Erasure of the Euro-Asian: Recovering Early Radicalism and Feminism in South Asia, by Kumari Jayawardena, Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo, 2007, iv+312 pages + photographs
The significant contributions to history of Euro-Asians – a term coined by Kumari Jayawardena to encompass Burghers, Anglo-Indians and Eurasians – are documented in detail in this book, which deals mainly with Sri Lanka, but also takes up some cases in India, and a few elsewhere. The central question posed by it is the following: There were many men and women of mixed European and Asian descent in India and Sri Lanka, who questioned both foreign domination and oppressive local social structures – visionaries and agitators who supported national liberation, feminism, pluralism, secularism and the rights of workers and peasants – yet their contribution to history has largely been erased. In the case of Euro-Asians of maternal European descent, such as Ananda Coomaraswamy, they have been recognised, but at the cost of erasing their mothers. What is the reason for this denial?
‘Racial mixing’ was frowned upon by the white rulers, because colonial ideology relied on the assertion of superiority of the colonisers over the colonised, and racial mixing was therefore an embarrassment. Yet at the same time, the shortage of women among the Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisers resulted in numerous mixed marriages and liaisons with local women, which were tolerated or even encouraged by the white rulers initially, although racist ideologies had grown stronger by the mid-nineteenth century. A complicated hierarchy arose among Euro-Asians, depending on a variety of factors: the proportion of European or local ancestry, and hence skin color; the class origins of parents on both sides; the country of European parentage, with those of Portuguese descent, for example, being treated with contempt by those of Dutch descent; and whether they were legitimate or illegitimate.
There was also a marked gender
dimension to European Orientalism, with ‘women of colour’ or ‘native women’
being portrayed as beautiful and desirable, but also submissive, pliable, and
somewhat empty-headed. Euro-Asian women were often portrayed as sexually
available, but those of upper-class origin were sometimes seen as ‘Oriental
princesses’. Such attitudes to Asian and Euro-Asian women were coupled with the
notion of European women as frail creatures, unsuited to the rigours of life in
the tropics, or – if they decided to travel there on their own – as little
better than prostitutes. Such fantasies hardly corresponded to reality.
However, another colonial strereotype of Euro-Asians – that they were ‘dangerous adversaries,’ ‘subversive and potentially seditious’ (pp.7, 85) – had some truth in it. The author observes that ‘since Euro-Asians belonged neither to the European ruling class nor to local semi-feudal families, they were well-positioned to take up causes of oppressed groups in society, whether peasants, women, urban workers or the petty bourgeoisie… The real asset of the Euro-Asians was their ability in the 19th century to be part of a “double critique” of West and East while valorizing the best of both these worlds’ (p.12). The central portion of the book consists of biographies of prominent Euro-Asians, and descriptions of the activities and movements in which they were involved, illustrated generously with photographs.
In the colonies, ‘the great
awakening of the French Revolution of 1789, as well as the subsequent revolutions
of 1830 and 1848, reverberated throughout the following decades, much to the
chagrin of the colonial rulers. The emergent colonial bourgeoisie and
intelligentsia eagerly grasped the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity,
and were quick to use these slogans to challenge colonial rule’ (p.88). In India, Henry
Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-31) formed a group which inspired the Young Bengal
reformist movement. The Derozians challenged Hindu religious rituals,
patriarchal and caste structures, female subordination, and political
conservatism, with an anti-colonial, secular patriotism many decades ahead of
their time. Perhaps their most important contribution was their campaign
against various forms of women’s oppression, especially the practice of sati.
Derozio petitioned the British parliament successfully against the extra discrimination
faced by Euro-Asians as compared to Hindus and Muslims, and criticised Euro-Asians
who objected to their children being educated alongside children of other
communities. Yet despite his pioneering role, Derozio has virtually been
ignored, because of his Euro-Asian ethnicity and social radicalism. Another
Kolkata Euro-Asian, John Ricketts (1791-1835), also campaigned against discrimination
and in favour of a free press. Like Derozio, he died young, and his
contribution has not been recognised adequately.
The European revolutions of 1848 – the year in which Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto – also reverberated in Sri Lanka. Christopher Elliott (1809-59), an Irish doctor who catered to the poor in Colombo and started his own paper, the Colombo Observer, publicised the events in Europe, and campaigned for political rights and representative government in Ceylon. He formed an organisation called ‘Friends of Ceylon’, and Euro-Asian Richard Morgan (1821-76) was one of its members. Morgan spoke against the caste system and in favour of more representative government, and despite being co-opted by the establishment in later life, inspired another Euro-Asian, Charles Ambrose Lorenz (1829-71). Lorenz was also a protégé of Dr Elliott, and at the age of 19 joined his campaign against oppressive taxes. Along with his young friends Frederick Nell (1828-67), Louis Nell and Charles Ferdinands, Lorenz started the literary journal Young Ceylon in 1850.
