The Hierarchy-Intimacy Paradox: Everyday Politics of Non-Official Interracial Relationships in British India, 1800-1915
Authors:   , Sen Sucharita 
Published: August 2022

<p><b>The British men and women who lived in India to fulfil their imperial duties were known as the ‘Anglo-Indians’ until the beginning of the twentieth century. In the direct service of these imperial residents were the Indian soldiers, officers and servants who often shuttled between British regiments and households. The non-official relationships of the Anglo-Indian families with their domestic and regimental employees, this thesis argues, frequently featured interracial intimacies which transgressed the structural separation of colonial social frontiers. Transgressions disturbed but did not dismantle the officially prescribed hierarchies. Instead, interracial intimacies existed in tandem with imperial hierarchies. In four chapters, the thesis taps into the hierarchy-intimacy paradox of non-official interracial relationships in the everyday lives of the Anglo-Indian men and women between 1800 and 1915. </b></p>
<p>Existing literature on interracial relationships has largely oscillated between the two opposites of racial animosities and heterosexual intimacies, both of which engendered colonial anxieties. By focusing on interracial non-sexual intimacies, this thesis problematises the overemphasis on colonial anxieties. Personal loyalty and reciprocal affection shaped non-sexual intimacies, which became especially important in times of social and political disruption. Five decades into the nineteenth century, the mutiny broke out. The extant historiography has presented the Indian mutiny of 1857 as a watershed which compartmentalised colonial India into pre-mutiny and post-mutiny periods, with the latter period marked by strict racial segregation. Beginning in 1800, this thesis travels through the last fifty-seven years of the British East India Company and the first fifty-seven years of the British Raj till 1915, breaching this dominant temporal dividing line of the mutiny. The mutiny, the thesis shows, only problematised any homogeneous understanding of interracial relationships in colonial India. Interpersonal exchanges largely reflected continuity of non-official interracial intimacies amidst escalating official distrust.</p>
<p>Interracial intimacies were stimulated by the precedence of personal loyalty over ideological disloyalty, occupational ethos over primary-group solidarity and visceral emotions over conscious cognition. The thesis opens in the battlefields, forests and tramping-grounds of colonial India where, as British officers recollected throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, non-official intimacies transcended the racial distance that prevailed in the more formal official domains. Intimacies tricked into the Anglo-Indian households. The chapter trails the intimacies into the household and enters the colonial bungalow. The second chapter locates the soft edges of empire within the colonial household which was an officially regulated domestic space designed to exacerbate racial distance and serve as a locus of performance of British culture. But households hosted heterogeneous interracial relationships that unsettled official boundaries. Intimacies generally peaked in the nursery and occasionally spilled over to the public spaces. In myriad ways, Anglo-Indian residents negotiated the multiple expressions of a hierarchy-intimacy paradox determined by the spatial diversities of the domestic realms and the occupational specialities of Indian employees. </p>
<p>Within the domestic space, the categories of race, class and gender frequently intersected to send colonial hierarchies into disarray. The third chapter unravels the gendered subjugation in the household which witnessed interracial intimacies cutting across colonial fringes. British women faced passive defiance from their male servants but found companionship in their female servants. Patriarchal domination resulted in gendered discrimination, but hardly led to disloyalties. Put to test during the mutiny, the loyalty of the servants towards the imperial families remained considerably unblemished. The survival of the British women and children largely rested on these servants. In the last chapter, the thesis examines multiple stories of escape during the mutiny of 1857, exploring the enduring domestic loyalties amidst a general atmosphere of official hostilities. </p>
<p>The thesis primarily relies on personal letters, memoirs, diaries, housekeeping manuals and fictional narratives that demonstrate the complexities of affect and the diversities of lived-experiences. An analysis of photographs and paintings on Anglo-Indian lives supplements the scrutiny of written records. The thesis captures the complexities of everyday non-official exchanges, foregrounds the multiplicity of emotions in interracial relationships and complicates our understanding of race-relations in the Empire.</p>