Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773-1833

242 Pages·1996·8.666 MB·English

by  Christopher J. Hawes

Poor Relations
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Poor Relations
The Making of a Eurasian Community
in British India 1773-1833
CJHawes
i
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LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published in 1996
by Curzon Press
Published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
7111hirdAvenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 1996 C.J. Hawes
Typeset by LaserScript, Mitcham, Surrey
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library if Congress in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 13: 978-0-700-70425-5 (hbk)
Contents
Priface VI
Acknowledgements Xl
Abbreviations Xill
Glossary XlV
Illustrations xv
1 British Men, Indian Women, Eurasian Children 1
2 Charity and Children in Care 21
3 Eurasian Employment: A Limited Opportunity 36
4 Eurasians in the Official Eye 55
5 Towards a Reluctant Community 73
6 Eurasians Up Country and in the Indian States 93
7 The Eurasian Struggle for Self-Advancement 112
8 Political Protest: The East Indians' Petition of 1830 133
Aftermath 150
Biographical Appendix 158
Notes 171
Bibliography 199
Index 213
V
Preface
Today an Anglo-Indian community still remains in India, its
families often linked to the Anglo-Indians who left in the mid
twentieth century, at the time ofIndia's Independence, for new lives
in Britain, Canada and Australia. They are the acknowledged
descendants of the mixed race Eurasian children of the British Raj,
officially described as 'Anglo-Indian' since 1911. Their origins date
back to the first arrival of European traders in India at the start of
the sixteenth century, but their importance to the study of British
involvement in India first becomes clear in the sixty years from
1773 to 1833, when an explosion in the numbers of British
Eurasians forced their presence, their needs, and their demands on
to the social and political agenda of British India. By 1830 there
were already many more Eurasians in India than British civilians.
One hundred years later within a total of 300,000 of European
descent, (civilians and soldiers included) living and working in
India, Eurasians - Anglo-Indians - had become a clear majority of
the population of Western descent, dress, religion, custom and
life-style.! They counted themselves as members of British society
and were widely employed, albeit generally in subordinate roles, in
occupations of value to the operation of the imperial regime.
The general exploration and literature of British involvement in
India is extensive and continues still. The lives and works of viceroys,
bishops, governors, missionaries and officials have commanded
attention. So too has the relationship between British colonial
authority and Indians themselves. But Eurasians, who in their lives
were often the Cinderellas of British society, are nowadays but a
footnote to the historical account of British India. No definitive
account exists for the crucial years of the late eighteenth and
nineteenth century in which the numbers of Eurasians with British
fathers rose from the hundreds to the thousands and at whose
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Preface
conclusion they already formed, in British eyes at least, a distinct
community. Why this neglect? Perhaps an answer may be sought in
the marginality of Eurasians to the great affairs of colonial govern
ment. The working lives of many amongst them were spent in the
offices of government in the early nineteenth century and in
supervisory railway roles in the twentieth.2 The poverty of many
Eurasians was at all times a very public feature of the community.3
Undoubtedly this embarrassed the Raj then and fits awkwardly into
the British imperial story now.
There is the problem too for historians of the early Eurasian
community that, in contrast to senior British officials and soldiers,
there are no caches of letters home to their families in Britain nor
tin trunks of manuscripts brought back on retirement from India to
personalise events and policies through the experience of indi
viduals. Nevertheless a wealth of contemporary sources exists to
illuminate the circumstances of Eurasian lives, and the role ascribed
to them by British authority. Leading Eurasians of the early nineteenth
century, through petitions and letters in the English language press
of India, were vociferous in their disappointed expectations of the
role prescribed for them in the European society to which they
belonged. This book is as much about the social as the political
history of a community which formed reluctantly in response to
outside considerations rather than through its own wish. An explor
ation of the reasons underlying the facts of its development, the
conflict between the status and opportunity to which educated
Eurasians aspired and the British allowed are important aims. So too
is an examination of the lives of the historically most obscure and
inarticulate - the poorest amongst Eurasians - the children of British
soldiers. In describing the formation by the British of an unfavour
able Eurasian stereotype - amiable, but allegedly unambitious and
unfitted for major responsibility - a contrast is made between the
achievement of Eurasians in Indian states where greater oppor
tunity often existed for them than allowed in British India, pointing
to the truth that educational advantage and occupational op
portunity determine the social state of any community rather than
any other consideration.
It has been left largely to Anglo-Indians themselves to record the
development of their own community and its concerns.4 More
