Racializing white residues: seditious Anglo-Indians and others

My dissertation interrogates the discursive residues of the Anglo-Indian question in decolonized India. To problematize these residues, I structure my dissertation as a fragmented genealogy of colonial and post-colonial perceptions of Anglo-Indians. I open my dissertation by showing how, since the late-nineteenth century, Anglo-Indians were claimed to be only of part-European racial provenance, and tautologically had their bodies deemed sexually deviant. Their bodies being, like those of their non-Anglo-Indian counterparts, in fact of uncertain racial intermixture, I argue that Anglo-Indians inhabit mongrel bodies—bodies in a state of continual flux of class and race, inhabiting a multiplicity of pluralized communities. The ethical end of the decolonized Indian nation-state, I accordingly suggest, is to facilitate the recognition of mongrelism as an inevitable phenomenon across groups—one that fractures monolithic conceptions of race and community. To flesh out this argument, I conduct readings from an archive of novels, historiographic treatises, short stories, memoirs, films, and cartoons. The figures whose texts I examine include, among others, colonial Anglo-Indian ‘prostitute’ Amelia Horne, Anglo-Indian anti-racism activist Cedric Dover, Bengali novelist Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, diasporic English writer Aubrey Menen, Indian cartoonist Mario Miranda, Bengali film director Satyajit Ray, Anglo-Indian politician and historiographer Frank Anthony, and British-Indian writer Ruskin Bond.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2018

Author dc:creator

• Chanda, Debojoy

Contributors dc:contributor

• Basu, Anustup
• Koshy, Susan
• Basu, Manisha
• Hansen, James

• Post-colonial studies
• Anglo-Indians
• sexual sedition
• the Anglo-Indian question
• mongrel bodies.

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2018 Debojoy Chanda

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101673

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/101673