The Young Ceylon circle opposed colonial authoritarianism and British
racism, but at the same time advocated contact with currents of liberal and
radical thought in Europe, such as those represented
by Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Their paper, the Examiner, argued for a
multi-ethnic Ceylonese identity, cutting across particularistic identities –
Burghers, Sinhalese, Colombo Chetties, Moors, Tamils, Malays and so on – and
supported the fortnightly Sinhala paper Lakminipahana.
Lorenz himself was a staunch secularist, arguing against religious sectarianism
and exclusion. The Ceylon League, begun in 1865 by Lorenz and five others,
agitated for political rights and constitutional reform. Lorenz too died young
(of tuberculosis), but Leopold Ludovici (1833-82), a Burgher, became the owner
and editor of the Examiner in 1876,
and continued its bold critique of British racism and arrogance, as well as its
opposition to ethnic divisions within Sri Lanka. J.L.K. van Dort (1831-98)
expressed the same radicalism in art.
The 1890s saw the emergence of the organised working class movement in Ceylon, and two of its prominent leaders were Alfred Ernst Buultjens (1865-1916), who was related to Lorenz, and Dr Pedro Manuel Lisboa Pinto (1857-98). Lorenz was one of the earliest to make a class analysis of colonial society, and championed the cause of clerks, coffee plantation workers and mechanics, among others. Buultjens became an avowed agnostic while at Cambridge University, and then proclaimed himself a Buddhist. He witnessed mass demonstrations and meetings of socialists in London, and ‘expressed strong views on “the extreme wealth side by side with the grovelling debasement, poverty and misery of the East End of London”’ (p.173).
After returning to Ceylon,
Buultjens became the principal of the Pettah Buddhist Boys’ School (later Ananda College),
and was prominent in the movement for Buddhist girls’ secondary education. But
the most outstanding aspect of his career was his involvement with the nascent
working class movement. In 1893, the Ceylon Printers’ Union
– the first trade union in Ceylon
– was formed, with Buultjens as secretary, and he was involved in their
historic strike of September 1893 at H.W.Cave & Co. Also involved in the
printers’ agitation was Dr Lisboa Pinto, who had a flourishing medical practice
in a working-class neighbourhood of Colombo, and wrote frequently in the Independent Catholic about the
conditions of the workers, criticising both British and local capitalists for
being ‘exacting and ruthless’ (p.178). He was president of the Ceylon Printers’
Union, and argued the need for trade unions.
Euro-Asian women, too, were pioneers in many fields. ‘In India and Sri Lanka the initial challenge to patriarchal structures came from pioneer women teachers, nurses and doctors who were Euro-Asian… They paved the way for women of other communities to excel in education and obtain employment’ (p.214), and in this they were supported by progressive Euro-Asian men. Hetty Drieberg led the way in education, by obtaining second-class honours at the Cambridge Junior examination in 1881. In that year, 25% of Sinhalese males and 2.2% of Sinhalese women were literate, compared to 50% of Euro-Asian women. Ten years later, the literacy figures were 30% for Sinhalese males, 4% for Sinhalese females, and 58% for Euro-Asian females.
Many of these educated Euro-Asian women
became teachers and principals of schools; for example, Ruth Marshall, whose
school in Kollupitiya later became St Clare’s, and her sister Priscilla, who
was head of the Princess of Wales College, Moratuwa, from 1908 to 1938. Others
published poetry, fiction and articles, mainly under assumed names, but one who
became known was Ina Trimmer (1890-1982). Grace van Dort (born in 1861) gained
recognition as a painter, and Emily van der Poorten (1889-1975) was an early
entrepreneur, owning the Hotel Metropole in Colombo. In 1892, Evelyn Davidson and
Henrietta Keyt were the first women to enter the Ceylon Medical
College, and in 1898, Alice
de Boer (1872-1955) was the first woman to qualify. Other early Euro-Asian
women doctors were Winifred Nell, Claribel van Dort, Rachel Christoffelz,
Ursula van Rooyen, Helen Kiddle and Sylvia Ebert, all of whom qualified in the
1890s and early 20th century.
Euro-Asian women were also pioneers in the struggle for women’s and workers’ rights. In 1909, at a meeting of the Ceylon Women’s Union founded by Canadian doctor Mary Rutnam, five Burgher women – Ms Beling, Ms W.Greve, Ms de Kretser, Ms C. de Zilwa and Ms E. de Zilva – performed a ‘Dialogue on Women’s Rights’. Cora Abraham, an innovative teacher, was politically active on the Left, and in 1948 was a member of the Eksath Kantha Peramuna, an autonomous women’s organisation which brought together women of the various Marxist parties and their sympathisers. Agnes Nell (born in 1884) married a Sinhalese lawyer and trade unionist, George E. de Silva, and was an executive committee member of the Ceylon Labour Party and All-Ceylon Trade Union Congress led by A.E.Goonesinghe. She was also a leader of the women’s franchise movement of the late 1920s, becoming the most active member of the Women’s Franchise Union formed in 1927. ‘In reply to Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan’s diatribe – that giving women franchise rights was “casting pearls before swine” – she retorted that prejudiced men were the swine’; and on the issue of voting rights for plantation workers of recent Indian origin, on which the Ceylon National Congress was split, Agnes de Silva was uncompromising: “Lord Donoughmore asked if we wanted Indian Tamil women labourers on the estates to have the vote. I replied: ‘Certainly, they are women too. We want all women to have the vote’” (pp.231-32).
