Dislocating The Dislocated
Imperial Constructs in Maud Diver’s Candles in
the Wind
By Cheryl-Ann Shivan
All over the world there have been discrete communities that
have uprooted themselves, or have been forced to do so, from their motherlands
for several reasons. In the earliest days of displacement, commerce was the
motivating factor but, later and more importantly, came the competition for
colonial domination. Hence, large communities migrated first, as trader, and
then as ruler, slave or indentured labourer to the New Colonies being set up by
European masters from as far back as the late 16th century.
The result of colonization was miscegenation and a new
community called the “Anglo-Indian” emerged in India as a result of
British-Indian confluence. The Constitution of India 1949 has defined this
community in the following terms:
…an
Anglo-Indian means a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors
in the male line is or was of European descent but who is domiciled within the
territory of India and is or was born within such territory of parents
habitually resident therein and not established there for temporary purposes
only….. (as quoted in 9)
The Anglo-Indians – or, as they were formerly termed,
‘Eurasians’ – have been in existence since the end of the 16th century. But it
was only by the end of the 1800s, because of certain events and ideologies that
marked the century, that they began to feature as characters in works of
English fiction. The end of this period in Britain saw the flourishing of
Imperial theories, for while the British had long practised attitudes of
Imperialism, a theory of the same gained official recognition only in the
1890s. Such theories, especially with regard to race and power, were carried
over to India and, since they were to the advantage of the white race, were
adopted, practised and propagated. The continued expansion of the British
empire supported Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest, as did the law
of natural selection uphold the racial purity of the Anglo-Saxons – a tenet
firmly held by the English. Such theories were detrimental to the well-being of
the other non-white races, and were particularly intolerant towards
‘half-castes’.
Maud Diver’s Candles in the Wind, a romance novel
written in 1909, will be examined to prove how prejudices were formed against
the Eurasian community, prejudices that were committed in literature and
thereby immortalized for posterity the belittlement of a whole community of
people, all in an effort to play out the authenticity of the Imperialist
theories to which the greater majority of the British population gave
credence. Further, novels like Diver’s
were read by succeeding generations of British coming to India, serving as
resource books to shape opinions even before actual experience was encountered.
Since fact must necessarily precede fiction, a short history of the community
will prelude a discussion of Candles in the Wind.
British-Indian miscegenation began almost as soon as the
first known Englishman (but not the first European), a Father Stevens, arrived
in Goa on 4th April 1579. He was
followed by four others, one of whom, called Leeds, settled in Goa, married an
Indian woman and opened a shop. The founding of the East India Company on 24th
September 1599 in England resulted in a steady flow of Englishmen into India,
where the East India Company established settlements for purposes of trade. The
presence of women in such settlements was anathema to the Company, and so in
those early days British women never made the trip to the sub-continent. But
since the natural instincts of their men had to have an outlet, they were
permitted to have relationships with the local women. However, when
prostitution resulted in the men contracting diseases that crippled many, more
permanent alliances, either through marriage or concubinage, were encouraged.
Such families were even granted a gift on the baptism of their Eurasian child.
The willful act of creating a new community was perceived to have advantages.
The Eurasian was to forge a link between the white man (who if a resident in
India began to call himself Anglo-Indian) and the native. For, being born of
racially different parents he embodied two races and could potentially bridge
the gap between merchant and native, ruler and ruled as the case may be. Hence in the early days of colonialism,
maintenance of racial purity was not a criterion in transcontinental
relationships.
In India, the Eurasians held important positions in the East
India Company and proved to be more loyal to their white families than to their
native ones. This was inevitable because such children were brought up along
British lines at home, without much influence from the Indian side of the
family, for the Indian woman who defied her family and community to marry an
outsider was ostracized by both. Further, these children were often taken away from
their native mothers and sent to England for their schooling. Those who
couldn’t afford to send their children abroad, packed them away to orphanages
for education.
Removed from closer ties with the mother race, the Eurasians
were more European in thought, religion, speech and dress. The Englishman, on
his part, was quite indulgent towards the Eurasian till around the latter half
of the 1700s, by which time the number of Eurasians far outnumbered the
British. A little later, news of the mestizo uprising in Haiti slowly reached
India, causing fear among the rulers who realized that this might be their
fate, too, if they did not impose restrictions on the Eurasians. To this end
they adopted policies to render Eurasians totally insecure. They hired and dismissed
them at will, and blocked the advancement of these men into the commissioned
ranks. The new ambivalent attitude adopted towards the Eurasians resulted in
great financial losses, reducing many to the state of pauperism. But more than
the monetary deprivation, these people underwent the unmitigated trauma of
rejection from a well-loved parent. From a position of equality, they were
rudely shifted to an ‘in-between’ state, the British recognizing the English
strain when it was beneficial to them and at other times distancing themselves
from them so completely as to categorize them with the ‘natives’.
