In this article Glenn D'Cruz examines the relationship between social science and race politics. In particular he puts the recent statements of Pauline Hanson about the issue of "race", which has a long history, in historical context. Further, and most importantly, he critiques the various arguments that have been raised against the process of miscegination and multiculturalism, in particular he questions the context of much social science research dealing with the Anglo-Indians.

Mr Acting Speaker, immigration and multiculturalism are issues that this government is trying to address but for far too long, ordinary Australians have been kept out of any debate by the major parties. I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. We are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40% of all migrants into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate. Of course, I will be called racist but if I can invite who I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country. A truly multicultural country can never be strong or united and the world is full of failed and tragic examples, ranging from Ireland to Bosnia, to Africa and closer to home, Papua New Guinea. America and Great Britain are currently paying the price. (1)

A Broad, brown palm stretches across the green felt, pink fingertips cradling a pool cue. It's a close shot. Another hand reaches for the stick. White on Black. The physical encounter of two races goes unnoticed in the bustle of the Boston Hotel saloon bar on a Thursday night. But this is Port Lincoln, where the products of more intimate racial mixing have been labelled "mongrels" by the town's mayor. (2)

Look at me and you will see a face indistinguishable from one billion Chinese who inhabit mainland China. Because of my appearance, I have been labelled "a chink, ching-chong and yellow-faced bastard" at various times throughout my life in Australia. But if I speak you will be shocked to hear an Australian accent thick enough to confuse my relatives in Singapore and Malaysia. Ask me a few questions and you will find out that I can yack with you about almost any so-called "Aussie topic", from the ins and outs of Aussie rules football to Shane Warne's mystery balls. I've been an Australian citizen for 20 of my 23 years and I know no other home. (3)

Introduction

In his review of Robert Young's book, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, David Bennett suggests that hybridity "became the rallying cry for a generation of post-humanist socialist (post) feminists seeking what Donna Haraway called 'pleasure in the confusion of boundaries'". (4) Bennett accurately describes the term's function within certain contemporary academic and perhaps aesthetic discourses, however, within the context of Australia's recent 'race debate', hybridity, along with a wide range of cognate terms, appears to prompt an acute anxiety about the confusion of racial and cultural boundaries. As the above quotations attest, the rhetoric of racism is a prominent feature of our current political landscape.

Of course, the so-called 'race-debate' is not a uniquely Australia phenomenon, nor is it particularly contemporary. The sentiments of Pauline Hanson's now infamous maiden speech to the Australian House of Representatives recalls the somewhat more extreme (and eloquent) rhetoric of Enoch Powell, who functioned as a figurehead for racism in Britain some thirty years ago. Powell's pronouncements, in turn, were not without precedent. Racism and the racial theory upon which the authority of its rhetoric depends has a long genealogy, which has been charted by a number of recent books which attempt to demonstrate that, contrary to popular liberal opinion, continuities exist between the demonised nineteenth century discourse of racial science and the cultural constructions and rhetorical functions of race in our own period. In the words of Robert Young:

There is an historical stemma between the cultural concepts of our own day and those of the past from which we tend to assume that we have distanced ourselves. . . Hybridity in particular shows the connections between the racial categories of the past and contemporary cultural discourse. (5)

Alternatively, the quotations cited at the head of this paper may be seen as examples of what Ann Laura Stoler calls "discursive bricolage"; that is, the process "wherby an older discourse of race is "recovered," modified, "encased," and "encrusted" in new forms". (6)

Hanson's reference to the dangers of Australia being 'swamped' by Asians and Councillor Peter Davis' pejorative use of the term 'mongrel' to describe the offspring of racially-mixed couples are, as we shall see, two instances of contemporary cultural discourse drawing on (or recuperating) the lexicon of nineteenth century racial theory. (7)

This paper has three aims: firstly, to document the ways in which Anglo-Indians have been subjected to and by discourses on race; secondly, to identify the ways in which Anglo-Indians have been constructed as the spoken subjects of social sciences like sociology and anthropology; and, finally, to comment on the social and political implications these appellations have for the community. However, in order to appreciate the contradictions and complexities that exist within these writings it is necessary to outline the somewhat broader theoretical precepts and axioms upon which they are built. This paper will be, therefore, be divided into two sections: the first will briefly review the more recent attempts to examine the genealogy of nineteenth century racial theory upon which a great deal of early twentieth century sociological and anthropological studies look to for epistemological authority; the second will analyse a series of sociological and anthropological texts which examine Anglo-Indians as a hybrid race in the light of the preceding explication of racial theory and its relationship to the contemporary rhetoric of racism.

Racial Theory and Science: A Genealogy

Racial theory has been the subject of a number of recent studies. (8) Paul B. Rich's 1986 book, Race and Empire in British Politics, describes his study as an "exercise in intellectual history" and asks the following questions: "How did people think of race? What were the most influential and widely circulated texts?". (9) He goes on to read the racial theory archives with particular attention to the ways in which the emerging disciplines of sociology and anthropology drew what he calls 'scientific racism':

From Victorian times, race had long been associated with ideas of 'scientific racism' based upon notions of biological hierarchies between racial types analogous to those between different biological species. (10)

Rich points out that before the second World War the academic status of sociology and anthropology in Britain (unlike America) were low, and "treated sceptically by a conservative educational establishment dominated by a classical humanism and legal positivism in the Oxbridge tradition". (11) In an attempt to raise their disciplinary profiles within the academic hierarchy, these fledgling social sciences allied themselves to the more respectable discourses of biological science. While Rich's work acknowledges that any reading of the racial theory archive will always be incomplete since it cannot point to "the less systematised and articulate thinking which makes a wider climate for thinking within a society at a particular point in time," he, nevertheless documents, in great detail, those texts which exerted a significant influence on the construction of the racial categories and figurative tropes which characterise the discourses on race articulated by the social sciences.

Michael Banton's book, Racial Theories, covers similar territory insofar as it also reads the archive in order to map the historical development and deployment of the concept of race, with specific reference to the ways in which the biological and theological strands of nineteenth century theorisations of race interacted with the scientific discourses of the era. He examines race as Lineage, Type, Subspecies, Status and Class. (12)

Robert Young's more recent study of racial theory, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, covers similar ground insofar as the texts of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century racial theorists are the most significant objects of analysis. Drawing on contemporary literary and cultural theory, Young is concerned to dispel the view that a wide gulf separates the overtly racist discourses of the past from the supposedly more enlightened and tolerant pronouncements on race of the present. Young's study is also concerned with what he describes as the mechanics of cultural contact; that is, the material effects produced by 'close encounters of the colonial kind'. Young argues that the biological products of colonial contact have been relatively neglected by scholars. He claims that:

If language preserves one major product of [colonial] contact, a second, less usual model, which will be retrieved and developed in the course of this book, is equally literal and more physical. In the British Empire, Hyam observes in a curiously unguarded metaphor, 'sexuality was the spearhead of racial contact'. The historical links between language and sex were, however, fundamental. Both produced what were regarded as 'hybrid' forms (creole, pidgin and miscegenated children), which were seen to embody threatening forms of perversion and degeneration and became the basis for endless metaphoric extension in the racial discourse of social commentary. (13)

Curiously, there are few references to specific 'hybrid' races, like the Anglo-Indians in Young's book; his work is more concerned with identifying the contradictions and aporias in various nineteenth century theorisations of race, and mapping the relationships between these texts, the question of colonial desire, and the contemporary function of categories and terms drawn from the nineteenth century paradigm of racial theory. He begins his study (in a manner which is not easily distinguishable from earlier accounts such as Banton's and Christine Bolt's) by pointing out that Victorian Anthropology was primarily concerned with the origin of the human species; (14) the major theoretical controversy of the period concerned the question of the relationship between the various races of humankind: do they emerge from a single point of origin as in the Biblical account of human genesis, or do they, in fact, belong to different species? The former proposition is termed the momogenetic thesis while the latter is referred to as the polygenetic thesis.

