of revolutionary change. A revolutionary mob re-enacted the storming of the Bastille and invaded the governor’s residence at Goretty, and from April 1790 there was also a heated stand-off between revolutionary and royalist factions that lasted six months.17 Settlers who opposed the revolution and who supported Montigny and the royal administration departed the colony and found refuge in the nearby Danish settlement of Serampore.18 Due to the unpopularity of the royal commander at Chandernagore, François Emmanuel Dehays de Montigny, revolutionaries went one step further than their revisionist counterparts in Pondicherry by creating a Committee of Citizens with full executive powers.19 This Committee successfully ousted Montigny from power in 1790. He was forced by an armed citizen’s militia to surrender the governor’s residence at Goretty, meaning that a republican assembly of citizens was now in control of Chandernagore. This was one of the ways in which the administration in Bengal became more radicalized after the revolution and, in the process, the settlement formed its own dialogue with other French colonies and became more distant from Pondicherry as a result. For example, no representatives were sent from Chandernagore to the Colonial Assembly in the south and a direct line of communication was established with the revolutionary administration on the Isle de France without consultation with Pondicherry as a brazen gesture of its active revolutionary policy.20 Using Thouret’s original principles as a guide, the National Assembly issued instructions to municipalities both in France and in the colonies concerning the eligibility criteria for active citizenship.21 In 1791, a new provisional constitution for the colony was drawn up to determine how the settlement was to be governed in light of these sweeping revolutionary changes. Although the first article stated that ‘the General Assembly of Chandernagore will be composed of the totality of her active citizens’,22 this applied only to those who were considered to be French. As the new symbolic trappings of sovereignty were put in place and the new rhetoric of revolutionary change promised liberté, égalité and fraternité to all, there was the real sense that the marginalized comptoirs in India were embarking on a radical new experiment in colonial politics. However, in these dramatic transitions from royalist to republican administrations, the performance and practices of revolutionary change were confined to the white town, since promises of equality did not apply to those over whom the French ruled.

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The great majority of the population were not conferred with citizenship rights and Indians found themselves in the same position of political subjection after the revolution as they were before it. One of the central paradoxes of the extension of citizenship to the colonies, and of revolutionary modernity itself, was the proclamation of universal rights while the majority of the population in French settlements remained under colonial subjugation. While the General Assembly did offer protection ‘to all who have the good fortune to be living under the French Empire’,23 this did not extend to political liberty or the recognition of civic rights on an equal basis. As a result, the status of Indians in the French colonies did not alter from their former status under the royalist administrations, and the right to citizenship under the principle of domicile did not apply to them.24 On the contrary, revolutionary legal codes remained tied to a political culture of racial privilege. An Indian could not ‘become French’ in the same way as a foreign European, since the principle of descent acted as a political mechanism to prevent Indians from membership.25 However, this principle was not applied equally to foreign Europeans who were able to apply for citizenship. What the General Assembly did offer to the Indian population was a modified legal system where ‘native’ cases could be heard separately to European cases. This comprised of two judicial chambers: one for Europeans under the French legal code and the other for ‘natives’, called the Tribunal de la Cacherie, which tried cases based on local laws. Indians were able to elect five conseilleurs to act as a collective jury in the Tribunal de la Cacherie. The conseilleurs, who were paid a monthly stipend of 30 rupees, were usually prominent male members of the Indian community over 30 years of age who owned property in the settlement. However, the decision-making authority of this ‘native’ tribunal was gestural since it was seriously restricted in real terms. A French judge, paid a monthly stipend of 200 rupees, was appointed above the ‘native’ conseilleurs with the power to arbitrate on issues of justice and overrule decisions made by the jury that he did not agree with.26 The disparity in power and remuneration reflected relations of racial superiority and subordination that kept French authority undisturbed despite the inclusion of some limited and cosmetic Indian representation. In the absence of citizenship rights, the creation of a chamber whose jury was elected by the Indian inhabitants of Chandernagore, but whose executive power was held by a French judge, was the only tokenistic gesture offered in the spirit of revolution.27 While ‘natives’ could not become French citizens, the political status of some members of the white population was also far from stable or secure. A closer examination of the 235 inhabitants in Chandernagore who were regarded as French subjects in 1790, a year before the establishment of the General Assembly, reveals that not all French Catholic subjects in la ville blanche would be entitled to the right of citizenship.28 Only white men who were over the age of 25 years and contributed three days’ taxation could vote, which meant that adult men under 25 and poorer men who did

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not meet the taxation threshold were automatically excluded. All women were excluded from becoming citizens, even if they wielded considerable political influence in colonial settlements or even if they were independently wealthy. Although their own birthright did not confer upon French and Portuguese Eurasian women the right of citizenship, it was valuable political currency for their foreign-born European husbands to acquire citizenship through their marriages with them. Ordinarily, European foreigners could claim French citizenship under the domicile provision if they had been living in Chandernagore for two years. This minimum requirement was waived and reduced to three months if the European foreigner was also a property owner.29 However, if he did not satisfy the length of domicile or the property qualifications, the marriage of a foreign-born European Catholic man to a French Catholic woman guaranteed his entitlement to French citizenship by default. The right to ‘become French’ was therefore reserved for those white European foreigners who satisfied domicile or property requirements or who were married to French women. These were the classic examples of how white foreign men could ‘become French’ under the principle of domicile, but this example was not extended consistently in French India to ‘native’, topas and métis men. The existence of mixed-race communities as well as acculturated ‘native’ Christians and other groups attached to the French East India Company who claimed European status meant that metropolitan definitions did not fit with colonial realities. In the case of ‘native’ Catholics, the principle of domicile was rendered an exclusive rather than inclusive clause. Converted Indian Catholics living on the fringes of European society in the French colonies who were considered to be ‘subjects of the French king’ under the royalist administrations were also denied citizenship rights. In practice, the principle of francisation through Catholic conversion and their birth and domicile in French territory was no longer enough to become French. Despite their cultural assimilation and loyalty to the French flag or their birth and domicile in French territory, Indian descent prevented acculturated ‘native’ Catholics from becoming citizens, while foreign European men could qualify on the basis of domicile or association. The entitlements of mixed-race communities in French India were split between the very different fortunes of the métis and topas communities respectively. The métis continued to be regarded as white subjects after the revolution based on the natural right of descent. A list of French inhabitants in Pondicherry was drawn up in 1790 for the president of the General Assembly, Maracin, to assist in the recommendation of who would be entitled to financial support and other welfare payments. The report used the term ‘tous les européens et descendants d’européens’30 to define what was meant by the description ‘French’, and such a clause automatically included the métis community as descendants. Born in French territory, professing the Catholic faith and possessing the names of their French forebears, they were not prohibited by virtue of physical skin colour from

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belonging to the assembly of citizens. Able to vote and be admitted as electors in the General Assembly, the métis could also be elected to municipal posts in the colonial administration and to serve in the loges under the French flag.31 They were included as members of the General Assembly as long as they were male, over 25 and had sufficient capital to pay the three days’ taxation requirement. While the Eurasians of British India were increasingly more defined by their Indian descent by the last decades of the eighteenth century, in French India it was their European descent that enabled the métis to qualify as French citizens.32 The topas were originally included in the body of citizens on 2 March 1790 alongside the métis, and they were not initially distinguished from them. They were recognized as inhabitants of la ville blanche and members of a wider French Catholic community. They were nominated as members of the first Representative Committee and they contributed to the sending of a delegation to address the National Assembly in Paris alongside Europeans and the métis. On 6 September, however, after they had enjoyed the benefits of French citizenship for six months, the Colonial Assembly decided to reverse its decision and exclude them from these previous privileges and to deny the franchise to them, stripping them of all citizenship rights. Article 2 of the revolutionary constitution at Chandernagor in 1791 stated that citizenship was not open to ‘the race of degenerate Portuguese known under the name of the Portuguese of India except for individual exceptions which the General Assembly may see fit to include according to merit’.33 This demonstrates the precarious status of the topas after the 1790 reversal and the uncertainty surrounding their official categorization. They were not accorded the same status as European foreigners or the métis for the purposes of assessing eligibility for citizenship due to uncertainty regarding their European origins. While métis men were able to accrue the cultural capital of whiteness, the far majority of the topas could not verify their European male ancestors. Some might not have been of European origin at all but ‘native’ Catholics with Portuguese names in the service of the French Company. For others who were of European origin, there was the enduring problem of providing birth or marriage records, where ancestors in interracial relationships were not married. The 1790 decision to strip the topas community of its European status motivated 25 topas men to send their list of grievances. The petition illustrates Peter McPhee’s point that the revolution was not irrelevant to ordinary people in their day-to-day lives who took an active part in its reception, meaning and impact.34 Contesting the orthodox view of the revolution as a purely metropolitan phenomenon, McPhee demonstrates how communities outside of Paris were affected by revolutionary directives and how they accepted, rejected or renegotiated these changes in politically informed ways. While this argument is made in the context of rural France, it is as equally relevant to the case of the topas in French India for whom the revolution provided the context for their own proactive

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political awakening. While it would be inaccurate to overstate the role and impact of the topas petition compared to the much more famous political agitations of Saint-Domingue, or to claim that a group of largely educated and propertied topas men represented the will of an entire community, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that they were able to frame their own claims to identity, status and political legitimacy within a wider global context based on significant historical precedents. As a political memorial, the petition is similar to those of other gens de couleur in the sense that it demanded citizenship rights by relying on what Ravi de Costa calls ‘an enlarged vision of morality in order to justify specific claims’.35 While it did not address them in technical terms, the petition spoke to the tension existing between the descent and domicile principles of citizenship entitlement inherited by the revolution from the ancien régime. The petition also articulated this tension in both domestic and global frames of reference but with one question in mind. Who and what was a French citizen and did one need to be of French descent in the colonies in order to satisfy the eligibility criteria? Aggrieved by their less favourable treatment compared to the métis community, with whom they shared close ties, the petition was first concerned with the reasons for their exclusion. In struggling to define the status of the topas, colonial authorities on the ground were confronted with a dilemma in relation to eligibility requirements. Under the domicile precedent, the requirement ‘to have become French’ theoretically relinquished the need for citizens to have French origin. However, the principle remained deeply contradictory in its application since the racial origin of the gens libres de couleur in the colonies seemed to outweigh their claims to citizenship based on birth, domicile and acculturation. As the petitioners argued, this went against both historical precedent and the spirit of political change. ‘The colour of the topas’, proclaimed the petitioners, ‘must not exclude them from the class of active citizens’.36 Getting to the heart of the matter, they argued that ‘the métis are admitted not only as electors of the Assembly but are even nominated to posts in the municipal chamber’, and furthermore, ‘what title do they have more than the topas, who are as French as they and have been born and domiciled in the French settlements?’ In their pursuit to remind the Colonial Assembly that they were treated equally with the métis before the revolution, the petitioners emphasized ‘the continuous and tight bonds that join together the métis and the topas’, but were keen to stress that they ‘cannot be jealous of them as they are all their relatives, more or less distant’. The emotion driving their protest was not envy but injustice because of those very ties that ‘seem to be enough to prevent the exclusion from the rights of active citizens – exclusion it seems that singles out the topas alone’.37 In defending their right to be citizens, the petitioners set out to disprove the seemingly inconsistent requirement that they needed to be of French descent. To strengthen these points, the critical requirement

