Historicizing Hybridity and the Politics of Location: Three Early Colonial Indian Narratives

1. This essay is based on seminar presentations at Macquarie University, Sydney on 17 September 2004, and at the Pigments of the Imagination Visiting Scholars Programme, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Canberra, November 2004.

Abstract

From White Mughals to Vikram Seth, novels, historical blockbusters and more nuanced anthropological and postcolonial critiques have exposed the fiction of fixed notions of “race” through sensitive understandings of the liminal space of the “inter-racial” relationship and the “mixed-race” experience. In an era where the textual and cultural production of hybridity has become a new form of cultural capital, articulations of racial “inbetween-ness” have also become somewhat universalised and romanticised. While acknowledging the radical potential of these new paradigms of transnational slippage and métissage as an affront to the old narratives of racial certainty, this article challenges the universalization of the term “mixed-race” in the context of colonial India, both ontologically and historically. By historicising cultural difference according to the social syntax that gives it meaning, it asks whether the term “mixed race” has political relevance in all colonial spaces and across time and culture or whether it needs to be interrogated as an historical product in itself. Finallly, this article turns to the politics of location in a global context to illustrate the limits of Homi Bhabha's notion of the “third space” by moving beyond celebratory and static notions of the “mixed-race” experience.

Keywords:

• Hybridity
• Eurasian
• Early Colonial India
• Global History

Notes

1. This essay is based on seminar presentations at Macquarie University, Sydney on 17 September 2004, and at the Pigments of the Imagination Visiting Scholars Programme, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Canberra, November 2004.

2. “Encouragement for Soldiers to Marry Native Women”, dated 8 April 1687, in East India Company's Despatch Books, 1626-1753, at India Office Records, British Library, London: E/3/91/fol. 290.

3. “A Court of Committees”, dated 7 November 1677, in East India Company: Minutes Court Book, at India Office Records, British Library, London: B/34/30.fol. 191.

4. “Dossier de diverses copies recentes sur la succession de Rose de Castro”, dated 11 July 1749 at National Archives of India, Pondicherry, India: Série 2/ fol. 54/ 3-45.

5. “Recensement de population de Pondichéry, 1789, 1790”, at National Archives of India, Pondicherry, India: Série 21/ 689/ fol. 73 and “Recensement de la ville blanche de Chandernagore, 1790”, at Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France: FR/ Série B/ 592/ fol. 429.

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Adrian Carton

Adrian Carton is a lecturer in the Department of Modern History at Macquarie University. He teaches in South Asian and World History and has published on Asian migration, Eurasian identity, hybridity in colonial India, world history, and sexuality in Asia