Racializing white residues: seditious Anglo-Indians and others

My dissertation interrogates the discursive residues of the Anglo-Indian question in decolonized India. To problematize these residues, I structure my dissertation as a fragmented genealogy of colonial and post-colonial perceptions of Anglo-Indians. I open my dissertation by showing how, since the late-nineteenth century, Anglo-Indians were claimed to be only of part-European racial provenance, and tautologically had their bodies deemed sexually deviant. Their bodies being, like those of their non-Anglo-Indian counterparts, in fact of uncertain racial intermixture, I argue that Anglo-Indians inhabit mongrel bodies—bodies in a state of continual flux of class and race, inhabiting a multiplicity of pluralized communities. The ethical end of the decolonized Indian nation-state, I accordingly suggest, is to facilitate the recognition of mongrelism as an inevitable phenomenon across groups—one that fractures monolithic conceptions of race and community. To flesh out this argument, I conduct readings from an archive of novels, historiographic treatises, short stories, memoirs, films, and cartoons. The figures whose texts I examine include, among others, colonial Anglo-Indian ‘prostitute’ Amelia Horne, Anglo-Indian anti-racism activist Cedric Dover, Bengali novelist Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, diasporic English writer Aubrey Menen, Indian cartoonist Mario Miranda, Bengali film director Satyajit Ray, Anglo-Indian politician and historiographer Frank Anthony, and British-Indian writer Ruskin Bond