The most important biological criteria (formulated by Comte de Buffon in France and John Hunter in Britain) for establishing whether members of different races belonged to the same species was their ability to produce fertile offspring. (15) Young writes that from "the 1840's onwards, the question of species and therefore hybridity, was always placed at the centre of discussions and was consistently and comprehensively treated". (16) Monogenesis appealed to the enlightenment values of universality and equality, and possessed the advantage of not contradicting the book of Genesis. Polygenesis as a theory persisted, nonetheless, and was for a time viewed as scientific orthodoxy. Young suggests that the theory was circulated in an overtly racist form through Edward Long's History of Jamaica (1774) and gained a degree of scientific credibility with the publication of Charles White's Account of the Regular Gradation of Man (1799). White, a British surgeon, is credited with moving the prejudices of the slave-owning Long into the realm of scientific theory. (17)

Having charted the course of the monogenesis versus polygenesis debate, through an examination of a wide range of works, including the aforementioned texts, Young argues that the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution more or less discredited polygenesis as a viable theory; this prompted racial theorists such as Count Gobineau, whose Essay on the Inequality of Races was widely circulated, to acknowledge the fertility of miscegenated offspring, but to declare, in the words of Young, "that the descendants of such inter-racial unions quickly betrayed signs of degeneration, a state often associated with the notion of 'degradation'". (18) Ironically, Gobineau was also of the opinion that 'civilisation' is the result of inter-racial contact. In a move which clearly identifies the contradictory nature of Gobineau's work and scientific racialism in general, Young points out that:

"given Gobineau's preference for races to remain distinct, the irony is that it is only the power of sexual attraction between the races that produces those races who raise themselves to the level of civilization. . . The core of Gobineau's argument emerges here: it is the white races who are inclined to be sexually attracted towards other races which is why they mix with them; the yellow and brown races by contrast have a stronger tendency to repulsion -- which is why they have tended to remain comparatively unmixed. It is thus the power of attraction felt by the whites for the yellow and brown races that produces those peoples who raise themselves to the level of civilisation. (19)

In her paper 'Some Comments on Stereotypes of the Anglo-Indian', Megan Stuart Mills observes that:

"Scientific racialism after the mid-19th century bolstered much of what had already become part of the attitudinal landscape of British India. Members of the omnipresent Anglo-Indian underclass were taken to represent Anglo-Saxonism's darker themes of 'contamination' as presented in mental and moral degeneracy. Racialist theory of course, contributed its concepts of 'miscegenation', including mental and moral degeneracy as genetic results of hybridisation". (20)

While Mills is undoubtedly correct in drawing our attention to the largely depreciatory stereotypes of Anglo-Indians generated by nineteenth century racial science, it is, nevertheless, important to observe, with Young, the field's heterogeneous and contradictory nature. The nineteenth century race debate moved on to map the intellectual, moral and psychological differences between the races, which were sometimes theorised as being the product of a tropical climate as much as genetic and physiological inferiority. Once again, the discourse on race and climate is ambivalent insofar as climate is posited as the cause of non-occidental degeneration, and simultaneously as an argument in favour of racial hybridity. In an Indian context, Charles Brooke argued in 1866 that the production of a mixed-race population in India would produce a breed who possessed both the intelligence of Europeans and the indigenous physical capacity to withstand the extremes of the Indian climate, thus giving birth to, "a more enlightened race, better qualified in every way for the duties required of them". (21)

From his survey of the nineteenth century literature on racial theory, Young argues that there were basically five positions that could be adopted in relation the question of hybridity : firstly, there was the extreme polygenist position which contends that people from different racial stock cannot mix, and that any offspring produced by such sexual liaisons will produce infertile offspring, or offspring which will become infertile after a few generations; this view became increasingly popular in the southern states of America during the time of the civil war because "if it could be proved that Negroes were a different species they need not be included in the declaration that 'All Men are created Equal'". (22)

The second position, the amalgamation thesis, claims "that all humans can interbreed prolifically and in an unlimited way". (23) This position is often associated with the accompanying notion that racial intermixture will produce "a new mixed race, with merged but distinct new physical and moral characteristics". (24) The third position, the decomposition thesis, argues that while some 'amalgamation' between the races is possible, mixed breeds are either extinguished quickly, or they revert to one of the permanent types of the human species -- Negro, Asiatic, Caucasian. (25) The fourth position asserts that "hybridity varies between 'proximate' and 'distant' racial groups, where the term 'proximate' refers to allied European racial groups like the Teutons, Celts and Saxons, for example. (26) Finally, there is the antithesis of the amalgamation thesis which argues that, "miscegenation produces a mongrel group that makes up a 'raceless chaos', merely a corruption of the originals, degenerate and degraded, threatening to subvert the vigour and virtue of the pure races with which they come in contact". (27)

The debates which were conducted within the field of nineteenth century racial science impacted upon concepts such as culture and civilisation, which, according to Young, were developed simultaneously. These categories, as we shall see, were used to demonstrate the superiority of the European races and legitimate imperialism. Indeed, Young claims that "culture has always been racially constructed", (28) and in his examination of the 'ethnographic politics' of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) he convincingly demonstrates that, for Arnold, a culture's energy is the product of racial difference:

"fuelled by an inner dissonance, the product of conflict and of the 'ineffaceable difference' of what he describes as two rival forces that 'divide the empire of the world between them'. These forces prove to be those of racial difference: 'Hebraism and Hellenism -- between these two points of influence moves our world". (29)

He substantiates this assertion by pointing out the influence of Ernest Renan, a prominent French Semitist and linguist, on Arnold's work. Renan declared that there were three races, the White, the Yellow and the Black, who belonged to different species, and were placed in a hierarchy with, predictably, the White race at the top and the black race at the bottom. Young notes that:

"With respect to the 'superior' white Caucasian race, it was language, Renan believed, that demonstrated its history and origin, and this enabled him to subdivide it hierarchically into two further races according to the split between the 'two poles of the movement of humanity', the Aryan and Semetic language families. Although Caucasians, the Semites were, in Renan's view, inferior. If Arnold took many of the predicates of his thinking from the Renan whom he admired so much, describing him in Culture and Anarchy as the 'friend of reason and the simple natural truth of things', it is all the more remarkable that his own racialism remains so comparatively restricted". (30)

In a move which recall's one of Edward Said's major arguments in Orientalism, Young declares that because Arnold's notion of culture becomes "a category of consciousness produced by the reading and knowledge associated with civilisation" modern racism is produced by the academy, whose research practices and knowledges are inextricably enmeshed in the imperial project. "What we are dealing with here," Young claims, "is the dominance of racial theory so widespread that it worked as an ideology, permeating both consciously and implicitly the fabric of almost all areas of thinking of its time". (31)

This assertion will become evident through my examination of the various writings and representations of Anglo-Indians in this and subsequent papers. There is, no doubt, that the British used racial theory to classify the diverse racial groups within India for a variety of administrative purposes. In a recent article, 'Inventing Race: The British and India's Martial Races', Pradeep Barua argues that the British, "rationalized India's complex population by classifying ethnic groups into martial and non-martial races. By doing this, the British could simplify the ethnic diversity of India into easily recognizable units, some of which might be useful to the Raj." (32) Ironically, it was an Anglo-Indian, Herbert Hope Risely, who dominated Indian anthropological study around the turn of the century, and applied the techniques of anthropometry (which used the physical measurement of various body parts) to classify India's multitudinous ethnic groups. Barua claims that:

"Risely felt that caste was concrete and measurable. Viewing caste as a biological rather than social phenomenon, Risely expounded the incredible theory that the caste of an individual could be identified by measuring his nose: the finest nose belonged to the uppercaste while the coarsest belonged to the lower castes".