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‘to have become French’ was stressed to be the deciding factor. Their long association with the French East India Company, their affiliation with the Catholic Church and their personal commitment to the success of French colonization served as reminders of their political and cultural loyalty to the French flag. The petitioners make the point that they ‘will not evoke here the direct bonds that the French born in France have long since contracted. They will only mention them to obtain from the assembly a leniency that they believe, on more than one account; they have the right to claim’.38 Harking back to a previous era where cultural assimilation made ‘natives’ into Frenchmen, regardless of skin colour, the topas framed their argument through a process of sustained analogy with those whom they considered to be cousins. Another tactic was to stress that free people of colour in other French colonies had been awarded active citizenship rights based on the principle of domicile. If they had ‘become French’, and eligible to take their place as citizens, then why should the topas be excluded? By illuminating the fact that ‘the topas believe that the National Assembly has already promulgated a decree giving the rights of active citizenship to any free coloured man born and having his home in the French colonies of America’, the petitioners were making a valid point about the wider global context of the argument. If free people of colour in the French colonies of America were awarded the right of citizenship based on domicile, and not racial descent, then the topas argued that this same notion should be extended to the free people of colour in French India. The Pondicherry petition was riding on the political coattails of similar pleas by people of colour in the French colonies during the years from 1790 to 1792, where the topas representatives were speaking to a central contradiction in the revolution’s idealistic message of liberty, equality and fraternity. From the fringes of the French Empire in Asia, the topas were able to articulate their plight through comparisons with both domestic and imperial precedents. By linking their own status with Europeanized people of colour in French North America, Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe and Mauritius, the topas were able to situate their own experience of disenfranchisement in a closely knit imperial framework where the question of race provided the context for articulating their own claims.39 Just as women and the poor were excluded from full political franchise in France, based on the principal of universality through exclusion, the institution of slavery and its legacy created a political landscape in the colonies that was underscored by the distinction between slaves and free men. Dissociating themselves from both emancipated slaves and the descendants of slaves was another sign that the topas were aware of citizenship debates in other parts of the French Empire. They were keen to argue that because the question of citizenship rights has not ‘been decided definitively in regard to the gens de couleur of the islands’, that the ‘Citizen Assembly of Pondicherry will not mistake their free origin with that of the

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coloured people of the islands, who are all either emancipated or the descendants of slaves’. While the origins of the topas community were not entirely clear, members were more likely to be descendants of free Portuguese Eurasians or converted Indians with Portuguese names, but some could have been descendants of Portuguese-owned slaves. However, claiming an identity as ‘free people of colour’ was a politically important choice of terminology. They were making the decision to distance themselves from freed slaves, whose citizenship status was uncertain, and to associate themselves instead with the status of property-owning mulattoes in SaintDomingue. The topas petition came seven months before the National Assembly granted active citizenship to free blacks and mulattoes born of a free mother and a free father on 15 May 1791.40 While citizenship rights were eventually extended to all free men of colour in April 1792, the topas petition was part of this pre-1791 wave of claims and protests in which the question of slave origins still mattered. In this respect, the topas petitioners were aware that their claims to citizenship were based on having equal status to the métis as free, property-owning male subjects. Ultimately, the message of the topas petition betrays a paradox common to the arguments of all free people of colour at this time who defiantly opposed their exclusion from the body of citizens but, at the same time, did not want to be associated with the anti-slavery cause. Apart from this sharp awareness of the rights of free people of colour in other French colonies, the topas also argued for the defence of the domicile principle by turning to the question of European foreigners who could attain French citizenship through living in French territory for a certain period of time. The fact that they were born and domiciled in French territory but were excluded from citizenship rights, while foreign-born European men were not, acted as the leverage to return to some of the ancien régime citizenship laws that were inherited by the revolution. For the petitioners, there was a fundamental principle at stake that formed the central kernel of their plea. As they state uncategorically in their petition: ‘to be French, there is no absolute need to be born in France or to be the son of a Frenchman’.41 Analogies were made in the petition between the position of free people of colour in French India and the status of foreigners in France. The argument was relatively straightforward and was based on a hypothetical but plausible example. If an Englishman should establish himself in France with his English wife and they produce a son on French territory, and that son continues to live in France and purchase properties there, then that son is treated as a French citizen although he was not born of a Frenchman.42 This logic drew directly from the status of foreigners in France and the prerevolutionary origins of citizenship criteria that were discussed earlier in this chapter. The topas were drawing on the idea that their claim to active citizenship was based on the simple fact of their place of birth in French territory. They argued that their exclusion based on skin colour or descent could not be legitimate since even foreigners

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who were not born in French territory could eventually apply. By employing their example of the English foreigner who settles in French territory and who satisfies certain residence or property requirements, the topas were arguing for the recognition of an already established principle of citizenship to prevail. As Michael Rapport argues, the notion of place of birth as a central feature of citizenship eligibility was an older principle that was retained after the revolution.43 One could claim French citizenship if one was born in France of foreign parents. In similar fashion, children born outside France to a French father were also accepted as French citizens as long as they took a civic oath and returned to live in France permanently. Naturalization laws stipulated that to become French citizens, foreigners needed to reside in French territory continuously for five years, or be married to a French national, or purchase property or undertake commercial dealings. Rogers Brubaker argues that the emergence of citizenship followed divergent trajectories in France and Germany, where the principle domicile was more influential and formative in the former country after the revolution. After the radical revolution of 1793, the domicile provision in France was widened. French citizenship was granted after foreigners had lived in France for one year, or acquired property, or married a French national, or adopted a child. In contrast, the principle of ius sanguinis seemed to shape subsequent German notions of citizenship, where the requirement to have German descent remained strong.44 The topas petition was therefore a specific reaction to racial exclusion that was inevitably part of a wider conversation about the place of free people of colour after the revolution. Using examples from both France and other colonial contexts, the topas argued that domicile rather than descent was the key to understanding citizenship rights in an era of revolutionary modernity. In this sense, they were not mere passive recipients of the French modernizing project, and nor did they accept a definition of active citizenship that ultimately excluded them. As a consequence of these arguments, they were readmitted back into the body of citizens in Pondicherry on 2 December 1792 and included once again on the liste des citoyens actifs. Taking their place in the Colonial Assembly alongside European and métis men, this was the result of an arduous and yet astute political campaign where this group of 25 topas men were originally regarded as Frenchmen, lost that status for six months in 1790 when they acquired the status of ‘natives’, and then were readmitted as French citizens in 1792. Their path to acceptance reveals the tensions inherent in the concept of French citizenship in a racially hybrid setting, where the debate about the status of the topas became an arena for the contested politics of whiteness. The struggle of the topas community to gain full acceptance as active citizens indicates that acculturation, Catholic affiliation, loyalty to the French flag and even place of birth were not always enough to demonstrate status since the question of ‘race’ started to emerge more strongly as a

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critical factor. While the petition was successful in its advocacy of domicile as an important foundation for citizenship entitlement, their journey demonstrates that the quest to identify the boundary between ‘native’ and white remained an integral part of the conversation between the various projects of modernity in colonial India. Within French India itself, the construction of whiteness changed with the transformation in political governance after 1790, as one space of modernity was replaced with another. Not only was the political situation and social perception of the mixed-race communities different to that in British India, there was also a clear difference in the manner in which the métis and the topas communities were categorized and treated. In this sense, the topas petition might be considered to be an archival fragment that gives a historical account of the injuries of changing racial classifications from the perspective of those who inhabited these spaces of modernity as embodied subjects.

Conclusion

The picture we have of Eurasians … is that of a large class of British subjects, with tastes, educations, traditions and religion in close sympathy with Englishmen, and hearts pulsating with a loyalty as devoted to English rules as those of natives of Britain themselves.1

Writing in The Calcutta Review in 1881, the journalist Thomas Edwards paints an all too familiar caricature of Eurasians in late colonial British India. With the eventual triumph of British rule, the Eurasian community adopted a policy of imperial loyalty and cultural identification to mobilize support for political recognition and status in the face of endemic prejudice and discrimination. Behind Edwards’ ironic and mocking characterization lies a well known and often tragic story of British betrayal and Indian indifference, as what became the Anglo-Indian community struggled to find true acceptance. Despite a genealogy going back to the Portuguese settlements of the 1500s, Eurasians were often considered to be outsiders in their own homeland. In the twentieth century, this predicament eventually led to the proliferation in popular literature and colonial history of stereotypes where mixed-race identity was portrayed as an acute social and moral problem.2 Seen as misfits or anthropological curiosities, Eurasians were subsequently represented in sociological and pseudo-scientific discourses as marginal individuals who were caught between two cultures with no sense of belonging to either.3 In these new colonial imaginaries, mixed-race people were considered to be people outside the project of modernity and, indeed, outside the discursive space of South Asian history. This book has sought to destabilize this view from an earlier period of imperialism where changing concepts of hybridity spoke to the relationship between race and modernity. My intention was to unpick the Eurasian experience from its British historiographical frame to gain a longue durée perspective of how the emergence of mixed-race categories were integral to (rather than external to) different expressions of modernity in Portuguese, British and French spaces. Race making was tied to distinct models of modernity within imperial projects resulting in often contradictory

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classifications of whiteness. In fact, the conceptual range of hybridity across these imperial spaces seems to suggest that race was in a state of constant renegotiation as a product of both local circumstances and broader global contexts. The notion of hybridity as an eternal ‘third space’ therefore invites historical revision due to these changing concepts where imperial governance gave mixed-race identity quite different meanings from local vantage points in Portuguese, British and French settlements. Looking at those letters written by Maria Texeira in Chandernagore a century earlier seemed like a good place to start thinking about the nature of this revision, since her own situation was in many respects an intersection where global politics, imperial histories and forms of modernity were in conversation with each other. As Saurabh Dube infers, modernity can only be expressed historically through the actions and words of the subjects of modernity.4 Like the topas petitioners of Pondicherry, Maria Texeira emerges from the colonial archive as one of these subjects and the aim of this book was not to trace her life story or employ her situation as an example of globalization, but to think through the various historical narratives that gave meaning to her cultural and political situation. Catholic acculturation in the sixteenth century created new Portuguese subjects where concepts of hybridity were mediated by religious difference. This idea of corporeal transformation meant that mixed-race Portuguese Catholics entered a wider European constituency where whiteness was a set of symbolic cultural attachments rather than merely a question of pigmentation alone. The perceptions and images of Eurasians from early modern travel accounts in Portuguese India seemed to suggest that ideas about religion and colour were in negotiation with each other. However, her identity was also caught in the cross-fire between British and French models of colonial governance and the political structures which sustained them. The global Anglo-French conflicts during this period shaped the attitude towards cultural difference in ways that have not generally been associated with studies of hybridity. In the absence of an aggrandising imperial project of their own, and facing both the habitual occupation of their own settlements and the political subjugation of residents, the French were situated in an altogether different political milieu to the British. As a result, the category ‘European’ itself was deeply fractured along religious and national lines in the context of the Anglo-French wars, thus creating deep cleavages in any monolithic or static notion of whiteness. These historical circumstances also mean that contested notions of hybridity emerged across empires. Informed by a situated genealogy of whiteness where Catholic affiliation and symbolic capital played a significant role, mixed-race identity seemed to be less threatening in places such as Chandernagore and Pondicherry since there was not the same sense of symbolic danger to imperial authority as there was in British India. Attitudes towards hybridity distinguished these imperialisms from each other and while Eurasians in British India were re-categorised as ‘natives of

