“The sins of their fathers”: culturally at risk children and the colonial state in Asia

Abstract

In contact with their foreign surroundings, European enclaves throughout imperial Asia and Africa formed new cultural communities. Nevertheless, over time as Cooper and Stoler (1997) have argued, such colonial communities became subject to the same bourgeois project as experienced in the metropolitan centres to which they remained connected. If, in terms of that project, metropolitan European society was deemed vulnerable from a brutish and unruly working class, these colonial outposts of Western society were even more vulnerable to what was deemed to be the more insidious dangers of miscegenation and cultural hybridity. Where nineteenth century educators typically suggested that working class children were “at risk” of not being able to benefit from, and simultaneously representing “a risk to”, the emerging opportunities of bourgeois capitalist society, this “risk” was accentuated in the colonies by the additional category of race. Focussing on the question of children of mixed parentage as a category of “children at risk”, this paper examines the way educationists and politicians responded to what was perceived as “civilisational decline” in four such communities ‐ the Dutch East Indies, British India, (British) Australia and French Indo‐China – to demonstrate the universality of these concerns in Imperial Asia.

Keywords:

• colonial cultures
• education
• miscegenation
• Dutch East Indies

Notes

¹ A. Stoler and F. Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a research agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. F. Cooper and A. Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56.

² A. Stoler, “Carnal knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender and morality in the making of race,” in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, ed. A. Stoler (2002) (Berkeley & London, University of California Press, 2000), 41–78, 42.

³ Governor General of French Indochina Doumer, referred to colonial officials as “the worst elements”, France’s flotsam and jetsam “on the Indochinese shores”. Quoted in V. Bang, “The Viet Nam Independent Education Movement, 1900–1908,” University of California, 1971, University Microfilms, Ann Arbor Michigan, 33. R. Twopeny, although a colonial by birth, told English readers that though eventually civilisation might emerge in Australia, currently its leaders formed “a half‐educated class, whose life has nurtured in them strong animal passions”. R. Twopenny, Town Life in Australia (1883) (Melbourne: Penguin, 1976), 93.

⁴ Stoler, “Carnal knowledge and Imperial power,” 43.

⁵ U. Bosma and R. Raben, De Oude Indische Wereld: De Geschiedenis van Indische Nederlanders, 1500–1920 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2004); C.J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India 1773–1833 (London: Curzon, 1996).

⁶ Stoler, “Carnal knowledge and imperial power,” 67.

⁷ See J. Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007).

⁸ Referring to British India, Robert Knox stated in 1850 that “separation [between the races] and purity [of race] were the sole alternative to extinction”. Quoted in Caplan, Children of Colonialism, 4. Dutch East Indies polemicist, Bas Veth, wrote in 1900 that colonial miscegenation had begun to contaminate metropolitan society. B. Veth, Het Leven in Nederlandsch‐Indië (Amsterdam: PN van Kampen & Zoon, 1900).

⁹ Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 95, cited in L. Kaplan, Children of Colonialism: Anglo‐Indians in a Postcolonial World (Berg, Oxford & New York, 2001), 5.

¹⁰ Charles Pearson, National Life and Character: A Forecast, 1893 cited in J. Tregenza, “Charles Henry Pearson, (1830–1894),” Australian Dictionary of Biography On‐line. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/adbonline.htm

¹¹ Prime minister of the newly independent state of Australia, Alfred Deakin, confidently declared that “in another century the probability is that Australia will be a White Continent with not a black or even dark skin amongst its inhabitants”. Quoted in W. Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2002), 90.

¹⁴ Alfred Deakin quoted in Anderson, Cultivating Whiteness, 90.

¹² C. Fasseur, “ Cornerstone and stumbling block: racial classification and the late colonial state in Indonesia,” in The Late Colonial State in Indonesia: Political and economic foundations of the Netherlands Indies 1880–1942, ed. R. Cribb (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994), 31–56.

¹³ See H. Reynolds, Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australian Identity (Camberwell: Viking, 2005), Ch. 7.

¹⁵ Algemeen Verslag van den Staat van het Schoolwezen in Nederlandsch‐Indië (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1863). See also Bosma and Raben, De Oude Indische Wereld, 203–210.