Such methods made it possible, he believed, to differentiate between loyal and disloyal fighting groups in India. Anthropometry became his tool for "social finger-printing." As a member of the Indian Civil Service, Risely believed that it was wise "to teach anthropology to the men of the Indian services." His greatest work, The People of India (1908), presented a detailed examination of the various racial types in India through anthropometric measurements primarily of the nose and head. (33)

The place of the Anglo-Indian in any hierarchical taxonomy of humanity is not easily determined, and any effort to locate the Anglo-Indian subject in such a schema necessarily involves an engagement with the concept of hybridity. Young observes that:

"In the nineteenth century, as in the late twentieth, hybridity was a key issue for cultural debate. The question had first been broached in the eighteenth century when the different varieties of human beings had been classed as part of the animal kingdom according to the hierarchical scale of the Great Chain of Being". (34)

The connection between the concept of hybridity (which is derived from biological and botanical origins) and scientistic systems of classification can be clearly observed in the sociological and anthropological studies of Anglo-Indian culture. (35) Indeed, the impulse towards classification is a dominant feature of these writings which will form the major focus of this paper. The 'objective', 'positivist' discourses of the social sciences have different interests, which are inextricably related to the ways in which they embody colonial authority, and reflect the prejudices of what Young calls 'scientific racialism'; predictably, these writings construct a different, and altogether unflattering, portrait of Anglo-Indians. (36) It should also be noted that 'Scientific racialism' also played an important role in the construction of imperial identities; Young argues that:

"Even after some of the scientific claims began to ebb away, racist assumptions remained fundamental to the knowledge of the West and to the Western sense of self. It is clear from the works of historians such as Lorimer or Chamberlain and Gilman that racial theory has always been a form of cultural self-definition. Western culture has always been defined against the limits of others, and culture has always been thought through as a form of cultural difference". (37)

Of course, Young's account is by no means the only genealogical account of the relationship between racial science and contemporary racism. His almost exclusive focus on the influence on biological science and linguistics on the emergence of modern racism ignores several crucial themes. For example, he does not really pursue the specific mechanisms which produce the forms of occidental 'cultural self-definition' cited in the above passage, and he fails to provide any sustained and detailed analysis of the the role played by the concurrent and adjacent discourses of sexuality and class in such formations of subjectivity. This is not to say that Young's account is incorrect or fatally flawed; it is particularly useful providing a framework for understanding why the Anglo-Indians seem to have been of sustained interest to various social sciences. Indeed, the impact scientific racialism had on the production of Anglo-Indian subjectivities by the social sciences can be clearly perceived in the following analyses.

Eurasains as the Spoken Subjects of Social Science

One of the earliest and most widely circulated examples of sociological writing concerned with Anglo-Indians can be found in E.B. Reuter's 1918 book, The Mulatto in the United States, which devotes a paper to surveying the fortunes of the world's mixed-blood races, presumably for comparative purposes; Reuter, who Young charges as being one of those responsible for the persistence of the question of human hybridity in the twentieth century,38 notes that the ". . . mixture of races is by no means a modern phenomenon, but it is only within recent centuries that the half-breed appears as a psychological type and as a social problem."39 Reuter authoritatively declares that:

"Physically the Eurasians are slight and weak. Their personal appearance is subject to the greatest variations. In skin colour, for example, they are often darker even than the Asiatic parent. They are naturally indolent and will enter into no employment requiring exertion or labour. This lack of energy is correlated with an incapacity for organization. They will not assume burdensome responsibilities, but they make passable clerks where only routine is required". (40)

Given that polygenisist theory and the notion of biological degeneration amongst hybrid populations had begun to lose its credibility, at least in scientific circles, Reuteur cannot attribute the characteristics of indolence and weakness to biology alone. "The half-caste individual," he argues, "cannot. . .be a mere individual; he is inevitably the representative of a type. He is not merely a biological product; he is a sociological phenomenon." (41) While Reuter's work is dismissed on the grounds of its overtly racist tone by subsequent sociologists (most notably Gist and Wright) it introduces a number of themes that are present, in various guises, in all the sociological literature devoted to Anglo-Indians: namely, the relationship between the natural biological order of things and society; and the relationship between social forces and subjectivity. (42) Reuter argues that:

". . . the half-castes tend to develop peculiar mental traits and attitudes which are not racial but are determined by the social situation in which they find themselves. To the extent that this takes place, the differences that normally exist between individuals are suppressed and the mental and moral characteristics of the group approach uniformity". (43)

Reuter is the first of many North American sociologists to examine the 'Anglo-Indian Problem'; he is, however, the only one to draw a direct comparison between Anglo-Indians and groups of dual racial ancestry in the United States. It is important to observe the ways in which Reuteur's discourse combines the organic, biological themes and tropes which dominated nineteenth century racial theory with the social and moral discourse of twentieth century social science, which, nevertheless, fails to completely reject Victorian racial theory. Reuter, for example, stubbornly uses the language of physical degeneration to describe the Anglo-Indian as a type, even though he contends that their "peculiar mental traits and attitudes are not racial".

Reuter's comments on Anglo-Indian degeneracy were directly contested by the Anglo-Indian biologist Cedric Dover in his book Half-Caste, which clearly demonstrates that the so-called 'half-caste' is pejoratively represented by novelists, eugenicists, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and politicians in the first half of the twentieth century. (44) According to Dover, the aforementioned groups have:

"contributed a vast mass of pseudo-science to the more delicate technics of bastard baiting and bluffing, and to the creation of a consciousness of genetic guilt in the sang m�l�".

The effects are partly illustrated by a brown dupe of aggrandisement who writes to England's leading welfare journal (New Health, June, 1935) to enquire if people with his 'complaint -- the result of mixed marriage' can be sterilised. 'I am not too dark', he says pathetically, 'but I dread to think now at 30, should I get married and have children, they might be of much darker colour than I am.'

The Editor's reply is still more instructive. He does not point out, perhaps he does not know, the error of his correspondent's biology. On the contrary, he says it 'is reasonable to ask whether sterilisation could be applied to avoid the possibility of having "coloured" children in the event of marriage . . . but unfortunately the law does not permit sterilisation on these grounds. You must, therefore, in the present state of law, be satisfied with the adoption of birth control measures.' The nervous reader might justifiably interpret this example of reciprocal ineptitude as a grim portent of the future. (45)

This acceptance and internalisation of racial inferiority is something that is given considerable attention in subsequent studies of the Anglo-Indian community. Dover makes direct reference to Reuter's work, which he discredits partially through his general 'scientific' refutation of American sociology and partially through his claim that Reuteur's more offensive remarks were based on an obscure graduate thesis by Mary Helen Lee. (46) Since Dover attempts to question the relationship between the natural biological order of things and the social sciences advanced by Reuter, it is worth examining his work in more detail.

In his preface to Dover's work, Lancelot Hogben, a self-described professional biologist, claims that Half-Caste discredits the racial theories propagated by the National Socialists in Germany and the Eugenics movement in England, movements which were in their ascendancy during the nineteen thirties. He goes on to emphatically state that both movements invoke "the authority of science for sentiments which are the negation of civilised decency and for doctrines which are in open contradiction to historical truth". (47) Indeed, Dover's 'crusading intent' is to demonstrate that "miscegenation has influenced human evolution from the earliest times,"and that the white man's economic domination of the world is not the direct result of biology and racial superiority. (48)

Predictably, Dover's realisation of his intent is based on his own appeal to the authority of science. He, therefore, begins his work with an examination of the biological aspects of racial hybridity, and cites a wide range of contemporary authorities to support his arguments. In his first paper, which is devoted to the influence of biological science on the social sciences, he points out that the Mendelian laws of heredity are complex, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to absolutely validate the racial purity of any given individual because the outward or phenotypic appearance of an apparently homogeneous group of individuals does not guarantee their underlying genotypic similarity.