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India’ by the 1790s, the métis in the French settlements were incorporated into la ville blanche as French citizens on the basis of paternal descent. To re-visit some of the main questions posed in the introduction to this book, one became mixed-race not through the sole fact of having mixed racial origins but as an ideological consequence of how race was constituted by the changing political structures of colonial governance. Hopefully, this study will have shed some light on the limitations of any simple or dichotomous comparison between British and French concepts of hybridity. On the one hand, both were underscored by the legacy of Portuguese imperialism and the Eurasian women who in many ways were the unsung historical agents who shaped the constitution of whiteness in both imperial spaces. On the other hand, the classification of mixed-race communities often changed within imperial spaces and not just across them. There was not a clear-cut divergence between empires since notions of hybridity changed within a particular colonial outpost depending on altering political circumstances. In British India, the core concern with Protestantism as a cultural marker of whiteness started to merge in more pronounced ways with race by the end of the eighteenth century when imperial modernity was defined by the formal consolidation of territorial sovereignty. As a result, Eurasians began to be classified in terms of their racial background rather than their cultural affiliations. In French India too, religious distinctions shaped notions of whiteness under the ancien régime in the colonial environment which were also influenced by the legacy of the Portuguese era where mixed-race communities were part of wider and more elastic Catholic constituency. The impact of the French revolution not only changed the nature of political sovereignty in the colonies but it also ushered in a project of modernity tied to distinct processes of race-making. Unlike changes in British India, however, it was the topas community rather than the métis community who were directly affected when they were unceremoniously moved from one racial category to another. The analysis given here, of unstable and shifting senses of mixed-race identity informed by global politics, imperial histories and forms of modernity, is not an interconnected story of transnational whiteness but a story of critical differences in historically situated expressions of race. In the context of the Anglo-French tensions of the eighteenth century, other forms of difference mediated what it meant to be ‘white’. Maria Texeira wrote her letters from her specific experience as a French subject under British occupation where the curtailment of civil and political liberties and her own financial distress spoke of the human dimensions of war. These were confident and self-assured testimonies of political activism, reflecting her high social status in the colony, where the literate class can speak through the archive but they also come from a woman whose own Catholic disposition was a threat to British interests. Despite the privileged position of Eurasians in French India vis-à-vis British India, however, gender continued to shape the embodied experience of race in politically

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significant ways. Ten years later, when the French Revolution reached the far-flung comptoirs of French India, the rhetoric of universal rights promised a new kind of modernity which encapsulated the ideas of equality and liberty for all. Like their European and ‘native’ sisters, however, Portuguese Eurasian women like Maria Texeira found that they would be denied the rights of citizens in an era where fraternal contract and paternal descent continued to determine civil status. In conclusion, this study also sought to show how these changing concepts of hybridity across (and within) empires did not reflect the expression of plural modernities in a haphazard and random way. Such a relativist interpretation hardly does justice to the disproportionate and animated significance of mixed-race identity to these projects of colonial governance. To only demonstrate that multiple imperialisms produced multiple forms of hybridity as a result of multiple modernities risks being purely rhetorical. In fact, these projects of imperial modernity were defined in and around the mixed-race subject who encoded the human dimensions of often dramatic political change. In this context, Dipesh Chakrabarty has asked how we might ‘envision or document ways of being modern that will speak to that which is shared across the world as well as to that which belongs to human cultural diversity?’5 In this book, I have wanted to show a few examples of this. In considering the exclusion of Eurasians in British India, the hardships faced by Eurasian widows under British occupation in French India or the anxieties faced by the topas with the coming of the French revolution, the sudden change from one project of modernity to another could have real and material effects on individuals who found their worlds turned upside down as a result of imperial decisions. In showing how individuals reacted to, or challenged, these changing concepts of hybridity we can see how modernities were shaped by the lived experience of history where agency really mattered.6 It appears that in the struggle of colonizers to define modernity in different imperial spaces, the question of whether mixed-race communities were ‘white’ and ‘modern’ or whether they were ‘native’ and ‘unmodern’ went to the heart of this lived experience. While the bestial fantasy of hybridity as depicted so vividly in de Camoens’ Lusiad spoke to the latter incarnation, the reality for most mixed-race communities in Portuguese, British and French India is that they straddled both as political expediency dictated.

Notes

Preface 1 For some foundational explorations of the relationship between Britishness, imperialism and mixed-race identity, see Y. Alibhai-Brown, Mixed Feelings: The Complex Lives of Mixed-Race Britons, London: Women’s Press, 2001; and J. Ifekwunigwe, Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of ‘Race’, Nation and Gender, London: Routledge, 1999. 2 See L. Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate History Self, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 289. 3 See A. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. 4 Also see L. I. Winters and H. L. DeBose (eds), New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the Twenty-First Century, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003. 5 See J. Matthews, ‘Eurasian Persuasions: Mixed Race, Performativity and Cosmopolitanism’, in Journal of Intercultural Studies 28, no. 1, 2007, 41–54. 6 G. Pandey (ed.), Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories, London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 4–6. Introduction 1 P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America, c.1750–1783, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 2–9. 2 P. J. Stern, ‘British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections’, in The William and Mary Quarterly 63, issue 4, October 2006, 693–712. 3 ‘Letters and Petitions of Madame Le Conte Demarest’ (1779, 1780), at British Library, Asian and African Studies Collection, India Office Records (IOR in subsequent references) P/2, 36, f. 138 and P/2, 37, ff. 133–38. 4 For examples, see A. Burton, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007; L. Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, New York: Harper Collins, 2007; D. Deacon, P. Russell and A. Woollacott (eds.), Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700 – present, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; M. Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 1–15; and A. Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 5 A. L. Stoler, ‘Racial Histories and their Régimes of Truth’, in Political Power and Social Theory, vol. 11, 1997, 183.

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6 The inspiration for this approach has come from the work of Kenneth Ballhatchet who suggested that ‘the French, Dutch and Portuguese colonial empires present significant differences in racial and social attitudes’. Ballhatchet addressed these differences through a study of Roman Catholic missionary attitudes towards caste rather than looking at specific racial formations. See K. Ballhatchet, Caste, Class and Catholicism in India, 1789–1914, London: Curzon, 1998, p. ix. 7 K. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980; and P. Robb, ‘South Asia and the Concept of Race’, in P. Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 8–9, 14, 61. 8 See H. Fischer-Tiné, Low and Licentious Europeans: Race, Class and ‘White Subalternity’ in Colonial India, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009, p. 376. 9 For illuminating examples of the transnational approach, see T. Ballantyne and A. Burton, Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in a Global Age of Empire, Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2008; L. Boucher, J. Carey and K. Ellinghaus (eds), Re-orienting Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the History of an Identity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; H. Fischer-Tiné and S. Gehrmann (eds), Empires and Boundaries: Rethinking Race, Class and Gender in Colonial Settings, London: Routledge, 2009; A. Holland and B. Brookes (eds), Rethinking the Racial Moment: Essays on the Colonial Encounter, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011; and M. Lake and H. Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 10 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, p. 94. 11 See U. S. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, Chapter 2. 12 J. L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, 1250–1350, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Also see A. Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; and K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. 13 D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 43. 14 For another contribution in the context of the Indian Ocean, also see A. Tambe and H. Fischer-Tiné (eds), The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region, Oxford: Routledge, 2009, p. 4. 15 S. Dube and I. Banerjee-Dube, Unbecoming Modern: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities, New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2006, p. 2. 16 A. L. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995, p. 15. 17 F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p. 8. 18 I. Ang, ‘Together in Difference: Beyond Diaspora, Into Hybridity’, in Asian Studies Review 27, issue 2, 2003, 141–54. 19 T. Mitchell (ed.), Questions of Modernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 6. 20 K. M. Clarke and D. A. Thomas (eds), Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, p. 2. 21 J. Ifekwunigwe (ed.), ‘Mixed-Race’ Studies: A Reader, London: Routledge, 2004, p. xxi.

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22 D. Parker and M. Song (ed.), Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’, London: Pluto Press, 2001, p. 6. 23 R. J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 27. 24 On this point, see M. M. Kraidy, Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005, p. 3. 25 H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 39. 26 S. Ali, Mixed-Race, Post-Race: Gender, New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices Oxford: Berg, 2003, p. 171. 27 See the thoughtful and insightful essay by Durba Ghosh within the context of British imperialism. D. Ghosh, ‘National Narratives and the Politics of Miscegenation: Britain and India’, in A. Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 27–44. 28 K. Mitchell, ‘Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity’, in Society and Space 15, no. 3, 1997, 534. 29 Ballhatchet, Sex, Race and Class under the Raj, p. 96. 30 The term ‘Anglo-Indian’ was traditionally used to refer to the British in India but it was also employed in an official sense under the Raj as a term to describe the mixed-race community as a political constituency after 1911. See H.W.B. Moreno, ‘Some Anglo-Indian Terms and Origins’, in Indian Historical Records Commission V, 1923, 78–79. 31 C. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833, London: Curzon, 1996. 32 For examples of some Anglo-Indian histories, see E. Abel, The Anglo-Indian Community: Survival in India, Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1988; F. Anthony, Britain’s Betrayal in India: The Story of the Anglo-Indian Community, Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1969; L. Caplan, Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World, Oxford: Berg, 2001; R. Maher, These Are The Anglo-Indians, Calcutta: Swallow Press, 1962; H. A. Stark, Hostages to India, Or The Life Story of the Anglo-Indian Race, Calcutta: Calcutta Fine Arts Cottage, 1926; and C. Younger, Anglo-Indians: Neglected Children of the Raj, Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1987. 33 W. Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India, New York: Viking, 2003. 34 Sudipta Sen also challenges the nostalgic view of interracial harmony, and Peter Robb’s work on the Blechyndens’ Calcutta diaries uncovers more complex realities for the early colonial British period. See S. Sen, ‘Colonial Aversions and Domestic Desires: Blood, Race, Sex and the Decline of Intimacy in Early British India’, in South Asia XXIV, Special Issue, 2001, 25–45; and P. Robb, ‘Children, Emotion, Identity and Empire: Views from the Blechyndens’ Calcutta Diaries (1790–1822)’, in Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 101, 2006, 175–201. 35 I. Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. 36 D. Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 37 On the need to historicize hybridity, see L. Boucher, J. Carey and K. Ellinghaus (eds), Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of an Identity, Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2007; A. Brah and A. E. Coombes (eds), Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 2; A. Carton, ‘Historicising Hybridity and the Politics of Location: Three Early Colonial Indian Narratives’, in Journal of Intercultural Studies 28, no. 1, February 2007, 143–55; D. Kennedy, ‘Imperial History and Postcolonial Theory’, in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24, May 1996,

