From the start of Gerard Gustavus Ducarel and Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa’s relationship in 1770 to its end when Ducarel died in 1800,1 attitudes towards interracial relationships shifted significantly. As scholars such as Ronald Hyam and C.J. Hawes note, for much of the eighteenth century interracial relationships between Englishmen and native women were accepted and even encouraged by the East India Company and society within India. However, with the advent of the new century, attitudes began to drastically shift. Fifty years later, cohabitation with native women became something that Englishmen were expected to hide.2
In understanding this shift and its implications for actual interracial couples, it is useful to look at the narratives recorded about native women and interracial couples in writing produced during this period. Unearthed by the work of Kate Teltschler, Durba Ghosh, and Roxanne Wheeler, accounts abound within European travel writing and novels of native women and their relationships, both sexual and romantic, with European men. These works display varying attitudes towards and concerns surrounding interracial relationships, displaying a microcosm of the shift in larger cultural attitudes detailed by the historical record. In adding an examination of these cultural artifacts’ depictions of interracial couples to the historical work done by Hyam, Hawes, and others, researchers can gain a greater sense of the popular perceptions of interracial couples. Understanding these perceptions gives a greater sense of the barriers that couples such as Ducarel and Sharaf un-Nisa faced in legitimating their relationship to those around them, giving greater insight to the way they navigated their relationship.
When British hegemony over South Asia was still being established in the eighteenth century, relationships between native women and Englishmen were relatively common, even encouraged. According to C.J. Hawes, interracial relationships began to occur as early as the 1600s, when the first Englishmen arrived in India. Interracial cohabitation was a virtual necessity for EIC men who desired female companionship, as there was a significant lack of Englishwoman on the subcontinent3 until well into the 19th century.4 Perhaps surprisingly given later attitudes, the EIC adopted the policy of prior European travelers to the subcontinent and actively encouraged its employees to form relationships with the native population.5 This reality is perhaps best reflected in the 1810 first edition of Thomas Williamson’s East India Vade Mecum, a guide written to assist those intending to enlist in the EIC6 which encourages informal interracial relationships between EIC men and native women.7 As Ghosh and Collingham have noted, the Vade Mecum’s discussion of interracial relationships is notable both for its existence indicating the commonality of these relationships and for its strong pronouncement against any sort of formal relationship.8 This advice reflects the reality that very few interracial relationships during this time period were formally recognized,9 with English law lacking a mechanism to legitimate any relationship involving Europeans in India until 1851.10
Interracial relationships also occurred in the ranks of the Company’s elite. As Durba Ghosh points out, in several cases familial connections between high ranking Company members and the Indian elite could form advantageous relationships for the EIC. She points to the cases of William Palmer, who served in various high ranking EIC positions and married Faiz Baksh, a Mughal noblewoman, and James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the resident to Hyderabad who married another Mughal noblewoman, Khair un-Nisa.11 However, by the publication of the second edition of Williamson’s guidebook in 1825, all mentioned of interracial relationships had been removed, demonstrating the shift in social norms.12 Hyam asserts that by the middle of the nineteenth century within most places in British-ruled South Asia the practice of keeping native mistresses had died out, with an influx of Englishwomen entering India in the late nineteenth century filling the space that native women had occupied.13
17th century travel writing on India provides insight into the larger European cultural understandings of native women and interracial relationships circulating during the early days of British involvement in South Asia. In India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800, Kate Teltscher examines these depictions, noting that they often portrayed native women as distinctly different from that of European women and focused on native women’s sexuality. In his 1653 travel narrative, the Frenchman François de la Boullaye le Gouz details the ways in which native womens’ bodies differed from European women’s. He claimed that native women uniquely “have very long thighs and legs and quite a short body, the opposite of European women.14” This description is followed by an illustration of a Hindu woman bathing behind a sheer covering, an image that, as Teltscher points out, is explicitly salacious.15 In her analysis Teltscher also identifies the common practice of regarding Hindu and Muslim women as two distinct groups, contrasting them against each other by the different stereotypes attached to each group.16 Teltscher also notes the common pattern of treating Muslim and Hindu women as wholly separate groups, comparing the two against each other. These comparisons often portrayed Hindu women as more sexually available than Muslim women.17 Writers depicted them as sexually dangerous, luridly detailing the religious sexual rituals in which they were thought to participate. Stories also circulated about Europeans being granted various forms of sexual access to Hindu wives.18 In contrast Muslim women were widely depicted as less sexually available to European men, yet still were still cast in a suspicious light. As Teltscher notes, they were often written about in connection with the harem, which was portrayed as a distinctly licentious place despite the majority of writers being unable to set foot inside its walls. This narrative was maintained even when writers were in positions that allowed them to enter harems. Teltscher points to the writing of Fryer, a doctor who was allowed inside a harem to treat women, as a prime example of this behavior. Fryer describes the harem as having “no indecent decorum,19” a line that Teltscher argues still implies a sexual licentiousness to the harem despite the admitted lack of observed impropriety.20
Teltscher’s analysis of these 17th century pieces of travel writing demonstrates a European fascination with native women distinctly centering around their sexuality. When placed in conjunction with early EIC company attitudes towards interracial relationships, this 17th century cultural perception suggests a cultural perception of native women’s relationships with men, European or otherwise, primarily through the lens of sex. The EIC’s allowance of interracial relationships within their ranks without instituting a definitive mechanism for recognizing these relationships demonstrates this attitude in practice, treating relationships between EIC men and native women as mechanisms for satisfying the needs of the men, rather than proper relationships on par with those formed between Anglo couples. This tendency, displayed both in the travel writing Teltscher analyzes and the EIC treatment of interracial couples for much of its early involvement within South Asia, suggests that one major roadblock Ducarel and Sharaf un-Nisa might have had to overcome was the refusal of other to recognize their marriage for what it was: an arrangement equal in legitimacy to any that Ducarel might have formed with a British woman. This was likely a strong motivator behind their decision to legitimate their relationship within the English legal system, which directly opposed assertions of the relationship’s illegitimacy.