In a related move which recalls Arnold's assertion, cited earlier, that cultural dynamism is the product of racial difference, Dover argues, through the quotation of contemporary authorities, that practices of 'inbreeding' and 'outbreeding' are as important as mutation in the process of human evolution. (49) On the one hand, 'Inbreeding', despite the protestations of advocates of incestuous reproduction in the name of pedigree (like A.M. Ludovici in his 1935 book The Choice of Mate) produces "an increase of undesirable types, since numerous disorders are carried as recessive characters, which only become manifest in the children of unions between similar recessives". (50) 'Outbreeding', on the other hand, produces a high degree of genetic variability which promotes the formation of new racial characteristics and "gives natural selection a wider range of individuals to work upon". (51)

In summary, Dover attempts to use biological science to refute three propositions widely circulated by eugenicists and social scientists like Reuter. Firstly, he counters the 'disharmonist' claim that "definite structural maladjustments are created by racial mixing", and that different races have different mental characteristics which "induce social failure and degeneracy in hybrid groups because of their innate incompatibility". (52) Secondly, he contests the 'arrested mental development thesis', circulated in texts like H.L. Gordon's The Mental Capacity of the African (1934), which argues that due to a supposedly lighter and "more primitively composed" brain, the African's mental development is arrested after the age of fourteen. Finally, he turns his attention to the science of psychometry, which he claims "illustrates technical inadequacy, complicated by rationalised prejudice". (53)

Psychometry, as deployed by Davenport and Steggerda in the book Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929), attempted to quantify the differing psychological characteristics of different races through the administration of a series of perceptual and logical tests which involved getting subjects to criticise absurd sentences, reconstruct disjointed mannequins and participate in something called the 'Knox Moron Test'. (54) Dover questions the motives of American anthropology when he notes that the research of Davenport and Steggerda was sponsored by the Carnegie Institution of Washington who had a profound "on recent [racist] ethnic and immigration policies in the United States". (55)

Having dealt with the biological and, more specifically, the genetic aspects of miscegenation, Dover goes on to address the social and cultural issues. He devotes to papers to Anglo-Indian history and culture which attempt to document the ways in which this marginal group have distinguished themselves. The paper entitled 'Fruit of the Pagoda Tree' basically follows Stark's account of Anglo-Indian history, while the following paper recounts the heroic life and deeds of the Anglo-Indian poet and educator, Derozio. It is significant that Dover concludes his account of the Anglo-Indian achievement with a lament for the community's low social and economic standing in modern India. He states:

"Condemned to an urban life of dependence upon the crumbs that fall from the paternal table, devoid of agricultural or industrial traditions, conditioned in a degrading atmosphere of prejudice and priestcraft and low cultural opportunity. . . a third of the employable men of the community are unemployed, thousands are in acute distress, and the majority barely subsist above what would be called in Europe 'the poverty line'." (56)

Dover, having convincingly argued against the proposition that Anglo-Indian Marginality is the product of biological inferiority, is nevertheless compelled to acknowledge the community's social and psychological problems which, as we shall see, provide the focus for the majority of sociological and anthropological studies of the Anglo-Indian community. It is worth noting that Half-Caste, according to Gloria Jean Moore, was banned by the Indian government. (57)

While not a self-identified work of sociology, John Macrae's study of Anglo-Indian poverty, published in consecutive editions of The Calcutta Review in 1913, is an interesting piece of analysis which also treats the Anglo-Indian as a social and psychological problem. Rich notes that, before the social sciences gained a degree of professionalism, through their establishment in British universities, sociological and anthropological debate "was conducted by an amalgam of both gentlemen amateurs in the older tradition and more professional scholars like A.C. Haddon and Julian Huxley." (58) Macrae's work is probably most accurately located in the older tradition.

Based on its contemporaneous British counterparts, like the Westminster Review, the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, the Calcutta Review enjoyed a reputation as one of India's most prestigious journals; articles on a variety of political, social and literary topics (which almost exclusively dealt with Indian themes and issues) were written, exclusively in English, by the city's intelligentsia, which included only a small number of Indians. The publication's principal constituency, however, were members of the British community residing, either permanently, or temporarily in Calcutta. Although it is unclear whether John Macrae was a professionally trained social scientist, his analytical methods and style of argument contain many of the themes and rhetorical tropes that we will encounter in later academic studies of Anglo-Indians. What is certain, however, is that his work was cited by the trained sociologists and anthropologists (such as Gist and Wright) who made Anglo-Indians the subject of their subsequent academic work. (59)

Macrae's article is titled 'Social Conditions in Calcutta: The Problem For Charity Among The Anglo-Indian Community', and it aims account for what he considers to be the disproportionate level of poverty experienced by the Anglo-Indian community in the Calcutta region in the late part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth.

Having isolated those factors responsible for Anglo-Indian poverty, Macrae goes on to formulate strategies for the solution of what he considers to be a significant social problem.

Macrae begins his argument with the declaration that it is imperative that we, ". . . understand the social and economic environment of those who are to be helped. . ."; and with the aid of the 1892 Indian census, he establishes that 22.5% of the Anglo-Indian population in Calcutta (which numbered some 20,000) were ". . .partially or wholly in receipt of relief". (60) This alarming statistic prompts Macrae to claim that:

There is therefore in this community a field for charitable work perhaps greater in intensity than in any other community in the world that calls urgently for thought, and urgently for action. (61)

Macrae argues that poverty experienced by the Anglo-Indian community in Calcutta cannot be compared with poverty experienced by other disadvantaged groups in the west, and sets about to establish the specific social and economic conditions which predispose the Calcutta Anglo-Indians to such disturbing levels of poverty. He rules out a number of the usual causes of poverty prevalent during his epoch (such as monotony, intemperance, 'sensual trade') and concludes that the unfortunate fate of the community can be attributed to the following factors: firstly, and perhaps least importantly, the harsh climatic features of Calcutta contribute to a short life expectancy; death is not uncommon in middle age, and the loss of the family breadwinner is often the immediate cause financial difficulty. This observation hints at physical degeneracy and contradicts Charles Brooke's aforementioned assertion of the presumed ability of a hybrid population to thrive in the harsh Indian climate. Secondly, Macrae suggests that bad nutrition and a predisposition to melancholia combine to produce a race of people who lack 'vitality': he states:

That there is a deficiency of vitality among this community may be gathered from the fact, that while among the other races in India, lunacy appears in many forms, among this community it invariably takes the form of melancholia. (62)

It is, however, the Anglo-Indian aversion to manual labour ("To dig I am ashamed, is the general feeling") coupled with the fact that the community is "socially organised on the model of the temporary European population in India. . ." that Macrae sees as the major determinants of Anglo-Indian abjection and ruin. (63) In other words, it is the desire to mimic the social patterns and practices of the European which accounts for the most significant cause of poverty amongst Anglo-Indians. In his second article (published in the April 1913 edition of The Calcutta Review ) Macrae points to the Anglo-Indian extravagance in the modes of dress and culinary habits. He notes, with more than a hint of indignation, that:

In the Bengali household, where the income is much the same, we find that much more of the work, especially in the preparation of food is done by the women of the household. (64)

Put yet another way, the Anglo-Indian community, according to Macrae, has an unrealistic vision of their place in the social hierarchy of India:

The ultimate place of the Anglo-Indian is not as one of the governing class, not as a European, but as an integral part of the social system of India, which the European is not. (65)

While the suggestion that the Anglo-Indian community recognise itself as an integral part of India would not, as we have seen in the last paper, be at odds with the views expressed by groups like the All India Anglo-Indian Association, the proposition that the race needs to shed its European habits, manners and customs strikes at the core of the Anglo-Indian's identity. Cultural hybridity, then, is viewed as the major cause of the community's abject misery. In addition, the Anglo-Indian, in Macrae's view, does not belong anywhere near the top of the social hierarchy, a point which is emphatically made in the following passage:

The fundamental fact to be grasped, if we would understand the conditions under which the Anglo-Indian poor come into being, is that there are two collections of persons, one of which consists of temporarily detached fragments of a large and complete organisation and another which should be an organisation complete in itself. But the latter strives to emulate the first, forgetful of the fact that their social organisation is incomplete and so it finds itself out of touch with reality. And this, I need hardly to add, is a condition predisposing to poverty. But there are other ways in which this symbiosis, to use a term borrowed from Natural Science, tends towards poverty on the part of individuals of the one class. (66)

This passage also reveals the extent to which the authority of Macrae's argument depends upon the rhetorical strategy of drawing analogies between his form of social analysis and the methodologies of the natural sciences; images of organicism abound, and scientific metaphors are commonplace. Indeed, Macrae's almost obsessive preoccupation with hierarchies and systems of classification is, as we shall see, a common discursive feature of much sociological and anthropological analysis.