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40

41 42 43 44

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345–63; A. Looma, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 178–79; S. Mizutani, ‘Historicising Whiteness: From the Case of Late Colonial India’, in Journal of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Association 2, no. 1, 2006, 1–15.; and N. Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 195. By the term métis, I mean the mixed-race progeny of French fathers and native mothers, and their descendants who identified as such. See S. Belmessous, ‘Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century French Colonial Policy’, in American Historical Review 110, no. 2, April 2005, 322–49. Also see A. L. Stoler, ‘Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 3, 1992, 514–51; and O. White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960, Oxford, 1999. On French imperialism in India, see M. Devèze, Histoire de la colonisation francaise en Amerique at aux Indes au XVIIIe siecle, Paris: Tournier et Constans, 1951; P. Haudrère, L’empire des rois, 1500–1789, Paris: Denoël, 1997; J.-M. Lafont, Indika: Essays in Indo-French Relations, 1630–1976, New Delhi: Manohar, 2000; J.-M. Lafont, ‘India and the Enlightenment’, in Encounters between India and France, Paris: Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, 1990, pp. 13–27; G. B. Malleson, History of the French in India from the Founding of Pondicherry in 1674 to the Capture of That Place in 1761, London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1893; K. S. Mathew, French in India and Indian Nationalism, 1700–1963, Delhi: B. R. Publication, 1999, 2 vols; K. S. Mathew and S. J. Stephen (eds), Indo-French Relations, New Delhi: Pragati Publications, 1999; A. Ray, The Merchant and the State: The French in India, 1666–1739, New Delhi: Munshriam Manoharlal, 2004; S. P. Sen, The French in India: 1763–1816, Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1958; P. Le Trégully and M. Morazé, L’Inde et la France: Deux siecles d’histoire commune, XVII–XVIII siecles, Paris: CNRS, 1995; J. Weber, Les établissements français en Inde au XIXe siecle, 1816–1914, Paris: Librairie de l’Inde, 1988, 5 vols. The French surrendered Pondicherry to Indian sovereignty in 1954 but the final de jure withdrawal did not occur until 1962. See A. K. Neogy, Decolonization of French India: Liberation Movement and Indo-French Relations, 1947–1954, Pondichéry: Institut français de Pondichéry, 1997. For historical approaches to whiteness studies, see the recent edited collections by Boucher, Carey and Ellinghaus, both Re-Orienting Whiteness and Historicising Whiteness. K. Anderson, ‘Race in Post-Universalist Perspective’, in Cultural Geographies 15, no. 2, 2008, 157. P. Spear, The Nabobs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, p. 62. For studies that look at the conflicting and contradictory classification of whiteness and ‘Anglo-Indian’ identity within the context of late colonial British India, see A. Blunt, Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005; E. Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; and S. Mizutani, The Meaning of White: Race, Class and the ‘Domiciled Community’ in British India, 1858–1930, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. For an important critical alternative to the transnational whiteness argument, see Laura Bear’s work on AngloIndian railways workers and the place of Indian lineage in constructions of national belonging; L. Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railways Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. J. Pugliese, ‘Race as Category Crisis: Whiteness and the Topical Assignation of Race’, in Social Semiotics 12, no. 2, 2002, 150. It should be noted that the

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groundbreaking research of David Arnold and Peter Marshall on the vulnerabilities of ‘white identity’ in colonial India anticipates and pre-dates the recent surge in whiteness studies. See D. Arnold, ‘European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century’, in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7, no. 2, 1979, 104–27; and P. J. Marshall, ‘The Whites of British India; 1780–1830: A Failed Colonial Society?’, in The International History Review XII, no. 1, February 1990, 27–44. 46 F. Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century, Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2003, p. 10. 47 I. M. Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, p. 3. 1 Portuguese legacies 1 See M. N. Pearson, ‘The Modern World-System and European Expansion in Asia to 1750’, in Before Colonialism: Theories on Asian–European Relations, 1500–1750, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 32–50. 2 See W. E. Washburn, ‘The Meaning of “Discovery” in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in U. Lamb (ed.), An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 1450–1800, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995, pp. 49–69. 3 Quoted in the English translator’s 1778 introduction to Luis de Camoens, The Lusiad; Or the Discovery of India, An Epic Poem, trans. W. J. Mickle, Oxford: Jackson and Lister, 1778, Part IV, ch. XII, p. 412. 4 S. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999, p. 22. 5 Satadru Sen makes a similar point in his discussion of European representations of the ‘Andamanese savage’ in S. Sen, Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean: Power, Pleasure and the Andaman Islanders, London: Routledge, 2009, pp. 1, 26. 6 C. R. Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963, p. 9. 7 This was not limited to the Portuguese colonial world but extends to global Catholic alliance building more generally. For example, Garry Leupp argues that a significant number of Japanese Catholic women married Portuguese men during the second half of the sixteenth century when Portuguese ships began to trade at Nagasaki. See G. P. Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543–1900, London: Continuum, 2003, p. 53. 8 The familiar concept of the ‘middle ground’ is taken from the parallel North American colonial experience. See R. White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 9 Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, p. 58. 10 Ibid., p. 59. 11 G. Bouchon, ‘Les femmes dans la société coloniale ibérique’, in L’Asie du Sud à l’époque des Grandes Découvertes, London: Valorium, 1987, p. 207. 12 J. Hugyen van Linschoten, His Discours of Voyages into Ye Easte and West Indies, trans. W. Phillip, London: John Wolfe, 1598, ch. XXIX, p. 55. 13 S. Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700, London: Longman, 1993, pp. 219, 220, 230 and M. N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 102. 14 M. N. Pearson, ‘Indo-Portuguese Society’, in The Portuguese in India, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1987, p. 92.

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15 See Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, ‘New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Créole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650’, in American Historical Review 104, 1999, 67. 16 ‘Letters of Albuquerque’, Letter IX dated 1 April 1512 at 10R I/3, f.162. 17 M. Faria y Sousa, The Portuguese Asia: Or, The History of the Discovery and Conquest of India By The Portuguese, trans. J. Stevens, London: C. Brome, 1695, Part II, ch. V, p. 173. 18 M. Sinha, ‘Signs Taken For Wonders? The Stakes For Imperial Studies’, in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3, no. 1, 2002, p. 4. 19 van Linschoten, His Discours of Voyages, ch. XXIX, p. 53. 20 F. Pyrard de Laval, Du Voyage de François Pyrard de Laval, Depuis l’arrivée à Goa, jusques à son retour en France, Paris: S. Thibovst et la veuve Dallin, 1619, ch. II, p. 39. 21 See W. Foster, The English Factories in India; 1642–1645, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908, p. 166. 22 W. Foster, The English Factories in India; 1637–1641, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908, p. 71. 23 W. Foster, The English Factories in India; 1646–1650, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908, p. 70. 24 F. Bernier, The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogol, Together With the Most Considerable Passages for Five Years Following that Empire, London: M. Pitt, S. Millers, J. Starkey, 1676, p. 134. 25 V. Ball, Travels in India by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Baron of Aubonne, London: Oxford University Press, 1925, pp. 160, 313. 26 The derivation and application of the term topas is further analyzed in the discussion on hybridity in French India in Chapters 4 and 5. 27 ‘A Diary Kept By Streynsham Master in His Inspection of the Factorys of Metchlepatam and the Bay of Bengale, and Regulating the Same’, at IOR, G/40/14, fol. 317. 28 ‘An Abstract of the East India Company’s garrison at Fort William for 1746’, at IOR L/MIL/10/130, f. 64. 29 ‘An Abstract of the East India Company’s garrison at Fort William for 1745’, at IOR L/MIL/10/130, f. 60. 30 A. T. Pringle (ed.), The Diary and Consultation Book of The Agent Governor and Council of Fort St George, 1684, Madras: Government Press, 1895, Vol. III, p. 189. 31 Ibid., p. 73. 32 Bernier, The History of the Late Revolution, p. 5. 33 W. Carey, ‘Miscellaneous Communication’, in Periodical Accounts Relative to the Baptist Missionary Society II, no. VIII, 1801, 189. In Bengal, Campos confirms that Portuguese was a metaphorical term to describe all mixed-race individuals regardless of nationality. Refer to J. J. A. Campos, History of the Portuguese in Bengal, London: Butterworth and Co., 1919, p. 188. 34 See M. N. Pearson, ‘Early Relations between the Portuguese and Gujarat: A New Overview’, in Indica 35, no. 2, September 1998, 81–96. 35 R. C. Temple (ed.), A Geographical Account of the Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679, by Thomas Bowrey, Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1905, p. 3, n. 5. 36 R. Challe, Journal d’un voyage fait aux Indes Orientales, 1690–1691, F. Deloffre and M. Menemenciaglu (eds), Paris: Mercure de France, 1983, p. 11. 37 In her historical account of old Pondicherry, Maguerite Labernadie comments that Portuguese Eurasian women provided the first marriage partners for French traders in the late seventeenth century and they were also referred to as ‘Lusitaniennes de l’Inde’. See M. V. Labernadie, Le vieux Pondichéry; 1674–1815, Pondichéry: Imprimèrie Moderne, 1936, pp. 86–87.

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38 See ‘Letter from Josiah Wedgewood’, 21 November 1710, at IOR H/MISC/59/10, fol. 191. 39 ‘Extract of a General Letter’, 2 February 1712, at IOR H/MISC/59/10, ff. 196–97. 40 See F. A. Meersman, Annual Reports of the Portuguese Franciscans in India, 1713–1833, Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1972, pp. 18–19. 41 See ‘The Portuguese in North India’, in The Calcutta Review V, no. X, June 1846, 284. 42 A. Wright, Early English Adventurers in the East, London: Andrew Melrose, 1917, p. 90. 43 ‘Soldiers to be Entertained’, 7 November 1677, in East India Company: Minutes Court Book, vol. 30 at IOR B/34/30, f. 191. 44 The six rules for correct behaviour at the Hughli factory are titled ‘Orders Made by Us and Councell for Affairs of the Honourable East India Company Upon the Coast of Chormandell and in the Bay of Bengale (for Advancing the Glory of God Upholding the Honour of the English Nation and the Preventing of Disorders), To Be Observed by all Persons Imployed in the Said Honourable Company’s Service in the Factorys of the Bay of Bengale’ and located as a minute of a meeting between Streynsham Master, Matthias Vincent and Richard Mohun dated 12 December 1679 in ‘Factory Records: Hugli, Diary and Consultations: 2 December 1678 – 30 November 1680’, at IOR G/20/2, ff. 19–20. They also appear in ‘Home Series: Yearly Papers Relating to Bengal, 1670–1708’, at IOR H/803, ff. 238–239. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 [Mrs] Frank Penny, Fort St George: A Short History of Our First Possession in India, London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1900, p. 33. 48 J. Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia, Being Nine Years Travels, Begun 1672 and Finished 1681, London: Chiswell, 1698, ch. I, p. 69. 49 The original petition that gathered eyewitness accounts (including that of William Isaacson) of the activities of the two French Catholic friars in Madras who were accused of attempting to forcibly convert the children of Protestant men and Portuguese women to Catholicism is titled: ‘Copies of Attestations Concerning Two French Padres’, 24 January 1660, at IOR E/3/26, f. 2840. 50 The official response to the inter-faith marriage crisis and the East India Company’s reaction to the presence of Portuguese Eurasian Catholic women in English settlements is articulated in a letter titled: ‘To Agent Trevisa, Bengal and Agent Chamber, Fort St George’, 31 August 1660, in Factory Records: Surat, at IOR G/36, f. 85. 51 See R. Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992, p. 116. Also see E. Abel, The Anglo-Indian Community: Survival in India, Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1988, p. 12 and C. Dover, Half-Caste, London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1937, pp. 117–18. 52 This is quoted from the original resolution, which is subtitled ‘Encouragement for Soldiers to Marry Native Women’, 8 April 1687, in the East India Company’s Despatch Books, 1626–1753, at IOR E/3/91, f. 290. 53 The idea that a mixed marriage was essentially a contract between a Protestant and a Catholic held social currency in India well into the nineteenth century amongst the European and Eurasian Christian communities. See ‘A Mixed Marriage: How The Promise Is Kept By The Protestant’, in The Bengal Catholic Herald III, no. 21, Saturday 19 November 1842, 290 and S. Riordan, The Directory For The Use of the Clergy and Laity, of the Apostolic Vicariate of Western Bengal for 1856, Calcutta: Bengal Catholic Orphan Press, 1856, pp. 206–9.

