“All Races are Mixed Races:” Of Anglo-Indians and British Aryans

Abstract

In this article, I situate Anglo-Indian anti-racism activist Cedric Dover’s thoughts against the backdrop of travelling discourses of Aryanism as manifested from the nineteenth century onward. Depicting the constructions of prejudices by British and German Orientalist philology against figures born of intermixture, I show how British appropriations of Aryanism disturbingly helped disenfranchise Anglo-Indians in colonial India, as Dover suggests in his work. 

Discussing how Dover uses his anti-racist oeuvre to problematize philology and, by extension, eugenics, I delineate Dover’s arrival at the realization that race as a category needs to be abjured. The repudiation of race, states Dover, is necessary because all bodies—including those of British and Anglo-Indian alike—are born of indeterminate intermixture. I show how Dover uses this conclusion to conceptualize a transnational coming community of the intermixed—a community in which Anglo-Indians may participate to write back against their disenfranchisement in colonial India.