than half a century has passed since H. A. Stark, himself a distin
guished educationalist descended from a Eurasian family long resident
in Calcutta, published an account of the emergence of a Eurasian
community in British India. He was the first to describe its early
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Poor Relations
development, the lives of Eurasians prominent in attempting to
improve the educational and job prospects of their fellows in the
1820s, and the unsuccessful agitation of that time to gain recog
nition for Eurasians as fully British.5 His critical judgment of British
treatment of their Eurasian relatives has been widely accepted.
More recent community writers: Frank Anthony, the long term
leader of the Anglo-Indian community still resident in India, and
Austin D'Souza, have accepted and reiterated Stark's argument that
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries British policy
set out deliberately to limit and stifle Eurasian ambitions, education,
and job prospects.6 Most recently the work of Evelyn Abel, which
is of particular assistance in study of twentieth century Anglo
Indian concerns as India approached self government and eventual
independence, echoes Stark's strictures on British policy towards
Eurasians.7
The Anglo Indian historians of the 1930s and 1940s on whom
we must still depend for most of what is publicly known of the
development of a Eurasian community in British India had their
own political agenda. It was to hold on to areas of public service
employment traditionally reserved to the Eurasian community. The
proposals of the Montague-Chelmsford commission in 1919 to ad
vance Indianisation of government employment rang alarm bells in
the Anglo-Indian community. Moves in the 1930s towards repre
sentative government for India threatened even greater competition
for Anglo-Indian men, for whom public service was the largest
employer.8 Although the Eurasian activists of the early nineteenth
century had failed to achieve their goal of parity with British
nationals in India, from the late eighteenth century onwards
Eurasians had always received a significant measure of economic
protection. It was in this context that prominent Anglo-Indian
historians sought to stress the British debt to their loyal community,
to re-emphasise their Britishness, and attack past British policy
towards them. Their agenda was political as much as historical.
Anglo-Indian criticisms of British policy deserve an impartial
examination, as do British actions and the motives which inspired
them. To attribute them to racial discrimination alone - present
though it undoubtedly was - would be unduly simplistic, for the
emergence of a sizeable Eurasian population in British India forced
colonial authority to consider the issues which it raised. How were
Eurasians to be catered for in education and employment? Were
there enough jobs for their rising numbers? Were they natives of
India or British, or somewhere in between? Could a large resident
V1l1
Priface
population of European descent, as events in other colonial regimes
suggested, pose a threat to stability and order? How far was general
policy, even when discriminatory in theory, modified in practice by
officials in India?
The years between 1773 and 1833 were critical to the British
role in India. They were the years in which it expanded rapidly from
a primary purpose of trade to paramountcy amongst the conti
nent's ruling powers. Sixty years of rapid transition changed the
political map of India irreversibly, engaged the British Government
in supervision of the vast territorial holdings of its agent, the East
India Company, and raised new and complex problems in the
government of a distant continent. A feature of these years was the
replacement of the free-wheeling British trader/ administrators of
earlier years by a new breed of salaried officials imbued with the
concept of a civilising British mission, a necessary rationalisation of
their exercise of political power. This was thought best to be
achieved by the exaltation of British 'character', the public display
of Christian virtue, and social distancing of a ruling caste from those
whom they ruled.
These events, and changing concepts of acceptable British social
behaviour in India, swept up Eurasians almost accidentally into
their consequences. It was not that a Eurasian population was a
novelty. The colonial rivals of the British, Dutch, French, and the
Portuguese particularly, had generated their own mixed race popu
lations. From the very earliest days of a British presence in India
there had always been a Eurasian population of British stock,
though few in numbers. Its dramatic increase, already causing
concern to British authority by the 1780s, directly and primarily
related to the influx of British soldiers required to support the
expansion of British interests in India.'1 The Eurasian 'problem', as it
became, was thus essentially of military origin. As the numbers of
British born Eurasians rose from hundreds to thousands - 20,000 is
tentatively estimated by the 1830s - questions of 'class' as well as
'race' arose. Whilst there were many Eurasians who were the sons
and daughters of military officers and covenanted civil servants, by
far the most were the children of 'poor whites' - the military rank
and file. A distinction in the treatment of Eurasians was clearly
drawn between the education and employment appropriate to the
Eurasian children of British 'gentlemen' - civil servants and
officers - and the children of ordinary solders drawn from the
poorest social classes of their mother country.
By the 1830s the social place of Eurasians in British India had
IX