Miscegenations of modernity: constructing european respectability and race in the Indian railway colony, 1857-1931

Abstract

From 1857 Indian railways built railway colonies to inculcate a practical mastery of middle-class domesticity solely in their European employees. These were key sites for the construction and contestation of European identity. They marked Europe and India as separate locales bounded by distinct racial typologies and gender identities. The central distinction reinforced was that between European modernity and Indian tradition. This project was complicated by the hybrid identities of Domiciled European and Eurasian railway employees, nationalist protests, and contradictions in the colonial discourse of modernity. By 1931 the racial logic of the railway colony was under threat, but its rhetorics of respectability, modernity, gender, and race intensified in new forms. By tracing the historical construction of boundaries between Europe and India and the history of interstitial groups that destabilize these, we can question the transition narratives of nationalism and capitalism that usually structure accounts of colonial history.