‘A race apart’?

In the late colonial period, starting in 1858, the ‘European-ness’ of the European community in British India was not as self-evident as we all too easily tend to assume. To maintain the fiction of the community as ‘a race apart’, it was deemed important that the problematic forms of whiteness be vigilantly watched and intervened upon whenever necessary. The imperial politics of whiteness was neither thorough nor effective enough, however, leaving the European community in India visibly divided and hierarchised, with its equivocal boundaries exposed to view.