Bridgerton tends to send visitors to Regency Reader interested to understand and contextualize race in the early 19th century. We haven’t added to the myriad of think pieces on race and Bridgerton, but we have offered some brief overviews of the history of multi-racial and BIPOC people in the early 19th century as a way to help reduce any myths that Regency England/UK was exclusively white.
Previous Representing Regency posts have focused on people of color in the clergy inspired by a recent adaptation of Persuasion, black Britons, and multi-racial people. Our multi-racial people post shares a few historic examples of early 19th century, well known multi-racial people living in Britain. That post does share a glimpse into a few Anglo-Indians from the era, resulting from British imperialism and marriage between Britons and Indians. I wanted to expand a bit on the Anglo-Indian experience and what the data suggests about Anglo-Indians in the early 19th century in the UK.
Its important to note that the term Anglo-Indian, now antiquated, has at times meant both progeny from a marriage between a British person and Indian person and a British person who has lived in India for an extended period of time. While I am primarily interested in exploring multi-racial people who returned to the UK in the 19th century, much of the literature treats these two fairly indiscriminately and so its difficult to unpack in this medium.
In doing some research to expand on the post, I found a fantastic, personal account from 2002 in The Guardian that explores the idea of race, Anglo-Indians, and how modern sensibilities can project onto the past through the lens of the author’s own ancestry. Dalrymple published a book about this complex topic entitled The White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India, but the hyperlinked article provides an excellent summary, and a great example of how integrated Anglo-Indians were in both Indian and Britain prior to the Victorian era. He shares an account of James Kirkpatrick’s marriage to Khair un-Nissa which caused no little controversy at the time due to her status, age, and the difference of religion between the two. What was more interesting to me was that his children were christened with English names and shipped off to London; Kitty Kirkpatrick became the muse for Thomas Carlyle, but was refused because of his status as a tutor.
Dalrymple highlights the many complex intermarriages that were present in what he posits was a world “more hybrid, and far less clearly defined” by ethnic, national, or religious borders “than we have all been conditioned to expect”. His own family members were not necessarily a rule, but also not an exception, and highlights through his own family tree that sometimes the results of intermarriage could hide in plain sight so much that it is likely the case for many modern Britons. I think the point he makes is to really question how our modern beliefs and perspectives on race/religion/etc. can project onto history and its important to step back and contextualize the realities to really understand what was happening and what that might mean about present day.
This isn’t to say there weren’t complex issues at play in both Indian and Britons for Anglo-Indians (James, 2003) during the Georgian or Regency era. However, the Anglo-Indian community, albeit small, had been a part of the British Empire since the early 1700s and would eventually be recognized as a distinct community (Williams, 2002). It does suggest, however, that there was less of a shock value to young women like Kitty Kirkpatrick being introduced into England than might have occurred later on.
Many scholars point to the Victorian era as the period when modern racism took root and would shift attitudes about race in Britain and elsewhere (Chanda, 2018; Bruhin, 2011). At the same time, a strong community of Anglo-Indians or Britons who had made their fortunes in India to return in their 40s was developing in Cheltenham (Fraser, 2003). It was the Regency royal patronage of Cheltenham as a spa town for retirement that attracted the so-called nabobs and helped develop an organic community of Angl0-Indians (Fraser, 2003). Meanwhile, a similar insular community of Anglo-Indians was present in India (Parker, 2019). Some of these Anglo-Indians would, in the 19th century, become the administrators of the East Indian Company, stuck between natives and the British elite as a perpetual “other” (Anderson, 2020).
Generally, intermarriage tended to occur within the middle or working class and was most often a British man marrying a Indian woman. This happened most frequently during the Georgian era, as the East Indian Company sought expansion in India and British women were largely absent from the landscape. As you will see from other posts within this series, its a theme of colonization. And like other progeny of these intermarriages, it was not uncommon for children to be sent to the UK for education, with or without their parents.
Without straying into think pieces about Bridgerton and race, I will say that the representation of non-white populations in early 19th century Britain is important to help reframe colonization in a way that starts to get at the human impact. It is perhaps more significant to truly show the impact different races, cultures, religions, and nations had on the changing geo-political and social landscapes of the 19th century.
Anderson, V. (2020). Race and Power in British India: Anglo-Indians, Class and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic.
Bruhin, S., & Kaya, A. (2011). British Imperialism and Anglo–Indians.
Buettner, E. (2003). Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 34(1), 137-138.
Chanda, D. (2018). “All Races are Mixed Races:” Of Anglo-Indians and British Aryans. International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies, 18(2).
Charlton-Stevens, U. (2016). The Professional Lives of Anglo-Indian Working Women in the Twilight of Empire. International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies, 16(2).
Charlton-Stevens, U. (2017). REVIEW ESSAY: Britain’s Anglo-Indians: The Invisibility of Assimilation. International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies, 17(2).
Chattopadhyay, S. (2002). ‘Goods, Chattels and Sundry Items’ Constructing 19th-Century Anglo-Indian Domestic Life. Journal of Material Culture, 7(3), 243-271.
D’Cruz, G. (1997). Racial science, social science and the Anglo-Indian. International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies, 2(1).
Deefholts, M. (2005). Who are the Anglo-Indians?. International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies, 8(1).
Fraser, S. (2003). Exiled from glory: Anglo-Indian settlement in nineteenth-century Britain, with special reference to Cheltenham (Doctoral dissertation, University of Gloucestershire).
James, S. P. (2003). Anglo-Indians: the dilemma of identity. International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies, 7(1).
Mills, M. S. (1996). Some Comments on Stereotypes of the Anglo-Indians, Part 2. International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies, 1(2).
Parker, W. (2019). Shaping a Nation: Identity and Ethinicity of the Anglo-Indian community in India. International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research. Vol. 7, Issue 4, pp: (838-847), Month: October – December 2019
Williams, B. R. (2002). Anglo-Indians: Vanishing Remmants of a Bygone Era: Anglo-Indians in India, North America, and the UK in 2000. Calcutta Tiljallah Relief Inc.
Thank you for this. I think too many people lump Regency in with Victorian so the nuances of differing attitudes during those two very disparate eras are lost.
I delved into this very topic for my book Romance of the Ruin, to flesh out the hero who is Anglo-Indian. One thing I discovered was that difficulties in travel and communication slowed the transfer of attitudes that were changing in India due to political expediency. So the typical colonialist superiority didn’t begin to take root in England until the advent of the steam ship in 1830 and the development of the telegraph later. Until that time, upper-class Anglo-Indian children seemed to have a better chance for success and acceptance in England than in India, where the politically influenced social divide had already become too great.
There’s so much to take into consideration here, and I’m glad you addressed the fact that we need to be careful not to project our modern viewpoints onto history.
Thanks for this insight, Judith and the comments. I think its really important, when we think about representation in Regency and conversely Regency representation, to have context. Not for “historical accuracy”, whatever that maybe, but because the nuances are interesting and can tell us a lot about the people in the era but also about ourselves. Communication absolutely plays a part; at one point I had touched on this idea of the world being much “larger” during the Regency era, but thought that might be confusing. The sentiment I was aiming for is what you have captured so beautiful with your example of technology.