In the social arena, the British continued to marry Indian
and Eurasian women. But everything changed after the Suez Canal was opened in
1869, greatly shortening travel time between England and India, and allowing
ship loads of English women to make the journey. With the availability of more
women of their own race, the British started discouraging further marriages
between their men and native and Eurasian women. Racial differences once
accepted without question or condescension were now the reasons cited for
prevention of further inter-racial marriages.
The arrival of Englishwomen saw a tremendous increase in the
number of Romance novels, with India as the ‘locus amoenus’, being written and
published. [Editor’s note: locus amoenus is Latin for ‘perfect place’, a
literary term generally referring to an idealized place of safety or comfort,
or a pastoral place with connotations of Eden.] These novels were in popular
demand, for they incorporated Imperial ideas in romance fiction, thereby
lending credibility to fantasies. Since these Imperial ideas fashioned
Victorian thinking it was not surprising that they found their way into the
writings of the time. Pertinent to this discussion are the books written before
the two wars. Writers who included Bithia Mary Croker, Alice Perrin, Flora
Annie Steele, E. F. Penny and Maud Diver wrote from the experiences they
themselves underwent, and their novels evince their rather ‘neurotic concern
with protecting their identity from pollution by strange, unwholesome and
deviant India’. (Benita Parry, quoted in 1). Much more than their male
counterparts, they were interested in exploring the inter-racial romances
between British men and Indian women. Particularly interesting was the Eurasian
community, for this section constituted a tangible danger to the European
community because it held the power to blur distinctions and transcend the
carefully constructed barriers between them and the pure bloods with their
ability to ‘pass’ as European.
Maud Diver’s creative corpus of fictional and non-fictional
work numbers almost 30, with several of them dealing with the theme of
hybridity. Candles in the Wind is
perhaps the most representative. At the time of writing, the Eurasian
population was already an established entity and, through the novel, Diver
tries to convey the folly of inter-racial marriages. The Eurasian’s ability to pass
as British is both threatening and destabilizing and, by portraying them
as more representative of the Indian race, Diver attempts to dislocate them as
far as possible from anything white and thereby to indirectly deny them their
right to claim kinship with the British.
The dislocation attempted by Diver is not physical but
mental. There is no attempt to circumscribe the Eurasians in a location with
physical demarcations. In fact the novel evinces the contrary. Psychologically,
however, they have been categorized by the white man as an ‘in-between’ entity
and the novel’s motif is to achieve an uprootment even from this position to
relocation to the Indian extreme. ‘In-between’ would make accessibility more
facile, removal would negate their claims to links with the white rulers, make
associations more difficult and further miscegenation, hopefully, an
impossibility. The title Candles in the Wind thus becomes a metaphor for
the gradual disappearance of the community. Like a flaming candle that in windy
surroundings will melt down quickly, the Eurasians if continually made to
endure the changing winds of opinion and prejudice will eventually disintegrate
and merge into the larger Indian community.
The tone of the novel is set with Laurence, the white
protagonist’s definition of the Eurasian.
…the half-caste out here falls between
two stools, that’s the truth. He has the misfortune to be neither white nor
brown: and he is generally perverse enough to pick the worst qualities of the
two races, and mix them into a product peculiarly distasteful to both…..Clever
enough, some of ’em: but there’s a want of grit in their constitutions,
physical and moral. It’s a bad business all round; the mixing of brown and
white races in marriage. (p.45)
While the definition, unwittingly given to Lyndsay Videlle,
the white wife of the Eurasian doctor James Videlle, fixes the Eurasian’s
present social standing it also blames him for the position he is in. He is unfortunate not to belong to either
side but the misfortune is credited to his own making – “…he is generally
perverse enough to pick the worst qualities of the two races…” The statement
makes it seem like the Eurasian had a choice in determining his racial make-up.
“Clever enough some of ’em …” is designed to substantiate Dr. Videlle’s position
as a doctor, yet having given credit, it is immediately retracted with, “…but
there’s want of grit in their constitution, physical and moral.” Throughout the
novel we are shown instances of the varied weaknesses inherent in Videlle’s
character.
Since the white man’s contribution to the genesis of the
Eurasian race cannot be denied, Diver seeks to justify early miscegenation.
