ABSTRACT
Studies of Anglo-Indians have revealed an overlap of race and culture with definitions of whiteness and Britishness in the colonial context. Although the notion of mixed race originated in eighteenth-century theories of race and miscegenation, whiteness could be perceived as constructed, indeed, achieved, rather than biological. Whiteness and Britishness, rather than simply being, was produced through the performance of cultural and behavioural class markers rather than always being attached to a birthplace or phenotype. This chapter argues that while Anglo-Indians’ aggressive retention of European culture enabled them to stake claims to Britishness, their attempt to define themselves as a new railway caste propelled them into Hindu social hierarchies, in which mixed races have been traditionally included as avarna (‘classless’). It shows that the performance of Britishness through sports, music, dancing, and other forms of sociality, not only accorded Anglo-Indians honorary Britishness during the colonial period, but also facilitated the production of a specifically Anglo-Indian subjectivity. Anglo-Indians’ self-fashioning as a new ‘railway community’ in relation to the Hindu category of caste paradoxically betrays their ‘contamination’ by Indian social hierarchies and forms of sociality that were stigmatized by the British.