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54 ‘Letter to the Court of Directors’, 31 January 1757, at IOR E/4/23/292, para. 14. 55 ‘Letter from Mr Richard Wilson, Containing a Proposal for the Education of Soldiers’ Children, Trinchinpoly’, 21 May 1778, at IOR P/240/46, ff. 703–4. 56 ‘Extract Fort St George Consultations’, 30 October 1787, at IOR H/MISC/59/9, f. 36. 57 These conclusions are based on the 2,371 Protestant marriage records recorded between 1713 and 1800 at St John’s church in Calcutta. The sources for these records are located at ‘Bengal baptisms, marriages and burials’, at IOR N/1/1, f. 1 through to N/1/5, f. 412. 58 For the period 1741–50, 53 per cent of women marrying Protestant Englishmen were Portuguese Eurasian or Indian, and for the period 1751–60 this figure is 58 per cent. 59 A. L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 47. 2 Race and reform 1 ‘Letter sent from the East India Company to the President and Council at Fort St George’, 12 December 1687, in East India Company: General Correspondence with the East at IOR E/3/ 91, f. 466. 2 See H. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, ch. 4. 3 Diwani is the right to collect land revenues as established under the Mughal system. 4 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India; 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 5 See P. Basu, Oudh and the East India Company, 1785–1801, Lucknow: Maxwell, 1943, pp. 3–5. 6 J. B. Williams, British Commercial Policy and Trade Expansion; 1750–1850, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, p. 309. 7 See F. Russell, A Short History of the East India Company: Exhibiting A State of Their Affairs, Abroad and at Home, Political and Commercial; The Nature and Magnitude of their Commerce. And Its Relative Connection with the Government and Revenues of India, And a Discussion on the Question of Right to the Conquered Territories in India, London: J. Sewell, Cornhill and J. Debrett, 1793, p. 10. 8 Ibid. 9 See ‘To the Court of Directors of the Honourable United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies’, 26 November 1777, at IOR H/MISC/134/6, f. 626. 10 In his compelling study of the ‘nabob controversy’, Tillman Nechtman argues for a separation between the image and the reality of the ‘nabob’ presence in eighteenth-century Britain. The negative image of the ‘nabob’ was a metaphor around which public hostility and public discussions concerning the nature of imperialism in India were foregrounded. See T. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth Century Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 14–16. 11 A loan of £1,000,000 was requested in 1772 and another of £1,400,000 was requested in 1773. See M. E. Wilbur, The East India Company and the British Empire in the Far East, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1945, p. 290. 12 See P. Auber, An Analysis of the East India Company and of the Laws Passed By Parliament for the Government of their Affairs, At Home and Abroad, New York: Lenox Hill, 1970, p. 118.

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13 B. B. Misra, The Central Administration of the East India Company; 1773–1834, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959, p. 20. 14 Mr. Burke’s Speech, on 1st December 1783, Upon The Question for the Speaker’s Leaving the Chair, in Order for the House to Resolve Itself into a Committee on Mr. Fox’s India Bill, London: J. Dodsley, 1784, p. 74. 15 See M. Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 16 ‘Minute of John Shore, dated 10 February 1790’, in Parliament of Great Britain, Fifth Report of the Select Committee, Appointed by the Court of Directors of the East India Company, to take into consideration the export trade from Great Britain, London: n.p., 1793, p. 10. 17 Ibid., p. 11. 18 See B. S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. 19 A. Dow, ‘A Dissertation Concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan’, in The History of Hindostan; Translated from the Persian. To Which Are Prefixed Two Dissertations, London: J. Walker et al., 1812, vol. I, p. lxvii. 20 Ibid., p. lxxi. 21 Ibid., p. lxxiv. 22 Ibid., p. lxxxv. 23 Ibid., p. clvi. 24 Lord Clive’s Speech, In the House of Commons, 30 March 1772, on the Motion Made for Leave to Bring in a Bill, For the Better Regulation of the Affairs of the East India Company, And of Their Servants in India, London: J. Walter, 1772, p. 42. 25 While the rhetoric of ‘despotism’ was deployed as a strategy to justify parliamentary intervention, the irony was that British rule needed to work with existing structures of Asiatic government as a matter of pragmatism. See R. Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British in Bengal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 26 See S. Kapila, ‘Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond, c.1770–1880’, in Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 3, 2007, 471–513. 27 Dow, ‘A Dissertation’, vol. I, p. lxxvi. Also see the discussion by Thomas Metcalf in Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 6–8. 28 A. Dalrymple, Considerations on a Pamphlet Entitled Thoughts on Our Acquisitions in the East Indies, Particularly Respecting Bengal, London: J. Nourse, 1772, p. 71. 29 ‘Letter from Lord Cornwallis to the Duke of York, Calcutta’, 20 July 1787, in Cornwallis Papers, The National Archives (UK), Public Record Office, Kew (TNA in subsequent citations) PRO 30/11/18, f. 269. 30 ‘Letter from Lord Cornwallis to the Court of Directors, Fort William’, 16 November 1786, in Cornwallis Papers, TNA PRO 30/11/11, f. 153. 31 P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976, p. 17. 32 ‘Letter from Lord Cornwallis to the Duke of York, Calcutta’, 10 December 1787, in Cornwallis Papers, TNA PRO 30/11/21, f. 269. 33 Section XXXIII of the ‘Code of Military Standing Regulations of the Bengal Establishment’, 8 February 1787, at IOR L/MIL/17/2/438, f. 376. 34 See Misra, The Central Administration, p. 8. 35 See Radhika Singha’s work on race and the legal public sphere during this period. R. Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 291–94.

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36 J. W. Kaye, The Administration of the East India Company, London: Richard Bentley, 1853, p. 420; Wilbur, The East India Company, p. 348. 37 J. Capper, Memorial of Colonel James Capper, Addressed to the Honourable the Court of Directors of the East India Company, London: J. Dodsley, 1784, pp. 45–46. 38 See I. Munro, A Narrative of the Military Operations of the Coromandel Coast, Against the Combined Forces of the French, Dutch and Hyder Ally Cawn, From the Year 1780 to the Peace in 1784, London: T. Bensley, 1789, p. 49. 39 R. Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, From the Year 1745 To Which is Prefixed a Dissertation on the Establishment Made by Mahomedan Conquerers in Indostan, London: John Nourse, 1763, p. 81. 40 ‘Long Roll of the Honourable Company’s First Brigade Commanded By Brigadier General Stibbert for the Year 1778’, in IOR L/MIL/10/133, f. 3. 41 See V. C. P. Hodson, List of the Officers of the Bengal Army; 1758–1834, London: Phillimore & Co., 1947, Part IV, appendix F, p. 609. 42 ‘Alphabetical Annual Long Roll of the Commissioned Officers, NonCommissioned Officers and Privates of the 1st Brigade from 30 November 1779 to 30 November 1780’, in IOR L/MIL/10/133/f. 4. 43 See ‘British Parliamentary Papers: Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company. Appendix to Report from Select Committee’, at IOR V/4/9, 1831–32, p. 315. 44 ‘To the Guardians, Trustees and Patrons, of the Children of Bengal Officers and Surgeons Deceased’ in The India Gazette; Or, The Calcutta Public Advertiser, Saturday 14 September 1782, p. 3. 45 Original Papers Relative to the Establishment of a Society in Bengal, For the Protection of the Orphans of Officers, Dying in Indigent Circumstances, And Also of the Children of Non-Commissioned Private Europeans, Belonging to the East India Company’s Service, Whether Orphans Or Not, London: Joseph Cooper, 1784. (Referred to as The Original Papers of the Orphan Society in subsequent citations.) 46 The Original papers of the Orphan Society, p. 47. 47 Munro, A Narrative of the Military, p. 49. 48 A. Spencer (ed.), The Memoirs of William Hickey, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1918, vol. III, p. 327. 49 Also see Nechtman, Nabobs, p. 203. 50 See I. Chatterjee, ‘Colouring Subalternity: Slaves, Concubines and Social Orphans in Early Colonial India’, in G. Bhadra, G. Prakash and S. Tharu (eds), Subaltern Studies X: Writings on South Asian History and Society, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 54–58. 51 The India Gazette; Or, The Calcutta Public Advertiser, Saturday 29 November 1783, p. 4. 52 Durba Ghosh also notes that one of the clear ideological justifications for the establishment of an orphanage for Eurasian children was so they could be re-educated and put into the service of the colonial state. See D. Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 224–37. 53 ‘Established Regulations and Bye-Laws Passed by the Managers, Respecting the Orphan Fund, Subsequent to the Establishment in August 1782’, in IOR L/MIL/17/2/438, f. 321. 54 Ibid. 55 The Calcutta Gazette; Or, Oriental Advertiser, Thursday 16 February 1786, p. 1. Also see the interpretation in D. Ghosh, ‘Making and Un-making Loyal Subjects: Pensioning Widows and Educating Orphans in Early Colonial India’, in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 1, 2003, 1–28.

