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Project MUSE - Who Counts as 'Native?': Gender, Race, and Subjectivity in Colonial India
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Browse>History>JournalofColonialismandColonialHistory>Volume6,Number3,Winter2005

WhoCountsasNative?:Gender,Race,and
SubjectivityinColonialIndia
DurbaGhosh
Who counted as European and who as native in a colonial settlement? There was no
clear-cut answer to this question, particularly in the early years of British colonial rule
on the Indian subcontinent. As in other colonial contact zones, mixed-race or Creole
women proved to be especially elusive to categorize and, depending on their marital and
familial situations, could easily slide from being identied as European or native in the
course of their lifetimes.1 By framing this essay as a question, I want to be mindful of
the ways that the question of gender and racial subjectivity was always unstable,
constantly being made in response to historical contexts.
This essay depends on a series of documents written by or about mixed-race women.
It argues that the ways in which these liminal subjects of colonialism were classied,
both by themselves and by colonial ofcials, proved to be dependent on the context and
demands of colonial governance. By considering the intersections between gender and
ideas of racial difference, this essay examines how female subaltern subjectivity was
inextricably linked to the dynamics of establishing colonial authority.2 In particular,
when women from Europe were relatively few in number, mixed-race women, born on
the Indian subcontinent, with European names, behaviors and habits could be pressed
into serving as the matrons of colonial society who upheld the presumed authority and
superiority of a putatively white womanhood. When British rule became more secure,
and a larger number of women from Europe emigrated, mixed-race women became less
welcome in the Anglo side of the colonial settlement.

Journalof
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andColonial
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Volume 6, Number 3,
Winter 2005

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I start with an examination of the case of Harriet Birch, a woman who was allegedly
abducted in 1832, and then turn to examine the lives of three mixed-race women who
lived in Calcutta at the turn of the nineteenth century. In following these life narratives,
I want to emphasize how porous were the categories of native and white in early
colonial British India and how broad these identifying categories could be in
encompassing women who had a range of racial, national, and religious afliations.
Female subjectivity in this case was made by at least two reinforcing processes: by how
the women understood themselves and their social location and by how others
understood the position of these women.3 Colonial racial subjectivities were especially
gendered because who a woman could marry, whether she had a child out of wedlock,
and who her friends and condants were often indicated her place in the social and
racial hierarchies of the colonial settlement. Her changing status was often indicated by
her marital partners, as well as by her lineage and religious practices. Through a reading
of the lives of four women who lived in early colonial India, I explore the ways in
which ideas about racial, national, and cultural differences were worked out through the
subjectivities of mixed-race women and how the articulation of these subjectivities
changed to meet shifting historical imperatives.

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In arranging these brief biographies out of chronological order, I hope to show that
although the grammar of racial categories shifted from vague notions of cultural
competence,4 in the late eighteenth century to scientic and biological notions of racial
difference from the middle of the nineteenth century, the history of the subjectivities of
mixed-race women has not been linear or progressive. In early colonial India, mixedrace women could be counted as European or native, depending on the exigencies of the
context, and they could count themselves as occupying a range of positions in between.
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However, later histories, written during the colonial and postcolonial periods have
serviced other demands and desires.5 Mixed-race women have not been allowed the
exibility of occupying multiple racial classications and it is to this conundrum this
essay turns.
European was the term widely used through the late eighteenth-century to mark out
those arriving in India from elsewhere. European, in this usage, was associated with a
culture of whiteness in which whiteness was an aesthetic that built on classical
denitions of beauty and dened by a set of early modern social practices that prized
itself on certain modes of comportment, governance, and dress.6 Like European or
white, native, was a highly constructed category, malleable according to the specicity
of the situation and context.7 Although native was often a shorthand and imprecise term
to describe men and women of a wide range of ethnic, racial, and religious
backgrounds, the term native woman represented the category of indigenous and
colonized subjects who were doubly likely to be marginal and oppressed.

Racial Crossings: Race,

Intermarriage, and the
Victorian British
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Ieremia Salesa
(review)

As scholars have shown over the last two decades, throughout the nineteenth century,
colonial societies encouraged and promoted the status and performance of so-called
white women in order to hold up these women as superior in comparison to native
women.8 On arriving in India, women of European descent were made into good
bourgeois subjects as efcient homemakers, tidy, disciplined, and organized, while
embodying physically fragility, and worthy of (white) male protection from the
deleterious effects of tropical climates, disease, and the sexual advances of native male
inhabitants.9 Made white through a constant and unrelenting defense of their sexual
purity, chastity, cleanliness, and fair complexion, women who arrived from Europe on
the Indian subcontinent from the eighteenth century onward represented some of the
most powerful images of whiteness under colonialism. A crucial symbol of the racial,
class, and moral superiority of British rule, European women were often dened against
their native counterparts in that they were presumed liberated, free, for instance, to
choose their husbands, to be seen in public, and so on.10
In contrast, many historical accounts gure native women as nameless, secluded,
distinctly unfree in a society that was seen as despotic.11 Often kept in purdah, or in
seclusion, the lack of public visibility for indigenous women on the Indian subcontinent
was an important sign to Europeans of the ways in which indigenous women were
constrained and of the capacity of European colonialism to rescue them. The
construction of the backward native woman rationalized particular types of colonial

Gender, Morality, and

Race in Company
India, 17651858 by
Joseph Sramek
(review)