The prevalence of 'scientific' metaphors become even more pronounced in the latter part of Macrae's second article which deals with his solutions to the problem of Anglo-Indian poverty in Calcutta. He points out that poverty is, ". . . the symptom of as many different social diseases as a high temperature is of different diseases of the body. . " and argues that each case requires its own special treatment. (67) He goes on to say that:

To isolate the causes, and find means of affecting them rather than to attack the symptoms directly is a feature of modern medicine. The modern conception of poverty, in like manner, is not that it is the outcome of one social disease but of many, and that most of these are curable at present, and even the most obstinate and seemingly hopeless, must not be considered as beyond the reach of ultimate cure. (68)

In an attempt to find the 'ultimate cure', Macrae makes four general observations:

firstly, that direct financial relief in the form of dole payments "dries up the springs of initiative and self-help'; secondly, that institutional relief needs to be tailored to suit specific causes of poverty. In particular, celibate segregation of the unfit and feeble-minded, labour-testing homes for the general out-of-work, semi-penal labour colonies for the work shy and vicious, more comfortable provision for the aged. . . ; (69) thirdly, that 'self-support' and 'independence' should be encouraged amongst all those who are capable of it; and, finally, that the "Investigation of the circumstances of each individual case, knowledge of the individual temperament, and continued friendly inspiration and guidance, are essential to successful reclamation". (70)

Macrae's observations are interesting, not only because they bear a striking similarity to the rhetoric of contemporary economic rationalists pontificating about welfare, but because they are so obviously part of an exercise designed to re-articulate Anglo-Indian identity in terms which are, predictably, close to the notorious 'individual bourgeois subject', so often demonised by critical theory.

The mechanisms which Macrae advocates for bringing about this change in the identity and attitude of the Anglo-Indian poor are dependent upon their specific circumstances; he devises a system of classification which distinguishes the Anglo-Indian poor by type and temperament. For example, the European ex-soldier who becomes part of the Anglo-Indian community

"through some fault on his part" should be sent home (to Britain) or repatriated to Australia; . . . as for the loafer of the Anglo-Indian community, the proper course seems Institutional treatment of a semi-penal nature. The germ of such an institution is to be found in the Government Workhouse, and the Vagrancy Act makes it possible to send him there. (71)

In a somewhat more humanitarian tone, Macrae concedes that "a separate Home would harbour the unfit, and pensions would be reserved entirely for widows, orphans, the aged and deserving poor incapacitated by disease and accident". (72)

Viewed from the perspective of the late twentieth century, it is tempting to dismiss Macrae's work as a mere product of its times; it does, as I have already demonstrated, contain some of the more obvious theoretical and political prejudices that characterise the functionalist paradigm in sociology: a taste for statistics, hierarchical systems of classifying social phenomena, a preference for figurative tropes dependent on metaphors of organicism, and a resolute faith in the interpretative and redemptive powers of western rationality and science; in short, Macrae represents a typically nineteenth century attitude towards his subject matter, which is reinforced by the moralistic, almost missionary tone of his discourse. It is probably more productive, for my purposes, to look at Macrae's project in terms of how his ideas on the administration of poverty function as technologies of subjection, which seek to reformulate Anglo-Indian identity in terms that suit the colonial regime. The Anglo-Indian's problems are, for Macrae, essentially problems of classification and psychology. Anglo-Indians literally mistake themselves for what they are not: Europeans; a re-fashioning of their self-identity is, therefore, seen to be a matter of psychology:

It has been said that charity has failed in the past, largely by ignoring psychology. But modern charity is as dependent on psychology, as modern medicine is on physiology. . . the applicant for relief is not merely a unit in social organisation. He is a human being, and an end in himself. . . (73)

Macrae uses the term' psychology' to point to the human dimension of the problem he seeks to solve, and to mark out the territory upon which the re-articulation of Anglo-Indian identity must take place. It is, however, a line of argumentation he does not pursue to its logical outcome presumably because, "[T]he application of psychology to charity would require an article in itself". (74)

The April 1913 edition of The Calcutta Review also contains an article (by one W.H. Arden Wood, M.A.) on the Simla Education Conference and the 'Domiciled' community in India, which indicates that Macrae's position on the issue of Anglo-Indian poverty was at least partially contested. It is important to note, however, that the term 'domiciled' refers to both the so-called 'pure' Europeans and 'mixed-race' Anglo-Indians, which may account for Wood's somewhat more measured tone. Wood remarks, with some concern, that:

It is indisputable that a serious decline in the efficiency and material welfare of the domiciled community that would bring into existence a well-marked class of 'mean whites,' and largely increase the number of degraded and poverty-stricken Anglo-Indians, would be a damaging blow to British prestige, and that to permit this to happen, if it is in any way avoidable, would be a political blunder. (75)

While wood also compiles a list of causes which have contributed to the 'decadence' of the Anglo-Indian population ('a rooted aversion to manual labour', 'early and imprudent marriages, thriftlessness, and the drink habit', 'decreasing susceptibility to religious influences' and so on), he isolates the fact that "the domiciled community has not advanced in education as fast as the Hindus" as the major factor in their fall from grace. The children of the domiciled community, therefore:

. . . require schools that are good not because they have good buildings and apparatus, or because they have teachers who can make their pupils pass examinations, but because they are efficacious in training character. . . Every lesson that a teacher gives is a moral lesson. Specific religious and moral instruction at stated times will not make up for the lack of teachers of the right kind, exercising continuously, if silently, an influence for good. (76)

While Wood does not advocate a radical re-articulation of Anglo-Indian identity (he suggests, for example, that the minimum wage for a member of the domiciled community "must be a wage that will enable him to retain European habits and modes of life") he nevertheless argues for a form of identity re-fashioning through the subjecting mechanism of education.

Elmer L. Hedin's article, 'The Anglo-Indian Community', which appeared in The American Journal of Sociology of 1934, is a curiously bland piece of analysis, which consists of a series of platitudes delivered with an undeserved degree of authority. (77) Hedin isolates the Anglo-Indian community as the most 'interesting' of the 'half-caste' populations produced by European imperialism, but fails to elaborate on this presumably self-evident declaration in the early part of his paper. After a precis of Anglo-Indian history, Hedin reveals an interest in what he describes as "the present mixed-race complex in India. . . the more obvious aspects of this complex are fairly well summed up in the following extract from a recent book on India:

The most pathetic of India's minority groups are the mixed-bloods. They were formerly called Eurasians; but they coveted the name Anglo-Indian. . . They number 113,000 and, call them what you will, there is little chance of mistaking the mixed blood for the pure. Some of the women are almost blond and very pretty. Most of them have an anaemic look. They speak in a metallic falsetto with a curious sing-song accent. They always wear European clothes. . . They are ostracized by both English and Indians. They in turn look down on the Indian with a scorn that is acid with hatred. . . They always speak of England as "home" though they may never have been there. (78)

Hedin lets the quotation stand without further commentary or explication. The 'mixed-race' complex is similarly left to stand without further elaboration, although the echo of the nineteenth century degeneration thesis is clearly present.