¹⁶ From Rapport van de Inspecteur over het Middelbare en Lagere onderwijs, 1823 cited in Algemeen Verslag van den Staat van het Schoolwezen in Nederlandsch‐Indië, 1850 (Batavia: Lansdrukkerij, 1850), 9.

¹⁷ Algemeen Verslag, 1850, 12.

¹⁸ Cited in Algemeen Verslag, 1850, 10.

¹⁹ Algemeen Verslag, 1862, 42.

²⁰ Caplan, Children of Colonialism, 2001, 37.

²¹ In the British Australian colonies, elementary school attendance for settler children became the rule by the 1870s but here attendance was made compulsory, and, as was the case of the Dutch Indies in practice, free. Exclusive church grammar schools based on the English model and state funded universities were quickly established for the well‐to‐do. “Real class”, however, continued to educate their sons in Britain.

²² H. Reynolds, North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia’s North (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003); J Coté, “Being white in the tropical Asia racial discourses in the Dutch and Australian colonies at the turn of the twentieth century,” Itinerario xxv, nos 3/4 (2001): 112–141.

²³ Quoted in Reynolds, Nowhere People, 124.

²⁴ Reynolds, Nowhere People, 161. Reynolds shows the plight of adults was effectively ignored by legislators.

²⁵ Reynolds, Nowhere People, Ch. 7. These include the Victorian Aborigines Protection Law Amendment of 1886, which came to be referred to as “Merging the Half‐castes Act” and similar acts in Queensland (1897), Western Australia (1905), Australian Territories (1912–1918), South Australia (1911–1923) and NSW (1918).

²⁶ A. Haelich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000, Freemantle Arts Centre, Freemantle 2000, 149–150.

²⁷ This was authorised by the Industrial Schools and Reformatories Act, 1865. Haelich, Broken Circles, 150. For a detailed study of the separate educational arrangements for “full blood” and “half‐caste” Aborigines in Queensland and the operation of mission schools in that colony and state see R. Kidd, The Way We Civilise (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2005).

²⁸ For a detailed study of one mission school see B. Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989).

²⁹ Fitzgerald, Big White Lie.

³⁰ Bishop Cotton, 1860 cited in Caplan, Children of Colonialism, 55, n.17.

³¹ But Caplan notes further that by the end of the century, as in the Dutch East Indies, educational authorities increasingly focused on the demands of metropolitan migrants, who “were not paid enough to send their children back home for schooling” (ibid.).

³² Algemeen Verslag van de Staat van het Onderwijs in Nederlandsch‐Indië (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1862), 42.

³³ G.P. Kelly, “Schooling and national integration: the case of interwar Vietnam,” in French Colonial Education: Essays on Vietnam and West Africa, ed. D. Kelly (New York: AMS Press, 2000), 73–106, 81.

³⁴ As in the Dutch East Indies, government provision of schools for natives was also motivated to discourage the establishment of “free schools”, that is, schools established by Indonesian and Vietnamese nationalists (Kelly, “Schooling and national integration”; M. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since 1200 [London: Palgrave, 2001], 238–239.

³⁵ Vereeniging tot Bevodering der Zedelijkheid in de Nederlandsche Overzeesche Bezittingen (Association for Promotion of Morality in the Dutch Overseas Possessions) and de Nederlandsche Vereeniging tegen de Prostitutie (Dutch Society for the Prevention of Prostitution) Een Onderzoek naar de Toestand van het Nederlandsch‐Indische Leger uit een Zedelijk oogpunt beschouwd, 1898.

³⁶ One estimate reckoned 362 of every 1000 European soldiers suffered from a sexually transmitted disease. Een Onderzoek, 1898, 113.

³⁷ Een Onderzoek, 1898, 165. Others claimed that “the demoralization of the Indies army and the Indies society, in particular the breed of Indo‐Europeans, in or out of uniform is less the result of the practice of living with a women in the state of concubinage than from clandestine visits to prostitutes, running from one woman to the next, the abuse of one women by many” (p. 135).

³⁸ Een Onderzoek, 1898, 156.

³⁹ Een Onderzoek, 1898, 69.

⁴⁰ Een Onderzoek, 1898, 156.

⁴¹ Het Pauperisme onder de Europeanen in Nederlandsch‐Indië (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1901–1902); Rapport der Pauperisme‐Commissie ingesteld bij Artikel 2 van het Regeeringsbesluit van 29 Juni 1902, No. 9 (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1903); De Staatsarmenzorg voor Europeanen in Nederlandsch‐Indië. (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1901–1903).

