Constructing hybridity: Eurasians/Anglo-Indians in British and Indian fiction

While theories of hybridity have proliferated in literary and cultural studies in recent years, there has been a tendency to overlook the lived experiences of those historically categorized as hybrid. “Constructing Hybridity: Eurasians/Anglo-Indians in British and Indian fiction” addresses this oversight through a historically-grounded investigation of literary representations of the mixed-race population in India in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The recovery of the overlooked longevity of the “Eurasian” as a trope in colonial and postcolonial literature of India not only adds to our understanding of British colonialism and Indian postcolonialism but also offers a valuable case-study in the limitations of current theoretical notions of hybridity.; I begin this project by demonstrating that “hybridity” as a category of racial “in-betweenness” was constructed in colonial texts, represented by the fiction of Maud Diver, in direct response to the threat that the mixed-race population posed to the British community in India; I then discuss the ways in which the transformation of the “in-betweenness” of the Eurasian into a metaphor for relations between nations and for British anxiety in the event of decolonization by British writers such as Paul Scott and John Masters relocates not only that anxiety but also the difficult political realities faced by Indians, Britons, and Anglo-Indians at Independence. Turning to the postcolonial Indian fiction of G. V. Desani and Salman Rushdie, I examine the use of Eurasians as metaphors for a universal cosmopolitan individual, the Indian nation and the uneasy place in literary history of Indian writing in English. I then conclude with a consideration of contemporary novelists I. Allan Sealy and Vikram Chandra's attempts to re-imagine the history of the Eurasian. I argue throughout that a responsibly historicized literary criticism, attentive to uneven experiences of race, class, caste and religion, is essential to a much-needed reformulation of hybridity theory as an adequate description of the lived experiences of disparate hybridities.