The rest of Hedin's article is devoted to the compilation of statistics (drawn from census documents and reports to the Indian Statutory commission) on the Anglo-Indian population: their numbers, their occupations (which are sub-divided by sex) their geographical distribution (in chief cities, military stations and railway centres) their forms of political and electoral representation and so on. The following passage is indicative of Hedin's style and methodology:

The statistics available on infirmities and delinquency among Anglo-Indians are for the city of Calcutta only, but may be considered as representative of India in general. In 1921 the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta had about the same proportion of insane, deaf-mutes, blind and leper members as the total population of the city -- 6 males and 2 females of 14, 886 Anglo-Indians being insane. The jail population of the city on the census date showed a relatively large number of Anglo-Indians as compared with Europeans and Indian Christians. The offences for which they were imprisoned were not stated. (79)

Having collected a wide range of statistical data on the community, Hedin cites a variety of exchanges between Sir Henry Gidney and members of the Simon Commission (a body set up to deal with minority rights and political representation in an Independent India) as evidence of the racist Anglo-Indian attitude toward 'native' Indians, and the attendant Indian animosity towards Anglo-Indians. In response to the increasing competition from Indians in the railway labour market, Gidney claims that Anglo-Indians deserve some form of preferential treatment because the government depends on the them ". . .whenever Indians go on strike"; he reminds the commission that, "Anglo-Indian school children cleaned the railway carriages and our lads left their schools to work this railway to enable H.R.H., the Prince of Wales, to travel in comfort and safety when he visited India." (80)

Hedin concludes his article by attempting to place the Anglo-Indian within the general "scheme of things" and suggests that the role of the Anglo-Indian is:

. . . that of a parasite whose hold on its host is none too secure. The Anglo-Indian lives his separate life on the border of the official community, which supplies him with sufficient employment to keep up his shabby and pathetic Britishness. (81)

He notes that while ". . .there is some evidence of a tendency among them to develop a race pride of their own," it is more than likely that they will cease to exist as a distinct community. (82)

Anglo-Indians have continued to be the subject of a number of more recent studies by American sociologists and anthropologists in the form of doctoral dissertations, journal articles, monographs and books. (83) I will deal with the most significant of these texts in chronological order. Doris L. Goodrich's unpublished PhD dissertation, 'The making of an Ethnic Group: The Eurasian Community in India' (submitted to the department of Sociology and Social Institutions at the University of California at Berkeley in 1953) takes up the issue of what Hedin calls 'race pride', and argues that the Anglo-Indian community gradually came into being as a self-conscious group through their increasing marginalisation from both British and Indian social life. Goodrich's thesis is that a variety of formal and semi-formal institutions were set up to foster a sense of espirit de corps amongst a people who were excluded from participating in the social and cultural life of British India. Goodrich's interest in the 'making of the community' has been revived by the British academic Christopher Hawes' recent book, Poor Relations: the making of the Eurasian community in India 1773-1883. (84)

V.R. Gaikwad's study of Anglo-Indians is motivated by a desire to contribute to India's national solidarity. Described as a work of social psychology, Gaikwad's book attempts to "examine the problems and processes involved in the emotional and cultural integration of the Anglo-Indian Community in the Indian society." (85) He notes that:

Social scientists in India have not yet produced a single objective and scientific study of Anglo-Indians, an important linguistic and racial minority community, comparable to the many excellent works on groups of mixed racial origin in other parts of the world. . . Neither a shallow caricature nor an unreal and lofty idealization meet with the exacting requirements of science. (86)

Gaikwad, in a move that we shall see repeated in many subsequent works, meets the "exacting requirements of science" through collecting data from three major sources: questionnaires administered to three Anglo-Indian communities (located in Jhansi, Bangalore and Bilaspur) who were deemed to be representative of the community at large; ethnographic observation of specific areas of Anglo-Indian life (eating habits, recreational and cultural activities, patterns of social interaction); content analysis "of the speeches delivered by the leader of the community ( Mr. Frank Anthony) in post-independence India, and of The Anglo-Indian Review, a journal which functioned as the mouth-piece of the All-India Anglo-Indian Association referred to in the last paper. After rehearsing the obligatory history of the community, Gaikwad briefly describes his aims and methods and goes on to compile a vast array of tables and charts which, among other things, map 'attitude statements' which record the communities social, cultural and economic anxieties. Gaikwad's study is, within its own terms, a fascinating document. Floor plans of different types of accommodation used by different classes of Anglo-Indians are reproduced in detail.

Noel P. Gist and Roy Dean Wright's sociological monograph, Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially-Mixed Minority in India, is concerned with the 'cultural gap' between Anglo-Indians and other Indian communities. Theoretically informed by Everett V. Stonequist's 1937 book Marginal Man, (87) and its development of the sociological concepts of marginality, marginal man and marginal situations, the work purports to be a "descriptive analysis of the minority written from the perspective of marginality". (88) Marginality, within the sociological discourse of the period refers:

to inter-group relations when a minority has social, cultural, and/or social-psychological attributes that distinguish if from other groups in the same society and which function to impede or prevent inter-group contacts and cooperative participation in undertakings of mutual interest. (89)

The monograph is divided into eight major sections which examine different aspects of Anglo-Indian life. After a brief historical account of the community's formation, which draws heavily on the account's of Stark via Goodrich, Gist and Wright justify their theoretical framework through a detailed account of the concept of marginality and its specific relevance to their study. The thesis they advance claims that:

Anglo-Indians are (and were) culturally marginal to the other Indians in India. This is because their mother tongue, religion, family organisation and general style of life distinguishes them from Indians who are relatively distinctive in this respect. (90)

They go on to defend this platitudinous assertion by firstly documenting those attitudes and images which contribute to the formation of negative Anglo-Indian stereotypes, and then describing the community in terms of their occupations, social relations, education and 'styles of life'. They discover the existence of four major stereotypes: Anglo-Indians as stooges of the British, Anglo-Indians, especially Anglo-Indian women, as people of lax morals, Anglo-Indians as traitors to India, and, finally, Anglo-Indians as opportunists. (91) Gist and Wright are, nevertheless, cautious in their own assessment of the community, and are at pains to establish their work's objectivity and limitations. They state:

The authors have attempted to interpret objectively the Community and its relations with other communities, to present factual information free from conscious bias. . . Empirical factual information is in itself selective, obtainable information may be only part of the multi-faceted situation, and one person's "facts" may be another person's "poison." to paraphrase an old adage. . .Some of the factual materials presented in the study are concerned with attitudes, of Anglo-Indians and other Indians. Whether or not these attitudes are justified is not of concern to this study; they are merely an aspect of the psycho-social environment of the peoples involved. (92)

Of course, this moment of methodological self-reflexivity does not actually impede the collation of empirical data in the form of personal interviews and questionaries designed to establish attitudes held by and about the community. These sources of information are augmented by references to other scholarly works (such as Goodrich's dissertation, the aforementioned articles, Hedin and Reuter, among others, and the various historical accounts of Anglo-Indian culture cited in the last paper) and descriptions, in the style of anthropological field notes, of specific Anglo-Indian behaviours. The following quotations are representative examples of Gist and Wright's methodology in action.

Said one student, whose viewpoint seems to be widely held:

"They [Anglo-Indians] possess a superiority complex toward us Indians. They have exceptionally loose morals, and pretend to be westernised. The fairer ones proudly proclaim themselves to be of British origins, whereas the darker ones reluctantly admit they are Indian. (93)

...students were asked to take an overall or categorical view of these ethnic groups and rank them in order of personal preference, assigning a rank value of 1 to the most preferred group and so on to the least preferred group with a value of 6. . .the rank order and scores are as follows:

1. British              1.7
2. Parsees              3.5
3.Egyptians             3.5
4.African Negroes       4.2
5.Jews                  4.2
6.Anglo-Indians         4.5 (94)

At regular meals within the home, middle-class Anglo-Indians almost invariably sit on dining-room chairs at a dining table, often at pre-arranged places for members of the family or invited guests. The behavioural aspects of food consumption -- the proper way to use a knife and fork, or spoon, or the acceptable way to serve others -- resemble the European style of eating. The traditional Indian practice of eating solely with one's hands, without the benefit of table utensils, is socially unacceptable, and for some, downright offensive.