Lyndsay’s repulsion to white men marrying ‘the sort of women one sees around
here’ prompts Laurence to go once again into an explanation:
And
they don’t now; at least not one in a thousand. But in the Mutiny days, or
earlier, when men were stuck out here for half their service, it was another
matter. One cannot blame them. It is not good for man to be alone. But their
descendants have had to pay heavily for that simple fact. It’s not race
prejudice that puts one off……It’s the fatality of mixing such mighty opposites
in marriage; and the white man’s distaste for the half-breed all the world
over. I can’t stand them. (p.p.45-46).
The “It is not good for man to be alone” part echoes the
Bible and thereby condones the action of the white man. However, while they are
absolved of their supposed fall, the resultant Eurasian has to pay for his
father’s faults. But most rankling of all is, “One cannot blame them,” and as
Loretta Mijares rightly asks, “Then whom are we to blame?” Laurence feels he
has to defend his statement by claiming that he and his countrymen are not the
only ones prejudiced against hybridity, “…the white man’s distaste for the
half-breed all the world over” is intended to excuse and explain his attitude:
“I can’t stand them.” As such, Laurence indicates that he is quite fond of the
Indian, but it is the Eurasian, who refuses to be content with his new
location, that earns his hatred. So naturally, the “mixing of brown and white
races in marriage” becomes “bad business” as such unions would increase the
number of half-castes with the deceptive ability to pose as European. Here it
is worth recalling the order passed against Eurasian children being sent ‘home’
(to Britain) for education for, once there, with their particular
indistinctness (which would however be recognized in India) they would
ultimately contract marriages with ‘unsuspecting’ English men and women and produce
half-blood off- spring, thereby causing a degeneration of the pure race.
Fear of continued race-mixing prompts the need for further
distancing and hence the focus is shifted to highlight the Indian in the
Eurasian through his life-style and behaviour. Since the novel includes only
two Eurasian characters, the manifestations of their personalities are taken to
be representative of the community as a whole. Irrespective of the fact that
almost all Eurasians are Christians, attention is drawn to their non-Christian
mothers. Diver uses the occasion of Lyndsay’s enlightenment to her husband’s
Eurasian identity to drive home the divide between the whites and the natives.
The “pride of race that burned in her life a steady flame” causes her to smart
under the sting of the revelation that she is married to a half-caste:
…the
mother of the man she called “husband” had been no Spaniard but a Hindu; a
woman born in the smoke-grimed squalor of a native hut: reared in an atmosphere
of ignorance and superstition;… (p.64)
Nowhere do we actually get any concrete evidence as to the
real identity or religion of Videlle’s mother. But by emphasizing the mother’s
religion, and by associating her with poverty, ignorance and superstition,
Diver conveys the idea of the other supposedly inferior race that formed part
of Dr. Videlle’s genetic make-up, the part that proved more dominant in Videlle
and was manifested by his lie, his melancholy and his “aloofness of the
Asiatic”.
Lyndsay’s marriage to James is however a reality and must be
explained. James’s apparent slyness in concealing his Indian streak is
contrasted with Lyndsay’s naivety, and the success of his repeated proposals
attributed to the emotional instability she underwent following the death of a
beloved father, with Diver all the while asserting, “Lyndsay Videlle was not
genuinely in love with her husband; though she had married him in that belief
seven months earlier…”(p.59) The readers are therefore given to understand that
a white woman, with all her faculties intact, would have perceived the
difference between herself and a half-caste and would never have entered into
such a repulsive union. Moreover, the
Eurasian with “…the crooked pride of his kind”, which stifles demonstrations of
affection and understanding of English womankind, cannot be expected to sustain
such a marriage. Videlle’s maintenance of his widowed half-sister, Carrie
Vansittart, and her son Montgomery is because “… the Hindu strain in his blood
accepted her right to live under his roof as a matter of course. It was
‘dastur’ (custom)…” (p.84), and Carrie’s behaviour and Monty’s lack of
schooling and familiarity with the servants “…suggested a more vital connection
with the country than mere living in India could explain” (p.64) Later, on the announcement
of her pregnancy, James Videlle’s eagerness in catering to his wife’s comforts
evokes the comment,
Had
she realized how typically Asiatic was his change of attitude – his respect,
bordering on worship, for Woman, the Life-Bringer, the mother of men – the
knowledge might possibly have checked her impulse towards closer union. (p.152)
Other typical Indian qualities are indicated through Carrie’s
letter containing “voluble condolences” at the birth of a daughter and her opinion
that Lyndsay had failed “in a wife’s first duty to her husband.” “That was
Carrie’s Oriental way of looking at it”(p.217). In spite of Diver’s repeated
references to the Oriental in James and Carrie, nowhere do we read about their
socialization with any other community but the whites – Diver’s overt attempts
to prove that such Asiatic qualities were a result of strong heredity factors
rather than aspects acquired through association with the environment.