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intervention.12 Debates about sati, or widows burning on the funeral pyres of their dead
husbands, identied in the earliest travel accounts, then again prevalent through the
1820s and 1830s and emergent over a century and a half later, focused the European
imagination on the horrors of being an Indian woman, subject to the inhumanity of
suicide by re.13 Indeed, the downtrodden and depressed condition of indigenous
women in India gave rise to a particular colonial fantasy that Gayatri Spivak identied
as White men are saving brown women from brown men.14
The binary between native and European has been somewhat productive in helping to
dene gures in both categories and yet it is crucial to historicize the emergence of
racial subjectivities. In the early years of British rule in India, from about the middle of
the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, Britons observed a wide range of
variations between native and European.15 The link between complexion or color and
racial identity was one that emerged toward the end of this period, in the middle of the
1800s. But until then, ideas about savagery, comportment, religion, parentage, and
education were all important factors in delineating difference between those who were
considered European and those who were considered natives. Cultural performances,
rather than innate biological differences, determined racial belonging and so ones racial
condition was changeable, rather than permanent.16 In this early period of Anglo-Indian
relations, racial identity could be yoked to religion and nationality and was not
biologically determined. The idea of mixing blood and tracing biological lineage was
elaborated after the middle of the nineteenth century that merged with ideas of
polygenesis and the argument that races were different species.17
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By tagging their subjects as either European, British, (which were the preferred
terms to denote whiteness in this period) or native, colonial ofcials selectively
homogenized the identities of these subjects, thus erasing or smoothing over their
various afliations and purifying them of any hybridity. In an era in which the idea of
India had not been clearly articulated and Britain had only come into being,
dening who was British and who was not was a crucial component of colonial
governance in extending or limiting for whom the colonial government was
responsible.18 Indeed, there was little discursive or legal space for imagining a mixedrace subject who might be part British, part native. Although the status of a British
subject was partially a matter of dening legal subjectivity and the governments
jurisdiction, this concern spilled over into dening personhood in national, religious,
and racial terms. Being British often meant white and Christian (which might mean
Protestant or Catholic); being Indian meant being not white, either Hindu or Muslim,
perhaps a Portuguese Catholic or collah feringee, or black foreigner to denote those
descended from Europeans who had lived on the western coast of India for several
centuries, in Goa and environs.19 This aggregate and broadly construed category of race
developed and generated some of the distinctions and homogenizing characteristics of
colonial governance that became more marked and prevalent after the middle of the
nineteenth century.20
Debates over who was a British subject lay the foundations for an increasingly raceconscious colonial government that followed the Indian Mutiny in 1857 after which the
British crown formally took control from the East India Company in managing the
British dominions in India. Elsewhere, I have argued that the East India Company state,
through several charitable institutions, attempted to manage the sexual and familial
practices of its employees by excluding non-white subjects from receiving nancial
benets offered by the Company. Even when native women were longtime companions
of British men, the Company refused widows pensions on the grounds that they were
not of European extraction, or that they had not been legitimately married in a church.21
From who their parents were, to whether they were Christian converts and had been
legitimately married in an Anglican church, native women were subjected to a series of
tests to determine whether they should be counted as native and or as European,
and whether they should benet from the nancial provisions offered by the Companys
political and legal authority in its Indian dominions.
In these early evaluations of what constituted a British subjectivity, as opposed to a
native one, the colonial government and its ofcials vacillated, and in the process
showed that such designations were at the heart of establishing colonial authority.
In February 1832, Harriet Birch, daughter of an indigo planter named Stephen Birch,
paid a visit to her fathers old friend, the nawab of Farrukhabad, in the Gangetic plains
of the Upper Provinces of India, and confessed that she wanted to marry him and
convert to Islam. Nineteen years old, she had been raised a Christian and educated in the
British colonial settlement of Calcutta. Several days later, Harriets father led a
complaint with the local magistrate against the nawab claiming that the nawab had
abducted the young girl and forced her to convert.
When the nawab, Sirbuland Khan of Farrukhabad, wrote to the governor-general of
India, he claimed that he been falsely accused. The nawab described the events in a
different way: the young woman had willingly come to him, offered herself in marriage,
and professed the desire to convert to Islam. As the nawab described it, by the tenets
of her religion as well as by law she was at liberty to marry as she pleased. The nawab
noted that the young womans father, Stephen Birch, had been a close friend to whom
the nawab had lent large sums of money when the indigo business had been in a slump.
Following the allegations of abduction, the nawabs lands and property had been seized
by the local British magistrate and the nawab was left without any resources. The nawab
complained that the local cotwal, or constable, had shouted these false accusations
throughout the city, accompanied by the loud beating of a tom-tom drum and these
actions had tarnished the nawabs name and reputation among the local populace.22
Colonial administrators noted, with some alarm, that the matter was one of
considerable importance, and that the ofcials involved should proceed cautiously,
following the letter of the law and behaving with guarded delicacy for the feelings of

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the Party accused.23

As the dispute unfolded over the next few months, the legal, racial, and national
status of Harriet Birch, the young woman at the center of the controversy, were key
coordinates for the ofcials who debated what punishment, if any, the nawab should be
subject to. Of particular concern was whether Harriet Birch was a British subject,
whether she was, legally speaking, a minor, and whether she should be allowed to marry
a native man who, although a loyal ally of the East India Companys administration,
was an unsuitable husband for a young British girl because he was a native Muslim.
Correspondence between ofcials at the level of the local magistrate in Farrukhabad all
the way to the governor-general of India based in Calcutta showed the ways in which
the affair between Harriet Birch and the nawab was of crucial signicance in dening
the political and moral authority of the colonial government. In this case, the question
focused on which colonial subjects the government was obliged to offer its protection
the loyal ally or the British girl and her father and what kind of protection these
subjects could expect. As the nawab noted, his family had had treaties with the British
for over three generations and had always conducted themselves in accordance with
British political aims.
Stephen Birch, the indigo planter, argued on the other hand, that the alleged sexual
violation, alongside the coerced religious conversion and abduction of a putative
Englishwoman was not consonant with the British governments political goals, nor
with its claims to higher moral authority. In demanding the governments intervention,
Birch drew on many logics to make his case. First, that his rights as a father had been
abridged by the abduction of his child; second, that the colonial government had
suffered injury by losing one of its young women to a native Muslim; and nally, that
the virtue of a young woman of European descent had been violated by allowing her to
remain in the home of her seducer. Guided by the assumption that fathers (and
husbands) had the legal right to control the sexuality of female subjects, and that it was
the governments responsibility to enforce these rights, Birch claimed that the nawab
had violated both the Birch family and the government. Indeed, as the magistrates
understood it, the legal statute that might be applicable to the case specied that the
abduction of legally minor or married women constituted an injury to the patriarch of
the family and the state.24
In the case of Harriet Birch and her alleged abduction, ofcials were very careful to
parse the question of her parentage, in determining whether she should be removed
from the home of the nawab. By parentage, ofcials referred to her ancestry and
whether she could be accorded the privileges of a British subject. Although Harriets
father claimed that she was Christian, having been educated by a missionary in Calcutta
for nine years and subsequently baptized and conrmed, the acting magistrate, F. J.
Shore questioned whether this was true. Shore noted that Harriet was born to a native
woman who was not married to Mr. Birch. Moreover, Stephen Birch himself was the
son of a European and a native woman who had converted to Christianity. Although
Stephen Birchs parents had been married in a church, making him legally legitimate,
his daughter, Harriet was the offspring of unmarried parents, one of whom was not
Christian. This was an important element of the case: the calculus of parentage, which
was the term colonial ofcials of this period used, showed that Stephen Birch was half
European, and his daughter was thus a quarter European and three-quarters native.
Although the language of blood or fraction was not used, this judicial discussion over
the racial identities of Harriet Birchs parents was resonant with contemporaneous
discussions elsewhere about mixed-blood offspring and the level to which they
belonged to their parents ethnic and racial communities.25 The question of marital and
natal legitimacy, seemed less relevant, although ofcials took note of the issue:
Stephen Birch was seen to be legitimate in that his parents had been married; Harriet
Birch was considered illegitimate because her parents were not married. To further
validate Mr. Birchs biological and social proximity to natives, ofcials noted (and the
nawab conrmed) that Mr. Birch been habitually friendly with natives in the area in
which he lived, implying that his prolonged intimacy with the natives, however
platonic, had invited such a sexual relationship into his family.
At the time of the kidnapping, Harriet was 19 years and 7 months old, making her an