Gloria Jean More indignantly suggests that Gist and Wright's work lacks 'respect', and, indeed, their work has, despite their condemnation of Reuter (95) and their clearly stated intention of providing an objective account of the 'facts', has not been well received by the Anglo-Indian community at large. Indeed, the work confirms Young's assertion that the gap between the demonised Victorian discourses on racial hybrids is not so far removed the more contemporary sociological and anthropological discourse which condemn the racism of earlier scholars while remaining unaware of their own complicity with racism. While Gist and Wright repeatedly assert that they intend to "let the facts speak for themselves," they fail to recognise the extent to which their work lends credibility to the stereotypes originally propagated by racial theory, and the extent to which the "facts" speak the Anglo-Indian subject in the authoritative accent of American sociology.

Incorporating the 'authentic' voices of a small sample of interviewees does not necessarily increase the accuracy or authenticity of Gist and Wright's discourse. The voices they invoke are inevitably strategically positioned within what is essentially an academic discourse, which participates in what Foucault has called power/knowledge relations. (96) In other words, the sociology of Gist and Wright (and the discourses of the other commentators I have cited in this paper) is a type of knowledge which is also a form of power inextricably related to the functioning of other forms of power.

This is not to say that their work is invalid or irresponsible. Rather, the attention they pay to disciplinary protocols (the formulation of their questionaries, and their imperious deployment of statistically significant results, their detached description Anglo-Indian "food consumption") ensures that they remain 'in the true' of their discipline, and that their discourse resonates with an imperious authority which contributes to the series of truth effects which validates their thesis concerning the marginal status of the Anglo-Indian.

Nancy Lucille Brennan's dissertation, 'The Anglo-Indians of Madras: An Ethnic Minority in Transition' (submitted in the Anthropology department of Syracuse University in 1979) is concerned with Anglo-Indians as a group in transition, and her work documents the ways in which the community has had to 'adapt' to their changing social and economic status in modern India. She claims that her work attempts to go beyond the 'marginal man' theory which dominated the published sociological and anthropological work on the Anglo-Indians in the American academy during the nineteen sixties and seventies. Brennan attempts to examine the impact of racism and economics on the groups adaptive strategies. It is significant that while she rejects, with her predecessors like Gist and Wright, the biological bias of earlier studies she, nevertheless, uses a series of biological metaphors to describe the community:

The end of British rule in India profoundly disrupted Anglo-Indian life. Anglo-Indians are making adaptions to survive. There are at least two ways to deal with the stress of change -- to escape or to adapt. Further, there are different ways of adapting. One may adapt individually, in which case the individual survives physically, but the culture may not survive. The group may adapt in which case both physical and cultural survival may be assured. (97)

Brennan locates the Anglo-Indian in a liminal space, negotiating between the centripetal forces of institutions, like the school and church, which reinforce community affiliations, and centrifugal political and economic forces which threaten to erode traditional ethnic identifications.

Similar sociological/anthropological studies of Anglo-Indians, focusing on Anglo-Indian stereotypes and the community's marginal status have been produced in the nineteen eighties and nineties. Most of these works cite the a forementioned sources, and rarely move beyond the presumptions of the positivist paradigm. For example, Coralie Younger's book, Anglo-Indians: Neglected Children of the Raj, attempts to:

...look at the self-image the Anglo-Indian Possessed in response to the stereotyping that was present in fiction and which was generated by word of mouth. I proposed to examine the stereotypes that had developed in novels and short stories and compare the novelists' image with the interviewees' own self-concept and lifestyle. (98)

Younger's book started life as a higher degree thesis awarded by the University of Sydney. The dissertation was consequently published as a book in 1987 by the B.R. Publishing Corporation. This version is printed without footnotes (even though footnote references are given in the main body of the text). This oversight characterises the book's lazy scholarship, which relies heavily on personal testimony (once again given in the form of the personal interview) and content analysis of literary texts. The following passage is typical of Younger's approach to her subject matter:

Vicky Jones in Bhowani Junction, repeatedly questioned the position her community had taken in identifying with British society. She could see defects in the community but none of the virtues. Vicky was aware of the basis of their inferiority complex and she chafed under it. When she burst in where her boyfriend and sister were making love, she, thought, "In that moment I had gone back where we came from, which was the Indian loose woman of a hundred years ago." (99)

Younger thus concludes that:

The novels and interviews reveal the British horror of interbreeding with particular races. The British had a distaste for mixing with non-whites which included both Anglo-Indians and Indians. Anglo-Indians in turn did not want to breed with non-whites but desired union with whites or 'half-caste' Anglo-Indians. (100)

While Younger's research was conducted in a department of Anthropology, her focus on the relationship between literary texts and the propagation of negative Anglo-Indian stereotypes makes her work more relevant to other aspects of my on-going research, which focus on the representation of Anglo-Indians in literature. I shall, subsequently, provide a more detailed account of Younger's work in that context.

Kuntal Lahiri's 1992 paper 'The Psyche of a Marginal Community: Attitudes to and self-images of the Anglo-Indians' (101) is little more than an uncritical restatement of Gist and Wright, while Lionel Caplan's 1995 paper on the 'culture of emigration' among Anglo-Indians in Madras is a more sophisticated analysis of the impact of globalisation and international migration on the Anglo-Indian community. (102) Caplan notes the methodological problems Anglo-Indians pose for contemporary theorists of emigration when he declares that:

Much of the literature on the effects of emigration for sending societies deals with cyclic movements of labour, and assesses the impact of remittances and the investment of monies earned abroad on the economy of labour-exporting families or that of the wider community.

Caplan argues for the recognition of the role 'cultural factors' (by which he means beliefs, understandings and practices) play in motivating emigration. He uses the contemporary Anglo-Indian community in Madras as a case in point, and documents their sometimes desperate scrabble to leave India. He concludes that members of the community, often referred to as 'dings' or 'dingos' by other Indians because of their desire to re-locate to Australia, seek:

...to keep abreast of rapidly changing immigration policies in target countries, educate and train their children in the skills they deem to be required abroad, redefine marriage strategies and kin obligations in the process of assisting one another to leave, make considerable financial sacrifices, offer prayers and make vows to saints and deities to intercede on their behalf (in the process neglecting earlier and promoting new cult shrines) -- all to obtain the visa which will, they believe, enable them to realize their hopes. They have thus evolved a local lifestyle and an outlook which is out-focused, and which insists, as one Anglo-Indian woman put it, that 'life is only abroad, not here'. (103)

While it has not been my intention to provide a comprehensive history and critique of the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, it may be tempting to map the development of these twentieth century social science's (in terms of their thematic obsessions, theoretical preferences, and methodological techniques) through my survey of the field's representations of Anglo-Indians. At the risk of stating the obvious, I think it would be a grave error to succumb to such a temptation.

It should be evident, even to the most casual observer, that the aforementioned writings on Anglo-Indians display a rather narrow range of research methodologies, and are in no way representative of what is an extremely heterogeneous area of academic knowledge. This is not to say that we cannot draw some conclusions about the thematic and theoretical continuities and discontinuites which characterise the representation of Anglo-Indians in the social sciences.

The treatment of Anglo-Indians by the social science appears to have two major functions: firstly, and most obviously, it enables social scientists to deal with the specific problems of a minority group within the context of a large multi-cultural society like India. The study of social, cultural and psychological marginality may provide a better understanding of the sectarian conflicts that continue to plague the sub-continent. The second function, I think, is to open up a discursive space for the discussion of sensitive minority and race-related issues which would be, at the very least, controversial in other contexts. This may explain the interest American social scientists have in the Anglo-Indian community. Certainly E.B. Reuter's interest in Anglo-Indians stems from his desire to denigrate the African-American minority in the United States (you will remember that his comments on Anglo-Indians are found in his book, The Mulatto in the United States).