To understand the later EIC attitudes that regarded interracial relationships in a more negative light, it is helpful to turn to Durba Ghosh and Roxanne Wheeler’s analyses of depictions of interracial relationships within late 18th century novels. In The Complexion of Race Wheeler discusses the 1774 novel The Lady’s Drawing Room, which includes among other stories the tale of a marriage between a Frenchwoman and a native man, and of their Anglo-Indian daughter who married an Englishman. She notes that a primary focus within the novel is the difficulty of marrying across religious lines. As Wheeler notes, the Frenchwoman’s lamentation of her daughter’s upbringing within a non-Christian household emphasizes the fear of the potential loss of Anglo cultural identity within such marriages.21 In Sex and the Colonial Family Ghosh describes Hartly House, a novel published in 1789 which Ghosh identifies as depicting an interracial romance between a native man and an Anglo woman, albeit a markedly nonsexual one. Ghosh points out how the Anglo woman’s interest in the native man “transformed very shortly into a romance and sympathy with India and its traditions,22” explicitly noting the novel’s linking of interracial romance to Anglo assimilation into native culture. As compared to The Lady’s Drawing Room, Hartly House potentially offers an even bleaker rebuke of the Anglo woman’s assimilation: the native man dies, removing any possibility of continued contact.23
The fear of English assimilation into Indian culture through intermarriage expressed in both of these novels suggests that fears of Indianization circulated among the broader British population. While these novels legitimize the interracial relationships they depict, showing them as having an emotional core, they also display them as dangerous, entrapping the English into losing themselves within Indian culture. The fear of assimilation displayed within these texts likely contributed greatly to the shift of attitudes towards interracial relationships. It also set up a second major perception that Ducarel and Sharaf un-Nisa had to overcome, which likely prompted Sharaf un-Nisa’s extensive assimilation into English culture, language, and religion upon the start of her relationship with Ducarel.
1: Timeline of Ducarels,” Unstable Archives (August 2021): https://unstable-archives.github.io/unstable_archives/timeline/.
2: Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992): 115-118; E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001): 76; C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India 1773-1833 (Curzon Press, 1996): 2-3, https://doi-org.ezproxy.cul.columbia. edu/10.4324/9781315026565
3: C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India 1773-1833 (Curzon Press, 1996): 1-4, https://doi-org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/10.4324/9781315026565
4: Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992): 118.
5: C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India 1773-1833 (Curzon Press, 1996): 1-3 https://doi-org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/10.4324/9781315026565.
6: Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (New York: Cambridge University Press): 42; E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001): 73; William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: Flamingo, 2002): 37.
7: Thomas Williamson, East India Vade Mecum: Or, Complete Guide to Gentlemen Intended for the Civil, Military, or Naval Service of the Hon. East India Company, vol. 1 (London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1810): 459, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53400/53400-h/53400-h.htm#Page_451.
8: “Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (New York: Cambridge University Press): 43, 45; E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001): 73.
9: C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India 1773-1833 (Curzon Press, 1996): 2, https://doi-org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/10.4324/9781315026565; Valerie Anderson, “The Eurasian Problem in Nineteenth Century India,” PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London): 149-150, https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/1 3525/1/Anderson_3334.pdf. Durba Ghosh, “Sex and the Family in Colonial India” (New York: Cambridge University Press): 35, 42-44.
10: Valerie Anderson, “The Eurasian Problem in Nineteenth Century India,” PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London): 124 https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/1 3525/1/Anderson_3334.pdf.
11: Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (New York: Cambridge University Press): 69-70, 82-83, 89, 91.
12: Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (New York: Cambridge University Press): 42-43..
13: Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992): 118.
14: Francios de la Boullaye le Gouz, Les Voyages et Observations du Sievr de la Bovllaye Le-Gouz (1653, reprinted Paris, 1657), 143. Quoted in Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1995): 40..
15: Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1995): 39-40.
16: Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1995): 37-38.
17: Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1995): 38.
18: Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1995): 45-47.
19: Quoted in Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1995): 43.
20: Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1995): 38, 42-43.
21: “Timeline of Ducarels,” Unstable Archives (August 2021): https://unstable-archives.github.io/unstable _archives/timeline/.
22: Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (New York: Cambridge University Press): 51.
23: Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Colonial Family (New York: Cambridge University Press):47, 51-52.