“You are an Anglo-Indian?” Eurasians and Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children |
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Volume 38, Number 2 (April 2003)
pages 125-145
DOI: 10.1177/00219894030382008
The term “Anglo-Indian”, emerging as early as 1806, originally referred to the British in India. In India today, however, the term is universally understood to refer to the mixed-race descendants of British-Indian liaisons. In between these two historical markers lies a complex history of changing notions of racial mixture and affiliations with colonial power. At the same time, the “half-caste” has been a perennial figure in colonial fiction, and continues to appear regularly in contemporary Indian writing in English. Discussion of the literary figure of the half-caste, however, has taken place (if at all) by and large in the absence of any acknowledgement of the history of this community. A literary analysis of the “half-caste” attentive to this history offers valuable lessons about the usefulness and limitations of such theoretical notions as “hybridity” by calling attention to the shifting historical valences of literal experiences of hybridity. As a case-study in such an approach, this essay examines the role of racial mixture in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, with due attention to the Anglo-Indian community in India. This reveals how racial mixture in the literary imagination often becomes a metaphor for something else, and in this process of metaphorization is alienated from the history from which it originates. This process has parallels in literary theory: theoretical abstractions such as hybridity have become rarefied and need to be reconnected to their geographical and historical contexts if they are to retain any efficacy in explaining the processes of identity construction they claim to describe.
In India, the mixed-race population was known as “Eurasian”, with “half-caste” as a derogatory term. By the late nineteenth century, however. “Eurasian” had likewise accumulated a pejorative connotation…
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Tags: Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Loretta M. Mijares, Loretta Mijares, Salman Rushdie, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature