Who Counts as 'Native?': Gender, Race, and Subjectivity in Colonial India

Who counted as European and who as native in a colonial settlement? There was no clear-cut answer to this question, particularly in the early years of British colonial rule on the Indian subcontinent. As in other colonial contact zones, mixed-race or Creole women proved to be especially elusive to categorize and, depending on their marital and familial situations, could easily slide from being identified as European or native in the course of their lifetimes.¹ By framing this essay as a question, I want to be mindful of the ways that the question of gender and racial subjectivity was always unstable, constantly being made in response to historical contexts.

This essay depends on a series of documents written by or about mixed-race women. It argues that the ways in which these liminal subjects of colonialism were classified, both by themselves and by colonial officials, proved to be dependent on the context and demands of colonial governance. By considering the intersections between gender and ideas of racial difference, this essay examines how female subaltern subjectivity was inextricably linked to the dynamics of establishing colonial authority.² In particular, when women from Europe were relatively few in number, mixed-race women, born on the Indian subcontinent, with European names, behaviors and habits could be pressed into serving as the matrons of colonial society who upheld the presumed authority and superiority of a putatively white womanhood. When British rule became more secure, and a larger number of women from Europe emigrated, mixed-race women became less welcome in the Anglo side of the colonial settlement.

I start with an examination of the case of Harriet Birch, a woman who was allegedly abducted in 1832, and then turn to examine the lives of three mixed-race women who lived in Calcutta at the turn of the nineteenth century. In following these life narratives, I want to emphasize how porous were the categories of “native” and “white” in early colonial British India and how broad these identifying categories could be in encompassing women who had a range of racial, national, and religious affiliations. Female subjectivity in this case was made by at least two reinforcing processes: by how the women understood themselves and their social location and by how others understood the position of these women.³ Colonial racial subjectivities were especially gendered because who a woman could marry, whether she had a child out of wedlock, and who her friends and confidants were often indicated her place in the social and racial hierarchies of the colonial settlement. Her changing status was often indicated by her marital partners, as well as by her lineage and religious practices. Through a reading of the lives of four women who lived in early colonial India, I explore the ways in which ideas about racial, national, and cultural differences were worked out through the subjectivities of mixed-race women and how the articulation of these subjectivities changed to meet shifting historical imperatives.

In arranging these brief biographies out of chronological order, I hope to show that although the grammar of racial categories shifted from vague notions of “cultural competence,”⁴ in the late eighteenth century to scientific and biological notions of racial difference from the middle of the nineteenth century, the history of the subjectivities of mixed-race women has not been linear or progressive. In early colonial India, mixed-race women could be counted as European or native, depending on the exigencies of the context, and they could count themselves as occupying a range of positions in between. However, later histories, written during the colonial and postcolonial periods have serviced other demands and desires.⁵ Mixed-race women have not been allowed the flexibility of occupying multiple racial classifications and it is to this conundrum this essay turns.

“European” was the term widely used through the late eighteenth-century to mark out those arriving in India from elsewhere. European, in this usage, was associated with a culture of whiteness in which whiteness was an aesthetic that built on classical definitions of beauty and defined by a set of early modern social practices...