Nineteenth-Century Eurasians and Spatiality in Emma Roberts’ Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan, with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society (1835)

Abstract

In this article, through a spatial reading of Roberts’ Scenes and Characteristics I illustrate how the stringent regulations of the East Indian Company disempowering the Eurasians are manifested through the spatial strictures, and how notions of cultural purity and hierarchy are realized through the politics of space in colonial India. Spatial concepts of lived space, third space, and hybridity— drawn from the theories of Homi Bhabha, Edward Soja and Henry Lefebvre—are useful in mapping the spatial politics in nineteenth-century India, especially in relation to the Government-house in Calcutta, the seat of the highest authority in colonial India, and the marginalized orphanages/schools run by the East India Company primarily for the benefit of Eurasian children. Discrimination through spatially segregation was practiced by the British East India Company in order to preserve the racial purity of the European upper class at the helm of the Indian colony. My paper illustrates how the fortunes of the male and female “half-castes” of empire were variously charted, and how spatial homogeneity was subverted through the subtext of marital relations. The “third space” that some of the fortunately-marked interracial men and women occupy constantly pulled at the seams of apparently inviolable concepts of homogeneity and purity to expose and challenge the cultural dominion of the British Empire.