It is easy to understand why the contributions
of these eminent Sri Lankan men and women were ignored or deplored by British
colonialists. The more intriguing question is: why did they suffer the same
fate at the hands of their Sri Lankan compatriots? After all, ‘At the onset of
European colonialism, Sri Lanka was already a “Hybrid Island” where for
centuries, migrations and invasions from all parts of southern, eastern and
western India, with additions also from the Arab, African and Malay world, had
mingled to form communities of Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. In this ethnic
mosaic, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam increased the diversity of beliefs and
made the island a plural society’ (p.19). Indeed, although the book does not
mention it, there is also evidence of a Christian community in Mantai in
northern Sri Lanka,
established by Nestorians from Southern Persia
by the early 6th Century AD. Given all this intermingling, what
accounts for the erasure of Euro-Asians?
One answer to this question suggested by the author is that like the Europeans, local elites too had notions of ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘pure’ and ‘impure,’ derived from the caste system. In 1892, Anagarika Dharmapala argued that the Sinhalese belonged to a ‘superior race,’ and from this point of view, Europeans and hybrids were seen as inferior; ‘the terms popularly used by the locals for those of mixed origin were inevitably demeaning and insulting, ranging from lower forms of animal life, karapoththa (cockroach) to expressions like mico (mechanic) and thuppahi (mixed)… To South Asians who put a high value on “purity”, the mixed population was sankara – namely, “impure”’ (p.241).
Through the mediation of Aryan race
theory, these notions of purity and superiority became incorporated into both
Hindu and Sinhala nationalism, with (Semitic) Muslims and dark-skinned
Dravidians being seen as racially inferior. Thus Anagarika Dharmapala wrote in
1902, ‘the glorious inheritance of Aryan ancestors, uncontaminated by Semitic
and savage ideas…has been preserved by the Aryan Sinhalese’ (pp.249-50). The
racial claim was supplemented by a claim to religious superiority as the
protectors of Buddhism, which expressed itself in hostility to Christianity and
contempt for Christians. In this way, paradoxically, nascent nationalism and
the assertion of a national identity further obliterated the contribution of
Euro-Asians to the struggle for liberation from colonialism. Finally, the
social and political radicalism of these Euro-Asians came into conflict with
the conservatism of the ethnic nationalists. For example, ‘campaigns by the
Women’s Franchise Union, along with the granting of women’s suffrage in 1931
and women’s participation in the legislature, were subjected to much criticism
in the Sinhala and Tamil press’; a polemical diatribe by Piyadasa Sirisena
written in 1934, Parivarthanaya,
‘took the form of a debate where proponents of women’s franchise were vilified
as immoral, westernized women who neglected their families and ended up in the
divorce courts’ (p.255).
There are many more biographies in this fascinating book, revealing the important contribution made to a modern democratic culture in Sri Lanka by a large number of Euro-Asians who have thus far been more or less hidden from history. The reason why they have been overlooked is their mixed ethnicity, and this fact raises a host of questions, some of which have been taken up by the author, and some of which still remain unanswered. How can we account for the valorisation of ‘purity’ and horror of ‘miscenegation’ and ‘mixing of blood’, given that from a purely biological point of view, it is the opposite – i.e. inbreeding – that leads to degeneration? Why do so many people believe that those who look different, speak a different language or follow a different religion should, at best, be kept at a distance, and, at worst, be persecuted and killed? These are burning questions even today.
By way of a footnote, since the
marriage of my parents, C.R.Hensman and Pauline Swan, is mentioned (p.266), and
I myself am mentioned as a person who has taken on my (Tamil) father’s ethnic
identity (footnote on p.274), I would like to make it clear that I have no
intention of ‘erasing’ my (Burgher) mother, or denying my own ‘half-caste’, thuppahi, hybrid identity! Indeed, my
vehement opposition to any link between ethnicity, language or religion on one
side, and nationality on the other, stems from the conviction that establishing
and maintaining such a link depends on either a fascist prohibition of mixed
marriages and liaisons, or a patriarchal erasure of female ancestors. From this
point of view, I too am all in favour of celebrating hybridity, impurity, and
intermingling of peoples and cultures!