A large historiography has been devoted to the politics of race in British colonial India. Yet much of this historiography has explored British conceptions of nonwhites without adequately exploring the racial category of “whiteness” as itself problematic and contested. In The Meaning of White, Satoshi Mizutani seeks to remedy this gap by exploring British conceptions of their own whiteness as it was refracted through anxieties over domiciled Europeans in India, a group that included people of mixed European and Indian descent as well as whites who lived permanently in India. Mizutani estimates that there were over 200,000 domiciled Europeans in India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more than double the 93,000 nondomiciled Europeans (72). In addition, domiciled Europeans did more than simply outnumber nondomiciled Europeans: indeed, because of their general poverty and their tendency to integrate more fully into Indian culture, they also functioned as a foil against which nondomiciled Europeans defined what it meant to be white.
Mizutani convincingly demonstrates that the idea of whiteness was central to British ideas about racial difference. Like other categories of racial difference, whiteness was not a stable, self-evident concept. In late colonial India, one did not qualify as white simply from parentage or ancestry; one could only be sufficiently white if one had the means to return to Britain periodically or at least to send one's children there to be educated. What this meant was that ideas about whiteness were tied inseparably to ideas about class and geography. For Britons who considered themselves sufficiently white, India was to be considered a place of temporary residence only. Furthermore, while in India, white Britons were expected to maintain themselves in a style that would allow them to be separate from other Indians, to speak English, and to maintain British cultural and social practices. Clearly, it took more than the right skin color to qualify as sufficiently white; it also took money. In the period between 1858 and 1930, Mizutani argues that the increasing rigidity of ideas about race only made this insistence on the class-specific boundaries of whiteness more intense.
No wonder, then, that Britons worried so much about domiciled Europeans, who not only were defined by the fact that India was their permanent home but also were frequently poor and immersed into Indian culture. As Mizutani explains, Britons in both India and the metropole believed that the existence of such a group posed a threat to the idea of European racial superiority precisely because of their supposed immersion into Indian society and their inability to return home. These defects, Britons worried, not only would cause racial degeneration among domiciled Europeans but also would reflect badly on all whites, whether domiciled or not. Because of these dangers, domiciled Europeans could not simply be excluded and ignored—instead, British authorities and philanthropic organizations in India sought to do something to mitigate the size, the poverty, and the lack of education of the groups who were counted in this category.
The Meaning of White is divided into six chapters, not including an introduction and a conclusion. The first chapter sets the context for the evolution and practice of British racial thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing particular attention on the idea of racial degeneration and its attendant anxieties over Europeans going native if exposed to Indian climate and culture over a long period. Although this chapter does not offer much that is new to historians of race, it does provide necessary background to the reasons why Britons were so threatened by the existence of domiciled Europeans. The second chapter explores the origins of domiciled Europeans in India, in terms of both the growth of mixed race communities and also the reasons why some Europeans ended up becoming impoverished and making India their permanent home. This chapter also explores the evolution of British ideas about these communities and the reasons why British authorities lumped domiciled Europeans into a single monolithic category, even though, as Mizutani strives to show, there was great diversity among them. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 dig into the many schemes hatched by British authorities and organizations to remedy the perceived threats posed by domiciled Europeans. Chapter 3, for example, focuses on two commissions launched in Calcutta in 1892 and 1920, respectively, that were important for shaping British approaches to the issue. Chapter 4, meanwhile, explores both official and private religious approaches that sought to rehabilitate domiciled Europeans to more acceptable forms of whiteness, particularly in terms of providing a general European education to the children of poor, domiciled Europeans. Chapter 5 goes on to provide an in-depth analysis of an extreme antidote to the problem of domiciled Europeans: child removal. Finally, chapter 6 explores the ways in which domiciled Europeans resisted British efforts to classify them as less-than-white, instead making claims for themselves as respectable Britons invested in the class-specific elements of whiteness.
The Meaning of White makes a meaningful contribution to our understanding of the politics of race in late colonial India. Mizutani effectively demystifies the ideology of whiteness (3) by subjecting it to the same critical analysis as any other category of race, and he demonstrates convincingly that Britons in both official and private capacities saw domiciled Europeans as a problem because of their capacity to blur the boundaries between white and nonwhite. At the same time, Mizutani's arguments might have been even stronger if readers had a more concrete sense of the size of the domiciled European community outside Calcutta or if he had taken more time to provide an analysis of the newspaper sources he used so extensively. Indeed, some sense of circulation, frequency, and political orientation would have provided welcome context. Finally, chapter 5 would have been greatly strengthened if Mizutani had drawn parallels (rather than provide a single footnote) to the many concurrent child removal schemes that were taking place in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Did the Indian scheme draw from such schemes? If so, what might this remedy say about British attitudes toward race and poverty on a more global scale? Such fascinating parallels seem to demand greater attention. Overall, however, Mizutani has produced a relevant and thought-provoking study of an insufficiently studied group.
