Race and Power in British India: Anglo-Indians, Class and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (International Library of Colonial History) by Anderson Valerie

Author:Anderson, Valerie [Anderson, Valerie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2015-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

It is not obvious who their target audience was; Sachdeva notes that their diwans , or song-books, were popular with ‘working-class babus , munshis (clerks), railway employees and small time writers ’, but the praise of Tipu's descendant suggests a wider appeal. Gauhar Jan was recorded as an example of ‘native’ talent. British difficulties in distinguishing prostitutes from female entertainers eventually affected conservative indigenous groups who ‘began to prohibit performances by women such as the tawa'if ’. What is clear is that Malka Jan (Edilian Imangus or Victoria Hemmel) and her daughter Gauhar Jan (Angelina Eduard or Yeoward) exercised agency by immersing themselves in Indian culture and disguising their European ancestry. 58

Prostitution and Destitution

Derozio's 1827 poem ‘The Orphan Girl’ is full of language suggesting that without help a soldier's orphaned daughter would inevitably become an erring woman, wretched, scorned, and filled with sorrow, guilt, and shame. 59 He meant prostitution. How many Eurasian women followed that path in Derozio's time is unknown, but statistics for Calcutta in 1880 show that amongst 2,458 brothel keepers and 7,001 prostitutes, only 46 Eurasians and 65 Europeans were identified. 60 From the early nineteenth century, the fate of the daughters of Europeans was a grave concern. When the Company prohibited their return to Britain, the Bengal Orphan Fund managers wrote:

Almost every consideration that opposes the idea of prohibiting their removal to the Mother country, appears to claim a more than ordinary attention in the case of the female Orphans. – To excite this attention in the man of delicacy and of feeling – in the parent – or in the soldier, the bare mention of their sex must be sufficient. 61

Destitution of single European and Eurasian women was feared more than male destitution because of the risk they would become prostitutes. The prospect of native male clients was particularly abhorrent to European sensibilities. The nineteenth-century ‘Englishwoman in India’ was a performance. The obedient wife of the domestic sphere personifying a feminine and racial ideal, she was also ‘an ambassador for British imperialism’. 62 Prostitution, indeed any miscegenation involving European women, was emphatically not part of the performance. 63 The more European a Eurasian woman was, the more this applied to her too – so extended family, government-sponsored orphanages, missionaries, and church congregations mopped up poor European and Eurasian girls and women.

Until 1833, to control who could enter India, the Company required bonds of around £200. Typical amongst thousands of examples is Miss Maria Sharman, who, after posting a bond for £200 and finding two people willing to be responsible for her care and behaviour, was granted permission to travel to India in 1822. 64 India-born, English-educated, and with a brother in indigo production, she married a Company surgeon in the same year. This was the behavioural norm for European women. Those who remained single were expected to leave.

For the India-born, officers’ European orphan daughters were sent to Britain. Eurasian and European daughters of other ranks were equipped with a dowry, accoutrements for domestic service, placed as schoolteachers, or set up as seamstresses.

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