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adult if she was categorized as a native, a minor if she was considered a British subject.
The case had been brought under Regulation 7 of 1819, section 2, in which girls under
the age of 15 were considered minors. This age barrier applied to native girls, following
the advice provided in the late eighteenth-century translations of the Laws of Manu,
which were the foundations for laws applying to Hindus. Under English common law,
women were not considered adult until they were 21, which was the argument that Mr.
Birch had relied on in demanding the colonial governments intervention. As Radhika
Singha has noted, it was taken as axiomatic by colonial ofcials that native women
ripened very early, and were sexually advanced in comparison to European women.26
Paradoxically, this meant that in colonial legal terms, native women, who were
ordinarily cast as backward and without personal liberties, achieved sexual and legal
majority earlier than European women. Even though native women were, in the peculiar
logic of the colonial legal system, considered legal subjects who had the ability to
consent to sex and marriage at a younger age than their European counterparts, the
presumed backward status of native society diminished the possibility of native women
enjoying such rights. As later discussions over colonial reforms of native practices
involving child marriage, the age of consent, and debates about widow remarriage
would demonstrate, Indian women were seen to have few rights and privileges when it
came to making their own sexual and marital choices.27
As Shore speculated in this particular case,
The question therefore seems to be is Miss Birch to be considered a Native of India, her parentage would
probably decide in the afrmative, and if so, I conceive the whole case must fall to the ground, and she must
be allowed to follow her own inclinations. But in consideration of her religion and Education it may perhaps
be deemed proper to take the English Law and Custom in view, and consider her as a Minor until she may
have completed 21 years of age, in which case, I conceive the Regulation above would apply.28

Although Shore took account of her upbringing as a Christian woman trained to

expect the protections of the English common law, he noted that Harriet had attended
the judicial proceedings, sitting in purdah, and made no objection to any part of it.29
Her presence in the court was required by the magistrate, and although she did not
testify, her silent action was represented in the colonial archives as her voice being
heard.30 Within days, ofcials in Allahabad who were overseeing the case, ordered that
all charges be dropped and that the young woman be released from the courts
surveillance. They noted that she was nearly twenty years old and had never claimed
that she was abducted, but had claimed that she had gone willingly. More important,
since Harriet had been married under Muslim law, the court had overstepped its
jurisdiction in ordering her to appear before the court, possibly offending the peculiar
prejudices of her new religion in making her show herself in public.31
Harriet Birch remained with the nawab. This released her from her fathers claims
that she was a British subject and allowed her to move from her fathers household to
that of her Muslim husband. As a case of the exchange of a woman, the transfer of
Harriet Birch demonstrates the ways in which gender structured and shaped markings of
racial difference.32 Having converted to Islam, she was allowed by the colonial
government to have the legal protections of a native woman living in purdah. She and
the nawab had a marriage that lasted at least a decade, because when Stephen Birch died
in 1844, he left Rs. 5000 to each of his three daughters. Harriet, wife of Nawab Sir
Boolund, received her bequest on account of her children, while the eldest two,
Mary Anne and Rose, received their bequests with no stipulation, suggesting that
Harriet had been cast out of the family because of her conversion. Birchs eldest sonsin-law were both English, and military ofcers in the East India Companys native
infantry, showing the way in which the Birch family tree branched toward the different
limbs of the Anglo-Indian colonial community.33
The resolution to this case dramatized the various coordinates of Harriet Birchs
gendered subjectivity religion, ancestry, age, education, parentage. Ofcial attempts to
categorize who she was British or native in order to administer her particular
situation show the ways in which the colonial government was continually in a process
of attempting to understand its legal and political authority over a diverse eld of
subjects. Rather than being marked as Christian/British/white, Harriet Birch was
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reclassied as Muslim/native/nonwhite showing that the tags white or native stood

as proxies for a whole list of identications that were not only about color or racial
difference but about training, behavior, and aspirations. The case of Harriet Birch is
striking because of how she moved between these two subject positions in colonial
society. By marrying, she showed that (at least at this particular historical moment) that
her racial, religious, and national afliations could change.
The outcome of the Birch case, in which ofcials allowed Harriet to remain in
purdah, dramatize that there were signicant obstacles to allowing her to become legible
to the government as a British subject. One crucial issue was her parentage and whether
she could be treated as a British woman whose sexual virtue had been violated. A
related issue was her fathers parentage and whether his status as an indigo planter
trumped the social and political status of the nawab, whose cooperation was necessary
to the Company. Although the balance between these issues was never made clear in the
deliberations, it was apparent that ofcials were reluctant to intervene in such a way to
disrupt their alliance with the nawab. In the careful investigations of the case, ofcials
repeatedly made reference about ensuring that legal regulations and norms were
followed scrupulously so that even if it was found that the nawab had illegally abducted
Harriet, his followers would not nd cause to rebel.
This was an unusual case because it focused on a case of interracial marriage and
conjugality between an indigenous man and a putatively white woman. Claiming that
his daughter had been enticed and abducted by the nawab, Stephen Birch implied
that a sexual coupling between a white woman and a native man was only possible if
the woman was duped or coerced. By invoking a broader colonial fear about sexual and
social disorder brought about by interracial sex, Birchs complaint rested on a colonial
logic that assumed that white women were desirable to native men making them
behave in violent and uncontrollable ways but that white women could not and did not
reciprocate or experience desire themselves.34
Through his appeal to the government, Stephen Birch sought the governments
intervention in returning his daughter to her family, thus restoring his paternal authority
as a British male subject to decide the fate of his children. When the dispute was
ultimately decided, ofcials determined that Harriet Birch should not be considered a
British subject and could not be restored to the legal and social protection of her fathers
home. Instead, by the logic of the colonial judiciary, Harriet Birch was understood to be
a native female subject who was Muslim, under seclusion, and notably, insufciently
white to be counted as a sexually immature English girl whose body required the
protection of her father or the colonial government. Her situation was particularly
gendered in that the key question rested on which of these men, her father or her
husband, could be charged with protecting her from being sexually violated. Although
no mention of the word race was ever made, the dispute rested on understanding her
biological ancestry and the degree to which this affected her gender and legal status.
The case of Harriet Birch occurred in the context of a wider concern about the status
of mixed-race individuals. By the 1830s, mixed-race Eurasians, also known as East
Indians, had encountered various obstacles to achieving social, political and racial
equality with Europeans in India. The middle-class offspring of European men and
native women became politically involved in petition drives, press campaigns, and
lobbying efforts in Britain to demonstrate their desire and ability to govern India on
behalf of the British. Throughout their agitations, they remained committed to the idea
that in spite of their parental extraction, other markers of social distinction, such as
education, comportment, dress and religion should allow them to occupy positions of
authority as honorary whites in colonial society. They failed in these efforts when
Parliament upheld the prohibitions of Eurasians holding covenanted ofces in the civil
and military services, kept them from serving on juries reserved for British subjects, and
decided that native Christian converts would be treated as Indians in the legal system,
not Britons.35
These campaigns were led by men, and the prohibitions against Eurasians
participating in the governments bureaucratic and administrative structures was largely
targeted at mixed-race men, whose social and political aspirations the government
hoped to contain. Mixed-race women, on the other hand, found it easier to blend into

