Distancing the proximate other: hybridity and Maud Diver's Candles in the Wind

The half-caste out here falls between two stools, that's the truth.
--Maud Diver, Candles in the Wind (45)

Miscegenation has long been recognized as one of the recurrent tropes of colonial discourse, and recent work has convincingly demonstrated that it was often enlisted in efforts to justify more authoritarian colonial rule. Critics such as Nancy Paxton and Jenny Sharpe have drawn attention to the ubiquitous theme of interracial romance and marriage in domestic fiction written by the British in India, a body of literature previously relegated to the genre of romance and dismissed as what Margaret Stieg calls "sub-literature" (3). While critics have begun to recognize that the focus of this large body of fiction on domestic arrangements expresses anxiety about interracial liaisons and miscegenation, few pay adequate attention either to the historical reality of the Eurasian community in existence during the periods they analyze or to the Eurasian characters in these works of fiction and their particular ideological function. The tendency of literary critics discussing miscegenation to categorize Eurasians and "natives" as equal threats in the domestic sphere is itself evidence of the success of this body of fiction's strategic response to historical Eurasians: the disconcertingly familiar Eurasian is converted in fiction from proximate other to distant other, thereby relocating the anxiety generated by both the uncanniness of the Eurasian and the material threat this population posed to smooth colonial rule. (1)

A deeper and more historically nuanced investigation into the Eurasian as trope and as historical reality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century offers opportunities to expand our understanding not only of the dynamics of colonial discourse but also of our current conceptions of hybridity. Maud Diver's Candles in the Wind is representative of a body of colonial fiction that constructs its images of Eurasians as being in between Indian and British culture, negating in the process the possibility of their existence as Anglo-Indian. (2) The representational strategies this body of fiction deploys in depicting Eurasians can be seen as a refusal to allow the history of the Anglo-Indian community into the official colonial narrative. Undertaking a literary analysis that examines fictional representations of Eurasians in light of the silenced history of actual experience demonstrates that hybridity is a constructed category. Furthermore, the construction of this category occurs unevenly within specific historical contexts, and its imposition on a body of people, often not by the choice of those so described, can attest to the entrenched nature of power rather than to the fluidity of identity.

Eurasians in colonial India

As with the Portuguese, Dutch, and French before them, early British colonizers commonly maintained sexual relationships with Indian women. (3) These arrangements, both informal (concubinage) and formal (marriage), were well known to colonial administrators and often officially encouraged. Anglo-Indian historian Herbert Stark, in documenting the incentives the East India Company offered to British soldiers in the late seventeenth century to encourage intermarriage, argues that the motivation behind this encouragement was only secondarily an interest in propagating Christianity in the colonies:

     The authorities of the East India Company were not slow to
     Recognize and appreciate the advantages to the company from the
     Alliances formed by their servants with the Indian women. The
     children grew up in attachment to, and in dependence upon, the
     nation of their fathers. Their mothers having been cast out by
     their Indian relatives, the children formed the beginnings of a new
     race standing in detachment from the people of the soil, and
     separated from them by speech, religion, dress, customs and
     habits--by those fundamentals which go to constitute nationality.
     (Hostages 30)

As with Thomas Macaulay's program of anglicization, proclaimed in his infamous "Minute on Indian Education" (1835), the reasons for favoring intermarriage, Stark argues, were firmly grounded in the material business of colonization: the loyalty of Eurasians to the British, in combination with their knowledge of Indian ways, conditions, and markets, made them "an invaluable asset to those whose chief concern was with the wealth to be derived from a lucrative trade" (30-31). Stark's unambiguous account reminds us that while the Eurasian community was often depicted as the outcome of the unpoliced and regrettable sexual licentiousness of British soldiers, early colonial administrators both benefited from and often encouraged these liaisons. (4)

Anglo-Indian historians characterize the period before the close of the eighteenth century as one of prosperity for Eurasians. Many held intermediate positions in the civil and military government. Fair-skinned Eurasian children of British men of means were often sent "Home" to England to be educated. Schools offering Westernized education were also established in India by the East India Company for poorer Eurasian children. By the 1770s, however, the Eurasians in India came to outnumber the British; awareness of this fact coincided with several "native" antigovernment "mutinies" in the colonies and the mulatto revolution in Haiti. Growing British anxiety about the role of the Eurasian in India was succinctly expressed by a writer in the Calcutta Chronicle in 1792: "If forthwith drastic measures are not put into operation to keep down the East Indian [Eurasian] race, they will do to the British in India what the Mulattoes have done to the Spaniards in San Domingo" (qtd. in Stark, John Ricketts 18-19). These colonial apprehensions brought an end to the period of prosperity for Anglo-Indians.