⁴² Rapport der Pauperisme‐Commissie, 1903.

⁴³ “Onderwijs,” De Staatsarmenzorg voor Europeanen 1903, 38. Application for remission of school fees had to be made based on parent income. The percentage of “charity cases” had increased by 257% since 1872, significantly outstripping the increase in the number of schools.

⁴⁴ The term “Indo”, an abbreviation of “Indo‐European”, was widely used in DEI as a derogatory term for Europeans of mixed parentage from the latter part of the nineteenth century to emphasise negative attributes such as dark skin colour, poor Dutch language usage or low economic position. The same term was used in British India to refer to people of mixed descent but who were socially or culturally primarily Indian oriented, although sometimes also used generically to include poor “Anglo‐Indians”. The term “Anglo‐Indian” primarily referred to people of mixed Indian and European descent but culturally European, although the term could also be used to refer to those Europeans who had settled in India as distinct from those in India for the duration of their employment only. In that sense it was equivalent to the similarly ambiguous Dutch term “Indisch”. In French Indochina, people of mixed descent were generally referred to as “colon” or “métis” to distinguish them from metropolitan “French” migrants (Stoler, “Sexual Affronts”).

⁴⁸ Het Pauperisme, 1902, Final Report, 1903, 56.

⁴⁵ See for instance A. Kidd and K.W. Roberts, eds, City, Class and Culture: Studies in Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.

⁴⁶ Het Pauperisme, 1902, 5.

⁴⁷ Het Pauperisme, 1902, 12.

⁴⁹ Het Pauperisme, 1902, Final Report, 1903, 39–40.

⁵⁰ Het Pauperisme, 1902, Final Report, 1903, 55.

⁵¹ Report of the Pauperism Committee, Calcutta, 1892. It should be noted that in the Dutch East Indies no separate official statistics were maintained for Europeans and Eurasians.

⁵² C.J. Hawes, Poor Relations; Capalan, Children of Colonialism.

⁵⁴ Minutes of Evidence, xvii. Minutes of Evidence from Robert Carbery, vice‐president of St Vincent de Paul, Report of the Pauperism Committee. Thomas McGuire of the District Charitable Society’s Alms House, however, said there was a “very clear difference between what may be called the “kinthal class” and the real Eurasian. The former were “mostly pure natives whose fathers, grandfathers or remoter ancestors were converted to Christianity and adopted European, chiefly Portuguese names. The habits of this class are very little removed from those of the native…. My opinion of Eurasians is that they are intelligent and fairly well educated but have a distaste for manual labour” (Minutes of Evidence, xvi).

⁵³ Minutes of Evidence, Report of the Pauperism Committee 1892, xiv.

⁵⁵ Report of the Pauperism Committee, 14.

⁵⁶ Report of the Charity Subcommittee, Report of the Pauperism Committee, xxv.

⁵⁷ Report of Charity Sub‐committee, Report of the Pauperism Committee, 20. This linked to Australian government policy with regard to “half‐castes”.

⁵⁸ Report of Charity Sub‐committee, Report of the Pauperism Committee, xxv.

⁶⁰ Reynolds, Nowhere People, 166. Reynolds cites from the 1932 memorandum of Cecil Cook, Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory 1927–1939.

⁵⁹ From the 1930 Report of Cecil Cook, Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory 1927–1939, cited in Reynolds, Nowhere People, 162.

⁶¹ Cited in McCallman, “Class and respectability”, 94–95.

⁶² Frank Tate, “Introduction,” in 1905 Course of Studies, Department of Education, Victoria (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1905); P. Ling, Education Policy in Australia, 1880–1914 (Melbourne: CYCS, 1984).

⁶⁴ Hicks, “This Sin and Scandal,” 146.

⁶³ Hicks, “This Sin and Scandal”: Australia’s Population Debate 1891–1911 (Canberra: ANU Press, 1978), 25.

⁶⁵ Frank Tate, “School power – an Imperial necessity,” 1908, in The Australian Government School, 1830–1914: Select Documents with Commentary, ed. A.G. Austin and R.J.W. Selleck (Carlton: Pitman, 1975).