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British society because so many succeeded in marrying newly arrived British men. Until
1810, mixed-race female orphans were encouraged to marry men in the military service,
because it provided these young women with nancial security and the soldiers with
someone to take care of their domestic needs. After that, marriages between mixed-race
women and British men continued, as witnessed by the case of Harriet Birchs two
sisters, thus enabling some mixed-race women to move into British circles.
In contrast to the East Indians demands to be considered British, what was unique
about the case of Harriet Birch was that she demanded to have the government honor
her conversion to Islam and her change in status from the daughter of a British subject
to the wife of a native one. She did not challenge the idea that she was legally
dependent on a man, but her father challenged the idea that a native mans authority
might supersede that of a British one, invoking a battle between different types of
colonial masculinity.36 When Stephen Birch accused the nawab of sexually violating his
daughter, his ability to control her sexuality (as well as her right to choose a different
religion) became a barometer of Stephen Birchs racial and legal status as a white, male
British subject. The magistrates recognition of Harriet Birch as a native female was
enabled by her parentage, which was only partially European, and the legal result
(without being explicitly stated) diminished Stephen Birchs claims to Britishness. In
the end, allowing Harriet Birch to remain a Muslim was not difcult given that
classifying her as a British subject would have been hard to rationalize in the logic of
this particular bureaucracy.
Throughout the early colonial period, the British government debated whether and
how to include mixed-race men and women into the colonial establishment. Although
by the 1830s, the antipathy to acknowledging mixed-race subjects as British was more
clearly articulated in ofcial records and edicts, in the early years of the Anglo-Indian
encounter, when the British were establishing their presence in India, mixed-race
women were often at the center of social life in Calcutta, playing the part of local
matriarchs. In the late eighteenth century when there were relatively few women
coming to India from Europe, daughters of Englishmen and local women became wives
to European men. They established households and families that behaved in a European
manner, attending church, wearing European clothes and eating European foods
imported from abroad. In India as elsewhere in this period, by marrying European men,
some mixed-race women could be categorized as socially white, participating fully in
the social circuits of the British colonial community.37 As Thomas Williamson
famously remarked of this period, there were only about 250 European women for 4000
male civil servants and countless more soldiers, making marriage between social and
racial equals a difcult possibility. Thus, some men married mixed-race women or
entered into concubinage arrangements with native women.38
When women from Europe became relatively more plentiful, particularly after 1800,
the requirements for what counted as white became narrower and mixed-race women
found it harder to nd marriage partners among Britons in the East India Companys
covenanted service, a relatively high-ranking position both in Britain and in India. As
the East India Company expanded its territorial dominions in India from the battle of
Plassey in 1757 onward, anxieties about who was white and who was not quite white
enough to become part of the ruling group permeated debates about the boundaries of
British governance and Britishness itself.
By marrying European men, mixed-race women cemented their ties to the Europeans
of the colonial settlement and formed an early image of respectable womanhood that
became the core of a bourgeois and white female ideal in later years. According to
Williamson, marriageable men included men who could afford to support a wife, in a
suitably appropriate middle-class and British way by providing a house, servants,
particular types household goods, and so on.39 Notably, the highest ranking men
married women from Europe or in Europe, while men lower down on the social scale
married the mixed-race daughters of prominent ofcials. Men with relatively less social
status, such as commissioned ofcers in the army, were encouraged to marry mixedrace female orphans, but this was only allowed until the 1810s.40 In the next section of
this article, I want to examine the experiences of several women of mixed descent who
lived in Calcutta in the late eighteenth century and explore the ways in which their

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status in colonial society relied on their construction as white, rather than native, and
how this was achieved by their marital and conjugal practices.
In moving backward to the late eighteenth century, the stories of the remaining three
women suggest that the racial and sexual politics of the early Company Raj were more
permissive, open-minded, and tolerant than they later became, particularly after the
1830s.41 This narrative partially explains how and why women of mixed-race descent
managed to participate in European colonial society and maintain intimate relationships
with European men. The racial subjectivities of mixed-race women seemed particularly
exible, however, as I argue below, there were limits to how acceptable mixed-race
women ultimately were as wives to the European men who were expected to act as the
pillars of the colonial establishment.
Mary Carey was best known as a survivor of the Black Hole incident in 1757 in
which over a hundred Englishmen, women and children were reportedly imprisoned in
Fort William by the nawab of Murshidabad. Counted as an Englishwoman, Mary
Careys imprisonment helped to justify the Companys response to the nawab, which
was to ght the nawabs armies at the battle of Plassey and decisively earn the right to
claim Calcutta for the British. Sophia Yeandle was another of these early gures: when
she died in 1778, she called herself the widow of Matthew Yeandle and the mother of a
girl who was the natural child of Henry Verelst, previously a high-ranking civil
servant in Calcutta. The house she owned in central Calcutta on Chowringhee was next
door to a home once owned by Warren Hastings, the rst governor-general in Calcutta,
and rented by Mahomed Reza Khan. The last woman I will discuss is Frances Croke,
who also went by the name Begum Johnson, and was married to four European men in
the colonial settlement. Her estate grew to such a signicant size that it was protected
by the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement. These three women, with European names
and attachments, resided in close proximity to Europeans, socialized and beneted from
European nancial and social networks, and represented themselves as Europeans by
taking on the names of their male protectors.
While the histories of Mary Carey and Begum Johnson are relatively well-known, the
life of Sophia Yeandle was much less remarkable, but nonetheless instructive. Her
biography shows how a relatively anonymous mixed-race woman negotiated the racial
and sexual politics of her day. In her will, Sophia Yeandle described herself as a widow
living in Calcutta. She had an estate that included two houses in Chowringhee,
Company bonds, some cash, jewelry and personal effects, which she left to her daughter
Ann. Ann was named as Yeandles daughter by Henry Verelst, who had once been the
governor of Bengal (1767 1769), an important gure of the East India Companys
establishment.42 At the time of Sophia Yeandles death in 1778, her daughter, Ann, was
not yet 21 so the estate was left in the hands of a local Englishman, David Kullican,
who had also served as Henry Verelsts executor. In addition to several smaller bequests
to a godson, her servants, some friends, Sophia Yeandle freed her two female slaves,
Belinda and Ilona, and gave them fty rupees as their bequest. Identifying herself as
Catholic, as many women of mixed parentage did, she left a small bequest to the
church.43
When she was the single mother of a mixed-race child (albeit one whose father was
very prominent) Sophia Yeandle married Matthew Yeandle, the jailer at the Calcutta
prison. But the Yeandles did not have a conventional, or perhaps even legitimate,
marriage: When Matthew died (several years before Sophia), he noted in his will that he
had a lawful wife in England who has behaved inappropriately and a wife now
with me, Sophia. Moreover, he felt that Sophia had an ample fortune independent of
meI therefore think she does not stand in need of my assistance.44 Matthew Yeandle
made bequests to the children born of his wife who was in England Matthew who was
then in Calcutta, and Mary who was residing in England but he acknowledged no
stepchildren or other parental responsibilities.
Sophia Yeandles marriage, however it was observed, solemnized, or legalized
gave her the privilege of taking Matthew Yeandles name, perhaps improving her
somewhat less-than-respectable status as an unmarried mother. Becoming Yeandles
wife socially elevated her from the mistress to the wife of an Englishman, even though