In summary, Reuter's attempts to deal with the Anglo-Indian as a racial hybrid manifestly appeals to the authority of biology and racial science in an attempt to 'objectively' depict the Anglo-Indian as a degenerate subject. In other words, the Anglo-Indian is spoken of as a specific biological type, primarily through a pejorative reading of biological hybridity. While Dover's rejoinder reminds us that hybridity has almost always been an ambivalent category, it has, more often than not, been used to denigrate the progeny of inter-racial unions.

Macrae's analysis of Anglo-Indian poverty in Calcutta in the early part of this century, while still employing scientific tropes and biological metaphors, argues for the importance of economic and social factors in the construction of the Anglo-Indian subject. This fledgling attempt to understand Anglo-Indian poverty in terms of some 'fatal flaw' in the culture introduces a theme which present in most contemporary sociological/anthropological accounts of Anglo-Indian culture.

While it is possible to observe a shift away from overt references to biology and racial science in the empirical studies of the community conducted in the latter half of the century (Goodrich, Gist and Wright etc. . .) these later texts, nevertheless, fail to fully purge themselves of the traces of nineteenth century racism; and while references to biology are rare, and the techniques of anthropometry and psychometry are no longer 'in the true', the social sciences continue to construct the Anglo-Indian as a rather pathetic figure on the margins of legitimate society. The most frequent representation is of the Anglo-Indian, as we have seen, is that of a social and cultural misfit, a 'marginal man' whose problems exist because of an unrealistic self-image. It is significant that Anglo-Indian marginality, up until recent times, has been denied the romance usually associated with the figure of the 'outsider'. The rather dour image of the Anglo-Indian painted by the social sciences, as my future work will demonstrate, is being transformed, particularly in the areas contemporary Indian literature and film, where the stereotypical representations of the Anglo-Indian subject co-exist with a more glamorous figure who often functions as a symbol of dynamic modernity.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

(1) Pauline Hanson, Parliamentary speech, 10 September 1996.

(2) Sue Hewitt, 'Stormy weather in a Port divided against itself' The Sunday Age, 22 December 1996, News 3.

(3) Colin Chan, 'Immigration debate need not be racist' The Sunday Age, 22 December 1996, News 14.

(4) David Bennett, 'Mixed Feelings, Hybrid Theory', The UTS Review, 2.1 (1996): 206.

(5) Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) 27.

(6) Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995) 61.

(7) Cedric Dover, writing in his book Half-Caste (London: Secker and Warburg, 1937) of which more will be said later, argues that, "The majority of Australians are unmistakably branded by signs of miscegenation: the taller stature, the elongated face, the dark pigmentation, which is becoming increasingly darker. . . Biological factors, combined with the relatively low numbers of black indigenes and Asiatic immigrants during the period of colonisation, have therefore assisted the policy of a 'white' if brunet Australia, but local conditions and the pressure of surrounding populations suggest that isolation will eventually be broken down. In the end it is difficult, writes Jens Lyng of the Commonwealth Bureau of Statistics, 'to visualise anything but a coloured population in tropical Australia'. 179-180.

(8) These works include Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins Of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981) and Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987) and Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes Towards Race (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971). For purposes of clarity and brevity, I have chosen to focus on the more contemporary work of Rich and Young.

(9) Paul B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 6.

(10) Rich 8

(11) Rich 93

(12) Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)

(13) Young 5

(14) See Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971)

(15) Young 7

(16) Young 7

(17) Young 7

(18) Young 102

(19) Young 107-108

(20) Megan Stuart Mills, 'Some Comments on Stereotypes of the Anglo-Indian' (part 1) The International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies 1.1 (1996):

(21) Charles Brooke cited in Young 143.

(22) Young 125

(23) Young 15

(24) Young 15

(25) Young 15

(26) Young 15

(27) Young 18

(28) Young 54

(29) Young 60

(30) Young 69

(31) Young 64

(32) Pradeep Barua, 'Inventing Race: The British and India's Martial Races' Historian, 58(1995): 107.

(33) Barua, 110.

(34) Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) 6.

(35) Young, 7.

(36) Young 93.

(37) Young, 93.

(38) Young 9s

(39) E.B. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States: Including a Study of the Role of Mixed-Blood Races Throughout the World (Boston: Gorham Press, 1918), pp. 29-31.

(40) Reuter, 29.

(41) Reuter, 19.

(42) Noel P. Gist and Roy Dean Wright, Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially Mixed Minority in India (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973). 46.

(43) Reuter, 19.

(44) Cedric Dover, Half-Caste (London: Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd, 1937) 16

(45) Dover, 16-17

(46) Dover 163. The thesis he refers to is 'The Eurasian: A Social Problem' written by Mary Helen Lee in the Graduate Divinity School of the University of Chicago in 1912.

(47) Lancelot Hogben, Preface to Dover, 8

(48) Dover 19

(49) Dover, 21

(50) Dover 22

(51) Dover 25

(52) Dover 31

(53) Dover 47

(54) Dover 47

(55) Dover 48

(56) Dover 141

(57) Moore 96-97

(58) Rich 8

(59) Gist and Wright, 16-17. Gist and Wright identify Macrae as an Anglo-Indian writer.

(60) John Macrae, 'Social Conditions In Calcutta: The Problem For Charity Among The Anglo-Indian Community', The Calcutta Review No. 271 (January 1913): 85

(61) Macrae, 86

(62) Macrae, 89.

(63) Macrae, 90

(64) Macrae, 353

(65) Macrae, 352.

(66) Macrae, 92

(67) Macrae, 357

(68) Macrae, 357

(69) Macrae, 358

(70) Macrae, 359

(71) Macrae, 368

(72) Macrae 369

(73) Macrae, 358

(74) Macrae, 358

(75) W.H. Arden Wood, 'The Domiciled Community in India and the Simla Education Conference', The Calcutta Review, No.272 (April 1913): 111.

(76) Wood, 122.

(77) Elmer L. Hedin, 'The Anglo-Indian Community', The American Journal of Sociology 40:2(September 1934): 165-179

(78) Gertrude Marvin Williams, Understanding India, p. 167, cited in Hedin, 168.

(79) Hedin, 172

(80) Hedin 175.

(81) Hedin 176.

(82) Hedin 178-179.

(83) See bibliography for more details.

(84) Christopher Hawes, Poor Relations: the making of the Eurasian community in India 1773-1833 (London: Curzon Press, 1996)

(85) V.R. Gaikwad, The Anglo-Indians: A Study in the Problems Involved in Emotional and Cultural Integration (London: Asia Publishing House, 1967) 4-5

(86) Gaikwad, 7

(87) Everett V. Stonequist, Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict ( New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937)

(88) Noel P. Gist and Roy Dean Wright, Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially-Mixed Minority in India (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973) 3

(89) Gist and Wright, 151

(90) Gist and Wright, 26

(91) Gist and Wright 45

(92) Gist and Wright 3-4

(93) Gist and Wright, 41

(94) Gist and Wright 41

(95) The state in emphatic terms that "It would be difficult indeed to find in social science literature an array of stereotypical images as grossly distorted and misleading as the ones presented by Reuter in the guise of sociological scholarship". Gist and Wright, 46.

(96) See Michel Foucault, 'Truth and Power' in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 ( New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) 109-133.

(97) Nancy Lucille Brennan, The Anglo-Indians of Madras: An Ethnic Minority in Transition, Unpublished PhD. Dissertation, Syracuse University, 1979, 272

(98) Coralie Younger, Anglo-Indians: Neglected Children of the Raj (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1987) 3

(99) Younger, 119

(100) Younger, 121

(101) Kuntala Lahiri, 'The Psyche of a Marginal Community: Attitudes to and self-images of the Anglo-Indian', Socialist Perspective 20:4 (1992): 217-232.

(102) Lionel Caplan, 'Life is Only Abroad, Not Here': The Culture of Emigration among Anglo-Indians in Madras' , Immigrants and Minorities 14.1 (1995): 26-46.

(103) Caplan, 43.