The edifice of whiteness in British India remained complex and even contradictory during the period from 1858 to 1930. Under the Raj, the spread of racial ideologies was thoroughly pervasive, but paradoxically, or perhaps all the more for it, whiteness was never taken as self-evident whether as a concept or as a code of praxis. Rather it was constantly called into question, while its boundaries were disciplined and policed through socio-cultural and institutional practices. Only those whites with sufficient degrees of attainment in terms of social status, cultural refinement and level of educa ... More

The edifice of whiteness in British India remained complex and even contradictory during the period from 1858 to 1930. Under the Raj, the spread of racial ideologies was thoroughly pervasive, but paradoxically, or perhaps all the more for it, whiteness was never taken as self-evident whether as a concept or as a code of praxis. Rather it was constantly called into question, while its boundaries were disciplined and policed through socio-cultural and institutional practices. Only those whites with sufficient degrees of attainment in terms of social status, cultural refinement and level of education were deemed able to command the respect and awe of colonized subjects. Among those who straddled the boundaries of whiteness defined by these terms were the ‘domiciled community’, which was made up of mixed-descent ‘Eurasians’ and racially unmixed ‘Domiciled Europeans’, both of which lived in India on a permanent basis. Members of this community, or rather those who were categorized as such under the Raj, unwittingly made the meaning of whiteness ambiguous and even contradictory in fundamental ways. The colonial authorities quickly identified the domiciled community as a particularly malign source of political instability and social disorder, and were constantly urged to furnish various institutional measures—predominantly philanthropic and educational by character—that specifically targeted its degraded conditions. The prime task of Boundaries of Whiteness under the Raj is to reveal the precise ways in which the existence of the community was identified as a problem—or as what was then called the ‘Eurasian Question’—and to ponder the deeper historical meanings of such problematization itself. Through such inquiry, the book aims to demystify the ideology of whiteness, situating it within the concrete social realities of colonial history.