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Matthew Yeandle, the jailer, lacked the social credentials of the governor-general.
Sophias premarital conjugal relationship with Verelst did not preclude her marrying
later, however, she married someone of signicantly less social status, demonstrating
perhaps that while she was adequate as a sexual mistress to a high-ranking civil servant,
as a mixed-raced woman, she could only aspire to marry a European of lower status.
While Sophia Yeandle was clearly a woman of some property, with connections to the
colonial community of Europeans in Calcutta, the ways in which she narrated her past
in her will show a woman who was balancing her racial status and social status,
particularly as this status was expressed through the men with whom she had been
attached.
The marital and sexual histories of Sophia Yeandle and Mary Carey share some
important commonalities: they both adopted the names of their British husbands,
erasing the names they had at birth, and moved into the putatively white community of
their male partners. They were both also involved in conjugal relationships that were
not legalized and solemnized by marriage, a sign perhaps of their sexual independence,
but also perhaps a sign that they were not socially eligible partners for men who could
opt to or afford to marry European women. In spite of their similarities, Sophia Yeandle
and Mary Carey were different. As a relatively anonymous gure, Sophia Yeandle only
represented herself in the archives, fashioning a self that was consonant with how she
wanted to be presented. Mary Carey was a much more historically famous gure, whose
subjectivity was constructed by herself and by others, thus emerging in fractured forms
in the archive.
When Mary Carey died in 1801, she left behind a will in which she briey narrated
her life story. Although she died as a woman of some property, owning several houses,
company bonds, jewelry, and a substantial amount of cash, she emphasized she had
been made destitute over the events surrounding her multiple imprisonments and had
had very few possessions or resources. The whiggish personal narrative recounted in her
will was built on tropes of discipline and determination. She had been the wife of
Captain John Carey, in the sea line, and living at Fort William when it was taken over
by Siraj-ul-dowlah, the nawab of Bengal. Her husband, son, mother and sister had died,
while she had lived and had subsequently been imprisoned in Murshidabad in the
nawabs household, where she remained until he was deposed by the British and
brought to Calcutta. Her release had been secured by Robert Gregory, who had been a
friend of Governor Vanisttarts and she had been set up in a house in which she had
resided for over thirty-ve years. She wrote, I must further, tho with great sorry and
reluctance, declare that I fell a sacrice to the inclination of my said benefactor, Mr.
Robert Gregory, by whom, I had two sons, namely William and George Gregory.
Robert Gregory had returned to England, and both sons had spent some time there.
William lived in England and George was in Bengal.45 In detailing her relationship with
Robert Gregory, Mary Carey noted that he had purchased her house for her and had
settled a monthly subsistence allowance on her but delicacy prevented my requiring
from him at his departure the account of the money, and the title and deeds of the house
in question
Mary Careys confession of her relationship with her benefactor and her claims
of delicacy over the issue of money suggest that her conjugal alliance was a matter
that caused her some embarrassment. We can only speculate that the relationship was
worthy of comment in her nal testament because they did not marry, which would have
legalized her ownership of the house he purchased for her and sanctied their conjugal
alliance and the birth of their sons. She nonetheless acknowledged Robert Gregory as a
tender father and as a gentleman possessed of liberal and rened sentiments, when
she prevailed on him to continue to watch over their sons.
Whatever the reason for her admission, Mary Careys will showed that she had
formed social obligations beyond her ties to Robert Gregory and their sons. In addition
to the provisions made for her sons, their wives and children, Mary Careys bequests
were to men and women with Portuguese names, suggesting that they were mixed-race
subjects born of Portuguese fathers and native mothers, her servants, and her
godchildren. She even made a donation to the orphans at Bandel, a Catholic church
on the opposite side of the Hooghly River from where Mary Carey resided. Living
among a diverse and multicultural population, she shows herself to be especially

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cosmopolitan in her circle of friends and condantes, while her access to a range of
people demonstrates that perhaps she was not sequestered from Indian society as many
European women of this era were.
At her death, Mary Carey left behind a household that can only be described as
hybrid in its contents, containing items that were prized among Europeans living in
Calcutta and other items that were primarily in use by elite Indians. In her everyday life,
she had been lived between two cultures, observing a range of social and cultural
practices involving dress, food, and aesthetic consumption. Some sentimental objects
were distributed to her closest friends and relations (petticoats, shawls, diamond
jewelry) and many of her household effects were sold. Her executors auctioned off brass
pots and pans, several hookas, silver snuff boxes, miniature portraits of nawabs and
princesses of Hindustan, and other desirable goods that were produced and used in
India; as well, her estate included a Wedgwood teapot, silver cutlery such as knives,
forks and spoons, porcelain plates and bowls, silver chang dishes, trays, European
prints and a dining table.46 At the auction of her effects in April 1801, a range of British
and Indian men bid on her goods, including the two men who rented her houses,
Nilmony Mitre (Mitra or Mitter?) and Lochun Tagore.
Mary Careys will and inventory describe a woman as she wanted to be seen by
others, particularly in her old age. But she had another historical persona, one in which
her subjectivity was constructed by the demands of explaining and rationalizing the
dramatic pace of British expansion in Bengal from the middle of the eighteenth century
onward. John Holwells famous account of the Black Hole incident described her as
country-born, young and handsome. He represented Mary Carey as a target of
sexual violence for native men in the narrative of siege, capture and imprisonment of
Englishmen, women and children that helped to justify the East India Companys
takeover of the Bengal administration in 1756.47 Yet, as Betty Joseph recounts, Most
English accounts concur that before the siege of the fort was under way, all the English
women and children had been sent off to safety on a ship downriver. Now we nd that a
half-caste woman, Mrs. Carey, was left behind. Although her lineage did not get her a
place on the ship, it was sufcient, it seems, to earn her the sole place in an allegorical
tale of native violence against Englishwomen.48
Mary Careys marital and racial status were crucial coordinates for how she has been
written and rewritten into history. Because Mary Carey was married to a soldier who
was charged with protecting the fort, she was incorporated into the British community,
even as her parentage barred her deserving the protection offered to the other women
who had been sent away earlier. Holwell, who wrote in the immediate aftermath of the
Black Hole incident, cast Mary Carey as loyal because she stayed by her husbands side,
and recast her as an idealized white woman who was brave, true, and whose sexual
honor needed protection by the further intervention of the East India Company. The
imagined sexual threat to Mary Careys body consolidated a colonial social contract in
which a putatively white womans sexual violation constituted a violation of a collective
European masculinity.49
In later accounts, Mary Careys status as a white female survivor of the Black Hole
and a captive of the Muslim rulers of Bengal was questioned. Mary Carey was
memorialized in Busteeds late nineteenth-century account of the late eighteenthcentury colonial settlement, Echoes of Old Calcutta. In Busteeds telling, the
establishment of British dominance involved in part an ideology of the protection of
women from the marauding armies of the Bengal nawabs. Notably, Busteeds account
cited a meeting with Mary Carey in 1799 that described Mary as being of a fair
Mesticia colour, highlighting her status as incompletely white.50 In Busteeds 1882
account and in Bucklands subsequent dictionary of notable gures published in 1905,
they noted that Mary Carey had been liberated by British forces after the Black Hole
and had not been further imprisoned in the nawabs household, as she had claimed in