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56 Munro, A Narrative of the Military, p. 50. 57 Original Papers of the Bengal Orphan Society, p. 34. 58 ‘Report From the Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Existence of Any Abuses in the Disposal of the Patronage of the East India Company’, in The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1812, vol. XIII, Appendix IV, pp. cxxvii–cxxx. 59 Ibid., p. cxxxi. 60 Ibid., p. 46. 61 Ibid., p. 33. 62 H. A. Stark, Hostages to India, Or The Life Story of the Anglo-Indian Race, Calcutta: The Calcutta Fine Art College, 1926, p. 39; H. A. Stark, John Ricketts and His Times, Being a Narrative Account of Anglo-Indian Affairs During the Eventful Years from 1791 to 1835, Calcutta: Wilstone and Son, 1934, pp. 1, 19; and F. Anthony, Britain’s Betrayal in India: The Story of the Anglo-Indian Community, Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1969, p. 22. 63 George A. Mountnorris (Viscount Valentia), Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt in the Years 1802, 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806, London: William Miller, 1809, vol. I, p. 241. 3 Contested colonialisms 1 Henri Théron’s poem quoted in M. Cordier, ‘Rapport sur la situation de Chandernagor’, in Revue Historique de l’Inde française 2, 1918, 311. Author’s translation. 2 ‘Des établissements français en Asie et principalement de ceux du Bengale, 1822’, at Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (ANOM in subsequent citations), FM/C2/115, f. 195. 3 D. G. Crawford, A Brief History of the Hooghly District, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1902, p. 41. 4 G. B. Malleson, History of the French in India from the Founding of Pondicherry in 1674 to the Capture of that Place in 1761, London: W. H. Allen, 1893, p. 475. 5 The Annual Register, Or A View of the History, Politics and Literature for the Year 1758, London: J. Dodsley, 1773, p. 32. 6 ‘Letter to the Court of Directors from Robert Clive’, 18 April 1757, at IOR E/4/ 23, f. 503. 7 ‘Journal de Comte de Modave’, at National Archives of India, Record Centre, Lawspet, Pondicherry (NAIP in subsequent citations) Ser. 2/121, f. 1. 8 J. Law de Lauriston, Mémoire sur les quelques affaires de l’Empire Mogol; 1756–1761, Paris: Libraires de la société de l’histoire des colonies françaises, 1913, p. 140. 9 ‘Notes sur le Bengale’, 25 July 1789, at ANOM FM/DFC/XIX/94, dossier 62, ff. 39–40. 10 R. C. Mitra, ‘The French Settlement in Surat’, in Indian Historical Records Commission, 1955, 40 11 See ‘Compagnie des Indes Orientales’, in ANOM FM/F2A/12, ff. 23–26 and ‘Histoire de la Compagnie française des Indes’, in Revue maritime et coloniale 4, no. 101, 1889, 513–47. 12 See H. Dodwell, Dupleix and Clive: The Beginning of Empire, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1920, p. 3. 13 See M. Wilks, Historical Sketches of the South of India, In an Attempt to Trace the History of Mysoor; From the Origin of the Hindoo Government of that State to the Extinction of the Mahommedan Dynasty in 1799, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1810, vol. I, pp. 301–2.

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14 ‘Mémoire instructif sur l’état politique des Maures et des Français dans le Deccan et sur leurs intérêts réciproques, 1753’, in ANOM FM/DPC/XIX/93, dossier 25. 15 ‘Letter from Dupleix to Governor Saunders of Fort St David’, 10 February 1752, at IOR I/1/4/f. 97. 16 ‘Letter from the Secret Committee of the East India Company to Lord Holdernesse’, 30 July 1754, at IOR I/1/3/f. 2. 17 ‘Letter from the Court of Directors of the East India Company to Sir Thomas Robinson, One of His Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State’, 8 November 1754, at IOR I/1/3, f. 22. 18 ‘Secret Committee of the East India Company’, 18 August 1756, at IOR H/MISC, 94, 1, f. 20. 19 ‘Mémoire de Jean Law de Lauriston, 1767’, at NAIP Ser. 2/101, f. 22. 20 ‘Lettre de Chevalier aux Directeurs-Généraux’, 30 December 1767, at ANOM FM/C2/99, ff. 65–86. 21 ‘Mémoire sur tous les différents griefs dont les nations européennes établient à Bengale ont à se plaindre contre les anglais au sujet du commerce’, 25 March 1768, at ANOM FM/C2/99, ff. 213–34. 22 ‘Lettre de Chevalier aux Directeurs-Généraux’, 30 December 1767, at ANOM FM/C2/99, ff. 65–86. 23 Ibid., f. 70. 24 ‘Letter from Chevalier to the Governor at Calcutta’, 18 July 1769, at IOR H/MISC/102/7, f. 245. 25 ‘Mémoire sur la situation de la colonie de Chandernagor et des établissements français qui en dépendent’, 15 September 1778, at ANOM FM/DFC/103, dossiers 13–14. 26 ‘Mémoire de Jean Law de Lauriston, 1767’ at NAIP Ser. 2/121, f. 21. 27 ‘Extrait de la déliberation du Conseil Supérieur de Chandernagor’, 23 November 1767, at ANOM FM/C2/99, f. 60. 28 ‘Lettre du Conseil de Calcutta à Chevalier et au Conseil de Chandernagor’, 2 May 1769, at ANOM FR/Ser. B, f. 2488. 29 ‘Lettre du Conseil de Calcutta à Chevalier: Incident du fosse’, 29 May 1769, at ANOM FR/Ser. B, f. 2490. 30 ‘Extract of a General Letter from the President and Select Committee at Fort William’, 30 September 1769, at IOR H/MISC/102/7, f. 124. 31 ‘Letter from Chevalier to the Governor at Calcutta’, 18 July 1769, at IOR H/MISC/102/7, f. 245. 32 ‘Letter from Chevalier to Verelst’, 30 September 1769, at IOR H/MISC/102/7, f. 174. 33 ‘Letter from Puget, Chenneaux and Le Roy to Warren Hastings’, 10 August 1778, at IOR P/2/24, f. 484. 34 ‘Notes Concerning the Colony of Chandernagore’, 30 August 1778, at IOR P/2/25, f. 38. 35 ‘Bengal Public Council: Letter to Chevalier’, 2 September 1778, at IOR P/2/25, f. 50. 36 ‘Letter from Monsieur Padet and the French Pilots’, 28 July 1779, at IOR P/2/32, f. 93. 37 ‘Bengal Public Council: Letter to Chevalier’, 16 November 1778, at IOR P/2/26, f. 364. 38 ‘Abstracts of Petitions from Several French Inhabitants’, 18 March 1779, at IOR P/2/29, f. 442. 39 ‘Bengal Public Council: Letter from Madame Chevalier’, 16 July 1778, at IOR P/2/23, f. 819. 40 ‘Bengal Public Council: Letter from Warren Hastings to Colonel Dow’, 10 July 1778, at IOR P/2/23, f. 827.

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41 ’Bengal Public Council: List of French Widows at Chandernagore’, 28 June 1779, at IOR P/2/31, f. 455 42 ‘Bengal Public Council: Petition from the Ladies of Chandernagore’, 22 March 1781, at IOR P/2/43, ff. 433–35. 43 ‘Réflexions générales sur le commerce de la Compagnie’, 1 October 1769, at ANOM FM/C2/50, f. 109. 44 ‘Réponse aux questions sur l’Indostan’, 8 December 1774, at ANOM FM/C2/115, f. 164. 45 Royal instructions to Bussy quoted by S. P. Sen, The French in India, 1763–1816, Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1958, p. 306. 46 See M. Blesson, Les aventuriers français aux Indes (1775–1820), Paris: Payot, 1932. 47 Henry H. Dodwell, ‘The Exclusion of the French in India, 1784–1815’, in The Cambridge History of India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929, vol. V, p. 325–28. 48 Ibid. 49 ‘Letter from Wellesley to the Secret Committee of the Court of Directors’, 26 October 1799, at IOR H/MISC/688/1, f. 1. 50 ‘Letter from the Governor in Council of Bombay to the Government and Captain-General of Goa’, 20 October 1801, at IOR H/MISC/689/1/f. 5. 51 Abbé Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les Deux Indes, Paris: A La Haye, 1776, vol. II, IV, ch. XVII, p. 166. 52 Ibid. 53 Raynal, Histoire philosophique, vol. II, I, ch. XVI, p. 135. 54 55 F. M. Arouet de Voltaire, Fragments sur l’Inde, sur le General Lalli, et sur le Comte de Morangiés, Londres: n. p., 1773, p. 42. 55 Ibid. 56 Also see J. Mohan, ‘La civilization la plus antique: Voltaire’s Images of India’, in Journal of World History 16, no. 2, June 2005, 173–85. 57 Ibid., p. 6. 58 W. W. Stephens, The Life and Writings of Turgot, London: Longman, Green & Co., 1895, p. 323. 59 Ibid., p. 322. 60 ‘Minute in Council at Fort William, Dated 18 August 1800’, in The Asiatic Annual Register, Or, A View Of the History of Hindusthan, and of the Politics, Commerce and History of Asia, For the Year 1802, London: J. Debrett, 1803, Part III, point 56, p. xix. 61 Ibid. 62 See J. J. Whiteman, Reform, Revolution and French Global Policy, 1787–1791, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, p. 74. 4 French complexions 1 A. Hervey, Ten Years in India; or, The Life of a Young Officer, London, 1850, p. 284. 2 ‘Chandernagor, Recensement de 1756’, in ANOM FM, DPPC, G/1/481, ff. 101–2. 3 Ibid. 4 ‘Recensement de population de Pondichéry, 1789’, at NAIP Ser. 21, 689/7, f. 73; and ‘Chanderagor, Recensement de 1790’, at ANOM FR/Ser. B/592, f. 429. 5 C. W. Mills, The Racial Contract, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997, p. 127. 6 Article 3 in ‘Compagnie des Indes Orientales’, 26 May 1664 at ANOM FM/F2A/12, f. 204.

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7 Ibid., Article 4, f. 205. 8 See S. Belmessous, ‘Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and EighteenthCentury French Colonial Policy’, in American Historical Review 110, 2005, 322–49; and S. Peabody and T. Stovall (eds), The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 9 See F. C. Jaher, The Jews and the Nation: Revolution, Emancipation, State Formation and the Liberal Paradigm in America and France, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. 10 L. Colley, Britons: Forging A Nation, 1707–1837, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. 11 The pamphlet is a response to Voltaire’s claim that the English were ‘the savages of Europe’. See E. Long, English Humanity No Paradox: Or, An Attempt to Prove that the English Are Not a Nation of Savages, London: T. Lowndes, 1778, p. 10. 12 In significant ways, the concept of race was articulated in eighteenth-century thought as a product of pre-existing notions of national difference. Refer N. Hudson, ‘From Nation to Race: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth Century Thought’, in Eighteenth Century Studies 29, no. 3, 1996, 247–64. 13 Long, English Humanity No Paradox, p. 65. 14 See P. Carson, ‘An Imperial Dilemma: The Propagation of Christianity in Early Colonial India’, in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 18, 1990, 169–90. 15 Belmessous, ‘Assimilation and Racialism’, p. 331. 16 ‘Compagnie des Indes Orientales’, May 26, 1664, ANOM FM/F2A/12, f. 363 17 See A. Ranga Pillai, The Diary of Annanda Ranga Pillai, 1736–1761, eds. J. F. Price and K. Rangachari, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1985, vol. I, pp. 284, 287. Also see K. Ballhatchet, Caste, Class and Catholicism in India; 1789–1914, London: Curzon, 1998, p. 10. 18 The mass baptisms of orphans, illegitimate children and slaves were written into Chandernagore’s parish registers as single daily entries. See ANOM DPPC, EC, Inde, Registre 19.[aq] 19 ‘Lettre de Montalambert’, 25 December 1725 at ANOM FM/F5A/19, f. 51. 20 Article 2 of ‘Arrête du 11 février 1733 concernant le culte catholique dans les colonies de l’Inde’, at ANOM FM/SG/536, dossier 1006. 21 R. Challe, Journal d’un voyage fait aux Indes Orientales (1690–1691), eds. F. Deloffre and M. Menemenciaglu, Paris: Mercure de France, 1983, vol. II, p. 90. 22 A. Halim, ‘French–Indian Families of Aligarh’, in Journal of Indian History XXX, Part II, August 1952, 156. 23 H. Compton, A Particular Account of the European Military Adventurers of Hindusthan; 1784–1803, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902, p. 68. 24 The original of Dupleix’s marriage certificate in La Paroisse de St Louis, Chandernagore is dated 11 April 1741 and describes his wife as ‘Madame Jeanne Albert, née à Pondichéry, fille de M. Jacques Théodore Albert et de Dona Elisabeth Rose de Castro, agée de trente-trois ans’. The marriage extract is located in the archival sources at ANOM DPPC/EC/Inde, Registre 17, n. 868. 25 Y. Gaebelé, Créole et grandedame. Johanna Begum, marquise Dupleix (1706–1756, Pondicherry: Bibliothèque Coloniale, 1934. 26 ‘Dossier de diverses copies recentes sur la succession de Rose de Castro’, 11 July 1749, at NAIP Ser. 2/54/ff. 3–45. 27 Challe, Journal d’un voyage, p. 11. 28 See L. de Grandpré, Voyage dans l’Inde et au Bengale fait dans les années 1789 et 1790, contenant la description des îles Séchelles et de Trinquemaly, Paris: Dentu, 1801, vol. I, p. 137.