Since the Eurasian embodied so many Hindu qualities his
removal to ‘in-betweenness’ is justified and further relocation is desired, for
the divide created by racial differences cannot be bridged by pretensions to
Europeanness. As Videlle is representative of ‘his kind’, then all Eurasians
are to be treated in like manner. They are to be distanced or relocated to the
Indian side. Such a relocation is to be effected in their psyches. The
relocation had already been executed in the mind of the white man but was
having apparent difficulty in taking root in the Eurasian’s. Furthermore, as a
punishment for having dared to transgress the line of divide and defying
relocation, he has to die so that the white hero, the white woman’s soul mate,
can take his place.
As the novel progresses towards its conclusion, with Lyndsay
playing the Victorian ‘angel of the house’ in contrast to Videlle, who has the
propensity to read “an ill motive into the simplest act”, we realize that the
Videlle marriage is also heading towards disaster. The union, contracted in deception
between two most unsuitable partners, must necessarily end so that a more
appropriate one between two pure bloods – as per the natural law of things –
can materialize. Videlle must therefore be sacrificed at the altar of prejudice
so that Alan Laurence, “wholesome and refreshing”, can take his place. To this
end Videlle must therefore be stripped of all virtues and shown to be what he,
according to the white man’s reasoning, has to be, which would make his exit
all the more justifiable. To them, he is not a white man, only a pretender.
For the Eurasian, life took an unexpected, bitter turn from
the late 1700s. The unwarranted change in attitude towards his kind produced
complexes not easily cured, and further dislocation attempted during the
Imperial tide threatened to obliterate the existence of such a community by
categorizing them as fully Indian. The earlier displacement transpired as a
result of political policies formed out of a fear of usurpation by the
ever-growing Eurasian population. The second, and more earnestly sought-after
re-displacement, a hundred years later, was born out of hatred for a class of
people whose hybridity threatened the new-fangled theories of racial
superiority and purity. The danger, as perceived by the new racists, existed in
the perpetuation of this community and a permanent transplanting to the Indian
side appeared to them the best solution.
Diver’s prejudice against inter-race unions is not unique to
her. Kipling, F. E. Penny, and Flora Annie Steele have all dealt with
inappropriate inter-racial marriages/liaisons by working out the
death/sacrifice of the Indian or the Eurasian as a means of terminating
unwholesome relationships instead of the other way round. The white man ‘goes
native’ because of the circumstances in which he finds himself, the Indian has
a choice, but the Eurasian, the fruit of willful act and option, is the fall
guy. He is to be despised because he represents the outcome of lust, feared
because he has the deceitful ability of ‘passing’ as either race, and must be
relocated in an effort to maintain racial purity.
The despicable attitude adopted towards the Eurasian was a
19th century Imperial phenomenon, and the novels written with the purpose of
decrying the folly of inter-racial alliances ultimately served to legitimize
British Imperialism.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aziz, Khursheed Kamal. The
British in India. A Study in Imperialism, New Delhi: Indian Institute of
Applied Political Research, 1988.
Ballhatchet, Kenneth. Race,
Sex and Class under the Raj, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd.,
1979.
Bandyopadhyay, Debalina. The
Woman-Question and Victorian Novel, Ideology, Society, Law and Literature,
Kolkata: Renaissance Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2002.
Diver, Maud. Candles in
the Wind, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1912.
Hsu-Ming Teo. Romancing
the Raj : Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels, History of
Intellectual Culture, 2004, Vol.4, No.1.
Islam, Shamsul. Chronicles
of the Raj: A Study of Literary Reaction to the Imperial Idea towards the end
of the Raj. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1979
Kincaid, Dennis. British
Social Life in India, 1608-1937, India: Blackie and Son, 2nd Edition, 1973.
Mijares, Loretta M. Distancing
the Proximate Other : Hybridity and Maud Diver’s Candles in the Wind,
Twentieth Century Literature, Summer 2004.
Vellinga, Eric. Pride
and Prejudice. Anglo-Indians and Racial Attitudes in India. 1857-1920. M.A.
Thesis, Department of History and Arts, Erasmus University, Rotterdam,
August,1994.
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Cheryl-Ann Shivan (nee Brown) is an Anglo-Indian who works as a
Selection Grade Lecturer at a College of Education in Pondicherry, South India.
She has an MPhil in English Literature and a Masters Degree in Education, and
is now working towards a PhD in English at Pondicherry University. Her area of
specialization is Anglo-Indian literature, with special reference to
Anglo-Indian women, as both writers and characters, featuring in works written
about the community. She can be reached at: cherylshivan@gmail.com