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her will.51 Although Bucklands entry was brief, his telling of Mary Careys life showed
the ways in which the subjectivity of Mary Carey shifted as Britains expansion into
India solidied and the demands put on the telling of particular types of history
changed. However crucial the narrative of Mary Careys imprisonment was in the
eighteenth century, both Busteed and Buckland were careful to diminish Mary Careys

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experience as a European female captive, perhaps as a way of signaling that this claim
was no longer necessary to sustaining and rationalizing British intervention and
expansion as it had been in Holwells time.
Part of a larger movement to record the history of the British empire in India,
Bucklands dictionary was compiled at the height of the British Empire in 1905. It
carefully recorded the lives of important gures in the history of British India, among
them, Mary Carey, but made no note of minor gures such as Sophia or Matthew
Yeandle, or even Robert Gregory, Mary Careys benefactor. Bucklands revision of
the Mary Carey story was specic to a historical context in which the British empire
ruled over a quarter of the worlds population and had no need to recruit mixed-race
women into its history. In the nal section of this essay, I will return to how yet another
womans racial subjectivity was recalibrated, at the end of the twentieth century, in
order to service a different set of historical imperatives.
The narrative of the female captive is one that has proved enduring, if only to
demonstrate the mettle of European women, and their abilities to negotiate difcult and
dangerous situations.52 Also reportedly imprisoned by a nawab of Bengal, Begum
Frances Johnson, nee Frances Croke, or Crook, (depending on the spelling) was not
unlike Mary Carey. Born at Fort St. David in Madras in 1728 to a high-ranking British
merchant and a woman named Isabella Beizor, a purportedly Portuguese woman,
Frances married in quick succession two men who died within ve years. At age 20,
she married William Watts, a high-ranking East India Company merchant who was
stationed outside Murshidabad at Cossimbazar. After the death of the nawab of Bengal,
Aliverdi Khan in 1756, who had cooperated with the Company, the position of the East
India Company changed and the companys commercial prosperity was threatened.
Ofcials within the company were drawn into in a succession battle among the former
nawabs household members.
When William Watts refused to retreat from the Companys position, the newly
installed nawab imprisoned Watts, his pregnant wife, Frances, and their three children.
The Watts family were held captive for over a month in June 1756, with Frances and the
children kept in the apartments of the nawabs mother, Amina Begum, with whom
Frances had become close. Due to this friendship, the nawabs mother interceded and
they were released. From captivity in Murshidabad, the Watts family was transferred to
the French fort in Chandernagore, where Frances reportedly gave birth to her fourth
child and was reunited with her husband.53
After their imprisonment at Cossimbazar, the Watts family lived briey in Calcutta
and, in 1759, moved to Britain, where Frances had never been, although she identied
as European. The Watts family resided in Britain for the next ve years, during which
time, their eldest daughter Amelia married Sir Charles Jenkinson, who was then a
member of the royal guards and would eventually become the Earl of Liverpool. Their
son, Robert, would later become prime minister in Britain. When William Watts died in
August 1764, Frances returned to India, reportedly to settle his estate, but implicitly
because she had never been comfortable in Britain.54 Her return to India was, in some
sense, a return home, where she had been born and where she remained for the rest of
her life.55
In 1774, nearly a decade later, Frances Watts married the chaplain at Fort William,
William Johnson, who was notably both less wealthy and younger than Frances. In
order to protect Francess estate and keep it intact for her children and grandchildren,
Johnson signed the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement which specied that he would
receive Rs. 40,000 at her death and that he could make no further claims on her estate.
Reverend Johnson, by all accounts, was an ineffectual and lazy chaplain, although he
did oversee the building of St. Johns Church in the old burial ground. By 1787, the
Johnson marriage was declared at an end, and Frances offered him a settlement and an
annuity, with which William Johnson returned to England in 1787.56 Frances was 59
years old and never married again.
By the time Frances Johnson died in 1812, she had become a well-known hostess and
gure on the Calcutta social circuit. The story of her life has been most recently

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narrated in a pamphlet published by the British Association for Cemeteries in South