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29 ‘Ordonnances et reglements que la Compagnie établie pour le commerce des Indes Orientales’, October 26, 1664, ANOM FM/C2/3, f. 71. 30 ‘Correspondance du Conseil de Pondichéry avec le Conseil de Chandernagor’, 9 November 1730, at ANOM FR/Ser. A/89, f. 73. 31 ‘Lettre de Dupleix’, 22 August 1732, at ANOM FR/Ser. A, f. 89. 32 ‘Correspondance avec le Conseil de Pondichéry’, 7 January 1772, at ANOM FM/C2/122, ff. 29–30. 33 See ‘Mémoire sur les mariages entre Catholiques et Protestants qui sont nommés par la plupart des autres, mariages mixtes ou mariages mêlés (1774)’, at ANOM F/3/95, ff. 177–93. 34 M. Blesson, Les aventuriers français aux Indes, 1775–1820, Paris: Payot, 1932, p. 30. 35 ‘Passagers, L’Orient’, at ANOM FM/F5B, f. 50. 36 Ibid., f. 51. 37 ‘Tableau des habitants de la Colonie de Chandernagor pour l’année 1768’, at ANOM DPPC/G/1/481, ff. 104–11. 38 John Law de Lauriston notes that the French garrison at Chandernagore attracted Catholic deserters from the English forces, and the parish registers also contain the names of English and Irish men who married Portuguese Eurasian and French women in the parish of St Louis. See J. L. de Lauriston, Mémoire sur les quelques affaires de l’Empire Mogol; 1767–1761, Paris: Libraires de la Société de l’Histoire des colonies françaises, 1913, p. 140. 39 For a comprehensive discussion on the discursive erasure of ‘native’ women in unions with European men, see the important essay by Durba Ghosh in the context of the British imperial archives. D. Ghosh, ‘Decoding the Nameless: Gender, Subjectivity and Historical Methodologies in Reading the Archives of Colonial India’, in K. Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, Modernity, 1660–1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 297–316. Also see B. Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 8. 40 See ‘Etat générale de la dépense actuel’, at ANOM FM/D2D/D, f. 11. 41 H. Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: Being a Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases of Kindred Terms, London: J. Murray, 1903, p. 933. 42 See A. Bédier and J. Cordier, Statistiques de Pondichéry (1822–1824), ed. Jean Deloche, Pondicherry: Institut français de Pondichéry, 1988, p. 58. 43 See H. Hägerdal, ‘Colonial or Indigenous Rule? The Black Portuguese of Timor in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in International Institute of Asian Studies Newsletter, no. 44, 2007, 26. 44 Roxan Wheeler argues that clothing was an important marker of cultural difference in eighteenth-century Britain and much the same can be said in colonial India where Indian Christians and the topas who dressed in the European style were part of broader European constituencies. See R. Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 45 See J. Deloche, Le papier terrier de la ville blanche de Pondichéry, 1777–1778, Pondicherry: IFP/EFEO, 2002; and J. Deloche, Le vieux Pondichéry (1673– 1824), Pondicherry: Institut français de Pondichéry/EFEO, 2005. 46 Bédier and Cordier, Statistiques de Pondichéry, p. 50. 47 ‘Au Fort St Louis à Pondichéry’, 16 March 1732 at ANOM FR, Ser. A, f. 89. Reproduced at Correspondance du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry avec le Conseil de Chandernagor; 1728–1757, Pondicherry: Société de l’Histoire de l’Inde, 1915, tome 1, p. 154. 48 S. Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 395.

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49 See P. R. Sloan, ‘The Idea of Racial Degeneracy in Buffon’s Histoire naturelle’, in Proceedings of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies 3, 1973, 293–321, and M. Winston, ‘Medicine, Marriage and Human Degeneration in the French Enlightenment’, in Eighteenth Century Studies 38, 2005, 263–81. 50 Madame veuve Laurent Prault, Etat actuel de l’Inde, et considérations sur les établissements et le commerce de la France dans cette partie du monde, Paris: Chez Madame veuve Laurent Prault, 1787, p. 56. 51 See S. Luillier, Nouveau voyage aux Grandes Indes, Rotterdam: Jean Hofhout, 1726, p. 33. 52 E. de Warren, L’Inde anglaise avant et après l’Insurrection de 1857, Paris: Kailash, 1994, pp. 121–22. 53 ‘L’Ambassade de Tipou Sultan en France’, in Revue de l’histoire des colonies françaises 4, 1928, 455. 54 ‘Troupes des colonies. Listes générales (1701–1804)’, at ANOM FM/D2/C, f. 91. 5 Race and citizenship 1 See M. Labernadie, La révolution et les établissements français dans l’Inde: 1790–1793, Paris: E. Leroux, 1930. 2 See I. Wallerstein, ‘The French Revolution as a World-Historical Event’, in Social Research 56, no. 1, 1989, 52. 3 See A. Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 2. 4 L. Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, p. 2. 5 See D. Van Kley, The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Régime and the Declaration of Rights in 1789, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994; and K. M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 6 See L. Hunt (ed.), The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, pp. 99–101. 7 Refer to M. Gutwirth, ‘Citoyens, Citoyennes: Cultural Regression and the Subversion of Female Citizenship in the French Revolution’, in ibid., pp. 17–28. Carole Pateman’s classical formulation in regard to the fraternal bonds that underscored the emergence of citizenship continues to be relevant to this study. See C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract, Cambridge: Polity, 1988. 8 G. Bossenga, ‘Rights and Citizens in the Old Régime’, in French Historical Studies 20, no. 2, Spring 1997, 222. 9 J. Merrick, ‘Conscience and Citizenship in Eighteenth Century France’, in Eighteenth Century Studies 21, no. 1, 1987, 65. 10 See C. Wells, Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 114–17. 11 See the ‘Petition of the Jews of Paris, Alsace and Lorraine to the National Assembly’, dated 28 January 1790, in Hunt, The French Revolution, pp. 93–97. 12 G. Kates, ‘Jews into Frenchmen: Nationality and Representations in Revolutionary France’, in F. Fehér (ed.), The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, pp. 103–15; and R. Schechter, ‘The Jewish Question in Eighteenth-Century France’, in EighteenthCentury Studies 32, no. 1, Fall 1998, 84–91. 13 P. Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Régime and After, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004, pp. 11–12. 14 Ibid., p. 63. 15 Ibid., p. 182.

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16 See M. Labernadie, La révolution et les établissements français dans l’Inde: 1790–1793, Paris: E. Leroux, 1930, pp. 21–41. 17 An anonymous account of the impact of the revolution on Chandernagore from April to October 1790 can be found in ‘la Révolution de Chandernagor ou Relation des troubles qui ont eu lieu dans cette colonie en 1790’, 1 November 1790, at ANOM FR/Ser. B/tome III, f. B2783. 18 Although the revolution was embraced by the majority of Chandernagore’s white population, there were around 65 opponents, most of who fled to nearby Serampore. See ‘Tableau des employés et habitants de Chandernagor qui ont protesté contre les assemblées illicites et illégales qui ont eu lieu à Chandernagor’, at ANOM FR/Ser. B/tome III/ f. B2738. Protest letters of the royalist French refugees at Serampore reveal that there was resentment at the establishment and decisions of the General Assembly and Committee of Citizens. See ANOM FR/Ser. B/tome III, ff. B2712–B2722. 19 ‘Extrait du régistre des déliberations du Comité National des Citoyens de Chandernagor’, 9 May 1790, at ANOM FR/Ser. B, f. 2697. 20 ‘Des établissements français en Asie et principalement de ceux du Bengale’, at ANOM FM/C2/115, f. 163. 21 ‘Instructions de l’Assemblée Nationale pour la formation des nouvelles municipalités dans toute l’étendue du Royaume’, 14 December 1789, at ANOM FR/Ser. B, f. 1188 22 See Article 1, ‘Constitution provisionelle de la Colonie de Chandernagor (1791)’, at NAIP Ser. 2/592, f. 429. 23 ‘Extrait du registre des délibérations’, at NAIP Ser. 2/592, f. 457. 24 While foreign European men were entitled to French citizenship under the jus solis claim, the 1791 constitution in Chandernagore stipulated that Indians could not be citizens on the same basis. See ‘Constitution de la Colonie de Chandernagor et extraits de délibérations de l’Assemblée Coloniale (1791)’, at ANOM FR/A/92, f. 321. 25 Ninety years later, Indians in the French colonies were awarded the right of French citizenship, if they renounced their personal status, under a decree dated 21 September 1881. See E. G. Schmit, Législation de l’Inde, Pondicherry: Imprimérie de la Mission, 1945. 26 See Article 14 of ‘Extrait du registre des délibérations’, at NAIP Ser. 2/592, f. 468 27 S. P. Sen, The French in India: 1763-1816, Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1958, p. 471. 28 ‘Recensement de la ville blanche de Chandernagor (1790)’, at ANOM FR/Ser. B/tome III, f. 2783. 29 ‘Constitution provisionelle de la colonie de Chandernagor (1791)’, at NAIP Ser. 2/592, f. 429. 30 ‘Etat général des familles de Pondichéry demandant les secours du gouvernement’, 27 March 1790, at ANOM FR/Ser. B, f. 1230. 31 ‘Enregistrement des ordres, commissions, instructions, brevets et règlements relatifs à nos établissements du Bengale’, 15 July 1790 – 8 June 1793, at ANOM FR/Ser. A, f. 94(2). 32 Likewise, in the context of non-British colonies such as Cuba and Louisiana, the idea of legal colour did not necessarily correlate to physical colour. See V. Martinez-Alier, 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, 1989; and V. R. Domínguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Créole Louisiana, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. 33 Article 2, ‘Constitution provisionelle de la Colonie de Chandernagor (1791)’, at NAIP Ser. 2/592, f. 430.

