The Meaning of White: Race, Class, and the ‘Domiciled Community’ in British India 1858–1930 by Satoshi Mizutani (review)

As its title suggests, this interesting and enjoyable book revolves around the term “white,” identified as implying “European descent, English language, and Christianity” (1). In India, none of these securely or exclusively matched white. I believe the term (meaning European) was first recorded at the end of the seventeenth century. A hundred years later, it was still uncommon among Britons in India. However, they made free with the terms “Black” and “Blackey,” basking in a so-called superiority of birth and culture. The concept “white man” gained prominence during the nineteenth century, presumably as an antonym for Black, applied to American Indians and other colonized peoples, as well as African slaves. Only the New Zealand pakeha seem to have adopted a local term for themselves. The cultural resonance of white thus owes little directly to its figurative meanings (pure, innocent), but much to the supposed degeneracy of other races.

Satoshi Mizutani’s account, focused on Calcutta, is about “poor whites” and mixed races, anomalous because white was supposed to mean dominant and Europe-born (2). Respectability, vigour, and ethical conduct defined an elite whiteness against lower-class Europeans and natives. The book makes good use, among other studies, of Ann Laura Stoler’s arguments about the colonial and socio-economic origins of race-consciousness, an evolving symbiosis with bourgeois class-awareness. My view is that misconduct by elite whites, whether explained by degeneration or not, also sharpened this construction of identity. There were practical, self-interested reasons too for discrimination in favour of the England-educated. In any case, as Mizutani shows, the result was a critique of the poor whites and the supposed effects of miscegenation and Indian experience. The low-class India-born Europeans and Eurasians could not be turned British by education in England; firmer racial categorization was anyway making that more difficult.

Positives were evoked. “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), as Rudyard Kipling put it, was to “send your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need” (l. 3–4); and fine qualities were attainable by non-whites. In another poem of Kipling’s, the heroic water-carrier Gunga Din, “for all ‘is dirty ‘ide,” “was white, clear white, inside” (l. 44–45). Britons, who feared the malign effect of the tropics, sought to regenerate those of European descent, born in India, who suffered in their domicile and domesticity. Mizutani recounts such impulses for improvement, implying not only exclusion by inherited characteristics and degenerative practices, but also inclusion by acquired merit and virtue. Heredity and environment intertwined, a discourse inhabited by the spirit of Henry Maine (though Mizutani is curiously silent about him, and says almost nothing about law). Typical of the muddle was that some evoked the environmental argument only for children with a European inheritance.

The book’s thematic organization limits the attention to change over time. It also makes relatively little of the poor whites’ Christianity, and makes few comparisons with similar so-called ameliorative efforts on behalf of Indian Christians— adivasis (tribals), dalits (untouchables), or criminal tribes. It provides little of the general context; nor does it study the developmental excuses for colonial rule. But supposed whiteness did define a category of people to be improved. We come to the obsessive definition of communities in nineteenth-century India. Those who regarded themselves as domiciled British, Eurasian, or Anglo-Indian could not also be Indian, by categorization and lifestyle.

In the later nineteenth century, the problem for many such people was seen as poverty, investigated by public or private inquiries in 1892 and from 1918 to 1919; analogies were made with the urban poor in England. Parallel equations of low-class and native inferiority are well known, as Mizutani notes. At least two complications exist. First, whatever the similarities, the race question remained, as was evident for the poor whites. Secondly, the outrage...