Asia (BACSA), an organization of Britons who had once lived in India. According to
her biographer, she delighted in telling and retelling the story of her imprisonment in
Cossimbazar and of her close friendship with the nawabs mother, Amina Begum,
which resulted in her release. It was reportedly this close relationship that led to her
friends referring to her as Begum Johnson.57 Her funeral was a grand affair that
brought many of Calcuttas most prominent men and women, including the governorgeneral, Lord Minto, together to celebrate the passing of a great life.
In spite of her biographers vociferous claim that she was most certainly not mixed
race, other histories argue that Begum Johnsons mother was Indian, which would
make Frances Johnson of mixed extraction.58 There are various signs that she might
have been mixed-race: Begum, was a title used to denote Muslim noblewomen;
perhaps it was offered to her because she behaved as and looked like a begum.59
Although she was a wealthy young widow aged 36 when she returned to Calcutta,
Begum Johnson spent a decade nding a husband and then married someone with
signicantly less wealth and social standing, which suggests that her desirability as the
wife of a European man had declined. As in the case with Mary Carey and Sophia
Yeandle, Begum Johnsons ability to marry respectably within colonial society
diminished as the East India Companys involvement in Bengal grew.
In raising the possibility that Begum Johnson was mixed-race, I want to speculate
why it might be important to afrm her whiteness in two historical moments: at the time
of her death in the early nineteenth century and at the end of the twentieth when her
biography was produced.
In a long and detailed list of bequests, Begum Johnsons will reads like a social
registry of her relations and friends and their high-ranking and visible locations in
British, imperial, and Indian society. Her will was careful crafted to reect the
community of a woman who constructed herself as European, which was expressed
largely through her afliations and bequests.60 She noted that she was leaving behind a
substantial estate of land, houses, property, and government and East India Company
bonds and her survivors included two children, and eight grandchildren. Her two sonsin-law had been at one time, the earl of Liverpool and the governor of Barbados. By the
time her will was led, her eldest grandson, Robert, was the prime minister of Great
Britain and the heir to a third of the estate (the other two thirds were bequeathed to
Frances Johnsons surviving son and daughter). Among her close friends were Henry
Russell, then the Chief Justice.61 Notably, she made no provisions on her will for her
dozen slaves and made little acknowledgment of an adopted daughter who had
previously been an illegitimate mixed-race orphan girl named Betsy. Although Begum
Johnson had eight grandchildren, her grandson, the prime minister, had a privileged
position in the will, marking out her relationship to Britain and afrming her racial and
national status. Even though she was born in India, and had found living in Britain
difcult, as the ancestor of the prime minister she presented herself as culturally and
racially white.
In writing Begum Johnsons biography, Ivor Edwards-Stuart explained that she was
his great-great-great-great grandmother through his mothers side.62 Born in Australia
in 1914, Edwards-Stuart was educated at Sandhurst and then joined the British imperial
army, working rst in the northwest frontier province of India and later in Burma. After
the independence of these two nations, he went to the middle east as part of Britains
security forces. A member of an empire family, in Elizabeth Buettners evocative
phrase, he spent little of his childhood and adult life in Britain. Yet his activities in
retirement as a member of BACSA, an organization that has devoted itself to
recording rst-person accounts as a way of integrating themselves and their histories
into that of postcolonial Britain, and as the publisher of a newsletter for former civil
servants in the Punjab suggest that it was crucial for Edwards-Stuart to retell the story
of his ancestor in order to reclaim and afrm his attachments to Britain and to the
British empire by claiming ancestral whiteness.63 Buettner has noted that British
families domiciled abroad were in danger of being confused with mixed-race subjects, a
confusion that embarrassed them and made them more determined to mark themselves

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out as European through their lineage and superior through their accent and behaviors.64
Through education, professional training, comportment, and marking themselves as of
purely white extraction, British men and women who had spent a lifetime abroad tried
to mitigate against the specter of racial degeneracy that haunted them. Edwards-Stuarts
literal and determined whitewashing of his ancestor, Begum Johnson, was as much
about producing himself as a particular kind of purely white and British subject as it
was about telling her history.
Ending with Begum Johnsons biographer and his claims to a certain type of imperial
Britishness is reminiscent of the British gentleman with whom I began this essay:
Stephen Birch, the indigo planter whose daughter had run away to marry an Indian
nobleman. When Birch asked for the intervention of the colonial government, he relied
on his understanding that he was British and his daughter was thus a symbol of the kind
of white womanhood that needed to be defended. When his request was denied, largely
because of what might be called the Birch lineage, Harriet became a native, something
it seemed that both she and the colonial government could agree on.
What unites this group of women Sophia Yeandle, Mary Carey, Frances Johnson,
and Harriet Birch is that all four were born of European fathers and mothers who were
either native or not quite European. And yet, as we have seen, in their lives, their racial
and gender subjectivities were entwined and ranged widely, dependent in part on the
historical moment in which they lived and in which the story of their lives was written.
They expressed their social status on a range of registers which included (but were not
limited to) who they married, whom they bedded, and what religious choices they made.
While we might count Harriet Birch as native, (as she herself did), the others passed
as European for much of their lives, as did their children. Mary Careys subjectivity as a
vulnerable, but intrepid and loyal, white woman was pressed into service at a moment
when the Black Hole incident was needed to justify further military intervention by the
Companys armies but this racial status was revoked in histories that were written later.
Sophia Yeandle, however unexceptional she seemed during her life, was a woman who
saw herself as participating fully in life of the European part of the colonial settlement,
bearing a child with one European civil servant and cohabiting with another. Frances
Johnson was socially and nancially privileged, having married important men in the
East India Company establishment, as well as been the mother-in-law to a colonial
governor-general and grandmother to a prime minister. Although she was mixed-race,
she claimed herself to be British, and has been adopted as such through her inclusion
in the series published by BACSA.
By opening up and interrogating the ways in which women in colonial contact zones
were counted as either white or native, I hope this essay has shown that in spite of the
ways in which racial classications homogenized and xed a range of national, racial,
and legal attributes to female subjects across the colonial world, these classications
were rarely complete or conclusive. The process of counting as white or native is one
that continues to unfold.