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34 See P. McPhee, Living the French Revolution; 1789–1799, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 35 While set in the context of indigenous petitions in Australia, New Zealand and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, De Costa’s argument that petitions act ‘to articulate the identity and status of the petitioner’ on a global scale can also be considered in the context of the aftermath of the French Revolution. See Ravi de Costa, ‘Identity, Authority, and the Moral Worlds of Indigenous Petitions’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 3, July 2006, 669–70. 36 ‘Mémoire en faveur des topas’, 16 October 1790, at ANOM FR/Ser. B/2/2779, f. 1312. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 There were simultaneous pleas made by free people of colour in the French colonies during the years 1790 to 1792, where notions of freedom and property were the basis of claims to active citizenship. For Mauritius (Ile de France), see M. Vaughan, ‘Métissage and Revolution’ in Creating the Créole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth Century Mauritius, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 229–52. For Guadeloupe, see F. Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté: La Révolution française en Guadeloupe, 1789–1802, Paris: Grasset, 2004. The sources on the revolution in Saint-Domingue are numerous and exhaustive. Of these, see L. Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004, ch. 3; C. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Haiti Revolution From Below, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990; J. Garrigus, ‘Sons of the Same Father: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, 1760–92’, in C. Adams, J. R. Censer and L. J. Graham (eds), Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth Century France, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997; and J. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. For an analysis of the relationship between créolization and citizenship in the Atlantic World, see J. G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. 40 See R. Forster, ‘The French Revolution, People of Color, and Slavery’, in J. Klaits and M. H. Hatzel (eds), The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 99. 41 ‘Mémoire en faveur des topas’, f. 1312. 42 Ibid. 43 See M. Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners, 1789–1799, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, p. 86. 44 See R. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Conclusion 1 T. Edwards, ‘Eurasians and Poor Europeans in India’, in Calcutta Review LXXII, no. CXLIII, 1881, 40. 2 See A. Nundy, ‘The Eurasian Problem in India’, in The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review IX, nos. 17/18, January–April 1900, 56–73 and K. E. Wallace, The Eurasian Problem Constructively Approached, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1930. 3 For example, see P. Cressey, ‘The Anglo-Indians: A Disorganized Marginal Group’, in Social Forces 14, no. 2, 1935, 264; N. Gist, ‘Cultural Versus Social Marginality: The Anglo-Indian Case’, in Phylon 28, 1967, 361–75; V. R. Gaikwad, The Anglo-Indians, London: Asia Publishing House, 1967;

Notes

117

A. D. Grimshaw, ‘The Anglo-Indian Community: The Integration of a Marginal Group’, in The Journal of Asian Studies XVIII, no. 1, November 1958, 227–40; E. Hedin, ‘The Anglo-Indian Community’, in The American Journal of Sociology XL, no. 2, September 1934, 176; and J. Hurwitz, ‘Marginal Men of India: An Enquiry into the History of the Anglo-Indians’, in Indonesië, 1955, 130. 4 See S. Dube (ed.), Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, New Delhi: Routledge, 2009, p. 9. 5 D. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. xx. 6 See P. Burke, Cultural Hybridity, Cambridge: Polity, 2009, p. 54.

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Index

Abu-Lughod, Janet 3 Albuquerque, Afonso 14–15 Anderson, Kay 8 Ang, Ien 4 Anglo-French antipathy 33, 43, 48, 52–53, 56, 62; rivalries 8, 23; wars 9, 24, 46–47, 50, 79, 96 Anthony, Frank 44 Ballhatchet, Kenneth 2, 6 baptisms 66, 69 Bayly, Susan 77 Belmessous, Saliha 66, 77 Bernier, François 17–18 Bhabha, Homi 5 bloodline 80, 84–93 Bombay 20, 28, 29, 31, 59 Brubaker, Rogers 93 Burke, Edmund 31, 42 Burton, Antoinette 82 Calcutta 1, 2, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 40–45, 50–55 Catholicism in India: Chandernagore 67–70; French identity 65–66, 83; inter-racial relationships 12–14; Portuguese identity 1, 13, 20, 24; topas 77–78 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 3, 98 Chandernagore 9, 46, 49: British occupation 2, 46, 53–57; 72; 78, 85; 97–98; British trade embargoes on 50–51; Catholic identity 67; expulsion of French subjects 54; French emigrants (female) 71–72; French emigrants (male) 71; French pilots 53–54; images of 45–46 Chatterjee, Indrani 7

Chevalier, Governor of Chandernagore 50–54 Christian identity in India: British colonies 19, 21–26, 43, 65; French colonies 66–67, Portuguese colonies 12–20; 73–76, 88; topas community 38, 76–78 Christianization 9, 12–20, 26, 66, 77 Clive, Robert 35, 46 clothing 26, 67, 78, 113 Colley, Linda 65 complexion 26, 42, 63–64, 66, 74, 76 Compton, Herbert 68 Cornwallis, Charles 32, 36, 37 citizenship: France 83–84; French colonies in India 87–88; French empire 84–85; French revolution 83–85; Jews 84–85; Protestants 84–85 Dalrymple, Alexander 35 Dalrymple, William 7 Danish in India 4, 19, 46, 86 de Laval, François Pyrard 16 Delhi 46 descent: British Eurasians 6, 89; French citizenship 84, 89–93; French empire 85; French Eurasians 88–89, 97; Indians in French India 88–89; Portuguese Eurasians 16, 98; topas community in French colonies in India 89–93 despotism 32–35: ‘oriental despotism’ 61 diwani 28 domicile 84: French in India 65; foreigners in French India 87–88; Indians in French India 87–88; Portuguese in India 16; Portuguese

Index Eurasians 68; Protestants in France 84; topas community in French colonies in India 80, 90–94 Dow, Alexander 34–36 Dubois, Laurent 82 Dupleix, Joseph François 45, 47–49, 68–70, 74 Dutch in India 4, 13, 15, 18–19, 21, 38, 66 East India Company 28–29, 32–34, 46, 58: Court of Directors 24, 29–31, 36–37, 43, 46–48, 59; racial composition of armies 17, 37–38; morality and male conduct 20, 22–25, 43; religious instruction 19; Eurasian children 39–42 Esguerra, Jorge Cañares 14 Eurasians in India: British colonies 6–7, 21–27, 31–32, 37–44, 96–98; French colonies 56, 62, 67–79, 80–81, 88–89, 96–98; Portuguese colonies 14–19, 96–98 evangelization 66 expulsion: French subjects from Bengal 54 feringhee 18 Fick, Carolyn 82 francisation 66, 77, 81, 88 French: as a cultural category in India 8, 54–57 French East India Company 47, 57–58: topas community 78–79, 81 French Revolution 10: colonialism 82; global significance 81; impact on French colonies in India 85–87 Gaebelé, Yvonne 68 gender 2, 10, 12, 13, 16, 20, 26, 53, 55, 65, 70, 83, 97 gens de couleur 81–85, 90–91 Ghosh, Durba 7 globalization 2, 4, 7, 9 Goa 11, 13, 14–19 Greenblatt, Stephen 12 Guadeloupe 82, 91 Hastings, Warren 31, 37, 53–56 Hickey, William 40 Hobson-Jobson 17, 76 Huguenots 70, 84 Hyam, Ronald 23

139

hybridity 5–6, 96: British colonies in India 7, 25, 43–44; divergent meanings 53, 79, 80–94; 95–97; French colonies in India 63, 79, 80; Portuguese colonies in India 22, 96 Ifekwunigwe, Jayne 5 India Act 1, 31, 36, 38, 42, 58, 82 inter-racial marriage in India: British colonies 20–21, 25–26, 40, 43; concept 6, 9, 12; French colonies 56, 69–76, 81, 88–89; Isle de Bourbon 67, 72; Isle de France 54, 57–58, 67, 72, 86; Portuguese colonies 13–14, 21–24 Karaikal 47, 86 Lauriston, Jean Law de 50, 52 Lusiad 11 McPhee, Peter 89 Madagascar 47, 67, 71–72 Mahé 47, 86 Marathas 29, 46 Marshall, Peter 1 Master, Streynsham 17 mestiço 15–17 métis 7: status in French colonies in India 10, 44, 63–64, 67, 69, 74–81, 88–90, 97 métissage 5 missionaries 19, 60, 66–67 Mitchell, Kathryne 6 mixed marriage 6, 9: British colonies in India 21–26, 41,43; French colonies in India 56, 69–76, 81, 88; Portuguese colonies in Inda 12–14 mixed-race: British colonies in India 21, 23, 26, 31–32, 38, 40–44; categories 10, 17–18, 43, 95–98; concept 4–6; French colonies in India 56, 62, 69, 71, 85, 88, 94; populations 6–8, 31–32; Portuguese colonies in India 13–19, 96–97 mixed-race studies 5 modernity: British colonies in India 3, 31, 35, 43, 46; Christianization 12–14; concept 3–4, 7–8; French colonies in India 46, 53, 61–62, 71; French Revolution 10, 80–82, 87, 94; mixed race categories 4, 95–96; Portuguese colonies in India 12; Portuguese Eurasian

140

Index

women 1, 27; public virtue 35; topas community in Pondicherry 94 mulattoes 82, 85, 92 Muslims 26, 34, 44, 67, 68 Nussbaum, Felicity 8 orphans 39–42 Pearson, Michael 13 petitions: of expelled French men in Chandernagore 54–55; of French women in Chandernagore 54–56; of Maria Texeira 2; moral dimensions 90; mulattoes of SaintDomingue 85; topas community in Pondicherry 81, 89–94 philosophes 59, 61 Pitt, William 31 Plassey, Battle of 9, 49 Pondicherry: colonial descriptions 19, 63; colonial politics 57, 70–72; French East India Company 47; hybrid population 64, 69, 76, 96; impact of French Revolution 85–87; Portuguese Eurasian women 69; topas community 77, 81–82, 91, 93, 96 Portuguese: identity in India 13, 17–19; 22–27, 68–69, 72–75; language 19–20 Princely States 31, 38, 48, 54, 58–59, 62, 68 Protestantism 19–26, 43, 65–66, 70–72, 84–85, 97 ‘public virtue’ 9, 29, 32, 35–39, 41, 43–44 Pugliese, Joseph 8 race: concept 2–6, 95–98; British colonies in India 35–38, 43–44; French colonies in India 10, 65, 75, 79–82, 9; Portuguese colonies in India 13–16 racialization 2, 8, 9, 10, 32, 37, 38 Rapport, Michael 93 Raynal, Abbé 59–61

Regulating Act 1, 30–31, 71 revanche 58, 62 Robb, Peter 2 Sahlins, Peter 84 Silverblatt, Irene 8 slavery 59, 66, 91, 92 slaves 19, 67, 69, 72, 74–76, 78, 85, 91–92 Spear, Percival 8 Stark, Herbert 44 Stoler, Ann Laura 2, 4, 26 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste 17–18 Texeira, Maria 1, 2, 10, 67, 74, 6–98 Tipu Sultan 58–59 topas in India: British colonies 38; French colonies 64, 75–76, 78–94; French citizenship 88–89; Portuguese colonies19; representation of 77–78 trade embargo 50–51 Valentia, Viscount 44 Van Linschoten, Jan Huygen 13, 15–16 Voltaire 60 Wallerstein, Immanuel 82 Wandiwash, Battle of 49 Wellesley, Richard 59, 61–62 whiteness: concept 8–9, 96–97; British colonies in India 24, 26–27, 35, 50, 56, 63; French colonies in India 64, 67–68, 71–79, 80–94; Portuguese colonies in India 15–16, 19, 27 widows in India: French 56; Hindu 60; Portuguese colonies 13; Portuguese Eurasians 21 women: English 20; French 55–56, 71–75; Indian 7, 12–14, 19–26, 37–40, 68–69; 73–74; Portuguese 13; Portuguese Eurasian 15–16, 19, 97–98 Yanam 47, 86 Young, Robert 5