DurbaGhosh
CornellUniversity

Endnotes
* Many thanks to Pamela Scully and Robert Travers for a careful and thoughtful reading of this essay and to Katherine Prior for
research assistance. All mistakes and oversights are my own.
1. This was true in other contexts as well, see Martha Hodes, The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: a transnational
family story, American Historical Review 108 (2003): 84118. On women and early colonial contact elsewhere, see Peter
Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 14921797 (London: Methuen, 1986), chs. 45; Sandra Cypess,
La Malinche in Mexican Literature, chs. 13
2. See also Pamela Scully, Race and Ethnicity in Womens and Gender History in Global Perspective, Womens History in
Global Perspective, vol. 1, edited by Bonnie Smith (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Kathleen Wilson, Empire,
Gender, and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century, and Catherine Hall, Of Gender and Empire: reections on the nineteenth
century, in Gender and Empire, edited by Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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3. Following the work of Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); see especially, Aihwa Ong,
Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States, Cultural
Anthropology 37 (1996): 738.
4. To paraphrase Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: race and the intimate in colonial rule (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002), chs. 45.
5. On an especially good essay examining the link between knowledge in the service of colonial governance. See especially David
Ludden, Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge, in Orientalism and the post-colonial predicament,
ed. by Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press, 1993).
6. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: economies of race and gender in early modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1995).
7. Stoler, ch. 2.
8. Margaret Macmillan, Women of the raj (London, 1988); Nancy Paxton, Writing under the raj: gender, race, and rape in the
British colonial imagination, 18301947 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); Mary Procida, Married to the
empire: gender, politics and imperialism in India, 18831947 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Indrani Sen,
Woman and Empire: representations in the writings of British India, 18581900 (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002); Jenny Sharpe,
Allegories of empire: the gure of woman in the colonial the colonial text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1993); Margaret Strobel, European women and the second British empire (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991);
Kathleen Wilson, The island race: Englishness, empire and gender in the eighteenth century (London, 2003).
9. Flora Annie Steel, The Complete Indian Cook and Housekeeper (London, 1869).
10. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), ch. 4.
11. For this period, Lata Manis Contentious Traditions: the debate on sati in colonial India (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1994).
12. Mani, Contentious Traditions; Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture,
18651915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), chs. 34.
13. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined women (London: Routledge, 1993).
14. Gayatri C. Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988), 296; Jyotsna Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues:
Discoveries of India in the Language of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996).
15. Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: national imperialism and the origins of British India (New York: Routledge, 2002), esp.
13749; Lionel Caplan, Iconographies of Anglo-Indian Women: gender constructs and contrasts in a changing society, Modern
Asian Studies 34 (2000): 86392.
16. Roxann Wheeler, The complexion of race: categories of difference in eighteenth-century British culture (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); S. Sen, 100118.
17. Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: hybridity in theory, culture and race (London: Routledge, 1995), especially chs. 45;
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science, Great Britain 18001960 (London: Macmillan, 1982).
18. On the emergence of British national identity, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 17071837 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1992).
19. National Library, Calcutta, Rare Books Room, Hyde Reports, vol. 4; dated 19 December, 1777.
20. Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies, 17931905 (New York: St.
Martins Press, 1980), chs. 46; E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies (London: Polity Press, 2001).
21. Durba Ghosh, Making and Un-making Loyal Subjects: pensioning widows and educating orphans in early colonial India,
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31:1 (January 2003): 128.
22. Oriental and India Ofce Collections, British Library (hereafter O.I.O.C.), F/4/1455, no. 57339, extract Political
Consultations, 28 May 1832, no. 83.
23. O.I.O.C., F/4/1589, no. 64556, 17.
24. O.I.O.C., V/8/18, Regulation VII of 1819.
25. See especially Theda Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians: racial construction in the Early South (Athens, GA: University of
Georgia Press, 2003).
26. A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 139; See also,
Radhika Singha, Making the domestic more domestic: Criminal Law and thehead of the household, 17721843, Indian

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Economic and Social History Review 33 (JulySept. 1996): 30944.
27. Dagmar Engels, Beyond Purdah? Women in Bengal, 18901939 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), chs. 23.
28. O.I.O.C., F/4/1589, no. 64556, 22.
29. O.I.O.C., F/4/1589, no. 64556, 21.
30. On the legibility of subaltern female voices in colonial archives, see Gayatri C. Spivak, The Rani of Sirmur: an essay in
reading the archives, History and Theory 38 (1985): 24772.
31. O.I.O.C., F/4/1589, no. 64556, 17.
32. Gayle Rubin, The Trafc in Women: notes on the political economy of sex, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited
by Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).
33. O.I.O.C., L/AG/34/29/70 (1844), part 3, 19194.
34. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: the gure of woman in the colonial text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993).
35. C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: the making of a Eurasian community in British India, 17731833 (London: Curzon Press, 1996),
chs. 78.
36. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
37. Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: a literary archeology of black womens lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003): 5759.
38. Thomas Williamson, The East India Vade Mecum, (London, 1810), vol. I, 453. For the relatively low rate of Europeans
marrying, and other estimates of the low ratio of European females to European males, see S. C. Ghosh, The Social Condition of
the British Community in Bengal (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970), 5764.
39. Williamson, vol 1, 41415, 45156; see also S. C. Ghosh, 6574.
40. D. Ghosh, 1921; Hawes, 411, 77, 81; Caplan, 87273. This pattern of mixed-race daughters of European male civil servants
marrying newer members of the civil service was not exclusive to British colonialism in India ; see Jean Gelman Taylor, The
Social World of Batavia (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).
41. The progression from a non-racialist society to a racialist one is argued by Ballhatchet; Collingham; T.C.P. Spear, The
Nabobs: English Social Life in eighteenth- century India (New York: Penguin, 1963); Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The
British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); and William Dalrymple, White Mughals: love and betrayal
in eighteenth-century India (London: HarperCollins, 2002).
42. Henry Verelst (? 1785), went to Bengal in 1750, was taken prisoner in 1757 and released, and later was a political and
commercial agent in Chittagong (176165), Burdwan and Midnapur (176566). Author of A View of the Rise, Progress and
Present State of the English Government in Bengal (London, 1772), Verelst argued for the British to further intervene in the
process of land regulation and tax extraction in Bengal. As a result of the litigation accusing him of corruption, he was made
bankrupt and ed to France, where he died in Boulogne in 1785. See N. Chatterjee, Verelsts rule in India (Allahabad, 1939); C. E.
Buckland, Dictionary of Indian Biography (Banaras: Book Depot, reprint 1971, original 1905).
43. High Court, Original Side, Calcutta (hereafter H.C.O.S.), 17781780. See also Pradip Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History
(Calcutta: Firma, Ltd., 1978), 198.
44. H.C.O.S., Wills Register, 17741777. He died in May, 1777.
45. O.I.O.C., L/AG/34/29/13, Bengal Wills (1801), 14.
46. O.I.O.C., L/AG/34/27/27, Bengal Inventories (1802), part 2, nos. 100101.
47. John Zephaniah Holwell, A genuine narrative of the deplorable deaths of the English gentlemen and others (London, 1758),
29 and 36, cited in Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 17201840: colonial currencies of gender (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004), 71. For readings of this episode and its inuence in shaping British understandings of India,
see Kate Teltscher, The fearful name of the Black Hole: fashioning and imperial myth, in Bart Moore-Gilbert, ed., Writing
India, 17571990: the literature of British India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).
48. Joseph, 72.
49. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Standord University Press, 1988).
50. H. E. Busteed, Echoes from Old Calcutta, being chiey reminiscences of the days of Warren Hastings, Francis and Impey
(Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1882), 2932.

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51. Busteed, 32; Buckland, see entry for Mary Carey.

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52. Joseph, 67; see also Linda Colley, Captives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
53. Ivor Edwards- Stuart, The Calcutta of Begum Johnson (Putney, London: British Association of Cemeteries in South Asia,
1990), 2930.
54. Edwards-Stuart, 61.
55. For more on the relationship that colonial subjects had to home, see Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home:
postcolonial relocations and twentieth-century ction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch.1.
56. H.C.O.S, Bengal Wills (181011), no pages.
57. Edwards- Stuart, 118.
58. Edwards- Stuart, 4; S. C. Ghosh, 90.
59. A begum is dened in Hobson-Jobson: A glossary of Anglo-Indian colloquial words and phrases (London, 1886).
60. For a discussion of how wills were used to record how a subject wanted to be seen, see Trevor Burnard, Family continuity
and female independence in Jamaica, 16651734, Continuity and Change 7 (1992), 181.
61. H.C.O.S, Bengal Wills (181011), no pages.
62. Edwards-Stuart, iv.
63. Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004),
251 ff.
64. Buettner, ch. 2.

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